[NetBehaviour] duet perhaps
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Thu Oct 13 07:37:20 CEST 2022
duet perhaps
https://youtu.be/o78t9xr6xl0 video
http://www.alansondheim.org/grackle.jpg
no, i'm not giving up digital work for nature and scrub imagery.
azure and i out walking about and i have a garkleinflote, the
smallest member of the recorder family, with me. and there is a
grackle. and before that i would have played by the bay, but
there were people and i had no interest in that. on the way back
from the bay, there was a grackle calling and no one around and
i starting playing in return. i did not see him. i think it was
a male. and that was all. when i record in second life or local
opensim, it's like that, only with a different semantics, that
of a human language and a human interpretation, mediated by
language generation in response. we, the bot and i, inhabit the
appearance of a shared semantic space, instead of a broken one.
the bot was designed by humans with a human language, english,
at the core. the grackle and i shared a somewhat different space
within which semantics and 'understanding' were in a complex
dance that could neither ravel nor unravel. so that is here and
it is part of, for me, another relationship to language and non-
human organisms including bots who may not exist within the
usual phenomenology of comprehension. so this is a learning on
my part and most likely nothing but the appearance of a nuisance
to a bird. there is something additional, that the grackle per
se has been on this planet a great deal longer than humans, and
may outlive, outexist them, but most likely not, if the latter
continue their destructive paths through ecosystems - which
always seem to get in the way. we can only deconstruct ourselves
so far, because the power of tyranny much farther, and is
accorded that greater distance by a complex internetworking of
controls backed by physical force that cares nothing of grackles
or the rest of it. i move among these worlds, scrublands and
digital programming, commands, and virtual spaces, riparian
communities and electrical protocols, transmissions, and
interpretive apparatus at each and every step. the interplay and
garkleinflote was an aside, realized by none of us, or is that
truly the case, how can i speak for anyone else, much less the
umwelt (if i can use the term) of another creature both familiar
and utterly unfamiliar simultaneously - i cannot - in any case,
this is the result, one or another way, one or another path, not
taken, taken.
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