Around the time Bill was posting his newest blog this morning, I was squirming in my chair in a rictus of catalytic cascades of meaningfulness as I decrypted Mamoru Oshii's film AVALON! Spent the earlier part of the night lurking the discussion boards on Pattern Recognition, and following links all over the web putting lateral relations of thematic fragments together. Looking over the film references sections, suddenly this video arrived at the door from an upstairs neighbor. Holy emergent Serendipity! What a dense and discourse-iterating film!

What I wanted to raise as a topic of discussion was a specific aspect I found particularly relevant to posts ongoing here - one among innumerable delicious Gibson and Sterling nods to post-soviet techno-cognitive relics which riddle this gorgeous work.

The idea was that comprehension and resultant success in the game relied on patterns inferred from sources 'outside' yet implicit to the gameplay. That books and text, both reading [matrix-style scrolling code] and writing [the blank notebook] were essential to the construction and navigation of these variant planes of 'reality'.

The recurrent presence of books in Ash's 'solo game play' world gave me the heebie jeebies straight off, and wedged a deep connection between the film to subjects at hand here. When we see her sparse and squalid appartment the first time, the only furniture that stands out is a tightly packed bookshelf. Later, she spends her winnings in an antiquarian bookshop, researching Arthurian and Norse legends. When the Bishop appears at her door, he compliments her collection of accessory data, unavailable from the terminals.

This all brought me back to my favourite aspect of Gibson's oevre. He recognizes and accentuates from the outset that the artificial realities of fiction are enveloping and very real distortions of the 'real'. This 'knowledge' of signifying chains composes the very fabric of our sense of reality. Our relationship to language, our familiarity and navigation of available signifiers, very carefully worked in films like this one or books like Gibson's [where the reader's mind provides all the holo-projections based on densely evocative details], 'reading' in the most general sense constructs our comprehension of the scene, imposing very vivid interpretations [and interpretive biases] onto the world we are experiencing. Our Pattern Recognition and signification-weaving skills are all about our overall gestalt of Literacy, our familiarity with and ability to laterally connect the contextual field of references in play.

Gibson has always specialized in this virtual aspect of literature, and speaks to it when he humbly emphasizes himself as a literary cultural agent rather than one particularly interested in participating in the digital or cinematic fields [though I'm deeply delighted and thrilled that he's now so openly engaging the online discourse, thanks so much Bill! Ecstatic to share your telepresence.]

I linked from a reference somewhere on the board to Grant Morrison's response to seeing thematic parallels to his own work in the Matrix. I found an interview at Disinformation in which he's discussing his interest in sigils, or word magic. http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id987/pg4/
Quoted from the end of the previous page:

"One of the things we're actually dealing with is some - as I say, some kind of operating system that can be hacked using words. And words seem to be the binding agent for this thing, whatever it is." -Grant Morrison

This I think is one of the most powerful things which Bill's been telling us for years, and we've been witnessing through the immense degrees of influence attributed to cyberpunk's dusty old ink and paper interface technology of books, which nonetheless succeed in warping the very liminal edge of interactive technoculture. In a virtual world constructed entirely of socially coded language, the author is working with a magical techne of non-local causation, as some kind of massively parallel architect of the zeitgeist, a catalyst for emergence and radical change in the perception and comprehension of immanent reality.

The origin point of authroship in the technology-culture / language-thought feedback loop has become so indeterminate as to be moot, since the fact that the relative 'virtuality' of the lives we live in are deeply tied-in with our most ancient and so-obvious-as-to-be-invisible technologies: cultural memes. The specialized cultural language games we operate in, the information systems we internalize and re-articulate, intrinsically condition the worlds we think and believe we live in.

Which leads me back to the Avalon's ending, and to Gibson's recurrent trope of the synthetic-angelic children, ghosts in the machines, even those pygmy ketamine greys with the piano wire - some superior and possibly artificial intelligence with which we periodically collide. In its soul-shattering massively-lateral pattern-assembly effect, the Wintermute children confirm for us that our reality is a generative and associative fiction, a machine constructed of texts, a game we play for experience points. Our immersive involvement in the exercise occludes global understanding, while at best our art refelexively reveals fragmented reflections of it. Our potentials for access and control over the organizing principles and limiting structures of the illusory aspects of our lives are vividly if chaotically articulated. From that point onwards, potent hints are everywhere glimmering in the sphere of perception, creeping in from the most unlikely and synchronistic places. The schizophrenic metanoia accreting from mutagen-reactions under capitalism's massive informatic accelleration affects an overall organizational shift in our cognition. This is clearly evident in Gibson's approach to the cultural side-effects of the artifacts of Pop. Returning from the Sprawl novels, we begin to see the code flickering in the walls, the cybernetic control-systems of the market, and are inspired to attempt to deprogram its conventions for appropriate response.

What this virulent strain of sci-fi and its recurrent subtext of liberation seems to be enculturating is a very present and experiential phenomenology of pattern reassembly, of hacking reality. It's a 'superior' awareness of these terms of associative play, of the coercive relationships of fiction over reality. It also emphasizes a nonlinear and ahistoric organizing principle by which pattern recognition and the mimetic faculties imprint meaning onto our most intimate and private constructions, accentuating the remarkably flexible [and suggestible] senses by which we analyze and interpret living reality.

It may be that the 'satori' by which consciousness comes to this limit point, a threshold encounter with the 'guardian gateway entities' which reveals the existence of internalized structures, the 'others' folded into our membranes - Words - which engage the field of cognition on too-often imperceptable levels of play. This very postmodern, cybernetic, complex system of 'paranormal experience' involves language itself as an active and seemingly separate sentient organism encoding collective reverie, and more significantly, negotiating a large scale social 'becoming'.

In the literary trance-lucidity induced by books, and particularly in Gibson's books, we enter a shockingly vivid world of inference and subtly suggestive detail. In the very private 'solo game play' of reading, we access a dark but undeniably luminous world, toured elsewhere by the imaginations of innumerable others. In this proto-VR we confront the artifacts and relics of the Developer. In Gibson's books, he has installed an artificial agent, the provocative idea of autonomous agency, a chaotic attractor which invades and takes over a part of our interpretive systems. We don't think in the same ways after reading his books, and the world will never maintain for us the same illusions of comfort and stability.

By stacking his cyberspace atop the oldest VR in the Book, readers recognize that we have always been living and operating in multiple virtual worlds simultaneously. When Mamoru Oshii takes hold of this trope, and torques it's compounded strata to implicate the slightly more broad-band 'literacy' of the cinema, we recoil, stunned, that indubitably there are agencies of affect molding our layered presumptions as to the contemporanity of reality.

Taking off the 'trodes, I return to 'life' and continue my meat-space search for the twins, who in turn, are elsewhere, seeking us.

..................

Joyful Intentions
Intelligence and Love
til next time

ctev calvert