Emotional (Dis)(Orders Memory, Affect, Play & Web Arcades LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY

Student: Dinis Guarda dinis.guarda@gmail.com www.dinisguarda.com http://www.dinisguarda.com/category/emotional-(dis)orders.aspx Student Number: 2707558 SCHOOL: AAM, Course Code: 2430

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Index:: Introduction – Paris Arcades, World Wide Web Arcades and emotional new “code” language is it possible 2 compare

#WalterBenjamin Paris #ArcadesProject, with #WorldWideWeb Arcades & #emotional new #code #language

1st chapter – Arcades Project –“Dream of a Theory of Knowledge” versus a Dream of a global technological linked World Wide Web Arcades

#ArcadesProject #WalterBenjamin –―#Dream of a #Theory of #Knowledge‖ vs a Dream

of a global #technological linked algorithm #worldwideweb 2d chapter – Web Arcades and an entire new coded language where affects play a new game – I am the son of a computer!

#Web Arcades & an entire #news coded #language where #affects play a #new #game - I am the son of a #computer! #poetry of #emotions & #tech

3d chapter - My role as an adventurer in the web arcades talking these languages, mixed with affects in the creation of my data, theory of time through (the) memory (of) the present and crowdsourcing

#adventurers in the #web http://twitter.com/search?q=%23web arcades talking new

#languages http://twitter.com/search?q=%23languages, mixed with affects in the creation of data, #theory of #time through #memory http://twitter.com/search?q=%23memory #poetry http://twitter.com/search?q=%23poetry

Conclusion – A web arcade of affects, language, theory of order and disorder and ultimately dreams of an impossible future lost in the theory of the present

#web #arcade of #affects, #language of #order & #disorder ultimately #dreams of an impossible #future lost in the #theory #memory #present

Appendices Bibliography

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Introduction Paris Arcades, World Wide Web Arcades and emotional new code language

is it possible 2 compare #WalterBenjamin Paris #ArcadesProject, with #WorldWideWeb Arcades & #emotional new #code #language

"To great writers finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Walter Benjamin

My purpose in this final thesis is to reflect upon the parallels between the World Wide Web and The Arcades Project where Benjamin managed his efforts to represent and to critique

the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" perception that underlay the ideological mask of time and creation of meaning. The whole WWW (World Wide Web) - in the bustling, cluttered, technological, search engine- and user-generated digital arcades, streets and interior merging - is a fascinating parallel to Benjamin’s Arcades and also a powerful equivalent process to the present production and creation of thinking, ideas and art. In this universe where present and historical time are broken, or rather exploded into kaleidoscopic distractions for senses, affections and displays of ephemera that opens a new space for emotions and perceptions.

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where these web arcades (the natural evolution of the XIX century arcades of Benjamin) create new languages that are constantly emerging, proliferating, and mutating into obsolescence. These are languages of our own emotional representations, the result of orders and disorders. These representations are written in mathematical engineered code, no longer in just iron buildings where the bourgeoisie is walking and interacting but a whole new concept of walking and interacting through new digital buildings: web arcades where we walk and interact side by side with intelligent machines we call computers. N. Katherine Hayles's My Mother Was a Computer, Digital Subjects and Literary Texts provides a way of understanding the relations between these languages we have created to interact with these new arcades – a language made of code and language.

Ultimately, N. Katherine Hayles considers how these interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices and emotions.

What are the equivalents in 2010 to the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, the glass-

roofed rows of shops that were early commercial / shopping centres? Where is the index / collage (montage) of quotations and reflections on hundreds of published sources, arranged in thousands or millions of categories with descriptive rubrics using such keywords as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," and "Theory of Progress" in our present world? The answer might seem difficult, though thinking in a broader way one can indeed find a complete similarity between Walter Benjamin’s unfinished The Arcades Project and the World Wide Web.

The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental, unfinished puzzle of ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years – "the theatre," as

Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." On the other hand, the World Wide Web is a fragmented monumental, meticulously constructed theatre by millions of people, more exactly 1.4 billion people (and growing), a place where they share their struggles and ideas in the new digital public Web Arcade centres.

My central preoccupation in the development of my MA was to reflect on the impact of these monumental web arcades on emotional orders and disorders and in the ―play‖ of my own

theatre as a writer, thinker and creator. What Walter Benjamin calls the commodification of things – a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age – we can now call ―crowdsourcing,‖ a concept that I will work further of ideas in real time, through the streets and

arcades that are Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, web applications guiding us through the same preoccupations with affects, boredom, advertising, flaneur, the interior, mirrors, conspiracies and other topics Benjamin examined in The Arcades Project. In general most of the emotions that were there all through human history are still there and we still experience them as human beings. The main difference is how we organise them in orders and disorders under the new arcades, the digital ones, as Walter Benjamin did.

In this thesis I will focus on how my understanding and my own production interact with the ideas of Walter Benjamin and N. Katherine Hayles and the two previous books I mentioned. I will also manage to integrate my own personal artistic production: poetry, drawing and the way I published it though the digital, technological and social arcades of my own time. I will also add fragments and quotes from other authors that I think are relevant for my work, in the same way Walter Benjamin did. This is an open and fragmented creative MA and I intend to assume and go through a creative and perception analysis of the similarities between the XIX century Arcades and the World Wide Web ―Arcades‖ and the languages and challenges created by this

web reality. A fact that affects me as a producer / creator of perception, language and creative representation and its emotional effect in the contemporary artistic and thinking production and affects as a whole, namely in my personal practice of ―play‖ creation, plus affects, emotions.

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1st

chapter

Paris Arcades –“Dream of a Theory of Knowledge” versus a Dream of a global technological linked world

#ArcadesProject #WalterBenjamin –―#Dream of a #Theory of #Knowledge‖ vs a Dream of a global #technological linked

algorithm #worldwideweb

http://www.ibsanjose.org/main/rm-dp.htm

In the nineteenth and, particularly, the twentieth century, the Arcades were a sort of shopping centre of the time. These spaces functioned as the new special spaces and an escape from

street life, the boulevard stream that had characterised urban life of previous centuries in Paris, city of lights and of development. The Arcades worked as broad pathways designed to increase

life in some specific places and were a sort of early capitalist effort aiming to augment and control the fluxes of commerce by making the stores’ locations easier to access and safer (Paris

at the time had grown explosively, like Sao Paulo in the present, and was a city with enormous security issues), while at the same time operating as barricades of some kind of social layer of control. The Arcades of Walter Benjamin were also a kind of gate in the larger urban Parisian networks. They were architectural and technological highlights and provided a different stream for human traffic. These new buildings were broad, straight and, as the new agoras of

the time, worked to accommodate the growing populations and became the emblem of fashions and mundane life. In these spaces for the first time on a massive scale, humanity can be seen as a kind of liquid organism. In these fashionable spaces of iron and steel and fresh architecture, the bourgeoisie passed their flaneur and flowed in throngs through a city flourishing between the nineteenth and early twentieth century and emerging as the modernism capital of the world, amongst big train stations, the Tour Eiffel, the Paris subway.

"In speaking of the inner boulevards says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1852, ―we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the

most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rain showers, the arcades are a place of

refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade, one from which the merchants also benefit.‖ Convolute A entitled "[Arcades, Magazins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks"

The Blackwell City Reader By Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson Searching in google.com for the keywords ―theory of knowledge‖ one finds a substantial

number or search queries, (about 13,300,000 results (0.29 seconds) :

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Theory+of+Knowledge The interesting thing about these results is the broad spectrum of definitions of such a deep, multiple and complex paradox of meaning. What we can define as ―theory of knowledge‖ is perhaps not the most interesting to any intellectual but what brings any

searcher of knowledge some kind of pleasure and harmony is probably the quest in itself, a metaphysic path towards the meaning and the absolute. Having said this, I can now enter into the full scope of the unfinished quest of Walter Benjamin, his ―Arcades Project.‖ This work is

precisely an ultimate, absolute and powerful exercise of search towards the demanding mazes of meaning and, of course, knowledge.

Benjamin’s The Arcades Project was an absolute and cryptic search query, the quest of

a strong and vulnerable man for whom knowledge, writing, thought and books were everything. It was a search inside the architecture or landscape of his thoughts, his time – and the place

where he concentrated all his energy and efforts, the landscape for his intellectual essay fiction, was precisely these Paris Arcades. Moreover, Benjamin was in a total personal immersion in the metaphor of the then-future and present city of reference, Paris in its more fashionable and

modernist space. But the project was a personal voyage / immersion of thirteen years in the making. It was a query, a very playful fragmented exercise, scribbled beneath the flaneur, the commercial, the iron and steel arcades ecosystem and ’painted sky of summer’ in the huge

ceiling moving from impressionism to modernism mural of Paris, then one of the world capitals... The result is an epic, fragmented and unfinished book. This book is comprised of a mix

of different kinds of essays with various quotes and thirty-six Convolutes or sheaves (originally made up of thirty-six handwritten folios), one set constructed by capital letters from A to Z and ten additional files marked by lower-case letters. The Arcades Project is a very personal mix, sometimes sampling (now we could use the DJ term that bears some similarity to a stack of file folders of a collector of writing) some facts and artefacts of the often-ignored side of nineteenth-

century and early twentieth century Parisian daily life one might pull from a dusty filing cabinet. Independent of any scholarly debate that continues regarding the project's intended destiny, the importance for me in this opus is its fresh look at a memory of a time through the lens of a creator, thinker and researcher of history, in this case the archaeology of the then present. To me it is not relevant if it is a collage, a montage or any other form. It is somehow a personal diary, a postmodern work-in-progress that remained unfinished due to many factors. We are talking about working moleskin, a singular notebook. And what enthusiasms in it are its personal approach of thought, the description of objects, different themes that reveal Benjamin's own concerns and obsessions. Another interesting definition of this particular literary object

comes from the editors of the English version, Eiland and McLaughlin, who described it as a "research project [that] had become an end in itself." (AP xi)

http://novusites.admin.brevard.k12.fl.us/schools/cocoabeachjrsr/musolino/theory.html

Benjamin somewhere claimed that The Arcades Project was ’the theatre of all my

struggles and all my ideas.’ This is probably the best definition of a ―theory of knowledge‖ and

of this work. This struggle, and those ideas, aimed to index, like a search engine, and chronicle

the main axis and dilemmas of history, at the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. At that moment Paris majestically presided as the capital of the world or, at least, the glamour capital of the world (it is worth pointing out the parallel how history has so many faces and how the world has now changed). In this capital of the nineteenth century the arcades symbolized the city’s heart and blood pumping circulation. In this unfinished work one finds, paradoxically, the best metaphor of any ―theory of knowledge,‖ something that cannot be

found or ever finished, something that is too fragmented and esoteric and pricey. The Arcades Project is a tentative epistemology, a personal diary of exploring various

fragmented theories of knowledge about the present and its relation with the past, with history,

while coexisting with justification and belief. In this work of reflection one goes through an assemblage of quotations, notes and theses that wrestle with themselves in an extraordinary syncope effect.

As a personal kind of ―theory of knowledge,‖ The Arcades Project is a product of

wandering, a wrestling of ideas, memory and doubt. The question it brought and still brings is that it is an impossible absolute quest towards knowledge and as the writer’s personal quest in

the moving architecture of the city of Paris, the memory of the most advanced mix of economics, politics, culture and technology of the time, this is always an unfinished quest. The unfinished veritas of The Arcades Project is that we will always have to ask ourselves seriously whether we really know anything about the city where the present is moving fast forward. Moreover, the challenge is how we are naturally led into the examination of knowing about the present and our relation with the past and the future. What is the hope of being able to distinguish trustworthy beliefs from those that are untrustworthy during our quest(s)?

The frontiers between reality and fiction are always simpler than most of us draw it. We live in a near layer of landscapes that are partly human and fatality, some kind of reminiscence of history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called, in Walter Benjamin’s time,

present belles-lettres. In a sprawling, fragmented meditation on the social and urban ethos of nineteenth and twentieth century Paris, The Arcades Project was left incomplete on Benjamin’s

death in 1940.

The Arcades Project captures the singular and almost obsessive relationship between a puzzled writer and a city in a form as richly developed as those presented in the great cosmopolitan novels of Proust, Joyce, Musil and Isherwood, although in a paradoxically different way in its form, structure and method. Those who fall under Benjamin’s spell may find

themselves less willing to suspend their disbelief in fiction, what we are watching is more a philosophical writing script of literary film essay, what Jean Luc Godard did precisely at the end of the twentieth century with Histoire(s) du cinéma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire(s)_du_cin%C3%A9ma. Paris the city in this broken opus offers sufficient fantasy to meet most needs, but Paris is probably a metaphor for reflection about the archaeology of the memory of the present that was somehow the obsession of Walter Benjamin.

Regardless of its intended function, The Arcades Project exists as a veritable, powerful "world in miniature," (AP 31) a literary, historical and sociological sampling of fragments through which its reader-adventurers (one does not read it as a novel or conventional book) are somehow invited to to be wanderers – in the same way as nineteenth and early twentieth century Parisians and, of course, Walter Benjamin wandered through the novelty of the structures of the arcades themselves. Thus what value is to be found within its confines depends as much on what the collection http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-

web/home/collecting.html contains http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/containment.html as on the conceptual leaps and connections http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/juxtaposition.html its omissions http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/omission.html require its readers to

make. Curiously, the analogy in the twenty-first century for Paris is, for me, the whole ―city‖ of

the World Wide Web, the perfect arcades of the present times. The iron and commercial social places are now the social media platforms, the search engines and algorithms where the present is now digitalised in real time through a crowdsourcing of our moves between the real and the virtual.

Where Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish thinker of the Weimar period, left his

Arcades Project unfinished when he died in 1940, they awaken as collective subject in the internet concept, a collective not global technological stream of diaries of millions of people. But the spell of the "phantasmagoria" of the nineteenth-century is now the wide-open new path of the twenty-first century in a new technological "weak messianism" best conceived as a form of writing and managing a diary online designed to incite and publish readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation and comments, this time by any person with access to the internet through Facebook, Twitter, Email, and other digital forms.

With the development of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications, originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile), RSS feeds, Skype and IM conversations, the rise of the iPhone

model of mobile computing and Android apps, there is a broader way of facilitating web and technologies through daily life. These new Internet Arcades open new paths for us to walk as modern digital flaneurs and express our emotions in different and broader ways. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora or Spotify, you play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s YouTube streaming service that facilitates

the wide-spread implementation of data communication applications into the daily system.

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2d chapter Web Arcades and an entire new coded language where affects play a new game – I am the son of a computer!

#Web Arcades & an entire #news coded #language where #affects play a #new #game - I am the son of a #computer! #poetry of #emotions & #tech

―It will be convenient to divide our discussion into three stages, concerning respectively (1) the definition of knowledge, (2) data, (3) methods of inference. It should be said, however, that in distinguishing between data and inferences we are already taking sides on a debatable question, since some philosophers hold that this distinction is illusory, all knowledge being (according to them) partly immediate and partly derivative.“ Bertrand Russell (1926), Theory of Knowledge, for The Encyclopaedia Britannica

We live in a world where the borders between the definitions of knowledge, data

influence of ―data‖ have been mutating at a powerful velocity. Ultimately this has been

synthesized in the way the web is changing our personal development and behavior. The impact of the digital world and its computational code on everyday life and in the way we process language has become comparable to that of speech and writing. The process of language creation and code has grown entangled and the lines that once separated human speech from machine code have become blurred.

These circumstances have as well produced a powerful effect in the way we produce our affect, the old process that refers to the way one experiences feelings or emotions. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. Affect means a change and

usually refers to an emotion or symptom.

The book My Mother Was a Computer explores precisely how the impact of internet and

digital technologies code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and digital code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, the analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become more and more blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us some interesting directions towards

how it is necessary to make sense of these complex relationships and how they are making us go through a code evolution.

Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about

language, subjectivity, literary objects and textuality. Thus, this process of intermediation, the interstice of media, takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions. She explores how code differs from speech, how electronic text differs from print, the effects of digital media on the idea of the self, the effects of digitality on printed books, our conceptions of computers as living beings, the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.

Most of our lives are now passed in a kind of limbo were we entangle the real world and

digital web-based experiences. We leverage existence in the present history in some kind of web arcades, or digital spaces: electronic shopping centers: e-commerce websites such as Amazon, ebay, Apple, Itunes; lounges and social spaces: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and many others; television and music: YouTube, Spotify, etc; and other navigational spaces, yellow pages and new ―newspapers,‖ hybrids such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

These ways and processes of behavior are creating new languages that are constantly

emerging, proliferating, and mutating into obsolescence. These are languages of our own emotional representations, the result of orders and disorders making a new way in the relation to this new digital world. These representations of language that we are using in our daily life are no longer just written in one single platform such as paper. At the moment we are dealing with mathematical engineered code languages in web-developed, different and moving platforms that co-exist and replace the Arcades made of iron buildings, stone buildings, parks and gardens where we walk and interact in the material world.

In this digital world we are in the presence of a whole new concept of walking and interacting through digital buildings, web arcades where we walk and interact side by side with intelligent machines we call computers and its instruments and tools: browsers, applications and platforms. N. Katherine Hayles’s outstanding book My Mother Was a Computer, Digital Subjects

and Literary Texts http://books.google.com/books?id=lwaRyOZfBzgC&dq=My+Mother+Was+a+Computer,+Digital+Subjects+and+Literary+Texts&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=vKRMTOboNovKOI2ZmJcD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false provides a way of understanding the relations between these languages we have created to interact with these new arcades – a language made of code and language. In her book, N.

Katherine Hayles considers how these interactions have affected creative, technological and artistic practices and emotions (our affects).

And how in fact are all these interactions and new languages changing our personal

development and behavior?

The major impact of digital – that is made of mathematical engineering code – on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing. All present language and code have somehow grown entangled, mixing the lines that once separated humans from machines. This is processing profound mutation in our emotional and behavioral actions. There are things we do in the physical world and others we do in the machine landscape – and the mix of both is having a deep impact on our life standards and development.

We live using a mix of technologies always in profound evolution, sometimes disappearing as fast as they come. The co-existence of the analog to the digital and the shift from old technologies to new ones have become blurred and are making us change and adapt faster.

The book My Mother Was a Computer gives us an excellent insight into these processes and some tools necessary to make sense of this complex web of relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation and mutation that challenges ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects and textuality.

Hayles considers that this process of intermediation, media interaction and exchange takes place where digital media interact with human traditions and cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions and how the machine code differs from human speech; she continues, reflecting on how electronic text differs from print. Also of major importance for me, she makes us think about the effects of digital media on the idea of the self, our web personal development and behavior. She continues then through the effects of digital on printed books and our conceptions and ideas of ―computers as living beings‖.

One of the most powerful conclusions of the book is (something I have been thinking as

well) the possibility that the human brain and consciousness itself might be computational. This is somehow logical since computers were created and developed by humans.

Another important idea to consider is that this new language of humans interacting with code and machines pushes the borders of emotional orders and disorders and ultimately we can envision a subjective cosmology wherein we humans see the universe, our daily life and the implications of our acts through the lens of the digital, the computational as part or equal to a part, a continuation of the brain and the due perception we have of the world.

The challenge now – and I know this is a polemic reading of the relations between human and machines and the development of our language – is how we are going to continue evolving and managing our web personal development. I leave the answer to each one of us, but as a provocation we need in fact to push our boundaries so we are no longer just humans!

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3d chapter My role as an adventurer in the web arcades, speaking these languages, mixed with affects in the creation of my data, theory of time through memory

adventurers in the #web web arcades talking new #languages, mixed with affects in the creation of data, theory of time through #memory #poetry Sizable. Intimidating. Episodic. Unfinished. Seemingly ordered: alphabetically, arbitrarily. The "Overview" (or table of contents) reads much like a guide to Paris: "Fashion", "Conspiracies", "Marx", "Iron Construction", "Prostitution, Gambling", "Collecting". . ."The Streets of Paris". Despite the project's massiveness and seemingly haphazard nature, the collection is saved from chaos by its title: The Arcades Project--a title which, gesturing toward the precursor of the twentieth-century shopping mall and the architectural construction that Benjamin "considered the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century, and which he linked with a number of phenomena characteristic of that century's major and minor preoccupations" (AP ix), encloses, contains, and delimits this collection of asides, quotations, footnotes, and aphorisms, for those flâneurs, prostitutes, gamblers, and collectors who might approach its contents from the perspective of that early twentieth-century world it attempts to escape; however, once inside, we get a sense of an organizing force at work behind the chaos, an order produced by an attentiveness to conditions of exteriority/interiority and the random throes of diversion. We read what we hold in our hands; we pick out constellations--we assemble and arrange the text in various ways as its fragmentary style invites us to do. And just as we are expected to do as scholars, we search out patterns, locate references to locatable schools of thought, note recurrent themes, trailing a long thread of words in our wake lest we lose our way. Heather Marcelle Crickenberger, (2007), The Arcades Project Or The Rhetoric of Hypertext (Project http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arcades.html

Each person in the web is somehow a publisher of content and data. Each net citizen lives in a world where the influence of the web is changing the way they conduct their personal development and behavior. The impact of the computational, the digital and the internet on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing, but it has also shifted the way we process knowledge and our affects and its intimate orders. The process of creation of language and code and the way we relate with them have grown entangled and the lines that once separated human speech from machine code have become blurred.

Most of our lives we now pass and relate through different layers, where we entangle the

real world and the digital world of the data we produce, like the flow of our thoughts: emails, news feeds, tweets, publishing photos in Flickr, videos in YouTube, looking for new career paths in LinkedIn and searching for specific keywords in Google and directions in digital maps, suggestions of friends and websites. We leverage daily existence inside a construction of data,

a memory that, besides being neurological, is the concept of social intelligence: it is a digital, data-driven prosthesis, a continuation of the organic and machine and in effect a symbiotic relation that is becoming the new part of human evolution. In fact the present history is done as in the time of Walter Benjamin, in some kind of web arcades, or let us call them intermediate digital spaces: electronic shopping centers: e-commerce websites such as Amazon, ebay, Apple, Itunes, lounges and social spaces: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and many others, television and music: YouTube, Spotify etc., and other navigational spaces, yellow pages and new ―newspapers,‖ hybrids such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

But the way we produce and manage our data has some particularities. It is done

through a new set of blueprints. One of the most powerful and singular back stones of the internet and of the way we leverage data is through crowdsourcing. This concept originated from the original etymology of outsourcing and was then taken to another level. Crowdsourcing comes from a reasonable number of computer programmers and project managers who understood and showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than the biggest of the behemoth corporations such as Microsoft.

Jeff Howe, the author who first coined the term, tracks the amazing migration of this

contemporary model of production both in his book and on his website, showing the potential of the Internet as a powerful and effective tool to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick creative and sometimes complex work(s) of otherwise overwhelming tasks. Amongst some of the most intriguing ideas behind the concept of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems and issues—a cure for cancer or understanding global scientific puzzles for instance—may indeed exist within a close warp, but when getting in the

broader network weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped amount of resource(s) that distribute and aggregate knowledge and share it faster and more efficiently.

Jeff Howe, a writer for one of the oracles of present times, Wired Magazine, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University who coined the term crowdsourcing, and wrote a book on the subject, focused on the definition of an act of outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (one specific crowd) through an

open call. Howe showed, as an example, that the public may be invited to develop a new technology, and here the case of Twitter is seminal. Twitter has been partly redesigned and revamped by a crowd of users, developers and professionals, also known as community-based design and some distributed participatory design. One other example is to refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation like the example of the search engine

Wolfram|Alpha). The term has become popular with businesses, authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to

achieve creative and business goals. Nevertheless, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

For me, the concept of Crowdsourcing has grown to be another metaphor for the internet

as a whole, where all the data works as a multiple interlink of voices where each one of us can go and get some part for our needs and interact with it faster than at any time in history and at the same time effectively create a memory of it and keep that data.

The storytelling mixes with the news feeds and knowledge all working together and

giving us new directions for each of our individual crossroads and for each of our individual quests. But the proposition is a shift in the way we think, a need to continue expanding our thinking and also a need to banish preconceived notions of how problems are solved. A continuous net evolution though the web arcades of our individual quests, independently of how different they are. And when humans log out, the machines will still be on…

3D Map of the World Wide Web (www.opte.org)

These ways and processes of daily behaviour are creating new evolving steps in the way we handle languages that are constantly emerging, proliferating, and mutating into obsolescence. We are now adventurers in singular languages of our own emotional representations, the result of orders and disorders, making a new way in relation to this new digital Arcades world. These representations of language that we are using in our daily life are no longer just written in one single platform such as paper. In fact, paper is in an advanced process of evolution for a new technological background, probably the iPod computing model, the iPad, the touch tablet. An example is the Kindle and applications such as iBooks where one can have a repository of thousand of books. At the moment we are adventurers in data or data-mining ―pirates,‖ navigators dealing with mathematical engineered code languages in a fast-evolving group of web platforms that replace and paradoxically co-exist with the iron buildings, stone buildings, parks and gardens where we walk and interact with the material world.

In this digital world we are publishers of data and media, meaning we are all in some way imitation Walter Benjamins, managing the fragments of our quest in the web arcades of the

present inside a sea of data and creating a digital, living crowdsourcing memory. One lives in some kind of evolving concept of walking and interacting through digital buildings, web arcades

where one deals side by side with intelligent machines, algorithms and our emotions as organic

neurologic humans. And these interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices, processes and emotions – the affect.

And how in fact do I, as a creator, play and manage my quest through these new Internet Arcades, as Walter Benjamin, dealing with my time, the architecture of the present and

its fragments, its data and all these interactions and new languages that are changing our personal development and behavior?

What are the traces that make me survive as a creature, an individual of difference? All of us have a genetic DNA, and some instinctive glossary of multiple differences and cultures; these Arcades are just the new ecosystem where the story happens and at the same time they become the platform, the memory. We live in a process of cultural and anthropological social quotation, reiteration, allusion and inner chaos trying to combine signifying practices of intelligibility in our stories, rituals and customs the same way Walter Benjamin did through the feed of his intellectual concerns and quest.

―A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.‖ Aristotle

And what makes us survive in a civilisation or inside the fragments of different

civilisations without meaning? What makes us survive or continue to live with a lack of a ―representation of a complete or certain magnitude‖? Probably that is the meta-tragedy or the

messianic paradox of the present, to try to have an action with a beginning and middle and end when that is impossible. That is the challenge of recreating a meta-narrative that is necessary to re-write down, a grand narrative that can con-substantiate the small stories, the fragments of daily life with a full cycle at a specific time and place. And how to do this in a society that plays in a crossroads of critical destroyed epistemological impossibility? Though still a society that means to impose limits on meaning or at the different variations of the memory of meaning…

Meaning is probably the most demanding and necessary drive or psychic representative

of the human instinct and behavior, and namely is the last quest for any creator or thinker. Still the creation of meaning, the ideology with its form of social cohabitation and social exchange, is a puzzle that has no comprehensive solution and still reduces all little stories to its terms.

And in this landscape what are the trends of this logo-centrism, drawn upon the supposition of meaning with metaphorical and visual significance, in the case of the The Arcades Project the writing fragmented and unfinished opus, in the case of the digital Internet arcades the excessive quantity of data, platforms and sources where we manage our own data through some kind of crowdsourcing tool (even not realizing it most of the time)? What are the trends and metaphysics and its quest for underlying the cold and mutant reality towards the other symbolic referent, which exists outside of us in a kind of unnamable which resides beyond all reach and in deep landscape of a signifier as binaries oppositions?

The biggest challenge for Walter Benjamin and for me as an adventurer of thinking is to be capable of signifying in the binaries oppositions of our daily collection of thoughts, to create structures that escape and organise a path towards the awareness of the real.

_________________________________ 19. phenomenology regarding freedom who sought to investigate the pure data of human consciousness in a system of supposing or assuming beforehand; of taking for granted in advance the powerful flight of an hawk ; all the presupposition less … who has the power to act or to speak or to think without externally imposed restraints, who has the exemption, the immunity from an obligation or duty, the limits of thinking and intuitive moving ? who sought to investigate the structures of experience as they present themselves to thoughts ? affection, conflict and love are as old as gravity and what is the best recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences ? and what is the final destiny to those who refused to take sides in the path of life ? there are still millions of people left without a definitive place to rest, and self-determination as an expression of the individual will is a myth - an impossible theory regarding all the invisible grotesque geography(ies)

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Conclusion A web arcade of affects, language, theory of order and disorder and ultimately dreams of an impossible future lost in the theory of the present

#web #arcade of #affects, #language of #order & #disorder ultimately #dreams of an impossible #future lost in the #theory #memory #present

To synthetise The Arcades Project, was Benjamin’s singular adventure through data,

theory and language for 13 years. It was and still is an attempt to capture the reality, to dig in the archaeology of the memory of his own present. He immersed himself in a diary of quest in the flows that he believed underplayed the matrix of the political, economic, and technological world landscape of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He did it through representing all of this through the metaphor of the Arcades and Paris.

Walter Benjamin saw in the phenomenon of the Paris arcades a turning point away from a communal old society based on mutual concern to one based on material modernistic well-being and economic gain. To fortify his argument, Benjamin used the more updated quotations from a variety of published literary, philosophical, and artistic sources and added his own

reflections and commentary in a balanced way. Probably if Walter Benjamin was alive today he would be doing his opus online and digitally, with links and crowdsourcing.

Although not a finished work due to Benjamin’s untimely and tragic death, The Arcades

Project is powerful as a singular architectonic voice of the whole in an impressive breadth and as an attempt at establishing a memory of a present historical comprehension, a kind of theory of the knowledge of the present. And in this attempt there are inventively some parallels one can draw towards the internet as the whole.

Now the sense of displacement or disorientation produced by the environment of the industrial city gave rise to new entertainments that produced a cognitive and corporeal mapping of the subject into a previously overwhelming and intolerable space. Panoramic perception became a fundament of the machine Age, a function of new architectures of steel and glass; it defined the arcades and department stores of consumerism abundance as well as a set of spectacular forms that reinforced the new dominance of an epistemology of vision. (…)‖ Scott Bukaman, Matters of Gravity Special Effects and Supermen

And a parallel can be found between Benjamin and all of the authors digging in the present digital Arcades. If any person, author, adventurer or creator has his or her own Emotional Intelligence EQ the fact is that intelligence always needs some kind of balance.

The first use of the term "emotional intelligence" is usually attributed to Wayne Payne's

doctoral thesis, A Study of Emotion: Developing Emotional Intelligence from 1985, although this

concept was developed by Daniel Coleman in the book with the same name where he argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow and that there are wider areas of Emotional Intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. But we are beings of overwhelming emotions and orders. Orders and disorders – there is some kind of duality, not an old duality but

a tension towards the way we address the memory of the present and the way we investigate the past and imagine the future.

And this tension or tensions are now revisited in the way one addresses a new

language, a coded language in exchange with machines created by us and by other machines created by machines. The arcades are not any longer just made with iron and steel (although they still exist) but also digital platforms in web computing devices and mobile platforms.

Though the importance for Walter Benjamin, for any creator and for me is that we build our own world every day, dream by dream, inside sleep, even when collapsing fear by fear, hope by hope. And in the end it is not only about what we are able to do with it, but how we can collect and organise our own thoughts, the way Walter Benjamin did, and how to manage our social and emotional intelligence through these arcades (of capitalism, velocity and attention spam) and how to wander on it without getting lost in the emotional disorders of the present. In the end we can make this adventure a nightmare or a wonderful ecosystem and it is this ―transfiguration of things‖ we aim for and that can enlighten us!

―The interior is the asylum of art. The collector is the true resident of the interior. He

makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one – one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better

provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.

The interior is not just the universe but also the etui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. (...)‖ Exposés, Paris Capital of the Nineteenth Century

There are no limits to life and most of the things happen in our brain, through the

neurological mix of emotional and social intelligence. Our brain and the way we pump it with the blood of the heart is our own limitation. And the same goes for any writer, individual, author. The ultimate and fundamental quest is how you handle the ―etui of the private individual.‖ Each author, creator or even any individual is a collector of data, this data being the surroundings of each of us, ideas, affects, architectures: the arcades of a given time. Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project shows his insight into the cultural consequences

of early capitalism, and its emergence through the debut of the shopping malls. His work shows an insight that gives us a style of thinking about the memory of the present and one of the first

philosophical looks at the emergent culture of consumerism.

One can read Benjamin’s enormous opus made of fragments on the Paris arcades as a guide, sometimes a compendium, or an x-ray that one can begin to glimpse or simply get lost in. A way of reflecting and travelling through the emergence of the habits of a culture of capitalism that promises to stave off the despair and at the same time the fascination with the new – the opus Modernum – that originated modernism and its enthusiasm for technology and

materialism. This is precisely the same fascination one can find right now in the new digital Arcades – the Internet.

If Benjamin’s style of writing still has a narcotic effect and it still envelops the reader in

Parisian ambiance the same goes for the internet where browsing and the narcotic system of travelling through websites has the same effect on the web ―surfer.‖ Picking up The Arcades Project is now similar to the experience of visiting a ghostly city. What was then the marvellous Magasins de Nouveautés are now an urban archaeology. Perhaps that will be the fate that we

will find in a short time. But what haunts in this project is not so much the voyeur aspect but its capacity to

engage with us through its singular overview of a man, his wandering through a given space, a city, a time, his singular collection of thoughts. And this is where the bridge between the Parisian arcades and the web arcades lies: the thematic streets and alleys, its peculiar cultural constructs, its architecture, its personal collections, overviews, and its literature(s)... Where we wander and are adventurers in the same way Walter Benjamin was at the time.

The Arcades Project is indeed an anthropological narrative fiction of a photographic

written essay of thinking and philosophical poetry. It is a sort of encyclopedia, freeing its subject from traditional historical and literary interpretations and playing in a re-inventing style as a living, breathing picture, related to technological fascination, photography, the authors of reference Fourier and Marx. The same way the Web is.

Both the Arcades Project and the internet or web arcades are a maze of small

revelations and collections. And both its pages are as seductive and confused as the streets, dreams of all mankind. At the same time, what is invigorating in both these worlds is their philosophy of daily life. As in Benjamin’s remark that ’knowledge comes only in lightning flashes’ and both the Arcades Project and the Web Arcades are indeed flashes of knowledge, some strong awareness of life and what surrounds us.

Walter Benjamin’s reflections and the Internet are themselves an unflawed mirror for the

world which he and all of us was / are attempting to explore. He seems to have retrieved everything that is still our present and at the same time anticipated everything that it is still new in the new digital arcades. In the web one can find the same.

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Appendices 1# when you think in angels remember what you were when baby. the irony is that even the biggest bloody murder was once an angel. what dna set had we once and what dna do we write during life? what is the music score of your own motion picture? are you the composer, dj or passive person listen to what is playing in the radios? think as well are you a director, actor, producer? or just a member of the crew or of the audience? it is a web of affection, a complex management of emotions. you need a MBA to learn or just a strong set of values in order to drive the car without crashing. you can be an easy learner or someone that erases memory and go ahead like if nothing ever happened. and trust me independently of the choice one makes the world won’t ever stop. it was already on the move

even before humans. that makes us think are we just humans, or indeed part of something bigger? the questions are questions and should make us question. there is non-sense, uncertainty, we will be always fooled by emotions, by the weight of randomness. probabilities are inner shadows of thoughts, struggle, all risk taking. the paradox is that effectively we build our own world, but probably the biggest challenge is how do we get inspired? what makes us dream or not to dream in the way we relate with acquired or genetic biases? a chamber orchestra playing under the water like the set of a disaster film with a large landscape where you see the ruins of what was once a huge powerful city. all empires are pre-defined to dye, trust me arrogance is just as stupid as shooting yourself in the feet several times. though all of us are sometimes arrogant, even with the ones we love the most. we are in effect what we are and even when fighting for personal development we are indeed making an effort, a hard effort. nothing is easy, a cold rain in the pick of the summer is important to clarify the thoughts because most of the time one ends up living inside failed dreams inside dreams, sometimes one lives even close to the biggest eyes wide open nightmares… (in fact only we are able to create the substance of nightmares… and dreams!). I guess is that the paradox of life… one of the paradoxes…

we build our world out of ourselves. it is made of affects, blood and complaints. it is a world that alleges causes of action for intentional infliction… we hit each other with emotional distress, constructive discharge in violation of public policy, breach of oral contract, promises unkept, negligent infliction of emotional distress, unjust enrichment and negligence. how do we manage, enrich and cultivate the flowers of our fears, insecurity without taking ourselves too seriously. how do we purge our thoughts from moral censorship, the scars of memory, of all the things we have in our pockets as certainty stopping us from walking, because they became burden… how can we develop methods to deal with our unknown?

there are no mathematical probabilities, just ways to keep building our own world and keep walking with some kind of faith towards the outcome of thinking and the way we act. and bear in mind what is core in the relationship between emotional orders and reason. how to make sure

our brain interacts with our muscles in a way that the all of nothing of life makes sense for our probabilistic behave, for the dealing with skepticism (never nihilism), delusion, and how to be able to keep constructing reality.

____________________________________________________________________________ 2. ontological mnemonic

the sweet collection of landscapes where you are lost in the anxiety of contamination

, the sweet elements of the neurological interactivity , the realm of resources, the sinking boat of my believes (what's the best way of remembering?) the difficulty of securing places in a global darwin economic geography combined with the fascination created by the new world of images where space and information are becoming one and the same thing ; this can lead us to abandon the roots of reality; abandon it to the point where life inside the space of places

and life in side the space of data transmissions drifts increasingly apart , and meanwhile i look for the authenticity of my eyes looking at your sight of camera lens, and the disorder of the resources where you look for answers, the order of the line between the sessions of the sun ; another planet that appears in the system and another day that comes better or worse than the other ; there is not a metaphysical fire to illuminate the darkness of all my artificial light there is not a subsequent qualified reply to all my cries , i am looking for the peace diplomacy delegates are supposed to bring - i am a country in the process of discovering - in a chiasmic blindness ,

after the resonance research of blurring the categories of the shadow diversity of the present in this impact of hybrid archetypes and algorithms where i derive in an array of gateways to the unknown day after day making visible the fluidity and unpredictability of the journey, the soft boundaries between water and ice in this winter in the north hemisphere where i hide my feelings , looking for the tensions of emotion, trying to perceive the possibilities of reality while i think about what, i think about you, wet after the late rain and i can not stop singing like a child in an array of incomprehensible sounds made of unbearable semiotic meaning and life makes sense only when i think you exist, only when i sleep next to ... in this visualisation of hermeneutic colours self-consciously concerned in the engagement of a smile , wandering of about lost paradigms and perceptions after this mnemonic tricks to master new meaning and words and messages , to remind me of the exhausting race that leads nowhere where i am running after you and the motley crew of ontological ideas i gathered to sail this invisible vessel

From the book Emotional (Dis)Orders

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Bibliography: Links: The Arcades Project http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52223.The_Arcades_Project, (1999), by Walter

Benjamin

Related links: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1860.Walter_Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/253525.Rolf_Tiedemann (Editor), Kevin McLaughlin http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/162124.Kevin_McLaughlin (Translator), Howard Eiland http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/225750.Howard_Eiland (Translator), Belknap Harvard.

Related links: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=27259&content=reviews http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=27259&content=toc N. Katherine Hayles http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/author.epl?fullauthor=N.%20Katherine%20Hayles, (2005), My Mother Was a Computer, Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, 288, pages, Related links: http://www.jstor.org/pss/4241469 http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/321487.html Bertrand Russell, (2008), entry on The Theory of Knowledge for the 1926 edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Heather Marcelle Crickenberger's doctoral dissertation entitled "The Structure of Awakening": Walter Benjamin and Progressive Scholarship in New Media Heather Marcelle Crickenberger, (2007), The Arcades Project Project Or The Rhetoric of Hypertext (Project Prospectus) Related links: http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/about/story.html http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arcades.html

Alexander Gelley, (2008), Weak Messianism: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69bGf2DnBY Daniel Goleman http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=rdr_ext_aut?_encoding=UTF8&index=books&field-author=Daniel%20Goleman, (12 Sep 1996), Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ [Mass Market

Paperback], Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition Related links: http://www.danielgoleman.info/ http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~canadianliteraryculture/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=49&Itemid=95 Scott Bukaman, Matters of Gravity Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, Duke University Press, Durhan

& London, 2003

Tim Berners Lee, (1998), The World Wide Web and the "Web of Life" http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/UU.html

Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (2010), The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired magazine

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 related links: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/ www.ted.com/speakers/chris_anderson_ted.html http://www.ted.com/speakers/chris_anderson_ted.html Jeff Howe, (2008), Crowdsourcing, Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, Published by

Crown Business http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/crownbusiness/

Related links: http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/ http://twitter.com/crowdsourcing