<nettime> nezIVOTnost

[eyescratch@t0.or.at]

The "paradigm war" that now breaks out is one measure of an
antagonism between "cyberspace" and "neurospace", but the relation
cannot be simply vulgarized as a dichotomy.

What proposals challenge the dead/alive binary (videogames,
military simulators, etc.) as the primary paradigm of virtual
interaction?

          Created the company - and       Created the company - and
             the paradigm - that             the paradigm - that
          dominated the use of radio          dominated the use
           and television for many         microcomputers for many
                    years.                         years.


Working within the paradigms of cyclic cultural development
and racial topology, they related the representation of
space in art to the spirit of entire epochs, civilizations, and races.

If we are to apply the evolutionary paradigm of Panofsky
to the history of virtual computer space, it has not even
achieved its Renaissance yet.

While thoughts on the discontinous
have been reduced to sloganeering, and interpreted as a
license to do this or that arbitrarily, the paradigm of an
omniscient contextuality (derived from particle physics)
exhorts us, directly opposed, to continuity and responsibility.

It was not because Wasson brought the spores
out on his boots in 1956 that suddenly magic
mushrooms were all over the world again;
it was because some paradigm shift occurred
at the same time.

  Diagrams composed of lines and blocks,
  indicating links and documents, illustrate the new
  paradigm.

Many of us are struggling against this paradigm and the reiteration
of it suggests another hierarchical positioning in the making.

pshift - paradigm shift utility

The pshift operator performs a paradigm shift on its input stream
within the context of the current or specified zeitgeist.

we do not know what DIGITAL CHAOS may mean, but we are
sure that the confluence of minds will produce a new and exciting
paradigm that may mean a relocation of our inbuilt prejudices; a burst of fin
de siecle energy that may transform our information into a living force.

This proposal is emblematic of paradigm shifts which characterize Alife.

It is one example among many, of computer technology
functioning as the paradigmatic technology or our era, to use J. David
Bolter's term.

Paradigm Busters

The Top-Down Artificial Intelligence paradigm has come in for its fair share
of bashing in recent years, one of the earliest and loudest whistle blowers
being Hubert Dreyfus [15] who refers to the paradigm as 'good old fashioned
artificial intelligence' or GOFAL.

The Top-Down
paradigm, on the other hand, exactly replicates and reinforces very
traditional tropes of lord and serfs, boss and workers and more abstractly,
body/mind, form/content and hardware/software.

Another techno-scientific paradigm is Claude Shannon's Communication theory.
Ported into the humanities and particularly into telematic arts, this
technologically validated paradigm entirely ignores the question of
interpretation in communication.

PARADIGM SHIFT INTERRUPTUS1

The conscious and efficient grabbing of publicity is the order of the
communication environment following the era of enlightenment and the
consequent paradigm shift.

Not pregnant with the new paradigm,  perhaps the net has gas -
only needing to fart?

He distinguished between ordinary science, which solves problems
within a particular paradigm, or way of looking at the world,
and revolutionary science, which introduces a new world-view.

This project was centred on the creation of "a profoundly
non-linear paradigm, a paradigm of ambient interactivity, ritual activities,
and of representations which were circular, repetitive, without syntax and
without closure."

Yet seeing the new paradigm linked with so many
important aspects of life imparts a revised world view, one that renders
apparently arbitrary currents of culture freshly comprehensible.

Telematics within the global economy paradigm is regarded as
the new means of production.

Manuel De Landa has already remarked that interest in AL came out of
reflexion on the failure of the AI paradigm.

In the paradigm of AL, this emergence and  bottom up decision making
in a system are very important.

America the federalist paradigm, the government has been effectively brought
to heel and hollowed out and turned essentialy into a sickafennic lapdog by
corporate power that is evermore global in scope that flows with the
frightening liquidity over national borders from whence springs all of this
utopian rhetoric in the Wired camp about the end of the nation state, the
end of geography in a sort of dizzy vertiginous hyperreal way that almost
sounds post-modern.

On the other hand the fact that cyberspace is created via narration has
nothing to do with the vacuum-paradigm of cyberspace, that presupposes
subjects without predicates - the so called Îcues filtered outâ approach.
This vacuum paradigm about disembodiment is supposed to allow an open
reinvention of the self.

      Today the technology exists to use
      higher-frequency portions of the spectrum, increasing bandwidth
      enormously, but the cellular telephone companies that should be
      rushing to take advantage of this are still caught in their
      scarcity-based paradigm.

      No problem, says Gilder, in a world of bandwidth plenty, the paradigm
      of operating systems will change to one of distributed software in
      the Internet, and this by itself will end Microsoft s domination.

      This switch in modelling strategy would have a significant impact
      on the shape of the new paradigm of economics that I mentioned
      before, the one that goes beyond the invisible hand and
      commodification.

In the printed book,
it's not only the pages, but the machinery of their
assemblage and distribution--that is, the production
paradigm that upholds the book form.  On the computer, it is
not the screen, but the mechanism that arrays the codes
there, along with its production paradigm.  The latter
contains strata:  layers of codes and interfaces, visible as
one probes beneath the user-friendly surface.  While these
paradigms are very different, the page is a kind of switch
term that is able to traffic between them.  Not in the sense
of linkage, but of conduction.

By the way, in actual fact one only meets up with well-known
media artists from the seventies: Valie Export presented the
exhibition *Glass Papers* in 1990 in the Vienna EA-Generali
Foundation, and Silvia Eiblmayr wrote in the catalogue, which is
available on the WWW: >>The art of Valie Export exists under the
auspices of that change in paradigm which characterizes a break with
the projects and the Utopias of the moderns.

And therefore there is this temptation to
think that new theories are the only way to explain
the most recent changes - like the "paradigm shift"
which Manuel Delanda has been talking about. If we
look at this century, we can see that there has
been a succession of new theories which have come
and gone: Bolshevism, fascism, Keynesianism - and
we're now  witnessing the end game of
post-modernism and neo-liberalism. It is
interesting that - at this very moment of
theoretical exhaustion - we get the importation of
terms from biology, computing and physics into the
social sciences.

It should be a rule of debate that, when the very conceptual foundations of
a particular view (in this case classical economics) are in question one
should not be allowed to use "evidence" from historians that operate
complexly within the paradigm one is criticizing.

"We're shifting the naming
paradigm from militarism to democracy, and fulfilling the ideal nature of
the Internet, which is virtual space with no borders."

Jarman subverts some of the basic parameters of the new paradigm of
visuality produced by the new technology and the position of the eyewitness
within it.

However, this is only one side of the paradigm of the
new media technology.

On the one
side of the paradigm of new media technology we are witnessing the
systematic production of blindness, and on the other, the frightening
hyper-realism of a system of total visibility which is particularly
reinforced in legal and police procedures.

During this interval, the limitations of the current naming
paradigm became obvious as companies discovered that they had to race,
or in some cases litigate, to secure their internet identities,
"their-name.com"--only to discover that it was already assigned.

Recently this new business paradigm was
expressed most forcibly by Akio Morita, causing uproar in Japan,
when he announced that Sony was a global company and not Japanese!

A new paradigm is upon
us, in which the nation-state has mutated into just another form of
organization, which will delegate market regulations to
continent-wide bodies such as North American Free Trade Agreement or
the European Union, which in turn will use their economic muscle and
conspire with local communities to undermine each member state.

Stephen Jay Gould has attacked it from within
the Darwinian paradigm -- so too has Steven Rose et al
in _Not In Our Genes_.

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