Bye-bye Blogger

So Blogger overhauled their system, tweaked the posting-system and tuned up some other stuff. The result: Blogger balks at wayward or otherwise not quite orthodox code. Like mine.
Meaning I can't blog anymore. Whatever.

I'll get this thing onto (into? around?) Tinderbox and then we'll see.


Don't stop checking, though. The "relaunch" (hem hem) won't take much longer than the usual interval between my posts (hem hem hem).

So --- see ya. A.

Never thought that semiotics might be fun

Last weekend saw the 10th international congress of the German Semiotics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik - DGS) in Kassel. I missed the first day of Karin Wenz's section, Zeichnkörper im Netz (sign-bodies on the net), but day 2 alone was well worth the trip.

Mela Kocher from the Swiss Institute for Children's Media / Zürich, Switzerland, talked about the sign-quality of the avatars most or some of us use on the net. Mela applied Saussurean sign-theory and found that while "normal" signs are material and refer to immaterial entities (concepts, ideas), avatars are immaterial / virtual and refer to real bodies. Except for some, like Gibson's Idoru oder the non-fictional (well, not quite) E-Cyas, who / which have nor real-life referents - seemingly embodying Peircean sign-theory.

Randi Gunzenhäuser from Chemnitz University presented online multiplayer worlds: The combat-world of Diablo II and The Dark Age of Camelot, a massive multiplayer game of the contemplative sort. While Diablo is high on stress, demanding perfect hand-eye-coordination, in Dark Age, the player can let her avatar ride through rolling hills for real-time days, make friends, trade - or gather for battle, if she must. With games differentiating into more or less discrete genres on high-performance platforms, players can create avatars for all facets of their personalities (or every whim) - as well as enter one and the same game as different characters at the same time.

Maria Teresa Santoro and Rejane Cantoni gave a brief history of the development of artificial life, robots, prostheses, implants, AI and genetic engineering, reminding us that even in this dark age of marketing-provoked desires and for-sale-positions in search engines, technology is exciting, not just one more fad to be jaded about.

Philosopher Elke Müller, from Erasmus University Rotterdam, explained the concept of Cartesian space and in contrast to it Merlau Ponty's concept of space - in such a way that even the non-philosopher could follow her through. She come to the - surprising - conclusion that space presented in a PC or even online-game is by and large Cartesian, adressing only part of the body, while CAVEs are more in Merlau-Ponty's line, addressing the phenomenological body.

Karin Wenz talked about avatars as interfaces: the mask to hide behind, the tool through which to interact with the online-world. Karin draws on the German word for interface, Schnittstelle, to approach this duality: the cut that connects, e.g. two frames in a movie or the Schnittmenge, that which two entities have in common - but also the cut that bleeds, the unbridgable difference.

Download the abstracts and watch out for the November 2002 issue of Dichtung Digital, edited by Karin, with contributions from the section.

It seems strange, though, that onliners are so proficient with avatars, even multiple avatars, while in ecommerce / advertising, the avatar (called "intelligent agent") is nothing more than *out*.

So Germany "lost" the World Football Championship. Big deal. Of course, the media here go on and on about how the team played some great matches and how very well they lost. Yeah, right. The Römer in Frankfurt, where the largest open-air viewing in town was held, was deserted about ten minutes after the match ended. And the team themselves? Headed for the lockers the moment the ceremony was over. Could hardly get themselves to congratulate the winners. Some even took their medals right off after they shook the referee's hand.

And the media go on about how a new, positively humble feeling of nationality grew (spontaneously originated) out of the great 2nd place. Over here, some guys got in their cars and paraded flags rather listlessly. (Ok, ok, far better than this outburst of national pride after the "victory" over the USAmerican team.) But partying losers? Good sports? Gimme a break.

Now, the Koreans. Ok, maybe they know excuse-my-French about football. So what. Remember the match against Turkey? Looked like what they were doing was not trying to win a match but to create the experience of playing out of the necessary ingredients: two teams giving their last. The fun of playing. The joy in good moves. Who cares who wins? Saw them hugging and parading *together* after the match? Saw the Korean audience unroll the huge Turkish flag (that someone must have provided just in case).

I guess that's what playing is all about, even playing FPSs: mastery of the game, not mastery of the opponent.

Compare this to Kahn who was obviously so teeth-grittlingly bound on winning the trophy for "his country" that he stayed in the box after his hand was injured and of course lost the ball.