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3 comments:

1. Prokofy Neva on August 17th, 2006, at 9:17 pm:

   Walker, the lights on the Empire State Building have been out the last few weeks, did you notice? With all this heat? Usually they have it different colours and the city fathers decided to bag that because they were trying to reduce the strain on the electricity grid — Queens didn’t have power for days, you know?

   But now the lights are back on, but just white. I think the Metaverse is talking to me, Walker. I’m looking out the window now and in fact, I’m positive it’s interacting with me. The Empire State Building, after all, is an avatar, and it’s in a matrix, and it’s in a matrix beyond all matrixes, as you’d have to admit. It’s the avatar rezzed in 1930-1931 by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s Lamb’s avatar because, well, I just feel that it is. And he was harking back to influences from Egypt and the Aztecs in this Art Deco period. In fact World War I induced the Metaverse by forcing everybody into contact with everybody else and that set them up for World War II. Decades’ later, Lamb’s avatar continues to speak to me, flashing me pixels that I gaze at and try to interpret, and yet I cannot be sure that the game god/administrators of Lamb’s avatar are respecting his wishes and turning on those lights with different colours might have been a horrible form of violence to his/their original artistic vision.

   In fact, the whole world is the Metaverse, the Metaverse was *always right here staring you in the face but you were just too busy to notice, or in fact, you weren’t born yet.* You’re soaking in it, Walker. In fact everything real was *always* virtual because everything real was always mediated by your eye’s retina and those rods and cones and things we learned about in 6th grade. Now, are you going to tell me the Empire State Building is “real”? Of course it’s not real, Walker. It’s the concoction of a million perceptions and fantasies and mis-cues and is always mediated and is always virtual, and therefore meta, and therefore versal.

   I know it’s counter-metaversal to suggest reading an old fashioned meat page-turning thing like a magazine, but the latest New Yorker has a review of ‘On Hashish’. And in it you can read about this interesting German Jewish writer in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin.

   “In ‘The Arcades Project,” he made lengthy catalogues of ephemera–advertising posters, shop-window displays, clothing fashions–commenting, “whoever understand how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions.”

   I could go on a great deal more, Walker, but the thing is, the Metaverse is just always talking to you, always, always, was always there, was always waiting to be embraced, but you weren’t listening, or you weren’t born yet.

2. rikomatic on August 18th, 2006, at 10:28 am:

   Wow, that was pure beat poetry. I’m snapping right now.

   Seriously, I don’t see how having a touch screen computer in front of Ralph Lauren’s store counts as “real life meets metaverse.” It’s a freakin computer in a window. These are not the droids you are looking for.

3. Prokofy Neva on August 18th, 2006, at 5:09 pm:

   >It’s a freakin computer in a window

   That’s what you say *now*, rikomatic. But you won’t be laughing when the Metaverse comes and *bites you in the ass* when you least expect it, when it pops up with your toast in the morning; when it whispers to you from the sidewalk, when it choses your news clips, your books, your optimal path to work on your sleek monorail…when it starts living your life for you and all of a sudden you can’t stand it anymore and then you will grasp hysterically at the Ralph Lauren window computer seamlessly gleaming, and you’ll be pounding and trying to break the glass, trying to reach somebody, anybody, in there, trying to fight back…

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