<nettime> Limits of the World

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Limits of the World


Gamespace is bracketed by the _blank_ and the _edge._
Unlike the physical world, gamespace isn't fractal: moving closer
to a surface results in pixel enlargement (or penetration).
This is the blank of gamespace.
The blank isn't unknown; the blank is entirely known.
The blank is the death-limit, absence, unforgiveness.
Traveling across (parallel vectoring the surface) leads towards a limit.
This is the edge of gamespace. (Not all games have edges.)
The edge is unknown; the edge is the failure of rule-binding, identity,
physics. The edge is the life-limit, presence, forgetting.
(What came before isn't relative.)
The game occurs before the blank (play with a sufficient pixel raster);
the game exists beyond the frozen zone of the edge.
(The frozen zone: where media play.)
Both blank and edge are spaces of negotiation.
These are the limits set by the contract or rule-governing of the game.

To understand the game, play it; to comprehend the game: move from blank
to edge, edge to blank.
The mute blank: One speaks before it. The activated / activating edge:
One moves across it.
To cross the edge of gamespace is to be drawn Elsewhere.
To be drawn in gamespace: to play. Drawing is always redrawing.
(Ontology is rewrite.)
Gamespace: One speaks within it. Blankspace: The Unspeakable.
Physical world (let's call it realspace): The deeper one proceeds, the
greater utilization of economic resources (colliders increasing in size
and power, etc.).
The smaller the realspace object, the greater degree of virtuality.
(Perhaps gamespace and realspace meet at the hypothetical infinitely
small.)
The virtual is the foundation of the hierarchy/holarchy of realspace.

The edges of realspace, gamespace, are the jectivity of transgression.
Or certain edges are, or certain transgressions.
The blank is withdrawal, catatonia, the virtual-real, the inert, obdurate.
Transgression means always having to look back (return the gaze, appear
across the edge).
Blank is never-looking (nothing to look at, unable to look).

Culture flourishes in the liminal.
Theorizing from the inside-out, theorizing from the deconstructed basis.

The blank: broken writing-pad, magic slate, inviolate sheet of assertion,
defuge, decathected.
The edge, the stylus. Fulcrum or balance for the interior. Tottering,
toppling (inward).

The transgression in realspace is the occasion of death. In gamespace,
return. In gamespace, return of the repressed.
The analog of gamespace: psychoanalytical oozing, blank and edge.
The digital of realspace: apparatus, mechanics, closing-down of the
liminal.

(Drawing a blank.)


(Reading Ken Wark's Gamer Theory, playing in SL, teaching in Providence)




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