A Space Without A Goal
Part IX
A sense of touch is a sense of unfinishedness.
The most "noticed" websites are the strongest ideas - the thoughts that draw the attention span.
People gravitate to the strongest ideas.
That's all your company is, on the web. An idea. A symbol.
We are symbols, too.
Everything's sublime. Everything's interactive. Everything touches us. We touch everything. We're connected.
"Time, and not spatial/physical property is the new salient capital of the information age." - Michael Benedikt
Your attention span is the salient currency of the information age.
Efforts to create workable realities tend toward a primary reality. The web tends toward a primary reality.
The rationalities of a primary reality make a nonsense of much that we hold dear: our approach to the practice of business, for example.
One of the reasons people won't need to use a computer to be profoundly affected by the web is because the web forces a new business reality upon the world. A business reality which tends toward a primary reality. The web's impact reaches everywhere.
The web: surrender made manifest.
"If we have a coherent approach to reality, reality will have a coherent approach to us." - David Bohm
"If you can describe a problem, you've got one." - Robert Rauschenberg
The Web is Unknowable.
Judge this medium by it's art.
The strongest corporate spaces, in other words, the strongest virtual business models, are being built by artists.
"Your enterprise is an information system which incidentally sells goods and services." - Joseph F. Coates
The strongest businesses sacrifice more, more creatively than their competitors.
"I think there is a new consciousness of realizing that this world has its own limitations." - Robert Rauschenberg
"Consciousness is our most immediate experience of reality." - Robert Rauschenberg
Our senses are senses of unfinishedness, senses of flow.
Hyperlinks extend our senses.
"You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself." - Gautama Buddha
"Walk on!" - Buddha's last word to his disciples
Walk on. Get webbed.
"The Wayless Way, where the sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves." - Meister Eckhart
Mid-November, 1995: "What's this interest everyone suddenly seems to have in Meister Eckhart?" - Media Technician, Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles
Everything flows.
Let go. Connect. Love.
"Reality, of course, is wholeness. Everything is related." - H.H. the Dalai Lama
"Wholeness is an attitude or an approach." - David Bohm
"I think we are going in entirely the wrong direction looking for coherence. I think the world was not designed to make sense. It is original to each person." - Robert Rauschenberg
"You cannot rely on some absolute truth or absolute judgement. Every form of knowing, every form of ignorance, is contextual." - Francisco Varela
"I think we have a great difference from one person to another. Nothing is done until each one of us does it." - John Cage
To exist, you must share.
"Kosmopololites eimi." - Diogenes
"Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it." - Indian proverb
"Most nomads claim to 'own' their migration path (in Arabic Il-Rah, 'The Way'), but in practice they only lay claim to seasonal grazing rights. Time and space are thus dissolved around each other: a month and a stretch of road are synonymous." - Bruce Chatwin
"Il-Rah 'The Way' was first used as a technical term for 'road' or 'migration path' before being adopted by the mystics to denote 'the Way to God'...The concept has its equivalent in the Central Australian languages where tjurna djugurba means 'the footprints of the Ancestor' and 'the Way of the Law'. It would seem there exists, at some deep level of the human psyche, a connection between 'path-finding' and 'law'" - Bruce Chatwin
"To think is to voyage." - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
The web is made thought.
"Pompey in Jerusalem, after barging his way into the Temple, demanded to be shown the Holy of Holies, and was surprised to find himself in an empty room." - Bruce Chatwin
The senses are the chief inlets of flow, of unfinishedness.
"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us; to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable." - Rainer Maria Rilke
November 19th, 1995
For Jeff Gross.