by John Craig Freeman, augmented reality public art, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 2012.
The city of Miami is a quite literally a threshold between the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Miami River is a hinge for this connection. Air and cruise ship traffic aside, the Miami River connects the city to over 72 ports of call throughout the hemisphere with most of the traffic operated by small shipping contractors in vessels of 100 tons or less.
Tp<Crossroads Miami Virtue.
Metaphoric Rocks: the Karst Topography of National Identity
Electracy
What are the electrate equivalents of the literate institutional practices and identity formations? Much of the best theorizing of new media and digital technology today neglects the insights of “apparatus”: that the Internet is an emerging institution that is to electracy what school was to literacy; that the categorial, logical, and rhetorical practices needed to function natively in this institution have to be invented, and moreover that the invention of an image metaphysics (the equivalent of what Aristotle accomplished for the written word) has its own invention stream, independent of the features of modern recording equipment.
Flash Reason
Paul Virilio described the society of the spectacle as a dromosphere, a condition of dimension collapse due to light-speed technologies. The Internet (General) Accident is one that happens everywhere simultaneously, as a possibility of an information economy. In such conditions the established rubrics of rhetoric (practical reason, the logical means of decision) are made problematic, to the extent that they concern one or the other dimension of time: Forensic (determine what was true in the past); Epideictic (praise or blame in the present); Deliberative (decide on future action). Prudence is a time-image, a wisdom of temporality gathering up the three orders of time into an act of judgment. Electracy requires the introduction of a fourth order of rhetoric, capable of ethical and political reasoning Now, in the Moment (Augenblick).
Choragraphy
As part of the invention of word metaphysics, Aristotle appropriated the Greek spatial concept “topos” for use as a rhetorical structure. The commonplace method for generating "texts" used “topics.” Flash Reason supplements the literate topical system with another Greek category of space, chora (region). Our goal is the invention of a choral generator for Internet creativity. A relay for this invention is a hybrid of traditional image systems: Tarot (a Quest archetype), and the I Ching, the Book of Changes (Landscape archetype). The heuretic rule is to discover the functional equivalent for our own apparatus. Electrate Chora is multimodal, a correspondence of institutional discourses (Family, Pop, History, Philosophy).
Konsult
Supplementing conventional consultant scenario narratives, inventional consulting introduces the Konsult. The challenge to deliberation in the dromosphere is not what may be imagined, but the unimaginable. A Konsult applies choragraphy to reconfigure disasters as epiphanies, revealing the fatal strategy underlying all possible scenarios. Disasters intimate Limit, Measure, functioning as messages from Technics, the Other Ontology of our machines.