Defining ourself, ourselves, has always been difficult. And despite that, we have tried. Oh how we have tried.
Try after
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Try,
the ability to define even oneself within any means afforded to us, any means carved by us, has proved immensely difficult. It has resonated, yes, and for that we are thankful, but it is always incomplete.
It will always be incomplete.
Thus begins another incompletion. →
Parallax defines an internal system for managing information. Let’s add another, for structuring existences.
“The self” is an umbrella that covers things that are non-physical1, and things that are independent of the physical. One’s identity, one’s preferences, one’s memory, one’s broad history. The thing that makes twins different from each other, that would make a clone distinct from its source.
“The body” is an umbrella that covers the physical, but crucially, only the physical which is directly attached to the self. The actual body, and all of its changes, and all of its actions, and all of its appearances over a lifespan, yet nothing more. The voice, the gaze, the grasp, the way someone dances, the way they scramble over terrain, climb, jump, speak, gesture.
Then what of clothing? What of tools? What of things used to work, to express, to perform? Is the outfit someone wears on stage, the outfits they build throughout their time in this world, the manner a pencil is used2, the way they use different forms of keyboards and interaction devices, the way they drive, to be entirely separate from the body the way the body is from the self? No. The self is flexible, the body is flexible, and what defines an entity is more than what they are in a vaccuum.
Let us make a few alterations.
Hynospace Outlaw is an experience of Hypertext. One may consider this a game, which is correct. One may consider it an exploration, parody, reference, or otherwise of older internet experiences, which is also true. Things are rarely so simple—a thought that frequently delivers both joy and suffering.
Hypertext is a form of text with “live” references—ones that allow the reader to immediately jump somewhere else, even within the same document! I would like to liken mental activity to hypertext. Our available options are to lift the word wholesale, or lift the “hyper” prefix only and apply it to “self”. For several reasons, I am choosing to lift the entire word—“Self” would become far too awkward to use, even compared to how it is already.
Now, with Hypertext defined as the realm of mentality, that means it also is now allowed to encompass headspace as a whole: multiple selves, multiple expressions of self, things that relate to “the self” but would otherwise be left out, and so forth. It also places it explicitly in conversation with itself, and with other Hypertexts (or, what are generally described as “other people”). In addition to that, Hypertext is also allowed to exist in conversation with “the body” and things that the Hypertext and “the body” perform. →
From this, you might expect that “the body” should be termed Text. However, to call it Text would deprive it of what I am terming it instead: Context. Something that exists together with text.
Then, what is Text? Text is things that exist that are neither explicitly Context nor Hypertext—forms of reality that are not inherently related to a self. A ball is Text, and can be acquired with the Context to play soccer, or baseball. An exam is Text, provided and filled out and graded. A biography, especially, is Text: an extruded and encapsulated collection of stories, a snapshot of the Hypertext and Context encoded in literal text, or sometimes a spoken story.
To return to Context: the important thing about it is that it does not only encompass the body. It encompasses “the physical that is associated with the self”. This means it includes clothing, it includes the ways someone prefers to get to a frequent destination, it includes a person’s keyboard, personal affects, the ways they use and style their keys, the way they structure meals, the ways they remember things. It is inherently connected to Text, in the same way that Hypertext is—they are prefixed to Text because there is no self when there is no way to define one in relation to another, or to the self of another time.
In this way, the Text and Context that a Hypertext deals with informs the Hypertext. The ways a Hypertext and Context act on Text affect the Text. The Context that is available to the Hypertext affects both the Hypertext itself and the way it can interact with or produce Texts. → Additionally, aspects of the Hypertext are encoded in Texts, which allows them to become part of the Context.
Here, we arrive at External Memory. Something that I have anguished over some, explored more, and defined far prior to this exercise in definition.
There are two ways to think about External Memory: Memory prompted by external impulse, and Memory extent as external impulse. Either can be correct, and in our case, both are.
Learning an instrument involves touching the instrument. Learning a song requires singing the song. Learning lines for a play involves reciting them, with the script, with the appropriate emotion and gesture, and often with fellow actors and others working on the production. In that sense, the act of practice is creating the memory, and the memory is the practice. It is also the object. It is the script, it is the gesture, it is the cadence, it is the instrument. One beat leads into another, one word into the next, notes stacking on top of each other, with room for improv and for mistake and for repair. →
Another aspect to this, or at least how it presents for us, is the incredible weight of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. Visibility, and readily accessibility, are incredibly important to retain access to External Memory. Part of the tragedy of social media and the instant messaging paradigm is that it feels so incredibly easy to forget about things that spark joy, because they’re gone. Music videos are out of the subscription box and off the discord channels, even soon gone from the latest page on a forum, and there’s no social aspect here for that to fall back on, so it falls back on nothing, through the wall, outside the eye, into the maelstrom.3
Why would I save that link, that image, that video?4 There was never any reason to preserve it—though that’s also extremely untrue. →
I think a significant part of why we put so much of “my-self” out onto the internet is so there’s something for me to remember me by, as much as it is for others to do the same. There’s a sense that we’re… The psychiatric term for this would probably still be “dissociated”, from the world, but that doesn’t seem right, now does it? “I” am here, the locus of myself, the world is as it always is, emotions and experiences are parsed fine when we aren’t dreadfully behind on sleep, but there’s a distance, still. Something that “distance” scarcely can describe, even. Depth, neither. The way that we interface with each other, memory, and the world doesn’t conform to terms that existed, hence, Parallax. There is somehow another direction that thought and dialogue can take, and how are you meant to describe that? How are you meant to explain that, just like you can adapt to 4D golf with 3D controls and relatively understand it but be unable to visualize it all at once, explaining something like this is probably impossible without experiencing it?
Maybe that’s part of the point, here.
When creating Parallax media5 the primary limitation was linearity, and the lack of ability to embed External memory. While we have elected to use “Hypertext” as the representation for the self-space in this…whatever-this-has-become, the issue with text and thereby other linear media is inherent to it. I can no more force a video to exist out of order than you can invert the sphere on-field in the middle of a game of soccer.
Would that we could.
Location, time, experience. How do you fit any of that into a video timeline?
Footnotes
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Insofar as they are not generally considered physical—I am electing to ignore ways in which mental processes are neurological for the moment. ↩
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like, think about the ways you use a No.2 pencil. the other ways you use a mechanical. have you ever picked up a colored pencil, or a charcoal pencil? each of these are sharpened differently. using one over the other for different ways of drawing and writing is a choice, and each presents its own difference in meaning and experience of use. they wear down differently than they would in someone else’s hands. think of a game controller. think of how you put on jackets, how you pick them, how aesthetic must by necessity always be in dialog with usefulness and usability for the one setting it up. ↩
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we should really talk about the maelstrom a bit more someday. that’s a Parallax definition but it’s never been super easy to communicate. ↩
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I’m always always always mentally kicking myself (as the expression goes) over not having references on hand at a moment’s notice. Realistically, it’s improbable if not impossible to have things catalogued completely and without fail and to be able to find things spontaneously even if that first condition were to be satisfied somehow. Doesn’t stop me from wishing it were different. If a reference or post can spring to mind while speaking or explaining something, it feels correct to expect it to be readily accessible. Too bad it never fucking is. ↩
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—the video, the associated blogpost, the pre-existing writing, and the comic— ↩