Genetologic Research

Paul Ramirez Jonas
Paper Moon (I Create as I Speak), 2007

Consisting of sheets of paper tiled to represent an image of the moon, upon closer inspection, the design is made up of text that reads, “I Create as I Speak.” A single sheet is removed from the wall and rests on a lectern, with a microphone and a portable amplifier, inviting the viewer to interact with the work. The text plays with words; “I Create as I Speak” translates to ABRACADABRA in the ancient Aramaic language.

Toril Johannessen (with Vilde Salhus Røed)
Large and partly spectacular solar eclipse (08.01.08), seen from a hill between our houses, 2008

‘Are you present in the present to present the present?’ – Jamila Adeli, artistic director of BodhiBerlin asking independant curator Manray Hsu during a dialogue called: Can The Same Exhibition Happen Everywhere? in the framework of Rotterdam Dialogues: The Curators, March 7th 2009, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Félix Gonzàlez-Torres
Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991

Toine Klaassen
Untitled, 2005

This work consists of rusty nails put on the ceiling composing the names of different global corporations like Shell, Pentax, Texaco, BMW….

Visit his TRAVELING LABORATORY FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY

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The 196th Law (“an eye for an eye..”) of Hammurabi, King of Babylonia, using graphics, in three different modes of cuneiform script, illustrating the evolution of signs over time. The first is the original Old Babylonian version (around 1750 BC), the second is in Neo-Assyrian signs (around 1000 BC), and the third is in the classic Sumerian signs used about 400 years before Hammurabi’s reign. Below that follow a transliteration into Akkadian and a translation into English.

Original Old-Babylonian

Neo-Assyrian

Classic Sumerian

Transliteration

šumma awīlum
īn mār awīlim
uḫtappid
īn šu
uḫappadû

English

If a man
the eye of a son of man
destroys
eye his
they will destroy.

We Re-act
Re-adjust
Re-admit
Re-affirm
Re-afforest
Re-animate
Re-appear
Re-appoint
Re-arrange
Re-ascend
Re-assemble
Re-assert
Re-assume
Re-assure
Re-baptize
Re-bind
Re-birth
Re-bound
Re-build
Re-call
Re-capitulate
Re-capture
Re-cast
Re-cede
Re-charge
Re-claim
Re-clothe
Re-cognize
Re-coil
Re-collect
Re-commence
Re-commend
Re-compense
Re-compose
Re-condition
Re-conduct
Re-conquer
Re-consider
Re-construct
Re-count
Re-cover
Re-create
Re-criminate
Re-crudesce
Re-current
Re-deem
Re-descend
Re-develop
Re-distribute
Re-double
Re-draft
Re-draw
Re-dress
Re-duplicate
Re-echo
Re-edify
Re-elect
Re-eligible
Re-embark
Re-enact
Re-enter
Re-establish
Re-examine
Re-export
Re-fashion
Re-fill
Re-fine
Re-fit
Re-float
Re-form
Re-fresh
Re-fuel
Re-fund
Re-furbish
Re-generate
Re-group
Re-habilitate
Re-house
Re-import
Re-incarnate
Re-inforce
Re-insert
Re-instate
Re-insure
Re-introduce
Re-invent
Re-invest
Re-issue
Re-iterate
Re-join
Re-juvenate
Re-kindle
Re-lapse
Re-lax
Re-lay
Re-lease
Re-legate
Re-light
Re-live
Re-make
Re-mark
Re-marry
Re-member
Re-mind
Re-miss
Re-model
Re-mould
Re-move
Re-name
Re-nascence
Re-new
Re-occupy
Re-open
Re-organize
Re-pass
Re-pay
Re-peal
Re-people
Re-percussion
Re-petition
Re-place
Re-plant
Re-plenish
Re-polish
Re-populate
Re-pose
Re-possess
Re-pot
Re-present
Re-press
Re-print
Re-produce
Re-prove
Re-publish
Re-pulse
Re-purchase
Re-sale
Re-search
Re-seat
Re-seize
Re-sell
Re-serve
Re-set
Re-settle
Re-ship
Re-shuffle
Re-sign
Re-solution
Re-solve
Re-sort
Re-sound
Re-source
Re-strain
Re-strict
Re-surgent
Re-surrect
Re-survey
Re-tell
Re-tire
Re-touch
Re-trace
Re-tract
Re-treat
Re-turn
Re-unite
Re-use
Re-value
Re-vision
Re-view
Re-vote
Re-wind
Re-write

A representation of the internet
(Credit: Bill Cheswick, Lumeta Corp.)

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.

The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of a fundamental branch of metaphysics concerned with existence. According to Tom Gruber at Stanford University, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science, however, is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.” He goes on to specify that an ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.”

Swoogle is a search engine for the Semantic Web on the Web. Swoogle crawl the World Wide Web for a special class of web documents called Semantic Web documents, which are written in RDF (Resource Description Framework). Swoogle is a research project being carried out by the ebiquity research group in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

William Crossman is a philosopher, futurist, and professor involved with issues of education, media and technology, language and culture, and human rights. He is Founder/Director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures

‘The prospect of escalating conflicts and tensions around the world, together with the ongoing search for global peace, demand that we create technologies which allow everyone to communicate with everyone else. Voice-in/voice-out (VIVO) talking computers, using online voice-recognition technology, will allow all people to access the world’s storehouse of information merely by speaking, listening, and viewing graphics. We live in a world in which 80% of the population is nonliterate or functionally so, thousands of different native languages block or deter easy communication amongst people, and millions suffer from disabilities that prevent them from reading and/or writing. However, using a VIVO, a person won’t need to know how to read or write text in order to store and retrieve information. VIVO’s instantaneous language translation function will enable that person, while speaking only in their own native language, to converse with all of humanity. And if they had a disability that barred them from accessing text, they could speak, listen, or sign via their VIVO. By lowering these historic barriers to global communication, VIVOs hold the potential for democratizing information flow worldwide–one key step in creating democratic nations that support human and civil rights, freedom, justice, and equality as the necessary bases for world peace. Without our being able to hear–literally–the voices of the world’s disenfranchised, world peace will remain an illusory goal. Over the next decades, as VIVOs enable more and more of those voices to be heard, and as written language/text shrinks as our technology of choice for accessing information, the electronically-developed countries will evolve into oral cultures. By mid-21st Century, written language/text–which is essentially an ancient technology for storing and retrieving information–will be a thing of the past, and by mid-22nd Century, all nations and communities, including those we build in space, will be informationally united in a worldwide, yet diverse, oral culture.’

Mission Statement

The Institute’s mission is to study, learn, speak, consult, promote dialogue, and write about:

1. The social, cultural, and philosophical implications of talking computers and voice recognition technology–that is, the ways that talking computers will affect every area of human activity.

2. The replacement of writing, reading, and written language itself by talking computers and other speech-based and non-text visual technologies–a process that began in the 19th Century and will reach completion in the 21st Century.

3. The parallels that exist/will exist between today’s oral cultures around the world and the oral cultures that the United States and the other electronically-developed countries are becoming.

4. The ongoing school literacy crisis, its causes and its solution. The impact that talking computers will have on education in the 2lst Century.

5. The nature, history, uses, and effects of written language as a technology specifically developed to store and retrieve information under the specific conditions of the agricultural revolution 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

6.The role that human evolution plays/will play in the development of information technology (including talking computers), and vice versa.

7. How to make sure that the human right of all people, nonliterate or literate, with disabilities or without, to access the stored information of our world via talking computers is realized in the 21st Century.

‘By enabling us to access stored information orally-aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for us to replace all written language with spoken language. We will be able to store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we´re about to recreate oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological foundation’ -William Crossman-

Vilém Flusser

… ‘Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called “historical consciousness.” History began with the invention of writing, not for the banal reason often advanced that written texts permit us to reconstruct the past, but for the more pertinent reason that the world is not perceived as a process, “historically,” unless one signifies it by successive symbols, by writing. The difference between prehistory an history is not that we have written documents that permit us to read the latter, but that during history there are literate men who experience, understand, and evaluate the world as “becomming,” whereas in prehistory no such existential attitude is possible. If the art of writing were to fall into oblivion, or if it were to become subservient to picture making (as in the “scriptwriting” in films), history in the strict sense of that term would be over.’

‘If one examines certain Mesopotamian tiles, one can see that the original purpose of writing was to facilitate the deciphering of images. Those tiles contain images impressed upon them with cylindrical seals and “cuneiform” symbols scratched into them with a stylus. The “cuneiform” symbols form lines, and they obviously mean the image they accompany. They “explain;” “recount;” “tell” it. They do so by unrolling the surface of the image into lines, by unwinding the tissue of the image into the threads of a text, by rendering “explicit” what was “implicit” within the image. It may be shown through text analysis that the original purpose of writing, namely, the transcoding of two-dimensional codes into a single dimension, is still there: every text, even a very abstract one, means, in the last analysis, an image.’ …