Fibonacci phyllotaxis:As prehistories of virtual Harbin multimedia & interactive representation, New feedback loops for exploring Harbin play, Bateson

Harbin ethnography:


... To participate in soaking in the Harbin warm pool, from one's own bathtub at home would allow for new developments of the Harbin experience.

As prehistories of virtual Harbin multimedia and interactive representation, all of the above virtual world examples make possible new feedback loops for exploring play at Harbin. Cybernetics - 'the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things' (Apple Dictionary) – a term coined in 1947 by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, as well as information processes and communication have all informed concepts of virtuality from their inception (Boellstorff 2008:34). The anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson both engaged concepts of cybernetics as important ways to 'theorize' anthropology. Bateson begins to formulate some theoretical elements of this anthropological domain in ‘Naven’ (Bateson 1958). Since it isn’t possible to examine the whole of culture in a ‘single flash,’ Bateson says he arbitrarily selects a paradigm defining culture as “an elaborate reticulum of interlocking cause and effect, [presenting it] not with a network of words but with words in linear series” (Bateson 1958: 30). In particular, Bateson explored questions of play vis-a-vis cybernetics. The building of virtual Harbin in Second Life involves play, and feedback, in multiple ways, now in a form which complements writing – virtual world building – and allows for ongoing ethnographic research. And individuals could build new aspects of virtual Harbin that potentially interact between actual life and actual Harbin, for example, in the actual/virtual interactive Second Life holodecks, as prehistories of Harbin virtuality. And the play at actual Harbin can develop in multiple ways in virtual Harbin and between the two, giving new expressions to cybernetic theory.

Harbin's films which are shown 2-4 times a day, for decades now, probably contribute to Harbin residents and visitors' experience of actual Harbin's virtuality in unique ways, as another prehistory of virtual Harbin. ...

















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/08/fibonacci-phyllotaxisas-prehistories-of.html - August 24, 2010)