Nederlandstalige versie

mecanolodiamauro cube, a recent Cathedralic cluster

 

... a Cathedral is something with lots of stuff in it among which there are or can be some things that have a Cathedral in them ...

 

...the New Cathedral of erotic Misery is not here, it's kinda missing...

 

 

 

purpose and subjects

practice area

introduction to theory

...purpose and subjects of this website - Cathedral Geography...

 

• To all likelyhood, I (and you along with it) am (are) trying to build a game here, the Cathedral Game. It's going to take a long time, because i can only work on it in my spare time. The purpose of the Game is very complicated and mysterious as well as utterly simple: you can read about it in the Introduction to Cathedral Building. Basically it requires you to find or build a Cathedral.
  
  
• otherwise: 'website'=programmed container of information, a file you request. So if it's a game, you started it. Down at the East Gate, i keep track of how many 'visitors' each 'place' gets. You actualise these 'places' by what you normally do on a 'website', i.e. clicking on links or letting embedded programs do the clicking for you.
  
  
• I'm also trying to develop some artistic publishing tools, mainly for a practice some call 'Digital writing'. I use my own work to test these things, so i guess that would make me a Digital Writer. I prefer the term Cathedral Authoring Process (öder C.A.P. (- hu! Nè! UGH YAK untsoweiter)) to describe my part in the business.
  
  
• When you combine both perspectives, and add my constant need to write, or mess about artistically, what you get is what you see: a process started in september 2004 that sort of turned into a blurry field of what you might call artistic research. Originally, the central questions i wanted to formulate some answers to with this kind of research sounded like:
  
  
  • What kind of writing will be the result of writing with tools that are co-defined, simultaneously developed, with the writing itself?
  • In how far will this 'website' be writing itself ?
  • Can you get a process similar to (Semantic) Web Services up and running based on different ontologies than what's being used now?
  • Can Software Agents be programmed to behave artistically? Poetically? Ethically? How would you then redefine those terms?
  • Is there such a thing as a poetic algorhythm? What would it look like in, say, JAVA?
  • What happens to text when you put it on a URL? What happens to poetry? Philosophical texts? What's all this talk about liquid data?

  Untsoweiter. Mostly i forget about those things, because you do need some time like 2,3 weeks of empty days in a row to get anything decent running programmatically. With three children and a full time job, that don't happen too often...

• So what actually happens is some events of creation, starting dates identifyable with a URL from which the absent Cathedral might go in any direction and you could pick up tracing it from there.Whenever a new event occurs, i sent a mail to list@rhizome.org, the webartery Yahoo group and some others of these lists so as to let people know about it.

• In order to build the game i need to create a universe here first . Now i don't have the time nor the budget to go about it the Star Wars way so it's gonna be a rather simple universe. Not a model of the universe, just a space with places in them, so there's gonna be a lot of fiction involved. I don't like the 'page' metaphor for files that are accessible by requesting them, i prefer a fictionalisation into 'place'.
  
  
• the subjects of this website are literature, language, software, painting, 'contemporary' music, boat varnish and how you can build a poetic world with combinations of these processes.
  
  
• the Cathedral World has 4 directions you can go to, like our world: left, right, up and down. It has a central place you can start from: the meret becker PLAZA. The PLAZA is the most fun part of the website, or at least it's supposed to be(come)...
  
  
• From there, or from anywhere else, you can go, left or right, to four Gates, or content areas, all covering different approaches to the subjects of language and software.
  
  
  Here's a Gates summary (no Bill involved):
  

  South	This Gate leads to prose, how you can create a world in people's imagination by telling stories. It has the novel 'Anke Veld' in it, that is being published as i write it. I only write prose during summertime. The fiction, however, spreads all over the place and beyond it...
  West	This Gate leads to more theoretical, technological writing and will contain pieces on Cathedral Building Theory as well as practical bits of software that can be helpful for authors to create texts and things on public networks. I try to keep things as simple as possible, avoiding theory, but there's a general tendency towards hermetic clusterings of meaning in my writing and as i try to unfold those, i end up theorising anyway. Its a poetic disorder of the mind, i guess.
  North	This Gate leads to poetry. It contains an ancient draft of an application called [babelog] that serves the end of publishing poetry in an international context in an optimal way and it also wants to explore combinations of visuals, audio and text.
  East	This Gate leads to more abstract thinking, and visualisations of the construction of meaning itself. It's very prematurely open to the public, i hope to be able to show you later where it's going.

• All four gates are supplemented by a visual or plain useful section that i leave for you to discover and exploit. One of them is a LINK section to net art, literature, music and philosophical sites that i like(d).
  
  
• Underneath all of this, the 4 Gates and PLAZA, there's the very fascinating but rather chaotic world of the Cathedral Residents. Residents can refer to actual persons, in that case they are very special persons with very high poetic talents, or they can be imaginary persons living in my fantasy, in that case they behave in the now-you-see-me-now-you-don't-way.
  
  
• I will need those Residents in the Game, to let you use the information that is given on them (or by them) to participate in the Game. There's three of them already, more will come. There's some explanation at the Cathedral Parish Administration Service, a Service that's mostly closed, but anyway...
  
  
• Underneath the Residents' world, there is but a black space called the Tomb, where you will only find some hidden Dutch poetry buried in a black field. I let Google eat all the stuff i wrote till 1999, it's nice to know that those programs index it properly. The poems are my work up to starting the Cathedral, i build on those in different ways
  
  
• Above everything else there's the meagre world of objects: REDUX, the Cathedral World reduced to what it would be when it was just an object containing other objects.
  
  • There's a Paint and Garbage Shop in the REDUX section. I try to sell some artisanal stuff there in order to support me building the Cathedral Game. All support i receive is used to buy me time to work on the Cathedral.
    
  • There's also a flash skin for the NKdeEBLOG, that's where i dump texts and translations and such that need to be encoded to xml defined by the nkdee.xsd to use them later. The blogsystem i made does that quite easily, that's useful.
    
  • Other than that the Redux section also holds a more 'finalised' work, Song for Europe 2005, last year's version of a song that remains the same, essentiallyand continues into 2006...
    
    
• And yet above that, there's nothing but a blank white space called, well, nothing.

thanx & have fun,
...dv...

L.M. 19.04.2006 1:34

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