This page contains the fresh development of this project, as it reaches the Net.
This content is unstable: when information reaches a shape, it will probably slip into docu.
Some parts will be eventually stored into journal.
Graham White during a presentation at Queen Mary University suggested the development of polemic relations: some files/entities are born in relation to others, there is a tension and a critique that doesn’t belong to other kind of relations. Polemic relations will be implemented.
There is a substantial difference between Virtual Entity and any other software of files description or detection: a soul can only be given, there is no other way to create a soul if not through the act of giving. The soul is a gift, it is a human action upon a digital entity.
There are entities which have never been online, although their soul lives in the net and will survive longer. The soul becomes consistent.
An ancestor is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth).
Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one is the ancestor of the other, or if they share a common ancestor. In evolutionary theory, species who share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent.
Translations are in VE considered derivative works. The translation of a text has its own Soul.
Minimal amount of information necessary to describe a cultural object, or a digital resource.
Current technologies: compatibility problems on the level of format and codecs. But also: what information is really relevant and why? What data is hiding into metadata? Metadata are nowadays a description of culture. Ve is not focusing on tagging: tagging is about a subjectivity, tagging is infinite.
How to transform select metadata to make them proper to the digital world? Compatibility here is important. Language is the mechanism. Language can be human or machine understandable. Or both.
Metadata can include future plan: future development of a file, editing plan and ideas. Technology does not know about the difference between present, future and past.
Metadata can include future.
Metada in Ve are more like licenses fields and descriptive elements then tagging semantic descriptors.
W3 definition: “Metadata is machine understandable information for the web.” and Wikipedia: “Metadata is data about data”
Can be both taken into account in the Ve. Ve’s metadata wants to be as much as possible machine and human understandable.
video
raw material, edited version, video-art, television piece, analogue video digitized, digital video never out in the analogue world (can DVD be considered analogue in the sense that it is an object?)
Example from a real archive of video art tapes (for preservation and digitization):
Title
Year
Collection
Duration
Status
Format
System
Sound
Color
Short Content
Announcing Titles
Credits
Quality
Observation
Where every tape is identified by a code composed of title / version / copy / tape
audio
music, recording, noise, sound, track, performance, stream
text
manual, declaration, manifesto, poetry, research, essay, notes literary, material created before the digital world text whose author is not alive (homerus) books
example, very interesting:
http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/t/turing-alan-mathison.bib
image
photography, graphic, assemblage, painting, digital painting, scan, image that was born digital image that became digital
Soul
The Soul is what makes the file alive and independent. A sort of DNA liberates the file from any possible control or ownership. In the DNA and the Soul is written the file’s destiny. (file karma)
Digital Resource
Minimal unit to which it is possible to assign an identity.
Relations Analysis and Graphs
What node connects different places/groups. A node that is connecting two graphs that would be otherwise separated is important because of creating this relation and not in itself.
What is the impact of this idea? The commons is dead: we have independent culture and digital entities.
A psychedelic functioning can disperse any attempt to use relations between entities to control other entities.
How to avoid this: Ve is not compulsory, and it is not a tracking system. Error is possible, information is not statistic or absolute. It cannot be used as a quantitative indicator. Ve is based on spontaneous use only. Ve is not about people: the actors of the web are the Files, not the users. The relations that can be made visible are regarding these entities and not the users. Users have any role in the process only when they create, and upload. New files can be generated, some files are newborn, other are mongrels of other files.
What happens when reality becomes digital for the first time? What is the difference between a file Child of other files and a file that is made of reality only? And a file made by software without any relation to reality? How do we take into account these relations and make them visible categories?
The system, imagined for the digital world’s objects, can be expanded to physical objects (virtual entity of a chair) (philosophical ontology = aristotile, la cavallinita’)
Can this system relate to non digital world?
What are the dangers? RDF?
Scarcity (also called paucity) is the problem of infinite human needs and wants, in a world of finite resources. There is no scarcity in the Net, no need to possess or fighting for resources, then.
In biology, scarcity can refer to the uncommonness or rarity of certain species. Such species are often protected by local, national or international law in order to prevent extinction. Although some files will survive, and some will die, some will transmit themselves, others will not, and Darwinism is being active in the virtual domain, scarcity is not necessary. Uncommonness and rarity are available as equally as mass items. See, from another perspective, the long tail.
A system as a functioning machine of any kind is not defined by its ability to control the process generated. Chaos is an intrinsic element.
The extinguishing of a file does not imply the deletion of its Soul. As well, creation and existence are independent and not necessarily related to the instantiation of a metasoul.
The database of Souls cannot be a system of control, or a statistic index, risking to homogenizing diversity, in-predictability, secrecy, other realities, submersed entities, fake information, theater.
The system contains errors because reality is immense and goes beyond description. Data analysis is just a perspective.
Real and Virtual have in common repetition, life, and death, among others.
A very simple way to prevent spam, paranoia, infection, delirium, enchantment and ghosting is the line: stop loop, end.
./stop
stop is a start.
stop is the consequence.