Monday, October 6, 2008

Particle Storm

Platforms of Relation:

To follow up my elist post
re: collaborative digital platforms, Mind Manager (www.mindjet.com) is a diagrammatic mind-mapping tool using an arbourescent tree model (i know, D&G would roll in their graves) with nodes that open / close, where you can move and relink ideas, attach files and hyperlinks, use scheduling tools, appearance/view options. There's also a secure online extension for co-editing maps in real-time, using workspaces, web conferencing and chat (Mindjet Connect).

Sorry if that sounds like an ad (i paraphrased their site a bit), but perhaps this is useful or there is something else like that out there we can use?
Mindjet Connect isn't cheap ($350 or so for individual licenses), but perhaps its possible to get a short-term group license sponsored/funded as an R&D angle? The readers are free, and maybe licenses for the interactive version can be hosted by affiliated institutions..

i woke up at 4am last night haunted by metaphors... if for SoM 'the molecule' is of necessity conflated to the scale of social groups located in different cities/countries, how can we use online collaborative tools to generate a molecular micropolitics of the event? To extend (or prehend?) the metaphor into an operative molecularity, if
SoM molecules are locally situated social bodies, what are the consitutents parts of these molecules for individual bodies? In our global online communications do we become 'like' non-local wave-particles or protein folds... am i mixing too many metaphors - how do you theorise D&Gs molecularity vis-a-vis the wave-particle duality as immanent transmission?... this recalls somehow the complementarity of singularity and multiplicity, as an aspect of folding... (Greg Lynn i think from the HTB reading last year).

Anyway,
if we can integrate an online digital ecology of collaborative tools, perhaps we can hold a global media jam at some point during SoM, which may take the simultaneous form(s) of a party, a dinner, a performance etc, etc... eventing a Particle Storm as non-local assemblage for the Society of Molecules. From a radical predagogical POV we might establish affiliations with one or several wolverine open-source / media-jam communities to help facilitaite/operate such an interface, opening a mutual transmission of conceptual and technical platforms of relation, as interventions of thought within already molecular techno-social assemblages.





3 comments:

Khadija said...

Mike.
You know I'm working away on these diagrammatic praxis (in anticipation of the collaborative project we discussed via the Senselab) and I found Mindmap for free here to download:http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I also think (possibly more) highly of this program: http://vue.tufts.edu/

hope this helps. keep us updated on your thoughts.
Khadija

michael hornblow said...

Khadija,

Wow, VUE looks amazing... certainly given its open-source, academic focus and resource plug-ins to Fedora, Sakai, Flickr etc (am i sounding like an ad again?)... wonder if there's any online reviews comparing pros/cons for Vue vs MM etc?

Mike

Erin Manning said...

this is great - I love the idea of a dinner party across molecules. In an interview with Isabelle Stengers yesterday she mentioned the idea of mesopolitics instead of micropolitics - another way of thinking molecules (from the between).