Midterm post

Guru Meditation

While using Guru Meditation (for the first time, in a serious way) I could not let myself relax enough to not care about the little floating man. Is he falling? Am I holding it right? What the hell am I doing? However, Guru Meditation describes itself as being a videogame that interacts with the user through a lack of rather than an abundance of interaction. What? All I could think about was how I was trying to meditate before a midterm on an iPad. I could not separate the ipad from my meditation, because even the lack of interaction recalls a need for interaction with the ipad in order to "play." The game aspect of the meditation and the way I processed my ability to meditate was wrapped up in this device, this information machine of sorts, the ipad. "Info-aesthetics" is not just a way to approach the ipad itself, but also the app and the way I was affected by the meditation as I played; the form preceded the information. When I read "the policeman's beard," I was so wrapped up in the fact that a computer wrote a book that I could not simply read it as I would a book, but rather I focused on the form and not the information. Perhaps the policeman's beard is an exception, as the form has a great deal to do with the information, you could even say that the form is the information rather than the writing itself, but the form plays a different role when applied to guru meditation. I could not let go of the fact of the app or the ipad as I played, and therefore my meditation was of a different sort. I eventually did try to forget that I was using the ipad to meditate, and tried to meditate as I would normally. Lo and behold, the man didn't fall. But what was more interesting was that if he had, it wouldn't have mattered because I was trying to meditate so hard that I forced myself to ignore the form and instead focus on the information, i.e. the meditation. With the policeman's beard, I would have just taken the writing as I would any other book if I didn't have the information to influence how I percieved the form. So the policeman's beard is the foil of guru meditation, in a way. One of the ways guru meditation is described on its page of the app store is the ideal meditation for one who "can't break away from the itouch or iphone." In this case, the form works as the the access to information rather than just the precursor to it, the ipad can become a form of meditation if you can only forget the form.

Stumbleupon and Simulacra

The stumbleupon app is the absolute form of the third order of simulacra, in a way that is clear even in the name of the program. It takes your interests and seeks out things on the internet that may excite you, randomly appearing by a click of the "stumble" button. In the second order, one has this kind of interaction by merely existing and functioning in the world and actually stumbling upon things that interest you; in the first order, the idea of "stumbling upon" something interesting doesn't even have an idea, it just happens. But this "stumbleupon" is the hyper-real in its most extreme-- it takes "total operationality" to new heights, being able to summon an interesting idea or web page at the click of the "stumble," and the way it uses your input of interests and learns from what you "like" to fully excercise its "aim of control" over what it will let you see. "The process will, rather, be the opposite; it will be to put decentered situations, models of situations in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life." Instead of stumbling upon something interesting outside four walls, or within them, interesting because it may not be something we could ever concieve of being interested in, we can now feed a program our interests and simulate that feeling of discovering something new and amazing without ever having to risk interacting with it in the outside world, we can have that discovery instantaneously, and we can have it for cheap. But the problem is that it is cheap. It is simulated, it is "reconstituted... down to disquietingly strange details," and because of it, we can no longer go back to that feeling of discovery as we would in either the first or second orders. First stumbleupon was a computer software to be downloaded and used, but now we can stumble upon something virtually on an ipad, wherever we go! We no longer even have to risk having the discovery feeling we would if we were to step out onto the world because now we have a portable virtual realm with which we can further immerse ourselves in. So we must simply do, go forth or stay wherever you are, and Stumbleupon something amazing, on a screen only, free download at the app store!