time travel

I got some spam back in 2001, and we found its sender on AIM. The spam comes first, then the AIM transcript.

Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2001 5:35 PM
Subject: attention time travelers and aliens

> If you are an alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through
> time I need your help!
>
> My life has been severely tampered with and cursed by a very evil women of my past.
>
> I need to be able to:
>
> Travel physically back in time.
>
> Rewind my life including my age.
>
> Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again
> after I go back.
>
> I am in great danger and need this immediately!
>
> Only if you are an alien or have this technology please send me a separate email to:
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
—-

11:54 PM, Kevin and Kio create AIM account “marvermejo”.

—

marvermejo : You are in danger.
Core0139 : are you telling me or asking me?
marvermejo : I am telling you.
Core0139 : why is that?
marvermejo : I can’t say right now.
marvermejo : where are you right now?
Core0139 : in my house home alone
marvermejo wants to directly connect .
Core0139’s software does not support sending and receiving IM images .
marvermejo : you are in danger.
marvermejo : do you have a car?
Core0139 : yes
marvermejo : you need to get in it, and drive away from your house immediately.
marvermejo : You need to stay away from your house for a period of not less than 72 hours.
marvermejo : Look, this is important.
Core0139 : you are freaking me out, yes my life has been tempered with by what i beleive to be a evil women, I have a bad heart and have had my health tempered with and am scared to go out this late at night alone
marvermejo : This is a woman from your past.
marvermejo : You may not need to leave the house.
marvermejo : Am I correct?
Core0139 : yes I dpn’t belive my house has much to do with it
marvermejo : But she knows where you are.
Core0139 : yes, she was my dads girl freind, was into wich craft and secretly druged and poisened me,
Core0139 : i made my dad break up with her she has been after me since
marvermejo : yes
marvermejo : yes she has
marvermejo : how old is your father now? He is a part of this story.
marvermejo : Though he is not in danger.
Core0139 : he is going to be 51 in november
marvermejo : Do you believe the poisoning to have taken place over a prolonged period? This is an important detail.
Core0139 : she called him 2 years ago, and made him throwing up over the tolit all night long, she called and left a sick message on my moms machine just 6 months ago
marvermejo : right
Core0139 : yes
marvermejo : but do you understand the poisoning to
marvermejo : have been over time
marvermejo : or just once
Core0139 : since she has been around I find I am the victom of my food always being tampered with and bad luck, woerd things, when she was arounf is when i was 9, she was around for a year and poinsed me through out the year
Core0139 : with no bodt beliveing me
marvermejo : right.
marvermejo : But one person has believed you, they know.
Core0139 : I don’t hnik anybody undersatnds or knows what i went through, the gloominess she made me see, once she even put somthing in my food at luch for school which made me start crying for two hours
Core0139 : since then i am having weird things bad luck health problems
marvermejo : right
Core0139 : now so severe i am fighting to stay alive
marvermejo : but others know about the health problems, and they know that you are strong.
Core0139 : they do? who nobody belives me, not even doctors, it’s like i have been given invisible suffering of the worst kind
marvermejo : there’s no one you can trust?
Core0139 : I can trust my mother, but she does not belive me, nor does anyone because i have have so many other things happen and they all just sound to unreal listic
marvermejo : not everyone is capable of seeing the truth
marvermejo : it’s not their fault
Core0139 : yeah thats true
marvermejo : you might have to move. Not today, but soon.
Core0139 : do you predict somthing?
marvermejo : you are further from danger in the North
Core0139 : what if i wear a north facing against a south magnet on each pinky finger?
marvermejo : that will help, but maybe not enough
marvermejo : but the magnets are important
marvermejo : do you have somewhere to go in the North?
Core0139 : no, not at all
marvermejo : look on a map, do you have one there?
Core0139 : no I am lousy at reading maps, so i dont have any
marvermejo : damn
marvermejo : what is the closest border?
Core0139 : i don’t know, I got an f in geogophy, it was my worst subject
marvermejo : But you may have to cross state lines. Do you understand?
Core0139 : yup
marvermejo : Time travel requires that you move through space as well.
Core0139 : once when thier was a ufo in the sky i was brought back 6 hours in my own house, apparently my house is over a grid point
marvermejo : yes, that makes sense
marvermejo : they follow latitudinal lines, but not longitudinal
Core0139 : i see
marvermejo : Do you know about the Tri-Star system
Core0139 : no
marvermejo : I cannot access it right now
marvermejo : but it could help you
Core0139 : i see
marvermejo : when you went back 6 hours, did you experience the shortness of breath then?
Core0139 : no, it was just like a quick flash of white light, heard what sounded like a camera flash, then i noticed it went from 6 oclock in the moring with the sun starting to rise back to 12 oclock mid night
marvermejo : but you can remember nothing about it
Core0139 : no nothing it was just a qucik second not even, and i wondered what happened, but did not think much, when i went down stairs to wake my mom to take me to school, i realized it was 12 oclock again
marvermejo : they may have used time coils
Core0139 : yeah posably
marvermejo : no one at school is aware of your powers, or what you know.
Core0139 : you mean that time trvel experience
marvermejo : yes
Core0139 : yes i mentioned it but ofcorse they all thought i was nuts
marvermejo : of course they did
marvermejo : but it is not the last time
marvermejo : it will happen
marvermejo : Your watch is no good for this, you need a quartz watch.
Core0139 : however i did hear my bus driver speaking to someone over her cb the other bus driver was saying to her that her shild saw monsters in the sky that night
marvermejo : Where was the other bus driver from? Could you tell?
Core0139 : no
marvermejo : damn
marvermejo : because then you could triangulate the location
Core0139 : yeah i know it, I have a hyper dimensional resonator ordered form a fellow named steven gibbs claims to be an actual time traveler, and this things will work over a grid point, however he mentions a lot of bad in his experiences with his machine, not to sure about it
marvermejo : You need to have a plan for what you will do when you get it functioning, it’s not long now.
Core0139 : I wan’t it to work in the way i ask the lord to make it work
then everyting will be ok
marvermejo : yes
marvermejo : this is important: when was the last time you actually saw her?
Core0139 : the witch my dad dated, when i was 9 which was 11 years ago now
marvermejo : but you have sensed her presence
Core0139 : yes and waht is weird is just 2 months before she came into my life i was hanging out with my freind one day and a catering guy handed me and my freind a free hotdog laughing as he handed me mine 1 milnute after eating half way through tears started pouring down my eyes, he must have used one of the same drugs the witch used on me
marvermejo : the effects of the drugs feel as if they are increasing
Core0139 : now I dont know, the felling i got when she wasarounf after I ate her food was the sadest feeling of my life, a feeling of darness and crying all the time, it is posable i have long term drugs effects of whatever she used on me
marvermejo : however
marvermejo : by eating more food you are diluting the effects of the poison. Over time, this is effective.
Core0139 : yeah i know it
marvermejo : Fresh fruit is best
marvermejo : Raisins
marvermejo : With your heart, you need to avoid avocado.
Core0139 : as of now I have such bad uneplained health problems between my heart, prostate infection, to now a feeling of light headessness dizzyness so faint I can’t move around without fight to stay concious my haed feels heavy and it feels like a brain tumor the only thing
Core0139 : that has helped is drinking 6 cups of carrto juice a day and eating nothing but
Core0139 : vegies
Core0139 : and now it is starting to not work!
marvermejo : Right
Core0139 : anymore, i beleive strongly this women is the cause
marvermejo : because they do not dilute the poison without a catalyst
marvermejo : this is why you need fruit.
Core0139 : i do also eat a lot of fruit
marvermejo : I’m sorry that wasn’t clear to me.
Core0139 : I eat anything infact except for animals products including
meat dairy eggs or anything like that
marvermejo : Right, this is important in preparing for time travel. Your body cannot have impurities like that in it.
marvermejo : I have to go now.
Core0139 : ok very nice talking to you, later
marvermejo : I will find you again soon,
marvermejo : I will have information about
marvermejo : the Tri-Star system
marvermejo : do not tell anyone about this conversation.
Core0139 : ok great i appreciate it
marvermejo : Everything good comes around.

ITP H79.2798 Mediated Intimacy: Closeness and Distance

Mediated Intimacy: Closeness and Distance

H79.2798

(Kio Stark)

The experience of intimacy across distances is at least as old as the technology of the letter. Since then, every new technology of connection produces new ways of initiating, enriching and sustaining intimacy. These new developments are often perceived simultaneously as creating distance and bridging distance. Because the invention of technologies of intimacy is a perennial pursuit at ITP, the goal of the class is to enrich students’ ability to create meaningful and successful projects related to intimacy. Students will gain a studied and nuanced understanding of the idea of intimacy and the physical and emotional experiences associated with it— as well as examining how existing and cutting-edge technologies work to connect intimates across the physical and metaphorical distances they routinely experience in everyday life. The first section of the course is devoted to studying intimacy, bonding, attachment, longing and desire from a variety of perspectives. These will include psychology and psychoanalysis, recent neuroscience, neurochemistry, and evolutionary biology related to intimacy and bonding; and recent psychological work specifically regarding intimacy and the internet. The second section of the course focuses on current art and technology projects— along with commercial ventures— that explore mediated intimacy across distances (the examples are legion). We will scrutinize these projects to understand what they do right and what they do wrong. And we’ll investigate the language and syntax of mediated intimacy, including attempts to incorporate each of (or combinations of) the human senses into devices of connectedness. In seeking to articulate what makes a meaningful mediated experience of intimacy, the course also looks at a group of edge cases— for example, personal performances in public (from web-cam girls to performance art)— that support asymmetrical intimacies. Through this process, we’ll attempt to define a set of possible methods from which to create fully realized projects in the future.

Goals

At the end of the semester, students should have developed a refined set of skills for thinking analytically about the concept of intimacy and how it is or isn’t possible to develop or enrich it at a distance; they should have gained a general understanding of what has been established (by a variety of disciplines) about what constitutes intimacy, how it is formed, ad how it works. In addition, they should have become familiar with existing art and technology projects that involve intimacy over distance.

The overarching aim of the course is for each student learn how to recognize points of leverage that allow space for technology and art to make interventions in the experience of intimacy over distance.

Work

The principal work of the class is in understanding and synthesizing your observations from the readings, discussions, and written assignments. You will demonstrate your understanding by your participation in class discussions, your weekly written responses to the readings, your short written assignments and written final project that will be presented to the class for discussion.

Grading

Participation: 50%–This includes your reading responses, class attendance, and meaningful contributions to class discussion.

Short assignments: 30%

Final project and presentation: 20%

Attendance policy

Class attendance and prompt arrivals are mandatory. If you miss more than one session, or are habitually late, it will affect your grade. If you know that you will be forced to miss a session, let me know in advance.

SYLLABUS

Note: Readings will be handed out, be available online, or be distributed by PDF the week before each class. For the PDFs and online material, I STRONGLY suggest that you make a printout and make notes on it as you’re reading. It is very difficult to assimilate complex ideas without using your hands a little. I apologize to the trees for this.

Part 1: Closeness

Week 1: The poetics of love and longing

Short readings from Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse; poems by Robert Creely and Frank O’Hara; Janet Cardiff’s “To Touch.”

Week 2: The psychoanalytic premise—the subconscious and the centrality of parent-child bonding to adult experiences of intimacy

Week 3: Attachment

John Bowlby, Attachment; Deborah Mashek, ed, Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy

Week 4: Intersubjectivity, recognition, projection

Donald Winnicott; Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love

Week 5: Gender differences & sexuality

Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love; Karen Prager, Psychology of Intimacy; Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Week 6: Neuroscience part 1–bonding and attachment, the limbic system

A General History of Love

Week 7: Neuroscience part 2–bonding and attachment, neurochemistry

Roundtable proceedings “Love Code: The chemistry of Intimacy”

Part 2: Distance

Week 8: Psychology of intimacy online

V.M. Scott et al, “Does Virutal Intimacy Exist”

Note: weeks 9-12 will consists of both readings and guest speakers

Week 9: Intimate words and memories

Monica Whitty, “Love Letters”

Week 10: Intimate sight, sound, touch (evoking co-presence)

Joseph Kaye et al, “Minimal Intimate Objects”

Week 11: Visual intimacy

Dan McAdams et al. “Looking, laughing, and smiling in dyads as a function of intimacy motivation and reciprocity”

Week 12: Intimacies of one-to-many (public intimacy, asymmetrical intimacy)

webcam girls, sex blogs, videoblogging, confessions

Week 13: student project presentations

Week 14: student project presentations

ASSIGNMENTS

Note: All assignments are due on the Sunday before that week’s class meeting. If I don’t get them by midnight, they’ll be counted as late and you’ll be docked a letter grade.

1.

Exploring: part 1

Due September 27

Use an existing technology that allows intimacy at a distance (eg Skype video chat, IM, or something more cutting edge) to communicate with someone you are close to. This person must be someone who has NEVER or rarely used your chosen medium. Try to have a ‘natural’ interaction. Take notes on your experience, and ask your partner about their experience, particularly what felt ‘natural’ and what felt weird, whether they felt like the episode made them feel closer than other forms of communication.

2.

Exploring: part 2

Due October 11

Interview 5 people about their use of various existing technologies of intimacy and distance. Find out how they use various technologies, which they prefer, if they use some differently than others and how so, who they interact with, what kinds of interactions they have and how satisfying are they. Do the technologies create more closeness or more ‘missing’.

Both assignments will be evaluated based on your demonstration of having invested time and thought into the exploration and its documentation, as well as the degree of insightful observation and interrogation you perform.

3.

Analyzing

Due November 1

This exercize requires an analytical response to an assigned idea from a prominent thinker about intimacy. Using the course reading material, you will support or argue with the thinker’s stance. This assignment will be evaluated on clarity and organization of your ideas and how well you use evidence to analyze the concept you’re responding to.

4.

Inventing

Due December 6

This assignment has three parts. You will need to meet with me to discuss your preliminary idea by November 20.

A: Dream up a future technology of intimacy and connection over distance. Write a User’s Manual to accompany it including a drawing with parts labeled, a detailed description of how it is used, warnings, etc. Free up your imagination—don’t limit yourself to what is currently (or predicted to soon be) technologically possible.

B: Write a story about a person or people who are using your technology. You will need to express the invented ‘physics’ of the world in which your invention exists. In other words, where you rely on new general capacities available in the future world, you will need to describe those things, in order to situate your invention. The point here is to think through and express what the technology might do from an emotional and social perspective, based on what you know about existing technologies and ideas about intimacy, as well as your ability to imagine consequences of not-yet-possible devices.

Be creative about how you construct your story. You might write a story in the first or third person perspective of the people using your invention. You might write a case study by a psychiatrist or psychologist about a person who uses the invention and how it affects that person’s emotional life. You might write from the perspective of someone who is crusading against your invention. You might write from the perspective of the inventor as a fictional character (non-autobiographical). These are just some examples to get you going. See what else you can think of!

C: Present your invention, its context, its function, and its potential or known emotional and social effects on users.

You’ll be evaluated on the creativity of your thinking and the thoroughness with which you examine and express the ideas behind your invention and its possible/expected effects. You’ll also be evaluated on the quality of your presentation to the class and your ability to respond to questions that arise.

fragment from “the invisible museum”

On the sidewalk by the park, a man stood watching the children play. He required a child of a particular age. Old enough to follow instructions. Too young to be trusted as a witness. And alone. The boy was digging a small pit near the edge of the stone wall. Next to him were piled the sort of sundry treasures a boy keeps, shiny and sharp. It seemed as though the hole in the dirt was his only dominion. The man dropped a heavy coin onto the pile, and then an envelope sealed with wax. He pointed over the wall, across the street. He watched the boy cross over, slip in the door behind an old lady, then emerge again a minute later. When the boy returned the man dropped another coin in the dirt. The boy’s greed over the bright currency consumed him. He had not once looked at the man’s face.

fragment from an unfinished short story

They named him Hector, but he didn’t live up to it. So they chopped the name down to a curt and humble syllable: Heck. He was a late and desperately desired child, hard to conceive and harder to raise. His father had been a weak man who succumbed to his foibles while Heck’s mother was still fanning herself on the porch, awaiting deliverance. Alone with her daughters, she settled on this state of affairs as the cause of Heck’s inconsolable wailing, which could go on for hours and often did. His mother rocked him in her arms and sang her sweetest songs. A dull rage would start to tighten between her bony shoulders, and then her prim little daughters took their turns. His screams revved like an engine. Some days there was nothing to do but leave him in the crib and rest their worn nerves outside in the thick wet air, where the hum of the cicadas dulled the pitch of his cries. By the time he could talk, the threat of his tantrums hung over them like a thunderstorm that would not leave. It was the sound, most of all, that kept the tired women under his thumb. His demands crowded them into the corners of the house. By then it took only a dark glance to achieve his aims. They would do almost anything to avoid the exhaustion of appeasing him. When he was sixteen, and they were all wrung dry, his mother sent him to live with her war-hardened brother across town. As if, much too late, that might cure him. The day he left, he turned back from the sidewalk and saw his older sisters glowering at him from the safety of the porch swing like the meek inheriting the earth.

postcards from the shore of a foreign lake

Dear Charles,
Longing is desire, constituted by distance. Across an ocean, across a border, across a room. I long for you now, and I long for you as you walk toward me. As we finally touch, what does longing become?
-R

Dear Charles,
You aren’t here and I am lonely. I weep, and the rented villa weeps with rain. I’m afraid that when I see you again, I will still be lonely. One is poetics, the other is pain.
-R

postcards from an ancient city

Dear Rosa,
This is how it used to be. You would think a thing and write it in ink and drop it in a box and days later it comes out where you meant it to, slides through the slot of a door. Someone picks it up with their fingers and turns it over, looks at the picture, reads the words you scrawled days or weeks before. It’s a trace, a time machine.
-C

Dear Rosa,
Before the postal service it was even slower, and less certain. You would fold the paper and seal it with wax, to prove it has not been opened on its way. You hand it to a horseman or a sailor. Chances are they pass it along to another horseman or another sailor whose voyage runs closer to the destination of your words. Maybe it gets there, maybe it doesn’t. In any case, it’s months later. Everyone’s faith has waned.
-C

Dear Rosa,
I found this in a junk store. The city doesn’t look this way anymore.
-C

fragment from “the invisible museum”

Daniel woke to the sight of his fingers stained with pigments that he had ground by hand the day before, crushed from the same rocks and minerals mixed with the plant dyes that Caravaggio had used long ago. Making paint was kitchen chemistry. He kept a separate mortar and pestle for each color in a metal-topped drawer meant for bread. His porcelain sink was tainted with the brilliant dust. It had marred his sheets and left bright bruises on his own pale skin. He whispered the names like an incantation: verdigris, yellow ocher, vermillion, madder lake.

instructions

Wish for a surprise
Wish that California will not fall into the sea
Wish for roller skates
Wish that you were president, or queen
Wish for a dream in which Cary Grant calls you beautiful
Wish for the extinction of mosquitos and roaches
Wish for perfect pitch
Wish your teapot’s whistle was sweeter
Wish for a job as a magician’s assistant
Wish for something that is not yet possible
Wish you were an umbrella, to shelter your lover from rain

i already forgot your name

I found you an abandoned house