There are 2 major things going on right now for me.
First is related to my studies, the secound is related to my life situation.
I will start with the 2nd.
As my dog cannot climb the stairs anymore, due to the accident he had this summer, I need to change flat.
I have found one and with my friend we have signed a contract.
As both of us are unemployed at the moment it was difficult - in Barcelona, due to massive tourist gentrification it is hard to get a flat and owners abuse of this situation.
So you cannot rent anything if you do not have indefinite contract for at least two years back.
This is not our case, but we had to pretend we have, don't ask for details. Inkscape was involved.
It is not a comfortable situation, but moving under a bridge wouldn't be neither.
So we decide to take a bigger flat to share it - this is a very common practice here, even though sub-letting rooms is not really legal. Everybody does it.
So we have found 4 rooms flat that is quite cheap, in a nearby town. If we share it with 2 other people things will be fine.
.. Would be fine if not the fact that at the moment of signing the contract we have learnt that the son of the owner, and at the same time advocate that manages the flat, lives in the attic, 3 floors above our new flat.
This makes things much more complicated. And our already fragile budget that shrank significantly by dog's spine operation late summer, now is getting something like kernel panic.
What to do. Now we will move and then we will hack the reality again not to get overturned by capitalist waves of systemic violence.
Secound thing going on are my studies.
I have to submit like 4 works by mid January. I think I have 1,5 that is already set and I still need to put effort and time, but they are on the right path.
But other two I have to start anew.
One is state of the art : as my final work will be on tilde.town, I should write state of art about.... about what?
The problem is defining the area where tild.town can be inscribed.
After cmccabe article, the type of thing that tilde.town is, is a Shell Based System or a Public Access Unix Shell.
But the term didn't exist previously. There is nothing to write state of the art.
So the idea I had was to do a kind of archeoogy of text-based social environments, from BBS, IRC to MUDs and MOOs.
But this idea wasn't much liked by my professors, as I should write about current views.
Yeah, currently social psychologists are busy with Social Media more than with voluntarily obsolete communities in forgotten corners of the Net. Come on, it is not even a Web!
So finally, I have found the concept of Virtual Communities. I don't know how is it possible that I didn't know it before. Maybe because the main focus is so set on the Media...
Since then this part is already set. And within this framework I can include all the readings I did on Internet prehistory.
On the BBJ some anonymous person mentionned also virtual settlements.
The other work that I don't know yet where to focus is the "conceptual framework" that are the lenses that I would see tilde.town though.
So things like biopolitics, gubernamentality and so on.
Yet I don't think those concepts do any justice to ~t.
I have some possibilities I want to explore.
As I want to base my work on not only discursive perspective (which is the "official" one, takes into account discoursive interactions as a basis of social reality) I want to include also affective and corporeal perspectives. It is specially important in the context of personal affective relations that I think are important to understand ~t. Also, I am really interested in the concept of empathy, how is it experienced in a text-based reality?
So I think that even though we are in "virtual reality" here, at the same time we are bodies in our physical worlds and this fact conditions how we feel/experience this virtual settlement.
Apart of my attraction to the concept of the Virtual, there is also the notion of "heterotopy" by Michel Foucault. It is not Utopy, it is not a virtual-affective space. Heterotopy would be something like a space where we do not live but we spend some time, something between Temporary Autonomous Zone and a Permanent one, but as a place of passage. A party for example is a Heterotopy.
It is Another Place.
well. I go reading.
I will let you know how things are going.
