THE REFCARDS-SYSTEM v.1.0.1
From an email thread to a close friend, called X. in this document.
I’m working right now on the basic data model, the smallest structure, how can I put it? If you think of Twitter as a system, then what I call the “data model” or “data structure”, the most “atomic” one, is the Tweet… Twitter is a System — and now a Business — built on, founded on, THE TWEET.
In my system, that’s the Refcard… but before I can build the full Quickref System, I need to build the MoralTempCard system as a proof of concept, amongst other things, an exercise for me in building things, etc.
For now the MTC or moraltempcard is simple. It contains these pieces of information:
- Time/Date
- Location
- Situation/Context
- Observations
The “observations” part might also be able to take in “assertions”. But for now, that’s the content of each Card.
Example:
Time: 06:21 2014–03–22
Place: Mont-St-Hilaire, Qc, Canada
Context: Sitting at computer writing to X.
Moral Temperature: 36%
It becomes obvious that the key is the Moral Temperature Reading, which has to do with the concept of artists taking “moral temperature readings” when they study the quality, and temperature, of incident light, indoors and outdoors. It’s an important part of the art of professional painting, but this isn’t about the arts & culture per se.
For now, though, I am experimenting with percentages. So moral temperature goes from 0% to 100%.
I evidently want it to have the flavor of a Weather Report type thing, since it isn’t just “moral temperature” but “moral climate”, and why is it MORAL anything?
Mostly it’s a historical thing, Hippolyte Taine used the term and it has been used countless times, in many different languages. We can speak of politics and say “the climate is x, y z”. The current moral climate is x, y z etc. Social Climate, Political Climate, etc. etc.
Evidently, also, I could just say “SENTIMENT” or else “SOCIAL MOOD” and don’t worry, I’m working on that angle/aspect.. I want it to be the simplest possible. I just prefer the term moral temperature (“reading”).
For now, if you really wanted to help, then if you have a camera, go outside somewhere and take a picture or two every now and then and send me at least one picture with time and date and general location — can be super general like “In the United States” down to exact GPS coordinates, I don’t care. Ballpark figures are all I need, the system is founded on ballpark figures. Send me your moral temperature readings, and if we all did this on a system similar to Twitter, but with Moral Temperature Cards as fundamental data model on which the system, and then the business, is built, I think it could do a great deal of good for humankind.
The beauty is what happens once you’ve got a couple of cards in the system, recording what I also call “qualia” or “Qualities of Time”. (You could replace the “moral temperature” part, the percentage, with at least 3 “qualia” about the Context such as, “Happy, Threatening, Beautiful.” It can be anything you like, it really doesn’t matter what it is.)
Think of it as a kind of Library Card Catalog, except completely Abstract, on whatever you like, you design it the way you like. The cards don’t have to be cards from a library card catalog, they can be cards representing whatever you like.
So yes, it IS sort of like a private Twitter system and YES it’s meant to take in data of an “emotional” or “subjective” or “sentimental” quality, and NO nothing currently exists that is like this, not the way I have envisioned it.
Once you have cards in the system, you will be able to dice them and shuffle them and stack them in an indefinite number of ways.
That’s what I’m working on mostly, what to do once you have the cards. The problem is, I have to know exactly what the cards will look like, feel like, etc. what DATA they contain, and I can’t get it wrong, and I can’t use ballpark figures for that.
The MoralTempCard has to be ONE WAY, ONLY ONE WAY and it can’t change once I built the first prototype. Maybe it can change after that, but I will have to start from scratch. Anyway, as an artist, I am an expert in finding out what the underlying “social mood” is. Give me anything, a tweet, a sound byte from someone, part of a phrase, part of a facial expression, and I can extrapolate on that for what seems like an eternity.
Now, remember this. Look at this picture. What do you see? Imagine I tell you, “X., here is a Picture of the Weather where I am right now.”
Granted. Ok. Stick it in the system, in the database, the card catalog, “A Picture of The Current Weather by A.G. in This Location, At This Time, etc.”
Ok, but wait. Let us remember something important: AG. is an ambient experimental sound designer. He does Soundscapes, Soundwalks, he does Acoustic Ecology. Remember, my thing is SPACES, open spaces, airy spaces, and what is this Picture of? A SPACE. That’s all I need, an open space with a little air in it. I already said I could do anything imaginable all I needed was a space. (For I can hear the “temperature” of any Room or Space, just by heading the ambient sounds it contains. It’s been the basis of my ambient, experimental sound design practice for the last 30 years.)
I need an Ambience, an Atmosphere. Once I have the most infinitesimal amount of information — as Subjective as you want, you can literally pull it out of your *ss for all I care or even make it perfectly purely random chaotic noise, I couldn’t care less — then I can build a Picture of it as a Space, as an Ambience, an Atmosphere, and remember this: ALL SUCH SPACES ARE ALWAYS UNIQUE. They are unique “Qualities of Time”.
Every space is ALWAYS a unique special case and all I need is 1-bit, a 1-bit message, I can do the rest. Why, how come?
Because I’ve got the Time, Date, Location and hopefully the Situation/Context. It can be a perfecty EMPTY CARD, I don’t care, you can’t go wrong.. I have this information: An empty card created by X. at time t and place p, in this context/situation. An empty moral temperature card, as long as it has a mood or moral temperature reading, is still a moral temperature card, as valid as one with 100% certainty or whatnot.
Tweets require that we do some thinking. 140 characters is short, one has to think. But if I ask you, “X., can you please pull a word out of your *ss, completely at random?” What’s the first word that comes to mind right now? The moral temperature card also used to have a field for what I called “qualia”. All you needed was the time and place, a note on the context, and at least 3 “qualia”, or “Qualities of Time”. The system will do the rest.
It doesn’t matter, you could say, My word is Albuquerque. Fair enough. More than I even need. I can work with that, I can work with Albuquerque.
That’s where the 30+ years of experience in being Alex, the Artist known as Alex, comes in. How I turn “X. pulled Albuquerque out of his *ss” into a Picture, into a global picture of the world, into a whole Universe, a unique special case Universe called “X. pulls Albuquerque out of his *ss” well that’s the art part, the technique part, the methodology part..
As an artist, I can paint a picture, make a sound design, a soundscape, based on anything, even based on nothing, as I was saying. I tend to start with perfect NOISE. I don’t start with a blank canvas, I start with a NOISY CANVAS, a dirty canvas, a soiled scratched up broken canvas.
I start with a NOISE FIELD. I posited the existence of a universal Noise Field that is like a lattice of sorts, that covers the entire physical universe and beyond. It is a useful Fiction. It just means that you have an expanse that goes in every direction for infinity, a lattice of Zeroes, example:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
So this lattice of 0s goes on forever in every direction, like a kind of 2D Cartesian coordinate plane, except all the values are 0.
Okay let’s look at a very small part of this massive Noise Field. What if somewhere, at some point, a 1 or a few 1s pop up out of nowhere, out of thin air?
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
What we get is a SHAPE forms. If Time t is moving forward, we get a sort of “drag” pattern that forms like a SCRATCH or CRACK on a piece of glass let’s say. For what it’s worth, I call these “historionic processes”, and every process is essentially a process-with-history, a “historionic process”, starting with an n-bit or noise-bit which is a 1-bit signal that starts off the process that propagates like a crack propagates in concrete. I’m getting ahead of myself.
I say that ANY shape whatsoever, anything imaginable can be described, specified, determined, in the noise field with 1s and 0s because that’s essentially how MICROPROCESSORS/INTEGRATED CIRCUITS work. Little on/off switches…
I just took the model of logic gates and so forth and posited that the universe works that way: a noise field that covers the entire known universe and the only question is where the 1s are, that make up specific things, like matter, energy, etc.
So all I need is 1 bit, with time and place, even just Time is enough, a 1-bit switch and at what TIME it occurred in the current universe. In fact, all I really need is the TIME.
You could just CLOCK IN, press a button that will say “X. JUST CLOCKED IN”, a PING is all I need, X…
If we all just took the time every now and then, for no reason, that’s a Time Series, that’s a bunch of “firing” or “branching” patterns, in the aggregate.
So we could just take the already existing time of our collective Tweets. that’s a pattern, the Synch/Asynch Time Pattern,of a small local group.
Now look at any given picture I post. It’s a picture of “THE WEATHER” a.k.a. “THE CURRENT CLIMATE”. What kind of Climate? I don’t care. THAT IS A PICTURE OF WHAT TIME IT IS… That’s the TIME, the QUALITY OF THE TIME.
What TIME IS IT? This is the Time, this is what it look like.. This is what the TIME is, looks like, on Planet Earth.
Once you realize that THAT’S ALL AN ARTIST EVER DOES is Chronicle, Inscribe what the TIME IS, then you have found the secret, the secret not only to the art and thought of one A.G., but also of his MoralTempCard system.
Oh and the secret that unlocks the truth of all of human history, civilization. METHODS TO FIND WHAT THE TIME IS!
Counting comes from that, from WHAT THE TIME IS. The question about WHAT TIME IT IS.
The planet revolves around the sun, we use calendrical systems. We have Seasons and so forth, Lunar Cycles. We make MARKS on some SUBSTRATE, call it Twitter because at times the medium is Twitter.
At times it’s a big X that I put in a square on my calendar at the end of the day, i.e. THAT WAS TODAY, X…
We TRACK time, we MONITOR WEATHER PATTERNS, we monitor TIME, the passage of time. That is the secret meaning of the Vanitas painting.
What is a Still Life? A MOMENT IN TIME.
What is a NOVEL? A bunch of moments in time strung together. Leaves, pages, strung together, glued together.
A group of people putting together methods of WHAT THE TIME IS, coming in, pulling out, SYNCH/ASYNCH timing patterns, timing logic, etc. IT IS MUSIC, and music is STRUCTURED SOUND. How is it structured? Harmonically, by melodies, weaving patterns, weaving in and out, but also by TIME, temporal structures, rhythm, beats, etc.
What is human History? TIME. Next question?
The Cards just record what the time is, that’s the secret, and the rest is quite literally HUMAN HISTORY because you have thousands of years of the human historical record, The Human Documentary Heritage, that is, time-based, existence, life itself is always Time-based, next question.
I’m sorry but now that I unraveled the secret of Human History and the history of civilizations themselves, I’m thirsty for more. I can’t stop there, I have a Reference Card system to build. But I realize that sharing all of these constructs and ideas, and a half-*ssed technical specification for such a system as I am describing is highly problematic, and potentially dangerous to civilization. Because if people only knew, if they even had an idea even remotely of what was really going on, and how shameful they are for taking references out of thin air and acting like they invented Sliced Bread, and gave no credit to the people or persons who actually designed the system, or painted the painting… they would be blown away, and experience Freud’s “unheimlich” experience, of the Uncanny, but a thousand times multiplied. It could lead them to great fatigue and even complete mental breakdown.
Sharing this arcane knowledge could potentially be dangerous, but since I’m being persecuted as an artist and person, and don’t have the resources to implement my own ideas, or am even risk losing “operational continuity” in my art operations because of acts of aggression, stigmatization, judgement, and outright violence, persecution, iconoclasm, etc., I am forced to share it with the world, lest I am murdered or hanged in public for my ideas.
“Remember, hang the painting, not the painter!” as I used to say. That’s all for now. Thanks for being such a good friend and for taking the time to listen to my crazy rants. You are doing me a great service and I thank you.
Sincerely,
A.G. © 2014–2023. All Rights Reserved.
