The line makes its way across the world, making it by marking it. The line passes across valleys, pages, mountains, rivers, tracing trails, roads, railways, highways, doubling itself with telegraph, television, telecommunications, doubling itself again as the code of the letter migrates from text to telegraph and explodes into the myriad lines of the digital. The line makes topics, maps them into the topographic, then folds the topographic into a digital topology. The line does something else as well. For every line drawn are an infinite number undrawn. Every line is an allegory of the possibilities for a line of its type. The line may also intimate the possibilities of lines of another type. One can find gamespace in the pages of Leibnitz. But the possibilities of a given type of line are not infinite. Allegory always touches the virtual — which one might define as the possibility of possibility — via a particular line. At each level of the actual unfolding of the line across the world, it offers a glimpse of the virtual in its own image. This is the limit to allegory. If allegory yearns for something ahistorical, a topos beyond all particulars, it does so over and over in the most particular and mediated way.
Hi Ken,
I haven’t read all your work here yet, but I have read your section on Civilization.
Having read your allegorical reading of Civilization I suggest you check out Alex Galloway’s book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, as his chapter on civilization is on much the same riff… …but he calls it an allegory for ‘control society’…
Tom,
I read Alex Galloway’s Gaming Culture in manuscript, and it was indeed the seed of much of what i wrote here on Civ III. There’s a handsome footnote thanking Alex that will appear in the published version.
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very nice summmary.
Navigation.
I worked with some 3D artists in Brussels called lab[au], who developed a modern composition tool called Spa[z]e (the “z” stands for the z axis). It is essentially a large 3D space in which the (music) composer can design and place sound objects. Music composition and performance become one and are both “navigated” in real time, as in a game. This was critical I think- that story (or composition in this case) was replaced by ‘navigation’.
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Mckenzie have you read the book evrything bad is good for you? it has a large section on video games.
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hi ken. sorry to bring this back to level one, but pynchon’s “mason & dixon” is a great example of geocultural line drawing, especially in terms of “America.” i’ll have to re-read this section before i can confidently call it topological or topographic. (btw, isn’t there a “yes” album about that?!)
That’s a good tip (Pynchon, not Yes..) I reread Gravity’s Rainbow but it didn’t quite work its way into the text.
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One can find gamespace in the pages of Leibnitz. – Example required? And in others? Aren’t they (philosphers, mathematicians) all playing the game of discovering gamespace?
Ref Figure 3
I am mindful of a redrawn map of the underground in London “THE GREAT BEAR”
google it
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