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In the myth of Sisyphus the task is to roll the ball to the top without quite knowing where the top is. There’s no mark, no point, no code. Sisyphus pushes the ball up, but it either falls short or falls over the unmarked peak, and rolls back down again. In the myth of Katamari there is no such ambiguity. Each threshold is clearly marked. The analog movement of rolling the ball, continuously increasing its size, takes place within the given limits of the digital. There is an exact mark at which it flips from being too small to just the right size. The reign of topology subordinates the analog to the digital. Where once analog and digital maintained an ambiguous and continuous — analog — relation to each other and to the world, the digital now distinguishes itself sharply from the analog, subsuming the analog difference under the digital distinction. This is a transformation not merely in forms of communication or entertainment, not even in forms of power or of topos, but a change in being itself. The digital appears, finally, to install topology in the world — only in the process it has installed the world within topology. In Katamari Damacy, the world is just stuff, there for the clumping. It is King Digital’s decision on its name, size and place in the heavens that gives it being.
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A time without violence? What can that possibly mean? If as space is cut into discrete and equivalent units, there is violence (in the cutting) isn’t the cutting of time similarly violent? The democracy of the digital – its self similarity, its equivalency – doesn’t appear to be a guarantor of a pacific ontology.
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