Innate Characteristics vs Ambiguity

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 18, 2010 | permalink |  |  

Looking at the political and other divisions in the United States, more and more I am struck by a minor issue that came up while researching The State of Information: the idea of ambiguity. It didn’t seem like a particularly significant issue at the time, but more and more it’s becoming obvious that how someone responds to ambiguity determines much of their outlook on the world around them.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 30, 2009 | permalink |  |  

The accumulation and preservation of information has been a fundamental condition of human society throughout its entire history; to a lesser or greater extent, this history is coincident with the preservation, propagation and presentation of specific information sets and the paradigm-technologies they enable—“culture” and “society” being simultaneously the vehicles and contaners for these specific information sets, described by the horizons they produce. Information differentials scale between the microlevel of the individual within a society in competition with other members for status, wealth, authority to groups within societies, to different paradigms jostling for dominance. The aggregate actions of each level of this construct depend on the indivdiual choices and actions of specific members whose cumulative impacts emerge at with variable coherence at different levels of organization. Because success depends specifically on both access to relevant information, and the more specific ability to apply and employ it, the organization as a whole has an in-built bias towards the accumulation and concentration of information maximally: the baseline condition for success within such structures historically has been one determined by an information differential: those lying at the greater end of the gradient tend towards success and dominance, with those falling at the lesser end tend to fail, excluding such mediating factors as already established positions and authorities that tend to replicate themselves.

story © Michael Betancourt | published November 14, 2009 | permalink |  |  

Lately it seems like we, collectively, are stuck in the past, the 1980s to be accurate. I don't know what happened to the present (nevermind about the future, that was always already an imaginary)? I increasingly get the feeling that we aren't going to be getting anything of or from the present for a while at least. Instead, we have this strange obsession with revisiting the past artifacts of our culture and redoing/remaking/recreating them at a higher resolution and with more detail, but without anything that we haven't already seen.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 24, 2009 | permalink |  |  

The State of Information is an expansion of some of the ideas developed in my earlier work on the idea of the aura in digital art. Published on CTheory.

story © Michael Betancourt | published June 17, 2009 | permalink |  |  

Two Women and a Nightengale is my homage and subversion of Max Ernst and Surrealism generally. I've decided to give away the first chapter as a free download to anyone who wants it.

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