From jcj@cityscape.co.uk Mon Oct 23 15:03:46 1995 Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 15:03:38 +0100 X-Sender: gy20@cityscape.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 To: ellipsis@cityscape.co.uk From: jcj@cityscape.co.uk (john chris jones) Subject: hermeneutic homepage for my work Status: R good morning gentlemen yesterday before jonathan arrived i woke to find myself dreaming of this, an hemeneutic hompage in which linkwords connect to other screens which link to topics which are revealed to be each inclusive of the homepage. thus the homepage becomes not the stable source of what follows from it but the ever-changing edge or horizon of my thought as i compose and as others may read. the diagram which led me to this consisted of homepage H and elements e1 e2 e3 etc (eg softopia,archive, imaginary rock). the linkwords in the element e1, softopia,for instance, reveal that H is itself a possible imaginary software such as softopia invites people to mail in. similarly the element e2, archive, links to design on another screen where one finds that H is one of my designs, presently in process, a 'design without a product'. it seems to me this morning that this enclosure by opening, if i can call it that, is perhaps a new step or genre in the traditions of glossing and re-interpretation that we discussed briefly last night, jonathan. with a bow to Jacques Derrida, Annetta Pedretti, and other theorists of everything. here's how i described this in my journal: 'just to record gratefully soon after waking from productive or constructive dream that my brain and nervous system is automatically or spontaneously composing the long-attempted homepage (H) . . . what i found myself dream is already becoming a self-referentially nested net of elements (e1-eN) some (or even all) of which are of greater 'generality' than H . . . ie H is an example or element of each! . . . and so on . . . this principle seeming to permit H to be the roughest and livliest part (the emerging and changing perimeter of my actual moment to moment on line real time living-by-designing process! 'probably, i sense, this move alone sufices to launch the whole thing as a non-hiearchical, or non-evaluated, non-verified, whole, 'NOT IDENTIFIED WITH OBJECTIVE TRUTH (E1-EN ARE SEEMINGLY THAT) BUT SELF-REFERRING SELF-CONSISTENTLY, AND SUCH,TO "THE PRESENT". '(could that, "the present", be the name of H? - as Design Methods 1 was meant as goodbye present to design, could H be present to everyone (or only me)) '(perhaps the SECRET NAME, OF SELF, OR OF SELF/OTHER,OR OF SELF-|-OTHER)? . . . SUCH "incidental" QUESTIONS/PROCESSES AS THAT BEING ADMITTED TOO (WHICH IS WHY THIS MUST NOT BE IN PRIVATE NOTES BUT RAW MATERIAL FOR HTML?)' WELL, I GUESS THAT'S THE CUE TO SEND THIS TO YOU AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS. AND THAT'S AS MUCH AS I CAN TYPE TODAY WITH THIS DEFECTIVE KEYBOARD. YRS JOHN CHRIS