Strange goals

I’ve had three of my own children and spent my life thinking about how to manage with children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike other human emotion. I feel so profoundly attached to them, and as other parents completely independently of their particular qualities.

And yet 15 years later I am (more or less) happy to see them becoming independant – I have to be happy to see them autonomous. Actually, we are totally devoted to them when they are kids and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We want them to thrive. And yet we have to grant them the autonomy to make mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours. Thanks to Alison Gopnik to help...



Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Internet art

As Robert Kendall puts it, hypertextuality pushes software into the domain of art, where the demand for beauty (not to be confused with surface prettiness) is absolute and unforgiving.

Hypertext literature becomes a uniquely rigorous test bed for interface and systems design because it heightens the aesthetic expectations of the user. A satisfying reading of a hypertext story or poem depends upon how successfully all the details of the reading experience fit together into an effective whole. Navigation becomes not simply a means toward an end but an end in itself.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Hypertextual experiment

Is there something personal in my work, other than my "personal" intellectual interests and political opinions?

There is always mention of mental relationship with otherness therefore. The work is also much more technically sophisticated, using HTML, Flash, sound software such as ACID, Photoshop, PHP, etc. At the end, the sound should be turned on for the whole thing because there is sound on the main menu page, but some pieces use sound and some don't.

Metabole is a collection of electronic textual experiments where the goal was to make philosophy interactive in a new and different way in each piece. I was experimenting with user interface design, and my goal was to have a unique user interface and programming in each text. For that reason, I did not make any traditional hypertext literature where you click on words in the text to get to new sections. Instead, each piece has its own kind of interaction. Some works are best seen as texts in their own right with fixed content, in which the user interaction just serves to explore the content, whereas other pieces are games or tools for users to create their own point of view. See the introduction for more on this.

In most texts, if there is fixed or dynamic content, it is on behalf of political reasons...