Dynamic Semantics

First published Mon Aug 23, 2010

Dynamic semantics is a perspective on natural language semantics that emphasises the growth of information in time. It is an approach to meaning representation where pieces of text or discourse are viewed as instructions to update an existing context with new information, with an updated context as result. In a slogan: meaning is context change potential.

Context plays a role in two distinct oppositions. The first opposition is the duality between context and that which modifies the context. Here the context is the information state, or, say, a suitable abstraction from the information state (compare the entry on semantic conceptions of information). The context modifier is the information received. The information cannot be received without the correct kind of presupposed information state. The proper analogues in predicate logic (compare the entries on classical logic and first-order model theory) are as follows. The information state is an assignment (environment) or a set of assignments. The information received is a set of assignments. The second opposition is the duality of context and content. Here the context is something like the storage capacity of the receiver. The content is the information stored. Thus, e.g., the context in this sense could be a set of discourse referents or files. The content would then be some set of assignments or, perhaps, world/assignment pairs on these referents.

3. Interpretation as a Process

Interpretation of declarative sentences can be viewed as a product or as a process. In the product perspective, one focusses on the notion of truth in a given situation. In the process perspective, interpretation of a proposition is viewed as an information updating step that allows us to replace a given state of knowledge by a new, more accurate knowledge state. Dynamic semantics focuses on interpretation as a process.

[Extracted from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dynamic-semantics/]

Saturday, 9 October 2010

Indeterminate Hikes~Ecoarttech

Indeterminate Hikes

ecoarttech

Indeterminate Hikes involves a custom smartphone app that guides participants on urban hikes & encourages them to navigate, question, and document the possibilities of hybrid ecology—spaces for “nature” or wildness—in a globalized, urban space. Users assess their approximate coordinates in relation to "Lookouts" embedded within IH maps that indicate points in which the merger of ecologies of the social, psychic, & environmental may be experienced. Indeterminate Hikers are encouraged to pause for a minimum of 5 min. or 30 breaths at each lookout and then capture / upload images of their ecological experiences to the IH site. Images are archived in a database according to each lookout locations and made available for all to consider. ecoarttech will lead an Indeterminate Hike that functions as a performative, in-the-field workshop to cultivate conversations of nature, wildness, & wilderness as well as strategies for sustainability within cosmopolitan, digitally networked environments.

The ecoarttech collaborative explores environmental issues and convergent media and technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, including art, digital studies, philosophy, literature, and ecocriticism. For ecoarttech, the term “environment“ does not refer only to nature or geographic spaces; rather, we understand it as part of an interwoven network of biological, cultural, mental, and digital spaces, and we imagine the health of each as indistinguishable from the health of others.

Extracted from http://www.confluxfestival.org/projects/conflux-festival-2010/indeterminate-hikes/

Could I develop a similar project, on a smaller scale yet nonetheless conceptually congruent and informative/performative, around the space of Tremough/Performance Centre campus?

CEP Proposal

Deleuze & Guattari once wrote that “New York is virtually a city without a language...” [from Postulates of Linguistics in A Thousand Plateaus, 1923, pp. 103]. How provocative a statement to make about a city brimming with so many languages, dialects, slang etc. I thought. New York for me has always been, as for so many before me, a city of such artistic prestige and accomplishment, vitality and possibility. It has drawn young artists to its bright lights and wide streets for decades now, and it will continue to. Surely New York is a city without any ‘without’: a city of infinite possibility and opportunity, offering itself to all whom arrive, making them never want to leave, offering everything they need.

But I was too hasty; my argumentative cry against with their provocations would have been quickly silenced, had I read a little further on: “There is no language that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities...” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1923, pp103). But my silence was brought with a smile, with a sense of relief, of assurance. Just as I believe[d], and have argued, New York is a city without a language- without a set, solid and all-conforming ‘language’, but rather a multiplicity of tongue, of variations of the tongue, the lingua franca, of English. New York for me is a prime example of how all languages, exchanged by so many different people from such different places is continually being shaped, changed and modified, mutating every day through common shared discourse and people trying to make sense to each other.

Having been born in one country but then being raised between two countries has brought difficulty when pledging allegiance to either. I have felt neither here nor there, not this nor that. What happens to those who don't feel a part, or feel apart, from their surroundings? They start something new; they seek out new places to live and to start again, afresh. The historical implication of New York City having been built ex nihilo by such a wide group of people(s) having travelled from their Old World in search of the New, ready to build themselves a New life in new contexts has always inspired me to travel and work there, to also become a part of the engagement with the 'new' moving away from the old, the traditional, the conventional, the usual, the obvious. I can see a direct link between this state of mind, towards progression through experimentation, in my journey to art and performance College and my future journey to New York and the USA, to frame my questions around the 'New' within city whose very name and ethos is just that.

NewWorLdLog

Saturday, 30 October 2010