net.sauna log file September 11th, 1997, 10 am       Alexander Frisk & Tapio Mäkelä on Towards intimate dialogue

OAF: Hi HHeater: Hi Alexander! Welcome to the net.sauna. OAF: Thank you for the invitation HHeater: How is Stockholm doing; beautiful day there? It is blazing sun in Linz. HHeater: The sauna stove was accidentally left on for the night, temperature in the sauna was 50 Celsius when I entered, almost 60. Now the door is open, cooling down for the beginning of our dialogue. OAF: I don´t know anything about the weather - I have worked all night. HHeater: I had a party instead. Would you like to dive in to talk about dialogue? OAF: Nice feeling I liked your ? so how about a beer (danish). HHeater: Thanks, pop it open. Skål. Kippis. I throw some on the stove also to get an aroma of fresh rye. OAF: Wow skål to you too - but do you really think that it has so much to do with physical spaces? HHeater: Dialogue, you mean? Ok. I will do an introduction to the net.sauna research... OAF: ok HHeater: We started out researching how intimate dialogue is related to an environment, a space with certain conditions. Also we were interested in looking at the cultural tradition of sauna as a dialogic space. Within the Ars Electronica framework, it has turned out that this quiet sauna space is rudimentary enabling factor for intense and intimate dialogues. Also, in chat environments, we are now on a password (door) protected channel. If it was open space, our dialogue could be interrupted at any moment... We attempt to move the metaphor of sauna as a dialogic space into the net.space. OAF: Aha - nice idea - of course a dialogue can be intimate but is it always like that? HHeater: No... there are several factors when dialogue is not intimate, for instance, a dialgoue in a space where there are other people, who have a different agenda, different will. I think chat is not = dialogue... I tend to see dialogue as a productive mode. You, as a philosopher having researched dialogue, how would you define it, and how would you see intimate dialogue as a concept? OAF: I was just wandering in my brain and writing .... but intimate can also be that you know the persons or the rules - (I belive that dialog is a kind of play). And I think that a dialogue is productive, it must be so, but the dialogue also allow jumps to strange things - since it´s productive. HHeater: Exactly, productiveness is about unexptected new links, like hypertext in corporeality. And yes, knowing your partners in dialogue is important, or having a shared ground. OAF: But why are we afraid of to be productive? I mean to say it? HHeater: I think productiveness has a heavy baggage from industrial metaphors... OAF: Hm but now is it postpost to accept it? I don´t care but our thoughts of our time are interesting. HHeater: Being part of a linear process, identifiable results (expected outcomes) is the industrial understanding of productiveness. Productive dialogue for me deals with innovation, delight, construction of knowledge and also understanding of the other person in the dialogue. OAF: That must depend on a kind of scale or? Like fractals. HHeater: Please elaborate on the scale and fractals... HHeater: Sauna is getting steamy again; dialogue and human heat is replacing the machine generated dry air in the sauna. Dialogue is the fuel of human interaction; previous net.sauna dialogue logs are thrown into the stove to generate more intimacy through dialogic steam. OAF: A scalpel (sharp knife) looks like a saw in a microscope - it´must be the same with a very non linear event in a smaller scale - it would look like a line. HHeater: ... please link that to the intimacy of dialogue... nice analogue. OAF: Ho ho that one demands more beer. Sharp objects must be handled with trust. When i started on your pages i wrothe this regarding your node of departure. Dialogue is a totally different ballgame - gossip and talk are not play but perhaps sharing information. A dialogue is a process to reach new understanding - but it has nothing to do with elitism. Dialogue must be playful. It has no more boundaries than the mode of gossip - to make interesting gossip into a dialogue is to destroy the interesting gossip. HHeater: I agree. Gossip must float. About elitism... I referred to dialogue being part of western tradition via Greek theater and philosophy... hence, the historic touch of the word is not part of every day life vocabulary (not saying that dialogue would not exist in zillions of instances). OAF: This is interesting - the absence of the concept of dialogue. HHeater: Yes... this is the only "elitist" or "academic" part of it; also the marooning of dialogue and monologue into the realm of theater. As if you need wittnesses for your dialogue through public performance in order for "it" to be dialogue. Like now we are creating publishable text... OAF: Nice idea publishing the gossip of the dilogue in the sauna. I think (the absence has something to do that we are scared to death with the word - think. HHeater: What do you mean; scared of thinking in public? This relates to Finnish universities for sure, but it is culturally very specific. Americans have dialogues loudly anywhere (not all, let´s not generalize), but often in Finland there is this scare to show the intellect... private spaces in Finland, the after hours, is when you hear the most interesting views. Sweden? OAF: Not only in public. I had a girlfriend who said to me that the problem with me was that I always had an idea and also dialogue, which implicate that you have to think about thinking - it´s complex and you must be interested... HHeater: Are you saying, that dialogue demands continuous processing of ideas, and that as a state of being, practice, would by some people be not desirable? Dialogue is intensive when it is intimate. OAF: I read your lines somethimes more HHeater: What do you think about my suggestion that hypertextuality is very much analogous to dialogic mode of communication; but instead of a live dialogue, hypertexts are dialogic monologues... phew. I read your lines sometimes more? ? Is this irc for you slow? Out of sync? OAF: Hm yes well that was good really good. HHeater: Would you like to say something about that, Hypertext/dialogue? OAF: Well a lot! I read the story of the inventor of the hypertex - Nelson? in Wired one or two year sago HHeater: Sauna gets all of a sudden very balanced with heat and humidity; the contact point was found and we move on. OAF: The interesting thing was that he had some kind of cronic forgettness - He wrote small notes which was all over his apartment to try to remember - and he was into hyperlinks!!!!! But your idea was nice: a hyperlink is not really a dialogue but close to it. HHeater: Exteriorizing your own speech into hyperlinked notes can create an imaginary dialogue between your present self and your past writing self... I think, actually, that this very sentence that our dialogue created proves to be very intensely valuable. OAF: Yhe it´s great fun.. but when does this "next to dialog occur" - when you click or? Before i forget it - you asked about producing ideas. Not producing ideas for the sake of producing ideas, it´s more about timing - a hm or a smile or whatever is also ingredient of the dialogue. HHeater: I think a communication process is not borderlined by a click. When you are ignited by a link (a piece of memorized speech), you anticipate the next line and the meaning is constructed between your anticipated horizon and the met sign and your reaction to it; it is totally fluid, not mechanical. (((((: OAF: Ithink that you made a point there. But you have to be ignited - this is a ? of design. HHeater: ¥ ¥ ¥ ¥ ¥ (Heater takes out a birch whip & relaxes with it...) OAF: Relaxes? I can never understand this tradition. HHeater: Good... bringing design into this discussion is a good idea. Design is very close to the textual term rhetoric, I think. ¥¥ is smooth, like a big warm tongue of a tree licking your skin. OAF: Its getting even worse that I could imagine. Then we are very close to: if the brain functions on picuteres or text -?? To me it´s all the same. HHeater: Both are very igniting when connected to productive content. Mere design and mere rhetoric are dry memories of human interaction; like computers, rhetoric and design can also alianate from communication. For me too, textual and visual spaces merge. That is why I think the investments in multimedia and net (text+image+hyperlinking) are so acute. What is often missing from the dialogue is ergonomics, incudling the engaging subject. OAF: Perhaps when you are afraid of the dialogue - then you are close to the ignition you get scared and do non igniting design. HHeater: Heater stands up and relaxes in the cool breeze coming from the door, opened for a while for fresh air. Sauna benches could be softer. Interesting; go on with the ignition & design a bit further, an example please. OAF: To a start MacLuhan had a concept: cool and hot which was very complex. But those words are nice in themselves... if hot means to be ignited, then industrialism as a tradition was into cool. So when you did´something hot you simply broke the rules. HHeater: I would rather leave McLuhan behind since he is engaging always in bipolar opposites and generalizing totalities... but yes, in our net.sauna too, the matter of hot and cold is influenced by human interaction and absence of mechanic passivity. Post-industrial and industrial - dialogic and non-dialogic - makes sense. OAF: But i can´t understand - why hot is just hot. HHeater: .... we have a time out. I will start with Lev Manovich soon... We need to have a swim in between. Dialogues are nice in the sense that they can be continued from where they were left, they continue even when the moment of contact dissolves. Would you like to develop some thoughts based on this? Maybe a second session on Friday? OAF: When? HHeater: Afternoon? OAF: ok time? HHeater: 3 pm? OAF: Afternoon please later but not too late. HHeater: I try to invite David to join us then and read our log. Our project finishes on Friday at 7 pm... I am calling Terhi. OAF: ok over and out - thanks agin nice sauna you have skål! HHeater: 4-5 Austrian time! OAF: Its the same 4 pm on Friday ok. HHeater: OK; thanks for having a bath with me. I wish you were here to do it. Try to fix CuSeMe for Friday? Not necessary, just spice. Thanks, over, and more water on the stove! OAF: 1. but I am 2. yes CuSeMee OAF: seeeyuouu HHeater: bye OAF: *gone*