plasticthought

Collaboration and the game theory

2005-10-27T00:52:00.000-07:00

Looking at collaboration through the lens of an existing model of the Game Theory in economics. Here the evaluation is done by comparing the results of possible transactions between the players, and the junction that their individual choices will meet at, thus determining the result of the transaction. The game theory is an interesting model to look at because it uses ‘rationality’ to evaluate the individual players responses, and thus to project the result of any interaction. But then again, this theory lies in Economics. And it is mutual economic benefit that is considered the desired outcome of both players. But lets take this theory out of the context of an economic win-win situation, and apply to something where the desired outcomes are perhaps less tangible.
The game remains the same, the players still making ‘rational’ choices and the desired outcome still lays emphasis on mutual benefit. The only change is in the value that can be drawn from the exchange by both players.

thought traitor

2005-10-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

I do solemnly declare that the Future Academy is open.

Minutes of the last meeting

In the midst of talk about design pedegogy making new references and drawing from non-legitimate sources of knowledge.

11:23 – Damn. Need to make a quick call. Excuse me.

(quick call overheard – hello? Is that a big multinational advertising agency? I’m calling about my future employment with you, post my graduation from a reputed cutting edge design college. This is just to confirm that I will be selling my soul to you, and will work like a mule, day and night, for not too big a salary and very little job satisfaction. Yes?
Ok, thank you.. and yes.. yes of course I remember that I will be given very little credit for the work I do.
That’s all.. thank you. Bye.)

It is about change. I’ve heard it over and over again, and now I’m almost convinced. Design is about change. Its easy to walk into a design school at 17 and say it like its law, but its easier now that I actually believe it.

hello is that d? no.

2005-10-12T07:55:00.000-07:00

no prizes for guessing what the following conversations are a result of.

tring tring (apologies for the phone sounds from the sixties, but havent updated my NOKIA onomatopoea dictionary lately)
hello?
is that d speaking?
no.

tring tring
hello?
is that d's phone?
no.

tring tring
hello?
may i speak to d please?
no.

tring tring
hello?
is d there?
no.

tring tring
hello?
d?
no.

tring tring
no.

tring tring
tring tring
tring tring
tring tring..

sigh.

damn you technology.

How things work

2005-09-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

About Ars Electronica and Failure

Where does an institution with barely a year of indulgence in New Media Studies place itself in the game of being watched by the ones that created the dictionaries of reference for the same. We were being watched, no doubt. Big brothers came in, fanning themselves with a catalogue expecting be told the stories from a land where the elephants do probably still roam.
Culture is a scary word. It is what we bring with us and hope to represent.
We had stories of the different kind. Small stories about people coming together and working on things that could have previously only be imagined. The story of
Srishti at Ars was one of making some of those stories come to life. For real. A design school that has absolutely no training in the fields of interactivity, interfaces and exhibitions, brought with them in a container neatly packed and labeled, stories that now could be said through machines and buttons and levers and sensors instead of voices, words and silence.
Did it work?
No.
Poetry lies in simplicity. Of the sound of words as they fall into a sentence one after the other. The next line is a pause, the next, a full stop. Poetry lies as much in the silence between the words as the words themselves.
Srishti at Ars drowned itself in noise. An endless stream of word and visual. No pause.

But its ok.
We have much to learn when it comes to having the button trigger off the right video clip, but in terms of having that dialogue that determine of we need to have buttons at all, we’re ahead of the game.

27th September 2005
d.

after thoughts

2005-06-14T02:05:00.000-07:00

Colon irrigation.

Isn’t that the strangest two words to ever be put beside each other to make meaning?

Ugh.

About objects.
I was reviewing a project done by a peer and digging through the idea of the knowledge bank. She had taken this one particular shop in question (one of those new tech kitsch shops that do everything from having an STD booth, to lamination to colon irrigation (ugh) but have no means of archiving what could be potential sources of information and thus perhaps a knowledge flow system. The extreme of a situation like this are those annoying telecom service providers who liberally volunteer you name to some random country club or life insurance scheme. It seems to be a violation of my privacy (and under the long awaited RTI act, I potentially have a right to sue, I presume) but there exist some very devious boundaries within which these information flows operate.

So, going back to this little shop on Sampige road (which was named after the lovely white flower, the sampige). These people have an unauthorized (or possibly authorized) access to people’s passport details, building construction plans, telephone calls, school textbooks and resumes. Do they do anything with this information? Is it archived? Do they keep copies of the files? Not just for voyeuristic purposes, but also to send out flyers to those customers about shop improvements or something like that, for the sake of promotion of their services (an advertising mean) As ‘service providers’ they don’t seem to play the role of data protectors. Nothing is permanent for them, in terms of information.

The one and a half day.

2005-06-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

24 never seems enough for anything. Especially when my new plan includes fiction and non fiction time. Whatever that means.

So I made the one and a half day. Its not as long as two days, but definitely longer than a day. It all began when I realized I wanted to sleep at night. Not just nap with the lights on, or wake up at four to pretend that while it was still dark, I could do the previous day’s leftovers and cheat the day into believing I wasn’t into procrastination. But its so nice to go to bed at night just thinking of how well I should sleep, perhaps chart out a dream route, or REM patterns. The one and a half day allows for all of this. And more! Its like I’m selling it. So the day begins at 12 noon. You start in the middle of the ‘day’ and then in about 11 hours, you can take a break and go to sleep. After this rest, you can get on with your new day doing work, completing what you couldn’t have done the previous night and eating and stuff. The ‘one’ in the one and a half day plan begins here. You have a whole ‘day’ to do things before the day is done. And the best bit is that the next day begins with a good length of sleep! So every alternate day has a similar pattern. You cant even complain that each day was like the other. (every alternate day can though, but its length was decided factoring forgetfulness time as well..)

If it works, its free.

1

2005-06-08T00:53:00.000-07:00

something happened on the way to the upstairs.
the flip side of the coin. all that is good and well intentioned and in the light of the future, we turned our backs on and decided to investigate. that is the nature of what we do now.

on collaboration.
a few years ago we went to a small town with a designer, faculty member, mentor and guide. all the same person. our intentions were honest. we wanted to create a working environment that was both a learning space for us, and them, the wood carvers who had been commissioned by the local government design authority to create new products for the urban market. previously they had no market. they worked for the temple, or the rich men who could afford to have decorated doors and swings inside their tacky speckled marble living rooms. there was this is craft, dying and waiting to be saved by the designer god who came and gave them designs for the urban market. the urban market. a far away land made with streets of gold, and chariots with flying horses. men, dressed in fine silks and ate peeled grapes and wine. destination - not rural.
so we went, 15 of us, for 15days. its was collaborative. we learnt about their ways and they about ours. it had to be forced, no doubt, there was no time to be natural. But it was such a huge step up, that smaller nuances in such cases are easily overlooked. But its time to re-investigate.

(a) about giving and taking - what is the quality of exchange? In return for profit of economic nature, how much else am I gaining out of this experience that you are? how do we define these values for ourselves. Is equal necessarily the best and who is to judge. If I am the judge, then how can I judge what is of value to you? Should there be a neutral third party to every exchange? If I bring up the opportunity to collaborate, does that immediately make me the more powerful player?
Negotiation. The politics of exchange.

(b) about composition – how are the participants of this space? If me, and people like me are sitting in the boardroom deciding who to include and who to exclude, does that mean that the composition of the team are only these people? Is it variable? Is the network unique for each kind of interaction or project. Is this ‘my’ idea?

(c) about time - what is the length of each interaction. For the purpose of a demonstration, can participants of the exhibition, for instance, be a part of a collaborative project. To generate a product in 4 mins. 1 min.

(d) about why – looking for a new aesthetic. Within boundaries that we have explored and imagination that have been fuelled by thoughts similar to the thoughts we already think, within libraries that have limited words and images with similar frames, we need to create our own new aesthetic that is generative. It is born in the in context it was framed in, and the flavor of the people it was created by and for. A democratic aesthetic.

Kashmir.
A story told about the partition in collaboration with 500 children force-migrated from Kashmir to a small town in Kerala.

A film about marriage.
A film made in collaboration with the marriage video editor.

The cross-over products.
In college course works produced by students who collaborate with other students.

Thought in progress.

someone i know

2005-02-10T04:03:00.000-08:00

The setting.
Four floors. Students work making project presentations and redefining client briefs. Some poke pins into headless mannequins and make clothes for the new generation. There are 12 computers lined up in a sterile workspace. Cream walls. Cream lockers. No cream in the coffee. No coffee. Everyone here stays up on will power, and an occasional trip to the water cooler 4 yards away. The noises. Click. Hum. Click. Whine. The guard sits downstairs. white desk front of him, a register of student movement opened to the last page of illegible student scribbles. In. 9:00am out.1:00pm In1:24pm out.9pm The kitchen is on the same floor. With its 4 white square tables, and white electric heater and white microwave. No prizes for guessing the color of the fridge. People talk in knowledgeable tones, using phrases like, ‘I’m on system overload’ or ‘I wish I could ctrl z my life’. They google when in doubt and ppt to make a point.

Action.
She walks from floor to floor replacing toilet paper and tends to the flower patch on sunny days.

k-a-b-i-r. kabir.

2005-02-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

This example keeps coming up often.
An exercise in a ‘critical thinking’ class asked us to take an essay (2,500 words or more) that we had written, and in the first step condense it to half its size. The intent was not at any point to describe the original essay, but to take what it meant and say it again, in fewer words. We then had to cut this down to a hundred words and finally, in a frustrating attempt to one single sentence. Again, none of these reductions could be ‘about’ the essay, they had to ‘be’ the essay itself. This, in a new perspective is what I have understood of Kabir after today. There is a descriptive version of anything. To talk about, to speak of. But that is not the direct, un-inhabited truth. It is a translation.

A personalization is a little different It involves the role of the author. And that mark of the author makes it new again. There is not many kinds of work in our world today (that I can think of immediately) that allows for this re-newal. That asks for it. That practically thrives on it. The work of Kabir is one of them.

We talk of open-source and of a new-age sharing culture that we believe we have now created. It’s a new thing, we assume. But of course, we would be wrong. What is not afraid to true will not hide. It is not scared of opinion or argument. It is not afraid in the face of an opposition. It needs no protector, just friends.

Kabir reminded me a lot of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates lived at a time when philosophy was being preached to the masses as information that one couldn’t live without. All Socrates knew was, that he knew nothing. And this troubled him. Be began the process of an internal dialogue in order to understand some of these questions whose answers he knew lay within him. He engaged the ‘common man’ to be part of his dialogues and provoked them to initiate their own private interrogations. Another similarity I found, was that like the works of Kabir, Socrates never published his words during his time. Plato, his disciple did so instead. So all the work of Socrates as we know them today, are in fact written by authors other than him. Kabir leaves his name as signature in all his poetry, and I find this reference to the author quite interesting. Imagine the following hypothetical situation. Everyone who claimed to be the transcribers of the work and words of people like Socrates and Kabir actually wrote these works themselves, but sold them under the brands of the respective ‘valued’ individuals. It becomes so much easier in that sense to pass something off in the name of an established name rather than in your own (perhaps ‘novice’) self. I was wondering why the people who appropriated Kabir dint include their own names into the poetry to authorize their claim on them. But perhaps if they did, they wouldn’t have spread as much as they did. So, in that case (if the above hypothesis would be true), the name of Kabir became the means for spreading the different messages of people who appropriated him. He was the brand, under which several products were created. No less authentic than if he had written them himself. No less famous, no less appreciated.

eight and a half

2005-01-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

A review I had once written for the film. Some of the ideas I had now became more concrete on second viewing.

8 ½

How do you represent forms of memory that occupy spaces that part lie in memory, part in imagination. And how do all of this in the view of what we understand as the ‘present’. Fellini’s 8 ½ gained him his reputation of being a traitor to Neo Realism. His film making style that steered clear of anything to do with politics, and the likes of it, was condemned by his critics and regarded with much doubt in its initial stages. But Fellini’s style, like the charm of his characters can’t help but grow upon you.

Guido, like Fellini himself, is a filmmaker. He is in the process of making a film – getting sets made, hiring actors and actresses, dealing with production managers and the cast and crew, and being under constant criticism of his co-scriptwriter. He is perhaps a reflection of Fellini’s own state of mind as he was making the film, and to have it reflect is a sign of vulnerability, it is an exposure of the most private experience an ‘author’ could have of his work.

As I touched upon earlier, this form of narrative touches upon what Fellini comes to categorize as the three states of consciousness:

The Past – This state is represented formally thought the diversion to states of memory – both conscious and sub-conscious. The character, Guido, played by Marcello Mastrioni is constantly taken back into his past and relives moments of his childhood. These are moments that are primarily been responsible for the creation of who he is today – his sexual exploration, his fears, his desires and significant conquests. Scenes like the dance of the Saraghini on the beach and the repetition of the words ‘ Asa Nisi Maza’ that take him back to a night of his childhood are denotative of the experience of traveling back in time, mentally, and how it projects forward into the present, perhaps also into the future. Symbolic elements like shadows are used in beautiful compositions that explore chiaroscuro. (they symbolize the unconscious)

The Present – Guido takes us through the process of filmmaking, in all its glory and madness. Through all of this, there is an exploration of another topic that apparently (a glance at his other work helps highlight it) close to Fellini – women. Guido makes distinctions in his life between Love, sex, Marriage and friendship when it comes to women. This (again) reflected identity of the filmmaker that explores various relationships Guido has with women at different levels illustrates the multiplicity of viewpoints through which this film can be read. In a conversation with his wife Luisa, he says, “Loving you is so natural…” and yet, he cannot live with her. His tolerance towards her is minimal, and their relationship is strained. And yet there is a realness to it that is moving. He falls in love with Claudia, an actress whose beauty he is enthralled by. But he is unable to get close to her beyond a point of professional comfort. She becomes an icon of beauty, a statue in his garden. Clara, his mistress is an object of sexual interest. He is uninspired by her, but he is still at her service – providing her with the luxuries he knows a man should provide his mistress. Theirs is a relationship of compromise. And finally there is Rosella, part big sister, part conscience, and part friend. “I really have nothing to say,” he confesses to her while sitting atop the monstrous set that is being constructed. “…but I want to say it after all”. These relationships are illustrated not from the angle of a condescending male gaze, but one of relationships that are genuine and often mis-interpreted even in the real world.

The Imagination, Dream, and Subconscious – The film begins with a dream of Guido being trapped in a car, in the midst of a traffic jam. The claustrophobia and suffocation starts to build up visually, and the sequence bursts with the character escaping reality and flying above the sea. This seems to be a part of a nightmare, or of past memory built up dramatically to the point of explosion into the imaginary, an unconscious act of creating memory that perhaps does not exist. This act of creation falls into a loop. The further you delve into memory, the deeper you rise in your imagination. 8 ½ lies on this Mobius strip. Another scene that lies in this realm is the one that is enacted like a circus act. Where all the women in Guido’s ‘harem’ play parts like ones in a circus, and Guido (no doubt) plays the ringmaster with the cracking whip. All his women occupy center stage at some point, flaunting their sexuality of submissiveness. It is a constructed image of power, of male prowess, so much that it crosses the line of sanity and moves into satire.

The above scene is also a good example of the kind of choreography that has evolved from the idea of mise en scene. This kind of language that Fellini has developed in order to translate his form of storytelling, is one that speaks not only formally, but also more fluidly, in terms of the meaning it generates as an experience. The sequences at the park (with all the old people), the final circus sequence and the one mentioned above are choreographed like theatrical pieces, and yet the form of narration is so much more organic. The movements lead the story forward in seamless strokes, breaking out of a linear monotony and a predictable structure.

Fellini is a cinematic poet.

Day 3. (and 4) about you and me. (opening a door)

2005-01-28T20:25:00.000-08:00

Placebo. A concept developed first in medicine in order to give the patient a false sense of relief in order to cure him. Sugar or starch were often substituted in the name of big complicated sounding drugs that sounded like they could cure you. Faith in the medical sciences, faith in the ‘expert’ practitioner and in contrast, a complete lack of faith in ones own ability to heal oneself..

(dramatic pause)

..Ladies and gentlemen, Exhibit A.

Trauma and recovery looks at the relationship between the doctor and patient as one where there is a trust formed between the two. It is within the space of this relationship that the recovery happens. All that is said, is with the higher goal of establishing the truth, and the truth is the only prescribed cure. in that sense, there is an absolute value attached to this truth (and equally to truth telling).

Exhibit A. an examination.
Is the process of arriving at the truth also ‘truthful’? i.e does the psychiatrist have to use truthful means to uncover the truth of the patient? Does the psychiatrist play a role similar to one of the basonos or the touchstone? (in the parrhesiatic discourse) if so, then he also has to demonstrate parrhesia. Then, in the case of drugs administered under the license of them being placebo, isn’t the psychiatrist playing a more rhetorical role in the administering of ‘cure’ rather then confronting the real fears of the patient? The extent of truth telling in the practice of medicine is now somewhat suspect.

Let me link this up to another line of thought. Keeping in mind the above,

Let us look at the Hellenistic era a little closer. At the same time as the evolution of the Greek philosophers and the idea of parrhesia in its different philosophic sects (the Socratic age forward) there were two parallel and simultaneous threads that were in their infancy. One being the birth of the new Christianity, and the second, the language of semiotics. (the language of signs, developed as early as St. Augustine). Let me discuss them as two different events so as not to confuse (any further) the point I seem to be getting further and further away from.

One
Towards the beginning of the end of the Hellenistic era, Christianity had paved its way into society with ideas of mankind being sinners and confession of sin being the path to moral cleanliness. Where was the occurrence of the parrhesiatic act in this case? Was parrhesia condemned by religious leaders in fear of

Two
The birth of the study of signs, or semiotics, was documented as early as in the time of St. Augustine who had done a lot of work in the area of defining the ‘rhetorical situation’. He distinguished between ‘things’ and ‘signs’, where things were objects that signified. They existed. Signs, on the other hand he said, did not exist. Things took on the properties of signs in order to signify. This is a discussion for another time, but the idea of rhetoric, which I am particularly interested in is one that grew out of a need. A context. Put together an audience, a purpose in a given context, and you have the ingredients of a rhetorical situation. The art of rhetoric today is used everywhere. Our media is a child of it, and so is our political system. I use rhetorical language when I have to talk about my work; when I’m trying to convince my parents that I have actually grown up, and that I was 12 ten years ago; and when I’m having an personal argument with a peer. Language is but a tool..

.. Exhibit B

now going back to the concept of parrhesia, or fearless speech. The art of the rhetoric came into our lives with the need to get people to believe. It was practices in political campaigns, religious rallies, and for commercial benefits. In all these, and similar mass exchange of ideas, there has been an inherent need to convince. To get people to ‘buy’ the ideas put forth by the speakers. This selling of ideology, in order to reach the largest no.s possible, had to resort to a slight distortion of the ‘truth’. Truth is relative in any case, and they capitalized on its fluid nature to make arguments that would support their cause to any listener. This choice of reverting to the rhetoric, would mean the silent death of the parrhesiastes, excluding the occasional independent thinker. Anything develops in congruence to need.

Exhibit B, the evaluation.
the evolution of our collective thought and action was heading eventually in the direction of the industrial revolution. The growth of products, objects, and commodities. Buy, sell, profit, loss. These words became a mantra. Our avatars turned commercial, and currency was even attached to thought. Where was the room for a parrhesiastes on a scale comparable to this? The ‘fear’ in ‘fearless speech’ was generated by this new era. As syncretic as the Hellinistic age was, it brought with it a competition to be heard. The lone parrhesiastes will be the single voice out of tune in the choir, but it will stand out.

Disclaimer : The above two ‘exhibits’ were arguments, for argument sake. I invest a lot of time trying to make random connections between pieces of information I have on various subjects to see in some way, how to make my world a compact place. I do not dismiss any of these notions in isolation, or in connection to other areas.

day 2. true and blue.

2005-01-25T03:22:00.000-08:00

i dislike surrealist games. just the utter randomness of thought (and there is no such thing, i believe) and the frivolous-ness (the hyphenated 'ness' in true platonic tribute) seems to me too forced an activity to conduct in 100% sanity. so the concept of the derive in the beginning was suspicious. that coupled with the fact that they were largely (an assumption) french. anyway, thats a story for another time. i'm not being immediately dismissive of anything french, or surreal, dont get me wrong. just thats sometimes there is a convenience in resorting to surreality. if its vague, its surreal. if its kinda obscure and you dont really get it, its surreal. if the chap in the arthouse does a fancy number with more than 4 and a half materials, its surreal (either that or its contemporary) anyway. this is becoming derogatory. and thats totally not how i intended it. what i'm saying is that words that have been born out of true blue events and experiments in the art world have been adopted (rather kidnapped) by people with an idea of these events but not a clue on how they really operate. for instance, there can never be another 'situationist' movement. there will imitations (coupled with very good intentions) but i, will never be able to conduct or participate in a derive. i can stroll with intentions of being aware (lets call that S.W.I.O.B.A for short) or make maps that are personal and include physhogeographical influences (thats M.T.A.P.A.I.P.I) but they will not be the results of what a derive will achieve. a SWIOBA sounds like fun even, and i might try one, but i have to personalize even the concept of this neo-derive before i attempt it. thats one of the problems i feel with adapting these foreign notions. you can borrow an idea, but you can never re-claim it. our ideas of design (in our own institution) come predominantly from a western construct. i dont have a problem with that either. what i do have a problem with is failing to respect this construct enough to personalize it, rather than to imitate it.

i'm looking at the beginning of this entry and thinking, 'is this what i was getting at?' i cant remember.

this is not an argument against issues that we have been discussing, but just an extension of thought.

fearless speech is up next. coming soon to a blog near you.

day 1 and a half. a failed attempt to laugh.

2005-01-25T02:52:00.000-08:00

art and the public space. the argument made in-visible by ms. mary jane jacob.
bringing three things into focus. the artist. the audience. and the space of the art installation (performance/demonstration/structure). site-specificity. a term heard once before in the context of contemporary art practice. from prior examples (prior unfortunate examples) site-specificity has come to mean things like taking tiles from the wall of your house and displacing them on a wall elsewhere, in an futile and unrealistic attempt to 'claim her space'. needless to say, i'm a cynic .(recently converted, soon to be altered)

on trauma.
skepticism. why are we reading this? the 'blah blah' being why? another attempt to reconcile the aloof individual with the real world? urban angst? (tho it dint seem too much to me like a self-proclaimed bengali scholar-ly approach) so lets try and be subjective about this. i can see how it relates to me, on some personal note (and thus to anyone who has (and they have, no doubt) suffered a traumatic state of being) then looking at it as theory, i can recognize the role of memory in something like this. A trauma lies in memory. The infrastructure of the concept of memory holds ideas of our past. I tend to have a mostly delusional one. I seem to vividly recall events that (I have confirmed) never happened. Or its just my archaic memory catching up on me. The egg in which I used to reside cracked. And molten yellow dreams followed.

day 1. a time in the sun.

2005-01-24T03:07:00.001-08:00

an interesting way to look at things that are happening to you, is to imagine that they're happening to someone else, say a friend, or a dog or your grandmother. this way it makes it easier to stand on the outside and comment upon the situation rather than feeling kind-of in the blurry midst of it. (i'm bad at starting things. please read on)

so i comment.

to 'critically investigate' the issue of today, i.e memory and art and the likes of things-that-go-bzzz (sound of sparks, maybe) in my head, i have decided to look at two trails. for convenience.

one
this one is about art. a recent perception of art and artists is one i hope to somewhat alter by the end of this week. i have been left with these following notions over a couple of months:
(all references made to art are in context to what i understand is 'new' (ha ha) or contemporary art practices)
ok,
1. artists are self-indulgent more than anything-else-indulgent. the degrees of self to anythin-else vary from artist to artist, but the former is always in higher proportion.
2. participation in art is often at the level of inclusion (only), and hardly engagement with another.
3. it seems like art needs to be spoken for, that it has no voice of its own. does the 'document' of art leave it speechless?
4. the transformation (between creative and visionary art - as referred to by ms. estella in her essay) happens at the level of approach, experience, production and revelation. but the authorship still seems to remain singular. the issue of plurality of authorship in contemporary art practice seems to be avoided. (as far as i know)

two
memory. in true mad scientist temperment, i conducted random self derived experiments to explore my dream memories. the practice was simple. every night i would go to sleep listening to the same song. one i knew all the words of. and the next morning i would try and remember what the last line i remembered was before i fell asleep. you're thinking 'hell yes, like she would remember'. but you do. like if you're reading a book, and fell asleep reading, you usually remember where you left off the next day. so anyway, (you get the drift and i'm not going to spend any more time convincing anyone of my techniques. if you've read this far, you'll read on. ) i did this for about two weeks, and i noticed that i used to fall asleep more or less at the same time on nights that i was sleepy. (the awake time to sleep time equation) and say this is about 4 mins into the song. so for the next week, (and this is the hard part) when you go to bed (sans book, and other distractions)and play the song, i used to let myself fall asleep, but secretly wait for that one line of the song which i had previously (so ingeniously) calculated, and then almost in a surreal sense try and watch myself dream! (ok, now i've lost all hope of a cult following) but what i was doing was, pretending to be dreaming, and pretending that i was watching myself and.. ok, it was a hoax. but i have memories of these dreams like they were real. but i'm sure i made them up. i cant really remember now.

later.