Review of Mazes by Noah

11/8/2010 - 11/9/2010 - N. Vawter part (1/3) and part (2/3)

[ part (2/3) - Mazes in Dance]

'Crane Dane,' in which they went through the motions of threading the Labyrinth = this is intriguing.

'spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place' this is really fascinating! If we can show that this is a common feature of mazes, we can apply it to the C64 maze!

IOW, this is the first time we start to consider the program, not as a catalyst (in our user-happy mindset, which was only possible after the production of the USER), but as a GATE. For example, all those who entered the program but made a mistake, and got faulty program. I think we've established a history of people entering programs in that way. I've seen it myself haha more times than I care to remember. Anyway, the Minotaur story does have an obvious GATE component, how about that maze quoted in Shakespeare, perhaps it was used for a game of some kind?

Ok, I'm dumb, but it took me a little bit to realize that the Cretan maze and Minotaur are part of the same story.

"maze of rope reflects the maze of her mind and the maze of the myth, with the V- formed set, perhaps illustrative of a sexual fear as well," this is insteresting, but dislocated. perhaps it could be reordered earlier?

"demarcation of inside and outside. ... as the programmer becomes dancer." this is all so amazing!

"prepares to face the minotaur Commodore PET," earlier I foudn some inconsistencies in the thinking of whether or not there was a minotaur or not in this case. I'm interested to see if the coincidental pairing between a 'pet' and the 'animal to be slain' has some resonance to it. supposedly P.E.T. (Personal Electronic Transactor) wasn't chosen because it sounded cute, but there is some info on this in On The Edge: Epic rise and fall of commodore)

This is especially interesting when we consider the "chickenhead" graphic of Commodore!!! erhaps it did represent a kind of head to be defeated, even if it was not intended, it was percevied that way. how did the prorammer look to a third party?

aporia - cool word

"Possibly cut The maze-as-dance can be seen in contemporary video games"

no, pleaes don't cut, this is great supporting material. I would add this: the midpoint of video game history and today's Dance Dance Revolution games with motion-based controller was arcade fighting games

such as Virtua Fighter and more famously, the Mortal Kombat series, which challenged players to quickly execute practiced sequences of movements, albeit solely with their hands. It was the success of these games which helped spark interest in video game platforms demanding even more precise movements such as the Nintendo Wii, the iPhone platform, and along with other factors, the rise of the 'music game'.

Putting these concepts together, the dance of the maze exists not only in the movement required for its exploration and completion, but in its mental representation. the string which theseus uses is not only a story but a lesson, and the string may be any means required to return to back to one's physical or mental position. Possibly these may be used in concert, as the 10Print maze exercises physical entry skills as well as various mental exercises. It's kind of like an invtation to a challenge.

Are You Bad Enough?

"disarticulated from space; whereas, the maze dance traces an imaginary space. In any event," disarticulated? hmm good word, but the movements are not only sliced up, but reassembled.

"Diana Slattery has created a work called The Maze Game " this is Awesome! perfect supporting material. I just think it should be moved to earlier, possibly back to where we start talking about mazes as games

However, as I'm winding down this section, I'm not sure what the conclusion was, but the material is great. I'm especially glad at how the question of "ritual" in an earlier section was illustrated here. I think there's a sense in the world that ritual and dance are inscrutable/ineffable, but I don't think it's true. I think one of the conclusion I can draw so far is that the maze is a metaphor for a recurring challenge and that it invites movements through a kind of seduction. The tantalization of memory and invention as challenge to the contest of flesh-for-fresh. use a string, kill a beast, save a girl. Perhaps if Joseph Campbell's mythological model is true, the maze has a distinct function within it. Furthermore, the arc of the chapter seems to have a feeling of such momentum, that I feel generalities are beginning to resolve, and it's beginning to reveal how people reveal themselves individually through their various approaches to the maze, and to 10Print.

[ Mazes in Mathematics ]

"Behaving like a modern day Theseus, Dantzig himself has acquired legendary status as the student who, upon arriving late to a class, mistook the historically unsolved problems on the board as his homework."

wait a minute, did I miss something? Did theseus accidentally walk into the maze? I thought he was "called to the challenge" in the Campbell sense, but Dantzig hasn't been called.

"twisty little corridors " soudns like a value judgement?

"proven to be one of the grand challenges of the late 20th " kind of cliche... it what sense was it grand? there are probably still people working on it, so at this point, it's a field or a tradition, although there is a kind of meta-tradition around it.

"first autorouter was tested on a map of the maze at Hampton Court Palace " intresting, can we put out an APB for information on this?

"t time itself, time which can be just as easily be lost in inefficient and unproductive paths. " very fascinating point, but I think it is more at home in the previous section about dancing, since movement introduces the elemtn of time to the static maze ornament.

This was an intriguing little section, but I think needs more re-ordering.

"celebrity of 10 PRINT " "10 PRINT in this light pays tribute" I think proposing it this way would be elevating it to the status of THE INVENTION OF THE MUSICAL ORGAN. It's more like a rhythm, than an instrument. and we can celebrate rhythms and pay tribute to jsut about anything, but mostly rhythms are structures onto which songs and celebrations are structured. The space of music, may be huge, but the spce of rhythm is a special path through it, a reliable, minimal framework about which one can articulate, refigure, recollect, rhyme, repeat, and perhaps even reason. There may be an inifinte number of rhythsm, but we select and perpetuate a limited number of them for re-use between generations.

This could lead into individual expression through mazes, the variations in the program, such as casey has been making.

"Mazes and Monsters (1982)," this sounds like it belongs in the psychology seciton, not the media section, when talking about insdie and outside. Or possibly earlier in this chapter when we talk about the lack of a distinct inside and outside in 10Print.

"those who retreat into their imaginations" "minotaur as a gendered cautionary tale. " this going off the deep end a little bit, unless we are the geniuses who can explain gender gaps in everything. the 80s werent unique for having derpy dreamer geeks, see also Jason and the Sirens.

[ Mazes in Psychology ]

I believe in this section, you are not referring to mazes in psychology, but Mazes in Intelligence testing, and for many paragraphs, narrowly limited to rodent testing. It's all a bit perverse and I like it, except I can't connect it back to 10Print very well. There was once a program to type in that simulated a mouse solving a maze... Plus, Douglas Adams' suggestion that the mice were actually experimenting on us all the time suggests a kind of hierarchy based on who could enter the program into a computer and who couldn't. I'm not sure how to proceed with that.

"In 1959, one " ah,okay, glad we're getting back on track now.

"much as Commodore 64 programmers later would" and most home computers after the 80s

"If some of those who look at this Commodore 64 maze do think of the experimenter's maze, they are sure to make some different further associations. " ok this, is paranoia and leading. Why not introduce the possibility of poisoned cheese?

"any computer program that evokes the researcher's maze at least hints that the computer is a scientific instrument and that the recent history of science has some darker corners. " ok I say