GoomWorkshop
From UoWiki
GOOM workshop: 3rd Feb, 2005, LimehouseTownHall, preceeded by another attempt at WalkingTheOlympicSacrificeZone
GOOM is a goodie bag of anecdotes, suspicions, theories and speculations about the intangible stuff that connects people and objects over time and place, born in a wiki-conversation between 2 people who have until now never met in real-time. The conversation ranged across interests such as (post-)structuralism, memetic engineering, mental mapping, chaos magick, programming paradigms, psychogeography and the mythographic works of Robert Graves.
GOOM stands for Generative Object-Oriented Mythology. The workshop aims to understand what that might mean.
For a quick glance for each of the individual words see:
generative
object-oriented
mythology
It is clear from these links that a workshop aimed at exploring GOOM, let alone to decide how it might be used, easily forkbombs into a Spaghetti Junction of microcultures, pseudo-arcana and personal obsessions which, while interesting in themselves, risk usurping the (as yet undelineated) bigger picture. But the essence of GOOM is very simple: GOOM is the 'flogiston' that made two people in different parts of the world (at the time Kentucky and Utrecht) email each other, a fertilising medium of interesting questions. This workshop represents the realisation that a fertilising medium both represents and is an object of (object-oriented) study in its own right.
The technology-enabled 'birth' of GOOM discussion into real time shows how an apparently random confluence of interests can be enough to seed a community. From this initial chaos, coherence may self-assemble as a turriphilia of topics (classes, like memes) and their applications in the world (objects, like applied poetics). The link to programming in GOOM reveals it a strategy for making things happen; and yet, the G and OO must not be over-emphasised, as GOOM is nothing without a commitment to its main concern, namely M, the mythology.
The structure of this workshop will most likely reveal itself in practice, through a free-form flow of associations and stories. However, this will take place with a clearly defined goal: to have at the end of the evening a clear enough grasp of GOOM to enable a Wikipedia definition of the concept to be created.
Some lines of thought for discussion might be:
- GOOM: mapping the collective unconscious. Jung, Levi-Strauss, Schklovsky;
- 'The centre cannot hold' - the structuralist vision and its limitations;
- Where next? Open-sided memographics. What kind of text could write (e)motion?
- The mechanics of meme-engineering (media manipulation, PR, self-historfication, artistic representation, religious figures, enduring myths etc. How are they different and how similar?);
- Serendipity and applied chaos theory: designed intelligence or intelligent design and the pitfalls of both views;
- Applications: urban planning, affinity groups, ironic prayer, multiple-personalities
- The language of GOOM, notation systems to follow the growth and evolution of GOOM-objects and their interaction with other objects;
- GOOM as neuro-symbolic programming.
The GOOM workshop will take place at Limehouse Town Hall, 3 February 2005 at (?)19:00
Please feel free to comment here.
The original conversation (at your own risk) that started it all is here
The GOOM workshop is a collaboration between MaryHarrington and Wilfried, each representing their faculty
