A data array manages to emulate a human for a brief moment, but the illusion slips from its grasp. The other character does not see how this can be so hard.
This is my every day sense of alienation. Note that the emulation is a miscalculation - a fop several hundred years out of date. I am as alien as an array of data, and the people around me, listening to me describe my lifelong sense of displacement, often convey confusion or annoyance, as if it's motivated by a need for attention-getting, or a matter of will-power. But, still, I always feel utterly lost in this world, and do not fit in - particularly in social circumstances. I do, however, feel at home in art, or OTR, or computer programming. I relate to ideas, rather than people, as one friend put it.
The simulacrum taken from a fashion illustration of an eighteenth century (I think) European nobleman, the news reader from a photo of a young woman from the 40's or 50's reading a newspaper, her hair close-cropped in this imagining to push her a little closer to Scout from the 1962 film To Kill A Mockingbird. Thinking about this now, I imagine there's a pull toward the Tomboy, the simulacrum adaptation that many women needed to adopt in order to adapt, so there might be an acknowledgement here that my challenge is not that of any of an entire class of folk (gender/orientation/race/economic class) who themselves have had to learn to pretend to survive. At least, not that of a class that I have yet recognized and found. I don't know what the hell I am.
The title came as I was fishing around Archetypal, as in, 'looking to match the archetype of the image that I am trying to emulate.' But found ectypal - a word I don't recall seeing before - and thought it more appropriate. It means a copy from the archetype, and I would infer (perhaps erroneously) that it implies a copy 'inferior'.
A data array manages to emulate a human for a brief moment, but the illusion slips from its grasp. The other character does not see how this can be so hard.
ReplyDeleteThis is my every day sense of alienation. Note that the emulation is a miscalculation - a fop several hundred years out of date. I am as alien as an array of data, and the people around me, listening to me describe my lifelong sense of displacement, often convey confusion or annoyance, as if it's motivated by a need for attention-getting, or a matter of will-power. But, still, I always feel utterly lost in this world, and do not fit in - particularly in social circumstances. I do, however, feel at home in art, or OTR, or computer programming. I relate to ideas, rather than people, as one friend put it.
The simulacrum taken from a fashion illustration of an eighteenth century (I think) European nobleman, the news reader from a photo of a young woman from the 40's or 50's reading a newspaper, her hair close-cropped in this imagining to push her a little closer to Scout from the 1962 film To Kill A Mockingbird. Thinking about this now, I imagine there's a pull toward the Tomboy, the simulacrum adaptation that many women needed to adopt in order to adapt, so there might be an acknowledgement here that my challenge is not that of any of an entire class of folk (gender/orientation/race/economic class) who themselves have had to learn to pretend to survive. At least, not that of a class that I have yet recognized and found. I don't know what the hell I am.
The title came as I was fishing around Archetypal, as in, 'looking to match the archetype of the image that I am trying to emulate.' But found ectypal - a word I don't recall seeing before - and thought it more appropriate. It means a copy from the archetype, and I would infer (perhaps erroneously) that it implies a copy 'inferior'.