92682670

theory.sauna dialogues
an IRC transcript from net.sauna

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. Sk�l. Kippis. I throw some on the stove also to get an aroma of fresh rye.

OAF: Wow sk�l 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.