A Brief Case

Peter Lewis

[Dedicated to the late Jean Baudrillard]

"The project brief demonstrates to the client our ability to engage, to think creatively about their business, and to execute a professional business engagement. This document is useful as a very short introduction to client-focused consulting work. It talks to the needs for clear communication and a structured process, even as the end-result of the work is a more formal proposal for much larger implementation project.

"The Interactive Bureau" is all about building great web sites. Greatness can be measured by the degree to which the site matches the needs and expectations of our clients. These needs and expectations include the design, technology, and marketing of the site itself, but how the project is run day-to-day and week-to-week: how we hit our milestones, how accurately we project costs, and how we conduct ourselves in our business. All of our site projects start with a planning phase; this phase is meant to ensure that all members of the project team understand the project fundamentals:

• why the project is being undertaken - the project goals and objectives;

• what the project will produce;

• how much time and money will be needed to achieve these goals.

"The Project Brief & Plan is a means to an end; it exists merely to set the groundwork for the "real work" of design, implementation, and validation. The Plan ensures that appropriate resources are available (both at IAB and at the client) and that expectations are set appropriately. In order to succeed, the Brief and Plan must be brief: it has required elements, but the focus of the document is on the Plan itself (the schedule and the budget).

"The following document details what a Project Brief and Plan includes, and outlines the major tasks required to produce that document...

"Commercial spoken dialogue systems are mostly based on menu or form filling paradigms. However, one of the advantages of speech should be to allow users to take control of an interaction e.g. to skip to a leaf node of a menu structure, or to ask a clarification question."

Defining A Brief Case

Commands spoken or written or visualised in / as telephonic space, are framed in 'an ontology- based dialogue system'. Or are they? Technology has a language for itself built from logic; it is not sublime, void, contradictory, musical [it doesn't behave other than discursively yet yields non-discursive symbolic forms and affects, at an unknowable point of its communicability]. In speaking of the Internet, as an alternative 'sphere' of enactments, ontological dialogues, we are mute to dislocated, 'unessential', collective, and violent being... Here is the no-thing, the arrival point, [whose philosophy is not given, it describes a virtuality but not a truth]. Nor is it nothing. It is trans-fini', an absent centre. 'Trans-ontology'. A situation, exceeded by its inexistent parameters [the 'miserable' infinitity of the Net] is subtracted from melancholia, [just try and imagine the impasse Durer's Angel infers beyond the thinking image, or the reading itself], if forced to destroy its harbour of recollection. Plato's aporetic space and time, reducible to a shining image of the past, lost of a murky and insoluble architecture, declares its new subject victorious, the corporate atom. The Dead Zone, at the level of a greater subtraction, is where we begin.

What defines, in the beginning, as impasse? [structure, non-structure, desolation, dispersal] or, restored, as a film in reverse...The Dead Zone, never the less, where 'someone else' is witness to the thing that cannot be named other than logically, may overload the political [through a process of 'unnatural' selections, or ethical suspensions]. What do we end with but an indefinite feeling that something, everything is missing, unreconciled? Or to put it another way, think at speed, say 8.5 seconds per second per second per second per second etcetera ad infinitum, a vertiginous plateau spilling everywhere slower and slower, 'How to begin again, to go on?' without the horizon of speed. 'Call that going? Call that on?' [S.Beckett]

This poetical / political separation from the limits of social dialogue, defines a brief [case] as a journalism in no-space and time, without asking for anything other than for a recollection, a question to erase the measure of ontological dialogue: 'function', the 'discursive', the 'relational', the 'knowable', etcetera, and to have a fidelity to the fidelity that demands a different [atomised] order: the 'unnameable', the 'non-discursive', the 'singular' and [eventful] the 'universal' as an inhuman ontology [tilting the horizon until it breaks the gravity of the plane and the diagonal].

Support

Time is both the support and the structure of virtual journalism. Virtual becomes Concrete, inevitable, elemental. An empty briefcase to organise the plans of political revolt and its myths of contradiction, such as these. Architecture, Philosophy, Art, The Gods? They go on forever, but don't pack them, not in my new briefcase.

I am making a magazine that is not a magazine. I need to make more and more [but need less and less 'support'] uncomfortable demands of it. Multitude is to be presented, [unrepresentable within its brief], as indifferent. The world is terrorised [at first] in accord to the ritual contests of dialogue, but its accounts are always to be settled in the agonia of its destiny of violent contradiction. This is the only justification of affective journalism and the definition of its task.

"This text will discuss replacing hand crafted dialogue descriptions with task and domain descriptions. In particular it will discuss the role of a domain ontology, both in allowing more flexible dialogue interactions, and to enable interpretation of what people say, possibly in conflict with the grammatical constructions which they have used."

[Note: quotes above selected at random from Internet search on the groupings of 'define', 'brief, 'command' and 'ontology'.]