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The dualities in paleonymy and the resonance of dueling paleonymic materials.

2012-01-18T10:40:00.000Z

An enquiry of paleonymic dynamics as artistic concepts: The dualities in paleonymy and the resonance of dueling paleonymic materials.

In the following text I hope to explore, define and communicate under a perhaps Derridian guise applied to conceptual art, how context and meaning (increasingly the bones of ‘things’ in todays de-materialised and de-territorialized universe) are transitory, fragile and fleeting. I will attempt, (I say ‘attempt’ because the process is inherently Sisyphean and problematic) to identify Paleonymic artistic formats and mechanisms in two contemporary art pieces, artworks that, I feel, wear such dynamics on their conceptual sleeves. Also, by identifying various compositional structures and causal components (verisimilitudes) in the following examples I hope to highlight how everything’s ‘unique’ context is essentially, inherently, finite and consequently exists as base material for future artistic productions - hence an inevitably automatic dissolution of lineage, history and permanence. This essay will outline the nature of the Paleonymic dynamics operating within particular artistic practices, the trouble with this aim is that the causal elements are always in flux, as soon as a particular aspect is grasped the (ontological) position of all other contexts shitfs, similar to a set of globes placed with their sides touching like spherical cogs, the process of mapping one cartography immediately disrupts the possibility to map another (cartography, globe).

Let us begin with Paleonymics(1), personally I feel the etymological heritage of this Derridian portmanteau betrays its true meaning: paleo- (“ancient”) nym (“names”)= Paleonym. Personally I’d rather call Derrida’s notion of Paleonymics something along the lines of Neo(new)Paleo-rhythm’s (Latin rhythmus from Ancient Greek ῥυθμός (rhythmos, “any measured flow or movement, symmetry, rhythm”) ῥέω (rhèō, “I flow, run, stream, gush”)…or even Paleo-neotrophies? Ancient to New changes? Or Neo-paleopoiesis – New to Ancient births. Etymological nit picking aside I feel it’s important to regard a few words by J W P Phillips (2) regarding the definition Paleonymy:

“It is worth recalling Kierkegaard’s warning, though, about “what the philosophers say about actuality,” which, he says, “is as disappointing as when you see a sign in a second hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed you would be fooled: the sign is for sale” (E/O 50). Accordingly, if the first approach requires attention to what is said, the second requires a shift in focus, an emptying out of the statement itself, what we might call a paleonymic procedure that retains the old concept but allows its conventional or traditional designations—its sense and the conceptual or syntactic space around it—to become loosened before it can be firmed up in a new, more powerful, designation. “Paleonymy” is a coinage by Jacques Derrida, designating the method according to which old names can be utilized in novel circumstances where existing terms are inadequate. Derrida, of course, does not invent the procedure but rather discovers it at work covertly in the texts of the tradition at significant moments.”

I hope to apply Phillips parallel of Derrida’s Paleonymics and Kierkegaard’s statement to map the paleonymic practices of artists, or rather the contextual poiesisthesizings through paleonymic mechanisms – mechanisms that, essentially and intrinsically, harbor an element of sacrifice/subtraction/trophy/addition – this is approaching another area of Derridian concepts, namely Pharmakos, but we must first attempt to understand Paleonymics. So many art works are ‘propelled’ by jettison (feel free to insert a petro-political analogy concerning modern civilisations dependence upon fossil (paleo) fuels as a means to progress/continue). When I say propelled, I use the term as an execution, an artwork becomes and artistic conceptual act as original components are employed and changed. A composite material (the art piece) is born of a fusion, an act that colours, destroys, changes or shifts an original materials context.

The first example I’d like to explore is Cory Arcangel’s ‘Punk Rock 101’ (2004)(3). Conceptually I feel this is a very simplistic, very plain piece, essentially a composite of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note and Google Adsense advertising programs – the conceptual dynamics, the shifts of context are, however, more complex. Arcangel’s statement:

“A while back, I made a web page which paired Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter with Google Ads (google ads are generated from the text of the page they appear on). It was up for a while but after getting digged google decided to remove the ads from the page. I took some screen shots while it was up and below are two examples of what it looked like. Also below are the checks that google sent me!”(4)

Screenshot of ‘Punk Rock 101’, Cory Arcangel (2004)

Arcangel’s piece installs all the required apparatus for a Paleonymic resonance to form. The old socio-political context of Cobain’s suicide letter (this is very well established, I won’t explore this particular “materials” qualities, we all know of the tragedy and the then commodified legacy) is used as an interior host for the all enveloping, and somewhat parasitic, mechanism of Arcangels work. Work that, in turn, also mirrors the other parasitic medium he employs so adroitly: Google Adsense. The paleotrope (τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way", related to the root of the verb τρέπειν (trepein), "to turn, to direct, to alter, to change") supports the newer context surrounding it, whilst at the same time continuing to exist independently - a state necessary for ‘Punk Rock 101’ to execute as an artwork. Cobain’s note has two contexts, it simultaneously has its established MTV context (key for the work to work) but also it’s newer ‘Punk Rock 101’ context. The double context is active, each facet existing to bolster and define the others context.

Conversely it is also important for us to contemplate how the parasitic dynamic is also operating symmetrically, from Google Adsense to Kurt Cobain’s suicide note and vice-a-versa. The dynamic is not dissimilar to a Klein bottle – if we regard the contextual mechanism dynamic of Cobain’s (CN) suicide note we may perceive it as an interior host for the all enveloping and parasitic Google Adsense (GA). However if we regard the contextual resonance of GA we now perceive CN to be the parasitic exteriority, sacrificing the original (pre-experience) context of GA to a newer understanding – a mutual contextual decay of GA / CN is essential for the re-contextualization, the neotrophic (newly changed) state of CN / GA to be completed. For every moment one feels the cold, morbid and mercenary treatment of Cobain’s suicide note by Google Adsense one also rethinks the position of Cobain’s note in today’s world. One either thinks of Adsense in a new way or one thinks of Cobain’s note in a new way to (inevitably) re-animate and re-contextualize the other paired component – but this thinking is intrinsically linked to the older context of each component.

This bi-parasitism is difficult to contemplate simultaneously. Arcangels piece is so effective because of the resonance emerging from the two conceptual materials (GA and CN) juxtaposed paleonymic dynamics. A comfortingly physical analogy can be ‘drawn’ by animating M.C. Escher’s ‘Drawing Hands’ lithograph (1948). Let us imagine that the two pencils in the piece are pencils of death, upon touching another human being or any of their clothing the person is relegated to a two dimensional form or nothingness altogether, this transition begins in the center of the victim and slowly spreads out to their extremities. However, when the pencil is withdrawn the victims original state resumes. Looking at ‘Drawing Hands’ with this in mind we can imagine that if the lower hand were to lift his pencil the top hand would spring to life, grow an arm covered in shirt material and disappear off the right hand side of the page. In keeping with the terrifying magic at work in this dimensionally unstable universe we can appreciate that, conversely, if the top hand was to withdraw its touch of death then the bottom hand too would spring back to life, inhabit a three dimensional state and an arm would disappear off to the left hand side of the page. Being experienced with the laws of this world, and understanding the capabilities of the lethal writing tools we can appreciate that each hand in M.C. Eschers lithograph is not in the process of destroying any being, essentially these two implements of death are just touching an inanimate object.

‘Drawing Hands’, M.C. Escher, (1948).

In this universe the only possible explanation to the evidence depicted would be that two men, living and breathing simultaneously touched one another’s arms, leaving all but the offending hands remaining, the pencils held down under their weight – perpetuating the stalemate. A massive change of context is afforded one by the other, but, depending on how the eye falls upon the piece the viewer is sure that the top hand is drawing the bottom or the bottom is drawing the top. Each entity jettisons a context in itself or to alter the others context to be progressed, this strange loop is propelled by a similar dynamic to that of Cory Arcangel’s “Punk Rock 101’. The bi-parasitic paleonymic (as always in the Derridian sense not the strictly etymological sense) resonance is the peculiar sensation we experience in both works. It is also the mechanism of both pieces and the concept. Old things are put to work here, to change a context, in this moment they retain their original context, but shortly afterward this too fades an artistic statement is left behind.

However.

To take a rather Bourdieu-esque view of the cultural components employed in such mechanics (that give rise to paleonymic resonance) we can see each facet of the pieces as loaded ‘cultural capital’ activations, keys or switches. Before the creators knowingly strategic juxtaposition each part carried an enormous, historic ‘burden’ of context and signification. Cobain’s note inevitably carried a very culturally embedded essence of understanding and a unique carto-cultural-signature, however in order for the paleonymic resonance in Arcangel’s piece to emerge the carto-cultural context needs to shift, or rather, as the paleonymic dynamic of the infamous note is comprehended (directly or indirectly, from on top of or beneath the opposing mechanics of Google Adsense – depending upon the gaze of the viewers understanding) a simultaneous event/context kinetism occurs. Even though the loaded nature(s) of the cultural components are present they are also comprehended and read within their mechanization of the piece, so after this event the subjectively received context, the significance, is altered. Depending upon the previous cultural entrenchment of the material and also upon the nature in which it is deployed the shift could be subtle or seismic. Degree’s of change are not of interest here (and these are subjective and therefore further removed from the primary mechanics of paleonymic execution I am interested in exploring here) – the inevitability of context change, of this shift remains. The argument that this change or shift only occurs in a viewers minds eye is valid, for it is true, but on a macro-premise this ‘subjective’ context shift is housed within the collectively alive nature of the world, if an art work (such as Arcangel’s ‘Punk Rock 101’) becomes infamous and notorious then the objectively established context of it’s cultural material is stained or at risk of a shift. Not dissimilar to the living and fragile language upon this page, the language of an artwork that piggybacks upon existing cultural-cartographies and entrenched semiotics of significance is engaged in the (at least) slow morphing, twisting and progressing of it’s employed materials meanings. I understand this phenomena as sharing similarities to the cultural-semiotic (or context) palimpsests (re)forming the current art. Or to put the notion in an even more simplistic analogy as Bourriaudian(5) remix and collage that inadvertently colours the material of it’s collage as the materials are pasted and mixed in juxtaposition within one another.

Another piece, or pieces that I feel activate(s) upon a similarly paleonymic resonance are Jake and Dinos Chapman’s ‘Insult to Injury’ series. In this series an original set of Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’ etchings are used as a base for the Chapman’s to paste and draw demonical clown faces, puppy heads, horse heads and myriad indescribably ghoulish characters of macabre and sinister physiognomy. There are many themes explored in these works (the ‘Insult to Injury’ series) and implied within the calculated climate of the works execution, mans inhumanity towards man, the question of evil in a secular society, the fetishism of evil, the injection of Eros to Thanatos, the perversion of scopophilia, the mortocentric slippage of arts subjects in a post Kantian world the world – post deicide introspection is where the nightmares begin and fade: “unmetered data-overkill obliterates the potential of poetic redemption” (6). As fascinating and massive as these themes are, they are not my concern in this essay, the mechanics of ‘extraction, graft, extension’(7), the ‘lever of intervention’(8), the paleonymy dynamic employed in the conceptual deployment of materials is what interests me.

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s ‘Insult to Injury’.

Like Cory Arcangel’s ‘Punk Rock 101’ the Chapman brothers put a cultural relic to work for their own conceptual communications. Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ etchings cannot be read without the massive implications they hold traditionally under an art historical pretext. In ‘Insult to Injury’ Goya’s works carry not only their traditional connotations (the pre Chapman constellation of cultural signifiers) but are also forcibly re-configured to carry new meanings of context in the work and after the work. Solely regarding this facet of ‘Insult to Injuries’ materials (and disregarding the Chapman’s original material contributions to the ‘works’) it is natural to appreciate the dualistic dynamic, the paleonymic or rather the Paleo et neo labores, the ancient and new toils that Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ prints undergo.

The Chapman’s original material contributions to ‘Insult to Injury’ are less easy to define from a subjectively focused analysis, the imagery they deploy is stained, post-modern and composite to begin with and the ‘Disasters of War’ prints hold such massive cultural gravity that the ill defined Chapman applique risks being dwarfed by the weight of the old masters histories. However the paleonymic dynamic still occurs precisely because of their marriage with Goya – each paleonymic activation is intrinsically tied to the others. Despite the asymmetrical cultural weighting the conceptual form of two paleonymic mechanisms resonating from (and within) one another are as purely symmetrical conceptually as Arcangel’s ‘Punk Rock 101’. The reason for this is straightforward: despite any concerns of cultural context, despite any comparison between the two materials contexts the subjective act within the contemplator remains the same (the dynamic is the same). By just thinking of the newly contextualized facet of one paleonymic side/material (old context or new) one, by logic, does not think of the other, so the dynamic of paleonymic resonance between two paleonymic dynamics (the materials) remains the same, homogenous, across works that deploy faint or complex or bold parts against one another.

Rather than re-iterate the same notion of paleonymic resonance I will re-present my previous text from the ‘Punk Rock 101’ analysis with the corresponding material signifiers replaced:

The dynamic is not dissimilar to a Klein bottle – if we regard the contextual mechanism dynamic of the ‘Disasters of War’ (DOW) we may perceive it as an interior host for the all enveloping and parasitic Chapman additions (CA). However if we regard the contextual resonance of CA we now perceive DOW to be the parasitic exteriority, sacrificing the original (pre-experience) context of CA to a newer understanding – a mutual contextual decay of CA / DOW is essential for the re-contextualisation, the neotrophic (newly changed) state of DOW / CA to be completed. For every moment one feels the cold, morbid and mercenary treatment of DOW by CA one also rethinks the position of DOW in today’s world. One either re-thinks of The Chapman Brothers art in a new way or one re-thinks of Goya’s prints and etchings in a new way to (inevitably) re-animate and re-contextualize the other paired component – but this thinking is intrinsically linked to the older context of each component.

In contemplating these endless shifts, this horizon we cannot catch, in squinting at the various parts, the various concepts the (singular) paleonymic entity behaves as a entoptic phenomena(9), we can turn our gaze towards it’s position only to experience it shifting once more out of view, out of knowing, out to another context. The resonance between two of these phenomena (each refracting the others context, each maintaining and/or disrupting the others paleonymic dynamic), is the glory of the artist’s sublime execution of cultural materials and conceptual sensitivities. The paleonymic harmonizing of an artwork that performs through reforms that perform ad infinitum… is the art in the art.

Through-out this essay I have labored upon terms, like infinite(), constant, shift, endless etc. I have relied upon notions, analogies and metaphors of infinite regression, Mobius strips and Klein bottles. There are two reasons for this method of communicating such conceptually abstract readings of art is through . Firstly, with regard to the cultural context of artworks cultural materials/components it is important to always contemplate the endless horizion of the context, these shift as we approach comprehension, like a mirage or entoptic phenomena their nature, their context and subjective conceptualization is tied to our journey of enquiry – and thus our journey to see, or grasp is Sisyphean, endless. Secondly, it is vital to remember the essence of Derridian deconstruction that Derrida outlines time and time again. His deconstruction is as applicable to post-production art as it is to language, for they are both a mix of endless shifting contexts and ever evolving, malleable signifiers. A signifier cannot move outside the system, the structure – but it can shift from one signification to another, paleonymy doesn’t destroy a meaning/context/signifier in order to deliver a alternate meaning/context/signifier. Paleonymy is the space, the transition, the doubling, juggling, penumbra between structurally or systemically established states as they become disrupted and, for want of a word with less ‘meaning’, shift. (Bi)Paleonymic resonance operates by giving each paleonymic entity a disruption upon constant contemplation, every time I think of Goya’s etchings (the renewed context, signification as well as the ‘original’) I also re-think The Chapman Brothers work (again, in this instance the renewed context, signification as well as the ‘original’), so I re-think Goya’s work and so on and so on. By pairing, by setting two bi-contextualizing in opposition (or harmony, marriage) is minimizing the ‘risk’ Derrida writes of: “To put old names to work, or even just to leave them in circulation, will always, of course, involve some risk: the risk of settling down or of regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being, deconstructed”(10). Rather than think of this artistic composition as minimizing the risk of rapidly sinking back into the system, we may also think of this composition as giving each paleonymic material every possible chance to suspend itself in deconstruction- to elude the hierarchical, systemic attribution of static signifiers for as long as the viewers mind swims amidst the currents of paleonymic resonance. “To remain content with the reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to be destroyed.”(11) Each context I mention in this essay (eight in total, two for each material, two materials in each piece) is seldom content or afforded the chance to rest or regress, their composition of/in of a (bi)paleonymic resonance results in a (their) shifting deconstructionist purgatory.

(1) Most relevant text on page 71 of Positions, Jacques Derrida, The Athalone Press. Positions Chapter interview with Jean Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta. Derrida States “…I will say that my texts belong neither to the “philosophical” register nor to the “literary” register. Thereby they communicate, or so I hope at least, with other texts that, having operated a certain rupture, can be called “philosophical” or “literary” only according to a kind of paleonymy: the question of paleonymy: what is the strategic necessity (…), what then, is the “strategic” necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept? With all the reservations imposed by this classical distinction between the name and the concept, one might begin to describe this operation. Taking into account the fact that a name does not name the punctual simplicity of a concept, but rather a system of predicates defining a concept, a conceptual structure centered on a given predicate, we proceed: (1) to the extraction of a reduced predicative trait that is held in reserve, limited in a given conceptual structure (limited for motivations and relations of force to be analyzed) named X; (2) to the de-limitation, the gratifying and regulated extension of the extracted predicate, the name X being maintained as kind of lever of intervention, in order to maintain a grasp on the previous organization, which is to be transformed effectively. Therefore, extraction, graft, extension: you know that this is what I call, according to the process I have just described, writing.”

(2) A Guide to Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, John W P Phillips, (http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuresign.htm)

(3) http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/PunkRock101/

(4) ibid

(5) Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud, Art Data, (October 2003)

(6) Insult to Injury: The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Jake Chapman in ‘Insult to Injury’ by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Steidlmack, Germany 2003.

(7) Again, Positions : Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta in ‘Positions’, Athalone Press, P.71.

(8) Ibid

(9) entoptic phenomena, or eye floaters, visual phenomena that are caused by materials on the eye itself.

(10) Outwork, p5, in Dissemination, Jacques Derrida (trans: Barbara Johnson), Continuum Publishing, London (2004)

(11) Ibid, p5

Mladden Dolar - Notes and thoughts from Vocalities blog

2011-12-06T23:15:00.001Z

My Presentation Notes on Mladen Dolar's essay 'The Metaphysics of a Voice' from A Voice and Nothing More. – The phony schizophony and Derrida’s questionably founded phonocentrism….FIrst posted on the Vocalities Blog

Firstly let's re-view Lacan's Graph of Desire that Dolar opens with:

Dolar jettisons many of the finer points of this journey, of the signifier to voice trip and the signifier-out-and back into the structural ‘other’ that Lacan would focus on (the “retroactive production of meaning”, the “quilting point” or the inevitable stitching of itself back into the system -as I like to think if it, like Theseus stitching himself back into the heart of Daedalus’ labyrinth… ). Instead he (Dolar) asks why the Voice runs out into being a “remainder”. If the system, quilts signification and encodes through the re-absorption into the structure then what is this Voice that is left behind on the right side of the diagram? By this process of reduction, a remainder is left behind – this is the object voice. It’s outside of the system, an outcome, it doesn’t signify (that facet of the voice is swimming about in the middle of the graph). It is the remainder left ofter the signification. So whilst there is a phonological / language voice drifting around the system, being re-quilted in meaning, being coded, there is also a strange a-phonological remnant.

“It is a non-signifying remainder resistant (immune) to the signifying operations, a leftover heterogeneous to structural logic…and as such it seems to present a sort of counterweight to differentiality; the differential always refers to absence whilst the voice seems to embody a presence” – Dolar P. 36

Signification(s), structure(s) etc are webs and cosmos of absences but this voice is the remainder after this structure of signification (through absence), it is the positive remnant that signification and phonology cannot accommodate, cannot ‘work’.

So phonology/logos/the internal structures of signification/codifications can deal with the differences, the absences – they are in some respects constituted from absences. These structures of signification can work the absences and differences, but this remainder, this anomalous positive, elusive ghostly object voice, the Voices irreducible “missing half” seems “to enable this negative being to acquire some hold in positivity, a ‘substance’ a relationship to presence” Dolar P. 36.

So from this split, between

Absence(s) and ‘Presence’

Codified and Un-coded

Signification and Immune to signification

Reducible and Remnants of reduction

Negative and Positive

Systemic interior and Exterior

Dolar asks

“Does the voice essentially relate to presense after the symbolic has done away with all the positive features? Is pure presense, then, the remaining residue? Does the object voice, as the necessary implication of the structural intervention run into the notorious “metaphysics of presense” as its most recent and most insidious variation?” Dolar P. 37

By this Dolar is, as I understand, asking: Does this renegade remnant, this voice that is immune to the signification system, or is left behind after it’s reductions and subsequent phonologic abuses, does this remainder mean presence? Does it really?

From this Dolar looks at metaphysics history of phonocentricism emerging from phonologo-ism or rather a paranoid shizophony, of consistently taking phonocentric presuppositions concerning the Voice – something that has often lead to us seeing the Voice as closer to meaning (because of a presupposed presence) than writing which is derivative. – “It consisted in the simple and seemingly self-evident assumption that the voice is the basic element of language, it’s natural embodiment and consubstantial with it, whereas writing presents its derivative, auxiliary and parasitic supplement (it merely fixes the spoken word)…” Dolar P.37

Dolar goes on to talk of how the metaphysical tradition has always supported the priority of the voice, and the voices unique proximity to essence of meaning because of auto affectation (amongst other things):

“The voice offered the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence, an origin not tarnished by externality, a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs which are anyway surrogates by their very nature, and always point to an absence” Dolar P.37

Dolar then goes on to quote Saussure twice, each quote displaying a sentiment opposed to the other – outlining the paradoxical conundrum of the voice and its primacy of presence over writing – begging the question of where is language? Is true language in the voice or in the text? Because, and I hope I’m not over simplifying these notions here, if language is signification and they are absence(s) then the immediate presence afforded voice by the auto-affectation (for now) is not absence – but presence. Also, the voice is, a la the metaphysical traditions and subsequent phonocentrism closer to the essence of meaning, less removed – not quite a dead symbol like its other logosified mute cousin.

Dolar: “The subsequent fate of phonology was thus caught between the two as well: between, on the one hand, its unquestionable prejudice that the voice was the natural material of language, and thus the evident place to start; and, on the other hand, it’s (phonology) operations which dismantled the living presence of the voice into the lifeless differential matrix (..) – except for the residue, the remnant, which Lacan has taken to be the paradoxical OBJECT VOICE” Dolar P. 38

Dolar then goes on to re-iterate how metaphysical tradition maintains that the voice is the ultimate, with no trace of alterity – and that it does so by maintaining this idea of the voice as that golden nugget of auto-affectation – this divide between interior and exterior derives from here.

He then quotes Derrida, and in this context Derrida looks like he naively treats the voice as gospel, or rather that his phonocentrism comes from the ‘wrong’ place, aligning with the metaphysical traditions, as the voice as the closest purest form of the signifier “producing itself spontaneously from within the self” Dolar P.37 quoting Derrida.

Dolar doesn’t dwell on the phraseology of this quote from Derrida, but I’d like to just (to rub a little more salt into this Lacanian wound)….. “PRODUCING ITSELF” this really is a million miles away form the phonological, logos, the writing, signification of text and what we later find to be exterior rather than interior…. To say producing itself is to disregard the network of differences and the chasms of absences this shows just how interior and close to the essence of meaning Derrida considers the voice to be – “the origin of conceptuality, between vocality and ideality”. Dolar P. 37

Dolar then goes onto to examine how even though the voice is the primary auto-affectation, the first instance of putting something out there and being aware of it (our little trick to know presence – supposedly), it is not the same as the mirror stage. The roots of this notion are found in Narcissus’ relationship with the nymph Echo, the details (of all the myths) are enthralling – but the point of this mythic example is that Narcissus loved his reflection, but he didn’t love his echo (despite not being aware that this voice was an echo initially..), his voice bouncing back at himself – because the moment there is a surface to bounce our voices back at us our “Narcissism crumbles.” Dolar P. 40

“As soon as the object (..) voice appears as the pivotal point of narcissistic self-apprehension, it introduces a rupture at the core of self presence. It is something that cannot itself be present, although the whole (metaphysical, derridian, historical) notion of presence is constructed around it” Dolar P. 42

“So if, for Derrida, the essence of the voice lies in auto-affectation and self transparency, as opposed to the trace, the rest, the alterity, and so on, for Lacan this is where the problem starts” Dolar P. 42

So for Lacan, “This object voice embodies the very impossibility of attaining auto-affectation; it introduces a scission, a rupture in the middle of full self presence, and refers it to a void, a void in which the voice comes to resonate” Dolar P. 42

In the section titled A brief course in the history of metaphysics. Dolar re-examines the phonocentric bias of Derrida in relation to the phonological tendencies that have cropped up throughout history… I won’t regurgitate all the examples he runs through, but to sum this strategy up crudely it’s basically that for millennia there has been an enforced logosification of sound and voice and music. This Logophony, this phony phonology has been working to shirk away from the exteriority of the voice (and in many ways shows the bias in dealing with such a schism)

“the voice should not stray away from the words which endow it with sense; as soon as it departs from its textual anchorage, the voice becomes senseless and threatening” Dolar P. 43

Dolar goes through Plato, Aristotle, Chinese emperor Chun, Wagner, Saint Augustine… throwing up example after example that consistently show the long established tradition of reigning in the voice to text, of always having an urge of shackling it into textual signification, away from the sensuous, dangerous and scary realm of resonance and alien exteriority. This tradition is not just confined to words, it extends to music too – and I can’t but feel Leonard Bernsteins example of children saying Nurr Nurr Nuh Nurr nuh as e e Ff e Ff is worth chucking in here…. Sonologos…. Music turning into significations/absences - text and codes…

Along this journey Dolar also mentions of how the voice sound, outside of logos can be harnessed for good, as an appreciation of god, as something to “animate the energy of the defenders of equality”. So all the way from Plato’s hatred of the flute to Hildeberg of Bingen’s cunning reversal of sonic roles in relation to good and evil in her Ordo Virtutum there is a dichotomy between the sound of utter joy or depravity that is immune to signification and irreducible and exterior – the object voice AND the voice as text, as something which follows words - here is the schism, the lacanian problem that Dolar shows to be perhaps more than just a Lacanian interpretation but an issue that has been battled with ever since Narcissus said to his own voice: “I’d rather die than fall prey to you”.

Dolar sums up: “from this brief (..) survey we can draw the tentative conclusion that the history of ‘logocentrism’ does not quite go hand in hand with ‘phonocentrism’, that there is a dimension of the voice which runs counter to self transparency, sense and presense: the voice against logos, the voice as the other of logos, its radical alterity.” Dolar P. 52

Dolar talks of how metaphysics can only yield phonocentrism and the voice as presence by demoting writing AND ALSO ignoring or banishing the sensuous aspect of the voice and disavowing it’s inherent alterity.

“The presence of the present in the voice becomes doubtful the moment sense is eluded, (and as we know there is always that nonsensical, un-coded, to put it bluntly, remnant), and this dissociation is at the core of the Lacanian operation”

but!

…this division, this schism is not “the proper dimension of the object voice. It is only here that the Lacanian problem really starts”. Dolar P. 52

Shofar: Examples of the remnant as the masculine, and gods voice – a is now b and b is now a…. phonologos’ authority comes from the only part that is not law, that is not logos…

Personally I like this part of the essay least, I feel the leap to the father’s ominous sonic presence a touch ‘clunky’, nonetheless, I’ll talk a little bit about this next step because it provides a nice springboard for introducing a Derridian betweenism…

So throughout the text Dolar has talked about the remnant outside of phonology… - there is always a part of voice that is incompatible and immune to logos…. But Dolar now introduces a nifty notion here – a paradoxical interpretation of the voice we have outlined so far. He explains how the gravity of gods voice, the shofar, the authority of the father (that is the signified part of the voice) only holds it’s authority through it’s remnant – it’s noise, it’s sound outside of signification.

“it seems that the voice, as a senseless (that’s the unsignified logos-immune remnant) remainder of the letter, is what endows the letter with authority, making it not just a signifier, but an act (…) as Lacan says: ‘that something which completes the relation of the subject to the signifier in what might be called, in the first approach, passage a l’acte’, Those primordial signifiers are inherently acts, namely something that happens when the signifier is not just articulated (..) but when it is uttered and vocalized” Dolar P. 55

Ss the logos facet of voice, can only become an act, holding enough weight to be the law or the father, because its remnant, what we have previously been referring to as the exo/object voice, has imparted the weight of act into it’s signification reduced brother – “it is the part which can never be simply present, but is not simply absence either: the object voice is the pivotal point precisely at the intersection of presence and absence” Dolar P. 55

At this point I’ll throw out the Derridian notion of Hymen (for those who are familiar) if not I’ll define this concept shortly, as will Dolar inadvertently.

Dolar on the two sides of this voice now..”…they are both the same, (..) there are not two voices, but only the object voice which cleaves and bars the other in an ineradictable (undestroyable) extimacy” Dolar P. 56

Extimacy meaning both inside and outside simultaneously and inherently but each is always in or out – exterior intimacy….

So in a very double, Mobius, paradoxical manner, the object voice is actually the composition/fusion/conflict of logos voice, because the logos voice is only given its authority, its act, by the ghostly un-logosifyable remnant – the sound. So the object voice is neither the reduced or the remnant, it is neither exo or interior it is both, the fusion.

“Masculine and feminine positions would then be two ways of tackling the same impossibility; they arise from the same predicament as two internally linked versions of dealing with the same object which retains in ineradictable ambiguity” Dolar P. 56

So, taking in hand the history of the feminine other/exo voice plaguing metaphysical histories, Christianity, the Greeks and so on and masculine (the Shofar, gods voice, logosification, the reduced etc) I’d like to ask if we are not dealing with a kind of hermaphroditic paradoxical object voice, a dyad of ineradicable extimacy?

Questions, thought food:

1) Is this logosification of the voice still at work today more than ever? Continuing to hide it’s alterior remnant, think Vo-coders, auto-tuners, think samplers, think the Wilhelm scream robbed of any biological urgency or emotional weight through repetition and being reduced to a mere ‘horror signifier’.

2) Think of the male/female then logos/remnant positions of the voice that is at once presence and absence interior and exterior – can we use Derrida’s Pharmakos (remedy and poison) or Derrida’s Hymen notion (the inbetween that prevents but also consummates) – not to be too phallocentric but I think this analogy, this strategy has legs…

From Marcel Cobussen:

“The opposition of inside vs. outside is a frequent returning point of Derrida's interest. An example is found in his writing about the hymen. Hymen, the virginal membrane, but also the consummation of a marriage. (In Greek and Latin mythology, 'hymen' refers to the God of matrimony and to a hymeneal song.) As a protective screen, as an invisible veil, it stands between the inside and the outside of a woman, and consequently between (male?) desire and fulfillment. As a (con)fusion between two people (marriage), however, there is no longer any difference between desire and satisfaction. So, hymen both implies communion and hinders this communion; it is both barrier and interaction. Hymen is a fusion that abolishes contraries, for example, the difference between desire and its accomplishment. But hymen is also the fold of a mucous membrane that keeps them separate (cf. Dissemination, 209-18).  It is not a matter of choice here. If we would choose between the two, there would be no hymen. Hymen is neither fusion nor separation, but stands between the two. Neither inside nor outside, but between the two. 'It is an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites at once' (Dissemination, p.212). And it is the 'between' that counts. It outwits, as Derrida says, all manner of dialectics”

3) What do people enjoy about the voice and music (now we accept music is essentially a language – cue micro tone problems).. Think jimi Hendrix missing notes, think Florence at Glastonbury avoiding most notes etc etc

4) How can we read the massive rise in echo and reverb in modern pop music? Think witch house, drag, hauntological stuff, Maria Minerva!?!?! Is this echo effect abuse a strategy to bring the voice further into alterity and void of signification? Or a burgeoning form of voco-narcissism?

5)The MP3 as a metaphor for signifiers, absences, gaps – the MP3 a simulacra, signifiers with no object voice, with no remnant – can this be used for thinking about records, torrents, itunes in relation to live performance, gig experience, crowd sonix etc

few notes...

I read the Ovid story about Narcissus and Echo, I would have loved to include a painting or etching of Echo and Narcissus, but the only versions I could find depicted them as getting along quite well, and in the text it's obvious that as soon as Narcissus meets Echo and realises she is not who he's looking for he dislikes her.

Also in the Ovid text I have (translated by A.D. Melville) there is a lot of word play. For example when Narcissus says in disgust after Echo tries to hug him "I'd rather die than yield to you" Echo replies "I yield to you".... before this when Narcissus is looking for his friends and asks "Anyone here?" Echo replies "Here!" I think there maybe some scope for thinking around the logos facet's meaning only being subject to the exo-remnants desires etc, you can say the words but the un-coded remnant will betray you....

Mladen Dolar links + Musings on Echo and Narcissus

Steven Shaviro on The Voice and Nothing More

The Vocal fetish (referencing Lacan and Dolar) on Blah-feme

Aaron Schuster interviewing Mladen Dolar on Metropolis M

This Metropolis M interview is great, I meant to mention it in the presentation but I guess I forgot, what with all the talk of Narcissus and Echo.... Dolar talks of a missing chapter that he decided not include in the book, about "the ethics, metaphysics, physics, politics of the voice".

I am still mulling over the dynamic of the Exo irreducible remnant holding not just the ultimate animating power for the Logos side of voice to be taken as an act, to grant it weight and authority, but also as an ultimate force for totally warping meaning. Like the Echo and Narcissus story, when Narcissus calls out, the exo-echo deliberately (she loves him, she's besotted with him and know she can only use his words to woo him - "she longed to come to him with winning words") warps and reconfigures the meaning of his own voice, of his own intent.

It chanced Narcissus searching for his friends,

Called 'Anyone Here?' and Echo answered 'Here!'

Amazed he looked all round and, raising his voice,

Called 'Come this way!' and Echo called 'This way!'

He looked behind, and no one coming, shouted

'Why run away?' and heard his words again.

He stopped and, cheated by the answering voice,

Called 'Join me here!', and she, never more glad

To give her answer, answered 'Join me here!'

And graced her words and ran out into the wood

To throw her longing arms around his neck.

He bolted, shouting 'Keep your arms from me!

Be off, i'll die before I yield to you.'

And all she answered was 'I yield to you'

Goldigga got told.

from P.E.S.T.

2011-12-05T17:36:00.001Z

A video with audio from the recent Black Metal Theory P.E.S.T. Symposium

Ben Woodard, Folding a Cadaverous Scream

Posts Elsewhere

2011-11-25T18:37:00.000Z

Check out a great Cyberpunk fiction fragment over at Doin' the Lambeth Warp - I love this guys writing.
Most of my writing has been over at the Vocalities blog of late.
Also check out P.E.S.T. Streams for a dose of Black Metal Theory.

Another blog: Aural & Visual

2011-11-14T23:35:00.000Z

OK - I've started another blog: Aural & Visual. Anything that doesn't fit in there will go here but I imagine I'll be focusing on the new one for the time being. Hopefully updating it on a weekly or even daily basis.

Joseph Nechvatal Interview Part 2 - Immersion Into Noise

2011-10-03T11:56:00.000+01:00

V: “macro-context of Noise with regards to the secular space we are inhabiting” = Massive, historic context. Religion has always played a massive role in life. Capitalism (a worthy surrogate in my unpopular opinion) lets us project our beliefs and values upon an artwork, essentially seeing what is not there, interpreting what may or may not be there and giving energies to innate objects, like dark matter (but I won't rope science into question just yet). I wondered if you ever contemplated upon the possible similarities between religious dynamics of old and the belief of Noise. Like Dark Matter, and some speculative realist art pieces and also religion and capitalism (bourdieuian capital, cultural capitals etc) the worth is, intrinsically non definable objectively but subjectively obvious - sensed in ones minds eye.

JN: I see. Well, it occurs to me that there is nothing more massive than that groaning connect-break-connect cosmos where noise of one sort or another is everywhere. Of course, excess noise radiation indicates that the universe is continuously expanding. Unsystematic activity at the molecular level suggests that the universe consists primarily of processes of noise. So any massive topos for the universe must be in its very constitution indeterminate, noisy, complex, unified and unsatisfactory.

That does not tend to go down well in the realm of most religious dynamics that have achieved dominance recently. But I think it is permissible to say that this noise-state has become emblematic of our consciousness.

I say this because in a sense we are living in what might be called the noise age, as we daily attempt to orient ourselves in the noise of the expanded immersive electronic field. Certainly it is true that hidden in us and in connected computer-space there is something so noisy, abstract, so large, so astounding, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite space that it excites and frightens us and thus returns us to the experimental and to a state of stimulating abstract desire and restlessness. In one sense artists are prepared for this state better than most in that the history of abstract art has shown us that consciousness may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the space of clean and clear representation, and by scanning the space of representation art may formulate the knowledge of the laws that provide its de-compressed noisiness.

But with an abstract comprehension of the noise age, art theory itself needs to take on a new sense of de-compressed spirit and redefine itself from the omni-perspective view found in immersive cyberspace. It is neither surprising nor coincidental that an epistemological change in art theory would follow connectionist noise developments inherent in hyper-media as the immense perspective of connected computer-space requires us to question the legitimacy of commonly held beliefs and the forgone conclusions established concerning the theoretical issues of sexual politics, multiculturalism, gender studies and the far-reaching heterogeneous philosophical critique of the cultural mechanisms of representation which have preceded it. The desire to theorizes this sense of the infinite and the spectacular via noise has lead me to a field of theoretical interests that I have amassing under the rubric of noise theory: a broken AND connection theory which is everywhere, all the time, all at once.

If this sounds like “religion and capitalism” it does so as tragedy.

It is a well worn cliché by now that we live in the era of information overload - hence a connectionist noise theory which purports to attempt an art noise of the extended virtual-field presupposes we have reached an orientational level of symbol density and we are now able to combine many individual symbols into complex noise relationships, or chunks, of information which can then be treated as single megasymbols. However, since it is impossible to make sense of today's swirling phantasmagorical stimulus, the general proposition behind a theory of noise is one of ripe delirium, as noise pulses with higher and higher flows of data to the point of near hysteria. In my view, it is noise theory's job to find out what unconventional un-connectionist sense this uncertainty might make to us, and to see how blocks of the chaos of information might start to sympathetically vibrate with each other based on a decadent reading of our electronic media environment.

So as far as a “religious dynamic” is concerned, I think the only similarities are those related to infinity, the sublime, excess and ecstasy. Rather, noise theory is compatible with and comparable to chaos theory, the contemporary theory which stems from physics, biology and mathematics which is closely associated with poststructuralist theory. While classical sciences isolated physical systems from their surrounding, chaos theory is founded on the realization that all systems in nature are connected and subject to flows of matter and energy which move constantly through them.

A noise theory cognizant of the same principles of connectivity would begin with the presumption that a theory bomb has exploded, showering us with bits of theory shrapnel, drastically changing the way in which we perceive and act, even in our private dream worlds. This realization may lead us back to Michel Foucault's analysis of Raymond Roussel's Fin-de-Siècle invention of dreamy language machines that produced texts through the use of repetitions and combination-permutations, as a dream-like and machine-like logic provided Roussel's writing with a seemingly endless variety of textual combinations flowing in circular form. As described in Foucault's book Raymond Roussel: Death and the Labyrinth, Roussel's technique and its process of endless development lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously inventive theories which give the reader a feeling of being pulled into the noise of eternity through the ceaseless constructions of theory itself, transmitting an altered and exalted state of mind to the reader as it systematically imposes a formless anxiety through its labyrinthine extensions, doublings, disguises and duplications.

Most salient to my noise theory is Foucault's analysis of Roussel's final book, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, which contains and repeats within its mechanism all the mental-machines he had formerly described and put into motion, and by doing so making evident the master-machine which produced all of his previous text-machines. Hence Roussel presents to us a model of theoretical perfection: a theory machine which functions independently of time and space, pulling theory into a developmental logic of the infinite. Hoist by it's own petard.

So yes, in terms of what you call “massive historic context” I may not omit this internal logic of the infinite and its tragic drama which I find potentially interesting for noise theory - for it must be remembered that electronic theory itself resides in a field of virtual immersive perceptions at once seamless and fragmented - made up of electronic energies corresponding to the new combination of space and time. An immersive perspective without horizon. Thus noise theory might be considered as an osmotic membrane, a blotter of ubiquity resulting in the atomization and disintegration of normal information and data. This merges noise theory into its proper network of circulation - demystifying the ideology of its reproduction and intervening in its system of cultural interpretations.

Whereas religious pre-noise theory is made up of conventional, rigid, social representations, my noise theory makes use of the abstract potential of the connected, all-encompassing sign-field. Thus it is unconventional, and therefore demonstrative of the real arbitrary nature of all representations, as I learned from Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. Hence noise theory may offer art the opportunity for the creation of relevant and applicable anti-social theories (abstract, ecstatic, and/or antiseptic) which may continue to move and multiply.

Noise theory opens thought up to new spaces of malleable and combinatory sites that exceeds religious sentiment through a perpetual multiplication of significance. It does so by creating a hybrid of inner meaning and cosmic inference, thereby opening up a glitchy territory of signification in which to connect and create a chain of decoded and deterritorialized meanings into new megasymbols.

V: Noise theories inter-exchanging dynamics are certainly is more malleable than traditional religions, I appreciate that - but I still feel there are some belief based similarities in the mechanics of reception, thought certainly more liquid in nature..
Cyber theory and our collective interaction and emersion with the sprawling online ether has been a concern of mine (theoretically) for sometime now. There are many examples of how online cultures are evolving the way we think, younger people do have slightly different cognitive processes than older people mostly because of their deep engagement with the internet through their formative years. Music, literature and artistic practices are changing as this new landscape of interactions and communications emerges.

Do you feel that enquiries and explorations into Noise are best suited to traditional modes or online modes of poly-ontologous engagements... I appreciate that that essentially Noise would transcend both, but which is more fruitful or progressive in this respect? If neither are their any differences subject to Noise?

JN: You make a good point about reception, as it is clearly important to an art of noise that offends yet allows us to look into own underlying assumptions of sacred superfluity. Noise in art, I think, as you suggest, can face us up to the radical implications of sacred superfluity while purging us from conventional ways of thinking by making no recourse to imagined exterior principles or a priori assumptions. It theorizes principles of linkages, of connectivity, and breaks of the intersection of all non-noise god theories, giving rise to theoretical production and the creativity of the poly.

May I just say that this escape from previous non-noise religious theories has the most urgent political/social ramifications in our media society. This is so as this new noise theory has a well founded but ambiguous urge for epistemological reconfiguration based on the capacity of connected electronic media's immeasurable (and ultimately noisy homogenous) intermixtures that provides the definition of the material links that abet and break communications while also expressing the laws of composition and decomposition that administer it. Hence this noise theory can be, in a sense, the abstract theory of all representation when it attempts to orient itself in the unlimited field of representation, which utilitarian ideology attempts to scrutinize in accordance with a step-by-step, discursive method but which now appears as noise metaphysics, but a noise metaphysics which abstraction helps to step outside of itself. Thus perhaps its intention is to achieve an ultimate integration of consciousness by the dissolving of theory into its original unmanifested ground (symbolic of stark unconsciousness) and of infinite complexity in unity.

This dynamic interdependence of electronic forms of noise in contemplative vision is certainly poly and as so represents the ultimate in re-configuration, one that subsumes our world of simulation/representation into a nexus of over-lapping unity of mind which equals an understanding of the unity which ties the whole universe into a single noise, linking observations of the outer world with precise extractions of human essence. This noisy view of theory, brought to a certain sense of pliability, offers a double prospect: first, the solipsistic images of theoretical excess, and then, as in a psychedelic glamour, in the reverberant structure of the unfolding total-theory-work.

This assertion on my part concerning theoretical noise consciousness as possibly being multiple and unified simultaneously combines into an all-inclusive private picture the segregated forces and particles of noise through sympathetic vibration, just as the strings of a piano do, especially when tuned to the system called just intonation.

If what I have said above sounds slightly religiously metaphysical, it is metaphysical only in so far as it is memory, intensity, and stratosphere all working together in making up an internal model of the self. My noise theory's central mission is in addressing information now as a personalized megasymbol. Hence my art noise theory is non-linear, yet it displays long-term tendencies and organizational patterns and principle of becoming in and through constant mutation. It is a principle of intermingling micro-relations in an ongoing processes of macro-relations. Therefore it theorizes principles of transversality and of contaminations within the personal obsessions of the individual.

But I don’t want to suggest that noise cannot also impact on society at large. It can and does at times. For example, the entry of recorded noise into popular rock music can be traced to Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track of The Beatles' 1966 studio album Revolver. Credited as a Lennon/McCartney song, it was written primarily by John Lennon. The track included looped tape effects. For the track Paul McCartney supplied a bag of 1/4 inch audio tape loops he had made at home after listening to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. By disabling the erase head of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower.

McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops. After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of 30 or so tape loops to George Martin, who selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was about six seconds long. The tape loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building and controlled by EMI technicians in studio two at Abbey Road. Each machine was monitored by one technician who had to keep a pencil within each loop to maintain tension. The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Geoff Emerick watched the meters. Eight of the tapes were used at one time, changed halfway through the song. The tapes were made (like most of the other loops) by superimposition and acceleration. According to Martin, the finished mix of the tape loops cannot be repeated because of the complex and random way in which they were laid over the music.

But most notable in this vein is Revolution 9, a track produced in 1968 by The Beatles for The White Album. It made sole use of sound collage, credited to Lennon/McCartney, but created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition is similar to the avant-garde Fluxus style of Ono as well as the musique concrète works of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.

V: Yes, I wholly echo the notions you raise in the second and third paragraphs, there is very much an ontological chasing of the horizon, and infinite regression formed from feedback and infinite receptions and animations. Noise and Religion will always share an unseen foundation, a bottomless foundation. Painting a mirror problem, every move changes what you are painting, you will never paint the reflection.

I'd say this aspect of the dynamics similarities is a massive realm to explore, through art too as well as theoretically.

Changing topic slightly - or operating across different lines. My understanding of contemporary music is subjective, but I believe that there is a pandemic salvaging of past histories - because no new history is available (due in part to the Noisy, Cyber, data saturated, infinitely transparent and..oddly as addresses previously ultimately opaque/claustrophobically subjective world we inhabit) - so echo's and collage, remix and reference are the only tools left to create a context, something new cannot be made without a context being seen/heard by the listener - so a control of existing materials emerges in almost all aspects of modern genres. Also a labouring occurs, music is transformed into a leitmotif or a slo-mo homage.

Could Noise be seen as an alternative to this? Finding newness through the massive shifting matrix? What are your thought's on Noise's possibilities to become active independent of this (salvage-phile, neophobic) syndrome?

JN: I tend to deduce that definitely noise is a possible alternative to thanatophilic re-mix cultural conservatism - even while acknowledging that the history of avant-garde culture is a rich tipple from which we can draw intoxicating stimulus. Morton Feldman once said something interesting about the quality of noisy newness in his text "Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez" that “noise is incomprehensible yet it is noise that we truly seek since the greatest truth lies behind the greatest resistance.” If we take his thought on resistance sincerely, and opposition remains an ambition for art, than cultural newness still has some probability to emerge out of the massive necrophilia syndrome. But what is obligatory is an innovative fortitude of looking beyond.

Lucio Fontana often said that the canvas for him was primarily there not for what it is or for what it represents but to show that we can look and move through it. It is for this reason that he punctured holes (buchi) in his canvases as a means of integrating the theoretical space represented on the surface of his paintings with the tangible space that surrounded them. Fontana, in his last interview with Tommaso Trini said that, “The evolution of art is something internal, something philosophical and is not a visual phenomenon. Speaking of the buchi in a late interview, Fontana said, "...the discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is the infinite, so I make a hole in this canvas, which was the basis of all the arts, and I have created an infinite dimension (...) that is precisely the idea, it is a new dimension corresponding with the cosmos. The hole was precisely to create that void there at the back."

Concerning this puncturing of holes, Fontana said in the last interview that "...if any of my discoveries are important the buchi (hole) is. By the buchi I meant going outside the limitations of a picture frame and being free in one's conception of art. (...) I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind me the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface." To make the point in specifically heightened immersive terms, Fontana created in 1952 a ceiling peppered with his punctured buchis for the Kursaal at Varazza which also incorporated low-angled lighting. He repeated the gesture on the ceiling of a cinema in Breda the following year.

For Fontana however, space no longer functioned, as it did for the Futurists, in the context of the image (the flow of space around sculpture or the implied space of painting), but it became the palpable field in which his proto-cyber method took shape. Hence he literally transgressed abstract painting's support, refusing the illusory for the actual, activating ambient space and the technological allure that envelops post-modern life.

I raise the example of Fontana here in order to show an example of an art desire that might reterritorialize. But we can talk about cultural noise in the abstract too, as a polyvocal epidemic or contagion. As a basis of becoming.

V: Oh, wow - your calling the remix crazed artists thanatophilic?!?! Fantastic! Presume this is most applicable to Mark and Dinos Chapmans Insult to Injury Series! This is perhaps the polar opposite of your hopes with regard to art and art with Noise etc..

Your comments about Fontana are interesting, and maybe elucidate how much importance you feel is to be found in and around Noise's employment and presence in Contemporary Art. Without being too simplistic, would you sat that Noise is your Buchi? Has similar potentialities as Fontana's Buchi - or the potential he hoped?

JN: I have nothing particular against the work of the Chapmans. I just don’t find them or Maurizio Cattelan or Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami at all interesting in terms of the complexity of noise as I’ve been talking about it above and in the book. Their sort of one-liner art is closer to the pop logo aesthetic that for me cultural noise strives to make problematic. In that sense, an overly tight focus on Fontana's Buchi should also be avoided.

But it is true that my noise production has been hovering around holes in the human body, most recently retinas and anuses. That again will be the emphasis in my New York show this May that I am thinking of calling errant anusmOs. The idea is to link the individual through noise to the universe in a way that is not overly human so we can imaginatively re-place ourselves inside the context of the Dionysian flux of cosmological nature. There is an image from this series of paintings on the cover of my Immersion into Noise book called sOuth pOle.It has been enjoyable and fascinating talking with you. I will just leave you with the suggestion that noise, as I see it, is an obscure (w)hole of intense potentialities that gives artists the capacity to speculate, fabricate, and think and act otherwise.

V: Jospeh, thanks, it's been a pleasure.

Joseph Nechvatal
'anus frenzy'

2011, computer-robotic assisted acrylic on canvas, 70 x 40 cm, courtesy Galerie Richard, New York

Joseph Nechvatal's Viral Symph0ny can be downloaded here

Joseph Nechvatal Interview Part 1 - Immersion Into Noise

2011-09-30T20:50:00.001+01:00

American digital artist and art theoretician Jospeh Nechvatal's new book, Immersion Into Noise is out now, published on Open Humanities Press and part of the Critical Climate Change series. Immersion Into Noise "is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores". The book is reviewed by Yuting Zou in The Brooklyn Rail where Zou states: "While most people would naturally think of noise as an audio-only disturbance, in Immersion Into Noise,(...) Joseph Nechvatal takes us on a rowdy conversional ride through a series of audio, visual, spatialized, and networked 'art noises'.".

The following interview was conducted with Joseph Nechvatal by email in September 2011.

V: In the introduction you mention how 'the creative art of noise draws us closer to our inner world' - could you expand upon this? I read this as an interior aspect of creation being reflected most truly as noise, in a rather Cartesian sense of thinking about 'truth' and the 'world' - the brain in the vat example etc. Is 'noise' in this sense the most ontologically sound, or as proximal (exterior) phenomena we could hope to communicate in and witness - is this what make 'noise' so important?

Josph Nechvatal: I think that our inner world is very much unlike a brain in a vat in that such a model cuts through the connectivity that I see, hear and feel in my inner world as connecting to your thoughts - and my entire outer world. That buzzing connection is my truth. While noise is often considered as coming externally into a non-noise entity (an us), I think that a creative use of noise can also be viewed diagrammatized as an integral part of the same function of that system (us) - and so accorded a position within the diagrammatic structure (instead of residing as unmixed noise outside us).

But your question opens up so much of what I have been thinking since completing the book (late-2009) in terms of art as inner genesis. I have gone on thinking about aural and visual noise as a means of exploring difference and multiplicity as spectral material held in infinite suspense – something akin to an iniquitous spiritual ecstasy. This means for me an ontological self-as-wonder – but for all of us. Noise is what one makes of it. And what one makes with it. As it shape shifts.

V: Perhaps i'm thinking of Noise in a far to simplistic, far too solid a sense?

Would Noise (and it's inherent possibilities for creativities - interiorized and exteriorised) be more akin to a phenomena that is born from the two never meeting parallels of interiority and exteriority simultaneously (in both artist and viewer\s for examples sake)? Through multiple exchanges and inter-receptions of communication. Mind's eye, praxis, execution, viewer reception, viewer interpretation on so on? Noise as an aspect of these gaps - but nonetheless also a mode of creativities mechanics and communications? Noise as a hint that undoubtedly we are more than likely to be sharing the same world, but only existing/being visible through the spaces between both our endologics and exologics? I suppose you could/should argue that your sentiments concerning Noise are contrary to the brain in the vat idea? Noise as proof against this Cartesian doubt?

JN: You raise an interesting point about noise never meeting parallels of interiority and exteriority. But I do not agree with that. For me, art noise hums exactly in the fold between interiority and exteriority, where they do meet. Certainly I agree with you that art noise may have an aspect where gaps of creative mechanics and communication function as non-communication. That is why in Immersion into Noise I pin art noise to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the vacuole. This concept of noncommunication comes from Deleuze’s Postscript on Control Societies - a notion he pulled out of the work of William S. Burroughs. A vacuole is like a sac in a cell’s membrane, completely bound up inside the cell but also separate from it. So yes, kind of like space between both our endologics and exologics (whatever endologics and exologics is). Your fucking with me, right?

V: Well, thats, not quite what I meant actually! Hard to describe as it's juggling a few ideas at once. Ultimate Interiority and Ultimate Exteriority are parallels - they run side by side but never meet (however both are theoretical and not thinkable - but i'll leave that for now), and somewhere between the two, with the communications and mechanics, the 'tuning of a praxis', 'perception' and a 'viewers reception of art' etc etc... between all the things that go between an artists interiority and the viewers perception of this externalised interior ( this is interior itself because it's a perception) - is where noise is? So it's vital to have these two problematic poles of inner and outer, without these Noise would not be? -But it's quite etherial and ever changing - not to simplify the idea too crudely but perhaps sharing just some of the dynamics of a zeitgeist maybe - with regards to it's existence between myriad parties endologix and exologics...... maybe worth mentioning the Klein Bottle at this point...

I hope we are thinking about Noise along the same lines? Endologics and Exologics - ha, yeah, I'm a devil for making up my own portmanteau instead of actually explaining the notion fully! Endo=Inner, Exo=Outer, Logics= thinking linear, reason... Personally I find it easier and more concise to use these weird terms rather than get bogged down in descriptions over and over again...

JN: No problem with the made-up lingo so long as we don’t speak past each other. I enjoy your terms now that I understand them. You have pulled off a state of externalised interiority. But I think that, yes, we are thinking about noise along different lines. I am thinking about it as I defined it (mostly visually) in Immersion into Noise – that is, with an emphasis on perception and reception in art. One way to apprehend a theoretical ambient noise art field's felt scopic atmosphere is to think of it in terms of a study of cognitive-visual acoustics. This is equitable in that sight itself is nothing other than a continuous pattern of perpetually changing light-data recorded on the retina which we process through the aggregated internal acts of discerning. This idea of a form of cognitive-noise-perceiving is continuously allocated by tones of recognition, ranges of totality, and distributed visual echoes as humans produce a full interpretation of the plethoric information which hits their retinas in order to assign it cultural meaning. More precisely, such an acoustic-like cognitive-visuality would involve the equivalent of what in acoustics is called envelope - as visual attention has characteristics of attack, growth, duration, and decay in terms of peripheral spatial intelligence (when self-attended to). Such attention calls for the viewer’s active and self-conscious engagement with art. V: I think I understand now - so Noise is really very very similar to regular 'acoustic Noise', not sound outright but the strange phenomena that occurs in the world it's sounding in etc...Noise is definitely the right word you chose! Seems very very apt. Thinking about Noise as a cognitive and visual phenomena following a not dissimilar dynamic to regular 'acoustic noise'. I'm a wannabe hi-fi geek so do have some appreciation of the slippery nature of acoustics, some things one senses, some things one actually hears for example.

Could perhaps you talk about works that are strong examples of how 'Noise' is present, how that rely on 'Noise'? As culturally loaded or ambiguous as you like! Or, to get a little more deeper into things, talk about an example of art that you feel changed it's envelope over time, as history and the (cognitive) space it inhabits morphs?

JN: It is exactly this slippery aspect of all types of noise that interests me. Binary positions of in and out don’t last long when thinking about noise. For example, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (1825) sounded like noise to his audience at the time of its creation. Beethoven’s publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro, and they subsequently published it separately. Would anyone think of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge as noise now? No.

As for examples of works that make a strong case in point of how cognitive and visual noise is present: the entire mid-section of Immersion into Noise goes through my history of such works, starting with the Apse of Lascaux. I should perhaps mention a slightly more recent audio example here: that of Luigi Russolo, a futurist painter who was perhaps the first noise music artist. His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Many artists are now familiar with his manifesto.

But as far as art that changed it's envelope over time, as history and the (cognitive) space it inhabits morphed: I would pick the prime example of anti-art; Marcel Duchamp's Fountain of 1917. Of course, anti-art is the definition of a work of art that may be exhibited or delivered in a conventional context but makes fun of serious art or challenges the nature of art. Yet it cannot help itself from being considered art. So it moves from being not art into the envelope of art. Such was the noisy mechanamorphic impulse of Duchamp's works from 1911-1912, and the machine works that follow his exposure to Raymond Roussel, are an inescapable point of reference for avant-garde noise of the 20th century. The machine in that century, for Duchamp, was the symbol of total bliss through pure mentality and auto-sexual autonomy in contradiction to the horror that mechanized war had brought. By hypnotizing attention, the noisy machine freed Duchamp from troubling obsessions and personal hang-ups through the alternative model of android life; intimating both a rush of desperation and an ecstatic release, refracted through a web of glazed impersonality. If the machine, as a representative of noise, was a fascination Duchamp used to balance out ineptness, whether of the mind or flesh, his mechanamorphic production and machine forms refigured the human body into an almost mechanized substance. In The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even, which positions a central bride machine over a bachelor apparatus, Duchamp, with the strictness of machinery, applies fantasy to seduction and masturbation. In a way, Duchamp suggests that we (as viewers) can use his art as a vehicle for self-transcendence into a kind of dream world of nonsense sex. By mechanizing sex and dreams, this nonsense of the sex machine converts sexual energy into artistic noise energy.But the preferred decisive point in understanding immersion into noise in the context of art is its facilitation of a more potent conscious-totality in the art audience produced by merging the audience's perceptual circuitry with the artwork. Ultimately for me, though, noise is just a rupture signifying transmission of excess and/or negativity for the artist to employ or disregard at will. It can be lavish and thrilling. It can be incredibly tedious and boring.

V: I suppose that Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is perhaps another example of Noise/noise and also another example of classical music riots.

Using art as a primer, a space to generate such "potent conscious-totality in the art audience" brings to mind a number of works that are only completed upon the viewers active engagement - for example Rirkirt Tiravanija's works or the recent Piccadilly Community Centre - both only function upon viewer engagement, but also neither strictly create the conscious-totality in the audience (that you mention), just requiring active participation is not really the criteria here.

Biophilia by Mark Cypher may create noise, I imagine the participants endless reflexivity upon the fact that they are moving the art, they are the art and that they are an intrinsic part of the art - thinking around the artists intentions but putting them in the epicentre of visuals and consequences.

JN: Yes. Even if when we narrow our scope just to classical music, it is still quite interesting. Another early example is Parade, a performance produced at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917, that was conceived by Jean Cocteau, with design by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Eric Satie. The extra-musical materials used in the production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Coctueau and included a dynamo, Morse code machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters.

In Futurism and Musical Notes, Daniele Lombardi discusses the mysterious case of the French composer Carol-Bérard; a pupil of Isaac Albeniz. Carol-Bérard is said to have composed a Symphony of Mechanical Forces in 1910 – but little evidence as emerged thus far to establish this assertion.

Arseny Avraamov's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922. In 1923 Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive.

Another example is Ottorino Respighi's 1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome, which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording. Also in 1924 George Antheil created a work entitled Ballet Mécanique with instrumentation that included 16 pianos, 3 airplane propellers, and 7 electric bells. The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece.

In 1930 Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds. Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called a continuous flowing curve of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931 Varese's Ionisation for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lions's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise. In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises".

Your other art examples amply make my point that visual-cognitive noise is a hidden key component in visual and electronic art today. I might include my own recent work as another example: asstrOnOmical affected autOmata

V: I noticed that your linked video of work 'asstrOnOmical affected autOmata' is used as a video response to Thou Art That talking about Speculative Realism. Noticing this just boosted a notion I had at the back of my mind regarding Noise. Speculative Realism explores the metaphysical 'aspects' of the empirical/sensory data world around us, or raises the questions about the dynamics between these things... I remember seeing Hecker's Speculative Solution at The Tate Britain/Urbanomic Event - The Real Thing and thinking that if I believe, if I apply myself (standing with a group of people who aslo want to experience the same revelation as myself in a large hall, a massive established public space), then it's there in two respects - endo-logically but also via sensory - exo-data (and here the two concepts of pareidolia and apophenia raise their heads). Noise could arguably operate under a similar syndrome of onto-mechanics? So does religion in many ways - do you have any thoughts about the macro-context of Noise with regards to the secular space we are inhabiting today, in some ways i'm asking if Speculative Realism

and/or Nechvatalian Noise quenches (perhaps for some) a theo(god)philic(love/r) thirst?

JN: Yes, that Speculative Realism has been wetting the parched dryness of a mislaid metaphysical inquisitiveness recently - a metaphysical inquisitiveness that art has been (since its beginnings) continuously jacked into. Certainly an art of noise, by its very nature, must retain its speculative character because of the impossibility of attaining conclusive experimental data in art. But I am especially interested in what I perceive as Speculative Realism’s ties to Pataphysics. I discuss pataphysical noise in my book’s Conclusion: Noise Against Oblivion. What I find relevant here is Speculative Realism’s yearnings to surpass, as you say, the “empirical/sensory data world around us” in that Pataphysics is involved with the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws that preside over exceptions—an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Alfred Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.” Pareidolia and apophenia are salient concepts here - and I am pleased that you raised their weird heads. I wonder if you saw Richard Wright’s Turner Prize show at Tate Britain (London) in 2009-2010? For me viewing Wright’s pareidolia-like no title (2009) set in motion a collection of considerations about the contemporary condition of noise in art. I think I can sum it up for you by saying that the success of Wright’s large, but delicate, wall mural signaled to me the return of magical immersive noise thinking into mainstream art at the expense of the pop icon/logo. Its gold, monochromatic (but kaleidoscopic) ground dominated its configuration, producing an all-over fervor that needed to be interacted with imaginatively.

I felt immediately a sense of languor in the room. People were in no hurry to move along. Rather, they seem immersed in their own mirrored filigreed realms. Clearly we were in the presence of an invitation to noise reverie. The composition has a distinct resemblance to the kind of work I was doing in 1991-92 when I first uploaded my drawings into a computer and began mirroring them with Photoshop. My companion at the museum also pointed out that Wright’s mural shares its structure with pioneers of algorithmic art, such as Roman Verostko, especially his series Epigenesis: The Growth of Form from 1997—pen and ink drawings executed with a multi-pen plotter coupled to a PC—or the mirroring manipulations in the early 90s work of the British artist Carl Fudge based on the Durer etching, Resurrection. I was slightly annoyed by the uneven lighting that produced distinct hot spots on what should have been a unified undifferentiated field. But nevertheless, this golden work (not at all typical of Wright’s other temporary murals) made opportune a re-appropriation of my finer senses in a way similar to the experience of my listening to the prepared piano Sonatas and Interludes of John Cage. It was more noise affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic. The work was full of complex inter-relational transitions and rhythmic overlapping, interlacing perceptions. It displayed noisy elasticity by coupling sameness with difference. Forms emerge from other forms, both up and down in scale, and nested within larger units, so that things became component parts of other things. Image-formations surfaced from the depths of our mind. If the primary feature distinguishing aesthetic noise consciousness is glitched imagination, it is worth recalling that imagination’s two components, visioning and symbolizing, are integral to heightening perception and intuition. Indecision, ambiguity and conflict became dynamic and useful. The apparitions and angelic visual pleasures concealed in the florid ground of no title turned apparent “flaws,” such as the all-over ambivalence of the mural’s superficially illusory groundlessness, into affirmative values. That was the interfering shift I detected in what I think of as the responsibility of looking—a shift towards (and into) visual noise. Here I could re-appropriate my fragile capacity to visualize in a field where the noise of bewilderment and indistinctness govern. Here was an interiorly reverberating resonance that could not be appropriated by capital. Here one feels oneself feeling as a first person singular. This is a shift towards an anti-pop, no-logo emancipatory labor. One that is indicative of social relationships outside of passive pop consumption. Here I could take back my head. Caught in the cognitive interactions of its florid web, I drifted off into the Tate’s permanent collection and was rewarded by a similarly mirrored and webbed enticement in the lace collar depicted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger in his Mary Rogers, Lady Harington. So Richard Wright’s no title seemed to be pointing me at a reevaluation of how to look at high art, and to the necessity of our re-conceiving it in our time as an art of inner noise.

Would you be more specific about “macro-context of Noise with regards to the secular space we are inhabiting”? Which macro-contexts have you in mind?

Part Two Following soon

London Riots 2011 Analysis

2011-09-05T17:40:00.001+01:00

Too much text has been spewed around the media and blogosphere about the London riots, so instead here are two meme generator images that sum up the most salient political revelation to come out of the whole mess.

Till the World Ends, Pop at the End of History - Sicker than the Remix

2011-07-17T13:13:00.001+01:00

Cory Arcangel's recent observations regarding the 'eternal redevelopment' and 'recontexturalization' of Euro-Trance within the Pop careers of Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, reinforce some of my more general sentiments regarding cultural production in the current climate as well as my recent analysis of specific contemporary literary examples such as Reza Negarestani's theory-fiction Cyclonopedia ( Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves also springs to mind ). Essentially the mode of todays production is not to produce anything new, but rather to activate a post production praxis of re-mix, re-contexturalization, re-presentation and re-packaging - this could be regarded as rather capitalist in essence but this would be an unfairly politicized and negative reading. There is not an alternative utopian option available, vampiric praxis and socio regurgitation are the tools of todays craft, to master these and 'create' an awesome collage is what must be explored by writers and artists. After my previous ramblings about the intrinsic mechanisms employed and re-deployed by Negarestani in Cyclonopedia, to re-mix and re-appropriate existing materials to conjure a new and thrilling sensation is not dissimilar to the re-mixing and re-producing of pop materials by Britney Spears and Lady Gaga that Cory Archangel writes of. For readers of Negarestani's and Mark Z Danielewski's re-workings the effect is discombobulating and frightening, for listeners of Britney Spears and Lady Gaga the effect is exciting, ultra high definition, exhilarating and vivid - but I'd argue that all four cultural contributions align with a praxis paradigm of post-production, re-mix, re-contexturalization, re-presentation and re-packaging. The effect, the panorama of sensation created is vastly different for each, but the mode of creations share more similarities and differences.

I will focus on the sonic aspects of this praxis phenomena first, there are more examples outside of pop, but initially I'll display the particular sounds Cory Archangel identifies, namely "Auto-Tune, heavily “side-chained” compression, and new waveform-editing software enabling thicker percussion sounds—that give the music a fresh feeling." in Britney Spears' single 'till the world ends':

Notice how 90% of the track is a warm up, the submerged bass heavy "whoa whoa whoa..." works along the same melody as the verse - "dj what you, what you, waiting for". Beat layering is the star here, amongst 'still D.R.E.' stabs and rushes of warm synth stabs the momentum builds for two minutes and thirty five seconds before the crescendo falls.... what we are treated to is a rather fetishized strata of 'treatments', a melody being re-worked and, upgraded and re-vamped multiple times until finally ripe for the devastating crescendo of the main chorus... the continual building of 'non-events' as Arcangel so rightly exclaims is essentially what the first 2:35 of this track are about. Here is Arcangel's text regarding one of Britney Spears previous singles "Hold it Against Me":

"LISTENING TO BRITNEY SPEARS’s recent single “Hold It Against Me”—which launched this past January at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart—one can’t help but think that aspects of its production and structural composition betray the year of its release. The song is essentially one long crescendo, overlaid on a classic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format. The chorus builds in each iteration until finally it re-appears, accompanied by a beat, with only about thirty seconds left in a song a little shy of four minutes. The entire song is constructed around this moment, and the effect of the rhythm entering is exacerbated by the production techniques—synth washes, digital piano, and thirty-second-note drum rolls familiar from the legendary Roland TR-909 drum machine—that have been used to tease us repeatedly about the climax’s impending entrance by continually building to nonevents. Although it’s frustrating and maddening, this withholding of gratification, which the song presents over and over, is what ultimately keeps us listening. And these elaborate, endurance-taxing crescendos, as well as the technical means used to amplify their tension, are all in fact taken from a single vernacular, one that is hardly contemporary: 1990s Euro-trance."

O.K. so the promotional video for Spears' "Hold it Against Me" may well be the most hideous concoction of cultural book marks you see today ( cyberpunkXwedding dressXbondageXbleached and blinded squatting ninjas!?! ) - but the sonic mechanics of anticipation are similar. A slow, laboured re-vamping, a momentum built from technologically driven renewal and re-workings of the same musical theme. A fetish for the moment, build from pre-existing materials, must be the praxis for such works, finding the right remix, the right sound and the right moment to unleash the core of the material, like an avid film fan, who has seen Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' a hundred times before, still going to great lengths to ensure the next viewing is 'perfect', blue-ray high definition, 7.1 surround sound, the right seating, the right time - nothing is new here, but existing material can be re-presented 'better' then they were the first time you experienced them. What do you like? Trance? Hip-Hop? Let it be re-presented to you in a wider panorama than ever before.

This trend of re-invigorating and re-animating existing pop music materials is not unique to Britney Spears or the kings and queens of american pop music, this paradigm of praxis is being worked through/upon/in at 'bedroom' levels of modern cultural production - for example Witch House, essentially slows and relishes, re-frames and primes large chunks of culturally entrenched pop moments. Salvage Punk ( also see Evan Calder Williams ), Witch House and the implicit retrocentric praxis of modern pop phenomena like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga all stem from a genesis void of new and saturated with existing, loaded and potent cultural capital with which to play, worship and fetishize. DJ Screw's, slowed, screwed and chopped mixtapes are massive influences upon all three of the aforementioned modes ( Salvage Punk, Witch House, Modern Pop ). The chopped signature is evident in Witch House and Britney Spears 'skipping' vocal track on 'Till the World Ends', the slowing and reframing is even more obviously employed in Witch House and also the more video based and electronic offerings of Salvage Punk artists. DJ Screws, sizzurp drenched and stoned out ( I'm not dismissing these chemicals role in his works aesthetic ) re-workings and dragged out relishing of existing tracks has permeated so many producers praxis today - but perhaps his influence was not directly singular, but rather that the coincidence of being ahead of the curve and intoxicated meant his praxis' development arrived at a stage that would be inevitable for so many artists praxis years ahead of him to end up in?

Re-approaching Arcangels observations, the priming of a track for a moment, the 'frustrating and maddening' continual 'building to nonevents'. Is a key facet of Screw inspired Witch House tracks. Take the morbidly introspective and melancholic dirge of ✞▇ Ϯᴪ₥ʒ ɪʂ Џ₱ᴖ₱ ▇✞ on the Nate Dog tribute mix "Don't want to lose you: a tribute to Nate Dog:

<p>&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://immaculatecollective.bandcamp.com/track/-"&amp;amp;gt;✞▇ Ϯᴪ₥ʒ ɪʂ Џ₱ᴖ₱ ▇✞ by IMMACULATE COLLECTIVE&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;</p>

Across so many genres the practice of making a moment, a crescendo, last forever is now a mode of creation, an impossible end in itself - like an addict chasing the horizion . No doubt there may be deeper political currents beneath this phenomena, I would suspect that an accelerating world, saturated with culture, data, coverage and tools means that artists of today are not dissimilar to a millionaire who has everything retreating into the garden to cherish the moments of quiet, volume and excess, variety and possibility to not replace memories and feelings, despite the sonic form of Salvage Punk, Witch House and Modern Pop only being afforded by technology, the accessibility only being afforded by technology the impetus behind so many creations is still more intrinsically human and emotional then ever. One can become so cynical but to see the buoyancy of humanistic tenderness and nostalgia is wonderful.

Take your time:

Urbanomix?

2011-07-01T22:31:00.000+01:00

Mix 3 parts A J Pakula with 2 parts Adam Curtis, add Reza Negarestanian theory fiction and shake viciously - order will form from such wretched destruction.....

Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia & (re)Materialist Horror

2011-06-11T21:34:00.000+01:00

Another acutely inanthropocentric theme ( for want of a better definition, re-defining will follow ) between Lovecraft's fictions and Cyclonopedia is touched upon by O in the opening paragraph of his essay: "Apart from the numerous direct references to Lovecraft and his so-called Cthulhu mythos in Negarestani’s philosophy-fiction, an implicit link exists between the two writers in their shared anti-humanism". For the following topic "anti-humanism" would be an apt phrase, but it is not a writers anti-humanism or even a universes anti-humanism ( see my earlier, etymologically pedantic assertion that this is a fallacy, -perhaps a flash that all humans, even learned bloggers like O harbour an intrinsically anthropocentric formatting! ). The anti-humanism I would like to explore has a genesis of pure philosophical conflict - anthropocentric epistemologies and ontologies ( and their respective stratas ) collide violently, this seismic event re-inforces cosmicist and dustist paradigms - maximalisms, cognitive dissonance, de-contexturalization and rabid discombobulations are simultaneously symptoms and catalysts of amalgamating/disintegrating truths, realities, theories and fictions.... the feedback is violent, traumatic and ( most importantly ) infinite.

To begin let us re-examine the infamous opening paragraph from Call of Cthulhu:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain."

The "placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity" is our inability to fully comprehend any form of context, we can guess connections, we can Only Connect - but essentially there is always a 'beyond' ( Xeno, exteriors, extraphies ) not matter how intrepidly we chase the horizon. Alvansons temporal, geographical and contextual struggles within the opening incognitum hactenus mirror our own struggles, and relish with russian dolls, horizon chasing and Xenopoetical connections. As Ruthless Culture highlights cyclonopedia "embodies an academic culture where impenetrability, the playful use of data from other disciplines and indifference to objective truth are not hidden secrets but standard operating procedure". Truths, occultisms, fictions and data are putrefying together to form a blackness we can sink into. Whilst reading Cyclonopedia it's incredibly easy to become disorientated, one forms multiple internal narrative hypo-hypo-diegesis ( poropoetix, porocryptics xenopoiesis? ) and ones google history suddenly reads: The Valley of Hinnom, Tellurian-Magnetic, Pazuzu demon, The Wheel of Pestilence, Zurvan Akarana, Tetrasomia.... Hyperstition. As any internet user will know, after hours of crimson-eyed online exploration a subjects context is often no more defined than before the accelerating quest through endless obliquely connected memes, themes, philosophies and paradigms left one dizzy and breathless.

Infinite porocryptics - Xenopoetix, a constant searching for connections, contexts and truths and endless infinite realms, "black seas of infinity", "an inability of the human mind to correlate all it's contents", "The sciences, each straining in its own direction", "dissociated knowledge". Cyclonopedia and it's mechanisms are a metaphor for itself, it's production praxis and the forces that created it. Rather than imagine the tome ( its creation, components, receptions and significance ) in a Borgesian nature it's vital to attempt to psycho-animate these facets under the more dizzying paradigms of cyber-theory and the data saturated sphere we are currently existing through. As truths and fictions become one and the same narrative we see academic assertions that are re-constructed upon a neo-aesthetica. "Cyclonopedia presents Theory as a form of artistic creation" - this is a piece of art that performs a profound demonstration across polylogics, performing simultaneously our cyber-figurian syndrome in unison with our engagement. This dissolution of anthropocentric epistemologies and ontologies is a new mode of enquiry ( mirroring cyberlogics ) that is inanthropic on an ontological level. The massive realms, the lack of distinctions between truths and fictions, theories and metaphors, the de-contexturalized materials are rendered in a neo-aesthetic format that is innately incompatible with our ontological formatting and capacities - in-anthropontologix?

Negarestani's Cyclonopedia has ( I feel ) been designed as a somewhat hyperstitional academic aesthetic, the theory and fictions within building a symphony of endless metastitional webs - our substitional experience of Cyclonopedia is akin to "the piecing together of dissociated knowledge..... open(ing) up such terrifying vistas". The experience of opening Cyclonopedia and racing though it's infinite maze reminds me of the Hallway that the character Navidson explores in Mark Z. Danielewski's ergodic ( and somewhat poromythic crypto theory-fiction ) House of Leaves. As the reader ventures deeper the universe changes, the more one grasps the slimier the object, the harder you stare the blacker the air, the faster you run the taller the staircase.

Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia & Materialist Horror - Inanthropocentricism? ( Micro )

2011-06-11T13:51:00.002+01:00

After reading this wonderful interpretation of cyclonopedia I felt compelled to highlight further connections upon the shrewd readings by Doin' the Lambeth Warp A.K.A. "O". The anti-anthropocentric aspects of both Reza Negarestani and H. P. Lovecraft are well observed, the 'otherness' the 'exteriorites' that loom as modes of horror are intrinsic to both paradigms and praxis within Lovecraft and the wonderfully discombobulating theory-fiction of Negarestani's Cyclonopedia. O highlights many similarities in Lovecraft's fiction and Negarestani's theory-fiction, body horror, extra-materialism, materialistic nihilisms and the primal fear of an indifferent other orchestrating our universe. All these notions emerge from an essential de-centering of ourselves. O summarises this as "anti-anthropocentric" however anti is essentially against, and to say an entity is against oneself is essentially anthropocentric. The old ones of Lovecraft's fictions and the oil of Cyclonopedian narratives do not work against our centering - because, as is so petrifying - we simply are not at a center, in fact we do not feature on any scale, we are not part of the currency of the universe, however important and in control our world presents itself to be, we are not significant, from behind our eyes the importance of our existence is a fallacy. Perhaps a slightly more appropriate term for this ultra-nihilist materialism/cosmicism would be inanthropocentric, the prefix 'in' meaning 'not' or 'lacking' rather than "anti-anthropocentric" which presupposes we matter enough for something to be in conflict with us, which is simply not the ramification of the myriad avenues O pursues across these texts in Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia and Materialist Horror. Rather than hang my assertions upon a mere etymological in-discrepancy within the essay I will re-examine various facets that O highlights, and re-inforce the intrinsic inanthropicism as the genesis of horrific trauma. Let us commence with the many facets of body horror in Lovecraft's work which are brought to our attention by O here:

"But we should not get distracted. Metaphysical terrors take a back seat to sheer physical horror in all of Lovecraft’s best writing. In many of his most celebrated passages the emotion that is evoked most strongly is not even fear per se but revulsion. There is always a hideous miasmic stench, there are always gruesome bioluminescent fungi and nameless slithering invertebrates; traditional horror tropes such as blood and bones are generally eschewed in favour of the ubiquitous slime. The very quantity of ectoplasm, mucus and miscellaneous snot in these stories is startling, before we even consider the stream of adjectives describing them, which gush from the author’s pen like the issue of a gangrenous sore. Perhaps the most evocative description of fleshly mortification is that suffered by the unfortunate Gardner family in The Colour out of Space(1927), who are not so much bodily consumed or even possessed by the sinister entity as they are parasitized and drained by it, reminding one of a hapless insect falling victim to an ichneumon wasp or predatory fungus. This is supreme science-fiction body-horror to rival even the psychosexual nightmare of the Alien films – the entomo-reptilian monster that stars therein having been created, of course, by the Swiss visionary artist and Lovecraft devotee, H. R. Giger."

Horreur de corps in Negarestani's Cyclonopedia are also referenced here:

"A comparable fate seems to befall Hamid Parsani, the fictional Iranian archaeologist in Cyclonopedia. After coming into possession of a mediaeval relic associated with an obscure pre-Islamic Persian cult, he begins to suffer from a leprous skin condition and a concurrent worsening of his already somewhat febrile mental state. Shortly before his final disappearance, one of his friends evocatively describes him as “a bulging syphilitic brain with a pink leech dangling at the root of it”."

There is certainly a physicality present in both texts, there is revulsion, viscerality and the grotesque all pouring forth in a fantastically loquacious dexterity of prose. These are engrossing deliveries but my interest lies in questioning why their presence is so horrific on an ontological premise. Where O presumes that "Metaphysical terrors take a back seat to sheer physical horror" I am inclined to disagree, the physicality, the revulsion is a constant ( in many well described horror tales, detailing the gruesome will always lead towards an effect of repulsion ) but the astonishing depth of terror evoked is not solely a consequence of description or bodily revulsions, they are present but not the cause of such devastating metaphysical rupturing, the cause of these horrors in both Lovecraft and Negarestani's Cyclonopedia is still inanthropicism! Rather than study the wonderfully descriptive language of such penetrating trauma it is vital to examine and frame the acts being conveyed in detail and to question if these acts within the narratives are anthropocentric or inanthropocentric. O exclaims "Perhaps the most evocative description of fleshly mortification is that suffered by the unfortunate Gardner family in The Colour out of Space(1927), who are not so much bodily consumed or even possessed by the sinister entity as they are parasitized and drained by it". Here the essentially inanthropicentric ( I say inanthropic and not cosmicist due to such traumas, within the narrative, occurring on a micro, personal and bodily level ) is unearthed. Consumption and possession are anthropocentric, to be consumed one is the predators meal, the focus, to be possessed by another entity one is again the focus - despite being devoured or owned by are an evil predator or foe one is still the center of the world, the universe hinging around ones existence. To be parasitized is to be positioned upon ( not 'within' or 'in' ) a chronically inanthropocentric context, the host is not the focus, the parasite is indifferent to hosts existence, one is a means to an end for another being, a habitat.... We don't look at the dirt we roam, we stare at the sun - as does the wondrous Cordyceps Unilateralis.

In Cyclonopedia O observes how "A comparable fate seems to befall Hamid Parsani...a leprous skin condition and a concurrent worsening of his already somewhat febrile mental state." most likely the symptom of the "bulging syphilitic brain with a pink leech dangling at the root of it". The parasitic emphasis within this body horror imagery is apparent, Parsani is perhaps infested and hosting, a curse of inanthropocentric connotations. However, this aspect of gruesome decentering via parasitic modes is not dissimilar to another fascinating enquiry Negarestani has embarked upon. The traumatic inanthropocentric horror, the madness, the slip of reality, the experience of de-centering is perhaps operating along similar ontological consequence vectors as Nupta Contagioso/Cadevera....the morbid realisation of ones self as a part of something, and not being the heart and soul of a body/world. This must be torturous ( ontologically and psychologically ) like the Mezentian punishment described in The Aeneid. The ontological trauma is not wholly symmetrical, but facets of interior implications share formal similarities I feel with the psychological woes of parasitism and existential pains of uncovering an inanthropocentric galaxy. The Mezentian torture, the excruciating writhing of the mind in such ( putrefaction / necrosmosis ) context, grappling with the reality(ies) of being(s) amidst the whirlpools of ontological ramifications shares the same inanthropocentric praxial vectors ( modes ) as hosting ( parasitism woes ) and Lovecraftian Cosmicism and inanthropocentric body horrors. The further implications that Negarestani hunts in Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo do not, I feel, offer much scope for highlighting such vivid inanthropocentric parallels with despite their ( the later themes in Corpse Bride ) Mezentian genesis. I do not wish to digress, but rather thought that the inanthropocentricisms implicit ( in and orbiting ) this trio of trauma ( 1- Mezentian Torture in Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo, 2 - Parasitic body horrors in Cyclonopedia and 3 - Lovecraftian Cosmicism both subjective/micro and objectively/macro animated ) are quite a pertinent and haunting theme across the texts.

Till The World Ends

2011-05-09T00:01:00.000+01:00

After reading Adam Cutis' reading of Osama bin Laden's death, the following two tracks feel prescient. The Salem remix is essentially a dragged, chopped and screwed format of the original Britney Spears version, I suppose the following are just exhibit A, from the case stated in my previous post here. Salvage punk, archive claustrophobia, and collage compulsion are starting to feel like syndromes of today's world, an inevitable feedback, a distortion of infinite regression, (neo)meta²

Slow-mo.... Capitalisms Remission : Hibernation from the cold speed of now

2011-04-19T22:31:00.001+01:00

Firstly, apologies for not posting more ( I know quite a few visit each day ), the Analemma project is taking up the little spare time I have. Fittingly, the subject ahead is mostly concerned with temporality, and the existential catalysts that yield sublime pockets of syrupy drag time amidst an accelerating world. As one lets the years slip by time seems to be running quicker and quicker, there are myriad metaphysical theories around this subject, I won't attempt to any address here, instead I'll focus on the cultural theme of slowing/stretching time that seems to be more and more prevalent in more than one aspect of cultural production as the second decade of the 21st century begins.

Minimal Dubstep, Chopped & Screwed, Witch House, Drag and Hypnogogic Pop are all ( in at least one respect or more ) examples of a creeping taediōsus-chronos at play in contemporary cultural production. Modern music is an obvious realm whereby the drift to slow is conspicuous, amidst the relentless 'New' and voracious MTVian force feeding the solace of a calmer ( or just slower ) experience is an odd interlude that's occurring more and more frequently, arching skywards between the X axis of popularity and the Y axis of ubiquity.... The drag could just be a ploy, a music video whereby nothing happens is often the most eye catching, even the most casual viewer is desensitized to the stale flickering of the established music promo mode: 2 shots a second, 3 back drops, 5 costume themes providing the filling for an ill conceived narrative prologue to feature to epilogue sandwich-type composition. Producing something so slow and releasing it into such a rabidly paced world has a similar effect as that of selective colour in modern film and art works, Spielbergs red girl in Schindlers List being the most obvious example, V/VM's time warped re-animations of time worn 'classics', Burials echos and James Blakes minimal vocoder noodling are all angelic 'red girls' against the grey of today. However, as a trick to gain greater recognition or yield a weightier impression this 'red girl' mechanism would have be exhausted of all potency long ago, possibly in the early 00's, instead the slowing is widening to a pandemic, soft clocks litter todays cultural landscape. Most forms of popular music now harbour a sub-genre of lethargic tempos or are even themselves the genesis of larger emerging stoned out memes that are gaining greater exposure and popularity. Hip Hop has screwed and chopped, electronica has ambient, metal has sludge and drone, rock has post rock. There are possibly more examples of cross pollination and mutation between genres amidst the slower spectrums of execution rather than the classic(read entrenched)-tempo entities.

V/VM's time warped remix of Robbie Williams 'Angels'.

Salvage Punk, is perhaps a driving force between much of the creative praxis behind modern cultural productions increasing tendency to decelerate, and hibernate in introspection. The notion of using existing materials is a recurring theme, art and music at the end of history have few options - remix, collage, parody and meditation present themselves as logical economies of production simultaneously for both capital creator and consumer, at the end of history Salvage(punk) is important ( the punkian aspect = the DIY component ) for there will never be another Beatles or Rolling Stones, the cultural significance and gravity afforded to culture past is receding under the horizon behind ourselves, as the expansion of our universe accelerates year on year the cultural gravity of the atoms swirling around us diminishes in correlation. To re-imagine and re-animate yesterdays relics, to find new ( some could argue intrinsically derivative ) methods to re-present is now a worthy talent in the cold desert, post producers are the new artists, necessarily leaching off an established cultural field from a massive relic, piggy-backing upon the gravity of familiarity, soaring out of the dark on a larger orbit ( and reflexive trajectory ) afforded by the source materials inherent potentiality.

As these genecentricist satellites gyrate elliptical, and orbit parasitically the drag emerges, to mine the strata of source material it's necessary to slow down, to dissect, relish and re-live. As this mode of production proliferates and slo-mo salvage becomes ubiquitous, the doppler-effect of the end of history rings in ones ears. Red shift slurrs mournfully for the end of 'new'.

D.J. Screw's 'chopped 'n' screwed' mix of 'Still D.R.E.'

Nick Lands 'Fanged Noumena' emerges from the darkness....

2011-04-01T23:24:00.000+01:00

Fanged Noumena is here at last! Urbanomic and Sequence Press have collaborated and released a beautifully produced 666 page edition ( aptly ) that harbours all of Nick Land's rabid, writhing and contorting texts from 1987-2007. The image opposite is lifted from Jake & Dinos Chapman's infamous 'Disasters of War IV', a similar image from the series is the cover image for Fanged Noumena ( pictured below ). The image I have selected here shows a rather vampiric chiroptera feeding upon a sleeping ( in perhaps any sense ) being. At the back of my mind there is an analogous resonance between a vampiric being's bloodlust and the act of Jake & Dinos Chapman feeding upon the cultural collateral of Francisco Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings. No doubt the metaphor of the vampiric habit, the nocturnal feeding frenzy, could be extended to academia, in particular philosophy, as well as the Chapman Brothers rather capitalist cannibalism. After reading Land's intensely hallucinatory but razor strict 'Thirst for Annihilation' ( or in fact any of Land's texts ) the lasting impression is that of the authors superiority, he does not 'feed off', or piggy back upon the tsunami of historic thoughts or previous doctrines or paradigms, Land don't name check for kicks. Rather, the tone of his examination and/or implementation of histories scholars and renegades is that of knowing confidence, his efficiency to drop 'Mad, Black Deleuzianism' upon/amidst/around Heidegger and Kantian strata is not a praxis of schizophrenic autodidactism, not a simplistically (bi)polar punkian talent of juxtaposing cyberpunkian themes with cryptography, occult, numerological and grammatological. Land activates strategically, employing only the most poignant and devastating of philosophical devices at his disposal, that history and his expansive learnings have afforded, His writings could well be appreciated merely for the wealth/breath of influences and philosophical avenues re-animated and/or explored but the aspect to cherish most, that which is most Landian, is the talent to re-contexturalise myriad, disparate entities ( each more vivid and alive than that last secondary text wherein they arrived to us ) to re-formulate a coherence of destruction and nihilism, re-mixing and coagulation, his cold, machinic orchestration is but an instrument/vehicle to convey/carry his truly accelerationist and inhumanly progressive thoughts.

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Analemma

2011-01-09T21:48:00.001Z

Analemma

Throughout any mode of enquiry a context is born. An autodidact's journey is peculiar, often elliptical, running off at tangents, gravitating towards fleeting interests, burning desires. Themes, memes, zeitgeists and canons gyrate. The effect is discombobulating if comprehended, however seldom. Often a learner's knowledge is perceived as that which has come to him. Like the notion of the Sun revolving around the Earth, this is not so. We are pulled towards the stars that give us life, towards sources of energy, decay, fusions, implosions and explosions. An Analemma could signify our queer contexts, plotting our paths so wild and frenzied in the cold dawn of empirical retrospect.

Analemma does not intend to provide a strict analysis of any particular topic or theme. It is not a linear re-presentation of enquiries or research; rather, it is an organically born tome harbouring myriad facets of interest(s) acute and oblique. Contexts maybe alien, content maybe curious - in retrospect, at some point, relevance will emerge from such chaotic genesis. Where context is explored, when a relative position is analyzed, this too will shift or morph.

As the shining source of one's journey sleeps on the other side of ones world (consciousness), one squints up at the darkness, in the cold night colours leap and a galaxy of freckles draws our gaze skywards. Peering into the shades of blackness fascinations blossom, apophenic curiosities haunting the panorama. As one's journey orbits the world the pareidolian is re-born as truth and vice-versa.

The first edition of Analemma contains themes and subjects of or obliquely/acutely related to (explored directly and operating in juxtapostion with one another) Occultism, Esotericism, Decay, Contemporary Philosophies, Black, Drone, Doom, Ambient and Experimental facets of Metal and percussively driven music, Avant-Garde Fashion, Theory-fictions, Horror Literature, Ergodic Text, Archaic exhumations, Illustrative Artwork, Greek History, Speculative Realism, Melancology, Literary Criticism, Journalistic Enquiries/Re-interpretations and Lovecraftian fictions and modes of analysis.

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Not Much

2010-11-21T09:39:00.000Z

Not much posting around here recently I'm afraid. I've been dwelling on Mark Z. Danielewski's ergodic House of Leaves and focusing on my new music blog Feynmans Echo.

Katy Perry & Elmo - "you're it" - Post-Production, 3rd Realities and the Perils of Casual Re-Contexturalization.......... + Salvagepunk

2010-10-09T17:31:00.002+01:00

The position of pop stars within ( or throughout ) myriad realities is becoming a slight preoccupation for me lately, socio-politcal aesthetics and contexts that support odd and uncomfortable ontological punctures can be seen frequently to be evoking critical responses that are either relationally over the top or contextually uncalled for in juxtaposition with the actual criticisms specific content. One recent example of this is Lady Gaga's recent PETA riling stunt of wearing a meat dress within the purely fantastic and heavily theatricized aesthetic arena of MTV's predictably gratuitous Video Music Awards ceremony. After my previous comments on the suffocatingly insular sphere that MTV has constructed ( whereby an exterior entity, namely the vividly visceral politic of meat entered the realm of MTVian fantasy ) an exact inversion has occurred, something utterly MTV, utterly fantastic, has cropped up sans le sphere of un-reality in Seasame Street. Katy Perry featured in a guest spot on the iconic American children's program to perform a small send up of her single "Hot'n'Cold", an entity of MTV in another, foreign, world. Opposite Elmo ( the uber-reflexive, third person tensed red thing.. ) Katy Perry, self consciously hams it up amidst the awkward directions of forced parodic theatrics and/or earnest enthusiasm. The feature was pulled from the final cut after a mild amount of protest concerning the amount of cleavage ( Katy's, not Elmo's ) on display. This is not the issue, for as sexually confident ( confidant ) as the Katy Perry brand is, the level of flesh on display opposite Elmo was not particularly provocative, and certainly not unusual in relation to the various other shows that pipe through American television networks and into the young minds each day.

Katy Perry's 'inappropriate' cleavage on Seasame Street and Lady Gaga's meat dress stunt at the VMA's are inversions of each other but both harbour a particular constant - de-contexturalization. Outside of an edited MTV arena, under the cold glare of the studio lights Perry's abysmal acting highlighted that she's just another girl, and over worked star trying to make it, this is a horrific infringement on Seasame Street's philosophical sentiments of simplified world views and positivist teachings. As much as Katy Perry's brand, and offical habitat are fantasy ( MTV ) outside, decontexturalized the collision of realities unnerves, just as the collision of realities at the VMA's previously upset. However cleavage and meat alone do not warrant unease, an awkward clash of realities, simultaneously shattering both polarized worlds does bring forth a rabid need for re-evaluation and urgent comprehension of the problem - hence the 'what is to be done' rabble of inane 'debate'. For the majority, the problem is that which is most apparent, and that is typically whichever facet appears most de-contexturalized and conspicuous be it a dress made from meat of a low cut neck line.

As the mechanics of advertisement and entertainment entrench themselves deeper and deeper in insular auto-dogma any entity wishing to operate across mediums does so perilously. In today's hyper emancipatory realm of data overload post production, the unforgiving cut and paste effects of such a cultural ( capital ) material surplus highlight the tightrope that is navigated, but seldom successfully, when juxtaposing multiples of disparate and alien materials ( realities ), contents and ( subsequently ) contexts. After the Katy Perry and Elmo video featured below are more examples of post-production, one in particular is disastrous and a crude re-contexturalizing of 2 parts, this act essentially destroys each original component, effectively destroying two previous realities without birthing a new or original experience. The other video ( by James Leyland Kirby A.K.A V/VM ) flourishes, dances and creates a spectacle whilst walking the metaphorical tightrope of post-production peril. Inevitably both source materials are altered, contorted and essentially lost, however a 3rd reality is born, Chris De Burgh's vocals, old Top of the Pops footage and pitch-shifting re-animation amalgamate before producing a cohesion - and a new reality. This new reality unavoidably taints and colours the previous history, but it becomes a part of the old as much as a substance of the new. The rot of an established form putrefies and bonds into/through a ( meta ) neo-trope. De Burgh's classic Lady In Red is transformed, the original dies, and a frankenstein cultural entity walks. However, when the trite ( and bemusingly derivative ) lyrics of Three Six Mafia are entwined with the culturally loaded imageries of Disney's Alice in Wonderland, each re-contexturalization provides no support for the opposing component, the history, and vitality of both components are lost, each part is reduced to a materialist level. They are existing ( within the experience - therefor existing ) as nothing more than cut-and-paste collage pieces - if your going to use caviar and gold for collage you need to ensure that it works together, otherwise you are left with three outcomes none of which are positive. 1, wasted caviar, inedible. 2, wasted gold, unappealing to the eye and covered in caviar, not shiny. 3 a rather expensive mess you cannot eat and don't really want to look at. For post-production the sum of parts= 0, because parts are destroyed because the previous form is either transformed or contorted into something new. There is no sum, by juxtaposing, by colliding and piling source materials into one another their intrinsic values are negated. With regard to post-production there is no sum of parts, instead there is a sum of contexts.

Salvage Punk as both American Theorist Evan Calder Williams and the ever shrewd Mark ( K-Punk ) Fisher feel is a positively creative appendage to post-modernism, an "opposition to postmodern pastiche". Rather than creating flat collages of negated and destroyed socio-cultural sources SalvagePunk "retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together in new assemblages", this sentiment of Mark Fisher, published in The Wire Magazine is perhaps slightly over positive, I feel that after viewing either Oneohtrix Point Never's or V/VM's re-animations of Chris De Burgh's Lady in Red any future experience of the original will be jaded, personally I cannot help but feel that the source material is not actually retained as it previously stood, Salvage Punk is not cryonic. Instead Salvage Punk allows a cultural/social/political form to continue to evolve, through a slow erosion and abrasion - ( perhaps on a massive scale, taking to account large temporal paths and seismic cultural events the paths and lives of source materials could be seen as evolving through endless attrition, abrasion and corrasion ). This extension beyond post-production and postmodernism's destructive flattening seems preferable and infinitely more productive that the cold meaningless desert of PMism, this is because Salvagepunk is a symptom of inhabiting a such a barren realm, one only cherishes materials once they become scarce, people only recycle once it's far too late. This interpretation is focused solely on 'now', looking forwards, a la Caspar David Freidrich's 'The Wanderer on the Sea of Fog', Salvagepunk could be a premature admission that nothing new is expected, ironically, it could be this impetus that proves that humans are endlessly creative and apt at finding new, inspiring and enthralling methods of communicating etherial emotions through cultural semiotics and languages.

Katy Perry's collision with Elmo negated both their socio-politcal positionings, with little reward for either component to evolve after the event, what is needed now is a delicate salvaging operation coupled with a socio-contextural inversion of the previously destructive event. My preferred future would involve a series of drink, drug and sexual misdemeanors involving Elmo ( not dissimilar to a lynchean, anti-Alice, regression into the darker underbelly of Hollywood ), and then a subsequent PR drive to re-align the puppet with the world that initially encroached his universe ( MTV ), taking into account his annoying propensity to refer to himself in third person tense he could feature in a series of guest spots on various MTV videos much like the ever moribund snoop dog.

Katy Perry and Elmo on Seasame Street

Three Six Mafia Alice in Wonderland - Smokin on the Dro

V/VM's 'Remix' of Chris De Burgh's 'Lady In Red'

Oneohtrix Point Never - "Nobody here"

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Celestial Mechanics, Aaron Koblin, Flight Patterns ( Mycelium )

2010-10-07T21:52:00.001+01:00

This project, by Aaron Koblin ( and also initially Celestial Mechanics ), embodies, perhaps, in the most accessible and poignant of manners, a major aspect of my thinking on humans, technology ( especially the internet ) and how we inter-relate across geographies, both interior, exterior and through temporal zones. This paradigm is much more prevalent in my mythopoeisthesizing fictional blog Pyrrhic Victories Against Urban Oncostrophy but facets of this philosophy have been touched on previously here, especially in my dialogue with Bejamin Phelan.

Aaron Koblin - 'Flight Patterns'

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Lady Gaga's Meat Dress : MTV meats Real.

2010-09-17T18:40:00.000+01:00

This recent reporting of the celeb's ( she's not quite a celebrity yet ) escapade at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards struck a chord somewhere within my addled brain. Firstly, I am not a fan of Lady Gaga's music or videos, I find her work derivative in the worst sense of the word, parodic - no, simply semi-pro reenactments of already parodied pop memes and aesthetics. Secondly, I have no interest what-so-ever in the animal rights facet of the reportage, was wearing a dress of meat was a waste of the resources that many animals died for? - Yes, but then tons of meat, are thrown away each day on a massive scale, some simply goes past it's sell by date before disposal, some is over cooked by careless chefs and discarded hastily within a heated kitchen - meat is wasted, capitalism rolls on, this is nothing new, it's not good, it's not ethical, but it doesn't warrant such urgent evaluation and disscussion as Lady Gaga's recent stunt at the MTV VMA's has appeared to cause ( although I expect 99% of the material born from this stunt will be focused, rather passionately, on animal right issues ).

The various semiotics of wearing meat have been addressed before. Canadian artist Jana Sterbak is known for a sculptural work in the form of a dress sewn from various slices of dried meat. The work was made over a decade ago. even further back, Anne Bean, performance artist and one-time member of seventies glam-pop group The Moodies is reputed to have worn a dress made of raw bacon. As a statement, as a performance, as action art Lady Gaga has not been remotely creative or groundbreaking ( but then, this is no change to previous Lady Gaga events ). I don't intend to dispute the various semiotic implications surrounding the uses of meat within fashion/art/performance, these aspects still exist but just do not the warrant global tabloid reaction that Lady Gaga has accrued ( by implications and aspects of such a meat I'm referring to the fairly obvious connections that such a material can drawn into - for example the parallel of fresh meat being the performers MTV pimps out to the large global population, the parallel of all 'products' having a sell by date, a long painful growth before a brief spell center stage, in the lime-light, being/s consumed ). Even in stricter terms of deduction limited only to Gaga's stale attempts at media provocation, the reaction to Gaga's VMA outfit has been far greater than any reaction that should correspond or align with any notion connected with animal rights issues or the more socio-political implications of meat wearing/wasting. Lady Gaga has actually worn an outfit of meat before ( just as wasteful, just as distasteful and with the same concoctions of implications mentioned previously ) on the cover of Japan's Mens Vogue Magazine ( as shown ). In both lurid attempts of edgy posturing and provocation the components of animal rights issues, waste, socio-politcal ramifications, and crude metaphors and allegories for women artists/the artist etc are all present. What made the VMA stunt so different, what caused the column space? Context. Fashion photography is now predominantly split into real and unreal, there are quite simply traditionalist fantastics ( David LaChapelle, Rankin etc ) and realists, perhaps the latter being increasingly successful and mainstream ( Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller etc ). In fashion photography, the documentation of imperfection, the impulsive recording of fun and desire has established itself as an aesthetic, I will not speculate on the reasons for this recent shift, but state that this aspect of art, reality and it's oddly indigestible form/appearance/politics are present within fashion, art and culture magazine. This reality is not present within MTV's politics. A simple statement, but in almost all of the media giants output there exists a suffocating homogeny, and a smothering insulation of a fixed paradigm.

The Hills, My Sweet Sixteen and Punkd all have a massive theatricality, the staging is meticulously thorough, the reactions considered, the laughs saccharine, canned and fake. An Ellisean universe whereby even the reality, undercover, documentary is theatricized. One can slip through stage, to street, to club to dark apartment in the outskirts within MTV without ever being confronted with reality - horror, crime, angst or elation are products to portray, not emotions to live through. This is simply because MTV is an advert for something that is desirable but essentially non-existent. My favourite example of the MTV paradigm at work occurs when bands or pop stars re-enact a hateful walk out or a desperate fleeing through the Brechtian curtain of show-biz, only to perform this journey with full make up, perfect lighting, sponsors attire and a polished rent-a-crowd, paparazzi or fans in tow, in position and in shot. Unfortunately meat cannot be polished, raw, striated muscle tissue looks like little else. The 25 pound dress of meat was suspected to be cooking under the stage lights, ( cue another metaphor for modern day celebrity and hollywoods unquenchable thirst for the young ) this unrelenting material could not be re-aligned to classic MTV aesthetics, meat will never adhere to the advertisement-centric paradigm. Whether ones reads the context as an uncomfortable rupturing and colliding of two parallel lynchean worlds or a rather violent implosion of a psychological lacanian triangulation ( Symbolic, Imaginary and Real ) the constant is an exterior within an interior. Something foreign within an otherwise homogenous world of fixed paradigms, order and familiarity, and alien within a your home. The dress was uncanny.

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The Real Thing, Urbanomic at Tate ( A journey )

2010-09-04T15:49:00.000+01:00

Welly welly welly, Urbanomic at the Tate Britain. Last night I attended The Real Thing, a night of events, sound installations, video works and a rather thought provoking panel discussion. I started the evening ambling through the Urbanomic Curatorial Intervention of Art in the Sublime in room 9 ( this room is my favourite space in London, for sometime it's housed one of my most cherished artists, the british romantic painter John Martin ) curiously reading the alternative interpretations of by Urbanomic associates ( Reza Negarestani, China Mieville, Robin Mackay and Eugene Thacker to name but a few ) interpretations and neo-readings of various romantic paintings, this experience was cerebrally stimulating. These re-readings of such established works, works of entrenched history and aesthetics, provided fresh contextualizations for the pieces within todays socio-politic economy, effectively shattering my projected reality of previous viewing experiences, Art and the Sublime re-thought through to The Real and the Sublime, the sublime being re-construed as an aesthetic gravity, pulling the viewer into 'complicity with anonymous materials'. I sensed destruction, re-imagining such contexts and realities felt eerie but none-the-less revelatory ( was this a glimpse of a speculative realism? ).

After this philosophical empyrean, I moved through doors adorned with various statements and permutations of 'the sun is good' on the glass ( visible from both sides ), the blinding sun, the spectacle of revelation seemed apt, the progression of these statements led from 'the sun is god' to 'the sun is evil' - the dualism, of ontological blackholes and blinding neo-realisms echoed my feelings/reactions towards the alternative speculative realist curation of the Art in the Sublime exhibition.

In the geographically transient space of the octagon were refreshments and Florian Hecker's new sound installation Speculative Solution. The piece explores the notion of 'hyperchaos' from Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude ( a book that proposed that natural laws are contingent, autonomous and subject to change, shift or stop ). The experience was immersive, lucid and certainly conveyed, or rather highlighted, our realities uncertain degrees, transience and liquidinous temporalities.

After an engaging, albeit brief, panel discussion titled The Real, Representation, and the 'In-Itself' with Urbanomic director Robin Mackay talking to Iain Hamilton Grant, , Mikko Canini and Amanda Beech about the nature, role and significance of speculative realist ( and also art's role in exploring such a notion ) philosophies was Beech's video work Sanity Assassin. I found this work to be violent, abrasive and intimidating, the raw amphetaminean rush of imagery, noise and text bombards the organ of the eye with such unrelenting intensity that I found myself in an uncomfortable limbo, between a tension of cerebral comprehension/contemplation and the more physical, instinctual reactions to the stimulus that drenched me.

The Real Thing certainly provided a platform, an opportunity for people to access, experience or explore a fleeting facet of speculative realism. Writers, thinkers, philosophers and academics have explored Speculative Realism for some years now, but retrospectively I cannot help but feel compelled by the unique power/effectiveness of art to convey such ideas and themes, the instantaneous effect, the vivid ontological impressions, especially from Amanda Beech's Sanity Assassin and Florian Heckers Speculative Solution were enthralling and powerful. It's wonderful to have experienced art working and exploring so effectively for Speculative Realism, hopefully this exciting and effective mode of enquiry continues.

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Bibliophilia.... The Idler 43: Back to the Land

2010-08-27T19:55:00.011+01:00

Anyone who reads this blog frequently will be more than aware of my bibliophilic tendencies, I fiend for the book beautiful as much I lust for the mesmerizing content that it harbours. On a recent trip to London I, as usual, bought a few books. Corduroy Magazine ( sadly not the edition with Helena Christensen on the cover ), Fashion Insider UK to which I was a recent contributor to, the profoundly insightful, investigative and refreshingly in-depth Elephant Magazine along with the exhibition catalogue for Rude Britannia: British Comic Art ( one of the best exhibitions I've experienced for a long, long time - pandering to my various current interests of Alice in Wonderland and the absurd- but none the less a fantastic experience with a marvelous curation that orchestrated an aesthetic symphony from so many juxtaposing and varied pieces ). However the best publication I stumbled across was The Idler: Back to the Land, No 43 . A gorgeous orange hardback with no book jacket and sumptuously thick creamy paper inside that has a lovely feel, typeset by Christian Brett of Bracket Press and edited by Tom Hodgkinson it includes essays by Simon Fairlie, Paul Kingsnorth and Harry Mount amongst others about politics, land, leisure and idling.

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In Dialogue: Benjamin Phelan

2010-08-19T17:43:00.022+01:00

July 2010 Dialogue with Bejamin Phelan

Over the past few weeks I have been fortunate enough to engage in a dialogue with contemporary mixed media artist Bejamin Phelan, below is the resulting text from our discussions.

NV - Here is a text concerning a new notion I’m exploring called Phenomenopoly, it’s the experience of having multiple perspectives.

Phenomenology is essentially a portmanteau of Phenomena, which is a derivative of the Greek term phainómenon meaning "that which appears" ( to appear pre-supposes perspective ) and logos ( to study ). Phenomenopoly replaces the logos with poly ( from the Ancient Greek πολύς polus, meaning "many, much”).

I feel your work explodes phenomenopoly within technologies roles.

I hope you don't mind answering a few questions about your work and the subjects it explores.

BP - I would be happy to answer any questions, just enjoyed you breakdown of "California Gurls"! I haven't very well articulated my thoughts yet on phenomenology but here is some paraphrasing from my sketchbook. Looking forward to talking with you.

"I first think of phenomenon as vectors of influence exerted on a single point in space, like the illustrations of a special relativity bowling ball on a rubber grid, they combine and solidify in to an entity that exists so long as I look at it. Its this image of the implicit physics necessary to experience any object that shapes the development of technology and the self in its image. The first models of the unconscious, as overlapping spheres of influence, were accessible only after the mechanisms of magnetic fields were described. Looking and looking, under the influence of and object/entertainment, what information do I desire to see again and again; the pleasure of stimulating some corresponding internal symbol; the sensory titillation of presence and body awareness, or some larger pattern solidified by the act of observation."

NV - I found 'California Gurls' to have some curious connections, I don't often blog about pop stars though!

That's a wonderful analogy for the infinitely reflexive nature of phenomena, an almost voracious regression into an uber-strict Cartesian empiricalism ( if you know Descartes )..... The later part of that text really brings to mind your ball point pen pieces RGB 1 and RGB 2 from 2008. These pieces almost embody how many technologies operate within our lives, the effect, our capability to translate into the 'phenomena', into the illusion hinges solely on previous experience. It's only due to our experience of drawings, from birth onwards, can we 'see' or comprehend a consciously three dimensional subject within the paper and ink. This is perhaps true for language, to learn and understand codes ( linguistic or aesthetic ) enables the viewer/reader to immerse themselves within the code, within the illusion - however escapist this may sound it is not. Succumbing to a code, trapping consciousness with a set structure is not an emancipation. I feel this blinkering is not a new facet of life, it has always occurred, but due to the increasingly ubiquitous nature of technologies its almost omnipresent.

There's a wonderful monotype by William Blake titled "Newton". It shows Newton sat on a rock, gazing at a diagram he's drawing with a compass. Newton is so deep in concentration he is oblivious to the beautiful world around him. I often feel this image has more resonance 2010 than in 1795.

P.S. - Part of your statement of intent really reminded me of how language has evolved as a result of new modes of communications - like txt messages. - Ill expand on this later - I'm writing about it already but would like t finish the text I have so far.....

BP - The RGB drawings came out of automatic drawing experiments I started several years ago with a personal computer sculpting device that was unique in that it simulated the touch and viscosity of clay in virtual space, a spin-off from a company that developed virtual cadavers. The primary tool to build matter in its modeling void CG was a ball of volume that could be felt, dragged around and deposited together to make form. This to me was a primal human experience, making mud balls, made possible by a level of technology that surpassed the sensory threshold to the point of encapsulating all actions within its logic. Any object made within this space now has more value than those outside it by the nature of its coordinate codes, the universal formats defining the interchange and representation of virtual objects. The Janus face of advancing technology is that processes are based on unconscious desires played out in a marketplace of satisfaction, the end result is a topology blob that contains hermetic infinite knowledge of itself and nothing else. “In here we can do anything we want”, if that is possible then you cease to exist. I do think that you are right that construction of codes is not a recent activity at all; language is the first control system, the first viral symbol. I don’t want to spend time trying to remove all the agents that replicate inside me, there are more bacteria in the body than human cells by a power of ten. I am more interested in surrendering to the pleasure of control, having the functionality of my visual cortex hijacked by the pulsing lights on the face of a casino slot machine.

NV - Ben, that's fascinating. The parallel between the 'starting point' for the modeling program and a starting point of human creativity is poignant. The conclusion that the CG clay ball has more value due to the intrinsic codes ( both actually, technologically and metaphysically i.e. in the consciousness ) is interesting, however, as I feel your work highlights or at least questions, the additional value is strictly within a code, within a paradigm. Surely any additional value ( however intrinsic to the 'objects' phenomenological 'existence' ) is negated due the idea of it being trapped within the suspension of an illusion provided by codes?

One could argue that a tree ( for example ) is under the same predicament. In that it's existence, within ourselves, depends upon an understanding, a comprehension of previous data, a code. You don't know a tree is, in fact, a tree the first time you see one, however after experience and a code being built for comprehension a object on the horizon can, upon first glance be a tree if it aligns with the viewers code gained from previous experience.

However, this symmetry between the clay modeling program and the tree example is not perfect, there are striking similarities but one facet is different.

If a man lost his sight he would, somehow, either through smell or taste, be able to generate a new set of codes unique to his situation, and could continue to build his knowledge from experience ( sensory experience of everything but sight ). With the new technologies that flexibility is not available for each and every user singularly, in fact in essence many new technologies are just new generations of the previous code with a higher level of complexity - but the mechanisms of comprehension, the interface between user and content is, by comparison, static and rigid.

Your notion of surrendering to a strict technologically determined code is perhaps an interesting example, or rather an exaggerated study of something that is slowly happening to mankind. There is now 'scientific proof', or rather pretty conclusive studies, that children born into the Internet age develop slightly different cognition patterns than their parents.

Have you ever read Cyberpunk fiction like William Gibson, the idea of the Internet addict, the hacker relinquishing control to the matrix is an incredibly prophetic metaphor.....

BP - I have read a lot of cyber punk. Williams Gibson's novels and short stories were my favorite in high school. He has one short story in which a photo journalist on assignment to document old gas stations in the dessert, starts to hallucinate the atomic age "world of tomorrow", with flying cars and zeppelins moored to the top of mile high skyscrapers. The idea of "tuning in" to an aesthetic frequency and extrapolating the social perspective embedded in the old gas stations is kind of like the reading of a code system we were pointing out. I think of some part of the work I am doing as this kind of reverse artifact process, seeing and extrapolating the code of beliefs in mass produced objects into concentrated forms. I love looking at new technologies and the way they are designed, what is being preached by their packaging and what does it reveal about the actual people making them. I really like the websites where you can order these generic plastic boxes to fit your prototype technology into, the minimalist modular systems are like the aesthetics of aspiration to me. The positivity that surrounds new visual production technology is prettying fascinating, the plastics age - the computer graphics revolution. There was a flourishing of fiberglass forms and CG animations produced respectively by an enthusiasm for "limitless" possibility, but the limits are still exactly defined by the constraints of the technology.

When I think about the mind looking at the tree, I am definitely approaching it from the camp of evolutionary psychology. I am reminded of all the mammal, primate and extinct human ancestors that contributed to my ability to recognize what is on the horizon. Every successful interaction with a tree they had, which allowed them to continue surviving, shaped the structure I now am using to look at the tree. Which leads me to question, is my satisfaction looking at early computer generated fractal symmetries a vestigial evolutionary perception mechanism developed in response to pressures of navigating branch growth in trees? I guess I'm attracted again to the idea of a universal shared code, the 'universal' being the containment aspiration of the code, but in this case our shared physical perception mechanism is the technology. By building commercial systems that more perfectly emulate our senses and perceptual devices, like clay sculpting programs and 3D movies, we are granting the developers of those technologies deeper and deeper penetration into the mind at the mechanical level, leaving a hole open to slip anything in below cognition. The MSG flavoring additive was chemically developed to mimic the taste receptors of Umami, the taste sensation of savoriness that is biologically linked to the presence of protein in your mouth. Now it is used by the processed foods industries to simulate intense satisfaction. Recent developments in artificial flavoring have produced anti-taste suppressant chemicals capable of selectively blocking bitter or sweet. The neural plasticity of the mind that allows the bind man to regain perception can be locked down by the control of its underlying mechanisms through simulation.

I have been feeling like the blind man, trying to learn a new computer modeling program to paint on computer models. Im coming in at version 7 or something, so the interface has already evolved to fit the requests of generations of users. Trying to glean information off the maze of forums to get the software to work, you run into text that is totally impenetrable but very fascinating because of the community of users is excited about it and challenging themselves to follow every rule of the system. The story of technology though is like the secretion of layers and layers on top of its self. When I look at that story in science fiction, you have a society that is lacking the ability to question the fundamental systems shaping it, "Any fundamentally advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". You end up in a very dystopian place basically eating yourself, see The Time Machine or Logan's Run.

ps: Have you read the classic cyber punk novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson? His character eventually learns that fundamentalist Christians have re- discovered the first Sumerian language, which when spoken, as if in tongues, people everywhere understand and cannot disobey. The undiluted linguistic control technology that we now use the derivative form of.

NV - It’s interesting that you mention the notion of the "reverse artifact process, seeing and extrapolating the code of beliefs in mass produced objects into concentrated forms." This almost sums up some of the impressions your work puts upon the viewer, perhaps that's not worded as well as it could be. Your work really explores and fleshes out the aesthetic codes around scientific languages and technological developments whilst also exaggerating a codes strict structure of rigidity and inflexible nature with regards to a viewers autonomy - you either buy into the code, jettisoning a certain degree of autonomy in order to enjoy the endless arrangements of rules within the code or you don't and the experience, the illusion is never gained. I feel your work tip toes around this threshold and really exploits the nth degrees of both options.

It's intriguing that you mention the MSG flavouring. In many ways this example is typical trend of the modern worlds crutch on technology. The importance of the contained freedoms, the coded possibilities available by plugging in is so great that to not do so would render life experience less dynamic or engaging than those who do plug in.

It's interesting that you mention technology as being layer upon layer of progression. I often contemplate more abstracted philosophies or interpretations of the world in extremely organic or biological forms, I think it's absolutely correct to view technological progressions and shifts as living things. Even industry is organic, the aerial views of cities at night could almost be cells flowing through capillaries or bacterium expanding across a surface. It's worrying that this omnipresent, enveloping entity is so alive and vital and pulsing. Reminds me of a Reza Negarestani text 'The Corpse Bride" whereby Negarestani investigates an ancient method of torture that consisted of a human corpse being tied to another live human. Through rot, putrefaction and decay the two entities would become one. The ontological, phenomenological philosophical ruptures of the interior and exterior being obliterated ( for the living ) are explored in depth, I see the facets of life like social networking sites and wonder where we end and the living, breathing network beings/ends. I'm no Luddite, but I just contemplate these aspects of life. Our Nupta Contagioso ( marriage with the contagious - from Negarestani's text ) is with our own creation, the nucleation of such a situation may already be occurring.

P.S. Neil Stevenson is someone I've always intended to read but never got round to. I've read a few Gibson novels and watched the odd Cronenberg film.

BP - The corpse -bride idea is really grossing me out, and its combination with social networking is really visual as well, an image of a consumable identity being purchased at a cellular level. I think of technologies that mimic mental processes, even something as simple as a list of contacts in a cell phone, as a prosthetic device. I missed the generation of social net workers by just a few years, I wonder what its like to grow up with the structure of facebook in your mind as the ideal. I really don't use them at all, I am not attracted to that level of communication, I want my telepathy to be between bodies, not as a multitude of voices talking. Our networking technologies are shaped on cellular strategies, it makes sense to ask what part of our brains are outsourced. "Bio-mimicry" is the science of pulling useful techniques from observation of natural processes, but it only replaces nature only at the level of our perception, we are left with only the MSG equivalent but that can be thrilling in its amplification. The perfectly shaped molecule to slide into the receptor cite on our cell membrane, or the social online sensation of tribal identity saturating deep desires to earn status and be protected by the group.

The idea of encoding an object, and reading it for that matter, is one of the information technology biases I am interested in. What ratio of self to object to observer can be advertised in a piece so that it will function as art. In the recent videos I am trying to provide an art experience on the terms of telepresence, using stereo cameras to record the slow process of hand extruding foam forms. My perception is the distortion that gets in the way of the viewers art experience. In my work I am performing an act defined by seductive transformation, a genie in bottle. Technology is a theater of re-imagining identity on constructed terms. When Nasa scientists send a probe to mars, they themselves are going to mars. What I am doing is constructing systems that have limitless possibilities within clearly defined aesthetic operations, and then trying to close off that space and see what the feedback loop of infinite existence is like living in.

NV - Negarestani's corpse bride text is amazing. He's one of my favourite theorists.

Earlier I hinted that a passage of text in your statement of intent reminded me of the myriad of social networking networks that are populating cyber space, and subsequently our reality.

"I am easily blinded by the optimism embedded in a new process, as it first appears to be the universal solution. The euphoria quickly dissipates though, as it becomes clear that each new process also a regulating device. I believe that the techniques that promise Utopian solutions, through totally malleable mediums, simultaneously produce total control environments."

With regard to the corpse bride analogy the situation of technology today and its sprawling intrusiveness seems an apt comparison, or the analogy of bacteria growing into tissue, like how humans grow on the earth progressing along the veins of water or through the crevices of the land.... The question of dominance applies. There are major world wide debates about humans impact on the earths ecosystem, I think the same questions should be applied to our technological progressions, are they proliferating to such an omnipresent level that they are shaping the land that created them - metaphorically, metaphysically as well as industrially, psychologically, economically and....... physically? Biomimicism in the widest possible sense?

The feedback loop of infinite existence reminds me of two way mirrors, or video loops ( where by the video screen is in front of the lens ) and an infinite regression can be seen. At first the effect is disorienting but after a few seconds the formula, code and mechanism is comprehended and the experience looses it's novelty.

Tell me, which artists produce work ( or have produced works ) that you find interesting or particularly inspiring? Have you heard of Pierre Huyghes 'No Ghost, Just a Shell'?

BP - I like Pierre Huyghe's mini stage light show, I saw it several years ago I think, or maybe have just stared at images of it. The "No Ghost, Just a Shell", I remember the idea was a anime character that gained legal independence of its own copyright, a very cyber punk idea, see William Gibson’s Idoru! I think it’s a good thing to explore the structures that existing in the pop-media-scape, and his work manipulates them into very sincere, poetic, and public journeys. I’m interested in artists like Bruce Nauman, who have produced work where technology is used to map out a relationship between themselves and public commercial mediums. His “manipulations” of florescent tubes and body based early video works made an impression on me. I am inspired by Beat artist Brion Gysin’s Dreammachine, a stroboscopic device that induces dream states. The concept that the visual work existed inside the viewers mind, and his failed attempts to commercialize it in America. Also, I really enjoy modern biomorphic sculptors, Henry Moore, Barbra Hepworth, and Noguchi, searchers obsessed with form and the power it has over them, who defined the aesthetics of an ideal future for the public and industry. Artists producing work I like; Roxy Payne, Roger Hiorns, and Ruby Sterling, using production and organic processes to solidify modernism residue. I think the core social technology to radically alter its own environment was television, and its a good predictor of things to come. The TV and its audience was first defined by its “goods” based production and consumption, then later by its display of lifestyle systems to populate its own ecology. The screen, to me, is the ideal technology. An array of red green and blue flickering dots relying on the brain to process and construct an approximation of experience, capable of delivering infinite variety. The end of the industrial / physical age was the dawn of television. Why travel when you can see the world from the comfort of your own home, or make anything that cannot be transported through its network? The future of the object is based on our heritage of the screen, rapid prototyping and “Fab-Labs” where virtual objects are printed one voxel ( volume-pixel) at a time. This is the “crystal interface”, by which all objects are constructed by a single process that is instantly comprehensible in its fractal uniformity. The scientists developing these technologies believe it will produce a new democracy of socially constructed objects, ending mass production. I tend to think that it will replace matter with the value of a shifting image, and by eliminating the distance between desire and possession, enclosing a feedback loop between the irrational unconscious and lived reality. Video feedback is something that I have been interested in for a long time. When I was 13, I would set up the family camcorder on top of a video projector borrowed from my father’s office and spend the evening “in the loop” doing shadow dances in that infinite feedback regression. I suppose those experiences greatly shaped my thinking about evolution of organic forms within simple systems. Steven Wolframs book, A New Kind of Science, and its images of cellular automata patterns on mollusk shells, led me to believe the diversity of nature relied on feedback systems as well. Later I was exposed to the cultural image of the Stoner putting the camera up to the TV screen and having this cosmic experience by the most domestic and dismissible means, which to me is very exciting role for science to play in culture. I am continuously inspired by executive desktop sculpture, objects that levitate or defy physics and perception in some other way, mass produced as decorative baubles and exhibited as distractions from office work. The science at their core is negated by a futuristic aesthetics of dismissal, physics reduced to the irrelevant novelty.

NV - Pierre Huyghe and Bruce Nauman both influenced my brief ( and now moribund ) artistic development and enormous amount back when I was an undergraduate. Both Huyghe's "No Ghost Just a Shell" and Gysins dream machine operate conceptually - pre-supposing that a piece executes and exists within the minds eye, within the consciousness. The pixels and documentations around AnnLee, are not as important as the codes, the systems she breaks through - due to Huyghe's and Parreno's creativity. Her meta-ascension from one set of paradigms to another is what gives her freedom - but this freedom is realized by the viewer understanding the codes and universe through which 'she' is emancipated. If you don't empathise, if you don't re-invent AnnLee as a person ( even before all the documentation is comprehended ) then the piece falls flat - but who would? Everyone has empathized with a fiction on a screen - very few people are around today who haven't learnt the code of realities and fictions. Engagement with this code/comprehension is taken for granted, but the understanding that transforms a cartoon into a reality is the same understanding that prevents wildlife documentary viewers to know that there are no tigers in their televisions! A malleable suspension of fiction comprehension is key to the concept in Huyghe's and Parreno's work forming. Nauman and Gysin's Dreammachine also spring to mind as works that ( Nauman has such a massive practice but many come to mind ) operate as experience from codes. I won't flesh out this facet of Nauman's work or Dreammachine, its the experience, the comprehension, the code reading that's important, not the materials or the craftsmanship used to create the works. It's interesting that you mention feedback systems within nature, this is something I've been exploring recently. Hive minds, Internet theory, collective consciousness are all interesting to me. Check out a slime mould called Physarum Polycephalum and an article about its humanistic intelligence and this article about the Internet behaving more like a brain than anything else. I feel due to our massive engagement with codes and a network of constant renewing data and feedback the most apt name for our society is meta-social, context and history is more important than the actualities. This is especially true in economics, that now is an autonomous meta-entity that everyone and no one can gage, quantify or control.

Thanks for taking the time to talk, it's been a great discussion.

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Upcoming Urbanomic Releases: Land, Negarestani and Laruelle

2010-08-10T22:07:00.000+01:00

The fantastic Urbanomic will be releasing more enthralling publications over the next year or so, for me the excitement is deafening, a feverish static is drowing me.

Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007

Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 , a title I've been looking forward to for a temporial eternity, will contain a collection of Lands vital, violent and voraciously nihilisitc writings, charting his early re-enterpretations and cybergothicist contortions of various major thinkers and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant and Bataille - the latter of course being the subject of his vibrant, raw and abrasively powerful work of legend, namely the exhilarating Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. I have already ranted before ( here ) about my excitement and expectations for the book however below is perhaps the most appropriate text concerning the forthcoming Fanged Noumena, taken straight from the Urbanomic sites corner concerning Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007:

"Fanged Noumena brings together the writings of Nick Land for the first time. During the 1990s Land's unique philosophical work, variously described as 'rabid nihilism', 'mad black deleuzianism' and 'cybergothic', developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of 'continental philosophy' - a route which was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British 'speculative realist' philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers - artists, musicians, filmmakers, bloggers - who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.

Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume then collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s - for long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print) - in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids.

Fanged Noumena will allow a perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and will introduce his unique voice to a new generation of readers."

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007

Nick Land

Forthcoming 2010

Introduction by Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay

Paperback 115x175mm, 500pp. Limited edition of 1000 numbered copies

ISBN 978-0-9553087-8-9
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Reza Negarestani, The Mortiloquist

Reza Negarestani's second installment of his Blackening Trilogy, The Mortiloquist is due for release in 2011. The first part was the giddying and porocryptic Cyclonopedia : Complicity with Anonymous Materials, a text that I found so fresh and vitalistic it was absurd, I felt 14 again - but that is just the prose. Negarestani's real talent is for generating a cyclonic, frenzied, gyrating symmetry of metaphor and analogies. The sprawling, rotting putrefaction, the coagulating marriages of politics and metaphysics. Endless wormoid, inversions, an infinite writhing existence whereby realities are opposites and vectors swing violently and invert spasmodically across plains of myriad unquantifiables. The Mortiloquist looks to ( on some level ) expand panoramically on his quite effective feeding on the more grotesque aspects of forgotten history and ancient philosophical texts ( perhaps some mechanics will be not dissimilar to facets of his Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo text, published in Collapse IV ) - this will, doubtless, yield a devastating impression but will merely be one of countless apparatus in his philosophical/theoretical/literary armoury. Negarestani's kaleidoscopic mythopoiesisthesizing and contortions of theory-fictions will be taken to stratospheric new realms of horror and enlightenment. Here is the blurb, again, from the Urbanomic site:

"A sequel to Cyclonopedia and the second installment in the Blackening trilogy, The Mortiloquistis a barbaric interpretation of the life and problems of Western philosophy.

Feasting on the theatrical resources of Greek tragedy, Jacobean revenge drama, grand guignol theater, the theater of cruelty, aktionism (especially Herman Nitsch's Fall of Jerusalem and Orgien Mysterien theater) and employing the dialogue-commentary of scholasticism, The Mortiloquist is a cross-breed of play and philosophy. In this textual mongrel, the life of Western philosophy is gutted out by outlanders and barbarically staged.

Taking place in an alternative history of the Greek Empire during a hypothetical siege of Athens, The Mortiloquist begins with a heated debate among three philosophers. Aristotle, Speusippus and Andronosos have refused to flee from the Academy. Oblivious to the commotion in the streets, they are arguing the impact of Speusippus' 'alien causality' on generation and corruption of ideas. As those who represent the philosophical militancy and political ethics of the Greek Empire, the philosophers are put into an ordeal of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the barbarian invaders. They are forced into freshly gutted out carcasses of three oxen; the animals are then sewn up to trap the philosophers in a way that only their heads protrude.

Composed in the form of an inverse chiaroscuro, the stage consists of a tenebrous foreground and a luminous background. Three animal corpses lie in the foreground, from each carcass a chattering human head has protruded. Each act begins with monotonous De Sadesque depictions of barbarous savageries taking place in the stage background. Set against this chaotic but silent background, conversations between the three philosophers who are trapped in dead animals are audible and appear in the form of scholastic colloquies and theatrical dialogues.

In The Mortiloquist, each scene begins with a generation of a new entity from the putrefying animal carcasses. In line with Henry of Langenstein's unsettling remarks regarding the possibility of a dog being generated from the corpse of an ox or a horse, the oxen carcasses in which the philosophers have been trapped change to canine and fox corpses among other unheard-of creative forms. Ideas and philosophical debates are renewed and shifted according to the germinal power of putrefaction and the possibility of the infinite deformity of forms in decay. The history of philosophy is, barbarically and problematically, revealed to be a differential form of arborescent emptiness which is in the process of blackening its vitalistic twists - a tree of rot whose supernal branches stretch toward the One and whose roots reinvent their own tortuous earth.

A unique blend of horror, Beckettian drama, and classical philosophy as seen from the 'barbarian' outside, The Mortiloquist takes Negarestani's 'theory-fiction' to astonishing new depths."

THE MORTILOQUIST

Reza Negarestani
Forthcoming 2011

CONTENTS

Act I (Cruelty, or determination against an indeterminable background)
Scene i: The Fall of Athens
Scene ii: Outlanders in the Academia
Scene iii: A philosophical torture

Act II (Life, or when death jabbers about itself)
Scene i: Corpora viva
Scene ii: Corpora cadavera
Scene iii: Cadavera dicta

Act III (The Revenge of Socrates: transcendental dirt and thinking dung)
Scene i: A ventriloquist humanism
Scene ii: An animist necrologics
Scene iii: A mimetic Inanimism

Act IV (To have done with the judgment of dog)
Scene i: On the generation of a fox from a canine corpse
Scene ii: On the corruption of ideal and generation of ideas
Scene iii: On the generative No-One and brooding No-Thing

Act V (The Return of Mezentius)
Scene i: Dubito ergo
Scene ii: Cogito ergo
Scene iii: Vivo ergo

François Laruelle, FROM DECISION TO HERESY: INTRODUCTION TO NON-PHILOSOPHY

The third release will be a collection of newly translated work from French thinker François Laruelle, unfortunately I am not familiar with Laruelles work, however I have faith in Urbanomic and expect this publication to be as important and powerful as other writers I've had the adventure of reading. Here is the blurb from the Urbanomic Site:

"This volume provides for the first time a collection of English translations of the writings of François Laruelle, one of the most important, but also least well-known, French philosophers working today.

For the past thirty years Laruelle has been setting out a rigorous theory for philosophy that offers a universal and abstract transcendental organon capable of conceiving the various philosophical accounts indifferent to their doctrines.

Laruelle has invented a totally new conceptual framework that transforms not only philosophical practice but even thought itself: In universalizing the theoretical conditions of philosophical theorising through his unique formal inventions, Laruelle develops a new form of thinking: one that initiates a transcendental and non-decisional theory for philosophical decision in a militant and heretical way.

This volume follows Laruelle's ambitious project of constructing this universal but non- systemic theory of philosophical decision. It is unquestionable that the technical rigour and heretical radicality of 'Non-Philosophy' will have a major impact on contemporary philosophy and future theoretical practices."

FROM DECISION TO HERESY: INTRODUCTION TO NON-PHILOSOPHY

François Laruelle
Forthcoming 2011
Edited by Tobias Huber and Robin Mackay
Paperback 115x175mm.
Limited edition of 1000 numbered copies

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1945-1998, Isao Hashimoto

2010-08-07T16:48:00.001+01:00

Despite the fact that online forums are mostly realms of homogenizing interplay through positive re-inforcements and atomic pursuits of self promotion every once in a while genuinely wonderful ( literally ) discussions and dialogues emerge. One forum that offers more exceptions to the rule than most is the sleepy cyber corner of dissensus. Mr Teas Top 10 Badass Phenomena veered slightly off tangent and the topic of the Tsar Bomba was introduced to the discussion, a separate thread about nuclear testing was born and this is where I stumbled across Isao Hashimoto's poignant, beautiful and sobering video '1945-1998'. The video shows a map of the world displaying in a second/month time-lapse format the nuclear detonations ( every single one of the 2053 nucleat tests and attacks that occurred in this period of history ) and their geographical positions between 1945 and 1998. A metronomic bleep signifies the explosions and a key for the bombs country of origin is also shown, each countries explosion has a different tone and the passing of each month is also signified by a bleep. Unsurprisingly a call and response symphony is created by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. detonations throughout the cold war period of the 1970's.

1945-1998 by Isao Hashimoto ( 2003 )

Hashimoto's video reminded me of the ancient folk myth of Hitodama. Hitodama ( meaning human ( hito ) souls ( dama ) ) can, according to Japanese Folklore, often appear to be green or blue with long tails and appear next to the dying before floating off to the next life. When you consider the amount of lives that the bombs depicted in Hashimoto's piece are capable of taking, the number of souls the detonations could/have claim(ed), Hashimoto's subtle work acquires a gravity that emphasizes the sorry morbidity of so many nations pouring so much time, effort and resources into tools and technologies that's main purpose ( despite being politicized, and capitalized ) is essentially to take the lives and souls of other human beings. According to this he began the piece in 2003, with the aim of showing, in his own words, "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons". Hashimoto says: " I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."

Hashimoto has produced an incredible example of how powerful and politically astute a work of contemporary art can be. Other Artist's like Santiago Sierra and Francis Alys ( who has has a vaguely disappointing exhibition showing at The Tate Modern ) create politically engaged works, both on conceptual levels and through more literal confrontations of social and economical issues, however I cannot remember the last time I experienced such a succinctly powerful and conceptually transparent piece as Hashimoto's '1945-1998', the piece is concise and unassuming, rather than forcing an analogy or metaphor for contemplation he literally re-represents a very sad history and a series of facts so uncomfortable they need nothing more than acknowledgement.

Here are two other works by Isao Hashimoto:

'Atomic Bomb'

'Overkilled"

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