http://www.paraflows.at/index.php?id=2L=1Paraflowshttp://www.paraflows.at/index.php?id=2L=1
talk.
Modern techno-mythologies assume that more information and more
connections will literally make more sense, extending all the way to
the post-human desire to transcend the meat entirely and evolve into
pure code. But even before porn and spam turned obfuscation into a
profitable business model, the noise and bugs of the meat were
already embedded in the code. From the supernatural mass murder which
inspired the Arts of Memory to the atomic alien conspiracies that
spawned the Web, information technology has always been paranoid.
This talk covers several thousand years of information technology,
focusing on strange threads of symptom and haunting woven into the
history of mnemotechnics. How does ancient gnostic cosmology
influence the way we use computers? How did magicians, junkies and
sexual deviants give us computers, programming and rocket science?
How did a cave in Kentucky became the blueprint of cyberspace? How
did a moth presage y2k and terrorist paranoia? How is the crashed
flying saucer at Roswell tied to the origins of hypertext?
These weird errors and coincidences cannot be cleansed from the
history of our memory machines, because memory itself is buggy. It
operates by associative logic, making unexpected squirms and jumps,
revealing poetic truths about the world without concern for linear
reason. We cannot escape into the clean world of information and code
because the messy conspiratorial logic of sex-dirt is in fact the
paranoid logic of code.
All of this will be examined through the gnostic allegory of the 1983
Disney movie, Tron.
Jason Brown (from Los Angeles) is an ambient noisemaker,
constellation manipulator, and paranoid historiographer.
[]
Wednesday, September 19. 8 PM @ http://www.metalab.atMetalab, Vienna.
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Posted By johannes to
http://www.monochrom.at/english/2007/09/paraflows-2007-paranoid-machines-with.htmmonochrom
at 9/18/2007 05:02:00 PM
