Emerging - Somatic Ghosting http://www.alansondheim.org/terma06.jpg still Image courtesy of WVU, Foofwa d'Imobilite, others http://www.alansondheim.org/organon.mp4 VIDEO AR by Will Pappenheimer This isn't a standard presentation, not even by my standards: 1. The theme is almost non-existent, something always in the background. There's a need to 'chase it down' - and 'it' is diffuse, multiple, a conglomerate of micro-biomes - traces left everywhere. 2. There are examples which overlap/underlap - there's a kind of persistence, a residue - the subject matters wanders, just out of reach. (We saw the muskrats at early dawn, late dusk, watched them from a distance, their features indistinct in the near-dark. Their communicaton seemed based on touch, more than anything else.) It's like that - a theme that crosses digital media, analog worlds, body issues, uncanny imagings within the 'idiotic real' - 3. A theme of bodies always as ghosts, some examples - a. I'm walking down the street, engrossed _in_ my cellphone, I'm staring at it, concentrated, my vision and attention narrowly focused on the screen. b. Trump's splatter semiotics - tweets presented at high-speed, traditional news media unable to keep up - literally at a loss - his broken discourse dominating everything - as if the media were unaware of the ghost in the room - c. Gray Barker in 1950s West Virginia invents the 'men in black' meme, creates fake flying sauces, 'flies' and photographs them - at the same time collecting images he half believes in - at the same time turning the 'men in black' into pornographic memes - "Gray Barker (May 2, 1925 December 6, 1984)[1] was an American writer best known for his books about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. His 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers introduced the notion of the Men in Black to UFO folklore. Recent evidence indicates that he was skeptical of most UFO claims, and mainly wrote about the paranormal for financial gain. He sometimes participated in hoaxes to deceive more serious UFO investigators." Archives in Clarksburg, WV. d. The ontology of images is no longer among 'real,' 'analog,' 'digital,' 'fake,' 'authentic,' and so forth - but is on the order of a miasma of representations - what changed all this is the ability to alter a single pixel of an image without altering any others - the 'crackling' of the digital image - and what changed all this are the modes of transmission themselves - from tcp/ip through blockchain through the imminence of the alterity of the other through the skeains of satellites and other modes of information transmission. e. Serres' parasite has invaded content; becomes content; _is_ content; every observation is simultaneously noise and broken, disseminated information. f. The markings which characterize the body now characterize only its carapace, its striations. The body exists as data-base insertions, with a troubling horizon of the somatic - flesh, blank time, care. g. Among the hyper-collapse of resources, the politics of desire becomes the desires of politics; the presence of bodies translates into flows; the other face of real deprivations transforms into genocidal collapse; and the faces of strongmen, increasingly evident, dominate through violent and fictional totalizations. h. The sky is the mirror of the strong, the silent violence of ecological collapse. i. The faces we see are our own: i.e. digital tagging, and no longer our own: i.e. alexa: the flows of material and economic goods (blockchain, traditional finance, intelligence) depend less and less on us, much less our 'good will'; this is all debris, j. absorbed and disseminated by the dynamics of the single pixel and the chaotic absorption and degradation of the image/imaginary itself. k. The image absorbs its imaginary; the imaginary absorbs its image: somatic ghostings. -------------------------------------------------------------- The first section of http://www.alansondheim.org/ica6.rtf _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour