Re: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
Yes always good to attack each other's pain. On Mon, 28 Sep 2020, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote: Dear David and all, Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of general hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many others have suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they are talking about - all the white privileged men who could up until recently still believe in the radical progressiveness of higher education and new media technologies? Welcome to the despair of the rest of the world, Nick and Bruce. Cheers, Ingrid. -Original Message- From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org On Behalf Of d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53 To: Nettime Subject: 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world' which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay. "Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It?s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do. What?s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones ? real though those worries are. It isn?t even the sense that, if we?re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we?d taken for granted as inherently valuable." "It?s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies. Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don?t notice them very often. We don?t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive. What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It?s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That?s what many of us are feeling. That?s today?s acedia." Full essay here... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: web http://www.alansondheim.org/index.html cell 347-383-8552 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/xo.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Facebook
I read about this - it sounds amazing, and working through consensus is brilliant. Fb is different, however; it's taken me a long time to build community that 'works for me' on it, people worldwide who are interested in the kinds of media art, music, theory, that I'm interested in. So there's a kind of flow, give and take, that's valuable (especially for those of us who have no institutional support). I feel oddly nomadic in this regard. But it's important for me to connect with online work and network projects, for example, with participants everywhere, reading documents from Nauru re: refugee conditions. - Alan On Tue, 5 Nov 2019, tac...@riseup.net wrote: other social networks are possible https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50127713 Em 2019-11-04 21:29, Alan Sondheim escreveu: I'm in agreement here; I leave as little trace as I can. (Also trapped because I want my own work to remain.) This reminds me of the fight I had on YouTube with Viacom and YouTube (later) re: my banning which went on for a couple of years, a fight I finally won. YouTube has its own viciousness of course - even something as saying no to autoplay, which then returns on the next login. I'd be curious about the server farms YouTube must use; they seem unimaginable to me. Best, Alan On Mon, 4 Nov 2019, Craig Fahner wrote: maybe it's not so much a question of whether facebook's policies are bad (of course they are) or whether facebook is part of our social infrastructure (of course it is), but, rather, what capacity users have to undermine facebook's more predatory policies and evade its data collection regimes and biased recommendation algorithms. given that a lot of people use facebook not because they think it's an optimal platform, but because it is absolutely necessary to use it in order to connect with certain communities, what possibilities exist for users to participate in those communities while circumventing the platform's more odious aspects? what do a tactics of social media usership look like? i suspect they would engage in a constant give-and-take with the algorithmic governing forces that be, but, with a growing sentiment of suspicion regarding facebook's policies, perhaps a tactical approach along the lines of plugins that remove algorithmic recommendation features, deliberate scrambling/obfuscation of users' data and trackable behaviours, etc. might be more successful in empowering users than simply encouraging them to leave the platform entirely. craig fahner - https://www.craigfahner.com/ On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 9:25 AM Alan Sondheim wrote: On Mon, 4 Nov 2019, mp wrote: > On 03/11/2019 20:36, Alan Sondheim wrote: >> >> The loss is more important to me > >> On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: >>> 1/ FB enables to create a "community," that's good for sure;? >>> 2/ but in the same time, it destroys?the condition of the possibility of >>> community/togetherness/Gemeinwesen/?tre-ensemble, etc. > > Individual, particular and hence relatively short term perspective and > context (Alan's) vs. collective, abstract and hence relatively long term > perspective and context (Frederic's). > > A common disjuncture. > What disturbs me here is the assumption of passivity "relatively short term perspective" for example. Unless you know my work, read my posts, etc., you have no idea how long my perspective is. I've run talkers, a MOO, conferencing in IRC years ago, CuSeeMe, and on and on. I've taught courses in internet culture from 1995 on. And one of the things that keeps me generally from posting on nettime, is its own toxicity, these constant presumptions about one another, about the world, etc. And re: below, there is no "on the one hand, on the other hand" - the issue is far more complex as is people's usage of Fb or other platforms (for example email lists themselves). So "email is also shit"? I know a hell of a lot of free jazz musicians who work through Fb, fight racism, and take advantage of the platform. I know people who have found community on Fb that is absent for them in rl. I've participated in courses taught on Fb. I've engaged in political action on the platform. I don't expect purity anywhere; I never have. And one person's purity can be another person's hell. I'm appalled at Fb's policies but also given that the platform has between 1 and 2.4 billion users, the sociality is far greater (and far more diverse and interesti
Re: Facebook
I'm in agreement here; I leave as little trace as I can. (Also trapped because I want my own work to remain.) This reminds me of the fight I had on YouTube with Viacom and YouTube (later) re: my banning which went on for a couple of years, a fight I finally won. YouTube has its own viciousness of course - even something as saying no to autoplay, which then returns on the next login. I'd be curious about the server farms YouTube must use; they seem unimaginable to me. Best, Alan On Mon, 4 Nov 2019, Craig Fahner wrote: maybe it's not so much a question of whether facebook's policies are bad (of course they are) or whether facebook is part of our social infrastructure (of course it is), but, rather, what capacity users have to undermine facebook's more predatory policies and evade its data collection regimes and biased recommendation algorithms. given that a lot of people use facebook not because they think it's an optimal platform, but because it is absolutely necessary to use it in order to connect with certain communities, what possibilities exist for users to participate in those communities while circumventing the platform's more odious aspects? what do a tactics of social media usership look like? i suspect they would engage in a constant give-and-take with the algorithmic governing forces that be, but, with a growing sentiment of suspicion regarding facebook's policies, perhaps a tactical approach along the lines of plugins that remove algorithmic recommendation features, deliberate scrambling/obfuscation of users' data and trackable behaviours, etc. might be more successful in empowering users than simply encouraging them to leave the platform entirely. craig fahner - https://www.craigfahner.com/ On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 9:25 AM Alan Sondheim wrote: On Mon, 4 Nov 2019, mp wrote: > On 03/11/2019 20:36, Alan Sondheim wrote: >> >> The loss is more important to me > >> On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: >>> 1/ FB enables to create a "community," that's good for sure;? >>> 2/ but in the same time, it destroys?the condition of the possibility of >>> community/togetherness/Gemeinwesen/?tre-ensemble, etc. > > Individual, particular and hence relatively short term perspective and > context (Alan's) vs. collective, abstract and hence relatively long term > perspective and context (Frederic's). > > A common disjuncture. > What disturbs me here is the assumption of passivity "relatively short term perspective" for example. Unless you know my work, read my posts, etc., you have no idea how long my perspective is. I've run talkers, a MOO, conferencing in IRC years ago, CuSeeMe, and on and on. I've taught courses in internet culture from 1995 on. And one of the things that keeps me generally from posting on nettime, is its own toxicity, these constant presumptions about one another, about the world, etc. And re: below, there is no "on the one hand, on the other hand" - the issue is far more complex as is people's usage of Fb or other platforms (for example email lists themselves). So "email is also shit"? I know a hell of a lot of free jazz musicians who work through Fb, fight racism, and take advantage of the platform. I know people who have found community on Fb that is absent for them in rl. I've participated in courses taught on Fb. I've engaged in political action on the platform. I don't expect purity anywhere; I never have. And one person's purity can be another person's hell. I'm appalled at Fb's policies but also given that the platform has between 1 and 2.4 billion users, the sociality is far greater (and far more diverse and interesting) than its public image. Alan > It is a complex issue. On the one hand it makes sense to adjust your > means to the ends you desire. Be the change you want to see and all that. > > On the other hand, it could be seen as a form of neoliberalisation when > the responsibility for the future of the system is distributed to > individuals - and at the end of the day, it is impossible to live in > this planetary urbanisation without acting in destructive ways, so we > all have to cut corners. Email is also shit for the web of life we are > entangled in. > #?distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #?? is a moderated mailing list for net
Re: Facebook
On Mon, 4 Nov 2019, mp wrote: On 03/11/2019 20:36, Alan Sondheim wrote: The loss is more important to me On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: 1/ FB enables to create a "community," that's good for sure;? 2/ but in the same time, it destroys?the condition of the possibility of community/togetherness/Gemeinwesen/?tre-ensemble, etc. Individual, particular and hence relatively short term perspective and context (Alan's) vs. collective, abstract and hence relatively long term perspective and context (Frederic's). A common disjuncture. What disturbs me here is the assumption of passivity "relatively short term perspective" for example. Unless you know my work, read my posts, etc., you have no idea how long my perspective is. I've run talkers, a MOO, conferencing in IRC years ago, CuSeeMe, and on and on. I've taught courses in internet culture from 1995 on. And one of the things that keeps me generally from posting on nettime, is its own toxicity, these constant presumptions about one another, about the world, etc. And re: below, there is no "on the one hand, on the other hand" - the issue is far more complex as is people's usage of Fb or other platforms (for example email lists themselves). So "email is also shit"? I know a hell of a lot of free jazz musicians who work through Fb, fight racism, and take advantage of the platform. I know people who have found community on Fb that is absent for them in rl. I've participated in courses taught on Fb. I've engaged in political action on the platform. I don't expect purity anywhere; I never have. And one person's purity can be another person's hell. I'm appalled at Fb's policies but also given that the platform has between 1 and 2.4 billion users, the sociality is far greater (and far more diverse and interesting) than its public image. Alan It is a complex issue. On the one hand it makes sense to adjust your means to the ends you desire. Be the change you want to see and all that. On the other hand, it could be seen as a form of neoliberalisation when the responsibility for the future of the system is distributed to individuals - and at the end of the day, it is impossible to live in this planetary urbanisation without acting in destructive ways, so we all have to cut corners. Email is also shit for the web of life we are entangled in. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Facebook
The loss is more important to me; the community functions as best an online community can. I'm connected with all sorts of other networks as well such as Furtherfield, ELO, etc. What I find worse and more problematic is the university system including publications - I can't afford most books that are advertised for example (which is why the Alexandria project was so important for me); I go to conferences if I can get a stipend, etc. American intellectual life is more of a divide for a lot of people than Fb. (Of course it also depends how intelligently one uses Fb; I put in a lot of controls, use blocking, etc.) - Alan On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: Thanks Alan! But I've a question, I try to formulate it... Let's say:? 1/ FB enables to create a "community," that's good for sure;? 2/ but in the same time, it destroys?the condition of the possibility of community/togetherness/Gemeinwesen/?tre-ensemble, etc. For instance, in making possible the election of people whose main goal is to destroy any community/being-in-common (note that I do not consider being quantified and recombined by algorithms a good way to generate some being-in-common). So, in the end, I understand?that something would be lost by leaving FB - hence my first question! - but would it be possible to say that the loss is even more important while not quitting FB? My best, FN On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 11:14 AM Alan Sondheim wrote: I'm on it because there are a number of new media artists/writers/etc. including myself who form somewhat of a community - it's a way to distribute work, especially if one's not in academia or media industry. It's brutally flawed but also useful and it gives more scope to textual work than Instagram. Alan On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: > Hi, > > I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists, > environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on Facebook > and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this "social" (?) > network. > >Thisarticle?https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-pol itics- > republicans-right > is not the reason of my email, but its occasion. > > Thanks in advance for your light on this matter, > > Frederic Neyrat > > > web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/wm.txt web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/wm.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Facebook
I'm on it because there are a number of new media artists/writers/etc. including myself who form somewhat of a community - it's a way to distribute work, especially if one's not in academia or media industry. It's brutally flawed but also useful and it gives more scope to textual work than Instagram. Alan On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote: Hi, I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists, environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this "social" (?) network. Thisarticle?https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics- republicans-right is not the reason of my email, but its occasion. Thanks in advance for your light on this matter, Frederic Neyrat web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/wm.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: nettime past and future
of extreme interest, re the nudge-horizon of compression/containment On Fri, 6 Sep 2019, tbyfield wrote: (I just dug this up -- maybe of interest.) - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< SNIP! 8< - A- - - - - - - - - - - To: nettim...@kein.org Subject: digestion digest From: nettime mod squad Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 06:27:37 +0100 As nettime comes up on its twentieth birthday, we've started looking back at what happened. What follows is a nearly complete list of more than 700 different identities we've given to nettime's digest function over the last 16+ years. Cheers, the mod squad (Ted and Felix) nettime's.sorry nettime's(.bash)_history nettime's_ _ nettime's_ _ again nettime's_ roving_reporter nettime's___ nettime's nettime's_ nettime's__grand_inquisitor nettime's__detector nettime's_...wait...oh my god! it's alive! nettime's_'r'_critic nettime's_(anti)?thetical_synthesizer nettime's_(g)?lo(b|c)al_pundit nettime's_|<0u||+3r-.* nettime's_1337ologist nettime's_31337_h!5+0r!4|| nettime's_911_compiler nettime's academy nettime's accelerated cycles nettime's accountants nettime's_active_digestresse nettime's_adding_machine nettime's_akademik_zensor nettime's_alarmist nettime's alias nettime's_american_friend nettime's_anal_editor nettime's_anal-retentive-book-editor/librarian nettime's_AND_gate nettime's_annaliste nettime's_annotation_line nettime's announcer nettime's_anonymizer nettime's_anonymizing_service nettime's anonymous coward nettime's_anonymous_login nettime's_anti_war_dig nettime's_antithesis nettime's_api nettime's_appraisal_committee nettime's_arbiter_of_taste nettime's archivist nettime's_armchair_historian nettime's_ascii_infidel nettime's_asciimilator nettime's_assimilationist_system nettime's_attivatore nettime's_autoimmune_system nettime's_automaton nettime's avid crossposter nettime's avid gift giver nettime's avid law reader nettime's avid reader nettime's avid review reader nettime's_avid_reader nettime's_b00xw0rm nettime's_B1FF!!! nettime's_babelfish nettime's bable fish nettime's_balancing_act nettime's_barcode_reader nettime's_barker nettime's_barking_dialogist nettime's_bartleby nettime's_basic_visual_script nettime's_bean_counter nettime's_beancounter nettime's_bear nettime's bifurcated tuber nettime's_big_thumb nettime's_bird_watchers nettime's blockwart nettime's_bloggee nettime's_BMOC nettime's_body_politic nettime's_border_reporter nettime's_bored_summer_intern nettime's broken pumps nettime's_broken_record nettime's_bullshit_detector nettime's_burning_man nettime's_busy_reader nettime's_butcher nettime's_butlins nettime's_c-spammer nettime's_cache nettime's_caching_proxy nettime's cage aux trolls nettime's calculating machine nettime's_captive_audience nettime's_car_warrespondent nettime's caring parent nettime's cartoonist nettime's cash hoard nettime's_cashier nettime's_center nettime's_centrist_urge nettime's_cgi_joe nettime's_charterhouse nettime's_chatterbox nettime's_cheeseburger_to_go! nettime's_chronicler nettime's_chronological_digesta nettime's_circle_jerk nettime's_clerk nettime's closed nettime's_closet_case nettime's coin box nettime's_collection_service nettime's collective nettime's collective theorists nettime's_collective_brain nettime's_colostomy_bag nettime's compiler nettime's_compiler nettime's_compression_algorithm nettime's compulsive gamer nettime's_conditional_dig nettime's confused ontologist nettime's_conscientious_digestor nettime's_convergence_center nettime's copy editor nettime's_counter_counter_counter_something nettime's_counterimagineer nettime's_counterspam_kr!k!t nettime's_CPA nettime's crew of janitors nettime's critic of the critic nettime's crooked dealer nettime's_crusher nettime's_crystal_ball nettime's cuban middle nettime's_cud_chewer nettime's cultural nettime's curator nettime's_d-di-di-digestive_s-s-system nettime's_d-spammer nettime's_dataminer nettime's de-terminator nettime's_deadman_switch nettime's deaf reader nettime's_debabelizer nettime's_decider nettime's decoder nettime's_deep_sea_diver nettime's_deficit_disorder nettime's_deja-vu nettime's_delayed_response nettime's_delete_key nettime's_delp_hesk nettime's_demultitudinizer nettime's_depth_charge nettime's_designative_dig nettime's_dfh nettime's dialetical materialist nettime's_diet nettime's digest nettime's_digest nettime's_digest_ready_to_read nettime's digesta nettime's digester nettime's_digestion nettime's digestive system nettime's_digestive_system nettime's_digestive_system_politic nettime's_digestive_tract nettime's_digestor_of_forwarded_crises nettime's_digger nettime's director nettime's_discursive_constipation nettime's_discursive_digestive_system nettime's_disgestive_system nettime's dishonest nettime's disinfecta nettime's_disintermediation_system nettime's_dogcatcher nettime's_dom nettime's_dot_dot_dot nettime's_dot_matrix nettime's_doubleplusuncountercountercounterreformer nettime's dr doom nettime's_drive_thru nettime'
here we go again -
From mailer-dae...@mx.kein.org Sat May 5 23:15:44 2018 Date: Sat, 5 May 2018 23:15:41 From: Mail Delivery System To: sondh...@panix.com Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender This is the mail system at host mx.kein.org. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message. The mail system (expanded from ): can't create user output file [ Part 2: "Delivery report" ] Reporting-MTA: dns; mx.kein.org X-Postfix-Queue-ID: B0F7C122686A X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; sondh...@panix.com Arrival-Date: Sun, 6 May 2018 05:15:40 +0200 (CEST) Final-Recipient: rfc822; nett...@kein.org Original-Recipient: rfc822;nettime-l@mail.kein.org Action: failed Status: 5.2.0 Diagnostic-Code: x-unix; can't create user output file [ Part 3: "Undelivered Message" ] Date: Sat, 5 May 2018 23:15:34 From: Alan Sondheim To: Heiko Recktenwald Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org Subject: Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted? On Sat, 5 May 2018, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: Alan, Am 05/05/18 um 04:53 schrieb Alan Sondheim: Isnt that in the story of the Tower of Babel? Maybe we should read it again. or the opposite, every thing and every one speaking exactly the same digital terrain, the same protocols. even in one of 'my' areas of interest, non-western instrumentation, the well-tempered western scale and accompanying musics have been increasingly dominant. But isnt this allready the end? The same protocols and no content. Well tempered. flat, absorbed - less pessimistic. What is that "knowledge" of fb? Cant we laugh about it? And what is new in our "mass-psychology"? What people may do one day? A question of speed? depends on what knowledge or knowledging of fb one's concerned with - For marketing it may be better than nothing. But the rest is speculation. it's the carapace that surrounds the user on Fb; there's very little control over appearance; the settings are a joke. it's designed for data-mining - almsot impossible for example to keep 'recent' from 'top' in the feed - the latter already shaping one's perception of one's personal sphere. there's also constant attempts to mine phone numbers and to give fb control of the computer - repeatedly asking if it can add notifications to your screen even when the medium's closed - which creates the constant presence of fb, no matter what. There are some problems of dataownership that have mostly to do with sharing that data. What did Cambridge do wrong? They didnt pay. As if science would not be free. That Robert Mercer wrote an email in january that sounded very much like Timothy Leary... "Question authority"... Some of the opening questions of that Zuckerberg hearing were very good. Unfortunately didn't hear this - Feinstein was very stupid. I like those details. Maybe a starter in the time of Babel. That Donald was a present. He creates cases that we need. He creates cases that brutally tear families apart - Best, Alan Best, H. New CD:- LIMIT: http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138 email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/vj.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?
On Sat, 5 May 2018, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: Alan, Am 05/05/18 um 04:53 schrieb Alan Sondheim: Isnt that in the story of the Tower of Babel? Maybe we should read it again. or the opposite, every thing and every one speaking exactly the same digital terrain, the same protocols. even in one of 'my' areas of interest, non-western instrumentation, the well-tempered western scale and accompanying musics have been increasingly dominant. But isnt this allready the end? The same protocols and no content. Well tempered. flat, absorbed - less pessimistic. What is that "knowledge" of fb? Cant we laugh about it? And what is new in our "mass-psychology"? What people may do one day? A question of speed? depends on what knowledge or knowledging of fb one's concerned with - For marketing it may be better than nothing. But the rest is speculation. it's the carapace that surrounds the user on Fb; there's very little control over appearance; the settings are a joke. it's designed for data-mining - almsot impossible for example to keep 'recent' from 'top' in the feed - the latter already shaping one's perception of one's personal sphere. there's also constant attempts to mine phone numbers and to give fb control of the computer - repeatedly asking if it can add notifications to your screen even when the medium's closed - which creates the constant presence of fb, no matter what. There are some problems of dataownership that have mostly to do with sharing that data. What did Cambridge do wrong? They didnt pay. As if science would not be free. That Robert Mercer wrote an email in january that sounded very much like Timothy Leary... "Question authority"... Some of the opening questions of that Zuckerberg hearing were very good. Unfortunately didn't hear this - Feinstein was very stupid. I like those details. Maybe a starter in the time of Babel. That Donald was a present. He creates cases that we need. He creates cases that brutally tear families apart - Best, Alan Best, H. New CD:- LIMIT: http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138 email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/vj.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?
On Thu, 3 May 2018, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: On Sat, 28 Apr 2018, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:: compare, and should not be compared. But it's not hate speech that worries me, it's the languages of desire, and what becomes of them once they enter the grid of two hundred million. (9) Google "Jessi Slaughter", for starters Am 28/04/18 um 18:34 schrieb Alan Sondheim: I do wonder if hate speech isn't precisely the languages of desire? TV advertising around here is now based on jealousy and putdowns - buy this car and you'll triumph over your neighbors. Just the planting of a seed - Isnt that in the story of the Tower of Babel? Maybe we should read it again. or the opposite, every thing and every one speaking exactly the same digital terrain, the same protocols. even in one of 'my' areas of interest, non-western instrumentation, the well-tempered western scale and accompanying musics have been increasingly dominant. The human destinity? The Donald and what we thought of him were mostly reflections of ourselves and maybe it is the same here. One very old friend very deep in the pop-media-business once told me that fb is the first usable interface and I started to use it again. Maybe we should be less pessimistic. What is that "knowledge" of fb? Cant we laugh about it? And what is new in our "mass-psychology"? What people may do one day? A question of speed? depends on what knowledge or knowledging of fb one's concerned with - - Alan, thanks! There are some problems of dataownership that have mostly to do with sharing that data. What did Cambridge do wrong? They didnt pay. As if science would not be free. Best, H. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?
On Sat, 28 Apr 2018, sebast...@rolux.org wrote: On Apr 27, 2018, at 6:07 AM, Alan Sondheim wrote: Query - again, I'm admittedly naive in these matters - Here's a current stat on Fb - As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users had surpassed 1 billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active users are those which have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days. (from statista.com) - My assumption is that these stats are wildly exaggerated, and that the definitions of "active", "unique", "logged in" or even "users" have little to do with how these terms are commonly - na?vely - understood. I'm not sure of this - what is your assumption based on? Do you have alternative stats to back it up? In any case, there are huge numbers of users of course - I keep coming back to this enormity which stresses across any number of cultures/population segments and wonder how this might be governed at all - given the number of empty accounts, bots, etc. And what are the mechanisms of control that anyone might apply to this quantity - as well as the quantity of material YouTube, say, handles daily? It's one thing to theorize what is to be done or not done, or whether Z. should be jailed or not; it's another to deal with this flood of material. As a problematic user, I'm always amazed at the naked control Fb exercises - the simplest example being the top stories trope over the recent. What may be turned off varies from week to week, but basically, nothing. Facebook makes its users hysterical: about intimate stuff, about politics, and even more so about Facebook. One example would be the issue with "top stories", which I assume is the outrage about specific content that appears or fails to appear in what Facebook users tend to call "their feed", and the conclusion that secret "algorithms" have begun to take control of their lives. Even though the same is true for, say, my own - self-hosted, self-programmed, not-platform-or-silo-dependent - blog, if I had one: some things appear, some don't, I might even "personalize" content in a way that is intentionally intransparent, and if you don't like it, you're free to go elsewhere. Even my old unused blogs have everything I put on them still in place. And there's a basic difference between 'top stories' and 'most recent' or some such - the former involves content algorithms, which is where shaping comes into play; the latter might be nothing more than a simple temporal ordering. The third of the world that is on Facebook didn't get there as a result of enslavement by a global corporation. They're on Facebook because they love it. Maybe, since you explicitly use the term of "control" to describe the mechanisms at work here, it's worth to take yet another look at the little text, written and published in 1989/1990, that introduced this term - to me, but (I guess) to many others around here as well: "We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network." (1) "But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation." (1) "The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a
Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?
Query - again, I'm admittedly naive in these matters - Here's a current stat on Fb - As of the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users. In the third quarter of 2012, the number of active Facebook users had surpassed 1 billion, making it the first social network ever to do so. Active users are those which have logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days. (from statista.com) - I keep coming back to this enormity which stresses across any number of cultures/population segments and wonder how this might be governed at all - given the number of empty accounts, bots, etc. And what are the mechanisms of control that anyone might apply to this quantity - as well as the quantity of material YouTube, say, handles daily? It's one thing to theorize what is to be done or not done, or whether Z. should be jailed or not; it's another to deal with this flood of material. As a problematic user, I'm always amazed at the naked control Fb exercises - the simplest example being the top stories trope over the recent. What may be turned off varies from week to week, but basically, nothing. There are obviously alternative platforms but it's a question of populating - the people I want to reach are on Fb as their primary platform (for example free jazz / improvisation which reaches worldwide) - there must be millions of mini-commons like this. I do see the damage Fb does and www for that matter; when I began teaching Internet culture/community/etc. in 1995 or so, I took my students first to stormfront.com which had the most sophisticated website at the time - it was international, in several languages, and a platform for neonazi organization. Thanks again for the responses, learning here, Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
thanks for your responses
I want to thank Stephen and Sebastian for their responses, particularly Stephen's. - Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
from today's Washington Post - how to we resist this?
The fascist creep in action: Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Wednesday that he reserves the right to jail journalists, if we have to. Here's his exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: KLOBUCHAR: Will you commit to not putting reporters in jail for doing their jobs? SESSIONS: Well, I don't know that I can make a blanket commitment to that effect. But I would say this: We have not taken any aggressive action against the media at this point. But we have matters that involve the most serious national security issues, that put our country at risk, and we will utilize the authorities that we have, legally and constitutionally, if we have to. Maybe we we always try to find an alternative way, as you probably know, Sen. Klobuchar, to directly confronting a media person. But that's not a total, blanket protection. There is a lot of missing context here that Sessions would have been wise to include, if he were interested in avoiding panic. Sessions appeared to be reiterating a warning he issued in August, when he said that as part of the Justice Department's effort to prosecute government workers who make illegal disclosures of classified information, one of the things we are doing is reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas. [...0 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
notes from working with Mike Gurstein, 1997
(please post if relevant) = Working with Mike Gurstein http://www.alansondheim.org/mike.txt From 1997, Nova Scotia, mainly Sydney, working with Mike Gurstein Revisiting, Notes and Pieces = # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: RIP Michael Gurstein
Oh hell, Ted. I worked with him in Cape Breton and elsewhere in NS on Wiring Nova Scotia; we were close until he moved west. We worked together in Sydney; it was wonderful and necessary work. I hadn't heard from him in a while. Thank you for passing this on. He was amazing. Best, Alan On Sat, 14 Oct 2017, t byfield wrote: I'm sad to pass this news on. T < https://www.facebook.com/gurstein/posts/10155671874752457 > Michael Gurstein October 2, 1944 - October 8, 2017 Michael Gurstein was born on October 2, 1944 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Emanuel (Manny) and Sylvia Gurstein. While still an infant, the family moved to Melfort, Saskatchewan where Manny grew up and his family still lived. In Mike?s youth, Manny and Sylvia ran a successful retail store. There, the family grew with a younger sister, Penny. Mike excelled at school. He spent his summers working at a golf club in Waskesiu and graduated from Melfort Composite Collegiate Institute high school, and then completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Mike was driven by pragmatism and curiosity about the wider world that motivated his doctoral studies in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. While a student, he began his life-long exploration of the world, with trips through North Africa and a long journey from Southeast Asia through Afghanistan and Iran and back to the U.K. Upon Mike?s return to Canada, he worked in politics and policy, as a senior civil servant for the Province of British Columbia under Barrett?s NDP government (1972-4) and for the Province of Saskatchewan under Blakeney?s NDP Government (1974-5). While teaching at York University, he ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in the riding of Parkdale. Mike moved to Ottawa in the late 1970s where he met his wife, Fernande Faulkner. Together they had two children, Rachel (1981) and Marc (1983). He and Fernande established and ran a management consulting firm, Socioscope, which studied and guided the social aspects of the introduction of information communication technology. In Ottawa, Mike also built and managed a real estate portfolio. In 1992 the family moved to New York, where Mike and Fernande worked for the United Nations. In 1995, Mike became Associate Chair in the Management of Technological Change at the University College of Cape Breton. There, he founded the Centre for Community and Enterprise Networking (C/CEN) as a community based research laboratory exploring applications of ICT to support social change in one of Canada's most economically disadvantaged regions. Grown out of his early experience in rural small town Saskatchewan and his later experiences in impoverished but culturally and communally rich Cape Breton, Mike's work provided the conceptual framing for ?community informatics?. He published the first major work in the field, and introduced the term "community informatics" into wider usage as referring to the research and praxis discipline underpinning the social appropriation of ICT. Within the area of community informatics a major contribution has been Mike's introduction of the notion of "effective use" as a critical analytical framework for assessing technology implementation superseding approaches based on the more commonly accepted frameworks such as that of the "digital divide". In 1999, the family moved to Vancouver to be closer to Mike?s parents and sister. In 2000, Mike and Fernande returned to New York, to work at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the UN, respectively. Mike returned to Vancouver in 2006 and established the Center for Community Informatics Research Development and Training (CCIRDT). With this platform, he traveled the world to consult with governments and civil society organisations, present at conferences, and conduct research. Mike was the founding editor of the Journal of Community Informatics and was Foundation Chair of the Community Informatics Research Network. He was at the time of his death the Executive Director of CCIRDT, and formerly an Adjunct Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies Vancouver Canada, and as well as Research Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey, and Research Professor at the University of Quebec (Outaouais). He was also a member of the High Level Panel of Advisers of the UN's Global Alliance for ICT and Development. He has also served on the Board of the Global Telecentre Alliance, Telecommunities Canada, the Pacific Community Networking Association and the Vancouver Community Net. In recent years he was active as a commentator, speaker and essayist/blogger articulating a community informatics (grassroots ICT user) perspective in the areas of open government data and internet governance. Through all of his work, Mike was motivated by his commitment to democratising access to the tools of information technolo
Re: The Looming Impossibility of the Present
For me, this depends on whose future, not an abstracted one, but one within which genocide all too easily inheres, where the extinction of a species is absolute; a few years ago Johannes Birringer and I co-moderated a discussion on empyre on absolute terror which centered, for me, around scorched-earth operations that permanently eliminated cultural narratives from whole regions. So 'whose future' is absolutely critical, given this and given the enclaving of so many of the top .1%; obviously the planet will survive, things change, etc., but given the potential of nuclear war etc., the future may be brutal indeed. And as I've grown older, I've come to the opposite realization, that life is not resilient at all... - Alan On Sat, 14 Oct 2017, Peter ciccariello wrote: This is brilliant. Thanks Ian Alan Paul. I would like to share it? On Oct 14, 2017, at 10:04 AM, Ian Alan Paul wrote: And so here we are. In the present, the new normal. In a situation that feels just as quotidian as it does impossible. With my coffee I read of fires in California and I scroll through friends' facebook posts debating which filters and breathing masks are best to buy. I read of the news from Puerto Rico, where a tragedy smears across days and then weeks in slow motion, obfuscated by politicians but nonetheless occasionally breaking through the surface. I listen to friends talking about what white supremacists are doing on their campuses, worried about posters and about speaking events, while some have begun receiving death threats. I hear of safehouses being organized for migrants that are soon to be made illegal. Everywhere things are heating up, the seas are rising, and democracies fall from the air like flies. On mornings like this one, I'm reminded of Brecht when he wrote that "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." What could better describe our present? There's no room for nostalgia in such a formulation, in a rapidly disintegrating present that forcefully collapses towards the future. While collapse is always to some degree anticipated as we can see its shadow stretching across the ground beneath us, even its most astute architects cannot be sure in which direction the debris will fall. As I've grown older, one thing which has become increasingly clear to me is that life is resilient. It goes on. Whether in occupied territories, under the weight of a military coup, or after the election of a demagogue, tea and coffee are still brewed in the morning, and people still find, even if somewhat troubled, sleep at night. Even in the face of the most tremendous of losses, the past's rubble is slowly and carefully accumulated into something new and is in turn guarded by the living. We find temporary and fragile shelters from our looming impossibility. And so here we are. In the present, the new normal. In a situation that cannot stay this way because of the way it is. In a kind of life we live because we must continue living. The question for us, I think, isn't whether or not the future can be warded off, although promises that it can be will continue to fill the air with their vacancy. All that remains for us is to embrace the possibility of the impossible present we find ourselves within. If the world can no longer hold as it is, what can come to be in its stead? As our lives in their present forms become increasingly less possible to live, the only refuge may be in the collective invention and elaboration of new forms of living. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: New CD:- LIMIT: http://www.publiceyesore.com/catalog.php?pg=3&pit=138 email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 current text http://www.alansondheim.org/uw.txt # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: nottime: the end of nettime
I've been relatively quiet on nettime; I've submitted more than has been allowed through, and I found that disenheartening. At one point, one of the moderators answered with a critique that I felt should have appeared on the list, instead of privately. What I find missing, what for me was there earlier on, was a freer, less strict environment; at this point, I do a lot of self-censoring because I send anything to nettime, and that doesn't feel right. (Maybe 1 out of 4 posts I have sent actually went through.) The discussion doesn't seem to allow for a critical poetics, or at least the poetics I've submitted at times. So I have mixed feelings about nettime - while I don't think it should be a free-for-all, and I read what I can, I also think it should have a more open submission policy; otherwise it reproduces a kind of back-channel authoirty. Perhaps my submissions don't belong on the list; I do wish that had been up to the subscribers to decide, not the moderators. - Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/td.txt == # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
double apologies
that last post went to the wrong list, I've been getting almost no sleep for weeks, apologies - == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/tc.txt == # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
apologies
I want to apologize for not participating so much in the discussions around netartizens; we just finished (today) a long-term intensive collaborative (Azure Carter, Kathleen Ottinger, and myself) residency at the Brown University Cave, out of which I have about 10 gigabytes of material to deal with, and in three days I'm performing locally with Azure and Luke Damrosch at a non-profit venue here. After that we're recording another cd, hopefully working in the Cave again, and driving out west to deliver some of my instruments to a musical instrument museum. So it's not lack of interest, but projects which are gobbling up my time for the next month or so - ironically, they're all collaborative, just not online. I do want to say something about email lists - I find them the ideal medium for long-term discussions, since they have the capacity for deep and longer responses than, say, Fb; they also come with a leaner menu, less trolling, less distractions, and buffering which give participants the possibility of thinking through more complex replies. The archives and text-based presentations (for the most part) also make it easy to go through the conversational flow and retrievals... - Alan, apologies, writing on just about 0 sleep == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/tc.txt == # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Broken World: Steerage and Steering Mechanisms
Broken World: Steerage and Steering Mechanisms We are steerage. We do not arrive. */Properly, the space in the after part of a vessel, under the cabin, but used generally to indicate any part of a vessel having the poorest accommodations and occupied by passengers paying the lowest rate of fare. [1913 Webster]/* The ship is steered. The ship wanders. The world's broken. Don't misunderstand: nothing will save us; there is no land or: the land is damaged, or: the land is exhausted: blank, the land is blank: anguish. Anguish on our part. We're the ship. Our world. Or: We're all marooned. It is no longer a question of hope, of the human project, of plans or structures, of capital or capitalism, of late capitalism, of neo-liberalism, of inerrancy or the absolute. It is no longer a question of ideologies, of common language, of the commons: it's over. It's steered, and it's steered over, the steering's over. The mechanisms at work are simple and fundamental. They are abject; they grind the rest, whatever was tottering through modernism - they grind the rest down. The world's a world of dust and radiations. The world does not crack. Our project's broken. Some of them: The first intractable mechanism: Overpopulation. The planet is close to its carrying capacity, and there's no end to population increase. The demographics are skewed towards young reproducers; exponential growth lumbers on. The result is more mouths to feed, more strains on the environment, more slash and burn, more hillside slums, more bush-meat, more overcrowding, less jobs, more local war. The second intractable mechanism: Environmental degradation which has reached the point of no return. Consider the plasticization of the oceans, the post-tipping point of animal and plant extinctions, the increasing desertification world-wide, the loss of biological diversity. The anthropocene is not the usual planetary rise and fall; it's the greatest, the fastest, the most violent, extinction. The world is already destroyed; Gaia or its equivalent, is over. Something will remain, future adaptive radiations, but it won't be us: every species will be invasive, and the world, for the foreseeable future, will swarm. The third intractable mechanism: Global warming which is also global redistribution of currents and weather flow. This is also irreversible, past the tipping-point. The results are harrowing: record-setting droughts and floods, enormous hurricanes, tornado swarms, irreversible sea-level rises, and so forth. This is the classical catastrophe (Rene Thom): the fragility of the good descends to chaotic phenomena, and practical measures, theory, containment, is always after the fact. The fourth intractable mechanism: Increased violence and local/ global warfare: again, with limited resources, this will only grow worse. Territories split and compete; the lines are religious, ethnic, geographic, historic etc.; brutality increases as humans turn more and more to the rigidity of absolute/inerrant ideologies, and fortified binary oppositions - classical logics - gain strength as ideological instrumentality. This turn to the right, where the free press, women's rights, science and self-critique etc., are all viewed with suspicion; the left (if these binaries still exist at all) is an endangered species. The fifth intractable mechanism: The vast sea of weaponry and the nuclear arsenal available to all; it is only a matter of time before a dirty bomb or nuclear device is detonated, the equivalent of over-fishing, trawling, the sea bottom. Scorched earth returns to scorched earth; there are no longer resources for rebuilding as poverty and social chaos increase in the world. History, archaeological sites, villages, nations, records, are erased; history is no longer visible, readable; reading itself becomes suspect. The sixth intractable mechanism: Enclaving of the rich and income disparity exponentially increasing; the result is hoarding of resources and increased poverty as noted. This enclaving extends, crudely, to nations; the U.S. for example uses far more resources per capital than almost any other country; the U.S. prison system is itself a flux of pure capital, privatization, the largest in the world. Prisons are less efficient than pure disappearance; even so, population growth more than makes up for the violent loss of life around the planet. Think as well of local militias, including police forces that, first and foremost, look after their own, by any means possible. The seventh intractable mechanism: Antibiotics and spread of disease across varying species; as sludge and clutter increase world-wide, the opportunity for endemic disease increases. Disease vectors are driven by population vectors, by poor health practices, by hunger and poverty. Understand that overpopulation is behind all of this, a developing horizon, just like hacking and criminal gangs are a developing horizon of violence and seizure. There's no more living off the grid;
Invisibility
Invisibility http://www.alansondheim.org/cairn016.jpg Invisibility is the problem of our time, but there are so many! Most of our collapsing phenomenologies center on attention economies, acceleration, dromodology; these are epistemological problems, what might be examined, what should be examined, and the process of examination itself. But invisibility is more perverse; it is an issue of ontology, of disappearance, from within and without, a problem which not only robs us of our situation, our habitus, but also invades the discourse of the body and the self. It can be a sudden transformation, occurring at the edge of the possible, the refugee, the unmanned migrant ship floundering and heading for unknown shores; it may also be a slow and almost imperceptible withdrawal from being, to the extent that being exists as instrumental. Age is one index of invisibility, and this I experience: whatever I do increasingly makes no difference whatsoever, as long as it is with the bounds of the law. Making a difference, making a distinction, is fundamentally a communal and social act; when it no longer matters, helplessness ensues - not the helplessness of a lack of knowledge or tools (but that too), but the helplessness of the collapse of speech acts or being. The aging body is a refugee body, and what might have passed for wisdom is no longer given an audience, but is transformed into some thing swept aside within another register altogether. All of this occurs within a rigidity of etiquette which is not acknowledged, but which creates an iron and exclusionary ontology. Too many people I know, for a variety of reasons (political, age, class, religion or lack of it) feel marooned, a marooning which answers to no shore, no boundary. The issue is one of consequences, which at one point in our social evolutions might have been the concern of cause and effect, but now operates within the regime of effacement (what I have to say is of no consequence, because I am not speaking - a Lyotardian differend which operates across innumerable strata within broken models of being and the world). Engagement is not a projection, not what 'makes us human'; it is, of course, a skein, and one now driven by fast- forward feedback, ranging from high-speed stock manipulation to high speed online text-and-image feeds that leave no time for reflection, but, more importantly, no need for reflection as well. The horizon of all of this is the fracturing of steering problems which dissolve in rhetoric and shifting positions; the problems, however, remain and increase in urgency. Behind them is an increasingly devastated planet with extinctions and population out of control, existing within the immediacy of the digital and its potential for internal transformation (a change of pixel for pixel, for example), for epistemological slide. ... For all of these reasons, these flows, invisibility tends towards pharmacology and depression, towards despair and violence, towards the inerrancy of fundamental religion and a rigidity of logics and taxonomies between believers and non- believers. It is easy to conclude from all of this that 'we are all invisible' or some such, but in fact, the presence of belief and violence point elsewhere, towards a sweeping-aside of the ephemeral and the harnessing of the digital for a strict rhetoric of communications. For those of us who can neither ascribe to this, nor participate (by virtue of the problematic 'essences' of age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc. etc. (all these categories left over from an age of classical modernism and post-colonialism)), nothing is left, and this nothingness leads nowhere to enlightenment, but to those invisibilities which are always hammered into position by others, but which always resist positionality as well; this is the state of marooning, defined by the receding of that instrumental past which at one point, close by, has seemed to be heritage, but in fact was a social construct - the social construct of time which, fast-forward, takes no time at all. It is not that this too shall pass, but that this too has always already passed, and where once the I-(pod) might have been, there shall no longer be absence, but an absence of absence, mute, ontological, nowhere and everywhere at all. There is no answer because there is no time, and no evolution of our, or any other species; there is only the time of slow cessation, on this and other worlds, and the endpoint of invisibility is this - that one is invisible because there is nothing to be seen. This is no longer brilliant weather, but fabrication bending under the weight of its own collapse, as popular culture demonstrates over and over again, and we all succumb to its charms, just as news, here in Providence, flails out with the slogan 'news you can trust,' and advertisements hawk replacements and necessities with the slogan 'just for you.' No one drives these, no one receives them; events as well are marooned
Empyre list discussion on ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance
Empyre list discussion on ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Please consider joining the November discussion on Empyre. All you have to do is join empyre; more information is below. The discussion starts this Monday, November 3rd, and runs until December. There are amazing presenters. From the precis: The world seems to be descending into chaos of a qualitatively different dis/order, one characterized by terror, massacre, absolutism. Things are increasingly out of control, and this chaos is a kind of ground-work itself - nothing beyond a scorched earth policy, but more of the same. What might be a cultural or artistic response to this? How does one deal with this psychologically, when every day brings new horrors? Even traditional analyses seem to dissolve in the absolute terror that seems to be daily increasing. We are moderating a month-long investigation on Empyre into the dilemma this dis/order poses. We will ask a variety of people to be discussants in what, hopefully, will be a very open conversation. The debate will invite the empyre community to a deep and uncomfortable analysis of abject violence, pain, performance, and ideology [taking further the October 2012 debate on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual], looking at the ambivalences of terror, incomprehensible emotions, and our own complicity in the production of 'common sense' around terror. Co-moderators: Johannes Birringer and Alan Sondheim. About the empyre email list: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/ -empyre- is a global community of new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others who participate in monthly thematic discussions via an e-mail listserv. -empyre- facilitates online discussion encouraging critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media. The list is currently co-managed by Renate Ferro (USA) and Tim Murray (USA). Melinda Rackham (AU) initiated -empyre- as part of her doctoral research in 2002. -empyre- welcomes guest moderators who organize discussions for one month. After more than ten years, -empyre- soft-skinned space continues to be a platform dedicated to the plurality of global perspectives reaching out beyond Australia and the Northern Hemisphere to greater Asia and Latin America. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
ISIS: Logic of Universal Terror
ISIS: Logic of Universal Terror
[for all]X{not X --> 0}
Therefore not X is taken to 0 (null set)
Therefore not X is always already processed to 0
Therefore not X is equivalent to 0
Therefore not x is identical to 0
Therefore X --> V (universal set)
Therefore X is always already processed to V
Therefore X is equivalent to V
Therefore X is identical to V
http://www.alansondheim.org/isis1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/isis.mp4
why are monothisists such bitter and miserable people? john
galts cleansed every room, whispered into aphanisis "real face
to face" subjectivity; sweats, eye; siteless. "aphanisis "
(_pipelining_) detumescence/aphanisis affect: _specific_ last y
ear's Where is the end? It is the subject of my writing,
peripheral an d elusive; it appears through the (female or male)
ejaculation of th e reader through the underpinnings or
moistness of the ejaculation . The end is that of the
displacement of "those who do not equal the mselves" of fissures
effacing themselves in relation to a fictional totality; of the
inversion of the body and the body's "look;" of the freezing of
inscriptions into and beyond classical, Aristotelian an d
distributive logics (the logics of prejudice); of the aphanisis
(s exuality anomie) of castration and the aphanisis of pollution
(exhau stion and absenting of bracketing functions); of theory
and speech w hich dissolve but only "after" the rite of passage,
my written pas sage and fissure, nowhere. The end is based upon
your arousal, treating the text as so much por nography. "Those
who do not equal themselves" are equivalent to the null set.
"Fictional totality" refers to the violence of narrative. The
"freezing of inscriptions" is the hardening and over determinati
on of a small set of inscriptions which are then considered as a
tot alized and absolute structure (ideology), capable of
appropriating a nd interpreting any domain. "Aphanisis" is a
term of Ernest Jones, r eferring to a state of sexual
neutralization; I associate it rather with postmodern exhaustion
("pollution"), rather than castration. Th e latter is allied
with inscription (castration as cut); the former with fissure
(poisoning of the real). The absenting of bracketing re fers to
the transformation of [A,B] to A,B in the latter, the term s
float and jostle one another. [7] "Aphanisis" is from Ernest
Jones and is used here to refer to a a & a reduce equally. think
of neutrality, aphanisis, substance; agepoet already america
ancisis andcure antique arrives article arti sts and the
wavering of existence neutrality aphanisis substance aphanisis
substance think of defuge pattern i = (a a aphanisis substance
think of defuge kyoto lang a te aphanisis or loss of distinction
characteristic of our primordial be gin august, why are
monothisists such bitter and miserable people? become a space
of learning, sexuality, mathesis, semioisis... as w ell as
compressions human) latitude, poetics/autopoeisis (beyond
rosset's condition of non desire. Aphanisis. Devouring.
detumescence/aphanisis [7] of affect: _specific_ objects (last
year' s ecocononomymy o of f teteororisism.m. w we e
wiwi l livive e inin eeries for lacan s = defuge pattern i =
(a s = aphanisis fefearar o of f teteororisism.m. w we e
wiwi l livive e inin w food engorgement. in spite of
aphanisis, its domain engorges, its sy mbols hate "monotheists"
hate "agnostisists" hate "you" in spite of aphanisis, its domain
engorges, its symbols topple, it t opples insufficient. becoming
devoured. aphanisis. devouring. heals sutures .
isncingpenisncingpenisisncingpenisncingpenis kaly Mayako Genisis
Hyun Nestra Careless Manx Wharton Paulette Halos tar kinships
cleansed room whispered aphanisiscourse we breathe floods our
meramec message morasco musical mystery noemata nothing nthisis
nurt ure net loss, aphanisis, skull or doctrine of the body
electric the edges players) noise for but noise email or noise
human a (like noisist a * s = aphanisis substance think of
defuge pattern i = (a s = aphanisis substance think of defuge
pattern i = (a aphanisis somome e teteororisism m wiwi b
be e ththe e fifinanal l spopotsts whwherere e teteororisism
m wiwi b be e anand d sstorm street string sullen superb
theory things thinks thisis thori n substance think of defuge
pattern i = (a aphanisis substance surplus. So thisis a
fantastic. Interlude of philosophy. Already mis sed or
teteororisism m anand d i wiwi t telell l yoyou,u, i i w
wil teteororisism.m. t thehe n newew t tererrororirismsm i
is s anan m mosost t fefearar. . wewe a arere g goioingng i
intnto o ththisis thehe teteororisism.m. m my y woworkrk i
is s alalwawaysys a abo boutut towards...aphanisis, decathexis,
releasement, this w whehen n ththe sksky y isis b blulue e anand
d wewe l livive e ini walalkikingng a arorounund d a a
teteororisism.m. w we e wiwilll l when life is nothing more
than that, aphanisis sets in, everything g oes wiring, fibre
optic, heedless
Game of extensions - m/art - currency and probably not
Game of extensions - m/art - currency and probably not Consider a work of art as a pure item of exchange, that is, a form of currency based on an identification between exchange value and unique object. As such, it participates in currency exchange, instead of a standardized marketplace emphasizing commodities. In order of the work to be so constituted, it obviously must possess unique features, a means of identifying authorship without question, the potential for investment by directly entering the monetary system through galleries and other institutions identified directly as banks, and the ability - like gold - to be simultaneously currency and substance/ object. It's clear that the ideology of the object is irrelevant since it is subsumed within the structure of currency, much as the design on a bill is irrelevant to its purchasing power. But I do not want to stop here, I want to mention briefly blockages to this scheme, blockages which exist at the edge of the object itself, which become dysfunctional within the game-space of monetary exchange. It's here that another value is generated, one of unacceptability or waywardness, and I'd argue that this opens up to other territories outside the commodity system - most often, territories of the abject which cannot be encapsul- ated, which remain abject and flooding, which perturb because they cannot be absorbed. For a long time schiz-thought was considered as such, but that, too, formed a signifier within certain kinds of theory. I'm thinking instead of those fluxes which flood 'out the other side,' which remains broken, or a form of gravel, which are not only undefinable, but are incapable of being defined to the extent that their ontology is also undefined, unclear, scattered, exhausted, disparate at the very heap of cores and interrelationships which may be hinted at, at best. I can think of examples, but they are literally beneath me, and them, and their; the examples are under erasure as soon as they're considered, as soon as attempts to apply indexicality to their chaotic territories are underway. The index itself is false, an illusion; the ghosts in the machine are dissipated, and what remains are remnants and residues in unknown tongues, not languages. I'd call this the aporia of the broken territories beyond the pale, the aporia of edge-spaces which extend indefinitely, having forgotten the game-spaces and rules at the core, edge-spaces, in other words, beyond edge- spaces, elsewhere, 'neither this nor that.' I'd think of this as a domain of unformed provinces, the game of extensions which can't be played but which is forgotten, necessarily, the game which seeps out from currency. So there might not be, and probably aren't, objects; so there might not be and probably aren't, flows or chaotic trajectories - there might not be, and probably aren't. (Consider the signature on an artwork and on U.S. 'paper' currency. Currency is backed by governments, exchanges, banks; artworks are backed by discursive formations. Forgeries are tolerated by neither; they create a sense of discomfort in relation to the symbolic; the abject leaks through, even though the objects remain the same. Substances and age are analyzed by assay which may be able to detect age and provenance. The thing itself requires protection within a physical potential well. The physical gallery is a vault; the gallery system is a banking system. Everyone knows that currencies and exchange values in general are subject to wild fluctuations, speculations. What to look for in any work of art? Signature, rarity, buzz, market trajectories, real or virtual life-span of the artist. Shock doesn't hurt but shock may fade.) (The game of extensions appears to absorb everything, but the abject may leak elsewhere. To the extent that the abject is indexical, it functions within the m/artworld; to the extent that it remains uncategorizable, problematizing the object itself, its dysfunctionality deflects absorption. How can one speak about the unspeakable? One pushes it under the rug.) (Of course, the digital creates a different system altogether, one based on plurality, pure exchange down to the bit, fast- forward marketing, the cult and visibility of the artist as managerial. The abject transforms into glitch, re-enters the discourse through the front door, not the back. Everything on the level of abstraction falters on the logic of the copy. I want to argue that the peripheral, the unspeakable, co-exists among real bodies tending towards death and dissolution, that technophilia looking towards the future is in actuality a rear-guard action. I want to argue this because I want to consider the possibility of a corrosion which simultaneously doesn't lead to extinctions, and produces continuously without demarcation; this doesn't go anywhere # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural po
Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by DC Court (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:49:47 From: NAMAC To: Subject: Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by DC Court Connecting You to the Media Arts Community Court Strikes Down Net Neutrality In a blow to Net Neutrality, today the DC Circuit Court struck down the Federal Communications Commission?s Open Internet Order that prevents Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to some online content over other. This is a huge blow to all who currently make independent media works that rely on an open Internet. Media works created outside the commercial industry may now be relegated to the ?slow lanes?, thereby marginalizing public interest and artistically expressive works. We cannot allow this to happen!?? The Internet must remain open and available to all, as it currently is, to ensure that Internet users have equal, unfettered access to content, and creators may distribute their work without artificial constraints.?? The ruling?s only good news is that the Court established that the power to create and enforce rules for the Internet rests with the FCC. The time is now for the FCC, under the direction of the new Chairman Tom Wheeler, to reclassify broadband service as a telecommunications service rather than an information service. Add your voice to our allies at Free Press?s petition to Restore Net Neutrality! Copyright ? 2014 NAMAC, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you are affiliated with NAMAC as a member or you opted into our newsletter through our website or other communication. Our mailing address is: NAMAC145 Ninth Street Suite 230 San Francisco, CA 94103 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
even in the u.s. -
even in the u.s. - i was in Providence in the late 60s/early 70s doing computer art, showing in 71; there were people working with lightshows earlier than that. these histories are all canonic histories and ignore - at least in this country - a lot of what went on. chris funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry covers some of this ground. and this stuff sloughs off into people who built video and sound synthesizers using analog computer components - we built one of the latter in 68 from scratch. it's like the 'history' of electronic lit in this country - things like irc/newgroups/bbs/moo and mud programming are usually excluded. what's needed is a monumental, encyclopedic, and generous accounting for as much as possible world-wide, not this focus on media artists who happened to grab media attention. i should mention that so much was visible from MIT, San Francisco, NYC, LA, etc., that regional work was almost entirely ignored. - Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Death of a Hospital
Death of a Hospital Today we went to the LICH, Long Island College Hospital, for neurology issues. The hospital is being closed down so developers can build condominiums there. In our area there are seven 30+ storey buildings, condominiums scheduled for the next few years. Current condos go for around $700,000 for a one bedroom. The hospital has been the scene of protests in recent months; it serves a large number of neighborhoods and in particular seems to serve minorities. Patients were removed and sent elsewhere. An emergency vehicle was turned away as the emergency rooms were closed down, and someone died on the forty-five minute trip to the nearest still-functioning place. A mayoral candidate was arrested along with doctors and others a week or two ago. When we went, there were, now, security guards everywhere, to make sure there were no more protests. We were escorted to neurology by one of them. They were on the street, they were guarding everything. A receptionist was crying. Our doctor told us how he felt when his bag and belongings were searched as he reported for duty. They have maybe a month to clear out. The developers say they're "beautifying" the waterfront. The hospital is beautiful, with trees and gardens. The guards looked like thugs with military haircuts. Some of them had the word "Summit" on their uniforms. Their uniforms were black. I cannot describe the horror of all of this - after the Barclay Center was built through subterfuge and lies, including seizing buildings by eminent domain and declaring the neighborhood "blighted" (which it wasn't) - now this. Healthcare is collapsing in NYC; this is the second hospital I know to shut down. LICH has been around for 155 years. There are no really close-by others, and to get to others, you now have to negotiate traffic jams created by the Barclay Center over a mile away. LICH doesn't make a profit - it loses I think around 15 million a year. Since when is healthcare supposed to make a profit? We are now at the bottom of developed countries in terms of healthcare - there was a long report about this online. The US idea of healthcare is increasingly moving in two directions - every nicety and technological advance for the rich - and back- breaking financial burdens for the rest of us. Obamacare doesn't change this that much and it will probably be defeated anyway. The horror of people I know struggling to stay alive in the US is unimaginable. People are dying, are been driven into poverty, as a result of greed. There's no way out. I wish these developers will all get sick, unbearably, unbelievably, sick, sick to the point of death - and beyond - and that they lose all their money and have to get in lines for emergency care or be turned away at the door. I wish them hell. They make live miserable for the rest of us. I hope they go up in flames in this life because I sure don't believe in hell. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Do we still engage?
Do we still engage? Do we still engage with Sartre? Do we still read Derrida? Do they speak to us? Does Heidegger speak to us? Does Husserl? Is Hegel still critical to our thinking? Does anyone read Sartre? Does anyone think through Derrida? Do we think we've absorbed Badiou? Is Badiou important? Is Shestov? Is philosophy dead or dying? Is thinking philosophically still important? Does anyone read Plotinus? Does St Augustine speak to us? Is Descartes necessary? Have we absorbed Spinoza? Are we the better for Kristeva? Is Butler still relevant? Is Russell? Have we absorbed Wittgenstein? Do we still engage with Reichenbach? Is Latour still important? Have we gone beyond Carnap? Is Peirce relevant? Does anyone read James? Have we buried Marx? Does anyone think through Freud? Is Arendt still necessary? Are we still inspired by Jung? Do we relate to Plato? Is our world Aristotelian? Is Nietzsche still necessary? Has philosophy disappeared? Have people read Thom? Has Mill disappeared? Is Confucius fundamental? Do we still grapple with Hobbes? Is Kant still an inspiration? Are there answers to questions? Do we still learn from Kierkegaard? Is Lacan still read? Does Maimonides speak to us? Have we abandoned Fanon? Does anyone think through Kofman? Is there any reason to consider Hui Shi? Has Zhuangzi turned the world upside down? Does Parmenides offer solace? Does anyone read Goodman any more? Do we still engage with Bachelard? Is Balibar important? Is philosophy important? Do we consider West? Is Ranciere dead? Does Althusser still speak to us? Is the thought of Merleau-Ponty important to anyone? Is there anything to learn anymore from philosophy? Do we still read Trotsky? Is Grene still relevant? Have we absorbed Cassirer? Is philosophy of science science? Is philosophy of science necessary? Do we still read Langer? Is thought important? Is untethered thought necessary? Is philosophy tethered? Are we engaged with de Beauvoir? Do we remember Deleuze? Do we consider Guattari? Do Deleuze and Guattari offer solace? Is there any value in reading Lyotard? Have we forgotten Kripke? Have we ever comprehended Baudrillard? Is there any point to philosophy? Does philosophy worsen us? Is it necessary to think philosophically? Is it relevant to abandon philosophy? Have we taken Lao Tzu to heart? Are we trusting Agamben? Have we forgotten Schopenhauer? Do we still read Schelling critically? Is Heraclitus still inspiring? Can our lives be guided by Pascal? Are we informed by Whitehead? Do we comprehend the depth of any thought? Do we take thought to heart? Do we still engage with Lucretius? Do we still read Irigaray? How do we know? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Incident at YYZ Toronto International Airport
Incident at YYZ Toronto International Airport We were in Toronto for the HASTAC Conference at York University. We left Sunday late afternoon. At the airport we checked our bag. We then took the bag through customs. We went through several stages. We had the bag tagged. We showed our boarding-passes and passports everywhere. We filled out the customs declarations. We waited in lines. We went through a long line. Azure had her boarding-pass stamped. The Canadian official forgot to stamp mine. We went through another line. We turned things in. I was stopped two stops later and told to return to the Canadian official. The line to reach him took a half hour the first time. I walked two stops back. I reached a U.S. official who had allowed us through the first time. I said do I have to go through the whole line again. I was annoyed. He told me I was being rude. He started yelling. He told me one of the three Canadian soldiers present would escort me back [it was to booth 20]. He was furious. He said if the soldiers have time. He said be polite to them. He said don't interrupt them. He said be nice to them. He was glaring at me. And for a moment I felt I was in a foreign country, the United States of America. He was bullying. His sarcasm was stupid. His insults were flat. His eyes impaled. Other people watched. He kept his eyes focused 'in that male gaze way' on me. He wanted me to challenge him. He wanted to arrest me for something. He wanted to humiliate me. I said nothing. The soldier was fine, the Canadian official joked with me, the U.S. guy let me through. I didn't look at him. People afterwards asked us what happened. I didn't know. All I knew is that here was an ugly bullying American who liked a uniform and didn't like me. Who wanted to arrest me; more, I was sure he was going to hit me. I kept thinking: here's the police and here's the police leakage across the border. You check INTO the United States while still in Canada. Canada, throw them out. I thought: this guy owns guns. I thought: this guy wants _action._ I thought of his pleasure: humiliation. I wanted to strike out at him. I was powerless _there._ _There_ was _here._ I came back to the States and played cura and did this piece: http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/1115 (best) http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/stations.mp3 I wanted to play as many styles as possible in as short a time as possible. But it's long. I want to wrap the strings around his eyes. I want to slam him to the ground. He turns me ugly. He turns me enemy combatant. He turns me _collateral damage._ I don't play guns with cura. Of the music: cura _cures._ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
the HASTAC docx file as rtf - this might be easier
Hi - some people couldn't open the http://www.alansondheim.org/hastac.docx file; please try http://alansondheim.org/hastac.rtf - this might be easier. Both will probably download the file to your download directory; it should be easy to open from there. Feedback welcomed. Thanks, Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
avatars and theory
(wrote the original around 1996, and I'm still talking about this stuff, most recently at SXSW Interactive this year.) == AVATARS AND THEORY == I started working with avatars in text-based applications such as newsgroups, email lists, MOOs, LPMUDs, and IRC. Below is a list of what I perceived as their common characters - and the relationship of those characteristics to everyday, i.e. non-CMC, life. Current notes are in brackets. == JENNIFER, JULU, NIKUKO, ALAN == 1 system resonances - what entrances and exits available - sendmail for example (from telnet 25 to configuration files), doctor for another [at this point text-based avatars were attached to applications that were not avatar-based. on the other hand the Eliza program in emacs allowed for the development of personality and dialog, and might be one of the first online avatar environments.] 2 explorations of self and fragmentations - discomforts, tremblings as totality is problematized [this tends towards issues of abjection, wounding, frisson, arousal, and death within the virtual - which might cynically be seen as nothing more than a rearrangement of digital bits.] 3 psychotic emanations - selves generating worlds, inability to return or manipulate one in relation to another [the worlds such as IRC were widely disparate and appeared autonomous; to carry Jennifer from one to another required reassertions. the same is true today, but mixed-reality work tends to blur all of this - in other wor(l)ds the environments exist in potential wells that allow tunneling.] 4 perturbations within systems - IRC or alt.jen-coolest for examples [it was, and still is, possible to perturb systems, to work at the edges of the game space, to hack and infiltrate - annihilating a performance platform at the end of a performance in Second Life, or having human performs work at the edges of a mocap space are two examples.] 5 theoretical turns - Jennifer's 'panties on the ground' - desire in relation to metaphysical system building [sexual-theoretical turns, as both male and female avatars operated within fetishization and abjection, two trends that have become commonplace in virtual sexuality. what happens when an avatar is 'in tatters,' falling apart, collapsing?] 6 problematics of author and authoring - 'deaths of authors' [like the uncanny between real and virtual worlds, there is an uncanny between avatar creator/controller/human performer and avatar; through an analysis of projection and introjection, avatar and (presumably) human become inextricably entangled.] 7 multiculturalisms (Nikuko), sexualities (Julu), Alan and the rhetoric of innocence [multiculturalisms extend to virtual cultures and their ethnographies, but what occurs in the virtual doesn't stay in the virtual.] 8 duals and dialogs, dialectic - talker or MOO explorations (wanderings and fabrications of spaces) [these explorations have moved of course into OpenSim and Second Life, but the concepts of historiography, broken projects, avatar absences, debris, etc. remain the same.] 9 stutterings, etc. - manipulated texts - the problematic of speaking, including breakdowns of first/second/third persons [textual stuttering can blur diegesis, tense, and person; it can play off inner speech, it can speak among- or for-, it can reveal psychoanalytical debris.] 10 ontic explorations - ghosts and other emanations (the videos) - elements of disappearances, sadomasochisms, bindings and controls - the nature of writing and inscription [again in this early outline, sexuality makes an appearance. not only are ontologies blurred, but the very nature of control becomes messy and obscured in terms of agency. social media obscures and hides: think of Facebook for example as a sado-masochistic theater, with non-existent keywords and with hidden, unknown, power dispersing and controlling your self-image, and your image of other's selves.] 11 sexualities - multiples, topologies, exchanges (Nikuko), dismemberings (Julu-function), affect (Alan) [selves split, bots are everywhere, avatar bots are wonders of control and one can imagine such control as looped and continuous, eventually becoming the real/virtual landscape itself. all of this relates to the _obscene,_ which has been shown to operate differently in the brain; 'primitive' processes are called up, and language becomes threat, arousal, and other. sexualities operate everywhere in social media and virtual worlds, and the cartoon-like visuals in the latter play deeply into fantasy introjection and projection. humans are just at the beginning of understanding this, ignoring their animal and primate present.] 12 dismemberments - part-objects, splays, ruptures, s/ms, emissions [this ties quickly into the world-theater of slaughter and corruption, plant and animal extinctions, neo-liberalism and corporate enclaving: hiding the parts in relation to a simulacrum of the w/hole. in a sense this
we are all damned
[post dorner rhetoric: read this: "San Bernardino County sheriff.s officials said they tried to force the suspect to surrender before accidentally setting the cabin where he was holed up on fire when they shot a pyrotechnic chemical device inside." Yes - "accidently" because "pryotechnic" devices are "accidental."] we are all damned Yea, the that's navy, why a he police was officer, in hunted the officers, navy, and a Yea, police that's officer, why hunted he officers, was and in engaged won them several won firefights. several Does firefights. ignoring Does reality ignoring to reality preserve to engaged preserve them your make happy you little feel view better? of The world is make that you murdered feel your better? happy The little is view that of murdered world innocent(and people. unarmed cowardwith people. "c". cowardwith Well "c". when Well try when rat try out rat innocent(and out unarmed corrupted they law start enforcement their they attacks start against their you? attacks what against else you? corrupted what law else enforcement do. innocent You people, all how claim do killed we innocent know? people, Because how same do do. we You know? all Because claim same killed cops criminals revealed said be so? criminals Not said defending so? him, Not just defending playing him, cops just revealed playing be devil's with advocate. his Plus, training, with I his highly training, doubt I hes highly dead. doubt devil's hes advocate. dead. Plus, believe before did SOTU, end humiliation it fact before couldnt SOTU, stop humiliation one fact man... couldnt believe stop did one end man... it We on shall record see. (which were msnbc caught fox on news record or (which any msnbc We fox shall news see. or were any caught mainstream burn would house never down. air), amy saying not burn agree house but down. few amy mainstream not would agree never but air), few saying things They made cared obvious: for They Due cared Process for Constitutional Due right Process tried Constitutional things right made tried obvious: by ALL jury factual peers, evidence WITH presented. ALL Was factual first evidence American presented. US Was by first jury American peers, US WITH Soil if authorized spotted drone (we strike see if well spotted those (we go see overseas, well Soil those authorized go drone overseas, strike 1200 dead children counting). dead Regardless counting). criminal, Regardless our criminal, judicial our system judicial has system 1200 has children shown swore care uphold. law, know swore EVERYTHING uphold. transpired know here, EVERYTHING this transpired real here, shown this care real law, story, are is, expected re it. told calling thing him are hero, expected again, it. Devil's calling story, him is, hero, re again, told Devil's thing Advocate. been He brought should court have PEERS, been public brought forum, court so PEERS, could public Advocate. forum, He so should could have reveal add side, more WHY this, did.. about To who add fired more people this, due about reveal who side, fired WHY people did.. due To mistaken where identity, investigation where criminal investigation charges criminal into charges that? into 41 that? 71 41 mistaken 71 identity, year hispanic old women hispanic cretainly women meet cretainly description, meet truck description, had truck burned, had year burned, old still it? looking What it? mean What miserably mean failed miserably officer failed lied officer female lied still female looking supervisor own cover mistakes own like mistakes tiny like man tiny was, man completely was, couple completely supervisor couple cover included success young loser black two success good loser officers two didn't good even officers brains didn't included even young brains black get creep mexico brother every (of creep nationality) brother successfully (of fled. nationality) Too successfully bad fled. get Too mexico bad every take that, aim since at don't you, seem that, appreciate since person don't situation seem hurt appreciate take person aim situation at hurt you, care, defend whether not. defend "The not. people" "The So people" soldiers, So police, soldiers, homicidal police, care, homicidal whether maniacs, etc... psychopaths, lack etc... fear. lack That fear. makes That murderer makes nothing murderer more. nothing maniacs, more. psychopaths, Feeling need need label label someone someone something something solely solely appease appease feelings feelings weakness. weakness. Feeling honey, 13 ive olds, shot i 13 protect olds, CONSTITUTION i enemies protect foreign CONSTITUTION domestic. enemies honey, foreign ive domestic. shot Just do, because will dont give it, my doesnt life dont. rights, do, no will amtter give Just my because life dont rights, it, no doesnt amtter dont. other SWORE deserves TO. not, Glad why, can SWORE LAPD TO. proven Glad capable can wrose LAPD other proven deserves capable not, wrose why, crimes. back If barn, MSNBC sheep. then But back open b
========================================= dead music (fwd)
= dead music = i do dead music: music of the dead, music by the dead, music for the dead. sometimes someone listens over my shoulder until our bones fall off. our bones are bright bracelets but the music goes out. sometimes someone does dead music. yes because the dead are eternally with us, and my music, at least to me, appears stillborn. I'm not sure what you mean like all elements; objects have resonances but if they're chaotic enough they'd cancel out. Meanwhile for us humans most music dies unrecorded and probably unheard except for the musician - because I work the graveyard shift. because there's nothing dreamed of in this world, there's just the world. because the world does not dream. because it does not i do dead music. my saz was made by ahmet tekeli a famous saz player. there is a picture of him in Rebecca Bryant, The soul danced into the body: Nation and Improvisation in Istanbul. the label reads Figure 5. Saz greats in a _meyhane_ (bar/restaurant): Left to right, Semsi Yastiman, Kastamonulu Yorgansiz Hakki Baba, and Ahmet Tekeli in Kastamonu, 1967 (courtesy of Sinan Yastiman). my saz now has violin pegs, six working strings, a bridge positioned upon veneer, a somewhat damaged headstock, a poorly-painted bowl (black), and cracks. the sound is the sound of the dead. on my suroz, the sound is the sound of the dead. do i play for myself. i imagine all instruments in flight from the open window ascending silently into the sky. i imagine they call for me. tonight i walked among them strumming the open strings. they say, whatever you do is insufficient, your hands are torn and crippled, your mind bedraggled, you think about death and your thinking is a dream. i cannot reply unless i dream, and my dreams are nightmares of death and close-knit families internally torn apart. on the saz i play without error and without tradition, i know no songs, i cannot sing anyway. to listen and play dead music is to inhabit the ashes of the world. the world unsung has no history, no moments. it is the singing of the world that transforms sound into speaking, that gives stories the strength of continuing the history of death. our history is the history of death and there is not, even for a moment, any other history. we do not revive the past, we are drawn into its graves, we are already accumulation and abyss. among ourselves with think we are talking. if you listen to a recording of my saz you can imagine fingers in motion, the light weight of the instrument, the smoothness of the neck, the roughness of the sound- board from so many players. it is all grey, the color of non-existent when the first whites and last blacks transform into last blacks, first whites. that moment when death seeps through and you realize nothing has seeped in all eternity, it has always been what we interpret in shuddering as motion and meaning, just as we are forgetful and the promise or premise of the fecundity of infinite worlds dies before the music has even a chance of becoming-music, when it appears to take up residence, reside. besides, you do not listen, and if you did, you would have to always listen, have always listened. just in order to make an other order, to make an other. which you cannot do. which is why i play for myself and it is always an appeal and always unappealing. it refuses the raggedness of enlightenment when something crackles and you believe you are transformed. but the mountain is still a mountain. the mountain always was a mountain. the solace of geologic time transforms it into flatness. notes are never carved, they appear dream-like to inhabit the air. they do not. they are not heard. there is possibility of hearing. there is no hearing. there is no life, there is either death. there is no history and no death. there is none of this. there is no writing. there is no sounding and no sounding- out. nothing is heard. all music is dead music. i do dead music. i do dead music: music of the dead, music by the dead, music for the dead. i do nothing. in figure 5, ahmet stares at the camera with an odd expression. he is on the right. he appears related to me. i am playing his saz which has been changed through history. it is not his image and it is not ahmet and he is not looking at anything. every statement precedes with a codicil and is followed by a codicil. the codicil is mute. the codicil enunciates the end of the universe within an imaginary belonging to the text. to the statement. to every statement. the codicil is continuous reiteration. it precedes and follows everything. it is within everything. it precedes and follows every word. it is within every word. it precedes and follows every letter. it is within every letter. it is within every sound. it is within the sound of the saz. it is within the string and the vibration of the string. it is the texture and textile of dreams. it precedes and follows dreams. it is within dr
the difference between the new fiction and the old
the difference between the new fiction and the old is simple: we're increasingly forced to recognize that we're buffeted in the universe, that we're atom to mountain, that we're increasingly irrelevant outside our own self-interest. so the narratives are narratives of buffeting, of forces beyond our understanding and control. we received entangled messages of limited content from the cosmos; we strangle ourselves in attempts to cohere, inhabit instead of live within as abstraction - Heidegger, where are you when we need you? we are the misery of absolute annihilation within the matter of time; we operate on smaller and smaller domains as if space were a matter of local technologies and our corporate love of them. the truth is that the truth is incontrovertible, inconceivable, immense, beyond our limitations, as multiverses become place-holders in formulas and emptied signifiers. we believe in universal knowledge, sentient networking, data-banks of the world's intelligence, ignoring the real physical devastation the planet shakes upon us. we hold to the myths of an Internet of totalizing and infinite connectivity, ignoring the buffeting in favor of buffering, hold-fasts and clouds which are still more phenomena of the mythos of placing and placement. the buffeting will necessarily, entropically, win out in the end, in a version of Eliot's whimper, and it's this that's forming the new germ of our cultures, hardly visible, but with increasing presence as the surface of the planet continues with its own branding of devastation. write of buffeting, not buffering, and tell the truth, while simultaneously the truth, under erasure and corrosion, is annihilated, while both voice and comprehension are permanently stilled. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
RATTLING THE REPUBLICANS
RATTLING THE REPUBLICANS http://www.alansondheim.org/rattling.mp3 I want to rattle the Republicans; I want to SHAMANIZE them I want to rattle their evil I want to SEND THEM TO HELL All I can do is PLAY my MUSIC and play my SHAMANIC TRANCE I did do TRANCE along with the DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION I did to RATTLE to RATTLE the REPUBLICANS AND SEND THEM THEY ARE INCURABLE THEY SUCK THE MONEY FROM THIS COUNTRY I want to rattle them I WANT TO SHAKE THEIR BONES I WANT THEIR SKIN TO FALL FROM THEIR BONES I PLAY SHAMAN TO THEM I PLAY SHAMAN AGAINST THEM I PLAY SHAMAN AGAINST THEM I SCREAM SARANGI AGAINST THEM I WANT THEIR BONES TO FALL FROM THEIR BONES I WANT THEIR POISON TO DESTROY THEM I WANT MY MUSIC TO DESTROY THEM I GIVE MY MUSIC TO THEIR DESTRUCTION I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE I did do TRANCE # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Carrie Ahern's Borrowed Prey - vimeo link
Carrie Ahern's Borrowed Prey Carrie Ahern is a dancer and performer I met at Mount Tremper a few years ago. She has recently completed and performed, at Dickson's Farmstand Meats, Borrowed Prey, one of the most interesting, and, I think, 'important,' works I've seen. The piece, roughly an hour long, is concerned , among other things, with animals, meat and the meat industry, and human empathy or lack of it. I want to share the link with you and hope you'll watch it. I wrote her an extended and favorable reply, which I may send out in a while, but I feel you should see this in its entirety on Vimeo without my interference. In any case, please go to Carrie Ahern ?? https://vimeo.com/42007072 and her website is http://www.carrieahern.com . Thanks, Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Internet immediate future, through E-Week
You might want to check the following out; one of the things that fascinates me is the enormity of the next - and yet we continue to theorize as if it's somehow comprehended. I'm part of the Electronic Literature Organization for example, and mostly see the same names over and over again - and yet, with so many hundreds and hundreds of millions of people online, there have to be whole continents of thought we're unfamiliar with. I know in one area I'm concerned with - world-wide animal extinction - there are so many hotspots and so many populations on the move or in difficulty, that it's impossible to keep track of things, much less effect them. In any case, statistics like these are wake-up calls, but I'm not sure to what - http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/Cisco-The-Internet-in-2016-by-the-Numbers-394993/?kc=EWKNLNAV06012012STR1 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Recent Books I'm In and Why They're Good
Recent Books I'm In and Why They're Good Ok, this is a bad way to begin reviews/announcements of some recent books that discuss my work (in the midst of others of course); I'm not sure how to do this modestly, or whether modesty would even be an issue. For me these books have been important because much of what I've done, I thought lost; my career is one of constant falterings, restarts, occasional moments when it seems as if things are going to turn out well - then more falterings, and so forth. I begin constantly; it's only a matter of time before I collapse. The truth is I also like these books for all sorts of reasons, so here goes. The most recent is also the most expensive, Garry Neill Kennedy's The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978, MIT Press, 2012, around $70. I taught there several times during this period, as a visiting artist or visiting faculty. The school was amazing; it had a world-wide reputation with people like Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, and Joseph Beuys coming up. There's a lot on Dan Graham and Ian Murray, who was a student and catalyst at the time. The book's over 450 pages long, large format, and includes a lot of work and statements by the people who came through. NSCAD was a kind of paradise; students and faculty were given tremendous latitude in their projects, and everyone was treated as as valuable, and an artist. Simone Forti, Gerhard Richter, and Michael Snow made books for the NSCAD Press. A lot of the energy and genius of the place emanated from David Askevold, who headed the Projects class. Krzysztof Wodiczko and Emmett Williams and Charlemagne Palestine were there. Dorit Cypris and Sharon Kulik were students, Martha Wilson and Kasper Koenig were there. I'm not sure of Martha's affiliation. The school had a conceptual bent, but this was translated into thinking about and through performance, painting, sculpture, and life. These were formative years for me; in particular, I owe a lot to David and Ian. I wouldn't get the book for me, however (god, what hubris); the totality of the volume really shows what's possible in art education, and why art schools - which seem to be on the decline (as is art education in the US at least, another matter) - are really important in the world. Along with this, Peggy Gale edited Artist Talk, 1969-1977, NSCAD Press, 2004 - transcriptions of talks given at the school. Artists include Acconci, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Dan Graham, Lawrence Wiener, Patterson Ewen, Daniel Buren, and so forth - all males, it should be noted (which is one of its faults - Laurie for example also gave a talk). I'm in this as well with 43 pages of strangeness. Even more recently than Kennedy's book, Jason Weiss just edited Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-DISK, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America, Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Again, I'm part of the "oral." This book documents the company, which for all intents and purposes introduced the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Guiseppi Logan; Michael Snow is in this as well. Ayler died years ago; the people interviewed include Sunny Murray, Amiri Baraka, Gato Barbieri, William Parker, Burton Greene, Logan, Roswell Rudd, Marion Brown, Milford Graves, Ishmael Reed, John Tchicai, Gunter Hampel, and Sonny Simmons, among others. There's a large section on Bernard Stollman, who founded the company. If you're interested in free jazz, new music, experimental music, alternative-anything, this book, I think, is a must read, along with Valerie Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. And the music (forget me here) is unbelievable; both books serve as reasonably good guides. Chris Funkhouser has published two books on electronic writing; the latest is New Directions in Digital Poetry, Continuum, 2012. There's a section on me, for which I'm grateful. This is the best book I've seen on the subject - it follows up on Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, Alabama, 2007. I'm in this as well. What Chris has done, in both, is present the works of a great number of people, along with commentary/theory; the writers/poets/artists include David Daniels, Jim Andrews, Philippe Bootz, mIEKAL aND, Laurie Anderson, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Mez (Mary Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, Caitlin Fisher, Sandy Baldwin, Deena Larsen, and many others. New Directions is divided into case studies, Prehistoric focuses on history, but both volumes overlap past and present. I love Funkhouser's writing, which is clear, energetic, amazingly lucid, and really useful for anyone trying to follow the roots and current landscape of an incredibly messy area of contemporary - what? literature, programming, poetry, thought, culture, interactive work, new media? The books are exciting with numerous examples. The intensity of Maria Damon's art and writing is phenomenal; her Postliterary America,
What's Left: The Crisis of Philosophy and Thought in the World
What's Left: The Crisis of Philosophy and Thought in the World (I've been thinking along these lines for quite a while now, skittering from one article or book of physics/cosmology to another. Now a similar debate is occurring, from Scientific American to the New York Times and across the Net. The issue isn't basically the issue of the role of philosophy - it's one of our own, human, disorganization as the universe appears increasingly alien and unknowable. Do we release ourselves from knowledge and its attendant dream of totalization, or do we proceed with the development of grander, perhaps simpler, models which "fit" more and more awkwardly with the results coming in from theory and experimentation? My own work has always tended towards concepts of fundamental or background material, however weak such material might be; now, it tends towards a releasing that's somewhat similar to the creation of a bunker or village.) It's a wonder we're organized at all, that there are cultural restraints, that one can function in this world - such a miniscule part of the multi- verse in the midst of inconceivable catastrophic forces that just happen to avoid the planet, disrupt the solar system. Given the multiverse and an eternity of consequences, the one remaining goal of philosophy is to consider the relationship of this inconceivable to human consciousness - the relationship of increasingly complex theories as well, to a comprehension of one's place in the cosmos. Everything else has been prepared for and the fundamental structures of logic, equivalence and identity for examples - as well as the fundamental structures of mathematics in general - point towards a platonism that goes hand in hand with the physics of the world and its interpretation. There is no role for doubt in this as well as no room for belief. The haecceity of the world is its demonstration; it remains mute, obdurate. What can be said is the entanglement of philosophy with haecceity which veers from cognitive science to a traditional phenomenology of the senses. On the other hand, it's impossible to draw first principles from this, and philosophy remains a mode of description, not explanation, or perhaps explanation by fiat, by circumlocution in the literal sense. All of this is also the condition of anxiety; whatever moorings one might desire disappear in the digital shifting of analysis and culture. In other words, the appearance of the multiverse is founded on enormous holarchies of data reaching far beyond our ability to comprehend directly; we rely on interpretations of inferences that allow us to filter the inconceivably high input we would require for absorption of the raw. In this sense, there's an uncanny parallel with looking on the face of a god which necessarily remains ineffable: Everything that exists, everything that occurs, does so, for us, only on the basis of interpretation. I would argue platonically that any logic would unfold the same in any universe, that this is a characteristic of mathematical ontology that remains identical from one conceivable unfolding to another. One might construct, read, and interpret syllogisms variously; the tetherings are radically different for differing systems, but the tetherings themselves are dictionaries, acts of interpretation, within which tautologies and equivalences rule. The Whorfian hypothesis and its descendents doesn't hold for mathematics, but only for mathematical cultures; someone working in base twelve will have a different sense of the divisions of the day, for example, than someone working in base ten. We have to let it go at that. Further, mathematical ontology is not dynamic: It is the background of dynamics, which operates through radical transformations that must be coherent anywhere on a fundamental level. Chaos and noise are coherent in this sense, as is randomness. Think of mathematics as the indeterminate scaffolding of the multiverse; think of physics and cosmology as "that" scaffolding that fits. So the crisis of philosophy might be this: That there is nothing to be considered or done that is not part of the human, part and parcel of human culture. Fundamental truths are relegated as they always have been, to physics and cosmology; the rest is narrative and the fear of death and abjection. The rest is human affairs. What is human and human culture is founded on unsteady and dynamic principles, as well as cybernetic and prosthetic ones; it's here that philosophy operates - for example within the realms of inscription, psychoanalytics, marxisms, deconstructions, multiculturalisms, etc. So we're talking about philosophy as part and parcel of the humanities, adjunct to the world, contingent. We're talking about it as a moral guide, and as guidebook to the phenomenology of our imaginary of our place in the cosmos. The manifesto appears in this, for example in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as the last gasp of setting the world aright, bridging human and non-human, my
PCMs (real and virtual arrays in the worlds)
PCMs Years ago I designed a PCM, this was around 1970 maybe. PCM stands for Parameter Control Module; the idea was to create a unit which could connect and control other similar units. PCMs were digital but they didn't need to be. There were any number of inputs and outputs. The idea was that anything could be connected to anything else. In other words, there were standardized simple protocols in terms of voltage and bandwidth; every- thing functioned like blood in the veins of some untoward ganglion. In order to enter the PCM array, translation was necessary from an outside world into the protocols; this was the job of an input interface which could be tailored for particular situations. The interface was divided into two sections: the outer section was tailored to the world, and the inner, to the emission of protocols. So the input interface was generous in its acceptance. At the other end of the array, there was a similar output interface, divided into two sections; the inner section was tailored to the protocols, sending the signal current to the outer section, which was tailored to the world, and generous. For example, an audio input interface might take microphone signals and standardize them, sending them to the array; an audio output interface might take the array protocols and send them simultaneously to audio amplifiers and a lighting board. What made the array of greater interest, of course, is that input and output signals could also be applied directly to any particular PCM, bypassing the standard interfaces. The array as a whole, as a ganglion, would be in effect a ganglion open to the world at any place or space, both for input and output. One might think of the PCMs as formal neurons. Internally, the components of the PCMs might be smoothly voltage-control- led, with the possibility of directly inputting different equations; one might begin with standard smooth trigonometric functions and replace them with discontinuities of all sorts, including chaotic behavior. I believe to this day that designing the PCMs would have been a relatively trivial matter. Although the project remained stillborn, the concept behind it remains of interest to me. I've begun to think of the arrays, inputs and outputs, as an affair in which anything might modify or influence any- thing, including, reflexively, itself. The arrays in fact might be virtual and one thinks only of empty, undefined, space or air, a distant model of the real and external world, where such things happen. Thus anything here and now has the potential for affecting anything else, and anything might seem to turn around and talk directly with you, listening, at the same time, to your innermost thoughts, whatever you choose to reveal: here are the input and output interfaces. What goes on in such virtual arrays is only the ideality of the world itself, the ability to take-for-granted that there are always relatively stable domains for communication or dwelling, for work or discourse, and so forth. Any dynamic action, any action which changes in time, might be considered to be modeled thus; any static action might be one which leaves the virtual array quiescent. The size and power of the virtual PCMs are also of interest; as they decrease, one might argue that the granularity of the world is increasingly differ- entiated, just as their increase transforms the granularity into rougher constructs handled by integration. In the middle lies everyday life, where processing of this sort is kept to a minimum. I can imagine in this fashion thinking of the world as a vast complex of fundamental operations on the ordering of everyday life, just as Aristotelian logic and its laws of distribution appear to deal well with the uncanny lack of transience of everyday objects. The edges of such modeling, however, are always limit- points which a different kind of roughness appears, for example quantum phenomena or color vision or even corrosion. To some extent, these rough processes, including unknown one, can be imagined within the virtual array which would have additional signals, alarm signals, that anomalies were working their way into or out of the array; there could be, in fact, virtual interfaces utterly open to the real, whose sole purpose would be the conversion of such anomalies. One process would be that of the name, beginning with the proper name, and working towards untoward generaliza- tions; another would be that of radical smoothing, and a third might be the cessation of array activity altogether. I think of this as burrowing or death, depending on the degree of destruction or rearrangement encountered. Likewise, there would be inverse processes, those of birth or emerging, in which partial identity transformations would remain and perhaps even be backwards-traceable, backwards-compatible in terms of the protocols. The whole, virtual and real, is a form of metaphor ready to be implemented. I can only conclude that the same is already in the
Aesthetics of Improvisation: Intermissions, Interruptions, and Digressions in Performance
Aesthetics of Improvisation: Intermissions, Interruptions, and Digressions in Performance At the Sunday talk/video/dance given by Foofwa at the 92nd St. Y, he talked about the relationship between complex choreography and inter- ruptions in his piece based on Cage, THiRtEEn. We talked about this later and I related the discussion to my own improvisation work, as well as performances I'd done in Second Life, with other musicians, and so forth. I began to think of a taxonomy of interruptions, realizing that I was heading into muddy hermeneutics at the least, as well as splitting epistemologies and fractured phenomenologies. I revived the idea of the 'fissure,' a break in the midst of A and A, which doesn't change the entity; the split remains, temporary or permanent, as a glitch, but not - as in negation, an ontological process. So we begin with a choreography (which may also be a musical score, theatrical text, etc.) which is absolute in the sense that the real is absolute; it forms a foreground and background structure which the performer follows to the best of hir abilities, without break, with a sense of inhabiting the piece which is almost unconscious, and with a repertoire of technique that, hopefully, can be taken for granted - a form of tacit knowledge that allows the piece to flow smoothly, from beginning to end. Think of this absolute choreography as an impossibility, as the performer adjusts hirself throughout the presentation: nothing is or can be perfect, because no choreography operates as natural law, and interpretation is part of the very atmosphere of any performance. We are talking about human performance here, not machine or program performance, where choreographies may repeat themselves endlessly without error, or with the repetition of the same error growing either linearly or exponentially. Let us think, without error. There is always the question, or the state, of the freedom of the performer, who has agreed, often under contract and capital, to perform and rehearse a piece, for perhaps a set amount of time, with various riders attached, for example drowning as an act of God. What can happen? Here we enter into the phenomenologies, the taxonomies, of behavior in relation to structure: the coupling is always a loose coup- ling. The performer may repeat or elide a section or sections of the choreo- graphy, This may be the result of forgetting the section or sections; it may be a conscious decision; it may be the result of an other cue; it may be the result of muscle strain or other sense of injury. It may also occur as a result of play. All of these situations imply different intentions, different intentionalities: forgetting can also connect to a suturing, for example, so that the performer does not know s/he has elided something - s/he remains within the aegis of the dance, inhabiting the dance, in spite of (perhaps) the consciousness, from outside, of something amiss - as if there were differing hermeneutics and strata of the same choreography: someone performing, someone reading, someone watching. A sense of injury or strain tends to foreground the body; if the pain is minor, the performer may attempt to circumscribe it, detour 'around' the section, as if the detour _were_ the section. If the pain is major, the performer may slip into a phenomenology of the body, backgrounding the choreography which is then only an inscription under erasure (a differend; the choreography is no longer speaking, no longer in control, no longer _in_ inscription). The performer may make a conscious decision not to do the section or sections, or to repeat them, or transform them according to any number of semiotic operations. This may come out of an inhabitation of the dance, leading hir elsewhere/elsewise; it may come out of a sense of play, as if the dance were temporarily objectified, thrown for a loop, thrown out of kilter; it may come out of a sense of play in which the dance is forgotten and the section becomes the horizon itself. The forgetting of the section may be a conscious forgetting, as the per- former does something else, or nothing at all: the performer might rest, might decide to rest; the performer's body might 'seem' to rest or decide to rest. The daily, the everyday, is foregrounded; the performer has an itch, wants to rest, needs to go to the bathroom; has a sense of the giggles; remembers a recent argument or sex; starts laughing; is furious at hirself; and so forth. For the audience, the conscious forgetting, the everyday, may well be part of the performance: did s/he forget hir lines or is this part of the choreography, the score? Is this Brecht, Pirandello, their descendents? Is this revolutionary theater, Occupy? It may simply be everyday, a relationship or communality among people - performers, choreographers, audience, within or beneath the problematic sign of capital. For the performer, there may _never_ be a return to the choreography; for the audience, there is a
Prisonhouse of Age
Prisonhouse of Age Something has to be said about age and ageism, which is so pervasive in our culture, that we're held down, tied up, unable to move. I'm told I look good for my age; that I play like a much younger person. In a performance I hear that a dancer, who died at 68, was in the middle of the end of her life. A friend says that his uncle dying at the age of 72, is quite old. Grandfathers and grandmothers on tv always look to retirement and playing with the kids. Television ads are increasingly aimed towards drugging us, those over 60 say, because of a variety of ailments we don't have. We're frightened of falling and not getting up. We're no longer mid-career artists, but a dying generation. We're waiting for the end. Friends say that now we're waiting for us to die off, that every day brings news of new deaths and again this isn't true. The rhetoric is hurtful and isn't meant to be hurtful. The rhetoric is made out of bits and pieces of the 'natural' progression from birth to death. We're the AARP generation. We're the baby boomers are are demanding to suck social welfare dry. We don't do anything. We're not worth listening to. We're hippies and repeat the 60s. We just love listening to 60s music which formed us. We're part of the social welfare state. Some of us who fought in Vietnam are an embarrassment. Some of us who didn't are an embarrassment. On tv we're told that 'all we have is our stories.' If this happened to anyone at any age, the result would be unbearable. We're not taken seriously. We're all waiting for us to pass away. We have to prove ourselves repeatedly. We're the result of hidden prejudice. We're on the way to dementia. We're on the way to Alzheimer's. We're told our short-term memory isn't what it used to be. In the most well-meaning areas of popular culture, we're forgetful. Our bones are weak and ready to fracture. We have to exercise more. Our family has to be everything. We're not eligible for grants and for jobs. We're eligible to die and the sooner we do that, the less the embarrassment. In fact embarrassment is the key to everything; we embarrass others. If we're sexual it's a joke. If we remarry it's a joke. If we refuse our assigned place in the family it's a joke. I first ran into ageism at the age of 30, applying for a job as editor of an art mag in Los Angeles. I've always been sensitive to it because I've always been told I look and act 'younger than my age.' Now the violence of age, an assigned number, a number we can't do anything about - almost but not quite like the color of our skin - is foregrounded. I get turned down for jobs because of it, illegal but of course there are always ways around it. My own feeling? If I can't do something now, just as if I couldn't do something at 20, then so be it; I don't belong where doing that thing is impossible. But otherwise, leave me alone, judge me on what I make, what I say, and leave goddamn age out of it. Don't call me a generation and don't tell me my best days are behind me. Don't tell me I'm in my golden years. This may all seem minor, idiotic, to you. You have no idea, at least in the US, how pervasive this is. There are pockets of resistance - Eyebeam for example, where I was resident until a week or two ago, is a healthy exception. But almost everywhere, the codes are in place, they're suffocating. I'm offered seats on the subway - because of age, not because I need them. People condescent, smile at me, since apparently I'm no longer sexual, have no desires, know my place. I'm told I'm a child again, that the elderly are child-like. I'm told I'm living on borrowed time. I'm told there's not much time left. I'm told I should be grateful. I'm told I have a loving family. I'm told my grandchildren are my future. I'm told my children are my future. I'm told I have no future. I'm told about generations, that I'm of this or that generation, that it's now the turn of a new generation. I'm told what our generation thinks and I can't recognize that. I'm told repeatedly that we were born before the digital age, that we think differently. The fact this isn't true, none of this is true, with people I know and I'm sure millions of people in this country, is irrelevant. I'm lectured _to._ I'm talked _to._ I'm taken out of the realm of instrumental thinking, consigned to a real which is a total mirage, told to act my age and behave myself. People don't tell me to retire, but they assume I'm headed that way. My theoretical work is assumed dated, somewhere back probably with existentialism or Bateson. My mind is supposedly elderly. Am I repeating myself? Did I forget something here? Should I send a birthday gift? Should I ask a grandson or daughter to drive for me, since I'm constantly running off the road? Should I start preparing for the end? Should I become a consumer of culture, preferably old tv shows and books, instead of a producer? It's remarkable how well I look for my age! It's remarkable I haven't had any ma
Information Week discovers anonymous
This articles, composed of ten panels, fascinates me in its illustration of the somewhat clandestine; Information Week tends to remain corporate from top to bottom but makes for interesting reading. "Mathew J. Schwartz 02/07/2012 Anonymous 'hacktivists' aim to expose what they call government and establishment hypocrisy. Take a closer look at the group, its offshoots, and its infamous attacks." http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/security/attacks/232600322?cid=nl_IW_daily_2012-02-07_html&elq=618b922918214eaeb02d72afd9040891 - And take a look for a style of presentation based on listing "10 key facts" - a style adopted by any number of online magazines. Everything gets sewn up in the process, which is also entertaining and related (I think) to the hunt. - Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
two essays on memory and annihilation
== From performance with Monika Weiss, text written over six hours, at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, Feb 6, 2012: flying blind means working without network or planning this is flying blind. this is a broken network. what collapses is the software, the timing, the indication that things aren't going to continue in this fashion, that what is here is irretrievable skies don't last forever pain is what happens when the network collapses. then there is nothing but bangu, the drum there's nothing else but absence, exhaustion there's no inscription, emptiness or depletion depletion is what happens when the words disappear when the words disappear, there is nothing more to be said. there are no hearers, no listeners. there is the blank wall. i am living in the blank wall. software collapses. these pilots are dead. these pilots have all died. they died NOW when the film was shot. these people can't stand up. these people are in the network. these people are out of the network, these people are the ends of it. if you want to know where the internet goes, it goes here, it ends here. it ends with these people HERE. it ends with their dance-distortion, their ecstatic dance-distortion but the network, the network is gone so they fly apart if we knew what to say we wouldn't be so numb with pain get your stem cells today! get your stem cells today! do you know your skin is your largest organ? MEN< YOUR SKIN IS YOUR LARGEST ORGAN> we apologize for that intrusion. you see, when you talk about your SKIN, you're talking about inscription, what can be said here, what's going on here, what's your history, you're still talking or at least you're yelling, you're doing something, you're not silent. but then - you're not just music either, you're something else if you could hear me - I'd go so far as to make the claim that art has nothing to do with pain, at least abject pain, that pain from which there is no return. at that point, form and structure, inscription and discourse, disappear: so this presentation is an anomaly, senseless, this presentation cannot touch the subject AT HAND, it can only avoid the subject by necessity, it steers you elsewhere, as if there were something other than pain, as if there were AN OTHER. it's certainly not located in the virtual, no matter how distorted the bodies appear. they're appearances. they don't have the flesh, the interiority, tissues they don't live where you expect them to virtuality always gets a black eye. the image always already disappears, it's this disappearance that permits the onset of pain. pain is the disappearance of the image; pain is welcomed by the disappearance. time seems to find its way into errors, give time enough time, and errors will appear. the errors are the first harbinger of pain, when time disappears; when you die, when you disappear, you will not know it, you will think your last thoughts, projects, that there is something in the corner of the room god has commanded your stem cells god has commended your stem cells pray to god. your stem cells pray to god. "that requires a doing, not a speaking only" tenacity! determination! it's what ERIKA IS ABOUT! she has sons and daughters! sometimes we take a deep breath and organize and then we are ready to begin again, but we find ourselves without limbs, we find outselves silenced by God and our mouths are stuff with some unknown substance, we cannot breathe, we can only whisper, our whispers take us nowhere, there is a moment when we begin to know, just for a second, that our lives are ending, that we are on the way out, and that second is extended, as is the universe itself, until matter is blown apart, until nothing is left, perhaps isolated protons or electrons, memory will be gone when data is gone and data will be gone when the bases are goneI WILL END YOU I WILL FINISH YOU OFF I WILL ANNIHILATE YOU I WILL DESTROY YOU I WILL KILL YOU I WILL WOUND YOU I WILL CAUSE YOU UNUTTERABLE PAIN I WILL CREATE WOUNDS AMONG YOU AND PESTILENCE I WILL MURDER YOU AT MY WILL AND UNTOWARD DESIRE I WILL PERMIT MY WAYWARD BALANCE TO GET THE BETTER OF ME I WILL TURN AGAINST MYSELF I WILL TURN AGAINST ALL BELIEFS I WILL KILL YOU I WILL GIVE YOU UNUTTERABLE PAIN I WILL CREATE PESTILENCE AMONG YOU YOU SEE WHEN ONE DISAPPEARS ANOTHER APPEARS. THE SERIES IS FINITE, CONTROLLED BY ENERGY, BY CAPITAL, BY MATERIAL WEARING-OUT, DISSOLUTION THIS IS MY BODY IN REAL LIFE. THIS IS ALL THERE IS. IT CAN'T TALK AND IT CAN'T THINK. ITS PAIN WILL KILL IT IN THE END. NOW WE HAVE a new topic, one of the plague, of viral connections, memes gone wild, girls gone meme, language is a virus, we'll all make bacteria at eyebeam, the old animals and plants are disappearing but they're not patented (for the most part) and there's little room for them, they have to make way for newer models. so many shows to see! Anja in preparation for pe
sondheimogram [x8]
[digested @ nettime == mod (tb)] Alan Sondheim PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege in silence here the idiotic poverty of pain For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way * Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Quick reviews - recommended books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 04:36:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim Subject: PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain PAIN.TXT On (severe) Pain (dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim) In relation to pain: Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interior states that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, for example) - and also because severe pain derails speech and language and thought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams in abeyance. All of this touches on the _pain of the signifier_ and its inexpressible relation to death - (Alan) = I really like your phrase "pain of the signifier" in that final installment on unprintability. I'm not sure how we think about it, however. On the one hand, pain is all that the signifier negates and forecloses. So, there's a numbness to the signifier, an anaesthesia. On the other hand, the signifier in the place of pain, as a kind of bad suture, a bandaid. On the third hand, is the real gamble, the crying or trembling of the signifier, in its negation, trembling with the world that it is holding off. How to show this? Or is it simply what shows up? Sandy = Hi Sandy, doesn't pain negate and foreclose the signifier? The pain of the signifier for me is the pain of the _incision_ accompanying inscription; the world simultaneously expands and narrows. In Buddhism, I'd imagine (I'm fuzzy at the moment) all signifiers equal and empty; suffering and attachment imbues distinction with intentionality, capture. The signifier's sharp; the numbness is what's created in the act of distinction. So the signifier's x^-x, that stuff I wrote about a while back about the intersection of a set and its complement relativized in relation to the 'content' of the set; if x = apple, then 0-sub-apple is the intersection of x^-x. So classically this is very sharp, 'smeared' out in the real via abjection. The signifier's not in the place of pain except for the observer; for the person undergoing (severe) pain, there is no place at all: that's the numbness. The signifier's the report; the distance between the report and the pain is also painful... Could you elaborate on the third hand? Not sure I understand - (Alan) = I'd say I was thinking about the signifier as something read, as an object that I read into. Whereas I see in your reply the signifier as something I write. In the case of the reader, of myself as reader of the signifier of pain, the incision is for you, the pain is yours. This fact makes pain *your pain*, makes it witnessed, validated for me by that big other. The signifier is communicated and read. You and I share in the signifier of pain. I would say it is beyond reading or non-reading to realize that the emptiness of all signifiers. Every reading fictionalizes this, tells a story of it, but it is only in non-reading that I really approach the alterity of your pain. So, I agree that for the person undergoing the pain there is no place; I would go further: it is this inarticulate boundary that concerns me. The signifier of pain as your pain - can I feel this? Only as reversibility, as my pain (which in a Cartesian sense I would see as like your pain)? As reader or receiver, I can push reading to impossible limits. I can strip everything away from the report of the pain, every connotation, every signification, to the point where I touch at the incised flesh of the signifier and find the continuous flesh of the world, the great surface where we all feel. And here it is no longer your pain / my pain. Here signification is a kind of perturbation, wherein pain and pleasure blur and float, pleasurepain. Or - and this may not be an alternative but a supplementary dimension - reading your pain must be already framed, consensually, as they say of communicational domains. There must be pain before and beyond, which is to say, beyond otherness, beyond the ultimate fact that the signifier is a structural fact in the communication circuit. (The validation, the implication of the big other I wrote of above. (In communication, the price of signification is that it is always the others pain I read, never yours, and the other's pain I write, never mine.) I think, I think the beyond w
sondheimogram [x8]
[digested @ nettime == mod (tb)] Alan Sondheim PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege in silence here the idiotic poverty of pain For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way * Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Quick reviews - recommended books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 04:36:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim Subject: PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain PAIN.TXT On (severe) Pain (dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim) In relation to pain: Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interior states that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, for example) - and also because severe pain derails speech and language and thought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams in abeyance. All of this touches on the _pain of the signifier_ and its inexpressible relation to death - (Alan) = I really like your phrase "pain of the signifier" in that final installment on unprintability. I'm not sure how we think about it, however. On the one hand, pain is all that the signifier negates and forecloses. So, there's a numbness to the signifier, an anaesthesia. On the other hand, the signifier in the place of pain, as a kind of bad suture, a bandaid. On the third hand, is the real gamble, the crying or trembling of the signifier, in its negation, trembling with the world that it is holding off. How to show this? Or is it simply what shows up? Sandy = Hi Sandy, doesn't pain negate and foreclose the signifier? The pain of the signifier for me is the pain of the _incision_ accompanying inscription; the world simultaneously expands and narrows. In Buddhism, I'd imagine (I'm fuzzy at the moment) all signifiers equal and empty; suffering and attachment imbues distinction with intentionality, capture. The signifier's sharp; the numbness is what's created in the act of distinction. So the signifier's x^-x, that stuff I wrote about a while back about the intersection of a set and its complement relativized in relation to the 'content' of the set; if x = apple, then 0-sub-apple is the intersection of x^-x. So classically this is very sharp, 'smeared' out in the real via abjection. The signifier's not in the place of pain except for the observer; for the person undergoing (severe) pain, there is no place at all: that's the numbness. The signifier's the report; the distance between the report and the pain is also painful... Could you elaborate on the third hand? Not sure I understand - (Alan) = I'd say I was thinking about the signifier as something read, as an object that I read into. Whereas I see in your reply the signifier as something I write. In the case of the reader, of myself as reader of the signifier of pain, the incision is for you, the pain is yours. This fact makes pain *your pain*, makes it witnessed, validated for me by that big other. The signifier is communicated and read. You and I share in the signifier of pain. I would say it is beyond reading or non-reading to realize that the emptiness of all signifiers. Every reading fictionalizes this, tells a story of it, but it is only in non-reading that I really approach the alterity of your pain. So, I agree that for the person undergoing the pain there is no place; I would go further: it is this inarticulate boundary that concerns me. The signifier of pain as your pain - can I feel this? Only as reversibility, as my pain (which in a Cartesian sense I would see as like your pain)? As reader or receiver, I can push reading to impossible limits. I can strip everything away from the report of the pain, every connotation, every signification, to the point where I touch at the incised flesh of the signifier and find the continuous flesh of the world, the great surface where we all feel. And here it is no longer your pain / my pain. Here signification is a kind of perturbation, wherein pain and pleasure blur and float, pleasurepain. Or - and this may not be an alternative but a supplementary dimension - reading your pain must be already framed, consensually, as they say of communicational domains. There must be pain before and beyond, which is to say, beyond otherness, beyond the ultimate fact that the signifier is a structural fact in the communication circuit. (The validation, the implication of the big other I wrote of above. (In communication, the price of signification is that it is always the others pain I read, never yours, and the other's pain I write, never mine.) I think, I think the beyond w
sondheimogram [x13]
[digested @ nettime == mod (tb)]
Alan Sondheim
Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior: Part
cauterization of the sublime
Mis/take (self-interrogation)
Propeller
Here's the Thing, two texts
Worry
WORLD */CYCLE CONTROL COMMAND COMMUNICATE COMPUTER CENTRAL/* (fwd)
Warwick rehearsal shooting (fwd)
Fireworks: American Empire
Islam, Norway, Christ
I used to be good.
wounded avatar. aporia.
Wounded Avatars text
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 01:43:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior: Part
Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:
Part 2: the Wringing (Part 1 repeated below):
Laban, in Modern Educational Dance, distinguishes ``eight basic efforts'':
Wring, Press, Glide, Float, Flick, Slash, Punch, Dab. ``Each of these efforts
contains three of the six movement elements: strong, light, sustained, quick,
direct, flexible.'' Four of the group are strong: Slash, Wring, Press, and
Punch. Wring and Press reconfigure the avatar; Press preserves both topology
and topography, but Wring transforms at least the latter.
Wringing slides one against another, in combination with pressure: Wringing
distorts the body. With physical bodies, wringing breaks connections (slashing
can also break connections).
The wrung body, the hobbled body. Wringing occurs when the body is
simultaneously twisted and restrained.
Gravity restrains and locates the body. With mocap, gravity may be 'eliminated'
through the use of harnesses, or through edge phenomena that carry the body
elsewhere.
The heaped or pressed body: the body as thing, as material: the body of the
slave (wrung from and within capital, wrung from the socius).
>From the viewpoint of capital, of war, the dehistoricized body - the body
becoming element or token, demarcation of nothing but position, mined for its
materiality.
The finality of the dancing body, the dance of death - the heaps of Rwanda,
Auschwitz, Abu Gharayb.
Similarity, in the world of the simulacrum, the disappearing body: Argentina,
U.S. prisons.
Not similarity: the world of the (natural) catastrophe, the disaster: the
heaped body, but the body (perhaps) recuperated for/within history.
One might think through all of this as the historiography of the body. Where do
we go from here?
Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:
[for Epoetry 2011]
motion-captured/motion-transformed/behavior-modification:
poetics of movement: vocabulary of movement:
{range of human actions, Laban A} >T> {unlimited range of actions B}
A bound by skeletal connectivity, Jordan surfaces; B bound by skeletal
connectivity, twisted/tangled surfaces
in other words the links in B can bend in any direction;
the links in A are confined by human skeletal potentials + topology
(topological embedding in four dimensions):
think of this as a tensor calculus of human movement
think of this as a topography of flesh and sinew
Ruptures in the calculus:
the tortured or wounded body
the body convulsed in pain
the catatonic body
the terrorized body
the broken or 'defective' body
Ruptures through the imaginary:
the nightmare
the orgasm
hysteria/ boundaries of laughing and crying
the confined body/ body of s/m
the forgotten or abandoned body
the hyper-sexualized body transmitters/ receivers
hallucinations and other phenomena (Dendy's Philosophy of Mystery)
Ruptures of the body invaded by capital:
prosthetics
X-scopic surgeries
rfid implants
Ruptures of the body invaded by the imaginary:
(capital of the imaginary, imaginary capital)
psycho-tropics/overdetermined associations/disassociations
Ruptures of the body by an augmented real:
sports, steroids, body-building, and so forth
Invasions of the imaginary, invasions of capital, of the augmented real,
invasions through the imaginary: invasions or invaginations,
incorporations or intensifications? These terms entangle and return to:
Either the proper body, or the body as heap;
the articulated body, or the dismembered and reassembled body;
the body characterized by a real, or the body chararacterized
by an imaginary;
either the fundamental topography of the body,
or the fundamental topology of the body - invasions, dissolutions,
ruptures.
Ruptures as returns of the repressed: What lexicons are at work? What
economies?
What is it that motion capture captures? What is snared, what abandoned?
What is the vocabulary of behavioral dynamics voluntary, autonomic,
involuntary, intrinsic or involuntary, anomalous and axiomatic,
extrinsic?
In other words: What's going on with us, within and without the world?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Interview with Katherine DiPierro, re: my Eyebeam residency
Interview with Katherine DiPierro, re: my Eyebeam residency http://eyebeam.org/blogs/katherinedipierro/eye-to-eyebeam-a-conversation-with-alan-sondheim (her other interviews are excellent as well) # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week (fwd)
This kind of stuff is fairly hidden here - Alan -- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:38:31 From: Portside Moderator To: ports...@lists.portside.org Subject: Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez Democracy Now! July 15, 2011 http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/15/protests_grow_in_solidarity_with_california Thousands of inmates in at least 13 prisons across California's troubled prison system have been on hunger strike for almost two weeks. Many are protesting in solidarity with inmates held in Pelican Bay State Prison, California's first super-maximum security prison, over what prisoners say are cruel and unusual conditions in "Secure Housing Units." We play an audio statement from one of the Pelican Bay prisoners and speak to three guests: Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of "All of Us or None" and executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and one of the mediators between the prisoners on hunger strike and the California Department of Corrections; Molly Porzig, a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition and a spokesperson for Critical Resistance; and Desiree Lozoya, the niece of an inmate participating in the Pelican Bay Hunger Strike, who visited him last weekend. [includes rush transcript] Guests: Molly Porzig, a member of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity coalition and a spokesperson for Critical Resistance. Dorsey Nunn, co-founder of "All of Us or None." He is also the executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Nunn was incarcerated from 1971 to 1982 in San Quentin Prison in California. He is one of the mediators between the prisoners on hunger strike and the California Department of Corrections. Desiree Lozoya, is the niece of an inmate participating in the Pelican Bay hunger strike. Rush Transcript This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to California, where thousands of inmates in at least 11 prisons across the state's troubled prison system have been on hunger strike for almost two weeks. Many are protesting in solidarity with inmates held in Pelican Bay State Prison, California's first super-maximum security prison. The hunger strike began on July 1st in the Pelican Bay's Security Housing Unit, when inmates began refusing meals to protest what they say is cruel and unusual conditions. Prisoners in the units are kept in total isolation for 22-and-a-half hours a day, a punishment some mental health experts say can lead to insanity and is tantamount to torture. Democracy Now! obtained a recording of an audio statement that one of the Pelican Bay inmates, Ted Ashker sic, made to his legal team in the secure prison's Secure Housing Unit, which is referred to as the SHU. You will need to listen closely as he explains his reasons for joining the hunger strike. TODD ASHKER: The basis for this protest has come about after over 25 years-some of us, 30, some up to 40 years-of being subjected to these conditions the last 21 years in Pelican Bay SHU, where every single day you have staff and administrators who feel it's their job to punish the worst of the worst, as they've put out propaganda for the last 21 years that we are the worst of the worst. And most of us have never been found guilty of ever committing an illegal gang-related act. But we're in SHU because of a label. And all of our 602 appeals, numerous court challenges, have gotten nowhere. Therefore, our backs are up against the wall. A lot of us are older now. We have serious medical issues coming on. And we believe that this is our only option of ever trying to make some kind of positive changes here, is through this peaceful protest of hunger strike. And there is a core group of us who are committed to taking this all the way to the death, if necessary. None of us want to do this, but we feel like we have no other option. And we're just hoping for the best. JUAN GONZALEZ: That was Todd, not Ted, Todd Ashker, one of the prisoners in Pelican Bay's Secure Housing Unit who is on hunger strike. California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson, Terry Thornton, responded to the hunger strike, saying, quote, "This goes to show the power, influence and reach of prison gangs." A prison guard told MSNBC that prisoners are kept in the SHU for their own safety. PRISON GUARD: Inmates that were placed into the SHU housing unit were placed in here, for the most part, because of violence, and that violence could be against other inmates or against officers. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, activ
re Rapture
It's true. If you find a copy of the World Radio-TV Handbook (WRTH), perhaps the largest US entry and one of the largest in the book, is that of Family Radio; in this country they broadcast all over the shortwave spectrum, drowning out other stations. They have to have a huge amount of money for this. You can pick them up world-wide. Never underestimate the US for this kind of stuff, which often carries implicit violence within it. - Alan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
text for talk not given at epoetry
[the following text was to be delivered at epoetry - it's an enlargement of the
outline I sent out a week or so ago. I'm sick and unable to attend in person,
and Loss Glazier refused, as a matter of principle (if someone can't attend the
conference in person, hir paper can't be presented), to have anyone else read
it, or to have me deliver it by Skype, etc. so it's stillborn. I worked a
couple of months on it, and think it might be of interest; here it is, as it
was to be read.]
Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:
[for Epoetry 2011]
Hi, apologies for not being able to attend; I've been sick. The following
is an outline of my recent work, which is based on a semiotics of the
human body that relates to political and environmental concerns,
choreography, and so forth, but is not based on particular graphemes or
vocabulary.
I use motion capture in a variety of ways, emphasizing a poetics of
movement that works through motion-transformation, motion-invention or
discovery - in other words, I use motion capture for things beyond the
standard reproduction of human movement.
Think of a set constituting the range of human actions, as described by
Rudolf Laban:
Then think of different sorts of transformations T, that can be applied to
this range through modified motion capture.
The result is an unlimited range of actions, preserved in files, which can
be used in virtual worlds, in mannequin software, or for augmented
realities. I describe this as:
{range of human actions, Laban A}
T >
{unlimited range of actions B}
What is T?
a. software interface (dynamic behavior filtering) transformations
- WVU changing the software itself, some node remappings.
When I was at WVU, we reworked the software for the older motion capture
equipment at the Virtual Environments Lab; the result was the ability to
create dynamic filtering, which modified the original actions.
b. hardware (distribution, remapping) transformations
- remapping the nodes on one performer, distributions as in c.
Or the hardware could be mapped differently - the nodes could be assigned
different positions on the body, than the usual.
c. social transformations (many into one, distributed mappings)
Or - and this is most pertinent - the nodes for a SINGLE AVATAR or
representation could be distributed among several people, resulting in a
SINGULAR BEHAVIOR, assigned to one avatar, but representing a social
confluence - many people controlling one body.
The REAL BODY bound by skeletal connectivity, Jordan surfaces;
But the transformed body bound by skeletal connectivity, twisted/tangled
surfaces
In other words the links in the transformed body can bend in any
direction; the links in the real body are confined by human skeletal
potentials + topology
(topological embedding in four dimensions):
think of this as a tensor calculus of human movement
think of this as a topography of flesh and sinew
The following typology emerges - this is where my work is taking me:
Ruptures created by the general calculus above, ruptures through the
calculus or in the calculus. This breaks down as follows:
Ruptures in the calculus:
the tortured or wounded body
the body convulsed in pain
the catatonic body
the terrorized body
the broken or 'defective' body
Ruptures through the imaginary:
the nightmare
the orgasm
hysteria/ boundaries of laughing and crying
the confined body/ body of s/m
the forgotten or abandoned body
the hyper-sexualized body transmitters/ receivers
hallucinations and other phenomena (Dendy's Philosophy of Mystery)
Ruptures of the body invaded by capital:
prosthetics
X-scopic surgeries
rfid implants
Ruptures of the body invaded by the imaginary:
(capital of the imaginary, imaginary capital)
psycho-tropics/overdetermined associations/disassociations
Ruptures of the body by an augmented real:
sports, steroids, body-building, and so forth
Think of all of this together:
Invasions of the imaginary, invasions of capital, of the augmented real,
invasions through the imaginary: invasions or invaginations,
incorporations or intensifications? These terms entangle and return to:
Either the proper body, or the body as heap;
the articulated body, or the dismembered and reassembled body;
the body characterized by a real, or the body chararacterized
by an imaginary;
Either the fundamental topography of the body,
or the fundamental topology of the body - invasions, dissolutions,
ruptures.
Ruptures as returns of the repressed - some questions to be considered:
What lexicons are at work? What economies?
What is it that motion capture captures?
What is snared, what abandoned?
What is the vocabulary of behavioral dynamics - voluntary, autonomic,
involuntary, intrinsic - or involuntary, anomalous and axiomatic,
extrinsic?
In other words: What is going on with us, within and without the world?
=
Part 2: the Wringing. T
Mumia Abu-Jamal's Death Sentence KO'd (fwd)
surely of interest here. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:31:01 From: Portside Moderator To: ports...@lists.portside.org Subject: Mumia Abu-Jamal's Death Sentence KO'd Mumia Abu-Jamal's Death Sentence KO'd Minority News April 26, 2011 http://www.blackradionetwork.com/activist_s_death_sentence_ko_d PHILADELPHIA, PA The jury that sentenced black activist Mumia Abu-Jamal to death for the murder of a white Philadelphia police officer was wrongly instructed, a U.S. appeals court said. The court ordered the state of Pennsylvania to hold a new sentencing hearing within 180 days or to sentence Abu-Jamal to life imprisonment. The three-judge panel upheld the findings of a district court judge and an appellate decision in 2008. Abu-Jamal, 57, has been on death row since 1982 when he was convicted of shooting Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. During his years in prison, he has written several books and become one of the best-known death- sentenced inmates in the world. Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said he is considering whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The high court has already ordered the appeals court to reconsider its earlier finding that the sentence was invalid, resulting in Tuesday's opinion. The court found the judge gave confusing instructions to the jury. As a result, the panel found, jurors might have believed wrongly that they needed to be unanimous on mitigating factors. Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, worked for several public and commercial radio stations in Philadelphia during the 1970s. At the time of his arrest, he was driving a cab. ___ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: ports...@portside.org Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3 Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
