Notations: blankspace, Arctic/Antarctic, image and text
http://www.alansondheim.org/blank.png http://www.alansondheim.org/blanked.png http://www.alansondheim.org/blanks047.jpg Phenomenology culled from texts on Arctic and Antarctic exploration - blankspace and delay: I've been working with a group of early 19th - early 20th century texts - journals, technical papers, narratives, letters, biographies; in the past, these have been a valuable source for thinking through blank- space, those regions of the world and mind where projection and introjection become entangled; from the blank, the edge of the blank (culture, traderoutes, familiarity) is problematized ... The edge of the blank is the edge of the other; the delay of the self who has _left,_ who is elsewhere, selfwhere, indeterminate, who _thinks and records._ Myopic view of 19th-century travelers - brutal hunting, remnants of social darwinism, problematic ethnographic theory, 'stages' of civilization and so forth. Gets caught up in error when linguistics enters the description. The blankness of the Arctic and Antarctic; even as late as 1928, large parts of the arctic appear as black/blank/unknown in maps. The wreck. The hallucinogenic of mountains and islands, charted, confirmed, non-existent. This against the overlay of latinate linnaean classification. The wreck. The ship held fast in the ice. The blankness of the _delay_ - the story-framework: a ship sets out; get caught in ice; is abandoned; the crew reorganizes, goes through numerous hardships; travels on boat or ice-floe; is stranded; many or all die; later, search parties (for Franklin, Jeanette, etc.); remains are found including photographic plates, diaries; possibly decades later (1897-1930, or Franklin, much longer); then reconstruction, publishing, etc. Within the delay or gap, narratives develop against the blankness (all knowledge then is local knowledge - arguments about whether Greenland is an island or not for example - maps of coastlines with emptied spaces, drained spaces, blankspace. The problem/s of human groups living in severe conditions - hot and cold deserts; as if these were determinant; as if groups lived hand-to-mouth, hard-scrabble; as if material culture implied fixed or mobile _stages_ of human development; as if the 'sanctity' of rites and doxa were translate into dominant European values. The problem/s of projection and introjection from the (mostly white) travelers; the uncanny; as if the cold regions of the planet (now melting furiously) were at their most fundamental, decathecting; as if the world were hodge-podge, bricolage, inherently dangerous; as if hallucinations were the order of the day. The _gamespace_ of this is the European ship-hold or home, the text of the New Testament; the missionary and his or her church; the implementations of laws and codes; the implicit colonialist attitudes over 'natives.' The _edgespace_ of this is the literal boundaries of the ice-pack and floes; the shorelines of Greenland and the islands; the ships held fast, moving only as objects collapsing in the brutal coherency of flowing ice-fields; the limits of medical treatment, food, and mindfulness of the crews. The edgespace is also the limits of communication - passenger pigeons (Major Andree's balloon), letters, cairns, signposts, journals, photographic plates, drawings, all susceptible to destruction and delay. It was possible to determine, with recognized errors, longitude and latitude; it was impossible to connect one's position with others in the sense of communication/communality across or through the totality of a grid; ships and crews were fixed among each other, but through inconceivable disassociations; temporary autonomous structures and bricolage ruled the day. The _blankspace,_ described above, also enters into uneasy dreams, idle conversations, furious hunting for food and sport, prayers and bibles; but none of the fabulous, say, of Mandeville or animisms; the religious narratives were those of the ancient mid-east, transplanted and tested, but all the more inviolate by the limits of this testability. The imaginary reaches just so far; the world is all that is the case, and the world is text- less in spite of compass and sextant. Or rather, perhaps, the text is that of the ascertained grid-grip of numbers and measurements (longitude, latitude, temperature, soundings at times, barometric pressure, etc.), a Robinson-Crusoesque approach to the world, touching everywhere on the indexical and mercantilism. The icebergs give play to fantastic figures of birds, animals, and what would be perceived as primordial landscape; never home, never fecundity, in spite of the presence, often, of enormous numbers of walrus, birds, polar bears, and seals. Over-hunting was noted, even then, however, and there are troubling accounts of species perhaps headed towards 'extirpation.' " /Today, the edgespace is always uneasy, tottering, catastrophic; it is the space of the unalloyed world, where things no longer operate within a classical or modernist tradition. Increasingly, this space characterizes our current place on the planet, with its fractured media histories and environments of scorched earth, environmental depredation, and slaughter. We can work through and within such spaces, developing (as perhaps Occupy did) new forms of production, resistance, and digital culture./ " " my philosophy in a nutshell think of striations of the imaginary within blankness, strange attractors, hallucinatory structures, wrong turns, dead ends, failures. think of edgespace not as glitch but as inherent, inhering, bridging nonetheless, entangled projects and intro- jections ('jectivities,' morphisms); think of gamespace as corporate, closed manifolding, totalities, kernels of clean and proper bodies:: map all of this onto immersive/definable hierarchies (mathematical _activity and production_ in relation to (in)formalized mathematical structures):: immersion appears _fundamental_ to blankspace, as mutually-generated activities within edgespace, as the construction of _dwelling_ within gamespace; definability appears _fundamental_ to gamespace, as wrong or deliberate well-defined turns within edgespace; as categorical formalisms after the fact in gamespace:: then think of _regimes of control_ within and without gamespace (player / gamemaster / corporation) and their loosening within edgespace and blankspace (as well as the chaotic and stochastic nature of blankspace itself):: and you have a way of thinking through a world or the world:: now consider this in terms of unravelings, being again with this consideration in mind, in terms of gamespace, edgespace, blankspace, immersion and definability (again keeping in mind that these are basically entangled), and you are on the way to at least an interesting way of thinking through worldings (which are subject to and suspect of such categories which are thereby unraveling... ):: " " - those three terms, gamespace, edgespace, blankspace - and for example melville's 'whiteness of the whale' or moby dick itself - the book-archive - a splattering of signs, partial structures, strange attractors across texts and horizons - consider fall foliage - the potential randomness in color transformations. for in blankspace signs jostle - forms of roiling, coagulations, even fractals filling the space of uneasy dreams - things brought out from below - " " - it's this that characterizes blankspace, the splatter need not have structure, or rather brings along, with it, partial structures, partial objects, fragments - from the 'outside, the realm of structure, of absolute 0 and 1 - they appear broken, corrupt - from within, they're just 'what they are' - hard to agree with this, for example against the totalizations of classical marxism, cultural marxism, semiotics, psychoanalytics, catastrophe theory, the subaltern of the internet of things in 'chorus' - " " within those cracks and fissures of edgespace, fissures grow - lichens with triple or quadruple organic communities - what begins as noise ends as inscription - as alphabet - alphabetics as generators - among the veering gyre of semiotic splatter - selves as self-organizations - things fall apart - it can't happen here - as selves tighten hold - all growths die - nothing is reborn - the blankness of the magic mystery slate - it all begins again - nothing begins again - among thus, nothing begins - nothing ends - then, what consciousness perceives - the game and its negations of perfections - where culture begins - the clutter - the making sense - the sense - the turning away, the scapegoat or scapeboat - the refugee - splatter is never self- contained - never contained - the cleanup of the clean and proper body, sweep-up of the world, denials of genocide - the genocide itself - the *cide as an operator - edgespace crackles on the precipice of construction and destruction - gamespace names these nonsensical terms, con* and de* and their placement in culture - lisp comes to mind, programs and potential wells - the minutiae of gamespace - the game of throwns - the reading of the world is the writing of the world - world becomes worlding, origin, its appearance as already written - the logic of the origin necessarily a reversal - there's no tomorrow - there's only closure - enclosure - inscription devouring the ikonic - becoming the understood - someone or other writes a book - archive's _origins_, preservation - archive becomes the state - splatter cleaned up - 99% of all germs annihilated - new antibiotics from _new_ fungi, bacteria, molecular biologies, crispr - things are _on their way_ - archive equivalent to redundancy - someone or other burns a book - chatter of things among things - apocalypse now and then - our enemy the archive - the time of time - " http://www.alansondheim.org/maps04.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/maps05.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/north06.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/north14b.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/blizzarda08.mov http://www.alansondheim.org/extracts.mp4 " Outline for a Talk on Blank that can't be Given (That is inconceivable that it could be given, that it is inconceivable that it might occur without contradiction, that it might say anything, that anything might be said): - EDGESPACE: (Artworks which explore the phenomenology of the limits of gamespaces in virtual worlds: how are objects and behaviors affected, how does the physics change, how does one "inhabit" these zones? Do the zones have strict boundaries themselves? Can one speak of a broken game, or a suite of behaviors and objects that open elsewhere? situations where structure collapses: -where structure and the symbolic can't be recuperated (where there's no return, where the vectors quickly end up entropic, where chaos dissolves into noise.) -where the symbolic is limited by the _game of extension_ (so that, for example, the gamespace or mocap edge is characterized by particular behavioral regimes: the game then moves the edge elsewhere or creates a catastrophic anomaly. once this is absorbed and con/figured, the game moves elsewhere. Sooner or later, the game of extension dissolves into the cold death of the universe.) How are these experienced? Does experience always translate into text? What is the textuality of experience? What is the dissolution of textuality?] Exhaustion of symbolic space, BLANKSPACE: (The blank is a state where [ ] is emptied but always already virtual, where the blank is the site of introjection/projection.) -blizzard whiteout example (whiteout of the blizzard images and videos: nothing visible but a seething, the fogged details at the edge of the frame pointing towards nothing, the seething incapable of geometrical meshing or interpretation as "mandala.") seething emptiness of the 'far north, far south.' -recapitulation through contouring (noise reduction operations on blizzard and similar images: when the contour lines reveal nothing, where the inchoate roams among and through protocol suites. a busy seething might blockade imaginary projections; nothing survives the seething). inchoate emptiness, the 'empty regions' for example. the blankness of maps is described early on by the presence of 'dragons' and later by a sense of the uncanny. again, these are limit spaces, edge spaces, gamespaces defined by no games, unpopulated except in relation to the imaginary. Here and elsewhere, what does consciousness _do?_.) " http://www.alansondheim.org/blizzards25.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/extracts1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/wraithflight.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/extracts2.jpg -- _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
