a calendar (not a bible)... cybernetics, time refusal, "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream."

Jan Provoost, Sacred Allegory, XVIe siècle

The radical mystic Suso of Cologne, v. 1330: “Whence have you come?” The image answers, “I came from nowhere.” “Tell me, what are you?’ ‘I am not.’ ‘What do you wish?’ ‘I do not wish.’ ‘This is a miracle! Tell me, what is your name?’ ‘I am called Nameless Wilderness.’ ‘Where does your insight lead to?’ ‘To untrammelled freedom.’ ‘Tell me, what do you call untrammelled freedom?’ ‘When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after…’

Suso’s explicitly anti-time utterance = an element of time refusal.

A new level of spatialisation was involved in the defeat of the 14th century resistance to time; the emergence of the modern map in the 15th c. and the ensuing age of great voyages / Braudel’s phrase regarding modern civilisation’s “war against empty space” is best understood in this light.

The first document known to have been printed on Gutenberg’s press in the mid 15th century was a calendar (not a bible).

Notes from John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal

Harry Sanderson, Human Resolution @ Arcadia Missa

HB: We should talk about Haptics, where artist Yuri Pattison invited you to make a touchable 3D hologram within his Faraday Cage project (a Faraday cage is a 19th century invention that blocks out external electric currents, which Pattison recreated as a residency space in SPACE Studios). What's the difference between this work and Human Resolution? 

HS: [...] Haptics was just a straight desire to reproduce this technology that I'd heard about, which was this touchable hologram, which I thought was potentially quite beautiful: that you could touch something [...] that wasn't actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense [...] The promotional video for that technology contained one line that was "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream." There's this desire to give technology a physical form so there's at least there's something that will push back at you. I think I found that profound, in a way, because it means that people still desire each other, even if it's so mediated that they just desire to create some kind of holographic representation of something. [...]

Human Resolution's a bit more negative, saying "look at you here as nothing but data". There's that Ashbery poem we were reading the other day where he says "much that is beautiful must be discarded so that we may resemble a taller impression of ourselves." There's a constant aspiration toward this image we've created of ourselves that we can't ever quite get to which is this, I suppose, want or desire: the "big other." You can't ever get it, you can't touch it. And data and Cloud computing perfectly fits into that as an ideological form because it's completely inaddressible. 

[...] The desire to make machines instantly responsive to the body plays on a strange sort of humanism, which is so close to digital property protection. We have these swipe screens and fingerprint scans under the remit of protecting oneself against identity theft, but it's also the protection of private property, which is inseparable from force in some sense.

Harry Burke / Harry Sanderson, hitherr >?>>>

"The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit." (Waite)

This card consequently means the life of the soul in particular, the feelings and sentiments, emotions (not only fear, etc.), changes wrought in existence by them, water and the female element in general. It is the sign of panta rei: everything passing, flowing or ebbing away in life, consequently uncertainty. It may relate to dreams, to exhibitions, popular plays, and games, theatres, and to the lower class of people. Physically it means the brain and the stomach.

"Servile spirits (the dog), savage souls (the wolf), and crawling creatures (the crayfish) are all present watching the fall of the soul, hoping to aid in its destruction." (Papus) That is true. And it may happen to us, that a lower current of the Moon brings our way people who have no higher aim than to 'aid in our destruction' even if we ourselves have no intention whatever of 'falling'.

Unfortunately, so firmly were the prevailing nineteenth century conceptions committed to the notion of man as primarily homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker, that […] the first discovery of the art of the Altamira caves was dismissed as a hoax, because the leading paleoethnologists would not admit that the Ice Age hunters, whose weapons and tools they had recently discovered, could have had either the leisure or the mental inclination to produce art – not crude forms, but images that showed powers of observation and abstraction of a high order.

Notes from Lewis Mumford, Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine

Theodore Kaczynski in Lutz Dammbeck's The Net (2003)

Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator (organic and inorganic envelopes); Atkins, Bratton, Smith, Jameson, Ballard...

Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine. The weathers, christ, the weathers on those Saturdays. 

And no provision has been made for the casual life in casual freshly-laundered bedclothes.

(Allowing liquids to puddle, importantly)

This one goes to the damp clothes, balled-up and forgotten in the washing machine.

I don’t want to hear any news on the radio about the weather on the weekend.

“The Stack, the megastructure, can be understood as a confluence of interoperable standards-based complex material-information system of systems, organized according to a vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols. The Stack is a standardized universal section. The Stack, as we encounter it and as I prototype it, is composed equally of social, human and ‘analog’ layers (chthonic energy sources, gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities and streets, rooms and buildings, organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and ‘digital’ layers (multiplexed fiber optic cables, datacenters, databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems, universal addressing tables). Its hard and soft systems intermingle and swap phase states, some becoming ‘harder’ or ‘softer’ according to occult conditions. (Serres, hard soft). As a social cybernetics, The Stack that we know and design composes both equilibrium and emergence, one oscillating into the other in indecipherable and unaccountable rhythm, territorializing and de-territorializing the same component for diagonal purposes.” 

 Benjamin Bratton, “On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address, Integral Geography,” Nov. 2011 

THE BLACK TOWER (extract) 3' 44" from John Smith on Vimeo.

If everything means something else, then so does technology. It would be a mistake to reduce the menacing object-world of allegorical conspiracies to that first, fresh fear of spy systems and informants in the 1960s, when right-wingers discovered a whole new generation of just the right gadgets and someone was listening to you, but only to you personally. J. Edgar Hoover would make a most anachronistic mascot for late capitalism; while the anxieties about privacy seem to have diminished, in a situation in which its tendential erosion or even abolition has come to stand for nothing less than the end of civil society itself. It is as though we were training ourselves, in advance, for the stereotypical dystopian rigours of overpopulation in a world in which no one has a room of her own any more, or secrets anybody else cares about in the first place.

Fredric Jameson, Totality as Conspiracy, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Cinema and Space in the World System, 1995

//

 49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes
   only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of
   security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates
   nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes
   very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable
   framework.
   
   50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of
   traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological
   progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that
   you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the
   economy of a society with out causing rapid changes in all other
   aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably
   break down traditional values.

Theodore 'Ted' Kaczynski; Industrial Society and its Future / Unabomber manifesto; 1995

//

“Laing listened to her spirited description of the continuous breakdown of services within the building, the vandalizing of an elevator and the changing cubicles of the 10th-floor swimming-pool. She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain.
Laing looked out across the darkness at the brilliantly lit decks of the nearby high-rise, barely aware of the other guests who had arrived and were sitting in the chairs around him-the television newsreader Paul Crosland, and a film critic named Eleanor Powell, a hard-drinking redhead whom Laing often found riding the elevators up and down in a fuddled attempt to find her way out of the building.

“Isn't your apartment next to the elevator lobby?" Laing asked her. "You'll need to barricade yourself in."
"What on earth for? I leave the door wide open." When Laing looked puzzled, she said, "Isn't that part of the fun?"
"You think that we're secretly enjoying all this?"
"Don't you? I'd guess so, doctor. Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference. When you think about it, that's really rather interesting…”

Ballard's “High Rise,” 1975