Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion... skin, interfaces, & mimetic flesh; Fanged Noumena, Digital Delirium, & Stelarc
/ Stelarc \
Memetic flesh as a floating outlaw zone where memes fold into genes, where the delirious spectacle of cyber-culture reconfigures the future of the molecular body. In Ars California, mimetic flesh is neither future nor history, but the molecular present. Pure California Gening. . . . Neither techno-utopian nor techno-phobic, mimetic art in the streets of SF is always dirty, always rubbing memes against genes, always clicking into (our) memetic flesh.
My latest filmic foray into the world of WWE (formerly WWF, the wildlife guys were
getting wild) where cold war agitprop gilded the flesh fight ; Paris 2014
The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self, and simultaneously, a beginning to the world. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.
How can the body function within this landscape of machines? Technology has speeded up the body. The body now attains planetary-escape velocity, has to function in zero-G and in greater time-space continuums. For me this demonstrates the biological inadequacy of the body. Given that these things have occurred, perhaps an ergonomic approach is no longer meaningful. In other words, we can't continue designing technology for the body because that technology begins to usurp and outperform the body.
Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.
Perhaps it's now time to design the body to match it's machines. We somehow have to turbo-drive the body-implant and augment the brain. We have to provide ways of connecting it to the cyber-network. At the moment this is not easily done, and it's done indirectly via keyboards and other devices. There's no way of directly jacking in. Mind you, I'm not talking here in terms of sci-fi speculation. For me, these possibilities are already apparent. What do we do when confronted with the situation where we discover the body is obsolete? We have to start thinking of strategies for redesigning the body.
Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.
CTheory interview with Stelarc, hither>>>
Pan-Africanist Pop Art, New Elizabethan cult of personality, and Social Realist portraiture
Melanie Gilligan: The Common Sense, Phase 1
Melanie Gilligan's largest project to date, The Common Sense takes the form of a sci-fi mini-series which looks at how minds, bodies, and interpersonal relations are shaped by technological advancements within capitalism. This experimental narrative drama tells a story that revolves around a future technology which allows one to directly experience another person's bodily sensations and affect, a system that becomes widely adapted altering social interactions until it breaks down and alternative narratives unfold.
Gilligan draws upon a feminist sci-fi tradition that includes the work of writers Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin in which sci-fi is used as a means for both critiquing a social order and proposing a different vision. The story is also influenced by recent social movements and riots across the world responding to the "permanent crisis" of capitalism. Gilligan explores the complex relationship between the technological development as propelled by capitalist accumulation and how interpersonal relations and emotions are instrumentalized in this process. However, the artist also leaves open some uncertainty for possibilities regarding the new conditions technological change can create.
The Otolith Group: In the Year of the Quiet Sun
The post-lens essay-film In the Year of the Quiet Sun, also the title of the exhibition, explores the role of the Ghana Philatelic Agency. This mysterious Wall Street company created the Pan-Africanist Pop aesthetic associated with the independent state of Ghana from 1957 until the overthrow of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966. Connecting postal politics depicting antagonistic policies of newly independent states to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement within the unstable context of the global Cold War, the title also points to the decrease in solar surface temperature that occurs every 11 years.
Occupying two rooms of Casco's new space, the installation Statecraft envisions the short century of decolonization as a political calendar assembled from the medium of the postage stamp. These masscult artifacts were issued to commemorate the independence of Africa's new nation-states, from Liberia in 1847 to South Sudan in 2011. The formation reveals the iconography of independence as a combination of Pan-Africanist Pop Art, New Elizabethan cult of personality, and Social Realist portraiture.
~ fantasy role-playing fantasy ~ DREAMLIFEWORLD
BLOAT !
Book launch & works by WILL BENEDICT and HENNING BOHL
@
section 7 Books
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castillo/corrales
holy motors motion capture
denis lavant
a pneumatic habitat that was a cross between a gangland hideout and a Venusian freetraders club... Archigram!
The 1950s, and conventional land planning tools, were trailing in popularity polls. The rediscovery of the avant-garde’s traditional tools satisfied a general anti-bureaucratic sentiment. While English pop scoffed at the new American idols, not without humour and affection, young architects took on the city.
Impertinent, opportunist, and illiterate, Archigram was to architecture what Apocalypse Now’s Playboy Bunnies were to war. Original, skilful, vital, and sincere. Experimentation replaced contemplation. Their architecture was wilful, violent, and provocative affirmation. They emphasised contradictions, making them even more apparent. Certain members of the group had grown up in seaside resorts (hence, perhaps, the semblance of seaside dancehall in their projects).
Their fanzine, nine issues of hyperactive layout between 1961-1974, elevated insolence to an art form. Their mobile machine-cities rekindled a biological and mystical industrial dynamism, long forgotten since the Italians’ brief rise to fame. They cherished ambiguity. They breathed new life into Fuller and Otto, Prouvé and his prefabs, mobile homes and inflatables. They planned to open, in Monte Carlo, the first ever psychedelic sea-food stall, perhaps even the first paper bikini vending machine. Long live appearances and public space!
A transparent igloo for trendy travelling salesmen. Mobile pods for motorised slaves. Suspended capsules for sterile bachelors. Solipsistic inflatable bubbles. Cells for fusional couples with no kids and a definite penchant for small spaces. Theories of decisive movements: changes take place when enough favourable conditions are united. this isn’t a battle of wits, simply readymades, the generation game.
Transforming one’s objects, one’s vernacular into a weapon against the establishment. Combining hippy free love with high-tech space travel research. Neither trees nor greenery, just roads, girls, and speed: the middle classes at home. Neither art nor business, just a flow. Everything must be disposable, random, nomadic. Programmed obsolescence. They’re not into the business of spare parts: their discoveries don’t add up, they multiply. They are, in their own way, far closer to the situationists than their comic-strip-reading counterparts in France.
Archigram : Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Mike Webb.
Text from Yves Tenret's The inflatable as a form of denial, in Air-Air catalogue
constant risks, return uncertain. Oh, a museum of loneliness... MoL x Purge x Dry Hump (Pillow Talk)
Performance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream debuted at Oberhausen Short Film Festival as part of Mika Taanila’s Film Without Film programme, presumed 2014. The magazine, published by Pillow Talk, features original content specific to (and beyond) the performance and soundtrack.
get it hither >>>>
It simply unfurls and expands this world (the only one): drained of its opacity... ASR
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A small incomplete history of the rebellious apple that I wrote for new french journal, ANTICHAMBRE de la SUBSTANCE RAYONNANTE, edited by Edgar Sarin.
to find out more about ASR, >>>>>>>
Photo by sati leonne faulks, >>>>
a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy; And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee; Ghost in the Shell l'Eve Future FN AK
The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the Ideal made eternal prisoner / l'Andréïde, avons-nous dit, n'est que les premières heures de l'Amour immobilisées, l'heure de l'Idéal à jamais faite prisonnière
This spectral vision could cloud my eyes, my senses, my soul; but could I ever forget that she is nothing personal? My self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero? / Vous pourrez troubler mes yeux, mes sens et mon esprit par cette magique vision: mais pourrai-je oublier, moi, qu'elle n'est qu'impersonnelle? Comment aimer zéro? me crie, froidement, ma conscience.
Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam; L'Eve Future, 1886
That's all it is: information. Even a simulated experience or a dream; simultaneous reality and fantasy. Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket.
If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems, and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.
Who can gaze into the mirror without becoming evil? The mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it.
>> Batou x 2, Major Motoko Kusanagi / Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2 / 1995, 2004
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
>> Arthur Koestler / The Ghost in the Machine / 1967
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
>> Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil; Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886
fluid neon origami trick; And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face... WG Neuromancer
`The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said
the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military
experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional
space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns,
demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic
spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab
animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control
circuits of tanks and war planes. `Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical
concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un-
thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of
the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
receding...'
`What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel se-
lector.
`Kid's show.' A discontinuous flood of images as the se-
lector cycled. `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.
`You want to try now, Case?'
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
Molly beside him. `You want me to go out, Case? Maybe
easier for you, alone...' He shook his head.
`No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweat-
band across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the
wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, _now --_
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
_Now --_
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
gray. Expanding --
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the
stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission
Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
face.
the signifier is always facialized... People who want somebody to wear costumes, people who want somebody to sit with them while they watch dirty movies and jerk off.. Stewart Home
facialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfaciaityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfacialityfaciality
The Neoist's face is part of the collective soul of his memory (see fetishism). It is a signifier marking the boundaries of the object of his desire. Tell me who's the boss. All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. To come. Tell me what you like. The signifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns materially over that whole constellation of significances and interpretations. Tell me how much you like it. When his memory says, "tell me how it feels" or some other such thing, it's not just about the words but about faciality, watching the words being spoken by the Neoist, watching the significance process through faciality. A face is such a subjective thing. The collective soul contains gaps and ruptures, never to be closed.
Tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. Tools and plagiarism: There is an entire system of horizontal and complementary appropriation, between hand and tool. Tools form the appendages of a hypostasis.
Two kinds of fetishism occur during the reading--that of the commodity as value and that of the Neoist as the object of desire. The fetishization is not of use value or meaning; rather it is about being drawn to the system of signification, it is a generalization of the structural code of the object: It is thus not a fetishism of the signified, a fetishism of substances and values called ideological, which the fetish object would incarnate for the alienated subject. Behind this reinterpretation which is truly ideological it is a fetishism of the signifier. That is to say that the subject is trapped in the factitious, differential, encoded, systematized aspect of the object. This entrapment can be called desire. People who want somebody to wear costumes, people who want somebody to sit with them while they watch dirty movies and jerk off, people who want to be tied up, people who want to wear diapers and be given a bottle. Beauty as fetishism: we are bound up in a general stereotype of models of beauty. The generalization of sign exchange value to facial effects. Thus fetishism is being drawn to representations of Akademgorod, fascination with the system of encodement represented on minds through images in magazines, movies, television, advertising, etc. Fetishism is integral to logic of, to construction of his memory.
The indivisible becomes divisible, space becomes ideal space, sentiments become one and insensible, the body will be pure... (Proklos, Platonis Timaeum commentaria, iii, 287): "Monty can't sin."
The Neoist performs plagiarism on his collective soul during the reading, which stands in for his own desire. Your collective soul is my psychical activity. I am immaterial. The impossibility of the collective soul being ever reached is plagiarized by his memory as desire, the Neoist as object of desire. "Our doctrine is nothing new, it has been set up a long time ago." (Plotinus, vi, 8, 10) The more the system is systematized, the more the fetishist fascination is reinforced. Desire, for the object of desire, is plagiarized as the coded mind, through the system of representations then again through Neoism. "Act like you're enjoying it."
the blotches of the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; but thinking makes it so; JLB DJ LW
It is not one thing, but all the things which
legend attributes to Judas Iscariot that are false
(de Quincey,1857).
Like a certain German before
him, de Quincey speculated that Judas had
delivered up Christ in order to force Him to
declare His divinity and set in motion a vast
uprising against Rome's yoke; Runeberg
suggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature.
Cleverly, he begins by emphasizing how
superfluous Judas' action was. He observes (as
Robertson had) that in order to identify a
teacher who preached every day in the
synagogue and worked miracles in the plain
sight of thousands of people, there was no need
of betrayal by one of the teacher's own apostles.
That is precisely, however, what occurred. To
assume an error in the Scriptures is intolerable,
but it is no less intolerable to assume that a
random act intruded into the most precious
event in the history of the world. Ergo, Judas'
betrayal was not a random act, but
predetermined, with its own mysterious place
in the economy of redemption. Runeberg
continues: The Word, when it was made Flesh,
passed from omnipresence into space, from
eternity into history, from unlimited joy and
happiness into mutability and death; to repay
that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in
representation of all mankind) make a sacrifice
of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man.
Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus'
secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The
Word had stooped to become mortal; Judas, a
disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an
informer (the most heinous crime that infamy
will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable
flames. As below, so above; the forms of earth
correspond to the forms of heaven; the blotches
of the skin are a map of the incorruptible
constellations; Judas is somehow a reflection of
Jesus. From that conclusion derive the thirty
pieces of silver and the kiss; from that
conclusion derives the voluntary death, so as
even more emphatically to merit reprobation.
There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad.
If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.
And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters.
I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water [even] if I were to pour out a gallon over it.
Borges' The End (Artifices)
Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein
Wittgensteins A Lecture on Ethics
tristan garcia - form and object
A thing is nothing other than the difference between that
which is in this thing and that in which this thing is. Unless one
guarantees this double sense, there are no thinkable things. Every
reductionist who claims to deduce that which this or that thing is
from that which composes this or that thing only succeeds in dissolving
the very thing that they claim to account for. We attempt
to accomplish the exact opposite of this: to guarantee things as
invaluable differences embedded in the distribution channels of
being of the world. To complete our task, we set out to discover
the meaning which circulates among things, between that which
composes them and that which they compose, inside or outside us,
with or without us.
This meaning that we call for, and that thought seeks, is not
salvation. It is not the possibility of holding onto the essential,
necessary, or genuine self after the end of life, or in our damaged
social existence.
Some ways of thinking seek salvation. Here we seek to redeem
nothing: not the soul, not personhood, not the body, not thought,
not a community, not the proletariat. A thing among things, this
treatise attempts to save neither me nor you; between things there
is no salvation whatsoever.
The meaning we seek is not reducible to a mere signification,
a language game, a body of practices, or a normative system.
Whoever calls for a semiotic meaning of things or a return to the
description of their signification, to the ways in which we name or
make use of things, or to our linguistic, social, or cultural practices
will be disappointed. The promise of thought is not kept. I seek a
meaning of things outside us, and I have returned to what takes
place between us.
Salvation is the hope of situating oneself outside things (escaping
annihilation, death, oblivion, inauthenticity, alienation, reification).
Signification is the disappointment of never managing
to abstract things from the relations that we maintain with them.
Salvation situates us outside of things, while signification precludes
things from being situated outside of us.
I do not wish for the salvation of my soul, my body, human
beings, my ideas, or my individuality. I do not ask for the (linguistic,
cultural, historic) signification of things – our way of referring
ourselves to them, of constructing their significance, of using them,
of exchanging them, of making them significant among us, for us,
and by us. No, I simply search for a meaning of things, whether
this is the meaning of me, of you, or of a piece of black slate.
In truth, this meaning – neither completely existential nor
completely semiotic – is simply the possibility of passing from one
thing to the other. It is the possibility and necessity of never being
reduced to a thing that would be nothing else, that would be in
nothing else, and that would not exist in and by itself – whether
one calls that matter, nature, history, society, God, or an individual.
As if one could reduce the black slate to being nothing
but a material thing or a natural thing or a social thing. As if one
could then consider matter, nature, or society as things outside
appearances, absolute, remaining in themselves. This ghost of
‘compactness’, which will be the adversary of our whole adventure
of thought, will only disappear on one condition: for each thing to
make sense, it must have two senses. Nature or history as things
contain many things (first sense), but they are contained by things
other than themselves (second sense).
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