Re: [-empyre-] from 5th Avenue New York City
--empyre- soft-skinned space--HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. -- But we're in Rhode Island where there are protests which are fantastic, everywhere here downtown - but the fact there are jobs, that's good, and your HELLO? does an injustice to people who can't find work, can't get food, can't get shelter; in Rhode Island we have the nation's highest or second-highest unemployment, and this brings real pain to the disenfranchised, in particular to people of color - any employment news like this is good news here, and one social injustice does not negate another which might be, somewhat barely, addressed. - Alan On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Renate Ferro renatefe...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- It is raining here in New York City. Tim Murray and I just joined hundreds of protestors who marched down 5th Avenue, one of the most tourist, commodified streets in the world. Past the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree decorated in lights galore hundreds of tourists stood in line to watch on one side the lit tree and the other side a light/video show on the facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. Loud speakers filled the block and adjacent streets with holiday music. Disrupting that scene hundreds of what I noted as young activists marched directly down the side walks of this holiday scene shouting Hands Up, Don't Shoot, I can't breathe, and other chants to stop shoppers in their tracks. Shoppers had two choices: to clear out of the way for protestors or to join. Right now in Macy's protestors move into the inside of the shopping season, lay down and conduct a die in. I find it stunning (has to be another word) that reflects the confusion of the junta-postion between a commodity driven season and a politically driven movement that collides head to head. How crazy is it that just moments before when I opened my email via the smart phone I was using to video the moment, the White House sent out this message: We've been watching the economy steadily improve for years, but today there's new reason to really zoom in on that progress. Consider this: Last month, American businesses created 314,000 jobs, extending the longest streak of job growth on record. That's 10.9 million jobs added over the last 57 straight months. Let's put that in perspective: With 2.6 million jobs created in the first 11 months of the year, we've already added more jobs in 2014 than in any entire year since the late 1990s. It's been a long road to recovery since the Great Recession. And while there's more work to do, America is outpacing much of the world in putting people back to work. Take a look at how far our economy has come since President Obama took office -- then share the facts with everyone who needs to know: HELLO? What about the thousands of young and dis-engranchised who for the past three nights around the US have been shouting out to be heard about the injustices that have manifested themselves over the past several weeks. World-wide ordinary people from Hong Kong to Mexico to the US are shouting out as well about other injustices. Can we take a moment to reflect on how these movements may be organically generating? How does social media, list serves, networked media enable movements such as these? What else may be inspiring these gestures of resistance. I am looking forward to speaking to all of you now but for now I have to run. Renate Ferro (and Tim Murray from NYC) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- *=* *directory http://www.alansondheim.org http://www.alansondheim.org tel 718-813-3285* *music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ * *email sondheim ut panix.com http://panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com http://gmail.com=* ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] last - archive and centering, from here (lacks vigor)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance - archive for the month - http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2014-November/thread.html check out also http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2014-December/thread.html since the discussion spills over (time-zone dependent) and last thoughts here - centering, from here (lacks vigor) http://www.alansondheim.org/fromherea.png (centering) http://www.alansondheim.org/fromhere5.mp4 (centering, receding) http://www.alansondheim.org/fromhereb.png lack vigor; they're leaning too far into the dim light from here here here, it's from here, from this voice, that the problematic - it's from here nonetheless that i can only ask, should we not, electrical substation across the plaza, tiny shooting star moving south from here, almost overhead, a punctum, from here nor there, neither to here nor there, from here, i'm sure. I understand this; I just don't know where to go from here, Get out. Get away from here. Get out of here. Get out. I could not go on from here, from there. I could not move, i'm thinking you got to get as far from here as you can. you'll have to keep me informed, where you go from here. nonetheless i can only ask, should we not, is there an infinite plane extending - imagine the possibilities - where one goes from here - the sink is overturned deep below the surface of the ground - electrical substation across the plaza - that's just around the corner - they're moving in - from there, from the desert, dance, anita berber, the three, love notes for anita, saved the multiverse, i'm thinking you got to get as far from here as you can! the electrical substation across the plaza! the electrical substation across the plaza! from here nor there, neither to here nor there, words babble, please, where does one go, from here is just here, enough! == bereft, in the silence coming here among us, i will truly miss you, thank you ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] nothing gives
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 28 Nov 2014, Ricky Ray wrote: I wonder what this healing aspect of a healing nihilism refers to--healing what, and to what end? And where is the idea/feeling of needing to be healed coming from, how is it operating in/affecting one's day-to-day behavior? If there is a sense of brokenness behind it, what would dropping that perceptual filter, if only momentarily, do? --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dropping perceptual filters is related to asking a neurotic not to be neurotic, etc.; the sense of brokenness becomes (as depression does) a dwelling, inert and familiar. Nihilism for me (there are many varieties and I'm interested in Nagajuna's refutation of logic in this regard) is the cicatrix of scorched earth, its inhering; healing would mean acceptance without anguish, so that I might proceed with a degree of acceptance. Buddhism doesn't work for me (nor does yoga or meditation), nonetheless I attend constantly. I greatly appreciate your dscription of your own processes; for me, I have to find another direction. Thank you, 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/sx.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Now the last three days, we end the night of November 30 -
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Now the last three days, we end the night of November 30 - Hi - we have only three more days of this discussion on empyre; please post anything you might find relevant, you might have wanted to say, any references you might want us to have, any points you might want to make. I would especially like to hear more from the guests of this fourth week. The discussion has been intense, harrowing at times; I wish there were a permanent forum for continuous conversation, for the long duration of healing and change, for opening up other spaces for performance, anything. I think I've learned more this past month than I've learned in years, a learning involving self-critique, self-assessment. (For myself, I want to follow a path between nihilism and annihilation, see where that leads.) I want to thank everyone who has been actively participating, everyone who has been reading and following the discussion. And I want to thank Johannes in particular, whose close reading and moderation are brilliant and exemplary. My final piece here is below, hopefully it's relevant. dwelling and lamentations http://www.alansondheim.org/lamentations.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/lamentations1.mp3 guqin http://www.alansondheim.org/lamentations2.mp3 guqin http://www.alansondheim.org/lamentations3.mp3 guqin http://www.alansondheim.org/dwelling.jpg after close to a month on empyre, the topic ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance, these came to me, state,meant by other means ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] gender war, mythic violence
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Wed, 26 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- of the within/without non-issue. The violence of war is within-without; and Alan, I venture to say, you were recruited the last few days by the cameras and technological instruments of war (as I pointed out in my paraphrase of Judith Butler yesterday), you were 'constituted' by them. Hi Johannes, To respond to this, perhaps a misrecognition that is difficult to explain - it's not the 24 hours a day cameras-on-Ferguson (which you mentioned to me personally); it's the deterioration of life here and the increasing violence in this city (Providence, RI), coupled with the erosion of civil liberties across the United States. Ferguson was a flash-point, but was not the recruitment; the recruitment was, for me at least, literally signing up with a number of conservation organizations, then watching legislation fall apart, animal and plant extinctions rising horrendously. Ferguson was all too familiar, and it resonated with the slow burn, the slow war against Blacks and Latinos and otheres in this country, that's all. We're not in New York, where one can pretend to a certain immunity of affect/effect; Providence is not the same sort of liberal bubble, in spite of Roger Williams' legacy. And what we see here are shootings, knivings, arson, as a daily occurrence; the homeless increasing and increasingly desperate; graft at all levels; and the state plundering itself from decrepit and unreachable power, in spite of the fact that almost all the offices are held by Democrats. Providence is the ninth-most economically (read racially as well) divided city in the country - the rest, except for one in Ohio, are all in the south. So when you mention contituted by them - not only this isn't true, but it's a misreading perhaps of the U.S. itself; would you say that Romania is constituted by the media? That pain and intractable poverty elsewhere are? The U.S. is no different in this regard; large parts of it, Rhode Island included (with the second worst employment record in the country) is closer to the mythic and stereotyped third world country, than it is to the dream of a mythic U.S. from so long ago. That's what creates a sense of despair, derailing here, for so many (lots of people leave; this is the state with the highest percentage of people in the country trying to get out), and what was so perturbing about Ferguson, is that, like Occupy (as people have pointed out), there's no real clout in the protests, no political action. I keep thinking how far this is from the brutality elsewhere, but then I remember being violently kicked a year and a half ago in NY (ironically on the way to the doctor's), calling the police - we had witnesses, license plates, etc. - and the police told me if I tried to prosecute, to have the perpetrator arrested, I might be arrested myself for disturbing the peace. Later it came out that the NYC police were ordered to ignore most crimes of this sort, unless killing or hospitalization was required - the cops were trying to keep the stats down. So there you are, and the NYC cops are behaving as badly as ever, under the new mayor, and this country, for all its military power and swashbuckling and back-room international deals, operates on the principle of endocolonization, keeping the uppity poor and disenfranchised under control, making a massacre of the medial system for them, so they'll quietly die away. _That's_ what has recruited me, not CNN. - - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Last week on empyre: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance (fwd)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- -- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 10:54:24 From: Nictoglobe mail nictogl...@gmail.com Subject: Re: Last week on empyre: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Dear Alan Please forward it to empyre as i am inable to post to Thanks Andreas Sent from my eXtended BodY On Tue, 25 Nov 2014, Nictoglobe mail wrote: My 'personal' artistic response: http://nictoglobe.com/orsvibranturwurld Sent from my eXtended BodY ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Notes and a comment -
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Notes and a comment - In support of Ana - http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop From Wikipedia - Overall racial context According to The Washington Post, the incident sparked unrest in Ferguson largely due to questions of racism as a factor in the shooting.[155] Protests,[156] vandalism, and other forms of social unrest continued for more than a week,[157] with night curfew being imposed and escalated violence.[158][159] Several of the stores looted during the unrest are Asian American owned, with The Daily Beast writing that Asian Americans tend to be left out of the race relations discussion.[160] Also according to The Washington Post, the Ferguson Police Department bears little demographic resemblance to the mostly African-American community, which already harbored suspicions of the law enforcement agency preceding Brown's shooting, with 48 of the police force's 53 officers being white,[161] while the population is only one-third white and about two-thirds black.[155][162] An annual report last year by the office of Missouri's attorney general concluded that Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites.[155] The officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, lives in Crestwood, Missouri, 18 miles away from Ferguson.[163] The Los Angeles Times argues that the situation that exploded in Ferguson has been building for decades, and that protesters initially came from the town and neighboring towns that have pockets of poverty, the poorest of St. Louis, and lists the growing challenge of the suburbanization of poverty as the catalyst.[164] Another aspect of this situation might stem from a system that burdens the poor and black in Ferguson. Minor traffic offenses are the starting point, and the costs spiral up rapidly if the offenders do not pay the fines on time or do not appear in court. The income from court fines represented the second largest source of revenue for Ferguson in 2013. On October 1, 2014, the city of St. Louis cancelled 220,000 arrest warrants - and gave a three month delay to the offenders to get a new court date before the warrants would be re-issued.[165] Boko Haram Slashes Throats, Drowns 50 Civilians in Northern Nigeria Breitbart News - Nov 24, 2014 Scores of Boko Haram fighters blocked a route linking Nigeria with Chad near the fishing village of Doron Baga on the shores of Lake Chad on Thursday and killed a group of 48 fish traders on their way to Chad to buy fish, according to Abubakar ... On torture and the U.S.: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/20/cia-torture-white-house_n_6195032.html Comment - In backchannel with Johannes, I realized my position unfortunately is one of nihilism, combined with anguish; I see no way out of this violence and corruption, and actions of potential healing are for the living of course. A memorial in Ferguson, and there are, will be, many, will not change the tactics of the police, the deeply-embedded, structural, racism that rules the United States; mourning the victims of ISIS doesn't change the tactics of ISIS - and perhaps that's the real question - what can be done to change ISIS itself? And if nothing, you end up where I feel I'm heading, to a state of hopelessness. The world is simultaneously digital flows and abject, tortured, hungered, flesh, simultaneously living online, and moving among so many favelas, so much poverty, pollution, starvation, offline, and again this statistic which haunts me - that one in thirty children will be homeless, some time in her or his life. Nihilism isn't a course of action, and it doesn't mean giving up; instead it references taking a stance, most likely useless, just to assert that one is human, that anguish is still possible. My own work carries failure in its heart, it helps some people (I hope) cope with the world - we all hope for that - it has no effect on the systemic, however... On the other hand, one may well change the attitudes of the police - through education, community learning, dialog, and this is (I think) happening in some places. (I'd appreciate any bibliography you might be able to supply on nihilism and its potential.) But ISIS - or other groups believing in absolute inerrancy, absolute power, absolute truth, absolute annihilation - what is to be done? How to reach them? Is anything possible? - Alan (apologies for meandering) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Notes and a comment -
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Ana, I'm just repeating myself; to me these are all very different with different causes; the underlying terror, anguish, genocides may be similar, but I can't lump the countries together, as you do. This is a real difference between us; you say My point is why sort out Isis as villain/culprit/ when the US and Kina and Iran and Israel and so many other countries do exactly what Isis does? Public executions? Saudi Arabia and Iran. Collective punishment? Israel. Death row for 39 years being innocent? The US. Military violence exerted by the police? The whole world. Children in jail without trials. Israel. My point is Isis is only one of these groups using rebellions and violence as a tool for liberation. The M?s Mas movement killed white settlers in atrocious ways to decolonize Kongo and Tanzania. - and for me sorting out is absolutely necessary, and The whole world does not behave the same. Yes, the police can be horrific in the U.S. but there are no groups here committing genocide, wiping out towns and beheading everyone. If it were all the same, everywhere, there would be no reason for different testimonials, no reason for analysis, no reason for local action, no reason for looking at local histories or cultural difference. We just see the world differently and the reason I didn't want to discuss this further, I don't think we have common ground on this issue - at least for me, I'm just repeating myself. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Notes and a comment -
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- That's true; obviously I'm not disputing that, and I've protested. I was talking about within the United States. On Tue, 25 Nov 2014, Sonja Lebo? wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- (quote not coming through) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Notes and a comment -
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'm withdrawing from discussion on empyre. At this point I feel I'm being personally attacked; it's not why I was interested in the subject in the first place, and I don't want to defend myself or bring my own activism into the discussion. (I'm also worn out and literally shaking from the discussion in general, which is heavy, and unbelievably useful. I just feel my own role onlist has reached an end.) Apologies, Alan (I'll continue to moderate of course) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Lament Suroz
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Lament Suroz http://www.alansondheim.org/sarindaskin.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/lamentsuroz.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sarinda4.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sarinda1.jpg The stait of man dois change and vary, Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary, Now dansand mery, now like to dee; _Timor mortis conturbat me._ (Lament for the Makaris, William Dunbar) For all of us, incessant ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] my exchange with Alan when I apologized for making him feel attacked
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I've had excellent exchanges with Ana and Sonje back-channel; I think, at least for me, that dwelling has entangled and difficult boundaries, that discussion tends to blur into dream and the nightmare of burning cars and everything here, all over again, on the telly. Then it transforms into a repetitive compulsion, I wake up in the middle of the day or night for yet another narrative, always the same; it's as if the planet itself were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, tunnel memories playing back, repeating the same performance. I want to ask again if anyone has reference to a humanistic or healing nihilism, can one begin within degree zero expectation or projection, so to speak, and find some comfort in thought or movement, as if in flight elsewhere - On Wed, 26 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I wanted to take my share of the people arguing with Alan and maybe contributing, unintentionelly, to his feeling of unease. I listened to your laments and I felt a deep sympathy for you trying to heal us, to heal the world. Maybe that's what I feel we maybe forget trying to make a diagnose and applicate a remedy. We have been through. we discussed the terrible ways the Mesopotamian kings killed each other, or Dario blinding thousands of prisoners and letting only one of each hundred to keep an eye to be able to lead the others back to their country. Maybe the destine of Humanity is this, to die in the most horrible ways and the only relief we get are small pockets of happiness, when we compose, as you do, when we sing, when we write, when we laugh with our dear ones. I don't think of you as a nihilist, for me a nihilist is a cynical and resigned observer and you are definitely not a observer but one letting it's sould being engaged in the honest search for answers. This was my comment to him. I think that's the key, to find small pockets of happiness, to don't try to heal the world but to embrace the pain and the losses and the loneliness and the absurdity... Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Wood, what calms (if one has the luxury of calming)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Wood! (what saves me, occupies the space of anguish: the tending and playing of music, the physicality of wood. wooden instruments need a kind of stewardship; they're organic, they open other (sonic) registers, they restore balance, they quiet the world. I think of playing as curative, calming; the two oud pieces below present the anguish in another, more healing, register. on another note, Lakoff's update of Don't Think of An Elephant has arrived, and is useful in framing political discourse; it was recommended by Christina. I do remember reading it years ago, but given the state of political rhetoric in the U.S., it seems as relevant as ever.) http://www.alansondheim.org/nny119.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/msoud0.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/msoud1.mp3 returning from NY, finding the humidity below 20% and all the instruments untuned, even with a large-output humidifier going. so tuning up again - violin, oud, the sazs, suroz, gambus, all were wildly loose and luckily nothing cracked. the oud has been the most difficult to tune up again; at one point the twelfth (unused) peg fell out and I jumped; I thought it had broken. I'm now trying to adjust wood and string, keep the qin happy, set the humidity as high as possible in this dry place in a dry town (even though by the water), keep the temperature low, anything so I can stop running around like crazy, resetting the pegs, worrying the string tension, etc. tomorrow it's the hasapi and suroz, and that will leave the cranky bowl-backed mandolin for the last. meanwhile here are two oud solos, each played with the oud in a different position (traditional, or with the soundboard upright), each trying something different. with the dry air and the air dry, with the dry dry air, it's difficult to keep my hands from slipping, the oud from slipping, the pegs from slipping yet again, and so here we are; msoud0 is even a bit lyrical, a relief from the mourning music I often produce. msoud = Maurice Shehata oud, the name of the maker, the oud originally from Dubai. I would play wood! I will play wood! I would play wood! I would play wood! I will play wood! I would play wood! I would play wood! I will play wood! I would play wood! ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Cyberwar against St Louis / Ferguson
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- See images below: A Missouri grand jury has decided not to indict Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson [www.cnn.com] in the August 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, prosecutor Robert McCulloch said Monday. The incident became a flashpoint for racial tension in the St. Louis suburb; Brown was black and Wilson is white. Brown's father and others had called for calm ahead of the grand jury's decision, which comes amid concerns over the possibility of violent protests. http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson1.png http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson2.png http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson3.png ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Cyberwar against St Louis / Ferguson
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I agree with you but I don't think the grand jury was arrogant; the deliberation went on for two days and I think everyone is scared as hell. That said, the police are out of control here, there are so many goddamn guns on the street - there was an unarmed black shot just three days ago in NYC in a stairwell! You know who's arrogant? All of us who look at these symbols and say - they're out there, they're not us. But at least in the U.S. it's all us, we're all arrogant, and racism is so embedded in this society that it's a wonder war hasn't broken out here yet. And it will I think. - Alan On Tue, 25 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Ferguson is going to burn down, that's for sure. And the grand joury should be conscient and take their responsability about what is going to happen. That's the kind of arrogant behaviour who make people angry, frustrated and violent. Ana On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- See images below: A Missouri grand jury has decided not to indict Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson [www.cnn.com] in the August 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, prosecutor Robert McCulloch said Monday. The incident became a flashpoint for racial tension in the St. Louis suburb; Brown was black and Wilson is white. Brown's father and others had called for calm ahead of the grand jury's decision, which comes amid concerns over the possibility of violent protests. http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson1.png http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson2.png http://www.alansondheim.org/Ferguson3.png ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Cyberwar against St Louis / Ferguson
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Tue, 25 Nov 2014, Ana Valdes wrote: But it was what I wanted to adress the arrogance of a system which feel itself as above any judgement and carry on making people unhappy and frustrated. Why is the US endemic violent? Again compare Isis beheadings with Columbine killed or with the lynched blacks I wrote about showed in the postcards of Without sanctuary. The idea you are arrogant and nobody can judge your acts give you a feeling of total impunity. The impunity is a cardinal sin is the Nazis in Europe or the Serbs in the Balcony and Israel settlers torching olives or the Israeli army bombing schools in Gaza or it's the white police in Ferguson and my own torturers walking some streets I walk, unjudged, uncontested. Ana - All I can say, is being here, I don't think it's impunity or arrogance; I think it has a lot to do with deep racism and fear, and the reasons that the US is violent are much more complex. I've lived all over the U.S. and in all sorts of neighborhoods and made videos in many of them, and your analysis just doesn't resonate with me. You may be right, however. For me, I think there are issues of religious fundamentalism, the history of slavery, the notion of a mobile frontier, so-called 'rugged individualism,' mistrust of east-coast liberalism, the impunity (here) of the NRA and a right-wing supreme court that approves corporate PACs as the actions of individuals, the relative isolation of many parts of the U.S. from the coasts, deep paranoia on the part of the right, bad training for the police and the militarization of vigilante groups and the police, lack of money for social safety nets and the Republican destruction of what remnants there are of such, the collapse of the middle class - and this just touches the surface. I just can't run all these areas, U.S., ISIS/Columbine, Israel, Gaza, Nazi Germany, Serbs, together. I'd rather not continue this particular thread, if you don't mind, I'm sitting here watching Ferguson burn and it's terrible however the analysis. Apologies, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] a brief comment to Rustom
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you so much, Rustom; I do have a comment and questions. On Sun, 23 Nov 2014, Rustom Bharucha wrote: For whom are they a 'performance', or, more specifically, 'theatre'? Does this apply only to those who 'believe in the religious ideology of ISIS', as Alan assumes, even though there is no empirical evidence to suggest that this is, in actuality, the case? Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that it is 'we' - representatives of a spectrum of dissenting views whose liberal assumptions are antithetical to the ideology of ISIS - who are in a better position to claim that these beheadings are performances. I find myself in the discussion, at times, in the midst of theatrical theory or performance studies, and I also find myself incapable of drawing these distinctions which perhaps matter so much. I think the beheadings are a performance, as you say, they are staged; they are regulated, structured, concerned with the mise en scene, etc. There's a long tradition in art of bloodletting, torture, and so forth - any number of performers in the late 60s/70s worked with these process, from Nina Pane to Chris Burden, to artists committing suicide as acts. The fundamental difference is that these were done to the self, not to others, of course. In the long run, perhaps it doesn't matter as much as the effects of symbolic acts themselves, and here is the crux, for me; the beheading is symbolic, is interpreted from any number of positions, but is deeply effectual: for at least one of the participants, it is the last act she or he will ever know. The right, as I mentioned before, is brilliant at this; in a past Bush election, a rumor was spread in the rural areas of West Virginia, that if elected, the Democrats would take away our Bibles and throw anyone in jail caught reading them. The Democrats lost, and they usually didn't. In a popular book at the time, What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank described the process of getting people to vote against their interests: According to the book, the political discourse of recent decades has dramatically shifted from social and economic equality to the use of 'explosive' cultural issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, which are used to redirect anger toward 'liberal elites.' (Wikipedia) These cultural issues are used as symbols - just as the Tea Party title itself is symbolic - and I'd argue that these uses are also performances of slow terror - if the Democrats get in, our very form of life will be changed for the worst. So the right talks about Obamacare as promoting, requiring, death panels to get rid of seniors, and so forth. In the long run, aren't these all symbolic acts, symbolic processes, and perhaps it doesn't matter whether or not a performance is involved? Are we stuck on this terminology, which is useful within the enclave of formal and informal cultural production, but perhaps itself creates a situation of exclusion, so that beheadings, for example are bad art or not really art, or bad performance or not really performance - when in fact they move peoples and audiences in far more frightening and perhaps meaningful ways than what we ourselves do? I'm speaking, myself, as a 'failed artist' in this regard - and there is so much good intention in the expression never again - and then it happens, again and again and again... - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- J: But you do not think of the farewell as a loss and denial, do you? I: In no way. J: But? I: As the coming of what has been. J: But what is past, goes, has gone - how can it come? I: The passing of the past is something else than what has been. J: How are we to think that? I: As the gathering of what endures ... J: ... which, as you said recently, endures as what grants endurance ... I: ... and stays the Same as the message ... J: ... which needs us as messengers. - Heidegger, end of A Dialogue on Language, On the Way to Language the memorial work is a work of memorialization, a production, projecting time into the future, there is that past which forms a kernel (I'm reminded of the kernel in category theory); suppose the event, were there such (there can be memorials to fantasy as well), were a corrosion, or a constant dissolution - suppose that art is invaded by time - then what of the symbolic act, which is an act or sheaf of actions or directives, what of its efficacy, and is every symbolic act, in performance theory, a performance? - and are the actants messengers, and of what? - apologies for going on at length, I think of the inert brutality of genocidal performance (and for better or worse, I think in fact of performance in this regard also), and then again, what is to be done? - and the plaza is an excellent example of a response - and the plaza itself can be quickly undone, bombed, reimagined as the site of massacre - all those tribal (not my word, the media's) villages wiped out - the village markets, squares, plazas, as well, nothing - so we must act not according to our measures, perhaps? - is little said here about political response - voting, neighborhood activism, arming - but everyone in the Ferguson / St Louis area is arming already - the gun stores are sold out we hear - I: The danger of our dialogues was hidden in language itself, not in _what_ we discussed, nor in the _way in which_ we tried to do so. - ibid. On Sun, 23 Nov 2014, Alan Sondheim wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One thing I wonder, how so much cultural work occurs _after the fact,_ after the massacre, the use of the square, the beheading, the genocide; a temporality of mourning and warning seems embedded in so much production. It's hard to imagine art against a future massacre, without the looming presence of the past. I'm not sure of this at all, but I think that time might be a form of diacritical mark implicit in a performance related to the events we are discussing here, others as well, that the work looks back, perhaps inhabits the horror or curtails its effects. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Sections of some texts/images/video dealing with ISIS -
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Sections of some texts/images/video dealing with ISIS - see
http://www.alansondheim.org/st.txt and http://www.alansondheim.org/su.txt
for the full texts, other pieces, dispersed among other texts. (There are
also sv.txt, sw.txt, sx.txt now.)
black death piston
http://www.alansondheim.org/blackdeathpiston11.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/blackdeathpiston.mp4
it's the year of no return, it's the year of black death, it's
the piston it's the year of no return, it's the year of black
death, it's the piston it's the year of no return, it's the year
of black death, it's the piston it's the year of no return, it's
the year of black death, it's the piston
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
isis-is: the signal
http://www.alansondheim.org/thesignal1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/thesignal.mp4
trying to come to grips with annihilation when for example beheading
occurs, not only to foment terror, but as an act of piety, as part of the
natural order of things -
a signal is sent, becomes furious, begins to dissolve, the dance is
violent and sexual like a machine gun
ISISMACHINE
http://www.alansondheim.org/ismachine.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/ismachine.mp4
ISISMACHINE i can't do this
it doesn't come out right comes out wrong
ISIS = perfect humanism
demarcation and classification of the world
if you're not part of the answer you're part of the problem
ISISTHEY keep on coming
http://www.alansondheim.org/theykeep11.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/theykeep.mp4
_the they._ _the they_ mask. _the they_ masquerade.
already forced into a vanishing of alterity. already _they_ won.
already he won. already leaders. already led.
the violence of _the they._ the violence of a leader.
_they_ buy us into _their_ myth. _they_ caress us.
_our_ myth.
ISISLURE the disk of ISIS
http://www.alansondheim.org/isisdisk05.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/isisdisk.mp4
.ISISLURE allure extasis
.dilatation or distension of a hollow organ
.allure of the organ lure of the hollow
ISIS NEWFLAG
http://www.alansondheim.org/isisflag.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/isisflag.mp4
A new flag for ISIS. A cross turned, kindly bent to let the bodies down,
perhaps an arm remains, propping the rest of the weight. the wounded.
Poesis and Poetics of ISIS
http://www.alansondheim.org/isisdisk10.png
Poetics of terror, monotheism, inerrancy, cleansing. Analysis is dead,
dying, decayed, not of but without the body.
ISIS film: Light at the End of the Tunnel
http://www.alansondheim.org/lightattheend.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/lightattheend.mp4
The video is 2 hours 15 minutes 12.12 seconds
ISISdamnation
We're screwed to the wall.
http://www.alansondheim.org/damnthem1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/damnthem.mp4
We're screwed to history.
We're screwed to the hole of history.
We're screwed to the differend.
Warrior Lure Allure
http://www.alansondheim.org/warrior3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/warrior2.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/warrior.png
Promise the Warrior a softbed in a fourstar hotel. Promise the Warrior
black coolfabric sheen. Promise the Warrior ferociouslit facemask debric.
Promise the Warrior fullfood and lean womenmen. Promise the Warrior lean
womenmen revolutionfuturefun. Promise the Warrior radiotablet truenews
wheels and medical. Promise the Warrior thatperson thisperson yourperson.
Promise the Warrior yourperson here. Promise the Warrior stateposition
everfuture.
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[-empyre-] Introducing Ana Valdes
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'd like to introduce Ana Valdes, guest for the next week of empyre, ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Ana was critical in the empyre discussion we hosted on Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual; a social anthropologist, her work and writing combine universes of politics, theories, and media; we have learned so much from her. Welcome Ana! * Ana Vald?s was born in Uruguay, South America, in a family of Spanish and Italian emigrants, raised by German nuns. She studied Geography with German maps from 1942 and she believed firmly that Belgium, Netherlands, France, Norway and Danmark were a part of the Germany. In the maps the nuns used Germany was almost the whole Europe. She was put in prison when she was 19 years old for her political views. Ana belonged to a guerilla group called Tupamaros, at that timeshe believed in the weapons as a way to change things. She has changed her views, radically, and has been a member of the pacifist group Women in Black for years. After 4 years in prison she was deported to Sweden where she became at least an adult. She studied Anthropology and worked on death and blood ceremonies as these. 1982 she published her first book with short stories, awarded by Sorbonne University. She has written and published more than ten books and some of her short stories have been translated into English, French, Greek and Italian, Faber and Faber and Serpent's Tail has published several collections with her work, ?The Garden of the Alphabet? and ?Columbus's Egg.? She is a bilingual writer and writes both in Swedish and in Spanish. Ana has also been an independent curator and worked with Swedish visual artist Cecilia Parsberg in Palestine, they created the network ?Equator? (http://www.ceciliaparsberg.se/equator). She has participated in several debates about violence and representation with Jordan Crandall, ?Under fire? (http://www.wdw.nl/wdw_publications/jordan-crandall-under-fire-2/) She has been a member of -empyre since the beginning and guest moderated several times, her topics related to the representations of the Arabs in the contemporary world, the Crusades, and to urbanism and resilience. Her latest book, ?Your time will come, has been published in Swedish and in Spanish and it's about her time in prison, the torture and the resistance to break. About that, Counterpunch published an essay where her experiences were used (http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/). Ana has been in Palestine several times and saw how the civilian population suffers, she left Gaza one week before Rachel Corrie was murdered, and was in Jenin with Parsberg when the Israeli army left the town after ten days of attacks, death and mayhem, it was the Palestinian Ground Zero (www.ceciliaparsberg.se/jenin). http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I agree with Alicia, and I think the Right, judging by the U.S. among other countries, operates with the symbolic and its potential rigidity, much more effectively than the left; I do find beheadings, for example, clearly useful as aesthetic/symbolic acts. Self-critique is far more difficult than critique of others; the latter results in a highly useful reification, and the transformation of complexity into objects capable of annihilation is reminiscent of the video game. As far as Guernica goes, Franco won. And let's say for a moment Alicia is right - what then? (There have been so many artworks, paeans, dirges, warnings, all this for thousands of years, and what have we learned? To spread the havoc via social media? To be more effective in our slaughter?) Again, what is to be done? - Alan On Sat, 22 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I am having the priviledge of speaking with Alicia Migdal (the joys of the presenciality :), she is visiting me and we are speaking about the topics of this month. Alicia says what happens now seems impossible to reverse, not political acts not us. Alicia says nobody from the symbolical field can change things. But what happens, I say, par example, Picasso painted Gernica. His painting did not help one of the dead in Gernica but for us the generations to come Guernica became a symbol of the fascism and the resistance against it. Alicia says when you paint or write the effect of your creation is often delayed, maybe long time later others see in it the value of the expressed. I am thinking about Peter Weiss marvelous book The Esthetics of the Resistance when he reads the altar of Pergamus as a struggle between workers and owners. The altar was made for several thousands years ago and it's still something valuable to be reinterpreted how many times you wish. We were thinking of the Greek tragedies which had as explicit aim to arouse pity and terror in the spectator, as methods to purge the soul. They were warnings... Ana and Alicia ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] introducing week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Sat, 22 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I agree totally with Murat. The question, what is to be done? should not be asked. You, me, we, can't do other things that the things we do, it means, write, pain, dance, play, denounce. Again, Picassos Guernica didn't stop the war or the bombings of Guernica, but the horse and the bull he painted represent still today the most powerful abhorr against fascism. I am good friend to a Palestine family, nephews of both Ibrahim Tuqan and Fadwa Tuwan, two of Palestine greatest poets. Fadwa Tuqan lived in the UK for a while but went back to her beloved Nablus and never left it again. She wrote wonderful patriotic poems against the Israeli occupation. The prime minister Sharon said he was more afraid of her poetry than of the suicide bombers.. Ana I'm not arguing against the quality of work - to me the missing themselves or their bodies or the camps are the most powerful messages - and they are ineffectual, the wars go on just as they always have. Yes, the work is powerful - for me, Celan is of that quality, so many others. And they deepen our understanding of pain and violence, death and genocide. But they prevent nothing, they're political short-circuits - if anything, the world is far more violent today, since Celan and Picasso, and in the United States, there are far more incarcerations, far more killings I believe, far more acceptable racisms, than there have been before. Expressing anguish is helpful to those with empathy, but it is otherwise deeply ineffectual, while beheadings are certainly effectual, from the Assyrians to our own day. This at least is the dilemma for me; my work, I believe is eloquent in its content, but does nothing in the larger misery of the world. What is needed, ways of coping with overpopulation with dealing with religious intolerance and starvation, with preserving the biological species that are left... - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- out is what high, backwards, looking at the horror piled up, and yes, Alan, that horror grows and historically, how do you compare what cannot be forgotten or must be forgotten and ought not be forgotten? Johannes Birringer It will always be forgotten, it's disappearing at an increasing rate of course. Unfortunately, I think, the 'ought' (cannot be/must be/out not) is words, a turned phrase, a sound. I keep wondering how I am with the topic here in general, I have, deeply, absolutely no hope, and that is hardly a message that bears repeating (although it is one that bares repetition). - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, Christina Spiesel wrote: This is a long introduction to a simple thought: we need the arts to come to the rescue. I keep thinking of the art teacher in (Teresin?) who taught the interned young very advanced modernist aesthetic tools to express themselves even as they waited for transfer to extermination camps. Their wonderful works are on now display in Prague. Was it foolish to keep them spiritually alive in the face of atrocity or the best protest possible under the circumstances? What comfort did the teaching give the teacher when all other sources of power were eliminated? And for the children? Didn't it give them an experience of freedom and possibilty? We need arts both in the universities and out there in public spaces. And we need artists to keep themselves alive, somehow, both as beings and as creators. I believe that this is the counter story to the awfulness of our perceptions of the world these days. And there is always an inter-generational conversation between arts makers and their forebears, and hopefully, inventively, we'll find ways to play it forward. CS Of course I agree with you, but what is happening is the reverse - budgets are being drastically cut back, arts in the schools are being eliminated, and even art colleges are suffering or turning into vocational schools for digital technicians who dream of the next big game but end up doing commercials. There are so many disconnects. I feel that the right wants less education - 1. It interferes with religious dogma; 2. It's an imposition from cabals with liberal agenda; 3. Those cabals are elsewhere and are dangerous; 4. It forces things like a belief in global warming upon us; 5. It teaches that slavery was all bad and overlooks the good slave-owners; 6. It interferes with producing well-behaved workers; and 7. It's going to break up _my_ family. So the result is a war on education and teachers, and the further result is an inability of a large number of people do understand the complexity of the world geopolitical system and its miserable consequences. ISIS becomes and produces spectacle and gains thereby, and education in so many areas of the world (not just the U.S., but Nigeria for a horrific example) is seen as dangerous, and decadent. If we can't even support decent K-12 in our own country, if we can't support the arts (which are notoriously underfunded here) or critical dialog, how can we act in the world at all? Who even knows where Syria, Iran, Iraq, are on the map? The difference between Sunni and Shiite? This might as well apply to the United States, change the religion: In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled bythe wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt following World War I. The victorious Europeans hadimported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by Europeanschools and scientific and cultural institutes that cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western. ( http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/934 ) So the usual question: What is to be done? - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I want to echo Ana's post below; one statistic that came out two days ago - in the United States, one out of every thirty children will be homeless sometime in his or her life. In a country with such enormous wealth, there is so little distribution! But I do think there has to be some healing, not towards health, but at least towards the ability to sleep at night, to wake and function in the morning, and for many of us, this is lacking, the night is full of horrors, the day brings little relief. There has to be a balance, we have to at least tend towards that. (But the violence spreading now, for example Jerusalem, Egypt, I cannot imagine that, and how does one fight a conflagration, and is this conflagration our own, wherever we are?) - Alan On Wed, 19 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Reading Monikas very powerful and intuitive statements and going back to what Alan and others wrote, something struck me: we talk a lot about healing, but suppose we don't need to be healed? I mean the idea of a healthy society is ludicrous, there is not a healthy society in the world. The Nordic countries, seen by many as paradise on earth, are the countries with the highest amount of suicides in the world (followed quite near by my own birth country Uruguay) and a kind of chronical depression. Is the US healthy? Of course not, a country ravaged by violence, random killings, with the highest carcelary population in the world and millions living in poverty, is not a healthy society. Maybe the ambition should be heal enough to be able to take care of others, I want live in a society where the poor and the voiceless are seen as equally worth, a real polyphonic society as Bachtin formulated, a society where all voices are worth to be heard. Ana ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] please do not quote unnecessarily
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, I want to remind people, please don't quote unnecessarily; it makes archive access a bit overloaded. Quote when you're replying, or when the message as a whole is necessary. Apologies and thanks, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Introducing Monika Weiss
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
I'd like to introduce Monika Weiss, who is a guest for the second week of
our dicussion. I'd like to thank everyone who is participating; please
continue!
I've known Monika's work for years;, and identify with the concerns of
mourning, death, concentration camps. For me, her pieces touch on
tableau performances that strongly relate to this month's topic.
Welcome, Monika!
Monika Weiss is a Polish-American artist working with body, history and
postmemory. Her current work focuses on historical amnesia as reflected
within the physical and political space of a City. Weiss frequently
employs her own body as a vehicle of artistic expression and invites
others to inhabit her performances and films. ?Not being a proper witness,
not being a proper survivor, not being able to recall the very
overwhelming events, Monika Weiss indirectly, on the basis of found
fragments of images and encountered sites, chooses to inhabit them
performatively through her art. She attempts to do so even if, in her
words, they 'defy narrative reconstructions and exceed comprehension.' She
does so through lamentation, an original, often public, performative, and
collaborative form of her art. (Krzysztof Wodiczko, introduction to
Monika Weiss? performance at GSD, Harvard University, 2014) Originally
trained as a classical musician, the artist composes sound in her films
and installations. In 2005, Lehman College Art Gallery, CUNY organized
the artist?s first retrospective which was reviewed in The New York Times.
Weiss? traveling exhibition 'Sustenazo', first commissioned by the Centre
for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2010), was
subsequently shown at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago,
Chile (2012-2013), and at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU,
Miami (2014). Weiss? work has been also featured at Streaming Museum
('John Cage Centennial Tribute', 2012), Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation
CIFO, Miami ('Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and
Contemporary Art', 2007; 'The Prisoner?s Dilemma', 2009), and part of
Prague?s Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo)?s inaugural show in 2010. Some other
notable exhibitions include 'Moment by Moment: Meditations of the Hand' at
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2006); 'On the Absence of Camps'
at Kunsthaus Dresden (2006); 'POZA: On the Polishness of Polish
Contemporary Art' at Real Art Ways, Hartford (2008); and 'Frauen bei
Olympia' at Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2009). An important part of the artist
works are public projects which are process-based and site-specific
environments. Commissioned by The Drawing Center, her public project
'Drawing Lethe' (2006) took place at the World Financial Center Winter
Garden within sight of Ground Zero, where workers were still digging for
remains. Passersby lay down and marked their presence onto the enormous
canvas covering the floor, which gradually became a drawing-field. In
'Shrouds-Ca?uny' (2012), Weiss filmed, from an airplane, local women
performing silent gestures of lamentation on the abandoned, forgotten site
of the former concentration camp Gruenberg, located in Zielona G?ra. Weiss
has given lectures on her work at institutions around the world and her
writings have appeared in numerous publications, including New Realities:
Being Syncretic (Springer, Wien/New York) and Technoetic Arts (Intellect,
London). In 2007 her work was featured in the survey publication 'Drawing
Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art' (London: I. B. Tauris). Weiss
is currently Associate Professor at Sam Fox School of Design Visual
Arts, Washington University in Saint Louis. Born in Warsaw, Poland the
artist lives and works in New York City.
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Re: [-empyre-] creative powerlessness, expressive violence, performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Mon, 17 Nov 2014, Christina Spiesel wrote: As testimony to the importance of feeling and the emotions as guides to value -- something very much devalued at the moment as humanities and arts budgets are slashed and education is increasingly thought of as training. -- Can you elaborate on this? This, in the United States, is a crisis of conscience and citizenry that is ongoing and worsening; humanities, arts, music, and even phys ed programs are being cut out of K-12 schools - not to mention artschools themselves, which are increasingly becoming vocational feeds for the tech industries. I do think this plays into our inordinate fear of ebola, our magnification of crISIS in general, and our deep ignorance of conflict and violence (although we practice both with impunity). Comments appreciated, and thanks, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] more and the question about performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Amery and others talk about the dissolution of the self in torture; the 'ego' to me is actually a knot that's fairly easily dissolved in dire circumstances. The selves are varied, at times they've been related to different intelligences (Howard Gardner) or roles in classical capitalism - torture, horrendous pain in general, transforms the ego into something else entirely, seems to dissolve it. It may just be a matter of nomenclature? - Alan On Sun, 16 Nov 2014, William Bain wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] more and the question about performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Erik, I do want to reply, briefly, to you here. You state (the quote didn't work): a thing, to be art, must represent a thing by other means. so, the life in a flower (a feature of time) is re-presented in arrangement (a feature of space). [barba, dictionary of theatre anthropology] - and it seems to me, that to be art - in order to be art - is problematic; certainly there has been a lot of writing on the iconic (in Peirce's sense) to claim otherwise - a thing can represent itself. This was fundamental to a lot of West Coast feminist art from the 60s and 70s - where sweeping a floor for example wasn't representing sweeping by other means but was exactly what it seemed - work. Chris Burden played off this a number of times as well. So when you state to represent killing by killing is anti-performance. - for me it's performance, a horrifying one, but performance nonetheless. (I'm always suspicious as well about anti-anything, such as anti-poems, anti-art etc.; these exist within the same fold.) Thanks, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] more and the question about performance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think it was the work; there was a lot of art based on everyday activites. There's always what Smylie called the work of the audience, but there is also audience, for beheading, unfortunately. - - Alan On Sat, 15 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote: represented by other means in the sense that the floor didn't need to be swept or if it did that wasn't the point - what was being represented was the labor, above the activity, or specifically spectatorship... so the work of sweeping transferred to the work of watching sweeping? On Saturday, November 15, 2014 9:38 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi Erik, I do want to reply, briefly, to you here. You state (the quote didn't work): a thing, to be art, must represent a thing by other means. so, the life in a flower (a feature of time) is re-presented in arrangement (a feature of space). [barba, dictionary of theatre anthropology] - and it seems to me, that to be art - in order to be art - is problematic; certainly there has been a lot of writing on the iconic (in Peirce's sense) to claim otherwise - a thing can represent itself. This was fundamental to a lot of West Coast feminist art from the 60s and 70s - where sweeping a floor for example wasn't representing sweeping by other means but was exactly what it seemed - work. Chris Burden played off this a number of times as well. So when you state to represent killing by killing is anti-performance. - for me it's performance, a horrifying one, but performance nonetheless. (I'm always suspicious as well about anti-anything, such as anti-poems, anti-art etc.; these exist within the same fold.) Thanks, 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Brotherhoods research
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/11/war-really-does-foster-band-brothers?utm_campaign=email-news-latestutm_source=eloqua Apologies in advance for posting the URL, but, right or wrong, it seems relevant to the discussion. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] ethology?
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I read with great interest, Reinhold's post; he states All living being is open, in constant exchange with the world, with persons, other species and things around, with what is his Umwelt or his living-world. A newborn is in an extremely intense exchange with his environment. Just read what Daniel Stern 1985 wrote in his ?The Interpersonal World of the Infant? about the vitality affects: Long before there is any experience of an ?I?, there is an intense communication of forms of feeling, of affects taking place. Or to say it in a more philosophical way: The ?I? always comes late, the encounter with the other always already has taken place before the ?I? notices it. I then read the news: US led strikes hit Islamic State, al-Qaida-linked group in Syria Jerusalem Post - 57 minutes ago WASHINGTON - US-led air strikes hit 10 units of Islamic State fighters in Syria in recent days, as well as militants with the al-Qaida-linked Khorasan Group, US Central Command said in a statement on Friday. Islamic State sets sights on Saudi Arabia BBC News - 20 minutes ago In a 17-minute audio message, purportedly from its elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group sets its sights firmly on Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam and the world's largest oil producer and exporter. Militants seize hometown of kidnapped schoolgirls Businessweek - 1 hour ago MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) - Islamic extremists in Nigeria have seized Chibok, forcing thousands of people to flee the town where insurgents kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls in April, a local official said Friday. Student Found Unconscious at WVU Fraternity Dies ABC News - 19 minutes ago A West Virginia University student found unconscious and not breathing at a fraternity house died Friday, a day after the school ordered a halt to all activities at fraternities and sororities, officials said. Capital Wired Male Infanticide -- Male Mammals Kill Rival Babies To Endure Own Offspring Capital Wired - 18 minutes ago When it comes to the animal kingdom, it's the survival of the fittest and his offspring. To endure their own offspring, some mammals kills the babies of the rivals. Bullying Increases Mating Prospects For Male Chimpanzees [STUDY] ValueWalk - 45 minutes ago A 17-year study of chimpanzees in Tanzania reports that bullying may be of benefit to males of the group. More specifically, males that exhibited long-term aggressive behavior towards females, up to and including physical assaults, significantly increased. - And I wonder, why isn't sociobiology on the table here? It seems to me that violence is ingrained in being-human; although there are exceptions, most of human history seems bathed in blood. For me, part of the question does involve empathy - how can we so identify with the other, that the torture stops? And almost everything I've read, from Amery through Scarry through the Nuremberg War trial transcripts, presents against this possibility, that in fact torture has its own perverse logic, its own closure. I realize that sociobiology is considered problematic; on the other hand, I don't know how other-species evidence can be overlooked (even sea anenomes have (for us, slow-motion) wars). Comments appreciated here. Thanks greatly, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] ethology?
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- There's also considerable violence in small societies, in small towns; and of course there are altruistic decisions people make at any scale - otherwise there wouldn't be global charities, giving to flood victims in other countries, and so forth. For me, it has to do with picturing the other in relation to the local, a kind of negotiated logic... Thanks!, Alan On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, John Hopkins wrote: The balance between the violence and empathy probably have a break point at the number 150 -- the 'average' maximum number of relations that the human brain is evolved to be mindful of -- the clan-based society... Empathy can extend no further than that (perhaps), except in extraordinary circumstances (Jesus, Buddha, etc)... The rest of those outside the 150 are simply challengers of my use of resources that I employ to optimize the reproducibility of my clan (unless there is an attractive gene-pool-mixing opportunity 'out there'). Those may have to be taken by force. What genetic evidence is there of altruism that extends beyond clan? I know there has been some research in that regard, but my phenomenological observations suggest that humans are, on average and in aggregate, unable to make altruistic decisions on a wide scale (global warming seems to be one example)... Decisions can be made on a smaller scale when conditions pressure such, but otherwise, resource consumption and nest-soiling tendencies are not immediately impinging on quality of life, so, who cares? and so on... jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] ethology?
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Coot mothers will torture their weaker young, literally torture, until the young coot dies of exhaustion, anomie, etc. The videos are disturbing. And there's bullying, which is definitely a form of torture, among other species - excuse the long quote - When bullying is considered across animals, there is ample evidence that many other animals, including other primates, engage in bullying-like behaviors. Rats and mice are commonly used as models for social stress during different life phases, including adolescence. Studies on these common laboratory rodents indicate that social stress, experienced when one individual repeatedly attacks another or takes resources from them, has immediate and lasting impacts (Kinsey et al, 2007; Vidal et al, 2011). Rats who suffered from bullying-like behaviors were less likely to drink water or consume other resources (Vidal et al, 2011). Mice that suffered repeated social defeats were more anxious and experienced changes in brain chemistry (Kinsey et al, 2007). Bullying-like behaviors extend beyond rodents, and labs, appearing in many species, including other primates. Bullying-like behaviors are found in every major group of primates, and can sometimes be severe. Among baboons, one of the best-known, non-human primates in the world, bullying-like behaviors are common. Baboons are common throughout sub-Saharan Africa and many species live in female-centered societies that are held together by matrilineal bonds that span multiple generations. Groups of related females work together to compete over resources and in doing so regularly gang up on females from other matrilines (Altmann, 1980). Female baboons have large canines (though nowhere near as large as their male counterparts) and their fights can be intense and, occasionally, dangerous. Females who regularly lose fights and are low ranking are more stressed and have lower reproductive success than their higher-ranking group-mates (Sapolsky, 1987). While female baboons are not always bully-like toward one another, they frequently use intimidation and aggression to modify the behaviors of others and to get resources from them (Seyfarth, 1976). Bullying-like behaviors are not restricted to female primates. Chimpanzees live in communities with many males and females and males live in the groups their born into their entire lives. Males also form dominance relationships with each other based on physical power and friendships, which they use in competition over mates. Male chimpanzees regularly intimidate each other with bluffs, displays, charges and aggression, which can range from making another male move from a resting spot to physical violence. One of the areas I focus on in my research is the development of behavior in male chimpanzees, paying particular attention to adolescence. Adolescence is a time of great change and uncertainty for male chimpanzees, when they leave their mothers and enter into the adult male social world. When they do that they enter a world of constant posturing and networking that threatens to erupt into violence at any moment. Much like their human cousins, adolescent male chimpanzees begin at the bottom of the male dominance hierarchy (Goodall, 1986) and have to demonstrate their value as a friend and ally, while growing and putting on muscle mass in order to move up the hierarchy. Because adolescent males are smaller, weaker, less experienced and have to challenge other males in order to become competitive, they make attractive targets for older males, and older adolescents and adults regularly attack them (Sherrow, 2008). In short, adolescent males are almost continually bullied as they attempt to join the male social world. In most cases the bullying-like behaviors experienced by male chimpanzees are temporary and relatively harmless. The most common form of intimidation involves a dominant male puffing himself up, with all of his hair standing on end, and walking toward or by another male. This is usually enough to compel the subordinate, or lower ranking, male to pant grunt (a short uhh, uhh, uhh vocalization which is repeated several times and serves to recognize the dominance of another chimpanzee), don a fear grimace and put their hand out in a palm up begging gesture. However, if two males are close in rank or a male fails to adhere to social norms within the community, bullying-like behaviors can become more intense and, on occasion, dangerous. One of the reasons bullying-like behaviors can become so dangerous among male chimpanzees is that they regularly gang up on each other during aggressive interactions in what are called coalitions. On three different occasions, researchers at three different field sites, observed coalitions of adult male chimpanzees attack and kill a male from their group, apparently because they did not adhere to the social
Re: [-empyre-] ethology?
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi John!
A couple of things - it depends how 'clan' is defined; there is plenty of
internecine warfare within clans (see the sagas!) as well as in very
coherent small towns - try being gay in one of them, or a different race.
You say But if you compare the numbers and the perceptions that Amurikans
have -- people think that foreign aid is a *huge* number, larger than even
military budgets... when in fact it is actually a tiny number. Much better
to imagine we are doing good whilst killing... And altruism in this case,
well, many wide-scaled aid programs are more based in pragmatics ('fix
Ebola over there otherwise it will come here' or literally buying
political cooperation)...
But this is a red herring; I can cite you any number of cases where people
in the U.S. and for that matter any number of other countries, have given
aid without any such equation. Your we is wrong there - who is the we
who is giving and who is the we who is killing? If I vote against
killing and give money to conservation initiatives in other countries for
example - how is this based on pragmatics that something will come here?
People in fact do give, and killers can be kind, and givers can be
violent, but this doesn't play out logically or psychologically.
For example, we give a fair amount of money to various groups without the
stupidity of the ebola equation, I've organized or been part of organized
drives, without any sense that it will come here and without any notion
I'm covering up killing for example - you either recognize altruism or
you don't, and if you don't, your small extended family in Iceland is just
as much a part of the problem as people anywhere else. (Btw I was in
Fukuoka for a while years ago, it was a fairly closed-off local city, and
as a foreignor, I was ostracized, yelled at on the street for being
non-Japanese, etc. And I'm from a small town in Pennsylvania, and could
speak of problems there as well. These weren't and maybe still aren't,
atomized societies.)
Yoicks! Who exactly thinks foreign aid is a huge number? No one I know...
Alan
On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, John Hopkins wrote:
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
There's also considerable violence in small societies, in small towns; and
of
this suggests that those social configurations are *not* 'clan' based --
which seems to be the case in our 'mixed-up' society. Internal 'clan'
violence of course happens when there are hierarchic leadership questions,
but those are probably statistically rare as they threaten the viability of a
social unit (internal violence makes the group vulnerable to outside
attack)...
I know when I moved to Iceland, and married into a typical extended family
there -- I was amazed at the family dynamic -- something I'd hardly
experienced in my rather small extended US family. In Iceland, I knew I could
make a phone call to any one of a hundred people and get immediate assistance
for whatever. How strange a concept it was! There sense of family was perhaps
a couple generations 'behind' the US's atomized/nuclear families...
course there are altruistic decisions people make at any scale - otherwise
there
wouldn't be global charities, giving to flood victims in other countries,
and so
But if you compare the numbers and the perceptions that Amurikans have --
people think that foreign aid is a *huge* number, larger than even military
budgets... when in fact it is actually a tiny number. Much better to imagine
we are doing good whilst killing... And altruism in this case, well, many
wide-scaled aid programs are more based in pragmatics ('fix Ebola over there
otherwise it will come here' or literally buying political cooperation)...
And the provision of abstracted currency support for the remote Other, that
seems like very 'thin' empathy somehow... but so many would rather do that
than help a neighbor...
forth. For me, it has to do with picturing the other in relation to the
local, a
kind of negotiated logic...
does this seem grim? maybe it's a cup half empty/half full issue. I know
people do kind things, this is clear. Are we not men? We are Devo...
ciao,
jh
--
++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++
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Re: [-empyre-] From a distance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Yoko, Perhaps you're missing the point I'm trying to make? the equations are from the viewpoint of an absolute; X is a universal set, 0 is a null set; the origin of the symbol isn't an issue here. Following Sam Harris and some set theory, dealing with the inerrancy of the text - within an absolutist mindset, there is only _that_ text, and _that_ text defines hardened interiors and exteriors. Abjection leaks through (Kristeva), but there are attempts (Mary Douglas) to reinforce those boundaries. What is expelled is literally beyond the Pale, victims of an exclusionary logic; what is expelled is increasingly reduced into what might be called 'annihilation to the limi't (I wrote a text on that years ago and the phrase has stayed with me). I do believe that absolute annihilation of a group is possible; it happens all the time on an environmental level, and not everything leaves traces. That seems fairly clear, studying the convulsive extinctions that earth has undergone for hundreds of millions of years. You can change 0 to Y if you want, but that's of course something else, what I'm trying to grapple with is absolutism and the elimination of the Other. For me this has dire consequences; there are many human groups which have been absolutely annihilated by other human groups. Thanks, - Alan On Thu, 13 Nov 2014, Yoko Ishiguro wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello all, Johannes and Alan Yes, in my previous post, I tried to reflect Alan's 'fragments' concluded: 'What I'm trying to present is the idea of an expulsion and an annihilation of what's expelled. ISIS wants a purified caliphate with only believers; non-believers are expelled or murdered. Could you elaborate on the rest of your post? I'm trying to say then that the annihilation is that of the Other - the Other isn't permitted to survive, and with the death of the Other, the Other becomes identified with 0.' Apparently, the dangerous thought of ISIS and the other fundamentalists seems in their notion of X and 0. In my opinion, it should be X and Y instead. As long as I know and as long as I can imagine, there is no 0 of human beings -even if after they get killed. Ancient Indians invented a great concept of '0' but it cannot be applied to summarising or generalising humans/living creatures -they can not exist only by themselves but they do in a complex amongst THE OTHERS and in the occasional CHANGES of themselves and their circumstances -as Gregory Bateson claims. Simply to say, our conditions are relative and ephemeral so that the math formulas on us should not be so simple -at least they can not be consisted of X and 0. Additionally, I believe that even if you try to 'annihilate' THE OTHERS, it should not be possible in a genuine sense since THE OTHERS you want to annihilate have tons of ANOTHER OTHERS that THE OTHERS have left the traces, memories, effects, DNAs and viruses on. What are THE OTHERS to WHOM then? Is not it mere a systematic strategy of a bunch of people who make up an aesthetic in order to encourage the people 'inside'? Why do humans have to have the notion of THE OTHERS -is it actually our innate behaviour to try to eliminate THE OTHERS? Should our societies and our recognitions be necessarily consisted of the dualities/polarities of Figures and Ground (Gestalt) = Inside and Outside = Us and The Others...? If babies should develop/learn by acknowledging how to define themselves and THE OTHERS a prior as their nature, what kind of methodology is affective to create a different point of view to the adults? This must be the point that many art practitioners can speak something loudly. Johannes and Pier, Powerless? Is it the write word really...? Doesn't power exist anywhere (in our body, cells, societies, arts and galaxies)? 'War against war' does not make any good since the war against war is still a war. So what is the 'ethically CORRECT' attitude for art practitioners? Maybe there is no such a thing. As well as the examples you mentioned so far on this mailing list, the Salt March of Gandhi, for example, could be a good example of a slow/soft/'powerless' performance against an authority/power but what else approaches can we think of -that was the starting point of my moving/performance/installation 'Fuji-copo 102, Higashi-ogu, Arakawa-ku, Tokyo' in 2011? We might want to talk about POWER itself a bit, from the different points of views other than theologies and politics, not necessarily artistically but, for example, socially, physically, kinetically, psychologically, linguistically, or as Alan suggested, logically and mathematically. How would our bodies be if we became 'powerless' while we are 'against' any kinds of forces such as gravity? How can we think about the power balances of our right hand and left hand? How can we live without any power supplies
Re: [-empyre-] correction 2
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- But you made another point which is equally valid, I think, that everything is within a skein, that there's always another other. And maybe there lies redemption, or at least the possibility of functioning in a world that at times appears all too brutal? I think as well your points on Power are really well taken; I was just pointing out (in regard to what I replied to), that I was taking a different path? I've been offline more or less for a couple of days (performing in NY) - is your performance work online? Thanks greatly, Alan On Fri, 14 Nov 2014, Yoko Ishiguro wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Alan, Yes, you are right. I was out of the point totally. Pier and Johannes, I was very much confused when I wrote the previous email. Please ignore what I wrote. My apologies. I will write later. Thank you. Yoko Ishiguro ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Powerlessness
--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Pier, I've used the book you referred to, War Against War in English,
on Facebook at one point, choosing for my self-portrait, one of the
wounded; I wanted to slow down the fast-forward Facebook ethos, where one
image, violent and kitten and otherwise, replaces another, to make one
slow up, stop, and face the reality of war in this other context. I can't
find the original screen grab, it was a long time ago, Krieg dem Krieg;
when I look, I find a 'face.txt' I must have assembled, relevant but
stumbling as a work of writing, http://www.alansondheim.org/face.txt ,
which seem now with so many references, now even Wikipedia. The images,
always of course within a form or capsule of delivery, are necessary,
reminders, and what happens if they are turned upon themselves, become
catalysts towards further atrocities. What do people think, now, those for
example who continue to join ISIS, is there an attraction to the fractured
body or is it a case only of political action, religious action?
When I was thinking about the topic for this month, I wrote originally, in
the form of equations -
[Fragments below]
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
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
this came on the heels of a first post I wrote
thinking about ISIS and the idea of exclusion - from for all x
not x tends towards zero - to x is identical with the universal
set, not x is identical with the null set. I'm playing off ideas
of purity and exclusion - things like the Pale etc. or the
theory in Kristeva's Powers of Horror or the earlier Mary
Douglas' (sp?) Purity and Danger. that which is not for me, in
other words, is against me, and must be annihilated, and
annihilation must be carried out to the limit. so for me the
movement is from 'sending' or projecting not-x into the null
set, to making it equivalent, to making it identical - a
movement maybe from epistemology to ontology - the not-x become
- _are_ inherently non-being, eliminated. -
X doesn't equal not-X. The world divides and
hardens between X and not-X; it's a classical division so that
the intersection of X and not-X is the null set. What I'm trying
to present is the idea of an expulsion and an annihilation of
what's expelled. ISIS wants a purified caliphate with only
believers; non-believers are expelled or murdered. Could you
elaborate on the rest of your post? I'm trying to say then that
the annihilation is that of the Other - the Other isn't
permitted to survive, and with the death of the Other, the Other
becomes identified with 0.
because it's about ISIS and this is the second in
the series -
trying to come to grips with annihilation when for
example beheading occurs, not only to foment terror, but as an
act of piety, as part of the natural order of things -
in the above, a signal is sent, becomes furious,
begins to dissolve, the dance is violent and sexual like a
machine gun
amounting to firing a gun but now up close, the
taste of the gristle, trophy of the severed head, or there were
hands chopped, eyes gouged
at times anything that can be removed
what does this, where is a response, what is this?
ISIS EXPANSION BY FORCE AND TERROR
FORCE = TERROR
WORD = NOTHING
or think of it like this:
for all X, not-X tends towards zero, not the null set
a move from set theory to simple arithmetic
whatever isn't x must be eliminated
numbers brought down until the slate is cleansed kill-delete
then not-X = 0, the epistemology is complete
and in the future not-X is identical with zero,
history erased, ontology cleansed - fundamentals
[Fragments above]
- equations of hardening and cleansing, as an attempt to deal with the
exclusionary machine, the differend, and then it seemed as well to deal
with those who were powerless, on the wrong side of the equation, those
already in the realm of annihilatoin.
I apologize for bringing my own work in this, in this fashion, but perhaps
it resonates with some of the discussion here. I'd write more, but I'm in
a hotel and the connection is again terrible, what I type seems almost
taken from me by lag, I can't follow or contribute more to my own train of
thought, much less to others.
- Alan
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[-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I want to thank Johannes for all the work he's done here, and all the guests current and future; it's an amazing and intense month. and from my current Google newsfeed (space and time displacements) - Suicide bombing at Nigerian school kills 47Sydney Morning Herald Military Plans 'Operation No Mercy' Against Boko HaramAllAfrica.com Palestinian stabbed Israel soldier in attack near Tel Aviv train station, police say :Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversary RT Egypt jihadists vow loyalty to ISIS In this Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 photo, smoke rises from explosions demolishing houses on the Egyptian side of the border town of Rafah as seen from the Palestinian side of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Cyberespionage group targets traveling execs through hotel networks Russia Says Sanctions Hurting as Bank Moves to Defend Ruble Russian Military Encounters With West at Cold War Levels: Report Suicide bomber kills 47 boys in Nigeria school massacre Daily Mail - 1 hour ago Suicide bomber kills 48 at school assembly in Nigeria IBNLive - 1 hour ago UPDATE 3-Suicide bomber kills dozens at school assembly in Nigeria Reuters - 45 minutes ago ... * Suicide bomber dressed as student kills 48, injures 79. * Detonates device during school's morning assembly. * Angry locals block access to school buildings, hospital. Leaders of China and Japan hold first face-to-face talks amid tensions CNN Trending on Google+:Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall anniversaryRT Opinion:Terror attack in Tel Aviv: Palestinian stabs, critically wounds IDF soldierJerusalem Post From Nigeria:Scores Of Insurgents Killed In Mubi By SoldiersNAIJ.COM Clashes with Israel Police settle down in Arab locales ISIS gaining followers but losing leaders? CBS News - 52 minutes ago CAIRO -- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi organization based in the Sinai Peninsula that has carried out several attacks targeting Egyptian security forces, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). African nations counter Ebola's tourism damageTimes of Malta Mali due to declare 108 Ebola-free after quarantineeNCA China's president praises Hong Kong chief's handling of democracy protests Los Angeles Times- 1 hour ago In a high-profile meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his support for the Hong Kong government's handling of the ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations even as student protest leaders seek to schedule direct talks with central government ... Opinion:Russian Forces Provoked West 40 TimesDaily Beast In Depth:Russia's 'close military encounters' with Europe documentedBBC News ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] I feel today a bit patriotic :)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi - I agree with you here, however I do not watch beheading or other torture videos; I know no one personally who does. They're not shown on the new here. At one point I did see the beheading of Daniel Pearl; I felt connected to the case and wanted to 'face' the violence, however mediated. This isn't to say that there's not an interest in tortured bodies in this country; anyone who has seen an episode of Bones knows has graphic these kinds of images can be. But there are many people, myself included, who have too many nightmares; I'd write more but we're in NY for a performance and the connection where we're staying is close to non-existent. Apologies, Alan On Mon, 10 Nov 2014, Leandro Delgado wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- What I cut and pasted from was the headline page only, which breaks things down in categories; there's a lot of news, but one massacre seems to supercede another. The headline page also depends on categories the user assigns; for example I have a heavy section on physics, because it's an interest of mine. - Alan On Mon, 10 Nov 2014, Diana Taylor wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] concerning violence, and more Antigone's bones
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Sat, 8 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- is there any grappling that could answer Alan's statement of dissolution? -- And I want to answer this in so many ways; the statement was not a question although Johannes' question embodying my statement, is. There are visceral reactions to extreme pain, abject dissolution of the body; these seem fundamental to many animal species, not just humans. To speak of an answer is to speak of a question, is to speak, is to use language, to have recourse to language. And in these situations, none of this speaking, from 'the first blow,' may be possible. Extreme pain, without medical intervention - the cries and screams of the wounded (discussed earlier in empyre) - we are always already animal, we murder; there are other species who murder. Speech disappears, is impossible. (And as witness, so many Vets I know are silent about their experience.) The rest is the Other (of culture, cultural work, signifiers) which can only appear later, as an afterthought/afterbirth/afterdeath; we are all present, contribute to this. We all play and write in the theater of pain; years ago, when I was beaten up badly, it was staged - on the street, under an arch that might as well have been a proscenium. I think of anguish as straddling, come-out or coming-forth from silence, from those who bear witness, are affected, perhaps on the edge of death. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] concerning Ayotzinapa, and more Antigone's bones
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- oh God, Johannes, how can anyone really 'deal' with this? how could the students, Mexico, anyone? I'm sitting here in tears and we're talking analytically online and we have to, I just don't always have the resources. humans do hell to each other, this is just awful, the worst because it's breaking now. - Alan, thank you for posting ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] virtually true
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, two comments, Could you elaborate on Ethical concerns: I was very insecure dealing with the most controversial issue, best exemplified by the title of book by american psychologist James Hillman A terrible Love of War (2004) and also on So is soldier a mad subject or a patriot? And what would be the distinction between a 'mad subject' and 'patriot'? Here in the US, patriotism often connects to violence, jingoism, all sorts of racisms... Thank you so much, Alan On Fri, 7 Nov 2014, O Danylyuk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Assyrian resonance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 7 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote: (not quotable :-( Could you say something about the staging? And is there a relationship with noh? (I've always felt that tragedy, violence, underlies the surface of noh.) And finally, Raven, is this related to the NW Coast Raven? Apologies to everyone for so many questions; I woke up shuddering this morning, after reading and working through yesterday's posts. - Alan --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] speed of the list
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi - Just want to say that I think the 'speed of the list' is just right; I had someone complain that it was too slow. I see it more of a conversation or seminar, than a series of texts, although it can be that too. My own feeling is just to let things flow, as they are, as people desire to post or respond. I do worry about the odd posts that either need moderator's approval, or come through garbled, or not at all. Someone pointout out that gmail can be set for straight-forward text, but it wraps at 78 characters; still, that might eliminate some of the problems. Thanks, 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Fwd: para empyre
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Erik writes, [...] 9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a clich? ? we had already seen it. Looking at the live broadcast: ?This must be a movie; this is just like a movie? but really ? ?This is just like a movie trailer.? Genocide testimonies (of both perpetrators and victims) can quickly fall to clich? ? rote chit. It is imperative that we don?t respond to the bad art of terror or art stunted by trauma with louder, counter terroristic or re-traumatizing clich?s. This runs the risk of keeping the disaster alive, Frankenstein fashion, as a patchwork of clich?s, sanctioned by a fortified culture of the beautiful, important, death-affirming clich?. [...] We were in Miami at the time, watching CNN news, and 9/11 came on. I can say, it never seemed like a cliche, it invaded the body, ate the body from within, devoured it, devoured any other thinking that might salvage. The cliche for me is the comparison, maybe months later, yes the iconography was there, but it's always there. But at the time, it didn't feel the slightest like a move, it was raw, it ate us alive. Trauma is always already a repetition, there's no need for a reworking. I can only give my reaction, and mention as well so many people in NYC out of touch, the cells were down, at least one friend talking about suicide, hysterical. What has always bothered me about this and the USA in general is its self-victimization, its constant mourning, its mourning-monuments, its insistence on 'heroes,' and the way, for example, the public face of 9/11 survivors has so often turned towards the fury of monument constructing, towards the right-wing as well. We can never, ever, accept the damage we inflict on others, as something that might occur to ourselves; we can never move on. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Assyrian resonance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- (I sent this to nettime when I started thinking about the history of the region; I have a number of texts and books from the late Armand Schwerner, who worked with the material. I've also been interested in semitic languages and the history of the early Mid-East. Anyway nettime refused to present this, calling it 'bog-standard' and implying the whole area was like this. I beg to disagree; in any case, here might be something to consider, or it might be something that's a dead-end.) The Assyrians publicized their atrocities in reports and illustrations for propaganda purposes. In the tenth and ninth centuries BCE, official inscriptions told of cruelty to those captured. Most were killed or blinded; others were impaled on stakes around city walls as a warning. The bodies were mutilated; heads, hands, and even lower lips were cut off so that counting the dead would be easier. These horrifying illustrations, texts, and reliefs were designed to frighten the population into submission. [...] When surrounding the capital city and shouting to the people inside failed, the Assyrians' next tactic was to select one or more small cities to attack, usually ones that could be easily conquered. Then the Assyrians committed extreme acts of cruelty to show how the entire region would be treated if the inhabitants refused to surrender peacefully. Houses were looted and burned to the round, and the people were murdered, raped, mutilated, or enslaved - acts all vividly portrayed in the Assyrian stone reliefs and royal inscriptions in the palaces. The Assyrian troops regarded looting and rape of a conquered city as partial compensation. [...] The annals of Assurnasirpal II vividly described such tactics: In strife and conflict I besieged (and) conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, (and) cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms (and) hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, (and) extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living (and) one of the heads. I hung their heads on tress around the city. I burnt their adolescent boys (and) girls. I razed, destroyed, burned (and) consumed the city. This type of psychological warfare was especially convincing, and the inhabitants, overwhelmed by the fearful splendor of the god Assur, surrendered. From Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, Hendrickson, 2008 === Sargon, the ruler of Bel, the priest of Asur, the darling of Anu and Bel, the mighty king, king of hosts, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters, the beloved of the great gods and the mention of his name caused to go forth for the greatest deeds, the mighty hero girt with terror, who for the overthrow of the enemy sendeth forth is arms, the valiant warrior, forgot and trusted in his own strength. Against the kings and governors whom in Egypt had installed the father who begat me, to slay, to plunder, and to seize Egypt he marched., Against them he went in city which the father who begat me had conquered and to the border of Assyria had annexed. I summoned my supreme forces with which Asur and Istar had filled my ends the way ... he summoned his fighting men, With the might of Asur, Istar, and the great gods, my lords, who go at my side, in the battle on the broad plain I accomplished the overthrow of his forces. heard the defeat of his forces. That city I took; my troops I caused to enter and I stationed them therein. had conquered fortified cities, I captured. Their forces in numbers I slew; their spoil, their possessions, and their cattle I carried off. Their soldiers escaped and occupied a steep mountain Of a vulture within the mountain had they set their stronghold, In three days the warrior overcame the mountain he cast down the mountain, he destroyed their nest, their host He shattered, Two hundred of their fighting men I slew with the sword; their heavy booty like a flock of sheep I carried off; with their blood I dyed the mountain like crimson wool their cities I overthrew, I destroyed I burned with fire. they came to make war against me. I fought them and defeated them. Their warriors I overthrew with the sword, like Ramman I rained a deluge upon them, into trenches I heaped them, with the corpses of their mighty men I filled the broad plain, with the blood I dyed the mountain like scarlet wool. The team of his yoke I took from him, a pile of heads over against his city I set, his cities I overthrew, I destroyed, I burnt with fire. mile and female musicians, the whole of his craftsmen, as many as there were, and the officers of the palace I brought out and as spoil I reckoned. I besieged, I captured, I carried off their spoil. The walls of that temple had fallen in ruins. I was anxious, I
Re: [-empyre-] Assyrian resonance
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- It's disturbing that the same patterns repeat over and over again, that they're successful, that the violence is a useless violence, that everything is so unbearably fragile. We just had elections here, and I sense the violence there as well: Boehner says Obama playing with matches if he acts on immigration without ... and so forth, not to mention guns and the NRA. Erik, you say performance, on the other hand, strives to humanize the individual - but I doubt this; I don't think that performance strives, people strive, and they can strive, perform, in any number of ways. If one believes in the religious ideology of ISIS, then, I assume, the beheadings feel necessary and proper, that they send the proper message, that they are enactments designed to create certain emotions in their audience - in short, that they are a theater of the real, degree zero. - - Alan On Thu, 6 Nov 2014, Ana Vald?s wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I translated from Swedish to Spanish the testimony of a young indigenous peasant from Guatemala, she walked from her village to the nearby village to borrow some corn. The villages were in the Cuchumatanes mountains, the border between Mexico and Guatemala, old Mayan lands. She spoke Chuj, a language spoken by 4 ppl. She was going home from the village she visited and she saw some choppers landing at the main square. She hided from sight inside a pyramide in the square and from the eyes of pyramide, which was modelled as a face, she saw the soldiers gather all the people at the village, roughly 300 persons, and starting to kill them. The women were first raped and beaten, their small toddlers were killed and beheaded with machetes, the elderly and the women and the kids were put in a big barn and the soldiers lighted the barn with all the people inside. They were burned alive. The men were killed with machetes and guns. The killing took the whole day. The girl waited until it was dark and the soldiers were drunk and feasting, she ran to her village and warned them the soldiers were going for them. In her village, Chalambochoj, lived three or fourhundred people. All of them fled during the night, carrying the little they could bring, the kids, some blankets, some corn, some animals. At down they crossed the border and sought refuge in Mexico, almost one million indigenous from Guatemala lived several years in Mexico waiting for the peace agreements between the amy and the gerilla. The army tactic was called the fish and the water tactic. To hinder the indigenous to give food or shelter to the gerilla they used the tactic to kill all the indigenous they found and to destroy the villages. The fish, the gerilla, could not survive without water, the indigenous acted as the water to the fish, from it the gerilla took their nutrients. It was called the massacre It happened in the nineties, far more recently than in Sargon's time. Ana On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 8:04 PM, Erik Ehn shadowtac...@sbcglobal.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- museveni is known for exerting crowd control by just killing one or two people as a ugandan friend pointed out to me. wade into a crowd, kill a couple of folks, and everybody quiets down or disperses. this doesn't always work, but seems to have worked for him in a number of cases... spectacular, specific disasters, broadly instrumental. genocide works to alter the world's relationship to history - stops history for an anti-dramatic period of rest (or a period of concentrating wealth, disguised as rest, as peace, as utopia). so the scale is larger but the principle is similar - kill a minority, spectacularly, and the will-to-change disperses or submits. performance, on the other hand, strives to humanize the individual, meaning - moves out from the individual to the plural public - plural to the point where the constitution of audience (witnesses, listeners) is a dramatic act itself, meaning - that audience/artists are co-creators of a collective noun - moving from person to persons, a human to human(e). walk out into a crowd and cause a couple of people to listen to each other, and you are reversing the polarity of genocide. only a polarity - a magnetic trace... but the only real (sustainable) antidote to genocide that i have ever been able to imagine involves the stillness of listening/self-absenting, versus the stillness of what strejilevich calls the single, numberless death. On Thursday, November 6, 2014 3:52 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- (I sent this to nettime when I started thinking about the history of the region; I have a number of texts and books from the late Armand Schwerner, who worked with the material. I've also been interested in semitic languages and the history of the early Mid-East. Anyway
Re: [-empyre-] either the victim or the killer but never the image
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, a few things. First, on the surface, 'biopower' to me is an odd term, connected with 'biofuel' and so forth - it skitters and deflects. Perhaps I am wrong. The images you speak of slide from the indexical to the ikonic, or both entangled; in other words, the truth is in the abject. What I miss in some of the discussion is the utter violence done to and within the specatator; I can only speak for myself, but the images act upon me, invade me as the 9/11 coverage did, construct the repetition and tunnel-vision of trauma: these are real effects that aren't wiped away by analysis. Amery comments constantly on the effect of the concentration camp and its thugs upon his intellect, his analytical prowess, which meant nothing at all, and how much dissolved with the first blow. This is where, again, anguish comes into play - anguish which is a knot, which is always already ikonic itself, which produces and inhabits itself, in a manner similar to severe depression, which loves itself and its comfort, which remains and gnaws at the self. You ask, What would it mean to take responsibility for images such that it would not be demanded of you or I that we front for them, giving and laying down our bodies to be signs of their truth, in the properly religious ritual? - and I wonder, who remains to take such responsibil- ity, and, after trauma, anxiety, who is the you or I, much less the we? There is where Kristeva comes in - such dissolution, falling apart, within and among the abject, that self and other are uncomfortably bound, felt as such, repulsive. And I keep thinking of PTSD among so many in the military - but also so many walking the streets here in the US, where Fergusons and schools are war zones, when the violence if language is just a short step away from the blow to the face. - Alan On Fri, 7 Nov 2014, simon wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sw.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- There are times this 'slow terror' speeds up, times it slows down; it seems to me it might be problematic to inflate it with ISIS and the like; there are two - and more - destructive orders of the world and worlding. I began reading Assyrian texts again (in translation/transliteration/etc.) and it's uncanny how the same techniques pop up again and again, all the way back roughly four-thousand years. Violence is everywhere; think of the heads used in the Mayan ball-games, the Shang Burials, Ferguson. How do we psychologically survive this (in some ways we don't re: Amery - I have to thank Pier Marton for recommending him), how can we refuse the catatonia of anguish? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] first intervention from my part
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Pia Holenstein wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- */again text unquotable, apologies/* Perhaps there is only the wall of death, up against the border of Lyotard's differend? To return is to be ignorant of annihilation? Anguish then seethes at the wall? Decades ago, many decades ago, I was in Israel and we were shot at; I felt nothing. The bullets were exhausted, dropped before they reached us. I can only claim the status of a witness, of what? An image, nothing of the body, nothing of interiority. Perhaps everyone who is alive, arrives late at the scene? Then perhaps there is no scene at all, scorched earth dissolving every vestige of anything but dust. Did you dream of these things? I have nightmares (for no reason at all). Thank you, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn (from Erik Ehn))
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- [picking up from yesterday... Forcing a chaos to force a telos-precipitate -] This power survives as long as light remains in anticipation, and the public is controlled by anticipation. This is advertising as an end in itself ? all trailers, no movie. * Terror can be an outcome of spiritual experience? mad to have the experience again, betrayed by the personal and the practical. Building the dark. Stitching death. Making a Frankenstein society not for the sake of the society, but for the sake of the wonderful mistake of it ? the disaster we will pursue by means of our technologies, blessed (in our minds) by prior experiences of grace. Building the dark, building in the dark, engaging in the economies of frustration ? these our tides. Crusting our eyes shut with cravings, and suffocating us with an induced fear of breathing. * But grace is not experience, finally. To know, we are known. We happen in the world as an electricity through its systems: the brains of trees, the insulin of temperature. And the world happens through us as electricity in our bodies; building patterns in us that habituate us to readiness. ?Habits of readiness? is grammar; we have grammar first, and then find language to fit it out with; experience finds synthesis in words. In reciprocity: we throw our words out to the source of words (this is a way of defining ?praise?); our language when perfect goes away- first to pure experience and then to pure readiness. Similarly the world speaks persons in the grammar of societies, not for the sake of persons or societies, but so that the world may break apart to praise. In alternative to this scary prospect (where fear = a sense of punctured control without repair) we stop at our words; we don?t move them, we tether them, hold our creations close, our temporary mnemonics, our shorthand (all language is shorthand); adore our words, and make them portable in the form of slogans. Porting slogans becomes our mission ? the definition of our citizenship; our hands are always occupied with them, we have no other function than to carry advertising. In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our writing. Our ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if we felt like it, but we don?t feel like it, because something hates me or has left me and my fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological need to defend against feeling. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Yes, I think, it can be lost, erased, this is the heart of anguish - BAGHDAD: Islamic State militants have executed 85 more members of the AlbuNimr tribe in Iraq in a mass killing campaign launched last week in retaliation for resistance to the group's territorial advances, a tribal leader and security official said on Saturday. Sheikh Naeem al-Ga'oud, one of the tribe's leaders, told Reuters that Islamic State killed 50 displaced members of Albu Nimr on Friday. In a separate incident, a security official said 35 bodies were found in a mass grave. Nearly a thousand years old the first of its kind in Iraq, according to Archnet, and one of the last six standing, according to Iraq Heritage the distinctive muqarnas-domed mausoleum is now a statistic. The tomb of Shia Uqaylid amir Sharaf ad-Dawla Muslim is one of a number of sites that have been destroyed recently. Preceded by the Shrine of Arbaeen Wali (for 40 martyrs in the Islamic conquest of Tikrit) and the Syrian Orthodox Green Church of Mar Ahudama in late September, followed by the Yezidi Shrine of Mem Rean (Meme Reshan) in late October, the Mausoleum of Imam al-Daur was destroyed by the Islamic State on October 23. And then what is there? anthropologists? archeologists? dust? - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'd like to introduce Erik Ehn, whose plays are often concerned with issues of genocide and torture (he travels regularly to Rwanda and other troubled locations), and is head of theater at Brown University. I've asked him and the other guests to post a short bio and then anything in relation to the topic. Thank you greatly, and thanks Erik for agreeing to participate. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Erik Ehn
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Erik Ehn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- (for some reason, I can't quote directly here) The technocrats of light, I keep thinking of scorched, of scorching, of the annihilation of language, body, history, past reduced to a telling and invention by others. The past was never the present, never translates; what I remember for example of the Vietnam era is just that - quotations. All the way back, Sartre in Imagination described the image as imaginary in both senses, that it's a presence/construct. But that requires someone to do the constructing. I think of Barrett's post as well - if there are images that literally block or destroy by their vehemence - or better yet, experiences that produce post traumatic stress syndrome where, among other things, the mind keeps tunneling inescapably around the same moments of anguish - what then? (What if contemplation is impossible?) - Alana ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
[-empyre-] Introductory post (Alan Sondheim)
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- (The beginning guests will be announced shortly) The topic for this month: ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Our initial 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. The format this month will be slightly different; participants will be announced on an organic basis, and we hope that many of the subscribers will chime in. We are all facing the anguish of political situations that seem out of control. We are interested in topics such as, How does one deal with anguish personally? How can anguish be expressed culturally? Can such expressions make a difference at all? We have all read political analyses of the causes of this descent; here, we're interested in the cultural and personal responses to it. ISIS, Absolute Terror, Performance Lyric poetry begins, not end, with Auschwitz; the very violence and terror produced by slaughter places the statement under erasure. But lyric, poetics, poesis, are among other things subversions of language, the recognition of a linguistic weight that bypasses the syntactic, caresses the abject. So that one might drive poetics through the force of terrified flesh, one might find language springing there, just as unutterable pain may be surrounded by the cacophony of elegy and mourning. Lyric poetry begins with nothing; poetics scrapes away at lateral fluency, undercuts the corporate, only to die in the advertising slogan. But Auschwitz is a borderland of time, where end and annihilation are imminent, imminant, and I keep think of this in relation to absolute terror, wailing postulations against the wall that also disappear. Absolute terror, the performative of beheadings, genocides, and crucifixions, signs the performative of the end-time itself. It is not a question of the inerrancy of the text leading the torturers on; it's the errancy of any text in the face of decapitation; every world is ultimately unutterable. It's the unutterability of the world that founds anguish, that tears momentarily at the soul and body under erasure. It this which I've been wrestling with for years, only momentarily handed off to ISIS and this and other geopolitics. How does one live within the knowledge of annihilation? How does one produce within such, in response to such? What is the conceivable meaning of such production? Is meaning itself obliterated to such an extent that even suicide becomes a useless act? [/] We have guests for this round, several each week for four weeks. But we need your input, as many people as possible. I'm on a number of email lists concerned with cultural workers, cultural production, cultural politics, geo-politics; ISIS and terror rarely come up for discussion or as a subject for production, and when they do, things often tend towards the usual leftist analysis (for which there is also BBC and Al Jazeera, which I recommend). But here, we want less political analysis or politics for that matter, and more, a form of personal/cultural testimony that is rarely written. What of anguish? What of inconceivable torture? What of a planet tending wildly towards overpopulation, extinctions, local wars, starvations, all producing despair, breakdown, anomie? In other words - how does one sleep at night? So in a sense, this is about the dark night of the soul without god, without recourse. And the very absence of discussion in general, about the interiority of absolute violence, opens the subject up here, on Empyre (given the subject, an ironic title!) - please contribute! Thanks to Renate and everyone - - Alan Sondheim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment / whose our systems
--empyre- soft-skinned space--that's not what quantum mechanics says. On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 6:31 PM, John Hopkins jhopk...@neoscenes.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- What is the scope or meaning of 'interaction' when Quantum suggests that any 'change' anywhere affects all 'things' everywhere simultaneously? jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- *=* *directory http://www.alansondheim.org http://www.alansondheim.org tel 347-383-8552* *music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ * *email sondheim ut panix.com http://panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com http://gmail.com=* ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] whose our systems body weather
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- You might be interested in Merlin Donald who argues much the same thing; even here, however, I'd ask where is the Borg? In ISIS/ISIL? In the US prison system? Right away class enters - violently - into all of this, and class media, etc. As far as memories go, what do we do with abject horror, mediated or not? - Alan On Sun, 6 Jul 2014, Simon Biggs wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- == 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/sp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Subject: Re: whose our systems body weather
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Johannes, You say, I tend not to believe we are always already virtual (as Alan Sondheim suggests), -- but one problem I have with the discussion is that it doesn't include a critique of the corporate. Take the distinction (which I've also written about) between digital and analog - on a 'deep level' these merge or are problematized, in spite of things like the collapse of the wave function. But on the level of the _body,_ embodiment, the digital is entangled with digital technology - i.e. protocol suites, software, etc.; a gif is not a jpg is not a png - and a bvh is not an stl is not a mesh is not an Oculus is not a glass etc. - each of these have their own protocls, standards, tolerances, media ecologies, etc. etc. So on THAT level, the virtual becomes entangled with embodiment yes but also with the corporate/control etc. What I'm saying is that not ENOUGH attention is given, say, to the ontology of dreams, hypnagogic visions, the pervasive imaginary, etc. etc. - which is deeply inhering within embodiment, entangled with it. And for me THAT is what's interesting, not technological articulations and mappings etc. - 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/sp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] whose our systems window weather [gluggaveðri]
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, I'm writing in answer to Johannes' invitation, and will be somewhat short here. I've dealt with issues of sexuality, pain, death, and mourning in the virtual, and in the virtual in relation to the real. The points I'd make are as follows - That we are always already virtual, that the symbolic and the super- structure of the symbolic (it's uncanny appearance of closure), brings us elsewhere in our embodiment; That abject pain and abjection as well (in Kristeva's sense) break through the symbolic, literally muddying the waters of the real; That messiness is on the edge of virtual worlds and their (computational, virtual, formal) gamespace - and it's this edge which opens up the possibility of thinking through embodiment. On a practical level, avatars can be anything in a sense; some performers use them as functions, so that embodiment occurs as abstracted extensions or structured articulations; some performers see them as extensions of themselves; in some cases, the extensions, as in Polyani's tacit knowledge, are inhering and smoothly incorporated within the body; and so forth. My own avatars are often so highly extended and abstracted, that they mediate between the body and the function; they serve as broken embodiments that veer, for the performer, between exchange value and usage (in Polyani's sense) value - between structure (objects and arrows) and kernel (internal circulations) for example. Sexuality breaks through in so many ways - arousal brings the body around into resonance with itself, through any of the styles of embodiment and so what triggers what, and where, and how, and with what symbolic manifestations, becomes problematized and smeared across categories. I think this breaking through is also true of mourning and representations of death in the virtual, which cease to remain representations; in the virtual, death is embodied, repeatedly enacted and re-enacted. When I crash out of the MacGrid I receive a message You have just committed suicide - and to whom is this address; the statement itself is a form of differend in the real, incapable of being received. It's the smearing that fascinates, and what happens in social media for example with bullying - where statements within the virtual, naming or not naming names, react upon the body of the bullied? Or another exanple - how does (for example) credit card hacking itself play with embodiment, if at all? Or ISIS using Twitter, apparently hijacking World Cup tags? I tend towards the messiness of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, thinking in terms, not of separations and analysis (which also tend towards genre and canon), but of flows, spews, abjections, tolerances, potential wells and tunnelling, and so forth. In other words, perhaps, on the far side of the academic, where people live and die. Thanks, hope this makes some sense; unlike my avatar in Second Life, Alan Dojoji, my sleeplessness last night (I have acute insomnia), has most likely led to a certain blurriness of reason - yours, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] wearable technology
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Just want to mention, in passing (wrote Johannes about this), but I don't think there's a digital look at all, any more than an analog look or flesh look - whatever. The days of either sheen/metallic/glass surfaces on one hand, and robotics/attachments/prosthetics standing out - as a look, these are long gone. Even among avatars for example - although there's a stereotyped digital avatar style (complete with facets instead of curves), there are so many people working with other ways of being! Think of digital look as clothing look, and the genre begins to disappear. On another stereotyped level, I tend to think of hipsters carrying wired or Air around has having that digital look - which implies money, corporate bias simultaneously denied, and laissez faire at the service of capital. But that's that Park Slope look possibly - which brings up the point of fashion and its micro-ecologies; what passes for a look on one block may be something entirely different on another. - Alan On Fri, 31 Jan 2014, Bienia Rafael (LK) wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear all, there are at least two aspects of wearable technology that might raise interesting questions. The first is about the aesthetics of what was described here as a digital look. The second is about the practices, what users actually do and maybe more important what they do not do. To the first I shortly ask how long the uniform of digital devices will hold when the development of smaller and more integrated devices continues. Think about the line smartphone, smartwatch, smartglass. Maybe another question is how people integrate these devices into the construction of the self with clothing. To the second, well, this is particularly interesting to me as I study role play practices with augmented reality devices. How do people actually use these devices in everyday life or for recreational purposes? When, where and what are they doing what they do? Is anyone here who also works with actor-network theory in this area? Best wishes, Rafael Bienia PhD candidate Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Department of Literature and Art Maastricht University Phone: +31-(0)43-3883452 Email: rafael.bie...@maastrichtuniversity.nl Staff page: http://www.fdcw.unimaas.nl/staff/bienia Game Studies resources: http://www.rafael-bienia.de Postal address: PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands Visiting Address: Room: 0.006, Grote Gracht 86, 6211 SZ Maastricht From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Sent: 31 January 2014 02:00 To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: empyre Digest, Vol 110, Issue 21 Send empyre mailing list submissions to empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au You can reach the person managing the list at empyre-ow...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of empyre digest... --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Today's Topics: 1. Re: wearable technology (Johannes Birringer) 2. Begiining to part. (Patrick Lichty) -- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 20:01:04 + From: Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] wearable technology Message-ID: 899F3B65F6A5C8419026D0262D3CECB8051DE0@v-ex10mb2.academic.windsor Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 dear all [Susan Ryan schreibt] But wearable devices have a stake in treating us all the same and thus all having the same, sleek digital look. hmm, surely I would have thought the opposite, no matter what stake wearable devices might have and I don't think they do have one. In my experience, and there are separate areas then of discussion, namely the everyday or such sectors such as the medical, or the firefighters or the police or border guards, and then fashion (and sports) and then, say, the performing arts, where for example Mich?le Danjoux, our designer in the DAP-Lab creates designs costumes with integrated technologies for the performers and they are all different; and thus perhaps one needs to look carefully at what is worn and how, and what can be worn that is technologically interactive or proactive, needed or useless, adorning or playful and degraded, as Hito Steyerl might say when she so wonderfully writes about the need for low resolution against the commodity fetishisms implied by
Re: [-empyre-] setting fire to avatars, collapsing realities
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- One thing I'm missing in the discussion, which relates to Johannes' comment about dancers w/ mirror - the as if for me relates on one hand to Vaihingers, and on the other, to what one might call a phenomenology of the interior - I'm thinking for example of Alphonso Lingis. I personally want to get away from the apparatus into/within the body/consciousness itself - not tracking the social, but tracking perhaps (at the outer limits) mindful response; Drew Leder's The Absent Body is also good in this regard. And somewhere I'm within Scarry's writings as well. Documenting interactive art is documenting the apparatus, of course and tracking the social goes all the way through head-mounted cameras, etc. (think of skeleton or luge) - but this is different than immersion, this is definition. There's always limited projection; with the pieces illustrated here, I can imagine myself in the position of the dancer etc. but I know from my own work w/ dance/music, that the complexity of immersion doesn't lend itself to analytics, no matter how fine the raster. I'm not arguing for a romanticized body here, but just the recognition that the 'bruteness' of the body is surplus, mind-felt - even symptoms which are almost never mentioned - health or sickness of the viewer or participant, things like aches, tinnitus (which I have and which is screaming now), muscle pains, headaches, injuries, etc. Do we produce, then, for an idealized healthy body or perhaps (if we're working with specialized audiences) for bodies defined by defined unhealth? For me these aren't idle questions, given the pain so many go through just to find a bite to eat for example - - Alan On Fri, 17 Jan 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Alan for commenting on the immersive and definable hierarchies in regard to screen/virtuality - do you believe that feeling as if one were there is something that can be analyzed in terms of Katja's reception/applied aesthetics, based on receiver-participant evidence (interviews, reports, recordings, documentation, etc)? how is interactive art documented by the way? how do we track the social? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] interactivity and flow
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi - I feel my week or so is up, of course, but I do want to give one example of an early interactive work of mine; I was trying to think back to early virtual space investigations. In 1970-71, I created a piece, 4320, using a computer program written by Charles Strauss at Brown University, and run on a vector graphics console with keyboard and joystick controls. The program presented a four-dimensional hypercube on a screen, and the hypercube (or technically it's two-dimensional projection) could be manipulated by the joystick. I was this as a virtual space, an else-where space, but one that a human operator could 'drive' in. I asked a number of students to sit at the console, as if they were driving in 4d (spatial coordinates), and to complete the task of turning the 4d shape into a 3d shape (by making it orthogonal to the projected 3d space); to then turn the 3d shape (a cube) orthogonally to the screen, creating a square, and finally, to reduce the square to a dot - hence the title 4320 as the dimensions were reduced. The participants interacted with the hypercube and felt indeed that they were driving in 4d, that they were inhabiting it in a way. I wrote about this and other work and human experience in general in terms of what I called immersive and definable hierarchies; the idea of the former is what is called flow now; and the latter, the mechanics behind the habitus of the flow - the programming, visualization protocols and display, etc. etc. I worked off Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, and other phenomenologists, as well as Piaget's mathematico-logic work, and some ideas from the structuralists and post-structuralists. I found the same issues then, that we're discussing now. There's a brief description of the project at http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/27/1971-alan-sondheims-4320/ I feel most of the research since then, that might be useful, is found in second-order cybernetics materials and cog psy. For me, the odd thing about 4320 is that the screen/virtuality setup is identical with the ones in use today in SL and other virtual worlds / mixed realities. You couldn't place your physical self/representation in the vector graphics display, but you did feel you were 'there.' ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Some Thoughts on Interactivity and Art From Bibbe
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi - could you explain It's been proposed that everything existing has a dichotomy as evidence of its reality. That material reality is a product of the frisson resonating between this duality. Interactivity might thus be woven into the very fabric of all creation. -- I'm not sure what this means? Interactivity occurs everywhere as far as I know; the world is entangled, but I'm not sure that's what you mean; this week it seems to be being used in a more restrictive context. Thanks, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] setting fire to avatars, collapsing realities
(which I mentioned before), land rights, and so forth; every patch of earth is fecund with ecological significance. So I didn't mean that; which is why I say below: The ground is the ground, ground up, as featureless as death and in the sense of materiality, the body is already dead, and in the sense of transformation, always alive. - in other words, the dichotomy disappears. The body is dead qua body; otherwise there would be no coroners; on the other hand, as transformation it is always alive, but presumably not consciously so, may spirit strike me dead. - Alan, and thank you for the dialog, and I do hope others will participate in this one, although I think another is close to beginning - regards, Johannes Birringer [Alan Sondheim schreibt] Should this go first to the body-Johannes-Birringer and then to the listserv (if such be the software), a form of indirect addressing? Is the body of Johannes Birringer receiving these words smoothly? I ask only because the element of the body as weight or pull has entered the dialog, only _as_ since the words here are weightless, although their carriers and data-bases are not. I keep going back to Clement Rosset, who I read only in part years ago to the effect that the real is 'idiotic,' which I quote far too often, but which means for me that it is just there, as mute haecceity perhaps at best. The ground is the ground, ground up, as featureless as death and in the sense of materiality, the body is already dead, and in the sense of transformation, always alive. The states grind into each other; bump and grind have no other meaning than sweat and something felt; what goes bump in the night speaks nothing, and its sound is muted. So all dancers fall, fail, at the end, and their memorized movement is or is not captured from particular viewpoints, but not from the interior, what feels within and looks without. These can be dialed-in, in virtual worlds, objects turned physical, but they carry no weight. I've worked with such, watch them reach the edge of the game-space as the tumble across the sim, then disappear. Sometimes they're returned to inventory, sometimes not. This is playing out the game with its rules, the kind of virtuality everyone talks about today, talks about of course until they're dead. I'd say the ground isn't virtual because it doesn't speak; in this forum months ago I wrote about the unspeakability of untoward and numbing pain, often close to the curtain of death. The body sinks, and what then? Nothing, old tech software, and the interior/internal, spoken and thought world sinks as well as the body dies. The virtual, we might say, is among and for the living; the body, dead, is out of the gamespace entirely. On the other hand, what we're not talking about, virtual particles and multiverses, holographic universes and black hole interiors, who knows? One can only hope to live on, in a perhaps drastically-altered cosmos, and perhaps we already are. I would have liked to have heard the Finnish tunes - ... ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- = directory http://www.alansondheim.org tel 347-383-8552 music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ email sondheim ut panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] setting fire to avatars, collapsing realities
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Fri, 10 Jan 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear all In the beginning of this month's debate, Patrick Lichty proposed for the first week that we look at Interaction, Performance and Introductions to Bodies and Space, and in his own opening statement he spoke of caricatures of remediation (re: Abramovic) of body art in virtual worlds, when bodies are removed and then went on to ask about affect and empathy generated in such virtual worlds. Amongst references to his own work, he mentioned While I think what the cognitive chain of affect-sense-feel is much better served by Nathaniel Stern, I would like to approach the subject from the opposite side of the coin. and asked about evidence for real affective interaction in virtual spaces.. Thinking about this, think of this as a parenthesis, I've always felt that duplication or remediation of physical activity in virtual worlds can be deflecting or worse; the power of Abramovic of course and with Ulay was in their flesh; what happens in remediation is that a plane of inscription is created which is untethered, which is specatcle, as she was in her activity in NYC recently. Reneactment I find a bit frightening in the face of current slaughter/ extinction and I wonder if someone might re-enact those rare earth mines in SL? Alan Sondheim sent a series of fascinating missives and at one point argued that setting fire to an avatar is setting fire to nothing, and I was wondering whether this could be discussed further, as I assumed he was talking about the consequences of burning an avatar or of an auto-da-f? - namely that there are none. But to contradict myself, there are to the extent that pain is numb, inert, and that things (think arousal) may be conjured up; the consequences per se may be nothing, but the effect/affect on audience is something else. And for my own referencing here, I'd bring in Bharata's Natyasastra, which postulates a complex dramatological system of codes with which actors might portray pain or death for example, the audience comprehending and feeling, through the system of codes, what is portrayed - certainly similar chains of inscription and hermeneutics occur in SL. When I expressed my skepticism about the virtual, over the past week, or argued that interactivity in the performance arts turned out to some of us as a limiting concept (and not an institutiuonalized discourse or practice) and an aesthetically encumbered technical instrumentation, I was also implicitly trying to question what folks mean when they speak of embodiment. What kind of embodiment? and kind of real affective interaction? I'd ask you in return, what does it mean to speak of embodiment at all, for example, in relation to the problems raised in Scarry's writing on pain? Perhaps examples could be usesful, and since Patrick mentioned Nathaniel Stern's work, I tried to have a look, not at his new book (Interactive Art Embodiment), which I don't have available, but at some of his complementary open writing or networked book 'in production where he speaks, in one chapter, about some of his interactive installations and provdes some clips on the functioning of enter:hektor, the odys seres, elicit, and stuttering - all works seemingly connecting audience action (gestural) with language or words that flash up on the screen. http://stern.networkedbook.org/body-language/ Watching the audience groping for words, or, as we had mentioned this week, grappling with shadows, I could not help remembering a number of similar works in dance and installation art which solicit this kind of actor/audience groping (in a mimetic or mirror mode, not now thinking yet of kinetic empathy and anything neurophysiological). I wonder what others here think watching the interface, and the accompanying statement on the networked textsite that thisbody of work can, perhaps, be described as an exploration of the interstitial itself ? revisiting between technology and text the dangerous spaces of enfleshment, incipience, and process I looked for the danger but didn't see it, but then I thought of another example that did affect me in many ways, too long to go into here, but I had been following William Kentridge's work for a while, and his The Refusal of Time I believe is currently on view in New York in a 'roughed up' space at the MET. http://whiteelephantonwheels.blogspot.com/2013/12/william-kentridge-refusal-of-time.html I also found the sound (Philip Miller) and thus could listen at the words and sound of the installation, http://www.philipmiller.info/audio/the-refusal-of-time/ - jwplayer having read somewhere in an art review that (Alan Sondheim might appreciate this) that the audience in this installation by the South African artist might not only be riveted by an extraordinary inventiveness (of the visual animations and the machines
Re: [-empyre-] setting fire to avatars, collapsing realities
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Mon, 6 Jan 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- happy new year to you all. Alan posted an interesting series of opening comments, and if it were possible and if we had time to look at details in the posting, I would ask you, Alan, whether you are sure that the virtual is always real (the rest is undifferentiated/differentiated substance) - and how am I to understand this, if the rest is what you say it is? I guess I tend to go for the differentiated substance. I've just been listening to lower sideband short-wave communication which requries a great deal of tuning to bring the signal in properly. The signal is most likely analog; the radio I use is digital. Inside the radio, if I'm not mistaken, virtaul intermediate frequencies are generated and eliminated; a lot of signal processing occurs. The virtual is just as much in radioi transmissions, in Dufrenne's world of the novel, in the doubled and tripled representations of speech, in the phenomenology of the gesture, as it is in the obvious creation of buildings and shapes in so-called virtual worlds. My world in Providence, aka New Providence aka Providence Plantations aka zip code 02903 is equally virtual, equally differentiated by imaginary boundary lines, just as SL is for example. There are also whole levels of differentiated permissions; for example I am in an historic building which MUST have white shades facing outwards on the windows. There are contracts and contracts that can be broken. The autonomic nervous system etc. works with the imaginary of the body, body image, in ways somewhat paralleling the manipulation and feedback from avatars in SL. I'm trying to summarize without being boring or carrying on too much, and the transmission, the tracerouted protocols are currently misbehaving as I type this. I thought years ago of the analog as a form of substance, and characterized by the notion of fissure - a fissure being defined as separating the same from the same, as opposed to but entangled with the digital notion of x and not-x in-relation-to-x, so that the union of x and not-x was not the universal set but the universal set-in-relation-to-x; the opposite held for the intersection and the null set. Of course in real life all of this is entangled, and x and not-x are entangled with a division resulting in x and x, for example, dividing air or water so that on both side there's just that, neither more or less. And this fissuring is analogic, sloppy, semi-differentiated, while the digital tended towards definition, potential wells with high walls, corporate and other protocols and so forth. Obviously there are holes in all of this; the point is that the digital has a bit of defining going on, as well as separation according to natural and/or corporate kinds, beneath as well as leaking out from the sign of capital - which is operating now, making typing, inner-speech, thinking through text almost impossible as what I'm writing now is compromised by delay, lag, misrecognition, and now complete invisibility of these words, as the machine in them (wires, routers, servers, satellites) breaks down to a greater and greater extent. It seems that there is no clarity in virtual worlds, to my mind, and certainly I think that the dancer you mentioned who might work/dance to/with a projection is not in the projected space. An image, data, or avatars and animated objects might be in that other space that does not affect the dancer (well, here we would have to start examining the affect that Patrick posited, and also the new media discourses on so-called interactivity which Patrick mentioned (Manovich, and others) which may or may not be as institutionalized as you assume, surely not in the performance and music communities. Manovich does not mention performance or live art as far as I can remember, and Kwastek I have not read (her only performance examples seem to be Blast Theory?). Interactivity is not very relevant these days for dance; at the recent Motionbank workshop in Frankfurt (Forsythe Company) it was not part of the conversation or the choreographic processes even though plenty of digital data were captured and archived to help understand better some of the physical choreographic principles and vectors of movement (this tends to relate to dance that is motion-oriented rather than narrative-gestural, conceptual or hypertheatrical). Well in our case it does affect the dancer, and frankly although we're not doing this now, I pay little attention to what or what not is in fashion these days as you put it - in fact dance itself is not in fashion, Linden Labs is not in fashion, OpenSim is not in fashion, none of this is. Re: What is in the projected space - _nothing_ is in the projected space or rather the epistemology is a bit smeared, as it might be
Re: [-empyre-] The Self and Post-Reality
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- - Hi Kevin, I wanted to quote you, but in the linux terminal I'm using, your text disappears! I'll do my best. Apologies for my terminal condition... Kevin writes: Alan, your response gives us much to consider, and I agree that ?the clarity of virtual worlds? as described by some is ?disturbing.? Some of what you write reminds me of artist Randall Packer?s notion of a third-space, post-reality. While I appreciate works that create/demonstrate this collapse between the real and the virtual, I also think that this is an opportunity to go beyond that model of ?unmasking,? a model that embraces making?invention?that escapes ?protocols, scripts?, etc. -- I'm not advocating a post-reality or any other temporality, however; I'm saying these conditions have always already existed. It's not a collapse, it's not something that _occurs_ that way; it's continuous. So that 'going beyond,' or 'unmasking' - all these verbs - for me, this has already existed; technology may foreground it, but it's always been there. Alluding to the work of Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and Greg Ulmer, part of the problem with many discussions on the ?self? is that this concept might be outdated, outmoded, in the digital. We forget that the ?self? is itself an invented concept?one that has become pinned down and mythologized from print cultures. As we continue our digital turn, artists, programmers, designers, philosophers, etc. need carve a new path towards not a new definition of the self but a new concept altogether. -- But I'm not discussing selves or self, I say In relation to Stelarc, I wonder if he does not _have_ a body, and even the particulation of the body - does not this reflect something beyond or behind us? And what selves are there, and are there shelves, not selves? - in other words, shifting the discourse from self to shelves, avatar shells in other words, choice - this has nothing to do with a new definition of the self but everything to do with inventory in virtual worlds as well as the smeared phenomenology of that inventory. -- Btw, it wasn't a spelling error but deliberate trope. Could you say something more about OOO in relation to all of this? I haven't read it (other than in relation to programming) - Thanks greatly, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Alan Sondheim, opening comments
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you Patrick, for inviting me, and for your opening remarks. I want to talk a bit about my experiences in virtual world performance, which emphasize several things - that the virtual is always with us, and predates/presages the currency of digital virtuality today; that performance work in virtual worlds is fully entangled with the real; that the virtual is always real, and the real is always virtual (the rest is undifferentiated/differentiated substance) - and that, as Heinz von Foerster would have it decades ago, the determinative of culture and organism might be formal negation, a turning-away. All my performance work is interactive, online often with Sandy Baldwin, and with audience as well, both within and without the gamespace. I'm fascinated with the ability to create physical collapse - very often near the end of a performance I'll destroy the sly-platform, and all of us, including audience, will fall a kilometer or so, to the ground. Language entangles all of this activity - to the extent of occluding the screen at times, so what is going on can only be inferred. I find the apparent clarity of virtual worlds disturbing; everything of course is defined by protocols, scripts, and the digital in general, so that everything exists as if it were in a clean and proper room, to borrow from Kristeva. My avatars and environments attempt to contradict this as much as possible, smearing boundary and object, so that what's present relates more to Lynn Margulis' superorganism, than to a body composed of articulations, parts, and well-defined flows. The world as I see it is a melange of affect and effect, analog and digital. There are so many ways everything entangles: through the use of dancers simultaneously presenting in front of the screen and within the virtual world; through performances described and embedded in real-world behaviors or mixed realities; through the use of multiple live video projections in relation to the virtual worlds; through the presence of horrific or distorted images in virtual worlds that clearly originate in real-world scenes, bodies, deaths; and so forth. I'm involved in the MacGrid project, a very large array of sims based on the OpenSim architecture, originating among Canadian artists and scientists (I gave the keynote speech at a conference/workshop on the project at McMaster University in Hamilton last year). There is a lot of work being done there with neurophysiologists and others on the use of such virtual worlds for biological research; as this plays out, we will increasingly find such worlds as central to our making sense of the world around us in general. Advantages of virtual worlds (by which I mean digital worlds): people can meet from all over the world, interact live in a virtual space, and interact with any performance or presentation going on; the worlds permit manipulation of physics and avatar appearance in almost unlimited ways, which gives us the ability to experience other possilities of being; the software is relatively portable and intimate; the possibility of communality therefore exists on many different levels. I should note that virtuality now ranges from AR thru Kinect and wearables and it's becoming clearer that our language, our symbolic habitus, itself is both virtual and malleable; that virtuality may well escape the analog/ digital distinction as it develops an increasingly neurophysiological basis and implementation; that culture and virtuality are and always have been, deeply entangled; that culture is trans-species and occurs all the way down; and that the world is far more entangled in general than we might ever have imagined under the dual signs of modernism/postmodernism. In relation to Stelarc, I wonder if he does not _have_ a body, and even the particulation of the body - does not this reflect something beyond or behind us? And what selves are there, and are there shelves, not selves? Thank you greatly, Alan === Here is a slightly updated bio - Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; he lives with his partner, Azure Carter in Providence. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University in English. A new-media artist, writer, and theorist, he has exhibited, performed and lectured widely. Sondheim finished a successful residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York in March 2012; while there, he performed with Foofwa d'Imobilite and Monika Weiss; created a series of sound pieces based on very low frequency radio and building vibrations; produced a number of 'dead or wounded' models of avatars usings 3d printing technology; and worked on a series of texts dealing with issues of pain and its relation to the virtual. He continues to work on these themes, which he presented at SXSW Interactive 2013. Last year, he spoke at HASTAC on animal and plant
[-empyre-] Alan Sondheim bio and thanks
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- (In addition to the below, I have a new cd/vinyl combination coming out with ESP-Disk. There will be an upcoming film screening of my films in NY, and I have a residency/ exhibition at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in the late fall. Finally, Sandy Baldwin and I are performing for the ELO conference coming up in Paris. I'm still scattered as ever, focusing on the darker side of the body and death in relation to the Net, social media, technology in general. I've become incrasingly concerned with biological extinctions as well. Apologies for the formality of the following, I love the idea of these bios - Alan) Alan Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; he lives with his partner, Azure Carter in Brooklyn NY. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Brown University in English. A new-media artist, writer, and theorist, he has exhibited, performed and lectured widely. Sondheim finished a successful residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York in March 2012; while there, he performed with Foofwa d'Imobilite and Monika Weiss; created a series of sound pieces based on very low frequency radio and building vibrations; produced a number of 'dead or wounded' models of avatars usings 3d printing technology; and worked on a series of texts dealing with issues of pain and its relation to the virtual. He continues to work on these themes, which he presented at SXSW Interactive 2013. This year, he spoke at HASTAC on animal and plant extinctions and similar themes at HASTAC and Subtle Tech. Sondheim's writings include Writing Under (West Virginia University Press, 2012) the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988), .echo (alt-X digital arts, 2001), Vel (Blazevox 2004-5), Sophia (Writers Forum, 2004), Orders of the Real (Writers Forum, 2005), The Accidental Artist (Fort/Da), Azure/Nature/Digital (Blue Lion, 2009), The Wayward (Salt, 2004), and Deep Language (Salt, 2010) as well as numerous chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. Sondheim's videos and films have been shown internationally. He co-moderates several pioneering mail lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting; Jon Marshall published a book-length ethnography of the first. Since January, 1994, Sondheim worked on the Internet Text, a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality. The Text is coordinated with multi-media work on various websites. In 1999, Sondheim was the 2nd Virtual Writer in Residence for the Trace online writing community (Nottingham-Trent University, England). In 2008, Sondheim had a solo installation and nine-month residency at the Odyssey exhibition space in the virtual world Second Life; he currently works in the Odyssey sim. He recently completed a Second Life residency through Humlab, University of Umea, in Sweden; this was accompanied by a gallery installation at the university. He has performed for LowLives and the Virtual Futures conference (both 2011). Sondheim has worked on augmented reality pieces with Mark Skwarek; he continues to work with motion capture files created at Columbia College, Chicago; and has been creating complex performances in both OpenSim and Second Life. In 2004,Sondheim had a five-week residency at the Center for Literary Computing and the Virtual Environments Laboratory, under the directions of Sandy Baldwin and Frances Van Scoy, both at West Virginia University; in 2007 he was a six-week resident of the same. In 2005 he was resident artist/writer at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He produced two cds at the latter (his older recordings have been reissued by ESP-Disk and Fire Museum). Two new cds and a vinyl record have since appeared with FireMuseum, a record with Qbico, and another cd with Myk Friedman for Porter Records. Sondheim has played live in numerous venues around New York and Philadelphia, both solo and with others. His instruments include oud, saz, pipa, guitar, cura cumbus, violin, viola, sarangi, ghichak, suroz, flute, and chromatic harmonica. In 2008 he was on an eight-month National Science Foundation (NSF) consultancy at WVU. His research is in the art and aesthetics of codework, body and behavioral modeling, virtual environments, and avatars in general. In 2007, Sondheim was also the recipient of a New Media New York State Council of the Arts grant. In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special issue of the American Book Review on Codework, which was seminal in its genre; along with Mez and Sandy Baldwin, he co-edited an online issue of Leonardo. Codework was the subject of a major workshop at WVU in April, 2008. In 1999-2000, Sondheim was second virtual-artist-in-residence in the Trace online writing program. Sondheim has taught at a number of schools, including UCLA, RISD, NSCAD, Brown, and SVA. From 1994-2012, Sondheim
Re: [-empyre-] Practice in Research odd methods, rude mechanics
I'll second what mez has to say here; it's always a situation of bricolage for people I know outside institutions; it's even difficult to get to conferences, to get published with academic presses, etc. Universities and art schools still provide communality after graduation for creative workers, but without these ties things always seem to be in a state of falling apart. At least the net provides the ability to proffer work, even if no audience emerges - On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:17 PM, mez breeze netwur...@gmail.com wrote: ..+ those who persist in operating outside these boundaries (in art or academia) are having a tougher time existing in such marginalised (sometimes engineered, sometimes otherwise) spaces. Chunks, mez On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 3:10 AM, Talan Memmott t.memm...@underacademy.org wrote: ** On 18 January 2013 at 15:08 Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk wrote: ... and to respond to my own email (probably bad etiquette) one can observe the obverse to be the case - just as plenty of research is not necessarily instrumental so too is much art instrumental, whether responding to a commission brief, applying for thematised funding, completing a work destined to be sold in an art gallery or making adjustments to a performance in response to audience feedback. Adrian's argument has value but is too black and white... I would say that this is more and more so ... art becoming instrumental (in context) And, some of this has to do with the rise of practice oriented PhDs, where there is now the expectation, say for writers to pursue a Creative Writing PhD. Talan Memmott, Caput Magnum Full Digressor of Undefined Arts and Sciences UnderAcademy College http://underacademycollege.wordpress.com/ TWITTER: @underacademy ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- | http://mezbreeze.com/ | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mez_Breeze ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- = directory http://www.alansondheim.org tel 347-383-8552 music/sound http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/ email sondheim ut panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] in lieu of last month's topic
(since the discussion hasn't started yet, on RISK, I thought I'd post the
following short text on death, which might have been relevant and relates
to risk as well - Alan)
Death Cull
The new reality is watching, walking death, repeatedly, until
things finally come to an end. Everyone goes through the same;
we are always the new old. Every week there are new
disappearances; because I have so many acquaintances, I see
these disasters constantly. Why disasters? Because, unlike
everything else in life, there is an obdurate finality about
death; communication, palliatives, reminiscences, are no longer
possible. Death points to the impossibility of life. Death
points by virtue of non-pointing; there are no vectors in and
among death. Death is neither singular nor plural. My friends
and acquaintances disappear; my daughter and I are estranged:
mutual disappearance. It began when I was a child; whole
generations died off. By the time I could think through them,
they were gone; by the time I could think, death gnawed me. Life
is a process of sinking through life and lives. The new reality
is always present; what's new is the constant birthing of death.
Death is assigned names: X died, whole sets {x} pass on,
veterans, generations, species. Death begins with _death-of_; it
is the last use of the name, which undergoes absorption. Another
way to think: the proper name contains the seed of death.
Another way to think of it: death is a time or demarcation for
the living. But this is not death, this is the signifier. The
signifier of death is not, can never be, death. Death for the
living is a gathering of similarities. The proper name changes
when death enters; it no longer serves as the reception or
transmission of messages in the name of the body. Or rather
there is an ontological shift in the body, which enters the
virtual in its entirety; someone may speak in the guise or
simulacrum of the body. Death transforms the speaking body into
an other speaking-for. What was unspeakable, the body, is the
responsibility of others; the speaking body, even before death,
lives within a recessive mode, every utterance a portal unto
death, every utterance a gift on the verge of being returned.
How does one approach this, one's death, the death of others?
One only waits; being is waiting, and being alive is living
awaiting. As one ages, one awaits time itself, the real is
transformed into the passive substance of dying, rebirth and
rebearing elsewhere beyond a horizon, immovable, unnamed. We
remember the partings of others far more than their arrivals; we
remember the arrivals of deaths, more than the parting of
others. We passively take our place in this panoply; there is
never anything more to do, never anything more that has been
done.
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked
On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Johannes Birringer wrote: is this not amazing. having lived through numerous hurricanes in Texas and the Gulf bay area, I can sympathize with your excitement, the thrill, the rush, the relief? i also, when in Houston during these events, felt the impending disaster as intoxicating, dangerous, fatal, and yet (yet Katrina happened nearby, very nearby, and it was awful) and yet, what is it. this becoming equal to the wound we have been talking about? - For me it's also one of the sources of art, an incredible and astonishing sense of _wonder_ - that the real surplus of the world is what it gives back to us, I almost wrote, and do write, _naturally._ I remember a conversation for WBAI between David Finkelstein and his interviewer, a pure mathematician - at one point David said, Do you know the difference between you and me? I'm fucking reality, you're masturbating. (David was one of the pioneers of quantum logic.) The idea is that cosmology, quantum mechanics, etc. is give and take with the real; it's seeing what's there in a fundamentally different way than pure mathematics. Of course this isn't really true - they come together implicitly entangled in so many ways - but the idea has stuck with me - What a wonder nature gives us! Not dangerous or fatal but intoxicating, because it just _is._ - Alan (yes, so many arguments against this, but it feels like this, coheres like this) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy
Hi - I think it's more that they feel they can _do something_ to protect their houses; leaving, makes the houses and them vulnerable. I've thought a lot about this because I'd be one loathe to evacuate; instead I'd be doing what we did here - covering things, moving things up higher, and so forth. A home is a _homestead_ - 75 Moby Thesaurus words for homestead: ancestral halls, arable land, barnyard, barton, cattle ranch, chicken farm, chimney corner, collective farm, cotton plantation, croft, dairy farm, demesne, demesne farm, dry farm, dude ranch, estate, factory farm, fallow, family homestead, farm, farmery, farmhold, farmland, farmplace, farmstead, farmyard, fireplace, fireside, foyer, fruit farm, fur farm, grain farm, grange, grassland, hacienda, hearth, hearth and home, hearthstone, home, home place, home roof, home sweet home, homecroft, homefarm, house and grounds, house and lot, household, ingle, inglenook, ingleside, kibbutz, kolkhoz, location, mains, manor farm, menage, messuage, orchard, pasture, paternal roof, pen, place, plantation, poultry farm, ranch, rancheria, rancho, roof, rooftree, sheep farm, station, steading, stock farm, toft, truck farm - it's a belonging, it's where one can live and work, and work on living and live on working; it's a Heideggarian in-dwelling, in-habiting. I think that's the crux, crossroads, center, center-post of the matter, at least for me, and I'd think for others who _stay put._ - Alan On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Yes, I was going to ask, Where to people evacuate *to*? I think people stay in their homes not because of bravado but because a) they feel overwhelmed by having to make plans, b) they feel safe in their homes because they are identified with them and have filled them with their identities and view them as a haven even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary (like kids who stay with their mothers' dead bodies after a carnage because they feel safe being with their mothers) or c) because they have noplace to go. On 10/31/12 8:21 AM, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote: The flooding and power outages are a bummer. I live in zone B which is the secondary evacuation zone. Zone A is one block from me. The subways are flooded and they are beginning to pump them out. Last year we had a hurricane hit New York at the same time. It's odd because the year before that we were sent emergency evacuation plans for our neighborhood in case of hurricanes. The hard part is all the people who must evacuate. This also happened during 9/11 and the hurricane last year. Without power the high-rise apartment building don't have water. So if you want to flush our bath you must carry water up the stairs. And of course theres no elevator, no refrigeration for food etc.. But this is the fourth blackout since 9/11. New Yorker have no choice but to cope. I have a house in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I split my time between New York and PA. We were up there when the storm hit. We also have a backup propane generator because we tend to get hit with high winds that known out power up here. I always thought of this place as a refuge and it appears to be becoming more so. On Oct 30, 2012, at 11:34 PM, Maria Damon wrote: wow~ chicago! On 10/30/12 8:03 PM, Lichty, Patrick wrote: In Chicago, we're having 40 MPH winds and 20 foot waves out near Lakeshore Drive (LSD) Patrick Lichty Assistant Professor, Interactive Arts Media Columbia College Chicago 916/1000 S. Wabash Ave #104 Chicago, IL USA 60605 Some distractions demand constant practice. From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jonathan Marshall [jonathan.marsh...@uts.edu.au] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 7:54 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy I was amazed to hear from someone in Michegan who said they were experiencing 40mph winds, so the effects in NY must be staggering. The news this morning was full of pictures of the sea moving inland, and the kind of heavy debris blowing around that Alan was talking about yesterday. hoping its moving out now. jon From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim [sondh...@panix.com] Sent: Wednesday, 31 October 2012 10:15 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy Hi, thanks Renate, we're ok, have been out numerous times in the hurricane. NYC and NJ and coastal Connecticut are epitomes of suffering at the moment - a real mess here, no one was expecting this. But our roof and our repairs held! Thanks to everyone who wrote in as well. love, Alan and Azure == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
Re: [-empyre-] the end of the month
I want to thank everyone as well, particularly Sandy and that other Sandy that provided an open closure at this point. Taking up one of the points he makes below, If we circled to some degree, it would be because of the irreducibly human and worldly problems at the center of the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual. No progress is desirable or possible on this topic. - it strikes me that the core of the discussion has also been repetition, the repetition of trauma, of PTSD, which is subject-ive, inhabiting the subject, body of the subject - as well as the repetition of death itself, which is across subjects and bodies. And has been eloquently discussed here, these are within us, rediscovered and uncovered by all of us, perhaps in similar ways to the discovering and uncovering of sign and body themselves. So another month would another experience be, different and the same, always differand to sign and body, differand to traumatic pain an death. I wish I had learned more about the practice of healing, and even more about plausible afterlives (I live within what, for me, is the misery of absolute atheism). Some of the people we know are in real troubles as a result of the hurricane, let's do what we can, reaching out, on a practical level as well. This is only the storm of the century (here) (this year). Thank you everyone! - Alan On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Charles Baldwin wrote: I thank Maria for beginning the ending of the month by noting the full circle of the discussion. To some degree we were suspended between moving examples of forms (genres?) of expressing/giving words to pain and suffering, and - on the other hand - impossible examples (the impossibility of examples) of the inexpressibility of suffering at the core of the organism. Maria nicely stated that this full-circle gives us a chance to consider the past month with a certain vividness. *Vividness* might be a term for intervention of events (such as Sandy, *events* as the weather or the world's noise). Vividness, as well, brings us back to art, another of our persistent concerns. In this sense, the aesthetic sense of vividness offers as term for the intervention of names (such as Sandy, names as the voice that expresses events in all their contingency). If we circled to some degree, it would be because of the irreducibly human and worldly problems at the center of the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual. No progress is desirable or possible on this topic. What would it mean to leave this behind? How could we? What would we be without the topic of pain and suffering? The topic will continue, we have no choice. I want to thank everyone who participated in this months discussion, including invited guest discussants Monika Weiss, Deena Larsen, Johannes Birringer, Jonathan Marshall, Fau Ferdinand, and Maria Damon. In addition, I particularly want to thank my co-moderator Alan Sondheim. - Sandy ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy
Hi, thanks Renate, we're ok, have been out numerous times in the hurricane. NYC and NJ and coastal Connecticut are epitomes of suffering at the moment - a real mess here, no one was expecting this. But our roof and our repairs held! Thanks to everyone who wrote in as well. love, Alan and Azure == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Hurricane Sandy
Everyone I know is documenting the storm and putting it up online. The reality as such is troubling; listening to the police radio gives an idea of the degree people are in trouble. At the moment the situatio is more severe, small explosions, more fires, flooding everywhere. So far we're okay but the roaring inside our place is almost 80 db consistently. Is this the Singularity come early? - Alan Hurricane Sandy some audio files - sounds from inside our place from the skylights; playing nepalese sarangi and sarangi with the sounds; police radio - note the stranded cars with water rising, fires, etc.; a few shots from our excursion out with Gary Wiebke holding the piece of wallboard that almost killed me, and a tree around the corner which has split and killed a smaller ginko next to it as well. The buoy videos fascinate me, taken from a Brooklyn waterfront pier yesterday as the storm approached. http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh1.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh2.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh3.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh4.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh5.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh6.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh07.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh08.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh09.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh10.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh11.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/sandyh12.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/buoy2.mp4 http://www.alansondheim.org/buoy1.mp4 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] of pain and others
On Mon, 29 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: All i'm trying to do here is suggest that pain, misery depression etc are not the only inexpressable states of being My point (and examples) where to suggest that other states also cannot be expressed. and while we are at it, lets not forget zen which is always precisely about the non-expressable and the hope that the 'art' and practice can induce that realisation of something else. I don't think this is what Zen is about - think of the Oxherding pictures for example. The difference re: pain again, I keep saying this, is not whether it's expressible, but when suffering is extreme, it's inexpressible in a different way, and again think of slaughter or death _from the viewpoint of the dead._ This is the difficulty of the virtual; unlike Deena, I see a _lot_ of expressivity of joy, even in Fau's work, Second Front's work, Gaz's work, all these people in SL; it can be ecstatic. i did not mean to write 'all' so the example does not negate what seems to be to be a trend - when compared to other times and places. Then let me mention Laurie Anderson, Mariko Mori, all those mentioned in SL, I'd include some of Garrett Lynch, a great deal of Stelarc, etc. I don't see this as a trend and I know the artworld pretty well. Maybe in Australia it's different; I can't speak to that. Personally i think that the denigration of the comedic/joyous/ecstatic probably began during the reformation period - let's blame the calvinists :) but others might date it earlier I give up, Jon; you keep harping on this. If i cannot use my own reactions to art to write about those reactions and about art, are those reactions being defined as illegitimate? what else do we generalise from? We generalize from knowing art and art movements deeply, knowing the sociology of art, and then knowing not to generalize from individual reactions, but trying to look beyond them; otherwise at least for me, I'd fall into a position of connoisseurship, which places everything in terms of taste definitely and class somewhat; I'm more interested in looking critically at my own reactions and proceeding from there, and from a fairly good knowledge of contemporary art and art practices, and from my own position having curated a great deal, etc. etc. I believe that there were many attempts to ban songs during the arab spring, there were many banned songs during the French Revolution. According to a story I was told once, in the in early stages of the American war of independence whistling 'yankee doodle' was considered insubordination But it wasn't banned; I don't know enough about music and the Arab Spring or French Revolution, but I do know that in the US songs just aren't banned, not even the stuff from MDC, Millions of Dead Cops, for example, or gangsta rap, etc. Maybe it's different in Australia again; I can't speak to that. but the 'song' aspect is more or less irrelevant; the point is that art that depicts the enemy as human, or as worthy of empathy tends to have a difficult official life. ??? What official life does art possibly have. Jon, we shouldn't go on about this; we live on different planets in terms of art, I think. I just don't buy into what you're writing, any more than you buy int what I'm saying; we're not even on the same page. Again does every song have to be banned before we can talk about the logic of banning art, or of attempts to repress of empathy? You brought up banning art, not me. Again, I don't understand your aesthetics; I don't know what the more 'real' the art means at all, what it means for art to stand on its own, etc. etc.; to quote badly Foucault, art is a discursive formation. I'm not so sure i would reduce all art in that kind of way. It's not reductive; it simply says that art is a confluence of works, discussions, conversations, art bars, galleries, museums, idiolects, etc. etc., everything, that it's a discourse, that it doesn't exist in a vacuum, that art doesn't stand on its own, but it's culturally embedded. Or insist on people having a aesthetic theory to be able to talk about art (that is really making art a discursive formation!) That's not what discursive formation means I think. After all the conversation then becomes fruitless - to make pain more of a problem for art because it is inexpressible is a discurisive formation, indeed it could be simply to say that we cannot deal with pain, and pain only, within a particular discursive formation, and then universalise it and valorise it to make it a 'fact of life'. I don't understand this, apologies - For me, if (for someone or other) art is does not make something 'real' in any way at all (perhaps fictively-imaginally as i have been saying), or if it does not open something, or convey something, then it is a bit pointless. Ok, then my art is pointless; it's not about that atall. It is because it does have
Re: [-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked
There's also the other Goffman book, Stigma, which is relevant and excellent. I remember one oddity during the Vietnam war - there was an oddly apolitical stance, I think, among performance artists in the US; one could watch an Acconci piece, for example, and read political action into it, but it wasn't overt; what I remember in conversation with him was mostly discussions about art which was emerging out of modernism, but was still bound by a rather linear idea of success, style, and progress. - Alan == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked
I know this is obvious to say, but I wonder if one goes back to Indo-European roots, if there might not be a relationship between PIE and penis? Certainly in the confused male world of psychoanalytics, the penis figures heavily in pain; one only has to think of Bob Flanagan (and others) again. - - Alan On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: pain, n. late 13c., punishment, especially for a crime; also condition one feels when hurt, opposite of pleasure, from O.Fr. peine difficulty, woe, suffering, punishment, Hell's torments (11c.), from L. poena punishment, penalty, retribution, indemnification (in Late Latin also torment, hardship, suffering), from Gk. poine retribution, penalty, quit-money for spilled blood, from PIE *kwei- to pay, atone, compensate (see penal). The earliest sense in English survives in phrase on pain of death. Pain seems to be related thus to pay, and remorse, or its display, is intimately related to concepts of justice and retribution. Public displays of screaming penitence under torture, in pre-Enlightenment Europe, and current media coverage of trials in which the faces and demeanor of the defendants are scrutinized for signs of remorse...which are weighed in consideration of a just penalty... this idea of paying with emotion, how does it tie in with empathy? On 10/27/12 4:45 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: There's also the other Goffman book, Stigma, which is relevant and excellent. I remember one oddity during the Vietnam war - there was an oddly apolitical stance, I think, among performance artists in the US; one could watch an Acconci piece, for example, and read political action into it, but it wasn't overt; what I remember in conversation with him was mostly discussions about art which was emerging out of modernism, but was still bound by a rather linear idea of success, style, and progress. - Alan == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Before the Law / control and cutting, stripped naked
On the line for what? This had to do with Chris and art-making, not Vietnam. It wasn't protest; it was relatively decontextualized body-art. - Alan On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Kristine Stiles wrote: Yes, Alan, but then there is Chris Burden's Shoot, 1971. Few put their bodies on the line like that. Kristine On Oct 27, 2012, at 4:45 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: There's also the other Goffman book, Stigma, which is relevant and excellent. I remember one oddity during the Vietnam war - there was an oddly apolitical stance, I think, among performance artists in the US; one could watch an Acconci piece, for example, and read political action into it, but it wasn't overt; what I remember in conversation with him was mostly discussions about art which was emerging out of modernism, but was still bound by a rather linear idea of success, style, and progress. - Alan == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] of pain and others
On Sun, 28 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: Hi Alan, I'm still not sure here. For example, to use some other easily referenced points can we really describe ecstacy? even a moderate 'real' orgasm? then there is the often remarked failure of the mystics to convey the 'union with god', the breakdown of language - to some extent this might also be about the failure of represenation when there is no-person to do the representing, and others do not have a similar experience, to resonate. No emotion can be perfectly expressed, but unutterable pain or death can't be expressed at all it's different - it's why there are tests, as long as one can answer them. What i would say is that maybe i've had experiences of sheer joy a couple of times in my late teens early twenties. The amount of art i have experienced, which can help recall those experiences, or sustain them is miniscule when compared to the amount of art which can sustain or induce the sense of depression, meaninglessness, pain, pointlessness, negation etc. (especially post mid 19th Century art) Again, this is taste; I can name any number of artists who give me joy from that period. There's no verification procedure here; even someone like Rimbaud can be read as ecstatic or depressive. So my conclusion would be that it is far easier (or considered important) to 'do' art around pain (in our world anyway). Bad sociology! First you're using your reactions to the work and then making a sociological generalization from them. Good grief art can work in any number of ways around any number of themes; I just don't want to name names here, that's not relevant, and would only be my take on stuff. That it is not to say that it is easy to do art that maintains empathy or overcomes state barriers or exclusions etc (which is a different issue). That i think is very hard (and very worth attempting) and is why songs with the potential to raise pity and self questioning are roughly banned. There is perhaps no other defense - but the banning *can* add to the potency, because it may make us listen harder to find what led to the banning. Confused - other than that Israeli song, I can't think of any that were banned. Even pop stuff, listen to Morrissey or the old U2 - none of this stuff was banned. unutterable joy. But that does not suppose a continuum, other than from the *representable* to the *unrepresentable*, to the *hintable*... Confused what you're saying here, apologies - But quite frankly, how do i 'know' what anyone means, or is attempting to convey? You don't which is why one take on language from AI is that it's the mutual orientation of cognitive domains which doesn't mean they're mappable or convey the same. each word, each gesture, may not only be social, but it is also profoundly individual. it has particular meanings that are unique, but it is not individual as it lives in interaction Of course, language is both a commonality, consensus, and idiolect. Perhaps the more complex the statement, or the art, the more this is the case. And indeed the more 'real' the art, the more it seems like it stands on its own , being so rich in what it can provoke/say Again, I don't understand your aesthetics; I don't know what the more 'real' the art means at all, what it means for art to stand on its own, etc. etc.; to quote badly Foucault, art is a discursive formation. Ultimately i probably don't understand anyone, but at the same time if i work (and art and communication require empathetic work from the audience, even if it is only beforehand), i may gain an inkling. Depends what you mean by understand - there's no ultimately but there is consensus enough so that, if I visit you, as I did, and say something, we can actually have a conversation. and that is true of anything not 'just' pain. Pain brings the incomprehension to the fore, makes it harder to ignore, but it is always there. Argh, again pain is different, as is death. Think for a second, incorrectly, of pain as just this side of death - maybe that will help. However, of course, if we (as a moral decision) may want to act towards the pain of others for alleviation or sympathy or coaction etc, then we may decide those in pain need/require (not the right words, but let communication fail) our attention and work more than those in 'harmless' joy but let us not think that joy is easy to express and may not separate. I agree with the first part, not the second. Even popularly Laugh, and you laugh with others; cry, and you cry alone. Joy is contagious. Mirror neurons! Empathy! - Alan Perhaps i don't even know what i'm attempting to say jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received
[-empyre-] of interest below
Hi - I wanted to post this to the list; it applies to this month's topic. Dehumanization is a common technique in the military of course; it places within the abstract and virtual, that which is abject and concrete. Songs like this can tunnel through. I'd like to all the guests this month to comment on this. Part of the original theme for the month, dealing with pain, suffering, and death, emphasized the virtual - and I'd like to return to this, wondering if, for example, the song itself might be considered as opening into the virtual; I remember Mikel Dufrenne talking about the world of the book, which relates of courses to diegesis, etc. It's a short step from this world to the text-based worlds of MOOs and MUDs etc., and from there to the audio- visual worlds of Second Life, Open Sim, etc. The next step would be the Holodeck of course. So where, within all of this, is the location of the body's pain? I keep returning to this on one hand, and Diane Gromala's work on the other. Comments? Thanks, Alan -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 23:03:34 From: Portside Moderator modera...@portside.org To: ports...@lists.portside.org Subject: Israeli Song About Learning to Kill and Dehumanizing the Enemy is Going Viral in Israel - Banned From Army Radio Israeli Song About Learning to Kill and Dehumanizing the Enemy is Going Viral in Israel - Banned From Army Radio 1. Israeli Protest Song Banned from Army Radio (Richard Silverstein in Tikun Olam) 2. Song critical of the IDF goes viral after being banned by Israeli Army Radio (Annie Robbins in Mondoweiss) = Israeli Protest Song Banned from Army Radio by Richard Silverstein October 15, 2012 Tikun Olam (Promoting Israeli democracy, exposing secrets of the national security state) http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2012/10/15/israeli-protest-song-banned-from-army-radio/ There was once a time when Israeli songs like A Matter of Habit were routinely written, aired and became hits. These were songs of political commentary or protest, songs of hope and idealism. They represented the aspirations of Israel's secular liberal (generally Ashkenazi) elite. But that was long ago. Which is why the popularity of A Matter of Habit is so extraordinary in today's political context. The song, sung by Izhar Ashdot and written by Alona Kimche, speaks of how an Israeli soldier begins slowly to become degraded to his own humanity and that of the Palestinians among whom he patrols. It's not only a powerful political and social statement, it has those infectious pop hooks that are the mark of a lasting hit. As we used to say way back in the 1960s when such music was popular here: it's got a message and you can dance to it. The song's popularity will no doubt be amplified by a ban that Galey Tzahal, Israeli armed forces radio, slapped on the song for degrading the IDF. I'm always amazed that whenever the misdeeds of the IDF are documented and criticized that doing so somehow in itself becomes an inhuman or degrading act. So goes the logic of the oppressor who never knows or understands his own power and oppressive acts. Here's a peek into the mind of the military oppressors: The radio station announced that Due to the song's contents, which debase IDF soldiers, the station commander decided that there is no room on Army Radio to publicly celebrate a song that denigrates and denounces those that have sacrificed their life for the defense of the country. The statement continued, the artist Izhar Ashdot is held in high esteem by Army Radio. In this specific case however, we believe with the artistic leeway afforded to artists by this station, Army Radio, as a station of soldiers, where many soldiers perform their military serve, should avoid celebrating a song that demonizes those soldiers. It appears that the soldiers of the IDF are so fragile that they cannot withstand even a bit of scrutiny or introspection without collapsing into a morass of self-doubt and moral paralysis. God forbid that any such soldier should question himself or his comrades. The entire military order might collapse leaving Israel defenseless before the massing hordes of Arab enemies. Here are the lyrics translated into English: Chorus: Learning to kill is a matter of a push It begins with something small, then it comes easier Patrolling all night in the Nablus casbah Hey, what here is ours and what's yours The beginning is an experiment A rifle butt banging on the door Fearful children, a terrified family Then a closure, there's already danger Death lies in wait around every corner You cock your weapon and your arm trembles Your finger tightens around the trigger Your heart goes crazy, beats in fright It knows that the next one will be a lot easier. They aren't men or women They're only things and shadow Learning to kill
Re: [-empyre-] of interest below
Hi Jon, let me answer you in pieces here - On Sat, 27 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: I'm not quite sure i can say this correctly, but seeing we seem to have shifted a bit from the role of pain in virtual life, or 'the virtual' (if you like suspended nouns), to pain in art, let me try - and please forgive me for failing or being trite. I wouldn't say pain in art, but issues of representation of pain in relation to omeone undergoing the same, perhaps. Firstly, given the shift, is pain, misery, and abjection the issue? These aren't issues, they're states; the issue is how are these represented, what can and what can't be represented, how can representation potentially lead to (hopefully positive) action. For me, the intial issue was that when living a life through mediated means, online, via mobiles, via games, via theatre, via alchemy whatever (and these may well be different experiences, that is not the point), people (not perhaps people here) generally seem to want to pretend that pain and misery are absent, that the 'virtual life' is not real in some kind of way. That it is both missing something and that it *should be* absolutely free. That they can watch executions for fun. Here I agree. My point was that pain and misery is present, that words do things, that images do things, that the structures of communication do things, and people get hurt, suffer and die - although i never presented the stuff on death and people's reactions to it. Hence there is a 'problem of pain'. Yes. Hence, communication of misery and pain seems to be a subset of the general problem of 'how do we communicate anything'? No, because as Scarry herself pointed out, pain is different, and I'd say as well, death and slaughter are different. I can't communicate to you I'm dead. I can communicate to you other things, but pain is incredibly difficult to communicate, which is why there are measured tests, gradations. These suppose however that 1. someone is able to take these tests etc. by being in the right place at the right time to take them, and 2. that someone is in pain that is not completely debilitating, i.e. that prohibits one from taking them. My mother for example, a highly articulate woman, could not saying anything coherent towards the end; pain devouted her. Is communication about replication of internal states in another? I'm not sure, possibly sometimes, most often not. If this space of communication is the virtual, then there is also a problem of joy, It is not just pain. Joy and pain are very different, paralleling perhaps the difference between masochism and sadism. Pain is private in a different way; it can be unspeakable, unutterable. They're not two poles along a continuum - unutterable pain may tend towards cessation, towards death. This is why i wanted to argue that art is not about authenticity, or roughness, or other conventions of genuninness, but that art is fictional and involves pretense. But referencing artaud again (i think) good art is a realer fiction, a 'great' fiction. No one ever said art is about authenticity, and I think that myth has been thrown out long ago. There's no art is about - it's contested and changes along the lines of a Wittgensteinian game. It may or may not involve pretence. It may or may not involve fiction. There are no realer fictions, great or non-great fictions, D/G write about minor literature (Kafka) in this regard. And I'm not sure I'd buy into even the notion of good art - the nearest I can get to it is along the lines of Bourdieu's Distinction - what is the cultural economy of the art and its audience being considered? Can these things even be defined? These questions come up constantly and usually end up in discussions about taste or connoisseurship. Indeed, if we thought conveying pain was what art was about then perhaps trolls and torturers are the true artists? In that mode of thinking, is it the case that people who get others to find them offensive are the real artists, and those who are not found offensive, by anyone who matters, are not? But this is your own line of reasoning - no one has said that conveying pain was what art was about - art can be about anything or nothing, again a regime of contestations. I don't honestly know what mode of thinking you're referencing here. If we think that people are not artists just because they cause pain, then perhaps we have to think about art and morals, however difficult? But this doesn't follow either, no one has said that X or Y are not artists because they case pain. Doing what could be refused, and making a gesture towards myself. I have lived with chronic pain for a large portion of my life, and have recently held my mother while she struggled in apparent 'animal' agony towards or away from a death that came longer than i would like, and less tranquilised by morphine than i would like Yes. So what would i
Re: [-empyre-] control and cutting, photographing
Johannes, How do you read these artists/works in the West, and not only in the West of course, how are they related to the self-immolations of Tibetan monks, there have been many over the years? I've known Stelarc as well and feel disturbed at the repeated hookings, but it makes no difference what I feel of course. This is also touching on self-scarring, self-amputations and amputation sex, cannibalisms, and so forth. Here is a related link Jiggsy Baron has posted on Facebook: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114122/Donald-Eric-Trump-pictured-posing-trophy-carcasses-big-African-hunt.html I am seriously in awe of people who can think clearly, who have all the answers; I can't buy into the answers, but am envious of belief in general; in this way I constantly undermine myself. Thank you, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] control and cutting, stripped naked
Just want to point out this story bears an uncanny resemblance to the
current conviction of the Italian seismologists, in relation to te
response by the scientific community; I've been following this closely
online but also in Science magazine, which goes into amazing detail. So
it's not just fiction, and it's connected, as in the current example, also
with the notion that science harbors truth even in uncanny and critical
situations - where the truth may even be recognized as problematic or
wavering at best.
- Alan
On Thu, 25 Oct 2012, Johannes Birringer wrote:
and no,
after reading Peter, and Maria,
what I said earlier does not grasp the remorse and pain mentioned,
especially in regard to a sense of overwhelming loss of a loved one.
Biting oneself, Maria responded, seems an angry rejection of a life that has
betrayed one.
Yet how do we think remorse in relationship to guilt, that guilt as Kafka said
which cannot
ever be doubted, and how do we treat remorse?
The doctor in Kafka's story (A Countrydoctor) travels out to find a young man,
the patient,
in a house, the community is gathered, the young man whispers into the doctor's
ear
('let me die'), and the doctor cannot see a problem. After a while, when the
pressure
rises (the community waiting for the right diagnosis), the doctor looks again,
probes
the patient, and discovers a gaping wound around the hip, surely the man will
die.
The situation grows tense the villages finally undress the doctor and place
him inside
the bed, with the dying patient. the story becomes hallucinatory, as the doctor
prepares
for his escape.
I tried to think about the story afterwards, this summer, when i had met with
my own doctor in
the countryside. And listened to him, as he began to tell me about his readings
as a 15 year old boy
before he knew he would become a (country) doctor. He said he read Goethe,
Shakespeare,
Rilke, Thomas Mann, and so on. He read some Kafka, but disliked it, he felt
Kafka was psychotic.
This was interesting to me. I told him my synopsis of the Countrydoctor.
And within minutes, my physician had tackled an interpretive crux. He saw right
through it, i think,
suggesting that this is a very common situation faced by all doctors: they are
called upon to make a diagnosis.
Some are good at that, they get it right. Others are not so good at it, and
worry to get it right, break into a sweat.. ,
perhaps into remorse later. And thus, especially when, as in the Kafka story,
everyone in the house and the village is watching
to await the diagnosis, the doctor is suddenly put on the spot. The doctor is,
so to speak, made naked, made vulnerable. Exposed.
Everyone expects him to say the right diagnosis.
The amazing scene in Kafka then shows us the polis, the community, selecting
the scapegoat, stripping the doctor naked and laying him into the bed with the
dying patient.
I had thought of the scene as a sexual fantasy - and as we know such ones are
also mixed up fatally with remorse or guilt, but I can see now also the
psychotic or paranoic side to the doctor.
This makes some sense to me, as painful as it is.
chorus:
?Entkleidet ihn, dann wird er heilen,
Und heilt er nicht, so t?tet ihn!
's ist nur ein Arzt, 's ist nur ein Arzt.?
Take his clothes off, then he?ll heal,
and if he doesn?t cure, then kill him.
It?s only a doctor; it?s only a doctor
i just wanted to share with you the story of a consultation with my Kafka
doctor.
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
___
empyre forum
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http://www.subtle.net/empyre
==
blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog)
email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt
==
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Re: [-empyre-] week four: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
On Wed, 24 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Dear all, Alan, Peter, thanks for your comments. I'm in a slightly awkward position of being in MLA-DAOC meetings through Friday, so my ability to really post with an appropriate fullness of attention is somewhat compromised right now. Peter, this is really powerful. Biting the hand that feeds one?that is, ones own hand?seems an angry rejection of a life that has betrayed one?an appropriate response to an overwhelming loss. Alan can you say more about what you mean by the ultimate collapse in relation to the ultimate risk/control of the body by the self? there seems to be a tension between these two concepts, control and collapse. The word smart, btw, also is related to mord, with the sharpness of intelligence apparently a very late development in the word's history compared to the sharpness of stinging or other pain. Is intelligence a kind of suffering, pain and death? Si on sait tout, c'est la mort. I think of ultimate control as leading (as in category theory, which I'm trying now to understand) to a _terminal object,_ which absorbs everything - cutting is among many other relevant things, an exerting of control over the body, but it also reduces the body to a cipher; catatonia is another example. I knew an anorectic artist years ago who was going with someone incredibly wealthy; she said that her greatest joy was to have him take her to an expensive restaurant; she'd then go into the restaurant bathroom and vomit everything up; this was control; she was also on heroin; this was cipher. Vito's piece demarcated and imagined the control-space of the mouth on the body; it also reduced the body to meat with an uncanny relationship to eating. On a light note, MLA - I was invited years ago to speak in San Francisco - they - someone - flew me out. I couldn't relate to anyone there - so I ended up staying up to 3-4 am - roaming around the meeting rooms and gathering up the graffitied napkins - I felt I was a ghost haunting the conference. I felt I didn't belong - the control was in taking the rooms over in the night - the cipher was in the non-entity I felt and knew I was at the event. So it veered between 0 and 1 or 1 and 0 or null and non-null - but there was also incredible pleasure in the roaming - as there may be in cutting as well. To return the question - does knowledge bring pain? Are they en/tranced? - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] comment relating to Johannes' night sea crossing 4
-- I wrote this text for Foofwa d'Imobilite's Involuntaries, which for me were part of the inspiration for this month's topic. The Involuntaries (with Foofwa, Vea Lucca, and myself) are at http://foofwa.com/productions/video/choreiagraphies.html and I thought this works in well with Johannes' comments, and issues of real/virtual pain and embodiment. I do hope others will participate with Maria Damon's contributions, beginning today. - Alan Breaking New Ground all circumstances are extenuating. if you want to understand what they're about, perhaps these works will open up the vast chasm of comprehension on the edge of falling apart - I can't think of any better pieces in this regard, and, for that matter, in the sheer beauty of fractured movement works based on choreia, return, withdrawal from broken edges (before one is cut) (before the sound loses its grasp) (before one is cut out (of the world) (of your acquaintance) (your grasp) (your body) (of your body my own)). how does one write or circumscribe the body of movement within horizons defined by mappings of hyperbolic geometry in the circle? the edge isn't just asymptotic; from the outside, it's a bad pill. what looks like chance is a battlefield; what looks determined is incandescent birth. the battlefield is your last chance of being-alive, just as your birth is your first-chance of dying. there are so many things these movements and sounds are not: listing narrows sublimity: just look, it's almost drained away. think of dance as a draining, symptom as style, medication-technique, how to get out of the hospital. don't follow or recognize avatars, don't follow or recognize symptoms. they start with dim memories of body, with landscapes that accompany us, we're hounded. we're hounded by death, but we're also hounded by disease, troubles, fevers, forgetfulness, wrath, rage, ecstasy, visions, poverty, money, obligations, lovers, ennui, hallucinations, speed, crime, frustration, cataclysm, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, nightmares, mutilations, panic, neuroses, economies of attention, economies of the body, excretions, garbage, wounds, scars, allergic reactions, insect bites, age, bad eyesight, bad hearing, shudderings, shiverings, fear, belongings, jealousy, loathing, disgust, addictions. the playing-field of hounding, playing-field of the hounded. one hounds, is hounded; the hounded hounds, hounding is hounded. or like this: playing-field of haunting, of the haunted. one haunts, is haunted; the haunted haunts, haunting is haunted. these texts, they are haunted. if i write this sentence, thus; if i write this sentence beneath or within the sign of fever, migraine, incipient diabetes, tumors malign-benign. if i write this sentence beneath the symbolic of medication, bandaging, radiation treatment, dialysis. if i write this sentence gagged and splayed. if i write this sentence to control you, if i write this sentence under your control. the order to work: persevere. to persevere, endure, maenad-dance of self-devouring, maenad-music of self-control. how can that be, except to ensure that the beat is periodic, that repetition hungers. the maenad feeds, hungers for repetition, desecrates it (the repeat-ing). they passed it on so far down the line that gender-sex and sex-gender change. they passed it down farther. Who were they? Who's haunting us? text by Alan Sondheim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] week four: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
Thank you, Maria! I wonder, remembering Amanda Todd's video, if remose in the sense of biting might also be connected to cutting? I remember teaching a class at an artschool at one point; the course was about contemporary art, the body, etc. - and almost everyone in the class was a cutter. It was incredibly sad; it seems the ultimate risk/control of the body by the self, the ultimate collapse. And I remember also Acconci's biting piece, mapping his body with his teeth - but more abject than that, an uncanny surplus of meaning - On Tue, 23 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Dear all, I've been very moved by the range, quality, and seriousness of the inquiries and revelations here in these past weeks. The intensity of the participants' commitment to exploring these questions posed by Sandy, Alan and us guests has left me wondering what I can add. I keep returning to the experience of remorse, which I first mentioned some time ago. The bitingly anguished regret that often has no basis in wrongdoing, that is, no precedent (but that doesn't mean no cause) for which remorse is the appropriate response, is one of those existential enveloping conditions that swoop down like a weather system but that feels personal. Remorse is connected to death, it is a wanting to follow someone into the grave, a form of survivor guilt. Remorse, etymologically to bite again, or re in the sense of emphasis, redoubled self-biting, only one letter (mord) away from death (mort), and a very close letter at that. Biting oneself as a symptom of mourning or grief. Somehow remorse is connected to abjection, to bare life, to stripping away the comforts of denial, creature comforts that enable a turning-away from the basic unease and suffering that characterizes our experience of life. As if we were to blame. Are we? Remorse is a hangup, a habit, a deceitful friend that tears your flesh at the first opportunity, just so s/he can comfort you afterwards. On a different but related note, I read an account of Brian Kim Stefans's talk at one of the EPoetry conferences, in which he exhorted epoetry and digital arts to embrace the dark side. Yes, yes, and yes. Fewer slick surfaces, more abrasions, more acknowledgment of wounds. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] week four: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
The fourth week of October's -empyre- discussion will start tomorrow, continuing with the topic of Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Real and Virtual. The guest will be Maria Damon. Her biographical information is below. I've followed Maria's work for a long time, and it has always amazed me; it has a poetics all its own, brilliant and surprising. - Alan Week 4 - Maria Damon (US) Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries, co-author of several books of poetry and online projects with mIEKAL aND (Literature Nation, Eros/ion, pleasureTEXTpossession, E.n.t.r.a.n.c.e.d) and one with Jukka-Pekka Kervinen (Door Marked X), and co-editor, with Ira Livingston, of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] the subject of this month
Hi, I've been thinking about this month's subject, repeatedly, and find myself running into difficulty when I try to relate it to the moderated and rationalized discourse one finds on an email list, especially a list which is text-oriented, and oddly self-contained in that regard - one _reads_ empyre. Pain, suffering and death all relate to individual experience that breaks through whatever circumlocution has been theoretically established. P.D. James, in a recent book, talks about the fabric and comfort of the detective story, where the world is contained, where the suspects are few, and the crime works itself out, creating pleasure in suture for both the reader and writer. The crime, almost always murder in the traditional story, is of course catalyst; it figures as a trope or function that creates an unraveling and closure at the end. She is talking about the traditional detective story, not a post-modern version. The pain, suffering, and death of the victim are also functions and are generally not dwelled upon; in fact, they would break through the structure and create a differet dynamics (in much the same way as Bourbaki structuralism was repaced by category theory, but that's another story, just something I'm trying to think about). Anyway, the rupture occurs with the personal, with testimony, as we have seen and commented on; it also occurs with the inertness of death, the muteness of horrific pain, the unutterable in slaughter. One may describe the dynamics, diplomacy, history, culture, economics, and politics of slaughter, but slaughter itself, the _thingness_ of it, eludes us, is inexressible. So this is where the text bears witness to its own limits and limitations, and this might be also where the structure of an email list founders. The solution, if there is one, is to keep on writing and talking on the level of writing and talking; this constantly changes and is itself porous - Emily Dickinson - Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind -- - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Introduction--Deena
On Tue, 16 Oct 2012, Deena Larsen wrote: Thus the work is a complex and subtle exploration of pain--and uses links, navigation, etc. to explore the unsaid and unsayable. In MS 3.0, I also used tags to show how pain and suffering can be connected. But I tried to balance pain with light--as despair has as many entries as love--for life is not always pain and suffering, but encompasses a wide range of emotions. Do you think the links themselves might be representative of cutting or incision - that the meaning they carry would have a hint of pain itself? I remember writing about links as a kind of breaking down of the diegesis of a narrative, for two reasons - you suddenly have a cut where you have to do something to proceed, something like moving a mouse, which can be very external to the immersive experience of narrative and the world of the work (Mikel Dufrenne), and that cut is often a jump-cut as in film, where the viewer ends up doing extra psychological work suturing the before- and after-scenes. There's also the idea that you're no longer in the world of the author, but you're in a world (partly) of your own making, which is a type of separation you don't get in real life, where you're always inhabiting your body. That said, I find the idea of links as content fascinating - the artist/ choreographer Ursula Endlicher uses them as choroegraphic markers for example, to good and amazing effect/affect. Finally, I wonder how one lives through this attention to suffering; I have difficulty doing so and want to try and move on eventually. And I remember Iris Chang, and think it's important in the context of empyre this month, perhaps, to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang Thanks, Alan___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
It makes sense that you wouldn't want to talk about personal pain or for that matter anything personal here. Everyone makes his or her decision, everywhere and everywhen, about revelation. I need at times to speak 'somewhat' out of pain, because it comes from trauma, and trauma, at least for me, is uncontrollable repetition. As far as urls and other sites etc. are concerned, for me, empyre, or any other email list, is not in isolation, and one thing fundamental to the subjects under consideration, is bearing witness. The list by itself is clausterphobic in this regard, and I returned again today, for example to http://this.is/jenin/index2.html as part of thinking through these things. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] more trolling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddedv=vOHXGNx-E7E http://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/173764121.html - she died. On Tue, 16 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: I was a bit provoked when I read the text Jon published when a troll saw her trolling as a piece of art, Now I find these text and start to ask myself, are we going to accept trolling as a natural phenomena in the virtual life? I am very skeptical. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/understanding-internet-trolling/263631/ Ana -- http://writings-escrituras.tumblr.com/ http://maraya.tumblr.com/ http://www.twitter.com/caravia158 http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/ http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/ http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/ http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/ http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0 http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/ cell Sweden +4670-3213370 cell Uruguay +598-99470758 When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. ? Leonardo da Vinci ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] week three: Pain, Suffering, and Death in the Virtual
Hi Johannes, very briefly, not to interrupt the discussion, I've noticed on almost all mailing lists, including empyre, say, or nettime, or Cybermind for that matter - there are usually very few posters around a particular topic. Empyre works through guests of course and just for the month, guest moderators, and everyone is welcome to join, but I didn't expect a large number of posters. The subject is difficult. And the matters aren't private - that's the heart of it. Our experiences, your experiences, everyone's, are private, and the experiences are at the core of what we consider pain, or death, our own projects or horizons or undergoings. At least here, pain is not an abstract subject, it certainly is not for me, and the emergent problem is, how do we communicate pain and death, from ourselves, from our habitus, and place it within the political or cultural, whatever? I think the art discussed here, the texts, are a way to do it, as are the writings into the email list itself. And in the long run, as well, we all do hold back, I keep dark secrets, that cripple me, to myself, as perhaps do many others of us. The list is, yes, open, and we are all vulnerable, as those urls of the Canadian girl who was bullied and killed herself, surely indicate. - Alan On Tue, 16 Oct 2012, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear all, thanks to Sandy and Alan, for inviting me to be on this discussion, and you probably saw that I had joined on occasion since week one, when responding to Monika's work and some of the postings here. Then i decided to follow the later discussions more quietly, just listening, there was much brought forward here that surprised me as it seemed of a personal nature. Then again, after listening to Sandy and Alan, and Ana as well, and Jonathan's very interesting chapters from his ethnography of the lives, pains and joys on a maillist, I realized that I probably would have little to say about either the personal directly experienced (i think it's not for me to discuss my private emotions here), nor do i work very much with avatars and in the Virtual, or have long feuds with people i know or don't know on some maillist. So as i had told Alan initially, my role can only be to share some questions or some stories, but lately i also wondered, given both the gravity and the sincerity of this month's discussion, which I respect much, I wondered (following my initial queries to Monika) who the audience or the community is *here* and how a few people get to enjoy talking to each other via a maillist (international scope, over a thousand subscribers) about private matters for a whole month? Now, as we addressed some public or performed private works or alternate areas of operation (SL or other games or virtual environment), the issue of private and public gets naturally more entangled, and I shall perhaps be writing on that matter in the next days, in Valeska Gert spirit I hope (the poster is present), whether in regard to ritual and commemoration as initially proposed via Monika Weiss's work (and re:history of theatre or civilizational historical terms), whether there are phenomena of catharsis today (after Greek tragedy and what Aristotle thought), whether they are addressed through this debate, whether some of the other questions (Alan's from yesterday: how do we live with ourselves?) are addressable through work, performance, and telling. I stop for now. I wanted to thank everyone for their offerings here, it was strong reading. I particularly also enjoyed seeing Diane Gramola's posting and wish to return to it, and thank you Sandy for remembering, on Sunday, some of the questions i raised earlier. I heard a question as well about Antonin Artaud. Yes, I am sure Artaud posed that question to himself, Alan (how do I live with myself), and he answered it in so many ways, screamingly and torched, corrosively and breathtakingly. His radio broadcast (Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu) is scary. respectfully Johannes Birringer dap-lab London ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Writing and viewing and living our pain
Hi Deena, It seems to me this is a delicate balancing act. My mother before she died was in such agony, she couldn't speak, much less express anything. There is also clinical depression, which is chemistry and often unresponsive to anything. One has to have the capacity to express, and expressing may be indeed a form of healing. But I've seen people who lose that, who don't respond. Even in terms of mental pain, there have been times I've been reduced (note the passive tense, which doesn't imply passivity) to silence or silent weeping. I don't want to go on about this, but trauma and depression can be very close to intractible, which is why I find the latest issue of the AAAS' Science magazine important - it has a section on depression, potential causes and cures. - alan On Mon, 15 Oct 2012, Deena Larsen wrote: Hi, I'd like to respond to a couple of points so far: We have a long standing convention of using art to express the otherwise ineffable truths of being-emotions, pain, daily living, spirituality--it is the way to communicate what our souls en(s)(d)ure. The act of writing/creating, whether it be performative or private --the elegy or the journal-- can in and of itself be an anodyne. Moreover, the act of reading /being an audience can be a catharsis. There are a few scenes in literature that I go back to over and over again when I want to *feel* and *release* and *be* and *overcome--or at least cope with* my pain--when I want to help be healed of my depression and agonizing grief. (okokok I admit it, I have a few secret vices. When I am really upset and depressed, I'll declaim the entire Wasteland, but when I just want a good cry, I open up the Little Princess to the scene where Sarah finds her father has died. There now, you know all/some of my secrets.) So to answer Alan, we write/create because in reliving the agony, we can channel it and find a way to survive. To echo the material presented on convention, it is almost entering a paradox, but we do have these conventions stemming back thousands of years (or at least to the greek plays, to chinese literature, to...) that creating in pain relieaves pain, and viewing pain helps to understand it, giving us a perspective we need to deal with our own emotions. So I am not sure we really are breaking conventions when we show the extremity of our pain. Alan wrote: On empyre, I wonder and want to ask - not about avatars, but a more basic question - how do we live with ourselves? and especially for those of us who have experience trauma or war or torture (I fit in the first category only, as if these were categories), how do we live with ourselves? For if embroiling our work in these issues of pain and annihilation solves nothing but brings mourning and despair, anguish, constantly to the foreground, how can we possibly escape? I think these questions are at the heart of the human project, such as it is, and would like to hear from others here, if possible. ?Not sure who wroteThe problem here is that breaking conventions can then become the aim of the art/work, or thus become equally conventional. That is to show the extremity of our pain feeling thought etc, we break convention and then risk becoming as tied in the convention of breaking conventions as we were previously tied in the conventions we are breaking; or we take the risk becoming incomprehensible or repetative, because there are no conventions to interpret us by. Deena Larsen http://www.deenalarsen.net == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt ==___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] VII: free speech and its ends
What happens on email lists is performative on the level of the structure; with people leaving, the list can disappear. So you must have moderation. There's another list I know of, for example, that deals with suicidal people (the moderator actually killed himself - I'm not sure it's still running); my co-founder of Cybermind was on it (who also died, young, of more or less natural causes, a long story - his death set the tenor of the list for a long time), and told me that it was tightly controlled; it had to be. One of the greatest tragedies of the commons was what happened on the newsgroups - most of which were unmoderated; after AOL released about two million subscribers onto the Internet proper, and after the net was (more or less) privatized, they were hit with so much unstoppable spam, that they stopped functioning altogether as communities. - Alan On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, l...@theorbiolchem.org wrote: If I'm not mistaken, this circle here is kept up by philosophers and intented to be read by philosophers. In philosophy there is no such term as hate speach, but in philosphy there is much reasoning (even if indirect) for free speach. Without free speach philosphy is dead. And let's not forget: everybody has the right to be stupid, and the non-stupid ones have the responsibility to show how stupid the stupis is. Laszlo G Meszaros Quoting Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com: The situation is an aporia; there are no short-cuts but decisions have to be made. When there was hate speech or trolling, the list became unweildy and furious; while I as co-moderator might side with subscribers who wanted completely freedom, the fact was that - out of pain and anger - we'd usually lose about a third of subscriber within the first few weeks, and other postings would go down. In a sense, the list was held captive. On a practical level, there were two ways we dealt with this behind the scenes - first, I never made decisions alone; they were always made by the co-moderators together; and second, I would also try to nip things in the bud (an odd metaphor, ah well) - if someone joined the list and immediately posted something defamatory about the 'Hebrews' (which happened), I'd immediately unsub that person and ban him or her. There's no solution right for everyone; as you know, this list as well is moderated, and its the moderation that hopefully keeps the discussions alive. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] VII: free speech and its ends
in both cases, people feel their areas are their 'homes,' and that implies one might do what one wants. Fb is a corporate state; email lists are TAZ (temporary autonomous zones), very different, but people feel comfortable in both - Alan On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Rob Myers wrote: The state prosecuting people for what they post on Facebook is a matter of free speech. An admin banning someone who disrupts a mailing list is not. - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre == blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog) email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rq.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
