Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 52, Issue 15
and definitions; I think he'd fine them (a bad typo but worthwhile to keep in the sense perhaps of a cultural economy) problematic, foundationless - one wouldn't circle back but worry else- where... I have a lot of experience with canon-building as a curator, editor, and critic at times - as well as watching histories of experimental film and video unfold (new media thank god is too new for such glue). And I want more than anything to efface this building, which I find is a kind of cultural interference - not opening us to new possibility, but in fact placing blinkers on us. If I'd read Lucan or the Moselle when I was in college, for example, instead of Vergil, I'd be a lot better off, I think. Of course there's no way to know - but it took me years and years to shake off the classical canon and see things fresh and different - and see other things. I remember Serres on Lucretius 'my contemporary' - which is the kind of engagement I think is the moost successful - not proceed canonically, but proceeding among writers, literatures, and cultures, following and opening up different possibilities, trails, traces. And this is most needed with digital literature which is already strangling under far too many definitions - in what? a couple of decades really? Maybe not even that much. It's absurd - far better to think around fields and waves - any modeling that doesn't promulgate models, boundaries, or restrictions - for one thing, wonder increases the further one gets from defining - - Alan, thanks Peace! Davin -- ___ empyre mailing list empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre End of empyre Digest, Vol 52, Issue 15 ** | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | To access the Odyssey exhibition The Accidental Artist: | http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | sondh...@panix.com, sondh...@gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] abstract gestures / digital virtuality
Hi - I've been following this discussion and thought the best way I might participate is to describe the work that I've done with Foofwa d'Imobilite and others over the past decade or so. We went from using video and audio tracks accompanying choreography, to work in Blender and Poser. The Poser work was created from bvh (Bio-Vision Hierarchy) files produced with motion capture (mocap) equipment that used 21 sensors electromagnetically interacting with an antenna. The antenna fed sensor signals into a hard- wired 486 microprocessor that output coordinates; these were fed into a second computer that created the bvh files themselves. we modified the sensors in a number of ways - some through the software interface, and some with limb assignment and position. We did a piece called heap for example - the sensors were dropped in a heap and the bvh file fed into Poser. We did a star piece, arranging the sensors in a star formation on the floor and inverting it by exchanging +r from a sensor position to -r. We also reassigned sensors in several ways - dividing them between two bodies, remapping inversely onto a single body, and so forth. All of this produced bvh/Poser mannequins that were used as projections in live per- formance, or chroma-keyed over dance/performance video. All of this work was at West Virginia University's Virtual Environments Lab, headed by Frances van Scoy. I received an NSF consultancy through Sandy Baldwin and NYSCA grant; through the former, I had a grad assistant from software engineering, Gary Manes, to assist me. We went into the mocap software itself and Gary rewrote it, creating a dynamic/behavioral filter interface, which would produce transforms from the sensor output - before the 3-d assignment to bvh was made. This was modeled on graphic software filtering, but the assignments were different - we applied a function f(x) to the coordinates and/or modified the coordinate mechanism or input streams themselves. The bvh files that were produced were sent into Poser for editing; in some cases, Poser mannequin video was output. But more and more, we edited in Poser to format the bvh for upload to Second Life; this way we had live 3-d performance based on the transforms. This performance could interact within Second Life itself - with other online performers and audience - or through projection, without Second Life, in real-space where performers might interact with the avatars. The bvh files are complex and avatars perform, most often at high-speed, with sudden jumps and motions that involve them intersecting with them- selves. The motions appeared convulsive and sometimes sexualized. Foofwa d'Imobilite used projects direct from Poser - about 100 files - as part of Incidences, a piece produced in Geneva and widely shown. Foofwa, along with Maud Liardon and my partner, Azure Carter, also imitated avatar move- ment - and this fed back, from dance/performance into programming and pro- cessing; at times it has been impossible to tell whether a particular motion stream originated on- or off-line. I've always been interested in the psychoanalytics of dance/performance, beginning with Acconci's and Anderson's early work years ago. With Sl/ live performance, we've been able to explore these things - particularly issues of abjection and discomfort, sexuality/body/language - directly. Two other modes of representation have been of great use - modified 3-d scanner modeling programs (also from the WVU VEL), and Blender assign- ment, for example, of metaballs to nodes; using both of these, we've been able to create avatars that have no relation to the body whatsoever, but whose movement is impelled by mocap files. These appear almost like dream objects undergoing continuous transform. In SL, everything is pure, digital, protocol, numeric; by 'smearing' the animation input, avatar appearance, and location, we create in-world and out-world experiences that stray from body and tend towards choratic and pre-linguistic drives. We've performed a lot at various limits of SL - on sim edges for example, or at 4k 'up', where the physics changes. The output is the usual - audience in-world or out-world, as well as video and stills. I've had great help in SL programming, and Sugar Seville gave me a very large gallery/museum space to experiment with these things - this was from June 08 until March 09. I created complex performance spaces that were literally impossible to navigate; for both audience and performer, everything was negotiation. The results of this work can be best seen in my files at http://www.alansondheim.org/ or at http://odysseyart.ning.com or through Foofwa's site http://www.foofwa.com . Foofwa, Maud, Azure, and myself all traveled to the Alps where avatar work was re-enacted live; the performances were on the edge of the Aletsch glacier. (This was sponsored by a Swiss grant.) What was interesting most to me here was the
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 54, Issue 7
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 09:34:03 +0100 From: Sally Jane Norman s.j.nor...@newcastle.ac.uk Subject: Re: [-empyre-] abstract gestures / digital virtuality To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Message-ID: 38aca5ee9bb2474e8b3ecb1a38c5fb2c1bca8da...@exsan02.campus.ncl.ac.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Windows-1252 Hi Alan, all Thanks for these exciting exchanges. Alan, your 'cosmologies in the small' is a wonderfully evocative concept, and connecting a performing avatar to an object designed to move away from the avatar for me chimes with some deeply archaic images ? e.g. the puppet trying to escape its master in Henk Boerwinkel?s unforgettable piece where the sulky puppet in its booth pulls so hard on the strings manipulated by the visible puppeteer that it brings down the wooden ?cross? to which the strings are affixed ? then miraculously gathers itself together and picks up the cross to use as a crutch to limp triumphantly off the booth stage? - exhilarating and spine-chilling. Please don?t see this comparison as a thoughtless long shot from the algorithmic virtuosities of digitally programmed attachments. I think it generates a gnawing poetic image for the same reason: it artfully tapping into the metaphysics of connections, proxemics, interactions. A blasphemously demiurgic ?black art? no dou bt ? in Tadeusz Kantor?s/ Bruno Schulz?s terms ? essential to my broad definition of theatre, which involves the creation of live, viscerally perceptible fields of relations AS AN ARTEFACT. In other words, as a living, aesthetically invested construct where (Artaud?s) hybrid materials, energies and scales of being get chucked into a single unholy crucible to generate something previously unthinkable. Yes, yes, yes! I also think it's important, at least for Foofwa and myself and others of course, to keep the thickness or inertness of the flesh, the real body, at the heart of things - the puppet example is an excellent example. I don't see reason to make distinction among technologies, only among phenomenologies in a sense, which are fuzzy and grounded in related, but not exact differentiations. I like the idea of proxemics here; Sandy and I are working with a script/program/object complex within which we try to reach one another through gestures that are constantly thwarted - the result is a kind of shuddering - here's http://www.alansondheim.org/dduueett.mp4 that I put up today. I?ve been working with motion capture and other ways of exploring gesture and movement in technologically extended performance since organising a workshop at the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mezieres in 1994 (ouch!), in collaborative situations with artists who?ve been immensely important to/ for me, and am always struck by the ways experiments imbued with/ triggers of the yearning Alan's avatar-performer connection embodies, seem at the same time to form part of this ancient theatrical realm of unholy alliances. This might be where plays on scale, ?cosmologies in the small? (or big) come into the picture. When you can parachute gods into the action ? in ancient Greece, India etc, or bring inert matter alive as in puppetry (and intermediate arts of masks, effigies, automata, Lunar and Martian Rovers, etc), or ascribe autonomous, evolving behaviours to digital entities, this brings about a potently in vivo remapping and inspirational stretching of our usu al frames of reference. I keep thinking of trickster figures in this regard; I've also been influenced by the Japanese Kojiki, perhaps the oldest Japanese text in existence. There's something uncanny about all of this, which for me connected to the idea that we live, our bodies live, within the imaginary. It?s a process of estrangement (ostranenie) in Victor Shklovsky?s terms ? and underpins the Russian avant-garde?s concept of sdvig ? displacement, shift, dislocation ? brought about by subverting rules, scales, foreseeable logics. Forgive me for paying idle lip service to such massive concepts ? I loathe name dropping but feel that these movements, like historical areas to which Stamatia is referring, grasped ? or tried to ? many of the paradoxes we?re focussed on, and that diachronic thinking can crucially inform turn-of-21st century hidebound readings of technology. It's strange, for me the roots are moreso in Weimar performance, in particular Anita Berber and Valeska Gert... Where we?re dealing with live motion, it involves generating and working in a kind of synaptic space, i.e. the space occupied by creative performance energies which uniquely legitimates otherwise inacceptable degrees of hybridisation of diverse materials, forces. Erin?s account of the switch to slow moving tag taps into this somehow ? when the spontaneously frenetic agility of young kids modulates itself to accommodate another quality of
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 7
I was fascinated by the link Paul Brown sent in, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/04/new-augmented-reality-app-unle.html - because of the creativity unleashed; the iphone, whatever, becomes an active tool instead of a receiver. I have two questions, occasioned in part by my relative poverty in relation to this discussion (I can't see my own pieces!) - 1 - What, if anything is being done to eliminate the various headgear or even smartphone receivers that are current necessary to receive AR and its extensions? The last issue of Lusitania, Beyond Form, Architecture and Art in the Space of Media, focuses on the physico-inert-kinetic constructs of situated responsive liquid architectures, some of which have been realized. But even these require an over-emphasis on things. I was taken in this regard by Newstweek which runs interference on a wide variety of platforms, augmenting inscription. 2 - A vast number of people already carry smartphones etc., constantly use them on the move (too many walks/hikes with people staring at the screens etc.); for them, the media environment is already amalgamated, physical reality already augmented simply by the presence of the screen. So there's an enclave set up in the midst of the practico-inert, one occasioned by surplus income, local/technological accesspoints, etc. The second question is related to the first and my previous post - what can be done to extend this, breakdown the enclave? The uses are tremendous - think of a device that might be employed around Fukushima, directly outlining radiation levels as AR. This would have application for all sorts of pollutions; one might use it in a firefight, for example, in order to avoid oncoming. Sorry, I'm writing blurrily at the moment. ... What I'm asking - how does one break the enclave - the sense of privilege AR implies - how does one make the creative version of the $100 or $10 laptop here? Why is this important? It's not in a lot of places, but in the US at this point, 1% of the country owns 95-99% of the wealth (depending on the stats) and the relative income of the poor is decreasing quickly: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110408/ts_yblog_thelookout/off-the-charts-income-gains-for-super-rich and http://l.yimg.com/a/i/ww/news/2011/04/08/inequality.jpg - these are people who would socially benefit from AR, and yet it's totally out of reach. I might add that the elderly obviously fall into this category as well, etc. So is there a way for AR to reach out? Is there a technology that doesn't require technology? Or an AR-technological equivalent, say, of the old Bread-and-Puppet Theater? Finally I want to thank everyone for an fascinating discussion, and it's really heartening to see so much amazing work, so many directions! I particularly want to thank Patrick here, and Mark Skwarek, who has nurtured me to some extent. - Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qy.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 9
Hi - I just want to thank people for their responses. There are so many channels available! The aural seems relatively simple to use and is a great leveller. And it can be incredibly powerful; years ago I wrote about Vito Acconci's performances - they almost always were second person, addressed to you,' as a target or seduction. And stereo aural, which is also relatively inexpensive, places this you inside the listener's head - it's intimate, subject not object, world, not bubble. I think even vibrate modes have their use - as radiation warnings, for example: don't come here! And this doesn't require the phone near the head at all. On another matter, really liked the maquette at gh*(H) - this image is fascinating for its combination of grit and hi tech. Thank you again, Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qz.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based monuments and virtual memorials
Hi - I'm not sure how to reply to this; I've been thinking about it. One thing about locative art is its oddly inert quality - it's _there_ and remains there, is fixed there. It's _there_ in the sense of geographic location, and _there_ in the sense of specific technology needed to reveal it, almost as if it's embedded in the technology, welded to it. The ephemerality lies in the fact that it takes a specific, soon-to-be- outdated technology to run, as well as energy; unlike a physical public monument, the energy is meted out within a specific regime of capital and control. So the 'We' in electracy you talk about is inextricably mixed with capital, with enclaving, and with the specifics of location; only the last is accessible to everyone. In this sense, what you call 'this virtual public sphere' is a 'real private sphere' whose manifestation or represen- tation is is virtual. - Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qz.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] various to empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 12
On Mon, 18 Apr 2011, empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote: Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:44:40 +0200 From: xDxD.vs.xDxD xdxd.vs.x...@gmail.com As the next steps of the REFF project (and its AR drug, and its youth program on the methodological reinvention of reality) we are planning two very powerful actions for the next few months and if, anyone is interested, i can keep you all updated about them: they will go straight into this direction and include in all this a deep and disruptive reflection on capital, and money. Please do keep us updated! - if you have an email list for such, pleaes add me. Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:04:31 +1000 From: Rodney Berry rodbe...@gmail.com That ephemerality is an attractive part of it though. Plaforms live on under emulation and remediation in the newer platforms, like how we watch TV on the internet. There are of course still issues of interoperability (as anyone using linux soon finds out - at leastt it's been my experience). The piece was protrayed as a malfunctioning museum exhibit from way back in 2010, the year that long-ignored predictions of global innundation by elvis imersonators finally came to pass. I'm really interested in this - the idea of failure as inherent in work - could you say more about this? From: Lichty, Patrick plic...@colum.edu To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] JC's post Well, the first thing that I think of is having spoken with one of the protesters on Tahrir Square in Cairo when she visited my school last week. She had mentioned that they had mapped out where all of the police where and what all of the escape routes were in case Mubarak decided to crack down. So, consider this - could AR layers in the public spehere be used as tools for activism, with people dynamically reporting bottlenecks and trouble spots in real time via Layar? Imagine there being an altercation and swinging up your phone and seeing the way out - very Max Headroom. I see this happening though, and it could have been used quite well in Seattle. But what about other applications, like JC's critical US/Mexican border project, or even critical issues regardin abandoned spaces? All of this seems wide opemn for discussion. It would be amazing to have a piece of AR software that could be loaded, like Google maps etc., by anyone, with specific content - an example I gave being radiation levels around Fukushima. So you might have an AR open structure that could delineate areas with specific symbols and content - something simple enough that a person with no programming experience at all could place in an app. Call the app 'Warning' for example. A creator would upload coordinates (or even places by walking around them); would then upload an accompanying symbol or symbols demarcating the area; would then upload a text accompanying both. A user would turn on the app 'Warning' and read out whatever was there. If there were more than one (overlapping or not) AR at the spot, they could be indexed. If someone spammed with an enormous number of AR, the user might be able to get a specific channel number to tune to, etc. The idea would be that the AR would be social, as easy to use as Facebook, interoperable, and capable of responding to everything from crowds/military to radiation leaks. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Avataric -
Hi - This is my last post, since my time is more than up here in empyre, so I'll keep things short. I do agree for the most part with John, but I think his (your) post is overly optimistic; you say In the twenty-first century, not only is identity not fixed or inherited, it is absolutely malleable, subject to continuous invention and re-invention. It is, in short, avataric. - and I just don't see this, given the current (and foreseeable future) political/economic climate. Class identity in the US is hardening; continuous invention and re-invention requires capital or at least access to technology as production, not just reception, and inheritence statistically is becoming increasingly critical (more people living at home because there's no money out there, etc.). Income and racial gaps are increasing, and we have the largest per capita prison system in the world, not to mention overall number of prisoners. The world is appalling for a lot of people, so my question is the usual (stupid) one I ask - for whom is identity malleable? The rest of your post I agree with and thank you for your reply! I'm bowing out of the discussion at this point; I feel I've already written beyond my time here. Thanks again, Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qz.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based monuments and virtual memorials
[This may not have gone through; apologies, if it did. - Alan] Is there the possibility of live AR? - or using bvh files - similar to their Second Life application? So that AR can be real-time interactive? I'm naive here, but it occurs to me that placement of virtual objects is similar to a kind of modernist phenomenology - here at X is Y, etc. I can imagine performance/body art for example occurring in front of someone with an iphone; for that matter, I can imagine the iphone viewer interacting with the performance. So in your description below, this is the case? Could you explain what you mean by the Ontology of AR and why one needs a vocabulary of gestures/movements as starting point? Thanks, Alan On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 9:57 AM, gh hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: One way around the proprietory lock I've been using is the Kinect camera hack. There's an open TUIO driver that allows for connection to any of a number of free software environments including PD. The kinect gives you the interactivity and live video. Using PD gives you the GEM window with openGL rendering or sound or sensor interface. The larger question is what do you want to do. The most obvious is to start with a vocabulary of human gestures and movements as the starting point. Then there is the discussion of where the AR event takes place (on screen, projection, goggles or Real 3D). This reminds of early body art and performance art. Insofar as a simple art system can produce tremendous results. I find it sort of interesting that there is potential for a rigorous discussion on the Ontology of AR and changing human techno-consciousness. On Apr 20, 2011, at 8:40 AM, Rob Myers wrote: The problem is that these are currently immature products relative to previous AR technology. They are also proprietary software, which limits artists ability to address their limitations. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- === Work on YouTube, blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com . Tel 718-813-3285. Webpage directory http://www.asondheim.org . Email: sondh...@panix.com. http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim for theory; also check WVU Zwiki, Google for recent. Write for info on books, cds, performance, dvds, etc. = -- === Work on YouTube, blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com . Tel 718-813-3285. Webpage directory http://www.asondheim.org . Email: sondh...@panix.com. http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim for theory; also check WVU Zwiki, Google for recent. Write for info on books, cds, performance, dvds, etc. = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] AR musings in Leonardo Electronic Almanac
[the same for this - apologies if duplicated - Alan] Hi - The Leonardo article is excellent; the reason SL faded, however, is that it didn't fulfill the dream of virtual life - most people are used to games, and SL has no teleology at all. I've thought of it as reverse AR, since the porosity goes the other way - portals into real spaces, and evidence of those spaces projected into SL. I think Garrett Lynch is a good example of this. In your other email you write: The hype about AR comes exactly from the fact that a device that everybody enjoys and likes to have (smartphone, iPad), and is a symbol of being (let's face it) wealthy and hip, is ALSO capable of doing this new and cool technological thing. Below, you describe it as chic. Are these people then your audience? - Alan On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Tamiko Thiel tam...@alum.mit.edu wrote: Hi Y'all, Leonardo Electronic Almanac just published an article of mine with musings on the urge to augment, plus comments on some of the augments I've been able to encounter in person. These website has the abstract, and a link to a pdf with the full article: http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/cyber-animism_and_augmented_d reams/ take care, Tamiko -- Tamiko Thiel tam...@alum.mit.edu Media Artist http://www.mission-base.com/tamiko/ Manifest.AR Augmented Reality Artist Group http://www.manifestar.info/ Upgrade! Munich A node of Upgrade! International media artist network http://upgrade.reframes.com/ ___ 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-] AR musings in Leonardo Electronic Almanac
You have a way different experience/trajectory of SL than I do. Suburbia? I've been to dozens of sims with interesting stuff; I can't affect your virtual rush of course, but there's a lot more experimentation than sandboxes and the gallery. SL has sifted down demographically of course - it's not suburbia but its sexual underbelly that drives a lot. But there's an enormous amount of creative energy beyond Odyssey. - Alan On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On 25/04/11 08:13, Alan Sondheim wrote: Hi - The Leonardo article is excellent; the reason SL faded, however, is that it didn't fulfill the dream of virtual life - most people are used to games, and SL has no teleology at all. Virtual Reality was infinite blackness with a few fascinating spaces and objects around 0.0, 0.0, 0.0. Second Life is simulacral suburbia. The only regions of Second Life that give me that old virtual rush are the sandboxes with their glitch aesthetic and the Odyssey gallery. Stray more than a few dozen metres from the origin in VR and you fall forever. Stray more than a few dozen metres from anywhere in SL and you're in a strip mall. The teleology of VR was immanent to its form: VR was there to be experienced. The architecture and socialising of games are [more directly] instrumentalized: they are there for you to hack and slash around. Second Life lacks the teleology of either. It's there to be normalized and made unproblematic. Our best hope is that browser 3D + WebSockets + JavaScript break the stifling conformity of Second Life's unified grid and give some more interesting destinations and destinatees the space to bloom around their own co-ordinate systems. - Rob. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- === Work on YouTube, blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com . Tel 718-813-3285. Webpage directory http://www.asondheim.org . Email: sondh...@panix.com. http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim for theory; also check WVU Zwiki, Google for recent. Write for info on books, cds, performance, dvds, etc. = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Tamiko Thiel on cyber-animism
One way I deal with this is through the notions of culture and inscription - that culture is culture per se 'all the way down' in relation to species, and that inscription is the fundamental characteristic of the world, the human body - beyond which lies only the threshold of pain and death, unutterable, ikonic, beyond the Pale or effluence of symbols/the symbolic. Real and unreal are always already problematic, problems, especially given string theory, virtual particles, planck distances, black hole interiors, and so forth; where should the line be drawn? I think not at all. There's no such thing as the 'merely physical or merely visible' (I follow Lingis in this regard; the interweavings are mingled with desire, decay/corrosion, simulacra, etc. It's easiest on the other hand to define augmented reality precisely in terms of hallucinatory constructs, or images augmented, not in relation to the real, but in relation to the technological, images that are fundamentally projects and projected. On the other hand - and there are other hands always, and infinite other hands, given the possible holographic nature of the universe (cosmos), we're all within Plato's cave - only the source of the projections, the horizon, is no more real than the images themselves; everything, even pain, death, thresholding, is within the imaginary. - Alan On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Mathias Fuchs mathias.fu...@creativegames.org.uk wrote: Hi Tamiko, you stretch the notion of augmented reality quite wide, when you include cave-paintings and animist folk-practices. Wouldn't one have to introduce some aspect of conscious understanding of the nature of the augmented when speaking about augmented reality. In other words: if I consider something like a mountain ghost or a river goddess as real and make a cave painting of it, then this painting is part of my reality, it is not augmented reality. The problem is this: If we consider any non-physical or even invisible artefact as augmenting our reality, then reality shrinks down to the merely physical or merely visible. The buffalo of a cave-painting is real for the painter of the buffalo, and even the power of the buffalo and the spirit of the buffalo-god is real for the painter. Those features do not differ from magnetism or rainbows or other real phenomena. I would suggest to call something an augmentation of reality only if it is a consciously introduced element of our environment that we believe to be unreal. Such is a display element in the viewfinder of a camera, a hologram on a bill etc. - not the feather of a bird that we believe to be part of a bird goddess. Do you see what I intend to achieve? I want to keep a difference in between real and physical. This is also of relevance in the light of what the Germans call Positivismusstreit. The side I am on tries to ake a point that phenomena like Freud's es or ich are real because we believe they exist. We would not want to classify them as augmented aspects of reality and as unreal. My question is therefore: I wonder whether it makes sense to distinguish between conscious non-belief or half-belief (Pfaller) extensions of our physical environment (virtual or augmented reality) and the animistic or religious full-belief forms. The latter would have to be called real. Best Mathias On 20/04/2011 04:00, empyre-requ...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au wrote: The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the first forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult artifacts. -- Dr. Mathias Fuchs European Masters in Ludic Interfaces http://ludicinterfaces.com Programme Leader MA Creative Technology and MSc Creative Games Salford University, School of Art Design, Manchester M3 6EQ http://creativegames.org.uk/ mobile: +44 7949 60 9893 residential address: Ratiborstrasse 18 10999 Berlin, Germany phone: +49 3092109654 mobile: +49 17677287011 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- === Work on YouTube, blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com . Tel 718-813-3285. Webpage directory http://www.asondheim.org . Email: sondh...@panix.com. http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim for theory; also check WVU Zwiki, Google for recent. Write for info on books, cds, performance, dvds, etc. = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 22
Did anyone get my reply to Mathias Fuchs? I can't find it; I tried to go to archives - list as Pandora and Cornell - but the latter came up with no archives at all and the former ended years ago. I'm on digest; last time, when I sent the reply out again, it appeared twice. Apologies for this - not quite sure what to do. Thanks, Alan == email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/qz.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] is AR objects?
This is fascinating, below; I think that such anxiety is always the anxiety procured of and/or by our perception of the world in general - our realization at times that meaning is *only* construct, that there may well be no fundamental grounding, no primordial. For us, reality haunts itself in this regard. And perhaps AR points towards that, towards the idea of consensual hallucination, that nothing is as it seems, that everything is continually falling apart. Walk out of the AR target area, and things disappear; the abject is just around the corner. - Alan On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 2:11 AM, simon s...@clear.net.nz wrote: Dear empyreans, I have been enjoying the discussion so far. I would like to question, with Rob Myers, the normalisation and making unproblematic of a simulacral suburbia - wonderful phrase -, such as SL exemplifies, and suggest that it is the very objecthood, as telos of AR, or even as one of its inflections, that gets in the way of its augmenting reality. Adding more objects to reality - the multiplication of representations - does it really augment reality? Or is there a sort of deficit and detraction, an 'owing to' which rather than increasing the richness of experience diminishes it - as it adds interest and even in so doing? I would like to ask how reality might be augmented outside of (over-)drawing on the debt owed to objects and outside the consequent technological over-determinations of an encoded representation of reality (and the subsequent access issues to technical means): what else is it apart from adding objects to reality we can do with AR? The question as to whether the objects of AR are real - or indeed how to make them more (and less) real - seems to me to be secondary to this question of how reality may be augmented. I suppose I am asking where to plug AR in that it might produce something new beyond its technical means (and their renewal - and renewed chicness). And raising the critical spectre of an augmentation problematising and perverting the simulacral satisfaction of a strip-mall secondment of those means through the creation of new senses, a 'plugging in' to 'for' a new sense. The sense of gaming is relevant here not for the fact of plugging the body in but for stripping the body down in order to allow something new to emerge, from a pool of anxiety, maybe. (This anxiety I would speculate derives from the very anxiety that objectivity (in the objecthood) arouses in making promises that it can't keep of an ultimate ground, in the object's inability to keep it real.) Best, Simon Taylor www.squarewhiteworld.com www.brazilcoffee.co.nz ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- === Work on YouTube, blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com . Tel 718-813-3285. Webpage directory http://www.asondheim.org . Email: sondh...@panix.com. http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim for theory; also check WVU Zwiki, Google for recent. Write for info on books, cds, performance, dvds, etc. = ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 88, Issue 5 / resilience
Apologies for posting here (have a bad history w/ Empyre)- a few thoughts - Asking if resilence is the new resistance is already buying into corporate sloganeerig; I worry about that. Is X the new Y is a kind of Wired mag slogan-op and perhaps tends to derail things. I also wonder about the (metaphoric) mirror-neuron effect: one might consider violent government/governing forces themselves as occupiers; they're certainly resilient; they might well see themselves as revolutionary (don't forget the Revolutionary Guard); they're incredibly network; they resist. Who are the Occupiers? The 'real' Occupiers? The word here seems to be losing meaning (if not gaining ground!) by the second - In the USA which is all I can speak about (and not intelligently), at the same time OWS was @ Zucotti, Newt Gingrich called for a reinstallment of child labor, racism was and is violently on the increase, and Republican rhetoric was and is increasingly violent and deliberately ignorant as well. Reams were and are written about OWS, but if we don't have concrete resistance, we're going to see Republican sweeps that will finish whatever might be liberal or open about the US. In other words, no matter what we feel about Obama and the Democrats, we'd better the hell get out the vote; things can get much much worse. I worry phrases like general assembly and world revolution will end up paralleling the kind of Leftist thought swept under at the end of the Weimar Republic. - Alan == eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/ 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/ri.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Benjamin, Peter Weiss, the city as performative?
There's a lot of material on Weimar performance which tallies with this; I'm thinking particularly of performers like Anita Berber and Valeska Gert, both of whom have had a large influence on my work. Interestingly, much of the best performance work, much of the legacy, is the work of women. Gert later came to the US, and opened a cabaret/cafe here in NY for a time; she had an effect on Living Theater. Both Gert and Berber were within the imaginary of resistance; their own identity was on the line. There was also Mary Wigman, many others. This was all swept away of course. I'm just curious - did Weiss reference any of this? On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote: I am reading again Peter Weiss The Aesthetics of Resistance, the best description of Berlin together with Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz. The city is described as a hub of energy, as the place where all converge, where utopian thoughts and political work blends and interact. Curiously I don't find in Weiss work (not only this one but all of his writing, his Marat-Sade, his Process, etc) any reference to Benjamin. They were not in the same age, Benjamin was born 1892, Weiss in 1916. They belonged to different generations and they were intellectually quite different. Weiss saw himself as a people's intelectual, as someone anonymous, as anonymous as the builders of the altar of Pergamus, which play such a principal role in his book The Aesthetics of Resistance. He was a communist and believed in the workers as the base of the society, the ones being destroyed by the gods in the altar of Pergamus. Benjamin chose another path but for both writers the city was this canvas where all activity could be performed and be herself a performer. Ana -- http://www.twitter.com/caravia15859 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/ mobil/cell +4670-3213370 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 -- = 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-] this month, the first week
Hi Ana, Is your book available, and has it been translated? Would very much like to see it. I remember working through Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, and Ernst Friedrich's War Against War (KKrieg dem Kriege), among other texts, while at Eyebeam. I also read a number of Buddhist texts on suffering, but they were personally les helpful. Thanks, Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Hi Alan and good luck in your month here! Interesting in reading about Monika's work, I was very concerned with these topics when I wrote my book about torture and violence and history. As maybe many or you know since my earlier participation in -empyre I was a political prisoner in Uruguay when I was very young. I was tortured, waterboarded and so on, but could not cope with these memories until now, four years ago I wrote. And when I was writing I was in physical pain, my body remembered things I had deleted or forgotten. To be able to write the book I read many books written about pain and evil, body and memory, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, etc etc. I am sad I was not aware about Monika's work at that time! Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi - Monika Weiss, Sandy Baldwin, and myself are on together for the first week. I've been fascinated by Monika's work for years, and earlier this year we performed together, in dual performances, at Eyebeam in New York, while I was a resident there. Her work is concerned with anguish, memory, violence, cultural debris, and related concerns. It is multi-media, involving performance, installation, video, and sound. She writes The transdisciplinary work of Monika Weiss examines relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her current work considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space of a City. We're asking her to begin the week; later, Sandy and I will also post, in sections, a text we wrote together on pain, avatars, and virtuality. I just want to say a few words here, in relation to my own interest in the topic. The internet, inscreasingly dominated by social media, is a safe place for many people; at the same time, it is a Kristevan clean and proper body that hides or bypasses pain and suffering - not through content, but through the nature of the online media themselves. I think this has troubling psychological repercussions, Levinas, say, on one said, and Baudrillard on the other. Alterity, the presence of the other, disappears into pixels, and simulacra, all the way down, take over. So how do we feel, convey, or act in relation to, pain, suffering, and death, online? How can we deal with the political beyond petition? How can we situate ourselves in a world of images and the imaginary? Sandy and I both moderate email lists, but we're a bit unused to this format - if it's a bit rough at the beginning, bear with us! We'll begin with Monika, and later, intersperse the discussion with the text we wrote back and forth. Because we're beginning October 2, we'll continue for the next seven or eight days; our weeks aren't exact. Thanks for reading, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- 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 == 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/rp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] this month, the first week
Hi Ana, I read both below and have a practical question - is the original post, from which the excerpt is taken, available in archives anywhere? The second piece is beautiful and dark and poetic, and oddly undercut, visually, by one of the symptoms of power and how it's deployed online - I mean the words which are doubly underlined and clickable, something you didn't do, but something that was done to the text, bringing up advertisements that had no relation to what you were writing. It's as if the writing itself became a marker of exile from a kind of integrity, undercut by capital - that isn't the case, of course, but I found it disturbing. I think both point not only to the contexting of pain, but to its politics - it's been written about, widely here, that torture doesn't work, that this is why it should be discontinued. But I know, myself, that I'm a coward in this regard, and I can't see why it would work, which makes it all the more horrifying. When we - my friends and I - found out that Bush etc. was applying torture routinely (we had always suspected it, in a clandestine way), it spelled the end of a kind of innocence about good Americans, that I, at least, had been brought up with. I imagine now something very different, a world of torture, and wonder how we, how anyone or anything, can live with that. Thank you - Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Yes I read Elaine Scarry as well, didn't know Friedrich's work, will look for it. Sadly my book was written in Swedish, at that time Swedish was my first language, the language I spoke daily, now I am back in Uruguay and I am translating with a friend's help my book into Spanish. With luck the book will be published in Spanish here next year. But I don't have any conections with a publisher house to translate it into English, you could be my agent, Alan! :) This links are related to the book, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/ and this other, http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-new-country/ (The last one was part of an anthology published some years ago by Serpent's Tail, called the Garden of the Alphabet, we were ten or twelve storytellers, one from each country, I was Sweden's chosen contribution). Cheers Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi Ana, Is your book available, and has it been translated? Would very much like to see it. I remember working through Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, and Ernst Friedrich's War Against War (KKrieg dem Kriege), among other texts, while at Eyebeam. I also read a number of Buddhist texts on suffering, but they were personally les helpful. Thanks, Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Hi Alan and good luck in your month here! Interesting in reading about Monika's work, I was very concerned with these topics when I wrote my book about torture and violence and history. As maybe many or you know since my earlier participation in -empyre I was a political prisoner in Uruguay when I was very young. I was tortured, waterboarded and so on, but could not cope with these memories until now, four years ago I wrote. And when I was writing I was in physical pain, my body remembered things I had deleted or forgotten. To be able to write the book I read many books written about pain and evil, body and memory, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, etc etc. I am sad I was not aware about Monika's work at that time! Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi - Monika Weiss, Sandy Baldwin, and myself are on together for the first week. I've been fascinated by Monika's work for years, and earlier this year we performed together, in dual performances, at Eyebeam in New York, while I was a resident there. Her work is concerned with anguish, memory, violence, cultural debris, and related concerns. It is multi-media, involving performance, installation, video, and sound. She writes The transdisciplinary work of Monika Weiss examines relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her current work considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space of a City. We're asking her to begin the week; later, Sandy and I will also post, in sections, a text we wrote together on pain, avatars, and virtuality. I just want to say a few words here, in relation to my own interest in the topic. The internet, inscreasingly dominated by social media, is a safe place for many people; at the same time, it is a Kristevan clean and proper body that hides or bypasses pain and suffering - not through content, but through the nature of the online media themselves. I think this has troubling psychological repercussions, Levinas, say, on one said, and Baudrillard on the other. Alterity, the presence of the other, disappears into pixels, and simulacra, all the way down, take over. So
Re: [-empyre-] this month, the first week
Thank you for this as well, it's helpful of course and something that surely forms part of the background of this month's topic. Monika will post later tonight, and I think we can also put up part of the pain text Sandy and I wrote. Hopefully others will begin to participate as well! - Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Thank you Alan for your kind words! It's true the advertisements are a part of prize you pay to have the text available online :) But I am too lazy to keep a homepage or a blog updated, that's because I use authorspot because it don't cost me anything. They did the formatting and they have some money back from the publicity. Dears, it took a while to dig into the huge archives of Justwatch, a list mostly composed by lawyers and journalists where I wrote the text in March 2006. At that time I was far to know I should write my book. This is the original post, quoted in other context but the original is there: http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=10411 Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi Ana, I read both below and have a practical question - is the original post, from which the excerpt is taken, available in archives anywhere? The second piece is beautiful and dark and poetic, and oddly undercut, visually, by one of the symptoms of power and how it's deployed online - I mean the words which are doubly underlined and clickable, something you didn't do, but something that was done to the text, bringing up advertisements that had no relation to what you were writing. It's as if the writing itself became a marker of exile from a kind of integrity, undercut by capital - that isn't the case, of course, but I found it disturbing. I think both point not only to the contexting of pain, but to its politics - it's been written about, widely here, that torture doesn't work, that this is why it should be discontinued. But I know, myself, that I'm a coward in this regard, and I can't see why it would work, which makes it all the more horrifying. When we - my friends and I - found out that Bush etc. was applying torture routinely (we had always suspected it, in a clandestine way), it spelled the end of a kind of innocence about good Americans, that I, at least, had been brought up with. I imagine now something very different, a world of torture, and wonder how we, how anyone or anything, can live with that. Thank you - Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Yes I read Elaine Scarry as well, didn't know Friedrich's work, will look for it. Sadly my book was written in Swedish, at that time Swedish was my first language, the language I spoke daily, now I am back in Uruguay and I am translating with a friend's help my book into Spanish. With luck the book will be published in Spanish here next year. But I don't have any conections with a publisher house to translate it into English, you could be my agent, Alan! :) This links are related to the book, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/ and this other, http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-new-country/ (The last one was part of an anthology published some years ago by Serpent's Tail, called the Garden of the Alphabet, we were ten or twelve storytellers, one from each country, I was Sweden's chosen contribution). Cheers Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi Ana, Is your book available, and has it been translated? Would very much like to see it. I remember working through Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, and Ernst Friedrich's War Against War (KKrieg dem Kriege), among other texts, while at Eyebeam. I also read a number of Buddhist texts on suffering, but they were personally les helpful. Thanks, Alan On Tue, 2 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: Hi Alan and good luck in your month here! Interesting in reading about Monika's work, I was very concerned with these topics when I wrote my book about torture and violence and history. As maybe many or you know since my earlier participation in -empyre I was a political prisoner in Uruguay when I was very young. I was tortured, waterboarded and so on, but could not cope with these memories until now, four years ago I wrote. And when I was writing I was in physical pain, my body remembered things I had deleted or forgotten. To be able to write the book I read many books written about pain and evil, body and memory, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag, etc etc. I am sad I was not aware about Monika's work at that time! Ana On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: Hi - Monika Weiss, Sandy Baldwin, and myself are on together for the first week. I've been fascinated by Monika's work for years, and earlier this year we performed together, in dual performances, at Eyebeam in New York, while I was a resident there. Her work is concerned with anguish, memory, violence, cultural debris, and related concerns. It is multi-media, involving
Re: [-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II
Hi - some questions occasioned by what I've been reading here, and also thinking about torture, living through torture. Lamentation seems to imply an other, often disappeared or disappearing, that one mourns for, after, or almost within; torture applies to the self to the depths that there is no other. They are related by suffering, by anguish, and they both seem elsewhere than new or other media - they seem unmediated, even though lamentation may and often does, follow traditional cultural forms. They also seem to involve a pouring out or into; the self is dissolved. Lamentation seems to imply, as well, the second (still living or just alive) dissolving into the third (the dead), in an uncanny way paralleling the second person, 'you,' dissolving into the third, 'he' or 'she' or 'it' as the body might be. So how is all this manifest - or is it - through media? Is, for example, a video then a catalyst - of affect, memory, mourning? I ask myself these questions in the work I do in Second Life or 3d printing as well - Thanks, Alan, and please everyone, join in - == 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/rp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II
I think torture has always been with us; there are signs dating well back into prehistory, and there have been books written, for example, about the Assyrian murals and what they depict. The Central American ball-games weren't innocent either of course. I think it was Lorenz who postulated that humans have gone awry with the development of tools that allow killing at a distance, in spite of deflection behavior, but torture is otherwise than this; it is intimate; the other's body is not only in reach, but is _reached._ I think all of this is tangled with our primate behaviour as ravaging generalists who began with limited food supplies and over-the-top group solidarity, but I really don't know; I do think there are far too many who take pleasure in torturing. I do want to add there is other pain and suffering to consider - I'm thinking of cancer, of the abandonment of the elderly, even of the wildly different accounting for tragedy between, say, the eternal technophilic optimism of Wired, and the constant reminders of world-wide extinctions, local warfares, etc. etc. For me the accompanying images, sound-bites, and videos of slaughter are intolerable, inconceivable; Azure filters them for me, because they reduce me to catatonia. The suffering of the world is overwhelming, in spite of the promise of a bright and glorious future, etc. I don't know how to accommodate all of this, how to think of it or through it. My work deals with the unthinkingness or abandonment of the world, in other words - and it's something Sandy and I considered in the pain text (which we'll send out in a day or so - would rather the discussion continue online for now without more reading from us!). Thanks, Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
Re - weeds - terms like 'weeds' and 'pests' and 'vermin' are very problematic - they reflect only the speaker, not the spoken-for who often is placed in the position of a Lyotardian differend, unable to speak, blotted out. Whenever I hear them, I cringe... == 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/rp.txt == ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. - Alan, foggier, apologies ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) Book of Lamentations in English All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary about the burial of ashes. - Alan Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. ___ 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-] public lament and gardening
mourning, lament, are acts, they're intended, they're cultural expressions - as long as one can mourn... but what happens when mourning, lament, end, not through desire but because the unspeakable becomes manifest - i think this is where celan comes in for example, or the spaces in jabes' books with the words themselves removed - On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: I think mourning and lament are related to the ceremonies of the death. When I did my research as anthropologist I travelled to Mexico and did a fieldwork in Yucatan, the old Maya empire. Their funerary pyramids, specially in Palenque, were very similar to the Egyptian pyramids. Many scenes painted in Palenque's walls were about death, mourning, ceremonies to placate the wrath of the gods. The gods mourn as well, the Greek gods mourned lost sons, dead sons, lost wives. I think mourning and the act of mourning is a very healthy state, when the repressed grief comes ut and is shouted or cried. Ana On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 9:06 PM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: yes, if I understood you correctly Maria, you say that I am not trying to work with grief over ones own complicity or remorse. I am more invested in the notion and symbolic power as well as real experience of communal grief -- this is what oppressive systems fear most -- the symbolic power of the connecting tissue of our emotions but not those on individual level alone On Oct 4, 2012, at 6:41 PM, Maria Damon wrote: Yes, when I mentioned Lamentations, I meant the Hebrew Bible. Old. Grieving for ones city, ones polis, ones people. Also, it seems that this is *not* where you were going, Monika, a sense of grief over ones own possible complicity, real or imagined... remorse. On 10/4/12 5:55 PM, Monika Weiss wrote: While aware of some of the lamentations explored by artists such as Martha Graham (who is not my favorite although I have a great respect for her) -- what I am working towards is a connection with the older, before now, before any specific time, lamentation. My dancer actually took me to Wender's film about Pina Baush last Spring, and while aware of her name I never really knew of this work until quite recently (maybe even Alan mentioned her to me a long time ago) but it took a person whose body literally inhabited my work 'Sustenazo (Lament II)' to discover this work and a feeling of connection. Monika On Oct 4, 2012, at 4:05 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) Book of Lamentations in English All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary about the burial of ashes. - Alan Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider point-of-view, seems based on the manipulation of symbols, but from within is much more of clouded movements with indeterminate focus (see Jacques Hadamard). Thinking itself, in other words, may well have less content than its representations, and certainly its representations in virtual worlds, where everything, one way or another, is determinate and rationalized on a pixel-by-pixel level. ___ 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 M o n i k a W e i s s S t u d i o 456 Broome Street, 4 New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212-226-6736 Mobile: 646-660-2809 www.monika-weiss.com gnie...@monika-weiss.com M o n i k a W e i s s Assistant Professor Graduate School of Art Hybrid Media Sam Fox School of Design Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1031 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 mwe...@samfox.wustl.edu http
Re: [-empyre-] public lament and gardening
Ana, thank you for this and for the site. I've spent some time with it; as with Monika's work, it's overwhelming. I have never had these experiences; I've been shot at, but from a distance. My own grief is sourceless in a sense, and selfish. I do understand about the silence. And the amnesia of cities, which is why it is so important that New York has been recognizing its own history of slavery and draft riots, and why the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan is so important; I always sent my students to the site. - Alan On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: The nearest I was from a massgrave was Jenin, 2002, people were eerie silent around the hole wich was Palestine's ground zero. Under the hole were dismembered people, restaurantes blown in pieces, ashes, bones, lonely shoes. I wrote some texts from there, http://www.this.is/jenin In the total mourning people were silent and the silence were heavier than any shouting... Ana On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote: mourning, lament, are acts, they're intended, they're cultural expressions - as long as one can mourn... but what happens when mourning, lament, end, not through desire but because the unspeakable becomes manifest - i think this is where celan comes in for example, or the spaces in jabes' books with the words themselves removed - On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Ana Vald?s wrote: I think mourning and lament are related to the ceremonies of the death. When I did my research as anthropologist I travelled to Mexico and did a fieldwork in Yucatan, the old Maya empire. Their funerary pyramids, specially in Palenque, were very similar to the Egyptian pyramids. Many scenes painted in Palenque's walls were about death, mourning, ceremonies to placate the wrath of the gods. The gods mourn as well, the Greek gods mourned lost sons, dead sons, lost wives. I think mourning and the act of mourning is a very healthy state, when the repressed grief comes ut and is shouted or cried. Ana On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 9:06 PM, Monika Weiss gnie...@monika-weiss.com wrote: yes, if I understood you correctly Maria, you say that I am not trying to work with grief over ones own complicity or remorse. I am more invested in the notion and symbolic power as well as real experience of communal grief -- this is what oppressive systems fear most -- the symbolic power of the connecting tissue of our emotions but not those on individual level alone On Oct 4, 2012, at 6:41 PM, Maria Damon wrote: Yes, when I mentioned Lamentations, I meant the Hebrew Bible. Old. Grieving for ones city, ones polis, ones people. Also, it seems that this is *not* where you were going, Monika, a sense of grief over ones own possible complicity, real or imagined... remorse. On 10/4/12 5:55 PM, Monika Weiss wrote: While aware of some of the lamentations explored by artists such as Martha Graham (who is not my favorite although I have a great respect for her) -- what I am working towards is a connection with the older, before now, before any specific time, lamentation. My dancer actually took me to Wender's film about Pina Baush last Spring, and while aware of her name I never really knew of this work until quite recently (maybe even Alan mentioned her to me a long time ago) but it took a person whose body literally inhabited my work 'Sustenazo (Lament II)' to discover this work and a feeling of connection. Monika On Oct 4, 2012, at 4:05 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote: which Lamentations are you refering to? (not Martha Graham's Lamentation?) Book of Lamentations in English All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example of my mother shortly before her death, when she had been anesthetized to alleviate her suffering in the hospice. The silence is also the silence at the heart of the signifier; the signifier is both suture and broken suture, covering and dis/covering pain, naming it for those who are suffering, who can no longer hear the name, who are no longer with us, coffin or not - when my father died, there were issues at the cemetary about the burial of ashes. - Alan Alan schreibt: public lament and gardening On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote: Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in Lamentations? Maria, I wonder what sort of critique would be possible? Lamentations seems to bridge the political and the obdurate. When pain becomes overwhelming, silence is at the core and the signifier dissolves; I think this is also the core of anguish. One is left speechless. On the other hand, how much clarity is necessary for political or 'rational' thought? In an odd way this also brings up mathematical thinking - which, from an outsider
[-empyre-] Control Anita Berber Sebastian Droste
Control Anita Berber Sebastian Droste 99[[]][[ 999 control sequences http://www.alansondheim.org/AnitaDroste.mp4 thinking through the empyre list among other things, silence and mourning, butoh, sexuality, the slightest gesture, those which cannot be named, suffering and repetition thing I can about Anita Berber. I identify with the _lunge._ Nightmares throat skeleton throat Anita Berber skeleton Anita Berber Droste and Berber in rehearsal by the hairs of Droste and Berber cut off from the bodies of Droste and Berber a framework where Berber first sadly languished the hairs of Droste and Berber were tangled sadly among them the memories of Droste and Berber performance-fix, cure and cognac, despair, Anita Berber nightrance nakedance in dawndusk morning, mourning, 'I am as pale as moonsilver.' dawndusk morning, mourning, 'I am as pale as moonsilver.' by the hairs of Droste and Berber cut off from the bodies of Droste and Berber a framework where Berber first sadly languished the hairs of Droste and Berber were tangled sadly among the reels where memories of Droste and Berber and nothing remains but fear, and the slightest scent ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] On (severe) Pain Part 3 (dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim)
For the person in abject and insufferable pain, pain becomes the universe; thinking through pain otherwise, as in these writings, is thinking through the entire universe itself in terms of suffering. We assume that in general when one 'does' philosophy or science, one speaks from a position of neutrality and/or health, that a degree of detachment from the body is intrinsic. But one might just as well speak from a position of depression or pain or hysteria, and different cosmologies, of the body especially, emerge. Just as cosmology describes at its asymptote the whole of the cosmos, so abject pain describes in a similar position the whole/hole of the body; there's nothing else. For humans, death, dying, and the universe are entangled; Wittgenstein's drawing of the eye interconnects with all cessation of being. In cosmology as well there is constant speculation on the heat death of the planet, the cold simmering out death of the universe, the ending of all life; all of these are interrelated, and birth/life/death histories of the cosmos parallel birth/life/death histories of species. We somehow believe as well that our body is ours, and our universe is ours; we know no others, but speculate on the Other in existentialism (among other domains) and multiverse; everything is both unreachable and apparently reachable, embraceable. And in both, at the heart of the psychology and physiology of bodies and worlds, there are unutterable fears and drives. - - Alan On Sun, 7 Oct 2012, Monika Weiss wrote: These are very beautiful summaries of your meditations--reinscriptions, thank you Alan and Sandy. Pain as socially visible and already historical from the point of view of others, yet unnamable and meaningless within ourselves. Loss of the ability to signify, to mean, is a shared attribute of pain and mourning. Pain as embodied union of mind and body, in their indiscernible embrace (when it hurts it hurts throughout) --- and mourning as an act, a response to the loss of meaning, to the loss of, breaking of, falling of a part of one self, the entire self breaking, so that it no longer is capable to comprehend itself. Could you expand on the pain's relationship to the body as cosmology to the universe Monika Weiss On Oct 6, 2012, at 11:12 PM, Charles Baldwin wrote: Here's the final part of the dialog (in fact, the notes below are largely by Alan). Again, these emerge from the kernel/core/chora of the discussion of mourning and grief. 110812_004: Pain as separating inscription/history from the inertness of the body; what's read as history from the outside (and thereby entering the social), from the inside is unread/unreadable. The inside is pure substance. 110812_005: Inscription carries, until burial, carries a specific relationship to the body until burial. Burial is a form of reinscription. A line on the body - how is this interpreted during life? during death? 110812_012: Inscription = embodiment and maintenance; maintenance = retardation: what makes for example virtual particles last as long as they do? Retardation - slowing things down, copying, duplicating, a poetics of dispersion, holding-back. See the phenomenology of numbers: data-base, interpretation, intentionality, an immersive situation, memory. In doing mathematics, always dealing with temporal processes. In pain: everything drops away, definable and immersive situations cease to exist. 110812_014: Splintering, splintered nails, leveraging of particles, striations, applicable to notions of binding, constriction, discomfort. 110816_002: Pain of the signifiera: signifier as incision, disturbance, splits between the Pale and beyond the Pale. Pain beyond the Pale? The pain of death: horizon foreclosing its origin and the subject as well. 110816_003: The work I do as obdurate, not grid or mapping, but flows that are not channelized, flows that are mute - relation to pain. The phenomenology of the embodiment of the signifier is also mute. What I do is planless, expands into available technology on a practical level, produces and reproduces that way. 110816_006: My Textbook of Thinking: components of inscription: linkage, syntactical structure, inscription is an ordering of difference, impulse, representation-structure, legitimation structure, maintenance, stabilization mechanisms, positive/negative feedback, field of abjection. Excessive related to corrosion. Difference between fissure and inscription. Relationship of corrosion and scarcity to pain. 110816_007: Phenomenology of eccentric space, Sarduy, de-centering the subject, tied to abjection. 110816_008: Difference between fissure and inscription; pain tends towards fissure; if fissure is same and
Re: [-empyre-] regarding grief and mourning
On Mon, 8 Oct 2012, Johannes Birringer wrote: Ana's references (and the discussion between Alan and Sandy) seem to be to the Real (and yet I sense so much slippage to the virtual in Alan's and Sandy's discussion, surely intended, and if we follow through the idea of the virtualization (opera, machinima, manga comic, poetry) of pain, its dis-location to other genres, then my weary irony finds itself in a discussion, say, about opera, where I'd agree with what composer Thomas Ad?s (Wagner is a fungus) suggested we feel when we watch opera, namely we may very well feel the power of the music, but what are we watching? Operas, Ad?s argues, should indeed be absurd in a way that is truer than reality. But that's just the most absurd form of something that is absurd from the start: music. Music should have no excuse, other than itself. Music is its own excuse. Just want to touch on Wagner is a fungus, since fungi are their own kingdom, closer to animals than plants; along with that, slime-molder are intermediaries, simultaneously animal and fungus, each with the potential of the other, each the entangled virtual of the other's real. Most humans are troubled by slime molds, which are highly organized communities in the gathering or stalk-building phases, but which appear to them as abject, rotted, shapeless, and so forth. Their motility is both microscopic and slowed. They are one of my favorite life-forms on the planet, along with jellies and other troublesome fungi. And they relate here, but it's difficult for me to follow the traces. As far as opera goes, or music or affect in relation to empathy, sympathy, pain, Philoctetes, Ovid's exile letters (which are irritating in their pain and painful in their irritation) and so forth, go or goes, isn't this ground that has been repeatedly covered by everything from analyses of Hollywood cinematic codes to the neurophysiology of pain and mirror neurons? The relations of humans or other species to music for that matter con/figures into the discussion which then seems a bit hopeless. I work my pieces to affect my readers, listeners, or viewers, and the artists I know and love, including you Johannes, do, I think, the same; Laurie Anderson was very clear about that when she said that if you take 45 minutes of the audience's time, you have to give them something worth that period. So here I'm confused about the discussion; admittedly I've been away in Washington, D.C. which is confusing in itself, not to mention sick, me, not Washington, so I may be missing something here? Of course we feel when we watch opera, especially if we have somewhat of an idea of what's going on. Perhaps you are talking about a phenomenology of song? - Alan, feverish ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] II (
Hi Jon again, I think some of these concerns were addressed by you in III, in which case possibly ignore the below. For me, re the discussion, the virtual and the real are inconceivably entangled; on one side, subject/abjection and on the other /virtual elementary particles/particle properties/pheomenology of inscription on the llevel of the life world/inscription itself. These devolve; years ago there was talk of Eddington's table or the physicist's table, which was full of holes, etc., subject to quantum mechanics, etc. That was the 'real' table; in fact, though, I think the table today would be seen as a cultural object, a collocation of particles, etc., just as well, and one can develop ontologies that pertain to or are relevant in relation to particular domains, physics, mathematics, the lifeworld, affect, etc. etc. One looks towards the domains, the properties of the domains, their projects into and among other domains, etc. The problems become different. But there is for me the practical problem, on the level of ordinary talk, how to work within virtual worlds and social media online, and bring pain and the misery of slaughter, torture, etc., not only to the table, but to the subject hirself who is viewing etc. the materials. So this is a practical problem, one outside the subject, outside the body - the construct of pain within these areas, and the other is a theoretical problem - the flooding and de/construction of pain, the abject, the collapse of the signifier, inconceivable suffering, etc., within the body itself. - Alan On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Alan Sondheim wrote: Hi Jon, I think some of these myths are true, that we're too much online and too close to the 'virtual' to see that. You say In either case the virtual world was remote, ?virtualised?, different and disembodied. - but in fact at least from my experince in putting Being on Line and a special magazine issue together, the virtual world was seen exactly as the opposite - intimate, 'real,' entangled and embodied within the body. The comment about the wires maybe refers to I feel the wires article I republished by Andy Hawks - and its basis was affect itself; it wasn't analytical, but talked about the pain and entanglement with the virtual. Michael Current and the Walkers in Darkness list were living and dying embodiments of that as well, as you know. - Alan On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: II I began living online with a thesis in mind, sometime in 1994. I had read much of what was then available as analysis. This is ?ancient history? and the amount of writing was small enough. But what was then available, struck me as fundamentally misguided. Firstly people tended to write about things which were not as if they were present day activities. They wrote about being online as if it was Gibson?s cyberspace with immersive reality, with translocation and working teledildonics amongst other things. They wrote about being online as if it were one domain, which conquered or transcended space, place, bodies and gender. They wrote about being online as if we were enmeshed in the wires or as if becoming cyborg was somehow radical or liberating. They said that nobody knew if you were a dog, and that free speech rained and fertilised everything, so we would have worldwide democracy and mutual understanding. They wrote that capitalism was now perfect, or that socialism was natu! ral. They wrote we were free of the chains of matter. They claimed we would download our souls into the ether. They claimed that we lived in an information or knowledge society, and that knowledge would arise by compounding our opinions and research, and that networks gave superior social morphologies. They claimed that people engaged in immaterial, or virtual, labour. We even had virtual classes. Knowledge workers were central. The less triumphalist said that the internet would corrupt thought, would corrupt presence, would corrupt relationships, would alienate people from reality and responsibility, and was full of deceit. It was Heideggerianly inauthentic or fake; a forgetting of being. In either case the virtual world was remote, ?virtualised?, different and disembodied. Sometimes it seems that such statements are still made today, and I wonder if we have gone beyond thinking the myths that we brought to online life, before we had even had any such life?. jon Some formal writings gathered at http://uts.academia.edu/jonmarshall 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 this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender
Re: [-empyre-] II (
On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: Let's just assume that i don't know what the virtual is, anymore than i know what the real is To me, they look like two (distorting?) views of the same events. Just because momentum and position might be ill defined and entangling doesn't eliminate their usefulness and credence in QM. I want to emphasize two things here, the reason I've been writing on these issues in the first place - on one hand, pain and death are inextricably linked; both diminish the body, and on the other, severe pain, like death, can be so disassociating and immobilizing that the organism (this extends beyond the human) can't be 'reached.' I've seen people in this state and have known others. Even psychic pain and intense depression can make one unreachable until death intervenes. This is one issue for me. The other is the phenomenology of the virtual, which I do find useful; I think there is culture all the way down in terms of evolution, learning, retention, and culture is related to digital phenomena. I've written a lot on the digital as well, on its relation to a presumed eternity and data- banking, on its relation to inscription and standardization/typification, on the potential wells necessary to immunize image storage against deterioration, on the abject's undercutting of the digital, on the digital's relation to the corporate, etc. etc. This predates computers, predates encoding, and you can see all of this already at work in cuneiform and even earlier 'forms' like Acheulian pebbles. On the other hand, your notion of 'online' as fundamental loses more and more meaning every day to me, since it's getting harder to define - is a prosthetic heart monitor or time that may report, like an rfid, online? Are you online if you're on mobile? If you're on mobile on the subway working locally until the train emerges from a tunnel? If you're writing offline and later uploading? The last is a good example since formatting, for example in my case, is already part of the writing itself, even though I'm not momentarily electrically connected to a matrix. The term online is too dependent on the social in an incredibly wide range of associations to be useful; I'm not even sure I can define 'social media' in fact. - Taken together they may be paradoxical. I suspect that all axioms imply paradox, although i cannot prove this. If so, then the real and the virtual are useful to the extent they unsettle each other or open the user to receive something. Depends I think on how small and simple the system is. Same for subject and object - although it seems to me that the subject is as 'virtual' as the object or the particles. Of course. Although, if we use it this way, is the virtual becoming the illusory? Or is it fortifying illusions? And we have the problem of what is not illusory. Is pain illusory? Perhaps sometimes, especially if some VR diminishes it. Perhaps not, but we are not perceiving the nerves, 'only' a translation, but there is no pain perhaps apart from the translation... and the interpretation of what is happening and what is being done. I think 'illusory' is also suspect. If I feel 'illusory' pain, I feel it. This relates for me to the popular notion of depression, that someone should 'snap out of it,' that it's not 'real.' Which is why i prefer 'online' to virtual. Living online depends on social-psychological-technical dynamics, and that combination clearly includes pain, suffering, melancholy, distance, incomprehension, failure, bonding, joy, intensity, exchange, response, etc. Living offline depends on exactly the same things, which is one reason why I find the term suspect; it even hides the differences between, say, what being online meant in relation to the post-modern-culture (PMC) MOO, and what it means in Second Life. Even 'real' VR depends upon software written by people in interaction with a socio-cultural background, it still depends on social dynamics and social understanding - and social dynamics always changes and is changed by its environment - again they intertwine. So VR expresses some social dynamics. Yes. Simply we are hurt by words and images and people. We can be tortured by words and plans, as well as by tools. We can suffer as a result of some intention and suffer unintentionally we can feel people die in words, in images. We can feel our world being destroyed by indiference or direct cruelty. All life is there online, and not diminished. Again, it depends on how 'life' is defined; organic life on this planet for the most part is inscribed and encoded in RNA/DNA; computer AI is also relevant here. - Alan And the problems are not perhaps the same, as the environment differs, but they are similar. jon ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] II (
On Wed, 10 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: No, but neither does it mean that every ill defined binary is useful everywhere... I don't think these terms are as ill-defined as you think and obviously most people find them useful. What i would like is some bigger idea of what the 'virtual' means and what it does when compared with the real, and what its interaction with real does, in ways that opens, or could not be done without it. Basically as Rosset would say, you can't compare it with the real because the real is inert. In fact 'doing' with the real in a sense is already towards the virtual, re: inscription. For example what you write in the next paragraph, is stuff that i have absolutely no issue with at all in terms of its importance, in terms of its general accuracy, or in terms of its relevance for discussion of online life. But i don't see what the concept of the virtual necessarily contributes to it Now this is getting more complex, but again i don't see that i would want to diminish this or deny this, or in anyway downplay the issues. they are quite likely to be fundamental. However, i'm not really sure if you are implying that the virtual is the digital? Or that digital coding is the only kind of coding? or the only important coding? Not important or not important, but coding implies the digital; this is why there are potential wells, protections, built into data, all the way back to the bullae and envelopes. Or another way to think about it - inscription is difference, analog is fissured, the same. I think that coding is always digital at its core or kernel; for example, bandwidth is defined, symbols are separated from each other, and so forth. All of this in real life wears down, sloughs, corrodes, decays - what Kristeva is on about in Powers of Horror when she talks about the abject. If the first then, to me, that would not seem to be a defintion which is usual, however valid it is. If the second then i would be hesitant, - thinking that pain might be discontinuously analogue Being within severe pain is analog, yes, which is why it is so difficult to speak about (Scarry, other sources). And yes, it's a definition which is not usual but there's precedent I'm sure. But are you 'virtual' if you have a prosthetic heart monitor, or are on a mobile? Precisely - I can't answer this because the term is too vague to me. I prefer to be more specific about the situation that i am in or writing about. Then you don't need the word 'online' perhaps at all. Thus why should we assume that being online, is the same as using a mobile, or having a heart monitor? They may have similarities, they may have differences. I still want to be particular Yes, it's a term you brought in, though. Well i can't define social media either, but i will suppose that humans are always immersed in social fields and social histories - even when on their own. social life, interaction with others, seems to be fundamental to almost everything about us. Sure sometime in the future people may reside alone from birth in environments entirely defined by intelligent machines, or intelligent non-humans, but this is not yet very common. Indeed, in the traditional sense, such suppositions are purely 'virtual'. Yes - Taken together they may be paradoxical. I suspect that all axioms imply paradox, although i cannot prove this. If so, then the real and the virtual are useful to the extent they unsettle each other or open the user to receive something. Depends I think on how small and simple the system is. in a positive or negative sense? Neither; what I mean is that if you have a system that, for example, a = a as the only axiom, then you don't get vary far re: paradox. AI is a human social product at the moment Actually, I might argue against that. I'd say it's a manufacture, but I'm not sure I'd apply AI as a human social product - unless you might apply the same to infants - which you might well do, but I wouldn't - My first expression is careless, but what i mean to claim is that human life is not diminished online That is, I would oppose those who take second of the two conventional approaches i listed earlier, that online life, or computer use, is inherently a diminuation of proper life. Of course I agree with you, but care's got to be taken here; I don't think Levinasian alterity occurs at least at this technological point - which is a fundamental issue - if you're turned down for a date online, it's not the same thing as the kind of annihilation that occurs when you're turned down face-to-face in highschool (I know!). Sartre's notion of seriality has some relevance here. and part of the action here, is to argue here that online life is not without pain, not without suffering, not without consequence, not a mere image or excresence on the real - which of course you also argue all the time as well as me - and so do others. I am not
Re: [-empyre-] II (
On Wed, 10 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: Where we disagree I think might be the degree of suffering, or accounting for the ease with which, for example, animal torture might be acceptable online, the ease that slaughter can become a meme, viral, as in the beheading videos of a few years back, etc. For me, part of this occurs because people convince themselves its only an image, its only virtual Hi Jon - think this is really wrong, the idea that people are convincing themselves sidesteps the fact that they're not, they're in lived situations that are fundamentally different than off-screen. But it does not take much empathy to realise that it is not 'just' anything, Doing that takes reinstating online life and images as real really, if different as having the potential to cause further injury, of being ways of inducing and resolving agency I think there are other paths, at least my work explores them. http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim?page=24 was the beginning of a six month residency dealing with this. Being dispassionate and watching is, in some way, agreeing with the perpetrators It is refusing to be open to one's own wounding as well. I don't think so, one isn't actively refusing or agreeing. signing a petition is a first step :) and first steps are good. and usually the last. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] II (
On Wed, 10 Oct 2012, Jonathan Marshall wrote: Alan writes: I don't think these terms are as ill-defined as you think and obviously most people find them useful. but that does not help define them... :) The whole point is they're not subject to the kinds of def. you want; they're much more in tune with Wittgenstein's language games for example. They're imprecise because they're entangled in the lifeworld, Not important or not important, but coding implies the digital; this is why there are potential wells, protections, built into data, all the way back to the bullae and envelopes. I'm not sure here, why does protection necessarily imply digitality? It's protection of the signifier and of the chain of signifiers. Checksums. indeed but all kinds of coding can decay. We don't even have to specify that it is coding everything of a certain complexity decays, wears down etc Decays in the analog, not the digital. Decays because of noise, rupture, etc. Again, I've written about this at length, apologies. Its one reason why i would say the real is not inert, that it undermines itself and reconstitutes itself continually. The real doesn't _do_ anything. Ok. I had thought you are wanting the 'virtual' as the question you asked was: On the other hand, your notion of 'online' as fundamental loses more and more meaning every day to me, since it's getting harder to define - is a prosthetic heart monitor or time that may report, like an rfid, online? in which case then virtual and online both fail to describe the commonality between things which may not have much in common Virtuality and online aren't the same and don't have parallel phenomenologies. If i am writing about life online then why not? that is an attempt at being specific Here we circle again, maybe we should stop? What IS life online? The heart monitor? Electronic surveillance? Facebook? ATMs? All of these? None? i agree that complexity helps. but with a=a it depends. is the system completely closed, is there nothing looking at it (which is not a)? does it say anything? is it meaningful? does it undermine itself because the only way a can equal a is if there are non a's it cannot equal? Yes, there is no -a because all there is, is a=a; that's the entirety. What's meaningful? It's precisely meaningful in this conversation. To the extent that logic relates heavily to tautology, it's meaningful. And actually it doesn't undermine itself - again _it_ doesn't do anything - because this is the entire universe of discourse, defined as such. which is social, and depends upon a history of software writing and a history of theorising, and of interactions between people and people and machines and so on. more complicated than that from within. - Alan ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] VI feud and passion
Mike, I agree with you; most of what went on with Cybermind was and still is fairly heart-warming; there was pain when there was death, but there were also marriages that came out of the list, relationships of all sorts, and the Cybermind conference in Perth, which set the tone of the list for a long time, was exhilerating. I'm surprised at the account below; I'm only writing into Empyre here because I want to support another view of Cybermind here - people on empyre for the most part haven't heard of it, and the list is one of the few that have lasted now for close to twenty years. - Alan On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, michael gurstein wrote: Interesting... As one of the (non-central) denizens/occupants/participants (but certainly not victims) of Cybermind in those days I don't remember it as a place of pain, although I do remember painful episodes -- basically accounts of the pain of others--sometimes onlist but mostly off... Mostly I remember it as a place of motion--ebbs and flows of conversations, personalities, sometimes emotions but with a very strong sense of flow--a sort of time's arrow in flickering pixils... And very interesting people--sometimes even more interesting in the flesh and sometimes less but always with that heightened expectation/possibility that comes from the magic of turning the virtual into the real... M -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jonathan Marshall Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 11:02 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] VI feud and passion VI Amongst my first attempted papers were long accounts of feuds and passions. The first version of the thesis was almost nothing but an account of conflict and pain, of misunderstandings, miscategorisations of others, of impositions, of temper, of exile and resentment. I attempted to relate these to the 'structures of communication', as mailing lists are structured differently to newsgroups, IRC and MOOs - the age shows although the same is true of facebook etc - and hence the easier possibilities of ways of life and actions, are different on each format. Communication structure might be thought of as analogous to Marx and Engel's infrastructure. This supposition implied there was no uniform life online, even if cultural differences offline, brought to the online were of no importance in making that online life, which seemed improbable. Sometimes I would relate these conflicts to the way categorisation of others was used in the offline world (such as gender, political allegiances). The politics of offline life always permeated online space, again whether it was wanted or not, because it allowed meaning to be resolved with some ease and made response possible. And that involved repression, and attempts to avoid repression, to move others, to persuade others, the making of power, and patterns of power and convention, and what could be spoken and what could not. This again was 'concrete' and affective in nature, it was grounded in bodies and bodily or bodily/linguistic responses. [Currently I'm using the term 'information group' to try and work out how wider group allegiances filter information, so that groups have differing views of the world. These differing allegiances then maintain difference and distortion, while rendering others inhuman or inferior or hostile. Communication, in information society, breaks down as a matter of course.] However, to portray Cybermind as simply a long series of hurts, delusions and conflict was missing the mark by a long way. There were the other sides. The ease with which people gave support, even to those they had been feuding with a day or so earlier, the massive intertwining of relationships, and all the correspondence which never appeared onlist, the love affairs, the group meetings, the collaborative work, the way it was used to enable people to live offline. It was dense and not just dense with pain. If had been only pain, how would any of us have stayed so long? Living online, at least on CM, involved a large spectrum of affects and connections. But this is much harder to write about (why does it seem harder to write of joy than pain - for me to write comedy than to write tragedy? Why do we seem to value melancholy as a source of truth?). Hurt seems to channel attentions. Just as small amounts of flame seemed to overwhelm the rest of the mails which went on with either good humour or without connection to the hurt. That was an early 'discovery': that times that people remembered as completely times of pain, were in terms of volume, not. The singleness of mood of some mails overwhelmed the disparate moods of the rest. So what made that the case? 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
[-empyre-] [Air-L] Mark Poster, in memoriam
I think this is apropos on Empyre, Alan -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:23:56 From: jeremy hunsinger jh...@vt.edu To: Cultural Studies cultstu...@lists.comm.umn.edu, ai...@listserv.aoir.org ai...@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] Mark Poster, in memoriam It is with immense sadness that we share the news that our dear colleague Mark Poster, Emeritus Professor of History and Film Media Studies, passed away in the hospital earlier this morning. Mark Poster was a vital member of the School of Humanities, and for decades one of its most widely read and cited researchers. He made crucial contributions to two different departments, History and Film Media Studies, and played a central role in UCI's emergence as a leading center for work in Critical Theory. In the first part of his career, when his focus was on modern European intellectual history, his path-breaking publications included the influential book *Existential Marxism in Postwar France* (Princeton University Press 1975), a study of the intellectual world around Jean-Paul Sartre. When the theory boom hit the U.S., thanks in part to this book, he became a widely sought-after authority on French critical thought, especially the writing of Michel Foucault, whose work he helped introduce to American audiences. He played a crucial role in setting the History Department on its current course, as one of the first departments--if not the first department--in the discipline with a required graduate sequence in theory. In that sequence Mark taught a Foucault seminar that became legendary. His investments in French intellectual history also positioned Mark Poster for crucial contributions to the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine, which he helped start as an informal reading group; by 1987 it was established as a campus research institute. The distinction of Irvine, reflected in the CTI, the graduate emphasis, the Critical Theory Archive, and departmental strengths, still defines the special character of the School, and contributes to its international reputation for scholarly innovation. Hosting internationally known scholars, the Critical Theory Institute with its public seminars and Wellek lecture series soon became one of the global hotspots in the humanities. In the second part of his career, Mark became a seminal theorist of media and technology. He was the founding chair of the Department of Film Media Studies at UC Irvine. Together with Franco Tonelli and Eric Rentschler, he had helped shepherd the Film Emphasis of the early 1980s to Program status by the end of that decade, and then to departmentalization by 2002. In the process he was pivotal in hiring and mentoring faculty who now serve the School's second largest major. Mark Poster was a major figure in the rapid development of media studies and theory in the USA and internationally. While as an intellectual historian he could draw on Frankfurt School thought as well as on cybernetics, he was particularly interested in the potential of poststructuralism for media studies. From his translations of Baudrillard to his dissemination of Foucault, Poster played a highly influential role in the study of media culture, including television, databases, computing, and the Internet; he continued to offer crucial commentary on the relevance to technology and media of cultural theory, and his numerous articles and books have been translated into a number of different languages. Reflective of the breadth of his interests and expertise, Poster held courtesy appointments in the Department of Information and Computer Science and in the Department of Comparative Literature. First hired at UCI in 1968, Poster had recently retired after 40 years of service to the School and the Campus. We will let you know as plans for a memorial event in the School develop. In the meantime, we extend our condolences to his family and to all those close to him. Jim Steintrager, Interim Dean, School of Humanities Peter Krapp, Chair, Department of Film Media Studies Jeff Wasserstrom, Chair, Department of History jeremy hunsinger Communication Studies Wilfrid Laurier University Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series ___ The ai...@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] VII: free speech and its ends
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
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
Re: [-empyre-] performing in virtual
In our culture, at least in the US, frontal male nudity is constantly censored; it's overdetermined in far too many directions. The aggression is definitely there, but actually, I've had more experience of kindness than anywhere else - from you, Liz, Jo, Garrett, Patrick, for example. It's a large and vacant territory and it's easy to avoid problems - until performance time! In a way it's a punk aesthetic - issues of pain transformed, cathartic, and the lack of barrier as you say. The idea of the offensive is always confusing to me; if you're at a punk performance and don't like it, you can always leave - the same in Second Life, or art performance, almost any cultural event. Instead censorship takes over - our ex-mayor Giuliani tried to have the Brooklyn Museum defunded because there was a painting by Chris Ofili he found obscene. Some stuff here - http://www.artsjournal.com/issues/Brooklyn.htm - Alan On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Yael G wrote: Well don't get me wrong. Audience is what makes a performance a performance the fact it is witnessed SL as an environment is quite aggressive. Sometimes it's like everyone around you shouts me me me at the same time. There is no barrier between performer and audience in Second Life They can be as loud as you are and what you do might seem offensive to them. Use male nudity and even though you're in the right frame, that they are seeing something happening in fine arts context and they might choose to disrupt you for various reasons, none may seem valid to you. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] performing in virtual, links
I think that the three videos address some of the issues raised here; the first two seem to deal directly with pain and repressed memories - perhaps others might have some comments? - Alan On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Peter ciccariello wrote: Fascinating! On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Yael G fauchard...@hotmail.com wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_xrIblAys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TOLaHeYWsYfeature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUkg49R2q8sfeature=relmfu ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- New work gallery - http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/ Ephemeral Photography - http://uncommonvision.blogspot.com/ Poetry and writing - http://poemsfromprovidence.blogspot.com/ You can find my art and writing updates on Twitter https://twitter.com/ciccariello == 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-] 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-] 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
[-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
[-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-] 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
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
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
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[-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-] 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
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
[-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-] 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
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
[-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-] 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-] 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
[-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
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-] 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-] 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-] 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-] 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
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-] 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
[-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 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
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
[-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
[-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
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
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-] 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-] 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-] 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
[-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
