----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
dear empyre:
so sorry - finding your posts fascinating and unique, but - my inbox is a
little overwhelmed? possible to unsubscribe, at least for now?
e
On Sunday, July 27, 2014 10:28 AM, Johannes Birringer
<johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
dear all
Ilsa: Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
Sam: I don't know what you mean, Miss Ilsa.
Ilsa: Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By."
Sam: Oh, I can't remember it, Miss Ilsa. I'm a little rusty on it.
Ilsa: I'll hum it for you. Da-dy-da-dy-da-dum, da-dy-da-dee-da-dum..
[Casablanca]
The difference between once and again might be of interest; our discussions are
reaching a point where I'm not sure what to return to (virtual embodiment as
oxymoron?) or what to turn to - thanks Simon Taylor for your
wonderful response, difficult to read, fully, but I am taken by your reference
to bodily crisis, and the critical, in the figural in art <embodiment of
slapstick, or, more directly, its incarnation, because, after all, the meat
feels as it falls off the chair-lift. The virtual is here too?>, and if I may
mention this, the other week during the Metabody workshop in Madrid, on a free
day, I spend a few hours in the Prado and looked at the current exhibition "El
Greco y la pintura moderna", stunned by the representations of the crucifixion,
the crucified limp hollowed-out unsavory body, in El Greco's often steep
vertical canvases that loom over the viewer, there was also a striking
'Laocoonte' of convulsed bodies fallen, a slithering snake coiled around limbs
...(see
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/at-the-museum/el-greco-y-la-pintura-moderna/).
The pairing of the El Grecos with the moderns was limp (a not so striking
Bacon hung
there too, forlorn, a blob of pink fleshiness smudged near the center of the
picture, weak compared to Bacon's frightening Crucifixion triptych and meat
carcasses). A few rooms further on, I encountered Goya's so-called dark
paintings, and the horrific anthropophagic 'Saturn devouring his Son', a
prolepsis if there ever was one.
The 'différend' that you mention seems to hint at the relative
incompatibilities (of such meat bleeding through?) with our current
<technological facade, or digital interface, or sexy face>>, if I understand
you correctly, and that would to some extent then seem convergent with my
earlier questions to Wesley (and Sally Jane, and Kirk), and picking up on Sally
Jane's response, I don't think my concern was merely a question of
sensibilities though of course I don't know what sound or song was playing in
your head/headset, how it affected you..
Wesley, thanks for your further elaboration on your work, and no doubt there is
conceptual strength and thoughtfulness in what you are working on, also the
political intent seems clearer to me, yes, and what you propose
"Wireless-Fidelity" to become – "a tool with lasting use by inviting the
listener to an explicit awareness of the density and presence of corporate
bodies, opening the door to further exploration and discussion with this
knowledge..." But how can the sound of the soundwalk (and I am basing this
on your explication of the sonifications,
>BT 30.5 % Market Share - Low Bass drones
Sky 22% Market Share - Granular Pianos
Virgin 20.1 Market Share - Female Vocal Samples
>
and the vimeo documentation of the person strolling the streets of Brighton
hearing sound) be construed, by a listener, to make a connection between low
bass drones and corporate ideologies or "reflecting BTs long-standing market
share"?
I am reminded of two other conceptual media works that some of you may have
encountered, one aural one visual.
- CORE SAMPLE by Teri Rueb [2009] (http://www.terirueb.net/core_sample/)
The conceptual explication is very rich, if you perhaps want to take a glance
at it on the website, but when I enacted the soundwalk in Boston Harbor, none
of the sedimented layers underneath "the picturesque surface that
conceals Spectacle Island's complex past, present and future," were "exposed"
to me it through layers of sound Rueb had composed. I would have had no idea
what I am listening to, had I not read the artists statement, and even after
reading, the sounds did not reveal.
- Data_Plex (economy), by Michael Takeo Magruder (2009)
http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns031/
, an online work that utilises live data feeds from real-life scenarios (global
financial markets) to generate three-dimensional geometry and textures in
real-time, creating virtual realms that refract ever-changing, volatile forces
in and upon the real world......A Java and VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling
Language) framework translates this stream of fluctuating information into a
metaphorical cityscape based on modernist aesthetics of skyscrapers and urban
grids. Each company is represented in the virtual environment by a series of
cubic greyscale forms that are proportioned according to factors such as its
stock price, market capitalisation and percentage of the DJI index. <
Michael's work is also conceptually powerful; looking at the citiscape, you'd
have to know the programming to sense the work.
Perhaps, in the spirit of (the political despair in Lyotard's) différend, and
thinking of Wesley's statement about out-sourcing (extraction; and
non-knowledge of algorithmic machines working somewhere in the 'occult'?) and
pop culture delusion – < a portrayal of 'the network' and the many forms it
takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or access to any but
a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of occult knowledge,
beyond the ken of the passive masses [Wesley] > – I would propose that we
have plenty of incidents in recent history that show the "masses" are not
passive, just think, e.g., of the sustained protests in Taksim and Gesi Park
in Istanbul, where some striking embodied theatrical languages were at play
that excited me physically; I supposed the excited body is also what Simon had
in mind?
But did not Susan Kozel, in the first week of our empyre discussion, raise the
issue of encryption? Could you come back to this, Susan?
>I have now become a little obsessed by encryption and what this might mean on
>an affective and bodily level as we continue to expand and transform our
>movement by networked, sensed and virtual technologies. Affect, I believe, is
>already encrypted [Susan]>
respectfully
Johannes Birringer
(and here an epitaph borrowed from a writer who has returned from Taksim where
a play he had written to be staged in a theatre was cancelled due to public
unrest)
Lang ist
Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber
Das Wahre
(Hölderlin)
.....................................................................
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