I really do wish that those who are perfectly able to send and receive 1 Mb messages which could easily be greatly reduced by saying inline the important bit + a URL to the bulky bit would not assume that those of us who are not able to receive them can lump it. Actually, I wish it would just occur to them
To me, it's very much like people with big cars splashing through puddles without worrying about pedestrians Let them eat cake People who can't be bothered to think of other people The internet would often run faster if there weren't huge files being sent to multiple recipients quite unnecessarily It's very selfish ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Lewis To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [email protected] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 1:08 PM Subject: [NetBehaviour] INVITATION TO LAUNCH PARTY /seconds 7th December at E:vent, 96 Teesdale Street, E2 6PU, London 6.00pm till late We are pleased to invite you to the launch of the 7th edition of /seconds: sci-fi, utopia, roadside picnics, at E:vent, 96 Teesdale Street, E2 6PU, London on 7th December starting at 6.00pm. After Party till late. Bar, DJs. E:vent in collaboration with Redux /seconds issues 1-6 currently online Issue 7 sci-fi, utopia, roadside picnics "I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my own hand...the wave hesitated, recoiled, and then enveloped my hand without touching it, so that a thin coating of 'air' separated my glove inside a cavity which had been fluent a moment previously, and now had a flesh consistency." [From the novel ‘Solaris’ by Stansislaw Lem] Scene: In the car. Night. [Two Shot] Fred: Whatever you want ... Donna: You drive over to my place, bring the money, we'll kick back, drop some Death, maybe get some Tequila … Fred: Well alright ... [From the film of Philip K Dick's 1977 book, A Scanner Darkly; Linklater, 2005] “Happiness for everybody! ... Free! ... As much as you want! ... Everybody come here! ... Happiness for everybody, free, and no-one will go away unsatisfied!” [From Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky Brothers, 1977; Film, Stalker, Tarkovsky, 1976] “The whole process … is hidden under the surface of our reality … will only be revealed later ... and even then ... the people of the future ... our children's children will never truly know ... the awful time we've gone through ... and the losses we took ... well maybe some minor footnote in a minor history book ... a brief mention with no list of the fallen.” [From A Scanner Darkly, Film, Linklater 2005] Frederick Jameson writes in The Archaeology of the Future [the Desire called Utopia and other Science-Fictions]: "What if the 'idea' of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else?" Whether films are drawn from novels, for example Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, H.G.Wells' Things to Come, who also wrote the screenplay for the film [1936, Menzies] or, Metropolis, co-authored and written as a novel after the film by Thea von Herbau, [1927, Lang / von Herbau], Progress still looks suspiciously of and in historical time and place. Other markers of progressive, future time, Soylent Green [1973, Fleischer] and Fahrenheit 451 [1966, Truffaut] adapted from the novel by Ray Bradbury, move ideas through Luddite mistrust of technocratic advance, to a generally agreed desire in the present to reclaim the planet’s ecology; yet swing the pendulum unawares, backwards, to paradisiacal, Garden myths of origin and return. Futureworld [1976, Heffron] following Michael Crichton’s book and film Westworld [1973] targets and demonises [out of] control robots designed for fantasies. And so on, progress is marked again as symptom in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days [1996, Bigelow / Cameron], pathological desire, fixation, and fetish, captive in cyber-space. [The film's central science-fiction idea uses high-tech equipment to record a person's experience, then distributes that recording to a second person who can re-live the experience over and over as ‘virtual reality’. The idea was mined previously by William Gibson, who featured the squid-like 'simstim' devices in his Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels. From Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto [1991]: "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction...This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." Cyber iconography develops arguably from what Marc Augé terms the 'non-spaces' of transition, and boredom [doubling as spaces of invention] hotel rooms, service stations, airports, etcetera, that are the familiar settings for Philip K Dick's android 'cogito', and 'stigmata'. Dick equalises the non-ideological dead-pan with a salvational attitude, through the pure surface of America’s trash culture to visions of a future running out of gas. In counterpoint, art’s newfound social practices, such as Marjetica Potrc's 'pragmatic utopias', [platforming small land holdings for sustainable use], are autonomies; as architecture, art, and social space, affinities elected by local collectives. Utilising global technologies of high-end satellite transmission Potrc integrates a sci-fi aesthetic within a pre-modern narrative [agricultural or rural], of feudal settlements and 'gated' communities. These projects might suggest a model utopia as the exception to the rule, setting up, for example, Forest Rising at Xapuri, Acre, in the Brasilian rain forest. They could come out of a Dick novel such as 'Martian Time-Slip'. For sure, the hostility towards these isolated ‘spaces of exception’ from corporate and government agencies derives from paranoia fuelled sci-fi, but they are examples of a very real, and banal contemporary experience [the murder of a settlement leader for example]. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels are less worthy social enterprises, but arguably more effective artistically; such as the science fiction Projet pour une révolution à New-York [1970] which conflates the false factualisation of cult communities with art. As a surplus narrative, the ideal exists 'in a dubious relation to the world'. Subverting worthy endeavour by perverse futuristic sexual scenarios, Robbe-Grillet intersperses 'passion' and 'belief' with the disarmingly neutral description of objects such as a potato-wedge. And so on. Is not science fiction now, precisely, historical? In fact sci-fi draws strength from its ironies of worn out performance and redundant ideology, or machine malfunction, against the impossibility of imaging Utopias. Narratives need endings, even open-ended or bad ones; and so too technology, like writing, is suited to speak of new technologies beyond frame and closure - that's what defines the limit and extends it as genre at the same time. Think of 'La Jetée', Chris Marker's 1962 ciné-roman; black and white stills, classical music and a visceral vision of an unknowable time-skewed future. It tells the love story of a post-nuclear experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed (i.e. optically printed) photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace with no dialogue and a voice-over, ending darkly, and beautifully. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36mm and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. Philip K Dick's 1977 novel 'A Scanner Darkly' recently transforms book into film [by avant-garde filmmaker Richard Linklater, 2006], in the appropriate style of a 'progressive' hybrid. The graphic novel enhanced through computer software, conjoins Pop Art’s acid humour within a simulated ciné-realism, setting its action upon the hallucinated terrain of Orange County in a vision of the near future, unsurprisingly accurate [1994] of California's suburban sprawl. Scanner Darkly concerns the drug industry of 'Substance D', derived from a blue flower, the 'D' ultimately standing for Death or at the very least its 'jouissance' of taking illicit pleasure in the contract with the phantasmatic, an identification followed by inevitable disappointment. "Oh…it’s not it..." ‘D’ distribution, surveillance and symptomatic paranoia are acted out at a level of back-yard familiarity seeded from counter -culture 60s radicals and drug-users (under surveillance) like Dick, during the Nixon years. Things have, yes and no, progressed. The confrontation with any new consciousness [call it evil, alien, or at least something beyond comfortable notions of human life and death] might be best staged in the real as if 'somewhere else'. In both the novel and film Solaris (by Stansislaw Lem,1961,and Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972 respectively), the alien is the ocean, Solaris, who vividly conjures, without any explanation, fantasies of undeniable awe, complexity and terror for its observers. Solaris is a negative proof of our own 'human' limit, as what Brian Massumi might advocate as the moment of 'something else' non-human, for a revolution in the here and now, fomenting discontent in the 'oceanic' brain’, by simulations undreamt of; the melt-down of past and future. Ursula K Le Guin's Legend of Earthsea would also deconceal these limits in the censorship of her work. [A Whitewashed Earthsea, How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books, Ursula K. Le Guin, 2004] We cannot speak of what we know not. Or can we listen? Science fiction speaks of a deficit economy in this sense; it kicks into activity an affective memory of something lost, or being lost, by getting lost. The very effort to negate that ‘lostness’, to imagine Thomas Moore's Utopia, and furnish it, unhappily ends up betraying the impossibility of doing so. Its fictional traveler Raphael Hythloday [whose first name is an allusion to the archangel Raphael who was the purveyor of truth, and whose surname means 'speaker of nonsense' in Greek, was re-employed under another name at 'faster-than-light' speed on the starship Enterprise [ Startrek original series 1966-69, NBC Television ] for his insightful commentaries. The future, invoked in these narratives [ whether they are architectures, paintings, animations and cartoons, pulp novels and commercial movies and so forth], is never just a product of 'now', nor even purely an acknowledged event that has already taken place. As such science fiction determines its panoramic aesthetic from a broad political unconscious, the rapidly altering consciousness of today beyond the facile and obligatory references to the rival social systems and their technological determinism, East and West. Science fiction exists in the present tense, that's a given. But what about tomorrow, really, will we wish to imagine written or pictured, a fiction for and of 'tomorrow', however briefly glimpsed? That the condition of its possibility is also, and at once, the condition of its impossibility? The alien ‘Zone’, from Tarkovsky’s film, Stalker, [1979] which Chris Marker, in his 1982 film Sans Soleil, references as a space of exception to describe the ‘somewhere else’ in which images and their attached memories are made possible, and transformed, is an aporia, a place of impossibility. It is announced quietly in an 'act proper', when the protagonist pauses, to recite a poem inspired from the rather unpleasant feeling of impasse within an encounter: "…It’s still not enough…" "I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, "I chose," yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done... "...at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back—drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling." [From Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, 1955] executive editors Derek Horton Peter Lewis designer Graham Hibbert editorial board Maurizio Bortolotti Tony Chakar Clementine Deliss Wolfgang Fetz Simon Ford Andrew Hunt Craig Martin David Mollin Sarah Wilson advisory board Steve Arguelles Richard Caldicott Anna Daneri Mark Harris Melanie Manchot Makiko Nagaya Michael Nyman Annie Ratti Dimitra Vamiali Paul Violi Mark Arial Waller Steven Wong ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Find out how you can get spam free email. http://www.bluebottle.com/tag/3
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