There's a difference between secrets and bodies, and people aren't
becoming disembodied at all; I think that's a troubling political position
- one might argue that people are having their bodies stolen from them
(organ mining in China for example, or prisons in the U.S.) and
transformed - but as Carolee Schneeman or Michael McClure would have
pointed out - it's the meat of the body, it's bushmeat as well of other
species and bodies - that's being destroyed. There's a difference between
our secrets - which, to the extent they exist in an arhivable/digital
form, no longer belong to us - and our situation within our own minds -
it's your personality, for example, your poetics (which are brilliant)
that comes through to me, even here in the midst of lower ASCII, all that
interconnectivity. I've often felt that if a machine writes a brilliant
poem, I wouldn't be interested in it - or interested in it only under the
aegis of New Crtiticism (I.A. Richards etc. back in the 40s), which
separates the text from the body, from the habitus. For me a poem is
intimately tied, inherently tied, to the writer in the way that song or
music is. Well, this is off the point, but there's increasingly Queer
politics in new media (judging by Interrupt), as well as a radical
politics of race, etc. etc. - and for me this flies in the face of
technophilia, the absent body - at Interrupt, the body was insisted upon,
over and over again; if anything, it was the contested body in the midst
of all those screens/projections. Downtown here in Providence we see the
fallout as well, with so many disenfranchised people on the streets.
It's this phrase - "desire machines, driven by autonomous
social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
in crisis, to do 'what must be done'." - that worries me; capitalism is
not an "autonomous social virus" - look at mining in West Virginia and the
decisions made by people, by bodies, crippling the state, and the people
who are being driven are by and large the poor who produce machines in the
first places. But this is a contestation among people and bodies, as ISIS
and Yemen and Boko Haram and Ferguson and so many other places, show... So
the question for me isn't about "desiring machine" (so many phrases of D/G
are just _cool_), but whose desire? And by that I don't mean tchnology,
techne, capital, etc. - I'd mean (for myself, I mean, I'd mean), Who?
Thanks, Alan
On Thu, 26 Mar 2015, BishopZ wrote:
You all bring up some great points. It has taken some time for me to
think thru them. I really appreciate everyones responses, and I really
like the perpendicular dimensions suggested by "savage shapeshifting"
- the biological and virtual, performance and archive, mutilation and
desecration.
There is no research that shows that a mind would be such, without a
body. Consciousness is highly defined by personality which depends on
identity derived from our bodies: their movement, adornments,
eccentricities.
While I agree that to 'fire and forget' the body would be an
e desire machines, driven by autonomous
social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
in crisis, to do 'what must be done'.>
extravagant move, discursive to
civil rights, a 'spit in the eye' to
anyone with heliocentric or anthropomorphic sensibilities - Yet I do
find it hard to believe that the desire machines, driven by autonomous
social viruses like capitalism, wont drive humans, particularly those
in crisis, to do 'what must be done'.
I've come to find metaphors of people becoming asleep or as sheep, to
be 'out of date' - rather people are becoming more like disembodied
oxen - our physical world littered with 'drone bodies' the bodies left
behind by the pilots of drones.
To phrase it in another dimension, our ability to record our
experiences, with or without our permission or intention, continues to
out-paced our ability to search, isolate, curate, or understand the
'big data' we hold in our 'hands'. The internet archive and the
eventual 'internet of things archive' are both far deeper than even
quantum computers could reach. Not only will our secrets be buried
there, so too all the secrets of all the recorded generations.
Any thoughts appreciated,
Bz
On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Alan Sondheim <[email protected]> wrote:
We're having a lot of discussion here; we have to archive/document our
performance/s at Interrupt in and out of the Cave, and I find that close to
an impossibility; I turned over all the materials I shot, which are about 8
gigabytes, and they, the director, want it narrowed down, understandably,
but I'm not sure how to narrow down a residency which was in the form of a
continuous opera in real and virtual spaces. I must comply or nothing, I'll
pick out a random video clip, random soundpiece, random image or two and try
to tie things together.
As far as the body is concerned, I keep going back precistely to Rwanda (a
teacher/playwright at Brown has taken students every year to Rwanda to
record, witness, in fact) and other bodies, and what a luxury it must be, to
think of abandoning the body! Certainly this isn't true, for example, for
prisons in the U.S. and the majority of people here and elsewhere suffer
from hunger, violence, etc. So I see the issue as one paralleling cryogenics
or some such - sooner or later the rich will think they live forever, have
access to all knowledge, public and private, incredible life extensions and
prostheses; and they certainly won't live in the West Side of Providence!
It's obscene to me; on G+ I am getting even more the latest new tech ads,
passing as significant advances in human civilization and thought.
I'm not a curmudgeon by the way, I've just witnessed far too much suffering
in the world.
I enumerated objects only in relation to the .5m files mentioned; generally
I don't think of things that way, but as blocks of thought in a way, periods
to pass through.
And Bishop, do any of us intend to keep our bodies? What will we do with
them after we're dead?
Room for a BBC special!
- Alan
==
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web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 718-813-3285
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