Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all Terry replies that he is out there hoping to catch more glimpses of the developing paradigm there (why going to Venice?), the externalized memory system of velocitized selves, the cognitive distributive system. Meanwhile, Terry you describe briefly the Glastonbury Festival -- did you see the performers and the crowds as an example of the new developing paradigm? and if so, can you say why, and how this might be linked to the questions that Simon Biggs proposes as leitmotifs for this month's discussion such as how artists, arts groups, academics and activists might ensure their activities are sustainable as the processes of technologisation and globalisation unfold? I suppose I'm asking about the theme: resistance to what? why futile? futile in regard to what? the unfolding processes of technologisation and globalisation? [Simon from NZ schreibt] ..so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body - since we don't yet know what a body can do... all right -- this idea of the body not knowing yet what it can do, I like it. And yet we do grow older, and so do our behaviors. But can we track back to the idea of resistance, then, and ask here (for example those amongst you here on the list who were at this Resistance ISEA) what exactly would be our intuitive or rational response to what Terry has called, in his first posting, the collective behaviour both online and via social media and then explained as as narrative construct? A few examples have popped up, the ISEA panel on The Future of the Moving Images, Big Data, Mr Snowden and surveillance prisms, the 'collective (social) state from which we individually emerge within a complexity of voices that situate themselves through various performative activities' (this is Simon Biggs's interesting evocation of James Leach's anthropology and what James discussed here in 2010 on the subject of social creativity), junk noise and dropped data (Christine), the children at the Montessori school, the Glastonbury Festival I'd think bodies learn when to resist and when to be exuberant; I just participated in an event, maybe similar to Glastonbury maybe not, at Houston's Pride Parade last Saturday which was mind blowing, hundreds of thousands of people in our community and city celebrating each other and expressing whatever they needed or desired on the streets we had taken for day and a night. The euphoria of the Parade was a physical shared event, a kind of dance, but also expression of political will. This connects it to May 68, and many other moments of irruption of the commune-political and the sexual. Along the lines of the Technicians of the Sacred that I quoted, the poetry I perceived in the happening had a tribal-communal dimension that is unaffected by the beforementioned unfolding processes of technologisation - and it is precisely not velocitized, it requires a slowing down, duration, a slow pantomime relying on bodily memory that is not expropriated. These kinds of memories, and their political dimension of experience and learning, within societal systems of repression of creativity, are related, wouldn't you think, to what we see in Egypt right now, although their's was not a Parade nor a Festival, and yet is described at the moment as 'celebration' on Tahrir Square continuing with the military helicopters providing further spectacle flying over the heads of the celebrants. What liturgies are we witnessing? And how incredibly complex they are. Un-mediatable, this complexity, by facebook or twitter. And no surveillance data were gathered at the Pride Parade, except of course if you think of the celebrants capturing their joy on their cell phones, photographing themselves, embracing themselves each other. Low resolution, less realistic. How do we construct stories of these uprisings? James Leach, a few years back, said that creativity is not outside human experience, but part of its everyday reality. Creativity is inherent in what it is to be a human being because in myth, the actions referred to above, beginning with the acts which established gender, and thus the possibilities for human reproduction and kinship [JL; this does not work in the context of the Pride Parade of course except otherwise], were the actions of the first human beings constituting themselves as human and not something else. In their everyday lives of gardening, animal husbandry, hunting etc., these people are the same as those first creator beings, and thus are constantly partaking of the original ‘creativity’ as they also constitute their lives as human and not something else... Having said all that, and given the underlying premise of all the above is that we, just as Reite
Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle: mere note
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think the body learns to move and will know what it will have done. And with it the mind knows or learns to comprehend how it moves and thinks. For me, the entrainment has to do with rhythms of understanding or intuiting and listening. That is a collective process, as you listen to others and the environment, and so the exograms complement and enrich the endograms or whatever that is, the e/motions of our make up inside. Not sure what 'bad abstractions' you refer to, Simon, but I was not at ISEA and have no idea what resistance is futile to or about. In my opinion, resistance is necessary. And especially to data/big data and virtualizations of knowledge. I tried to look at the panel Terry introduced us to, http://www.isea2013.org/events/imaging-capabilities-of-the-future-panel/ ? is this correct? and it seems the panel discussed new interfaces [..]] already being designed to control high-resolution, high-frequency images, and new research [ ] being undertaken to explore the relationship between humans and their works... yet I don't think Terry spoke about high resolution, or did you? I didn't comment on that, and cannot know what the buzz was like after your panel. But I like stories. And poetry. Evoking the children's play/dance was a way to raise a question about the practical learning in groups of moving together, without big data. Small local in-formation or transformation, perhaps. Images surely, of movement, of also of thinking, and thinking as a way of dancing. In the workshop, language was used as well, but more spontaneously and unprogrammed. I would place it more alongside [a book] something I heard about yesterday, edited by art critic David Antin (Radical Coherency), namely an anthology edited by Jerome Rothenburg in 1968 called Technicians of the Sacred (long live the Paris Commune and the uprisings of May 68) -- You may well have come across this anthology, which I believe tried to outline the possibilities for a new poetry but sought to connect the poetic to the older paradigm world of tribal and archaic poetries, and assorted media, charms, spells, invocations, naming games, lists and litanies, rituals, shamanic visions, dream narratives, also linked to dada, and the transrational zaum poets of Russia (Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov) and this would make me ask how close the interest in life after life, or your new paradigm, is linked to the poetic traditions .. (after all, it was Dante who wrote in the most eloquent Italian, which I recently heard recited in the CAM Houston museum exhibit on Joan Jonas/Gina Pane [http://www.camh.org/exhibitions/parallel-practices-joan-jonas-gina-pane], about his journey into the underworld where he meets the shades). Jonas has it recited in her pantomine performance Reading Dante III: I wandered off the path what else I saw there, I shall relate ..they stopped, drew back a little, I thought this is a human body I see.. and I pushing him, moved forward, but only clasped my hands around my empty chest... this is what I remembered or translated for myself: the meeting Dante has with the shades (alongside Jonas's moving images. Terry, I am happy to change my view about moving images and the choreographic unconscious, but tell me more...) tell us where the mountain rises so I can begin the long descent with regards Johannes Birringer [simon schreibt] so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body - since we don't yet know what a body can do... ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to practical investigations of consciousness rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning), may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic? You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality. Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically. But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter) then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality... is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent, or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed, yet in the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action. May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance class to 4 and 5-year olds? The teachers there had told me that by age three, much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or identity has been set in motion (through the mix of genetic information, learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental influence). I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at such an early stage, and am ignorant of developmental psychology. But I was experiencing the beauty of, if you want, the pantomine and the analogical imagination in the young children, as they went through a series of exercises with me culled from Yoga, sports, dance, vocal training, improvisation, music, rhythm, and the realm of kinaesthesia that I think has not been addressed yet in Terry's postings and the responses. I noticed that the children had no preconceived ideas of dance, but they enjoyed enacting all kinds of movements, also inventing motion on the spot or finding comparisons to what they saw others do (this is group learning, we were 18 people in the room), so external information is adopted and also internal information may not be cognitively known except in terms of motorsensory experience as well as through memory? When I asked the children whether they had seen dance, only three or four said yes (some just looked at me curiously in silence, smiling), and each of them had something different in mind, one young girl mentioned the dance she remembered seeing in an animation (film) - and Terry, since she had no theory or concept of dance (of film for that matter) in the sense that her thinking mind got in the way, she was processing something (moving images or moving bodies). I don't know what. Fascinating, however, was the teachers' quiet instance on observing the children (this month's theme in the Montessori school is insects) and letting them try out, and this practical investigation of dance, that we engaged, was to a large extent kinetic or kinaesthetic-playful (how does this connect to what you call entrainment?), and they did not necessarily follow the instructor, which I enjoyed much. I have not idea whether programs were running already, but I sensed that nothing about the new paradigm (big data, everything placed outside) you evoke mattered here, we were still inside the group of shared activity, face to face, physically close, a good old paradigm. I am also of course thinking of remembering information through the body here. The stories we tell each other return to body. with regards Johannes Birringer ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle: mere note
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body - since we don't yet know what a body can do... On 04/07/13 17:08, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to practical investigations of consciousness rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning), may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic? You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality. Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically. But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter) then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality... is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent, or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed, yet in the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action. May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance class to 4 and 5-year olds? The teachers there had told me that by age three, much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or identity has been set in motion (through the mix of genetic information, learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental influence). I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at such an early stage, and am ignorant of developmental psychology. But I was experiencing the beauty of, if you want, the pantomine and the analogical imagination in the young children, as they went through a series of exercises with me culled from Yoga, sports, dance, vocal training, improvisation, music, rhythm, and the realm of kinaesthesia that I think has not been addressed yet in Terry's postings and the responses. I noticed that the children had no preconceived ideas of dance, but they enjoyed enacting all kinds of movements, also inventing motion on the spot or finding comparisons to what they saw others do (this is group learning, we were 18 people in the room), so external information is adopted and also internal information may not be cognitively known except in terms of motorsensory experience as well as through memory? When I asked the children whether they had seen dance, only three or four said yes (some just looked at me curiously in silence, smiling), and each of them had something different in mind, one young girl mentioned the dance she remembered seeing in an animation (film) - and Terry, since she had no theory or concept of dance (of film for that matter) in the sense that her thinking mind got in the way, she was processing something (moving images or moving bodies). I don't know what. Fascinating, however, was the teachers' quiet instance on observing the children (this month's theme in the Montessori school is insects) and letting them try out, and this practical investigation of dance, that we engaged, was to a large extent kinetic or kinaesthetic-playful (how does this connect to what you call entrainment?), and they did not necessarily follow the instructor, which I enjoyed much. I have not idea whether programs were running already, but I sensed that nothing about the new paradigm (big data, everything placed outside) you evoke mattered here, we were still inside the group of shared activity, face to face, physically close, a good old paradigm. I am also of course thinking of remembering
Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thank you Johannes. Firstly I'd like to say that I see all of these kinds of discussions as narratives which can be adopted or discarded in relation to perceived worth - and that is a completely relativistic judgement. So we're already on slippery ground. Today I've just visited a friend that has cancer and this puts any conversation like this into perspective for me. However: With regard Engrams and Exograms I take my lead from Professor Melvin Donald's work who proposes that memory relevant locations or things outside of the body can trigger memories - and these are exograms. What's interesting to me is the tendency towards a gnostic understanding within the narrative - where we humans are intimated to be more than that which is described within a straightforward materialist description - that we are more, because we may live on within data. I think your comment about being overloaded by information is a reference to the gnostic idea that we have been limited in our sentience because if we were exposed to higher level knowledge, we would be obliterated - Possibly Swedenbourg. I think that you point out a valuable insight that entrainment could play out in us as kinaesthetic-playful. I struggle for an exact language to describe this other level of relationship, not because I can't find the words - but rather because I know that to describe these responses can only be reductionist and therefore limiting - and it is this which I'm really pursuing in thinking about the narrative put forward by Cognitive Neuroscience. Prior theory has sought to describe its subtlest areas, but ratiocination will not do the work this time. Well - 'the good old paradigm' is ok. Donald himself stresses the scaffolded nature of our evolution - and here's the point real - that what it is that we have been, what it is that we now are, and what it is that we are to be, is governed by conservative evolutionary tendencies that have only one goal in mind - that of developing sentience wherever life is, to then change when necessary, to be and do when necessary and during all of this - construct art that means something as an act of bravery. It would be good to have a beer sometime. Best, Terry On 4 Jul 2013, at 06:08, Johannes Birringer johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.ukmailto:johannes.birrin...@brunel.ac.uk wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to practical investigations of consciousness rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning), may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic? You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality. Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically. But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter) then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality... is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent, or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed, yet in the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action. May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance class to 4 and 5-year olds? The teachers there had told me that by age three, much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or identity has been set in motion (through the mix of genetic information, learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental influence). I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at such an early stage, and am
Re: [-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear All, A couple of responses -- I will attempt to knit them but will probably not succeed. I asked my husband, the pediatrician, this morning whether the Monsessori teacher that Johannes described [and what a wonderful morning with kids!] is correct about everything being set by the age of 6. His first reply, She doesn't see 7 year olds, and his second reply, You know, I see kids who at young ages don't seem to be special who wind up surprising me no end with the profoundness of their later achievements. We are elders -- he's treating some grandchildren of kids he raised in his office. And while I asserted in an earlier posting that I came into the world with a mind with a certain temper, in my seventh decade I am still learning what my mind can do. The best cognitive neuroscience that I know of describes an active brain that both structures inputs with perceptual capacities that are themselves constructive and put out many signals, both conscious and unconscious. When we make things there is always both more and less in them than what we think and if we listen attentively to response, we can find out something about what others think in response to what we have made and learn something from it. We are organisms in environments. If we can't see those environments, we can't adapt for self-protection. If we wish to sustain our lives, we must be able to operate under changed signals from a changing environment. So to borrow Terry's language, we are both exo and endo and we cannot lop off either one. What work is meaningful to do? There is no external algorithm for that. But one thing kids are good at that we can perhaps retrieve for ourselves -- they are great scientists. That is, their lives consist in trying stuff to see how it works and as they try they develop a sense of what's out there. Repeated exposure to forms in light over time gives them some guides both to what's out there and what is regular. So how we attend to what is there, I submit, is very important. And the capacity for play which is the science of children. All best, Christina On 7/4/2013 1:08 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- dear all following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to practical investigations of consciousness rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning), may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic? You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality. Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically. But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter) then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality... is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent, or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed, yet in the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action. May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance class to 4 and 5-year olds? The teachers there had told me that by age three, much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or identity has been set in motion (through the mix of genetic information, learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental influence). I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at such an early stage, and am ignorant of developmental psychology. But I was experiencing the beauty of, if you want, the pantomine and the analogical imagination in the young children, as they went through a series of
