so brilliant// Alan.
or floppy>like, {the valley talk..
Like,
the ocean is sometimes called a 'smooth space' {Nomadology} redolent in a
purely abstract sense
of a specie of freedom or release, but there is of course the old cliche' in
televsion and movies of the
ocean suicide.. the monty python "It's" character heads out there a few times..
one of my favorites
would have to be Richard Burton's attempt in Night of the Iguana, a 'classic'
failed oceanic suicide,
but the one that sticks in my mind is the BBC series Reginald Perrin starred in
the late 70's where
every episode began with him returning from a failed oceanic suicide..
the surfer connotation is interesting too.. especially if we're talking
depleted associations
because that's how I see the whole web-surfing metaphor.. its like a faded old
tv program
and yet underneathe the Jack Kirby Silver Surfer half-tones of depletion,
theoretical shallow
ness there is that image of a kind of 'perfect skin' or 'enhanced skin' the
potential for that shiny
3ds or Maya model of data access, a weird shadow of hegelianism's historical
positivism,
"progressions" congregating about the signifier proliferating with insane
specificity, the piles of
networked science papers, the undeniable evidence that the human race is indeed
producing
intricate forms of knowledge, the sprawl of it is like a kind of salinity, an
evidence of agency
as buoyancy, a kind of Serresian parasite emerging from that ocean of
personological depletion,
living, seeing that ocean, even if, in the midst of a setting sun..what was
there, what was really
there.. vague, depleted still perhaps, but the bulkiness, the physical heft of
the production of
knowledge, the meat sprawl of science, those rakish surfers doing gene research
innocent of
irigaray or even baudrillard, those muscley chemists quantifying the image
down to the angstrom...
if you've never smelled semiconductor grade acetone it's kind of sweet, erotic
in a way..
there is something Marcusean in it, like an old Russian constructivist film,
hoky yet undeniably
good..wholesome even, as if those piers might have been made by the Vesnin
brothers, as if
unbeknownst to us all the ghosts of El Lissitzky and Marcel Pagnol are
cryptically alive in this
dark Proun of film. Marcel Pagnol described this relationship between the eye
and the equipment:
"In a theatre, a thousand people cannot sit in the same seat and thus we cannot
say that any two
of them have seen the same play.. The playwright has to take aim at his public
by taking his
shotgun and firing a thousand pellets at once, if he is to strike successfully
a thousand views in
a single blow.. Film resolves this problem, since the spectator, no matter
where he is in the
theatre, sees exactly what the camera saw..The internet multiplies the theatre,
distributes it
in time and space, giving the spectator control over the 'controls'.. I have
the time to notice
how the pier might in fact bear some resemblance to one of El Lissitzky's
Proun, or just what
kind of depletion might be there.. that control over time is a kind of metaphor
of infinite multiplication,
as if any film might in fact be something like Flaubert's telescope.. that dull
ocean is something like
the formlessness of the quantum foam, the ordered chaos from which nodes of
conscious emerge,
"like beads of mercury on an infinite mirrored plain" all staring
simultaneously at one another.. a test,
a screen, that pier a secret Proun, jutting into the exactness of the image,
rupturing it.. As Benjamin:
"The camera substitutes a space of unconscious human action for that space in
which man consciously
acts. Basically following the maxim "too much justice results in injustice,"
too much justness- too much
exactitude in the definition of the recorded and transmitted form-image-
results in inexactitude, or better,
a relative uncertainty due to the interpretive delirium of the observer, be it
spectator, or tele-spectator..
What we can't see is the map of interruptions, within and within.. and it is in
that sense that media generates
a kind of synthetic dimension exactly, over-exactly perpendicular to that of
the 4 we know, if not a
dimension, then an all pervasive substance of interruptions, redolent in every
surface of image production..
specifically*(?) in this sense a tele-topology of delirium machines
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 6:38 PM
Subject: failure
failure
another in the final series of sped-up surfers off a California beach from
found webcam images.
i want the summer of my life.
in an attempt to regain this, over and over again, i imagined myself surf-
ing in these oceans: utterly useless.
it's like repetitive dreaming, over and over again, but nothing _takes._
in fact there's no reason to look at the video, which can only be a
failure.
on the other hand, the impulse itself, that loss among water, Theweleit.
philosophical immersion, fluid mechanics of Irigaray, Lingis (Excesses).
but a tawdry image, far from the madding crowd, isolated, numerical
infinitesimals juggled in a depleted style. (once this might have been
fun. once this might have been unusual. 1898, for example, Lumiere, for
example.)
the point, punctum, is the dream of immersion and its digital decay.
http://www.asondheim.org/summer.mov
and my own weakness although Gidget was a jew.
