Utterly fascinating. Both Alan's "failure" and now this response.
-Peter Ciccariello ARTIST'S BLOG - http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/ -----Original Message----- From: lanny quarles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA Sent: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 00:17:52 -0800 Subject: Re: failure 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: <WRYTING-L@listserv.utoronto.ca> 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. >
