Had anticipated making some kind of entry here, leaping, as it were, into the next four-year cycle of be-ing. Four years, what will four years bring to be-ing? Not a thing to be known about it except that it will pass faster than the last leaping year’s gap. Or, perhaps it will stretch into an eternity of enlightened bliss.
the AudioBlast Festival #4 performance
Another big thanks to the https://apo33.org crew! This year was a bit tougher than last for me, as I have to stream from 0200-0300 after which I couldn’t sleep so well. And ended up with a migraine most of the following day. Another weekend, another day of life gone, not to be recovered or caught up with or regained through magic means. Gone. As is an hour of your life should you take on the challenge of listening to one of my dense mixes…
(01:04:40, stereo audio, 150.2 mb)
prescient: Amurikan Facism
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Given the gradual transition from The Federation to The Republic to The Imperium during the last years, facism in Amurika will be very subtle and hard to catch: this, especially in the exercise of power relations among those vying for influence. There will be obvious spectacles worthy of the label ‘facist’ but the real machinations will be largely beyond the reach of ‘the media’ given that ‘the media’ is merely a symptom (or harbinger of infection).
AudioBlast Festival #4: le cri des neurones
Electrical transmission running through our neural networks produce all kinds of stimulations and impulses within us every day. The Internet network can be taken as a comparison of the nervous system that conveys information between neurons, are not exactly the same type of information circulating the same way or to pass this information – Electrical vs. Digital : is put in relation to its copy.
Since its origins, cybernetics seeks to re-create its own reality, whether or not this is wanted, by taking it into account the question arises : how can we transform this approach?
The Shout as a proposal for a sound practice combines its own dematerialization and reinstatement of disruptive wave vibrations in a powerful sound system – Taken as a starting point we propose “The Shout” as a constitutive element of musicality and poetry, all nuances that may transcend technological reality !! Is it possible? Let us know !!
A one-hour live improv stream of material drawn from a sizable analog/digital archive: the multi-tracked material will be selected based on a criteria of neural resonance — during a lead-up to the performance, and during the improv performance itself. There will be various electric field disturbances, recorded in a variety of ways, along with the neural traces of memory, re-constituted from ancient electromagnetic 4-track and cassette tapes.
The controlled behavior of a magnetic dipole is the primary model for all material used to store information via electromagnetics — both tape and hard-drive — to relinquish control of the dipole moment is to spin into chaos and noise.
The Festival starts on Friday night 26 February and runs through Sunday 28 February.
neoscenes was again invited to jump into the festival for a one-hour live improv stream.
Stay tuned here for up-to-date information on catching the live improv stream. Mark the time — (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones).
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Phoenix – 02:00 – 03:00 AM GMT-7 (MST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – New York – 4:00 – 05:00 AM GMT-5 (EST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – London – 09:00-10:00 AM (GMT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Nantes – 1000 – 1100 GMT+1 (CET)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Helsinki – 1100 – 1200 GMT+2 (EEST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Sydney – 8:00 – 9:00 PM GMT+10 (AEDT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Auckland – 10:00 – 11:00 PM GMT+12 (NZDT).
The Festival has their own output stream to tune in to. (or copy/paste https://apo33.org:8000/audioblast.ogg.m3u into VLC or other streaming player). Headphones recommended to capture the ethereal density of the stream!
If you can’t manage to stay awake, we will be archiving this stream for future listening.
addressing technology
Regarding the Ecosa Institute‘s curriculum re-generation (this note is a draft sketch to be sent to the rest of the dev group. Contextualized, it addresses a program that has not, historically, substantively engaged the communicative technologies and the potentials for social engagement that are currently available — but it does not cover the whole of the issue, by any means!):
I’d like to insert more nuance into the technology (digital or not) discussion that we’ve been engaging in off-and-on over the course of the last half-year. I am somewhat concerned with the question of wider relevance of the program in this regard as I compare it with other creative design situations I’ve observed or participated in over the years.
To begin with, I’d like to propose a model of technology that is more of a sliding scale rather than an ‘on-off’ binary of opposites: somewhere between proto-Luddite and techno-utopian positions. Technology can be imagined as a ‘human-constructed’ or ‘human-formed’ means of directing the pervasive energy flows that we are part of/immersed within. Precisely because of this potential to redistribute tangible power, technology sits squarely in the space of the politic, the space of the personal, and the space of the collective. Altering the flows through any ‘making’ process is just that, regardless of the technology employed. Different technologies sit on different locations on the sliding scale based on how, particularly, they affect the ‘ambient’ energy flows of the infinite surround.
Along the sliding scale, there are, for example, profound shifts in the balance between the personal and the social. The issue of personal autonomy is seen as a crucial metric. This autonomy is a measure of control that the individual exerts directly on their existence in the world. What we face in our contemporary techno-social system is a situation where the technologies and protocols are largely not self-determined or determined by a localized community. Autonomy is thus prone to devolve to a greater degree of social dependence: depending on a technology and, more critically, how a technology is understood and used. This is a crucial issue that directly affects an empowered outcome from any process that questions the status quo (of global human-dominated ecosystems).
Several interconnected points: more “addressing technology”
people keep asking me …
For reasons that elude me, many folks that I encountered since buying a house assume that buying one is some joyous and happy occasion. They want to celebrate some hidden dimension of it. This escapes me, at least on the surface. I can propose several possible reasons, but it’s difficult to understand otherwise. Perhaps I’m being congratulated for joining the herd as opposed to being an outlier, a nomad, an artist? Or have people felt sorry for me, living out of a suitcase, as tech-no-mad, for all these years, now that I have a house, I can survive in the world? Or is home ownership the sure sign of fiscal sensibility?
I think it’s the herd thing — roped into the corral, safe, no longer a strange Ranger of the North, ei enää ulkomaalainen, no longer a threat to the established order, ekki lengur útlendingur, boxed in, nicht mehr als Ausländer, someone, not the Other.
the map is not the territory
The following, a (lightly edited) reply (to Brian Holmes) on a nettime thread (that invoked a NYT article on GPS navigation ‘blindness)’.
Hallo Brian —
I had read about that Amurikan tourist in Iceland, and your notes, and thought to re-reflect/meditate on that from a personal/historical Icelandic context:
Naming of location is a traditional, age-old process. It is often the association of place with event (long- or short-term). Event may be natural or social, short-lived or cumulative. The naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. Local suggests that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. Embodied suggests that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. Idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people who lived there.
more “the map is not the territory”diminished potential for resonance
As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. . . For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.
on fingers and toes
Anni, amori e bicchieri di vino, nun se contano mai …
Is this for youth, the drunk, or the nymphomaniac? Or for all ages of the numerically challenged?
Ah, to revel in a life once full of romantic encounters — with cultures, cuisines, conclaves, and, sometimes, complications. So few of these are documented, at least here. It would make a good story. It’s been a long pathway. But these days, can’t afford a good bottle of vino tinto — necessary to lubricate a fluid pen to commit to paper, or screen. Someday. When the time, skill, and courage converge.
Gelassenheit & Dada
Dada is the activated inverse operation of Gelassenheit: what could be more accurate a statement? Now, to completely destabilize it. Mr. Summers says, from Maastricht, “I bought a parachute for my orangutan today. And to celebrate the centenary of Dada I took a plastic sieve for a walk.” There you have it.
‘bedeutungsblind’ of eco-thought
As long as we use technical models in biology without being fully aware that by applying these models we just imply that nature performs according to the projected human requirements and guidelines, we are “blind for the significance (bedeutungsblind)” as Jakob von Uexküll expressed it. We are incapable of putting up questions about the origin and legitimacy of our own needs nor are we capable of asking for the origin and legitimacy of the needs of other living beings. We cannot investigate either, in which ways the needs of the different living beings on this planet are dependent on each other.
Uexküll, Thure von, 1980. Kompositionslehre der Natur. Biologie als undogmatische Naturwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Schriften Jakob von Uexkülls, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Thure von Uexküll. Frankfurt am Main – Berlin – Wien: Verlag Ullstein GmbH.
a very raw pedagogic generality
My international undergraduate and graduate students would often critically challenge/engage me on the content of whatever I was presenting, as well as (sometimes) even the form of the pedagogic encounter [all this tempered on occasion with excessive deference for the ‘professor’]. I learned a lot from them.
To begin with, my Amurikan students would frequently challenge me as to why should they have to extend any effort to learn; who was I to tell them what to do; and why should they be required show up at all to the pedagogic encounter; it was rare to have the fruits of a critical thought process emerge in what passed for (stultifyingly obtuse) discourse anchored firmly in cryptic language usage (think Palin) and pop media snippets (think any form of advertising being passed on as ‘information’).
changing the course of nature
Chuang tzu, on asymptotic knowing
Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog – he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect — he’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar — he’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea – so you realize your own pettiness. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle. more “Chuang tzu, on asymptotic knowing”