and then
and then …
desperate.
where is meaning in a system so completely out of balance?
speed of adjustment too slow,
gyroscopic inertia too high,
center of gravity external,
lightening world spinning, all in a cosmos of dark energies and dark matters: occultation.
at once, briefly, looking up, with the eyes of god: plasma of blood reading plasma of star.
and then, exsanguination and final uplift into the approaching Void
hypostatic inversion, return return return
acceleration. what does this look like? bodycage pressing seat of heart, spine once shattered, now in tensile repair. static, greymetal frames cage neuronal pathways. acceleration of bodily demise is not motion, it is stasis.
it is time.
to make do. quickly. traverse no zenith. accelerate.
A story
“A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.” ― David Abram
The question: what is the lineage of what is now called a story (a fiction, a documentary, a novel, a reportage …)? Where does this symbol-laden, semiotic act come from?
When many tell the same one, or when I tell one to myself, in a dream: these are different instances, very much so, than One telling a story—the story—to many. Numbers.
When the story is a deliberate inhalation and exhalation, the warmth of breath, vital, embodied, incarnate, voice: hypostasis.
Before writing, before the interpolation of symbolic systems, the story was the body: the body, a story.
What is at the core of the desperate need to tell stories in this moment, in this cosmos? What is the psychology of storytelling? Everyone has a story, but the embodied, singular telling is suppressed in the noise of the technosocial now.
And when is enough of this telling? word dialogue Light revolution action. When does telling change to listening, and when do words transform into actions?
I force myself to write something, anything, letters on a screen, filling line-by-line. Though there is little to be said and much to be done. A hollow emptiness that has overtaken days and days. Cosmological movement becomes the singular touchstone that allows demarcated time. The horizon, and zenith, the ecliptic and azimuth. Where is the sun, the moon, Andromeda, Orion, Sirius, and the Milky Way? The temporal where of heavenly transit becomes the story.
life, or
Life, or what’s left of it changes to a different ground state. Still indeterminate, still challenging, still energized. with others, with the self, with the world, with all perceived, all known, all thought of, all sensed.
But, when infertile senses are gone, what’s left? A hollow (corpse)? A teeming emptiness? A plasmatic field? A soul? or no thing.
I prefer no thing. I’m tired of the endless material chase of noun, of structured and reductive sameness. The soul-less naming of the world. The endless descriptions, declensions, and derivations, not to mention re-creations and duplications. Enough is … enough. Gluttony gnawing at the root of satiation. The belly ever larger than the eye. Consume this. It’s gone.
And yet, fully immersed in the stuff of nightmares, no stillness of soul. The body wracked by energies of disorder. Has hypostasis reversed itself, abandoning body’s object?
Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification
Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):
The Regime of Amplification
Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!
*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.
print archive
Glacial creeping, pre-global-warming, through the print archive, I mentally calculate how much effort it would (be/have been) to create a full index of all the works there. Similar to what I did, post-mortem, stripped down to underwear and sweating, for the hundreds of paintings in Kevin’s studio during those hot summer days in 2006. Exploring a dead friend’s oeuvre pulls one’s interior through a filter of “is this it?”, “is this all there is left?”, “what will I leave behind?”, and a more general “what the fuck am I doing?”
Existential? Yup. Dilemma? Yup. Crisis? Yup. Fuggit? You bet.
Material art works are experienced, in this case by the creator, as a burden. There is some spark when pulling archival storage boxes, opening them up, and recalling the original vibe of making, enjoying the surface of the paper, the rich and detailed tonalities, the complex challenge of the performance of printing (what I described to my students as dancing through a print), but all that fades whenever the box is closed and the spine is given the task of moving the portfolio against gravity. Artist and artwork cannot escape the unceasing earthward pull (“fight gravity” a once-owned tee-shirt proclaimed with rock-climbing brilliance). So this becomes the interrogative metric: How heavy is it? Followed by the musing: Why is it not Light? It’s made from Light, but perhaps Light’s tracing on the paper is the carnal, the hypostasis: is the Fall. Ach! For levity, arise!
From The Regime of Amplification to The Road
[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”
trauma
Yes, there was an event; yes, an event began, barely, when she began to say something. But this event did not come to fruition, for nothing, nothing really, happened — except a sudden defamiliarization of my world, an unforeseen estrangement brought about by the least violent of all acts — the mere emitting of sounds — that topple the sense-structure of my world. After she breached my silent existence, silence returned, devouring both of us again by expropriating my ability to respond. So nothing, nothing really, happened. But this nothing, compared to “idle chatter” and the “forgetfulness” of an ordinary conversation, was much more dramatic. It produced in me an effect like no other. Considering what happened, or rather, what failed to take place, I must confess that I was profoundly affected by it. In fact, I am still living that event through the unique nothingness brought home to me by the incident, suffering from it, agonizing over it as an event that keeps returning as a non-event. In any case, the undeniable fact is that there was an event, there took place a situation that, although nothing, nothing really happened in it, is still happening now. It was like a traumatic “primal scene,” forever gone but constantly coming back. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p 224)
Reflecting on the abstracted essence of the gap between the self and the other: it suggests the reality that we cannot share the same point of view. There exists an infinitely deep irruption, separation, or gap, between the Self and the Other. This is defined partly by the presence of the energized matter that makes up our bodies and by the fact that this particular embodied form of matter cannot be collocated or commingled with another body. There is the warm and wet topology of sensual engagement, but this is not collocation, though some would like to believe that it is. The Self will never share the same point-of-view as the Other. My eyes cannot be collocated with yours. I may exchange places with you, but when all is change along the arrow of time, what you experienced there and then, I cannot experience there and now. The interstitial chasm exists within constant change and flow and it exists as long as life is embodied. Some models of transcendence suggest a unification, an omniscient one-ness, after embodiment ends, but here and now we all face the challenge of hypostasis, that puzzling duality of existing in a transitory body now and yet connected with an apparently detachable spirit before and after.
Communication cannot not take place. — ibid, p. 227
and heaven
Bodenlos and Heaven. and the ascent of be-ing as the ground turns to vapor and dissipates beneath the standing feet. how will these thoughts images intertwine? the German, rolling off tongue, with a dropping and slowing lilt. the English, heavy, gravitational in its religious orbit.
walking out of the building where people work at maintaining a certain form beyond hypostasis, Venus is low on the horizon in the irradiated semi-darkness. the semi- arising through the human re-concentration of energies. Licht. Light. Life. das Leben. I look upwards, taking care to stop walking. is this, what I see, is this heaven? it is called the collective signifier: the heavens. what is there to see but the anisotropy of matter revealing its presence? we are coalesced ejecta of novae. Ich fühle mich wie im siebten Himmel. or is it in us? the Empyrean, lifting us, vapors, to the brightness that fills the sky in the days, at the same time as burning in our chests, our eyes, blinded.
and that, though known, is not brought into the path, the way. in ascendant modes, the heart intuits direction.
The foreigner (and foreign) is the one who acknowledges his own being-in-the-world that surrounds him. Thus, he gives sense to the world, and in a certain way he dominates the world. But he dominates it tragically: he does not integrate into the world. The cedar tree is foreign in my park. I am foreign in France. Humankind is foreign in the world. — Vilém Flusser
randomsystem workshop
early in to notam to do email, Kim Cascone gets there shortly thereafter. great to finally meet him. randomsystem workshop starts up. energy begins to coalesce, form. hypostasis. configuring, constellating. such is the vibe of the synchronicity for dropping into this moment that, well, it seems right. what more to ask? clearly a moment in time and a place (both only dance with concepts that Newton was cruelly ignorant to pin down!)
and all the streams of living, they seem so convergent to a transformation that will be complete. someday.
volume
Oh hell, what pretense to think that I could really get any sensible writing done here, when all other mediums seem to fail me as well. Concentration lags behind — a result of very poor physical condition that my body is in, and mentally I am really unfocused … Can’t really point to what is going on. Material stimulation and the stimulation of speaking to others seems to not hold my attention for long. I wonder at how others can focus and make massive and detailed material contributions to this monolithic world of Art. I am left babbling about spiritual transcendence, hypostasis, and being. Out of step with the environment that I have immersed myself in … This Art world. This world of commerce and culture and the intersection thereof. more “volume”
Trane
Here for one more day. A picnic in the afternoon. Still no time to retrospect on the full events of the last few weeks. So it goes. But always this preoccupation with the theme of mediation. It seems rooted in the basic tendency of humans to use the material world as a cover, a carapace against the eventual confrontation with the spiritual — that which is not material, that which is energy (which is all!). There is a rebalancing that must come. An acceptance of the material, acceptance of the hypostasis — the coming-into-the-material-world — existing as a being-in-the-world. (As John Coltrane jams from the CD-player). Always astonishing music comes from him. Long after his death, his spirit rings around the world. Mediated or simply impregnating, quickening, the material essence of life with spirit motions … The studio recording of 26 September 1962 of In a Sentimental Mood with Trane teamed up with Duke Ellington on piano, Aaron Bell on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums is a piece that has resonated in my heart for years. The poignant emotion brimming through the sounds from the opening to the uncertain ending holds an entire life in its brief 4 minutes 15 second duration. Always a pleasure listening to Miles, Trane, and other jazz with Randy — he is an accomplished jazz pianist himself, and even was playing with a band back when he lived in Chicago … Speaking of which I discovered that I share the birthday of the late jazz great Lester Young.