There’s a certain magnetism to this city. Drawing you in; pulling even when you’re away. The other song stuck in my head during that Berlin trip was Jimmy Soul’s “If you wanna be happy”—don’t know what that says about me. All those films and novels and short stories that are odes, love letters to nyc; where the city features as a third character, &c&c! (You know what else causes me anxiety? Semicolons! But also shady punctuation in general.)

As the visapocalypse dawns then, it’s time to get my baggage—material and emotional—in order. I had meant to write about Christian Marclay’s The Clock exhibit at length. The last Friday of the exhibit, at the Paula Cooper Gallery was of the beautiful 19° did-someone-turn-February-off variety. Wholly underdressed, then, I spent about two hours freezing in line on 21st and, essentially, the Hudson. One or many human popsicles? My friends grew tired and cold, and left about an hour in. About a half hour after that, I watched a group of kids swingdancing around and over Marclay’s Moebius Loop, a twisted amoebic wall of cassette tapes in the gallery’s front room. Somewhere near 4 a.m., I was shown a place to sit against the theatre wall, and time began again.

There’s been a flood of thoughtful reviews and analyses of The Clock, so I’ll leave it to those better equipped for the meta art-historical narratives. Its premise is, like many great ideas, simple enough. Each minute of the day is announced through a newly spliced film clip. A projected cinematic clock, synchronised with local time. The passive-aggressive digits of a morning alarm clock; variations on velvet stretches and “What time is it?”; shady parked car comic duo countdowns to some bumbling crime. Phones ringing on bedside tables and fumbles for the nightlight before answering, without fail. Insomniac and waking habits that make me wonder, is that how other people do it then?

It feels, in part and unsettlingly, like some kind of voyeuristic reality show. Like the 24/7 Big Brother channel in the UK, except with a look into households across the country. Across the world, I should add, with the token inclusions of oddly unsubtitled foreign language clips. At some level I can realise they’re perhaps filmic tropes. But then again, how many of our everyday gestures are appropriated from the screen, and in turn (re)absorbed and cycled back in? At about 6:37 a.m. I walked back out into my real life, and wasn’t sure exactly what was different.

Bled traces, perhaps. The images here are from Corinne Vionnet’s gorgeous “Photo Opportunities”:

Series of photographic works entitled “Photo Opportunities”, from hundreds of snapshots of tourist locations culled from the Internet. By collecting and then bringing together successive layers of around a hundred similar “photo souvenirs”, these images conjure up questions about representation and memory of places.

Thousands of google images searches, all layered upon each other to create a composite image. Through the eye of the tourist, perhaps, but at the same time, remade and reimagined at each click. Kind of hazy, like childhood, or what I remember (or want to remember) of growing up in Dubai.

- Caesar Diablo

- Nick Bygon

So this site tells me that Mubarak’s finally gone. A nice day in history: Feb 11th saw the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release from prison. Shades of Dubai’s now defunct Channel 33, which used to have a daily 15 minute “Today, in history!” programme. I remember watching it at 19:00 every night for about a year, right before my mother sat down to The Bold and the Beautiful. The one with the stripes and bolt of pink satin in the sax-y opening credits.

- ammar designs (t), Oblind (b-l) and Unknown (b-r).

Wikipedia tells me that it’s also the first anniversary of Alexander McQueen’s death, and the 355th of the same for Descartes. Royally speaking, it’s also the day that Henry VIII became recognised as the supreme leader of the Church of England, and the “traditional date for the foundation of Japan by Emperor Jimmu.” And unrelatedly, is there a name for that series of “Is it _____ yet” YES/NO Magic 8-Ball type memes?

Tim Simons

And so, the Egyptial Revolution? I spent much of yesterday glued to Al Jazeera online, and was moved to tears by the footage of happy reverberations around the Arab world. Which was weird. Beautiful and inspiring as it certainly is, it’s not my revolution, regardless of how much I’ve been vicariously consuming it through photos, emails, links and online tv. Midan Tahrir’s incredibly central so I did end up spending a fair amount of time round there when last in Cairo. Much of it in a cutesy-bouge café with free wireless overrun by American University students—AUC’s old campus is, for better or worse right on the square. It’s not Facebook’s revolution either, for that matter. (This tendency to ascribe uprisings to social media? Biggest boner killer ever, seriously). From what I can find, only 21-24% have internet access, while a mere 5-7% use Facebook. You do the math.

RIMC (t-l), graphic resistance (t-r), and Melanie Cervantes

These images, meanwhile, are some of my favourite solidarity posters and graphics responding to Egypt, and occasionally Tunisia. The first one below, from Omar05, translates to something like “I’m an Egyptian against corruption … against violence … against vandalism … with change and reform” at the top. The bottom says ‘revolution revolution until victory’. And below that, “the people want to bring down/topple the regime”, or ‘el sh3ab yureed isqat al nidham’, which will be a chant familiar to anyone who’s been at solidarity rallies in the past few weeks. The small text in the middle, meanwhile is “we won’t go/leave” (the second part being ‘until he does’). And finally an exciting tense change in the very last image: “the people brought down the regime”, artist unknown. Can you tell I’m a ridiculous fan of root-system languages—!

Otherwise, I’m finally beginning to read fiction again after five years of theory pedestalisation, which is nice. Baileys, glüwein and diet coke left over from a houseparty, though not all at once. A job—and various transgressions—that might be slowly killing me, and a refrain of Fannie Lou Hamer in my head.

Via grinding, comes Sensebridge, with its wearable sensory augmentation devices. They describe themselves as such:

Sensebridge is a research and collaboration group based at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco, California. We are concerned with human-machine interfaces and making the invisible visible. We aim to bridge our senses by augmenting our bodies with wearable electronics. We’re making ourselves (and you) into cyborgs!

First up, Northpaw. I immediately think of the Brooklyn venue Southpaw, which turns out to also be a boxing stance. But this Northpaw is, rather, a Pavlov-for-humans training device. More simply, it is an anklet compass with a north-seeking unit controlling eight vibrating motors. Or as they explain, “the skin senses the vibration, and the wearer’s brain learns to associate the vibration with direction, giving the wearer an intuitive sense of which way is North”. Guy Deutscher’s NYT piece on linguistic determinism and the cardinal directions is interesting here. It is however unclear whether you retain this intuitive sense of direction when not wearing the anklet?

This could regardless have some pretty fascinating applications if the device could be re-attuned to different locations. Always knowing which way to turn towards Mecca for Muslims’ salat, for example. Always knowing which way ‘home’ was, however that might be defined. Or even, always knowing which direction your partner or significant other is in relation to you—although this would really seem to work better with static objects or locations. (Sensebridge also make a LED pendant that flashes in time with your heart). This also probably bleeds into GPS and faintly creepy surveillance technologies, versus the kind of compellingly elemental magnetic north. Speaking of which, did you know that it’s moving towards Russia at a rate of nearly 40 miles/year—!

And from the always incredible we make money not art, 2.6g 329m/s, aka the ‘bulletproof skin’. In which Jalila Essaidi teams up with the Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands to create a “transgenic human skin with a layer of spider-silk embedded in between the epidermis and dermis”. Their work ,which examines this innovation’s social desirability, goes on to win a Designers and Artists 4 Genomics award. I had no idea what transgenics were—it turns out that goats can now grow coats of BioSteel. Here’s an early sketch:

“The next time I kill you,” replied Scharlach, “I promise you that labyrinth, consisting of a single line which is invisible and unceasing.”
He moved back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.
—Borges, Death and the Compass

So immortality? Definitely something the post- and even transhumanists—and I exclude myself from this number—can get behind. Not that this skin, which is yet to be produced and tested, promises this, or even the ability to stop a bullet. The name of the project—2.6g 329m/s—refers to the maximum weight and velocity of a travelling bullet from which a Type 1 bulletproof vest offers protection. Didn’t know that bulletproof vests aren’t always bulletproof. I also don’t know anything about the physics behind this, but does this have something to to with 330m/s as the approximate speed of sound in air? Or rather, is the only deadly bullet the one that creates a sonic boom of sorts?

The interview with the artist isn’t all too compelling, but she offers this:

What I want to realize by displaying this installation, made to enhance protection & safety, is to let people realize that safety is relative.

Safety is a balance and when you go to the extremes with it like I’m doing with this project, this will become more visible. Think about complications during surgery for someone with this skin or the development of better weapons to counter this new safety technology. The possible reduced sense of touch? You always give up something else in order to increase safety; this counts pretty much for all forms of safety.

Surveillance societies, and/or digitally cocooning ourselves—not with spider silk but with social networking technologies and i-Gadgets? Check and check. Mads Peitersen wrung-inside-out look at techno anatomies—which illustrate this post—are then especially apt here. And finally, Amber Case’s TED talk on cyborg anthropology and a second, digital adolescence: “We are all cyborgs now”.

There is no way to perform architecture in a book. Words and drawings can only produce paper space, not the experience of real space. By definition, paper space is imaginary: it is an image

Advertisements for Architecture (1976-7): a great series of postcard sized text-image juxtapositions from architect Bernard Tschumi. The accompanying text says, “Each was a manifesto of sorts, confronting the dissociation between the immediacy of spatial experience and the analytical definition of theoretical concepts”. Wonderful as these are, I don’t know that most people experience architecture through words and images—paper, and now the screen—as opposed to in physical space. Unless architecture cannot be experienced only from the outside, but requires actually traversing the space. This, or some sort of aesthetic hierarchy that relegates some structures as just being ‘buildings’, and not ‘architecture’.

Compelling, though, are these intimations of ‘performing architecture’, and the ‘sensual experience of space’. I’m reminded of the lovely Goethe quote, describing architecture as frozen music. (Is music then liquid architecture? I suppose they at least share atmospheric decay, albeit at different timescales). Among arts, music—or let’s say, sound—would seem to have the best shot at this sensual experience of space. Especially drone or similar, but also convolution reverb and its attempts to mimic specific rooms or spaces. All of this is upholding the physical as some kind of pinnacle of reality or human experience; not so sure about this anymore.

“The function of the Advertisements—reproduced again and again, as opposed to the single architectural piece—was to trigger desire for something beyond the page itself. When removed from their customary endorsement of commodity values, advertisements are the ultimate magazine form, even if used ironically. Because there are advertisements for architectural “products,” the logic of the Advertisements for Architecture asks, Why not advertisements for the production (and reproduction) of architecture?” Triggering desire for something beyond the page! Presumably the paper variety, though now there’s increasingly the screen too.

Otherwise and unrelatedly, Snowpocalypse! Blizzarmageddon! Other variant on meteorological eschatology! Others are presumably more used to this kind of weather but I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. On my Brooklyn sidestreet, there are snowdrifts over 4′ in places. Even four wheel drives/SUVs (same thing?) are getting stuck on the road—an oddly unsettling snowy version of dunebashing and getting stuck in desert sand.


93GJSTPPSTSW

Following the Patriot Act, its iEquivalent: the PatriotApp. Not surprising, or particularly creepy as these things go—as someone put it today, “iSnitches get iStiches”. Fascinatingly, though, is the ascendance of ‘i’ as the new virtual prefix of choice. Not to mention the contracting of the hyphen, no thanks to décapitalisme(!) I wonder if this progression from ‘e’ (e-mail, e-commerce, e-book) to ‘i’ (iPhone, iGoogle, iPlayer) reflects a broader turn? Presumably from ‘electronic’ to ‘interactive? This said, much of the latter comes from iAppleProducts, whose ‘i’ initially stood for ‘internet’, and is now presumably modulated to ‘individual’. Interestingly, Apple did try to introduce an eMac—with the e standing for ‘education’—in 2002, before discontinuing it.

And after the ‘i’, what then? After the ‘interactive,’ and after the ‘individual,’ what then? (Not to mention the soon-to-close Mars Bar). Atomisation/dividuation presumably remains, but after interactivity? Triple Canopy—where I’ve just begun doing stuff— is thinking about this in pretty rad ways. I particularly like the impulse to slow down the Internet. Something else I came across today: the Web Stalker browser, which also approaches interactivity in a particularly lovely visual manner. It’s by I/O/D, aka Matthew Fuller, Colin Green and Simon Pope. Unfortunately for me, their Mac version is a Classic app, which won’t run on my OS (at least without installing something like SheepShaver, if any of you have more patience). A description:

Perhaps best described as a Lynx browser crossed with a Ven Diagram, Web Stalker is based on the belief that the user should be able to define the different functions they want to apply to a Web document, rather being than launched through a finished Web site. The user opens up Web Stalker as a blank screen and then builds windows to perform different functions: a crawler parses Web documents, and a map function creates a local dynamic map that uses circles and lines to represent URLs and links. You use the extractor to grab the text out of the particular document you select to view, and the dismantle window to list the components of page. [via]

Their documentation’s pretty sparse, but this is a decent summary, along with a few other texts, which are compelling if unedited. Despite not being able to immediately use the browser, its idea is seductive enough. Rhizomatic though the internet might be, it presumably has a coded arterial structure. Web Stalker reveals these architectural bones: the streams of code, map of links, and nodal interconnectivities, with even graphics reduced to text. Visual appeal aside, this focus on virtual archaeology and interactivity—and explicitly textual interactivity—is probably the most fascinating aspect. From the same article,

“A lot of the working capabilities within the [standard commercial] browser have been determined by the needs of advertisers, corporation, and so on, rather than experimentation with the format of the Web,” explains Fuller. “So much of visuals on the Web are just noise – ad banners and eye candy – we wanted to give people access to the most important information, which right now are words.”

Granted, the interview is from 1997. I don’t know that words are the most important information anymore? Still, Web Stalker provides an interesting iSynthesis, (if you will) of interactivity, the individual, and the internet. There’s a certain agency denied to the average user, especially with the advent of Web 2.0: the ability to mine, parse and destabilise the internet-as-presented.

As all HTML is received by the computer as a stream of data, there is nothing to force adherence to the design instructions written into it. These instructions are only followed by a device obedient to them. Once you become unfaithful to page-description, HTML is taken as a semantic mark up rather than physical mark-up language. Its appearance on your screen is as dependent upon the interpreting device you use to receive it as much as its ‘original’ state. The actual ‘commands’ in HTML become loci for the negotiation of other potential behaviours or processes.

Several possibilities become apparent. This data stream becomes a phase space, a realm of possibility outside of the browser. It combines with another: there are thousands of other software devices for using the world wide web, waiting in the phase space of code. Since the languages are pre-existing, everything that can possibly be said in them, every program that could possibly be constructed in them is already inherently pre-existent within them. Programming is a question of teasing out the permutations within the dimensions of specific languages or their combinations. That it is never only this opens up programming to its true power – that of synthesis.

As interactivity goes, though it’s still glassily one way. Many sites allow you to comment, and some virtual art projects allow you to otherwise leave your mark or trace or presence. Usually only in the delineated boxes or spaces, though. Is the only way to really viscerally interact—with teeth, with stains—with the internet, then, to hack it? This, on visceral interactivity from Qusai Kathawala is otherwise interesting with its expansion from just the sensory to the empathic (albeit with a turn of global southasian fetish). With the senses, there’s almost only taste and smell left to rupture, as even human tactility has been brought into play by the capital-I Internet. I was just looking up HIDs on—what else, Wikipedia—and came across ‘Human-computer interaction‘. But dig this: “An important facet of HCI is the securing of user satisfaction (see Computer user satisfaction)“.

Is interactivity then measured on some kind of pleasure principle scale? Or something more along the lines of Nietzsche’s pleasure-as-little-series-of-displeasures, with the optimum being a resistant Internet? Worth thinking through, though the latter, though it would seem to contradict my own aim. To adapt Triple Canopy’s phrase how to synaestheticize the internet?

I figured I’d take some time to navigate attribution anxieties, deal with apartment catastrophes, and finally learn how to bake. Also figure out what I really want to do with this blog. Other collective print projects are now fairly dead; this could go either way. This said, some interviews and hopefully broader collaborations (or a new home) coming up soonish. And unrelatedly, editing at Lacanian Ink is starting to feel like karmic retribution for a lifetime of cooing over the impending apocalypse, castration anxiety and so on.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been thinking and writing about text versus noise/silence lately. (Text-as-ascii-characters certainly scream, shout, whisper. But text congealed as PDF and/or image? And on the other end, textually programmed coded music, like SuperCollider in 140 character twitter form. I can only dream of having SC code that clean … ) Here’s Blanchot, M. Dupont, and Zerzan:

“Silence is impossible. That is why we desire it”—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Communications technologies are being superseded by anti-crisis industries as capital’s preferred futurological modality. In crisis, power manifests itself up close, not as itself, not naked, but in the manner of the Wizard of Oz, a roaring face. Noise is the proper medium of contemporary power, it occupies all wavelengths and prevents other sounds, you can feel it pinning you against the wall, but it is careful never to form any discernible words—Monsieur Dupont, Nihilist Communism

So here we are, with the Machine engulfing us in its various assaults on silence and so much else, intruding deeply. The note North Americans spontaneously hum or sing is B- natural, which is the corresponding tone of our 60 cycles per second alternating current electricity. (In Europe, G-sharp is “naturally” sung, matching that continent’s 50 cycles per second AC electricity.) In the globalizing, homogenizing Noise Zone we may soon be further harmonized. Pico Ayer refers to “my growing sense of a world that’s singing the same song in a hundred accents all at once”—John Zerzan, On Silence