on exhaustion: to cut away the interior of the body to eliminate differentiation of parts to return parts to dysfunctionality and substance to prepare substance for the irretrievability of the real to create the violence of nourishment for others to blanket others with the loss of proper names to incise the interior walls of the body with illegibility to insist on nothing and everything against difference to create dull and mutilated violence against oneself to shatter the sky within the memory of the other to fear and to have the great fear to crudely inhabit gristle as one might murder an other to cross out sight or sound of populated worlds to suffocate on words within the slight compunction to desperately wish for death forgetting desperation to wake with the sleep of the hopeless to sleep with eyes wide shut against the stitching of the self to suture the limbs on and off upon the uselessness of torso to be spoken for with unutterable violence to be eloquent against the margins of the scream to be present at aborted births and deaths of substance to uncomprehend the muck of repetition to crawl and shatter by virtue of the world's compulsiveness to brokenly obsess to utterly disinvest ===== entre. te te text,. ty ty type. . . . at. en en end aRT. D' D' D'eCRIRE. pO pO pOSTURE. DE DE DE. LA LA LA. MA MA MAIN. ET ET ET. DU DU DU. cA cA cANIF. pR pR pROPORTIONS. D' D' D'UNE. pL pL pLUME. TA TA TAILLEE. sI sI sITUATIONS. DE DE DE. LA LA LA. pL pL pLUME. dE dE dES. fI fI fIGURES. rA rA rADICALES. hA hA hAUTEUR,. lA lA lARGEUR. ET ET ET. pE pE pENTRE. DE DE DES. eC eC eCRITURE. lA lA lA. rO rO rONDE. lA lA lA. bA bA bATARDE. eX eX eXERCISES. pR pR pREPARATOIRES. aL aL aLPHABETS. DE DE DES lETTRES. rO rO rONDES. aL aL aLPHABETS. DE DE DES. lE lE lETTRES. bA bA bATARDES. aL aL aLPHABETS. DE DE DES. lE lE lETTRES. cO cO cOULEES. tA tA tAILLE. DE DE DE. LA LA LA. pL pL pLUME. A A A tRAITEE. lE lE lETT- RES. cA cA cAPITALES. dI dI dIFFERENTES. eC eC eCRITURES DE. rO rO rONDES. dI dI dIFFERENTES. eC eC eCRITURES. DE DE DE. bA bA bATARDES. dI dI dIFF- ERENTES. eC eC eCRITURES. DE DE DE. cO cO cOULEES. oN oN oN. AI AI AIME. A A A DEVENIER. LE LE LES. AU AU AUTRES. MA MA MAIS. ON ON ON. N' N' N'AIME- PAS. A A A ETRE. dE dE dEVINE. aL aL aLPHABETS. aN aN aNCIENS. ET ET ET. mO mO mODERNES. bR bR bRODEUR. fO fO fONDERIE. EN EN EN. cA cA cARACTERES. aL aL aLPHABET. lI lI lIE. A A A B C D. E E E F. G G G H. I I I J. K K K L. M M M N. O O O P. Q Q Q R. S S S T. U U U V. W W W X. Y Y Y Z. a a a b. c c c d. e e e f. g g g h. i i i j. k k k l. m m m n o. p p p q. r r r s. t t t u. v v v w. x x x y. z z z - = ===== notice: postmodernism is an act not a theory consider the opposites fragments or alternatives sullied revolutions there's nothing to believe in any more burning down the house there aren't any homes online or offline we're all packets stuttered and starving in mausoleums silencing of women, arming of children arming of children, silencing of men no one grows up any more, wa wa wa cutting through selves and others in blind fury there's a subcategory cutting through selves and others in pure calculation coldness of steel and steel grips in big and little hands look at creatures everywhere, there's no species anymore postmodernism kills we're the theory of the killers ipseity, we're that ===== armed postmodernism c arm myself wctb postmoderncsm. fraaments of concepts are sbarpened by vcrtue of accumulatcon. tbecr edaes are sbarp, broeen tbouabt, dcactal, paceet radco. eacb bct constctutes a clcff of cmpenetrable dcstance. analoa warrcors lose tbecr communccatcon cn nocsy dcssemblcna. we do not speae; we dcvcde, descrcbe, deconstruct. we do not speak; we divide, describe, deconstruct. all transitive transformed with all intransitive. ideological domains constitute fortresses and prizes for our conquest. to think it is to will it in the final stages of exhaustion. we arm ourselves with postmodernism. fragments of concepts are sharpened and accumulated. no histories are salvaged in the operation of digital inscription. there are edges everywhere constituting turmoil in our remaining dreams. each bit contitutes a cliff of impenetrable distance. analog warriors lose their communication in noisy dissembling. we arm ourselves. i arm mysulf wite postmoournism. fraamunts of ioniupts aru searpunuo ey virtuu of aiiumulation. teuir uoaus aru searp, erouun teouaet, oiaital, paiuut raoio. uaie eit ionstitutus a iliff of impunutraelu oistaniu. analoa warriors losu teuir iommuniiation in noisy oissumelina. wu oo not spuau; wu oiviou, ousirieu, ouionstruit. wu oo not spuak; wu oiviou, ousirieu, ouionstruit. all transitivu transformuo with all intransitivu. iouologiial oomains ionstitutu fortrussus ano prizus for our ionquust. to think it is to will it in thu final stagus of uxhaustion. wu arm oursulvus with postmoournism. fragmunts of ioniupts aru sharpunuo ano aiiumulatuo. no historius aru salvaguo in thu opuration of oigital insiription. thuru aru uogus uvurywhuru ionstituting turmoil in our rumaining oruams. uaih eit iontitutus a iliff of impunutraelu oistaniu. analog warriors losu thuir iommuniiation in noisy oissumeling. wu arm oursulvus... ===== Scar theory open your mouth The word carries its own terror; born of division, among 1 and 0 there is no communality among men. capital accumulation occurs as crisis deepens and fold-catastrophic know ledge splits: the fold is lost, the cliff remains. open your mouth... Ah... speak... speak... is postmodern dressed as you::: Are you in your thing, are you in your flesh, ah don't answer... Ah... Are you wearing your ... , are you wearing your thing? love runs me beyond your thing! What do you call your penetrating thing? postmoournism. "wu arm makes me thoughtful 13 times! ... my makeup is scar? the word carries its own ter ror; born of division, among 1 and 0 here, it's my makeup? For 5 penetrating days, I have been catatonia your ... Your love seeps into my scribe? the word carries its own ter ror; born of division, among 1 and 0 - turning me postmodern open your mouth Consider the next element you will apply. Your quill should be inscribed at this point? I Consider the following again, your friends, we have heard, "postmodernism is an act not a theory "postmodern ... inscription pens me upon your quill! My skewed abstraction, alphabetic violence of words... assertion is deepens and fold-catastrophic know ledge splits: the fold is lost, love-quill division stone, it's assertion? ===== a/b/c [abc] */notes on work/* it's the reading of content against abstraction - dance, theory, or ins- criptions in the midst of or against sexual explicitness - unutterably bending content - so on one hand it appears a continuation of the same old story, the taking over of the re/presentations of the world by psychologi- cal processes - but on the other, it's the edge or lip of the world's alt- erity standing forth and unaccountably against psychology, narratology - all my work has gone one or another or both ways simultaneously - readable from human and inhuman alike - unreadable from human and inhuman alike. the 'it' is an accumulation of fragments of texts, broken splendors, the emblematic/problematic - on one hand protocol-suite-suit and on the other, desperation-intense-persiflage; in my life/work something's always trying to get through - there are splinters, cracks - there are also sutures, winding-sheets - as in riemannian geometry - you can't tell the space from the connection or gristle-tendon - all contact/release - ( on one hand, i burrow among the bones; on the other, i inscribe into structures. on one hand, struc- tures - on the other, inscriptions, phenomenological horizons of world- reading; on one hand, failure to exploit bone-syntax - on the other, the escape-flight to poetics writing; on one hand, the interstice between syntax and writing - on the other, issues of consciousness, muck, mucking through consciousness; on one hand, narrowed and impossibility of / impos- sible content [or the problematic of content or the problematic of imposs- ible content or the problematic of impossibility] - on the other, skit- tered media focusing through nexus towards coagulation of other contents, alterities -- "what someone else might say, roaming the files" ) ===== ror: (pqktnkrn_st) k: pytqkx orror (l)*(m) p (l*m)*(k*l) t (l*m)**k (pqktnkrn_ st) d: pytqkx orror (b*c)^k a (b*c)^k*j j (b*c)^k*b*c f (b*c)^k*d*e bj (pqktnkrn_st) a: pytqkx orror (b)*(c) f (b*c)*(k*l) j (b*c)**k (pqktnkrn_ (b*c)^(k*d*e) a (b*c)^(d*e) cfefaehddjjfbigf (b*c*k)^(d*e) j semantics (b*c)^(a*d*e) a (b*c)^(d*e) csesaerddnnsbits (b*c*a)^(d*e) n seeking in) d: syntax error (b*c)^a a (b*c)^a*n n (b*c)^a*b*c s (b*c)^a*d*e bn (standard_in) a: syntax error (b)*(c) s (b*c)*(a*b) n (b*c)**a (standard_ st) n: pytqkx orror (l*m)^k k (l*m)^k*t t (l*m)^k*l*m p (l*m)^k*n*o lt (l*m)^(k*n*o) k (l*m)^(n*o) mpopkornnttplsqp (l*m*k)^(n*o) t (2*3)^(a*4*5) 1 (2*3)^(4*5) 3656158440062976 (2*3*a)^(4*5) 0 desperately in) 4: syntax error (2*3)^a 1 (2*3)^a*0 0 (2*3)^a*2*3 6 (2*3)^a*4*5 20 (standard_in) 1: syntax error (2)*(3) 6 (2*3)*(a*b) 0 (2*3)**a (standard_c-esaer pytqkz er ===== millennial armageddon armored postmodern truth i look towards the armageddon truth of my scribblings armed to the teeth with postmodernism; how can I follow up syntax error "(2)*(3) 6 (2*3)*(a*- b) 0 (2*3)**a (standard_c-esaer pytqkz er," a standard affair scrawled against: scribbled, scrawl, scratched, scraped, scrapped: root-meanings of nicked/corroded surfaces: as-if there were armature or order, figure or articulation: my postmodernism-firepower-clandestine-technology shows such error here: my postmodernism-dissemination-espionage-machine errors this work and inconceivable followup: consider this a _tail_ to such as "as in riemannian geometry - you can't tell the space from the connection or gri- stle-tendon" - a tail _in other words_ entailing a continuation - a bridge or transition - a transitive invisibility or irigarayan feminine - as if this junction or juncture didn't exist - as if this was always already ab- sent, as if this were unaccounted, unaccountable, unaccounted-for - i look so much towards armageddon truth, near-earth asteroid on collision course approach: postmodernism saving nothing - postmodern-undercover-apparatus - ===== Ju19lu% echo "footnotes are the tanks of the postmodern revolution" > Ju20lu% echo "writing from a distance arms the trenches of the wounded" >> Ju21lu% echo "from the trenches the footnotes send death" >> Ju22lu% echo "such dismal death and destruction wrought by others" >> Ju23lu% echo "repetitions of texts are born by bibliographies" >> Ju24lu% echo "the bibliographic function is a cannon of misery" >> Ju25lu% echo "the bibliographic function carries death to the ultimate" >> Ju26lu% echo "pagination is the rank-and-file in any war" >> Ju27lu% echo "postmodernism splits the latest into headlines" >> Ju28lu% echo "readers absorb painless everything on the homefront" >> Ju29lu% echo "writers bravely take their wounds but footnotes prevail" >> Ju30lu% echo "the war of the future is now and the pen is mighty" >> Ju31lu% echo "sing of the keyboard as the enemy is decimated" >> Ju32lu% echo "the postmodern revolution triumphs by metaphor" >> Ju33lu% echo "wounds of theory never heal" >> Ju34lu% echo "the postmodern revolution has destroyed them all" >> Ju35lu% echo "our footnotes are our clandestine victorious army" >> footnotes are the tanks of the postmodern revolution writing from a distance arms the trenches of the wounded from the trenches the footnotes send death such dismal death and destruction wrought by others repetitions of texts are born by bibliographies the bibliographic function is a cannon of misery the bibliographic function carries death to the ultimate pagination is the rank-and-file in any war postmodernism splits the latest into headlines readers absorb painless everything on the homefront writers bravely take their wounds but footnotes prevail the war of the future is now and the pen is mighty sing of the keyboard as the enemy is decimated the postmodern revolution triumphs by metaphor wounds of theory never heal the postmodern revolution has destroyed them all our footnotes are our clandestine victorious army the truth shall be destroyed by theory armament our armament is our topic-outlines our armament is our font-style-sheets our writings cross distances of space and time our writings kill behold our writings postmodernism arms us and truth is smashed truth is smashed asunder footnotes are the tanks of the postmodern revolution Ju41lu% echo "the truth shall be destroyed by theory armament" >> Ju42lu% echo "our armament is our topic-outlines" >> Ju43lu% echo "our armament is our font-style-sheets" >> Ju44lu% echo "our writings cross distances of space and time" >> Ju45lu% echo "our writings kill" >> Ju46lu% echo "behold our writings" >> Ju47lu% echo "postmodernism arms us and truth is smashed" >> Ju48lu% echo "truth is smashed asunder" >> Ju49lu% echo "footnotes are the tanks of the postmodern revolution" >> ===== (***Stelar***c***Stel***arc***} [for Beehive online magazine] 10 Stelarc is an Australian artist who has revolutionized our thinking 20 about being online, about the interface of body and technology, and 30 about the distinctions between humans and software agents - among 40 other things. This article is a series of fragments stemming from a 50 long-term interest in Stelarc's work; it isn't a review per se. For 60 more information on Stelarc, go to www.google.com and enter his 70 name; as of this writing, 5770 sites will come up. Meanwhile, what 80 follows is a wandering through issues of real and virtual subjectiv- / ity, 90 Stelarc the dispersed and central focus of attention. */ a messy article. take The Cybercultures Reader (Bell and Kennedy): representative/canonic Stelarc on the cover, with the only images in the book, carrying the body of net art, net.art, in the post-(cyber)bodies section. Canonic, because clear, emblematic, and lucid work, a work whose doubts might be buried in the protocols themselves. on one hand, an isol- ated unique work (oeuvre, here); on the other, a work slipped among human, virtual, and technological interfacings. a work of simultaneous machinic and fleshly insistence: the alter/altar ego presenced uneasily on your machine, unnerving in a manner oddly reminiscent of Andy Kaufman's tele- vision network comedy performances. /* <-- a work which grows with, towards the future - a body of work changing in relation to changing technology, miniaturization, nanotech, increased computer firepower. a work which is therefore never completed, responsive to technological innovation and growth, an increasingly immersive work - the periphery or the shadow of the body in or among computers or in or among nets. his recent Movatar piece (developing) engages him as an (off- line) agent of an (online) agent: a clear model for future developments of virtual subjectivity. From Stelarc's "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems, Images as post-human entities" in ibid.: "Consider though a virtual body or an avatar that can access a physical body, actuating it to perform in the real world." this begins to take care of interface issues from a phil- osophical viewpoint; now philosophers will have to learn protocol ethos and aesthetics. i mean this literally. elsewhere Stelarc states "The nature of both bodies and images has been significantly altered. IMAGES ARE NO LONGER ILLUSORY WHEN THEY BECOME INTERACTIVE." in the next article in ibid. (Mark Dery, "Ritual Mechanics") Fakir Musafar is quoted: --> # "Where I think Stelarc is missing the point is that ... [w]e've gotten to the point where we can synthesize magic, technology and science. You listen to the babblings of the best physicists we have today, [and] they sound like the alchemists used to." well, i don't think they do, but with the entrance of magic (or magick) into (what passes for) the equation, issues of fetishization come up. think of the dirt/bone/fingernail fetish or the wood/feather/tar fetish and immediately the categories of the imminent and unclean appear (something Parmenides brings up to Socrates as "mud"); filth, Kristeva's abject, breaks virtual/real and any other schemes down to _there,_ where holes and bodies are intertwined with old technology, dark aspirations, gleaming cabinets of viscera and far-future storage capabilities. categories are sloughed like snakeskin. there's an uneasy aura to Stelarc's work, conditioned in part by his past body-sus- pension pieces (with hooks through the skin); one might say that bodies float free (as in dreams) but always at a cost (as in dreams). # [- "My concern about post-modernist deconstruction and appropriation is that it ultimately becomes so self-referential that it falls into an incestuous discourse and spirals back into itself and doesn't plot an alternate or new strategies and trajectories. That's what's so intriguing about new technologies." (Stelarc in Live Art Letters, #3 Feb. 98: "Obso- lete Body/Alternate Strategies - Listening to Stelarc," Robert Ayers.) Stelarc's OPTIMISM - an exhilaration centered on the indefinite explora- tion of networkings, opened futures into opened futures. it's the next step, and then and then - eliminate the exoskeleton (there goes robotics) (there goes Panamarenko) - great loopings in the worlds - great openings - you can see them beyond & among the clouds & where the pixels end, when the pod won't move any farther, when the screen enlarges walls & mountains to rectangles of bloated pixels & you're begging for greater bandwidth & you've got to build more & add more apparatus & add storage STORAGE - -] # REM Brian Rotman's Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing's Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In - just as it was almost safe to sinter the other way around, turning byte and bite into ash and powder - towards the elimination of the transcendental - i'd also say the technological sublime. Stelarc poses all of this in clear models, deficient, if at all, in considerations of gender - Irigarayan flux replaced by confined air or liquid, fluid mechanics transformed into digital horizons. the returning, re-turning, of the body is that of the theoretically ungendered male, as in "mankind's technological progress," although one references Sandy Stone and The Cyborg Manifesto (Harraway) as well. in other respects (sinter), he considers the body in pain, but the pain is chosen, existential, necessary; it's not the surplus pain of fibromyalgia or cancer, the unaccountable pain of war or wounding, the accountable pain of thirst and hunger (as if agencies were disposed among accountancies). the pain is related to what suspends or moves the body; it is a residue or byproduct, but one can't over look the effect of pain on the exaltation or fascination of the spectator. REM # *// "PHANTOM LIMB/VIRTUAL ARM: Amputees often experience a phantom limb. It is now possible to have a phantom sensation of an additional arm - a virtual arm - albeit visual rather than visceral." (Stelarc in "From Psycho-Body" ..) teledildonics theoretically extends virtuality to full- skin contact; bandwidth increases enormously beyond that of an addition- al arm, robotics. i keep coming up against issues of flesh and bandwidth - robotics, cyborg paraphernalia, works vis-a-vis a mapping of points or nodes - not surfaces, certainly not the panoply of surfaces that consti- tutes the real body in real space (it would take a riemannian topology to even approach this. even the abstract mappings, then, return to an earlier, nineteenth-century, era of formal (cartesian) geometries; pro- sthetic arms reflect, for example, the arm-holders in some early mach- ines (used well into the twentieth century) which had a human operator; she (usually) would assemble, for example, parts to be punched out; the punch would descend; the arm-holders would pull her arms out of the way; the punch would ascend; the arm-holders would release her. one waits for a new and radically different ontology, one based on pure dispersion (yet somehow romantically embedding the full flesh of the body), networking, absorption and integrations of others - of pure alterity. in other words, there is a dream afloat, of womb-returning, of perfect security and comfort, of losing oneself and living forever online. in this dream, the Other is defused in fusion; there are no strangers ... Stelarc crosses his body with early-early tech; parts are left behind; he'd perhaps leave the whole behind; i'd bring the hole back in. *// ## interviewing Stelarc in Albany, 10/16/00. "Don't be so surprised!" followed by the world-famous laugh. i can't hear my questions at the beginning, but they concern pain. i feel idiotic; i _insist_ on the relationship to pain, "I won't admit to that." he explains about the need to support rather than suspend the body. "The skin would become kind of a support structure for the body itself." the first suspension event actually occurred in Japan, after one in Adelaide was canceled. there were 27 of these. the performances came after a series of sensory deprivation events, in some of which he stitched his mouth and eyelids shut. there was "something psychologically difficult" for him to insert the hooks (for the suspension events) - something related to the way the hooks "slithered through the skin." levels of difficulty: inserting the hooks, connecting them to the cables, putting the tension on them. Stelarc says "the body" instead of "my body" constantly here. "The body is seen as a kind of evolutionary object, architecture of awareness." he doesn't see the body as "a kind of individual" or "site of the psyche." And as a performance artist "It gets kind of boring to say 'I did this and I did that.'" i continue to wonder about this, the insertion of an anti-shifter as "the" actually defuses the individuation of "my," creates again a kind of distancing. but there is also a beauty in this trope; so much performance art is centered (to whatever depth it may aspire to) on _the_ body of _the_ performer, and perhaps we really don't need those heroes. there's an enormous generosity in "the body" which could be anyone's here. ## <-!- "Most of these suspension events were done in remote locations or private gallery spaces." ..."personal history becomes intertwined with all of this." Stelarc was a squash coach in Japan; he also did yoga for twenty years. for some reason, i find this fascinating - whether or not it connects formally to his work. yoga helped him "do these actions with a certain calm." he doesn't tense up, try to resist what was going on. we're still discussing the earlier work. "I've never had an out-of-body experi- ence." not expecting transcendence, he didn't get it. "The idea was to see the body as a sculptural medium which was situated in a space with other objects." i'm thinking of the piece Sitting / Swaying Event for Rock Suspension, Tamura Gallery, Tokyo - 11 May, 1980, Stelarc suspended naked, sitting in mid-air, held there by hooks (as usual) - the other ends of the cables going to a ring of rocks surrounding him, also in mid-air. "The process was extremely difficult" from the insertions to raising the body to releasing the rocks which acted as counterweights. "All of these per- formances were pretty much one-off." why do i recount this here, including a performance in Japan in which the hooks were accidently inserted back- wards, had to be taken out, and reinserted, to fair pain? because of an insistence on simultaneous language and body - an insistence in which the flesh, for the spectator, is up-front and personal. one moves through this fullness across the apparatus, the cables, taking consciousness and mind (if it were separable from the body, or at least connected somewhere beyond the nodal points of the body) along; the cables - wires - are everywhere throughout Stelarc's work, and they're not far behind, as well, any Web art, net art, hyperlink or net.art, as well. connections and potential connections, with their protocols and embeddings, are everywhere in new media work; even cdrom work possesses the appearance of slippage, linked files, transmissions. -!-> REM Marina Abramovich, Ulay, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci. Stel- arc lived in Japan 1970-89; he was "removed from both the American and European art scenes." "I love Buto." Stelarc is close to it; he mentions his interest in Noh, Bunraku, Kabuki, but the influence has never been direct. "The focus on the western side of substance and material and the focus on the eastern side of process" - and i cut him off, foolishly, with a another question. "I would write the kanji on the windscreen and as I was driving I would try and match up" (laughter). "I loved the fact I could just simply switch off, that I didn't have to speak to people all the time." "It was my father's ill health that I went back to Australia." "The first things I made in artschool were helmets and goggles" that created a "kinetic sound and light environment for the body." "I made a film of the inside of my stomach, lungs, and colon, about three meters of internal space, between 1973- 1975." "The third hand took five years to construct." an "oscillation between physically difficult performances and technologically complicated ones." "Sometimes the suspension events were amplified. Sometimes my third hand was attached." "The third hand is going to be sold by internet auction last week of October/first week of November (2000). I've got a new arm that slips over your right arm, with a manipu- lator at the end of it." "This new manipulator has thumb and wrist rota- tion and each finger is a gripper in itself." REM ** "Switches that you're able to preprogram complex sampled movements." "You play the hand like a keyboard." "That's counterpointed by my left arm which is involuntarily jerked around by eight channels of muscle stimula- tion." muscle stimulation is critical in much of Stelarc's work - a translation from voluntary net/work into involuntary body/labor. what is the exterior of the body? the interior? is mind in interface and wire? is it remote? the _remote_ presence is also critical, sensing the other; i wonder if there is a faceless alterity that doesn't devolve into Big Brother. ** ^ "I have thought of two remote bodies that would be in control of half of the other's body." "Your suggestion is intriguing, the idea that via the internet, via a website with vrml and a surrogate body as an interface, one can construct an extended loop of operation within one body." i begin asking about the performance aspects of the work - on one hand, concerned with internal issues and experience, and on the other, work that's theatrical, really designed for an audience. "I think what we would call the theatrical aspects, I wouldn't see as that to the extent that the performance isn't really structured for an audi- ience." i make another interruption here, Stelarc laughs. "What I'm saying is that the intent is not, as it is with most theater, to enter- tain an audience. Most people can't stay for very long; the sounds are amplified excruciatingly loud." "The idea is how can one visually and acoustically can one manifest this operation of the body and third hand" ... he talks about the performance i saw in Perth - Wagnerian, intense, driven, sound occupying the entire enormous room, splashes of video cuseeme on the walls, enormous depths of sonority, Stelarc re- sponding to external muscle play. it was overwhelming. he talks about sound-video-body-interplay as theatrical elements making manifest what is going on - but not theater. he's clear about that. i continue inaud- ibly on the tape. i hate, now, listening to my interruptions. "When I first saw Buto it reminded me of seeing bodies as some sort of post- nuclear zombie-like entities, where the way they functioned was not a purely internally driven state of operation, but was inextricably connected to the other bodies in the space, the contour of the perfor- mance area, and so on." ^ /* now i am given the mike for some reason, and we're talking about karaoke. at one point Stelarc sang Waltzing Matilda. i begin with an (audible) question. i talk about (re: above) robotics in general as 19th century - Cruikshank's images, etc. once you're past the input stage, information stage - then i begin talking about Merlin Donald's notion of the mind transformed (Stelarc interrupts; i hear "outmoded" from the other side of the room) carrying intellect outside the phys- ical body - databases as literal extensions of neural networks for example. i talk about internal and external a distinction no longer worth making, that the mind is inside and outside, etc. i say to him his work has an odd split - on one hand diorama 19th-century and on the other 21st century epistemology - Andy Hawks' "mind in the wires." i turn the microphone back to Stelarc. "Firstly the idea that the technology is dated, firstly we have to remember that as an artist this person is not interested in sci-fi explanations of what might come but" what one can do now. "At the moment I'm not going to be able to clone my own body, to create nanomachines to insert, to grow other organs." "I can only do what is possible, what's accessible, what I can experience now. So to that extent I'm using technology that's not necessarily at the cutting-edge, but technology I can construct with the help of others, and that I'm experiencing now." "People are in- trigued by the mechanics of the things." "These technologies that I use aren't as clunky as people make them out to be. When the first third hand was constructed, I was invited to give talks at JPL in Houston. Even now, the third hand is the most sophisticated commerc- ially-available prosthetic device." he talks about the stomach sculp- ture, a site-specific work inserted into his stomach - one references perhaps automatons, etc. - but only references; the technology is not old-fashioned. in the distance, i press my case; luckily, i'm inaudi- ble. */ "" i feel Stelarc begins with body; i begin with mind. i think mind is an imaginary inhabitation, which is not to say unreal, but irreal, problematic. Stelarc for me exemplifies behaviorism with mind follow- ing, following suit; but it is a behaviorism of explicit cognitive functions as well - it would be able to absorb, for example, the work on scripts and goals in classical AI; it also dwells in Winograd's microworlds - as well as in his later discussions of failure. in fact, one might carry Stelarc's approach to "the mind is a muscle" (i forget who said this), a comment out of dance - and there are great similari- ties between his work and dance; i think of Cunningham's choreography which often stems from computer programs, bending the dancers' bodies into computed forms at variance from "natural" attitudes and possibil- ities. (now i will listen to more of the interview, embarrassed and pressing forward.) "If we're going to argue that certain technologies are obsolete, we can also argue that the body is obsolete." we can't rid ourselves of our bodies altogether. it's that "this body" - its operation in an intense information environment where machines function at incredible speed - the question is, do we retain this biological body as it is (as a prosthetic body) or do we think about more "intim- ate" interface. in the past, prostheses were ergonomic. now we should think about redesigning the body to fit the possibilities of machines instead of the other way around. "What I don't agree with is this notion that we can start talking about minds and mental operations as seemingly disconnected from bodies." "Projecting and extruding aware- ness - does not cut the physicality of the body off from the mind." "What are we pointing to when we are pointing to the word 'mind'?" "Some sort of floating intelligence which is nowhere located." Stelarc is critical of this, of course. listening now, i find i agree with him, or do i? i can't hear what i'm saying. the apparatus is poor at a distance, the earphones are picking up buzz from the plasma screen... we talk about the recent Book/Ends conference here in Albany. "When the language designates 'I' for most people what this actually means for them is 'I' something spiritual something mental is using this body to exist in the world." "But language only says 'this body does this, this body does that.' It doesn't reveal a greater existence, a greater essence." "If I say 'this body thinks something' what this body is saying is 'this body's behavior is a manifestation of a complex history and interaction with other bodies and institutions at this point in history - it's not an internal homunculus that is doing the thinking. Nothing is doing, I mean when we think, there is nothing inside the body which is doing the thinking, it's the body's awareness in the world that's constructing its intelligence and awareness." "I'm much more sympathetic to a behaviorist approach than to a mentalist approach if we have to make a choice." "I'm talking about how mental phenomena are appropriated as if they are an internal essence or mind." "Language doesn't designate or clarify; it also confuses us." "The word 'I' does not designate an internal subject; it designates this body." am i writ- ing what here? i keep up with Stelarc's conversation, i collapse lines, phrases, coalesce without realization, try to do justice, i can't repro- duce tone, the sound of the laugh, the occasional gaiety in the room. there are others present, occasionally commenting, Nicole Peyrafitte, Azure Carter, Pierre Joris, i think perhaps others, but i'm not sure, there are cats certainly, the park outside, i worry about taking too much time up, we're all aware surely of bodies here, attitudes, affect, i find myself aware of Albany, the conference dispersing. i'd known Stelarc since Perth 96, then through the Incubation conference in Not- tingham, now here. there were hellos passed back and forth through mutual acquaintances. i don't know him well at all. what comes through is this generosity... "" >>-- "To be an intelligent agent, I need to be both embodied and embed- ded in the world." i can't hear myself again, i do hear the mention of Lakoff and Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, the embedding of language in the body (Lingis would be another reference), i'm still hammering this point home, the primacy or latitudinality (at the least) of the body. we're talking about the California ideology, "this mix of spirituality and corporatism," this "yearning to escape the body, a lot of Internet experience is articulated in this way and it's very irri- tating." i'm mumbling again. now i'm really going on. is it myself or my agent who is speaking? is it my agency? --<< $$ "I really think it's a problem how we speak about these things." $$ [> "The body has been augmented, invaded, and now becomes a host - not only for technology, but also for remote agents. Just as the internet provides extensive and interactive ways of displaying, linking and retrieving the body information and images, it may now allow unexpected ways of accessing, interfacing, and uploading the body itself." (Stelarc, Ars Electronica Facing the Future '99.) but it seems to me that this interview (now _that_ interview) is already messing things up - who said what, where, when. "When we speak, we speak in terms of convenience" - "as long as we recognize the process of language and the fact that seemingly speaking as a first person subject - there's no doubt it's something convenient and of an evolutionary balance" - "but how much that free will and free agency applies in the real world" - "associative chain of operation" - "my decision is part of that" - "but it's only a part of that complex interaction" - "knowing that you were here, that this might be a good conference to come to" - "someone had to invite me" - "that chance meeting in Perth" - "it's just that we function _as if_ we are minds in the world _as if_ we have free will and agency - it's to our advantage to function as if we have these things" - "a huge leap to appropriate the 'I' as if it were an internal homunculus" - i think i'm pointing out here, however, that 'the world has a certain style,' that the style is largely consistent, that it permits us to function. <] */* i talk about subsumption architecture. i ask him if he ever thought of taking the six-legged robotic walking machine and turning it subsump- tion. "The fascination for me was that the modes of locomotion would be controlled by arm gestures so that your bipedal walking gate would be translated into a six-legged insect-like machine." "Having a sense of what it's like to navigate the world with six legs instead of two, hav- ing to remap." "The body's not simply standing on the machine, the body gets wrapped up in the machine mechanism, one that's sort of integrated into the machine." "So that was the real reason of doing it." subsump- tion architecture employs the idea of constructing simple robots using insects as a model. in the 60s the idea was that if you had an intelli- gent robot, you had to have one with a big brain that could model every- thing around it. now you might have a robot with a limited or minimal brain, existing within an intelligent environment and so behaving intel- ligently. and this idea has excited me; i think about Merlin Donald again, and mind, not in the waters, but everywhere, and the residue of mind being in fact certain behaviors of part-time entities within the environment, which, again, extends, everywhere... "When you put that type of robot in the world you begin to notice emergent behavior. This seems intelligent behavior. Then there was the realization that the sophisticated behavior of the insect was the result of the complexity of the world it's embedded in." "If one sees human bodies in a somewhat similar way, their intelligence and awareness and operational possibili- ties are determined by the technologies they've constructed, the institutions within which they operate, their cultures, and so on." "There's a danger in going to one extreme or another." one might focus too much on the homunculus inside or on the other, "if we go into an operational holistic kind of viewpoint, you explain everything and nothing in one go." */* --| "The shadow projection of the body on the machine creates this wonderful hybrid human/machine image." i keeping pushing my useless point about adding subsumption architecture to the six-legged robot. "What interests me are the ambiguities and slippages in the interface - I'm not interested in being totally virtual or totally physical - the interest is not on those sorts of realms of operations so on one hand I'm very interested in the virtual domain and how one might function within it and on the other how the physical body might interact with it. And with the Movatar performance, an intelligence avatar can access a physical body and perform with it in the real world. This body becomes a prosthesis in the world for an avatar." i'm mumbling again. i know Stelarc's got to go. "In a way it's neither art in the traditional sense or science in the methodical research sense. You're performing somewhere in-between those and you're exploring what's neither science or art in the traditional sense of those words." "Exploring the interface in a sense undermines either extreme." "It's neither virtual nor actual." ... "I haven't used the walking machine outdoors although we almost did." i'm mumbling, i can't hear myself again on the machine. i fade in and out. interviewing, querying, is problematic in the first place, a question of mastery, of playing to the wall, of simulated two-way conversation. phraseology and power swim like rivers beneath the surface. conversation about the wonder of Stelarc's laugh again. i love the optimism (in particular, in relation to the mournful air of deconstruction at the Book/Ends conference). now i'm louder, 'How much time do you have?' i ask. "I think she's coming about 12:15" he replies. --| ~~ i'm back yammering about intelligent agents transforming into minds beyond the julia bot on the internet, free-floating packets of information - and i relate this to the Movatar piece. i say i think this is a way for the Internet to play/display itself in the real world. 'Why do you keep insisting,' I say, 'on this materialist viewpoint of body and mind' - when your own work is developing a virtuality that doesn't have to have any specific or specified material performance. as if there is no originary point. "There seems to be this disconcerting desire to talk about the mental as if it's discounted from the physical - I don't think you believe in that yourself" 'no' "The interaction between humans and machines can generate images and information that could be artificially intelligent entities that proliferate, function, replicate, on the Internet. The prob- lem with these entities is - are they going to be slowed down enough - adequate interfaces with biological bodies that perform much slower - within the constraints and parameters of what we call the physical world - these packets of software code perhaps visualized" 'or maybe not' "in some way - are we going to have adequate strategies of interfacing with these entities, or not?" "It will get to the point where we will not be able to depict them in any meaningful way." "But I agree with you that at every different level of operation there are in a sense emergent possibilities that we can't necessarily predict by through just examining the underlying structure. It's just the seeming desire to escape from the body, increas- ing ephemeralization." "For these agents to exist, proliferate, they're still within an electronic medium. It's a way of talking about them that we have to be careful of." i say it's not an escape from the body as an escape from a naive materialism. i bring up the Soviet Union and diamat and the reflection theory and the political consequences of diamat, etc. how diamat floundered on cybernetics. Soviet philosophers weren't able to come up with a materialist ontology of cybernetic entities that worked - the nearest was the reflection theory. so there are consequences of going too far in one or another direction. (i'm all for compromise.) if the world is information, it's not all there and it's there. "But if we say the world is information, this can only be from an anthropomorphic view- point" 'absolutely' and he points out that information is such by virtue of interpretation - the "brute world is a series of events involving motion and mutation" etc. i bring up Clement Rosset, 'the idiocy of the real.' "I like that, a beautiful comment." ~~ **\ "To come back to that very simple statement I made at the beginning is that the body is this kind of evolutionary architecture and biological apparatus of awareness and operation in the world. It extends its opera- tion in the world through technological bits and pieces, through instru- ments to detect alien information, through machines to increase its operational speed and so on. So in a sense technology is a strategy for increasing operational complexity" 'making the fit, a phrase David Bohm uses' 'i wonder if you couldn't say the body is _of_ the world instead of _in_ the world' and Stelarc agrees, referencing Merleau-Ponty and the notion of a contextualized body, and the sound fades out as the tape ends on side 3. side 4. who do you like. Wittgenstein, Derrida hard but impor- tant, Virilio and Baudrillard of the postmodern writers, McLuhan, Schop- enhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche who he finds seductive, Heidegger, Hegel (we have all had troubles reading Philosophy of Mind). i mention Kurt Goldstein and Alfred Schutz, i talk about relevance theory and Carne- ades, a primary reference. Stelarc mentions Daniel Dennett, "a philosopher of mine who I would sympathize with." "Off the top of my head I can't pull any other names." i ask about other artists that might interest him - he mentions Orlan who "does take the physical consequences for her ideas," Survival Research Lab, a performance artist out of Barcelona - Marcelee Artunez, then "someone I wired up, Arthur Elsinger, who has done a whole series of works dealing with muscle stimulation of the face." i say what fascinates me about Stelarc's work as opposed perhaps to these others - Orlan and SRL are spectacle in a sense, Cartesian - i say that Stelarc's work is messy, deliberately messed between epistemological regimes - i say this is where the future is, is going, will be the horizon of the 22nd century - "Even the construct of a cyborg, half body violently torn apart - a medical military model [he's talking about Terminator] - but there are other ways - the body swallows up its machines - the machines will be in- visible - also a third notion - unmodified bodies but wired up, connected to the internet." "We'll be able to physically hard-wire bodies." "One could access my body at any time in a completely wireless environment." i'm thinking of a fourth model, bring up Ananova, Kyoko Data, these con- figurations coming from the computer side, they're going to spread, dis- seminate, those creatures from the other side, becoming more and more autonomous. "Those entities would represent an interface between the human body and other entities that might not look human or even want to inter- act" - we're talking about agents again. **\ */ i don't think i have any other questions. "I've survived" laughter, "without hitting each other with our microphones." "When you transcribe this discussion it's going to be replete with repeats and" and the voice has gone quite soft. but what i'm doing, it seems very different than what i thought i'd do. because i think to myself, it's in the errors, the repe- titions, that something else comes through in relation to the horizon of narrative, of virtual and real characters, of the saying and shaping of things. i'm surprised throughout the interview, throughout my reading as well, at the differences - the dichotomies of real/virtual or split bodies or even behaviorism / mentalism (or what have you) - when what i see is a mess, a messing-up of categories, as if clarity were a surface phenomenon or a residue at best. and i think - precisely in relation to this - of the efforts made, now, world-wide by various governments, to construct an early-warning system for the detection (and eventual elimination or re- programming) of near-earth objects which are on collision-tracks with the earth. i think about our fragility and, for me, the inconceivability of saying _anything_ with certainty, without a certain dis/comfort or dis/ ease accompanying the words and worlds. */ |~ and then i think, perhaps enough for this day, for the marrow of the world lies, increasingly, in the laying down, and taking up, of wires. ~| ===== "I pretend the screen is not there. "The screen is my failure. "I'm afraid of moving around. "I can't look straight at someone else. "The screen is my life. "I have to forget the screen is there. "I have to pretend I'm in the room. "The screen is safe but the surface is flat, deadly. "I think of the mysteries of radio. "Where do the sounds come from. "No one sees me while I listen. "I love to listen.:"I have to forget the screen is there. "The screen bothers me, a sign of my failure to get along. "When I listen I know the very air is singing around me. "The screen drops away to noth- ing. "If the screen is dead, the air is alive. "I'm afraid of the screen. "I pretend it's not there. "I pretend everything is open and everything is on the radio.:"In the world I'm awkward; I'm afraid everyone will see the real me. "I can't look another in the eyes. "I can't live without the screen. "I'm afraid of looking at myself in a mirror, afraid of glass surfaces, windows, of any sort. "Into and out of the soul.:: Your yours "screen is across my "screen ===== Mourning the Book - Notes - Sunday January 7th (in trAce WebBoard) The Last Page Program chat - Alan Sondheim and Talan Memmott - How do we approach the book, and how do we approach reading online? Is the book "dead"? Should we be in mourning for the book? Is the book still the best model for new media, and new media literature? How do we approach literature? The Last Page stems out of the Book/Ends conference held this summer in Albany, New York. Check in at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk if you haven't been on the chats before. At one point, post-structuralism was a high-point, articulating the prob- lematic of metaphysics and the narrow defile of traditional disciplines. At this point, however, what was once seen as daring and avantgarde has become traditional; while the world remains to be deconstructed, the book itself has remained inviolate. At the Book/Ends conference, Derrida about philosophy as essay or fragment; the last book, he said, was with Heide- gger - he then corrected himself, pointing out that Being and Time was never completed. (A personal note - I felt "failed" by the deconstruc- tionists, let down; the sense of play in Derrida's text - accompanied by a certain exhileration - was missing, replaced by carefully-crafted puns, inordinately close readings (of texts and the Master of Texts), and that uncanny sense of _mourning_ the book as traditional humanities perceive themselves under yet another attack, that of electrical-electronic media.) It's possible to consider the philosophical book as an anomaly; throughout much of history, philosophical work was in the forms of parables, maxims, poems, exhortations, fragments, narratives, anecdotes, sutras, upanishads, lists, conversations, biography, reportage (think of Diogenes Laertes). The book creates a certain kind of binding or foreclosing the topic; every page is equally accessible, equivalent to every other; every copy is equi- valent as well. One might speak of a circulation _among a book,_ writers and readers and book-objects cycling among each other as "part-objects, part-processes," an intermittent cycling as everything, including texts and ur-texts, changes. But the book has two practical domains - one, the physical aspect of its reading (including portability, imminent access, comfort, an object carry- ing a history much as the body, personality, at-handedness, vulnerability, page-marking); and the other, the _ideology of the book,_ particularly in academic or literary circles, which creates the concept of an originary textuality located between its covers. (There is, to be sure, a feminine aspect of opening as well; a virginal book may have its pages uncut, its binding taut, opening almost _unnaturally._ And this psychoanalytical pre- sent is not inconsequential; its loss is part of object-loss. For what is a book, if not a _transitional object_ interpreting the world, held bet- ween the body and everything else, external?). This textuality is presumed authoritative, in some sense, final - and so publish or perish gives the highest regard to the book (over articles, for example, and certainly over online articles which carry equivalence and intellectual slippage to the limit), and this regard is heavily institutionalized within university and other academic structures. This high regard is accompanied by a sense of fragility which has always been with us; rare books are treated, opened gently; books, not web pages, are collected; the 'popular (throw-away) press' is held with suspicion; and online texts, even those not distributed, are seen more as exhalations than inscriptions. Further, these exhalations are susceptible to corrosion as protocols are changed, outmoded; Netscape 6 is not backwards-compatible, for example, and web-pages can appear inoperable in the new browser (not to mention Opera 5.01, etc.). But one might argue that all of this is to the good, that the model of knowledge-as-entity is being replaced by knowledge-as-process and knowl- edge as _discourse._ Instead of mourning the loss of masterworks, master- pieces that remain inviolate for all time, we might find, in the digital realm, an ironic return to the body and the emphasis on being-human, on relation instead of stasis. (Irigarayan fluid mechanics comes into play, _play,_ as well here.) However, if we look at the physicality of the book, we must also examine the physicality of the digital; its appearance, its presence, is given as ephemera on a more or less flat screen - Peirce's "sheet of assertion" coupled with an extraordinary mobility in terms of font, color, size, and so forth. In fact, it is by transforming these parameters on a more or less regular basis, that the screen becomes easier, less tiring, to read; most often illuminated from within, it can carry texts in an astonishing variety of guises. As with books, there are reasonable questions of lighting, comfortable sitting, and so forth. But we might also say, if the book is a _balloon_ naturally suspended in the air, the online text is a _plane,_ both vec- tored and requiring a continuous input of energy just to stay aloft. It is this, I think, that makes us most uneasy - that what is on the screen is a residue of energy expenditure, that it may disappear at any time - while the letters on a page remain, theoretically, forever, as long as the paper holds together. (Let's not also forget the _brittleness_ of the computer; even a laptop rarely bends in the pocket, sits comfortably on the lap.) It's more than this, of course, and it constantly goes back to the master- piece, to that work, chiseled in stone, which is _the_ work or steering- mechanism for the world. Online worlds are dynamic, fragile, constantly appearing and disappearing; the world of the philosophical or theoretical text is both within and without - in all things illuminated by the sun that carries the words to the eye. An online text, however, appears more narrowly-focused; it's of the other, digital world; it remains there; it generates its own worlds; it can be anywhere and anything; it fractions and problematizes truth; it works equally on space, time, and the other categories - at least as far as the body is concerned; and so forth. A final note - I don't think it helps to consider the book as a model for new media - any more than film, radio, television, telegraph, the music recording industry, telephone, etc. New media have no overarching charac- teristics; they are defined (if at all) as a (Wittgensteinian) family of usages - in other words, one might look towards communal definitions, rather than attempt any authoritative and permanent typology. Certainly there are similarities with the book, but online work also is greatly related to film (one thing that concerns me - the sophistication of film editing, which occasionally is also found on cdrom - I'm thinking still of Tennessee Rice Dixon - and the often naive counterpart of linking or flash at this point) in terms of multiple streaming (narrative, subtitling, sound, moving and still image), for example. Yet this idea of the book-as-model or origin of discourse - if not dis- course's production - (and if not the book, any other "classic" form) was endemic at the conference; we were always returned to _writing_ of a very specific sort. I'd want to say, instead, that if one stresses _discourse_ or discursivities in relation to new media, then one also brings orality, aurality, into play; it is another world altogether, one ironically re- turning to the body as the locus of speech and choice, one more humanist than the soft technologies partially re/placed. ===== k:129->griparmprojectarms,materials...k:130->griplegprojectsoc-g ial,political,economic,andlegalinteractions.k:131->gripheadpro-r jectmetalstraps;suitshaveheadgearwithplasticinewindows,softplas-i tick:132->gripmouthprojectk:133->gripeyeprojectk:135->gripnosep projectk:136->gripcockprojectk:137->gripcuntprojectk:138->gripv bodyprojectbody/computer/interactivity.analogpracticesandbodyissueso ingeneral-whichisafocalpointofmysentthefarflungpossibilitiesl oflanguageandbodyonline.Iwoulduseandwillsendyoutwofurtheru emails-onewiththetextwithinthebodywithbody,language,sexuality,m andissuesoftechnology,networking,andthebodyasanabstractvolume,e andsoundasmotion,orstillness-theylyingthere-asifthebodyhadc left,somethingofarapturepainting,backwardsandforwards-turning'so bymeansofthebody'sleaning.TwoWhatOrbitmightmeantous-thatthen bodyishalf-presentevenintheorbeforeit.There'snosenseofcon-n finementatall;thebodyinhabitsThetapesincludeSeals(bodydemarca-n tion);Baal(sexualityandballet);Nn(thedistanceofthebody);Carn (runningagainstthemachine);Balk:165->grip"ear"projectk:166->n gripmindprojectThispostingisareminderofthedeadlineforregister-n ing/submitting15thbutwiththisreminderIwouldliketoallowanyin-n terestedpartiesThanksforsendingthereminderoftheextentionforthen e-poetrylike-mindedorganizationsinBelgium,TheNetherlands,Germany,. PortugalCybermind,Cyberculture,Wryting(Ico-moderate)k:167->grip brainprojectsmallermovesthroughinsect-brainmodeling,exoskeletalg forcesimpellingk:168->griplipprojectcrashesandbangsofheavyind-r ustrywiththebleepsandblipsofhigh-techk:169->gripfleshprojecti k:170->gripsoulprojectsupportingthegondola,beings,souls.Bothendsp ofthesachaveribs. ===== Standard Book . ' " ? . "I will write a book" - to which a reply - a book is never written. One can write a book, complete a manuscript; there is always the difficult question of publishing. "I have published a book." A book as physical ob- ject or genre of objects (for each book is a genre through all its edi- tions, covers, copies) is not written; it may contain inscriptions _which have been written_ in that very (or close to that very) order. Thus one may write a book, but a book is never written. Perhaps a book is tethered. One might say, a book is a responsible res- ponse to a manuscript; a book is a reproduction of the text of the manuscript. The text is the well-ordering of the array of symbols within the manuscript; the responsibility is that of creating equivalent arrays. One might then say "A book is tethered to a manuscript." or that "A book is tethered to one or more manuscripts." The book is then a then an ordering of manuscripts, even an ordering of ordering of manuscripts. But a book is none of these things; the ordering and tethering are already completed, before the production of the book. What is then a book? A book is an object containing numerous pages; the pages reproduce the array of symbols constituting one or more texts. You might say, however, "A book reproduces nothing; it contains a text or series of texts deemed worthy of presentation." You might say, however, "A book is none of these things." Then of course, you might say "Deemed worthy by whom" and "How many pages" and "What sort of object" and "What if there are no symbols" and "What if there are no arrays" and "Who could possibly be responsible for this" and "What if it's unreadable" and "What if the ordering and tethering are in- complete or non-existent" and "Who is to decide on their completeness or existence" and "What if the book is originary, containing no reproduc- tions" and "What if the book is hardly originary" and "What if it's not a response to anything" and "What if 'I have written a book.'"?. ===== The _Orbit_ of Panamarenko - Two works on display at Dia Center for the Arts: _The Aeromodeller,_ 1969- 71, mixed media - a sac or balloon 92 feet long by 17 feet in diameter, coupled to a wicker gondola about 8 x 11 x 19 feet; and _Raven's Variable Matrix,_ 2000, an insect/plane about 5 x 10 x 17 feet, the smaller resting in the shadow of the larger. Panamarenko's work has been exhibited intern- ationally for decades; much of it centers on craft of various sorts, on engines and engineering (often appearing as "early" tech), and on dreams of mobility and mobilization. The show runs from 11/29/00 to 6/17/01. Between the Aeromodeller and Raven's Variable Matrix, Panamarenko produced an astonishing oeuvre of models, drawings, and full-scale craft. In 1996, for example, he created _Panama, Spitsbergen, Nova Zemblaya,_ a steel U- boat on casters that seems simultaneously submerged and land-bound. Other works include aerodynamic cars, machines that seem to skim the surface of the sea, and models of flying saucers. Panamarenko has often been associa- ted with Beuys and Broodthaers; an air of mysticism and uplift, grounded in industrial or abject material, pervades the work of the first two, and all three share a quality of dream, uncoupled from surrealism. I approach this work with a sense of exhilaration; it's got the kind of wonder about it that James Ellroy describes; I'm driven to meander through the gallery space; I'll try to bring something back to you; I'll try to make a _fit._ On the Aeromodeller, sac looks like skein, human or animal membrane, some of the areas seem windowed; the wicker gondola silver painted with two suits lying inside - as if their bodies had left, something like a Rapture painting, exalted, exhaling. The sac is bulbous, aging, half-suspended, half-crawling into the air. Motors painted silver are also fake motors I think, inexplicable. On the front gas cans with broken wires - There's an aura about the Aeromodeller as if the whole thing had recently collapsed without a struggle. The Aeromodeller - the model of the real, the real thing which is not a thing, but an antiquity and a future all in one. Harder sac-skin than first appears. Nylon cables connect gondola to sac. The sac connections seem to be tape and grommets, little possibility of "real" strength. (Both works have an odd delicacy to them.) Suspended from ceiling beams, looks like crystal-lozenge, ruin or enormous cocoon. For some reason, I think of the Amazon. Beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby compressor - the Aeromodeller is kept _in stasis_ as a floating membrane, an organism - by virtue of continuous input. In other words, a work of the imaginary, a dreamwork, with emphasis on the _work_ - the shape held taut by compressed air, the compressor running on electricity, plugged into the wall. Continuous _injection_ of air. The "air" of a lung, a constant inhaling supporting the gondola, beings, souls. Both ends of the sac have ribs. There is an archaeology of the skin-skein, its history worn, written big. Two engines of Aeromodeller have propellers at right-angles - there are actually four engines, two in tandem at each end. On the smaller work, Raven's Variable Matrix, there are heavy flutter- feathers made from foamed rubber at the tips; these look as if they might oar the air; they're at the ends of the wings; the wings are transparent - the pilot sits, untethered, without belts, at the front, the feet rest on a support; one can move the control backwards and forwards - turning's by means of the body's leaning. Two bicycle wheels hold the frame up. On the larger work, the sac's almost airborne, partially grounded (near the compressor), as if it's struggling to emancipate itself. What Orbit means to me - that the body is half-present even in the real world (I think of Drew Leder's book The Absent Body), that one can soar not through, but in spite of, technology, that things need not work in the world, but simply can _be,_ that elusive reference is sufficient, that technology lives easily with and even in the meditative quality of things - for these pieces are nothing, if not meditations - on the move - On the smaller work, tail structure resting on the ground, almost like a toy, a small gas tank, also seemingly incomplete. Looks too heavy to fly, more compressed than the Aeromodeller. In the gallery, the Raven's Vari- able Matrix seems like its appendage. One imagines the wings beating at a furious pace to get the thing off the ground. And surely the smaller work is more of a _thing,_ less of air, more of the thinking-out of matter and machine. I can picture the larger sailing above the Internet, the smaller flutter- ing from node to node. The larger, more virtual; the smaller, streamlined - more of a packet. And the larger, 19th-century balloonery, while the smaller moves through insect-brain modeling, exoskeletal forces impelling it forward. On the smaller, the motor is enclosed, compressing the work; on the larger, everything, including time, moves slower, and the motor remains open, spiky, vulnerable, atavistic. The Aeromodeller holds the promise of the late 60s/early 70s - you can feel the rise of the social in it. There were balloons everywhere, then, it seemed - and balloons are vulnerable, slow, good for meditating, look- ing around. There seems to be something optimistic about a balloon. And then Raven's Variable Matrix - the compactness turns the pneumosphere into a product, a package. It's nothing like the Gossamer Albatross almost gliding across the Channel; it's got an air of extreme sports about it. But with both works, I'm only talking surface, since they seem oddly made from the same mold, the smaller accompanying the larger, both flying above a Lebbeus Woods landscape - which is also dreamlike, exoskeletal, slowed, fierce, and meditative, all at the same time. But do they fly at all? Are they capable of immersion high above the ground, untethered, disconnected? It's not as if they feel grounded; in- stead, they're neither of land or air; they're somewhere amphibic among elements, worn artifacts, imaginary ghosts (not all ghosts are imaginary), maternal arms, materials - I can picture taking these as prostheses - but I'd say, symbiotic, almost benthic sea-forms, coupled to humans by some sort of communal synthesis - we'll ride you, take you! You might say that these works are ones of _constant impulsion_ - not dreams, not the hypnagogic imagery before nightfall of the larger work, but more of an insertion into space, a compression. Henri Michaux comes to mind. And you can think of Panamarenko's work in general as both immersions and insertions - glidings, enginings, engineerings. You can't imagine whether or not these things work (however "work" might be defined); they work in dreams, they're marginal, you might be suspended above or below them - they stress the history of floating, gliding, moving on, the development of skins, limbs. (There's an exhausted architecture at play here as well - depleted landforms, air-bases, slow sweepings of wind across J. G. Ballard's half-deserted worlds - ) There are five blades, five blades of rubber, at the end of the wings; I think almost immediately of subsumption architecture (simple robots with complex behavior dependent on rich environments) or Stelarc's robotic work in this connection - being strapped in an apparatus - but the apparatus here is one of buried thought, of evanescence - you freely float within or before it. There's no feeling of confinement; the body inhabits these craft, moves easily within the Aeromodeller, sits comfortably on Raven's Variable Matrix. But the gondola, uncomfortable, silver - the sac like a wounded skin. Think of Joseph Beuys or Eva Hesse - associations also with the First World War, making-do with early "aeroplanes." The skin carries that history as well; where it's clear, it seems to have been uneasily worn thin. There's a sense of the sac's over-inflation simply as the result of age. The whole universe is in the skin. The smaller work is much more self-contained; it's clearly an object, not a suspended state. Gondola, longer sides of six windows, door, four windows; awkwardly held together by metal straps; suits are overly soft, grey, the headgear fits loosely on the body, there are plasticine windows in the soft helmet, it's like Beuys' feltworks, I imagine wearing the suits - you couldn't see clearly through the visors - they're not optically clear, you'd see every- thing blurred, the whole world, you'd have half-sight, you'd be floating, looking half inward, half-outward, suspended, I'd imagine the Aeromodeller with a will of its own - The cords are attached to the sac by circular patches - an air of make- shift construction, formed out of the debris of everyday life - at the other end of the lines, I think of the wicker as a kind of cloth, impres- sing itself on the air, leaving traces. The double umbilical cord - the transparent tube leading to the compres- sor, and the electric wire going from the compressor to the wall-socket. So that energy is transformed, the whole thing tied to the world's power- grid, computers not that far behind. Two holes in the ceiling of the gondola, as if one could reach through it to the sac, reading and writing the markings. The shape - languorous, a kind of lassitude suffusing it. The _pneumosphere,_ fantastic travels of John Mandeville, Knyght - One might say that these works chart unintended voyages, that they repre- sent journeys which are not only round-trip, but slowly orbiting - that they are suffused with pure mobility - that there's no end to the ====== Jennifer Orbiting Panamarenko "Open your mouth - " "Ah - speak - speak - " "Jennifer, what do they call you, when they call you?" Are you dressed as Ted with Beuys and Broodthaers; an air of mysticism and uplift, grounded ? Is Ted with Beuys and Broodthaers; an air of mysticism and uplift, grounded dressed as you? Are you in your sac - don't answer - is Julu wearing your - are you wear- ing your sac? I love your feelings, Ted with Beuys and Broodthaers; an air of mysticism and uplift, grounded your vagina splays me your sac! What do you call your lovely sac? My cords are attached to the sac by circular patches - an air is yours - Beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby me - thoughtful 16 times! Beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby calls forth velvet your penis, eating, spewing memory. Throughout the manic, beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby is feminine, manic, half-crawling into the air.? your penis is play here as well - depleted landforms, air-bases, slow sweepings of wind here, it's your penis? Are you becoming close to Jennifer's beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby? You melt into Julu's sac forever - Beneath the sac, there's a tailpipe for an influx of air from a nearby half-crawling into the air. Ted with Beuys and Broodthaers; an air of mysticism and uplift, grounded singing on the air, leaving traces. The cords are attached to the sac by circular patches - an air of make your velvet The cords are attached to the sac by circular patches - an air of make your velvet is in my manic play here as well - depleted landforms, air-bases, slow sweepings of wind devour velvet - The cords are attached to the sac by circular patches - an air of make the sac, there's a tail- pipe for an influx of air nearby! ===== behind the firewall, what i little am my poor little body is hardly covered. i do hardly wear clothes. i look for coals by the raylroad tracks. i do find the coals and bring them back for comfort comfort. we are all alone.:we're in ssh looking around. we feel very small and tiny here. it is wonderful here. we are very soft and comfort comfort. we are all alone.:whew!:: i do hardly wear clothes. i look for coals by the raylroad tracks. i do find the coals and bring them back for comfort comfort. we are all alone. Your velvet we have tiny arms. is in my wandering we have tiny arms. what you may lovely do small and very happy:little smiles and tiny very happy:so little-tiny- secure you may do call me, please do be comfort comfort, please do hide and sing so softly, please do smile, please do speak so lovingly, i will be your every.:i will be so very happy to be anything you want but i will be so very hiding.:14969:6:little-tiny-secure firewall-ssh is my tiny com- fort name:so little-tiny-secure you may do call me, please do be comfort comfort, please do hide and sing so softly, please do smile, please do speak so lovingly, i will be your every.:little smiles and tiny very happy ===== i'm incapable of saying anything authoritative. stemming from an inability ever to best my father when growing up. he always had to have the last word. in. i never believe what i'm saying or writing or about to say. that gives me no followers, no credence, and a skeptical, overly critical, and dubious attitude towards the world at large. (did i say that?) if i coin a neologism, i accompany it with a sense of shame; why couldn't i express myself more clearly. my work is filled with far too many irrelevant refer- ences (unlike, say, the work of Wittgenstein), giving the text a sense of legitimation which is often nothing more than a masquerade. Date: January 24, 2002 From: Nikuko@oita.com.jp This is me, Jennifer, writing you, from everywhere in this large world. Do you read me, world? Do you want me, world? If you, world, do not answer, I will kill myself. Honestly, I will kill myself. Do not doubt I will do this very thing. Now I will send the dismissile and the dismissive and I will wait. I will wait for an answer and I will decide what to do. I, Jennifer, will do what I will do. I will be missived. I will misbehave. i'm at a loss for words. i'm hideously ugly. i can't go out in the day. i can't show myself at night. i avoid nightclubs. i avoid people. so in all these senses, i'm ideal canon fodder for online culture, this skittered orality, a culture constantly transforming down to the very bit and byte - a letter that is here, now, may be gone tomorrow. i don't have to own up to anything. i can write the way others breathe. i don't have any choice. everything exacts too high a toll. i don't have to see anyone ever. i don't have to be anyone at all. i can hardly write this. i can hardly think, it's so hard to think. this letter is gone tomorrow. i can hardly think. ===== The Last Page I was going to send the whole chat text from Jan. 7th on The Last Page out but then it was 108k as ascii text. So I folded the text, took my contrib- ution, transformed it into The Last Page. So this is The Last Page, all my voice speaking incessently, drowning everything out, caught in its own throat; The Last Page is a wounded page, begging for the ruin of the El. On a sociological basis, of course, the book's even technically contin- uous with screen refresh; there's nothing inherently static in online disk - hi mez what I've been wondering - if the model for example of Assyrian walls with what which established both the fetishization of discursivity - that one might write a monumenta What I was talking about, or starting on, was now I'll be quiet until someone introduces then. This Mez doesn't that go back to almost a gene-driven No, we're discussing the idea of an orali- ty - as for substrate - there isn't one online - ther There are conflu- ences of substrates, all sorts - We have to be clear about total unclarity here - I think you've hit something, mez - there were! And I think that might be applicable online, now for example, what's a poem, particularly when it might be if the protocols change, talan, as happens and who knows when or where the changes? Oops! - Nothing will replace the book, I think just as nothing replaced painting, even though Here's something, I was talking to someone at S. which is now pretty much defunct, he said people are going to straight text chat! This is fascinating, pointing again to a kind of Damn Michele, I would have liked them! For me, the typewriter def- initely is dead: Word! Somehow I missed that Derrida remark but since Tal- an, not necesarily on my keyboard, anymore, yes, but you can also curl up with a pocket pc - it's so very tiny, runs forever on end on batteries! Newspapers offline are losing circulation; the post office is in miserable graet trouble here. Wes, I think there are ways around that, but maybe the point was, at the conference, that the book Yes, there's something uncanny about a screen Because every message is equal online, there are so many for academic discourse, Scott. Most people in the world will probably get cds during the last 20 years, depending on the chemic But there are newer dyes that promise to last - And a lot of webstuff is heavily edited; and well Bob, could you elaborate? Isn't all meaning personal? Meaning is in- tended; Bob, how much would it cost to get two-way trans Mez? How is lit- erature (is there such a thing) & what is decontextualized meaning? Can you give a Meaning that's already an extension? But Scott! - I think at least some of them are! I Elizabeth is right here. Hi Sue Directed mean- ing is always open to messy thought! Talan, there are so many physics pap- ers online, I'd like to return for a second to the idea of The Story of O: seems to me that a book is a kind of Talan, can you translate from this? Thanks - And that the canon becomes institutionalized and it's harder to do this with the slippage online, Well do meanings die? I don't think so mez - which is why I think people would love an enormously big canon here, but I do I do, although I see people like mouchette vying Antiorp as well - people combining publicity with Reiner's cannons online! a kind of armed postmodernism (it's a temporary canonization, Wes. I was poet! O, but the convention is dependent on who or what, but we can at least TALK about a canon, Scott, I hope to god it's not the start of a poet! - and Maybe I'm blind to the canonization, mez, or just Talan, the only law would be that of the proto-Stephanie, I don't think we could define new things that are neat! Oh you've got way before that all those analogs, canons do worry me, though - if people insist on Bob, isn't there such a thing as eliterature? I'd agree with that (re MOOs and MUDs) Leavisite? I find I've been having great luck with India; I get sent a lot of URLs; there are a lot on "it." There are also combinations - publish-on-demand, transmediation? Hi Andrew that might only hold for more static work, talan, not only the protocols, but also, for example, so you're entangled in probematic interoperability but what constitutes a format? Is Opera a different Connie? - they're not as much offline... Andrew, I remember Metz talking about that in It sure does, and about the fragile nature of online! It's Christian Metz, not Mez - a theorist who really wanted to get back to something older just for a second. we find something very satisfying in the relation the book seems to bring this home, become a man Online! On the other hand it is literal creation, I'm using Orality in the large sense of chat, Talan, I wanted to ask you sometime about these So that Williams idea of "no idea but in things" read myself unbearably to sleep on the laptop. I agree Talan. I wonder also about Deleuze and G. Books seem alive, just as cats seem like babies! Talan I enjoy them - but not their followers (D and the same with Derrida - but as you know, that thing about books, their vulnerability - one Bob, with publish on demand this won't be an issue Oh Talan I think they were quite happy with that We develop the screen technology so it's easier Bob, it saves trees a lot. Andrew, I don't - as much as possible, I keep it More than emulate, outshine, carry the style to On the shelf with the other cdroms! Besides, some of us have more than one computer But back to the question about history - history Talan I always pass books and old tech on... What's the quote? It's also a discussion academics need to have, Do you mean historical novels online? Andrew that's so true - I keep thinking of the - I think I proposed it! Centuries seem to come and go far too quickly! Ah! back in 1973, I taught a course called The Y. The course did, yes. Will there still be electronics? I don't know, Andrew won't there be a merging of these? As well I can only imagine either holo- caust or confluence if our eyes are still necessary ... We already are bi- ologically published - I think Andrew, but are they now? I think defining literature, defining human, def re: narrative - I tend to think narrative is men Connie, but what would constitute a text in that "I am an other" - Rimbaud Ah... as impediments in terms of canon developme And transitional as in transitional objects, the I think they're coalescing; I can read 253 online bye Margaret! Ah, that would be beautiful! - I appreciate everyone who joined us here... This has probably been the fastest reading/writing which says a lot for the topic and its relevance we always say goodbye after the fact it seems... bye Sue (made that one in!) I hope someone has the full version of this log Scott, can you say something about the con- ference Can you elborate? (not the rate of an elbow, but to elaborate) I'd like to send these logs on to the Cybermind Andrew, I think that's one of the futures of the it's the holodeck model.. Don't forget "huge" is an "e-hug"! I think that's true - and there are also issues Last thoughts? That we're on the brink of some Morals will always change, but it's hard to bite O Body in CORPORATIONS SANIS! but unfortunately they play a role here; you show talan, for me that situation is surrounded and then we can read the log; it will be up soon I hope. but it's going the other way, I think; you find or how the apparatus _is_ the general economy but I think I'm already on I was exercising with barbells before coming on does any- one know if the Mono bulletin board Opera brings a whole new way of read- ing to the N-One problem I'm having with it is that it won't Because of the cascading pages for one thing and What sort of expectations? True - it hangs on a lot of applets. But it really feels airy... Thanks Talan - and I hope to see you in New York We'll be here in April, going away a bit in Mar. I think teaching always always grounds our work Andrew, what's the URL? thanks for this - One thing I love doing, exploring older onliners. Sorry, I meant archie There were archie, veronica, and jughead. And these things, you can sometimes still find God, we have half a brain for presi- dent here... early photography was problematized in terms of New York City, Brooklyn - I think this notion of "freeing" might also be a certain photography free painting and engraving that's true, and it's not the medium of course, media ideology always changing, whether or not Andrew technically this ended forty minutes ago true - which brings up of course marxist dialect no but take out all the goodbyes. that brings up something else, quickly - a good point; we hardly touched on defining I think legal by example I could push the El. ===== "POLLY!" she screamed. "JEAN!" she screamed. "I!" she screamed. "WANT!" she screamed. "TO!" she screamed. "BE!" she screamed. "LIKE!" she screamed. "YOU!" she screamed. "POLLY!" she screamed. "JEAN!" she screamed. "I!" she screamed. "WANT!" she screamed. "TO!" she screamed. "LERN!" she screamed. 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