Pata-Thought: 2011

And yet another favorite of mine from Thrower and The Peddler and their Cartes Postales project:

Lao-Tse Rebirth in a tin can and the Derridean Morpheme drip. http://www.youtube.com/user/LampshadePeddler

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Carte Postale: Homage to The Dali

Thrower and The Peddler, Carte Postale: Homage to Dali.
http://www.youtube.com/user/LampshadePeddler

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Carte Postale: Searching for the Libraries

Here's another ditty by my brothers Thrower and The Peddler in their continuing Cartes Postales Project.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LampshadePeddler

Monday, March 7, 2011

Carte Postale: Bookish Knowledge

Here is a sneak peek of my friends' digital cartes-postales project.

Thrower and The Peddler, Carte Postale: Bookish Knowledge http://www.youtube.com/user/LampshadePeddler

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The dialectics of the eye.

   When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might
   add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of
   consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed
   thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea.5 It is thus now
   common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as
   transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense.

   Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

We wake up in the morning. We grab a cup of coffee and head towards the next moment. A self-reflective illuminated screen will be found somewhere. As our memories begin to reverberate at light-speed, as the marketing campaigns of the algorithmic future-present continue to swarm around the data-body from all directions, the algorithms themselves no longer believe in gravity. They never had to, theres was cybernetic world of heading towards the optimum calculation. Within this novel architecture of a continuous lenticular vision of real-time, one where any screen moment, becomes a novel screen-memory of the present to come which is already here. This is a way of seeing. It is, as Peter Sloterdijk has stated in his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason, a way of seeing vision which is double, or multi-faceted which is not foreign to the spy or philosopher.To achieve this sort of vision is to also become aware of a certain so-called conscious state of being: seeing oneself see. This is what Sloterdijk calls the eye-dialectic.

It is perhaps no coincidence today that when one takes on this relation to one’s own psycho-geographical location, that one is within a world of doubles, sitiuational architecture, and confusion. Power relations here work from a different position. For power to work today, it is merely in trying to reign itself in. If we are, as Jean Baudrillard states, in The Agony of Power, within the period of the violence of the global,where we find that universal human rights become watered down within an accelerated sphere which carnivalizes itself, feeds on itself, cannibalizes itself, we are also within the realm of the potlatch of information exchange where, as Baudrillard says so well, "We no longer match the perfection of our technical devices. What we produce is beyond our imagination and our representation. Humanity, confronted with its own divinized model, with the realization of its own ideal, collapses." (The Agony of Power, p. 82)

As we continue our voyage into the cybernetic theatre of cruelty, the digital moebius strips keep on updating, backwards and forwards, we weave a hyper-frequency of cinematic eye-dialectics that has us seeing each other see. A doubled-up dialectic swarm. Sloterdijk will speak of a novel architecture that has begun to carve itself out of the 21^st century digital dromospheric landscape. He speaks of spheres and foams. Identity strains stream out in all directions, and become foam-like, bubble-like, leading to morphogenetic emergence. It is perhaps here, that we can begin to re-think the Greek philosophical problem of the accident of substance. Within an accelerated realm of spheres within spheres, psycho-geographic foams spill over into each other through the digital network sea of hyper-frequencies. Here, we are in the realm of the eye-dialectic. But this visual machinery apparatus is not only allowing us to see ourselves see, such as the philosophers used to craft with their cauistic techniques of rhetoric, but it is a position of seeing what the networks see. Here we can perhaps begin to see that spheres can also be viewed as lenses, reflecting or refracting the illumination of vision. We are not only seeing ourselves see, but seeing the networks see us. As power itself becomes in this lenticular universe, we will continue to find ourselves brushing up against our own spherical natures, ever changing in the becoming vision of the future-present.

Baudrillard, Jean The Agony of Power, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 6, 2010 The MIT Press
Sloterdijk, Peter The Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, 1988

One or several architectures: the becoming visions of the stereo-real.

One or several architectures: the becoming visions of the stereo-real.

The architecture in this reality is precisely the construction of its reality as such. Vision within this digitally based architecture functions as a novel relief of real-time. It is a relief, which is to say, a new type of depth, which like the aesthetic perspective of cubism or the cinematic movement image itself, functions within a temporality whose speeds and forces fluctuate according to one’s perception angle (parallax view) which is none other than a micro-projection of one’s lived existence, and perhaps more importantly, one’s memory of these events. It is not a coincidence that psychoanalysis focused its attention on the words “projection”, “surrealism” and the “imaginary”. To project an expression outward is to perhaps also to discover its inward relation as well. The duty of any aesthetic venture is its capability of attracting, or repulsing various magnetisms. The magnetic fields of Breton and Soupault resonate all too well within these ever changing virtual architectures which are nothing more than the ever changing political (power-relations) aesthetics according to which various triangulated partial subjective frequencies of collagic, cubist, image-movements of streaming video digital awareness become illuminated. It is an audio-visual-sensual architecture of the theatre of the world. It is itself the ‘jeu du monde’ according to Kostas Axelos. This bizarre novel relief of stereo-real immediacy is a situational awareness of a reality based on a cinematic energy of the instant. Here, one is always already caught, captured within one’s own micro-projective event. But one can nonetheless strive to articulate, carve out, create, invent, discover, pen a reverberating aesthetic resonance, a voice. To vocalize within the instant is to accept the call of the Other. To speak in this sphere is to re-focus one’s attention on a space of auto-poietic emergence. Competing desiring machines of Simondonian psychic individuation, emerge within a shared cinematic subconscious space of coding and decoding of metaphor and pataphor (see paul avion). We are only now becoming aware of this novel inter-active virtual/actual aesthetic. Here we can perhaps begin to understand Felix Guattari’s concept of partial subjectivity. We must begin to look at our position of collective shared cinematic awareness as an inter-mingled architectural space. Gilles Deleuze speaks of the necessity for philosophy to begin to use various innovations which have already been championed by other artistic communicative mediums. Gilles thought philosophy needed a Max Ernst. A Max Ernst of philosophy what would this look like?

"Le Baiser" (The Kiss) 1927, Max Ernst

The Max Ernst philosophers would no longer write their philosophical images, but take on another of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts, they would strive to think and write thought-images, which are none other than those of the likes of Jean Baudrillard’s event-thoughts and the seductive mechanics of the cut-ups of William Burroughs. (See his Electronic Revolution) To write here is to undertake an automatic writing of light. An image-writing at light speed. The surrealists had explored this geo-philosophy before, but now we have entered what Paul Virilio names “stereo-reality”. How would philosophy upgrade itself here? It would have to perhaps again look to the other domains of aesthetics to gain insight from artistic creations which include all of the technological apparatuses with which we bind ourselves today. But within the stereo-real, all other aesthetic novelties and methods and techniques find themselves converging on each other, and leave within their immediate rubble, an increasing resonance of a bizarre architectural design where we are only beginning to understand or become aware of a shared cinematic subconscious of the social networks.

Today, our relation to the real is precisely within these shared social network spaces, within layers and folds of collected social-creative image-thought. We pen our narratives in an aphoristic style. A youtube clip becomes an aphorism. We find ourselves within a psycho-geographical reverb that the situationists had only begun to understand with their goofy experiments of detournement. Today, reality itself is a continuous detournement where we are cybernetically satisfied by the tiniest of digital electro-shocks. Cinematic shock becomes the preferred pavlovian feedback where emotion reigns and is reigned in. But here we find ourselves up against an instantaneity which perhaps only leaves us within a vanishing point where Virilio asks, “Is an anthropology of the Instant possible?” (See his book, University of Disaster)

Can one reflect or intuit within an interval that merely constructs itself as its pens itself? Here we can perhaps begin to understand the connection between the game world and the game of the world (le jeu du monde)and the inter-active partial cinematic subjectivity which is only beginning to become aware of itself. A grey ecology, according to Paul Virilio, demands the necessity of being aware of one’s own relativity to the self-created world. Not that this position is relative or has no meaning as such. But our relation to the instant is within a critical space between a time/space register proper to the concepts of relativity to the extent that one is also dealing with various competing time/space registers within a varying field of architectural and memory (time space)geo-loactions within the dromosphere. Within the architecture of the dromosphere, speed reigns. Here we must begin to think a vision-aesthetic that takes into account one’s own bodily position to this “disastrous” landscape where the virtual and the real provide a novel illumination of a light-writing.