archive for September, 2011
rainography☂
29 September 2011 • 1 comment inner
tags: rain
I’ve had a lot of blogs, and most of them are now dead. In fact, the only one that survives is música visual, so I guess that I’m really interested in that subject. Anyway, I’ve never had a blog about rain, my biggest obsession, so a couple of days ago I decided to create one, and here it is rainography☂.
Plagiarism is necessary
24 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, copy, plagiarism, quotes
“Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès l’implique. Il serre de près la phrase d’un auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une idée fausse, la remplace par l’idée juste.”
“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.”
Poésies
Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont)
Psychogeography links
24 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, situationism, urbanism
All these links are taken from the book Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley [read]:
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Decadent Action
International Psychogeographic Society
London Psychogeographical Association
New York Psychogeographical Association
Urban Adventure in Rotterdam
Wrights & Sights/Mis-Guide
Psychogeography
Classic Cafes (The Psychogeography of the Café)
Nothingness.Org & The Situationist Archives
Psychogeography Links Collection
Situationist International Online
Eight delegates in a state of semi-drunkenness
22 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, psychogeography, quotes, situationism
“In July 1957 this pre-situationist phase of largely unproductive navel-gazing finally came to an end, as the Situationist International was founded at a ‘conference’ in Alba in Italy. What was presented in typically grandiloquent style, as the merger of the Lettrist International and Asger Jorn’s International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, was in reality eight delegates ‘in a state of semi-drunkenness’ meeting in a remote bar and this pub lunch-cum-party conference was bolstered by the attendance of the London Psychogeograhical Association in the form of its single and only known member, Ralph Rumney. It was from these humble origins that the Situationist International was to emerge.”
Psychogeography
Merlin Coverley
Walking… an act of subversion
20 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, quotes, walking
“This act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion. Walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city with its promotion of swift circulation and the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants. In this way the act of walking becomes bound up with psychogeography’s characteristic political opposition to authority, a radicalism that is confined not only to the protests of 1960s Paris but also to the spirit of dissent that animated both Defoe and Blake as well as the vocal criticism of London governance to be found in the work of contemporary London psychogeographers such as Stewart Home and Iain Sinclair.”
Psychogeography
Merlin Coverley
Plots Unlimited
18 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, quotes, software
“Plots Unlimited, a PC program for screenwriters which generates plot lines out of an internal database of plot elements. (…) With its title alone, Plots Unlimited puts itself into the tradition of encyclopedic combinatory poetics, but does so as a commercial and pragmatic industrial tool. It is naive, and not sarcastic like Eco’s combinatorics. That, though, does not change its implication that much of contemporary movies and television soap operas might be based on its formulas, product of the Plots Unlimited matrix, so-to-speak. (The program is in fact a popular tool among screenwriters.)”
Through aimless drift
18 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, quotes, walking
“The Situationist concept of “psychogeography” had its roots in the aimless Surrealist drifts through Paris described in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja and in Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Le Paysan de Paris, and meant a purely subjective, para-scientific exploration of (chiefly) urban spaces through aimless drift. The surrealist drifts in turn were indebted to the romanticist “flâneur,” a wanderer “botanising the asphalt” as cultural theorist Walter Benjamin put it in his essay on 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire.”
Its own autonomous, self-contained world
18 September 2011 • 1 comment out of context
tags: books, games, quotes, religion
“Pre-modern concepts of computation typically relied on an equivalence of macrocosm and microcosm and so conceived of algorithms as demiurgic creation, metaphysically. The game by contast is a central model of 20th century computation, both in the arts and in technology. The main ontological difference between theosophic and game computing is that games can do without a reference to higher powers—which is why religions declared many games, dice and card games for example, sinful—and may impose arbitrary restrictions that do not logically follow from a higher natural order. A game, in other words, can be its own autonomous, self-contained world.”
Memories stop… like the rain
18 September 2011 • out of context
tags: comics, memory, rain
Lenore #2, Roman Dirge