posts tagged ‘books’
Immersion Into Noise
27 November 2011 • 1 comment out of context
tags: books, control, noise, politics, quotes
“If anything is representative of the art of noise, it is ambivalence.”
“Art must indict—or at the very least play the role of the noisy jester who unmasks the quietly persistent lies of the powerful.”
“Noise may break some connections, but connections will always continue to grow in other directions, creating new thoughts and new affects.”
“In one respect, all sounds and images are already a kind of noise: data without meaning.”
“An art of noise can also be postulated as a realm of anti-social cultural purpose directed toward the revolutionary transformation of an irrational social reality that insists on calling itself rational.”
“If we agree to combine this thought of noise art as a vacuole of noncommunication with an insistence on signal-to-noise psychological circuit breaking, we gain a more complicated image of noise—as vacuoles that re-route and break-up the pathways of control. Let us therefore entertain a noncommunicating art of noise as an aesthetic act that nevertheless communicates intricately.”
“I hypothesize that an art (or culture) of noise produced in our milieu of image superabundance and information proliferation can problematize culture and hence enliven us to the privacy of the human condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle that engulfs and (supposedly) controls us.”
“What the art of noise does is to take the meaninglessness of noise and convert it into the meaningful.”
“I shall establish my fundamental contention that all art is fundamentally conceptual and imaginative because art only exists conceptually and its goal is to change our consciousness.”
“What was once noise (unacceptable) has now become noise music (acceptable and even desirable).”
“For noise to be first noise, it must destabilize us. It must initially jar. It must challenge. It must initiate a glitch of psychic crumbling.”
“Noise art theory, then, involves the exaltation of the void and the melting of unstable frontiers as it expands definitions both inwardly and outwardly to envelope from both sides a felt understanding of the unfettered immensity and myrrh of our universe (where noise of one sort or another is everywhere).”
“Ideally, communication must be separated from noise. Noise is what is not communicated; it is just there as a kind of chaos, as the empirical third element of the message, the accidental part, the part of difference that is excluded.”
“Normal noise, as opposed to art noise, doesn’t mean anything and isn’t about anything; it just is annoyingly so.”
“Torben Sangild points out in his essay “The Aesthetics of Noise” that in Genèse, French philosopher Michel Serres sketched out the idea that the ultimate being-in-itself is noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive)—he proposes—is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude analogous to white noise. What Serres initially finds intriguing about noise (rather than the message) is that it opens up a fertile avenue of reflection. Instead of remaining pure noise, it becomes a means of transport.”
“Noise vs. music, non-intended sounds vs. intended sounds, life vs. art; the oppositional pairs resonating along with the first opposition form an ever-extending thread.”
“hyper-chaos (…) a form of absolutization where nothing is impossible or unthinkable.”
The Luddite panic of the nascent punks
16 November 2011 • out of context
tags: books, machines, music, quotes
“Several key differences between the two movements {industrial music and punk} should also be noted, in spite of occasional efforts to link the two in their ultimate goals. Chiefly among these differences is the reactionary, Luddite panic that the nascent punks sometimes espoused in the face of new technology. Sound artist Francisco López noted the pitfalls inherent in this attitude when he stated:
“I once read an interview with [Clash guitarist] Joe Strummer, in which he was criticizing technology in music. He said something like ‘I am a musician, I don’t want to be a fucking computer operator’. Surprising to see he didn’t realize about the fucking guitar operator in front of him.”
Microbionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century
Thomas Bey William Bailey
Readings
1 November 2011 • readings
tags: aesthetics, articles, books, comics, death, hauntology, history, imagination, machines, noise, novels, phonography, psychogeography, robots, science, television, texts, vampires, zombies
• Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard [read]
Tom McCarthy, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
• El elogio de la sombra [leer]
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
• Lenore #1-13
Roman Dirge
• Psychogeography [read]
Merlin Coverley
• Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination [read]
Florian Cramer
• Jacques Attali, author of Noise (1977). Speaking at the ICA, London, May 2001 [read]
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.”