Strata

Standard Stoppages -

2008-12-25T17:54:00.000-05:00

JJJJJ YR-MO-DA HH:MM:SS TT L H msADV UTC(NIST) OTM

Watching the Gaps

2008-12-21T14:43:00.001-05:00

Watching the Gaps

Sculpture and Psychoanalysis - Judd's Badge - Tim Martin -

2008-12-01T15:48:00.001-05:00

To give a very simple example, it is like the three-year-old boy who, upon losing his favourite toy car, responds to the anxiety by becoming the car and motoring around as if he were the car. The id's object-cathexis is thus taken under control by the ego by making itself into a car, or at least those parts of the car that are libido causing, i.e. the sound, the movement, the shiny paint, the variety of interior spaces, and the translucency of the glass. This is why Smithson listed in detail the chemical contents of the paints he and Judd used in 1966. Thus, for Smithson, specific objects produced a sensation of 'an inaccessible regression [that] enforces a danger-stimulus, to which no reaction is appropriate'. Although the object-choice itself regresses to infinity (it's gone), no anxiety results because, as models of the ego, Judd's sculptures retain some of its features.

Fragmentation and Interdisciplinarity

2008-10-13T13:35:00.002-04:00

"Thus art, science, technology, and human work in general, are divided up into specialties, each considered to be separate in essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs, men have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended to unite these specialties, but these new subjects have ultimately served mainly to add further separate fragments. [...] The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion." Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order; pp. 1-3.

Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, 183;

2008-06-18T02:43:00.003-04:00

Fieldwork with children and computers is rich in examples of the kind of fright that Minsky expects. For example, an incident where it was evoked by a first contact with recursion is reported in Sherry Turkle, The Second Self. Interviews with adults on early experiences also reveal many such memories--fear of prisms, of mirrors reflecting mirrors, fear of questions such as "How far away are the stars?"

Preposition

2008-03-05T02:21:00.001-05:00

A word or phrase placed typically before a substantive and indicating the relation of that substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, as English at, by, with, from, and in regard to.

Border transfer - edge transfer

2008-02-19T20:27:00.001-05:00

Border transfer - edge transfer

One thing after the other.

2007-10-25T09:30:00.001-04:00

One thing after the other.

Cargo/Frontier

2007-09-14T15:01:00.001-04:00

Cargo/Frontier

Default time/clock collection

2007-07-08T15:17:00.001-04:00

Default time/clock collection

Demarcating Boundaries;

2007-05-04T00:10:00.001-04:00

There is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers

Hyper-solid homage to the artifical (Artfice);

2007-04-29T20:23:00.000-04:00

"I am reminded of Roland Barthe's essay on seventeenth-century Flemish painting, on obsessive tactile materialism, what he calls 'the world as object in itself'."

Simulacrum;

2007-04-04T23:49:00.002-04:00

The simulacrum on the far side of the screen towers of the everyday, not as its representation, but as its mythic model and truer self.

Crash;

2007-04-04T23:49:00.001-04:00

The crash would appear as the emblem of an unarticulated desire to return to a “primitive” regime of “symbolic exchange,” to a relation of fluidity and ambivalence, between the domains of the living and the dead, and incompatible with operation criteria.

Language;

2007-04-04T21:02:00.001-04:00

The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a good language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., "a," "the," "I") should be shorter than less common words (e.g., "benefit," "generation," "mediocre"), so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise—e.g., a passing car—the listener should still be able to glean the meaning of the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory.

Spatiotemporal Effects / Curtis Roads;

2007-03-14T14:53:00.000-04:00

The IR of a room contains many impulses, corresponding to reflections off various surfaces of the room--its echo pattern. When such an IR is convolved with an arbitrary sound, the result is as if that sound had been played in that room, because it has been mapped into the room's echo pattern.

Massumi on brightness;

2007-03-07T19:37:00.000-05:00

Fogs: actual traces of the virtual are often light effects. Although we tend to think of the perceptual dimensions of light as clearly distinguishable and almost boringly familiar, they are not so docile on closer inspection. [...] The boundaries we set and distinctions we function by are habitual. According to many theorists of vision, they do not replace the infinitely complex perceptual fog that is our originary and abiding experience of light. They occur with them, alongside, in a parallel current or on a superposed abstract perceptual surface, in a perpetual state of emergence from the continuum of light-dimensions that one frustrated would-be tamer of visual anomaly termed “the brightness confound.” / The “brightness confound” can become a conscious percept, through a concerted effort of unlearning habits of seeing, or through a simple accident of attention. When it does, the confound is contagious. It strikes depth: three-dimensionality, argues the “ecological” school of perceptual theory, is an effect of complex differentials of surface lighting played out in ever-shifting proximities of shadow and color, reflectance and luminosity, illumination and translucence (it is not, as traditional theories of perception would have it, the product of mysterious calculations of relative size and distance--as if the eyes could count). / Depth is a surface effect susceptible to the brightness confound. When it goes, so goes separable form. Not only do the relative size and distance of objects flutter, their boundaries blur. They cease to be separate figures, becoming not entirely localizable zones in a fuzzy continuum. In other words, they cease to be objects, becoming what they always were, in the beginning and in parallel: fluctuations. Visual runs. Experiential transition zones. The distinctions of habit fold back into the always accompanying level of the more-than- three-dimensioned light concurrence from which they emerged. The fixed boundaries and “constants” of our habitual perceptions are emergences from an experiential confound to which they can return, and must return. For they are not in the final analysis structural constants at all, but continually regenerated effects, predicated on the variation they follow and emerge from, as its perceptual arrest. They rest entirely on variation.

The Optical Unconscious;

2007-02-28T19:01:00.000-05:00

The answer explains the reference to the "fixed stare" in that Ruskin cannot take his eyes from the "sea" and "the sea is a special kind of medium for modernism." How so, the implied reader wants to know, and the answer is that the sea is "a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, the no-space of sensory deprivation." So the sea is a sort of ready-made monochrome, or perhaps a natural analogue to an all over blue painting, or perhaps to the oblong luminosities of what Rosalind Krauss elsewhere designates "The California Sublime." Or in any case for what she designates here as "the optical and its limits," where a certain kind of positive nothingness is in fact what one sees.

Present-tense -

2007-01-29T23:47:00.001-05:00

One could say that nouns do not really exist, only verbs exist. A noun is just a "slow" verb; that is, it refers to a process that is progressing so slowly so as to appear static.

Boomerang -

2007-01-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Serra-Richard_Boomerang_1974.mp4 "As an example, let us consider the Latin verb 'videre', meaning 'to see', which is used in English in such forms as 'video'. We then introduce the root verbal form 'to vidate'. This does not mean merely to see in the visual sense, but we shall take it to refer to every aspect of perception including even the act of understanding, which is apprehension of a totality, that includes sense perception, intellect, feeling, etc. (e.g., in the common language 'to understand' and 'to see' may be used interchangeably). So the word 'to vidate' will call attention to a spontaneous and unrestricted act of perception of any sort whatsoever, including perception of whether what is seen fits or does not fit 'what is', as well as perception even of the very attention-calling function of the word itself (...)"

David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram";

2007-01-24T20:58:00.001-05:00

"Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange....[by] paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for 'real' to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."

Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments;

2007-01-18T01:02:00.001-05:00

There is something irresistible about such a place, something grand and empty. This kind of architecture without "value of qualities," is, if anything, a fact. From this "undistinguished" run of architecture [...] we gain a clear perception of physical reality free from the general claims of "purity and idealism." Only commodities can ford such illusionist values [...] As the cloying effect of such "values" wears off, one perceives the "facts" of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy.

New Totalities;

2007-01-05T13:16:00.001-05:00

The new totalities, or transcultural ensembles, that can be envisioned in the near future in the place of "collective identities" issue from the processes of self-differentiation maturing into interferences. In this case differences strengthen our need for each other: Some of our differences are neutralized (in order not to become oppositional), others are intensified (in order to avoid group identification). Interference is what we perceive as the joy and play of communication that reinforces some of our differences and neutralizes others in the play of non-totalitarian totalities. Generally, totality can be developed in two directions: (1) as opposed to difference and therefore eliminating all particular differences, as in a totalitarian state; (2) as truly different from difference and therefore preserving and nourishing all particular differences, as in an interdisciplinary community. \ These new totalities will shape the transcultural world, which has not yet received any satisfactory theoretical articulation. Deconstruction may prove methodologically inadequate to this emerging class of totalities that could be detected as transcultural communities, or as transmetaphysical systems, as trans-utopian visions, or as transsocial groups. Deconstruction operates through the theoretical differentiation of existing unities while what is in question now is the new integration of differences, the construction of trans-differential cultural, social, epistemological totalities.

Tron;

2006-12-28T23:06:00.001-05:00

"Every one of us is in that computer somewhere, whether it's because of out drivers license, social security, or income tax. But the fact is that there is an alternate person that is an electrical person that is forming inside this electrical dimension. And then the question is, 'Are you in control of that information, or is somebody else in control of it?' When thinking about Tron, you sort of have to picture yourself inside a Pac-Man game. Picture yourself in there fighting for your own life, and the only way you can get out of that game is if you figure out how it works from the inside this time. The big difference is the game doesn't look the way it looks to you from this world as a little screen. This time it looks real. What happens in Tron is that the character that Jeff Bridges plays, a guy named Flynn, has invented these various video games, and they've been taken away from him illegally by a large computer company. In an effort to release the information from their computer files, he takes on their computer system. In so doing, he gets pulled into the computer. Once he's in the computer, he gets sentenced to die as a video game player by the Master Control Program. The irony is that those video games are his creation and now his life depends on overcoming his own creation."

Heat Death & Homogeneity (New Totalities)

2006-12-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

If the universe lasts for a sufficient time, it will asymptotically approach a state where all energy is evenly distributed. "That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."