Holodeck Simulation Proposals 02

I have presumed participant reactions where necessary in the interest of the reader. The Holodeck can only produce some uncomfortable artifacts alluding to sexual stimulation, pain, or depression.User experience would vary.

Untitled Program 0016

[Not recommended for seniors, those with heart conditions and women in duress of pregnancy]

You are in a fairly large room with a bay window facing East. You cannot linguistically distinguish yourself from a table. Beneath your polished top, four hand-lathed and sanded legs continually spasm at magical joints bolted to each corner of your apron; your pattern of movement is frustrating and boolean, restricting you (a table) at first to only a constant and directionless bouncing. With concentration you find are able to shift your weight, guiding the idle hops into a slow prance toward a set of double doors at south end of the room which is decorated with blue yarn, gourds and a small painting of a coastal galleon, its mizzen mast angled low by the pitched froth of the sea, all green and violet. You likely try to slow your advance as you reach the doors though you find that your legs have altered their fits in a more irregular or erratic way, veering you. Soon, despite your efforts, you find yourself flailing backward toward the center of the room in a kind of violent jig. As you are made of blackened oak, the sounds of your legs’ repeated strikes against the floor remind you of a nail-gun and you see that you have left deep gashes in the rough-hewn parquet. [Program may continue or loop until ended by the participant]

Untitled Program 033

[Program consists only of a procession of specific sensations, each lasting no more than 8 seconds and experienced in the following order: fatigue, a sense of distant arousal, a sense of ideological enterprise, leasing a truck, aphasia associated with petting animals, smelling a cardfile, the taste of copper, the fire department, My Lai, Gyges.]

Untitled Program 002

You are legless and own a prominent United States auto-manufacturing enterprise with factories in seven states. Arriving late to a meeting with top-level staff convened in response to looming state fuel-economy standards legislation, you experience the overwhelming sense that your legs are, in fact, still present, and feel as spools of gold spun by the young—and them, seraphic, lie, eyes shuttered, in a forest copse; about you the poppies, asters, crane toward the weirding sun. You excuse yourself, wheeling towards a set of double-doors at the south end of the conference room. You exit. At your back you hear the sounds of stripping paint and wood scraped by forks.

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WOFL

This short animation by artist, David Oreilly is entitled WOFL and a higer resolution version can be found here.
I think little else needs to be said unless you would ask to whom that blip of disembodied head belongs to -- in which case I would tell you that it belongs to Brian Peppers, internet meme incarnate.

wofl

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On the Nature of Intrepidness

So I was having some thoughts over the weekend. Here is the extremely incomplete result.
Also here are some reference materials.

A Confrontational Symmetry

I awoke on Friday to this footage of yet another fatal police tasering, this one having been filmed by a Canadian traveler, Paul Pritchard at the Vancouver International Airport. Skimming what details there are available at the moment, the unfortunate tase-ee was a Polish man by the name of Robert Dziekanski whose flight had landed there at VIA some ten hours before his death at the hands of four Canadian police officers. While little is known about his actions at the airport in the many hours spent there prior to his death, the iteration of the footage I saw recorded what were arguably the final ten minutes of the man’s life, depicting a confused and obviously upset Dziekanski pacing back and forth outside of the shatterproof terminal glass, picking up a table, throwing an object, etc – that is, until the authorities arrived to subdue the man, eventually tasing the shit out of him and then, after mistaking his subsequent ataxia for resistance, doing it again. This cycle is repeated until the man is no longer moving; or at least, that’s what it seemed like to me. Obviously there have yet to be universal usage standards for tasers as a paradoxically “non-lethal” method of controlling violent behavior and while that’s an interesting topic, I suppose that my own interest while watching continually came to rest on the recording itself and its intrepid author. While I have no designs on constructing any kind justification or defense on behalf of the deceased, I do think that in order to properly outline the particular psychological standoff that I witnessed, some dissection is needed beforehand.

-hit the jump for more...


At only a few seconds into the video, Dziekanski is seen to cross the area just outside of the terminal entryway carrying with him what to all appearances seems to be a wooden, collapsible TV tray. Breathing heavily, he then enters the terminal lounge with the table held to his chest, legs out, nervously gesturing to the trapped onlookers, of which our cameraman is one. This stance is, to my eyes, undeniably one of defense rather than assault; as Dziekanski grips the table, he seems to actively analogize it to an offensive shield (the stereotypical image of the lion tamer's chair seems appropriate) capable on its own of defense though active offensively as a deterrent. Altogether, the situation was quite obviously a stressful and frightening one for all parties but it should come as no surprise that it was filmed almost in its entirety because that action of filming itself plays the role of a mirrored defensive/offensive deterrent for our cameraman – the balancing half of an interesting symmetry. In the image above taken from the video we have an invisible and equal confrontation constructed of two men and between them, each their double-sided prostheses exemplified like so:

A x -----------x’ B
(From left to right: Dziekanski, the table, the camera, then Pritchard)
My question about this symmetry regards the defensive affects of the camera.

It has been shown elsewhere that the camera lens can be a deterrent, a weapon, a window: a tacit but real threat of forced intersubjectivity. While we often address the inanimate lens as an asynchronous stage or podium from which to confront a limited potentiality, that limit is set by the operator’s intention; and without the knowledge of that intention the photographed subject performs, quite literally, for all. In considering the camera as prosthesis of memory or vision, it should be also seen that the prosthetic effect extends both to the photographed or filmed subject as well as to the operator; that is to say that the camera has two openings: the lens and the viewfinder.

The HUD and the Solace of Distance

The concept of the viewfinder is a simple one, allowing the photographer to approximate a camera’s output by providing a hole (duplicating the format ratio of the film) whose negligible distance from the lens guarantees passable consistency between that which is perceived and captured perception. As technology has advanced, the viewfinder’s role has expanded somewhat to become a completely digital simulation of the lens’ exact point of view. Regardless of the type of camera or its feature set, the viewfinder already mediates experience for the operator though to what degree depends on other factors. The common move to digital cameras has allowed manufacturers to augment the once sole purpose of the viewfinder to include the display of technical information for experienced users (aperture, focal data, shutter speed, lighting condition, white point and so on) allowing a apt comparison with that of a HUD system.

The first HUDs were deployed in fighter jets, providing truncated synopses of critical flight data such as altitude and various kinds of gyroscopic readings. Now, as then, these displays are vital tools in helping to minimize a pilot's eye movement, reducing the amount of time her focus might need to stray from a more 'primary' field of view while allowing her the advantages of simultaneously presiding over the abstracted status of numerous instruments/limbs. A particularly relevant characterization of a HUD system would be as the prosthetic's prosthetic: providing streamed and ideally seamless data reports concerned with the integration of subject’s real or virtual extremities into a unified format. Upon using a HUD, a subject’s experience with the phenomenal world is fractured into specific-use modules; through the collaboration of GPS, "minimaps", specialized scanning, light sensors, image zoom, temperature and diagnostic readouts, a modular HUD display provides a measure of functionality (and at times multipresence) that not only could be understood to consoles the amputee but perhaps to provide kind of buffer against the ‘primary’ experience which it modifies; an experience whose nature, if traditionally in need of advanced display technologies, might already be described as critical, dangerous or stressful i.e. war and its siblings (the fighter pilot, tank operator, video game battles, etc.) The more precarious the balance of control between environment and the user or the more demanding the stringency or exactitude of this balance, the more reliant their practice becomes on technologies built to monitor the physics and minutia of the phenomenal and subsequently integrated into a HUD system.
The essence of the HUD however, has much to do with its physical immediacy (as a translucent overlay) in relation to a ‘primary’ perception rather than a complete replacement of it. The design of most consumer and professional camcorders already allows for a close juxtaposition of these two in that the viewfinder can be constantly mated with a particular eye while the other is left unobstructed by the camera apparatus itself. In the case of modern digital cameras (as differentiated from camcorders), the form factor precludes the same possibility though it is arguably accounted for in having a large LCD version of the viewfinder at its back to serve the same end – here, the viewfinder has already become the optional HUD, recasting the filmed experience “on the fly” from within the structure of the camera apparatus and available without obstructing the natural vision.

We might attempt to understand a HUD or viewfinder as a simulacrum, or as Barthes so aptly put it, "intellect added to the object" -- in this case, an object that may or may not have been quantifiable without the use of a particular prosthesis. If supposing a simulacra to de-realize phenomenal experience then it could similarly be said to distance or protect a subject from that experience. This is not to say that the photographer’s perception is only subject to derealization when in the presence of HUD-like auxiliary data, but that the presence of any codification of experience already implies the de-realization that a HUD system relies on. The constant mimicry of an experience over the digitized screen of a camera could literally show us that that experience is already, even as it happens, distanced from the camera operator, allowing them to interact with either or both as ‘primary’.

Considering again the symmetry posed above, is it a logical inference to say that the camera operator is protected from the events which he films? In looking for evidence of (what I’ll call) a confusion of distance in explaining the phenomena of the “intrepid cameraman” I waded through quite a few YouTube videos labeled with variations of the terms “amateur” “disaster” and “footage” though in the end, it is impossible to tell to what extent the viewfinder plays in their pillar-like constitution. In the end, I think I’ll need a lot more justification.

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Internets are Serious Business

Lest anyone should doubt it, let me reiterate that the Internet, despite constant assertions to the contrary, is in fact serious business.

I've learned a lot in a short amount of time due to the events of the past few days. One of these lessons had to do with context and the authority of “blogged” versus traditional media. I spent an hour or so yesterday reading about several more or less recent court cases whose dominant conflicts could be reduced to a question over who deserves the protection of journalistic rights or, more simply, “blogged” journalism versus "traditional" journalism. I found the results very interesting when considering the same arguments in relation to an internetified critical practice.

I spent a big honkin chunk of time this morning writing a long post about these relations but in the end, I pulled it. The reason being, while I was in the shower I realized the issue was much larger than I had sketched it. Wanting to do it justice, I think this is a job for Palace Wreck. Suffice it to say that there is much to discuss.
Anyway, I cited an example to reiterate one of my points about blogs and though the whole thing was scrapped, I still want to leave you with the decontextualized "case in point" as it were: Here you go, lol.

Update #1.
In starting to gather some materials (online and off) for further study, I've come across this panel discussion which, though spotty, offers some interesting tidbits and observation for expansion. It's from 2005, which, in internet terms, seems to be around 100 years ago.

I've also started to read an incredible antique entitled "Trusting Aesthetics to Prosthetics - Art Criticism Internet World Wide Web Sites". Oh yes, my friends. Carbon dating suggests this relic to have been written around the year CE 1997 or, if you're incapable of counting that high, approximately 750 years ago.

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Dream Post

I dreamt that, having attended a lecture on 'spells of maturation' (I kid you not), I and an auburn -haired woman sitting nearby to whom I was attracted, repeatedly got up and left through a rear set of double doors. We did this calmly. I describe it as 'repeatedly' however because this incident occurred several times, with each episode concluded in being somehow mysteriously seated again at the back of the lecture hall. I was not aware of this looping discrepancy, or at the very least, it did not trouble me.

At some point I do not recall, we must have succeeded in our leaving as I can clearly see the two of us standing together in an acutely angled cove lined blue with painted aluminum footlockers. In the fluorescent light she examined my calves whose higher half had been replaced (in an indescribable fashion) with a low powered gas engine covered in a shellac of oil and grime. As she leaned to examine it, I found that our agencies became immediately reversed and the engine/leg became hers though no longer remaining in any way attached to her body (once mine).

The final scene involves only vagaries, sadly. The engine grew laterally, resembling a shape more equal among its faces, and jut a black gossamer from around its center width, looking for all the world like a skirt. Having a lighter, I held a flame to the gossamers surface, quickly evaporating its mass. Eventually, all that remained of the skirt was a long, smoldering stem that lined the cube. Inches below, the hair of my leg curled from the heat.

Seriously.

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Happy Saturday

All qualia are lamentable.


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Will Rogan and Palace Wreck

Will Rogan
Silencer, 2007, from A Memory of Shadows and Stone
altered magazine page (with me in it)

I want to say thanks to John, Alli and Brandon for the good times last week. We had the chance to visit Creativity Explored for the stellar Superheros and Supervillains opening gala as well as the Jack Hanley for Will Rogan's A Memory of Shadows and Stone.
Critical text by yours truly, concerned with Rogan's pictorially ashen, Japanese saga of dis- and re-appearance is forthcoming from Palace Wreck Review, which will raise its gilded gates to and for public entry very, very soon.

[Postscript]

Will Rogan, Getting Through (Spectral Vortex)
from Getting Through, 2005
(via Cathrine Ross)

and as promised,
Charlie White, Everything is American




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Venice Biennale Highlight

Toril Goksoyr and Camilla Martens
It Would Be Nice to Do Something Political, 2007

With the above iteration (i think) installed near the entrance of Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, this is probably both the most impressive and brazenly confrontational of the works I've so far had the chance to see featured from this year's show (going on till November if anyone has a plane ticket). Goksoyr and Martens have succeeded in a coyly blunt critique of not only artistic institutions but their more broadly social counterparts as well; this, having only asked a simple question in the right place.

I wasn't familiar with their work prior to this, maybe some of you were.
Regardless, let me know what you think.

"...Something Political" is featured in Lacanian Ink, Issue 29 from which I scanned it, having liked that angle better for whatever reason (sorry for the spine split). Im currently getting my Zizek on.

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#06 Food Security & Preparedness

Matthew Arnone
Food Security and Preparedness, Hyatt Regency
Split Valedictory Series, 2006
altered photograph



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Reader Mailbag #003

Omissive Channel,
I happen to have heard that you recently saw John Carpenter’s Christine.
a.) Is this true?
b.) What do you think about the social mechanics of L.A’s freeway system?
Yours,
Wheelie in Manchester


Dear Wheelie,
First of all: yes.
Regarding the second, I’m not exactly sure about the nature of question but I’ll do my best. You’d have to understand however, that Santa Cruz is the closest I’ve ever even been to L.A so I can say definitively that I don’t have any working experience of how the psychological entrails of the Los Angeles freeway system functions on a daily basis, but after reading a relevant chapter of Reyner Banham’s “4 ecologies,” I can say that his analysis shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Hobbes.

More after the jump...

Concerning the freeway and our interaction with it atop suspension, I suppose you could argue for the efficiency of public transportation but it’s the illusion of freedom imminent in a car-carried culture that, as Banham suggested, seems to foster the psychological well-being of millions and eventually ensure what is a smooth ride I might one day take from here to the tar pits in Le Brea. This simple, communicative constriction of freedom looks to be a corollary to what Paul Churchland described as the “gridded open” of not only Western democracy, but the neural outlay of the human brain as well. Churchland’s advocacy of eliminative materialism ostensibly seeks to snuff the rampant squeals of colloquial metaphysics still present in neuroscience and psychology but I couldn’t help but hitch those ideas to a question about the clockworks of the American freeway.
Feeling, meaning, and belief are, for Chuchland and others, merely arbitrary “folk” classifications -- mistaken signifiers in a common diorama of conscious life, however familiar. Eliminativists would argue the illusory nature of these classifications, relegating them to misunderstood manifests of higher-order neurofunction (i.e. phantasms). In terms of a motorized culture, we may transpose these classifications onto exactly each and every anecdote, “scarifying” story and wrong turn; every “accident” and badly executed lane-change finds lysis, melting into a single misfire of popular psychology.
Specifically, as regards our freeways and highways, we’re talking about a ruthless systemic geography, forged, guided and maintained passively not by citizens per se, but by their counterparts in the institutional realities of labor and city planning acting through our adherence. As citizens (or drivers) we’re aware only a few of the strict and finite set of rules governing the realities’ relative positions and not aware of the economy as a whole. So-called anomalies are a function of the system, a “feature” if you will.
Putting it this way, it’s easy to see any matrix of road as a specific mode of alienation, not unlike a kind of Taylorism. To argue the freeway into a shape of a conveyor belt doesn’t take a lot of imagination exactly, it’s only that the dynamics unfurl to a complexity of not only magnitude, but of sentiment and legend.
So if that’s the city, what about the “open road” of the interstate or its innumerable tributaries leaking eastward, fractalizing into an unfamiliar, rural, half-dirt vascular writhing out over the map unchecked but by single or double-consonant significations like MM, crossed like net? In the same way that, technically at least, one could witness the birth of the cosmos (had they a telescope powerful enough), the spidered drift of the mass-use roadways into the greener lands of steadily decreasing population density should be more-or-less akin to bearing witness to the economic regression of western civilization, to the gasping feudalism of the 13th century, I bet.

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Split Valedictory #1

Matthew Arnone
Split Valedictory #1, Holyoke High School
2006
altered photograph

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Week Links

Check it out: two posts in two days... impossible?

As regards sharing links, what usually happens is that I'll tell Armand about something noteworthy and/or interesting and he'll ask me how I it was that I could have arrived at said website with an accusatory wry smile implying I'm a creep; upon such suppositions, I mostly never comment.

Modelcastings
Though he used the format more than a few times across his filmography, I seem to most strongly recall Godard's claustrophobic cinéma-vérité character interviews from Masculin, Feminin (1966) during both the opening of the film with the (admittedly problematic) miss 19 interview and later (loosely) during the scene in the toilet with Goya and Léaud. The "modelcasting" interviews I only found interesting because of the way they function similarly to the others mentioned by transforming "documentary" into a voyeuristic act -- voyeurism being characterized by witness to pain or distress -- in all these cases the distress comes from sometimes rapid questioning of a (in all cases female) subject who is seemingly unprepared.
(via Coolgirl365)

Thomas de Quincy: On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Scroll down a bit to find it. Pay attention to the theme of complicity.
(via Hitchcock's Rope [1948])




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The Saddle

Illustrations by yours truly for the forthcoming EP, Underneath the Mop in a Janitor's Dream by Steve Orth with production credits going to himself and Ralph Carney, a man of many and exceptional musical talents.

Steve preferred a letter-sized sleeve for the discs and I (eventually) chose what I thought would be a xerox-friendly design, enabling a quicker production pipeline during tours or any extra copies on the fly.

I would post one of the many earlier iterations of this piece but that would be heinously embarrassing. What I will do is to congratulate my good friend Steve on a fine recording and here's to many more in the future.



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Part 1: The Salvaged Works of Guy Van Menard

Before ever becoming even remotely acknowledged by his sitting for various artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, Guy Van was, above all, a student of poetry. As he plays a great part in Schwender's novel, I thought it would be apt to start posting some of the work hes most (if at all) known for.



Oh Livid Bones and Gathers

All, oh livid,
Though red subtends mine marrowed brow
Instead and tongue in vitiate form from rend
Forged, “eat ten their brethren”
By that marrow measure forked
And borne to say that marrow, he
Beneath, “Squalled clouds, the men may foam
bricks bound long by edges’ trine”
My bones!

Oh! Love stative,
And arbored quoins whom quoin returns
In season they did listless borrow
Stock, cause coarse their bods’.
In throws the beasts be borrowed too, and leaden
Them, beasts’ do scroll their halves
Them they, the hundred orbs that split our naught
From day!

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The Feral Cyst

“’If in dictate, all, then no man will be to bow and scribe…” has said the good Herodotus and from therein does stream our wan’d janitors paring crust from Europe’s augured failure-sepulcher; that is to say, we should take caution to creep not with heavy steps aside our history. Even the standing century has borne witness, in part, to the sight of its own stories already fraught to a crook by enmities masked in paradisaical bombast; and once usurped, they tales become twisted toward a braid upon themselves and yet will remain immune to all obloquy from their own tale-tellers (being not always wise to the minutiae of distortion).

As an example, it is none other than the Augustus Welby N. Pugin (and to some degree, his father, Augustus Charles) that would belch the panegyrics of a fevered diaspora backwards into to the Gothic world for all of London, and throatily, to instill anew (and yet spring himself) what is the inherent morass of the Dark Ages -- its wake in many ways ebbed not enough that we may walk unstung still along our own shores -- and while deliriums like these may cheer a moral ground, the stuff of their want is not always so far away as to require some misguided plan to attain it, perhaps the goal is met already ( recall that the whole of French medieval history can be at once found in all its blazonry, bitten into the walls of the Notre-Dame de Paris).
Doubtless it is precisely the rough communal hands and scriptless vigor of the Gothic that in their modern absence contribute to the style’s now varicose adulation among the zealous and the mad who, to our present day, still churn foam in their lips’ fold at its mention and betwixt their crests spill garrulous sermon singularly necessitating the Gothic style for the slightest moral debris of a given man; he, now only a vessel punctured to limpidity, with each hole bored by some unique malice of the classical style to such degeneration so as no nectar however graced may keep him filled! Pugin is just one of these sorts of acolytes and his fanatic plans of a ‘Gothicised’ London to bright a new piousness within the West amounts to little surprise, though when proposed into corporeality, its strategy flags toward putrescence. Pugin’s pastoral limbo, woven in the sweated, dreamless sleep that he, each night, devotes to the see Fathers in distant Rome, is rather (to combine our examples) as if the grim ‘Lady of Paris’ were somehow in each detail duplicated and subsequently, with enormous tackles, upended and hoist upon its sister -- a monster seeming for all the world to have sprung inverted from its seeded sibling, from her horned crowns; a tumor’d twin, these Siamese, scalped in a grandly flat second and identical basement chattering skinless shed and weirdly high above the grey streets of Paris; the feral cyst, this noma somehow leapt from the nether of blindness to coax a moral gene… we weep the centuries out our eyes for any man bent to God from cancer.”


Within Schwender’s manuscript, the preceding paragraphs were accompanied by an inset etching (assumed to have been his) labeled “The Feral Cyst or Pugin’s Proposal Illustrated in its Effect” The impassioned paragraphs here quoted were originally written in condemnation of A.W.N. Pugin’s stated theories concerning a country-wide Gothic revisitism. Schwender’s source for the “outrageous” supposition was taken from Pugin’s publication the year prior in which he outlines the desirable influences a “…newly and wholly Gothic London” would have on its inhabitants not to be limited to excessive health, piety, crime reduction and “… grace beyond any sense in the brow of our Lord God”.
Of interest to me however, is Schwender’s bizarrely trance-like etching of Notre-Dame (Schwender’s etching is not in fact based on the visage of Notre Dame of Paris but instead borrows certain elements of its ornamentation combined with those of possibly Mantes Cathedral or another of Notre Dame’s sister chapels of varying similarity; the reason for this discrepancy or confusion with the example he explicitly gives within the text – either by mistake or puzzling intention – is unknown).

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