Category Archives: theory

‘For centuries, and as late as the early 19th century, a “moment” was something quite specific—a 40th of an hour, or around 90 seconds.

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Because most of the world’s landmass is in the northern hemisphere, Lowe says, heavy winter snowfall can impact how quickly the Earth rotates in certain months. “It’s like a skater putting their arms out—all the snow gets accumulated to higher and higher altitudes, and you can physically see the Earth slow down,” he says. “And as that snow melts and recedes back down into the ocean, the Earth will speed back up a little bit again, just like a skater pulling their arms in.”

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Take snapping your fingers. It might seem instantaneous, and is a sort of shorthand for something that happens in a moment. Instead, it is like live television with a short delay. By the time your brain has processed the command to move your fingers, the visual of your middle finger sliding down your thumb, the feeling of that finger striking the corner of your palm, the vibrations of your eardrum from sound waves in the air—all passing through nerves like electricity through copper wire—the snap has long since come and gone. All these stimuli seem to be happening simultaneously, even though they aren’t. And your brain is rewriting this perception in the moments between when it occurs and when the stimuli are threaded together. “Your perceptual world always lags behind the real world,” he says.

The lag is further complicated by what our brains know about causality and anticipation—and that any given perceived moment is influenced by what happens before and after it. “The part that we fall for … is that there are these crisp moments in time, instead of blurry,” Eagleman says, “which is to say, you know, if you’re incorporating information from the past and also from what happens next in an event, it means that the moment ‘now’ is not a crisp moment in time. It’s actually smeared out, over at least a half a second, maybe longer.”’

Excerpts from Susan Sontag’s On Photography:

“The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

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Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

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To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subject.

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There is no matter in all the world so homely, trite, and humble that through it this man of the black box and chemical bath cannot express himself entire.

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The other world is to be found, as usual, inside this one.

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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape. Instead we have our paper phantoms, transitorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

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Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way.”

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound… disembodied.”

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Barbara Maria Neu – Missing: “Like a hole in the body and mind, missing someone. Is it even possible to miss someone. Is it longing, eternal quest. For the absent, which I don’t know, for illusion, imagination. Love. Unfortunately, Kris cannot be there today. I miss Kris.”

“In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct.”

‘The Birth of Tragedy is driven by the famous contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, “the two art deities of the Greeks”, and by the “tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the non-imagistic Dionysian art of music”. Nietzsche aims to show that Attic tragedy represents the truce between, and the union of, Dionysus and Apollo, and that it also resolves an assortment of other oppositions in Greek theology, art, culture, psychology, and metaphysics that can be keyed to the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition: the Titans/the Olympians, lyric poetry/ epic poetry, the Asiatic-barbarian/the Hellenic, music/sculpture, intoxication/dreams, excess/measure, unity/individuation, pain/pleasure, etc.

The Apollonian affirms the principium individuationis, “the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense”. The Dionysian, by contrast, affirms “the mysterious primordial unity”, “the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being”. The Apollonian is associated with “moderation” and “restraint”, the Dionysian with “excess”. The Apollonian is concerned with pleasure and the production of beautiful semblance, while the Dionysian is fraught with “terror”, “blissful ecstasy”, “pain and contradiction”. The Apollonian celebrates the human artist and hero, while the Dionysian celebrates the individual artist’s dissolution into nature, which Nietzsche calls the “primordial artist of the world”.

The Apollonian is a gallery of “appearances”, “images”, and “illusions”, while the Dionysian consists in the perpetual creation and destruction of appearances. “In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism”, Nietzsche writes, “nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: ‘Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of appearances, I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of appearances!’”

Nietzsche insists on the reality of “alteration”, “change”, and “becoming”, noting that only a “prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood [and] being”. A few pages earlier, Nietzsche calls unity, thinghood, substance, and permanence “lies”, praising Heraclitus “for his assertion that being is an empty fiction”, and praising the senses for telling the truth by showing “becoming, passing away, and change”.

Excerpts

from

Click to access Cox%20article%20OS%2014.1.pdf

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“…a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions.

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At its best, ‘sound art’ opens up or calls attention to an auditory unconscious, a transcendental or virtual domain of sound that has steadily come to prominence over the course of the twentieth century.

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Background noise [le bruit de fond] is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and cesspool of our messages. It is to the logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is the background of information, the material of that form. Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest. The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no back- ground, no contradictory. Noise cannot be made a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself.

‘In short,’ Moles concludes, ‘there is no absolute structural difference between noise and signal. They are of the same nature. The only difference which can be logically established between them is based exclusively on the concept of intent on the part of the transmitter. A noise is a signal that the sender does not want to transmit.’

This sort of relativity would seem to put signal and noise on a par with one another, allowing noise an ontological place of its own, one no longer subordinate to signal. Yet this relativism, too, privileges signal. It construes the distinction between signal and noise (or music and noise) solely from the perspective of communication and meaning, and of human intentions and values. And yet, before there were creatures to exchange signals, there was a generalised noise: the crackling of cosmic radiation, the rush of the wind, the roar of the sea. And, even now, every signal is issued against the backdrop of this noise. As Serres puts it, ‘noise’ is the background hubbub of life, the ceaseless sonic flux. Just as objects fill visual space, noise is what fills the auditory field: the hum of fluorescent lights, the rustling of leaves or fabric, the sound of traffic, radio static – indeed, all of these combined. It is from this background that any signal comes to the fore, temporarily drawing our attention to it and away from the background noise.

This virtual field has, for Leibniz, a truly cosmic significance. Each of the ‘minute perceptions’ that unconsciously determine conscious perception is itself the effect of causes that ramify out to infinity. Each individual wave is the result of a multitude of forces: the speed and direction of the wind, air pressure and temperature, the temperature and viscosity of the water, and so on. As a result, each conscious perception is the local registration of the entire state of the universe at any given moment. And the same is true of memory. The reservoir of memory contains not only particular memories or experiences – traces of all the past events I have experienced – but everything to which those experiences and memories are connected – namely, the entirety of the past.

Vibrations do not disappear, but dissipate, echoing all the while, for energy is conserved. Every vibration, every sound, hangs in the air, in the room, in bodies. Sounds spread out, they become less and less contracted, they fuse, but they still remain, their energy of vibration moving the air and the walls in the room, making a noise that still tickles the strings of a violin playing weeks later. Every sound masks an entire history of sound, a cacophony of silence.

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‘Is the universe noise?’ Kosko asks, and then continues:

That question is not as strange as it sounds. Noise is an unwanted signal. A signal is anything that conveys information or ultimately anything that has energy. The universe consists of a great deal of energy. Indeed a working definition of the universe is all energy anywhere ever. [T]he noise-signal duality lets a sincere pan-theist counter that he loves or wants God and that God just is the entire universe but spelled with fewer letters. So to him the universe is not noise but one big wanted signal.

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Leibniz’s other prominent auditory example approaches this idea from the other side. For the man who lives next to the watermill, it is not the parts but the entire sound that is – or has become – imperceptible. This sound has ceased to be remarkable and has become ordinary, unconscious, background. Leibniz thus makes it possible for us to grasp the distinction between signal and noise not as one between part and whole, ignorance and knowledge but as one between the singular and the ordinary, perception and its conditions of genesis, the actual and the virtual.

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…in a lecture on Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze offers just such a suggestion. ‘One can conceive of a continuous acoustic flow that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence’, he writes. ‘A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow’

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As Cage once put it: ‘Music is continuous; only listening is intermittent’ (1982: 224).

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The piece as a whole focuses on the very medium of sonic transport – air – and highlights the fact that sound is simply the result of pressure changes in that medium. Its subject matter – wind – is the most elemental of all phenomena and the most primeval sonic stuff. Wind is powerful, invisible and ever-changing. To focus on it is to transcend the limits of our ordinary ontology, composed as it is of relatively stable visible objects. For wind is pure becoming, pure flow. It is immemorial, but never the same. And it is nothing but the play of differential forces, differences in air pressure and temperature that generate immense currents, fronts and bursts across the surface of the earth – phenomena that are contracted by our ears (and by the microphone membrane) as sound.

The more I thought of the essence of music, the more conceptual I became. The element of sound disappeared. I thought “Feeling duration itself is music.”

– Mieko Shiomi

“For example, we can notice how the turn to the singular engenders — and in fact requires — a limited engagement with the historical. By treating the internet as a monumental event that has shaped the entirety of the present, the post-internet, as both a discourse and a concept, gains its particular “currency.” History must be stripped of complexity, ossified and binarized, for the post-internet to function. This denuded sense of the historical is reflected in Olson’s understanding of the post-internet era, which for her “may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero.” This assertion’s appeal to generality, its belief in the total subsumption of the contemporary by the internet, refuses to countenance historical complexity, instead allowing for a subsequent assertion that “We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always-already postinternet.” In these terms, history is rendered as a thing that happens, that has already happened, not something that can be shaped, that emerges out of economic, social, political, or cultural forces. The internet’s emergence can then be posited as a rupture, something that, by clearing away the vestiges of the past, announces a new future. In the face of this epochal shift, art exists simply to register these changes and to self-consciously comment on them from within.

No politics, no struggle, only content.

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The play […] is to desediment, to exfoliate, to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all.

Against the individual, Crampton is instead enfolded in a trans-generational play of influence that resolves itself into a sonic mantle that she takes on and continues. Ownership of this sound is less important than its persistence, ensuring that its legacies are respected, its attachments attended to. This is a mode of music-making for the present, one that neither shies away from history nor lets itself be overcome by it. It is a music-making that understands that history is made “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The past does not recede into obscurity here, crushed by the momentousness of the internet. Instead, it is reworked, returned to the present in a new form, giving the lie to a historical consciousness constructed according to a series of pre-s and post-s.”