Category Archives: theory

“Cyberspace: The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuel fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways…from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things – from paper to brains – across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.” – Michael Benedikt in Cyberspace

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“The Web isn’t just something that happens in the world; it’s something that’s happening in you. When people set up e-mail accounts or personal web sites or join a chat room or create a MUD persona, what are they doing? They’re saying to the world, I AM. I signify. I am part of a large community. I am part of something bigger than myself.
“These are empowering acts. These acts are an expression of hope. These are spiritual acts. [In fact,] the adjective ‘spiritual’ simply refers to things which have no body, form, or substance. Spirituality is about things that are disembodied, things that are formless, things that are insubstantial, things that are virtual.”
“Spiritual experiences are, in fact, our business. Ours will be an economy of spirits.” – Game designer Brian Moriarty, 1996 Computer Game Developers’ Conference

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“Variously described as a ‘space that wasn’t space’, a ‘nonplace’, and a space in which ‘there are no shadows’ (William Gibson)”

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“The communication of sacra and other forms of esoteric instruction (memes) really involves three processes, though these should not be regarded as in series but as in parallel. The first is the reduction of culture into recognized components or factors; the second is their recombination in fantastic or monstrous patterns and shapes; and the third is their recombination in ways that make sense with regard to the new state and status that the neophytes will enter.” – Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between

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“We will all become angels, and for eternity! Highly unstable, hermaphrodite angels, unforgettable in terms of computer memory. – Nichole Stenger in Cyberspace

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“The notion of ideal forms in early Platonism has the allure of a perfect dream. But the ancient dream remained airy, a landscape of genera and generalities, until the hardware of information retrieval came to support the mind’s quest for knowledge. Now, with the support of the electronic matrix, the dream can incorporate the smallest details of here-and-now existence. With an electronic infrastructure, the dream of perfect FORMS becomes the dream of inFORMation.”

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“The analogy of Indra’s Net is very old, from Hindu mythology, whereby the universe is seen as a great net with a jewel at each intersection that reflects every other jewel in the net.” – Tim McFadden in Cyberspace

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from http://www.mysterium.com/cyberspace.html

It’s kind of like that Mark Fisher quote where he’s like, “It’s almost easier to imagine death than life post-capitalism.” Something like that. If you can’t hear the present and you can’t hear the future, how can you imagine anything other than what you’ve had in the past. I think music plays a really big part in creating a vision or momentum towards human development. Maybe that’s really idealistic, but…

-Holly Herndon

Our background as television viewers has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between viewer and screen – you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.

BRIAN ENO, 1984

“All sound is the invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. . . . Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.

Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent.”

‘…here’s a sound that I can’t hear. It’s a high-frequency, around 17.4 kHz. I can’t hear it because that frequency of sound (and anything above it) is typically only audible to people under 25. It’s the result of a phenomenon called presbycusis, a term used for this progressive, age-related form of hearing loss.

In 2005, Howard Stapleton adopted this frequency for an invention he called The Mosquito, an ultrasonic alarm designed to “disperse unwanted youth gatherings” and “combat vandalism,” as the company puts it. Because the sound is only audible to those under 25, UK business owners — including even McDonald’s — can flick on The Mosquito alarm to repel potential vandals while retaining the patronage of the 25+ crowd who can’t hear it. Adults are sneaky fucks.’

“Some have argued that the ways in which the design of software structures human cognitive processes can have a detrimental effect on performance. For example, criticism has been directed at the way Microsoft’s successful PowerPoint application has shaped the rules of giving presentations, encouraging a dull linearity of bullet-pointed texted over deeper, more discursive talks; the software overtly focuses the audience on the presentation format and not its content.

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In the network age, information (music included) has become musicalized, which is to say, the appearance of information (here, music) is more a spectacle than the musical content itself.”

Andrew Feenberg writes that “human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects.”

“We leave nothing. We leave, really, nothing….And I think that the biggest possibility on this world that we have is to create the nothing. But to create something — the nothing.”

-Reinhold Messner