Category Archives: theory

“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.”

“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