MachineMachine /stream - search for argo https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Memes Are For Tricksters: The Biology of Disinformation - Mondo 2000]]> https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/21/the-ends-dont-justify-the-memes/

Back in 1990, when MONDO 2000 magazine promised Screaming Memes on its cover, it was more or less a secret argot winking at our technohip Mondoid readers.

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Fri, 24 Nov 2023 11:33:51 -0800 https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/21/the-ends-dont-justify-the-memes/
<![CDATA[Memes Are For Tricksters: The Biology of Disinformation - Mondo 2000]]> http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/21/the-ends-dont-justify-the-memes/

Back in 1990, when MONDO 2000 magazine promised Screaming Memes on its cover, it was more or less a secret argot winking at our technohip Mondoid readers.

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Sun, 24 Jun 2018 02:18:30 -0700 http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/21/the-ends-dont-justify-the-memes/
<![CDATA[What makes out today’s notworking is the social glitch]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/what-makes-out-todays-notworking-is-the-social-glitch

For 3 years I have collaborated on a project with Kyoung Kim. Known as GLTI.CH Karaoke, or sometimes just GLTI.CH, we’ve plotted the course of accidents, of temporal lyrical disjoints and technical out-of-syncs through a wide variety of different mediums, spaces and social conditions. This week saw what feels like the climax of our experiments, a three day – 67 hour – installation at CRYSTALLIZE, an exhibition of new media art held alongside the 2013 Korea Brand & Entertainment Expo, at Old Billingsgate, London. GLTI.CH has played a significant part in my practice and thus my thinking over the last 3 years. Working with Kyoung has afforded me countless experiences and opportunities, and introduced me to the world of glitch, digital, net and new media arts and artists. The project is not over, but its Karaoke phase is drawing to a conclusion. I thought it would be a good time to republish this half-considered manifesto I wrote a while back. 15 Statements about Glti.ch Notworking What makes out today’s networking is the notworking. There would be no routing if there were no problems on the line. Spam, viruses and identity theft are not accidental mistakes, mishaps on the road to techno perfection. They are constitutional elements of yesterday’s network architectures. Lovink, Gert. (2005), “The Principle of Notworking Concepts in Critical Internet Culture,” p. 10 GLTI.CH Karaoke is not a hack or some fancy programming. It’s taking the front-end of things and trying to make something else. We’ve made the mishmashed world of GLTI.CH Karaoke through play and we hope you’ll sing with us. karaoke, glti.ch (2011), “WHAT IS GLTI.CH KARAOKE?”

Glti.ches are more than aesthetic revelations: as software crashes, or hardware halts to a stutter, the soft underbelly of the notwork is exposed. The trick is to see the glti.ch not as an abhorrence, but as a signal of noisy potential: error and noise are an implicit feature of digital materiality. What Gaston Bachelard called ‘Desire Paths’, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of (human) feet, also exist online. For those versed in the language of the glti.ch, desire equals subversion and the means of flight – a way to reverse the roles of power. The line of desire in these cases is often laid directly over the enclosed path. Being buffered along by the unruly torrents of technical failure, the true semblance of the glti.ch is impossible to pin down: notwork control mechanisms have desirable unintended effects. The kludge is a hands-on, makeshift solution, to an unpredictable technical or social problem: 100% of cargo cult coders, pirates, glti.ch artists and hackers started out as kludgers. Algorithms that churn your Google search, or offer you potential meta-data with which to imbricate your image collection into the logic of the database, have themselves become actors in the play of human relations. Digital formats as diverse as ePub, DivX, and GIF, and software platforms from the likes of Google, Microsoft or Apple, trace narrative arcs which are themselves transcodable relations. Interruption, stutters and breaks force us into encounters with the world, exposing the circuitry that we as consumers are expected to elude into the background. Digital copies, being copied, forever copying, exert an unruly behaviour that exposes the material world. The most astonishing thing about the notwork is how any order can be maintained in it at all. The more regulations imposed upon the notworks, the more interesting the resulting glti.ches will be in their variation/liberation. Human beings are material entities, buffered by the same stops and starts as the notwork. Participating in the glti.ch, in the artifact that exposes the failure, is to align oneself with material reality. The glti.ch is a social phenomenon.

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Thu, 07 Nov 2013 07:16:51 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/text/out-loud/what-makes-out-todays-notworking-is-the-social-glitch
<![CDATA[Kipple and Things II: The Subject of Digital Detritus]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things-ii-the-subject-of-digital-detritus

This text is a work in progress; a segment ripped from my thesis. To better ingest some of the ideas I throw around here, you might want to read these texts first: - Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean - Digital Autonomy

Captured in celluloid under the title Blade Runner, (Scott 1982) Philip K. Dick’s vision of kipple abounds in a world where mankind lives alongside shimmering, partly superior, artificial humans. The limited lifespan built into the Nexus 6 replicants  [i] is echoed in the human character J.F. Sebastian,[ii]whose own degenerative disorder lends his body a kipple-like quality, even if the mind it enables sparkles so finely. This association with replication and its apparent failure chimes for both the commodity fetish and an appeal to digitisation. In Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, mechanisation and mass production begin at the ‘original’, and work to distance the commodity from the form captured by each iteration. Not only does the aura of the original stay intact as copies of it are reproduced on the production line, that aura is actually heightened in the system of commoditisation. As Frederic Jameson has noted, Dick’s work ‘renders our present historical by turning it into the past of a fantasized future’ (Jameson 2005, 345). Kipple piles up at the periphery of our culture, as if Dick is teasing us to look upon our own time from a future anterior in which commodity reification will have been: It hadn’t upset him that much, seeing the half-abandoned gardens and fully abandoned equipment, the great heaps of rotting supplies. He knew from the edu-tapes that the frontier was always like that, even on Earth. (Dick 2011, 143) Kipple figures the era of the commodity as an Empire, its borders slowly expanding away from the subjects yearning for Biltong replicas, seeded with mistakes. Kipple is a death of subjects, haunted by objects, but kipple is also a renewal, a rebirth. The future anterior is a frontier, one from which it might just be possible to look back upon the human without nostalgia. Qualify the human subject with the android built in its image; the object with the entropic degradation that it must endure if its form is to be perpetuated, and you necessarily approach an ontology of garbage, junk and detritus: a glimmer of hope for the remnants of decay to assert their own identity. Commodities operate through the binary logic of fetishisation and obsolescence, in which the subject’s desire to obtain the shiny new object promotes the propagation of its form through an endless cycle of kippleisation. Kipple is an entropy of forms, ideals long since removed from their Platonic realm by the march of mimesis, and kippleisation an endless, unstoppable encounter between subjectness and thingness. Eschewing Martin Heidegger’s definition of a thing, in which objects are brought out of the background of existence through human use, (Bogost 2012, 24) Bill Brown marks the emergence of things through the encounter: As they circulate through our lives… we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us… (Brown 2001, 4) This confrontation with the ‘being’ of the object occurs by chance when, as Brown describes, a patch of dirt on the surface of the window captures us for a moment, ‘when the drill breaks, when the car stalls… when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily’. (Brown 2001, 4) We no longer see through the window-object (literally or metaphorically), but are brought into conflict with its own particular discrete being by the encounter with its filthy surface. A being previously submersed in the continuous background of world as experience, need not necessarily be untangled by an act of human-centric use. The encounter carries the effect of a mirror, for as experience stutters at the being of a thing, so the entity invested in that experience is made aware of their own quality as a thing – if only for a fleeting moment. Brown’s fascination with ‘how inanimate objects constitute human subjects’ (Brown 2001, 7) appears to instate the subject as the centre of worldly relations. But Bill Brown has spun a realist [iii] web in which to ensnare us. The object is not phenomenal, because its being exists independent of any culpability we may wish to claim. Instead a capture of object and human, of thing qua thing, occurs in mutual encounter, bringing us closer to a flat ontology ‘where humans are no longer monarchs of being but are instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings.’ (Bryant 2011, 40)

Brown’s appraisal of things flirts with the splendour of kipple. Think of the landfill, an engorged river of kipple, or the salvage yard, a veritable shrine to thingness. Tattered edges and featureless forms leak into one another in unsavoury shades of tea-stain brown and cobweb grey splashed from the horizon to your toes. Masses of broken, unremarkable remnants in plastic, glass and cardboard brimming over the edge of every shiny suburban enclave. The most astonishing thing about the turmoil of these places is how any order can be perceived in them at all. But thing aphasia does diminish, and it does so almost immediately. As the essential human instinct for order kicks in, things come to resemble objects. Classes of use, representation and resemblance neatly arising to cut through the pudding; to make the continuous universe discrete once again. You note a tricycle wheel there, underneath what looks like the shattered circumference of an Edwardian lamp. You almost trip over a bin bag full of carrot tops and potato peel before becoming transfixed by a pile of soap-opera magazines. Things, in Brown’s definition, are unreachable by human caprice. Things cannot be grasped, because their thingnessslips back into recognition as soon as it is encountered: When such a being is named, then, it is also changed. It is assimilated into the terms of the human subject at the same time that it is opposed to it as object, an opposition that is indeed necessary for the subject’s separation and definition. (Schwenger 2004, 137) The city of Hull, the phrase ‘I will’, the surface of an ice cube and an image compression algorithm are entities each sustained by the same nominative disclosure: a paradox of things that seem to flow into one another with liquid potential, but things, nonetheless limited by their constant, necessary re-iteration in language. There is no thing more contradictory in this regard than the human subject itself, a figure Roland Barthes’ tried to paradoxically side-step in his playful autobiography. Replenishing each worn-out piece of its glimmering hull, one by one, the day arrives when the entire ship of Argo has been displaced – each of its parts now distinct from those of the ‘original’ vessel. For Barthes, this myth exposes two modest activities: - Substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) – Nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts) (Barthes 1994, 46) Like the ship of Argo, human experience has exchangeable parts, but at its core, such was Barthes’ intention, ‘the subject, unreconciled, demands that language represent the continuity of desire.’ (Eakin 1992, 16) In order that the subject remain continuous, it is the messy world that we must isolate into classes and taxonomies. We collate, aggregate and collect not merely because we desire, but because without these nominative acts the pivot of desire – the illusionary subject – could not be sustained. If the powerful stance produced in Dick’s future anterior is to be sustained, the distinction between subjects aggregating objects, and objects coagulating the subject, needs flattening. [iv] Bill Brown’s appeal to the ‘flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition’ (Brown 2001, 4) partially echoes Dick’s concern with the purity of the thing. Although Dick’s Biltong were probably more of a comment on the Xerox machine than the computer, the problem of the distribution of form, as it relates to commodity fetishism, enables ‘printing’ as a neat paradigm of the contemporary network-based economy. Digital things, seeming to proliferate independent from the sinuous optical cables and super-cooled server banks that disseminate them, are absolutelyreliant on the process of copying. Copying is a fundamental component of the digital network where, unlike the material commodity, things are not passed along. The digital thing is always a copy, is always copied, and is always copying: Copying the product (mechanical reproduction technologies of modernity) evolves into copying the instructions for manufacturing (computer programs as such recipes of production). In other words, not only copying copies, but more fundamentally copying copying itself. (Parikka 2008, 72) Abstracted from its material context, copying is ‘a universal principle’ (Parikka 2008, 72) of digital things, less flowing ‘within the circuits’ (Brown 2001, 4) as being that circuitry flow in and of itself. The entire network is a ship of Argo, capable, perhaps for the first time, [v]to Substitute and Nominate its own parts, or, as the character J.F. Isidore exclaims upon showing an android around his kippleised apartment: When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. [my emphasis] (Dick 1968, 53) Kipple is not garbage, nor litter, for both these forms are decided upon by humans. In a recent pamphlet distributed to businesses throughout the UK, the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign made a useful distinction: Litter can be as small as a sweet wrapper, as large as a bag of rubbish, or it can mean lots of items scattered about. ENCAMS describes litter as “Waste in the wrong place caused by human agency”. In other words, it is only people that make litter. (Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, 3) Garbage is a decisive, collaborative form, humans choose to destroy or discard. A notion of detritus that enhances the autonomy, the supposed mastery of the subject in its network. Digital networks feature their own litter in the form of copied data packets that have served their purpose, or been deemed erroneous by algorithms designed to seed out errors. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define, ‘the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage’. (Hillis 1999, 18) Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management are of primary economic and ontological concern: control the networks and the immaterial products will manage themselves; control the tendency of errors to reproduce, and we maintain a vision of ourselves as masters over, what Michel Serres has termed, ‘the abundance of the Creation’. (Serres 2007, 47) Seeming to sever their dependency on the physical processes that underlie them, digital technologies, ‘incorporate hyper-redundant error-checking routines that serve to sustain an illusion of immateriality by detecting error and correcting it’. (Kirschenbaum 2008, 12) The alleviation of error and noise, is then, an implicit feature of digital materiality. Expressed at the status of the digital image it is the visual glitch, the coding artifact, [vi]that signifies the potential of the digital object to loosen its shackles; to assert its own being. In a parody of Arthur C. Clarke’s infamous utopian appraisal of technology, another science fiction author, Bruce Sterling, delivers a neat sound bite for the digital civilisation, so that: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Clarke 1977, 36) …becomes… Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from [its] garbage. (Sterling 2012)  

Footnotes [i] A label appropriated by Ridley Scott for the film Blade Runner, and not by Philip K. Dick in the original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, who preferred the more archaic, general term, android. Throughout the novel characters refer to the artificial humans as ‘andys,’ portraying a casual ease with which to shrug off these shimmering subjects as mere objects. [ii] A translated version of the character, J.F. Isidore, from the original novel. [iii] Recent attempts to disable appeals to the subject, attempts by writers such as Graham Harman, Levi R. Bryant, Bill Brown and Ian Bogost, have sought to devise, in line with Bruno Latour, an ontology in which ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else;’ (Latour 1993, 163) one in which a discussion of the being of a chilli pepper or a wrist watch may rank alongside a similar debate about the being of a human or a dolphin. An object-oriented, flat ontology (Bryant 2011) premised on the niggling sentiment that ‘all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally.’ (Bogost 2012, 19) Unlike Graham Harman, who uses the terms interchangeably, (Bogost 2012, 24) Bill Brown’s Thing Theory approaches the problem by strongly asserting a difference between objects and things. [iv] I have carefully avoided using the term ‘posthuman,’ but I hope its resonance remains. [v] The resonance here with a biological imperative is intentional, although it is perhaps in this work alone that I wish to completely avoid such digital/biological metonyms. Boris Groys’ text From Image to Image File – And Back: Art in the Age of Digitisation, functions neatly to bridge this work with previous ones when he states: The biological metaphor says it all: not only life, which is notorious in this respect, but also technology, which supposedly opposes nature, has become the medium of non-identical reproduction.

[vi] I have very consciously chosen to spell ‘artifact’ with an ‘i’, widely known as the American spelling of the term. This spelling of the word aligns it with computer/programming terminology (i.e.’compression artifact’), leaving the ‘e’ spelling free to echo its archaeological heritage. In any case, multiple meanings for the word can be read in each instance.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1994. Roland Barthes. University of California Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1) (October 1): 1–22. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9750134.0001.001. Clarke, Arthur C. 1977. “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination.” In Profiles of the future?: an inquiry into the limits of the possible. New York: Popular Library. Dick, Philip K. 1968. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Random House Publishing Group, 2008. ———. 2011. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Eakin, Paul John. 1992. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton University Press. Hillis, W. 1999. The Pattern on the Stone?: the Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. 1st paperback ed. New York: Basic Books. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso. Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, Environmental Campaigns (ENCAMS). YOUR RUBBISH AND THE LAW a Guide for Businesses. http://kb.keepbritaintidy.org/fotg/publications/rlaw.pdf. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2008. “Copy.” In Software Studies?: a Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, 70–78. Cambridge  Mass.: MIT Press. Schwenger, Peter. 2004. “Words and the Murder of the Thing.” In Things, 135 – 150. University of Chicago Press Journals. Scott, Ridley. 1982. Blade Runner. Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller. Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. 1st University of Minnesota Press ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sterling, Bruce. 2012. “Design Fiction: Sascha Pohflepp & Daisy Ginsberg, ‘Growth Assembly’.” Wired Magazine: Beyond The Beyond. http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/01/design-fiction-sascha-pohflepp-daisy-ginsberg-growth-assembly/.

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Sat, 25 Aug 2012 10:00:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things-ii-the-subject-of-digital-detritus
<![CDATA[Binary Nomination]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/binary-nomination

‘An important feature of a learning machine is that its teacher will often be very largely ignorant of quite what is going on inside, although he may still be able to some extent to predict his pupil’s behaviour.’ Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Replenishing each worn-out piece of its glimmering hull, one by one, the day arrives when the entire ship of Argo has been displaced – each of its parts now distinct from those of the ‘original’ vessel. For Roland Barthes, this myth exposes two modest activities:

Substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) Nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts) 1

The discrete breaches the continuous in the act of nomination. Take for instance the spectrum of colours, the extension of which ‘is verbally reduced to a series of discontinuous terms’ 2 such as red, green, lilac or puce. Each colour has no cause but its name. By being isolated in language the colour ‘blue’ is allowed to exist, but its existence is an act of linguistic and, some would argue, perceptual severance. The city of Hull, the phrase “I will”, the surface of an ice cube and an image compression algorithm are entities each sustained by the same nominative disclosure: a paradox of things that seem to flow into one another with liquid potential, but things, nonetheless, limited by their constant, necessary re-iteration in language. There is no thing more contradictory in this regard than the human subject, a figure Barthes’ tried to paradoxically side-step in his playful autobiography. Like the ship of Argo, human experience has exchangeable parts, but at its core, such was Barthes’ intention, ‘the subject, unreconciled, demands that language represent the continuity of desire.’ 3

In an esoteric paper, published in 1930, Lewis Richardson teased out an analogy between flashes of human insight and the spark that leaps across a stop gap in an electrical circuit. The paper, entitled The Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks, navigates around a provocative sketch stencilled into its pages of a simple indeterminate circuit, whose future state it is impossible to predict. Richardson’s playful label for the diagram hides a deep significance. For even at the simplest binary level, Richardson argued, computation need not necessarily be deterministic.

The discrete and the continuous are here again blurred by analogy. Electricity flowing and electricity not flowing: a binary imposition responsible for the entire history of information technology.

 

1 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (University of California Press, 1994), 46.

2 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (Hill and Wang, 1977), 64.

3 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton University Press, 1992), 16.

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Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:32:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/binary-nomination
<![CDATA[The madness of crowds: hoarding (Will Self)]]> http://will-self.com/2012/05/21/madness-crowds-hoarding/

Wherefrom comes this urge to expose such traumatic interiors? After all, hoarding can be nothing new – it’s easy to imagine a Cyclops’s cavern stuffed to the roof with sheep bones, cheese rinds and the remains of hapless Argonauts. The splurge of reality obesity shows that the explanation is simple: schadenfreude. We look upon those poor wobblers being shaken to their core by life coaches and think to ourselves, I may be a little on the tubby side but – Jesus! – I’m not that bad. Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and, for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds us.

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Wed, 30 May 2012 01:50:49 -0700 http://will-self.com/2012/05/21/madness-crowds-hoarding/
<![CDATA[Thinking of starting my own Cargo Cult]]> http://twitter.com/therourke/statuses/179588725339205632 ]]> Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:24:23 -0700 http://twitter.com/therourke/statuses/179588725339205632 <![CDATA[Inside the Internet Art Bubble]]> http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/inside-the-internet-art-bubble/Content?oid=2170964

The internet finally seems to have made a dint in New York's institutional art world. Cory Arcangel, an artist who began his career manipulating old computer technologies and critiquing web culture, has an entire floor to himself at The Whitney. At the age of 33, his show Pro Tools makes him the youngest artist to receive a solo show at the institution since Bruce Nauman in 1973. Meanwhile, over at MoMA PS1, 30-year-old art star Ryan Trecartin is gathering steam with his four hour-plus video exhibiton of fucked-up child-adults on Blackberries, titled Any Ever. The show at PS1, chock full of internet jargon, is just one stop on a world tour that includes the Istanbul Modern Museum and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Given the ridiculous level of buzz now surrounding these shows, one has to wonder just what we're expecting from the art. 

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Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:26:27 -0700 http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/inside-the-internet-art-bubble/Content?oid=2170964
<![CDATA[And Another ‘Thing’ : Sci-Fi Truths and Nature's Errors]]> http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/09/and-another-thing-sci-fi-truths-and-natures-errors.html

In my last 3quarksdaily article I considered the ability of science-fiction – and the impossible objects it contains – to highlight the gap between us and ‘The Thing Itself’ (the fundamental reality underlying all phenomena). In this follow-up I ask whether the way these fictional ‘Things’ determine their continued existence – by copying, cloning or imitation – can teach us about our conception of nature.

Seth Brundle: What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I know what the disease wants.

Ronnie: What does the disease want?

Seth Brundle: It wants to... turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

Ronnie: Turned into what?

Seth Brundle: Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?

The Fly, 1986

In David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly (1986) we watch through slotted fingers as the body of Seth Brundle is horrifically transformed. Piece by piece Seth becomes Brundlefly: a genetic monster, fused together in a teleportation experiment gone awry. In one tele-pod steps Seth, accompanied by an unwelcome house-fly; from the other pod emerges a single Thing born of their two genetic identities. The computer algorithm designed to deconstruct and reconstruct biology as pure matter cannot distinguish between one entity and another. The parable, as Cronenberg draws it, is simple: if all the world is code then ‘all the world’ is all there is.

Vincent Price in 'The Fly', 1958Science fiction is full of liminal beings. Creatures caught in the phase between animal and human, between alien and Earthly, between the material and the spirit. Flowing directly from the patterns of myth Brundlefly is a modern day Minotaur: a manifestation of our deep yearning to coalesce with natural forces we can’t understand. The searing passions of the bull, its towering stature, are fused in the figure of the Minotaur with those of man. The resultant creature is too fearsome for this world, too Earthly to exist in the other, and so is forced to wander through a labyrinth hovering impossibly between the two. Perhaps Brundlefly’s labyrinth is the computer algorithm winding its path through his genetic code. As a liminal being, Brundlefly is capable of understanding both worlds from a sacred position, between realities. His goal is reached, but at a cost too great for an Earthly being to understand. Seth the scientist sacrifices himself and there is no Ariadne’s thread to lead him back.

In her book on monsters, aliens and Others Elaine L. Graham reminds us of the thresholds these ‘Things’ linger on:

“[H]uman imagination, by giving birth to fantastic, monstrous and alien figures, has… always eschewed the fiction of fixed species. Hybrids and monsters are the vehicles through which it is possible to understand the fabricated character of all things, by virtue of the boundaries they cross and the limits they unsettle.”

Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human

Hybrids such as the Minotaur or Brundlefly are meeting points for disparate categories of representation. They symbolise the tragic limits of human perception. Unable to grasp the world in and of Itself (nature) we colonise it with ever more fabricated representations and imitations (culture) which only result in distancing us yet further from The Thing Itself. One such category of fabrication, a favourite in science fiction, is ‘code’. Brundlefly is a Thing caught on the threshold between, what in geek-terminology we might call, wetware and software. Cronenberg’s parable plays into the hands of every techno-fearing luddite: a monster born from our desire to reduce nature to science; to simplify lumpy, oozing, unpredictable flesh in the patterns of an efficient genetic code.

Jeff Goldblum in 'The Fly', 1986We are all the tragic Brundefly because whilst we see beauty and endless creative potential in the natural world around us, we find it impossible to quantify those same categories in the reductive models we have devised to describe them. To describe nature, whether genetic codes unwinding or bees busying around their nest, we gasp at its “creativity”, ascribing its endless variation a human-like attention to detail. But as Richard Dawkins alludes to below, the most creative force in nature is the absolute opposite of perfection: it is in fact error. The world that science has modelled for us is a world riddled with mistakes, failures and run away coding errors. In order to ‘create’ nature must, as Alexander Pope said of the human, err:

“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”

Richard Dawkins, Viruses of the Mind

It is beneficial for life that errors exist and are propagated by biological systems. Too many copying errors and all biological processes would be cancerous, mutating towards oblivion. Too much error management (redundancy) and biological change, and thus evolution, could never occur.

Simply put, exchange within and between natural systems has no value unless change, and thus error, is possible within the system. What science fiction allows us to do is peek into a world where nature’s love for error is switched off, or allowed to run rampant. What would be the consequence of a truly ‘perfect’ natural process, devoid of error? In John Carpenter’s The Thing we see the result of such a process: a nature perfect by our standards, but terrible in its consequences.

Blair: You see, what we're talking about here, is an organism that imitates other life forms, and it imitates them perfectly. When this thing attacked our dogs, it tried to digest them, absorb them, and in the process shape its own cells to imitate them. This, for instance...That's not dog, it's imitation. We got to it before it had time to finish.

Norris: Finish what?

Blair: Finish imitating these dogs.

The Thing, 1982

John Carpenter's 'The Thing', 1982John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. As in The Fly, the film depicts a sinister turn for the body, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits the awesome ability to imitate its host, devouring any creature (or human) it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect - at every level of replication - that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost's Doctor is sent mad at the implications:

Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the earth... and it's not gonna stop!!!

In The Thing it is we, the human race, who are trapped between realities. A twist in the truth that highlights our own liminal nature. If, as Dawkins suggests, evolution is about the imperfect copy, then, like the tragic Brundlefly, or the towering figure of the Minotaur, the characters in The Thing are torn between two equally horrifying worlds. In one, the alien Thing aims for perfection, cloning its hosts cell by cell until, like The Ship of Argo, an entirely new, but identical world remains. In the other, the beauty of nature, in all its intricacy, is the result of a billion years of ugly mutation. 

Which process is closest to the truth? Which result is more hideous? I have not the authority to say. In science fiction every improbable event is balanced by the existence of an equally improbable reality. The Thing Itself, the world beneath phenomenon, and the Things that inhabit it, have always been impossible to comprehend. Where science fiction takes us, kicking and screaming, is right back to the real world, our knuckles a little whiter from the journey.

by Daniel Rourke


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Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:20:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/09/and-another-thing-sci-fi-truths-and-natures-errors.html
<![CDATA[To crush a Morlock’s skull]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/to-crush-a-morlock%E2%80%99s-skull

Although the Time traveller is an inquisitive type his journey through the crumbling museum offers him little insight. The relics are from his future: the arché has all but snapped off from archeology. As he leaves the Time Traveller ponders how best to crush a Morlock’s skull.

Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The Neanderthal is the most futuristic thing I can think of. Riddled with mythic charm, and soon to have its genes sequenced in the laboratory. Darwin wrote about the fittest surviving, but as a causal chain ‘natural’ biology has all but ceased to sow its paradigm.

Neanderthals may have interbred with humans

We live in a world of parasitoid wasps injecting their host with a virus that re-writes DNA...

...of skyscrapers designed in the 1960s coming to symbolise the turmoil of a new millennium. ...of a North Korean leader accused of using plastic surgery to counterfeit his doppelganger. ...of seedless grapes upgraded with information encrypted and compressed onto DVD Rom. ...of Kings, cargo cults and cannibals.

How the Neanderthals met their grisly end 30,000 years ago...we ate them

I am interested in the liminal phase between these states: the threshold betwixt when a Neanderthal is both lumbering Caliban and scientific curio. I am interested in the one genetically modified grape vine in every thousand that still harbours a bitter tasting seed. There is no room for representation here, and nor will there ever be in a world of non-privileged data packets interspersing culture at the speed of light.

New Mobile App Lets You Morph Yourself into a Neanderthal

Nature has never copied, never aimed to represent. These two are constructs of the human sphere, of art and computer code willing their paradigms onto perception. All around us are hybrids and shape-shifters: relations becoming related through noise and mistranslation. From Deleuze and Guattari:

“...it is a matter of something altogether different: no longer an imitation at all, but the capture of a code, the code's surplus value, an increase in valence, a genuine becoming – the becoming-orchid of the wasp, the becoming-wasp of the orchid.”

Neanderthals may have interbred with humans

Without categories the archive submits to entropy, but that doesn’t mean that the laws of creation will cease to tick and tock. Like the Time Traveller, leafing through the textbooks of his future in an ancient museum, we can help old paradigms become new past-futures. But first, we must smash a few Morlock skulls.

Bible does not contradict human, Neanderthal link

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Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:42:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/to-crush-a-morlock%E2%80%99s-skull
<![CDATA[The Ship Argo]]> http://www.flickr.com/photos/huge-entity/4593039926/in/set-72157624025953884/

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

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Sun, 09 May 2010 12:37:00 -0700 http://www.flickr.com/photos/huge-entity/4593039926/in/set-72157624025953884/
<![CDATA[Bad Writing and Bad Thinking]]> http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/

Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules:

* Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
* Never use a long word where a short one will do.
* If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
* Never use the passive where you can use the active.
* Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
* Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
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Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:55:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/
<![CDATA[On Seeing (an Imitation)]]> http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.”

Jacques Derrida, Economimesis

Enlarged pupil (an eye with iritis)
As the day drew closer to its end so I strained my eyes to compensate. A milieu of symbols littered my computer screen, each connected to a staccato breach between breath and tongue. And in conjunction, fused one to another in a series, these symbols formed words and concepts, visions and ideas to which I felt an obligation.

I was designing a book, turning a text into a form through the processes of a computer design interface. The semblance of a page confronted each turn of my wrist or tap of finger, until the virtual book lay splayed open, its central fissure dilating as the words grew bigger or shrank to barely perceptible pricks of black. By manipulating the interface I could expand letters until they inked out the screen, or, in turn, spiral to infinite distance, turning definite symbols into the pixels of a cloud.

This process of making occurred at a virtual distance to me and yet, as the nights rolled onwards, this work was limiting my ability to see.

The doctor examined my right eye. I had iritis, a strain of the pupil with no particular cause, except perhaps for its over-use: for one's over-reliance on its mechanical operation. Being that my right eye was the strongest of the two it had over-compensated at each dimming of the day, allowing my left eye to relax as the symbols of my book whirled on. The strain resulted in a blood-shot appearance accompanied by a searing, throbbing pain. It hurt to see, and even more so to look. It hurt because looking was its cause.

Standing at the base of the Southern tower I arced my neck back as far as I dare. As the horizon descended into my stomach I could just about perceive the towers' tallest corners, pinching at sky. How many coins did it take to build these things? And how many steps was I expected to ascend in order to get to the 'observation deck'?

In exchange for my tiny coin I fathomed a giant network called 'New York'. From up here everything was horizon: the imaginary boundary between earth and sky that moves in respect of one's position.

In 2001 the two towers tumbled. How profane their figures seem now. How could it be that these prisms, designed and built in the 1960s, opened and occupied in the 1970s, witness of boom in the 80s and bust in the 90s, would come to stand for all the tumult and turmoil, striving and hope of our newest century?

The precision of the prism – flat, grey surfaces observed in isometric space – will forever be bound to these charismatic towers built of steel, concrete and capital. That they now stand as symbols effaces their identity in time or in space. They will always be contemporary, so long as cities are built and planes soar the skies above them. Looking back at them it is now I that stand on the horizon. Yet, howsoever I alter my vision, the towers stay solid and fixed to their position, being at one and the same time the landscape, the illumination and the roving eye.

'Office Block With Twin' by Koizumi Meiro, 2006

Idiopathic is an adjective used primarily in medicine meaning arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. From Greek ἴδιος, idios (one's own) + πάθος, pathos (suffering), it means approximately "a disease of its own kind."

extract from Wikipedia

In 2006 Koizumi Meiro tore pages from pornographic magazines. Over images composed of two erotically entwined women he painted tones of grey. The resulting collages speak of capture, of closure and the banal. They are severely a-erotic, displaying none of the titillation that their originary magazines wished upon their audience. The women's heads have been disembodied, or more precisely, have been relocated onto the bodies of twin prisms. Does Meiro's objectification of these women mirror the objectification they suffer under the guise of the erotic gaze? Perhaps. What draws me into the images though, and what emerges most strikingly as I look upon them, is a haunting sense of recognition. This simplified, perfect horizon, these strutting prisms of grey mirror the defining twin icons of our era. Captured, closed off and made banal to my mind by the passing of time, by their over admittance into the symbolic syntax of the new century.

My recognition is itself an imitation, such that seeing and looking are intertwined.

A focal point rushes to meet me, like a pupil contracting as the first band of sun breaches an ever distant imaginary line.

Cargo Cult

In the 1940s the Southwest Pacific Ocean became of fundamental strategic importance for both the Japanese and American forces. After establishing bases on a range of Melanesian and Micronesian islands the US Military settled into the routines of war.

To the native peoples of these islands the military presence signified a complete over-turning of the natural order. Within a few months the beaches and grasslands were transformed into encampments and runways, and as the war effort ensued the skies above must have seemed filled with the buzz of alien craft. The native people came to know American society through the exchange of commodities and the gestures of an unknown tongue. As planes soared overhead and countless ships descended over the horizon the islands became saturated with cargo of all kinds, from cans of coca cola to livestock the likeness of which the islanders had never seen.

Much has been written of the so called 'Cargo Cults' which later emerged on these islands. Strange rituals still carried out today seem to hark back to those informative years when Western civilisation first imposed itself on the native Micronesians. Islanders build imitation planes and runways from straw and dirt; act out military processions with bamboo guns slung over their shoulders. In order to bring back the abundance of cargo that used to land on their islands the native people appear to be imitating the conditions under which its arrival used to occur.

Ritual obtains a value at the meeting point between the thing imitated and the imitation. Ritual is action, but it is also object. It is natural because it is always a copy; repeated whilst never attaining perfect resemblance; repeated to bring into order the miasma of our visions.

With work there is always consequence, both intended and in excess. For the tribal communities of the cargo islands the dividing lines between nature and ritual, between alien technology and the routines of war must have seemed identical. A resemblance, a dividing line, that was worthy of imitation whether it brought cargo or not.

We cannot know what they saw. We can only imitate an idea of their seeing by analogy with the kind of seeing we consider in ourselves.

Upon the arrival of the American Military in the Southwestern Pacific there was a lot more to see than had been seen before.

“Why should we be at all interested in perceiving the obscurity that emanates from the epoch? Is darkness not precisely an anonymous experience that is by definition impenetrable; something that is not directed at us and thus cannot concern us? On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him. Darkness is something that – more than any light – turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time.”

Giorgio Agamben, What is The Contemporary?

The eye-drops soothed the burning pain, but they also gave me chronic photo-phobia, such that stepping out into daylight was excruciating. I needed to let my eye rest, and this meant shutting off its ability to work. Whether the light was dim or bright, whether the object of my attention was near or far, the muscles around my pupil lay dormant. I considered the world through a pupil locked at its fullest expanse. The light gushed in.

In place of depth, of shade and colour, there now existed a miasma which my left eye alone could not navigate. The physical frames of everyday life were impossible to attenuate. It was as if upon being freed from the shallow glare of the computer screen I had stumbled into a space between signified and signifier. Everything was flattened to the status of an interface, but an interface that lead nowhere and manipulated nothing.

My book had been printed and bound. I could hold it in my hands, flick through its pages. In real space I could consider it, scanning its lines and paragraphs with my working eye. Wearing a make-shift eye patch or a pair of sun glasses I was able to avoid headaches and spatial confusion. But upon holding the very object whose making had rendered my right eye useless I was overcome with a different kind of dislocation.

Was this the book I had designed on my computer? It bore a resemblance, there was even a sense that my fingers had observed it before, the memory of its movements surfacing as I turned it over in my hands. But this sense did not transfer to the content of the book, to the meaning that emerged when words were read in conjunction, and pages, phrases, paragraphs and footnotes came to meet each other in endless variation. I recognised the words themselves, but I did not recognise from where they had come. I saw the book's space, time and content, yet I could not see its work.

Between seeing and looking which paradigm was closest to this work: the roving eye or the mind engaged in making?

by Daniel Rourke

“To go beyond is to communicate with ideas, to understand. Does not the function of art lie in not understanding?... Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.”

Emmanuel Levinas, Reality and Its Shadow

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Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:04:00 -0800 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html
<![CDATA[Eric Duyckaerts, Kant (Part 1)]]> http://vimeo.com/3333031

Cast: Argosy

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Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:47:07 -0800 http://vimeo.com/3333031
<![CDATA[Cargo cult]]> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture through magical thinking and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors. Cargo cults developed primarily in remote parts of New Guinea and other Melanesian and Micronesian societies in the southwest Pacific Ocean, beginning with the first significant arrivals of Westerners in the 19th century. Similar behaviors have, however, also appeared elsewhere in the world.

Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when large amounts of manpower and materials were brought in by the Japanese and American combatants, and this was observed by the residents of these regions. When the war ended, the military bases were

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Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:51:00 -0800 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
<![CDATA[I discovered the ants]]> http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html

by Daniel Rourke I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time. Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast. In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles upon piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons. I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses. The French tourist attraction Lascaux II is like the 1980 family movie Superman II because: It’s a translation of archetypes, a kind of ode to idealism. Some people claim that it is better than the original. The special effects are dated, but they still pack a punch. It cost millions to re-produce. All it is is editing. In 1963 Lascaux cave, a network of subterranean tunnels scrawled with some of the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic human art, was closed to public scrutiny. Since its discovery in 1940 around a thousand visitors had trampled through the site per day, bringing with them a toxic mix of exhaled CO2 and greasy, groping fingers. In 1983 the Lascaux II replica was opened to the public. The tourist attraction contains a faithful recreation of the textured surface of the original cave upon which 75% of the precious art has been meticulously copied. In the late 1970s Richard Donner, a talented director best known for his earlier film The Omen, was fired by the producers of the Superman franchise. Donner’s attempt to craft and create two Superman movies back to back had become hampered by production disagreements. A new director, Richard Lester, was drafted in to piece together the unfinished second film from remnants that Richard Donner had left scattered on the cutting-room floor. Lester’s Superman II was released in 1980. Richard Donner’s name was absent from the credits. The original Lascaux cave rests in darkness again now, killing the time its simulation has reclaimed from toxic breath and greasy, groping fingers. The addition of a ‘state-of-the-art’ air conditioning system to the Lascaux complex is thought to be responsible for a virulent, black fungus now invading the site. Experts are looking for a solution to the new problem they helped introduce. Richard Donner finally released a ‘faithful’ version of Superman II in late 2006, a version for which Richard Lester received no credit. The two films contain around 75% of the same material, in vaguely different orders. Most fire ant bait is an insecticide and an attractive ant food (generally processed corn grits coated with soybean oil) combination. Baits are taken into the colony by ants searching for food. The bait is distributed to other members of the colony through the exchange of food known as trophallaxis. Although several fire ant baits are available, there are two main types: insect growth regulators and actual toxins. Hydramethylnon bait (Amdro®, Siege® and Maxforce®) is a toxin (slow acting stomach poison) that disrupts the ant’s ability to convert food to energy. Spinosad bait (Eliminator® Justice™) is a slow acting biorational toxin derived through the fermentation of a soil dwelling bacteria. Abamectin, the toxin in Raid® Fire Ant Bait is also the result of the fermentation of soil dwelling bacteria. Fipronil bait (Chipco® Firestar™) is a slow acting toxin that disrupts the insect’s nervous system through contact and stomach action. Fenoxycarb (Award™ and Logic®), or methoprene, (Extinguish™) and pyriproxyfen (Distance® and Spectracide®) are all insect growth regulators that prevent queens from producing new workers. Abamectin (Clinch™, Varsity™, Ascend™ and Raid®) bait acts both as an insect growth regulator and a toxin. One key to the efficiency of baits is that the insecticide gets to the queen. [i] (The stage is very dark. The sound of breathing can be heard, and then the scrape of a foot against something solid. The darkness holds in this state for a few more moments. The breathing dwindles to a spoken whisper, low and indistinct. These noises echo from within a narrow space. They grow closer as they repeat. The audience waits. A flicker of light erupts from below stage right. It swells and diminishes like a heart-beat. The stage is modelled on the inside of a cavern. Its edges fill all angles of the stage except the obligatory missing section. It is through this absence that the audience watches. Two men clamber up from a tiny recess in the simulated stone. An older man carries a flame set upon a gnarled tree root. The dank odour of tar drifts out from the flame as the men catch their breath. There is only an iota of light. The audience waits.) Older man: Though the radiation from kryptonite is detrimental to all life, it is especially harmful to Kryptonians such as Superman. Man: Kryptonite is the ore of kryptonium, and usually has a green hue. Older man: Although in its red form, kryptonite is perhaps at its most unpredictable. Man: Red kryptonite is especially volatile. (pauses, looking at his companion) No two chunks of red kryptonite have the same effect on Superman. (The two men drift. The older man's lantern casts the only light in the theatre. A series of hand outlines, shaped in ochre powder, are met by the men's gaze. In turn they each press an outstretched hand to one of these, muttering under their breath. After this ceremony they find seating spaces and buckle into crossed legs. As well as his flame the older man carries a small, leather pouch over one shoulder which he now sets down. The men are dishevelled and dirty with tar smoke.) Older man: Red kryptonite turned Superman into a powerless giant and a dwarf. Man: (thinking at first) Turned him into a terrifying Kryptonian dragon. Older man: Red kryptonite drove Superman insane for a period of forty-eight hours. Man: Made Superman unable to see anything green; grow incredibly long hair, nails, and beard. Older man: Grow fat; gain the ability to read thoughts; grow a third eye in the back of his head. Man: Lose his invulnerability along the left side of his body. Older man: Split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent. Man: Become apathetic. Older man: Be rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese. (The older man opens his pouch, passing his companion the lantern. He pulls out handfuls of twigs, moss and dried fungal remnants and begins to build a fire.) Man: Grow an extra set of arms. Older man: Become clumsy. Man: Swap bodies with the person nearest him. Older man: Transfer his powers. Man: Rapidly age. Older man: Go through multiple personality changes. Man: And have his skin rendered transparent... Older man: ...overloading him with solar power. (By now the fire has been built. The younger man lights the fire. As it begins to burn the light of the stage naturally increases. The cave walls are covered with ancient depictions of horses, reindeer, mammoth and bears, as well as the outlined hand-prints.) Man: (thinking again) Red kryptonite made flames shoot out of Superman’s mouth and endowed him with the power to make his wishes come true. Older man: (weary) Transformed Superman into an infant with the mind of an adult. Man: Robbed Superman of his super powers and afflicted him with total amnesia. (From the fire the older man now draws a length of charred wood. He stubs the stick into the ground, and pinches at its end, blowing away the cinders until only a charcoal tip remains. The older man attempts to stand, eventually requiring his companion’s assistance. He walks the length of the cave, touching his fingers against the animal depictions. Coming upon the naive likeness of a human amongst the animals he taps it in recognition, and begins to mark the figure with his charcoal tool. His marks are simple strokes, but they highlight the human form until it is transformed into something quite different. His companion speaks as he continues to draw.) Man: Is that everything? (The older man continues transforming the painting. From its head he draws a set of antennae. Its torso he elongates into a tear-shaped thorax, adding new limbs onto the extended body. He finishes, stepping back. The human now resembles a giant ant, defined in charcoal against the surface of rock.) Older man: Red kryptonite once endowed Superman with the head and antennae of a giant ant.[ii] Ants! Giant fucking ants! Millions of them, with spiny knees and quivering mandibles trickling with deathly secretions. They advanced upon Earth, taking Tokyo at first, seeming to rise up as one black monolith and wash across the terrified metropolis below. They came from the moon - or perhaps from outer space - although tales of cracks in the Earth opening to an ant-shaped hell beneath could not be founded on rumour alone. From Asia they advanced West, pulling behind them the glistening entrails of human civilisation in one terrific globule. To cross the Himalayas they congregated along its flank in layers, cemented one upon the other with human gunk, until a sheer wall of arthropod crept like a heavenly bridge, up and over the mountain peaks. By the time they reached Iraq they had crushed five hundred armies beneath their scurrying limbs. The viscous mass of human dead they trailed behind them now teemed with the remains of fighter jets, gun turrets and ten thousand war tanks - all minced together in the goo. On a dusty plain, not far from the city of Baghdad, the horde began to gather. Within hours a vast swathe of earth and human cement had been erected into a cone-shaped tower of Babel. The human armies kept their distance defending what little remained of the terrified populous; cursing their inevitable slip from the top of the food-chain; peering back into the evolutionary quagmire from whence they had risen. From the entrance of their Biblical tower the insects extended, like a waiting procession, along the walls of Babylon. With their antennae pushed up high and their thoraxes lowered onto the hot desert ground it was then that their Queen appeared in the sky. In her tree-trunk sized jaws she carried a great, green meteorite, which she set down at the gates of her new ant city. The rock emanated from within a pulse of fire which seemed to re-energise the ant millions; causing their many limbs to chatter against one another; causing the whole of Earth to tremble in anticipation. There are many contradictory tales of what happened next. Some say that the green rock cracked, tearing apart the Earth with its power. Others claim that the Queen ant shed an outer skin, revealing beneath a pair of golden wings. The most accepted story though, and the one to which I subscribe, is that slowly the Queen rolled the green rock in through the gates of the tower, her army following behind her, until the entire swarm had disappeared into the awesome nest. Today the new Babel tower glints in the sun, its upper-most pinnacle piercing through the thin desert clouds. It is said that one day, when the ants have waited out their restful sleep, our waking nightmare will drive them from the tower once again. But I don't believe that, knowing that in time all monuments must crumble to the earth which bore them. Instead I listen carefully for the pulse of the Queen's cargo. Turning my ear to the trembling sky. Waiting for it to speak of the journeys on which it has travelled. Hoping that somewhere, out in the depths of outer space, the ant Queen is revered as the saviour of her alien race. By morning the upturned plastic mushroom was empty of its poison, as piece by piece the ant bait had been dragged, carried and manoeuvred into the nest. In places a fine yellow dust now stained the kitchen's cracked linoleum. A dust composed of corn grits soaked with delicious, deadly poison.END [i] Extracted from University of Arkansas web archive.[ii] Dialogue text compiled from online sources: Superman wiki, Wikipedia& SupermanHomePage. by Daniel Rourke

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Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html
<![CDATA[John Frum - Wikipedia]]> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_from

John Frum (or Jon Frum; John From) is a figure associated with cargo cults on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. He is depicted as an American World War II serviceman, who will bring wealth and prosperity to the people if they follow him.

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Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:29:50 -0800 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_from