MachineMachine /stream - search for relic

A Deeper Look Into The Life of An Impressionist

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 11:36:19 -0700

Actor/impressionist Jim Meskimen (Parks & Recreation, Whose Line?, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) recites "Pity the Poor Impressionist" poem in 20 celebrity voices, with the help of SHAM00K.

BTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm3squcz7Aw

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Contact Jim Meskimen: www.jimmeskimen.com

Is anything more sad and lame contemptible, beneath disdain, In short, provoking of disgust than being an impressionist?

A third rate, even fourth rate skill, the definition of "cheap thrill". Like watching farm equipment rust is watching an impressionist.

A relic from a distant day that long since should died away, dishonorably mentioned is the pitiful impressionist.

Weird, and somewhat ostentacious tired debris from old Las Vegas, whose former fans have all dismissed allegiance to impressionists.

How many opportunities passed up and wasted because he's Hell-bound to follow what he must? Pity the poor impressionist.

Doomed to live an abject failure dogged by his own echolalia. Better to crumble into dust than live as an impressionist.

His borrowed voices can't deflect a life of well-deserved neglect. His name's on simply no one's lips; forgotten, vain impressionist.

That sound–did anybody moan? That creature at the microphone is last on everybody's list; forgettable impressionist.

When Peter at that shiny gate condemns those souls who imitate he will but shake a heavenly fist and curse condemned impressionists.

But 'til that time we'll tolerate the good for nothing reprobate, and hide the truth: that we're just pissed that WE can't be impressionists!

All I want, every day, is to find a derelict spaceship, develop abnormal symptoms & then tell no one.

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:09:38 -0700

There's Not Much 'Glitch' In Glitch Art | Motherboard

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:45:15 -0700

Artist Daniel Temkin has been creating and discussing glitch art for over seven years. In that time, he's exhibited in solo and group shows, and had his work featured in Rhizome and Fast Company, amongst other publications. For Temkin, glitch art is about the disruption of algorithms, though algorithmic art is a bit of a misnomer. He prefers "algo-glitch demented" in describing the methods, aesthetics, and philosophy of glitch.

In January, Temkin published a fascinating glitch art essay on NOOART titled "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." There he laid down the philosophy and "mythology" of glitch, which had really started in a series of email conversations with Hugh Manon. Though there is no shortage of writings on glitch art, many aspects of the these texts didn't address what Temkin loved most about how it is created.

"The glitch aesthetic may be rooted in the look of malfunction, but when it comes to actual practice, there’s often not much glitch in glitch art," wrote Temkin in the essay. "Yes, some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." This, he said, doesn't make it traditional algorithmic art (algorithm-designed artworks), but a more demented form of it—algo-glitch demented.

Over a series of email conversations, Temkin elaborated on some of his conclusions in "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." Aside from highlighting some of the best algo-glitch demented art, Temkin also talked about bad data, image hacking, and why computers are no less "image makers" than humans even though they aren't sentient (yet).

MOTHERBOARD: Aside from being an artist working in glitch, would you say that you've also sort of become a philosopher of glitch or algorithmic art, if there is such a thing?

Temkin: There's tons of writing on glitch, much of it very good (Lab404.com, for instance), but some aspects of glitch theory didn't jibe with what really interested me about the style. Originally, Hugh Manon and I started a long email conversation about glitch, which evolved into our 2011 paper. It ranged across glitch aesthetics, methodology, and issues around authorship, while delving into glitch's ambivalence about error—the way the glitch is possible because of software's ability to "fail to fully fail" when coming across unexpected data.

We questioned why computer error is so emphasized in this form when nothing is really at stake in a digital file (a deleted but endlessly reproducible JPEG has none of the aura of an Erased DeKooning), and what it means to purposely simulate an error, something that ordinarily has power because it is unexpected and outside of our control.

Ted Davis, FFD8 project

These issues stuck with me, until I considered Clement Valla's familiar quote about his Postcards From Google Earth project: that "these images are not glitches... they are the absolute logical result of the system." It was a familiar quote, but in this instance got me thinking about how most glitchwork can be described the same way—as products of perfectly functional systems.

I wrote my recent piece for NOOART, arguing that glitch's preoccupation with error doesn't always serve it well, that it limits the scope of what's produced and how we talk about it. Bypassing computer error opened new avenues of investigation about our relationship both with technology and with logic systems more generally, and got at what interested me more about the style we call glitch.

In the NOOART essay, you write: "Some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." Can you elaborate on that point?

In the paper, I discuss JPEG corruption, one of the fundamental glitch techniques. Introduce bad data to a JPEG file, and you'll see broken-looking images emerge. I use this example because it's so familiar to glitch practice. JPEG is not just a file format but an algorithm that compresses/decompresses image data.

When we "corrupt" a JPEG, we're altering compressed data so that it (successfully) renders to an image that no longer appears photographic, taking on a chunky, pixelated, more abstract character we associate with broken software. To the machine, it is not an error—if the image were structurally damaged, we would not be able to open it. This underscores the machine as an apparatus indifferent to what makes visual sense to us, at a place where our expectations clash with algorithmic logic.

Daniel Temkin, Dither Studies #2, 2011

The excitement of altering JPEG data directly is the sense of image hacking—making changes at the digital level without being able to predict the outcome. This becomes more apparent in other glitch techniques, such as sonification, which add layers of complexity to the process. Giving up control to a system or process has a long history in art.

Gerhard Richter describes committing to a systematic approach, veiling the work from conscious decisions that may ruin or limit it. As he puts it, "if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything—by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned" [p179, Gerhard Richter, Panorama]. In digital art, we often function in an all-too-WYSIWYG environment. Glitch frees us from this, bringing us to unexpected places.

Can you draw a distinction between generative art (which can feature algorithms) and your concept of algo-glitch demented?

I call it algo-glitch demented, as opposed to algorithmic art (which I understand meaning generative art that uses algorithms). I'll have to paraphrase Philip Galanter and say that generative art is any practice where the artist sets a system "in motion with some degree of autonomy," resulting in a work.

"Glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine." What makes algo-glitch demented is how we misuse existing algorithms, running them in contexts that had never been intended by their designers. Furthermore, there are moments of autonomy in algo-glitch, but this autonomy is not what defines it as algo-glitch; what's more important is the control we give up to the process.

You call glitch art a collaboration with the machine. That's an interesting point because the human is conscious of this, while the machine is not. Or, do you have another way of looking at that collaboration?

Machines are not sentient, but they are image-makers. Trevor Paglen, in a recent Frieze Magazine piece, says we are now or very soon to be at the point "where the majority of the world’s images are made by-machines-for-machines," and "seeing with the meat-eyes of our human bodies is increasingly the exception," refering to facial-recognition systems, qr code readers, and a host of other automation.

One of the most compelling ideas to come from James Bridle's New Aesthetic is how we can treat the machine as having a vision—even as we know it's not sentient—and just how strange this vision is, that does not hold human beings as its audience.

Jeff Donaldson, panasonic wj-mx12 video feedback, 2012

Glitch artists have been doing this for a long time, treating it as an equal collaborator and seeing where it leads us as we cede control to broken processes and zombie algorithms. Curt Cloninger describes it as "painting with a very blunt brush that has a mind of its own;" in this way, glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine.

Can you talk about glitch as mythology? I've never heard it described as such.

I'm probably being a bit obnoxious there, using mythology to describe the gap between how we talk about glitch and what we're actually doing. There are several strains of work within glitch or that overlap with glitch. There is Dirty New Media, which is related to noise-based work; materialist explorations; the algo-glitch I've emphasized in the JPEG example; and what we might call "minimal slippage glitch" (a term that arose in a Facebook discussion between me and Rosa Menkman).

Minimal Slippage fits a familiar contemporary art scenario of the single gesture that puts things in motion and reveals something new. It's great when things actually work this way, but when this language is used to describe work made by manipulating data repeatedly, there's a problem.

I also take issue with the term glitch art. I don't propose we replace it, only to be more conscious of its influence. If we produce work with other visual styles using glitch processes, why limit ourselves to work that has an error-strewn appearance? This connection begins to seems artificial. I kept this in mind with my Glitchometry series. I use the sonification technique to process simple geometric shapes (b&w squares and triangles, etc.) into works that range from somewhat glitchy to abstractions that fall very far from a glitch aesthetic. They emphasize process, the back-and-forth with the machine, and an anxiety about giving up that control.

Clement Valla, from “Iconoclashes” 2013

With Glitchometry Stripes (an extension of the Glitchometry work), the results are even less glitchy in appearance; this time using only sound effects that cleanly transform the lines, ending up with Op Art-inspired, crisply graphic works that create optical buzzing when scrolled across the screen.

You mention Ted Davis's FFD8 project in your essay. What is it about the work that you like?

FFD8 is JPEG image hacking, with protection against messing up the header (which would make the image undisplayable). It's a gentle introduction to glitching, but it illustrates how it works, which encourages one to go deeper. I'm suspicious of glitch software that does all the work for you, essentially turning glitch styling into the equivalent of a Photoshop filter. With FFD8, enough of the process is exposed that folks starting out in the style might decide to take the next step and mess with raw files directly, or build their own software, or discover some new avenue to create work.

What's your opinion on something like the iPhone's panorama function, which, if you move the camera fast or in unexpected directions, creates glitches? It's movement-based as opposed to other types of glitch.

I think someone will come along with a brilliant idea of how to use it to do something fresh and interesting. One interesting work that uses photo-stitching (although not on the iPhone) is Clement Valla's Iconoclasts series. He loads images of gods from the Met's collection and lets Photoshop decide how to combine them, creating improbable composites, many physically impossible. It works because of how carefully the objects were photographed. Each is lit the same way with the same background. Many of these religious relics come from cultures where it was believed that such objects were not created by human hands. Now an algorithm, also not human, decides how to combine them to construct new artifacts.

Daniel Temkin, Glitchometry Circles #6, 2013

Where do you feel you've been most successful in your own projects?

I never trust artists to tell me which of their works are more successful. [laughs] I'll tell you the theme I'm most interested in. Much of my work revolves around this clash between human thinking and computer logic, and the compulsiveness that comes from trying to think in a logical way. My own experience with this comes from programming, which is my background from before art. Glitch gives me a way to create chaotic works as a release from the overly structured thinking programming requires.

As a few examples of work that deals with this, my Dither Studies expose the seemingly irrational patterns that come from the very simple rules of dithering patterns. They began as a collaboration with Photoshop, where I asked it to dither a solid color with two incompatible colors. From there, I constructed a web tool that walks through progressions of dithers.

In Drunk Eliza, I re-coded the classic chat bot using my language Entropy, where all data is unstable. Since the original Eliza has such a small databank of phrases, yet so clearly has a personality, I wanted to know how she would seem with her mind slowly disintegrating, HAL-style. Drunk Eliza was the result. The drunken responses she gets online have been a great source of amusement for me.

Neither Here Nor Then: Thomson and Craighead at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 04:12:48 -0700

Visiting Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thomson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

Never Odd Or Even features a series of works that play more explicitly with the internet, including London Wall W1W (2013), a regularly updated wall of tweets sent from within a mile of the gallery. This vision of the “quotidian” out of the “global” suffers once you realise that twitter monikers have been replaced with each tweeter’s real name. Far from rooting the ethereal tweets to ‘real’ people and their geographic vicinity the work paradoxically distances Thomson and Craighead from the very thing twitter already has in abundance: personality. In a most appropriate coincidence I found myself confronted with my own tweet, sent some weeks earlier from a nearby library. My moment of procrastination was now a heavily stylised, neutralised interjection into Carroll / Fletcher gallery. Set against a sea of thoughts about the death of Margaret Thatcher, how brilliant cannabis is, or what someone deserved for lunch I felt the opposite of integration in a work. In past instances of London Wall, including one at Furtherfield gallery, tweeters have been contacted directly, allowing them to visit their tweet in its new context. A gesture which as well as bringing to light the personal reality of twitter and tweeters no doubt created a further flux of geotagged internet traffic. Another work, shown in tandem with London Wall W1W, is More Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2012). Here the kitsch backdrop of karaoke is offered as a way to poetically engage with SPAM emails. But rather than invite me in the work felt sculptural, cold and imposing. Blowing carefully on the attached microphone evoked no response. The perception and technical malleability of time is a central theme of the show. Both, Flipped Clock (2009), a digital wall clock reprogrammed to display alternate configurations of a liquid crystal display, and Trooper (1998), a single channel news report of a violent arrest, looped with increasing rapidity, uproot the viewer from a state of temporal nonchalance. A switch between time and synchronicity, between actual meaning and the human impetus for meaning, plays out in a multi-channel video work Several Interruptions (2009). A series of disparate videos, no doubt gleaned from YouTube, show people holding their breath underwater. Facial expressions blossom from calm to palpable terror as each series of underwater portraits are held in synchrony. As the divers all finally pull up for breath the sequence switches.

According to David Auerbach, and with echoes from Thomson and Craighead themselves, Never Odd Or Even offers a series of Oulipo inspired experiments, realised with constrained technical, rather than literary, techniques. For my own reading I was drawn to the figure of The Time Traveller, caused so splendidly to judder through time over and over again, whilst never having to repeat the self-same word twice. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ original novel the protagonist stumbles into a crumbling museum. Sweeping the dust off abandoned relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that the Time Traveller has a revelation. The museum entombs the history of his own future: an ocean of artefacts whose potential to speak died with the civilisation that created them. [2] In Thomson and Craighead’s work the present moment we take for granted becomes malleable in the networks their artworks play with. That moment of arising, that archaeological instant is called into question, because like the Time Traveller, the narratives we tell ourselves are worth nothing if the past and the present arising from it are capable of swapping places. Thomson and Craighead’s work, like the digital present it converses with, begins now, and then again now, and then again now. The arche of our networked society erupting as the simulation of a present that has always already slipped into the past. Of course, as my meditation on The Time Traveller and archaeology suggests, this state of constant renewal is something that art as a form of communication has always been intimately intertwined with. What I was fascinated to read in the works of Never Odd Or Even was a suggestion that the kind of world we are invested in right now is one which, perhaps for the first time, begs us to simulate it anew.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, https://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100.

Neither Here Nor Then: Thomson and Craighead at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 03:12:48 -0700

Visiting Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thompson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth™ marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, http://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100.

io9.com: Seeing the truth of the world via science fiction

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:10:00 -0700

Seeing the truth of the world via science fiction: Science fiction takes us out of our own time and place, and confronts us with alien objects as well as incomprehensible future artifacts. By doing this, argues Daniel Rourke, SF brings us closer to seeing things as they really are. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them. Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time’s grander web. Unable to grasp a people’s history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them. [continue reading at io9.com]

'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-Fi Archaeology

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:05:00 -0700

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine's ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time's grander web. Unable to grasp a people’s history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them.

Archaeology derives from the Greek word arche, which literally means the moment of arising. Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a Thing, which although indemonstrable and intangible in Itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that Thing. In a sense, archaeology is as much about the present instant, as it is about the fragmentary past. We work on what remains through the artefacts that make it into our museums, our senses and even our language. But to re-energise those artefacts, to bring them back to life, the tools we have access to do much of the speaking.

Like the unseen civilisations of H.G.Wells’ museum, these Things in Themselves lurk beyond the veil of our perceptions. It is the world in and of Itself; the Thing as it exists distinct from perceptions, from emotions, sensations, from all phenomenon, that sets the conditions of the world available to those senses. Perceiving the world, sweeping dust away from the objects around us, is a constant act of archaeology.

Kant called this veiled reality the noumenon, a label he interchanged with The-Thing-Itself (Ding an Sich). That which truly underlies what one may only infer through the senses. For Kant, and many philosophers that followed, The Thing Itself is impossible to grasp directly. The senses we use to search the world also wrap that world in a cloudy haze of perceptions, misconceptions and untrustworthy phenomena.

In another science fiction classic, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem considered the problem of The Thing Itself as one of communication. His Master’s Voice (HMV), written at the height of The Cold War, tells the story of a team of scientists and their attempts to decipher an ancient, alien message transmitted on the neutrino static streaming from a distant star. The protagonist of this tale, one Peter Hogarth, recounts the failed attempts at translation with a knowing, deeply considered cynicism. To Peter, and to Stanislaw Lem himself, true contact with an alien intelligence is an absolute impossibility:

“In the course of my work... I began to suspect that the ‘letter from the stars’ was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the coloured blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is ‘on his mind’, so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

In HMV and Lem’s better known novel, Solaris, the conviction that an absolute true reality exists under the dust of perception leads humanity down ever more winding labyrinths of its own psyche. For Stanislaw Lem the human mind exists in a perpetual state of archaeology, turning away from Itself in search of truth, but time and again finding Itself confronted as the very Thing that underlies the reality it is trying to decipher.

To transcend phenomena, to clear away the dust, one must, according to Kant, think. Thus his Thing Itself, derives from the Greek for 'thought-of' (nooúmenon) and further implies the concept of the mind (nous). Kant’s Thing Itself is accessed through pure thought. A clear enough mind, devoid of the bodily shackles of pain, pleasure or emotion, might see without seeing, sweeping away the perceptual cobwebs by guile alone. What Plato referred to as the only immortal part of the human soul, reason, becomes through Kant the dominant principle by which The Thing Itself may be reached.

In the short space I have allotted myself here, I have not the time, or the guile, to fully analyse the Kantian noumenon. Needles to say, countless thinkers, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Hegel to Agamben, have grappled with the suppositions and presuppositions made to cohere and then crumble by Kant’s addiction to reason. What interests me about science fiction, and most readily about the works of Wells and Lem, is the attempt made to search for 'The Thing Itself' beyond the mind; beyond the human altogether.

Science fiction allows the creation of an imaginary set of conditions by which the human being may break their most burdonsome shackle: their own mind. Human timescales, bodies, forms of thinking and perception: each of these must be circumvented if one is ever able to grasp The Thing Itself. Kant’s principle of noumenon embodies a discourse on the limits of perception that has remained relevant to philosophy for millenia. The paradox of the archaeology – the arising – of an underlying reality is the defining principle of a thousand sci-fi tales.

For Stanislaw Lem our limitations become obvious once we are confronted with the existence of an intelligence which is not human. Lem’s novels seek to connect us with the absolute ‘other’: that most alien of Things, ourselves. Reality, for Lem at least, is composed in an indecipherable language. Humanity lives in an eternal stasis, unable to circum-navigate the new realities it constantly 'discovers' for itself. And in the end we find ourselves limited by the brains that think us, unable to distinguish the twinkle-twinkle from the little star:

“There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of – and the languages not made by man. In such language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural...

Now to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ‘acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself’. One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

To crush a Morlock’s skull

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:42:00 -0700

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

The Archaeology of The Book

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:05:00 -0700

Before the printed book there was the book as relic, the book as idol to knowledge. Those who could read dictated to the masses who could not. Books were material conduits to hidden, immaterial territories, placed out of reach of the proletariat – atop the holy pulpit or concealed within the labyrinthine catacombs of the private library – books were of the other, were unreachable.

For a long time the book’s inaccessibility is what granted it an authority. Instances from the stream of time were made real once admitted to the pages of the book. The performed biblical enumeration was a creative act, forging the words of the Priest into a material truth which the audience could almost reach out and touch, almost but not quite. As Susan Stewart notes:

“The book stands in tension with history, a tension reproduced in the microcosm of the book itself, where reading takes place in time across marks which have been made in space.” – On Longing, Page 22 – Duke University Press, 1993 History was true, it had form because it was manifest in the pages of the book. This belief in the formative capacity of the book created a culture of desire. It was thus inevitable that the book, once given a symbolic new life by the ink of the printing press, would find its way into the hands of the masses.

In time written language became the omnipresent signifier of freedom, of knowledge. The authority of the book was shifted to the word itself. If one could read, one had the authority only previously wielded by the few. Reading was a powerful gesture of self-realisation. The authority was now one’s own. This self resolving revolution came at a time of even greater existential resistance in the West. Martin Luther had placed the power of religion in the hands of the individual. Continental art was developing a fascination with the Earthly human not seen since the time of Aristotle. The book still had encoded within it the authority of the word, only now it was the individual who carried the means to crack that code. Access to the highest of truths was not a privilege, but a right. David Lodge:

“Phenomena such as memory, the association of ideas in the mind, the causes of emotions and the individual’s sense of self, became of central importance to the speculative thinkers and writers of narrative literature alike... The silence and privacy of the reading experience afforded by books mimicked the silent privacy of individual consciousness.” – Consciousness and the Novel, Page 40 – Penguin Books, 2003 The contents of the book became equivalent with the contents of consciousness. Words affected an inner space, twisted an internal narrative, were dictated by a clock that ticked in the mind of the reader. Books began to evolve. The novel is probably the most important of the forms which transpired. Its tendency to focus in on the mind or actions of a single individual gave readership an empathetic union with what was read. Where previously truth had been a feature of the world which stories reflected, now truth was an author’s prerogative. Stories in books were self-contained realities able to control the minds of their readers. Suddenly the authors of books were the bringers of authority, of authenticity. But not everyone agreed.

Books were now seen as having such power over the individual that they could be banned, burned en-mass, wiped from history. All the major political, psychological and intellectual upheavals of the 20th Century came with their associated book, whether actively chosen or emerging in retrospect. And with the power of retrospect many claimed that books had foretold the World Wars, the rise (and fall) of Communism, the death of history, the death of the author - even the death of the book itself. Books from the past were re-examined via new theories, new technologies of the intellect. Marxist, Freudian, Post Modern... In a world where the individual ruled, books had become the ultimate artefacts of history. A new code emerged, one which an everyday reader would not necessarily understand. A book could not merely be read anymore, it must be examined under the most explicit of conditions in order to tease apart the infinite tangles of culture that had accumulated within it. In the latter half of the 20th Century a new view began to consume the academic establishment, that truth was a misnomer.

Since that time many arguments have been fought over where true authenticity lies, and how to mediate the multiplicities that the book encompasses. In the past ten years or so it is the masses that have been given the privilege. The internet binds us together and explodes readership. For the first time in history the act of reading can be considered a truly communal experience. Web-entities such as Wikipedia and Blogger have allowed information and knowledge to authenticate itself. Cultural evolution can occur at the click of an 'edit' link, and if it doesn’t exist in the pages of Wikipedia, well, then it isn’t worth noting.

But what now of the book? That tome of knowledge, of history, of somewhat questionable self-located truths? Once again the book is emerging as an idol, only this time to itself. As mass produced information slowly moves from the printed page to the computer screen, to hand-held digital-ink devices, so the value of the printed word will transmogrify. Books will re-assume an identity that revolves around their individuality rather than ours. Artists books, self-published limited prints, historically significant palimpsests – these are the books we will come to register our faith in. Books will no longer represent a simulacrum of the idea they encompass – as in the mass-produced paperback – instead they will act as archaeological signifiers to otherwise un-locatable pasts. The internet contains buried beneath its surface a copy of its previous selves. Browsing the ‘history’ section of any Wikipedia article is like projecting your perspective back a few edits. Take time to navigate through The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine and pristine, perfect versions of internet history will find their way into the archived menus of your internet browser. The data we perceive in books is very different. Each copy of a book is different, it has a history beyond the content it attempts to justify. My copy of Gravity’s Rainbow is a microcosm of the journeys I have taken it on/it has taken me on. Particles splashed onto it from a Croatian sea shore, specks of my sandwich from Venice airport, pencil scribbles and every single word they circle in an order I defined as I sat and took in some of the words, misread others, allowed other still to fall through the sieve of my conscious mind into the unconscious well beneath.

And books can be re-read in ways as yet inconceivable for the internet. Take The Archimedes Palimpsest for instance, a text of significance for its archaeological value as well as for the fresh insight it gives scholars into the mind and works of the ancient mathematician. Contained within its multiple, physical layers are histories that scientists have had to design new technological means to access. Shine a laser onto the calcified pages and beneath each a multi-verse of forms emerge, each layer needing to be decoded separately, each signifier spanning off into infinite possible meanings beyond. Books are crucial to our understanding of our place in time and space, because they are fundamentally composed of time and space. They carry with them the history of thought, of physical presence and of psychological evolution that created them, moved them forward and now sends them explosively back into their own pasts. To understand ourselves we need to understand our pasts, to understand our pasts we need to examine the artefacts we carry with us, which carry us forwards:

“Michael Shanks: A lot of people think that archaeology—archaeologists—discover the past. And that's only a tiny bit true. I think it's more accurate to say that they work on what remains. That may sometimes involve, absolutely, coming across stuff from the past—maybe a trilobite fossil, or a piece of Roman pottery... but the key thing about archaeology is that it works on what's left. And that makes of all of us, really, a kind of archaeologist. We're all archaeologists now, working on what's left of the past.

... as we explore this stuff, we figure out how to bring it forward, first into the present, through our interpretation of it...

Lynn Hershmann Leeson: Exactly. Revitalize the past, inserting it into the present, which gives direction to its future.

Michael Shanks: Yeah. Displacement is another key feature of this archaeological sensibility. What happens when old stuff—remains—are shirted into new associations...

And, actually, this is what archaeological science has always offered—accounts of everyday life with which we can all identify and yet find uncanny. It may simply be a thumbprint upon an ancient pot that connects an inconsequential past moment with the present; it may be the evidence of the lives of those who built a place like Stonehenge. It is the archaeological focus on the everyday that many people find fascinating.

Lynn Hershmann Leeson: Because these are the relics of ourselves.”

– Archaeologist Michael Shanks in discussion with artist Lynn Hershman Leeson : Extract taken from Seed Magazine, October 2007