[-empyre-] Liminalities

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Thanks to Joseph, Melinda, Greg and Angela for such a great
discussion...playing a little catch up here, what follows reflects on bits
of  what's been thought through in the last few days.  Looking forward
tomorrow (November 15) to introducing Gregory Little who will pick up the
flag as host for the second part of "Virtual Construction".


>This space can be further inscribed as the "viractual span of liminality" -
> which according to the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (based on his
> anthropological studies of social rites of passage) is the condition of
> being on a threshold between spaces. (*2) I wish to suggest that the term
> (concept) "viractual" (and "viractuality") may be a concordant conception
> helpful in defining this third fused inter-spatial place of the emerging
> viractual arts which is forged from the meeting of the virtual and the
> actual. Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more
> oscillators 
> as they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical
> terms an égréore (an old form of the word agréger) is a third concept or
> phenomenon which is established from conjoining two different elements
> together. I suggest that the term (concept) viractual (and viractuality) may
> be a concordant entrainment/égréore conception helpful in defining our now
> third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the meeting of the virtual
> and the actual.

I have been interested in installations that are engaged in sounding and
imagining the viractual consciousness as a neurologically impaired
landscape, an aphasic situation; the logos is in a kind of partially valient
and partially chaotic voicing within an interstitial hyperreal space. It's
as if the alchemical interacting frequency you mention Joseph is on a
current that alternates between go and no go, between absolute yes and
absolute nothing, a schizophrenic condition that has many joys and terrors
within its play, or entrainment.  I guess I came to this imaginary of the
electronic hyperreal both as a response to conditions and aftereffects of
sexual abuse in my real (corporeal) body and neurological functioning.  I
noticed that there were short circuits that seemed to coalesce around the
the amnesia of the violence, that would explode as migraines, as recurrent
nightmares.  These were soundless visualizations that had a freeze frame
quality, like a grainy film still, like Andy Warhol's execution chair or
dallas jfk shooting silkscreens.  I was both removed and present, actualized
and dematerialized, physically tormented and abstracted from torment through
the escape into the migraine or nightmare.  In this regard I can concur with
Gregory's comment, in other words, it was the neurological synaptic
impairment of my logos-making (speech) and visualizing function via the
memory of violence that became viractual...


Gregory comments..

> Yes, Melinda, Joseph, in this regard I prefer to look at
> body/self/mind/virtual/actual as UNgengered, not about sex or sexuality at
> all, but about signification, vectors of pleasure and pain, "local
> intensities" body inscribed on code inscribed on emergent body, not body
> with sex and sex organs...
> condition of transcendence through a subjectivity that is "licensed through
> decadent extension" where "sexual signs are subject to boundless semiosis",

Digital became as  breathing--prajna== or nuah, breath, that in fact the
function of pixels (I was working in photoshop and final cut pro) was like
oxygenation..it blew  everything apart into minute "fused inter-spatials
place" conditions like a wind, a connecting spirit, that allowed me to
regard self and body and memory as a disappearance: it was  escape from
oppression of violent memory and its attendant traumatic shock/ neural
features. At the same time I found that as a fused consciousness interfacing
with the viractual digital consciousness, a strange condition (an alterity)
arouse whereby the mimetic power of icon and representation was, in a sense,
obviated, made irrelevant, as here:
> In the viractual mechanomorphic operation, the paradoxically simultaneous
> experiences of sex, death and immortality that is fundamental to Western
> religious practice is laid bare into a post-flesh art by virtue of a
> relocation of body/machine/consciousness.

And further..

> 
> Nothing is left behind - but the viractual experience is one of
> self-liberation, a breaking free of an ordinary place cramped among the
> oppressive desiderata of individual existence. For most of us, the concept
> of the hermaphroditic indicates an unknown and undefinable totality of
> internal flux that is at the same time the ground of all things and of the
> process of thought itself. That is an unleashing by way of the movement of
> intelligent viractual perception that bursts bonds. With viractual
> hermaphroditic depictions an extremely pliable state of consciousness,
> resting on the basis of relaxed (extended) attentiveness, may thus become
> available; and it is within this elastic framework - ideally constituted
> both between artist and audience and within the individual awareness of each
> participant - that viractual consciousness takes place.
Yes, Ithink this is where  we come to a place where the old gods of
sacrifice to the image, the issues of mimetic violence (Rene Girard) are in
a sense no longer efficacious and we revert to Joseph's Hellenistic paradigm
of landscape as an inhabited interstitial, liminal space, a series of
endlesss thresholds between 'human' , 'god', 'posthuman'.
 When this does 
> occur, even to a limited degree, one has, not surprisingly, an experience,
> which brings a sense of communion and completeness.

Not for nothing that the Taliban 'kill' the Buddha by bombing the great
statues.  They in fact engage in idolatry when they do so, because they
ascribe to the image of the Buddha a god quality or ultimate power.  That's
why the Buddhists say, "if you meet the Buddha, kill him." If I understand
Buddhist compassion/consciousness even a little bit, it has something to do
with that sense of communion and completeness: it's in a way the
simultaneous proliferation of and extinction of image that is the rich zone
of consciousness;; simultaneously being present in Josephs words to the
'desiderata' of everyday life and to a 'relaxed extended attentiveness;'


> Within the realms of viral consciousness could it be that
> the move away from
> an externalised and specifically gendered god in western thought (or even
> the  existentialist lack,
> as an indicator of persistant duality), has only made possible by the
> introduction of a catalyst to
> bring about the `egreore`.
Angela, I certainly noticed this in practice.
> Could it be that the explorations by western artists, musicians and
> philosophers in the 60's, infected western conciousness to the extent that
> an actualised mechanism arose to realise this (the advent of digital
> possibility).
So the sense of neural imprisonment that I had as an aspect of post
traumatic stress reaction to violence, was given an opportunity for
entrainment and egreore via the digital medium.  The electronic landscape
became a liminal arena in which the sense of my own actual body's pain was
not narcotized but rather sharpened so that I could aestheticize the
experience of violence and memory in terms of a projection into the virtual
realm of electronica.  This cyborg projection is a kind of narcissistic
double, or golem, whose presence and voicings become a viractual theatre of
partially seen and heard, partially subliminal, content.

At the same time I feel that Melinda is on to something when she insists on
the realness of our real bodies, in the midst of all this simulacra. We do
persist, we do age, we die, the actual doesn¹t go away.  In this connection
it is always interesting to remember the principle of the 2nd law of
thermodynamics, that entropy principle.  Everything decays.  Things fall
apart.  It is the struggle to continuously move into the zones of the
possible, into levels and layers of interactivity and complexity, that is
the prime characteristic of life.  Life is, if you look at it that way, a
response to entropy and requires entropy in order to continue and to
proliferate.  I found after a couple of years of immersion in the software
that I re=emerged into painting and these no longer seem like two twin
'disembodied' and 'embodied' realms apart.

regards
Christina