Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity? who is we? : existential sublime

[Christina McPhee <christina@christinamcphee.net>]

I'd like to add a quote from Erik's article, actually the conclusion,

'It seems that a deeply rooted belief in technology as a compensatory  
apparatus, a machine that can transcend the limitations of the merely  
human, has played a crucial role here. Machines have become not only  
the mediators of the divine, but in their mythological significations  
the complexity of the new machineries and their extraordinary  
transformative powers in society and in the private lives of an ever  
growing portion of the global population, have become the abstract  
embodiment of the divine. It is a system of belief that assumes a new  
'naturalised' status, in which technology is not seen to be driven by  
will or interest, but is increasingly regarded as a matter of fact,  
much like the forces of nature. The enormous popularity of biological  
metaphors in the speculative writings of new technology protagonists  
of the mid 1990s [24] testifies to this 'naturalised' status of  
emerging technologies. Society itself is no longer seen as the  
interplay of strategic interests, conflict, and power, but is  
regarded as an emerging property of the interaction of abstract  
forces that operate outside of anybody's will or interest. However,  
the projection of this public image has been largely a deliberate  
affair, driven by a variety of strategic interests, so much is clear  
post-WorldCom, post-Enron, post-World On-line. As Barthes noted long  
before all this, myth is depoliticised speech, and the politics have  
been effectively washed away by the metaphor of nature. The purpose  
of the naturalisation of the mythical object is to make it appear  
neutral, matter-of-fact, indeed "natural", and thus unquestionable.'

http://www.debalie.nl/dossierartikel.jsp?dossierid=10123&articleid=40127

(Amsterdam, May 2005)


c




On Mar 7, 2006, at 12:16 AM, Christina McPhee wrote:
Hi -empyre-

thank you Aliette for this compliment and, quite accurate casting of  
this mashing discourse we have on empyre this month...

 In this disjunctions and other disjunctions of ideas coming from  
these different conceptual cultures, there is a REAL cognitive  
disposition of the differences that give a feeling of knowledge to  
subtle ideas of each part -inprogress- even they will possibly work  
self-apart.


To "Is modernity our antiquity"?

one's first response is another question,  who is the  we? which we?

which launches another algorithm of thought, about whose modernism  
and antiquity and then how about getting past the binaries.

When I was studying painting as an undergraduate there was only one  
'we' , the idealized eye of Cezanne.  The formal rigor to see every  
color change as a material affect: no more light, only color, only  
the data of materiality.  Though an ace painter, there was no place  
in that world for one such as myself to be regarded as other than a  
nice girl who makes pictures.   There was one kind of 'we' and I was  
generically not it.  Therefore there was no 'we'  zone, shared  
space;  nevertheless, a  Joycean phrase of the time echoed on bad days,

"allgirls is we,

at times"

and (also Anna LIvia here),

'thinking always,

 if I go,

 all go,"


This got me just to the point of disappearance. I'd go.

But in actual fact , my life experience as  'girl' was always  
'becoming'.--

I was disruptive,  never at one point of a binary (A-B) or the other,  
loving equally antiquities and modern, not having place in either.

.

Erasure and silence  here but also aphasia, or partial articulation.  
Partial visualization. Things half scene or seen, as in dreams.

Working through painting  I came to 'new' tradition of performance  
from Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, together with the  
architectures of memory and trauma in Louise Bourgeois. Nor, neither  
post-modern nor modern, the 'allgirls' of this group operate in the -  
between,  A-B

They'd  introduce a prime place for the imaginative leap, or  
'possibly, maybe' (Bjork), existential sublime. an 'other place',  
pretty scarey but also rich in the moment of waking after nightmare.

 Coming up from the dark, or coming  up for air, it is as if she/I/ 
we (this girl / kore) was always getting away from Mom, even the  
Mother of the New Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  Even as Mom (alma  
mater, academia, new media)  hits on  pomo or mod, either way, one  
day one way, the other way the next.   She could  hang out in the  
place of x (could be genetic, xx,  could be no place) . Probably  
outside the Cathedral? (I am not sure!)

Critic  John Haber wonders

what happens when art translates visual data into a human landscape.

http://www.haberarts.com/myintro.htm


or the other way, as GH suggests, performance, human landscape into  
visual data,
 on the earthquake fault lines.

I developed a practice of making performance within the landscape  
using digital media, artifacts transliterated from a machine  
interface, thereby both giving myself the condition of erasure and  
disappearance, but also of disruption and provocation at the same  
time, but at a remove (because the production was artifacts or  
instantiations of the performances rather than the performances  
themselves).  In connection with a new site study (in progress)  on  
La Conchita  http://christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html

 I wrote some notes towards a seminar last December at Humlab,  
University of Umea (thanks to list members Patrik Swensson and Jim  
Barrett)

Triangulating between study of the limited range of scientific  
forecast or remedy, and documentation of the continued local  
intensity with which the site inspires vernacular sacred gestures,  
digital media may amplify leaps and elisions between observed ‘fact’  
and subjective response, as the sense of place emerges, less through  
a psychological subject (psyche) than through a pervasive  
multiplicity of data arrays (a landscape of data).  In this regard,  
the sublime comes into play, since a mathematics of chaos determines  
the scales of time and periodicity in the always already traumatized  
place of La Conchita.

I was playing around somewhat mendaciously, or at least with the  
artifice of, place as a construct of some off-the-screen, sidereal  
'presencing' of machine sequences 'as if' they were standins for a  
transcendental data scape, like the enormous, full on,  predictable  
database of geologic and hydrologic information that supports a  
certain prediction of more mudslides and death at La Conchita.  I  
conceived of a plan to try video analog editing tools to make 'data'  
driven disruptions of the straight video shoot,  as an allegory of  
this machine dictation of some reality, some logos coming from  
somewhere else, off stage, off screen. Just as the way Hiroshima is a  
character in Hiroshima mon amour, anterior to everything and all  
memory.     Then to punch it all back into digital video negating the  
mechanics or rather overwriting via layering loops of nonlinear  
digital editing.  It was partly for this reason that I went to  
Experimental Television Center in New York state to work with the  
linear analog Jones Sequencer to edit streams of digital video on La  
Conchita.  I desired a 'machinic' edit.  (see http:// 
www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita_/texts/la_conchita_mon_amour.html

and a bit more about that grrl (with a few apologies for indulging in  
some deleuzianisms),  I asked the Humlab habitants,

  Persephone goes to the underworld, but she returns.  She is always  
en train de something else, becoming, recursively, thereby performing  
survival in the face of literally crushing adversity and its  
anticipation.  In and out of the ground, Kore generates a topology.  
Performing its own becoming, and at a remove. Is shooting the  
evidence, like the hanging of a thing onto another thing, like a  
prayer flag with a heart onto a chain link fence at La Conchita, at  
once art and ritual itself?   The work desires more than re- 
presentation, wants presence, in the repeat.  Intuitively, the  
performance of documentation wants both to observe La Conchita and to  
sublimate its terro(i)r in images that move from the erasure of the  
community to its recuperation and return.

http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita_/texts/ 
laconchitaprojectstatement.html


This probably deluded aspiration, finds some gloss in a very  
interesting discussion on the 18 century philosopher Edmund Burke's  
understanding of the sublime in existential, or at any rate  
experiential terms,  thanks to our guest Eric Kluitenberg.

in "Connection Machines" , his observations are  apropos of several  
themes,  scale, time, measuring, and mystical attachments thereto,   
that go back at least as far, in his account, as the 13th Century,  
and have their apotheosis in Tesla.


http://www.debalie.nl/dossierartikel.jsp?dossierid=10123&articleid=40127


If you 've followed my daisy chain this far,  thanks for your  
patience and indulgence.


-cm

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