[-empyre-] RE: [-empyre] -noiseless art with images

["Johannes Birringer" <Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk>]

hello.
I try to be efficient late in the evening.

1. This is a complex debate not easily responded to in detail.       thank you for these last writings, Henry, Hamed and Maria.
     Hamed, your scholarly/critical and most acute reading of the Benjamin writings on 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'  is very thought-provoking,
     precisely as you end in a possible eschatological threshold -

     >This possibility is an open gate on which messiah might enter.>

2.   Not being able to envision this entrance,  I smile (in defeat), at all of our well meaning friends.  ("to hold your arm steady until the Brechtian sun has finally sunk beneath its
      exotic waters")


3.  Can we publish images in this discussion?


4.  I send you two, received/found during rehearsals on a game performance over the summer, in the heated days of July and the reports from the "war without a name." 
     "greetingsfromIsrael.jpeg.

5.  I also remember reading an article by ethnographer Thomas Burkhalter,  entitled "Thank you, for letting me listen to the war again",  describing  "how a war is heard, and what
      suppressed memories from the 1980s war are now re-turning, re-appearing."  I believe he was discussuing musicians and sound artists in Beirut, perhaps the
     "perceptual guerrilla" Sergio was imagining.


4b.  Games, I propose, are also about memories, and re-appearances.  Hamed, in response to my reflections on the "Imagined Landscapes"  festival, seemed to recognize the
        conflation, or the inextricable connection we can now see between technology/technological media.

       Hamed wrote:
       >Technological Media doesn't use GAME as a the external, it is emerged from game or playing faculty. It is at stake here to reflect about this game. What is this game? Is it
       possible to play it different? >


Not sure.


{Hamed, i did note, last May, browsing in a bookstore, that I had not seen the other versions of Benjamin's Kunstwerk essay.  I now find some notes in my notebook, from footnotes i copied. They were on "close ups" and the actor on camera going through "optical tests"  -- this interested me. He speaks of an "unconsciously penetrated space."  This space, opened up by the camera, "substitutes for a space consciously explored" ]


5.   Second image is landscape film:  please, if you have a chance, view Anouk de Clercq's "Kernwasser Wunderland" (2004)
      http://www.portapak.be/    ; > go to "portfolio" and click on the film title below
 >>>
kernwasser wunderland

2004, dvd b/w stereo 14:00

Kernwasser Wunderland opens up a deserted landscape in a pregnant environment, a biotope subject to specific laws and its own ecology filled according to the intuitive logic of the unconscious and the imaginary.  The basis for the content is the great nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in April 1986. As a consequence of the great danger of radiation the whole area was declared inaccessible and was closed off with fencing and checkpoints. The radiation cannot be smelt or tasted, only a Geigercounter can confirm its presence. This abandonment and brooding emptiness inspired us to reflect on nature and technology, in a fusion of sensual sound and image of both digital and natural worlds.>>>



6.    Nothing wrong with "digital efficiency" (Maria), I presume, as long as one reaches the political understanding and cynical grasp of what Henry writes about, from the
       programmers' cubicles  to the board rooms of the military-industrial complex.



      Who watches all the tape of all the thousands of surveillance cameras in London's tubes and train stations?


7.   Maria suggests: >>This ability of the digital realm, as technology of enhanced flow, to force a constant exteriority, may lead to distancing or proximity
       depending on the social ground of its insertion.
       Inverting this equation, one could take the pulse of a social ground by attempting to trace how the digital realm is effecting on its gestures/gestural of distancing and proximity,  
       that is, how digital activity is interacting with old atavisms, even maybe just reproducing them in acceleration...>>

8.   I like how atavisms/activism got confused in our disparate November conversation.


9.   One more image.
       fer5.jpeg
       Feresteh Vaziri Nasab  walking upward on infinity road in abandoned coal mine Göttelborn. Road leads to paradise.
      On the right of paradise, below, one of the largest new photovoltaic plants in Europe. Beyond that, 300 meters further north, a new nanotechnology center. 25 new jobs.
      50 meter to the left, my team working on coding the sofware for our live game ("See you in Walhalla").  Walhalla is the place where all the efficient heroes meet.

10.  Schlöndorff's film, "Die Fälschung",  was translated into "Circle of Deceit."  The protagonist, journalist Laschen,  gradually loses his confidence in war reportage and real time
        information streaming from Beirut, or, rather, he seems to lose his emotional disassociation or detachment from the carnage. Apart from Laschen's problems with women ( a  
        plot  throwback, or atavism), you could say the film is media/technology-critical, makes Baudrillard look foolish, and has been subsumed by the entertainment industry and is
       ineffective.


good night
Johannes Birringer