[-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle: mere note

[Johannes Birringer]

I think the body learns to move and will know what it will have done.
And with it the mind knows or learns to comprehend how it moves and thinks.
For me, the entrainment has to do with rhythms of understanding or intuiting and listening.
That is a collective process, as you listen to others and the environment, and so the exograms
complement and enrich the endograms or whatever that is, the e/motions of our make up inside.

Not sure what 'bad abstractions' you refer to, Simon, but I was not at ISEA and have no idea what "resistance" is futile to or about.
In my opinion, resistance is necessary. And especially to data/big data and virtualizations of knowledge.

I tried to look at the panel Terry introduced us to, 

http://www.isea2013.org/events/imaging-capabilities-of-the-future-panel/

? is this correct?  and it seems the panel discussed "new interfaces [..]] already being designed to control high-resolution, high-frequency images, and new research [ ] being undertaken to explore the relationship between humans and their works..."  yet I don't think Terry spoke about high resolution, or did you?  I didn't comment on that, and cannot know what the buzz was like after your panel.

But I like stories. And poetry. Evoking the children's play/dance was a way to raise a question about the practical learning in groups of moving together, without big data. 
Small local in-formation or transformation, perhaps. Images surely, of movement, of also of thinking, and thinking as a way of dancing.

In the workshop, language was used as well, but more spontaneously and unprogrammed.
I would place it more alongside [a book] something I heard about yesterday, edited by art critic David Antin ("Radical Coherency"), namely 
an anthology edited by Jerome Rothenburg in 1968 called "Technicians of the Sacred"  (long live the Paris Commune and the uprisings of May 68)  --
You may well have come across this anthology, which I believe tried to outline the possibilities for a new poetry but sought to connect the poetic to the older paradigm world of tribal and archaic poetries, and assorted media, charms, spells, invocations, naming games, lists and litanies, rituals, shamanic visions, dream narratives, also linked to dada, and the transrational zaum poets of Russia (Kruchenykh,  Khlebnikov)....
and this would make me ask how close the interest in life after life, or your new paradigm, is linked to the poetic traditions ..
(after all, it was Dante who wrote in the most eloquent Italian, which I recently heard recited in the CAM Houston museum exhibit on Joan Jonas/Gina Pane [http://www.camh.org/exhibitions/parallel-practices-joan-jonas-gina-pane],  about his journey into the "underworld" where he meets the shades....). Jonas has it recited in her pantomine performance "Reading Dante III":

" I wandered off the path....
what else I saw there, I shall relate....
..they stopped, drew back a little,
I thought this is a human body I see..
and I pushing him, moved forward, 
but only clasped my hands around
my empty chest..."


this is what I remembered or translated for myself:  the meeting Dante has with the shades (alongside Jonas's moving images. Terry, I am happy to change my view about moving images and the choreographic unconscious, but tell me more...)



"tell us where the mountain rises
so I can begin the long descent"


with regards
Johannes Birringer




[simon schreibt]

so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's
image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like
stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body -
since we don't yet know what a body can do...