[-empyre-] Virtual embodiment made of meat As Time Goes By

[Erik Ehn]

dear empyre:

so sorry - finding your posts fascinating and unique, but - my inbox is a little overwhelmed? possible to unsubscribe, at least for now?

e



On Sunday, July 27, 2014 10:28 AM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
 


----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

dear all

Ilsa: Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
Sam: I don't know what you mean, Miss Ilsa.
Ilsa: Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By."
Sam: Oh, I can't remember it, Miss Ilsa. I'm a little rusty on it.
Ilsa: I'll hum it for you. Da-dy-da-dy-da-dum, da-dy-da-dee-da-dum..
    [Casablanca]


The difference between once and again might be of interest; our discussions are reaching a point where I'm not sure what to return to (virtual embodiment as oxymoron?) or what to turn to - thanks Simon Taylor for your
wonderful response, difficult to read, fully, but I am taken by your reference to bodily crisis, and the critical, in the figural in art <embodiment of slapstick, or, more directly, its incarnation, because, after all, the meat feels as it falls off the  chair-lift. The virtual is here too?>, and if I may mention this, the other week during the Metabody workshop in Madrid, on a free day, I spend a few hours in the Prado and looked at the current exhibition "El Greco y la pintura moderna", stunned by the representations of the crucifixion, the crucified limp hollowed-out unsavory body, in El Greco's often steep vertical canvases that loom over the viewer, there was also a striking 'Laocoonte' of convulsed bodies fallen, a slithering snake coiled around limbs ...(see https://www.museodelprado.es/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/at-the-museum/el-greco-y-la-pintura-moderna/). The pairing of the El Grecos with the moderns was limp (a not so striking Bacon hung
 there too, forlorn, a blob of pink fleshiness smudged near the center of the picture, weak compared to Bacon's frightening Crucifixion triptych and meat carcasses). A few rooms further on, I encountered Goya's so-called dark paintings, and the horrific anthropophagic 'Saturn devouring his Son', a prolepsis if there ever was one.

The 'différend' that you mention seems to hint at the relative incompatibilities (of such meat bleeding through?) with our current <technological facade, or digital interface, or sexy face>>, if I understand you correctly, and that would to some extent then seem convergent with my earlier questions to Wesley (and Sally Jane, and Kirk), and picking up on Sally Jane's response, I don't think my concern was merely a question of sensibilities though of course I don't know what sound or song was playing in your head/headset, how it affected you.. 

Wesley, thanks for your further elaboration on your work, and no doubt there is conceptual strength and thoughtfulness in what you are working on, also the political intent seems clearer to me, yes, and what you propose "Wireless-Fidelity" to become – "a tool with lasting use by inviting the listener to an explicit awareness of the density and presence of corporate bodies, opening the door to further exploration and discussion with this knowledge..."    But how can the sound of the soundwalk  (and I am basing this on your explication of the sonifications, 

>BT   30.5 %  Market Share -  Low Bass drones
  Sky   22% Market Share - Granular Pianos
  Virgin   20.1 Market Share - Female Vocal Samples
>

and the vimeo documentation of the person strolling the streets of Brighton hearing sound) be construed, by a listener, to make a connection between low bass drones and corporate ideologies or "reflecting BTs long-standing market share"?

I am reminded of two other conceptual media works that some of you may have encountered, one aural one visual.

-  CORE SAMPLE by Teri Rueb  [2009]   (http://www.terirueb.net/core_sample/)

The conceptual explication is very rich, if you perhaps want to take a glance at it on the website, but when I enacted the soundwalk in Boston Harbor, none of the sedimented layers underneath "the picturesque surface that
conceals Spectacle Island's complex past, present and future," were "exposed" to me it through layers of sound Rueb had composed. I would have had no idea what I am listening to, had I not read the artists statement, and even after reading, the sounds did not reveal. 


-  Data_Plex (economy), by Michael Takeo Magruder (2009)  http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns031/

, an online work that utilises live data feeds from real-life scenarios (global financial markets)  to generate three-dimensional geometry and textures in real-time, creating virtual realms that refract ever-changing, volatile forces in and upon the real world......A Java and VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) framework translates this stream of fluctuating information into a metaphorical cityscape based on modernist aesthetics of skyscrapers and urban grids. Each company is represented in the virtual environment by a series of cubic greyscale forms that are proportioned according to factors such as its stock price, market capitalisation and percentage of the DJI index. <
Michael's work is also conceptually powerful; looking at the citiscape, you'd have to know the programming to sense the work.

Perhaps, in the spirit of (the political despair in Lyotard's) différend,  and thinking of Wesley's statement about out-sourcing (extraction; and non-knowledge of algorithmic machines working somewhere in the 'occult'?) and pop culture delusion –  < a portrayal of 'the network' and the many forms it takes in these fictions as something beyond understanding or access to any but a mystical 'expert', sphinx-like in their guardianship of occult knowledge, beyond the ken of the passive masses [Wesley] >  –  I would propose that we have plenty of incidents in recent history that show the "masses" are not passive, just think, e.g.,  of the sustained protests in Taksim  and Gesi Park in Istanbul, where some striking embodied theatrical languages were at play that excited me physically; I supposed the excited body is also what Simon had in mind?

But did not Susan Kozel, in the first week of our empyre discussion, raise the issue of encryption?  Could you come back to this, Susan?

>I have now become a little obsessed by encryption and what this might mean on an affective and bodily level as we continue to expand and transform our movement by networked, sensed and virtual technologies. Affect, I believe, is already encrypted [Susan]>


respectfully
Johannes Birringer

(and here an epitaph borrowed from a writer who has returned from Taksim where a play he had written to be staged in a theatre was cancelled due to public unrest)

     Lang ist
     Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber
     Das Wahre
           (Hölderlin)

.....................................................................







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