[-empyre-] language, reporting the virtually true

Thu Nov 6 00:13:27 EST 2014

The theater director and theorist Brenda Laurel was early engaged in
videogames. She worked at the legendary Atari Lab and was envolved in many
games with a pristine narrative. Her work with videogames for girls took
her to Interval Research, founded by Paul Allen, the cofounder of
Microsoft. I attended several conferences she participated and interviewed
her in Palo Alto for my book "Internet and Women".
She argued the videogames were so addictive and had the capacity to become
viral because they played with archetypes, the same kind of archetypes the
Greek tragedy used. She said the early staged tragedies were a work of
clear propaganda, paid by the state of Athenes, sponsored by the state and
many times commissioned by the state to implant a meme in the population.
Terror and it's choreography aim to the same effect: create a situation
where the inflicted pain becames a collective fear, the pain of others is
seen as our own possible pain.
When I was tortured the worst was not the own pain but the feeling it
should come other more painful things, the tale of the torture and it's
variations became as powerful as the pain in itself.
Ana Valdés

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Erik Ehn <shadowtackle at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> [about hesychios: see his written for theoduolos in v.1 of the philokalia:
> https://archive.org/stream/Philokalia-TheCompleteText/Philokalia-Complete-Text#page/n109/mode/2up/search/Hesychios
> ]
>
> [continuing from yesterday - performance and the lure of mere sense.
> moving on from: "In terms of scripts: we are writing into the ads for our
> writing. Our ironies and glibness suggest what kind of art we would make if
> we felt like it, but we don’t feel like it, because something hates me or
> has left me and my fear produces a serum of anger that serves a biological
> need to defend against feeling..."]
>
> When a paranoid production process drives us to clarify the event of our
> plays, we are often encouraged to settle specifically on event as aftermath
> – what one takes away from the play. A play you can take anything from has
> to exercise ownership – has to be premised on private property, on stabile
> units cleanly transported (portablilty). This is undramatic. A play is
> public property and doesn’t go anywhere; it is, like an angel or a star. An
> angel has useless wings – the wings suggest movement, but the angle doesn’t
> have to actually move – it’s mentality and physicality are perfect –
> nothing inhibits and angel so its choices are constant and ambient – the
> angel is the complete string-theory cosmos – is every possibility of
> itself, realized in active adoration – is perfectly reciprocal; is
> all-contemplation, all praise. Better than the post-hoc event is the
> precipitating event, the source of action, not it’s read-out. Passover is a
> gorgeous drama – “why is this night different from every other night?” –
> the precipitating event isn’t the answer – it is the asking of this
> question.
>
> A play in response to terror is barely there, is more question than
> answer, is an occasion for collaborative labor (the labor of not-knowing,
> not-having, not-expecting); it is without consolation. It is ceding
> language, losing its language as it spills it.
>
> A play’s action doesn’t matter, in the sense of the activities it
> sequences or ideas it builds, the action is the action in us – the event in
> the play is not what we comprehend, but what moves us to action, what
> starts up our discontent through irresolution. (Bert States: plays used to
> embed self summaries, tellingly called “arguments” a play is just enough
> itself to disagree with itself.)
>
> Event as description is marketing; plays of description sell specifically
> what has already passed away. Sell death. Sell us what we’ve already bought
> and has already been worn down, worn away (trailers for movies that in
> essence, we’ve already seen).
>
> 9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a cliché – we
> had already seen it.
>
>
>   On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 6:34 PM, John Hopkins <
> jhopkins at neoscenes.net> wrote:
>
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> On 04/Nov/14 15:47, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > You know, I've been wondering about this: since the Taliban blew up the
> Buddhas
> > and then with the destruction of the domed mosques and manuscripts in
> Mali and
> > environs, and now this.
>
> It was painful to watch the video of the Buddha sculptures, especially
> knowing
> why it happened. It's always painful to see what we might consider
> unchanging
> reality suddenly lose its persistent form and ... change. It acts as a
> bitter
> reminder of mortality.
>
> But isn't it such that cultural accession over time is doing essentially
> similar
> things all the time, over the vast reaches of history. And our
> contemporary
> focus on, literally, digging up the past and preserving it has limits. (We
> probably only do so because we have such a glut of energy flowing around
> our
> 'developed' world, because re-organizing the past in any form (from
> library to
> archive to buildings) definitely takes energy!).
>
> While the Buddhas were obliterated rapidly, using modern weapons
> (explosives),
> time via entropy continually devolves the detritus of the yesterday, and
> it is
> only the socio-cultural context (or even 'fashion') that dictates what is
> saved
> and what is allowed to slip away into chaos. Contexts change, and what was
> important in one context becomes passé in another.
>
> > I wonder if there shouldn't be an emergency scanning fund that would
> help pay
> > for capture of threatened built heritage. Maybe some kind of Unesco
> thing.
>
> This is where the question of choice of what to preserve and what to let
> go
> surfaces. We are witnessing the procession of history and it seems we are
> in the
> moment as powerless as others in the past, watching accepted heritage be
> ground
> to dust. It's a strange process to witness. (and interesting that Johannes
> suggests that "archaeologists and anthropologists will surely confirm that
> the
> past cannot be lost" -- once humans have interjected their changes into
> the
> world, the change will persist (though it gradually dissipates, never
> quite to
> zero, until the universe resets itself...)
>
> And maybe it's the same as watching a national 'infrastructure' collapse
> slowly
> when the national treasury is sapped of resources through war...
>
> So it goes...
>
> JOhn
> --
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
> grounded on a granite batholith
> twitter: @neoscenes
> http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
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> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>

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