[-empyre-] All call: subscribers interested in Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

Wed May 27 08:23:51 AEST 2015

"A maid waiting to be kissed by a prince" :)

What about Warhol's film about a man sleeping?

Murat

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I am a writer and as a writer we are used to boredom we feed on it as
> vampyrs. Alain Robbe-Grillet one of the most known writers from the French
> "nouvelle vague" and "nouveau roman" wrote pages about how a fly walks on a
> wall. His romans lack often plots they describe boredom in exquisite ways.
> The German Jewish writer Peter Weiss who lived many years as refugee in
> Sweden, wrote a great book about the Aesthetiques of the resistance a book
> which first 40 pages are a description of the altar of Pergamus, plundered
> by the Germans in the last part of the 19th century from Turkey and Greece.
> The description of the altar of Pergamus, housed today in Berlin's Alt
> Museum, lacks any element of punctuation, a challenging reading, an hommage
> to boredom as literary tool.
> Boredom is not the opposite of action and movement but it's shadowed
> sister, a kind of veiled maid waiting for an unknown groom she only dreamed
> about.
> Ana
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 11:30 PM, Jason Bernagozzi <
> jason at seeinginvideo.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hi Murat, thanks for your post.
>>
>> I too have had many interesting boring moments with film, but I don't
>> think there is an ideal format. Each format comes with its own codes, film
>> is one, sitting and listening to music is another. It is important to mine
>> and understand the codes behind how various media instill can trigger
>> "boredom", because there is not one type.
>>
>> For instance, surfing youtube videos for hours can trigger a very
>> specific kind of boredom that is different than viewing a film. We have
>> every kind of possible combination of images at our fingertips, yet when
>> they are put together they still instill a sense of wandering through the
>> network as aimlessly as a child wanders through the woods, and that
>> immediacy possibly gives a manic feel to our boredom, desperately bored
>> even. We can go to see our favorite cat videos, but that only works for so
>> long.
>>
>> This kind of boredom reminds me a lot of the work of a brilliant young
>> media artist Eric Souther, whose "Search Engine Vision" series compiles
>> youtube videos as virtual video sculptures whose form is determined by
>> search terms for various words. I highly suggest viewing the work below:
>> http://ericsouther.com/search-engine-vision-buddha.html
>> http://ericsouther.com/search-engine-vision-chair.html
>>
>> But boredom triggered by specific kinds of experiences gets into the
>> heart of Deleuze's thinking. His doctoral thesis, Difference and
>> Repetition, is a great reference for opening up a conversation about media
>> specificity. Boredom, as widely defined, triggers an image in our minds. We
>> can think about boredom being one thing experienced over mutliple days,
>> times and experiences, boredom as boredom. But, as in all things in nature,
>> repetition is an illusion that we perpetuate. We have a need to
>> compartmentalize the immensity of all of the specifics that make up a
>> boring moment, to articulate or understand this with language would be
>> maddening. For example, we see a field of grass and have no ability to
>> understand that while we see all of those blades as grass generally, the
>> fact remains that each blade has a form and function to its environment
>> that is not completely the same. In fact, there may be hints of an
>> interloping strain amongst the grass that can wipe out the entire species
>> in that field, but we still just see a field of grass, until a potentially
>> boring survey of these strains is taken and understood on a material level.
>>
>> It is important to our understanding of the inner workings of things,
>> like medium specific boredom, as gateways to unknown ideas. Being receptive
>> to that boring moment is and of itself an insight specific to your
>> experience of place at a specific time hour during a specific time of the
>> year through a specific medium. How deeply are you listening to all of the
>> aspects that make up that moment?
>>
>> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Jason, that's exactly what I am talking about, partly the integration of
>>> the consciousness of the passage of time into what one is doing--which also
>>> I think may result in the consciousness of the tools one is using.
>>>
>>> Doesn't the consciousness (that is the prerequisite) of the passage of
>>> time create a positive kind of boredom. Film I think is the ideal form for
>>> this experience (perhaps also music though the repetitions in Glass's
>>> minimalism, for instance, are dynamic, therefore not boring in this sense).
>>>
>>> Deleuze talks about time-image in film. That's what I think partly he is
>>> talking about.
>>>
>>> Ciao,
>>> Murat
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:10 AM, Jason Bernagozzi <
>>> jason at seeinginvideo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>> Thanks for the introduction Renate!
>>>>
>>>> There have been some great discussions on boredom, and while I did not
>>>> reply to some of the other threads, I was engaged and meditating on my own
>>>> experiences with boredom.
>>>>
>>>> I clearly remember how bored I was when confronted with some of the
>>>> most iconic sonic art created. Lets be clear, the boredom that I was
>>>> experiencing was a good thing. I was a graduate student at Alfred
>>>> University and Andrew Deutsch was having us listen to a small section of
>>>> LaMonte Young's "The Well Tuned Piano". For those of you who are not
>>>> familiar with this work, a "small" section of this piece meant that our
>>>> session lasted over 2 hours. I remember attempting to concentrate on the
>>>> arrangement of notes for the first 20 minutes only to find my mind
>>>> wandering. The repetitive nature of the score caused me to think about what
>>>> I was working on, which was a database narrative video installation that
>>>> was in absolute disarray because I could not get any of the programmatic
>>>> arrangements right. Then I thought about my daughter and arranging
>>>> playdates for the weekend, and that I was graduating in 2 months and needed
>>>> to figure out the next steps of my life.
>>>>
>>>> As these thoughts flowed through my consciousness, LaMonte Young's
>>>> score kept wafting in and out of my waking mind. I began to tire but not
>>>> fall fully asleep. The minimalist structure of the work was turning my
>>>> sense of time on its head, had I heard these notes before? Eventually,
>>>> after the first hour my mind stopped wandering towards all of the pressing
>>>> issues that demanded immediate consideration in my life and I became
>>>> intensely aware of all of the sound around me. While I had studied a lot
>>>> about the concepts and methods driving the work of Pauline Oliveros, this 2
>>>> hour listening session of "The Well Tuned Piano" was the first moment that
>>>> I experienced what she terms "Deep Listening".
>>>>
>>>> According to the Deep Listening Institute, this method "explores the
>>>> difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary,
>>>> selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening." These methods
>>>> are deeply rooted in Buddhist tradition, but it is also an inherently
>>>> post-structural form of engaging sonic works where the variability of how
>>>> one listens determines the tone of the work. Rather than thinking of
>>>> boredom as emptiness and a void, think about the presence of absence.
>>>> Difference is such a powerful tool, imagine five minutes of white noise: an
>>>> irritating, sharp and prickly sound. Then over a minute a warm, low
>>>> frequency begins a slow attack and washes away the white noise. Without
>>>> that juxtaposition, the pleasurable stimuli of the warm tone would not be
>>>> as effective.
>>>>
>>>> This certainly comes into play in terms of the trajectory of how my
>>>> work has evolved through research and development. The first time I
>>>> attempted to create a database narrative video installation,  I had so many
>>>> assumptions about how it would work. However, the first 6 or 7 programs
>>>> that I created to drive this system left me completely stranded
>>>> conceptually. The language of the self-directing system was contrived and
>>>> pretentious. I had to struggle through it, reviewing the same arrangements
>>>> over and over again until the moment the work finally clicked. The boredom
>>>> and tedium of rewriting small amounts of code over and over again was not
>>>> what I wanted to focus on as an artist, I had to produce! I was convincing
>>>> myself that I was not a programmer, that artists needs to sit at the
>>>> crossroads of various disciplines and mold passing ideas into culturally
>>>> relevant statements or objects.
>>>>
>>>> Yet I had to understand the tool that was letting my ideas flow. If I
>>>> did not build the tool, would it be articulate when "speaking" the media I
>>>> am putting through it? Without boredom, can I actually reflect on
>>>> incompletion? Can you equate drive to boredom? Or is the problem the word
>>>> itself, do we need to wrestle this concept to the ground along with "truth"
>>>> and "originality", all words that are unhelpful in accurately describing
>>>> how things work in our world. Listening deeply to LaMonte Young that next
>>>> weekend for 6 hours was a long, sometimes boring,  yet rewarding task, and
>>>> helped lead my inquiry into new expressive forms.
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Renate Ferro <renateferro at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>> Murat you have assimilated both Simon's and Ana's posts in a way that
>>>>> makes so much sense though I'm wondering if you would say a bit more about
>>>>> the negative value of nothingness.  How is it possible to give value to
>>>>> absence? . Perhaps our resident philosophers can chime in here?
>>>>>
>>>>> This might be a great segue into Week 4. While we say thank you to
>>>>> Simon Biggs and Ana Valdes,
>>>>> We welcome Erin Obodiac and Jason Bernagozzi to our final week on
>>>>> Boredom. Their biographies are below.
>>>>>
>>>>> Week 4:
>>>>>
>>>>> Erin Obodiac (US) received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
>>>>> the University of
>>>>>
>>>>> California, Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at
>>>>> UC Irvine, the
>>>>>
>>>>> University of Leeds, SUNY Albany, and Cornell University. Her writings
>>>>> assemble
>>>>>
>>>>> residual questions from the deconstructive legacy with emergent
>>>>> discourses on technics
>>>>>
>>>>> and animality, robotics, and biomedia. She is currently a Mellon
>>>>> postdoctoral fellow at
>>>>>
>>>>> Cornell University, teaching a series of Comparative Media seminars
>>>>> and completing a
>>>>>
>>>>> book called The Transhuman Interface, which repositions critical
>>>>> theory and
>>>>>
>>>>> deconstruction within the history of cybernetics and machinic life.
>>>>> The Transhuman
>>>>>
>>>>> Interface is a result of the research project “Robots at Risk:
>>>>> Transgenic Art and
>>>>>
>>>>> Corporate Personhood,” which Obodiac began as a Fellow at Cornell’s
>>>>> Society for the
>>>>>
>>>>> Humanities. The project and the accompanying book manuscript examine
>>>>> contemporary
>>>>>
>>>>> theories of machinic life and robotics as well as the philosophical
>>>>> traditions that underpin them. This summer, Obodiac will finish a cinematic
>>>>> version of her Ph.D. dissertation, Technics and the Sublime.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jason Bernagozzi (US) is a video, sound and new media artist living
>>>>> and working in upstate New York and is the co-founder and chair of the
>>>>> board of directors of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal
>>>>> Culture. His work has been featured nationally and internationally at
>>>>> venues such as the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruk, Germany, the
>>>>> LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona, Spain, the Beyond/In Western NY
>>>>> Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan Gerber International Arts Festival in
>>>>> Hebei Province, China. His work has received several awards including
>>>>> grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, Wavefarm and the ARTS
>>>>> Council for the Southern Finger Lakes. He is an Assistant Professor in
>>>>> Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State College.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://seeinginvideo.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.signalculture.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> empyre forum
>>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
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