[-empyre-] Starting the Second Week / Adeena Karasick and Alan Sondheim

Wed Nov 9 10:09:51 AEDT 2016

Great to see these beginnings, and to feel the language of critical theory/philosophy infused with imaginative play in both of your texts! Quite a treat.

On Nov 8, 2016, at 2:26 PM, Adeena Karasick wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Well here goes -- 
> some thoughts about play and power
> on this auspicious eve
> 
> A Juiced-up Jewy Jouissance of Multi-Media Dialectics
> 
> If according to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the rules of language are analogous to the rules of games; and if for Lyotard meaning is constructed through libidinous play, and for Baudrillard, the notion of the “real” is a play of simulation and images, media poetics, reminds us how communication itself is a massive, multipart and global algorhythm a celebratory praxis of pulsing plays, appelées (callings), pulls, plies pliés of hyper-spatial interplays, re/p/laced in plaisir. For the past 3 decades, I’ve been consumed with a sense of “linguistic play”, a play that leads not to “paralysis” but – because each luxuriant letter, phrase, meme is saturated with ideological codes, intertextually drenched palimpsested systems, must be read as an ever-shifting political social or gendered logospace of ambi-valence.
>  
> Recently, I was working in collaboration with vispoetic media artist and theorist, Jim Andrews, using dbCinema, a graphic synthesizer, where 'brushes' sample from a set of specified images. Essentially using them as 'paint', they are fragmented, palimpsested, bifurcated highlighting the construction of memory, meaning production, the materiality of language and the ever-recombinatory swirling nature of communication; forgrounding how language is always-already intertextatically layered and proprioceptively received.
>  
> http://vispo.com/adeena/vic7/index.htm?n=1
> http://vispo.com/adeena/vids/concatenation.mp4
>  
> Drawing on two distinct bodies of work, Salomé: Woman of Valor, (the libretto from my Opera; re-visioning the apocryphal figure through a feminist, Kabbalistic lens) and Checking In (a listing of faux Facebook status updates), its seductive swathes of color texture, image typographies are synecdochic of how meaning unveils itself as an ever-spiraling space where “Origin” is unlocateable; and everything’s a re-articulation of a re-articulation, an erupting in an irrepresentable present non present or resonant present that continually escapes itself. And as such, puts into play a kinda Lyotardian dissimulation; a libidinous “freeing-up” of structures for maximum potentiality of expression; highlighting how through a plurality of regimes, “phrases” maintain their own rules, criteria and methods, and how meaning-making is always an anti-hegemonic play of signification
>  
> As outlined by Avraham, Abulafia, 13th C. Kabbalistic mystic, in his Science of the Combination of Letters, we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy; gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and through lettristic “skips” and “jumps” slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated. According to Kabbalistic thinking, we are “commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated; through a continual process of constructing and re-constructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls; through a caterwaulery of lolling scrolls brawling sprawls of extracted maculates bracketed tracks, hacked fractures.
>  
> And this play is never merely “free play of association”,
> frivolous or free-floating but like in Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel, 
> always already operates through certain identifiable structures, codes, logics, idioms.  And communication necessarily becomes a praxis of palimpsest and dissemination, generating a contiguous infolding of meaning –
>  
> These infinite (algorithmic) openings, though overwhelming are not equal to no choice at all, but rather -- swirling through Hebrew, Aramaic, English and Yiddish, multiple creators, aesthetics, histories and codes, is synecdochic of how language is always between multiple cultures and traditions, renditions and re-codings – how meaning slips between difference, appliance, appearance, and never possesses some portable and universal context. But rather as Wittgenstein’s description of a “language-game,” meaning “consist[s] of language and the actions into which it is woven.” And functioning through friction transgression, invasion, contradiction, ambiguity, thrives on rhetorical strategies of ornament and excess, heterogeneity and paradox, hybridity and desire. 
>  
> Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2016 09:24:59
> From: Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] Starting the Second Week / Adeena Karasick and Alan Sondheim
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> The origin of the computer involved the decoding of "enigma," a mystery—a desire to penetrate the impenetrable, the veiled, violating the inner sanctum of an enemy in a time of war. Demobbed, in a time of "peace," the computer became as aggressive tool of seduction, offering algorithmic possibilities for happiness and ease/ or obeisance and abjection. (I hope by the end of the day we don't discover that Donald Trump is the apotheosis of this virtual existence where a lie is equal to truth and being "bored with success" is the coin of the realm.)
>  Both ADEENA KARASICK and ALAN SONDHEIM are intensely attuned to the deep effect of the computer in contemporary life and culture. While embracing and even ingesting its pervasive presence and adopting its tools to their poetic/artistic purposes, each in her or his way carries out a rear guard action against it, in essential ways redefining or critiquing its nature.
> Worddance of a woman of valor—Salome: Canadian poet, performance artist and librettist ADEENA KARASICK is acutely attuned to the seductive impulse that lies at the heart of the computer. But she transforms its hostile functionality to an ecstatic dance of feminist (religious) empowerment and sensual self affirmation. Against an idea of infinity embedded in algorithmic proliferations, she posits a counter narrative—the infinity the 13th century Kabbalist Abulafia (the contemporary of the Sufi poets Rumi and Yunus Emre in Anatolia) saw within a play/dance of language. That's the way Karasick describes it: " For the past couple of decades, I’ve been consumed with how a sense of infinite linguistic play leads not to paralysis'... [But] its seductive swathes of color texture, image typographies are synechdochic of how meaning unveils itself as an ever-spiraling space where “Origin” is unlocateable [italics my own]." Karasick returns to the unlocatable mystery at the origin of the computer.  
> "Artist, writer, and musician, working in entangled media," ALAN SONDHEIM is inherently suspicious of the ability of the computer finally to reveal the secret embedded in the enigma. Rather, he sees it as a series problematic codes full of holes, created and combined, proliferating into ever larger systems. Yet the gaps remain, and humanity, culture remain entangled with them. In their skepticism of a final "localized" meaning, Sondheim and  Karasick are similar to each other; but, tonally,  extremely different. For her, the continuous change with "unlocatable origin" is ecstatic. His is melancholy, infused with a sense of catastrophe and dissolution. His work is a continuous meditation on endless human entanglements with codes and the wounds they inflict. Here is how he describes it: " I have been working with computers for decades, and specifically with virtual worlds and motion capture for the past fifteen or so. I developed the notion of 'codework' to indicate works in which code is presenced on the surface, but problematic - works in which meaning uneasily inhabits distinctions among 'worlds of the work' and program-spaces. Of course the distinctions themselves are problematic and entangled among many other things, such as the body, abjection, and 'dirt' in the mix. In motion capture, I've worked with altered software and mapping, producing distorted avatars and avatar behaviors. In virtual worlds, I've been working with concepts of gamespace, edgespace, and blankspace...."
> 
> To know more about Sondheim's vast work, one can read the interview "Surging Towards Abjection: an Interview with Alan Sondheim" in The Rain Taxi (http://www.raintaxi.com/?s=Alan+Sondheim+Interview).
>  
> I hope the members of the list will participate in the discussions around the works of these two artists.   
>  
> _______________________________________________
> 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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20161108/28ffe32a/attachment.html>