[-empyre-] Starting the Third Week: Michael Boghn and Jerome Sala

Sun Nov 20 18:28:29 AEDT 2016

Sorry I don't understand your question. 

Skickat från min iPad

> 19 nov. 2016 kl. 21:53 skrev Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com>:
> 
> I am an old fan of science fiction and I am still in love with masters as Philip K Dick Sturgeon and Ursula Le Guin. They wrote about dystopian realities not far from ours. Sturgeon wrote about a gestalt a kind of complex unity composed by kids with extra sensorial abilities I don't want to call it "powers" to avoid any link to Marvels hyped heroes.
> And Ursula Le Guin, an anarchist, challenged the whole idea of an antrhopomorfic God.
> Science needs a narrative to prevail.
> Ana
> 
> Skickat från min iPad
> 
>> 19 nov. 2016 kl. 21:34 skrev Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>:
>> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> "... "we're mostly unaware of how deeply our lives depend upon
>> the functioning of complex, expert systems..." -- we're the fish in
>> their ocean (McLuhan) (unless they break down). ..."
>> 
>> That's why a digital art critiquing its own medium must involve, one
>> way or another, a break down of its system. It must have an ethos of
>> inefficiency or failure at its center-- not an expression of power,
>> but weakness-- maybe an elusive glitch that the reader may experience
>> subliminally or a software that decrease communication rather than
>> improving it, etc., etc.
>> 
>> "...I am not sure whether the "digital" can speak its truth (at least in a
>> language we understand), but Shaviro suggests one way we humans might
>> begin to see its truth/reality for ourselves - by creating art where
>> the "material and technological factors are explicitly foregrounded...."
>> 
>> I do not agree with this part of the argument. Most often, this kind
>> of work is celebratory, of "look what I'm doing, ma" kind  (I hope
>> people will jump up and show the error of my way). It suggests that
>> the technology is revealing something about us when in actually the
>> work is mimicking, promoting the reality the technology is imposing.
>> 
>> I think all great science fiction is dystopian. And I am a great fan
>> and believer in it as a modern relevant form of expression. My
>> previous poem The Spiritual Life of Replicants is actually a science
>> fiction work. At this moment, Peter Valente's reference to Melies's
>> silent masterpiece A Voyage to the Moon comes to my mind. On first go,
>> it seems to be a science fiction work that is celebrating the future.
>> So far so good... But the film is so full of domestic details and the
>> space ship the "space men" are traveling on is so ramshackle that one
>> gradually realizes that the people are transporting their bourgeois,
>> middle class life to the moon, that the movie is a magical, exquisite
>> piece of satire.
>> 
>> Ciao,
>> Murat
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Jerome Sala <jeromesala502 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Murat, your question, as to whether "the computer (and the web and its
>>> consequence) has the ability to expose and criticize the condition it
>>> has created...whether the digital can be 'revealer of is own truth',
>>> brought to mind a book I've been reading - Discognition, by Steven
>>> Shaviro. One of the points Shaviro argues is that, in our everyday
>>> experience, "we're mostly unaware of how deeply our lives depend upon
>>> the functioning of complex, expert systems..." -- we're the fish in
>>> their ocean (McLuhan) (unless they break down). Another aspect we
>>> don't grasp, as your question implies, is that such technological
>>> entities, rather then just being there, inert until we manipulate
>>> them, have an agency of their own: "...if we engineer them, in various
>>> ways, they 'engineer' us as well, nudging us to adapt to their
>>> demands."
>>> 
>>> I am not sure whether the "digital" can speak its truth (at least in a
>>> language we understand), but Shaviro suggests one way we humans might
>>> begin to see its truth/reality for ourselves - by creating art where
>>> the "material and technological factors are explicitly foregrounded."
>>> His book is about science fiction stories that do this. Perhaps this
>>> is also what I had in mind by the poetic project I wrote about, which
>>> foregrounds digital/corporate cliches that inform us, through the
>>> jargon we speak. In any case, Shaviro's book may offer a clue as to
>>> the great popularity of the SF genre. Often, in allegorical ways, it
>>> acknowledges the agency of the technological (remember the Borg?), and
>>> enables people to start talking about the power of its influence.
>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 3:15 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>> Hi Jerome, by your question on the nature of "knowing" in poetry, I
>>>> think you touched a critical point, an issue running throughout the
>>>> discussions and presentations this month.
>>>> 
>>>> Knowledge that poetic experience contains or "reveals" does have
>>>> multiple facets. On the one hand, the knowledge (in some incarnations,
>>>> message/propaganda) may be transactional and implicitly points or
>>>> leads to action. Some great classics are of that sort, for instance,
>>>> Lucretius's On Nature or Virgil's Eclogues, Shakespeare's Henry V and
>>>> also, in some sense, though a book of "revelation," The Bible, etc.
>>>> The election of Trump last week drove the discussion to the
>>>> transactional side of poetry (art), and rightly so. That is what all
>>>> the writing invited to be sent to Dispatches for the anthology all
>>>> about. So are the post cards Craig refers to, as conceptual acts.
>>>> 
>>>> There is another kind of knowledge that poetry "reveals," not
>>>> necessarily leading to action-- of course, the distinction is somewhat
>>>> artificial since a poem or work of art contains both simultaneously
>>>> each time creating a different balance. If one extreme side of this
>>>> spectrum is propaganda (all nations/cultures/languages have propaganda
>>>> masterpieces), the other extreme is gnosis-- a knowledge not quite
>>>> contained in the practicalities of a language, but in its peripheries,
>>>> the often unacknowledged overtones that emanate from words, space,
>>>> etc. (embedded in poesies).
>>>> 
>>>> It is in terms of this same dilemma (the nature of poetic knowledge)
>>>> that Heidegger is discussing technology in his essay. On the one hand
>>>> it is defined as "enframing" nature to exploit it (in terms that
>>>> Francis Bacon asserts as "knowledge is power"). On the other hand, it
>>>> returns technology to its roots as techne, a making that reveals the
>>>> truth. Their relationship is dialectical.
>>>> 
>>>> I have been on Empyre list for about two years, following it on and
>>>> off with interest because it presents to me a digital culture that is
>>>> of great interest to me; but in which I am not directly involved as a
>>>> practitioner. What struck me most is that, save for important
>>>> exceptions such as Alan Sondheim and Isak Berbic (and I am sure there
>>>> are others), the focus of the participants was on what the internet or
>>>> the computer can do for them, on the computer as a new potent enabler,
>>>> the computer as artistic or political power. As far as I can see,
>>>> little attention was given to it as a revealer of "truth," the
>>>> knowledge of human condition and psyche in a digital technological
>>>> age.
>>>> 
>>>> In my view, poetry (art) is doomed to die without containing within
>>>> itself both these knowledge, though the melange may be different in
>>>> each.
>>>> 
>>>> The underlying focus for me this month has been, that is why I
>>>> accepted the invitation to moderate, to explore whether the computer
>>>> (and the web as its consequence) has the ability to expose and
>>>> criticize the condition it has created, in other words, whether the
>>>> digital can be the "revealer of its own truth." I can not say I have
>>>> been that successful up to now.
>>>> 
>>>> The primary text for this month is the fifteen minute video clip I
>>>> referred to in my introductory statement at the beginning of the month
>>>> in which the film maker Jean Renoir discusses the effect of technology
>>>> on art (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Mtd6GE_PI ). He says that
>>>> art becomes boring to the extent that that the art maker is in total
>>>> control of his or her own materials and techniques. He refers to a
>>>> group of 11th century French tapestries (the Bayeux, the first known
>>>> ones) where the threads were coarsely spun, the colors were primitive
>>>> and of a narrow range; but they contained great beauty, revealing the
>>>> strife of their making.
>>>> 
>>>> That is why "Overcoming Technique"--the first two words of my
>>>> introductory title-- is crucial, whether one finally agrees with
>>>> Renoir or not. In our daily lives with family and children and
>>>> teaching and grading papers, etc., I hope some of us find time to
>>>> re-focus on these issues the remaining days of this month. As artists,
>>>> the issues are important for all of us.
>>>> 
>>>> Ciao,
>>>> Murat
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 9:28 AM, Craig Saper <csaper at umbc.edu> wrote:
>>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>> Relevant to the discussion and the “dispatches” this event might speak to the issue of, what Jerome Sala called in a recent "poetry is a particular way of knowing the mind” …
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> "Post Card Avalanche"
>>>>> 
>>>>> Join in and send a postcard directly to Trump! Here are the basic instructions to participate:
>>>>> 
>>>>> ** IMPORTANT - Don't mail your card until NOV. 26th **
>>>>> 
>>>>> In the message section, write this simple message: NOT BANNON!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Throw a post card Avalanche party. Make postcards.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Address it as follows:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Donald Trump
>>>>> c/o The Trump Organization
>>>>> 725 Fifth Avenue
>>>>> New York, NY 10022
>>>>> 
>>>>> Affix a stamp - you can use a 35 cent postcard stamp, or a normal letter stamp.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Take a picture of your postcard that you can share on social media using the hashtag #stopbannon
>>>>> 
>>>>> Drop it in the mail! We are aiming to get these mailed between Saturday, Nov 26th and Monday, Nov. 28th to create a concentrated avalanche of postcards.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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