[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]

Fri Jun 29 11:29:44 AEST 2018

Looking backwards to go forwards, we seeded the potential for becoming beside ourselves - becoming multiple, partial and parallel - in the floating worlds, the hanging gardens of MOOland, unfurling without scaffolding from multiple centres (bridge building machines, an abyss before us), we made acephalic or hydra (no heads or many - it works the same) entities living in spaces with no geolocation and no maps (though we tried in vain to to lay the grid of a fixed XYZ onto a runaway textuality going out, north, left, down, into, through, round - "a triumphant X on a mobile map” - ). 

“ media effects [media-affect], to have meaning and significance, must be located within an embodied human world “

… when the screen signals no carrier, my hands become cold, the uplink is severed, my heart begins to beat again only when the modem sings its birdsong and connection is made. my consciousness becomes oceanic in the flow.

I’ve been reading alot about breathing, corpomateriality, intra-action and corpo-affective actions in Magdalena Gorska’s Breathing Matters. Which connects to the idea of the para-human as articulated by Brian Rotman in Becoming Beside Ourselves. All this is related to the splitting, shimmering, vibrating, iterating of the self (in my case through episodes of panic.)

"the intra-active relationality of corpomaterial processes is a matter not merely of “internal” dynamism but, as Stacy Alaimo (2008, 2010) articulates –  [ … ] of trans-corporeal character. Using the concept of trans-corporeality, Alaimo proposes thinking about human embodiment in terms of “entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (2008, 238). Such an entanglement is dynamic, and within it the mutual constitutiveness of bodies and environments shows the ongoing changeability, mutual relationality and transformations of nature and culture (e.g., the relationality of genetically modified food, bodies and environments). What is at stake in Alaimo’s approach, however, is not the mere assimilation or comparison of human corpomateriality with non-human nature but the need to rethink concepts of materiality and nature as well as of the notion of “human” itself. As Alaimo argues, “dwelling within trans-corporeal space where ‘body’ and ‘nature’ are comprised of the same material, which has been constituted, simultaneously, by the forces of evolution, natural and human history, political inequities, cultural contestations, biological and chemical processes, and other factors too numerous to this list, renders rigid distinctions between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ impossibly simplistic” (2008, 257). For Alaimo, the “‘material world’ ... includes human actions and intra-actions, along with the intra-actions of man-made substances, all of which intra-act with natural creatures, forces, and ecological systems as well as with the bodies of humans” (2008, 259)."

Back in the day, I often found myself dissociating in the static of the real/virtual split, not able to become data and flow, and never ever again able to live the fiction of unity - forever caught in a loop of deterritorialising/reterritorialising. panic driving the desire to unify, panic driving the production of multiplicities. These days, a keyboard of dirt, with a microbial network, connects me to my extensible selves. to expanse. (thinking of a scandi-noir show now where humans were becoming-root, tree, network - eventually, with fingers in the dirt, they became part of the forest, fingers-becoming roots). 

this is all rather a ramble, and condensed because time …

…………….

Skinwalking through melting permafrosts, beds of bleached sea antlers, carpets of heat-felled bats, walking with gender as a liability, black lives unmattering, the human-gun assemblage targeting aberrant subjects, sterile insects crawling over beached black whales, Antarctic krill becoming imperceptible, frakked wastelands, icebergs calving stillborns, plastic bags gathering in the gyres becoming-microbial.

treechangers flee the city to seed the mycelial networks of utopian retreat.
They grow dank warm skins of green velvet, nodal,
drink the mother, the kool-aid of awakened consciousness.
feed on mossbodies
harvest wild yeasts from rarefied hinterland air
with local inflections

deranged hippy nodes make lovely compost for co-option…

while they are sleeping the uplink activates, the market streams through their dreams and nano aliens trade on cellular information
their flickering REM eyes flood the dark pools with encrypted instructions and rumourware.
the mushrooms glow at night.
and
S E N D
the traffic is dense in the pulse
the warm machine awaits your intention.
The rapture never comes.
V + F
We had a dream last night

・・・--------☆ Ø ☆--------・・・
Virginia Barratt
Doctoral  candidate, University of Western Sydney, Writing + Society Research Centre

ph: +61 435925245
w: virginiabarratt.net
e: virginia at virginiabarratt.net

monstering the logos eros
・・・--------☆ Ø ☆--------・・・

I acknowledge the traditional custodians, past and future, of the land on which I live and work.

>  rehearsal of a network - [week 4] (Simon)
> On 28 Jun 2018, at 11:30 AM, empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au wrote:
> 
> Send empyre mailing list submissions to
> 	empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> 
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> 	http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> 	empyre-request at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> 
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	empyre-owner at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> 
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of empyre digest..."
> 
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: rehearsal of a network - [week 4] (Simon)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2018 19:56:53 +1200
> From: Simon <SWHTaylor at zoho.com>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]
> Message-ID: <c8c34454-606c-15da-3512-fd980dacb911 at zoho.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"
> 
> Dear <<empyreans>>,
> 
> On 26/06/18 06:37, Shu Lea Cheang wrote/quoted:
>> I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. 
>> Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with 
>> information-sharing membranes
> 
> Mycorrhyizal networks became entangled in the underground theatre work 
> of Minus Theatre. But for reasons that rather go against those adduced 
> in and around CMNs here, in their emphasis on the gains to be had, got 
> from, harvested off the literal and metaphorical fungolalia and 
> fungalia. The gain, for example, of communication: what if--we 
> speculated in the spectacles we made--communication were not the point, 
> but an exploitation-abstraction layer covering over--a too-human 
> groundcover--the /work/ of decomposition? What if communication is /in 
> /and an /excess/ of this work? And what then if the scatter, crackle and 
> static of languages were the condition of their significations? The 
> breaking-down, the waste itself, the soil, ground? Such work--of 
> decomposition--would not be valued according to elements and minerals 
> /liberated/ but would be valued in and through itself, as forming the 
> maternal matrices in indeterminacy, inaction, asignifying, across 
> inorganic and organic strata. Decomposition lays waste: elements are 
> understood to be liberated and the value is in this breaking down, 
> giving off phosphorescing halos in an excess of incandescent energy 
> illumining the dark, not a light dispelling it.
> 
> best,
> Simon
> http://squarewhiteworld.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------- next part --------------
> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
> URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180627/2f00eeb7/attachment-0001.html>
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre mailing list
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
> 
> End of empyre Digest, Vol 162, Issue 38
> ***************************************

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180629/0a6138f0/attachment.html>