[-empyre-] Week 3 Introduction

Fri Mar 30 16:17:19 AEDT 2018

Hi Ryan,

Norie (aka Noralyn) here – thanks for sharing your alchemical putrefaction experience.  Interesting its connection to Christof’s bodily noises, which nausea voices in such gut wrenching plenitude. And now that nausea's erupting back into the discussion — I’m still trying to think about why it’s made such a cinematic come back.

Anyway, now you’ve opened the gate… more on alchemy, though I’m not an alchemist or scientist either. But I got interested in it for the way it connects bodily vocalizations, noise, and dirt and dissolved myself when researching and making a radio work. Alchemy’s enigmatic and poetic concepts are not pure intellectual abstractions but emotional and physical as well. It is experienced with/within the body as an intelligence – where knowledge – and emotions --  are bodily.

 I got fascinated in the complex history of alchemy and the way it recalls different cultures where body and mind are/were not split; when nature is/was not out there, ‘a standing reserve’ as Heidegger puts it, to be penetrated and controlled by science or romanticised by art.  As an artist I’m drawn to the way that in the practice of alchemy, the subject who seeks to know is actually transformed by the knowing.  Because it involves a connectedness to one’s work that is physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual. Like new materialism, alchemy offers artists a way of continuing to speak about their crucial material relationship with their work -- about the materiality of the work. Interesting that alchemy engaged the performer, artist, writer Antonin Artaud – because alchemy is an Artaudian theatre  of corporeal performance: it is a performative body technique.

Best

Norie

> On 28 Mar 2018, at 2:32 AM, ryan jordan <ryan at nnnnn.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry I have dissolved into the wrong week.
> I hope it doesn't cause too much noise with the discussion.
> 
> There was one point which Noralyn mentioned on the 20th, that of alchemy and specifically the parts of putrefaction and fermentation, with which I thought I could share a practical experience.
> 
> I have been trying to decode the alchemical instructions for breeding basilisks. The first part of which I deduced as burying 20 cocks eggs, within a sealed clay pot, in a dung heap for 40 days and 40 nights. I assume the heat given off by the dung heap (I am no alchemist or scientist by the way) caused the eggs to ferment slightly. The smell once the pot was opened was putrid. It was almost as if you could see the smell oozing over the pot and crawling along the floor and sinking deep within the pores of my skin and refused to leave, even after many repeated washes. It made me wretch. Literally noise; nausea.
> 
> Ryan.
> 
> 
> On 2018-03-20 04:05, Noralyn Neumark wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hi Junting and all
>> Thanks for inviting me into this fascinating discussion. I’d like to
>> provide a bit of background to my thinking and work with noise —
>> from the 90s to present day.
>> (Sorry the formatting seems to have gone a bit dirty… no sooner
>> spoken of than enacted!)
>> Noise first appealed to me as a dirty antidote to ‘modern’
>> aesthetics of clean, bright, white, mono-cultural future and all the
>> ecological and political problems that has evoked. In the sound world
>> that included the early digital promises of ‘clean’ sound.
>> Historically cleanliness has been a way to distinguish the clean,
>> white, proper, and quiet bourgeois self from the dirty, messy noisy,
>> carnally excessive, sexually out of control working class and
>> colonials (great book about this was Peter Stallybrass and Allon
>> White, _The Politics and Poetics of Transgression_  l986).  I liked
>> how this history complicated the pleasures and political effects of
>> "clean" sound. Perhaps someone might comment too on the cultural
>> specificity of this take on dirt and noise – a Chinese friend of
>> mine in Australia pointed out to me that where she came from noise is
>> a sign of happiness and prosperity.
>> One of the things I got interested in to listen differently, in a more
>> messy and polyphonic way, was alchemy – a practice of knowing and
>> doing. Looking into the seven gates of the alchemical process, I
>> really responded to putrefaction: putrefaction and fermentation. The
>> moment of putrefaction is bodily. All your senses are assaulted.  This
>> is a moment resonant with Julia Scher’s “dirty data” (1995
>> _Danger Dirty Data
>> _https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/54044338?q&versionId=67005692 ) The
>> alchemist smells decomposition, hears the noise of the dung beetle,
>> recalling the stench and noise of the transformative process within
>> ourselves. Putrefaction undoes the clean and proper, noiseless
>> bourgeois subject’s body.
>> It is during the _nigredo_ of alchemy, which might occur at any gate,
>> that you come most thoroughly and noisily unstuck. A moment of deepest
>> despair so familiar and resonant for most artists.  You are plunged
>> into something awful, but essential. There is a raucous cacophony of
>> pain/noise -- beetles, ravens, green lions -- human/inhuman
>> caterwauling that echoes, redoubles and exceeds the noise of Michel
>> Serres in his most multiple unpredictable turbulent moment. The
>> _nigredo_ is an intensity of matter/ing, of meaning/meaninglessness,
>> of noise and information, an intensity so great and terrible that
>> there is nothing left but to do the Work. (I made a radio work with
>> Alchemy, _Separation Anxiety_, for ABC in Australia and New American
>> Radio in the US – that was a long time ago but this discussion has
>> made me think about it again now.)
>> I hadn’t thought about dirt much lately til recently working with
>> the ultimate decomposers/composers -- worms -- and attuning to a noisy
>> collaborative voice together. https://workingworms.net/
>> https://vimeo.com/247735081
>> In another register, recently as I’ve been thinking about voice and
>> new materialism I’ve been noticing the voice of nausea – which
>> recalls the opening points for this month about noise and nausea. In
>> _Voicetracks_ I wrote about Kathy High’s wonderful video work
>> _Domestic Vigilancia _from_ Everyday Problems of the living_ -- the
>> voice of her vomiting cat that gave me so much to think about. Since
>> he alerted my senses and thinking to the vomiting voice, I’m hearing
>> it all over the media. Does anyone have any ideas on why so many films
>> have scenes of nausea and vomiting lately? It’s like vomit has
>> replaced sex as the required transgressive gesture. The gut speaks…
>> all the best
>> Norie
>> www.out-of-sync.com <http://www.out-of-sync.com/> [1]
>> https://workingworms.net/ <https://workingworms.net/>
>>> On 19 Mar 2018, at 1:51 PM, Junting Huang <jh2358 at cornell.edu <mailto:jh2358 at cornell.edu>>
>>> wrote:
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Thanks to Eleonora, Wenhua, and Joo Yun for your posts! I’m sorry
>>> about the slow pace in the second week, but please feel free to
>>> follow up on their posts anytime. The annual meeting of Society for
>>> Cinema and Media Studies ended today in Toronto, and we are back in
>>> week 3. I am excited to introduce the guests for this week. They are
>>> Nicholas Knouf, Norie Neumark, Ryan Jordan, Sarah Simpson, and
>>> Gianluca Pulsoni.
>>> ————————
>>> Nicholas Knouf
>>> Nicholas Knouf is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies
>>> at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. He is a media scholar and
>>> artist researching noise, interferences, boundaries, and limits in
>>> media technologies and communication.
>>> His recent book, How Noise Matters to Finance (University of
>>> Minnesota Press, 2016), traced how the concept of “noise” in the
>>> sonic and informatic domains of finance mutated throughout the late
>>> 20th century into the 21st. His current research project,
>>> tentatively entitled At the Limits of Understanding, listens to how
>>> we have tried to communicate with both ghosts and aliens.
>>> His current artistic research explores the re-presentation of
>>> signals from the cosmos. Projects in this vein include they
>>> transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned / and their
>>> signals dissipated in the æther (2018-present), a 20 channel sound
>>> art installation with speakers made from handmade abaca paper and
>>> piezo electric elements, with sounds collected from satellite
>>> transmissions; PIECES FOR PERFORMER(S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENTITIES
>>> (2017-present), event scores laser etched into handmade translucent
>>> abaca paper; and, On your wrist is the universe (2017-present),
>>> generative poetry about satellites and the cosmos for your
>>> smartwatch.
>>> Norie Neumark
>>> Norie Neumark is a sound/media artist and theorist.  Her radiophonic
>>> works have been commissioned and broadcast in Australia (ABC) and in
>>> the US. Her collaborative art practice with Maria Miranda
>>> (www.out-of-sync.com <http://www.out-of-sync.com/> [1]) has been commissioned and exhibited
>>> nationally and internationally. Her sound studies research is
>>> currently focused on voice and the new materialist turn. Her latest
>>> writing on voice is Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the
>>> Arts (MIT Press, 2017). She is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at
>>> VCA and Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the
>>> founding editor of Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts.
>>> http://unlikely.net.au
>>> Ryan Jordan
>>> Ryan Jordan creates powerful audio-visual performance experiences
>>> explicitly attempting to access portals into the psychedelic reality
>>> matrix. These are explored through experiments in Possession Trance,
>>> retro-death-telegraphy, hylozoistic neural computation and derelict
>>> electronics. Recent projects include engram_extraction, a
>>> hypothetical experiment into extracting and recording the
>>> biophysical and/or biochemical imprints of events on memory; and
>>> several failed attempts at breeding basilisks, mythical reptiles
>>> with a lethal gaze or breath, hatched by a serpent from a cock's
>>> egg. He disseminates these experiments via his noise=noise / nnnnn
>>> platform for live events and workshops currently based in Ipswich
>>> UK, and via a PhD thesis being completed at the School Of Creative
>>> Media in Hong Kong.
>>> http://ryanjordan.org/
>>> http://nnnnn.org.uk/
>>> Sarah Simpson
>>> Sarah Simpson holds as Master's Degree in the History of Art from
>>> University College London and a Bachelor's Degree in both Art
>>> History and Archaeology from Cornell University. Originally from
>>> Binghamton, NY, she currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Sarah has
>>> held a range of positions in the art world including Curatorial
>>> Assistant, Gallery Manager, and, most recently, Publicist. She's
>>> worked in The Whitney Museum of American Art, BRIC, Didier Aaron,
>>> and Blue Medium. Sarah has a personal blog, as well, where she
>>> writes about exhibitions and theoretical concepts that strike her
>>> interest, such as museum gift shops (which are absolutely
>>> fascinating): https://ecloart.wordpress.com/
>>> Gianluca Pulsoni
>>> Gianluca Pulsoni is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies
>>> Department of Cornell University (Italian section). He holds an MA
>>> in Cultural Anthropology from the University La Sapienza in Rome,
>>> Italy, with a thesis on Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's cinema and
>>> exhibitions. He is a contributing writer to the Italian newspaper,
>>> Il Manifesto -- its cultural pages and weekly, Alias. Also, he has
>>> experience working with digital companies and publishing houses in
>>> Italy as editor and translator.
>>> all the best
>>> Junting
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>> Links:
>> ------
>> [1] http://www.out-of-sync.com <http://www.out-of-sync.com/>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
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