the dictionary

Langue et parole. The OuLiPo would approve. "Abominable snooow-man" is my favorite.

Manuel DeLanda at European Graduate School - 2006 I/VIII

Manuel DeLanda lecturing about the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, logic, meaning, and the understanding of geometry and mathematics in an open lecture at European Graduate School EGS, Media Studies department. Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2006. (((Thanks to Naxos @ Inmanencia! Keep twittering!)))

Max Headroom Pirating Incident (11-22-87)

During a broadcast of the Dr. Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock" on WTTW Chicago Channel 11, on Sunday November 22nd, 1987, at around 11:15pm, a Video "Pirate" wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and transmitted one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves.

"End of literature, which is made up of sentences."

“I will learn how to compute on my typewriter,” writes an inmate of Gugging. Alan Turing did nothing else. Instead of learning his public school’s prescribed handwriting, he reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring; third, reading (formerly reserved for secretaries) or computing discrete data, that is, block letters and figures. Rather than conclude that humans are superior, as did his colleague Godel, with whom he jointly refuted the Hilbert program (in support of a complete, consistent, and decidable mathematics, that is, a mathematics that could in principle be delegated to machines), Turing was suicidal—in life as well as in his job. He dropped the unpredictable in order to relieve mathematicians of all predictable (or recursive) functions and to construct the machine that Hilbert had presumed as a formalism. The hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines. Turing, with an eye toward “computers and guided projectiles,” predicted good times for men, programmers, and mathematicians. But it was a strange kind of mathematics into which he imported the elegance and complexity of classical analysis. What disappeared in the split-up of binaries was not only the continuity of all graphs and trajectories examined since Leibniz, and which Fourier’s theory and Edison’s phonographs simply followed. What was much more drastic than such primitive step functions was his crucial innovation: the abolition of the difference between numbers and operational symbols, data and commands. For even if numbers stood for data relationships, the signs + or – were still inhabited by a human spirit who appeared to give the command to add or subtract. Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine, however, converted these (and all other) letters into their monotonous rows of binaries. In machine language, the command ADD is neither a human enunciation nor a letter symbol, but just one of many series of bits…It was not Godel’s humanist belief but rather his simple trick of Godelization that once again emerged victorious: only after commands, axioms, or, to put it briefly, sentences had been converted into numbers were they as infinitely manipulable as numbers. End of literature, which is made up of sentences. ... Under the conditions of high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms that defy interpretation and only permit interception. Of all long-distance connections on this planet today, from phone services to microwave radio, 0.1 percent flow through the transmission storage and decoding machines of the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization succeeding SIS and Bletchley Park. By its own account, the NSA has “accelerated” the “advent of the computer age,” and hence the end of history, like nothing else. An automated discourse analysis has taken command (Kittler 263).

Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, a Novel

When I was twenty-three, it began to be possible for me to escape my parents. I started to remember directly, not just through writing, all that happened to me. A sailor is a man who keeps on approaching the limits of what is describable. I was wild. My brother was the first man who helped me. I spent an increasing amount of time in his apartment. There Paul Rendier took my virginity. Fucking enabled me to cast off my past; red gave me the authority to be other than red. Once I had fucked, the only thing I wanted was to give myself entirely and absolutely to another person. I didn’t and don’t know what this desire means other than itself. After Rendier, I threw myself into every bed as a dead sailor flings himself into the sea. My sexuality at that time was separate from my real being. For my real being’s an ocean in which all beings die and grow. The acceptance of this separation between sexuality and being was an invention of hell. What dominated me totally was my need to give myself entirely and absolutely directly to my lover. I knew that I belonged to the community of artists and freaks not because the anger in me was unbearable but because my overpowering wish to give myself away wasn’t socially acceptable. As yet I hadn’t asked if there was someone named me. At this time I first read de Sade. Perusing The One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom exulted and horrified me; horror because I recognized myself, or desire. Loneliness, and my kind of life, in Russia physically deteriorated me to such a point that I almost died. From that time onward I have always felt anxiety based on this situation: I need to give myself away to a lover and simultaneously I need to be always alone. Such loneliness can be a form of death. My brother found me in Russia and brought me back to New York. I first attempted to dissipate my anxiety by deciding to fuck and be fucked only where there could be no personal involvement. I traveled on trains, like a sailor, and made love with men I encountered on those trains. My attempt failed. Friends said about me, “She’s on her way to dying young.” But I wanted, more than most people, to live, because just being alive wasn’t enough for me. Wildness or curiosity about my own body was showing itself as beauty. My brother placed as much importance on sexuality as I did. When I met Bourenine at one of the orgies my brother gave, I was ready to try again to give myself to another, to someone who was more intelligent than me and a committed radical. Anxiety turned into a physical disease. Bourenine said that he wanted to save me from myself, my wildness, my weakness. He made me feel safe enough to try to give myself to him. I became so physically weak that I stood near death. When Bourenine believed that I might die, he began to love me. I began to hate him, yet I worshiped him because I thought he protected me. My gratitude has always been as strong as my curiosity, as is mostly true in those who are wild (15-16).

bjork - bachelorette

arborescence makes me shmaltzy. i suppose i should write that book now.

Microscopic

"All life forms have their own way of communicating. You can't even imagine how many languages there could be in our galaxy. Microscopic is a performance that tries to capture some sort of universal language. With hypnotic music and kaleidoscopic video material we bring you to a domain where there are no secrets. The creatures communicate with light and colour. They are silent and have no purpose. They are just beings flowing around, knowing all there is to know. (Montevideo, live cinema)."