March 2011
24 posts
On Martin Arnold's Cineseizure
“The constant flickering effect demonstrates that our unconscious viewing in interrupted by our blinking, by phases of blindness”
It is, in a certain sense, a stroboscopic storm of our visual perception.
His films disturb the imagined fluidity of movement. For movement is only ever a series of ‘captures’, or ‘stills’- made so either by our blinking, or by the...
culture/control
“Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century”
Mark Getty, american businessman and grandson of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty “Mans culture and technological development as we know it, is intrinsically connected to the free and unlimited right to copy”
Morten Skriver, artist “There has never been a time in history when more of our “culture” was as...
“If you fake the funk, your nose will grow”
– Bootsy Collins
For a more radical opposition
The internet today is awash with comment, analysis, reflection, condemnation and awe of yesterdays march. And so it should be. Yesterday’s march points toward the grey area we have reached in terms of political opposition and so should generate an important debate that asks ‘what is the next step’, rather than resting on the laurels that it was a good turn out.
What was striking...
Achille Mbembe; social justice and exclusion
Notes from Mbembe’s lecture at Birckbeck;
Mbembe opens the lecture with the question of how we might begin to deterritorialize critical theory. As a writer from ‘the south’ as is now popular to say, based in the Western Cape, this is a pertinent question, and one which he addresses through his practice.
On Democracy:
“What remains of democracy in a time of violence and...
238, 127
“On one of my visits, Walter and I were driving the curving road towards San Francisco when he glanced down at the odometer and said, “This car has almost reached the moon” What? “The distance to the moon is 238, 713 miles, and this care has gone 238, 127. And most of it has been on this winding road”
Towers
The tower blocks. The towers become beacons of information transfer. They become physical, material sites that deliver us to what is hyper-real. They are confused signs for the constant intermingling of the imagined and the seen, the tangible and the abstract, the organic and the artificial.
They flood the air with signals, they charge the aether with a projected subjectivity and generate...
Piracy doesn't add up...
“There are too many different things happening at the same time to
explain these numbers definitively, but one conclusion is unavoidable:
The recording industry constantly asks, “What’s the difference between
downloading a song and stealing a CD?”—but their own numbers
reveal the difference. If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to
sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the...
From Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture'
They were right about FM radio in a narrow band of spectrum.
But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a wide
band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with
much less transmitter power and static.
On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting
of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in
New York City. He tuned...
Watch
intimacy
If you could hear my voice now you could feel my body in this voice penetrating your ears, immersing you, and inviting you to act on me with your own articulation of your body, and I in turn would continue this play with another sonic gesture of mine and you with yours.
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths...”
– Baudrillard
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
