2009-11-04

so...

So: cake-eating and collective fly-posting dérive it is. Details to be announced off-site.

2009-11-03

Notes from the final session

as kindly typed up by Thomas

1 MEMORIAL | brief description of feelings | ritualistic burning of fragmented portions | posted on blog | message-board where people can leave messages | survivors | recording | un-named event | description to camera of feelings

2 PHYSICAL MEMORIAL | brick altar | paper 'to resolve the catastrophe, turn it over' | form of website | 'there is a difficulty in creating physical objects' | bumper sticker | Duchamp 'to look at from the other side' | bumper sticker

3 EAT THE MINDMAP | eating Greenberg | consume the mindmap | no fixed memorial | BAKING A CAKE AND EATING IT | fortune cookies | previous catastrophe classes could be involved

4 CARRY ON REGARDLESS

5 DESTRUCTION | archive | RECORD THE SOUND before destruction; record the sound after the destruction | filming sound

6 KILL THE BLOG | replace by iterations | program it to dissolve | disperse in fragments | word summary | implode | google translation | index | eliminate punctuation | let the barbarians in (open access) | post this on blog

7 back to THE MINDMAPS | ripping it in pieces and distributing it | shredder | FLY-POST them | derive | collective effort

2009-10-26

Like a scene from a movie (repeat)

Meteorite-like object falls in Latvia

Readings for session six

Please note that the readings for session six are the following two texts by Guy Debord, replacing the Futurist Manifesto.

Détournement as Negation and Prelude (1959) http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/3.detourn.htm

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html

joyce on facts

Re all the facts and judicial processes we've been discussing, this passage from Finnegans Wake came to mind:

Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus two. Nevertheless Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious.

So much going on here: deed-poll becomes leg-pull, Horace's line Exegi monumentum aere perennius ('I have erected a monument more lasting than bronze') becomes a gutted shell (another crypt?). Earlier in the book we're told:

'in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightiness that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls'

notice the riff on Scheherazade: in lieu of pure fact/truth, we have endless narrative, at stake in which is a woman's life: if she stops narrating, she gets the chop!

2009-10-24

Ken Loach's piece in 11'09"01 September 11



I saw this when it came out in 2002. IMDB

2009-10-19

It was like a scene from a movie!

"Taken together, the energy crisis and the ecological mise-en-scène are themselves a disaster movie, in the same style (and with the same value) as those that currently comprise the golden days of Hollywood. It is useless to laboriously interpret these films in terms of their relation to an 'objective' social crisis or even to an 'objective' phantasm of disaster. It is in another sense that it must be said that it is the social itself that, in contemporary discourse, is organised along the lines of a disaster-movie script."

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser, trans.)