Friday (18 November 2016)
(All sessions take place at 155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto)
Please register in advance at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tuning-speculation-iv-tickets-28478143895
9:30 – 11:00 — Keynote 1
Katherine Behar — “Post Haste: Communicative Capitalism, Context Collapse, and Decelerationist Aesthetics”Post HasteIn April of 2016 a handful of technology news outlets began to report a curious concern: Facebook, the social media behemoth, was worried over a “disturbing trend” called context collapse. Users, it seemed, were sharing fewer personal posts about themselves and instead were posting links to existing online content. Social media scholars like danah boyd analyze the effect of context collapse in social media, by comparing it to Erving Goffman’s notion that we gear social behavior to different audiences depending on context. Online audiences are too massive and diverse to be intimately parsed or directly addressed, so previously compartmentalized communication contexts bleed together, effectively collapsing. Facebook’s overwhelming commercial success means many users have vast networks of friends, mixed from all realms of social life. Hesitant to post personal content to this collapsed audience, they (re)circulate links instead.
Because the social in social media is both raw material and product, context collapse reveals social media’s paradoxical dynamics. Its overproduction goads an accelerationist information economy with more-and-faster posts, likes, and personally identifiable bits. But context collapse reveals the personal as a scarce resource, limited in a tangible, material sense. Facebook’s maelstrom of posts, hastily clicked and shared, may disguise latent nonproductivity at its center. Does context collapse offer a reserve from “post haste,” shielded from the total capitalist subsumption of human activity? Does this subtle shift hint at eventual decelerationist alternatives, or even simply at the empty inflation of digital content?
This paper draws on my object-oriented feminist work “tuning” object-oriented thought and feminism to one another, and develops my recent project on decelerationist aesthetics. In both, I speculate on how objects (in this case, human objects and their online utterances) resist when their material properties come into contact with cultural systems—so to speak, when the rubber hits the road. I apply Jodi Dean’s concept of “communicative capitalism,” a theory that posts have shifted from messages, a unit of communication, to contributions, a unit of personal productivity, and George Bataille’s idea of nonknowledge, conceived by Randy Martin as the surplus of the information economy. I conclude with examples of artwork that embody decelerationist aesthetics.
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 1
- Lendl Barcelos & Michael Vertolli — "Obscuring (-) Epistemologies"Obscuring (-) Epistemologies
to alight in visceral discord
Sample interpolations of the Absolute
Physiognomy exhibiting
— Mina Loy
The work of Tara Rodgers gestures toward “sonic epistemologies” obscured by the (white-, male-)dominant approaches of a Helmholtzian (physico-reductionist & rationalist) bent. For Rodgers, alternative sonic epistemologies can be framed so as to reorient explorations into (at times occulted features of) the sonorous—beyond an uncritical parameterization of sound. Continuing our research into phenoumenodelic variations within the context of machine learning presented at Tuning Speculation III (& expanded in a paper for The Journal for Creative Music Systems), we aim to radicalize listening. We propose to aspect discussions of the visceral effects of phase modulation with passages by the self-described “very unknown” Otherist poet Mina Loy. The conflicts arising from this amalgam potentiate alternate approaches to the sonic through their negotiation.
A sonic epistemology inculcates norms of listening, amenable to modification and revision. Yet, the intoxication of a revisionist exit—as can be seen proliferating across contemporary neorationalist philosophy (Negarestani, Wolfendale, et al)—entraps the listener to a disavowed unboundedness that fails to incorporate aesthetically unsound navigations. In other words, the neorationalist mode often progressively aims at a grandiose synthesis, refusing to admit: “lost it is / in grey dis-synthesis” (Loy). But, a modernist path is not the only one. We propose a form of hybridization that can speciate a model of dis-synthetic potential, of non-unitary knowledge. We demonstrate how a visceral investigation into phasic audition is an alternate path, constructively obscuring epistemology. “Holy anomoly!” (Loy) - Adam Hulbert — "Xbductive listening: Occlusion, folding and mythopoeisis in close encounters with the electrocene"Xbductive listeningRoughly correlating with the development of instruments of electromagnetism and acoustic surveillance in the early 1900s, such as Leon Theremin’s The Thing, reports of paleo-abductive alien encounters have spread virulently throughout cultural discourses, albeit orthogonal to the normative silencing of institutional narratives. Associated with chronoportation and various experiential intensities (including the out-of-body listening phenomenon of autophony), such accounts have received varied responses, situated within a spectrum that gradates from technotopia to paranoia. Despite these variances, in all but a handful of exceptions the abduction experience has been understood in terms of a linear flow of force, with the abductee as receiver in relation to an unknown entity. Only recently—largely through reverse engineering of Phonoegregoric technologies—have researchers into listening begun to identify the possibility of a latent xbductive drive, originating from the process of listening as an engaged relation to hyperaffective entities.
Xbductive listening, by accelerating the production of meaningful interactions with the semiosphere, runs contrary to Phonoegregoric interests; given how little is currently known, identifying their stratagems in relation to the xbductive drive remains one of the more effective ways to examine this phenomenon. Phonoegregoric technologies of cooption include the earworm (Couroux 2013) and earlier instances synthes/is (Hulbert 2015, in press): biotechnological processes wherein the will to fragmentation is used as a priming method to facilitate coopted mythopoeisis, and folding of the materiality of the soundscape provides an architectronic simulacrum of a centred subject that can be readily manipulated. Furthering the recent exploration of Phonoegregoric activity that has emerged within occultural studies, this paper examines the xbductive drive and attempts to situate it as an impulse to extrosubjectivity arising through specific relationships within the nascent electrocene. - Germán Sierra — "All Meaning is Noise. Extreme Performance from the Other Side of the Semantic Apocalypse."All Meaning is Noise.R. Scott Bakker’s ‘Semantic Apocalypse’ is a theoretical posthuman extrapolation from the orthosemic humanist assumption that ‘we are neurologically wired for meaning’ (Bakker). In Bakker’s terms, the contructivist chance of selectively re-wiring/re-programming individual human brains could result in the fragmentation of ‘our shared neurophysiology,’ in a way that ‘sharing imperatives’ would become ‘a matter of coincidence’. Departing this proposal—which assumes meaning to be a production of natural or artificial ‘brain programming’—, I would like to introduce the hypothesis of an ongoing Semantic Apocalypse resulting not from the manipulation of individual brains as single information processors that might (or might not) share meaning afterwards, but as the consequence of a paradoxical reversal in the environmental (ecopoietic) behavior of expanded templex networks.
In the classical communication-theory model (Shannon), noise is both the material from which information is constructed as well as ‘the matter that information resists.’ Orthosemic humanism—and most posthumanisms derived from it—rely on content-dependent information-processing models that require a metastable noise/meaning balance—but it seems evident that this balance is now being challenged. The most clear departure from humanist orthosemics are the digital, metasemic machine communication processes in which the noise/meaning ratio is significantly reduced, opening the possibility of some ‘universal semantics’ that, although evolving from human orthosemics, might develop into hypersemic loops beyond human understanding.
The current templex (Land) processing-time defies Shannon’s classical model through the emergence of novel environmental noise/meaning imbalances. Fully-context-dependent/asemic and fully analogical/presential contemporary artworks —including conceptualist art, glitch aesthetics, extreme performance, abstract horror, etc—are manifestations of a process in which noise spontaneously becomes meaning. In my presentation, I will consider how the interaction of departure trajectories (universal hyperproduction of meaning, together with the overexpansion of feed-forward metasemic ‘translations’) across the network are producing a paradoxical reversion of the standard environmental noise/meaning ratio, leading to a discognitive (Shaviro), parasemic, and highly speculative environment, where meaning functions as noise.
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:30 — Panel 2
- Edia Connole & Hunter Hunt-Hendrix — "In principio omnes creature viruerunt"In principio omnes creature viruerunt
In the beginning all creation greened, / flowers blossomed in the midst of it; / later, greenness sank away. / And the champion saw this and said: / ‘I know it, but the golden number is not yet full. / You then, behold me, mirror of your fatherhood / Now remember that the fullness which was made in the beginning need not have grown dry, and that then you resolved that your eye would never fall until you saw my body full of jewels. / For it wearies me that all my limbs are exposed to mockery: / Father, behold, I am showing you my wounds.’
—Hildegard of Bingen
The closing chorus from the liturgical drama, Ordu Virtutem, composed by Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, is arguably the earliest extant iteration of the specific aesthetic strategy black metal employs. Termed ostranenie (estrangement) by the Russian formalists—most notably by Shklovsky in his 1917 essay, ‘Art as Technique’—it is in speculative or new realist terms a matter of ‘projecting unreason into things themselves’ (Meillassoux). While this process of defamiliarization finds obvious literary forebears in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, Novalis’ romanticism and Schopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism, it has a more apposite and integral one, we would argue, in a lineage that, stretching from Hildegard’s own Ignota Lingua (Unknown Language) down to the present day, reaches its apogee in the glosso- and mythopoeia surrounding Reign Array; to wit, the Ark Work, a completely immersive art/life process in which Hunt-Hendrix—sonically limning the ‘teratological noosphere’ of black metal (Thacker)—is, at the very least, like Ligotti’s ‘Vastarien,’ ‘a votary of that wretched sect of souls who believe that the only value of this world lies in its power—at certain times—to suggest another,’ and at most, a heretical conduit for ‘living in and transmitting faith, hope, and love in an era when it is difficult to believe in the structures that have traditionally activated this type of transcendence’ (Hunt-Hendrix).
In an attempt to push the commutative aspect of black metal theory, this presentation will simultaneously tune and de-tune speculation to the Perichoresis of the Ark Work, in a mel(o))dramatic mapping of music, art and philosophy onto three moments of dialectical becoming through a series of aural (dis)encounters between (and about, around [peri]) its central protagonists.
CODA:The value of drama is that it makes music possible, and the value of music is that it makes thought possible.
—Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
- Nicola Masciandaro — "Synaesthesia: The Mystical Sense of Law"Synaesthesia: The Mystical Sense of Law
Synaesthetic perception is the rule [la règle].
– Merleau-Ponty
For to everyone who senses something there comes about, in addition to the apprehension of the thing that he is sensing, also a certain self-awareness [sunaisthēsis] of [the fact] that he is sensing.
– Alexander of Aphrodisias
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
– Wittgenstein
The question of the relation between law and the senses—the interface between the senses of law and the laws of sense—necessarily touches upon the synaesthetic nature of all experience. As law is itself not something properly observable, but is rather a matter and force and idea operative through a non-circumscribable matrix of forms, the sensing of law is unintelligible without reference to the principle of synthesis which governs sensation, that is, the common sense and sensing of sense first named by Aristotle’s commentators as synaesthesia. “Formed by the addition of the prefix ‘with’ (sun-) to the verb ‘to sense’ or ‘to perceive’ (aisthanesthai), the expression in all likelihood designated a ‘feeling in common,’ a perception shared by more than one” (Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch). Indeed the creative proportion between the with-sensing of perception and the with-thinking of commentary (from comminisci, to devise, invent) reflects back upon the inseparability of law and commentary, and thence to the broader perceptual sphere wherein the reflective sensing of law’s being— what law is and that law is—operates and/or fails to operate upon tradition’s margin, “the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission” (Agamben, Man Without Content). In these terms, understanding the synaesthetic dimensions of the sense of law carries the potential to reanimate awareness of the agency of our acts of perception vis-à- vis law’s various domains, restoring our senses (corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual) to their commentarial role as interpreters and shapers of the multiform fact of law. In the four-fold medieval scheme of scriptural exegesis, the mystical or anagogical sense, termed the “foretaste of paradise,” is the “locus of intellectual synaesthesia” (McLuhan, The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul) wherein the other senses (literal, allegorical, moral) are synthesized and led beyond themselves into the immanence of what they signify. Likewise, to sense the law in light of the principle of synaesthesia leads to where it is no longer possible to perceive law as being any less within than without, nor any less above than within. At the level of physical perception, synaesthesia points back into the mystery of the immanent fact of the sense occurring without its proper object, as in the classic form of audition colorée, or remaining without object at all, as in the perception of black. So with respect to the law, synaesthesia points back to the threshold of freedom where law persists without itself. For “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient” (1 Timoty1:9) and “this Soul is above the law, not contrary to the law” (Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls).
My exploration of synaesthesia as law’s mystical sense falls into three parts. In the first, I examine the range of correspondences between synaesthesia and traditional definitions of law in connection with the three levels of being (physical, subtle, mental) whose ancient legal forms are sunétheia (custom), ethos (habit), and nomos (law), demonstrating therefrom the need for an appreciation of the impressional nature of perception and the auto-mediated structure of rationality as “ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience” (McLuhan, Understanding Media). As law is sensed synaesthetically, via the self-mediating sense of sense, so does synaesthesia expose the interface of rule and mediation found in the Greek root med-, which “express the notion of a thought that rules, commands, moderates . . . ‘he who utters the law” (Chantraine, quoted in Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, Excommunication). In the second, I consider Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of justice as a “fourth world” spontaneously emergent from the three worlds of matter, life, and thought, showing how his model of the “vectorial subject,” one for whom “politics . . . seeks its own proper abolition in the accomplishment of the end that is sought,” is congruous with becoming a synaesthete of law per se, in the sense of one who cannot not sense in law the presence of something beyond and other than law at work. In the third, I comment upon Arthur Rimbaud’s famous synaesthetic sonnet “Voyelles” in light of Dante’s poetic concept of authority, drawn from the vocalic verb auieo (to bind together), as a binding of words worthy of faith and obedience, in analogy with the five vowels as “the soul and bond of every word” (Dante, Convivio). Playing upon the tradition of a mystical correspondence between the five senses, the five vowels, and the tetragrammaton, Rimbaud’s poem masterfully presents synaesthesia as a portal to the astonishing plenitude of spontaneous life found between law and its anarchic beyond.
As the radically immanent non-sense of the sensible, synaesthesia is a palpable form of the pure THAT of mystical experience, an omnipresent sign of the fact that only what escapes the grip of intelligibility makes any sense at all. From far beyond the parameters of the known world, synaesthesia rulz. - Émile Fromet de Rosnay — "The Tunatron of Experience"The Tunatron of ExperienceThe Enlightenment substituted experience with experiment, existence with essence, and event with evidence. What can a “going through” of the Greek “peri” offer us today? When we shift from experiment back to experience, we shift from usefulness to intrinsic value. Art provides a way through this experience, providing a blueprint for reflection, where scientific experiment seeks “truth.”
Continuing work around Natali Leduc’s Churnatron 1400 (2016), I would like to reflect on what the Tunatron 2000.13 (made at the Houston Makerspace in 2014 by William Hesser and Leduc) can bring to the potentiality of the useless as it relates to experience. This experience reveals the conditions of possibility of knowing. “Use” provides us with a means of grasping this condition. The fact that we are unable to understand the Greek chresis (employment, use) according to our modern conception of use (“to use something”) is the sign that we have added the subject position of the accusative (subject) to the meaning of a verb that in the original Greek depended upon the genitive and dative. This means that the experience of language for the Greeks was a different one, one which was the going-through of language in the world of objects, where we today conceive of the verb through the subjective. This means that an abstract or affirmative self transcends experience in its move towards truth and knowing (thus experimentation), rather than working through the experiences that we encounter that might exceed and multiply us. Working towards taunting the useful of a Tunatron of resistance, our experience of the machine is an experience of potentiality as useful/useless.
3:45 – 5:15 — Panel 3
- Derek Coulombe— "ELEPHANT FEET"ELEPHANT FEETElephant Feet presents the body and actions of of the Kadett: a cult of excess, a militia of ceaselessly affective anti-utilitarian bodies. I propose, in the physique of the Kadett, a tinnitus unbounded by the drums and passages of the ear, instead resonating throughout the trunk and the limbs, causing organs to terminally destabilize; thereby forming plastic, emblematic, corporeal beacons capable of transforming local environments and materials towards elusive, counter-linear coordinates.
This paper will be structured by two concerns. First, drawing upon the hallucinatory figures of Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure alongside Samuel Beckett’s recurring, atrophying bodies as prototypical models for the Kadett's vibratory anatomy. Secondly, referring to George Bataille’s conception of excessive, non-utilitarian activities as a handbook for the Kadett’s objectives—specifically his invocation of sport, mourning, and luxury. Through these inquiries Elephant Feet will play out as a speculative fiction describing a set of manoeuvres written though the obtuse framework of the closet drama and punctuated by sections of critical commentary.
Elephant Feet is an account of figures in motion, whose very composition upset, upend, and cloud what before was transparent. Their functions confuse systems of cumulation and pervert symmetries of logic. Radical work-shy bodies, vibrating tumours, the unthinkable discipline of the cult... - Chris Shambaugh— "Standards are Legion: A Study of the Norm-Virus"Standards are LegionThe spatio-temporal itinerant, William S. Burroughs, was once infected with a theory – in short, that language is itself a kind of virus – whose host is humankind, medium is sound and image, and whose message is the word. The idea that language uses us more than we use it is certainly a seductive one, but can it be a (counter)productive one as well? More precisely, can language be used to extricate the control patterns it imposes on its hosts?
Drawing on recent research into ‘behavioral niche construction’ as a guiding thread for both viral evolution and that of human language, in this paper I aim to show the extent to which the virological operations of language, as exposed by Burroughs, are coextensive with what has come to be called normativity – a symptom of a widespread control problem or program enforced and reinforced by all language users, but problematically and programmatically camouflaged within academia.
Burroughs was well aware of the link between the colonizing control patterns of language and its parasitizing propensities towards normative standards of correctness, or in other words, means of becoming-RIGHT. “The RIGHT virus has been around for a looong time,” he wrote, “and perhaps its most devoted ally has been the Christian church.” In short, I will argue that the so-called space of reasons is not just the realm of freedom; it is a virosphere, governed by a veritable NORM-virus whose philosophical camouflage is far more complicated and deadly than even Burroughs could have imagined.
The problem of normativity is precisely the problem with normativity – it is a viral copying error whose survival is only explainable on its own terms or in order to justify itself. As Reza Negarestani put the self-replicating point, “One cannot assess norms without producing them.” While norm-sickness is ubiquitous, it is also decisively syllabic and sonorous, meaning that norm-habits can be broken, if only temporarily, via purposeless repurposings of their very own vironomic auditory and symbolic devices, of which this presentation hopes to take (a)part. - Josh Trichilo — "A Machine to Speak for Them: Jonathan Key and the Vocal “De-”granulation of the Japanese-Canadian Interned"A Machine to Speak for ThemIn Canada in March 1942, as a preemptive caution against a “land invasion” during the war, all Japanese-Canadians were unjustly forced to evacuate their homes and move to derelict and abandoned ghost-towns, relics of the B.C. gold rushes. In June 1943, Jonathan Key, a sociology professor at U.B.C., set out to New Denver, one of the larger internment towns, determined to assuage the frenzied racism with a piece of technology in tow: one of the first tape recorders. His use of the tape is most surprising, for he is one of the first documented users to cut and reconnect tape, to make extended use of editing. Key, with the intent to facilitate second-language pronunciation, granulated and manipulated the voices of the first-generation interned.
Despite Key’s determinations, a sonic-materialist analysis of his practice reveals a relationship to technology and the other embedded in privileged notions of rationality and meaning on the one hand, and of cultural purity and superiority on the other. The paper theorizes that Key’s retrieved recordings and his related recording practices reveal that tape editing emerges from the correlational development of sound technology usage and conceptions of the voice’s materiality. Crucially, it was the other’s voice that was seen as manipulable. The paper argues that this correlation was at least partially motivated by an attempt to have machines speak for the other, to remove the grain of the other in translation; it arose from an attempt to “solve” or at least contain the cultural problem of difference.
Saturday (19 November 2016)
9:30 – 11 — Panel 4
- R. Scott Bakker (& Special Guests) — "An Algorithmic Eärwa: On the Imperial Aspects and Aspect Emperor of The Electrocene Era"An Algorithmic Eärwa"Keynote"
- Margret Grebowicz —"What Can Be Played? "What Can Be Played?The Voyager Golden Record is currently hurtling through interstellar space. It will be forty thousand years before it reaches another solar system. But back in the 1970s, as Ann Druyan curated its “Sounds of Earth” section, she found herself surprised at how difficult it was to record human kissing. Of the long catalogue of sounds the group recorded, she writes, “this wonderful sound proved to be the most difficult to record.” After numerous attempts, they still had nothing worthy of sending. Something about the assignment proved extremely difficult.
The other animal on the Golden Record whose language was recorded as a greeting to alien intelligences was the humpback whale. Whales have never been spotted kissing and don’t even have what we would call lips, but they are the only other animal besides humans that mates belly-to-belly, or face-to-face. This paper will thus ask whether whales suffer, as we do, from what Lacan announced to the world in his famous dictum, "there is no sexual rapport." - Joe Snape — "Who is Raymond?"Who is Raymond?Last year, I found a scrap of paper on the New York City subway. It read ‘Raymond looking for work,’ and included a phone number. A filmic study for a future piece, Who is Raymond? is a wild goose chase across the American south in search of the note’s author and an explanation for the intriguing clues it holds within it. If ethnography is but a stylistic effect of the genre of academic writing, where does the line between truth and fiction lie? How to distinguish between staged interventions and real life? Do these binaries even hold water when put to the test? To ask ‘who is Raymond?’ is to ask ‘who do we want Raymond to be?’ From here, it’s but a short step to asking ‘who do we want to be ourselves, and how do we want to live?’
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 5
- James Currie (Lady Baronia Jackson) — "How Big are the Stakes in the Chop House?"How Big are the Stakes in the Chop House?If at one time academia had been able to prove its cutting edge credentials by complaining of the academy’s lack of commitment to addressing relevant concerns, we might now argue that because of an increasingly violent infringement of economic injunctions to which we must respond it has become impossible to address anything else. As a result, the cutting edge and capital now find themselves embroiled in peculiar copulations.
If at one time Henry Kissinger could supposedly state that “academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” it is now the case that the politics infringing upon academic politics are so overbearing that academics have no choice but to posture as if the stakes involved were enormous. As a result, failure to do so convincingly is but the prelude to a quick trip to the chop house, funding slashed, your area nudged towards extinction.
If academia has indeed become a completely protestant affair, producing ghastly research driven by the dreary instrumentality of its work ethic, it is time now to imagine it as something else. As result, and picking up on an image that I dropped lightly into an article of mine in 2009, my paper will consist of a monologue in which musicology will appear before you as a lazy Catholic lady who spends her life starting out the window, smoking cigarettes and waiting for her unemployment check to arrive. - Geraldine Finn — "“I KILL THEREFORE I AM” TUNING SPECULATION IN/TO MALE RAGE"“I KILL THEREFORE I AM”‘This has got to stop!! These are my words scrawled in the margin of A Mother’s Reckoning. Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold who with Eric Harris planned and executed the Columbine massacre in April 1999. Of course, what I want to stop is the rash of murder-suicides committed by usually but not always young men which seem to be occurring with increasing frequency these days. But that is not what provoked my comment in the margin of this book or this presentation. What I was protesting there and in the paper I am proposing here—what I want to stop and believe can and should be stopped—is the abject poverty of the routine analyses of and speculations about the possible motivation of these men both in the mass media and among the experts, which never ever address the central fact that these killers are indeed men—not women, men. Surely their murderous and suicidal rage must have something to do with that fact and with the particular challenge of becoming and being a man in contemporary society? My paper will elaborate on what I consider to be the poverty of mainstream efforts to ‘explain’ these extreme manifestations of male rage as well as offer an alternative account of both the rage itself and the collective inability/refusal to interrogate its specific conditions of possibility in the being and becoming of men: with reference to the irreducible duplicity of the category of Man/man—a fantasy-fiction at once universal and particular, generic human being and sexually specific male—which no man can realize or fulfill, the contradictions of which each man is condemned to suffer, suppress and/or resolve—in silence—on his own. ‘I’m here, STILL alone, still in pain’ Dylan Klebold wrote in his journal entry of 20 January 1999. His parents didn’t have a clue. This has got to stop.
- Sebastian Roberts — "THE LONG GOODBYE"THE LONG GOODBYE“This will have been a true story.” So ends the amateur detective’s dispatch from a future already foregone.
It begins mundanely enough. Out of casual curiosity, the sleuth starts surveying the bookshelves of every living space he passes through. A pattern emerges with unanticipated clarity: to the right are tomes about Objectivism, NLP, lie-detection, and corporate insurrection; to the left are titles about self-esteem, lucid dreaming, MBCT, and vegan recipes.
The detective soon develops a faint ringing in his ears – as though the books themselves buzz with an orphic resonance. Indeed, pacing the rooms, the detective senses he is crossing vibratory threads connecting the various cultural and mediatic objects around him. He goes temporarily blind as he passes a vinyl reissue of Never Mind the Bollocks. Someone keeps swapping the dust jackets on biographies of Mao and Kissinger. On TV is a remake of Fight Club starring George Stephanopoulos and Peter Thiel.
Finding a paperback copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra hidden inside a DVD boxset, the sleuth is struck by a sulfurous epiphany: time is a flat circle. What first appears as a constellation of coincidences is gradually revealed to be a pinwheeling galaxy of Möbiusoidal horror. The detective sees the past noosed around the neck of this annus miserabilis, 2016. The warnings have been ignored and now it is too late. All the gumshoe can do is hurl his message-in-a-bottle into the ouroborosian gyre of post-history and hope that someone receives it before the whole imbroglio starts up again.
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 4:00 — Panel 6 (The Occulture)
- David Cecchetto — “An( )alibic Aurality”
- Marc Couroux — “Evil Dispositions (Speculative Relayism)”
- Ted Hiebert – “Ouspepo: ’pataphysics as first non-philosophy”
- Eldritch Priest — “Impractical Enthusiasms”
4:00 – 5:30 — Keynote II
Natasha Myers — “Ungrid-able Ecologies”
7:30 – 11:00 — “Occultural Soiree: Performance-Lectures and Book Launch”
Book Launches:
Object-Oriented Feminism, edited by keynote Katherine Behar!
Phono-Fictions and Other Felt Thoughts (catalyst: Eldritch Priest), edited by The Occulture’s David Cecchetto!
Plastic Blue Marble (catalyst: Amanda Boetzkes), edited by The Occulture’s Ted Hiebert!
Digital Dionysus, edited by Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Performance-Lectures:
Yvette Granata & Bogna M. Konior — "Against Speculative Sufficiency! Philosophy-in-the-wild as an Aural Spell, Recording our Misencounter with Women Philosophers"
Against Speculative Sufficiency!
In this paper, we discuss and perform our multi-media philosophy project, PINTHW (Philosophy-in-the-wild). Philosophy-in-the-wild is a sonic apocrypha in which we simulate a philosophy of ancient women philosophers while walking and recording in the dark on Lamma Island (Pok Liu Chau, or 南丫島). We nod in agreement both when we hear the proposition of cymatics (that sound creates matter), the modulations of dark animism (that sound puts thought in a relation of predation with the ontologically promiscuous world), and the rebellions of Francois Laruelle’s non-standard method, where speculation as a type of immanent philo-fictionalizing equates itself with a performative invention. Recorded on Lamma Island in May 2016, we walk the island in darkness as we simultaneously think aloud with the contemporary and ancient darkness of island sound.
Taking cue from Laruelle and Anne Francoise-Schmid, we consider philosophy to be a new wild object and not a discipline defined by the sins of the father — its androcentric fidelity. We seek not a state in which philosophy or art gives voice to the Real, but a mistuning to its occluded rhythm and entombed history. Extending Luce Irigaray’s notion of ‘rigorous unintelligibility’ and against philosophical logic that seeks to capture the Real, we employ wild speculation articulated along its syntax. As philosophers-in-the-wild, and in the darkness of the island that becomes our distorted Plato’s cave, we aim not to capture the voices of female philosophers both erased from history and those to come; We dismiss the question whether these dark philosophers that we seek to sonically reap from death are real or not. We instead provide them with our vocal cords, our silence, and a myriad of sounds through which the vibrant darkness of this philosophical genocide can speak itself.
Taking cue from Laruelle and Anne Francoise-Schmid, we consider philosophy to be a new wild object and not a discipline defined by the sins of the father — its androcentric fidelity. We seek not a state in which philosophy or art gives voice to the Real, but a mistuning to its occluded rhythm and entombed history. Extending Luce Irigaray’s notion of ‘rigorous unintelligibility’ and against philosophical logic that seeks to capture the Real, we employ wild speculation articulated along its syntax. As philosophers-in-the-wild, and in the darkness of the island that becomes our distorted Plato’s cave, we aim not to capture the voices of female philosophers both erased from history and those to come; We dismiss the question whether these dark philosophers that we seek to sonically reap from death are real or not. We instead provide them with our vocal cords, our silence, and a myriad of sounds through which the vibrant darkness of this philosophical genocide can speak itself.
Didier Morelli — "En-Danger(ed) Music Number 27: Undisciplined Bodies"
En-Danger(ed) Music Number 27
En-Danger(ed) Music Number 27: Undisciplined Bodies considers the ways in which the moving body (falling, crawling, climbing, standing, skipping, running, stumbling…) lends itself to conceptual playfulness. In doing so, it evokes the experiments of 20th and 21st century sound artists who wished to explore the ways in which music can harm the listener or the performer (i.e. Dick Higgins). As a performance-lecture, it progresses from the basic premise: what sounds does the body produce when it engages in regular and irregular activities (in/against architecture)? It investigates the relationship between the body of the performance artist and city/architectural infrastructure paying attention to the ways performance art has attempted to resist, renegotiate, and respond to architectural functionalism by generating kinesthetic acts that in themselves generate disruptive sounds (i.e. Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1, Los Angeles, 1970; Trisha Brown Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, New York, 1970; Papo Colo, Superman 51, New York, 1977; William Pope.L, eRacism, New York 1980s; Suzanne Lacy, In Mourning and in Rage, Los Angeles, 1977). Following dance scholar Ann-Cooper Albright’s notion that a falling body enacts a form of disorientation that skews our sense of direction (spatial, political, cultural, and social)[1]—a slippage through time and space that disrupts the binary of up and down—this lecture proposes to expand upon the potential of the sounding body in motion as a site of speculative promiscuity that interlinks, reproduces, challenges and/or stagnates and degenerates into (un)intelligible action. Where André Lepecki sees the dancer as the particular political subject that transforms “spaces of circulation” into “spaces of freedom”[2]—this paper posits the sometimes (un)skilled, (un)trained, (un)polished body of the flailing performance artist as a site/space of potential. This type of performance work, while often singularly associated with the production of kinesthetic (a/e)ffect, is seldom considered for its sonorific production—and so this performance-lecture seeks to carry out this inquiry as a live event invoking utterances, groans, moans and screams of the past and present.
[1] Albright, Ann Cooper. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
[2] Lepecki. André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review, 57:4, (Winter 2013): 13-27.
[1] Albright, Ann Cooper. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
[2] Lepecki. André. “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer.” TDR: The Drama Review, 57:4, (Winter 2013): 13-27.
Sean Smith — "Soundings and Reverbs: The Mutant Acoustic Line in Department of Biological Flow's Arts Based Research Practice"
Soundings and Reverbs
This performative paper and artist talk is an attempt to resonate with the evental thematics of nonsense, hyperstition, opacity, stupidity and imaginary solutions as these appear in work by the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research practice between Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler.
We would usually consider our practice from the past 8 years to be informed by intuitive experimentation on the one hand (in the sense that Deleuze describes a Bergsonian method), which on the other hand 'normally' generates visual-based and/or performatively gestural outcomes (often woven together in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari consider a haptic vision). And yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that these intuitive processes of experimentation also contain within them a mutant line of inquiry which folds in again and again (perhaps in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe a metallurgic line), disappearing and reappearing at irregular intervals to animate our practice: the acoustic.
We will explore the DoBF projects Gait Surfing, Timespace 815, I.Got.The.Clap, and Cottage University to consider this mutant acoustic line and deterritorialize these experiments into new speculative attunements.
We would usually consider our practice from the past 8 years to be informed by intuitive experimentation on the one hand (in the sense that Deleuze describes a Bergsonian method), which on the other hand 'normally' generates visual-based and/or performatively gestural outcomes (often woven together in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari consider a haptic vision). And yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that these intuitive processes of experimentation also contain within them a mutant line of inquiry which folds in again and again (perhaps in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe a metallurgic line), disappearing and reappearing at irregular intervals to animate our practice: the acoustic.
We will explore the DoBF projects Gait Surfing, Timespace 815, I.Got.The.Clap, and Cottage University to consider this mutant acoustic line and deterritorialize these experiments into new speculative attunements.
Alexandre St-Onge — "Performing Opacity"
Performing Opacity
Performing Opacity focuses on the mutation of the performative body through its sonic mediations. The estrangement of the organic source becoming sound waves generates hermetic entities. For instance, the voice escaping the body becomes an autonomous creature that manifests inaccessibility by occulting the origin that is always already in displacement. A voice can also translate this displacement and make a difference. The Italian saying traduttore, traditore ("translator, traitor") is often used to depict the transformative agency of translation. However, if translation implies a form of metamorphosis, it still produces a semblance of the source. This semblance reveals the origin as being hidden in a new reality emerging from the repetition and the performativity of difference (Deleuze, 1968) differance (Derrida, 1972).
Performing Opacity is an attempt to translate difference/differance’s aural undecidability to create alternate realities betraying logical reductions to extend conceptual investigation beyond what can be understood or perceived. Diverse pragmatic approach tactics to the ungraspable in sonic performance can engender paranormal conceptual entities. In this experimental talk, I would like to speculate on the ungraspable nature of such conceptual entities that resonates with Sol LeWitt’s seminal statement from 1969 : "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach". These hermetic conceptual abstractions can be useful to listen closely to the inaudible mutation of the performative body through its sonic mediations.
Performing Opacity is an attempt to translate difference/differance’s aural undecidability to create alternate realities betraying logical reductions to extend conceptual investigation beyond what can be understood or perceived. Diverse pragmatic approach tactics to the ungraspable in sonic performance can engender paranormal conceptual entities. In this experimental talk, I would like to speculate on the ungraspable nature of such conceptual entities that resonates with Sol LeWitt’s seminal statement from 1969 : "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach". These hermetic conceptual abstractions can be useful to listen closely to the inaudible mutation of the performative body through its sonic mediations.
Tony Yanick — "Friendship"
Friendship
“He says indifferently and alike – how are you, friend?” (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned ‘mastery’ or ‘authority’ or binaric split between ‘self and Other’. This is not a suspended aliveness as in ‘freefall’ or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already ‘in between’ or ‘transitioning’ state of affairs. Leastwise it is ‘romantic’, though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhsia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage of Truth, as epimeleia (the technologies of care). Drawing on a specific encounter, a wild encounter, one stretched over a seven-year period with a semi-feral mustang whose precise split-down-the-middle brown/white face, earned him the Ojibwe name “Manhattan” (corrupted from “Madweijwan, the ‘heard-flowing’ of where the two rivers meet), these remarks here today will step into that suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness in order to develop a wholly different logic of this event-secret-sensuous intelligence called ‘friendship’.
At its core is an ability to harness a particular type of raw energy, sexual presence, even joy – an athleticism, respect, trust, odd form of mastery and slowness of time (despite or, even perhaps, at a gallop), that not only goes beyond the traditional (and anthropomorphically bound) tropes of ‘fraternity’ or ‘brotherhood’, but beyond the linguistic turn itself, with all the trappings of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘becoming-x’ and the ‘transcendental’, now thrown to one side. In so doing, a form of consciousness and indeed a ‘new’ form of communication is enabled, one that speaks a wholly different language game, embodied in the breat(d)th and fractal singularities that today go under the such headings as quantum entanglements, ana-materialisms, incompletenesses and undecidabilities.
All this I learned from befriending a wildly playful and somewhat dangerous horse named Manhattan.
Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned ‘mastery’ or ‘authority’ or binaric split between ‘self and Other’. This is not a suspended aliveness as in ‘freefall’ or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already ‘in between’ or ‘transitioning’ state of affairs. Leastwise it is ‘romantic’, though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhsia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage of Truth, as epimeleia (the technologies of care). Drawing on a specific encounter, a wild encounter, one stretched over a seven-year period with a semi-feral mustang whose precise split-down-the-middle brown/white face, earned him the Ojibwe name “Manhattan” (corrupted from “Madweijwan, the ‘heard-flowing’ of where the two rivers meet), these remarks here today will step into that suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness in order to develop a wholly different logic of this event-secret-sensuous intelligence called ‘friendship’.
At its core is an ability to harness a particular type of raw energy, sexual presence, even joy – an athleticism, respect, trust, odd form of mastery and slowness of time (despite or, even perhaps, at a gallop), that not only goes beyond the traditional (and anthropomorphically bound) tropes of ‘fraternity’ or ‘brotherhood’, but beyond the linguistic turn itself, with all the trappings of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the ‘becoming-x’ and the ‘transcendental’, now thrown to one side. In so doing, a form of consciousness and indeed a ‘new’ form of communication is enabled, one that speaks a wholly different language game, embodied in the breat(d)th and fractal singularities that today go under the such headings as quantum entanglements, ana-materialisms, incompletenesses and undecidabilities.
All this I learned from befriending a wildly playful and somewhat dangerous horse named Manhattan.
SUNDAY (20 November 2016)
10:00 – 12:00 — Panel 7
- Mitchell Akiyama — "The Dark Impossible: Black MIDI and the Future of (post)Human Music"The Dark ImpossibleIn the late 1940s, the composer Conlon Nancarrow breathed, or rather punched, new life into an archaic technology, creating a series of “studies” for the player piano whose technical complexities vastly exceeded any human’s ability to perform them. The emergence in the early 1980s of the MIDI protocol (a standard that allows electronic instruments to communicate information such as pitch and volume with each other) offered new affordances for the creation of post-human music, but digital music’s Nancarrow wouldn’t surface until well into the new millennium.
This paper begins by considering the rise of “Black MIDI” as a response to digital technology that is as gratuitous (and predictable) as Nancarrow’s work was to the capacities of analog machinery. Black MIDI creators harness the power of contemporary computing to produce works that can contain hundreds of billions of note events. But Black MIDI’s brain-melting excess is entrenched in the banality of popular culture and the constraints of Western tonality and rhythm. If this is the future of post-human creativity, is this future limited to, as Pierre Schaeffer conceded, the age-old constraints of do-re-mi? In respect of this I bend my ear towards future musics that not only exceed the ability of a human/machine virtuoso to play ever faster, but that might also usher in gestures that elude, rather than extend, traditional matrices. Listening slightly askew to Bataille, I suggest that it is evident that the general economy supplies far more sound that can ever be harnessed, and given this, what forms of both expression and dissemination might be latent in this excess? - Jessie Beier — "There’s No I In Me (or, “I Don't Necessarily Agree with Everything I Say”)"There’s No I In MeIn Two Regimes of Madness (2006), Deleuze asserts that discussion is nothing more than an “exercise in narcissism where everyone takes turns showing off” (p. 384). Contextualized in terms of contemporary eco-political discourse, Deleuze’s critique of discussion raises important, if uncomfortable, questions about the role of dialogue and communication in the age of the Anthropocene. Indeed, it is not discussion that is fundamentally narcissistic, but rather it is the assumption that human meaning-making can, and should, overcome the inherent incommensurability of communication in and with the world that has exposed yet another ambit of our human philosophical privilege. In the face of complex geotraumatic upheaval, the presumption that there must be more — that is, more than we are able to think, to say — is beset by the prospect that current modes of thought have reached a terminus outstripped by the vast inhuman complexities of geological and ecological change. As the planet recedes from the image of the world’s givenness to human thought and analysis, the limits of dialogue, discussion and conversation surrounding climate change (all of which seem to be given general equivalency), are stripped bare and exposed for what they are: a panicky evasion of exhaustion prefigured by the ongoing noumenal transpiration of the non-human. Taking the (in)utility of discussion and its speculative potential as a starting point, this performative essay enacts an entangled discussion between five dissident voices, all of whom debate the complexities of climate change from distinctive philosophical perspectives and sonic positions. By weaving together the often contradictory aural (dis)encounters of anti-catastrophism, (cosmic) pessimism, scientism, techno-fetishism, and neo-rationalism, this 'patasonic experiment highlights both the potential and limits of “logical” discussion and argumentation, particularly in light of the inexhaustible rhythms of exchange engendered and maintained by our inveterate anthropocentrism and its coming planetary annihilations.
- Nikki Cesare-Schotzko — "We Are Young—#nihilism, #poptimism, and living it down at the end of the worldWe Are Young
Tonight
We are young
So let’s set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun
—Fun, “We Are Young, ft. Janelle Monáe” (2011)
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!
—F.T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto” (1909)
According to Saul Austerlitz, the “reigning style of music criticism today is called ‘poptimism.’” “Prefer Queens of the Stone Age to Rihanna?” Austerlitz writes, “Find Lady Gaga’s bargain basement David Bowie routine a snooze? You, my friend, are fatally out of touch with the mainstream […] You are, in short, an old person” (2014). Poptimism is Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry sounded large: It identifies what is “good” through tween-gush approbation and it begs the collective rush we get when we can sing along with the radio the first time we hear a song. It is “a studied reaction to the musical past” (Austerlitz 2014), but it is also a counterpoint to that past. As Kelefa Sanneh notes, it is no coincidence that poptimists’ antagonists, the “rockists,” play the manly singer-songwriter dirges of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen against the girlish anthems of Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and, not just a girl anymore but a FEMINIST, Beyoncé. Poptimism is fun; Fun is poptimist.
But, after modernism’s “crisis and crash” (Clark 2012), poptimism also represents a cultural shift—a cultural climate change, even—in the relationship between pop culture and politics, particularly the politics of the intellectually belaboured and sorely maligned Left. T.J. Clark, in his nihilistic feature in the New Left Review, urges the Left not to “go on exalting its marginality,” but rather to “look its insignificance in the face”—and what better way than through a catchy tune about the inherently nihilistic state of being young. This paper crashes through Clark’s sing-song metaphor of politic’s “tragic key” and into the crisis of epic climate catastrophe that we are all, young or not, rehearsing. - Tobias Linnemann Ewé — "TWENTY QUESTIONS CONFUSING ((SONIC)) D/RECEPTION"TWENTY QUESTIONSTo what extent do attempts to move away from an anthropocentric world do disservice to its own project? We may try to better understand non-humans through biology, acoustics, sound art, OOO and creative research, but eventually these tactics turn back on themselves in ouroborosian fashion – humanly rationalising that which may have no rationale. Speculating about the sonic experiences of things, we end up applying the very violence we seek to discombobulate. Where does that leave us? How do you probe the minds, materials and assemblages of objects without your own essence oozing in in the process?
If the mind is not that which is inside an organic, mechanical or digital system, but – in the vein of speculative realism – something that is between objects [distributed and interobjective] then behaviour, physiology and sensorimotor affordances might not be the best place to start probing the experience of objects. But how does one probe the interobjective?
To come closer to this reality of non-human sonic experience, I suggest a game of Wheelerian Twenty Questions. In his later years John Archibald Wheeler wrote hundreds of imaginary games of Twenty Questions in order to come closer to the reality or nature of otherness. Some sets methodically ask a row of twenty standardised questions of everything from parrots to calculators and dust, whereas other sets pose gibberish questions with seemingly no interest of arriving at any lucid certainty.
Presenting a selection of Wheeler’s recently unearthed questionnaires, the purpose of this paper is to confuse and conceive a non-anthropocentric theory of {{vibrational ontology}} that accounts for the sonic experience of objects.
12:15 – 1:45 — Panel 8
- Joshua Dittrich – "Vibrato, Vibration, Vibrancy: Peter Kowald, Extended Technique and the Detonation of a Musical Instrument"Vibrato, Vibration, VibrancyThe term “extended technique” designates a range, if not a repertoire, of experimental and unorthodox ways of making sound with conventional musical instruments. Such techniques exploit a tension inherent to every instrument between the abstraction of musical tone and the materiality of physical vibration. In addition to “de-tuning” our habits of playing and listening to a given instrument, I suggest that extended techniques de-tone, or indeed detonate, the resonant body of an instrument by amplifying the expressive interplay of tonality and materiality that is built into its vibratory structure. The mode of listening demanded by extended techniques thus initiates a philosophical dialogue between traditional aesthetics of musical expression, the ontology of vibrational of force (Steve Goodman) and the vibrancy of matter (Jane Bennett) to inquire into the excess of thing, sound and player that constitutes a musical instrument.
My paper will concentrate on a single solo album: Was da ist (1994) by the German double bassist Peter Kowald. Kowald’s playing techniques shatter the conventional expectations of how a bass can sound, but at the same time force us to re-imagine the material breaking point of musical tonality as the paradoxical starting point of improvisation and composition.
The paper will incorporate a discussion of an unpublished aphorism on the double bass by Theodor Adorno written in the wake of his famous 1936 essay “On Jazz.” Adorno’s aphorism suggests that the musical redemption of jazz might only be sought in the reversal of its “canned improvisation” against a backdrop of “monotonous basso continuo.” He continues, “Indeed, if jazz is capable of achieving anything musically new, it would lie in its potential to liberate above all the bass from the expressionlessness [Ausdruckslosigkeit] of rhythm, and surely not in the bleating vibrato of trumpets and saxophones.”[1]
[1] In 1937, during a stay in England, Adorno did write a series of aphorisms that became known as the “Oxford Additions” to his famous jazz essay. The aphorism I quote from here, however, is my own invention. - Jonathan Scott Lee — "Decomposition and Simultaneity: New Prospects for an Old Avant-Garde"Decomposition and SimultaneityThis presentation takes its origin from Andrew Culp’s recent remark that ours is an age “of obligatory positivity, distributed management, and stifling transparency” (Dark Deleuze [2016]). Believing that the only aesthetic/political response to such an age involves a questioning of all the binaries that might be generated around the concepts of use and intelligibility, I argue that there is still much to learn from the aesthetic politics of the 1950s and 1960s. To this end, I put into dialogue the situationist platform of Guy Debord (1931-1994) and the poetic, musical, and performance practices of Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004). Debord’s analysis of bourgeois culture in terms of decomposition leads him to call for a new “freedom in the employment of time, “ a freedom made possible only through “the construction of situations” (“Theses on Cultural Revolution” [1958]). Elaborating the temporal structures manifested in Debord’s own aesthetic practice, I suggest that these modes of temporality are effectively realized in Mac Low’s simultaneities, performance events that model and exemplify what Mac Low describes as “a free anarchist society” (“The Poetics of Chance and the Politics of Simultaneous Spontaneity, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus” [1975]). With the passage of historical time, the ideologies governing these avant-garde strategies—Debord’s Lukács-inflected Marxism, Mac Low’s Taoist-inflected Zen Buddhism—fade in importance, while their actual political/aesthetic practices remain exemplary and relevant to our own age. Freed from the dual constraints of intellectual coherence and political utility, these icons of a nearly lost avant-garde can be seen to offer us paths towards thoughtful experience that bypass recuperation by late capitalism.
- Ryan Platt — "Alvin Lucier and Jacob Kierkegaard’s Resonant Sense of the Past"Resonant Sense of the PastAccording to its conventional definition, communication proceeds from origin to destination in a continuous, linear trajectory. Many artists disrupt this pattern with noise, which functions as material excess foreign to meaning— namely, nonsense. Rather than such disruption, this paper examines music and installations that interfere with communication by using continual motion to defer the arrival of transmitted meaning, which produces an oddly uneventful temporality. This temporality emerges in artists’ affinity for walking, whose non-linear motion slows the pace of modern life and reveals neglected dimensions of past and present experience. Admittedly, since audiowalks and soundscapes often depend on pastoral conceptions of the past, it is necessary to consider a corrective example: Jacob Kirkegaard’s sonic portraits of two uninhabitable places, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Kirkegaard’s installations contemplate how past losses incurred in these catastrophes invisibly persist in the present. To create this strange sense of the past’s enduring presence, Kirkegaard uses techniques from Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room. Like Lucier, he recorded recordings of spaces’ resonant frequencies, which permit sound to continuously rebound, thereby deferring its arrival at a meaningful destination and suspending teleological temporality. Furthermore, this process of recording recordings foregrounds the material interval that mediates sound. As such, Lucier and Kierkegaard’s sounds neither make sense as meaningful communication nor produce disruptive nonsense. As an alternative, I invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of sense (sens) as meaning that is never fully present and cannot be heard or understood, except by listening to sound’s perpetual passage, which Nancy names resonance.
1:45 – 2:30 — Lunch, Closing Remarks