London Calling

I'm off on the plane tomorrow.

"Heathrow is a mess," or so I hear.

"Expect delays."

"Leave the shampoo at home," says one collaborator.

"Toothpaste too," says another.

But what if I am I desperate for a tooth brushing while in flight? I guess I could squeeze some into a Teflon coated condom, ingest it, like a mule transporting contraband, bring it on board in my gut, and if I'm lucky, get it out of my system just in time to clean my teeth and get that fake airplane food taste out of my mouth.

"Expect delays."

No matter what, even with a 48 hour delay, I''ll do all I can to embody the ever elusive author function in action:

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts.

- Alexander Trocchi

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Metadata: literature, London, Heathrow, life, toothpaste

Elemental

According to the poet-cum-alchemist:

Precious minerals form her polished eyes,
and in her strange symbolic nature where
angel and sphinx unite, where diamond

gold, and steel dissolve into one light,
shines forever, useless as a star,
the sterile woman's icy majesty.

Where does Baudelaire find these words while concocting his Flowers of Evil?

The historical record will show a meadow of potential allegories to pick from.

But once picked, and placed in a flower book, what life left in the dried remembrance of things past?

Still, the meadow seduces the alchemist's eye.

In the beginning, there is nothing if not an endless supply of material.

But the meadow is not full of allegories after all.

Only allegorithms, for even the meadow is nothing but warped code leading you down an uncertain alley.

Do you go down it anyway? Just for the experience? But you already know the outcome:

Like both the desert and the desert sky
insensible to human suffering,
and like the ocean's endless labyrinth
she shows her body with indifference.

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Metadata: literature, art, poetry, alchemy

In Transit

"All over the globe, revolutionary praxis, like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative into positive, lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of rebellion to ink in the map of its triumph." - Raoul Vaneigem

ZeroOne

(Updates Below)

OK, so I'll be going to ISEA 2006 after all. The New York Times just wrote about it today:

“Of course we react to a painting when we look at it, but it can’t react back,” said Steve Dietz, the director of ZeroOne. “A lot of digital media, though, is about a kind of feedback loop. The piece behaves differently according to different inputs.”

Steve Dietz has been a great proponent of new media art for close to a decade now. His work at the Walker Arts Center's Gallery 9 was instrumental in raising the international visibility of early Internet art. But why, after all of these years and hard work, and the mainstreaming of digital art, do we still read this in the Times article:

When it comes to the question of whether all of this activity, not to mention the inevitable technical challenges, is better suited for a science fair than an art exhibition, the ZeroOne participants land squarely on the side of art.

I thought we were already beyond that. No?

The ZeroOne participants I know enjoy art and lifestyle practices that are indistinguishable from each other. This is what really makes new media and network artists so hard to pin down. They are nomadic, performative, techno-geekish, underground, overground, academic-theoretical, comedic, activist, international, and generally on fire with the potential to shake up status quo consumer culture the way the lefty blogosphere is starting to shake up democratic politics in America.

Unfortunately, I'll only be able to catch a few days of the action. For example, since I'll be going to London at the end of this week, I'll be missing this and this.

My bad.

UPDATE: The last link above and previous posts pointing to the VJ remix of Tulse Luper by Peter Greenaway seem to have been premature. I cannot find his gig anywhere on the ZeroOne site, although in its place on Friday night appears to be Mike Figgis' remix of Time Code which I blogged in relation to Greenaway, FILMTEXT, and interactive cinema here. I'm glad I'm not the only one remixing source material from over five years ago :)

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Metadata: art, media