Mind Time (Traveling Form)

When considering time-travel, I take into account active memory tripping. And then there's always the cognitive neuroscientific angle:

“What we have learned over the years is that what you get out of memory depends on how you cue memory. If you have the perfect cue, you can remember things that you had no idea were floating around in your head,” Norman said. “Our method gives us some ability to see what cues participants are using, which in turn gives us some ability to predict what participants will recall. We are hopeful that, in the long run, this kind of work will help psychologists develop better theories of how people strategically cue memory, and also will suggest ways of making these cues more effective.”

Cue Libet. Benjamin Libet, that is. Libet, whose research investigates what he calls Mind Time or The Temporal Factor in Consciousness, has conducted experimental studies that show how we all engage in a backward referral of subjective time so that we feel like we are living in the present when in reality, we are always living in the past. New media experiments in hyperreality try to catch up with the present through spontaneity and interactivity, where the artist simultaneously and continuously fuses with their readiness potential (to become a present-tense medium).

But I am not interested in making an argument or developing a speculative theory about Melting Plastic Fantastic Time.

Instead, I prefer to time-trip, capturing, processing, and stylizing the data of my experience as I go. The traces I leave behind, well, those are my Form.

Robert Creeley: "Form is never more than an extension of content."

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Metadata: literature, art, poetry, neuroscience, Libet, time travel

Instantaneous Structuring

Before there was The Blair Witch Project, jerky-camera TV sitcoms like The Office, and yes, video blogs, there were the improvisational in-camera edits and "single frame filming" diaries of Jonas Mekas:

"I am sick and tired of the guardians of Cinema Art who accuse the new film-maker of shaky camera work and bad technique. In like manner, they accuse the modern composer, the modern sculptor, the modern painter of sloppiness and poor technique. They are hopeless. I would rather spend my time in heralding the new." (from his 1962 essay "Notes on the New American Cinema," in a section called "A Note on the 'Shaky Camera'")

And now, at age 83, there's this, Jonas' latest heralding of the new (tip of the hit to Cuechamp).

After viewing Jonas' frontline video blog entry, I think to myself: Moving visual art as an exercise in instantaneous structuring. That's my next project (2007-2008).

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Metadata: art, film, Mekas

911 (Unknown Caller I.D.)

Zizek:

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld (The Tragicomic Actor):

The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

There are also things we don't know we know. It's what we sometimes call instinct. The commercial captains of consciousness continually do whatever is necessary to kill our human instinct. They do this by bombarding us with their rhetoric of mass distraction, so that we unknowingly obliterate any chance of generating what we intuitively know to be creatively human. To lose your creative instinct is to no longer know what you don't know you know.

It doesn't take a genius to see how large masses of citizens in the US are having their Reality TV minds manipulated by the ruling elite's PR engineers.

They don't call these "reality" shows Big Brother, Fear Factor, and Survivor, for nothing.

Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Metadata: 911, politics, September 11, power, media