Feeling the Frequencies (The Tactics of Sensuous Computing)

Roberta says this at Rhizome:

Perhaps our inclination to invent characters, personas, and agents is merely a means to find ourselves; a way of affirming what we do not know about the universe so as to bridge and locate ourselves in what is still mysterious.

We as a species continue to invent ways of conversing and symbiotically merging with virtual presences who, more and more, infiltrate our reality. Artists insist on tactical strategies that target activism as a means of converting defiled reality.

Not that we make so-called reality pretty and pure again, but more like when we go back to the face of a mountain that has suffered immensely from strip mining, and actively reclaim it and make it a viable scenic resource for our senses.

It's not a return to Nature per se. It's more like turning on to the cycles-in-sync with one another. Sensuous computing with a political agenda aimed at revitalizing what is mysterious in human culture and that still has resonance, as if we could still feel the frequencies charging our bodies to the utmost possible degree.

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Metadata: art, persona, Breitmore

Myspace, My Timetravel

When considering time-travel, I take into account active memory tripping. And then there's always the cognitive neuroscientific angle (sampled from a recent blog):

“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.”

For Proust, in what we still call A Remembrance of Things Past, the trigger was a madeleine:

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

For others, the unexpected trigger might be a song by the Beach Boys, the dark voice of a stranger breathing heavily on the other end of the phone line, the smell of lavender, an anonymous person walking by whose body type matches that of the one who last made your own body stiffen in erotic joy, and so on.

Spend a few weeks jotting down the "things" that trigger various memories and then use that list as a prompt for a new work, one that will attract new experiences, which will then feed into future memories triggered by the debris of neurotica your stormy life continues to leave behind.

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Metadata: literature, art, neuroscience, memory, time travel

Other Lives (The Babelfish Remix)

My last blog entry, from English to French and back to English, using Babelfish:

(Now UPDATED with bolds and strikes).

To each being, several other lives were due. - Rimbaud

Today I am a novelist, a blogger, a flanor, and a post-Situationist fluxy "mark on the drift."

Yesterday I was a playing artist of the vocals of wire for a mix-band impromptue called Electronique Writing (we since then broke to the top of).

The day before I was a historian of sentimental art ardently wishing the good old women days of art Net when nobody knew what they did and not never, not in million years, to consider to move in New York "to find a gallery."

The day before I was a numerical photographer and a mobilophone "scenario writer" the new jets of tightening of the data for a forthcoming film project that I always imagine (council: if all is well, it will finish to the top of the becoming part two of my series "of foreign film" of work device-length which is modelled after what we had the practice to call the film but which smells now more as one narrative environment of new media which integrates aspects of increased cinema, art Net, of blogging mobile, and of electronic literature within its conceptual framework).

The day before I was a glutton, eating two breakfasts (a quinoa-corn bowl is scaled with grapes, raspberries, cutters, mango, banana, plums, bilberries, blackberries, figs, grapes dry, dates, and milk of soya [ all the organic/bio, naturally ] and a bagel enormous of oil poppy seed with salmon cheese and molten smoked), two lunches (new ginger of age and pastes of vegetable followed of the couscous African vegetarian of north with many side dishes [ spiced ]), a snack of midday (salad nicoise), one organics of nut, fresh cheese a round of goat, two mangos, one of lawyers and half, wafer of the sesame-almond tofu, two French red wine bottles, a rare beer of Belgium made by the organic monks (yes, the monks of Trappist themselves are also organic!), five cups of espresso, two bars of chocolate dark bitter additional vénézuélien of 76%, really two breads of bread organic of nut (with the hummus and the pesto draw aside liberally placed on their slightly roasted crusty textures), cup of true chocolate hot (not the "premixing sprinkled to the bottom the usual variety with milk", but of dark chocolate basically melted with a little milk mixed inside so that it pours), a double cup of crême frozen made house (dresses lower cup made with pinions, cup higher made with figs which turns the frozen crême a luminous luminous red of kind you felt as if you suck the velvet blood out of the cone-victim passivates), a half of a melon, a smoothie of Zen (fishing, mango, banana, milk of soya), three ratatouille portions been useful with a side dish of rocket (arugula) with fresh cherry tomatos and cheese slightly cut in sections and very old of Parmegian, a treated black olive bowl soaking in an olive oil swimming pool scented with a council with rosemary and thyme, five baklavas of pistachio, and much of other things which I cannot remember, particularly after the unexpected blow of required me drink as manner of obtaining the surplus wishing ardently about the good old women days of the art Net (which is itself to wish ardently factitious, since the good old women days were never as good as some would make you believe, and moreover, twelve years really this old man is?). Tomorrow I will be a raising producer of the funds for still another project which will be a multi-media documentation of various Person numerical of which the identities liquidate allow them to create internetworked art-making the machine out of the falls of behind left of data on the other world Web, that which has its secret protocols, handshakes, codes, and missing bonds. During one day the public password for this underground WWW will be finally indicated so that each one, even the consuming masses, can test the final pleasure a drift to become the kind "of currency of phase" this of the dreams of turns in actions being allowed of this fact of destroying the replicant agenda of the all-dominant media of corporation.

(And soon, once again, I will be a professor, like always, narrativizing these Person and experiments liquidate by the intermediary of a line changing never imaginary skewerable filters which I particularly prepare for the occasion [of teaching ].)

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Metadata: net art, literature, writing, food, art, music, life (a remix)