An incredible and innovative way to use sound from an algorythm called "cetera". Make sure to use your headphones and enjoy the trip.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Mulholland Drive Club Silencio
Splitting sound from image to create uneasiness. Where does the voice come from? Somewhere between the body and the soul, one cannot place it. Illusion of sound.
"It's all recorded. No hay banda. It's all a tape". Why do we forget the words of the M.C.? Why is it such a shock when she falls to the ground if he warned us in advance? Because we want to believe the illusion perhaps?
Friday, January 25, 2008
BBC UNIVERSOS PARALELOS
A world of possibilities.. Was our universe created from a BIG BANG between two universes clashing, like two hands clapping?
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
“( …) Em vez da eternidade, a história; em vez do determinismo, a imprevisibilidade; em vez do mecanicismo, a interpenetração, a espontaneidade e a auto-organização; em vez da reversibilidade, a irreversibilidade e a evolução; em vez da ordem, a desordem; em vez da necessidade, a criatividade e o acidente.”
O Espaço e o Tempo - Intraligações, Paulo Nuno Ribeiro, Ed. Fim de Século, Lisboa,1998.
O Espaço e o Tempo - Intraligações, Paulo Nuno Ribeiro, Ed. Fim de Século, Lisboa,1998.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Politics of time, politics of space
Going back to things and speaking positively of the phantom of the public, is this not, in the end, terribly reactionary? It depends on what we mean by progressive. Imagine that you have the responsibility of assembling together a set of disorderly voices, contradictory interests and virulent claims. Then imagine you are miraculously offered a chance, just at the time when you despair of accommodating so many dissenting parties, to get rid of most of them. Would you not embrace such a solution as a gift from heaven?
This is exactly what happened when the contradictory interests of people could be differentiated by using the following shibboleth: "Are they progressive or reactionary? Enlightened or archaic? In the vanguard or in the rearguard?" Dissenting voices were still there, but most of them represented backward, obscurantist or regressive trends. The cleansing march of progress was going to render them passé. You could safely forget two thirds of them and so your task of assembling them was simplified by the same amount.
In the remaining third, not everything had to be taken into account either since most of the positions were soon made obsolete by the passage of time. Among the contemporary parties to the dispute, progressive minds had to take into consideration only those few seen as the harbingers of the future to come. So, through the magical ordering power of progress, politics was a cinch since ninety percent of the contradictory passions had been spirited away, left to linger in the limbo of irrationality. By ignoring most of the dissenters, you could reach a solution that would satisfy everyone, namely those who made up the liberal or revolutionary avant-garde. In this way, the arrow of time could safely thrust forward.
Philosophers define time as a "series of successions" and space as a "series of simultaneities." Undoubtedly, while we filed away everything under the power of progress, we lived in the time of succession. Kronos would eat away all that was archaic and irrational in his own progeny, sparing only those predestined for a radiant future.
But through a twist of history that neither reformists nor revolutionaries ever anticipated, Kronos has suddenly lost his voracious appetite. Strangely enough, we have changed time so completely that we have shifted from the time of Time to the time of Simultaneity. Nothing, it seems, accepts to simply reside in the past, and no one feels intimidated any more by the adjectives "irrational," "backward" or "archaic." Time, the bygone time of cataclysmic substitution, has suddenly become something that neither the Left nor the Right seems to have been fully prepared to encounter: a monstrous time, the time of cohabitation. Everything has become contemporary.
The question is no longer: "Are you going to disappear soon? Are you the telltale sign of something new coming to replace everything else? Is this the seventh seal of the Book of Apocalypse that you are now breaking?" An entirely new set of questions has now emerged: "Can we cohabitate with you? Is there a way for all of us to survive together while none of our contradictory claims, interests, and passions can be eliminated?" Revolutionary time, the great Simplificator, has been replaced by cohabitation time, the great Complicator. In other words, space has replaced time as the main ordering principle.
It's fair to say that the reflexes of politicians, the passions of militants, the customs of citizens, their ways to be indignant, the rhetoric of their claims, the ecology of their interests, are not the same in the time of Time and in the time of Space. No one seems prepared to ask: What should now be simultaneously present?
How different, for instance, to deal with religion if you wait for its slow disappearance in the faraway land of fairies, or if it explodes under your very eyes as what makes people live and die now —now and also tomorrow. What a difference it makes if nature, instead of a huge reservoir of forces and a bottomless repository of waste, turns suddenly into something that interrupts any progression: something to which you cannot appeal and can't get rid of. "Comment s'en débarrasser?" Ionesco asked during the "Glorious Thirties". It has now become the worry, the Sorge, the souci of almost everyone in all languages. We can get rid of nothing and no one. Ecology has probably ruined forever the time of Succession and has ushered us into the time of Space. Yes, everything is contemporary. Progress and succession, revolution and substitution, neither are part of our operating system any longer.
And yet where is the alternative OS? Who is busy writing its lines of code? We sort of knew how to order things in time, but we have no idea of the space in which to collect ourselves. We have yet to channel new political passions into new habits of thought, new rhetoric, new ways of being interested, indignant, mobilized, and pacified. Whenever we are faced with an issue, the old habits still linger and the voice of progress still shouts: "Don't worry, all of that will soon disappear, they're too archaic and irrational." While the new voice can only whisper: "You have to cohabit even with those monsters, because don't indulge yourself in the naive belief that it will soon fade away; space is the series of simultaneities, all of that has to be taken into account at once."
This does not mean that there is no progress in the end, or that no arrow of time can be thrust forward. It means that we slowly proceed from a very simple-minded form of cohabitation —such as the evolutionary or revolutionary ones— to a much fuller one, where more and more elements are taken into account. There is progress but it goes from a mere juxtaposition to an intertwined form of cohabitation: How many contemporary elements can you build side by side, generating the series of simultaneity? Communism might have been wrong not in the quest for the community, but in the hasty way it imagined what is the Common World to be shared.
[Introduction to the catalogue of Making Things Public– Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press 2005, edited by Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel]
This is exactly what happened when the contradictory interests of people could be differentiated by using the following shibboleth: "Are they progressive or reactionary? Enlightened or archaic? In the vanguard or in the rearguard?" Dissenting voices were still there, but most of them represented backward, obscurantist or regressive trends. The cleansing march of progress was going to render them passé. You could safely forget two thirds of them and so your task of assembling them was simplified by the same amount.
In the remaining third, not everything had to be taken into account either since most of the positions were soon made obsolete by the passage of time. Among the contemporary parties to the dispute, progressive minds had to take into consideration only those few seen as the harbingers of the future to come. So, through the magical ordering power of progress, politics was a cinch since ninety percent of the contradictory passions had been spirited away, left to linger in the limbo of irrationality. By ignoring most of the dissenters, you could reach a solution that would satisfy everyone, namely those who made up the liberal or revolutionary avant-garde. In this way, the arrow of time could safely thrust forward.
Philosophers define time as a "series of successions" and space as a "series of simultaneities." Undoubtedly, while we filed away everything under the power of progress, we lived in the time of succession. Kronos would eat away all that was archaic and irrational in his own progeny, sparing only those predestined for a radiant future.
But through a twist of history that neither reformists nor revolutionaries ever anticipated, Kronos has suddenly lost his voracious appetite. Strangely enough, we have changed time so completely that we have shifted from the time of Time to the time of Simultaneity. Nothing, it seems, accepts to simply reside in the past, and no one feels intimidated any more by the adjectives "irrational," "backward" or "archaic." Time, the bygone time of cataclysmic substitution, has suddenly become something that neither the Left nor the Right seems to have been fully prepared to encounter: a monstrous time, the time of cohabitation. Everything has become contemporary.
The question is no longer: "Are you going to disappear soon? Are you the telltale sign of something new coming to replace everything else? Is this the seventh seal of the Book of Apocalypse that you are now breaking?" An entirely new set of questions has now emerged: "Can we cohabitate with you? Is there a way for all of us to survive together while none of our contradictory claims, interests, and passions can be eliminated?" Revolutionary time, the great Simplificator, has been replaced by cohabitation time, the great Complicator. In other words, space has replaced time as the main ordering principle.
It's fair to say that the reflexes of politicians, the passions of militants, the customs of citizens, their ways to be indignant, the rhetoric of their claims, the ecology of their interests, are not the same in the time of Time and in the time of Space. No one seems prepared to ask: What should now be simultaneously present?
How different, for instance, to deal with religion if you wait for its slow disappearance in the faraway land of fairies, or if it explodes under your very eyes as what makes people live and die now —now and also tomorrow. What a difference it makes if nature, instead of a huge reservoir of forces and a bottomless repository of waste, turns suddenly into something that interrupts any progression: something to which you cannot appeal and can't get rid of. "Comment s'en débarrasser?" Ionesco asked during the "Glorious Thirties". It has now become the worry, the Sorge, the souci of almost everyone in all languages. We can get rid of nothing and no one. Ecology has probably ruined forever the time of Succession and has ushered us into the time of Space. Yes, everything is contemporary. Progress and succession, revolution and substitution, neither are part of our operating system any longer.
And yet where is the alternative OS? Who is busy writing its lines of code? We sort of knew how to order things in time, but we have no idea of the space in which to collect ourselves. We have yet to channel new political passions into new habits of thought, new rhetoric, new ways of being interested, indignant, mobilized, and pacified. Whenever we are faced with an issue, the old habits still linger and the voice of progress still shouts: "Don't worry, all of that will soon disappear, they're too archaic and irrational." While the new voice can only whisper: "You have to cohabit even with those monsters, because don't indulge yourself in the naive belief that it will soon fade away; space is the series of simultaneities, all of that has to be taken into account at once."
This does not mean that there is no progress in the end, or that no arrow of time can be thrust forward. It means that we slowly proceed from a very simple-minded form of cohabitation —such as the evolutionary or revolutionary ones— to a much fuller one, where more and more elements are taken into account. There is progress but it goes from a mere juxtaposition to an intertwined form of cohabitation: How many contemporary elements can you build side by side, generating the series of simultaneity? Communism might have been wrong not in the quest for the community, but in the hasty way it imagined what is the Common World to be shared.
[Introduction to the catalogue of Making Things Public– Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press 2005, edited by Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel]
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Pioneer Plaque
Pioneer Plaque
The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earthlings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
After NASA had received criticism over the nudity on the Pioneer plaque (line drawings of a naked man and woman), the agency chose not to allow Sagan and his colleagues to include a photograph of a nude man and a nude, pregnant woman on the record. Instead, only a silhouette of the couple was included.
Here is an excerpt of President Carter's official statement placed on the Voyager spacecraft for its trip outside our solar system, June 16, 1977:
"We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."
The 115 images are encoded in analogue form. The remainder of the record is audio, designed to be played at 16⅔ revolutions per minute. It contains spoken greetings beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a spoken Chinese dialect.
Make the world last twenty minutes
Duration: 21 minutes
Props: a world and a watch
Effect: terrifying and reassuring
The past clings on. It is present in the smallest actions. It coils itself around our thoughts, even in those that seem unconcerned with it. The future also ceaselessly sustains the smallest of our projects. It accompanies our slightest expectation.
What would happen if we tried to rid ourselves – in a spirit of illusion of play – of these terrible constraints? Imagine therefore, as far as it is possible to do so, that the past never happened and the future does not exist. Let us believe that the world, this world, lasts only twenty minutes. It was created from nothing, just an instant ago, as it is, and us with it. One minute earlier, it did not exist. Everything the world currently contains by way of relics, ancient ruins, libraries, monuments, archives, distant or recent memories – the whole lot – has just materialized, at the same instant. The archives are there all right, as are the witnesses to a past, but the past they speak of never existed – until a moment ago.
This world – infinite, diverse, multiple – has a life expectancy of exactly twenty minutes. Beyond which time it will disappear completely and definitively. Not in some gigantic conflagration, or cosmic explosion. Not in some terrific fire or furnace. Just a brusque extinction. Like a soap-bubble bursting, or a light going out.
Make yourself at home in this twenty-minute world. Remark the extent to which it is, in a sense, identical to our own: same dimensions, same skies. No object is any different. The same people are doing the same things. And yet: it is not at all the same universe. A world which lacks the depth of a real past and the perspective of a viable future may certainly seem completely identical, but it still differs radically from our own, due to this time limit. Before this ephemeral universe has completely disappeared, try hard to understand – you who were under the illusion that another reality existed and will exist – to what extent your thought process is habitually different from this existence which is even now counting down. The more you experience this contrast and this distance, the more you will feel the importance, for us, of an immemorial past and a distant future.
As the fatal twenty minutes approaches its term, you should feel, furtively, the dumb terror that everything will, effectively, disappear.
Most likely this will not happen. You can then emerge, at the twenty-first minute, from this objectless terror. Now concentrate on savouring your relief that the world goes on.
Later you might feel, like an after-taste, a secret disappointment that nothing was obliterated.
Bad loser…
Props: a world and a watch
Effect: terrifying and reassuring
The past clings on. It is present in the smallest actions. It coils itself around our thoughts, even in those that seem unconcerned with it. The future also ceaselessly sustains the smallest of our projects. It accompanies our slightest expectation.
What would happen if we tried to rid ourselves – in a spirit of illusion of play – of these terrible constraints? Imagine therefore, as far as it is possible to do so, that the past never happened and the future does not exist. Let us believe that the world, this world, lasts only twenty minutes. It was created from nothing, just an instant ago, as it is, and us with it. One minute earlier, it did not exist. Everything the world currently contains by way of relics, ancient ruins, libraries, monuments, archives, distant or recent memories – the whole lot – has just materialized, at the same instant. The archives are there all right, as are the witnesses to a past, but the past they speak of never existed – until a moment ago.
This world – infinite, diverse, multiple – has a life expectancy of exactly twenty minutes. Beyond which time it will disappear completely and definitively. Not in some gigantic conflagration, or cosmic explosion. Not in some terrific fire or furnace. Just a brusque extinction. Like a soap-bubble bursting, or a light going out.
Make yourself at home in this twenty-minute world. Remark the extent to which it is, in a sense, identical to our own: same dimensions, same skies. No object is any different. The same people are doing the same things. And yet: it is not at all the same universe. A world which lacks the depth of a real past and the perspective of a viable future may certainly seem completely identical, but it still differs radically from our own, due to this time limit. Before this ephemeral universe has completely disappeared, try hard to understand – you who were under the illusion that another reality existed and will exist – to what extent your thought process is habitually different from this existence which is even now counting down. The more you experience this contrast and this distance, the more you will feel the importance, for us, of an immemorial past and a distant future.
As the fatal twenty minutes approaches its term, you should feel, furtively, the dumb terror that everything will, effectively, disappear.
Most likely this will not happen. You can then emerge, at the twenty-first minute, from this objectless terror. Now concentrate on savouring your relief that the world goes on.
Later you might feel, like an after-taste, a secret disappointment that nothing was obliterated.
Bad loser…
101 experiments in the philosophy of everyday life
1. Call yourself
2. Empty a word of its meaning
3. Look in vain for 'I'
4. Make the world last twenty minutes
5. See the stars below you
6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas
7. Lose something and not know what
8. Recall where you were this morning
9. Hurt yourself briefly
10. Feel eternal
11. Telephone at random
12. Rediscover your room after a journey
13. Drink while urinating
14. Make a wall between your hands
15. Walk in the dark
16. Dream of all the places in the world
17. Peel an apple in your head
18. Visualize a pile of human organs
19. Imagine yourself high up
20. Imagine your imminent death
21. Try to measure existence
22. Counting to a thousand
23. Dread the arrival of the bus
24. Run in a graveyard
25. Play the fool
26. Watch a woman at her window
27. Invent lives for yourself
28. Look at people from a moving car
29. Follow the movement of ants
30. Eat a nameless substance
31. Watch dust in the sun
32. Resist tiredness
33. Overeat
34. Play the animal
35. Contemplate a dead bird
36. Come across a childhood toy
37. Wait while doing nothing
38. Try not to think
39. Go to the hairdresser
40. Shower with your eyes closed
41. Sleep on your front in the sun
42. Go to the circus
43. Try on clothes
44. Calligraphize
45. Light a fire in the hearth
46. Be aware of yourself speaking
47. Weep at the cinema
48. Meet up with friends after several years
49. Browse at the bookseller's
50. Become music
51. Pull out a hair
52. Walk in an imaginary forest
53. Demonstrate on your own
54. Stay in the hammock
55. Invent headlines
56. Listen to short-wave radio
57. Turn off the sound on the TV
58. Rediscover a childhood scene that seemed larger
59. Get used to eating something you don't like
60. Fast for a while
61. Rant for ten minutes
62. Drive through a forest
63. Give without thinking about it
64. Look for a blue food
65. Become a saint or sinner
66. Recover lost memories
67. Watch someone sleeping
68. Work on a holiday
69. Consider humanity to be an error
70. Inhabit the planet of small gestures
71. Disconnect the phone
72. Smile at a stranger
73. Enter the space of a painting
74. Leave the cinema in daytime
75. Plunge into cold water
76. Seek out immutable landscapes
77. Listen to a recording of your voice
78. Tell a stranger she is beautifull
79. Believe in the existence of a smell
80. Wake up without knowing where
81. Descend an interminable staircase
82. Swallow your emotion
83. Fix the ephemeral
84. Decorate a room
85. Laugh at an idea
86. Vanish at a pavement café
87. Row on a lake
88. Prowl at night
89. Become attached to an object
90. Sing the praises of Father Christmas
91. Play with a child
92. Encounter pure chance
93. Recite the telephone directory on your knees
94. Think about what other people are doing
95. Practise make-believe everywhere
96. Kill people in your head
97. Take the tube without going anywhere
98. Remove your watch
99. Put up with a chatterbox
100. Clear up after the party
101. Find the infinitesimal caress
2. Empty a word of its meaning
3. Look in vain for 'I'
4. Make the world last twenty minutes
5. See the stars below you
6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas
7. Lose something and not know what
8. Recall where you were this morning
9. Hurt yourself briefly
10. Feel eternal
11. Telephone at random
12. Rediscover your room after a journey
13. Drink while urinating
14. Make a wall between your hands
15. Walk in the dark
16. Dream of all the places in the world
17. Peel an apple in your head
18. Visualize a pile of human organs
19. Imagine yourself high up
20. Imagine your imminent death
21. Try to measure existence
22. Counting to a thousand
23. Dread the arrival of the bus
24. Run in a graveyard
25. Play the fool
26. Watch a woman at her window
27. Invent lives for yourself
28. Look at people from a moving car
29. Follow the movement of ants
30. Eat a nameless substance
31. Watch dust in the sun
32. Resist tiredness
33. Overeat
34. Play the animal
35. Contemplate a dead bird
36. Come across a childhood toy
37. Wait while doing nothing
38. Try not to think
39. Go to the hairdresser
40. Shower with your eyes closed
41. Sleep on your front in the sun
42. Go to the circus
43. Try on clothes
44. Calligraphize
45. Light a fire in the hearth
46. Be aware of yourself speaking
47. Weep at the cinema
48. Meet up with friends after several years
49. Browse at the bookseller's
50. Become music
51. Pull out a hair
52. Walk in an imaginary forest
53. Demonstrate on your own
54. Stay in the hammock
55. Invent headlines
56. Listen to short-wave radio
57. Turn off the sound on the TV
58. Rediscover a childhood scene that seemed larger
59. Get used to eating something you don't like
60. Fast for a while
61. Rant for ten minutes
62. Drive through a forest
63. Give without thinking about it
64. Look for a blue food
65. Become a saint or sinner
66. Recover lost memories
67. Watch someone sleeping
68. Work on a holiday
69. Consider humanity to be an error
70. Inhabit the planet of small gestures
71. Disconnect the phone
72. Smile at a stranger
73. Enter the space of a painting
74. Leave the cinema in daytime
75. Plunge into cold water
76. Seek out immutable landscapes
77. Listen to a recording of your voice
78. Tell a stranger she is beautifull
79. Believe in the existence of a smell
80. Wake up without knowing where
81. Descend an interminable staircase
82. Swallow your emotion
83. Fix the ephemeral
84. Decorate a room
85. Laugh at an idea
86. Vanish at a pavement café
87. Row on a lake
88. Prowl at night
89. Become attached to an object
90. Sing the praises of Father Christmas
91. Play with a child
92. Encounter pure chance
93. Recite the telephone directory on your knees
94. Think about what other people are doing
95. Practise make-believe everywhere
96. Kill people in your head
97. Take the tube without going anywhere
98. Remove your watch
99. Put up with a chatterbox
100. Clear up after the party
101. Find the infinitesimal caress
"Cada tarefa descrita nas páginas que se seguem deve ser realizada correctamente. É possível compará-las, modificá-las, e inventar outras. Mas devemo-nos aplicar se queremos sentir a desestabilização da realidade proposta pelas tarefas. Foi sempre esta a aspiração desde primórdios da filosofia: uma discrepância sistemática, um passo ao lado, uma mudança de ponto de vista – por muito discreta que seja inicialmente – podem inaugurar uma paisagem inteiramente nova. Se o entretenimento provar ser útil, é por oferecer pontos de partida tão distintos. Deliberadamente estranhos. Talvez até dementes. Pondo em causa as nossas certezas, a nossa identidade, a estabilidade do mundo exterior, e até o significado das palavras. Resultados e conclusões serão diferentes para cada pessoa."
Droit, Roger- Paul, 101 experiments In The Philosophy of everyday life
Droit, Roger- Paul, 101 experiments In The Philosophy of everyday life
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
