Empiricism, the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience, is beautiful for all the swirls and loops we might find ourselves in when we remember what empiricists often forget: that all knowledge produced from sense experience is not produced as knowledge, but as bits and pieces of the world, scribbled on paper, typed up in books, depicted in graphs and hopefully imagined as more than just dry pulp and ink collecting dust in the downstairs stacks of the Library of Physics, Chemistry, Biology -- the temples of interpreting The-World-As-It-Is (so long as we get results, so long as we can change the world and twist it into prettier things or, if it is pretty enough at as it is, keep it that way to save it from the destructive forces of human habits, from the lust, the war, the greed, from the laziness of leaving trash behind in the forest, or from the clumsiness of tripping over the yellow tape into an exhibition at the Natural Museum of History, upsetting the order of nature by knocking over the buffalo into the field painted under a blue horizon that stretches west like all blue horizons -- because that is what knowledge is: clear and precise, mapping relations from subjects onto objects or predicates without ambiguity, so long as it is either true or false, as long as it is true, or mostly true, or truly true for the time being, or known to be false but only in the future, which can’t be known because the future can’t be experienced unless enough past experiences have prepared you, or someone you trust (based on past experiences) for a past future experience that you expected and adequately prepared for through a number of predictions that have been confirmed by you, or your colleague or by an author recommended by your colleague but not recommended by yourself to yourself because that would constitute bias and we all know bias isn’t pretty and things that aren’t pretty aren’t suitable partners for the lifelong commitment that is the road to knowledge because truly who would want to marry an idea isn’t pretty, an idea with flaws or imperfections, an idea that might lead you astray, down the wrong path into a dark alley or seedy motel where thoughts are fleeting, impermanent, intense but ephemeral like mere mere feelings -- no, proper knowledge ought to be experienced with more weight and heft, or like a ox dragging your face through the sand, with your foot caught in the yolk until you can see light, the blinding light of true experience, experience experienced as knowledge, a knowledge experience or, a knowledge derived experience that experience derived knowledge is derived and experienced from leading to an experience of an experience as knowledge which is of course known to be a knowledge experience by an unfortunate series of past experiences clearly summarized in the old adage “we know not to touch the pot because we touched the pot and the pot was hot” or was it, “we know not to touch the pot because we’ve touched things before that were hot and we can do the math”, or “we know we can touch the pot, so long as mother isn’t looking, ouch”, or “we know not to touch the pot because we know what a pot is and we know what hot is and we know that anything, including a pot, plus hot plus touching isn’t pretty except in the cases where ‘hot’ means ‘pretty’”, in any case an experience was experienced as an experience, or at least an experience was experienced and somehow experiences can be experienced as they are (as experiences) or as other things they aren’t (i.e. as knowledge) the former being not very helpful, and the latter being far more truthful and therefore helpful which let me assure you insures that the experience was truthful to begin with, not that there are any experiences that aren’t truthful, after-all all experiences are experiences, especially experiences that are clearly and unambiguously experiences because as they say, “how could you experience something unless you experienced it yourself?” or “wouldn’t you like to experience it, first hand?” or “Where's The Experience?”, “Keep going well, keep going Experience.”, “The magic of Experience.”, “Experience, since 1632.”, “Experience, it's a kind of magic.”, “Make Room for the Experience.”, “Get more from life with Experience.”, “Something Special In The Experience.”, “All Experience, All The Time.”, “Passion for Experience.”, “Experience - The Revolution.”, “The Experience that Smiles Back.”, “Put Experience in your pipe and smoke it!”, “Nobody doesn't like Experience.”, “Spreads Straight from the Experience.”, “The Experience man.”, “Can You Tell Experience From Butter?”, “All You Add Is Experience.”, “Experience, where success is at home.”, “Experience - You see this name, you think dirty.”, “Sometimes You Feel Like a Experience, Sometimes You Don't.”, “It's Not All Experience, Experience, Experience, you know.”, “Experience, you can't live without it.”, “One goal, one passion - Experience.”, “We All Adore a Experience.”, “Experience. It's What's For Dinner.”, “All The Experience That's Fit To Print.”, “Experience goes on and on.”, “Only The Crumbliest Flakiest Experience.”, “I'd sleep with Experience.”, “Experience on the outside, tasty on the inside.”, “Everyone wants a Experience.”, “It's A Bit Of A Experience.”, “Time To Make The Experience.”, “My Experience to Yours.”, “The Experience That Refreshes.”, “Experience the time is now.”, “I need Experience right now.”, “We're Serious About Experience.”, “We Build Experience.” ) because any knowledge system doesn’t actually produce “knowledge”, it produces a leap of faith whereby an experience is imagined as something else, as data, as a confirmation, as a piece to a puzzle and no matter how many attempts to reduce experience into something more primitive or fundamental like “sense-data”, the power of producing knowledge emerges from the recombinatory potentials that experiences are open to -- the uncomfortable reality that experience is extendable, moldable, mod-able and essentially caught in up in derivations upon derivations such that empiricism is the theory that all that is derived is derived is derived -- which apart from being circular is far from meaningless: it clues us into a fruitful moment in between knowledge and experience, representation and represented, where an active translation occurs: a function capable of passing functions to functions: a map that draws experiences together, and despite being un-experienceable is mappable and yet, more importantly, remappable in all senses: from cartography to texture mapping: it is routes, paths, topographies, textures, and tones; it is representational, generative, sci-fi fantasy and mercantile; it is playable but bounded and like all video games there are the three aesthetic tensors from which you can build a number of aesthetic vectors, or judgments that define the range of experience in terms of a primitive logic for which the basic tensor units of this coordinate system are: 1) Slooty, 2) Immersive, and 3) Lore-friendly -- categories that ought to keenly map onto the hegelian categories of thesis, antithesis and synthesis -- because it is the aspirational trifecta of slooty, immersive and lore-friendly that all knowledge platforms wish to emulate but can only ever approximate with shitty bootleg resolution, as each category is endlessness mod-able and extendable, reformulating the very base for measuring the vector length of any game or map between experiences such that even the most slooty, immersive and lore-friendly mod will exceed either the slootiness, immersiveness, or lore-friendliness of the experience function itself and thus to formulate any truth requires a laboring balance of the accumualtion of slootiness, immersiveness and lore-friendliness or, in other words, the knowledge product is always already an element of the experience economy whereby verisimilitude is achieved only as a shadowy projection of a much less “easy-mode” combination of a variables x sense-data that naive/n00b empiricism might attempt to formulate in a characteristic poser “beast-mode” empiricism as “the theory that all knowledge is derived from the experience economy,” even though this too fails to address the dynamic tendency of lore-friendliness to reduce to slootiness, while slootiness in turn degnerates parabolically into immersiveness, and immersiveness itself renders into the lore-friendly such that the three, interpreted logically produces a trilemma, but interpreted topologically inculcate an ouroboric Triquetra or, the Trefoil knot, whose operative tension Thomas Aquinas and J.J. Abrams termed Felicity -- the ultimate happiness -- and according to wikipedia, “In 2007, Felicity was one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-Time."[1]” so clearly, ultimate happiness is the slootiest immersiveness in all that is lore-friendly. #blessedbe
Perhaps soddened by messianistic spiritualism or a hiding reverence for fascist aesthetics, the singularist vision of the singularity demonstrably forgets the multiplicity of actors entwined in the search and desire for super intelligence as well as the fundamental tension between generality and specificity at the heart of all digital ventures. The "singularity", if it ever were to happen, would be a fantastic mess. Not single in any sense, but a bubbling seething matted mess of institutions and actors concurrently producing different models of intelligence born out of a competitive environment. There will be many singularities and it is doubtful they will all cohere & resonate into one harmonic “the singularity” as if the future were a meditation bell waiting to ring. No expect instead the sound of piano sliding down a flight of stairs.
This is my little theory hole. A hole to put theory in. Because sometimes bad theory is good theory. You have to articulate the sentence, scratch it out on .txt so it can stare back at you. Otherwise it’s just an idea and ideas are sticky. As a word on a page a thought is more of a block. Something to you build with. Or stick in hole. And even if it’s wrong, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it is pure crap it is important to put it down on a page and look at it. At least so you can be like “no. shut up, you are stupid. stop looking at me.” Some people say their anxieties build up and talking out loud to people releases pent up passions, restoring a sense of equilibrium. I never subscribed to tea kettle psychology. From my perspective, if speaking releases anxieties then speaking forms the habit of having to speak to release anxiety which is to say, it in some sense causes the anxiety. Just a theory. Just a hole.
Affordance is a virtue of a coupling, degenerate and potential. The meaning, not founded on agreence nor the harmony of generals, relates, though by indeterminate determination. A force from within or without is equal. With drawn image, an image withdrawn, by which a couple hardens into one. As if the ship and the dock, linked by chain, wet and salted, rusts and by rusting the segmentation countable (tiresomely so) finds unity in its decomposition. The links linked by manner tangential to purpose. The word too, an image too, journeys with a buzzing sway -- a trajectory inaugurated with unsuspected leaps, chanceworthy -- falls in the gaps completing. But to fall short of a word with a line or two or more does not fall short of the gap by which the question of coupling, coupling answers. And in so filling, the line aligns lines pointing as if to map a map, the buzzing directed and buzzing itself. Through the mark, through the mark, a mark buzzing from the gentle sway.
We might all readily agree that to say the value of a thing is ‘intrinsic’ is foolish, but the sentiment that Value is ‘subjective’ fairs no better, except perhaps, as a crude sign of an incomplete thought. I propose to reconceptualise value as a folded packet in desire space. And that desire is not so much subjective as it is perspective--that is: embodied. Value exists in the transformation of a potentia or capacity into a use, i.e. into the sedimentation or composition of a being. Take anything on your desk --- a pen. The pen is not so much an object as it is a cluster, a galaxy of potentials. A pen affords a vast array of possibilities, from the writing of thoughts in english or french, to sketching, underlying, manifesting distinction -- gestural punctuation of speech -- as a rhetorical example in an argument about potentials… the multiplicity of capacities afforded by a pen is sublime, infinite or at least indeterminate. However, to reduce the inability for any subject to conceive of each and every possibility of its use to the ‘subjectiveness’ of the pen’s value is to smudge over complexity in the affordance structure of the object. The pen affords many things, but not all. Even though the generata of the pen qua potentia are indeterminate, it is not up to the subject to determine the potential of the pen. Nor does the subject govern the actualization of potential -- the subject is the actualizationization of the pen. Thus, the subject does not determine the value of the pen, the subject, being what it may become, merely makes purchase on the affordance of the pen. That the subject uses the pen to write a pithy phrase in english does not constrain the value of the pen to the pithiness of the subject’s compositional aptitudes. The value of the pen emanates from the affordance structure of the pen in its ability to capture a territory in desire space. That is to say first that the value is a vantage---not to be confused with the doctrine that the value of a pen is intrinsic. As the vantage of a vista affords no advantage to the blind, the value of a capacity is only afforded to those agents with a capacity of purchase. A pen holds little purchase to the stars, stars that shine dimly on the earth, a whole of no value to them. Now this is not to confuse value with the notion of subjectivity. Or rather, the notion of subjectivity is not to be taken for granted as an accessory to the illusory. Value is real -- consisting in a mediation between the affordance structure and the becoming of the agent. Namely, value is a mediation that tends to act in the favor of the agent. It is Value if and only if it composes the agent. Clearly, this is not a judgement. Value is not an ascription upon the object by way of the agent. Indeed the very possibility of being able to receive the script of purchaser is a base capacity inherent in the object, made complicit by the subject. It would be better not to speak of object and subject at all, but rather two capacities and their actual coupling, and the effect that coupling has. Value exists in a capacitive coupling that develops towards a threshold. The hammer and the stone both afford the being of being able to bash and pound. It would be wrong to say that the hammer is more valuable than the stone without announcing a metric. Perhaps the hammer is more value as an object fit for mass production, then again , perhaps the stone is more valuable precisely owing to it’s unique quality of formation. To announce value in terms of such intrinsic properties is to forget that the object is not object, but a fuzzy cloud of possibilities. These possibilities only become valuable in relation to an agent. The “subject” does not get to decide the metric, the “subject” is the metric-- the threshold. An agent is not a conscious thing, or a thing with hands and feet. Agent simply is a class of being, namely that of becoming. Not all beings are becomings. Only those beings whose quality of being does not reside in there being a quality of being and whose being is not being not being can be becomings. A becoming is manifestly self-compositional. That of value is that of which is an asset to composition. Fodder only explodes with a match.
There is an impulse in contemporary theory to collapse time into a spatial model of reality Time as another vector or direction -- a mere dimension of movement. History recedes, as another element in the atmosphere But we lose the that has nothing to do with dimensional notions of time. The misfortune or happy accident is not a “rupture” in scale, but a collision That is, a chance meeting -- an obliterating unity. Not a relation, network or an action, but a production or a destruction. A statistical anomaly, slim but real. Real as deafening air compressed against that thin membrane: two lacerations, one in space, one in the body. That is
In geological intimacy
this act of destruction puts the stratified composition of the
screen on display. The crust of the image in a thin plastic film. More
resilient than you might expect, the cover requires considerable force
to rupture. The polarizing film
filters out all light except light traveling at a particular angle.
Under the film is a glass substrate,
etched with microscopic grooves that match the lines of the polarized
filter. Held in place by the fine etching, liquid crystal.
Angular, geometric with the tendency of to
align in a structural fashion, liquid crystal, uncharged, degrades
in formal regularity. Like any clear crystal, the
nematic liquid crystal transmits light. But when an electric current
organizes the fragments of the crystal into a straight line, the
geometric helical
structure of the liquid crystal lost. Transparent electrodes at
either end of the crystalline spiral embrace the nematic liquid.
Charged, the electrodes deform the nematic liquid’s helical structure,
barring the crystal from twisting the crests of entering light by 90
degrees. As with
window blinds, the twisting crystal allows for gradations of light
to pass. Thus the duality of the liquid crystal allows for the
continuous transformation of light from its brightest to its absence.The
strata of the digital image is mirrored with a second glass filter and a
polarizing film, followed by a thick glass plate, resting on top of a
mirror.
Taking a break from Decomposed this month. I'm on the road directing a documentary called Automated Futures. We are following a fiber optic cable from Chicago to New York, stopping off at amplification centers along the way. Inspired by the old City Symphonies we seek to capture the material underpinnings of the contempory network city by documenting the space inbetween Chicago and New York.
Photos of the trip are available at www.af.brianechon.com.
A virtual image has undergone a transduction, whereby the vehicle of affective content is transformed from one substantive format into another but the affective content only allows for absorption as if it were the original, or --rather-- of the original’s order of materiality. What is striking about watching the fractured image recapitulate into darkness is the realization that this parameterization of virtuality is formulaically open. That is, open to recursive embedding. The definition of virtuality as a second order materiality that carries the affective force of the first can be generalized: virtuality is a m+1 order of materiality. Thus, we do not make claim to the ‘originality’ of the first order or the substantive priority of material, nor does it posit an immaterial force ever transcendent, hovering above the material. Rather it makes the claim that the divergence of virtual and material rests in a functional or translational relationship. In other words, any virtuality entails a materiality and that virtuality is the platform for another level of materiality. Thus, materiality becomes an disfinite string of functions relating levels of virtuality to the correspondent materiality. The only stable relation is the hollow recursive field of embedding, itself a material-virtual order.
Cryptohashing (not to be confused with the cryptographic hash function) is an internet phenomena particular to microblogging social networking services. A cryptohash is a hashtag that takes an arbitrary string of characters as the hash name, prefixed by the symbol #. Like common hashtag usage, cryptohashing is a way of grouping and categorizing content. However, unlike common hashtags, crytohashes are chosen for their complexity and arbitrariness. Often a long string of numbers or numbers and letters, a cryptohash serves to uniquely group a content set. Only those who are aware of the cryptohash sequence can find all the content in that grouping, thus keeping information groupings as deep in the deepweb as possible while still being discoverable by keyed in users. This system of course relies on a 'security through obscurity' protocol. Because the platforms are open and public it is not feasible to implement real cryptographic security. However, though innovative combinations of image, text, @mentions and hashing, and chaining, truly complex barriers can be erected around deep content islands.
This is a game that obeys all of Chess's rules with one additional rule:
At the end of each player's turn, the player must make a one-word edit to the Meta Chess
rule book.
This game can get out of hand very quickly, for instance, a player my
change "all" to "none", drastically altering the play of the game. Other
edits can have subtler effects, such as changing "must" to "may". The
Phrasing is important. I tried to make it difficult to 'solve' the game.
In previous phrasings a player could easily take complete control over
the rule book, leading to insurable victory. Hopefully the current
phrasing does not have any immediately apparent holes.
I thought of this game while thinking about Saussure's concept of Langue. If Langue is an abstract field of rules that determines the fabrication of speach, I wonder if Langue harbors a rule for segmenting rules from other rules. (How else could you have multiple rules, especially if you suppose Saussurean negative ontology). Then I attempted to draw out the potentials rules about rules afford. playing a game against myself. Similar to the <a href'http://forum.ponyville.net/index.php?/topic/438-kenny-the-kill-the-ant-game-forum-game/>kill the ant game, one player attempts to defend the position that Langue is a synchronic set of rules that govern differentially defined signs/concepts while the other deploys concept of rules about rules to dismantle the Saussurean definition of Langue.
The line of attack I persued was:if Langue requires rules about rules to distinguish rules from rules, what limits these rules to distinguishing one rule from another. Could you have a rule that re-writes rules? If this is allowed there the synchronic perspective is not a tenable vantage point for the study of Langue, let alone language. Moreover, if each rule requires a differential field of rules to maintain its identity, Langue may require infinite levels of (meta)Langue to keep its structure.
When I played, the defender kept falling back on concepts of hierarchal specificity (perhaps n+1 level rules have different limitations that n level rules) and conditionality (rules only come into effect when a condition is met). These responses seem to lead to A) a paradox in distinction and B) a loop respectively.
A) The paradox of distinction: hierarchy requires two types of distinction, 1) distinction between elements themselves and 2) distinction between elements and classes. If you have a purely negative ontology a la Saussure & subsequent "post" structuralists (Lacan, Derrida) what distinction can distinguish between types of distinction? A third distinction? What about that distinction distinguishes it from the others? A fourth, fifth, etc -> infinity. Distinction is hollowed out, becomes merely a relation inflected with a property, i.e. positively defined.
B) The loop occurs when the attacker asks the defendant what rule Langue has for specifying the condition for rules to obtain. This restarts the game.
A third path emerges from the possibility of rules rewriting rules. This path can lead back to the loop but it also allows for self referential rule 'nonrewritablity', and ultimately either total rule breakdown or rule robustness through < a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT-zZ0PMqgI>diversification and cloaking leading to infinitely recursive general rules used by both sides. Of course, once the defender allows this you are far from 'Langue' originally conceived.
There is something telling about the congealed residue of hyper masculine absence on thousands of young faces and perky tits that waits, wrapped in compressed codecs, for seeking eyes and sallow hanging wangs across miles of draping cable. It is misdirected to make generalizations about porn. Pornography encompasses a wide range of possibilities from the tender to the violent but one domain of porn that sticks out --or at least sticks-- is that of the 'the huge load' 'excessive cum' 'slime drenched slut' verity. At the extreme, like some ハイパー bukkake, the cum bath prizes itself in impossibility. Girls literally coated in slime as if the monster of patriarchy himself unloaded thousands of years of pent up symbolic gender violence at once. There has been a lot of good work by feminists on complex effects of porn and the objectification women but in my experience there is little dialogue on how porn constructs the male on both sides of the screen. In screen the man is absent, indexed only by what is presumably his vitality -- that milky viscose ooze. On the one hand, the fountain cum asserts the male presence, but on the other hand, it denies it. A seemingly infinite stream of man juice functions as both a claim to unbounded masculine domination and the negation of the possibility that masculinity is even within the realm of the actual. If masculinity only cums in bucketfulls then no man himself is sexuality capable of being male. Rather, only the conglomerate, the 'gang' of the gang bang reaches any sort of approximation of the hyper male Spector that coats the pornographic image. The millions of male masturbators detached from the particularities of space and time as a single hyperobject, like global warming or the market economy, an overwhelming force that follows indirect paths of action. Every ejaculation going unnoticed. a drop in the bucket, dissipates into tissues, toilets, bed sheets, cleaning solution etc. yet by dimly lit sorcery re-aggregates in the form of an opaque monster.
That arrow, that ripple in the air, that strike, that end, that pause,, before death sets in. How do you judge an arrow? an arrow? An arrow is true if it hits the mark. Truth is in the motion. To true, to tune, to adjust the harmony. Truth does not come from above or without, from the form or from what it is about, but resonates with in. To true a wheel, this is my model of truth. Truth is a circularity that gets you places. That kills. The wheel, the arrow, are both waves and like the crashing crests breaking by the shore, all truths have limitations. What is the medium of truth? It is indistinct from reality as such. The truth of an arrow is imminent to it. Be careful. Not "it" -- the whole state, the action, motion, condition, outcome -- a system of reproducibility/an economy of interdependence. A true arrow says as much of itself as that of the marksmen. To say something that hits the mark.
Subsumed under the general sentiment that contemporary society experiences a representational reality detached from 'the real' is the common trope that modern warfare will shift its focalization from the human solider in field to a cybernetic landscape of drones and machine intelligences. This geopolitical imaginary is motivated by a desire for the elimination of violence of the flesh, finding solace in virtual potential of simulations and their apotheosis-- "the game". In the end, "the game" reduces itself to informational asymmetries and discrepancies in initial conditions. Despite the long history of soothsayers decrying the 20th century obsession with data, only today can I sense a perturbation in temperaments of philosophers and theorists regarding the primacy of information. We are beginning to realize that information is not knowledge, and via Foucault, information is not power. So despite RAND's recommendations on how to "byte back", a dominant strategy for maintaining power will always require entanglement in the pulsing fears of the embodied beast-- the lived tension of the other. In fact, we can read the rise of modern torture and the impulse towards human terrain as not merely effects but accomplices in the rise of the virtual and mechanic forms of war. The balance of power, in the particular sense of the balance of force and knowledge, requires it. If information is but a map, knowledge is the ability to get from A to B. If information is a diagrammatic index of a set of features, knowledge is the capacity to turn virtual contingency into existent continuity via the performance of an action. Knowledge is violence at play.
We can already watch the seams rip as the weight of the future of the industrialized sexual pleasure factory stretches the fabric of contemporary reality. As sexual desire is reoriented towards a system of equivalencies mediated by soft market ideologies in the online chat agoras, the phone, text, image, video based economies are now beginning to be "revolutionized" by the emergence of teledildonic platforms. At the juncture of telecommunications and the sex toy industry there percolates the long imagined fantasy of sharing in sexual intimacy across arbitrary distances. Eschewing complications involving special relativity, it will one day be possible to fuck deck to deck on separate star cruisers drifting listlessly through the outer reaches of the void in search for downtime after earth freezes because of shitty over-heating circuitry. But the real revolution in the sexual pleasure industry will not cum from providing 1-to-1 network services. The orgasmo-information complex will not maintain the face-to-face (or should I say organ-to-organ) intimacy of pre-modernity even if mediated by miles of fiber optic cable. The exchange of pleasure, just like the exchange of all other goods and services will be warped by the forces of economies of scale. Despite the tear jerking "mutual" jerkoff stories used to promote the teledildonic imaginary today, I ask you to imagine an old telephone switchboard staffed by operators. Thousands of plug holes terminals line the walls. But these jacks are not your average 1/4 inch patching points of the 20th c. That's right, in the future you will trunk your junk to a massive cybernetic glory hole staffed by cheap human labor skilled just enough to get you through, if you know what I mean, but not skilled enough to receive any benefits. The busy machine of desire, blinking LED's indicating satisfaction levels, preferences, etc. powered with back up fusion generators, supporting the throws of passion of billions of lonely detached human beings is something you should consider investing in today. It will be aided by complicated timing and compression algorithms to optimize access, reduce flow blockages and increase the liquidity of the new massive market. Personally, I cannot wait until the the topological information used to fully simulate your holo-cock gets so data-intensive that on one especially lonesome night for trillions of humanoids, the servers will fail, their dicks will be suspended lifeless in cyberspace and more likely than not a massive power failure will drain the energy out of entire space colony. But after all the glitches are worked out and the information collected despite the private policy statement is processed and analyzed then finally highly competent, turing certified automated fuck bots will flood the market, and all the underpaid and overworked operators will be laid off without severance packages destined to suffocate in the poorly climatized streets of the future while the ever evolving algorithms of pleasure continue to climb the steep walls of the uncanny valley, adopting the personalizations and nuanced particularities of your wildest and most perverse fantasies, now made easily mappable and rewritable. Yet, despite all this, somehow I doubt we will ever have a robot that can feel joy.
As the media landscape reaches impenetrable density we are charged with the task of creating new practices for media engagement. Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on Youtube. When I begin to imagine what affects this staggering amount of time mediates, I am surrounded by the chuckling sniffles of the millions of unique users that comprise Youtube's global audience. Indeed, seen from one perspective, youtube has become a marginally effective but globally entangled infinite source of laughter. While laughter is valuable, youtube, as an archive of human visual history, would be wasted if we do not approach it critically, passionately and poetically. Instead of passively letting youtube to pass through us in the form of LOLs, I propose engaging in the production of affect though the speculative poetics of media. By the speculative poetics of media I mean the task of understanding the material-semiotic openness of the networked image as an invitation to the poetic intensification of meanings. In a youtube video we have the affordance of decomposing the layering of forms of representation and presentation into a new media ecology of affects. Twisting the digital weight human history upon itself, like a concave mirror, we may burn new inscriptions in the unfolding of time.
Article Coming Soon
[x] xxxtcyV123: i must see a hot girl
[x] malaise69: hte flesh dissolved into pixels
[x] malaise69: numed by the grainy shadows,
[x] MaiyAlterEgo: My cam is not working horny sorry
[x] malaise69: highlighted in the familar grey-blue that stares back
[x] malaise69: with the same intensity
[x] xxxtcyV123: Wanna watch me?
[x] xxxtcyV123: Wathc me
[x] MaiyAlterEgo: Sit down open legs infron cam to see balls and cok xxxtcyV123
[x] malaise69: as the long desired possibility of becoming spectorcal.
[x] malaise69: wait with repepetive eagerness for the markd window..
[x] MaiyAlterEgo: Spit , Slurp
[x] NthFaceGirl: Spit on dick
[x] malaise69:a soddened climax that has since forgone joy.
[x] malaise69: exstayc is an avatar
[x] NthFaceGirl: Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
[x] malaise69: detatched from the raw blood and breath://
[x] MaiyAlterEgo: Mmmmmmmmmmm
[x] malaise69: only that dull pleasure of knowing you might not be all alone
[x] malaise69: in the moment confuses the lust for being composed by her eyes
[x] malaise69: for her eyes for her for her for her her her.
[x] xxxtcyV123: My baby nth i want lick your hole ass
[x] malaise69: the labor of being#of being seen
[x] malaise69: of occupying a signal not completely lost,
[x] malaise69: .though likely already forgotten.
[x] xxxtcyV123: cum see me
[x] malaise69: and who is she but a momentary space filled
[x] malaise69: by a click adn perchance a stream
[x] linda23: Wating xxxtc
[x] malaise69: and this is desire
[x] malaise69: or what desire has become
[x] malaise69: ?=remains
I found myself in a tinychat room with a Hail_lamasthu aka the demon queen™ aka the internet presence of teenage girl going through a nervous breakdown. She hadn't slept for days and wasn't eating until twitter saint gabetwee convinced her to. Her eyes were wide, her voice was a low stumbling whisper, and her head, severed by the frame of the screen, would drift in slow circular movements as fragmented stories involving past loves, stale mushroom pizza, and the feeling of impossibility streamed in dull monotony out from her pixelated lips. In the video broadcasting div Hail_lamasthu was flanked by three other livestreams: gabetwee, sprewellimz, and me under the temporary guest handle slargmofr. But when she talked she wasn't talking to us, she was talking to someone inside tinychat. Gabe and her internet friend sprewell, a depressed insomniac recovering from a leg amputation, were attempting to convince the demon queen™ of the merits of sleep, while I, stunned by this nightmare, felt absolutely powerless as my eyes, sunk into the grey-blue skin of my motionless real-time me, stared back in paralyzing self-consciousness. We were trapped. We couldn't sleep unless she, she the teenage hopped up on adderall "it makes me focus" broke body clock girl slept too. So there we lay, all four of us together, blankets up to our necks, faces illuminated only by the off-white of the millions of RGB cells inches from our heavy eyelids until we all drifted away into our own separate dreams, and, as our computers fell to sleep too, we lost the connection. I awoke to an empty room, chat history gone with no signs of the past except for one screen capture .jpeg remaining in my random access memory as a drag it deep into my pictures folder. Of course the teenage queen is out there too, somewhere, in some city, in some condition. 3m ago she tweeted "lol who plays solitaire with real cards anyways"
We often attribute gender to people. "What is your gender?" seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. We even grow up holding beliefs about our gender. 'I'm masculine", "I'm feminine" or what have you. This is all wrong. People don't have gender. Things are gendered, and sometimes people are confused with the things they have or they are made into things themselves. Objectifications are a deep issue: First-order objectification, the objectification of people. Second-order objectification, the objectification of processes/practices/play. What is troubling about suburban warfare is the dual spectacle: Not simply 1) the mimicry of a cinematically-coded warfare, but 2) the re-performance of the performative or cinematic component of modern warfare through the medium of home video. Today war play is not simply playing "war". Children are not content to embody those practices and behaviors we have come to associate with war. They are already far ahead of us, now playing the recording, editing and narrativizing of war. Displaying war. The home video becomes an element in the arsenal. A toy gun of its own, but more powerful than a military grade shotgun, shattering images of nascent suburban masculinity across the globe. What odd order of objectification is this, to turn your play into an object? In turn war itself becomes a game, and all is always already waiting on the other end of a camera.