Matthew Fuller’s Behind the Blip; Essays on the Culture of Software (also available directly from Autonomedia) is not a very inviting read (its flashes of surrealism and delightful nastiness are not enough to redeem its clotted prose and its reified theoryspeak), but it raises important question about software, its meaning and its uses. What ideological assumptions, and what power relations, are built into the way programs work, and especially into their “interface” with the user? Fuller hammers away at this question, and convincingly argues that such things are never neutral. The book is less effective, however, at proposing any sort of alternative (isn’t that always the problem? it certainly is for me in my own writing). The things he does propose – free, open-source software on the one hand, and an interrogation, probably by artists, of the ideological underpinnings and hidden levels of code on the other – are not really satisfactory. Open source software, for one thing, tends still to be too demanding and difficult to be used by anyone who doesn’t already have a high level of technical skill; being able to read the source code doesn’t do me any good, since I can’t understand it; even the surface usage of such programs is difficult for computer users who (like my parents, for instance) have considerably less experience than even I do. As for Brechtian artistic strategies of unveiling the hidden substructures of code – one could include under this rubric the two software projects Fuller himself was involved in, and writes about, Web Stalker (an alternative browser) and Natural Selection (an alternative search engine) , as well as other celebrated web art projects like those of jodi.org, I can only say that the relatively meager results of such projects, compared with the theoretical sophistication that went into making them up in the first place, only suggests that our critical paradigms of demystification, alienation-effects, deconstruction, and so on, are far behind the times, because they were developed for print, or live performance, or other, older media, and simply do not work with the new (electronic, net-based) media we are experiencing today.
Matthew Fuller’s Behind the Blip; Essays on the Culture of Software (also available directly from Autonomedia) is not a very inviting read (its flashes of surrealism and delightful nastiness are not enough to redeem its clotted prose and its reified theoryspeak), but it raises important question about software, its meaning and its uses. What ideological assumptions, and what power relations, are built into the way programs work, and especially into their “interface” with the user? Fuller hammers away at this question, and convincingly argues that such things are never neutral. The book is less effective, however, at proposing any sort of alternative (isn’t that always the problem? it certainly is for me in my own writing). The things he does propose – free, open-source software on the one hand, and an interrogation, probably by artists, of the ideological underpinnings and hidden levels of code on the other – are not really satisfactory. Open source software, for one thing, tends still to be too demanding and difficult to be used by anyone who doesn’t already have a high level of technical skill; being able to read the source code doesn’t do me any good, since I can’t understand it; even the surface usage of such programs is difficult for computer users who (like my parents, for instance) have considerably less experience than even I do. As for Brechtian artistic strategies of unveiling the hidden substructures of code – one could include under this rubric the two software projects Fuller himself was involved in, and writes about, Web Stalker (an alternative browser) and Natural Selection (an alternative search engine) , as well as other celebrated web art projects like those of jodi.org, I can only say that the relatively meager results of such projects, compared with the theoretical sophistication that went into making them up in the first place, only suggests that our critical paradigms of demystification, alienation-effects, deconstruction, and so on, are far behind the times, because they were developed for print, or live performance, or other, older media, and simply do not work with the new (electronic, net-based) media we are experiencing today.
John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.
John Crowley’s early novel Engine Summer (most easily available, with two other short novels, in the collection Otherwise) is a beautiful book whose seeming simplicity contains (conceals? or better, enables) great depth and affective power. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a future when humanity’s great technologies have crashed and burned, and various semi-utopian communities and isolated individuals or small groups survive and make their lives in the ruins, in a world that has been mostly reclaimed by nature, but also amidst the detritus of all that lost technology – and sometimes with bits and pieces of that technology that still seem to work, more or less. In the setting, the novel is basically a young man’s coming of age narrative; except that it’s also many other things at the same time: an exploration of different modes of life, different cultures, different values, different ways of relating to time and memory; and a reflection on the ways of negotiating these differences; and a meta-narrative about the ways that stories get told, and narratives organized, and about how the telling of stories relates to the lived experience those stories are about and which they claim to recount; and a bit of experimentation with psychedelic dislocation; and a meditation on love, pain, and loss, and irreparability; and a kind of lyric in prose, whose language and rhythms are always shimmering at the limits of the speakable and thinkable, even as they seem so clear and direct, only you can never quite pin them down. This book isn’t like anything else I’ve ever read (except for the only other Crowley novel I have read, the immense and stupendous Little, Big); its mode of thought, and very way of being are quite alien to me, or to anything I usually like; but the radical otherness of Crowley’s writing haunts me, in ways that I cannot account for, aside from on the basis of the beauty of his prose, and his books’ undertows of emotion, somehow mixing melancholy and a sense of having to live with impossibility and failure, with a kind of understated exultation.
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was pretty much a box office flop last year, but it’s a really good film. It’s a biopic about the life and death of Bob Crane, the actor whose one famous role was as Colonel Hogan, on the Nazi-POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. (I used to love the show when I was a kid, both when it was originally on the air, 1965-1971, and later in reruns). Crane did dinner theater after Hogan’ Heroes ended its run, and in those early, pre-VCR days he was really into videotaping himself having sex with loads of women. He was murdered in 1978; the only suspect was his friend and associate, John Carpenter, who provided him with his video equipment and went out with him to pick up babes. But Carpenter was not tried until 1992, and then he was acquitted. The film extrapolates from these uncertain facts…
Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus was pretty much a box office flop last year, but it’s a really good film. It’s a biopic about the life and death of Bob Crane, the actor whose one famous role was as Colonel Hogan, on the Nazi-POW-camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. (I used to love the show when I was a kid, both when it was originally on the air, 1965-1971, and later in reruns). Crane did dinner theater after Hogan’ Heroes ended its run, and in those early, pre-VCR days he was really into videotaping himself having sex with loads of women. He was murdered in 1978; the only suspect was his friend and associate, John Carpenter, who provided him with his video equipment and went out with him to pick up babes. But Carpenter was not tried until 1992, and then he was acquitted. The film extrapolates from these uncertain facts…
Continue reading “Auto Focus”
Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.
Seafair is a Seattle summer festival; it goes on through much of July and culminates the first weekend of August. I’ve never quite understood it, even though I have lived here for 19 years. There are some cool parades for kids, miscellaneous events like “landings” by the Seafair Pirates (a bunch of businessmen in pirate costume who swagger about; in recent years they have toned down their act), and – on the final weekend, which is now – the hydroplane races in Lake Washington. Traffic is going to be a nightmare this weekend, since we live right near the main viewing area for the races.
But the part of Seafair that I really hate is the Blue Angels: Navy precision fliers who put on an air show every year for Seafair final weekend. The planes may look pretty up in the air, but it is HELL living in the neighborhood above which they perform their maneuvers. The noise of their repeated fly-bys is incredibly loud; the animals are terrified, the baby can’t sleep, and the overall effect is nerve-wracking. I know we should thank whatever forces or powers there be that this is only a simulation of war, and we are not actually getting bombed; but our not-so-well-to-do, racially diverse neighborhood really does feel under assault. And it’s all the more galling that this is for the benefit of jokers from the suburbs who are better off than we are, and who can enjoy it as a show because they don’t actually live here. I don’t understand how they can allow air shows and such in (above?) heavily populated areas like ours.
I’ve been listening to a bunch of bands from Detroit, because I have been considering the possibility of moving to Detroit within the next year. (Nothing’s been settled, yet). Anyway, I kind of like Electric Six. It’s sort of like white guy (and girl) trash rockers go disco. Raucous, funny, and fun. Like most white rockers who try to emulate black rhythms, they can’t really do it well enough, and are too stiff and unfunky – which at great length becomes a bit tiresome, so I’m not really able to listen to their album Fire straight through. But listened to individually, in small doses, the songs are great: especially their hit single “Danger! High Voltage”, which is a total , hysterical scream, sort of like the chintzy monster-movie version of a neo-Gothic celebration of the power of Desire.
I’ve been listening to a bunch of bands from Detroit, because I have been considering the possibility of moving to Detroit within the next year. (Nothing’s been settled, yet). Anyway, I kind of like Electric Six. It’s sort of like white guy (and girl) trash rockers go disco. Raucous, funny, and fun. Like most white rockers who try to emulate black rhythms, they can’t really do it well enough, and are too stiff and unfunky – which at great length becomes a bit tiresome, so I’m not really able to listen to their album Fire straight through. But listened to individually, in small doses, the songs are great: especially their hit single “Danger! High Voltage”, which is a total , hysterical scream, sort of like the chintzy monster-movie version of a neo-Gothic celebration of the power of Desire.
Andy Clark‘s Natural-Born Cyborgs is an excellent discussion of what new information technologies mean for us as embodied, intelligent beings. Clark argues, rightly, that fears about “unnatural” cyborgization are unfounded. Human beings have always – as long as we have been human – used prosthetic devices to extend our intelligence. Language is the first and most important such prosthetic device; writing is a second, momentously important one. The list goes on, to include all the “media” (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) that are woven into the texture of our lives. The point is that such technologies are not mere “tools” in contrast to ourselves as conscious minds who merely “use” those tools. Much of our conscious experience, from the way we “use” our hands and feet to the way we remember things that are not directly present to consciousness until we willfully recall them, is in fact based on “distributed systems” without clear boundaries. Through writing, for instance, we can do mathematical calculations, and create narratives and reasoned arguments, that would be impossible to articulate without pen and paper. The best way to explain this is to say that my intelligence is a distributed system that includes the marks on the sheet of paper (and the hands that make those marks, and the eyes that read them back) as well as the flashings across synapses. The result is that we can master a greater body of material than is literally storable in short-term memory. But this can be extended; looking at my wristwatch in order to know the time is no different, and neither is using software to access knowledge that isn’t always implanted in my physical brain, or using a telephone to talk to somebody thousands of miles away. There is simply no sensible way to draw the line between what we do “naturally” and what we only can do with technological prostheses. If anything, what defines human beings as a species is our “natural” ability to extend our bodies and intelligences – by using “technology”, and by exploiting the extreme “neural plasticity” of our minds to adapt culturally, rather than waiting for genetics, to new circumstances and new ways of being – in ways that other animals cannot. I think that Clark is entirely right in his arguments; it’s ridiculous to say that computers and mobile phones and future developments in virtual reality are “denaturing” and “alienating” us any more than using fire, or speech, or drawing marks in the sand has done. So Natural-Born Cyborgs is a smart and useful book; it is also admirably written by an academic philosopher in a readily accessible style (as is all too rarely the case). At times, the book seems a little thin, because the argument has been drawn out for more pages than is really necessary; but this is only a minor quibble, in light of the book’s many virtues. (Also, it’s nice to see a cognitive philosopher who’s savvy enough to cite William Burroughs and J G Ballard and Warren Ellis).
Andy Clark‘s Natural-Born Cyborgs is an excellent discussion of what new information technologies mean for us as embodied, intelligent beings. Clark argues, rightly, that fears about “unnatural” cyborgization are unfounded. Human beings have always – as long as we have been human – used prosthetic devices to extend our intelligence. Language is the first and most important such prosthetic device; writing is a second, momentously important one. The list goes on, to include all the “media” (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) that are woven into the texture of our lives. The point is that such technologies are not mere “tools” in contrast to ourselves as conscious minds who merely “use” those tools. Much of our conscious experience, from the way we “use” our hands and feet to the way we remember things that are not directly present to consciousness until we willfully recall them, is in fact based on “distributed systems” without clear boundaries. Through writing, for instance, we can do mathematical calculations, and create narratives and reasoned arguments, that would be impossible to articulate without pen and paper. The best way to explain this is to say that my intelligence is a distributed system that includes the marks on the sheet of paper (and the hands that make those marks, and the eyes that read them back) as well as the flashings across synapses. The result is that we can master a greater body of material than is literally storable in short-term memory. But this can be extended; looking at my wristwatch in order to know the time is no different, and neither is using software to access knowledge that isn’t always implanted in my physical brain, or using a telephone to talk to somebody thousands of miles away. There is simply no sensible way to draw the line between what we do “naturally” and what we only can do with technological prostheses. If anything, what defines human beings as a species is our “natural” ability to extend our bodies and intelligences – by using “technology”, and by exploiting the extreme “neural plasticity” of our minds to adapt culturally, rather than waiting for genetics, to new circumstances and new ways of being – in ways that other animals cannot. I think that Clark is entirely right in his arguments; it’s ridiculous to say that computers and mobile phones and future developments in virtual reality are “denaturing” and “alienating” us any more than using fire, or speech, or drawing marks in the sand has done. So Natural-Born Cyborgs is a smart and useful book; it is also admirably written by an academic philosopher in a readily accessible style (as is all too rarely the case). At times, the book seems a little thin, because the argument has been drawn out for more pages than is really necessary; but this is only a minor quibble, in light of the book’s many virtues. (Also, it’s nice to see a cognitive philosopher who’s savvy enough to cite William Burroughs and J G Ballard and Warren Ellis).
Sogo Ishii’s Electric Dragon 80,000 V is a delirious, audacious masterpiece: 55 minutes of crazed rock ‘n’ roll theatrics in a demented duel between Tadanobu Asano, all heavy-guitar/dissonance/feedback rage, and Masatoshi Nagase, eerily calm techno-Buddha. Both characters command the forces of electricity, and the film is awash with montages of lightning storms, electric chairs, shock treatment machines, exploding transformers, and the like, not to mention reptiles, guitars, cell phones, fast tracking shots scurrying through the gutters, and enormous kanji trembling and vibrating across the screen. All shot in crisp, high-contrast black and white, usually at night, or if in the daytime, overexposed to the point of washout. With a screaming, pounding soundtrack, Hendrix meets industrial. Almost no plot, almost no dialog, nothing but an over-the-top amphetamine rush, and megalomaniacal rock ‘n’ roll iconography pushed well beyond the point of total absurdity. Pure, exhilarating cinema, in short.
Sogo Ishii’s Electric Dragon 80,000 V is a delirious, audacious masterpiece: 55 minutes of crazed rock ‘n’ roll theatrics in a demented duel between Tadanobu Asano, all heavy-guitar/dissonance/feedback rage, and Masatoshi Nagase, eerily calm techno-Buddha. Both characters command the forces of electricity, and the film is awash with montages of lightning storms, electric chairs, shock treatment machines, exploding transformers, and the like, not to mention reptiles, guitars, cell phones, fast tracking shots scurrying through the gutters, and enormous kanji trembling and vibrating across the screen. All shot in crisp, high-contrast black and white, usually at night, or if in the daytime, overexposed to the point of washout. With a screaming, pounding soundtrack, Hendrix meets industrial. Almost no plot, almost no dialog, nothing but an over-the-top amphetamine rush, and megalomaniacal rock ‘n’ roll iconography pushed well beyond the point of total absurdity. Pure, exhilarating cinema, in short.
I went to a great reading tonight by Samuel R. Delany. It was the last in a series of readings this summer sponsored by Clarion West. Delany read a lengthy passage from a novel he has recently finished writing, called This Short Day of Sun and Frost. (The title, he explained, comes from a phrase by Walter Pater). He said that the novel was fantasy, in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a book which, I am ashamed to say , I have never read). But there was nothing fantasy-like, or non-naturalistic, about the passage he read. Set in New York in 1992, it was about sex, and sexuality, and AIDS, and mourning, and race, and class, and life, and death… and sex. Brilliant and utterly compelling, with an essential weirdness, and much about desire, and yet thoroughly embedded in the everyday, and in concrete, physical details: a strange and digressive, but naturalistic narrative. Delany is one of our greatest living writers, and it is always an immense pleasure to hear him read, so vividly and powerfully, from his own work.
I went to a great reading tonight by Samuel R. Delany. It was the last in a series of readings this summer sponsored by Clarion West. Delany read a lengthy passage from a novel he has recently finished writing, called This Short Day of Sun and Frost. (The title, he explained, comes from a phrase by Walter Pater). He said that the novel was fantasy, in the manner of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (a book which, I am ashamed to say , I have never read). But there was nothing fantasy-like, or non-naturalistic, about the passage he read. Set in New York in 1992, it was about sex, and sexuality, and AIDS, and mourning, and race, and class, and life, and death… and sex. Brilliant and utterly compelling, with an essential weirdness, and much about desire, and yet thoroughly embedded in the everyday, and in concrete, physical details: a strange and digressive, but naturalistic narrative. Delany is one of our greatest living writers, and it is always an immense pleasure to hear him read, so vividly and powerfully, from his own work.
Travis Jeppesen’s Victims is an oblique, enigmatic, and strangely beautiful short novel, ostensibly about a religious cult whose members self-immolate in the manner of Heaven’s Gate; but the rhetoric and story of the cult is just one of many strands, or languages, or perspectives, flickering through the book in concisely chiseled passages of minimal prose. The book circles around a basic despair at living, but contains everything from mock-nouveau roman close descriptions of next to nothing, to self-reflexive lyrical meditations upon vacancy and pain. It’s as if crystalline fragments of all the genres of contemporary fiction were somehow melded together. The novel was too delicate, too otherworldly for me to find it altogether compelling, but I find it haunting in its very ephemerality, an ignis fatuus I can never quite grab hold of.
Travis Jeppesen’s Victims is an oblique, enigmatic, and strangely beautiful short novel, ostensibly about a religious cult whose members self-immolate in the manner of Heaven’s Gate; but the rhetoric and story of the cult is just one of many strands, or languages, or perspectives, flickering through the book in concisely chiseled passages of minimal prose. The book circles around a basic despair at living, but contains everything from mock-nouveau roman close descriptions of next to nothing, to self-reflexive lyrical meditations upon vacancy and pain. It’s as if crystalline fragments of all the genres of contemporary fiction were somehow melded together. The novel was too delicate, too otherworldly for me to find it altogether compelling, but I find it haunting in its very ephemerality, an ignis fatuus I can never quite grab hold of.
Hypercube, or Cube 2, is (of course) the sequel to Cube. The films share a minimal, elegant SF/horror premise. A bunch of people are trapped in a series of cubical rooms. The rooms are basically empty and featureless. Each room has six exits, one in the middle of each side (including the floor and the ceiling) which lead to similar empty cubical rooms. Various murderous threats appear in certain rooms; the characters also get tenser and tenser, and somtimes break down, or turn against one another. You have a combination of abstract mathematical patterns – a sort of modernist architecture theme gone mad through its own excessive purity – and psychological tension, people pushed to the point of nervous collapse. In Hypercube, the sadism of modernist geometry (everything white, with no irregularities or distinguishing features) is multiplied by the cruel unpredictability of quantum weirdness (postmodern? quantum theory is modernist, early 20th century; but here it is invoked, not very rigorously, as the justification for all sorts of twisted and trippy – as in a bad trip – video effects) as the victims find themselves in a tesseract (the equivalent, in four spatial dimensions, of a cube in three dimensions, or a square in two). Space folds back on itself, time contracts and dilates, and people encounter alternate versions of themselves. There’s no way out, of course, but only interminable waiting, or else actual death; both Cube films could be described as pulp versions of Beckett, and all the better for their mixture of high intellectual concept and trash TV psychology. The affect of Hypercube is an odd combination of icy distance and a sort of free-floating dread, too unfocused, abstract, and impersonal to be existential angst, but too palpable, too tactile, to be dismissed. A chillingly creepy experience; low-budget trash-art at its best.
Hypercube, or Cube 2, is (of course) the sequel to Cube. The films share a minimal, elegant SF/horror premise. A bunch of people are trapped in a series of cubical rooms. The rooms are basically empty and featureless. Each room has six exits, one in the middle of each side (including the floor and the ceiling) which lead to similar empty cubical rooms. Various murderous threats appear in certain rooms; the characters also get tenser and tenser, and somtimes break down, or turn against one another. You have a combination of abstract mathematical patterns – a sort of modernist architecture theme gone mad through its own excessive purity – and psychological tension, people pushed to the point of nervous collapse. In Hypercube, the sadism of modernist geometry (everything white, with no irregularities or distinguishing features) is multiplied by the cruel unpredictability of quantum weirdness (postmodern? quantum theory is modernist, early 20th century; but here it is invoked, not very rigorously, as the justification for all sorts of twisted and trippy – as in a bad trip – video effects) as the victims find themselves in a tesseract (the equivalent, in four spatial dimensions, of a cube in three dimensions, or a square in two). Space folds back on itself, time contracts and dilates, and people encounter alternate versions of themselves. There’s no way out, of course, but only interminable waiting, or else actual death; both Cube films could be described as pulp versions of Beckett, and all the better for their mixture of high intellectual concept and trash TV psychology. The affect of Hypercube is an odd combination of icy distance and a sort of free-floating dread, too unfocused, abstract, and impersonal to be existential angst, but too palpable, too tactile, to be dismissed. A chillingly creepy experience; low-budget trash-art at its best.