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LIKE POTTED PLANTS
IN AN OFFICE
L
O
B
B
Y
K
A
R
L
O
S
GIL
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text #11
Mutatis Mutantis
by Martin Stevens
and Sami Merilaita
text #14
Moquette
by Florence Pike
text #13
Ghost in
the Machine
by Karlos Gil
text #9
The Semiotic
Hinge
by Alfred North Whitehead
text #12
Aestethics of
Interruption
by Janne Vanhanen
text #17
Mysticism
by Bertrand Russell
text #10
Filling a Hole
with Plaster(and removing the surplus
with a spatula)
by Nora Baron
text #2
Towards an
ergonomic telepathy.
by Carlos Fdez-Pello
text #3
Summa
Technologiae
by Stanislaw Lem
text #1
Like knotted
glands in an
ofsh goby
by Beln Zahera
text #4
Holograms
Roses
by William Gibson
text #5
Overlapping
Figures (ii)
by Karlos Gil
text #7
The Nose
Issue
by Edmund Husserl
text #6
Plastic Fragments
by Jean-Franois
Lyotard
text #8
Holly
Spam
by Karlos Gil
text #15
Objections to
Representations
by John Sutton
text #18
Tractatus
Herbis
by Ludwig Wittgenstein
text #16
Image Scanner
by Benjamin Cheverton
and Jules Duboscq
i
n
d
e
x
t
e
x
t
s
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stands for like potted plants in an ofce
lobby at the level of speech and writing, in
a somewhat similar form of utterance and
appearance that even disregarding meaning
nonetheless produces it.
The experience of words echoing other words
is reminiscent of Benjamin Chevertons inven-
tion - a reducing size machine - which was
based on the mechanism of the pantograph: a
structure that resembled an accordion, formed
by a linkage of parallelograms with pointers
placed in both arms, of which one would
follow the model whilst the other would draw
or sculpt a copy at a different scale.
By proportionally reproducing the location
and distance between each point that informs
a gure, what is repeated is not only the gure
but its contour, the line that speaks of every
position at once and reveals the transit from
one form to the next. Thus, beyond the all
too famous discussions on the original and
the copy lies the question of this movement
that makes replication possible. The phrase
embedded in multiple shifts. The path traced
by repetition.
[0]
A replica does not refer
to a model at rst but re-enacts the motion by which it
is produced. The experience of objects echoing other
objects expects and at the same time recalls this move-
ment, which unites them in a sort of fraternity while
keeping them apart.
Like knotted
glands in an
ofsh goby
precedes Like knotted glands in an ofsh
goby, where like remains identical in
both as to indicate or exactly reproduce the
movement that connects distant gures, be
it under the logic of resemblance or that ofmeaning. The like entails remembrance
and the retrieval of memories. Every time
we reproduce this journey by saying like,
we actualize this movement and anticipate
the next.
Even if the word replica seems
to emphasize the apparition of
an exact copy the term itself
contains a specic movement by
which we are reminded of the
Latin word replicare meaning
to repeat, to fold again and
later to reply.
[1]
So by uttering like knotted
glands in an ofsh goby, I come back to
like potted plants in an ofce lobby to
which I had replied like knotted glands
in an ofsh goby while overhearing like
dotted pants in a selsh hobby.
Like potted
plants in an
ofce lobby
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sets in motion a play on words, like
potted plants in an ofce lobby. Each case
containing thirty one letters and seven words
that look (a)like and sound (a)like but
cannot merge. It is this reverberation, thisdistance: the evidence that one cannot speak
in vacuum.
Echoing suggests once
again the movement
created by enunciation,
the reection of sound
waves, from one surface
to another until they
reach the listener.
[2]
For whenever
one replicates, someone else
repeats and responds.
Like knotted
glands in an
ofsh goby
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We subdivide the self and treat the experience as a temporary hardrive partition so that even
the internal propioception is materialized, that is, formalised or verbalized, and taken care of
lingistically. That is why, to feel the different parts of your body when you are still, you have
to focus on them, name them, separate yourself momentarily through mental words or medita-
tion, to give that inadverted constant feeling of being still a shape you can adapt the self to.
This
v
e
r
s
i
o n
of experience is not precisely new and can be easily related to the multiple
psychoanalitic branches of the lacanian sort. However, linking our own ex-
perience to actual telepathy might prove to be a horse of a different color.
The traditional telepathic tale of being able to transmit what I feel or what
I think without saying a single word is built upon the assumption that there
is something clear to transmit; that there is a total control of the subject; that
we can truly decide and dene what it is that we feel or see or read. It assumes
that when we think we are basically talking in silence, which is quite an inac-
curate statement. It indirectly classies experience as something more truthful
to the self than its equivocal rational idealisation. Eventually, this traditional
approach considers the linguistic role of the body ignoring it as the continuous
and blurry organ it is: instead, the body is depicted as the aristotelian proof of
an unequivocal identity; it is the device where experience leaves an objective
physical imprint allowing for one to know things better from the inside of
this imprinted body than others do from the outside. However, I am inclined to
believe that the illusion of owning the self is based on the quantity of our en-
counters with certain external objects and not on the veracity of these innner
experiences which are, quite the opposite, consistently distanced, mediated and
telepathic.This could help explain synesthetic phenomena, ghost limbs, intui-
tion or analogue magic as adaptations of the self to objects beyond the con-
stitutive neighbouring ones: a sign that we can be equally telepathic when we
imagine a moving rock in the middle of the Arctic than we are when touching
a keyboard with our nger.
T O W A R D S
A N
E R G O N O M I C
T E L E P A T H Y
Etymologically, telepathy describes remote experience - tele meaning distance andpathos meaning feeling or perception. Despite its theoretical coinage I propose
to read telepathy beyond the caricature of getting inside someone elses head
or understanding the thoughts that others claim to be having at a given time,
silently. That would somehow portray telepathy --and language-- as a set of clear
cut meanings and solid concepts, notwithstanding the abstract process these two
undergo in order to transform phenomenological inputs into inteligible outputs;
ignoring a bodily and aesthetic process that is profoundly linguistic yet highly un-
stable. Telepathy shouldnt be just a smartphone although we can denitely use a
smartphone telepathically.
We can argue that the very moment we are aware of an experience we are
remembering it already, distorting it, mediating it linguistically. Live experience
would be an illusion generated by just-recorded stimulus: as it happens with the
speed of light, saying we have a direct experience is a colloquial way of overlook-
ing a delay, so small, that reveals itself only at a great distance: just because the
delay is invisible to the eye we shouldnt rule out telepathy as part of the process,
dismissing it as an impossible psychic device of scientic ction. In the contem-
porary scheme experience, as language, would not be what we have culturallyconstructed as our sensation proper but a relation of different exteriors; our own
experience is always objectied; our senses are ways of sharing with something
else. A caress, a reading, a landscape.
. Even when we have an inner feeling, an internal experience
of ourselves such as a headache, the u or sadness, we submit to the
reication of this pain or sensation as an autonomous object within
ourselves, hence manageable.
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On the contrary, if we embrace that telepathy is inherent to the
way the subject experiments themselves, it is not that far-fetched
to imagine it can extend that native ability to experience someone
elses through the same erratical speculation and assimilation they
already use against their own experience. This approach to telepathy
not only draws a scheme of the linguistic othering, but describes
the mediated blurriness of the self to its own material being
and dismisses erratic translation as the proof that telepathy with
other things does not exist. In a world where experience is esentially
elusive to err in our predictions is precisely what empowers us,
telepaths, to participate of an experience that belongs to
nobody completely.
If the past 100 years have debunked the western positivist notion of
the self, of language and of experience, telepathy becomes nothing
near a paranormal power but a fundamental quality of matter: it
reveals itself as the very way we culturally, socially and eccentrically
invent our psychic uniformity, at a distance with ourselves and
our bodily and physical borders. Telepathy becomes the ergonomic
device for linguistic and cultural adaptation: it is the tool we use to
adapta an absent identity to a set of physical things or the procedure
by which the matter is dreaming about us; a body to a tool, a place to
a mind. If we picture telepathy as a way of emancipating ourselves
from the concept or our own thoughts and experiences and as
long as we do not take any telepathic reading literally --starting
with our own experience-- we can hastily give in to the pleasure
of inconsistently and ergonomically predicting what others are
thinking. As a matter of fact we are already doing it. We cant stop
doing it. Telepathy is acknowledging we have been doing it all
a
l
o
n
g.
In other words, it is
the amount of dealing with our bodily objects that veils distance and creates
the illusion of a consistent, enclosed form of sentience that is ours. And
it is based on that, that we agree on a denition of experience that can be
culturally integrated and socially shared a unitarian non-transferrable me,
that is, paradoxically, one of the greatest social conventions of capitalism and
mass consummerism. So when we agree that our experiences are unique and
non-transferrable other than by verbal or alphabetic forms of language we
are ironically eliminating difference and undermining the equivocal nature of
language and perception; we accept everyone knows positively who they areand what they are thinking at any time: we admit the only way for telepathy
to exist is to be able to transfer this chimera of a true and positive self
experience; we say that everything else, any other intuition or guess, is plain
ction, trickery or mere coincidence. Yet, if we think that the aforementioned
blurriness of the continuous body is also linguistic that language is not clear
but a blur of feelings and signs of every sort-- and that experience is not a
pure stimulus but that it starts by translating our own experience to ourselves
in a dirty, delayed, mediated and contaminated manner that I cannot be fully
sure of what my own experience is unless I incur in a considerable amount
of belief , when all that happens, then our own experience becomes
a regular byproduct of language and becomes subject to all the mediatic
aberrations of translation, dissemination and interpretation, making telepathy
a mundane, tangible material means of transfering it.
Again, as postructuralist psychoanalysis
would put it, it is not only that communication with the other
is erratic and absent, but that the very subject proceeds from
this negative othering and blind-spot; that we are already blind-
guessing what we experience ourselves without having to try
it on someone else. The telepathic diferential would add to the
theory that this constant and psychoanalytical blind-spot make us
natural-born-telepaths, and that telepathy understood as some sort
of technological feat for the positive transmission of information
is quite a serious political threat to the otherwise open-ended
etymological nature of telepathy itself: to hear the thoughts
of someone else in plain english 5000 miles away is, I insist,
degrading experience and language to mere letters that are decoded
against a standardised dictionary denition.
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The mechanism of the various technologies, existing as well as possible ones, is not of interest
to me, and I would not have to deal with it, if the creative activities of man were, godlike,
free of any spoiling caused by the unwanted - if we could, now or at some time, realize
our intentions in a pure state, coming close to the methodological precision of Genesis, if, by
saying let there be light, we could obtain, as a nal product, the very light, without any
unwanted ingredients. However, the above mentioned bifurcation of goals, or even the replace-
ment of the chosen goals by different, often unwanted ones, is a typical phenomenon. Moaners
nd similar faults even in the work of God, especially since the introduction of a prototype
for beings endowed with reason and the start of mass production of this model, Homo
Sapiens - but this part of reection is better left to theo-technologists. It sufces to say that,
in doing anything, man almost never knows what he is actually doing - in any case he does
not know it all the way. To reach for the extreme: the destruction of Life on Earth, so possible
today, was not intended by any of the discoverers of atomic energy.
Thus technologies are of interest to me somehow out of necessity, since
a certain civilization includes all that the general public hoped for, as well
as things which were nobodys intention. Sometimes, even more often, a
technology is created by chance, e.g., in searching for the philosophers stone,
porcelain was invented, but the fraction of intentional, conscious goals, in the
set of all events that are able to initiate technologies, is growing as knowledge
progresses. What is indisputable is that, as they become rare, surprises can in
turn grow to apocalyptic dimensions. As was actually mentioned
above.
Cognitive ergonomics is concerned with mental processes,such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor
response, as they affect interactions among humans andother elements of a system.[5] (Relevant topics include
mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance,
human-computer interaction, human reliability, workstress and training as these may relate to human-system
and Human-Computer Interaction design.)
Dilemmas
[5]
Summa
T
e
c
h
n
o
l
o
giae
Talk about the future. But isnt talking about future roses at least an inappro-
priate occupation for someone lost in the highly inammable forests of the
present? And the investigation of the thorns of these roses, the search for the
problems of our great-grandchildren, while we cannot even deal with todays
abundance of problems, does such scholasticism not border absurdity? If only
we had the justication of searching for means to strengthen our optimism
or of doing it for the love of truth, clearly visible in a future without storms,
even literally taken, after the possibility of climate control. The justication for
these words, however, does not lie in any academic passion, nor in unshakable
optimism which imposes the faith that, whatever may happen, the outcome
will be favorable. The justication is at the same time simpler, more practical,
and maybe more modest, since while I am preparing to write about the future,
I am simply doing what I am able to do, no matter how good I am at this,
since it is my only ability. But if this is true, then my work will be no less, no
more dispensable than any other, because every work is based on the assump-
tion that the world exists and that it will continue to exist.
Thus having made sure that the intention is free of unprincipledness, let us
ask about the extent of the subject and the method. We will talk about various
aspects of civilization that can be thought up, and which can be derived from
todays prerequisites, however small the probability of their realization may
be. The foundations for our hypothetical constructions, in turn, shall be given
by technologies, i.e., the ways, dependent on knowledge and social abilities,
in which goals are realized, goals chosen by the community as well as those
which nobody had in mind initially.
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Sure - he developed methods of assistance for the victims of such and of other
cataclysms. Some of them he is able to predict - if only approximately. He is
still far from homeostasis on a planetary scale, not to speak of homeostasis of
stellar dimensions. Unlike most animals, man does not so much adjust himself
to the environment, as he rebuilds the environment according to his needs.
Will this ever be possible with regard to the stars? Will there arise, maybe in a
very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes,
such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the
sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year re? It seems to me that this
is possible, and dont I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous
enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up
to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to
do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will
have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnicianto stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was
possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance
that it might come true, will be possible.
An improbability - I necessarily have to explain at once - which is not based on my faith in
the necessary triumph of Ormuz over Ahriman. I dont trust any promise, I don believe in
assurances based on the so called humanism. The only way to deal with a certain technology
is another technology. Today, man knows more about his dangerous inclinations than he knew
a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years his knowledge will be even more complete.
Then he will be able to benet from
it.
Digital Metaplasticity describes plastic qualities of digital
media congurations and its expressions through theapplications of abstract art languages and methodolo-
gies to computational symbolic systems. The metaplasticmedia, one of disciplines objects, within its own aesthetic
and semantic codes dene a new culture of the representa-
tion. Interaction processes dened with metaplastic codes,trace behaviors and plastic multisensorial qualities.
Overlapping gures
There are only few technologies which are not double-edged, as is shown for
example by the scythes attached to the wheels of the Hittite chariots, or the
proverbial plowshares forged into swords. Every technology is, in principle, an
articial extension of the natural, inherent to everything that is alive, tendency
to rule the environment, or at least not to be defeated by it in the struggle for
existence. Homeostasis - the scholarly name for the striving for equilibrium,
i.e., for survival in deance of change - developed chalky and chitin skeletons
which could resist the force of gravitation, legs enabling mobility, wings
and ns, canine teeth making eating easier, horns, jaws, digestive systems,
protecting armors and camouage shapes, until this led to the independence
of organisms from their environment by regulation of a constant body
temperature. In this way small islands of decreasing entropy in a world of
general entropy increase were created. Evolution does not restrict itself to
this; from organisms, from types, classes and varieties of plants and animals inturn it creates superior entities, no islets anymore, but islands of homeostasis,
forming the whole surface and atmosphere of the planet. The living nature,
the biosphere, is at the same time cooperation and mutual eating, an
alliance which is inseparably connected with ght, as is demonstrated by
every hierarchy that has been investigated by ecologists: these are, especially
among animal forms, pyramids, at the top of which rule the large predators,
eating smaller animals, and these in turn others still, and only on the very
ground, at the bottom of lifes kingdom, acts the green transformer of solar
into biochemical energy, omnipresent on the land and in the oceans, which by
billions of inconspicuous blades carries the changing, for taking on new forms
continuously, but constant, for not coming to and end as a whole, massifs of life.
Homeostatic
activity, which used tech-
nologies as specic organs, made
man the ruler of the Earth, a power-
ful one actually only in the eyes of the
apologist, which he is himself. In view of
climatic perturbations, earthquakes, the
rare, but possible danger of impact of
a large meteor, man is in principle
as helpless as he was in the
last Ice Age
6
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She had helped him get his papers, found him his rst job in ASP. Was that their history? No,
history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History
was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab
driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fr
a
g
m
e
nt reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but
delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.
Evolution has no foresight. Complex ma-
chinery develops its own agendas. Brains
cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote
stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the
temptation of rhythm and music. The rush
evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms
used for habitat selection, metastasize into
art. Thrills that once had to be earned
in increments of tness can now be had
from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise
unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors,
and the system moves beyond modeling the
organism. It begins to model the very process
of modeling. It consumes ever-more com-
putational resources, bogs itself down with
endless recursion and ir relevant simulations.
Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every
natural genome, it persists and proliferates
and produces nothing but itself.
[3]
More and more people
buy objects for intellectualand spiritual nourishment.
People do not buy my coffeemakers, kettles and lemon
squeezers because they
need to make coffee, to boilwater, or to squeeze lemons,
but for other reasons.
H O L O G R A M S
O
S
E
S
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body.
European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the
smell of dust...and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasnt met you yet; youre hardly
out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl
up and circle - and static takes loves body, wipes it clean and gray.
Waves
white sound
break along a
beach that isnt
there.
And the tapes ends.
The inducers light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thou-
sand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered
and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling
toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing
a whole hell never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary
conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a at packet of drugs
- a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: Were each others fragments, and was it always this way? That in-
stant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer
now, or more real, for his having been there?
Overlapping
gures ii
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The
n
o
s
e
Issue
The sign cannot be reduced to signaling an exterior
correlate. The correlate becomes a sign at the moment
when it is denoted, revealing some of its components
while hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate
objects.To the contrary,the object becomes an object
through signs, meaning that signs partially disclose
the objects. Otherwise said, the act of relating to
an object turns the object into a sign. However,
discourses fail to entirely convey an exterior correlate,
and that is because opacity is central both to the
sphere of communication and to the exterior objects
themselves. Language cannot assimilate an exterior
correlate inside its structure without transforming it,
delivering one facade and hiding others. Put inana-
lytical semiotic terms, language cannotinteriorize
a denotatum, an existing referent,without a process
of transforming itthe object is never rendered assuch but isalways already a semiotized object, and
its semiotization implies a selection of some of its
qualities because the denotatum is anopaque entity,
evincing one side at a time.
The sign
corresponds to adesignatum, that
is, to a class of
object that gives it
its regularity and
justies its sense.
As a gure, the sign
is affected in its
plasticity and
appearance.
[7]
P L A S T I C
F R A G M E N T S
Discourse produces sense
by maintaining regular spaces be-
tween terms; the gural produces sense by
engaging the desiring body in its relation to signs
that are plastic, visual, and dense.The issue of Discourse,
Figure concerns thus the role of the signier in the formation
of sense. Is its plasticity a dimension that erases itself in the me-
chanical production of sense, or does it generate an excess of sense
that involves a libidinal involvement with an object in its density and
spatiality? The gural designates the gesture that breaks through lan-
guage and reveals its purely visual forms. This aspect of signication,
cannot be reduced to the logic of discourse, to its communicability and
transparency, because language requires regularity, and desire is apriori
irregular and labile. The issue of discursive communication is to
transmit the sense of the phrase the tree is green by coding it an
defciently providing the code to as many subjects so that it can
be decoded and understood. The issue of art in relation to thephrase the tree is green is to experiment with the rules of
the sentence, transgress them and integrate into the
sentence a type of experience that is foreign to the
code itself: color the words, disintegrate their
order, displace the syntax.
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Metonymy, which participates in the structu-
ring of every metaphor and can sometimes be a metaphor itself,
creates chains of signication that stretch in various directions
(Fig. 21). The screen uses both metaphor and metonymy to structure
space and time around appearances, and this is where it becomes
particularly useful in art criticism. Metonymy has to do with the
materiality of the sign, its potential for multiple meanings, ambigui-
ty, and the creation of new meaning. Opposition creates an inde-
pendent function capable of conveying abstract and invisible ideas.
Light and dark, day and night, left and right come to stand for the
most broadly cosmic and theological notions. The composite struc-
ture of the sign, described as the opposition of signied to signier
(s/S). By stressing the arbitrariness by which different signiers areculturally chosen to signify things that must be common to cultural
groups (tree, arbre, Baum, etc.), the autor was able to demonstrate
the cooperative co-existence of two different realms of signication:
a metonymic realm that allows for substitution, modication, and
error; and a metaphoric realm that instates reality as a consistent
and coherent whole.
The Semiotic
Hinge (ii)
PHILOSOPHY is the product of wonder. The effort after the
general characterization of the world around us is the romance
of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so
obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the
traditional doctrine: we can detect the oversights, thesuperstitions, the rash generalizations of the past ages. We
know so well what we mean and yet were main so curiously
uncertain about the formulation of any detail of our knowledge.
This word detail lies at the heart of the whole difculty. You
cannot talk vaguely about Nature in general. We must x upon
details within nature and discuss their essences and their types
of interconnection. The world around is complex, composed of
details. We have to settle upon the primary types of detail in
terms of which we endeavour to express our understanding of
Nature. We have to analyse and to abstract, and to understand
the natural status of our abstractions.
3I hear a melody, screeching andscratching behind the bells.
4
An old backside of a building.Small patches of navy and red lie
indiscrimninately on top of white
plaster. Where time peeled white,bare gray bricks remain. Decaying
colors hinting its previous livesweathered its unique har mony.
H O L L Y
S P A M
Spam or aesthetics may have
initially been a useful adapta-
tion: this is the only way that
it could have arisen in the rstplace (see Darwin on sexual
selection, and Elizabeth Groszs
recent gloss on this). But spam
or art quickly outgrew this pur-
pose; it has now become para-
sitic, and replicates itself even at
its hosts expense (cf: peacocks
tails). It serves no further pur-
pose any more. Spam or art is a
virus; and, insofar as we have
aesthetic sensibilities (including
self-consciousness and dwelling
just in the present moment), we
are that virus.
Our thoughts and bodies, our
lives, are needlessly recursive
and wasteful. Our lives are
pointless luxuries in a
Darwinian war universe.
If we are the dominant species
on Earth at the moment, thismay only be because we are in
the situation of ightless birds
and marsupials, in areas where
the placental mammals have not
yet arrived.
1
I see a poem as a multi-coloured
strip behind peeling plaster, inseparate, shining fragments.
What if everything that
exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted,
events with ends but no beginnings with us
constantly making categories, seeking out, andreconstructing, until we think we can see total
love, betrayal and defeat, although in reality
we are all no more than haphazard fractions.
The mind, for its own self-preservation, nds
and integrates scattered fragments. Using reli-
gion and philosophy as the cement, we perpe-
tualy collect and assemble all the garbage com-
prised by statistics in order to make sense out
of things, to make everything respond in one
unied voice like a bell chiming to our glory.
2
I see a veil, a diaphonous tint,
nearly invisible.
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obstacleobstacle
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obstacleobstacle obstacle
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obstacleobstacle
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heore-tical ergonomics. Fud-
ge Factor. Teory and practice cometogether through a type o Western
conectionery, usually sof, sweet, and richthat it acquires a smooth, creamy consistency.
Chocolate is necessary to hold back gravity andachieve a static universe. Fudge Factor is more
than a unique conection, it is one o those simplepleasures that give us a mo- ment o peace as we enjoy
not only the resh crea- my taste but the warm floodo memories that it brings . E x - per ience meets theorythrough a viscous choco- late. Te enjoyment o fitting apiece in a puzzle. Te pl ea su re o touching the sura-ce o the puzzle with the palm o the hand beore itvanishes. Adapting elements that fit the characteris-
tics o the agents who will use them. Naminga thing is filling a hole with
p l a s t e r and re- movi ngthe surplus with a spatula. Speaking is covering cakes with
sticky chocolate. Lambda is a joint in the skull, the 11thletter o the Greek alphabet, the symbol or the ud-
ge actor, the starting point o all prosthetic
designs and the secret ingrediento chocolate.
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Similar points can be made for other camouage strategies, such as self-shadow concealment
(SSC). Finally, matching a random sample on even one background does not guarantee a high
level of background matching or crypsis (Merilaita & Lind 2005). This idea of random
sample is problematic even on simple backgrounds, because the animal may still be visible due
to spatial or phase mismatch with important background features, such as edges (Kelman et
al. 2007). For these reasons, we simply refer to crypsis as including colours and patterns that
prevent detection (but not necessarily recognition).
CR
Y
P
S
IS
CR
Y
P
S
IS
Despite the above, it is a sub-
ject of some debate as to which
other forms of camouage alsoprevent detection and should
therefore be included under
crypsis along with background
matching (see below). One of the
main arguments surrounding
what should be included under
crypsis regards disruptive co-
loration, and whether this pre-
vents recognition or detection.
While some researchers (e.g.
Stobbe & Schaefer 2008) assert
that disruption prevents recogni-
tion of the animal, we argue that
disruptive coloration initially
prevents detection by breaking
up form (which in turn may also
inuence recognition) and is
therefore a type of crypsis. For
instance, disruptive coloration
seemingly works by breaking
up edge information, so that a
predator may not detect a prey
item because the salient outlines
that may give away its presence
have been destroyed.
mutatis
m
u
t
a
n
t
i
s
The use of the term crypsis has caused disagreement over the last few years,
but we argue that it comprises all traits that reduce an animals risk ofbecoming detected when it is potentially perceivable to an observer. In terms
of vision, the term crypsis includes features of physical appearance (e.g.
coloration), but also behavioural traits, or both, to prevent detection. To
distinguish crypsis from hiding (such as simply being hidden behind an object
in the environment), we argue that the features of the animal should reduce
the risk of detection when the animal is in plain sight, if those traits are to be
considered crypsis. Hiding behind an object, for example, does not constitute
crypsis (see also Edmunds 1974), because there is no chance of the receiver
detecting the animal. We opt for this usage for several reasons. First, this is
broadly consistent with the literal and historical terminology; (albeit briey)
Poulton (1890) used the term to describe colours whose object is to effect con-
cealment; Cott (1940) uses cryptic appearance to encompass modications
of structure, colour, pattern and habit; and Edmunds (1974) denes the terms
crypsis and cryptic, in terms of predators failing to detect prey. By contrast,
some researchers have dened crypsis as synonymous with background
matching, largely because they rapidly adopted Endlers (1978, 1984) deni-
tion of crypsis, where an animal should maximize camouage by matching a
random sample of the background at the time and location where the risk of
predation is the greatest.
However, in recent years, it has become clear that the above denition is wrong on a number
of grounds. First, matching a random sample of the background does not necessarily mini-
mize the risk of detection when an animal is found on several backgrounds (cf. compromise
camouage; Merilaita et al. 1999, 2001; Houston et al. 2007; Sherratt et al. 2007).
Second, the risk of detection can be decreased by disruptive markings, where the emphasis is
on specically breaking up tell-tale features of the animal.
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13
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle,his feet tangled in coils of discarded
beroptics. The arcades sea ofsound washed over him, receded,
returned. Rolling over, he sat up and
held his head.
12
His vision crawled with ghost
hieroglyphs, translucent lines ofsymbols arranging themselves
against the neutral backdrop ofthe bunker wall. He looked at the
backs of his hands, saw faint neon
molecules crawling beneath the skin,ordered by the unknowable code. He
raised his right hand and moved itexperimentally. It left a faint, fading
trail of strobed afterimages.
An
additional form of camouage, distractive markings, is also
included under crypsis because they seemingly prevent
detection. Although the distractive markings should be
detected, the outline of the body or other revealing
characteristics, and thus the main part of the animal, is not.
However, we note that little work has specically
investigated distractive markings, and that one could also
argue that if part of the object is detected, then recognition
of the prey is also prevented. Clearly, there is much more
work to be done.
10
They damaged his nervous systemwith a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphishotel, his talent burning out micron
by micron, he hallucinated for thirty
hours. The damage was minute,subtle, and utterly effective. For
Case, whod lived for the bodilessexultation of cyberspace, it was
the Fall.
11
Cyberspace. A consensualhallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators,in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts . . .
A graphic representation of dataabstracted from the banks of every
computer in the human system.
[9]In countershading, an animal possessesa darker surface on the side that typi-
cally faces light and a lighter opposite
side. Most researchers seem to now
agree that the term refers to the
appearance of the coloration and not
the function, especially as counter-
shading may be involved with several
functions. These include compensation
of own shadow (SSC), simultaneously
matching two different backgrounds
in two different directions (back-
ground matching), changing the
three-dimensional appearance of theanimal, protection from UV light and
others (Ruxton et al. 2004). For the
purposes of this theme issue, the two
most relevant functions are SSC, where
the creation of shadows is cancelled
out by countershading, and oblitera-
tive shading, where the shadow/light
cues for three-dimensional form of the
animal are destroyed (Thayer 1896).
We argue that SSC prevents detection
by removing conspicuous shadows, and
obliterative shading prevents detection
by removing salient three-dimensional
information, so group both these under
crypsis.
In principle, some of the issues of dening types of camouage may be clearedup by specically dening detection. However, at present, there are few good
ways of fully dening camouage object properties correctly with respect to the
relevant viewers perception. Understandably, there is a real issue that distin-
guishing between detection and recognition in experimental situations is very
difcult, and it follows that preventing detection may also lead to a prevention
of recognition, e.g. the receiver does not recognize the form of the animal be-
cause it does not detect its edges. What matters is what the colour patterning or
other camouage features primarily do. As such, masquerade need not prevent
detection but it does prevent recognition, whereas disruptive coloration and
SSC, along with background matching, primarily prevent detection.
7
The sky above the port was thecolor of television, tuned to a dead
channel.
8You needed a new pancreas. The
one we bought for you frees you froma dangerous dependency. Thanks,
but I was enjoying that dependency.
9
And in the bloodlit dark behind hiseyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from
the edge of space, hypnagogic images
jerking past like a lm compiled ofrandom frames. Symbols, gures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandalaof visual information.
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We can remember Marshall McLuhans
words about electronic media having outered
the central nervous system itself, thus making
the world into a smooth plateau of percep-
tion. This rings true when considering digital
media, which is characterized by its transpa-
rency, its smoothness. Any type of information
is de- and recodable into another format.
This kind of ux and mutability of digital
media makes it into an immersive enviroment,
rather like sound.
So far, however, our conception of electronic
media seems to have been very v isually domi-
nated and tied up to the more general link be-
tween the visual and the rational, which has
been prominent in Western thought. However,
many thinkers have also heard something new
coming from the explosion of new media since
the 19th Century. McLuhan wrote about the
acoustic quality of the electronic global village
he saw coming. German philosopher Wolf-
gang Welsch, in his essay On the Way to an
Auditive Culture? addresses the problem of
oculacentrism of the Western philosophical
tradition and tries to create a conception of
an auditive form of thinking. How to think
of sound itself when the epistemological focus
of our thinking and our concepts is located
in a seeing subject? With its temporality and
immersiveness, sound seems to avoid clarity,
categorization and objectivity. Light and sight
reveal objects, sound is the result of processes,
of something happening and of mistakes:
there cant be glitches without processes.
The whole notion of glitch is tied up to an
auditive thoughtform, which approaches
the world as a multiplicity of processes rather
than a pre-set eld of objects.
The scratches and glitches of contemporary
electronic music, its aesthetics of interrup-
tion and misuse, should be considered in
relation to the ontology of the Outside, or its
hauntology (to quote Derrida writing about
hauntings and returnings). Contemporary
thought has painstakingly strived to approachthis outside of thought and perception. The
subject and the world, if such separation can
be made, are seen to be formed in complex
interrations between both. The subject
emerges from the processes of the world.
Deleuze and Guattari give these processes a
name: machines. Machines are dened as a
system of interruptions or breaks (AO 36),
cutting and redirecting the energetic ows of
preconscious world, which can be thought
of as an innitely complex assemblage of
machines acting upon other machines acting
upon others etc. A subjectivity is emergent and
residual, having only a limited perspective
upon the underlying world of forces it
inhabits. Looking at our surroundings we
recognize things, we are creatures of habitand conventions. Thinking, ultimately a
creative act, is not recognition but an encoun-
ter, violence to thought. Something comes from
the outside that interrupts and grabs us and
forces us outside of our habitual territory.
AESTHETICS
OF
INTERRUPTION
In science ction, ghosts in machines
always appear as malfunctions, glitches,interruptions in the normal ow of things.
Something unexpected appears seemingly
out of nothing and from nowhere. Through
a malfunction, a glitch, we get a eeting
glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As
electricity has become the basic element of the
world we live in, the steady hum of power
grids and their owing immaterial essences
slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of every-
day machinery, the ghostly rapport has also
relocated into the domain of current uctua-
tions, radio interference and misread data.
Early telegraph experimenters heard strange
raps and clicks issuing from disturbances in
Earths magnetic eld, seemingly communica-
tion from some other side; Thomas Edison
tried to put together a radio device to address
denizens of other worlds; Constantin Rau-
dive, Raymond Cass and Friedrich Jrgenson
spent hours and hours attempting to capture
voices of the dead onto magnetic tape; radio
antennas at Arecibo Observatory are pointed
skywards, waiting for extraterrestrial signals.
The presence of some outside force has
always been supposed to be apparent through
interference and interruption.
Actual facts about these manifestations are
not really important. The interesting thing
is that every new medium seems to open
up a new kind of outside, every new mode
of perception leaving out, or even creating,
something imperceptible, and on the other
hand bringing out something previously out
of reach. Erik Davis has named the outside
boundary of electronic media as the elec-
tromagnetic imaginary, meaning that many
animistic or alchemistic notions of essential
energies and life spirits have been translatedinto the concept of electricity, and remaining
in the technological unconscious. Machines
seem to be inhabiting some kind of life, even
as it is an extension of ourselves. The sheer
uncanniness of a disembodied voice transmitting
via telephone line, as experienced by early
telephone users, is quite hard to imagine now,
but think of hearing a voice of a recently
departed person on an answering machine.
[2]
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If arts quest is to bring the
imperceptible to perception,
music seeks to make audible the
inaudible forces of time and du-
ration, to bring out an immanentsound plane, a pure sound block,
in which forms are replaced by
pure modications of speed.
(MP 267) How does one
manage to get away from the
grip of musical forms while
being still able to retain a plane
of consistency; to not regress
into undifferentiated chaos which
couldnt hold any consistency? This
is the question of the refrain.
In order to become-other, one
has to align with some outerior
forces and create new machinic
assemblages. Thats why Deleuze
and Guattari write that refrain
isnt the origin of music but
rather a means of preventing it,
warding it off (MP 300).
Becoming is an alliance. With
music machines we have entered
a new kind of musical alliance.
Phonography, the art of recording
sound, allows the production of
a smooth sound plane, on which
all relations between its various
elements are immanent as
recording extracts or constructs
a block of time, a musical time
that is present as sound
penetrates our bodies, but
emerges as a result from an
(quasi)event which is distant
from us spatially and
temporarily.
One can see the effect of
recording or sound processing technology as having helped
in breaking with the traditional musical notation and the
ideal of a pure musical form. Once all sound has become
recordable and reproducible by machines, we can be done
away with the concept of music as residing, ultimately,
in the score. Phonography and electronic/digital media
have attened out the arborescent model of the actual
sounds relation to a higher structure, that is, the compo-
sition itself as actualized in various levels of perfection
in the performances of musicians. From machinic point
of view (or hearing) theres no difference between voice
and noise, we have only sonic stratum and various means
to manipulate that sound matter.
By introducing the refrain Deleuze and
Guattari have created a concept that
illustrates the constantly shifting nature of
relations between territorialized or habitual
milieu and the chaos of the outside forces.
A refrain, in the domain of music, can be
described very vaguely as a rhythmic element,
something marking out a territory amidst
chaos: a nursery rhyme, a childs song to
comfort oneself, a birdsong to stake out a
territory? Refrain doesnt, however, have just
a reactionary function against chaos; it is
situated in the middle and has a potential
to both reterritorialize and deterritorialize
sound, constantly on the border of a territory.
Art has posited itself onto this border. Or, to
paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, all creative
activity, whether its art, philosophy or
science, has to approach the outside of
thought. To be able to create new ways to feel
the world, new percepts and affects, one has
to court the chaos and worship the glitch.
Machines
Contemporary electronic music has approached this outside
of thought, or outside of music, by distancing itself from the
hierarchy of Western classical music tradition, which has
valuated certain musical structures (such as melody/harmony)
over another qualities (rhythm, timbre) and posited the score as
a transcendent compositional principle. Deleuze and Guattariobserve the deterritorializing tendency of refrain in music:
25
Certain modern musicians oppose the the transcendentalplan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated
all of Western classical music, to the immanent soundplane, which is always given along with that to which
it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and
carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kindof molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds,
tenths and hundredths of seconds. (MP 267)
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I hear no great conceptual divide between
various music machines. Whatever means
there are available for recording acoustic phe-
nomena or presenting sound, no matter what
the source, making sound reproducible and
thus variable, all phonographic technologies
have the potential to deterritorialize sound
and music. Maybe the greatest singular
moment in nomadic use (= an act of
capturing forces, making a new machinic
assemblage of existing machinic formations)
of phonographic machinery has been the
emergence of hip-hop DJing and the misuseof vinyl records, making a pair of turntables
into a nomadic war machine. For a better
part of the last century the record remained
inactive, a storage capsule of time.
Apart from few artistic experimentations
vinyl records were used as passive playback
devices which always referred to some original
event captured onto the grooves of the disc.
In a parallel to the reinvention of the electric
guitar by nding the aesthetic potential of
the feedback noise generated by the guitar
amplier -circuit (and thus making electric
guitar something other than an amplied
replica of acoustic guitar), the DJ would nd
and learn to use the immanent forces within
the record itself.
Radio, a medium which in the early 20th
Century had a similarly all-pervading
role as the internet has today, remained
the primary medium of the DJ for a
long time. The status of a radio jock rose
from that of a salesman/entertainer to
a central gure in pop business during
the 1950s youth culture explosion. DJ
as a sonic artist evolved somewhere else,however: in the discothque, a club for
dancing to recorded music instead of a
live orchestra. The rst discos were born
in 1940s France during the German
occupation that hampered the live music
circuit. After the war some clubs stuck
with the concept of dancing to records.
This idea migrated elsewhere and in the
50s dance clubs experienced a massive
leap in popularity with the advent of
rocknroll and youth culture. We can
see this as a sort of deterritorialization:
instead of responding to the presence of
performers the audience responds to the
music and the forces it directs into the
space it creates.
Disco as a musical style developed from the mantric/tantric heavy funk of James Brown,
followed by others, which concentrated on the bass-heavy, steady and monotonously repetitive
groove; a becoming-machine of the rhythm section. This style evolved into even more functionalist
direction, downplaying the soul element of funk and delving solely in the groove. Record com-
panies started producing long dance remixes of songs. Disco DJs wanted to create an all-night
ow of music and that required a skill of seamlessly mixing records into one another. Any kind
of music focusing on rhythm rather than melody could be used; DJ was becoming a curator-
gure in the emerging club spaces, such as the loft parties in 1970s New York.
The concept of frequency, according
to German media philosopher Friedrich
Kittler, brought about by recording
technology, allows music to break with
the Old European tradition of pythagorean
harmony and notation as the preserver
of clear and pure sounds (in opposition to
the chaotic noise of the world). Since the
19th Century sound has been recordable,
vibrations in a carrying medium
transferable to a recording surface. The
phonograph does not hear as our ears thathave been trained immediately to lter
voices, words and sounds out of noise;
it registers acoustic events as such.
(Kittler 23) The phonograph hears sounds
acousmatically, without a relation to the
origin of a sound.
Using the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, we can state that the
phonograph deterritorializes sound, attens down the hierarchical
organization of music into a rhizome, which is an open, multiple
and temporal form of organization and subsceptible to constant
de- and recoding. The act of recording is in one way already a
creative act of framing and selection. Any recording is a whole
in itself, all its characteristics are immanent to itself, without an
essential relation to an outerior or higher symbolic order.
However, up until the 1960s and the expansion of recording
studio technologies, record was generally regarded as referring toan original acoustic event, a performance, which would have more
ontologic value (i.e. realness) than mere representation of it.
Multitrack tape machines make that stance irrelevant; studio-
as-instrument does away with acoustic realism. A particular
soundscape, experienced as a unied whole, could have been
assembled during many different takes and places, or wouldnt
have to result from any acoustic events, as in computer music.
Through the mixing board and the master tape, the record is the
stratied surface of sound.
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Despite its inventors wishes to provide a
surface for the representation of an original
event, a stable protector of the preceding mode
of organization, the record became a destabi-
lizer, weapon in sonic warfare (a nomadic war
machine of sorts). DJs hand is a terrorwrist
opening up a new eld of objectile thought:
ngertip perception (Eshun 18). A de-
territorialization of hand and record in the
machinic assemblage of scratching.
The phonographic diagram, given its direct
transduction of physical wave to mechanical
impulse or electrical signal, provides a code
both precisely reproducible and potentially
editable. ... [W]here the score represents,
phonography simply transduces... As soon as
the deterritorialization of sonic matter into
vinyl abstracts it from the moment, and makes
music into this random-access memory
available time and time again, the sonic
matter is susceptible to temporal mutation,
warping, looping. (Mackay 250)
DJs (ab)use of vinyl is a derangement
in every sense of the word. Scratching
deterritorializes the noise on the grooves,
bends the spiral grooves into lines of ight;scratching rips its source material from the
record, transforms the ideal into matter to
be molded, cuts into syntax to isolate words
and phrases, achieving an Artaud-style
decoding of language systems (both human
and musical). A scratch takes up a block
of recorded time and folds it up in baroque
ourishes like a cloth. Scratching makes
audible the ow of time and matter, the ow
and the machines that cut it, and creates a
vinyl psychedelia = scratchadelia, a machinic
refrain, a becoming-vinyl of music.
[0]
A digital counterpart to the scratch is the
often-mentioned glitch. A precariously vague term, which however captures
some of the slipperiness of digital media. If analog phonography has led to
some sort of metallurgy of sound, made sound malleable and mutable, digital
sound processing approaches sound as molecules. The term microsound is very
appropriate for the digital music of today. Or, if we take heed of Kim Cascone,
we should be talking about post-digital music, since the medium of digital tech-
nology has become so transparent it doesnt reect in the expression of music
anymore. Instead specic sound processing tools, such as Max, AudioMulch or
SoundForge produce an auratic sound, as well as providing amazing detail and
accuracy in manipulating sound.
The conceptual leap of DJ from a curator (organizing a collection of works)
to an artist (creating a work) happened in 1970s Bronx NY, when local DJs
invented the isolating of the breakbeat and hip-hop: they would play only
the rhythmic percussion breaks of funk records, alternating the same passage
on two turntables, creating their own music. This rather crude skill of keeping
the party going (with the help of an MC hollering encouragements to the party
people) soon evolved into ner techniques of vinyl manipulation and collage.
The DJ became a cut chemist.
Grandmaster Flashs 1981 record The Amazing Adventures of Grandmaster
Flash on the Wheels of Steel was almost literally an encyclopedia of DJ tech-
niques: crossfading, punch-phrasing, backspinning, cutting and scratching...
Not only percussion was used as a sound source, almost everything could be
dropped into the mix, all kinds of noise, as long as it was on record. In someways a popularization of musique concrte, this meant a huge shift in the per-
ception of music:
After Flash, the tur ntable
becomes a machine for
building and melding
mindstates from your
record collection. The
turntables, a Technics
deck, become a subjectivity
engine generating a
stereophonics, a hi
consciousness of the head,
wholly tuned in and turned
on by the found noise of
vinyl degeneration that
hears scratches, crackle,
fuzz, hiss and static as lead
instruments. entirely oriented toward anexperimentation in contact
with the real... susceptibleto constant modication.
(MP 12)
The turntable becomes not only a new
kind of percussive instrument, it becomes a
syntax-destroyer and a connective synthesizer
in a Deleuzian sense (mixing this AND this
AND this...). Record is a diagram, a map,
rather than a tracing or writing. A map is
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smooth plane of constant present, deterritorializing the sound itself as a
singularity, a sonorous force, theres a tendency for that repetition to become
reterritorialized as a clich, an all-too expectable formula; this seems to be a
potential dead-end for numerous genres of electronic dance music. A glitch
appears: a wrinkle in time of the constant present. If we listen to an arche-
typal glitchy sound, an Oval track for example, we can hear a rich tapestry
of sound and absence of sound. There are skips, something is missing, there
are holes in the smooth space of sound. Or we can consider Kim Cascones
concept of residualism that involves structuring a work around an absence,
removing a signal and leaving onl y its effects to be heard. Scratching, sam-
pling and the stuttering of malfunctioning soft- and hardware are means of
derangement, seeking out a way to make a rhizome out of music, a way to
place its elements in continuous variation, where absences, breaks, holes, folds
and ruptures can be a part; a way to let ghosts of the outside in.
Love
[M]achines work ... by continually breaking down... (AO 8),
producing anti-production, creating gaps and glitches. One has to
remember we?re talking about desiring machines and arts ability to
reect the formative processes of machinic pre-conscious world, which
is libidinal. As Jake Mandell observes in his liner notes for his album
Love Songs for Machines, artists relation to their tools of the trade
has always been fetishistic. A favorite pen of the writer, a beloved
brush of the painter; its always been intimate. Mandell writes that the
once-close relationship of artists and their tools has encountered a crisis
in the digital age, the screenandmouse -interface is abstract and
alienating. Still, as an immersive environment, digital media allow for
an exceptionally affectionate experience.
As tool-using creatures (among other such creatures) weve always been cyborgs. [T]ools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them
possible. (MP 90) That is to say, tools imply a symbiosis between two bodies in amachinic assemblage, deterritorializing them both. Think of Roland TB-303 Bassline
Generator, becoming an Acid Machine through a glitch, a programming mistake, releasing
a whole new spectrum of sounds, transforming both the musician and the instrument. Itsa two-way relation: we can well take heed of Kodwo Eshuns conception of human beings
as the sex organs of synthesizers. New sounds happen between things, in the movement thatsweeps you and your computer to somewhere else: in order to effect deterritorializations you
have to love your machines.
[3]
R
E
P
E
T
I
T
I
O
N
As
builds
the
up
a
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quote #2
Silver Phosphenes
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes,silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of
space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a
lm compiled of random frames. Symbols,gures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala
of visual information.
quote #5
Fast Forward
Night City was like a deranged experimentin social Darwinism, designed by a bored
researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button.
quote #4
Atlantic Noise
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the
white noise that is London, that Damienstheory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul
is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some
ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake ofthe plane that brought her here, hundreds of
thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Soulscant move that quickly, and are left behind,
and must be awaited, upon arrival,
like lost luggage.
quote #1
Ghost Hieroglyphs
His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs,
translucent lines of symbols arranging them-selves against the neutral backdrop of the
bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his
hands, saw faint neon molecules crawlingbeneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable
code. He raised his right hand and moved itexperimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of
strobed afterimages.
quote #3
Event Horizon
There must be some Tommy Hilger eventhorizon, beyond which it is impossible to be
more derivative, more removed from the source,more devoid of soul.
quote #6
Fragmented Dreams
It will be like watching one of her owndreams on television. Some vast and deeply
personal insult to any ordinary notion ofinteriority. An experience outside culture.
gure #2
Parallel Resonance
The resonance of a parallel RLC circuit isa bit more involved than the series resonance.
The resonant frequency can be dened in three
different ways, which converge on the sameexpression as the series resonant frequency if
the resistance of the circuit is small.
gure #5
The Shift Register
The Shift Register is another type of sequen-tial logic circuit that is used for the storage
or transfer of data in the form of binary
numbers. This sequential device loads thedata present on its inputs and then moves or
shifts it to its output once every clock cycle,hence the name shift re gister.
gure #4
Redundancy
Redundancy in information theory is the
number of bits used to transmit a messageminus the number of bits of actual infor-
mation in the message. Informally, it is the
amount of wasted space used to transmitcertain data. Data compression is a way to
reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy,while checksums are a way of adding desired
redundancy for purposes of error detection
when communicating over a noisy channel oflimited capacity.
gure #1
Cyberspace
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions of legitimateoperators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts... A graphic
representation of data abstracted from banksof every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light rangedin the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data.
Like city lights, receding...
gure #3
Central Processing
A central processing unit (CPU) is the hard-ware within a computer that carries out the
instructions of a computer program by per-forming the basic arithmetical, logical, and
input/output operations of the system.
gure #6
Accelerationism
Accelerationism is the belief that in order togenerate radical change, the prevailing system
of capitalism should be expanded and itsgrowth accelerated so that its self-destructive
tendencies can be brought to their conclusion.
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In more recent years the moquette
designers role has been transformed
by the introduction of Computer Aided
Design (CAD), greatly improving the
efciency in production and the style
of the designs. To update the debates
about design and industry in the
present day, I visited the moquette
factory in Hudderseld. Here I was
able to draw on further historical
resources and see production inaction. I was also able to discuss with
the designers at Holdsworth Ltd the
ways in which modern technology has
changed moquette and how nancial
restraints in the recent economic
climate have altered manufacturing
and design priorities.
In the
essay I close by
exploring London Undergrounds
plans for the future design of moquette, in
particular how design decisions are now being
reached. A competition launched in 2009 gave
members of the public an opportunity to design a
moquette which will eventually be used on all the lines of
the London Underground. Furthermore, in 2012 HeatherwickStudio was commissioned by Transport for London to design a
new moquette for the redesigned Routemaster Bus. My essay
considered the context and signicance of this new approach
to design for public transport, and concluded by discussing
the need for London Underground to continue to
employ the best contemporary designers so that the
network maintains its position as an iconic
design symbol of modern London.
[11]M O Q UE T T E
The underground rail ser-
vice is an iconic design symbol
of London. This success can
partly be attributed to its strong
modernist identity, initiated by
the Chief Executive of LondonTransport, Frank Pick (1878-
1941) in the early 20th century.
His aim was to integrate modern
design with industry to create a
distinct corporate style for the
network. The Underground was
to be a showcase of the very best
of contemporary designers for an
audience which today amounts
to over one billion
passengers per year.
Most people are familiar with
the roundel signage by Edward
Johnson and the tube maps of
Harry Beck, however my prize-
winning essay focused in parti-
cular on the design of moquette,
the often overlooked textile used
to cover seating throughout the
network.Moquette, the French
word for carpet, is a woollen
material woven on large looms,which is ideal for use on public
transport due to its hard-
wearing properties. The colour-
ful repetitive patterns often seen
on moquette function to camou-
age dirt. The moquette used by
London Underground is currently
woven in two factories, one in
Hudderseld and the other in
Lithuania, where manufacturing
costs are considerably cheaper.
Both the manufacture and design of the moquette have been transformed since it rst appeared
on the Underground networks in the early 1920s. Frank Picks aim was to bring modernist
design to the ever yday commuter. He employed the best contemporary textile designers of the time,
such as Enid Marx and Marion Dorn, whose designs displayed a strong modernist inuence.
The London Transport Museum Library and Transport for Londons archive contain revealing
correspondence between these designers and the London Transport management team during the
1930s. The documents demonstrate the importance that was placed on a close collaboration
between designer and manufacturer. They detail many important design decisions which ensured
neither the style nor quality was compromised at any stage of the design process. The network un-
derwent changes when Frank Picks inuence faded after his death in 1941. My essay examined
the founding principles and the debates between designers and manufacturers to consider how these
changes affected the overall feeling of design unity within the network.
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Could memory traces be discovered? Wittgenstein sought to undermine our condence in the
empirical nature of representationism, asking Why must a trace have been left behind?
(1980, paragraph 905). Do trace theorists misguidedly seek, on a priori grounds, to dictate
to science what to discover in the brain (Zemach 1983, pp. 323)?
Some defenders of the trace in response drain it of empirical content. Debo-
rah Rosen, for example, develops a logical notion of the memory trace, dis-
tanced from the scientic notions for which the logical notion provides only a
philosophical underpinning (1975, p. 3). But giving up the ideal of an inde-
pendent characterization of the trace may not be necessary. The postulation
of traces is empirical, but the relevant domain is not psychology. Whats doing
the work is the physical assumption that there is no macroscopic action at a
temporal distance, that mechanisms in fact underlie apparent cases of direct
action between temporally remote events. This assumption may be mistaken,but challenges to it must offer some positive alternative theoretical framework.
The mere logical possibility of a unique mnemic causation which does oper-
ate at a temporal distance (Heil 1978, pp. 6669; Anscombe 1981, pp. 1267)
is insufcient, as is the simple denial of any temporal gap between past and
present (Malcolm 1963, p. 238).
Critics deny that the retention involved in memory requires any continuous storage (Squires
1969; Malcolm 1977, pp. 1979; Bursen 1978). This worry rightly requires trace
theorists to be explicit on the relation between occurrent remembering and dispositional memo-
ries. We do need models of the mechanism by which enduring dispositions are actualized. But
the criticism does not show that there is anything deeply mysterious in the notion of under-
lying causal processes which g round memory abilities (Warnock 1987, pp. 502; Deutscher
1989, pp. 5863). The kind of storage invoked by trace theorists need not be the storage
of independent atomic items localized in particular places, like sacks of grain in a storehouse.
How does the postulated trace come to play a part in the
present act of recognition or recall? Trace theorists must
resist the idea that it is interpreted or read by some in-
ternal homunculus who can match a stored trace with a
current input, or know just which trace to seek out for a
given current purpose. Such an intelligent inner executive
explains nothing (Gibson 1979, p. 256; Draaisma 2000,
pp.21229), or gives rise to a vicious regress in which fur-
ther internal mechanisms operate in some corporeal
studio (Ryle 1949/1963, p. 36; Malcolm 1970, p. 64).
A dilemma:
circularity or solipsism?
[8]
Objections to
R
e
p
r
e
s
e
n
tations
In a taxonomy and evaluation of criticisms of memory representations and traces, this
section synthesizes the polemics of theorists who hold quite different positive views about
memory. The answers sketched here to some of these criticisms leave open a number of issues.
In particular, the issue of how the content of memory representations is determined is barely
mentioned: and the question of how memory traces could provide the right causal connections
between past and present if they are not static and permanent inner items is postponed
to section 3. Again, the key question here is whether memory does involve representation
of the past.
One initial objection mischaracterizes its target. Some critics complain that
trace theorists see an episode of remembering as entirely determined by the
nature of the stored item. But, they note, many factors other than internal
brain states affect remembering. As Wittgenstein notes, whatever the event
does leave behind, it isnt the memory (1980, paragraph 220). Trace theorists,
however, accept this point: the engram (the stored fragments of an episode)
and the memory are not the same thing (Schacter 1996, p. 70). Traces
(whatever they may be) are merely potential contributors to recollection,
providing one kind of continuity between experience and remembering; so
traces are relevant but not sufcient causal/ explanatory factors. In fact,
psychologists attention is increasingly focussed on the context of recall:
research on synergistic ecphory (Tulving 1983, pp. 1214) addresses the
conspiratorial interaction of the present cue and circumstances with the trace
(Schacter 1982, pp. 1819; 1996, pp. 5671). Developmental psychologist
Susan Engel argues that often one creates the memory at the moment one
needs it, rather than merely pulling out an intact item, image, or story (1999,
p. 6). So there is no inevitable reduction of the multicausal nature of remem-
bering to a single inner cause (see further sections 3.4 and 3.5 below).
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One approach to content determination does retain resemblance as the core explanatory notion.
According to the structuralist theory of mental representation developed by Robert Cummins
(1996), Paul Churchland (1998), and by Gerard OBrien and Jon Opie (2004), there is
an objective relation of second-order resemblance between the system of representing vehicles
in our heads and their represented objects. First-order resemblance involves the sharing
of some physical properties, and is thus unlikely to ground mental representation, since no
traces in my brain share relevant physical properties with (say) the elephants or the conversa-
tions which I remember. But in second-order resemblance, the relations among a system of
representing vehicles mirror the relations among their objects. In the case of brain traces,
second-order structural resemblances hold when some physical relations among certain brain
states (such as distance relations in the activation space of a neural network) preserve some
system of relations among represented objects.
Whatever the fate of such a general defence of the notion of a struc-tural analogue, there is another (compatible yet independent) response. We can weaken the
requirement of isomorphism further, remembering that a theory of memory in the philosophy
of psychology should not cover veridical remembering alone. Details in my memory of an
experience need not have been permanently encoded in the same enduring determinate trace as
that experience. We often tell more than we (strictly speaking) remember. Even where memory
for the gist of an event is roughly accurate, details may shift as the trace is ltered through
other beliefs, dreams, fears, or wishes. The causal connections between events and traces,
and between traces and recollection, may be multiple, indirect, and context-dependent. The
structures which underpin retention, then, need not remain the same over time, or might not
always involve identiable determinate forms over time.
This more dynamic vision of traces, rejecting the idea of permanent
storage of independent items, may satisfy both recent developments in cognitive science (section 3
below) and some of the positive suggestions with which critics of static traces have accompanied
their objections. Wittgenstein had wondered whether the things stored up may not constantly
change their nature. Gibsonian direct realists in psychology, like some phenomenologists and
Wittgensteinians in philosophy, have sometimes assimilated all theories of memory traces
to the vision of passive, separate entities each with a xed location in an inner archive. But
writers in these diverse traditions have rightly stressed various ways in which remembering
often relies on information left in the external world, arguing that we should see the inter-
nal aspects of memory more as an active resonance or attunement to information of certain
kinds than as the encoding and reproduction of determinate images. These ideas have had
considerable inuence on recent theorizing in cognitive science, and on views of memory
and mind as embodied, embedded, and extended (section 3 below). But they do not rule out
weaker, dynamic notions of the memory trace. As the great English psychologist of memory
Frederic Bartlett argued, though we may still talk of traces, there is no reason in the world
for regarding these as made complete, stored up somewhere, and then re-excited at some much
later moment. The traces that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined,
interest-carried traces. They live with our interests and with them they change.
But then the trace theorist is left with a dilemma. If we avoid the homunculus
by allowing that the remembering subject can just choose the right trace, then
our trace theory is circular, for the abilities which the memory trace was meant
to explain are now being invoked to explain the workings of the trace (Bursen
1978, pp. 5260; Wilcox and Katz 1981, pp. 229232; Sanders 1985, pp.
50810). Or if, nally, we deny that the subject has this circular independent
access to the past, and agree that the activation of traces cannot be checked
against some other veridical memories, then (critics argue) solipsism or scep-
ticism results. There is then no guarantee that any act of remembering does
provide access to the past at all: representationist trace theories thus cut the
subject off from the past behind a murky veil of traces (Wilcox and Katz 1981,
p. 231; Ben-Zeev 1986, p. 296).
Well see below (section 3.3) that this dilemma recurs empirically, in the difference betweensupervised and unsupervised learning rules in connectionist cognitive-scientic models of
memory. There, as in this general context, the natural response is to take the second prong of
the dilemma, and accept the threat of solipsism or scepticism. The trace theorist must show
how in practice the past can play roles in the causation of present remembering. The past is
not uniquely specied by present input, and there is no general guarantee of accuracy: but the
demand for incorrigible access to the past can be resisted.
6
How can memory traces represent past events or experiences?
How can they have content? This is in part a general problem
about the meaning of mental representations (see the entry
on mental representation). But specic problems crop up for
naturalistic trace theories of memory. In stating the causal theory
of memory, Martin and Deutscher argued that an analysis of
remembering should include the requirement that (in cases of
genuine remembering) the state or set of states produced by the
past experi