Machinic Unconscious
November 16, 2011
Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.1
Analogical to the graphologist who finds in scrawls, scribbles and illegible inscriptions the signals and signs of unconscious dynamics (illness and so on), geophonographic practice finds in the illegible and `meaningless’ traces distributed across the earth’s surface the signs of a machinic unconscious, as `in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics’, and so the aforementioned unconscious dynamics or `intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself’.2 Certain planes or dynamic informants of this machinic unconscious or pre-individual background are to be located terrestrially; thought and the individual appear as a fold or twisted contraction of this—at once tropospheric and subterranean—unconscious, or perhaps a kind of mole or miner, bombarded with and making pathways through endless and indefinite wavefronts that pound and transpierce the individual/object via all available mediums. Accordingly, we should remain suspicious of the phenomenological conditions according to which Deleuze and Guattari ascribe a certain privilege and power to sound:
Sound owes this power not to signifying or “communicational” values [...] nor to physical properties, but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us3
The privilege ascribed to sonority by Deleuze and Guattari is itself to be `deterritorialized’ in recognising this incisive function or information as indicating the affective capacity of a larger vibrational continuum inclusive of a broader set of mediums—including, for example, the electromagnetic. The incisive function that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to sound, when adequately deterritorialized constitutes a synthetic field comprising ontologically diffusive and taxonomically diverse wavefronts, a synthetic field—or wavefield synthesis—that engenders `syntheses of the impersonal unconscious’.4
- Walter Benjamin, Reflections, 335. [↩]
- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 283. [↩]
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 383. [↩]
- Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 322. [↩]
Comments (0) | Tags: Electromagnetism, Geophonography, Geotrauma, Materialism, Medium, Nick Land
Quantitative Extractions
November 15, 2011
T5 Quantitative Extraction by schrimshaw
First attempt at a spectral reduction of the results of prior iterations of geophonographic approaches, an attempt at identifying intensive quantities behind the surface appearances that previously documented techniques have traced and rendered audible.
A development of the Ur-writings series. Technical details can be found here.
Comments (0) | Tags: Geophonography
Tynemouth Surface 5
November 6, 2011
Tynemouth Surface 5 by schrimshaw
Comments (0) | Tags: Geophonography, Phonography
Tynemouth Surface 8
November 5, 2011
Tynemouth Surface 8 by schrimshaw
Experiments in geophonography: a process of tracing ‘meaningless’ and illegible inscriptions that are nonetheless informative, following distorted lines and figures that intersect both the history of phonography and recent geophilosophical speculation. Each iteration of the process entails tracing the contours of a particular geological rupture or protrusion, the abstraction of its structure, and its eventual re-inscription into wood and vinyl.
| Tags: Geophonography, Geotrauma, Phonography
Dark Materialism
October 14, 2011
It would appear that we have entered a new Dark Age. Far from this being a lament for the loss of clear vision, the stagnation of thought, or forewarning against rising fundamentalism seeking to reinstate the dominance of religious dogma, the darkness into which we are heading presents itself as the site or sector of unimaginable potential. An irritable object indifferent to prying eyes, a spot that cannot be itched, a bubo nested within the armpit of the Enlightenment; this darkness presents a strange attraction, the power of a mode of thought whose strength resides not with punitive certainties or that which speaks loud and clear, but in constantly uncovering, from within the obscure murmur of the universe, the humbling if not humiliating extent of our ignorance.
The narrative of cosmology, far from presenting the greatest story ever told, appears riddled with plot holes, presenting more a kind of cheap horror or soap opera, whose internal contradictions and inadequacies are patched-up or filled out with the sudden appearance of new figures and forms, dubious subplots and returns from the dead. A new darkness engulfs us on a cosmic scale, dark matter, dark energy, dark flows, a `dark sector‘ that constitutes around ninety five percent of what we currently understand to be our universe. For all our advances, we now more than ever find ourselves alone in the dark, the extent of this blackness presenting another point on a long list of humiliations that have seen humanity irrevocably withdrawn from any leading or central role in the cosmological narrative.
Yet, beyond dejection, once we have recovered from any anthropic sulk or fit of pique at the erosion of our cosmic significance, this darkness is to be recognised as the source of great desire, of hope (not of salvation but of a better grasp of reality, whereby we might come to terms with the inevitability of our demise), of incomprehensible potential, an ominous shadow of futurity that itself embodies quite the opposite. As Katie Paterson has said of her History of Darkness (2010) “every time we look into the sky we are looking into the past. For example, the light from the sun is reaching us from a few minutes ago. The light from the moon, from a few seconds ago. So when we look through a telescope, we are looking right into cosmic history”. This black beyond blackness presents a cosmos both temporally and spatially before our eyes. This darkness presenting imperceptible electromagnetic wavelengths whose journey began well before the dawn of humanity and will extend beyond our brief window in cosmic history. In its combination of blackness and cosmology, History of Darkness presents a peculiar kind of `gothphysics’, manifesting the aesthetics of scientistic nihilism.1 The impact of this scientifically inspired realism or dark materialism is not, however, constrained by the kitsch aesthetics of gothic darkness, as it is in attending to the imperceptible that its power resides. Many of Paterson’s works are concerned with that which persists beyond anthropocentric epistemologies and the bandwidths of empiricism, taking as their various `objects’ or forces that which is otherwise or remains imperceptible. These concerns are variously manifest in the construction of her Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand (2010), the imperceptible motion of As the World Turns (2010), in which the revolutions of a 12” record are synchronised to those of the earth, and to the extension of the medium of light beyond the thresholds of sight in History of Darkness. In all instances thought is propelled towards an ontology beyond the manifest image of what is empirically given. In such instances the conceptual work indexes the gap constitutive of our cosmic ignorance, that between nature and intuition, cosmic exteriority and perception, matter and knowledge, or (as in the case of the Ingleby Gallery‘s curatorial intent for Mystics or Rationalists?) that `between an idea and an object’.
Mounted and framed, each iteration of History of Darkness presents a hole, a puncture or gap within the whiteness that surrounds each black, rectangular image. This darkness presents a kind of blind-spot, marking the contingencies of vision and the epistemologies built upon it. The blackness of this cosmic darkness is such that its depth cannot be known; this blackness presents a seed of doubt and uncertainty that on the one hand attests to our ignorance and, on the other, presents infinite allure. As one is drawn towards these images, thought is drawn towards the void. While not jettisoning representation, it is of significance that this blackness presents not only to the eye an abstract, empirical blackness, nor to the mind the sign or symbol of any-thing, but a `nothing’ that is nonetheless what it is, a residual artefact and impression of a cosmic exteriority that attests to its reality: “I like to think that while they [the images comprising History of Darkness] show `nothing’ they are also latent with the future and all things that came after”. While not escaping representation (nor trying particularly hard to do so) this Darkness nonetheless presents what resides beyond representation’s `ultimate external illusion’, according to which this blackness or `groundlessness should lack differences, when in fact it swarms with them’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 347). Beyond apparent and empirical homogeneity, this blackness remains, as Paterson states, “latent with the future”, swarming with differences, with the generative elements of the universe that while imperceptible remain productive on cosmic scales. In our questioning and scouring of the universe we enter a new age of darkness, one where the black presents neither dejection nor speculative exhaustion, but infinite allure, boundless potential and unfathomable depths. Despite its radically non-anthropic consequences, this darkness, far from stagnant homogeneity, attests to the unfathomable productivity of the imperceptible, its potential to undermine and pierce the often apparently immutable state of things; it is only from these shadowy regions and `dark sectors’ that the radical and truly contingent event can emerge, coming as if out of nowhere, out of nothing.
- The phrase `gothphysics’ first came to my attention through conversation with Julian Oliver. See #gothphysics on Twitter. [↩]
| Tags: Infraesthetics, Invisible, Katie Paterson, Materialism, Realism, Speculative
subterranean (in)difference
July 30, 2011
Contrary to the irresolute intersection of nature and consciousness, as in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the chiasmus as a figure X by which the former is thought relative to the latter, the `rumbling chiasmus‘ describes an obscure volcanism that subtends the consciousness it both engenders and destroys, all the while remaining indifferent to it.1 The rumbling chiasmus is seized upon, plugged or routed into the productive desires of an inchoate politico-economic order, informing an occupation, inscription and encoding of the surface to which it nonetheless remains indifferent.
In the above diagram, the figure X is replaced by—or becomes—a loop of interference depicting a subterranean (in)difference rising to the surface—in the form of a loop heading back down below—affecting the modulation of a thought differenciated from it according to a prior bifurcation.
- my thanks to Iain Hamilton Grant for his assistance on this point. [↩]
Comments (0) | Tags: Chiasmus, Diagrams, Iain Hamilton Grant, Subterranean
Telluric Conditions
July 24, 2011
Rumbling Chiasmus investigates rumours of subterranean, chemical dynamics, speculating upon the manner in which they may come to inform and shape the surface. In combination with this interest in what lies beneath the surface of many once industrial cities, this project approaches the problem of how the architectural and chemical residue of an industrial past might be used as a political asset in the production of alternate politico-economic occupations of civic space. The story is a common one: a once prosperous industrial area falls into confused and unsightly abandon after the collapse of a localised industrial economy faced with the truth of ceaselessly dissipating capital according to the mechanics of globalisation. Amidst the ensuing confusion anterior to the reorganisation that must occur after such a shift, an area of land—highly organised to accommodate the needs of industrial production—provides an unwieldy, expensive and stubborn opposition to the City’s planned economic reformation: the highly organised architectonic terrain that had supported the specific requirements of industrial production is insufficiently `smooth’ to accommodate a newly globalised outlook and the formation of a `knowledge’ based economy partially informed through `immaterial labour’. Amidst this temporary deadlock a permissive economy of neglect opens up within the previously industrial area of the city and an `organic’, `creative quarter’ emerges. The mills, warehouses and factories of an industrial past become the hosts of an inchoate `creative industry’. The perceived uselessness of this land, in its state of temporary abandon and confusion, contributes to a permissive neglect that affords a certain creative potential through occupation and appropriation.
1. Industrial Creativity
Suspicion first arose at the point where the tracks broke the surface, indicating a past hastily covered and poorly hidden, a superficial solution to a persistent problem either too troublesome or expensive to remove. Questioning our guide, this brief enquiry revealed the site’s industrial history:“these tracks lead into the old fabric”, he paused and then corrected himself, “factory”. Sixty years of industry had left the ground heavily contaminated. Petroleum, cleaning products and solutions had rendered the ground useless, too polluted for development and habitation, too risky to sell. The ground would have to be neutralised, but this is an expensive and lengthy procedure so a compromise was reached. Contamination affords cheap rent and so `creative occupations’ became possible: it would seem that a peculiar allegiance was formed, between the artefacts of an industrial past and an inchoate `creative industry’. The residue of an industrial past which provides an obstacle to `regeneration’ begins to function as a political asset in the production of an alternate politico-economic occupation of the surface. The uselessness and ambiguity of land bearing ruins, spectres of an industrial past, affords a continuation of synthetic production analogous to that which would appear to have seeped into the ground from above; so frequently we find these `cultural quarters’ built atop the trace remnants of an industrial past. Both the residue of exhausted labour and that which continues at the surface retains an essential and reciprocally sustaining uselessness, the former of no value due to its progressive decrepitude and the latter due to its relative obscurity and lax attitude towards the necessity of accumulating capital.
A line of influence stretching from the earth to the tactics of those operating on its surface is not conceived as a linear progression, as if from the core outwards, as the contamination that presently drives or sustains synthetic creativity at the surface—while allowing lateral architectures to crumble—is easily understood as a human accident, as having been injected into the earth wherein it could thrive and prosper, patiently undermining plans made at the surface regarding future topographical divisions. Accident or otherwise, upon reaching the surface, these sublimated contaminants and solutions realise their own desires through the medium of humanity, and so the question of antecedence remains obscure. Through patient undermining the ground is not so much hollowed out by persistent contamination as saturated by chemical dynamisms that conspire beneath the surface, figuring alternative movements and forming allegiances according to an independent subterranean information. To ally with a chemical insurgency that throws a spanner in the works of developers is to adopt the `absolute empiricism’ of an inhuman creativity that sets a space apart from commercially developed centres, with persistent wilderness that breaches the uniformity and otherwise smooth distribution of tarmac; it is to ally with the dynamic imbalances and objective occlusions of a productive and synthetic political ecology. Uncovering these dynamics reveals the strange kind of `freedom’ the contaminated earth permits: a degree of freedom from the obligations of capital and a permissive economy left with little choice but to make room for labour considered useless by developers, repulsed by the slimy depths allied with in sustaining the actions of a creative or synthetic surface occupation. A peculiar freedom is attained through allegiance with a chemical insurgency conspiring beneath the surface; its darkly imaginative capacity for alternative methods of infrasomatic organisation and economic sabotage yields certain rewards while its own motives remain obscure and may never be known. A truth not so much stated or spoken as observed, tested and verified reveals that an insurgency indifferent to that forming a trailing allegiance with it on the surface, yet it nonetheless finds itself plugged or routed into the mechanics of an inchoate politico-economic reorganisation of the surface, which itself conspires against the City.
A sense of familiarity, recognition or apparent repetition in surveying the surface, its architectural decay and the labour of its occupants, provokes suspicion of a chemical insurgency, of industrial residue as both asset and agent informing the operations of the surface. Signs, significant impressions are followed up by way of an `absolute’ or `industrial empiricism’, calling upon the diffusive sensations and peculiar expressions of objects thought otherwise as dumb or inert.1 A method sympathetic not only in name to the recent history of many regenerated sites—an industrial past prior to the monetization of `cultural capital’ that drives so much desire for gentrification from within the City—`industrial empiricism’ taps into not only ubiquitous sensation but equally prevalent creative production, seeking influence and allegiances with the inhuman towards an imaginative expansion of political, praxical alternatives to the current state of things. Industrial or `absolute’ empiricism claims that `where there is chemistry, there is sensation, and since there is nowhere in nature an absence of chemical activity, then sensation must be universally immanent’.2 This universality entails a radical expansion of the thinking of sensation beyond anthropic horizons, where sensation must be thought in relation to the inhuman and that which appears inert. This method requires a descent from the elevation of the anthropic in the sense of an ontological redress, but also a descent into the dark and synthetic obscurity of the infrasomatic, yet it is the diffusive influence or function of this universality that unbinds empiricism from anthropic conservatism that is of preliminary importance, in similarly unbinding the industrial from human labour power and its division. Unbinding sensation into the universally diffuse performs a consequent gesture of unbinding an industrial creativity from the space allotted to it under the division of labour, insofar as sensation is recognised as synthetic and therefore productive. Industrial empiricism unbinds not only sensation but production, which we take as the general term identifying an unbound creativity.
Absolute empiricism is presented as diffusive concept recognising sensation and locating objects of study well beyond anthropic horizons according to the requirements of speculative thought; it is herein adopted as a method in investigating the lingering subterranean traces of industrial production contributing to the contaminated earth and in particular its information of surface activities. Here it should be noted that information is understood in the first instance as a productive or synthetic process rather than consumable chunks of knowledge, as ontological function anterior to epistemological operation, less something to be known than something to be subject to. This industrial, absolute or unconditioned empiricism entails a praxical openness to `syntheses that “make themselves felt”;3 where chemistry is equated with sensory dynamics, sensation is located within both the inhuman and inorganic. A consequence of this absolutism is ubiquitous sensation, but also the eruptions of this exteriority within anthropic horizons, so exercising an influence through the ungrounding functions of an unconscious anteriority.
The ubiquitous distribution of sensation as a result of its being unbound in thought from the anthropic sphere occurs where one recognises sensation as a synthetic production occurring wherever there are chemical interactions. Sensation is thus production and product of interaction and production creation; we thereby arrive at a notion of industrial creativity as a diffusive conception of influential or informational productivity. Having amidst its dependencies Iain Hamilton Grant’s developments of Schellingian absolute and industrial empiricism, this industrial creativity defines creativity not as the preserve of the arts but as a diffusive concept distributed throughout all production, anthropic and otherwise. Recognition of a diffusive and inhuman creativity forces an imaginative exercise upon thought, the importance of which cannot be underestimated within our current state of political crisis defined as such through the absence of any imaginative alternative to the necrotic state of party politics bent upon recitation of the dictums of capitalist realism. Industrial creativity forces recognition of an inassimilable inhuman creativity, the productivity of a radically extimate alterity, what Negarestani has called the `treacherous Insider’.4 Industrialising the thinking of creativity is of primary importance to the re-ignition of an imaginative politico-economic praxis, as the creativity of inhuman exteriority forces a thinking of the other within humanistic solipsism that accelerates the presently unfolding global catastrophe. That all production should be politically implicated is utterly uncontroversial where politics opens onto the inhuman already at work within it. In this way we consider the politico-economic consequences of an artistic practice that seeks allegiances with inhuman indifference, as all production has such consequences despite attempts at their infinite deferral within thought. Through exploiting the ambiguity of industrial ruin, occupation of the contaminated earth by way of an industrial creativity forms an allegiance with the subterranean alterity and industrial residue that informs the politico-economic organisation of the surface through providing an objective problem to gentrification and architectural imposition. The anti-capitalist occupation of the surface contains amidst its dependencies the peculiar eruptions of a contaminated and contagious plutonism that interrupts the production of `smooth space’ essential to the erections of developers and their regimes of gentrification. The contaminated earth subsists the permissive economics of the area that keeps rents low and sustains the productivity of a synthetic ecology, a chemical insurgency—requiring that the City turn a blind eye—allied with the industrial creativity of the surface, which is not to be confused with the creative industries. The industrial corresponds with synthetic production, with fabricaction and not simply exchange value or representational operations: fabrication being the modality of an industrial creativity and the latter terms more applicable to the creative industries. Industrial creativity, building upon the ubiquitous productivity of absolute empiricism, is taken as naming a productivity in general, and so where the `creative industries’ entail a division of labour that occludes the productivity of Ideas that do not observe such disciplinary discretion—but rather move `horizontally’ by means of a contagion that informs from within through infectious propagation (the tactics of the treacherous Insider)—industrial creativity is seen as tapping into an diffusive productivity catalytic of labour rather than effecting its division. The postponement of the division of labour cannot be endured indefinitely, as a division is necessary if this work is to attain significance or the actualisation of a radical alternative; rather, this division should be resisted until its necessity is forced from within by the production of the Idea itself, rather than imposed according the necessity of exchange and dissemination that would foreclose the extremities of any alternatives it may harbor or inform. To be clear, Ideas are referred to here not in a sense concomitant with the tradition of transcendental idealism but in a sense synonymous with an informative material continuum or the `ultimate elements of nature’.5 Concomitant with a praxical generalisation complicit with the productivity of Ideas, industrial creativity is understood as extending beyond a common sense of the industrial, insofar as this is defined through a division of labour that presently appears as given. Just as a restriction of creativity to the arts appears banal, the industrial is not thought as bound to the common sense definition of industry. While the capital the regenerative City seeks through the gentrification and redivision of the industrial is to be attained through establishing quarters for the `creative industries’—which appear opposed to the industrial creativity that often occupies and informs both the surface and subterranean—the sterility of gentrification appears at odds with the synthetic and contagious earth within which the industrial creativity thrives. The neutralisation of the earth will precede the gentrification of the surface, and so those presently working above ground must sustain and continue to be sustained by the industrial and synthetic creativity that teems—or at least lingers, leaving a trace—beneath.6
2. Sous les Pavés …
Uncovering the trace elements of a chemical insurgency entails a minimal descent into the dark, synthetic depths of this contaminated territory in order to exhume whatever might remain of its contagious and contaminant productivity. Digging beneath the surfaces of the city that informs much psychogeographical practice, enquiry beneath the pavement entails a shift from the interpretation of the city as a set of signs to the experimental investigation of its affective and material substrates—an approach that yields just as many projectiles.
Debord’s call for critical engagement with the city `by means of [...] experimental d\’erives, [through which] a cartography of influences can be drawn up’ is here realised not as a smooth flow or drift across the surface but as an action punctuated by requirement to mine.7 With each pause and descent a little more of `the objective field of passion in which d\’erive is propelled’ is uncovered.8 The mining of influential substrates—contrary to the Situationists’ assumption that beneath the authoritarian surfaces of the city lies the freedom of the beach—uncovers a deeper ecological determinism and subliminal substrata that subsists its political conscription and participation within the material practices of ideology. Through digging, mining and drilling a `cartography of influence’ extends beyond the outlines and architectonic organisation of the surface towards informative subterranean dynamics, a cartography of influence that includes substata and not simply a topographical overview.
Further notes from Oldenburg.
- Grant, `Chemistry of Darkness’, 42-3. These objective expressions are, in this instance: the decomposition of cabbage in the acquisition of anthocyanin, the consequent saturation of a coffee filter in the production of Ph paper for use in preliminary analyses—the method of which will be familiar to anyone who attended even a handful of chemistry lessons at school. [↩]
- Iain Hamilton Grant, `Chemistry of Darkness’, 44. [↩]
- See Iain Hamilton Grant, The Chemistry of Darkness [↩]
- Reza Negarestani, `Drafting the Inhuman’, 200. [↩]
- See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, probably somewhere in chapter 4. [↩]
- We can find a similar tactical allegiance in an entirely different context: Weizman has described how in the most extreme situations an allegiance has been formed with surfacing sewerage which in this instance becomes a political asset. Where the present argument concerns itself with sustaining and developing an existing occupation and its incubation of a nascent politico-economic occupation of the surface, tactically comparable allegiances have been formed in order to accelerate the essential temporality and necessary dissipation of an effective imprisonment within Gaza’s refugee camps: “When sewage overflows and `private shit’, from the underground, invades the public realm, it becomes a private hazard but also a political asset. In some places, efforts by UN departments to replace existing systems of infrastructure with permanent underground plumbing have been rejected. The raw sewage affirm’s the refugee camp’s state of temporariness and with it the urgency of claim for return”. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 21. An allegiance is formed at the surface with the eruption of the otherwise subterranean flow of shit and sludge, rendered an asset in determining the political status of the surface as a necessarily temporary organisation to be reconfigured. [↩]
- Guy Debord, The Situationists and The City, 84. [↩]
- Debord, Situationists and The City, 78. [↩]
Comments (0) | Tags: Cartography, Chiasmus, Ecology, Environmental Data, Gentrification, Iain Hamilton Grant, Subterranean, Urbanism
Notes from Oldenburg
July 15, 2011
My first suspicion was that the subterranean conspiracy would take effect within the economic situation on the ground, but this naive assumption would soon be proved false; the City mobilises an economic machine against the earth, stalling the effects it might otherwise have in this sphere, making sure that developments on the ground are subject to its own decisions, or otherwise illegal. The economic situation on the ground would foreclose the possibility of any t(r)ailing allegiance with subterranean conspirators gaining any ground, or any potential progression towards an alternate situation becoming the state of things.
That the insurgency should not take direct effect within the economic organisation of the surface did not, however, fully neutralise the conspirators, as their various concoctions were already being felt by means of horizontal contagion and architectonic decay at the surface; foreclosing the possibility of economic influence would only force the conspirators to the surface by other means, where, upon arrival, various contaminants and solutions would set about realising their own desires through the medium of humanity.
( s.boot; s.doWhenBooted({ var pHArray, pHSeq; pHArray= [8.5596, 8.435, 7, 7.758, 6.815, 5.8, 7.901, 7.1, 6.655, 5.142, 7.5984, 7.22, 6.016, 6.6372]; pHSeq = Prand(pHArray, inf).asStream; SynthDef(\impulse, { |input, pHMin, pHMax, attack, volume, decay, out| var pH, rate, frequency, impulse; pH = In.kr(input); rate = LinExp.kr(pH, pHMin, pHMax, 19, 6.5); frequency = LinLin.kr(pH, 0, 14, 50, 150); impulse = Formlet.ar(LPF.ar(Impulse.ar(rate, volume), 400), frequency, attack, decay); Out.ar(out, impulse); }).send(s); /* Reference frequencies for the perception of relative depth & the production of a more independent harmonic structure: */ { var klank = Klank.ar(`[ [800, 1071, 1353, 1723], [0.1,0.1,0.1,0.1], [1, 1, 1, 1]], PinkNoise.ar(0.005)); klank!2 }.play; // Ramp Synth: SynthDef(\ramp, { |end, dur, out| var line; line = Line.kr(In.kr(out), end, dur, doneAction: 2); Out.kr(out, line); }).send(s); 0.001.wait; // wait for the synth to get setup on the server. // set up the control busses: s.sendMsg(\c_set, 200, 7); s.sendMsg(\c_set, 101, 12); // Left Channel: s.sendBundle(nil, [\s_new, \impulse, f = s.nextNodeID, 0,1, \pHMin, pHArray.minItem, \pHMax, pHArray.maxItem, \rate, 1, \volume, 0.8, \frequency, 62, \attack, 0.1, \decay, 0.65, \out, 0], [\n_map, f, \input, 200]); // Right Channel: s.sendBundle(nil, [\s_new, \impulse, p = s.nextNodeID, 0,1, \pHMin, pHArray.minItem, \pHMax, pHArray.maxItem, \rate, 1, \volume, 0.8, \frequency, 62, \attack, 0.1, \decay, 0.65, \out, 1], [\n_map, p, \input, 101]); // Left Channel Task: t = Task({ |pH| loop ({ // pH = 0.rrand(14); //pH = pHArray.choose; pH = pHSeq.next; s.sendMsg(\s_new, \ramp, x=s.nextNodeID,0,1, \end, pH, \dur, 0.34.rrand(6)); s.sendMsg(\n_map, x, \out, 200); 10.rrand(13).wait; }); //loop. }).play; //routine. // Right Channel Task: h = Task({ |pH| loop ({ // pH = 0.rrand(14); //pH = pHArray.choose; pH = pHSeq.next; s.sendMsg(\s_new, \ramp, l=s.nextNodeID,0,1, \end, pH, \dur, 0.02.rrand(5)); s.sendMsg(\n_map, l, \out, 101); 8.rrand(11).wait; }); //loop. }).play; //routine. }); ) /* s.queryAllNodes; s.sendMsg(\n_free, 1019); */
Comments (0) | Tags: Chiasmus, Gentrification, Noise, Subterranean, SuperCollider, Synthesis
Geomnemonic Regression or the Indexing of Epochal Intervals?
April 28, 2011
According to Professor D. C. Barker’s exposition of geotraumatic research ‘descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through cosmic time’.1 Here subterranean explorations mirror the atavistic regression of a Ballardian spinal descent through transorganic memory or evolutionary history. Yet perhaps opening up to subterranean influences or conditions is less a regression or movement through time as the indexing of temporal or epochal intervals, such as that carried out by Powers:
Closing his eyes, Powers lay back and steered the car along the interval between the two time fronts, feeling the images deepen and strengthen within his mind. The vast age of the landscape, the inaudible chorus of voices resonating from the lake and from the white hills, seemed to carry him back through time, down endless corridors to the first thresholds of the world.
He turned the car off the road along the track leading towards the target range. On either side of the culvert the cliff faces boomed and echoed with vast impenetrable time fields, like enormous opposed magnets. As he finally emerged between them on to the flat surface of the lake it seemed to Powers that he could feel the separate identity of each sand-grain and salt crystal calling to him from the surrounding ring of hills.2
The impression of the landscape upon and within Powers’ mind forces an mnemonic indexing of geological time, opening up an interval between the present and variable points in geological history, an interval within which the earth ‘screams’, booms and echoes. Note that Powers closes his eyes for the ‘descent’ beyond a visually configured world space or level. This closing of the eyes marks a preliminary step beyond the antropomorphically scaled and visually configured world space: ‘Level 1, or world space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision configures, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly’.3 This descent into deep time is marked by auditory envelopments, impressions and a mnemonic impression of the landscape within the mind, a primarily auditory domain, the constitutive bandwidths of which accompany a similar shift in scale or range as that which occurs in Powers’ awareness of the landscape which shifts from the cliff face to sand grains and salt crystals. This is an auditory domain that exceeds the bandwidths of anthropocentric and organic audibility in terms of both frequency and time.
- Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 498 [↩]
- J. G. Ballard, ‘The Voices of Time’, The Complete Short Stories vol. 1, 260-1 [↩]
- Nick Land, Fanged Noumena [↩]
