watch out

Future Past IV

2005-03-22T15:21:00.000+01:00

Irrelevant information may become relevant if we use it or if we invent reality. In the first case, relevance has to do with usefulness, instrumentality, utilitarianism. In the second one, it has to do with the meaning of the realities we inhabit or choose to inhabit.

I decided that HA--ON should be relevant information because the two letters missing were HT. Hahton is a Scandinavian family name, and it has other forms in other languages, such as Haughton and, possibly, Huston. I thought that Hahton could have something to do with the Haughton-Mars project (NASA) and as a matter of fact that huge hole on planet Earth, located in the Devon Island, the largest inhabited island on Earth, has got its name from Hahton (I can assure you). There is striking similarity between the quality of the soil and the rocks around the Haughton crater and the surface of Mars. Well, the truth is that no one knows for sure how to make such comparisons. Planet Mars disappeared in the year 2005 (Christian era converted to Martian space-of-time measures). It means that NASA keeps on getting and broadcasting images from a planet that only exists in our time. It's a sad illusion because it's a sign that our time is about collapse definitely, indefinitely.

Oh, I'm so sorry. Useless information, again.

Postcolonial postcard

2005-03-19T21:15:00.000+01:00

http://www.jasonbaker.net/world/india/delhi.htm

We have. Definitely. Indefinitely. Lost. Our Hope.
We survive. We do. We did. We die.
We lie. We don't. We doubt.

http://www.thecloudmakingmachine.com/
http://www.ma/
http://www.dentsu.com/

(this is bibliography, not advertising)

Fall of Icarus 9-11

2005-03-17T13:56:00.000+01:00

http://www.skfriends.com/-wtc/wtc-person-jumping-photo4-1002/wtc-person-jumping-photo4-640w-orig.jpg (a picture by Richard Drew)

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(from W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux-Arts")
http://www.education.tas.gov.au/english/hugopaul.htm
http://www.dwpoet.com/poetassign.html

Future Past III

2005-03-15T23:16:00.000+01:00

http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/jpeg/stopterroraa.jpg

One of us remembered a text that had been written in 2008. No one could recall the name of the text, but some of us recalled the name in it: Ha--on. It was incomplete, our memories failed to bring two of the letters back to the present, but it was too harmful to make the effort. Our brains were so damaged that we didn't even have the choice to preserve it: we had to do so for the sake of our survival.

And I remember one of the images that came out of that text: it was the image of an english word, but one letter was missing. I guess it was that absence in the word Ha--on that allowed me to remember another similar occurrence in the clean though chaotic archive of my memories. TEROR. Now I know it! It is: HAHTON. I have to find out what that text was about. A cyberwalking for search engines taught me that Hahton is a Scandinavian family name. Is this meaningful information?

Haloportrait II (overstanding)

2005-03-15T11:34:00.000+01:00

Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960–66. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, By exchange. 93.4239. © 2003 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_133A_1.html

What if we could touch, at least with a brand new language, that sur-surface that stands over words like Time, Love, Death, Art? We may feel that upper level, we may even know what the feeling is about, but still we cannot fully grasp it.

We may have under-stood those words, but when will we over-stand them?

Future Past II

2005-03-12T20:15:00.000+01:00

Time divisions, systematizations of the category of time, simulacra of chronometry and historical perception of the reality, illusionary notions of evolution and even reality, all those phenomena began to be unveiled by their own disappearance.

Their surfaces manifested themselves as such, through autonomous movement. Its dynamics was somehow similar to scratching. The structure and representations of time were scratching themselves, moving over. There was another dynamics underneath: it looked like empty space, then it looked like no space, then it couldn't be looked at, then it could only be entered and experienced with empty hands, no clothes, empty minds. Our bodies looked particularly peirceable by the void.

How can there be substance where there is still a subject?
How can there be time if there is nothing but no where?

Images: http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd4317/
Text: Watchout

Future past

2005-03-10T13:16:00.000+01:00

It felt like there were no seconds, no minutes, but there were still hours and days and weeks, but again no years or decades. It felt like the only existing categories of time were those more closely related to our work schedule and the illusionary movement of the sun in the sky. This illusionary movement decided the quantity of light that our eyes could perceive, but the quality of light was not only decided by the presence of clouds and their shapes, or by the quality of the atmosphere, but also by our changing perception.

In fact, we were escaping reality, or at least we were meant to decide to do so. We were so afraid of not deciding what we were supposed to that we weren't even aware neither of that fear nor of the fact that our decisions were based on fear. We were escaping reality, perhaps trying to move faster than the earth to become as bright and powerful as the sun. But we might look like colourless spots, living spots getting closer and closer to death and oblivion. We were moving too fast to think, too fast to know what our feelings were, what were those feelings about. We were all running, literally running out of time.

Moving still

2005-03-08T16:13:00.000+01:00

Paul Klee, Stilleben (Still life), oil on canvas (1938).
http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/by_artist.php?id=901

Paul Klee, "De l'Art Moderne"

Il n'est pas facile de s'orienter dans un ensemble dont les organes relèvent de dimensions différentes. Et la nature, de même que son image recréée, l'art, sont de tels ensembles. Art ou nature, il est difficile d'embrasser du regard un ensemble de ce genre et encore plus d'en faciliter la vue à autrui.
Cela tient aux méthodes échelonnés dans le temps dont nous disposons pour étudier un ensemble spatial afin d'en obtenir une représentation mentale claire et distincte. Cela tient à l'infirmité temporelle du langage. L'instrument manque qui permettrait de discuter sunthétiquement une simultanéité à plusieurs dimensions. (...) A chaque dimension qui s'efface dans le temps, nous devrions dire: "Tu es en train de devenir le passé, mais il se peut que nous nous retrouvions en un point critique, et peut-être propice, de la nouvelle dimension qui te rendra au présent. (17-8)

la musique, art du temps (...)

la polyphonie (...), ce phénomène de simultanéité (...) (18)

[L'artiste] se dit toutefois: sous cette forme reçue, [ce monde] n'est pas le sul monde possible.
L'artiste scrute alors d'un regard pénétrant les choses que la nature lui a mises toutes formées sous les yeux.
Plus loin plonge son regard et plus son horizon s'élargit du présent au passé. Et plus s'imprime en lui, au lieu d'une image finie de la nature, celle - la seule qui importe - de la création comme genèse.
Il s'autorise alors à penser aussi que la création ne peut guère être achevée à ce jour, et c'est vers le futur qu'il repousse maintenant les limites de cette oeuvre de création du monde, reconnaissant ainsi à la genèse une durée continuée. (28-9)

Paul Klee, "Credo du Créateur"

Seul le point mort est intemporel. Dans l'univers aussi le mouvement est donné préalablement à tout. (...) Le récit biblique de la Genèse offr une très bonne parabole du mouvement, la Création recevant ainsi une dimension 'historique'. L'oeuvre d'art également est au premier chef genèse; on ne la saisit jamais simplement comme produit. (...) Chez le spectateur également, l'activité principale est temporelle. L'oeil est ainsi construit qu'il fournit des morceaux successifs à la cavité oculaire. Pour s'ajuster à un nouveau fragment, il doit abandoner l'ancien. Il finit par s'arrêter et poursuit son chemin, comme l'artiste. S'il le juge bon, il revient, tout comme l'artiste. (...) L'oeuvre d'art naît du mouvement, elle est elle-même mouvement fixé, et se perçoit dans le mouvement (muscles des yeux). (...) Il est (...) souhaitable que l'artiste recherche une certaine simplicité de construction, une certaine facilité de lecture qu'il ne faut pas prendre pour l'indigence et qui ne dément en aucune façon l'assurance, le savoir-faire, la science qu'il peut avoir. (...) L'oeuvre plastique présente pour le profane l'inconvénient de ne savoir où commencer, mais, pour l'amateur averti, l'avantage de pouvoir abondamment varier l'ordre de lecture et de prendre ainsi conscience de la multiplicité de ses significations. (37-9)

Paul Klee. Théorie de l'Art Moderne. Paris: Denoël, 1964. (orig. Das bildnerische Denken; Schriften zur Form- und Gestaltungslehre, ed. Jürg Spiller, Schwabe & Co. Verlag, Bâle, 1956).

(Klee will be back.)

Simul : times

2005-03-03T12:57:00.000+01:00

http://www.tallstories.org.uk/shows/other/the-egg.jpg

The expression "end of times" could be nothing more than a social myth based on religious beliefs: apocalypse, parusia, end of history in a teleological sense... However, it is almost tantalizing to notice the plural form of the noun "time" (which nevertheless also occurs in singular form: the end of time) - and, more than noticing, to think that it encodes a belief in time multiplicity. The end of times may therefore be understood either as the end of all experiences of time, i.e. the end of all history(ies), or as the end of multiplicity in time.

Would this imply a simultaneity of times, or would the various experiences of time be so diversely constituted that one could think of simultaneity only in one type of time experience? But in order to evaluate simultaneity, the ability to recognise alterity is required, for it is a comparative judgment. Schizophrenia, for instance, as well as other mentally (i.e. physically) different ways of operating in non-standard dimensions, show that multiplicity within an "individual" is enough to make him or her a community where/who simultaneity occurs or not.

We still wander and wonder whether time is a line or not, and why.

Larger than lifetime

2005-02-23T23:08:00.000+01:00

http://community.webshots.com/photo/275416380/275424453dnsxFC
"On the verge of despair or melancholy (Babylon effect syndrome)"
by photographer Katarzyna Ruchel (Kasia)

"We were served multiple perspective on visual and literary culture, different teaching styles and various lines of argument and reasoning; in short, this has been a once in a lifetime experience."

Kristien Lindemans (from the Galatea forum)
http://www.galatea.be

I agree. But it also made me think of what might be a once in a lifetime exerience.
If we accept that there is such an experience, we assume that (some, many) things cannot be repeated or that they are not replicable, and if so, how will we rethink the scientific principle according to which the "phenomena" (things and events, e.g. the LITEVA meeting) that are not replicable are therefore not explainable and kept outside the domain of science.

Am I talking about such an important experience? I am not sure. Because everything we know is known through ourselves - and reality becomes subjective because it is through ourselves that we know it - then every experience is a once in a lifetime experience because anytime it happens, it does so always in a different way because it happened to us, whom we perceive as always changing - or not. But if this is so, nothing is replicable and therefore nothing is explainable. However, as long as everything is interpretable, the most trustworthy knowledge would come from practices of communication that allow us to know ourselves better.

I'm thinking of literature and the arts.

Haloportrait

2005-02-21T22:22:00.001+01:00

halo: (...) the aura of majesty or glory surrounding a person or thing that is regarded with reverence, awe, or sentiment; a luminous ring or disk of light surrounding the heads or bodies of sacred figures, such as saints, in religious paintings (dictionary.com)

Wouldn't the artist of the future be the one who expresses, through silence, but eternally, an immense painting lacking every notion of dimension?

L’artiste futur ne serait-il pas celui qui, à travers le silence, mais éternellement, exprimerait une immense peinture à laquelle manquerait toute notion de dimension?

Yves Klein

http://ledeurjp.club.fr/Klein.htm

http://ikb2002.altervista.org/home.htm http://blancardi.jeanjacque.free.fr/yvesklein/yves.htm

A very short introduction to the very short career of Yves Klein (excerpts)

(...)

Yves Klein chose the limitless as his own field of creation and the void (not the same as emptiness or hollowness) as the expression of immaterial. What I think is new in Yves Klein's work (and at that time unique, if we are to consider art history as a linear narrative, which I think is not), is the effacement of the level of discourse through its very redimensioning. What I’m trying to say is that his search for monumentality (the experiments with Electricité de France for the experience on the Place de la Concorde, in Paris), political power (the letter to W. Churchill, presenting the Blue Movement), civil power (the projects for air architecture with Werner Murnau) and so forth find their way to dissolution in their own lack of materiality (“blue is the invisible becoming visible”, “my pictures are the ashes of my art”, “man will be able to conquer space only after having realized the impregnation of space by his own sensibility”).

On the subject of Yves Klein’s blue monochromes, Banai also writes: “self-presence and self-efacement, then, are the coordinates of the crisis engendered by this hybrid object, which, in its heterogeneity, perpetually emphasizes the experience of limits – themselves always shifting” (18). However, “Klein’s monochromes take on a chimeric aspect, offering themselves up for consumption as a sensation of spiritual union with oneself and the world. The result is a circulation of signification among these three sutured sites: a society mediated by images, which frames itself as a spatial construct, the monochrome, which manifests itself as a sacred space, and the spectator, who experiences his or her own bodily presence in space as a sensation of the sacred. (…) Paradoxically, the sacred aspect of space has to be “spoken”, revealed to the world (…) if it is to be preserved as a public secret” (20-1).

(...)

The utopy of becoming no-bodies after having been members of the capitalist state, i.e. no-things in a consumer society of both available and unreachable things, becomes a possibility in a reality devoid of itself, a reality turned into a fiction that would be the site of ultimate freedom but also of absolute truth, because where is dissolution, there will be absolute no-thing, radical negativity.

(...)

Bibliography

Olivier Berggruen et al. (eds.), Yves Klein, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004.

(Spanish version) AAVV, Yves Klein, catálogo de la exposición, Bilbao: Museo Guggenheim, 2005.

Peter Noever, François Perrin, Yves Klein: Air Architecture, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2004.

Weitemeier, Hannah, International Klein Blue, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1996.

Yves Klein, Le Dépassement de la Problématique de l'Art et autres écrits, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2003.

Martin Heidegger, "Bauen, Wohnen und Denken", Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, 1951.

(French version) "Construir Habiter Penser", Essais et Conférences, Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

(English version) "Building Dwelling Thinking", Poetry Language Thought, New York: Harper Colophon, 1971.

http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/ingles/exposiciones/las_exposiciones.htm

http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/frances/exposiciones/las_exposiciones.htm

how blue is our burden

The translation of silence

2005-02-20T15:31:00.000+01:00

Alan Kaufman, Image #2376, The September 11 Digital Archive, 9 December 2003.
http://911digitalarchive.org/art/details/2376
"My daughter was exactly one week away from her 6th birthday on 9/11/01. We tried to explain the best we could, not sure if she understood the terrible events that had taken place just a few miles from where we live in New York City.The morning after the attacks, she quietly left this drawing on the kitchen table, and to this day refuses to talk about it. "

When a moving image has been recorded with sound but it is cut through editing or while broadcasting, would you consider it a silent image?
Are still images silent?
Are the experiences of trauma and horror speechless? (Remember Monica Turci’s and Hilde van Gelder’s courses.)

Well, here goes an enigmatic picture for all Litevans.
This is not Belgium. This is Rome and the photo has been taken by Adalberto Tiburzi. Below this image I would write "my eye and I", but you can suggest other captions.
http://www.pbase.com/image/25768153

Why are we left speechless if there is speech? Or shall we remain silent, for that is the only answer to the speechless?
Speech may be considered as a power strategy in the market of social interchange (Pierre Bourdieu), but wouldn’t silence be a stronger currency?
How do we deal with images? How do we make them speak?

Speaking may seem ridiculous when it is an act of expressing the obvious, and especially when you have a pseudo-speech (it is less performative than description itself) which simulates the expression of actual "feelings of emotions" (in the neurobiological sense given by António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens). Here is an example of such placebo-discourse:

"This video was aparently shot by a local from the Maldives Islands. Although it is not very dramatic one can clearly see how the sea literaly sweeps through the whole island."

"This is a long video shot by locals and it shows the tsunami flood ariving and battering the city. There are amazing shots inside a building showing the water flood the first floor taking everything in it's path."

"Screams can be heard from the tourists in the background and he starts showing increasing concern repeating the phrase "what is that" untill he finally panics and tries to flee for his life."

These are video descriptions taken from the website http://www.asiantsunamivideos.com/. The webmaster also tries to justify his own practice.

"Why am I hosting these tsunami videos? Answer: Seeing how a lot of sites can't keep up with the bandwidth requirements of hosting them and recognising the importance of distributing them to educate the public about the enormity of this disaster and increase fundraising I decided to help distribute them." (my emphasis)

The images of the speechless (suffering, death, trauma), which are themselves a visual voice, are gathered as spectacle and speakable, i.e. objects to be seen, objects to talk about, but also objects to be forgotten, since memory works in a way more and more similar to a recycle bin: we can put many things there and then recover them, but at a certain point we no longer recognise what we want to recover. To use is exciting, but the used is not; the same goes for silence: to uncover it is to experience the new, but the things that we have already heard (or seen) remind us of the repetitive rhythm in our life (our identity as a narrative of iteration). The translation of silence takes ... well, I do not know so I stop writing.

Rudolf Arnheim

2005-02-19T17:32:00.000+01:00

Rudolf Arnheim. (Marie Gay, photographer) Sarah Lawrence College ArchivesBronxville, NY
http://pages.slc.edu/~psychology/biographies/arnheim/ARNHEIM-5.jpg

Arnheim, Rudolf. The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in Visual Arts.
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~ipederse/Arnheimcentre.htm

"the copies of the optic images projected on the retinas, generated in our nervous system, may be understood as processes, and so do their equivalents on consciousness, i.e. on visual perception" (adapted)

"the old distinction between mass and energy has been replaced by a more unified a conception of the universe consisting of anything but models of energy; what we call thing or object is nothing more than an energetic field" (adapted)

Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking.
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~ipederse/Arnheim.htm

...and, for those interested, an article on time in the work of art:
van Gelder, Hilde. The Fall From Grace. Late Minimalism's Conception of the Intrinsic Time of the Artwork-as-Matter.
http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/pdf/van%20gelder.pdf

Images of time

2005-02-12T15:46:00.000+01:00

Barnett Newman, Vir heroicus sublimis (1950-1) oil on canvas 7'11" x 17'9" http://academics.smcvt.edu/gblasdel/ar333.htm

This picture is a copy of a copy (in a website) of a copy (a photography) of a painting (a copy of reality?). How can we decode it? Is it abstract? What is the relation between abstract and referential representations? Is there such a difference? Is the "abstract" representational and meaningful?

Paul Klee, Eros (1925) aquarel
http://www.cultuurnetwerk.org/bronnenbundels/2000/2000_57.htm
in German: http://www.meisterhaeuser.de/de/bewohner_7_klee.html
also in German (Catalogue): http://www.kunst-edition.de/index.htm

Excerpts from Klee's diaries (in English)
http://www.constable.net/arthistory/glo-klee.html

A personal (and beyond-the-visual) experience of Klee's paintings
in French: http://www.cottet.org/ab/k.htm
in English: http://www.cottet.org/ab/k_e.htm

Bibliography:

Paul Klee, Cours du Bauhaus. Contribution à la théorie de la forme picturale. s.l., Hazan, 2004. ISBN: 2850259284

Paul Klee, Journal. s.l., Grasset, 2004. (trad. Pierre Klossowski)
ISBN: 2246279135

Paul Klee, Théorie de l'art moderne. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
ISBN: 2070326977

Paul Klee, Histoire naturelle infinie. s.l., Dessain et Tolra, 1970.
ISBN: 2249250197

Looking and writing

2005-02-12T00:55:00.000+01:00

I'm looking at the floor, sitting on the stairs made of stone, writing for myself.
I look at the almost white wall once in a while.

I know that all these events took place (and time) before I could write them. And as you are reading these lines, I will be doing something else, I won't probably be sitting in these stairs because they are so cold. And even when I say that you are reading these lines (which is true), I am playing with time and its writing because as I am writing now, you are not reading me at all.

And yet how strange it is to notice that it is both so true and so false to say that you are reading these lines.

However, while reading these or any other words, you might never say that they are being written at the same time, because even if it is you who is writing them, they have already been read by you in your mind, even before you could just write them.

(4th February 2005)

Presentation

2005-02-04T11:20:00.000+01:00

Is time a one-way line? May it be thought of as a line at all?

A group of wise and beautiful people met in Bologna (Italy) in February 2005 to talk about aesthetic texts in a visual age, though perhaps no one knows what age is.
So these people keep on searching for the meaning or meaninglessness of time and other related concepts such as history, memory, present, being old, getting older.

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