January 2012
Spiral Galaxy 28948
Hawkwind
“Spiral Galaxy 28948” by Hawkwind
“This election system was invented before the light bulb, for goodness’ sake. I think we can modernize.”
—Nathan Cullen, NDP leadership candidate, on the first-past-the-post election system, and electoral reform in Canada (via eksmalltalk)
A Climate Cooling
Jordan Prestrot
This is a music I composed last winter, when my boiler broke down.
“‘Everything which we call nature’, he [Malevich] wrote in 1926, ‘in the last analysis, is a figment of the imagination, having no relation whatever to reality’. Appearance was an illusion. True being was non-figurative, so non-representative painting was necessary for the presentation of the truths hidden by common objectivity. ‘Form is a condition’, wrote Malevich. ‘In Reality form does not exist’.”
—THOMAS AIELLO
Head-First Through the Hole in the Zero:
Malevich’s Suprematism, Khlebnikov’s Futurism,
and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, 1908-1919 [pdf]
(via russianavantgarde)
Head-First Through the Hole in the Zero:
Malevich’s Suprematism, Khlebnikov’s Futurism,
and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, 1908-1919 [pdf]
(via russianavantgarde)
“The cow must go.”
—
Henry Ford (via thegildedcentury)
“Cows are my passion.” - Charles Dickens.
Play
year of the elephant
vyto b
- Year of the Elephant by Vyto B
- Can’t Afford No Shoes by Frank Zappa
- Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra
what does it mean
Ladies and gentlemen we have a philosopher in our midst!
“The world is my idea.”
—
Arthur Schopenhauer (via untilasinglesolitonsurvives)
Does that mean he can claim intellectual property rights?
(via mirrorfloatinginwater)
A charming list of obviously coordinated pages attempting to make a social media statement about how excited Northern BC is for ‘economic development.’
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fort-St-James-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/305159529500584https://www.facebook.com/pages/Prince-George-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/290844254276716
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Smithers-BC-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/128810913890491
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Burns-Lake-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/111855155591875
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fraser-Lake-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/236714383051459
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/233422436712686
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanderhoof-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/206274112777472
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bruderheim-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/297225790287944
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bears-Lake-Supports-Northern-Gateway-Pipeline/136554696446723
free knowledge vs. the intellectual trust
Most of us have love for this internet, but as a model for the pursuit of “free knowledge,” I must contest. The notion of a mass (or “open”) information consensus generator is not tantamount to “free knowledge,” as it says on the wikipedia homepage today. You do not need wikipedia, an internet connection or even property to pursue or express “free knowledge.” What we talk about when we talk about net neutrality is preserving our current intellectual trust, an open resource which, at this point, attaches some of us to our practices and most of us to what we deem valuable, but values change quickly. More quickly now than ever. What are we doing to anticipate those changes?
Consensus is possible because we can place our faith in the specialists around us, which may include ourselves (researchers, observers, cooks, so on). When we no longer trust the specialists or ourselves we can go above to the sources of those educations and put our trust in those things or add criticism and the consensus can be maintained. To attempt a deeper read than consensus falls beyond the boundaries of the current intellectual trust. The internet is an expensive, technocratic expedition into known space [note]. It is a system that augments, not allows for, the human “free knowledge” capacity by enforcing linguistic ‘givens’ so that we don’t need to question the relevancy of certain things for expediency’s sake. For example, when confronted with the feeling that one’s job generates misery for the self and the other, one can take that situation and report it with the intention of increasing the good humour of others. As we know these good vibes will come back to us amplified a great deal, we will see our own pain and our own desire return with a resounding “LIKE.”
So here is an illustration of the surface of the thing; how the open information consensus resource can interfere cooperatively with the idea of a task-at-hand, not lead us to overthrow the need for the task itself in our own lives; how it is a reflection of my expressed self-image and less a manifestation of a desire for actual change; it is a joke.
Wikipedia is an internet organ created to convert information into commodity within the body of the reality it claims to foster, like HAL 9000 in 2001. The directive of HAL in our case is facilitated by those who control the flow of information and how that information is to be presented to us. The internet is one form of possible consensus management. Like HAL, the management purports to contain within it the necessary items for advancement and social stability and prosperity, and so here we see on the list of necessary items for future society it has placed itself.
No doubt it is important to maintain discourse on the internet. No doubt it is important to use this thing as a means of organization, for a dance troupe must observe itself in motion many times before it executes the performance. But let’s not begin to believe that the thing itself is revolution. The expression of free knowledge is revolution. That happens outside of the consensus. By its nature internet is media and subject to coercive radiation. I suggest that it is a good tool right now, and that I wish I was part of more discussions surrounding better, simpler tools more fitted for liberty of thought and action. I wish I wasn’t drawn into conversations about how to save this particular system. I would rather replace it. Jan. 18th, 2012
[note: what is “known” vs. “unknown” here? I’m talking about the stuff we’ve mined from experience and made physical for checking and double-checking. I’d like to point out also that words like “overthrow” and “revolt” represent only the possibility for serious discourse, and as individuals who have been paying providers for this service for years we are only now coming upon the appropriate language for those discourses today and are discovering that the medium designed to contain us is being used to prevent its overthrow. This experience we all have here is traffic’d. So when I say linguistic givens I guess I’m lazily referring to the vernacular of the pharaoh, where the roles of starving student in forever-debt and well-intentioned protester waiting for the sky to clear are quick, easy and comfortable while the role of the mystic or the revolutionary still seems beyond what’s possible for most internet users, myself included.]
“The scorn of pleasure is the greatest pleasure.”
—Diogenes Laertius
Being a poor bibliophile is going to ruin me.
This is why I’m all about the library.
Represent!
“The screen is not a simple rectangle but rather the homothetic surface of the viewfinder of his camera. It is the very opposite of a frame. The screen is a mask whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves hidden.”
—Andre Bazin (via mirrorfloatinginwater)
“The first step in any real utopia is to look in the mirror and demand to know my true desire, an action which already presupposes at least temporary overcoming of conditioned anxiety, of the fear that a daemon may appear in the glass, or a daemonic cop.”
—Hakim Bey, Criminal Bee
