Monday 16 November 2015
Wednesday 4 November 2015
The Countries that Dont Exist, by David Robson
Middleton, however, is here to talk about countries missing from the vast majority of books and maps for sale here. He calls them the “countries that don’t exist”, but although their names may seem fantastical – Atlantium, Christiania, and Elgaland-Vargaland – they are all real places, occupied by fervidly patriotic citizens. In fact, you have almost certainly, unknowingly, visited one.
The globe, it turns out, is full of small (and not so small) regions that have all the trappings of a real country – a fixed population, a government, a flag, and a currency. Some can even issue you a biometric passport. Yet for various reasons they are not allowed representatives in the United Nations, and are ignored on most world maps.
Middleton, a geographer at the University of Oxford, has now charted these hidden lands in his new book, An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist (Macmillan, 2015). Flicking through its pages, it feels like you have entered a parallel world with a vibrant, forgotten history and a rich culture.
Read more here
Tuesday 3 November 2015
quote
“There is no present which is not haunted by a past and future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come.”
– Gilles Deleuze
Thursday 22 October 2015
A magical glimpse into the Tudor imagination: Lost library of John Dee to be revealed
No figure from the Tudor world better exemplifies the diverse and apparently contradictory intellectual and social preoccupations of the period than John Dee.
At once deeply religious and fastidiously superstitious, Dee was a scholar of mathematics and magic, a keen historian and courtier and tutor to Elizabeth I and a polymath whose interests included astronomy, astrology, exploration, the occult, alchemy, spying and imperialism.
Little wonder this extraordinary man has continually fascinated and served as inspiration to artists from Shakespeare and Ben Johnson to Derek Jarman and Damon Albarn.
Now, the intriguing and mysterious Dee, who survived the machinations of the late Tudor period only to die in poverty in 1608/9, is to be revealed to the public through his remarkable personal library for the first time in history.
Read more here
Royal College of Physicians Museum info here
Event: The EVP Sessions
Saturday 14th November
Start time: 8pm
Tickets: £11
Book online
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT
Website: shoreditchtownhall.com
Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices.
Featuring
EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
LAURA BURNS, TIM MURRAY-BROWNE & JAN LEE
ROWAN EVANS & MAISIE NEWMAN / DUNCAN GATES
LUKE JORDAN / GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN / NICK MURRAY
NATHAN PENLINGTON / JOANNE SCOTT
ANTOSH WOJCIK / NICOLA WOODHAM
with special guest
S J Fowler
Full programme of works: http://
https://www.facebook.com/events/1639973726274802/
Monday 19 October 2015
Event: Two Knocks For Yes
Shrouded in secrecy, Two Knocks For Yes will incorporate talks, music, theatre and photography.
“In every story of things that go bump in the night, there are two possibilities. One, that it’s a hoax. Two, that there is something going on beyond the grasp of the human mind”.
And so begins Black Channels’ radiophonic exploration in to the poltergeist phenomenon that forms part of this evenings immersive entertainment, alongside a talk on the folklore of death and water by James Burt, ghost stories and archive video footage and photographs, all hosted by paranormal enthusiast, Curtis James.
Real life reports of paranormal activity, otherworldly vibrations and oscillations, chilling accounts of nocturnal visitations and strange activity in the most mundane of suburban surroundings will echo around the 19th Century stone walls of Saint Andrews Church, Brighton. There are tales of hauntings in the venue itself (no longer used for worship), and it is certainly true that the burial vaults beneath the pews have yet to be removed.
Doors open at 7:30pm. Performance starts at 8. There will be no admittance after 8.
Tickets are £6 and available here...
http://www.eventbrite.com/
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Friday 23rd October. Doors at 7:30pm, kicks off at 8pm.
Saint Andrews Church, Waterloo Street, Hove, BN3 1AQ
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(all money from ticket sales go to the performers and creators of this piece)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1476101159360253/
Sunday 18 October 2015
The Reality Show, by Mike Jay
Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled ‘The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village’, published in the May 2012 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its authors, the brothers Joel and Ian Gold, presented a striking series of cases in which individuals had become convinced that they were secretly being filmed for a reality TV show.
In one case, the subject travelled to New York, demanding to see the ‘director’ of the film of his life, and wishing to check whether the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in reality or merely in the movie that was being assembled for his benefit. In another, a journalist who had been hospitalised during a manic episode became convinced that the medical scenario was fake and that he would be awarded a prize for covering the story once the truth was revealed. Another subject was actually working on a reality TV series but came to believe that his fellow crew members were secretly filming him, and was constantly expecting the This-Is-Your-Life moment when the cameras would flip and reveal that he was the true star of the show.
Few commentators were able to resist the idea that these cases — all diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and treated with antipsychotic medication — were in some sense the tip of the iceberg, exposing a pathology in our culture as a whole. They were taken as extreme examples of a wider modern malaise: an obsession with celebrity turning us all into narcissistic stars of our own lives, or a media-saturated culture warping our sense of reality and blurring the line between fact and fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales for an age in which our experience of reality is manicured and customised in subtle and insidious ways, and everything from our junk mail to our online searches discreetly encourages us in the assumption that we are the centre of the universe.
But part of the reason that the Truman Show delusion seems so uncannily in tune with the times is that Hollywood blockbusters now regularly present narratives that, until recently, were confined to psychiatrists’ case notes and the clinical literature on paranoid psychosis. Popular culture hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more sense than they used to?
The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between new technologies and the symptoms of psychosis was Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1919, he published a paper on a phenomenon he called ‘the influencing machine’. Tausk had noticed that it was common for patients with the recently coined diagnosis of schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being controlled by advanced technologies invisible to everyone but them. These ‘influencing machines’ were often elaborately conceived and predicated on the new devices that were transforming modern life. Patients reported that they were receiving messages transmitted by hidden batteries, coils and electrical apparatus; voices in their heads were relayed by advanced forms of telephone or phonograph, and visual hallucinations by the covert operation of ‘a magic lantern or cinematograph’. Tausk’s most detailed case study was of a patient named ‘Natalija A’, who believed that her thoughts were being controlled and her body manipulated by an electrical apparatus secretly operated by doctors in Berlin. The device was shaped like her own body, its stomach a velvet-lined lid that could be opened to reveal batteries corresponding to her internal organs.
Read more here
Wednesday 7 October 2015
Event: Consciousness as Interface Workshop
Full information :: http://
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$Pay what you want$
Saturday 10th October & Sunday 11th October, 12 midday - 7pm.
Room 18, Floor 19, Block B, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, Kwai Hing, Hong Kong.
Booking and info email ryan@nnnnn.org.uk
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This workshop explores the idea that human conscious experience functions as a virtual reality interface with the external world.
The workshop includes an introduction to theories related to this idea in combination with practical experiments.
Participants will build a variety of experimental electronic circuits using materials such as amber, copper, zinc and iron pyrite, as well as more standard electronic components.
These circuits will create experimental audio-visual instruments; with the audio played through loudspeakers, and the visual generated via a combination of the physiology of the eye, electricity and flickering light.
The results from these experiments will (hopefully) generate experiences akin to hallucinations which will be controllable, therefore offering a navigable passageway through the holoflux.
Artaud, Deleuze and The Will to Nothingness, by Cengiz Erdem
I close the eyes of my intelligence, and giving voice to the unformulated within me, I offer myself the sense of having wrested from the unknown something real.
I believe in spontaneous conjurations.
On the paths along which my blood draws me, it cannot be that one day I will not discover a truth.[1]
Antonin Artaud does not call for
destruction of reason through the imaginary but an affirmation of
reason’s self-destruction on the way to self-creation. There is a
knowledge which Artaud is in pursuit of without knowing what that
knowledge is and what purpose it serves. Artaud is always in pursuit of
this unattainable and ungraspable knowledge and he knows that, as he is
trying to give it a voice, he is moving away from and towards it at the
same time. This movement of the action and the intention in opposite
directions, that is, this turning against itself of desire, is a thought
that Artaud feels with his body but cannot express through articulable
forms. Artaud makes the inarticulable visible through costume, lighting,
etc., and tries to create a psychic materiality.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom,
then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out,
as in the frenzy of dancehalls,
and this wrong side out will be his real place.[2]
Artaud feels the body as an externally
organized structure and experiences existence as pain because he feels
his body to be restricted and subjected to forms it is not willing to
take at all times. By disorganizing the body through putting its organs
to different uses, to uses other than they have come to be put, within
the organizing structures, Artaud induces agony in himself. Desiring to
become inorganic, and this is a desire for an impersonal death, an
“ungraspable” knowledge, this striving for infinity within the finite,
is, paradoxically, at once the product and the producer of his
affirmation of life as it is, that is, as “a process of breaking down…”
as the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald puts it in his The Crack Up. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze reads Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up with Kleinian eyes and says that identification is peculiar to manic-depressive states. In The Crack Up Fitzgerald says,
I only wanted absolute quiet to think about why I had developed a sad attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion… Identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure…[3]
Deleuze affirms Fitzgerald’s manic-depressive attitude towards the relationship between life and death in the Porcelain and Volcano chapter of his The Logic of Sense.
If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves—better death than the health which we are given. Is there some other health, like a body surviving as long as possible its scar, like Lowry dreaming of rewriting a “Crack Up” which would end happily, and never giving up the idea of a new vital conquest?[4]
In a world ruled by fools full of
ill-will war becomes inescapable. Since war, conflict, violence and
destruction are interior as much as they are exterior affairs, it is
hardly a matter of bad luck that we will be wounded at some point if we
haven’t been already, not that I wish it to be that way. An injury
either creates a possibility of relating to the world as it is, or turns
into an obsession with the self, into a delusional and rigid vision of
existence projected onto the real, giving birth to neurosis or psychosis.
Read more here
Bataille and the Surrealists: Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body? by Cengiz Erdem
The pineal eye is not the organ that
turns two different perspectives into one. It rather attempts to turn
the reality inside out so that the objects, instead of becoming visible
through reflecting light, themselves overflow their objectivities and
generate light. The Surrealists
aimed at precisely this kind of a process through automatic writing.
They aimed at replacing the objective reality with another subjectivity
that would go beyond the polar opposition between the subject and the
object. Surrealism tries to attain inorganicity through becoming
inorganic. It desires nothing, rather than willing nothingness. It is a
movement governed by the death drive rather than being the governor of the death drive.
Bataille at first looked at the
Surrealists with sympathy, but before long he came to understand that it
was nothing other than a false pretentiousness. Bataille says,
If we were to identify under the heading of materialism a crude liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive, indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts, and ridicules spirit, we could at the same time identify surrealism as a childhood disease of this base materialism: it is through this latter identification that the current prerequisites for a consistent development may be specified forcefully and in such a manner as to preclude any return to pretentious idealistic aberrations.[1]
To understand why Bataille is so angry
with the Surrealists, and especially with Dali, we have to go back to
the roots of this distress caused by the attempt to show that the
subject and the object are one. Bataille compares the prefix Sur at the
beginning of Surrealism and Nietzsche’s
Surhomme. For Bataille, what is common to both Nietzsche and the
Surrealists is that they both in vain strive for a higher world, and yet
since Nietzsche at least inverts his attitude and attempts to revalue
all values including his own. Whereas Surrealism is a hopeless case in
that all they do is to devalue everything valuable. For Bataille, the
Surrealists are merely a group of people making themselves ridiculous
and being the objects of nervous laughter.
Read more here
Event: Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin
Saturday 10th October,
The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan, Holloway Road, London
19:30-22:00
https://www.facebook.com/events/907740049263314/
Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan in Holloway.
Please RSVP and we'll send the address.
Acts
Neofung and Cao
"Trans-Trance Vol. II. Intra-telluric Transplant"
Following from wasteland embodiment act “Trans-trance”, a performance that proposed savage physiological strategies to incorporate nature into the city environment, re-appropriating base-materiality through the transformation of the performer into an urban-feral agent, “Intratelluric Transplant” seeks to reframe the act within the space of an underground realm, evoking the symbolism of the telluric interior of the earth. Here, the act executed by the urban-feral character will serve as a rite for the opening of a new abstract space: the entrails of the wasteland, the intimacy of the wasteland. A transplant onto a different symbolic realm would take place as the performers oscillate between the opening of new possibilities of rooting and uprooting, and the mute encounter with groundlessness.
http://neofung.tumblr.com/
http://www.cao-music.net/
http://www.soundcloud.com/
Luke Jordan
"Unclean Spirits: A Transformative Lecture"
An absurdist action installation of ritual uncleanness, invoking the visual and sonic informe.
Within, cacophony, biotic painting and sculptures of detritus and rot, occur in an affective flux.
Functioning between the urge to communicate and its failure; feedback, spoken words and unintelligible vocalisations are channeled and distorted through sculptural objects within the environment, further obscuring any rational meaning therein. The objects animated and possessed by the disembodied voice, and materials interacting with and manipulated by the body become transformed in an assemblage of the human and non-human, each taking on aspects of the other.
http://
Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)
“Live De-composition with desiring assemblages for Les Hommes n’en sauront Rien (Of This Men shall know Nothing), 1923, oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 25 1/8 (80.5 x 64 cm) by Max Ernst (1891-1976)”
The back of the picture is inscribed with a mysterious and enigmatic prose poem (Ernst only confirmed in 1970 that the poem was written by himself), which can be translated as follows:
OF THIS MEN SHALL KNOW NOTHING
The Crescent (yellow and like a parachute) prevents the little whistle falling to the ground. The whistle, because people are taking notice of it, thinks it is climbing to the Sun. | The Sun is divided into two so that it can spin better. | The model is stretched out in a dreaming pose. The right leg is bent (a pleasant exact movement). | The hand hides the earth. Through this movement the earth takes on the importance of a sexual organ. | The Moon runs through its phases and eclipses with the utmost speed. | The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance each another.
Ernst’s occult symbolism (depicting the sun, the moon, rays and human organs) can be related directly back to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of my Nervous illness) 1911. Crow has been obsessively working with this text from as early as 1992, the year he opened up the Institution of Rot.
THE INSTITUTION OF ROT (A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY)
In history as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life. Karl Marx
The wonderful Schreber...ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital. Sigmund Freud
There are many aberrant 'histories/herstories/
Speak (and listen) according to the madness that seduces you.
The Institution of Rot (IOR) was founded by artist Richard Crow and writer Nick Couldry in 1992 as part of London’s Secret Spaces. Situated in a Victorian House in Finsbury Park, North London, Richard Crow's working and living space, the IOR has been (from 1992 - 1996) an active artist-run space dedicated to performance, audio works and site-specific installations. Rooted in a mindset of do-it-yourself production and collaboration, the IOR significantly contributed to the extraordinary dynamism of London’s artist-run spaces phenomenon of the 90's.
IOR’s specific concerns (and obsessions) were the privacy of the human body and its public transformations (ingestion, expulsion, cleansing, confessions, rituals and taboos).
From 2002 (until July 2009) the space of the IOR remained 'open' as a point of contact for international collaborations and occasional (unofficial) artists’ residencies in partnership with the curator in residence Lucia Farinati.
At present the ‘remains’ of the IOR constitute a ‘living archive’ – a kind of uneasy hauntology of recordings, objects, texts and images, people and places.
RICHARD CROW/INSTITUTION OF ROT
http://
https://soundcloud.com/
Monday 21 September 2015
The Sun Does Not Rise by Andrew Crumey
How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated scienc.
Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific? The question was asked in a survey in the United States, and according to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 ‘slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific”’. The rest, almost 50 per cent, were willing to grant it credibility, a higher proportion than in previous surveys. Perhaps that indicates a decline in rational scepticism, but an alternative interpretation suggests itself: many respondents had simply confused astrology and astronomy. It’s a common enough mistake: when the Daily Mail profiled the ailing Patrick Moore not long before his death in 2012, they dubbed him an ‘astrological legend’. One can only hope the error did nothing to hasten the great man’s demise.
As an amateur astronomer myself, I’m used to the mix-up, though to be honest, the confusion doesn’t particularly trouble me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to suggest there is any plausibility in the idea that the gravitational field of Jupiter can stimulate life-changing tidal forces in my head. But while the boundary between science and pseudo-science seems clear enough in theory, it’s not always so straightforward in practice. The reason, in many cases, is that both draw on the same recurring set of ideas.
I would like to propose what I shall call the principle of eternal folly. It states that in nearly every era there arises, in some form, nearly every idea of which humans are capable. Certainly, there is the emergence of new ideas: technological ones are the most obvious, but there are others, too. I do think it fair to say that Jane Austen, Beethoven, and even the occasional entrepreneur have invented radically new things. However, the vast majority of ideas are recycled – and it is when we fail to recognise this, as we eternally do, that we commit folly.
Read more here
Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific? The question was asked in a survey in the United States, and according to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 ‘slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific”’. The rest, almost 50 per cent, were willing to grant it credibility, a higher proportion than in previous surveys. Perhaps that indicates a decline in rational scepticism, but an alternative interpretation suggests itself: many respondents had simply confused astrology and astronomy. It’s a common enough mistake: when the Daily Mail profiled the ailing Patrick Moore not long before his death in 2012, they dubbed him an ‘astrological legend’. One can only hope the error did nothing to hasten the great man’s demise.
As an amateur astronomer myself, I’m used to the mix-up, though to be honest, the confusion doesn’t particularly trouble me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to suggest there is any plausibility in the idea that the gravitational field of Jupiter can stimulate life-changing tidal forces in my head. But while the boundary between science and pseudo-science seems clear enough in theory, it’s not always so straightforward in practice. The reason, in many cases, is that both draw on the same recurring set of ideas.
I would like to propose what I shall call the principle of eternal folly. It states that in nearly every era there arises, in some form, nearly every idea of which humans are capable. Certainly, there is the emergence of new ideas: technological ones are the most obvious, but there are others, too. I do think it fair to say that Jane Austen, Beethoven, and even the occasional entrepreneur have invented radically new things. However, the vast majority of ideas are recycled – and it is when we fail to recognise this, as we eternally do, that we commit folly.
Read more here
Sunday 5 July 2015
Snapshots of an AI's Psychedelic 'Dreams', by Emiko Jozuka
Researchers trained the neural network to recognize things like animals and objects in photographs by showing it millions of samples. Their aim is to hone a computer’s visual system so that it’ll be able to tell the difference between different objects and, in this case, interpret images in similar ways that humans do. For example, Google’s neural network can “see” shapes in images, in the same way that we can sometimes see the shape of an animal in a cloud.
The neural network is made of ten to 30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. The researchers feed an image into the input layer, with each layer communicating with the next until the network’s “answer” is produced from the final output layer.
The primary layers of the neural network identify relatively simple features such as edges or corners. Further up the chain, the middle layers interpret simple features that can suss out individual shapes like a leaf or a window. The final layers interpret the information collated from the first and intermediary layers so that the network can come up with something as complex as a tree or a house.
Read more here
Into the Underworld: The Hackney Underworld, by Iain Sinclair
They dig and the
earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down
through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is
separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered
brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of
Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the
13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a
statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a
self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and
shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft,
without any of the tortured grinding and screeching, the mechanical
gouging that attends the uncivil engineering projects that carve so
recklessly through the tarmac and concrete and clay of this loudly
regenerated fiefdom. And down again through the pipes and wires of the
utility companies who treat their cone-protected pits as privileged art
installations and block off junctions and towpaths for unspecified
months, as an oversubscribed militia in sour yellow tabards retreat to
their all-day breakfasts and tabloid-insulated Portakabins. By way of
contrast, the lawn-despoilers initiated their modest project at the
summer solstice, before returning every grain of soil, with willing
volunteers, in October. One of those who went down into the pit spoke of
falling asleep every night to the clatter of helicopters ‘circling the
milky sky of Hackney’. She relished, by contrast, the silence of the
burrow, and the 'damp, perfumed scent' of the living earth that held her
firm in a clammy poultice. ‘I felt cradled by this bare soil,’ Chiara
Ambrosio, a filmmaker and anthropologist, told me, ‘contained and
absorbed by it, a place of origin and convergence.’
And now, without fanfare, the domestic mining fetish has arrived in Hackney. I visited Wilberforce Road, a generously proportioned artery running south from Finsbury Park. This is a transitional zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs with earth-shuddering excavations. Estate agents are busily promoting hikes in achieved selling prices, while encouraging the neurotic impulse to regard your home as a volatile asset. The canny speculator should be alert for the optimum moment to cash in. Three-bed flats are on offer at £750,000. The average rent in the street is calculated at £1666 per month. Inspired by this febrile vision, householders dig. There are seven basement excavations in progress. Wilberforce Road is unlisted and schemes for enlarging properties are waved through in the mistaken belief that more housing units are being created. Specialist earth removers mask their activities behind blocky grey sheds. Which prove to be the ideal surface for protesting graffiti: no excavation! ten more years. no more excavating in wilberforce. Mining operations can take as long as a year to complete. Giant compressors thump and thunder. Security guards lurk, bored and edgy, warning off casual photographers. Backs have been torn from properties, and cavernous pits revealed. Plagues of disturbed rats are on the march.
Read more here
Tuesday 26 May 2015
Big Trouble In Big China: Ghost Cities Of China Reviewed, by Stephen Lee Naish
Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally planned to a market based economy and experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth averaging about 10 percent a year has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty
This is a truly a remarkable accomplishment in economic reform, yet has not been without its shortcomings to the general populace. High inequality is widespread, environmental concerns and sustainability is a major concern. One of the other aspects of China's growth has been the mounting need/desire to increase its urban spaces as more and more rural communities up sticks and move to the cities to partake in the economic boom. China has put into practice a colossal programme of urban renewal and expansion as well as creating brand new cities from the ground up.
When the Communist Party came to power in 1949 there were 69 cities, today that number has leapt to 658 cities of various population densities. No civilisation in history has built so much in such a short space of time. Yet the majority of these new constructions remain virtually empty. Towers of apartment buildings with no tenants. Shopping malls, and offices without shoppers or workers, sports stadiums with no home teams. China is building pristine virgin cities that no one has yet to touch. Why is this happening? Could China be building these metropolises in preparation for a mass external migration as it surpasses the West as the world's economic power?
Read more here
Tuesday 5 May 2015
Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard, by Ron Cowen
The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.
In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.
Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.
Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.
The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.
In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory. “The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”
More here
Saturday 11 April 2015
The Eeriness of the English Countyside, by Robert Macfarlane
Ninety years ago this spring, MR James published one of his most unsettling ghost stories, “A View from a Hill”. It opens on a hot June afternoon, when a Cambridge academic called Fanshawe arrives at the house of his friend Squire Richards, deep in the south-west of England. Richards proposes an evening walk to a nearby hilltop, from where they can “look over the country”. Fanshawe asks if he can borrow some binoculars. After initial hesitation, Richards agrees, and gives Fanshawe a smooth wooden box. It contains, he explains, a pair of unusually heavy field-glasses, made by a local antiquary named Baxter, who died under mysterious circumstances a decade or so earlier. In opening the box, Fanshawe cuts his finger on one corner, drawing blood.
So the two men walk up to the viewpoint, where they stop to survey the “lovely English landscape” spread out beneath them: “green wheat, hedges and pasture-land”, “scattered cottages” and the steam-plume of the last train. The smell of hay is in the air. There are “wild roses on bushes hard by”. It is the pinnacle of the English pastoral.
But then Fanshawe raises the binoculars to his eyes – and that “lovely landscape” is disturbingly disrupted. Viewed through the glasses, a distant wooded hilltop becomes a treeless “grass field”, in which stands a gibbet, from which hangs a body. There is a cart containing other men near to the gibbet. People are moving around on the field. Yet when Fanshawe takes the binoculars from his eyes, the gibbet vanishes and the wood returns. Up, eerie; down, cosy. Up, corpse; down, copse. He explains it away as a trick of the midsummer light.
From there, though, the story takes further sinister turns. The next day Fanshawe bicycles out to Gallows Hill, as it is called locally, to investigate the illusion. In the wood on the hilltop, he becomes convinced that there is someone watching him from the thicket, and “not with any pleasant intent”. Panicking, he flees.
Eventually the grim secret of the binoculars is revealed. Baxter had filled their barrels with a fluid derived by boiling the bones of hanged men, whose bodies he had plundered from the graves on Gallows Hill, formerly a site of execution. In looking through the field-glasses, Fanshawe was “looking through dead men’s eyes”, and summoning violent pasts into visible being. Prospect was a form of retrospect; Baxter’s macabre optics revealed the skull beneath the skin of the English countryside.
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Sunday 15 March 2015
Linguistic Comprehension of Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Experiment In Auditory Perception Accuracy, by Michael J. Baker
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Tuesday 3 March 2015
The Behavioral Sink, by Will Wiles
Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.
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Wednesday 18 February 2015
All the ghostly sounds that are lost when you compress to mp3, by Jack Rusher
Right now, you’re probably listening to music on your computer. The source of that music — whether you’re listening to an mp3 file or streaming — is a compressed version of a file that was much more detailed, but way larger. It’s worth interrupting your music for a moment and asking: What sounds are you missing?
To get a sense, watch the video above, created by Ryan Maguire, a Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia Center for Computer Music, for a project called The Ghost In The Mp3. It’s a song made with only the sounds that were left out when compressing Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” to mp3.
As his site explains,
“‘moDernisT‘ was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song “Tom’s Diner”, famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 video compression.”Read more here
Tuesday 10 February 2015
Arthur Machen: The Sounds From Beyond The Veil, from The London Sound Survey
The Welsh-born mystic and writer Arthur Machen moved to London in 1881 when he was in his late teens, a good age for the kind of long exploratory walks which can bring on a trance-like state of fatigue. He lodged briefly in south London before moving to Turnham Green, then Notting Hill Gate. With De Quincey’s opium-powered London wanderings sometimes in mind, Machen began first to explore the north and west of the city. His autobiographical works, such as Far Off Things (1922), suggest he gathered enough thoughts on London and its hinterlands during these expeditions to inform the rest of his literary career.
Machen’s descriptions of sounds often occur in the absence of seeing what’s making them. In The Terror (1917), a part of the Welsh countryside is haunted by an eerie, distant moaning, which is later revealed as people crying for help up the chimney flue of a barricaded cottage. A Fragment of Life (1899) features a nature spirit less benign than Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which whistles unseen at a couple walking in the fields near Totteridge. The confrontation is a foretaste of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now:
Still, she felt it was no good bothering her head over what couldn’t be made out or explained anyway, and she was just settling down, when one Sunday evening it began all over again, and worse things happened. The whistling followed them just as it did before, and poor aunt set her teeth and said nothing to uncle, as she knew he would only tell her stories, and they were walking on, not saying a word, when something made her look back, and there was a horrible boy with red hair, peeping through the hedge just behind, and grinning. She said it was a dreadful face, with something unnatural about it, as if it had been a dwarf, and before she had time to have a good look, it popped back like lightning, and aunt all but fainted away.
Part of H.P. Lovecraft’s acknowledged debt to Machen also lies in hearing without seeing. Well before Lovecraft’s half-human ululations emanated from somewhere below ground, Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) has Francis Leicester ingest a restorative white powder from a chemist, only to undergo a horrible physical degeneration. The process takes time, however, as his sister finds out:
“Francis, Francis,” I cried, “for heaven’s sake answer me. What is the horrible thing in your room? Cast it out, Francis, cast it from you!” I heard a noise as of feet shuffling slowly and awkwardly, and a choking, gurgling sound, as if some one was struggling to find utterance, and then the noise of a voice, broken and stifled, and words that I could scarcely understand.
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Monday 2 February 2015
Staging Disorder Exhibition, words by Debika Ray
Photographs of the fake buildings, streets and interiors created to train police and miltary forces to deal with conflict situations are on display in an exhibition that began this week.
Staging Disorder at the London College of Communication includes images from seven series of photographs that examine a unique type of architecture where form is predicated on fear rather than function.
Among these are photographs by Sarah Pickering of the locations used to train officers in the British police who deal with terrorism, riots and protests. The largest of these, where she shot most of her images, is Denton, a series of large-scale backdrops and fake streets that simulate a stark, mid-sized city – complete with a football stadium, a nightclub and a Tube station. The apparent order and cleanliness of the set is in sharp contrast to the inherent chaos of the scenarios for which the officers are training.
Claudio Hils’ Red Land Blue Land was shot at training grounds for German troops in Senne, North Rhine-Westphalia. During manoeuvres, the term “Red Land” means enemy territory and “Blue Land” denotes friendly areas. Traces of military activity, such as targets in the shape of people, emphasise the emptiness and lifelessness of the terrain.
Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg photographed Chicago, a fake Arab town in the Negev desert built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training. Its history has mirrored the story of the conflict with Palestine: During the war in Lebanon, its streets were filled with abandoned cars, imitating areas of Beirut; during the first and second intifada, its concrete walls were covered with Arabic graffiti reminiscent of Gaza city and an area was built to simulate the refugee camps of the occupied territories; during the first Gulf war, American special forces had their first taste of the Middle East in the artificial town.
Friday 16 January 2015
Hibbert’s Ghosts: An Autopsy of the Unconscious, by EsoterX
“The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them” ― Philip K. Dick
Long before the Father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) arrived on the scene to remind us of the retrospectively obvious, yet poorly understood fact that we are all neurotic, sex-obsessed slaves of our id, inevitably traumatized by our childhood, and that “dreams are the most profound when they seem the most crazy”, English doctor, antiquarian, and psychical hobbyist Samuel Hibbert-Ware (1782-1848) was toying with the idea that metaphysical speculation regarding the origin of ghostly apparitions was a philosophical dead end, and that various species of specters and phantasms were a side effect of what he called “the association of ideas”, an acutely vivid, and conscious expression of what has remained dormant in our unconscious. That is to say, the specters of our consciousness were merely an associated chain of thoughts and feelings (even from infancy) which are revitalized due to some form of mental excitement. In short, Hibbert-Ware proposed that ghosts were peculiarly concrete, conscious expressions of unconscious associations, emerging from deep within our mental catalog linking emotions, predispositions, cognitions, and traumas, and as we were unconscious of the source of these re-emergent impressions that had suddenly leapt into consciousness, they seemed to spring forth from nowhere, like a ghost, one might say.
Read more here
Long before the Father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) arrived on the scene to remind us of the retrospectively obvious, yet poorly understood fact that we are all neurotic, sex-obsessed slaves of our id, inevitably traumatized by our childhood, and that “dreams are the most profound when they seem the most crazy”, English doctor, antiquarian, and psychical hobbyist Samuel Hibbert-Ware (1782-1848) was toying with the idea that metaphysical speculation regarding the origin of ghostly apparitions was a philosophical dead end, and that various species of specters and phantasms were a side effect of what he called “the association of ideas”, an acutely vivid, and conscious expression of what has remained dormant in our unconscious. That is to say, the specters of our consciousness were merely an associated chain of thoughts and feelings (even from infancy) which are revitalized due to some form of mental excitement. In short, Hibbert-Ware proposed that ghosts were peculiarly concrete, conscious expressions of unconscious associations, emerging from deep within our mental catalog linking emotions, predispositions, cognitions, and traumas, and as we were unconscious of the source of these re-emergent impressions that had suddenly leapt into consciousness, they seemed to spring forth from nowhere, like a ghost, one might say.
Read more here
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