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.

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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.

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Event: Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

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/cao-6

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://lukerichardjordan.blogspot.co.uk/

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/heresies' of the IOR, therefore you may not recognise/identify yourself with what is written below.

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://www.soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm
https://soundcloud.com/richard-crow

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.

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Snapshots of an AI's Psychedelic 'Dreams', by Emiko Jozuka

If you give an artificial neural network free reign to create something visually, what does it come up with? The answer: multi-coloured psychedelic landscapes with hybrid beasts and mutant horsemen.The images, which are as stunning as they are surreal, were created by Google’s image recognition neural network—a bunch of statistical learning models inspired by biological systems—in a project dubbed “Inceptionism”.

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.

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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.’

When the surface of the world is so overloaded with competing narratives, with shrill boasts hung from every blue fence and plastered over buses and police cars and refuse trucks, there is an understandable impulse to go underground. Oligarchs and overcompensated money market raiders, Premier League footballers and their agents have burrowed under Chelsea and Kensington for generations, commissioning Dr No fantasies of swimming pools and cinemas and state of the art gymnasia in which no uninvited civilian will ever set foot. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify.

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.

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Big Trouble In Big China: Ghost Cities Of China Reviewed, by Stephen Lee Naish

The rapid rise of China as one of the world's economic powerhouses has been astonishing to witness: Due to the sheer volume of exportable goods produced within the country, and the largest labor force in the world, China has been given the unofficial status of the world's factory. However this slightly derogatory and naive term is becoming more and more redundant as China is hastily being transformed beyond recognition from a production-based society to a consumerist one. The World Bank states that:

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?

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Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard, by Ron Cowen

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

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.”

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The Eeriness of the English Countyside, by Robert Macfarlane

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie – ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism – it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears.

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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Linguistic Comprehension of Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Experiment In Auditory Perception Accuracy, by Michael J. Baker

Abstract. Since the mid-20th century EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) has been the focus of countless debates. Among them is the interpretation of what is truly being spoken within each recording. Since most EVP recordings are low in quality, phonetic analysis is often difficult and therefore most researchers rely on their hearing and audible interpretations to determine the words contained in each file. The purpose of this experiment is to establish the accuracy percentage at which human hearing can identify spoken words in random statements contained in low quality recordings. To perform this experiment we have created twenty simulated EVP recordings, each with similar background noise and vocal styles (normal speech, whispers, mumbles etc.) as those found in purported anomalous recordings. The recordings were created in various environments by three N.E.C.A.P.S. staff members (C. Wong, B. Hantzis, M. Baker) and presented within in two separate online surveys, displaying each recording independently. The volunteers then listened to the recordings and reported the words (if any) they felt were contained in each file. The results (123 for survey 1A and 108 for survey 1B) were downloaded and analysed for grading accuracy and to establish perception patterns. Our findings have shown that none of the volunteers scored above 80% accuracy for survey 1A and 50% for survey 1B. The average accuracy percentage for survey 1A was 49% and survey 1B was 28%. The results of this experiment indicate that human perception is not an accurate methodology for determining non contextual spoken words contained in an EVP recording. Inaccurate interpretations appear to be due to various neurological and psychological obstacles such as various biases, anticipation and pareidolia. These obstacles greatly affect the comprehension and or objectivity of the listener’s perspective.

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The Behavioral Sink, by Will Wiles

How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.

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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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

Arthur Machen: The Sounds From Beyond The Veil, from The London Sound Survey

ADVENTURES MADE EARLY in life can go on to define intellectual careers and reputations. Darwin was 22 when he set off on The Beagle. T. E. Lawrence built a personal mythos from his experiences as a young officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18. The anthropologist Margaret Mead was 27 when her book Coming of Age in Samoa was published, while Napoleon Chagnon spent his twenties studying the Yanonamo people, sometimes introducing himself to a new village by leaping into its central clearing with his face daubed in war paint, waving a shotgun.

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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Staging Disorder Exhibition, words by Debika Ray

An exhibition of photography depicts the eerie, artificial towns used to train the police and military for conflict

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.

Staging Disorder runs until 12 March and the LCC in Elephant and Castle, London

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.

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Public Lecture: Realism and Psychosis, Simon Morgan Wortham

A lecture in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy's 20th Anniversary Public Lecture Series, in association with the London Graduate School.

Thursday 18th December 2014

Time: 6.00pm - 8.00pm
Venue: E003, Granary Building, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Price: free
Speaker: Simon Morgan Wortham (the London Graduate School - Kingston University)

In ‘Judiciousness in Dispute' Lyotard gives us an image of the seventy-four year old Kant beset by a near-permanent head cold. Here, while the mind, through a sheer effort of will, has the capacity to overcome a variety of ailments, thought nevertheless causes it severe pain, a pain to which it is not just opposed, but which indeed accompanies its very operation. To the extent that this ambivalent relationship to pain is insurmountable, the ageing philosopher's inflammation of the head is linked to what Kant himself describes as an involuntary spasmodic state in the brain, that is, a certain inability to maintain concepts, or to secure the unified consciousness of related representations, which Lyotard wants to suggest is fundamental or necessary, rather than merely contingent upon an ailment contracted late in life. To what extent is post-Kantian thought in pain? In what ways is such ‘pain' prolonged in philosophies that seek a radical departure from Kant? For instance, in seeking an exit from the subjective representation of objects (for Lyotard, the source of Kant's ‘pain')? Does speculative materialism risk a certain lapse into a psychotic state that—as both Lacan and Kristeva suggest—may be arrested only through the onset of phobia?

Followed by a reception to launch Simon Morgan Wortham, Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press).

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The Brain Makes Its Own Ghosts, by Julie Beck

In a new study, researchers were able to induce people to feel a presence behind them using a robot, which has implications for understanding schizophrenia and consciousness itself.

 When I was little, whenever I climbed a flight of stairs in the dark, the climbing quickly turned to running. About halfway up the steps, every time, I was overcome with an unshakeable certainty that there was a monster behind me, chasing me. I won’t say I never get that feeling anymore, but I force myself to walk up the stairs slowly and calmly when it happens now, swallowing my fear. That’s called being an adult.

The sense of someone near you when no one is actually there is called “feeling of presence” or FOP, apparently, according to a new study in Current Biology that identified the regions of the brain associated with this sensation and, wildly, recreated it in a lab setting.

“Although it is described by neurological and psychiatric patients and healthy individuals in different situations, it is not yet understood how the phenomenon is triggered by the brain,” the study reads.
First the researchers, who mostly hailed from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, studied the brains of 12 patients with neurological disorders (mainly epilepsy) who had experienced FOP, and found lesions in three regions of their brains: the insular cortex, frontoparietal cortex, and temporoparietal cortex. These areas deal with self-awareness, movement, and spatial positioning, suggesting that when sensorimotor signals get confused, people can feel presences that aren’t there.

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800,000 Pages of Patient Art and Mental Health Archives Are Going Online

A few weeks ago, the Wellcome Library announced a new initiative to digitize more than 800,000 pages of material from British psychiatric hospitals. Dating between the 18th and 20th centuries, the trove includes examples of patient artwork and writing, as well as patient-produced publications.

Some of these are shaky pencil drawings stuck amid further details on patient conditions — like this casebook on a patient at Ticehurst Hospital that includes a portrait of a doctor from 1891. Others are more elaborate oil paintings, like the above late-19th-century piece by George Sidebottom at the York Retreat, showing an eclectic scene of recreation. Together these visual details and the greater archives record a period of change in mental health management, when the mistreatment of patients began to be be addressed and institutionalization became more popular (and then gradually less so in the 20th century). The effort sees  the Wellcome Library partnering with the Borthwick Institute for Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, Dumfries and Galloway Council Archives, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Archives, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

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