wearable art. wearable technology. hot hot hot!

http://www.engadget.com/entry/6833839062762584

seduced by pure technology...

Useless Technology, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

> more seduction

Comments on thesis writing thus far

okay, not the WRITING part as much right now as the TALKING part...

We had our colloquium meeting just over a week ago and found out our "schedule" for writing various sections. I am preparing for this like a track meet --- lots of diet mountain dew, sweatpants, mental stretching exercises, and marathon dance sessions to guns and roses.

An over-arching theme emerged from the meeting = ANXIETY, and I thought -- This Is It. This is when the history of future academics is written. Who will sink and who will swim? Who wants to stay in the academic institution pool, or who will escape to join the salary paying fields that kill trees to make new pools? I looked around the conference room to see if there were eyes hidding in holes peering into the room, or perhaps one way glass concealing the department chair and georgetown funders, each of them laying down bets on us little horsies all dressed and ready in our saddles, about to burst through the gates --- Fear Factor: which one of us will survive? And, who will get a book contract like two of our thesis advisor's students last year? "MTV, I wanna get MADE!"

Ugh. Reality Bites. A friend in the program is going through the break-down I experienced all last year, somewhat unfortunate timing, but fortunate in that there is ample opportunity for a truly creative project to emerge from that chaos...Amazing how the pressure of the institution can take away from the pleasure of the pain. Picture your subjectivity prior to graduate school as Pangea...your plates start to shift with every digested text, every alcohol-infused intellectual debate, every lonely night spent with one hand on your book and one hand on your text...At the end of it all, the breaking apart of prior perspective not only is an alllusion to the philosophical debate of knowledge construction that is embedded in theories of "postmodern subjectivity" as a state of mind, but it also mirrors Heidegger's notion of developing a New World Picture --- From Pangea we get this disconnected sense of self -- at times you feel more in a state of continental drift than others --- but, don't forget the water, the water binds it all, making a comfortable bath to lie in, hands with which to play with the arrangement of the parts.

I am embracing the pleasure of this moment. My plates are shifted, shifting, fighting for space, breaking mountains into plains and melting ice caps to leak liquid onto new ground, new territory that feels new just because of the rearrangment of the old (never forget your roots).

And in such rambling we hope an order emerges from the chaos (i'll spare the chaos theory quotation here and give the one that started this post):

"Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm, when things break down." - Chris Kraus

Writing a thesis is a wave of cresting pleasures, and to reach such pleasure, you have to put in some time, some work, some energy. A thesis is a photograph capturing a moment of intersubjectivity, connections between the parts, your "world picture" perspective at that moment in the development of your own intellectual history. Damn it feels good...

let us pretend

that this is over
final words are exactly that
- final

sex and skin are licked
once more and then
- not again

a light turns off in time to catch a shoulder
exiting the door

the hollow night
mirrors the moon into rings
that stain memory, through glass eyes,
rings that stay just long enough
at the bottom
to stain a cup
with the leaves
and water
that same shoulder
once helped
to pour

So my roommate and I just watched and listened to this guy give a prayer during the inauguration...

And we lowered the volume on the TV as I read aloud from Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again:

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

...And as we watch the rest of the TV programming showing the opulance with which the occasion of the moment will be celebrated, let us remember that...

"...sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things much be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs...and see the same TV shows and the same movies. Rich people can't see a sillier version of Truth or Consequences, or a scarier version of The Exorcist. You can get just as revolted as they can - you can have the same nightmares. All of this is really American. The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is."

---
I am Virilio's "body terminal of man...that interactive being who is both transmitter and receiver..."

cold boredom, and art can be boring sometimes

wearing you like the
comforting arms of
retreat
step indoors
smuggle yourself into
the blue night
the black darkness
the pink empty
of the space between
one fold of fabric
and another

wrap up within the layers
of little upon little upon little
snowflakes
eyelashes
cold cuts onto the tongue
your second finger

touch glass and ice
and forget the difference

open up alone
accept inevitable blending into silence
for white upon white upon white
is as warm as warmth you will ever know

cover blankets with more blankets
because you can, lucky.

let arms be the destination
of final retreat
indoors
alone
together

the right and the left
folded

like a skipping record...

a scratched cd, the player winding and winding around trying to pick up someplace to start, but caught in its own strange loop...

listening to cat power's american flag...her voice makes you hold on, thinking it's about to spill over, the moment before the meniscus breaks, the moment in Keats captures in Ode to a Grecian Urn -- you expect her voice to go somewhere else, but instead it keeps you in that same moment...then you begin to enter into disbelief -- perhaps we aren't supposed to go somewhere else at all. maybe right now is all there is and that is that and so enjoy the looping moment, active suspension...

her voice in this song is exactly what the Philip Glass score used in Rondinone's Roundelay video installation does...keeps you moving in circles, starting and stopping without points to distinguish one act from another...extremely effective in Rondinone's video, and equally meaningful to the illustration of Cat Power's lyrics...

just realized

my last three posts had Sin in them...No Comment.

for the indecisive, or perhaps the Honest

I just got back from a get-your-shoes-on-we're-takin'-a-drive spontaneous trip to pittsburgh. never been before. two weeks ago i thought i should move there. no comment now. jury is out and not due to return for quite sometime.

Saw the Warhol Museum (finally). Out of the fate of my fingers, the first binder (describing the contents of one of his time capsules) that I picked up, opened directly to a page that listed one of the contents as a letter from Alice Denney inviting Warhol to participate in her NOW festival. Pretty damn amazing that it was literally the first thing I read on the page too (a weird weird dc energy must be encapsulating my aura making dc type things attract to my skin -- maybe like when people have dogs that look like they do, or couples start to look like each other...maybe i've just been in dc too long...). Anyway...A few months ago, Alice gave a talk and slideshow presentation about NOW at the WDC Arts Club (moderated by Jean Cohen), which was the first I had heard about the event. Hearing about NOW, and the collaboration of Alice with Warhol, Rauschenberg, and other artists brought to DC for the week-long festival, made me salivate for a similar energy and ambition to sweep through DC and make a "new now" happen...and i'll leave that with an additional ellipsis...

Saw most of the 2004-5 Carnegie International...still wandering around in my eyes and ears is Ugo Rondinone's video installation, "Roundelay." And that's all i'll say about art for now...


Because.

The real thing that i can't get over right now is this hilarious invention called The Pittsburgh. It's a salad that wants to love you more that you want to let it. It's a typical salad with chicken or steak, and...French Fries, with cheese. It's for the indecisive - the want-to-be-healthy-but-still-craving-grease-and-salt-type. It's for the person who wants to feel good about choosing a salad for their meal, but since we know they will inevitably steal fries from their neighbor's plate, the kitchen sidesteps the ill will causing scenerio by including fries on the salad. Crazy. Smart. Tasty. Perhaps the embodiment of the entire spectrum of the American palatte -- health conscious, but inevitably subject to the failings of our own systems of restraint (oh our protestant roots shake at this). Mmmm...The rewarding taste of Honest Sin.

Now is the winter of our discontent...

January 20th will be a busy, busy day. Besides the swearing in of gw, two other events of interest are the following:

1 - at Fusebox, 7pm - Francois Bucher's Television (an address) live video feed from Bogota with the Former President of Columbia. (too bad there is no online feed as well.

2 - at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, their two session winter symposium, Politics in the Age of Empire, starting at 1pm PMT. Fortunately, for this one a live stream the day of the event is available -- http://www.pactac.net/stream.html

just when you thought strategic synchronicity was only a tool of marketing firms...

"I am in so far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin," (from Richard III).

sex lies and videotape

i watched sex, lies and videotape for the first time last night. what a trip! i wish i knew what the popular response to that film was back in its day.

i enjoyed it for its oh-so-quaint lens into the circa 1989 representation of people's relationship to video technology and its fetishized use in mediating the late 20th century notion of "the confession."

today's version (perhaps): http://www.dailyconfession.com. or, of course, the mtv-patented confessional booth in The Real World.


"Told to tell in detail what she had done she replied, 'I have already told you the truth.' Then she screamed and said 'Tell me what you want for I don't know what to say.' She was told to say what she had done, for she was tortured because she had not done so, and another turn of the cord was ordered. She cried 'Loosen me, Senores and tell me what I have to say: I do not know what I have done, O Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!'" -- In Lea, Spanish Inquisition.

eh. i could get more into this stuff but i have to save it for an upcoming installation piece. besides. it's saturday. and there's nothing else to do.

like returning home from your brother's funeral and finding yourself clutching and smelling his forgotten dirty sock found under the bed by the dog...

...after you thought you already cleaned up all of the leftover details...

I came across a quote from Susan Sontag in a book yesterday...It seems so strange to read another's words when the memory of their death is so fresh in your mind...

the quote (from "notes on camp"):

"To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility."

--Well, this is a fitting quote to come across given previous discussions here on the portability of quotation, its link-like form (linking another's mind to the stretch of your own), and the re-re-presentation of it here in the blog (the form i chose for the very reason Sontag states).

Anyway. What I want to get at is how sad it feels to catch a recorded glimpse of a woman's articulation of the world, knowing that it is over. No more will be produced. Like playing the record of bands dead and long gone (IMAGINE), all you have left is the reverberation of their presence...all of a sudden quotations like this are cherished for another reason than before, with a weight of finality that we know is inevitable, but still tastes like cold metal instead of warm tongue.

(I've been living another's death through the eyes and words of my sister who recently lost her most intimate friend, and I feel as though I am pulled like a piece of trash along a riverbed to contemplate death again in a more visceral way, now in this season of its meta-metaphor.)

When Sontag died, I thought of Derrida's recent death. Then of Bourdieu. Then Said. And who is next? Baudrillard? Virilio?

It seems that all the great theory matriarchs and patriarchs are completing the end of their physical season. Will the kids born thirty years from now learn to employ their quotation? Or will it be the words of us sitting here right now that will matter more? I've struggled myself to come to a semi-resolution about the library-as-graveyard dilemma. Which do I prefer? Honor the dead? Wear their skin in the words of my text, marked off by little lines at the top and to the right and left of thought? Or, burn the memories and memoirs - claim no one can comment on the present without a working set of lungs - fill in their blanks? Neither matters as both make nice beds. Both make nice coffins. (what kind of sleep doesn't lie?)

and Virilio -- I hope my quotation doesn't invoke his death too...(read Open Sky, where this quote is from):

"One day the day will come when the day will not come."

Clearing Houses for Irrelevant Theories.
Washcloths for Weightless Words.
postmodern theory always Rests In Pieces.

armed with technology/wrapped up in arms of lovers dead. gone. killed.

"Again we have to ensure that the best of the human is not lost amidst the best of technology, corresponding exactly with the current positioning of Uranus (the mind/technology) in Pisces (the heart/emotion). A difficult juxtaposition, but one that we must get in balance and harmony." (from artnet)

worth considering, even if horoscopes aren't your thing.

and one more,

"The truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'" (from Tanizaki's in praise of shadows)

The holidays always leave me feeling so...

Deflated, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

this is what you think about when you go running in cemeteries at 8:14 in the morning

Lines For Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Mark Strand

null

i want to stop all language
but you keep dishing out the words
nullify the past with
future tense

make your case

before i close mine.

back then

i bit your language
you fed my psychology
ate my biology



are we done yet?

slick exit

wet
like rain gets
loud in
that same quiet
thunder
the loud
that thunder
will get
will do
surrender
under that thunder
reverberate
berated
words
words
washed
by words washed
some
things are wet
(wet heat
is hot)
others leak
some must dry
from time to time
time to time to
time

there.
dropped.
dripped.
hung. dry.
dry.
dry.
dry.
drop.

prevent all watermarks.
lay down plastic first.

is it really so bad to not want to put a period at the end of any project?

is a work ever truly complete?

Saussure proposed that words have meaning only in their differential relation to other words; meaning is the result of a system of differences without any positive terms. Taking this further, Derrida asserted that the signified itself is also the product of differential relationships between signifiers -- meaning is produced through an endless chain of signifiers. From Derrida and other linguistic philosophers/poststructuralists, the relation between experience and language is no longer seen as the relation between the original and its vessel, mirror image, or copy.

Existence, including our individual experience, is comprised of a mosaic of "texts" ("text" for a lack of a better word; see Kristeva, Bakhtin). When we produce a text, like an artwork, its composition is a collection of our experiences, filtered by the producer's subjectivity in that temporal and spatial relation, and translated into some form. Foucault would shake his finger and say, 'not so fast...you can't say producer because there is no producer, no architect; everything has always already been said.' ----well, it's this very thinking that hip theory courses want you to get muddled up in. and i did. hence, the origins of this blog site.

And so...if all the world is a text that follows through me and i flow through it, channeling data like a T1 line packet-switching device (the network exists only if i exist), why must i adhere to the notion of a period? I don't like that sort of final punctuation. Transmission is never complete. Some might say it happens in death, but all you need to do is look at a graveyard, or the Mall, to know otherwise.

When Dr. Seuss died, he had produced and left behind a massive amount of "completed works" in various media. However, there was one drawing he never did complete; despite his prolific career, he kept ONE DOOR OPEN...And that, was a drawing of cat faces. He worked on the same large canvas drawing various sized cat faces whenever he needed a break from another project, or he just felt like it. Upon his death it was determined as his only unfinished work, despite what would appear to be a filled canvas, because he had remarked one time that he could always find another place to make another cat face. That is a beautifully succinct recognition of a fact of creation --- there is always room for another cat face. No work is ever truly complete. It continues on as its own chained link. I did a performance (Mythology Machine/Chain Value) about this idea this past spring where my grad school classmates and I literally deconstructed Barthes' Mythologies, tearing out and folding its pages, in an assembly line fashion to create a chain out of the work. Originally a comment on intellectual labor and artistic creation, I was reminded of this piece as I watched MTV at the gym and saw the new (? new to me) Eminem video, Just Lose It.

"Guess Who's Back? Back Again. Shady's Back. Tell a Friend." I LOVE that he starts this song with a self-sample from an earlier recorded song. In the video, Eminem samples a host of beloved (c'mon, admit it!) Mythological pop rock/pop culture icons, each with their own interesting taboo(tabloid/ed) sexual myth(?)ologies: Michael Jackson, Pee-Wee Herman, M.C. Hammer, Madonna, Christina Aguilera...The video and song lyrics are just full of prior texts for your pleasure-seeking intertextual deconstruction experience!

--->So, I just linked to myself here, when I said "prior text." I linked to some earlier work for a linguistics course, and now I must raise the following question/statement/hypothesis:

SELF-SAMPLING vs./and SELF-LINKING = a "new" and improved art form or a new narcissistic turn in creativity?

The narcissism I am referring to is the Kristeva-on-Freud version --- The lover is a narcissist with an object, but the narcissist is someone incapable of love because his object is metaphor, not reality. "The subject exists only inasmuch as it identifies with an ideal other who is the speaking other, the other insofar as he speaks," (Kristeva). All of the figures in Eminem's video (including himself) are metaphors for a narcissistic-based relationship to sexuality for construction of the individual's identity. This whole tangent is another lens for reading how undeniably connected our constructions are to other individuals, other nodes on the network of communication, and hence, enacting existence. Ideas are just a molecule for eliciting the act of exchange. It is the act itself that confirms identity and hence existence, and all of the other details that come with it -- "reality," "time," "fact," "event," "creative production," etc. The act, the very "Verb-ness" of it, begs a lack of closure, No Periods to Terminate its Verbness into a Past Event, a Closed Noun on a Timeline -- the Punctuation of Punctuated Equilibrium.

And--

From the self-link:

creativity::originality

The reliance of the artist on prior texts in the development of his own artistic practice/products/performances begs the following question: If every text has always already been said, is creativity a fiction? Johnstone [2002] instructs that "creativity has to be embedded in the familiar," and that texts which attempt to be the most boundary-bending still must comment on and derive from the more familiar in order to be effective.

Eminem uses humor and prior texts from pop culture, as well as his own works to question the social construction of sexuality and its mediation by communication technologies (print, tv, etc.).

Let me self-sample here, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes style...("it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.")...

From the 4/04 performance, Theory Will Eat Itself: Notes on Postmodernity from A-Z:

Intertextuality
DJs sample without marking the quotation; no brackets or punctuation define the space of the sound, making it free to travel its invisible trajectory without Authorial riot. A reference to a prior text is not made for authoritative legitimation or the (re)creation of power relations through citation. Excerpts are embedded for simply the pleasure of intertextual experience, the vibe of the listener/reader.

It’s all been dubbed before. Creativity is in the manipulation of the sampled sounds, the reworking into new rhythms, laying down of rhymes over drum and bass that dubs no bass with my head(trip) man. I write beats as I type into the keys –pound and pulsate—fingers type with a clackety-clack finger nail tap tap tap, as they scratch another written record of thoughts captured, a composition escaped from the confines of its own history, laying down memories like dropping beats. A letter is a note ripped from vinyl – your pupils move left to right as you read the rhythm, dancing with the prose like a partner in in-step with your own feet.


Again, this is content from a previous performance involving a powerpoint presentation, computer spoken text (the text re/quoted here), and consuming a chocolate cake while drinking copious amounts of water.


AND NOW I'VE REALLY LEFT MYSELF OPEN...

Thanks to Blogger's "Save as Draft" function, I'm coming back to this post, days later, evidence to the anti-period method.

OR --- "Material which has been learned at an earlier stage and 'slept on,' is much more easily recalled. Some kind of REVERBERATION around neuronal circuits must be linking new material to old material, and committing new material to the long-term memory store," (from Solitude, by Anthony Storr).

Lawrence Lessig takes the idea of ideas that has been discussed here thus far into the realm of privatization and commodification via legislation that is impacting nearly all forms of cultural production today (it ain't just the music industry), in his book The Future of Ideas. Copyright is much more a Catch-22 issue today: there is a desire for the openness of the commons , yet a economic capital form is still desired/necessitated by most producers of creative works. If an idea flows through me and into another person in conversation, for example, who can really own that idea and in turn, use it as a raw material for their own production? Are quotations necessary? Should we check to see if there was a PERIOD involved in the idea? Does that "completedness" thwart its own copyrighted "protection" from derivative works?

I am tired of this question and game right now --- I tend to take the Open Source Initiative approach in relation to this, but as competition seems to filter into all areas of production these days (it ain't just the dot-coms - it's as much the dot-orgs too), there is tremendous pressure to reach some personal decision on this -- if you don't, get your own idea body guards. YIKES!

Let's just put it this way. The element of carbon, is the element of carbon no matter what body it resides in at any given temporal and spatial moment. Molecules of water are molecules of water -- we all experience the same weather, just in different parts of its spectrum.


Bottom line (literally): Punctuation is hegemony.
Are you a believer? Watch how what you ascribe to inscribes you ---

diapause

diapause \DYE-uh-pawz\ noun

: a period of physiologically enforced dormancy between periods of activity


Prior silence to this post was the result of being stunned --- my installation at Art-O-Matic was shut-down only 8 days into the show due to the building management's exertion of territorial force (they didn't like the water on the floor, despite its initial committee approval). oh well. Adios. Just hope they get their head on straight and give me back my money - and equipment (yeah, they've been holding that hostage since they literally boarded up the room). Soon.

Now entering...A new kind of silence.

This upcoming diapause will be due to my travel to Miami for Art Basel. Fun in the Sun. Sandwiches on and of Sand.


bye.