Category Archives: Art

Causality and “one second per second”

How fast does time unfold?  Silly question.  It unfolds at one second per second.  The tautology makes it clear that time, itself, does not have a rate.  Rather, it is a coordinate system that allows us to label, order, and sequence events.  This way of viewing time is called the B-series, and can be contrasted with the experience of time, the A-series, which is perpetually of a present moment, separating an established past from an indefinite future.  These are radically different ways of conceptualizing time.

Continue reading Causality and “one second per second”

Film Editing And Naive Realism

Current film editing techniques are more than likely partly responsible for the silly naive realism that seems to underpin so much of our thinking about ourselves. It used be, in early film, and hence also in experimental film, that the camera represented a single point of view, and that was important. But with modern editing, view changes. The distributed logic of film editing does violence to the notion of a single point of view. I bet that’s a modern change brought about by film. Perhaps changing again right now though, with the proliferation of cameras that do stand in rough correspondence to single points of view. The Tsunami, for example.

The lunatics are in the house

Most psychotics are harmless.  Lucky people get to be psychotic without harm.  Musicians do. Music is psychosis without the pain.  Best really listened to alone. But there is a serious point to this.  If there is continuity between the suffering psychotic and the happy psychotic, and both rest on an altered equilibrium between the endogenous dynamic and the exogenous one, then we could learn more by studying the felicitous ones.  Are there mirrors there when they are enjoying themselves?  Do advertisements inhibit enjoyment? What role do the various visible evidences of other similarly constituted dynamics give? It is a huge imaginative step to try to imagine a P-world that is not subjected to the influence of endogenous and exogenous dynamics.  It can’t really be done.  But recognizing this boundary does not rob the individual of autonomy.  Because there is no I in a P-world.  There, there is a boundary that marks the subject-object divide.  It has to do with nervous systems.  It is the mediation between perception and action.   Perhaps here is a way to reconcile personal and public.  The altered equilibrium referred to above is morally neutral. By studying the interface in the happy and the sad lunatics, we will learn more.  The word lunatic is about to get a new definition.  p.s. I now feel silly for thinking badly of people who listen to music in the background while they work.  There is no background.  No foreground either.  Experience is a shape shifter.  This was written along with some excellent Russian modern classical tones.

Addendum, over a year later, I stumble upon this in Charles McCreery’s work:

picture-10.png

Found here.

Bring on armageddon!

The Church of the Stone Pharisee demands belief in the rationality of the lunatic.  The ‘delusions’ are none such, but result from a specific relationship between the P-world of an individual and those around him.  They often are being controlled by the ideas.  In hearing voices, they are merely being aware of some of the stuff going on in nervous systems (that annoying repetitive tune: do you own it?).  No wonder its confusing, and the stories come out peculiarly.  Therein lies the lack of the self: the P-world has lost some of its autonomy.

In this regard, I am highly amused to see that that gloriously batty compser, Alexander Scriabin, described Stravinsky as “Apostle” to the “Latin reactionaries”.  I have no ideas who these Latin reactionaries are, and I suspect that they do not constitute a natural kind. Scriabin was entirely incoherent, and that is interesting, because he was standing at an interesting point. He was immersed in a sea of cultural currents, and he dreamed of multimedia performance (Scriabin was a VJ long before there were VJs).  He was probably also a synaesthetic. He had tics as a child and was known for not sitting still (Children, pay heed!).

Before he died, runour has it that he was working on a big light and music job, to be played in the Himalays.  Once played, in the right setting, it would bring on Armageddon.  Anybody fancying having a go?  I’d love to try it out.

The uncanny valley

Here’s an anti-resonance phenomenon for you: the uncanny valley. The creepiness is an error signal for a process that tries to see itself. That’s why the mirror system is so bloody important.  WHen it works, its a resonance phenomenon.  You can practically see it in the fMRI images, pulsing, as it strives to ‘recognize’ itself.  That recognition is a reverberation.

What Bataille was after….

Georges Bataille has always revolted me.  Much more than the Marquis de Sade. But then it struck me that it is a good idea to explore the following thought:  Given that any rationale anybody can come up with for morality is so weak, what if we were to adopt a frame of mind that knew nothing whatever of good or evil.  That looked dispassionately at what we know.  That would indeed be a useful point of view. Neither good nor bad.  Not of that.  Dispassionate.

Chasing memes

Google Search Trends is a fabulous instrument for observing ‘physics-like’ regularities in our communal intercourse. I saw the tool, and thought of phenomena defined over P-worlds, and immediately inferred that there would be search terms, which alone or in conjunction with others, would give away physics-like regularity defined over P-worlds. (This is what Kelso is after too). So I started trying to think of pairs of search terms that would reveal oscillation. Continue reading Chasing memes

What it is…..

…learning not to force, to pass control to coordination (or surrender), to put up with a shift from a distinct image to a play of light.  I can well believe that nausea is a frequent partner on the road to enlightenment.  Does ‘enlightment’ mean anything at all? If it does, it probably means something reasonably better expressed in the language of biology, rather than, say, psychology.