“- There is also another reversal, that of day and of night. Is there a link to be made between the day-night relationship and the night bombings of the Second World War and the idea of night as a black hole, in ‘Star Wars’ (the Strategic Defense Initiative)?
– There is much to be said here. It is certain that technological war allowed us to continue to make war at night, in other words, we’re performing theatre. Then, after that, in 1914, 1925, those same projectors were used to pick out the planes coming to bomb in order to shoot them down. So here we have a whole light-war; tracer-bullits wil be used to make night-time shooting possible, and flares to light up the troops’ night chargers (flare revolvers and rifles). And I myself saw those special effects in the Second World War. During the bombings of the city of Nantes I saw those projectors, those tracer-bullets, those rocket-parachutes tossed out of bombers to light up the bombing zone. It was a fabulous show of unheard and even tragic beauty. It was Rome burning. So it’s certain the use of new technologies extended war to the totality of time, not only as in the past wars in summer time, but also war in wintertime. In antiquity was was waged starting in march, and then stopped in September-October. The new technologies have allowed us to wage war year round. But up ntil 1914 no one made war at night, they stopped at nightfall. Now, with the new technologies, not only do they make war all the time, in all seasons, but non-stop, day and night. We have a totalising phenomenon that is also a phenomenon we experience daily with live broadcasts from the four corners of the earth, which allow us to watch a festival or ballgame. there is therefore a cancellation of the daytime.”
“For (Ernst) Jünger, there can be no war without photography. This is why the entirety of his writings on photography suggest the ways in which the German war of light and disaster illuminated the links between photographic technology and the techniques of modern warfare. While the English began equipping their bombers with photographic apparatuses, the German blitz flashed its death across the skies and landscape of Europe. Dividing night into night and day, it illumined the space of war. “What had taken place in the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre,” Paul Virilio explains, “was now happening in the skies of England.” Indeed, we could even say that the blackout that was enforced during the blitz-the event that, according to historian Philip Ziegler, “impinged most forcibly on the life of the average Londonern-transformed the entirety of London into a kind of gigantic darkroom, into a massively photographic space. Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, the Luftwaffe bombers dropped incendiaries both to trace the bombing area in London and to light up nocturnal targets. London became subject to the glare of explosives and the blinding light of the searchlights whose skyward beams traced a kind of luminous cat’s cradle in the night. To say that there could be no blitz (the word “blitz” was taken from Blitzkrieg, “lightning-war”, sd) without the production of images is to say that there could be no lightning war without the flash of the camera.”
“During the WW2 nocturnal Blackout procedures were tantamount to a policy of compulsory mass hyperacusis. Venturing outdoors at night, particularly the urban population, already hypersensitized by fear, found their hearing heightened still further by immersion in levels of darkness which were unprecedented since the introduction of street-lighting. The basic hypothesis here is that the experience of defensively listening, consciously and unconsciously, for the dull-thud of explosions, the whistle of rockets and bombs and the roar of planes is the mechanism by which such autonomic states encode, at a fundamental neurological level, as conditioned, reflexive responses to ambient low frequency sounds. These high states of arousal are necessarily those in which individuals are most receptive to sense-data. These responses are also culturally transmissible – primarily through the medium of cinema. It is worth noting that extreme sensitivity to sound (of the exact sort idealised by the composer John Cage) is not only a state of heightened esthetic awareness, but also a recognised medical condition, often associated with debilitating phonophobia and the onset of conditioned tinnitus – and during the war advertisements in Picture Post magazine suggest there was a roaring trade in sedatives, not only for people but also for household pets.”
Part three in an ongoing series of posts on musical appropriation (see also part 1 and 2), this time mostly consisting of a small selection of the numerous glitchy affairs, cut-ups, mash-ups etc. that have invaded, defined and excited various musical (sub)cultural movements since the end of the previous century (well, before the hype subsumed into the mainstream). These are some of the tracks that still catch my ear, in one way or another.
V/Vm, Lady In Red (Is Dancing With Meat) (with Chris De Burger), 2000
[audio:butcher01_01_vvm.mp3]
V/vm is one of the projects of James Kirby (aka the Caretaker, the Stranger, …). Since 1996 V/Vm has produced stuff on a bunch of labels (notably his own V/Vm Test label), often in collaboration with likeminded musicians ike Speedranch, Jansky Noise and Kid 606. Early releases were situated in the border zones of industrial, playful electronics and fierce individualism, littered with distorted digital noise and tuff beats. In the late 1990’s the V/Vm output saw a shift into the reworking (or butchering, if you will) of pop music – labeled as “bastard pop”. Songs by Robbie Williams, Spice Girls, East 17, Chris De Burgh, Elton John, Alphaville (V/vm’s version of ‘forever young’ was used in a never aired ad for Sony’s Playstation) and countless others – not to forget Aphex Twin, who got a special treatment – were reshaped and renewed. This approach culminated in 2000 with V/Vm achieving single of the week in the NME for this reworking of the Chris De Burgh hit ‘lady in red’ (on the B-side: ‘All Night Long (Butcher All Night)’ (with Loin-El Glitchie)). Though V/Vm “abused” copyright at this time initially no action was taken. Indeed V/Vm has often spoken about meeting Chris De Burgh in person at a TV Station and giving him a copy of his remixed version and surprisingly never hearing from De Burgh or his lawyers. In 2003 the lawyers caught up following the release of several versions of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s hit ‘relax’ (commemorating its 20-year anniversary). Within weeks of the release V/Vm received legal threats and in the end was forced to legally withdraw the release from sale. Apparently, this forced V/Vm into “hiding” in Belgium, where he rediscovered New Beat, the ultima thule of late-80s dance music (find the releases ‘made in Belgium’ and ‘SABAM’). In 2006 V/Vm spent the whole of the year on his most ambitious and challenging project to date, the V/Vm 365 project. In the words of the man “The idea is basically to create and upload free audio for one whole year and leave a massive big mess behind, warts and all for you to digest as you see fit.” This involved producing 603 audio tracks, 6 video tracks, with a total running time of 52 hours, 3 minutes and 57 seconds, all of which are free to download (via CC licence).
Here’s another, pretty creepy, V/Vm reworking:
Kid606, Straight Outta Compton (MC DSP Mix), 2000
[audio:vvmt11_01_kid606.mp3]
Another classic, released as a 7″ on V/Vm Test Records. I kinda lost track of Kid 606 now, but this track still brings a huge grin to my face. Before he became “the hottest property on the electronic scene stuff”, with releases on the prestigious Mille Plateaux imprint, Kid606 (born Miguel Trost De Pedro) combined his love for industrial music and hip-hop with DIY electronic explorations and an explosive punk attitude, with an irreverent sense of humor thrown in the mix (song titles like ‘Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass’ – itself a wink to Lesser’s 1999 track ‘Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass’ – say it all), into some of the most exciting indiepunkgabberidmraverblastbashings of that time. Labeled “the Sid Vicious of Techno” and once named as one of the “100 Most Dangerous Men On Earth” (at number 93 – ahead of Bill Gates and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and just behind former Cheers star Ted Danson), the kid with “a Tourette’s syndrome-like compulsion to deflate the pomposity of electronic music” has “has flouted copyright laws with more glee than anyone since Negativeland and The Bomb Squad” and “consistently sabotaged categorization of his work by remaining true to its core; his violence is against sound, against the sounds of comfort, against the sounds listeners expect.” This track sees Kid606 “drop NWA’s classic ‘Straight Outa Compton’ from the top of a multi-storey carpark and glue the bits together with numb fingers”. Also check out ‘The Action Packed Mentallist Brings You The Fucking Jams’ (2002), on which you hear him trainwrecking pieces of Eminem, the Buggles, the Bangles, A-Ha, Missy Elliot, Jay-Z, Radiohead and Kylie Minogue.
Alan Licht, The Old Victrola, 2001
[audio:Licht_The-Old-Victrola.mp3]
Well, maybe this track doesn’t belong in this list, but I like it so much it couldn’t leave it out. Alan Licht. You might know his work with Love child, Blue Humans, or Run-On, or his solo adventures on albums such as ‘Rabbi Sky’, ‘The Evan Dando of Noise?’ or ‘NY Minute’. You may want to check out his collaborations with Loren Connors, Lee Ranaldo or Aki Onda. You also might have read his critical writings, published in The Wire, Halana magazine or the book ‘Sound Art. Beyond Music, Between Categories’. Some of his writing has helped to create a resurgence of interest in minimalist music, especially thanks to his influential “Minimalist Top Ten,” a list of hard-to-find minimalist albums (see earlier post). His body of work is very much his own, influenced by his intense explorations of free jazz, pop music, minimalism and experimental cinema. This track, from the album ‘Plays Well’ begins with a reworking of Captain Beefheart’s “Well” (from ‘Trout Mask Replica’), drenched in guitar fuzz drone, and eventually dissolves into a hypnoticly looping of a Donna Summers sample (from a live version of “Dim All the Lights”), superimposed with layers of wailing guitars, gradually building the tension until the original disco song explodes in all its glory at the 16-minute mark. This part of the track was recorded live at the Transmissions Festival in July 2000, of which Bill Meyer in Signal to Noise said, “somewhere Andy Kaufman was smiling.” “It’s about recontextualizing”, said Licht. “I heard that song on the radio and immediately connected that section where she holds one note over several bars of changing harmony with similar sections in compositions by Reich and Glass. I knew I had something to work with.” Also great: ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ in which the audio levels of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album are manipulated; “Bridget O’Riley,” a mashup of Blondie and The Who’s ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘A New York Minute,’ consisting of a month’s worth of weather reports from a New York AM radio station, mixed with an addictive mix of some samples from Don Henley’s “New York Minute” (some of these pieces are available on ubu.com).
Girls on Top, I Wanna Dance With Numbers, 2001
[audio:whitney-vs-kraftwerk.mp3]
This is the single that essentially popularised the whole bootlegging/mashup craze, back in 2001. I still remember the excitement I felt when I heard this for the first time. Working under the name Girls On Top, Richard Philips aka Richard x released a limited 7″ featuring, on one side, the Whitney Houston-meets-Kraftwerk combiné ‘I Wanna Dance With Numbers’. “Whitney’s vocal floats over the proto-electro beats and looped synth pulses, creating a kind of euphoric techno-soul hybrid”. On the other, he placed his all-time favourite track, The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’, beneath TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’, creating ‘Being Scrubbed’, turning an insouciant funky strut into a “menacingly apocalyptic goth-pop mantra” (NME). “It was kind of a little personal thing at the time”, said Richard. “I just thought, I could listen to this all day. It wasn’t about getting one over on the majors, it was a cheeky irreverence. It was the excitement of the two worlds colliding.” These fresh-sounding R&B anthems took swinging London by storm. Tastemakers raved about them – this was novel, not a novelty. For a month or so, with-it DJs played the tracks to death. A few months later, Girls On Top surfaced again for the second and final time (an all-girl rock group who’d been performing as Girls On Top for a while took umbrage at Richard’s use of ‘their’ name) with another 7″. The A-side was ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’, a version of which the Sugababes would later take to the top of the charts. The flip, ‘Warm Bitch’, married The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ to Missy Elliott’s ‘She’s A Bitch’. The Face noted at the time: “If talent borrows and genius steals, Girls On Top commits the perfect crime, every time.” Shortly after this, loads of copyright-snubbing mixes started appearing on file-sharing networks, and for a short while I guess there was the slight whiff of freshness about them, although hardly any of these gems still resonate today (then again, perhaps that’s not the point). It didn’t take long before the phenomenon was recuperated by the mainstream. The likes of Madonna, Cher and David Bowie started commissioning what ‘bootlegs’. Universal Records, who were looking to relaunch the Sugababes, contacted Richard X with a view to using his Numan/Adina Howard bootleg, with the girl trio replacing the latter’s vocals. He has now become a successful record producer, producing hit singles for artists including Sugababes, Kelis, and Rachel Stevens.
Cassetteboy, Fly Me To New York, 2002
[audio:Cassette_Boy-Fly_Me_To_New_York.mp3]
In 2002 The UK based duo Cassetteboy – Steve Warlin and Michael Bollen – published their debut album, titled The Parker Tapes. They claim it took them 7 years to finish. It contains about a hundred short tracks, including a cut up of various Jamie Oliver samples, proclaiming himself to be a ‘tosser’ and radical hilarious takes on songs like David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, Stan Ridgeway’s ‘Camouflage’ and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Get Out My Life, Woman’. Other sample sources include The Fall, Doctor Who, Madonna, many television advertisements, Coronation Street, The Smiths, BBC News, and St Winifred’s School Choir, although cataloguing every sample used on the album is a near-impossible task. Casseteboy earned a lot of praise for their satires, which have become their most circulated works. One of their earlier singles, ‘Di & Dodi Do Die’, tore down Britain’s beloved Princess Diana. On this album they also mock ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, twisting his words to say that the Labour Party will start slashing eleven-year-olds with a knife. The most notorious track is ‘Fly Me to New York’, a satirical political swipe at the 9/11 bombing, which includes Frank Sinatra’s voice cut up to create the dialog. As well as producing two albums of their own, Cassetteboy has appeared on an album with DJ Rubbish entitled Inside A Whale’s Cock Vol 1, which includes humorous cover versions of songs by Alanis Morissette and Jennifer Lopez (a skiffle cover of ‘Jenny from the block’), along with a parodical take on a song by The Streets.
If you enjoy Cassetteboy, you’ll probably dig these videos as well:
DJ Lance Lockarm, S’wash Ya Wart, (release date unknown, I’d say around 2002-2003)
[audio:Lockarm_Swashyawart.mp3]
Let’s face it, most of the output of ‘bastard pop’ and ‘bootleg’ stars like 2 many DJs, McSleazy, Soundhog, Go Home Productions or Party Ben didn’t or won’t stand the test of time. Perhaps they are not meant to – their versions are, after all, just part of a neverending process of musical/cultural mutation. Always in the moment, as a promise (or gift) to an uncertain future. This guy knows that all too well. “NO TRACKS HERE ARE FOR SALE FROM ME — IN ANY FORM — EVER!”, he writes on his website. He just uploads his stuff whenever he feels like it, and doesn’t ask anything in return. The gift economy in its purest form. This is one of his most accomplished tracks – a mash-up of songs by the Beasty Boys, My Bloody Valentine and Schoolly D. Sounds far fetched, doesn’t it? Well, just listen and find out just how much they have in common.
Evan Roth, Explicit Content Only (fragment), 2005
[audio:Fuck_Tha_Police_EDIT.mp3] Evan Roth (aka fi 5e) is an artist with interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. Roth’s work with graffiti, open source technology and public space led to him forming the Graffiti Research Lab with James Powderly in 2006. He frequently releases work under the name ‘fi 5e’ and enjoys spending his free time violating laws related to copyright and vandalism. “Explicit Content Only” is an album (first released as mp3s in 2005, rereleased on Vinyl in 2008) in which everything is removed except for the curse words. Side A is the ECO version of N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, and side B is EAZY-E’s EAZY DUZ IT. All radio safe content has been removed from the original albums, leaving a condensed string of content deemed ‘explicit’ by the United States Federal Communications Commission. At the age of 10, Roth bought the Straight Outta Compton album because of his infatuation with curse words. At the age of 27, Roth created this reductive mash-up as a tribute to a piece of popular culture that has had a profound influence on his career path. Despite receiving a RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) cease and desist notice, the album can still be download for free from evan-roth.com. The intellectual property concerns associated with the project highlight comparisons between the content censorship issues surrounding rap music in the 1980’s and censorship as a side effect of excessive use of copyright law today.
Del Nileppez (Thomas Dimuzio), Yawriats Ot Nevaeh, 2006
[audio:Dimuzio_Yawriats-Ot-Nevaeh.mp3]
Composer, sounddesigner and sampling aficionado Thomas Dimuzio has produced various sound libraries which have been utilized by television programs such as the ‘X-Files’, has done mastering work for the likes of Negativland, Wobbly/People Like Us/Matmos, and GG Allin and has been collaborating with the likes of Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Matmos, Wobbly and DJ Qbert. For this piece he has taken Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, reversed it, cut it up into quarter-notes and then reassembled it in forward order to retain the melody. Dimuzio claims that the resulting file contains exactly 666 regions (for years there’s been much debate whether the song was in fact a love letter to Satan when played backwards. Check it out for yourself – along with backward versions of Imagine, Another One Bites the Dust, Hotel California and the Pokemon Rap! – here). It’s certainly not the only reworking of the classic rock track – WFMU listed 101 versions – but I find this particular one very addictive. Since this piece has been published, there have been quite a bit of variations on the procédé. You can try it for yourself with the Meapsoft software.
This track also reminded me of Jeroen Offerman‘s hilarious video ‘The Stairway at St. Paul’s‘, in which he sang the song backwards in front of the Royal Albert Hall in London, reversed the tape and added a karaoke track (see below).
(Notes for the ‘Night Vision’ program)
Excerpt from the article ‘Our Vanishing Night‘ by Verlyn Klinkenborg:
“Now most of humanity lives under intersecting domes of reflected, refracted light, of scattering rays from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded highways and factories. Nearly all of nighttime Europe is a nebula of light, as is most of the United States and all of Japan. In the south Atlantic the glow from a single fishing fleet—squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps—can be seen from space, burning brighter, in fact, than Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze that mirrors our fear of the dark and resembles the urban glow of dystopian science fiction. We’ve grown so used to this pervasive orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost. And yet above the city’s pale ceiling lies the rest of the universe, utterly undiminished by the light we waste—a bright shoal of stars and planets and galaxies, shining in seemingly infinite darkness.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.”
Paul Virilio in ‘Unknown Quantity‘:
“Because of the scale of light pollution caused by over-powerful electric lighting, two thirds of humanity are now deprived of true night. On the European continent, for instance, half of the population is no longer able to see the Milky Way, and only deserted regions of our planet are still really plunged into darkness at night. This has reached the point where it is no longer only the night sky that is threatened but indeed the night itself, the great night of interstellar space; that other unknown quantity that, nonetheless, constitutes our only window on the cosmos. The situation is such, furthermore, that the International Dark-Sky Association has just launched a surrealist petition to get the night listed on the world heritage list as a heritage of humanity!
‘The World is Deeper than the Day thinks, ‘ wrote Nietzsche, while it was still a question of sunlight. But already, here and there, and often everywhere at once, contemplation of a screen not only replaces contemplation of script, the written word, the writing of history, alone, but also contemplation of the stars. So much so that the audiovisual continuum has superseded the – substantial – continuum of astronomy.”
Image: fragment from Thomas Ruff, ‘Sterne, 11h 54m, -20°’, 1989 (part of a series based on astronomical survey photos taken from the European Southern Observatory in Chile in the context of the ESO Southern Sky Atlas project [1974-1987])
Here are some snapshots of the Impakt Festival (14 – 18 October 2009, Utrecht NL) and the Accelerated Living Program (exhibition, performances, screenings, conferences) we put together. We met some nice people, had some great experiences and, most of all perhaps, we learned a lot. Thanks to the Impakt team for making it possible, thanks to all the participants for being there, we hope to meet you again.
Images are shot by Pieter Kers. More stuff to come. Also check out www.impakt.nl for more information on the rest of the festival program.
Vadim Fishkin: A Speedy Day
Guido van der Werve: Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world
Guy Sherwin: Clock Screen
Julieta Aranda: You Had No Ninth of May!
Jonas Dahlberg: Three Rooms
Thomson & Craighead: Horizon
Mark Formanek & Datenstrudel: Standard Time
Thorsten Fleisch: Dromosphere
Opening Night 14 October 2009. In the pictures: Maria, me, Arjon, Bruce McClure (talking away), Thomson & Craighead, Guy Sherwin
Opening concert 14 October 2009. Thomas Köner, Carl Faia & Iris Garrelfs: The Futurist Manifest
Conference 15 October 2009. In the pictures: John Tomlinson, Mike Crang, Carmen Leccardi, Sybille Lammes, Charlie Gere, Ann-Sophie Lehmann
Dopes To Infinity 15 October 2009. Guy Sherwin, Core of the Coalman, Dirk de Bruyn + Joel Stern, Bruce McClure
Impakt Online Conference 16 October 2009. In the pictures: Sabine Niederer, Richard Rogers, Daan Odijk, Theo Deutinger, Constant Dullaart
Leif Inge: 9 Beet Stretch. 16 – 17 October 2009
Speed Tribes 16 October 2009. Sonido del Principe, Mount Kimbie + James Blake, Cooly G, The Bug + Flowdan, Kode9
Ecstatic Mutations 17 October 2009. Thomas Brinkmann, Arnold Dreyblatt Ensemble (with Jörg Hiller, Joachim Schutz, Robin Hayward), Oren Ambarchi + Robbie Avenaim
Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak I, II, III 17 October 2009. Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez (rehearsing)
Hanging around. Rose Lowder, Bruce McClure, Joel Stern, Miguel Escobar Varela, Maria, me
Documentation of the Impakt Festival will be posted here soon, but as a start here’s a report on the conference, written by Elena Tiis.
Sitting in the plush, red chairs at Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt in Utrecht on the 15th of October, I listened in to the lectures of the “Accelerated Living” conference dealing with the ecologies of time & speed, and media technologies’ capacity to impact contemporary time experience.
The kick off was with John Tomlinson’s (UK; Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham) lecture on the culture of speed. Taking a broadly historical approach to what speed is, Tomlinson describes it as a condition of immediacy, a most spectacular transaction between time and space, that Marx describes as the “annihilation of space with time” (Grundrisse). Speed in general is under-researched; it fades from view in considerations of modernity, except for Virilio to an extent. Marinetti in “The Futurist Manifesto” talks about omnipresent speed, about capturing in art countercultural appropriations of speed. Interestingly, Tomlinson characterises Le Corbusier as a mainstream version of speed appropriation because the Swiss talked how a “city made for speed is a city made for success”, imagining how the speedways of the Voisin plan would serve businessnessmen as they swished to and from work. This type of speed was the mechanical, physical speed that could putatively transform the whole world.
Contemporary “fast capitalism” is facilitated by ICTs. The integration of media is a key dynamic for understanding of how this type of fast speed works, how it leads to the general increase of intensity and mobility. High speed speculative activity has the capacity to induce crisis.
To characterise this condition of fast capitalism, Thomlinson introduces the concept of “immediacy”, which is instant/has no lapse and proximate/close. It is a quality of cultural experience, containing a new sense of compulsion in life – that of communicational imperative or demand. To this effect, he treats a Blackberry ad as Derrida’s pharmacon – both a poison and a cure – because it is useful for both work and leisure. It also signals the bleeding of work-related emails outside of work hours, in a Marxist sense this is exploitative because these emails come to constitute unpaid labour, but on the other hand it has the advantage of being flexible. Consumers often start facing the burden of service, for instance they are required to buy their own plain tickets, to check in, to selecting seats etc. all of which demands their time.
The second major concept that Tomlinson introduces is “legerdemain” or lightness of hand. In the first sense, it is the body-work of touchpads and keyboards that seems effortless, something like gesturing as opposed to real work. This lightness has the capacity of bringing with it associations of immediate accessibility. In the second sense, it is a world of illusion and delusion, like a type of magic that conceals and deceives; the interface is hiding the complexity of the whole.
The baseline promise of immediacy is that “stuff arrives”, and in the manner of a cargo cult consumer use attains a casualness and even thoughtlessness. Finally, there are political and environmental costs to all of this because these media do not penetrate everywhere and are not accessible by anyone. There is also a sense that there is no broader narrative for current features of speed, unlike during the machine age when a strong narrative of speed operated on the assumption that there are disjunctions between home/abroad, now/later and desire/fulfilment. Now there is no gap to close so there is narrative of closure. To conclude, Tomlinson argues for the importance of ensuring that distinctions do not collapse and that one must keep in view the sight that there are broad, cultural-political reasons for us doing what we do.
Mike Crang’s (UK; Lecturer in Cultural Geography at Durham University) more geographically inflected take on spatial and temporal reach examines how to combine the fragmentary pattern of speeds and scales on different places. One must not forget extension, or the spatial distanciation of multiple temporalities. New technical possibilities shape world spaces where “bits [are] over borders”, where patterns of flows are connecting across physical boundaries. Crang showcases various examples of mapping these new realms, e.g. NYTE who map global conversation space from the perspective of New York. (http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/)
He also emphasises the usefulness of drawing out Virilio’s dromo-chrono-politics, which is a way of collapsing distinctions that puts forward the question: what type of governance for ICTs?
GAWC’s world city index maps the propinquity of cities based on the shape of their communications and flight connections, showing that even these new forms build on old connectivities, especially those of colonial origins. One can also talk of the production of centrality, for instance when hub airports become gateways like in the case of the Helsinki – of itself it is not a big airport, but by virtue of its good Far East connectivity it can characterise itself as a major gate. Sekula also notes that we must not forget the sea as transport space: most global steamer routes haven’t changed much in fact, and these are mostly how as Tomlinson would put it “stuff arrives” as if by magic.
Crang devotes some time to the space of chronopolitics. This is to mean the way in which cities “shut down” at different times; time, in fact, is populated by different chronopolitical topographies. Crang proposes a typology of spatial and temporal fixings, which also involve social coercion. Flexible space involves trading on the real spaces of poor countries, for instance when New York time is transposed to Hyderabad where employees must use various locational masking techniques –
as well as working at inconvenient times of day – in order to service their employer.
Next, Carmen Leccardi (IT; Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca) takes a broadly philosophical approach to the restructuring of time. Her key terms are detemporalisation and acceleration society, which she compliments by a consideration of the ways in which “young people” bring into being new notions of time by engaging in anti-globalisation movements and new ways of constructing biographies. Taking her cue from Rosa, Leccardi defines acceleration society according to its three motors – economic (profit driven, neoliberal), cultural (need for experiences) and structural (rhythms of social change). Aside from this, it encompasses three levels: technological, political meaning and the role of social change, what she conceives of as the different meanings of institutions (which could constitute a point of contention because one might want to keep an analytical distance from the meaning of social change and institutional realities). Rosa’s “acceleration society” traces how technological acceleration means that time is growing in scarcity which manifests as a contradiction shaping our lives. Thus, how can we build civic space?
Leccardi spends time on the reconsideration of the idea of the future. Lübbe’s monster term of “Gegenwartsschrumpfung” – the contraction of the present – means that the present is not available for use and one must rely on the future for conceptual package. The building of identities in this interface is challenging, as it is the situation in question and not the over-all life-plan that matters in the end. Again, there might be some rigidity in Leccardi’s notion of these two; she seems to think of them in terms of their reflection in institutions and as their own separate spheres which tend not to interact.
Her guiding term “detemporalisation” means that time loses the character of being a dimension of experience, that the sense of duration is reshaped and operates in relation to the future. The unpredictability of the future is making life-plans irrelevant, therefore the “young people” of today are rather learning to act flexibly and contingently. She enlists two examples of this. First, antiglobalisation movements are resisting the violence of time/space commodification, think in terms of values and re-establish the connection between cause and effect in what is happening. The second feature are biographical constructions, which are concerned with mediating unpredictability and developing responses that neutralise fears of the future. I think that there might be more flexible ways of considering how notions of time are changing than simply from institutionalised to a non-life-plan. Be that as it may, Leccardi rounds up the first session of general introductions to the notions of speed from the perspectives of different academic disciplines.
After lunch, there is a change of moderation as well as an inexplicable change in the order of the talks. Stamatia Portanova speaks before Steve Goodman, who, due to the moderator’s confusion about the timeframes had his lecture cut tantalisingly short. This session begins to showcase talks of more specific inflection – as concerns choreography, music and visual perception.
Stamatia Portanova’s (IT; PhD in Digital Cultures at East London University) talk proposes a redefinition of the digital age as a neo-Baroque age. Her dense, dextrous presentation dealt with Bifo’s manifesto for a postfuturist age (http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848). Using futurist notions of time and movement as points of departure, she investigates more corporate conceptions of rhythm and topography. Movement is a sensation not a perception. Sensation is a vibratory wave crossing through bodies. As the body becomes a framer of spatial information in media interface, the liberation of the body is a biophilosophy that turns towards the affect, or embodied aesthetics. Intensity is understood as Deleuzian desire; an energy that is in itself and not for something. Aesthetic style with its technological present is controlling the body possible and creating a different ontology: Deleuzian desire and ICTs interfacing in the creation of energy as information. The digital is an idea, a concept before becoming reality. In this it is attuned to the Baroque in its striving for dissection, for a microscopic notion particles and the technological idea of the cut. Portanova’s contention is that we can find an openness in technology that is not only dependent on the imitation of life. Chronological and metric notions of time can allow us to imagine an infinite succession of time that is alive.
Steve Goodman’s (UK; teaches Sonic Cultures at East London University) talk was badly interrupted, so the promised exposition of the concept of speed tribes and the development of music cultures did not manifest. Even so, his brief talk was beautifully evocative of the forthcoming book “Sonic Warfare” (2009). Like Portanova, he begins by departing from Bifo’s provocation; how is it possible that futurism could become passé? He proposes a consideration sonic ecology, the competing corporate and grassroots initiatives in contemporary sonic culture. By contrasting futurism with afrofuturism, he is tracing the things that could be retained of futurism. Afrofuturism presents more complex ideas of speed than futurism’s god of speed. The sonic warfare concept is evoking the art of war in the art of noise. Afrofuturism is a colonised culture’s way of striking back through sound. As expounded by Kodwo Eshun in his “More Brilliant Than The Sun” (1997), it is a nexus of black musical expression, the city and the cybernetic in electronic music. Eshun’s concept of the future rhythm machine evokes the sensual mathematics of music as non-conscious counting. Afrofuturism is rewiring alienated experience through urban machine musics, presenting a landscape that extends into possibility space. Simon Reynolds’ description of the dystopic metropolis of warrior clans and robber corporations creating a city as a warzone and ecologies of dread in the 90s wanted to examine the intersection of underdevelopment, technology and race in the city, thus attains a different type of futurity. In contrast to Marinetti’s and Russolo’s unilinear notion of history with its white metallicist Übermensch, Eshun’s afrofuturism is polyrhythmnic, bred from cyclical discontinuity, aligning the future paradoxically. In the intersection of roots and futurism, memories are those of the future – the future scifi alien abduction actually happened in the past when black people were subjected to slavery! According to this, the sonic avant-garde of high modernism were actually afraid of rhythm. At this point, Goodman is forces to “skip about 20 pages” and concludes that in view of corporate co-option of musics, afrofuturism is not necessarily scifi but has proliferated as something that – aside from selling record – has the capability of affectively mobilise people.
Dirk de Bruyn’s (NL/AU; Senior Lecturer in Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Melbourne) lecture dealt with the “after-image as a traumatic event” by using Prensky’s distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants as a way of tracing out inherencies in the way that people tend to interact with the medium and Brewin’s notions of VAM (verbally accessible memory) which deals with the context and SAM (situationally accessible memory) which deals with perception. These always intermix; the categories are not useful so rigidly. Flusser’s notion that “we all are immigrants now” repositions the migrant experience as that of globalisation itself. This has impact on our relation to technical literacy: we remain illiterate if not engaging in criticism of technical images. The issue is about how to critique technologically mediated images on their own terms, by the realignment of senses as in the case of the perceptual apparatus adjusting and sometimes fooling the viewer.
The final session could be said to attain to a type of microspecificity, first in relation to maps in video games such as Civilisation and Charlie Gere’s talk which managed not to consider nothing related to digital media, or the 21st century for that matter. This was followed by a presentation of two artworks by two British artists operating in the ambiguous interface between visual art and online media.
Sybille Lammes (NL; Assistant Professor of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University) spoke of gameplay and digital ludic cartographies. In particular, she explored the changeable status of minimaps in gameplay with recourse to De Certeau’s and Latour’s concepts. Is there something at stake in what games do to analogue maps? De Certeau’s notion of spatial stories – of touring – contrasts with the rigidity of mapping especially after the Renaissance period. In the middle age, the two senses were fuse: a map would show a place as well as an “experience” or a perception of it. Such touring traces are performative iterations. In games, minimaps are looked at and altered by the player as a way of exploring vast spaces. Further, Latour’s “immutable mobiles” concept provides a way of describing the image as technology: it can be moved around but still depends on inscription. The player is a mediator, mutating the map by tactically interacting with space but also constantly erasing earlier versions, or inscriptions.
Charlier Gere (UK; teaches New Media Research at the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University), for the whole of his lecture on ecology and messianic time, did not address much of anything to do with new media. In stead, his concern was to trace out Ruskin’s complex relationship with environmental issues to the point of the latter’s positive theophany of nature. In his soi-disant “vicar mode”, Gere was continuously on the verge of getting utterly distracted by long quotes from Ruskin peppered by autobiographical jabs at the author’s many odditities and failings. This domain-bridging presentation dealt with an eschatological mode of experiencing nature, through Ruskin’s description of the “messianic/apocalyptic” storm cloud of the 19th century. Via references to Derrida’s spectrality, or the reproducible virtuality of technology, to Agamben’s political ecology of messianic time in reference to Pauline notions of it, he ends up with images of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (the flash of the bomb took “photos”) to Tsernobyl’s radioactive fallout, arguing that invisible radiation is the storm cloud of the 20th century; its messianic narrative. At the end of this complex, flighty and quoty exposition I was left wondering where it is that we are then at the beginning of the 21st century – there are still about 90 years to think up/bring about the apocalyptic storm cloud of digital media and environmental depletion.
To conclude the day, artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (UK) showcased two pieces of their work which deal with data by attempting to represent its two facets: the procuring information and the contrast between live and dead data. The exploration of the materiality of their material is at the crux of their endeavours.
* Beacon takes a live stream from search engines, functioning as a “useless clock”, portrait and a landscape whilst also managing to reveal a particular type of intimacy in people dealing with a search engine.
* A Short Film About War (part of Desktop Documentaries) is a collation of Flickr images and log texts accompanied by blog pieces spoken out loud. The film scrutinises the browsing experience and mediatic war through the net (web 2.0), especially by the use of Collective Commons images. The act of editorial becomes a sort of surrogate browsing experience for this collation of multiple strands of images and stories of war.
