“Just as the exponential prolifreation of mechanical and electric inventions is predicated on the development of certain few fundemental technologies, the elaboration of a toolkit of parts which might then be recombined ad infinitum, so is the mass importing and uploading of data onto the intertubes the preliminary step towards future recombinative capacities we can only begin to imagine at this point.” 

Jonathan’s post on sampling and the new forms of expression it enables immediately brought to mind another music video – Chairlift’s ‘evident utensil’. In this case though, the act of sampling is more intrinsic and self-referential, denoted by a glitched and pixelated lag-time between established frames; instead of being constructed from external aggregations, the work, in a sense, generates elements of itself through sampling its past incarnations.

Vasco Mourão’s intricate line drawings suspend architecture in the dream-static of the blank page. Lines accrete in labyrinthine structures of rooftop landscapes and cathedral towers – an infrastructure tangled in infinite regress:

Further to issues raised today about physical place and the validity of its media/fictional cartographies, I thought it would be interesting to explore a city, say New York, through its video game landscapes. We’ll play pac-man in alphabet city, fight off aliens in the Chrysler Building and drag-race down the Bowery – wandering through the figment Manhattan in its all its endless and imagined mutations.

Just caught word that the Vancouver Public Space Network’s annual planning meeting/open house is happening tonight at 7:30, at the 411 centre. Preceding the open house is a presentation by Scott Hein, the city’s Senior Urban Designer, on the idea and practice of “Implementing Urbanism”

Cronenberg’s Crash is on at my place tomorrow, around 1pm. Also, don’t forget to read Crary’s (7 page) paper for Monday’s seminar.

“On one level, the world of public events, Cape Kennedy and Viet Nam mimetized on billboards. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by my opposed hands, the geometry of my own postures, the time-values contained in this room, the motion-space of highways, staircases, the angle between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born. With these co-ordinates some kind of valid reality begins to clarify itself” – J.G. Ballard

I brought this passage up today as indicative of a prominent and overarching theme in The Atrocity Exhibition, and although it had no particular questions attached, It might be useful in grounding monday’s discussion on the book’s negotiation of interiority / exteriority, as well as issues of hyperreality raised today.

(re-)read Baudrillard’s “Science Fiction and Simulacra” for Monday – in addition to its ties with The Atrocity Exhibition, we’ll be revisiting ideas of simulation and hyperreality later on; Baudrillard’s article will be working as our common point of reference.

Map-territory relations: the formal title for the concepts introduced at the beginning of class, encompassing both Baudrillard’s and Borges’ notions of what might be called the irreducibility of space: read “On Exactitude in Science”
and to see the same ideas drawn another way, take a minute to navigate a map is not the map

also, CNN’s “the Moment” – in terms of layered images, media, consolodated by a single event

I thought I’d post the question on trauma/temporality as well, derived from a class I had earlier on terrorism and writing:

In a critical analysis entitled “Trauma’s Time”, Aimee L. Pozorski (drawing on the fiction of R. Clifton Spargo) describes the time of trauma as “a time that is paradoxically not the moment itself, but ‘what comes after,’ what will always come after, the ‘afterwardsness or belatedness of trauma itself.”

With this relationship of time/trauma in mind, what elements of futurity (post-trauma?) resonate within Ballard’s text – where is it situating itself temporally in relation to the trauma of its historical moment, and to what effect?  

And on a less related note, I’ll be in Irving K on the third floor Thursday between 1 and 4pm, working on a proposal for the film project – if you’re around and are interested, drop by!

We’ll be discussing Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition on Monday, along with Gasiorek’s introduction to the book – “Deviant Logics” (read pp.58-80). Also, take a look through the Ballardian sometime this weekend, and develop some questions / thoughts to bring to the discussion. 

And as a way to bring some kind of closure to (or more more likely further agitate) our jumbled look at The City and the Stars, I’ll be showing Logan’s Run at my place this Sunday, around 4pm – feel free to drop in.

I’m sitting on the sixth floor balcony of the downtown law courts, looking out on the waists and necks of Howe street high-rises. A woman’s disembodied voice calls out for court room reconvenings, dissolving inside the empty glass atrium, with the occasional clatter of footsteps and the quiet blur of conversation drifting up from the floors below.

–

Yesterday’s seminar was loopier than usual – a morass of starting points, links and ideas that we’ll hopefully be able to follow through and make sense of as we move on to Ballard. For next class I’ll try to set a more coherent path for the discussion.  Below are some divergent, digressive things somehow related to yesterday’s seminar – worth looking through:

23 skidoo – short film we opened with, on the post-apocalyptic metropolis; Montreal after the neutron-bomb. Vacant infrastructure, the ‘city without us’, encrypted with memory of its inhabitants.

the lotus eaters – re: vancouver, diaspar

Russia’s Russia in the Black sea…with its very own Black sea.

Dubai’s world

( Synechdoche New York is playing next week at the Norm. Also, a lucky Kaufman interview bylife without buildings)

wandering sickness and the gas of peace – visual essay by derek horton. thinking specifically about the title of the piece. The magazine itself is worth looking through as well: a choice essay

Questions of memory and materiality in the City of Diaspar – how much of it is fabricated, re-membered from its own archives?

Is Clark imagining a proto-digital environment? How do elements of spirituality and mysticism relate with the realities of mediated (online) communication?

Michael Filimowicz’s guest lecture last week presented a sprawling and evocative introduction to the employment of sound in science fiction film. Citing strong ties between the genre of SF and the musical avant-garde, Michael took us through a historical trajectory of weird sound. What follows is the gist:

We started by briefly looking at a layout of sound, as it functions between the poles of noise/pitch and contrast/similarity.

Arnold Schoenburg, along with other early 20th century composers, noted a gradual depature in musical composition from its previously stable and harmonic quality towards more dissonant and chaotic elements. He called this shift the emancipation of dissonance. We watch a few star-trek clips which illustrated the direct use of dissonant tones to connote forces of malevolence and the alien – with the protagonists portrayed in an evidently harmonic contrast.  

Later musicians came to profit from Schoenburg’s narrative, which worked to justify atonality, bringing this departure from convention to their own productions. 

Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Noise Manifesto (1913) extends this idea of dissonance into what he deems as the environment of its inception: the industrialized urban landscape produced concurrent soundscapes of mechanized hum and pandemonium, by which many musicians were influenced.

George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique displays an embodiment of the technological within the musical, incorporating an on-stage choreography of instruments and devices (electric bells, pianos, airplane propellers etc.) – a visual / sonic expression of the machine aesthetic. 

Further along this path of mechanical sound, albeit in a more abstracted sense, is musique concrète – a form of primarily electronic music (began in the 1940’s), and consequently entwined in a narrative of technological progression. It is produced acousmatically – where the originating cause of the sound is unseen. Here, generating music becomes more an abstraction than a definite, observable act, implicating a sense of uncertainty within its performance.  The work of John Cage, continued this notion of uncertainty, where his “chance” pieces and various experimental compositions pushed music towards further indeterminacy.

From its conception, electronic music became a dominant element in achieving alien effects and the characteristic sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity in SF film. Heavily influenced by the ideas above, pioneers in sound design such as Louis and Bebe Barron forged “electronic tonalities” derived from passing currents through custom circuitries, recording the effects:

The process itself exposed the ephemerality of the medium, as the circuits would often be destroyed through overheating. More to the point though, these sounds marked an aesthetic of sound distinct to (classic) SF, and one arrived at through the employment of its contemporary technology alongside a sensibility based in the avant-garde.

Hi everyone – just a reminder: Michael Filimowicz will be guest-lecturing Wednesday’s seminar. Currently teaching at the SFU SIAT, he is developing a public-art project for the city of Surrey, and has exhibited a range of creative film and photographic projects, in addition to publishing short stories in science-fiction. He specializes in sound design.