Rejects?

Cinematic Mis-mnemonics

I would like to bring myself back in touch with my culture. But I have restricted means to do so. I thought America was the land where anything can happen. I thought  cyberspace could produce a surrogate culture for me. I guess I will have to make do with whatever I can find – even if it is reductive and offensive to me. And kind of funny at the same time.  Cinematically manufactured mythologies.

Locating the feeling visually, through cinematic and televisual detours:

Texts and Signs

Experimentation with the branching out stucture of (hyper)texts and signs is now commonplace in digital art practices (among other fields).  Artists like Jeffrey Shaw use this metaphor to forge varying cosmologies of  digital spaces.  Such cosmologies consist of visual, textual, and aural spaces, which are meant to be traversed by visitors/ users (in the case of “interactive” installations) in non-linear ways.  Art curator Soke Dinkla labels such works as “floating works of art” which create “the urban space of today not just as a moving, fragmentary and non-linear order, but also as a hypertext that can be perceived spatially and explored associatively.”

Urban spaces such as Tokyo have the capacity of turning the visitor into a traveler whose decisions structure the text/ space in new ways, depending on individual experiences, personal decisions, and associations.  If we look at Tokyo as a floating work of art, then we can say that Tokyo as an experiential space negotiates between physical experience and intellectual cognition. Any good example of brandscaping taps into its consumers cognitively, viscerally, and emotionally. Even though branding can arguably be seen as a homogenizing act of product standardization – through, paradoxically, differentiation – it can also be a customizable consumer experience simply because consumer responses are not quite uniform. A brand’s polysemy is achieved through the consumers’ varying emotional, intellectual, and visceral responses. Like the immersive installations above, each set of  eyes – and every singular mind – travels to different parts of the space.  Of course, this semblance of diversity is counterbalanced by the homogeneity of the producer-directed [or desired] response, which is always the same: spend money!

” The city of today can only be known by an activity of an ethnographical type: one cannot orientate oneself in such a city by means of the book, the address, but by walking and seeing, by familiarity and experience. Here every experience is intense and fragile. It can only be rediscovered through the memory of the trace left behind: to visit a place for the first time therefore means: beginning to wire it: since the the address is unwritten, it needs to create its own script.”  – Roland Barthes, Das Reich der Zeichen

Is Barthes’ analysis applicable to blogs and other kinds of websites? Can one orientate themselves by familiarity (of web navigation) and experience (both practical and emotionally-triggered) ?

Do blogs inevitably create precarious experiences which can only be rediscovered through digital traces? Is this the best response a blog can hope for?

A transient affective response

More triggers

When walls form  labyrinths…

I must self-confess: I have contracted an infectious compulsion. Like a paranoiac, I stumble upon seemingly random information that I automatically relate to this blog. Am I turning into Pynchon’s Oedipa? Which Oedipa, the crazy or the lucid one? Depends on your outlook.

In thinking about walls, experiences, and immersive environments, I came across something I was searching for in relation to a project on interactive cinema that I am currently working on.

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67

Cinema is a big part of my life. Sadly, not as big as it used to be because reading about cinema takes up most of my time, so I don’t really have that much time to actually watch films! Yes, this is frustrating me more and more every day.

Anyway, I was reading descriptions of the Labyrinth Project installation at Expo 67 in Montreal at the same time as I was reading Brandscapes. Perhaps the connections I have drawn are arbitrary and a simple consequence of concurrent events taking place in my mind at the same time.  In any case, I connected the cine-Labyrinth to a broader idea of cinema as architecture, cinema as an all-encompassing experience (an illusion enhanced by the immersive architecture of the project), and the Labyrinth as an experience cinematographed (rather than choreographed or orchestrated) around the installation’s traversers.

Any attempt to describe the Labyrinth experience is inevitably reductive.  Not even pictures and sketches can complement a language-oriented description. But alas, this is all I have in terms of accessing an event that cannot be – and does not wish to be -  recreated… and relived.

Floorplan of the Labyrinth building and of the vertical and horizontal screens in Chamber 1

Even though I had to imagine the experience of traversing the cine-labyrinth in an indirect manner – through descriptions, accounts, sketches and pictures – I still had an affective response to the idea of a cinematic labyrinth. All I could think of FEEL was a sense of panic creeping and building up inside me. I’m not quite sure why, but I think it has to do with the the fact that this is an experience that distorts certain expectations regarding cinema, architecture, and the concept of viewership. The labyrinth accentuates this feeling of panic… Panic when coming face to face with the unknown.  Panic intermingled with feelings of clastrophobia and disorientation… Loss of control.

But then I read the inevitable analysis of this maze-like space. Oooh, so this is supposed to be an experiment that lays the “sensory training ground for the new global citizen”… a space “where simultaneous information inputs create not confusion which numbs the senses but a new ‘oceanic consciousness.’ “

“This represents the world in all its plurality… [a] mythological cultural mosaic of humankind that was the basis for Pierre Trudeau’s new plan for Canadian federalism.”

Do these interpretations negate my visceral response? Do they undermine the affective sentiment triggered by the fragmentary views of the project that I had to piece together and also fill in the gaps with my imagination?

Analysis rationalizes and ultimately negates the possibility of a raw affective reaction

Cretan Labyrinth

The Prelude

Greek fires kill 60 but spare ancient Olympia

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2543062320070826

By Vassilis Triandafyllou

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (Reuters) – Firefighters saved the temples and stadiums of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, from forest fires which razed nearby villages and took the death toll from Greece’s three-day inferno to 60.

Dozens of blazes, from northern Greece to the tip of the Peloponnese peninsula in the south, have blackened hillsides, destroyed forests and raced through towns and villages, causing unprecedented destruction.

Hundreds of houses have been burned and thousands of people have fled the fires, seeking temporary refuge in schools, hotels and regional health centers.

On Sunday the government offered rewards of up to a million euros ($1.36 million) for help in tracking down arsonists who it suggests have played a major role in Greece’s worst forest fires in decades.

Thick black smoke billowed over the well-preserved ruins of Olympia, on the Peloponnese. The blaze crept up a hillside, engulfing surrounding pine and cypress woods.

“With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought ‘trench battles’ to rescue these sensitive and important sites,” Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters.

Fire scorched the yard of the museum at Olympia, housing famous classical sculptures such as Praxiteles’ Hermes, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters beat it back.

Some 60 firefighters and six trucks remained at the site to battle any flare-up, the fire brigade said.

Ancient Olympia, which hosted the Olympics for centuries from 776 BC, holds an Olympic flame ceremony every two years and is among the most popular tourist sites in the country.

“Here it is, the contrast: ancient Greece gave the world civilization and modern Greece gives it destruction,” a resident of ancient Olympia told Alter TV station.

Towering walls of flame have cut a swathe of destruction through the southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia near the capital and swept across other regions, prompting Greece to declare a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday.

“The destruction is of biblical proportions,” Nicholas Orphanos, a volunteer firefighter in the Peloponnese, told reporters. “There are villages we want to go to and we cannot because the roads are blocked. In 30 years, I have never seen such destruction.”

The fires have covered Athens in thick white ash that swirled round the temples on the Acropolis, and the smell of smoke permeated the city.

REWARD OFFERED

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who has called a snap parliamentary election on September 16, has suggested arsonists are behind the fires, and the government has offered a reward for information leading to their capture.

“The reward is set between 100,000 and 1 million euros for every (act of) arson, depending on whether death or serious injury occurred and the size of the damage,” the Public Order Ministry said in a statement.

Many local mayors have accused rogue land developers of setting fires to make way for new construction on virgin forest and farm land. So far, police have arrested two elderly people and two boys on suspicion of starting fires deliberately.

The first fires broke out on Friday and others erupted in scores of places around the country. The death toll rose to 60 and health officials said it could increase as many villages remain cut off.

“We will all burn tonight,” a resident of Matesi village told Mega television on Sunday. “Where will we go, we are trapped everywhere. Are we all going to burn like mice?”

The overstretched fire brigade threw reinforcements from Greece’s EU partners into action to fight blazes stretching over 160 km (100 miles) across the Peloponnese, the island of Evia and northern and central Greece.

Two French and one Italian firefighting plane dropped water on burning hillsides and 60 firefighters from Cyprus joined the fray. More help was expected from at least 11 countries.

Villagers used garden hoses and buckets in futile efforts to save their homes. Others jeered politicians, including Culture Minister George Voulgarakis who visited ancient Olympia to assess the damage.

The government has been criticized for reacting too slowly to forest fires that killed 10 people earlier this summer and the blazes are sure to become a central election campaign issue.

πῦρ, γυνή καἰ θάλασσα

Afterthoughts on reading reports on the Greek riots from all over the world (or, rather, all over cyberspace)

Does geographical distance guarantee some degree of critical distance, and therefore a desired degree of  “objectivity” (whatever that means)? Or, is geographical distance – and, consequently, cultural and political detachment – just another form of disengagement from context-specific discourses?

What happens to geo-political discourses when they migrate to cyberspace? Do they magically disappear, or do they become recolonized under the guise of globalization?

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation…”

- Liquid Fire – πῦρ θαλάσσιον/ ὑγρόν πῦρ -  Fire as weapon – fire as recombinant force (with water) – liquid fire as defying the logical laws of nature – destructive construction/ constructive destruction –

Prometheus: “In this rhythm, I am caught”

QR

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Is this what I come down to? How did I bring myself to this? Was this with me this whole time?

Obsession with Others

THE REST IS SILENCE

* !Shhh! *

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Resting on Laurels

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

Nontruths

Myth as a nontruth (but not untruth) “still protects the bygone which will have no effect, at least for those (all of us) who, being alive, seem to recognize only the active power of the present” (Blanchot).

[1] Turks fire shots at British soldiers – no injuries

[2] Cypriot police are closing in on killers of Solomou and Isaac

[3] Rauf Denktash reportedly was present at Cyprus’ latest violent incident

[4] Turkish doctors are cooperating with torturers, according to British newspaper “The Observer”

[5] Arrest warrants issued against Turks

[6] Warrants of arrest issued for the murder of Solomos Solomou

[7] State Department protests shooting against British soldiers by Turkish troops

[8] International warrants for the arrest of six suspects in the killing of Greek-Cypriot Tasos Isaac were issued by the Greek-Cypriot police

[9] Arrest warrants issued for murder of Tassos Isaac

An Obligatory Post

Blanchot Vs. Barthes: (Non)Dialectic battle, Round 1 Warmup

Bathes sees myth as a specific kind of speech. “…Myth is a system of communication, that is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form”.  For Barth, myth’s function is “to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.” (Barthes, Mythologies, 1973)

It is unfortunate (for Barthes) that even his choice of words (e.g. “literally”, “reality”, “perceptible”)  points to the inherent contradictions in his argument.

On the other hand, Blanchot directs our attention away from signs and signifiers by introducing the concept of the mythical or hyperbolic cancer. On the surface, cancer signifies symbolizes “the refusal to respond.” But more than this, “it destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message: it wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs.” According to Blanchot, this kind of cancer is “one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate… the universal programming and signifying power.” (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980)

But, the experience economy attempts to make the cancer relevant by manipulating its mythical nature. The cancer may not signify within the system, but it is made to exist through the system by cancer’s very attempt to dislocate it. The system validates the cancer, out of fear that the cancer will dislocate it … or out of denial that this cancer has already dislocated it.

>> Jump to Walls for the Match, and take this with you:

Media Reports: Arsonists torched two cars outside a Greek consulate in southwestern France yesterday, scrawling slogans in support of the youth riots gripping Athens, according to an account by the Associated Press. Police found graffiti on a wall opposite the consulate, and on a nearby garage door, reading “Support for the fires in Greece,” “Insurrection Everywhere” and “The Coming Insurrection.”