Tag: full text
Face me , said the Bouquet Scholar to her listener. When he did, she kissed his mouth; lips turned into rosebuds. The two then spoke in unison. Let my words be the bloom of revolution. Not the round and round of circles that go nowhere, that repeat the same old stories under the veil of overthrow. Let this be the revolution whose axis is the heart.
—Joanna Freuh, Erotic Faculties
My face grows flowers of pink and red. My mouth vomits flowers and sucks them in. I am the fucking fuschia arousing rose at the center of your heart. There no mind misconstrues pink as a maudlin color or mistakes rosiness for foolish optimism. A rose is not embarrassed by its color or its beauty.
The rose is rowdy. Flowering voices know Fuck Theory, the pink that was the rose of China Sharon Jericho. This pink is love. In the pink first meant in love, the highest state of health.
—Joanna Freuh, Erotic Faculties
(…)We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean, we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us, as well, in our distance. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion is not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar that would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (where it to praise him) and which, far from preventing all communication, relates us to one another in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.(…)
Jacques Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, p. 386-387
This shift in position is consistent with Michel Serres’s observation that, in human relations the positions of sender/receiver are always in flux. In 1948, Claude Shannon, a research engineer with Ma Bell, rationalized communications by offering a model that stubbornly remains dominant in information theory and beyond. Communication is an immutable message in the form of information initiated by a source, moved through a channel with all its susceptibilities and vagaries, and is finally received at its destination. This is the world of signals, noise, probability error, coding and decoding, and channel capacity, of clear transmission functions within tolerances.16 But Serres’s analyses of communication question the stability of this system. He prioritizes the concept of noise over message, noting that in French a secondary meaning of the word for “parasite” is “static or interference.” Rather than the unwanted remainder, noise is the motive force that moves subjects from parasite to host.17 There is no message without resistance.
In a certain way, identity, then, is a noise…that interferes with the messages that we transmit and receive. It’s hardly audible to others, but we hear it loud and clear. Yet it’s not the kind of noise that bothers us; on the contrary; it gives us a sense of reality, a measure of empowerment: it adds “room-tone” to the otherwise hyper-real world around us. Some may enjoy listening to it more than others; some may tune in to it more than the others would care to. And some play it so loudly just for the fun of it or in order to make the others listen; but the others usually do not and would not listen.18
Dystopia is a noisy non-place.
—Being Heard: Listening In—Sound & Our Dystopian Present by Matt Malsky
Notes on Glitch
29. Glitch art does not “dirty up” a text, but instead undermines its basic structure. Glitch damage is integral, even when its effects manifest at the surface.
30. Code is built in layers, each with a metaphor constructed by the programmers building it, to enact and describe its behavior. The tech blogger Joel Spolsky has described these abstractions as “leaky.”10 They are perched on hidden metaphors beneath—those used by the programmers who created the libraries, other software components, the operating system, etc. Each metaphor tries to be completely descriptive of the code’s behavior but the lower levels, with their foreign and seemingly primitive logic, cannot be contained—they leak. The details that are obscured at the lower levels—such as using a two-digit number to store a year which is displayed in four digits—can potentially play havoc with higher level systems, as many feared would happen with the so-called Y2K bug. These hidden layers spill logic upward, sometimes slowly, but often in sudden bursts: a glitch.
Notes on Glitch by Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin
9. Glitch art is process art: the artist’s hand intervening in digital data leaves its mark in the visual essence of the image. The artist’s process is not exacting, but an invitation of chaos: one triggers a glitch; one does not create a glitch. The limited amount of control the artist maintains is evident in the resulting image.
10. Glitch practice is surely as much a drive-based oscillation as it is a desire-based quest. Deliberate glitches viewed on screen and on the walls of galleries do not necessarily represent “the goal.” Individual works of glitch art may just as well be residues of “the way,” i.e. a happenstance by-product of the addictively game-like occultations that typify glitch practice: change, save, view and undo; change, save, view and undo. In such an arrangement, the exhibited image, sound, or video is strictly secondary to the process: a kind of notational proof that the technique in fact worked.
11. For glitch practitioners, the distinction between accidental and purposeful is not irrelevant, but it is also not the most crucial distinction.
Little Bristling Soul 