Lichtitious
Posted by ben on 10 Nov 2007 at 07:35 pm | Tagged as: announcements, books, interviews
My interview with Alan Licht is now available in the newest issue of NeoAztlan. Also in this issue: Kate Green interviews Angela Bulloch and Steve Peralta interviews Ioana Nemes. Licht’s on sound art came out this week as well; look for my review in the upcoming issue of Artlies.
“Once I asked John about how he planned to finance and distribute his movies. He looked at me in disbelief and said, ‘If you’re worrying about how to finance and distribute your movies than you shouldn’t bother making movies.’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘You make movies because you need to make movies. Everything else is unimportant. If you wait to get the money to make a movie then you shouldn’t make the movie. If you need distribution in place before you have the courage to make a movie then it’s not a movie worth making. There are many other ways to make money than making movies. If you need to make money, please find some other way to do it. You make movies to lose your money. That is the purpose of making a movie—to put your life into something—not get something out of it.’”
“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse”
“In inhuman conditions he has behaved humanely. And you act as if none of this concerns you, and consider your guests — it seems that is what you call us — something external, a hindrance. But it’s a part of you. It’s your conscience.”
CLT
“Lacan, Jacques, 79, 91-92; mistakes his penis for a square root, 88-9″
I look forward to the day when Francis Wheen will use his considerable inteligence and talents towards saying something instead of just being, you know, clever.
honey, i got rhythms i haven’t even used yet.
dennis kucinich, in a ufo, with a blunt instrument.
sometmes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
Almost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed “man” as a figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the (then) fashionable topic of the “death of man.” Although Houellebecq stages this disappearance in much more naive literal terms, as the replacement of humanity with a new post-human species, there is a common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual difference. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures liberated from Sex, and one is tempted to claim that Houellebecq’s post-human society of clones is the realization of the Foucauldian dream of the Selves who practice the “use of pleasures.” While this solution is the fantasy at its purest, the deadlock to which it reacts is a real one: in our postmodern “disenchanted” permissive world, the unconstrained sexuality is reduced to an apathetic participation in collective orgies depicted in Les particules – the constitutive impasse of the sexual relationship (Jacques Lacan’s il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel) seems to reach here its devastating apex.
its devastating apex.
However, an opposite reading also imposes itself: the human being IS in its very essence a “passage,” the finite opens into an abyss.
I look forward to the day when Zizek will use his considerable inteligence and talents towards saying something instead of just being, you know, clever.
in our Jeans
hungry?
you’re going to reap just what you sow.
To whoever it is that likes to spam Emvergeoning:
I’m sure you’ll indulge me since those of us who come here every so often have to indulge you on *every single post* that Ben or Michelle make here. You are either a) new to the Internet, in which case you might have an excuse, or b) someone who has a sweet amount of time on his hands in which case I have a yard that needs mowing.
In either case, however, you’re still an asshole.
You see, there are other people who have an appreciation for what Ben and Michelle and others are doing here and, aside from your spam being a pretty effective deterrent in encouraging other people to comment on the posts here, it’s also extremely disrespectful.
This isn’t your personal playground on the Web, dude. If you want to post your nonsense, go for it, but how about saving us all some grief with a quota on your bullshit? Maybe one or two YouTube links to dogs that read Hegel or lumps of shit that look like the Virgen de Guadalupe?
Give it a rest, friend.
dear steve peralta:
while i respect your point of view, there are a number of factors which you haven’t taken into account:
a) spam is specifically commercially-oriented and unwelcome posting.
b) ben et al have have graciously allowed myself, tlc and even you to use this as an open forum.
c) this whole thing began as a project of tlc’s – i won’t reveal his identity here, that is up to him, although there are clues to be found – a sort of meta-hyper performance piece which may or may not be documented outside emvergeoning, and has become a sort of sideways dialogue parallel to the official emvergeoning content in which anyone can participate. you already have. perhaps you are too bound in your view of what constitutes art to appreciate it, but fortunately the same is not true of the emvergeoning crew.
d) this whole thing has the specific approval of at least two of the emvergeoning triumvirate, and in fact as an indirect result i have been invited to be an occasional guest writer.
e) nothing at all has indicated disrespect of the site or the writers, quite the opposite is true.
f) calling someone (or multiple people, in this case) an asshole on a forum is called flaming and is considered antisocial internet behaviour.
g) you, and anyone else, can simply read the content and ignore the commentary.
while i do sometimes feel concern that our comment-play may keep others from participating in the comment portion of the festivities, ben has assured me that he doesn’t see it as a problem. very few people commented before tlc’s project began, and in fact site traffic has only gone up – coincidental, probably, but proof-positive that people aren’t being driven away.
i have a slightly used sense of humor i can sell you dirt cheap, if you’re interested.
with love,
your internet pal,
aaron
ps: make me an offer and i will consider mowing your lawn. i charge extra for mowing around lumps of shit that look like the virgen.
Play is the exultation of the possible.
I’ll respond to each of your points individually:
a) Spam is simply unwelcome posting and lots of it. It doesn’t have to be commercial.
b and d) No sense in taking Ben’s invitation to be an ocassional guest writer, is there? Your context is pretty clearly defined at Emvergeoning or do you actually have something interesting to contribute apart from the spam? Why not start your own blog and post your nonsense if there is such a demand for it?
c) I’m not bound by any specific definition for art. Call what you do here art if you want and I’ll even call it art too. Doesn’t mean your “meta-hyper performance” piece isn’t annoying.
e) I know that one Emvergeoning contributor doesn’t appreciate the spam and would rather that it stop. How’s that for respect?
f) Antisocial Internet behavior is engaging in a long inside joke at the expense of other visitors to this site and then insulting the intelligence of said visitors by calling it a “meta-hyper performance piece.”
g) Why should we have to ignore the commentary? Do you own the commentary functionality at Emvergeoning? Are you planting your meta-hyper flag onto the commentary? If so, you should inform Ben.
I don’t buy dirt cheap senses of humor. I only buy the good stuff. Know anyone?
And if you can’t get your hands dirty and pick up the occasional piece of shit like you’re supposed to, then you shouldn’t be offering to mow people’s lawns. Hard workers only, Internet pal.
I view the comment threads as a kind of poetry, I know others view them as a kind of novela, and still others as a kind of cinema. And there’s the viewpoint that it’s a kind of spam. To each his own, but it is an open forum.
I will say that the reason I don’t view these comments as spam is that I see a genuine effort to try to communicate ideas.
For instance, “Movies is Magic” is the title of a song by Van Dyke Parks, which was incorporated into the “Reluctant Swimmer / Virtual Surfer” album I discussed briefly with Alan Licht in the NeoAztlan interview. The first post in the thread references this and the idea that cinema is perhaps something that resists reality rather than participating in it or imitating it. “Real Life is Tragic” is the next line in the song, and this post references Don Quixote, who resisted the historicization of reality, and about whom Terry Gilliam has tried to make a movie (but was unable to finish due to funding issues). The quote from Don Quixote is also referenced in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, just before the lines quoted by “Guest”, which deals with the extent to which we can ever view an “other” as external. Next we come to the Central Limit Theorem, a basic underlying principle of probability theory. This deals with the extent to which we can plot the distribution of random but limited variables given a reasonably large sample size. And so we come up against the question of free will as a statistical model. Etc. Of course the references are loose, and the interpretation above is just an example of how one might read the text, which is why I consider it poetry.
Now I see this as a way to expand the possibilities in communication, rather than to hijack comment threads, although I think there is always a kind of self-indulgence in poetry, because there is always an attempt to reshape the way we use language. Of course, we need only look to Don Quixote to see the pitfalls in this approach — the solution becomes the trap from one instant to the next.
Now back to our regularly scheduled novela.
thank you, ben.
and fuck you, steve.
’nuff said.
The driving force behind BLIND DATE was that I was horrified at having failed to give the woman I loved the proof of how I felt for her.
Summary: A classic problem in signal processing is that of analysing empirical data in order to extract information contained within that data. The primary goal of this article is to employ the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) techniques for approximating, to a prescribed accuracy, the response of a shift-invariant recursive linear operator to a finite-length excitation. In this development, the required properties of the Fourier transform (FT) are first reviewed with particular attention directed toward the stable implementation of shift-invariant recursive linear operators. This is found to entail the decomposition of such operators into their causal and anticausal component operators. Subsequently, relevant issues related to the approximation of the FT by the DFT are examined. This includes the important properties of the non-uniqueness of mapping between a sequence and a given set of DFT coefficients. In the unit-impulse response approximation, DFT is shown to provide a useful means for approximating the unit-impulse response of a linear recursive operator. This includes making a partial fraction expansion of the operator’s frequency-response. The error incurred in using the DFT for effecting the unit-impulse response approximation is then treated. This error analysis involves the introduction of one-sided exponential sequences and their truncated mappings that arise in a natural fashion when employing the DFT. These concepts form the central theme of the article.
Sirs,
I agree with Steve. Hungry why don’t you start your own blog that allows you to communicate with an excited populous yearning for your youtube enhanced world view? Or even become a regular member of the triumvirate who post’s on the main page? The incessant late night linking and pasting of media you find interesting or esoterically relevant doesn’t seem to enhance the dialog that Ben, Michelle, and Justin are trying to create through specific and well thought out commentary. Not angry at you just a little annoyed and turned off to emvergeoning comment boards.
eltb
eltb and anyone else who is interested -
thanks you for your reasoned and reasonable contribution to the dialogue. however, let me just clear up one misconception that you and mr. peralta (whose words i have many exceptions and responses to, but decline to turn this into a flame war) seem to share: i am not responsible for beginning this comment-board hyper-poetry excercise, and although i have been a frequent contributor, have by no means been resposible for the bulk of it. of course, this is difficult to ascertain as indentity-play quickly became a feature of the fun. aditionally, tlc and i are by no means the only players. i have it on good authority that at least one of the ‘triumvirate,’ as i seem to have inadvertently dubbed them, has been dipping his toes in the swirling waters of non-linear communication. so you see, you appear from my perspective to be defending the noble emvergeonites against themselves. we have met the enemy, and he is us. one small note to mr. peralta, self-appointed defender of the fairer sex: you might note that the invitation to guest came from not just ben, but all three of our beloved emvergeons. i mention that not to toot my own horn, but merely to reveal to you the notion that you may be commenting (see your respect comeback) on relationships you know nothing about. and in regards to my contributing, which you both mentioned: i was honored to be invited, and am slowly working on a few things which may hopefully meet the high emvergeoning standard at some point in the near future.
let me take a moment to make clear that i speak only for myself and have not discussed any of this with tlc or ben since this little “controversy” broke out. ben, i hereby apologize publically if i put you in an awkward position in any way.
now then, i have been thinking it over from other perspectives, and in the interest of fairness to the apparent wishes of at least a portion of the community, i promise to limit my own contributions to this ‘long inside joke’ to a more reasonable number. forgive me for allowing the enthusiasm inherent to any passionate conversation, which is what i consider this to have been (an ongoing exchange of ideas through hyperlinked textual and visual references,) to overcome my normal instinct to limit my big mouth/typing hands. i have no wish to dominate the conversation or shout others down, and i shall try to do better in future. in the same spirit, i urge more readers to participate in the dialogue in any way you wish, because before tlc, these comment boards were quite often hella boring.
xo,
aaron
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