like potted plants in an office lobby

7/21/2019 Like Potted Plants in an Office Lobby

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LIKE POTTED PLANTS

IN AN OFFICE

L

O

B

B

Y

K

A

R

L

O

S

GIL


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text #11

Mutatis Mutantis

by Martin Stevens

and Sami Merilaita

text #14

Moquette

by Florence Pike

text #13

Ghost in

the Machine

by Karlos Gil

text #9

The Semiotic

Hinge

by Alfred North Whitehead

text #12

Aestethics of

Interruption

by Janne Vanhanen

text #17

Mysticism

by Bertrand Russell

text #10

Filling a Hole

with Plaster(and removing the surplus

with a spatula)

by Nora Baron

text #2

Towards an

ergonomic telepathy.

by Carlos Fdez-Pello

text #3

Summa

Technologiae

by Stanislaw Lem

text #1

Like knotted

glands in an

ofsh goby

by Beln Zahera

text #4

Holograms

Roses

by William Gibson

text #5

Overlapping

Figures (ii)

by Karlos Gil

text #7

The Nose

Issue

by Edmund Husserl

text #6

Plastic Fragments

by Jean-Franois

Lyotard

text #8

Holly

Spam

by Karlos Gil

text #15

Objections to

Representations

by John Sutton

text #18

Tractatus

Herbis

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

text #16

Image Scanner

by Benjamin Cheverton

and Jules Duboscq

i

n

d

e

x

t

e

x

t

s


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stands for like potted plants in an ofce

lobby at the level of speech and writing, in

a somewhat similar form of utterance and

appearance that even disregarding meaning

nonetheless produces it.

The experience of words echoing other words

is reminiscent of Benjamin Chevertons inven-

tion - a reducing size machine - which was

based on the mechanism of the pantograph: a

structure that resembled an accordion, formed

by a linkage of parallelograms with pointers

placed in both arms, of which one would

follow the model whilst the other would draw

or sculpt a copy at a different scale.

By proportionally reproducing the location

and distance between each point that informs

a gure, what is repeated is not only the gure

but its contour, the line that speaks of every

position at once and reveals the transit from

one form to the next. Thus, beyond the all

too famous discussions on the original and

the copy lies the question of this movement

that makes replication possible. The phrase

embedded in multiple shifts. The path traced

by repetition.

[0]

A replica does not refer

to a model at rst but re-enacts the motion by which it

is produced. The experience of objects echoing other

objects expects and at the same time recalls this move-

ment, which unites them in a sort of fraternity while

keeping them apart.

Like knotted

glands in an

ofsh goby

precedes Like knotted glands in an ofsh

goby, where like remains identical in

both as to indicate or exactly reproduce the

movement that connects distant gures, be

it under the logic of resemblance or that ofmeaning. The like entails remembrance

and the retrieval of memories. Every time

we reproduce this journey by saying like,

we actualize this movement and anticipate

the next.

Even if the word replica seems

to emphasize the apparition of

an exact copy the term itself

contains a specic movement by

which we are reminded of the

Latin word replicare meaning

to repeat, to fold again and

later to reply.

[1]

So by uttering like knotted

glands in an ofsh goby, I come back to

like potted plants in an ofce lobby to

which I had replied like knotted glands

in an ofsh goby while overhearing like

dotted pants in a selsh hobby.

Like potted

plants in an

ofce lobby


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sets in motion a play on words, like

potted plants in an ofce lobby. Each case

containing thirty one letters and seven words

that look (a)like and sound (a)like but

cannot merge. It is this reverberation, thisdistance: the evidence that one cannot speak

in vacuum.

Echoing suggests once

again the movement

created by enunciation,

the reection of sound

waves, from one surface

to another until they

reach the listener.

[2]

For whenever

one replicates, someone else

repeats and responds.

Like knotted

glands in an

ofsh goby


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We subdivide the self and treat the experience as a temporary hardrive partition so that even

the internal propioception is materialized, that is, formalised or verbalized, and taken care of

lingistically. That is why, to feel the different parts of your body when you are still, you have

to focus on them, name them, separate yourself momentarily through mental words or medita-

tion, to give that inadverted constant feeling of being still a shape you can adapt the self to.

This

v

e

r

s

i

o n

of experience is not precisely new and can be easily related to the multiple

psychoanalitic branches of the lacanian sort. However, linking our own ex-

perience to actual telepathy might prove to be a horse of a different color.

The traditional telepathic tale of being able to transmit what I feel or what

I think without saying a single word is built upon the assumption that there

is something clear to transmit; that there is a total control of the subject; that

we can truly decide and dene what it is that we feel or see or read. It assumes

that when we think we are basically talking in silence, which is quite an inac-

curate statement. It indirectly classies experience as something more truthful

to the self than its equivocal rational idealisation. Eventually, this traditional

approach considers the linguistic role of the body ignoring it as the continuous

and blurry organ it is: instead, the body is depicted as the aristotelian proof of

an unequivocal identity; it is the device where experience leaves an objective

physical imprint allowing for one to know things better from the inside of

this imprinted body than others do from the outside. However, I am inclined to

believe that the illusion of owning the self is based on the quantity of our en-

counters with certain external objects and not on the veracity of these innner

experiences which are, quite the opposite, consistently distanced, mediated and

telepathic.This could help explain synesthetic phenomena, ghost limbs, intui-

tion or analogue magic as adaptations of the self to objects beyond the con-

stitutive neighbouring ones: a sign that we can be equally telepathic when we

imagine a moving rock in the middle of the Arctic than we are when touching

a keyboard with our nger.

T O W A R D S

A N

E R G O N O M I C

T E L E P A T H Y

Etymologically, telepathy describes remote experience - tele meaning distance andpathos meaning feeling or perception. Despite its theoretical coinage I propose

to read telepathy beyond the caricature of getting inside someone elses head

or understanding the thoughts that others claim to be having at a given time,

silently. That would somehow portray telepathy --and language-- as a set of clear

cut meanings and solid concepts, notwithstanding the abstract process these two

undergo in order to transform phenomenological inputs into inteligible outputs;

ignoring a bodily and aesthetic process that is profoundly linguistic yet highly un-

stable. Telepathy shouldnt be just a smartphone although we can denitely use a

smartphone telepathically.

We can argue that the very moment we are aware of an experience we are

remembering it already, distorting it, mediating it linguistically. Live experience

would be an illusion generated by just-recorded stimulus: as it happens with the

speed of light, saying we have a direct experience is a colloquial way of overlook-

ing a delay, so small, that reveals itself only at a great distance: just because the

delay is invisible to the eye we shouldnt rule out telepathy as part of the process,

dismissing it as an impossible psychic device of scientic ction. In the contem-

porary scheme experience, as language, would not be what we have culturallyconstructed as our sensation proper but a relation of different exteriors; our own

experience is always objectied; our senses are ways of sharing with something

else. A caress, a reading, a landscape.

. Even when we have an inner feeling, an internal experience

of ourselves such as a headache, the u or sadness, we submit to the

reication of this pain or sensation as an autonomous object within

ourselves, hence manageable.


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On the contrary, if we embrace that telepathy is inherent to the

way the subject experiments themselves, it is not that far-fetched

to imagine it can extend that native ability to experience someone

elses through the same erratical speculation and assimilation they

already use against their own experience. This approach to telepathy

not only draws a scheme of the linguistic othering, but describes

the mediated blurriness of the self to its own material being

and dismisses erratic translation as the proof that telepathy with

other things does not exist. In a world where experience is esentially

elusive to err in our predictions is precisely what empowers us,

telepaths, to participate of an experience that belongs to

nobody completely.

If the past 100 years have debunked the western positivist notion of

the self, of language and of experience, telepathy becomes nothing

near a paranormal power but a fundamental quality of matter: it

reveals itself as the very way we culturally, socially and eccentrically

invent our psychic uniformity, at a distance with ourselves and

our bodily and physical borders. Telepathy becomes the ergonomic

device for linguistic and cultural adaptation: it is the tool we use to

adapta an absent identity to a set of physical things or the procedure

by which the matter is dreaming about us; a body to a tool, a place to

a mind. If we picture telepathy as a way of emancipating ourselves

from the concept or our own thoughts and experiences and as

long as we do not take any telepathic reading literally --starting

with our own experience-- we can hastily give in to the pleasure

of inconsistently and ergonomically predicting what others are

thinking. As a matter of fact we are already doing it. We cant stop

doing it. Telepathy is acknowledging we have been doing it all

a

l

o

n

g.

In other words, it is

the amount of dealing with our bodily objects that veils distance and creates

the illusion of a consistent, enclosed form of sentience that is ours. And

it is based on that, that we agree on a denition of experience that can be

culturally integrated and socially shared a unitarian non-transferrable me,

that is, paradoxically, one of the greatest social conventions of capitalism and

mass consummerism. So when we agree that our experiences are unique and

non-transferrable other than by verbal or alphabetic forms of language we

are ironically eliminating difference and undermining the equivocal nature of

language and perception; we accept everyone knows positively who they areand what they are thinking at any time: we admit the only way for telepathy

to exist is to be able to transfer this chimera of a true and positive self

experience; we say that everything else, any other intuition or guess, is plain

ction, trickery or mere coincidence. Yet, if we think that the aforementioned

blurriness of the continuous body is also linguistic that language is not clear

but a blur of feelings and signs of every sort-- and that experience is not a

pure stimulus but that it starts by translating our own experience to ourselves

in a dirty, delayed, mediated and contaminated manner that I cannot be fully

sure of what my own experience is unless I incur in a considerable amount

of belief , when all that happens, then our own experience becomes

a regular byproduct of language and becomes subject to all the mediatic

aberrations of translation, dissemination and interpretation, making telepathy

a mundane, tangible material means of transfering it.

Again, as postructuralist psychoanalysis

would put it, it is not only that communication with the other

is erratic and absent, but that the very subject proceeds from

this negative othering and blind-spot; that we are already blind-

guessing what we experience ourselves without having to try

it on someone else. The telepathic diferential would add to the

theory that this constant and psychoanalytical blind-spot make us

natural-born-telepaths, and that telepathy understood as some sort

of technological feat for the positive transmission of information

is quite a serious political threat to the otherwise open-ended

etymological nature of telepathy itself: to hear the thoughts

of someone else in plain english 5000 miles away is, I insist,

degrading experience and language to mere letters that are decoded

against a standardised dictionary denition.


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The mechanism of the various technologies, existing as well as possible ones, is not of interest

to me, and I would not have to deal with it, if the creative activities of man were, godlike,

free of any spoiling caused by the unwanted - if we could, now or at some time, realize

our intentions in a pure state, coming close to the methodological precision of Genesis, if, by

saying let there be light, we could obtain, as a nal product, the very light, without any

unwanted ingredients. However, the above mentioned bifurcation of goals, or even the replace-

ment of the chosen goals by different, often unwanted ones, is a typical phenomenon. Moaners

nd similar faults even in the work of God, especially since the introduction of a prototype

for beings endowed with reason and the start of mass production of this model, Homo

Sapiens - but this part of reection is better left to theo-technologists. It sufces to say that,

in doing anything, man almost never knows what he is actually doing - in any case he does

not know it all the way. To reach for the extreme: the destruction of Life on Earth, so possible

today, was not intended by any of the discoverers of atomic energy.

Thus technologies are of interest to me somehow out of necessity, since

a certain civilization includes all that the general public hoped for, as well

as things which were nobodys intention. Sometimes, even more often, a

technology is created by chance, e.g., in searching for the philosophers stone,

porcelain was invented, but the fraction of intentional, conscious goals, in the

set of all events that are able to initiate technologies, is growing as knowledge

progresses. What is indisputable is that, as they become rare, surprises can in

turn grow to apocalyptic dimensions. As was actually mentioned

above.

Cognitive ergonomics is concerned with mental processes,such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor

response, as they affect interactions among humans andother elements of a system.[5] (Relevant topics include

mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance,

human-computer interaction, human reliability, workstress and training as these may relate to human-system

and Human-Computer Interaction design.)

Dilemmas

[5]

Summa

T

e

c

h

n

o

l

o

giae

Talk about the future. But isnt talking about future roses at least an inappro-

priate occupation for someone lost in the highly inammable forests of the

present? And the investigation of the thorns of these roses, the search for the

problems of our great-grandchildren, while we cannot even deal with todays

abundance of problems, does such scholasticism not border absurdity? If only

we had the justication of searching for means to strengthen our optimism

or of doing it for the love of truth, clearly visible in a future without storms,

even literally taken, after the possibility of climate control. The justication for

these words, however, does not lie in any academic passion, nor in unshakable

optimism which imposes the faith that, whatever may happen, the outcome

will be favorable. The justication is at the same time simpler, more practical,

and maybe more modest, since while I am preparing to write about the future,

I am simply doing what I am able to do, no matter how good I am at this,

since it is my only ability. But if this is true, then my work will be no less, no

more dispensable than any other, because every work is based on the assump-

tion that the world exists and that it will continue to exist.

Thus having made sure that the intention is free of unprincipledness, let us

ask about the extent of the subject and the method. We will talk about various

aspects of civilization that can be thought up, and which can be derived from

todays prerequisites, however small the probability of their realization may

be. The foundations for our hypothetical constructions, in turn, shall be given

by technologies, i.e., the ways, dependent on knowledge and social abilities,

in which goals are realized, goals chosen by the community as well as those

which nobody had in mind initially.


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Sure - he developed methods of assistance for the victims of such and of other

cataclysms. Some of them he is able to predict - if only approximately. He is

still far from homeostasis on a planetary scale, not to speak of homeostasis of

stellar dimensions. Unlike most animals, man does not so much adjust himself

to the environment, as he rebuilds the environment according to his needs.

Will this ever be possible with regard to the stars? Will there arise, maybe in a

very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes,

such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the

sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year re? It seems to me that this

is possible, and dont I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous

enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up

to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to

do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will

have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnicianto stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was

possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance

that it might come true, will be possible.

An improbability - I necessarily have to explain at once - which is not based on my faith in

the necessary triumph of Ormuz over Ahriman. I dont trust any promise, I don believe in

assurances based on the so called humanism. The only way to deal with a certain technology

is another technology. Today, man knows more about his dangerous inclinations than he knew

a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years his knowledge will be even more complete.

Then he will be able to benet from

it.

Digital Metaplasticity describes plastic qualities of digital

media congurations and its expressions through theapplications of abstract art languages and methodolo-

gies to computational symbolic systems. The metaplasticmedia, one of disciplines objects, within its own aesthetic

and semantic codes dene a new culture of the representa-

tion. Interaction processes dened with metaplastic codes,trace behaviors and plastic multisensorial qualities.

Overlapping gures

There are only few technologies which are not double-edged, as is shown for

example by the scythes attached to the wheels of the Hittite chariots, or the

proverbial plowshares forged into swords. Every technology is, in principle, an

articial extension of the natural, inherent to everything that is alive, tendency

to rule the environment, or at least not to be defeated by it in the struggle for

existence. Homeostasis - the scholarly name for the striving for equilibrium,

i.e., for survival in deance of change - developed chalky and chitin skeletons

which could resist the force of gravitation, legs enabling mobility, wings

and ns, canine teeth making eating easier, horns, jaws, digestive systems,

protecting armors and camouage shapes, until this led to the independence

of organisms from their environment by regulation of a constant body

temperature. In this way small islands of decreasing entropy in a world of

general entropy increase were created. Evolution does not restrict itself to

this; from organisms, from types, classes and varieties of plants and animals inturn it creates superior entities, no islets anymore, but islands of homeostasis,

forming the whole surface and atmosphere of the planet. The living nature,

the biosphere, is at the same time cooperation and mutual eating, an

alliance which is inseparably connected with ght, as is demonstrated by

every hierarchy that has been investigated by ecologists: these are, especially

among animal forms, pyramids, at the top of which rule the large predators,

eating smaller animals, and these in turn others still, and only on the very

ground, at the bottom of lifes kingdom, acts the green transformer of solar

into biochemical energy, omnipresent on the land and in the oceans, which by

billions of inconspicuous blades carries the changing, for taking on new forms

continuously, but constant, for not coming to and end as a whole, massifs of life.

Homeostatic

activity, which used tech-

nologies as specic organs, made

man the ruler of the Earth, a power-

ful one actually only in the eyes of the

apologist, which he is himself. In view of

climatic perturbations, earthquakes, the

rare, but possible danger of impact of

a large meteor, man is in principle

as helpless as he was in the

last Ice Age

6


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She had helped him get his papers, found him his rst job in ASP. Was that their history? No,

history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History

was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab

driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.

But each fr

a

g

m

e

nt reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but

delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex ma-

chinery develops its own agendas. Brains

cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote

stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the

temptation of rhythm and music. The rush

evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms

used for habitat selection, metastasize into

art. Thrills that once had to be earned

in increments of tness can now be had

from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise

unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors,

and the system moves beyond modeling the

organism. It begins to model the very process

of modeling. It consumes ever-more com-

putational resources, bogs itself down with

endless recursion and ir relevant simulations.

Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every

natural genome, it persists and proliferates

and produces nothing but itself.

[3]

More and more people

buy objects for intellectualand spiritual nourishment.

People do not buy my coffeemakers, kettles and lemon

squeezers because they

need to make coffee, to boilwater, or to squeeze lemons,

but for other reasons.

H O L O G R A M S

O

S

E

S

Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body.

European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the

smell of dust...and the smell of dust.

Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasnt met you yet; youre hardly

out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl

up and circle - and static takes loves body, wipes it clean and gray.

Waves

white sound

break along a

beach that isnt

there.

And the tapes ends.

The inducers light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thou-

sand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered

and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling

toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing

a whole hell never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary

conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a at packet of drugs

- a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.

Thinking: Were each others fragments, and was it always this way? That in-

stant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer

now, or more real, for his having been there?

Overlapping

gures ii


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The

n

o

s

e

Issue

The sign cannot be reduced to signaling an exterior

correlate. The correlate becomes a sign at the moment

when it is denoted, revealing some of its components

while hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate

objects.To the contrary,the object becomes an object

through signs, meaning that signs partially disclose

the objects. Otherwise said, the act of relating to

an object turns the object into a sign. However,

discourses fail to entirely convey an exterior correlate,

and that is because opacity is central both to the

sphere of communication and to the exterior objects

themselves. Language cannot assimilate an exterior

correlate inside its structure without transforming it,

delivering one facade and hiding others. Put inana-

lytical semiotic terms, language cannotinteriorize

a denotatum, an existing referent,without a process

of transforming itthe object is never rendered assuch but isalways already a semiotized object, and

its semiotization implies a selection of some of its

qualities because the denotatum is anopaque entity,

evincing one side at a time.

The sign

corresponds to adesignatum, that

is, to a class of

object that gives it

its regularity and

justies its sense.

As a gure, the sign

is affected in its

plasticity and

appearance.

[7]

P L A S T I C

F R A G M E N T S

Discourse produces sense

by maintaining regular spaces be-

tween terms; the gural produces sense by

engaging the desiring body in its relation to signs

that are plastic, visual, and dense.The issue of Discourse,

Figure concerns thus the role of the signier in the formation

of sense. Is its plasticity a dimension that erases itself in the me-

chanical production of sense, or does it generate an excess of sense

that involves a libidinal involvement with an object in its density and

spatiality? The gural designates the gesture that breaks through lan-

guage and reveals its purely visual forms. This aspect of signication,

cannot be reduced to the logic of discourse, to its communicability and

transparency, because language requires regularity, and desire is apriori

irregular and labile. The issue of discursive communication is to

transmit the sense of the phrase the tree is green by coding it an

defciently providing the code to as many subjects so that it can

be decoded and understood. The issue of art in relation to thephrase the tree is green is to experiment with the rules of

the sentence, transgress them and integrate into the

sentence a type of experience that is foreign to the

code itself: color the words, disintegrate their

order, displace the syntax.


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Metonymy, which participates in the structu-

ring of every metaphor and can sometimes be a metaphor itself,

creates chains of signication that stretch in various directions

(Fig. 21). The screen uses both metaphor and metonymy to structure

space and time around appearances, and this is where it becomes

particularly useful in art criticism. Metonymy has to do with the

materiality of the sign, its potential for multiple meanings, ambigui-

ty, and the creation of new meaning. Opposition creates an inde-

pendent function capable of conveying abstract and invisible ideas.

Light and dark, day and night, left and right come to stand for the

most broadly cosmic and theological notions. The composite struc-

ture of the sign, described as the opposition of signied to signier

(s/S). By stressing the arbitrariness by which different signiers areculturally chosen to signify things that must be common to cultural

groups (tree, arbre, Baum, etc.), the autor was able to demonstrate

the cooperative co-existence of two different realms of signication:

a metonymic realm that allows for substitution, modication, and

error; and a metaphoric realm that instates reality as a consistent

and coherent whole.

The Semiotic

Hinge (ii)

PHILOSOPHY is the product of wonder. The effort after the

general characterization of the world around us is the romance

of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so

obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the

traditional doctrine: we can detect the oversights, thesuperstitions, the rash generalizations of the past ages. We

know so well what we mean and yet were main so curiously

uncertain about the formulation of any detail of our knowledge.

This word detail lies at the heart of the whole difculty. You

cannot talk vaguely about Nature in general. We must x upon

details within nature and discuss their essences and their types

of interconnection. The world around is complex, composed of

details. We have to settle upon the primary types of detail in

terms of which we endeavour to express our understanding of

Nature. We have to analyse and to abstract, and to understand

the natural status of our abstractions.

3I hear a melody, screeching andscratching behind the bells.

4

An old backside of a building.Small patches of navy and red lie

indiscrimninately on top of white

plaster. Where time peeled white,bare gray bricks remain. Decaying

colors hinting its previous livesweathered its unique har mony.

H O L L Y

S P A M

Spam or aesthetics may have

initially been a useful adapta-

tion: this is the only way that

it could have arisen in the rstplace (see Darwin on sexual

selection, and Elizabeth Groszs

recent gloss on this). But spam

or art quickly outgrew this pur-

pose; it has now become para-

sitic, and replicates itself even at

its hosts expense (cf: peacocks

tails). It serves no further pur-

pose any more. Spam or art is a

virus; and, insofar as we have

aesthetic sensibilities (including

self-consciousness and dwelling

just in the present moment), we

are that virus.

Our thoughts and bodies, our

lives, are needlessly recursive

and wasteful. Our lives are

pointless luxuries in a

Darwinian war universe.

If we are the dominant species

on Earth at the moment, thismay only be because we are in

the situation of ightless birds

and marsupials, in areas where

the placental mammals have not

yet arrived.

1

I see a poem as a multi-coloured

strip behind peeling plaster, inseparate, shining fragments.

What if everything that

exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted,

events with ends but no beginnings with us

constantly making categories, seeking out, andreconstructing, until we think we can see total

love, betrayal and defeat, although in reality

we are all no more than haphazard fractions.

The mind, for its own self-preservation, nds

and integrates scattered fragments. Using reli-

gion and philosophy as the cement, we perpe-

tualy collect and assemble all the garbage com-

prised by statistics in order to make sense out

of things, to make everything respond in one

unied voice like a bell chiming to our glory.

2

I see a veil, a diaphonous tint,

nearly invisible.


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obstacleobstacle


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obstacleobstacle obstacle


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obstacleobstacle


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heore-tical ergonomics. Fud-

ge Factor. Teory and practice cometogether through a type o Western

conectionery, usually sof, sweet, and richthat it acquires a smooth, creamy consistency.

Chocolate is necessary to hold back gravity andachieve a static universe. Fudge Factor is more

than a unique conection, it is one o those simplepleasures that give us a moment o peace as we enjoy

not only the resh creamy taste but the warm floodo memories that it brings . E x - per ience meets theorythrough a viscous chocolate. Te enjoyment o fitting apiece in a puzzle. Te pl ea su re o touching the sura-ce o the puzzle with the palm o the hand beore itvanishes. Adapting elements that fit the characteris-

tics o the agents who will use them. Naminga thing is filling a hole with

p l a s t e r and re- movi ngthe surplus with a spatula. Speaking is covering cakes with

sticky chocolate. Lambda is a joint in the skull, the 11thletter o the Greek alphabet, the symbol or the ud-

ge actor, the starting point o all prosthetic

designs and the secret ingrediento chocolate.


22/61

Similar points can be made for other camouage strategies, such as self-shadow concealment

(SSC). Finally, matching a random sample on even one background does not guarantee a high

level of background matching or crypsis (Merilaita & Lind 2005). This idea of random

sample is problematic even on simple backgrounds, because the animal may still be visible due

to spatial or phase mismatch with important background features, such as edges (Kelman et

al. 2007). For these reasons, we simply refer to crypsis as including colours and patterns that

prevent detection (but not necessarily recognition).

CR

Y

P

S

IS

CR

Y

P

S

IS

Despite the above, it is a sub-

ject of some debate as to which

other forms of camouage alsoprevent detection and should

therefore be included under

crypsis along with background

matching (see below). One of the

main arguments surrounding

what should be included under

crypsis regards disruptive co-

loration, and whether this pre-

vents recognition or detection.

While some researchers (e.g.

Stobbe & Schaefer 2008) assert

that disruption prevents recogni-

tion of the animal, we argue that

disruptive coloration initially

prevents detection by breaking

up form (which in turn may also

inuence recognition) and is

therefore a type of crypsis. For

instance, disruptive coloration

seemingly works by breaking

up edge information, so that a

predator may not detect a prey

item because the salient outlines

that may give away its presence

have been destroyed.

mutatis

m

u

t

a

n

t

i

s

The use of the term crypsis has caused disagreement over the last few years,

but we argue that it comprises all traits that reduce an animals risk ofbecoming detected when it is potentially perceivable to an observer. In terms

of vision, the term crypsis includes features of physical appearance (e.g.

coloration), but also behavioural traits, or both, to prevent detection. To

distinguish crypsis from hiding (such as simply being hidden behind an object

in the environment), we argue that the features of the animal should reduce

the risk of detection when the animal is in plain sight, if those traits are to be

considered crypsis. Hiding behind an object, for example, does not constitute

crypsis (see also Edmunds 1974), because there is no chance of the receiver

detecting the animal. We opt for this usage for several reasons. First, this is

broadly consistent with the literal and historical terminology; (albeit briey)

Poulton (1890) used the term to describe colours whose object is to effect con-

cealment; Cott (1940) uses cryptic appearance to encompass modications

of structure, colour, pattern and habit; and Edmunds (1974) denes the terms

crypsis and cryptic, in terms of predators failing to detect prey. By contrast,

some researchers have dened crypsis as synonymous with background

matching, largely because they rapidly adopted Endlers (1978, 1984) deni-

tion of crypsis, where an animal should maximize camouage by matching a

random sample of the background at the time and location where the risk of

predation is the greatest.

However, in recent years, it has become clear that the above denition is wrong on a number

of grounds. First, matching a random sample of the background does not necessarily mini-

mize the risk of detection when an animal is found on several backgrounds (cf. compromise

camouage; Merilaita et al. 1999, 2001; Houston et al. 2007; Sherratt et al. 2007).

Second, the risk of detection can be decreased by disruptive markings, where the emphasis is

on specically breaking up tell-tale features of the animal.


23/61

13

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle,his feet tangled in coils of discarded

beroptics. The arcades sea ofsound washed over him, receded,

returned. Rolling over, he sat up and

held his head.

12

His vision crawled with ghost

hieroglyphs, translucent lines ofsymbols arranging themselves

against the neutral backdrop ofthe bunker wall. He looked at the

backs of his hands, saw faint neon

molecules crawling beneath the skin,ordered by the unknowable code. He

raised his right hand and moved itexperimentally. It left a faint, fading

trail of strobed afterimages.

An

additional form of camouage, distractive markings, is also

included under crypsis because they seemingly prevent

detection. Although the distractive markings should be

detected, the outline of the body or other revealing

characteristics, and thus the main part of the animal, is not.

However, we note that little work has specically

investigated distractive markings, and that one could also

argue that if part of the object is detected, then recognition

of the prey is also prevented. Clearly, there is much more

work to be done.

10

They damaged his nervous systemwith a wartime Russian mycotoxin.

Strapped to a bed in a Memphishotel, his talent burning out micron

by micron, he hallucinated for thirty

hours. The damage was minute,subtle, and utterly effective. For

Case, whod lived for the bodilessexultation of cyberspace, it was

the Fall.

11

Cyberspace. A consensualhallucination experienced daily by

billions of legitimate operators,in every nation, by children being

taught mathematical concepts . . .

A graphic representation of dataabstracted from the banks of every

computer in the human system.

[9]In countershading, an animal possessesa darker surface on the side that typi-

cally faces light and a lighter opposite

side. Most researchers seem to now

agree that the term refers to the

appearance of the coloration and not

the function, especially as counter-

shading may be involved with several

functions. These include compensation

of own shadow (SSC), simultaneously

matching two different backgrounds

in two different directions (back-

ground matching), changing the

three-dimensional appearance of theanimal, protection from UV light and

others (Ruxton et al. 2004). For the

purposes of this theme issue, the two

most relevant functions are SSC, where

the creation of shadows is cancelled

out by countershading, and oblitera-

tive shading, where the shadow/light

cues for three-dimensional form of the

animal are destroyed (Thayer 1896).

We argue that SSC prevents detection

by removing conspicuous shadows, and

obliterative shading prevents detection

by removing salient three-dimensional

information, so group both these under

crypsis.

In principle, some of the issues of dening types of camouage may be clearedup by specically dening detection. However, at present, there are few good

ways of fully dening camouage object properties correctly with respect to the

relevant viewers perception. Understandably, there is a real issue that distin-

guishing between detection and recognition in experimental situations is very

difcult, and it follows that preventing detection may also lead to a prevention

of recognition, e.g. the receiver does not recognize the form of the animal be-

cause it does not detect its edges. What matters is what the colour patterning or

other camouage features primarily do. As such, masquerade need not prevent

detection but it does prevent recognition, whereas disruptive coloration and

SSC, along with background matching, primarily prevent detection.

7

The sky above the port was thecolor of television, tuned to a dead

channel.

8You needed a new pancreas. The

one we bought for you frees you froma dangerous dependency. Thanks,

but I was enjoying that dependency.

9

And in the bloodlit dark behind hiseyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from

the edge of space, hypnagogic images

jerking past like a lm compiled ofrandom frames. Symbols, gures,

faces, a blurred, fragmented mandalaof visual information.


24/61


25/61

We can remember Marshall McLuhans

words about electronic media having outered

the central nervous system itself, thus making

the world into a smooth plateau of percep-

tion. This rings true when considering digital

media, which is characterized by its transpa-

rency, its smoothness. Any type of information

is de- and recodable into another format.

This kind of ux and mutability of digital

media makes it into an immersive enviroment,

rather like sound.

So far, however, our conception of electronic

media seems to have been very v isually domi-

nated and tied up to the more general link be-

tween the visual and the rational, which has

been prominent in Western thought. However,

many thinkers have also heard something new

coming from the explosion of new media since

the 19th Century. McLuhan wrote about the

acoustic quality of the electronic global village

he saw coming. German philosopher Wolf-

gang Welsch, in his essay On the Way to an

Auditive Culture? addresses the problem of

oculacentrism of the Western philosophical

tradition and tries to create a conception of

an auditive form of thinking. How to think

of sound itself when the epistemological focus

of our thinking and our concepts is located

in a seeing subject? With its temporality and

immersiveness, sound seems to avoid clarity,

categorization and objectivity. Light and sight

reveal objects, sound is the result of processes,

of something happening and of mistakes:

there cant be glitches without processes.

The whole notion of glitch is tied up to an

auditive thoughtform, which approaches

the world as a multiplicity of processes rather

than a pre-set eld of objects.

The scratches and glitches of contemporary

electronic music, its aesthetics of interrup-

tion and misuse, should be considered in

relation to the ontology of the Outside, or its

hauntology (to quote Derrida writing about

hauntings and returnings). Contemporary

thought has painstakingly strived to approachthis outside of thought and perception. The

subject and the world, if such separation can

be made, are seen to be formed in complex

interrations between both. The subject

emerges from the processes of the world.

Deleuze and Guattari give these processes a

name: machines. Machines are dened as a

system of interruptions or breaks (AO 36),

cutting and redirecting the energetic ows of

preconscious world, which can be thought

of as an innitely complex assemblage of

machines acting upon other machines acting

upon others etc. A subjectivity is emergent and

residual, having only a limited perspective

upon the underlying world of forces it

inhabits. Looking at our surroundings we

recognize things, we are creatures of habitand conventions. Thinking, ultimately a

creative act, is not recognition but an encoun-

ter, violence to thought. Something comes from

the outside that interrupts and grabs us and

forces us outside of our habitual territory.

AESTHETICS

OF

INTERRUPTION

In science ction, ghosts in machines

always appear as malfunctions, glitches,interruptions in the normal ow of things.

Something unexpected appears seemingly

out of nothing and from nowhere. Through

a malfunction, a glitch, we get a eeting

glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As

electricity has become the basic element of the

world we live in, the steady hum of power

grids and their owing immaterial essences

slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of every-

day machinery, the ghostly rapport has also

relocated into the domain of current uctua-

tions, radio interference and misread data.

Early telegraph experimenters heard strange

raps and clicks issuing from disturbances in

Earths magnetic eld, seemingly communica-

tion from some other side; Thomas Edison

tried to put together a radio device to address

denizens of other worlds; Constantin Rau-

dive, Raymond Cass and Friedrich Jrgenson

spent hours and hours attempting to capture

voices of the dead onto magnetic tape; radio

antennas at Arecibo Observatory are pointed

skywards, waiting for extraterrestrial signals.

The presence of some outside force has

always been supposed to be apparent through

interference and interruption.

Actual facts about these manifestations are

not really important. The interesting thing

is that every new medium seems to open

up a new kind of outside, every new mode

of perception leaving out, or even creating,

something imperceptible, and on the other

hand bringing out something previously out

of reach. Erik Davis has named the outside

boundary of electronic media as the elec-

tromagnetic imaginary, meaning that many

animistic or alchemistic notions of essential

energies and life spirits have been translatedinto the concept of electricity, and remaining

in the technological unconscious. Machines

seem to be inhabiting some kind of life, even

as it is an extension of ourselves. The sheer

uncanniness of a disembodied voice transmitting

via telephone line, as experienced by early

telephone users, is quite hard to imagine now,

but think of hearing a voice of a recently

departed person on an answering machine.

[2]


26/61

If arts quest is to bring the

imperceptible to perception,

music seeks to make audible the

inaudible forces of time and du-

ration, to bring out an immanentsound plane, a pure sound block,

in which forms are replaced by

pure modications of speed.

(MP 267) How does one

manage to get away from the

grip of musical forms while

being still able to retain a plane

of consistency; to not regress

into undifferentiated chaos which

couldnt hold any consistency? This

is the question of the refrain.

In order to become-other, one

has to align with some outerior

forces and create new machinic

assemblages. Thats why Deleuze

and Guattari write that refrain

isnt the origin of music but

rather a means of preventing it,

warding it off (MP 300).

Becoming is an alliance. With

music machines we have entered

a new kind of musical alliance.

Phonography, the art of recording

sound, allows the production of

a smooth sound plane, on which

all relations between its various

elements are immanent as

recording extracts or constructs

a block of time, a musical time

that is present as sound

penetrates our bodies, but

emerges as a result from an

(quasi)event which is distant

from us spatially and

temporarily.

One can see the effect of

recording or sound processing technology as having helped

in breaking with the traditional musical notation and the

ideal of a pure musical form. Once all sound has become

recordable and reproducible by machines, we can be done

away with the concept of music as residing, ultimately,

in the score. Phonography and electronic/digital media

have attened out the arborescent model of the actual

sounds relation to a higher structure, that is, the compo-

sition itself as actualized in various levels of perfection

in the performances of musicians. From machinic point

of view (or hearing) theres no difference between voice

and noise, we have only sonic stratum and various means

to manipulate that sound matter.

By introducing the refrain Deleuze and

Guattari have created a concept that

illustrates the constantly shifting nature of

relations between territorialized or habitual

milieu and the chaos of the outside forces.

A refrain, in the domain of music, can be

described very vaguely as a rhythmic element,

something marking out a territory amidst

chaos: a nursery rhyme, a childs song to

comfort oneself, a birdsong to stake out a

territory? Refrain doesnt, however, have just

a reactionary function against chaos; it is

situated in the middle and has a potential

to both reterritorialize and deterritorialize

sound, constantly on the border of a territory.

Art has posited itself onto this border. Or, to

paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, all creative

activity, whether its art, philosophy or

science, has to approach the outside of

thought. To be able to create new ways to feel

the world, new percepts and affects, one has

to court the chaos and worship the glitch.

Machines

Contemporary electronic music has approached this outside

of thought, or outside of music, by distancing itself from the

hierarchy of Western classical music tradition, which has

valuated certain musical structures (such as melody/harmony)

over another qualities (rhythm, timbre) and posited the score as

a transcendent compositional principle. Deleuze and Guattariobserve the deterritorializing tendency of refrain in music:

25

Certain modern musicians oppose the the transcendentalplan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated

all of Western classical music, to the immanent soundplane, which is always given along with that to which

it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and

carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kindof molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds,

tenths and hundredths of seconds. (MP 267)


27/61

I hear no great conceptual divide between

various music machines. Whatever means

there are available for recording acoustic phe-

nomena or presenting sound, no matter what

the source, making sound reproducible and

thus variable, all phonographic technologies

have the potential to deterritorialize sound

and music. Maybe the greatest singular

moment in nomadic use (= an act of

capturing forces, making a new machinic

assemblage of existing machinic formations)

of phonographic machinery has been the

emergence of hip-hop DJing and the misuseof vinyl records, making a pair of turntables

into a nomadic war machine. For a better

part of the last century the record remained

inactive, a storage capsule of time.

Apart from few artistic experimentations

vinyl records were used as passive playback

devices which always referred to some original

event captured onto the grooves of the disc.

In a parallel to the reinvention of the electric

guitar by nding the aesthetic potential of

the feedback noise generated by the guitar

amplier -circuit (and thus making electric

guitar something other than an amplied

replica of acoustic guitar), the DJ would nd

and learn to use the immanent forces within

the record itself.

Radio, a medium which in the early 20th

Century had a similarly all-pervading

role as the internet has today, remained

the primary medium of the DJ for a

long time. The status of a radio jock rose

from that of a salesman/entertainer to

a central gure in pop business during

the 1950s youth culture explosion. DJ

as a sonic artist evolved somewhere else,however: in the discothque, a club for

dancing to recorded music instead of a

live orchestra. The rst discos were born

in 1940s France during the German

occupation that hampered the live music

circuit. After the war some clubs stuck

with the concept of dancing to records.

This idea migrated elsewhere and in the

50s dance clubs experienced a massive

leap in popularity with the advent of

rocknroll and youth culture. We can

see this as a sort of deterritorialization:

instead of responding to the presence of

performers the audience responds to the

music and the forces it directs into the

space it creates.

Disco as a musical style developed from the mantric/tantric heavy funk of James Brown,

followed by others, which concentrated on the bass-heavy, steady and monotonously repetitive

groove; a becoming-machine of the rhythm section. This style evolved into even more functionalist

direction, downplaying the soul element of funk and delving solely in the groove. Record com-

panies started producing long dance remixes of songs. Disco DJs wanted to create an all-night

ow of music and that required a skill of seamlessly mixing records into one another. Any kind

of music focusing on rhythm rather than melody could be used; DJ was becoming a curator-

gure in the emerging club spaces, such as the loft parties in 1970s New York.

The concept of frequency, according

to German media philosopher Friedrich

Kittler, brought about by recording

technology, allows music to break with

the Old European tradition of pythagorean

harmony and notation as the preserver

of clear and pure sounds (in opposition to

the chaotic noise of the world). Since the

19th Century sound has been recordable,

vibrations in a carrying medium

transferable to a recording surface. The

phonograph does not hear as our ears thathave been trained immediately to lter

voices, words and sounds out of noise;

it registers acoustic events as such.

(Kittler 23) The phonograph hears sounds

acousmatically, without a relation to the

origin of a sound.

Using the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, we can state that the

phonograph deterritorializes sound, attens down the hierarchical

organization of music into a rhizome, which is an open, multiple

and temporal form of organization and subsceptible to constant

de- and recoding. The act of recording is in one way already a

creative act of framing and selection. Any recording is a whole

in itself, all its characteristics are immanent to itself, without an

essential relation to an outerior or higher symbolic order.

However, up until the 1960s and the expansion of recording

studio technologies, record was generally regarded as referring toan original acoustic event, a performance, which would have more

ontologic value (i.e. realness) than mere representation of it.

Multitrack tape machines make that stance irrelevant; studio-

as-instrument does away with acoustic realism. A particular

soundscape, experienced as a unied whole, could have been

assembled during many different takes and places, or wouldnt

have to result from any acoustic events, as in computer music.

Through the mixing board and the master tape, the record is the

stratied surface of sound.


28/61

Despite its inventors wishes to provide a

surface for the representation of an original

event, a stable protector of the preceding mode

of organization, the record became a destabi-

lizer, weapon in sonic warfare (a nomadic war

machine of sorts). DJs hand is a terrorwrist

opening up a new eld of objectile thought:

ngertip perception (Eshun 18). A de-

territorialization of hand and record in the

machinic assemblage of scratching.

The phonographic diagram, given its direct

transduction of physical wave to mechanical

impulse or electrical signal, provides a code

both precisely reproducible and potentially

editable. ... [W]here the score represents,

phonography simply transduces... As soon as

the deterritorialization of sonic matter into

vinyl abstracts it from the moment, and makes

music into this random-access memory

available time and time again, the sonic

matter is susceptible to temporal mutation,

warping, looping. (Mackay 250)

DJs (ab)use of vinyl is a derangement

in every sense of the word. Scratching

deterritorializes the noise on the grooves,

bends the spiral grooves into lines of ight;scratching rips its source material from the

record, transforms the ideal into matter to

be molded, cuts into syntax to isolate words

and phrases, achieving an Artaud-style

decoding of language systems (both human

and musical). A scratch takes up a block

of recorded time and folds it up in baroque

ourishes like a cloth. Scratching makes

audible the ow of time and matter, the ow

and the machines that cut it, and creates a

vinyl psychedelia = scratchadelia, a machinic

refrain, a becoming-vinyl of music.

[0]

A digital counterpart to the scratch is the

often-mentioned glitch. A precariously vague term, which however captures

some of the slipperiness of digital media. If analog phonography has led to

some sort of metallurgy of sound, made sound malleable and mutable, digital

sound processing approaches sound as molecules. The term microsound is very

appropriate for the digital music of today. Or, if we take heed of Kim Cascone,

we should be talking about post-digital music, since the medium of digital tech-

nology has become so transparent it doesnt reect in the expression of music

anymore. Instead specic sound processing tools, such as Max, AudioMulch or

SoundForge produce an auratic sound, as well as providing amazing detail and

accuracy in manipulating sound.

The conceptual leap of DJ from a curator (organizing a collection of works)

to an artist (creating a work) happened in 1970s Bronx NY, when local DJs

invented the isolating of the breakbeat and hip-hop: they would play only

the rhythmic percussion breaks of funk records, alternating the same passage

on two turntables, creating their own music. This rather crude skill of keeping

the party going (with the help of an MC hollering encouragements to the party

people) soon evolved into ner techniques of vinyl manipulation and collage.

The DJ became a cut chemist.

Grandmaster Flashs 1981 record The Amazing Adventures of Grandmaster

Flash on the Wheels of Steel was almost literally an encyclopedia of DJ tech-

niques: crossfading, punch-phrasing, backspinning, cutting and scratching...

Not only percussion was used as a sound source, almost everything could be

dropped into the mix, all kinds of noise, as long as it was on record. In someways a popularization of musique concrte, this meant a huge shift in the per-

ception of music:

After Flash, the tur ntable

becomes a machine for

building and melding

mindstates from your

record collection. The

turntables, a Technics

deck, become a subjectivity

engine generating a

stereophonics, a hi

consciousness of the head,

wholly tuned in and turned

on by the found noise of

vinyl degeneration that

hears scratches, crackle,

fuzz, hiss and static as lead

instruments. entirely oriented toward anexperimentation in contact

with the real... susceptibleto constant modication.

(MP 12)

The turntable becomes not only a new

kind of percussive instrument, it becomes a

syntax-destroyer and a connective synthesizer

in a Deleuzian sense (mixing this AND this

AND this...). Record is a diagram, a map,

rather than a tracing or writing. A map is


29/61


30/61

smooth plane of constant present, deterritorializing the sound itself as a

singularity, a sonorous force, theres a tendency for that repetition to become

reterritorialized as a clich, an all-too expectable formula; this seems to be a

potential dead-end for numerous genres of electronic dance music. A glitch

appears: a wrinkle in time of the constant present. If we listen to an arche-

typal glitchy sound, an Oval track for example, we can hear a rich tapestry

of sound and absence of sound. There are skips, something is missing, there

are holes in the smooth space of sound. Or we can consider Kim Cascones

concept of residualism that involves structuring a work around an absence,

removing a signal and leaving onl y its effects to be heard. Scratching, sam-

pling and the stuttering of malfunctioning soft- and hardware are means of

derangement, seeking out a way to make a rhizome out of music, a way to

place its elements in continuous variation, where absences, breaks, holes, folds

and ruptures can be a part; a way to let ghosts of the outside in.

Love

[M]achines work ... by continually breaking down... (AO 8),

producing anti-production, creating gaps and glitches. One has to

remember we?re talking about desiring machines and arts ability to

reect the formative processes of machinic pre-conscious world, which

is libidinal. As Jake Mandell observes in his liner notes for his album

Love Songs for Machines, artists relation to their tools of the trade

has always been fetishistic. A favorite pen of the writer, a beloved

brush of the painter; its always been intimate. Mandell writes that the

once-close relationship of artists and their tools has encountered a crisis

in the digital age, the screenandmouse -interface is abstract and

alienating. Still, as an immersive environment, digital media allow for

an exceptionally affectionate experience.

As tool-using creatures (among other such creatures) weve always been cyborgs. [T]ools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them

possible. (MP 90) That is to say, tools imply a symbiosis between two bodies in amachinic assemblage, deterritorializing them both. Think of Roland TB-303 Bassline

Generator, becoming an Acid Machine through a glitch, a programming mistake, releasing

a whole new spectrum of sounds, transforming both the musician and the instrument. Itsa two-way relation: we can well take heed of Kodwo Eshuns conception of human beings

as the sex organs of synthesizers. New sounds happen between things, in the movement thatsweeps you and your computer to somewhere else: in order to effect deterritorializations you

have to love your machines.

[3]

R

E

P

E

T

I

T

I

O

N

As

builds

the

up

a


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36/61

quote #2

Silver Phosphenes

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes,silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of

space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a

lm compiled of random frames. Symbols,gures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala

of visual information.

quote #5

Fast Forward

Night City was like a deranged experimentin social Darwinism, designed by a bored

researcher who kept one thumb

permanently on the fast-forward button.

quote #4

Atlantic Noise

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the

white noise that is London, that Damienstheory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul

is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some

ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake ofthe plane that brought her here, hundreds of

thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Soulscant move that quickly, and are left behind,

and must be awaited, upon arrival,

like lost luggage.

quote #1

Ghost Hieroglyphs

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs,

translucent lines of symbols arranging them-selves against the neutral backdrop of the

bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his

hands, saw faint neon molecules crawlingbeneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable

code. He raised his right hand and moved itexperimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of

strobed afterimages.

quote #3

Event Horizon

There must be some Tommy Hilger eventhorizon, beyond which it is impossible to be

more derivative, more removed from the source,more devoid of soul.

quote #6

Fragmented Dreams

It will be like watching one of her owndreams on television. Some vast and deeply

personal insult to any ordinary notion ofinteriority. An experience outside culture.

gure #2

Parallel Resonance

The resonance of a parallel RLC circuit isa bit more involved than the series resonance.

The resonant frequency can be dened in three

different ways, which converge on the sameexpression as the series resonant frequency if

the resistance of the circuit is small.

gure #5

The Shift Register

The Shift Register is another type of sequen-tial logic circuit that is used for the storage

or transfer of data in the form of binary

numbers. This sequential device loads thedata present on its inputs and then moves or

shifts it to its output once every clock cycle,hence the name shift re gister.

gure #4

Redundancy

Redundancy in information theory is the

number of bits used to transmit a messageminus the number of bits of actual infor-

mation in the message. Informally, it is the

amount of wasted space used to transmitcertain data. Data compression is a way to

reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy,while checksums are a way of adding desired

redundancy for purposes of error detection

when communicating over a noisy channel oflimited capacity.

gure #1

Cyberspace

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination

experienced daily by billions of legitimateoperators, in every nation, by children being

taught mathematical concepts... A graphic

representation of data abstracted from banksof every computer in the human system.

Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light rangedin the nonspace of the mind, clusters and

constellations of data.

Like city lights, receding...

gure #3

Central Processing

A central processing unit (CPU) is the hard-ware within a computer that carries out the

instructions of a computer program by per-forming the basic arithmetical, logical, and

input/output operations of the system.

gure #6

Accelerationism

Accelerationism is the belief that in order togenerate radical change, the prevailing system

of capitalism should be expanded and itsgrowth accelerated so that its self-destructive

tendencies can be brought to their conclusion.


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In more recent years the moquette

designers role has been transformed

by the introduction of Computer Aided

Design (CAD), greatly improving the

efciency in production and the style

of the designs. To update the debates

about design and industry in the

present day, I visited the moquette

factory in Hudderseld. Here I was

able to draw on further historical

resources and see production inaction. I was also able to discuss with

the designers at Holdsworth Ltd the

ways in which modern technology has

changed moquette and how nancial

restraints in the recent economic

climate have altered manufacturing

and design priorities.

In the

essay I close by

exploring London Undergrounds

plans for the future design of moquette, in

particular how design decisions are now being

reached. A competition launched in 2009 gave

members of the public an opportunity to design a

moquette which will eventually be used on all the lines of

the London Underground. Furthermore, in 2012 HeatherwickStudio was commissioned by Transport for London to design a

new moquette for the redesigned Routemaster Bus. My essay

considered the context and signicance of this new approach

to design for public transport, and concluded by discussing

the need for London Underground to continue to

employ the best contemporary designers so that the

network maintains its position as an iconic

design symbol of modern London.

[11]M O Q UE T T E

The underground rail ser-

vice is an iconic design symbol

of London. This success can

partly be attributed to its strong

modernist identity, initiated by

the Chief Executive of LondonTransport, Frank Pick (1878-

1941) in the early 20th century.

His aim was to integrate modern

design with industry to create a

distinct corporate style for the

network. The Underground was

to be a showcase of the very best

of contemporary designers for an

audience which today amounts

to over one billion

passengers per year.

Most people are familiar with

the roundel signage by Edward

Johnson and the tube maps of

Harry Beck, however my prize-

winning essay focused in parti-

cular on the design of moquette,

the often overlooked textile used

to cover seating throughout the

network.Moquette, the French

word for carpet, is a woollen

material woven on large looms,which is ideal for use on public

transport due to its hard-

wearing properties. The colour-

ful repetitive patterns often seen

on moquette function to camou-

age dirt. The moquette used by

London Underground is currently

woven in two factories, one in

Hudderseld and the other in

Lithuania, where manufacturing

costs are considerably cheaper.

Both the manufacture and design of the moquette have been transformed since it rst appeared

on the Underground networks in the early 1920s. Frank Picks aim was to bring modernist

design to the ever yday commuter. He employed the best contemporary textile designers of the time,

such as Enid Marx and Marion Dorn, whose designs displayed a strong modernist inuence.

The London Transport Museum Library and Transport for Londons archive contain revealing

correspondence between these designers and the London Transport management team during the

1930s. The documents demonstrate the importance that was placed on a close collaboration

between designer and manufacturer. They detail many important design decisions which ensured

neither the style nor quality was compromised at any stage of the design process. The network un-

derwent changes when Frank Picks inuence faded after his death in 1941. My essay examined

the founding principles and the debates between designers and manufacturers to consider how these

changes affected the overall feeling of design unity within the network.


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Could memory traces be discovered? Wittgenstein sought to undermine our condence in the

empirical nature of representationism, asking Why must a trace have been left behind?

(1980, paragraph 905). Do trace theorists misguidedly seek, on a priori grounds, to dictate

to science what to discover in the brain (Zemach 1983, pp. 323)?

Some defenders of the trace in response drain it of empirical content. Debo-

rah Rosen, for example, develops a logical notion of the memory trace, dis-

tanced from the scientic notions for which the logical notion provides only a

philosophical underpinning (1975, p. 3). But giving up the ideal of an inde-

pendent characterization of the trace may not be necessary. The postulation

of traces is empirical, but the relevant domain is not psychology. Whats doing

the work is the physical assumption that there is no macroscopic action at a

temporal distance, that mechanisms in fact underlie apparent cases of direct

action between temporally remote events. This assumption may be mistaken,but challenges to it must offer some positive alternative theoretical framework.

The mere logical possibility of a unique mnemic causation which does oper-

ate at a temporal distance (Heil 1978, pp. 6669; Anscombe 1981, pp. 1267)

is insufcient, as is the simple denial of any temporal gap between past and

present (Malcolm 1963, p. 238).

Critics deny that the retention involved in memory requires any continuous storage (Squires

1969; Malcolm 1977, pp. 1979; Bursen 1978). This worry rightly requires trace

theorists to be explicit on the relation between occurrent remembering and dispositional memo-

ries. We do need models of the mechanism by which enduring dispositions are actualized. But

the criticism does not show that there is anything deeply mysterious in the notion of under-

lying causal processes which g round memory abilities (Warnock 1987, pp. 502; Deutscher

1989, pp. 5863). The kind of storage invoked by trace theorists need not be the storage

of independent atomic items localized in particular places, like sacks of grain in a storehouse.

How does the postulated trace come to play a part in the

present act of recognition or recall? Trace theorists must

resist the idea that it is interpreted or read by some in-

ternal homunculus who can match a stored trace with a

current input, or know just which trace to seek out for a

given current purpose. Such an intelligent inner executive

explains nothing (Gibson 1979, p. 256; Draaisma 2000,

pp.21229), or gives rise to a vicious regress in which fur-

ther internal mechanisms operate in some corporeal

studio (Ryle 1949/1963, p. 36; Malcolm 1970, p. 64).

A dilemma:

circularity or solipsism?

[8]

Objections to

R

e

p

r

e

s

e

n

tations

In a taxonomy and evaluation of criticisms of memory representations and traces, this

section synthesizes the polemics of theorists who hold quite different positive views about

memory. The answers sketched here to some of these criticisms leave open a number of issues.

In particular, the issue of how the content of memory representations is determined is barely

mentioned: and the question of how memory traces could provide the right causal connections

between past and present if they are not static and permanent inner items is postponed

to section 3. Again, the key question here is whether memory does involve representation

of the past.

One initial objection mischaracterizes its target. Some critics complain that

trace theorists see an episode of remembering as entirely determined by the

nature of the stored item. But, they note, many factors other than internal

brain states affect remembering. As Wittgenstein notes, whatever the event

does leave behind, it isnt the memory (1980, paragraph 220). Trace theorists,

however, accept this point: the engram (the stored fragments of an episode)

and the memory are not the same thing (Schacter 1996, p. 70). Traces

(whatever they may be) are merely potential contributors to recollection,

providing one kind of continuity between experience and remembering; so

traces are relevant but not sufcient causal/ explanatory factors. In fact,

psychologists attention is increasingly focussed on the context of recall:

research on synergistic ecphory (Tulving 1983, pp. 1214) addresses the

conspiratorial interaction of the present cue and circumstances with the trace

(Schacter 1982, pp. 1819; 1996, pp. 5671). Developmental psychologist

Susan Engel argues that often one creates the memory at the moment one

needs it, rather than merely pulling out an intact item, image, or story (1999,

p. 6). So there is no inevitable reduction of the multicausal nature of remem-

bering to a single inner cause (see further sections 3.4 and 3.5 below).


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One approach to content determination does retain resemblance as the core explanatory notion.

According to the structuralist theory of mental representation developed by Robert Cummins

(1996), Paul Churchland (1998), and by Gerard OBrien and Jon Opie (2004), there is

an objective relation of second-order resemblance between the system of representing vehicles

in our heads and their represented objects. First-order resemblance involves the sharing

of some physical properties, and is thus unlikely to ground mental representation, since no

traces in my brain share relevant physical properties with (say) the elephants or the conversa-

tions which I remember. But in second-order resemblance, the relations among a system of

representing vehicles mirror the relations among their objects. In the case of brain traces,

second-order structural resemblances hold when some physical relations among certain brain

states (such as distance relations in the activation space of a neural network) preserve some

system of relations among represented objects.

Whatever the fate of such a general defence of the notion of a struc-tural analogue, there is another (compatible yet independent) response. We can weaken the

requirement of isomorphism further, remembering that a theory of memory in the philosophy

of psychology should not cover veridical remembering alone. Details in my memory of an

experience need not have been permanently encoded in the same enduring determinate trace as

that experience. We often tell more than we (strictly speaking) remember. Even where memory

for the gist of an event is roughly accurate, details may shift as the trace is ltered through

other beliefs, dreams, fears, or wishes. The causal connections between events and traces,

and between traces and recollection, may be multiple, indirect, and context-dependent. The

structures which underpin retention, then, need not remain the same over time, or might not

always involve identiable determinate forms over time.

This more dynamic vision of traces, rejecting the idea of permanent

storage of independent items, may satisfy both recent developments in cognitive science (section 3

below) and some of the positive suggestions with which critics of static traces have accompanied

their objections. Wittgenstein had wondered whether the things stored up may not constantly

change their nature. Gibsonian direct realists in psychology, like some phenomenologists and

Wittgensteinians in philosophy, have sometimes assimilated all theories of memory traces

to the vision of passive, separate entities each with a xed location in an inner archive. But

writers in these diverse traditions have rightly stressed various ways in which remembering

often relies on information left in the external world, arguing that we should see the inter-

nal aspects of memory more as an active resonance or attunement to information of certain

kinds than as the encoding and reproduction of determinate images. These ideas have had

considerable inuence on recent theorizing in cognitive science, and on views of memory

and mind as embodied, embedded, and extended (section 3 below). But they do not rule out

weaker, dynamic notions of the memory trace. As the great English psychologist of memory

Frederic Bartlett argued, though we may still talk of traces, there is no reason in the world

for regarding these as made complete, stored up somewhere, and then re-excited at some much

later moment. The traces that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined,

interest-carried traces. They live with our interests and with them they change.

But then the trace theorist is left with a dilemma. If we avoid the homunculus

by allowing that the remembering subject can just choose the right trace, then

our trace theory is circular, for the abilities which the memory trace was meant

to explain are now being invoked to explain the workings of the trace (Bursen

1978, pp. 5260; Wilcox and Katz 1981, pp. 229232; Sanders 1985, pp.

50810). Or if, nally, we deny that the subject has this circular independent

access to the past, and agree that the activation of traces cannot be checked

against some other veridical memories, then (critics argue) solipsism or scep-

ticism results. There is then no guarantee that any act of remembering does

provide access to the past at all: representationist trace theories thus cut the

subject off from the past behind a murky veil of traces (Wilcox and Katz 1981,

p. 231; Ben-Zeev 1986, p. 296).

Well see below (section 3.3) that this dilemma recurs empirically, in the difference betweensupervised and unsupervised learning rules in connectionist cognitive-scientic models of

memory. There, as in this general context, the natural response is to take the second prong of

the dilemma, and accept the threat of solipsism or scepticism. The trace theorist must show

how in practice the past can play roles in the causation of present remembering. The past is

not uniquely specied by present input, and there is no general guarantee of accuracy: but the

demand for incorrigible access to the past can be resisted.

6

How can memory traces represent past events or experiences?

How can they have content? This is in part a general problem

about the meaning of mental representations (see the entry

on mental representation). But specic problems crop up for

naturalistic trace theories of memory. In stating the causal theory

of memory, Martin and Deutscher argued that an analysis of

remembering should include the requirement that (in cases of

genuine remembering) the state or set of states produced by the

past experi

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