GO […]What’s striking is the casual insistence of the way these things recur, without following any obvious rule or system. I’m curious as to what extent you were playing it by ear in allowing these repetitions to find their shape.

LT The rhythms helped shape the recurrences. I often use rhythm to carry a story, and it does determine so much. There was something about the ear and associations, about hearing, listening, to how we remember. I used more repetition than I ever have, to make pathways by which the protagonist/narrator’s thoughts move. It struck me that, when we remember, we usually do it in the same way, with the same words. When memories recur, they come back attached to specific triggers, maybe through rhythms, associations, and they go to the same place again and again—that river.

GO We’re not necessarily changing the memory at all.

LT No, that’s right.

GO And certainly not changing the outcome. We’re simply taking notice of the same memory once again.

LT Hopefully, a reader’s memory comes into play, and is affected by the various ways in which things return.

theatlantic:

tetw:

from Playboy

Perhaps because the Q. and A. format serves to pin him down by counteracting his habit of mercurially changing the subject in mid-stream of consciousness, this interview has considerably more lucidity and clarity than McLuhan’s readers are accustomed to…

Reblogged for photo alone, but the interview is fascinating as well.

PLAYBOY: Why should it be the artist rather than the scientist who perceives these relationships and foresees these trends?

McLUHAN: Because inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

[…]

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

pooressays:

…

[MR:] I am interested in automated improvisation. I design situations in which an artwork can take place. Often time what I am asking from the technology is something it is not intended to do. So there is a collaborative process between the automated tools I employ and myself.  I am interested in co-authoring works—arriving at traditional media such as drawing, painting, prints and sculpture)—with various consumer forms of artificial intelligence.  

…

Adam Ekberg: I can assure you that my approach is anything but scientific. The process of making an image stems from the desire to see something in the physical world and then depicted in a photographic representation. It can be something grand—like a meteorite piercing an empty seascape—or diminutive—like an ice cube melting on the floor of my apartment. Whatever the image, I’m interested in doing whatever is necessary in the physical world to arrive at the phenomena I’m after. In some cases, the thing photographed happens so quickly it only exists in the photograph. It is imperceptible in the moment of making. Often times the thing photographed lingers in space and time. After all of the setting up, carrying of objects, performing of tasks, and making of photographs, I relish a moment in which I am able to simply sit with this thing. This moment represents the end of a process, sometimes one of months or years: what began with a desire to see the thing has led to sketches being made, materials acquired, locations scouted, objects carried to just the right spot, and camera set up. All of these steps makes the thing photographed feel almost alive, but after that, lights go out, balloons fall, and I clean up the mess.

nopefun:

New York native photographer studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

q: I feel that a lot of photography is about color and light, is it an important element in your pictures?
a: There are different ways I could answer this question. A fellow-photographer friend of…

I currently see performance in a very simple (yet useful) way: performance is nothing other than the process through which an object is translated into a version of itself able to be experienced by another object. By translatable object I don’t only mean a musical score, a theatre play, an idea, or even a person; rather, an object (like Graham Harman demonstrates) is anything that has an autonomous existence: from a person to a rock, from a shot of electricity fired by a neuron to a bankrupt financial institution, from a debt-ridden national economy to a melting iceberg. Performance is, in my view, that which allows for an object to manifest itself in the experience of another object by performing a double of itself. So yes, a performance is always performance and object at once. Because all objects that are given to us (or to any other objects) in experience are performances of other objects. 

[…]

I’d say there are at least two different kinds of performance: the performance that brings forth an object’s double onto another object’s experience (the kind of performance I mentioned earlier) and then there is a particular second kind of performance, a performance that starts by being like the first one but that then becomes something else. It begins by translating an object into the phenomenological realm of experience but then, for reasons that, in my view, have to do with a change on the way objects engage with each other as audiences, it goes beyond the experience of the given sensual object to suddenly denounce the presence of the real object hidden behind it (even if it never really makes it known). I see it like the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, the defamiliarisation effect through which audiences realise the play they’re watching isn’t reality itself: they become aware of the fiction of theatre; the presence of the actor behind the character is denounced. If the first kind of performance gives us the experience of what graham Harman has called ‘time’ (by allowing us to perceive sensual objects and changes in their sensual qualities), then this second kind of performance gives us ‘space’, the sudden realisation that the real is much deeper than we had hitherto known. It is also this second kind of performance that is usually associated with the art object. However, in my view, it has nothing to do with the nature of the object being experienced but with the nature of the experience itself. If we are to truly support a flat and democratic object-oriented ontology, then we cannot divide the world into ‘normal objects ‘and ‘art objects.’ Art objects don’t exist ontologically. What exists is a particular kind of relation between objects, the aesthetic relation. The aesthetic relation can in principle exist between any two objects. If we think about it, that has already been the case since the first avant-garde. just think of Duchamp’s ready-mades: they are objects like all others; the only thing that changed was that they were placed in a context that triggered an aesthetic engagement on the part of the audience, that context being the so-called ‘art exhibition’. However we do not need art galleries to tell us when to engage with other objects aesthetically: I can be enchanted by anything around me as long as I allow it to myself. It’s almost like my teenage LSD tree-hugging trips. Didn’t ‘they’ say something about opening the doors of perception? Perhaps we are the new hippies but without their terrible sense of fashion. Anyway, I digress here. Let’s just say that in a world made of equal objects and ridden of anthropocentrism, there is no privileged ontological space for ‘art objects.’ Because if we allow the art object to be in any way privileged, then we are a step closer to getting back to anthropocentrism because if art is special, then so must be its creator (the human genius). There is no art; there is only aesthetic experience.

François Adragna: What is a photographic series?

Lise Sarfati: It is a set of photographs which are linked to each other and which create a whole. Something which shuts us in and in which we cannot find the exit. It is also a way of thinking. A form.

[…]

FA: Finally, why not a movie?

LS: Because of the silence and stillness, because of the power of the fixed image and its circulation as an object.

[…]

FA: The uniqueness of your work is based on the gaze. It reminds me of Roland Barthes who said :  ”The gaze, if it insists (if it lasts, if it traverses, with the photograph, Time) the gaze is always potentially crazy : it is at once the effect of truth and the effect of madness. ”

LS: Truth and madness. Subjectivity. No, I think I first start with a subjective mental image and I try to make it cross through reality, I project it on the outside world. I expect from the viewer, that they will project their subjectivity into the image as well. Also, I hate explaining my work. It is made to be looked at.