A publishing house is a fragile organism

In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’

- Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98

photo credit: anyjazz65

In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …

Angels dancing in the static

“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian

[key texts] Oshii, Haraway, Cunningham, Gibson

Some video fragments for a Wednesday afternoon; loosely indicative of where my brain is at this precise moment.

1. Clip from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence – a brilliant film, directed by Mamoru Oshii:

The female forensic specialist is named for Donna Haraway, which segues nicely into the second clip.

2. Video montage (mash-up) inspired by Haraway’s landmark feminist essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto‘. Created by YouTube user artlessartist, this includes some really nice footage, particularly that of the different examples of cyborg and robot:

3. Music video for Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’ – directed by Chris Cunningham:

Supposedly, Cunningham was the inspiration for an minor character in Pattern Recognition (2003) – the (absent) owner of the flat Gibson’s protagonist is house-sitting:

‘Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn halflight, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.’

- William Gibson, 2003: p. 5

4. Clip from No Maps for These Territories (2000), with Gibson talking about technology:

Wunderkammern: ‘Please do not touch the walrus’

BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz on Wunderkammern:

CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.

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Goldsmiths: ‘Jacob Vaark’s Ghost’

Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.

For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths – helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.

Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:

Stuart Candy: ‘The Unthinkable and the Unimaginable’

Dating back to November 2009, this talk by Stuart Candy resonates at an incredibly similar frequency to where my head is right now. Highly recommended.

So, not only am I attempting an essay that links Stuart’s examples of experiential futuring, the wunderkammer, and public sociology, but I’m also in the early stages of some kind of design fiction slash media futures thing with two other MA students from Goldsmiths – and it’s probably the most fired up I’ve been since the end of Superstruct. For more on both project and essay, watch this space.

Goldsmiths: ‘Advertising, Screens and the Airport Chapel’

The first (assessed) essay for my Masters degree, deploying the work of French anthropologist Marc Augé in relation to a key site of modernity – the airport terminal. The first half is a work of ethnographic ‘thick description,’ which is then subjected to a critical analysis:

photo credit: irina slutsky

Network Dystopias

Architecture student Keiichi Matsuda‘s AR concept video triggered memories of a short vignette posted on a forum by a pseudonymous stranger, back in 2008. Taken together, we get something like Bladerunner with a 2000s sensibility -

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Goldsmiths: Autumn’s Final Fortnight

Really need to get this post finished before heading back up to London for the ice-encrusted start of Spring Term. So, here’s a compressed summary of Weeks Eleven (30/11 – 4/12) and Twelve (7/12 – 11/12).

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Peer production, no hippy lovefest

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)