Friday 30 November 2012

Patricia Piccinini

There is an amazing video piece at the Patricia Piccinini exhibition at Haunch of Venison gallery on New Bond Street where a woman has some kind of CGI goo pouring out of her mouth onto the ground which accumulates to form the structures around her. It reminded me of some of what we have been discussing in class, particularly in regards to materialist notions about the voice. 

The exhibition is definitely worth seeing as it also deals with really interesting ideas surrounding nature/culture. 

The press release from Haunch of Venison reads, "The characters in Piccinini’s stories are alien creatures, mutated animal/human hybrids and startlingly lifelike - they simultaneously attract and unsettle the viewer. Her anthropomorphised machines - motorbikes as lovers, staring lovingly at one another – reference both a universal instinct to apply human emotions to all animals and things, as well as an implied genealogy that humans and technology are increasingly intertwined. Her work  ultimately questions the way that contemporary technology and culture changes an understanding of what it means to be human and the relationships with, and responsibilities towards, the things mankind creates in the name of progress."


Thursday 29 November 2012

Exorcist scene - original Linda Blair voice followed by dubbed voice (Mercedes McCambridge)

Hammer House Of Horror: Ep. 12 - The Two Faces Of Evil



I used to be obsessed with dopplegangers. This is very scary, I'm not sure what's more frightening though, the glottal groans and velociraptor shrieks or the obtusely quaint englishness of it all.

The architecture and decor in that hospital spells trouble from the start - totally up on that gothic christianity / pagan masonic tip - you can almost smell the tannis root....

Great tip Mark.

Monday 26 November 2012

Voices from the Depths

A nice little Radiolab episode here about cartoon polyphonies and the voice acting as a lifeline when physical conciousness is all but gone.

That's all Folks!

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/nov/06/blanc/

Wednesday 21 November 2012

the feministscum kollective

As promised here is a link to the feministscum kollective



The feminist scum kollective is a non-heriarchical group which anyone can join. There isn't a particularly cohesive element to the group but I would say that we are largely queer, anarchist, and feminist. The idea of the group is roughly based on ideas proposed in Valarie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. If you haven't read the SCUM Manifesto you really should. 

Feel free to submit any critical essays, art, anecdotal writings,  or music to feministscumkollective. If you read the manifesto that follows, there is a lot of emphasis put on publishing papers written in academic settings which would otherwise lie dormant on your hard drive. 

Also you can follow femscum on Facebook for regular updates! 

The manifesto, which exists as a wiki here, reads as of November 21, 2012: 





FEMINISTSCUM KOLLECTIVE WIKI-MANIFESTO:
“The veneration of `Art' and `Culture'… leads to the constant intrusion on our sensibilities of pompous dissertations on the deep beauty of this and that turn. This allows the `artist' to be setup as one possessing superior feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments, thereby undermining the faith of insecure women in the value and validity of their own feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments.” 
VALARIE SOLANAS

THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF A COLLECTIVE  
1. The act of publishing underneath an umbrella organization decentralizes a creative endeavor from a privatized/individualized/isolated/singularized pursuit to one that stems from a community. This credits the entire community with a creative product rather than just one persona. Why is this important? This is important because it reaffirms and creates community by allowing creative works to stem from the context of a community rather than an individuals isolated experience. This transference of creativity from the individual to the community is a revolutionary act that undermines the processes in which creativity is commoditized upon by being tied to one creative being  
i. In the words of Valarie Solanas, “The veneration of `Art' and `Culture'…leads to the constant intrusion on our sensibilities of pompous dissertations on the deep beauty of this and that turn. This allows the `artist' to be setup as one possessing superior feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments, thereby undermining the faith of insecure women in the value and validity of their own feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments.” At least I think that quote is applicable. Who really knows what Valarie Solanas is talking about.
 2. A collective allows for collaborations and creative projects that otherwise don’t have a home. (there are creative projects, rants, drawings, etc etc that all are growing dust in our hard drives and in storage. i think u r really talented and i think u should share ur work!!!)
a. Here is a personal anecdote: Sometimes I get really freaked out when I think about all of the amazing/radical manifestos and political statements that are written/embedded in my class papers. In my possession I have a number of academic texts that I have written that have never been read by anyone besides a professor. Where does all of that amazing information go? It just sits on my fucking computer wasting away and of no use to anyone. Granted, some of my papers belong deep within my computer but some of them are pretty good. 
b. Our private elite stuffy education has told us to bury all of this radical information- to separate out our idea about ‘academics’ and ‘politics.’ This collective website is a venue to break down that fake barrier between our beliefs as activists and political bodies and our academic selves. I mean, after all, didn’t they teach us that the academics can be a form of activism? 
i. I encourage you to think about this- do you have a paragraph from a paper that you are really proud of? How about an entire essay you wrote that you are super proud of? Why are you limiting access to that paper? Wouldn’t you want it to be shared with as many people as possible even if there are a few typos? (THINK ABOUT ACCESS AND EDUCATIONAL PRIVILEGE AND HOW PUBLISHING CAN BE A FORM OF SOCIAL JUSTICE) 
3. The Internet is an amazingly revolutionary medium that allows for widespread access to a huge body of information. This access becomes a revolutionary tool because it allows for democratized access to information rather than an elite structure of top-down access. Universal access is the keystone to ensuring that creative communities can grow and network despite physical, geographic, monetary, and temporal boundaries.  
a. By the end of four years of college your brain is worth almost 250,000 dollars, an amount of money that a lot of people wont ever see in their LIFE! You wrote papers, made art, and wrote poetry because you had the academic PRIVLEDGE and ACCESS to college classes. Wouldn’t the most revolutionary act be to publish and share every last bit of knowledge that you gained from your education?

Thursday 1 November 2012

"Yzur" Leopoldo Lugones


"Yzur"

Leopoldo Lugones

Carlos Costa and Georges Dodds, transl.


Big thanks to Tiff Thomas and Jon Shaw for this one.

Amazing short story by Lugones about a haughty white dude who tries to get a chimpanzee to speak. You may cringe at the condescending tone of superiority and shadow of colonial rascism but past all that there are some really interesting little passages about voice. Connects very well with the Burroughs story on the reading list too (one of the main (- adamic - no pun -) inspirations behind my last post on my own blog). There is a nice passage about the difference between vowels and consonants too which understandably interested me. Also, it re-ignighted my interest in phylogenetic language evolution.... Broca's area and all that.... I kinda feel that monkeys can speak, and must have a super simple form of language, rather than an instinctive emotive cry, but do actually learn sounds for things in societies - which self replicate (oh language the virus! -  Bill), they do understand symbolic gestures too, so must have semantic capacity. 

There is a great scene about Yzur's tongue being pulled and lips contorted, made me think of Jared Diamonds QWERTY text  - yup language is painful, but once there I guess we get a kinda psychosemantic/corpo-mechanic version of stockholm syndrome........ 

I wonder - , if Yzur's chimpnapper was so superior and learned surely it would've been easier for him to just learn chimpanzee rather than 't'other way round?