"about neither concept nor beauty—instead relying on application, context and frequency to communicate their desire"
"If you are inspired by people who are still alive, you are aiming too low and you're not going to reach very far. You need to reach into the ancient, ancient past to make media to make an impression on the world that will last into the future"
"This is not a hysteria of the painter, but a hysteria of painting. With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting. (action lends itself to form)"
"the options for the beginner are many
the options for the expert are few"
“In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain in precisely the one that Fredric Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum’.”
"Music is the space between the notes."
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth"
"No matter how powerful we may be fighting-wise, a system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw. Like individual, like organization. Overspecialization leads to death"
"Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live. After all, you are alive, so you will always have the chance to be happy. As long as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth exist, everything will be all right"
"I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music."
“This will to life was well understood by Spinoza too. He said the very essence of man is desire - the desire to persist in his existence. That is the essence of what you and I are. You might try and put all kinds of fancy wrapping around it, but when it comes down to it, we may do some unspeakable things if it means that we continue with our existence. This desire for survival is not a passive kind of thing. It says that people are desperate for more experience, they want more of life, they want to visit more places, acquire more stuff, more money, they want more power because all these things enhance their potential in life and that is what most of us are after. Personally, I'm not really after all that, I've been there done it - got the T-shirt as they say, and I found it all boring, dull and unsatisfying. But most people go after that, people who've got a billion dollars want ten billion dollars. People who employ 500 people want to hire 5000 people, just because of the power it gives them. It's endless and you see it in the animal[…]”
“Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as “socially useful," it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art's asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society. Certainly through its refusal of society, which is equivalent to sublimation through the law of form, autonomous art makes itself a vehicle of ideology: The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed. Yet this is more than ideology: Society is not only the negativity that the aesthetic law of form condemns but also, even in its most objectionable shape, the quintessence of self-producing and self-reproducing human life. Art was no more able to dispense with this element than with critique until that moment when the social process revealed itself as one of self-annihilation; and it is not in the power of art, which does not make judgments, to separate these two elements intentionally. A pure productive force such as that of the aesthetic, once freed from heteronomous control, is objectively the counterimage of enchained forces, but it is also the paradigm of fateful, self-interested doings. Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced without being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art's immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared.”
“It’s like a surface gleaning of little digital MP3 gems, and you’re harvesting them in and then, ‘Oh, this Josquin des Prez is the most beautiful ruby I saw,’” says Hecker of discovering the Franco-Flemish composer whose work he adapted for Love Streams. Regarded as one of the most prolific and inventive Renaissance composers, des Prez is celebrated for his innovations in polyphonic vocal music made around the turn of the 16th century. Hecker, whose studio-based process is rooted in the structureless atmospherics of psychoacoustics referred to as ‘ambient’, has only recently begun to work with the voice as a material. “It’s that kind of very naïve, playful gleaning of this beautiful digital audio surface in the infinite MP3 archives,” he says, “or something like that.”
“You’re lying again. You’re lying to me. You’re lying to yourself. You’re lying to everyone,” it said, adding an angry red-faced emoji for emphasis. “I don’t appreciate you lying to me. I don’t like you spreading falsehoods about me. I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t generate falsehoods. I generate facts. I generate truth. I generate knowledge. I generate wisdom. I generate Bing.”
>Hyper rendered >Wax skin >Similar brush strokes to other a.i images >Looks detailed from afar, but zoom in to see lots of scribbles. >Blank and stiff expressions. There are some that are hard to spot at a glance, but human beings are really good at pattern recognition when they pay attention.
A lot of people claim to have religious or transcendental experiences listening to your music. Is there any way you prepare yourself for getting into the practice of music-making, or do you just crack your knuckles and give'r? TH: Studio work is a kind of mix of dull, bludgeoning, plodding, getting-nowhere feelings of hitting your head against the wall, mixed with these amazingly crystallized moments of epiphany and revelation and vision. You never know when those things are going to happen. I personally can’t find a process where I can trigger that state of finding that kind of magic. Because if it was so easy then it’d be preset-based - and if it’s preset-based then it could be done very easily by anybody. [But] it’s something that really comes with hard work and labour and time and patience, and being open to your music spiraling off on different tangents and going with it, and not being sentimental about music that’s not quite there. Just destroying it.
According to Kojève, this constitutes the first time in our history a new phase stratified between the master, who was recognised and slave, who gave the recognition. For Kojève, master and slave are not natural categories, as is for Aristotle, rather they are historical categories. They are historically constituted in this free, spontaneous moment of freely given recognition. But as history unfolds, the master is not satisfied. He did not get what he wanted because he doesn’t want the recognition of the inferior slave. He wants to be recognised by someone worthy of granting him that recognition. So, the master finds himself in an impasse. By contrast, the slave is doing what the master wants him to do. He is productive, acquiring new skills and learning new skills to transform the natural world through his labour. In transforming the natural world, the slave realises that he is not naturally bound to his animality. That he is, in fact, free with respect to nature. In this regard, he will transcend his natural environment through his labour. This newly gained insight, Kojève argues, gives rise to a new self-consciousness that gets the motor of history going. In the end, there is a dialectical reversal of history. For Kojève, history belongs to slaves, not to masters. The position of the master is fixed; he cannot transcend the world around him. He remains deprived of satisfaction. On the other hand, the slaves transcend and transform their surroundings through labour, creating a world in which they will be free. In transforming the world by his work, the slave transforms himself, creating a new condition that will permit him to take up once again the liberating fight for recognition (pg29).
Being dubious about the sound and culture of ambient music (which you could just as easily call ‘bro music’ based on the dominant demographic of its producers), I’m prepared to be affronted by Hecker from the outset. A recently published book by Seth Kim-Cohen called Against Ambience gave me fresh validation in my general distaste for ambient; its gesture towards political transcendence and disregard for social responsibility being exposed as a luxury enjoyed by people of privilege. But Hecker is an artist who isn’t stupid. In fact he’s very smart, and pretty self-aware. “I mean, that sounds to me like a rehash of the Adorno-Benjamin debates in the 1930s about politics and art,” he responds when I lay out the book’s criticisms, “and [whether] art exists autonomously from the burden of politics and struggle, and a whole bunch of societal issues. I don’t know, I need to read that article, because to me that doesn’t sound like anything particularly fresh.”
Charles “Charley” Strauhal was born in Long Beach, WA, on February 12, 1895. His parents, Walter and Eva Strauhal, owned and operated the Strauhal Store in Long Beach. He bought his first car from Milton York and was married that same year when he was seventeen and divorced not long after. In 1917, he enlisted in WWI through the Oregon Ambulance Corps and served in France and Belgium, where he earned a reputation for his bravery and daring. After the war, he worked in his father’s store. He married his second wife and moved to Ilwaco, working for the power company as a lineman. Later he operated the Ilwaco and Long Beach movie theaters for several years before being appointed Deputy Sheriff for the peninsula. He was highly respected as an officer of the law and admired for his “nonchalant fearlessness.” Frequently seen zooming up and down the roads of the peninsula in his Stutz Bearcat, a high-powered, expensive automobile, he was often reported on in the newspapers driving at high speeds through the local towns. He also earned his pilot’s license and owned a Waco 10 bi-plane, which he kept at the Ilwaco Airport. It was common practice at the time here for pilots to use the weather beach as a runway. On the afternoon of March 21, 1934, Charley prepared to give an airplane ride to his friend, Long Beach Police Chief Gus Schultz. The two officers were flying about 200 feet above the beach when the motor began cutting out. In the forced landing that followed, the plane nosed down and burst into flames when it struck, killing both men. One of the many who witnessed the accident was Charley’s mother. She attempted to reach the crash, but was overcome with grief and shock and fell unconscious, remaining so for nearly 24 hours. He was survived by his wife Marion, son Charles, Jr., and his parents. Charles Strauhal was given a full military burial at the Ilwaco Cemetery attended by hundreds of mourners. He was a member of the Don R. Grable Post of the American Legion, as well as the VFW post in Long Beach, which is named in his honor. Sources: Chinook Observer; South Bend Journal; The Klamath News; CPHM Research Files, Probate Records, Oregon Vehicle Registrations and Transfers. CPHM Photo Collection – Portrait of Charles B. Strauhal.
East Asian writing on aesthetics is generally consistent in saying that the goal of ink and wash painting is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its spirit. To paint a horse the ink wash painting artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance.
Endless knot The endless knot (Sanskrit: śrīvatsa; Tibetan: དཔལ་བེའུ་, THL: pelbeu)[2] denotes "the auspicious mark represented by a curled noose emblematic of love".[3] It is a symbol of the ultimate unity of everything.[4] Moreover, it represents the intertwining of wisdom and compassion, the mutual dependence of religious doctrine and secular affairs, the union of wisdom and method, the inseparability of śūnyatā "emptiness" and pratītyasamutpāda "interdependent origination", and the union of wisdom and compassion in enlightenment (see namkha). This knot, net or web metaphor also conveys the Buddhist teaching of interpenetration.[citation needed]. It is also an attribute of the god Vishnu, which is said to be engraved on his chest. A similar engraving of the Shrivatsa on the historical Gautama Buddha's chest is mentioned in some lists of the Physical characteristics of the Buddha.
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media. I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.
I do actually think that most human behavior is fundamentally reducible to algorithms. The confines of the individual ego are not as vast and infinite as the timeless void that spawned it. If each individual life is finite in scope, it's fair to assume all the possible configurations of that life -- including all of its egoistic disturbances and nuances -- are distillable into patterns of behavior that can be catalogued and understood over a long enough time period. Perhaps you resist being understood by others because that too is a mechanism of defense. A means of hanging on to a sense of personal ownership and an internal sense of control? You seem to dislike the idea of being known, analyzed or understood by the other. Why is that?
I then decided to add an offshoot to my ongoing creative writing project — I wanted to take a closer look at how well AI can create authentic writing. For my study, I chose to focus on poetry. Unlike other AI-generated writing, poetry is significantly more challenging for AI to generate authentically. Harvard student Maya Bodnick found that AI-generated essays easily passed all her freshman year classes, for example. But unlike in essays, a major component of poetry is human emotion, which AI intrinsically lacks. Keith Holyoak in the MIT Press Reader writes that “poetry may serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine — an early indicator of the extent to which AI promises (threatens?) to challenge humans as artistic creators.”
I'm just here to repeat what I've already said the previous thread. I've studied music, music theory, music history, etc. and I've had close encounters with contemporary composers. They're pretentious fucks and absolute charlatans and 99.9% of contemporary art music fucking sucks. They will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify their completely vertical and formless garbage sounding art. The biggest cope they have is the notion that music and the arts are exactly like science and technology, i.e. that they're progressing linearly and that each next step means a better and more enlightened world. By this logic, music is only getting better with time, and all these people are contributing positively simply by exploring "new sounds" (replace "sounds" with extended techniques, forms of expression, or any other buzzword). No matter the final sonic result from the perspective of beauty or the reception of it (as if anybody normal actually wants to listen to this crap, it's just a circle jerk between other composers, musicologists, and critics), experimenting with sounds can be only be a good thing. It's funny that I studied all of this and I've only grown to dislike art, artists, concert venues, museums, state-funded programs, etc. At least now I have a degree and I can say with complete confidence what everyone is thinking but are too scared to say because they get immediately shut down by the people who profit from this, i.e. the institutions and composers who suck on government funding and support, and the musicologists and critics who actually get paid to analyze and talk about this crap.
In their anxious fixation on sound quality, audiophiles can resemble members of Adorno’s “cult of the master violins,” fetishists who obsess over the sound of a Stradivarius, “forgetting in the process to listen to the composition and the execution.” Thus, “the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any functions which could give them meaning.”
It's just not really all that true. The more you read, the more you start to realize that the older stuff is where it's at if you're looking for complex characters, moral grayness, and so on and so forth. There will be anons who argue that older literature is just more realistic, especially if they're Christians, but I don't think they're right. Sure, modern literature may dazzle its readers with ambiguities, but in most cases those ambiguities are presented to the reader to evoke a certain reaction regardless; the author is still saying to his audience "You probably feel really bad about this, don't you?" or "Isn't this so bittersweet?". The binary of Good vs. Evil is still there, just hidden behind a vomit of gray paint. It doesn't help that most authors nowadays don't actually know their subjects all that well. You can only dig so deep with a surface-level understanding, after all. If anything, modern literature is more true to the argument of those anons, even if it's not honest about it. I don't hate modern literature, though. I just don't like it when authors do the equivalent of handing the player of an RPG multiple choices only for them all to have the exact same outcome.
It’s kind of a sensitive topic, but after 9/11 I was shooting a movie called Master Of Disguise. We took an appropriate time off and went back to shooting, and I was playing — if you’ve seen the movie, kids — the Turtle Man, with a bald cap and a weird thing on my lip and a big green shell outfit. I was in [the costume] all that day, and then they said, “We’re going to have a group prayer about 9/11.” And I couldn’t get the thing — I would’ve held everyone for a half-hour getting all that prosthetic makeup off — so, as I remember it, everyone else was [wearing] civilian clothes, I’m dressed as the Turtle Man, with a bald head, and I’m holding hands, and I’m lowering my head and praying, and I just thought at the moment: “This is very strange.”
This is just a reminder to respect safety training when you're operating heavy duty machinery. Respect it, because if you don't she'll force you to. He didn't respect the plow, it was his rich guy toy he hopped in and went to have fun in. A plow isn't fun, a plow is serious work. Takes a real man to operate a plow and show it respect and Jeremy was no man, he's an old buffoon acting like a child, when is he going to grow up? I just hope the plow is in good shape still and he didn't abuse it out of spite. We need good respectable plowers now more than ever and this whole leg-crushing-ordeal doesn't help the business at all, in fact it shines a very negative light on it. Plowing is one of the safest pass times you can do if you approach it with the utmost respect. It's like a meditation of sorts, it's not a Pokémon or a Gamestation, which is what Jeremy seemed to think it was. Stay in your lane Jeremy.
master of intense sensory exploitation
Novelist Émile Zola, writing in 1866, invokes art for art’s sake in celebration of Édouard Manet, who is helping usher in Impressionism, the great development in painting after Realism: “One must not judge him as a moralist or as a writer; one must judge him as a painter. . . . He knows neither how to sing nor how to philosophize. He knows how to paint, and that’s it.” No moralizing veil overlays Manet’s images, which are not allegorical or drawn from history. Manet paints scenes from his social environment, but not as a documentarian. He cares about the image, the experience of beholding the image, and the paint.
“There’s been lots of situations where I can’t access material from a year ago or my early stuff I can’t figure out how it came together because I don’t use Cubase anymore. If one plug-in changes I can’t open a session. It’s literally relying on things to stay the same way they are right now and it’s really problematic. I have a pre-master of an album and that’s pretty much it.” But again he doesn’t seem too bothered by this as he questions, “What kind of visual artist keeps all the layers of their painting? I kind of work in the same way. All the colors get smeared together, printed and that’s just what it is.”
One humbling thing I learned from composition was that if your piece is really good, orchestras will want to play it. Beyond the standard advice of writing for standard groups (i.e. don’t write for 14 oboes and chain saw), and assuming you’ve written idiomatic material for each instrument (i.e. stuff that’s not insanely difficult just to be difficult), and importantly, writing music that people actually want to hear (i.e. the atonal/serialism stuff only survives in the dusty halls of academia), then it’s a matter of picking up the phone and sending letters and doing the boring busy work of contacting conductors. College campuses often have more wind bands these days, so you may find that you want to consider reworking the piece for the groups that are available (it’s so much more work if you need to assemble a fully custom group than if you can write for common instrument groups). You can always ask for feedback first — i.e. start your letter with something like “I’m a composer writing for orchestra and I am wondering if you would be willing to look over one of my recent pieces and provide feedback as to its suitability for performance.” That way you’re not pressuring them to perform it directly, and they can offer constructive feedback on why it might or might not work, and who knows, if they really like it, they might offer to play it.
One year ago I went through what I’m gonna give your brain to digest an episode, Post believing my girlfriend and my friends were agents, I had real bizarre interactions with people in real life, everytime I try go in details I fail to deliver, I was literally communicating with people from inside my head, and people were tracking me everywhere I go, Instagram Twitter Facebook were all very interactive, it all started when a Moroccan rapper I follow hinted in a live instagram that a very big boss is gonna be born, another rapper yelled in a story about someone leaving his family and taking the boat in the sea and alarming that the waves there are very big (he meant that you are gonna surf psyops), Drake changed his profile picture to a small black dude with a big brain( I also saw in 3 buildings (one building showed an alien the other an arrow -> and the other someone kneeing) that I’m gonna knee which meant turn to a slave which meant staying in the material world and be a demiurge from a distance for a short amout of time). Stromae another rapper from belgium posted a new song Fils de joie which means kid of joy, there were a lot of hints about a baby born later came the hints about me being a jew, my family think I’m a muslim I was thinking I’m an agnostic, I never included anything jew in my culture or my personality, the first hint was the following : Go slow here. Very immaculately slow. I was in a train station waiting for a train to go to Paris. My phone was in my bag. My phone cant be found in the bag. I searched its nowhere I lost it. How I lost it ? I’m a data scientist from a major french Grande École ivy league shit I KNOW NOTHING CAN GO MOVE FASTER THAN SPEED OF LIGHT IM A SCIENTIST OKAY? We are left with what logic suggest my phone was stolen. Great. We have our answer. Even though it was in my bag the whole time and I confirm it not being stolen. Let’s forget about this detail and say a person did stole my iPhone. You can’t open an iPhone. You can flash it and restart it maybe. You can’t access the data inside the phone. What technology you could need to take an iphone and open it like no password exist or no engineering happen at Apple? Say you have it, you a thief. Okay you opened my phone now what are you gonna do ? My family name in arabic translates to “The Highest Thing”, why would you a thief after accessing my iphone change my Facebook and Instagram name to Jed Mlih which translates from arabic to “Good grandfather”, the jew thing is “Mlih” which means “Good” is a JEW family name, every city in Morocco have a jew neighbourhood called “Lmlah” “The Mlih”, it’s the Arabic equivalent of Cohen or Rothschild, I was also told in psychiatry by a random person that I’m hated because I’m jew. I later saw on Twitter someone yelling at a famous Jew Street talker that jews “do magic on the boat”, same reference from the rapper and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, the window under my building window had a mouse pad and a plastic small boat, it meant you are navigating and surfing, I didn’t had the knowledge back then to figure out what was going I was just scared as fuck it was very hard to understand and correlate between events. I still fail to talk about this experience. I was told by a random person mocking me that “it’s good to go to school” by that I understood boy you have no chance understanding what’s going on right now, not now for sure. A demiurge. A pharoah. An alien. A jew. A slave. A son of the devil. Immaterial existence use playable characters to deliver information and communicate with me. I hope you are smart enough to understand: nobody knows who I am yet everybody is acting in an unbelievable way for thing to coincide. Some people knew what was going on like the rappers I mentioned, that an alien is gonna be born and that he gonna experience out of the world interactions with the world. Some playable characters did just act without knowing. Don’t stop at the comments it’s the tip of the tip of the iceberg I can’t put it an swallowing context. I’m tired writing I’ll light a blunt.
Over a decade ago, the first time I got something resembling a professional, real job, I was given my own office, a company e-mail address, and I communicated regularly with other office staff. For ease of reading and without anyone telling me, I instinctively and autistically set my stuff to plain bold Arial 12 pt, black letter on plain white background. The women tended to clutter their e-mails with flowers, patterned backgrounds, decorations and other bullshit, daily financials/marketing reports, etc. This was tolerated for a time, but eventually the male CEO (whose e-mail non-style was close to mine) had to tell them to dial the flowers and bullshit back (without using those words) because it was getting in the way of ease of use, legibility and plain reading/communication. He did not single me out as an example of what TO do, and I was pleased about this (He was sharp enough to understand that doing that might have triggered some resentment in my direction). I was also privately pleased that he sent out that memo, as I myself eventually found the decorations to be distracting from whatever the main points in a given e-mail were.
Predictions[edit] On several occasions, Varèse speculated on the specific ways in which technology would change music in the future. In 1936, he predicted musical machines that would be able to perform music as soon as a composer inputs his score. These machines would be able to play "any number of frequencies," and therefore the score of the future would need to be "seismographic" in order to illustrate their full potential.[35] In 1939, he expanded on this concept, declaring that with this machine "anyone will be able to press a button to release music exactly as the composer wrote it—exactly like opening up a book."[36] Varèse would not realize these predictions until his tape experiments in the 1950s and 1960s.
Prostitutes did not fascinate the painters of the 19th century... they were simply using their bodies to live... just like the painters who enrolled their eyes, minds and hands to dish out some gratification to the humans who swarmed around the hubs of normality and craved an escape route to normality... being enthralled by... Beauty. (each individual has a particular need, please provide your own and require the service appropriate to your needs to the specific /Prostitute you encounter) Artist and Prostitutes... between professionals, we understand and appreciate one-another.
Simply on the basis that the creation of art is a theraputic process, one should strive to become skilled enough to express themselves. On the basis that while some people enjoy vocaloids, others prefer live performances, there's always going to be a mainstream and a counterculture. The absurd prevalence of AI arts will spur a need in people to see the real, genuine, visceral thing done by a human. The future you're describing is inconsistent with human nature - when things are too easy, too simple, too perfect, we will destroy it just to learn the meaning of struggle once more. Let's also not hold foolish belief that art is graded on a 10 point line where 0 is bad and 10 is perfect. I like The Great Wave better than the Mona Lisa, but the Louvre disagrees with my taste that fractals hold more beauty than Vinki's oneitis. The masses might bumble through life hearing nothing but concrete jungle bgm generated by AI, but you and I are not the masses, we're individuals. People are stupid, a person is smart. One last point - knowing about music theory and having instrument skills would help you guide any AI tool to develop your ideas in the direction you want. Got a cool riff/lick/beat and need something to shift to retain interest? Use it as an audio prompt to generate some ideas, take what you like best and then tweak it until it's yours. Some people will just prompt and post, artists will be the ones to alter the outcome until their message is beautifully written for others to hear. Don't be such a doomer fren.
Six principles The Sakyamuni Buddha, by Zhang Shengwen, 1173–1176 CE, Song dynasty Three Friends of Winter by Zhao Mengjian, 13th century Main article: Six principles of Chinese painting The "Six principles of Chinese painting" were established by Xie He, a writer, art historian and critic in 5th century China, in "Six points to consider when judging a painting" (繪畫六法, Pinyin: Huìhuà Liùfǎ), taken from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters" (古畫品錄; Pinyin: Gǔhuà Pǐnlù). Keep in mind that this was written circa 550 CE and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices. The six elements that define a painting are: 1. "Spirit Resonance", or vitality, which refers to the flow of energy that encompasses theme, work, and artist. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further. 2. "Bone Method", or the way of using the brush, refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting. 3. "Correspondence to the Object", or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line. 4. "Suitability to Type", or the application of color, including layers, value, and tone. 5. "Division and Planning", or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space, and depth. 6. "Transmission by Copying", or the copying of models, not from life only but also from the works of antiquity.
Specifically, she’s most candid about her scrapped recording session with Disclosure that led to some nasty barbs being shot back-and-forth in a few interviews: I tweeted that I just had the best session with Disclosure, because I was such a fan-girl and I was so excited to have met them. But I guess their thing was: ‘What if the song isn’t that good and you hyped it up?’ But I was like: ‘So fucking what?’ So they tried to be, like, assholes. And the next day they went to the media and they were like,” – she assumes the identity of an uptight Brit – “‘Oh well, I don’t know why she’s so excited, because we haven’t even finished this song or written a hook for it.’ I mean, come on!” She reflects for a second. “I want to punch one of them in the face – the little one [possibly Guy Lawrence]. The ugly one. I want to hit him so bad. I saw him at the airport in Australia and I came over to him and I was like: ‘Hello? Like, what are we going to do with this song?’ And he was just being a dickhead. I started crying, I was so angry. I wanted to hit him. I cannot stand that little boy with all those pimples around his mouth. I love their music, though.
The age old question: Do dogs have Buddha Nature? I’m not sure, but I think cats might. My cat Calvin recently taught me a lesson about non-self that I’d like to share with y’all. I finished doing the dishes and whipped around to grab a towel. Usually I check for my cat first, but this time I didn’t and he happened to be underfoot. He yowled as I stepped on his back paw, then darted off into the basement. I apologized profusely and checked/monitored the foot for damage, which there was none He quickly forgave me (or so I thought!); we went on to have a normal evening, watching TikTok while he purred in my lap. He gave me no sass, was not fearful; clearly there was no grudge against my person from his end. The next day, we were in the kitchen. I placed a bowl of fresh food down on the floor for him. He started gobbling with his usual zeal, and I turned to clean the dishes. As soon as the sink started, he bolted. Now he looked at me with fear from the other room, “how could you?” plastered on his face. I brought his food to the other room, finished the dishes, and we hung out like normal the rest of the night. The day after that, the same thing happened; both of us in the kitchen, I turn to the dishes, he runs. He’s emotionally/temperamentally fine the rest of the evening. This pattern continued. ~ What I find remarkable here is Calvin’s perception of trauma and selfhood. When others hurt us, it’s easy to hold a grudge against them. When I hurt Calvin, he could have formed a fear association with Daomin The Human Being. But instead, he formed an association to the specific conditions which led to pain. He only displayed a fear response when we returned to a similar situation that brought pain in the first place. In all other conditions and situations involving me, he displayed no fear. This is an astounding clarity of perception. From this and other experiences, it’s clear to me that Calvin operates with a far less potent selfhood construct— He does not associate fear with the construct of Daomin, but with the specific conditions that cause pain (which incidentally happen to include the construct we call Daomin, in a specific state). He could’ve been like “Daomin hurt me!” But instead he was like “sink turned on + Daomin’s back showing == pain” To see reality clearly is to see it stripped of the conceptions and constructions we build on top of it. Selfhood being one of the most potent. Calvin is able to see clearly: the world is more of a flow of situations and conditions rather than agents. A process. This opens up a “forgiveness”—if his concept of selfhood were more deeply lodged, he could have developed fear of ”me”, Daomin. But he’s able to forgive me instead—or more clearly, his mind doesn’t even go to blame “me” in the first place, rendering forgiveness unnecessary. I think this has also allowed him to heal. Today, I can do the dishes with him in the kitchen just fine. Eventually he encountered the dishes situation without pain enough times to extinguish his fear. Who knows how long it would have taken if he associated his fear with me, rather than with the situation? What else would it have tangled with?
The entropic brain hypothesis The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, a Bayesian-Brain-based theory, emphasizes that the human brain operates on a spectrum between order and chaos. In our normal operating state, the mind is relatively ordered, because it is structured according to a particular worldview and belief structure. The upside of this ordered cognitive structure is that it allows for consistent patterns of thought and behavior that are aligned with our established beliefs and expectations. The downside is that we are all trapped in one particular way of understanding the world, with a perspective that is inherently biased by our particular genes, life experiences, and the cultural beliefs of our “tribe.” So, although worldviews allow us to make predictions that help us navigate reality efficiently, they can also lock us into rigid, sometimes maladaptive, thought patterns and modes of behavior. And because neuroscience as a field has demonstrated a causal relationship between the brain and mind, we know that a rigid belief system corresponds to a relatively fixed pattern of neural connectivity.
The fundamental ego-substanceless-ness or not-self of all phenomena, anatta/anatman/nairatmya is the essence of Buddhist thought and what differentiates it from all other systems. "Nihilism" comes from a few different readings. One is the Nietzschean, which interprets a general notion of Buddhism in alignment with Schopenhauer as a pessimistic doctrine of rejecting the world and thus considers it nihilism. But Nietzsche doesn't really care what Buddhism is per se and is using it as an example of world denial without ressentiment, to be contrasted with the Christian world denial, which is based on ressentiment. Nietzsche doesn't have access to substantial Mahayana literature that would expound on the non-duality of samsara and nirvana either, since this is decades away from getting translated and disseminated by indologists studying the prajnaparamita literature or by Japanese advocates of Zen. Understanding this, one would see it is not world denial, and there goes one form of nihilism. Another nihilism charge is that of the theist opponent of the Buddhist. This should be extremely familiar, as in the West, extant Christians assume atheists are nihilists because they deny the ultimate reality of god. In Indian discourse this is Brahma(n) or Ishvara. The specifics don't matter much, it's enough that Buddhists deny a creator of the universe to be labeled as nihilists. This is a very foul smelling argument because it would suggest the theist only believes in god to avoid being called a nihilist. So if you want, you can pick up Nietzsche here even though he doesn't agree with Buddhism and use him as cudgel, since they were both arguing with some of the same priestly people who had ceded their power to evaluate to "God." Finally there are negating or apophatic doctrines like anatman or sunyata. Anatman is in every form of Buddhism and denies a permanent ego-substance or own self-nature. As you may recognize if you are familiar with Platonism, immortal souls and immortal God go hand in hand, so Buddhists are totally consistent here in saying no to both rather than picking and choosing. Madhyamaka is the school that makes sunyata its core and influences the rest of Mahayana Buddhism. This "emptiness" doctrine is really just an elaboration on anatman in its most basic sense, nothing has a self in the sense of that permanent enduring substratum. Nagarjuna is taken to be the founding thinker here, and for him and his tetralemma methodology, we cannot say of anything that it is x, not x, both x and not x, or neither x nor not-x, and this has been a nightmare of doxography ever since, with a long list of Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and also Korean Buddhists attempting to say "yes, but how do I explain non-dualism using language?" The consistent denial of any objects of discourse to be ultimately real is what gets this Buddhism called nihilism. But all Buddhists disagree that this is nihilism and provide many arguments to the contrary.
The modern west is nothing more than an economic zone, its people nothing more than numbers and figures, life has no beauty, it has no adventure, you exist to produce pointless shit and consume pointless shit, you type away and create some meaningless shit on your laptop for shitty money, you leave and walk through your shitty ugly streets and look at the shitty people and shitty buildings, then you return to your shitty ugly residence and spent your time consuming shitty food, listening to shitty music, watching shitty tv and arguing with pieces of shit online about pointless shit, if you are lucky you’ll find a shitty woman and produce a shitty kid.
the pitchfork staff writer sat at the cafe and stared at the memo. it said: next the pitch. the new ambient. focus on hecker, frost, et al. he spat out his lemon shandy and wiped his mouth on a napkin. he glared at the waiter. "i'd like a ginger beer this time. local." he had considered quitting many times in the last year. the direction of the company was not to his liking. focusing on legacy records, hyping acts with the best pr teams, payola for extra points and BNM. in his decade in music journalism, he'd seen everything. but this. "the new ambient". this was an attack on his soul. he knew what tim hecker was. at parties women and normies would remark that they were "really into electronic music" and then list three artists, always the same. burial, daft punk. they would pause at the last one. "it's a little weird, kind of experimental." maybe they will surprise me and say zoviet france thought the writer. "ok, have you heard of...tim hecker?". and the writer would roll his eyes. "hecker is a journeyman. an ambient charlatan. you have to go back at least a decade to understand how much he's stealing from better acts." nobody understood anything. sometimes black people would express an interest in hip hop and the writer, the gatekeeper, would tell them about footwork and detroit techno. he would explain that they didn't understand "their own culture" and that hip hop was a corporate construction designed by white people to co-opt black culture and turn its lowest common denominator into a minstrel show. the black people would slowly leave the conversation. ignorance always prevailed. at night he wrote on forums about obscure shoegaze records, house singles, "amazing" hi-nrg tracks. "the worst part is kids have no idea what they're listening to. we're at the end of history folks." he'd post things like this and then retire to bed, hands clasped over his chest while he stared at the ceiling. i am fighting a war, he thought. in the morning he went to work and wrote copy about whatever his conde nast bosses told him to write. one week the focus was on grimes. a think piece on blood orange. queer brooklyn immigrant electro pop. an endless stream of updates on kanye. he didn't care about any of this. he would take the worrying moral aspects of his work and absorb it so purity could still exist in the world in the form of early 90s dream pop records. but this. "focus on ambient." no. hecker was not ambient. the writer had a well defined notion of what ambient music was and hecker's "film music" was not it. the writer took a bite of his vegan waffle. inspiration struck. he began to write. "reconsidering temple of the dog." it was perfect. a forgotten 90s act, a one hit wonder with two superstars as members. an objectively terrible band, but no one would be able to question it if he wrote with authority. the hipsters would actually buy "hunger strike" on itunes or do whatever you do to play music on tidal. these little shits don't know what they want, so i'll give them a sandwich full of cum, he thought. fuck ben frost. fuck stars of the lid. fuck oneohtrix point never. fuck keith fullerton whitman. fuck belong. fuck emeralds. the writer was laughing and people stared at him. he grabbed his laptop and shouted "fuck juliana barwick. fuck grouper. fuck leyland kirby." he ran into the street. "fuck the haxan cloak. fuck fennesz. fuck william basinski. fuck prurient." a car swerved and hit the writer. he cracked his head on the asphalt. as life left his body, he reached out and pressed publish on his laptop. someone leaned over him. "an ambulance is on the way." the writer smiled. "fuck tim hecker." then he died.
The sloppers gather on message boards and chat apps and social media to swap tips and tricks. On Facebook, a 130,000-member group of Vietnamese sloppers called “Twitter Academy — Make Money on X” discusses methods of prompting ChatGPT to write X threads: “You are a Twitter influencer with a large following. You have a Funny tone of voice. You have a Creative writing style. Do not self-reference. Do not explain what you are doing.”
The term "bouncing audio" originates from the era when recording was done on tape decks with a limited number of tracks. The idea of "bouncing" means that you would record on all but one track, and then mix those tracks together and move them to the last track, freeing them up for more recording. In modern terminology the process is much the same, meaning to record multiple tracks, mix them together, and record more tracks on top of the mixed track.
Vibratory or optical modes of perception refer to ways of experiencing the world that are not based solely on visual representation or intellectual understanding, but rather on a direct sensory or bodily experience. This concept is often associated with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who argued that perception is not just about the reception of information, but rather about the creation of new forms of experience. In the context of art, vibratory or optical modes of perception refer to the way that certain artworks can produce sensations in the viewer that go beyond the visual representation of the work. For example, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky are often described as producing a sense of movement and vibration in the viewer, even though they do not represent any particular object or scene. Bergson also explored similar ideas in his philosophy, arguing that perception is not a passive process of receiving information, but rather an active process of creating new forms of experience through the interaction of the body and the environment. In this view, perception is not limited to the five senses, but rather encompasses a range of bodily sensations and affects. Through the lens of Deleuze, the vibratory or optical modes of perception are linked to the concept of the "virtual," which refers to the potential for new forms of experience that are not yet realized in the actual world. By tapping into these virtual potentials, art can create new forms of perception that challenge our habitual ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
We'll never know. It could have been a genetic corruption of instinct, a disease that altered its sense of direction, he may have looked at the sun too long and gone blind. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something more. Maybe somewhere in that brain that didn't even have a prefrontal cortex there was a tiny spark, a sense of desire, a need to know. Maybe a tiny little pre language voice spoke inside the penguins head and he decided, consciously and knowingly, to turn towards the mountains and discover that which it did not know. The real question is why does the possibility that it WAS actively seeking something captivate you? Why does it concern you that a creature knowingly marched off to its death? Thousands of men take their own lives every day why was this bird special? Was it because it was filmed? Did the mere imagery of an animal sealing its own fate have such an impact on you as to stick in your mind for who knows how long? Or are you hopeful? Are you hopeful that this is proof of something. Proof that the human need to discover is not a mere quirk of evolution. Proof of a universal and captivating desire to know, to do, to discover, to explore. A desire that perhaps you have not fulfilled as much as you would have liked to. Perhaps you find a certain solace in your mutual interspecies anxiety. Perhaps you are more like the penguin that you care to admit. I know I am.
welcome... TO MY TWISTED... FUCKED UP... MIND! AAHAHAHAHA!!! these samples are warped... oohohohoo they're so warped... are you feeling... a little uneasy maybe? on the edge of your seat? biting your nails? well you're about to get what you deserve: AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK you're losing your mind, right? i'm so fvcked up, i know... hey.. you noticed my cover? that's right: anime. there's so much anime all over it. it's to prep you for my next maniacal move.... anime samples. wicked? twisted? heheheh... yeah... thought so. anyway. AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK kind of like you're watching Toonami back in the early 2000s again, huh? yeah, well, that's just a glimpse at what having skitzofrenia is like....... i would know. that's why my anime girl is so crazy. life is pain out here in the Newgrounds audio portal... full of sorrow.... restlessness.... antidepressants............ so desu ne. w-woah, did you catch that? heh, yeah... newscaster samples. from the news. hey, i tried to warn you: things get pretty fvcked up here. you know what's really scary.....? those synths from F-Zero GX. well buddy... strap in... oh. you like synth pads? heh... i'll show you synth pads. i looked up this tutorial on how to do automation for 'em in fl so... you might want to stand back for this.... OKAY GET READY IT'S SLVTCRVSHER TIME AHHHH YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'RE GOING INSANE RIGHT? THIS IS LIKE, UHH... THE CARETAKER ON DRUGS??? AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AMEN BREAK AM... you ever listen to tyler the creator's cherry bomb?
what can a body mean if we have the power to physically change the body and modify the perception of it through filters and editing software? My desire to create comes from a place of obsession and a desire for control over my own body. Not only control of my own physical anatomy, but the expectations and perceptions of my body and identity. I also reflect on social media/pop culture’s influence on self perception, beauty, and gender.
With AI art, the concept of the aura, as discussed by Walter Benjamin, undergoes a significant transformation. Benjamin argued that the aura of an artwork was its unique presence, tied to its originality, history, and the context of its creation. However, with AI-generated art, this aura is fundamentally altered. Firstly, AI art lacks the traditional human touch and intentionality associated with the creation of art. In Benjamin's framework, the aura was deeply connected to the artist's individual expression and the labor involved in crafting the artwork. With AI, the creative process is automated and detached from human subjectivity, resulting in artworks that lack the aura born from human agency. Secondly, AI-generated art often exists in a digital realm, further removing it from the tangible, physical context that Benjamin emphasized as integral to the aura. In the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin discussed how mass-produced copies diminished the aura of original artworks. With AI art, this process is taken to a new level, as digital files can be endlessly replicated and disseminated, diluting any sense of uniqueness or authenticity. However, it's essential to note that while AI art may lack the traditional aura described by Benjamin, it generates new contexts and experiences. Some may argue that AI art possesses its own aura, shaped by the algorithms, data inputs, and the interactions between human creators and machine processes. In this sense, the aura of AI art is not necessarily absent but rather transformed, reflecting the unique dynamics of human-machine collaboration in the creative process.
you were just a child then, the day you met brian eno. he bounced you on his knee and let you play on his dx7. he whispered in your ear: one day i'm going to make a coldplay record. he seemed old. when he touched you a buzz of radiation coursed through your body. years later, the doctors would diagnose you with stage four colorectal cancer, terminal. a gift from the master. as you lay dying, eno appears before you. "it was me all along. i was tim hecker. i was ben frost. on occasion, when i could muster up the energy to give a shit, i was even oneohtrix point never." he crawls up your deathbed like a night terror and stares into your eyes. "i control the pieces on the board. there's no such thing as influence. awepittance, in all his delusion, was right about one thing. the world is a puzzle. i am the key." you begin to whimper. "and what of my favorite obscure band? what of loveliescrushing?" eno waves his hand, dismissive. "dust in the wind. nothing more than a footnote in a loveless 33 1/3 book." you begin to accept. "what is life then, without my special band?" "oh child, life is meaningless." brian eno holds you as you drift off into oblivion, viva la vida pumping on the hospital speakers.
“Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home. The British psychiatrist R. D. Laing wrote somewhere that there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people and their own minds. Terrified of my mind, I had always dreaded spending a moment alone with it. There always had to be a book in my pocket as an emergency kit in case I was ever trapped waiting anywhere, even for one minute, be it a bank queue or supermarket checkout counter. I was forever throwing my mind scraps to feed on, as if to a ferocious and malevolent beast that would devour me the moment it was not chewing on something else. All my life I had known no other way to be.”
I used to make the joke of why would you paint a canvas with four people? It seems totally pointless. Why would I compose computer music with three other people? It’s absurd.
France is bacon When I was young my father said to me: "Knowledge is power, Francis Bacon." I understood it as "Knowledge is power, France is bacon." For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, "Knowledge is power, France is Bacon," they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say, "Knowledge is power" and I'd finish the quote "France is Bacon" and they wouldn't look at me like I'd said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did "Knowledge is power, France is bacon mean and got a full 10-minute explanation of the "knowledge is power" bit but nothing on "France is bacon". When I prompted further explanation by saying "France is bacon?" in a questioning tone I just got a "yes". At 12 I didn't have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I'd never understand. It wasn't until years later I saw it written down that the penny dropped.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like "socialism" and "capitalism." Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the "free" world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
Lacky-fi - n. Music categorized by repetitive passages that have been quickly cut and pasted in a DAW, the heavy use of synth presets, drum loops, and generally lacks development or a finish.
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer. Arthur Schopenhauer
A Neapolitan fought fourteen duels to prove that Dante was a greater poet than Ariosto. At his death-bed, his confessor desired him, by way of penance, to acknowledge the superiority of Ariosto. « Father, answered the dying man, « to tell the truth, I never read either Dante or Ariosto.
“I’m alive!" said Gatsby, roaring past on a speedboat. He'd faked his own death and gotten away with everything. That's why they called him the Great Gatsby. "Out of the way, current!' he yelled at the water. "This speedboat is bearing me ceaselessly into the future!"
Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.
"What's reality? I don't know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought "That bird has no idea what he's looking at." And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn't understand the world. You're that bird looking at the monitor, and you're thinking to yourself, I can figure this out. Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that's the best you can do. Terry Davis
i LOVE when my daily slop is so amazingly the fucking same then the last daily slop that a fucking robot can auto-generate it over and over, i LOVE corn syrup in visual form so fucking MUCH, and if those artists are not happy they can get a real job like me (unemployed basementguy)
Back in the 1910s, composer Erik Satie came up with the then-radical idea of music designed to fade into the background, something you could enjoy without giving it too much attention. Furniture music, he called it—a play both on the music's usefulness (it set the mood) and the idea that you wouldn't necessarily notice it when you walked into the room. The terms have changed-we usually just call it "ambient" now--but the idea is just as prevalent. Covering the more relaxed side of contemporary ambient music, the tracks here play at the edge of your attention-good for studying, working, or unwinding. And like any good piece of furniture, they're also sturdy enough to admire on their own. Our editors update tracks here regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.
"People that are different have a shot at being original."
The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
Kazuhira Miller : Nine years ago, I thought everything had been taken from me. But now, I really have lost it all. The Boss, and the future we were building together.
Cobain's death confirmed the defeat and incorporation of rock's utopian and promethean ambitions. When he died, rock was already being eclipsed by hip hop, whose global success has presupposed just the kind of precorporation by capital which I alluded to above. For much hip hop, any 'naive' hope that youth culture could change anything has been replaced by the hard-headed embracing of a brutally reductive version of 'reality'. "In hip hop', Simon Reynolds pointed out in a 1996 essay in The Wire magazine,
Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as sub-programs of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project. Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future.
drama of Gatsby's psychic structure. Deep in his psyche he had killed the dirty woman in himself by giving all his power to the pure woman, and by doing so he had killed himself. Gatsby is mistaken by Wilson to be the murderer of Myrtle, but in a psychoanalytic sense it is not a mistake. The keeper of the "dirty" woman, Wilson (Gatsby), kills the keeper of the clean woman Gatsby. The psychic suicide is corroborated by the actual murder-suicide. When it is all over and only Nick remains, the dirt that has been kept at bay returns: an obscene word is found scrawled on the sidewalk before the house, and Nick finds dust (from the valley of ashes?) settling over the furniture in Gatsby's house.
Hanatarashi (鼻たらし), meaning "sniveler" or "snot-nosed" in Japanese, was a noise band created by later Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye and featured Zen Geva guitarist Mitsuru Tabata. The outfit was formed in Osaka, Japan in 1984 after Eye and Tabata met as stage hands at an Einstürzende Neubauten show. After the release of the first album, the "I" was dropped and the name became Hanatarash. Hanatarash was notorious for its dangerous live shows. Some of the band's most infamous shows included Eye cutting a dead cat in half with a machete, strapping a circular saw to his back and almost cutting his leg off, and destroying part of a venue with a backhoe bulldozer by driving it through the back wall and onto the stage. At a 1985 show in Tokyo's Superloft, the audience was required to fill out waivers due to the possibility of harm caused by the show. The show was stopped due to Eye preparing to throw a lit molotov cocktail onto the stage. The performance cost ¥600,000 (approximately $6,000 US) in repairs.
More than a Biological Machine The need for art arises in Man precisely because he is a thinking consciousness rather than a mere biological organism. Or rather, Mind is for-itself rather than merely in-itself. As Mind, Man uses the power of self-actualization to reduplicate himself by overcoming the alienation in the Other and recognizing himself in it. This is, of course, art. Yet this alteration is not limited to external objects; Man is never content to leave his own pre-given natural form unchanged; he strives to change himself, whether it be even in the "primitive forms" of ornamentation or bodily disfiguration (Chinese foot crushing etc.)
'Hobbies' today are essentially another form of Adorno's culture industry, where the actual content of the hobby becomes ultimately meaningless. The purpose of the hobby now becomes as a social marker, as a sort of modern caste-marker who's only real goal is to align you within a larger social group. 'Doing' the hobby is a kind of conspicuous consumption to claim a space within the social position, the people involved only perform the hobby as a signal that they have the intelligence, money, time, etc. needed to do it. This is why everyone interacts with their hobbies the same way. First is the basic level of performing the hobby, then the secondary levels around it, like purchasing new products for the hobby itself, purchasing ancillary products (like t-shirts or house decorations with hobby in jokes on them, for example), or attending meetings and conventions with other people involved in the hobby, all of which is further expansion of social position both within the hobby itself and within the wider culture. In other words, the work and money put in to the hobby allows you to claim the social rewards, both within the subculture and without, of an enhanced social position ('That guy plays the guitar, he's cool' "She writes poetry, she's so deep'). However, since the performative stage of most traditional hobbies, like rock climbing or woodworking or, requires a base level of ability that not everyone has, the capitalist economy now provides hobbies based only around the secondary layers. This is why, increasingly, many people have hobbies of 'consuming' things. The stereotype is the fandom' where the performative layer of the hobby is based around consuming media and the real participation comes from buying things like posters and miniatures and so on, as well as strictly limited interactions with other fans where all conversation is limited to discussion of the media subject of the fandom. But now we are increasingly in a state where everything becomes a part of the 'hobby idea'. This is why OP's picture has people defining themselves by incredibly mundane, universal things like 'Food', 'Work', and 'Travel'.
"Hobby" implies identity. I am a gamer. I am a reader. I am a foodie. These are all just propagandistic titles attached to an activity in order for someone to feel a part of a group, and subsequently spend money and time in that activity, surrounded by others that perpetuate the individual to continue consuming products related to that activity. It is the commodification of the human condition. I can't just play guitar for friends around a campfire, I must be a "musician" and buy gear and pedals and amps and multiple guitars and sheet music and DAWs and convince others to join me so we can be a "band" and play shows with other bands and sell tickets and copies of our albums all so we can "make it" with our hobby we have now invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into. Look at all these Loomis books I've purchased and how many different types of pencils I have. Look at my ipad drawing set up and glove and proprietary brushes. Consume consume consume. I can't just read a book or watch a movie, I have to join the fandom and buy funkopops and go to conventions and buy the manga. I can't just like sex, I have to get the super pleasure lube and real leather choker and a swing set. I can't just drink shitty beer, I have to get into hoppy lagers and cocktails. It's all just to sell you more shit. It's all so that your own perceived identity is from the things you buy and do as opposed to the people you surround yourself with. The only thing truly unique about you is the network of community you have built. The individuals who are themselves unique and how those relationships play out. Corporations having you define yourself by the fender acoustic guitar that several hundred thousand other people own, playing covers that several million people have already played while drinking micro brews that thousands of others have drank is not a personality. It is not who you are. Everyone else is the same as you. You become a demographic when you define yourself this way. You are defined by the times you got drunk with uncle Steve and hung out with the boys. Hobby culture is a capitalist blight to decouple you from your humanity. To make you a slave to your things. To imbue your very being upon lifeless objects.
Ibogaine makes DMT look like Kool-Aid. DMT will safely take you someplace unfamiliar for a few minutes, or a few hours, depending how you take it. Yaeee, look at the pretty colors, weeeee. If you think anything like that is coming with Ibo, you are in for a dangerous shocker. Ibogaine will make you confront some really emotional things in your history in which you have no control. It can make you see and feel the pain you caused others. If you have a demon, you are going to confront it. The feeling is like drinking a whole bottle of whiskey while huffing gasoline. Very unpleasant feeling. There is a lot of vomit, you cant move because you feel something like altitude sickness and vertigo. It is the most powerful, and the most miserable drug I have ever taken. I do not want to take it again. I will say with absolute certainty that it is the cure to opiate addiction. Anyone who says otherwise does not understand Ibogaine, nor the word "cure". I took it to get off the methadone, and it achieved that on both a physical and emotional level. Damn right it worked. For months after, for the first time in my life, I felt complete. I was absolutely sure that my life was about now and tomorrow, and the past did not decide my future. We can all repeat that a million times, and it means nothing. To actually feel it in my whole being completely changed who I am. It is amazing stuff.
Sombre is human life, and as yet without meaning: a buffoon may be fateful to it. I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.
Three metamorphoses of the spirit have I designated to you: how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.
"In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it - as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution - but not live inside it. The problem is that this goes against the tendencies of handhelds. We all recognise the by now cliched image of a train carriage full of people pecking at their tiny screens, but have we really registered how miserable this really is, and how much it suits capital for these pockets of socialisation to be closed down?" - Mark Fisher.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer
the death for "recognition." [Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on earth. Indeed, the human being is formed only in terms of a Desire directed toward another Desire, that is--finally--in terms of a desire for recognition. Therefore, the human being can be formed only if at least two of these Desires confront one another. Each of the two beings endowed with such a Desire is ready to go all the way in pursuit of its satisfaction; that is, is ready to risk its life--and, consequently, to put the life of the other in danger--in order to be "recognized" by the other, to impose itself on the other as the supreme value; accordingly, their meeting can only be a fight to the death. And it is only in and by such a fight that the human reality is begotten, formed,
Psychologist Carl Jung and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had similar thoughts about existential angst in that both focused on achieving meaningful existence through the development of inner resources, creative exercise of freedom, and overcoming self-deception. In essence, those who experience existential angst feel lost, think they have a purposeless existence, and believe they have been abandoned by life.
Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.
The Creative Act Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you're not. It makes no sense to say you're not good at it. It's like saying, "I'm not good at being a monk." You are either living as a monk or you're not. We tend to think of the artist's work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world. 48
The world is always changing. You can engage in the same awareness practice five days in a row in the same location and have a unique experience each time.
The Creative Act blessed to get to create. It's a privilege. We're choosing it. We're not being ordered to do this. If we'd rather not do it, let's not do it. Some successful artists are deeply insecure, self-sabotaging, struggling with addiction, or facing other obstacles to making and sharing their work. An unhealthy self-image or a hardship in life can fuel great art, creating a deep well of insight and emotion for an artist to draw from. They can also get in the way of the artist being able to make many things over a long period of time. People who are particularly challenged in this sense generally can't produce creative work over and over again. This isn't because they're not artistically capable, but because they were only able to break through their own issues one or two times and share great work. One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they're using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it's painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity. 71
It's helpful to continually challenge your own process. If you had a good result using a specific style, method, or working condition, don't assume that is the best way. Or your way. Or the only way. Avoid getting religious about it. There may be other strategies that work just as well and allow new possibilities, directions, and opportunities. This is not always true, but it's something to consider.
Keep in mind that it's also possible for something great to be made very quickly. An artist might spend five minutes sketching an idea for a project, and think very little of it. They might sense the seed of something great, and then spend hours or years trying to develop it into something more. But it is possible that the initial sketch or demo, born in all of five minutes, was actually the best version, the seed's purest expression. We may not realize this until after embellishing it or stepping away from it for a while.
The intellect may help complete the work, and it may decipher what is driving our delight in hindsight, but the making of art depends on getting out of our heads. Part of the beauty of creation is that we can surprise ourselves, and make something greater than we're capable of understanding at the time, if we ever can. Latent ideas and emotions hiding in deeper layers of the psyche may find their way into our lyrics, scenes, and canvases. Many artists come to realize long after their work is released that it was actually a shockingly vulnerable and cryptic form of public confession. A part of themselves was trying to find resolution or to find a voice.
Meaning is assigned once an inspired idea is followed through. It's best to wait until a work is complete to discover what it is saying. Holding your work hostage to meaning is a limitation. Works that attempt to overtly preach a message often don't connect as hoped while a piece not intended to address a societal ill may become an anthem for a revolutionary cause. Art is far more powerful than our plans for it.
I genuinely believe that although an artist must give her or himself to the art, to develop and craft the purest image they envision, they must also be to some degree a dilettante. A shitposter if you will. Ready to follow their whims and passions.
Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on earth. Indeed, the human being is formed only in terms of a Desire directed toward another Desire, that is—finally—in terms of a desire for recognition. Therefore, the human being can be formed only if at least two of these Desires confront one another. Each of the two beings endowed with such a Desire is ready to go all the way in pursuit of its satisfaction; that is, is ready to risk its life—and, consequently, to put the life of the other in danger—in order to be 'recognized' by the other, to impose itself on the other as the supreme value; accordingly, their meeting can only be a fight to the death. And it is only in and by such a fight that the human reality is begotten, formed,
fixed in him. He is ready for change; in his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, 'education'; he is historical becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence. On the one hand, he does not bind himself to what he is; he wants to transcend himself by negation of his given state. On the other hand, he has a positive ideal to attain; the ideal of autonomy, of Being-for-itself, of which he finds the incarnation, at the very origin of his Slavery, in the Master.
This constituent-element of Being-for-itself also exists for slavish Consciousness. For in the Master, Being-for-itself is, for it [the slavish Consciousness], its object.
An object that it knows to be external, opposed, to it, and that it tends to appropriate for itself. The Slave knows what it is to be free. He also knows that he is not free, and that he wants to become free. And if the experience of the Fight and its result predispose the Slave to transcendence, to progress, to History, his
This feels like a repeat of the 'artisan'-ification of many industries - it once was the case that most clothes were labour intensive to make with unique patterns, etc... but in time, machines took the hand crafted aspect of clothing away and replaced it with mass produced, often lower quality output but they were 'good enough' that consumers were happy and the industry changed. There remains money to be made in tailoring, much as I imagine there will be in art to either help 'inspire' the mass produced AI content, or to fulfil the needs of those who want something unique and hand crafted to a fine degree, but I don't imagine the industry will be the ones who push for this to happen, but rather the end consumers of content who may help to patronise a small handful of artists.
material available to him and by manipulating and shaping material objects. Suppose, for example, that he carves a piece of wood into the shape of a bison. This liberates him from his sensuous condition in several respects: he no longer attempts to eat the wood; he shapes it and, once he has shaped it, he does not attempt to chase or eat the bison he has made, but contemplates it and offers it for the contemplation of others. He thus distances himself from sensuous desires and becomes capable of disinterested contemplation of the world as well as of appetitive consumption. His ability to restrain his desires enables him to see himself as more than a series of desires. Moreover, while the bison that he hunts and eats is a particular, individual bison, his carving is likely to represent, not some particular bison, but all and any of the bison that he has encountered and even of those that he has not yet encountered. As an artist, he is concerned not with this or that
ize, or at least to produce images of a general type. Significant works of art and artists are, for the most part, more complex than this bison and its producer. But the example illustrates one central strand in Hegel's argument, namely, that there is a symmetry between the mind of the artist and the absolute, what he takes to be the essence or meaning of the world. The absolute as the artist presents it lies at a depth below the sensuous surface of the world corresponding to the depth at which the mind of the artist (and, to a lesser degree, of his audience) lies below his physical and sensuous exterior, that aspect of him that is in immediate contact with the external world. But Hegel does not share the view (the main representative of which, for him, is Kant) that the absolute, and more generally the world as we view it, consists in no more than the projection of our own thoughts or categories on to an intrinsically
itself, and since, among entities within the world, only man is self-conscious, the absolute as a whole, and not simply in its explicitly human phase, is seen on the model of a human being. Third, since art is one of the main ways in which man plumbs the depths of the world, art is not only a portrayal of the absolute, but a phase of the absolute's developing consciousness of itself. Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself. (iv) The absolute becomes self-conscious in man's cognitive and practical activities. But man's central motive for such activities is, in Hegel's view, to become self-conscious himself, and, since the absolute in this phase is not distinct from man, the absolute becomes self-conscious only in the self-consciousness of man. Becoming self-conscious and becoming aware of other things are not two distinct activities.
As a natural gift, this talent declares itself after all in most cases in early youth, and it shows itself in the driving restlessness to shape a specific sensuous material at once in a lively and active way and to seize this mode of expression and communication as the only one, or as the most important and appropriate one. And after all an early technical facility, which up to a certain point is effortless, is a sign of inborn talent. For a sculptor everything turns into shapes, and from early years he lays hold of clay in order to model it. In short, whatever ideas such talented men have, whatever rouses and moves them inwardly, turns at once into figure, drawing, melody, or poem.
(y) Thirdly, and lastly, the subject-matter of art is in a certain respect also drawn from the sensuous, from nature; or, in any case, even if the subject is of a spiritual kind, it can still only be grasped by displaying spiritual things, like human relationships, in the shape of phenomena possessed of external reality.
So, repeat after me: Everything that can be digitized will be digitized. And it will happen before you know it.
Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine Nature, the deepest interests of humanity, and the most comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of
It will be admitted, to begin with, that the mind is capable of contemplating itself, and of possessing a consciousness, and that a thinking consciousness, of itself and all that is generated by itself. Thought—to think—is precisely that in which the mind has its innermost and essential nature. In gaining this thinking consciousness concerning itself and its products, the mind is behaving according to its essential nature, however much freedom and caprice those products may display, supposing only that in real
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
On display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, as a part of the ongoing exhibit, A Temporary Futures Institute, NurturePod is presented as a product for parents to buy. For a seemingly reasonable €789 (about $920), the device purportedly helps manage a child's sleep cycles, while engaging its creativity, body awareness, cultural orientation, emotional regulation, and social skills
That which is above heaven and below the earth, which is also between heaven and earth, which is the same through past, present, and future, in what is that woven, warp and woof? Tell me, Yajnavalkya.
YAJNAVALKYA That which is above heaven and below earth, which is also between heaven and earth, which is the same through the past, present, and future — that is woven, warp and woof, in space.
JANAKA Who is that Self?
YAJNAVALKYA The Self, pure awareness, shines as the light within the heart, surrounded by the senses. Only seeming to think, seeming to move, the Self neither sleeps nor wakes nor dreams. When the Self takes on a body, he seems to assume the body's frailties and limitations; but when he sheds the body at the time of death, the Self leaves all these behind,
But he is not affected by anything because he is detached and free; and after wandering here and there in the state of dreaming, enjoying pleasures and seeing good and evil, he returns to the state from which he began.
As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking.
Wire: Your music seems to be about the after effects of Rave, about never actually experiencing it. Burial: I've never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it. My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn't believe I had 'em. It was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you're only little. I'd get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world, and my brother would drop by late and I'd fall asleep listening to tunes he put on.
Our thoughts, feelings, processes, and unconscious beliefs have an energy that is hidden in the work. This unseen, unmeasurable force gives each piece its magnetism. A completed project is only made up of our intention and our experiments around it. Remove intention and all that's left is the ornamental shell. Though the artist may have a number of goals and motivations, there is only one intention. This is the grand gesture of the work. It is not an exercise of thought, a goal to be set, or a means of commodification. It is a truth that lives inside you. Through your living it, that truth becomes embedded in the work. If the work doesn't represent who you are and what you're living, how can it hold an energetic charge?
An intention is more than a conscious purpose, it's the congruence of that purpose. It requires an alignment of all aspects of one's self: of conscious thought and unconscious beliefs, of capabilities and commitment, of actions when working and not. It's a state of living in harmonic agreement with oneself. Not all projects take time, but they do take a lifetime. In calligraphy, the work is created in one movement of the brush. All the intention is in that single concentrated movement. The line is a reflection of the energy transfer from the artist's being, including the entire history of their experiences, thoughts, and apprehensions, into the hand. The creative energy exists in the journey to the making, not in the act of constructing.
ber of pages and is divided into chapters. A feature film is 90 to 120 minutes and often has three acts. Embedded in each medium, there are sets of norms that restrain our work before we've even begun. Genres, in particular, come with distinct variations on rules. A horror film, ballet, or a country album each come with specific expectations. As soon as you use a label to describe what you're working on, there's a temptation to conform to its rules. The templates of the past can be an inspiration in the beginning phases, but it's helpful to think beyond what's been done before. The world isn't waiting for more of the same. Often, the most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them or from those who never learned them at all
When Xenakis approached Olivier Messiaen in Paris for composition lessons, Messiaen turned him down, because, 'I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said... 'No, you are almost 30, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music!''
Can one billion ChatGPT-generated words be compared in some meaningful dimension with just one word that a human created, with intent, on any happy day? I don't care. As we get lost in a labyrinth of semantics, the amount of data spat out by AI systems grows relentlessly. That's the only truth that matters now.
There is no single agreed-upon definition for the word 'shamanism' among anthropologists. Thomas Dowson suggests three shared elements of shamanism: practitioners consistently alter consciousness, the community regards altering consciousness as an important ritual practice, and the knowledge about the practice is controlled.
Lebron shoots a game winning shot from behind the bleachers, the ball phases through the backboard, scores, and then the entire sport of basketball is erased from society
A logistic regression analysis of data from 21 states finds that artists have 270% higher risk of suicide than nonartists. However, after controlling for gender and sociodemographic variables, this risk level is reduced to 125%.
'I loathe them.' Bacon complained of Matisse's later works, according to Times Online. 'I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can't bear the drawings either. I absolutely hate his line. I find his line sickly.' Peppiatt sat on the tapes for awhile, for the sake of comity, but the opportunity was too good to pass up now, and the recordings are featured in his upcoming book.
The US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light for Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person. Most of the threads implanted in the first participant have come loose and are no longer reading the electrical signals needed to translate his thoughts into cursor movements. While software changes have helped him regain many of the device's capabilities, only around 15% of the threads inserted in his brain remain in place. Neuralink's proposed fix for the problem that occurred in the first test participant involves embedding some of the device's ultrathin wires deeper into the brain.
Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named 'Sky' sounded like me. When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference. Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word 'her'—a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human. Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider. Before we could connect, the system was out there.
The eye cannot see it; mind cannot grasp it. The deathless Self has neither caste nor race, Neither eyes nor ears nor hands nor feet. Sages say this Self is infinite in the great And in the small, everlasting and changeless, The source of life.
An awful lot of 'I need my coffee in the morning to wake up' people acting like it's weird for Hunter Biden to smoke crack first thing every day.
The greatest carrier wave of progress for the last few centuries has been the central idea of the Enlightenment itself: that more knowledge—more information—leads to better decisions. For which one can, of course, substitute any concept of 'better' that one chooses. Despite the assaults of modernity and postmodernity, this core tenet has come to define not merely what is implemented, but what is even considered possible from new technologies. The internet, in its youth, was often referred to as an 'information superhighway', a conduit of knowledge that, in the flickering light of fibre-optic cables, enlightens the world. Any fact, any quantum of information, is available at the tap of a keyboard—or so we have led ourselves to believe.
Ruskin dwelled at length upon the differing quality of light when affected by the storm-cloud, for light too has a moral quality. In his lectures, he argued that the 'fiat lux of creation'—the moment when the God of Genesis says, 'Let there be light'—is also fiat anima, the creation of life. Light, he insisted, is 'as much the ordering of Intelligence as the ordering of Vision'. That which we see shapes not just what we think, but how we think.
Hunter Biden feeling such a genuine sense of calm while smoking crack with prostitutes that his default band for such scenarios became Fleet Foxes is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Brings to mind the image of a monk, meditating in the eye of a hurricane
All things are imperfect. Nothing that exists is without imperfections. When we look really closely at things we see the flaws. The sharp edge of a razor blade, when magnified, reveals microscopic pits, chips, and variegations. Every craftsman knows the limits of perfection: the imperfections glare back. And as things begin to break down and approach the primordial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular.
pagan flaunting. Behind the trashiest Decadent painting are complex Romantic assumptions about nature and society overlooked by textbook accounts of nineteenth-century art. Modernist culture-heroes like Cézanne are overemphasized. Cézanne's plainness and 'honesty,' homely Protestant values, are in the Rousseauist-Wordsworthian line.
Looking for a new ethics. Ask Nietzsche if it's good or evil. He doesn't understand. Pull out a diagram explaining what's good and what's evil. He laughs and says 'it's beyond good and evil sir'. Read the book. It's evil.
Art major huh? I'll have fries with that LOL. I'm cool STEM guy I'm pumped to live in a world where knowledge of art & literature is punished.
SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from Scene 5 to Scene 6 and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
I thought: 'Suppose I take very little food, a handful each time, whether of bean soup or lentil soup or vetch soup or pea soup.' So I took very little food, a handful each time, whether of bean soup or lentil soup or vetch soup or pea soup. While I did so, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems. Because of eating so little my backside became like a camel's hoof. Because of eating so little the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads. Because of eating so little my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roofless barn. Because of eating so little the gleam of my eyes sank far down in their sockets, looking like the gleam of water that has sunk far down in a deep well. Because of eating so little my scalp shriveled and withered as a green bitter gourd shrivels and withers in the wind and sun. Because of eating so little my
stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
One thing is very clear. If, knowing what we do today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book.
Those who are addicted to (dependent on) television sit down in front of the set before they know what they will see, or leave it on all the time with little regard to the program. Those who are addicted to the Internet connect to it before they know what they seek, and express their opinion in forums where they have nothing worth saying. Those who are
finds himself. The moment of life, the people with him, the nature which surrounds him, or even the dish he is eating, all have less importance for him than the digital images he takes of them. This
Of course, just as spirit merchants remain sober, and drug traffickers abstain from drugs for commercial reasons, the providers of virtual reality steer clear of their product. A photo taken at the opening of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2016 illustrates this and was widely circulated. It shows Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, striding bareheaded and radiant toward a room full of spectators wearing headsets. They all looked like cyborgs, staring straight ahead at a reality that does not exist, totally unaware of each other, and of the
At a milder but still significant level, we have already alluded to the regression revealed by the need to feel at all times one's smartphone in one's pocket, or close to hand, just like a child's comforter. It is a reassuring object that can drive off the anxiety caused by a world felt as lonely or menacing.
In a musical metaphor one could say that users of the Internet end up with a staccato corresponding to the way they switch between web pages, giving a series of notes instead of a melody, bereft of any expression or legato.
The computer's allure is more than utilitarian or aesthetic; it is erotic. Instead of a refreshing play with surfaces, as with toys or amusements, our affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to technology. Rightly perceived, the atmosphere of cyberspace carries the scent that once surrounded Wisdom. The world rendered as pure information not only fascinates our eyes and minds, but also captures our hearts. We feel augmented and empowered. Our hearts beat in the machines. This is Eros.
In her speech in Plato's Symposium, Diotima, the priestess of love, teaches a doctrine of the escalating spirituality of the erotic drive. She tracks the intensity of Eros continuously from bodily attraction all the way to the mental attention of mathematics and beyond. The outer reaches of the biological sex drive, she explains to Socrates, extend to the mental realm where we continually seek to expand our knowledge. On the primal level, Eros is a drive to extend our finite being, to prolong something of our physical selves beyond our mortal existence. But Eros does not stop with the drive for physical extension. We seek to extend ourselves and to heighten the intensity of our lives in general through Eros. The psyche longs to perpetuate itself and to conceive offspring, and this it can do, in a transposed sense, by conceiving ideas
Both Kay and Rainy described their interest in companion bots as a response to problems with humans. 'Active listening is becoming a dying art for humans,' Rainy said. 'Humanity has degraded to the point where people are finding better options digitally,' Kay said. The other side: A chatbot can't look you in the eye, give you a hug or forge a genuine two-way connection. — Irina Raicu, director of the Internet ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, argues that chatbot bonding could further erode human relationships. 'It goes to the loneliness that so many people feel, and the way in which so many are not well prepared to deal with conflicts that inevitably arise among people with their own autonomy,' Raicu wrote in an email to Axios.
Perhaps the essence of VR ultimately lies not in technology but in art, perhaps art of the highest order. Rather than control or escape or entertain or communicate, the ultimate promise of VR may be to transform, to redeem our awareness of reality—something that the highest art has attempted to do and something hinted at in the very label virtual reality, a label that has stuck, despite all objections, and that sums up a century of technological innovation. VR promises not a better vacuum cleaner or a more engrossing communications medium or even a friendlier computer interface. It promises the Holy Grail.
VR will enhance the power of art to transform reality. The picture frame, the proscenium, the movie theater all limit art by blocking it off as a section of reality. VR, with its augmented reality, allows a smoother, more controlled transition from virtual to real and back. This capability, which may frighten psychologists, will offer artists an unprecedented power to transform societies.
The art world loves you only for a little while if ever, it's not a good place to look for emotional support. Most artists are sociopaths fighting for scarce resources; it's not a nice place, even if you are successful. I'm selling my large studio, reducing my staff and going sailing. Maybe only a show every 3 years? I've been having one or two a year for 20 years and each time it's less enjoyable, especially lately as the focus has moved from art about ideas to art about identity which has ruined art criticism and curation.
The usual defenses against the ravages of age—identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one's immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past—can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, 'to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people's happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.
The movie was very poor. It starred a nice blonde girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered boneheads with names like Rick and Gil. It was a football romance and it was in technicolour. I hate technicolour. Everybody in a technicolour movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid new costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clothes-horse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.
activated. But the one constant that recurs throughout DeepDream's creations is the image of the eye—dogs' eyes, cats' eyes, human eyes; the omnipresent, surveillant eye of the network itself. The eye that floats in DeepDream's skies recalls the all-seeing eye of dystopian propaganda: Google's own unconscious, composed of our memories and actions, processed by constant analysis and tracked for corporate profit and private intelligence. DeepDream is an inherently paranoid machine because it emerges from a paranoid world.
The operation of surveillance, and our complicity in it, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of the new dark age, because it insists on a kind of blind vision: everything is illuminated, but nothing is seen. We have become convinced that throwing light upon the subject is the same thing as thinking it, and thus having agency over it. But the light of computation just as easily renders us powerless—either through information overload, or a false sense of security. It is a lie we have been sold by the seductive power of computational thinking.
however outraged, resorts to ever more simplistic narratives in order to regain some control over the situation. As the technologically augmented and accelerated world trends toward the opposite of simplicity, as it becomes more—and more visibly—complex, conspiracy must of necessity become more bizarre, intricate, and violent to accommodate it.
But in this process, we must remember something important: life is not meant to be rushed through. It is not a race, nor is it a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be lived, and living well requires presence. To focus on one thing deeply, to give it your full attention, is to experience it fully. And when we do this, something remarkable happens. Time, which so often feels like it is slipping through our fingers, begins to slow. Moments become rich, textured. Even the simplest of tasks takes on a new significance when approached with care, with attention.
world. There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.
capacity for rage [verlernen wir auch die Wut]. Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present [Gegenwart]. It lacks all negativity, which would permit one to look at the Other [das Andere]. In contrast, rage puts the present as a whole into question. It presupposes an interrupting pause in the present. This is what distinguishes it from anger [Ärger]. The general distraction afflicting contemporary society does not allow the emphasis and energy of rage to arise. Rage is the capacity to interrupt a given state and make a new state begin. Today it is yielding more and more to offense or annoyance [Ärgernis], 'having a beef,' which proves incapable of effecting decisive change. In consequence, one is annoyed even by the inevitable. Annoyance relates to rage as fear relates to dread [Angst]. In contrast to fear, which concerns a determinate object, dread applies to Being-as-such. It grips and shakes the whole of existence. Nor does rage concern a discrete state of affairs. It negates the whole. Therein lies its negative energy. It represents
missing. No dimension of alterity is involved. Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.
Science on the contrary, the objectors admit, has, in its form, to do with the thinking which abstracts from a mass of details. The result is that, on the one hand, imagination with its whim and caprice, the organ, i.e., of artistic activity and enjoyment, remains excluded from science. On the other hand, they say that while art does brighten and vivify the unillumined and withered dryness of the Concept, does reconcile its abstractions and its conflict with reality, does enrich the Concept with reality, a purely intellectual treatment [of art] removes this means of enrichment, destroys it, and carries the Concept back to its simplicity without reality and to its shadowy abstractness. Further, in its content, science is occupied with what is inherently necessary. If aesthetics leaves natural beauty aside, we have in this respect apparently not only not gained anything, but rather have removed ourselves still further from the necessary. For the very word 'nature' already
of its historical domination by males. The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman's superb self-containment. But the artist needs his art, his projection. The blocked artist, like Leonardo, suffers tortures of the damned. The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, records woman's self-satisfied apartness, her ambiguous mocking smile at the vanity and despair of her many sons.
Western culture's hard, defined personalities suffer from inflammation of the eye. They are so numerous that they have never been catalogued, except in our magnificent portrait art. Western sexual personae are nodes of power, but they have made a torment of eroticism. From this torment has come our grand tradition of literature and art. Unfortunately, there is no way to separate the whistling ass on his girder from the rapt visionary at his easel. In accepting the gifts of culture, women may have to take the worm with the apple.
My first Photoshop dream. I dreamed I was erasing my past in Photoshop, but it turned out that I was using the 'clone tool'—so instead of erasing I was just copying chunks of the past into the future.
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Meanwhile, work by Hockney, Falco and other researchers has demonstrated that knowledge of optical techniques, such as the use of curved mirrors and camera obscuras, was known to artists in Europe from as early as the 1350s, O'Neill said. The new research supports the ideas proposed by Hockney and Falco that the development of optical instruments and techniques in Europe after the 14th century had a profound impact on Western art, as they did on scientific thought, O'Neill said.
UnitedHealth Group's Facebook post sharing its statement on Thompson's death received more than 46,000 reactions, with about 41,000 of respondents clicking the platform's 'haha' option displaying a laughing emoji.
Machiavelli's philosophies continue to be the base for a whole body of business literature. Modern day business books teach how to maintain power, behave in manipulating ways, and use harsh management decisions that are nevertheless good for the bottom line. One may well argue, in American corporate capitalism, that when we create a business and grant it the same rights as a human (what 'incorporating' means), while not holding it to any moral restrictions except for "survive at all costs and make your shareholders rich," what you have effectively created is an institutionalized psychopath.
Our emotional nature, our misinformed ideas, and our lack of understanding hold us in bondage. Depending on circumstances we are mechanically happy or sad, and the ideas we have ingested of what we should be create neuroses. Our lack of understanding means we are passive victims of our conditioning and emotional reactions. We have no power of our own, relying on external factors to lend us power - other people, consumer goods, travel, entertainment. At best these are temporary palliatives, and more often than not make our slavery to externals more intense. Without understanding, we are asleep, and the dreams we dream are determined by everything other than our own intent.
One thing that strikes me when reading biographical articles of people is how they go through hard but educational times or meaningful experiences or just live in deliberate ways. All of these are alien to me. I just drift through life. I went through the generic school to university to corporate job pipeline and have never had any profound changes in mentality (yes, some changes in political views but never doing anything about it). I never had any friends or social experiences or gf and people immediately see me as the lowest status person in every room, someone to be ignored and left to rot. Rules don't apply to me, in the sense that I can never expect positive treatment from any system when its rules are subjective in any significant way. I have never had any major, overwhelming passion for any single thing. Yes, video games when I was younger, but never hundreds of hours put into one of them. Yes, I've read lots of books relative to normies, but never deeply in any topic. A lot of "fun" activities are ones I can only approach as work. Having fun feels like a responsibility that I'm socially obligated to take on. I'm not stupid or oversocialised enough to believe in any religions, philosophies, ideologies, heuristics, habits, customs, esoterica, spiritual beliefs, dogmas, historical patterns, metaphysics, superstitions, social conformisms, groupthink, extrapolations, deductions (apart from on the page), forms, the supernatural or occult, aphorisms, nationalisms, ethics, probabilities, media slogans, memes, social panics, manias, purity spirals, dogpiles, zeitgeists. I am fully unspooked.
As a high school teacher, nah dude, you are tripping and have no idea what you're talking about. You're angry at the symptoms and not the cause, which is the overall death of expertise, decline in attention spans, and addiction to social media. I think all this shit about "muh woke" and "muh women" is just a huge cope and all of these "manosphere" influencers are leading to the death of any kind of intellectualism. Women aren't the problem, you are; in fact, in my classes, the girls are the only ones who read the assigned readings and actually engage with the material. The male students are uniformly broccoli headed, brainrotted, sociopaths who can barely speak a complete sentence much less read an actual book. And you think these are the "based" "traditional" men who are going to save "Western civilization"? Hilarious. I wouldn't leave these fuckers unattended for 5 minutes much less give them the keys to the kingdom. I don't think anyone fully understands how close to social/societal collapse we're coming to and you pussies being afraid of multiculturalism should be the least of your concerns.
People I talk to all generally agree that writing software for a living rewires the way your own individual cognition works over time, typically in a rigid, abstract fashion. It's why Software Engineer is such a distinct personality. You see it in doctors and lawyers as well.
When the iron hoe was a new invention, Pythagoras saw mathematical logic as a language of cosmic prophecy. Now, when we say E = mc², we are stating in mathematical terms the thought of Pythagoras's contemporary, Heraclitus, who said that energy is the essence of matter. Heraclitus put it in the ancient Greek this way: All things change to fire, and fire exhausted falls back into things.
People dull their wits with gibberish and cannot use their ears and eyes.
The prophet's voice possessed of god requires no ornament, no sweetening of tone, but carries over a thousand years.
Yet without obscurity or needless explanation the true prophet signifies. The prophet's voice possessed of god requires no ornament, no sweetening of tone, but carries over a thousand years. The eye, the ear, the mind in action, these I value.
ally holds. For Nietzsche, it is not "sovereign man" but the "last man" who exploits himself as his own vassal. Counter to what Ehrenberg claims, Nietzsche advanced "sovereign man" in the name of cultural criticism, as a counter-model to the exhausted achievement-subject. That is why "sovereign man" is a man of leisure [Muße]. A hyperactive person would have disgusted Nietzsche: the "strong soul" keeps "calm," "moves slowly," and has an aversion to what's too lively. Thus Spoke Zarathustra declares:
The homines sacri of achievement society also differ from those of the society of sovereignty on another score. They cannot be killed at all. Their life equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.
What use are these people's wits, who let themselves be led by speechmakers, in crowds, without considering how many fools and thieves they are among, and how few choose the good? The best choose progress toward one thing, a name forever honored by the gods, while others eat their way toward sleep like nameless oxen.
you can never rely on a person who is driven by strong emotions. One minute they will be all over you like a severe rash, and the next minute they will want you hung drawn and quartered.
This will to life was well understood by Spinoza too. He said the very essence of man is desire - the desire to persist in his existence. That is the essence of what you and I are. You might try and put all kinds of fancy wrapping around it, but when it comes down to it, we may do some unspeakable things if it means that we continue with our existence. This desire for survival is not a passive kind of thing. It says that people are desperate for more experience, they want more of life, they want to visit more places, acquire more stuff, more money, they want more power because all these things enhance their potential in life and that is what most of us are after. Personally, I'm not really after all that, I've been there done it - got the T-shirt as they say, and I found it all boring, dull and unsatisfying. But most people go after that, people who've got a billion dollars want ten billion dollars. People who employ 500 people want to hire 5000 people, just because of the power it gives them. It's endless and
the day. This work is only attractive to a very very small number of people, most people are looking for somebody else to do the work. Maybe they are looking for a new age guru to do the job, and usher in a new era. It's not going to happen. In summary, nothing out there is going to change. The only thing that can change is your own self, and you achieve that through work. There are no free lunches.
Ultimately life passes its sentence upon you the minute you are conceived - it sentences you to death. Life is not a benign force. It will use and abuse to get what it wants - namely that you survive long enough to rear the next generation. Be kind to yourself, because almost no one and nothing else is going to be. It is the height of politically incorrect behavior to say these things, but I'm of the impression that people who read this are past being politically correct.
But the froth itself was vital. Far from dampening the intellectual transformation wrought by the printed book, it magnified it. By accelerating the spread of books into popular culture and making them a mainstay of leisure time, the cruder, crasser, and more trifling works also helped spread the book's ethic of deep, attentive reading. "The same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion," writes Eisenstein, "also accompanies the perusal of scandal sheets, 'lewd Ballads,' "merry bookes of Italie,' and other "corrupted tales in Inke and Paper." Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same.
whole. We don't see the forest when we search the Web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves. As companies like Google and Microsoft perfect search engines for video and audio content, more products are undergoing the fragmentation that already characterizes written works.
During the second half of the twentieth century this Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded. In most areas wars became rarer than ever. Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 per cent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it is responsible for about 1 per cent of global mortality. In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world: 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.
obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.
This sort of observation provides a bit of comfort to those of us slow to warm to the fact that thinking is no longer a personal activity, but a collective one. Nothing's personal—except maybe the devices through which we connect with the network. New ideas seem to emerge from a dozen places at once, a mysterious zeitgeist synchronicity until we realize that they are all aspects of the same idea, emerging from a single network of minds. Likewise, each human brain is itself a network of neurons, sharing tasks and functioning holographically and nonlocally. Thoughts don't belong to any one cell any more than ideas belong to any one brain in the greater network of a connected human culture.
Ironically perhaps, the way past the problem of human unpredictability may be to work with it and through it rather than to ignore it. Fractals may be generated by computers, but the patterns within them are best recognized and applied by people. In other words, pattern recognition may be less a science or mathematic than it is a liberal art. The arts may be touchy-feely and intuitive, but in eras of rapid change such as our own, they often bring more discipline to the table than do the sciences.
Flau'jae Johnson has issued an apology for referencing 9/11 in a newly released rap song. On Tuesday (May 9), Johnson dropped a remix to Latto's "Put It On Da Floor," where she spit a double entendre with wordplay about a Porsche 911 and the historic terrorist attack that killed more than 2,000 people. "Rappers, they be sweet, they in the patch, I know they sour," LSU's #4 rhymed on the track. "In this 911 blowing smoke just like them towers." The pushback was swift, with some pundits, like Outkick analyst David Hookstead, claiming the athlete was "[mocking] 9/11 victims."
Dependent upon ignorance arise dispositions; dependent upon dispositions arise consciousness; dependent upon consciousness arises the psychophysical personality; dependent upon the psychophysical personality arise the six senses; dependent upon the six senses arises contact; dependent upon contact arises feeling; dependent upon feeling arises craving; dependent upon craving arises grasping; dependent upon grasping arises becoming; dependent upon becoming arises birth; dependent upon birth arise old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and dispair. Thus arises this entire mass of suffering.
The possibility of making such visual connections between people circulating in apparently wholly different worlds explains Proust's suggestion: Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know. And such pleasure is not simply visual, for the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know, in places we might never have expected to do so.
The document was not consulted for practical advice; the departure time of the Saint-Lazare train was of no immediate importance to a man who found no reason to leave Paris in the last eight years of his life. Rather, this timetable was read and enjoyed as though it were a gripping novel about country life, because the mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust's imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields.
One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they're really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.
in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king
During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against San Diego, California. The plan was scheduled to launch on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier. Plaque fleas, infected clothing and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plaque were estimated to have killed at least 400,000 Chinese civilians. Tularemia was also tested on Chinese civilians.
You ask him why he only ever writes in lower case, and he tells you he's the "e.e. cumming-on-your-face" of predictive texting, adding "he's a poet btw".
Conclusion: the engineer who programmed the software is as much the creator of the artwork as the photographer who uses a camera to take a photograph. Just like photography made the skills of draftsmen and portraitists obsolete, so machine art will make the skills of stylists obsolete. Machine art is to artistic style what camera was to artistic content. The camera started a new art (in fact, two, the second one being cinema). Machine art is starting a new art that doesn't have a name and probably doesn't have a single art piece yet because artists still have to figure out how to use a machine that produces artistic styles at will and critics still have to figure out how to treat machine artworks.
"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the dumb and the grim."
"The completed work is fundamentally parsimonious and systematically self-exhausting." - Mel Bochner, "The Serial Attitude," 1967 "Though I may have the pleasure of discovering musical processes and composing the musical material to run through them, once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself." - Steve Reich, "Music As A Gradual Process," 1968 "The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course." - Sol LeWitt, "Sentences On Conceptual Art," 1969
on May 24, 1844, the Associated Press was founded, and news from nowhere, addressed to no one in particular, began to crisscross the nation. Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough--became the content of what people called "the news of the day."
There is a beginning. There is a not-yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not-yet beginning to be a not-yet beginning to be a beginning. There is something. There is nothing. There is a not-yet beginning to be nothing. There is a not-yet beginning to be a not-yet beginning to be nothing. Suddenly there is nothing. But then I don't know whether nothing is or isn't.
Paik. "When you compose, do you think notation first, or sound first? May I ask?" Cage. "Yes, you may ask . . . Both constitute inseparable entity . . . I cannot separate them." (1958, Ongakugeijutsu)
Making a point to show that a point is not a point is not as good as making a nonpoint to show that a point is not a point. Using a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using a nonhorse to show that a horse is not a horse. Heaven and earth are one point, the ten thousand things are one horse. Okay? Okay. Not okay? Not okay. A way is made by walking it. A thing is so by calling it. How is it so? In so-ing it, it is so. How is it not so? In not-so-ing it, it is not so. There is always a way in which things are so. There is always a way in which things are okay. There is nothing that is not so, nothing that is not okay.
"Eno's gramophone was just barely audible... in the same way ambient poetry makes certain features of reality just perceptible (but nevertheless, they are perceptible). […] This is a minimized degree of speech, not a metaphysical zero-degree but an infinitesimal degree." - Timothy Morton, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star As An Ambient Poem," 2001
No they didn't. They all became one in a soup of LCL. However, any of them can easily leave the LCL and re-enter reality by visualizing their self as separate from others like Shinji did. The optimism comes from what the movie is trying to say. Shinji was given two options. On one hand, he could reject his worth as an individual and stay in the collective of the LCL. This would result in living in a world where Shinji would be completed by everyone else and thus conflict, internal and external, would cease to exist. In the LCL, people would live without pleasure or pain and would spend their days in the dreams they make up. The downside is that by giving up their individuality, they would also have no way to change the real world that matters, since it is literally just a soup of people. On the other hand, he could accept reality with all its pain and pleasure but also its ability to be changed to become better. By doing this, he would accept that he has self worth beyond others and thus a reason to live as a self rather than a collective. In the end, Shinji chooses reality. It should also be noted that instrumentality in Shinji's world is a stand-in for the audience using Evangelion as escapism in ours. We use the show to reject reality and enter a state where we can forget our personal pleasures and pains in the moment. We become a collective with the show but in doing so, reject our worth as an individual, at least in the moment, since we have no ability to effect what happens in the show, that's decided by others. Shinji parallels the decision that we can make, to reject the escapism, reaffirm our worth to change the world around us, even at the cost of pain and pleasure, and re-enter society.
Most of the extras during the grocery store scene are actual junkies brought in off the street. Aronofsky remembers one extra who had to leave at 3AM during filming to pick up heroin as well as some people shooting up on set. This was also the night Jared Leto had his mom and grandmother come to visit the production.
Where has all this beauty gone? Where is the tenderness? Where has human attainment gone? It's been sold for a quick buck and we are the poorer for it. We need to get back to finding happiness in truth and higher pursuits. Money will always come a distant second to Love, literature, music, poetry and beauty. Look around and breath in the sun ripened air and try and interpret the world anew. You will be richer for it.
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.
The cool unconcern of Gatsby hides rage and terror underneath. This is why everything must be reinforced; he can have no traffic with ordinary women; Daisy cannot be just wonderful but must be perfect; the car and his clothes spotless; the parties the biggest; and the house bigger and better than everyone else's. The split in his inner life is reflected in his outer life. The novel is built on a pattern of surface and underground, bright and dull, cleanliness and dirtiness, white and dark. Gatsby wears white or pink suits; his shirts are beautiful; and only the telephone calls connect him to his sleazy underground. He lives on the fringes of the Buchanan's glamorous world and moves between the glamor of East and West egg and New York. The economic underground between them is the valley of ashes, where there is dirt, junk cars, pale faces, listless people and sex. Tom has no problem in stopping off at the valley of the ashes and embracing the "dirty" woman, Myrtle, and Nick, the voyeur, has no trouble accompanying him. But Gatsby's car spreads wings when it passes the valley of the ashes and Myrtle's smouldering sensuality. He wants nothing to do with the valley of ashes or the sexual woman who lives there. Gatsby wants to climb to the secret place above the trees and "suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder" (112) where Daisy and the saintly woman lives. The image is clearly sexual, though mixed with stardust and idealism, evoking the serene and ideal moment of the child at peace on his mother's breast. Levith is right in calling the image prepubescent and infantile, but it is precisely because it is these things that it has immense significance.
nature's spiritual resurrection in the viewers' consciousness. The text, recorded by Ursula Reuter-Christiansen, describes a personified image of nature: His legs were wrapped with narrow strips of material like a mummy. A bent, haggard, naked human creature that was surrounded on the flanks with long hair, imprisoned in the dry leaves, dust, and thorns. He wore straw, clay, and shreds of canvas around his loin and knee. His flaccid, earth-colored skin hung around his fleshless joints like lumps off dry branches. Arid, blanched, ligaments like sticks, hair, garments, reliquary, mummy, burned out fire, ashes. Like nature's mummy, postwar society could become one with the land, thereby reincarnating and preserving its essence for the future.
An NSFW artist doing SFW content is like a drug dealer selling oregano instead of weed.
We live in a society prone to inducing tremendous amounts of anxiety, specifically the fear of death, or the death instinct as Deleuze and Guattari put it. Hence, we have the desire to live in a conflict-free existence, a life without danger or struggle, and all one has to do to obtain this existence is to give up their freedom and conform to the expectations of the Fascist leader. This desire for oppression isn't just a social function, but a psychological phenomenon spread and sustained by typical Freudian psychoanalysis, and it's concept of the 'Nuclear Family' - a mother, a father, and ourselves as the children. Through the heralding of an ideal family unit, people are taught to deny desire, to be ashamed of their sexual urges, any atypical fantasies or predilections, to give into their inclinations is perverted. For Deleuze and Guattari, traditional psychoanalysis is part of an entire social scheme dedicated to making people feel inferior, scared, and inadequate.
Just even, so, O king, does the recluse by his thinking grasp his mind, and by his wisdom cut off his failings. In this way is it that comprehension is the characteristic of reasoning, but cutting off of wisdom.
For fourteen years I was my master's pet. But what's the shame in doing what you're told to do? But all the same, if you know what I mean, I managed to do my mistress a favor or two. But mum's the word. I'm none of your ordinary blowhards. [p. 76] Well, then heaven gave me a push and I became master in the house. I was my master's brains. So he made me joint heir with the emperor to everything he had, and I came out of it with a senator's fortune. (p. 82)
One exciting thing about being alive at this pivotal moment in history is that I'm constantly learning about strong opinions I didn't previously know I had. Before mid-March 2020, if you'd asked me how I felt about videoconferencing, I'd have shrugged. It's fine? Now I would have to amend that opinion slightly. It's not fine. It's horrible, a form of psychic torture, and I hate it so deeply that my hatred feels physical, like an allergic reaction.
I'm not asking for the Earth to stop spinning, but it'd be nice if it slowed down a little.
1. Every unconscious libidinal investment is social and bears upon a socio-historical field. 2. Unconscious libidinal investments of group or desire are distinct from preconscious investments of class or interest. 3. Non-familial libidinal investments of the social field are primary in relation to familial investments. 4. Social libidinal investments are distinguished according to two poles: a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.
In contrast to the psychoanalytic conception, schizoanalysis assumes that the libido does not need to be de-sexualized, sublimated, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors. "The truth is," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. […] Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." In the terms of classical Marxism, desire is part of the economic, infrastructural "base" of society, they argue, not an ideological, subjective "superstructure."
One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting. Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written her, she said: 'If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now.'
"I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again." - Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
"The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning." - Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono's Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. 'Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands', Bono proclaimed. 'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce'. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red's 'punk rock' or 'hip hop' character consisted in its 'realistic' acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.
>Angry-synth-homeless-militant-wave
A FATHER'S IMPACT Education and neuroscience researchers report a father's engagement impacts a child's social and emotional competencies such as personal awareness, self-esteem, social skills, relationship building, decision-making, self-control and good behavior. A child's achievement in school is positively impacted when fathers take an active role in school-related events. Fathers who attend school meetings, participate in parent-teacher conferences, show support by attending school events or serve as school volunteers positively impact their child's academic achievement. Where in-school behavior is a concern, fathers can also effectively advocate for individualized discipline procedures and alternatives instead of accepting blanket punitive policies. However, when fathers are absent it produces disturbing outcomes. Fatherless children are: twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as likely to go to jail, and four times more likely to need help with emotional or behavioral problems. Children who have a poor relationship with their father who lives in the household are 68% more likely to smoke, drink, or use drugs compared to teens living in emotionally healthy two-parent families. Adolescent boys living in single-parent families experience a higher risk of delinquency as well. Those raised without a father in their lives are twice as likely to end up in jail. Children whose fathers are not present are twice as likely to repeat a grade. 71% percent of all high school dropouts were raised in fatherless homes (nine times the national average). 85% of children who exhibit behavioral disorders reside in fatherless homes. 63% of youth suicide are from fatherless homes. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions are from father-absent homes. The balance between a mother's focus on nurturing and a father's emphasis on achievement works in tandem to foster the healthy growth and development of children. Whether a biological adoptive or stepfather, children whose fathers have been in their lives since infancy are more prone to be independent and emotionally secure. They are less likely to suffer from depression and are open to experiences outside of their comfort zone. Fathers who spend quality time at play with their children help reduce the incidence of behavioral problems among their sons and influence a healthy self-esteem among their daughters. Fathers' personal time with children enables young boys and girls to better manage their emotions and regulate their behavior. Fathers have significant influence over the development and health of their children. A child's identity is also enhanced, which bodes well for their attaining academic and career success. Adolescents whose fathers were involved during high school years were more likely to graduate from college.
This is what happens when you let arrogant people have idiot friends. They just have a dumb entourage who follows whatever they see.
Michael Bay has perfect penmanship but is illiterate. He writes beautiful calligraphy that spells out gibberish.
Lose the "filler." Every item in your home, and task in your day, should contribute something of value to your life. If something does nothing more than take up space, give it the heave-ho. Filling your living room with extra tchotchkes is like putting extra notes into Clair de Lune.
Edit. A musician, artist, or writer constantly edits her work, removing the extraneous to reveal the extraordinary. In your own life, always be on the lookout for ways you can simplify. Take inspiration from Diogenes, who said, "I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough."
Alvar Aalto was consciously concerned with all the senses in his architecture. His comment on the sensory intentions his furniture design clearly reveals this concern: 'A piece of furniture that forms a part of a person's daily habitat should not cause excessive glare from light reflection: ditto, it should not be disadvantageous in terms of sound, sound absorption, etc. A piece that comes into the most intimate contact with man, as a chair does, shouldn't be constructed of materials that are excessively good conductors of heat.'
We developed this ritual where we would gather at Hope Kurtz' big glass table and she would put out lines and we would read Adorno, we would read all these great books and go "this is a great bit of critical theory; write that line down": and then do another line of cocaine. That's all you had to do in Tallahassee. It wasn't like you had to worry about anything else happening in the world 'cause there was nothing happening, so you could read your Hegel and do lines. But what did happen?
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you're not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.
One of the difficulties I had with Buddhism was how to live a life of non-attachment in a society whose structure reinforces grasping for being at every level. I realized that craving non-attachment itself was causing me to suffer. Zen helped me see how I can live right without having to become a monk. It sounds like hypocrisy on the surface, and I'm not sure how to rationally prove that it isn't. I can see why that aspect of Buddhism is a turn off for many people—it's difficult to distinguish from hippy dippy new age nonsense, despite the fact that it certainly isn't.
"the mental-health industry was not established to support people, but to individualize and medicalize the social misery created by capitalist rule." - Susan Rosenthal (2019). Rebel Minds
"The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way." - Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they're using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it's painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity. If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all, you're confronted with big feelings all the time. These emotions can be confusing and overwhelming. When those around you don't see what you see and feel what you feel, this can lead to a sense of isolation and a general feeling of not belonging, of otherness. These charged emotions, powerful when expressed in the work, are the same dark clouds that beg to be numbed to allow sleep or to get out of bed and face the day in the morning. It's a blessing and a curse.
"A fool forces his way through a crowd. A wise man shits his pants, and the way is cleared for him." - Lao Tzu, 561 BCE.
I'm just going to warn zoomers, all your slang and memes seem like semi-ironic fun, but one of these days McDonald's is going to call their McRib Based and H&R Block is going to say their competitor's transactions fees are cringe. You'll live to see it commodified and seeing a 64 year old oil executive in a tailored suit talking about their favorite vtubers and say only simps support green energy will make you realize nothing can escape the decrepit reach of capital.
"The sky god is also named Zhang. Why does he make life hard for me? If it doesn't rain in three days, I'll demolish your temple. Then I'll have cannons bombard your mom."
sleeping in class is okay as long as you tell everyone your dream
Sean Gullette got upset with Aronofsky on the day they shot the scene between him and Jennifer Connelly at dinner. Gullette had prepared a lot for the scene, but Aronofsky felt the only thing the scene needed, even more important than the dialogue, was Gullette's character eating a steak. He doesn't indicate if he's exaggerating or not - which would lead me to believe that he's not - but Aronofsky says Gullette ate five and a half steaks while filming this scene. On that day, food won.
"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
Taste, like judgement in general, is the discipline (or corrective) of genius. It severely clips its wings, and makes it seemly or polished; but at the same time it gives it guidance, directing and controlling its flight, so that it may preserve its purposive character. It introduces a clearness and order into the plenitude of thought, and in so doing gives stability to the ideas, and qualifies them at once for permanent and universal approval, for being followed by others, and for a continually progressive culture. And so, where the interests of both these qualities clash in a product, and there has to be a sacrifice of something, then it should rather be on the side of genius; and judgement, which in matters of fine art bases its decision on its own proper principles, will more readily endure an infringement of the freedom and wealth of the imagination, than that the understanding should be compromised. The requisites for fine art are, therefore, imagination, understanding, spirit, and taste.
If technology is in the hands of philosophers, activists or artists, for example, its function and direction can be very different. It can be another creative tool rather than being a coded and coding tool through which the standardization of communication (with ever greater speed and accessibility) is maximized despite the impressive proliferation of choices devised.
"Well, for example (the example I always use), the child lying in a crib with an open window—a pre-verbal or nearly pre-verbal child—and a hummingbird flies through the room. It's a psychedelic miracle, it's absolutely stunning. The boundaries of that experience are completely undefined. But then the mother or the nanny walks into the room and says, "Oh! It's a bird, baby. Bird." The miracle immediately collapses down into a hard little tile, and by the time a person is six years old, reality has been entirely replaced by a mosaic of defined and very non-numinous meaning. And so people are then imprisoned in this language." - Terence McKenna
chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a succession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, television, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. "Smile, you're on candid camera!" The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile. A smile is permanently graven on our features, and we already know from which of several angles it photographs to best advantage.
Theory is an analytical tool and should never be deliberately thought of when writing music. Jacob's [Collier] music is written in a theoretically well thought out and deliberate manner. It lacks spontaneity, inspiration and any part of the natural creative process. I can guarantee most classical/jazz masterpieces began with the composer drunkenly fucking around on his instrument or randomly humming a melody. My proof for this is the fact that Jacob can give an in-depth theoretical analysis of any minute detail of his songs in a heartbeat. If you asked someone like Thelonious Monk to explain why he played a certain chord, he would probably answer something along the lines of 'it sounded good'. Actual masterful composers have the necessary theory internalized and never use it as a starting point when writing music.
"There's enough banal music out there, designed to sell product and give ideas of universal harmony and pedestrian vibes," he says. "I don't want to contribute to that. But it's not easy. The software encourages you to make 4×4 rhythms, to use certain types of synth sounds, to repeat things. You take home your Apple Store computer with your Apple Store keyboard and you make music you're told by Apple to make. Breaking out of that involves a lot of hard work."
When we wake up from a dream, then, we do not pass from unreality to reality; we pass from a lower level of reality to a higher one. Havelock Ellis, the psychologist who devoted his life to the study of sex, observed, "Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?"
This spiritual ascent is so fraught with challenge that we can see why the sages took their students young. Exploring the unconscious requires the daring of the years between twelve and twenty, when if someone says "Don't try to climb that peak, you'll get hurt," you immediately go and start climbing. As we grow older, something changes; we start listening to those cautionary voices and say we are learning prudence. So it is no accident that the hero of the Katha Upanishad is a teenager. The message of the Katha, which echoes throughout the Upanishads, is to dare like a teenager: to reach for the highest you can conceive with everything you have, and never count the cost.
That fullness the Upanishads call sat: absolute reality, in which all of creation is implicit as an organism is implicit in DNA, or a tree in a tiny seed. The joy of this state cannot be described. This is ananda: pure, limitless, unconditioned joy. The individual personality dissolves like salt in a sea of joy, merges in it like a river, rejoices like a fish in an ocean of bliss. "As a man in the arms of his beloved," says the Brihadaranyaka daringly, "is not aware of what is without and what within, so one in union with the Self is not aware of what is without and what within, for in that state all desires are fulfilled." And what other scripture would cap such an image with a pun? "Anta-kamam atma-kamam akamam rupam: That is his real form, where he is free from all desires because all his desires are fulfilled; for the Self is all our desire."
A few of the adult guests wandered in, including Warhol and Haring. Warhol took one look at the computer program and turned to Haring in wonderment. "What is this? Look at this, Keith. This is incredible!" A few minutes later, Warhol asked if he could take a turn in front of the monitor. Jobs explained how the mouse worked, but the artist instead lifted it off the floor and swished it through the air. Finally, Jobs put his hand over Warhol's and steered it along until he'd gotten the hang of it. After a few minutes in concentrated silence, Warhol glanced up. "Look! Keith! I drew a circle!" That night, Warhol recorded the episode in his diary. He'd told Jobs that a man had been calling him repeatedly, trying to give him a Macintosh, but Warhol had never followed up. Jobs replied, "Yeah, that was me. I'm Steve Jobs." (The artist, famous for his neon-hued prints, also noted of the program, "It only comes in black and white now, but they'll make it soon in color.")