Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

The paintbrush shown in the above video is a remarkable piece of technology. It’s eerie but breathtaking to watch a human being capture complex, varied patches of color, texture and motion and reproduce it all with a flick of the wrist.

At the same time this is essentially just another sampling technology, taking the camera to its next logical evolutionary stage: not only snap the world out of context, but repurpose it in real-time.

As sampling technology then, it has the same potential to be used to honor its medium (I think of Edgar Varese’s musical compositions, or some of the soundscapes in a Public Enemy song) or debase it (contemporary pop which lifts entire melodies and motifs from older artists, slaps on a new lyric and calls it a new composition). It all depends on who handles the technology.

Still, at the risk of seeming all Ludditish, all I see are people creating more distance (or having distance inserted) between themselves and life through technology like this. I think of all the concerts and live music I’ve been to in recent years where, more and more, the audience is content to view everything through a lens, snapping away, only occasionally putting aside the camera to experience the event unmediated.

Or botanical gardens I’ll go to where people rush up to a bonsai tree, or orchid, or kiku flower, snap a few strained photos and hurry off to the next shot, never pausing to experience the subject in its immediacy, apart from the impulse to contain and preserve — and sample.

People are being conditioned to relate to the world outside of them as opportunities first & foremost for sampling and capture, whether by camera or this new LED-paintbrush, & not as opportunities for real, developed, fully-rounded experience.

Many will answer a concern like mine with: “Well, um, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
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Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com
   

   

(10 more like him here)
   

19th century thinkers like William Paley argued for the existence of God based on brilliant, beautiful, complex designs in nature — flowers, trees, bird plumage.

You might as well argue for the existence of God based on the ten astonishingly repulsive submarine lives in the link above: Alien forms so ugly they resist all aesthetic valuation. With walleyed gill-flutter they shatter the mirror and slither into the soft void beyond, where symmetry, harmony, color, line & beauty all become meaningless. They’re defiantly themselves, in silent, weird, ultra-pressurized pitch — Holy fuck, look at these critters.

My throat catches when I scan them all. The glutinous blobfish. The estuarine rockfish, severe & implacable as an Olmec head. The wheezing porcine lumpfish.

Why do I start to feel this way? Is it because I catch myself finding them wretched and laughable, ridiculously abhorrent, and then become ashamed with myself, knowing they can’t help how they were made?

Is it because I feel humbled in their presence, their ancient miles-removed presence, so coldly distant from mine that they might as well be martians wriggling among asteroids?

Is it because I feel smaller and uglier & more pathetic compared to their spiny, encrusted, cartilaginoid, mucoused, jellied but unselfconscious & heedless & glaring faces? More purely themselves in all their horrorshow gristle than all of us with our dissembling and meta-shit and second-guessing?

There they are, these deeptrench lives, captured in shock at the foot of ours, drinking all our drainage, our oldest and strangest cohabiters, blinking and mouthing in black while we feed them more plastic.

Lists.

LISTS.

SWEET JESUS POTATO GUNS we love our lists.

Can I please have a day of Internets without another godforsaken Authoritative Top Ten List of important shit befouling my screen?

I remember seeing High Fidelity years ago and thinking: damn. People love lists. An entire film based around a man’s list-rank organization of his love life’s vicissitudes. & I remember simultaneously liking and feeling odd about that. It tapped into the geeky anal organizer in me, but it also felt cheap, easy, hydrogenated, canola-oiled, sort of throwaway and disrespectful of the experiences under discussion in the film.

Since then it’s only gotten worse, in media, art, blogs, & I’ve become increasingly alarmed at everyone’s insistence on reducing history & day-to-day experience to a tidy assortment of ratings, rankings — everything crammed through this OCD quantitative sieve.

It’s as if we don’t trust experiences unless we can package them & stamp them with a tag/number — so much anxiety in every step of that machine-like categorization. You can feel it pulsing behind the numbers, a teeth-chattering, skittery little ghost-droid, antennae frantically waving, robo-tentacles eager to seize more data parcels to slot & secure. Hell, I’ll be doing it at the end of this post.

The uninterrupted modern brain/eye-fuck of data datadatadadtaddtatdtatdata must make us this way. So much info hailing down upon us from every source that all we can do is try to make ourselves bots in the face of it: analyze, arrange, parse, order, next data set please.

My mother called me yesterday to hear my voice.

I said: “Mother, what are the top five reasons you love me?” She responded readily, with a tagged data set including supplemental links to her & my amazon wishlists.

I felt 6.5 EU (emotional units) of love at that instant, and we exchanged relational signifiers before disengaging our info-relay.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

The following are excerpts from an interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1995, where he weighs in on his career and the works of modern artists influenced in part by him (Aphex Twin among them). Interview is found here:

http://www.stockhausen.org/ksadvice.html

“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be
very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic
music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then
immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look
for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat
any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a
direction in its sequence of variations.”

“The beginning of every art music development, in China, or in India or in European monasteries was always to relate the art of shaping composing sounds with the art [by which] the stars are shaped and composed. Astronomy, mathematics and music were the highest disciplines throughout the centuries since the beginning of European art music in the monasteries, let’s say in the tenth until the 14th, 15th century… I have studied all music of Europe as a student - I had to - and I at a very early age became aware, also naturally, [that] certain music, like the Art Of The Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach or the Musikalishe Opfer, [has] always known about this relationship between the laws of the universe, astronomical laws, and the laws of the music of this Earth. “

I absolutely love the premise — have an establishment-throned, grumpy old-guard composer address the works of his progenitors (Aphex Twin, Scanner, etc). And I doubly love that the ‘children’ of the article got the chance to weigh in on old Stocky’s recommendations afterwards — famously Aphex Twin’s flippant (but unquestionably disappointed) rejoinder where he basically says “Stock, fuck off, you ain’t got no SOUL.”

So right after reading the interview I checked out some of the Stocker’s music, the first time I’d heard him since college. With all due respects to the now-deceased composer — I didn’t care much for him then (though I think as an idealistic 20-something it was easier for me to feel I wasn’t ‘up to’ the lofty sublime peaks of his craft) — & I realized quickly that I sure as hell don’t care for him now.
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For our Branches are buried in mud, and instinctively thirst for rain and sun even while sunk in the muck.

But they’re smothered to choking in that damp and locked from the light in that dirt.

We were born with a sharp garlic taste for lust, madness, and with an inarticulate goat-cry lodged in the throat. But every noble, kicking, fearsome, joyous impulse in us can’t live while our lungs and hands and brains and souls are trapped by the rank Sludge of the Burying World.

Because the Burying World hates anything secret, strange, and wild. It wants us tame, drooling, limp, soft and clawing around in the underground or not at all. It wants us like Wax to better receive the bombardment of impressions from television & advertisements, billboards and the Buy-This Datafeed. The Burying World is the world of sensory overflow. The Burying World is the world of the Close-Up & Zoom-In; it’s the world of graphic representation run amok. The Burying World wants your Eye, wants to bore a hole in it to fuck. And then it will ask for your money.

The Burying World knows what you want, because it has seized your senses and pumped you full of well-marketed desires like formaldehyde. The Burying World coddles your narcissism and makes you think you deserve everything. That you should improve yourself endlessly. That nothing else matters but you [and only the ‘you’ that is able to purchase and desire]. Not other people, not a tree or a creek, not a cow or a lark, not Art or the Spirit. And so the Burying World keeps you slavering after its products and messages — yoked to its Pus-Drip-Feed — through planned obsolescence and psy-ops marketing. The Burying World fastens thick cables around your neck.

The Burying World is the world of convenience and expedited-everything. The world of Minimalism, Economizing and quick, marketable Feng-Shui-Simplicity at the expense of the bounding heartful healthy Sprawl that we are born craving. The Burying World wants to strangle your thoughts and words into easy-to-digest Soundbytes and Energy Bars. The Burying World will chain you. The Burying World will take your Gazelles from their well-gamboled Steppes to trammel to Troughs for fattening up.

The Burying World numbs your sex and makes pallid your grins with isolating devices, gadgets and technologies. The Burying World automates and automates until there is no need for us to intervene in the endless layers of Processes regulating Processes; Machines regulating Machines. Removed from the world, we rot. The Burying World will feed on our compost.

The Burying World hates the past, hates history, and lives in the eternal, marketable Now. The Burying World is afraid of absolutes, whether in Art or in morality or in church or in state, and would rather you accept everything in what seems to be an enlightened & progressive relativism, but which is actually a spoon-fed blubbering Apathy.
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“Habitual Costiveness,
Depraved appetite,
Calculous and nephritic complaints,
Cutaneous eruptions,
Some species or states of gout,
Some species of dropsy,
Scrofula,
Amenorrhea,
Dysmenorrhea.”

That’s from Saratoga Springs’ 1821 advertising literature. It’s a list of maladies supposedly cured or alleviated by the the famous spring waters of that NY state resort. I read about this in the Atlantic Monthly a few issues ago.

So my first reaction, of course, was: “Bubbly mineral water, that’s all. Snake-Oil.”

Then I got to thinking about it. If enough people believe it, does that make it true? I’m used to hearing, and saying, ‘Hell no.’ What if the answer was ‘Yes’? In matters of faith, I believe it is.

I think a kind of psychic energy accrues around the hoped-for phenomenon, the faith-healer or faith-healing object, whether it’s a spa, a river, a shroud, whatever sacred or magical site or relic or person is supposed to confer health or powers or miracles, and that the more hope and yearning is focused on it, the more potent becomes its very real psychosomatic effects. Buzz swells around the faith-healing object in proportion to the people who swear by it, and the likelihood of people having real, empirically-knowable results from an encounter with the faith-object increases.

Put another way, I have no problem believing that some people visiting Saratoga Springs in 1937 really did have their indigestion alleviated, their skin conditions helped. I’ve known people that were so agitated and nervous as to send themselves to the hospital. You have too. There is no limit to the havoc the mind can wreak on the body. And conversely, no limit to how it can help.

It’s all too easy to lambast these kinds of things as pure evil-hearted humbuggery. And there’s a lot of it around, I’m not saying there isn’t. But a lot of it, if only psychosomatically, has worked. What the Saratoga founders did — and what most well-meaning and inspired faith-healers do — was to strike a wellspring — not of magic water, but of Need. They found a nexus of yearning on earth, tended it, cultivated it, marketed it, marshaled the psychosomatic evidence to its efficiency, and created a phenomenon. I don’t know how many people really came away from Saratoga springs over the last 200 years bettered and more healthful. But I’m not willing to say it was all a gigantic sham. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people returned in a better frame of mind and body. It might’ve been expensive. But what kind of price do you put on health? Especially a diminished “Depraved Appetite”?

But when does it get ugly? When does it turn devious? I believe the answer is — following William James in his “Varieties of Religious Experience” — when the “fruits” of religion are no longer there to consider, i.e., when the empirically-knowable benefits disappear. Only then can we start to call out the faith in question — like the faith in the healing powers of spring water — to be false.

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