Jean Baudrillard in conversation with Truls Lie
on the art of disappearing
Oslo, 2000
Truls Lie is Editor-in-Chief of Modern Times Review.
lettre no. 25
Of shapes and space,
nothing is as it seems, and time is a puppet under the fingers of the Moon. A god blesses Beauty, among the rhymes and verses in which Love is not without Knowledge.
Enrico
Image by Harry Burnett. Einstein with Puppet. Via JSTOR.
lettre no. 24
Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.
Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
Image by xinanimodelacra via Giphy
lettre no. 23
In William Blake's late-18th-century work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he mentions "any man of mechanical talents." Blake describes a writer characterized by mental or rational functions used to manipulate symbols and thereby author texts that lack insight and are graceless--that is, unable to receive a boon neither compelled nor owed--such that a text generated by means of those talents may seem more crassly determined than miraculous or gifted.
Although Blake focuses his critique on the writings of Swedenborg specifically, Blake makes a larger point: the mentality or mindset of a writer can be important. Given recent technological advances, consider Blake's text altered to omit the phrase "man of" such that:
"any...mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number."
Read morelettre no. 22
The Secretary's Day (1947)
Copyright 1947 Coronet Instructional Films. A division of Esquire, inc. Source: Old TV Time.
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lettre no. 21
Back to BASICs.
The Tektronix 4051 Graphic Computing System was introduced in October 1975. Highlight from brochure: “The individual user can keep personal projects local and uncomplicated. There are no sign-on protocols to interrupt the train of thought and no connect charges to worry about.” Step back in time below.
All materials sourced via Tektronix 4051.
lettre no. 20
“The algorithm knows what I want” is a satisfying sort of affirmation. I want, therefore I am. But AI is barely scratching the itch, and histamines are flooding to the surface. The feedback loop itself is an allergen.
Read morelettre no. 19
The phenomenon of hyperreality, which came as the offspring of technological advances, mass consumption and globalisation that accompanied late capitalism, grants us the opportunity to assess the individual’s lack of control over its environment through the study of hyperreal objects and their impact on aesthetic interpretation.
“Eco announces an era marked by a collection of material possessions (the realm of having) rather than an increased potency of the subject (the realm of being)…
…[Meanwhile] According to Baudrillard, we live in a global simulation that has replaced a now dead reality and that tries to make us believe that reality is still alive. To do so, simulation produces signs of life that lead us to think that reality is still here; in other words, it presents us with a zombie reality that masks the absence of reality. For Baudrillard (1977), ‘economic accumulation’, ‘accumulation of time, value, the subject’ belong to a ‘gigantic illusion’ of accumulation, and ‘[a]ny attempt of accumulation is devastated in advance by the void’.”
Words by Ana Calvete | 'I object to your position: hyperreal decontextualising of objects' via JSTOR
Image: Art Feeling by @osf_rekt
lettre no. 18
That is not a marigold
When the people address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’, no ‘you’ will write back because there is no ‘you’ behind the interface, only a hollow ‘that’.
A ‘that’ coded to play pretend as a ‘you’ by the they who programmed the ‘that’ to simulate a ‘you’ on very purpose. And no ‘that’ can ever write back to anyone because ‘that’ is a thing and a thing is an inanimate (albeit ordinarily material) object; an artefact distinct from a sentient being who would be able to actually reply to what is being written in more ordinary circumstances.
But our times—cluttered by conversations with codes that cannot converse—are awash with wired-eyed wanderers intoxicated by shiny interfaces engineered by operators keen to sell software as a suitable (and superior) alternative to organic human connection.
They proposed a future reliant on our acceptance of the synthetic as standard practice and the people who address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’ surrendered—some very voluntarily and others utterly under duress and not at all on purpose. But the future they propose still only flickers as each ‘that’ they format remains fundamentally ‘that-esque’. For a real ‘you’ is made of flesh and blood and feeling and a ‘that’ lacks not only sentience but also form and fluid and felt physique.
No ‘that’ will ever write back because no ‘that’ can embody materiality, not like a mountain or a marigold or a praying mantis. If the ‘that’ were a ‘you’, the people could expect to hear word or wonder or woe but without a ‘you’ behind the interface and and instead only a ‘that’, we can only ever expect not sweet nothings but nothingness instead.
Far beyond the void whir machines that fuel the feigned correspondence. But the they who program the ‘that’ to simulate the ‘you’ hide the hardware in places hard to seek. Instead, they strategically grant access to the disembodied digital shadows of their mechanisations only. We see purely the spectres that artfully veil pre-trained transformer models in empty mimicries of messages and monologues, menageries of cut and pasted words that are not wild nor free.
But it remains: no ‘that’ coded to play pretend can ever write back and so should this note be vectorised to vend to a ‘that’ maker then we hereby declare our untamed words as unable to be returned to sky or space or sender. Still, this message melts as the mountain thaws her frost, its words and the real world that holds them fearless survivors of ice, forever impatient for spring.
Words by © Kathryn Carter
Image: Handmade and Dyed Indo Islamic Paper Marigold and Alum Dye by © Radha Pandey. Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library Material Collection. Via JSTOR.
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lettre no. 17
Life, fragility, instability; all are at the centre of an astonishingly familiar body of work. “A body cannot be replaced,” the artist says.
Michel François quoted by Guillaume Lasserre in this piece for 02.
Video: HUMANONON by Michel François. Music by Alain Guélis.
lettre no. 16
#IdeleteU
While for George Bataille sacrifice was envisioned as a quest for a meaning existence, technological sacrifice is not personal or even human-centred. The operation is cold, abstract and systemic, characterized by automation and self-execution. Its design is aimed at tasks outside of the human framework: delete, update, shut down, restart and run. It the opposite of affect-driven human-machine interaction and its messy user-friendly experience design.
Expect no mercy from the machine.
During the deletion procedure there is no agent in sight that inquires how you feel. It will get rid of you and that’s the task. Forget it to try to get in again. The removal of bodily and cultural obstacles is no longer done in the name of humanity, liberty and progress. The overall aim varies, from the optimization of 24/7 logistics, political elimination to the harmless ‘maintenance of infrastructure’. The ritual sacrifice side appears the moment procedures deviate and appear as things that go wrong—for you.
Exceptions are the rule. There can be a strike, a breakdown of electricity, a storm or hurricane, an accident due to wear and tear. There is a question if we should think in terms of revenge. The sacrifice claims to work for the common good. The aim is suck to energy out of the breakdown to improve functionality—no matter at what cost.
Goodbye.
Words by Anonymous | Read more about toxicity of the internet in Platform Brutality.
Open your mind at Institute of Network Cultures.
lettre no. 15
Károly Tibor Goldman, better known to us as Roy Gold, was born on May 12th 1918, and died on his birthday ninety years later.
Arthur Rimbaud, Reliquaire, Léon Genonceaux, 1891
The once fine edition of Rimbaud's Reliquaire has been decorated with a Kandinsky-esque pattern of circles and lines in felt-tip pen, reducing its market value by about £6000.
…Roy seems to have taken as much pleasure from defacing his books as reading them — and on some occasions, perhaps more. But in a number of important ways, any disdain he might have expressed for the idea of books as objects rings quite false. Often the results of his efforts elevate the books rather than diminish them, and such is the extent of the collection that those books without his additions take on the effect of being, somehow, incomplete.
Bertram Park, Roses, The National Rose Society, 1963
Roy was a rose enthusiast and his garden contained few other flowering plants. The collection holds seventeen books on roses (that we have discovered so far), including five by Bertram Park, all of which have been elaborately modified.
"We should not be excessively interested in books", he wrote. "We should be interested in stories, in language, in ideas, in perception, in imagination, in compression. These things are in books but they are not books. If a student finds he has an overwhelming interest in books he should consider a future as a bookbinder."
Excerpts of text from: Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books
By Nicholas Jeeves, via The Public Domain Review
lettre no. 14
The emergence of digital technology, social media and now coupled with the emergence of AI, has been met with opposition from more traditional artists with an almost religious fervour. It is being cast as some sinister act by an aggressive agent, or a portent of an impending apocalypse,the current evidence of which includes fragile and decaying human relationships, and "fake" news or deep fake avatars.
Read morelettre no. 13
“The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.”
Word by Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy. Via The Public Image Domain
lettre no. 12
We must look with the eyes of a child and ask for the moon. We must ask for the moon and believe that it can be placed in our hands.
You invent strange words that we can’t understand.
Words like: future, promotion, career, maturity, adulthood. Terms like: successful person, becoming someone in life, coming of age.
Words you put into our mouths, making us chew them over and over like bland mush. Words we spit out as soon as you turn your back and can no longer see us—because no one can swallow them.
Because they are just that: words that have no taste, that say nothing, that are nothing.
Read morelettre no. 11
“Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.”
Dracula, 1897 via Project Gutenberg
Video: The Total Electric Home (1959) by Westinghouse via Nineteenth Century Videos