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Garth Roberts

None Futbol Club - Work No. 11

Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the gray moss that coated everything. . . . I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with such new eyes the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked it to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the distance like sudden revelations. The stooped and blackened appearance of these trees was shocking against the vast and shimmering gold-brown of the reeds. The strange quality of the light upon this habitat, the stillness of it all, the sense of waiting, brought me halfway to a kind of ecstasy.

Jeff VanderMeer, 'Southern Reach Trilogy'

advancedsystemsarray

Former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director and now Google Executive, Regina E. Duncan, has unveiled a super small, ingestible microchip that we can all be expected to swallow by 2017. “A means of authentication,” she calls it, also called an electronic tattoo, which takes NSA spying to whole new levels. She talks of the ‘mechanical mismatch problem between machines and humans,’ and specifically targets 10 – 20 year olds in her rant about the wonderful qualities of this new technology that can stretch in the human body and still be functional.

My album art and a stream of Slow Build, a track from the new album from The Range, Panasonic. Vinyl / Album release on March 25th with additional artwork.

advancedsystemsarray

At the very least, these questions help reframe social media use—sometimes dismissed as merely narcissistic attention-seeking—as the attempt to live the truth courageously in a perpetual provocation of others, in the mode of the ancient Cynics. The Delphic oracle told Diogenes of Sinope not to “know thyself” but to “deface the currency.” What are our social media platforms asking us to do?

There are many other things that a mouth can do besides act as an outlet for what the brain thinks. As we viewers of horror films know very well, it can project vomit or spew bile, it can contaminate with a kiss, and it can issue screams. It is not a matter of speaking the unspeakable, but of vocalising the extra-linguistic or the non-verbal, and thereby letting the Outside in. (Fisher, “Gothic Materialism” 242) The mouth gurgles forth a black matter thick and putrid. (Leviathan, “Mouth Orifice Bizarre”) [T]he apocalypse depicted by spittle, blood and dried sperm, the sweat of clenched fists and smashed teeth spat onto the sun to humiliate the day. (Massemord, “The Madness Tongue Devouring Juices of Livid Hope”) The mouth is a chamber of thousands of larvae, each germinating an acephalous mouth, cannibal to the other, serving the other as a meal. (Negarestani, “Acephalous Mouth”)

BLACK METAL AND THE MOUTH: ALWAYS SERVING YOU AS A MEAL, OR, INFECTED ORALITY, PESTILENTIAL WOUNDS AND SCARS Aspasia Stephanou

Glossator, Volume 6

Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

These worldviews are typically constructed such that qualifying for these literal and symbolic modes of immortality require being a valued contributor to the culture. Not coincidentally, this mirrors the way children develop and sustain a sense of psychological security. Born helpless and dependent, their first basis of security is parental love. But within the first year or so, this protective love becomes dependent on being good and thus of value in the eyes of the seemingly omnipotent parents. As children develop cognitively, they begin to understand that the threat of death lurks behind their early fears of big dogs, monsters, the dark, and so forth. Their basis of security shifts from the parents to large cultural concepts, such as deities, their nation, and cultural ideals. That is, from being good little boys and girls in the eyes of their parents to being good, valued Christians or atheists, Americans or Germans, artists or scientists. The result of this socialization process is fully enculturated adults who sustain psychological security, despite knowing how vulnerable and mortal they are, by maintaining two psychological constructs: our faith in our worldview and our sense of self-worth.

How the Unrelenting Threat of Death Shapes Our Behavior, Hans Villarica

Hugo Simberg The Garden of Death

In fact, glamour began quite literally with magic. Growing from the Scottish gramarye around 1720, glamer was a sort of spell that would affect the eyesight of those afflicted, so that objects appear different than they actually are. Sir Walter Scott anglicized the word and brought it into popular use in his poems (“You may bethink you of the spell / Of that sly urchin page / This to his lord did impart / And made him seem, by glamour art / A knight from Hermitage”); not long after his death in 1832 the word began to be used to describe the metaphoric spell we cast upon one another by being particularly beautiful or fascinating. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment (“There was little doubt that he meant to bring his magnetism and his glamour, and all his other diabolical properties, to market here,” from an 1878 novel) but by the 1920s—not coincidentally, the time women started developing the styles that we now recognize as glamorous—the meaning had shed much of its air of suspicion.

No photographer name has been credited with the above photo, but the library description reads, "An A-bomb blast set off in Nevada at 4:36 a.m., on April 18th, 1953, was judged by early risers to have been the most sensational of any seen so far. The blast made the eastern horizon as 'bright as day.'"

Atomic Tests of the 1950s

We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.

They're Taking Over!

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