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Interrupt V: Jhave Johnston, John Cayley, & Maralie Armstrong

This is footage from one my live scrying performances last year during Interrupt Festival V at Brown University. In this series I use a simple audio/visual synth patch in Max MSP to generate live sound and light which is then projected through glass and water.

The abstract light & shadow play dislodges control of the rational mind and acts as a means to “see” the things we normally dismiss or fail to notice. Glass and water both intrinsically bridge the material and the ethereal. For this reason both materials have historically been used for scrying practices by diviners. Yet in an age of ubiquitous screens these tools, or more specifically glass, is commonly used to display ‘rational’ information and permits us to communicate with known entities like living friends, family members, and contacts.

Moving the synthesized video from screen to projector brings the information into a physical immersive space and disperses the light so that an audience may participate in this “deep seeing” at the same time. The act of scrying becomes a communal one.

Later in the video is a panel discussion in which John Cayley describes the piece as, “One of those moments where within the audiovisual, there was an entity. An entity was being conjured and addressed and brought in so that we would have some relation with it, which in a lot of audiovisual work doesn’t happen. It’s just there’s a concept and that concept is being expressed by the audiovisual. I think Maralie’s work goes beyond that”

#Interrupt Festival #john cayley #jhave johnston #maralie armstrong #valise #scrying #av synthesis #maxmsp #spiritualism

I return to Interrupt Festival this weekend. Find me in the first session on Friday morning in the Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University

Full schedule here: http://www.interrupt.xyz/

#festival #conference #interruptconference #digitalliterature #john cayley #claire donato #jackie wang #wafaa bilal #drought spa #qianxun chen #Maralie Armstrong-Rial #ian hatcher #paul soulellis #david jhave johnston #live

This week, we’re talking about the poetics and politics of code. We’ve been asked to consider whether code is aesthetic, as well as if it is political.

Though I personally have no experience writing code, my close friend who works in “comp-sci” tells me that she works in many “languages.” Just as we learned French in high school, she learned HTML, CSS, and JAVA, and contends that when you become “fluent” in these languages, you have the same degree of flexibility with how you express yourself as you do with traditional languages. When you approach a problem - say, coding a square to move horizontally across your screen - there is more than one way of achieving that instruction. (In this way, I can understand how code is a “magical language” in the sense of conjuring that action into being.) For those who understand it, code must be understood as aesthetic.

And similarly, when John Cayley writes that reading is a “learned practice,” I have to agree. We have been taught and socialized to expect certain forms and practices when we read, which allows us to interpret properly. The trouble with coding languages is that they look so completely foreign. Without instruction on what the symbols mean, most of us find code incomprehensible. Like any language, code excludes those not taught how to interpret it. As Cayley warns, “If there is no reading then we have reached the end of all literature, and electronic literature may have helped to get us there.”

But does its incomprehensibility make code political? Somewhat, yes, because we now “live” in a “world built from all of this infrastructure,” as Cayley argues. World powers are concerned with tech companies’ control over our individual lives. But the public discussion over “net neutrality” has been almost completely eliminated, maybe because at this point, we as a digitally integrated society have come to expect exploitation and a lack of privacy from our browsing experiences. We don’t yet live in M.T. Anderson’s Feed, but we aren’t nearly as distant as we once were. (The novel imagines a cyber-dominated near-future where corporations have literal, direct connections into everyone’s brains, ”feeds,” through which individuals mentally access a global network of advertisements, programs, and communication channels and face constant bombardment to remain engaged.) Cayley worries that “the contemporary and evolving cultural practices of reading — what reading is and will become — will be determined not by the innovators of electronic literature; they will be determined by those cultural power brokers who build and control the Big Software architecture of reading.”

Cayley’s use, then, is in how he makes us think about the construction of code - how influential it is in our daily lives, how it has and will be exploited, and how he predicts it will develop into what he calls “aurature.” (He cites Amazon’s Alexa, the equivalent of Apple’s Siri, whom Cayley says is the first robot “I think and feel I have invited into my home.”) He suggests that software and programming will become “integral to the predominant practices of linguistic creation, of aesthetic linguistic artifactuality.”

If Cayley is right, and the future of literature is bound up in aurature, I can see its ultimate harm, but I’m unconvinced that we have any means of stopping the path we’ve begun. In Feed, the repercussions are vast: environmental disaster, a society become regressive, closed-minded, pod-like, and mostly illiterate. But for most people, that kind of outcome resides still in science fiction, not as a practical near-reality. I don’t want to end this post with the kind of anxiety-charged imagery that many have when describing the “end of literature,” but I do find the similarities between Cayley and Anderson’s predictions unsettling. Time will tell, but I would guess that for most people, code is simply too mystifying to hope to engage with on the level required to make real changes to the way it is embedded in our lives. The best most of us can do is to acquire basic training in some of the languages, or take “breaks” from the obvious sources of interaction we have, i.e. social media and digital technology.

#lit #text post #poetics #code #john cayley #m.t. anderson

This mesmerizing work by Cayley (with music by Giles Perring) invites the reader to look at this poem for a long time, searching for something to read, particularly if you cannot read French or German.

Another really cool art-writing-translation project.

#john cayley #intersemiotic translation #translation #relevant to my interests

Programmatology

John Cayley on Francesca Capone’s, Primary Source http://programmatology.shadoof.net/pdfs/CayleyOnCaponePrimarySource.pdf

#John Cayley #Primary Source #Francesca Capone #maximum sideline postscript