#qty

[parkerpeanuts]

this pretty much sums up the stream

[iej-ce]

Inventing the Future - Isiah Medina (2020)

[alephcinema]

wadiz:idizwadidiz?

by Alexandre Galmard

A new ‘demolition of the wall’ (of language) has brought itself to the Ground (’zu Grunde gehen’), then back as a background. Isiah Medina. Every point is a passing through the event-horizon, a universal projection of the concept of concept driven to be unwritten, ceasing to be what they are by reversing back to their natural space, challenging them on another basis than the one of philosophical articulation, outlining the contours of the world of thought. There is a crossing of threads from which this work stems : philosophical concepts and artificial languages as toys, their geometries, their blueprints, their figuration and animation, their interactions, transgressions and fantasies; and the multiplication of their dialectics to understand what they are and how they may be, changing the way we think worlds can be made in a systematic manner. As a foundation kit, a toolbox to share with fellow makers and thinkers, an about-face to a ground-zero which is never fully it ('Kindergarten'), idizwadidiz is ‘textless punctuation’, a sort of 'concept-script' whose ideography extends from the index which registers itself in its own immanent unraveling into an articulated and complex rebus which, more than staging a formal methodology for content-breaking, breaks from old molds by breaking from the molded idea of the mold itself, casting away the cast, engaging the whole media into a process of unlearning. If we must break from the despotism of fixed grammatical rules at every point, such that each composition has its own mold, one point at least must break with this idea by dealing with the most absolute form of despotic formalism. Here we have the marvel of marvels, extimacy demarking itself from the passing through of ascents and descents, through the formal-concept that emerges from the background of immanent abstractions.

If one lacks the proper language, should an effort be made to be able to see it all? Wouldn't it be denying that something can be thought without the thought with which it was conceived to affirm that Isiah's movies are indiscernible without its bibliography? The point is not so much that, if we were to show it all, artistic creativity would be compromised (clearly it isn't). Rather, the desire to see (truths) always already inscribes the Idea into the intimate domain of placement. The obverse position rendered here is subtraction for the very purpose of unconstraining thought to a position, of unconstraining the concept to a lens of truth, to an 'epistemological intermediary' which would render the world ingurgitable. What is shown is not lacking its sources because it is heavily censored, it is heavily censored because you do not come back scot-free from wanting to see it all. You cannot see it all without compromise, without an absolutely subtracted codified contextual structure without which it would be 'like turning round hopelessly in some obscure labyrinth', tracking down sensible intensities. By reflecting upon both epistemic transactions (between abstract things and concrete ideas) and their typological axiomatization, one goes through a sort of brachylogical sabotage, the very destructive step towards a re-foundational grounding of all parameters, of the conceptual and the not-so-conceptual brought to appear in other ways than they were made or thought to exist without reducing the conceptual to an effect, nor understanding to an affect : from 'having or not having' (concepts) to 'having or being', that which 'presupposes the subject as always already having a generative capacity' shifts into that which 'takes into account how the subject itself emerges through the substance's auto-scission', thinking thought as always-already a structured ideal, and whose Idea shifts from the affect of the subject in the effect of a truth to the effect of the subject in the affect of a truth.

(0)

As a contraction of words into one, the title, being a negation of Leibniz's "what is not a being, is not a being", presenting its inverted form and taking into account abstractness in its most concrete sense, is the grand investigation of a being of negation, 'there is no peace even in the Void'.

An empty screen appears. A 'compulsion to repeat' chops the opening shot, beginning over and over, acting as its own absolute self-reference, its principle of identity : A is A, which, being the same and posited twice, differs from itself, splits itself from itself, jump-cuts self-referent identities being re-injected into themselves as a constant reminder that substance always-already splits itself intermittently. The original black frame is pre-ontological while the screen is the Void proper, its failure of being something other than nothing, or rather, a nothing which is counted for, just like anglosaxon groundfloors marked '1'. The black frame leaves its place for its negation, the white empty sheet. This is closely followed by the appearance of another form of nothingness, an empty projection, a 'shadowy double', which plays the pre-roll countdown. This is at once the announcing of the beginning of the roll, and the retroactive referent that we already have begun to count. The two unaligned empty squares are an exemplary distinction between A's voided being and A's appointed there. The out-of-jointness from frame to screen, from picture to movie, as seen throughout, disrupts their identification with one another. Once the logical projection meets the ontological socle, a third term is created. This is 88:88's undertitle : '––:––, –'. Or : 'onto, logy, –'. The third term is what comes out of the intersection of a union, the very mark of their conflation (which in turn will burst into solid colours). At this stopping point to the adjustment of the two, the co-incidence, the moment they superpose each other, the (thus non-excluded) middle becomes intersected, giving the shared part a space of its own. This third term is at once the Two's representative and its disruption into a blind spot, the passage from 'there is no relationship' to 'there is a non-relationship', its very own display.

(1)

If you take 'Envers' in F is a •reverse• in E, some fundamental laws of thought are written down : negation (reverse), minimal, maximal – excluded middle, double negation; the track is reversed in correspondence with the axioms written before us. The dynamic range is then used to picture the cancelling out of the maximal and the minimal, with no other way, fading to black or manually pushing and pulling the exposure on Porphyry's tree (as I like to call to it) cancelling out the background formed of water and skyscrapers. To rely on such grounds, discernment must be the basis by which one perceives a space for neither full white nor full black, neither maximal nor inexistent (since both indiscerns and flattens form). Complementarity of logic and geometry is the opening – the union drawing – and the conclusion – an extended logical square diagram shown on top of a computer screen as a continuation of paint.

This announces the logico-geometrical expansion of idizwadidiz. Invariants transacting between similarity and dissimilarity unfold in accordance to how they are cut together and which predicaments do they pose, drawing positional and oppositional relations, 'movement from place to place, and change from color to color'. The colour palette symbolically reduced to a logical square (but ranging through all the intricate middle-zones throughout) could give : orange, blue / red, green. Notice how each side of the palette mixed with its respective inverse results in chromatic neutrality, grey on grey.

Notice also the black or white backgrounds and flickers which render the space of the frame. We thus depart from the ontological grounding of the count to a full scale dynamical geometry, that is, of the discernment, in the presentation, of the continuous and discontinuous interpenetrability of the same and the other (from 16mm green water to video of green synthetic grass, for example). Forms shift between, shapes, flatness and depth (circle, square / sphere, cube), from its support (film, video / drawing, CGI) up to its editing-structures, indicating how an opposition is treated by the cut (continuity, contingency / regularity, irregularity – with a singular cut-to, with shot/counter-shot and its acceleration to flicker, with a superposition), and so on. The body of idizwadidiz works its vast web of things; after having backed up from nothing, the move between opposition and 'n-opposition' is the one between the very distinctions it posits – flatness and depth, interior and exterior, inward and outward, implicit and explicit, symmetrical and asymmetrical, real and artificial, stratas of various states of the same, between the 'what' and the 'how' –, binding the count point by point and drawing from the raccord of site and sight as the dialectics of universality and particularity, alternating between both conceptual formalization and points of representation.

(2)

In the diagram drawn, a chain bites its tail, the head, coloured in orange, is the One, while the tail, coloured in blue, is the Multiple. The One (Orange) is the world-view, the representation of a set which collects all into a singular intensity, earth.

This element is presented both as 'CGI-earth' and '16mm-globe', both extending from the flat surface of the diagram into a three-dimensional object from which one may circle around, from which all perspectives are available, a 'cognitive mapping' which allows to situate ourselves within what is being worked through, the out-of-body experience. The logo of the world is a logos, a rationality which extirpates itself from the meanders of ratiocination, from what there is to its circumvention and articulation as an idea, re-making it into a renewed representative accuracy, a world-brain. The Multiple (Blue) presents the expansion of particularity as the very form of the presentation, the immersion within the element that is lost when looking at the world from a global focal point, and provides the unifying continuous scanning of its ground.

The solid blue from the iMessage screen, the empty space for text to the homogeneous set of the ocean (yet only a partial image, just like the 16mm globe, both sides already being diagonal to the present dialectical split) can be read as this singularity which stands out of the totality, the exception of the ocean being the drop of water that is drinkable (Hugo’s La source tombait du rocher), the very space for reason, the singular addressless message drowned in the indefinite depth of communication. Nowhere is it said that things are going to get more and more (conceptually) digestible.

The dialectics of the universal and the particular, the global and the local, extended out of colour-matching, is formalized in the very shape of the frame, in its inward or outward bend. Each without the other would be its own proper relapse.

The transgression of some pre-patterned and programmed transitions requires in fact that the transitions be fully rendered, then reinjected into the project. The necessity of the export/import into render-files to achieve such cuts is quite telling. Collections turn into sets when the multiple, bound with the use of various presets, is rendered-as-one : modifications are glued in, frozen, and can be reprogrammed as being-cut. This is how the recoil of the frame may be understood, not only by turning the frame into a floating flat-screen, but by using cubic transitions and other pre-sets, by cutting and superposing them on top of each other, transitioning between them, being incremented to obtain unprecedented dynamisms impossible within the same timeline, transgressing the classical modes of transgression of the 'art of transition'. Beyond the compass-view and the three-dimensional mapping, transgressing the pre-determined ways we transform what is, we arrive at a stabilization following a unique process of harvested intelligibilities : the buoy, the 'underlying oppositional backbone' which necessitates no solid ground (since it floats, it oscillates) in order to operate the shift between universal principles corresponding to particular forms and their conceptual polymorphy, generating thus new dialectical pictures of thought.

(3)

The decapitated couple (the bathroom divide), already painted as being torn from their respective bodies, being representative of their own inherent disjunction, are paired by being parred.

The rhyme is simple, we all do not fit our bodies. From the metonymic fluctuations between binary and plurality, the movie condenses the field of possibles back to sexual difference. This 'bi-sexed body' always-already splits itself in the working through of the impossibility to cope with one's own predisposition. This left/right exchangability of the body turns to one-sided heads, two flat green circles that are forcibly and subliminally pictured as the same, flashing away, tied by the bokeh which focuses back into its real form, the 'separated interior' which ends up being a buoy, a system made so that our ships don't get lost or worse, sink. The fast flickering does not signal the indistinguishability of both sides; it rather takes a step further, not proving the very identicality between them, but proving the inability for the contradiction to overlay (at least materially), its impossibility to appear at once without what stands it apart, other than through the vue d'ensemble which includes the gender divide. In other words, they meet outside of sides, in the indeterminate bokeh (Badiou's 'objet u'; recall Isiah's movie (∃u) [u ≤ f and u ≤ m] which formulates a love encounter and pictures the series of decisive points which awaits the lovers). From the impossibility of a One to emerge from difference (the flicker with the inverted positions), to the impossibility to have a One for the parts that are the same (the flicker with the two heads), we move to the signalling of a third term. From the 'finitude of desire' to the 'eternity of drive', from the excluded middle, the 'parallax gap' between the two from which no synthesis is possible, we move to the formula : Spirit is a buoy.

A mapping with the light characteristics chart (the navigational maritime signalization system) – that can be extended upon : solid colours in alternating flicker of orange and blue, a variety of sequences with black or white, regular or irregular (according to their grouping together) of cuts, and so on – forms subtle shifts between the systematicity of editing patterns and their dynamical rhythmic composition.

In the buoy sequence, the steady navigational signalling breaks from the irregularities and saccadation of the flickers, the formal synchronization with a separated entity regularizes the irrational cut-flow between positions, breaking out of the vicious cycle between Law (the gendered separation of bathrooms) and its transgression (the stroboscopic flickering). Similarly, in the scene where the vignette flashes at every marking of dots of water, it is the actual marking on the cement which, as Law, controls the vignetting of the frame, so when the marker gets included in its own count, pointing the act of pointing, a new dimension opens up as the axis shifts. Finally, there is a recondensation in the ambiguous figure of the cut, torn between the 'flicker of the void' and the 'infinite of intervals'. How do we apprehend the continuity and discontinuity between the illusion of both animation and inanimation as that which renders visible the 'material inferential transitions' between the two, the very form of their distinction in the passing into each other? Conception and transformation; the dynamic condensation of this shot/counter-shot generates the stereoscopic vision, a static image made out of two by retinal persistence (static -> movement -> stabilization), like the sides of a same coin, the thaumatrope (or as I call it, the traumatrope), the 'synthesis of world and spirit that offers the most sublime certainty of the eternal harmony of existence' whose 'simulated simultaneity' is something like an afterimage. Finally, the totality of the ramified network of oppositions is contracted in the shift of this eternity-coin, the inception's ever-spinning totem, where at every take the stakes are the same.

So what do cuts form? With or without the morphological variety of fades, incrustation, superposition (negativity's dilution). With or without the untenable invariant whose purpose takes form by playing these forms and nonforms against each other, by 'traversing the fantasy'. Yet if cuts unrestrict themselves to breaks made out from the substance's finite limitations, being neither a fold nor a stretch, if they do not appear in other ways than through blended losses, pure substanceless gaps, then, as Grothendieck puts it (for mathematics), you do not read, you listen. Listen to it like a birdsong, so that cuts be silent symphonies – recall Lacan's wordplay between J'ouis, 'I hear', and Jouis, 'enjoy' – which justifies the piece being silent (other than the two pinches which rime with the pre-count roll, as a mark of a prolonged beginning), already acquiring distance over the indistinction of sense and understanding. There is a non-continuity between the image's field of possibilities and the cut proper, such that cuts emerge neither solely from the elements of the sets, nor as a purely intentional act, 'what is is birthless and deathless'. In other words, how do we think away from continuity as neither an identification of image qua life and cuts qua death, nor as its transitory mode? If we reverse the metaphor of light and take the image as being imperfect insofar as cuts come leaking through like a flare over a closed shutter, how will we think beyond the self-instantiation of the particular interior it breaches through?

idizwadidiz's transits are an exemplary case of a 'dialectics of formalization' whose impulse, challenging the classical thinking of the image with the 'classical image of thought', does not restrict itself to arbitrary stratification, to contextual strings via pro-grammatical operations, nor simply to an enrolment of body-volumes. So what may finally lie beyond phenomenological description and conceptual prescription? From the replacement of 'the object and its identity by the system of its perspectives, the functor', Isiah responds : 'Is it possible to do a motion study without arrows or bodies, but to study the 'motion' or (meta)stasis of the conditions of a motion study itself?'

[gothgrrrlaz-blog]

Goth Grrrl November Issue pt 2 of 2

[kenotype]

88:88 is free on youtube for the duration of the INVENTING THE FUTURE crowdfunding campaign. https://igg.me/at/inventingthefuture/x

[thevennreview]

QTY. If Lou Reed and Interpol had a baby.

This band has everyone talking about how "New York" they are, so who better to hypothetically parent them than a couple of true New Yorkers. But seriously the resemblance of Lou Reed in Dan Lardner's voice is remarkable at times.  

www.QTYnyc.com 

Click on the diagram for a sample track from the artist.

[sxsweveryband]

QTY - “Rodeo”

SXSW 2017 - OEB Score: 8; Popularity Index: 2

Pairs Well With…The Velvet Underground, The Strokes, The White Stripes

QTY is the sound of the New York rock and roll. Premiering in late 2016 with “Rodeo”, the duo quickly sound like of a rejuvenated Velvet Underground on the track, a reference that especially informs the band’s lead baritone, speak-sing vocals. That classic bridge of garage rock and catchy, pop-fueled hooks is also a apt descriptor of QTY’s sound. After just one spin of “Rodeo”, you’ll be singing the chorus and humming the melodies, plainly one of the best rock songs from a new SXSW band this year. Follow-up “World Breaker” gives off moodier steam, adjusting focus inward for something totally different, but equally weighted. It also highlights QTY’s guy/girl vocals, a unique twist on the CBGB roots of the band’s songwriting.

[iej-ce]