Breve-ity

I learned about artificial life last night after questioning my buddy Jim about the screensaver that's been on his computer for as long as I can remember. He explained that there are mathematical representations of evolution, and this Breve program simulates that. It is pretty awesome watching god's mistakes suffocate on the floor like fish out of water for no more than 4 seconds. Then, the next polygonal generation is born based on the successes of it's predecessor. Breve is a wonderful program, but lacks realistic options (i.e. polygon abortion, speed controls, a synesthetic soundtrack). Fortunately, there are about twenty other artificial life simulations that one can download off the internet, and most of them incorporate a unique survival mechanism with which the evolution works towards. I haven't had the time to delve deeper, but it seems there's people programming neural networks into these things. Oh, chaos theory.........








This album is the shit and will never grow old. I don't know how they've done it, but the bass lines in this album complement just about everything other instrument. If you're going to listen to reggae, then I recommend anything made by the Trojan people.

Dichotic listening between the linguistically civilized and the arbitrarily simple makes it hard to focus on any one category. I'll write tomorrow, with good news from magma.

Damn the Man

Solutions

Empathizing with one's genes (or the gene's identity)

How is gene decay going to be integrated into subjectivity, once it is made apparent that one's lifespan is determined via this process?

"sonic cognitivism"

(elaboration pending)

Faderzzzz

Hegelian Jazz

In this externalisation of the good from human affairs we see forming what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness. This, Hegel associates with much of the early Christian era when people turned away from the world through ascetic and monastic life and prayer.

Of course, for Hegel, each of these stages is an attainment, the achievement of the unhappy consciousness is the truth of the will, which has been trained and nurtured though the ascetic life.

The contradictions in the unhappy consciousness are given some resolution in the person of Jesus Christ. Here the temporal and eternal are combined and held up toward a higher plane wherein life now posits an afterlife. Yet it remains an unhappy consciousness since all goodness is alienated in God or in the afterlife.

Guy's Saturday Extravaganja!

Deleuze Precis

• In Welles, fixed point exists through which “sheets of past” coexist and confront each other. (116)
• In Resnais, death does not fix on an “actual present”; it cannot be traced back to/reduced to a single experience. (116)
• Voice-off loses centrality as a result of dissonance with the visual image. (116)
• Confrontation between sheets of past takes place directly, each capable of being present in relation to the next. (116)
• Different levels of past do not relate back to a single character, family, or source. (116)
• Memory-machine does not consist in recollecting, but rather in reliving a precise moment of the past. (117)
• Complex memory relationship between Nevers and Hiroshima, he keeps her distant from his memories, she draws him into hers. This is a method of forgetting. (118)
• Idea of age tends to take on an autonomous political, historical, or archaeological range. (118)
• Durations can be inferior and superior to human time. (118)
• Resnais plunges us into a Memory which overflows conditions of psychology. (119)
• Each sheet of past is a continuum. (119)
• Resnais’ tracking shots define continuums; circuits of variable speed. (119)
• “Boulanger transformation”: a square may be pulled into a rectangle whose two halves will form a new square, wit the result that the total surface is redistributed with each transformation. (119)
• If we take the smallest imaginable region of this surface, two infinitely close points will end up being separated, each allocated to one half, at the end of a certain number of transformations. (119)
• Each transformation has an ‘internal age’, and we may think of a coexistence of sheets or continuums of different ages which form a topology (119)
• What happens is that the transformations or new distributions of a continuum consistently and inevitably end in a fragmentation; every region of a continuum 'may begin by changing shape in a continuous way but will end up being cut in two. (120)
• Resnais enjoys creating maps and cartographies for his characters, for biographies allow him to delimit the different 'ages' of each character. (121)
• The map appears, first, as descriptions as objects, places and landscapes: series of objects are used as witnesses in Resnais' films. (121)
  • These objects are above all functional, as the mental function or level of thought which corresponds to it. (121)
    • Resnais conceives of cinema not as representation of reality, but rather the way the mind functions. (121)
• The Bibliotheque Nationale's books, trolleys, shelving, etc. constitute the elements and levels of a gigantic memory where men themselves are only mental functions, or 'neuronic messenger.' (121)
• In Resnais' films, cartography is essentially mental and cerebral, representing the brain as world, as memory, as 'memory of the world.' (122)
• **Resnais creates a cinema which has only one singular character, Thought. (122)
• In Resnais' films, the inadequacy of the flashback doesn't stop his work as a whole being based on the coexistence of sheets of past, the present no longer even intervening as centre of evocation. (122)
• In interpreting flashbacks, Bergson's distinction between the 'pure recollection', which is always virtual, and the 'recollection-image', which makes it actual only in relation to a present. (123)
  • Bergson states that pure recollection should not be confused with the recollection-image which derives from it; it remains a 'magnetizer' behind the hallucinations which prompt it. (123)
• Non-chronological time is extracted, by constituting a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of traverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them. (123)
• When recollection fails, one enters the territory of false recollections with which we trick ourselves or try to trick others. (123)
  • It is possible of the work of art to succeed in inventing these paradoxical hypnotic and hallucinatory sheets whose property is to be at once a past and always to come. (123)
• 'The absence of the childhood-adolescence-adult age progression in Resnais......perhaps pushes him to reconstitute a synthesis of the life-cycle on the creative plain.....' (124)
• Success appears when the artist reaches the excess which transforms the ages of memory or the world: a 'magnetic' operation, and this operation explains the 'montage' rather than the other way around. (124)
• Resnais has often said that characters do not interest him, but the feelings that they could extract from them like their shadows. (124)
  • Characters are of the present, but feelings plunge into the past. (124)
• When transformations themselves form a sheet which courses all the others it is as if feelings set free the consciousness or thought with which they are loaded: a becoming conscious according to which shadows are the living realities of a mental theatre and feelings the true figures in a 'cerebral game'. (125)
• If feelings are ages of the world, thought is the non-chronological time which corresponds to them. (125)
• If feelings are sheets of the past, thought, the brain, is the set of non-localizable relations between all these sheets, the continuity which rolls them up and unrolls them like so many lobes. (125)
• Resnais says of cinema, that something ought to happen 'around the image, behind the image and even inside the image.' (125)
  • This is what happens when the image becomes the time-image. (124)
• The world has become memory, brain, superimposition of ages or lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, creation or growth or even new lobes. (125)
• The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future. (125)
  • Independent of and fixed point. (125)
• The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time. (125)

Guy's Medallions