Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Digital Literature in Canada


If you're Canadian or living in Canada and are involved in digital
literature, please contact me backchannel. A bunch of us are putting
together a doc petitioning the Canada Council to start funding digital
literature. If you think that's a good idea, please contact me backchannel.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

more jim leftwich


more jim leftwich:

the ones from his book STACEAL: http://tinyurl.com/cst99

ja

DISCUSSION

visual poetry of jim leftwich


jim leftwich is a very fine visual poet. check out his collaborations with
john crouse at http://tinyurl.com/8b9l6

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: isabelle dinoire


> hello,
>
> this video is about the truth of nerve endings and microphones.
>
> abe

I haven't seen the original footage it was taken from. I suspect that must
have been painful to view. Certainly viewing Abe's piece produced painful
little shivers. Not solely at what the surgeons had done but what the video
editing had done. A face transplant and then a video transplant of that.

I wasn't sure, actually, about Abe's intent. I didn't really make any
judgements about it.

The video reminded me of something Salman Rushdie once said (and I
undoubtedly recollect it improperly), to the effect that we sometimes become
grotesques (but freer) in our nonetheless real and valuable attempts to heal
ourselves in a world that is often grotesquely indifferent to pain and
suffering.

Of course the question crossed my mind if Abe was being cruel in his use of
this footage, later, reading the posts, but that wasn't really clear to me
in viewing the video, although it is painful to watch.

But, Abe, I don't think you can hide behind statements like "this video is
about the truth of nerve endings and microphones". That may or may not be
what you thought it was about. It is definitely about this particular
woman's pain, isn't it, whatever else it is about such as media blah blah.
However you cut it. However you cut it, you cut her.

It feels to me that you should acknowledge that. Presenting the pain of
other people in works of art is not uncommon. It goes way back even beyond
the tragedies to religious ritual. But it is still volatile and delicate as
flesh and bone. As is the recognition.

ja

DISCUSSION

the random


I read the discussion of the random with interest.

I liked Plasma's comments on some of the uses and abuses of the random in
programming.

One thing that wasn't noted by anyone, that I read, was the sort of
perspective William S. Burroughs brought to the role of the random. His
novel Naked Lunch and, more radically, his trilogy (The Ticket that
Exploded, Soft Machine, and Nova Express) used the cut-up method in
literature. This is detailed well in his book The Job. As you probably know,
one of his themes was addiction and dependence. Not simply to drugs (he was
a heroin junky) but, say, to our habits of thought. Or our style. Or our
methods. He felt that we are usually deeply habitual enough, in most things,
that often it is necessary to introduce something out of our own control to
cut our own mental tape loops (he did interesting audio cut-up work as
well).

The random can be used in intelligent ways to help us toward insights that
we would not come up with on our own. Burroughs said "When you cut audio
tape, the future leaks out." And that quote has something of the feel of a
cut-up to it: unexpected, of a somewhat altered consciousness.

As Plasma notes, the random can also be used poorly as, for instance, a
substitute for making a decision that should have been made.

When I started in radio during the eighties, I was unfamiliar with Burroughs
and such methods and would have thought them inevitably productive merely of
nonsense. As I got into Burroughs and McLuhan and Gregory Whitehead's work
and writings on the cut, it started to dawn on me, though, that we are not
the sole creators of what even we ourselves produce in media and that,
instead, the media/um is/are influential in several ways in shaping what we
say/create. This can be an unacknowledged influence, ie, we can be
unconscious of the media's own rhetoric and its influence on us, or we can
explore it in various ways, including cutting it and using it as a material
in ways that we would not normally do were our notion of 'the material'
confined, say, to the typical writerly notion of 'the material' as subject
matter. The material is also media matter. There are both 'material' and
'immaterial' aspects to the 'material' we deal with, and that is true even
of media matter. That was an exciting time for me, coming to some sort of
awareness of media and art.

Use of the random needn't, of course, simply represent a failure to take
responsibility for decisions that would have better been made by us.
Instead, it can help us explore the decisions we do make, why we make those
decisions, and can *occassionally* offer us alternatives that are
preferable.

ja
http://vispo.com