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

Re: On narrative, abstract and location


> Pall,
>
> Sorry to come back on your post after so long --
>
> Just thinking about this piece on GPS narrative -- and I do realise
> that I don't know your work in detail -- this "backbone" or "abstract
> narrative" as you call it --- the problem I see is in the openness of
> the situation. The audience doesn't know if the backbone is TRUE and
> actually couldn't care less, unless there is some driving force or
> motivation behind the narrative. If the narrative where to be authored,
> now, that would be a different matter.
>
> Traditional fictional narrative is authored. Which doesn't mean that it
> couldn't be based on a GPS narrative. (probably already done,
> somewhere, sometime). Also, it doesn't mean that the narrative should
> be as fleshed out as most fictional narrative is. It could be just as
> basic as the example you gave in your piece. But it would be fiction.
> And it would be an authored, intentional narrative (line) leading
> somewhere (to redemption, in circles). There is a huge difference
> between my wanderings through the city on a given day in July and an
> authored narrative of the same, tracing the Odyssey.

One evening many years ago during a time in my life when I was producing a
radio show, I decided to take my tape recorder with me on a walk through the
city and leave it on through the whole walk. I didn't think much of it
during the walk. The next day, I popped the cassette into the tape player to
listen to it. I wasn't sure what to expect. Nothing much, really, was what I
expected.

What I found was that there was all sorts of stuff going on that I hadn't
really understood. Having been, as usual, mesmerized by the visual during
the walk, I hadn't noticed the relation of the sounds in the video arcade to
the sounds of the cars outside. I hadn't noticed the one liners that you
hear as you walk down the street and pass people who are talking with a
friend or on the cell phone. Usually you get one line from them and often it
is telling. I hadn't noticed the way the teenagers shouting from the car
were part of the sound of the car passing and how violent the sound was. All
sorts of things like that. Just listening to the audio posed relations that
I had not considered during the walk. I had not previously heard the mix of
natural, 'machine', and crafted sounds in most everything we hear.

I learned that I had not been listening. I learned to hear.

The world talks to us, or maybe just talks, and few are listening.

Someone called radio 'the soundtrack of our lives'. But actually the
soundtrack, the natural, the machined, and the crafted, is all around
whether radio is part of it or not. Radio is just part of the crafted part
of it, when it's audible at all.

So then I took that recording and added audio pieces to it and made a piece
I called Victorium (I live in Victoria). Audio pieces coming out of
mufflers, drifting out of windows, etc. A different sound scape than the one
I heard, but related. An odd thing, don't know whether it's a narrative or
not. But it is telling.

So maybe some sort of similar things can happen with Pall's GPS stuff. A
sense of the bigger picture we don't normally get.

When I was producing radio, I had occassion a few times to record people who
hadn't heard their own voice recorded before. Invariably their response was
"that doesn't sound like me." And they meant it. Hearing ourselves via
recorded sound gives us an objectivity about the sound of our own voice that
we don't have without recorded sound. I got a similar sense of objectivity
about the sounds of the city when I did my walk. The GPS stuff could
possibly give us a related objectivity about the geographic space that we
don't normally have.

And then use that newly discovered objectivity to more fully explore the
subjective.

ja

DISCUSSION

RE: [SPAM] RHIZOME_RAW: derrida was a flip-flopper


interesting. i interpreted Lee's statement not as disrespectful toward
Derrida but as a humorous acknowlegement of the relevance of his ideas to
the current 'language wars' between bush and kerry. bushies characterize
kerry as a flip-flopper and bush as plain spoken. but bush is not plain
spoken and assinine 'bushisms' highlight this, as do many of his
pronouncements such as Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the USA
invaded Iraq. Bushies try to make Bush out as a plain-spoken teller of the
truth. but language itself, never mind power and desire, resists this. the
situation is more like what trashconnection describes when s/he says "it is
relation, more like a terrain, but without any hard ground, because every
word as the placeholder of sense is just a placeholder, but a placeholder
with 'tradition'.

Derrida's writing is famously difficult. It is hard to tell, often, what the
hell he means. But he affirms the value of reserving the right to change our
minds as we learn more about complex situations, like Kerry the 'flip
flopper'.

also, recall that it was Lee who originally posted the news of Derrida's
death and the article from the NY Times, which is another indication that he
is unlikely to be disrespectful of Derrida.

ja

> Can we be more respectful?
>
> Don't make general statements unless you are ready to explain yourself.
>
> He earned better than this--whether one likes theory or not.
>
> e.

DISCUSSION

Re: NET ART NEWS: Trashconnection dictionary


holy cats, trashconnection, http://dict.trashconnection.com is terrific.
derrida would love it! the description is very good also. brings out the
philosophical via a "technical explanation".

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: derrida


> well...
> it is, of course, difficult to type about derrida. too much i never
> really understood.
> i suggest, nonetheless, that he was a man of great intellectual
> courage. a
> man
> unfragmented by common currency. the realignment of symbolism in this era
> is this brother's gift.

he understood the complexity of natural language which follows from its
necessary logical circularities. and in the absence of logic as the
controlling factor in the construction of meaning, he investigated how power
and desire engineer the construction of meaning. he was a philosopher of
language and has also often been called one of the great poets of the late
twentieth century. We associate with poetry the most intense engagements
with language. If this is so, then Godel, Turing, and Derrida rank among the
great poets of the mid to late twentieth century. They have changed the way
we look at language and ourselves.

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Re: Flash formalism?


Also, as a piece of writing, even the spelling and grammar indicates it was
thrown together quickly and without further consideration. Why this sort of
sloppy work is taken seriously is beyond me. Who's agenda is it serving?

ja
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]On Behalf Of
Jess Loseby
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 7:22 AM
To: list@rhizome.org
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Flash formalism?

in the name of sonny j and all his fluffy angels PLEASE lets not bring
that reactionary, presumptive exercise in patronizing, *intellectual*
snobbery back in to play. Any other of his essays, books , conference,
papers, transcripts of his phone conversation even, but please not that
*essay*
please no, i beg
nooooooooooooooo!!!! There IS NO generation flash!!!!!!! It's a manovich
mythology!!!

>
> lev manovich has an essay on flash you might want to check out
>
> http://manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc
>