you see these photos and they're black and white with a harsh flash, probably desaturated in photoshop or shot with a yashica t4 or something, and it's a photograph of a girl laughing and some skateboard on the ground and the flash means that the background drops away into black more than quickly, and the punctum (if there is one) for you is probably more than anything the gradient of this dropping-away that happens at the upper edge of the photograph, and also the thin layer of shadow that follows the curves of a pant leg or a hand and makes you think 'space' or 'emptiness' -

and what's this? what's it to know that the circles you are in and the friends you take and the people you interact with are at there sincerest, most sincere, trying for themselves and making things to make things, but that this becomes exported out into this aesthetic found and followed as an imitation of the byproducts of following this interest? maybe you live in a warehouse, or you laugh on top of rooftops, or you bike around in the cold, or your friend's bartending in chinatown. sure. "export" is this funny word, and by funny I mean sinisterly appropriate, because what starts as idea and becomes followed through with effort often turns into product (which isn't bad at all) and becomes fetishized into something else. perhaps the space, step, gap, delay between product and fetish is where everything happens, this is the battleground of us versus us where there are no such things as victories or losses but just distributions, leanings, border patrol guards.

if anything the byproduct of doing a lot of design work is that these things become much more transparent all the time; the immaculate presentation of a product hinges on the subtle alignment of images on a grid, or the forms of a typeface and their thickness, size, geometry. so-called elegance and put-togetherness comes from an indesign page and can sprout from that and only that. there is this remarkable, incredible accessibility to the tools of elegance-creation that is so very one-sided, and this one-sidedness is both what design exists in pursuit of and supports, a one-sided fetish, a pop-up facade that nobody on one side believes to be anything other than a facade and that most everybody on the other side conceives as a relative structure. of course that's how it is.

it is always good to make. making is always always better than talking about making. for many reasons: a, b, c, d, e. one of these (reason d, say) is because talking about making invokes a paralysis, a stoppage. making without talking creates something. and it's always better to create something than to not have something at all.

the freedom of a city without automythologizing impulses.

just go out and do it, you FUCKER.

this article just tears me up.

all of a sudden: I do know what it's like to pass winter in a old dormitory with one-pane-thick wooden windows overlooking the tennis courts with boston in the distance. It's cold and nobody's around and you wake up on a sunday morning and walk out the front door in your pajamas. that girl you like is in another dorm. there's someone walking outside barely awake to the dining hall with its chimney steaming of smoke. if you go, there will plates of leftover scrambled eggs and a scattering of people talking idly. it's too cold. there's a box of pizza lying empty on the desk, a videogame has been paused on the television overnight, a sweatshirt lying around on the couch over there. most everyone is asleep or absent.

maybe you decide to go into the city. the walk is twenty minutes, the trolley is fifteen minutes, the T is thirty-five minutes into harvard square.

four years you later you keenly and always understand that your recollection is only yours, because for those who stayed in that city the overlay of people and encounters dilutes every human presence on every street corner. the most recent inscriptions of a palimpsest are the most visible.

there were still: the forbidden, the hidden, the mystical, promises of this, this, this. once you found a medium format negative lying in a book, ran to develop a print. some soldier standing. when was this from? who was this? that experience was a convenient metaphor epitomizing this, this; there's more, it'll happen, there's stuff to find. there are few rankings. are you interested? are you fascinated? life becomes permeated with deliberation, careful examination. what is this? what is that?

--

what's more valuable -- heterogeneity that comes from seeking after obscurity for the sake of being different, a reliance upon an external definition of a norm ---- or being comfortable with (or deliberately comfortably oblivious to) the relatively mundane, normal, slightly interesting, believing in the myth of an untouched presence unaffected even by that which one usually wishes to rebel against, and so therefore not rebelling for the sake of rebelling manifests itself as a hope for independence that may or may not align itself (hume's word is "conform", I say co-incide) with a complacent attitude of embracing the norm?

--

cuuuunctation.

Reply to D's comment:

Thanks for the Hains and Villegle reference - I hadn't heard of them. I also completely agree with you about Zadie Smith, and what she says..

What I mean in terms of involvement in a medium is the navigatability of the medium -- the action I do to "play" the piece. The (physical, mental) action I take to play an artist's film is to sit back and watch, but the action I do to 'play' a sculptor's labyrinth is to physically walk through the piece, looking for an exit. I feel as if the difference between the action I take to involve myself with a book (versus a videotape, or a concert) is more of an active one, like Smith says. Not only is there a relationship between skill and value, there's also a sense of progress that is created by the self: the words won't create sentences unless you read through them, and the pages won't turn unless you turn them. A book is a series of static words/sentences, separated by spaces, in which the adventurer has to go forth and climb, jump across these textual and mental gaps in order to traverse it.

And in that sense, you're right on about the Wii (but less about the youtube videos -- the involvement of a video response is a contextual one, and not within the media). The intoxication of the videogame comes partially from the sense of power and influence created, as a direct result of action done onto the controller expressed in a reaction on the screen.

The Oratorio Society is a great example, but when they perform they become the performs of that medium, which was something different than what I was thinking. When we read books, we read them for ourselves, so the effect of interacting with the medium is that I struggle with it and internalize it, as you said. The Oratorio Society puts on a performance for others to enjoy. If they were all about singing for themselves in an enclosed room, with the motivation of truly enjoying the sheet music, that would be more akin to Smith's example, but by performing, they become creators as well.

In other words, I was thinking more about content that (traditionally) flows from creator -> appreciator: a creator creates the piece and gives it to the reader, who enjoys it. In some ways, music and film (and audiobooks!) are completed when they are given to the viewer, perhaps because of the dimension of time they contain. They flow and run, and the viewer's process of appreciating is partially about keeping up; the viewer is being engaged and (almost forcibly) progressed, and is the one being played. (An object, not an agent.) In contrast, books, sheet music, and video games are all played by the viewer; the creation comes semi-completed to the viewer, who takes part in the creation of literature, music, and interactivity by directly engaging and controlling the creation.

Having said this, I feel that interactivity -- content, experienced through co-creation -- has just been created very recently, in the last two decades or so. A while back, there was once a time when Smith's amateur musicians existed, before record players rendered them relatively obsolete. After that, there was a long in-between period in which economies of scale and yet-limited technology meant that content flowed one-way, from the creators to the audience. Smith talks about reading-as-amateur-musicianship, yet that sort of appreciation process is one that's sort of obsolete in a sense. It's akin to the idea of shouting at Shakespearean theatre, or the black church-going experience that many point to as the origin of call-and-response within jazz: a sort of community call-and-response with the creation. I don't mean to say that the former amateur-musician-era is necessarily a better method of appreciating media. What I really mean is that it's fitting that books are transmedialized into audiobooks: more than a technological conversion, it's almost a historical transition from the age of private chamber music to the age of professional recording.

The next step of interactivity applied to literature perhaps, is books as websites; with the equivalent of the promotional websites for movies. Maybe, an interconnected tangle of narratives without time, pointing to each other, mixed and uncomfortable and meant to be experienced simultaneously, like a piece of Trafalmadorian literature. Say, yeah, like Slaughterhouse Five, or Infinite Jest...

some thoughts looking out bus windows, walking on different bricks a different shade of red:

--

Encryption based upon publicly-available files: a book cipher, but with software versions. Normal encryption/compression involves: ciphertext ==key==> plaintext. In this idea, the encryption involves: ciphertext ==book==> plaintext. Erg - I guess the book is still the key, but the idea is that the ciphertext is so compressable because the book is a large enough file. Maybe it's a stupid idea.

--

In Doug Aitken's book Sleepwalkers, for his video installation of the same name, there's this great interview with Melissa Plaut, and they talk about the aura of the city, and mystical flows, and segments of time. I can't find it online, but it's great, nothing really special, just filled with small snippets of quiet exuberance. It's less of an interview, more of a coordinated duet, in which they agree with each other, complement each other, weave in and out circling and talking about the same city.

--

After talking with Clara, I reaffirm: Politics is everywhere. This is simultaneously a reason for woe, joy, and also something quite normal and not warranting exclamation.

--

Meta-knowledge versus knowledge; the study of understanding knowledge, as a sort of side effect of understanding.

--

I created this diagram a few weeks ago as part of a computer music project. I kinda like it. It was part of a project based around the idea of subdividing (into segments of time) a room into a series of spaces, and then sonifying those spaces into sounds (that are devoid of time).

"The idea draws from the image of a djinn releasing itself into the air, sublimated as sound. The process of listening involves the process of anti-creation; in listening to the sound, you disturb the forces of creation at work. Every time the space is opened, the recording/generating process stops, and a djinn is released, its inception process is interrupted.

Also: to a solipsistic self, the interior space of the room ceases to exist when I
close the door of a room. From my point of view, my timeline is punctuated at periods by the interior space of the room, and vice versa. Leaving and entering the room is like a thread weaving in and out of a two-sided strip of cloth; on either side of the cloth, there is only a series of disconnected pieces of thread, and empty spaces, in which the thread punctures the cloth and is on the opposite side.

I wanted to explore this idea in terms of a space, in which opening the door releases a sound that is a tangible aggregation of the space/area that was sealed in the room: in other words, the segments of string running on the underside of the strip of cloth. The user’s opening and closing the room divides the room into a series of rooms, like the disconnected pieces of thread. The sound that is released defines the space within that was contained, because the texture and quality of the sound is actually generated by the portion of time that passed -- each sound generated is the aural representation of an entire section of invisible space (with dimensions width x height x depth x time). "

-me, Spaces

it's good to be back sometimes, I suppose. I do miss living here, identifying with these places. I came back and bridges got flashier, things with more lights, larger sans-serif fonts with larger designs, the 2-line gets platform barriers, a new building sprouts in 잠실, cars with emergency lights in department store parking lots. I went out today and thought about the size of these subway cars, the stance and method in which people assemble themselves, stand facing outwards, away from the center, the rows and rows of sodium lights, another bus looking out a window reading and listening. oh man man.

I say this all incoherently and haphazardly and stupidly unedited but to have trust in the in-between and to describe this momentary return is like describing faint notes of taste, or a proustian madelineian reminsecence immediate momentary and piercing:

today I was looking out the window when I saw the side of the bus and something that reminded me of something other else, didn't really matter, less subject than presentation. I could feel my spine stiffen and this - oh this these things at the core of things - this initial jerk, slight slip sideways at recognition, a burp in the process of a slight alignment of the past.

gosh, memory is a funny thing, and this oscillation is as well, and to return back here is to 1) attempt to accept this place for where it is, (which really means that I attempt to accept the union set of the inverse sets of me and this place, what-we-both-don't-have-in-common), 2) identify my own lack of identification, ascertain the degree with which I am distanced and external, (and in the constant permeation of a mainly streaming culture to lose all of these wit-ful humor references, whatever),

to 3) return and to attempt to assign great meaning or symbolism to the idea of return itself, memory itself, a sentimental romanticization of the idea of cities and leaving, apparent disconnect, et cetera et cetera.

I'm tired, all I know is this feeling of the under, depth, a grounded sodium orange accented by the sensation of float, of gentle and inculpable disconnect,