The Progressive Ingression of Intelligence into Matter

Language isn’t just an internal process. Rather, linguistic components overflow their boundaries in the mind and become concretized as artifacts. Writing is the most obvious of these boundary overflows, but every technology represents some sort of material fixation of a linguistic concept. In that sense, the materiality of human history is a story of how homo sapiens learned to speak with their hands, translate their language into artifact, and then engage in a conversation with these artifacts. This sets up a very interesting feedback loop, because the exteriorized linguistic object – the technology – produces ramifications of language, which in turn produce new technologies, etc., until the whole thing spirals completely out of control. And we’re already well past that point."

Chemical by Andrew Topel

See the rest here

Be Bop Deluxe - Electrical Language

Dennis Mezenzev

Mutant Fish




Zerthimon




Water of Styx



More Info Here

Leonardo DaVinci: Proto-Surrealist?

That may or may not seem like a ridiculous question. But I was reading an essay by Joseph Nechvatal about visionary art when I came across this passage regarding a technique called sfumato which DaVinci wrote about in his Maniesto and taught to his students:

"Sfumato is the subtle, smoothly imperceptible, gradation of dark colors which approaches a smoggy unity useful in the creation of psychological atmospheric effects evocative of the visionary display in the Apse of Lascaux. This is so as sfumato invites and promotes an expanded, diaphanous, dilated focus and necessitates a more expansive field of vision. Thus a visionary (anti-perspectivist) characteristic of high renaissance art was sfumato unity particularly because it depended upon a balance achieved as a matter of intuition and hence was beyond the reach of rational knowledge or technical manoeuvres. With sfumato we see the seeds of a visionary counter-tradition in opposition to the crisp, detached, geometricised optics of point-perspective.

This oppositional optical practice of sfumato visualization was taught by Leonardo to his students in his Treatise on Painting where he encouraged languid attention to the ambiguous grubbiness of cracks and smudges on decrepit walls which may suggest faces and forms to the viewer in order to aid artistic imaginative and visionary ability."

Now, it's been many years since I read Dali's treatise on the paranoiac-critical method, so I can't quote any bits off the top of my head, but if memory serves (and I'm not saying it does), there seem to be some striking similarities leaping out between the two methods.

I'm just saying...

New Gasoline Monk Mixtape Out Now!

“Here it is folks… Soundtrack to an Unnamed Book is out now. Twenty tracks, riddled with blends and interludes. Available both in physical, signed copies and a downloadable version that’s free. And each CD has different art printed on it… some graffiti, some trip stuff, some bullshit… “

"...pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to the last, the Culture refused to place its trust in symbols. It maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such outward representation. The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs."

Iain Banks, Consider Phlebas

Fluid Radio - Experimental Frequencies

Not All Of Paradise Is Lost

Weathercocks turn into crystal
They protect the dew with blows from their crests
Then that charming emblem the thunderbolt
Descends on the banner of the ruins
The sand is nothing but a phosphorescent clock
That says midnight
With the arms of a forgotten woman
No place of refuge turning in the countryside
Erected where the heavens advance and retreat
It's here
The harsh blue temples of the villa's head bathe in the
..........................night that traces my images
Hair hair
Evil grows stronger nearby
But what does it want from us

-- Andre Breton

Free Union

My woman with her forest-fire hair
With her heat-lightning thoughts
With her hourglass waist
My woman with her otter waist in the tiger's mouth
My woman with her rosette mouth a bouquet of stars of
...the greatest magnitude
With her teeth of white mouse footprints on the white
...earth
With her tongue of polished amber and glass
My woman with her stabbed eucharist tongue
With her tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With her tongue of incredible stone
My woman with her eyelashes in a child's handwriting
With her eyebrows the edge of a swallow's nest
My woman with her temples of a greenhouse with a slate
...roof
And steam on the windowpanes
My woman with her shoulders of champagne
And a dolphin-headed fountain under ice
My woman with her matchstick wrists
My woman with her lucky fingers and ace of hearts
...fingers
With her fingers of new-mown hay
My woman with her armpits of marten and beechnuts
Of Midsummer Night
Of privet and angelfish nest
With her seafoam and floodgate arms
Arms that mingle the wheat and the mill
My woman with rocket legs
With her movements of clockwork and despair
My woman with her calves of elder tree pith
My woman with her feet of initials
With her feet of bunches of keys with her feet of
..weaverbirds taking a drink
My woman with her pearl barley neck
My woman with her Val d'or cleavage
Cleavage of a rendezvous in the very bed of the mountain
...stream
With her breasts of night
My woman with her undersea molehill breasts
My woman with her breasts of the crucibles of rubies
With her breasts of the specter of the rose beneath the
...dew
My woman with the belly of the unfolding fan of days
With her giant claw belly
My woman with her back of a bird fleeing vertically
With her quicksilver back
With her back of light
With her nape of rolled stone and damp chalk
And a falling glass that's just been sipped
My woman with her rowboat hips
With her hips of a chandelier and arrow feathers
And stems of white peacock plumes
Her hips an imperceptible pair of scales
My woman with her buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My woman with the buttocks of a swan's back
My woman with her buttocks of springtime
With her gladiolus sex
My woman with her sex of placer and platypus
My woman with her sex of seaweed and old-fashioned
...candies
My woman with her mirror sex
My woman with her eyes full of tears
With her eyes of violet armor and a speedometer needle
My woman with her savannah eyes
My women with her eyes of water to drink in prison
My women with her eyes of forests forever beneath the
...axe
With her eyes of sea-level air-level earth and fire

-- Andre Breton

And Now A Word From Post-Reality Central...

"There is a war for reality between zombies and the creatures in Avatar, and you can’t call a winner yet, because the zombies are getting stronger and faster and allying themselves with vampires, ghouls, and golems, while Avatar’s badger frigs, bearded cats, and Sotty Cooper Fritillarys are technically and generationally better motivated. The zombie advantage is that they have human roots in the rising dead of all religions. If they succeed in cross-breeding with vampires, who also have undead human roots, they will be practically unbeatable; their notorious individual weakness will be diminished and it wouldn’t take such vast numbers of them to knock over a few geeks with a talent for drawing..."

Words of Advice For Young People

"As William Burroughs said: Beware the middle way, the way of moderation and common sense, for it lead not to the secret lands. If you already live like that then great, the book should come to you right on time. And ask yourself what do you really want? Because there are no limits to what is possible..."



In other, late-breaking news...

"The “Elfish tapes” album by ION will be initially released on Saturday, 27th of March as a free file /MP3 download from No Camera blog."

Elfish Tapes from Aggeliki Vrettou on Vimeo.

Art Manifestos and Their Applications in Contemporary Design




Head Molt at INC2010



add and return n. 18

Robert Venosa

There is more work and an interview with the artist here, as well...


Ever have one of those days where you wake up and realize you're the Queen of fucking England? This would likely be the soundtrack:


Beatlefist! Beatlefist! Beatlefist!

"Dada today is still for war. Life should hurt. There is not enough cruelty!" - Richard Hulsenbeck