feedback request (new project) - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 04-04-2009, 06:33 AM

comrades!

i am cooking up a new project.
the idea is to make a web=project. what i'll probably do is send out a call as widely as i can manage for people to make texts that chart the economic-ideological crisis or transition we are moving through, but to do so in a particular manner, taking a particular approach. there's a huge amount of room within this approach, but it's important that the texts be in this range.

so what follows is the call for collaborators or the rules of the game.
what i am wondering about it is two basic things:

is it clear to you what i am referring to and what is being asked for?
would you play this game yourself?

Quote:

Preamble:

This project will use a set of intermedia texts to map the modalities of dreamtime that are characteristic of the present economic and ideological crises.

Ideology:

It is not within the free power of the mind to remember or forget anything. Hence comes the belief that the power of the mind whereby we can keep silent or speak solely from mental decision is restricted to the case of a remembered thing. However when we dream we are speaking, we think we do so from free mental decision; yet we are not speaking, or if we are, it is the result of spontaneous movements of the body. Again, we dream that we are keeping something secret, and that we are doing so by the same mental decision that comes into play in our waking hours when we keep silent about what we know. Finally, we dream that from a mental decision we act as we dare not act when awake. So I would very much like to know if in the mind there are two sorts of decisions, dreamland decisions and free decisions. If we don't want to carry this madness so far, we must necessarily grant that the mental decision that is believed to be free is not distinct from imagination and memory and is nothing but the affirmation which an idea, insofar as it is an idea, necessarily involves. So these mental decisions arise in the mind from the same necessity as the ideas of things existing in actuality, and those who believe that they speak, or keep silent, or do anything from free mental decisions are dreaming with their eyes open.

By crisis, we refer to the atomization of central social-imaginary significations, which can be thought of as nodes in a kind of symbolic network which act as constraints on collective investment and so shape or the ongoing performance of embeddedness in the world. It follows that ideological crisis also cognitive crisis.

Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Therefore the idea of their freedom is simply the ignorance of the cause of their actions. As to their saying that human actions depend on the will, these are mere words without any corresponding idea. For none of them knows what the will is and how it moves the body, and those who boast otherwise and make up stories of the dwelling places and habitations of the soul provoke either ridicule or disgust.

The project is a series of expeditions in search of cognitive crisis. Each will fail, but not in the same way as any other. A collection of accounts is a collection of maps of collective dreamtime.

Procedures

Expedition.

The central element is having adventures or going on a expedition.
An expedition should be understood as a duration.
The texts produced are duration maps.

Decide upon or fix a period of time that is the expedition. To assign a duration is to create a structure; working with or through a structure entails shifts in relation to everyday experience that the Situationists relied upon derive to generate, and which are of a piece with the explorer/flaneur figure that we have all read way too much about.

Within this duration, drift: move; observe/listen/talk with folk; document; generate linkages. The outputs are not psychogeography: there are problems with this category and much the procedures that follow concerning the texts you should generate amount to an immanent critique of the category.

Feel free to adapt these in whatever direction you like.

Texts: Duration Map

Think of these texts produced to document contemporary dreamtime as duration maps, or as time-space maps.

As a duration map need not recapitulate clock time: event need not follow one another in the way 1 follows 2. Map experiential time, write so that the time of the narratives is not uniform, but rather speeds up or slows down as focus dilates and dissipates. Movements are always movements of someone: the attention that dilates and dissipates is that of a narrator, who should be staged in situ, not at a remove. However the relation to narrative time is analytic, not mimetic. The map is not the territory.

Interzone

The idea here is to produce texts that are neither subjective nor oriented around an illusory objectivity, but which are in-between.

Duration maps should be constructed in such a way as to make it unclear to those who encounter the project how many narrators. This is crucial for the fracturing the first-person and problems of centeredness. Consider each map an element of a critique of a god’s-eye viewpoint (the viewpoint built into conventional map projections for example).

The writing should involve a first person pronoun but the first person pronoun should not be excessively present. When you use the Ï, make sentences that describe without imputing substance to it. Think Robbe-Grillet.

For example, associations of present and past should be rolled out into the staging of the space rather than separated from it as if there was something more than an instituted limitation of perspective to skull-boundedness

Another way. Descriptions produce what they claims to re-produce. Maps of collective dreamtime are oriented toward capturing something of a crisis within the structure of that dreamtime, produce what they would describe. A cognitive crisis would surface as discontinuities within the I, the space of the ego. This project can produce what it maps and shift in the process from description to incantation, Whitman in reverse, chant down Babylon.

Intermedia

As a mapping project, feel free to work with as wide a range of textual, graphic or sonic elements as you see fit. Remember, however, that the parameters outlined here will create real problems for conventional maps---the emphasis on duration, on unevenness of surface, on the fracturing of a unified and unifying I---- except as broken up and/or taken over. This extends to all correlates of conventional mapping.

Work with exactitude. Please keep descriptions precise: use minimal means to greatest effect.

i was considering explaining what's here, but maybe it'd be best to simply put it up in this form as questions about it may point to areas that i need to rethink.

thanks in advance.
and if this gets up and running, i'll definitely include this collective in the game.

edit: i think the crushed layout may be a problem, so i made a couple small modifications.
the paragraphs in italics are quotes from spinoza's ethics.
so there's a disjunction between them and the rest of the text...

another thing to know up front: i think that for this to work the rules of the game need to be short. they also need to balance specific directions with open-endedness.
so the way i am trying to balance these factors is by making the rules such that they can be read in several different ways--i might include a suggestion that folk read through them at different points in playing the game because the meanings/implications will become clear differently as you move through the playing.

but it's this problem of balancing precision and open-endedness, alot of information and brevity that's at the core of where i'm currently not quite stuck but more unsure. i am not convinced that i've found the balance yet. but it's getting there.

so any comments you have are more than welcome.

o yeah--one more thing: i think the rules work better on paper than on a screen.

Baraka_Guru · 04-12-2009, 11:21 AM

I think what remains to be unclear is what you are looking for as an input. Do you have examples of how these texts come to be or what they might look like?

What is dreamtime?
What do you mean by time and space when it comes to text?
Are the collaborators writing the text from personal experience, or are they merely stitching it together from other sources?

roachboy · 04-12-2009, 12:19 PM

thanks sir....

the procedures will come framed a bit more than they are here: but basically the idea is to general something like psychogeographies of the ongoing economic/ideological crisis.

here's a link to a bunch of psychogeography resources:
Psy-Geo-Conflux - Links

initially, the situationist idea of psychogeography was pitched toward making intermedia objects as their results---over the past few years, the ideas have resurfaced, mostly taken over by visual/conceptual artist types. some of these folk--like francis alys--do very cool things, but they produce very different types of documentation than i had in mind.

as for examples....for straight-ish writing, there's been alot of this sort of work happening in england for some reason.
the best known version is the work of iain sinclair.

patrick keilor's films robinson in space & london work in the form as well, and are really lovely.

so that's a bit of the background.

as for the type of text, i'm trying to leave it open--most of the stipulations have to do with encouraging cross-genre work (integrating visual, audio and written material)....and with ways to handle the first person in the textual elements. the reason for that stuff has alot to do with the idea that we're tracking an ideological problem, so a collective matter, which means that the terms psychogeography creates problems that seem to me unnecessary--i decided to address them through the procedures rather than by making an argument about them.

the other reason for the constraints to do with the narrator come from the way the procedures try to define ideology, which is routed through spinoza---and the reasons for that center on the claim that there is no outside of this ideological crisis--there are myriad views of it--but we're all one way or another implicated--so i wanted the texts to *not* be made up of snarky observations by an observer who positions him or herself on some plane of Objectivity and watches stupid people turn circles like by going on an expedition and talking to people and looking around they're going to the zoo.

the process itself has to do with setting up a duration and going on an expedition---the duration is important because it marks off the process as particular, and situates you in the mode of drifting, collecting, observing, talking...the emphasis on time follows not only from this, but from the hope that the text-objects produced will not duplicate conventional ways of mapping space, but rather will reorganize it around the central point of the dilation of the observer's attention.

at the same time i'm hoping that folk will not simply write i saw this....i saw this....i did this....
preventing that is another explanation for the constraints concerning the i.

dreamtime is what we are living through. i adapt it from spinoza, and it comes out of the first quote in the procedures, the last line.
if you do not know something about the constraints that shape what you do and are and how you are, you are saying nothing..and in the belief that the situation is otherwise, you are dreaming with your eyes open.
so it is with all of us.

i want to map that.

if you look at sinclair's work, you'll get a good idea of the considerable range of possibilities that follow on playing around with this sort of approach in terms of integrating the experience of someone moving through a geographical space with historical information, conversations with others, memory, etc.

the idea of the project overall would be to collect lots of such accounts, so that taken together they'd be a complex map of the contemporary ideological situation, of the collective dreamtime.

that help?

i'm interested in all of this--what i have to explain, what stands on it's own, whether the project is clear or clear enough that itd be interesting to do some expeditions---personally i think the last response is the one i'm after, and that the doing of the expeditions and writing about them would push you into what the procedures are saying and how they're organized. so i see the project as in significant measure this dynamic of process and constraints...and the outputs--but the core of it is this dynamic.

the vehicle for it will be a webspace. the design is important, and is in process. hopefully it won't take so long to get right that the page will never appear...

04-12-2009, 11:21 AM	#2 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	I think what remains to be unclear is what you are looking for as an input. Do you have examples of how these texts come to be or what they might look like? What is dreamtime? What do you mean by time and space when it comes to text? Are the collaborators writing the text from personal experience, or are they merely stitching it together from other sources? __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

04-12-2009, 12:19 PM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	thanks sir.... the procedures will come framed a bit more than they are here: but basically the idea is to general something like psychogeographies of the ongoing economic/ideological crisis. here's a link to a bunch of psychogeography resources: Psy-Geo-Conflux - Links initially, the situationist idea of psychogeography was pitched toward making intermedia objects as their results---over the past few years, the ideas have resurfaced, mostly taken over by visual/conceptual artist types. some of these folk--like francis alys--do very cool things, but they produce very different types of documentation than i had in mind. as for examples....for straight-ish writing, there's been alot of this sort of work happening in england for some reason. the best known version is the work of iain sinclair. patrick keilor's films robinson in space & london work in the form as well, and are really lovely. so that's a bit of the background. as for the type of text, i'm trying to leave it open--most of the stipulations have to do with encouraging cross-genre work (integrating visual, audio and written material)....and with ways to handle the first person in the textual elements. the reason for that stuff has alot to do with the idea that we're tracking an ideological problem, so a collective matter, which means that the terms psychogeography creates problems that seem to me unnecessary--i decided to address them through the procedures rather than by making an argument about them. the other reason for the constraints to do with the narrator come from the way the procedures try to define ideology, which is routed through spinoza---and the reasons for that center on the claim that there is no outside of this ideological crisis--there are myriad views of it--but we're all one way or another implicated--so i wanted the texts to not be made up of snarky observations by an observer who positions him or herself on some plane of Objectivity and watches stupid people turn circles like by going on an expedition and talking to people and looking around they're going to the zoo. the process itself has to do with setting up a duration and going on an expedition---the duration is important because it marks off the process as particular, and situates you in the mode of drifting, collecting, observing, talking...the emphasis on time follows not only from this, but from the hope that the text-objects produced will not duplicate conventional ways of mapping space, but rather will reorganize it around the central point of the dilation of the observer's attention. at the same time i'm hoping that folk will not simply write i saw this....i saw this....i did this.... preventing that is another explanation for the constraints concerning the i. dreamtime is what we are living through. i adapt it from spinoza, and it comes out of the first quote in the procedures, the last line. if you do not know something about the constraints that shape what you do and are and how you are, you are saying nothing..and in the belief that the situation is otherwise, you are dreaming with your eyes open. so it is with all of us. i want to map that. if you look at sinclair's work, you'll get a good idea of the considerable range of possibilities that follow on playing around with this sort of approach in terms of integrating the experience of someone moving through a geographical space with historical information, conversations with others, memory, etc. the idea of the project overall would be to collect lots of such accounts, so that taken together they'd be a complex map of the contemporary ideological situation, of the collective dreamtime. that help? i'm interested in all of this--what i have to explain, what stands on it's own, whether the project is clear or clear enough that itd be interesting to do some expeditions---personally i think the last response is the one i'm after, and that the doing of the expeditions and writing about them would push you into what the procedures are saying and how they're organized. so i see the project as in significant measure this dynamic of process and constraints...and the outputs--but the core of it is this dynamic. the vehicle for it will be a webspace. the design is important, and is in process. hopefully it won't take so long to get right that the page will never appear... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite