Decay Heraclitus Velvet

"Recombinant"
[Textual Composition - Eugene Thacker]


[Blake: to me this world is all one continued vision of fancy and imagination and i feel flattered when i am told so.] to simulate such strange events of fictionality, theory itself must be remade as something strange: as a perfect crime, or as a strange attractor. All epochs, philosophies, and metaphysics have formulated at some moment (manicheans, heretics, cathars, witches, but also Nervalians, Jarryites, Lautreamontists) the hypothesis of the derisiveness and the fundamental unreality of the world, that is to say, really of a principle of Evil, and they have always been persecuted and burned for this, the ultimate sin. a dimension that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes between points, that is constantly changing direction, a mutant fugue of this kind that is without in/outside, form or background, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation or debauchery - such a dynamic can >be fragmentarily considered a recombination. there are matrices of great >negative, destructive work to be continued. surface glide and >dis/appearance, that is the space of recombinant seduction. as more and >more things have fallen into the abyss of signification, they have >retained less and less the charm and fascination of dis/appearances. there >is something secret in dis/appearances, precisely because they do not >readily lend themselves to interpretation, and only the recombinant secret >is seductive: there is nothing hidden and nothing to be revealed. my dear >friend, i send you a little work of recombination of which no one can say, >without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, >on the contrary, everything in it is a dynamics of effect and meaningless >intensities. i beg you to consider how admirably impossible this is for >all of us - you, me, discourses, artistic pra! ctices, and general modes of postmodernity. phantom appearance still in the sepulcher folding like scrolls of the enormous volume, the text functioning as a (soft) writing machine, in which a certain number of invisible wild furies from the tiger's brain represent the study of angels the workmanship of demons. we can cut wherever we please, and take away one vertebra and the two ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again with a fascinating tension. 337. Genet, Jean: The Thief's Journal. [NP: Printed for subscribers], 1948. Lightly soiled dust jacket with a few small edge tears. This copy was a noncombatant veteran of a famous southwestern biblio-inferno, and shows light smoke stains to extreme edges of the boards (obliterating the spine stamping). It passed, in 1988, into the hands of a collector, who consequently felt little reservation against putting his ownership inscription in it, thereby kicking it down an additional notch. Possibly the cheapest signed Genet one will encounter this week. A couple soft creases to rear wr! apper. $85. chop it into numerous fragments and you will see that each can get along in temporary autonomy. upon waking, a recombinant razor, making its way along the pages of my wrists, will prove that, in effect, nothing was more real. Principles of multiplicity and heterology: any net of a recombination can be connected to anything other, and must be. a recombination is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections negatively. I'd like to find a crime that should have never ending repurcussions even when I have ceased to act, so that there would not be a single instant of my life when even if I were asleep I was not the cause of some disorder or another, and this disorder I should like to expand until it brought general corruption in its train or such a categorical disturbance that even beyond my life the effects would continue. it is a question of a model that is perpetually prolonging! itself and its own spectacular torture garden, breaking off and start ing up again after the suicide horizon. i will call a recombination any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground synapses in such a way as to form or extend a rhizomatic matrix of dis/integration and decadence. to attain the multiple, one must have a method which effectively constructs it, inventions of disappearance call for appropriated forms. [ ] am not hidden within the recombination, [ ] am simply irrecoverable from it continuously. [Nerval: my books, a bizarre accumulation of the experiments and non-knowledge of all eras..they let me have it all - there is enough here to drive a wise man mad; we shall see if there is also enough to make a madman wise.]

A FILM FOUND AMONG THE RUINS

Einsturzende Neubauten "Kangolicht" (1985 - Bargeld/Caffery/Chudy/Chung/Hacke/Strauss)
A fire song sparked on the noise of an electric jackhammer. Like fire and metal, we regularly used such construction tools both live and in the studio. We stopped using the jackhammer when it was stolen by Copenhagen squatters in 1988, who restored it to its original use.
From the album Strategies Against Architecture II 1984-1990. Mute Records 1991.


PLASMIDS [ring-shaped strands] are among the favorite vectors used by genetic engineers in recombining operations. it is one of these rings that is opened, using a restriction enzyme, so that a foreign gene can be inserted into the genetic code of a microorganism and make it produce, for instance, a substance that it would not ordinarily produce.


//that by this a characteristic appropriation of the modes and practices of recombinant DNA can be effected from the field of genetic engineering and biochemistry. By a certain necessity, alterations and equivalencies in this paradigm shift will enable recombination to, as an articulated fascination of spectacle, perform itself as a free-floating, hard-core pomo theory without consequence (that is, at disintegrative processing velocities). One of the more fundamental dynamics of a postmodern recombinant in artistic/cultural discourses is the coming together (or arrangement in proximity) by various means of selectively diverse and heterogeneous elements to form an unbound, synaptic matrix, or ritual space of virtual cruelty. In one sense this always occurs in any work of art, but one of the distinctions in the dis-articulation of the recombinant is not only the excess will to extremities and intensity, but this in the absence of any critical or discursive intent. If anyth! ing, a will to continuums of disappearance in a fin-de-millenium crash theatre of uninterr//

Marcel Duchamp: Bicycle Wheel. (orig. 1913, here replica of lost original, third version, 1951.) 50" high. Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

//yet what this then amounts to is not a methodology for creative or cultural production, nor for a critical production of discourse, but rather models of disintegration, for implosive expenditure, for continuums of moments of dis/appearance as//

Schnittke, Alfred (b.1934) Symphony No. 1 (1974)        [72'27]
________________________________________ 1) First Movement      [21'22]
2) Second Movement      [14'46]
3) Third Movement       [8'59]
4) Fourth Movement      [27'16]
5) Applause     [4'20]
________________________________________ Carl-Axel Dominique (piano): jazz
improvisation Ben Kallenberg (violin) : jazz improvisation Ake Lannerholm
(trombone) : Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra Leif Segerstam,
director

In about 1968 - tired of experiments with serial music - Schnittke had come to polystylism, under the decisive influence of Webern's idea of contrast (tensed and relaxed), of Ives and of Pousseur's multi-style theory.

Schnittke: It is an attempt to reconstruct the classical form of the four-movement symphony - a form which has meanwhile been destroyed by the development of music - from fragments and leftovers, supplying new matter where it was missing...Apart from the numerous classical quotations (Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Dies irae, Gregorian chorales, Haydn) the material is my own (these are mostly fragments from my film and theatre music)...I am against any attempt to interpret the piece in a purely programmatic way, because I had no programme in mind. I merely wished to remain honest with myself - as a person (by taking the liberty of depicting the tension of our time without providing empty solutions) and a! s a musician (to let all the layers of my musical consciousness exist without worries as to style).


//general form of operativity, then, recombinant discourses (also practices, exercises, activities) involve three main events, inextricably tied together and in interchangeable order:

Elements - The gathering together by various means (aleatory with parameters of varying constraint; selective according to various aesthetic standards; found elements according to various environments and situations; intersection with other discourses to varied degrees) the semi-arbitrarily designated/contextually based elements to be incorporated into an unforeseen and equally dispersed ensemble. These elements, within artistic discourses, may be combinations of materials which in themselves are considered "artistic" (other works, styles, techniques), mediate (auto/biography, technologically and/or medium-based, pop culture), and "non-art" (found objects, images, texts, and appropriations from other contexts). A scene-setting of the pieces to be played with (...playing with the pieces - that is postmodern - Baudrillard). These should in no way be regarded as points of origin, or even emergence. These fragments are not only themselves recombinant already, but the ! very act of transposing and grafting contexts also significantly enlarges the intertextual field, connections, and rhizomatic passageways.

(Per)mutation - The particular modality of alteration (or lack thereof) to a recombinant element as it is presented in the change of contexts. Elemental treatments. This process occurrs indistinctly, and may involve a radical change in the "original" content of the recombinant element (as simply a starting point for another idea or line; as influence), a degree of appropriation (from altered words/phrases to re-arranged text blocks to cut-up), or an absence of any treatment (the treatment of direct citation, or contextual appropriation). Since (per)mutation fundamentally has to do with a kind of effected alteration or change, in very rarely imagined cases does absolutely "no change" occur. At the very least/most, the fact of grafting or transposing an element from one locus to another enacts a recombination. Furthermore, the element in its previous context was already undergoing various discursive alterations due to the elements as! discourse encompassing it (socio-historical situating of a text as well as retrospective revaluations).

Arrangement - There is a certain aesthetic quality (though fostered by a shifting and eclectic set of judgments) to certain "arrangements" which suggest something lucid yet indistinct (the Surrealists). You pass by a vacant construction site and see various debris, rolled up plastic netting, several iron rods, and other objects which suggest something irreducible; the intriguing arrangement in a second-hand store or at a flea market (Beuys; Breton). The arrangement of recombinant elements follows no logic, no overt aesthetic plan, no subjective intention - only (affective) intensities and differentially shifting dynamics of a kind of non-knowledge, the matrix of indecipherable forces of the recombinant discourse. In this matrix - mobile, interactive, variously immanent - sets of textual dynamics and interrelational forces appear and dissolve, reappear and vaporize. This is the operative principle in a recombinant matrix, the movements and metamorphosis of the ! discourse as dissolutive force, as a hologram arena of catharsis and cruelty which plays out variously the sovereign ritual of disintegration. An arrangement constructs and consumes itself according to an idea of shifting, interchangeable elements, and thus conceives of itself as a continuum. This has little to do with the appearance of such an arrangement (the fact that the elements are recombinant, that they do recur differently, itself dissolves the fixity of arrangements and//

the recombinant DNA procedure allows DNA material from one organism to be selectively introduced into the DNA of another organism. the desired portion of the original DNA molecule is snipped or cut out by restriction enzymes and inserted or spliced into the DNA sequence of the host molecule, often a loop-shaped plasmid from a common bacteria (upper left, shown magnified 21,000X). returned to its home cell, the recombined DNA molecule rapidly reproduces cloned replicas of itself, including the spliced DNA segment.


Merz
Schwitters: The material is as unessential as myself...Because the material is unessential, I use any material the picture demands. By harmonizing different types of materials among themselves, I have an advantage over mere oil painting, for besides playing off color against color, I also play off line against line, forms against form, etc., and even material against material, for example wood against burlap. I call the worldview from which this mode of artistic creation arose "Merz".


Georges Bataille: Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts. The first, reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals' productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity. The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production. Even though it is alw! ays possible to set the various forms of expenditure in opposition to each other, they constitute a group characterized by the fact that in each case the accent is placed on a loss that must be as spectacular and intensified as possible in order for that activity to take on its true (destruction of) meaning.


(frontispiece): Nancy Rubins, MoMA and Airplane Parts (1995), assemblage, airplane parts, installed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

//so that in the particular modality of this extension is to perhaps be considered contextually, but its general mode is the isolating and intensifying (a hyper-izing methodology of a fatal strategy) of the "anti-" process (which may be regarded as essentially a critical one) without the critical intentions and motivations for generating newer, more developed openings or discursive sets. Here, the un-nessesity of reduction via 'pataphysics: As critical modes attempt to open interesting and diverse paths for the cultural production of micrological politics and discourses, there is here a equivalent interest of the opening and de-velopment of decadent stylizations. The general gesture of dismantling is maintained, but the critical sensibility which previously informed it is discarded as both inefficacious and banal. The question is, what happens when the specific movement of a critical mode (as dismantling) is kept, as is its possibility of perpetual proliferation, but it i! s conceived of as a continuum of decadent, disintegrative modalities and forces?
If (active) nihilism (Nietzsche) is thought of as a rigorous, Dionysian destruction and clearing away in order that the condition for a kind of emergence might make itself available ("when the highest values devaluate themselves"), an aspect of a millennial, pomo-decadent nihilism is fascinated by the dissolutive energies of nihilism and, affirming the impossibility of a matrix-like continuum of stylized (aesthetic but not ethical) decompositions and disappearances (not discourses per se, but morphologically stylized gestures of a auto-decay and fanatic//


FRANCOIS VILLON IS TAKING EDITING TO THE EXTREME WITH ADOBE AUTO-APPROPRIATION 7.1.

At Francois Villon's Blue Movie Room they're taking a slightly more "radical" approach to virtual/interactive S&M performance. You might even call it a whole new art form. Radical here might just be an understatement. That's because they're using Adobe Auto-Appropriation programs to fine tune everything they do - effortlessly compositing and adding effects, flash-text, and holographics. Radically enhancing content by integrating morph processes with hyper-video. Mixing and layering sounds with dissonant synchonous 24-track digital audio. The "net" result: Superior quality without compromise.
Adobe Auto-Appropriation combines non-linear desktop graphic and video editing, effects, and treatment processes with Omegacam SP, component level output in both NTSC and EDAS formats. It's the only professional system that's integrally Qu! ickTime-based. Such innovating architecture allows you to make use of the entire range of existent available (and not-available) image, text, and sound data. Auto-Appropriation lets you get the job done right at your desktop, so you can release full control of everything you create, getting results comparable to traditional collage-based techniques. Now you can get so much more out of the same digital images. And there's no risk, because Auto-Appropriation is backed by a Norton Re/Activirus anti-virus application in continuous operation.
Things may never be the same with Francois Villon. "We're just a small group, really. But we're able to do feature-quality video work, holographic detournements, hypertext decollage, CD-ROMs. Who knows where it's going to grow from here?"
So if you want radical - we can help you make it happen sooner. Call us now at ß.999.3 and we'll throw in an extreme Dissect Inc./Francois Villon simposter at no extra charge. There's never b! een a more affordable way to do "radical" stuff!
Adobe Auto-Appropr iation 7.1 Specs:


montage
Eisenstein: To determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema. The earliest conscious film-makers, and our first film theoreticians, regarded montage as a means of description by placing single shots one after the other like building-blocks. The movement within these building-blocks, and the consequent length of the component pieces, was then considered rhythm. - A completely false concept! This would mean the defining of a given object soley in relation to the nature of its external course. The mechanical process of splicing would be made a principle. We cannot describe such a relationship of lengths as rhythm.
According to this definition, montage is the means of unrolling an idea with the aid of single shots: the "epic" principle.
In my opinion, however, montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots - shots even opposite to one another: the "dramatic" principle. The shot is by no !

means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell (or molecule).
We can list, as examples of types of conflicts within the form - characteristic for the conflict within the shot, as well as for the conflict between colliding shots, or, montage:

  1. Graphic conflict (see Figure 1).
  2. Conflict of planes (see Figure 2).
  3. Conflict of volumes (see Figure 3).
  4. Spatial conflict (see Figure 4).
  5. Light conflict.
  6. Tempo conflict, and so on.
    Nota bene: This list is of principal feature, of dominants. It is naturally understood that they occur chiefly as complexes.
    Some further examples:
  7. Conflict between matter and viewpoint (achieved by spatial distortion through camera-angle) (see Figure 5).
  8. Conflict between matter and its spatial nature (achieved by optical distortion by the lens).
  9. Conflict between an event and its temporal nature (achieved by slow-motion and stop-motion), and finally,
  10. Conflict between the ! whole optical complex and a quite different sphere.


Jean Tinguely, "Hommage to New York", 17 March 1960. Self-destroying kinetic machine performance, metal gears, rods, poles, machine parts, rolls of paper with ink, treated piano, weather ballon. Performed in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

//looking more specifically at what the recombinant may actually involve, a possible position would be to situate ourselves within a particular cultural discourse - for example, that of textual practices in a more articulated sense (poetic-theoretical-literary practices). What this situating excludes to some degree are the other medium or genre-based distinctions (but not divisions) of multimedia and interactive artistic discourses (from collage to performance to interactive and virtual formats) which constitutes another aspect of recombinant practices as well. However, by focusing to a greater degree on and within a particular artistic discourse ("writing"), characteristics within that practice and which inform the recombinant may be made momentarily apparent. Whereas the event-functions of elements, (per)mutation, and arrangement display possible modes/gestures/interelationships of recombinant practices, a more specified emphasis on/in a practice such as writing may dis! play theoretical implications relating to the question of technique. As one possible conceptual grouping, three textual modes - citation, appropriation, dynamization - can be considered as integral practices or extensions of writing (within the discourse of writing, "recombinant element" may be taken as a specified portion of written text that is//

TENDON
TECHNIQUE
Variatio I Two-part Invention, quasi Corrente.
Variatio II Three-part Sinfonia.
Variatio III Two-part Canon at the unison with free bass.
Variatio IV Four-part imitatory movement, quasi Passepied.
Variatio V Two-part Invention for one or two manuals with crossing of the hands.
Variatio VI Two-part Canon at the second with free bass.
Variatio VII Two-part Gigue.
Variatio VIII Two-part Invention for two manuals with crossing of the hands.
Variatio IX Two-part Canon at the third with free bass.
Variatio X Four-part Fughette.
Variatio XI Two-part Gigue for two manuals with crossing of the hands.
Variatio XII Two-part Canon at the fourth in contrary motion with free bass.
Varia! tio XIII Aria descant movement with two-part foundation.
Variatio XIV Two-part concerto movement for two manuals with crossing of the hands and virtuoso keyboard figuration.
Variatio XV Two-part Canon at the fifth in contrary motion with free bass, in G minor.
Variatio XVI French Overture.
Variatio XVII Two-part concerto movement, similar to Variatio XIV.
Variatio XVIII Two-part Canon at the sixth, alla breve, in stretto with free bass.
Variatio XIX Three-part Minuet.
Variatio XX Two-part concerto movement for two manuals with crossing of the hands, virtuoso keyboard figuration and off-beat semiquavers.
Variatio XXI Two-part Canon at the seventh with free chromatic bass, in G minor.
Variatio XXII Four-part alla breve, three-part Fugato over a fr! ee bass in the style of a ricercar.
Variatio XXIII Two-part concerto movement for two manuals with virtuoso keyboard figuration, runs, off-beat chords and crossing of the hands.
Variatio XXIV Two-part Canon at the octave over a free bass, quasi Gigue.
Variatio XXV Aria descant movement with two-part chromatic foundation, in G minor.
Variatio XXVI Chordal Sarabande in 3/4 time with "disembellished" Aria melody in the upper part and superimposed flowing 18/16 motion, both alternately in the right and the left hand, on two manuals.
Variatio XXVII Two-part Canon at the ninth without free bass.
Variatio XXVIII Virtuoso concerto movement in free writing, "Etude" in written-out trills and double trills.
Variatio XXIX The same, "Etude" in off-beat chords.
Variatio XXX Three-part Quodlibet over a free bass.
Fold-in
Burroughs: ...in writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, I have used an extension of the cut-up method I call "the fold-in method" - a page of text - my own or someone else's - is folded down the middle and placed on another page - the composite text is then read across half one text and half the other. The fold-in method extends to writing the flashback used in films, enabling the writer to move backward and forward on his time track - for example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred - I insert the resulting composite as page ten - when the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one.


this bit of synthetic gene must then be glued to a "vector" capable of introducing it and making it express itself in a microorganism. a bit of this vector, whose nature we shall consider later, is then cut off and replaced by a piece of the synthetic gene, which is glued on with the aid of ligase enzymes, more or less as one would cut off a piece of magnetic tape and replace it with another in editing a musical tape recording or adding another piece to the completed tape.


(above) Arman - Traite du violon (Treatise on the Violin). 1964. Accumulation of destroyed violin parts with paint traces. 60x128". Collection Philippe Durand-Ruel, Paris.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no fundamental difference between accumulating an object and smashing an object. A thousand objects are not fundamentally different from a thousand pieces of the same object. There is also a logic to destruction. If you break a rectangular box, you arrive at something cubist. If you break a violin, you get something romantic.


utopian plagiarism
Critical Art Ensemble: Plagiarism often carries the weight of negative connotations (particularly in the bureaucratic class); while the need for its use has increased over the century, plagiarism itself has been camouflaged in a new lexicon by those desiring to explore the practice as method and as an alegitimized form of cultural discourse. Readymades, collage, found art or found text, intertexts, combines, detournment - all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism. Indeed, they are not perfectly synonymous, but they all intersect a set of meanings primary to the philosophy of plagiarism; they all stand in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text: They all interpret that no structure within a given text provides a universal and necessary meaning. Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by appropriating and recombining fragments of culture. The pla! giarist sees all objects as formally equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. All texts become potentially usable and reusable. Herein lies an epistemology of anarchy.


Merzbow - "Ananga-Ranga"
from the album Music for Bondage Performance.
Extreme Records (XCD008) 1994.


Arthur Kroker: The millennium is most certainly not the so lamented "end of history," nor a period of "post-history," but, most definitely, the beginning of recombinant history. We live, that is, at the edge of a fantastic intensification of a history that is yet to be written: the telematic history of the virtual body. It is a history marked by a double moment: its reflex, the archiving of the horizon of human experience into relational data bases; and its dynamic will, a will to virtuality, the creative recombination of our telemetried past into monstrous ("The will must be made monstrous"-Rimbaud) hybrids that will form the incisions of the electric landscape of the emerging century. Data trash? We are data trash, and it's good. Data trash crawls out of the burned-out wreckage of bodies splattered on the information superhighway, and begins the task of putting together the pieces of the (electronic) body together (again). Not a machi! ne, not nostalgia for vinyl, and most certainly not a happy digital camper, data trash is the critical (telematic) mind of the twenty-first century. Data trash loves living at that violent edge where total human body scanning meets an inner mind that says no, and means it. For who can now speak of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives on economy, politics, culture, sex, art, and even sighing is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation.


2.) Appropriation - The manner in which a recombinant element is handled as a discrete entity, that is, the changes or treatments which are applied to it in its movement from a preceeding context to a current one. Though the shift of contexts serve as the condition for this mode of recombination, the emphasis is on what specifically happens to the formal (and thus hermeneutic) properties of the specified and isolated recombinant element in that contextual shift. Changes in a recombinant text can be a matter of (recombinant) innovation and technique (as the OuLiPo has shown), and, for a certain situation, the appropriation of earlier techniques - avant-garde or not - can have varying effects depending on the text to be treated and the discourses involved. Appropriation may take place on the level of concepts/ideas/theoretical paradigms, on different formal bases such as linguistic alterations, formatting, or it may be based on a pastiche of outdated or traditional c! haracteristics such as genre, or individual (artist-based) and historical (period-based) style. The degrees to which appropriations are meant to be referential may also vary, from Joycean reference-games to indistinguishable mutations in Burroughs, each also varying the importance placed on the contexts from which an appropriation emerges (it may be less important to know which exact scientific article it is than to produce the effect of a scientific article, it may or may not be important that it is from a newspaper article, it may or may not be important that a certain author/text is being appropriated). Examples are any recombinant texts since this is but an emphasis on a fully interconnected phenomenon, but isolated examples include the Cabala (temura, notakarion, gematria), Tzara's "How to make a dadaist poem", as well as Burrough's treatments of specific texts (scientific/rehab articles, Rimbaud), and Acker's novels (diary, pornography, the myth of Rimbaud, sci-fi,/! /

Appropriation
Acker: What a writer does, in 19th century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience and he "represents" that material. What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.
Sherrie Levine: In most cases it is reduced from the original but maintains the size of the book plate. The watercolors and drawings are traced out of books onto 11-by-14-inch pieces of paper. The paintings are easel-size on 20-by-24-inch boards. The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationships to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed. By the time a picture becomes a bookplate its already been rephotographed several times. When I started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disapp! ear and other times when they're both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work's about for me - that space in the middle where there's no picture.


Exquisite Corpse
Surrealist game, usually for a minimum of three players. The players sit around a table and each writes on a sheet of paper a definite or indefinite article and an adjective, making sure their neighbors cannot see them. The sheets are folded so as to conceal the words, and then passed to the next player. Each player then writes a noun, conceals it, and the process is repeated with a verb, another definite or indefinite article and adjective, and finally another noun. The paper is unfolded and the sentences read out. This is the simplest version of the game, and other versions of it may be created as well (for example, where each player writes a longer unit such as a sentence, then conceals all but the last word or phrase, and passes it to the next player, who does the same). The game acquired its name from the first sentence obtained in this way:
The exquisite convulsive draped
somnambulist   shall drink the new


Umberto Boccioni: Fusion of a Head with a Window. (1911-12). Plaster, wood, glass, and other found materials (Sculpture destroyed).

By considering bodies and their parts as PLASTIC ZONES, any Futurist sculptural composition will contain planes of wood or metal, either motionless or in mechanical motion, in creating an object; spherical fibrous forms for hair, semi-circles of glass for a vase, wire and netting for atmospheric planes, etc. In this way, the cogs of a machine might easily appear out of the armpits of a mechanic, or the lines of a table could cut a reader's head in two, or a book with its fanned-out pages could intersect the reader's stomach. We cannot forget that the swing of a pendulum or the moving hands of a clock, the in-and-out motion of a piston inside a cylinder, the engaging and disengaging of two cog-wheels, the fury of a fly-wheel or the whirling of a propeller, are all plastic and pictoral elements, which any Futurist work o! f sculpture should take advantage of. The opening and closing of a valve creates a rhythm which is just as beautiful to look at as the movements of an eyelid, and infinitely more modern. Insist that even twenty different types of materials can be used in a single work of art in order to achieve plastic movement. To mention a few examples: glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, hair, leather, cloth, mirrors, electric lights, etc.


the genetic code: in this table of the code of correspondences (see below, fig. 1.4), known as the genetic code, the nucleotides are represented by their nitrogenous bases A, U (for uracil, which corresponds on messenger RNA to thymine T, of DNA), G, and C. a group of three of these letters (CAU, for instance) is known as a codon. the amino acids for their part are represented by a three-letter symbol - generally the first three letters of their names - Ala for alanine, Lys for lysine, etc. looking at the table, one can see that there are "synonymous" codons which concievably relate to each other in various ways.

pastiche
Jameson: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody; black humour: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer tenable, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.

104. Jacques Villegle - Rue de la Perle, 20 juillet 1962. Decollage, torn and pasted found posters. 50x37.5, dated on back. Galerie Claudine Breguet, Paris.

Left, Nari Ward: Peace Keeper, 1995, assemblage, hearse, mufflers, iron fence, industrial plastic, grease and feathers, approx. 11 by 73/4 by 22 feet. Photo taken at 1995 Whitney Biennial.

//to, in such a case, enumerate the series of automatically appearing and also only slightly credulous moments of critique in any general recombinant gesture. In a kind of tension there is perhaps more irony than questioning. The following are operative and critical modalities already apparent in recombination, and may be recalled to add a critical dynamic to any work, but the actualized effectivity of such a dimension will always be a virtual or simulated one, as the impression or suggestion of a critical dynamic apart from any realized, (micro)political efficacy. Go to [File], then to [Open], and access the application for the programmed code for critical processes - that is, the Automatic Readymade Critiques:

ARC.7 - meaning, signification, interpretation (hyperizing of deconstructive metacritiques to inertia points of freeplay-dissolution, and Nietzschean perspectivism to point of spectacular suicide of successively infolding interpretation - preceded by the institutionalizing and standardizing of the aforementioned; possibility of McLuhanesque effacement of content and the meaning of content, Baudrillardian alchemy of illusion of meaning, meaning as seduction-effect; positing of successive and dispersed annulment of meaning's depth by crash-velocity displacements via linkages; spectacle-fascination of the stylized ritual, aesthetically articulated effect or form of meaning via combinations of recombinant//


(Below) Gary Hill, Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place, 1990, video and sound wall installation with approximately 15-20 black and white monitors (varying in size from 1/2 to 21-inch monitors) in a niche.


PRISONER OF THE ANT PEOPLE
A Choose Your Own Adventure Story.

CAN YOU SAVE THE UNIVERSE?
You are a genius. The Zondo Quest Group III, an interplanetary task force, is counting on your amazing talent with computers to help them combat the Evil Power Master. You're at work in the virtual reality lab when one of your co-workers suddenly paralyzes you with a strange purple beam. He tells you he is the leader of a warrior ant species that wants to rule the universe!
____________________________
What happens next in the story? It all depends on the choices you make. How does the story end? Only you can find out. And the best part is that you can keep reading and rereading until you've had not one but many incredibly daring experiences!
____________________________
WARNING!!!
Do not read this book straight through from beginning to end! These pages contain many different adventures you may have as you explore the realm of the ant ! warriors. From time to time as you read along, you will be asked to make a choice. Your choice may lead to success or disaster.
The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens next.
Think carefully before you make your move. One mistake could trap you in the realm of the ants forever....or it might help you save the universe from utility.
Good luck!

1.) Citation - Insertion, direct-grafting, or splicing of a recombinant element (citation of phrase, paragraph, or entire section), into the template text or by itself, without any alterations whatsoever. Implied in this is a fundamental alteration or appropriation of contexts in which the recombinant element operated. Of course a major issue in citation is the putting in quotes and "giving credit" to the discourse/context from which it has been taken (author's name). If, as Foucault says, the author function should operate as an element among others in a discourse (and not as a referential, originary point), then any obligations of citation are less ethical than critically unnecessary. The questions now become for citation, what is the efficacy of framing a text?, what happens when the author's name is indicated - what elements of that author's works and discursive set are brought into play?, to what degree and what kind of knowledge is involved in citation, and ! to what effect? what connections does that discursive set itself open up?, what happens when a different ("wrong") author is indicated for a given citation, or a character from another author's work speaks the citation? Example: the insertion of a paragraph from a computer magazine article into a text (either framed analogically as a magazine article, as dialogue by a character, or as a poetic-collage juxstaposition within a larger text). The enigmatic quotation-marks of Duchamp, Finnegan's Wake, Perec's La Vie Mode d'Emploi, poetic experiments of Lautreamont, Schwitters (An Anna Blume), Futurism, dada, etc. Also within this are issues of quotations and reference, alterations in font/typography/style/formatting, and general relationships of the changes which occur in a constant text from one context to another.

Disc One: John Cage - Europera 3, 1990. Multi-media performance for six opera singers each singing six arias of his/her own choice (from Gluck to Puccini), 140 1-16 measure excerpts from Liszt's Opera Phantansien by two pianists; fragments of 300 78s played on 12 electric victrolas by six composers, the brief intrusion of a composite tape of more than a hundred operas superimposed (Trukera tape), 75 lights, 3,256 cues. [70 minutes]

Printed Readymade
The extract of a printed text (of any kind) inserted by the author (without any modification) into his or her composition. Such intervention is, of course, of a botantic nature: it has affinity with the grafting practised by the gardener to modify the flower or fruit of a plant. In modern French poetry, Ducasse was the first to make use (1868) of the Printed Readymade: "Beautiful as the following rhizome: The system of scales, their sequence and their dissonant connection, serpentine, do not rest upon immutable natural laws, but are, rather, the consequence of anaesthetic principles that have already become modified with the expending involution of humanity and which will become further modified." (Chant 6eme, IV, in Les Chants de Maldoror). Rimbaud will explain: "The old stuff of poetry had a place of importance in my alchemy of the verb" (Cf. "Delires II", in Une Saison en Enfer, 1873), adding, "I believed in all enchantments, and! I derided Great Culture, those who are now considered to be great writers. I loved naive painters, primitive painters, schizophrenic painters, fashion designers, comic strip artists, popular art, any literature which is low and brutal, Church Latin, badly offset porn, the first novels ever composed, fairy tales, kids' adventure books, dumb children's songs, rock-n-roll. Anything but culture." (op.cit.)
Almost a century previously, Novalis observed: "In certain moments even spelling-books and dictionaries seemed to us poetic" (Fragments, #1220). The missing link between the Printed Readymade and the Modified Printed Readymade will be proposed by Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara, who will apply almost to the letter, the recipe of Lewis Carroll: "For first you write a sentence,/And then you chop it small;/Then mix the bits, and sort them out/Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all" (Cf. "Poeta Fit, non Nascitur", in Phantasmagor! ia, 1860-63). Whereas Carroll recommends the chopping into pieces one 's own writing, Breton and Tzara will chop up newspaper articles, as in Tzara's "To Make a Dadaist Poem" and Breton's publishing of a page from the telephone directory. Jacques Vache, in a letter of 19 December 1918 to Breton: "I have received your letter made of many glued-together cut-outs, which filled be with joy. It is very beautiful, but needs a few extracts from railway timetables, don't you think?"

a year later, a successful experiment was carried out in the in vitro synthesis of genetic molecules from two different sources, and the resultant composite molecules were called "chimeras" - for indeed they were reminiscent of the creature in Greek mythology with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. simultaneously, it was showed that the existence in higher organisms of "a mosaic of genes" in which, alongside the genes that express themselves and code for a protein (the extrons), there are other genes which seems to have no purpose at all, the introns. just what are these introns? are they dormant agents, capable of being awakened during a mutation? do they have other functions, such as regulating or expending the expression of the genes?

Bibliography.
Breton, Andre, and Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs
Magnetiques), trans. David Gascoyne, Atlas Press, 1993 (orig. 1919).




 Parataxis (pÆràtÆ* ksis). Gram. [mod.a.Gr. a placing side
by side, f. to place side by side, f. -PARA-1 to arrange, arrangement.] The
placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by
connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between
them. 1842 in Brande Dict. Sci., etc. 1883 B.L. Gildersleeve in Amer. Frnd.
Philol. IV. 420 Now to make hypotaxis out of parataxis we must have a
joint. 1888 W. Leaf Iliad II. 414 A good instance of primitive parataxis,
two clauses being merely set side by side.


Survival Research Laboratories - An Unfortuneate Spectacle of Violent Self-Destruction (Saturday, Sept 6, 1981/8:30pm, Parking lot at Folsom/2nd Sts.). Most complex and dangerous show staged to date, in which a wide variety of equipment (organic robots, dart guns, laser-aimed explosive rockets, land mines, and a catapult) interacted to effect a frightening illusion of ultimate misfortune. SRL's first audience injury. Videotaped by Ned Judge, Ch 4 News (6-minute condensed version aired on Sept 16 on Ch 4 Live on 4).

//thus the first thing to be said is that the recombinant is itself a recombinant concept of negation, designed to operate, designed as processes, as processes embodying their own dissolution. It may be viewed, for the time being, not as a concept per se but as a morphogenically polyphonic theoretical nomad-matrix. For artistic discourses, it may be viewed as the possibility of recombination according to readymade distinctions such as genre (assemblage, hyperfiction, film, performance, online/digital art), movements (Incoherents, Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Group Zero, Actionism, Avant-Pop), artists (Sade, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Rubins, MASONNA), methods (collage/assemblage, silkscreen, sampling, polystylism, scanning/photoshop), and materials (words, found objects, other works, concepts, images). Not only is recombination composed of a matrix of lines or planes or fractals of various other discourses, but it is a metamorphically immanent event-horizon which, at each i! ndeterminant moment, can be imagined to embody different combinations of its theoretical particles from an undefined field. As the under-erasure container of all specificity (in which it is variously included), the recombinant is not at all a general whole, but itself a linkage, an intersection, a regulatively implosive generator of disintegrative modalities. In many ways to discourse recombination is to engage in fictional theories and theoretical fictions, and actuate its lines of dissolution. Every time recombination is something, it is also not that thing, because it is obviously not only that thing, because it is contextually that thing, because its model of operation is that of a continuum of intersections, arrangements, dynamics, and the spectacle of variation and intended meaninglessness or effect/seduction of meaning by way of//


subject for recombinant experimentation exercises: "Take away one vertebra and the two ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again without pain. Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each can get along alone." (Baudelaire)

L.S.D.(litterature semo-definitionnelle)
In which the definitions of the words (all words or selected words by various methods) replace the words themselves (Queneau):
To remove by death, subtract the number denoting unity of the bony or cartilanginous segments composing the spinal column and being one more than one in number as the part of an area that lies at the boundary, of this cruelly painful free play of creative imagination will rejoin usually by something intervening without usually localized physical suffering associated with bodily disorder. Cut into or sever by repeated blows of a sharp instrument into numerous standard quantities (as of length, weight, or size) and you will perceive by the eye that one of two or more distinct individuals having a similar relation and often constituting an aggregate is able to approach an advanced state independently of assistance or control.


Jean Baudrillard: Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither, which denies, life or death. Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. As more and more things have fallen into the abyss of meaning, they have retained less and less the charm of appearances. There is something secret in appearances, precisely because they do not readily lend themselves to interpretation. Seduction is that which follows this curvature, subtly accentuating it until things, in following their own cycle, reach the superficial abyss where they are dissolved. Thus the real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word, to sacrifice everything fo! r an artificial effect or an acceleration into a void. To capture such strange events, theory itself must be remade as something strange: as a perfect crime, or as a strange attractor.


Track 1. Pierre Henry - Voile d'Orphee (The Veil of Orpheus) 1953. Electronic tape composition for voices, percussion instruments, piano sounding board, and other found sounds. Composed and recorded at the studios of the Groupe Recherche de Musique Concrete. [15'34]
1948: The first primitive grammophone-record studies by Pierre Schaeffer at the Musique Concrete studios. The techniques used were at first extremely simple, influenced by Luigi Rossolo's writings on the "art of noises." A 78rpm record was played at 33rpm; Schaeffer found that this made train noises sound like a blast furnace. A cough on an abortive concert recording provided a valuable piece of raw material as well. It was combined with the rhythm of a motorboat engine, and American accordion record, and a priest's song from Bali. "Ainsi naissent les classiques de la musique concrete" notes Schaeffer. These "classics" were broadcast by French Radio on 5 October 1948 a! s a "concert des bruits" ("concert of noises"). The public was alarmed.

  1. Superimposition of models.
  2. Two musically identical tapes can be played in succession (canon).
  3. Tapes can be cut and spliced (reassembled) in any chosen order.
  4. Rhythm patterns can be created by translating durations into tape lengths in centimeters.
  5. Speed changes.
  6. Retrograde forms.
  7. Tape-loops (ostinati).
  8. Use of sound tape and blank tape in any order.
  9. Sound fading in order to produce transitions in timbre.Distribution of sounds via several loudspeakers so that the sound "wanders".

Track 2. Pierre Henry - Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir (Variations for a Door and a Sigh) 1963. Electronic tape composition using three sound sources: a sigh (breathing out and breathing in); a "sung" sigh obtained by percussions on a musical saw; and a series of grating and squeaking sounds made by a door. First performed in the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Pa! ris on 27 June 1963.

Dynamization - Alterations made within a certain textual field or (variously designated) matrix to whatever degree. Whereas modes such as appropriation emphasize the changes from one context to another of a certain recombinant element, dynamization emphasizes the dynamics and interrelationships within a certain text itself, and, recombinant texts being only semi-autonomous, the interrelationships and interreferences which modes such as appropriation effect. In many ways this is an indistinguishable mode from the preceding two, but its emphasis is on the resonances produced within the new/present context. Within a single text, these might include the relations between various textual elements or text-blocks (in a hypertextual manner), stylistic, typographic, linguistic, concrete variations as well as graphic/design variations. Obviously there need not be citation or appropriation to look at the dynamics and interrelations in a text, but recombinant modes can intens! ify and have the potential to ecstatically complicate the dynamics within a given textual space. What is emphasized here is the interrelation of arbitrarily designated elements within the equally articulated textual space. In a text such as Lautreamont's unfinished manuscript "Indelicacy", the prose-assault of radically juxtaposed and irrational images, pastiche, plagiarism, intertextuality and appropriations produce certain dynamics or tensions, just as in the typographic experiments of dadaists and Futurists, of concrete poets, of postmodern graphic design, or in the post-theory texts such as Hassan's The Postmodern Turn, Jabes' The Book of Questions, Derrida's Glas, the fragmentary texts of Blanchot or Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus also produce a violent play of signification, graphic/visual elements, and an intertextual omnivorousness of what//

the first was that, contrary to common belief, genes could jump from one spot to another and were not fixed, as was previously believed. It was noted that these differences were repeated in regular sequences, with unstable mutations accompanied by chromosomic discontinuities in specific areas, and inferred that these areas must thus correspond to new genetic elements, to a new category of genes, which are mobile and which "jump" during the course of successive generations.


Tzara: TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM/Take a newspaper./Take some scissors./ Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem./Cut out the article./Next cut out carefully each of the words that makes up this/article and put them all in a bag./Shake gently./Next take out each cutting one after the other./Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag./The poem will resemble you./And there you are - an infinitely original author of charming/sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

sensibility, your take from this poem. Take conscientiously infinitely some other. gently. MAKE words paper And this newspaper. each even the scissors. resemble there DADAIST charming bag. unappreciated which will to the in carefully order makes original Copy TO Shake each them The that poem. article. an out one up vulgar want length put left the an Choose you article after Next Take article author the are - in bag. the cut out though Cut ! make the you. cutting herd. of the POEM a Next you by A all they of and a out in.

//millennial postmodernism, this fascination is even less concerned with death, with ends, or with the decline or decay towards death. In fact, on the virtual screen of cruelty, death disappears, and only the movement preceding death exists. Rather than fin-de-siecle decay, it is modes of disappearance - disintegration, dissolution, dispersal - which inform the postmodern (techno-)Decadent. Today's message brought to you by the letter D. Modes of disappearance have a specific (anti-)aesthetic quality to them as the appearance of disappearance - they operate on a plane of pure appearance and (empty, surface) form. This aesthetic quality is an ecstatic moment, delighting in the devouring of the aethetic, in turning against it without alternative positions in a stylized gesture. Aesthetics becomes an ecsthetics of pure fascination (a becoming-acritical). The moment of disappearance of an appearance is the movement of postmodern Decadence processed by recombination! . This is characterized by an ecsthetics of dis/appearance: the simultaneous and imperfectly contradictory pure event of the disappearance of appearances. This is not informed by a hermunetical intention to reveal a deep meaning, but only to effect this movement itself as a fascination. Furthermore, since death has itself disappeared, the movement can be conceived as a continuum, as if//

John Zorn - blue(7:08) yellow(2:48) pink(15:44) black(3:42)
from the cd ELEGY.
Alto and Bass Flute - Barbara Chaffe, Viola - David Abel, Guitar - Scummy, Turntables - David Shea, Sound Effects - David Slusser, Percussion - William Winant, Voice - Mike Patton.
[1992, Tzadik Records.]


Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont: To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense and mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renewed doses, so as to paralyse his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, in addition, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. I mean - not to make myself better understood, but only in order to develop my train of thought which through a most penetrating harmony interests and irritates at the same time - that I do not think it necessary, in order to reach the proposed effect, to invent a poetry quite outside the known modalities, and whose pernicious breath seems to unsettle even absolute interpretations; but to bring about a similar result (consonant, moreover, with the operations of soft aesthetics, if one thinks it ove! r) is not as easy as one imagines: that is what I wanted to say.



[chance encounter, dissecting table, sewing machine, umbrella, beauty.]

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