________________________________________________________________________________ living in mediaspace 0 living in mediaspace 1 azure, foofwa, and i are living in media space. the air is filled with electromagnetic discharge, cooling fans create a disturbing hum, wires snake through the room, we're in the midst of the machine, the belly of it. living in mediaspace 2 there's no escape; the sound and radiation continues through the night, matched only by the bleak sunrise and furnace roar, one toppling the other, the other toppling the one. living in mediaspace 3 it's here we create our body movements, over and over again, the irony of heavy labor in within the virtual, as we become aware of big iron, even in the smallest appliance - of the need for clean and proper protocols, as our body becomes increasingly filthy. living in mediaspace 4 century-and-a-half old brick walls, wooden floors, skylight and energy, wooden tables, several miles of tables, interoperability among machines ranging from yesterday to forty years ago, analog and digital regimes snaking into each other, patchcords and internal proprieties of memory; we're here, turning knobs, pulling levers, plugging and unplugging cords and cables, moving tripods, focusing cameras, aiming lights, speaking, singing, walking, dancing, playing, theorizing, discussing, eating, sleeping, excreting, shuddering, washing, dressing, typing, aligning, realigning, transforming input to output, output to input, looping through interruptions of storage media, replaying, rehearsing, recuperating. living in mediaspace 5 my hands move across the six strings of the electric guitar; they're not moving fast enough; when my fingers blur - then i know something is working - something is laboring properly - the output roars into being. living in mediaspace 6 intermittent taking of digital photographs through the obdurate regime of the real: everything returns to the virtual; we're leaving our traces. living in mediaspace 7 thus tracing our cords - where does this one or that one go - following the line snaking among hundreds of others to the obverse side, interior, of the device or patchbay: they go on with three switches half-buried among distribution amplifiers and sync generators. living in mediaspace 8 the day is ready when the machines are ready; some remain on, alert and vigilant through the night; some sleep uneasily; some keep their clocks right on time. living in mediaspace 9 we are sure to be activated; there's no uncertainty; the bricks glow with data bombardment; we're becoming suffused; there's not a moment to lose; the machines are waiting, tapes and disks running; other storage media as well; there's always flash memory, wetware; the room pulses to a single sync; you can almost hear us living in mediaspace 10; you can almost hear us breathing _ living in mediaspace now there we are in the background, huddled naked against the dancer, this is very old-fashioned, dance and articulation, bodies and dreams of bodies, media11 as i play old-fashioned shakuhachi living-bamboo, mirage sampler, electric guitar, media12 against crashing shinto bell-gong sounds earlier recorded, media13, working through a barrage of errors, computers closing down after sound and videocards malfunction, removing the board making matters worse, media14, trying different .mov compressions and settling on sorenson 30-50 percent, putting aside temporarily the belkin usb input device, media15, although first uploading a character-generated text into a short video of wounding and sadness compressed like wap protocols, media16, working with both hi8 v5000 taping with noise reduction and time base correct, and dv all over, even with what's saved of jpegs on the zip drive played back through the g4 which handles the sorenson beautifully, media17, as usual i'm amazed at the labor involved in finding the right usb or rca or digital or s cables, moving from one to another conversion, usually ending, media18, at adobe premier, recording straight wording and harmonica through the mirage, media19, more and more impedance problems, how can all of this work together, media20, the videotoaster 4000 no longer with us and the 2000 giving out right here, just now, but the images from the nikon 800 beautiful and tomorrow we'll set up the analog video synthesizer again for vocal switching, media21, while i'll play back the live mirage sound recorded on the sony professional cassette player, not dat, but with good plugin powered mikes, through the onkyo deck, while azure and i are working naked, shaved, elsewhere, dreams reflecting off bodies against brilliant difficult dance taken from nikuko parable texts and the problematics, media22, of ballet _ 23 living in 23 24 waking this morning, knowing i'm irrelevant to the world and all 25 my instantiations which will have maybe another twenty years of 26 creative life if alzheimer's doesn't get to me, azure and foofwa 27 asleep in their respective rooms (she's in the back of the main 28 studio with me, i'm typing in mediaspace on a pc laptop, there's 29 a pc next to me, then the video synthesizer (analog computer), 30 then a couple of amigas, then the mac g4, all surrounded by and 31 surrounding other dedicated units, actually the amigas are dedi- 32 cated, one running a frame-bragger* / processor, and the other a 33 time base corrector, as well as the dying toaster), am i dying, 34 it is another early morning, knowing i'm the old man fading into 35 the older brick walls, trying not to become too swamped by what 36 might be depression slogging in; i'm thinking - here i want to 37 become-, not -woman, but -digital, losing myself between one bit 38 and another, leaving the odd eternal life, and outside, just as 39 in joyce's story, it looks like snow and memories 40 *should be frame-grabber, but the typo works in affect 41 living in media41 _ living in 42 mediaspace delicate fluttering pink things in the wires over there labor of foofwa dance over here alan wants to be a machine more than any other thing azure will melt wires surround alan bleak insulation plastic almost smudged against circuit boards, sputtering out he doesn't become a man she doesn't become a woman ballet doesn't need dancers screens don't need cables rooms don't need ceilings cities don't need streets fluttering pink things don't need air _ l43i43m "43 yes a fingers and feet nightmare! your inscription finished, you have created thing." 43% completed defragmentation next to me. last night, too many cameras, five, to few microphones, one, too many devices, perhaps ten including the video analog synthesizer, too unprepared for embedding. :camera say hello to us and camera heal us the seals were broken. what little text escaped was drowned in flesh burst open by contrary bytes. blood short-circuited everything, including hearts and motherboards, mute blindness of cameras recording it all in the wires, my arms stuck out, and one leg was severed at the cable junction, all of us could feel incipient life growing, tumors in the midst of analog pots struggling to control signal feedbacks, keeping the graph clean on the waveform monitors your elegiac names my camera say hello to us and camera heal us "your the seals were broken. what little text escaped was drowned in flesh burst open by contrary bytes. blood short- circuited everything, including hearts and motherboards, mute blindness of cameras recording it all. -4394 text is your final enunciation. for 43 sutured hours, we have been dead and written. and it has taken you 43.450 minutes to write your last" "production with ideogrammar" _ living in media44space: the new piece 44 placing chinese chop below NOT ideogram 45 body under affect and 51 nipples dotted turned towards f luttered five camera 52 thus jagged against the other in fast switchin g 57 bodies in cave pulled out into and red on white skin of violent s exual revolution 61 switching controlled by audio 62 meaning, look, i di/s/ play myself, reading these from language erasure 46 thin labia of supine bo dy 47 NOT ideogram of violent sexual five camera flicked twisted body i nto body 50 handled penis of supine body incision of kanji ideogram flicked across frame 53 twisted body jagged 54 meaning 58 pulled meaning from bod ies flanged against dark blue 59 b lack revolution 48 writing NOT ideogram above the cunt and cock 49 flutte red smeared kanji before erasure after violent grasp 56 cameras shifted one _ living in mediaspace 60 we've finished fifteen pieces in three days. music sources include moog and mirage, electric guitar and voice, shakuhachi and harmonica. video processing includes adobe premier, an old titling program on an amiga, and the analog video synthesizer. other media include the usual computer programs and everything's checked on the g4. shooting sites include a wildlife refuge about two miles from here, as well as the interior of the loft. other work produced includes about 45 digital photographs and a number of texts. there are several strands to all of this - working with the nikuko parables, working with a critique and sexualization of ballet, and working through systems of signs and the body. for once the intensity has remained through everything; we play back through premier, but also on cdrom, and we're finding ourselves constantly astounded. the space and architecture of the loft seem liquid, mobile; the movements and cameras are determining the reading of worlds, not proscenia. the pieces are also fragmenting; there may be several versions of each, and we don't choose between them but keep them all. burning them into cdroms which are write-once only gives them the permanency of sculpture, of inert materiality, the grain of the planet. it's as if we're there on-disk online re-enacting or recuperating the same movements and the same firewalls against death, as ever; we're caught, to be played backwards and forwards, repeatedly. you can see this in the semantics of the work itself; one of the pieces is a parable scrolling in reverse, from top to bottom; through several loopings, the meaning, the time of it all, become clear. last night i dreamed of my mother again, with the same narratology - there is a traumatic interruption announcing her death, that she is death; i wake somewhat later, almost in tears. look at this, this looping in wetware under constant mismanagement; it is inconstancy which harbors memory, not the truth burned into microscopic tracks. it takes the pure light of a laser to read them. there seems to be a truth in nudity in all of this, something neither machine nor inscription can touch. it's as if what's signified - the presentation of the naked sexualized body - converts only ikonically - that is, through representation, into itself, looped through the viewer, who completes the real. while foofwa is dancing, is a dancer, azure and myself stumble or present differently, and the difference draws dancer and dancing in; the fictivity of the dance is subverted by the labor and body of the dancer, and everything reaches or lathers around or through the same knot. look at this, look at this, look at this. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive