'...and fear that the instrumental logic of machines conceals a void of meaning.' (2)

(Don Quixote and The Windmills Of Your Mind )

'...and fear that the instrumental logic of machines conceals a void of meaning.'

"The absence of the figure is conspicuous in Klippel's works. Looked at in this way, one can see some of the assemblages deliberately trying to avoid anything even indirectly anthropomorphic."

(More ... )

The Economy as projection-$pace : regarding certain views and 'the value of value'

.


"Firestorm sweeps world stockmarkets" : the headline on the front page of today's (Melbourne) Age.

Samuel Pepys diary entry, September 2 1666
"Having staid, and in an hour's time seen the fire: rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steele-yard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs.--------lives, and whereof my old school-fellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, an there burned till it fell down: I to White Hall (with a gentleman with me who desired to go off from the Tower, to see the fire, in my boat) ; to White Hall, and there up to the Kings closett in the Chappell, where people come about me, and did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King.

So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire . . . "

(More ... )

'Rudd's View on the Economy'
On ABC.Radio National's current affairs program P.M. a few nights back Mark Colvin introduced the item 'Rudd's view on the economy' with this progression of definitions :
"A crash happens when markets realise that assets are seriously overvalued, and brings them back down to earth.
A panic is a step on from that when markets no longer have any benchmark for what assets are worth, so they stop lending against them.
They no longer know the value of value and that means a period of chaos when no-one knows where the bottom of the slope is."

(More ... )

"Get Me My Mighty Bucket, someone!"

for Eve

-
Supreme Goddess as Void,
as the character Golden Frame,
with projection-space for LOGOS/HA HA

METABLAST

(More at ... )

Laugh Now

.


"PREMIER John Brumby's hissy fit over the inclusion of graffitied lanes in a replica of Melbourne at Disney World was so ludicrous that ...".

(More ...)

ROAMING GRAFFITI WALL PROTEST PIECE : for auction

"We have a special addition to our auction, by physical graffiti artists WORKMAN JONES (they use their bodies..a different kind of political street art practiced during the day) who created the stencil protest as a work that paid homage to Melbourne’s stencil artists. It is a collection of 5 canvases that made up the roaming wall of graffiti - a pro street art campaign that challenged the City of Melbourne’s zero tolerance policy during the 2006 Commonwealth Games."

(Click here for online auction site : auction ends 10 October.
Later, auction now ended - all 5 panels bought for a song by a Melbourne collector.)

Launched!

Mauricio Kagel : before and after "1898" (December 24 1931 – 18 September 2008)

.


"In the context of this unwritten chronicle, the vocal entries in 1898 underline the prevailing “Yes” and “No” malaise with an explicit text covering every conceivable nuance: both carefree and obsessive, whistling, singing - but with the mouth closed -, and laughter which is both liberating and despairing.

And here the composer is again confronted with questions which are also relevant to his current work. When one looks at yesterday with today’s eyes, is one not also tracing the future?"

Mauricio Kagel
August 1998
(translation: Richard Toop)

(More ...
including 'A Response to Kagel’s notes re: 1898' by eldritch Priest)

Tony Coulter played Kagel's 1898: 1st Movement and several of his other works on his penultimate program at wfmu. To hear these go to the playlist for that show and click on the Pop-up Player.

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/28711

While there check out other wfmu programs, as well as their massive audio archive. Stochastic Hit Parade with Bethany Ryker is a favourite at bLOGOS/HA HA

http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/HP

You might be interested in this upcoming performance :
Sunday, October 12th, 10pm - Midnight: JACK Quartet plays Xenakis
For the first time since the show began, the Stochastic Hit Parade features a live performance of Xenakis' stochastic music. What's that you say? By definition, a stochastic process is one that is unprovable by theory....random, in other words. Xenakis (an architect, composer and all-around genius-type) used computer algorithms, game theory and algebra to generate random sequences of notes. The JACK string quartet comes to WFMU's studio to perform all four of Xenakis' string quartets, including St/4-1,080262, one of Xenakis' emblematic stochastic works.

No Laughing Matter

.


"Commenting on the research, visual neuroethologist Jochen Zeil, from the Australian National University, says the findings are no laughing matter. "I'm not surprised that they found pigeons could distinguish the fine details of paintings," he says.

Zeil notes that people often underestimate how well other animals can see. "This research gives us a better appreciation of how amazing animals other than ourselves are in terms of their visual abilities," he says.

In order to tease out the critical faculties of pigeons, Watanabe and his colleagues first showed a pigeon 10 paintings by Monet. Then they asked the same pigeon to identify -- peck out -- a different work by the same artist from a mixture of paintings by Monet, Renoir, Matisse and Delacroix. The pigeons were able to do this for a range of other artists as well, including Picasso, Van Gogh and Chagall."

(More... )

Spiders and flies and the World Wide Web

.

"When you think of a spider in nature, you think of it in its interactions with an environment, not in isolation. The spider sees and feels its way around, moving from one place to another in a meaningful way. Web spiders operate in a similar way. A Web spider is a program written in a high-level language. It interacts with its environment through the use of networking protocols, such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the Web. If your spider wants to communicate with you, it can use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send an e-mail message.

Spiders aren't limited to HTTP or SMTP, though. Some spiders use Web services, such as SOAP or the Extensible Markup Language Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC) protocol. Other spiders scour newsgroups with the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) or look for interesting news items in Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. While most spiders in nature can see only light-dark intensity and movement changes, Web spiders can see and feel using many types of protocols."

(More...)