not

born 29 Reims.fr, father- civil servant, studied German at Sorbonne, phd: “Thèse de troisième cycle: Le Système des objets” (66, under Lefebvre), habilitation: “L’Autre par lui-même” (72)
prof of German in Lycee 58-66, prof of sociology at uni of Nanterre 72-87, prof of phil of culture and media criticism at European Graduate School 01-
scientific director at IRIS at uni de Paris Dauphine 86-90

the mirror of production (75)
simulacres et simulation (81)
the gulf war did not take place (95)
+
america (86)

Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical control screens.
Instead of the real, we have simulation and simulacra.

4 logics of objects = 4 categories for value of commodities:
– functional value = Marx’ use value, “a pen writes”, “diamond ring adorning otherwise empty hand”
– exchange value, economic value, “a pen is worth three pencils”, “diamond ring as 3 months’ salary”
– symbolic exchange value, value in relation to another subject, “pen as a graduation present or speaker’s gift”, “diamond ring as love between 2 individuals”
– sign exchange value, value in system of objects, “pen as a part of desk set, or particular pen as a social status”, “biggest diamond ring as a highest social status”

keywords: realtime, end of history, disappearance.
..What’s beyond the end? Well, beyond the end, there is virtual reality, that is to say, the horizon of a programmed reality in which all our physiological and social functions (memory, affect, intelligence, sexuality, work) gradually become useless. Beyond the end, in the era of the transpolitical, the transaesthetic, or the transsexual, all our desiring machines first become tiny mechanisms of spectacle, and finally turn into celibate machines which exhaust all their capabilities in an empty vortex, as in Duchamp’s work. The countdown is the code for the automatic disappearance of the world. What’s left to be done when everything is already calculated, subtracted, realized in advance? Our problem is no longer what to do with real events, with real violence, but what to do with events that did not take place, that never had the time to take place? No longer the question: what are you doing after the orgy, the orgy of history, of freedom, of modernity? But rather: what are you doing when the orgy no longer takes place?..
..History, for example, ends with information and the creation of the instantaneous event..
..The retrospective curving of historical space, which in a sense resembles the recurrence of physical and cosmological space, is perhaps the big discovery of the end of the millennium..
..There is no better allegory for this fatal countdown than Arthur Clarke’s novel Nine Billion Names of God. A community of Tibetan monks is in charge of detailing and copying down all the names given to God. There are nine billion names. According to the prophecy, at the end of the countdown, once the last name is written down, the world comes to an end. But the monks are getting tired and, to go faster, they turn to IBM experts who come to the rescue with a bunch of computers. The work is done in three months. It is as if world history were to end in a few seconds thanks to a virtual intervention. Unfortunately, this also marks the disappearance of the world in real time. The prophecy of the end of the world which corresponds to the exhaustion of all of God’s names becomes true. On their way down from the mountain, the IBM technicians (who previously did not believe a word of the story) can see all the stars in the sky disappear one by one..
.. If history is a movie (which indeed it has become through its immediate retro-projection), the ‘truth’ in the news media is nothing more than the post-synchronizing, the dubbing, and the sub-titling of the film..
..In A Critique of Political Economy, Marx states that “mankind only poses problems that it can solve… We notice that a problem arises when the material conditions of its solution already exist or, at least, when they are about to exist.” But it is not like this anymore. Our jump into the virtual world unsettles all the material conditions that Marx was talking about, and deprives historical conditions of any dialectical solution. In a sense, the virtual is history’s final solution and the end result of real conflicts. Today, this means that humankind (or those who think on its behalf) only comes up with problems when they have already been solved. They have been virtually surpassed, or the system has displaced them by absorbing their occurrence. But wasn’t it already like this in Marx’s time? The emergence of the notions of class and struggle, the birth of a historical conscience: aren’t these indicative of the moment when humankind ceased to be violent and irreducible? This is reminiscent of Foucault and his analysis of power. When he starts to analyze power, isn’t it already the sign that power no longer has any political meaning, that it has lost its object? When ethnology looks at primitive societies, it means that they have already disappeared. Analysis itself is part of the process of disappearance..
(1998)

11 cauac XI

wrote Lovecraft’s bio 91
94 Extension of the Battlefield
98 Elementary Particles, 300.000 sold
01 Platform

Frederic Beigbeder one evening not long ago popped a Moody Blues ballad into his CD player and saw Houellebecq burst into tears: ‘He started crying, crying. Finally he explained that at all the parties when he was 18, all the boys and girls slow-danced to this song, but he was alone and no one talked to him because he was ugly.. he loves pathetic – all his work is about being pathetic’.

mountain-guide father and an anesthesiologist mother, hippie parents, at 6 shipped off to a communist grandmother SW of Paris, 78 she died, frequently depressed, at 18 rejected for military service because of a morphine addiction, in 80 graduated from college with a degree in agricultural engineering, married sister of a classmate, had a son and 84 divorced, within a few years, he was unemployed, drinking heavily and in and out of mental hospitals, where he was treated for anxiety, poet in 80s, since 91 computer admin in French National Assembly, 98 wife Marie-Pierre, 99 moves to Ireland near Cork from Paris, plan to move to a house on an island off the SW coast of Ireland where there are more sheep than people, doesnt like to speak English, asocial, Jim Beam, 00 has recorded a CD of his poems and tours France with a rock band, is directing an erotic film for the Canal Plus network, maintains an open marriage, frequents swingers’ clubs, estimates that he sleeps with 25 women a year, has no idea where his parents are today – or even if they are alive.

infl: Baudelaire, Brave New World and Island by Aldous Huxley, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Kant, Auguste Comte, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Book of Kells, and… Pif le Chien (a comic strip)

‘pop star of the single generation’, ‘nihilist’, NY Times: ‘deeply repugnant read’, ‘France’s biggest literary sensation in 20 years’.
To 20-somethings, he’s a hero; to baby boomers, he’s a menace to society. He is also considered by turns a pornographer, a Stalinist, a racist, a sexist, a nihilist, a reactionary, a eugenicist and a homophobe.

Extension of the Battlefield — features a physically repellent software technician whose unrealistic obsession is to find a woman who will have sex with him. Instead of losing his virginity, he ends up losing his life in a car crash.

Elementary Particles — story of Bruno and Michel, a pair of half-brothers who are palmed off to grandparents at a tender age by irresponsible hippie parents. Bruno grows up to become a self-loathing, sex-obsessed psychiatric patient who, though ‘prepared to go to the ends of the earth’ for nubile flesh ‘wrapped in a miniskirt’, is rarely satisfied. He abandons the one woman who loves him, when she becomes a wheelchair-bound invalid. As for Michel, he becomes a chronically depressed molecular biologist who commits suicide off the Irish coast – but not without leaving a blueprint for establishing a new species of perfectly rational human clones, the only hope for saving mankind from self-destruction.

Houellebecq said that having money has changed his life in one crucial respect only: it has allowed him to escape ‘the nightmare’ of being an employee.
‘I don’t like to eat, I only like sex.’
‘We live in a world in which there are no more links. We’re just particles. It’s a simple metaphor.’
Marie-Pierre: ‘Michel’s not depressed. It’s the world that’s depressing.’

*9th century
1.2mil + 0.3 working nonresidents
13th, charles IV, bridge, st vitus cathedral [gothic], uni, prague 3rd largest in europe
18th, prague = hradcany + mala strana + stare mesto + nove mesto
art noveau / baroque / cubist / gothic / neoclassical / ultramodern
8 uni (uk, cvut..)
aug 02 flooding
tram *05, bus *08, trolleybus *36, metro *74, ruzyne airport
castle said to be the biggest in the world at about 570m length and an average of about 130m wide

-18 austria-hungary, 18-38 csr, 39-45 protektorat cechy a morava, 45-60 csr, 60-90 cssr, 90-92 csfr, 93- cr

18 tomas garrigue masaryk 850.3.7-37 pi 3 lamat IV
35 edvard benes 884.5.28-48 ta 2 ahau IV
38 emil hacha 872.7.12-46 ca 9 chicchan* IX
45 benes // 45 klement gottwald 896.11.23-53 11 cauac XI
48 gottwald
53 antonin zapotocky 884.12.19-57 12 chicchan II // antonin novotny 04.12.10-75 sa 10 cib II
57 novotny
68 ludvik svoboda 895.11.24-79 sa 11 men* VI // 68 alexander dubcek 21.11.27-92 sa 1 lamat XIII
// 69 gustav husak 13.1.10-91 cp 10 manik+ VII
75 husak
// 87 milos jakes 22.8.12 le 12 cimi XIII
89 vaclav havel 36.10.5 li 2 oc* XI

http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/6/6d/Gottwald100.jpg

wikipedia “free encyclopedia” = nupedia + wiki, 50+ languages
*01.1 by Larry Sanger (Nupedia) + Ben Kovitz (programmer) + sponsored by Jimbo Wales (Bomis president)
// Nupedia *00.3-03.9 Jimmy Wales + Larry Sanger
// Wales: “We recruited academics to write the articles. We had a peer review board. After nearly two years of work and an enormous amount of money, I think we had 12 articles to show for it.”
“Wikipedia owes its success to the presence of a strong core group of well-educated and articulate contributors from around the world who together maintain community standards of civility, quality and neutrality.”
“three strikes” vandalism policy is fairly easy to enforce. Most vandals get a two-strikes allowance. On the third offense, administrators block the offending poster’s I.P. address, preventing them from accessing the site. Though some find a new way back in, taunting the admins as they do so, most casual vandals get bored and find other places to ply their hatred.
“neutral point of view”, neutral content policy, bez zaujatosti
based on wiki technology, open knowledge, can be improved by anyone, content free of charge, w/o ads
licensed under GNU FDL
operated by nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation Inc
wiktionary *02.12, dictionary+thesaurus, words in all languages, a free dictionary
wikiquote *03.6, a collection of notable quotations
wikibooks *03.7, free textbooks for schools and universities {ucebnice, manualy // recept na vegansku indicku Aloo Masala, ucebnica XML}
wikisource, a collection of public domain or FDL-licensed texts, {the communist manifesto, bible, zdrojak Perlu, text turkmenskej hymny, vysledky regionalnych volieb vo Francuzsku}
mediawiki, sw na ktorom fachci wikipedia, open source wiki engine

* Spike Jonze 69 13 eb III: videos– Beastie Boys, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Weezer; films– Being John Malkovich (99), Adaptation (02); cocreated Jackass; 99-03 married to Sofia Coppola
* Michel Gondry 65 fr: videos– 6x Bjork, White Stripes, Chem Bros, Kylie Minogue; ads– levi’s, smirnoff; invented ‘bullet time’ technique (sequence slowed down, frozen, camera rotates around); films– Human Nature (01), Eternal Sunshine.. (04) both screenpl by Kaufman
* David Fincher 62 ta 10 eb* X co/denver: animator; videos– Madonna, George Michael, Aerosmith, Rolling Stones; ads; films– Alien 3 (92), Se7en (95), The Game (97), Fight Club (99), Panic Room (02)
* Julien Temple 53 sa 6 manik XII uk/london: rockumentaries– Sex Pistols (80) + The Filth and the Fury (00), Mod culture; films– Bullet (96), Pandaemonium (01)
* Russell Mulcahy 53 ca 6 chuen IV au/melbourne: videos– Elton John, Duran Duran, Billy Joel, Spandau Ballet
* Singh Tarsem 61 ge 12 akbal VI in: films– The Cell (00)

An Introduction to Social Network Analysis —
* degrees– s kolkatimi ludmi som priamo spojeny, castokrat “the more connections, the better” pristup when one connects only those who are already connected to each other; what really matters is where those connections lead to — and how they connect the otherwise unconnected,
* betweenness– ludia na spojeniach medzi inak nespojenymi skupinami, bez nich by info medzi nimi netieklo,
* closeness– ak mam blizke spojenia s ludmi, som rychlejsie pri info, ale zase nie som s vela ludmi,
* boundary spanners– are well-positioned to be innovators, since they have access to ideas and information flowing in other clusters. They are in a position to combine different ideas and knowledge, found in various places, into new products and services,
* peripheral players– are often connected to networks that are not currently mapped, making them very important resources for fresh information not available inside the group,
* Network Centralization– a very centralized network is dominated by one or a few very central nodes. If these nodes are removed or damaged, the network quickly fragments into unconnected sub-networks,
* Structural Equivalence – determine which nodes play similar roles in the network,
* Cluster Analysis – find cliques and other densely connected clusters,
* Structural Holes – find areas of no connection between nodes that could be used for advantage or opportunity,
* E/I Ratio – find which groups in the network are open or closed to others,
* Small Worlds – find node clustering, and short path lengths, that are common in networks exhibiting highly efficient small-world behavior.

seven plus or minus two (miller)

“What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead” (norbert wiener)

“To live effectively is to live with adequate information.” (norbert wiener)

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions (norbert wiener)

we stand in relation to the world as in a mirror that does not tell us how the world is (varela)

the fact that we can coordinate our own sense data into recurrent structures can never prove that these structures are ontologically real
(Ernst von Glasersfeld)

Break the pattern which connects the items of learning, and you necessarily destroy all quality (Gregory Bateson)

some sort of self-fulfilment, occurs in all organisations and human cultures (Gregory Bateson)

A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner; what occurred once will occur again. Its organization (both genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works (Humberto Maturana)

disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them
(humberto maturana)

the self resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours (Ernst von Glasersfeld)

I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are (george kelly)

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
John von Neumann

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
John von Neumann

The lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. adorno

“for machines that deal with people rather than people that deal with machines!” (mxhz.org)

“everything that can be marketed will eventually vanish” (mxhz.org)

environment transformation via technology:
– indoor beaches (Seagaia, also known as Ocean Dome)
– ski slopes (SSAWS, acronym for Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter: Snow) of Japan.
– high-tech casinos and artificial nature of Las Vegas, American shopping malls and theme parks
– SimCity (Maxis)
– CAD (Computer Animated Design) Institute in Phoenix (the first educational institution to offer a degree in Virtual Reality)
– Virtual World, a virtual arcade facility
= no seasons, no danger, no discomfort, no travel; world as a package; selfenclosed, manmade worlds; abandoning nature for synthetic version; virtual as ultimate synthetic

human body transformation via genetic engineering, plastic surgery, biotechnology:
– Orlan: “I am attracted to plastic surgery because it is a fight against nature, the idea of God, the programmed, the DNA which is in charge of representation. I believe the body is not sacred as religion taught us, it is just a costume that can be changed.”
– Robert Ettinger, President of the Cryonics Institute, who is attempting to achieve immortality through the freezing of human bodies
– Max More, President of the Extropy Institute (a society of progressive futurists), looks forward to a future where mankind will have transcended the limitations of nature through the advancement of nanotechnology (molecular robotics) and the creation of cyborgs (human-machines): “I don’t think robots are going to replace human beings. I think that what we are going to see is more of a merger of human beings and robots, to become some kind of combined organism…there will be a whole spectrum.”
– transsexual cyberpunks, Limelight Club in New York City.
– body piercing

moods / personality / consciousness transformation by cosmetic pharmacology:
– prozac
– smart drugs, psychedelics
– RU Sirius: “Our culture is starting to view drugs as information. You take a particular combination of chemicals to create a particular response in your brain and in your nervous system, and you find that response useful in getting a different view of reality, a different photo- graph from a different angle, and you use that for whatever you need to create.”
= we are able to change subjective experience to suit our needs and desires

– Steve Roberts (editor of High-Tech Nomadness) proposes the possibility of nomadic (yet connected) lifestyles in the digital age. We see him cruising natural landscapes on his Behemoth, a computerized, 105-speed bicycle which he designed himself. The on-board monitor displays a map, a virtual landscape, pin-pointed with blips representing his virtual friends spread out across the Internet/terrain.

The computer programs for example which calculate the credit line of checking accounts or control medical instruments in an emergency station can’t be meaningfully called “media”.

algorithmic vs digitized
Contrary to conventional data like digitized images, sound and text documents,
the algorithmic instruction code allows a generative process.
It uses computers for computation,
not only as storage and transmission media.
And this precisely distinguishes program code from
non-algorithmic digital code,
describing for example the difference between algorithmic composition on the one hand and
audio CDs/mp3 files on the other,
between algorithmically generated text and
“hypertext’,
or between a graphical computer “demo” and
a video tape.

A piano score, even a 19th century one, is software when its instruction code can be executed by a human pianist as well as on a player piano.
~ software can be executed by humans, not only by computers

Literature is a conceptual art in that is not bound to objects and sites, but only to language.. Since formal language is a language, software can be seen and read as a literature.

patterns in the music, arts and sociology (Ward, 2001).
Ward, Mark (2001) Universality: The underlying theory behind life, the universe and everything, Macmillan, London.

seriality ~ physical, synchronicity ~ psychical

Seriality is a concept coined by Paul Kammerer in 1919 with the publication of his book Das Gesetz der Series. Kammerer viewed seriality as a “law”, like gravity or entropy, and the recurrence of same and/or similar events was so regular as to negate the term coincidence.

Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung in his essay Synchronicity: An A-Causal Connecting Principle.

there were three main categories in Kammerer’s classification: typology, morphology and systematisation. Typology refers to similar names, numbers, events and so forth in a series. Morphology refers to the number of consecutive sequences. And systematisation is what Koestler (1971, p. 139) refers to as ‘homologous and analogous series, pure and hybrid series, inverted series’ and so on.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer (880-40 le 1 imix* I) advanced his little-known but thought-provoking theory of seriality. Kammerer supposed that events, objects, or occurrences of a like kind assemble together in space and time through unknown and acausal means. Kammerer defined seriality as “a lawful recurrence, or clustering, in time and space whereby individual members of the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active source.”(1) Where Jung’s synchronicity deals with the relationship between subjectivity and the external world, Kammerer’s seriality is more concerned with patterns and groupings of objects that occur in the environment. Many of us have had the experience whereby we encounter a new word for the first time and, surprisingly, we encounter it numerous times after its initial introduction into our lives. For instance, someone rolls off a particularly mellifluous sounding word in conversation, “insouciant,” that piques your curiosity but you have no idea of its meaning. Shortly after hearing it the first time, you read it in a book, someone else uses it in conversation-and someone else.

Kammerer suggested that these events revealed a heretofore unrecognized law of nature which tended to bring like and like together

DJ Spooky at Rhythm Science 2004, p13: “Kammerer was looking for the algorithms of everyday life – how patterns appear, and how their structures can affect all aspects of the creative act.. Kammerer’s idea of sequential reality and process-oriented events was one of the first systematic attempts at figuring out a rhythm of everyday life in an industrial context.”

The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with the synchronicities is what Jung labelled “individuation” (process by which components of an individual are integrated into a more indivisible whole)

Some think that a scientific basis for the phenomena of synchronicity may be related to the principle of correlation, since a more precise scientific term for Jung’s expression ‘acausal connecting principle’ is ‘correlation’.
It is a well-known scientific principle that ‘correlation does not imply causation’. Yet, correlation may in fact be a physical property shared by events without there being a classical cause-effect relationship. This is most clearly seen in the correlation effects of quantum physics, where widely separated events can be correlated without being linked by a direct physical cause-effect.

suicide bombers

term “suicide bombing” became commonplace after the attack on a US Marine barracks in Beirut in 83.
arabs: “human bomb”, “shahid” (martyr, “person who died in a Jihad in order to testify his faith in Allah”)
bush, 02: “homicide bombing”

jp samurais, jp ww2 (anti us),
vietnam (anti fr), kurdistan (anti tr),
palestina (anti isr/us), tamils,
iraqi (anti us)

Seppuku, honorable suicide, was part of samurai duty.
During the Crusades, the Knights Templar destroyed one of their own ships, killing 140 Christians in order to kill ten times as many Muslims.
In ww2, japanese kamikaze pilots acted as “human missiles” by flying their planes, heavily laden with explosives, directly into enemy warships. chiefly against United States Navy aircraft carriers.
The Japanese Navy also used both one and two man piloted torpedoes called kaitens (midget submarines) on suicide missions. After aiming a two-person kaiten at their target, the two crew members were to embrace and shoot each other in the head.
After ww2, Viet Minh “death volunteers” were used against the French colonial army.
Kurdistan Workers Party.
During the Al-Aqsa Intifada the Palestinians (groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) have attempted to kill Israelis using suicide bombers nearly every single day. usually crowded civilian targets.
The Tamil Tigers have committed 75 (mostly female) suicide bombings since 80.
9/11 attack used large fully-fueled planes as enormous cruise missiles flown into buildings, killing the planes’ hijackers, and causing over 2,500 casualties in the process — making it the most destructive suicide bombing in history.
After the US occupied Iraq in 03, a wave of suicide bombings occurred. The suicide bombers target mainly US military targets although civilian targets such as Shiite mosques and intl offices of the UN and the Red Cross were also attacked.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri expresses the point clearly: “the method of martyrdom operation [is] the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahidin in terms of casualties.”

Soldiers who lay down their lives to protect their comrades are commonly awarded the highest recognition for courage in battle.

anthropologist Scott Atran in 03: Most bombers are educated, many with college or university experience, and come from middle class homes. Many do show signs of psychological imbalance, and often had trouble relating socially as children.

saddam platil rodinam suicide bomberov $10-25k,
palestinci platia tiez, izraelci im nicia domy

while a man can be checked to see if he’s carrying an explosive belt by simply lifting his shirt, ordering a woman to do so contradicts Jewish norms of modesty.

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_restaurant_suicide_bombing
+ http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200206/brooks

Father told me that if someone says “can’t” that shows you what to do.
Mother: “..you know perfectly well I’ve never enjoyed having a good time.”

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book.

Fischinger: “Everything in the world has its own spirit which can be released by setting it into vibration.”

I was given a job at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was there that I discovered what I called micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure. The large parts of a composition had the same proportion as the phrases of a single unit.

I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication, because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh.

I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the artist is to imitate nature in her manner of operation.

I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred.

In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.

The Buddhist texts to which I often return are the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (in Chu Ch’an’s first translation, published by the London Buddhist Society in 1947), Neti Neti by L. C. Beckett of which (as I say in the introduction to my Norton Lectures at Harvard) my life could be described as an illustration, and the Ten Oxherding Pictures (in the version that ends with the return to the village bearing gifts of a smiling and somewhat heavy monk, one who had experienced Nothingness). Apart from Buddhism and earlier I had read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna it was who said all religions are the same, like a lake to which people who are thirsty come from different directions, calling its water by different names. Furthermore this water has many different tastes. The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, though for him we would have to add the erotic.

That summer Fuller put up his first dome, which immediately collapsed. He was delighted. “I only learn what to do when I have failures.”

It was at Black Mountain College that I made what is sometimes said to be the first happening. The audience was seated in four isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which touched a small square performance area that they faced and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the exhibition of paintings and the playing of a Victrola by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his poetry by Charles Olsen or hers by M. C. Richards from the top of a ladder outside the audience, the piano playing of David Tudor, my own reading of a lecture that included silences from the top of another ladder outside the audience, all took place within chance-determined periods of time within the over-all time of my lecture.

I was to move from structure to process, from music as an object having parts, to music without beginning, middle, or end, music as weather. In our collaborations Merce Cunningham’s choreographies are not supported by my musical accompaniments. Music and dance are independent but coexistant.

My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music I write. I write in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard.

(1989)

theo van gogh 57.7.23 le 1 imix* I
His great-grandfather was art dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent van Gogh.
2003 book Allah Knows Best – in his typical cynical, mocking tone – presented his views on Islam.

ayaan hirsi ali 67.11.13 sc 7 kan+
naturalized refugee, from the ex-royal family of Somalia

Together with Hirsi Ali, van Gogh created the 10-minute movie Submission. The film is about violence against women in Islamic societies, and focuses especially on female circumcision. It shows four abused women, naked under see-through dresses with Qur’anic verses in Arabic unfavourable to women, painted on their bodies. After the movie was released, both van Gogh and Hirsi Ali received death threats. Van Gogh did not take these very seriously and refused any protection.
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2655656?htv=12

2004.11.2 van Gogh was shot with seven bullets and died on the spot. His throat was slit, and he was then stabbed in the chest. Two knives were left inplanted in his torso, one pinning a 5 page note to his body. The note threatened Western governments, Jews and Hirsi Ali (who went into hiding). The note also contains references to the ideologies of the Egyptian organization Takfir wal-Hijra. The alleged killer Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old man of Dutch and Moroccan nationalities, was apprehended by the police after being shot in the leg.
Though Bouyeri’s parents were from Morocco, he was raised in The Netherlands in Dutch and apparently did not know Arabic. The letter had nothing on Van Gogh. It was a long ramble on purported quotes from the Jewish Talmud. The suspect was said to be upset by his mother’s death and TV footage of US soldiers killing wounded Iraqi civilians. There is not any proof that he did not act alone. So, an INDIVIDUAL killed Van Gogh. Not “Islam”. Not even “political Islam.”
http://indymedia.nl/nl/2004/11/22690.shtml

Until his death Van Gogh was working on a movie (0605) about the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.

Pim Fortuyn 48.2.19 7 ik.
Openly gay publicist; hostile views on Islam and his anti-immigration positions; could perhaps be described as a nationalist, but on cultural rather than racial grounds; held libertine views, favoring the drug policy of the Netherlands, same-sex marriage, euthanasia on request and related positions; wanted to disband the army and air force, retaining only a navy.
2001: “I am also in favour of a cold war with Islam. I see Islam as an extraordinary threat, as a hostile society.”
2002: Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, had enough inhabitants, and therefore, the practice of allowing 40,000 asylum-seekers into the country each year had to be stopped.
2002: “I don’t hate Islam. I consider it a backwards* culture. I have travelled much in the world. And wherever Islam rules, it’s terrible. All the hypocrisy. It’s a bit like those old Reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have norms and values that are so high that you can’t humanly maintain them. You also see that in Muslim culture. Look at the Netherlands. In what country could a leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? It’s fantastic that it’s possible. That’s something that we can be proud of. And I want to keep it that way.”
In 2002 assassinated by an animal rights left-wing activist. After consultation with the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, it was decided not to postpone the elections. However, it was not possible under Netherlands law to modify the candidate lists, so Fortuyn became a posthumous candidate. Lijst Pim Fortuyn went on to record an unprecedented debut in the lower house of parliament, winning 26 seats (17% of the total 150 seats).

three Bazin principles, where he suggested that cinema came from literature, the theater and painting. I would suggest actually that very little of cinema comes from painting..
..images which are constantly slaved to texts. I challenge you to acknowledge the notion that when you watch ninety-nine percent of cinema you can see the cinema maker following the text. The text is the prime organizer of ideas and of the narrative structure, as well as the prime organizer of the way the characters are envisaged

cinema is in deep trouble because it has been a slave to four separate tyrannies.
First of all, I believe as already indicated that the cinema is a slave to text. We should had an imagistic cinema, not a cinema which is essentially created by writers.
..second tyranny would the tyranny of the frame. This might seem strange to you, but all of us watch cinema primarily in a dark space sitting down, looking in one direction at a single frame. The human body doesn’t like sitting still, it’s obviously restless, and the notion of a single concentration on a single space is a most extraordinary situation.. A frame doesn’t exist in nature, it’s entirely artificial.. The television ratio of 1 to 1.3 has begun to create a great straitjacketing, a great closure of the ability in which the whole world is now seeing its moving picture imagery.. My desire is to break away from the conventional relationship of a seated audience in the dark focusing on one single screen throwing shadows of a hallucinogenic nature.
third tyranny would be the tyranny of the actor. Now we all know that the actor and actress are the best possible publicity stunts cinema could ever ever imagine. The actor or actress offscreen creates an environment which affects how you look at them on the screen. The whole media of the world in all its gossip facilities is very highly geared in order to create this particular relationship, but to repeat a phrase I’ve used at least fifty times in this room in the past three days, the cinema does not exist as a playground for Sharon Stone..
We have to get rid of the camera. The camera has made us arrive at cinema almost at level six on the Richter scale. We’ve already created pictures of the world which we know are grossly inadequate. The world out there is always going to be more exciting, more fascinating, more adventurous, more extraordinary than what can be presented through a camera.. cinema of the last hundred years has been very much associated with the production of a photographer, that whole situation has been changed around so that the king in terms of cinema manufacture will now be the editor. The editor, thanks to new technology, can do anything with anything.

Cremaster is a medical name for the muscles that raise and lower the testicles,
depending on the temperature.

We have undescended testicles (semennik), which, in the course of fetal (plod) growth,
eventually drop, but not before the fetus swims in a presumably blissful sea
of gender ambivalence.

We have Celtic legends and chorines and tests of physical strength (mostly for Mr. Barney
himself, as his own star)

and Harry Houdini and Gary Gilmore and Mormon and Masonic signs and rituals.

letting the imagery captivate you on its own, preverbal terms

4
the tap-dancing man-beast and androgynous “Faeries” and motorcycle racers with what
Ms. Spector calls “gelatinous gonadal forms” oozing from their pockets in “4”
—
In “Cremaster 4,” the earlier of the two, the artist plays a redheaded satyr
in a white suit who is slavishly attended by three androgynous “faeries” as he
tap-dances around a hole at the end of a pier, eventually slipping through it
into the water. From under the sea, he makes his way back to the land through
a white viscous tunnel made of a mysterious substance that suggests paste,
sperm and blubbery animal innards.
–
The scenes of his descent and re-emergence are intercut with a contest on the
Isle of Man between two racing-car teams speeding in opposite directions around
the island. When one of the cars stops for a tire change, the faeries futilely
attempt to replace an ordinary tire with one equipped with testicles. The final
image is an enigmatic logo viewed through a pair of spread legs while bagpipes
play on the soundtrack.
—
“Cremaster 4” suggests sperm frantically competing to fertilize a female egg,

1
sleek (ulizana) elegance of the dirigible stewardesses in “1”
—
On each of two nearly identical Goodyear blimps, four female flight attendants
monitor a table whose centerpiece is a bunch of grapes (green on one
aircraft, red on the other) that surround a vaguely phallic sculpture.
Underneath each table a weirdly angelic woman surreptitiously pulls the grapes
through a hole in the table and arranges them into pretty formations.
–
Meanwhile, on the ground below, an elaborate ceremony unfolds across a football
field covered with bright blue Astroturf. As a bland beauty-pageant musical
theme is repeated over and over, a corps of smiling air hostesses attired in
double hoop skirts (designed by Isaac Mizrahi) and holding blue balloons repeat
the same formations arranged by the woman under the tables, in choreography
worthy of an Esther Williams extravaganza. At the end of the film, the woman
under the table magically appears on the field and skips across the Astroturf,
pulling the two blimps on ropes behind her.
—
the egg and its welcoming committee: the yang and yin of the biological equation

5
the Budapest Opera House and dappled Asian water sprites and the amazing image of
Mr. Barney’s descended testicles attached to ribbons borne by fluttering doves, from “5.”

2
the dazzling desert and ice landscapes and bizarre Gary Gilmore enactments (although
as an actor Norman Mailer is no Richard Serra) in “2”

3
the Houdini zombie and demolition derby, the racetrack of rotting horses,
the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim itself, the dueling Celtic giants and
the extraordinary Aimee Mullins as the Cheetah Woman, all in “3”;
Richard Serra, playing Hirma Biff or the evil Architect in “3” as an Oedipal father figure

2005 TOP 10
1. Damien Hirst, artist, Uk
2. Larry Gagosian, dealer/ gallerist US
3. Francois Pinault, owner of Christie?s /collector, France
4. Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate director, Uk
5. Glenn D Lowry MoMA director, US
6. Eli Broad, collector/philanthropist, US-LA
7. Sam Keller, Art Basel director, Switzerland
8. Iwan Wirth, dealer/gallerist, Hayser and Wirth, Switzerland
9. Bruce Nauman, artist US
10. David Zwirner, dealer/gallerist, US

damien hirst
artist, born 65 in Bristol, 2 men I ge, father car salesman, school in Leeds, works for 2yrs at building sites, 89 art degree at Goldsmiths College London, worked in mortuary during studies, 88 curates student exhib Freeze in E London attended by Saatchi, Rosenthal and Serota, 92 shark at yBa exhib, 92 Saatchi offers him to fund whatever artwork he wants to make, regular Soho’s Groucho Club visitor, early 90s – 02 cocaine and alcohol addict, banned from Groucho, marries Californian Maia Norman (now 2 kids), 95 Turner Prize, 98 opens restaurant Pharmacy in Notting Hill, 98 records a World Cup tribute pop single Vandaloo with Fat Les (w/ actor Keith Allen and Blur bassist Alex James) and reaches #2 in charts, 98 publish autobiography "I Want To Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now", 00 100.000 people visits his show at Gagosian in 12 weeks and all the works are sold, since 00 spends most time at remote farmhouse in north Devon, 03 good friend Joe Strummer (ex bass of The Clash) dies, founds Strummerville charity to help young musicians, 03 after retrospective at Saatchi’s: "I’m not Charles Saatchi’s barrel-organ monkey … He only recognises art with his wallet … he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it.", intr in Christianity, 03 Pharmacy closes down, 04 in fire at Saatchi’s 17 Hirst’s artworks are destroyed, 04 new agent: Gagosian, 04 solds shark for $12mil to Steve Cohen who then donates it to MoMA (Serota tried to acquire it to Tate and also gov was asked to fund)
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/H/hirst/

larry gagosian
art dealer and gallerist, aka GoGo, born in LA, opened largest private gallery in London 04, Gagosian Gallery *96 has 5 branches (2x Manhattan, 1x Beverly Hills, 2x London), ArtReview’s top art businessman since 04, in 03 US gov took lawsuit against him for taxes
http://www.gagosian.com/

francois pinault
born 37
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Pinault

nicholas serota
dir of Tate, curator, born 46, 7 cauac I ta, son of labour edu minister, studied economics, then history of art, 73 marries ballet dancer Angela Beveridge, 88- Tate Gallery director, 97 marries head of Tate’s info dept Teresa Gleadowe (affair since late 80s)
http://www.answers.com/topic/nicholas-serota

glenn d lowry
dir of MoMA in NYC, born 54 in NYC

eli broad
born 33, 8 ix II ge

sam keller
dir of Art Basel

(left)
iwan wirth

bruce nauman
born 41, 4 caban I sa

david zwirner