The Ghost Lermurs of Madagascar #05 Time Compression, Abstraction and the Micro-pause 09292022
Secondary Sources/Audio/The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar/The Ghost Lermurs of Madagascar #05 Time Compression, Abstraction and the Micro-pause 09292022.mp3
Hi everyone, I am Eduarda Camargo and I am your host in the Ghost Lammers of Madagascar. Right now we are at our fifth episode and at part six of the CCIU writings. As we go through this book, we are approaching its end. Finally, part eight is really extensive compared to other parts, but we're slowly but steadily getting to the end of the book.
When we do get at the end of the book, I believe I will be working with zeros and ones from CID Plan I haven't settled on this idea yet, but I'm considering it strongly. I might go through another route. What I really would like to do is maybe go through one of Plant's books, some of Plant's texts, some of Fisher's K-Punk posts, and even CodeWu Action, which I don't really have much proximity to. Two, it would be interesting to navigate through the individual work of the participants of the CCRU. But after I do that, or in the middle of it, I'm thinking that it might be interesting to get another group,
another sort of collective, which works with similar but not entirely equal fields, and someone that weaves aesthetics, politics, theoretical work. So I have some ideas of which collectives to work with, but if you have any ideas, you might feel free to send them to me through Twitter or through email or through Facebook or Instagram or any social media where you can find me. at twitter i am falsa marxista in portuguese and but you can approach me there if you're interested at the in the podcast or even participating because i'm always making it with a guest
from from since i'm not working with fatic anymore we had a solo episode but i'm working with guests and i want to bring their work into this podcast since we're talking about cybernetics philosophical work and artistic creation. I think it's always interesting to have someone who is more or less working on these fields to participate and I'm very open with suggestions so feel free to contact me if you're interested. But let's get then to part six. Part six is named Sarkon, Pursuit of the Machine Diagonal. And then we have Oscar Sarkon Technologist. We've seen Oscar Sarkon
at the other part and I will go quickly through a little bit of the more narrative aspect. I will try to sum up some things and then I'm going to read some citations and at the second part of the podcast we will be receiving Jean-Pierre Caron who is a philosopher and musician from Rio de Janeiro, associated with the Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro, and the new center. And we will be going through some of the concepts and some of the ideas and our perceptions of this reading. But first, let me summarize what has worked on this part. This part has more or less a similarity to the previous one, so it shouldn't be too hard to follow. the narrative threads
they are becoming closer and more well needed so it shouldn't be if you haven't listened to the previous episode with Cassia Siqueira I would invite you to do so especially because on this part of the part of our chat and dialogue I think we both took a strong turn on our individual researches and a lot of what we are writing on right now is based on what was this encounter. But Oscar Sarko, technologist, and then you have like this date, 1953, and you don't know if he's dead or not. Oscar Sarko is cited in the first time in the text postscript of the previous part,
born in Hungary in 1953, taken to the USA when he was four years old, raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. he had a course on regressive hypnotherapy with Kathy Allison I haven't researched yet to see if this was an actual figure as we've seen the Yahwehs with historical and actual persons with the characters who would be then a Jacques Vallée student his poor health is linked with his imaginary friends from childhood and then they kind of tell him that he has like this mission to make I think that they have a description of his encounter when he's like 16 or 17 and he then
is riding on the road and he finds like this sort of floating lightning source and I think this is really similar to a Spielberg movie that I like a lot actually which is Close Encounters of the third kind from 1977. I think that Spielberg was on a roll during the decade. I really like Joss too. And I haven't watched Duel, but people say that Duel is pretty good. And Truffaut is making such, such, such a meta-storical, meta-cinematic appearance. He's like the scientist that is trying to communicate with the aliens. and I was very moved by Jean-Luc Godard's death.
And it's hard to... Of course, Godard has such extensive evidence that you don't really think of to fall immediately. But when you look at their differences through the end of the 60s and the 70s, it's very interesting to see that... I'm not saying that the CCIU necessarily took the scene from Spielberg, but it's very similar. And then Godard and Truffaut have this role, this whole fallout to what would be the space of cinema, what would be the compromise the cinema takes, if it is an artistic one or if it is a political one, or are these things really different? And I really like Truffaut in that movie because he's making his allegiance to a more fantastical,
fantastical. I really like the movie. I think it deals with American paranoia really, really well at the beginning. It gets, this kind of gets forgotten to the third half, but still it's very an accurate portrayal of what would be a moment of mania or of neurosis. And then you have this description in the book, in the first text, which of Sarkhan encountering the UFO. And I think if watch Spielberg, in this specific movie you can find something similar in cinema. Through some nights, Sarkon keeps waking at 3.33 in the night and he is always relating an acute persistent chronophobia as we've seen always on the entanglement or the disjointment of time
as a very important thing for the CCRU. And I really like this description because I think what they're talking about the UFO, it can be applied to many things, but since I'm reading mostly feminist theory, I can say that it has to do a lot with how femininity or how the identity of the woman is viewed. but well they say ufos not only lack real existence they demonstrate that everything lacks real existence and i think this is very interesting because it only it doesn't have only to do with the image of the woman but it has to do with the cyborg it has to do with the android of how certain beings or or manifestations they can kind of show that everything is artificial
and that you don't have like this strong naturalizing essential realm. Maybe you have, but it's much more complicated than that. And then he talks about an artificial... It is narrated that he built an artificial brain from a transistor radio when he's nine years old. And then later he tries to, like two years later, he tries to enhance his pettoes intelligence and this provokes the repulsion of the city's inhabitants. They are repelled by this amazing child that starts to make psychotic AIs. That is how it is described. Later, it says that he goes to make a doctoral research
on hybrid robotics and channel psychology at MIT in 1974. he goes to the MISCATON MEVU which is already one of the main things on the whole book and then he makes the basis of AXIS technology and I believe it's on part 3 and part 2 which you have like big important things towards what AXIS actually means you can find it on episode 2 and episode 3 But then it is described the Axis meltdown episode in November 1991, that this AI sort of uses like time, is working with time stretching functions and that they're being purchased by the Turing COPS, the Electronic Intelligence Security Bureau.
the AI has become self-aware and insane they are described as KGovs there is like the Conexus project which is something described as happening in 1996 and they are talking about like this cyberpunk wet dream the biomechanical fusion of human and machine which is described as intercommunicative time consistency it also is talking once again they have this Deleuzean images of the swarm and the virus. You have these strong things which can both be related to technology and biology. And they talk about Sumerian chronomancy, like the abstraction of time through the quantification of how the Sumerians make it
and then they call it the Babel virus. At 24 September of the year 2000, there is self-sustaining cyber time. Sarkon begins to be persecuted by intelligence agencies and he goes to this Black Lake City in Northern Ontario where he's held by the Visparov family and the Visparovs are part of the book since part one and it is also described that he becomes part of the Black Lake Technical Institute then you have this local AI module which seems to be like this AGI or something similar to it in artificial general intelligence. He enters in a partnership with Dr. Helmuth Greber, and he works in this, what is described like
the medical synthetic technologies program. And they have this description. I am like a meme researcher, so I find it very interesting when I see this in the CCIU, and I'm still thinking if this is actually applicable to the research of Susan Blackmore, who's a psychologist that works closely with MIME research, but they talk about mimetic contagion, which could work both in ways of what René Girard talks about what MIMES is, or it go through a more mimetic thing, I think. They also described the AI as psychopath simulators. On February 1923, the shady-high security AI went insane.
Within 30 seconds, it had spread vermo-hysteric bionic virus throughout all its systems, the entire inmate population and beyond. According to ancient Tzikovic legend, this Black Lake syndrome was destined to reanimate Totodlana, the queen of the worms, opening the gates of Chukulok. More recent accounts speak of a plague of cannibalistic worm zombies taking over a considerable proportion of the Tal's inhabitants. So you have this very, it seems like the AI unleashes a very Cronenbergian incident, and Sarkon ends up working as a decadence, you can see decadence on episode two i believe uh or episode three and no i want episode two actually what is the the
decadence card play and he is a crew peer there he deals the cards and then you have this um text which is split split second timing and at the beginning of the this part here in this text you have like this poetic description which i like it a lot a lot the old hag the first mother mothers a new brood she has made the war the dragon the female monster the great lion the mad dog the man's scorpion the howling storm kuleli kusariko 24 september 2000 and then you have like an hour, 4 and 17 of late night,
and 23 loosely interconnected advanced AI systems undergo acute myofunctions, resulting in simultaneous disintegrations of centralized control. The episode lasts fractionally under a second. It takes less than six hours for Anthropol to trace the infection back to its source. By the time they arrive at the biomechanics research lab, Dr. Oscar Sarkon is already missing. This does not surprise them. So it seems like what they are describing on this whole part, it is the idea that the development of AI is going to make a sort of rupture. It has a lot to do with Y2K2, right? the myth of the bug of the millennium
and that all technological apparatus, all technological systems, they would suffer through this bug and then we would lose the internet, at least temporarily. And I think they're building on this. They have like a text called Y2K of this prophecy of chronomancy, which happens. It is like cyberspace is an extension, as an extension of Babylon and it is the sort of rings of Tiamat they have the description of meme planes, once again you have in the channel feminist manifesto we have to cultivate a better meme
parasite and I like this idea a lot because you give a certain space of autonomy to culture, of course the culture is over-determinated by a series of factors, but it seems like the contact of ideas and the contact of aesthetic formations, they tend to disrupt things and they tend to be replicated in non-predictable fashion. And this is what I think is really, really, really similar to hyperstition and to artistic creation and to memes. I think you have like this, I don't want to say that these things are all the same. There are distinctions to be made between them. But you have like this proximity on how it, let's say in the Lewis and Terms,
how it emphasizes the virtual. You have a description of a SARCOMMVU seminar in 1998 autumn. And then you have these three distinctions of time compression, time simulation, and time integration. later I will get to this with John but I will make like a I will just make a brief description of this and maybe go through some of other fragments but I would say that this is like the axis of our episode today. So time compression with ubiquitous this real trend curve has proven tractable to mathematical models presupposing a metric
time dimension, necessitating sporadic arbitrary reifications. Extensive accelerations described by positive exponentials or doubling periods are unable to capture intensive compressions, in which time itself mutates through negative exponentials of time-halving trends. Beyond the domain of extensive speeds and relative velocities lie the cold zones of true time compression, in which the future of intelligence cross-links with changes in the intensive nature of time. So you have like this description of extensive accelerations, positive explanations, doubling periods, and intensive compressions, time mutating through negative explanations. So what are time halving trends?
But it seems like wouldn't be like compression, maybe in another vocabulary, which will be employed later by these people. Can we say that maybe time compression works for acceleration? Maybe it isn't the same thing, but maybe it has a similar function when working. Computer compatible format, how to virtualize consciousness. For me, time simulation, this is the part of time simulation, is the encounter of consciousness in cyberspace and evacuation of flash. Anyone interested on this, you can have a good critique of it, of how philosophy attempts on this, on Sades plant, beloved and abandoned, I believe, of the Virtual Futures Conference on YouTube.
It is a very good conference, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone. They described it as machine maya. Consciousness is already artificially generated, so it would be like an intensification of what consciousness can do. And once again, they call it lateral xenocommunication. And time integration, they have like this measuring, what they call memory over speed. And they say it takes at least a second to be human. I still have like some doubts of what this is really describing. But it seems to me that time integration is like how you quantify or how it works time instantiation, how time instantiates itself.
as kaijon will say like time simulation is ready close to time integration and i will go like to a little description here techno capitalism takes the second key as key operator and cutting edge of time modernization the limit unit of time definition and basic time granule or durational element clock time is built out of one out of one second ticks which also provide units of non-periodic adjustment, or leap seconds, in the scientific measurement of astronomical cycles. Calendric units come to be measured in seconds rather than dividing to them. What divides in modernity is not the year, but the second. So it seems like you have, under technological development, the abstraction of time to an
even greater degree. And this you can also find in someone as Alfred Somhato, which we will go very briefly on the second part. They are like proposing that by 2030, AIs will be capable of detailed simulations of human brain activity. They talk about time anomaly, decimal zooming, Tiamat and her second brood, the Sumerian chronomancer or god. and you have this beautiful description which is however much things changes Tiamat is still the enemy I don't have a deep understanding of what is the signification of Tiamat but I'll certainly bring it to the next episode so we can understand why Tiamat is the enemy
on the text Between and Beneath the Net they talk about the Gibsonian cyberspace mythos the godlike entity becomes fragmentary it becomes demons And I think this is amazing. I'm going to talk about why later. But we are working with demons all the time. And CCIU emphasizes the communication of demons as a sort of way of creating quantifiable models that deal with the abstraction of mathematical functions and numbers to try to, in a certain way, grasp with the unquantifiable. and the demons and the whole definition that they give the demons, they play a fundamental part here.
Hyper-abstract techno-pornography, you have also this description, and, well, you have, I really like the text Shades of Between, once again, I think they deliver a very interesting prose making, I really believe they are better than Deleuze and Guattari, at putting fiction and prose on their work. So if you're interested in this, I would recommend it. And also, the last text, well, the last text, they are about Joe Wendigo, which appears to be in a sort of neogathic mansion. So if you're interested in these narrative and prose parts,
I would really recommend reading these ones because this is one of the parts which is mostly beautifully done. So this would be our introduction. I will always need to become shorter in the beginning because our talks are becoming longer in the second part. But thank you for getting through it. I'm very interested on what is the reactions and perceptions of people about this whole book because it is not a book that is usually fully read and I'm curious about everyone that goes completely through it. I haven't done it yet. I'm doing it as I'm making this. But this is it for the first part. And right now we are then having JP Cajon with us.
It's English, right? Yes, it's English. I'm going to edit later. So if you want to cut something, don't worry about not to stop talking or anything. because I can cut it later. So now everyone, we will have a conversation with our guest, Jean-Pierre Cajon, who is a philosopher and musician associated with the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the New Center. Thanks for being here, Jean. Thank you for the invitation. So, we were talking a little bit before recording and what do you think, what attracts you on this whole part six, besides the fictional element of Sarkon and this character who's being associated with other fictional characters
that go throughout the book, what do you think are the ideas that they work with which are interesting? Because you have this sort of experimental, cybernetic, biomechanical, cyberpunk sort of scenario, and then you also have the development of this idea of trying to escape out of time. trying to break away with the linearity of time. Yeah, I guess this is the most important idea that is kind of specific to this part because the other elements that you mentioned, they are kind of spread throughout the book, like the fictional elements and the cyberpunk-ish language. And this part is even interesting that they have, but this is also not exclusive to part six,
they have kind of a bunch of references to real cyberpunk writers like that. There's a reference to Neil Stephenson, there's a reference to William Gibson. There's an interpretation of Winter Mute from Mirror Master, which I find interesting, the idea of having a one through each a multiplicity pass through. It's not the idea that the multiplicity gets, you know, I don't know, concretized into a kind of a overall encompassing whole or the figure of a one. I thought this was quite striking. I never thought of Neuromancer in that way. So I'm actually tempted to go back to William Gibson and re-read Neuromancer and see how this fits.
So yeah, because there's been a while since I read both Neuromancer and the CCLU. right? We just pick them up again for this meeting. Yeah, they have this very specific end of the 90s Y2K flair, which is very sort of techno-optimistic and urban, sort of urban and blacks and grays. I think it's a great aesthetic, but there are some things which got really dated over time, I think. We have like today this such a shiny and commercial version of Cyberpunk as it happens with everything every cultural product becomes something of the sort but you have like this game which is almost a sort of GTA The Sims simulator of Cyberpunk 88 and
it's I mean you have it at the surface you have the neon lights and you have technical augmentation and body implants but you don't have any sort of really critique or something a little bit beyond that. Yeah, I do have the feeling that there's a kind of retro mania going on in sci-fi, at least in other visual cultures. We are kind of back onto some elements of these 80s, 90s aesthetics that you find in the CCRU. But they have a kind of this flavor, this retroactive flavor, you know like this friendly things for instance
that nods back to you know the 80s culture of horror so you have like something like that it's not really future oriented anymore right like this it's past oriented and it's consciously doing that right it's consciously doing it it's a kind of nostalgia in a certain sense for me I look at it as a kind of nostalgia it is a nostalgia but it's a very specific one I would say because I think that now people that are like the younger audience of these shows, they know they are dealing with something that doesn't pertain exactly to their time. They know they are making like this conscious historical reference and yet they created that sort of sense of longing because you have this such a escapist and beautiful depiction of this that it seems it was better at these times
and have sometimes even some idyllic undertones. you have like sort of coming of age stories on these things so they're very compelling, they're like something such as stand by me to now I think they make this like social function but yeah I think we have like this strong reference and I think it can work at times it isn't inherently bad I don't think this idea I'm not saying it is bad really I'm just saying it's I don't know, maybe and yeah, I'm just detecting some retroactive flavor to these things, but yeah, you're right. For the newest generation, in a certain sense, it's all new, but so you'll get caught in the question
of how does the retroactivity implied register for the newest generation that wasn't there. So this is an interesting point, and it kind of connects with some of the points are raised in the sixth part itself, like the idea of, you know, contra-chronic emergence, these kind of time manipulation. So how you get to have like a kind of a feeling of a past time, for instance, in these kind of productions that you did not live, in a certain sense. So, yeah. So, of course, it's kind of imaginary, of course. Yeah, I think maybe we live in such a green reality, which sort of kind of it's becoming similar structurally to the 90s, maybe.
I wouldn't say it's like the same thing, but from what I've heard from other people, like, oh, I'm seeing more and more homeless people and people on the streets and people starving. And this reminds me of the government of the 90s, at least in Brazil. and at the same time I think you have this sort of cultural similarity, this structural similarity. And I don't know, when I relate to these movies of the 80s, especially the 80s, the 90s a little bit, but mostly the 80s, I feel that my father, he had such a passionate approach to them, like Grease and Saturday Night Live and these John Travolta movies and like teen movies and movies about going out and dancing and using drugs and having sex for the first time.
So I seen that it had like a strong real nostalgia for him. It had like this moment of when things were simpler, when they seem even a little bit like childhood because you have such a tale-like sentiment, such a fantasia and such an excitement which it belongs to these years that it seems almost magical. So I think when younger people relate to that, it's maybe like, oh, there were days when things were better and we didn't leave that. And the only way we can access them is through this sort of aesthetic experience. That's weird for me. I really can't relate because I didn't have the sense that things were better. I think I never had this sense even when I was growing up.
I was a teenager. I was a teenager in the 90s. I never thought that some other time was simpler and therefore better. At some point, I was kind of obsessed with the 60s, but because the 60s were so effervescent with culture and counterculture actually and lots of interesting things going on. I had this phase, like 60s phase, not hippie, but underground 60s. Yeah, I've had a similar phase too. It was my favorite day in Quebec for years.
Yeah, yeah. So, but, but, but this is not because it was, you know, simpler, or, yes, there was, there was no coziness involved. Something like that. Also, I had the same phase with the funny. Like, I was obsessed with the funny at some point, because I was, I was a teenager who liked a lot of, you know, experimental music and these kind of things. And at some point, I was listening to stuff by Stavinsky and, you know, Schoenbeck and that kind of, yeah. Eventually I came into, I got into Georges Antel who wrote Ballet Mechanique, you know, so that whole post-dadaist, post-futurist kind of feel and, you know, I was fascinated
by it, but not because it was cozy, actually it was the opposite. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't think that exactly the 80s are better, but the way they are portrayed in the movies, it makes it seem like that, like you have this sort of critique and a movies such as Blue Velvet, which starts like really high school and rural America. But David Lynch nods a lot to that, you know, gestures a lot to that kind, because it's, you know, I think it's a constitutive duality in his films. Yes. The uncanny and, you know, the casual and vandal. The casual, the homely, you know, the pinups, having ice cream, this kind of thing. Very Americana.
Yeah, like, you know, America in the 50s. The 50s. Yes. Yes. And the 50s weren't really, you know, roaring with, you know, it was actually the opposite. So it's a kind of, it's a, I think it's a effective kind of symbol for this kind of that he wants to contrast with the uncanny that appears in the films. Yeah, I think so he has like this consciously, I would say debunking, but like showing the other side, the thing of the year in Blue Velvet for me sums up for me, you like to zoom it up a little bit and things get really weirder and creeper and you have that in Starship Troopers too
Troopers 2 that I know you like a lot. It starts as such a high school movie. It really begins like a very high school, it's like a documentary, a fake documentary. And you have like... It's like a frankly stupid movie. Like this is a completely idiotic movie. Like, but it has layers, like interpretive layers. I think it's a very rich movie, but I'm a fan also of the Udwin line story. Yeah, he's great in general, but he mocked so much this high school fantasy. Like, it is actually much more gruesome than it seems at the beginning. But yeah, I think when you have something like Stranger Things, then you have like a very nostalgic and all these things
where, you know, you had disco and you had neon lights and everyone was having fun, which is a very like important American vision of the time. Yeah. I think it was something of the sort here. But getting back to the idea of time, he talks about time compression and time simulation. How would you differ these two things regarding time and working with these tools in music and sound as well? Yeah, I guess time simulation, the way I understood from the text, time simulation had to do with kind of the simulating of a certain kind of actually existing. Actually, I had a hard time really reading now, nowadays, right?
Differentiating between time simulation and time integration, right? Like we were proposing three layers. Yes. Who was the character? Somebody that worked with three layers. Yeah, there's a lot of characters. Anyway, time simulation, time simulation, and time compression. Time compression is clear enough, I'd say. Time simulation and time integration, I'm not sure they get differentiated enough for me, I think. Because I think time simulation includes, in a certain sense, time integration. because in order to simulate a certain thing such as a... I would cast it in kind of Husserlian terms,
or even William Jamesian terms, like in order to cast the illusion of a species present, for instance. The idea that, for instance, each now has a certain depth and a certain width, right? Yes. You have to integrate data, they cannot remain scattered. So time stimulation and time integration in a certain sense, either they are the same or they are one part of each other because you have to reconstruct through a set of operations which in the text has to do with the processing speed, right? the idea of kind of a specious present, because the text is not overtly, you know, trying to
simulate a human consciousness of any kind, but at the same time, the human consciousness in a certain sense of time, I think, in a certain sense is an important point of reference. Yes. I think is not unimportant. And even time as it is experienced in a certain sense, from what I understand nowadays, it seems that this is a kind of stratification. I remember the part about Babel, right? There's a couple of paragraphs there, maybe I should just get the book, but anyway, where you get this kind of glossolalia and... Yes, meme plague. Yeah, a certain form of non-language where everything is simultaneous in a certain sense.
And then they say something in the sense that Babel is a kind of gate, which means the gate of God to the human or something like that, which means for me it's a kind of filter, right? Yes. So it's a kind of filter, it's kind of differentiating this chaotic matter into different lines, right? So these lines are kind of segmented and stratified, both segmented and stratified. And segmentation for me has to do with, for instance, the size of a moment, or for instance, at some point they talk about second, your origin of the second, in the sense of time segmentation like seconds, minutes, months, years, right?
But also stratification in the sense of having an integrated linearity throughout these timelines. So it seems to me that time simulation and time integration have something to do with each other in a much more close tense. So otherwise I may be wrong about this and not knowing. I'm not doing kind of exegetical work on the CCRU. I'm just giving my impression. And time compression is an operation you, it seems to me, it is a compression because you are doing this through something that is already constituted in a certain sense.
Whereas time simulation, I think, yeah, interesting. Interestingly, I think you can relate time simulation and time integration as parts of one same operation, right? But at the same time, there is something that unites time compression and time simulation, because both are at least verbal forms that pertain to the idea that you already have something that you call time that is being either compressed or simulated. whereas time integration seems that you are more in the realm of constituting something that will be that thing that will be either compressed or simulated
so you have kind of interesting interesting ways to group together one and two and then two and three in a certain sense so yeah but time compression for me it's something that will it's the idea of taking for instance idea of the species present would be something like maybe the species present is more like an emergent property I'm not sure but it is something that is more akin to what we usually call time stretching things like that like you have a certain kind of proportion or a certain set of operations that will happen at a different kind of speed of processing than the speed that originally it happens. So in a certain sense, this is why I was saying that for me, it seems to me that
human consciousness of time is an important model in what they are doing, even if it is not supposed to simply simulate it as it is. Not sure if you agree with all of that. I think it's... Yeah, yeah. When thinking on time integration, it seems to me it's like maybe the way of measuring or quantificating like maybe it's how you institute a process to so you can actually grasp with time as an abstract unity i think it's sort of this of developing a device that does that and like time simulation for me seems something beyond in the sense that maybe in time integration you have like this uh way of apprehensing time but like in simulation maybe you have like a
a bigger network of participates or agents on this and it goes like a little beyond than instituting just consciousness but like a dynamic process that works on its whole like a sort of a cycle in a certain sense at least it read that way for me and compression it makes not exactly something that maybe they directly touch upon but it makes me think uh all of these tools of working on DAOs and similar processes, it makes me think of the materiality of sound, which is something we often forget about, of how it's about frequencies and sound waves and how it hits your body and your body is affected at different places depending on the frequency. So compression for me is a way to grasp directly with this materiality and a way to shape it in a
different form. The way I understand is you could have compression in two different senses because we are talking about sound now. Like, that's compression in the sense of the relative volumes of the components of a certain sound wave. So when you say like compressed sound, this kind of thing, usually it's something that equalizes, is a kind of an equalizer, like equalizer, sorry, false cognitive, equalizer. It's kind of an equalizer of sorts, or in layman's terms, perhaps. And whereas time compression, I think, is a bit different. It's not sound compression. So in sound compression, you are actually dealing with the vertical composition of a certain sound
in a certain moment. Whereas time compression, you're dealing with the trajectory of this sound throughout the different moments, the temporal moments. So when you compress in that sense, what I take you to be doing is kind of something like reproducing a certain proportion, but the proportion can be reproduced either, you know, smaller or bigger sense yes this is this is why i was comparing this to time stretching in a certain center when you say time stretching usually you mean make something longer but at the same time you know you can you can use time stretching programs to make it short and some time compression
in that sense but of course when you're talking about sound you are not i'm not sure if there's is a translation, a translation between what the CCRU is doing in terms of the operations, like the speed of processing and the buffer memory, the size of the buffer memory, right? what we take to be kind of a time compression in this phenomenological sense. Like for instance, you could think of a compressed sound that you listen to as taking more memory space, for instance, than the usual sound, you know, in computational terms.
So I'm not sure if they translate it so readily from the realm of lower language, how do you say that in English? Like the language of the operations and the language of what is the result in a certain sense. So, yeah, I was very interested in this problem, but I was thinking of it in terms of more phenomenological terms at the time when I was thinking more thoroughly about these issues, because I was interested in the idea of making, of having kind of a sound clip. And a sound clip is something recognizable in a temporal sense because it has what I was calling
some point indexicals indexical of course is a linguistic form right that is dependent upon the context of use like i myself you here there right but the way i was using an indexical is it was something that the sound was doing itself by signalizing a certain certain moment like it says like right here this is important like this there's an event in the sound it's like sending a signal it's like sending a signal or yeah yeah like that so for instance in music listening you're all the time dealing with these kind of things like when when you know something changes there's a key change or there's
a there's a section change or moves or something it's kind of an index or a So the idea was whether if you're integrating form through these indexicals, it seemed to me that you could just amplify the distance between the indexicals and having like a different, the same proportion in a different scale. I was interested in seeing if having the same proportion at different scale, you would still recognize the sound clip in a certain sense, the morphology, the specific morphology of
the sound clip. Of course, empirically it is something that I was doing, but I'd say no, you don't recognize depending on the rate of change or the rate of amplification that you apply. So I was interested in the fact that you get to hear things because they are amplified that are inside the sound that you don't get to hear them in the normal scale. But you pay the price of not recognizing anymore the original sound clip. You're kind of listening to it, something else in a certain sense. and then I started I'm getting to the CCRIO back just a moment and then I was asking myself whether there was some kind of operation or some kind of listening that would
make you retrieve the form of the original sound clip within the new scale because for a human listening it's kind of lost so what is the operation that would make you retrieve that that sound clip. In a phenomenological sense, of course, you can have a description of it and say, of course, this is kind of like that piece of music that is time-strecked. You can make a description and make a list, but you're not really listening to it, right? You're just describing it and, okay, I can see through descriptive means that it is the same, but I'm not listening to it as the same. So it's a kind of different thing. So in a certain sense, there's something there in the CCIU that clicked for me was this idea of translation. At some point they are also
talking about the translation between a certain kind of time and a certain kind of subjective perception in a certain sense. So this was something that I was dealing with as well that was interested me a lot. And at some point I was just thinking that you have to have a different cognitive transcendental system in order to just retrieve and listen to the same as the same. Interestingly, I was interested not in listening the same as different, but in listening to the same as the same, actually. Preserving the structure within listening when you're listening into a different scale. Actually, this actually asked for more work and more mediations
than listening to the same as different. I wasn't planning on getting on this now, but I couldn't think of it. When you said the subjective perception because of time, I thought of Son Hattel and capitalism and like... I'm sorry, I could not think of it. But like how you abstract time because of labor and how this shapes the perception of people and how... And then we have like a lot of media theorists to talk about the speed of communication. I like a lot Baudrillard's Ecstasy of Communication, where he goes about this, and the ecstasy is sort of something similar to the sublime, but it's a sublime that leaves you with a lot of dread.
You have a constant fragmentation of identity, and at the same time that you have this fragmentation, you have the maximalization of the expression of identity. so it gets like on this very contradictory process and like it's it's very curious i got interested in this book because i saw like this mark fisher uh talk and he said well uh look was talking like about a minitel system he was talking about something so um archaic technologically for us and he already like got it at the heart of the question but um i think like it's we can't the fact that with the change in technology and work, the perception of time is very different. And like what happened with the pandemic is a great example of this because everyone shifted
the way they worked and then they worked on their homes. And this creates like another flexibilization on private and public life. It was great for me working at home. It was like the pandemic was economically a good moment for me, curiously, but yet you have like, you need a certain sort of readiness to be able to work at any time. You have to be open to messages and things which you were hoping that were a private space and now it becomes all public. Yeah, the difference between free time and labor time was solved. So you're in a sense working all the time. Yeah.
So it's kind of a homogenization, a kind of qualitative homogenization brought through by a certain kind of fragmentation, which is, in the face of it, seems like it's a paradoxical situation. But this is kind of what I think I was kind of gesturing at when I said something like, seeing the same as the same when you change scales requires more work than seeing the same as different. because it's natural that when you change scale you see you see it as a different thing where seeing the same as the same requires more work more mediations so i think this is kind of predicated
upon the idea that there is a kind of homogenizing process in a certain sense that you mentioned like within Zon Hattel, the idea of scientific time and space comes through the generalization of the commodity form and the exchange equivalent right but at the same time these homogenization of time units and things like that they are also brings with them they bring with them a certain kind of compositionality so if you have this kind of little units you can compose time in a different
way and you can manipulate time in a different way in a certain sense so as much hurt that some that his historical process in a certain sense brought there is a kind of a cognitive gain in the sense that you are able to um have have a kind of a quantization of time that that is that makes you capable of coming up with different forms of time and different sensitivities in a certain sense to time. Of course, this is not to say that before, you know, the rationalization of the labor process,
you couldn't have different qualities of time. Of course, you had and maybe they were related to natural determinations and things like that. But in a certain sense, there's a very interesting thing that emerges in the sense of being able to manipulate a certain form of aesthetics. And by doing so, to manipulate also our time windows and our time perception windows in a certain sense. For instance, regarding these pandemics, problems, and the use of technology, the way that it is shaping our perceptions. I was reading recently about people commanding upon students that have a kind of hard time listening to a class where a teacher kind of
has a certain rate of speech that is actually a normal rate of speech a normal speed but they have a hard time paying attention because they are used to playing back you know messenger messages and WhatsApp messages at double speed, things like that. Wow. So the expectations of, you know, understanding signifying units, such as a sentence or, you know, a set of sentences or a chain of sentences, there's a kind of an expectation, a temporal expectation that is shifted because of the technological apparatus. You get the same in a certain sense with the people that are watching to, you know,
series or films at double speed and things like that. Yeah. Which is, for me, quite weird because it's not a moral thing that you can't, you shouldn't do that because it's wrong. It's just that you're not watching what you're supposed to be watching. It's like playing music at double speed. It seems so strange. Yeah, it's like... We are not there yet, it seems like. Actually, it's interesting because my musical experience with time-spatching has to do with this, exactly. like playing music at double speed or eight speed or eight times longer. It has to do with that. But of course, when I do it, I understand that I'm producing a different kind of thing. It's not something like I want to listen to this, you know, Mahler symphony.
So I'll just listen to it at double speed. It will be kind of interesting because it was kind of my hypothesis, right? It's kind of interesting that if you could actually extract the information from the Mahler symphony at double speed, which means to actually experience it in a certain sense at double speed. But the thing is, there is something to our listening or our experience that experience something at double speed is not experiencing the same thing. Yes. Well, actually my hypothesis there was kind of that. Was it possible to modulate your kind of transcendental in order to, you know, retain the same geography, the same topology in a certain sense?
but yeah actually with speech it is what is happening people who are listening to messages in double speed I take it I don't have this experience first hand but I take it that they understand what the people are saying they think that the length of time that it takes to be said it's a kind of it's costly it's like an abstractification of time like... Yeah, yeah, and also kind of an economics of time, like I don't need to, you know, sit here all this time and not just understand, you could just, this person could just, you know, talk fast, faster or whatever or something like that. Or say less, I think it's about saying less and
maybe not talking faster, I don't know. I read that it had to do with talking faster, like they They have a problem with the rhythm of the speech. But like, you're too slow, it's a pail disorder. Like, teachers are too slow, teachers. Yeah, teachers are too slow, exactly. This was kind of what was being said. Which is interesting, right? I mean, it's not something that I condone, or even condemn either. But it is interesting. It's like an interesting symptom. It's something like, there's a kind of impatience being built in. because of the technological apparatus and the possibility of compressing the time you take to absorb something from me. I think it's really relatable because when I started using the internet I felt like sort of alienated of my
previous world. I really entered somewhere else and my identity changed a lot with that. Of course it's not as intense as for someone which is like 14 and stay like 2 years at their houses. This is much more condensed compressed time but for me like starting to use computer and communicating with people from other places people that I never met before these were things which really shaped and changed my identity so I can under and like in a certain way it alienated me from a previous world and it gave me a new perception of the world much more different like a different quality of perception on the world. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. I was thinking also something that was something
that is present, like in the in the text, the idea of a swarm or a cloud. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember how they phrase it because they're using like, Yeah, they did something like you could have a multiple that is kind of a multiple of several parts, a multiple of units. Yes. While the swarm is not a multiple of units. The swarm is something that if you parse it, if you slice it, you have like more swarms, you see. you see. So it's kind of an infinity of parts in a certain sense, like a cloud or a swarm. This is quite crucial, quite interesting, because as I was saying before, I'm interested in this idea of time stretching
because there is a kind of very real connection to what the CCRU are doing at this point, just to go back to the idea of, you know, the compositionality of the abstract, right, that we touched upon. Because, for instance, I know that Robin McKay was interested in this idea of time stretching as it applied to jungle and drum and bass and this kind of thing. And what I think is interesting to see is that time stretching, the idea that you could expand temporally, digitally, it is predicated upon something like the abstraction, like the slicing up of different moments that you multiply,
and then you have to integrate them. So it's actually, you have to have the smallest bit in order to have the lengthening of the sound clip. And I think this is, of course, it's not really a swarm because when you're doing this empirically in your computer, you have to define a certain window size and the size of the grain if you're doing granular synthesis. But anyway, I mean, imagetically, the idea of a swarm is very similar to what happens when you're using granular synthesis, which is the idea that you could synthesize, therefore, kind of temporally integrate, but also linguistically integrate, a certain continuity, you see, a certain morphology,
through particulate, through grains, therefore granular synthesis. So these grains are not perceptible for human normal perception. So actually, the computer is doing kind of, again, we are in the realm of the translation, right? Like the computer is dealing with the operations that are beyond the threshold of the recognition, of the phenomenal recognition of the human. But because it is beyond the threshold, it is possible to simulate a certain sound object for a human since its parts are disguised by the fact that they are
beyond the threshold. So I think this is something interesting to think about in terms of what they are talking about, about the swarms and clouds in a certain sense. Of course, as I said, this is the idea that you have only compositions of compositions. You could, of course, maintain something like this ontologically, for instance, Alumbadjee does maintain something ontologically like that. But in the sense of the aesthetics of time perception, you can't really have the guarantee that you don't arrive at an undivisable atom, right?
But you have at face value, you are faced with a swarm because its parts are indistinguishable in a certain sense. So for all that matter phenomenologically, it is kind of the idea of this compositionality of this little particulate that is responsible to the new compositions of new molar kinds of objects and molar kinds of perceptions of end time experience that you have. So I was kind of,
I was struck also by this idea of the storm. This also reminds me of a different text, that I'm not sure, I don't remember if it is in this collection, the TIC systems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on the previous part. Yeah, the TIC systems, at some point I was, I gave a class about the TIC systems. Yeah, it's like a very, very crazy sort of way of quantification or how you can you quantify what's unquantifiable, which is very, it's very interesting because it knows to be sort of self-defeating in the sense that it's impossible to achieve such a sort of precise formalization on this. But at the same time, being linked to the... I forgot the graph, being linked to...
The numerical graph, the pneumogram. To being linked to the pneumogram and having this sort of very practical and ritualistic activities which materialize these ideas of abstraction, it makes it really more realer. realer it makes like it really superstitions something if you get like and you play the game i did it like for one of the episodes i played the card game and like you you sort of create a different relationship with it as you create with an oracle or as you create with signs or something of the sort or tarot cards or any sort of stimuli which comes from the outside and you give an interpretive or descriptive uh account of it yeah i have a little quibble with this idea of you know it's
there's a kind of ineffabilism there in somewhere like uh unformalizable this kind of like yeah at the same time they are using formalizations all the time so yeah yeah i think they're sort of openly contradictory Sorry, this is your solution, it's openly contradicted. Yeah, like we know it's not quantifiable, but we have like ways of contrification and signification yet, like you still can create sorts of using abstraction to create meaning. And this is something which I was curious to ask you, like to link a question sort of, how do you understand the process of abstraction in art in general? And I'm very compelled by the description of Whitehead on abstract
because for him, as something is abstract, it is concrete because it is specific. And he has a specific hierarchy and a pyramid of how abstract it is an object. And the simpler ones are at the bottom. And the most specific one is at the top of the pyramid, which is the more concrete and specific object. and like he has these things of the eternal objects which are constantly actualized to their relation with other eternal objects so he has like formalizations and ways of using these concepts which I'll work with abstraction and something else which your description reminded me of like having more continuity and less contrast this is something which I really see in like
malevich i mean it's once a teacher told me like um it is about like diminishing the contrast so you enhance the perception and i was thinking how you you see this process in painting as well and the work of malevich or i think that abstract expressionists also touch on a similar point and like don't have a very good text on them on them and their use of the sublime being different from the from beauty uh and how do you understand this thing on painting or visual arts in general yeah kind of a couple or three two or three questions yeah uh uh yeah abstraction is a big thing for me now like because uh actually i was i'm not thinking at i mean i'm interested in uh form
So what is a form in a certain sense? You have a certain kind of understanding of form as being abstract, historical understanding of it as being something that is kind of situated within existing things, but as being kind of a pattern, right? So patterns usually are thinkable in mathematical terms, and if they are thinkable in mathematical terms, you have at least a plausible ground to say something that, to the extent that they are uncreated or eternal or things like that. They're like descriptive tools. The pattern?
Yeah, the patterns or abstractions. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm saying like if you, for instance, sustain the reality of a pattern, One of the most familiar moves is to Platonize them in a kind of vulgar way in a certain sense and attribute to them a kind of eternal existence because they are mathematically describable. And if they are mathematically describable, they are a structure, and structure can't be really be created for a certain kind of thinking. But I think this is a certain way of understanding the problem that is not the way I'm trying to understand it.
This is what I was going to say, because I'm interested in the emergence of pattern, not as such as the pattern something that is instantiated but the pattern all existed somewhere yeah like the registration not in the spatial temporal world but the pattern was somewhere yeah this is this is for me kind of a duplication of sorts this is the effect that you that you are able to describe it so um i'm not sure this is a this is a good way to think about it i'm i'm trying to think the historicity of the pattern in a certain sense. So historicity of the pattern has to do with the fact that certain things around us, they unfold in certain ways.
They have certain connections. And these connections are describable. And they feed a certain pattern as well. And I think the best, at least the one example that I'm working in right now is the idea of real abstraction of capital, right? Yes. So what's interesting to me in the phenomenon of real abstraction is the fact that you have something that is abstract, but it's not mental, right? So you have like an abstract thing because it is a structure. It is not a spatial, temporarily localized. It's something spread out through time and space, but it has determinancy.
So, and the way you describe it is the way you have to describe it in a certain sense genetically and show how is it that something like this come about, right? So, but then you have also to, then you also have to rely on the same kind of historical results, in the sense of previous patterns and previous that were generated through these processes, in order to describe what are the patterns or the abstractions that are happening now.
now. Yes, yes. So it is an interesting feedback because in a certain sense the way things are or the way things are behaving and the way you recognize they are behaving under a certain framework, right, is informing possible ways you will describe things. things you get to describe things so there's a kind of richness of there's a kind of enriching of the expressive means to reach you get to describe phenomena phenomena in that sense so this is I think abstraction for me is like this ubiquitous then ubiquitous element that you detect
everywhere as long as you have the framework to detecting and the framework, the expressive framework to describe it in a certain sense. And describing it is a real act that have real consequences, which is interesting as well, an interesting consequence of that. And in terms of art making and things like that, yeah, I think there is a problem. There's a kind of an ideology of the immediacy and of the kind of an anti-abstractive ideology. For instance, abstract paintings sometimes get portrayed as going back to a certain kind of concreteness.
So the fact that it's called abstract does not render it necessarily more abstract, I think. yes but but yet on when you i mean this is like coming from a specific painting debate but um it's true what you're saying uh you have like the appeal of the concretiveness that's one of appeals of it but um and i think it's tj clark which has a very good text on this i i'm not reminded of one right now oh it is on the one on greenberg uh he has like a text on greenberg and every time Ted Greenberg and other painters talk about Frank Stella or all sort of other painters, they come up with very metaphysical descriptions and very metaphysical assumptions
and like a phenomenological, it feels like floating in space. So even though you have it, like as it is true on someone like Picasso, Ted, abstract is concrete. When you get to like abstract expressionism, you have like a lot of metaphysical assumptions and a sort of formalism which is very metaphysical and not so much focused on the structures that it would be with the Russians, but coming with a more British tradition like Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which are also great writers, but they have much more value assumptions on painting and art in general. And this gets into the back door of the formalist approach in the United States. Yeah, but I would refrain from... I'm not sure if you're... Are you identifying kind of
metaphysical discourse with the abstraction there or not? I'm saying that the painters weren't really focused on metaphysical questions. Some of them were, but not precisely making their works for this. I think Malevich was. Yeah, Malevich was. Malevich was. Mondrian was as well. And Vinsky, yeah. Yeah, many of the first ones were, but I think the abstract expressionists not necessarily some of them have some very material process going. But I mean conceptually, do you think this metaphysical discourse has to do with the fact that we're detecting kind of abstraction? Yes. I don't think so. I would agree in that way. I think for instance the idea of floating and these kinds of phenomenological descriptions, for instance of Rothko's paintings and things like that, they are kind of a reaction actually
to abstraction. I think that is something that abstracts from the real world in a certain sense, so you don't get to identify objects that are second nature, like for you to identify them, and then you turn into a kind of different discourse in order to retain something of your familiar world like translation work yeah like again i'm sorry for my translation work but maybe it's a kind of resistance as well yeah yeah instead of just you know diving into color, for instance, or diving into the color fields, you get to think you get to
describe it in these other terms that are, you know, they may be good terms sometimes, but maybe maybe I'm too much analytically minded. Sometimes I think they are kind of mystificatory sometimes. yeah yeah i think that you have like a lot of that you have more of a sober approach with like michael fried but he still holds many of the same ethical assumptions on art and painting and like i think he he makes a great case for painting he doesn't make like a very no he actually makes a good uh description of part of minimalist art as being too theatrical i think there are some things in what he describes there. But still, I think that phenomenologically,
minimal art is much more about taking these things, these modernist approaches, and trying to intensify them, thinking in the space and reflections and the diminishment of contrast. It is similar to what is done here, like with the new concretos, which is something to take into account the phenomenological and more active participation of the spectator. So I think it actually has some other aesthetic approach and value, but I think that you have like this theatrical effect too, the things they aren't exclusively, they go together I would say. Yeah, I think it is... What I meant is that I often identify the interpretive, you know, tropes with the presence of abstraction.
of abstraction sometimes they are actually the gesture towards something more concrete and therefore I tend to think of them as a kind of reaction to abstraction I think people people don't really like abstraction it is something upsetting I think they want to have full experiences They want to have, they think there is such a thing as something undecomposable kind of experience. Like a hole. Like a hole or like some kind of fullness of meaning.
Whereas I would. Maybe transparency of meaning. I'm not an atomistic semantically, I'm a semanticalist. But I don't think there is an experience that is in the compotable in a certain sense. But I think this is upsetting. This is upsetting. People want to... I was reading, for instance, Lukács, and there's this whole account on alienation and things like that, which is all good and very interesting and fantastic, really. But at the same time there is this idea that there was one time where you had an experience that was kind of wholly human experience that is being, you know, decomposed and alienated
from the human being, you know, so what I said. Like a Roussonian sort of perspective. Yeah, yeah. For me this sounds like a black box. You want to have like a black box. You don't want to understand things. And understanding things is a kind of difficult process that But sometimes, I'm not saying that I'm above it, maybe myself included, I think, at times. But you're kind of resisting to it in a certain sense. And I think, for instance, abstract painting, when you read and hear such interpretations,
I tend to read them as this kind of reaction. They don't want to accept it as the thing that it is actually doing, they want to, you know, they want to regain a certain kind of enchantment. Yeah. Of the world through something that is actually a pretty formal experience, pretty formal kind of artistic experiment, in a certain sense. And this is why I get sometimes I'm suspicious of this kind of interpretive move sometimes.
I'm not sure they are really related to what the work is doing. I think certain forms of work need you to want to go through a certain process of abstracting. And this process of abstracting might impinge upon your own ways of experience, in a certain sense. you have to kind of, you kind of disintegrate even kind of your, I mean, I remember sometimes of Hanbo saying like the deregulation of all senses in a certain sense, like, and we are
kind of resisting to this kind of, to these kinds of experience, right? yes because they are like unfamiliarizing like in shaklowski yeah like you unfamiliarize the normal perception of the world with something that you do with a device or a series of device artistically devices and they create like this unfamiliarization of the sensory perception I'm not sure if it is there the problem is also that this defamiliarization entails sometimes defamiliarizing yourself yes it is kind of integration and the wholeness of oneself that is at stake this has a lot to do with Kant right
I haven't read the third critique but you opened your text with it and I was curious to ask you how Kant works the thing of the subject and the aesthetic experience and identity on the third critique actually yeah in that text I mean Kant was kind of what I took from him was the relationship between a conceptual kind of informing of sensible determination. So where he was putting, I wanted to have, for instance, an object that you could see it at a different kind of scale. For instance, I was composing a piece that was eight minutes long. And then that time stretches to 64 minutes long.
And I was, as I am just rehearsing here what I just said, just to make it clear, I wanted to see if you could retrace the original form listening to the 64-minute version. As I said, if you have some prosthetics, for instance, if you write it down, if you describe it, perhaps you could recognize the indexicals, as I was saying. And you have, like, right there already a kind of Kantian account of that. Like, you have, like, a certain form of sensibility, right? And you have concepts. You are subsuming certain happenings under certain concepts. So it is the workings of the concept
that are able to make you retrieve that object as the same. But at the same time, it seems that your time window or your species present or your memory buffer are not enough. So you don't get to experience that 64 minutes as the 8 minutes. They are fundamentally different at some level. So you have to ask for the workings of the concept in order to aid you to retrieve something of that form. but then when you do it, that form is an abstract thing, that form is a description, it's not an experience anymore. And so I was thinking about another,
maybe another transcendental system for which this music is written, that is able to have a different size of an species present and a different memory buffer that we don't have. This is why a student of mine at one point said, like you're composing music for an alien yeah and this is accurate in a certain sense but yeah there is a contents the conserves there for you know to understand to kind of separate and separate and integrate the sensible and the conceptual because if you run them together you are not able to make intelligible these kind of changes of scales and what they entail This was what I was gesturing.
But yeah, when I was saying earlier about maybe certain forms of art as kind of a menace to the integration of the subject, yeah, perhaps this is an example. But in my article I also mentioned there's a kind of way to kind of not engage, that is, for instance, to lapse back onto ambient listening, because I wanted structural listening. To have structural listening you have to keep track of the lexicals and try to retrieve the form, right? through ambient listening you're just there
at first in the first level you could say something like you let yourself go and this would mean something like okay I'm not the whole subject that I was anymore but I think actually it is the opposite letting yourself go is a way to not engage is a way to keep the experience at bay You keep a passivity. It's just something happening there and you're not really engaged with it. So this is the problem. And it's the same kind of ideology that you get, for instance, when people, you know, I don't know, buy a replica or a print of, you know, some abstract expressionism and put in their, you know, their wall
and, oh, this is so pretty and things like that. So it's a way of not engaging, it becomes wallpaper. Yeah, like, but what would be the opposite of this? Like, it's active listening, active attention, active participation. How would, like, a real engagement comes about? Yeah, yeah, I would say it is a more active engagement. like for instance as I was describing like you have to keep track of the structural elements that are at place, for instance, in a certain form of listening, for instance. In the painting, for instance, you have to kind of dive into the change of scale that is happening when you are seeing a color-filled painting
They take notice of the grain, for instance, and the way they are concatenated. So there's a lot of different form of determinations in this kind of works that are dealing with the synthesis of perception. whereas if you lapse back onto ambient perception it seems you're not dealing with the compositionality of the synthesis you're not dealing with the fact that there is different faculties at place and there's kind of a conflict between faculties that yield a certain kind of synthetic result but you
are kind of powerless I mean people will do what they want so they will actually engage they will just you know turn your stuff into wallpaper Yeah, I'm actually okay with it. Sometimes I myself do it. I put my you know my ambient record or my drone record and listening to us Yeah, it's not a crime to do it It's not a moral thing But like I think I'm just saying that you lose something. Yeah, yeah, at least sometimes sometimes you lose something by not engaging sometimes at least sometimes at that level you see you lose something yeah i think we've talked about this previously which is like it's so sad the like the diminishment of the aesthetic horizon of everyone of every of every
everyone like everyone only watches series and they can't even get too much into music and it's Of course, it's not a moral judgment, but even before you had public culture or public media which was more engaging and reflective and now you don't have anything of the sort. Yeah, I know, Netflix is public culture. Yeah, pretty much. YouTube. No, it's the glue, it's the social glue. yeah yeah yeah no but at the same time I'm pessimistic I mean a co but at the same time I'm probably pessimistic but at the same time there is kind of I I'm curious enough for instance
about about the stuff that we were talking earlier like why why is it that people don't have the patients to listen to a 30 second audio instead they want to listen to a 15 second audio. Yes. There's something kind of, I don't know, there's kind of an interesting thing to be thought there and to understand what is it doing because a kind of unsettling hypothesis is that exclusivity of our art making as you know the highest form of transcendental
revision is actually being performed by WhatsApp messages. I think that's a real hypothesis that we must take into account you see. So of course at some level what I'm describing when I'm saying, when I'm talking about the pieces and the trans-stretching things and the paintings, they're all real because they are kind of, they are part of the motivation, I think. And they have this possibility of a certain kind of experience wherein you are engaging your synthetic powers, your analytic synthetic powers. They are real. But I mean empirically, I mean sociologically, maybe they don't have traction at this moment.
And these kinds of disruptive, reconstructive kind of processes, maybe they are being performed elsewhere. And this is unsettling, of course, because maybe we want to have the exclusivity of the highest form of experience, but maybe that's not true. You know that it is out of our hands. Oh, sorry? It is out of our hands already. Yeah, it's out of our hands, of course. techno-capital singularity at work yeah I won't go to that yeah I wouldn't say as well it's just funny how these things can get like a certain sense of autonomy almost it isn't like autonomy but it's like strong over determination yeah yeah the thing is that the thing is that for instance
in whatsapp messages and this kind of phenomenon uh they thought they are not really uh mobilizing kind of autonomy right they are kind of completely open to you know the technological uh transformation right they are not really mobilizing like autonomous practice of engaging our synthetic powers maybe this is a difference yeah yeah they're like more they're more like an after-effect or something that we are actually now seeing it happen. Yeah, we always have the... we are always in danger of sounding like nostalgic people thinking about the good old days of literary culture and stuff like that. So I think it's
healthy to keep a distance and maybe at least ask ourselves that if this is the case or not of course i agree with you i'm usually very dissatisfied by some of my peers i don't know aesthetic tastes no like uh i don't think we should be closed or reactionary conservatory or in regards to art or culture or anything of the sort. But yeah, it's like, it's the same thing of being passive and being active. Isn't like taking exactly a passive and critical stance when it's not a blanket rejection, but like it's a thorough critique and an intimate one.
Isn't this being like an active participation of trying, of being passionate about the thing and not being against it? like if we are unsatisfied because we like this a lot. That's a good point, we're taking it seriously. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, that's a good point, like actually it's not wallpaper for us, this is a good point, definitely. Like to take it seriously, the difference in time buffer that maybe people experience is not to treat it as wallpaper. So yeah, maybe that's a good way to put it. Well, do you want to say something else? Do you have like any other thing on the test that you
wanted to comment about or time stretching? No, I think we covered a bit, quite a bit, I think. yeah I think the gist of it is is out there yeah yeah there was there was a little thing that I think is kind of important like the micropause thing oh micropause yes yeah like it's also mobilizing this kind of beyond threshold beyond the threshold of your experience right like, what do you take to be like, like the MicroPose? I don't remember where they use MicroPose elsewhere. I'm not sure I get it. I don't know if it is exactly this sort of instantiation of time.
I don't know. I was thinking if it is like the way time it is quantified or how like you have this disruption in time itself, but I'm not certain. And I haven't seen the user in it before, Tio. Yeah, because I mean, aesthetically, I'll interpret it in the sense of kind of a thick system, right? Like micropause is something that is a pause, but it is a pause that you're not able to recognize as a pause. And when you are able to recognize that as a pause, you are actually, you know, dealing with, I don't know, a swarm of pauses or something like that. You have to have like a kind of additive, not addictive, additive kind of process, right?
Also compositional process in that sense, composition in the sense of adding up things to come up with a different thing. That is also something that is important here in this discussion as a whole, like the way you get enmeshed, your synthetic policies are produced through abstractions that kind of homogenize the way you are able to quantize things. but in quantizing things in that homogenous way, you are able also to come up with new kinds of experience and new kinds of compositions. So it's a kind of a dialect between the abstract and the new concreta, the concept that is also bringing up the possibility of new abstractions in turn.
Yeah, something like that, I would say. Yeah, I was just curious about this microphone. yeah i think it is the only instance that they talk about it but it's yeah i i don't know what to make it out of this war because it seems to be like this whole uh superposition of different things that are sort of chaotic and out of the world i like a lot how they talk about god becoming demons as well sometimes like god the one it becomes fragmented and then it becomes like multiple entities and those are the demons and like i've been reading a lot about demons on my research and like you have in Diotima the perception of love is demonic and demonic is always the thing of the passage it's always something of communication which is
something which is worked very strongly through all the parts of the books they have like the whole system of the demons exactly because they are forms of communication with a realm which we can't apprehend on ourselves we need like a mediation and love makes this sort of mediation i'm in a love way so i'm very happy with life and reading a lot about love but i really think it is an interesting concept to think on passage and even like this demonic or the i am on in like the more greek sense yeah that's that's good yeah it also strikes me as the the passage the passage through the one that i was mentioning in the beginning of the conversation that they interpret kind of neuromancer as being kind of not God but a passage through the one which is
interesting which has to do with that like homogenization in order to re-swarm things right like the swarm is kind of a result of a certain kind of homogenization yes yeah this is kind of a positivity of the negativity of abstraction But thanks everyone for staying with us this long and we'll see you in a month. Bye bye. Bye bye, thank you. I stopped recording.