A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)

My own current form is suffering serious time constraints, which in part explains the lack of activity here, but hopefully things will pickup. Spring’s on the way which should mean some new image work, and there’s a new web-experiment in the works.it’s still in cloak mode at the moment, but should surface sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Having imagined sex and desire we assume the world.

I’m going to try and refocus here. While I make a lot of connections that are evidently difficult to explain, I’m operating on the theory that it will be useful to sort out and categorize some of the entities that catch my attention and let you make your own connections; or not. So LA is going to be devoted to the process of noticing things like concepts and trying to figure them out. Anomalous things like the previous post which seems to require only experience and not examination will wind up over on Sightwork. I’ve also started a sort of imageblog where I’ll be posting with some regularity the image work that I’ve been doing.

I’ve been reading Strieg Larsson, and the post title is his attributed dyke description of one of the more interesting characters in modern fiction. The reading encounter cropped up post a conversation wherein I found myself saying, “The cultural positioning of women, ‘be sexy; stay pure’ creates a classic double bind.” This isn’t exactly news, I’ve thought for years that guys just want to get laid and girls are instructed to entice and deny which is an odd kind of fun or more often than not not fun at all. It’s a little difficult to explain how we got from Gregory Bateson q.v. and double binds to Martin Heidegger so I won’t try.

And besides, we hesitate to call God a thing. In the same way we hesitate to consider the beast in the field, the stoker at the boiler, the teacher at the school things. A man is not a thing. It is true that we speak of a young girl who was faced with a task too difficult for her as being a young thing, still too young for it, but only because we feel that being human is in a certain way missing here and think that instead we have to do here with the factor that constitutes the thingly character of things. We hesitate even to call the deer in the forest clearing, the beetle in the grass, the blade of grass of thing.

This excerpt is one of those “things” that’s been following me around for years. The thing seems to me to be not merely accurate, but something that needs engaging, perhaps even changing. Related in some sense: I’ve also been reading about insomnia and Cognitive Behavior Therapy. In translation, “if you want to get off sleeping pills, stay out of bed until you’re damn well ready to go to sleep.” Obviously this is a little painful but over the long term it seems to prove effective. The thing is that It’s my general observation that things are getting better, though the behavior of mainstream media might argue otherwise. We are as a race, slow learners, and I sometimes think as Americans even less. “.. because we feel that being human is in a certain way missing here…”

Having imagined sex and desire we assume a world.

I wanted to share all this with the world, because I was moved, astounded, blown away. Pretty much, but not altogether, speechless. But then Shel pointed out that I appeared to be on the edge. Put it together. It was a matter of taste. Pretty much everything was a matter of taste. So what was it about the puppets and before them the pictures? I saw the answer, pictures, the images, didn’t answer. Looking at them I knew only that these people had existed. They were real and full, but nothing more. Ani that is what art does. It presents the thing in itself and refutes explanation. It’s a sharing that, if your taste runs that way, arrests rather than explains.

Imagine that you’d had one of those way-back moments and you’d Googled “Guy DeBord”. Once you’d finished with the Wikipedia obviousness you’d find the text of The Society of the Spectacle, sort of a book made up of overlong Tweets, but then if you became tempted by the backspace key you might find The Bureau of Public Secrets and then Nothingness. Well, at least you’d be Not Bored.

Extra points for figuring out the post title’s intertextal references.

DARPA Network Challenge

How to Win the DARPA Network Challenge

The DARPA Network Challenge wiki

Sharing History

Chess from Donal Little on Vimeo.

I’m a bit of late arrival so this will count both as an introduction of self, and as my daily sharing assignment. I’ve been absent from the “ write” part of the Read Write Web for the last several months, and it’s a bit odd to be participating here rather than trying to catch up on all the projects that I’ve left hanging. I probably should say something about who I am, why I’m here, and what I’m about, but that would presume a body of knowledge which I frankly lack. I’m trying to figure all that out; I suppose in some sense we all are. As self identified artist of one sort or another I’ve been thinking about sharing pretty much since I was old enough to think about thinking. The above is something from the late 80s; perhaps a bit long, but not without interest.