Category Archives: theory

Christophe Bruno’s Dadameter

Via Bright Stupid Confetti[1] comes Christophe Bruno‘s Dadameter

bright stupid confetti: packets of future transmission See Dadameter

The Dadamap

Christophe Bruno (born July 1, 1964) is a French artist. He began his artistic activity in 2001, influenced by the net.art movement. His thesis is that through the web, and especially through the ability to search and monitor it thoroughly by means of Google, we are heading towards a global text that among other things enables a new form of textual, semantic capitalism, which he explores in his work. His artworks include Iterature, Logo.Hallucination, The Google Adwords Happening and many other pieces.

The Dadameter is an art project by French artist Christophe Bruno first presented in 2008. It was inspired by the work of french writer Raymond Roussel use of homophony described in How I Wrote Certain of My Books.

In the words of the Bruno “the project is a satire about the recent transmutation of language into a global market ruled by Google et al. and uses the most up-to-date technologies of control to draw cartographies of language at large scale.”

It was co-produced by the Rencontres Paris-Berlin-Madrid 2008 for contemporary art and new cinema and programmed by Valeriu Lacatusu.

The result of the project is the so-called Dadamap[2][3] in which each pixel corresponds to one couple of words. The project started from “a lexicon of several thousands of words which correspond to about 800,000 couples (as many pixels then), and we looked for homophonic correlations, as in billard / pillard [see Roussel], or for semantic correlations.”

The procedure provides three measurements for each couple of words corresponding to homophony (the Damerau-Levenshtein distance), Google Similarity (or semantic relatedness) and thirdly equivocation (to which extent a word has a univocal meaning or at the contrary is polysemic or equivocal).

The Dadamap is a topographical map resembling an ocean floor, it features green for wasteland, light blue for utilitarianism, blue for mainstream, deep blue for boredom and brown for homophony[4]. There is an equivocation separation line which roughly splits the map into two, or maybe that is a rift. From left to right, the map contains the following lemmata: OuLiPo, Roussel, Dada, rap, Tecktonik, 911, pop, Warhol, Fluxus, Duchamp, Jarry, Baudrillard, reality TV, spam, neen, bling-bling, net.art, Debord, Burroughs, Mallarmé, spam, Hapax, Googlewhacks, epiphanies, infotainment, Joyce, Nouveau Réalisme, Sarkoland, recycling, Deleuze and Google.

David Toop @60

David Toop @60

Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The book can be had as cheaply as£2.25,$6.59 orEUR 6,07.

David Toop is celebrating his 60th birthday today. The first of his works I read was Ocean of Sound, it is in my opinion the best book of music writing of the 20th century. Sadly, Toop’s publication of his latest book, Ways of Hearing[1] has been delayed.

His masterpiece, however, is Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds is a music theory book written by British author David Toop and first published in 1995 by Serpent’s Tail. The book discusses topics such as ambient music, synaesthesia, aether and imaginary worlds British music magazine The Wire said upon its release that “its parallels aren’t music books at all, but rather Italo Calvino‘s Invisible Cities, Michel Leiris‘s L’Afrique fantôme, William Gibson‘s Neuromancer … David Toop is our Calvino and our Leiris, our Gibson. Ocean of Sound is as alien as the 20th century, as utterly Now as the 21st. An essential mix.”

Of all the things I admire about Toop’s writing, two things stand out.

First his insistence on treating music in the first place as sound. Secondly his ability to connect topics to far-ranging other topics, his ability to digress meaningfully.

If you are into late 20th century (un)popular music, be sure to check Toop’s abecedaria written for The Wire: “The A to Z of Dub“[2] (1994) and “The A to Z of Electro“[3] (1998).

Introducing Richard Lewinsohn (1894 – 1968)

Introducing Richard Lewinsohn (1894 – 1968)

A history of Sexuality by Richard Lewinsohn

Translation of A History of Sexual Customs (1956)  by Richard Lewinsohn

Flipping through my Dutch language copy of the above book brought German writer Richard Lewinsohn to my attention who published this book under the pseudonym Morus. I read a bit in the chapter on sexuality in ancient Rome and found a reference to Tutunus,  the Roman equivalent to Priapus of Greek mythology. Tutunus is very badly represented online, but that’s how I found out that Morus is a pseudonym for Lewinsohn.

Tutunus is expounded upon in Aphrodisiacs and Antiaphrodisiacs , a book by English author John Davenport privately printed in London in 1869 from which the following illustration comes:

Round Tower at Klondalkin, Ireland

Round tower at Clondalkin (Aphrodisiacs and Antiaphrodisiacs proves that the notion op phallic symbol to connote non-sexual imagery existed before Freud)

Richard Lewinsohn (September 23 1894 in Graudenz; – April 9 1968 in Madrid) was a German writer, journalist and cultural historian. He wrote several works under the pseudonym Morus and Campanella. He was a contributor to Die Weltbühne and is known for such works as A History of Sexual Customs (1956) and his biography of arms trader Basil Zaharoff.

Also a German jew, contemporary of my hero Walter Benjamin, Lewinsohn managed to survive the war. His work is largely undocumented in the Anglosphere.

RIP Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 – 2009)

RIP Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 –  2009)

Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick

Please let me know if you know the origins of the cover.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (May 2, 1950 – April 12, 2009) was an American theorist in the fields of queer theory and critical theory. She is best-known for her literary study Epistemology of the Closet (1990) in which she referenced Herman Melville, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde. A pity she did not use film as a basis for her analysis. She could have been the American Zizek.

She was popular with the American left, witness the review in The Nation. It’s not hard guessing how she was perceived in the bible belt.

Robinson Crusoe @290

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published on April 25, 1719.

Robinson Crusoe (1719) – Daniel Defoe
Image sourced here.

Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a desert island. This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a “false document“, and gives a realistic frame story.

The term “Robinsonade” has been coined to describe the genre of stories similar to Robinson Crusoe.

If we surmise that Robinson Crusoe was the first piece of boy’s lit, the Anglophone world had to wait 21 more years for its first piece of chick lit which was arguably Pamela.

See also: histories (history of the novel), bestseller, first novel, British literature, Robinsonade, 18th century in literature

I was three years old when May 68 happened

May 1968

burning Citroën DS during May 68 from here.

I was three years old when May 68 happened. May 68 was the direct precursor of the hippie movement here in Western Europe. Most of our teachers had been brought up in the “hippie” climate.

Yesterday E-L-I-S-E posted this burning Citroën DS (the photo is new to me and is unsourced at E-L-I-S-E). It brings me to repost one of my favorite quotes on art and politics.This is from one year before May 68.

The juvenile delinquents — not the pop artists — are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them.

A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple are the living denial of the ‘values’ in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the delinquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic.

They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell’s Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers — all are the assertion of the desire to play in a situation where it is totally impossible.

All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction. Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom proletarianised along with the rest. —Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe in The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution (1967) via http://www.notbored.org/english.html

Ernst Gombrich @100

Ernst Gombrich @100

Floris-Decoration by you.

Cornelis Bos, Female herm (1546). Engraving, 243 x 179. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

I first stumbled upon Ernst Gombrich via the enigmatic Ian McCormick who mentioned Norm and Form, volume one in Studies in the Art of the Renaissance in the bibliography of his excellent site[1] on the visual grotesque. By the way, if anyone has the lowdown on Ian McCormick, please let me know, he is one of the internet’s little mysteries.

But first some background info on Gombrich:

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE (30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian, who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian émigrés who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper (to whom he was especially close) and Friedrich Hayek. He is best-known for his books Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, A Little History of the World, The Story of Art and Art and Illusion, which ushered in reader-response criticism in visual culture theory.

Back to the grotesque.

Gombrich collaborated with Ernst Kris (the art historian/ psychoanalyst who brought the grimacing sculptures[2] of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt) on a history of caricature. The Principles of Caricature was the fruit of this collaboration and it was first published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1938, reprinted in full here[3]. The piece was later reprinted in Kris’s Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952).

Baron Haussmann @200, Haussmannization and creative destruction

Baron Haussmann @200

Paris_Arc_de_Triomphe by you.

Place de l’Étoile

Baron Haussmann (1809 – 1891) turned 200 today.

Haussmannwas a French urbanist who called himself an “artiste démolisseur,” literally translated as artist destroyer, a concept with a political equivalent of creative destruction. I’ve mentioned Haussmann and Haussmannization here [1] and here[2].

Haussmann’s renovation of Paris is often simply referred to as Haussmannization, connected to the notion of creative destruction, a political concept.

creative destruction, surplus product

The notion of creative destruction is found in the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and in Werner Sombart‘s Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism) (1913, p. 207), where he wrote: “again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises”. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation. It contrasts with various tactics of preservation and embalming the past.

Interestingly, Flaubert’s friend Maxime du Camp said:

“Paris, as we find it in the period following the Revolution of 1848, was about to become uninhabitable.” — [Paris Arcades] quoting from Maxime du Camp, Paris, vol 6 (Paris, 1875), p.253.

and

“Its population had been greatly enlarged and unsettled … and now this population was suffocating in the narrow, tangled, putrid alleyways in which it was forcibly confined.” — [Paris Arcades] quoting from Maxime du Camp, Paris, vol 6 (Paris, 1875), p.253.]

It was Jules Ferry who wrote “Les Comptes fantastiques de Haussmann,” his indictment of the bold handling of public funds for the Haussmannization. It was published in 1867, its title being a play on words between contes, stories or tales – as in Les contes d’Hoffmann or Tales of Hoffmann, and comptes, accounts.