The reason to read Autoportrait is to savor the shocking precision—a guillotine’s—of its rapid cuts between unlike ideas, and to savor the actual information offered about the textures and peculiarities of a specific consciousness.

The Prince of Parataxis – by Wayne Koesenbaum

“Parataxis” : the juxtaposition of two or more sentences without a conjunction.

“I came. I saw. I conquered.” is a common example of a paratactic statement. A list of events, where the missing “then” is supplied by the reader/listener.   By removing the conjunction, the swiftness, ease and shock of the sequence comes alive.

Cinema editing is naturally paratactic. Continuity (or discontinuity) is worked out spatially with lines of action, graphic matches/contrasts. For example, a cut from night to day is paratactic code for: “the next day.” But there is another kind of literary/cinematic parataxis. The listing of items–objects, thoughts or events–without regard to narrative conjunction. The art of Whitman, Joyce,  Stein, Beckett; of Perec, Barthes, Ruiz, Ashbery, Brainard. More recently in the work of David Markson, Édouard Levé, Diane Williams, Laird Hunt and Danielle Dutton.

In the past months, I have been writing about plot and database narrative for an upcoming paper; wondering if it is possible to have a narrative without temporal conjunction: this happened, then this happend.

I have been inspired by Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL.  Not exactly stream of consciousness, the work is more of an interface to the material and thought stuff in the life of suburban woman. There is no development, no hierarchy. The  words themselves sprawl across justified, non-breaking pages. If there is an implied conjunction, it is the word “and. ” Everything is equal to everything else.  Pleasure, wonder, ache, sadness comes through exploring the text, seeing its patterns, dipping into its flow, recognizing the strange incongruities of material life, and the deep longing for the immaterial.

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One of the things going on is that I have a new video work that is out and about, currently awaiting replies from various venues. Film of Sound is a 10 minute video I made with Australian sound artist Roger Dean and writer Hazel Smith, a creative duo and founders of Australysis.

It was performed in Sydney last December (12/10/11) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with 4-channel audio and a double-projection screen. The center of the audio space–the sweet spot– was the surface of the screen.

Here are two excerpts.

Film of Sound is a semiotic surface, a skin of image and text on the body of sound. Constructed out of collaborative, indeterminate and remix processes, layers and juxtapositions of disparate media hint at a narrative trajectory — a sleeping man, an evening in a hotel room, and a journey across vast and challenging spaces. But the incipient narrative constantly breaks down into disordered memories of violence and repression, undefined threats, splintered subjectivities, analog and digital glitches.

10 minute, single channel video
Artists: Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith
an australLYSIS commission

Electronic art video and interactive works generally prioritize image over sound, this is also the case in commercial culture at large. For this work, we chose a different approach, in keeping with the central focus of the commissioning ensemble, austraLYSIS. That focus is sound : musical, spoken, electroacoustic and environmental. In Film of Sound sound was chosen to be the initiator, sometimes even driver, of the text and visual processes at work in the piece. Three collaborators were involved, respectively with focus on the video composition (Luers), the text composition (Smith) and the sonic composition (Dean). In the first stage of creating the piece, a pair of sound compositions were made by Dean, and Luers and Smith began generating responses to them. After considerable exchange of materials, an overall plan for one imagistic narrative layer, to be constructed first in sound, was agreed. After the drafted sound layer was produced, all the ongoing text- and video- generation processes joined into an iterative amalgamation, interaction, and refinement sequence.

The result reveals at least two continuous narrative and process layers. There are ideas about the continuation of physical objects and processes — such as the life of the ocean — despite the termination of life. These ideas swirl with and against questions of language, the communicative powers of humans, and the resilience of human engagement even when resources and opportunities seemingly diminish.

Through the interweaving of text, sound and image —sometimes complementary, sometimes antithetical — the work explores a number of continua from the pre-verbal to the articulated, from the glimpse to the gaze, from noise to music. It also simultaneously projects both rapidly transforming affective intensities and sustained emotional states.

- Roger Dean, Will Luers and Hazel Smith

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We are distributing far and wide to academics and non-academics who are interested in, well, database, narratives and archives – however these meet and overlap in electronic space.

Here is the announcement and cfp (pdf available in the blog post):
http://www.dnasymposium.com/2011/08/15/cfp/

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Just a brief summary of the Database|Narrative|Archive Symposium in Montreal.  I spent last weekend with about 120 others discussing and exploring a range of projects that were mostly non-fiction, interactive and cinema driven.  The scale of the conference was perfect – small enough to weave good conversation, large enough for a range of points of view. Organizers Matt Soar and Monika Kin Gagnon had the participants make 5 min “lightening talks.”  This meant everyone could (and most did) listen to everyone else’s presentation. This created cohesiveness and plenty of opportunity for follow-up discussions. I presented about my The Father Divine Project, a database documentary and archive built on Scalar. See below for  my lightening talk and others as a Korsakow interactive video.

There were some very beautiful, innovative and smart examples of “database narratives” and all very different. Underlying my admiration for much of the work are lingering jealousies of the funding structures that we no longer have in the U.S. – but that’s another story. Besides the interesting content -content that demands multilinear presentation- these projects introduce and teach database thinking in their forms. Although this was not discussed much (too obvious?), the database narrative as a form is an orientation to the human world as a complex adaptive system rather than as a site of large and small “conflicts” centered around individual will and desire. For that reason alone, many of these projects would be great to integrate into learning centers – public, architectural spaces. They are ambient reflections of the world as database.

But…  As Adrian pointed out in the plenary session and in a blog response, there is a troubling gap between the the kind of attention these projects demand and the dwindling attention spans of our networked life worlds. Each participant probably has a laptop and smart phone full of more attention demanding media than our lives have time for. Not to mention the simultaneous flows of information coming at us at any given moment. This is a very different media ecology than the one that gave birth to the novel, the feature film and other weekend rituals that were considered escapes from work and boredom. What is the new ecology?

“Blogs are premised on the personal, polyvocalism, authenticity, trust and porousness….Technically they are premised on granularity, addressability, small world networks and dense connectors ”

-Adrian’s lightning talk

I struggle with this in my own work all the time.

One special feature of DNA – for me- was that it brought together some videobloggers: Adrian, Jenn, Jay and Ryan and myself. In our group discussions we kept returning to the blog and video blog as models or starting points for new projects – especially given the wide interest in tablet apps. But “video blog” is an ugly description. That is one big problem with even raising it in a conference like this. But the presentation and contextualization of video, audio, image and text – whether it is in a blog post,an epub, mobile app, kiosk, wall or website – is going to be most successful in short (3-10  min.) chunks that are network aware and are connected to other chunks. Chunks can integrate into longer, deeper and wider serialized forms, but we need the smaller narrative units to weave into our own lives.

.

Here is my talk embedded in a Korsakow movie with all talks.

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click to play

Lin remixes networked and print reading/writing practices into something dense, beautiful, puzzling and ultimately relaxing. The book is about its own construction, and the nature of a hybrid identity as “book”, as immigrant, as a networked digital being .  Search results, personal lists, metadata, receipts and low-rez images are indexical to the authoring process rather than illustrations of some simulated world.  A narrative essay (sebaldian), with multiple entrances and exits and no specific information to absorb, designed to contain flows of semiotic debris that wash up everyday.  Lin calls his poetry/fiction/essays  “ambient.” And his books do, like much ambient music,  set you on a leisurely stroll through semiotic space.

“I believe a novel should not preserve things, it should blank them out very very slowly around all those beautiful, corrosive things that are not happening in the world and that usually involve figures of state and violent incursions in countries far from our own and the loss of our loved ones.”

The novelistic arts – novels, movies, some documentaries – attempt to represent the complex flows of events, people and things inside dense cohesive structures. The novelist or screenwriter builds a structure so that its world can sit solidly in the reader’s mind. This is essential for immersion. And immersion is necessary to conjure the stresses of life and then to offer a catharsis – an end to the stress – and the ability to go on about ones’ business. Catharsis has always been a hot commodity.

But living with continuous networked flows of text and image, there is never catharsis – no end- to the piling on of information. Why pick up that novel or that netflix DVD and go through the motions of pretending to care about a watered-down and well-intentioned (accessible) version of reality when we’ve just spent the day sorting through various scales of  virtual and local “crises” and flights from crises: news headlines, electric bill, tweets, emails, calls, anecdotes, comments, deadlines, lists, searches. How do you represent that reality?

Sometimes a fiction universe is so good (thick) that it does seem worthy of the semiotic complexity we experience everyday. But catharsis? I have been watching The Wire and find that it and much of the good long-form television beats the novel in doing what a novel should do – giving access to the complex flows of contemporary experience. In The Wire, although plot heavy, the cathartic moments are never fully satisfying, the characters are always frustrated with each other and themselves. The problems never go away completely. I often “watch” the episodes while performing tasks on the computer, or doing light reading. Divided attention. I listen to characters and turn to the interesting parts. Scroll back to cover what I missed. There are, of course, peaks of dramatic action that take over my attention, but mostly the flow of story is background ambience. In a way, I am not looking for a subject, but for a reflective surface that can bring my own mind into play.  ADD?  Maybe, but also an indication of how our brains are remixing new realities.

John Ashbery: I would not put a statement in a poem. I feel that poetry must reflect on already existing statements.

Kenneth Koch: Why?

John Ashbery: Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject.

- Selected Prose by John Ashbery

Tan Lin proposes that the craft of writing “be replaced with handicrafts and utensils of writing. Thus recipes, tickets, text messages, itineraries, legal briefs and disclaimers would consitute various surface entrances.” A collaged “novel” cannot provide great catharsis . But it can, if shaped properly, make us see our life’s material ephemera (shopping lists and earthquake data) as worthy of reflection, speculation and discussion. Not the events themselves, but the intermingling of the various reports and records of those events.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Friend and Oregonian photographer had some of her iPhone shots shown at The New Space Center for Photography.

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 I am interested in your ideas about boredom, especially considering your work in an ambient avant-garde that goes against shock aesthetic. In your interview with Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, and Gordon Tapper you discuss your interest in middle-brow reading, especially material like an index and a forward, both of which appear as appropriations from other books in your book. Do you see boredom as a byproduct of reproducibility, as a vacuum space created by cultural institutions, a frame of mind that enables pleasure and creativity, a combination of these, or something different altogether?

 I thought of SCV as the slightly bored mood of reading distractedly, while cooking, waiting for a subway, or watching TV. I am supposed to be a very close reader of texts because I am a professor, but I mostly skim books and read synopses of important articles. I focus on forewords, appendixes (they are like pictures), and footnotes (they tell me the things I actually have to go out and read). Thus the title’s citation of 2004 in the near but not too distant past and where the book was published six rather relaxed years later, as you note, on April 1. So SCV is blogged writing, too, where the writing is additive and incremental but not necessarily in any teleological way. Blogging is sideways dilatory writing and the organization of SCV is similar. There is a lot of fetishism attached to the book as object , so I was interested in the book as dispersed ambient textuality, meta-data, or maybe just the allusiveness of the bibliographic that is referenced by a title, which I suppose is the book itself and its ecosystems of reading. So I was interested in non-print forms of reading: architecture, paintings, strip malls, potted plants, spoken words, the back stitching on a Margiela blouse, traffic lights, WD50, reality TV.

Reading is a system of highly commodified moods, but like individual blog sites, these are variable. I do a lot of reading while doing other things, like cooking or watching Olympic alpine skiing or the Weather Channel or whatever. So SCV emulates the ambient textuality or generalized medium (the term is Niklas Luhmann’s) of reading as it is structurally coupled to other things. I’m interested in the formats and micro-formats of reading, and their coupling to other things in the world, like restaurants, yoga mats, poems, former boyfriends or girlfriends, wives and husbands (and their photographs), and of course other books (and their photographs and the photographs they contain within them). So I would say boredom is a very loose medium in which the heterogeneity of the world can be gathered without coalescing into something meaningful—like a book. What do the stories “mean” in SCV? Not very much. Are they boring? Well, yes, sort of. Do they limit meanings? Of course. Do they prevent violence from being registered? Yes, and this is particularly true of the last section, which describes the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

Via http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3467

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