The Collection

Minecraft and Philosophy

2011-03-23T13:38:00.001-07:00

I swear to god, if I become one of the people who write theses with names like "The Appropriation of French Techno by the Martiniquan Neo-Hipsters and its Evil Colonial Problems" (or whatever, you know what I mean), the title of this blog post would be my preferred thesis; useless in its analysis of weird popular culture, yet cute-sounding and hip.

As you may or may not know, Minecraft is an independently-made game made by a singular Swedish dude that has become outrageously popular as of late. It's pretty amazing. I love it. I can't sum it up here, but essentially it is like legos reproduced through super-mario graphics in a fantasy setting. And no, it is not like Runescape or Farmville. It is soooo serious. I am an adult, OK? Believe me.

Minecraft brings up a lot of interesting questions, for me. The developer of the game has famously not stated any sort of back story or narrative of any sort for the events in Minecraft. the game doesn't even have a manual, even though it is actually pretty complicated. A fan suggests this: your character, a voiceless, bland antagonist -- some white dude wearing a green t-shirt, is stranded on a resource-rich island. Of course, you can play in "worlds" that are not islands, and you are by no means "stranded", really, but the point is the same: you have a vast land to conquer and make your own. You are in the best "State-of-nature" I know. Start by building a house. Get food. Mine gold or chop down wood. Create any structure or machine you can imagine. Then burn it down and start over agian. Whatever. The Multi-player feature is the most interesting, as you can create amazing things with your friends collaboratively and build a community literally from the ground up, or you can fight a war against them while constructing a base for yourself. Or anything, really.

The first philosophical questions I thought up while entertaining this thesis (that I will never write, because I don't give a fuck), were perhaps the obvious ones: how do you understand the "state of nature" of minecraft? How do multiple players come into a relationship with one another in a land that has valuable resources to attain, and has no "rules"? Unlike other video games that theorists seem to love (WoW, Second Life: I'm looking at you), Minecraft has no structure built into the architecture of the game: the game isn't even finished yet, but I doubt it will ever have any sort of regulatory functions. Conversely, most Massively Multi-player online games "have to have" a complicated built-in (I.E, part of the software) disciplinary and regulatory system. We don't want no internet trolls rollin' 'round here. No sir.

In the server I created for Hampshire, much discourse revolved around the boundaries and use of the land surrounding the "spawn point"; where players enter the map. A town was built with communal fixtures: a lighthouse for lost and wayward adventurers confused by zombie attacks, a "homeless shelter" full of beds, a "recycling center" where people people's waste is reused (stone, dirt and gravel excavated in the process of obtaining diamonds can now become a new player's house). Perhaps more like Legos and less like Everquest, people were eager to enter into a simple society, to contribute to the town community, because it allowed them to create vast communal structures to show off.

However, there are liberal capitalist servers (a market develops for extractable goods and services, and a loose governmental structure is assembled to actually regulate the market), communist servers, etc. The weird Lockean tapdance that occurs in the game is surreal; if not of anthropological value, it is interesting to see players argue about the nature of their labor and their ownership of goods.

These oddly complicated and very "serious" structures rises from the meaning of labor in Minecraft. Minecraft is notoriously full of boring and seemingly endless work -- mining the earth, chopping wood, or farming is tedious and it is rare that you find an ore worth extracting, for instance. Fights break out when it is detected that one person's mine is under another's house, or that someone let out someone's farm animals. Games that start out with Lockean ideals - "grab everything you can get your filthy hands on" go sour when the players realize that they have rendered a vast virtual forest to rubble and filled an area that could be used for cool buildings into a no-man's-land of gigantic strip-mines.

It isn't just the tedium of the game that gives the virtual labor weight, though -- it's that feeling of really owning your labor in a Marxian and intellectual sense that makes clashes of economies and governments a staple of play. You have a sense of the Minecraft state-of-nature, where an absence of regulatory apparatuses means that the creative function of the game is maximized to its fullest potential. What's interesting to me is that the creative quality of Minecraft developed by itself -- not because of the developers: the quality of the game, or some sort of prompting, but by the players. The first and most important thing to do in such an open-ended world was to simply build. Players care deeply about their creations; their intellectual and technical endeavors: labor spent creating, in both the "physical" and intellectual sense, makes labor meaningful.

Perhaps in the best games, I suggest, the accumulation of goods is a side-project for an application in building a rare virtual sculpture, or a pyramid, or a tower. The best games are where the focus stays on the open-ended nature of the game (using the game as simply a blank slate for the creations of the players), and the natural tendency of the participants to want to create, who use their virtual labor in a way that is meaningful to them. If this makes me a Virtual Communist, I have no qualms at all.

2011-02-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

Found some cool stuff in my pictures folder that I haven't seen for a while. Sorry for the bad quality, my phone is/was absolutely terrible at taking pictures. Haven't gotten on the iPhone bandwagon yet(!)...

Took this picture in Queens last year:

It's a total DIY setup for a messenger of some sort--- I'm guessing that because NY has some of the most tenacious, genius bike messengers ever, and this bike is equally genius. I'm not talking about the Williamsburg "fixers" or their kin, rather the guys on their Huffys (Huffies?) delivering Famiglia pizza across town. Some of those folks pile more weight on a Wal-Mart frame than I've ever seen on the most gnarly of touring bikes, yet handle it with the ease of a BMX. This bike is, in fact, a BMX (or at least, once was), but has now become a bizzaro workhorse: full front and back racks made of tough ~1" steel tubing. I absolutely love how overbuilt the thing is, and I think that it's an example of what I think design should be: appropriate, cheap, durable.

A Smithee's bike with that crazy-ass rear triangle. I've since seen a few bikes with this design, but I still don't know why it's used or who makes it. If you know, tell me. It looks radical.

2011-02-12T09:56:00.001-08:00

2011-02-03T14:51:00.001-08:00

As some of you know, I am working on my first silver-brazed bike. This is challenging. I am scared. However, being in the mood for lug-based aesthetics, I revisited a couple of my old favorite sites for design tips. Here is a overview of the "tahkion" series of USSR-era bikes. I actually own one of these frames, but it's one of the more boring models -- no fork-mounted handlebars, no chrome. However, it does have a brazing job that simply screams "I am in a gulag, please send help!". Hopefully I can do better on my frame.

Lemelson Style Critique No. 1, Feat. Clay Royse

2011-01-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

Q: If I am wearing non-boot-cut jeans but also high-top work boots, how can I wear them both without making them clash?

A: Everyone knows that tucking the bottom of the pant leg into your work boot makes you look like a neo-Nazi. It's important to accentuate the fine utilitarian leather of the boot without looking like you are an anti-semite or an armed guerrilla. If you simply cannot find any boot-cut jeans, I suggest a slight cuff at the bottom the the jeans (for very skinny cuts), or simply letting them down all the way. However, take care not to get the hem stuck in heavy machinery.

Q: When is it impolite to sit down to a meal after having bled my hydraulic brake system?

A: If the oil has a great deal of mileage on it, and therefore appears black, it should be discouraged under most auspices. However, new or slightly used hydraulic fluid is acceptable, as it is clear. This rule is maintained with Automatic Transmission Fluid, especially for darker-skinned individuals, as it has a transparent, pink tinge. Bear in mind that high-speed bearing grease and crankcase oil are never allowed, even in the most liberal of companies.

Q: I want to purchase a machinist's apron that will not clash with outfit. Any recommendations?

A: As far as shop aprons go, you have two options: synthetic or natural fabric. Outfits comprised mostly of Carhartt might go particularly well with a light beige leather apron, whereas a nylon outer layer may be complimented by a Cordura apron of muted grays. Keep in mind the spectrum of outerwear you enjoy wearing (L.L Bean, Flannel Button-ups, or compulsory high-temperature foundry safety gear) and plan accordingly, understanding that the utility of the shop apron means that its use will not be restricted just to the machine-shop.

2010-12-26T23:25:00.000-08:00

The 1992 Cadillac De Ville is a 5.4l v8. What a great car. I just love old luxury sedans. Whatever happened to stylin'? Whatever happened to getting 16mpg in a family car? You could take this car to war. You could fire mortars at it.

I'd really like to talk to the designer of the late-model ones, though. There's a weird retro-futuristic thing happening there. The big grilles and hood ornaments of the 80s mixed with like... a space-ship or something. Whenever I see one on the street I think a member of the Yakuza is going to step out of it.

2010-12-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

2010-12-16T21:20:00.000-08:00

Absolutely Fabulous Animations

2010-10-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

RSA makes David & Slavoj tons of fun, not that they weren't already.

Check out the rest, too: these are just the ones that I was watching today.

$$$$$$

2010-10-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

Kevin and I are buying any and all scrap and junk metallic items. Objects of the highest interest: Cars, motorcycles, small machinery: Lawnmowers, generators, pumps, pressure washers, engine blocks, aluminum crap. Email bicyclebricoleur@gmail.com or kmiche3562@aol.com to inquire. We will pick up! YEAH.

This is in preparation for a winter's worth of making aluminum ingots in our soon-to-be waste-oil furnace.

2010-10-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

I've been on a short schedule the last couple of days to make a die for Blacksmith Ben. The die will be used on a hydraulic hammer to make sections of 2 1/4 handrail. It's easy work, but the material is 4140 high-carbon steel, so the going has been slow. Blurry pictures, wooooo

2010-10-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

The Technical Ascent of the Tall-Bike

2010-10-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

As of this week, I have completed the latest iteration of my tall-bike frame. Tall-bikes are synonymous with the 2000's expression of "freak-bike" culture, bike co-operatives, and "underground" bicycling clubs ("C.H.U.N.K 666,"Rat Patrol", etc), and while they're no longer as freaky as they used to be, they are a shit-ton of fun to build, and most of all, ride. My design is unique because instead of having some kind of make-shift scrap pipe welded in-between the two component bicycles frames (as in this example), I fixtured the two donor frames and made linked the two with a cro-moly head-tube. This means that I also had to make a new steerer for the fork, meaning that the fork removed from the frame looks truly ridiculous: it is some 3 feet long. Here's a picture of the original bike, as of last semester:

As you can see, the top frame was a mixte. It looked pretty sweet. Sometime around the end of last semester, however, the tall-bike's short reign of terror was brought to an end. While it was locked outside of the Hampshire library, someone thought it would be a good idea to take some sort of power-tool to the lock, and then the fork and the crank. Theanonymous criminal then cut STRAIGHT THROUGH the crank spindle (hardened forged steel, am I right?), separating the drive-side crank (which a first-year later found under a bush and turned into a metal sculpture, no joke), finally stealing the front wheel.

Anyway, I finally fixed up the frame. Here's the result.

Did you catch the bend in the seat-tube? Perhaps it was just as well that I re-worked the frame, as it was bending where the non-diamond top-tube was hitting the seat-tube. Anyhow, I cut off the seat tube(s) and mitered a new 1" cro-moly tube in its place, TIGing it to the existing frame. I also fabricated gussets and TIGed them on as well. Finally, I fabricated a new monster steerer for a new fork. The head-tube arrangement is fabulous, because I've always been of the opinion that the normal amateurish tall-bike configuration makes endemic the symptom of poor headset performance; usually it's super-loose and rattles around like hell. Will's tall-bike had the headset welded to the steerer or something(!!) so you couldn't even adjust it. Anyhow, I think my design is not only stronger (solved the bending problem!) but also smoother.

2010-09-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

Working on my car at Budget, Saturday.

2010-09-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

(After a discussion about the production and contemporary reproduction of 18th Century American firearms)

Don Dupuis: In fact, the change to the American System (the push to the "American system of measurement" standardized the specifications of all components produced in an item so it could be mass-produced) in rifle-making was what made large-scale machining possible in American industry, and by extension, the assembly line.

Me: Why's that?

Don: Firstly because the demand to wage larger wars and produce large amounts of identical weapons was more pressing than other manufacturing concerns.

In other words, the techniques of capitalism as embodied in metal fabrication, the aesthetic of the assembly line: the splitting up of tasks into their smallest, standardized components so as to perfect efficiency ("Taylorism"). All this was made possible by a massive war industry.

This is actually pretty obvious, but I just like that because I'm re-reading David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity for the class I'm T.Aing, Postmodernity and Politics. The section on accumulation and Fordism is always tons of fun. Recommend.

2010-09-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

So I've finally come to a final product of my work with Chris Morrey. Chris helped me create a rubber mold of a plaster original using Smooth-On silicone rubber. The goal was to create a final concrete casting of a book-end I created. Here's the original:

I patched up some fuck-ups with plasticine. From left to right: The original, the rubber mold with a plaster mother mold (reinforcing shell), and casting #2.

Casting number one was mixed with a partially solidified batch of cement (the firsties have no idea what atmospheric water is), and a slightly larger gauge of sand, but it shows the casting dry:

2010-09-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

My [invisible] "committee" has advised me to take copious amounts of proof as to my various creations, so here goes.

Experiment: Brass inlaid in stainless steel, winter 2009

2010-09-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

As of two weeks ago, I have been apprenticing at "Budget Equipment Rental", for a mechanic by the name of Kevin. What I learn day-by-day depends on what walks in the door, which is the way I like it. Lately we've been doing a lot of car stuff, but Kevin does small engines, construction equipment, Uhaul, and all types of projects. Right now there's a Ski-Doo engine sitting in pieces on the table, a huge rubber tread for some kind of construction equipment rotting on the floor, and countless 5-gallon buckets of unidentifiable black liquid ("I'm trying to build a waste-oil burner, ok?"). Today we worked on a Toyota Camry's brakes.

Ha, just realized you can see the tread in the background. Also -- who knew air ratchets where so fun?!

Experiment

2010-09-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

Got my crappy jewelry crucible yesterday! Today I melted down nickels to cast, which are ~75% nickel, ~25% copper; a cupronickel alloy, as Don Dupuis informed me, which is derived from the German phrase "False Copper" or "Kupfernickel". Regardless of historic hate by European miners, it is a cheap metal that resists corrosion, melts (relatively) easily, and is SHINY.

I had welded a steel ingot mold earlier:

Noticed the capital "E" I milled out of the bottom. Mig'ed stock.

Here's my crucible, complete with nickels:

The setup:

My first pour was not only too small (although it was a test), but I didnt get it hot enough. This was just a torch and the crucible, no furnace or anything, and I didn't heat it long enough to get it to pour well (you need to get well over ~1700F).

After 2 more awkward pours:

And then I took the wire-wheel to it:

Experiment=SUCCESS! The "E" wasn't perfect, and I have a lot of pitting from air bubbles, but it certainly could be worse.

2010-09-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

http://monkeylikeshiny.blogspot.com/

2010-09-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

What a weird last night/morning. What are all these kids doing here? Was I that small two years ago? Will the coppers ever figure out that I'm crashing illegally in my own house?

If you'll excuse me, I have to go cut some stuff off of my car with a bolt-cutter so that it will pass inspection.

Edit: I had to use an angle grinder.

Large collection of Car Emblems/Typography!

2010-08-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

8/28/10

Day-old car rammed into by "blazed" college student. This may as well be a perfect set-up for insurance fraud because I will have her insurance pay for intensive bodywork and a tach and power-window that for some reason was taken out by a minor collision.

While making lunch, a belligerent woman opened the door to the house, ran into the kitchen, and demanded that i take her to Wal-Mart.

6 - 12PM: Limbs Bin et/al show at Rebel Sound Records, Pittsfield, MA. Excellent tunez.

2010-08-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

Your power bill will LITERALLY go through the roof... it's a scary thought because for the most part, my mail does not float or otherwise resist gravity....

In other news:

2010-08-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Columbia, MO, 8/15/2010.

Today we cut concrete with a large saw. It filled the house with gray smoke. The carbon monoxide detector went off. Then we hit it with a hammer. Then we ate chicken and potatoes.

Edit: Lindsey Rentals

2010-08-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

I am hanging out with Chris Morrey and Joanna Hearne at their beautiful home in Columbia, MO. I hope to glean information from him in the form of bronze-casting related skills and artistic inspiration. The work at the above link speaks for itself, but this man, among other things, casts solid blocks of iron in his back yard with a coke furnace. Today, however, we fixed his kid's play-set and attached latches onto his doors. This was followed by a rigorous Lego-building session with kids Leo and Desmond. This got me thinking, and a quick search came up with satisfying results. The internet provides.

See the rest here.

Of course, once you start looking for diesel cars in lego form, you cannot stop (unfortunately, this less artful lego-er made the 1980s Jetta 1.6 look like some sort of Scion. I don't really know what a Scion is, other than that it is about as aerodynamic as a brick).

Unfortunately, no Peugeot 505 could be found.

2010-07-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

2010-06-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Is it intentional that the Wal-Mart 4th-of-July-themed T-shirt display is shaped like a swastika? I say yes.

2010-06-13T18:21:00.000-07:00

I have this problem all the damn time. On the other hand, good luck finding a quality mill that measures in Millimeters. I'm pretty sure American machinists are conspiring against them because it's so much fun to say "a thou".

In other news, thanks to "Unique Upholstery" on east speedway, I have mastered the motorcycle's seat, getting new high-density foam and covering it with Italian upholstery fabric. Yay! The famous Dave Berry also came over and schooled me on cleaning engine blocks with a brush, and stealing said brushes from under the sink. The result is genius. Pictures when I figure out how to use my camera-phone.

EDIT: Painted tank, new seat, all electronics work.

2010-06-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

Just got some new shoes.

Once Alice and I got to the mall, we saw this:

I know my camera phone is not the preferred quality, so I'll explain. Why is there is a fashion runway in-between Old Navy and the food court? Do they parade the adolescents back and forth to the sound of the jeering crowd?

Thoughts, Thursday night, 5/27

2010-05-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

"Einstein and Stephen Hawking were ultimately artists and philosophers."

Hojun Song is a bit of a bricoleur. I say this because I think he realizes that his techniques of engineering, or musical style, or aesthetic decisions, are subject to his personal epistemological whims. I say "epistemological" because his subset of skills is really in service to some sort of higher interrogation into the way inwhich these methodologies appear in correspondence with one another. I'm also a big fan of the "f" holes he made out of metal and bolted on his MIDI instrument -- an aesthetic nod to the "past" of instrumentation, a nod to the division between acoustic and electric. I want to be like him when I grow up; I don't want my studied "trade" itself to be of interest, but rather the depth and feeling by which I articulate them in my work -- constantly re-arranging my skills, aesthetics and cultural memes and associations in fluidic ways.

I was talking with Professor Laura Berry tonight (over delicious ice cream!) about the dangers of "photography" itself as a trade and "genre" of art (is a technique a genre?). I took a kind of Barthesian (sp?) stance, and argued that the danger of photography lies in its position as a "frame-less" signifier. I'm not trying to normalize all of photography's methodologies -- but I merely observe a growing trend. Whenever I talk to photographers they always begin with the absolute thing-ness of that "moment" itself, or the position of the subjects, landscapes. They always seem to be trying to find a way to make the real "more visible" - they seem clouded by the absolute transparency of the frame. Maybe I'm an asshole, but I want more photographers to first grasp and attack the problem of representation before they begin to tackle the still they captured, and the things they used to capture it.

The other thing they seem to love, too, is articulating fully the means by which they capture these scenes. If we were ever close to ever talking about the problem of that capture, we are suddenly deflected onto the apparatus: lenses, CCDs, USB, darkrooms, you name it. I have always felt, in all disciplines, including all the disciplines that I maintain a presence in, that the rhetoric, the surface qualities, the apparatuses, always become the focus instead of the situations (Debordian shit coming up) they create. We're drawn into that alienation of the object itself. As an example, my peers, and course, myself in the field of theory, seem rarely interested in exploring the problem of their intense attraction to the articulation of language for the sake of language, articulation for the sake of articulation, than the things they actually articulate. Of course, it's ultimately fruitless -- as Derrida coined: "Sous Rature", and as De Man said, "The only opposition to theory is theory". There is no outside to representation, but I feel that there is little attention paid to that problem, even though post-structuralism is so popular!!

2010-05-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Everyone should go to Kent's Tools at least once. Aside from the rampant libertarianism, and the ridiculous mark-up that you can occasionally haggle down, there's a huge house jam-packed with used small engines, grinders, air tools, hydraulics, and a very impressive grab-bag of bizarre and rare hand tools of all types. When I went there today, they were luckily in the middle of a %20 off sale. Yay! However, the best part was the HUGE used endmill selection made complete by tons of collets, and lathe cutters. Now I think the neighborhood around Grant/Stone may be the future site of my Custom Motorcycle/Engine Re-Building Shop/Philosophical Clinic.

The Summer Project Begins

2010-05-24T20:41:00.000-07:00

Immediately when I arrived in Tucson, I was dead set on finding a project. Craigslist provided: a 1980 Yamaha XS400 Special II for the very special price of $400. When I arrived to check it out, it ran, (though was utterly decrepit), but for that price, I figured I couldn't really lose. The guy hadn't notarized the title yet, so I gave him half the money as a "down payment". In return, he gave me his ID, and as a result, you can see the finest South Tucson culture has to offer. We're talking I-10 and Craycroft. This guy had not one, but three cars on cinderblocks outside his mobilehome.

Once I got it off the truck, I was faced with this:

Yes, I had already taken the wheel off, in preparation for replacing the rear tube. both tires where pretty cracked, there was no tach, only one decaying mirror (still don't understand the penchant for crappy plastic mirror mounts the 80s had), and the headlight lamp didn't work. However, when I tried to extract the seat (which was covered in a Cigna health-care T-Shirt that said something like "Walk for great health!"), I got the greatest prizes. The first was the original Yamaha tools in their original bag:

The second was the motorcycle permit for whom I can only believe was the original owner; it is stamped 1980, and the cost of the permit was $5 (ha!). There was also a DMV-issued "What to do in an accident" card, on which the owner has scrawled the numbers "home" and "Betty".

Some idiot had put, for some reason, a roll of bailing wire underneath the seat. This is something that became apparent to me after is touched the battery and caused blue sparks to hit me in the face. Great. However, the engine runs great, and I'm a big fan of this model. More updates soon.

2010-04-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

The Importance of Being Vague

In other news, it turns out Paul Virilio was just me all along...

Rhizomatic

2010-04-21T18:42:00.001-07:00

Lorne brought this in today. He was a biologist before he was badass(art curator/professor), so he easily identified this object to put us Deleuzians in place. Wait a minute, I'm no Deleuzian. Articulate my control society, you intense folding nomads with organs

2010-04-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

Custom Machined tinyyyy V8

2010-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

Infamous Wall of Death

Similarity

2010-04-16T18:10:00.000-07:00

The relative similarity and simplicity of the two makes apparent the problem of visibility in industrial design. IS APPLE HITLER?

Early Typewriters

2010-03-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

I once went to a dinner party where I had a conversation with a drunk professor about machines that assist articulation, and together we affirmed "The Medium is the Message". Here goes another one.

Glissant, Abyss and Interface

2010-03-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another--from forest to city, from story to computer--at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.

...

The abyss is also a perspective of and a perspective into the unknown.

...

Not only a specific knowledge, appetite, suffering,and delight of one particular people, not only that, but knowledge of the whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of relation within the whole.

-- Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

I want to write a narrative of relation to the interface. not a relation, for the interface in itself is THE relation. Not a narrative, but a quick connection. I want to meander around the poetics of the aesthetics of capitalism, I want to create working unities in spite of the abyss.

The actual essence of The Interface is an abyss, or a series of abysses.

The first type of abyss is that of the magic of process, the way in which interfaces do away with the totality of "the visible". Look at your computer. The entirety of its actions are not wholly described by its visible components. Look at this sentence. This is merely a small example of The Interface's mode of contributing to metaphysics. The response to this can only be one -- not to respond, as I have remarked, with a discourse sounding that which can be rendered visible, "open[ed] up" or rendered articulable, but in creating working unities (not UNITY). This is the status of the bricoleur, and she is certainly a deleuzian nomad -- because the Interfacing process of "connection" isn't one that works to establish or unite territories, but quickly and effectually traverse them.

The essence of apparatuses is also that of distribution, the "distributed cognitive network" that Searle describes in The Chinese Room. "Distributed cognition" exposes the nature of articulation -- that while there may be varying territories of relatively large accumulation of "truths" within a network of articulation, there is no centre that does not immediately defy its status of centering and the method by which it centres.

Hence, the journey towards the origin, centre, or so on of the interface ends in a certain kind of emptiness. Gone is absolute unities of certainty but rather poetics of relation.

A Short Manifesto

2010-03-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”

--Donna Harroway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 171)

“The unchecked development of the capitalist system fosters the unchecked growth of abstract thinking (or forces it to be bogged down in a false concreteness)”

- Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (pp 82)

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school).

- Gille Deleuze, Postscript on Societies of Control (pp. 1)

The Interface is the reason my hands are scarred:

We have entered the age of The Interface. Perhaps we were always in it; but it has come to pass that it is made visible.
The Interface is a concept, an object, and a methodology. However, it collapses under the pressure of being solidified or objectified.
I want to resist the thing-ish-ness of this Interface, but it keeps being reinscribed.
The Interface replaces language, ideology, and discourse insomuch as it displaces relations of reference, or even relations of relations, for internalized heteroglossias. The Interface makes obvious that reference is a process of difference that relies less on actual finger-pointing than on variable methods of making difference occur.
The Interface does not expose, but connect. The Interface does not reveal, but internalizes. The Interface reveals neither dualism nor singularity, but discusses the relative merits of each.
The Interface collapses the concepts of "integral" and "peripheral" in order to reveal not the variable strength of connection or the distance of component parts, but the qualitative nature of that connection.
The Interface treats both Subject and Object indiscriminately as its own. It draws their relation as internal specimens. It is what is left in relative linguistics after De Man: The Other is everything that The Interface internalizes and so is the Self.
The Interface writes the eulogy of evolution.
The Interface determines what is utilitarian. In other words: it articulates what works (and it works when it articulates). It naturalizes processes. However, The Interface's irony is that it exposes the impossibility of anything ever working.
The Interface sometimes embodies the anxiety of needing to archive everything.
The Interface is an aesthetic augmentation. It is an image that exposes the image that exposes the process. It is the form that follows the function, or rather, doesn't.
The Image is visible and articulable, merged, yet it reveals the limitations of each.
The Interface makes things visible, yet it also makes Visibility visible; the more we recognize the illumination of "things" we realize the gaze that follows the illumination.
The Interface is the one and only tool of the cyborg. Even more importantly, it is the thought that came before the first tool itself; it articulates "pure" implementation in that it attempts to isolate it uniquely.
The Interface "grew" humanism (The interface grew "growing"). The Interface made possible a separation between humans and "non-humans". The Interface also made possible the rendering of other (now-humans) as objects. Therefore, The Interface is eugenics, it is the Jewish question, it is the logic of apartheid. The Interface reveals that the human was always Bestand. But: The Interface is the Metric System, it is Metaphysics, it is organic farming, it is psychoanalysis.
The Interface reveals not its technique of enframing, but the endless nature of the search for that origin. The Interface makes available the image of the many enframents - it is as though one is in-between two large mirrors, attempting to find the object being reflected. Or, alternatively: what is a camera filming a television showing that same film filming?
The Interface collects associations as a collector collects not objects, but the collective associations they represent.
Assemblages are Interfaces because they don't simply create an object subject to langue, they create the conditions of possibility for connection and for meaning. Deleuze's literary theory accounts for a composition but not for the very event of that connection.
Cybernetics was partially right. The medium is the message, at least, tangentially. The conditions of possibility for an overlapping of intensities creates a content.
The Interface is measured by Event (then this, of course, defies the objective of measurement).
The Interface makes The Bricoleur both widely possible and widely necessary. The Bricoleur is the search for a certain kind of Interface.
The goal of The Interface is to cease to exist; but it is not a death drive: it is a drive to naturalize itself in the ontology it incorporated.
The Interface is another proud producer of truths. The Interface produces worlds of logic where truths appear.
When I was younger, I attempted to make psychoanalysis create me an Interface. Now The Interface is, for me, a psychoanalysis.

This is an Interface. The goal of this Interface is not to solidify meaning, but to create a collection of disparate concepts which at once make a whole and then re-coagulate into singualar entities. Structure is inevitable, yet this Interface will continue.

Response to Badiou; Appearance and Machine

2010-02-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

After reading the beginning of "Logic of Worlds", I'm afraid I must supplement Badiou a little bit. In the prelude to the book, he outlines his materialist ontology -- the appearance of truths within worlds and the distinct relevance of truths to worlds, etc. He stops every couple of pages for a compelling quote or two. The most famous of course, is:

There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.

Truths move in-between distinct points; "bodies" and "languages" echoes Deleuze's "visible" and "articulable" in that they plot points of relation in a kind of compromised materialism. "Truths" embody these relations which Deleuze spent so much time on; the "other" of Body and language -- thought; or as we see in the most compelling example in the prelude, "horseness" through the ages, through different worlds.

Badiou gives the subject primary power in bringing truths to light; producing and realizing truths within a world. Truths are defined by their absolute otherness, in-between, while connected to the points of bodies and languages. In my upcoming essay "A squared circle", I take a kind of anti-materialist stance in the history of the production of objects and events in industrial capitalism. So the subject holds the key to the production of these truths. However, for me, appearance and event is precisely the way inwhich I plot "machine" as another producer of truths. "Machinations" are precisely the process by which events are produced; but these events do not testify to the absolute hegemony of the subject over truths, but the ambiguous intensity of that production. In the relation between "man" and "machine", where does the origin of event originate? The machine embodies a certain realm of mystery, a certain relation of language to body, and these to the truth of worlds.

Confession

2010-01-20T19:27:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that biopolitical power's "confessional" technique is useful not because it creates essential knowledge, but it creates politically and practically useful linguistic structures which subjects position themselves in. Ultimately, Foucault's critique and scepticism of psychiatry is solidified by a ultimate disciplinary moment in which the patient herself internalizes and validates the impending structure of the analysis -- "Yes, I am crazy! Yes, I have a problem"

This may have been really obvious to everyone else, but in studying the difference between what [Crawford calls] the difference between "Naming" and "doing", it becomes important to unpack even "statitistics" (as in biopower....); representations that are supposedly essential facts or measurements...... blah blah blah. I'm writing a sick essay about Form/Function, and the intersection between industrial design and linguistics... email me if you have any ideas or want to hear me talk your ear off with useless crap for hours.

Also.... I'm contemplating putting this sick CB360 engine into a new project. Anyone have any parts laying around? Of course not. Only two people read this blog.

15627485798653623142

2009-10-27T06:24:00.001-07:00

I stepped on my computer and the screen is all cracked. Since I'm obviously a cyborg, it's so deeply imbedded in my sense of self that I'm starting to feel a little cracked myself.

"Green" Steam Engine

2009-10-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

We are building this-- the first steam engine made in the last 75 years, using a new and improved design based on contemporary parts & technology. Don't worry, it's not necessarily "green" in the politically charged sense, it's only the inventor's last name.

Edit: But I don't think it's a coincidence lost on him.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

2009-06-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

FUUUUCK -- a free DOLPHIN EXPERIENCE? Sorry all you wanna-be anarcho-folk-punk-whatevers. If you thought "Juno" was shitty, you're in for even more embarrassment...

Obama/Biden Katana Slayer Contest 2009

2009-06-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

Though obvious to us high-minded intellectuals, this makes rudely apparent that diagnostic marketing (and perhaps "industry"?) is about manufacturing the problem rather than solution. Moreover, isn't it odd how imaginary this is? Even if you were "scummy", ("If you could see it..."), it must be imagined in the present... very surreal.

Discipline, Children, Leashes, and Collection

2009-05-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

My work at the Tucson Children's Museum has always been a fascinating first-hand look into the intersection between theory and life. Being a general dick (that's a theoretical term), I maintain a constant ironic commentary in my head, which in turn helps the hours pass.

I've served alongside hired "princess" actors for little girl's birthday parties (What the hell is a "Princess"?), meticulously cleaned plastic oranges, kicked alcoholics off of our lawn, led 10-year-old drum solos, made popcorn, and dressed up in a seven-foot-tall Curious George costume while some of the richest people in town came up to me and sat in my lap.

I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid, but It wasn't until I started volunteering there during my teens that I really realized why I liked it. The Tucson Children's Museum isn't themed in any way, shape or form: it's an odd collection of exhibits, activities, and festivities. Its general slogan, "Learning through play", is as free-form as its ambiances, and recognizes the odd collection it houses within its walls. Exhibits include a giant, robotically-moving T-Rex, a fake Farmer's Market (including plastic fruit), a refurbished and stationary police motorcycle, a historic collection of Mickey mouse paraphernalia, and a large room filled primarily with board games made 100 times their normal size. I do like kids - It's not that I don't - but I love that its weird and eerie insides replicate a un-structured and unassuming place for kids to do what they do, and to interact with weird and interesting stuff that isn't trying to tell them what to do.

If I have any critical Pedagogy, it's "Don't fuck with your kids". This morning, I sold admission to a middle-aged woman carrying her oversized purse in one hand and her child's motherfucking leash in the other. "What the hell is the deal with that?" I always ask myself; but it's not any logic you can teach to these mothers, who pride themselves on keeping their toddlers (and sometimes much older children) within two feet of them at all times (in response to my last post, it also seems to relate children to animals; derogatory?). As she fumbled with her wallet, she saw she had no choice to let her child go from her for at least a moment. Eyeing the end of the "leash" where it ended on her child's back, where it connected with a monkey-shaped "backpack" (that everyone, including the child held in check by the leash, knew was but a ploy), she turned to the leashed child's 4-year-old sibling. "Can you please hold your sister's.." and she fumbled for a moment; I could tell she didn't know what to call the leash. In the act of me staring at her, I realized that, at least for a second, she had to confront whatever insane idea she had about child-leashing. "...Tail", she finally said; but I could tell that something had occurred.

In an unrelated staff-meeting, my brethren and I (collectively, the "Discovery Explorers"), were given sheets of paper explaining what appeared to be an infantile sociological method for structuring activities and children's play. "What kind of Play are these kids taking part in?" asked a Xeroxed sheet, and underneath was a picture of two babies dressed in fireman's outfits, or something similar. The briefing continued, issuing different "types of play" and adult interaction: "structured" and "unstructured" play, "cooperative" and "uncooperative", etc. I hate to be the fool who says it, but WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE? What is this incesent need for scientific discourse? When will my job be indistinguishable from the amateur child psychoanalyst? Do I need to "understand" children for them to have "fun"? Do they have to "learn" in the scientific way our all-knowing faculty have advised? To cut to the chase, fuck the man; "Technically useful" discourses are killing children every day. It's been proven by science.

(Fig. 1: Child reenacts scenes from "Birth of the Clinic")

Cat Food

2009-05-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

In the last 48 hours, I've seen 3 pet food commercials (taking advantage of my mother's cable TV) that decry the "tastiness" of their cat-food, using describers such as "all-natural salmon" and "delicious vegetables". I'm sure it's old news, but isn't there something about pet products that calls for an anthropomorphizing lens? To have the happiest cat, you must be the cat... This is in stark contrast to the "scientific" method (shades of Purina), which talks about the healthiness of your cat's diet and the scientifically-proven method by which the food will strengthen your cat. (Your pet becomes the observed. Subject versus object? When is it fruitful to qualify your cat in this subjectifying way? Hasn't it always been done? Yes, but it does strike me oddly. Perhaps the blurring and de-centering of subjectivity has been realized quite early in this stage of the anthropomorphization of the animal. Old-school treatment of animals was a "Purina" treatment; a scientific, objective, and distanced observation where the animal was personified but not subjectified, perhaps? Now the cat becomes the subject...

Other News:

The cartridge bottom bracket on my Bianchi actually partially fell out. What the hell? Now I have this damn piece of metal clinking every time my crank makes a rotation.

More later,

Elliott

Hello.

2009-05-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

Beginning?