Two fragments re what I wrote briefly below on things that cannot be imagined. The first from Vlatka:
"i remember coming across some guy's site - an ongoing list/catalogue he was keeping - along the lines of 'things the internet couldnt find today'. i think it started with a few things he was googling and the search came with 'sorry. no results' - type thing. and then he started trying to come up with things to type into search engines which it would produce no hits for. i dont know why this came to mind - clearly such a different universe from your 'cannot be imagined' things... but the fact that the internet cant come up with it at all, anywhere, must mean that it's somehow not imaginable...
I was also thinking about the relation of what can be imagined to what can be said - is that the same thing necessarily? as in: if you can say it, does that automatically make it imaginable... in the sense that words alone conjure it up, make it happen. or is the 'cannot be imagined' more like something that cant even be put into words... - thus your empty notebook..."
The second from my friend A.:
Liked a lot your thoughts of the person with the two identical notebooks - especially as I am working on a book/dvd-project titled un_imaginable... I like the clarity of this from a text by Jill Bennet:
"The unimaginable materializes as a condition of shock, trauma or surprise in the face of an event that is unforeseen, hitherto unimagined. As Jacques Ranciere observes, the discourse of the unimaginable is only ever 'authorized' by the event's having happened. Paradoxically, it is named as such only once its occurrence renders it imaginable. ....There is no recapturing a state of unimaginability; the event, once it has occurred, becomes impossible to reimagine in the terms that rendered it unimaginable. At no point, then - before or after the fact - is unimaginability concretely knowable and representable..."
One of those times when a thought gets into your head as you're waking and won't shake loose. Something on the edge of a dream, but in this case more a semi-conscious linguistic spiral, half-formed in the mind. The thought is of two identical notebooks, one titled/named "things that can be imagined" the other "things which cannot be imagined". As the thought (which owes some money to Borges I guess) unravels (ravels?) it's about a person with these two notebooks, constantly making notes in the former, but with the growing conviction that his best work is in the latter. I'm unclear if this second book - of "things which cannot be imagined" - is just empty or if it contains examples of in some way paradoxical or self-canceling images ("a dull light that is blindingly bright"). More likely it seems that it's empty.
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Vlatka sent me a link to Wiliam Lamson's work. There's so much interesting stuff at his site I can't figure out what might be my favourite piece there - the animations/video loops are very cool - short, fragments many involving a simple action, mechanical trick or camera process that generates an enigmatic or blank event - balloons that burst each other, a foot that seems to be dragging a camera, a body that moves along the ground.
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Awake for more than two hours and still wondering what I am doing exactly.
Listening to Crystal Castles, esp Alice Practice and Airwar which is helping my feeling of distraction. Also (headed in a more mellow direction) listening to Santogold.
Graham wrote, with some nice thoughts/comments following on from the stuff I posted yesterday about Sight is the Sense...
I liked your notes on the flatness of the narrative and the implications for a performer as flesh and blood archivist of that text. I read the text with a mounting hope that I wouldn't find a narrative presence in the landscape, but be trusted to be present there without signposts - and the text doesn't disappoint for that. No signs in the snow.
One of my favourite, favourite descriptions is from a letter Rimbaud wrote about crossing the Alps on foot:
"No more shadows above, below or on either side, despite the enormous objects all about. No more road, precipices, gorge or sky: nothing but white to dream, to touch, to see or not to see, since it's impossible to look up from the white botheration that one supposes to be the middle of the path....Without the shadow that one is oneself, and without the telegraph poles that mark the hypothetical road, one would be as confused as a sparrow in an oven."
I don't know whether that's more apt for performer or viewer here. Both, hopefully. Fellow travellers.
I was excited to read about this project - TBT [Time Based Text] made by the free software programmer, media artist and activist Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and the artists group JoDi.
"The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing/typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised... The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities."
In the Nettime list archive there's a short interview with Jaromil about the software which for points the way to a dynamic exploration of writing processes, especially those of editing and rewriting which I've been pursuing to a certain extent, and by other (much less technical) means in projects like Long Relay and City Changes. TBT [Time Based Text] (open source and licensed GNU GPL) can be downloaded from the TBT project page here. I'll be curious to give it a go.
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Meanwhile a week or two back Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I was enthusing about greatly back here in January. There's a short interview with him at the Amazon blog plus an excerpt from the sci-fi novel he's now writing titled Dark America.
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