Dictionary of The Contemporary City

http://parole.aporee.org/work/index.php3?char=a



parole - a project of gruppo A12(I), Udo Noll(D) and Peter Scupelli(USA/I)

"There once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum."

-Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself

FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION Mark Fisher

http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FC2s9.htm#_ftn5

The ficto-theoretical elaboration of the concept of  anorganic continuum is what makes Ballard so crucial a resource for Gothic Materialism. Ballard’s schizophrenic gaze recapitulates what the set designers of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari had produced - a radical continuity between supposedly organic bodies and inorganic landscape, emerging in a refusal to distinguish figure from (back)ground. But, this time, there is no framing narrative that will attribute the perception to a disordered mind. Instead, Ballard replaces psychology - and Oedipal psychoanalysis - with what is, in effect, a geo-traumatics. At its most radical, this implies a a metapsychology stripped of all vestigial organicism, an analytic procedure complementary to Deleuze-Guattari’s stratoanalysis, whose object is not persons but landscapes; all psychology collapses back into geology.  “Ballard often talks about the conflict between geometry and posture, the competition between the animate and inanimate and the way the inanimate often creeps in and wins.”*



* Eshun, Motion Capture [Interview], Abstract Culture 2, Winter 97

Robert Smithson - Entropy And The New Monuments

On rising to my feet, and peering across the green glow of the Desert,
I perceived that the monument against which I had slept was but one
of thousands. Before me stretched long parallel avenues, clear to the
far horizon of similar broad, low pillars.
John Taine (Erick Temple Bell) "THE TIME STREAM"


Many architectural concepts found in science-fiction have nothing to do with science or fiction, instead they suggest a new kind of monumentality which has much in common with the aims of some of today's artists. I am thinking in particular of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt, Dan Flavin, and of certain artists in the "Park Place Group." The artists who build structured canvases and "wall-size" paintings, such as Will Insley, Peter Hutchinson and Frank Stella are more indirectly related. The chrome and plastic fabricators such as Paul Thek, Craig Kauffman, and Larry Bell are also relevant. The works of many of these artists celebrate what Flavin calls "inactive history" or what the physicist calls "entropy" or "energy-drain." They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse." In a rather round-about way, many of the artists have provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness. The "blackout" that covered the Northeastern states recently, may be seen as a preview of such a future. Far from creating a mood of dread, the power failure created a mood of euphoria. An almost cosmic joy swept over all the darkened cities. Why people felt that way may never be answered.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock. Flavin makes "instant-monuments"; parts for "Monument 7 for V.Tatlin" were purchased at the Radar Fluorescent Company. The "instant" makes Flavin's work a part of time rather than space. Time becomes a place minus motion. If time is a place, then innumerable places are possible. Flavin turns gallery-space into gallery time. Time breaks down into many times. Rather than saying, "What time is it?" we should say, "Where is the time?" "Where is Flavin's Monuments?" The objective present at time seems missing. A million years is contained in a second, yet we tend to forget the second as soon as it happens. Flavin's destruction of classical time and space is based on an entirely new notion of the structure of matter.
more

Marc Augé - Non-Places (Non-Lieux), p. 31, The Near and the Elsewhere.

"So it is with an image of excess - excess of time - that we can start defining the situation of super-modernity, while suggesting that, by the very fact of its contradictions, it offers a magnificent field for observation and, in the full sense of the term, for anthropological research. We could say of supermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose observe represents postmodernity : the positive of a negative. From the viewpoint of supermodernity, the difficulty of thinking about time stems from the over-abundance of events in the contemporary world, not from the collapse of an idea of progress which - at least in the caricatured forms that make its dismissal so very easy - has been in a bad way for a long time; the theme of imminent history, of history snapping at out heels (almost as immanent in each of our day-to-day existences) seems like a premiss of the theme of meaning or non-meaning of history. For it is our need to understand the whole of the present that makes it difficult for us to give meaning to the recent past; the appearance, among individuals in contemporary societies, of a positive demand for meaning (of which the democratic ideal is doubtless and essential aspect)may offer a paradoxical explanation of phenomena which are sometimes interpreted as the signs of a crisis of meaning; for example, the disappointments of all the world's disappointed: disappointment with socialism, with liberalism, and (before long) with post-communism."

dream-like things, in the dawn half-light, their small breaths gleaming, white plastic shining like white marble.

watching the grey light becoming more like day

simulacra of simulacra of simulacra.


(William Gibson, Pattern Recognition)