martian hiatus

martian hiatus

blög - page 5

  • suns

    we know that if we are kings we are supposed to be the sun, everyone from akhnaten to louis xiv thought that, it is a staple of vitalist power to pretend (in both senses) to be the generative principle itself, the very possibility of growth. and ever since popular sovereignty we have been supposed to be kings (emphasis on supposed).

    but i was walking around in the mountain prairies the other year gawking at the fields teeming with amazing flowers, and i realized something else about us<—>the sun: that maybe we are all also like suns in that everything happens, and in happening it can be happening for our eyes; our eyes are like backward suns, receptacles for the generative principle itself.

    the sun sends light to plants, and plants strive upward back toward the sun and its infinite light, in the direction of what feeds them. but in doing so they also swatch open into the spaces where everything and one is, and this opening out and filling out of the spaces we happen to inhabit, it is just that it is hard not to say that this is also a striving into the infinite darkness of our eyes, not merely a performance for eyes, but a raw and visceral driving at them, into them, whether or not the eyes or their owners realize it.

    this is not meant in a egomaniacal way (the eye is impersonal), nor in an anthropocentric way (there are other eyes), and the feeling that happened to me on the prairie was not at all akin to the usual self-interested leering of anthropos, it was a wholly depersonalized experience, and i experienced it as a stepping back out of ‘my’ vision to ‘see’ these interactions independently of individual agents and their positions. maybe it would be better to say that our eyes are usurping and backward suns. the black disc intervenes to capture the light being bounced back to the sun, intercepts it. it absorbs all, which it then processes into knowledges and informations and evaluations such that it can then pretend (in both senses) to be the generative principle itself.

    so imagine you are a sun, negative or positive or both, you are a sun, and there is no longer any earth time, which depends on that tiny planet’s rotation as it orbits you. there are no days, no nights, no lunar months, no seasons, no years and no possibility of eclipse, of blinking, there is only burning without measure, and absorbing without measure, neither of which now occupy a point, but an indefinite field. you face in all directions, and stay the (non-existent) course.

  • mkv-this

    i recently wrote a small text generation programme called mkv-this. it’s really just a wrapper for the markovify python library (which is what powers all your favorite twitter bots), a way of passing the options it provides to an end user.

    you can feed it text files, a directory (tree) of text files, URLs or PDFs, or a combination of these, and it will output new texts depending on the options you select.

    i have been feeding it my journal, my dream diary, my email sent folder, my notes and scrapbooks, as well as books by other ppl, etc. the types of juxtpositions, derailings and re-threadings it comes up with can sometimes resemble haruspicy, and often also utter trash, which is also great.

    the code (which is very bad but i’m slowly getting better), as well as details on how to install and use the progamme, are available at https://git.disroot.org/mousebot/mkv-this.

  • hangar


    picture yrself in a great hall, a hangar, built of alien alloys. picture your friends, families, loved ones, dear ones, communities, comrades, kin, your ppl and their ppl and their ppl and so on going about their livings, their daily commerce with small lime green plants and yellow grains and seeds from the outside, picture their handy creations kocked up from wood or clay or metal. picture their stories and theatres and histories and astrophyisicses. now picture an immense black form, a kind of solid matte box or crate that is the exact form of the hangars interior, now picture it filling the hangar, now picture vertical ppl celebrating something inside it.

  • metadata as history


    my thought today upon waking: will metadata, which is a waste product of machine—machine interactions, become the historical record, ie externalised or technical human ‘memory’. ie will it (functionally if not literally) replace the library/archive: this person was here, that person was there, said this to this person, did that to that person, manipulated this, re-coded that, exploited these people, screwed those ones, invented this new value-extraction-from-living-flesh app which saved us all, ergo made civilization, programmed this satellite community’s shoddy air system, modified x gene in their lab-grown meat, sent the ppl in that other satellite to their deaths in space in the name of fearless technological progress but actually for the insurance money, etc… and this info wouldn’t be in a library, in the sense of a funcionally separated/localised institution, it would just be backed up in the logs on the machines running whatever different kinds of infrastructure.

    (more...)

  • store visit

    i was walking away from a polluted urban stream lined by peppercorn trees or willows and into a fairly large and empty urban distribution centre car park. and although outside, and although i just walked out of a polluted urban stream, i’m carrying a purple helium-filled merchandise balloon from a store, holding it by the knot. and then i walk ‘into’ another ‘store’, but its all outdoors, in a car park, there are no products on display, no walls, no cash registers, just a single uniformed shop assistant. i get nervous because she will see me as i try to climb over the thief-proof exit, which is one of those electic detectors you see at the exits of media stores, but this one is also fitted with a 7ft. high pane of plexiglass blocking the gap between the two detectors (which i guess means no one may exit the store legitimately because all customers are theives?), and this person-sized transparent wall is surrounded by nothing, no other obstacle, its just there out in the open of the car park, blocking only the footpath. i try to climb it, but as i near the top i realise it is too precarious atop it to shunt myself over, there are no footholds, just smooth plastic. i know ill lose my balance and the single shop assistant will notice me if i struggle. so i ease myself down and explain i bought the purple helium-filled merchandise balloon from another outlet, and the woman escorts me away in some direction toward something else.