Dematerialisation.

luka

luka

Well-known member
"The Futurhythmachine has 2 opposing tendencies, 2 synthetic drives, the Soulful & the Postsoul."

"from the outset, this Postsoul Era has been characterised by an extreme indifference towards the human"

"rejecting today's ubiquitous emphasis on black sound's necessary ethical allegiance to the street"

"the new mindstates Machine Music is inducing"

"Today's cyborgs are too busy manufacturing themselves across time0space to disintensify themselves with all the Turing Tests for transatlantic, transeuropean and transafrican consciousness: affirmation, keeping it real, representing, staying true to the game, respect due, staying black. Alien music deliberately fails all these tests, these putrid corpses of petrified moralism. it treats them with utter indifference; it replaces them with nothing whatsoever."
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
padraig (u.s.) said:
but you're talking about what is "the human" or "living", it's hard to define
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This feels like a typical academic trap and it only matters from an scientific pov. This approach when it comes to matters of the soul is basically barking up the wrong tree. It can't be defined clearly. Either you feel it or you don't. And I don't believe that you don't really know what I mean by those terms. Surely instinctively you do?

padraig (u.s.) said:
there's a reason the social sciences are heavily reliant on statistics and modeling
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And the same reason is why there's not a lot of use trying to approach this subject from that angle. It only obfuscates something which is relatively simple.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
What Marx was on about when he talked about the assembly line and it's effects on the carpenters who once built pieces of furniture from scratch, who were suddenly just building one small piece, totally detached from the finished product, is kind of the same principle at work in the dematerialization process. Disconnect.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
it's almost like there's a bigger process that's assembling the assemblers, operating at a higher level than individual human agency. carpenters become production inputs to a machine that builds machines that build ...
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
vimothy said:
it's almost like there's a bigger process that's assembling the assemblers, operating at a higher level than individual human agency. carpenters become production inputs to a machine that builds machines that build ...
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that's one of the assumptions built into the premise as you well know.

ludic universe. god playing god playing god playing...
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
more Eshun
"machines don't distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite. Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of emotional spectra"

and Simon Reynolds from his big autotune article (which you should read)

"Related to the complaints about falseness and impersonality is the accusation that Auto-Tune, especially in its overtly robotic-sounding uses, lacks soul. But you could argue the absolute reverse: that the sound of Auto-Tune is hyper-soul, a melodrama of micro-engineered melisma. Sometimes when I listen to Top 40 radio, I think, “This doesn’t sound like how emotion feels.” But it’s not because it is less-than-human. It’s because it’s superhuman, the average song crammed with so many peaks and tremors. "

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
as an aside, i think, (and was reminded of this hearing a song on the radio in a bookshop this afternoon) one of the things voice does in regard to emotion, is it tells you where the emotion is situated. you can sing a note that come from deep in the gut, or can sing through a constricted throat, for instance. it's a commonplace in psychotherapy that emotions have a geographical location within the body, wherever that may be. becasue we can reverse engineer the singers voice as we hear it we can place where the note came from and it gives us that same hit, vibrating in sympathetic resonance.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
my feeling is that it is not more or less feeling, it is a different realm of affect entirely.
i don't think, for instance, the riff from trans-europe express expresses anything you could express with an acoustic instrument. it is an electronic emotion for an electronic age.


im not at all hostile to john eden's suggestion that 'alienation' is the most accurate word here.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
desires which have no hope whatsoever of fulfillment in other words- what do they feel like and what sound do they make when they sing?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
or what about the sound of a need which is not conscious. how does that need express itself? again, what might that sound like?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
or, to make it more specific, to be in love with someone who you can never meet. to consume their image, their voice, the videos and the tweets and status updates, but never able to make them step out of the screen and become real.


or to have friends, good friends, your best friends, who live thousands of miles away, who you have never met and never will meet.

what would that sound like?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
and what is the specific emotional valence of a skype call to a loved one in another country?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
what does it feel like investing emotional and intellectual energy into getting an online disccusion of 'dematerialisation' going and not quite being able to get the idea across?

what is the feeling of a classic 5* tweet going unnoticed and unliked.

what is the feeling of scrolling through instagram and feeling ugly and inadequate?

what about being the victim of online bullying as a teenager?


all these experiences have offline/real world analogues of course but i think it's far to say there is also a difference, they land differently
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
the frictionless quality of online life is sometimes experienced as the lack of resistance (click a button and its there!) and sometimes it is experienced as the inability to gain purchase. the inability to affect anything at all.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
or perhaps think about the voyeuristic tendency the internet encourages and intensifies, most glaringly, but far from exclusively, with porn. think of the implications of 'cyber-stalking' in all its forms, from the relatively benign downwards.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
pattycakes_ said:
Surely instinctively you do?
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I probably have an idea but I don't know exactly. to examine a thing you have to know what it is first.

it's not simple at all. look no further than the inability of any religion ever to arrive at a single universal doctrine free of schism.

"feeling it" isn't a useless criteria but it is for trying to learn why or what or how something is, including the soul

my interest is in the those built-in assumptions, in the metastructures and processes vimothy pointed to, the forces operating on the carpenters

to me that's the point of asking these questions
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
like, luka mentioned divination as a touchstone

my interest in divination would be how it developed and why humans utilized it, not in the divining itself

the soul, like god, is a human-created concept - why did humans create it? what is it shorthand for? hard questions to answer.

I see that I'm fundamentally not interested in the questions luka wants to ask here so like Eden I will leave you guys to it
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
padraig is a fact man. he likes to know things;
whats the highest waterfall in the world?
what's the longest river in South America?
what is the GDP of Egypt?

facts are great but you cant have a conversation with them. the best you can do is swap them, like baseball cards.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
no, I like to try to understand the processes behind individual facts. that is a big difference.

facts are tools, or inroads of investigation

I don't think your methods are invalid, they're just not what I'm interested in.
 
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