sus

Well-known member
Re conceptronica, it's a music of maps. One of the reasons why it's not interesting is that the map isn't reality. Of course you need the map to make sense of reality. You need a layout of the territory to keep things organized in your mind. Let's say that conceptual thinking is something you do to map out reality, you have to reduce and simplify. You are swayed. Sometimes, you will make impose sense upon things that have none. Reality is granular, not systematized.

Living in the map means you're living imprisoned. Your world becomes governed by concepts. You discard the reality that don't fit the sense. You reject the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

What's great about someone like Picasso or William Blake is that they de-familiarize the things you thought you knew and make you see them for what they are for the first time again. The nature of each thing individually, not how you've transfixed it in your map. Morton Feldman does this for me as well. It erases my map, liberates my reality.

Great post, just wanna draw attention to that.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Re conceptronica, it's a music of maps. One of the reasons why it's not interesting is that the map isn't reality. Of course you need the map to make sense of reality. You need a layout of the territory to keep things organized in your mind. Let's say that conceptual thinking is something you do to map out reality, you have to reduce and simplify. You are swayed. Sometimes, you will make impose sense upon things that have none. Reality is granular, not systematized.

Living in the map means you're living imprisoned. Your world becomes governed by concepts. You discard the reality that don't fit the sense. You reject the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

What's great about someone like Picasso or William Blake is that they de-familiarize the things you thought you knew and make you see them for what they are for the first time again. The nature of each thing individually, not how you've transfixed it in your map. Morton Feldman does this for me as well. It erases my map, liberates my reality.
Is this what hyperreality means, to you? It would make a lot of sense, the "hyper" meaning that one is over-analyzing, over-thinking. And it is as if the map is hovering, so to speak, over the territory.

Albeit more of a literal description of an abstract concept, all the talk of spatial relations as if we are talking about physical objects and not metaphysical objects.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Good thread. This kind of spatial metaphor is irresistible really and also comes up. You might talk of scientific pioneers for instance, discovering and opening up new territories to be mapped and exploited and the same can be said for culture.

The sense of a dark space we venture into, feeling our way. The possibility field. Actualising this or that set of potentials. All this is basic to our systems of metaphor.

the first real moment of psychedelia, it's official inauguration, comes with Rimbaud's Lettres du Voyant

"The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed - and the supreme scholar! - because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!"

this is where it frees itself from all tradition (including occult and heretical ones) and goes rogue.

They will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
It’s the earliest Anglo-Saxon (spews in mouth a bit) map of the world. Still pretty cool. I mean it’s a close approximation, given the chronology. Italy maxing things out land-mass-wise, France and Iberia getting in on the act too. The islands are the most beguiling.
 

sus

Well-known member
Feynman opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject. [...] Clearing the white spots on the map.
 

catalog

Well-known member
"clearing the white spots on the map" is v.suspicious IMO.

not sure about this signature youve adopted, its a bit close to the bone
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Entry 11.11.2020 7pm PST

I think one of the reasons I am psychically drifting in the direction in which I seem to be, is that I am constantly conceiving of formulae, and then identifying with them - identifying as a system of theories. Strictly understanding yourself as a highly complex physical machine. But it heightens the degree to which you mistake the map for the territory, seeing as you exert more and more cognitive energy doing the mapping, referring to your history, relying on previous thoughts, building upon them.

That is to say, part of the reason I may come across as machinic or faux-machinic is because I am constantly carrying all this gear around, including a psychic machine by which I can bifurcate the psyche so as to result in a schism of a cluster into two, a schism of the valuational center of gravity, such that no one reign supremely. It can be felt as an exercising of an antithetical voice.

I'm explicitly treating this as a journal entry, not only as a joke, but because my actual journal entries were increasingly pronounced as if they were directed to an audience, so naturally this makes a nice medium.

It had a very seismic effect when I first became conscious of it as such. It was right before I transferred schools to Chicago, which was largely an intentional move to pluck me from one cultural neighborhood and place me on another, a sort of grafting. (edit: two years ago. Time had already began to dilate.)

At a point when I was frequently writing in my pocket notebook, such that it became a a sort of history, I suddenly underwent turbulence. I had become convinced that this writing was to be looked back on through vitrines, and studied. So I then felt, rather palpably, that there was now a passionate crowd taking my word as gospel, as well as a high court of critics who could just as extremely negate me.

Also, I couldn't be sure that I was writing something because it was a thought of value, or because I got caught up trying to impress the audience and serve them. Whom am I writing for? Am I putting on a show instead of cleaving to the true? How can I be sure that the entries in this journa get progressivel better, as they should be, if I could be Am I being distracted by some hyperactive social organ? Am I yielding too much to the inner corporation of suits?

I have been gradually accustomed to this, once the initial turbulence of that day, still extraordinarily etched into my memory, subsided. That was also the night of perhaps my first revelatory psychic experience, felt as a deep identification with a highly ordered system that transforms itself by dissolving into the static from it emerged, an untethering from the ego, a dip into the higher order. I speak in religious terms where my scientific knowledge fails me.

A central axiom here is that the fitness that is popular is not necessarily even near the fitness that is optimal. The development of the-popular-in-search-of-the-optimal would almost be random, it would be stochastic, as far as I can tell. Using your past as your memory to chip away at the undecrypted future.

as an aside, perhaps the ability to revise your memory/history can prove to be a lucrative mutation. Epigenetics, retroviruses, etc? In other words, perhaps the ability to switch between a set of positions, in order to attain different perspectives of your history, could allow us to determine radically different modes of processing the world.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Hmmm, yes, I see what you mean.

May still be worthwhile though, you might find some hitherto unforseen connections and you'll get a sense of space/topography.

Could you work in 'rounds' or 'units' ie have say 4-7 core concepts and each of them has 4-7 more, something like that? Could go on of course, each of the 2nd round of 4-7s could have more 4-7s.

Try it on paper first but if it gets very big very quick, let me know, there's quite good software nowadays that you could use. but paper always best initially.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
A mate had a home office 20 odd years ago and hosted multiplayer LAN sessions of Age of Empires. 5-6 pc’s, all facing the walls so you couldn’t see the screens of your opponents.

When the games started, each player got allocated a zone, with unmapped areas in black and a ‘no looking and cheating’ rule for the first 30mins so you couldn’t spy on who was where.

The crap technology aspect (which was the foundation for building an army) had a balloon feature. First person to get that could see more of the map. Immense fun. People peaking over shoulders, sending kebab orders at 4am and the nuclear weapon option if your crew had war elephants.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
He's our machine.
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borzoi

Well-known member
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the maps in thief: the dark project force you to think spatially and really master where everything is if you want to get good at the game, always thought that was sick compared to modern video games which just hold you by the hand at all times.
 
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