Dematerialisation.

Today Software basically is work in progress. Despite not being 40 yet (but soon enough) I do remember a time when you bought a finished software product. At some point in the early 2000s - when there was enough broadspeed connections available - you didn't get a "finished software product" any longer, instead a stream of update after update. In some cases a necessary thing regarding security, but also a way to make the costumers your beta-testers.

firefinga said:

Today Software basically is work in progress. Despite not being 40 yet (but soon enough) I do remember a time when you bought a finished software product. At some point in the early 2000s - when there was enough broadspeed connections available - you didn't get a "finished software product" any longer, instead a stream of update after update. In some cases a necessary thing regarding security, but also a way to make the costumers your beta-testers.

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It's the same with games and even music and film too. It's an ongoing process. Kanye repeatedly 'fixing' his albums. DLC. Lucas, Coppola and Scott continually updating their films and re releasing them. Remasters.

sadmanbarty said:

the popularity of the ufc is counter-dematerialisation. the theatre of the visceral. audiences reviling in empathising with physical sensation.

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An image which stuck in my head for whatever reason was this guy streaming a live UFC event on Twitch but sitting in the corner with a controller pretending to play it so that it looked like a gaming stream and wouldn't get pulled for copyright infringement.

gek-opel said:

dHarry: Film is, in a way, deterritorialized and then re-territorialized from the product of the business practises of Hollywood into all image making and role playing in the world...
You are right film itself is almost the ghost, the revenant, between being and unbeing (the curious flatness of image and the alienating pixelization of the medium at once no longer aims to reproduce reality as does film, but rather as K-punk points out in his recent piece on IE, it is itself the very stuff of our current reality in the digital video of camera phones and embedded youtube clips...).

You could make a point perhaps about Lynch's journey from Lost Highway's video-camera horror ("I like to remember things my own way", the wielding of the camera as a weapon to be feared more than any gun by the "mystery man" etc) to Lynch himself as Digital video assassin, murdering film to allow it to re-occur outside of the cinema itself ("something has got out of the script" indeed...)

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They seem like if Sunn O))) were Russian and really into Tibetan music.

I can't remember if it was touched on previously but I've been thinking about fragmentation recently. Everything's being broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Soundbites, memes, Instagram vids, football highlights, tweets. How many YouTube vids do you actually finish? How many articles do you skim or glance at? I can't remember the last time I watched a full game of football without also browsing online, reading some sort of live comment feed on the game.

That Burroughs thing about life being a cut-up comes to mind more and more, a person walks behind a car and you see a fragment of the person. The top half half removed from the bottom.

version said:

I can't remember if it was touched on previously but I've been thinking about fragmentation recently. Everything's being broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Soundbites, memes, Instagram vids, football highlights, tweets. How many YouTube vids do you actually finish? How many articles do you skim or glance at? I can't remember the last time I watched a full game of football without also browsing online, reading some sort of live comment feed on the game.

That Burroughs thing about life being a cut-up comes to mind more and more, a person walks behind a car and you see a fragment of the person. The top half half removed from the bottom.

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what text of burroughs is that that you are referring to? it sounds interesting.

luka said:

Barthy talks about this. Info-packets shrinking. Condensed into blips... .. ... .. . .. .. ..... . ...

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my schtick is that twitter, snapchat, vine, et al. have rewired our collective cognition to crave rapid-fire snippets of novel information.

this is reflected in things like ad lib rap...


...footwork...


...and the repopularisation of todd edwards sampling techniques in pop music...

version said:

I can't remember if it was touched on previously but I've been thinking about fragmentation recently. Everything's being broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Soundbites, memes, Instagram vids, football highlights, tweets. How many YouTube vids do you actually finish? How many articles do you skim or glance at? I can't remember the last time I watched a full game of football without also browsing online, reading some sort of live comment feed on the game.

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Couple of years ago Amazon did trim the costumer reviews all of a sudden. From that point on you had to willingly click to read the whole review if it was a longer one than the default four lines or so. Could have to do with the smaller smart phone screens though first and foremeost (which of course cause websites being trimmed down, articles shortened etc to be readable on the phones)

"A heap of broken images,"

yyaldrin said:

what text of burroughs is that that you are referring to? it sounds interesting.

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It's just something he said over the years.

Walters: What always attracted me when I first heard about that—I suppose, a lot of students at the time—it seemed to introduce a random effect, a found work, do you know what I mean? I wonder if it was so random as all that.

Burroughs: Well, how random is random? Uh…

Walters: Well, let’s put it like this. I was in a pub in Charlotte Street, of all places, in Soho, and a mate of mine had read Nova Express—this was ‘64, ‘65—was talking about this, “You must buy this book,” and started to try and explain to me his interpretation of cut-up and fold-in techniques, which he probably got wrong. And I couldn’t remember the name of the book when I got outside, and then an Express Dairy van from the Express Dairies came by, and I thought, “Express, Nova Express!” And I thought, “That’s what he’s trying to tell us. Random events can have a hidden meaning. We can get messages.” But I don’t think that’s what you see in it, is it?

Burroughs: Oh, exactly. Exactly what I see in it. These juxtapositions between what you’re thinking, if you’re walking down the street, and what you see, that was exactly what I was introducing. You see, life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is cut by random factors, and then you begin to realize that they’re not so random, that this is saying something to you.