there are those

there are those who believe that the dead, and perhaps the living, return in the form of birds, and scatter food for them – white and yellow rice or torn up scraps of bread. we do not know what it is that draws us to birds – to look at them, to follow their calls through the brush, or pass our time studying their patterns. while working on THE BIRD AND ITS NEST (THE BIRD RETURNING TO ITS NEST), which he kept until his death, Braque went to the Camargue, where his friend Lukas Hoffmann had a field station. there he said he saw 'great birds passing over the lagoons, and from that vision I took aerial forms'. LE BILLARD - THE BILLIARD TABLE [ ] stages a series of ocular transformations in the direction of lift: taking a clue from the bird motif of the wallpaper, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the hinged billiard table shares its form with a partly obscured bird shape almost spanning the canvas. as the bird-table hybrid oscillates unstabley, it starts to create an effect where the canvas itself appears to flex. 2 sets of photographs [as examples of objects with surplus liveliness] 1. on seeing 5 pictures of the famous Flow Sequence by Ansel Adams, you imagined how, after following the water mile after mile with his eyes, in a mixture of tiredness and curiosity, he pulled off the road and began to make those exposures, whether by intention or habit or both, you do not know. now in their muteness and stillness those images in series evoke the passage of time with uncanny force: moving from one to the next, you sense the tension between the erosive force of waves over geological timeframes, crashing on that coast, and ephemeral openings and closings of the mechanical shutter. it's a hot sticky day in the Hayward Gallery in London, where S is sleeping in your arms. far from water, you lean forward, bringing your eye close to the glass, with its slight reflections. the greys or mid-tones of Ansel Adams, made by minutely graded degrees of silver oxidation, can produce a feint metallic taste. what are those photographs but reliefs, imprinted / eroded / stamped by light rebounding off foam and water on that bright morning at the base of the Pacific Pallisades, where Ansel Adams stopped and set up his equipment. 2 the photographs taken by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration show refugees from the Arkansas floods of 1936, sitting on iron beds with their few belongings. in other images from the show ________, we see watermelon stands, dusty stores selling chicken livers and minnows, such as you used to visit on fishing trips with your grandfather Ernest S, who became your protector. a child needs a strong protector. without rights or voices, they are at the mercy of the education system, which their own parents have no means to challenge. other young people steal from them and taunt them. if your grandfather Ernest S had been there, you used to think, those thieves would have been harmless. you long for such a person, the warm day open before you, now you have only machines for company   ################# 1. Thinking as resistance. Patterns formed by snags / obstacles in a current or sand [ebro delta 29–30/7/21 https://self-noise.net/ebro/delta1.html]. 2. Ecological writing proceeds by areas, one by another, by another.. in a patchwork. 3. The ability of certain artefacts to enact a kind of inner life, anticipates, perhaps, and enables, the extension of agency to a wider range of things, as towards the new and old animisms of Achille Mbembe [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/364960/meditation-on-the-second-creation/] and the Parti Pris des Choses of Francis Ponge. [E]ach of his.. [Braque's] paintings was like a stage in my ethics' [Ponge]. 4. By attracting interest from companion animals, evoked companions, unwritten entities, one another, you hope to set up resonant exchanges. 5. By publishing, you put out lures for accomplices and patterns, inviting participation in future commons. [Raafat Majzoub: THE PROPOSAL AS A PUBLICATION FORMAT in How to Manoeuvre: shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics. Kayfa ta (ed). Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi 2020 p247.] ] END OF CHANNEL 1
there are those who believe that the dead, and perhaps the living, return in the form of birds, and scatter food for them – white and yellow rice or torn up scraps of bread. we do not know what it is that draws us to birds – to look at them, to follow their calls through the brush, or pass our time studying their patterns. while working on THE BIRD AND ITS NEST (THE BIRD RETURNING TO ITS NEST), which he kept until his death, Braque went to the Camargue, where his friend Lukas Hoffmann had a field station. there he said he saw 'great birds passing over the lagoons, and from that vision I took aerial forms'. LE BILLARD - THE BILLIARD TABLE [ ] stages a series of ocular transformations in the direction of lift: taking a clue from the bird motif of the wallpaper, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the hinged billiard table shares its form with a partly obscured bird shape almost spanning the canvas. as the bird-table hybrid oscillates unstabley, it starts to create an effect where the canvas itself appears to flex. 2 sets of photographs [as examples of objects with surplus liveliness] 1. on seeing 5 pictures of the famous Flow Sequence by Ansel Adams, you imagined how, after following the water mile after mile with his eyes, in a mixture of tiredness and curiosity, he pulled off the road and began to make those exposures, whether by intention or habit or both, you do not know. now in their muteness and stillness those images in series evoke the passage of time with uncanny force: moving from one to the next, you sense the tension between the erosive force of waves over geological timeframes, crashing on that coast, and ephemeral openings and closings of the mechanical shutter. it's a hot sticky day in the Hayward Gallery in London, where S is sleeping in your arms. far from water, you lean forward, bringing your eye close to the glass, with its slight reflections. the greys or mid-tones of Ansel Adams, made by minutely graded degrees of silver oxidation, can produce a feint metallic taste. what are those photographs but reliefs, imprinted / eroded / stamped by light rebounding off foam and water on that bright morning at the base of the Pacific Pallisades, where Ansel Adams stopped and set up his equipment. 2 the photographs taken by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration show refugees from the Arkansas floods of 1936, sitting on iron beds with their few belongings. in other images from the show ________, we see watermelon stands, dusty stores selling chicken livers and minnows, such as you used to visit on fishing trips with your grandfather Ernest S, who became your protector. a child needs a strong protector. without rights or voices, they are at the mercy of the education system, which their own parents have no means to challenge. other young people steal from them and taunt them. if your grandfather Ernest S had been there, you used to think, those thieves would have been harmless. you long for such a person, the warm day open before you, now you have only machines for company   ################# 1. Thinking as resistance. Patterns formed by snags / obstacles in a current or sand [ebro delta 29–30/7/21 https://self-noise.net/ebro/delta1.html]. 2. Ecological writing proceeds by areas, one by another, by another.. in a patchwork. 3. The ability of certain artefacts to enact a kind of inner life, anticipates, perhaps, and enables, the extension of agency to a wider range of things, as towards the new and old animisms of Achille Mbembe [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/364960/meditation-on-the-second-creation/] and the Parti Pris des Choses of Francis Ponge. [E]ach of his.. [Braque's] paintings was like a stage in my ethics' [Ponge]. 4. By attracting interest from companion animals, evoked companions, unwritten entities, one another, you hope to set up resonant exchanges. 5. By publishing, you put out lures for accomplices and patterns, inviting participation in future commons. [Raafat Majzoub: THE PROPOSAL AS A PUBLICATION FORMAT in How to Manoeuvre: shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics. Kayfa ta (ed). Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi 2020 p247.] ] END OF CHANNEL 1
there are those who believe that the dead, and perhaps the living, return in the form of birds, and scatter food for them – white and yellow rice or torn up scraps of bread. we do not know what it is that draws us to birds – to look at them, to follow their calls through the brush, or pass our time studying their patterns. while working on THE BIRD AND ITS NEST (THE BIRD RETURNING TO ITS NEST), which he kept until his death, Braque went to the Camargue, where his friend Lukas Hoffmann had a field station. there he said he saw 'great birds passing over the lagoons, and from that vision I took aerial forms'. LE BILLARD - THE BILLIARD TABLE [ ] stages a series of ocular transformations in the direction of lift: taking a clue from the bird motif of the wallpaper, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the hinged billiard table shares its form with a partly obscured bird shape almost spanning the canvas. as the bird-table hybrid oscillates unstabley, it starts to create an effect where the canvas itself appears to flex. 2 sets of photographs [as examples of objects with surplus liveliness] 1. on seeing 5 pictures of the famous Flow Sequence by Ansel Adams, you imagined how, after following the water mile after mile with his eyes, in a mixture of tiredness and curiosity, he pulled off the road and began to make those exposures, whether by intention or habit or both, you do not know. now in their muteness and stillness those images in series evoke the passage of time with uncanny force: moving from one to the next, you sense the tension between the erosive force of waves over geological timeframes, crashing on that coast, and ephemeral openings and closings of the mechanical shutter. it's a hot sticky day in the Hayward Gallery in London, where S is sleeping in your arms. far from water, you lean forward, bringing your eye close to the glass, with its slight reflections. the greys or mid-tones of Ansel Adams, made by minutely graded degrees of silver oxidation, can produce a feint metallic taste. what are those photographs but reliefs, imprinted / eroded / stamped by light rebounding off foam and water on that bright morning at the base of the Pacific Pallisades, where Ansel Adams stopped and set up his equipment. 2 the photographs taken by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration show refugees from the Arkansas floods of 1936, sitting on iron beds with their few belongings. in other images from the show ________, we see watermelon stands, dusty stores selling chicken livers and minnows, such as you used to visit on fishing trips with your grandfather Ernest S, who became your protector. a child needs a strong protector. without rights or voices, they are at the mercy of the education system, which their own parents have no means to challenge. other young people steal from them and taunt them. if your grandfather Ernest S had been there, you used to think, those thieves would have been harmless. you long for such a person, the warm day open before you, now you have only machines for company   ################# 1. Thinking as resistance. Patterns formed by snags / obstacles in a current or sand [ebro delta 29–30/7/21 https://self-noise.net/ebro/delta1.html]. 2. Ecological writing proceeds by areas, one by another, by another.. in a patchwork. 3. The ability of certain artefacts to enact a kind of inner life, anticipates, perhaps, and enables, the extension of agency to a wider range of things, as towards the new and old animisms of Achille Mbembe [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/364960/meditation-on-the-second-creation/] and the Parti Pris des Choses of Francis Ponge. [E]ach of his.. [Braque's] paintings was like a stage in my ethics' [Ponge]. 4. By attracting interest from companion animals, evoked companions, unwritten entities, one another, you hope to set up resonant exchanges. 5. By publishing, you put out lures for accomplices and patterns, inviting participation in future commons. [Raafat Majzoub: THE PROPOSAL AS A PUBLICATION FORMAT in How to Manoeuvre: shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics. Kayfa ta (ed). Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi 2020 p247.] ] END OF CHANNEL 1
after travelling many hours from the hot dry coast up into the high mountains, to a campsite in the shadow of Pedra Força, the stone fork, you realized you had no desire to be in the high mountains, into which you had driven with anticipation, noting how the verges grew more varied the higher you went, with orchids and flowering shrubs, as if the seasons were running in reverse. first thing in the morning you set off back down, arriving in the evening at Montagut, pitching your tents on a grass terrace as many times before, where you remembered nightjars could sometimes be heard or seen. as the dusk rose up the terraces, their whirring/purring began, before they appeared among the trees below, and came close to you, with their gliding flight, passing like a thought [Audubon]. a long way to come, you always thought, three days driving, to these places which become like a home to you, the home you do not have, as you were to think, so that each spring you anticipate the storms of autumn, the fungi that will come up through the beech leaves: A. rubescens, the Blusher; A. pantherina in the Fageda d'en Jordà, where the Catalan partisans survived on wild mushrooms. in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the partisans survived by taking to the forest, as you are always told, biding their times, speaking under their breaths. in a short time they grew illegible to those living indoors, raised off the ground [ref] – if, in daily life, there is no time for the kinds of fights you need to have, in camping one thing after another can collapse. like dropping plates. every aspect of life and relation is exposed. your situation is staged with some poles and fabric. it reveals its baselessness quite simply. once that is done you can look around and see what can be salvaged. a person who is going camping oscillates between dread and elation. they discover a mania for documentation. sleep comes on them suddenly like a blackout. after trying all your lives to sleep, you find out you can't. you're afraid to sleep, as you learned, most of all in your own bed it is only when you are dropping with tiredness, that you throw yourselves down on to a mat thrown on the ground and there you finally sleep like a log. in the same way, unable to eat unless you are fainting with hunger, as you now know, especially indoors, having struggled all your lives to eat indoors, you now come all this way only to eat outdoors, and then to sleep. half fainting, slapping your face to stay awake, you come on these mountain trips to remote locations finally to get real food and then sleep on the ground – nothing is lower than the earth [Braque]. occurring between states of insouciance or trauma, time passes without a trace. cp listening, which can be overlooked or overwhelmed [ ]. memory, by contrast, occupies an area where dissonance is neither too feint nor too intense [Sebald]. there is no end to camping [Camps]. you float on a word that could drag you down or give you possibilities. you camp on that. temporary states of repetition, variation, registration of patterns. a substrate for work of memory, domestic actions beween earth and sky. END OF CHANNEL 2
after travelling many hours from the hot dry coast up into the high mountains, to a campsite in the shadow of Pedra Força, the stone fork, you realized you had no desire to be in the high mountains, into which you had driven with anticipation, noting how the verges grew more varied the higher you went, with orchids and flowering shrubs, as if the seasons were running in reverse. first thing in the morning you set off back down, arriving in the evening at Montagut, pitching your tents on a grass terrace as many times before, where you remembered nightjars could sometimes be heard or seen. as the dusk rose up the terraces, their whirring/purring began, before they appeared among the trees below, and came close to you, with their gliding flight, passing like a thought [Audubon]. a long way to come, you always thought, three days driving, to these places which become like a home to you, the home you do not have, as you were to think, so that each spring you anticipate the storms of autumn, the fungi that will come up through the beech leaves: A. rubescens, the Blusher; A. pantherina in the Fageda d'en Jordà, where the Catalan partisans survived on wild mushrooms. in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the partisans survived by taking to the forest, as you are always told, biding their times, speaking under their breaths. in a short time they grew illegible to those living indoors, raised off the ground [ref] – if, in daily life, there is no time for the kinds of fights you need to have, in camping one thing after another can collapse. like dropping plates. every aspect of life and relation is exposed. your situation is staged with some poles and fabric. it reveals its baselessness quite simply. once that is done you can look around and see what can be salvaged. a person who is going camping oscillates between dread and elation. they discover a mania for documentation. sleep comes on them suddenly like a blackout. after trying all your lives to sleep, you find out you can't. you're afraid to sleep, as you learned, most of all in your own bed it is only when you are dropping with tiredness, that you throw yourselves down on to a mat thrown on the ground and there you finally sleep like a log. in the same way, unable to eat unless you are fainting with hunger, as you now know, especially indoors, having struggled all your lives to eat indoors, you now come all this way only to eat outdoors, and then to sleep. half fainting, slapping your face to stay awake, you come on these mountain trips to remote locations finally to get real food and then sleep on the ground – nothing is lower than the earth [Braque]. occurring between states of insouciance or trauma, time passes without a trace. cp listening, which can be overlooked or overwhelmed [ ]. memory, by contrast, occupies an area where dissonance is neither too feint nor too intense [Sebald]. there is no end to camping [Camps]. you float on a word that could drag you down or give you possibilities. you camp on that. temporary states of repetition, variation, registration of patterns. a substrate for work of memory, domestic actions beween earth and sky. END OF CHANNEL 2
after travelling many hours from the hot dry coast up into the high mountains, to a campsite in the shadow of Pedra Força, the stone fork, you realized you had no desire to be in the high mountains, into which you had driven with anticipation, noting how the verges grew more varied the higher you went, with orchids and flowering shrubs, as if the seasons were running in reverse. first thing in the morning you set off back down, arriving in the evening at Montagut, pitching your tents on a grass terrace as many times before, where you remembered nightjars could sometimes be heard or seen. as the dusk rose up the terraces, their whirring/purring began, before they appeared among the trees below, and came close to you, with their gliding flight, passing like a thought [Audubon]. a long way to come, you always thought, three days driving, to these places which become like a home to you, the home you do not have, as you were to think, so that each spring you anticipate the storms of autumn, the fungi that will come up through the beech leaves: A. rubescens, the Blusher; A. pantherina in the Fageda d'en Jordà, where the Catalan partisans survived on wild mushrooms. in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the partisans survived by taking to the forest, as you are always told, biding their times, speaking under their breaths. in a short time they grew illegible to those living indoors, raised off the ground [ref] – if, in daily life, there is no time for the kinds of fights you need to have, in camping one thing after another can collapse. like dropping plates. every aspect of life and relation is exposed. your situation is staged with some poles and fabric. it reveals its baselessness quite simply. once that is done you can look around and see what can be salvaged. a person who is going camping oscillates between dread and elation. they discover a mania for documentation. sleep comes on them suddenly like a blackout. after trying all your lives to sleep, you find out you can't. you're afraid to sleep, as you learned, most of all in your own bed it is only when you are dropping with tiredness, that you throw yourselves down on to a mat thrown on the ground and there you finally sleep like a log. in the same way, unable to eat unless you are fainting with hunger, as you now know, especially indoors, having struggled all your lives to eat indoors, you now come all this way only to eat outdoors, and then to sleep. half fainting, slapping your face to stay awake, you come on these mountain trips to remote locations finally to get real food and then sleep on the ground – nothing is lower than the earth [Braque]. occurring between states of insouciance or trauma, time passes without a trace. cp listening, which can be overlooked or overwhelmed [ ]. memory, by contrast, occupies an area where dissonance is neither too feint nor too intense [Sebald]. there is no end to camping [Camps]. you float on a word that could drag you down or give you possibilities. you camp on that. temporary states of repetition, variation, registration of patterns. a substrate for work of memory, domestic actions beween earth and sky. END OF CHANNEL 2
open another channel [ ] absent persons can be felt as potential, almost palpable presences, or as silent abstractions revealed by traces. the one who has died verges on rematerializing in different felt forms. lovers, it is said, are not simply preoccupied with one another – the beloved is experienced as an almost constant presence, with the potential to change almost everything you do. your perceptions of the world are heightened, your movements re-configured, re-fined. how can experiences such as this be accounted for, Stern asks, with the particular earnest uncertainty that colours each laborious sentence, when somebody is trying to think the simplest things The basic memorial unit is the episode, writes Stern, a small but coherent chunk of time. the actions that make up the camping episode can be listed. add to those the sensations, the affects of camping. these episodes are averaged and generalized and represented pre-verbally as: Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs). the experience of being with another gradually forms a RIG. and these memories are retrievable, Sterns says. when an infant has a certain feeling, that feeling will call to mind a RIG. And whenever a RIG of being with someone significant is called to mind, an infant encounters an evoked companion. evoked companions can be called up when the infant is alone, so that, even if actually alone, the infant is being with the other. it seems likely, Stern writes, that an infant has almost constant rememberings of previous interactions, both in the actual presence and in the absence of other persons. various evoked companions will be almost constant familiars in everday life [Stern] Moreover, evoked companions can also be called up - you can even say they must be called up - when the other person is there. It is by projecting our desires onto the world around that it becomes activated, Marion Milner says. A people emerge from the underground, your indifference gives way to physiological changes (circulation, respiration), when the person you are waiting for appears. Vinciane Despret and _____ ______ say the same is true of sheep [Latour]. More recently, after the long work on birdsong, Vinciane Despret turned to questions of how the dead affect the living [ ]. even when a person is physically with you, on the ground beside you, work is needed, Stern seems to be saying, by a person, for that other person to appear more fully. in the same way, when de Certeau speaks of the work of memory, he is talking about remembering the present. for us this is about channels: for every channel you hear there is another channel that is unheard, and in fact a multitude (lukuki) of entities that escape attention. the distribution of sounds is not equitable or even. intricate everyday operation: to make a connection, to tune a person in from an indeterminate way away – where they seem to linger uncertainly, opaquely: (all the time they are) sitting right there on a low stool. somebody is waiting for a contact to get them across an area that disappears into nothing. (so absorbing is this constant coming and going [allez-retour – García] with equipment that) it is only when that person has gone, really gone – that companion – that they become most acutely present. so then begins the longing for them, held in the absence of their embrace. so intense are those experiences with imaginary persons, that persons of blood and bone can barely compare with them, insatiably craved, animated, amplified as they are. if a person like that appears taut, bursting with juices, a real person is always in the position of one who comes shyly, after, in, uncertain if they should be there, tilting their hip, dragging their toes or their heel in the dust of the threshold [from seuil – cill / sole / the undersurface of the foot] – if work, research, rituals are required to deal with the dead, the same can be said of relations with living things. the opacity of others is their right, and their only way to appear. veiled or half turned away, they come in the form of calls, songs and involuntary sounds, mixed with others. to tune to them, Glissant says, is to tremble with them. END OF CHANNEL 3
open another channel [ ] absent persons can be felt as potential, almost palpable presences, or as silent abstractions revealed by traces. the one who has died verges on rematerializing in different felt forms. lovers, it is said, are not simply preoccupied with one another – the beloved is experienced as an almost constant presence, with the potential to change almost everything you do. your perceptions of the world are heightened, your movements re-configured, re-fined. how can experiences such as this be accounted for, Stern asks, with the particular earnest uncertainty that colours each laborious sentence, when somebody is trying to think the simplest things The basic memorial unit is the episode, writes Stern, a small but coherent chunk of time. the actions that make up the camping episode can be listed. add to those the sensations, the affects of camping. these episodes are averaged and generalized and represented pre-verbally as: Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs). the experience of being with another gradually forms a RIG. and these memories are retrievable, Sterns says. when an infant has a certain feeling, that feeling will call to mind a RIG. And whenever a RIG of being with someone significant is called to mind, an infant encounters an evoked companion. evoked companions can be called up when the infant is alone, so that, even if actually alone, the infant is being with the other. it seems likely, Stern writes, that an infant has almost constant rememberings of previous interactions, both in the actual presence and in the absence of other persons. various evoked companions will be almost constant familiars in everday life [Stern] Moreover, evoked companions can also be called up - you can even say they must be called up - when the other person is there. It is by projecting our desires onto the world around that it becomes activated, Marion Milner says. A people emerge from the underground, your indifference gives way to physiological changes (circulation, respiration), when the person you are waiting for appears. Vinciane Despret and _____ ______ say the same is true of sheep [Latour]. More recently, after the long work on birdsong, Vinciane Despret turned to questions of how the dead affect the living [ ]. even when a person is physically with you, on the ground beside you, work is needed, Stern seems to be saying, by a person, for that other person to appear more fully. in the same way, when de Certeau speaks of the work of memory, he is talking about remembering the present. for us this is about channels: for every channel you hear there is another channel that is unheard, and in fact a multitude (lukuki) of entities that escape attention. the distribution of sounds is not equitable or even. intricate everyday operation: to make a connection, to tune a person in from an indeterminate way away – where they seem to linger uncertainly, opaquely: (all the time they are) sitting right there on a low stool. somebody is waiting for a contact to get them across an area that disappears into nothing. (so absorbing is this constant coming and going [allez-retour – García] with equipment that) it is only when that person has gone, really gone – that companion – that they become most acutely present. so then begins the longing for them, held in the absence of their embrace. so intense are those experiences with imaginary persons, that persons of blood and bone can barely compare with them, insatiably craved, animated, amplified as they are. if a person like that appears taut, bursting with juices, a real person is always in the position of one who comes shyly, after, in, uncertain if they should be there, tilting their hip, dragging their toes or their heel in the dust of the threshold [from seuil – cill / sole / the undersurface of the foot] – if work, research, rituals are required to deal with the dead, the same can be said of relations with living things. the opacity of others is their right, and their only way to appear. veiled or half turned away, they come in the form of calls, songs and involuntary sounds, mixed with others. to tune to them, Glissant says, is to tremble with them. END OF CHANNEL 3
open another channel [ ] absent persons can be felt as potential, almost palpable presences, or as silent abstractions revealed by traces. the one who has died verges on rematerializing in different felt forms. lovers, it is said, are not simply preoccupied with one another – the beloved is experienced as an almost constant presence, with the potential to change almost everything you do. your perceptions of the world are heightened, your movements re-configured, re-fined. how can experiences such as this be accounted for, Stern asks, with the particular earnest uncertainty that colours each laborious sentence, when somebody is trying to think the simplest things The basic memorial unit is the episode, writes Stern, a small but coherent chunk of time. the actions that make up the camping episode can be listed. add to those the sensations, the affects of camping. these episodes are averaged and generalized and represented pre-verbally as: Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs). the experience of being with another gradually forms a RIG. and these memories are retrievable, Sterns says. when an infant has a certain feeling, that feeling will call to mind a RIG. And whenever a RIG of being with someone significant is called to mind, an infant encounters an evoked companion. evoked companions can be called up when the infant is alone, so that, even if actually alone, the infant is being with the other. it seems likely, Stern writes, that an infant has almost constant rememberings of previous interactions, both in the actual presence and in the absence of other persons. various evoked companions will be almost constant familiars in everday life [Stern] Moreover, evoked companions can also be called up - you can even say they must be called up - when the other person is there. It is by projecting our desires onto the world around that it becomes activated, Marion Milner says. A people emerge from the underground, your indifference gives way to physiological changes (circulation, respiration), when the person you are waiting for appears. Vinciane Despret and _____ ______ say the same is true of sheep [Latour]. More recently, after the long work on birdsong, Vinciane Despret turned to questions of how the dead affect the living [ ]. even when a person is physically with you, on the ground beside you, work is needed, Stern seems to be saying, by a person, for that other person to appear more fully. in the same way, when de Certeau speaks of the work of memory, he is talking about remembering the present. for us this is about channels: for every channel you hear there is another channel that is unheard, and in fact a multitude (lukuki) of entities that escape attention. the distribution of sounds is not equitable or even. intricate everyday operation: to make a connection, to tune a person in from an indeterminate way away – where they seem to linger uncertainly, opaquely: (all the time they are) sitting right there on a low stool. somebody is waiting for a contact to get them across an area that disappears into nothing. (so absorbing is this constant coming and going [allez-retour – García] with equipment that) it is only when that person has gone, really gone – that companion – that they become most acutely present. so then begins the longing for them, held in the absence of their embrace. so intense are those experiences with imaginary persons, that persons of blood and bone can barely compare with them, insatiably craved, animated, amplified as they are. if a person like that appears taut, bursting with juices, a real person is always in the position of one who comes shyly, after, in, uncertain if they should be there, tilting their hip, dragging their toes or their heel in the dust of the threshold [from seuil – cill / sole / the undersurface of the foot] – if work, research, rituals are required to deal with the dead, the same can be said of relations with living things. the opacity of others is their right, and their only way to appear. veiled or half turned away, they come in the form of calls, songs and involuntary sounds, mixed with others. to tune to them, Glissant says, is to tremble with them. END OF CHANNEL 3



Recordings

1. Camping Montagut, Pyrenees, CAT. June 2002. Sunday. Dusk. People packing up.

2. Text-to-speech. 'Victoria high quality' synthetic voice, diacritical marks. Read on iMac DVSE [c. 2022–24].


Notes / References

Ansel Adams at 100. 11 Jul-22 Sep 2002. Hayward Gallery. London

Audubon described the passenger pigeon which, on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone.. I positively brought myself so much among the pigeons and in the woods of America, that my ears were as if really filled with the noise of their wings..]. Audubon, John James: Journal Entry 20 February 1827. In Audubon, Maria R: Audubon and his journals. Volume 1. p213. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39975/39975-h/39975-h.htm#Page_79. See also Audubon's description of the birds and how they were destroyed: https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/passenger-pigeon.

Braque – The Late Works. Catalogue to exhibition at the Royal Academy, London. Spring 1997.

de Certeau, Michel: 'Memory, in the ancient sense of the term, which designates a presence to the plurality of times and is thus not limited to the past'. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. 1984 p 82, note p218. Originally published 1974 as: L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire.

Despret, Vinciane: 'Sheep Do Have Opinions' in Latour, Buno and Peter Weibel (eds): Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. ZKM / MIT 2005 p360.

Despret, Vinciane: Our Grateful Dead. Stories of Those Left Behind. Translated by Stephen Muecke. Minnesota 2021.

Feld, Steven: Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression. 1982, 3rd edition: Duke University Press 2012. https://ia801006.us.archive.org/27/items/agenciamientos_aurales/Feld_soundAndSentiment.pdf.

Glissant, Edouard in the Trembling Museum. Curated by Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis. December 2023 to May 2024. Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. The Trembling Museum included a screening of Manthia Diawara's film: Edouard Glissant: One world in relation 2009.

Evans, Walker: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration 1935-1938. Da Capo Press 1973. And see the Library of Congress online collections.

Hailey, Charlie: Camps A Guide to 21st-Century Space. MIT Press 2009.

Mbembe, Achille: 'But the fact is that we must henceforth devise other ways of inhabiting Earth, of sharing, repairing, and taking care of it. It is in this regard that the African metaphysics of relation is particularly useful. We tend to forget that ancient African societies were open, plural, and in motion [..] All living beings and all living forms had to stop living at some point or another. This was one of their fundamental characteristics. At the same time, all of them were apt to receive animic substances within them. These substances were lodged there more or less temporarily, and life involved their activation, distribution, and circulation within an eco-technical configuration.' Achille Mbembe: The Earthly Community. Excerpt from the La communauté terrestre (Paris: La Decouverte, 2021). https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/410015/the-earthly-community/.

Milner, Marion [Joanna Field]: On not being able to paint. Madison, Connecticut. International Universities Press 1950. Thanks to Lisa Baraitser for the gift of this book.

Ponge, Francis: Feuillet votif n.d. in Sophie Bowness: 'Braque le Patron. Braque and the poets'. Braque – The Late Works. 1997. p27. See also Le Parti Pris des choses.

W. G. Sebald on memory. The reference probably appears below a small black and white photograph on the lower left of a spread in The Rings of Saturn (1998), The Emigrants (1993), Vertigo (1990), all Harvill Trans. Michael Hulse. Alternatively it may be found in Austerlitz (2001) or On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), both published by Hamish Hamilton, translated by Anthea Bell. For a discussion of Sebald and memory, see Jonathan White: 'Mental Travel and Memory Mapping in Sebald's Work'. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2152.

Dr Seuss: 'NIGHT / FIGHT / We fight all night.' Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel): Hop on Pop. Random House 1963.

Stern, Daniel: The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Basic Books 1985. Thanks to Lisa Baraitser for this reference.


About


there are those started by trying to describe simple and specific things: spending time with young children on a camping trip to spain. the deaths of two grandmothers living far off


it was also interested in how that description came about through writing, reading and recording.

re reading and re writing into there are those now, you can see things it opens onto, without being in a position to define them clearly. maybe the book by Stern anticipates this incapacity, in the ways it also tries laboriously to set out what is in some ways quite simple. the resistance of simple things is a theme. at the time you were not aware of Stephen Feld's book: Sound and Sentiment – Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, in which birds are experienced as reminders and presences of ancestors and others who have passed or moved away. Maria Papadomanolaki told you about that book. it conveys, you can say, closely the sense you had with nightjars at that time. Feld's book also contains long, quite opaque sections, as part of the structuralist analysis it carries through. that analysis / opacity / resistance also sometimes seems part (as if unavoidable) of a project of extended attention and concern.

Sound and Sentiment is sometimes described as the founding text of sonic anthropology, and what Feld called acoustemology – listening as a way of knowing. there are those coincided with making recordings on a minidisk recorder, some of which appeared in shows with Theatre Pur.

the method was to leave the recorder running in and around everyday situations, generally where people were not talking, or not much. the recording that is part of this piece from Camping Montagut spans a moment when some people were sleeping nearby, and others were sitting quietly in the evening, while other households were packing up to go back to work. the presence in the recording of voids, spaces, pockets seems to have to do not just with documenting the invisible in sound, but documenting the inaudible or what verges on inaudible (because you can sometimes hear feint traces of almost imperceptible things). this in turn became an improvised response to the binary: voice / silence of Beckett, which is already breaking down, perhaps, to some extent, in Krapp's last tape, which you went to see with Simon in Glasgow.

bird watching was something you did with your father. it was something that interested you and which you managed to find ways to do together. at some point it started to come back, maybe around the same time you began to engage with some art works, looking quite closely at paintings and other works for the first time after a long gap, as, you can say, the strange things they were. this included the late paintings of Braque, which have a link with Ponge.

some of Ponge's writing, eg the rain poem which works as a kinetic sculpture, relates to the appearance of there are those in 4 versions, with different combinations of sound, video and moving text.

imagined as transitional objects in the way of Winnicott, which Lisa told you about, they open onto a more general interest in how magic / tech operates, how it comes and goes in the everyday. that could include the way electret condenser micophones convey soundworlds through a small membrane with a bias voltage, and or how persons appear to others at a distance or close up.

the moving text pieces explored patterns of interference, ephemeral and incomplete experiences, the overlay and (re)appearance of materials and agencies through extended practices of writing and recording. they anticipate and open onto thinking with transmission.

22 July 2024


Plain text


there are those who believe that the dead,


and perhaps the living, return in the form of birds, and scatter food for them – white and yellow rice or torn up scraps of bread. we do not know what it is that draws us to birds – to look at them, to follow their calls through the brush, or pass our time studying their patterns. while working on THE BIRD AND ITS NEST (THE BIRD RETURNING TO ITS NEST), which he kept until his death, Braque went to the Camargue, where his friend Lukas Hoffmann had a field station. there he said he saw 'great birds passing over the lagoons, and from that vision I took aerial forms'.

LE BILLARD - THE BILLIARD TABLE [ ] stages a series of ocular transformations in the direction of lift: taking a clue from the bird motif of the wallpaper, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the hinged billiard table shares its form with a partly obscured bird shape almost spanning the canvas. as the bird-table hybrid oscillates unstabley, it starts to create an effect where the canvas itself appears to flex.

2 sets of photographs [as examples of objects with surplus liveliness]

1. on seeing 5 pictures of the famous Flow Sequence by Ansel Adams, you imagined how, after following the water mile after mile with his eyes, in a mixture of tiredness and curiosity, he pulled off the road and began to make those exposures, whether by intention or habit or both, you do not know. now in their muteness and stillness those images in series evoke the passage of time with uncanny force: moving from one to the next, you sense the tension between the erosive force of waves over geological timeframes, crashing on that coast, and ephemeral openings and closings of the mechanical shutter. it's a hot sticky day in the Hayward Gallery in London, where S is sleeping in your arms. far from water, you lean forward, bringing your eye close to the glass, with its slight reflections. the greys or mid-tones of Ansel Adams, made by minutely graded degrees of silver oxidation, can produce a feint metallic taste. what are those photographs but reliefs, imprinted / eroded / stamped by light rebounding off foam and water on that bright morning at the base of the Pacific Pallisades, where Ansel Adams stopped and set up his equipment.

2. the photographs taken by Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration show refugees from the Arkansas floods of 1936, sitting on iron beds with their few belongings. in other images from the show ________, we see watermelon stands, dusty stores selling chicken livers and minnows, such as you used to visit on fishing trips with your grandfather Ernest S, who became your protector. a child needs a strong protector. without rights or voices, they are at the mercy of the education system, which their own parents have no means to challenge. other young people steal from them and taunt them. if your grandfather Ernest S had been there, you used to think, those thieves would have been harmless. you long for such a person, the warm day open before you, now you have only machines for company  

#

1. Thinking as resistance. Patterns formed by snags / obstacles in a current or sand [ebro delta 29–30/7/21 https://self-noise.net/ebro/delta1.html].

2. Ecological writing proceeds by areas, one by another, by another.. in a patchwork.

3. The ability of certain artefacts to enact a kind of inner life, anticipates, perhaps, and enables, the extension of agency to a wider range of things, as towards the new and old animisms of Achille Mbembe [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/364960/meditation-on-the-second-creation/] and the Parti Pris des Choses of Francis Ponge. [E]ach of his.. [Braque's] paintings was like a stage in my ethics' [Ponge].

4. By attracting interest from companion animals, evoked companions, unwritten entities, one another, you hope to set up resonant exchanges.

5. By publishing, you put out lures for accomplices and patterns, inviting participation in future commons. [Raafat Majzoub: THE PROPOSAL AS A PUBLICATION FORMAT in How to Manoeuvre: shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics. Kayfa ta (ed). Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi 2020 p247.] ]

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after travelling many hours from the hot dry coast up into the high mountains, to a campsite in the shadow of Pedra Força, the stone fork, you realized you had no desire to be in the high mountains, into which you had driven with anticipation, noting how the verges grew more varied the higher you went, with orchids and flowering shrubs, as if the seasons were running in reverse. first thing in the morning you set off back down, arriving in the evening at Montagut, pitching your tents on a grass terrace as many times before, where you remembered nightjars could sometimes be heard or seen. as the dusk rose up the terraces, their whirring/purring began, before they appeared among the trees below, and came close to you, with their gliding flight, passing like a thought [Audubon].

a long way to come, you always thought, three days driving, to these places which become like a home to you, the home you do not have, as you were to think, so that each spring you anticipate the storms of autumn, the fungi that will come up through the beech leaves: A. rubescens, the Blusher; A. pantherina in the Fageda d'en Jordà, where the Catalan partisans survived on wild mushrooms. in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the partisans survived by taking to the forest, as you are always told, biding their times, speaking under their breaths. in a short time they grew illegible to those living indoors, raised off the ground [ref] –

if, in daily life, there is no time for the kinds of fights you need to have, in camping one thing after another can collapse. like dropping plates. every aspect of life and relation is exposed. your situation is staged with some poles and fabric. it reveals its baselessness quite simply. once that is done you can look around and see what can be salvaged. a person who is going camping oscillates between dread and elation. they discover a mania for documentation. sleep comes on them suddenly like a blackout.

after trying all your lives to sleep, you find out you can't. you're afraid to sleep, as you learned, most of all in your own bed it is only when you are dropping with tiredness, that you throw yourselves down on to a mat thrown on the ground and there you finally sleep like a log. in the same way, unable to eat unless you are fainting with hunger, as you now know, especially indoors, having struggled all your lives to eat indoors, you now come all this way only to eat outdoors, and then to sleep. half fainting, slapping your face to stay awake, you come on these mountain trips to remote locations finally to get real food and then sleep on the ground –

nothing is lower than the earth [Braque].

occurring between states of insouciance or trauma, time passes without a trace. cp listening, which can be overlooked or overwhelmed [ ]. memory, by contrast, occupies an area where dissonance is neither too feint nor too intense [Sebald]. there is no end to camping [Camps]. you float on a word that could drag you down or give you possibilities. you camp on that. temporary states of repetition, variation, registration of patterns. a substrate for work of memory, domestic actions beween earth and sky.

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open another channel [ ]

absent persons can be felt as potential, almost palpable presences, or as silent abstractions revealed by traces. the one who has died verges on rematerializing in different felt forms. lovers, it is said, are not simply preoccupied with one another – the beloved is experienced as an almost constant presence, with the potential to change almost everything you do. your perceptions of the world are heightened, your movements re-configured, re-fined. how can experiences such as this be accounted for, Stern asks, with the particular earnest uncertainty that colours each laborious sentence, when somebody is trying to think the simplest things

The basic memorial unit is the episode, writes Stern, a small but coherent chunk of time. the actions that make up the camping episode can be listed. add to those the sensations, the affects of camping. these episodes are averaged and generalized and represented pre-verbally as: Interactions that have been Generalized (RIGs). the experience of being with another gradually forms a RIG. and these memories are retrievable, Sterns says. when an infant has a certain feeling, that feeling will call to mind a RIG. And whenever a RIG of being with someone significant is called to mind, an infant encounters an evoked companion. evoked companions can be called up when the infant is alone, so that, even if actually alone, the infant is being with the other. it seems likely, Stern writes, that an infant has almost constant rememberings of previous interactions, both in the actual presence and in the absence of other persons. various evoked companions will be almost constant familiars in everday life [Stern]

Moreover, evoked companions can also be called up - you can even say they must be called up - when the other person is there. It is by projecting our desires onto the world around that it becomes activated, Marion Milner says. A people emerge from the underground, your indifference gives way to physiological changes (circulation, respiration), when the person you are waiting for appears.

Vinciane Despret and _____ ______ say the same is true of sheep [Latour]. More recently, after the long work on birdsong, Vinciane Despret turned to questions of how the dead affect the living [ ].

even when a person is physically with you, on the ground beside you, work is needed, Stern seems to be saying, by a person, for that other person to appear more fully. in the same way, when de Certeau speaks of the work of memory, he is talking about remembering the present. for us this is about channels: for every channel you hear there is another channel that is unheard, and in fact a multitude (lukuki) of entities that escape attention. the distribution of sounds is not equitable or even.

intricate everyday operation: to make a connection, to tune a person in from an indeterminate way away – where they seem to linger uncertainly, opaquely: (all the time they are) sitting right there on a low stool. somebody is waiting for a contact to get them across an area that disappears into nothing. (so absorbing is this constant coming and going [allez-retour – García] with equipment that) it is only when that person has gone, really gone – that companion – that they become most acutely present. so then begins the longing for them, held in the absence of their embrace. so intense are those experiences with imaginary persons, that persons of blood and bone can barely compare with them, insatiably craved, animated, amplified as they are. if a person like that appears taut, bursting with juices, a real person is always in the position of one who comes shyly, after, in, uncertain if they should be there, tilting their hip, dragging their toes or their heel in the dust of the threshold [from seuil – cill / sole / the undersurface of the foot] –

if work, research, rituals are required to deal with the dead, the same can be said of relations with living things. the opacity of others is their right, and their only way to appear. veiled or half turned away, they come in the form of calls, songs and involuntary sounds, mixed with others. to tune to them, Glissant says, is to tremble with them.

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