Worldmapper »
Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.
The Night Climbers of Cambridge »
This is a transcription of the 1953 edition of “The Night Climbers of Cambridge” by “Whipplesnaith”, a.k.a. Noel Howard Symington. The transcription was performed by photographing a copy of the book and re-organising it as Docbook XML via a mixture of OCR and manual labour. In particular, I enlisted the generous help of many people in correcting the OCR output from page 68 onwards: a thousand thank-yous to Alex Cowan, Richard Shaw, Callum Durnford, Ali Macdonald, Alex Gaastra, Ronan Kavanagh, Ben Weaver and Rachel Coleman-Finch.
So much for the technicalities; I shall now briefly mention the copyright situation. This is dubious as the author is dead, the book is long out of print and the publisher is defunct, or has been subsumed into one of the modern behemoths. The spirit of this transcription is not to steal but to make the content, which would otherwise languish in the obscurity of rare book shops, available to the modern night-climbers of Cambridge and beyond. I think Whipplesnaith would approve.
Altered States: The Origin of Art in Entoptic Phenomena »
J.D. Lewis-Williams and T.A. Dowson (1988) in their article ‘The Signs of All Times’ propose a neurobridge backwards in time to the Upper Palaeolithic by which we can gain insight into the nature of the origins of art. Our nervous system has not changed much in the past 100,000 years. We are still physically very much the hunter-gatherers we were prior to agrarianism. In the signs of Upper Palaeolithic art Lewis-Williams and Dowson see entoptic phenomena very similar to those produced by people in altered states of consciousness today. ‘Entoptic’ is derived from the Greek for ‘within vision’, that is, anywhere within the optic system between and including the eye itself and the cortex where signals from the optic nerve are interpreted (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988). Lewis-Williams and Dowson further break these down into ‘phosphenes’ which can be produced by physical stimulation (such as the patterns seen when you close your eyes and apply gentle pressure to your eyelids), and ‘form constants’ which are produced beyond the eye in the cortex itself. It is the latter which Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1988) primarily focus on, though they do not exclude phosphenes, and refer to both under the general term ‘entoptics’. They do, however, distinguish between entoptics and hallucinations. Entoptics are geometric patterns whose origins are in the nervous system itself, whereas hallucinations are iconic and culturally determined and may be experienced in all senses (aural, visual, tactile, olfactory and synesthetic) not just the visual. Hallucinations may arise out of entoptics as will be outlined shortly.
Sonic Warfare »
Sonic Warfare
Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
Steve Goodman
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza strip, and high frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.
Most theoretical discussions of sound and music cultures in relationship to power, Goodman argues, have a missing dimension:the politics of frequency. Goodman supplies this by drawing a speculative diagram of sonic forces, investigating the deployment of sound systems in the modulation of affect. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.
Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
About the Author
Steve Goodman is a Lecturer in Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), and the founder of the record label Hyperdub. He produces bass-driven electronic music under the name kode9 and is also a member of the sound art collective Audint.
RAMMELLZEE »
RAMMELLZEE´S MESSAGE
C:copyright by:A.Thiel(1997,1999)
enlarged:1999/2000
…with its verbosity is a persiflage “mirroring” the “academic language” and its verbal absurdity,thus an”outsider”here is looking at “culture” that permits the exclusion of whole cohorts form cultural process via stacking them into slums and ghettos,housing projects.
Via that article a “WASP” (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) could see and feel how it feels when you’re being confronted with messages,facts and informations “clad into” a language you don’t understand(bad schooling,education)because the populace you belong to(race,skin colour,creed etc.)isn’t considered worth equal education…..and in the end:chances,opportunities.
IF you aren’t “shocked away” by the “nonsense” of this treatise you will find some keen mind that is explaining to you some specifics related to writing(=graffiti).
RAMMELLZEE is one of the very early and few persons that had a deep understanding of the intricacies of education and writing(letters,ABC etc.)in special and how this very specific cultural tool also could be used to keep out-by ESTRANGING the writing-most of populace IF you only knew how…….
So in a way you have to “work through” his article and some others of his publications to come to some deeper understanding of his ICONOCLAST PANZERISM and how you could transform writing that it almost may be used as a “weapon” excluding person that haven’t been related to the very specific SUB-CULTURE(writing)here in question.
And-in a way-he also tells us about the(automatic)reactions of mayority of persons being confronted with writing(=graffiti)they don’t know nor understand(and via the estranged forms being afraid of so their motivation to understand even going down….)bringing about some process of repulsion that cannot be reflected and further is wedging the cohorts apart.
FEAR,and people become afraid when meeting unknown things,is the psychological intoxicant that perfectly inhibits learning processes we now know quite exactly.
He clearly is able to see how much writing could be used as a tool to keep “outsiders” at bay and even these possibilities could be enlarged.
To become able to “understand” it needs some motivated mind being able to ask questions and this also means you have to ask persons.In case of the origins of writing(New York,Los Angeles)so you had to ask people living in poor quarters and this meant the use of communication.So you had to visit these persons-writers-to become able to directly relate to them and only if trust was established you may have become “initiated”and come to some deeper,INSIDE understanding of matters here in question.
blotterbarn »
Mark McCloud’s collection, also known as the “Institute of Illegal Images” is the most comprehensive collection of decorated LSD blotter paper in the world. As such, the collection has been the target of two criminal trials where McCloud was forced to defend not only the collection, but also his own liberty. The story behind these events is best told by journalists:
