group w/michael

28-9-20 pad

individual w/michael

23-9-20

Transcription of the recording:

How does technology relate to my practice (improvisation, performance, sound, writing)?

I'm interested in hacking the human, the subconscious, the habitual behavior, the social contract - improvisation does all of that. Some systems, some ways in technology have a similar striving. Which ones?

tool > What technology derives from. The rock tool is already a technology. Conception of a tool and its effect on the human: how it externalizes the intent and provides more options to a being - options to change, shape, intervene in the outside world, gaining "internal powers" through that. Tool shaping the human. Alienation occurs (tech now: we have tools, but the intent is obsolete). I'm interested in this dynamics.

When it comes to technology, my interests are of a conceptual nature. I want to know how systems work, what kind of dynamics they afford to a human being. I'm into behavioral and psychological (also related to improvisation: in my practice i research: what happened to a human in the post-Industrial revolution period and how to get back to the primitive/primal/instinctive/sensory.

paradoxes: If I am making a tool that is fixing the damage that other tools have made > am I not the douchebag in this situation? AND Systematizing improvisation, rationalizing the sensory = tricky business.

script > making "poetic" scripts that follow the syntax of coding, but are read by humans. Scripts become compositions/exercises for a human being to run in a certain time frame of the day and produce data that might not have been regularly produced by the habitual approaches to how we do things. This can be applied to any medium - thoughts, spoken, written, painted, moved, etc.

The notion of composition (systematization of the flow) - can be a repressive act. I have to grind through the lineage to understand it better. How can structuralization enable and allow more freedom. A response to the external structures of repression. (anarchy is tricky). We mimic the repressive patterns we were conformed to (even while attempting to abolish them. Imagining the (im)possible.) What is another method of another reality - that can be very inner, subconscious, changing the habitus. Disobedient technologies/technologies for disobedience. Making yourself in the relation and also in the opposition to what is established as "normal/accepted" (this is not how you do music). Normalisation.

Daoism. Dao = flow. In relation to improvisation. How does it relate to technology? There is always a workflow, how one thing leads to another, the dangerous notion of optimization.

&link to prescriptive technology

Rituals in the ancient past are composed. A gathering, a "performative" activity. The presence of inner rules, not explicit, rationally explained/stated. What happens when there is nothing prescribed in a structured manner?

Formulating my research while doing it. Having a good system of annotation. Following the flow of the idea, of the overarching flow that is happening (to the thought, conceptuals, practices) > How to archive and represent it? Using the wiki.

Avoiding the division between analog and digital (mark also) - physical? material? (tiny technology, invisible but very material (conditioned by materiality))

Notes during the tutorial:

The world is so scripted already (like fuck Société de spectacle). Does it make sense to make new scripts.....? >>
A nother paradox (line of tension), a dangerous one: scripts for humans/composition - just another set of rules, an establishment of a "new, better" social contract or whatever else. Playing with fire.

What is the lineage?
What is the aim?
What is the tension? > between structure and chaos, between improvisation and composition.
It is not about the preferred one or another, it is about strategizing a co-existence that is not repressive.
Such composition that allows for agency, empowerment, sensibility, choice and subjective decision.
Script as a ritual. Development of scores, compositions, "Instruction-based art"

Cognitive capitalism, the social networks are profiting directly from tricking our sensorics. Attention is being grabbed, impulses directed, intuition overwritten by an addictive accumulation of hormonal stimuli - dopamines. How to produce them differently?

References M. gave:

Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology

prescriptive technology (tells u what to do) > doing a specialized job, planning - negative side of it, oppression ("externalization of intent/intention"), design for compliance, limiting your agency, possibilities

vs

holistic tech - artisan doing something independently, making decisions, has control over entire process, understanding pieces fitting together

+reciprocity > (=intra-action, rhizome)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism

Alison Knowles

generative poem computer program
https://www.damnmagazine.net/2016/09/07/the-house-of-dust-by-alison-knowles/
https://git.xpub.nl/XPUB/AHOUSEOFDUST/src/branch/master/AHOUSEOFDUST.ipynb
+her other recipes
fluxus tradition of events
code is a trigger
desert journalism: http://lowerquality.com/desertjournalism/

IRL group w/aymeric

22-9-20 (notes deriving from a transcription of a voice recording)

I am deriving from my established practice - improvisation in different mediums (sound, vocal, text).
I consider improvisation as a domain where habitual behavior and social contracts are questioned/challenged. The aspect of "hacking the human mind/the human intelligence", finding strategies that overcome habitual behavior /indoctrination, systems that produce us/, enhancing sensibility, exploring subconscious modes of operation.
Questioning normalization.
Distraction manager. Technology that re-humanizes the human. Sensibility, awareness, intuition - crucial terms.
I don't want to make a critique of technology. Using conceptual parallels and syntaxes of technology in order to shape the human.
Using the concept of the script as something that can be run by a human being. It is a practice of COMPOSITION, exercises for a human being in an everyday life practice and with this, produces data. The script can be run within an environment of any kind of a media (text, movement, sound, etc.)
Building hardware tools that capture the FLOW, the intuition, the Dao (the electrical current of chi that runs through the body, guided by movements, protocols, practice).
I don't wanna pin down my research into rationality and labels too much. I have to let myself float around and have as little labels as possible (until a certain moment in time when i establish a structure in which data that i produce is situated in.)
Technological aspect:
- archiving data that is produced through running the "scripts" (as linguistic tools, poetry).
- How technology can analyse or predict improvisation // have an overview of repetitive patterns within the flow of a specific individual. > AI> Cybernetic loops?

Invention of a TOOL. What is a tool to a human? From intuitive beings towards having tentacles of tools, we got away from sensing, from bodily mechanisms. I want to get back into the body through the development of "human intelligence".
I want to make tools that fix the damage that other tools did to us as humanity (as primal beings). /I am unfit to follow the dictate of technology, I get tired, thirsty, my back hurts from sitting down./

The paradox: to make a tool that fixes a tool.
The paradox: using technology to mediate/meddle with the human, to systematize the flow, to rationalize the sensory.

The formats:

...

- text, scripts/compositions/exercises
- interviews, phone call, letter (w/practitioners, theoreticians, believers)
- captain's diary research log, making a system that manages my research = research tool
- performances
- IRL workshops (CSS - composing sensibility sessions)
- hardware
- ... &add

I'm into the human, that is the point. But post-anthropocentrically, I guess. I think animals should be idols to humans. & the cyborgs? (was this a joke or something true?)

Am I going to work alone? Of course not, I want to work with many others.

I want to be hands-on, to have too much stimuli, because I believe that when you stress the brain, you get some genious shit out of it. Burnout ... ?

///

Comments from Aymeric:

Missing non-personal references. How does all of my thoughts/work connect to existing practices and research - how does it connect?
instruction-based art. 60s. Conceptual art. (scripts/scores + performativity)
Where do I situate myself in relation to this lineage?

(masculine, repressive, white, male, ...) > more into: Pauline Oliveros.

- (Is it really a male 70s thing and I should be opressed by it? (lol!).)
Improvisation that gets into structuralized, rationalized systems: it is a battlefield, it is a moment when two completely other worlds intersect. I am interested in this tension. Systematizing improvisation. Rationalizing sensority. /Knowing that these dichotomies are artificially constructed through discourse, and that in reality everything is in primordial flux anyways./
We live in a world that is scripted. By making environments where things /are scripted differently/ ...
Even the scripts produce abnormalities. Conception of failure. There is no failure in improvisation, if people are real-time.

Where do I situate myself in the realm of automation, scripting, proto-programmatic experiments in the art world in the 60s/70s were built upon the fascination for automation. Whereas only a few were critical. > I am making a critique of these tools or am I fascinated by machines and how they are scripting our lives, our behaviour.
- I am critical about it, I don't want my tools to automate anything. I want them to make us aware of options that we actually have. Even a script is a proposition of a way to work with certain constraints and then variabilize some notions within it. The script is like a poem that you read /each time affording new insights/.
  - The distraction manager also didn't do anything, until the human processed the whole. Context of productivity, tools, workflows, methods, DM as a piece of software art that makes a mess is left to interpret...

What the scripting methodology will be applied to? It's not scripting for the sake of scripting. You want to say something with this. What do I want to tell my audience with this? (lineage, history, instruction-based art) + RELATIONSHIP that I have with technology. + or - to technology > Where do i pose myself there?

Where to situate the practice, what does it tell us. Find a way to locate myself into different types of references.
- For me it is really about the heightened ability of intuition, sensibility, interaction, awareness, ... real-time, spontaneous.

Technology and the society that has been produced by it, is very far from these notions. With my practice I want to explore and produce tools that bring the humans back towards them.

Provide examples!

instructions OR infrastructures that people make own instructions

Guy Debord (SI) critique of automation ...

Douglas Engelbart biography: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/187/
- Book: Bootstrapping. Form of co-evolution of augmented humans with machines/computers. He came up with the mouse, ... Cybernetics as the future of the world.
- Research cybernetics more: reducing life and society to an algorithm.
- How can you describe an algorithmic process to talk about an ecosystem? If you can compute life, then you can manage life (as a software).

Technology as positive empowerment (in these practices that seem connected to what I'm saying) but am resonating with that?

Nam Jun Paik - exhibition in Amsterdam: https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/nam-june-paik

french artist open calendar edited by others, then he does what they instruct. &name?

Simon Yuill and Objscrs: software mimicking cctv surveilance, dancers improvise in a response to a machine algorithm

Everything in our lives is in a way automated and protocolized, works within a certain protocol (social contract, arrows on the floor, ...) If we do have these protocols - then the improvisation aspect is even more crucial. As society and humanity we cannot avoid scripting, so what does it mean: to script for yourself, to take on the role of the dramatist, the director of your movements. To expand the life of improvisation over the edges of the performative stage. How can it spill out? I think it is also about options in time. In what way to hack that?

xxxx

notes (prep for the session)

improvisation = a domain where habitual behaviour & social contract is challenged where awareness is amplified sensibility is enhanced exploring subconsciousness where mistakes are propositions

im interested in: human condition habitual behaviour human intelligence against normalisation and sameness bettering the (intra-active, inner, social) condition of subjects communication

to empower, to share, to afford options (to others&myself)

to engage in the activity of improvisation results in > updating operating systems interfacing yourself developing techniques within these media that influence RL&RT (outside of performative, beyond art) programming oneself (me providing a framework) hacking the human (intelligence) composition - scripts for humans

adressing the damage that the overusage of tech (and the social contract ..) had and is producing.

creation of a tool > externalization of intent

   The "invention"/conception of a Tool.

   As an extention of human intention (also the creation of possibility - expanding the options (for intention). The rock knife, the flute, language (communication).

   We get more and more options, our arms multiply and stretch, we get tentacles, we go towards the outside - shape it, change it, intervene with our intents and the tools that are (also) responsible for our behaviour.

   Intent is crucial.

   Tools become ends for themselves.

   Why are you doing something?

   Aesthetisation of nothingness.

   What is internal (what existed before the tool, the impulse behind the Intent) gets blurred, weaker.

   Creating tools that repair the damage that tools caused - mainly desensibilisation.

   Sensibility, triggers and cues, intuition are important here! FLOW.

Paradox: creating a tool that fixes a tool. Feedback loop. Rationaly constructed tool that trains intuition. Paradox: (linguistic) syntax of tech (Scripts for human beings / compositions / exercises / protocols) that meddle with the human (intelligence) (individual + collective - habitus, infrastructure, empowerment). == systematization of flow/of subconscious.

   [AI learning, machine learning > a system that feeds itself data through certain protocols] (cybernetic loop)

procesuality, temporality, determination, objectives (why?)

What i dont want: a critique of tech. Consider the PRO of everything before the contra/the negative/the disruptive. I want to fill in the gaps (with gold), it is a process of addition through proposition. A positivist approach! (positive psychology focuses on what is good, what is working, enhances and nurtures that!)

IRL vs online: i dont want this to be my topic. Rather: using both, online gives more reach, more macro, more external, more access.

improvisation = flow. (media: sound, movement, text) as a research field/domain. what? intuition, impulse, subconscious, "animal/primal", awareness, sensibility, interaction, collaboration, researching and expanding ones own liminalities (of thought, of action, ...), inventing protocols of being, interacting, interfacing the world > why? lack of those is a damage. > who? public= anyone. from micro (proximate surroundings) to macro (through online) outreach. we all improvise all the time anyways > how well? > training for the everyday life.

    (+social contract as a set composition (allows a lot of deviation - through mistakes/lapsus, decision/choice, disobedience, necessity, ...) making your own composition (rational vs intuitive, code of conduct, relationship, intra-action)

failing normality failure as a proposition (no errors in improv)