Realometer: A text is vessel.

Jab: A book is a vessel which carriers vessels. Rhyming is a sort of trimming a vessel.

Jab: Words are like waves. Listening to words, speaking them out loudly, reading or writing them we adapt to unstable conditions.

Realometer: This is no longer stable. Climate shift, volcanic ashes, financial conditions in the gene agroculturual industry … all this highly destabilizes the frame work of farming.

Jab.: Yes, the very foundations of dwelling are shaken. Therefore dwelling and living are forms of navigation in uncharted regions.

: Dipping of the prow into the water.

Very Hungry God calls the idea of the human head as a vessel and reservoir in question, since the buckets are completely empty.

The materials of Gupta’s sculptures, utensils in everyday use in India, are also traditional attributes of the gods. As such, they are useful for spiritual orientation. His sculptures point to the ambivalent status of instruments that structure the relationship between Man and his inner world as well as his outer world. This inner world is considered by traditional Indian culture as a transit station. The artistic thematization of instruments and everyday materials as in Gupta’s work is sculptural and therefore visual-spatial, yet it can also be time-based and appeal primarily to the ear instead of the eye.

Excerpt of Pointers – Contribution to beam me up

“Above all the fights … nobody ever had the smallest chance to fight with Marcel” (Arman).
Jabès: Substitute Marcel with the word “zero”.
Realometer: I have expected you to say: Substitute Marcel with “god”.
Magnes: This would have contradicted the subtlety of both.
D: Of both?
Jabès: Thank you for the question, but I have to reject it, too much honor for me.
Magnes: Zero  contains male and female, plus and minus in infinitesimal combinations.
Realometer: And a head? Indiana’ s head is a product of all the heads that had been seen in the movies. Indiana’s had is marked by the Eliot effect, which is an effect produced by history, and therefore by linear writing. The head in the Indiana cartoon is a combination of heads which have been sketched in other cartoons. Indiana’s head is the ultimate head of a certain time. Different times have different forms of ultimate heads.
Jabès: Different places have different heads, zeros and knifes. Butcher knifes, pen knifes (Schreibmesser),

Realometer: Incoming news are transformed. First I experience them as strikes or as incoming single bricks with a strong  quasi measurable impact. After a while they lose their discreteness and become somehow cloudy, fuzzy. This may have to do with the attention that I pay.

Magnes: This night I was dreaming to start a long walk in order to reach something in a far distance. While I was walking I asked myself: Why do I not take a bike? Just in the moment of deciding to turn back home in order to get my bike, I had a glimpse of thought. It suggested to consider my situation as a dream. In a dream it is possible to have a bike at disposition and to have it not a disposition. So I decided to have a bike at my disposition. This disposition did prevent me from returning home. Now I wonder why I did not ask myself to have my home at hand when I wanted it. I can dissolve this by arguing that this would be indirect and a dream supports direct decisions.

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„Die Dinge sind nicht schwarz-weiss. Es geht darum, zwischen den Dingen in Bewegung zu sein. Deshalb kann ich auch nicht an rein äusseren Gesichtspunkten festhalten, weder am Feminismus noch an Ideologien. Bezieht man einen solchen äusseren Standpunkt, wird man leicht in eine Verteidigungsposition gedrängt, wo man verteidigen muss, was man schon begriffen hat. Sich auf einer solchen Stelle zu befinden ist nichts für einen Schriftsteller. Man muss versuchen, sich in Bewegung zu halten, zu unbekannten Gebieten auszurücken, und neue Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen in Besitz nehmen“. (Inger Christensen: „Verwandlung – Das Gedichteschreiben“. In: Schreibheft 74. S. 62)

Seemundvorrat

Some say that line and color are subjects too difficult for a short note, other say they are not worth to talk about; Magnes suggests do reflect a line as a conjunction. A line is a line of force which runs from one pole to the other. J. doubts that. Speaking about poles is just a reflection of a theological figure: The figure of god and men. Writing is a sort of alignment between men and god.

D.: And color? The perception of color is not equally distributed. It opens a realm of fuzziness, which we have to overcome by a non-retinal art.

Desperatly, I am longing for poetry; the other, which – like many other objects of desire – cannot be achieved merely by will, discipline and violence.

Vilém Flusser’s (12.5.1920-27.11.1991) theoretical work is an example of the critical understanding of the dominant role of writing in western society. On the other hand he serves as a counterexample: Flusser substitutes the domination of writing by the dominance of computing. He replaces one medium on the top of the hierarchy of communication by another one. His work integrates aspects of modern nomadism with the theory and history of exact sciences. As a writer he felt challenged by the impact of computer technology on text production. On the one hand Flusser argues that computer culture will dominate all aspects of civilized life, on the other hand he strengthens the position that this domination has to be counterbalanced by inter-subjective values. One part of his thinking is a prophecy, saying that exact sciences and their major tool – the computer – will overwhelm the culture of writing. He regards computer processed mathematical functions as far more sufficient in describing phenomena than writing. Therefore the art of bookmaking and of authorship will die. On the other hand thinking and philosophy will survive when the computer is used dialogically. Flusser believes that the computer on the one hand will help to establish a technocracy of scientists, a new authority, but on the other hand it can be used to set up intersubjective relations and to overcome the authority of monological narrators. Flusser points out the communicational and mediational potentials of the computer. We see Vilém Flusser engaged in a conflict between the traditional communication of writing and the event of computer based communication. Problematic is Flussers impetus to establish the sovereignty of the computer. He reorganizes written history under the effect of a technological revolution, and establishes by himself a historical order, leading directly to the advent of the computer, which he regards as a tool to establish a new technocracy. Often he writes that the remaining time in which to fight and avoid this technocracy is short.*

On occasion of Flusser’s birthday we post “Serie Flusser” from Darya Berner.

* Extract from Nils Röller: „Hierarchies of Communication“. In: Diebner, Hans and Ramsay, Lehan (eds.): Hierarchies of Communication. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2003.