Am feeling slightly anxious about a new phenomenon I seem to have gotten myself into: deportation countdown. On Twitter I am recieving regular updates from Anselme Noumbiwa as he reaches the climax of his asylum bid to stay in the UK. It is pretty horrible and I'm at a loss to add anything here to round this entry or the story off.



Some more fish swimming together.

Hello again.

I have enlisted the help of a service called FeedBurner to provide a subscription service for the blog. As part of this service it provides me with stats on how many subscribers I have and some information about where they are coming from (only browser info, I don't get to know who they are).

It says: "FeedBurner Stats provides publishers with a single interface for analyzing the content consumption habits of their audience — be it feed subscribers or website/blog visitors. This insight can help you determine which content is performing best, where your audience is located, and better understand detailed information about traffic sources such as search engines." (1)

I also tried to make an account with Technorati which is a blog community site and quite interesting because it reads labels to tell us what are the hot topics at any one time in the blogosphere. Bit like the way Twitter is a window into the (mostly US) world. But Technocrati doesn't like something about me and refuses to take my blog, and I found in the small print that once you are accepted into their community they still might chuck your blog out.

They say: "Do not tag exessively. Make sure the tags you use to describe your posts really do describe your posts. If we see high occurrences of unrelated, variants and synonyms, or over-use of tags in your posts, we may conclude that your site is trying to game the system." (2)

Guess that's me then.

I am thinking about the rules that govern, the market-consumer model for people, performance/audience metaphors, organising criteria always being political, the community/exiled binary, blog-as-me-me-as-blog, where does experimentation belong?, politics of visibility (which as a term is usually associated with identity politics - sexuality, race, and so on)... The internet can only reflect our own organising structures.

A beautiful capitalist critique for you.

I wonder how many times I will go back to FeedBurner today to see if anyone else has subscribed...

Once upon a time we kept spelling mistakes safely locked away from the public domain. We fought a war against the tirrany of mistakenism and permitted only the very young, the mad and the poor to commit this crime of sloppiness. We enforced our rulings and the proper way to spell in special books called dictionaries, absurd repositories for words that made them seem as solid and unbendable as our own view dictated.

Now the bars have been lifted and the beast let out; spelling mistakes to be found in every nook and cranny of our world wide web. No longer can we rigidly enforce how our language behaves.

But don't you think that this is representative of a new freedom, one that promises more creativity in language? And is it not also more honest to express yourself in writing without worrying whether you are getting it right?

What? A proliferation of virally degenerate incomprehensions is the face of a new freedom? Disintigration of meaning the new creativity? I suppose you're going to tell me now that spelling mistakes are somehow more honest, that when you hit the send button on your messages that you have not been bothered to spellcheck, you congratulate yourself for being more sincere than most. Sincerity? on this hyperactive mirror show that is the Internet? Hrumph!


More ideas:
spelling mistakes as blind spots
spelling mistakes a trace of endearing 'failures' i.e. cute
spelling mistakes as highly individualised data for Google mashuping and producing data maps like computer programs or knitting patterns of ourselves. Can be read by robots.

Ghost in the machine:
dyslexics still floating around as the 'chosen' ones - artists/outsiders with special access to pictures.

Wow, aesthetics and coupling, kings of the castle.

Thought we could have something a bit porky in light of the current pandemic.

Spent much of last night trying to bend my already-sleeping-brain round the problem of making a viable table for Blogger. I had in mind that the previous post would be nicely ordered and allow me to contribute over time, the entrees lining up in their little boxes, the frame jumping to accomodate my new ideas. Fried myself.

I don't know if I like these pictures yet, though I recognise this line as the edge of a difference mirror.

Metaphors of Subjectivity (with non-specific parameters)

black holes, centre of gravity, artist, consumer, traveller, student, hero, artificial intelligence, central processing unit, god(s), actor, animal, writer, another brick in the wall, machines, more computers, texts, organs, sheep, machine, composer, program, curator, cyborg,

Just found this and this, and am pleased. I'll come back with more soon.

This is the produce of a fun evening with E, doing our first collaborative translation. Written by M, we helped out, E finding the Greek words and me rearranging them into English thinking. Got me very interested in the worldview carried by the structure of our languages. Ashamed that us Angles are so stingy with our language learning, otherwise perhaps my interest in different, localised? world views through language might be more profound. Suspect many multi-language speakers know this already.

I also wanted to make a note on centre of gravity. I am beginning to wonder if subjectivity is the condensed centre of all the debris of our lives, yes, modelled on the black hole theory. And perhaps, now that we have the internet to show us how constructed we really are, that condensed centre is found outside of our bodies, in cyberspace, in the realm of the unreal. My centre of gravity is here.

Also, on language, been listening to art lectures online, art lectures on line, stumped by the accent differences, thickness of accent, slowing of the words, thickening in the mouth, slowing of grasp, different kind of meaning, more time to make it, to let it stew, words make different associations in other accents.

Sabotage:
condensed milk

just storing this here to grow something from later

affetti

Welcome to PPI :)

I
can
not
forget
what
I
do
not
understand

I have company up here

A little Day of the Triffids moment for us. Plants spectating, speculating, prospecting, over the balcony, escaping?

At lunch with C today was laughing at the Jesus Christ Lord and Saviour People label she gave some elements of her home community. I love the specificity of this. She went on to explain the difference between the Lutherans and Evangelicals and so on. I was thinking about classification, the need to classify, the way we get more and more specialised the more localised? our specialisms become. The line of definition slides between priority, exactitude, accuracy and fixity, identity, enclosure.

Everything I see at the moment seems to be a visual parable of some great natural wisdom. Even the stuff on YouTube. I have been popping in recently for a cry and a laugh.

Connecting words: [contact words?]

meld, merge, cleave, hybrid, conjoin, glue, blend, interface, interfuse, amalgamate, compound, dissolve, intermingle, mix, fuse, conjugate, couple, consolidate, wed, link, unite, commingle, bridge, cohere, relate, link, love, pigeon,

touch, stroke, lick, kiss. finger. bolt-on. write. feed. eat.
hold, pierce, impress, defer, preach.
stitch, tie, knot.
teach...

play-ball, translate, mimic, hear,
violence, dance, flirt, metastasis, transition,
dance, duet, seeing, smile.

(ongoing project, please feel free to help out)

Good morning. Another kind of line:


Mutsugoto from Distance Lab on Vimeo.

(found it, here are some snippets)
The Dividing Line, 2007

When I think of a line on a page, or canvas, I imagine a miniature version of myself struggling to take hold of the line with my hands. It becomes a rope, or unwieldy tentacle, of which I must wrestle off of its grounding surface. I seize it with effort and tear it from the page, pulling it up as we would rip off embedded wires, the paint encrusted nails pinging dramatically and flying off to scatter into dark corners. In my hands it is rounded and slippery with a certain life force of its own. It flexes on its own accord and takes all my might to keep it under control.

Once I have released it from the surface it becomes a journey for me to undertake. I travel the length of the cord with my hands doing the walking. The line moves between my hands like a tug of war team might hope for, the slack - the distance travelled - discarded behind, fallen and forgotten, tamed but coiled, twitching. I pull, and is it me that moves forward or the line that pushes towards me? I don’t know. There are feet, but perhaps in this imagined world they are many and don’t only stand on a base but push out in all directions to define the whole sphere of spatial extent. The journey travelled, always seen linear – A to B. This terrible three dimensional snake whips up around me carving its way through a thought space, a nowhere place.
...

Sometimes I am allowed to come back down to earth and two feet plant themselves, imaginatively, on a bank on the side of a ravine. This line has morphed into a chasm of depth, with a bottomless view, for me to look fearfully over. I am so small, and it has roared open, a hairline crack grown catastrophic. The wind blows and threatens to take me over the edge. This line is no less scary, but I am no longer wielding it; I now grip the turf and feel condors soar over currents, their beady eyes watching me on my level, indifferent to the fathoms below.

...


It should go next to one of my drawings really.

I think a dream blog layout would be something more like a print magazine page, where the author has the flexibility to arrange postings around the page and in non-linear format. I'm thinking this because I want to move the photos around on the page, I want to see them next to each other in different configurations. Sets of images always offer more meanings than a solitary offering on a white wall and maybe it would be good to have boxes of text floating about that add something to everything else without necessarily being part of the same story. I think all this is possible, I just don't know how to do it yet. I'm working on it.

I'm still pondering on the title of this blog - the line. I have another piece of writing somewhere about fantastical transformations of line, I'll have to dig it out. I like deltas too now, especially after seeing some of the crocheted coral reef and its shape of brain activity and deltas. I think I have some drawings somewhere like that too...

Really excited this morning. Found a video of a talk by Margaret Wertheim on TED about a project to crochet coral reefs - an environmentalist, artistic and scientific collaboration. Apparently crochet is perfect for representing hyperbolic space. Wicked!



Without dwelling too long on what intuition is, I have been thinking about why we respond to certain ideas so well, perhaps picking up on them previously in other guises. Is this mimesis again? Communication through metaphor, understood abstractly (in language?) on an intuitive level, empathised with through emotions in real-life human interaction, reproduced in creativity as new ideas, plastic or virtual... blah blah, I'm just buzzing like I did reading William Gibson as a teenager. Uranus again. Communication, it's overwhelming. These fishes know where they're going.

Love has moved up the list, now in at no. 24. Flagging behind a bit we have order, then mezzanine, incoherant, grief and electro, beasts.

Found this today, am quite moved, though reluctant to face the sheer amount of homophobia around. It's difficult to feel that things can change, but they do, eventually, sadly, thankfully. Pretty flowers.

JG Ballard is dead. Last time I was in London I spent a whole afternoon reading his autobiography in the Angel branch of Waterstones, after K told me that Empire of the Sun was loosely based on his own childhood. I enjoyed his observations of post-war England: drab, exhausted. While I was reading there was a sales assistant with lots of personality making herself known in that way where a person/we/you seem to occupy far more space, physically and sonically, than might be considered appropriate for a sales assistant at work, unless I have antiquated ideas of service that is. But I think she might have been behind the display of queer titles on the mezzanine that I thought was very good.

Sorry about the Empire link, the film is amazing, haven't read the book yet, I just don't mind a bit of tacky electro every now and then.

I am amused to see love as the bottom label. I don't mean it to be, but for the sake of amusement I shan't label this or I might disturb the irony.

I'm trying to find one image from the set I took on my way home of a dead pigeon suitable to post here. Hang on,



ok, it's too dark but it's something. I'm still annoyed because I took some better versions of this when there was more light but somehow in RAW format and they seem to have disappeared upon arriving home. Bugger.

Through my own grief I feel like I have a right to this bird and its dignity in death, absurd as that is. When I found it and was taking photos I stood in the street, defiantly standing against all the on-coming cars. What is it about death that makes us tigers? It was a lovely Easter. The face on this bird is so tranquil and pleasant, more pleasant than a pigeon's face might be when living I think.

Can't sleep on this Orthodox Easter Saturday night. I am thinking that it's a bad thing to post four times on here in my first 24 hours. Then I was thinking who sets the rules?



I've been reading a lot about astrology lately. I am generally quite sceptical but I am drawn to a possible kind of similarity between it and structuralism, through reading Liz Greene's psychological-astrological work. She talks about astrology as our relationship to mythology, symbols, signs, which ties very nicely into an interest of mine in biosemiotics. With this Uranus-Saturn opposition going on, I find myself swinging between imaginative journeys of space, expanding into the nothingness and world of ideas, getting carried away by revolutionary ideas and newness with Uranus, then Saturn reminds me of the need to put a stake in the ground and claim something real to hold on to; Saturn and the necessity of limitations. I think he operates through fear (I have Cancer ascendant and moon in 12th house, plus Saturn almost conjunct my sun, and natal Saturn square Neptune). I have yet to see if my interest in astrology survives the transition.

I like this image because the flower is turning away from us and the glimpse of furry centre is slightly candid camera. Every time I pass these yellow poppies I want to photograph them. They have the most incredible silk-like petals, delicate and sensual. And the colour! I think it might be my new favourite.

Took this today on my walk up to J's to feed the cats and water the plants. Currently fascinated by construction - concrete, steel, order, solidity and magnitude. Think I'm responding to it metaphorically, as well as antidote to the picturesque beauty of Crete. Don't think the image really conveys the awe that big constructed things can make us feel in real life, but happy to discover a kind of twisted elegance in the two arms' coupling.

Hello, welcome. This blog is to try and make something of what goes on in my head and record it. I have a history of writing about myself, diaries and blogs, but am feeling resistant at the moment to sharing. We shall see then what happens between some conflicting interests. I hold that we are vessels for what goes on outside of ourselves and that we mirror, mimic, the world at large. This enables me to write, as the oscillation between inside and out is where we live and how we make sense.

On making sense I am not particularly interested in being coherent. It's been a tough winter and I am shattered; this is a beginning and an axiom. I suspect what starts off very raw and messy here will be edited into something more solid in time, but for now, pictures are easier as expressions and I'm wondering if keywords, labels and tags are the new criticism.

Luna