Darren Tofts

Lisa Gye & Darren Tofts

The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary’s obsession with the image of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come.

Perhaps this time has arrived, now, when mobile telephonic and teletextual communications are unavoidably associated with the spectacle of intimate bodily gestures. But this intimacy has a prehistory, a psychopathology of unconscious gesture in search of a purpose.

http://secretprehistory.wordpress.com

Image: Nina Sellars, Ear on Arm (2008). Reproduced courtesy Nina Sellars.

“Interiors”: Essay on George Bataille’s notions of pornography and the sacral in relation to Nina Sellars’ photographs of Stelarc’s Extra Ear surgery, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Perry Ogden’s photographs of Francis Bacon’s studio.

An unwitting allegory of post-humanism, “Rock DJ” segues into metaphysics as a commentary on the ascendance of a new philosophical conception of the body and eroticism more generally.  When traditional forms of seduction no longer work, it’s “time to move your body”.

NEW FROM LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA:

PORNOTOPIAS: IMAGE, APOCALYPSE, DESIRE
eds. Louis Armand, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchell
ISBN 970-80-7308-291-8 (paperback) 272pp
Price: € 12.00 (not including postage)

This volume of critical writing and photography includes previously untranslated work by renowned French thinker Georges Bataille, alongside essays on David Lynch, Pierre Guyotat, Carolee Schneemann, Alicja Zebrowska, Kathy Acker, Stelarc, Francis Bacon, Swinburne and the Victorian cult of flagellation, 9-11 and the architectural fetish, cyberculture, Freud, and Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.

***REVIEW COPIES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST***

Please write to the Managing Editor at litteraria.pragensia@seznam.cz

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CONTENTS

Darren Tofts - INTERIORS
Stuart Kendall - SOUND, MIND, BODY
Thierry Tillier - (((DISPARITION PROGRAMMÉE,,,
Johannes Birringer - AFTER BACON
Benjamin H. Bratton - FIGURES OF DESTRUCTION
Ruark Lewis - BANALITIES
Florian Cramer & Stewart Home - PORNOGRAPHIC CODING
Jane Lewty - BLUEJACK, DATAJACK
Louis Armand - THE MEDIUM IS THE FETISH
Karmen MacKendrick - HUMILIATED SUBJECTS
Pierre Daguin - SIX FEMMES
Georges Bataille - EROTICISM
Vadim Erent & Bonita Rhoads - REPLAYING FORT/DA
Ian Haig - FUTUROTIC
Jena Jolissaint - PIRATES, PRIESTESSES & PORNE PILLAGE THE PANOPTICON
Lara Portela - INCORPORATING OBJECTS
Malwina Zaremba - NAKED TRUTH
Beth Lazroe - VISUAL ASSAULT
Andar Nunes - AUTOEROTIC

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BLURB

“Bodily existence is an existence lived in constant fascination with a world beyond one’s reach. Embodiment, desire, metaphor. To exist on the verge of nonexistence. In the headlong pursuit of the real, of the other. Of the base materiality of the world, of religious hypothesis, of absolute relativity. Every utopia is a pornography, a recrudescence and pathological disillusionment, a lure into the vortex–paradoxical annulment of pure reason, compulsion, repetition, consumption.”

“The body cannot be neutral or indifferent. Its design is such that it must respond to both exterior challenge and interior impulse. Our means of survival, the sex act, galvanizes the body into a unique state of existence, which, though transient, becomes the essence of being; the concentration of an idea, the heightening of sense, the ultimate dissolution.”

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For more information see www.litterariapragensia.com

Dialogue between Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head (and his alter ego, Facetted Head) and Murray McKeich’s p-zombie.

H+ Magazine

H+ covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing human beings in fundamental ways.

p-z:   What are you reading at the moment?

PH:  Russell’s Analysis of Mind.

p-z:   Which edition? 

PH:  Funny you should ask that.  It’s the very one Borges refers to in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”.

p-z:   1921 Allen & Unwin if memory serves me correctly.

PH:   Yup.  And you?

p-z:  Just dipping into Pound’s Cantos.  You know the opening line is a translation of the first words ever written in Greek?

PH:  “And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea”.

p-z:  Ah, you know it. Scans well doesn’t it.

PH:  I always thought so.

http://hplusmagazine.com/digitaledition/2009-winter/

“What Now? The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix”

Issue 15 of Fibreculture Journal

Edited by

Darren Tofts, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
Christian McCrea, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne

From the Editorial Introduction:

The Downfall meme is a portrait in miniature of the doxa of contemporary remix; namely, the collaborative, socially-networked taste for creatively manipulating work made by someone else. These received ideas presume the assurance of an invisible yet simpatico audience of like-minded, DIY-capable remixers alive to the vertiginous pleasure of knowing that anything labeled a remix is one file in a conjugate (yours, mine, ours) Shareware .zip archive of infinite re-use. In other words, an assurance of many happy returns.

Featuring essays by Mark Amerika, Ross Harley, Lisa Gye, Ian Haig, Steve Jones, Esther Milne, Craig Saper.

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/index.html

What happens when mediated entities obtain agency and operate beyond our control? 

Seminar paper on the philosophical notion of the p-zombie in relation to the recent generative art of Murray McKeich.  

SOLID STATES/LIQUID OBJECTS:DISCOURSES OF MEDIATION

A one-day international symposium19 August 2009, 10am - 4.15pm 

http://www.ninasellars.com/symposium

Essay on plagiarism, poststructuralism and the condemnation of Socrates

In Plagiarism! (From Work to Détournement) edited by Niall Lucy & John Kinsella

A special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14, 1 (2009).  Now available:

ZOSO documentation updated in Projects

The world will be transformed to the power of 666.

Essay on Sue McCauley’s and Keith Deverill’s Rear Window

In Rear Window the mysterious radiance of the epiphany may well be the most recent technique to emerge in the visual language of the moving image.   Its simple poetry of manifestation and evanescence, of gradual fading out of and towards a vanishing point of darkness, is an apt analogy of the elevation of the commonplace to something profound.

Site Unseen: Laneway Commissions 2009

Published by the City of Melbourne

ISBN 978-0-9775563-4-2

REAR WINDOW 13 July – 8 August 2009 (from dusk til late)

Greyspace (Sue McCauley & Keith Deverill)

http://greyspace.com.au

REAR WINDOW is one of six artworks commissioned by the City of Melbourne as part of its annual Laneway Commissions.  As a series of site specific contemporary art projects across the CBD, the Laneway Commissions engage deeply with Melbourne’s distinct topography, providing artists with an opportunity to contribute to the interpretation of the urban environment.

REAR WINDOW is a video installation exploring the role of laneways in the contemporary working lives of people in Chinatown. With often long, unsociable hours, many work behind closed doors and in the kitchens that open onto the back alleys of Melbourne. The private and contemplative moments of workers taking a break have been transformed into slow motion video portraits that appear unexpectedly on windows and doorways in three of Chinatown’s bustling alleyways.

Chinatown and film culture are important parts of the fabric of Melbourne’s inner city life - GreySpace’s Rear Window links the two, making a connection between the foreign world presented in Asian cinema and the local reality of the Chinese community living in Melbourne.

Guildford Lane (off Queen and Sutherland Streets between Little Lonsdale and LaTrobe Streets)
Flanigan Lane (off Queen and Sutherland Streets between Little Lonsdale and LaTrobe Streets)
Croft Alley (enter via Paynes Place, off Little Bourke Street between Russell and Exhibition Streets)

Essay on George Bataille’s notions of pornography and the sacral in relation to Nina Sellars’

photographs of Stelarc’s Extra Ear surgery, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and

Perry Ogden’s photographs of Francis Bacon’s studio.

An unwitting allegory of post-humanism, “Rock DJ” segues into metaphysics as a commentary on the ascendance of a new philosophical conception of the body and eroticism more generally.  When traditional forms of seduction no longer work, it’s “time to move your body”.

Pornotopias

(Image, Desire, Apocalypse)
eds. Andrew Mitchel, Jane Lewty & Louis Armand

Prague, Litteraria Pragensia

ISBN 80-7308-170-6

August, 2009

http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/

Exhibition Catalogue Essay

In the age of mobility, the next killer app won’t be a gadget but a wireless capable organ “for other bodies in other places, enabling people to locate and listen to another body elsewhere”.  

Stelarc

Scott Livesey Gallery

909A High Street, Armadale.

August 5-29, 2009

http://www.scottliveseygalleries.com/

http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/