meanderings

“… a documentary about a controversial theory regarding the mechanism that drove the evolution of humans from primates to modern man; challenging the presently accepted evolutionary premise. It also speculates on humanity’s future evolutionary path.”

“Glory Hole includes the word in four languages: Kadosh – Hebrew, Holy – English, Maqadas – Arabic and Hailik – Yiddish. The dense construction rises about an inch off the panel. Holy is a heavy word it hold extreme connectedness and extreme conflict simultaneously.”

crepuscular knots of perfected complicity
derive no satisfaction from the eradication
of instinct in virtual realms

“…an expansive look at text-based art practices, inspired by the concrete poetry movement of the 60s which explored both the literary and graphic potential of language.”
17 Jun – 23 Aug 2009 @ ICA

FOXP2 (”forkhead box P2″) is a gene that is implicated in the development of language skills,[1] including grammatical competence.

You Are Beautiful – 2007 digital print on archival paper – 29×42cm – limited edition of ten prints

“In that modern culture of secondary orality, he [Ong] held, people do not learn language naturally as part of growing up. Instead, he argued, they absorb it from television, compact discs and computer programs.”

Steve Bishop | Artist

“Ces arbres reposent sur une arborescence complexe composée des lettres de l’alphabet.”

//

language crawls thru tree tunnels
unknotting calibrated moist
interfaces of cambium cognition

//

An eight-part Radio Art series by Sarah Washington exploring the roots of language, communication and consciousness. The spoken text used as the basis for these pieces is the biblical story of The Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1-9.

The series attempts to break down our understanding of language and challenge our relationship to meaning. The languages referenced include an array of tongues from Ancient Hebrew to Mandarin. Each episode is 3 minutes in length including a short introduction.

…an exhibition that explores visual art’s ongoing engagement – and entanglement – with language.

Why does this img remind me of txt msgs?

- Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890

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“Crystalpunk is a simpleton stampede, a coxcomb carnival, a daydreamers cabal, a platitude-peddling potlatch, a nihilists ambulation on tiptoe, an incantation of the language in the corners of your eyes, a wild farrago of those who run before they can walk, an ABD of being Free from the NOW! NOW! NOW! We wear non-matching socks: that is who we are!”

Sole, R. V., & Cancho, R. F. I. (2001). The small world of human language. Proc. Royal Society London, 268, 2261-2265.

“…a statistically significant property has been reported about the organization of human language. In spite of the huge number of words that can be stored by a human, any word in the lexicon can be reached with fewer than three intermediate words, on average.

…the graph connecting words in language shows the same statistical features as other complex networks. The short distance between words arising from the SW[Small World] structure indicates that language evolution might have involved the selection of a particular arrangement of connections between words.

If the SW features derive from optimal navigation needs… words the main purpose of which is to speed-up navigation must exist… According to our calculations, the 10 most connected words are `and’, `the’, `of ’, `in’, `a’, `to’, `’s’, `with’, `by’ and `is’. These words are characterized by a very low or zero semantic content.”

Algorithmic Improvisations on the 74 Unique Words of Gadji Beri Bimba

“One must free oneself from one’s ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality — which is an even greater illusion.”

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso Radical Thinkers edition, London, 2007, p. 50

dw=h :: darren wershler-henry

“lenguage is, that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.”
(Krazy Kat, 1918)

ebook sample: nicholodeon

1980s-1995: MIT Visible Language Group

Robert Smithson
Heap of Language, 1966

“…it is often/only at the expense of what is is information in language –it’s complexity in material, syntactic, poetic, or even vernacular form– that language functions in the electronic environment.”
Johanna Drucker
LANGUAGE AS INFORMATION: INTIMATIONS OF IMMATERIALITY (1996)

POSTLANGUAGE POETRY:

“…literature is too multi-faceted, rambunctious, and iconoclastic to fit the limits of any definition… Literary theory does continue to be a central part of the practice of many postlanguage poets, yet they tend to undertake it with an ambivalent and often wearied eye.…Thus, while narrative, lyric, spirituality, and a poetics of the everyday appear often as elements that language poets think should be rejected, postlanguage poets such as Juliana Spahr, Susan Smith Nash, Jefferson Hansen, Liz Willis, Peter Gizzi, Chris Stroffolino, Jennifer Moxley, Joe Ross, Lisa Jarnot, myself and many others have been consciously using one or several of these elements in their work, without returning to the sort of naive justifications of those elements that continue to be a feature of more mainstream American poetry.”

ap/xxxxx

The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.]

Culture and the Individual

Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.[Aldous Huxley. Culture and the Individual. 1963, Playboy]

Crystalpunk: Meaning is to language what Soup is to a Fork

“Crystalpunk is a panoply of ideas revolving around the same few Wandering Stars: the Game of Go and the Game of Life, the origin of language and the origin of mind, the suspected but never-realised capabilities of mind, matter, memory and computers whispered into your inner ear by unknown writers and succumbi, the power of abstraction and a melancholy for the noise lost, the BacterioPoetic and the cybernetic writing machine envisaged by Italo Calvino and William S. Burroughs”

Kaldron Home Page — Begun in the early 70s, Kaldron is the longest running magazine of visual poetry, or concrete poetry, or book art, the avant-garde intermedium between poetry and painting in the U.S., with an international and multicultural scope
 

Piet Zwart Institute – Words Made Flesh

WORDS MADE FLESH
Code, Culture, Imagination
Florian Cramer

A b s t r a c t: Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative imagination that encompasses art, language, technology, philosophy and religion. These speculations in turn inscribe themselves into the technology. Since even the most simple formalism requires symbols with which it can be expressed, and symbols have cultural connotations, any code is loaded with meaning. This booklet writes a small cultural history of imaginative computation, reconstructing both the obsessive persistence and contradictory mutations of the phantasm that symbols turn physical, and words are made flesh.