"Xeno-communications: Communication or data traffic based on the plane of being opened (by)instead of being open (to)." - (from Glossary in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. Complicity with Anonymous Materials
)
The concept of landscape is gaining a new dimension not only in the field of Urban Studies and the systemic approaches pursued by sociologists. People are also optimistically advocating the Parliament of Things (Latour) or investigating the autopoietic network culture of trash or human dependency on non-human communication clusters. Such holistic approaches may be based on trust or shadowed by apocalyptic forebodings.
But in either case, the landscape (which is to say, the dynamically networked communication currents in matter itself) is an actor, and no longer simply a passive backdrop to the accumulation and interaction of objects. Any landscape able to process information independently subsequently joins forces with landscapes of a similar composition. Interventions in such circumstances appear to be not so much regulations or controlled arrangements; rather, the currents technician himself is now deployed solely in this strange undead-living landscape, which manipulates him rather than he it. The material landscape and its currents, the dark and vibrant matters, themselves become active agents in our habitats. Here, the opposite of crystallization and glassy immobility defines the end (or the new beginning): untrammeled autonomous proliferation.
Similarly in the work of E. A. Poe: in Mesmeric Revelation (1844), Mr. Vankirk is petrified: "(His) corpse had all the stern rigidity of stone. His brow was of the coldness of ice. Thus, ordinarily, should it have appeared, only after long pressure from Azrael’s hand. Had the sleepwalker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?"
– while Valdemar, in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), is rapidly disintegrating: "(A)mid ejaculations of ›Dead! Dead!‹ absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once – within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity."
Surviving ghosts crystallize here, or fall apart in a mucosal mass against whose poisonous fumes not even an open window is of help. All that remains is the dispirited witness.
SAT 04.02. › 17:00 › HAU 3
TRASH / FLOWS (WASTELAND)
Lectures by Mark Fisher (UK), Reza Negarestani (IR)
Hosted by The Wire
SAT 28.01.– SUN 19.02. › 12:00–19:00 › Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien
FEEDING ON REFLECTIONS
Triptychon for three plasma screens by Alexander Christou (DE), 2011
