Turn off your mind relax and float down stream
It is not dying
It is not dying
Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void
It is shining
It is shining
Yet you may see the meaning of within
It is being
It is being
That love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing
It is knowing
That ignorance and hate may mourn the dead
It is believing
It is believing
But listen to the colour of your dreams
It is not living
It is not living
Or play the game “Existence” to the end
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Mekas, Godfather of American avant-garde cinema, passed away last year. Hamidrasha Gallery recently held an exhibition of his works, and I delayed this post to after my visit. While curator Avi Lubin’s intentions are admirable, I found the setup to be brutal and somewhat disrespectful to both audience and Mekas… which may have actually been unintentionally thematic with Mekas’ “just do it” spirit!
[Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections (1990)]
Only some weeks ago, I’ve added a line about Ulay and Marina to a spoken-word piece on my quest for love. Ulay, you can let go of the arrow now. Rest in peace my friend, you shall always be present.
The partnership between a person and computers in writing literary works – or creating any other works, in all lenses – seemed to me then and still seems to me today both inevitable and exciting.
In some ways, computers, fed into verbal programs, should not be referred to at this stage as more than sophisticated typewriters. But sophisticated typewriters should not be underestimated, with the sophisticated available (including the most elaborate trams), still a frustrating proximity to the stylus and feather, just as the existing motor vehicle, with all its sophistication, is no more than paraphrasing on the wagon.
I believe and hope that in the future we will write more and more on terminals and less and less on typewriters (in pen I stopped writing as early as seventeen) and that more sophisticated verbal programs will be written. Maybe in the not too distant future we will have the option of ticking a line – ticking a page, ticking a page – and ticking a book.
The process of creation was never the same to me as physical work, but to a minimum, to its absolute abolition. What matters is the idea, the model, the flashing, the opening sound, the code.
I always wanted to write mostly ciphers, and to a certain extent I did too. Computer ciphers will be the authors of future transcripts, and we will be the guiding and guiding eye. As with the desirable separation between decision-making processes and the administrative-administrative complexity in management models, so too is an increasingly clear separation between the right decision (which is the act of creation) and its execution. The work will become a work of creation.
[from My Electronic Psychiatrist (1974) by David Avidan]
In Avidan’s spirit, the above is a raw unedited output of Google Translate of the Hebrew source. I was so amazed by Avidan’s prediction/prophecy, that I appropriated some paragraphs as the abstract of my upcoming performance-lecture Electric Hebrew on compter generated/assisted text composition. As this future is happening now, it is only appropriate to conclude with Avidan’s Message from the Future (1985/3005):
If you care anything for new-media art, do yourself a favor and go see the Weibel retrospective at ZKM which is on until 2020-03-08, as well as the historical new-media collection. For me it has been a humbling, awe-filling and possibly artistic-life-changing experience. By the way, everything you ever did or thought of doing or will do, was already done in the seventies. More on this to come.
“Between TV and viewer there is a function, i.e.: The user switches the device on and off. This function is illustrated and content of the program. A “sandwich”- character of real process and figure process, of reflection and action. In the screen there are viewers seen sitting in front of their TV. In the last picture a disturbance occurs, so that the viewer who watches this scene has to get up, in order to repair the failure. Thus the screen of the next viewer is disturbed. The disturbance reproduces itself, up to the real TV set, so that the real viewer must rise the same way, in order to remove the disturbance. Time delay: The real action is the final point of the reproduced process.” [Peter Weibel]
