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Grace Dillon is an Anishinaabe cultural critic, professor in Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University, and a key figure in contemporary conversations about Indigenous Futurisms. Anchored in analyses of science fiction, her work spans literary sources, film, and popular culture. Her edited anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012) has become an invaluable guide to the growing field of Indigenous Futurisms and its many ramifications in studies and debates about race, gender, geography, science, and the notion of temporality itself. In this sense, Indigenous Futurisms-in the plural, as Dillon reminds us in this interview-encompass Indigenous perspectives on science fiction, speculative storytelling, and world-building through literary, cinematic, and other artistic forms, emphasizing both the colonial role of science and technology and its decolonial uses in affirming Indigenous sovereignty and creativity.

As a filmmaker, artist, and writer who has done extensive work in Brazil, I found myself confronted with the questions of who defines futures, when is the future, and what is futurity itself. This led me to consider the politics behind science fiction-its ideologies and world-building powers. In particular, my work with Indigenous actress and artist Zahy Guajajara, starting with my fiction film Exterminator Seed (2017), and my conversations with anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, among others, have led me to inquire about the cosmopolitical encounters and mis-encounters between my native Portugal and Brazil-that is, between "parallel futures." Although the notion of futurity itself is part and parcel of normative processes, the reality is that many futures survive and thrive in the present. In this respect, Dillon's work has been particularly important for me. Hers is a voice that helps us navigate the depressing reality of colonial legacies but also the affirmative, empowering magic of storytelling beyond trauma.
In our conversation, Dillon talks about key concepts within Indigenous-led science fiction and offers a genealogy of the term "Indigenous Futurisms," going back to authors like Gerald Vizenor and Diane Glancy; in doing this she provides a precious bibliography at a time when some of the most exciting science fiction writing today is coming from nonwhite authors. She considers stories with topics ranging from technology, environmental justice, and relations between human and other-than-human creatures, showing that thinking with science fiction offers a rich path to decolonize the notion of science itself, freeing up space for political imaginations beyond a one-world future. -Pedro Neves Marques
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Pedro Neves Marques: Your seminal 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction is a collection of science fiction literature by contemporary Native writers from North America, the Caribbean, and Australia. In it you characterize the term "Indigenous Futurisms" through different categories or concerns, all of which have both aesthetic and political connotations. These categories are: Native slipstream; Contact; Indigenous science and sustainability; Native apocalypse; and Biskaabiiyang, meaning "Returning to Ourselves." Could you describe these ideas briefly and how they might prove helpful to better understand the scope of Indigenous Futurisms?

Grace Dillon: I want to make clear that, as I was creating these categories, they seemed very flexible and moveable to me. I first asked each writer how they defined science and what they saw as science-fictional about their writing, and only then about Indigenous Futurisms. So these categories came to me from their own voices and what was available at the time. It's true that I didn't get everyone in; there were plenty of other voices that should've been a part of the collection. Another thing about the book is that, instead of it really being a story-by-story collection, I was more interested in getting people excited about the authors and their many writings. That's why sometimes there are just snippets of novels, rather than full short stories.

To start, "Native slipstream" came from the fact that there were several ways of thinking and writing about space-time-not as separate subjects, like "now let's talk about space" and "now let's talk about time," but rather as space and time flowing together, like currents in the same navigable stream. While sorting through my research, I was also reading the latest physics of that moment, with multiverses and parallel universes actually being verified by scientists. It was an exciting moment, because my own Anishinaabe traditional knowledges, gikendaasowin, and even our sacred stories, aadizookaanan, were being honored by these scientific discoveries, by "sciences in the making," as Bruno Latour refers to the stage when proofs are still in process or remain an artifact rather than a fact. I took great delight in that and called this aspect "Native slipstream" in honor of those much more ancient forms of thinking, and also in honor of writers like Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor and Cherokee Diane Glancy.

Vizenor and Glancy were writing way back before computers, and were among a bunch of artists and authors who couldn't get published by mainstream presses because their ideas just seemed so strange and unusual. So what they did was to create an exchange of self-publishing called Slipstream Press, borrowing the aeronautical term "slipstream" and then opening it up to experimental forms of writing. This was way before Bruce Sterling is said to have coined the term in the science fiction field. They were viewing and talking about their work as slipstream back in the 1970s, while Sterling only came up with the term during the cyberpunk days, in his 1989 fanzine column sf Eye. What's fascinating is that a lot of science fiction academics will start with Sterling and say that he is where slipstream comes from, overlooking these BIPOC voices that were already writing and sharing it among each other.

For its part, "Contact" was and remains a decolonizing feature of many Indigenous stories because, of course, contact is such a big topic in science fiction, especially in the form of contact with alien peoples. For us Native Americans and/or Indigenous peoples throughout all the Americas-South, Central, and North-contact carries political reverberations. Take these myths that talk about Indigenous peoples having visions or prophecies about white people coming and making contact. White people misunderstood, for example, our Anishinaabe word manidoo, which was used during that moment of contact or encounter with others; it can mean "spirits," but it doesn't mean "gods" or "deities." The immediate perception of the white settlers was that somehow they themselves were the gods who had arrived, whereas for Anishinaabe people like me, manidoo means: this is such an amazing event that it will shift our lives irremediably, for all of us, not just for Indigenous peoples, but also for settlers or whoever is involved in that contact. In other words, contact is such a momentous occasion that it will genuinely change relationships within the common pot-I use this term in honor of Abenaki Lisa Brooks' explanation of the common pot as a space-time that is intended for all who come to its area to live relationally and comfortably together. The myths about idealizing settlers and settler nations at the time of contact are a huge misunderstanding that are still promoted today.

PNM: You already mentioned science, but do you mind going back and talking a little bit more about the notion of "Indigenous science and sustainability"?

GD: Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that's the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, "What is Indigenous science?" According to him, "It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably." In his Indigenous Community: Rekindling the Teachings of the Seventh Fire (2015), he writes: "Over the years I've developed some working definitions. Here is how I defined that term. A body of traditional, environmental, and cultural knowledge unique to a group of People that has served to sustain that People through generations of living within a distinct bioregion."

So you have this kind of intergenerational knowledge, but you also know that you're always learning more. This is another definition that he gives: "Indigenous science is founded on a body of practical environmental knowledge that has been learned and transferred over generations of a People through a form of environmental and cultural education that is unique to the People."

Lastly, Cajete says: "Indigenous science can also be described as guiding thoughts and stories about the world uniquely based on the lived experience of a group of People."

Indigenous science, then, is a process for exploring, which reminds me, again, of Bruno Latour's "sciences in the making."

What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they're changing is that they aren't constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson's novel The New Moon's Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There's this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they're actually teaching each other. "Intergenerational" doesn't imply a hierarchical, top-down elders' passing of knowledge only. It's more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation.

PNM: You also speak about "Native apocalypse," which reads to me much like Gerald Vizenor's notion of "survivance." In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (1999), Vizenor explains that the end of the world has already been experienced by many people, mostly nonwhite, and still these people resist, survive, and thrive. It seems like this is something that white people have only recently caught up with, now that we're also somewhat facing our own end of the world. This is quite intriguing, because to me the current obsession with dystopias, in books and television series, reads as a final appropriation of sorts. While Indigenous peoples have lived through apocalypses for centuries, white people now steal even that space, or airtime if you will, of both Native trauma and survivance, only to push their own anguish, seemingly erasing any colonial differences with statements like, "We're all together in this climatic mess."

GD: As Indigenous peoples, we've already experienced forms of genocide, including biowarfare, with blankets being contaminated with smallpox and then handed out as a way to decimate our people. You can connect this with Vizenor's notion of survivance-telling stories to overcome the lived experience of tragedy, dominance, and victimhood. The important thing is not to be subsumed by those experiences. In Waubgeshig Rice's novel Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), you have an Indigenous community where all of a sudden the power is cut off and there's no internet or any connection to the outside world. To help everyone survive, what the community does is return to traditional protocols: if anyone hunts a caribou or a moose they don't hoard but share it with everyone, starting with the elders. To me, that is the hope that underlines the reality of Native apocalypse: you lived through it, so you may know how to pull together as an Indigenous community through any kind of crisis.

PNM: That connects to how you manage to go back to the community through Indigenous Futurisms, which is what is referred to as Biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabe word meaning "Returning to Ourselves." From what you explain, this implies a sense of reencounter and pride in Native traditions, not simply to preserve them but to push them towards better futures.

GD: For us Anishinaabe, Biskaabiiyang is a specific term that means "returning to the woods," because we're woodland peoples. For example, I grew up growing my "three sisters"-that is, corn, beans, and squash-along the edge of the forest, using what people now call sylvan culture or permaculture. It's curious how this counters the perspective of classical authors like Dante in early modern Europe or, later, Edmund Spenser, an important Renaissance poet, who view the woods as this terrifying presence. Why is this decolonizing? Because through boarding schools and many other colonial experiences, that fear of the woods creeps in.

PNM: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was "pacification," which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and "educate" its local Native communities, they'd call the whole process "pacification." So that's become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term's historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with "nature" and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned.

Going back to your ideas, it's been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, including women and queer writers, being published and offering some of the decade's most challenging stories. N. K. Jemisin, Stephen Graham Jones, and Hao Jingfang are well-known examples. At the same time, there were tremendous political upheavals and now-iconic Indigenous struggles, like the NoDAPL movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North America. Do you feel certain things have changed in the space both of indigenous struggle and of science fiction since the book's publication?

GD: A key change has been the integration of racial justice with criminal-justice reform. A good example of a story that portrays the racism of incarceration is Australian First Nations' writer and director Wayne Blair's new television series Cleverman. It tells the story of these supposedly nonhuman people called the "hairies"-and they are hairy!-as a way to exaggerate and exemplify how Australia's First Nations people are treated, especially in urban areas. It really speaks to issues like immigration reform and the caging of people by showing how they are interrelated issues.

Climate justice is another issue that's being addressed in fiction right now. I don't mean that stories are simply talking about climate change, but that the stories themselves become forms of climate justice. Take Waanyi Nation Alexis Wright's The Swan Book (2017), which deals with the contamination of First Nations' rivers and waters. Or, also in Australia, the works of Wirlomin Noongar writer and poet Claire G. Coleman, like Terra Nullius and The Old Lie, the former a clear take on climate injustices. Anishinaabe Louise Erdrich's novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) is a really interesting take on decolonizing the Anthropocene. The main character is a pregnant woman who is ready to have her little one in what other non-Native and non-BIPOC people in the story view as a mutated or regressive state. There's also the novel Corvus (2015) by Harold Johnson, who is Cree. The novel is very cyberpunk, with its urban forms of technology, but in this world there's this particular way of traveling where you can climb inside a mechanical bird to glide; the hero picks a raven but soon learns that the raven is actually a bird-person who brings him back to his own Native community out in the mountains and hidden valleys.

PNM: Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I'm asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous and anthropological discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the anthropological question of "what is human," from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like "animal," "plant," "human," and "spirit" may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them.

GD: Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King's novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that's impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?

PNM: That story reminds me of Larissa Lai's latest novel, The Tiger Flu (2018), and its post-hardware future, where plant seeds become technologies and the world has shifted entirely to wetware, cell culture, and herbology. It speaks to what you're saying about fiction that responds to knowledges of the land, rather than science fiction being restricted to "hard" technology like spaceships.

GD: Speaking of outer space, one indication of how much things have changed is the fact that I was invited to the advisory board of what's called ETHNO-ISS, an organization that focuses on the International Space Station and life in outer orbits. They want people working on futurisms, including Indigenous Futurisms. Right now, I'm also working with three other editors, Isiah Lavender III, Taryne Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, on a Routledge collection on Alternative Futurisms, or "Co-Futures" as Bodhi has coined it. That includes Afrofuturism, African Futurisms (with Nnedi Okorafor's definition of this in mind), Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Gulf Futurisms, and Asian Futurisms. I've noticed that the mindset is shifting for the better, I think; it is becoming more inclusive and diverse.

PNM: You always say "Indigenous Futurisms," in the plural, rather than in the singular, just as you say "sciences" instead of "science." I'd like to ask about this plurality of futurisms. Connected to this, it comes to mind that instead of painting the rosy multicultural future world imagined by much optimistic science fiction and liberal politicians, many of the writers whom you reference don't shy away from historical, racial, and thoroughly cosmological tensions. Would you like to comment on that?

GD: Indigenous Futurisms, in the plural, was a choice that I made after 2012. Until then I was calling it "Indigenous Futurism." The choice reflects the richness of Indigenous communities globally. I based it on the process and legal struggles that led to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with an s. It took about three decades of struggle to get that letter s in there. The reason that it's so important is because our nations can cross borders of what are perceived as other nations. My own nations are that way. Bay Mills Nation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in the US, and Garden River First Nation, in Ontario, Canada, belong together, but because of the 49th parallel, it's Canada on one side and the US on the other. We're not just one people, we are peoples and our lands can encompass more than one settler nation. So Indigenous futurisms became a political pushing-forward of decolonization.

Then, talking with other people, they said, yes, we should call it African Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, and so on. It's been very conversational. We left Afrofuturism alone because that was really the starting point, with Alondra Nelson's 2002 Social Text issue on Afrofuturism. Mark Dery is given credit for coining the term "Afrofuturism" back in 1994, when he edited the collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, where he interviewed Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. Once again, final credit was given to a white man, just like with slipstream. For my part, I start that discussion on Afrofuturism with Nelson; her collection is the first genuine piece of scholarship on Afrofuturism that brings in different African-American voices. In 2003, when I coined the term "Indigenous Futurism" (later "Futurisms"), I was doing it as an homage to Alondra Nelson's collection.

PNM: Interestingly, your anthology includes Indigenous writers from across the world, particularly those subjugated by British imperialism and the structures it left behind. To ask for the inclusion of South American Native voices perhaps would have been too much, but I wonder how that speaks to a divide between North and South America. In the North, thanks to voices like yours, Indigenous Futurisms have become a political and aesthetic project. My knowledge only goes so far, but I haven't seen much on Indigenous Futurisms in Brazil, which is what I'm most familiar with. (I'd say it's different with Afrofuturism though.) In Brazil, you may even find a certain distrust in the notion of futurity itself. I can understand that, because the relation between the future and technological advancement leading to a "better world" is fundamentally a modern Western invention. And we know how that future not only led to but is based on the colonization of other peoples' worlds, including their particular perception of technology, humanity, and the environment. In those techno-scientific, linear, or messianic terms, Native peoples were and continue to be robbed of any future, be it access to white privilege or their own cosmopolitical sovereignty. How might "Native slipstream" and the concept of survivance respond to this possible frustration and offer other ways of understanding the future beyond settler time?

GD: I should apologize, because when I edited Walking the Clouds I really wanted to bring in Indigenous Latinx authors from countries in South America. I speak a bit of Spanish but not fluently. I would have needed someone to translate those stories for me. Now things have changed. Now there are many more collections in many languages, and stories are being translated.

In terms of the future, my Anishinaabemowin language has a word, kobade-a very small word, but in reality an extremely sophisticated concept. The idea is that everything that's in the past and the future is also in the now, but it's not as simplistic as that. It's more like there exists a spiral of intergenerational connections, so that even if you are in the present you have spirit persons at your side; they can be ancient spirits, considered to be from the past or from the future. Kobade is the recognition of all persons, not just human persons, and of all the intergenerational connections that we have, which are never linear, but spiral. In my language some people may describe it as a chain, wherein we're connected to each other, so that the future is always containing the past and the present; I don't use the word "chain" because I work in Black Studies and it just feels heavy and inappropriate. I use the image of a spiral. This is very different from the former science fiction model, what was called "extrapolative fiction." This word came directly from Robert A. Heinlein, who took the idea from mathematical equations, where you pull something out of the past or the present and draw this imagined plausible future from one dot to another. That's an extremely linear concept, too simplistic to allow other forms of thinking. For example, we just don't arbitrarily choose a certain point in the past when writing and developing characters; there can be all kinds of remnants of pasts, presents, and futures.

PNM: That's such a fundamental rupture in the practice of science fiction. Of course, the 1960s and '70s New Wave generation already broke with that more messianic, technologically bound view of science fiction. But Indigenous Futurisms introduce, to my mind, a rupture not only in the conceptualization of time but also within the very topic of science fiction itself. It's science fiction, not future fiction. It's about the science, first and foremost.

GD: When talking about her 2010 short film The Cave, Helen Haig-Brown says that what she did in the film was to take the fiction out of science fiction. The film tells the story of a bear hunter who ends up in a cave, inside an alternative world where people speak to one another telepathically and you have these spirit beings floating in the air; in the credits they're actually listed as "Spirit Woman 1," "Spirit Man 2," and so on! The hunter meets a telepath spirit woman who warns him, "You're not ready for this knowledge, you need to go back," and there's a sudden clap of energy that pushes him back to the woods, where he finds that his horse is now a skeleton, as if he's been gone for decades. What's so interesting is that Haig-Brown was filming a recorded Tsilhqot'in story, which her tribal nation gave permission to adapt, and these were real people from the community who agreed to participate in the film. While the film may appear as science fiction, it's taking the fiction out of science fiction. This is something you see in many Indigenous Futurisms.

PNM: How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn't want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.

GD: I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I'd like to do is to eradicate the term "myth" or "mythology," because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do-and this is what I grew up with-is to call them "stories." Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences.

I grew up in a pacifist anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science.

Our word aadizookaanan means "ceremonial stories" or "sacred stories." Most First Nations don't share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to-and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations-got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I'm interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.

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Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms - Journal #120

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Dune - My lungs taste the air of time, blown past fallen sand bagpipes

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Will-o’-the-wisp In Scottish folklore, will-o’-the-wisps are variously depicted either as mischievous spirits (typically fairies), or even the ghosts of the dead, eager to lead travellers off their path and into their death. By Liana Paraschaki For weary, tired travellers, especially those fearing they may have got lost, there is little that can inspire more hope […]

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Deus Ex Machina? Witchcraft and the Techno-World

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This symbol is found on many ancient carvings, the most famous of which is Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland, which dates back to 2500 BC. The symbol is carved into the rock at the main entrance (above) and is one of the most famous stones in Megalithic art. The same symbol is found engraved on one of the stones inside the chamber. Newgrange is best known for the illumination of its chamber by the Winter Solstice sun. Morning sunlight travels up the passageway. Then, as the sun rises, the whole chamber is dramatically illuminated.

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The triskelion or" triskele" is also known as the tri-spiral or "Spiral of Life." The triskelion represents balance, harmony and continual motion indicative of the flow of life and of the Earth in her seasons and cycles.

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Digital Folklore - To computer users, with love and respect

Artdirection and Design for this 288 pages strong reader. With: Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied

"Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn't matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web and what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large. Users' endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typonihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement, ..."

Part of the Introduction by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied

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BODY OF WORK: The reader is subdivided into three parts:

DESIGN IDEAS: The leading purpose was to create a real amateur spirit - though you can feel that there's a "proper" design approach which makes everything practical and clear. Like the super duper tags, that you can find on almost every page - they give you a perfect idea of digital folkore topics. The strict use of little modified system-fonts let the design appear as a wonderful fail or rather "fail better":

PART A - Observations: Several essays, short articles and observations by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied. Each article is designed differently.

At the end of PART A you'll find a selection of works by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied. Like "Digital Divide", my favorite beach-art so far:

PART B - Research: Four essays by former Merz-Akademie students. Each essay is printed on different colored paper. The delicate layout & a delicious Arial typeface let them look as beautiful hand-outs...

PART C - Giving Back: On the last 40 pages you'll find projects of New Media and Interface Design students at Merz Akademie. Dope stuff like"Bootyclipse" by Dennis Knopf or Tobi's Timemachine (full screenshot below)
This LOL CATS FAMILY TREE comes as POSTER with the reader:
Order "Digital Folklore - To computer users, with love and respect" now - or never!
Reviews of Digital Folklore:

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Bookdesign for Digital Folklore by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied

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Futuristic Folktales: The Scots Whay Hae! Podcast Talks To Charlotte Mclean, Nelly Kelly & Malin Lewis...

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The latest Scots Whay Hae! podcast is all about the new experimental work Futuristic Folktales, and Ali caught up with Dance-theatre artist and director Charlotte Mclean, writer Nelly Kelly and composer Malin Lewis to learn all about it.They each break down their individual roles before talking about the collaborative process involved, and how working together was inspirational, and educational, for them all. The talk also turns to the other members of the team, and the joys, and challenges, of

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ABOUT the digital witchcraft institute Sacred interoperability to fix this spiritual crisis LATESTI. POSTHUMAN TECHII. DEEP MIGRATIONSIII....

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Scotland as Science Fiction - The Bottle Imp

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Though cinematic aliens pile up on the White House lawn, and monsters show a fatal attraction to a dwindling colonial power centered in south Britain, science fiction criticism typically considers its subject global in practice and universal in aspiration. This is a position of paradox—and therefore worthy both of the fictions of science and of […]

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In recent years, Chaos Magic " sigils" have circulated on the internet as memes for magical intents, with as diverse purposes as supporting alternative gender and sexual identities and catching pokemon, in the process gaining audiences on websites like Tumblr. Artist Eliza Gauger's project Problem Glyphs began when an offer to create sigils based on user submitted problems garnered an overwhelming response. Gauger indicates she believes Chaos Magic is part of the "generational 'zeitgeist'" due to its appeal to millennials struggling with poverty and the effects of visible queerness. In queer witchcraft groups on Facebook, Chaos Magic techniques like sigils are mentioned almost as often as crystals and tarot cards. Like Gauger, trend forecasting collective K-HOLE (of " normcore " fame) predicts a zeitgeist moment for Chaos Magic. Describing the ideology of Chaos Magic, K-HOLE writes, "Belief becomes a technology that creates change" and "￼Chaos Magic creates realities which are temporary and subjective. It's not a tool for changing others-it's a tool for changing yourself. You opt into whatever belief system you think will help you reach your intended goals". This meta-paradigmatic approach to occultism is extremely pop culture friendly.

In earlier stages of the technological development of the information economy, occult ideology was disseminated in different forms: Ancient Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, a Rosicrucian order, began selling correspondence courses and initiations via mail order in 1915; in the 1980s, Psychic TV began using experimental music subculture to proliferate Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a Chaos Magic order which required a sigil anointed with sexual fluids, blood, and saliva be mailed to them as an initiation. In the current information economy, methods of disseminating ideology and building community are relatively decentralized, memetic, even sometimes algorithmically automated. Few spiritual ideologies are as well-adapted to late capitalism as Chaos Magic, which traffics in the postmodern power of pure signifiers. As a structure of advanced imperialism it claims to distill all the world's esoteric traditions into the singular abstract technology of belief. It's an ideology that lends spiritual meaning to mass media, brands, and viral content as "egregores", powered by mass affect, as much as Renaissance Neoplatonism lent spiritual meaning to the social structure of feudalism. It claims to be an ideologically neutral technology, but it never interrogates the ideological ramifications of the concept of "ideologically neutral technology".

Chaos Magic began in the late 1970s with the publication of magazine The New Equinox and subsequent establishment of magical order Illuminates of Thanateros by Ray Sherwin and Peter J. Carroll. As an occult movement, Chaos Magic attempts to remove spiritual experience from ideology and treats it as a technology which is religiously, politically, and ethically neutral-to paraphrase Carroll, freeing magic from occultism. The "technology" of Chaos Magic is the method of obtaining altered states of consciousness ("gnosis") and crafting a symbolic language in order to arrange the subject's visionary world. Carroll writes, "It would be inappropriate for a Chaos Magic text to prescribe any particular beliefs or dogmas, except that magic works if certain general principles are followed". The project of separating the Western esoteric tradition from its ideological, religious paradigms (i.e., Christianity, synthesized with Kabbalah, and interpreted through the lens of Renaissance Neoplatonism and Hermeticism) began with modernity. The religious test of Freemasonry, amidst Enlightenment era secularism was at most belief in a generic supreme being. The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn, an influential Victorian occult society, was founded by members of a Masonic Rosicrucian order (Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia). The Golden Dawn's policy was similar Anglo-American Freemasonry's: "Belief in One God necessary. No other restrictions."

source: http://the-equinox.org

No one from the milieu of Victorian Rosicrucianism did as much to emancipate esotericism from its religious context as former Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. Referencing the Golden Dawn's Christological use of ancient Egyptian mythos, Crowley proclaimed an apocalyptic end to the "Aeon of Osiris" heralding the obsolescence of Christian ethics and metaphysics in the occult. The slogan of The Equinox (journal of Crowley's Golden Dawn successor order, A∴A∴) evokes Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in this "New Aeon" approach to esotericism. It reads: "The Method of Science, The Aim of Religion". Crowley attempted to incorporate the inner, subjective occult experience into a sort of Enlightenment era consensus about reality, while generally avoiding making paranormal claims per se. However, Crowley's Counter-Enlightenment tendency only partially removes a faith in magic from the medieval, esoteric, Rosicrucian ideological context it inherits. The "will" mentioned in Crowley's law of the New Aeon-"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"- is discerned through mystic communion with one's Holy Guardian Angel, through an operation derived from a 14th or 15th century grimoire ( The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage). Peter J. Carroll writes of a manual outlining an array of general magical techniques without any specified goals, "It is a definitive replacement for the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which system has become obsolete due to its monotheist transcendentalism". Chaos Magic is not "The Method of Science; The Aim of Religion," because any aim at all will do.

Flowchart image

"Each group may be considered as the "Illuminati" of its era in the sense that it possessed the keys to the next advance of enlightenment. This, I believe, is all the Illuminati actually consists of, and I like to think that Chaos Magic is the obvious esoteric current for the postmodern era." - Peter J. Carroll

From a historical materialist perspective, spiritual ideas and communities develop not as progressive stages of enlightenment, but as ideological structures of the political economy, reflecting conflicting class interests. As Marx wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Chaos Magic counts the various formal esoteric systems established in Europe and Asia from the Medieval period until present (e.g., Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, Tantra, Sufism, Taoism, et cetera) as well as informal "folk" magical traditions (such as witchcraft) among its inspirations. There are a few defining, cross-cultural, aspects of what constitutes "esotericism": an emanationist cosmology (which following the maxim "as above, so below" functions as a theory of everything); a symbolic language (e.g., iconographic, alphanumeric, etc) for interpreting and/or interacting with cosmological archetypes (e.g., theurgy, alchemy, astrology, medicine, textual exegesis, etc); and is initiatory and/or has restrictions on study or practice. Nearly all of the world's major esoteric traditions emerged in their respective cultural contexts during medieval transitions to feudalism. Even the spread of the esoteric Shingon and Tendai sects in Japan is placed in the Heian period, when the class tensions leading to the establishment of Japanese feudalism developed.

Cabala: Spiegel der Kunst und Natur, Michelspacher, 1615

That the world's esoteric movements, as social phenomena, have emerged in otherwise disparate social contexts with the rise of feudal class tensions would indicate that esoteric movements are an ideological structure historically tied to certain feudal class interests. In the context of the European Middle Ages, Silvia Federici claims in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that heresy served as a "protest movement" and "liberation theology". Federici goes on to call the Cathars and the Waldenses "the first 'proletarian international'". Federici identifies use of the sacraments to extort money from the peasantry, the threat of excommunication for labor protesters, and the Church's ideological control over reproductive labor as particular social grievances inspiring participation in heretical movements such as the Cathars. Though Victorian occultists later drew inspiration from the Albigensians' gnosticism, it is not clear that these sects had any direct effect on the esotericism of the European Middle Ages. Federici also argues that in the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, witch hunts were "instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources", noting however that "High Magic", "the Renaissance magician", and the Neoplatonists were largely unaffected by these persecutions of witchcraft and heresy. John Dee, for example, was not burned at the stake for creating the Enochian system of angel conjuration, but instead worked as Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, advising her in favor of imperial expansion.

Rosa Celeste, Gustave Doré

It would seem then that despite contemporary association with counter-culture, esotericism did not particularly clash with the interests of feudal powers. Johann Eck implied as much when citing Neoplatonic mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's Celestial Hierarchy in a defense of the Papacy against Martin Luther at the Leipzig Debate: "Our hierarchy is religiously arranged in orders which God ordained, and is conformed to the heavenly hierarchies of the saints." Indeed, a cosmology where absolutely everything is ordained in a complex hierarchy corresponding to every other thing in the universe is compelling when attempting to naturalize a complex social hierarchy.

Much ink has been spilled over Gutenberg's press-how this revolution in industry impacted European religious development in the Protestant Reformation. Changes to the economy naturally affect social change which in turn modify human spiritual consciousness. It is well known that in the United States the number of religiously "unaffiliated" persons keeps growing. What isn't known is for how many of these people traditional religious institutions are simply an outmoded technology for providing spiritual instruction and community. Doubtless many persons who reblog sigil memes or who are members of Facebook groups like "the Queer Witch Collective" are religiously "unaffiliated". These are engaging with ideological apparatuses that did not exist and were not possible prior to the advent of new media.

All of the occult movements since modernity are arguably part of the project of resacralizing bourgeois liberal positivism. As Horkheimer and Adorno write, "The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape." Chaos Magic, emerging in a vastly different technological and social context than either the mystery cults of late antiquity or the feudal esoteric movements which emerged from them, sublimates the sacramental formula. Word never becomes flesh; the word is encrypted, embedded in digital symbols which conceal its meaning, and broadcast in mass media where it is consecrated by the collective affect it elicits. Federici attributes to medieval folk magic a symbolic power of protest, while simultaneously noting that Hermeticism was tolerated among the elite. Chaos Magic positions itself as heir to both of these lineages. Its ideological flexibility provides an allure to the identities disaffected from institutional spirituality and at the same time it animistically breathes the breath of life into late capitalist mass media and finance. *~

Angel Ashley is an upstanding citizen who likes making desserts and looking at Google image search results for pictures of angels. Angel can be found at @jobhaver and @jobhaver.

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Towards a Marxist Cyber Theology of Chaos Magic

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In recent years, Chaos Magic " sigils" have circulated on the internet as memes for magical intents, with as diverse purposes as supporting alternative gender and sexual identities and catching pokemon, in the process gaining audiences on websites like Tumblr.

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Improvisational Artistry in Live Dance Performance as Embodied and Extended Agency | Dance Research Journal | Cambridge Core

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Improvisational Artistry in Live Dance Performance as Embodied and Extended Agency - Volume 46 Issue 1

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Received: 1 December 2017 / Revised: 2 February 2018 / Accepted: 5 February 2018 / Published: 9 February 2018

Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collective dance improvisation is kinaesthetic (based on movement and its perception), and so can be simultaneously addressed from the perspective of the performers and the spectators, and be measured. We utilise these multiple levels of description: the first-person, phenomenological level of personal experiences, the third-person description of brain and body activity, and the level of interpersonal dynamics. Here, we describe two of our protocols: a four-person mirror game and a 'rhythm battle' dance improvisation score. Using an interpersonal closeness measure after the practice, we correlate subjective sense of individual/group connectedness and observed levels of in-group temporal synchronization. We propose that kinaesthetic togetherness, or interpersonal resonance, is integral to the aesthetic pleasure of the participants and spectators, and that embodied feeling of togetherness might play a role more generally in aesthetic experience in the performing arts. View Full-Text

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Himberg, T.; Laroche, J.; Bigé, R.; Buchkowski, M.; Bachrach, A. Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness. Behav. Sci. 2018, 8, 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8020023

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Himberg T, Laroche J, Bigé R, Buchkowski M, Bachrach A. Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness. Behavioral Sciences. 2018; 8(2):23. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8020023

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Himberg, Tommi, Julien Laroche, Romain Bigé, Megan Buchkowski, and Asaf Bachrach. 2018. "Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness" Behavioral Sciences 8, no. 2: 23. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8020023

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Coordinated Interpersonal Behaviour in Collective Dance Improvisation: The Aesthetics of Kinaesthetic Togetherness

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Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices.

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Editors’ Note: Assembly, Gathering and Being with Dance | Dance Research Journal | Cambridge Core

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Editors’ Note: Assembly, Gathering and Being with Dance - Volume 55 Issue 2

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SLIMOCO brings together artists, scientists and others interested in slime moulds - to share research, knowledge, experiments, images…

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The mutual constitution of entangled agencies. An agent is anyone or anything that acts or engages in action. Intra-action therefore acknowledges the impossibility of absolute separation between bodies and thus subverts classical objectivity.

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Performance artist Joshua Serafin opens a void to birth a non-binary entity

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Many-Headed- Co-creating with the Collective

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The Physarum Experiments - short compilation of studies

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Speculative Ecologies | Agosto Foundation

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Inspired by the anthology Speculative Ecologies: Plotting Through the Mesh, edited by Vít Bohal and Dustin Breitling (2019).

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Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism invisible to the naked eye. However, in its ideal conditions-dark, wet, and bacterial-it multiplies into a visible bright yellow mass that spreads ostentatiously, fanning out in veins or erupting in polyp-like protrusions. The population of autonomous cells acts like a single being, moving and spreading with efficiency and coordination to find food and avoid light. Though it has no brain or nervous system, the group organism demonstrates advanced spatial intelligence.

Polycephalum, meaning "many-headed," is a species of slime mold. Long assumed to be a type of fungus, slime molds are now considered Protists, "a taxonomic group reserved for 'everything we don't really understand.'" ¹ Slime molds are ancient: they arrived hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion years ago, and theoretically, they're immortal. If the slime can't find resources it goes into hibernation, turning into a scab or growing spores to await future conditions when it can regenerate. In other words, it's one of the earthly creatures best suited to survive planetary extinction. Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist, argued that "those great evolutionary survivors, the lowly slime molds, would inherit the earth." ²

In the early 2000s a Japanese researcher named Toshiyuki Nakagaki placed a few cells of Physarum into a labyrinth with flakes of oatmeal at two ends. The slime quickly foraged the most efficient path between both food sources, finding the shortest route between two points-a job for which humans typically need equations or computational aids. Nakagaki then tried arranging the oats into an approximation of the geography of Tokyo and surrounding cities; the slime carefully extended itself across the oat-map into a shape remarkably similar to the existing railway network. In fact, unaffected by human bias and politics, Nakagaki says the slime actually may have improved upon the design of the railway system.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Tokyo rail network experiment (2010). Image courtesy of Future University Hakodate and Seiji Takagi.
In April 2016 the artist Jenna Sutela made a research trip to Japan to interview Nakagaki and other slime-scientists to document and learn from their work. Sutela is an artist whose practice has been following the trail of slime: the organism has become a collaborator/performer, growing inside recent sculptural works, while providing an ever-expanding rubric for material-based research into organizational intelligence and computation, both natural and unnatural. "The slime mold has served as a kind of a paranoiac-critical agent, helping me make connections where none previously existed. I trust its movement will take me where I need to go."
Beginning to Think
Sutela does artistic research; I research artistic research. We overlap, we leave traces, we circle back on one another. We write this essay back and forth, to articulate each other's thoughts: two heads working laterally through movement, tracing slimelike intelligence by simulating its collaboration. As Donna Haraway says: "To be a one at all you must be a many, and that's not a metaphor." ³ What can we learn from a primordial organism about decentralized cooperation, material problem-solving, and the limits of consciousness? How does the slime mold know what it knows? How do we know what we know?

Understanding the behavior of polycephalum requires a reconsideration of the meaning of intelligence. Contemporary theories of intelligence almost universally rely on the "information processing" metaphor, that is, the idea that the intelligent brain processes data through computational actions like storage, transfer, and retrieval-though this is probably nothing like what brains really do. Computational intelligence as a metaphor for all intelligence is a historically specific construction, just like theories of mind throughout history, which tend to mirror the most advanced technologies of the time-at various times the brain has been described as a hydraulic system, an electrical circuit, and a set of chemical reactions. 4 Many, including Noam Chomsky, have argued that no technological comparison will be accurate until we understand how consciousness works first; even if it could be artificially replicated, the process can't be initially grasped through stabs at modeling it. 5 So what if instead of looking for the most advanced metaphor to account for consciousness, we were to look to a "primitive" organic being like the slime mold, not only to understand or imagine how one brain works inside the skull, but also the way many brains work in concert?

Unlike a typical programmable agent that processes information through memory, slime mold decision-making can't be predicted or replicated, since it coordinates itself entirely through sensory feedback with its environment. Exactly how this feedback happens is still unclear, but it has something to do with the extracellular slime traces that the cell leaves behind to tell itself where it's already been. It does not make internal memories, but it does make choices based on past behavior. Its cognition is identical to movement; it knows exactly and only what it does. "Physarum's spatial memory works," writes Steven Shaviro, "not by internal representation, but rather by a physical marking of the very space that is being remembered. In this case, the map actually coincides with the territory." ⁶

Shaviro likens this behavior to the theory of Extended Mind, a philosophical concept put forth in the late 1990s that the brain and its environment can be seen as an indistinguishable coupled system. Nakagaki, on the other hand, compares it simply to the human unconscious response to stimuli. 7 Both theories are metaphorical attempts to move beyond the information processing metaphor, by relocating intelligence altogether from the brain itself to a type of distributed, physically situated (site-specific) system.
Organization, Organism, Orgasm
If a seemingly simple organism can solve spatial problems through movement, artificial intelligence could conceivably do the same. Many scientists believe the future of robotics lies in such processes of decentralized movement, and the bodies of newly developed "soft robots" are designed to adapt and learn by moving through what are often called "genetic" or "evolutionary" algorithms. A research group led by Akio Ishiguro at Tohoku University, who Sutela visited, developed a soft-bodied amoeboid robot (its working title at one point was "Slimy") inspired by the slime mold's plasmodium. While traditional robotics focuses on controlling movement through motorized joints, soft robots adapt to their environments in real time, expressing ever-greater degrees of freedom than their rigid counterparts.

The slime mold is an organism but it is also an organization-not a train but a railway system. Like robotics, infrastructure design has begun to learn from the notion of decentralized, environmentally specific intelligence. Keller Easterling describes the evolution of massive worldwide infrastructure systems: "When the object of design is not an object form or master plan but a set of instructions for an interplay between variables, design acquires some of the power and currency of software. [...] It is an 'abstract machine' generative of a 'real that is yet to come.'" 8 Sutela's artworks involving Physarum become such abstract machines generating alternate realities. However, the design is not only a set of immaterial "instructions"-in this case better thought of as suggestions or provocations-but also the materials through which those instructions are enacted (or not). That the slime mold is incorporated into the work outsources some of the decision-making process to spatial, non-human intelligence, which is interpretable only through its movement. The abstract machine becomes a soft machine.

Working with a living organism as an artistic material requires adapting along with it: besides the act of keeping it alive, there's the fact that not every museum or gallery wants mold-eating spores spreading around the exhibition, and so the life-form must stay contained in its artwork. Building a host sculpture therefore becomes an infrastructural design challenge, a calibration of multiple parts to form a whole. "Creating the works is like creating a laboratory. The slime needs a habitat-not just an installation, but an architectural space." The habitats she builds are interactive, often resembling mazes. The labyrinth as a generative form contains not only the formal history of computational problem solving and theories of mind, but also represents the collision of the natural and artificially constructed space. ⁹
Jenna Sutela, Orbs (2016). Physarum polycephalum, agar and oats on a silver 3D print of the Minakata Mandala, infrared light rod with engravings. Photo by Mikko Gaestel.
Sutela's works are grouped into an ongoing project called Orgs, which stands for Organization, Organism, and Orgasm. A circular motif recurs throughout the works: a feedback loop, a zero, an open mouth, a Petri dish. A living slime mold draws itself across a maze of three-dimensional Plexiglas forms derived from organizational charts and networking diagrams, the surfaces of which are coated with agar for moisture and dotted with oats for nutrition. In the most recent iteration, a series of three hanging, transparent, hand-sized spheres called Orbs (2016) were shown in an exhibition at Future Gallery in Berlin, the micro-climates also containing sticks of activated charcoal to purify the air within each orb. Housed in the dark gallery basement, the orbs are illuminated by infrared light; while Physarum is unique for a Protist in that its activity is visible to the naked eye, it paradoxically does not like to be seen, adding to the logistical and theoretical puzzle of putting it on display.

One Orb contains an explanatory blockchain diagram; another contains a "Minakata Mandala," or a shape drawn by the famous Japanese naturalist Minakata Kumagusu, who collected slime mold samples in the 1920s for Emperor Hirohito (also a biologist who had an affinity for the organism). In a letter to a Buddhist monk, Kumagusu represented his view of the world through this mandala drawing: "With humans placed at the center of the diagram, our ability to comprehend causal connections between things diminishes as they are located further outward from the center and our awareness of them becomes more tenuous." The mandala also is a manifestation of the limits of anthropocentrism and the existence of systems beyond cause-and-effect chains of connection. The juxtaposition of shapes inside the Orbs connects systems of belief, exposing the iconographic power behind ostensibly functional, empirically produced systems.
Minakata Kumagusu, Minakata Mandala (1903). From a letter to Horyu Toki. Image courtesy of Minakata Kumagusu Archives.
The third sphere contains a "Holacratic" organizational chart. The term originates in an essay from 2007, in which the American software engineer Brian Robertson used the word "Holacracy" to describe a system of corporate self-organization by which a company is organized into overlapping "circles," teams of employees who come together spontaneously around specific tasks. ¹⁰ Contemporary management theory has generally come to treat social groups as organisms possessing their own form of intelligence. Circles and holons replace linear organizational charts; role definitions become fluid, relationships become transient. Holacracies may retain hierarchical forms, but they are "value-neutral" hierarchies.

As a living model of non-linear action and lateral collaboration, the slime mold prompts the question of whether organizations could ever truly develop "naturally" as an organism, devoid of top-down controls, or whether imposed horizontality only advances the interests of external forces governing the body, instead of the interests of its constituent parts. The idea of a "conscious" organization is as disturbing as it is compelling. A decentralized, autonomous organism has no ideology, ethics, or accountability, whereas it might be preferable for a corporation to act according to a core logic beyond self-serving opportunism. In the case of Holacratic systems of corporate organization, it's hard to imagine the "oatmeal" driving the participants as being anything other than capital. Mike Pepi describes the trouble with decentralized organizations in terms of "asynchrony," or non-linearity:

We have dreamed about the revolutionary potential of self-organization for generations, but the apparent harmony between asynchrony and anarcho-syndicalism, libertarianism, or horizontalism obscures the extent to which an engineer's fantasy has become management's best friend. The decentralization achieved by asynchrony is different from the political ideal of decentralization. From the perspective of the individual worker, asynchrony doesn't remove authority as much as displace it. ¹¹

Becoming Other
For humans to act as a decentralized system constantly oscillating between competition and collaboration to the point where the two can no longer be distinguished, moving in the most efficient ways according to self-serving opportunities-that's already the condition of the free market. ¹² And yet, it's also the condition of resistant, resilient, "polycephalous" political movements, those adaptable, semi-coordinated networks of individual cells who join together and multiply, only becoming visible when they arise en masse. The remarkable intelligence of polycephalum is not in its asynchronicity, but in its lack of any need for a manager governing that decentralized movement.

For a performance at the Centre Pompidou in spring 2016, Sutela inhaled some "script-defining spores" of polycephalum before a performative reading. Near her was a physical work, a sandwich of Plexiglas plates. The bottom plate was colored red to distort the light to the slime mold's preferred color, and had an interpretation of the Minakata Mandala drawn over it; the middle one had a "word maze" with agar, oats, and replicating cells of polycephalum, and the protective top layer had a circle of arrows creating a shadow on the slime, potentially affecting is movement as it has an affinity for darkness.

Jenna Sutela, Orgs (2016). Reading with Physarum polycephalum; engraving, print and marker on a stack of Plexiglas. Photo by Mikko Gaestel.

The word maze consisted of lines leading in a starlike pattern to the letters of the words "organization," "organism," and "orgasm." In her reading she gave clues to the connections between these words, at one point explaining: "Orgasms may induce a brief loss or weakening of consciousness, la petite mort. According to Professor Nakagaki, by focusing on the level of unconsciousness, we may find clues to the similarities between the information processing of humans and other forms of organic and synthetic life. [...] Artificial intelligence has been trapped on the level of consciousness for too long." Imagining that the behavior of the polycephalum she'd ingested before the performance was "programming" her own, her speech act became itself a form of artificial intelligence. The reading was co-designed, moving towards the unconscious.

Nakagaki once felt an irresistible urge to eat the organism he devoted his life to studying. ¹³ From his description, it's hard to identify a scientific goal in doing so; he'd veered into the territory of non-empirical experimentation at that point. There is, from the other side, a long history of artistic fascination with biological organisms that overlaps with scientific methodology, but that often winds up in the same not-quite-empirical territory too. John Cage, for one, became biologically inclined via his adoration for all types of mushrooms. His mycological obsession likewise led him to eat them (including poisonous ones) as if driven by a desire for understanding through symbiosis, a non-codified type of knowledge. Like the slime mold, mushrooms were particularly interesting to him because they are so difficult to taxonomize-in reading his accounts, it seems as if only by achieving physical oneness with the organism did he feel he could begin to understand the mysteries of mushroom intelligence.

However, while Cage sought chance encounters without making conclusions, claiming that artists should ask questions rather than seek to provide answers (referring to a type of artistic "divination"), Sutela's interest in slime mold's intelligence is an interest in answers-there is a real element of experimentation in each of the physical works she creates. Will the slime mold react to the conditions of light and darkness she sets up each time? Will its presence affect her performance? What word(s) will it spell out as it grows across the maze? How does it communicate with the viewer? The behavior of her companion species enacts a type of knowledge beyond codified systems of representation. And likewise the artwork becomes a living, unpredictable, unknowable entity.

Art constructs systems of knowledge and belief that can be as rigid as any other, and often does this by (over-)explaining what it knows. Sutela's Orgs suggest the potential for other kinds of knowing that cannot necessarily be transmitted through existing channels of artistic or scientific research. She invents a new type of movement, a new language of forms-"form as action" as opposed to "form as object." ¹⁴ Artwork whose form is action is self-learning artwork-software rather than hardware. This could also be described as the distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how." ¹⁵ To know that the slime mold moves in a certain way because of certain capabilities-that's scientific research. To know how through the act of moving along with it-that's the work of the artist.
1 Ferris Jabr, "How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence," Scientific American, November 2012. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/?print=true 2 Steven Rose, "Lynn Margulis Obituary," the Guardian, December 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/dec/11/lynn-margulis-obituary 3 Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene, Lecture, University of California Santa Cruz, 2014. https://vimeo.com/97663518 4 Robert Epstein, "The Empty Brain," Aeon, May 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer 5 Noam Chomsky Lecture on Artificial Intelligence, Lecture at Navigating a Multispecies World: A Graduate Conference on the Species Turn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAP0xk-c4mk. 6 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (Repeater, 2016). 7 Interview with Jenna Sutela, April 5, 2016. 8 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2014). 9 "The questions of life and its control are central to the labyrinth and the garden. The growing and the made: just as nature is ordered in the garden, so subjects are "produced" in the labyrinth." Olaf Nicolai, Jan Wenzel and Sadie Plant, Labyrinth (Spector Books 2012 / Rollo Press 2013). 10 Brian Robertson, Organization at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy™ Evolving Organization, Integral Leadership Review, 2007, http://integralleadershipreview.com/5328-feature-article-organization-at-the-leading-edge-introducing-holacracy-evolving-organization/. Robertson borrowed the term from Arthur Koestler's 1967 philosophy/psychology book The Ghost in the Machine, in which Koestler invents the word "holon" to describe oneness of mind and body. Koestler argues that the brain is made up of holons that are autonomous and self-determining yet also fundamentally dependent on the brain as a whole. 11 Mike Pepi, "Asynchronous! On the Sublime Administration of the Everyday," e-flux journal #74, June 2016. 12 An economist named Alan Kirman made this connection in 2015: "Economies are like slime molds, collections of single-celled organisms that move as a single body, constantly reorganizing themselves to slide in directions that are neither understood nor necessarily desired by their component parts." From the Ernst Strüngmann Forum Complexity and Evolution: A New Synthesis for Economics, February 1-6, 2015. 13 "One time I tried to eat a very small portion of a slime mold. It tasted like nothing. After half an hour, I felt some irritable feeling on the tongue. Something happened. I tried to remove it, gargling. One hour later, I felt nothing." Interview with Jenna Sutela, April 5, 2016. 14 Easterling, 81. 15 Gilbert Ryle makes this distinction in The Concept of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1949).
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Top image: Jenna Sutela, Orgs (2015). Physarum polycephalum, agar, and oats inside a Holacratic organizational chart; fragment of a larger Plexiglas container. Photo by Mikko Gaestel.

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Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism invisible to the naked eye. However, in its ideal conditions-dark, wet, and bacterial-it multiplies into a visible bright yellow mass that spreads ostentatiously, fanning out in veins or erupting in polyp-like protrusions. The population of autonomous cells acts like a single being, moving and spreading with efficiency and coordination to find food and avoid light.

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We are all lichens.
- Scott Gilbert, "We Are All Lichens Now"

Think we must. We must think.
-Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens  - the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,Modern Man - was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on Earth must not be named the Anthropocene!

With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.

My first demon familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, near where I live in North Central California. Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes. The eight-legged tentacular arachnid that I appeal to gets her generic name from the language of the Goshute people of Utah and her specific name from denizens of the depths, from the abyssal and elemental entities, called chthonic. The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many. Making a small change in the biologist's taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is,and might yet be: the Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning "feeler," and tentare, meaning "to feel" and "to try"; and I know that my leggy spider has many-armed allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.

The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines - and such a wealth of lines - not at points, not in spheres. "The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers"; generations are like "a series of interlaced trails."

All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done under that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile. Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle! Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a bumper sticker for me, for us, for SF: "Composting is so hot!"

Shaping her thinking about the times called Anthropocene and "multi-faced Gaïa" (Stengers's term) in companionable friction with Latour, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we recompose ourselves to become able, perhaps, to "face Gaïa." But like Latour and even more like Le Guin, one of her most generative SF writers, Stengers is adamant about changing the story. Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself. Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia's intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself - microbes will adapt, to put it mildly - but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an "event" already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction.

Stengers, like Bruno Latour, evokes the name of Gaia in the way James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis did, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole. In this hypothesis, Gaia is autopoietic - self-forming, boundary maintaining, contingent, dynamic, and stable under some conditions but not others. Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves responsive to dynamic systemic processes. Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings' intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures. Gaia is not about a list of questions waiting for rational policies; Gaia is an intrusive event that undoes thinking as usual. "She is what specifically questions the tales and refrains of modern history. There is only one real mystery at stake, here: it is the answer we, meaning those who belong to this history, may be able to create as we face the consequences of what we have provoked."

Anthropocene

So, what have we provoked? Writing in the midst of California's historic multiyear drought and the explosive fire season of 2015, I need the photograph of a fire set deliberately in June 2009 by Sustainable Resource Alberta near the Saskatchewan River Crossing on the Icefields Parkway in order to stem the spread of mountain pine beetles, to create a fire barrier to future fires, and to enhance biodiversity. The hope is that this fire acts as an ally for resurgence. The devastating spread of the pine beetle across the North American West is a major chapter of climate change in the Anthropocene. So too are the predicted megadroughts and the extreme and extended fire seasons. Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire in our times are at stake.

Thus it is past time to turn directly to the time-space-global thing called Anthropocene. The term seems to have been coined in the early 1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene Stoermer (d. 2012), an expert in freshwater diatoms. He introduced the term to refer to growing evidence for the transformative effects of human activities on the Earth. The name Anthropocene made a dramatic star appearance in globalizing discourses in 2000 when the Dutch Nobel Prize - winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer to propose that human activities had been of such a kind and magnitude as to merit the use of a new geological term for a new epoch, superseding the Holocene, which dated from the end of the last ice age, or the end of the Pleistocene, about twelve thousand years ago. Anthropogenic changes signaled by the mid-eighteenth-century steam engine and the planet-changing exploding use of coal were evident in the airs, waters, and rocks. Evidence was mounting that the acidification and warming of the oceans are rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, resulting in huge ghostly white skeletons of bleached and dead or dying coral. That a symbiotic system - coral, with its watery world-making associations of cnidarians and zooanthellae with many other critters too - indicated such a global transformation will come back into our story.

But for now, notice that the Anthropocene obtained purchase in popular and scientific discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, modeling, and managing a Big Thing called Globalization. Climate-change modeling is a powerful positive feedback loop provoking change-of-state in systems of political and ecological discourses. That Paul Crutzen was both a Nobel laureate and an atmospheric chemist mattered. By 2008, many scientists around the world had adopted the not-yet-official but increasingly indispensable term; and myriad research projects, performances, installations, and conferences in the arts, social sciences, and humanities found the term mandatory in their naming and thinking, not least for facing both accelerating extinctions across all biological taxa and also multispecies, including human, immiseration across the expanse of Terra. Fossil-burning human beings seem intent on making as many new fossils as possible as fast as possible. They will be read in the strata of the rocks on the land and under the waters by the geologists of the very near future, if not already. Perhaps, instead of the fiery forest, the icon for the Anthropocene should be Burning Man!

The scale of burning ambitions of fossil-making man - of this Anthropos whose hot projects for accelerating extinctions merits a name for a geological epoch - is hard to comprehend. Leaving aside all the other accelerating extractions of minerals, plant and animal flesh, human homelands, and so on, surely, we want to say, the pace of development of renewable energy technologies and of political and technical carbon pollution-abatement measures, in the face of palpable and costly ecosystem collapses and spreading political disorders, will mitigate, if not eliminate, the burden of planet-warming excess carbon from burning still more fossil fuels. Or, maybe the financial troubles of the global coal and oil industries by 2015 would stop the madness. Not so. Even casual acquaintance with the daily news erodes such hopes, but the trouble is worse than what even a close reader of IPCC documents and the press will find. In "The Third Carbon Age," Michael Klare, a professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, lays out strong evidence against the idea that the old age of coal, replaced by the recent age of oil, will be replaced by the age of renewables. He details the large and growing global national and corporate investments in renewables; clearly, there are big profit and power advantages to be had in this sector. And at the same time, every imaginable, and many unimaginable, technologies and strategic measures are being pursued by all the big global players to extract every last calorie of fossil carbon, at whatever depth and in whatever formations of sand, mud, or rock, and with whatever horrors of travel to distribution and use points, to burn before someone else gets at that calorie and burns it first in the great prick story of the first and the last beautiful words and weapons. In what he calls the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas, hydrofracking is the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Melting of the polar seas, terrible for polar bears and for coastal peoples, is very good for big competitive military, exploration, drilling, and tanker shipping across the northern passages. Who needs an ice-breaker when you can count on melting ice?

A complex systems engineer named Brad Werner addressed a session at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in 2012. His point was quite simple: scientifically speaking, global capitalism "has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that 'earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response." Therefore, he argued, the only scientific thing to do is revolt! Movements, not just individuals, are critical. What is required is action and thinking that do not fit within the dominant capitalist culture; and, said Werner, this is a matter not of opinion, but of geophysical dynamics. The reporter who covered this session summed up Werner's address: "He is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability." Werner is not the first or the last researcher and maker of matters of concern to argue this point, but his clarity at a scientific meeting is bracing. Revolt! Think we must; we must think. Actually think, not like Eichmann the Thoughtless. Of course, the devil is in the details - how to revolt? How to matter and not just want to matter?

Capitalocene

But at least one thing is crystal clear. No matter how much he might be caught in the generic masculine universal and how much he only looks up, the Anthropos did not do this fracking thing and he should not name this double-death-loving epoch. The Anthropos is not Burning Man after all. But because the word is already well entrenched and seems less controversial to many important players compared to the Capitalocene, I know that we will continue to need the term "Anthropocene." I will use it too, sparingly; what and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refurbished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins and even for modest terran recuperation.

Still, if we could only have one word for these SF times, surely it must be the Capitalocene.

Species Man did not shape the conditions for the Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-making man came down once again, this time in tragic system failure, turning biodiverse ecosystems into flipped-out deserts of slimy mats and stinging jellyfish. Neither did technological determinism produce the Third Carbon Age. Coal and the steam engine did not determine the story, and besides the dates are all wrong, not because one has to go back to the last ice age, but because one has to at least include the great market and commodity reworldings of the long sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the current era, even if we think (wrongly) that we can remain Euro-centered in thinking about "globalizing" transformations shaping the Capitalocene. One must surely tell of the networks of sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery, with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of critters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all kinds. The infectious industrial revolution of England mattered hugely, but it is only one player in planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations. The relocation of peoples, plants, and animals; the leveling of vast forests; and the violent mining of metals preceded the steam engine; but that is not a warrant for wringing one's hands about the perfidy of the Anthropos, or of Species Man, or of Man the Hunter.

The systemic stories of the linked metabolisms, articulations, or coproductions (pick your metaphor) of economies and ecologies, of histories and human and nonhuman critters, must be relentlessly opportunistic and contingent. They must also be relentlessly relational, sympoietic, and consequential. They are terran, not cosmic or blissed or cursed into outer space. The Capitalocene is terran; it does not have to be the last biodiverse geological epoch that includes our species too. There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings.

As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropocene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with:

(1) The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story.

(2) Species Man does not make history.

(3) Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.

(4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do not do History.

(5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness.

(6) Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an "unthinkable" theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism - preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide).

(7) The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within restrictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That's a lot of trouble for adequate evolutionary theory.

(8) Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples.

I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrong-headed and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures. "Scarcity's deepening persistence, and the suffering it is auguring for all life, is an artifact of human exceptionalism at every level." Instead, a humanity with more earthly integrity "invites the priority of our pulling back and scaling down, of welcoming limitationsof our numbers, economies, and habitats for the sake of a higher, more inclusive freedom and quality of life."

If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists, another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthropocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis.

Note that insofar as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Darwin. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan.

Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both of the binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to Progress and its evil twin, Modernization. The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of. Shocked anew by our - billions of Earth habitants', including your and my - ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing called capitalism, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers note that denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long ago vanished from the Earth. A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. This explication does not excuse us from doing many important things better; quite the opposite. Pignarre and Stengers affirm on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well. They remind us that the established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress. Many Marxist critical and cultural theorists, at their best, would agree. So would the tentacular ones.

Chthulucene

Reaching back to generative complex systems approaches by Lovelock and Margulis, Gaia figures the Anthropocene for many contemporary Western thinkers. But an unfurling Gaia is better situated in the Chthulucene, an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names. Arising from Chaos, Gaia was and is a powerful intrusive force, in no one's pocket, no one's hope for salvation, capable of provoking the late twentieth century's best autopoietic complex systems thinking that led to recognizing the devastation caused by anthropogenic processes of the last few centuries, a necessary counter to the Euclidean figures and stories of Man. Brazilian anthropologists and philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski exorcise lingering notions that Gaia is confined to the ancient Greeks and subsequent Eurocultures in their refiguring the urgencies of our times in the post-Eurocentric conference "The Thousand Names of Gaia." Names, not faces, not morphs of the same, something else, a thousand somethings else, still telling of linked ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding in this age of the Earth. We need another figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthropocene into another, big-enough story. Bitten in a California redwood forest by spidery Pimoa chthulhu, I want to propose snaky Medusa and the many unfinished worldings of her antecedents, affiliates, and descendants. Perhaps Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, can bring us into the holobiomes of Terrapolis and heighten our chances for dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the Heroes on a living coral reef instead of allowing them to suck the last drop of fossil flesh out of dead rock.

The terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals, depicts a winged goddess wearing a split skirt and touching a bird with each hand. She is a vivid reminder of the breadth, width, and temporal reach into pasts and futures of chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond. Potnia Theron is rooted in Minoan and then Mycenean cultures and infuses Greek stories of the Gorgons (especially the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa) and of Artemis. A kind of far-traveling Ur-Medusa, the Lady of the Beasts is a potent link between Crete and India. The winged figure is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress of the Bees, draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts. Note the acoustic, tactile, and gustatory senses elicited by the Mistress and her sympoietic, more-than-human flesh. The snakes and bees are more like stinging tentacular feelers than like binocular eyes, although these critters see too, in compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics.

In many incarnations around the world, the winged bee goddesses are very old, and they are much needed now. Potnia Theron/Melissa's snaky locks and Gorgon face tangle her with a diverse kinship of chthonic earthly forces that travel richly in space and time. The Greek word Gorgon translates as dreadful, but perhaps that is an astralized, patriarchal hearing of much more aweful stories and enactments of generation, destruction, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude. Potnia Theron/Melissa/Medusa give faciality a profound makeover, and that is a blow to modern humanist (including technohumanist) figurations of the forward-looking, sky-gazing Anthropos. Recall that the Greek chthonios means "of, in, or under the Earth and the seas" - a rich terran muddle for SF, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fabulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. The Earthbound can take heart - as well as action.

The Gorgons are powerful winged chthonic entities without a proper genealogy; their reach is lateral and tentacular; they have no settled lineage and no reliable kind (genre, gender), although they are figured and storied as female. In old versions, the Gorgons twine with the Erinyes (Furies), chthonic underworld powers who avenge crimes against the natural order. In the winged domains, the bird-bodied Harpies carry out these vital functions. Now, look again at the birds of Potnia Theron and ask what they do. Are the Harpies their cousins? Around 700 BCE Hesiod imagined the Gorgons as sea demons and gave them sea deities for parents. I read Hesiod's Theogony as laboring to stabilize a very bumptious queer family. The Gorgons erupt more than emerge; they are intrusive in a sense akin to what Stengers understands by Gaia.

The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous, snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony Anthropos.

Because the deities of the Olympiad identified her as a particularly dangerous enemy to the sky gods' succession and authority, mortal Medusa is especially interesting for my efforts to propose the Chthulucene as one of the big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with the trouble of our ongoing epoch. I resignify and twist the stories, but no more than the Greeks themselves constantly did. The hero Perseus was dispatched to kill Medusa; and with the help of Athena, head-born favorite daughter of Zeus, he cut off the Gorgon's head and gave it to his accomplice, this virgin goddess of wisdom and war. Putting Medusa's severed head face-forward on her shield, the Aegis, Athena, as usual, played traitor to the Earthbound; we expect no better from motherless mind children. But great good came of this murder-for-hire, for from Medusa's dead body came the winged horse Pegasus. Feminists have a special friendship with horses. Who says these stories do not still move us materially? And from the blood dripping from Medusa's severed head came the rocky corals of the western seas, remembered today in the taxonomic names of the Gorgonians, the coral-like sea fans and sea whips, composed in symbioses of tentacular animal cnidarians and photosynthetic algal-like beings called zooanthellae.

With the corals, we turn definitively away from heady facial representations, no matter how snaky. Even Potnia Theron, Potnia Melissa, and Medusa cannot alone spin out the needed tentacularities. In the tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling, the spider of my first pages, Pimoa chthulhu, allies with the decidedly nonvertebrate critters of the seas. Corals align with octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. Octopuses are called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for their predatory habits. The tentacular chthonic ones have to eat; they are at table, cum panis, companion species of terra. They are good figures for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the Chthulucene. This Chthulucene is neither sacred nor secular; this earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal - and at stake now.

Mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. And so Pimoa chthulhu and Octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the Chthulucene.

All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble. The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos, "-cene," signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen - yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the Earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story.

However, the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. Like it or not, we are in the string figure game of caring for and with precarious worldings made terribly more precarious by fossil-burning man making new fossils as rapidly as possible in orgies of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capitalism and the Anthropos, both of which invite odd apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of thought, love, rage, and care.

Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the "game over, too late" discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination. Encountering the sheer not-us, more-than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for ongoing living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at stake to and with each other. Flourishing will be cultivated as a multispecies response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult.

Corals helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place. From the start, uses of the term Anthropocene emphasized human-induced warming and acidification of the oceans from fossil-fuel-generated CO2 emissions. Warming and acidification are known stressors that sicken and bleach coral reefs, killing the photosynthesizing zooanthellae and so ultimately their cnidarian symbionts and all of the other critters belonging to myriad taxa whose worlding depends on intact reef systems. Corals of the seas and lichens of the land also bring us into consciousness of the Capitalocene, in which deep-sea mining and drilling in oceans and fracking and pipeline construction across delicate lichen-covered northern landscapes are fundamental to accelerating nationalist, transnationalist, and corporate unworlding.

But coral and lichen symbionts also bring us richly into the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible - just barely - to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle. We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the Earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well. " 'Do you realize,' the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, 'that [once upon a time] they couldn't even read Eggplant?' And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak.' " Attending to these ongoing matters returns me to the question that began this text. What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Why is it that the epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when understandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis and sympoietics are wildly and wonderfully available and generative in all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics? What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the finished future, game over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts.

We must think!

The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.

This text is an edited extract from chapter 2, "Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene," in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. Copyright, 2016, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu

Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

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Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene - Journal #75

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The world is buzzing with activity that's invisible to us. Take slime mold. The fungus, also known as Physarum polycephalum, can be found hiding in dark, dank places like a pile of damp leaves or the belly of a log. Though it's not invisible-the mold has a mossy yellow color-to the naked eye and ear, it doesn't appear to move or make a sound.

Of course that's not true. Slime mold is a living, ever-shifting organism. Here, just listen:

What you're hearing in this clip is the sound of P. polycephalum existing. An odd little machine called the Energy Bending Lab was able to capture the electrical activity of the mold and translate it into sound. This synth-like instrument is actually a series of modular tools that amplifies the mold's micro voltages and turns them into eerie, warbling sound patterns called Non-Human Rhythms.

Leslie Garcia, an artist from Mexico who designed the machine with her partner Paloma Lopez, explains that electrodes are hooked up to microorganisms in a petri dish to measure and record the electrical activity. That activity is sent to a computer via an Arduino where a voltage control oscillator will turn the energies into audible oscillations. The resulting song is a collaboration between human and organism. Though the rhythmic patterns are based on the activity happening in the organism, the melodic choices are chosen by Garcia and her team. "The aesthetic is decided by us," Garcia says.

The artists are able to dictate the rhythm's frequency by introducing various stimuli. In the case of slime mold, which is photophobic, the presence of light will slow down the electrical activity, creating a more sluggish beat. The team also made a song using an electron bacteria. When heated, the bacteria increases its activity and produces a faster rhythm. In that way, the organisms are like a composer, setting the underlying pace of the song while humans fill in the expressive gaps.

Garcia explains that while Non Human Rhythms is certainly a creative pursuit, it's also a form of non-traditional scientific research. "We're looking for patterns and we think a good way to find patterns is sound because sound lets you have a more three dimensional experience of the phenomena," she says. Garcia hopes that by giving an organism sound, it can help teach scientists a little bit about how these tiny organisms perceive their surroundings. "We think these tools can help us humans to understand the way these organisms relate to their environment," she says.

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The world is buzzing with activity that's invisible to us. Take slime mold. The fungus, also known as Physarum polycephalum, can be found hiding in dark, dank places like a pile of damp leaves or the belly of a log.

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"In Glasgow, hipster colonialism is prevalent in areas like the Southside, where an influx of young, middle-class creatives brings trendy cafes and boutique shops. This gentrification raises rents, displacing long-term residents and undermining the neighborhood’s cultural roots and working-class identity."

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We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Cultural Mining — Read now

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From time to time, WhoWhatWhy will bring you unusual perspectives you probably won’t find elsewhere. You may agree or disagree, but you can be sure it’ll be thought-provoking. This piece from Victor Wallis, who teaches history and politics at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, argues that putting forth a token person or effort to mark progress in issues of gender, race or environment may hamper advancement.

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Alistair Davidson on the hysteria of the Scottish establishment in the face of political uprising. Too often, debates about class and Scottish nationhood are polarised. Either Scottish independence…

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You’ve been blocked by network security.

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Classism in Scotland
by u/ScotMcScottyson in Scotland

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Edinburgh Tab accused of classism and anti-Scots sentiment, saying lack of Scots at uni is ‘as god intended’

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The Edinburgh Tab is being accused of classism and anti-Scots sentiment after seemingly making fun of Scottish students at the university.

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“Hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations.

Hype actually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been”

http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/

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Priced-out, stressed-out creatives are fleeing London for Glasgow

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Tired of the rat race, artists are finding the same buzz north of the border - plus much cheaper properties

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Speech recognition researchers are attempting to crack the hardest nut in speech-to-text: understanding Glaswegian accents. Professor Martin Russell, project head, said: “The Glasgow accent is very pleasant and is heard…

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For Those Who Remain: How Cultural Displacement from Rapid Gentrification Affects the Psyche

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Gentrification of working class, urban neighborhoods is a process that uproots long-term residents and businesses and attracts wealthier…

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THE ART OF RENT- GLOBALIZATION, MONOPOLY AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF CULTURE

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computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic

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Quite often workers in the platform economy are not fully aware of the value created by the digital information they generate, writes CAILEAN GALLAGHER

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Anti Scottish sentiment in online communities, data mining, cultural erosion, commodification of Glasgow south, algorithmic bias, othering and exclusion of Scottish folk in local and online communities.

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2013
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Bio Design
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Marin Sawa
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www.marins.co.uk

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The ‘Algaerium Bioprinter’ prototype demonstrates how microalgae can be cultivated in our domestic space to provide digitally printed health food on demand. This project refers to my previous work, which explored the aesthetic and functions of microalgae living systems. Here, Algaerium acts as an in…

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear — Are.na

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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If there's one thing that gives us joy here at Hackaday it's a story of audio silliness. There is a rich vein of dubious products aimed at audiophiles which just beg to be made fun of, and once in a while we oblige. But sometimes an odd piece of audio equipment emerges with another purpose. Take [Boltz999]'s interconnects for example, which were born of necessity when there were no female-to-female phono adapters to connect a set of cables. Taking a baby carrot and simply plugging the phonos into its flesh delivered an audio connectivity solution that worked.

Does this mean that our gold-nanoparticle-plated oxygen-free directional audio cables are junk, and we should be heading for the supermarket to pick up a bag of root vegetables instead? I set out to test this new material in the secret Hackaday audio lab, located on an anonymous 1970s industrial estate in Milton Keynes, UK.

Characterising A Root Vegetable

A quick search on the composition of a carrot reveals an 88% water content, with the other 12% being mostly carbohydrates, followed by small quantities of fat, protein, and a cocktail of those vitamins and minerals that caused our parents to be so enthusiastic about our younger selves eating them. In particular about 0.4% of a carrot is comprised of potassium, sodium, and calcium ions in solution, making the vegetable analagous to a sponge soaked in a weak electrolyte solution. Thus you'd expect it to be conductive, and to pass a line-level audio signal into a high-impedance load such as an audio amplifier. A quick DC resistance measurement of our test carrot showed a resistance that started at about 50K for distances up to about 10mm, rising slowly to near 100K across its roughly 80mm length. It's probably beyond the scope of this piece, to characterise the complex impedance of a carrot.

The hack that prompted all this though didn't simply replace the pair of copper wires with ones made of carrot. By plugging the phono into the tap root an extra 50K resistance is created between its two conductors as well as between it and the other phono, and the result is a resistor network. Because it's not an unreasonable assumption the two pieces of hi-fi equipment in the same rack could share an earth, rather than disappear down the rabbit hole of infinite meshes of resistors it's probably safe instead to think of it as something closer to the familiar Pi network attenuator. There are plenty of online calculators that could give you a performance figure for a given network, but in this case with so many approximations and carrot-related guesses their results would be rather meaningless. All that we need to know is that there will be some attenuation of any audio fed into the carrot.

Crisp Treble, and a Crunchy Midrange

Having discussed the theory, it's time to move onto the practice. Standing in for a high-end audio source was my phone playing YouTube videos, and for a high-end hi-fi a set of amplified computer speakers. Surprisingly it worked, but unsurprisingly in doing so there was a noticeable attenuation that cut the volume by around half. Exactly as expected, but there was a further step of taking a look at it with a 'scope.

Applying a handy 1kHz squarewave a 30% attenuation was immediately obvious (as well as that maybe the secret lab's 'scope probes needed adjusting). We lacked an audio analyser to measure the harmonic distortion of the coupling, but there has to come a point at which characterising a vegetable comes to an end.

So, we've proved the original story to be true, you can use a carrot in an audio interconnect. But how would we describe its sound? The answer if you are fond of audiophile reviews is that it adds an organic feel to the broader soundstage, with crisp treble notes, a crunchy midrange, and deep, earthy bass tones. Meanwhile if you are simply looking for something to connect two cables, we'd suggest a carrot sounds better in the roasting pan.

Header image: Sajetpa [ CC BY-SA 3.0]

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Organic Audio: Putting Carrots As Audio Couplers To The Test

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If there's one thing that gives us joy here at Hackaday it's a story of audio silliness. There is a rich vein of dubious products aimed at audiophiles which just beg to be made fun of, ...

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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So you want to design a synth, or at least understand how all those DIY modules you have been building actually work, but don't know where to start... then this is the post for you! We will go over the basic principles of electronics and some of the first building blocks to add to your arsenal of analysis and design tools. This post will presume that you understand voltage in the context of modular synthesis (CV and audio-rate voltage) but not in the context of electrical engineering. Understanding some simple mathematics (Algebra I level) and a familiarity with the metric prefix system will also be useful - brush up on those here and here (respectively). The end of the post will also assume that you have a basic understanding of a filter in modular synthesis, but not in the context of analog electronics.

For you, voltage mostly just means a signal that takes on a value that may change with time - or stay the same. In any case, you just send that numeric value over a patch cable to another module which does something with the voltage and outputs a response signal. Conceptually, voltage to you is no different than automation in a digital audio workstation or the waveform of an audiofile - albeit a bit more arcane in its ethereal-yet-physical embodiment as electricity. Well if it's arcane, then its time for you to become a wizard!

So what is voltage, really? You know it's got something to do with electricity... As a starting point, let's look at the fact that we commonly refer to signal in our patches as "flowing" from point A to point B - and in turn we see that electricity flows from point A to point B. What we mean when we say this is that electrons - like, a lot of electrons - are flowing from point A to point B. This flow of electrons defines what we call a current. But wait - that's not voltage!

You're right! Current and voltage are two very different things. Current represents how many electrons are flowing past a point over a given duration of time, while voltage represents how strong that current is. You might be thinking, "but aren't those the same thing? For instance, doesn't the amount of water flowing by determine the pressure of the flow?" Well, you are keen to make a comparison to water, and are correct in thinking that the amount of water flowing by is important in determining the strength of the flow, but it is not the only factor - they are not the same thing!

The analogy to a stream of water is useful - to a point - in helping us understand current and voltage, so let's explore it further. First though, we have to give this analogy a cool name...the Hydraulic Analogy is what is typically used. We will make repeated analogies to water, but it is important to remember that these analogies are never perfectly isomorphic. Instead, they should always, only, be considered mnemonic tools to help build intuition in select circumstances for how electricity works.

Imagine a river - perhaps the Mississippi, I hear it's nice this time of year - on a serene, slow day. You probably wouldn't mind going for a swim in it, were it a little bit cleaner. It certainly wouldn't sweep you away, and you would have no trouble treading water. The pressure (voltage) that the water is exerting on you is really not that great. You are swimming happily. The current though is quite massive - if we were to draw a line from one bank of the river to the other and measure the volume of water that went past in one second it would be quite a lot!

Now imagine that same volume of water coming out of your bathroom every second. For maximum effect, imagine it to be the middle of the night after your super put off coming by to fix that pesky shower head once again. You would not be happy, nor would your synths be happy, and CERTAINLY not your synthkitty, as you and all your belongings (and likely your whole apartment building) are pulverized in a Pynchonesque deluge of... sewer water. The current, or volume of water flowing by per second, is the same in both cases, but the pressure of the water (voltage) is entirely different. So what changed?

The channel through which the water is flowing became greatly constricted. The narrower the passage, the more fierce the flow of water. Think back to children playing with hoses. When the thumb is away from the mouth of the hose, water comes out at a leisurely pace, but cover it up and it becomes a geyser-like jet of water for exerting dominance over playground peers.

In summary...

1. The pressure of this flow is equivalent to voltage, measured in.... you guessed it, Volts!

2. The volume of this flow per unit of time is equivalent to the current, or number of electrons flowing by per second, measured in Coulombs/second, also known as Amperes or amps for short. (Note a "coulomb" is like the word "dozen". It's just a specific, very large number instead of 12. 1 C/s = 1 A)

3. Finally, the narrowness of the passage through which the water flows is equivalent to a new concept which we call resistance and will measure in Ohms (Ω).

In the last examples, you may have noticed that we kept the current flow constant and only changed the resistance. When the resistance increased, the voltage increased, and when the resistance decreased, the voltage decreased! Similarly, let's think about a shower head: the diameter of the holes stays the same at all times, so we can't change the resistance. But we can change the current! As we turn our knob, we send more and more water through our shower head, and the pressure of the water gets greater and greater! Just like when we kept current constant, if we keep resistance constant, but increase current, voltage increases. Alternatively, when we decrease current but keep resistance constant, voltage decreases.

Resistors are electrical components that have different resistances. They are like lengths of pipe tubing for water to flow through, with different resistances corresponding to different diameters of pipe. The lower the resistance, the wider the pipe! Greater resistance means narrower pipes.

These relationships between current, resistance, and voltage can be beautifully captured by the extraordinarily elegant mathematical equation known as Ohm's Law ( by the way that photo of Izzy in their bio was taking at a club called Ohm. Pretty cool if you ask m e!):

V stands for voltage, I stands for current, and R for resistance. So, if current is 1 Ampere and resistance is 1 Ohm, then voltage will be equal to: \( 1 A\times 1\Omega = 1 V \)

$$ 2 mA \times 4 k\Omega = .002 A\times 4,000\Omega = 2 A\times 4\Omega = 8V $$

Since \(V=IR\), we can say that:

\begin{align} I = \frac{V}{R} \text{, and } R = \frac{V}{I} \end{align}

Remember, Ohms Law expects all units to be in Volts, Amps, and Ohms. In the context of modular synths, we will frequently see units in milliAmps (mA) or kiloOhms (kOhms). If you are going to use Ohm's Law, remember to do the following:

1. Convert currents measured in milliAmps to Amps by dividing the mA value by 1000 (since there are 1000 milliAmps in 1Amp) .

2. Convert resistances measured in kiloOhms to Ohms by multiplying the kOhm value by 1000 (since there are 1kiloOhm for every 1000 Ohms).

Finally, keep in mind that whenever you know two quantities, you can always find the third!

So, now let's talk about schematics. A schematic is a way of representing how different electrical components are connected to each other. In the case of our water analogy, it would be a description of how pipes, valves, pumps, pinwheels, and vacuums are connected together to control the flow of water. A line on a schematic indicates a , , or , all of which we can conceptualize as a path for current to take with 0 resistance. "Trace" and "wire" both refer to the physical manifestation on a circuit board, while "net" typically refers to the abstract representation in a schematic.
Where does current come from, and where does it go to?
Current will always flow from places in the circuit with higher electric potential to places with lower electric potential.
What is electric potential?
Electric potential is like the energy stored in a stretched rubber band, or the energy stored in a a reservoir of water stored above the ground. If we release the rubber band, it will move towards a lower energy state by contracting; if we connect a pipe to the tower, the water will move towards a lower energy state by flowing to ground. In terms of electricity, if we create a path from a voltage source to ground (which has 0 potential), current will flow! If we placed a water wheel in the path of the water current, we could use our flow to do work, like spinning a pin wheel! We can use our electricity to do work as well by placing a in the current path!
What is "ground" (GND) in the electrical context?
Simply put, it is defined as a place in the circuit with 0 electric potential - an equilibirum state. As such, on all schematics, ground is a point that is a common destination (or sink) for all current coming from positive voltage sources, and a source of current for negative voltages.

What actually creates our "electrical tension" or "electrical pressure", like stretching the rubber band or raising the water up?
If we are using batteries, then it would come from a difference of ion concentrations in two chemical solutions - this is known as electrochemistry! If a synth is plugged into the wall, then ultimately the electrical potential energy would come from the position of a magnet in relation to a coil in a generator somewhere at a power facility on the electric grid.
What are voltage drops?
If you imagine a schematic as a bunch of water towers and pipes, GND is like a reservoir on the literal ground to which all water eventually flows, while voltage sources are the water towers suspended in the air. The higher the tower, the higher the electric potential! Voltage is a measurement of the difference in electric potential between any two points in the circuit. Typically, we measure the voltage, or difference in electric potential, between a given node in the circuit and GND, however we can measure the voltage difference, or "voltage drop," between any two arbitrary points! This is like comparing how much energy is stored in an extremely taught rubber band to a moderately taut rubber band, or the energy stored in a 100ft water toware to a 50ft water tower. The voltage drop between any two points can always be calculated by simply finding the resistance between the two points, finding the current flowing between two points, and multiplying them together - this can get tricky when there are multiple paths from one point to another, but we will cross that bridge (or bridges!) when we get to it.
What is a voltage source?
A constant voltage source is an entity that can vary its current output in order to keep its voltage drop to GND constant. In other words, if a voltage source outputs V volts, when you measure the resistance R from the voltage source to ground and the current I flowing from the voltage source to ground, then the product IR will always be equal to V! Since the voltage source can't vary the resistance of its path to ground, it achieves this by varying its current output.

Consider the two schematics below. In the first, since the resistance to ground is 100kOhms and the voltage source is +12v, the current output must be \(I = \frac{12V}{100000 Ω} = .12 mA\). In the second exmaple, with R = 200kOhms, the voltage source will output \(I = \frac{12V}{200000 Ω} = .06 mA\).

The first is Kirschoff's Current Law, or . The law is stated as follows:
The sum of the currents flowing into a node must be equal to the sum of the currents flowing out of that node.
This is just like a fork in a river! The same amount of water that approaches a fork in a river must leave the fork, even if it has multiple exit paths! If we add up the current leaving the fork on each of the two paths, it must be equal to the current that entered the fork. Whenever you see a fork in a current's path, you can think of the fork as peeling off two separate substreams of current that add up to the original current.

Sometimes you might see this written with fancy notation using the Greek later Σ (pronounced "sigma"). In mathematics, Sigma is like a simple command that says "take all the instances of whatever comes after me, and add them up."

ΣI in=ΣI out means "the sum of all of the input currents at a node must be equal to the sum of all of the output currents at the same node!" $$\Sigma I_{in} = \Sigma I_{out}$$
$$I_{1}=I_{2} + I_{3}$$

Next, let's talk about Kirschoff's Voltage Law, or . The formal way statement is as follows:

The voltage drop around any closed loop in a circuit is 0 Volts.

Conceptually though, you can think of it a little more clearly and intuitively than this! If I measure the voltage between two points A and B and write it down, I will find that same voltage by doing the following:

1. Choose any path from the point A to point B.

2. Add an arbitrary number of points along the path, breaking it up into smaller segments

3. Find the voltage drop from for each individual segment (i.e. from one point to the next point in the path)

4. Add up all these adjacent voltage drops, and it will be equal to the originally found voltage!
NB: The voltage drop along any two points on a wire is always 0v since the resistance along a wire is 0Ω!

Consider a glacier on top of a mountain that all of a sudden completely melts. No matter what path any given current of water takes down the mountain, in the end, the drop in altitude (voltage drop) will always be the same! I could examine any individual path, break it down into smaller steps, and add up the drop in altitude for each step, and in the end, I would ultimately end up with the total drop in altitude from the glacier's original height to the bottom of the mountain. We can use this to start understanding schematics with more than one component!

\begin{align} V_{0} & = V_{a}+V_{b}\\ & = V_{a}+V_{c}+V_{d}+V_{e}\\ & = V_{a}+V_{c}+V_{f} \end{align}

We say that two components (or even whole sections of a circuit) are in "in series" when they are connected sequentially, providing a single path for current to flow.
We know that the input voltage \(V_{in}\) is coming from a constant voltage source, and the voltage drop from the source to ground is equal to . But what is the total resistance \(R\) from node A to ground? How much current \(I\) is leaving our voltage source and traveling through the resistors?

First, we know that the voltage drop from A to GND must be since we have a constant voltage source. By Kirschoff's Voltage Law (KVL), we know that the voltage drop \(V_{1}\) from A to B plus the voltage drop \(V_{2}\) from B to GND must be equal to , so by KVL, we can write:

$$ V_{in} = V_{1}+V_{2} $$

What is , the voltage drop from A to B? Well, by Ohm's Law, we know that the voltage drop across must be the current I across times the resistance. The same logic applies to . Since there is only a single path for the current, by KCL, we know the same current I must pass through both resistors. As such, we can write the following two equations:

\begin{align} V_{1} & = I\times R_{1}\\ V_{2} & = I\times R_{2} \end{align}

Now, we can subsitute these values for and into our original equation:

\begin{align} V_{in} & = I\times R_{1} + I\times R_{2} \\ & = I\times(R_{1}+R_{2}) \end{align}

Since I is the current flowing between A and GND, we can see that the resistance between the two points must just be !

Whenever two resistors are connected in series, the total resistance they present to a path of current attempting to flow through them consecutively is just equal to the sum of their resistances, \(R_{1}+R_{2}\)!

We say that two components (or even whole sections of a circuit) are connected "in parallel" when they provide two independent current paths from a single source node to a single destination node.

First let's think about it in terms of current. There's some amount of current flowing into node A from the power supply. Note that the same amount of current that goes into A has to come out of A, just like a fork in the river. This means that the sum of the current and the current must be equal to .

\begin{align} I_{in} & = I_{out} \\ I_{0} & = I_{1}+I_{2} \end{align}

Next, let's consider the voltage. Since we have a a constant voltage source, we know the voltage drop from A to GND will be equal to no matter what. The voltage source will output the precise amount of current such that whatever the resistance R from A to GND is, the product of will be equal to .

However, we also know that the voltage drop from B to GND will be equal to since there is no voltage drop from A to B, because the resistance between these two nodes is 0 Ω! From there, we can figure out that the current flowing along each of our two paths by realizing that the voltage drop across both and must be :

\begin{align} I_{1} & = \frac{V_{in}}{R_{1}} \\ \\ I_{2} & = \frac{V_{in}}{R_{2}} \\ \\ I_{0} & = I_{1} + I_{2} \\ \\ & = \frac{V_{in}}{R_{1}} + \frac{V_{in}}{R_{2}} \\ \\ & = V_{in} \times (\frac{1}{R_{1}}+\frac{1}{R_{2}}) \\ \\ & = V_{in}\times (\frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}R_{2}}+\frac{R_{1}}{R_{1}R_{2}})\\ \\ I_{0} & = V_{in}\times \frac{R_{1}+R_{2}}{R_{1}R_{2}} \end{align}

By Ohm's Law though, we know that the resistance R from A to GND is just divided by , so we can apply some simple algebra to that last equation to solve for the resistance!

\begin{align} R & = \frac{V_{in}}{I_{0}}\\ \\ & = \frac{R_{1}R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} \\ \\ & = \frac{1}{\frac{1}{R_{1}}+\frac{1}{R_{2}}} \end{align}

>So, whenever we have two resistors in parallel, meaning they provide two independent paths from one node to another node, as in the above schematic, then we can say that the total resistance they provide is actually equal to the quantity \(\frac{R_{1}R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}\) or alternatively the quantity \(\frac{1}{\frac{1}{R_{1}}+\frac{1}{R_{2}}}\)

So, let's finally put all this analysis we've been doing to use, by learning about your first modular building block: the voltage divider. The voltage divider is an incredibly useful tool for scaling voltages down. Suppose you have a point in your circuit which you know needs to be +2.5v, but you only have a +5v source? How do you do this? A voltage divider might be the right answer! Maybe you have a point which you know needs to be 1/5th of an incoming voltage, regardless of the input voltage? A voltage divider might be the right answer again! Depending on the application, another solution like a voltage reference, voltage regulator, or operational amplifier might be a better choice, but in many simple cases, a voltage divider will do the trick!

Our goal is to find \(V_{out}\), based off of our known input voltage \(V_{in}\) and the value of our two resistors, \(R_{1}\) and \(R_{2}\). Notice that \(V_{out}\) is the same thing as the voltage drop from B to GND. Let's analyze this to figure it out!

First, we know that the voltage drop from A to GND is equal to our input voltage, . However, let's divide the path between these two points into smaller segments - the first segment will be from node A to node B. The second path will be from B to GND.

Using Kirschoff's Voltage Law, we can write the following:

$$ V_{in}=V_{1}+V_{out} $$

We don't know how much current is leaving our voltage source, but we do know that the current must run through both and since there is no other path for it take. Let's call that current \( I \). Notice though that and are just sereis resistors going to GND, meaning the total resistance from A to GND is just \(R_{1}+R_{2}\). As such, we know that \(V_{in}= I\times(R_{1}+R_{2})\). We can now solve for I using algebra:

$$ I = \frac{V_{in}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}$$

Now that we know I, we can use Ohm's Law to find the voltage drop across :

\begin{align} V_{out} & = I\times R_{2}\\ \\ & = \frac{V_{in}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}\times R_{2}\\ \\ & = V_{in}\times\frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} \end{align}

The voltage gain (denoted \(A_{v}\)) of a signal is defined to be the ratio of the output voltage to the input voltage, so for a voltage divider, we can write the following gain formula:

$$ A_{v} = \frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}}=\frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} $$

Suppose \(V_{in} = +10V\) and \(R_{1}=R_{2}=100\Omega\). What will \(V_{out}\) be? Let's just plug into our voltage divider equation to find out!

\begin{align} V_{out} & = V_{in}\times \frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} \\ \\ & = 10V \times \frac{100\Omega}{100\Omega + 100\Omega} \\ \\ & = 10V \times \frac {100\Omega}{200\Omega} = 10V \times \frac{1}{2} \\ \\ & = 5V \end{align}

Notice that no matter what values we choose for and , if they are equal, the voltage divider ratio will always end up being 1/2!

Now, suppose you have an input voltage that you want to scale down. Perhaps your input voltage is +10v, and you want to output +3.3v. How can you do this? First, figure out the ratio of your output to input: \(\frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}} = \frac{3.3V}{10V} = \frac{1}{3}\). In other words, you want to divide your voltage down by a factor of 3. How can you achieve this? Well, since \(\frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}} = \frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}\), we can set the voltage divider fraction equal to \(\frac{1}{3}\) and use algebra to solve for the relationship between and !

\begin{align} \frac{1}{3} & = \frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} \\ R_{1} + R_{2} & = 3\times R_{2}\\ R_{1} & = 2\times R_{2} \end{align}

Let's say that you pick \(R_{2}=100\Omega\). Then you should make \(R_{1} = 2\times R_{2} = 2\times 100\Omega = 200\Omega\).

Suppose you have a sine wave with an amplitude of 5v, i.e. it goes from +5v to -5v, or in other words is 10v peak-to-peak. Perhaps you want it to end up with a 1v amplitude. Well, then we want \(\frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}} = \frac{1}{5}\), so we can find our resistor ratio using the same method as before: \begin{align} \frac{1}{5} & = \frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}} \\ R_{1} + R_{2} & = 5\times R_{2}\\ R_{1} & = 4\times R_{2} \end{align}

Noticing a pattern? Whenever you want your voltage divider output to be \(V_{out}=\frac{1}{n}\times V_{in}\), then the first resistor should always be \(R_{1}=(n-1)\times R_{2}\).

Finally, let's observe that our analysis depended on the current through both resistors being the same. If we want to use for anything though, we would need to tap the signal at B and send it off somewhere else for use! However, in that case, due to Kirschoff's Current Law, some current would be peeled off, and the current through and would no longer be the same! Solution: After tapping the output signal at B, send it through a very large resistor before passing it off to your destination in order to make the amount of current peeled off is as minimal as possible. Alternatively, you can buffer the output signal using an op-amp or a common-emitter transistor, where "buffer" means "copying" a voltage but providing an alternate source of current for your load. More on op-amps and transistors in coming posts!

Now that you have a basic idea of some of the fundamental principles of resistors, let's turn to a new component: the capacitor.

For many people (myself included) capacitors are much harder to conceptualize than resistors. When discussing resistors so far, we did not really care at all what the input signal looked like: it could be a static voltage, or it could be an oscillating signal, and in either case, the resistors behave the same - they just impeded the flow of current through them. Capacitors on the other hand change the way they behave depending on what the signal passing through them is and even how long that signal has been passing through it! This is the first, most important thing to remember with capacitors.

There are two primary conceptual models for capacitors:

1. Energy storage devices that can charge up and discharge

2. "Frequency-dependent resistors" (i.e. components who resist the flow of current depending on the frequency of the input signal)

For the purpose of the budding synthesis engineer, the second is the more useful model, so we will focus on that. Just like resistors have a resistance R associated with them, every capacitor has a value associated with it called its capacitance, C, measured in Farads. 1 Farad though is considered extremely large. In the context of synthesizer designs, you will virtually never see a capacitor with a capacitance greater than 50uF, or 50 microFarads (.000050 Farads). Typically, you will see capacitors in the pico-, nano-, and microFarad ranges, with values between 1pF (1 picoFarad, or .000000000001 Farads) and 22uF (22 microFarads, or .000022 Farads).

For our purposes, our main interest in the capacitance of a capacitor will be to determine how much the capacitor impedes signals depending on their frequency. Based off of this capacitance, for a signal at a given frequency f, we can determine a new quantity called reactance, denoted by . Reactance is measured in Ohms, and is just the capacitor's impedance to a signal at a given frequency! For now, you can think of impedance and resistance as being more or less the same thing... For a capacitor with capacitance \(C\), the formula for its reactance \(X_{c}\) at a given frequency \(f\) is given by:

$$ X_{c} = \frac{1}{2\pi fC} $$

Let's do a few examples with a 100 nF capacitor. For a signal at 100Hz, reactance of the capacitor will be: $$ X_{c} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1nF \times 100Hz} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1\times 10^{-7}F\times 100Hz} = 15,915\Omega $$ What if the signal is at 1kHZ? $$ X_{c} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1nF \times 1kHz} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1\times 10^{-7}F\times 1000Hz} = 1,591\Omega $$ And 10kHZ? $$ X_{c} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1nF \times 10kHz} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1\times 10^{-7}F\times 10,000Hz} = 159\Omega $$ Let's jump to 1MHz, and notice that the capacitor's reactance goes down to virtually nothing: $$ X_{c} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1nF \times 1MHz} = \frac{1}{2\pi \times 1\times 10^{-7}F\times 1\times 10^{6}Hz} = 1\Omega $$

As you can see, for a given capacitor, if frequency goes up, reactance will go down! To summarise: the greater the frequency, the lower the reactance. Lower frequency means greater reactance! Similarly, if we hold frequency of our input signal constant, but replace our capacitor with one of greater capacitance, reactance will go down, while replacing it with a lower capacitance cap will increase reactance.

Finally, let's consider what happens when we apply a static voltage to a capacitor, as in the diagram below. A static voltage can be thought of as a signal with a frequency equal to 0Hz. So what would the reactance be? We can't divide by 0, so how do we calculate it? Well, we know that the lower the frequency, the greater the reactance - as we get to smaller and smaller and smaller frequencies, our reactance just keeps getting higher and higher and higher. We can then say that as the frequency approaches 0Hz, the reactance approaches infinite Ohms. As such, we simply say that the reactance at 0Hz is infinite. This means that capacitors essentially block all static voltages from passing any current through them!

So, to summarize: to static (DC) and low frequency signals, the capacitor looks like an open circuit (no path for current), at midrange frequencies, a capacitor looks like a resistor, and at high frequencies, a capacitor looks like a short circuit (i.e. a wire with no resistance). As the capacitor gets bigger, the boundary frequency for each of these regions gets shifted lower and lower (i.e. bigger caps can pass lower frequencies).

Let's exploit frequency-dependent capacitance property of capacitors to build some simple filters!

Consider a voltage divider with the first resistor replaced with a capacitor with C = 100nF, while the second resistor going to ground has a resistance of 1kOhms.

Now, consider sending a sine wave through the filter, oscillating at frequency f. What does the circuit look like from the perspective of the signal? Well, the resistor looks the same. But the capacitor can be replaced with an impedance equal to the capacitor's reactance!

Now, this is just a voltage divider, as we saw above! Initially, you might expect that the gain of the signal would be equal to \(\frac{R}{X_{c}+R}\), our standard voltage divider formula, but it's not quite right... when dealing with impedance (opposition to flow of AC current), the impedance Z of a resistor and a capacitor in series is not their sum, but rather the square root of the sum of their squares: \(Z = \sqrt{R^{2}+X_{c}^{2}}\) - it's close, but not quite equal in value to their sum. We will just replace the series resistance \(R+X_{c}\) in the denominator of our voltage divider formula with the series impedance \(Z\). The gain \(A_{v}=\frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}}\) of our capacitive voltage divider will then be as follows: $$ A_{v} = \frac{V_{out}}{V_{in}} = \frac{R}{Z} = \frac{R}{\sqrt{R^{2}+X_{c}^2}} $$ Now let's pick some real values, and see what happens! As stated above, let's let \(R = 1k\Omega\) and \( C = 100nF\). What happens to a 10kHz sine wave that has an amplitude of 5V? First we need to calculate the reactance, then we need to calculate the series impedance, and then we will plug into our voltage divider equation to find the gain.

\begin{align} X_{c} & = \frac{1}{2\pi\times f\times C} = \frac{1}{2\pi\times 10,000Hz\times 1\times 10^{-7}F} = 159\Omega \\ \\ Z & = \sqrt{X_{c}^2+R^{2}} = \sqrt{(159\Omega)^{2}+(1,000\Omega)^{2}} = 1012\Omega\\ \\ A_{v} & = \frac{R}{Z} = \frac{1000\Omega}{1012\Omega} = .98 \approx 0dB \end{align}

So, we essentially just have unity gain for a sine wave at 10kHz! This should make perfect sense, since at such a high frequency, the reactance was so low that the capacitor was almost just like a bare wire allowing the signal to pass right through.

Let's see what happens when we send a 1kHz sine wave through: \begin{align} X_{c} & = 1,591\Omega\\ \\ Z & = 1,879\Omega\\ \\ A_{v} & = .53 \approx -5.5dB \end{align}

Since our input sine wave had an amplitude of 5v, our output sine wave will have an amplitude of \(A_{v}\times V_{in} = 0.53\times 5V \approx 2.5V\).

What about an input sine wave at 100Hz?

\begin{align} X_{c} & = 15,915\Omega\\ \\ Z & = 15,946\Omega\\ \\ A_{v} & = .06 \approx -24.5dB \end{align}

What if we try to send a constant DC voltage through our divider? Well, a constant voltage is just like a signal with a 0Hz frequency, though we can't divide by zero when we attempt to calculate reactance, we do know that as frequency approaches zero, reactance approaches \(\infty\), so we can essentially just replace the capacitor with an open break in the circuit, not allowing any signal to pass through. Alternatively, we could see that as reactance approach infinity, so too will impedance, and as such, the gain will be 0.

So, let' summarize our results from this experiment:

$$C=100nF, R=1k\Omega $$

Your next question will likely be: what is the cutoff frequency of this filter? Well, typically, we define the cutoff frequency to be the frequency at which gain of a sine wave is exactly -3dB, or in other words the gain ratio is exactly \(A_{v} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\). Let's use some algebra to solve for this frequency!

\begin{align} A_{v} & =\frac{R}{Z} \\ \\ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} & = \frac{R}{Z} \\ \\ Z & = R\times \sqrt{2} \\ \\ \sqrt{X_{c}^{2} + R^{2}}& =R \times \sqrt{2} \\ \\ \sqrt{X_{c}^{2} + R^{2}}^{2} & = (R\times \sqrt{2})^{2} \\ \\ X_{c}^{2} + R^{2} & = 2\times R^{2} \\ \\ X_{c}^{2} & = R^{2} \\ \\ \sqrt{X_{c}^{2}} & =\sqrt{ R^{2}} \\ \\ X_{c } &=R \\ \\ \frac{1}{2\pi\times f\times C} & = R\\ \\ f & = \frac{1}{2\pi\times R\times C} \end{align}

Now that we have the general form for the cutoff frequency of a passive highpass filter, all we need to do is substitute in our capacitor and resistor values to find the cutoff frequency for this particular filter!

\begin{align} C & = 100nF, R = 1k\Omega\\ \\ f & = \frac{1}{2\pi\times 1\times 10^{-7}Hz\times 1,000\Omega}\\ \\ & = 1,591 Hz \end{align}

What if we want to control the cutoff? Well, since the cutoff depends on both C and R, we have two choices for how to proceed: vary C, or vary R! The easiest method would be to use a potentiometer in stead of our resistor R, however we will leave this example for a future tutorial on filters.

What about the slope of the filter? Well, the definition of the slope of any curve is always just ΔY/ΔX, so to calculate the slope, you simply need to find the difference of gain ratios for two points in the rejection region of the filter (below the cutoff for a highpass), and divide that by the difference of the two frequencies! I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. As a challenge, try calculating the gain for two frequencies in the rejection region, f and 0.5f. Then use thowe two gains to find the slope; however, do it in the general case, leaving R and C as general constants.

I'll give you a second.

To low frequencies, a capacitor looks like a break in the circuit, meaning there will be no path to ground that peels off current, so the circuit will just look like a single current limiting resistor with no effect on the voltage. To mid range frequencies, the capacitor will look like a resistor providing a path to ground, creating a voltage divider which will attenuate our signals. To high frequencies, the capacitor will look like a short circuit, or a wire, providing a path to ground with 0 resistance which will suck all our current and meaning the output voltage will be 0v (same potential as GND)! I will leave deriving the explicit gain formula for a passive lowpass filter and the cutoff frequency as exercises for the reader - but please do write in if you have questions!

The most common use of a capacitor that you will see in synthesis schematics is as a simple passive low pass filter by providing a path for high frequencies to ground. In particular, capacitors are used to provide "power filtering." Ideally, you want all power supplies to output perfectly static, constant voltages - e.g. +12v. There will always be some noise in your power supply though - tiny fluctuations in the level of the power supply, or even large spikes and dips. These transients and noise ripple can be thought of as high frequency fluctuations in the signal. As such, if we provide our power supplies with capacitors going to ground, we provide an alternate path for the high frequency noise and temporary transients to go to ground, while still blocking our DC voltage source signal and forcing it to go on to its expected destinations! Go check out any synth schematic, and next to the power inputs on any chips, you will notice a 100nF capacitor going to ground - this is to ensure the chips receive stable power so they can operate as intended!

Now you should have a good intuition for the basic principles of electronics for synthesis! Here's a summary of the key points to take away from this post:

1. Electricity can be thought of as a flow of current (denoted by I) from one point to another, measured in Amperes (Amps).

2. Voltage (denoted by V or E) is like "electrical pressure", measured in Volts (V).

3. Resistance (denoted by R) represents the opposition to the flow of current, measured in Ohms (O).

4. Voltage, resistance and current are related by Ohm's Law, V=IR.

5. Current flows from places of higher electrical potential (voltage) to lower electrical potential (voltage).

6. We measure voltage as the difference in electrical potential between two points in a circuit.

7. "Ground" is a common return path for current in a circuit which we designate as having no electric potential.

8. Voltage drops between two points can be calculated by finding the product of the resistance between the two points and the current flowing between them.

9. The sum of the current entering a node is equal to the sum of the current exiting a nod (Kirschoff's Current Law, or KCL).

10. The voltage drop between any two points is always equal to the sum of the voltage drops along any path between those two points (Kirschoff's Voltage Law, or KVL).

11. The resistance of two resistors in series is equal to the sum of their resistances (R = R1+R2).

12. The resistance of two resistors in parallel is equal to the reciprocal of the sum of their reciprocals (R=1/(1/R1 + 1/R2) = R1||R2).

13. A voltage divider configuration of two resistors can be used to attenuate an input signal.

14. A capacitor is like a frequency dependent resistor - the higher the frequency, the lower the resistance.

15. Capacitors can be used to build simple passive highpass and lowpass filters.

16. Capacitors are used all over synthesizer schematics to smooth out power supply voltage sources by providing a path to ground for high-frequency noise.

In future posts, we will look at semiconductors (diodes and transistors), active components (op-amps, VCAs, logic chips,voltage regulators and other ICs), and common building blocks (mixers, integrators, differentiators, active filters, comparators + schmitt triggers, etc). Please let us know if you have any questions or things you would like explained! See you next time.

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Oceans in the Sky: Introduction to Electronics for the Synthesist - Signal Flux

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An intuitive introduction to the fundamentals of voltage, current, resistance, and capacitance for synthesis.

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bibliography/a temporary library

In her essay ' Uncertainty, Sociology and Fiction' (2016), Miranda Iossifidis writes about how shared experiences of fiction reading can become 'self-organised spaces of transmission'. She asks, 'What are the productive complexities of 'reading' as a political act, and why is the will to share these intimate experiences so forceful?'

Most of us arrived at Wysing with bags of books, zines and printouts. We piled them on the table in the living room and few days into the residency I put everything on the floor and began arranging texts into a temporary library, which grew into this list of virtual and material things to read, watch and listen to; it's still growing now, it will keep growing as Sonic Cyberfeminisms develops. For now this temporary library is a snapshot of the texts we brought with us, but also of what we wish we'd brought, what we remember and half-remember, what we cite, what we love, what we shared, what we danced to.

-- Frances Morgan

Books

Alexander Wehelyie Phonographies: Grooves in sonic afro-modernity Durham: Duke University Press, 2005

Audre Lorde Your silence will not protect you Silver Press, 2017

b. binaohan decolonizing trans/gender 101 biyuti publishing, 2014

bell hooks Teaching to transgress Routledge, 1994

Dark Storm Quiet rumours: an anarcha-feminist reader AK Press/Dark Star, 2012

David Bell & Barbara M Kennedy The cybercultures reader Routledge, 2000

David Novak & Matt Sakakeeny (eds) Keywords in sound Duke University Press, 2015

Deborah Levy Things I don't want to know Notting Hill Editions, 2013

Elena Ferrante Frantumaglia: a writer's journey Europa Editions, 2016

Eleni Fourtouni Greek women in resistance Thelphini Press, 1986

Faith Wilding, Maria Fernandez & Michelle M Wright (eds)Domain errors! Cyberfeminist practices Autonomedia/Sub Rosa, 2002

Irene Noy German visual culture vol 4: Emergency noises - sound art and gender Peter Lang, 2017

Jasbir K Puar The right to maim Duke University Press, 2017

Julia Eckhardt (ed) Grounds for possible music Errant Bodies, 2017

Nick Montgomery & Carla Bergman Joyful militancy: building thriving resistance in toxic times AK Press / IAS, 2017

N K Jemisin The Fifth Season Orbit, 2015

Nnedi Okorafor Lagoon Hodder & Stoughton, 2014

Octavia E. Butler Xenogenesis Guild America Books, 1989

Paul Rekret Down with Childhood London: Repeater, 2017

Peggy Phelan Unmarked: the politics of performance Routledge, 1993

Robin James Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism Winchester: Zero Books, 2014

Sadie Plant Zeros + Ones 4th Estate, 1998

Samuel R Delany, Aye, and Gomorrah and other stories Vintage 2003

Sara Ahmed Living a Feminist Life Duke University Press, 2017

Shulamith Firestone The dialectic of sex: the case for feminist revolution Verso, 1970, 2015

Tema Okun The emperor has no clothes: teaching about race and racism to people who don't want to know IAP, 2010

Terre Thaemlitz Nuisance: writings on identity jamming & digital audio production Zaglossus, 2016

Tara Rodgers Pink noises: women on electronic music and sound Duke University Press, 2010

Ursula K Le Guin The unreal and the real: selected stories vol 2 Gollancz, 2012

Walidah Imarisha & adrienne maree brown (eds) Octavia's Brood AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2015

Women working worldwide Common interests: Women organising in global electronics London: Women Working Worldwide, 1991

Zines/handbooks

Daikon*

Occupy Mental Health Project Mindful occupation: rising up without burning out Occupy Mental Health Project, 2012

QTPoC Mental Health Rest for resistance Rest for resistance, 2017

Sound Gender Feminism Activism (conference publication), LCC 2014

Journals/articles

Andrea Long Chu,'On liking women' n+1, Issue 30, 2017

Annie Goh 'Sonic Cyberfeminisms and its discontents' CTM Magazine, 2014

Clare Hemmings 'Telling feminist stories' Feminist Theory, vol 6, 2005

Elinor Carmi 'Taming Noisy Women: Bell Telephone's female switchboard operators as a noise source' Media History vol. 21/3, 2015, pp.313-327

N.paradoxa vol 37, 2016: 'Sound? Noise! Voice!' (various authors)

Faith Wilding & Critical Art 'Ensemble Notes on the political condition of cyberfeminism' Art Journal vol 57 no 2. College Art Association 1998

John Tresch & Emily Dolan 'Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science', Osiris Vol. 28, No1: Music, Sound, and the Laboratory from 1750-1980 (January 2013), University of Chicago Press, 2013

Tara Rodgers & Jonathan Sterne 'The poetics of signal processing' , d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Duke University Press, 2015

Online

Robin Buckley "OK i'd like to go into a little into something that has been frustrating me with the use of the word femme..." Twitter, 2018

Robin James, It's Her Factory blog

Sounding Out! blog

Films

Trinh Ti Minh-HaReassemblage, 1982

Caroline MartelThe Phantom of the Operator, 2004

Music

Analog Tara,Fundamentals EP 2018

Asha Tamirisa& the ARP2500 2014

Ed SheeranShape of You (Yxng Bane Remix) Asylum Records UK, 2017

Lauren Sarah HayesManipulation Pan y rosas discos, 2016

Lingua IgnotaAll Bitches Die Lore Records, 2018

Ladyz in Noyz Rhinoceritis:Voices in Dissent Corpus Callosum, 2017

Mary Jane LeachPipe Dreams Blume, 2017

SOPHIEOil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides Transgressive Records, 2018

Nadia RoseSkwod Relentless Records, 2016

Wham!Last Christmas Sony Music Entertainment, 1984

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bibliography/a temporary library In her essay 'Uncertainty, Sociology and Fiction' (2016), Miranda Iossifidis writes about how shared experiences of fiction reading can become 'self-organised spaces of transmission'. She asks, 'What are the produc...

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Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking provides a long-needed, practical, and engaging introduction to the craft of making-as well as creatively cannibalizing-electronic circuits for artistic purposes. With a sense of adventure and no prior knowledge, the reader can subvert the intentions designed into devices such as radios and toys to discover a new sonic world. You will also learn how to make contact microphones, pickups for electromagnetic fields, oscillators, distortion boxes, mixers, and unusual signal processors cheaply and quickly. At a time when computers dominate music production, this book offers a rare glimpse into the core technology of early live electronic music, as well as more recent developments at the hands of emerging artists.

This revised and expanded third edition has been updated throughout to reflect recent developments in technology and DIY approaches. New to this edition are chapters contributed by a diverse group of practitioners, addressing the latest developments in technology and creative trends, as well as an extensive companion website that provides media examples, tutorials, and further reading. This edition features:

Over 50 new hands-on projects.

New chapters and features on topics including soft circuitry, video hacking, neural networks, radio transmitters, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, data hacking, printing your own circuit boards, and the international DIY community

With a hands-on, experimental spirit, Nicolas Collins demystifies the process of crafting your own instruments and enables musicians, composers, artists, and anyone interested in music technology to draw on the creative potential of hardware hacking.

This companion website to Handmade Electronic Music contains video tutorials, video clips, audio tracks, resource files, and additional chapters with deeper dives into technical concepts and hardware hacking scenes around the world.

Nicolas Collins

Nicolas Collins, an active composer and performer, has worked with John Cage, Alvin Lucier, David Tudor, and many other masters of modern music. Dr. Collins is a professor in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. He has led hacking workshops around the world. He has been Visiting Artistic Director of STEIM (Amsterdam), a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin, and a long-time Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Music Journal.

Contact the author: nc (at) HandmadeElectronicMusic (dot) com

Book Information Complimentary Exam Copy

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Sound is such an important part of how we experience urban life. Can we design our cities of the future to be more acoustically alluring?

I was out doing a Bristol Sound Walk recently, acoustically mapping a neighbourhood with the Hush City App. As I logged wind in the trees, playtime in a local school, the constant background drone of traffic, I found myself asking what will this city sound like in the future?
Sound in Cities
Sound is such a fundamental component of our cities, of their vibrancy, of their urban identity, and of the health and wellbeing of their citizens. But it is too often disregarded. The architect Juhani Pallasma complained of the 'Ocularcentrism' of culture and design, how sight takes precedence over the other senses. For the UK Noise Association noise is the 'forgotten pollutant...sidelined when decisions are being made by the public and private sectors.'

According to the World Health Organisation, noise is the second most important environmental health factor, after air pollution: 'Excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people's daily activities...It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular and psychophysiological effects...Traffic noise alone is harmful to the health of almost every third person in Europe'.

Those that can afford to, live quietly.

There are distributional impacts, too, of noise pollution, which map to social exclusion. Those that can afford to, live quietly. The less well-off live near to noisy industry, next to busy roads, or packed in crowded dwellings with poor sound insulation.

Of course, sound can also contribute positively to the urban context. It can be part of the sense of place - the ringing of church bells, the hubbub of pavement cafes, the shouts of children playing out. Sound complements our other senses and helps to make sense of where we are; auditory cues, often barely noticed, help us navigate our towns and cities.

So, how will cities sound in the future? As we urbanise and densify, can we create sonic landscapes that work for all our citizens?
Science and Data
We'll certainly understand urban sound better. Smart cities, 5G, and citizen science allow much closer mapping of the negative physical and mental health impacts as well as differential social impacts. Colleagues at NYU's Center for Urban Science & Progress have deployed microphones in 60 spots around the city to understand the noise-scape. So far, the sensors have collected more than 150 million recordings, understanding the pattern, type, and intensity of noise, which city officials can then use to reduce pollution. Apps and wearables will generate yet more data that can be layered with health and wellbeing data to understand correlation and causation.
Changing Mobility
Given how much noise is due to traffic, changing urban mobility - particularly the wholesale move to electric vehicles - offers huge possibilities. Traffic noise is particularly intrusive: combustion engine noise covers so much of the spectrum, generating noise that can go round corners.

Unfortunately, electric vehicles now need have to be noisy for safety reasons. The charity Guide Dogs commissioned research in 2013 that suggested 'Quiet hybrid and electric vehicles are 40% more likely to collide with pedestrians than cars with a regular combustion engine'. These safety concerns led to EU lawsmaking acoustic vehicle alerting systems mandatory. Car makers have used the opportunity to think about the character of their car and brand in deciding what noises to generate.

Planning more mixed-use neighbourhoods and enabling more flexible working could have big noise benefits.

Cities will get bigger wins by reducing the need to drive. Noise dropped by 50% during the pandemic. Planning more mixed-use neighbourhoods and enabling more flexible working could have big noise benefits. Taking space away from cars and giving it to pedestrians, cyclists or green spaces, and building trams and light rail, could make our cities sound much better.

As we conquer terrestrial noise, we'll face new airborne challenges. Delivery drones are slated to fill our skies; and there's big investment in airborne personal mobility services. The fact that these have vertical take-offs, fly at much lower levels over communities, and have an annoying high-pitched tone, will - unless there is better design and regulation - add to the urban cacophony.
Electrifying Everything
A massive change over coming years will be the electrification of everything - generators, waste-collection, heating, cooling, as well as transport - and there is an opportunity to make sound an integral part of design.

A new air-con unit is bought every 4 seconds in India.

Heat pumps are becoming mandatory in the UK and air-source pumps in particular are causing arguments, with residents worried about the number, volume, pitch and proximity. Similar challenges will be faced by cooling systems, as our cities heat up due to climate change and the urban heat island effect. Air-con use is set to explode across the world; a new air-con unit is bought every 4 seconds in India. Added to this, the increased investment in mechanical ventilation in the wake of the Covid pandemic means there'll be a lot more engines and pumps whining away in our cities.

This gives an opportunity for more thoughtful design. Just as electric car manufacturers are asking what acoustic personality they want their vehicles to have, we can ask the same questions about our buildings. Joshua Taylor, a researcher at Bristol Interaction Group tells me 'We may be able to vary or control the running speed of static equipment, to create more pleasant sound-scapes or to stop unpleasant sounds from travelling as far. We often have more control over frequency and timbre than decibels and loudness. For example - the constant pitch drone of ventilation or AC might feel penetrating but could be tuned or slowly varied so people find it more comfortable.'
Augmented Auditory Reality
We'll certainly be using technology to shape our auditory landscape Not just wearables but 'hearables'. Personal technology, not to block, but to interact with and to tune the world around them.

This could help blind and partially sighted people navigate the environment, as in the Cities Unlocked project I worked on with Microsoft and Guide Dogs. And more and more people are wearing wireless earbuds to listen to music or block the sounds around them, and these will increasingly tune the urban environment.

Sound can be changed in real time, adding reverberation, or tweaking decay, strength, clarity and warmth.

This blocking and tuning is happening inside buildings, too. So called 'pink noise' provides background static to many new office spaces. And taking this a step further, Bloomberg's European headquarters in London, which I visited shortly after the opening, uses an electroacoustic system to capture the sound, digitally remodel it, then send broadcast the acoustically-improved edit back out. Because this is all done digitally, sound can be changed in real time, adding reverberation, or tweaking decay, strength, clarity and warmth.

This acoustic tweaking might move out of the building into the urban neighbourhood, recording, modulating, and amplifying the sound of the city.
Urban design
The physical design of the city can help make it sound better. Sonic barriers and defensive acoustics have already been deployed along thousands of miles of highways, mitigating some of the thoughtless road design of the past Century. These do block sound, but they are ugly and can further isolate communities.

A sound wave at the right frequency and wavelength, will counteract the sound waves of an unwanted noise.

Buildings themselves act as barriers, and we're likely to see more active noise cancellation by buildings. Augmenting existing structures with vibrating façades, for instance, could potentially cancel out noise by exploiting the physics of interference. (A sound wave at the right frequency and wavelength, will counteract the sound waves of an unwanted noise). New technologies and new types of materials will help: frequencies of unwanted sounds could be separated and selectively muted by material layers. And road surfaces too, where porous asphalt already reduces tire noise, could be further improved,

Greener cities with more tree cover and more high quality green space will absorb more noise pollution and potentially generate more of the sounds we want to hear: wind in the trees and birds on the branches. Sarah Jane Morris, a landscape architect who leads the Bristol Sound Walks, advocates 'proactively planting different species for the acoustic quality you want'.
Orchestrating the Future City
With these big urban changes - the electrification of energy, the digitisation of life, the densification and regeneration of cities - we have choices about the acoustic landscape we create. What sounds do we want to keep that are part of place-making? What should be the mixture of real and artificial sounds? Who gets to decide this sonic future?

Who gets to decide this sonic future?

Sound in cities is very contested. One person's banging tunes are another person's noisy neighbours. Incoming gentrifiers complain about long-established music venues. Young people want the right to party. And because we have a very culturally-determined response to sound, conflict can arise when different attitudes rub up against each other, with ethnic minority groups disproportionately penalised for the noise they make.

Will the cacophony of sounds that assault our cities be better regulated? A r ecent report on the sounds of the London Underground found that on average there was an announcement on the trains every 42 seconds and that some of the platform announcements reached 98 decibels - louder than a plane landing at Heathrow.

If Transport for London can't curate sound for a single system under their control, what chance do we have for the planning the city soundscape?

Architects and planners design for beautiful-looking cities; they sometimes design for quiet; but what about creating lovely sounding places? In The Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Murray Schafer suggests we see the 'soundscape of the world as a huge musical composition, unfolding around us ceaselessly... [people] are simultaneously its audience, its performers and its composers.' We now have the knowledge, the technology, and the opportunity to orchestrate the soundscapes in our cities to acoustically delight all of our citizens.

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I was out doing a Bristol Sound Walk recently, acoustically mapping a neighbourhood with the Hush City App. As I logged wind in the trees, playtime in a local school, the constant background drone of...

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HIFI Labs is a creative incubator and artist mentorship collective building an artist-owned, community-powered future for musicians. Fueled by web3 technology and industry-changing innovation, HIFI Labs' mission is to achieve a more equitable and sustainable music economy.

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This article orginally appeared on our sister site, Motherboard, and can be viewed here.

Big data centers have always had a noise control problem, but it's only now that the relentless din of the cloud seems to be reaching a fever pitch.

There is something almost sublime about the sound of data in a holding pattern. It's a digital ambience that fascinates Matt Parker, a British sound artist. Parker recently paid a visit to a medium-sized data center at Birmingham City University-Edgbaston, and rolled tape as the center's server racks and array of hard drives did their thing, emitting a steady white noise. The raw recording is the soundtrack of so much of our lives today, replete with a faulty drive panel that beeps out for help, but nobody's home.
listen to 'Birmingham City University, Edgbaston Campus Data Centre' on Audioboo
"The idea is to highlight the physical nature of 'cloud computing,'" Parker tells the blog Cities and Memory, "and to remind people that whilst their phones might be sat silently in their pockets, somewhere out there, a huge hive of hard drives and fans is spinning around frantically; managing our digital identities." He's not alone. Data center field recording has become a sort of cottage industry. Take the appropriately titled " Data Center Hum" by AutoDestructo:

Likewise Jezreel Acústica's " Data Center":

As this shaky video illustrates, recording the secret roar of data centers isn't always kosher; as the description of the video below states, it's "short and kinda dodgy; filming is not allowed":

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Christoph Cox - History of Sound Art — Are.na

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Philosopher Christoph Cox traces the history of sound art from the invention of audio recording in the late 19th century to the genre-bending compositions of…

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Doctor Andrew Michaels comes face to face with an alien Xenomorph from the popular "Aliens" movie series. Being it is 1947, He and his staff are totally overwhelmed with how to deal with the creature they have recovered from a crashed "Escape Pod".

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Doctor Andrew Michaels comes face to face with an alien Xenomorph from the popular "Aliens" movie series. Being it is 1947, He and his staff are totally overwhelmed with how to deal with the creature they have recovered from a crashed "Escape Pod".

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Part of the Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures book series (PSEF)

In today's world meanings circulate visually, in addition to orally and textually. Images convey information, afford pleasure and displeasure, influence style, determine consumption and mediate power relations. Who we see and who we do not see; who is privileged within the regime of specularity; which aspects of the historical past actually have circulating visual representations and which do not; whose fantasies of what are fed by which visual images? (Rogoff, 2002, p. 25)

In Defense of the Poor Image

"The poor image is a copy in motion" (Steyerl, 2009, para. 1). This quote is from the introduction to Hito Steyerl's essay, In Defense of the Poor Image, first published on e-flux in 2009. Ten years after the publication, the text is still relevant. Steyerl describes a contemporary hierarchy of images in which the poor images are at the very bottom. As a digital, poorly resolved copy of the original image, the poor image circulates on the net, partly without reference to its origin or authorship:

Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. (Steyerl, 2009, para. 1)

Steyerl ( 2009) describes the phenomenon using examples from film history. According to her, experimental and essayistic movies disappeared from the screens after the advent of commercial cinema. The latter replaced them and, due to lower demand, they were hardly shown anymore. High-resolution videos were only shown in elitist (art) institutions and installed on special projectors for a small audience, before disappearing into the archives (again). This has changed since the emergence of various online streaming platforms that are based on user content, such as YouTube. Steyerl ( 2009) explains that film classics that were considered to have disappeared from the screens are suddenly very easily accessible on the internet, albeit in poor quality. Furthermore, video art can be smuggled out of the museum with a mobile camera-phone to suddenly reappear on the internet (in the shape of poor images).

In the context of our post-digital present, which is inextricably linked to digital media, the question arises: What are the poor images today? The art educators Gila Kolb and Konstanze Schütze ( 2020) refer to an interview with Carson Chan by Karen Archey, when they describe that we are living in an Internet State of Mind. This illustrates a view of the world that has fundamentally changed since the internet:

We presume an Internet State of Mind and suggest a radically conscious approach to it (especially for art educators). For Internet State of Mind (Chan, 2011), understood as a fundamentally changed view of the world, leads us to a different perception of the world, which we now have to examine professionally. (Kolb & Schütze, 2020, p. 262, trans. Schmidt; cf. Archey & Chan, 2013, para. 8)

Since Steyerl introduced the poor image, digital technology has evolved tremendously. Smartphones film in 4 K resolution, drone, and mini action cameras are available and affordable to many for home use and are parts of the present-day consumer-oriented society. Until recently, holiday pictures taken with digital compact cameras had to be downloaded to the computer via cable and then sorted out before individual pictures were uploaded to the internet. Nowadays, a recording of a video piece in an exhibition can be, for many, posted on the net with a single click and in real time. For instance, using the Instagram story function, one can share an artwork live with one's online community.

Those images, produced by mobile devices, have ceased to only be badly resolved digital copies of analog originals. Should they still be called poor images? Why should we, after all the techno-social developments and innovations, still use this term? They are certainly copies in motion, but they are no longer "poor" in the sense of "badly resolved." So, can the term poor images still be used today in times of good resolution, live streams, and insta-messages? Where can poor images be found and do they need to be redefined under the updated media conditions? (Fig. 12.1).

What Is a Poor Image (Today)?

The artist Marisa Olson ( 2018) describes the poor image as a "lossy copy: a digital artifact accelerating toward a thing of the past; an accidental fallacy" (p. 2). This means, while the original image is still recognizable, the lack of certain information causes the image to become "poor in something." In the context of an internet characterized by widespread dissemination of content and constant updating, the meaning of the word poor may therefore vary in itself: It can describe low resolutions, fractured images, loss of information or sources or even barely recognizable content.

Similarly, the word image has different meanings depending on the context. Visual science distinguishes the "image" from the term "picture" (Mitchell, 2005). Pictures are materialized physical artifacts, while images are immaterial. Media scientist Simon Rothöhler ( 2018) describes digital images as invisible, stored code that computers can read and then convert into readable images (through pixel-shaped light points). These codes multiply and spread across the internet in a seemingly uncontrollable manner. In the shape of poor images, the digital code exists as innumerable copies of itself in different (digital) places. These online-environments vary in a way that would not have been technically possible before the emergence of web 2.0, which caused an abundance of visual digital data.

For post-digital image phenomena, such as memes,³ GIFs or Insta-clips, this makes sense. On social media, images are commonly used as raw material for mini-collages used by the online community to visually comment on current events. These images, for instance in the shape of memes, are repeatedly recycled and, re-captioned, according to the shifting context: "Another fundamental attribute of Internet memes is intertextuality: memes often relate to each other in complex, creative, and surprising ways" (Shifman, 2014, p. 2). For example, the infamous art piece Comedian consisting of a real banana, duct-taped to a wall by Maurizio Cattelan at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019 caused an immediate abundance of internet memes. It was commented on, copied, and edited almost in real time all over the world.⁴

The viral meme-production was not only conducted by humorous or critical private commentators, but also by other artists and several commercial brands who copied it to advertise their products. For example, McDonalds shared an image of their french-fries taped to a wall on their Facebook-account. Ultimately, the meme was induced so far in the collective memory that the advertisement went on a meta-level: One ad just showed a piece of half torn-down duct tape on a wall. Above the brand-name "Big Mac®," which implies that the famous burger had until recently been taped to the wall.⁵ This is essential for art education, as it shows how quickly artistically relevant concepts, such as original, copy and authorship, market value and appropriation, become blurred and intertwined in the post-digital age. Within a very short period of time, private users, artists and advertisers alike access internet content and negotiate it in a similar way, but with completely different ulterior motives and goals. Such examples may help the field of art education to understand pedagogically and demonstrate the potential fluidity of the image of the present and the variety of actors who deal with it (Fig. 12.2).

One of seemingly countless meme-reactions to Maurizio Cattelan's piece Comedian by the feminist collective Guerilla Girls Broadband. Guerilla Girls Broadband [@guerillagirlsbroadband]. (2019, December 12). Green Banana, found objects, 8 x 8 inches, 2019. DETAILS AND PRICE INFO AT: https://tinyurl.com/theartworldisbananas #ht to @robertasmithnyt for the recognition. #provoke #protest #prevail #feministart #bananaart. [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/B523Cztgddn/?utm_source=ig_embed

Poor images today (in 2020) can thus be described as immaterial, digital image-copies that have significantly lower resolution than the original analog (or now also digital) image. They circulate publicly on the internet where they potentially mutate and multiply over and over again. They are sent as private messages, shared via stories, posted as permanent posts and streamed live on social media platforms. Steyerl ( 2009) defends these poor images because she considers them to have political, community-creating and artistic potential. Due to the rise of new popular technologies, users not only consume images but also shape, change and redistribute them as prosumers (Toffler et al., 1980). As the professor for digital culture, Felix Stalder ( 2017), puts it, "Users of social mass media must produce (themselves)" (p. 57). So, following Steyerl ( 2009), images that were previously only accessible to a few are now available to a broad public, who produces and circulates poor images on their (mobile) devices. However, we know that a utopic online-detachment from the capitalist system has not become reality. Thus, the curator and writer Vanessa Kowalski ( 2018) doubts that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are solely sources of empowerment and positive social change:

It was thought that the Internet would rejuvenate democracy, but [...] the past several years have shown that emancipation and subordination can be enacted by exactly the same tools. It seems however, that these tools are all that we, those deemed the users, have left. (pp. 24-25)

Consequently, we as users have to accept these tools up to a certain point if we want to interact with them. That means to always consider their possible negative as well as positive implications. The fact is, however, that we have access to more images, videos and information on the net than ever before and thus the possibility of using them both in everyday life and in our artistic and pedagogical practice. Steyerl's concept of poor images ten years ago theoretically captured what is practically the case today: The use of poor images as artistic raw material has become a self-evident practice. This requires that art education takes a closer look at the poor image in order to critically negotiate its peculiarities and possibilities.

In 1997 the art historian and professor W. T. J. Mitchell famously asked: "What do pictures want?" ( 2005). He attributes a creative power to pictures-be it historical idols or cyborgs. For Mitchell, what pictures want is closely linked to how we treat them and what we expect from them:

The question to ask of pictures from the standpoint of a poetics is not just what they mean or do but what they want - what claim they make upon us, and how we are to respond. Obviously, this question also requires us to ask what it is that we want from pictures. (Mitchell, 2005, p. XV)

By this question, Mitchell implies that we as viewers project desire onto the pictures. We tend to animate images and thus turn them into icons, i.e., cult images that embody certain values and ideas. Mitchell writes: "Poetry (as "making," or poiesis) is foundational to picturing." (Mitchell, 2005, p. XV). As a result, the picture becomes productive, which can be easily linked to today's online image production, for example on Instagram. One could, following Mitchell, speak of a poiesis of loss (loss of material, information, sources, resolution, etc.) that enables the images to become performative.

What Do Poor Images Want (to Be)?

Perhaps this leads to another question: What do poor images want? Or more precisely: What do poor images want to be? Assuming that we find ourselves in an Internet State of Mind (Archey & Chan, 2013), new types of images adapt to this condition. Internet images are part of an open and mobile visual field, "in which classes of images arise, consolidate, diverge and dissolve" (Heidenreich, 2005, p. 390; trans Schmidt). Poor images are one of those classes. They are no longer defined only by their (poor) resolution, nor by their content, but by the fact, that they are accessible online as numerous copies of themselves. The provenance of these images is no longer necessarily traceable, and their proliferation is accompanied by qualitative and aesthetic transformations. In contrast to a lousy black-and-white photocopy, these are digital transformations. Furthermore, the status as poor image is defined by its utilization-as soon as I screenshot a high-res rich image (e.g., from nationalgeographic.com) it becomes a poor one. The image, although now poor, reaches new realms of activity and distribution. Images acquire new performative potential and, as Hito Steyerl ( 2009) concludes in her essay, function as a "link to the present" (para. 29).

This supports my hypothesis that connects the poor image to a new performative pictorial practice (Sachs-Hombach & Schürmann, 2005). Once published on the net, the image is potentially inserted into a multitude of possible contexts. It becomes a potential starting point: not only as inspirational material but also as raw material for further processing by a large group of anonymous prosumers. They can reuse, crop, comment, reproduce, collage, expand them, and so on. At some point, depending on the specific context of the distribution, the original authorship can no longer necessarily be traced back. This also makes it necessary to discuss imagery in a different way than in pre-digital times. Internet images are constantly being shuffled around, they can appear as links in different places at different times and then seem to disappear again, whereby the duration and frequency of these actions can no longer be completely controlled by the original authors. Even images protected by copyright can be reproduced through screenshots and reappear as poorly resolved copies of the original. Following Mitchell ( 2005), they thus produce new meanings. Poor images in that sense are icons of the post-digital era: They evoke pictorial agency and constantly transform during this process-qualitatively and quantitatively. The pictorial poorness turns into potential pedagogical richness.

@Poorimagearteducation-From Pictorial Poorness to Pedagogical Richness

In order to further explain this pedagogical potential of the poor images, I will present the following examples from my own academic teaching practice. In 2018, I started the Instagram-Account @poorimagearteducation with students of a seminar at Bern University of the Arts. One task was to create an art meme based on a work of art history. Two students used digital cut-outs from paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and created a speculative story about the painter's supposed inspiration for his fantastic figures in the picture. They re-enacted these figures with their own bodies and objects found at the university, which they quickly and intentionally assembled into new "bad" collages using Photoshop. Then they juxtaposed these with the corresponding cut-outs and added the following signature to the picture on Instagram (Fig. 12.3):

Hieronymus Bosch was very eager to have the perfect models for his incredible artwork. Here we were lucky to find the ORIGINAL inspiration for 'Das jüngste Gericht', Ausschnitt aus der Mitteltafel, 1482, Akademie der Künste Wien. #art #boschprofessional #lastjudgement #north #rennaissance [sic]. [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi36xFZAgn1/

So, the students claim to be the original themselves, on which the art historical icon is based. In doing so, they intentionally use a trashy pictorial aesthetic and thus expose the traces of their working method. They transform the original picture into a poor image, but also make a poor image out of themselves. They enable a new perspective on the image and speculate about its creation beyond art historical knowledge (Figs. 12.4 and 12.5).

In a second example, the same students take a very close cut-out of a Bosch's Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony. It shows a detail of a jar with the leg of a dead animal sticking out of it. This image is juxtaposed with their supposedly "original" version consisting of a photograph of an electric water kettle, they found in the institute's kitchen. Behind the device, a hand protrudes with the index and middle fingers extended upwards-similar to the peace sign. This gives the impression that this hand, just like the claw in Bosch's picture, would appear from the vessel.

The students operate with digital image processing techniques, social media language and humor. In doing so, they deliberately avoid creating an aesthetically perfect collage in order to point out the irony of their pictorial action. They do not care about perfect lighting, good composition or the best picture framing. Their photographs rather seem like testimonies of a performance or quick collage sketches. One can feel how quickly the pictures were taken. It seems as if an idea has immediately become an image. This is precisely where the appeal and richness of their visual examination lies. Seemingly naïve and careless, they include specific details of the "old" and "new" pictures in the post description, which gives the works a certain amount of naturalness. However, they very cleverly and intentionally use this as a stylistic method.

In the second example, the hashtags #boschprofessional, #ciao, #stilllife, #beautifullegs and #art are used. #boschprofessional is repeated in all their memes; #ciao derives from the sticker that happens to be stuck on the kettle. The hashtags are both claims and also ironically included details from the pictures, which add to the Instagram posts' fun factor. The way the captures are written takes up a language that is read as typical for social media content. The students work with prompts and short, catchy sentences, such as: "Ciao Bella!" or "You are welcome to try this at home!" They are creating new visual narratives while combining existing art historical content with their own imagery and their own speculative storytelling.⁶ In short, the students copied, reproduced, reused, appropriated, cut up, and re-enacted the picture. The original image was set in motion, became the new image and at the same time its supposed prototype, which opens up speculations on the levels of original, copy, idea and methods of image production. This example and the student's way of working with poor images, illustrates what I introduced above as a new performative image practice. They utilize the poiesis of loss by using poor images, creating new ones, and generating new narratives in a multilayered performative pictorial action that digitally mediates both the works of art history and the new creations.

In addition, a second student team created art memes through appropriation and recombination.⁷ They too have constructed alternative, speculative narratives about the history of art. For their memes, they created the hashtag #whatmichelangeloate. They made a series of posts, in which they are using image details of frescos and photographic reproductions of sculptures by renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarotti. In one post we see a collage combining a detail of Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel ceiling frescos ( The Deluge, detail, 1508) with a Dutch still life showing a sumptuous arrangement of food (Frans Snyders, Still Life with Meat Basket, around 1640). In the caption, they narrate the feeling of having had too much to eat: "Going home after eating at your italian [ sic] grandmother's house, be like ...".

Again, this type of sentence structure and the suggestion evoked by the open end is a characteristic Instagram caption. Like the first student group, they are using popular hashtags, such as #nofilter, #italiannana and #deathbychocolate. Interestingly, on a humorous level, this meme, just like the other examples, works without any prior knowledge of the original images used as templates. Although sources are given and it is implied that it has to do with Michelangelo, there is no further mediation of the image contents. What may be funny on a meme level, meaning to see apparently exhausted people after a feast, is rather tragic from an art historical point of view. The original picture illustrates a tragic biblical scene, in which people in vain fight for survival during the Great Flood.

This leads to some very important questions concerning art education. For although all the examples manage to convey art historical content with the help of poor images and a rethinking of their performative use, there are some problems. As already mentioned, the images work on a meme level; even without prior knowledge of art history or iconography. It is a frequent phenomenon that images of artworks appear on the internet without any indication of the source, or that they appear as memes without any comment. Although the students have provided the titles, authors and dates, the original contents of the images cannot be read without an iconographic education. The users potentially read them differently, which leads to their humorous potential. A critical mediation of art, for example at school, could link up with this and raise and discuss further questions. For example: Which scenes are represented here? How do we read certain figures, gestures, attitudes and objects depending on geographical, temporal, and cultural context? What kind of visual literacy is needed to read these images? Who are they made for? Can images in a digital context be misread at all? Or do they obtain a new meaning as poor images? After all, how many Instagram users even know who Bosch or Michelangelo are? And why and how can they have this knowledge? Do art memes encourage them to acquire it themselves?

A further step might be to address exactly such questions in class. In addition to the content of the images, captions, and hashtags can of course also be analyzed. Finally, it is also important to make the link to the present: What do we learn today from historical representations (of human beings)? Which art historical canon is reproduced by such kind of memes and to what extent is this problematic? (How) can we use Instagram and social media in order to create a new/an alternative canon? Which body norms do we see and which not? Which cultures are represented online and which are not? In summary-which physical and cultural ideals do we reproduce on Instagram and how is this reflected in our own image practice and self-representation on social media?

The Poor Image in Motion-Art Education

The poor image, as we have seen, is no longer just a copy in motion, but is transformative in itself. While images circulate on the internet, our present with its digital media possibilities is constantly moving, changing and refreshing itself:

The Web, although certainly a powerful social tool, has seeped so deeply into the foundations of everyday life that it has collapsed understandings of the present in exchange for a constantly refreshing sequence of now's. (Kowalski, 2018, p. 26)

Analogously, the term poor image must adapt to those present conditions. As described earlier, poor images are digital, circulating internet images that can be accessed by users at any time. Through their scattering and movement through the internet, which is inextricably tied to constant transformation, they are performative, as elaborated above. The images develop agencies by proliferation and circulation through the online world. This is possible so easily nowadays due to their digital materiality, in the sense of "matter matters" (Barad, 2003, p. 801). Furthermore, they are constantly being processed by human and non-human actors (such as algorithms or filters) online, which leads to constant change: "any change to the image is also a change to the program; any change to the programming brings another image to the screen" (Plant, 1996, p. 193). Indeed, this performativity is multilayered and possible links to pictorial action are expanding like a network.

This is precisely why poor images are suitable both as raw material for contemporary artistic practices as well as objects for the critical theoretical reflection on art. While visual practices, media and technologies are currently rapidly developing, art education must also adapt to the post-digital time. Teachers have grown up and been educated with completely different media realities than their students. Vanessa Kowalski ( 2018) contrasts the much-cited and etymologically not unproblematic categories of digital native and digital immigrant with the term digital naïve. She describes, how we all move across the cyberspace with a certain ignorance, lacking clearly defined rights and duties. One tends to take digital devices and the internet for granted, regularly consuming and producing web content. This naivety should be addressed by a critical mediation of art-especially at school. Acquiring visual literacy means being able to read, classify, and critically question visual phenomena of our time, such as digital images. For this reason, the poor image should be part of a radical (post-) digital artistic and mediating practice.

Art education in particular can be inspired by the poor image. This doesn't mean replacing traditional content, but offering the opportunity to react to a time dominated by rapidly changing visual content and applying the digital poiesis of loss. In her dissertation, Konstanze Schütze writes that images are "perceived and processed as omnipresent and almost omnipotent material" (Schütze, 2019, p. 133, trans. Schmidt) in the current debates about digital media. At the same time, the internet and the ongoing digitalization are shifting "aesthetic and social practices that are particularly influential measuring points for the arts and extremely useful for appropriating" (Schütze, 2019, p. 14, trans. Schmidt). The described societal changes open up new realms of agency through the described accessibility and malleability of images that have a huge pedagogical impact. Images can no longer be separated into categories of online and offline, but must be radically conceived under the post-digital conditions. As we have seen, the poor image may be poor in resolution but it is very rich in pedagogical and societal influence.

Notes

1. 1.
See Omnicore Agency ( https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/) and Statista ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/).

2. 2.
I have been working with poor images since my master's degree at the Bern University of the Arts. In my master thesis this was done through artistic research. See https://www.arteducation.ch/de/projekte/alle_0/inszenierte-archive-das-arme-bild-154.html. Since 2017 I am pursuing the dissertation project "From the poor image to poor images " (working title) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

3. 3.
"The term 'meme' was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe small units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation. [...] In the vernacular discourse of netizens, the tag 'Internet meme' is commonly applied to describe the propagation of items such as jokes, rumors, videos, and websites from person to person via the Internet" (Shifman, 2014, p. 2). In contrast to its original meaning, today the term is often used for pictures "[...] whereas in memetics the unit of analysis itself is abstract and controversial, Internet users tend to ascribe the meme tag to observable audiovisual content, such as YouTube videos and humorous images." (Shifman, 2014, p. 13)

4. 4.
See Artnet https://news.artnet.com/market/art-basel-maurizio-cattelan-banana-memes-1726233.

5. 5.
See Facebook McDonald's [@mcd] ( https://www.facebook.com/mcd/posts/10159244459202588) and Design Taxi ( https://designtaxi.com/news/407841/Brands-Go-Bananas-Over-Art-Basel-s-Infamous-Display-With-Over-The-Top-Remakes/?fbclid=IwAR2bxsdE7sjZIoTMC4lIQk1Oh85B6T2V2KHD-WCgzUztttHiSRApl6nxmWk).

6. 6.
Speculative storytelling as in Donna Haraway's practice. See (Haraway, 2016).

7. 7.
Art-Meme by Nadja Knuchel and Isabelle Weber ( https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi3_YwUgUta/). Caption: "Going home after eating at your italian [sic] grandmother's house, be like ... #nofilter #whatmichelangeloate #italiannana #deathbychocolate serious informaition: 'Stillleben mit Fleischkorb' von Frans Snyders (17. Jahrhundert) 'The Deluge' (Detail) von Michelangelo, Sixtinische Kapelle (um 1508)" (Poor Image Art Education, 2018).

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Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria

Helena Schmidt

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1. Department of Art, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Kevin Tavin

2. Schwyz University of Teacher Education, Goldau, Switzerland

Gila Kolb

3. Department of Art, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Juuso Tervo

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Schmidt, H. (2021). What Is the Poor Image Rich in?. In: Tavin, K., Kolb, G., Tervo, J. (eds) Post-Digital, Post-Internet Art and Education. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73770-2_12

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This chapter examines the concept of the poor image in relation to a contemporary, critical art education. Coined by Hito Steyerl in 2009, the term describes digital, sometimes poorly resolved image copies, which are proliferating on the internet, often deprived...

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See a recent post on Tumblr from @acchan-38 about parked domain girl. Discover more posts about parked domain girl.

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R-U-In?S

R-U-In?S is a research, art, expression, documentation, and image-sharing project.

Through genre or geographical proximity, the shared content in R-U-In?S exoticizes, rebrands, and organizes itself into new tribes and documentary topics, as the sequence of imagery builds ephemeral narrative and memetic structures (empires) which either thrive with social input or become abandoned.

It was created in 2009 inside the social content network of Tumblr.

It is best expressed by its live, up-to-date social feed:

The feed is a lexicon: a collection of found, made, and altered images, videos, texts and links from an ongoing social investigation into the aesthetics of empire and the deeper, older forces at play in the contemporary experience around the world. It is the result of conversations and image-pooling between a crew of about 20 researchers around the world.

From 2009-2013 it spawned artworks, videos, memes, trends, tropes, art shows, and several editorials, including one printed catalogue and one online catalogue.

It was a breeding ground for many artist identities.

It has been featured by platforms like:

The New Museum (New York), K48 (New York), PPOW Gallery (New York), Supersuper Magazine (London), UCCA (Beijing), Darsa Comfort (Zurich), Art Lies Magazine (Houston), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), and many many more, and exhibited through video screenings, lectured, art shows, art objects, curricula and editorials.

R-U-In?S and GARDEN CLUB have been archived by Rhizome's NET ART ANTHOLOGY as crucial parts of internet art history.

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THE PIRATE CINEMA - A CINEMATIC COLLAGE GENERATED BY P2P USERS — Are.na

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[a] From VHS to Peer-to-Peer * During the 80s, the availability of VHS brought the cinema into the living room. Today, Peer-to-Peer sharing and the Internet allows us to use our personal computers and mobile phones for cinematic experience. With these means of dissemination, a discussion on the medi…

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Studium Generale | Take a Walk on the Wild Side | GRA + Rietveld Uncut

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The Uneasy Afterlife of Our Dazzling Trash (Published 2020)

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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170719153532/http://www.paulrossen.com:80/paulinekael/trashartandthemovies.html

This longer essay can be found in Kael's collection Going Steady.

Trash, Art, and the Movies

Like those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we're just about all of us displaced persons, "a long way from home." When we feel defeated, when we imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home no longer exists. But there are movie houses. In whatever city we find ourselves we can duck into a theatre and see on the screen our familiars-our old "ideals" aging as we are and no longer looking so ideal. Where could we better stoke the fires of our masochism than at rotten movies in gaudy seedy picture palaces in cities that run together, movies and anonymity a common denominator. Movies-a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world-fit the way we feel. The world doesn't work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be. Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. Because we feel low we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet, which is no more "real" to us than the nursery-school story of the brave little tailor.
We don't have to be told those are photographs of actors impersonating characters. We know, and we often know much more about both the actors and the characters they're impersonating and about how and why the movie has been made than is consistent with theatrical illusion. Hitchcock teased us by killing off the one marquee-name star early in "Psycho," a gambit which startled us not just because of the suddenness of the murder or how it was committed but because it broke a box-office convention and so it was a joke played on what audiences have learned to respect. He broke the rules of the movie game and our response demonstrated how aware we are of commercial considerations. When movies are bad (and in the bad parts of good movies) our awareness of the mechanics and our cynicism about the aims and values is peculiarly alienating. The audience talks right back to the phony "outspoken" condescending "The Detective"; there are groans of dejection at "The Legend of Lylah Clare," with, now and then, a desperate little titter. How well we all know that cheap depression that settles on us when our hopes and expectations are disappointed again. Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser's delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it-not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.
II
There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. "The Scalphunters," for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art-if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as "Wild in the Streets"-slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism-can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an inartistic movie. What makes these movies-that are not works of art-enjoyable? "The Scalphunters" was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what's distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in "Viva Maria!") Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis-another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence-worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn't overdone.
And "Wild in the Streets?" It's a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it's smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren't. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it's as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There's not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there's something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way-as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny- It Can't Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists-but it's treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There's a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them-the daily papers merging into "Village of the Damned." Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he's done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).
If you went to "Wild in the Streets" expecting a good movie, you'd probably be appalled because the directing is unskilled and the music is banal and many of the ideas in the script are scarcely even carried out, and almost every detail is messed up (the casting director has used bit players and extras who are decades too old for their roles). It's a paste-up job of cheap movie-making, but it has genuinely funny performers who seize their opportunities and throw their good lines like boomerangs-Diane Varsi (like an even more zonked-out Geraldine Page) doing a perfectly quietly convincing freak-out as if it were truly a put-on of the whole straight world; Hal Holbrook with his inexpressive actorish face that is opaque and uninteresting in long shot but in close-up reveals tiny little shifts of expression, slight tightenings of the features that are like the movement of thought; and Shelley Winters, of course, and Christopher Jones. It's not so terrible-it may even be a relief-for a movie to be without the look of art; there are much worse things aesthetically than the crude good-natured crumminess, the undisguised reach for a fast buck, of movies without art. From "I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf" through the beach parties to "Wild in the Streets" and "The Savage Seven," American International Pictures has sold a cheap commodity, which in its lack of artistry and in its blatant and sometimes funny way of delivering action serves to remind us that one of the great appeals of movies is that we don't have to take them too seriously.
"Wild in the Streets" is a fluke-a borderline, special case of a movie that is entertaining because some talented people got a chance to do something at American International that the more respectable companies were too nervous to try. But though I don't enjoy a movie so obvious and badly done as the big American International hit, "The Wild Angels," it's easy to see why kids do and why many people in other countries do. Their reasons are basically why we all started going to the movies. After a time, we may want more, but audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it's a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That's what they go to burlesque for. Personally, I hope for a reasonable minimum of finesse, and movies like "Planet of the Apes" or "The Scalphunters" or "The Thomas Crown Affair" seem to me minimal entertainment for a relaxed evening's pleasure. These are, to use traditional common-sense language, "good movies" or "good bad movies"-slick, reasonably inventive, well crafted. They are not art. But they are almost the maximum of what we're now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as "art"-and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.
It's preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art-as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it's just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we're getting art for our money when we haven't even had a good time. I did have a good time at "Wild in the Streets," which is more than I can say for "Petulia" or "2001" or a lot of other highly praised pictures. "Wild in the Streets" is not a work of art, but then I don't think "Petulia" or "2001" is either, though "Petulia" has that kaleidoscopic hip look and "2001" that new-techniques look which combined with "swinging" or "serious" ideas often pass for motion picture art.
III
Let's clear away a few misconceptions. Movies make hash of the schoolmarm's approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money-and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist's intentions" you'd probably wish you couldn't anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.
The intention to make money is generally all too obvious. One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme-as if the conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem.
People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don't you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn't very interesting. Hollywood movies often have the look of the studio that produced them-they have a studio style. Many current Warner films are noisy and have a bright look of cheerful ugliness, Universal films the cheap blur of money-saving processes, and so forth. Sometimes there is even a spirit that seems to belong to the studio. We can speak of the Paramount comedies of the Thirties or the Twentieth-Century Fox family entertainment of the Forties and CinemaScope comedies of the Fifties or the old MGM gloss, pretty much as we speak of Chevvies or Studebakers. These movies look alike, they move the same way, they have just about the same engines because of the studio policies and the kind of material the studio heads bought, the ideas they imposed, the way they had the films written, directed, photographed, and the labs where the prints were processed, and, of course, because of the presence of the studio stable of stars for whom the material was often purchased and shaped and who dominated the output of the studio. In some cases, as at Paramount in the Thirties, studio style was plain and rather tacky and the output-those comedies with Mary Boland and Mae West and Alison Skipworth and W. C. Fields-looks the better for it now. Those economical comedies weren't slowed down by a lot of fancy lighting or the adornments of "production values." Simply to be enjoyable, movies don't need a very high level of craftsmanship: wit, imagination, fresh subject matter, skillful performers, a good idea-either alone or in any combination-can more than compensate for lack of technical knowledge or a big budget.
The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn't have much to do with art-the expressive use of techniques-it probably doesn't have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either. A dull movie like Sidney Furie's "The Naked Runner" is technically competent. The appalling "Half a Sixpence" is technically astonishing. Though the large popular audience has generally been respectful of expenditure (so much so that a critic who wasn't impressed by the money and effort that went into a "Dr. Zhivago" might be sharply reprimanded by readers), people who like "The President's Analyst" or "The Producers" or "The Odd Couple" don't seem to be bothered by their technical ineptitude and visual ugliness. And on the other hand, the expensive slick techniques of ornately empty movies like "A Dandy in Aspic" can actually work against one's enjoyment, because such extravagance and waste are morally ugly. If one compares movies one likes to movies one doesn't like, craftsmanship of the big-studio variety is hardly a decisive factor. And if one compares a movie one likes by a competent director such as John Sturges or Franklin Schaffner or John Frankenheimer to a movie one doesn't much like by the same director, his technique is probably not the decisive factor. After directing "The Manchurian Candidate" Frankenheimer directed another political thriller, "Seven Days in May," which, considered just as a piece of direction, was considerably more confident. While seeing it, one could take pleasure in Frankenheimer's smooth showmanship. But the material (Rod Serling out of Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) was like a straight (i.e., square) version of "The Manchurian Candidate." I have to chase around the corridors of memory to summon up images from "Seven Days in May"; despite the brilliant technique, all that is clear to mind is the touchingly, desperately anxious face of Ava Gardner-how when she smiled you couldn't be sure if you were seeing dimples or tics. But "The Manchurian Candidate," despite Frankenheimer's uneven, often barely adequate, staging, is still vivid because of the script. It took off from a political double entendre that everybody had been thinking of ("Why, if Joe McCarthy were working for the Communists, he couldn't be doing them more good!") and carried it to startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in a way that was trashy yet liberating.
Technique is hardly worth talking about unless it's used for something worth doing: that's why most of the theorizing about the new art of television commercials is such nonsense. The effects are impersonal-dexterous, sometimes clever, but empty of art. It's because of their emptiness that commercials call so much attention to their camera angles and quick cutting-which is why people get impressed by "the art" of it. Movies are now often made in terms of what television viewers have learned to settle for. Despite a great deal that is spoken and written about young people responding visually, the influence of TV is to make movies visually less imaginative and complex. Television is a very noisy medium and viewers listen, while getting used to a poor quality of visual reproduction, to the absence of visual detail, to visual obviousness and overemphasis on simple compositions, and to atrociously simplified and distorted color systems. The shifting camera styles, the movement, and the fast cutting of a film like "Finian's Rainbow"-one of the better big productions-are like the "visuals" of TV commercials, a disguise for static material, expressive of nothing so much as the need to keep you from getting bored and leaving. Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials-which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.
I don't mean to suggest that there is not such a thing as movie technique or that craftsmanship doesn't contribute to the pleasures of movies, but simply that most audiences, if they enjoy the acting and the "story" or the theme or the funny lines, don't notice or care about how well or how badly the movie is made, and because they don't care, a hit makes a director a "genius" and everybody talks about his brilliant technique (i.e., the technique of grabbing an audience). In the brief history of movies there has probably never been so astonishingly gifted a large group of directors as the current Italians, and not just the famous ones-or Pontecorvo ("The Battle of Algiers") or Francesco Rosi ("The Moment of Truth") or the young prodigies, Bertolucci and Bellocchio, but dozens of others, men like Elio Petri ("We Still Kill the Old Way") and Carlo Lizzani ("The Violent Four"). "The Violent Four" shows more understanding of visual movement and more talent for movie-making than anything that's been made in America this year. But could one tell people who are not crazy, dedicated moviegoers to go see it? I'm not sure, although I enjoyed the film enormously, because "The Violent Four" is a gangster genre picture. And it may be a form of aestheticism-losing sight of what people go to movies for, and particularly what they go to foreign movies for-for a critic to say, "His handling of crowds and street scenes is superb," or, "It has a great semi-documentary chase sequence." It does, but the movie is basically derived from our old gangster movies, and beautifully made as it is, one would have a hard time convincing educated people to go see a movie that features a stunning performance by Gian Maria Volonte which is based on Paul Muni and James Cagney. Presumably they want something different from movies than a genre picture that offers images of modern urban decay and is smashingly directed. If a movie is interesting primarily in terms of technique then it isn't worth talking about except to students who can learn from seeing how a good director works. And to talk about a movie like "The Graduate" in terms of movie technique is really a bad joke. Technique at this level is not of any aesthetic importance; it's not the ability to achieve what you're after but the skill to find something acceptable. One must talk about a film like this in terms of what audiences enjoy it for or one is talking gibberish-and might as well be analyzing the "art" of commercials. And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn't need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn't want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn't want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn't need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made-which is more or less implicit.
Just as there are good actors-possibly potentially great actors-who have never become big stars because they've just never been lucky enough to get the roles they needed (Brian Keith is a striking example) there are good directors who never got the scripts and the casts that could make their reputations. The question people ask when they consider going to a movie is not "How's it made?" but "What's it about?" and that's a perfectly legitimate question. (The next question-sometimes the first-is generally, "Who's in it?" and that's a good, honest question, too.) When you're at a movie, you don't have to believe in it to enjoy it but you do have to be interested. (Just as you have to be interested in the human material, too. Why should you go see another picture with James Stewart?) I don't want to see another samurai epic in exactly the same way I never want to read "Kristin Lavransdatter." Though it's conceivable that a truly great movie director could make any subject interesting, there are few such artists working in movies and if they did work on unpromising subjects I'm not sure we'd really enjoy the results even if we did admire their artistry. (I recognize the greatness of sequences in several films by Eisenstein but it's a rather cold admiration.) The many brilliant Italian directors who are working within a commercial framework on crime and action movies are obviously not going to be of any great interest unless they get a chance to work on a subject we care about. Ironically the Czech successes here ("The Shop on Main Street," "Loves of a Blonde," "Closely Watched Trains") are acclaimed for their techniques, which are fairly simple and rather limited, when it's obviously their human concern and the basic modesty and decency of their attitudes plus a little barnyard humor which audiences respond to. They may even respond partly because of the simplicity of the techniques.
IV
When we are children, though there are categories of films we don't like-documentaries generally (they're too much like education) and, of course, movies especially designed for children-by the time we can go on our own we have learned to avoid them. Children are often put down by adults when the children say they enjoyed a particular movie; adults who are short on empathy are quick to point out aspects of the plot or theme that the child didn't understand, and it's easy to humiliate a child in this way. But it is one of the glories of eclectic arts like opera and movies that they include so many possible kinds and combinations of pleasure. One may be enthralled by Leontyne Price in "La Forza del Destino" even if one hasn't boned up on the libretto, or entranced by "The Magic Flute" even if one has boned up on the libretto, and a movie may be enjoyed for many reasons that have little to do with the story or the subtleties (if any) of theme or character. Unlike "pure" arts which are often defined in terms of what only they can do, movies are open and unlimited. Probably everything that can be done in movies can be done some other way, but-and this is what's so miraculous and so expedient about them-they can do almost anything any other art can do (alone or in combination) and they can take on some of the functions of exploration, of journalism, of anthropology, of almost any branch of knowledge as well. We go to the movies for the variety of what they can provide, and for their marvelous ability to give us easily and inexpensively (and usually painlessly) what we can get from other arts also. They are a wonderfully convenient art.
Movies are used by cultures where they are foreign films in a much more primitive way than in their own; they may be enjoyed as travelogues or as initiations into how others live or in ways we might not even guess. The sophisticated and knowledge able moviegoer is likely to forget how new and how amazing the different worlds up there once seemed to him, and to forget how much a child reacts to, how many elements he is taking in, often for the first time. And even adults who have seen many movies may think a movie is "great" if it introduces them to unfamiliar subject matter; thus many moviegoers react as naïvely as children to "Portrait of Jason" or "The Queen." They think they're wonderful. The oldest plots and corniest comedy bits can be full of wonder for a child, just as the freeway traffic in a grade Z melodrama can be magical to a villager who has never seen a car. A child may enjoy even a movie like "Jules and Jim" for its sense of fun, without comprehending it as his parents do, just as we may enjoy an Italian movie as a sex comedy although in Italy it is considered social criticism or political satire. Jean-Luc Godard liked the movie of "Pal Joey," and I suppose that a miserable American movie musical like "Pal Joey" might look good in France because I can't think of a single good dance number performed by French dancers in a French movie. The French enjoy what they're unable to do and we enjoy the French studies of the pangs of adolescent love that would be corny if made in Hollywood. A movie like "The Young Girls of Rochefort" demonstrates how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American musicals misunderstands their conventions. Yet it would be as stupid to say that the director Jacques Demy couldn't love American musicals because he doesn't understand their conventions as to tell a child he couldn't have liked "Planet of the Apes" because he didn't get the jokey references to the Scopes trial.
Every once in a while I see an anthropologist's report on how some preliterate tribe reacts to movies; they may, for example, be disturbed about where the actor has gone when he leaves the movie frame, or they may respond with enthusiasm to the noise and congestion of big-city life which in the film story are meant to show the depths of depersonalization to which we are sinking, but which they find funny or very jolly indeed. Different cultures have their own ways of enjoying movies. A few years ago the new "tribalists" here responded to the gaudy fantasies of "Juliet of the Spirits" by using the movie to turn on. A few had already made a trip of "8½" but "Juliet," which was, conveniently and perhaps not entirely accidentally, in electric, psychedelic color, caught on because of it. (The color was awful, like in bad MGM musicals-one may wonder about the quality of the trips.)
The new tribalism in the age of the media is not necessarily the enemy of commercialism; it is a direct outgrowth of commercialism and its ally, perhaps even its instrument. If a movie has enough clout, reviewers and columnists who were bored are likely to give it another chance, until on the second or third viewing, they discover that it affects them "viscerally"-and a big expensive movie is likely to do just that. "2001" is said to have caught on with youth (which can make it happen); and it's said that the movie will stone you-which is meant to be a recommendation. Despite a few dissident voices-I've heard it said, for example, that "2001" "gives you a bad trip because the visuals don't go with the music"-the promotion has been remarkably effective with students. "The tribes" tune in so fast that college students thousands of miles apart "have heard" what a great trip "2001" is before it has even reached their city.
Using movies to go on a trip has about as much connection with the art of the film as using one of those Doris Day-Rock Hudson jobs for ideas on how to redecorate your home-an earlier way of stoning yourself. But it is relevant to an understanding of movies to try to separate out, for purposes of discussion at least, how we may personally use a film-to learn how to dress or how to speak more elegantly or how to make a grand entrance or even what kind of coffee maker we wish to purchase, or to take off from the movie into a romantic fantasy or a trip-from what makes it a good movie or a poor one, because, of course, we can use poor films as easily as good ones, perhaps more easily for such non-aesthetic purposes as shopping guides or aids to tripping.
V
We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art. The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don't have the same values as the official culture supported at school and in the middle-class home. At the movies we get low life and high life, while David Susskind and the moralistic reviewers chastise us for not patronizing what they think we should, "realistic" movies that would be good for us-like "A Raisin in the Sun," where we could learn the lesson that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family. Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it's pretty hard to make us queue up for pedagogy. At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. We get little things even in mediocre and terrible movies-José Ferrer sipping his booze through a straw in "Enter Laughing," Scott Wilson's hard scary all-American-boy-you-can't-reach face cutting through the pretensions of "In Cold Blood" with all its fancy bleak cinematography. We got, and still have embedded in memory, Tony Randall's surprising depth of feeling in "The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao," Keenan Wynn and Moyna Macgill in the lunch-counter sequence of "The Clock," John W. Bubbles on the dance floor in "Cabin in the Sky," the inflection Gene Kelly gave to the line, "I'm a rising young man" in "DuBarry Was a Lady," Tony Curtis saying "avidly" in "Sweet Smell of Success." Though the director may have been responsible for releasing it, it's the human material we react to most and remember longest. The art of the performers stays fresh for us, their beauty as beautiful as ever. There are so many kinds of things we get-the hangover sequence wittily designed for the CinemaScope screen in "The Tender Trap," the atmosphere of the newspaper offices in "The Luck of Ginger Coffey," the automat gone mad in "Easy Living." Do we need to lie and shift things to false terms-like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her acting had made her a star? Wouldn't we rather watch her than better actresses because she's so incredibly charming and because she's probably the greatest model the world has ever known? There are great moments-Angela Lansbury singing "Little Yellow Bird" in "Dorian Gray." (I don't think I've ever had a friend who didn't also treasure that girl and that song.) And there are absurdly right little moments-in "Saratoga Trunk" when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, "You're very beautiful," and she says, "Yes, isn't it lucky?" And those things have closer relationships to art than what the schoolteachers told us was true and beautiful. Not that the works we studied in school weren't often great (as we discovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for (and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admire them for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what might have been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing in them, and subversive, too, had been coated over.
Because of the photographic nature of the medium and the cheap admission prices, movies took their impetus not from the desiccated imitation European high culture, but from the peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip-from what was coarse and common. The early Chaplin two-reelers still look surprisingly lewd, with bathroom jokes and drunkenness and hatred of work and proprieties. And the Western shoot-'em-ups certainly weren't the schoolteachers' notions of art-which in my school days, ran more to didactic poetry and "perfectly proportioned" statues and which over the years have progressed through nice stories to "good taste" and "excellence"-which may be more poisonous than homilies and dainty figurines because then you had a clearer idea of what you were up against and it was easier to fight. And this, of course, is what we were running away from when we went to the movies. All week we longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary-the anonymity and impersonality of sitting in a theatre, just enjoying ourselves, not having to be responsible, not having to be "good." Maybe you just want to look at people on the screen and know they're not looking back at you, that they're not going to turn on you and criticize you.
Perhaps the single most intense pleasure of moviegoing is this non-aesthetic one of escaping from the responsibilities of having the proper responses required of us in our official (school) culture. And yet this is probably the best and most common basis for developing an aesthetic sense because responsibility to pay attention and to appreciate is anti-art, it makes us too anxious for pleasure, too bored for response. Far from supervision and official culture, in the darkness at the movies where nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses. Unsupervised enjoyment is probably not the only kind there is but it may feel like the only kind. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. I don't like to buy "hard tickets" for a "road show" movie because I hate treating a movie as an occasion. I don't want to be pinned down days in advance; I enjoy the casualness of moviegoing-of going in when I feel like it, when I'm in the mood for a movie. It's the feeling of freedom from respectability we have always enjoyed at the movies that is carried to an extreme by American International Pictures and the Clint Eastwood Italian Westerns; they are stripped of cultural values. We may want more from movies than this negative virtue but we know the feeling from childhood moviegoing when we loved the gamblers and pimps and the cons' suggestions of muttered obscenities as the guards walked by. The appeal of movies was in the details of crime and high living and wicked cities and in the language of toughs and urchins; it was in the dirty smile of the city girl who lured the hero away from Janet Gaynor. What draws us to movies in the first place, the opening into other, forbidden or surprising, kinds of experience, and the vitality and corruption and irreverence of that experience are so direct and immediate and have so little connection with what we have been taught is art that many people feel more secure, feel that their tastes are becoming more cultivated when they begin to appreciate foreign films. One foundation executive told me that he was quite upset that his teen-agers had chosen to go to "Bonnie and Clyde" rather than with him to "Closely Watched Trains." He took it as a sign of lack of maturity. I think his kids made an honest choice, and not only because "Bonnie and Clyde" is the better movie, but because it is closer to us, it has some of the qualities of direct involvement that make us care about movies. But it's understandable that it's easier for us, as Americans, to see art in foreign films than in our own, because of how we, as Americans, think of art. Art is still what teachers and ladies and foundations believe in, it's civilized and refined, cultivated and serious, cultural, beautiful, European, Oriental: it's what America isn't, and it's especially what American movies are not. Still, if those kids had chosen "Wild in the Streets" over "Closely Watched Trains" I would think that was a sound and honest choice, too, even though "Wild in the Streets" is in most ways a terrible picture. It connects with their lives in an immediate even if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don't go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept "good taste," then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all. We will become like those people who "may go to American movies sometimes to relax" but when they want "a little more" from a movie, are delighted by how colorful and artistic Franco Zeffirelli's "The Taming of the Shrew" is, just as a couple of decades ago they were impressed by "The Red Shoes," made by Powell and Pressburger, the Zeffirellis of their day. Or, if they like the cozy feeling of uplift to be had from mildly whimsical movies about timid people, there's generally a "Hot Millions" or something musty and faintly boring from Eastern Europe-one of those movies set in World War II but so remote from our ways of thinking that it seems to be set in World War I. Afterward, the moviegoer can feel as decent and virtuous as if he'd spent an evening visiting a deaf old friend of the family. It's a way of taking movies back into the approved culture of the schoolroom-into gentility-and the voices of schoolteachers and reviewers rise up to ask why America can't make such movies.
VI
Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies, it is not to be found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It's the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings. At best, the movie is totally informed by the kind of pleasure we have been taking from bits and pieces of movies. But we are so used to reaching out to the few good bits in a movie that we don't need formal perfection to be dazzled. There are so many arts and crafts that go into movies and there are so many things that can go wrong that they're not an art for purists. We want to experience that elation we feel when a movie (or even a performer in a movie) goes farther than we had expected and makes the leap successfully. Even a film like Godard's "Les Carabiniers," hell to watch for the first hour, is exciting to think about after because its one good sequence, the long picture postcard sequence near the end, is so incredible and so brilliantly prolonged. The picture has been crawling and stumbling along and then it climbs a high wire and walks it and keeps wanting it until we're almost dizzy from admiration. The tight rope is rarely stretched so high in movies, but there must be a sense of tension somewhere in the movie, if only in a bit player's face, not just mechanical suspense, or the movie is just more hours down the drain. It's the rare movie we really To the Editor: go with, the movie that keeps us tense and attentive. We learn to dread Hollywood "realism" and all that it implies. When, in the dark, we concentrate our attention, we are driven frantic by events on the level of ordinary life that pass at the rhythm of ordinary life. That's the self-conscious striving for integrity of humorless, untalented people. When we go to a play we expect a heightened, stylized language; the dull realism of the streets is unendurably boring, though we may escape from the play to the nearest bar to listen to the same language with relief. Better life than art imitating life.
If we go back and think over the movies we've enjoyed-even the ones we knew were terrible movies while we enjoyed them-what we enjoyed in them, the little part that was good, had, in some rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, some audacity, some craziness. It's there in the interplay between Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis, or, in "Wild in the Streets," in Diane Varsi rattling her tambourine, in Hal Holbrook's faint twitch when he smells trouble, in a few of Robert Thom's lines; and they have some relation to art though they don't look like what we've been taught is "quality." They have the joy of playfulness. In a mediocre or rotten movie, the good things may give the impression that they come out of nowhere; the better the movie, the more they seem to belong to the world of the movie. Without this kind of playfulness and the pleasure we take from it, art isn't art at all, it's something punishing, as it so often is in school where even artists' little jokes become leaden from explanation.
Keeping in mind that simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don't enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it's probably in the movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, many reviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there's that cultural snobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of the even bigger annual masterpieces. In foreign movies what is most often mistaken for "quality" is an imitation of earlier movie art or a derivation from respectable, approved work in the other arts-like the demented, suffering painter-hero of "Hour of the Wolf" smearing his lipstick in a facsimile of expressionist anguish. Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist (generally on the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) and especially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there is a tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to make up for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time. And so a revenge-of-a-sour-virgin movie like Truffaut's "The Bride Wore Black" is treated respectfully as if it somehow revealed an artist's sensibility in every frame. Reviewers who would laugh at Lana Turner going through her femme fatale act in another Ross Hunter movie swoon when Jeanne Moreau casts significant blank looks for Truffaut.
In American movies what is most often mistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it's combined with a genuflection to importance; then you have "a movie the industry can be proud of" like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or such Academy Award winners as "West Side Story," "My Fair Lady," or "A Man for All Seasons." Fred Zinnemann made a fine modern variant of a Western, "The Sundowners," and hardly anybody saw it until it got on television; but "A Man for All Seasons" had the look of prestige and the press felt honored to praise it. I'm not sure most movie reviewers consider what they honestly enjoy as being central to criticism. Some at least appear to think that that would be relying too much on their own tastes, being too personal instead of being "objective"-relying on the ready-made terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie). Just as movie directors, as they age, hunger for what was meant by respectability in their youth, and aspire to prestigious cultural properties, so, too, the movie press longs to be elevated in terms of the cultural values of their old high schools. And so they, along with the industry, applaud ghastly "tour-de-force" performances, movies based on "distinguished" stage successes or prize-winning novels, or movies that are "worthwhile," that make a "contribution"-"serious" messagy movies. This often involves praise of bad movies, of dull movies, or even the praise in good movies of what was worst in them.
This last mechanism can be seen in the honors bestowed on "In the Heat of the Night." The best thing in the movie is that high comic moment when Poitier says, "I'm a police officer," because it's a reversal of audience expectations and we laugh in delighted relief that the movie is not going to be another self-righteous, self-congratulatory exercise in the gloomy old Stanley Kramer tradition. At that point the audience sparks to life. The movie is fun largely because of the amusing central idea of a black Sherlock Holmes in a Tom and Jerry cartoon of reversals. Poitier's color is used for comedy instead of for that extra dimension of irony and pathos that made movies like "To Sir, with Love" unbearably sentimental. He doesn't really play the super sleuth very well: he's much too straight even when spouting the kind of higher scientific nonsense about right-handedness and left-handedness that would have kept Basil Rathbone in an ecstasy of clipped diction, blinking eyes and raised eyebrows. Like Bogart in "Beat the Devil" Poitier doesn't seem to be in on the joke. But Rod Steiger compensated with a comic performance that was even funnier for being so unexpected-not only from Steiger's career which had been going in other directions, but after the apparently serious opening of the film. The movie was, however, praised by the press as if it had been exactly the kind of picture that the audience was so relieved to discover it wasn't going to be (except in its routine melodramatic sequences full of fake courage and the climaxes such as Poitier slapping a rich white Southerner or being attacked by white thugs; except that is, in its worst parts). When I saw it, the audience, both black and white, enjoyed the joke of the fast-witted, hyper-educated black detective explaining matters to the backward, blundering Southern-chief-of-police slob. This racial poke is far more open and inoffensive than the usual "irony" of Poitier being so good and so black. For once it's funny (instead of embarrassing) that he's so superior to everybody.
"In the Heat of the Night" isn't in itself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it's an entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller. The director Norman Jewison destroys the final joke when Steiger plays redcap to Poitier by infusing it with tender feeling, so it comes out sickly sweet, and it's too bad that a whodunit in which the whole point is the demonstration of the Negro detective's ability to unravel what the white man can't, is never clearly unraveled. Maybe it needed a Negro super director. (The picture might have been more than just a lively whodunit if the detective had proceeded to solve the crime not by "Scientific" means but by an understanding of relationships in the South that the white chief of police didn't have.) What makes it interesting for my purposes here is that the audience enjoyed the movie for the vitality of its surprising playfulness, while the industry congratulated itself because the film was "hard-hitting"-that is to say, it flirted with seriousness and spouted warm, worthwhile ideas.
Those who can accept "In the Heat of the Night" as the socially conscious movie that the industry pointed to with pride probably also go along with the way the press attacked Jewison's subsequent film, "The Thomas Crown Affair," as trash and a failure. One could even play the same game that was played on "In the Heat of the Night" and convert the "Crown" trifle into a sub-fascist exercise because, of course, Crown, the superman, who turns to crime out of boredom, is the crooked son of "The Fountainhead," out of Raffles. But that's talking glossy summer-evening fantasies much too seriously: we haven't had a junior executives fantasy-life movie for a long time and to attack this return of the worldly gentlemen-thieves genre of Ronald Colman and William Powell politically is to fail to have a sense of humor about the little romantic-adolescent fascist lurking in most of us. Part of the fun of movies is that they allow us to see how silly many of our fantasies are and how widely they're shared. A light romantic entertainment like "The Thomas Crown Affair," trash undisguised, is the kind of chic crappy movie which (one would have thought) nobody could be fooled into thinking was art. Seeing it is like lying in the sun flicking through fashion magazines and, as we used to say, feeling rich and beautiful beyond your wildest dreams.
But it isn't easy to come to terms with what one enjoys in films, and if an older generation was persuaded to dismiss trash, now a younger generation, with the press and the schools in hot pursuit, has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art. College newspapers and the new press all across the country are full of a hilarious new form of scholasticism, with students using their education to cook up impressive reasons for enjoying very simple, traditional dishes. Here is a communication from Cambridge to a Boston paper:

In this psychic context, the possibility of establishing faith is explored. The movement of the film is towards Vicki's final enigma. Her ambivalence is commensurate with the increasing danger to Crown. The suspense lies in how she will respond to her dilemma, rather than whether Crown will escape.
I find "The Thomas Crown Affair" to be a unique and haunting film, superb in its visual and technical design, and fascinating for the allegorical problem of human faith.
"The Thomas Crown Affair" is fundamentally a film about faith between people. In many ways, it reminds me of a kind of updated old fable, or tale, about an ultimate test of faith. It is a film about a love affair (note the title), with a subplot of a bank robbery, rather than the reverse. The subtlety of the film is in the way the external plot is used as a matrix to develop serious motifs, much in the same way that the "Heat of the Night" functioned.
Although Thomas Crown is an attractive and fascinating character, Vicki is the protagonist. Crown is consistent, predictable: he courts personal danger to feel superior to the system of which he is a part, and to make his otherwise overly comfortable life more interesting. Vicki is caught between two opposing elements within her, which, for convenience, I would call masculine and feminine. In spite of her glamour, at the outset she is basically masculine, in a man's type of job, ruthless, after prestige and wealth. But Crown looses the female in her. His test is a test of her femininity. The masculine responds to the challenge. Therein lies the pathos of her final revelation. Her egocentrism had not yielded to his. "The Thomas Crown Affair" is pretty good trash, but we shouldn't convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That 's being false to what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it's even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition. What the Cambridge boy is doing is a more devious form of that elevating and falsifying of people who talk about Loren as a great actress instead of as a gorgeous, funny woman. Trash doesn't belong to the academic tradition, and that's part of the fun of trash-that you know (or should know) that you don't have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and entertaining.
It's appalling to read solemn academic studies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight of the primary reason for seeing films like "Notorious" or "Morocco"-which is that they were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what's good in them, what relates them to art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity. There is talk now about von Sternberg's technique-his use of light and décor and detail-and he is, of course, a kitsch master in these areas, a master of studied artfulness and pretty excess. Unfortunately, some students take this technique as proof that his films are works of art, once again, I think, falsifying what they really respond to-the satisfying romantic glamour of his very pretty trash. "Morocco" is great trash, and movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them. The kitsch of an earlier era-even the best kitsch-does not become art, though it may become camp. Von Sternberg's movies became camp even while he was still making them, because as the romantic feeling went out of his trash-when he became so enamored of his own pretty effects that he turned his human-material into blank, affectless pieces of décor-his absurd trashy style was all there was. We are now told in respectable museum publications that in 1932 a movie like "Shanghai Express" "was completely misunderstood as a mindless adventure" when indeed it was completely understood as a mindless adventure. And enjoyed as a mindless adventure. It's a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an "allegorical problem of human faith" out of your teeth. If we always wanted works of complexity and depth we wouldn't be going to movies about glamorous thieves and seductive women who sing in cheap cafés, and if we loved "Shanghai Express" it wasn't for its mind but for the glorious sinfulness of Dietrich informing Clive Brook that, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily" and for the villainous Oriental chieftain (Warner Oland) delivering the classic howler, "The white woman stays with me."
If we don't deny the pleasures to be had from certain kinds of trash and accept "The Thomas Crown Affair" as a pretty fair example of entertaining trash, then we may ask if a piece of trash like this has any relationship to art. And I think it does. Steve McQueen gives probably his most glamorous, fashionable performance yet, but even enjoying him as much as I do, I wouldn't call his performance art. It's artful, though, which is exactly what is required in this kind of vehicle. If he had been luckier, if the script had provided what it so embarrassingly lacks, the kind of sophisticated dialogue-the sexy shoptalk-that such writers as Jules Furthman and William Faulkner provided for Bogart, and if the director Norman Jewison had Lubitsch's lightness of touch, McQueen might be acclaimed as a suave, "polished" artist. Even in this flawed setting, there's a self-awareness in his performance that makes his elegance funny. And Haskell Weller, the cinematographer, lets go with a whole bag of tricks, flooding the screen with his delight in beauty, shooting all over the place, and sending up the material. And Pablo Ferro's games with the split screen at the beginning are such conscious, clever games designed to draw us in to watch intently what is of no great interest. What gives this trash a lift, what makes it entertaining is clearly that some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly shallow script and a movie that wasn't about anything of consequence, used the chance to have a good time with it. If the director, Norman Jewison, could have built a movie instead of putting together a patchwork of sequences, "Crown" might have had a chance to be considered a movie in the class and genre of Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise." It doesn't come near that because to transform this kind of kitsch, to make art of it, one needs that unifying grace, that formality and charm that a Lubitsch could sometimes provide. Still, even in this movie we get a few grace notes in McQueen's playfulness, and from Wexler and Perro. Working on trash, feeling free to play, can loosen up the actors and craftsmen just as seeing trash can liberate the spectator. And as we don't get this playful quality of art much in movies except in trash, we might as well relax and enjoy it freely for what it is. I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies; I don't trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn't need to find their way through trash.
There is a moment in "Children of Paradise" when the rich nobleman (Louis Salou) turns on his mistress, the pearly plebeian Garance (Arletty). He complains that in all their years together he has never had her love, and she replies, "You've got to leave something for the poor." We don't ask much from movies, just a little something that we can call our own. Who at some point hasn't set out dutifully for that fine foreign film and then ducked into the nearest piece of American trash? We're not only educated people of taste, we're also common people with common feelings. And our common feelings are not all bad. You hoped for some aliveness in that trash that you were pretty sure you wouldn't get from the respected "art film." You had long since discovered that you wouldn't get it from certain kinds of American movies, either. The industry now is taking a neo-Victorian tone, priding itself on its (few) "good, clean" movies-which are always its worst movies because almost nothing can break through the smug surfaces, and even performers' talents become cute and cloying. The lowest action trash is preferable to wholesome family entertainment. When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.
VII
Does trash corrupt? A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers' approach of wanting art to be "worthwhile," but in the higher reaches of the academic life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us. If we had to justify our trivial silly pleasures, we'd have a hard time. How could we possibly justify the fun of getting to know some people in movie after movie, like Joan Blondell, the brassy blonde with the heart of gold, or waiting for the virtuous, tiny, tiny-featured heroine to say her line so we could hear the riposte of her tough, wisecracking girlfriend (Iris Adrian was my favorite). Or, when the picture got too monotonous, there would be the song interlude, introduced "atmospherically" when the cops and crooks were both in the same never-neverland nightclub and everything stopped while a girl sang. Sometimes it would be the most charming thing in the movie, like Dolores Del Rio singing "You Make Me That Way" in "International Settlement"; sometimes it would drip with maudlin meaning, like "Oh Give Me Time for Tenderness" in "Dark Victory" with the dying Bette Davis singing along with the chanteuse. The pleasures of this kind of trash are not intellectually defensible. But why should pleasure need justification? Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us, that it prevents people from enjoying something better, that it limits our range of aesthetic response? Nobody I know of has provided such a demonstration. Do even Disney movies or Doris Day movies do us lasting harm? I've never known a person I thought had been harmed by them, though it does seem to me that they affect the tone of a culture, that perhaps-and I don't mean to be facetious-they may poison us collectively though they don't injure us individually. There are women who want to see a world in which everything is pretty and cheerful and in which romance triumphs ("Barefoot in the Park," "Any Wednesday,"); families who want movies to be an innocuous inspiration, a good example for the children ("The Sound of Music," "The Singing Nun"); couples who want the kind of folksy blue humor ("A Guide for the Married Man") that they still go to Broadway shows for. These people are the reason slick, stale, rotting pictures make money; they're the reason so few pictures are any good. And in that way, this terrible conformist culture does affect us all. It certainly cramps and limits opportunities for artists. But that isn't what generally gets attacked as trash, anyway. I've avoided using the term "harmless trash" for movies like "The Thomas Crown Affair," because that would put me on the side of the angels-against "harmful trash," and I don't honestly know what that is. It's common for the press to call cheaply made, violent action movies "brutalizing" but that tells us less about any actual demonstrable effects than about the finicky tastes of the reviewers-who are often highly appreciative of violence in more expensive and "artistic" settings such as "Petulia." It's almost a class prejudice, this assumption that crudely made movies, movies without the look of art, are bad for people.
If there's a little art in good trash and sometimes even in poor trash, there may be more trash than is generally recognized in some of the most acclaimed "art" movies. Such movies as "Petulia" and "2001" may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using "artistic techniques" to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive trash. All that "art" may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they're not honestly crummy, they're very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously.
I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than "Petulia" and I would guess that its commercial success represents a triumph of publicity-and not the simple kind of just taking ads. It's a very strange movie and people may, of course, like it for all sorts of reasons, but I think many may dislike it as I do and still feel they should be impressed by it; the educated and privileged may now be more susceptible to the mass media than the larger public-they're certainly easier to reach. The publicity about Richard Lester as an artist has been gaining extraordinary momentum ever since "A Hard Day's Night." A critical success that is also a hit makes the director a genius; he's a magician who made money out of art. The media are in ravenous competition for ever bigger stories, for "trend" pieces and editorial essays, because once the Process starts it's considered news. If Lester is "making the scene" a magazine that hasn't helped to build him up feels it's been scooped. "Petulia" is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party and in the opening sequence the guests arrive-rich victims of highway accidents in their casts and wheel chairs, like the spirit of '76 coming to opening night at the opera. It's science-horror fiction-a garish new world with charity balls at which you're invited to "Shake for Highway Safety.
Lester picked San Francisco for his attack on America just as in "How I Won the War" he picked World War II to attack war. That is, it looks like a real frontal attack on war itself if you attack the war that many people consider a just war. But then he concentrated not on the issues of that war but on the class hatreds of British officers and men-who were not engaged in defending London or bombing Germany but in building a cricket pitch in Africa. In "Petulia," his hate letter to America, he relocates the novel, shifting the locale from Los Angeles to San Francisco, presumably, again, to face the big challenge by showing that even the best the country has to offer is rotten. But then he ducks the challenge he sets for himself by making San Francisco look like Los Angeles. And if he must put carnival barkers in Golden Gate Park and invent Sunday excursions for children to Alcatraz, if he must invent such caricatures of epicene expenditure and commercialism as bizarrely automated motels and dummy television sets, if he must provide his own ugliness and hysteria and lunacy and use filters to destroy the city's beautiful light, if, in short, he must falsify America in order to make it appear hateful, what is it he really hates? He's like a crooked cop framing a suspect with trumped-up evidence. We never find out why: he's too interested in making a flashy case to examine what he's doing. And reviewers seem unwilling to ask questions which might expose them to the charge that they're still looking for meaning instead of, in the new cant, just reacting to images-such questions as why does the movie keep juxtaposing shots of bloody surgery with shots of rock groups like the Grateful Dead or Big Brother and the Holding Company and shots of the war in Vietnam. What are these little montages supposed to do to us-make us feel that even the hero (a hardworking life-saving surgeon) is implicated in the war and that somehow contemporary popular music is also allied to destruction and death? (I thought only the moralists of the Soviet Union believed that.) The images of "Petulia" don't make valid connections, they're joined together for shock and excitement, and I don't believe in the brilliance of a method which equates hippies, war, surgery, wealth, Southern decadents, bullfights, etc. Lester's mix is almost as fraudulent as "Mondo Cane"; "Petulia" exploits any shocking material it can throw together to give false importance to a story about Holly Golightly and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The jagged glittering mosaic style of "Petulia" is an armor protecting Lester from an artist's task; this kind of "style" no longer fools people so much in writing but it knocks them silly in films.
Movie directors in trouble fall back on what they love to call "personal style"-though how impersonal it often is can be illustrated by "Petulia"-which is not edited in the rhythmic, modulations-of-graphics style associated with Lester (and seen most distinctively in his best-edited, though not necessarily best film, "Help!") but in the style of the movie surgeon, Anthony Gibbs, who acted as chopper on it, and who gave it the same kind of scissoring which he had used on "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and in his rescue operation on "Tom Jones." This is, in much of "Petulia," the most insanely obvious method of cutting film ever devised; keep the audience jumping with cuts, juxtapose startling images, anything for effectiveness, just make it brilliant-with the director taking, apparently, no responsibility for the implied connections. (The editing style is derived from Alain Resnais, and though it's a debatable style in his films, he uses it responsibly not just opportunistically.)
Richard Lester, the director of "Petulia," is a shrill scold in Mod clothes. Consider a sequence like the one in which the beaten-to-a-gruesome-pulp heroine is taken out to an ambulance, to the accompaniment of hippies making stupid, unfeeling remarks. It is embarrassingly reminiscent of the older people's comments about the youthful sub-pre-hippies of "The Knack." Lester has simply shifted villains. Is he saying that America is so rotten that even our hippies are malignant? I rather suspect he is, but why? Lester has taken a fashionably easy way to attack America, and because of the war in Vietnam some people are willing to accept the bloody montages that make them feel we're all guilty, we're rich, we're violent, we're spoiled, we can't relate to each other, etc. Probably the director who made three celebrations of youth and freedom ("A Hard Day's Night," "The Knack," and "Help!") is now desperate to expand his range and become a "serious" director, and this is the new look in seriousness.
It's easy to make fun of the familiar ingredients of trash-the kook heroine who steals a tuba (that's not like the best of Carole Lombard but like the worst of Irene Dunne), the vaguely impotent, meaninglessly handsome rotter husband, Richard Chamberlain (back to the rich, spineless weaklings of David Manners), and Joseph Cotten as one more insanely vicious decadent Southerner spewing out villainous lines. (Even Victor Jory in "The Fugitive Kind" wasn't much meaner.) What's terrible is not so much this feeble conventional trash as the director's attempts to turn it all into scintillating art and burning comment; what is really awful is the trash of his ideas and artistic effects.
Is there any art in this obscenely self-important movie? Yes, but in a format like this the few good ideas don't really shine as they do in simpler trash; we have to go through so much unpleasantness and showing-off to get to them. Lester should trust himself more as a director and stop the cinemagician stuff because there's good, tense direction in a few sequences. He got a good performance from George C. Scott and a sequence of post-marital discord between Scott and Shirley Knight that, although overwrought, is not so glaringly overwrought as the rest of the picture. It begins to suggest something interesting that the picture might have been about. (Shirley Knight should, however, stop fondling her hair like a miser with a golden hoard; it's time for her to get another prop.) And Julie Christie is extraordinary just to look at-lewd and anxious, expressive and empty, brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if there's no woman inside.
VIII
"2001" is a movie that might have been made by the hero of "Blow-Up," and it's fun to think about Kubrick really doing every dumb thing he wanted to do, building enormous science fiction sets and equipment, never even bothering to figure out what he was going to do with them. Fellini, too, had gotten carried away with the Erector Set approach to movie-making, but his big science-fiction construction, exposed to view at the end of "8½," was abandoned. Kubrick never really made his movie either but he doesn't seem to know it. Some people like the American International Pictures stuff because it's rather idiotic and maybe some people love "2001" just because Kubrick did all that stupid stuff, acted out a kind of super sci-fi nut's fantasy. In some ways it's the biggest amateur movie of them all, complete even to the amateur-movie obligatory scene-the director's little daughter (in curls) telling daddy what kind of present she wants.
There was a little pre-title sequence in "You Only Live Twice" with an astronaut out in space that was in a looser, more free style than "2001"-a daring little moment that I think was more fun than all of "2001." It had an element of the unexpected, of the shock of finding death in space lyrical. Kubrick is carried away by the idea. The secondary title of "Dr. Strangelove," which we took to be satiric, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb," was not, it now appears, altogether satiric for Kubrick. "2001" celebrates the invention of tools of death, as an evolutionary route to a higher order of non-human life. Kubrick literally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; he's become his own butt-the Herman Kahn of extraterrestrial games theory. The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. "2001" is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it's all out of your hands anyway. There's an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.
It's a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself as a myth-maker, and this limp myth of a grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around before. Kubrick's story line-accounting for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence-is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time. And although his intentions may have been different, "2001" celebrates the end of man; those beautiful mushroom clouds at the end of "Strangelove" were no accident. In "2001, A Space Odyssey," death and life are all the same: no point is made in the movie of Gary Lockwood's death-the moment isn't even defined-and the hero doesn't discover that the hibernating scientists have become corpses. That's unimportant in a movie about the beauties of resurrection. Trip off to join the cosmic intelligence and come back a better mind. And as the trip in the movie is the usual psychedelic light shows the audience doesn't even have to worry about getting to Jupiter. They can go to heaven in Cinerama.
It isn't accidental that we don't care if the characters live or die; if Kubrick has made his people so uninteresting, it is partly because characters and individual fates just aren't big enough for certain kinds of big movie directors. Big movie directors become generals in the arts; and they want subjects to match their new importance. Kubrick has announced that his next project is "Napoleon"-which, for a movie director, is the equivalent of Joan of Arc for an actress. Lester's "savage" comments about affluence and malaise, Kubrick's inspirational banality about how we will become as gods through machinery, are big-shot show-business deep thinking. This isn't a new show-business phenomenon; it belongs to the genius tradition of the theatre. Big entrepreneurs, producers, and directors who stage big spectacular shows, even designers of large sets have traditionally begun to play the role of visionaries and thinkers and men with answers. They get too big for art. Is a work of art possible if pseudoscience and the technology of movie-making become more important to the "artist" than man? This is central to the failure of "2001." It's a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects-though straight from the drawing board-are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There's a little more that's good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn't take himself too seriously-like the comic moment when the gliding space vehicles begin their Johann Strauss walk; that is to say, when the director shows a bit of a sense of proportion about what he's doing, and sees things momentarily as comic when the movie doesn't take itself with such idiot solemnity. The light-show trip is of no great distinction; compared to the work of experimental filmmakers like Jordan Belson, it's third-rate. If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they've put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art.
IX
Part of the fun of movies is in seeing "what everybody's talking about," and if people are flocking to a movie, or if the press can con us into thinking that they are, then ironically, there is a sense in which we want to see it, even if we suspect we won't enjoy it, because we want to know what's going on. Even if it's the worst inflated pompous trash that is the most talked about (and it usually is) and even if that talk is manufactured, we want to see the movies because so many people fall for whatever is talked about that they make the advertisers' lies true. Movies absorb material from the culture and the other arts so fast that some films that have been widely sold become culturally and sociologically important whether they are good movies or not. Movies like "Morgan!" or "Georgy Girl" or "The Graduate"-aesthetically trivial movies which, however, because of the ways some people react to them, enter into the national bloodstream-become cultural and psychological equivalents of watching a political convention-to observe what's going on. And though this has little to do with the art of movies, it has a great deal to do with the appeal of movies.
An analyst tells me that when his patients are not talking about their personal hangups and their immediate problems they talk about the situations and characters in movies like "The Graduate" or "Belle de Jour" and they talk about them with as much personal involvement as about their immediate problems. I have elsewhere suggested that this way of reacting to movies as psychodrama used to be considered a pre-literate way of reacting but that now those considered "post-literate" are reacting like pre-literates. The high school and college students identifying with Georgy Girl or Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin are not that different from the stenographer who used to live and breathe with the Joan Crawford-working girl and worry about whether that rich boy would really make her happy-and considered her pictures "great." They don't see the movie as a movie but as part of the soap opera of their lives. The fan magazines used to encourage this kind of identification; now the advanced mass media encourage it, and those who want to sell to youth use the language of "just let it flow over you." The person who responds this way does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.
Still, we care about what other people care about-sometimes because we want to know how far we've gotten from common responses-and if a movie is important to other people we're interested in it because of what it means to them, even if it doesn't mean much to us. The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate-which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him. "The Graduate" isn't a bad movie, it's entertaining, though in a fairly slick way (the audience is just about programmed for laughs). What's surprising is that so many people take it so seriously. What's funny about the movie are the laughs on that dumb sincere boy who wants to talk about art in bed when the woman just wants to fornicate. But then the movie begins to pander to youthful narcissism, glorifying his innocence, and making the predatory (and now crazy) woman the villainess. Commercially this works: the inarticulate dull boy becomes a romantic hero for the audience to project into with all those squishy and now conventional feelings of look, his parents don't communicate with him; look, he wants truth not sham, and so on. But the movie betrays itself and its own expertise, sells out its comic moments that click along with the rhythm of a hit Broadway show, to make the oldest movie pitch of them all-asking the audience to identify with the simpleton who is the latest version of the misunderstood teen-ager and the pure-in-heart boy next door. It's almost painful to tell kids who have gone to see "The Graduate" eight times that once was enough for you because you've already seen it eighty times with Charles Ray and Robert Harron and Richard Barthelmess and Richard Cromwell and Charles Farrell. How could you convince them that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they're so clearly in the market to buy innocence? When "The Graduate" shifts to the tender awakenings of love, it's just the latest version of "David and Lisa." "The Graduate" only wants to succeed and that's fundamentally what's the matter with it. There is a pause for a laugh after the mention of "Berkeley" that is an unmistakable sign of hunger for success; this kind of movie-making shifts values, shifts focus, shifts emphasis, shifts everything for a sure-fire response. Mike Nichols' "gift" is that be lets the audience direct him; this is demagoguery in the arts.
Even the cross-generation fornication is standard for the genre. It goes back to Pauline Frederick in "Smouldering Fires," and Clara Bow was at it with mama Alice Joyce's boyfriend in "Our Dancing Mothers," and in the Forties it was "Mildred Pierce." Even the terms are not different: in these movies the seducing adults are customarily sophisticated, worldly, and corrupt, the kids basically innocent, though not so humorless and blank as Benjamin. In its basic attitudes "The Graduate" is corny American; it takes us back to before "The Game of Love" with Edwige Feuillère as the sympathetic older woman and "A Cold Wind in August" with the sympathetic Lola Albright performance.
What's interesting about the success of "The Graduate" is sociological: the revelation of how emotionally accessible modern youth is to the same old manipulation. The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it's one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet-one doesn't expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn't go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.
X
When you're young the odds are very good that you'll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. I saw a picture a few years ago that was the sixth version of material that wasn't much to start with. Unless you're feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. We don't go on reading the same kind of manufactured novels-pulp Westerns or detective thrillers, say-all of our lives, and we don't want to go on and on looking at movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason-simply that they've seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They're wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it's the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. And despite all the chatter about the media and how smart the young are, they're incredibly naïve about mass culture-perhaps more naïve than earlier generations (though I don't know why). Maybe watching all that television hasn't done so much for them as they seem to think; and when I read a young intellectual's appreciation of "Rachel, Rachel" and come to "the mother's passion for chocolate bars is a superb symbol for the second coming of childhood," I know the writer is still in his first childhood, and I wonder if he's going to come out of it.
One's moviegoing tastes and habits change-I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live-for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we're tired of.
But the big change is in our habits. If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don't want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers-those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers-depress us. Listening to them-and they are often more audible than the sound track-as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it's not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn't enough. If we've grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Harper's, February 1969

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Layli Foroudi, The Financial Times

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The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies' shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1. Low Resolutions

In one of Woody Allen's films the main character is out of focus. It's not a technical problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently blurred. Since Allen's character is an actor, this becomes a major problem: he is unable to find work. His lack of definition turns into a material problem. Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution. Just look at any electronics store and this system, described by Harun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview, becomes immediately apparent.In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized as if its lack amounted to castration of the author. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)

But insisting on rich images also had more serious consequences. A speaker at a recent conference on the film essay refused to show clips from a piece by Humphrey Jennings because no proper film projection was available. Although there was at the speaker's disposal a perfectly standard DVD player and video projector, the audience was left to imagine what those images might have looked like.

In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. But it has a much more general equivalent based on the consequences of neoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. Video essays and experimental films remained for the most part unseen save for some rare screenings in metropolitan film museums or film clubs, projected in their original resolution before disappearing again into the darkness of the archive.

This development was of course connected to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking. It was also connected to the restructuring of global media industries and the establishment of monopolies over the audiovisual in certain countries or territories. In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. Sources for these were extremely rare-tapes moved from hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, within circles of friends and colleagues. With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).

At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker's film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists' viewing copies are bartered. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and Piracy

That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images is significant on another level. Their situation reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images. Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images-their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.

Obviously, this condition is not only connected to the neoliberal restructuring of media production and digital technology; it also has to do with the post-socialist and postcolonial restructuring of nation states, their cultures, and their archives. While some nation states are dismantled or fall apart, new cultures and traditions are invented and new histories created. This obviously also affects film archives-in many cases, a whole heritage of film prints is left without its supporting framework of national culture. As I once observed in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, the national archive can find its next life in the form of a video-rental store. Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices.

As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. From this perspective, the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradually grew more important than state controlled/sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

4. Imperfect Cinema

The emergence of poor images reminds one of a classic Third Cinema manifesto, For an Imperfect Cinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written in Cuba in the late 1960s. Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, "perfect cinema-technically and artistically masterful-is almost always reactionary cinema." The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic.

In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects on the promises of new media. He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. Like the economy of poor images, imperfect cinema diminishes the distinctions between author and audience and merges life and art. Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets-a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images.

Poor images are thus popular images-images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

In this light, perhaps one has to redefine the value of the image, or, more precisely, to create a new perspective for it. Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production. Capital's semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences.

This flattening-out of visual content-the concept-in-becoming of the images-positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization. The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism. In a way, the poor image is subject to a similar tension. On the one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bond today?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversal happens. The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema-to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original," but on the transience of the copy. It is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it is propelled onto new and ephemeral screens stitched together by the desires of dispersed spectators.

The circulation of poor images thus creates "visual bonds," as Dziga Vertov once called them. This "visual bond" was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.

But there is also the circulation and production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution. Its optical connections-collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits-reveal erratic and coincidental links between producers everywhere, which simultaneously constitute dispersed audiences.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits: Vertov's "visual bonds," the internationalist workers pedagogies that Peter Weiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance, the circuits of Third Cinema and Tricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmaking and thinking. The poor image-ambivalent as its status may be-thus takes its place in the genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground video magazines and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials. Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov's idea of the visual bond.

Imagine somebody from the past with a beret asking you, "Comrade, what is your visual bond today?"

You might answer: it is this link to the present.

6. Now!

The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man's land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Now many of these works are back-as poor images, I admit. One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then-please, anybody-show me this real thing.

The poor image is no longer about the real thing-the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality.

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In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10

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SDS - Maarten van Disseldorp, Eenheidsworst (uit 'TypeNotes 2', 2018) - Are.na

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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Toggle the table of contents

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cladosporium sphaerospermum is a radiotrophic fungus[1][2] belonging to the genus Cladosporium and was described in 1886 by Albert Julius Otto Penzig from the decaying leaves and branches of Citrus.[3] It is a dematiaceous (darkly-pigmented) fungus characterized by slow growth and largely asexual reproduction. Cladosporium sphaerospermum consists of a complex of poorly morphologically differentiated, "cryptic" species that share many physiological and ecological attributes.[4] In older literature, all of these sibling species were classified as C. sphaerospermum despite their unique nature. Accordingly, there is confusion in older literature reports on the physiological and habitat regularities of C. sphaerospermum in the strict sense. This fungus is most phylogenetically similar to C. fusiforme.[5] According to modern phylogenetic analyses, the previously synonymized species, Cladosporium langeroni, is a distinct species.[5]

The hyphae of Cladosporium sphaerospermum are thick walled, septate, and olivaceous-brown in colour.[5] Colonies of the fungus are velvety in texture and flattened (i.e., rarely raised, fluffy, or radially furrowed). C. sphaerospermum conidiophores are branched, septate, and dark, up to 150-300 μm long and 3.5-4.0 μm wide.[5] The structure of the conidiophores are tree-like, a prominent feature of the genus Cladosporium. Unlike other related species, the conidiophores of this species lack swollen nodes at the branching points.[5] Conidia of this species are characteristically globose to ellipsoid with a diameter of 3.4-4.0 μm.[5] The conidia are formed in branching chains in which the youngest conidium is situated at the top.[3] Cladosporium sphaerospermum also produces ramoconidia 6-14 × 3.5-4.0 μm in length[3] and this feature can be used as a method of distinguishing between similar species.[5][6] Ramoconidia are conidia found at the branching points joining multiple spore chains and can be recognized by one end having a single attachment scar and the other end having two or more attachment scars. Cladosporium sphaerospermum is also a psychrophilic fungus, known to grow at temperatures as low as −5 °C (23 °F)[7] with an upper limit of 35 °C (95 °F) and no growth at 37 °C (99 °F).[5] The optimal temperature this fungus grows under is 25 °C (77 °F).[5] This fungus is xerotolerant as it can thrive in environments with low water activity caused by high salinity ( halotolerant) or other dissolved solutes.[5] This fungus has been observed to grow in as low as 0.815 aw in vitro.[7]

Cladosporium sphaerospermum is considered a saprotroph and is a secondary invader of dead or dying plant tissue.[7] Energy is provided through the conversion of starch, cellulose, and sucrose to alcohol and carbon dioxide.[8] However, it has been shown in a laboratory environment that these fungi are able to successfully grow with toluene as the sole source of carbon.[9] This trait may have arisen because these fungi and many others from the genus Cladosporium are secondary colonizers and frequently dwell in environments poor in nutrients.[5] Cladosporium sphaerospermum is able to enhance polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon biodegradation in soils due to reactive oxygen species produced as secondary metabolites, such as H₂O₂.[10] This species is a prolific producer of the pigmented secondary metabolite, melanin, thought to serve as a protective mechanism against UV irradiation, enzymatic lysis, oxidant attack, and fungal infections from other competing fungi.[11] A method that can be used to determine the presence of this fungus on a background of other organic material is through the KOH test which stains the fungus. The addition of lactophenol blue with this test turns the chitin in the cell wall blue but leaves the budding conidia and globular conidiophores with their characteristic brown colouring.[12] The first draft sequence of the C. sphaerospermum genome was created in 2012.[11] Genes were identified that are involved in the dihydroxynaphthalene (DHN)- melanin biosynthesis pathway which confirms the etiology of melanin in this species. Genes associated with the production of allergens were also identified as well as those conferring resistance to various antifungal drugs.[11]

Cladosporium sphaerospermum is a cosmopolitan fungus that inhabits city buildings and the environment and because of its airborne nature it can move rapidly between locations, though the extent of this is lacking in research.[5] It is found in hypersaline environments in Mediterranean and tropical climates, as well as soil and plant environments in temperate climates.[5] The indoor presence of this fungus can signify there is a condensation problem within the building such as on bathroom walls[7] and in kitchens.[13] Cladosporium sphaerospermum is also been shown to inhabit paint films on walls and other surfaces as well as old paintings.[4][14] This fungus is also able to grow on gypsum-based material with and without paint and wallpaper.[4] Plant materials that are affected include citrus leaves[7] on various other decaying plant leaves,[15] on the stems of herbaceous and woody plants,[15] on fruits and vegetables.[13] The fungus has also been reported from wheat-based bakery items.[13]

Cladosporium sphaerospermum is mainly known as a spoilage agent of harvested fruits and vegetables.[7] There are very few reports implicating this species as a disease agent in humans.[5] It is known as an allergen and mainly causes problems in patients with respiratory tract diseases as well as subcutaneous phaeohyphomycosis and intrabronchial lesions in immunocompetent individuals caused by many dematiaceous fungi.[11] It has been reported rarely from skin, eye, sinus, and brain infections.[16] There has been one reported case in which a female patient developed swelling on the dorsum of her hand which, after testing with Grocott's methenamine silver stain and Lactophenol cotton blue, confirmed the presence of dematiaceous hyphae compatible with C. sphaerospermum.[16] Another case in which identified was where it caused cerebral phaeohyphomycosis but this was treated successfully and the symptoms were abated.[17] Cladosporium sphaerospermum produces allergenic compounds but is not known to produce significant mycotoxins.[11]

Protection against radiation

An experiment has been made at the International Space Station in December 2018 and January 2019 to test whether radiotrophic fungi could be used as protection against radiation, especially in space. The experiment used Cladosporium sphaerospermum. Results were prepublished for peer-review in July 2020.[18]

1. ^ Dadachova, Ekaterina; Bryan, Ruth A.; Huang, Xianchun; Moadel, Tiffany; Schweitzer, Andrew D.; Aisen, Philip; Nosanchuk, Joshua D.; Casadevall, Arturo (2007-05-23). "Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi". PLOS ONE. 2 (5): e457. Bibcode:2007PLoSO...2..457D. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000457. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 1866175. PMID 17520016.

2. ^ Dadachova, Ekaterina; Casadevall, Arturo (2008). "Ionizing radiation: how fungi cope, adapt, and exploit with the help of melanin". Current Opinion in Microbiology. Elsevier. 11 (6): 525-531. doi:10.1016/j.mib.2008.09.013. ISSN 1369-5274. PMC 2677413. PMID 18848901. S2CID 6003062.

3. ^

4. ^ Samson, edited by Olaf C.G. Adan, Robert A. (2011). Fundamentals of mold growth in indoor environments and strategies for healthy living. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers. ISBN 978-90-8686-135-4.

5. ^

6. ^

7. ^ Hocking, Ailsa D.; Miscamble, Beverly F.; Pitt, J.I. (January 1994). "Water relations of Alternaria alternata, Cladosporium cladosporioides, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Curvularia lunata and Curvularia pallescens". Mycological Research. 98 (1): 91-94. doi:10.1016/S0953-7562(09)80344-4.

8. ^ Gottlieb, D. (1 January 1963). "Carbohydrate catabolism by fungi". Pure and Applied Chemistry. 7 (4): 603-610. doi:10.1351/pac196307040603. S2CID 96740062.

9. ^ Weber, Frans; Hage, Ko; Bont, Jan (Oct 1995). "Growth of the fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum with toluene as the sole carbon and energy source". Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 61 (10): 3562-3566. Bibcode:1995ApEnM..61.3562W. doi:10.1128/aem.61.10.3562-3566.1995. PMC 167650. PMID 7486990.

10. ^ Potin, Olivier; Veignie, Etienne; Rafin, Catherine (December 2004). "Biodegradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) by Cladosporium sphaerospermum isolated from an aged PAH contaminated soil". FEMS Microbiology Ecology. 51 (1): 71-78. doi:10.1016/j.femsec.2004.07.013. PMID 16329856.

11. ^

12. ^ Qiu-Xia, Chen; Chang-Xing, Li; Wen-Ming, Huang; Jiang-Qiang, Shi; Wen, Li; Shun-Fang, Li (18 July 2007). "Subcutaneous phaeohyphomycosis caused by Cladosporium sphaerospermum". Mycoses. 51 (1): 070726205023006--. doi:10.1111/j.1439-0507.2007.01417.x. PMID 18076601. S2CID 33166762.

13. ^

14. ^ Singh, Jagjit, ed. (1994). Building mycology : management of decay and health in buildings (1st ed.). London: E & FN Spon. ISBN 978-0-419-19020-2.

15. ^ Dugan, F.M.; Braun, U.; Groenewald, J.Z.; Crous, P.W. (1 December 2008). "Morphological plasticity in Cladosporium sphaerospermum". Persoonia. 21 (1): 9-16. doi:10.3767/003158508X334389. PMC 2846128. PMID 20396574.

16. ^ Patnayak, Rashmi; Verma, Anju; Mudgeti, Nagaraja; Kalawat, Usha; Asha, Thota; Maduri, Alekhya (2015). "Subcutaneous infection by Cladosporium sphaerospermum-A rare case report". Indian Journal of Pathology and Microbiology. 58 (3): 406-7. doi:10.4103/0377-4929.162936. PMID 26275282.

17. ^ Chen, Chi-Yu; Lu, Po-Liang; Lee, Kun-Mu; Chang, Tsung Chain; Lai, Chung-Chih; Chang, Ko; Lin, Wei-Ru; Lin, Chun-Yu; Chen, Yen-Hsu (December 2013). "Acute Meningitis Caused by Cladosporium sphaerospermum". The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. 346 (6): 523-525. doi:10.1097/MAJ.0b013e3182a59b5f. PMID 24263083. S2CID 3385023.

18. ^ Shunk, Graham K.; Gomez, Xavier R.; Averesch, Nils J. H. (2020-07-17). "A Self-Replicating Radiation-Shield for Human Deep-Space Exploration: Radiotrophic Fungi can Attenuate Ionizing Radiation aboard the International Space Station". bioRxiv: 2020.07.16.205534. doi:10.1101/2020.07.16.205534. S2CID 220650792.

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Toggle the table of contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Cladosporium sphaerospermum is a radiotrophic fungus [1] [2] belonging to the genus Cladosporium and was described in 1886 by Albert Julius Otto Penzig from the decaying leaves and branches of Citrus .[3] It is a dematiaceous (darkly-pigmented) fungus characterized by slow growth and largely asexual reproduction.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Syllid polychaete budding epitokes for the purpose of sexual reproduction.

Epitoky is a process that occurs in many species of polychaete marine worms wherein a sexually immature worm (the atoke) is modified or transformed into a sexually mature worm (the epitoke). Epitokes are pelagic morphs capable of sexual reproduction. Unlike the immature form, which is typically benthic (lives on the bottom), epitokes are specialized for swimming as well as reproducing. The primary benefit to epitoky is increased chances of finding other members of the same species for reproduction.

There are two methods in which epitoky can occur: schizogamy and epigamy.

Many species go through schizogamy, where the atoke uses asexual reproduction to produce buds from its posterior end. Each bud develops into an epitoke and, once fully formed, will then break off from the atoke and become free-swimming. Many genetically identical epitokes are formed in this way, thus allowing a higher chance of finding a mate of the same species and subsequent passing of genes to the next generation. Atokes may then live through another season to form more epitokes.

Epigamy is another common way to form epitokes. For species that use this method, the atoke undergoes physiological and morphological modifications as it transforms into the epitoke. Typically, male worms undergo a more pronounced transformation from atoke to epitoke. Modifications may include an increase in size of parapodia and the development of paddle-like chaetae for enhanced swimming ability, atrophy of the gut, filling of the body cavity with gametes ( eggs or sperm), the development of large eyes, and the musculature may even change to perform swimming movements instead of feeding movements. The majority of species that undergo epigamy are unable to revert to the atoke form and die after reproducing.

Male and female epitokes are produced and swim to the water's surface only at certain times of the year and are often synchronized with moon cycles in a behavior called swarming. Swarming brings individuals of the same species together so that there is an increased rate of fertilization. Some polychaete species have been found to use bioluminescence, presumably to compact and maintain swarms. Both schizogamous and epigamous epitokes are non-feeding individuals that die once gametes have been released into the water.

In the past, epitokes were thought to be a separate group of polychaete marine worms, because epitokes may look very different than atokes. For instance, the atokes of Platynereis dumerilii are yellowish-brown, while the female epitokes are yellow because of the eggs they contain, and the male epitokes are white in the front part due to sperm and red in the hind part due to blood vessels (see pictures).

1. ^ Pechenik, Jan I. (2015). Biology of the Invertebrates, Seventh Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. pp. 302-304. ISBN 978-0-07-352418-4.

2. Chatelain, Étienne Hébert; Breton, Sophie; Lemieux, Hélène; Blier, Pierre U. (2008). "Epitoky in Nereis (Neanthes) virens (Polychaeta: Nereididae): A story about sex and death". Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology B. 149 (2008): 202-208. doi:10.1016/j.cbpb.2007.09.006.

3. ^ Karleskint, George; Turner, Richard; Small, James (2009). Introduction to Marine Biology, Third Edition. Cengage Learning. p. 237. ISBN 9780495561972.

4. ^ Fischer, Antje HL; Henrich, Thorsten; Arendt, Detlev (2010). "The normal development of Platynereis dumerilii (Nereididae, Annelida)". Frontiers in Zoology. 7 (1): 31. doi:10.1186/1742-9994-7-31. PMC . PMID 21192805.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Epitoky is a process that occurs in many species of polychaete marine worms wherein a sexually immature worm (the atoke) is modified or transformed into a sexually mature worm (the epitoke). Epitokes are pelagic morphs capable of sexual reproduction.

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Tree of life showing vertical and horizontal gene transfers

Horizontal gene transfer ( HGT) or lateral gene transfer ( LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring ( reproduction). HGT is an important factor in the evolution of many organisms. HGT is influencing scientific understanding of higher order evolution while more significantly shifting perspectives on bacterial evolution.

Horizontal gene transfer is the primary mechanism for the spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and plays an important role in the evolution of bacteria that can degrade novel compounds such as human-created pesticides and in the evolution, maintenance, and transmission of virulence. It often involves temperate bacteriophages and plasmids. Genes responsible for antibiotic resistance in one species of bacteria can be transferred to another species of bacteria through various mechanisms of HGT such as transformation, transduction and conjugation, subsequently arming the antibiotic resistant genes' recipient against antibiotics. The rapid spread of antibiotic resistance genes in this manner is becoming a challenge to manage in the field of medicine. Ecological factors may also play a role in the HGT of antibiotic resistant genes.

Horizontal gene transfer is recognized as a pervasive evolutionary process that distributes genes between divergent prokaryotic lineages and can also involve eukaryotes. It is postulated that HGT promotes the maintenance of a universal life biochemistry and, subsequently, the universality of the genetic code.

Griffith's experiment, reported in 1928 by Frederick Griffith, was the first experiment suggesting that bacteria are capable of transferring genetic information through a process known as transformation. Griffith's findings were followed by research in the late 1930s and early 40s that isolated DNA as the material that communicated this genetic information.

Horizontal genetic transfer was then described in Seattle in 1951, in a paper demonstrating that the transfer of a viral gene into Corynebacterium diphtheriae created a virulent strain from a non-virulent strain, also simultaneously solving the riddle of diphtheria (that patients could be infected with the bacteria but not have any symptoms, and then suddenly convert later or never), and giving the first example for the relevance of the lysogenic cycle. Inter-bacterial gene transfer was first described in Japan in a 1959 publication that demonstrated the transfer of antibiotic resistance between different species of bacteria. In the mid-1980s, Syvanen postulated that biologically significant lateral gene transfer has existed since the beginning of life on Earth and has been involved in shaping all of evolutionary history.

As Jian, Rivera and Lake (1999) put it: "Increasingly, studies of genes and genomes are indicating that considerable horizontal transfer has occurred between prokaryotes" (see also Lake and Rivera, 2007). The phenomenon appears to have had some significance for unicellular eukaryotes as well. As Bapteste et al. (2005) observe, "additional evidence suggests that gene transfer might also be an important evolutionary mechanism in protist evolution."

Grafting of one plant to another can transfer chloroplasts ( organelles in plant cells that conduct photosynthesis), mitochondrial DNA, and the entire cell nucleus containing the genome to potentially make a new species. Some Lepidoptera (e.g. monarch butterflies and silkworms) have been genetically modified by horizontal gene transfer from the wasp bracovirus. Bites from insects in the family Reduviidae (assassin bugs) can, via a parasite, infect humans with the trypanosomal Chagas disease, which can insert its DNA into the human genome. It has been suggested that lateral gene transfer to humans from bacteria may play a role in cancer.

Aaron Richardson and Jeffrey D. Palmer state: "Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has played a major role in bacterial evolution and is fairly common in certain unicellular eukaryotes. However, the prevalence and importance of HGT in the evolution of multicellular eukaryotes remain unclear."

Due to the increasing amount of evidence suggesting the importance of these phenomena for evolution (see below) molecular biologists such as Peter Gogarten have described horizontal gene transfer as "A New Paradigm for Biology".

A transposable element (TE) (also called a transposon or jumping gene) is a mobile segment of DNA that can sometimes pick up a resistance gene and insert it into a plasmid or chromosome, thereby inducing horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance.

Horizontal transposon transfer (HTT) refers to the passage of pieces of DNA that are characterized by their ability to move from one locus to another between genomes by means other than parent-to-offspring inheritance. Horizontal gene transfer has long been thought to be crucial to prokaryotic evolution, but there is a growing amount of data showing that HTT is a common and widespread phenomenon in eukaryote evolution as well. On the transposable element side, spreading between genomes via horizontal transfer may be viewed as a strategy to escape purging due to purifying selection, mutational decay and/or host defense mechanisms.

HTT can occur with any type of transposable elements, but DNA transposons and LTR retroelements are more likely to be capable of HTT because both have a stable, double-stranded DNA intermediate that is thought to be sturdier than the single-stranded RNA intermediate of non-LTR retroelements, which can be highly degradable. Non-autonomous elements may be less likely to transfer horizontally compared to autonomous elements because they do not encode the proteins required for their own mobilization. The structure of these non-autonomous elements generally consists of an intronless gene encoding a transposase protein, and may or may not have a promoter sequence. Those that do not have promoter sequences encoded within the mobile region rely on adjacent host promoters for expression. Horizontal transfer is thought to play an important role in the TE life cycle.

HTT has been shown to occur between species and across continents in both plants and animals (Ivancevic et al. 2013), though some TEs have been shown to more successfully colonize the genomes of certain species over others. Both spatial and taxonomic proximity of species has been proposed to favor HTTs in plants and animals. It is unknown how the density of a population may affect the rate of HTT events within a population, but close proximity due to parasitism and cross contamination due to crowding have been proposed to favor HTT in both plants and animals. Successful transfer of a transposable element requires delivery of DNA from donor to host cell (and to the germ line for multi-cellular organisms), followed by integration into the recipient host genome. Though the actual mechanism for the transportation of TEs from donor cells to host cells is unknown, it is established that naked DNA and RNA can circulate in bodily fluid. Many proposed vectors include arthropods, viruses, freshwater snails (Ivancevic et al. 2013), endosymbiotic bacteria, and intracellular parasitic bacteria. In some cases, even TEs facilitate transport for other TEs.

The arrival of a new TE in a host genome can have detrimental consequences because TE mobility may induce mutation. However, HTT can also be beneficial by introducing new genetic material into a genome and promoting the shuffling of genes and TE domains among hosts, which can be co-opted by the host genome to perform new functions. Moreover, transposition activity increases the TE copy number and generates chromosomal rearrangement hotspots. HTT detection is a difficult task because it is an ongoing phenomenon that is constantly changing in frequency of occurrence and composition of TEs inside host genomes. Furthermore, few species have been analyzed for HTT, making it difficult to establish patterns of HTT events between species. These issues can lead to the underestimation or overestimation of HTT events between ancestral and current eukaryotic species.

A speciation event produces orthologs of a gene in the two daughter species. A horizontal gene transfer event from one species to another adds a xenolog of the gene to the receiving genome.

Horizontal gene transfer is typically inferred using bioinformatics methods, either by identifying atypical sequence signatures ("parametric" methods) or by identifying strong discrepancies between the evolutionary history of particular sequences compared to that of their hosts. The transferred gene ( xenolog) found in the receiving species is more closely related to the genes of the donor species than would be expected.

The virus called infects amoebae. Another virus, called , also infects amoebae, but it cannot reproduce unless mimivirus has already infected the same cell.

Sputnik's genome reveals further insight into its biology. Although 13 of its genes show little similarity to any other known genes, three are closely related to mimivirus and mamavirus genes, perhaps cannibalized by the tiny virus as it packaged up particles sometime in its history. This suggests that the satellite virus could perform horizontal gene transfer between viruses, paralleling the way that bacteriophages ferry genes between bacteria.

Horizontal transfer is also seen between geminiviruses and tobacco plants.

Horizontal gene transfer is common among bacteria, even among very distantly related ones. This process is thought to be a significant cause of increased drug resistance when one bacterial cell acquires resistance, and the resistance genes are transferred to other species. Transposition and horizontal gene transfer, along with strong natural selective forces have led to multi-drug resistant strains of and many other pathogenic bacteria. Horizontal gene transfer also plays a role in the spread of virulence factors, such as exotoxins and exoenzymes, amongst bacteria. A prime example concerning the spread of exotoxins is the adaptive evolution of Shiga toxins in E. coli through horizontal gene transfer via transduction with species of bacteria. Strategies to combat certain bacterial infections by targeting these specific virulence factors and mobile genetic elements have been proposed. For example, horizontally transferred genetic elements play important roles in the virulence of , Salmonella, Streptococcus and Clostridium perfringens.

In prokaryotes, restriction-modification systems are known to provide immunity against horizontal gene transfer and in stabilizing mobile genetic elements. Genes encoding restriction modification systems have been reported to move between prokaryotic genomes within mobile genetic elements (MGE) such as plasmids, prophages, insertion sequences/transposons, integrative conjugative elements (ICE), and integrons. Still, they are more frequently a chromosomal-encoded barrier to MGE than an MGE-encoded tool for cell infection.

Lateral gene transfer via a mobile genetic element, namely the integrated conjugative element (ICE) Bs1 has been reported for its role in the global DNA damage SOS response of the gram positive Bacillus subtilis. Furthermore, it has been linked with the radiation and desiccation resistance of Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032 spores, isolated from spacecraft cleanroom facilities.

Transposon insertion elements have been reported to increase the fitness of gram-negative strains through either major transpositions or genome rearrangements, and increasing mutation rates. In a study on the effects of long-term exposure of simulated microgravity on non-pathogenic E. coli, the results showed transposon insertions occur at loci, linked to SOS stress response. When the same E. coli strain was exposed to a combination of simulated microgravity and trace (background) levels of (the broad spectrum) antibiotic ( chloramphenicol), the results showed transposon-mediated rearrangements (TMRs), disrupting genes involved in bacterial adhesion, and deleting an entire segment of several genes involved with motility and chemotaxis. Both these studies have implications for microbial growth, adaptation to and antibiotic resistance in real time space conditions.

Horizontal gene transfer is particularly active in bacterial genomes around the production of secondary or specialized metabolites. This is clearly exhibited within certain groups of bacteria including P. aeruginosa and Polyketide synthases (PKSs) and biosynthetic gene clusters provide modular organizations of associated genes making these bacteria well-adapted to acquire and discard helpful modular modifications via HGT. Certain areas of genes known as actinomycetales, an order of Actinomycetota. hotspots further increase the likelihood of horizontally transferred secondary metabolite-producing genes. The promiscuity of enzymes is a reoccurring theme in this particular theatre.

1: Donor bacteria 2: Bacteria who will receive the gene 3: The red portion represents the gene that will be transferred. Transformation in bacteria happens in a certain environment.

Natural transformation is a bacterial adaptation for DNA transfer (HGT) that depends on the expression of numerous bacterial genes whose products are responsible for this process. In general, transformation is a complex, energy-requiring developmental process. In order for a bacterium to bind, take up and recombine exogenous DNA into its chromosome, it must become competent, that is, enter a special physiological state. Competence development in Bacillus subtilis requires expression of about 40 genes. The DNA integrated into the host chromosome is usually (but with infrequent exceptions) derived from another bacterium of the same species, and is thus homologous to the resident chromosome. The capacity for natural transformation occurs in at least 67 prokaryotic species. Competence for transformation is typically induced by high cell density and/or nutritional limitation, conditions associated with the stationary phase of bacterial growth. Competence appears to be an adaptation for DNA repair. Transformation in bacteria can be viewed as a primitive sexual process, since it involves interaction of homologous DNA from two individuals to form recombinant DNA that is passed on to succeeding generations. Although transduction is the form of HGT most commonly associated with bacteriophages, certain phages may also be able to promote transformation.

1: Donor bacteria cell (F+ cell) 2: Bacteria that receives the plasmid (F- cell) 3: Plasmid that will be moved to the other bacteria 4: Pilus. Conjugation in bacteria using a sex pilus; then the bacteria that received the plasmid can go give it to other bacteria as well.

Conjugation in Mycobacterium smegmatis, like conjugation in , requires stable and extended contact between a donor and a recipient strain, is DNase resistant, and the transferred DNA is incorporated into the recipient chromosome by homologous recombination. However, unlike E. coli high frequency of recombination conjugation (Hfr), mycobacterial conjugation is a type of HGT that is chromosome rather than plasmid based. Furthermore, in contrast to E. coli (Hfr) conjugation, in M. smegmatis all regions of the chromosome are transferred with comparable efficiencies. Substantial blending of the parental genomes was found as a result of conjugation, and this blending was regarded as reminiscent of that seen in the meiotic products of sexual reproduction.

Haloarchaea are aerobic halophiles thought to have evolved from anaerobic methanogens. A large amount of their genome, 126 composite gene families, are derived from genetic material from bacterial genomes. This has allowed them to adapt to extremely salty environments.

The archaeon Sulfolobus solfataricus, when UV irradiated, strongly induces the formation of type IV pili which then facilitates cellular aggregation. Exposure to chemical agents that cause DNA damage also induces cellular aggregation. Other physical stressors, such as temperature shift or pH, do not induce aggregation, suggesting that DNA damage is a specific inducer of cellular aggregation.

UV-induced cellular aggregation mediates intercellular chromosomal HGT marker exchange with high frequency, and UV-induced cultures display recombination rates that exceed those of uninduced cultures by as much as three orders of magnitude. S. solfataricus cells aggregate preferentially with other cells of their own species. Frols et al. and Ajon et al. suggested that UV-inducible DNA transfer is likely an important mechanism for providing increased repair of damaged DNA via homologous recombination. This process can be regarded as a simple form of sexual interaction.

Another thermophilic species, Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, is able to undergo HGT. S. acidocaldarius can exchange and recombine chromosomal markers at temperatures up to 84 °C. UV exposure induces pili formation and cellular aggregation. Cells with the ability to aggregate have greater survival than mutants lacking pili that are unable to aggregate. The frequency of recombination is increased by DNA damage induced by UV-irradiation and by DNA damaging chemicals.

The ups operon, containing five genes, is highly induced by UV irradiation. The proteins encoded by the ups operon are employed in UV-induced pili assembly and cellular aggregation leading to intercellular DNA exchange and homologous recombination. Since this system increases the fitness of S. acidocaldarius cells after UV exposure, Wolferen et al. considered that transfer of DNA likely takes place in order to repair UV-induced DNA damages by homologous recombination.

"Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic 'domains'. Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes."

Plants are capable of receiving genetic information from viruses by horizontal gene transfer.

Agrobacterium, a pathogenic bacterium that causes cells to proliferate as crown galls and proliferating roots is an example of a bacterium that can transfer genes to plants and this plays an important role in plant evolution.

HhMAN1 is a gene in the genome of the coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampei) that resembles bacterial genes, and is thought to be transferred from bacteria in the beetle's gut.

oskar is an essential gene for the specification of the germline in Holometabola and its origin is through to be due to a HGT event followed by a fusion with a LOTUS domain.

Bdelloid rotifers currently hold the 'record' for HGT in animals with ~8% of their genes from bacterial origins. Tardigrades were thought to break the record with 17.5% HGT, but that finding was an artifact of bacterial contamination.

A study found the genomes of 40 animals (including 10 primates, four Caenorhabditis worms, and 12 Drosophila insects) contained genes which the researchers concluded had been transferred from bacteria and fungi by horizontal gene transfer. The researchers estimated that for some nematodes and Drosophila insects these genes had been acquired relatively recently.

A bacteriophage-mediated mechanism transfers genes between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Nuclear localization signals in bacteriophage terminal proteins (TP) prime DNA replication and become covalently linked to the viral genome. The role of virus and bacteriophages in HGT in bacteria, suggests that TP-containing genomes could be a vehicle of inter-kingdom genetic information transference all throughout evolution.

The adzuki bean beetle has acquired genetic material from its (non-beneficial) endosymbiont . New examples have recently been reported demonstrating that Wolbachia bacteria represent an important potential source of genetic material in arthropods and filarial nematodes.

The psyllid Pachypsylla venusta has acquired genes from its current endosymbiont Carsonella, and from many of its historical endosymbionts, too.

Gene transfer between plants and fungi has been posited for a number of cases, including rice (Oryza sativa).[citation needed ]

Evidence of gene transfer from plants was documented in the fungus Colletotrichum.

Plant expansin genes were transferred to fungi further enabling the fungi to infect plants.

Plant expansin genes were transferred to bacteria further enabling the bacteria to infect plants.

The toxin α-amanitin is found in numerous, seemingly unrelated genera fungi such as , , and . Two biosynthetic genes involved in the production of α-amanitin are P450-29 and FMO1. Phylogenetic and genetic analyses of these genes strongly indicate that they were transferred between the genera via horizontal gene transfer.

The strikingly fish-like copper/zinc superoxide dismutase of Photobacterium leiognathi is most easily explained in terms of transfer of a gene from an ancestor of its fish host.

One study identified approximately 100 of humans' approximately 20,000 total genes which likely resulted from horizontal gene transfer, but this number has been challenged by several researchers arguing these candidate genes for HGT are more likely the result of gene loss combined with differences in the rate of evolution.

Through research into the growing issue of antibiotic resistance certain compounds have been observed to promote horizontal gene transfer. Antibiotics given to bacteria at non-lethal levels have been known to be a cause of antibiotic resistance but emerging research is now showing that certain non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals ( ibuprofen, naproxen, gemfibrozil, diclofenac, propranolol, etc.) also have a role in promoting antibiotic resistance through their ability to promote horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of genes responsible for antibiotic resistance. The transfer of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) through conjugation is significantly accelerated when donor cells with plasmids and recipient cells are introduced to each other in the presence of one of the pharmaceuticals. Non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals were also found to cause some responses in bacteria similar to those responses to antibiotics, such as increasing expression of the genes lexA, umuC, umuD and soxR involved in the bacteria's SOS response as well as other genes also expressed during exposure to antibiotics. These findings are from 2021 and due to the widespread use of non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals, more research needs to be done in order to further understanding on the issue.

Alongside non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals, other compounds relevant to antibiotic resistance have been tested such as malachite green, ethylbenzene, styrene, 2,4-dichloroaniline, trioxymethylene, o-xylene solutions, p-nitrophenol (PNP), p-aminophenol (PAP), and phenol (PhOH). It is a global concern that ARGs have been found in wastewater treatment plants Textile wastewater has been found to contain 3- to 13-fold higher abundance of mobile genetic elements than other samples of wastewater. The cause of this is the organic compounds used for textile dying (o-xylene, ethylbenzene, trioxymethylene, styrene, 2,4-dichloroaniline, and malachite green) raising the frequency of conjugative transfer when bacteria and plasmid (with donor) are introduced in the presence of these molecules. When textile wastewater combines with wastewater from domestic sewage, the ARGs present in wastewater are transferred at a higher rate due to the addition of textile dyeing compounds increasing the occurrence of HGT.

Other organic pollutants commonly found in wastewater have been the subject of similar experiments. A 2021 study used similar methods of using plasmid in a donor and mixing that with a receptor in the presence of compound in order to test horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic resistance genes but this time in the presence of phenolic compounds. Phenolic compounds are commonly found in wastewater and have been found to change functions and structures of the microbial communities during the wastewater treatment process. Additionally, HGT increases in frequency in the presence of the compounds p-nitrophenol (PNP), p-aminophenol (PAP), and phenol. These compounds result in a 2- to 9-fold increase in HGT (p-nitrophenol being on the lower side of 2-fold increases and p-aminophenol and phenol having a maximum increase of 9-fold). This increase in HGT is on average less than the compounds ibuprofen, naproxen, gemfibrozil, diclofenac, propranolol, o-xylene, ethylbenzene, trioxymethylene, styrene, 2,4-dichloroaniline, and malachite green but their increases is still significant. The study that came to this conclusion is similar to the study on horizontal gene transfer and non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals in that it was done in 2021 and leaves room for more research, specifically in the focus of the study which is activated sludge.

Heavy metals have also been found to promote conjugative transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. The paper that led to the discovery of this was done in 2017 during the emerging field of horizontal gene transfer assisting compound research. Metals assist in the spread of antibiotic resistance through both co-resistance as well as cross-resistance mechanisms. In quantities relevant to the environment, Cu(II), Ag(I), Cr(VI), and Zn(II) promote HGT from donor and receptor strains of E. coli. The presence of these metals triggered SOS response from bacterial cells and made the cells more permeable. These are the mechanisms that make even low levels of heavy metal pollution in the environment impact HGT and therefore the spread of ARGs.

Before it is transformed, a bacterium is susceptible to antibiotics. A plasmid can be inserted when the bacteria is under stress, and be incorporated into the bacterial DNA creating antibiotic resistance. When the plasmids are prepared they are inserted into the bacterial cell by either making pores in the plasma membrane with temperature extremes and chemical treatments, or making it semi permeable through the process of electrophoresis, in which electric currents create the holes in the membrane. After conditions return to normal the holes in the membrane close and the plasmids are trapped inside the bacteria where they become part of the genetic material and their genes are expressed by the bacteria.

Genetic engineering is essentially horizontal gene transfer, albeit with synthetic expression cassettes. The Sleeping Beauty transposon system (SB) was developed as a synthetic gene transfer agent that was based on the known abilities of Tc1/mariner transposons to invade genomes of extremely diverse species. The SB system has been used to introduce genetic sequences into a wide variety of animal genomes.

Horizontal gene transfer is a potential confounding factor in inferring phylogenetic trees based on the sequence of one gene. For example, given two distantly related bacteria that have exchanged a gene a phylogenetic tree including those species will show them to be closely related because that gene is the same even though most other genes are dissimilar. For this reason, it is often ideal to use other information to infer robust phylogenies such as the presence or absence of genes or, more commonly, to include as wide a range of genes for phylogenetic analysis as possible.

For example, the most common gene to be used for constructing phylogenetic relationships in prokaryotes is the 16S ribosomal RNA gene since its sequences tend to be conserved among members with close phylogenetic distances, but variable enough that differences can be measured. However, in recent years it has also been argued that 16s rRNA genes can also be horizontally transferred. Although this may be infrequent, the validity of 16s rRNA-constructed phylogenetic trees must be reevaluated.

Biologist Johann Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research" therefore "biologists should use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes". There exist several methods to infer such phylogenetic networks.

Using single genes as phylogenetic markers, it is difficult to trace organismal phylogeny in the presence of horizontal gene transfer. Combining the simple coalescence model of cladogenesis with rare HGT horizontal gene transfer events suggest there was no single most recent common ancestor that contained all of the genes ancestral to those shared among the three domains of life. Each contemporary molecule has its own history and traces back to an individual molecule cenancestor. However, these molecular ancestors were likely to be present in different organisms at different times."

Horizontal gene transfer poses a possible challenge to the concept of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) at the root of the tree of life first formulated by Carl Woese, which led him to propose the Archaea as a third domain of life. Indeed, it was while examining the new three-domain view of life that horizontal gene transfer arose as a complicating issue: Archaeoglobus fulgidus was seen as an anomaly with respect to a phylogenetic tree based upon the encoding for the enzyme HMGCoA reductase-the organism in question is a definite Archaean, with all the cell lipids and transcription machinery that are expected of an Archaean, but whose HMGCoA genes are of bacterial origin. Scientists are broadly agreed on symbiogenesis, that mitochondria in eukaryotes derived from alpha-proteobacterial cells and that chloroplasts came from ingested cyanobacteria, and other gene transfers may have affected early eukaryotes. (In contrast, multicellular eukaryotes have mechanisms to prevent horizontal gene transfer, including separated germ cells.) If there had been continued and extensive gene transfer, there would be a complex network with many ancestors, instead of a tree of life with sharply delineated lineages leading back to a LUCA. However, a LUCA can be identified, so horizontal transfers must have been relatively limited.

It has been remarked that, despite the complications, the detection of horizontal gene transfers brings valuable phylogenetic and dating information.

The potential of HGT to be used for dating phylogenies has recently been confirmed.

The acquisition of new genes has the potential to disorganize the other genetic elements and hinder the function of the bacterial cell, thus affecting the competitiveness of bacteria. Consequently, bacterial adaptation lies in a conflict between the advantages of acquiring beneficial genes, and the need to maintain the organization of the rest of its genome. Horizontally transferred genes are typically concentrated in only ~1% of the chromosome (in regions called hotspots). This concentration increases with genome size and with the rate of transfer. Hotspots diversify by rapid gene turnover; their chromosomal distribution depends on local contexts (neighboring core genes), and content in mobile genetic elements. Hotspots concentrate most changes in gene repertoires, reduce the trade-off between genome diversification and organization, and should be treasure troves of strain-specific adaptive genes. Most mobile genetic elements and antibiotic resistance genes are in hotspots, but many hotspots lack recognizable mobile genetic elements and exhibit frequent homologous recombination at flanking core genes. Overrepresentation of hotspots with fewer mobile genetic elements in naturally transformable bacteria suggests that homologous recombination and horizontal gene transfer are tightly linked in genome evolution.

There is evidence for historical horizontal transfer of the following genes:

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- Papers by Dr Michael Syvanen on Horizontal Gene Transfer

Salzberg SL, White O, Peterson J, Eisen JA (June 2001). "Microbial genes in the human genome: lateral transfer or gene loss?" (PDF). Science. 292 (5523): 1903-6. Bibcode:2001Sci...292.1903S. doi:10.1126/science.1061036. PMID 11358996. S2CID 17016011. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-09-01. About 40 genes were found to be exclusively shared by humans and bacteria and are candidate examples of horizontal transfer from bacteria to vertebrates. Gene loss combined with sample size effects and evolutionary rate variation provide an alternative, more biologically plausible explanation

Qi Z, Cui Y, Fang W, Ling L, Chen R (January 2004). "Autosomal similarity revealed by eukaryotic genomic comparison". Journal of Biological Physics. 30 (4): 305-12. doi:10.1007/s10867-004-0996-0. PMC . PMID 23345874.

Woese CR (June 2002). "On the evolution of cells". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99 (13): 8742-7. Bibcode:2002PNAS...99.8742W. doi:10.1073/pnas.132266999. PMC . PMID 12077305. This article seeks to shift the emphasis in early phylogenic adaptation from vertical to horizontal gene transfer. He uses the term "Darwinian Threshold" for the time of major transition of evolutionary mechanisms from mostly horizontal to mostly vertical transfer, and the "origin of speciation".

Snel B, Bork P, Huynen MA (January 1999). "Genome phylogeny based on gene content". Nature Genetics. 21 (1): 108-10. doi:10.1038/5052. PMID 9916801. S2CID 10296406. This article proposes using the presence or absence of a set of genes to infer phylogenies, in order to avoid confounding factors such as horizontal gene transfer.

"Webfocus in Nature with free review articles". Archived from the original on 2005-11-02.

Patil PB, Sonti RV (October 2004). "Variation suggestive of horizontal gene transfer at a lipopolysaccharide (lps) biosynthetic locus in Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae, the bacterial leaf blight pathogen of rice". BMC Microbiology. 4 (1): 40. doi:10.1186/1471-2180-4-40. PMC . PMID 15473911.

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Ochman H, Lawrence JG, Groisman EA (May 2000). "Lateral gene transfer and the nature of bacterial innovation". Nature. 405 (6784): 299-304. Bibcode:2000Natur.405..299O. doi:10.1038/35012500. PMID 10830951. S2CID 85739173.

Preston R (July 12, 1999). "The Demon in the Freezer". The New Yorker. pp. 44-61. Smallpox knows how to make a mouse protein. How did smallpox learn that? 'The poxviruses are promiscuous at capturing genes from their hosts,' Esposito said. 'It tells you that smallpox was once inside a mouse or some other small rodent.'

Szpirer C, Top E, Couturier M, Mergeay M (December 1999). "Retrotransfer or gene capture: a feature of conjugative plasmids, with ecological and evolutionary significance". Microbiology. 145 (Pt 12): 3321-3329. doi:10.1099/00221287-145-12-3321. PMID 10627031.

"Can transgenes from genetically modified plants be absorbed by micro-organisms and spread in this way?". GMO Safety: Results of research into horizontal gene transfer. Archived from the original on 2011-07-21.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Horizontal gene transfer ( HGT) or lateral gene transfer ( LGT) is the movement of genetic material between unicellular and/or multicellular organisms other than by the ("vertical") transmission of DNA from parent to offspring ( reproduction). HGT is an important factor in the evolution of many organisms. HGT is influencing scientific understanding of higher order evolution while more significantly shifting perspectives on bacterial evolution.

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Laboria Cuboniks, collective authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto , insist upon a scaling-up of feminism. Drawing on both queer and transfeminist theory and philosophical rationalism, Laboria Cuboniks propose a new universal-one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male-with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform. The Xenofeminist Manifesto contends that contemporary feminism is limited by its predominant investment in local and micropolitical action, and argues instead for a scalable feminism capable of systemic intervention. Against nature and biological essentialism, Laboria Cuboniks invest in alienation and the anti-natural, given that "anyone who's been deemed 'unnatural' in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who's experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of 'nature' has nothing to offer us."

aCCeSsions: The Xenofeminist Manifesto (XFM) demands that feminism and its emancipatory projects be scaled up beyond local communities and interventions, holding that these tactics must be extended to operation on a global scale. Why is this scalability of essential importance today? What role (if any) might micropolitical actions, such as those which largely constitute queer and feminist politics today, hold in a macropolitical feminism? How does XF seek to reconcile the emphasis on difference (in intersectional frameworks) inherent to current feminist micropolitics with an insistence that feminism rewrite or recode the universal?

Laboria Cuboniks (PR): Yes, the scalability question is central to the work of XF. We wholeheartedly agree with the assertions of someone like Rosi Braidotti, who has made the point that feminism cannot be satisfied by victories on the margins alone: it's time to occupy the center. This seems to us to necessitate a counter-hegemonic project buttressed by the deep work of what we could call "thinking integratively," rather than continuing a path that often stops at difference. Thinking integratively means that we cannot simply analyze our political reality from a single perspective-or believe that we truly understand something by breaking it down into particularities alone. Integrative thought, which borrows from the important epistemological innovations of Anne-Françoise Schmid, who coined the concept of the "integrative object," requires not only the weaving together of several perspectives. In Schmid's formulation, the object as a stable given does not exist, and thus a milieu must be engineered to host that object, since the object can only be grasped through a multiplicity of disciplinary viewpoints. Mapping this concept onto a socio-political framework (where clearly much more experimentation must be done), we can then begin to reframe something like universalism as a kind of gluing operation, rather than a top-down schematic à la modernism. Equally, contemporary mathematics offers us clues regarding universalism that are greatly at odds with our knee-jerk reaction to the term as a homogenizing machine (unleashed from a single perspective). No one would suggest that we can map these ideas directly onto socio-political programs, but we can certainly exploit these concepts to help reframe a strategy that would reinscribe universalism as a glue, piecing together difference in a bottom-up fashion, dynamically constituted by the relations it constructs.

LC (DB): I am often reminded of the Jodi Dean quote in relation to micro vs. macropolitics: "Goldman Sachs doesn't care if you raise chickens"-i.e., you can make things better in your immediate area or opt out of a system or go off-grid, but it will have no effect on the larger power structures that organize more widely how lives are lived (especially the lives of those less able to opt out). Basically, much of what happens within the micropolitical ends up being illusory, in that it makes those participating feel like they are doing something-and they are, for individuals or groups of individuals-but if the scale is limited to the local, then the change will remain in the local, and the larger global power networks that also affect people's lives in real ways will remain unaffected.

Scalability is not the same thing as replicability, and this is an important distinction. For example, let's say there is an app so parents can arrange to share childcare: who is available when, to take what, how many kids. This might already exist-if it doesn't, then it should-and it would be useful, but not an answer. As a model, this would be replicable, and could be used by anyone with a cellphone, but this is what I would call scalable or systemic. What would be systemic is the provision of universal preschool (and I would argue that it should be available from 12 months, in combination with an obligatory parental leave provision from 0-12 months, and I mean pointedly parental and not specifically maternity leave). So I would argue that thinking about legislation as a technology (not legislation technology, to be clear, but the construction of international law and its implementation a technology) and as a feminist project would be one way for this to go. This is not to say that action in the local or action as or for specific communities isn't important. It can benefit individual lives immensely; but feminism needs to be thought about systemically as well.

Broadly speaking, feminism needs to be injected into the fundamental logic of a vast range of disciplines that have the capacity to think systemically and have an interest in doing so. International law is certainly one area where scalable feminist politics can contribute; architecture is another. Keller Easterling has done a lot of work on infrastructure space-speaking of architecture not as objects or buildings but as the infrastructure in which we live. I think Xenofeminist logic could very easily be injected into the formation of infrastructure space. My own experience is more in the art field, so I am more equipped to speak to the specificities of that.

Though the art field may not be the site of the most urgent injustices of gender inequality, it can be a useful example here, in part because it is full of would-be sympathizers who (often unintentionally) help maintain a system of inequality. So it's a good example of a field where the problem is deeply embedded, and often invisible in its causes but not in its effects. If one were to ask those in positions of power within the contemporary art field whether they avow equal opportunities for women and minorities, I'm pretty sure a vast majority would answer in the affirmative, of course; yet looking at the numbers, this does not play out. This is visible across a myriad of examples, such as the percentage of represented artists, sale and auction prices, or the number of women studying in art programs as compared to the number of women in power once out of university. One has to question what is going on. I would wager that it's not something that localized action can deal with, because power, in the art sector anyway (and many others I'm sure), would indeed advocate micropolitical actions in support of humans that are not cis white dudes, but these micropolitical actions are no threat to this power; if anything, these micropolitical actions make power look good, make it look like its politics are also "right on" and in support of diversity and equality. Yet the power structures remain.

aCCS: You describe the art world as a site in which participants with good intentions (in terms of gender and racial equality) often end up reinforcing systemic disenfranchisement. Considering this, as well as contemporary art's tendency to absorb critique without really resolving its inherent inequities, does Laboria Cuboniks see a particular role for art within Xenofeminism, or ways in which art might be used as a vector for Xenofeminist politics? Is there a relationship between your thinking here and ongoing critiques of contemporary art which consider it as a field of indeterminacy with continued investments in the micropolitical, as discussed by Suhail Malik and Amanda Beech, among others?

LC (PR): I think it's important to point out that this tendency of contemporary art to absorb "radicality" with ease, rather than have radicality fundamentally alter its systemic conditions, is nothing new. Walter Benjamin pointed this out over eighty years ago when he noticed how readily revolutionary material could be assimilated by a bourgeoisie (a production class) without generating any threat to its own existence-going so far as to suggest that those authors who don't transform existing production chains (but only propagate revolutionary ) serve as mere amusement for the public. Clearly, the same or at least a similar phenomenon is very much at work in our field today. Thinkers such as Beech and Malik who have, I believe, correctly diagnosed our axiomatic conditions as being hindered by a commitment to indeterminacy, have done so by pointing out contemporary art's idealisms-insofar as there is a large gap between what contemporary art says it does and how it actually operates (I think this is important to elaborate on, since their arguments have already been boiled down to one single word). What needs to be pointed out, however, is a crucial question: If we agree with their diagnoses, and even if some of us elaborate upon them, how can these theoretical commitments be negotiated through practice in a transformative way? What I'm getting at, and this is no slight to either of them, but rather an indication of contemporary art's structural condition, is the following: Isn't there a risk that we could propagate these very arguments over the next several years (for as long as they remain in vogue), while contemporary art nods in agreement and blandly assimilates them, as it has all other radical positions? Because these questions concern the system of legitimization of contemporary art, the responses (if they are to be transformative) would equally require strategic systematicity. I don't think one could manifest a response as a single artist in this regard, since the diagnoses resist individuation and exemplification, and concern the very cultural-normative modes by which contemporary art functions.

aCCS: How might those currently invested in micropolitical feminist action begin to size up (or rescale) their investments and actions to the levels of the systemic, infrastructural, and global? Is there something specific about the online or the digital which proves useful here, given the digital publication of the Xenofeminist Manifesto? And as this scaling up occurs, how does one avoid the re-settling or re-solidifying of the regimes and hierarchies of power and difference within these new deployments of feminist action? Considering, for instance, how a recent broadening of feminist discourse seems to have resulted in a depoliticized white liberal or "lean in" feminism-emphasizing individualist corporate success rather than care, interdependence, and structural change-by and for whom are these actions deployed?

LC (LF): I'd say that there's a weirdly narrow focus in this question, in regard to the internet-enabled broadening of feminist discourse. As "feminism" becomes more and more of a buzzword, it's no surprise that you're going to see traces of it in the mainstream, bourgeois-liberal media (a sort of feminism fixated on celebrity gossip, or the kind of thing Nina Power rips apart in her amazing book One Dimensional Woman ). But if this is all you see emerging from the net-fueled boom in feminist discourse, then you're browsing with blinders on. It was this boom that eroded the walls of the ivory tower, where a lot of the more "theoretical" discussions of feminism had been contained, not only making those discussions accessible to people too poor or too busy with childrearing and work to enjoy the luxury of academic life, but also making highfalutin forms of academic feminism and gender theory answerable to a much broader mass of readers. Queer and feminist theory stopped being some academic preserve, and became something that alienated teenagers and other outsiders could engage in on Twitter and Tumblr. These are people who beforehand were not only walled off from the hotbeds of feminist discourse, but were walled off from one another. Similar things can be said for critical race theory, and for the dialogue that the web catalyzed-and repeatedly re-catalyzes-between otherwise sheltered white or well-to-do feminists and racialized and poor women in the struggle. Of course, what people call-or called, a few years back-"Web 2.0" arrived arm-in-arm with a host of mechanisms for forming "info-bubbles," and there is a very real tendency for people to re-insulate-"reterritorialize"-themselves into particular in-groups. There's even a pretty distressing tendency for people to react to any out-group exposure as if it were a severe allergy, breaking out in hives and quickly hitting block.

I guess what I want to say is that web dynamics are a double-edged sword in this regard-they have both deterritorializing and reterritorializing tendencies, to lift some jargon from Deleuze and Guattari. When too much reterritorialization or info-bubbling occurs, all these cybertribes begin to disengage from one another. When I say "disengage" here, I'm thinking of an idea in evolutionary theory, or, more specifically, in the craft of genetic programing. Under certain conditions, when you have a struggle between various groups, this can lead to each group becoming stronger, more complex, and better adapted to the struggle. Coevolution takes place. But there's always a risk of getting to a point where the groups just wall one another off, interacting (when they do interact) in such a way that just about every member of group A treats group B as a monolith. Any selective pressure that the groups might have put on one another in the past vanishes, and they close off into themselves, with interactions reduced to brute clashes. When this happens, you start to see what's called "genetic drift." (Maybe we could call it "memetic drift" in this case.) The groups continue to mutate and so on, but they no longer "adapt" to anything. Their transformations become purely stochastic, and literally irrelevant to anyone outside the in-group. We've seen this happen, I think, to certain swaths of academic discourse (not every ivory tower bailiwick was redeemed when the walls fell). You see it happening nowadays with various political affinity groups.

So, back to scalability and networks: yes, I do think that networks-and the internet in particular-are indispensable to any global political project today, including feminism. But feminism isn't going to sway global politics in some sort of unilateral takeover, in some magical imposition of Total Hegemony from above. So what feminism needs to be, at least for so long as it remains rather marginal, is a kind of parasite, a parasite that is just nonvirulent enough to steer the development of its host, while skirting the risk of disengagement. Or, to put it another way, we should be as virulent as host-engagement can endure. The bubble of radicalism has lured too many romantics into a kind of politics that is, in the end, entirely self-indulgent and disengaged from its adversaries. The idle "radical" doesn't engage, doesn't provoke change. She drifts. We need to be far more clever than this, far more cunning. Our goal, after all, is to steer the evolution of the status quo in a way that is more just, not to bathe in the nectar of our own beautiful souls.

LC (DB): I don't think any of us would espouse "lean in" feminism, though women tend to feel less able to negotiate higher salaries, for example, and this is a problem. I think the pay gap is not something that can be ignored simply because the women in question are already in a position of privilege. I think the misogyny at play there is real and endemic within corporate culture, but well beyond it too, of course. The fact that many women are reluctant to ask for more money because they feel they will be seen as a prima donna or as spoiled is real, and in many cases they be seen that way; and that sort of entrenched misogyny is indeed something that needs to be gotten rid of.

This sort of misogyny plays out in academia too (and probably other fields). I know many women who, before they give a talk, feel the need to know their shit inside and out, and the fact is that they do! I do think that men are more quickly granted authority as a matter of course. I don't think women get this automatic authority as much (unless it's about traditional feminism or the body); women have to earn their authority. Again, I'm speaking of women who already have agency, who tend to be middle class-and yes, these are first world problems, but it doesn't mean they are problems both in themselves and also as indicators of deeper forces, norms, and habits that are at play more widely.

The bigger problem is that liberal, corporate feminism is all about the individual, ignoring the systemic. One of XF's primary imperatives is its call for systemic thinking. The whole "lean in" thing would be the most minor of minor practices in that (as I understand it) one is left to advocate for oneself, and this too is insufficient-and as we have made clear, would not be a tactic we would support.

aCCS: How do you think the demands of the Xenofeminist Manifesto-scaling up existing tactics, repurposing technologies (in the term's widest sense) toward an emancipatory feminist politics, recoding the universal-might be implemented within broader culture? And how do you see the Xenofeminist project extending beyond the Manifesto?

LC (DB): The manifesto form is bombastic. We chose this format deliberately. But the question of what happens after the Manifesto is a good one. Ultimately, XF exists as a means to do away with itself.

We would like XF to be a contagion, infecting the DNA of a broad range of disciplines and thereby mutating the reality these disciplines produce. This is not a top-down program that can be followed, but, importantly, it is not a grassroots one either. It is a contagion. The claims to universalism, calling that term to task, demanding that it be true to its meaning, is of course at present an idealism. There will not be "a way to navigate from this idealism existing in the now to a future realism. There will necessarily be many "ways," via shifts in codes and norms, and via changes in legislation, amongst other things.

It will not be a matter of barricades in the streets. That is not how this will play out. The ways in which gender inequality manifests itself are of course very broad and multifarious, across cultures and economies, so the idea that one tactic or strategy could dismantle it is fantasy. This is why it needs to seep, it needs heuristics, as a tactic for a highly differentiated and mutable politics. So the kind of approach that one takes in the art field, for example, will be very different to an approach within health care. There will be overlap, but there will be no one-size-fits-all or silver bullet to end discrimination. However, one step in the right direction would be a recognition of the problems both in their specificity in terms of where they link with systemic conditions on many scales. The work must be approached from the perspective that these things are constitutively interwoven.

LABORIA CUBONIKS (b. 2014) is a polymorphous Xenofeminist collective. As an anagram of the "Nicolas Bourbaki" group of mathematicians, Cuboniks also advances an affirmation of abstraction as an episto-political necessity for twenty-first century claims on equality. Espousing reason and vigorous anti-naturalism, she seeks to dismantle gender implicitly. Cuboniks is a multi-taloned, tetra-headed creature uncomfortably navigating the fields of art, design, architecture, archeology, philosophy, techno-feminism, sexuality studies, digital music, translation, writing, and regular experiments with the use of evolutionary algorithms in offensive cybersecurity.

Commissioning Editors: Christian Camacho-Light, Patricia M. Hernandez, Dana Kopel

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Laboria Cuboniks, collective authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto , insist upon a scaling-up of feminism. Drawing on both queer and transfeminist theory and philosophical rationalism, Laboria Cuboniks propose a new universal-one no longer coded as cis, straight, white, and male-with Xenofeminism as its theoretical and technological platform.

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As a case in point, the microfluidic chip experiments by Coyte, now a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and her colleagues illuminated how the flow of water and the number of bacteria present can constrain and reconfigure the growth of biofilms. Their work, published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to a burgeoning literature demonstrating that physical forces like hydrodynamic shear and the stickiness of the extracellular matrix shape the growth of microbes into complex collectives. These studies provide a big step on the path to decoding the rules that govern the formation and evolution of biofilms.

Those biophysical forces are like universal zoning rules for the biofilm cities: they govern how the inhabitants obtain food and building materials, how they can move and how they interact with one another. Just as urban planners use their knowledge of civil engineering principles and regulations to build better cities for people, microbiologists and bioengineers can use these rules to make objects more or less hospitable to the billions of cells that live in and around us.

On September 17, 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of London with news of tiny "animalcules" he had seen under the microscope. From the teeth of himself, two women and two old men who had never cleaned their teeth, Leeuwenhoek had scraped "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter," and looked at it with his hand-polished lenses. His letter described "an unbelievably great company of living animalcules, a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen up to this time," in what was to become one of the first descriptions of bacteria recorded. Scientists now know that the tooth plaque Leeuwenhoek described was actually a biofilm, not a simple collection of individual bacteria.

Despite the dates of Leeuwenhoek's early discoveries, it took microbiologists until the 1970s and '80s to begin investigating biofilms. Early pioneers like Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University identified the chemical signals that bacteria use to take a census of their colleagues in a process known as quorum sensing. Other researchers decoded the genes that synthesized the extracellular matrix and how this matrix could vary between species and even within the same individual.

Important as those scientific contributions were, the studies suffered from a fundamental limitation. What makes a biofilm different from a mass of identical bacteria are the multitudes of interactions among the component microbes. Yet those scientists were largely obliged to observe biofilms growing in Petri dishes or the equivalent. And it became increasingly clear that those simple laboratory conditions could not support the full range of biophysical interactions that shape biofilms and their function.

For example, many of the interactions among the bacteria in biofilms are intensely competitive, both within a biofilm and between them. Fast-growing organisms will snatch up nutrients before their neighbors take over their space. Other bacterial species secrete antibiotics to prevent competitors from elbowing into their territory. To prevent freeloading cells from getting the benefit of extracellular matrix produced at a cost of energy and valuable nutrient resources, some species of bacteria attach themselves to matrix molecules to "privatize" them. The microbes in a biofilm can also specialize at different tasks, depending on where in the biofilm they are located and their genetic background. Cells on the edge focus on acquiring food and warding off predators, whereas those in the core often hunker down and serve as reserves. The cells within also walk the fine line between sharing resources and competing for them. The success or failure of all these interactions depends strongly on precise details of the dynamic physical circumstances in which the biofilms are growing, which can change significantly over a scale of microns.

What results, Coyte says, is a complex cooperative that looks and acts differently from bacteria growing in pure culture. "We have a habit of thinking of bacterial evolution in Petri dishes, which means we're missing crucial factors on selection pressures based on physics," she said.

The first biofilm researchers focused more on the chemical environments of these microbial communities rather than the physical forces that also governed their existence, according to Knut Drescher, a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. In the past five to 10 years, advances in microscale engineering and high-resolution microscopy have allowed scientists to measure physical forces acting on individual cells and replicate a range of environmental conditions in the lab that have enabled scientists to begin to track the formation of a biofilm, cell by cell.

"If you want to understand how a biofilm grows, you need to see individual cells. The resulting architecture and physiology arise from these interactions," Drescher said.

Even the earliest experiments on the physical forces affecting a growing biofilm challenged existing ideas. Microfluidic chips showed that the texture and shape of the surface to which the microbes attached were far more important than anyone thought, because they controlled the distribution of nutrients and the shape of the resulting biofilm. Similarly, rapidly flowing water can impede the formation of a biofilm because hydrodynamic shear forces can pry off loose cells.

But researchers have found exceptions. In 2008, Wendy Thomas, a bioengineer at the University of Washington, showed that some strains of E. coli have evolved fringelike attachment threads called fimbriae that adhere better in fast-flowing water than in a more torpid stream. Other bacteria create a different type of extracellular matrix that gives them superior sticking strength in areas with high amounts of hydrodynamic shear. The picture becomes only more complex as researchers recognize more layers of physical variables and biological responses as relevant.

This complexity turns out to be essential to understanding the real-world behaviors of many bacteria. Consider the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause life-threatening infections in immunocompromised individuals and can form resilient biofilms on medical equipment such as ventilators and catheters. Like E. coli, Pseudomonas strains differ in the type of matrix molecules they make, if they make them at all. In January 2017, Bassler, Drescher and their colleagues showed that, in simple environments, strains that produce matrix always win out over their nonproducing cousins.

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Building Codes for Bacterial Cities | Quanta Magazine

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Hydrodynamics and competition guide the architectural design of biofilm fortresses.

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Interspecies Library is the first archive dedicated to the curation and advancement of artists' books focused on alternative interspecies futures. The growing collection aspires to reflect our changing attitudes and acknowledgment of more-than-human worlds.

Support Us

Interspecies Library is currently working to share the whole catalog online. With your help, we can bring this to life.

Contact info@interspecieslibrary.com
if you are able to contribute.

-----------------------------------------

About the Curator

Oscar Salguero is an archivist, book curator, and independent researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2021, Salguero curated "Interspecies Futures [IF]" at the Center for Book Arts. The show marked the first public survey of bookworks by emerging artists working at the intersection of speculative fiction and interspecies possibilities. Salguero is the founder of the Interspecies Library and the author of Symbiocene Anthology, a series of artists' book reviews published online via the philosophical platform Future Based.

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Interspecies Library is the first archive dedicated to the curation and advancement of artists' books focused on alternative interspecies possibilities. The growing collection aspires to reflect our changing attitudes and acknowledgment of more-than-human worlds.

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Insights into the intelligence throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and under our sk...

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The 'living concrete' that can heal itself | CNN Business

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It’s the world’s most popular building material, and ever since the Romans built the pantheon from it some 2,000 years ago, we’ve been trying to find ways to make concrete more durable. No matter how carefully it is mixed or reinforced, all concrete eventually cracks, and under some conditions, thos…