The Friend (Postcard from Zarathustra)

Always once one - that maketh two in the long run!

I and me are always too

earnestly in conversation: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?

The friend of the anchorite is always the third one: the third one is the cork which preventeth the conversation of the two sinking into the depth. Ah! there are too many depths for all anchorites. Therefore, do they long so much for a friend and for his elevation. Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 14, The Friend)

I LOVE the forest (Postcard from Zarathustra)

It is bad to live in cities: there are too

many of the lustful.

Would that ye were perfect - at least as animals! But to animals belongeth innocence. Do I counsel you to slay your instincts? I counsel you to innocence in your instincts.  
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 13, Chastity)

Applause

taking a bow

Arachnids + a glitch in the works

http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/glitch/
Autonomous Phosphorous Rendering Engine by Ernest Glitch

http://technabob.com/blog/2011/11/02/spider-robot/

This morning was taken on a merry chase by a face book  friend, Simon Park (biologist from UK) who posted an intriguing image of an Autonomous Phosphorous Rendering Engine on his site, apparently invented in the mid 18th Century by the savant Ernest Glitch to move about agricultural land, harvesting animals for the phosphorus in their bones. Can you imagine this large contraption lumbering along with its metallic mandibles and serrated teeth ready to devour some poor unsuspecting creature? I thought the drawing of the machine rather interesting since its form was similar to hexapods being designed within contemporary robotics, particularly The Muscle Machine, six-legged walking robot that Stelarc performed with in the past decade, the prototype micro-robot designed by our own Steven Middleton for Stelarc, or, more recently, the spider robot developed by the Fraunhofer Institute.

http://juliejoyclarke.blogspot.com/2010/01/steven-middleton-prototype-robot.html 

Unfortunately I could not find anything substantial about Ernest Glitch and I suspect that rather than being an inventor he is the imaginative concoction of some mad scientist/artist/writer who writes a blog under the title of Lateral Science. Still, following up on all of this has been a delightful way to spent some of my morning. All I can say is I totally understand why some people are arachnophobic!.

almost still life

self made

speaking of masks

This afternoon...

Thanks to Steve I had a lovely post-birthday lunch today at a cafe in downtown Richmond . It was cold outside in the little courtyard, but the conversation was good. Whilst we were there we ran into Adem Jaffers (animator/compositor and friend of Steve's I was introduced to about five years ago) who is back in Melbourne and loving the culture, so different I believe from Queensland where he's spent the past few years. Thought I'd do a little promo for him by placing his website details here - not that he needs it, he's so talented.
I'm home now and just wanted to say that I'm disgusted that American forces shot and left behind Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, Osama Bin Laden's fifth wife, but I suppose they figured she was guilty by association and didn't warrant any medical assistance from them. Were they too busy photographing or filming the execution? Yes, I know I being emotive about this issue, but somehow perpetrating evil as revenge for past evils, does not seem right.

Latest Steve Middleton image

Untitled. Steve Middleton (2011)

GLOBAL SHUFFLE Review + memory piece

DISTANT PAST. Sometime in 1992 just after I met Stelarc he introduced me to his friend Garry Shepherd - composer, artist, musician and pyrotechnics performance artist. We became friends and there were occasions when I visited his studio space, come living quarters in one of the upper floors of Commerce House, Melbourne. I remember sleeping over one night because I was too tired to take a taxi home. Garry slept in his bunk, a bed made up high on a wooden scaffold in an adjoining room. I slept on the couch in the studio apartment, which was filled to the brim with books, records, videos, computers, sound recording equipment, artworks and stage props left over from one of the performances by Melbourne Band Boom, Crash, Opera who Garry had worked with in the late 1980s.

Anyway, staying over that particular night remains a significant memory because I barely slept. The couch I lay on faced huge bare windows and all I could see was rooftops and  moon light that flooded the room. From about two o'clock onwards shadowy figures passed outside the windows and then disappeared from view. Garry informed me that it was usual for residents of Commerce House  - artists and Goths, to meet on the roof, play role games, dance or just hang together. This was Melbourne’s underground. They lived in or around Flinders Street and Flinders Lane. Considered vaguely Goth myself (though hadn't I always worn black) it seemed appropriate that Garry allowed me (just once) to do some of the filming for him of people dancing at the Goth club in a downstairs venue in Swanston Street, Melbourne.

In 1994 Garry had a program on Chanel 31 called TOE: Theory of Everything and he visited me at my place in Hawthorn to conduct an interview. I still remember saying that I wouldn’t be on camera (I’ve always been happier behind, rather than in front of a camera), but was happy for him to record what I said and to film my artwork. Garry and I ran into each other regularly over the next few years, usually around Nicholas Building where he lived after he left Commerce House or at his favorite coffee shop in Degraves Street  lane way and we’d have long chats about his Cyberfaeries project. One day around the end of the millennium I stopped running into Garry because he'd disappeared up to the hills.

FAST FORWARD. Yesterday I received in the mail a copy of Global Shuffle a documentary by Garry (music, editing and direction by him) and I watched it last night.

REWIND. About once a week I walk through the foyer of the Sydney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne and have been captured by the dozen or so male Asian students who rehearse an energetic dance in which they contort their bodies, do amazing movements with their feet, undertake almost impossible acrobatics like twirling on one hand - arm outstretched or twirling around on their heads. They’re amazing. But it wasn’t until I saw Global Shuffle last night that I could even put a name to this kind of dancing. I’d been calling it break dancing. Occasionally I’d be in the city and see some young men perform these amazing feats combined with dance. So now I know what the dance actually is. It’s the Melbourne Shuffle, or rather, the Global Shuffle. But I’m sure now after watching the documentary that this underground dance style emanated from Melbourne at the beginning of the 90s.

FAST FORWARD.  So I’m watching the documentary and Garry’s showing someone around Melbourne. They stop at Peril Underground an alternative music shop in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne where I first met (in the early 90s.) and had amazing conversations about viruses, techno-music and Stelarc with Australian sound artist, Darrin Verhagin (Shinjuku Thief). I still listen to some of Darrin's earliest CDs. I suppose they'd fall within the Industrial/Goth genre. 

Global Shuffle documents footage of Melbourne shufflers dancing in Brunswick Street, at the Espy in St.Kilda, at Commerce House, and some old TV footage of National Nine News from 1994 when the police strip-searched about 400 people attending Tasty Night Club, which was held in the basement at Commerce House.

When I saw the footage of shufflers at The Lounge in Swanston Street I was beginning to think that this documentary was in some strange way a trace of my life. The Lounge was a place I would regularly frequent, but I guess all art students who attended RMIT did – I know the Fringe crowd met there often. We’d see the bands, the art and listen to poetry readings. Somewhere along the way the clientele of The Lounge changed and I stopped going there.

The trace becomes more significant as I continue to watch Global Shuffle in that there’s footage of Don’t Shoot the Messenger and one of its members, our own Steven Middleton (friend who writes for this blog) gives a brief wave (my god, he looks so young – this was a few years before I met him) and then later on in the documentary he appears again wearing a red jacket.

If you love the driving beat of mechanical sounds, then you’ll love this DVD. It’s filled to the brim with techno-music, persistent strobes, dark spaces and hypnotic laser lights. It’s thoroughly mesmerizing, not just because I’m from Melbourne and because the marginal life of underground Melbourne touched mine, but because it’s filled with vibrant colors that gleam in night’s dark sky and a city invaded by lone shufflers dancing unconsciously in empty alleyways and stark city car parks. It's alternative Melbourne at its best!

But the documentary is not only about Melbourne shufflers and the shufflers' frenetic state, there’s some  quieter, softer clips of shufflers all over the world. Snow covered ground in Russia - young people dancing on an ice white surface that doesn’t slow down their feet, they just breathe faster and dance in time with an internal rhythm; their cold breath hanging in the crisp, cool air. The Kremlin 2009 shuffle competition, people dancing inside and out of a stadium and somehow the large statue of Lenin with his feet outstretched, mirrors the stance of the lone boy dancer, if you can imagine his movement FROZEN STILL FRAME. The eerie mist of the snowy landscape somehow akin to the glow of Melbourne's interior dance club lights. 

PRESENT. I'm thinking this documentary is not only about the Melbourne Shufflers its a record of Garry's life for that period. It describes in many ways his absolute determination to record Melbourne's alternative culture, the energy and utter creativity of our people as well as his own creativity. I hear that Global Shuffle is coming to a film festival near you very soon, catch it if you can it's well worth a look.

Stranger in a stranger land

The only time I was ever involved with a blog before this one was when a robot I made blogged its way through a modest exhibition in a Melbourne gallery for a couple of weeks in 2002. Sure I read posts since they were plain 'ol newsgroup messages, before mainstream media discovered the internet. And I still prefer message boards to, say, Facebook, for always-on internet coms. But for me, until the first post on Anything But Human, blogging was an undiscovered country.

Any traveller on an alien shore will be at first consumed by the struggle to orient, to familiarize and unfold and unpack the baggage. And after by the complexities of navigating unfamiliar space and finding some sense of place, and belonging, under an alien sky. Not that I'm thinking the landscape is much better defined now than it was for me three months ago.

I seem to have written three times as many posts as I posted. I don't know how usual that is. Some of the unposted seem skeletal, others are way overweight. Still more have wandered far from the point, and others have no point at all. Or any that I can see now. And I was wondering why, in a mediaspace that seems so entwined in consciousness-streaming, I wasn't that comfortable joining in?

I guess for me there will always be more writing than posting. Because if there is something to say it is worth saying well. Because otherwise, what is the point?

I spent a couple of weeks cruising blog posts about Australia's climate change debate. It seems a fairly robust one, if not a pub brawl, and I'm not that comfortable joining in. But when the media is chastised for presenting the debate in full I have to call shenanigans.

The Age/SMH reported Professor Ross Garnaut's concern that there had been a decline in public acceptance of the mainstream science, and it is all the media's fault.

In a flawed attempt at balance, journalists present the views and prognosis put forward by numerous experts working within mainstream, peer-reviewed science, and then weigh them equally against the opinions of a handful of outliers whose views are generally not supported by published evidence.

''That's a very strange sort of balance,'' remarked Garnaut. ''It's a balance of words, and not a balance of scientific authority.''

Anyone can tell a story, but presenting a story from multiple points of view requires heavy lifting, and I'm pleased our media is up for it. And Garnaut's complaint reminds me of the baggage I bought to the undiscovered country of the blog. Although balance is a heavy load, it isn't excess baggage. Balance is fundamental to best practice reportage, and if the Professor can't make headway then maybe the message, or its herald, rather than the messenger, is to blame. After all, if an independent media can't report a debate in full, it isn't independent any more.

A shape within the watery gleam appeared

(click on image for bigger)

I was going to write something about a post of Julie's about Narcissism but, like Narcissus and Echo, the post has disappeared, leaving only this faint reprise.

The Gods fated beautiful Narcissus to become enraptured by his own image reflected in a pool, and fade away, like Echo, the wood nymph whose attentions Narcissus had spurned.

I was thinking what an act of violence and loss the legend represents; the eradication without trace of something beautiful feels monstrous.

So far from the bucolic reverie invoked by Milton...

On the green bank, to look into the clear

Smooth lake that to me seemed another sky.

As I bent down to look, just opposite

A shape within the watery gleam appeared,

Bending to look on me. I started back;

It started back; but pleased I soon returned,

Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks

Of sympathy and love. There had I fixed

Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire

-from Comus (1634)

...here instead is something elemental, and bloody.

what will thou do in the land of the sleepers? (postcard from Zarathustra)

The taxicab and other whole numbers

Happy birthday Godfrey Harold Hardy, an English mathematician born February 7 1877. Hardy is perhaps best remembered in modern popular culture for the number 1729 that crops up a lot in Matt Groening's Fox Television cartoon Futurama as, for example, the serial number of Bender the bratty robot.

The so-called Taxicab, or Hardy-Ramanujan Number, 1729, is named from a story G. H. Hardy told about a visit fellow mathematical genius Srīnivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujam he lay ill. "Once, in the taxi from London, Hardy noticed its number, 1729. He must have thought about it a little because he entered the room where Ramanujan lay in bed and, with scarcely a hello, blurted out his disappointment with it. It was, he declared, 'rather a dull number,' adding that he hoped that wasn't a bad omen. 'No, Hardy,' said Ramanujan, 'it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways' ".

Hardy, who once commented "Nothing I have ever done is of the slightest practical use" also noted his protege Rāmānujam remarking "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God".

Now Professor of Mathematics at Emory University Ken Ono has partly solved a particular puzzle that fascinated Tamil mathematician Ramanujan, by finding fractal relationships in sequences of the so-called Partition values of positive integers.

A Partition of an integer, or whole number, is any combination of other whole numbers that adds up to that number. For example, the number four can be made five ways: from 4, or 3+1, or 2+2, or 2+1+1, or 1+1+1+1. So the Partition number of four is five.

Ono and his colleagues say in their paper i-adic properties of the partition function (pdf) those sequences of numbers are "governed by fractal behavior".

In his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Benoit Mandelbrot describes a fractal as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is roughly a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. A familiar example of fractal self-similarity is a fern frond composed of self-similar but increasingly smaller fronds.

Observations of Fractals in the natural world are thought by some to be evidence of intelligent design.

Hardy, a lifelong atheist, wrote "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas".

Something to think about.

Brick is a

In a world of postmodern, posthuman uncertainty it is a relief to find something certain of not only its identity but its immutable place in the order of things. I give you, in this precarious, preverbal modern world, the brick that could.

Being human is a rollercoaster ride and sometimes you are suspended in a weightless, breathless moment between going up and going down. I had one of those preverbal moments for the past week where words made sense alright, but not necessarily in the order in which they presented.

Suspended I imagine (Australian performance artist) Stelarc, cruel metal barbs, pendulous skin and shiny wires like contrails, strained by gravity and embodied momentum, in the space between rising and falling. Aphelion, the furthest place you can reach, as if the universe becomes suddenly viscous and existence is measured in a Brownian swirl of instants. Suspended there like Icarus about to fall.

Simultaneously pushed and pulled, at Aphelion the almost fluid body defies conventional labels. Speed, trajectory, motion itself is momentarily indecipherable. Up, down, top, bottom, beginning, ending and uncertain centre are caught in a Dervish dance of inertia and Coriolis force. At Aphelion, uncertainty is the only thing you know for sure.

At Aphelion words and meanings become detached from one another, separating like name tags from garments in a washing machine, in a mighty struggle to adapt. Suspended, but paradoxically still moving, like particles in Brownian motion, entanglements of words and meanings quickly evolve. Up means down, today means sometime and tomorrow means never. Meaning suspended, like wax in the moment before it melts, or solidifies, in a futurist arabesque.

Brick stands a bulwark against the tide of postmodern uncertainty, its place in the symbolic order of things assured. Surrounded by like, but distinctly boundaried, brick, a brick, is a brick.

Mechanists and Shapers

I'm responding here to a comment made by Steve underneath his image 'the load-bearing spirit' (21.01.11) that the cyborg is motion and flow and unfinished and becoming and direct and moving and still, all at once. I should say that I see a vast difference between the cyborg of science fiction films, which is almost always more machine than human, real-life individuals with medical prosthesis and the cybernetic body associated with virtual technologies, although in theory they all get thrown into the mix. I agree with Steve, the human (posthuman) is a continuum, rather than an event and this is where the notion of becoming comes into play.

My current thought is that the cyborg will be surpassed in the future by the opportunistic human who avails themselves of advanced biomedical technologies. This genetically modified human, will take designer drugs to ward off dementia and prolong life, her failing tissue and internal organs replaced by specifically designed tissue-engineered ones that avoid rejection. Her diseased tissue replaced with those from an genetically modified 'human friendly' animal, her outer body surgically modified to conform to current standards of beauty. But for a long time we will live in a world inhabited by altered humans, one that Bruce Sterling described in 1983 as two distinct future states of being ~ a world of posthuman shapers ~ genetically engineered or surgically modified individuals and mechanists, those with prosthetically modified bodies. Eventually, even prosthetic limbs will look more life like, so much so that the new cyborg will be unidentifiable as such.

Child of the future

For those interested in the image in the previous post by Steve Middleton, I've included this link to the relevant section of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Without Steve's title one might have easily read his image as a commentary on the struggle for power and control between the Arab world and the west or Islam and Christianity. Here, the cyborg (overman or ubermensch) representing the contemporary, armored soldier is literally the 'load bearing spirit' of an aging and perhaps disintegrating human replete with prosthesis. Flanked on either side with the lion of courage and the camel of awkwardness, the human/machine is seized in an impasse; deadlocked between its desire to be brave and its obvious encumbrance.

Regardless of Haraway's embrace of the cyborg as transgressive figure, one that subverts binaries, it still continues to represent masculinist control and domination. No amount of armoring is going to rid the solder of her fleshy body. And, on this note, although Nietzsche spoke about transcendence he was not talking about body denial. Indeed, be would not have applauded current theorists (Stelarc) who maintain the human body is obsolete. ‘I do not go your way, you despisers of the body! You are not bridges of the Superman!’ (Nietzsche, 1969:63).

I'm thinking that we need to jettison the cyborg as metaphor of heroism and invulnerability and instead see the prosthetic body for what it is, a technological husk that masks our fragility and dependence. After all, most hybrid, human/machine entities from science fiction films and television series have depicted humans as damaged. In The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) Colonial Steve Austin (Lee Majors), an astronaut with NASA lost the sight of one of his eyes and the use of his legs in an accident. They were replaced with bionics, which gave him greater strength, telescopic vision and the ability to run faster than the average person. The six million dollar man was intended to showcase actual development in bionics and was a contemporary version of the Superman figure of the 1930s.

It was Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that depicted the first proto-fascist cyborg in the form of Darth Vadar, who had a prosthetic hand and wore an armoured helmet and life-support suit because he was asthmatic. Darth Vadar, who was presented as a powerful dictator with spiritual underpinnings (he is, after all, Lord Darth Vader a Jedi Knight), is, in his all black attire suggestive of Adolf Hitler’s SchutzStaffel (SS) Storm Troopers who were armoured in a very psychologically intimidating way against the terrors that they inflicted prior to and during World War Two. Both Darth Vader and the SchutzStaffel represented the evil, dehumanised and dehumanising other, and the mechanical, ordered and disciplined body.

Militaristic cyborgs in films such as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Testsuo (1989), Circuitry Man (1989), Cyborg (1989), Total Recall (1990, Terminator II (1991), Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Eve of Destruction (1991) just to name a few, represented the greater use of medical prosthetics and computer technologies during the 1980s and 1990s and with this an acknowledgement of human frailty.

But returning here to Steve's image. Perhaps Zarasthustra as cyborg is the child that Nietzsche speaks of. It's a place of new beginnings, fragile and armored with so much technology upon which to draw, we advance headlong into something not yet imagined! Who are these individuals, capable of finding their creative abilities? They are "only the rarest and most lucky" capable of the "most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates its own glorification". (Nietzsche: Will to Power )

A Book for All and None...Zarathustra

Der Riese ~ Geyger (1895) Etching

http://www.art-books.com/cgi-bin/artbooks/03-0752

Steve Middleton's Zarathustra (seen in post below)~ an armored, cybernetic being that propels itself above the city and the crowd via mechanical wings is literal translation of Ubermensch or Superman. Originally devised by Jerome Siegel and artist Joseph Shuster in 1938 and referred to in the comic as the Man of Tomorrow and the Man of Steel, Superman was a being from another planet that possessed great strength and the ability to fly.
Given the social, economic and political climate of the nineteen thirties, particularly the emphasis on eugenics in America and the fact that Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1891) was given to German soldiers to inspire them towards greatness, it is more than likely that the character of Superman devised by Siegel and Shuster was influenced by a misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. It is worth remembering here, ‘that Nietzsche invented that construct he called the overman in order to imagine a different kind of human attitude’ (James S. Hans, 1991:2:3). Indeed, a characteristic of Superman from his inception was his dual nature; he was simultaneously human and not human.

However, there are precedents. The German artist Ernst Moritz Geyger depicted in his Der Riese (1895) etching/illustration of Friedrich Nietzsche's poem The Giant, an athletic male body with wings, a human/angel hybrid, depicting the body/spirit as represented by the aura around his head and his otherworldliness. This Giant could be one of the erotes - winged gods of love, or Zeus, who in Greek mythology was born from the union of Saturn and Rhea who were Titans – a gigantic race who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. In Geyger’s etching the Giant is denoted by the word Grossen (grosse – large/to increase in size chiselled into the stone), it is depicted holding a sketchpad on which the planet Saturn has been drawn. In this context the Ubermensch represents humanity as designer of the universe and Nietzsche as protagonist. The figures at the bottom of the sculpture depict a monkey, birds, and foxes—all with human appendages suggesting that there is a relationship between humanity and the animal kingdom. The figure of the giant relates to the physical strength and beauty of the human body. Augmented with wings, the figure alludes to the spiritual body and flight. According to Mikhail Bakhtin ‘the giant in folklore symbolised in most cases physical strength…’ (1984:341) but also to the appetite (1984:342) and as such the giant is a symbol of that which devours.

Considered in light of the ways that Nietzsche’s writings have been appropriated to represent contemporary man and his desire to overcome disease and eventual decay, Geyger’s Giant stands as an interesting precursor for contemporary representations of the enhanced, pumped up body of the cyborg in science fiction and the ethereal virtual body. It also could be interpreted as anticipating the eugenic humanist agenda at the beginning of the nineteenth century for stronger, healthier bodies, the classical perfect complete body and the voracious appetite that humankind has for progress.
Especially relevant, given that Nietzsche admired Greek culture, is the mythological figure of Zeus, for Zeus represented an emphasis on the physical body within a spiritual framework. It was assumed from some of his writing that Nietzsche equated the Ubermensch with athletic Greek bodies.
This image is quite potent in contemporary terms because the human is represented as a creator, and as such embodies a trope of the human species’ ability to redesign the human race through cybernetic or biomedical technologies.
I argue in my book, The Paradox of the Posthuman: Science Fiction/Techno-Horror Films and Visual Media that contrary to the humanist interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch that focuses upon the Superman as a prescription for a stronger, healthier, more intelligent future race of humanity, one which stages the notion of the becoming of the man of tomorrow within an evolutionary schema, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is about immanence and embodiment. Indeed, Nietzsche never explicitly describes the overman but his thoughts about this being, as a man of the future, are dispersed through a number of his texts, particularly Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892), in which Zarathustra said, ‘I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome’ (41). He qualifies this: ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a going-down’ (44). It is important that Nietzsche affirms man’s potential through movement, ‘You should propagate yourself not only forward, but upward’ (95).
Nietzsche believed that ‘spiritual progress depends on those individuals who are less bound, much less certain, and morally weaker; they are men who try new things’ (1994:138). He gives an example of a ‘blind man’ who ‘will see deeper inwardly…’ and concludes by saying: ‘To this extent, the famous theory of the 'survival of the fittest' does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race’ (1994:139).
This spiritual evolution is revealed by Zarathustra who says, ‘and life itself told me this secret: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must overcome itself again and again” (138) suggesting that there is a process of repetition or eternal return through moments in life. He captures fully one of these moments with Zarathustra’s sleep revelation when, with eyes still opened, he realizes that ‘...the gentlest, lightest, the rustling of a lizard, a breath, a moment, a twinkling of the eye—little makes up the quality of the best happiness’ (288). Nietzsche reveals in this text that mankind may only find true pleasure in the here and now, which offers us glimpses of death in the form of loss of ego or oneness with the universe. It is only in these moments, when we are no longer self aware, when we are fully absorbed in the other (being or thing), that we lose sight of ourselves and thus this ‘death’ or nothingness actually pulls us away from our consciousness of the fragility of self into a continuity with all existence.
Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, embodied in the character of Zarathustra, advocates an absorption in the moment of being totally at one with the world. This appears as a joyous, ecstatic blending of self and other. Thus, the Ubermensch is a state that may only be achieved in absorption. It remains an idea of attainment in an enclosed moment, amongst a multiplicitous array of like or disparate moments, in which there are no dichotomies of good/bad, master/slave, male or female. This dissolution of binaries may found in the metaphor of the cyborg, which exhibits no morality, class or difference. It is a resolution and yet simultaneously not one at all, for it describes an almost indescribable journey experienced in the ‘blink of an eye’ or in a ‘lightning flash’. So, the ‘going down’ is the sudden impulse to let go of human (self-consciousness) and to become other than man—animal or machine, in order to overcome. Either way, we become less than human and more than human!

The fact that Middleton represents this cyborg as ghastly armored human skeleton, which for all purposes looks very much alive with its smiling teeth and animated left hand, suggests the death of the human or Humanism in conjunction with cyborg culture. Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) comes to mind here. The elongated, distorted human skull at the bottom of his painting appears strangely out of place in which there is order and symmetry, and in which the objects themselves point to a rational ordered universe. The skull is an uncanny reminder that no matter how much control humanity exerts over nature that death reigns supreme!
________________________

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Radelais and his world, Translated by Helen Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clarke, Julie (2009). The Paradox of the Posthuman: Science Fiction/Techno-Horror Films and Visual Media, VDM Verlag, Dr Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG Germany (excerpt from Chapter Two: From Ubermensch to Cyborg).
Hans, James S. (1991). The Origins of the Gods, State University of New York Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1961.1969). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated with an Introduction by R.J. Hollingdale, London, England: Penguin Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1994). Human, All Too Human, Translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Introduction and Notes by Marion Faber, London, England: Penguin Books.
Superman, Action Comics #1, 1938

Will the last individual please turn off the lights.

More than a decade ago, at the end of the nineties, waiting for the millennium bug to end civilization as we knew it, who knew everything about the noughties was going to be big.


More than a decade ago I was at Lorne to perform at the Falls Festival. New Years Eve a big storm blew in South Eastern Australia, and the Falls Festival, along with many other outdoor Millennium Eve events, was cancelled. I spent New Years Eve 1999 in a dark room lending an ear to wall shaking wind rather than earth shaking hip hop.


In between floods, fire consumed Melbourne's outer suburbs. That summer, temperatures previously unrecorded caused an early, eerie autumn when Melbourne's heat stressed trees simultaneously surrendered half their leaves to the pavement below.


This New Year's an area the size of France and Germany combined, around 1 1/2 times the size of Texas, is under meters of water up North, while here today in Southern Australia we are getting critical fire danger warnings on account of the heat. Australia kind of slopes downhill from North to South, so there is every chance that if we do catch fire water from the north will arrive in a few weeks or so to put it out.


Everything about the noughties was big, going on gigantic.


A googol, a very big imaginary number popularized by American mathematician Edward Kasner in his book Mathematics and the Imagination (1940) inspired the naming of Google, the gigantic corporation which indexes the world wide web and hosts this blog. Two hundred and fifty five million web servers responded to Netcraft's December 2010 automated world wide web census, hosting an unknown number of web pages thought to number in the billions.


The noughties was the decade that the googol became real.


There seems little room for individuals in a world consumed by bigness. Our new State Government seems set to abandon The Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, a simple but important state law that sets out individual freedoms, rights and responsibilities. "This formal recognition of our human rights protects people from injustice and allows everyone to participate in and contribute to society", the law begins. Foreshadowing its end, the new state government promised to build more prisons instead.


As bigness gets gigantic evidence is emerging that humans are hardwired for smallness.


Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, argues that language may have developed as a substitute for social grooming, an activity of primates where individuals in a group clean or maintain each other's body or appearance. Primates that live in proximity use social grooming to bond, build social structures, family links, and relationships. Social grooming is observably a form of reconciliation and a means of conflict resolution in some species. Dunbar speculates that there is a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships through social grooming, and that number is comparatively small.


Dunbar's number is between 100 and 230, but is usually assigned as 150. Cracked.com's David Wong derisively calls it the monkeysphere. There is as much need for small numbers on a website that reaches millions as there is for a Charter of Human Rights on a law and order crackdown.


Of course the tension between bigness and individuals is nothing new. David Hume wrote about it, and so did Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). But in an age where everything seems suddenly googol, revisiting makes a lot of sense.


Will the last individual please turn off the lights.

NEW REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS

In the spirit of collaboration & connection and by way of broadening the scope of this blog, I have invited a number of passionate, articulate friends and associates to become regular authors. Not all will take up the gauntlet, but I'm sure those that do will provide some interesting and provocative perspectives on a range of topics. As they come on board they will be introduced via a short profile written by themselves. This morning I introduce with pleasure, long time friend Steve Middleton, who has made regular comments on my blog posts over the past year. I expect that he will begin blogging soon. Until then, here is some valuable information about him:

Dr Steven Middleton is a digital native and almost retired Melbourne artist, academic and filmmaker renowned for massive multimedia installations and monstrous but moving robotic body extensions. His artwork appears in many books and journals about transhuman and other extropian projects. A recently retired University researcher and lecturer, Steve has directed television drama, animated 3D television programs and commercials, written articles about art theory, managed broadcasters, and contributed to national communications policy debate and change. He is also an accidental whistle blower who broadcast the Kennet-Peacock Tapes and exposed the inner workings of the Vanuatu Development Project, the biggest charity fraud in history. Steve is fiercely independent, opinionated, and unaffiliated, and expects to contribute pictures, as well as words, to Anything But Human.

That's a wrap!

Since I'll be making limited posts on this blog in the future, I've decided to do a wrap of the past year. So, here goes: I wrote short reviews of the following films:
A Single Man, Antichrist, Avatar, Fair Game, Farewell, Inception, Leaving, lo sono L’Amore, Precious, Micmacs, Monsters, Shutter Island, The Hurt Locker, The Stoning of Soraya M, The Waiting City and Winters Bone. I also made commentary on the following documentaries screened on the ABC: The Last Enemy, Hungry Beast, Alzheimer’s: The Musical and In a Strange Land.

And, short reviews or commentaries on the following art exhibitions, artworks and performances:
Karen Casey, Jon Cattapan, Steve Cox, Peter Cripps, Bruce Earles, Domenico de Clario, frank’scunt (Fn’L), Contemporary Encounters, Dennis Hopper, Jenny Holzer, Sam Jinks, Mark McDean, Steven Middleton, Gustave Moreau, Ron Mueck, Love, Loss and Intimacy, Jill Orr, Nina Sellers & Joanna Zylinka, Stelarc, Bill Viola, Reframing Darwin, and Unnerved. Three previously written pieces were posted on my blog: Patricia Piccinini, Juan Ford and Murray McKeich. Also included was the as yet unpublished catalogue essay for the Spectacle of the Mind performance and a lecture I gave on Stelarc’s work.

I reviewed the following books:
Rebecca Skloots, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Shannon Bell, Fast Feminism.
Donna Harrawy, Modest Witness…
And made mention a couple of times to:
Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolution Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema.

Parts of my draft novel in progress were also posted.

Surprisingly the top ten sites, in terms of hits (apart from the 5,600 views of the main page) were: Ron Mueck 833, Julie Clarke camping by the Murray River 354, Stelarc's Third Hand 287, Experimenta Launch 227, Prosh ~ dots and a dash 221, McKeach review 172, Patricia Piccinini 143, Prosh Pranks 146, Visual Poetry and Mail Art 130 and Trisomi 129. Another ten posts received between 100 and 128 views and twenty two posts received between 51 and 100 hits. Although, on average most of my daily posts received between 5 and 49. People from 99 countries or 1,435 cities visited the site and stayed approximately two and a half minutes. However, 4,000 out of the total were from Melbourne and they stayed on the site for 4.5 minutes.

The most exciting moments of the year was in early March when I met and photographed the French film director Jean Pierre Jeunot and the Australian animator Adam Elliot. I also managed to photograph the British R& B guitarist, Albert Lee at Basement Records, Melbourne. Oh, and I nearly forgot how interesting and exciting it was to meet Jill Orr again and to be involved in writing about and viewing the Spectacle of the Mind performance event at Federation Square. There have been nearly 16,000 page views of my blog over the past twelve months and about 300 comments. I regard this as a triumph, given that the blog was never advertised. I thank everyone who has visited and to those who will occasionally discover past blog posts that will still be floating around in the ether in the future. For those people who come across this blog you can search for any of these reviews or articles simply by typing in the search term next to the white letter B inside the grey rectangle on the top left hand side of the blog...and, that's a wrap! May I take this opportunity to wish you all, love and happiness for the festive season.