“The hermit turns his back on the world and refuses to have anything to do with it. But one can do more than this: one can try to recreate the world, to build another in its place, one in which the most intolerable features are eliminated and replaced by others that accord with one’s desires. As a rule, anyone who takes this path to happiness, in a spirit of desperate rebellion, will achieve nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He will become a madman and will find nobody to help him realize his delusion.” (Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents,
Re-contextualizing Art and Evil
The virtual world is Evil, unreasonable and tends towards Read more
“The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.” – (Jackson Pollock)
In his book, Understanding Media, McLuhan argues that our concentration on images and sounds, which has been intensified by TV, radio and cinema, leads to a reorganization of our sense ratios, mixing and mingling our sensual inputs within the whole nervous system more generally:
“For good or ill, the TV image has Read more
In his book A Clockwork Orange,
“We believed that the cybernetic approach to consciousness – whipped up frothy – would carry us to a plateau overlooking a pleasant mirror, but instead left us blathering in a dressed up solitude of manikin planets, twirling in a blank and unfriendly spaciousness.” (Steven Jesse Bernstein: The Sport Pt.1 – Prison
During 2011’s Virtual Futures conference at Warwick University, Mark Fisher (K-Punk) presented some reservations about the internet and mobile technologies, emphasizing their depersonalising, commodifying and anxiety producing aspects and making the claim that we got on OK prior to their appearance (See Here for Talk). The following is a catalogue of thoughts and observations that occurred in response to that talk. Read more
A 5 part conversation between Dennis Potter and the BBC following a speech he made in Edinburgh about the application of market principles to the BBC. Quite an exciting bit of video methinks.
(Article calling for the removal of both presenters
Pic: Sian Massey, lineswoman target of remarks)
This page Brooker referred to, half in earnest and half in jest, Read more
And my heart took fright – to envy some poor man
Who ran in frenzy to the sheer abyss
Who, drunk with the pulsing of his blood, preferred
Grief to death and hell to nothingness.
(Baudelaire, Translation taken from Benjamin, Illuminations,
In an earlier piece we identified two types of impulse exchange – The Positive Exchange and the Negative Exchange. We suggested that Negative Exchange was based on one’s potential to lose, or be destroyed/consumed by another; Read more
