Morphosis

other_life

other_life

bioconfused
roland kayn, logged on in the 21st century. off the deep end-meets-total surface fascination. the flat surface is a safe distancing from the refraction and melt on the inside. thought broadcasts ping pong in the skull when walking the city in winter, the real office park is an extension of its generic image, the rolling green is a video vista. fragments from archived advertisements refigured into a complex net-work, a cutting becomes the full plant, or, rather - a mutilated fracture becomes a mutant whole. the cassette rig gives us the feeling that this is a document of something as-is, happening somewhere physical, in the finite, dripping aspect of time.
this is ECCO UNLIMITED - LIQUID NITROGEN
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Just skimmed this thread and had some thoughts. About ketamine. I wonder if the popularity of K as a recreational drug has anything to do with what you might call the Internet condition? It's a drug that always makes me acutely aware of being a system of feedback and control, like k-punk's comment about how all organisms are inherently cybernetic.

It seems to de-privilege the head and bring the neural nature of the rest of the body to the fore, like how an octopus has a mini-brain in each leg, making them to an extent autonomous. Or, even better, a jellyfish, with no central 'brain' at all. Take enough and you attain amoebahood, with pseudopods spontaneously forming and disappearing, instead of limbs as such.
 
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Well-known member
luka said:
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003875.html
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version said:
"One of the sublimely ruthless (=machinically efficient) aspects of the behaviour of Aliens, predators and shoggoths from which the organism recoils in horror is their readiness to ditch body parts when they are damaged or redundant."

This sounds like something from the Morphosis thread. The internet does it all the time. How many formerly huge or important sites have disappeared over the years? Myspace was massive at one point.
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I read a piece on Guardiola's Barca during their heyday which described them as slime mold.

Barcelona as Slime Mold

Poor Sergio Ramos — not to excuse or justify him, of course, but he’s an elite athlete, accustomed from childhood to running circles around other people, and now, before an enormous world-wide audience, to have people running circles around him — and so evidently enjoying it — well, that’s an insult not to be borne, I suppose. Everyone gets beaten sometimes: even Messi was dispossessed a couple of times yesterday. But to be humiliated for ninety minutes almost without respite, as Real Madrid’s players were yesterday . . . that doesn’t happen very often at that level of sport.

There’s something fey abut how Barça plays when they’re at their best, as though they’re engaged in some odd game of their own and are not even aware of what observers (including, or especially, the other team on the pitch) think about it. Real played an extremely high defensive line yesterday, and for minutes on end Barça seemed content to pass the ball around at midfield — and then there would be some sudden, inexplicable drive forward and the ball would be in the net and everyone would be thinking, Wait, what just happened there? Commentators talk about 22-pass build-ups, but that’s not really how Barça does things: more like 20 exercises in midfield tiki-taka and then a two-pass attack. (Think of the first and third goals yesterday especially.) When they move forward, they do so fiercely and without a millisecond’s hesitation.

All this sends writers to the metaphor box: we turn over everything in it looking for some reasonably valid descriptor, usually with no success. But I’ll venture this: Barcelona plays like slime mold. Slime mold is sort of an organism and sort of a collection of organisms: it combines or divides according to circumstance and need. Sometimes it will assemble itself into one vast colony, sometimes split into hundreds of them. Its intelligence is not directed but collective and emergent, swarming; there’s no one player or coach making the crucial decisions, those decisions just happen. Take a video of a slime mold, speed it up appropriately, and trust me, soon you’ll be saying “Is that Camp Nou?”

 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That's quite a cool description but I can also see it in Private Eye's "Pseud's Corner" section.
 
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Well-known member
A k-hole could be the point at which each 'mini-brain' becomes so dissociated from the others that the organism temporarily ceases to function or even exist as a whole.
 
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vershy versh

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"You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point... I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous... "
 
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sadmanbarty said:
the death of the individual identity:

1) drill's masks, artist's dystopian code-like names (v9, c1, gt), the fact that these names are indistinguishable from gang names like m20 in drill youtube titles, individuals being numerical in drill lyrics ("they say 150, but 146 instead", "i'm 300 and more"), "no face"

2) all the masked antagonists in the purge

3) online internet anonymity

4) the hactivist group anonymous (and their guy fawkes masks)
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IT WAS MIDAPRIL, Carnevale had been over for weeks, and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition, with a strange dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of the sky than a soft glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks was not quite done here.

On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.

With no interference from authority, church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative, all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Maskworld, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.
 
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version said:
A k-hole could be the point at which each 'mini-brain' becomes so dissociated from the others that the organism temporarily ceases to function or even exist as a whole.
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This would make a person's body an 'assemblage'. A set of components temporarily working together.

"Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them."
--The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Disconcerting to think of your body that way, but there we go.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
This would make a person's body an 'assemblage'. A set of components temporarily working together.

"Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them."
--The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Disconcerting to think of your body that way, but there we go.
Click to expand...
Each of an octopus's arms has its own mini-brain.
 
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