Peli Grietzer's Amerikkkkka is the kind of text that punches preternaturally out of its weight class, manages miracles. It back-charts five years of intellectual growth, cultural mappings, one-off gags and twelve-page academic endeavors that together begin to depict a certain type of lifeworld. I had the chance to gChat with Peli for a few hours… Continue reading Each Venture Is A New Beginning
Predictive Hermeneutics
A preprint of "A Bayesian hermeneutic" — the cogsci paper Thomas Rutten & I worked on last summer in Mexico City — is available at Research Gate here. It aims to introduce a new subfield of hermeneutics we term "predictive hermeneutics." In layman's terms, we argue that contemporary art (fr. modernism to conceptualism & beyond)… Continue reading Predictive Hermeneutics
Sexual… Narcissism?
One end of sexual desire’s many spectrums is self-reflexivity, a desire not for the other but for the other’s desire. That is to say, desire indirectly for the self. Culturally this manifestation of sexuality is associated more with women than men. I’ll refrain from commenting on how gendered or inherent this kind of desire is, and… Continue reading Sexual… Narcissism?
The 1975’s Brief Inquiry
1. The 1975 “One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover… [W]hat perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to… Continue reading The 1975’s Brief Inquiry
Flowers in a Pop(ul)ist Paradigm
Spilled Reality, “One more on The 1975?”: The 1975 bloomed late in pop critics’ multi-decade questioning of masculine-rockist values like authenticity and edginess. In the new pop(ul)ist paradigm, entertainment value and its near heuristic, melodic propulsion, are strong arguments for aesthetic quality in themselves. Authenticity is redefined, less a matter of sheer aesthetic originality (anxiety… Continue reading Flowers in a Pop(ul)ist Paradigm
Teenage v. Depressive Ontology
Taken from Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher, esp. “No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division,” and “K-Punk, or the Glampunk Art Pop Discontinuum.” On Teenage Ontology: Romanticism is the dressing-up of Teenage Ontology as an aesthetic cosmology. Teenage Ontology is governed by the conviction that what really matters is interiority: how you feel inside, and what… Continue reading Teenage v. Depressive Ontology
Against Expression
In his introduction to The Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Craig Dworkin positions conceptual writing in opposition to romantic expression, to writing that conveys “the emotional truth of the self.” But he replaces it with a vision of writing that's true to its linguistic self, writing that can't be conceived of as taking any other form. What… Continue reading Against Expression
Someplace, Somewhere, Someone
When the shitty stream is gone, it will be remembered and missed. We will miss the warm filter of fuzz from digital compression, the aesthetics of illegality. The vignetting of television shows as means of escaping the algorithms of copyright detection; the avant framing of filmic action in still photoframes, sometimes bland and decoratively abstract,… Continue reading Someplace, Somewhere, Someone
Enthusiasm, Play, and “Cool”
Idea: Young animals of countless species have been observed engaging in play, exploring their environment, testing boundaries, and entering low-stakes simulations of behavior that will in adulthood become high-stakes (e.g. wrestling, hunting, dollhouses). In humans, playful exploration in this sense is associated with the sincere enthusiasm of discovery—young children can still be surprised or highly… Continue reading Enthusiasm, Play, and “Cool”
Sontag v. Top-down Frames
The title of Sontag's "Against Interpretation" is misleading, and regularly confuses readers who believe her "erotics of art" precludes interpretive dot-connecting and inference. This is not the case: the piece is more accurately titled "Against Allegorization," or "Against Ideological Readings" — those hermeneutic approaches that set out to find "encoded" and symbolic meanings in a work… Continue reading Sontag v. Top-down Frames
