petak, 9. veljače 2018.

Cosmic Communities - Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity

Image result for Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity

Tek u svemiru možeš istinski promijeniti seksualni poredak. A tu je i Hans Henny Jahn, najveći njemački književni bacač raketa i mraka.


Cosmic Communities:
Coming Out Into Outer Space – Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity

an exhibition organized by Diedrich Diederichsen &  Christopher Müller


feat. Marcus Behmer, Stefan George, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hans Henny Jahnn,  Lutz Bacher, Hans Kayser, Ludwig Gosewitz, Jordan Belson,  Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, The Fool, Rogério Duarte,  The Red Krayola/Mayo Thompson, Walter de Maria, Sigmar Polke,
Emil Schult, Isaac Abrams, John McCracken, Pedro Bell, Kai Althoff,  Henrik Olesen, Öyvind Fahlström, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sun Ra,  Hartmut Geerken, Albert Oehlen, Jack Goldstein, Jutta Koether,  Isa Genzken, Palermo, John Coltrane, Tony Conrad

2 November 2017 – 13 January 2018


Space is the place where the homosocial collides with the cosmos in this group exhibit that brings together works by artist muscians, art collectives and composers in a show that challenges “Western, bourgeois sexual order” by going off-planet to the realms of the spiritual, the magical and the psychedelic.


The curatorial flight of fancy suggested by this show’s wryly incantatory title makes for a dense and surprising group show, co-organized by Diedrich Diederichsen and Christopher Müller. Their springboard is the cultish literary cliques that orbited two Germans in the early twentieth century, the poet Stefan George and the writer and organ builder Hans Henny Jahn. The men’s rejection of bourgeois heterosexual mores and their quests for alternative cosmic harmonies are seen here as paving the way for such far-flung explorations as Jordan Belson’s “Brain Drawings,” from 1952, and the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. Some of the most visually compelling works invoke sound, including Tony Conrad’s freestanding “Fair Ground Electric Horn,” a conceptual instrument made from a big white funnel, and Lutz Bacher’s forensic-looking floor display of organ pipes. One lush highlight is an oil-painting outlier: Isaac Abrams’s golden-hued dream garden, from 1965.
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/cosmic-communities-coming-out-into-outer-space-homofuturism-applied-psychedelia-magic-connectivity




Tony Conrad, “Fair Ground Electric Horn” (2003), large funnel, hose clamps, copper tubing, metal mouthpiece, 182 x 121.5 x 55.9 cm, installation view, Galerie Buchholz, New York 2017 (all images courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York)
In his Nobel Prize-winning novel The Glass Bead Game (1943), Hermann Hesse writes,
For we do not regard even the perfect hierarchy, the most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of lifeless units that count for nothing in themselves, but as a living body, formed of parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and freedom.
Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space – Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity at Galerie Buchholz on the Upper East Side takes the living body of early 20th-century utopian intellectual communities as its starting point. Organized by cultural historian Diedrich Diederichsen and the gallery’s Christopher Müller, the exhibition brings together art and ephemera spanning the 20th century, anchored by two German literary and intellectual groups from the fin-de-siècle period: the circle of Symbolist poet Stefan George, and Ugrino, the polyamorous community headed by writer Hans Henny Jahnn.
George (1868-1933), a political reactionary whose work was adopted by the Nazis for his advocacy of self-sacrifice and his belief in a secret, true Germany, was at the center of the George-Kreis, an academic circle modeled on classic Greek organizations. Although George was celibate, the Hellenic principle of man-boy love permeated his circle and work.
Stefan George, installation view, Galerie Buchholz, New York 2017
In the exhibition, a small collection of ephemera by and about George includes his book Maximin: ein Gedenkbuch (A Memorial Book1907), dedicated to his friend Maximilian Kronberger, as well as a drawing (c. 1900) and matching 1908 etching by Marcus Behmer, George’s follower and a member of one of the world’s first homosexual organizations. Both of Behmer’s works are called “Prometheus” (the latter, “Prometheus (Stefan George)”)
The curators sharply contrast Behmer’s charming, folksy imagery with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1976 slapstick comedy Satansbraten (Satan’s Brew), presented here on a video monitor along with film stills, in which a frustrated writer adopts a high camp image and surrounds himself with male prostitutes to model himself on George.
Hans Henny Jahnn, who was also an organ builder, founded Ugrino in 1920 with his partner, the musician Gottlieb Harms, as a utopian community dedicated to literature, architecture (specifically, sepulchral), and baroque music. Jahnn, whose dramas were censored in 1920s Germany for their portrayal of “deviant” sexuality (incest and self-mutilation), seemed to equate sexual liberation with personal and collective freedom, exemplified in the sexual interrelationships between male and female Ugrino members.
Hans Henny Jahnn inspecting the St. Ansgar organ, Hamburg, 1931, xerox
Although George and Jahnn diverged in their political views, both circles espoused a kind of magic or cosmic utopianism that could be achieved by abandoning bourgeois social and sexual mores and pursuing intellectual and aesthetic ideals.
In their exhibition essay, the curators explain:
[…] we are here primarily addressing the special cases [of collectives] in which the supposed cosmic laws, the musical and mathematical harmonies of planetary orbits, and the numerical ratios that can be found in both nature and music serve as justifications for recasting interpersonal, societal, but also sexual relationships. Ideas of Pythagoras or Kepler here created all-encompassing artistic equivalences which were meant to organize contemporary forms of coexistence as well as important artistic and scientific work, and which were also supposed to give rise to the society of the future.
The first of the exhibition’s two galleries features Ugrino architectural plans and insignia, as well as Jahnn’s sketches for organs, a photograph of a test organ, an undated painting of Jahnn by Karl Kluth, and photographs of Jahnn (in one, he poses alongside an organ). The result is the beginning of what could easily be developed into an archival solo showcase on Jahnn.
Instead, the exhibition leads from George and Jahnn to various 20th– and 21st-century artists, musicians, and intellectuals “by similarity and association” rather than direct lines of influence. The correlation between transmission devices and mysticism is one of the exhibition’s leitmotifs, in works such as “Telefon” (1971), a screenprint of a nondescript telephone mounted on yellow paper by Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter; Sigmar Polke’s “Telefonzeichnung (Gespräch)” (“Telephone Drawing (Conversation),” 1975); Emil Schult’s 1974-75 cover design for Kraftwerk’s recording Radioactivity (Radioactivität); Walter de Maria’s stainless steel “High Energy Bar” (1966); and two iterations of Isa Genzken’s “Weltempfänger” (“World Receiver”), the first, from 1982, a radio, and the second, from 2017, a concrete cast of a radio with attached antennae.
Jordan Belson “Brain Drawing” (1952), ink on paper, approx. 24.8 x 24.8 cm
The “cosmic” evolves, by mid-century, into psychedelic album covers by the Dutch design collective The Fool and the British design team Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (including a 1968 album by Fats Domino), as well as a selection of Funkadelic album covers from 1973 to 1981, designed by Pedro Bell.
The most interesting objects are those that hold logic and mysticism in suspension, as in a series of geometric drawings (1968-1971) and undated glass vessels by Ludwig Gosewitz that mirror the graphic sci-fi cover of a 1969 edition of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.   There are also Jordan Belson’s ink Brain Drawings (1952) of biomorphic forms, Öyvind Fahlström’s series Improvisations for Nightmusic (1967), and two multicolored mandala drawings from 1971 by John McCracken (which fall loosely into the psychedelic camp).
The exhibition is strongest conceptually when the curators focus on collectives and artists seeking a new social and cosmic order through art. Following George and Jahnn, Diederichsen and Müller home in on scientist Hans Kayser (1891-1964), avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brazilian designer and musician Rogério Duarte, and the prophetic composer and performer Sun Ra.
Hans Kayser / The Urantia Book, installation view, Galerie Buchholz, New York 2017
Kayser’s book Der Hörende Mensch (The Hearing Human, 1932), along with reprints of his musical scales and Duarte’s sketches and diagrams, suggest further paths that the exhibition could have explored, given more space and resources. The former’s theory of harmonics based on the Table of Pythagoras identifies harmonics in music with harmonious structure in nature. Duarte, a pioneer of the Tropicalismo movement in Brazilian music and art, was also a political activist who turned to Hinduism late in life.
Undated musical notations by Stockhausen, done in colored marker on paper, are accompanied by several of his recordings and photographs documenting a performance of his 1974 science fiction opera Sirius, in which emissaries from another planet send a message to Earth. Costume designs for Sirius by Stockhausen’s then-wife, artist Mary Baumeister, are also on view.
Installation view, Galerie Buchholz, New York 2017
Sun Ra’s presence dominates much of the exhibition’s second room. He is represented by numerous record jackets, as well as his own drawings and designs for his album covers, photographs by Hartmut Geerken of a 1971 Sun Ra Arkestra performance in Cairo, and a 1994 publication by Geerken, Omniverse Sun Ra, displayed alongside two diagrams by John Coltrane, “The Circle of Fifths” (1961).
Cosmic Communities can be perceived in two distinct ways: as a whole in which major and minor players equally contribute to a tapestry of information and images, or as a study of the key players and their philosophies, with many of the above-mentioned works serving as supplemental material. A slightly different exhibition emerges with the latter, raising questions rather than simply illuminating aesthetic and philosophical connections.
The emphasis on music privileges Jahnn’s influence over George’s, but music is just one mode — if the primary one — of achieving utopias; and utopia is sought in these cases through a collective mentality in which order is imposed and a male leader is installed even as the establishment is rejected.
Installation view,  Galerie Buchholz, New York 2017
Diederichsen explained by email that an exhibition exploring the theme of homosocial and homosexual male collectives in the early 20th century “excludes women, not because we want to do this, but because they [the collectives] did.” (In fact, a selection of works from the 1960s and later decades are by women. However, Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who belonged to a women’s circle called The Five, could have inspired another genealogy.)
The representation of George and his circle in the exhibition is ambivalent, although Fassbinder’s portrayal in Satansbraten targets his persona perhaps more than his reactionary politics. Yet, despite the liberal politics of Jahnn and most of the included artists, a reactionary outlook is embedded in the patriarchal structure and strict order of the collectives; paradoxically, mysticism aligns here with authoritarianism, though it’s not so paradoxical in practice: George and Jahnn emerged from the fount of 19th-century German philosophy, which celebrated ancient Greece and advocated cultural renewal as a rejection of so-called “decadence” (i.e., moral or constitutional weakness). The same philosophy is easily co-opted into fascism.
The exhibition essay, available on the gallery’s website, clarifies some points (a publication is tentatively planned for next year), but not all of the questions it raises are answerable. What risks do we run of whitewashing history when we aestheticize reactionary politics and the myth of the male “artist-genius”? There are clear affinities among George, Jahnn and Sun Ra; how does this juxtaposition impact the relationship between Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism and the American Civil Rights movement? On the other hand, what do we gain by ignoring these histories and apparent affinities, or their aesthetic value? How do we tread the line between aesthetics and ideology? Between the art world’s responsibility to art and to fair and inclusive representation?
Hartmut Geerken, photograph of Sun Ra Arkestra performing at Balloon Theater, Cairo, December 17, 1971
At one time, it would have been enough to appreciate the aesthetic value of these artifacts and artworks without attention to the implications. That this is no longer the case is not a loss. Cosmic Communities invites us into a dialogue. It presents us with a choice between passive pleasure and active questioning.
And it concludes with a skeptic. On a wall near the gallery’s back office, a manifesto by experimental composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad, from his 1995 CD Slapping Pythagoras, savages Pythagorean harmonics. It ends, “And here’s a slap, too, for stealing the names of all your sect members and taking credit for their works. […] Slapping you Pythagoras, it makes me feel like I’m rising, like watching falling water.”   - https://hyperallergic.com/421249/the-cosmic-utopianism-of-two-fin-de-siecle-collectives/

David Rimmer - Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970)


Film lebdi u vremenu, odlazi, nestaje, vraća se. Metafizika kao Goldbergova varijacija; nenarativna recikliranja nađenog filmskog celofana.

















David Rimmer

Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
   
This three volume set brings together some of David Rimmer’s most seminal early works. Born in Vancouver, BC, Rimmer has been a pivotal figure in the city’s art scene since the early ’70s. Known for his experimentation with superimposition, looping and optical printing, Rimmer’s aesthetic reflects a “West Coast sensitivity to landscape, poetry and psychedelia” – Mike Hoolboom.
Internationally celebrated filmmaker David Rimmer has over 25 experimental and documentary film and video productions to his credit. Throughout his prolific career, he has worked primarily in film, video and photography with his expertise extending to a variety of other media. His multi-faceted background includes working in performance, sound, sculpture, holography and dance.
Widely considered to be a key contributor to the emergence of film as an art form, Rimmer’s innovation has led to much acclaim. In addition to his provocative work as an artist, he is an instructor in the film and video program at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

David Rimmer is one of Canada's best-known and influential experimental filmmakers. This 3-volume set brings together Rimmer’s seminal early works, made between 1968 and 1986. Born in Vancouver, BC, Rimmer has been a key figure in that city's avant garde and in New York City. Rimmer’s films are known for their formal experimentation with looping, superimposition and optical printing. But they also go beyond structuralist strictures to operate on a poetic and metaphoric level.


Canada / 13:00 / 1968 / sound / colour
“'Square Inch Field' surveys the micro-macro universe as contained in the mind of man. In that square inch field between the eyes... Rimmer projects a vision of the great mandala of humanity's all-time experience in space/time... powerful aesthetic integrity." - Gene Youngblood
Canada / 11:00 / 1969 / sound / colour
"Rimmer describes 'Migration' as 'organic myth,' and he recalls that shooting began with the central image of a dead deer on a beach. Subsequently, he worked on either side of that image (shooting and editing) towards a composition that predominantly featured visual rhythms (which) are the result of an integration of two interesting techniques - flash-frame montage and 'writing' with the hand-held camera... Naturalism is subordinated to a kinetic interaction with organic life processes and decay." - Al Razutis, Vancouver Art Gallery
Canada / 8:00 / 1969 / silent / colour
Using fixed-frame timelapse, fifteen hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. It was originally designed to be displayed like a painting: rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen that was framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.
Canada / 6:00 / 1970 / silent / colour
“‘Blue Movie’ was made for the international Dome Show where it was projected down onto the muslin surface of David Rimmer's geodesic dome. The audience lay on the floor looking up at it, the inside of each eye finishing the globe” (Gerry Gilbert, B. C. Monthly Magazine). Screened as a traditional "cinema" film, "Blue Movie" is about movement on the film surface.
Canada / 5:00 / 1970 / silent / b/w
“Treefall" was originally made for a dance performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April, 1970. Structured in the form of two loops of high-contrast images of trees falling, reprinted and overlapped.
Canada / 5:00 / 1970 / sound / b/w
"With an irresistible humour, Rimmer speculates in 'The Dance' on the nature of the film loop. We see a (1920’s) couple whirling around a dance floor at a dizzying pace... Even after the technical building block of the film is evident, the vertiginous effect remains... Uncanny in its ability to evoke complexity of responses from a simplicity of means.” - Art and Cinema, #2
Canada / 5:00 / 1970 / silent / colour
"The loveliest Rimmer film shows a river boat slowly steaming past the Houses of Parliament - so slowly that it seems not to be moving, and surrounded by such luminous mistiness that one critic is supposed to have thought he was looking at a Turner painting rather than at film footage. Gradually the surface of the film begins to wrinkle slightly, to spot, to show minor blemishes.... The gesture is tentative and discreet, but it is also unsettling and liberating in ways that seem central to the gentle invocations of dissolution that are a basic feature of David Rimmer's world." - Roger Greenspun, New York Times
Volume Two
Running time 53:30 min
Canada / 8:30 / 1970 / sound / colour
"The most exciting non-narrative film I've ever seen.... The basic image is a female factory worker unrolling a large sheet of cellophane.... The film resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction." - Kristine Nordstrom, The Village Voice
Canada / 11:00 / 1971 / silent / b/w
"The basic image derives from a shot of women in (Edwardian era ) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight-second loop, [Rimmer] cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over and over again.... Rimmer also chose to use the forms of surface imperfections, the scratches and dirt patterns, as bases for his loops." - Kristina Nordstrom, The Village Voice
Canada / 13:00 / 1971 / sound / colour
Selected moments from eight months of street life outside a Manhattan pizza parlour, as seen from a fourth-floor loft. People coming and going, changes in weather, light. My first dramatic film. (DR)
“A cheerful, slightly crazy jauntiness prevails that may be as close as film form can come to really capturing a mood of the city." - Roger Greenspun
Canada / 11:00 / 1973 / silent / b/w
A mathematically ordered restructuring of two seconds (48 frames) of stock newsreel footage, primarily concerned with the frame as information unit and the change in formation between frames.
"The first frame of the original shot is frozen for 1200 frames (approximately one minute), the next two for 600 frames, the next four for 300 frames, etc. The result is a slowly accelerating montage and a concretization of the 'real' event through time. It is as if a re-invention of the motion picture domain of 'reality' was being undertaken." - Al Razutis, Vancouver Art Gallery
Canada / 10:00 / 1973 / silent / colour
"Variously relaxed, apprehensive, or relieved, the fractured gestures of a woman and a baby are played backward and forward, frame by frame, like a musical phrase." - Ian Birnie
“‘Fracture’ presents the viewer with a narrative riddle, one which is related directly to the nature of parallel construction ... [It] successfully isolates and exploits basic cinematic codes and conventions, such as screen direction and open-frame composition, in the creation of an implied and poetic narrative." - Al Razutis
Volume Three
Running time 63:00 min
Canada / 9:00 / 1974 / silent / colour
Vancouver harbour, with its railyards, mountains and passing ships, is a vista in fluid transformation as three winter months are reviewed in ten minutes. What interested me about the shot were the horizontals: train tracks, the water, the mountains, the sky. In the way those four elements would change. (DR)
Canada / 9:00 / 1975 / silent / colour
Designed as a companion piece to “Canadian Pacific.” Shot from a window two storeys higher, on the fourth floor of the next building east from the artist's studio of the previous year: December 1974 to February 1975. Can be projected alone or in double-screen format with "Canadian Pacific."
Canada / 10:00 / 1980 / silent / colour
Starting with a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape evolves out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point - suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.
Canada / 11:00 / 1984 / sound / colour
A film which deals with aspects of male and female representation, spatial and temporal dislocation, and notions of framing and containment.
Canada / 15:00 / 1986 / sound / colour
"Much of the imagery seen on TV is first captured on film; here the filmmaker has reversed the process. As the title suggests, this film foregrounds the aesthetic nature of the television/cinematic medium by manipulating its pictorial qualities - image grain, scan lines and its luminous colour qualities. The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen.... ‘As Seen on TV’ is a moving film which conveys a deep-seated human experience." - Maria Insell

Film Descriptions excerpted from loop, print, fade + flicker: David Rimmer’s Moving Images
Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970. 8 mins.)
Or he might make a loop out of a woman throwing some cellophane on a table and then unravel every possible variation, in every colour and combination of colours (Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper, 1970). The way he could measure time and rhyme it out second after second like a musician working off a riff, like old Bach sitting down at the clavier running out his variations. David could make the fragments sing.
Surfacing on the Thames (1970. Silent, 10 mins.)
He was a recycler, working with remnants until the audience could feel it right along with him, holding that bit of plastic in his hands. He might dissolve one frame into the next frame into the next, so you’d slowly watch a barge cross the River Thames, along with a storm of golden dust and scratches (Surfacing on the Thames, 1970).
Narrows Inlet (1980. Silent, 8 mins.)
He takes his camera out on a boat and click clicks a frame at a time even though he can’t glimpse a thing.He’s caught in the fog and there’s nothing there at all until a sliver of colour appears, and then slowly, oh so very slowly, the fog lifts and the tree line lives again, staring back at the camera with all of its colour and height resolved. Another small miracle of looking
Real Italian Pizza (1971. 12 mins.)
"And I was a little reluctant to take my camera out on the street because it’s a tough place, you know, and a lot of people would try and steal it from me, I guess. And I didn’t know the rhythmof the city enough to...So I thought, 'Why not just stick it out the window?' And fortunately, across the street, this is four floors up, there was a pizza parlour and there was a lot of activity going on in front of it: kids would hang out there, drug deals would go on, or ..."
As Seen on TV (1986. 14 mins.)
So he lays a snippet of epileptic seizure between day-glo-coloured TV bits until the seizure becomes a comment on televisual spasmwhich he names As Seen on TV.
Bricolage (1984. 11 mins.)
He runs a loop of sound and picture out of joint until the sound comes all the way back and accompanies the picture again in Bricolage (1984).
On the Road to Kandahar (2003. 5 mins.)
Tiger (1994. 5 mins.)
Divine Mannequin (1989. 7 mins.)
Padayatra (Walking Meditation) (2006. 12 mins.)
An Eye for an Eye (2003, 12 mins.)
An experimentalist even today, directly applying colour on 35mm film in films like An Eye for an Eye (2003), a review of many of Rimmer’s earlier films such as Migration (1969), Landscape (1968), Canadian Pacific I (1974) and Canadian Pacific II (1975) set his work in sharp relief against the common structuralist penchant for indoor scenarios and confined settings, and constantly return us to the cultural contexts and broad visual "scapes" of Vancouver and British Columbia (both urban and rural) repeatedly invoked throughout his work.
Local Knowledge (1992, 30 mins.)
His second great "period" comes to an end with Local Knowledge (1992). It is a reckoning and last stand. Not a movie that could ever be made by a young man, its time-compressed skies and hunters and fishers and motorboat reveries narrate a home movie reading of the west coast. - http://www.thecinematheque.ca/loop-print-fade-flicker-david-rimmer%E2%80%99s-moving-images/david-rimmer-evening-i



DAVID RIMMER: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS by Al Razutis




Cover of Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker

Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer's Moving Images

By Mike Hoolboom & Alex MacKenzie, Anvil Press (March 1, 2009)

The Pacific Cinémathèque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers.

PRAISE FOR RIMMER’S WORK:
There is no better way to start off Pacific Cinémathèque’s Monograph Series, celebrating West Coast filmmakers, than with the work of David Rimmer. Mike Hoolboom’s essay tantalizes us with a romantic myth that contextualizes David, while Alex MacKenzie’s interview lets the artist speak for himself. Both offer a unique insight into the art practice of one of the most influential Canadian filmmakers of the 20th century. — Ann Marie Fleming,  independent filmmaker and visual artist

For David Rimmer, film is a way of seeing, a way of experiencing life. And there are no two better filmmakers to take us on this journey of coming to understand Rimmer and his practice than Mike Hoolboom and Alex MacKenzie. Before there was even the awareness of a filmmaking culture in Canada, one “more concerned with dramatics,” Rimmer was breaking the rules as they were being made. Working with film as a canvas, Rimmer’s works are technical experimentations incorporating found footage, optical and contact printing and hybrid film and video forms. Like that other Economics major turned self-taught filmmaker, Guy Maddin, Rimmer is a seminal Canadian filmmaker and a must-study for any student of Canadian cinema. — Cecilia Araneda,
Executive Director, Winnipeg Film Group

[Rimmer’s] Surfacing on the Thames is a brilliant film which, in its way, belongs in the same class as Snow’s Wavelength. I’ve never seen anything like it … the ultimate metaphysical movie.— Gene Youngblood, ArtsCanada magazine

The most exciting non-narrative film I’ve ever seen … images become polarized into grainy outlines, like drawings in white or colored chalk which gradually disintegrate and disappear. The film [Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper] resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction.— Kristina Nordstrom, The Village Voice


četvrtak, 8. veljače 2018.

Qualia Computing - There is no other intellectual challenge more important or pressing than qualia









Reverse-engineering of consciousness.
Ok, našli smo leteći tanjur, sad moramo otkriti kako su ga izvanzemaljci napravili; ok, našli smo u sebi samosvijest (unutrašnji "osjećaj" svijesti = qualia), sad trebamo otkriti kako ju je "evolucija" napravila.


https://qualiacomputing.com/




“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” (Schopenhauer)




The concept of qualia is clearly at the heart of the next stage of human intellectual endeavors.
There is no other intellectual challenge more important or pressing than qualia.
The revolution can only be brought about by a combination of a rigorous scientific thinking and a trembling sensitivity.




It is the greatest intellectual challenge for humanity at present to elucidate the first principles behind the fact that there is such a thing as a subjective experience. The hallmark of our subjective experiences is qualia. It is the challenge to find the natural law behind the neural generation of qualia which constitute the percepts in our mind, or to go beyond the metaphor of a “correspondence” between physical and mental processes. This challenge is necessary to go beyond the present paradigm of natural sciences which is based on the so-called objective point of view of description. In order to pin down the origin of qualia, we need to incorporate the subjective point of view in a non-trivial manner.
The clarification of the nature of the way how qualia in our mind are invoked by the physical processes in the brain and how the “subjectivity” structure which supports qualia is originated is an essential step in making compatible the subjective and objective points of view.
The elucidation of the origin of qualia rich subjectivity is important not only as an activity in the natural sciences, but also as a foundation and the ultimate justification of the whole world of the liberal arts. Bridging the gap between the two cultures (C.P.Snow) is made possible only through a clear understanding of the origin of qualia and subjectivity.


2018

Every Qualia Computing Article Ever

2017

Burning Man* (long)
Psychedelic Science 2017: Take-aways, impressions, and what’s next* (long)
How Every Fairy Tale Should End
Political Peacocks (quote)
OTC remedies for RLS (quote)
Their Scientific Significance is Hard to Overstate (quote)
Memetic Vaccine Against Interdimensional Aliens Infestation (quote)
Raising the Table Stakes for Successful Theories of Consciousness*
Qualia Computing Attending the 2017 Psychedelic Science Conference
GHB vs. MDMA (quote)
Hedonium

2016

The Binding Problem (quote)
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes(long)
Thinking in Numbers (quote)
Praise and Blame are Instrumental (quote)
The Tyranny of the Intentional Object*
Schrödinger’s Neurons: David Pearce at the “2016 Science of Consciousness” conference in Tucson
Beyond Turing: A Solution to the Problem of Other Minds Using Mindmelding and Phenomenal Puzzles*
Core Philosophy*
David Pearce on the “Schrodinger’s Neurons Conjecture” (quote)
Samadhi (quote)
Panpsychism and Compositionality: A solution to the hard problem (quote)
LSD and Quantum Measurements: Can you see Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive on acid?(long)
Empathetic Super-Intelligence
Wireheading Done Right: Stay Positive Without Going Insane(long)
Just the fate of our forward light-cone
Information-Sensitive Gradients of Bliss (quote)
A Single 3N-Dimensional Universe: Splitting vs. Decoherence (quote)
Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States(long)
So Why Can’t My Boyfriend Communicate? (quote)
The Mating Mind
Psychedelic alignment cascades (quote)
36 Textures of Confusion
Work Religion (quote)
Qualia Computing in Tucson: The Magic Analogy*
In Praise of Systematic Empathy
David Pearce on “Making Sentience Great” (quote)
Philosophy of Mind Diagrams
Ontological Runaway Scenario
Peaceful Qualia: The Manhattan Project of Consciousness(long)
Qualia Computing So Far
You are not a zombie (quote)
What’s the matter? It’s Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac’s (quote)
The Biointelligence Explosion (quote)
A (Very) Unexpected Argument Against General Relativity As A Complete Account Of The Cosmos
Status Quo Bias
The Super-Shulgin Academy: A Singularity I Can Believe In (long)
The effect of background assumptions on psychedelic research

2015

An ethically disastrous cognitive dissonance…
Some Definitions (quote)
Who should know about suffering?
Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity(long)
Google Hedonics
Solutions to World Problems
Why does anything exist? (quote)
State-Space of Background Assumptions
Personal Identity Joke
Getting closer to digital LSD*
Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures 2: Going Meta
On Triviality (quote)
State-Space of Drug Effects: Results*
How to secretly communicate with people on LSD*
Generalized Wada Test and the Total Order of Consciousness*
State-space of drug effects
Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research: Textures* (long)
I only vote for politicians who have used psychedelics. EOM.
Why not computing qualia?*
David Pearce’s daily morning cocktail (2015) (quote)
Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures
Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace? (quote)
A workable solution to the problem of other minds*
The fire that breathes reality into the equations of physics (quote)
Phenomenal Binding is incompatible with the Computational Theory of Mind
David Hamilton’s conversation with Alf Bruce about the nature of the mind (quote)
Manifolds of Consciousness: The emerging geometries of iterated local binding
The Real Tree of Life
Phenomenal puzzles – CIELAB
The psychedelic future of consciousness
Not zero-sum
Discussion of Fanaticism (quote)
What does comparatively matter in 2015?
Suffering: Not what your sober mind tells you (quote)
Reconciling memetics and religion.
The Reality of Basement Reality
The future of love

2014

And that’s why we can and cannot have nice things
Breaking the Thought Barrier: Ethics of Brain Computer Interfaces in the workplace
How bad does it get? (quote)
God in Buddhism
Practical metaphysics
Little known fun fact
Crossing borders (quote)
A simple mystical explanation






In this video I outline the core philosophy and objectives of Qualia Computing. There are three main goals here: 
  1. Catalogue the entire state-space of consciousness
  2. Identify the computational properties of each experience (and its qualia components), and
  3. Reverse engineer valence (i.e. to discover the function that maps formal descriptions of states of consciousness to values in the pleasure-pain axis)
While describing the 1st objective I explain that we start by realizing that consciousness is doing something useful (or evolution would not have been able to recruit it for information-processing purposes). I also go on to explain the difference between qualia varieties (e.g. phenomenal color, smell, touch, thought, etc.) and qualia values (i.e. the specific points in the state-spaces defined by the varieties, such as “pure phenomenal blue” or the smell of cardamom).
With regards to the 2nd objective, I explain that our minds actually use the specific properties of each qualia variety in order to represent information states and then to solve computational problems. We are only getting started in this project.
And 3rd, I argue that discovering exactly what makes an experience “worth living” in a formal and mathematical way is indeed ethically urgent. With a fundamental understanding of valence we can develop precise interventions to reduce (even prevent altogether) any form of suffering without messing up with our capacity to think and explore the state-space of consciousness (at least the valuable part of it).
I conclude by pointing out that the 1st and 2nd research programs actually interact in non-trivial ways: There is a synergy between them which may lead us to a recursively self-improving intelligence (and do so in a far “safer” way than trying to build an AGI through digital software). - algekalipso

OPEN Foundation: 31 video-lectures on psychedelic research






openfoundation
Narkoanaliza, normalizacija psihodelije.


The OPEN Foundation (Stichting OPEN in Dutch) is an interdisciplinary organization that aims to stimulate research into all aspects of the psychedelic experience. By organizing lectures, conferences and other informative meetings at universities, the goal of OPEN is to draw the attention of researchers towards this promising scientific subject. We want to spread honest information on both the potential and the risks of psychedelics, and hope to decrease the taboo that still surrounds the study of psychedelics. OPEN functions as a central node in an ever increasing network of national and international experts in the field of psychedelic research. A central focus in the coming years will be the facilitation and funding of psychedelic research in the Netherlands.







Stephen Whitmarsh - A Fully Emerged Neuroscience Expedition into the Shamanic Ayahuasca Experience from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Wouter Hanegraaff - Entheogens and Contemporary Religion from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Robin Carhart-Harris - Neuroimaging Studies with Psilocybin and MDMA from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Konstantin Kuteykin-Teplyakov - Molecules of Mysticism: Pharmacology meets Anthropology from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Joe Bicknell - Cognitive Phenomenology of the Psychedelic Experience from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Torsten Passie - Astonishing Similarities of Physiological and Psychoactive Drug Induced States from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Klaas Pieter van der Tempel - Psychedelic Consciousness and the Future of Academia from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.

Ayahuasca and Antropology, Amazonian Shamanism & Western Science from OPEN Foundation on Vimeo.