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The Mute Text Monument to the Second Millennium

By Mute contributors, 13 January 2004

Textual time travel courtesy of Mute contributors' heroes The Human League, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, John Milton, Félix Guattari, Toni Negri, Jacques Attali, Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Michael Bakunin, John Jesurun, Confucius, John Cage, Martin Heidegger, Antonin Artaud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nikola Tesla, Joe Denver and Gary Chalk, Ibn Al-Haytham, Danilo Kis and Imamu Amiri Baraka.

A classic science fiction narrative involves a timetravelling hero who goes back into the past in order to avert/ensure the structure of the present. Far from adding or subtracting elements in a straight line of causality – killing a future tyrant, protecting the infant messiah – the hero discovers that his very presence in the past is the thing that gives rise to the present he is seeking to influence. The riddle is: how was this present possible before the hero's journey into the past? Answer: the present and the past are a figure of eight, reciprocally generating each other; there is no past without the present but the present is also always staged in the past. This is a paradox that the Mute Text Monument to the Second Millennium takes to heart: by asking our past contributors to select a text fragment that has influenced their own personal development, or that seems prescient or that could be said to have had an 'impact on history', we are creating a picture of the present which simply didn't exist before.

The millennium itself is an opportunity for time travel and the reinvention of the present through a return to the past for the sake of the future. Text is the time machine which seems to guarantee our return to a stable moment in the past but which rides on an eight-shaped stretch of track leading us back to the present. Text is also no exception to the rule of time travel, creating its own reality as it attempts to negotiate existing ones. The success of the textual reality depends on the demise of other semiotic systems and with it other future/past scenarios. This monument could certainly be accused of perpetuating the tyranny of text. Using images of non-textual inscription – anything from tattoos to the rings of a tree – artist Tjebbe van Tijen helps to redress the imbalance through an investigation of some parallel forms of time engineering.

“Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything that is sought for its own sake are not interested in other things. Finding the truth is difficult, and the road to it is rough. For the truths are plunged in obscurity. It is natural for everyone to regard scientists favourably. Consequently, a person who studies their books, giving a free rein to his natural disposition and making it his object of understand what they say and to possess himself of what they put forward, comes (to consider) as truth the notions which they had in mind and the ends which they indicate. God, however, has not preserved the scientist from error and has provided no safeguards for science from shortcomings and faults. If this had been the case, scientists would not have disagreed upon any point of science, and their opinions upon any (question) concerning the truth of things would not have diverged. The real state of affairs is however quite different. Accordingly, it is not the person who studies the books of the scientists and gives free rein to his natural disposition who is the real seeker after truth. But rather the person who in thinking about them is filled with doubt, who holds back his judgement with respect to what he has understood of what they say, who follows proof and demonstration rather than the assertions of a man (scientist) whose natural disposition is characterised by all kinds of defects and shortcomings. A person, who studies scientific books with a view to knowing the truth, ought to turn himself into a hostile critic of everything he studies. He should criticise it from every point of view and in all its aspects. And while thus engaged in criticism he should also be suspicious of himself and not allow himself to be easy-going and indulgent with regard to the object of his criticism. If he takes this course, the truth will be revealed to him and the flaws in the work of scientists will stand out clearly.”

From ibn Al-Haytham's On Analysis and Synthesis Ibn al-Haytham (d. Cairo, 1040) wrote these words during the first decades of the second millennium. They were written towards the end of his life when he had already published his masterpiece, Discourse on Light, which laid the foundations of optics. Al- Hathyam not only made the discovery that light travels in a straight line and forms an inverted image in the eye, but also formulated the laws of refraction (later attributed to Snell), made the first pin-hole camera, developed a scheme to dam the Nile (it was built over nine hundred years later) and developed trigonometry. He was the first to explicitly connect mathematics with empirical work and suggest the creation of a new breed of scholars who based their researches on observation, experimentation and empirical analysis, thus laying the foundation of the 'Scientific Method' as we know it today. “The first essential”, for physicists – as he called his scientists – “is that they perform experimental work and conduct experiments. For he who performs neither practical work nor conducts experiments will never attain conclusive proof of knowledge.”

Ziauddin Sardar <zsardarATskynow.net> is editor of Futures, co-editor of Third Text and Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the City University. He writes a science column for the New Statesman. His Orientalism has just been published by the Open University Press.

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“But this is Phil talking I want to tell you What I've found to be true I love your love action” from the Human League's Love Action

Simon Pope <EscapeCommitteeATcompuserve.com>, I/O/D member and multi-media developer

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“The present, like the past, is laughter and hills, where from to listen. Understand if you can, blood. The all-the every. The solitary is the unitary-development. Of everything. We were sitting at the edge of civilisation. The missing teeth & split heads of our fossils were not yet in place in weightless metal blocks.

(...) All the knowledge & experience was put into machines to code & store & ultimately grade. The machines became judges and final arbiters of life and evolution. And they themselves evolved and passed from artifact to organifact to mental self projecting communalised intelligences. The ancient men gave themselves to the machines with the obsession of finding a purity impossible among themselves.

(...) But the continued worship of man would be like ancient presocial warmakers regarding their corpuscules with special awe. The term 'man' fell into disrepute or disuse.

(...) Sea air planet sub-planetary experiences arranged in the tonal points or 'Gods'. (Dig the ancient mss of Sun-Ra.) Expressed simultaneously by all the great machine-Gods, created the era in which we now live. Everything, as it was, disappeared. The 'invisible music', exchanging cultural forms, in constant revelationary consciousness, 'appeared' in lower seen.

(...) Organic nation factories roaming invisibly closer to one another. Each huge and loving. Are we finally atoms or men or suns. We are Gods and machines. And the magnetism lessens the machine of us. It is the magnetism that is the music structure, the sound, the life, the flow, the intelligence, the cosmogenetic factor, itself. Our name is magnetism. As the unity forms our name is the single intelligence. It is the music itself. It is all that is created, the creator the force the single all everything 00000000000000000000000000000000”

Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoy Jones), “God and Machine”, 1970, in Sonia Sanchez (ed.) We Be Word Sorcerers, Bantam Books, New York, 1973

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If we can believe the history books, Amiri Baraka transformed himself from a black nationalist to a third world Marxist writer sometime around 1970. Connecting the hi-tech of computers with a creation mythology, he created an early piece of Black Futurism with this text, obviously in the tradition of Sun Ra's Myth Science.

Ulrich Gutmair, member of Berlin-based Net audio group, convex tv <supertxt@mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de> [www.art-bag.net/convextv]

“Let the dead bury the dead. Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into the new life.” Karl Marx, Letter to Ruge

McKenzie Wark, author of Celebrities, Culture & Cyberspace <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>

“The twenty-first century is already inhabited by new realities, subjects or machines: by new projects or concrete utopias. It is inhabited by a new race of people that capitalist knowledge and control can no longer subdue. The twentieth century, with the experience of reformism and its crisis, has shattered all continuity. Beyond those limits, a new individual is advancing. This individual is a bundle of knowledge, power and love, the likes of which have never been seen before. Science, the artificiality of knowledge, ethical deterritorialisation and communism, constitute the elements of an irreducible ontological determination – that is, a decisively new, highly original, ontological break. The new individual is atheist because s/he can be god and his/her imagination has the violence of one who knows how to reconquer the universe, annul death and propagate and defend nature and life.” Toni Negri, The Politics of Subversion, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989, p.73

From “The End of the Century”, an essay by the Italian autonomist Marxist Toni Negri, first published in English in 1989. It seems likely that as the century ends Negri will still be in prison both serving a sentence and awaiting trial for further charges relating to his alleged leadership of the Red Brigade. This is in spite of the fact that Negri has continuously denied such charges, has consistently attacked the Red Brigade's strategies of violence in his writings, and voluntarily returned from exile. A website chronicling Negri's relations with the Italian state, which includes an online petition for his release, can be found at: [lists.village.viriginia.edu/~forks/TNmain.htm]

Dr. Charlie Gere <c.gereATbbk.ac.uk> is MA tutor of Computer Applications for the History of Art Department at the Birkbeck College, University of London.

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“Those rippling joints, the musical angle the arm makes with a forearm, a falling foot, an arching knee, fingers that seem to come loose from the hand, all this is like a constant play of mirrors where human limbs seem to echo oneanother, harmonious orchestral notes and the whisper of wind instruments, conjure up the idea of a passionate aviary where the actors themselves are the fluttering wings.”Sampled from Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theatre” fromThe Theatre and its Double

Kodwo Eshun <kodwoATthoughtware52.freeserve.co.uk>, journalist and author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Quartet, 1998

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“It was very early one morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn't very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: 'You asking me the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I can't find it myself.' 'Give it up! Give it up!' said he, and turned with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.” Franz Kafka, “Give it Up!”, in The Collected Short Stories of Franz Kafka Suhail

Malik <s.malikATgold.ac.uk> is a writer and lecturer at Goldsmiths College

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Here's my historical quote. It's the fluttering of the unpublished mystery beyond the human babble: [._..-...-......—..._______............-...............———...........—-......................——-......................................- _....-....... ...— .................................—..................................................—........_____................................—-.........—— .......................................................................................................——-......................................——.....- ............-..............................______..._____................................................._____.....]

Ebon Fisher <alulaATinterport.net>, digital artist

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In this part of the play a boy is trapped in a celluloid world where confusion reigns over what is the real reality. His friend (Whitey) is outside now, but was a 'captive' before. Just a poetic and old illustration...

“Whitey: Where will you go?

Sparky: Somewhere out into outer space. Hopelessly out into outer space. Alone. Alone. I will be dreamy and sad, dreamy and sad, always dreamy sad for a very long time and I will last forever because I am on film and it will be my pleasure to play you over and over and over again for my pleasure and freedom and my inspiration. I will play you over and over and over again until you are shredded year after year, year after year for a thousand years, real soft and real loud whenever I want, however I can, whenever I want because after that that's all I'll be able to do, over and over again for a thousand years because that's all I'll ever know how to do by then and I'll just keep doing it and I'll just keep playing over and over again for you, over and over again until I turn to shreds and when I turn to shreds you'll still hear me in your brain cavity over and over again for a thousand years and you'll always feel free because of that and even when they say I don't have a brain I will have a brain because I will have a brain because I do have a brain because I am a brain because the brain is right there in the plug or in your hand or in the light bulb or in the groove or whatever, over and over again because I do have a brain and I can sing if I want to because I can sing, because I can. Is that right? Do you understand me? Right? What is your name? Excerpt from Deep Sleep by John Jesurun,1985.

Josephine Bosma <jesisATxs4all.nl> is a journalist, writer, radiomaker and organiser in the field of art and new media. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

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For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute their aerie purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfill.John Milton, Paradise Lost

This Renascence Editions text was transcribed by Judy Boss in Omaha, Nebraska, and is provided by Renascence Editions with her kind permission. This edition is in the public domain. Content unique to this presentation is copyright © 1997 The University of Oregon. For nonprofit and educational uses only. Send comments and corrections to the Publisher.or: [darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/lost/pl1.html]

Caroline Bassett <sppa1ATsusx.ac.uk>

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“We are confronted with portentous problems which cannot be solved just by providing for our material existence, however abundantly. On the contrary, progress in this direction is fraught with hazards and perils not less menacing than those born from want and suffering. If we were to release the energy of the atoms or discover some other way of developing cheap and unlimited power at any point of the globe, this accomplishment, instead of being a blessing, might bring disaster to mankind... The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land...'' Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: the autobiography of Nikola Tesla, Hart Bros., 1982.

Originally appeared in The Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919. Tesla's statement may be called a 'bombastic pronouncement', but I also find it funny and mysterious. I choose it because, with all his great insights and good intentions, Tesla fails to make clear what exactly the difference is between those projects he assigns to the category of “providing for out material existence” and those he grants the honour of “tending to unification and harmony.” To me the question of which is which (yes, let's discover some way of developing cheap power; no, let's not create lakes and rivers for transformation of arid deserts....or, the other way around?) seems quite appropriate when shooting off into the next millennium.

Noortje Marres <noortje.marresATjanvaneyck.nl>, theorist in residence, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht

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“If we could escape this end-of-century moratorium, with its deferred day of reckoning, which looks curiously like a work of mourning – a failed one – and which consists in reviewing everything, rewriting everything, restoring everything, face-lifting everything, to produce, as it seems, in a burst of paranoia a perfect set of accounts at the end of the century, a universally positive balance sheet (the reign of human rights over the whole planet, democracy everywhere, the definitive obliteration of all conflict and, if possible, of all 'negative' events from our memories), if we could escape this international cleaning and polishing effort in which all the nations of the world can be seen vying today, if we could spare ourselves this democratic extreme unction by which the New World Order is heralded, we would at least allow the events which have preceded us to retain their glory, character, meaning and singularity.” Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, (L'Illusion de la Fin),1992.

Benedict Seymour <benATbseymour.freeserve.co.uk>, Writer

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“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way that it actually was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger. Historical materialism is concerned to grasp hold of an image of the past as it unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of tradition and its receivers. For both it is one and the same threat: that of becoming a tool for the ruling classes. In each epoch the effort must be made again to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is on the point of overpowering it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he also appears as the overpowerer of the anti-Christ. Only that writer of history possesses the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is convinced that even the dead are not safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not stopped winning.” Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI of Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1939-40, in Gesammelte Schriften 1:ii, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main, 1991, p. 695

Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History warn of the danger of technological fetishism, arguing that it is social relations which determine the liberatory import of new technologies, particularly those that are used in the labour process. This caution, which warns that what promises our emancipation turns out again and again to enslave us further, seems to me to be an apposite one for today's cyberfuturists. But my chosen thesis specifically concerns the past in memory. As the millennium flips over, and as we leave a year of anniversaries – the beginning of the second world war, the 'fall of the wall' – celebrated in numerous documentaries (and those unmarked and uncelebrated ones like the German Revolution of 1919, The Wall Street Crash of 1929) – it is apparent that history is written in the image of the present-day victors. The actors in history turn into ghosts, left only with overwritten memories of what they thought they had participated in. Benjamin makes the past a re-winnable zone, opens its meanings to unredeemed possibilities, and so brings life into dead time, providing, then, the comforting thought that this moment now might yet be recognised for what it is and can be in the next millennium.

Esther Leslie <eleslieATglobalnet.co.uk> lectures at a London University and has written on Walter Benjamin and cartoons.

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“So much for the past.” A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Danilo Kis

Ted Byfield <tbyfieldATpanix.com>, comoderator of the nettime mailing list, freelance editor and writer.

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“Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties – the power to think and the desire to rebel.” Michael Bakunin, God and the State, Eng. translation, 1916, Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York.

I am dreaming of digital atheism. A revolt against all forms of born-again fundamentalism, AOL Puritanism, mediocre good will, nice people and their spiritual moments. No more physics or scientists, desperately seeking for the gods behind the atoms. There is a future for this new nihilism in making fun of virtual phantoms of all sorts. For the time being, while we wait for all forms of organised (post) communism to fade away, there are the Bakunins, Stirners and Nietzsches to re-read.

Geert Lovink <geertATxs4all.nl>, sub Euro Net critic aka media activist.

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“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all the instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communications, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto 1848/1952: 47 – Progress Press, Moscow)

I think it is interesting that the 'immensely facilitated' means of communications of the English translation might also be rendered with a stronger affirmation when translated as 'infinite release' – the 'unendlich erleichterten' suggests also the release of a never-ending opening of communications that already anticipates the continually developing communications environment characteristic of the information order today.

John Hutnyk <john.hutnykATgold.ac.uk> is a lecturer in the Visual Anthropology programme at Goldsmiths College and author of The Rumour of Calcutta: tourism, charity and the poverty of representation and the forthecoming Critique of Exotica, which will be published by Pluto Press next year.

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“There is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from this decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no person could have dreamed would come their way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius power and magic in it. Begin it now.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The obvious relevance of this text is for individual action, but the reason I like this as a millennial text is that it's a philosophy which could also be applied to whole societies and civilisations. From this perspective, our future collectively is what we choose to make it – we can dream of a world we'd like to live in and then commit ourselves to making it come into being.

Margaret Wertheim <margaretwATgte.net> is the author of Pythagoras Trousers, a history of physics and religion, and most recently The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.

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“It will be a decisive programmatic point of the social ecology to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to set them on a path to singularisation. It is important to concentrate on those dispositions which can be useful for the production of subjectivity, and which work towards an individual and/or collective reconstitution of the self, instead of furthering the business of the mass-medial machine which represents a permanent state of emergency and desperation. Far from the search for a stupefying and infantilising consensus the aim in the future will be to nurse dissent and create singularity. Not only should the many practices be neither homogenised nor combined by a transcendental guardianship, but they should be sensibly taken into a process of the production of dissimilarity, of heterogenesis, that is a continuous process of resingularisation. It is appropriate to allow for the unfolding of cultural specificity while inventing new agreements about citizenship. It would be useful to maintain singularity, exception, scarcity, alongside the least weighty state order. The individuals must, simultaneously, become socially integrated and ever more different.” Text collage from: Felix Guattari's Les Trois Ecologies.Paris: Ed. Galilee, 1989, p.21, 46-7, 49, 64, 76 (page numbers refer to the German ed. Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994; transl. AB)

Andreas Broeckmann <andreasATv2.nl>, cultural theorist and networker, Berlin/Rotterdam

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<fragmentOne> “How is it far, if you think of it?”

Confucius: Analect IX:30 which generated Pound: Canto LXXVII:465 </fragmentOne>

<fragmentTwo>

This is the 'title' only from the title page of New Yorkbased artist Xu Bing's Book from the Sky. I consider it to be one of the most important artworks of the century. As is the rest of the book. This title is literally (and Transculturally) illegible. I've put a short essay about it up on my website at: [www.shadoof.net/in/ts.html]

</fragmentTwo>

John Cayley <cayleyATshadoof.net> is a Londonbased text art practitioner who invests in poetics chiefly by way of networked and programmable media.

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“...I'm twenty seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh...” and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Hari Kunzru <hariATmetamute.com>

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Been out all night, I needed a bite I thought I'd put a record on I reached for the one with the ultra-modern label And wondered where the light had gone It had a futuristic cover (Lifted straight from Buck Rogers) The record was so black it had to be a con The autochanger switched as I filled my sandwich And futuristic sounds warbled off and on...

“The Black Hit Of Space It's the one without a face It's the hit that doesn't fit You can only see the flip The Black Hit Of Space Sucking in the human race How can it stay at the top When it's swallowed all the shops?”

As this song climbed the charts The others disappeared 'Til there was nothing but it left to buy It got to number one Then into minus figures Though nobody could understand why

The Black Hit Of Space It's the one without a face It's the hit that doesn't fit You can only see the flip The Black Hit Of Space Sucking in the human race How can it stay at the top When it's swallowed all the shops?

I couldn't stand this bland sound any more so I walked towards my deck to turn it off. All I could see was the B-side of the disc which had assumed a doughnut shape with the label on the outside rim. I reached for the arm which was less than one micron long but weighed more than Saturn and time stood still. I knew I had to escape but every time I tried to flee, the record was in front of me.

The Black Hit Of Space Get James Burke on the case It's the hit that's never gone Time stops when you put it (on) The Black Hit Of Space, The Human League, 1980

Martin Conrads <conradsATzedat.fu-berlin.de> hit space in the late 60s and, as of the early 00s, will live as a freelance author and convex tv member in Berlin. Present data warble off and on.[www.art-bag.net/convextv]

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“You must make haste for you sense it is not safe to linger by the smoking remains of the ruined monastery. The black-winged beasts could return at any moment. You must set out for the Sommerlund capital of Holmgard and tell the King the terrible news of the massacre: that the whole Elite of Kai warriors, save yourself, have been slaughtered. Without the Kai Lords to lead her armies, Sommerlund will be at the mercy of their ancient enemy, the Darklords.

Fighting back tears, you bid farewell to your dead kinsmen. Silently, you promise that their deaths will be avenged. You turn away from the ruins and carefully descend the steep track.

At the foot of the hill, the path splits into two directions, both leading into a large wood.

If you wish to take the right path into the wood, turn to 85. If you wish to follow the left track, turn to 275. If you wish to use your Kai Discipline of Sixth Sense, turn to 141.” Lone Wolf Book 1, Flight from the Dark by Joe Denver and Gary Chalk, Arrow Books, London, 1984.

Saul Albert <saul.albertATvirgin.net>, Kai Worrier

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Each instrument, each tool, theoretical or concrete, implies a sound field, a field of knowledge, an imaginable and explored universe. Today, a new music is on the rise, one that can neither be expressed nor understood using the old tools, a music produced elsewhere and otherwise.” Jacques Attali

“What characterises the work of those musicians radicalised by their relation to bit-oriented reproductive technologies is the effort to raise the technical preconditions of their musical material to the level of cultural expression. That is to say, they struggle to make audible the noise/information polarity that both grounds contemporary listening and undermines it.” Martin Heidegger

“A freak is also a monster, a marginal. To improvise, to compose is thus related to the idea of the assumption of differences, of the rediscovery and blossoming of the body. 'Something that lets me find my own rhythm between the measures' (Stockhausen). Composition ties music to gesture, whose natural support it is: it plugs music into the noises of life and the body, whose movement it fuels. It is thus laden with risk, disquieting, an unstable challenging, an anarchic and ominous festival, like a carnival with an unpredictable outcome.” Jacques Attali

“Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth-century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom.” John Cage

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us, when we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” John Cage

“We must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics.” Jacques Attali Drew

Hemment <drewATfuturesonic.com> is a writer and the initiator/organiser of FutureSonic