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‘The country blooms – a garden, and a grave’, Oliver Goldsmith ‘The Deserted Village’.

Nick Groom – ‘Let’s discuss over country supper soon’ – Rural Realities and Rustic Representations

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“The whole ambition of the picturesque was to rework the natural world into a ‘landscape’ – a word that came to England at the end of the sixteenth century
from the German, via the Dutch. Early English uses of ‘landskip’ are strongly cultural – the word is used to describe paintings,
particularly the backgrounds of paintings, and thereby any view that could conceivably be painted.”

“The picturesque encouraged the critical appreciation of nature as a spectacle. Observers of a scene – the word ‘scene’ itself reveals the implicit theatricality of viewing – became an audience, by turns appreciative or critical.
Hence natural landscapes became part of culture, and were understood, judged, and painted according to artistic conventions and aesthetic theories.
For a growing proportion of the increasingly urban population, initial encounters with natural landscapes would be through the medium of art: representations delivered either by pastoral poetry or in picturesque images.”

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‘In grand scenes, even the peasant cannot be admitted, if he be employed in the low occupations of his profession:  the spade, the scythe, and the rake are all excluded.’ What was allowed was pastoral idleness:  the lazy cowherd resting on his pole . . . the peasant lolling on a rock’, an angler rather than a fisherman, and gypsies, banditti, and the occasional individual soldier in antique armour. The image of the countryside  presented therefore looked very much in need of improvement – slack, inefficient, indigent, lawless, and archaic. Moreover, once ‘improved’ the landscape was likely to be as empty of agricultural labour as the picturesque depicted it since nearly all the peasantry would have been forced off the land.

0848 – New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle (2018 book)

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.

From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.
In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. (VERSO)

James Bridle on New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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man always makes it clear to himself: “You are using things which have the intention of not being penetrable.” 1180

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“The Magellan and Pioneer space probes near Venus have reported through radar imagery (or radio-based imaging) that “snow” on the surface of Venus contains large quantities of lead sulphide. It is not hard to imagine a situation that certain geological tracts of this metallic snow act as a coherer in the presence of radio waves from outer space, clumping together to mark forever the arrival of a message from distant stars, like an interstellar telegraph in Morse Code. Two years before Karl Jansky’s discovery of the cosmic radiophony, Hart Crane wrote in the poem Cape Hatteras:

“And from above, thin squeaks of radio static,

The captured fume of space foams in our ears —

What whisperings of far watches on the main

Relapsing into silence, while time clears

Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects

A periscope –””

The kohl-makers of Venus

((( 1/फे )))

@fadesingh

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“(…) perhaps the crash will look like a string of blockbuster movies pandering to right-wing conspiracies and survivalist fantasies, from quasi-fascist superheroes (Captain America and the Batman series) to justifications of torture and assassination (Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper). In Hollywood, studios run their scripts through the neural networks of a company called Epagogix, a system trained on the unstated preferences of millions of moviegoers developed over decades in order to predict which lines will push the right – meaning the most lucrative – emotional buttons.  Their algorithmic engines are enhanced with data from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and others, whose access to the minute-by-minute preferences of millions of video watchers, combined with an obsessive focus on the acquisition and segmentation of data, provides them with a level of cognitive insight undreamed of by previous regimes. Feeding directly upon the frazzled, binge-watching desires of news-saturated consumers, the network turns upon itself, reflecting, reinforcing and heightening the paranoia inherent in the system.
Game developers enter endless cycles of updates and in-app purchases directed by A/B testing interfaces and real-time monitoring of players’ behaviours until they have such a finegrained grasp on dopamine-producing neural pathways that teenagers die of exhaustion in front of their computers, unable to tear themselves away.  Entire cultural industries become feedback loops for an increasingly dominant narrative of fear and violence.”

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

James Bridle (https://jamesbridle.com/)

809 – Ambient 4: On Land (1982)

Ambient 4: On Land is the eighth solo studio album by British ambient musician Brian Eno. It was the final edition in Eno’s ambient series, which began in 1978 with Music for Airports.

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On Land is a mixture of synthesizer-based notes, nature/animal recordings, and a complex array of other sounds, most of which were unused, collected recordings from previous albums and the sessions that created them. As Eno explained, “… the making of records such as On Land involved feeding unheard tape into the mix, constant feeding and remixing, subtracting and “composting”. (…) “instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones … I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work”.

Despite the music’s dark leanings, it is in a sense still highly “ambient” in that the tracks tend to blend into each other and thus fulfill all of Eno’s original expectations of what the term means. Nevertheless, there is still room for the occasional surprise, such as Jon Hassell‘s recognisable effect-laden trumpet in “Shadow“. Eno, cognizant of the deeper aural qualities, said, “On the whole, On Land is quite a disturbed landscape: some of the undertones deliberately threaten the overtones, so you get the pastoral prettiness on top, but underneath there’s a dissonance that’s like an impending earthquake”.

The album makes reference to definite geographical places, such as “Lizard Point“, named after the exposed, southernmost tip of mainland Britain, close to Land’s End in South-West England.

“Tal Coat” refers to Pierre Louis Jacob (1905–1985), aka Pierre Tal-Coat, a proponent of the French form of abstract expressionism, Tachisme. This interest in painting is reflected in his statement that the album was “… an attempt to transpose into music something that you can do in painting: creating a figurative environment. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art because it was abstract, not figurative. In contrast, my intention in On Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without referring to the history of music – more to a “history of listening””

“Lantern Marsh” was a place in East Anglia where he grew up. He remarks, “My experience of it derives not from having visited it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be”.

“Leeks Hills“, Eno explains, “is a little wood (much smaller now than when I was young, and this not merely the effect of age and memory) which stands between Woodbridge and Melton. There isn’t a whole lot left of it now, but it used to be quite extensive. To find it you travel down the main road connecting Woodbridge and it lies to your left as you go down the hill”.

“Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960” is named after the once prosperous seaport of Dunwich, England, which eroded into the sea over a period of three hundred years. (wiki <3)

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“Hardware and software is culturally biased. Robotic epistemologies are caught in a 500-year bubble, a particular way of looking at the world,” Lewis says. “It gave us some good things, but it also gave us colonialism, slavery, and sustained environmental degradation. Do we really want those biases trained into future technologies and A.I.?”

Indigenous peoples are decolonizing virtual worlds

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Pulp-horror, archaic science fiction and the darker aspects of folklore share a preoccupation with exhumation of or confrontation with ancient super-weapons categorised as Inorganic Demons or xenolithic artifacts. These relics or artifacts are generally depicted in the shape of objects made of inorganic materials (stone, metal, bones, souls, ashes, etc.). Autonomous, sentient and independent of human will, their existence is characterised by their forsaken status, their immemorial slumber and their provocatively exquisite forms. […] Inorganic demons are parasitic by nature, they […] generate their effects out of the human host, whether as an individual, an ethnicity, a society or an entire civilisation.
— REZA NEGARESTANI, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

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