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Text: Julie Joy Clarke Photo: Åge Langhelle |
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| It is all through the eyes and fingers>>>>>>>>the tap, tap, tapping, in soft and smooth rhythm>>>>>>>long monotonous tones of the airconditioning unit on the lower level provides the aural backdrop>>>>>>>establishing shot in the forever, forever silent landscape>>>>>>>this new stimuli is mechanic>>>>or siliconic>>>>>>>it is in bursts and fits, and epileptic proportions around me>>>>I write, and yet my geographic location is under threat>>>>am I there yet>>>>am I in travel mode?>>>>>my lover, is not my lover - he is text on the screen and words that migrate through space>>>>>the only thing we have is the screen and.......nothing more>>>>>>>there IS only this moment>>>>>only these sounds, save for memory>>>>>>and I now no longer know where that resides | |
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Being and non-being in cyberspace 1Remember this is a trace, don’t forget to read insertions, quotes, footnotes, allow yourself to be transported, there is no need to assume that this is a linear text, you may read each line as it captures your eye. In a cool place a vision of a warmer place entered her vision.........everything that has been lived directly has now moved into the domain of representation (Debord) Hazy, disturbed insects rise from decaying matter. The flesh perceived as outmoded, clings to the body as memory and strange poisonous thoughts infect the subcutaneous layer. She takes on surreal proportions, flies unrestricted in a different space of information. Something other than her has been here.She imagines herself as a hologram and no strength of mind can hold onto phantoms other than this. The empty spaces are fleshed out with objects. The rooms become containers of ideas and take on new life of playfull and serious interior and exterior planes. We enter the spaces and use them as a catalyst to modify and manipulate. As you make them, you then become the Labyrinth and are lost.The spaces are secretive or revealing, enclosed or open, full or sparce. The rooms are enclaves of display and parody other places. The original is subverted and work becomes art and art becomes work.If you cannot follow this, it is not because I have misguided you, but that YOU have misguided you. The silent and potent architecture of this space exerts an influences which is expressed in small hieroglypic forms that move across the silent white. Nothing is revealed in anxiety and the fear and acknowledgment of our own nothingness. When we imagine a space (time in which we will be a non-being, inhabiting or collapsing into that non-space of nothingness - and this happens because we objectify and make present this nothingness. In this new space of new stimuli which is hardly defineable we can swim with other bodies and still remain alive, after touching the nothing, which touches us. The anxiety is the knowledge of the other as the nothing and a sudden retreat from this space, which is filled with non-forms, except for the text, which moves forever and ever, receeding into a soft hiss in the cool void.This transcendence, is a dying, if only briefly, a departure from the physical plane. The body cannot be left behind to whither and dry in the bright screen light. Death must enter and being and non-being must also enter, but life too, in all its potent desire must too. Being is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing Heidegger, Basic Writings And so, the non-body, the electric body (WE ARE ALL ELECTRIC BODIES -WE ALL DESIRE TO BE ELECTRIC BODIES) is stimulated by the punctuated message on screen - the sudden jolt into consciousness of the black space and the icons that the fill the edges - or, sudden freeze - ice in my veins runs like steel rod into the cortical region - nothing, and then the bump of a screen leap and flicker, and a strange knowledge and intimacy with the other as the non-space of ourselves, and that this other IS the space of death - which, like the face1 or the dark and empty city windows that give nothing in the night sky, look back at us blankly. If only everything was a simple as making words run together - the death and the life as co-existence, haunt and torment. 2Action/responseWho are you really, with your smooth talk wrapped around an indelible persona? I imagine that between the cracks something will spill. "So, what stimulates you?" Her spine crackles with anticipation, as if the question was also the response. "Photograph me in cut glass and razer blades - with the edges in my skin, so that I know that I am alive! Mutilate me with words - autopsy my brain." Is this new stimuli? Is this all that is left for a body so anaesthesised with information that the flesh just hangs limp. My body a beehive. My body, an insect infestation of such splendour that each small microatom is moving, as if the parts were separate and distinct and in no need of the other parts. I am in each, and I am in none. For I am no longer myself, but other in this distinction of sameness and difference, here and beyond, closeness and distance. 3Acute anxiety She imagined briefly, that she was only hologram and her physical self was the apparition. Her body in usual state was too heavy, too fixed. Her holographic self was more fluid, attained great velocity, cut through space and time in mind speed. Voice carried slower, as if it were trapped in vocal chords that were chained to some fixed place in history - not about now, and not about the future. Panic occurs. Voice carried in, a long way off, and into the screen. Then faded. Glits ends in flat and empty surface slate. She imagined other - and the anxiety which began slowly somewhere in the middle of her body, overtakes and become her. The adrenalin slides into consciousness. Her tremulous body in spasm pounds. 4New Stimuli I am watching myself as I type myself on the screen. Cursor beats time, makes the distinct space between this word and the next. It is awareness that this, this, is, happening; and at light speed can be somewhere else, away from me, and yet still with me in memory.
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Åge Langhelle
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