The Powers That Be by FCINY

The Powers That Be

The Powers That Be a reader Edited by Ilari Laamanen

The Powers That Be reader was produced on the occasion of the exhibition, The Powers That Be, curated by Ilari Laamanen, on view at the Station Independent Projects in New York City, July 17–August 9, 2015. Editor: Ilari Laamanen Designer: Johanna Lundberg Typeface: FCINY by Schick-Toikka Printer: Tallinna Raamatutrükikoda, May 2015 The exhibition and reader was realized as part of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York’s (FCINY) 25th Anniversary program focusing on the Urban Nature. Kindly supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Exhibition supported by Frame Visual Art Finland. www.fciny.org

Preface 6

n:o 1 10

David Abram: Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 12

Veijo Rönkkönen’s Sculpture Park 22

n:o 9 24

Erkki Pirtola: Shaman Johannes Setälä 26

Nietzsche: The Hermit 30

Danila Tkachenko: Escape 32

Marcel Mariën: Mains 46

Mika Taanila: The Future Is Not What It Used To Be 56

Jussi Parikka: DIY Futurology: Kurenniemi’s Signal Based Cosmology 70

Vappu Jalonen: Ether, Dirty 81

On the Knowledge of the Body By Ilari Laamanen

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The body itself is a living metaphor that mirrors the mind, emotions and spirit.â&#x20AC;?

When watching the documentary film ‘The Future Is Not What It Used To Be’ by Mika Taanila, it seems not much has changed since the 1960s. In the film, members of a Scandinavian avant-garde group of sound artists, composers and performers tell how the ultimate motive for their 1968 exhibition ‘Feel It’ was to produce primary experiences instead of secondary watching. In 2015, that very idea remains as important as fifty years ago.1 The exhibition ‘The Powers That Be’, on view at the Station Independent Projects from July 17 to August 9, 2015, and this accompanying reader take as their point of departure the knowledge of the body and the circulation of energy, more specifically the manifestations of physical energy. To write about the circulation of energy can seem dubious, though, as the concept of energy is incessantly moving away from the rational and agreed upon (written language, that is). Furthermore, during the recent years, energy has become a much-used concept and a source for wonder for both artists and theorists alike. Yet I feel the need to do just that, as I believe there is a continuous, if often underlying, need for the primary physical experience alongside and in connection with the virtual and immaterial one. The importance of touch, and specifically the need to use one’s hands to communicate, sense and connect with the immediate surroundings, is something fundamental. The challenge lies in articulating these often deeply personal experiences in verbal and non-verbal ways. Energy in this context is treated more as a prerequisite for life and for any human activity than as a commodity or resource. The tactile nature of human behavior often functions on an unconscious level, although it is not completely separate from the conscious, either. It seems that, at times, we act based on raw impulses that cannot be traced back to any given order or reason. While physicists might call it the dance of the atoms, astrologers would suggest taking a closer look at the choreography of the luminaries and analyze our actions based on that. According to the Mayan order of the world, the body has a specific kind of consciousness through which messages are clearly delivered. In fact, the Mayans said that the body itself is a living metaphor mirroring the mind, emotions and spirit. Supposedly, the body also remembers all it has experienced and consequently holds the consciousness of the past within it, including past wounds and traumas. For healing these, it is important to remember the innocence of the body: one should always treat it with utter respect and engage in exploring whatever it may be asking one to see.

‘The Powers That Be’ does not so much use the act of destabilization as a method or analytical tool as it takes for granted that all we can rely on is change, to be quite frank. Knowledge is always in the state of becoming: it is never ready and should never be fixed. Therefore, to question is more meaningful than learning by heart and fitting in. When describing the emerging issues analysis, a method used in future predictions, futurologist Jim Dator talks about marginal people, offbeat publications and websites. He states the importance of trying to see things that are barely visible. More often than not these things are in the recesses of the mind of a scientist or engineer or the concerns of an artist, poet or unpublished novelist. Dator underlines the importance of the barely visible since quite often the most important breakthroughs and progressive ideas emerge on the fringes of society and culture, or within cultures quite different to ours.2 And often the ideas that seem most progressive are actually age-old, even ancient. The channels to understanding the knowledge of the body might not be so much in the future as they are in the past. One can see them in the traditions of indigenous cultures whose relationship with their habitat can come across as strikingly direct and spontaneous, at least when compared to contemporary life in metropolises. Focusing on the possibilities of the human mind and logic and creating progress accordingly has given the industrial societies so much, yet something quintessential has been diminished in the process, too. Cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram likes to point out that the human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled into and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.3 Even though the artworks featured in the exhibition ‘The Powers That Be’ can be seen as channeling transcendental experience – or the desire for such experience – the last resort is always the body and its ability and urge to connect and communicate with, and learn from, its habitat. However, our habitat does no longer only refer to the physical surroundings and nature we encounter but also to our connection to the shared virtual realm. This realm does not simply cut our minds loose from our bodies but rather alters the connection with our bodies by giving a very different experience or sensation than, for instance, taking a walk in the forest. While it remains unclear what the hybridization of humans and machines can actually mean, it is tempting to map

those very possibilities of extending both the human consciousness and the limits of corporeality. Nature and technology are not presented as enemies here but rather as two opposite poles creating a dynamic and tension in somewhat similar fashion as the mind-body relation. Artists’ visual and sonic languages create unique constellations and dynamism in each respective exhibition context. Similarly, each written text resonates differently depending on the suggested kinship with accompanying writers and their texts. That is why the exhibition ‘The Powers That Be’ and this reader are meant to act more as channels of the bodily knowledge and energy than as waypoints of a certain era or theoretical framework. The idea of bringing together different modes of communication (artworks, visual imagery, written text, graphic design) serves the essential: contemplation on the circulation of energy and information, of wandering concepts and unexpected experiences, with and through art.

1. Mika Taanila, 2002, The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, 35mm film 2. Jim Dator, 2009, Trend Analysis vs. Emerging Issues Analysis 3. David Abram, 1996, The Spell of the Sensuous, Pantheon, New York

The Magician is associated with the planet Mercury and carries with it skill, logic, and intellect. The number of the Magician is one, the number of beginnings. The Magician is the bridge between the world of the spirit and the world of humanity. His right hand holds a staff raised toward the sky and his left hand points to the earth. He takes the power of the Universe and channels it through his own body and directs it to the physical plane. Above the Magicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head is the symbol of eternity and around his waist is a snake biting its own tail, another symbol of eternity. His magical table holds all four suits of the Tarot, each of which represents one of the four primordial elements of the alchemists â&#x20AC;&#x201C; earth, air, fire and water. These symbolize the appropriate use of mind, heart, body and soul in the process of manifestation. The Magicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s robe is white; symbolizing the purity and innocence found in the Fool but his cloak is red, representing worldly experience and knowledge. In the bed of flowers at his feet this duality is repeated in the mix of pure white lilies and thorny red roses.

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth By David Abram

We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage upon which the human drama is enacted. History conceives the past mainly in terms of biography and nations. It seeks causality in the conscious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing. – Paul Shepard I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? – Young Ciijef, of the Cayuses tribe (upon signing over their lands to the U.S. government, in 1855)

PART I: ABSTRACTION

This text is an excerpt from David Abram’s book The Spell of The Sensuous. Originally published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

tories hold, in their narrative layers, the sedimented knowledge accumulated by our progenitors. To hear a story told and retold in one’s childhood, and to recount that tale in turn when one has earned the right to do so (now inflected by the patterns of one’s own experience and the rhythms of one’s own voice), is to actively preserve the coherence of one’s culture. The practical knowledge, the moral patterns and social taboos, and indeed the very language or manner of speech of any nonwriting culture maintain them16

selves primarily through narrative chants, myths, legends, and trickster tales – that is, through the telling of stories. Yet the stories told within an oral culture are often, as we have seen, deeply bound to the earthly landscape inhabited by that culture. The stories, that is, are profoundly and indissolubly place specific. The Distant Time stories of the Koyukon, the ‘agodzaahi tales of the Western Apache, and the Dreaming stories of the Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara present three very different ways whereby tribal stories weave the people who tell them into their particular ecologies. Or, still more precisely, three ways in which earthly locales may speak through the human persons that inhabit them. For meaningful speech is not – in an oral culture – experienced as an exclusively human capacity, but as a power of the enveloping earth itself, in which humans participate. The stories of such cultures give evidence, then, of the unique power of particular bioregions, the unique ways in which different ecologies call upon the human community. Yet these stories often provide evidence, as well, about specific sites within those larger regions. In the oral, indigenous world, to tell certain stories without saying precisely where those events occurred (or, if one is recounting a vision or dream, to neglect to say where one was when “granted” the vision), may alone render the telling powerless or ineffective. The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. To tell of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site, and indeed to participate in its expressive potency. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there – to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bub bling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence.

The Abstraction of Space and Time

As the technology of writing encounters and spreads through a previously oral culture, the felt power and personality of particular places begins to fade. For the stories that express and embody that power are gradually recorded in writing. Writing down oral stories renders them separable, for the first time, from the actual places where the events in those stories occurred. The tales can now be carried elsewhere; they can be 17

read in distant cities or even on alien continents. The stories, soon, come to seem independent of any specific locale. Previously, the power of spoken tales was rooted in the potency of the particular places where their events unfolded. While the recounting of certain stories might be provoked by specific social situations, their instructive value and moral efficacy was often dependent (as we saw with the Western Apache) upon one’s visible or sensible contact with the actual sites where those stories took place. Other stories might be provoked by a direct encounter with the species of bird or animal whose exploits figure prominently in the tales, or with a particular plant just beginning to flower, or by local weather patterns and seasonal changes. In such cases, contact with the regional landscape – and the diverse sites or places within that landscape – was the primary mnemonic trigger of the oral stories, and was thus integral to the preservation of those stories, and of the culture itself. Once the stories are written down, however, ‘the visible text becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories’ – the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly traces left by the animals, and by one’s ancestors, in their interactions with the local land. The places themselves are no longer necessary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human events that might just as easily have happened elsewhere. The trans-human, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely. In this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, performative character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing stories that once sprouted from every cave and streambed and cluster of trees on its surface, begins to lose its multiplicitous power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually, the felt primacy of place is forgotten, superseded by a new, abstract notion of “space” as a homogeneous and placeless void. Of course, many factors other than, but linked to, writing, contributed to the loss of a full and differentiated sense of place. The development of writing in the Middle East, as in China and Mesoamerica, was accompanied by a large increase in the scale of human settlements, as well as by a concomitant growth in the human ability, or willingness, to manipulate and cultivate the earth. Although the earliest shifts from hunting and foraging lifestyles to more sedentary, agricultural modes of subsistence are very ancient, and may have been prompted by climatic changes at the end of the last ice age,1 once the agricultural revolution began to accelerate, writing began to play an important role in the stabilization and subsequent spread of the new, sedentary economies. The ability to precisely measure and inventory agricultural surpluses, itself made possible by numerical and linguistic notation, enabled the new, highly centralized cities to survive and perpetuate themselves – especially through times of climatic extremity – and ultimately

enabled the commercial trading of surpluses, and the rise of nation-states. The new concentration of persons within permanent towns and cities, and the increased dependence upon the regulation and manipulation of spontaneous natural processes, could only intensify the growing estrangement of the human senses from the wild, animate diversity in which those senses had evolved. But my concern in this work is neither with agriculture nor urbanization – the enormous influences of which have been elucidated in numerous volumes – but rather with the curious question of writing; that is, with the influence of writing upon the human senses and upon our direct sensorial experience of the earth around us. We have seen that alphabetic writing functions to undermine the embedded, place-specific character of oral cultures in two distinct but related ways, one basically perceptual, the other primarily linguistic. First, reading and writing, as a highly concentrated form of participation, displaces the older participation between the human senses and the earthly terrain (effectively freeing human intention from the direct dictates of the land). Second, writing down the ancestral stories disengages them from particular places. This double retreat, of the senses and of spoken stories, from the diverse places that had once gripped them, cleared the way for the notion of a pure and featureless “space” – an abstract conception that has nevertheless come to seem, today, more primordial and real than the earthly places in which we remain corporeally embedded.

But if alphabetic writing was an important factor in the emergence of abstract, homogeneous “space”, it was no less central to the emergence of abstract, linear “time.” To indigenous, oral cultures, the ceaseless flux that we call “time” is overwhelmingly cyclical in character. The senses of an oral people are still attuned to the land around them, still conversant with the expressive speech of the winds and the forest birds, still participant with the sensuous cosmos. Time, in such a world, is not separable from the circular life of the sun and the moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and rebirth of the animals-from the eternal return of the greening earth. According to anthropologist Åke Hultkrantz: Western time concepts include a beginning and an end; American Indians understand time as an eternally recurring cycle of events and years. Some Indian languages lack terms for the past and the future; everything is resting in the present.2 Today it is easy for most of us, living amid the ever-changing constructions of literate, technological civilization, to conceive and even ‘feel’, behind all the seasonal recurrences in the sensuous terrain, the inexorable thrust of a linear and irreversible time. But for cultures without writing there is simply no separate vantage point from which to view and take note of

the subtle mutations and variations in the endless cycles of nature. Those changes that are noticed are often assumed to be part of other, larger cycles. For the overall trajectory of the visible, tangible world – the world disclosed to humankind by our unaided senses – is circular. Thus, in the words of Hehaka Sapa, or Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux: Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. . . . The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. . . . Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. . . .3 The curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articulate on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line. Yet to fully engage, sensorially, with one’s earthly surroundings is to find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles. The ancestral stories of an oral culture are recounted again and again – only thus can they be preserved – and this regular, often periodic repetition serves to bind the human community to the ceaseless round dance of the cosmos. The mythic creation stories of these cultures are not, like Western biblical accounts of the world’s creation, descriptions of events assumed to have happened only once in the far-off past. Rather, the very telling of these stories actively participates in a creative process that is felt to be ‘happening right now’, an ongoing emergence whose periodic renewal actually requires such participation. Mircea Eliade, in his important and enigmatic work ‘Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return’, has shown as well as any scholar the extent to which indigenous peoples inhabit a cyclical time periodically regenerated through the ritual repetition of mythic events.4 Within “archaic” cultures (Eliade’s term), every effective activity – from hunting, fishing, and gathering plants, to winning a sexual partner, constructing a home, or giving birth – is the recurrence of an archetypal event enacted by ancestral or totemic powers in the mythic times. The myths preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary models, for all the responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated. 5 By performing such activities with care, employing the very phrases and gestures disclosed in the Mythic Time, one actually becomes the ancestral being, and thus rejuvenates the emergent order of the world (just as the Pintupi tribesman on Walkabout, walking in the footsteps of his totem ancestor, is singing the world itself back into existence). Even highly unusual, extraordinary events are spontaneously assimilated to recurrent mythic prototypes. Thus, 18

“Yet to fully engage, sensorially, with one’s earthly surroundings is to find oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles.”

Cortes’s arrival on the shores of Mexico is interpreted by the Aztecs as the return of the minor god Quetzalcoatl to his kingdom (an interpretation instantly encouraged and exploited by the sly Cortes himself);6 similarly Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii is construed by Native Hawaiians as the return of the deity Lono.7 To oral cultures, and even to a partially literate society like the Aztec (whose largely pictorial writing remained perceptually bound to the visible forms of surrounding nature), human events take on meaning only to the extent that they can be located within a storied universe that continually retells itself; unprecedented events, singular encounters that have no place among the cycling stories, can have no place, either, among the turning seasons or the cycles of earth and sky. The multiple ritual enactments, the initiatory ceremonies, the annual songs and dances of the hunt and the harvest – all are ways whereby indigenous peoples-of-place actively engage the rhythms of the more-than-human cosmos, and thus embed their own rhythms within those of the vaster round.

The alphabet alters all this. in order to read phonetically, we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses and the encompassing earth. The letters of the alphabet, each referring to a particular sound or sound-gesture of the human mouth, begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves. They thus establish a new reflexivity between the human organism and its own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that organism and the land (the “reflective intellect” is precisely this new reflexive loop, this new “reflection” between ourselves and our written signs). Human encounters and events begin to become interesting in their own right, independent of their relation to natural cycles. Recording mythic events in writing establishes, as well, a new experience of the permanence, fixity, and unrepeatable quality of those events. Once fixed on the written surface, mythic events are no longer able to shift their form to fit current situations. Current happenings are thus robbed of their mythic, storied resonance; when the myths are written down, contemporary events acquire a naked specificity and uniqueness hitherto unknown. As some of these naked occurrences come to be described or written down, they, too, are thereby fixed in their particularity, and so assume their singular place within the slowly accreting sequence of recorded events. Thus does oral story gradually give way to written history. The cyclical shape of earthly time gradually fades behind the new awareness of an irreversible and rectilinear progression of itemizable events. And historical, linear time becomes apparent. But now let us step back for a moment. For by discussing in this somewhat cursory manner the influence of alphabetic writing upon the emergence of homogeneous “space” and linear “time,” I have perhaps left the impression that space and time were always – for oral peoples as for ourselves – distinguishable dimensions of experience, and that the literate 19

revolution simply altered the experiential character of these two, already distinct, phenomena. In truth, however, the very differentiation of “space” from “time” was itself born of the same perceptual and linguistic changes that we are discussing. For a time that is cyclical, or circular, is just as much ‘spatial’ as it is ‘temporal’.

The Indistinction of Space and Time in the Oral Universe

We touch here upon one of the most intransigent barriers preventing genuine understanding between the modern, alphabetized West and indigenous, oral cultures. Unlike linear time, time conceived as cyclical cannot be readily abstracted from the spatial phenomena that exemplify it – from, for instance, the circular trajectories of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Unlike a straight line, moreover, a circle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. Indeed, the visible space in which we commonly find ourselves when we step outdoors is itself encompassed by the circular enigma that we have come to call “the horizon.” The precise contour of the horizon varies considerably in different terrains, yet whenever we climb to a prominent vantage point, the circular character of the visible world becomes explicit. Thus cyclical time, the experiential time of an oral culture, has the same shape as perceivable space. And the two circles are, in truth, one: The Lakota define the year as a circle around the border of the world. The circle is a symbol of both the earth (with its encircling horizons) and time. The changes of sunup and sundown around the horizon during the course of the year delineate the contours of time, time as a part of space.8 On high plateaus in the Rocky Mountains, where the visible horizon is especially vast and wide, are circular arrangements of stones arrayed around a central hub. It is known that such “medicine wheels, “still used by various North American tribes, once served a calendrical function. Or, rather, they enabled a person to orient herself within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely temporal – the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of the sun’s northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in time (the summer solstice) as in space. A similar unity – of that which to us are two different dimensions, the spatial and the temporal – existed among the Aztecs at the time of the conquest, according to Diego Duran, a Spanish monk who arrived in Mexico in the first half of the sixteenth century: Duran reports that among the Aztecs, who distribute their years into cycles according to the cardinal points, “the years most feared by the people were those of the North and of the West, since they remembered that the most unhappy events had taken place under those signs.” 9

So a cyclical mode of time does not readily distinguish itself from the spatial field in which oral persons find themselves experientially immersed. We must remember, however, that this experiential space is itself very different from the static, homogeneous void that alphabetic civilization has come to call “space.” As we saw above, space, for an oral culture, is directly experienced as ‘place’, or as ‘places’ – as a differentiated realm containing diverse sites, each of which has its own power, its own way of organizing our senses and influencing our awareness. Unlike the abstraction of an infinite and homogeneous “space,” place is from the first a qualitative matrix, a pulsing or potentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness. It is a mode of space, then, that is always already temporal, and we should not be surprised that oral peoples speak of what to us are purely spatial phenomena as animate, emergent processes, and of space itself as a kind of dynamism, a continual unfolding. For instance, a recent, book-length analysis of spatial concepts among the Diné, or Navajo, concludes that for them [s]pace, like the entities or objects within it, is dynamic. That is, all “entities,” “objects,” or similar units of action and perception must be considered as units that are engaged in continuous processes. In the same way, spatial units and spatial relationships are “qualitative” in this same sense and cannot be considered to be clearly defined, readily quantifiable and static in essence.10 The authors assert, therefore, that a complex notion of spacetime (or, in their words, “time-space”) would likely be a more relevant translation of Navajo experience “than clearly distinct concepts of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space.”11 A similar situation was discovered by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in his extensive analyses of the Hopi language during the 1930s and early 1940s. Whorf found no analog, in the Hopi language, to the linear, sequential, uniformly flowing time that Western civilization takes for granted. Indeed, Whorf found no reference to any independent temporal dimension of reality, and no terms or expressions that “refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by implication leave a residue that could be referred to as time.”12 What we call ‘time’, in other words, could not be isolated from the Hopi experience of ‘space’,: In this Hopi view, [that which we call] time disappears and [that which we call] space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics.13 Whorf’s fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by researchers in other disciplines, to mean, among other things, that the Hopi people have no temporal awareness whatsoever, or that the Hopi language is utterly static, and has no way of distinguishing between earlier and later events, or 20

between occurrences more or less distant from the speaker in what we would call time. Such misreadings, doubtless encouraged by Whorf’s occasional propensity for vigorous overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to decry Whorf’s findings. Several researchers, working closely with the Hopi language, claim to have refuted Whorf’s conclusions entirely.14 Such refutations, however, are themselves dependent upon an oversimplified reading of Whorf’s conclusions, upon a crusading refusal to discern that Whorf was not asserting an absence of temporal awareness among the Hopi, but rather an absence, in their discourse, of any ‘metaphysical’ concept of time that could be isolated from their dynamic awareness of spatiality. While Whorf did not find separable notions of space and time among the Hopi, he did discern, in the Hopi language, a distinction between two basic modalities of existence, which he terms the “manifested” and the “manifesting.” The “manifested” corresponds roughly to our notion of “objective” existence, and it comprises “all that is or has been accessible to the senses . . . with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future.”15 The “manifesting,” on the other hand, comprises all that we call future, ‘but not merely this;’ it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental – everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the ‘heart’, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature, in the heart of nature [itself]. . . .16 The “manifested,” in other words, is that aspect of phenomena already evident to our senses, while the “manifesting” is that which is not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed to be psychologically gathering itself toward manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena. One’s own feeling, thinking, and desiring are a part of, and hence participant with, this collective desiring and preparing implicit in all things – from the emergence and fruition of the corn, to the formation of clouds and the bestowal of rain. Indeed, human intention, especially when concentrated by communal ceremony and prayer, contributes directly to the becoming-manifested of such phenomena.

While the language of the hopi belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, the neighboring Dine, or Navajo, speak an Athapaskan language-like the Koyukon and other tribes of the far Northwest, from whence the ancestors of the Apache and the Navajo first headed south many centuries ago. (The nomadic Navajo first came into contact with the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande valley around six hundred years ago, and ultimately adopted a range in the Arizona desert less than two 21

hundred years ago.) Nevertheless, the Navajo language also seems to maintain a broad notion of the influence of human desire and imagination upon a continually emergent world, a notion very analogous to that found by Whorf among the Hopi. In the 1983 study of Navajo semantics alluded to earlier, the authors claim that “existence,” for the Navajo, “should be understood as a continuous manifestation . . . [as] a series of events, rather than states or situational persistences through time.”17 They then go on to suggest that what Western people call “the future” is experienced by the Navajo to be like a stock of possibilities, of incompletely realized events and circumstances. They [these circumstances] are still most of all ‘becoming’ (rather than being) and involved in a process of ‘manifesting’ themselves. A human being can, through his thought and desire, exert an influence on these ‘possibles.’18 Thus, in place of any clear distinction between space and time, we find, in examples of both the Uto-Aztecan and the Athapaskan language groups, a subtle differentiation between manifest and unmanifest spatiality – that is, a sense of space as a continual emergence from implicit to explicit existence, and of human intention as participant with this encompassing emergence. The indistinction of space and time is also evident in the discussion of Aboriginal Australian notions of the ‘Alcheringa’, or Dreamtime. Like the Distant Time of the Koyukon, the Dreamtime does not refer to the past in any literal sense (to a time that is finished and done with), but rather to the temporal and psychological latency of the enveloping landscape. Different paths through the present terrain resonate with different stories from the Dreamtime, and indeed every water hole, every forest, every cluster of boulders or dry creekbed has its own Dreaming, its own implicit life. The vitality of each place, moreover, is rejuvenated by the human enactment, and en-‘chant’-ment, of the storied events that crouch within it. The Dreamtime, then, is integral to the spatial surroundings. It is not a set of accomplished events located in some finished past, but is the very depth of the experiential present – the earthly sleep, or dream, out of which the visible landscape continually comes to presence. And once again human dreaming, human intention, human action and chanting participate vividly in this coming-to-presence. Numerous other examples could be cited. These few instances, from opposite sides of the earth, should suffice at least to demonstrate that separable “time” and “space” are not absolute givens in all human experience. It is likely that without a formal system of numerical and linguistic notation it is not possible to entirely abstract a uniform sense of progressive “time” from the direct experience of the animate, emergent environment – or, what amounts to the same thing, to freeze the dynamic experience of earthly place into the intuition of a static, homogeneous “space.” If this is the case, then writing must be recognized as a necessary condition for the belief in an entirely distinct space and time.

Exiled in the World

According to Mircea Eliade, the ancient Hebrews were the first people to “discover” a linear, nonrepeating mode of time: [F]or the first time, the prophets placed a value on history, succeeded in transcending the traditional vision of the cycle (the conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way time. This discovery was not to be immediately and fully accepted by the consciousness of the entire Jewish people, and the ancient conceptions were still long to survive.19 To the ancient Hebrews, or what we know of them through the lens of the Hebrew Bible, the cyclical return of seasonal events commanded far less attention than those happenings that were unique and without precedent (natural catastrophes, sieges, battles, and the like), for it was these nonrepeating events that signaled the will of YHWH, or God, in relation to the Hebrew people. In Eliade’s terms, these unique occurrences, whose consequences were often devastating (either to the Hebrews or to their enemies), were interpreted by the prophets as “negative theophanies,” as expressions of YHWH’s wrath. Thus interpreted, these discordant and nonrepeating events acquired a coherence previously unknown, and so began to stand out from the cyclical unfolding of natural phenomena. And the Hebrew nation came to comprehend itself in relation to this new, nonrepeating modality of time – that is, in relation to history. [F]or the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God.20 Yet it is crucial to recognize what Eliade does ‘not’ mention in his discussion – that the Hebrews are, as well, the first truly alphabetic culture that we know of, the first “People of the Book.” Indeed, at the founding event of the Jewish nation – the great theophany atop Mount Sinai Moses ‘inscribes’ the commandments dictated by YHWH (the most sacred of God’s names) upon two stone tablets, presumably in an alphabetic script.21 (Contemporary scholars place the exodus from Egypt sometime around 1250 B.C.E.; it is just at this time that the twenty-two-letter, consonantal ‘aleph-beth’ was coming into use in the area of Canaan, or Palestine.) In truth, the new recognition of a nonmythological, nonrepeating time by the Hebrew scribes can only be comprehended with reference to alphabetic writing itself. Recording cultural stories in writing, as we have seen, fixes the storied events in their particularity, providing them with a new and unchanging permanence while inscribing them in a steadily accreting sequence of similarly unique occurrences. A new sense of time as a nonrepeating sequence begins to make itself felt over and against the ceaseless cycling of the cosmos. The variously scribed layers of the Hebrew Bible are the first

sustained record of this new sensibility. As we have also discerned, the ancient ‘aleph-beth’, as the first thoroughly ‘phonetic’ writing system, prioritized the human voice. The increasingly literate Israelites found themselves caught up in a vital relationship not with the expressive natural forms around them, nor with the static images or idols common to pictographic or ideographic cultures, but with an all-powerful human voice. It was a voice that clearly preceded, and outlasted, every individual life – the voice, it would seem, of eternity itself – but which nevertheless addressed the Hebrew nation directly, speaking, first and foremost, through the written letters. While the visible landscape provides an oral, tribal culture with a necessary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for remembering its ancestral stories, alphabetic writing enabled the Hebrew tribes to preserve their cultural stories intact even when the people were cut off, for many generations, from the actual lands where those stories had taken place. By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories earlier carried by the terrain itself, ‘the written text became a kind of portable homeland for the Hebrew people’. And indeed it is only thus, by virtue of this portable ‘ground’, that the Jewish people have been able to preserve their singular culture, and thus themselves, while in an almost perpetual state of exile from the actual lands where their ancestral stories unfolded. Yet many of the written narratives in the Bible are already stories of displacement, of exile. The most ancient stratum of the Hebrew Bible is structured, from the first, by the motif of exile – from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, to the long wandering of the Israelites in the desert. The Jewish sense of exile was never merely a state of separation from a specific locale, from a particular ground; it was (and is) also a sense of separation from the very ‘possibility’ of being placed, from the very possibility of being entirely at home. This deeper sense of displacement, this sense of always ‘already’ being in exile, is inseparable, I suggest, from alphabetic literacy, this great and difficult magic of which the Hebrews were the first real caretakers. Alphabetic writing can engage the human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least provisionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth. To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be displaced, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that nourishment, and so to yearn, to hope, that such contact and conviviality may someday return. “Because being Jewish”, as Edmond Jabes has written, “means exiling yourself in the word and, at the same time, weeping for your exile.”22 The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what has been lost, the intimation of a forgotten intimacy. The narratives in Genesis remain deeply attuned to the animistic power of places, and it is this lingering power that lends such poignancy to the motifs of exodus and exile. The stories of the patriarchs are filled with sacred place-names, and many of these narratives seem structured so as to tell how particular places came to have their specific names. While these sacred 22

“To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be displaced, cut off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of forms.”

sites never seem to have an entirely autonomous power (many, for instance, take their sacredness from the fact that YHWH there speaks or otherwise reveals Himself to one of the protagonists), earthly place nevertheless remains a structuring element of biblical space. Moreover, the trajectory of time, for the ancient Hebrews, was by no means entirely linear. The holy days described in the Bible are closely bound to the intertwined cycles of the sun and the moon. Further, the nonrepeating, historical time alluded to by Eliade seems to correlate with the sense of existential separation and exile. It is thus that, in Hebrew tradition, the expulsion from the eternity of Eden (and, later, the destruction of the Temple) is mirrored, at the other end of sequential history, by the promised return from exile, the coming of the Messiah, and an end to separated time. The forward trajectory of time, that is, will at last open outward, flowing back into the spacious eternity of living place (the “promised land”), and so into a golden age of peace between all nations. Eternity lies not in a separated heaven (the ancient Hebrews knew of no such realm) but in the promise of a future reconciliation on the earth. Time and space are still profoundly influenced by one another in the Hebrew Bible. They are never ‘entirely’ distinguishable, for they are still informed, however distantly, by a participatory experience of ‘place’.

It remained for the ancient greeks, possessed of their own version of the alphabet, to derive an entirely placeless notion of eternity – a strictly intelligible, nonmaterial realm of pure Ideas resting entirely outside of the sensible world. It is obvious that the Greek alphabet contributed to a kind of theoretical abstraction very different from that engaged in by the Hebrew prophets and scribes. In part, this may be attributed to the very different historical trajectories of the Hebrew and the Greek peoples, to the obvious contrasts between desert-dwelling peoples and seafaring peoples, and to a host of other influences upon Greek culture arriving, like the alphabet, from abroad. But it is also the consequence of a simple but profound structural change introduced into the alphabet by the Greek scribes when they adapted this writing system from its earlier, Semitic incarnation. We need to observe that Greek thinkers were the first to begin to objectify space and time as entirely distinct and separable dimensions. Yet this was a sporadic and fragmentary process, resulting from the overlapping descriptive, analytic, and speculative writings of diverse individuals and schools of thought. The earliest historians, like Hecataeus of Miletos (c. 550-489 B.C.E.), Herodotus (c. 480-425 B.C.E.), and Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.E.) pioneered the use of written prose, rather than poetry, to record past events. They practiced a new skepticism regarding the storied gods and goddesses of the animate environment, and by separating past events from 23

the tradition-bound rhythms of verse and chanted story, they loosened time itself from the recurrent cycling of the sensuous earth, opening the prospect of a nonrepeating, historical time extending indefinitely into the past. A century later Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) sought to ‘define’ the dimension of time as it makes itself evident in our experience. He concluded that “time is just this: the number of a motion with respect to the prior and the posterior.”23 Time, in other words, is what is counted whenever we measure a movement between earlier and later moments of its unfolding. Time is thus inseparable from number and sequence; it appears in Aristotle’s writings as a continuous linear series of points, each a punctiform “now” dividing the past from the future. Shortly thereafter, in his remarkably influential text ‘Elements’, the Greek geometrician Euclid (c. 300 B.C.E.) implied by his various definitions and postulates that space itself could be conceived as an entirely homogeneous and limitless three-dimensional continuum. The homogeneous character of Euclidian space was indicated, in particular, by his assertion that parallel straight lines, no matter how far they are extended in either direction, will never meet. While this postulate holds true for a perfectly flat and featureless ideal space, the experienced world that we bodily inhabit is not so regular. Indeed, we now know that the sphericality of the earth itself -this very surface on which we dwell – confounds Euclid’s parallel postulate: two straightest-possible lines that start out parallel to each other on the curved surface of a sphere will eventually converge and cross, like meridians at the North Pole. That we still commonly envision the curved surface of the earth, with all of its local irregularities (its mountains and river valleys), to be embedded within a three-dimensional space lacking any curvature of its own, is exquisite testimony to the lasting influence of Euclidean conceptions. Euclid’s assumptions provided the classical basis for Western, scientific notions of space, from the Renaissance until the work of Albert Einstein, and even today our supposedly “commonsense” experience remains profoundly under the influence of such assumptions. While evolving techniques of numerical notation and measurement obviously played an explicit role in the development of these early descriptions, the spread of alphabetic literacy was at work behind the scenes, altering the perceptual relations between the Greeks and the sensible world around them, and thus gradually disclosing the new, apparently independent dimensions of space and time to which the numbers and measurements were then applied.

Absolute Space and Time

Yet a thorough description of homogeneous “space” and sequential “time,” as objectively existing entities, had to wait until the invention of the printing press. For it was the dissemination of printed texts (texts that until then had been meticulously copied by hand and preserved, like treasures, in monastic libraries and universities) into the wider community

of persons, and the subsequent rise of vernacular literatures, that effectively sealed the ascendancy of alphabetic modes of thought over the oral, participatory experience of nature. The thorough differentiation of “time” from “space” was impossible as long as large portions of the community still experienced the surrounding terrain as animate and alive, as long as material (spatial) phenomena were still perceived by many as having their own inherent spontaneity and (temporal) dynamism.24 The burning alive of tens of thousands of women (most of them herbalists and midwives from peasant backgrounds) as “witches” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may usefully be understood as the attempted, and nearly successful, extermination of the last orally preserved traditions of Europe – the last traditions rooted in the direct, participatory experience of plants, animals, and elements – in order to clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a natural world increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set of objects. It was Isaac Newton, in his great ‘Principia Mathematica’ of 1687, who finally gave an absolute formulation to separable “time” and “space” as the necessary frame for his clockwork universe: Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external. . . . Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. . . .25 By these formulations Newton meant to distinguish “absolute time” from that “relative time” which is simply the order of succession of perceivable events, and to distinguish “absolute space” from that “relative space” which is the order of coexistence between perceivable things.26 While “relative time” is merely a relationship between material events, and so has no existence apart from those events, “absolute, true and mathematical time” is, for Newton, an independent reality that we cannot perceive directly, but which underlies all material events and their relations. Similarly “absolute, true, and mathematical space” subsists independent of all perceivable things. In itself it is empty – a void. Like absolute time, it is infinite in extent; it can neither be created nor destroyed, and no part of it can be distinguished from any other part. By assuming the existence of this empty and “immovable” space – this space that is at rest relative to any and all motion – Newton was then able to calculate the motion of the moon or the earth relative to this absolute space; it was only by assuming these absolute references that he was able to derive his theory of universal attraction, or “gravity.” After the publication of his ‘Principia’, Newton’s assumptions regarding space and time were challenged by numerous philosophers, and he found himself in extended debates with such illustrious thinkers as Leibniz and Berkeley over the question of whether one could rationally distinguish absolute from relative space, or absolute from relative time. However, although they challenged the 24

absolute character of Newton’s space and time, none of these thinkers challenged the assumption of an absolute difference between space and time – the by now commonplace assumption that space and time were entirely distinct dimensions of experience. In 1781, Immanuel Kant, in his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, capped the debates regarding the absolute or relative nature of time and space. He agreed with Newton that space and time were absolute, that they were independent of particular things and events. For Kant, however, these distinct dimensions did

not belong to the surrounding world as it exists in itself, but were necessary forms of human awareness, the two forms by which the human mind inevitably structures the things it perceives. Thus, while he denied that space and time necessarily exist apart from human experience, Kant’s work seemed to establish more forcefully than ever that, at least as far as humans were concerned, “space” and “time” were distinct and inescapable dimensions. Needless to say, Kant’s writings could not be translated into Navajo or Pintupi.

1. See Charles A. Reed, ed., Origins of Agriculture (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1977). 2. Åke Hultkrantz, Native Religions of North America (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 32-33. 3. T. C. McLuhan, Touch the Earth (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971), p. 42. 4. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper & Row, 1959). 5. Ibid., p. vii. 6. Todorov, Tzvetan. ‘The Conquest of America’. Translated by Richard Howar. 7. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981). 8. Hultkrantz, Åke. ‘Native Rerligions of North America’. San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1987. p. 33. 9. Todorov, p. 85. 10. Rik Pinxten, Ingrid Van Doren, and Frank Harvey, Anthropology of Space: Explorations into the Natural Philosophy and Semantics of the Navajo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 168. 11. Ibid., p.36. 12. Benjamin Lee Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” in Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, eds., Teachings from the American Earth (New York: Liveright, 1975), p. 122. 13. Ibid. 14. See especially Ekkehart Malotki, Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1983). 15. Whorf, “An American Indian: Model,” p. 124. 16. Ibid. 17. Pinxten, Rik; Ingrid Van Doren; and Frank Harvey. ‘Anthropoly of Space: Explorations into the Natural Philosophy and Semantics of the Navajo’. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania . 18. Ibid., pp.20-21. 19. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 104. 20. Ibid. 21. Indeed, the original tablets, smashed by Moses in anger upon seeing the golden calf, were according to the Hebrew Bible inscribed directly “by the finger of God.” Exodus 31:18. See also Rabbi Michael L. Munk, The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet: The Sacred Letters as a Guide to Jewish Deed and Thought (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1983).

22. Edmond Jabes, Elya (Berkeley, Calif.: Tree Books, 1974), p. 72. 23. Aristotle, Physics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 969), book IV. 24. By the era of the printing press, the mechanical clock was slowly exerting its influence throughout Europe. The presence of alphabetic writing may help explain why the mechanical clock was invented in Europe and had spread throughout European culture long before taking hold in the more ideographic world of the Orient. Actually, a few elaborate clocklike machines had been designed and built for the private use of Chinese emperors as early as the eleventh century, yet these were intended strictly as calendrical devices modeling the movements of the heavens-machines that would allow the emperor to align his intentions and decrees more precisely with astrological events. The order of time remained inseparable from such cosmic, spatial phenomena. In the West, on the contrary, the mechanical clock functioned to sever the experience of time from the spatial cycles of the sun, moon, and stars, marking out a series of determinate intervals that paid little heed to the heavens or to the shifting lengths of daylight and darkness. Mechanical clocks originated in monasteries (the strongholds of alphabetic literacy throughout the Middle Ages), where they were used to regulate the times for prayer. But by the middle of the fourteenth century, large clocks in the belfries of churches and town halls rang the equal hours for the whole populace, regulating the daily activities of the community according to an artificially determined and unvarying measure. Because the fixed hours of the clock were ultimately independent of the sun, independent of its rising and setting and the length of the daylight (all of which might vary not just in different seasons but in different locations), clock-time could ultimately be used to regulate transactions between different villages and towns, eventually establishing the sense of a wholly objective, quantitative time impervious to the particular rhythms of different locales and seasons. The voice of this objective time was the implacable “tick-tock” of the clock’s internal mechanism, which lent auditory force to the Aristotelian sense of time as a countable series of discrete now-points. See Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 36-46, 56-78. 25. Quoted in Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 161, 162. 26. Ibid., pp. 161-62, 245.

The sculpture park in Parikkala, close to the Russian border in Finland and built by selftaught artist Veijo Rönkkönen (1944–2010), is probably the easternmost outsider art environment in Europe. There are some 500 different and skillfully executed colorful statues in the park, including an ensamble of over 200 statues in different yoga positions. Rönkkönen practiced yoga and used yoga statues as a memory book for different asanas. Besides yoga other big themes in the park are carnevalistic statues describing different nationalities and hundreds of statues of children playing, dancing and doing gymnastics. Images courtesy of Minna Haveri

The traditional hermit is a crusty, bearded character who has withdrawn from the company of men to live a life of seclusion and hardship. Card 9 supports this understanding. The Hermit represents the desire to turn away from the getting and spending of society to focus on the inner world. He seeks answers within and knows that they will come only with quiet and solitude. There comes a point in life when we begin to question the obvious. We sense that there is a deeper reality and begin to search for it. This is mainly a solitary quest because answers do not lie in the external world, but in ourselves. The hermit on Card 9 reminds us of Diogenes, the Greek ascetic who is said to have gone out with a lantern in hand to search for an honest man. Diogenes is a symbol of the search for truth that the Hermit hopes to uncover by stripping away all diversions. In readings, the Hermit often suggests a need for time alone â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a period of reflection when distractions are limited. In times of action and high energy, he stands for the still center that must be created for balance. He can also indicate that withdrawal or retreat is advised for the moment. In addition, the Hermit can represent seeking of all kinds, especially for deeper understanding or the truth of a situation. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Seek, and ye shall find,â&#x20AC;? we have been told, and so the Hermit stands for guidance as well. We can receive help from wise teachers, and, in turn, help others as we progress.

Erkki Pirtola: Shaman Johannes Set채l채

Still image from Shaman Johannes Set채l채 (2010), courtesy of the artist. Image on the following spread courtesy of Minna Haveri.

For decades, Erkki Pirtola a video art pioneer and a curator of experimental art has documented captivating individuals living on the edge, and outside, the art world and society at large. In one of his audiovisual portraits, Pirtola introduces the visions of Johannes Setälä, a shaman living in close connection with nature and the spiritual plane. Eccentric and careless about the society’s norms and temporality, Setälä questions the notions of disciplines and genres within the art world. The whole paradoxical necessity of separating art into sections, schools and genres deals with something strikingly opposite to the most fundamental idea of art: power, he meditates. The connection between humans and nature forms the basis of his worldview. In the end all that matters is energy: energy that does not separate, but intertwines.

In the writings of a hermit we always hear something of the echo of desolation, something of the whispers and the timid gazing around of isolation; from his strongest words, even from his screaming, still resounds a new and dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. Whoever has sat down, year in and year out, day and night, alone in an intimate dispute and conversation with his soul, whoever has become a cave bear or digger for treasure or guardian of treasure and dragon in his own cavern - it can be a labyrinth but also a gold mine – such a man’s very ideas finally take on a distinct twilight colouring and smell as much of mould as they do of profundity, something incommunicable and reluctant, which blows cold wind over everyone passing by. The hermit does not believe that a philosopher – assuming that a philosopher has always first been a hermit – has ever expressed his real and final opinion in his books.

Don’t people write books expressly to hide what they have stored inside them? – In fact, he will have doubts whether a philosopher could generally have “real and final” opinions, whether in his case behind every cave there does not still lie, and must lie, an even deeper cavern – a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every reason, under every “foundation.” Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy – that is the judgment of a hermit: “There is something arbitrary about the fact that he remained here, looked back, looked around, that at this point he set his shovel aside and did not dig more deeply – there is also something suspicious about it.” Every philosophy also hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part 9, aphorism 289

For his Escape project, artist Danila Tkachenko traveled in search for people who have decided to escape from social life and live alone in the wild, far away from any villages, towns or other people. The main characters of this project violate social standards for different reasons. By a complete withdrawal from society they go live alone in the wild nature, gradually dissolving in it and losing their social identity. Tkachenko is concerned about the issue of internal freedom in the modern society: how feasible it is, when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re surrounded by a social framework all the time?

Danila Tkachenko: Escape

All the photographs from the series Escape (2013), courtesy the artist

Man does not need society at all, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the society that needs man. Society is a forced measure of protection and survival. Unlike a gregarious animal, man must live alone â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in nature among animals, plants and in contact with them. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Andrey Tarkovsky

MariĂŤn:

Marcel

Mains 1974 lithography

Marcel Marien, Mains, 1974, Published by Editions Georges Visat, Paris.

(1920â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1993, Belgium) was a key figure of Belgian postwar surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists including Guy-Ernest Debord in his journal Les LĂ¨vres

nues. Nevertheless, MariĂŤnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s texts, collages, photographs, film, and art objects have for the most part remained understudied. In his work, MariĂŤn continued the surrealist tradition of making unexpected combinations to reveal hidden or poetic meanings.

Mika Taanila:

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (2002)

Is the merging of man and machine really possible? Or has it already happened? Mika Taanila’s The Future Is Not What It Used To Be is a film about 1960s avant-garde music and film, the early history of microcomputers and the open questions of 21st century science. It is also a portrait of the nuclear physicist/artist Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941), one of the unsung pioneers of early electronic art. Kurenniemi has been exploring the potential of virtual reality and interactive computer art in diverse projects since the early 1960s. The film is structured around Kurenniemi’s “manic collection project”, in which he constantly and feverishly recorded his thoughts, everyday observations, objects and images, with the ultimate aim of merging man and machine – thereby reconstructing the human soul. Still images from The Future Is Not What It Used To Be © Kinotar 2002, courtesy of the artist and Kinotar. Image (right) courtesy of the Finnish National Gallery.

The future world belongs to people, communities, conscious and subconscious machines, thinking cars, roads and cities. It understands itself in big and small entities. It is a selfdestructing, continuously developing, improving, renewing, decaying, unstable symbiosis which analyzes its past and future with the speed of a superbrain and questions its own existence. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Erkki Kurenniemi

DIY Futurology:

Kurenniemiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Signal Based Cosmology By Jussi Parikka

This article has been previously published in Erkki Kurenniemi â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Man From The Future. Finnish National Gallery, Central Archives, 2013

‘Unlike the history to which it put an end, the media age proceeds in jerks, just like Turing’s paper strip. From the Remington via the Turing machine to microelectronics, from mechanization and automatization to the implementation of a writing that is only cipher, not meaning – one century was enough to transfer the age-old monopoly of writing into the omnipotence of integrated circuits.’ – German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler (1999, 18–19). In what ways should we consider Erkki Kurenniemi a topic of research for media archaeology? It could work through an excavation of his archives, practices and thoughts as an alternative to the normalized narratives of media art history. Kurenniemi is an example of the non-anglosphere media art pioneers, whose career runs parallel to many of the themes discussed by better known artists, for instance, in the U.S. His trickster-nature and wild interdisciplinarity are a testimony to such histories where media, art, technology and science become entangled: a rather different story from the usually cybernetic-centred American histories, but also oddly familiar in how it remediates narratives and cybermyths. But Kurenniemi is interesting for media archaeological research on the history of media art in other ways too: his practice is a combination of DIY engineering and scientifically fuelled narrativization of the role of high-tech in our globalizing societies. It is in this sense that Kurenniemi is symptomatic of this stance towards art/technology and practice/theory crossings that brand contemporary media art discussions. A Symptom of Media Change While waiting for July 10, 2048, Erkki Kurenniemi’s 107th anniversary and the date when his ‘data body’ is expected to carry on after the biological body has inevitably failed, let us consider Kurenniemi more as a symptom than a person. This focus on symptoms does not imply a negative connotation of sickness and failure; rather, it means that there is something deeply symptomatic about his artistic and intellectual career, enfolded with the archival fever of his everyday life. In other words, let us also consider him as a ‘symptomatologist’ (Deleuze 1995, 142–143) who, besides being a participant in the emergence of the close ties between art, science and technology,

is able to reflect on that in so many ways through his actions. Our culture is about the constant fluctuations between art, science and technology, and it is defined by the variation of such relations. As an analogy, consider the role of the high court judge Daniel Paul Schreber for the 20th century cultural and media theory. He was not only an example of a clinical illness (schizoid paranoia) that he suffered from but also someone who demonstrated a sense of archival modernity. Schreber’s case study became famous through Sigmund Freud and other commentators, but also because of his own writings: ‘Memoirs of a Nervous Illness’ (1955, [1903]). In terms of archival mania, this rather peculiar and very poetic description of his years of mental suffering can be considered to be very significant to our understanding of what new media technologies were about to do to the world and our lives at the end of 19th century and early 20th century, for instance. For media theorists, such as Friedrich A. Kittler, Schreber became an emblematic figure of the so-called Man, a case study in how modern media technologies are about the meticulous documentation of every possible sphere of life from thoughts to actions. Our ways of living, thinking, memorizing and even hallucinating were conditioned by the technological environment that mediated our relationship to the world, to others and even to ourselves. In Schreber’s case, he fantasized about celestial scribes who tracked down and documented his every single thought – like a meticulous recording machine that never misses a beat, a glimpse of a thought or a feeling, or a half-baked idea: it’s all there, a substitute of God in the form of a recording, storage and perhaps even an archive. As theorists like Kittler argued, Schreber’s writings and hallucinations embodied something rather essential about the modern technical media culture and the position of humans in the emerging sphere of communication. There is something similar in Kurenniemi, even if he is not mad and his hallucinations are grounded in the contexts of scientific literature and technological practice. His writings can, of course, often be characterized as veering closer to science fiction. His style and writings are part of what we could call the late 20th century and early 21th century ‘imaginary

of technological culture’: the belief in the powers of technology as revealing a point of singularity of historical proportions. While this is rather central for the belief in progress of the modern technological culture, it also has its theological connotations in Christo-Judean thought: there is a point in history when everything is revolutionized, reaching a singular point, a new beginning. Indeed, one is tempted to see Kurenniemi as an intermediary between Schreber’s hallucinations of celestial scribes, angels as careful notetakers, and the microchip revolution, which was supported by Silicon Valley and took the metaphysics of angels to the dimensions of technical media. In an AT&T promotional video from 1980, the narrator William Shatner voices this angelic development of microchips: ‘There was a time when philosophers argued the question of how many angels might fit on the head of a pin... well today, if we take the liberty of equating angels with transistors, we can make the case for the existence of a modern kind of miracle [...]’ (AT & T, 1980). Such miracles, however, are nowadays taken up in the expressions of madness or by technology evangelists. The archival belief is embedded in modern technical media in the sense of non-human materiality that exceeds human materiality: our humanity is saved not by powers of angels of celestial origins as it used to be, but by machines, as in Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. (2001). But this belief, part of the imaginary of the digital world, is not restricted to the most recent media culture. Indeed, E. M. Forster traced this desire of immortality in the earlier media technology of printing – here quoted by Marshall McLuhan: ‘The printing press, then only a century old, had been mistaken for an engine of immortality, and men had hastened to commit to it deeds and passions for the benefit of future ages’ (McLuhan 2001, 190). Time and the archive occupy a central place in Kurenniemi’s interests and practice. He is a symptom and a symptomatologist of a drive towards both storage and archiving – two terms easily conflated. He marks the passage from the documentation of

everyday life in storage and into archival form to the age of integrated circuits that do it for us: the moment of a jerk and a singularity which is seen as the imaginary moment when technology starts to write for us. But we need to pay attention to what we mean by archival and the writing of the archive. Mere storage is nothing unless you have a system – an archival moment when recording turns into something queryable, something searchable based on the logic of the archive. Media filled Kurenniemi’s life, and he documented everything he could meticulously: the vast amount of writing, photographs and moving image would form the basis of a possible future reconstruction of Erkki Kurenniemi, the flesh creature. The data would reproduce his mortal being, including its sexuality, thus functioning in a way in which society tries to in any case: reproducing sexual relations, modes of affect, habits of feeling and embodiment. Kurenniemi’s singularity is an imitation of everyday power relations in that it aims to reproduce the flesh in the data, to convey the past generation to the next. In the archive, there are endless piles of paper and bits of information in fragmented form, reminding of the central archival thinker of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, true history is not about linear success stories: it is about fragments. It is a necessary reconstruction and even a reimagining of pasts through its fragments, which forces us to consider any progress story unethical, and to look for another method of thinking about time: history of and from the ruins of the fragments of past lives, recorded, but never reaching, such systematicity or illusion of smoothness that we think our lives consist of. Instead, archival life reveals the jolts and jumps, but also the fact that only archival logic imposes order. The archive is the order, the command (Ernst 2013). In this text I am pursuing this media-theoretical perspective on Kurenniemi as a symptom/ symptomatology. This takes us inside his thinking with machines, which is one of the perspectives I want to endorse: Kurenniemi is embedded in archival discourse and now an object of fascination for many projects related to media arts, science and archives. However, he is also a media thinker and a ‘tinkerer’. Erkki Huhtamo (2010) used the portmanteau term

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Our humanity is saved not by powers of angels of celestial origins as it used to be, but by machines.â&#x20AC;?

“thinkerer” when writing about the work and style of the media archaeological artist Paul Demarinis, and I wonder if there is something similar in Kurenniemi as well. He certainly fits in with the lineage of the various visionaries who were, in a way, mediators, and who escorted us from the imaginary of technologies to their full blown popular cultural status. He is a sort of a McLuhan for the Finns (see Kurenniemi 1971). Supermegatechnologies of Kurenniemi One aspect that intrigues me relates to Kurenniemi’s way of moving across dimensions. Perhaps some of his quantum theory interests can be considered a logical part of his intellectual method – which is certainly an eclectic method – but something, which I would argue to be a peculiar indication of his manner of working. This refers to his way of being able to maneuver between the concrete worlds of tinkering with electronics and building synthesizers and the cosmological theories of mathematics, sound and physics. Indeed, we need to understand that even if his ideas were of epic visionary scale in their grand claims, his work also includes signal bending and circuitry. The two poles of Kurenniemi’s fascination with machines are sometimes hard to summarize. He is known for his hyperbolic visions of information technology, which are well expressed, for instance, in the article ”Supermegatechnologies” in the British journal ‘_things_’ (Kurenniemi 2000). The visions of technology are expressed in terms of their quantitative capacities that boast with a numerology that seems limitless. It is as if Kurenniemi is adapting to the regular discourse of information technology, which has to do with performance capacity as the sole driver of the technological world: ‘Processor frequencies will soon exceed the gigahertz, RAM memories the gigabyte, and discs approach the terabyte (1000 gigabytes). The speed of local networks will soon be in the region of a gigabit per second (one byte = 8 bits). And nothing is enough, nothing like it. There were 20 years between the mega period and the giga period. The tera (10superscript12) and peta (1015) periods will arrive in between twenty and eighty years.’ (Ibid.)

Kurenniemi loves the discourse of visionaries and continues with predictions of ubiquitous futures of information technology, augmented reality, geolocation and other themes that we now, of course, recognize as part of the everyday life. His mind picks up on details from various materials to the energy regimes of computers, never losing sight of the paradox at the heart of this method: his vision aims at 2048 and to the redundancy of the flesh in the world of intelligent computers to which you can upload yourself, but his everyday understanding is completely embedded in the energy and material investment that our computers need. Computers are not immaterial – Kurenniemi never makes this amateur mistake, which was typical of much of the cyber discourse of the 1980s and 1990s. But Kurenniemi constantly aims for the larger dimensions. Indeed, the title of the journal article, an exhaustible list of ideas, refers to his vision of computers merging with bio- and nanotechnological developments, fulfilling the implicit idea of technologies being organisms. His vision is geared towards connectedness that is a matter of scientific ideas merging in ways that makes it impossible to talk of technologies as disconnected. This is the meaning of supermegatechnology for Kurenniemi, who admits that it is a rather poor term, but one that can be used as a placeholder: we need to account for the future as IBN (info-bio-nano) (instead of IBM one might add): information technologies joining up with bio- and nanotechnologies, or in other words, “material technology + chemistry” (Kurenniemi 2000). Kurenniemi’s inspirations stem from the science fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Greg Bear and Vernor Vinge, and this is evident in his way of thinking. However, we need to recognize that such ideas were also part of the wider popular culture of the age, which can be argued to herald the emergence of technologies that take processing power in the new millennium to the heart of chemistry and biology, as well as to create new forms of visual culture, such as augmented reality. However, what I want to point out is that there is another archaeological layer to Kurenniemi that can be seen in his tinkering with musical instruments and construction of synthesizers in the 1970s. It is in these fragments that one sees how such visions

of grand scale are also contextualized in the work and interests of a circuit bender-hacker. After all, Kurenniemi embodies some Finnish modesty, too; for the American counterparts (and influences), singularity happens earlier: for Vinge, already by the 2030s, for Ray Kurzweil in 2045. Kurenniemi is happy to follow a little later.

another important context that was important for the wider emergence of technical media culture: music studios. Indeed, in Finland, for instance, it was equally important that the University of Helsinki started building their electronic music studio in the 1960s (Kurenniemi 2001), thus joining the various developments of experimental media culture across Europe.

Engineering the Analogue/Digital Divide Erkki Huhtamo (2003) has pointed out the existence of a media archaeological layer in Kurenniemi’s ‘thinkering’. It is not, of course, a huge revelation to anyone who knows Kurenniemi’s work, but it is something that should not only be considered in terms of Kurenniemi’s musical interests. Instead, as Huhtamo points out, Kurenniemi can be viewed as part of the media archaeology of electronic arts and different interface experiments. In 1969, Kurenniemi was developing his digital synthetiser Dimi- A. (DS1/11 ‘73-11-20; trscr 20.3.2000). This was followed by the Dimi-O (O short for “optical organ”), which had a more complex structure: besides an improved interface (you were supposed to be able to control the synthesizer by gestures thanks to a video camera input system), the machine included a graphic representation of the memory on a 32 x 48-pixel sized grid. The grid was to represent time (vertical axis) and the chromatic scale (horizontal). The interface was actually intended to function as an input mechanism for graphic notation, but it became “misused” for gestural interfacing: dancers, pantomime and the conductor’s hand offered an updated version of the Theremin device for the 1970s late hippie generation. In Kurenniemi’s world and within the technological scene of art and culture, synthesizers were a shortcut to computing. In general, he was keen to contextualize his personal history as part of the emergence of computing, gradually from the 1940s and 1950s bulky mainframes (see also Suominen and Parikka 2010) to the microelectronics’ revolution of the 1960s and especially the 1970s. Like so many others, Kurenniemi was introduced to computers at the university’s physics department. In addition to the institutions in possession of the computational machines, we need to keep in mind

Kurenniemi’s first experience of digital computers came in the 1960s with the “Swedish-made Wegematic 1000, with vacuum tubes, a drum memory, and a thirst for kilowatts of power” (Kurenniemi 2004). However, these first touches also inspired him to start developing his own machines and led to an interest in the internal worlds of machines: the notebooks and fragments containing his writings and fragments about microchips and Phillips logic modules back in the 1960s, for instance (Kurenniemi s.d.). As he writes in his “self-obituary” (Kurenniemi 2004), reading about Buchla and Moog voltage-controlled synthesizers also inspired him to engage in first-hand experimentation. This was a crucial feature for those in his generation that had some contact with computers – usually only professionals in banks and universities – who were gradually getting into circuitry via music machines. And it also resonates with the DIY spirit that was part of the technical media culture both before and after the war: the radio-amateurs of the earlier part of the 20th century (Douglas 1989) met their match in the burgeoning electronic arts scene of DIY technicians, who often misused the leftovers of the military technologies of World War II (Kittler 1999, 96–97) But besides entertaining visions of the supremacy of the digital world, Kurenniemi, like so many others, had to work with hybrid machines: ‘I began developing an integrated analog/digital music studio with combined voltage and digital control. Digital signals were used as triggers or gate signals, and also as square- wave sound. The final musical pieces were still edited the traditional way, by cutting and splicing analog full-track audio tape.’ (Kurenniemi 2004). And since the 1970s, this hybrid combo was defined in terms of the first available microchips, controlling

Image courtesy of the Finnish National Gallery

the analog synthesizers with oscillators and filters. It was already in this period that Kurenniemi’s engineering was informed by an interest in the abstract. The building of synthesizers and the plans regarding associative memory were influenced by Teuvo Kohonen (a famous Finnish researcher of neural networks). And it was not only that Kurenniemi was moving from the analog to the digital in a progressive manner: the later Dimi-T machine was a machine, which was intended to register the electrical activity of the brain. The signal produced was an early form of brain-controlled interfacing, which was used to “modify the pitch of a voltage-controlled oscillator” (Kurenniemi 2004). In fact, Kurenniemi was aware of the earlier experiments in the US in the 1960s, and he was probably thinking of Alvin Lucier’s brain music. Moreover, the famous Midi-S (the sexophone) was very closely tied to the skin-based world of humans – being a kind of a human-machine circuit controlling the sound collectively as well as ideally, sensually. It was something of a sexual revolution turned into technical media: a group sex device that registers and modulates sounds that on a political level were part of the critique of the monogamous bourgeois system.

about media pedagogy as well – at the moment they are mainly implied, but they are nevertheless something we should pay attention to: oscillate wildly in your technological thinking and doing! (Cf. Kurenniemi 2001 for Kurenniemi’s notes on why he left the university already in the 1960s). Kurenniemi’s notebooks are always a mix of the two poles of this oscillation: inspiration from Edward de Bono’s writings concerning the mind mixed with Kurenniemi’s meditations on flip-flop circuits and computer architecture (DRY 1974 1.nb).

Similarly, in an interview much later, in the early 2000s, Kurenniemi notes how the development of digital computing opened up a whole range of connections between sound and technology. Indeed, Kurenniemi is perhaps not a media theorist, but he constantly makes observations that resonate with the analytical accounts of scholars in digital aesthetics and media history: in this case, Kurenniemi speaks about how the generalized nature of the computer as a musical instrument has made electronics obsolete. He speaks of it as a historical remnant among other past musical instruments (Kurenniemi 2001). As a matter of fact, what Kurenniemi is producing is not just a macrolevel explanation of historical change, and even his grander visions can be traced back to his hands-on practice and the legacy carried over by experimenters engaging directly with signal processing and circuits. It is a DIY sort of engineering practice as well as a DIY sort of scientific thinking, which cannot be contained within the narrow confines of science. Indeed, there is much to be gained from his ideas

(00:00:00) (Click click, radio signal, blows in the microphone five times, click, blow) ‘One, two, three, puppadadud. Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is sensitive. There we go. (blow) Yeah, a dreaming computer... will be the last human invention. Well not the last one, but... the last invention. Because a dreaming computer will already have dreamt up everything. Prior unconscious. Well, no. Dead computers may only be in two spaces: in an idle loop waiting to be interrupted or in a conscious space receiving and handling external information, printing it. A sleeping computer is not in an idle loop. Yeah, well of course it is, it does ask questions and wakes up when needed but otherwise it dreams. It is organizing its files, optimizing, associating, organizing, thinking, planning. And only when called upon, it interrupts its sleep for a little while to answer a question.’ (The sound of the microphone being touched, cut) (Kurenniemi C4008-1 1/11)

Kurenniemi’s poetics meets with the technical conditions of their survival in the archival sense. Rummaging through his notes that proceed towards 2048, we have to be aware of the signal space in which they take place: the scratch of the microphone recording, leaving traces like the scribes who write down everything in Schreber’s hallucination: the recording media sets itself as part of the narrative. We hear words, but we also hear the noise recorded by the microphones. So, we do not focus only on the narrative content but on the signals as well: it is the clicks and signals, blows and microphone noises that also escort the voice and computerized philosophy of Kurenniemi.

Conclusions

References

By way of conclusion, there is an interesting tension between the way in which Kurenniemi constructs his discursive position and his expertise in technological practices. I want to argue that this is actually characteristic of his wider methodology in general. It is evident in many of his expressions and views, and it is summarized, for instance, in his sweep of how he sees musical and compositional practices. As Kurenniemi explains in an interview, even after the introduction of the European modernism and avant-garde, composing was still regarded as a concretization of an abstract Idea by the quasireligious figure of the composer (Kurenniemi 2001). He contrasts this with the field of popular music, which is geared more towards the process of communication and microtechniques in which the music takes place as a relation between people and technologies: for him, the techniques of tape cutting and manual editing are emblematic of the process of how music was entangled as part of life, and in this way the social realm infiltrated the sphere of sound.

Unpublished references

This article can also be regarded as a guideline to Kurenniemi’s ideas of technology: it is part of various microtechniques that support the wider abstract writings and notes concerning tonal systems, musical spheres and mathematics. The world that starts with the signal and the work of a theoristengineer-thinkerer is also one of signal bending. Kurenniemi emerges as a figure of both media archaeological significance and theoretical curiosity due to the ‘analytical weirdness’ in his writings, his archives and his DIY technologies.

Kurenniemi C4008-1 1/11. Erkki Kurenniemi’s audio diary (3rd-6th December 1971). Erkki Kurenniemi’s archive, Central Art Archives, Finnish National Gallery (EKA, CAA, FNG). Kurenniemi DRY 1974 1.nb – notebooks from 1974. EKA, CAA, FNG. Kurenniemi, Erkki (s.d.) “Muistumia elektronisen musiikin ajoilta” 22.6.1000 h. EKA, CAA, FNG. Interviews Kurenniemi, Erkki 2001. Interview of Erkki Kurenniemi 15 April 2001 and 16 April 2001 by Mika Taanila. Unpublished manuscript. Published references Deleuze, Gilles 1995. ‘Negotiations.’ New York: Columbia University Press. Douglas, Susan J. 1989. ‘Inventing American Broadcasting 1899–1922.’ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ernst, Wolfgang 2013. ‘Digital Memory and the Archive.’ Edited with an introduction by Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Huhtamo, Erkki 2003. “Kurenniemi, or the Life and Times of a Techno-Visionary”. Published essay. Huhtamo, Erkki 2010. “Thinkering with Media: On the Art of Paul DeMarinis”. In DeMarinis, Paul 2010. ‘Buried in Noise’. Heidelberg and Berlin: Kehrer, pp. 33–39. Kittler, Friedrich 1999. ‘Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.’ Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kurenniemi, Erkki, 1971. “Message is Massage“. Taide 6/1971, pp. 36–38. Kurenniemi, Erkki 2000. ”Supermegatechnologies. Some thoughts on the future”. ‘things 11’, winter 1999–2000. Kurenniemi, Erkki 2004. “Oh, human fart”. ‘Framework – The Finnish Art Review’ 2/2004. McLuhan, Marshall 2001. ‘Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man.’ London and New York: Routledge. Schreber, Daniel Paul 1955 [1903]. ‘Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.’ London: WM Dawson & Sons Ltd. Suominen, Jaakko and Parikka, Jussi 2010. “Sublimated Attractions – The Introduction of Early Computers in Finland in the late 1950s as an Audiovisual Experience.” ‘Media History’ 16:3, November 2010, pp. 319–340. Videos AT&T Promotional video, 1980.

Ether, Dirty By Vappu Jalonen

This work has been previously published in The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), issue 6, 2014 under the title â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Stained Black Mirrorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

1. Ether Machines

As Donna Haraway writes in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), ‘Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile – a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.’1

1. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in ‘Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature’ (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181 (p. 153).

2. Dirty Machines

But twenty years later the light, portable, and mobile machines are not clean. They are stained. Human fingers swipe and tap them so that their surfaces become covered in greasy fingerprints. Our best machines are dirty.

3. Black Mirror

As European art history tells it, the black mirror had two main uses: first it – the Claude glass – was a tool for the picturesque. The landscape painters and tourists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned their backs to the landscape and looked at it on the black mirror instead. It affected the light and shade, reducing and simplifying the colours, making things look better.2 According to Mr. Hamilton in a book by Uvedale Price from 1801 (as cited in Arnaud Maillet’s ‘The Claude Glass’): ‘You will then certainly allow, that the real carcass of an ox reflected in such a mirror, would lose part of its disgusting appearance, though the detail would be preserved’.3 The picturesque use of the black mirror has been compared with Instagram.4 The other use of the black mirror is a magical one. On occultcorpus.com, a contributor Caliban details how to create a black mirror of one’s own: simply paint a glass frame with thin layers of black acrylic paint.5 There were different kinds of black mirrors, some convex and some flat, some made of painted glass or obsidian, and some were simply oil in a vase or ink applied to the thumb.6 The use of the black mirror varied depending on time and place. It was called the devil and the witch, the source of errors and lies, the creator of illusions, something that usurps resemblance. It was thought to show the spirits, whether evil or kind.7 A poem published in the late sixteenth century in England recorded the belief that the black mirror showed ‘things to come, present, and past’.8 Or, as Elias Ashmole, cited in Maillet, wrote in 1652, it could show ‘all the persons one wishes to see, no matter what part of the world they are in, and even if they are hidden in the depths of the most inaccessible apartments, or even in caves in the bowels of the earth’.9 The European black mirror was thought to show the far away, the future, errors, the invisible, or the spirit – something that is outside the one who looks into it. But later on, with the rise of the notion of the unconscious (and perhaps progressing optics), the focus turned inside. The black mirror was then thought to expose the desires, fears, drives, and inner feelings of the one who looked into it. The black mirror became a horrifying tool for seeing to the inner self.10 2. Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Picture Pluperfect’, ‘The New Inquiry’ (12 April 2012) <http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/ picture-pluperfect/>; Arnaud Maillet, ‘The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art’, trans. by Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 3. Maillet, Arnaud, ‘The Glaude Class: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art’, trans. by Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 116. 4. Jurgenson, Nathan, ‘Picture Pluperfect’, The New Inquiry (12 April 2012) <http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/ picture-pluperfect/> 5. Occult Corpus forum, topic ‘Creating a Black Mirror’, post by Caliban (23 June 2010) <http://occultcorpus.com/ forums/index.php?/topic/20290-creating-a-black-mirror/>. 6. Maillet, pp. 57–58. 7. Maillet, pp. 47–50. 8. Maillet, p. 61. 9. Maillet, p. 50. 10. Maillet, pp. 63–64.

4. Blur Mirror

Unlike the modern notion of the mirror,11 the black mirror doesn’t pretend to only reflect back that to which it has been turned. The black mirror is blurry and distorting. It doesn’t allow the gaze only to see the reflection but always also the black mirror itself and its effect on what we see in it. And because we see ourselves in it, it shows its effect on us. I see myself in it and I see myself by it. I see its effect on my reflection. And I see something else too, I see myself using it.

11. Ian Bogost, ‘Alien Phenomenology; or, What it’s Like to Be a Thing’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 31.

5. Secret Â The secret kept revealing itself but we just didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t notice.

6. Stain I look into the depth and I see the surface. I see a stain. A stain on the screen is a trace of the human body, if you like: the Bakhtinian grotesque body that leaks over its boundaries.12 Also, a stain is a trace of the action of the body, the body rubbing against the machine. Of course the machine also leaves traces on the body. It produces new gestures and new abilities to point with a fingertip, tensing little muscles and tendons of the fingers and the hand, pain in new places, and new ways to perceive and think.

12. See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Rabelais and His World’, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968; repr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

7. A New Gesture

A nine-month-old baby of a friend lies on the floor and tries to change the pictures of a magazine by swiping them with a finger.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Observing, analysing, en collecting, reading, clean programm sometimes 90

researching, ngineering, listening, ning, cooking, ming, and, s, leaking.â&#x20AC;? 91

8. Touching a Poor Image

The occult black mirror is to be looked at but you should not touch the reflecting surface. The touch screen black mirror is to be looked at as well as touched. At the moment of touching a screen, a body touches also (at least most often) an image. The act of pinching and zooming an image has something special in its concreteness since an image has often been seen as only or mainly belonging to the realm of vision, not touch. And because of that, I guess, the childlike pointing of colourful icons and images can feel so lovely. The thing that is a digital image carries something spirit-like in itself: it can be invoked over and over again, in some form and shape and to same extent, but it is in no way safe from the touch. The touch is not innocent, nor is it something that one only does with one’s fingers. Digital images are touched and messed with in ways that extend beyond fingers and hands, and sometimes don’t include them at all. To quote Hito Steyerl: ‘The bruises of images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited and re-appropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated.’13 Sometimes the messing with does not include humans: the glitch can also be seen as an expression of the agency of the image itself, agency that according to Steyerl images also have, at least as potential.14 For Steyerl, a digital image is a thing that is not a shiny, immortal clone of itself.15 She calls this image poor. The poor image, rather than being about the real thing, is about its own real conditions of existence and thus about reality.16 And what would then be more appropriate than to take a photo of yourself from where your arm can reach, copy it in bad quality, and send it to the wrong person because of the clumsiness of your fingers.

13. Hito Steyerl, ‘The Wretched of the Screen’ (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p. 53. 14. See Steyerl, e.g., p. 56. 15. Steyerl, p. 53. 16. Steyerl, p. 44.

9. I’ll Be Your

10. The Mirror Story (Stories of Technologies Are Stories of Gender)

In one story â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a very well-known story â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a vain woman looked at herself in a mirror; she looked at her face, she put some make-up on, she looked at her clothes. She got ready to leave home to be seen or she got ready to be seen at home. She watched herself in a mirror and wanted to know who was the most beautiful. She spent hours staring at her face in a mirror. In another kind of a story, a woman was a mirror. She mirrored masculine subjectivity and desire. She was a mirror who stared at herself in a mirror. And she could only see an endless reflection of a mirror. In yet another story a woman used a mirror as a tool. She looked at herself with her sisters who were like her. She saw herself, and in her, her sisters who were like her, saw themselves.

11. A Selfie

I take a photo of my face on the pillow, the flat face of skin and gravity. I could publish it, the raw, ugly selfie. The word ‘selfie’ sounds like it would only be about cuteness, hotness, and selfishness. But selfies are also fragile, raw, defiant, and dependent on others: this is an image of me in a mirror and I give it to you. Then you’ll be my mirror. There is no obligation to like but please don’t bully me.

12. NSA

The outer wall of the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Maryland is a black mirror, a pixelated one. I assume that the building is supposed to look impenetrable by reflecting the outside back – as if by becoming the reflector of the outside it could become only about the outside, only a mirror for the wrongdoings of that of which it is not a part. At the same time it itself strives to become invisible, or at least mysterious, and of course enormously powerful. This is an attempt to look like a truth machine. And in a way it succeeds. In an already almost iconic image, the black mirror of the NSA chiefly reflects the cars of the employees inside – the human labour inside this mirror-machine: observing, researching, analysing, engineering, collecting, listening, reading, cleaning, cooking, programming, and, sometimes, leaking.

13. Inert (Human) Life

Donna Haraway states in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert’.17 I lie on a bed, balancing my computer on my legs. I open one tab after another. I type: slash fiction, feminist sex blog, how to grow long hair, doom metal drumming for beginners. I find out that someone found my paper about clothes on academia.edu by searching the phrase ‘Sweater of University of Turku’ on Google. I love the Internet. Suddenly, because for a while I have only been reading and not doing anything else, the screen goes to sleep. And then I see myself on the black screen, wide eyes staring at the screen: as if I were exposed; as if I had got caught being under the illusion of pure virtuality. This can’t be seen only as an example of inert life. The new black mirror is a medium of receiving and the medium of producing – the medium of performing the self, the medium of the soul at work as Franco Berardi might say,18 the medium of networking – which Haraway in 1991 described as both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy.19 This is not only inert but also productive. In fact the machine wants me to do something, all the time. We – some of us, that is – are not only frighteningly inert but also frighteningly (or empoweringly) self-performing and self-producing, the proper subjects of neoliberalism. Since 1991 our machines and our selves have changed.

17. Haraway, p. 152. 18. See Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy’ (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009). 19. Haraway, p. 170.

14. A Truth Machine

Even if we haven’t read the news about the Foxconn factories in China – for instance, the famous stories of anti-suicide netting being fitted beneath the windows of workers’ dormitories,20 or the disgusting Apple legend of Steve Jobs changing the screen of the first iPhone from plastic to glass one month before the release day and the factory workers being woken up in the middle of the night to start their weeks of overtime work with minimum pay21 – even if we haven’t heard this in detail, we know it. We know how our machines are made. And sometimes when we watch that glass, the touch screen, the screen, the phone, the computer, the black mirror, whatever, we see not only the images and words, the virtual, the digital, the weightless, or the stain we leave, or ourselves entangled in the machine, changing with the machine, or ourselves as users and consumers, or performing ourselves, or the enjoyment and the potential, or ourselves being observed – we also see the manufacture of the machine. In the words of Sara Ahmed, we see ‘the labor that is behind its arrival’.22 We see the matter of the machine and the human bodies that made it (and some of us were the ones that made it). The materiality of the machine shows that it came from something and somewhere and someone made it. Its becoming and being is in its matter. And this is how the black mirror shows the truth: the black mirror shows itself.

20. See, for example, Gethin Chamberlain, ‘Apple’s Chinese Workers Treated “Inhumanely, like Machines”’, ‘The Guardian’ (30 April 2011) <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/30/apple-chinese-workers-treatedinhumanely>; Cody Wopschall, ‘Apple Inc.: Severe Employee Abuse (2011)’, ‘Business Ethics Case Analyses’ (11 April 2013) <http://businessethicscases.blogspot.fi/2013/04/apple-inc-severe-employee-abuse-2011.html>. 21. See, for example, Henry Blodget, ‘Steve Jobs Freaked Out a Month before First iPhone was Released and Demanded a New Screen’, ‘Business Insider’ (22 January 2012) < http://www.businessinsider.com/ steve-jobs-new-iphone-screen-2012-1>. 22. Sara Ahmed, ‘Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 201n5.

15. Secret

There is no secret.

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