Joseph Nechvatal, editor
THE AESTHETICS OF AN OBSCURE MONSTER SACRÉ
Joseph Nechvatal
In the beginning was the noise.
Michele Serres, The Parasite
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Recently in my book Immersion Into Noise1 I mapped out a broad-spectrum of aesthetic activity I call the art of noise by tracing its past eruptions where figure/ground merge and flip the common emphasis to some extent. Immersion Into Noise concludes with a look at the figural aspect of this aesthetic lodged within the ground of consciousness itself.2 For me, the obscurity of Minóy exemplifies well a general noise aesthetic needed now within our broad-spectrum data-monitoring info-economy environment of background machine-tomachine gigabyte communication murmur3 in which we now find ourselves. Minóy is a good example of the speculative reality of noise music aesthetics4 in our era of algorithmic globalization.
This reflection on Minóy is somewhat of a reaction to what some interesting contemporary philosophers have been saying about contemporary art. Most notably, the surprising talk “The Next Avant-Garde” that the philosopher Graham Harman gave at the Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference at the University of Basel in September 2012, which engaged me with the recent speculative realism5 turn in continental philosophy and aesthetics. In that talk Harman criticizes Relational Art,6 calling it convivial art, so as to circle back to the formalist, media-specific aesthetics of the art critic Clement Greenberg, where art objects are free of the “tyranny of context.” This supposed context freedom merges efficiently with Harman’s theory of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), 7 but seemed somewhat at odds with his proclaiming that “there must be a new avant-garde in every field” that we cannot predict. His return to the formalist, media specific aesthetics is hard to swallow in terms of avant-garde ideals. Harman then touched on the subject of figure/ground relations (the main focus of my own noise art aesthetic theory) in terms of anthropomorphic free, flat ontology without going very far in addressing the human specialness8 (relationality) involved in viewing certain artworks. I mentioned to Harman, à propos, the irony of the intense dislike that Greenberg had for the late last work of Jackson Pollock, when Pollock went semi-representational, playing with indeterminate states of figure/ground ambiguity—for example, Jackson Pollock’s portrait of Jane Smith, No. 7 (1952), that I saw numerous times at her home, now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his talk, Harman touched on the subject of figure/ground relations in the context of the anthropomorphic-free, flat ontology that emerged as part of the debates within the Speculative Realism movement. He coupled this figure/ground discussion with a Greenbergian medium-specific version of the Object-Oriented Ontology defense of an ontology of objects (rather than processes). This was a welcome tonic in a relationally committed, but miserable, Europe of depressed post-convergent labor. I found remarkable his defense of objects amid the soaring (some would say souring) contemporary art trend of relations (de-aesthetized and dematerialized). Yet Harman failed to adequately account for the human singular (non-anthropomorphic-free) aspect involved in experiencing the art of noise, with its reversals in the order of figure/ ground. Without a rethinking of human singularity, I suggest that this omission conceals a concern for relational power, as we know from the life of Clement Greenberg. With the officially sanctioned support9 and celebration of relational dematerialization (celeb-commodified into a brand – and co-opted by the star-state-socio-economic system that is its life blood) the relational aesthetic10 is no longer an idealized mode of art activity that (supposedly) accepts the full range of all human relations as art in opposition to private objects and spaces. That has petered out, found now often unsympathetically aloof: afloat within relational administrative systems of power.11 The ideal of artistic exploration12 of the full range of all human relations is clearly untenable at this administrative level—and obscure, singular human intimacy pays the price. The relational artist as catalyst13—by means of flighty creations of intentionally stuplime14 works that fluctuate between sculpture, music, film clips and small Fluxus-like events—has turned the artist into a star-impresarioentrepreneur: a very specific, limiting and quasi-domineering human relation. Coupled with fun-house-laboratory work based in an aesthetic paradigm of aloofness that is so cool it verges on cold, the relational art star is placed firmly back at the top-center of things and torn away from art that creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a private-but-shared activity that is openended, interactive and resistant to closure.
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I would make the case for a return to the art object as post-conceptually scalable and mutable (as opposed to art as process alone) that owes something to Harman’s OOO object (stopping short of his context freeness) because the inherent detachment of work-in-progress post-medium practice, shorn of any deep commitment to medium specificity, seems to inscribe a limiting condition of superficiality on the artist while bestowing media success—a truly Mephistopheles-like metaphysical situation that, as Claire Bishop has suggested, “seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.”15
Also, I have been following closely the public proclamations of another philosopher on art, Simon Critchley. Critchley described in 2010 contemporary art’s dominant trend as an in-authenticity of “mannerist situationism” based in rituals of reenactment.16 Critchley goes on in 2012 to describe the circumstances further, as the “cold mannerist obsessionality of the taste for appropriation and reenactment that has become hegemonic in the art world.”17 So things have gotten no better. Clearly something deep-seated must be reevaluated. And art aesthetics is more interesting when it does the work of shifting meaning. So I am declining here Critchley’s urging for contemporary art to focus in on the monstrous, as, in my opinion, that parody of gloomy general dystopia only plays into the extreme spectacle aspect of mannerism. To be fair, Critchley doesn’t explain what or who he means by the monstrous, but when I think of the monstrous today I think of the high visibility of Lady Gaga (and her little monsters), extreme Hollywood lowbrow movies, and grotesque far right political claims and postures. No, here I am only interested in a new contemporary aesthetic labor based in a certain exquisite untouchability, and unseeablity—Minóy’s obscure monster sacré affinity of disconnectedness, which focuses on an impregnable divalike commitment to a nihilistic aesthetic of becoming imperceptible18 (á la Ad Reinhardt blackness, but one that takes you into embodied and embedded resonance perspectives, into radical immanence, and away from extreme pure abstractions). I am interested in an exquisite monster sacré aesthetic for Minóy (where personal anthropomorphic eccentricities and indiscretions are tolerated) that is bent on combining the neo-materialist19 vibrant world with a wider vision of political awareness including private spiritual, ecstatic or numinous themes accessible through the generative subjective realm of each individual; an aesthetics of perception-politics based on resonance (not a politics of visibility) which reveals in minute particulars the full spectrum of the extensive social-political dimension. This monster sacré affinity is a materialist nihilism of no that (if it goes far enough) can transform a metamorphosis (subject to the flickering formative forces of emergence)20 into an all-embracing yes of delicate abhorrence.21 So I am advocating here not the passive and thus incomplete nihilism of form, but a generative and virulent and curative nihilism that unleashes forces of reverberation to emerge and resonate like a web of inter-connected, molecular and viral relational affects and intensities that traffics in dissonance, deviation, and the incidental. But what specifically can we glean for art from this instability and resonance of covert nihilism? In what kind of regimes of attraction/repulsion can the resonant nihilistic art object participate, and what may it do differently from other signs and objects? To these questions I offer a countertheory to OOO’s formalism, a theory of à rebours22 exchanges of figure/ground relationships: a nimble art that emphasizes human and non-human entanglements. This is an art that depends on playing out nihilistic negativity by intensifying its forces into an affirmative nihilism. This nimble nihilist bracketing pushes the audience towards open defamiliarizations, challenging them to think outside of the normal system of human consciousness. In this way it is favorable to OOO aesthetics. So this art as nimble monster sacré is implicated in the very type of problematic instability that the “self” undergoes in Nietzsche’s thought: the cohesiveness of the culture/state distinction, like the cohesiveness of the self/other distinction, disintegrates with the ontological instability produced by the annihilation of the real as distinguishable from the illusory. With a nimble art of noise— based in the distinction between active nihilism and passive nihilism (or monstrous nihilism)—we can depict the underground vigor of form as an active verve that can only be speculated upon by thinking beyond the discursive.
The embeddedness of our inner world—the life of our imagination with its intense drives, suspicions, fears, and loves—guides our intentions and actions in the politicaleconomic world. Our inner world is the only true source of meaning and purpose we have and nimble exquisite gazing23 (that involves self-investigation) is the way to discover for ourselves this inner life. So we might consider now that, in contrast to our frenzied data market surveillance culture,24 that which trains us to fear the atrocious eyes of outer perception, a protracted and absorbing gazing art (like Minóy’s) could encourage the development of agile clandestine exchanges based on the embedded individual intuitive eye in conjunctive contact with an abundant optical-mnemonic commons (not cloud)25 that shares a sensibility for building a force. What I mean by optical-mnemonic commons is a visual memory of possible shared futures, a mnemonic gazing at that intersubjective affinity that we share as the cooperative common ground of sociality: that shared common ground that precedes community. Such a commons of exchange is what has to be built politically through the creation of innovative individual-polis assemblages; new modes of organization of the individual-collective from which all could benefit.
Of course this sphere of anti-purist gazing-commons (essentially a cooperative rejection of the tyranny of labels, essential identities, privileged abstractions, and fixed ideas) is what allows art to construct unstable distinctions between subjects and objects that embrace the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces—from the infinitude of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality. Subsequently my interest here is in anti-pure nimble artists like Minóy who challenge and sometimes exchange the hierarchy of figure and ground (figure and abstraction) through struggles with noise. Certainly globalization is all about world space, so noise art aesthetics here will continue to be thought of in terms of spatialization: dimensions, areas, and territories. What space does noise clear and what space does noise clog? How does noise function as an attractor for a gazing-commons and as a repellent in the monstrous era of global data mining and the digital surveillance state? How can monster sacré aesthetic thought help us to think and live differently within our smooth and surveyed spaces through art? How can we live more intently and intensely in our imaginary cosmos of pleasure rooted in the non-closure of a gazing-commons aesthetic, with its yearning for otherness in the non-appropriative mode? By not ignoring the differences between the personal and the political, but on the contrary, by showing how these differences resonate together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, 26 planes of consistency from which new political concepts can be formed. So what does the brand contemporary art presently suggest for a gazing-common aesthetic? Not much, yet. Julian Stallabrass argues27 that behind contemporary art’s multiplicity and apparent capriciousness lies a monstrous bleak uniformity and that this amounts to making culture uncurious, timid, and stupid in the service of a big business ethos of unquestioning consumer conformity. Also, Stallabrass purports that the unregulated insular contemporary art market seeks to dupe newbie art rubes into being enthusiastic participants in the dumbing-down values useful to big business—values which address all communications to the lowest common denominator of the monstrously massive. So, the obvious question is: what about art’s responsibility of resistance? Perhaps surprisingly, for me the answer is to be found within the challenge of a noise style based in resistance through the cultivation of invisibility. 28 So I want to argue for an agony of style of logo invisibility, and the importance that should be given within noise art aesthetic struggles for a gazing-commons. The principle of constructing patterns of infinite becomings is perhaps inherent in avant-garde artistic tradition (avant-garde values). Graham Harman suggested as much. But this avant-garde now, I think, should be considered in terms of noisy invisibility not ontology, as deviating from the regularities of visible normality provides the avant-garde new sources for artistic production. Certainly, the values of the avant-garde have always been interfering with the channels of artistic production and reception, and these values are responsible for expanding the forms and definitions of art itself.29 But like in nature, noise in art plays a productive role in the invisible life of a system when it stresses becoming-imperceptible. But a becoming-imperceptible-invisibile monster sacré, today can no longer be a form of enfant terrible withdrawl, akin to Marcel Duchamp’s strategic invisibility,30 but rather a phantasmagorical plunge into what Félix Guattari expresses as the chaosmosis. 31 In that sense, Minóy’s becoming-imperceptibly noisy is an event for which there is no immediate representation. The art of noise marks a qualitative transformation into a non-place where being and non-being reverse into each other, unfolding out and enfolding in their respective outsides. This short-circuit causes a creative conflagration typical of the art of noise. Let’s consider the difference between noise art (based on an individual’s inner vision) verses the monstrous mass machine data market,32 with its digital functionalism. For me the difference is in looking into and projecting onto something—thereby discovering an emerging manifestation based in invisibility—as opposed to looking at something. In that sense it requires an active slow participation on the part of the viewer—and noise style demands as much. For me this requires the use of hidden mental participation and, as such, is now essential in our climate of monstrous mass media in that it plays against the grain of given objective consensus visibility. I believe that Minóy’s deep droning palimpsest soundscapes exemplify what I have been theorizing above, the aesthetics of an obscure monster sacré. They suggest a spectral relationship between landscape and sound that accomplishes sensations of haunting dark ambience. They provoke dense planes of feelings, disrupted and veined by withdrawal and partial absence. They suggest a poetics of night. And of difficulty—one that explores both the outer space of presence and the inner space of remembrance, where a haunting perspective shatters both linear temporality and accounts of embodied emplacement.
1. Joseph Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press/MPublishing, 2011).
2. This involves a question of the qualities (and levels) of awareness of our own consciousness within aesthetic realms which we are capable of attaining through noise art. 3. Stupendous amounts of data generated by nearly one billion people are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s website, send e-mail with files attached, buy products, post on Twitter, or read newspapers and art theory papers online. 4. Noise Music in general traffics in dissonance, atonality, distortion, incidental composing, etc. This music begins with Luigi Russolo’s reti di rumori (networks of noises) music that he performed on his intonarumori noise instuments and with his text “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto,” in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (London: Continuum, 2004). For more of the history of noise music, see Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2007) and Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise, 39–47. 5. Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy which defines itself loosely in its stance of anti-correlationist metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy or what it terms correlationism (meaning philosophies that apprehend being and the world via human-centered lenses, where any understanding of being and the world is always correlated to what it means for or to humans, or how insight into being and the world looks, feels, etc., is shaped according to human perspectives). While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers (such as Harman, Ray Brassier, and Quentin Meillassoux, among others) have a shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant. 6. Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach simply as a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space. The artist can be more accurately viewed as the “catalyst” in relational art, rather than being at the center. 7. Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Specifically, OOO opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. In contrast to Kant’s view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. 8. Art’s coherence stems from human values and symbolic systems and the role of the beholder, and thus is, and must be, correlational and anthropocentric. 9. Curators promoting this “laboratory” paradigm include Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud. 10. Established by Nicolas Bourriaud, now director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 11. 2013 examples include Philippe Parreno’s Anywhere, anywhere out of the world at the Palais de Tokyo, Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective at Le Centre Pompidou, The Dia Art Foundation- sponsored Gramsci Monument by Thomas Hirschhorn, and Tino Sehgal’s win of the Golden Lion for the best artist in the International Exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in the Venice Biennale. 12. Artists included by Bourriaud under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics include Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, Henry Bond, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe, among others. 13. See “The Menagerie Entertains,” my review of the Pierre Huyghe Retrospective at Le Centre Pompidou in The Brooklyn Rail, December 18, 2013: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/12/ artseen/pierre-huyghe-the-menagerie-entertains. 14. In Chapter 6, “Stuplimity,” of her book Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Sianne Ngai offers this term as a necessary reaction to new, primarily postmodern objects of analysis, a term that acknowledges stupidity and boredom as part of the sublime expression connected to the postmodern art experience. 15. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 52. 16. Simon Critchley, “The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology,” Dance Politics & Co-Immunity Workshop, Giessen, Germany, November 12, 2010. See also Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2014). 17. Simon Critchley, “Absolutely-Too-Much,” The Brooklyn Rail, August 1, 2012: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/08/art/absolutely-toomuch. 18. “Although all becomings are already molecular, including becoming woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. . . . If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula”: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 279. 19. Manuel DeLanda coined the term “neo-materialist” in a short 1996 text, “The Geology of Morals: A Neo-Materialist Interpretation,” Virtual Futures 95 (1995), where he treats a portion of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in order to conceptualize geological movements. For more on neo-materialism, see Manuel DeLanda’s interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press/ MPublishing, 2012), 38. 20. In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. 21. For a musical comparison, see “The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow,” in Cox and Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, 59–61. 22. The meaning of à rebours is against the grain. Also, À rebours (1884) (translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) is a decadent novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates on the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. 23. Gaze: to look long and intently. Gaze is often indicative of wonder, fascination, and revelation. 24. For example, take the blandly named Utah Data Center, National Security Agency. A project of once immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases are all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital transactions. It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. For more on this trend, see James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). 25. The term “cloud” is generally used to describe a data center’s functions. More specifically, it refers to a service for leasing computing capacity. 26. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science— a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence, and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze also produced studies in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts (a two-volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature.) Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). 27. See Julian Stallabrass, Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). 28. Perhaps this should not be surprising given that the hidden complexity of a basic internet transaction is a mystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip through hundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrives across the street. 29. For more on this, read my essay “Viractuality in the Webbed Digital Age,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online #5, 25th Anniversary Edition (2011): http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/05/meaning- online5.html#nechvatal. 30. Duchamp's entire artistic activity since the “definitive incompletion” of the Large Glass in 1923 was an exercise in strategic invisibility, giving rise to objects and events which—because they were apparently too impermanent or unimportant or insubstantial, or because they eluded established genre conventions, or because they confused or diluted authorial identity—evaded recognition as “works of art.” 31. Félix Guattari said in his noteworthy book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, the work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment that leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself. 32. To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.
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Joseph Nechvatal, editor
THE OBSCURITY OF MINÓY
Joseph Nechvatal
Is it so a noise to be is it a least remain to rest, is it a so old say to be, is it a leading are been. Is it so, is it so, is it so, is it so is it so is it so.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Solitude, that dread goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more threatening, more violent, more heartbreaking—but who today knows what solitude is?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human:
A Book for Free Spirits
But he still did not know who he was . . .
Michael Knerr, The Sex Life of the Gods
He was feeling his way through obscurities.
Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils
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The initiative behind this book and CD has been developed as a project to rescue Minóy from obscurity. Therefore, in the shadow of eldritch Priest’s essay “Obscurity and the Poetics of Non/Sense,”1 I would like to explain a bit of how the Minóy project emerged out of obscurity, while simultaneously promoting the aesthetics of obscurity.
In large measure, we owe a debt of gratitude to my coproducer, Phillip B. Klingler (PBK), for its existence. Phillip had known Minóy since 1987, when Minóy was at the peak of his audio creativity. Phillip had been reading reviews of his music in the cassette underground press, notably pieces in Option and Sound Choice, where critics were calling Minóy a master of sound collage and a must-hear maximalist. Phillip sent Minóy a letter and ordered some tapes from him, but nothing quite prepared him for the unique world of Minóy’s music. In private correspondence, Phillip explained to me what Minóy’s dense musical abstractions meant to him, and how he perceived them. He described Minóy’s noise music in obscure terms, which is appropriate, as the origin of any sound in a Minóy track is most often indiscernible, thus creating an otherworldly abstract experience. Phillip found the work “dream-like, nightmare-like, but also sometimes spiritual,” and Minóy’s sound affected him deeply. Phillip (a painter at the time) sent Minóy his first sound experiments—and they were met with positive, validating comments from Minóy. Consequently, they started talking on the phone frequently. They had both been involved in the mail art scene, so were already on common collaborative sharing ground. In the mid 1980s, Phillip had been exhibiting his paintings around the L.A. area, obsessed with moving deeper into abstraction. When he heard Minóy’s music, he knew that the abstract possibilities with sound expression were nearly limitless—and Minóy provided an artistic model for him. Through their developing relationship (he collabo rated live with Minóy in Torrance, California and worked very closely with him throughout 1987 into 1988, making something like ten albums together under different names), he discovered that Minóy would stay up for days and nights on end without sleep, very excitedly, and compulsively, creating artworks and music. After that, Minóy would spend days in bed, depressed and non-communicative.
1 eldritch Priest, “Obscurity and the Poetics of Non/Sense in the Writings of Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa,” Mosaic 45.2 (June 2012): 1–17.
Through this creative process, Phillip discovered that as dense as Minóy’s music could often be, it was created with rather limited instrumentation: electric guitar, synthesizer, shortwave radio, and a Sony Pro Walkman. The only effects unit he used was a beloved Radio Shack spring reverb. Minóy didn’t use the common four-track recorder to overdub his sounds, and instead he dubbed back and forth between several Boom Boxes and cassette recorders that he would place in different proximities around his room. Minóy would do this over and over until he had achieved the spatial audio effects he desired.
As Phillip recounted to me, 1986 was the first year Minóy obsessively documented his sound works. The results were 33 full-length albums created in a twelve-month period. This manic, compulsive need to create more and more art—where ideas flow into work after work—would typify Minóy’s working method. During a fevered six-year period (between 1986 and 1992) Minóy created hundreds of cassette albums. Minóy defined the concept of mail collaboration, which suited his personality and his phobias well. (As I previously mentioned, he was an agoraphobic, didn’t like to travel and could not drive a car.) Minóy was addicted to his mailbox and would receive huge stacks of mail. He even adopted the name No Mail On Sundays for his collaborative project with Damian Bisciglia, a reference to their mutual postal addiction. Phillip (PBK) performed live with Minóy at the University of California, San Bernardino, in 1988—a show that became scandalous. Minóy had a colorful cloth that he had draped over his head and shoulders, his nails were painted black, and one could not see his face at all. He was doing a sort of Butoh-inspired strange, slow dance, while howling some anguished mashup of Somewhere Over The Rainbow and, ironically, I Get By (With A Little Help From My Friends). Campus crusaders shut the concert down, turning the sound system off after only fifteen minutes onstage, but the noise music continued for an hour, played through their own amps. This has been documented with a tape called Devil Music: Minóy Live (cassette released on the Nihilistic Recordings label in Holland).2 The press clearly loved the scandal (no surprise there), but events like this made Minóy acutely aware of how unacceptable and misunderstood his creative works were by society at large—how obscure he really was. This concert led to a dissipation of PBK’s and Minóy’s creative energies in collaboration, and they never worked together again. Phillip didn’t correspond with Minóy after that, but he was aware of Minóy’s activities in the noise underground. Their solo works appeared together on many tape compilations from that time.
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When Phillip came online around 2000, it was basically known amongst mutual friends that Minóy had dropped out and was not making music any more, and he had also completely stopped corresponding with his music friends. It has now become known that it was in 1992 that Minóy wrote to a close collaborator, Zan Hoffman, informing him that Minóy Cassette works (his DIY label) was over, writing (as Amber Sabri shares in her memoir in this volume),
My soul has dried up and blown away. I can no longer feel joy but only constant mental and physical (psychosomatic, so it seems) pain. We are three non-functioning people alone in the void of the Minóy house, sanctuary become prison. See and hear us go bump in the night in the day in the night in the day. It’s all the same. No exit. Now we scream help.
After 1992, nothing else was heard of (or from) Minóy.
In 2012, Phillip started doing some intense internet research and came upon a posting that Minóy’s partner, Stuart Haas, had made on an obscure mail-art site. It said Minóy had died in 2010. With Minóy’s old house address, Phillip was able to get the phone number and he called it. Stuart picked up and they talked as easily as if twenty years had not passed. Stuart told him about the sudden illness that had taken Minóy’s life.
Having learned all of this within a few hours, Phillip became very concerned about the master tapes: did Stuart still have the tapes? Stuart said, “no, we threw all those out.” Phillip hung up, with only Stuart’s email address in hand, but following up by email proved more encouraging as Stuart later recanted, stating that he had kept any tapes that Minóy had written master on. Phillip was elated and wanted to help. He suggested helping digitize and archive the Minóy tape collection, yet didn’t hear back from Stuart on this for quite some time. Eventually, Minóy and Stuart’s good friend, Amber Sabri, stepped in to help. Amazingly, she had the complete collection of tapes Stuart had saved. In June 2013, Phillip received three large boxes via UPS. Opening those boxes, for Phillip, was like finding the Holy Grail. In the boxes were all (or all of what was left) of Minóy’s master tapes: his life in music, his legacy, everything that the man obsessed over and the things that made him famous in the 1980s cassette network. The first thing Phillip did was physically count and document every tape in those boxes. There were at least twenty five lost works: just the jewel-case/insert with titles and credits, but no tape inside. There were a number of cassettes with no written documentation on them at all. Some masters were missing completely, as there are tapes listed on the Discogs website3 that were not found in the archive. Using all that information, Phillip was able to compile the definitive Minóy discography—and it totals 208 releases. Because of all the mystery behind Minóy’s self-imposed exile, the boxes settled a lot of questions about Minóy’s creative output, especially the late period works. Still prolific in 1991, he completed almost fifty full-length albums. In 1992 there were a little over twenty, six in 1993, and in 1994 only one was found. It was the late period works that were most interesting to us for this project, as the fact that anything after 1992 even exists was extremely fascinating. Amber Sabri related to Phillip how Minóy’s parents had moved into his house (actually into the large three-car garage) and had brought all their worldly belongings with them, so now with his parents there, plus Stuart, it might have been very difficult for him to feel comfortable creating his music, even as his parents enjoyed and admired his art and music. Amber describes it as a “happy and functioning situation for all four of them. Stuart worked full-time as an aerospace engineer and the parents took over the household chores.” But for whatever reason, Minóy’s eerie vocalizations disappear in these last recordings. But why did he stop all together in 1994? It may have been in part the changing technology—away from cassette to digital formats (like the CD)—that was furiously happening at that time. But Amber tells me that she believes Minóy at this moment was disenchanted with making music altogether, that he felt betrayed by certain noise musicians, and that he really meant it when he said he was finished with the world as a musician. As his illnesses worsened (exacerbated by thirty years of medication treating his pain, panic, mania and paranoia, plus his morbid obesity), the creation of sound art consumed too much of his energy. He became physically less able to create anything in any form that required physical movement. As Amber recalls, Minóy’s father died in early 1991 and his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia became impossible to handle at home so they moved her into an assisted living facility. Minóy steadily became more and more ill and Stuart became more and more overwhelmed with working full-time, caring for him full-time, and trying to maintain all the duties of a household. It was at this point that Minóy—now calling himself Haint—turned to making digital art from within his bed. As Phillip expressed to me, Minóy’s late works seem very stern, with an angry edge to them, “ponderous structures, with sounds buzzing around, moving in little ways within a confined space, they are claustrophobic”—and that makes sense, given his situation. For this project (this volume you now hold in your hands, or are reading on-screen, plus the cassette and CD released from punctum records titled, simply, Minóy), Phillip combed through the archive in search of shorter compositions that would represent the oeuvre. This was a challenge, as the vast majority of Minóy’s compositions are of running time between thirty to forty-five minutes in length. As Phillip articulated to me:
Listening to Minóy’s music is sort of like watching a movie: it takes you on a journey, the twists and turns can’t be anticipated because nothing repeats, the structure is always in flux until it ends. The sounds aren’t literal. They’re metaphoric only in the most abstract way. These long, elaborate pieces were essential to Minóy’s aesthetic of a cinema of the ear, allowing him to explore outside of time restrictions that would apply to avant-garde sound artists working in the shorter LP format.
Yet Phillip and I were not interested in editing longer compositions down to excerpts for this project. We were more interested in compiling a collection of his shorter works from different time-frames in his career, thus allowing a listener to come away with a greater sense of Minóy’s achievements, and thus also the bigger picture of what Phillip calls his “musical genius.”
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Joseph Nechvatal, editor
MINÓY AS HAINT AS KING LEAR
photographs by Maya Eidolon
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With projects such as Clock DVA and The Anti Group, Adi Newton investigated the philosophical, esoteric and political resonances of the relationship between music, technology and image. Conversation with one of the greatest sound alchemists of all time
We publish the interview to Adi Newton contained in Chaos Variation III , the 12 "+ SD Card vinyl edition by Obsolete Capitalism and the same Adi Newton / TAG (The Anti-Group) just published by Rizosfera . Translation from English by Claudio Kulesko. We thank Rizosfera and Obsolete Capitalism for availability.
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Obsolete Capitalism: We begin the conversation by working on the concept of intensive and a-programmatic bifurcation. A cartography of your long and astonishing artist itinerary leads us to identify two main floors. In our opinion, we are dealing with two macro-environments in which it is possible to divide your theoretical-sound research and your audio-visual pragmatics: the first of these environments is the Piano- Clock Dva , the second is the piano- Anti Group, often collected in the acronym TAG / TAGC. In between, many interesting collaborations, almost as a corollary of an intersection with the two artistic intervention plans mentioned above. The two macro-environments you have created are certainly intersecting, but they are also strongly divergent. In your audio-alchemical laboratory, at what point of personal and artistic research does the bifurcation between Clock Dva and Anti-Group begin, and what rhythm, or interval, can we attribute to them?
Adi Newton: Of course there is always a connection between things. Consider the theory of morphic resonance of Rupert Sheldrake. "The morphic fields of social groups connect the members of the group to each other even miles away, providing communication channels through which organisms can remain in contact with each other despite the distance. They help us provide an explanation for telepathy. Today there is strong evidence that different animal species are telepathic, and that telepathy appears to be a fairly common means of animal communication. Telepathy is normal, not paranormal, and is natural, not supernatural: it is also common among people, especially among people who know each other well. The morphic fields of mental activity are not confined to our heads. They extend well beyond our brains, through intention and attention. We are already familiar with the idea that fields extend beyond the material objects in which they are rooted: as in the case of magnetic fields propagating beyond the surface of the magnets; the gravitational field of the Earth extends well beyond the earth's surface, keeping the moon within its own orbit; the fields of a cell phone extend far beyond the telephone itself. In the same way, the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains "(Sheldrake, 1981). the fields of a cell phone extend far beyond the telephone itself. In the same way, the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains "(Sheldrake, 1981). the fields of a cell phone extend far beyond the telephone itself. In the same way, the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains "(Sheldrake, 1981).
Here is a summary of the properties of the morphic field, as described by Rupert Sheldrake: "At each level of complexity, the hypothesized properties of the morphic fields can be summarized as follows: 1) These are self-organizing totalities. 2) They possess both a spatial and a temporal aspect, and organize spatio-temporal patterns of vibratory or rhythmic activity. 3) Attract the systems in their sphere of influence towards models and forms of characteristic activities, of which they organize the coming-in-being, and of which they maintain the integrity. The goals, or objectives, towards which the morphic fields attract the systems placed under their influence are called attractors. The paths through which, usually, the systems reach these attractors are called creodi. 4) They interconnect and coordinate the morphic units, the holons, located within them, which, in turn, become whole organized by the morphic fields. The morphic fields contain within them other morphic fields, structured according to a certain hierarchy, or olarchy. 5) These are probability structures, and their organizational activity is probabilistic. 6) They are equipped with an integrated memory, produced by self-resonance with the past of an internal morphic unit, and by morphic resonance with all previous analogous systems. This memory is cumulative. The more certain patterns of activity are repeated, the more they tend to become habitual "(Sheldrake, 1981). The morphic fields contain within them other morphic fields, structured according to a certain hierarchy, or olarchy. 5) These are probability structures, and their organizational activity is probabilistic. 6) They are equipped with an integrated memory, produced by self-resonance with the past of an internal morphic unit, and by morphic resonance with all previous analogous systems. This memory is cumulative. The more certain patterns of activity are repeated, the more they tend to become habitual "(Sheldrake, 1981). The morphic fields contain within them other morphic fields, structured according to a certain hierarchy, or olarchy. 5) These are probability structures, and their organizational activity is probabilistic. 6) They are equipped with an integrated memory, produced by self-resonance with the past of an internal morphic unit, and by morphic resonance with all previous analogous systems. This memory is cumulative. The more certain patterns of activity are repeated, the more they tend to become habitual "(Sheldrake, 1981). This memory is cumulative. The more certain patterns of activity are repeated, the more they tend to become habitual "(Sheldrake, 1981). This memory is cumulative. The more certain patterns of activity are repeated, the more they tend to become habitual "(Sheldrake, 1981). So, from what we can understand, the information, once conceptualized and conceived, begins to resonate outwards, as if it were a wave in propagation, informing other receivers that they will end up having the same ideas. A concept, an idea, then, will inform other ideas, so the morphic resonance, the etheric vibration, the connectivism, the collective unconscious, can all partly explain the phenomenon for which certain events develop simultaneously in different topographical locations, within different cultures and in different languages, as can be seen in the arts, sciences and many other fields. From my point of view, therefore, my work is not only interconnected with sound, or with music, but also with art and science, and with other systems of thought and practices such as magic, alchemy and philosophical-spiritual beliefs. All this informs my ideas and my practices in the fields of art, painting, film production, or creative audio.
The Anti-Group, «The Delivery», Atonal Festival 1985
Let us now talk about the productive unity and its "excessive" side. Here the excess is understood as a wealth of themes, plurality of perspectives, multiplicity of theories juxtaposed in the assembling plane, and of the articulation of the involved languages - sound, image, text. Since its first appearance as The Anti-Group / TAGC - the first two years (1985/1986) at the Atonal festival in Berlin, for example - the synaesthesia between these three aspects of art remains your authorial signature - or your fundamental modus operandi- that produces that «surplus» that we translate as «excess of discourse». It is a matter that is not known as "schematising" or storing, then as today, within a single object of fruition, or of a precise discursive category - be it in the form of disc, film, video or performance, or all four things together. How has your approach to mixed media developed, and what motives, or intensity, have "forced" you to present your artistic projects with this discursive surplus?
From an early age, and throughout my life, my main interest was painting; I look at art, theater and cinema, from the privileged perspective of a painter. I work starting from an intuition: «An absolute can not be given by intuition, while all the rest derives from the analysis. Here we call intuition the sympathy with which one enters an object in order to coincide with what it has of the unique and, therefore, of inexpressible. On the contrary, analysis is the operation that leads the object back to elements already known, that is, common to this object and to others. "(Henri Bergson, 2012).
When I started experimenting with sound, I started with tape recordings and for me, at that time, the tape recorder was a means of altering and modifying the sound from recordings of concrete or acusmatic sounds, or some kind of tool. Through the physical editing, the variation of the speed, the reversal of the tape or its manipulation, it was possible to obtain compositions or arrangements. I was interested in the works of experimental artists such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Ilhan Kemaleddin Mimaroǧlu, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, GRM, and more recent groups such as Velvet Underground. Thanks to my interest in art - as these sound artists were exploring the relationship between visual art and other forms of expression such as dance and cinema - all this fascinated me, These first experiments of exploratory relationships between different practices, as in the case of Reunion 's performance by Cage and Duchamp, or the soundscape designed by Varese, Xenakis and Le Corbusier for the Philips Electronics Pavillon, at the 1958 World's Exposition in Brussels , marked the beginning of the expanding development of what today could be defined as a form of multimedia. I always had the idea of extending my ideas in other areas, such as the visual, starting with the use of 8 mm films and slide projectors. Over time, and with the advance of technology, I was then able to proceed towards a greater integration between sound and visual art.
Clock DVA, «The Hacker», 1988
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We have always thought about your artistic research as The Anti-Group / TAGC - but this is also found in the Clock Dva of The Hacker / Man Amplified period - as one of the fundamental pillars for understanding the concept and evolution of the "Image-Sound" »In art and in the theory of cinema-thought. The Image-Sound is the third movement of the image, that intersperse gap that defines a new level of "expanded cinema" that others call "the cinema of the future". The Image-Sound is when between sound and image there is no separation, if not an area of obscure and deep indeterminacy in which the sound becomes image, while the image becomes sound - as in the case of the performance of TAG in Prato , at the Museum of Contemporary Art (1988). The Image-Sound is that battlefield in which the clash between cinema, video and television dissolves in favor of a pure and at times narrative, sometimes semi-spherical, spiritual and intense image and sound. Your expressive side has often remained in the shade, while it seems to us the most advanced and the most paradigmatic. Do you want to talk about how, in your work, the image has changed so radically?
I believe that this aspect has in some ways developed together with greater availability of technologies and their advancement, since it has become possible to adopt techniques that, previously, were the preserve of expert systems, in Artificial Intelligence, and of very expensive processes. employed by specialized industries. Computers, especially in my work, have allowed us to integrate these two media, and to manipulate the sound to levels previously impossible outside of IRCAMstudies, or other experimental research studies. What would have required several weeks of physical work before, could now be obtained in a few days, and then be further developed; and it could be suggested that the immediacy introduced into computer music consists in the fact that it allows to assimilate such techniques into an easily applicable form, thus becoming a simulacrum of the original. In some ways, in the previous epochs, the technological restrictions and the scarce availability of the technologies have stimulated the invention, and therefore it is easier, nowadays, to understand that it has come to constitute a milieu , in which the techniques and experiments of the pioneers previous ones have become part of a sound fabric.
But to create something new or to expand what already exists, we must go even further, not only creating a unique individual expression, but also expanding the conceptual themes and their relations with the visual counterpart and with the corresponding literature, highlighting new significant meanings. For this reason, my work is both an investigation of relationships and connections within a given area of interests, and an application of these researches, which end up organizing the composition, structure and content; every element, therefore, is inserted inside the work, informing a total sound field. This sound field is, as you refer, the Image-Sound, containing the sum of a work in which there is no separation between image, sound and concept.
The Anti-Group, Digitaria , 1987
Your first artistic project in 1977 was called The Future. Already from the ambitious name, the future relationship and technology has represented for you a tension towards what seems to be destined to actualize itself as articulated coexistence, but it is already reality as a virtual project. The technological revolution, from the time when The Future, Clock Dva, The Anti-Group took shape at the end of the seventies, produced a dynamic model of society that structures our lives and profiles our culture in such a way as to allow impetuous development, facilitating some material sides of our way of life, but complicating other aspects. Can you talk about your approach to technology and technological objects in particular? And above all, how has technology changed your prospects for the future, and your approach to art and sound?
The relationship between science and art is something that has always existed, and the computer is the tool that has given us the opportunity to further develop the creativity of the mind and imagination. As an answer to your question about my approach to sound technology, we could turn to recording and recording with ambiguous techniques, a future form of sound reproduction, as well as a technique related to the total sound field and its studio replication. Since I recorded the TAGC album, Digitaria with ambiguous techniques33 years ago, these acoustic and psychoacoustic sciences have developed further, and technology and information have become even more accessible, both in terms of hardware and software. I am currently holding seminars and lectures on theory and practice at the State University of New York, New Paltz. The lessons concern not only ambiguous technology, but the creative use of the total sound field, which is in any case a practice already present in itself, as well as creative applications based on a more conceptual approach. There is, therefore, a relationship between the development of technology, creativity and imagination.
How many times, every day, do we pick up our mobile phones to check messages, to use social media, or take photographs, etc.? The number of applications that mobile technology offers is expanding more and more. It can not be denied that the cell phone has so far saved countless lives, and that it continues to do so; the development of medical technologies related to mobile technologies is only a small example, and yet very positive. Certainly there is also the invasive aspect, linked to control, of technology; the dystopian features we see appear more and more often have been written and predicted many times in science fiction. With my colleague and good friend TeZ ( Maurizio Martinucci ) we are working on a new album by Clock DVA which will be titled Analog Soundtracks , a sort of sequel to the previous Clock DVA album Digital Soundtracks ; this new album, however, will be strongly inspired by the ideas of the dystopian future described in works such as We by Evgenij Zamjatin, or Synthajoy of DG Compton, or in the work of JG Ballard. But next to the negative ones there are also different technologies and positive scientific achievements, positive advances on which to work and on which you can concentrate according to your needs. In every system the negative aspects are always the easiest to find, becoming the dominant and determining aspects of that system. There is no doubt about the degree of integration of digital technology in contemporary society: in fact, some aspects are omnipresent and are part of the very fabric of the system we currently take for granted. Control over electricity, water, food, shelter, education and health by computerized systems linked to individual credit has already been fully integrated. There is no Future, only a continuation of the Now that determines it. Technology should be liberated to provide for different modes of elevation of individual consciousness and, eventually, for the possibility that all of society is raised to a level that would allow us to build an empathized and civilized culture. This would be ideal. I hope that my work with TAG / Clock DVA can help to ensure that computers and technologies encourage the human mind to focus on a more positive use of technologies, in all their different and multiple uses. But, as always, the inverse must also be considered. I believe this extracted from Rumors. Essay on the political economy of music, Jacques Attali's book, is really relevant, also with regard to the question you ask: «Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool aimed at understanding. Nowadays, no theory obtained through language or mathematics can be considered sufficient; it would be unable to account for what remains essential over time - the qualitative and fluid aspect, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs that are used and exchanged, even the most solid concepts are crumbling and every theory wobbles. The current representation of the economy, trapped within the structures erected in the seventeenth century or, at most, around 1850, is not able to predict, describe or even express what awaits us. To speak to new realities it is necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms. Music, the organization of noises, is one of these forms. It rejects the fabrication of society, since it constitutes the same audible wavelength of those vibrations and those signs that make up society. As an intelligent instrument, music drives us to decipher a sound form of knowledge "(Jacques Attali, 1978).
Clock Dva, Man-Amplified , 1992
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We now enter deep into the heart of The Anti Group. Is it right to divide your artistic work on sound into two distinct areas? According to our perspective, the first would be the art of listening, that is, not only the aspects of "affection" of a sound with respect to the environment it traverses and the subject that perceives it, but also the physical and molecular production of the wave sound (its frequency diagrams, infrasound, heights, etc.); the second would be how sound becomes "Revolutionary Machine", that is how sound becomes a heterogeneous machine that allies itself with other abstract lines of thought (philosophy, alchemical theories, non-epistemic knowledge) or with artistic expressive lines (theater, painting, cinema, video-art) forming not just "music" but something else that does not yet have a name ...
As the German theorist and jazz producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote , scientists have only recently learned that the particles of an oxygen atom vibrate on a larger scale and that the blades of grass "sing". Moreover, different cultures only reaffirm what our ancestors have always known - the world is sound, rhythm and vibration.
Recent physics, tantra, cybernetics, Sufism and the works of Herman Hesse reveal the importance of sound in the formation of cultural and spiritual life throughout the world. Hans Kayser, Jean Gebser, Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan, musicians like John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, suggest that feeling, rather than seeing, is one of the keys to experience consciousness and sound more spiritual, in relation to mathematics, logic, sacred geometry, myth, sexuality, in a practical as well as a theoretical sense, in order to develop the ear as an organ of spiritual perception. It follows that sound is something more than a mere auditory event, that is, something more similar to a psychoacoustic event, since it enters into relationship with psychological and physiological states.
The Anti-Group, «Sonochemistry», 1987
In the recent book by Pedro Domingos The Master Algorithm(2015), the author defines "alchemy" the whole experimental research, under Orthodox canons of science, which would lead to the formulation ell'Algoritmo-it-all-knows, the final mathematical string that would have created and made prosper Life and the Universe. What impresses in the lexical choice of Domingos is that even the AI boundaries of theism algorithmic, and the most advanced mathematics, the dial plan in which theoretical speculation and scientific research heterodox are articulated and inter-penetrate, feel the need to refer to the "obsolete and unqualified knowledge" of alchemy. What do you think of this contemporary teleology that refers to a new "algorithmic alchemy"? Your project Anti Group we like digital art and artistic quintessence today's techno-alchemist, but it moves in a direction opposite to that of Domingos and other scientistscomputer science ...
The origins of alchemy are arcane and perhaps beyond our reach, that is, located outside of time as we know it. All we believe we know is measured through our own designed tools; we can measure and observe only thanks to the power of the devices we have invented and devised, and which are based on our knowledge and our senses. The Macrocosm and the Microcosm are, at the same time, infinitely larger and smaller. The philosopher's stone, the quintessence, the hermetic table, etc., are ideas that have been preserved over time and which are still the object of research in various forms. The origins of alchemy can be traced back to earlier Arabic sources; the term alchemy (whose etymology is still uncertain, ndt) comes from the Arabic Al Khemi, "The black earth" or "the earth-burning" (perhaps resulting from a corruption of the name of ancient Egypt, k ē me , ndt) .
Western culture has reoriented and adapted many of its original ideas from external materials: both chemistry and mathematics originate from Asian cultures, and have existed longer than in the West. This is information that has been removed from Western culture, and is a real imbalance within a system where knowledge is really available at all levels, and the true source of all information is recognized. The idea that mathematics would be an instrument of explanation, or a modality of knowledge, can be found in Kabbalah, in numerology, in magic, and in tantric science, etc. And the idea that we are on the edge of knowledge is progressing: we are still looking for answers through the use of computers, or other equipment - again, our limits are represented by the machines we build. Real progress must take place through the development of consciousness, a process parallel to the evolution of humanity.Cosmic Consciousness: A Study on the Evolution of Mind (1901), by Richard Maurice Bucke, contains within it a table of the stages of Consciousness and, according to Bucke, before us there are still several centuries before a full realization is reached of consciousness. I focus a lot on the means of expanding consciousness, trying to establish new connections, testing the knowledge acquired and opening the way to new possibilities - which will then be fixed within a well-defined paradigm. In this sense, my alchemy consists of a system of opposites that allows the paradox, rather than deny it.
The Anti-Group, «Test Tones», 1988
Your next project, the long awaited Meontological Research Recording 3 (Meon 3), is the last chapter of a trilogy based on Michael Bertiaux's concept of "meon" . Meon 3 is a work dedicated to the teratology and psychoacoustics you've been working on for about 10 years: it promises to be the decisive threshold of your artistic and intellectual journey. The release is scheduled for 2019. What can you tell us about this ambitious project?
The project name is TAGC - Transmission from the Trans-Yoggothian Broadcast Station - Meontological Research Recording 3. Meontological 3 covers a wide area of research including the science outsiderand the pataphysical ideas of Alfred Jarry, and explores some of the main themes and concepts expressed in Michael Bertiaux's La Couleuvre Noire , in Kenneth Grant's Cult of Lam , as well as in the works of Jack Parsons (whose real name is John Whiteside Parsons , ndt) and Marjorie Cameron. The work investigates the new developments of the Gnostic Voodoo, as well as the scientific aspects implicit in esotericism. To each track corresponds a film and an essay that explore the connections and concepts related to each specific idea, providing further references. Each piece of music is an invocation designed to recall a channel of transmission of knowledge inherent to the song itself.
For example, «Meontological Cartography», created together with Michael Bertiaux, is an audiovisual work based on original paintings and drawings from his old works and his work, Vudu Cartography , published by Fulgur Limited (2010). Another example of effective collaboration concerns the piece created together with Barry William Hale, directly inspired by his book Legion 49, as well as other ideas borrowed from teratological and pataphysical concepts. Legion 49 explores the traditional methods of evocation and the myths concerning Beelzebub, offering an iconographic and sealed reinterpretation of his hordes of forty-nine servants through the symmetry-protective of the ancient Mexican art of papel picado. Each audio track of Meontological 3 is synchronized with a visual invocation. The recordings use samples of biological radio transmission, terrestrial and information ELF (Extremely Low Frequency, ndt). Films use multiple editing techniques and image manipulations aimed at synchronization.
Obsolete Capitalism is a collective that deals with Image :: Sound :: Thought .
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Part 1
Joseph Nechvatal, editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
// 1
Mongram The Saturated Superimposed Agency of Minóy Joseph Nechvatal
// 19
Mémoire Whatever Happened to the Man Named Minóy? Amber Sabri
Portfolio
Minóy as Haint as King Lear Maya Eidolon
// 63
After Words The Obscurity of Minóy Joseph Nechvatal
// 71
After After Words The Aesthetics of an Obscure Monster Sacré Joseph Nechvatal
// 85
After After After Words Hyper Noise Aesthetics Joseph Nechvatal
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MonogramTHE SATURATED SUPERIMPOSED AGENCY OF MINÓY
Joseph Nechvatal
What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos: Between night and day, between that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between mutations from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal to human-kind, yet without this series constituting a progression. In this in between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to. Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
AN INTRODUCTION
Minóy was the pseudonym of the electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza (October 30, 1951-March 19, 2010). Until now, it was thought that he stopped recording in 1992.
Minóy created some of the most remarkably engrossing,beautiful and imaginative art music albums released on cassette in the 1980s, often with handmade covers mailed out from his home in Torrance, California. Though perhaps understandably unknown to you, the reader (he was celebrated only once, in 1991, when his image appeared on the cover of the July 1991 issue of Electronic Cottage mag-azine), Minóy was a major figure in the DIY-controlled noise music and homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s. It is significant that Bowsza chose his pseudonym Minóy based upon how someone he met mispronounced the name of one of his favorite artists, the deceased Catalan Surrealist Joan Miró. One can detect with this choice early on his em-brace of psychic chance operations coupled to the phantas-magorical; a method-theme that is profoundly explored during his creative career. Minóy was agoraphobic, but a prolific sound artist in-tensely active in the music underground between the years1986 and 1992. During that period he created many mes-merizing audio agglomerations in collaboration with othersound artists and mail artists. To be sure, Minóy was an avidmail collaborator, working with noted experimental Ameri-can composers such as PBK (Phillip B. Klingler) (as Minóyand PBK but also as Disco Splendor), If, Bwana (as Bwan-noy), Agog (as No Mail On Sundays), Zan Hoffman (asMinóy/Zannóy), Dave Prescott (as PM), Not 1/2 (as El Angel Exterminador), and many others. But he is best known for his thick palimpsest-like multi-tracked soundscape solo compositions: productions that fol-low the incorporation of multilayered electric sound into music compositional practice similar, at times, to the mas-terful musique concrète of the Groupe de Recherches Musi-cales. In general, his noise music is a form of labyrinthian droning superimposed collage electronics that produced an immersive otherworldly effect. It is a form of highly tex-tured, manipulated, and layered sound and noise that often creates a sonic painting-like effect with a spatial feel. Fre-quently, non-periodic tone clusters sweep across the treblerange, moving the contours of the sound, like shifting waves of shimmering colors that glide in an ocean of found sound.Many of his tape releases had only one or two compositions on them, thus allowing him the time to develop a drone theme and hypnotically immerse the listener in what were vastly complex works of art. His challenging, irritating at times, roaring-ambient recordings were often created by delay echoing and multi-tracking sounds (like field recordings and short wave transmissions), forming these sounds into deep and blurry ambiguous compositions full of feeling. Sometimes he used a constant murmuring voice along with found sounds or static or shrieks or staccato guitar bursts or the twitter of a toy mouth organ. His commanding but graceful compositions were more often than not delicate yet powerfully embellished soundscapes of great artistic sophistication. The work’s trans-formative affect is typically achieved through an effective cumulative buildup of tense, almost nervous, sounds that cycle through the realm of overload, an overload that compresses and mutates the original sound sources and transforms them into an expanding and indeterminate sonic field. It is a technique of creative destruction highly suggestive of forms of social resistance applicable to global techno-culture, as it suggests an ultimate triumph of individual originality over national-corporate hegemony. A GHOSTLY REFLECTION
Minóy’s lingering sonic material is a project of personal transformation (for him and us) that also covers much of the sonorous scope of the second half of the 20th Century, expanding the boundaries of the musical exploration of complex overtone structures. Minóy was (and is still) a precise example of expansive post-John Cagian abstract soundmusic let loose upon the expanding electronic environment in which we now abide. Of course, Minóy’s sample-based sound-music is noise music, indeed. It’s often a bit antagonistic, irritating and sometimes unpleasant, but it’s also exceedingly considered and put together beautifully with the utmost proficiency and comprehension. Yet a listener must fabricate a complicated forensic fairy-tale out of its counter-mannerist mélange as it keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration.
Minóy’s compositions are both harsh and contemplative. The contemplative register of his layered sound-music, achieved through superimposition as opposed to juxtaposition (for example in ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’), is noticeably different from other sample-based audio artists, such as the early sonic collage works of John Cage (‘Williams Mix,’ 1952, ‘Fontana Mix,’ 1958-59 and ‘Rozart Mix,’ 1965), James Tenney (‘Collage #1–Blue Suede,’ 1961), Steve Reich (‘Come Out,’ 1966), Terry Riley (‘You're No Good,’ 1967), Negativland, John Oswald (‘Plunderphonics’), or Christian Marclay. I find Minóy’s superimposed sound aesthetic closer to that of the audio décollage work of Wolf Vostell. Indeed, I feel that his droning fluttering work sounds closer to that of Vostell and to some early work of Pierre Schaeffer (‘Cinq Etudes De Bruits: Etude Violette,’ 1948), John Cage (‘Radio Music,’ 1956), Pierre Henry (‘Après La Mort 2: Mouvement En 6 Parties,’ 1967), and La Monte Young (‘Two Sounds,’ 1960, ‘Poem For Tables Chairs Etc., Parts 1 & 2,’ 1960, and ‘23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 am, The Volga Delta From Studies In The Bowed Disc,’ 1969). Indeed, though exactly the opposite of La Monte in one way (Minóy’s released public output was prodigious—perhaps only surpassed by that of Merzbow— and La Monte’s is tiny), like La Monte, duration (time in terms of the distribution of flows) plays a large part in his compositions of assembly. And like La Monte, their lengthy layered complexity is a neurological stimulant for the imagination. The extended length allows deep subjective perceptions of the present moment to come to consciousness. As such, they offer a sonically ontological vision of the world as superimposition, one that shows us in place inside of a saturated world. Thus a mental picture in which both the human and the nonhuman are recognized as open-ended becoming: a mental place where we take on emergent forms in an intrinsically temporal play of agency. In that sense (for me), Minóy’s noise music can be heard as a superimposed block of philosophical propositions that immerse us into rather different conceptions of being in the world. Here we are expected to work devotedly to appreciate its absurd conundrums, and to supply mental transitions between the diverse assortments of irrational elements that supply the sound-music its hooks. As a matter of fact, Minóy conjures up a different ontological interplay of the human and the nonhuman, as his productions speak powerfully of a dense, embodied, material engagement with the world at large. The sound of Minóy has us listen to (and look for) pure visceral abandonment coupled with emergent aesthetic effects in the world (superimposed swirls and vortices of chance juxtapositions, for example), which allows us to be carried away to a place where we are at once both the psychic co-author and the detached explorer of his composition, both an active and passive player at work in constructing its connotation. This is one key point I really want to emphasize, how Minóy unarguably shows us how originality based in co-directional creativity can still genuinely emerge in our digital age of endlessly recycled culture by remaining in the thick of things. With Minóy we go to the superimpositional place of the intersection of the actual and the virtual, and the human and the nonhuman, in an open-ended, forward-looking, search process. Subsequently I would say, Minóy’s sonic material thematizes for us a thick ontology of layered becoming, as it entails an assembly between the human (us now) and the nonhuman (the work he left behind), as well as an intrinsically sequential and superimpositional becoming-at-large. The point to grasp is: to appreciate Minóy’s droning style of assembly depends on us living in the thick of things. And his labyrinthian electronic sounds thematizes that assembly for us. On the other hand, the haunting 2007-2009 portrait images from the ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ series that photographer Maya Eidolon created before his death in collaboration with Minóy (then known as Haint) and Stuart Hass (Minóy’s partner)—included as an image portfolio in this volume—visually thematizes for us the eerie madness of resisting that ontological condition of existence. At this point, I have to say something about ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ that has in one way or another helped me live in the presence of becoming. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ unites life and death visually in a counter-hegemonic formation full of self-conscious unifying practices. Thus Eidolon’s photographs point me in the direction of a natural ontological attitude, exposing dualist detachment from the world for what it is: just one tactic of being in the fluxing world that we have at our disposal, and that is always slipping away from us. It is salient that Bowsza took on a third pseudonym for this phantasmal project of self-invention: Haint (he dropped the name Minóy and stopped releasing recordings in 1992) as ‘haint’ is a deep-south American colloquialism for a ghost, apparition, or lost soul. A general point I want to make here about ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is that we should not be dazzled by the work’s phantasmagorical field. Instead of seeing this performance for the camera as a descent into the thick eerie nonhuman (or as a move, a tactic, a ploy, a play), we should perhaps see the performance as a very specific way of living mad in the intensified flow of superimposed becoming. After all, we can well imagine his rage against his approaching death here. We can almost hear in these images his Lear-like scream into an unbounded white noise. Thus for me, Bowsza in ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical negation to spectral life by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral irony: at turns hip and flamboyant or abrasively outrageous. And, alas, that recitation keeps turning back into one about stinking death—that strange, incurable and deeply irrational affliction. So yes, ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is about self-transcendence by means of madness. Indeed I read it as a meditation on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its essentially nasty comedy. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is then crazy counter-mannerist art about comical, difficult death. So my argument is that even if we live and die in the thick of virtual and actual de-centred processes of becoming human and nonhuman, this is normally veiled from us by a particular tactic of dualist detachment and Bowsza tears back that veil. To move in this direction with ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ also immediately reminds us that in an ontology of becoming, art shades indirectly (and perhaps, also, unconsciously) into spirituality as immanent in nature, which itself is to be wondered at. Utter energy or vitalist matter: either way, with ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ we are in an enormous artistic and spiritual field that immediately evokes the ontology of becoming of Gilles Deleuze. ‘Minóy as Haint as King Lear’ is self-consciously in the flow of becoming a phantasmal self-experiment, imaginatively exploring the open-ended spaces of the world’s possibility. So this is where I would look for inspiration to renew our ontological faculties to remake the phantom world again, materially as well as representationally.
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A REMEMBRANCE (FROM AFAR)
As for most others, Minóy first came into my realm of awareness in the mail. I never met the man. Out of the blue I received in my Lower East Side mailbox a tape from him that I loved immediately: ‘In Search Of Tarkovsky.’ I quickly began trading Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine1 tapes with him for his work; my favorites being ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ (1985), ‘Nightslaves’ (1986) and ‘Firebird’ (1987). These tapes resonated considerably with the overloaded nature of the palimpsest-like gray graphite drawings I was working on then (which were reflective of the time’s concerns around multiple forms of proliferation). But my reception of his music also had to do with my vague impressions of California. No, there was no sun in them, but I could vaguely detect the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, long LSD trips, morning bong hits, and lurking danger; something like listening to the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ while on bad acid. So I was deeply impressed by his talent on those tapes even without meeting him, and I was determined to publish something by him on Tellus as soon as I could.
His work reminded me of when I first saw the obscure No Wave performer Boris Policeband play his screechy sounds in 1978 at a concert to benefit Colab’s X Magazine. It was entrancing for me how Policeband appropriated police scanner radio transmissions, entwining them with his dissonant violin and hilarious voice. After Rhys Chatham, his brand of post-minimalism may have had the greatest influence on my striving for my own form of post-minimal chaos magic, an art of magical gazing. That year I had been reading Aleister Crowley’s book Magick in Theory and Practice. What I conjectured from Crowley while listening and watching Boris Policeband, was that a noisy aesthetic visualization process could be used to create feedback optic stimulus to the neocortex in a kind of cop-free project of foreseeing (an attempt to scan into an un-policed future), based roughly on the basis of magical gazing. That gazing idea led me to form Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine and hence become acquainted with the music of Minóy. Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine was created in 1983 by me, curator Claudia Gould, and Carol Parkinson, a composer and staff member of Harvestworks/Studio PASS. We met for drinks to discuss my idea of a magazine on cassette that would feature interesting and challenging sound works. With the advent of the Walkman and the Boom Box, we perceived a need for an alternative to over-determined radio programming and the commercially available recordings on the market at that time. We then began to collect, produce, document and define the art of audio by publishing works from local, national and international artists. Sometimes we worked with contributing editors, experts in their fields, who proposed themes and collected the best works from that genre. Unknown artists were teamed with well-known artists, historical works were juxtaposed with contemporary ones, and high art with popular art, all in an effort to enhance the crossover communication between the different mediums of art: visual, music, performance, and spoken word. I was very pleased to have published Minóy’s dark ambient composition ‘Tango’ in 1988 as the lead piece on Side B of Tellus #20, an issue that I curated, entitled ‘Media Myth.’ The premise behind ‘Media Myth’ arrived to me out of the compositional principles of my palimpsest graphite drawings (deeply layered and saturated with vague imagery) in contact with the shivering layered fuzz music of Minóy. I would often do my artwork with Minóy playing on the Walkman headset or blasting out from my black Boom Box. Slowly the goal of the ‘Media Myth’ issue became the exploration of the introspective world of the ear under the influence of the era’s high-frequency electronic environment —that is, electronic circulation. Since it was rather difficult making sense of the mid-1980s swirling media society, the general proposition behind Media Myth was to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by looking for artists who took advantage of the time’s superficial saturation—a saturation so dense that it failed to communicate anything particular at all upon which we could concur (except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium) as the Reaganomic reproduction system pulsed with higher and higher, and faster and faster, flows of senseless info-data to the point of ear hysteria. Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance was that, the greater the amount of Reaganomic information that flowed, the greater the incredulity which it produced—at least, for thinking, questioning artists. So, the tremendous load of data produced and reproduced all around us then ultimately seemed to make less, not more, conventional sense. Indeed, this freeing feeling became the premise of the ‘Media Myth’ issue. This supposition, it now seems to me, played also into the history of abstract art which teaches us that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the form of representation, and that by scanning the spread of representation, art may formulate a critique of the laws that provide representation with its organizational basis. As a result, in my view, it was electronic-based sound art’s onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical, summational sense (in terms of the subjective world of the imagination) art might make of the mid-1980s based on an appropriately decadent reading of the time’s paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) media environment. Such a basically abstract, artistic, paradoxical/summational fancy began with the presumption that an information-loaded nuclear weapon had already exploded, showering me with bits of radioactive-like informational sound bytes, thus drastically changing the way in which I perceived and acted, even in my subconscious dream world. Perhaps you can now see why Minóy’s ‘In Search Of Tarkovsky’ touched me so deeply, as Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979) is a reasonable zone of connection to these ideas and feelings, as seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl disaster occurred (on April 26, 1986) and that led to the depopulation of a surrounding area that was officially called the zone of alienation, rather like in the Stalker film. Minóy’s weirdly romantic sound, by virtue of its distinctive electronic constitution of fluidity, floated for me in an extensive stratosphere of circulation while also simultaneously being tied to the materiality of the physical ribbon in the cassette tape. Hence, the particular constitution of Minóy superimposing and overflowing compositions could best be seen, perhaps even more so today, as an osmotic membrane: a blotter of the instantaneous ubiquity/proliferation of the mid 1980s. Consequently, Minóy reflected (and worked with) the social power that was shaped by the de-centered electronic overload of the 1980s. This is its historical merit. So, the question for the ‘Media Myth’ issue of Tellus was: how could artists like Minóy and I symbolically turn these de-centered power codes into artistic abstractions of social merit? Perhaps it was possible because he knew, and demonstrated with ‘Tango,’ that these symbolic media codes, which after all, helter-skelter, make us up as representational characters, are positively phantasmagorical. This is, of course, even more true today. Based on the premises of his atypical ‘Tango,’ perhaps a socially relevant digitally-based creativity can still be found dancing in today’s electronic world. After all, electrons partake (and make up) the all-encompassing phantasmagorical/ technological sign-field within which we live and which defines us (at least in part). Conventional non-artistic representation is often thought constructed of rather solid, unyielding social signs. Fine art, like Minóy’s ‘Tango,’ typically is thought to be made up of dancing, anti-social, unconventional, irresponsible signs. For me, ‘Tango,’ though constructed from social signs (albeit abused), represented the fine art mode of weird dark realism that corresponds to the real arbitrary nature of all signs, subverting socially controlled systems of meaning. In Minóy’s electronic noise I heard the opportunity for the creation of applicable antisocial phantasmagorical signs. That and abstract ecstatic anti-signs, that continue to mentally move and multiply within. Such a Tango-based, fancied aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious area of our current identity, as it is also the phantasmal depths from which all digital representation emerges in its precarious, but glittering, existence. Indeed, it was this quivering phantasmal cohesion found in his un-danceable ‘Tango’ (and in his weirdly sublime/ perverse output in general) that maintained for me a way beyond reductive conceptual minimalism into an excessive post-conceptualism. ‘Tango’ is an early example of a postmedia art, which is in theory, opposed to the tabular mental space laid out by classical thought. It is an art where reproduction technologies blur into transformations continually laced with contradictory messages (and that necessarily counters the logic of crisp information), warped and rowdy shifts in scale that evokes the infinite, and unexpected woven interconnections between the micro and the macro. If the ultra-dissemination of the physiological signs in ‘Tango’ may create such phantasmagorical hyper-logics of use to the formation of art, his potential may prove useful in questioning received notions of representation when viewed against assumptions of utility versus pleasure. Indeed, perhaps his unconscious intention with ‘Tango’ was to achieve an ultimate phantasmal integration by dissolving audio form into its original electronic foundation of nerve energy. Such a dynamic sense of aesthetic electronica as nervous contemplative vision might suggest the continued potential of social re-configuration, as it subsumes our previous world of simulation/representation into a phantasmagorical nexus of overlapping, linked hybrid observations of the outer world with precise extractions of human mentality. Encounters, then, with his audio work, one may assume, might create an opportunity for symbolic societal transgression, and for a vertiginous ecstasy of thought. Surely such an electronica/phantasmal impetus as found in his artistic production can help release pent-up ecstatic energies today, in that the more overwhelming and restrictive the social mechanism becomes in our age of digital surveillance, the more noisy the counter-effects needed. Hence he pushes us to exceed the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society. Therefore, his electronic music may serve as an ecstatic impulse/phenomena which proliferates in proportion to the technicization of society. As such, a nervous electronica-ecstasy may emerge as a result of our technological society’s obsession with the phantasmal character of digital speed and proliferation. Predictions for his legacy, then: as human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass digital data-mining, such nervously frenzied art like his will increasingly break out in forms of noisy resonances (and noisy visuals) that will promote an indispensable alienation from the socially constructed. His is a necessary outburst of nervy ecstatic art superimposed onto data-mined experience. Thus his type of noisy euphoric counterattack, such as in ‘Corridors’ (1985), provides phantasmal defiance through transport aimed against the controlling world’s scrutiny-destructiveness. Consequently, his aesthetic philosophy will provide a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, perfunctory, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical world. I would ultimately argue that the nervous phantasmal play found in his noisescapes has urgent political/social ramifications in our media saturated digital society today. His well-founded phantasmal model for an art of noise indicates the continued capacity for the electronic media’s worth, as it provides the explication and the means of the nervous phantasmal links that abet both communications and the superimposition of becoming onto being. Hence, his excessive audio abstractions, such as those found in his pieces ‘Mass’ or ‘Shame On Love’ (both 1986), or with Zan Hoffman as Minóy/Zannoy, ‘Why Jake Hobo Ate Whey’ (1987), can be seen and heard, in a sense, as the representation of all representation when we attempt to think through an artistic unlimited field of representation as non-utilitarian phantasmal ideology. This would be an attempt at scrutinizing representation in accordance with the sound’s phantasmal non-discursive process as noise music, such as in his ‘Distant Thoughts’ or ‘The Last Fortune Cookie’ (both 1986), where he has demonstrated for us art as an abstract ObjectOriented metaphysics—a nerve-based metaphysics where his phantasmal noises helps us step outside of ourselves and to posit ourselves outside of the mechanics of homogeneous dogmatisms. And so Minóy: the spectral audio project I have outlined for you based in part on your posthumous work ‘Pawbone Kisser Daylight Sins I’ (1993), will, I hope, contribute to the inventing of a new nervous noise art in which what matters is no longer sound identities, or logos, but rather dense, phantasmagorical forces developed on the basis of inclusion. A project where from now on things will be heard and seen only from the depths of this reverberating inclusive density (withdrawn into itself, perhaps, and adumbrated and darkened by its obscurity), but bound tightly together and inescapably grouped by the vigor that is hidden in a depth that is fermenting a phantasmagorical discourse that is both nervously capricious and, paradoxically, socially responsible.
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ADDENDUM: CRITICAL DESCRIPTION & RECEPTION OF VARIOUS RELEASES
‘White With a Crust Of Chill’
Thick layers of sounds added together make a detailed and overwhelming mix. Most of the tapes from Minóy have a distinct sound, sort of like high-pitched machine noises with bits of different musics wafting in and out of focus. Excellent, Must hear. (Robin James, Sound Choice #5, 1986) ‘Obscure Medicines’ Have you ever screwed up something so bad or got caught doing something so embarrassing that the memory of it, even years later, is physically painful? Well, Minóy has just composed a sound collage for you if you have. The opening track, ‘Naked Came The Memory,’ begins with mechanical chattering, industrial pounding, a stringed instrument suffering rape and torture, and a haunting drone that sounds like a far off air raid siren stuck on a middle tone. All this builds up, ebbs away and then comes back full in your face like the naked truths we must face from time to time. On the title track it sounds like every stringed instrument in Torrance, California tuning up in Minóy’s living room until the sounds swirl and rotate about each other like some discordant tornado. Five more equally disturbing or masochistically pleasing tunes follow, perfect background music when your Uncle Bob overstays his welcome, drinks the last shot of Old Thompson and still won’t go home. (Mick Mather, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Plain Wrap Purgatory’ An acknowledged master of sound collage offers two sidelong pieces, the title cut and ‘Flying Overhead.’ For the uninitiated, this is the guy who lives under your bed and creates soundtracks for your worst nightmares. Purgatory greets the listener with disembodied voices, moans, groans, demonic howling, clanging, industrial drones, and a stringed instrument tinkling like windchimes from hell, er, purgatory. These sounds are layered, bent, treated and kicked in and out of the mix, a Minóy trademark. On side two it appears our sins have been purged. We’re treated to an airy, uplifting blend of sound, giving the impression that you might be flying and making that last connection out of purgatory. Then, en route to some higher place the tone begins to turn brooding and ominous once more, like ice forming on the wings . . . Mary, Mother of GOD, full of grace . . . . (Mick Mather, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Pretty Young Negro Man’ More kooky, psychotic, and truly hellish sounds from this prolific sound composer. Followed immediately by loud, high-pitched machine interruptions. Groans, drones and warps loop in and out of sequence. Found sounds from many sources are woven into the irregular rhythm of the piece. A severely distorted string instrument is being beaten to death and gives out horrific, inhuman cries. There's also some of the strangest vocal manipulations I've ever heard. On side two Minóy plays with the radio dial, turning it slowly to catch extended bits of random speech and Mexican music, and turning it quickly to get clicks and honks. It’s as if several radios are shot through a tremendous p.a. system. A peaceful, yet oddly disturbing synth is laid on top. The overall mood is alarming, playful and determined. (Christopher Carstens, Sound Choice #9, 1987) ‘Firebird’ & ‘The Flavor Of Acid On Ice’ Minóy is one of the stalwart figures of the cassette network. At last count there were 63 tapes available and an untold number of collaborations and compilation appearances. These are two relatively recent releases. On both Minóy builds surging/droning looping icicle shaped sound pictures out of minimal electronics. I prefer the earlier Firebird for it's more varied moods. Morning is especially evocative. That's when I enjoy his music the most, in the morning, as sun cuts in low across the room. Sound mingles with dust particles floating in a beam. ‘The Flavor Of Acid On Ice’ gets a bit more violent in its imagery. Both are capable of producing these visual pictures through sound. (Glen Thrasher, Lowlife 13, 1988) ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ & ‘Babel Two 30-minute pieces of unique textural richness, borrowing something from industrial, Ligeti, Xenakis, and Tangerine Dream. ‘Doctor In A Dark Room’ creates a mesmerizing effect by constantly hovering between tone and noise, disembodied orchestras and choirs singing multitimbral drones, crashing waves of sound . . . best at high volume, but not late at night. ‘Babel’ is multi-tracked radios (FM, AM, Shortwave, CB, etc.), voices wreaking havoc with meaning and intelligibility in a dense riot of glossolalia. I’d call Minóy a maximalist as he is unafraid of thick and heavy textures which could run the risk of collapsing upon themselves. (Tom Furgas, Option Magazine, Jan/Feb 1985) ‘Future Perfect’ This consistently engaging tape plays tricks on your perceptions by displaying large sheets of texture that overlap one another so that it becomes impossible to discern whether they are organic or synthetic. Under this he further confounds us with barely perceptible voices that haunt from afar. Filled with a strange beauty, it evokes images of imaginary landscapes. (Kim Cascone, Option Magazine, Jan/ Feb 1985) ‘Landscape With Serpent’ More great sonic mayhem from the master of the musically macabre. On side A, ‘Stalker’ is that presence following you down that ciurcuitous tunnel to hell. Programmatic isn’t a dirty word, but for the most part, this surpasses that and is just plain eerie. The title side evokes visions of a primordial wasteland with a menagerie of strange, lumbering life-forms cavorting way off in the (safe) distance. In the closing section, the serpent's lonely wails penetrate the heavy mist and fog. (Jack Jordan, Option Magazine, Sept/Oct 1987) WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN NAMED MINÓY?
A Mémoire of My Dearest Friend, Stanley Keith Bowsza, the Man Who Was Minóy
Amber Sabri
BEYOND LOVE STORIES
Love is a Madman working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes, drinking poison, and now quietly choosing annihilation. A tiny spider tries to wrap an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb woven across the cave. There are love stories and there is obliteration into love. Love flows down. The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes. Open completely. Let your spirit ear listen to the green dome’s passionate murmur. Let the cords of your robe be untied. Shiver in this new love beyond all above and below.
The sun rises but which way does the night go? I have no more words. Let the soul speak with the silent articulation of a face. Locked out of life, waiting, weeping.
Coleman Barks, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings
The man who was the noiseMusic and cassette artist named Minóy disappeared completely from public view in 1992. In this memoir I would like to acquaint you, dear reader, with a brief history of the man who was Minóy so that perhaps the mystery of his sudden exodus can be understood.
I first virtually met Stanley Keith Bowsza through Flickr, the well-known image sharing website. I joined the site in January of 2005 and began uploading my photos and artwork under the name of Maya Eidolon. About a month later, someone named “My Life as A Haint” effusively complimented my digital art. When I looked at his Flickr site of artwork, I was in absolute awe. Our friendship grew from this moment. We began to comment on each other’s work, share ideas and communicate through private Flickr mail. We were both eccentric and we were similar in so many ways. Haint made light photoPaintings, and this grabbed me as the first photos I had made as a teenager were black and white light paintings of moving traffic at night. We both loved motion and blur and the night. Haint called us the Neon Night Twins. Through the summer and early fall of 2005, we communicated intensely via Flickr mail. We trusted each other and he needed someone to talk to, someone to confide in. He was entertaining and funny and a wonderful storyteller.
We shared a certain approach to our creative work. Keith Bowsza, both as Minóy the musician and as Haint the artist, worked intuitively with a minimum of pre-planning. The work evolved and was refined over time. It is my belief that what defines an artist is the richness and unique formation of the artist’s intuition (a ‘sixth’ sense), an amalgam of conscious, unconscious and subconscious thoughts and feelings and bits and snippets of sound and image. The ongoing jumble Memory of one’s life is the well from where intuition and creative endeavor flow.
To me, that intuition can best be visualized as a cosmos, a structure so large that one can not see its outside edges because the moment one begins to try to conceive of the enormity of it, the moment one tries to imagine what it might look like if it were possible to be outside it at a huge distance, one becomes engulfed within and swept along the glistening arrays of molecular structures, ever-shifting with light and color illuminating the impenetrable surrounding darkness. Keith sought to channel his intuition and be carried along by his creation whilst he created it. That process provided gratification for him and he wanted his audience to share the delicious and profound phantasmagoric depth of feeling and emotion he experienced as he created the work. The power of Keith’s creative output came from his prodigious resources. He was often manic: he barely slept and he spent most of his functional waking hours either producing art or absorbing art, music, or film. He had a phenomenal memory for sound and imagery, and when he created sound he approached it like he approached everything else, intuitively with gargantuan passion and leviathan intensity. The sounds he wanted to produce were the sound Noise music of his inner experience, not to be gently orchestrated but screaming to be let out: colossal sweeps of multilayered feeling and turbulent emotions. He created what he was feeling and the core of what he was feeling was mammoth psychic and physical pain. Being the terrific showman that he was, he knew how to maximize the effects and with his flare for drama, he played it to the hilt. We were mutually simpatico from the moment we met and I was instantly smitten with this marvelous man and his work. He was brilliant and had a vast Brobdingnagian knowledge of art as well as music, film and theater. He was a sensitive and beautiful soul: intense and passionate. We became the dearest of friends. He delighted in being my entertainment director, sending me music and recommending films. Keith shared with me that he was an invalid confined to a wheelchair with little respite from his decades long struggles with neuropathic pain, frequent episodes of intractable panic, and the mania and paranoia that had permeated his daily life. Always a large man, he had become morbidly obese. By this time in his life he was rarely able to muster the stamina to leave the house. He lived on his bed, surrounded by CDs, DVDs and art books. His computer was his link to the outside world. I believe that it was a catastrophic event early in his life that greatly influenced Keith’s personality and outlook towards the world. In his late teenage years, Keith told his parents he was gay. They responded with what was an alltoo-common reaction in those days: they thought he needed to be “cured.” In a horrifyingly misguided attempt to “fix” his homosexuality, they subjected him to sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). He complied willingly at first, but after he accidentally died and had to be resuscitated on the ECT table during one of these electroshock procedures, he refused to continue. This dreadful episode clearly had profound effects on his mind and body. All of his life he had terrifying nightmares, reliving an out-of-body experience of death, and seeing the “white light.” Although he told me that he had forgiven his parents for this abysmal act of parental treachery masked as compassion and love, issues of fear and betrayal plagued him throughout his life. He remained keenly sensitive to betrayal, real and/or imagined. Pain, panic, paranoia, bipolar mania, schizophrenia . . . he lived it all. Massive amounts of medications had been prescribed for him for more than forty years in an effort to mitigate his neuropathic pain and psychic suffering, beginning with antidepressives in his adolescence, and he had to cope with side effects as well. As 2005 progressed, my friendship with Keith deepened profoundly. We spoke every day. Sometime in early October I awoke and went to my computer eager to view my usual morning treat of looking at the new images Haint had uploaded. To my great horror, his whole account was gone. My heart sank and I started to panic. My visceral gut reaction was fear that I had lost touch with this incredible man. I lived in San Francisco and he lived in Los Angeles. All of our communication had been via Flickr and now I had no way to reach him. I was bereft. My heart was broken. Much to my relief, after a few hours Keith phoned me and assured me he didn’t want to lose touch either. That morning when I discovered Keith had deleted his entire art and photo website on Flickr, I thought perhaps he had done so in a fit of despairing rage and desolate fury, but I was wrong. He told me he had been contemplating it for several weeks, resisting the urge. His feeling was that if he performed this act of self-assassination it would in some way free him . . . and yes, he was right . . . it seemed to work for him. He felt better.
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During the next few years Haint’s ritual of self-annihilation was to be repeated several more times, echoing his disappearance of Minóy in 1992. Months would go by and he would build up his Flickr site with art and photography, and then suddenly the site would disappear from public view. Stuart (his partner) and I would beg him not to destroy it and all the wonderful comments from his admirers, but he insisted that he felt he “had to do it”—that this sacrificial act would somehow free and protect him.
He did not destroy the art itself. He knew how good it was and called it the best work he had ever done. He preserved it carefully on external computer drives, but withdrew it from public view, perhaps irrationally fearing that even though he, the man, was well protected beyond the physical reach of any viewer, the risk of letting people see his work left him too vulnerable. Simultaneously, a large part of his personality wanted very much to be seen, to be adored, to be congratulated. What a paradoxical dilemma. Keith told me that he had always had been extremely shy. His coping strategy was to imagine himself an actor playing the role of himself. He was quite amused with this idea. It exhilarated him to take time to “prepare” à la Method and as part of his costume he would also use makeup on his face before going out on those rare occasions when he left the house. Playing a role seemed to allow him to center himself. However, as his illness progressively left him more and more exhausted, he became less and less able to manage the tremendous swings of his internal weather. His inner resources crumbled and with that, his seclusion became his safety. By the end of that first year, I was spending hours talking with him on Skype and gradually I began to know more of him and his life partner, Stuart Hass. It was during these long Skype sessions that he told me he had been known as Minóy, the cassetteNoise musician. He told me the story of the ‘Devil Music’ Concert at Cal State Northridge. He and Phillip B. Klinger (also known as PBK) had performed a live concert at the university. They were shocked when the startling and completely unexpected response of the audience was hostility and abject fear. He had never felt so vulnerable at a performance, so hated by a crowd. Later on, in those all-too-often periods when he sank into days of despair and depression, he would relive this terrifying incident, perhaps convincing himself that his retreat into seclusion and isolation was the safest and most rational path to follow. It was difficult for Keith to accept any kind of negative response or criticism without overreacting. He was quick to respond deeply to any slight, real or imagined, and it was almost impossible for him to brush off these feelings. They fed his paranoia and panic, and when he felt threatened and vulnerable, he retreated deeper into isolation. Keith as Minóy disappeared completely in 1992, retreating into a hermetic-like existence with his mother and Stuart. His mother’s increasingly severe mental illness added to the conjoined household burden of emotional dysfunction. He contacted no one, did not return any correspondence, and no one knew why. Keith sent me a link to show me the last public communication of Minóy written on the outside of a package that he had sent to the musician, Zan Hofman, with whom he had been collaborating. Keith told me he’d killed off the persona of Minóy. He felt deeply betrayed and furiously angry and wanted nothing more to do with the outside world. Here is what he wrote:
Minóy cassette works has been permanently terminated. My soul has dried up and blown away. I can no longer feel joy but only constant mental and physical (psychosomatic, so it seems) pain. We are three nonfunctional people alone in the void of Minóy house, sanctuary become prison. See and hear us go bump in the night in the day in the night in the day. It’s all the same. No exit. Now we scream help.
As we now know, Keith continued to make his innovative cassette noiseMusic for a couple of years after he killed off Minóy. After Keith’s death, Stuart and I felt it was important to try to preserve his work. We sent the master cassettes to Phillip B. Klinger who has digitized them for posterity. This book, as well as the accompanying cassette and CD, have been published to share some of these works with the world and to preserve the legacy of The Man Who Was Minóy.
For Keith and Stuart, the rest of the 1990s was progressively more and more arduous and frustrating. Keith had turned his creative energies to making digital art and he renamed himself “My Life as a Haint,” then “Haint.” In southern United States English vernacular, a haint is a ghost, an apparition, a lost soul. Years of doctors and medication had not cured him nor had it slowed the relentless progress towards the inevitable. He knew he would never regain the health he had lost and he was consumed with grief and anger. So often we see brilliantly creative people plagued with mental afflictions, illnesses I have come to believe have their origins in overly intense and innate sensitivities to the vicissitudes of life. The delicate neurochemistry of the brain and body goes awry and can slide into self-propagating, neverending cascades of reaction and tortuous re-reaction twisting and turning to try to maintain stasis—to reach a mental and physical status quo. As we reach our later years of life on this earth there is a tendency to gravitate downward as our resources for existence dwindle. Keith and Stuart were fated to experience this dwindle way too early in their lives. In the 1990s they were only in their early 40s, but the world was beginning to collapse in on them with a vengeance, drastically closing them in, isolating them. As the years went by, Keith’s fears caused them to become entirely cloistered: no family, no friends, no casual relationships with their neighbors. As he became more and more incapacitated by his physical and mental afflictions, Stuart was swept along with him into their conjoined isolation. They were cocooned in a house filled to the brim with the prodigious agglomeration of their lives, yet all of this cushioning barely mitigated Keith’s profound and all consuming terror. Small events can become magnified in such an isolationist environment. Reality becomes warped. There was The Incident of the Wall. After a minor earthquake, a small section of a five foot cement block wall bordering one side of the house property was knocked partially askew. Keith’s response was way out of proportion. He catastrophized this relatively minor event and agonized over The Wall for months. Even after it was repaired he relived it as if it had been a major disaster in his life. Was it that his web of safety, his protective shell against the world, had been breached? I think so. ON THE IMAGE SERIES: MINÓY AS HAINT AS KING LEAR
I first visited Keith and Stuart early in 2006 and would visit them a couple of times a year over the next few years. Each time, Keith was able to muster the will and energy to get out of the house in his wheelchair and the three of us went to museums and drove joyously around Los Angeles shooting continuous exposures of light paintings. Those outings were precious to Keith as they were the only times he got out of his room. He delighted in these occasions even as the herculean effort he had to exert to cope with pain took a lot out of him. We also had several indoor shoots where we took thousands of the portraits of each other, some of which can be seen on my Flickr website. 1
As a gift to him, to try to cheer him up, I put together an image Montage piece called “King Lear” from some of these photo sessions (http://vimeo.com/2258762). I also made “Infinity Arcade” with the intent to show his digital art work to prospective galleries (http://vimeo.com/1947808). He was drawn to the idea of publicizing his work in the art world, but would invariably change his mind and withdraw from the idea, saying no, he was too sick. It is from the “King Lear” series that Joseph Nechvatal has chosen the image portfolio for this book. By the time I met Keith and Stuart in 2005 and began to interact in their lives, their world was collapsing. Keith’s mental and physical issues were ever-worsening and Stuart was breaking down. He was worn out, never getting enough sleep, sinking more deeply into the mire of his own lifelong depression, becoming more frazzled. In retrospect, we see that Stuart’s incipient early dementia had already begun the insidious destruction of his brilliant mind. There were times when Stuart would call me to help Keith calm down. I could hear Keith in full panic state, screaming and sobbing, raging, raving, ranting on and on. It would take hours for him to calm himself down. Keith in the throes of a panic attack was a formidable and disturbing thing to hear. It was scary as hell. He did his best to deal with his daemons and had amazing powers of recuperation, but his exacerbating illnesses were increasingly impacting his mind and body and it became harder and harder to define what was Keith and what was illness. The last dreadful half year before Keith died was filled with emergency visits from the fire department to help him get up from the floor where he had fallen and several hospitalizations. By this time all he could do was listen to music. I was able to speak a few words with him on the day he died. Stuart was with him, holding him in his arms. I knew Keith Stanley Bowsza for the last five years of his life and I knew him as the digital artist, photographer and videographer who named himself ‘My Life as A Haint.’ His spirit is one of my guardian angels, and I imagine him looking down from the cosmos, ecstatic that people will be able to enjoy his work via these publications.
The day he died
Keith said to me, “I love you, sweetie. Stay in the light.”
In Commemoration to you, my dearest Haint.
My darling Keith,
your corporeal body passed into this Earth too soon, cheating you out of years of life. If only there had been a magic potion to cure you of your afflictions, if only fate had given a full lifetime to enjoy, if only . . . For over half your life you struggled with brain Tangled cascades of maniacal neuron Screams that rarely left you in peace. Your death was a death that brought relief. Tragic and sorrowful though it was, it was the only solution to ease your suffering, the ultimate best solution in a situation where there are no good solutions. Musings of my neon Heart . . . where it all comes from . . . the heart and the mind the soul the art the music the passion the love. The world around us will forever be demented . . . the flesh next to mine . . . the air downtown . . . perverted strangers . . . the blinded white House . . . . . . the world at large enthralled with violence pushing and steaming and bursting to get it on get it going and roll on and rollover and crush her human children into despair. The light keeps us going . . . looking for the light . . . looking for sugar . . . looking for relief . . . looking for safety . . . looking for love. Have no fear . . . but know when to duck . . . when to step aside . . . when to let darkness pass because it is blinded by hate and it doesn’t even know you but it hates your guts and if you try to reason with it or snare it or snag it or engage it in any possible way it will kill you in the end . . . eat you alive . . . so let it go . . . stay in the light. Stay in the light, my darling Keith, bask in the light . . . let it caress you from the darkness seize it from the darkness . . . pull it towards you and don’t let go. You are safe.
taken from:
to be continued...
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