Allen, Jamie
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Letter from the Editors: Acoustic Infrastructure
The street-level sonic cultures, acoustic ecologies and personal interventions available to us have, during this long 20th Century, become proliferated by speakers, microphones, synthesised and recorded playbacks, beeps, buzzes and alarms. Roving gangs of indignant mobile-phone music-listeners disrupt the public transit experience. iPhones chirp out the sound of something called ‘crickets’, creatures many a listener may very well never encounter. Airlines pass on the extravagant levy of ‘noise charges’ to their customers, a kind of psychic and acoustic bandwidth fee. Microwave ovens, automobiles and authoritative ahuman voices chime out an acoustic ecology that is neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’, neither ‘societal’ nor ‘technological’, but something that is a heterogeneous mixture of all of these sources, causes and categories. These are 'acoustic infrastructures', and although human-made, they are naturalised by their ubiquity and always-on-ness, along with our allover, everyday, experience of them.
Letter from the editors: Fulgurite
As Gadamer reflects in The Beginning of Knowledge, "Anyone who has ever been a guest in Heidegger's hut in Todtnauberg [to be so lucky!] recalls the saying scratched into a piece of bark and placed above the lintel: ta de panta oiakizei keraunos; 'Lightning steers all' (Heraclitus, Fragment 64)." Fulgurites, sometimes referred to as petrified lightning, are the evidentiary traces of lightning strikes left as mineraloid debris on beaches, or soil, where the strike has occurred with a temperature of at least 1,800 °C (3,270 °F). Today, as markets crash at speeds faster than human thought, Quentin Meillassoux argues that the laws of nature must be considered to be able to change at a moment's notice. As fulgurites are formed in a second's time, like an error in a spreadsheet left to our retrospective perplexity...
Letter from the editors: Encounter I
Since we last checked-in with you, dear readers, there has been a tremendous amount of activity among the continent. crew. In September, we joined the Editors of Speculations at the University of Basel to discuss the aesthetics of para- academic publishing during the Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference. Just the following weekend, we were on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston, to discuss similar matters during the Biennial Meeting of the Babel Working Group. An inspiring set of discussions, and some meetings with friends we'd only theretofore encountered through somewhat less fleshy networks and communiques.
Letter from the editors: Arrete
We here at continent. gratefully share with you the fourth issue of our first volume. As 2011 draws to a close, we've finished up our first of what promises to be many years building and collecting manifestations of thought in its many forms. Guiding our thinking in this issue is the term arête. A thin sharp line, a lateral peak which separates valleys, ribs of sifted rock made mounds. With one stutter, the term becomes areté, a form of virtue, of goodness. Another stuttering, and we hear the French arreter—to stop. All of our stuttering is perhaps a form of nervous anticipation; a call for rest as well as an echo for change. For this December issue, we've drawn out these stutters: the solid fluidity of geology; the virtuous skill of craft; the possibility of a repose. Among many other givings in continent.1.4, we bring you Alain Badiou's hopes for neg through his interview with John Van Houdt, and John A. Sweeney's veiling and unveiling of politics in the pit-stop urban space.
Letter from the editors: Lost & Found
This issue was found in the lost conversations of continent.’s Jamie Allen and guest editors Johannes Bruder and Felix Gerloff. It is the crystallization of interests in the empirical, in notions of ‘evidence’, and the act of ‘returning’ something from a site of investigation. Developed through the Swiss National Science Foundation project Machine Love?[1], a project by researchers from the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW[2] (Claudia Mareis, Johannes Bruder and Felix Gerloff), these articles and artefacts stem in part from a workshop (All Eyes on Method in Basel on the 4th and 5th of June 2015) attended by contributing authors Sarah Benhaïm, Hannes Krämer, Luis-Manuel Garcia, Priska Gisler and Stefan Solleder. We also sought to expand the constituency of this continent. issue through a discussion of the role that media artefacts and material objects play in empirical research more generally. We have reached out to thinkers and doers who have developed ways of productively navigating the ambiguities of losing and finding, forgetting and remembering, capturing and deleting. Works by Geraldine Juarez, Mara Mills, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor with a response by Nina Jäger and Bronwyn Lay, Natasha Schüll, and the Times of Waste research team further elaborate the thematic of ‘Lost & Found’ for this issue. We (re)present here attempts to (re)create experience, waving our flag of surrender at a world that is forever slipping through our fingers.
Cum On Feel the Noize
As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations.
Note from the Editor: Autonomy
With this third issue of continent. we welcome you to join these conversations. The announced thematic for this issue, autonomy, was announced out of an interest to understand the contours of our being together, not the qualities or conditions necessary to identify what might exist in isolation. This summer brought some significant events and comminglings: we sponsored a symposium, with Christian Hänggi, a symposium at the historic Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich; we welcomed several new talented folks into the organization; and our dear Nico had back surgery.
Letter from the editors: Pitch Drop
In the American vernacular of the 1990s, people actually used to say that things “rocked.” “That rocks!” we’d say. The ‘we’ of our mostly 1990s teenagehoods could never have imagined that 20-something years later, a rather strange un-ironic interest in the literal referent of a pretty stupid exuberant rejoinder would arise. And yet, here we are, and here we go.
Letter from the editors: Firn
For this, our sixth issue, we offer firn as our constellating theme. From the Old High German firni, meaning “old” and related to the Swedish forn connoting “former,” firn is the term used to indicate snow that has survived the summer months. Firn is rounded, wellbonded snow that, like continent., has existed for more than one year and has a density greater than one would expect from snow pack. Firn snow is a moment between glacial ice and the wet snow that packs. The material recrystallizes, and affirms its surface tensions and as it becomes impermeable to moisture, the transition to glacial ice is consummated. We again have elected to emphasize a term that translates the passage of time into the spatialization of time.
An Art and Technology of Understanding
Those of us active in the work of art and technology seem a comparatively anxious, self-critical bunch. It has been pointed out elsewhere and often that communities engaged with "new media," "art and technology," and "multimedia" are rife with artist-researchers, craftsman-critics, and technologist-theorists. These people are in the business of simultaneously employing and critiquing the material and social complexes we call "technology" in ways more emphatic than other artistic methods, aesthetics and histories (Criticalengineering.org provides an encouraging and exciting recent example of these kinds of practical motivations). Why all this questioning of form, of motivation, of intention? What's with all the talk of context, architectures and infrastructures? Why continue to bother with the work of fusing and conjoining fields and conventions separated by historical, cultural, and institutional silos, misunderstandings and discords? In short: Why not just relax, and paint yourself a nice watercolour landscape?