timothy leary in the 1990s &/or how to talk nineteen to the dozen like a digital maniac even if you aren't

Raffaello Santi's Angelo (1500-1501), Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902);

Katja Kolm and Maria Dragus in Barbara Albert's Mademoiselle Paradis &/or Mesmer against Society of the Ugly Wigs (Austria/Germany, 2017), Tiziano Vecellio's Amor Sacro e Amor Profano (1514) (potlatch invitations, collages & photography);

Gilbert Simondon Interview (1965/Youtube); 

Fractals: The Color of Infinity (Arthur Clarke/Youtube); 

Cyberpunk: The Documentary (1990) [this video was removed from Youtube]; 

John C. Lilly interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove (from Youtube); 

Documentary about John C. Lilly's Dolphin House (from Youtube);  

Jack Parsons: Sex Magic, Drugs and Rocket Science (Biographics/Youtube, 2018);

Did Jack Parsons Blow Himself Up? (Tom Explores Los Angeles/Youtube); 

Éric Sadin: l'asservissement par l'Intelligence Artificiele (Thinkerview/Nov 2018) [the video is not available anymore at Youtube]; 

Survivre au système éducatif, Hackers et Crapauds fous (Thanh Nghiem, Thinkerview, 2018) [the video is not available anymore at Youtube]; 

Cédric Villani: Intelligence artificielle perspectives futures (Thinkerview, 2017) [mon commentaire sur cette interview, sur la page Youtube (this evil has now been sufficiently fenced against, they must have fretted and fumed inwardly): "c'est une connerie presque complète qui vous avez lá, et pourtant vous avez été bien plus gentil avec lui que avec beaucoup de vos autres invités... je me demande si au fond ce qui vous intimide est la mystification: c'est ça le secret qui vous maintient tous; juste un example: la finance internationale n'a rien fait qui s'effondrer dans le moment ou des algorithms et les modeles d'intelligence artificiel ont été introduits... quant à ce que Villani a dit sur la science, et bien! elle n'a pas quand même seulement contribué a nous faire comprendre le fonctionnement de la matière pour pouvoir developper la technologie atomique et l'appliquer à de fins qui pourraient être ou pas justifiées: des scientistes et des ingénieurs ont activement contribué à ce que nous ayons sur terre un tel nombre des bombes avec qui il serait possible de la faire exploser avec nous-mêmes et toutes les autres espèces des centaines de fois! a qui cela a-t-il vraiment profité?! croyez-vous que cela fait du progrès?! ah, oui! en prouvant que nous sommes tous de cons... la tradition culturelle de la France était réflexive et surtout critique, très sophistiquée, de Descartes à Deleuze, en passant par de gens comme Baudelaire; en abandonnant cela, vous êtes devenus des pseudo-pragmatistes et tombés bien au-dessous des Britanniques et des Américains qui au moins ne sont pas si prétentieux et ne rationalisent pas des choses qui n'ont jamais eu de justification" (to be published as part of a rhapsodical work "fit forms of swearing suitable to all occasions", after being totally abolished as altogether unnecessary)] [the video is not available anymore at Youtube];

Category Theory for Beginners: Yoneda Lemma (Richard Southwell, Youtube); 

How I Turned My 4-Year-Old's Art into an NFT (Wall Street Journal, Youtube); 

The great abyss inframince [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

Crows in Berg (Inter) View & Pillage [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

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From the cyclopedia of arts and sciences, to cut not a contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle: 

"Leibniz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation... He imagined that Unity represented God, and Zero the void... [And] alas! What was once hailed as a monument to monotheism ended in the bowels of a robot."

Laplace vs. Tobias Dantzig

"The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity."

Leibniz on imaginary numbers as quoted by Morris Kline (who has no understanding whatsoever of Leibniz's nature)

"... il est illusoire de chercher à retrouver des modes directement artisanaux de production... C’est dans l’accentuation même de la production industrielle, dans l’approfondissement de ses caractères qu’un dépassement de l’antithèse entre artisanat et industrie peut être recherché avec les plus sérieuses chances de succès... L’industrie isole l’homme de la nature parce qu’elle se charge du rapport homme-nature: elle est, en fait, par rapport à l’homme, ce qui remplace le réel d’ordre cosmique (le vent, la pluie, le débordement du fleuve, l’épizootie) en diminuant en une certaine mesure de son indépendance par rapport à l’homme mais conservant la transcendance de dimension et le caractère de discontinuité, d’irréversibilité."

Gilbert Simondon (Mentalité Technique)

"... En particulier, le mariage de la logique mathématique avec la technologie des ordinateurs vient d’implanter de manière spectaculaire la strate spirituelle dans la couche physique de la réalité. C’est ce feed-back ontologique de la puissance mentale avec son incorporation physique qui produit la résonance culturelle inouïe, dont nous sommes les témoins."

Guerino Mazzola (La vérité du beau dans la musique) 

"... [nous assistons à] la FRACTALISATION de l'étendue se doublant de celle des durées relatives à ce continuum d'une Histoire générale, en voie d'abolition instantanée..."

"... avec l'effraction de l'instant, la fractalisation du tempo historique, les nanochronologies de l'effet de réel entrouvrent la possibilité inouïe d'un dépassement de l'économique à l'avantage de l'astronomique..." 

Paul Virilio

"... le moment où la conscience opérant ce retour sur soi-même se révèle elle-même à elle-même et voit la production vouée à sa consumation est précisément celui où le monde de la production ne sait plus que faire de ses produit."

Georges Bataille (Théorie de la religion)

"Dans les limites de l'activité proprement économique, la rigueur a un objet clair: la consécration des ressources excédantes à l'aplanissement des difficultés matérielles de la vie et la réduction du temps de travail. C'est le seul usage des richesses qui coïncide avec une adéquation de l'homme à la chose et réserve le caractère négatif de l'action, dont le but pour l'homme demeure la possibilité de disposer entièrement de lui-même."

Georges Bataille (La Part maudite)

"Once again we are entering a phase of scientific development when pioneering investigations can be done by non-professionals... there are computers in millions of homes. There are more people with leisure than ever before."

Rupert Sheldrake 

"There are two experiences: One is movement in relation to other things; the other is the sense of flow. The movement of meaning is the sense of flow. But even in moving through space, there is a movement of meaning. In a moving picture, with twenty-four frames per second, one frame follows another, moving from the eye through the optic nerve, into the brain. The experience of several frames together gives you the sense of flow. This is a direct experience of the implicate order."

David Bohm as Gilles Deleuze's (interview)
"What's great about this country is that... President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke... A Coke is a Coke and no money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking... when Queen Elizabeth came here and President Eisenhower bought her a hot dog I'm sure he felt confident that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than that one he bought her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark... Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Cokes and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same ILGWU clothes and see the same TV shows... All this is really American."
Andy Warhol

"Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) made amazingly precise music using mechanically driven instruments. Operating a custom-built hole-punching machine, he produced piano rolls that drove two synchronized player pianos. Nancarrow was obsessed with the simultaneous layering of multiple tempo strands, where the tempi were related by a mathematical ratio. For example, in his Study for Player Piano 41a (1965), the tempi are related by an irrational factor, and cascades of notes sweep up and down the keyboard at superhuman speed."

"The technology of the magnetic tape recorder effectively liberated time. By simply varying the recording or playback controls, one could slow down, speed up, or reverse the flow of audio time. Tape cutting and splicing enable time segmentation and the free arrangement of tape segments on the timeline... The synthesis of sound by digital computer opened the doors to dramatically expanded control over the time domain. The most obvious extrapolation was the pursuit of superhuman precision and speed..." 

"Complex contrapulsations can lead to chaotic cloud textures whose internal rhythm can only be perceived statistically. A classic example is Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique (1962) for 100 metronomes, where each metronome is set to a different tempo."

"Some digital audio mixing applications let the user set the grid or time signature on a per-track or even per-clip basis. These temporal grids need not be rigid. Rather, their tempi can be elastic, deforming in the presence of pivotal sound events, analogous to the way that spacetime is warped by the presence of matter (Einstein 1916). In the extreme, the grids may evaporate, leading to free and open temporal spaces."

Curtis Roads, Composing Electronic Music

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Commentary scholium, illustration and key, by his ashes & with the officious humility of heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive:

"Let me quote the wise old drug experimenter, Thomas de Quincey: 'the machinery for dreaming and the imagination was not implanted for nothing'" (xii);

"It turns out that the brain is a galactic network of a hundred billion neurons" (xiv);

"Around 1900, physicists (Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.) demonstrated that the elements of all energy matter in the universe, out there or down here, consist of quanta of information. Light. During the Roaring 20th Century, the equations of quantum physics led to the development of quantum appliances that allowed humans to receive, process, and transmit electronic images. Telephone, cinema, radio, television, computers, compact discs, fax machines; suddenly humans were creating digital realities that were accessed on living-room screens. This universe of electronica signals, in which we now spend so much time, has been called Cyberia" (3);

"The advent of personal and interpersonal computers, digital editors, and audio-video gear (1976-90) turned the average American home into an electronic information center..." (7);

"Just before yesterday, around 1984, a combination of American creativity and Japanese precision suddenly mass-produced inexpensive, do-it-yourself home appliances for individuals to electronify, digitize, and transmit personal realities. Digital communication translates the recording of any sound or photograph of any image into clusters of quanta or fuzzy clouds of off/on information. Any image digitized by an individual human can then be flashed on telephone lines around the world inexpensively at light speed... The basic elements of the youniverse, according to quantum-digital physics, can be understood as consisting of quanta of information, bits of compressed digital programs. These elements of pure (0/1) information contain incredibly detailed algorithms to program potential sequences for fifteen billion years—and still running. These information-jammed units have only one hardware-external function. All they do is flash off/on when the immediate environment triggers a complex array of 'if-if-if-if... THEN!' algorithms" (14);

"In the cybernetic age now dawning, 'Digital Power to the People' provides everyone the inexpensive option to cast, script, direct, produce, and distribute his or her own movie. Custom-made, tallorized, in the convenient sizes—mammoth, giant, regular, and byte-sized mini" (16);

"The equipment used by this family costs less than a standard 1990 television set, that pathetic junk-food spud-box with no power to store or process electronic information" (19);

"Nothing from our rich, glorious past will be eliminated... we will drive cars, as we now ride horses, for pleasure" (20);

"The film industry's never been able to do anything with Gravity's Rainbow" (27);

"Hesse was hanging out in Basel, home of Paracelsus" (30);

"Computers will not replace real people. They will replace middle and low-level bureaucrats" (33);

"The human brain has a hundred billion neurons, and each neuron has the knowledge-processing capacity of a powerful computer. The human brain has more connections than there are atoms in the universe" (35);

"Much of Steve Job's astounding success in developing the Apple and the Mac was explicitly motivated by his crusade against IBM, seen as the archenemy of the 1960s counterculture" (40); 

"Physicists are traditionally assigned the task of sorting out the nature of reality. So it was Eistein, Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, et. al, who figured out that the units of energy/matter were subatomic particles that zoom around in clouds of ever-changing, off-on, 0-1, yin-yang probabilities" (45);

"Next time you boot up your Mac, breathe a word of gratitude to Emerson, Stein, Yeats, Pound, Huxley, Beckett, Orwell, Burroughs, Gysin—all of whom succeeded in loosening social, political, religious linearities, and encouraging subjectivity an innovative reprogramming of chaotic realities... Imagine what James Joyce could have done with MS Word or a CD-ROM graphic system or a modern data base! Well, we don't have to imagine—he actually managed to do it using his own brainware" (47);
"People spend more time gazing at electrons than they do gazing into the eyes of their loved ones, looking into books, scanning other aspects of material reality. Talk about applied metaphysics! Electronic reality is more real than the physical world. This is a profound evolutionary leap. It can be compared to the jump from ocean to the shoreline..." (48);
"Perceptive observers realized that Orwell's nightmare of a Big-Brothers society was too optimistic. In 1984 the authoritarian state used television to spy on citizen. The actuality is much worse: citizens docilely, voluntarily lining themselves up in front of the authority box, enjoying the lethal, neurological fast food dished out in technicolour by Newspeak. Visionary prophets like Marshall McLuhan understood what was happening. He said, 'The medium is the message.' Never mind about the junk on the screen" (49);
"'Cyberpunk is, admittedly, a risky term. Like all linguistic innovations, it must be used with a tolerant sense of high-tech humor. It's a stopgap, transitional meaning-grenade thrown over the language barricades to describe the resourceful, skillful individual who accesses and steers knowledge-communication technology towards his/her own private goals, for personal pleasure, profit, principle, or growth" (67);
"The cyberpunk code: Think for yourself, question authority (TFYQA)" (69);
"This global youth movement cannot be discussed in the terms of politics or sociology or psychology. We are dealing with a new, post-Darwinian, genetic science" (71).
"Psychedelic concepts like glasnost and perestroika are based on the common-sense principles of quantum physics—relativity, flexibility, singularity" (73).
"Countercultures go back at least as far as Hermes Trimegistus, and include Socrates, Dada, Gurdjief, and Crowley" (74).
"The stated purpose of the student in Tien Men Saquare in June 1989 was to brig the 1960s to China"(76).
"The Chinese students want something that is not mentioned by Marx or Margaret Thatcher... Gorbachev was dismayed to find that many Soviet youth, given freedom of the press, were more interested in UFOs, punk rock, astrology, and hashish than in political issues" (76).
"Just as the USSR and the U.S. controlled the world for forty years by distributing weapons to every compliant dictatorship, now Japanese and Silicon Valley companies are liberating the world with an endless flood of electronic devices designed for individuals" (77).
"But 'think for yourself' (TFYQA) does not mean 'think selfishly. It means 'think independently' (90).
"I don't care what people think as long as they have thought for themselves. So if you end up a Republican, right wing, it's okay with me, as long you have done it having had a gourmet, a connoisseur's selection of all the options. As long as you haven't done it out of fear or laziness" (90). 

"Two people communicating through their fast-feedback computers can access a range of brain circuits arguably wider than can be reached by bodily contact. This is because the brain and the computer work the same way—in the language of electric impulses, of light" (148).  

"The elements of the universe are digital, electronic, linguistic. Matter and energy are transitory hardware constructions. (Plato and Buddha, it turns out, were early cyberpunks.) The human brain is hereby and henceforth owned and operated by an individual. It is equipped with a hundred billion micro-info-centers called neurons, and is a miniaturized digital representation of the galaxy, which is equipped with a hundred billion mini-info-centers called stars. The universe is equipped with (naturally) a hundred billion mega-info-centers called gallaxies" (174).

***Everything from Timothy Leary's Chaos & Cyber Culture (Berkeley: Ronin, 1994/2014);

See also:
- 5G?! get real...
- Facebook community, nudity;
- The Doors of Perception & the learned foolery of research;
- Desubicarse (Lucrecia Martel);
- Godard's Sympathy for the Devil;
- Cinema Novo's Judgment Day;
And also:
- The House that Jack's Built's simple equation;
- Nature's Horror and Grand Style in Lars von Trier's Antichrist;
- ERRATA list for "Narrative Outbreak in Contemporary Conflict Cinema: A Case Study of Steve McQueen’s Hunger";

- "Narrative Outbreak in Contemporary Conflict Cinema: A Case Study of Steve McQueen’s Hunger";

- Beyond Subjectiveness: Non-Realism and Ontology in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park;

- Narrative Self-Deconstruction in Contemporary Cinema (Steve McQueen & Esmir Filho);

- Woody Allen as Impossible Cassandra;

- The Blindness of Meirelles; 

- Bases histórico-conceituais para a crítica cinematográfica não representacional;

- The Blindness of Meirelles;

- Deleuze, Ontology, and Mathematics (Elizabeth de Freitas); 

- "The Sticky Riff: Quantifying the Melodic Identities of Medieval Modes" (Kate Helsen, Mark Daley, Jake Schindler, Empirical Musicology Review 2021);