list processing from june

I've been scanning through a few months of empyre listings, http://www.subtle.net/empyre that all seem somehow relevant to what I am thinking at the moment but in an uncertain way. So bear with me as i think through some things here. As I read copy and paste the things that stick I wonder about the very act of copying. Just watched RIP! a remix manifesto last night and there is something inportant in here. I'm not doing well at crediting properly these fragments of discussion, they are of course all available on the empyre list archives, they can be traced. So in terms of citation that is ok. I feel a tempered responsibility to credit the voices here too. Although maybe not it is an overhead conversation anyway. Something that has happened in the halls outside. And this is my reading rather than their writing after all.
Presence and trace must connect into the discussion of relational aesthetics. What types of relationships are being formed? To what ends? Are all relationships good? And where is the power? If the relationship is formed through conversation then there is an equal play, but who prepared the field., or established the ground rules? someone has to. It is the conversation that can become truly generative.

Nick Knouf writes about John Law who describes how, "Method, then, unavoidably produces not only truths and non-truths, realities and non-realities, presences and absences, but also arrangements with political implications. It crafts arrangements
and gatherings of things---and accounts of the arrangements of things---that could have been otherwise" (_After Method_, 143).

There is The FLOSS+Art book
(http://goto10.org/flossart/, available from the Pirate Bay:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4671426/FLOSS_Art_v1.1);
We in western cultures tend to think primarily of
objects as commodities but they are of course also generators of
relationships.

Knouf talks about Michel Serres' quasi-object as the ball that holds everyone in place in the soccer game. I'm thinking that in some way Zidane himself becomes that quasi-object in Parreno's film. This can be extended into Bruno Latour's - work we have never been modern. Some of the material I was reading last week about ecology made a similar argument: that it is in the separation of nature from culture that we are able to not care. If this is actually an impossible task then yes we must engage we must do something. There is no impenetrable dividing line. the link to Latour's text is here. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html

And then indeterminancy appears amidst the discussion. Nathan and I are scratching around a project on indeterminancy. and it has grown out of nathan's work with graphic scores and my ongoing trouble with noise. The score is a most inexact reproduction, it is an impossible tool. But the invention of other systems is no more exact and involves the same ability to translate the language: i can't read stockhausen - http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~grace/220c/Kontakte_1.jpg. I will need to follow up on Simon Yuill's text as I absolutely agree notation is not the solution, and changing graphic style does not change the problematic of performance/ reproduction and improvisation. http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses
http://www.artandculture.com/feature/631

Sean Cubitt appears asking: "what might a digital resistance look like?": "The question is how do we operate now: Tactically? Strategically? And how do we minimise or at least delay the assimilation of whatever we invent into the reproduction of
capital?"

There are two potential answers posted by Caludia Costa Pederson: 1. Wafaa Bilil and his use of multiple platforms and 2. PUKAR collective and their gendered strategies for loitering videogame installation.

Both engage the structures of capital without buying it, and I think it is important to engage.