Every year in Berlin there is a sandcastle competition outside Berlin’s Central station. These creations are astonishingly intricate. And although the designs are usually too Disney/Fantasia for my taste, I imagine that part of the excitement of sculpting sandcastles must be the unpredictability inherent in the material. Despite the immense control that these artists have, ultimately there remains an element of contingency in the nature of the sand that has been formed into such magnificently chiselled castles.

This becomes more apparent on the simpler level of a pile of sand. As grains are added to a pile of sand the pile will grow bigger, until predictably, it collapses under its own weight and instability. Not so predictable, however, is precisely when the pile will collapse. Predicting this turns out to be almost impossible. This self-organized criticality – in which there is a fluctuation between stable and instable states – is also found in wildfires, earthquakes and avalanches.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy explores this tension between chaos and order in all of his work. He creates meta-stable pieces, always with the intention of allowing them to be destroyed. But unlike a Buddhist monk who destroys a sand Mandala after he (or are there also female monks who perform this ritual? I don’t expect so somehow) has finished it, Goldsworthy does not actively step in. His creations are made so that they will be worn down by natural processes. Goldsworthy’s work ruffles the veil where fragile beauty (or, to use a more neutral term, consistency) meets with forces that cause this consistency to fall apart. This results in creations of breathtaking beauty, as well as a lot of stress about finishing a work in progress before some unforeseen disaster takes place. Witness the moment in the documentary below, when a delicate construction of a web woven from tiny twigs (and appended to a tree), breaks apart moments before its completion.

watch?v=3TWBSMc47bw&feature=player_embedded

A recent article discusses new evidence that these systems of self-organised criticality are very much like the functioning of the human brain. It turns out that ‘sand avalanches’ have an analogue in the brain’s ‘neural avalanches’ (that is, in the way that neurons communicate with each other). Even further, it is precisely at this critical border of disorder and chaos that the brain functions. That is to say, the brain is always on the edge of chaos. The article explains that this self-organised criticality (on the edge of chaos) is crucial for a proper functioning of the brain. The brain’s neurons connect with a rate of one to one. If it was the case that neurons transmitted information faster the brain would be swamped with too much information and indeed dive into chaos. On the other hand, if the communication were slower, the neuronal avalanche would die out before having been completed.

watch?v=8k46vEy3Y08&feature=player_embedded

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Monika Cichoń: creation at the edge of chaos

So, what if you are constantly aware of the chaos bubbling up like lava through the thin film of consistency that is always erupting in our heads? How does chaos traverse the human figure?

These are questions viscerally explored in the artwork of Polish artist Monika Cichoń(1980). If Goldsworthy has taken as his subject the self-organised criticality of nature, Monika Cichoń makes studies of this phenomenon as it applies to the human figure. She portrays figures at the very point where they are sutured to the unnameable void of the real, or in other words where they emerge out of chaos.

When we look at any object or person, we single it/them out from a background of chaos. We assign it certain coherent values so that it becomes a discrete object that we can handle, or a person with whom we can interact. But of course we can never completely and exhaustively perceive an object or person, as they are continually changing and are also not at all as separate from their environment as we – if only for practical purposes – often assume. And in any case, it is impossible to truly describe any object exhaustively, whenever we do talk about objects/people, it is enough to refer to one or a few essential/recognizable features. Nevertheless, a person’s clear idea of an object is interwoven with the chaos of the unthought. As Alain Badiou posits, any object is counted-as-one by people, but is in reality an uncountable multiplicity.

One way to appreciate Monika Cichoń’s graphic art and drawings is to think of them as the direct treatment of the relation between chaos and the human subject. (Parenthetically, it should be noted here that Cichoń employs many more different styles/materials than the works discussed below). Cichoń’s pieces portray the individuation of figures that are attached to chaos like to an umbilical cord.

She locates the situatedness of the human; the event that marks where it is pinned to the void of its situation; the moment of individuation, in which a first distinction becomes apparent between chaos and form. I would like to go through these works by briefly discussing three different ways in which they address this relationship between chaos and the human subject: 1. Scratches and tears in the fabric of the real; 2. Partial objects; 3. Blurred/vanishing/emerging figures.

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1. Scratches and tears in the fabric of the real

Gilles Deleuze argues in his book on Francis Bacon that the painter’s cloth is never simply an empty, neutral space. Firstly, the canvas is always already impressed with marks and traces from everyday life that the artist carries with her/him and projects onto the ostensibly white, blank canvas. Secondly, there are ‘figurative probabilities’; places that are more or less likely to be painted.

The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.

Francis Bacon, it is recounted, used to make violent swipes across the canvas before starting work on the actual painting, ‘…make random marks (lines-traits); scrub sweep, or wipe the canvas in order to clear out locales or zones (colour-patches); throw the paint, from various angles and at various speeds.’ (LS, 70).‘It is as if, in the midst of the figurative and probabilistic givens, a catastrophe overcame the canvas.’ (LS, 71) It seems as if Monika Cichoń not so much ‘clear[s] out locales or zones’, as that she allows that very chaos to emerge, to seep through the canvas/paper. The surface of many drawings is literally torn from vigorous scratching as if she is rubbing through the empty paper to the chaos stuck in its fabric.

One thing that is noticeable is that there is nothing obviously ‘artistic’ about this scratching. In one sense they appear as random impressions on the paper. A second thing is the violence with which the marks are made, often resulting in actual tears in the paper. In some cases, tears are also drawn on the paper.‘[P]ainters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition.(Deleuze/Guattari, What is Philosophy, 203). Cichoń goes through a catastrophe, a conflagration. But the end result is never that of a linear process from ‘chaos to composition’, it is rather a disjunctive synthesis of both chaos and composition

The scratching, the cuts, the tears; they let in the light, but of course it can not be a composition and at the same time be wholly random. But although there is a plane of composition, it is at times minimally constrained/bound and at times contains actual holes. ‘…it is always a matter of defeating chaos by a secant plane that crosses it. Poets, artists make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light.’ (WP, 210) Or as Leonard Cohen wrote, ‘There is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in.’

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2. Partial objects

Many of these works depict parts of bodies rather than the whole thing. Before partaking in a full body these parts are depicted as partial objects drifting through and emerging out of a chaotic but consistent plane. The force of life that connects everything in conjunctive and disjunctive flows of desire:

desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn and breaks the flows … produced by partial objects and constantly cut-off by other partial objects which in turn produce other flows interrupted by other partial objects. Every ‘object’ produces the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object (16f) … Every machine functions as a break in the flow to which it is connected, but also a chain in the flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it (36).

These partial objects are part of the flows and functioning of larger bodies but in their own right also consist of and lead on to other flows within and away from the body. Both the body and the partial objects can thus be seen as flows; the body no longer as a discrete whole that contains organs, but as a body whose organs are flows and concentrations of intensities, in this sense a body without organs.

Partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs and the body without organs the raw material of the partial objects (Anti Oedipus 326) … The subject, discharged of his personal identity but not of his singularities, enters into relations with others following the communication proper to partial objects: everyone passes into the body of the other on the body without organs (63).

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3. Blurred, vanishing and/or emerging figures

Cichoń also depicts many figures that are already recognizable as more than floating partial-objects, but are nevertheless blurred, or vanishing/emerging from a backdrop of chaos or void. The figures (almost exclusively women) in these graphics are masterfully drawn; however, rarely are they rendered beautifully finished. There are either parts missing, or blurred out (in that way sometimes recalling Francis Bacon’s work). This can be unsettling, uncanny. But it can also ring true. In this sense that even a masterful finish and polished beauty can never separate themselves from chaotic turbulence, so showing one and not the other seems more flat than enveloping both in one another. There is bliss in merely being, but there is cruelty no less. If Deleuze illustrates this by invoking the chaotic backdrop of Goya’s paintings, in Cichoń’s work figures are often fading into a similarly chaotic background, against which the rest of their body is distinguishable. It is a violent rubbing out, a becoming-indiscernible, in defiance of a clean-cut representation of the body. Or conversely, this vanishing can be seen as the emergence of a true subject out of chaos.‘[T]he subject is, in the very instant of its coming to be, already in ‘eclipse’, as if the subject itself, in the event of art, were to appear in the flicker of its own vanishing or void.’ (Robert Hughes, ‘Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject’). A dark place to be sure. But also a place of pure potential, of any difference about to have taken place.

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4. Sutured to chaos

This place of potential can be thought of as an inconsistent and therefore unthinkable multiple; one that has not been unified, or counted as one object. It is as if, alongside the masterfully finished creation, the very condition for creation is being simultaneously offered. There is no master in the sense that there is no doormat big enough under which to sweep chaos. ‘Truth results from the fact and the place – the ordeal of absence and void – first nostalgically and then actively arouses the fiction of a master that would be capable of truth – truth results from the disappearance of the master into the anonymity of the empty place. In brief, ‘the master has sacrificed himself so that truth may be’ (Inaesthetics 50). A sacrifice of the delimited masterful stroke for the incoherent doodling of a child. Witold Gombrowicz, the champion of the childlike as creative force, writes of a poet who creates ‘not solely like a wise refined and mature one, but rather like a Wise One who benefits from stupidity, like a Refined One who profits from being tirelessly brutalized, and like a Mature One who is being ceaselessly rejuvenated… Our element is unending immaturity.’ Samuel Beckett another master of failure, who madedoodles of his own, wrung the cloth of language with one end dipped in sparse, formal perfection, the other in the unnameable collapse. And in what is something of an amorous encounter, Cichoń’s works, too, enmesh the perfect Masterful finish with the chaos of failure and childlike doodling. Two lovers do not merge with each other into a blissful One. Two lovers violently clash and meet and are traversed by the infinite extra that is the event of their love.

In a similar way, chaos and craft are both entangled and separately present. Film played at a slower speed such that the frames and the void that connects them become visible, without completely compromising the continuity that is the product of their sum. ‘The entire question can be reformulated as follows: How can a truth be thought, at one and the same time, as anonymous (or impersonal) and nevertheless as immanent and terrestrial?’ (Inaesthetics 54). In their own unthinkability, the figures in these drawings/etchings dwell. Yet if an uncanny emptiness pushes through them with unbound elasticity, it will also always snap back like an elastic band. And as infinity and the figure push through one another, intertwined with one another, neither remains unscathed.

“Let me be plain: the semi-colon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly. I pinch them out of my prose.” a quote by Donald Barthelme I just read here; and Beckett was no milder in his judgement: “How hideous is the semicolon.” I always sort of felt the same; but maybe just because Beckett said so; anyhow; lately I’ve been making friends with it. Agree it’s not the prettiest punctuation mark, but I like the pause it gives.

Stay where you stop, then move on stay where you stop then move and / paragraph paragraph paragraph, after a long time. After a long time, he hears her in the body of a grown-up, lady and boy, bird who cannot fly or flies too high, people call her Alaska, s/he stands in a plane of snow, no footsteps!

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A Zone (for Monkey in Stalker)

S/he sits at a table. S/he slouches her body drapes her arms on the table, lays, her head on one side, on the surface of the table. S/he bends towards the other-formed, moves three glasses by staring, one glass at a time, over the surface of a table. A perception of possible movement. The mark of her father in the gaze from her eyes. She rests her head on the surface of the table. In his zone, the man, rests his head in the moist earth. In this zone he leads wanderers by wandering, with the absolute seriousness and dedication of a child. Child’s play, silence as movement. She is unimaginably distant from him. Absolutely further far, each other, so close. He finds a room of impossible desire, same place different wander. He cannot enter, where he offers himself. And the Scientist, the Writer, the wanderers, sit slumped before this room, puppets in the wet sand, arms dangle forward stiff, heads bow half forward down

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The painter (for Rinus van den Bosch)

S/he is painter, using the Queen for a model, s/he has painted the shadow of the Queen, and the Queen did approve of the difference. Much later the best s/he can do is paint with one colour. S/he paints one colour, horizontal, one colour vertical. Difference in direction becomes a difference in colour. The painter is ridiculed, accused, ignored. S/he feels the hurt of a child, the terror of a child (door slam) or soldier (possible imminent bombing or death). S/he sees her painting, stares thoughtlessly into her painting, for hours, thumb and index fingers fumble with the hem of her skirt, when until a person presses from behind with caress, her hands, on her hands;

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Guilty landscape

He sits in front of a meadow, looks into the meadow. A plane of grass and lined by trees. He does not know, and, what kind of trees, some oaks probably, but only because people often talk of oaks. He remembers nothing, no place, death, the feeble bones. Sings a song alongside the death. Long rolling. Dark dark river, entangles the meadow grey and bloody dust

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Ageless pre-teen (for Eli and Kåre)

Dressed all black s/he curls up for a journey in a black coffer. There is no pain in her joints there is rubber. A young boy lets his index and middle fingers slide over the studs on the trunk’s edges. He can never see the blackness that s/he rests in, but it passes through him. He keeps her safe inside her black box. Maybe s/he will devour him, one body for another. When s/he is in her blackest box he feels the blinding desert, blast wave of an atomic bomb: one atom wave diffracts another. Sometimes tears from his eyes. Sometimes it makes him tremble, stare with unblinking eyes. He is hidden from sight, can feel the little particles of being wriggle, violently larvae. S/he is in a black box, in a forever black box. Ageless pre-teen, unthinkable, what we might call monster. The boy is about to have thought her, is about to have died. The boy is about to have thought her, is about to have died. He is for his life a salvation for her. He for his life redeems her blackest. He is a boy whose fingers stroke the stitching of her coffer, he with the murmuring of an old man offers his life as blood. He offers awkward and gentle as a child. When s/he opens her box, the slam of a wall of air when s/he touches his face her insides hurt, he is a streak of flash (the trace of an impossible star)

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A figure

An old woman standing, and with the light, and it appears as if, receding into, or emerging from a darkness. Heavy black dress with white frills white collar. Thick leather face, deep faults, etched grooves. The blackness from which into which, comes thru at some spots comes thru a woman’s face, only slightly as if not. When she looks left there is a gust of movement behind her eyes, a violent smashing of window panes. When she looks right, a collapse and rustling, some squirrel shooting thru high leaves, some rat or fox shooting thru a cartoon, thru dry leaves. Sagging but thick her face, heavy not sad, troubled but only because of her face,

I gather from other blogs that one Mark Taylor of Macmillan Publishing has threatened with legal action before, and now again, somewhat more successfully it would appear. Here an interview with aaaarg architect Sean Dockray, an extensive background article by Janneke about the sharing of pirated theory,

Now watching Ghost World (by same director, Terry Zwigoff). Two girls walk by a man who always waits for the bus on a spot where there has been no bus line for two years. And there is some Skip James:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtZ6DoeimP4&feature=related]

Dutch poet and composer Samuel Vriezen wrote a titillating piece about Dutch poetry and globalization, arguing among other things that Dutch poets could do with a bit more barbarism; start reading around more. He also talks about the role internet has played in the last few years: “If, once upon a time, Nijhoff could hold that Dutch poetry was among the world’s finest, we can today only excuse him on the grounds that he had no internet access.”; and about Leevi Lehto’s idea of writing in a second or N-th language as a the possible redemption from all this navel gazing (Dutch critics love using that phrase). Some extracts from Samuel’s essay:

If it took half a century before Vestdijk introduced Dickinson to Dutch readers, Flarf could make its mark on the Dutch situation within about five years. What gets noticed and picked up in The Netherlands and in Flanders has less and less to do with the institutional structures of major publishing and academic canonization, and more and more with the vitality of poetical discussion, which, in the States, generally is most vibrant in the “Post-Avant” general family of poetic directions

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For myself, then, foreign poetry has become a more important factor than original Dutch poetry. About half the poetry I have bought over the past five years is in English; about a quarter is in Dutch; the rest is mostly in German, French, or Spanish. This has caused a veritable reversal in my relation to my own language: if, normally, one would read foreign poetry and evaluate it with respect to its relation to domestic poetic developments, today I increasingly find myself “testing” Dutch language poetry against what I know from foreign poetries.

I don’t read much Dutch poetry myself. Don’t buy much either. Read mainly online dare I confess. And from PDFs (which doesn’t mean I don’t love books, but have also sort of gotten used to reading PDFs). Really like his formulation of his view that the local should be read in relation to the global; reading different literatures as interconnected, not separate. It reminds me of a similar point Graham Harman frequently makes about writing: that it does not happen separately from, but in continual reciprocation with the rest of life.

To acknowledge globalization in literature would then mean both to read and write in any language that one has access to, one’s own as much as those of others, acknowledging the local at the same time as its place in the world.

Here some more about Leevi Lehto’s proposal for a barbaric poetry:

He observes that the most widely spoken language in the world today is “English spoken as Second – or Nth – Language”, but that this language does not yet have its proper literature. Therefore he advocates the production of “barbaric poetry”: that as a Finn, for example, he might write original work in other languages – including, perhaps, languages he can not even read himself (and in fact Lehto has done so). Internationalism, then, is not to be achieved by everybody speaking the same language, but by everybody coming to the same uncontrollable pluriformity of languages from an uncontrollable pluriformity of linguistic positions. Radicalizing a poetics of misprision, language and nation would then no longer be fundamentally linked. Instead there would be a “new kind of World Poetry not yet in existence”, a poetry that might involve “independence vis-à-vis National Literatures, including institutionally [...]; mixing of languages; borrowing of structures – rhythmical, syntactical – from other languages; writing in one’s non-native languages; inventing new, ad hoc languages; conscious attempts to write for more heterogeneous, non-predetermined audiences…”

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Ever since Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman’s cute little, yet expansive (dubbed as such by Karla Kelsey), manifesto style book Notes on Conceptualisms came out last year people have been making much, or trying to make something of the statement made therein that Conceptualism is allegorical. How so? people asked. What does allegorical mean in relation to Conceptual Writing? Recently Vanessa Place, invited by Steve McCaffery, gave a talk, perhaps to clarify some of the confusion. And her language is indeed very lucid, as well as being suggestive, which for me sometimes creates a beautiful and/yet uncanny or haunting quality. A few days ago I received this lecture in the mail in the form of a handsome chapbook titled The Allegory and the Archive (published by derek beaulieu’s No Press). Like Notes on Conceptualisms this pamflet is feather light, beautifully bound with red string, but not a word is wasted and although hard work, I also found it a pleasure to read.

Although there is much more to say about the booklet in general I want to focus on how Vanessa Place’s use of allegory is a pointing to, but not a talking about: a decision, a bearing witness, but not a representation. In other words, how Conceptual Writing as allegorical writing rejects representation of in favour of presentation for or alongside the Real.

Place starts off by briefly sketching a history of various understandings of allegory: that of extended metaphor, a text with a literal and symbolic meaning. She then names Walter Benjamin as a turning point in the modern understanding of allegory; equating this through Baudelaire, with the inner life. Benjamin writes about Baudelaire that he, “always concentrates on the inner life, as Dante focused on dogma.” Michael Jennings in an anthology about Benjamin writes that for Baudelaire allegory was his “weapon of preference [against the] ‘harmonious façade of the world’ that surrounded him. This ability to unmask the given order, with its illusion of totality and organic wholeness, is the progressive tendency of allegory.” (in ‘On the Banks of a New Lethe’, in Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with the Arcades Project, p. 101)

So in place of Dante where the internal/external divide concerns the whole text; the modern allegory is internalized. The internal/external dichotomy is located between the ostensible inner world of a despairing psyche and the supposed outer world. Conceptualism, however, does not accept an internal/external divide between psyche and world. “Rather, there is a recognition of the truth of the soup in which the individuated we and you stew.” Instead of the transcendence of the aforementioned divide, there is only immanence, only the soup of which, although individuated, we are still a part.

I would like to make a distinction between representational allegory and allegory of the Real. The former  would be any story that allegorizes abstract universals (in the way that one individual represents the abstract universal Every(wo?)man in the famous medieval (15^th c.) tale Everyman), or moral laws, common sense, and good/evil; the delicate balance (for example, the Narnia tales). Conceptualism on the other hand, can be seen as allegorizing specific effects of the Real. Not free-floating abstract ideas or notions right or wrong; but rather effects of language or the subject that are present in a text as lack or excess. These are, for example, effects of uncontainability, unreadability, and material fabrication that express themselves by forcing themselves through the Conceptual text (Place mentions Kenneth Goldsmith’s unreadable Day (for one it consists of 40% stock quotes), or Craig Dworkin’s Parse whose very constitutive procedure simultaneously eats away at the text from within).

Thus, when Place writes that Conceptualism “is concerned with the way that the surface excess of text mirrors the excess of the remainder”, I take this to mean that 1. there is an excess of the immaterial (the irrelevant and the unreadable) which pushes through a given text and 2. that Conceptualism bears witness to this remainder (points to it by way of allegory). “All that poetry is is witness… on a paradigmatic basis.” And the one who witnesses Place calls the “sobject”, to indicate the rejection of the old internal/external divide in favour of immanence. The sobject stands in immanent connection to the outside; is “the one who witnesses some thing it is witnessed by.”

Although I am still not clear on the added value of the coinage “sobject”. If the reason is to get away from a closed-circuit correlation between subject-object, then why not simply think of the subject as an object (albeit it a complex one, with self-awareness) in relation to other objects (and to the “thing it is witnessed by”). Part of what I think Place (and Fitterman (co-author of Notes on Conceptualisms)) are getting at with the concept of “sobject” is an inclusion of the (lyrical-)subject in the event of the poem’s emergence from the Real; or conversely, the rejection of the lyrical subject as discretely/autonomously present somewhere outside of the poem (which is part of the Real); without however, denying a role for the subject (of which there will always be a trace: Think of the interference of Kenneth Goldsmith’s subject position in his works: the typo’s in Day, the impossibility of an objective notation in Fidget; the incorporation of inebriation in Soliloquy. And likewise, in Vanessa Place’s own impure Conceptualism, where the language with effects of baroque/excess is her own).

Non-Conceptual poetry?

For all of these reasons I think that philosophies of immanence provide good frameworks for understanding the significance of Conceptualism. Conceptualist writers, “witnesses on a paradigmatic basis” might be seen as clinicians of society (Deleuze), or subjects to an event of truth that emerges through poems, or bodies of work (Badiou). But one philosophy I think fits particularly well with the way Place presents allegory is the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle. The “non-” is meant not as a negation of philosophy but as a suspension of some of its axioms. One claim Laruelle makes is that all philosophy creates a  distance from the Real by talking about it. Even Deleuze’s plane of immanence, according to Laruelle, is already a distancing from the immanence in which it (the plane) must necessarily be contained. Likewise Badiou’s multiplicity too, is already posited. Instead Laruelle proposes a One that underlies everything and of which everything is an expression. Everything including all thought, all philosophy. This One is immediately reminiscent of Neo-Platonism, but Laruelle’s is not of course, a unified One that is transcendent to its expressions; it is what Laruelle calls radical immanence, about which nothing can be said. Therefore instead of making claims directly about the Real, Laruelle’s non-philosophy consists of learning indirectly, by treating works of philosophy themselves as effects of the Real. In the same way that Conceptualism undercuts the lyrical subject by way of the concept, Ray Brassier speaks of an alien subject of Non-philosophy, someone who only points toward, writes alongside, instead of about the Real.

As Nick Srnicek writes in an essay about Laruelle, “The question is not ‘what is the One and how does it operate?’, but rather ‘with philosophy being an object determined by the One, what can be done with it?”. Here echoes sound through of Christian Böks ‘pataphysics (the science of the possible), and more literally of Craig Dworkin’s question: “So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better… but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.”

Non-philosophy as allegorical philosophy? Conceptual poetry as non-conceptual poetry?

Dear filmmakers of the world,

We are a small group of people who are about to set up a cinema in the Somali refugee camp Al-Kharaz in the Yemeni desert, where more than 13.000 refugees reside. The project will be realized in collaboration with the United Nations and ADRA, and aims at establishing a creative learning environment for both refugees and aid workers. Screenings will be integrated in the general educational program, but there will also be screenings of films of a more entertaining character. We believe that living images from all over the world are inspiring to everybody and we hope you will share your love for films and contribute to this project by donating one or more of your works.

We are looking for a wide range of films on all kinds of topics; documentaries, feature films, animations and cartoons. We will send you a contract when we hear from you, which states that your film will only be shown in Al-Kharaz refugee camp, and only as a part of this project.

We would be grateful if you would forward this message to your network, and appreciate advice and suggestions on how to improve the project.

For more information and donations please email: johanneihle@hotmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Best wishes,

Johanne Haaber Ihle

Visual Anthropologist

Phone: +45 5288 5458

-[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47rUrlzdK3k]

One other thing Venter mentions is that he also injected language into a cell. This immediately reminded me of Christian Bök’s Xenotext project, which involves the same (or a similar) process except that Bök wants to calculate the bacterium’s reaction will be upon injection of the amino acid alphabet. Something that I believe means going through many zeros of calculations.

“We are entering a new era where we are limited mostly by our imaginations” posits Craig Venter. Science becomes poetry / becomes science.

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