Here is one of many possible versions of my final video essay:

 

Hopefully the project doesn’t lose too much of its full effect in this more constrained form, but until I level up my Max coding skills and learn how to turn patches into standalone apps, this the only way I know how to share the final product. I don’t necessarily want to say too much about the video itself because (ideally) it should make sense on its own; although what and how much “sense” it actually makes is a matter of each viewers’ susceptibility to the intended Burroughs-esque brainwashing tactics borrowed from his audiotape cut-ups. 

Based on some of the responses to my presentation, I do want to include a little more about the program I used to make the project, and use that as a way to hint towards some themes that I hope everyone was able to “unscramble” from the video.  Aside from just being a fun program to make things in, I’ve found myself returning to Max as an object of study because it is such an unrestricted “ecology” of incomplete elements.  In his “How I Learned to Love a Program That Does Nothing,” Max developer David Zicarelli explains that unlike a more maximal music composition software like Ableton Live or Logic which emphasize their built-in features and plug-ins, Max included as few parts as possible but those parts were meant to be endlessly connectable.  The interconnectivity of various elements became central to my project, through the plug-ins offered natively in Max, patches made my other users that I found on the Max web-forums, and my own audio/video files made outside of Max, I was able to build an “eco-system” of an essay. 

During the 1990s, in the early days of the internet on personal computers Sadie Plant applies a phrase from the French philosopher/psychoanalyst  Luce Irigaray about women to the computer, saying they are capable of “Nothing. Everything.”  This unity of seemingly opposing ideas comes from the French psychoanalytic tradition of approaching feminine subjects as un-unified sites for masculine subjects to mediate themselves through thanks to their intrinsically inter-connective nature and infinitely capacity for mimicry.

Plant saw the increasing presence of computers as a imminently liberating force for the subjugated feminine subjects, in describing the sort of thinking and acting they engender she says:

Every software development is a migration of control, away from man, in whom it has been exercised only as domination, and into the matrix… which has no place from historical man: he was merely its tool, and his agency was itself always a figment of its loop”

Like the hypertext literature coming out at the same time, Plant’s analysis was more optimistic than what has played out in reality as centralized social media corporations dominate much of the space on the internet.  Unlike hypertext works, which seem to have become dated after only a few years of interest, Plant’s take of the situation remains possible. Her reading is by no means entirely optimistic; she is quick to concede that much in the history of computing comes from militaristic and corporate desire for increased domination, but it is through these systems of cybernetic control that patriarchal institutions become open to subversion, hacking, undermining, etc. because of the sort of open-ended, decentralized, “feminine” thinking they produce.

Zicarelli’s description becomes especially interesting to me as a part of the lineage of the idea of computers as “universal machines.” Like Plant’s computer, or Irigaray’s woman, Max’s schema of basic, but connectable objects  lends itself to the production unconventional mechanisms and generative works. Where the hypertext offered readers a sense of agency as a part of the unfolding of the text, the cybernetic system Plant describes rejects centrality of the reader, the text, or the author in favor of a circuit on which the identities of all three run together and become indistinguishable from one another for the length of their connection.  In Max this often takes the form of building patches that operate independently, in a sense playing themselves, or invite participation from audiences and environments.  My project takes advantage of this in a fairly straightforward way which you can see the insides of here:

Step one of my process was to standardize the style of the videos I uploaded.  As you can see in the above photo, I sorted the videos into 5 types: 89 videos with texts, 4 web diagrams (centralized, decentralized, distributed, and a neural net), 5 images from Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, 4 “pop-ups,” and one “BLANK” screen.  All of these were set to the compatible color, contrast, and brightness so they wouldn’t conflict with each other when they were mixed together. Once organized in their respective playlists in Max, the videos were linked to controls operated by the music; turning on and off based on how many times the “Amen” drum break looped, with effects and positions on the screen being changed based on volume of certain frequencies as determined by the “Audiosplitter” object.  Because the music was also constantly changing, thanks to the same controls based on its own sonic elements, the video elements became increasingly indeterminate for both the viewers and for me.  Essentially, once I clicked the “X” in the top left corner, I gave up control of what was going to happen to the computer.

If you’re interested in downloading Max and running the patch that makes up my project this is its code you can paste right into an empty patcher (although it probably won’t actually work properly without the sound and video files that are local to my computer):

<pre><code>

———-begin_max5_patcher———-

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———–end_max5_patcher———–

</code></pre>

 

And finally, the full collection of the text I used in my project, as well as a proper bibliography is available here.

Bibliography

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000.

Burroughs, William. Electronic Revolution 1970-71. 1st edition. Blackmoor Head Press, 1971.

Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded: The Restored Text. Edited by Oliver Harris. Revised edition. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2014.

Cuboniks, Laboria. “Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism.” Accessed May 1, 2018. http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. 2 edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Dement, Linda. Cyberflesh Girl Monster. 1995. CD-ROM.

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. 1 edition. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Cdr edition. Watertown, Ma.: Eastgate Systems Inc, 1995.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

“Linda Dement. “Cyberflesh Girlmonster.” Accessed May 1, 2018. http://www.digimatter.com/monster.html.

“Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age.” Accessed May 1, 2018. http://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html.

Livingston, David. “Imperfection.” Star Trek Voyager, October 11, 2000.

Plant, Sadie. “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell. Psychology Press, 2000.

Plant, Sadie. “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” Body & Society 1, no. 3–4 (November 1, 1995): 45–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X95001003003.

Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

Plant, Sadie, and Nick Land. “Cyberpositive.” Accessed May 1, 2018. http://www.sterneck.net/cyber/plant-land-cyber/.

Spinoza, Benedict de, and Stuart Hampshire. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.

“STITCH BITCH: The Patchwork Girl.” Accessed May 1, 2018. http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/jackson.html.

WEST, KANYE. “decentralize.” Tweet. @kanyewest, April 25, 2018. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989184815340535808.

———. “Fear Takes Strategy   Unlearn Linear Thinking   Hit You with These Zig Zag Thoughts.” Tweet. @kanyewest, April 25, 2018. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989184405187973120.

 

---

 

our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation.

Immediacy depends upon hypermediacy

the mathematization of space makes the context or medium transparent, and provides immediate access to the world.

images, sound, text, animation and video, which can be brought together in any combination, offers ‘random access’; it has no physical beginning, middle, or end.

the windowed computer is both automatic and interactive at the same time

remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media

Media need each other in order to be media in the first place.

remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality

mediatization occurs at the very historical moment when interpretation has asserted a kind of dominance.

remediation is a concept that applies to media in their simultaneous character as objects, as social relationships, and as formal structures.

the refashioning of a network of relationships is what defines a medium in our culture.

a new version of subjectivity, one that is embodied in the fragmented and multiple nature of hypertext

like masculinity and femininity, print and hypertext are distinct categories, with some characteristics determined by historical convention rather than essential differences.  A productive multiplicity arises from combining those aspects in ways that unsettle both categories.

Such open-ended structure, in which the reader’s choices play a crucial role in creating meaning, is often cited as a key feature of the hypertext novel and its radical potential, yet

Hypertext offers a medium and a metaphor for exploring the fragmented nature of subjectivity, a fragmentation that has long been associated with the feminine, though it is not exclusive to the female gender

“what is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all because it can be shown

the reader is not locked into any kind of particular organization or hierarchy. Experiences with various hypertext systems reveal that for those who choose to organize a session on the system in terms of authors… the system represents an old-fashioned, traditional, and in many ways still useful author-centered approach.On the other hand, nothing constrains the reader to work in this manner

nothing constrains the reader to work in terms of authors… the system represents an old-fashioned, traditional, and in many ways still useful author-centered approach

by removing the linearity of print, individual passages are freed from one ordering principle sequence-and threatens to transform the text into chaos. hypertext destroys the notion of a fixed unitary text. Considering the “entire” text in relation to its component parts produces the first form of fragmentation; considering it in relation to its variant readings and versions produces the second.

The dispersed textuality characteristic of this information technology calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about the nature of text and scholarly textual editing

The concepts (and experiences) of beginning and ending imply linearity. What happens to them in a form of textuality not governed chiefly by linearity?  If we assume that hypertextuality possesses multiple sequences rather than that it has an entire absence of linearity and sequence, it provides multiple beginnings and endings

Linking changes the experience of text and authorship by rendering the borders of all text permeable

Hypertext thereby blurs the distinction between what is inside and what is outside a text.  It makes all the texts connected to a block of text collaborate with that text.

new possibility of laying a story out spatially instead of linearly, inviting the reader to explore it as one might explore one’s memory or wander a many-pathed geographical terrain

patching together of a physical body from disparate but harmonious parts was linked to a similar patching together of story materials, the body becoming text

There is a kind of thinking without thinkers. Matter thinks. Language thinks.

We become hybrids, chimeras, centaurs ourselves:

Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, there’s only this vast disorderly sprawl

this creature i was assembling was a brash attempt to achieve by artificial means the unity of a life-form—a unity perhaps more rightfully given, not made; continuous, not interrupted; and subject to divine truth, not the will to expression of its prideful author.

i am a discontinuous trace, a dotted line

history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I got from one to the other is unclear. Tthough I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete ( and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as i care to put together

hypertext requires a “cyborg reader,” not only because of his/her prosthetic relationship with the text but also because the text forces us to adopt a gaze which is equally modular and fragmentary.

the body is a patchwork, though the stitches might not show, it’s run by committee… a loose aggregate of entities we can’t really call human

We patch a phantom body together out of a cacophony of sense impressions, bright and partial views. We borrow notions from our friends and the blaring organs of commerce, and graft them on to a supple, undifferentiated mist of smart particles.

we are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity.

in this new writing, unless it is printed out on paper, a screenful of flickers soon replaces the previous screen.

Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity

We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy

the dominance of the visual in today’s online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation.

Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today’s web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential.

changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of our horizons

the production of space and the decisions we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about ‘us’ and reciprocally, how a ‘we’ can be articulated.

there is no ‘self’ to control man, machine, or any other system; instead, both man and machine become elements of a cybernetic system which is its a system of control and communication

Still confident of his own indisputable mastery over them, man continues to turn cybernetic systems on. In doing so he merely encourages his own destruction.  Every software development is a migration of control, away from man

they invade as a return of the repressed, but what returns is no longer the same: cybernetics transforms woman and nature, but they do not return from man’s past, as his origins.  Instead they come around to face him

Parallel distributed processing defies all attempts to pin it down, and can only ever be contingently defined. It also turns the computer into a complex thinking machine which converges with the operations of the human brain.

Llike Irigaray’s woman, the computer can turn its invisible, non-existent self to anything: it runs any program, and simulates all operations, even those of its own functioning.

Hysteria is the point at which association gets a little too free, spinning off in its own directions and making links without reference to a central core.

Neural nets function in a way which has less to do with the rigors of orthodox logic than with the intuitive leaps and cross-connections which characterize what has been pathologized as hysteria

Digital art takes the image beyond even its mechanical reproduction, eroding orthodox conceptions of originals and originality. And just as the image is reprocessed, so it finds itself embroiled in a new network of connections between words, music, and architectures which diminishes the governing role it once played in the specular economy.

The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binary or counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all the ones.

Communication cannot be caught by the gaze, but is always a matter of getting in touch, a question of contact, contagion, transmission, reception, and connectivity.

cyberfeminism is an insurrection on the part of the goods and materials of the patriarchal world, a dispersed, distributed emergence composed of links

If the schizoid children of modernity are alienated, it is not as survivors from a pastoral past, but as explorers of an impending post-humanity.

Self-designing processes are anastrophic and convergent: doing things before they make sense. Time goes weird in tactile self-organizing space: the future is not an idea but a sensation.

The body and the state are under seige, with drugs and other software diseases threatening the borders

Comparative rates of flow on these lines of flight produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable.

A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine

Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come

Take William Burroughs’s cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots implying a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus.

the human body is composed of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly composite…Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance

consider the Human body and nervous system as unscrambling devices. Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did

everybody splices himself in with everybody else. communication must be made total. only way to stop it

As we move into the world of integral, computerized knowledge, mere classification becomes secondary and inadequate to the speeds with which data can now be processed.  As data can be processed very rapidly we move literally into the world of pattern recognition, out of the world of data classification

With circuitry we have, instead of extensions of hand or foot, a kind of involvement of the whole nervous system, an extension of the nervous system itself

in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity. Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic, each helps to define the other; each contributes to the flow of information through the system.

Unlearn linear thinking   Hit you with these zig zag thoughts

decentralize

the Net has become the leading zone on which the old identifications collapse.  Genders can be bent and blurred and the time-space coordinates tend to get lost.

schizophrenia and the impossibility of distinguishing between virtual and actual reality, pales into insignificance in comparison to the emergence of the Net as an anarchic, self-organizing system into which its users fuse.

Network culture still appears to be dominated by both men and masculine intentions and designs. But theres more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze.

all differentiation between different types of media—text, images, animations—must be eliminated. The digital nature of information makes this possible.

The user must not be able to tell where one image begins and another ends, or where text ends and an image begins.

Feed- back loops are necessary to help produce the active subjectivity of the user.

the object is radically independent from context. Objects are inheritable, extendible, procreative. Objects are not read, they are scanned, parsed, concatenated, and split.