Archive for the ‘antiquarianism’ Category
Divergency and visibility
Boiling Clouds
I’ve been posting less and less new stuff, partly because I find running the site a distraction from what I enjoy doing – making my thoughts and other imaginings real through writing and creating images – but mainly because I don’t enjoy working under the conditions that apply in this medium and I reckon doing things at my pace, under my own aegis is the way to go.
Also, network connectivity and convergency is not for me. It’s a great macro-descriptor of local and global conditions, but from a pre-limited baseline consciousness that I don’t feel comfortable with; it encourages linear narratives; it promotes time-limited thinking; and it operates as a highly visible, even dazzling, structure of control.
I’m going to produce my text myself and distribute it how I see fit. But I’m not disappearing or cutting myself off: I’m attempting to make myself more visible. I’m going to show my photographs and the other images I’ve created to people so they can see what they look like, unmediated except for local atmospheric conditions. I’m going face to face with the world.
I’m going to reimagine Feastofpalmer.com as an archive site for a selection of things that I’ve done so far. I was going to underline this change by renaming the site ”Feats of Palmer”, but although it’s a really funny pun, it’d be far too much trouble to organise. A new-look archival format will be in place soon and new archival content will be added periodically.
If you’re interested in obtaining further material, please look out for a link to a one-page contact site that I’ll put up presently.
Thanks for reading up to here.
Neil
Posted by Neil
on October 7, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Tags: Art, Consciousnesses, Uncategorized, antiquarianism, site update
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The Imagined Village: Update — Lost in England
The Imagined Village’s Myspace is a roaring success! They only signed up on 26 September and as of today they’ve already gathered 77 friends (including Tom)! That must be nearly all the villagers in England. Or all the participants. And I’m sure things will pick up during their November tour — concert dates to include question and answer sessions — by the end of which they’ll have raised a veritable duststorm of popular discussion among The People and have a workable popular definition of what “the English identity” is up and running in no time!
Posted by Neil
on October 19, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Tags: Music, Regionalism, antiquarianism, ventriloquism
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Provincial Swimming
WMFU’s Beware of the Blog yesterday featured a video from Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers, whose joyful embracing of ruralism was coupled with its despoilation through generic counterculturalism plus cross-dressing (whether in tribute to the antient custom of molly dancing).
The session that Rustic Hinge did for John Peel hasn’t made it on to The Perfumed Garden yet.
I’d like to think that Roger Deakin (obtuaries here and here) was inspired by Rustic Hinge’s provincial swimming as he researched his swimmer’s journey in advance of writing Waterlog.
Posted by Neil
on October 18, 2007 at 7:01 am
Tags: Counterculture, Individualism, Music, Sound, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism
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Straining Towards A Dubjective Geophonics
Arvid Tomayko-Peters makes music, which he calls geophonic, from time series data, producing tonal pieces that can be manipulated by the listener and played any which way — faster, slower, backwards and forwards. His main work to date is an installation that plays geological data relating to climate changes over 5.3 million years. What’s more, he’s created sequencing software called Maestro Frankenstein that’s intended to enable others to produce similar results from other time series data. As he says: “Although designed with geologic data in mind, Maestro Frankenstein creates a score from any timeseries data and plays it back in realtime with any instrument (MIDI, VST or built-in synth) that you specify.”
Gough map of East Anglia, c.1360, from Foxearth.org.uk
I’m trying to get my hands on time series data sets relating to regional socioeconomics in the UK, specifically the eastern counties, that I could work on and make music from. It’s early days yet, but I’ve got it in my mind to produce a tonal representation of retail, transport and certain geophysical data as part of my attempt to map in intrapersonal detail my journey out of the eastern counties. Any links to and hints about relevant material gratefully received.
Clearly, there are problems with using empirical socioeconomic data in versioning the people, not least of which is its pre-determined structuration of the archive. I’m with Doreen Massey and Benjamin Keith Belton in regarding the archive as simultaneous space/flow rather than a series of knowledge paths — no matter how local or how deeply trodden.
Posted by Neil
on October 5, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Tags: Eastern counties, Ecology, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Regionalism, Sound, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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Rockhaunter — Dubjective Hauntology in Sound and Vision
I’d wasted more than half my life listening out for the ultimate monster earthquake history-killing punk-blues teenage feedback riff-fuck. And I’d wasted more than the other half trying to make music from unitary sounds I’d collected in my conscious fear of their presence. At some point in the past decade I stopped collecting songs and listening out for patterns and started describing the imaginary music that had left its constantly replaying imprint on me. All of a sudden, over a period of three or four years, I became dizzy with the truth: the finest tunes exist in the imagination.
I and I (and, indeed, I) am thee Rockhaunter. Keen hauntiquaries, or hauntiquarians, we poke into and recreate antiquarian sounds in our imaginings and in uttering thoughts about them. I’m no specialist, so I can’t get with “hauntology” — although I grok it and groove on its skittering blueprint surface. Also, I don’t simply regard the sublime and then cast theory with genuflections: I swim and cavort in it. I don’t consider the shadow tracks of unknown sounds as the memories of things that have never been present: in my dubjective sensing, these are unheeded frequencies. I don’t categorise the Unexplained or the Reimagined as monolithic footnotes to ‘the weird’ or ‘the uncanny’: I let the voices talk through my ventriloquising.
Is hauntology in music and visual culture a reinvention of historicism with weird contingencies replacing science? Why do hauntologists seek place-specificity? What makes hauntology different from psychogeography, deep topography or general critical theory? How is hauntology different from other re-educationalist projects in popular culture (like psychogeography and record collecting) that tackle both nostalgia and entrenched academicism head on with purposeful revisionism?
My hauntiquarian nose smells an attempt by radical minds to create an imaginary national epic of collective possibilities. I wonder what such an epic would sound like.
Watch me now. I’m thee Rockhaunter. The ghostly harmony killer. Versioning the people. With a sheet over my head.
Coming soon:— Rockhaunter, No. 1, Halloween Hauntology Special
Posted by Neil
on September 21, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Tags: Film, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
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