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TREIGNAC PROJET ASSOCIATION W W W. T R E I G N A C P R O J E T. O R G 2 RUE IGNACE DUMERGUE 19260
Copyright Š Treignac Projet and the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission from the publishers or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988. SPRING 2012
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Treignac Withheld
an occult editorial platform
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EDITED BY
Sam Basu Assisted by
Sabrina Tarasoff With thanks to Erin Baillie-Rutter, Nick Carr, Sam Johnstone, Isaac Munoz, Liz Murray, Liliana Sanchez.
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Forward Meta Detection Manifesto Occultatio On Cinematic Afterlife Anonymous: a selection Negative Theology
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Forward Automaton is pieced together from various contributors that have experienced the experimental space that is Treignac Projet. Automaton is an opportunity to bring together fragments of an evolving thought process. It is a Process that has been dispersed through locations, actions, and people. It is a thinking across geographies not yet attributed, indicating experience not yet interrogated. It is informal, shared and yet still private. It is withheld. It is impending and refuses the obligation to stand or defend ground. Automaton is for everyone because distance and separation exists between everyone, even between those who seem to be tied together. Automaton’s partial apparition of material is the residue of a growing conviction that the Human is not the sole force of creative activity. Other suprahuman levels of production and materialisation operate in the physical world. These productions may or may not be immediately apparent to us. Conceivably they manifest themselves in the world but are only obliquely presented. We speculate on the supraliminal experience of emergence as a potential foundation for living together. Automaton is an attempt to treat the things of the world differently; to be implicated in strange presences and weird behaviours; to recognize the assembled lumps of our reality and the emergent powers of animate and inanimate collectives, to try and annunciate the world beyond sense through our senses. Automaton sees a new opportunity to explore politics in tune with the rhythm of geology or the poetic prowess of cities. Not as the displaced processes of humans, but as the emergent expression of evolving structures. This exploration is revealing structures and networks that have convinced us of the ability of creative modes to adapt and annunciate our world. Automaton’s gateway to this supra-human expression is the death of the individual in the emergent consciousness of the collective. In attempting to experience this post-human death, we believe that useful ground can be claimed with literary tools, mathematical concepts and mental illnesses. All meanings are patterns that come to light via the forms we view them through. Automaton is thought through from outside, it is an invitation.
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Our feelings of interiority mask the vast percentage of automation that allows us to live. Not just the bodily functions and mechanical necessities of day to day, moment to moment being alive but also the computational, observing, speaking and behavioural facilities of the thinking mind. In interiority we have charge, we are who we are, but this is still a small part of how we experience the world. For an experiment I attempt to turn on and off my self-awareness (perhaps this is just a fantasy born of fatigue) and catch myself ‘at’ things. It is surprising how often I find myself ‘at’ things that have not surfaced upon my conscious, deciding processes. I find myself staring at my fingernails and whistling inanely an unknown tune. This tune is immediately morphed into something recognizable when I notice it, as if this zombie musicality is intolerable. So much activity interjects while supposedly writing a text. While I am out in the street, speaking, sharing space or avoiding contact, I am incessantly interrupted and looking to find my thoughts again. This alerts me to how the sense of continuity I have as a Self is also constructed. Moments inherit their sense of continuity, but cannot posses it. Passing through public spaces, I am constantly joined with a whole host of habits and behaviours. We layer and combine with each other, always complicating the landscape that my willed action must traverse. Out here you can begin to perceive the large-scale animals that are momentary behavioural You see the species on the large scale. You see it as a set of imposed features ascribable to architecture or history or evolutionary constraints. We can never escape being bundled in with one or other sets of habits and probabilities. Our world is compact and economises wherever it can on the luxury of assessing every contingency. Our thoughts do not all arise from the interior space of our thinking. They seep in and build and scaffold and better our homespun calculations. How useful, benign, unjust or revolutionary, will depend on your model of the world. How can we think about this relationship between the thoughts that we think and those that accompany and infuse us; those that appear and reveal themselves, and those we have no awareness of whatsoever? How can we think about things in a language from which the subject is excluded? It demands that we accept the materiality of thought; that we accept its attractions, desires, and transgressions as well as its mechanics and psychologies. We must grasp the contingent nature of the qualities of experience and interiority and negotiate those alien companions; learn to see them, if such a thing is possible.
Automaton
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meta detection Nicholas Carr
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A Background Hypothesis as the Site for an evolving
Manifesto Occultatio &tc
[To be read out loud] Lilian Sanchez, Isaac Munoz, & Sam Basu.
Under the banner of Institute for Mathematical Sciences, a group of scientists, artists, curators and a composer formed an experimentally inclusive structure where participants’ individual research could clash and collude within a project space in the form of artworks and public interactions. This text is derived from some of the participants that could not physically interact with the London based group.
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If we were able to speak you would have heard how… We propose to organise a feedback loop within the body of your group that will attempt to self-observe the internal dynamics of your group as a whole. The geographically dispersed nature of our feedback group would further allow your group as a whole to experience the distribution of information within its structure. Our internal group would take advantage of its locational extension and the resultant disengagement with the main group (time-lag), to create reports for the whole group. This arrangement would encourage and promote any emergent properties of the group, whatever they may be, through actively encouraging interconnectivities in the system. * The multidisciplinary nature of the collaboration in its academic, non-academic and Salon incarnations can be productive of objects with impact beyond the traditional bounds of the participating disciplines. These may be social or political in nature, but may also allow for novel forms of artwork and modes for presenting scientific data. Dissonance, apophasis and negative voicing form vital connectivity in this process. If the manifesto had been written, it would be a conduit for this.
Internal delay in the constitution of an emergent social object. 1) Propositions: • Within an emergent object or assemblage, it is possible to observe deformations of synchronicity. Why is synchronicity relevant to observe? Are we trying to justify the accidents in our communication as something useful for a purpose? Which purpose? The purpose to observe? What is the outcome of observing? Discourse? The discourse of this text? • Internal delay allows for access to the process of emergence from inside the emergence.
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Why does delay allow emergence? What kind of emergence? The capacity to be fed up, angry, bored or happy with the delay? The emergence of digestion, interpretation, synthesis or complication of this text? How do we make the emergence factual and not just a possibility? Is geographical distance a real trap that denies “facts” and opens infinite possibilities.s with a single fact, this text? • Socially complex objects co-ordinate internal time, but within the object, the participants that constitute the object also regulate their own Time. These several times coordinate physically in the realm of qualities and accidents, but are perhaps disassociated at other levels.
Between singular Times and a general Time. Are we talking about laziness, promptness, indifference, excitement, holidays, adventures? Which Time will impose over the rest, the collective Time of the deadline? Who is going to die first? Are we going to handle funerals? Are we going to celebrate the mourning? • The mechanism by which the various levels fuse into objects is still unclear, but must implicate an emergence mechanics. Why are we talking about objects? We should swap to the notion of objecthood. Is emergence an idea that appears in this context to help making delays relevant? What the fy89$$@8** if emergence is a rebellion of the syntax in this text? A scream that comes out from the F*#$KShsjtation of not having clear mechanics.
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• Linear causality usually fuels the descriptive power of non-specialist observation, however other relations exist such as catalytic transformations, which hint at a pantheon of other non-linear engagements from which to extrapolate models. Arts practice can be useful in developing these models. Why would non-specialist observation follow a line of cause-effect? That seems to be the explanation of a non-specialist story teller. Are we developing meta-functions that comes out from the understanding of observation, as a proposal in this piece of writing? Catalytic transformations seem to be ok with the forthcoming events. How many of those transformations will be the lack of engagement with the initial proposals? Is the format of hypothesis, an intelligent way of getting rid of the emergence of events? Is discourse right wing? Is the discourse, in any format: hypothetical, practical, material, enough to add something to the world? Don’t we need the audience to add something to the world? What is the mediation between the world and the hypothesis? Discourse? That sucks! • The group is the object of study and the mode of studying. This is a case of self-representation. An endogamic practice with no other output besides the group. This is problematic because it implies an excessive amount of energy that will be dispersed in the same source of energy. It means getting tired of being one-selves.
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2) Elements & questions for a dispersed remote structure: a) What is the organisation’s intellect (OI)? (there could be a different criteria of investigation such as our ability to play Bridge) a.i) How can we interact with this OI? a.ii) How can we measure this? b) Define the difference between a collaboration and a Clique c) How non-physical are we? c.i) Disembodied voice(over)s c.ii) Return of the repressed? Bombers. d) Emergence d.i) What is it ‘like’ to be on the inside of an emergent social object? d.ii) Will the emergent properties of the group be detectable at all? e) How to move beyond virtual participation e.i) Deep interactivity f ) difference, delay, communication/disruptions. g)We are participating in an object (the project) that is stratified by: 1) a static-geographical-disperced position and 2) IMS´s social dynamics in London.
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Elements for a Proposal on Interconnectivity a) The non-local participants of the group already form a secondary coalition that will measure and record impressions of the unfurling process of the group; its social structures, dinners, meeting and presentations. Transmission and its failures will comprise a part of this research, as will attempts at comprehension by the Non-Local. b) The Non-Local will submit a regular report to the group on the long distance workings of the group. This will take the form of astatus report, or the report will be produced through the actions of an artist. c) The report is also a voice-over d) The Non-Local group is an open group. e) We will include new information f ) Unintended consequences and side effects will accumulate. Why should the group listen at that report? Are we talking about a moral or intellectual weight on the side of the distant participants? Shall we tell the group to perform the most ridiculous activities, just because they come from a well grounded and smart way of articulating the discourse of the report? Lets make them jump like idiots during 30 minutes each day inside the gallery space, and before dinners. g) We deny the existence of a Manifesto Occultatio and its evolving process.
Lilian Sanchez is based in BogotĂĄ, Colombia. Isaac Munoz, is based between London, England and Puebla, MĂŠxico. Sam Basu is based at Treignac, France.
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SABRINA TARASOFF ON CINEMATIC AFTER LIFE
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ON CINEMATIC AFTER LIFE
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ON CINEMATIC AFTER LIFE
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SABRINA TARASOFF anonymous: A SELECTION
Suicide is a public health issue that affects many lives each year. This article has been compiled with respect for the gravity of this issue.
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anonymous: a selection
male, age 51
Divorced female, Sunday 4:45 PM. Here goes To who it may concern Though I am about to kick the bucket I am as happy as ever. I am tired of this life so am going over to see the other side. Good luck to all.
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male, age 45
My darling, May her guts rot in hell -- I loved her so much. Henry
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anonymous: a selection
male, age 74
to the undertaker We have got plenty money to give me a decent burial. Don’t let my wife kid you by saying she has not got any money. Give this note to the cops.
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female, age 56
About the Evil god (yes) About the Evil Seers killing people for their money (yes) I am a profit at my death I am a root of the stem of Jesse (yes) We have made many discoveries. We have found out who the people with the mark of the beast are. And the devil was a human being now killed and cast into hell and the angel with the keys of the bottomless pit is in hell casting out all the good souls which these evil people have cast into hell for no reason. The good Seers who serve our God are 1/3 to 2/3 of the evil ones in this world. We are better than holding our owne but in Heaven God is almost over come and I kill myself so I may go and help him, because I have a funny little quirk in my brain which helps. 6 palmy each at a few years sport. Our god will send them into the world.
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anonymous: a selection
female, age 37
To No-one and Everyone: hereditary insanity is manifesting itself nuisance attacks and rages against others and to each -- a deep fondness and love -- all funeral fanfare nonsense Anita R. To my father, Vincent M., the sum of one dollar ($1)
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male, age 48 Elaine, Darling, My mind -- always warped and twisted -- has reached the point where I can wait no longer -- I don't dare wait longer -- until there is the final twist and it snaps and I spend the rest of my life in some state run snake pit. I am going out -- and I hope it is out -- Nirvanha, I think the Bhudaists (how do you spell Bhudaists?) call it which is the word for "nothing." That's as I have told you for years, is what I want. Imagine God playing a dirty trick on me like another life!!! I've lived 47 years -- there aren't 47 days I would live over again if I could avoid it. Let us, for a moment be sensible. I don’t remember if the partnership agreement provides for a case like this -- but if it doesn't and I think it doesn't, I would much prefer -- I haven't time to make this a legal requirement -- but, I would much prefer that you, as executrix under my will, do not elect to participate in profits for 2 or 3 years or whatever it may be that is specified there. My partners have been generous with me while I worked with them. There is no reason why, under the circumstances of my withdrawal from the firm, they should pay anything more. I could wish that I had, for my goodby kiss, a .38 police special with which I have made some good scores -- not records but at least made my mark. Instead, I have this black bitch -- bitch, if the word is not familiar to you -- but at least an honest one who will mean what she says. The neighbors may think it's a motor backfire, but to me she will whisper -- "Rest - Sleep." Albert
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male, age 45 Dear Claudia, You win, I can't take it any longer, I know you have been waiting for this to happen. I hope it makes you very happy, this is not an easy thing to do, but I've got to the point where there is nothing to live for, a little bit of kindness from you would of made everything so different, but all that ever interested you was the dollar. It is pretty hard for me to do anything when you are so greedy even with this house you couldn't even be fair with that, well it's all yours now and you won't have to see the Lawyer anymore. I wish you would you give my personal things to Danny, you couldn't get much from selling them anyway, you still have my insurance, it isn't much but it will be enough to take care of my debts and still have a few bucks left. You always told me that I was the one that made Sharon take her life, in fact you said I killed her, but you know down deep in your heart it was you that made her do what she did, and now you have two deaths to your credit, it should make you feel very proud. Good Bye Kid P.S. Disregard all the mean things I've said in this letter, I have said a lot of things to you I didn't really mean and I hope you get well and wish you the best of everything. Cathy -- don't come in. Call your mother, she will know what to do. Love Daddy
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Negative Theology Erin Baillie-Rutter
Humanity has to be of minute significance. I have been researching a lot of serial killers lately and all of their abnormal patterns, specifically speech related, talking about ‘not this’ but also ‘not that.’ Which is something I want to bring to your attention though perhaps I don’t need to try? And sadomasochism has made a grand appearance. All good fun; something violently enjoyable, yes, speech patterns. I then realized that everything was one giant pattern and well, it got me going real good, and I started stringing things together. This then led back to the speech patterns of psychopaths, specifically serial murderers. It’s all quite interesting and that got me to thinking of patterns throughout memory, which is something I am constantly working on. Psychopaths have unconscious speech patterns that you can measure when they describe their crimes and I like to think of that displayed in shitty police handwriting, a sort of unconscious writing; an unconscious confessional poetry. truth?
And so I wait awaiting the next child to bite; how else will they learn the
While looking for patterns today I came across an honest man. He has displayed himself at the corner of my apartment block in a museum housed in a molested red tent that he himself constructed. His walls are collapsing in honesty; a rare breed, and he reveals the evidence on his temporary walls, preaching our wrong doings in the placement of patterned objects. A character: a woman falls to earth, Lucifer, on her way to Hell after the War in Heaven. By accident she is detoured by a trans-dimensional wormhole and reappears on the Metro in 21thC Paris. The wormhole is still having effects on her like some kind of static electrical charge; Time is swirling around like the eddying flow of black lake-water around a drowning soul. We follow her, as she slowly becomes Satan, transfigured in response to the everyday stench of modern life. “You should know, I went out last night and I could not distinguish between many things; the haze of people and conversations was all one with the walls; everything was colliding; a collision. And the metro ride to my destination at Monceau was utterly surreal like a time travelling tunnel. and so you decomposed allowing him to preserve you well, (modern) life is not my favourite, which includes many lives.”
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Cathy In a past life I was my aunt Cathy and her thoughts are becoming very articulate. She killed herself before I can remember, but I always felt close to her. I found letters and photos; there was a silence around her that made me calm. I visited her and I liked to talk about the collections of women who died (I am keeping them in my father’s tool shed), or the suicide that is something one always thinks of perhaps a little too much. It is strange but I believe that I have thought of many things but never known the name to go with them correctly, (I'm an inarticulate cunt) and, well, parallel universes was one. This word only proving to me that Cathy and me are one of the same. Suicide time travel made it very personal and such. Getting into genetics and time with little separation. Time travel was something that really caught me, perhaps because I thought of that many times? I must tell you of my own experience, quickly; about the first time I wanted to inhabit something else and felt that the body I inhabited was useless and meaningless. In one of the many homes my family lived during my earliest years there was a tool shed in the backyard that my father barely used but stored objects he thought necessary to attempt existence. Many tools with sharp edges and slightly menacing from afar, but as you approached they all looked like fabric, limp and weak. The house itself was very old, the oldest on the block, perhaps for ten blocks. It had a cellar that felt like the earth itself. It had seen the sprouting of many new structures and the pale faces matching the white picket fences slowly smearing and bringing with them more and more human filth. And I can remember peering at the tool shed from my bedroom window when everything was pitch black, and all I could see was the reflection of our house beaming against the shed windows, back to my retina, and, well, this reflection looked so much better than what I was living in. I started a habit of living there whenever I could, amongst all of the dull edges of my father’s tools. I liked the smell in there; it felt more honest than air. So, instead of going to my friends house for the night as I told my parents, I would sneak into the shed and sit there not moving, feeling invisible and watching my mother and father and brother through the lit eyes of the house. You see; I believe that in a lifetime we see many universes. Today sitting by the Seine I saw Catherine Deneuve, her name was printed on a tourist sightseeing boat in a colour of neutral yet alarming blue. I waved she smiled. Catherine looked good; real good. She ploughed through the water with force, all the while knowing she held humanity; they sat on her farting, picking their noses, cursing, jerking off and still she went on. That Catherine is quite something. So I watched her go by at a steady and powerful pace, not too fast, not too slow. My Catherine is a lady, a woman, a woman, a woman. I watched her disappear into the sun, the sky and the never ending of unity (Catherine always had a good shape, especially from behind). Her humbling engine is far and silent now gone A powerful engine holding the slime of our doings; pollution; garbage; human filth c l i n g www.treignacprojet.org www.treignacprojet.org to her propeller. I am sorry, I am sorry I am sorry, Catherine; yet still she floats.
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My Cathy is mine, she is here, she is now, and she is ready. And the children run to the water, always running, always running, never finding a bottom. Oh, they run alright, a child’s curiosity must kill, cruel truth. Talking about my victims (in which me and Cathy are one, and the victims are different lives I have lived) and they’re all stacked in the tool shed; the shed, so sharp in its edges, is growing more articulate.
And the tangled slime of the seaweed buried in itself, glares back at them and says there’s never luck so wait. I want a feel, I want a fondle. Little hands graceful and careful (full of precautions) reach; reach; r e a ch; touch the water; it bites in response. Fingers frightened and clasped into a premature womb. They are gone again, and I look up through the darkness dismantle and botch tangles of seaweed for a clear glance and the sun blinding, shines down on me, dancing in patterns and silent on my shoulder; how pleasant company is.
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“THIS IS NOT AN END” Does suicide time travel still remain? The past is pre-calculated and I am tired of calculations, though perhaps my memory is more precise than actual Time. Remembering different piles of rocks and the mishaps of fallen infants upon their sharp edges is easy recall; scars are nothing but proven to what is not now. For in the moment they are vacant and waiting to absorb a meaning, swelling at the thought of a wound. Yes, a lifetime is nothing but a pattern endlessly displayed, and it gets hard to distinguish between genetic clusters and self made manifestations drifting temporary into existence. I will tell you first of a childhood memory, very normal, nothing of the absurd; our family pet had died - a cat -my father had shattered her leg against a wall so hard it could not be fixed at the vets. Various lies were told and it seemed that she would not live past another twenty four hours and the most humane thing would be to kill her through injection, and so she was finally displayed on a barren table for final goodbyes, and so retinas stared in silence at the lump in front of us. I glanced around the room and saw my family crying and disposing of their own accessory (humans are funny creatures, aren’t they?) To see this small, barely visible thing in front of my prepubescent self only made me think of galaxies erupting and stars exploding; there was no real end and I saw that and I felt nothing. And so the cat was cremated and disposed of, brought to a predetermined landfill up north the following day. (Right now the ground is thawing.) Leaving the vet’s, it was dark and the stars shone bright bouncing off the evil Germanic of my dad’s eye. A galaxy revealed. As rehearsed, we loaded into the family minivan who’s space age blue paint-job reflected the sky, forever reaching. Up. To. Nothing. Now I am travelling through the desert southbound with a woman by my side - she has good legs and I reach for her centre. The cacti are recollecting themselves in hopes of telling me something; a fondling a deflowering
The rest is posthumous.
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