Three days after the explosion and meltdown of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Reactor Unit 4 on April 26th 1986, filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko was granted permission to fly over the 30-square km site known as the “red zone” in order to document the extraordinary efforts at cleanup by Ukrainian workers and volunteers. When Shevchenko’s 35-mm film footage was later developed, he noticed that the film was heavily pockmarked and carried extraneous static interference and noise.

... that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is likea rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music (although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem, under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block of becoming at the level ofexpression, or a block ofexpression: this block of becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordinates or punctual systems functioning asmusical codes at a given moment. It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of expression.

Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becoming-man?

In 2010, a museum and cultural center will open on Reunion Island, the Maison des Civilisation set de l’Unité Réunionnaise (MCUR). It will be the first museum built on the island entirely born out of colonial and postcolonial experiences. For the last three years, a team has been working on its cultural and scientific program and has organized events. The project has recently entered a new phase with the meeting of an international jury on May 14th, 2007. It proposed X-TU as the laureate for the architectural contest which used a spiral form as an answer.

Abstract Créolité and creolization have emerged as conceptual vectors for understanding the polysemic configurations of societies born out of two matrices: the island and the plantation. Here Françoise Vergès speaks with Vivian Rehberg about her understanding of creolization on Reunion Island and the ongoing project to build a museum (the Maison des Civilisations et de L’unité Réunionnaise) for reinterpreting and representing the specific, shared space of encounters and exchange that is Reunion.

Reading to accompany upcoming seminar presentation (March 28th 2007).

Reading for May 12th Presentation

Article: The Organizational Complex: Cybernetics, Space, Discourse by Reinhold Martin

Source: Assemblage 37 pp. 102-127, MIT Press, 1998.

A crime caper replete with a formidable male adversary prone to self-delusion and secrecy, a loyal secretary all too quick to take the fall, a well-intentioned archivist and a team of determined forensic detectives hot on the magnetic trail.

This case begins with a fundamental misconception, a tautology of inscription:
1) An analogue tape recorder does not have an erase button.
2) A tape can therefore only ever be rewound and then re-recorded over an existing track.
3) The recording process must by definition and design record something.
4) It is thus technically impossible to deliberately or accidentally erase anything.

My PhD thesis examines a series of media artefacts produced in the late 60s and early 70s (during the early transition from analogue to digital-media technologies) in order to track the specific rhetorical vectors that were mapped onto these technologies, which in turn continue to actively shape the development of digital technologies today as well as our understandings of these emergent relationships.

This research argues that the choice of a rhetorical framework and its attendant metaphoric alliances is always deliberately selective. Privileging the continued ascendancy of certain assumptions and ideas relies in large part upon the ability to translate complexity (organic or inorganic) into comprehensible forms and cognitive systems. Through such a process of rhetorical transformation, digital technologies are able to maintain their genealogical purchase with not only the past, but also with the future yet to come. However, the digital filiation of media machines is not simply a problem of language that requires an empirical intervention, but as Isabelle Stengers makes explicit, involves a risk that in learning ‘how to ask the right or relevant questions’ we may need to abandon the very epistemological ground that produced the necessary conditions for such an inquiry.