black box // last words

 the black box functions as a perfect synecdoche: one surviving part that at a human and material level, can reassemble the disintegrated whole

http://planecrashinfo.com/lastwords.htm

Eric Partridge suggests that it is in use from 1945 in RAF slang to signify any mysterious, clever piece of equipment on board a plane (interestingly, he says it was first applied to a device that allowed bomb aimers to see through clouds or darkness). Presumably the term gets transferred to one specific device, the flight recorder, not because the insides of such a thing are particularly intricate or mysterious (it’s just a sound recorder), but because they are made to be inaccessible. But, in either case, the ‘black box’ seems to point to a new phase of machinery, one in which machines, traditionally things which can be made fully explicit, and opened up to show their workings, start to have the same magical inaccessibility as selves, persons or souls.

http://literature-technology-media.co.uk/?p=280

Googolplex

Oswald's historic diary

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/snyder.htmhttp://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/snyder.htm

5		6H	7He	8Li	9Be	10B	11C	12N	13O	14F	Ne	11
6		7H	8He	9Li	10Be	11B	12C	13N	14O	15F	16Ne	Na	12
		7	9He	10Li	11Be	12B	13C	14N	15O	16F	17Ne	18Na	Mg	13
		8	10He	11Li	12Be	13B	14C	15N	16O	17F	18Ne	19Na	20Mg	Al	14
			9	12Li	13Be	14B	15C	16N	17O	18F	19Ne	20Na	21Mg	22Al	Si

hyoid / gravelly hill

Thoracic Drop

The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of Teneriffe, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock-towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish.

Here in this terminal hut,

he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests, out of curiosity he ran them on himself. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went on to forage, and came back to the hut with some documents and a coke bottle.

At times when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the heiroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

To begin with she wants to spend all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors.

All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds a drill for trainee astronauts, half of an 80 hour sequence.

towards a rusting quonset

The Terminal Zone

He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralising the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

But isn't Kennedy already dead?

Captain Webster studied the documents laid out on Dr. Lancaster's demonstration table. These were:

(1) a spectroheliogram of the sun;

(2) tarmac and takeoff checks for the B29 Superfortress Enola Gay;

(3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein;

(4) transverse section through a Pre-Cambrian Trilobite;

(5) photograph taken at noon, August 6, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression, Libya;

(6) Max Ernst's "Garden Airplane Traps".

just what is it...

...a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead - the muscleman husband and his stripper wife in their suburban home, the consumer goods, such as the tin of ham, regarded as ornaments in their own right ... we are what we sell and buy.

ballard / miracles of life / this is tomorrow 1956

war machine and christy mack

links

A Psychopathic Hymn:

J.G. Ballard's 'Crashed Cars' Exhibition of 1970

Passings – J. G. Ballard: Philosopher of the Future Present

Jim Haynes / Arts Lab

The Assassination Weapon

Re: They're four hundred feet high
Posted by: "stwrtmckenzie"
Date: Sun Jul 30, 2006

Not one of the people, the person.  I put it together with people from the Human Family, an English version of the Living Theater, working out of the Arts Laboratory under the exuberant patronage of Nigel Samuel, and students from one of the London theater colleges who provided actors and early multi-media technicians. We put on a demo at the ICA and Ballard came to see it, he loved it and invited me to join him in a video about the sexuality of car crashes which, I confess, sounded unappealing.  It was performed at the ICA for about a week with the title "The Assassination Weapon, A Transmedia Search for Reality" some time in 1968 or 1969.  It was performed a couple of times after that at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture and The Architectural Association.  The show took Ballard's text from The Assassination Weapon with early analog electronic distortion and music, and played this back in surround streo around a vertical circular screen, about ten feet in diameter, which revolved slowly at the center of circles of concentric seats separated by four access corridors at the four cardinal points.  The fire marshal required that the seats be fixed and I spent four days stapling chairs to a perfect hardwood floor, to the horror of my ICA minder.  Once the audience was seated, the recording of The Assassination Weapon was played back and four projection tables shooting down the access corridors combined images on the revolving screen which could take front and back projection.  I asked Jack Henry Moore, then the director of the Human Family, for a recommendation for the material for this screen, he recommended bed linen soaked in Parrafin (a flamable liquid), he said it took back projection beautifully.  I decided that, after the trouble with the chairs, I would not go to the mat with the fire marshal on this one, it was a white plastic.  The projection tables had a variety of image and light emitting parephanalia, still and movie projectors, boiling liquids (this was the sixties), rotating color filters. strobes, smoke machines, etc.  There was an image script but some room for improvisation to exploit happy coincidences on the screen which could become quite complex since, in addition to the front and back projection, the sides of screen segments (it was made up of six pizza slices bolted together) caught projections as the screen rotated, introducing lines of color and fragments of images into the main projection.  The English humor magazine "Punch" found it "Puzzling", the English manners magazine "The Lady" found it "Trying".  We played to full houses at every performance.  London was fun back then.
 

parliament of the birds

 

What about you - did any of you dream of flying?

protocols of escape / suffocating town

...besides, people around here are obsessed with anything like that -safari parks, dolphinaria, stunt flying, it's all the same to them, they're forever dressing up as beefeaters or Hanoverian infantry and re-enacting the battle of Austerlitz...

ballard/ the unlimited dream company


the "political action" which is at stake ... is ... liturgy [ returned to its etymological meaning  of "public practice".]

agamben / the kingdom & the glory

Crash! (Harley Cokliss, 1971)

where rainbows spangled the gilded air…

The bright sapphires slipped between his fingers and lay on the sequined grass behind him, illuminating his footprints as he entered the dark vaults of the forest.















With a cry Sanders raised his jewelled arm. In the sunlight the faint nodes of the gemstones he had stuffed into his cuff shone in the tissues of his arm like inlaid stars















Then he realised why Thorensen had brought the jewels to the young woman, and why she had seized on them so eagerly. By some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light within the stones simultaneously produced a compression of time, so that the discharge of light from the surfaces reversed the processes of crystallization. Perhaps it was this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St Peter's or the palace at Nymphenburg.


ballard / the crystal world























Here, wear this jewel for me, 'tis my picture
Twelfth Night / III iv 228

By day fantastic birds flew

By day fantastic birds flew
through the petrified forest, and
jewelled alligators glittered like
heraldic salamanders on the banks
of the crystalline river.
By night the illuminated
man raced among the trees,
his arms like golden cartwheels,
his head like a spectral crown...

There's no hurry here, Doctor. This is a landscape without time.

desert war

The four twisted blades, veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly, had already been overgrown by the trellises of crystals hanging downwards from the near-by trees. The fuselage of the craft, partly buried in the ground, had blossomed into an enormous translucent jewel, in whose solid depths, like emblematic knights mounted in the base of a medieval ring-stone, the two pilots sat frozen at their controls. Their silver helmets gave off an endless fountain of light.

Ballard / The Crystal World / 120

Komarov's cabin

image source


J.G. Ballard
The Atrocity Exhibition
A New Algebra

The Russian astronaut Col. Komarov was the first man to die in space, though earlier fatalities had been rumoured. Komarov is reported to have panicked when his space-craft began to tumble uncontrollably, but the transcripts of his final transmissions have never been released. I'm sceptical of what may be NASA-inspired disinformation. The courage of professional flight-crews under extreme pressure is clearly shown in The Black Box, edited by Malcolm MacPherson, which contains cockpit voice-recorder transcripts in the last moments before airliner crashes. The supreme courage and stoicism shown by these men and women in the final seconds running up to their deaths, as they wrestle with the collapsing systems of their stricken aircraft, is a fine memorial to them, and a powerful argument for equal frankness in other areas.

Wikipedia:
Just before impact, Soviet premier Alexey Kosygin told Komarov his country was proud of him. An American National Security Agency listening post in Istanbul noted Komarov's reply was inaudible, though persistent rumours stated that Komarov died cursing the spacecraft designers and flight controllers. Whatever the truth of the matter, a tape from a West German tracking station bearing some of Komarov's brief phrases was forwarded to the Command-Measurement Complex of the Soviet Union after the disaster and was reported to contain the word "killed", mixed in with Komarov's distraught unclear transmissions, among other flight data recorded on radio by the West Germans. The recording was made, apparently, on one of the last orbits, if not the final one.