he dances in the underworld and raises your heart to the level of JOY

Sidhe's crazy for Her Fool! Arthur Danu cuts it loose in this hilarious Karaoke Cover™ of Boney M's 1970s Disco classic, Daddy Cool. Let your darker side join Arthur as he dances in the underworld and raises your heart to the level of JOY! If you have it in you, The Decade of Love could use a token of your loving support. Donations can be made at the Rainbow Bridge Studios website or by clicking below. Enjoy the dancing!

welcome

Mary in the Black and White Room

Chun | On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge

Software has become a commonsense shorthand for culture and hardware a shorthand for nature. (In the current debate over stem cell research, stem cells have been called “hardware.”Historically software also facilitated the separation of pattern from matter, necessary for the separation of genes from DNA.
In our so-called postideological society, software sustains and depoliticizes notions of ideology and ideology critique. People may deny ideology, but they don’t deny software—and they attribute to software, metaphorically, greater powers than have been attributed to ideology. Our interactions with software have disciplined us, created certain expectations about cause and effect, offered us pleasure and power that we believe should be transferable elsewhere. The notion of software has crept into our critical vocabulary in mostly uninterrogated ways. By interrogating software and the visual knowledge it perpetuates, we can move beyond the so-called crisis in indexicality toward under-
standing the new ways in which visual knowledge is being transformed and perpetuated, not simply displaced or rendered obsolete

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

continent. 2.4 (2013)

“There are no great utopian texts after the widespread introduction of computers,” Fredric Jameson remarked recently, “the last being Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia of 1975, where computers are not yet in service.”

Today, instead of utopian texts, we have the free­market deliria of cyberpunk, which assumes that capitalism is itself a kind of utopia of difference and variety. I think this failure of imagination on the left can be attributed to the assumption that computers are enough to “take care” of totalization: that the well­nigh infinite complexities of production on a global scale, which the mind can scarcely accommodate, are mysteriously...resolvable inside the computer’s black box and thus no longer need to be dealt with conceptually or representationally.

The end of the utopian text thus signals for Jameson an end to representation. Or at the very least it indicates that representation—as complicated or flawed as it might be under otherwise normal conditions—has been interrupted and outsourced to another domain entirely.

Laruelle and Art
Alexander R. Galloway
continent. 2.4 (2013): 230–236

*Fredric Jameson, “In Soviet Arcadia,” New Left Review 75 (May­June 2012): 119­127, p. 125.

lachrimae lachrimarum

black box

...nothing in your hands but perplexities...

melencolia / durer's solid

When thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches an historical subject only when he encounters it as a monad.

WB/ TPH/XVII

black box white box kernel shell

black box white box

black box testing where you don’t know what is in the box , testing functionality, behaviour of overall system, u know the requirements that went into the code.

With (Hegel, the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell

Marx/Kapital/Afterword to second section

white box testing –you can look at algorithm / source code

the end and a beginning / sealed objects

And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. (Revelation 5:1-4)

And when matins and the first mass was done,
there was seen in the churchyard, against the high
altar, a great stone four square, like unto a marble
stone; and in midst thereof was like an anvil of
steel a foot high and therein stuck a fair sword
naked by the point, and letters there were written
in gold about the sword that said thus:-
Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and
anvil, is rightwise king born of all England

Malory/ Morte d'Arthur