"Chanson d'automne"

 

Shortly before the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, Radio Londres broadcast the first stanza of Paul Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne" to let the resistance know that the invasion would begin within 24 hours.

• Les sanglots longs
• Des violons
• De l’automne
• Blessent mon cœur
• D’une langueur
• Monotone.

Blessent mon cœur d'une langueur monotone ("wound my heart with a monotonous languor") was the specific call to action.

rot with me

The main three zombies are the Shambler, the Walker, and the Runner.

The licker from Resident Evil

 

The spitter from L4D2

she hurls balls of stomach acid

 

flyboy

the pair of 2 zombies in shaun of the dead lol

There is nothing that will stop them. Maybe a bat to the brain… But that’s up to you, and if you can manage to hit it without being distracted by that bod. While infected, the body converts all energy from fat into muscle, anything that it can use to turn the body into a killing machine. And all the pent up energy makes these sexy motherfuckers twitchy, and deadly.

Ur-Fascism

http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/
In his essay Ur-Fascism, Eco identifies themes and rhetorical habits that underpin fascism (although his interrogation is limited to describing what fascism looks and sounds like, as opposed to the mechanism by which it emerges).¹ Some of the characteristics that I will refer to in my aesthetic survey include:

1. the cult of tradition which idealizes a primordial past (think Make America Great Again, or Mussolini’s call to build a new Rome, a call recently echoed by White Nationalist Richard Spencer²).
2. fear of difference, whether difference be sexual, gendered, religious, or racial.
3. a cult of masculinity that, tends to manifest itself in an obsession with sexual politics (refer to online pick-up artistry and the heteronormative gender roles embodied in the nuclear family.)
4. a hostility towards parliamentary politics, criticality, and reason.
5. a belief in permanent warfare and a corresponding cult of action for action’s sake.
6. a worship of technology, not in the manner of an Enlightenment-esque worship of reason, but faith in technology to conquer and to reaffirm inegalitarianism.

militainment

💀

FIELD WORK IS ESSENTIAL

⛰⛲🏫🚴📷☂☂🌆🌈🌍🌌🌋🌊

glorying

Joy, arising from imagination of a man's own power and ability, is that exultation of the mind which is called glorying … Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.

It is manifest that during the time that men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man… In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, no use of the commodities that may be imported by the sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and that which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Hobbes / Leviathan

img

Decima // fate

Decimation ( decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by senior commanders in the Roman Army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as mutiny or desertion. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". The procedure was a pragmatic, yet vicious, attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the practicalities of dealing with a large group of offenders.

A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were often given rations of barley instead of wheat (the latter being the standard soldier's diet) for a few days, and required to camp outside the fortified security of the marching camp.
Because the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in a group sentenced to decimation were potentially liable for execution, regardless of individual degrees of fault, rank or distinction.

If ever these same things happen to occur among a large group of men... the officers reject the idea of bludgeoning or slaughtering all the men involved [as is the case with a small group or an individual]. Instead they find a solution for the situation which chooses by a lottery system sometimes five, sometimes eight, sometimes twenty of these men, always calculating the number in this group with reference to the whole unit of offenders so that this group forms one-tenth of all those guilty of cowardice. And these men who are chosen by lot are bludgeoned mercilessly in the manner described above.

In digital signal processing, decimation is the process of reducing the sampling rate of a signal. Complementary to interpolation, which increases sampling rate, it is a specific case of sample rate conversion in a multi-rate digital signal processing system. Decimation utilises filtering to mitigate aliasing distortion, which can occur when simply downsampling a signal. A system component that performs decimation is called a decimator.

choke point

In military strategy, a choke point (or chokepoint) is a geographical feature on land such as a valley, defile or a bridge, or at sea such as a strait which an armed force is forced to pass, sometimes on a substantially narrower front, and therefore greatly decreasing its combat power, in order to reach its objective.

fish knife - cut down tool

"Removing the ligature from a prisoner as swiftly as possible is crucial to ensuring the best possible chance of surviving and avoiding long-term or permanent brain damage."

bombsight

http://bombsight.org/#10/51.4916/-0.3557

 

Since it deals for the most part with what the ancient Egyptians called al-3khem (the Arabic al-khimiya, the Latin alkimia , the French alchimie and the English

alchemy, originally designating a fertile as opposed to a desert milieu: the generative “black earth” of al-khem as opposed to the deleterious “red earth” of

al-deshret…

constellated

sandbags and rocks

news

quirinus of neuss

During the siege of the city of Neuss by Burgundian troops in 1474, the citizens had worn a metal emblem of their patron saint, Quirin, on their clothing. Under the saint's protection, they all had remained uninjured, and if one of them was hit by an enemy missile, it quite simply bounced off the emblem, which quite literally shielded them from harm.

Defaced / Groebner/ 54

lulustein

 

Lulus Debüt bezieht sich auf eine Legende: Napoleon III. nahm seinen Sohn Lulu mit 14 Jahren auf den Feldzug mit, auf dass er das Kriegshandwerk von der Pike auf lerne. Er solle frühzeitig seinem großen Ahnen folgen, damit, wie der Vater hoffte, aus dem kleinen Napoleon einmal ein großer werde. In Saarbrücken, in Feindesland, angelangt, stießen die beiden zum ersten Mal auf Widerstand. Napoleon meinte zu seinem Sohn Lulu, dass es nun Zeit für die erste Lektion sei, das Abfeuern einer Kanone. Diese bestand Lulu dann auch sehr gut. Die Ausbildung konnte dann allerdings nicht weiter gehen, weil danach zurückgegangen wurde. Daher konnte Lulu die soldatische Ausbildung nicht abschließen, was dann auch als Grund angenommen werden dürfte, dass er eines so jähen Todes in Afrika sterben musste

forum / field

The Vatican Meteorite Collection:
Current research on these meteorites is centered on understanding their physical structure, including the nature and extent of the pore spaces, cracks and voids present in these rocks.

‘Forensic Architecture is grounded in both field-work and forum-work; fields are the sites of investigation and analysis and forums the political spaces in which analysis is presented and contested. Each of theses sites presents a host of architectural and political problems.
In fields, lets say starting with Territories, I attempted to engage a kind of “archeology” of present conditions as they could be read, or misread, in architecture. This archeology is not always undertaken by direct contact with the materiality under analysis, but with images of it. The spaces that we debate, analyze, or make claims on behalf of, are very often media products. Similarly, drawing a map includes synthesizing satellite and aerial images as well as images from the ground. Some images are created by optics and some by different sensors that register spectrums beyond the visible. One needs sensors to read sensors.
So this is a kind of archaeology of spaces as they are captured in these different forms of capture and registration. You read details, speckles, pixels and patterns, connect them to larger forces, or at least you understand the impossibility of doing so, often noting paradoxes and misrepresentations. We have done this very close reading of aerial images of colonies in the West Bank, we have read almost all elements from architectural through infrastructural archaeological to horticultural ones visible in these images as a set of tools in a battlefield.
Then there is the forum: a site of interpretation, verification, argumentation and decision. International courtrooms, tribunals, and human rights councils are of course the most obvious sites of contemporary forensics. But there are other political and professional forums.
Each forum is different. The third component of forensics, beyond the architectural and aesthetic, is what you need in order to stand between that “thing” and the forum: an “interpreter.” In ancient Rome it would be the orator; in our days it is perhaps the scientist, or the architect, or the geographer — the “expert witness” that translates from the language of space to the language of the forum. This definition of forensics might help expand the meaning of the term from the legal context to all sorts of others. Politics, as it is undertaken, around the problems of space and its interpretations, is a “forensic politics” as far I understand it.
Each of the multiple political and legal forums in use today — professional, scientific, parliamentary or legal — operates by a different set of protocols of representation and debate. They each have another frame of analysis. Each embodies dominant political forces and ideologies — that is to say that each instrumentalizes forensics as a part of a different ideological structure. In the turbulence of a changing world, there are also informal, subversive and ad-hoc and crisis forms of gathering: pop-up assemblies of protest and revolt in which the debate of financial, architectural (the housing or mortgage crisis), and geopolitical issues are often articulated.
Forensic architecture should thus be understood not only as dealing with the interpretation of past events as they register in spatial products, but about the construction of new forums. It is both an act of claim-making on the bases of spatial research and potentially an act of forum-building.’

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/ 

FORUM / what is out of doors
a meeting or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.
an Internet message board
a public square or marketplace used for judicial and other business. 
FORES [outside] door 

FIELD
Old English feld "plain, open land" (as opposed to woodland), also "a parcel of land marked off and used for pasture or tillage," probably related to Old English folde "earth, land," from Proto-Germanic *felthuz "flat land" (common West Germanic, cf. Old Saxon and Old Frisian feld "field," Old Saxon folda "earth," Middle Dutch velt, Dutch veld Old High German felt, German Feld "field," but not found outside it; Swedish fält, Danish felt are borrowed from German), from PIE *pel(e)-tu-, from root *pele- (2) "flat, to spread" (see plane (n.1)).  

"to go out to fight," 16c., from field (n.) in the specific sense of "battlefield" (Old English). The meaning "to stop and return the ball" is first recorded 1823, originally in cricket; figurative sense is from 1902. 

A physical phenomenon, such as force, potential, or fluid velocity, that pervades a region.

magnetic field

 

A region containing a particular mineral

A component of a database record in which a single unit of information is stored.

 A physical or virtual location for the input of information in the form of characters.

course of study or domain of knowledge

A realm of practical, direct, or natural operation,

The background of the shield. 

 

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.
 

feed the guns

Trafalgar Square, October 1918 : War Savings Campaign: 'Feed the Guns'

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/23497
A ruined farmhouse was built on the fountain, the Gordon statue was hidden by a crumbling church tower, next to it were two military lookouts camouflaged as tree trunks, and trenches built of sandbags surrounded the whole village.

The devices of the theatre were frequently invoked at home to stimulate civilian morale and publicise the War Loan

a spectacular ruined village erected in Trafalgar Square helping to draw in £29 million from Londoners in just 8 days in October 1918

image transfer // network hygiene

The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards.


A spokesman said the military was filtering out reports and content relating to government surveillance programs to preserve "network hygiene" and prevent any classified material appearing on unclassified parts of its computer systems.

WB // Commentaries on Poems by Brecht

The War Primer is written in 'lapidary' style. The word comes from the Latin lapis, 'stone', and describes the style which was developed for Roman inscriptions. Its most important characteristic was brevity. This was conditioned, first, by the effort required to chisel the words in stone; second, by the realization that for one who speaks to a succession of generations it is seemly to be brief.
If stone - the natural condition of lapidary style - is no longer the material of these poems, what has taken its place? What justifies their inscription style? One of them hints at an answer. It reads:

On the wall was chalked;
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

The first line of this poem could be placed at the head of each of the War Primer poems. These inscriptions are not, like those of the Romans, intended for stone but, like those of underground fighters, for fences.

sibyl

Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on... "They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry" (One Way Street 449-50

When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 100)