WINTER/SPRING 2000
Since the Renaissance, the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurement… [“The native”] and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless boundless olfactory space, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. They put into it everything they know, rather than only what they see.
Welcome to the unforeseen.
So rich and thick and choc-colate that you caaaan’t drink it slooow cause its quick, oh de doh.
I’m talking on the phone, just talking and they had come home or were home from some place or meeting together where they had been but now they were here at home but downstairs and my sister was downstairs too but my brother wasn’t…he was gone somewhere.
The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.
I arrive, stupid tired taken with predatory civility into Dakar. to a room at the Hotel du Marche that smells of sewer waste and fear. My fear: of stains on the sheets, of bugs, of sounds, of being consumed by the night. Against the early morning darkness I lie awake dressed in a soft yellow light till cocks first crow.
In a multimedia theatrical presentation the casting of shadows provides a visual visceral link between the physical action of performance and the projected or screened imagery.
The effect of technology, whether it’s the wheel or the internet, shrinks our perception of time and space while simultaneously expanding the separation between actions and the senses.
Communication technology is interesting because of the scale of its interconnectedness, hence the scale of its effect.
It is not that “the native” is so warm, it’s that we’re so numb.
The Hotel du Marche is a brothel and like rented sex, it’s often loud, abrupt with short intense exchanges. Which is unlike Mona, who lives there. on air, “comme ca” so she tells me. She doesn’t tell me she’s a refugee from Maryland, Liberia and has left her husband and child. She doesn’t tell me she’s traveled, speaks several languages, that once on the way home from Europe she’s held hostage, robbed and raped: that she’s had an American boyfriend named Fred and met the American politician Andrew Young. She doesn’t tell me “It’s not always for the money”, until after she uses my room to wash her face and rinse her mouth. She says “Senegalese tell good stories”. I say “We can’t be lovers”. She says “No problem”. Together we go for drinks, dinner, we see an old dubbed Chuck Norris movie, “Terror dans la Ville”. Returning she takes my arm. At my room she lies on the bed kicks off her shoes and…smiles. I chatter, I pace, I fake my confidence. She says “No problem”.
So rich and thick and cho-colate that you caaan’t drink it slooow cause its quick. oh de doh.
Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.
But I’m here talking on the phone and listening to it hearing voices their voices the noise of their voices arguing downstairs and I can hear them here over the talking on the phone I can hear them here they’re loud.
Environments are invisible.
Technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.
Technology quantifies. Anything quantified is commodified. Digitalization is a means to more, better, faster quantification. More, better, faster means less noise in the system. Less noise in the system means more homogeneity.
The natives” are right, replication reduces.
Life is short be vain.
Before media there used to be a physical limit on how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they’re actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and least exclusively on television.
But me, I’m just talking on the phone just talking and I’m hearing not listening to the screams. My sister’s screams. Her panicky hysterical screaming screams, screaming uncontrollably screaming a siren, screaming her world crashing to an end like she’s dying screams. And I’m saying, “I have to go know”.
Pain is great inspiration for technology’s development.
Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects.
Kill your darlings.
I want you to know African reality” says Moussa, a musician, who sings for tips and makes me cry, Now he invites me to meet African Reality, I go with him, out far from the city to where charcoal scents the air and goat shit peppers the sand: to suburbia of cinder block and corrugated tin. We file through working, dancing, praying people in segregated formality, in mixed company, in families and alone: passing he crippled, the diseased. His parents dead, I meet his uncle, his brother, his son and his wife who adores him. He ignores her. I see their windowless room packed with possessions, no toilet and a bed: a propane tank for cooking. I’m served rice and yogurt with peanut sauce by her in whose eyes the shock of my face once reflected. She won’t look at me now. I feel shame. I feel resentment. I leave money. I leave and go shopping. I buy gifts. I buy laxative. I buy a large open room.
The effect of technology on the “the body” is often violent.
So rich and thick and choc-colate that you caaan’t drink it slooow cause its quick, oh oh de doh.
*author’s note: Technodelux” has 27 steps, some of which are stolen. The sources for these steps are as follows: 1, 5, 13, 15, 16, 23—from THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel, published 1967 by Bantam Books. 20-from THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL, by Andy Warhol, published 1977 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 2, 24-from CREDO by Britta Sjogren, published in The Independent-January/February 1999. 3, 12, 27-from commercial product advertisement copy. 4, 14, 21—from “phone poem” 1996 by Dean Moss. 11, 25-from “5 journal entries” 1998 by Dean Moss.
