TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache

_Sound Mirror_ MP3 (256k)(5:43)

The mirror as a means of trafficking with spirits and seeing past and future events reflected in its depths, was originally based upon the mirror of the "waters" beneath the earth:  the subliminal abyss of the subconsciousness typified by the cross and the intersection of space-time-present symbolized by the vertical beam of extra-terrestrial and clairvoyant vision.

The Cult of Shadows, K. Grant Muller 1975
"Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power."
_Noise - The Political Economy of Music_ by Jacques Attali. 1977
Programmed by Clock DVA at the Anterior Digital Facility 1989

       -liner notes from _Sound Mirror_ 12" on Wax Trax

• track _Dark Attractor_ MP3 
• release _The Hacker MP3/Connection Machine_ MP3 (vK) 12" on Wax Trax! (1988)
• track _Re/Act_ MP3 (192k) off of _Collective 2_
• industrial breakbeat track _Eternity_ MP3 off of _The Collective Box Set_ Disc 2
  • sample: "space, light, life time, eternity"
• track _Sound Mirror_ (256k)(8:17)
• video footage (realvideo) for _Resistance_
• track _Velvet Realm_ MP3 (256k) off of _Buried Dreams_ on Wax Trax (1990)
• track _Voice Recognition Test_ MP3 (256k) off of _Sign_
• samples: "This is initial voice logic reconstruction test number one.";  "Diagnostics of recognition and speech synthesis centers have been completed. At this level all functions appear normal";  "Hello, Doctor, Yesterday, Tomorrow" - all from the film _2010_ (vhs/ntsc) written by Arthur C. Clarke

Man-Amplifiers

The first users of tools were not men (a fact appreciated only recently) but pre-human anthropoids.  The old idea that man invented tools is misleading, more accurately tools invented man - so began thesymbiosis.  The physicist J.D. Berna's book published in 1929 called _The World, The Flesh and The Devil_ decided that the numerous limitations of the human body could be overcome only by the use of mechanical attachments or substitutes until eventually all that might be left of man's original organis body would be the brain.  The word "cyborg" (cybernetic organism) devised by Dr. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, define a cyborg as "An exogenously extended organisational complex, functioning as a homeostatic system".  Along with other computer experts Dr. Clynes believes that intelligence need not be confined to the DNA structure.  He also believes that life is more a matter of relationships and organization than of material.  Clynes points out an understanding of the nature of our thoughts in terms of their mathematical, electronic and time-space identities which will permit us to communicate better than we do at the present time, we may find new shapes and discover means of utilizing them to communicate in entirely new ways.  Ways that cannot presently be imagined. Arthur C. Clarke sees the outcome of the future of the man machine as eventually a machine based evolution.  Whatever the key may be to longevity, man continues to amplify himself ever onwards in his desire to expand the natur eof the self towards new points, new levels, that currently cannot be accurately predicted.  The man amplifier is presently increasing its volume.

      - liner notes for track _Man Amplifiers_ MP3 off of _Man-Amplified_ CD on Contempo (1992)

sample: "...combining with economic advantages of the linking structure far surpasses any disadvantages in increased perversions, a final note, an infinite translated mathematics, tolerance and charity among artificial memory devices is ultimately binary. Stimulating rhetoric, absolute. The theatre of noise is proof of our potential..." from the film _THX-1138_ (vhs/ntsc) (1971) directed by George Lucas

The Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani (who inspired Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic novel _Frankenstein_ in 1818) discovered in 1786 that electricity was one of the essential secrets of life.  This discovery galvanised society, its future applications are only just beginning to be envisaged.  Its infiltration and uses are beyond calculation, its symbiosis presently is even greater than before as technology increases the use of electricity becomes even more fundamental to the workings of machines - Machine Breeds Machine. Duchamp's futuristic vision of allegorical machines is one of the true marriages between matter and spirit, art and technology, "the spirit is the bride".  Duchamp invented a new physics of his own, closer to Jarry's pataphysics than to conventional science, a fourth dimensional engineering that goes beyond the rational axiomatic rigidity of scientific law.  One of Duchamp's greatest works, _The Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even_ (1915-23) represents the most difficult and mysterious of all domains, the fourth dimensional phenomenon of sex.  These theoretical suggestions which were later to be discovered by Baron Von K. Reichenbach and Wilhelm Reich, isolate and demonstrate a tangible biological energy generated by the human body (particularly during sexual activity).  These discoveries can only enhance yet even more new possibilities in the future exploration of the man machine symbiosis in all levels of creation.  As technology accelerates and new knowledge formulates so does the spirit in its needs to expand its own awareness, only in the pursuit of knowledge of all things can we discover ourselves.
      - liner notes for track _Techno Geist_ off of _Man-Amplified_ CD  on Contempo (1992)

"Everything is sentient." - Pythagoras.  A "failure of logic" in a "paranoid democracy", ghost in the machine? Sentient Electronics?  As technology develops also our dependence on that system increases, even fault tolerant computers are vulnerable to overload, no standards have as yet been developed, "software is not predictable".  The nine hour breakdown of AT&T's long distance telephone network in New York dramatizes the vulnerability of complex computer systems everywhere and that chaos is evident in all systems. Chaos breaks across the line that separates scientific disciplines because it is a science of the global nature of systems.  Science was heading for a crisis of increasing specialization, dramatically that specialization has reversed because of terms of their constituent parts,quarks, chromosomes or neurons, chaos is looking at the whole.  We have to look at chaos. Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, defined information as "essentially a negative entropy".  In modern communication theory entropy is equated with noise which causes a waste of information.  According to the second law of thermodynamics "the general direction of physical events is towards decrease of order and organization". Schrodinger was led to postulate the existence of an ego which ultimately "controls the motion of the atoms".  Whatever the theory, something unseen and as yet unknown is at work behind the mechanisms of the world and the universe.  From the beginning of consciousness man has been all too aware of the existence of some mysterious force, and we can see this most obviously reflected in his spirituality.
    - from the liner notes for the track _NYC Overload_ MP3 off of _Man Amplified_ CD on Contempo (1992)

Claude E. Shannon, father of information theory, whose work _The Mathematical Theory of Communication_ is one of the greatest works in the annals of technological thought.  It showed how an algebra invented in the mide 1800's by British mathematician George Boole, (Boolean Algebra) could represent the workings of switches and relays in electronic circuits, its implications were profound.  He defined the overall potential for information in a sytem of messages as its entropy, which in thermodynamics denotes the randomness of a system.  Shannon defined the basic unit of information which came to be called a "bit".  Information could then be encoded as bits.  Code compresses information into its most compact form.  Shannon's ideas were almost too prescient to have an immediate impact.  Vacuum tube circuits simply could not calculate the complex codes needed to approach the Shannon limit.  Not until early 1970's, with the advent of high speed integrated circuits did engineers begin to fully exploit information theory.  Today Shannon's insights have shaped virtually all systems that store, process or transmit information in digital form.  Obviously this information applies to the above applications but science and computer technology is returning to the much older concept of connectionism.  "Does not the fiction of an isolated object imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole".  Bergson: _Matter and Memory_ 1910
from the liner notes of _Bitstream_ off of _Man-Amplified_ CD on Contempo (1992)

• _Bitstream_ MP3

Could be said to be the ultimate software, once programmed it expands indefinitely, redeveloping its own structure and evolution, designing new systems so that it can activate new forms of existence, outgrowing its own limitations as it proliferates to new states of being.  The final program could also be the development of the finest organic computer we at present know.  The human brain whose limitless capacity we have never harnessed, but whose possibilities are endless.  The quest for the development of evolution can move in two ways, outwards or inwards.  The outward projection seems to have progressed and developed more rapidly than the inward, eventually if we are to succeed then the two must join.  For eons this knowledge of arcane connections has been employed in mythology and within occult science, now we must go back to the beginning and develop the tool that gave us light.  In a recent article on _The Connection Machine_ - a new breed of parallel computers, W.D. Daniel Hillis, graduate of M.I.T. and co-director of the Thinking Machine Corporation, says "The applications worthy of a billion-processor machine are those that entail a radical change in the way we think about computation.  A parallel computer with a billion processors might provide the basis for a computational utility analogous to existing electric utilities.  Just as a plant generates electricity that is transmitted to individual appliances, a huge parallel computer could provide computational power to a city's worth of robots and workstations.
- liner notes from track _Final Program_ MP3 off of _Man-Amplified_ CD on Contempo (1992)

The electrical signals that are conducted to the brain by the auditory nerve fibres are like the impulses that activate a computer.  They are not themselves sounds;  they are symbols of sounds.  In this role they evoke different reactions in the various sections of the brain which govern responses.  The brain has a sound memory center which begins accumulating sounds even before birth.  We are able to distinguish between some 400,000 signals.  It is in the brain where the journey of sound ends, an instant after it begins that hearing and the memory of sound becomes the keynote of all communications.
- liner notes from track _Memories Of Sound_ MP3 off of _Man-Amplified_ CD  on Contempo (1992)

samples from film _THX-1138_ (vhs/ntsc) (1970) directed by George Lucas

• "Performance perfect is perfect performance""
• "I was so afraid""
• "I wanted to touch you..."
• "...so many times"

There is a real possibility that we may one day be able to design a machine that is more intelligent than ourselves.  There are all sorts of biological limitations on our own intellectual capacity, ranging from the limited number of computing elements we have available in our craniums to the limited span of human life and the slow rate at which incoming data can be accepted.  There is no reason to suppose that such stringent limitations will apply to computers of the future, it will be much easier for computers to bootstrap themselves on the experience of previous computers than it is for man to benefit from the knowledge acquired by his predecessors.  Moreover, if we can design a machine more intelligent than ourselves, then a fortiori that machine will be able to design one more intelligent than itself.  Dr. Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. has predicted: "As the machine improves we shall begin to see all the phenomena associated with the terms "consciousness", "intuition" and "intelligence".  It is hard to say how close we are to this threshold, but once it is crossed the world will not be the same; it is unreasonable to think that machines could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to suppose that we will always be able to compete with them in wit and wisdom.  Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior entities.  But perhaps the most portentous implication in the evolving symbiosis of the human bio-computer and his electronic brainchild was voiced by Dr. Irving John Good of Trinity College, Oxford, in his prophetic statement: "The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need make"
- liner notes from _Man-Amplified_ CD  on Contempo (1992)

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache