Tony Dalton related his first hand experiences with a ship’s cat:

ship, ello, explosion, cat, precognition, shipping, Rotterdam

Tony Dalton related his first hand experiences with a ship’s cat:

“Whilst serving on the Norwegian-flag tanker “Rona Star”, in 1965, I adopted a stray kitten in Mina al Ahmadi which took up residence in the radio room. It refused point blank ever to set foot on shore, despite being bodily carried, many times, down the gangway onto the land. The cat would never leave the ship until the night of June 15th, 1965, when the “Rona Star” was in the wet dock at Rotterdam’s Verolme shipyard, undergoing tank-cleaning. The moggy became extremely agitated, mewling and howling, and left the radio room. I watched it from the cabin window as it scooted down the gangway and disappeared. No sooner had it reached the shore than the ship exploded in a ball of fire and 16 persons were killed. To this day, I swear the damned thing sensed the forthcoming disaster. I never saw it again.”

http://messybeast.com/moggycat/warcat.htm

(via @interdome)

(via Before Abramović, A History of Nothing) As might be expected, Marina Abramović’s new performance event at the Sean Kelly…

hyperallergic:

(via Before Abramović, A History of Nothing)

As might be expected, Marina Abramović’s new performance event at the Sean Kelly gallery, Generator, has attracted a healthy level of press coverage that is concomitant with her reputation. Based on a premise of collective sensory deprivation, and the unanticipated insights that this can confer about communication and identity, the Generator experience begins with the voluntary blindfolding of participants and with noise-canceling headphones being placed upon the same. Each gallery-goer attempts to navigate through their environment in this limited state, up until the point where they can raise a hand and be led out of this paradoxically theatrical environment. While this experience will likely be novel to many of her recent converts, the performance has clear precedents among the work of at least one other artist who helped to shape the performance and intermedia subcultures of the mid-late 1970s. Namely, at least two of John Duncan’s events — Maze from 1995 and Voice Contact from 1998–2000 — also involve the voluntary blinding of participants and the subsequent entry of those participants into an unfamiliar space.

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SORN/Image from Berber Theunissen’s Series DOZEN OF BULLS, more on www.sornmag.com soon! #BerberTheunissen #DozenOfBulls…

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SORN/Image from Berber Theunissen’s Series DOZEN OF BULLS, more on www.sornmag.com soon! #BerberTheunissen #DozenOfBulls #photography #art #Dutch #fog #Iceland #sornmag (via http://instagram.com/p/vjDE__w1iI/www.sornmag.com soon! #BerberTheunissen #DozenOfBulls #photography #art #Dutch #fog #Iceland #sornmag (via http://instagram.com/p/vjDE__w1iI/)

The Online Memory

warren ellis, memory, writing, online, ephemerality, context

This fracturing of context is, I suspect, peculiar to these early decades of online writing. It’s possible that, in the future, webmentions and the like may heal that up to some extent. But everything from the 90s to today is going to remain mostly broken in that respect. Most of what we said and did had ephemerality long before apps started selling us ephemeral nature as a positive advertising point. Possibly no other generation threw so many words at such velocity into a deep dark well of ghosts.

http://morning.computer/2014/10/the-online-memory/

Top, photograph by Tanja Deman, from the series Collective Narratives, 2012. Via. Bottom, photograph by Aeschleah DeMartino and…

fette:

Top, photograph by Tanja Deman, from the series Collective Narratives, 2012. Via. Bottom, photograph by Aeschleah DeMartino and Nicolette Mishkan, from the series Permaid, 2014. Via. More.

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Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.

Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

Alain Badiou, from In Praise of Love [Éloge de l’amour], 2009, translation by Peter Bush, 2012. Via.

The singing comet

67p, rosetta, comet, comet song, ESA, space, sound

But one observation has taken the RPC scientists somewhat by surprise. The comet seems to be emitting a ‘song’ in the form of oscillations in the magnetic field in the comet’s environment. It is being sung at 40-50 millihertz, far below human hearing, which typically picks up sound between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased by a factor of about 10,000.

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/11/the-singing-comet/

Surfing is expressive of one’s innermost being. How you surf expresses who you are; what you click is expressive of your…

“Surfing is expressive of one’s innermost being. How you surf expresses who you are; what you click is expressive of your identity and fetishes. I think that writers try too hard to express themselves. Just by merely clicking, we are expressing ourselves. The new memoir is our browser history.”

–Kenneth Goldsmith in Influencers: Wasting Time With Kenneth Goldsmith, Bête Noire of the Ivy League, Kevin McGarry (2014)

A book on the 10th congress of the Communist party, center, in an abandoned home in Kanitz, a mostly empty village in Bulgaria….

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A book on the 10th congress of the Communist party, center, in an abandoned home in Kanitz, a mostly empty village in Bulgaria. Of approximately 50 houses, only 3 are inhabited - totaling its population to 6. Bulgaria has the most extreme population decline in the world - mostly due to post-1989 emigration, and visions of severe structural and industrial decay are becoming increasingly common across the country. There are so few people of childbearing age people here that population statistics project a 34% decrease by 2050, from 7.7 million to 5 million.
Follow me this week as I bridge Bulgaria’s communist past with photos gleaned from family albums, to its current state of democracy 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This project was supported by a grant from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Photo by @yanapaskova in October. #bulgaria #depopulation #communism #autocracy #berlinwallanniversary #1989 #pulitzercenter (via http://instagram.com/p/u_w4B7luk4/)

This land is whose land?

Australia, mining, land rights, WA, land access compensation

Under WA law, Aboriginal traditional owners have no legal right to stop mining, but they can negotiate land access compensation. A few confidential deals have been settled for multimillion-dollar sums — 0.5 per cent of production value — with protection for important sacred sites agreed to by big miners keen to avoid costly legal delays like the prolonged Yindjibarndi dispute. But according to a Fortescue spokesman, Andrew Forrest does not believe in big dollar “mining welfare”, saying it doesn’t help Aboriginal people, and this is why Fortescue is offering an annual compensation package of $10 million for the Solomon mine project. […] They say they will mine 60 million tonnes a year at first, rising to 100 million tonnes or more in future. That 60 million is worth around $10 billion at today’s prices and these are rising all the time.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/this-land-is-whose-land–20110405–1d30g.html