These two portraits are refined versions of sketches of one of Jamie Gaughran-Perez’s readings. Performed during “Via” at a Pyramid Atlantic reading, 2006.

The performance followed an actual ritual format, beginning with a circle creation and summoning, followed by the requisite banishings (throwing salt around the room), divine laughter (led by M’s daughter, Hero), invocation (singing a recombinant hymn together), and consecration. While we’re not sure if the summoning was a complete success, we believe that Heraclitus, the source of so much awareness of flux, chaos, and change, would have been proud.

The ritual was conducted as part of the excellent i.e. reading series at Dionysus restaurant, to an amused (bemused?) mix of folks coming to the reading and folks who just happened to be sitting down to dinner.

More M. Magnus (or, MMM)
Verb Sap, published by Narrow House
Video of performance with the Splash Ensemble

The performance was a “guided tour” of the USPTO building where the last day of the festival was being held.

The participants were given the score and a sheet torn at random from a dictionary. We then toured the building, describing it using the language on our pages, improvising a new reality out of the mix of the dictionary and our own creative impulses.

View the back side of the Score, containing great pseudo-mathematic equations like “Always (divided by) Whatever”, after the jump

So, there’s lots of great theoretical quantum semantics and magic happening here, so I encourage you to check out the photo page so you can see it in all its full-size glory.

General View:

Thought-object detail – peoples.

Thought-object detail – person flying some kind of kite

Thoughts?

Going through my backlog of work, I found this list of “fields and terms” of interest to the Group for Radical Recombinance (the GRR), a revolutionary avant garde group that met formally only once, but was incredibly prolific for a roughly two-year span, until it was succeeded by the Score for Local Knowledge (a slightly more library/music-centric group).

Make sure to check out the Flickr page, lots of good annotations.

Oh, and the list contains one of my favorite lines: “all effects are special.”

Happy listing.

There are a lot of annotations on the image at Flickr, in case you’re curious about feedback loops in the mind, semantic equations, or the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I watched. (Look for one of Willow’s first magic sigils!)

“A Collection of Commands” is a little post-it thought I had earlier in the day, and this page seemed a nice play to put it…. How is thought like/unlike a collection of commands?

At any rate, my first “note” was of a little diagram post-it I had on my desk at work:

My handwriting (as normal) is atrocious, but lends itself to some swell misreading-based statements:

• The user is surrounded by causes. & organizations.
• Local causes, probable causes.
• Actions also appear.
• And other causalities.
• Local production with general action.
• The user has a name (probably) and takes some actions.
• These actions may appear here or appear “out of the frame”
• Things are things in a series.

As far as I can tell, here’s what’s happening:

• A primary user (left) access a thought-object (center) that is connected to a portable medium (top).
• Collective knowledge of the thought-object, combined with perceptions of the primary user’s use of it, flows back and forth between observers (bottom) and the thought-object. This changes it.
• The thought-object, combining the inputs and manipulations of the primary user, portable medium, and observers, projects an image onto a screen (right) …

• The primary user and observers now have access to a representation of the thought-object.
• They can now discuss it as a tangible entity, and change its properties by manipulating the representation or by adjusting variables in the thought-object itself.

Note: this is probably very similar to the process of making a thought “happen” in your own mind.

More slides from Lecture 2

Video of Lecture 2