taken from Ultrablack of Music
you can order the book here
»Negative Music / The Poorest! If they still know silence at all, then only as holes in the continuum of noise – while we had still had the luck to know the noise as an interruption of silence. “Negative music” would have to be composed today, music composed of noise pauses.« (Günther Anders, 1965)
Why not Murke’s Collected Silence? Heinrich Böll’s paradox stratified in the narrative 10 years earlier. It is not about music, but about a silence that stands out against the noise. Murke offers a box of such collected silence.
As a young radio editor of the »Culture Word« section, he is given the task of replacing the mention of God in a text about the »essence of art« with »the higher essence that we worship.« What remains is silence. An acoustic-clasm or cut-down, extracted from a third volume, into which »God« is now recycled instead of silence.
In the case of Anders, his machine concept is reminiscent of such higher entities. Against this background, man seems antiquated.
From today’s perspective, machines can generally be mapped onto Turing machines and the structures of character strings. Here, too, signs and designations are not identical, although in the case of a differentiation between the symbolic, the real and the imaginary, it is increasingly difficult.
In fact, the problem is already apparent in Vaucanson’s music automatons or the sequencers that have been referred to as looms. In fact, looms are forerunners of 808, 909 etc. drum machines or pattern sequencers and metronomes of their time. They have by no means not only woven textiles into pattern-like forms, even if one likes to reduce them to this aspect. Vaucanson’s ideal stems, among other things, from creating an artificial human being that functions as accurately as possible. As before him already Pygmalion.1
Man, if he exists as a specimen, may disappear into these machines, which he invented, among other things, to overcome his development, or as a shortcut to it. God rises (»deus ex«) as saviour with them. As automatos / αὐτόματον (autos »themselves« and the root men »think, want«) or the self-moving.
Against this heavenly background or higher B/being2, so much moved by itself, which we worship, the following is true: »Everyone is only what by which he can replace every other person: fungible, a specimen. He himself, as an individual, is the absolutely replaceable, the pure nothing (and that is what he gets to feel when he loses himself in the time of similarity). 3
Such specimens logically demand:
»I want to be a machine.« (no pain – no thought )4
Or at least into the peace and comfort of a bio adapter.5 The all-round carefree package and the dream machine par excellence, already so »augmented«, that reality can be abandoned.
When Lutz Dammbeck in his film Das Netz questions Heinz von Förster on this point, he replies with astonishment: »Reality? Where do you get it from?« ‘Augmented’ therefore means sometimes an extension of a reality that does not (no longer) exist.
In the bio adapter, there would certainly also be »negative music«. All you have to do is ask. Beyond the adapter a gap, possibly a vacuum appears which wants to be filled.
Now some contemporaries are already claiming the end of the importance of extreme volumes. What has recently come along in the »digital world« as »spherical« moderation versus outmoded noise (also as defiance) should be absolute silence from the point of view of physics in such a moderate, crystalline sky. On this side of such spherical models it should become however all the louder:
The day the world will turn upside down
we’ll run together round and round
screaming, shouting, singing
loud, loud, loud, loud, loud.
Aphrodite’s Child / 666
Classic :
Replacement of labour: In Vaucansons, later Jacquard’s looms and their punched cards/control, lie, as already mentioned, the roots of future information societies. Perforation and ferformance – penetration not only of cardboard but also of its »Heimer«6, subjects and their products, among other things, as a performance of algorithms. Weave the Ones with Zeros. The nobility, hungry for beauty, is the driving force before the aspiring bourgeoisie sells to the workers what they no longer produce. From a finance-economic point of view, it is capital, not labour, that creates value out of itself. The information is subject to similar laws in the circulation, here transformed into an image-code. Patterns of light and shadow become processable (digital) information, that was the message of the mid-1950s when the “drum scanner “7 came into being. The same could have been expressed in French 200 years earlier. Both are based on the same principle. The code is separated from the material, or the images separate themselves from their image-body. As a consequence, the tone changes its resonance box.
From the holes as negative in the continuum of the paper, to the on/off-states of circuitries: Claude Shannon formalizes information in binary interplay and reduces it to the mathematics of communication. Exceeding or falling short of threshold values by means of sensation or their absence (literally saturation of the senses). Behind it are hidden desires for kicks and thrills, which are accompanied by permanent »disruption«, interruption or disturbance. The term ‘entropy’ used by Shannon slips from the junk of character strings into ashes. Endproduct of entropy and a kind of event-horizon in whose »Schwarzschild«-radius of zero, matter disappears. Ultrablack of whatever. But perhaps also an Ultrawhite that offers an alternative to the fashionable black. In fact, one is created by the adaptive, physiological mixture of light and the other by its absence.
26000 light-years away from the earth now as a confirmation of calculation models in the redshift to observe: Gas masses that are materialiter pulled over the edge of the event-horizon. This happens under observation with several VLTs (very large telescopes), bundled with another one, which is called SINFONI (Spectrograph for Integral Field Observations in the Near Infrared) at the ESO (European Southern Observatory). Hey Ya! Music wherever the eye goes.
The Schwarzschild-radius of the earth, named after Karl Schwarzschild and not after the color, would be 9 millimeters. The earth radius would have to be below this value at a constant mass in order to form an event-horizon and thus a static, black hole, of which an observer, who follows the event in falling or from a fixed point, could not say, whether it would actually be black.
This is at least what it’s said on paper or in the net, e.g. at the ESO.
An extended concept of this event-horizon (e.g. in the Bio Adapter) would also be conceivable.
The lack of availability of the paper, or the effort required to produce it, is from the outset the greater difficulty than its absence in the hole. Thus, in 1886, half a million punch cards were needed for the 50 pages of a woven prayer book in the weaving mill of J.A.Henry / Lyon. To produce them, 70 square meters of cartridge paper were needed. These are templates for bindings. Only these in turn resulted in the templates for punched cards. Around the year 1960 IBM was able to store about 40 MB of information in the hard paper of 500,000 punched cards. If you calculate a thickness of 1mm for such a Henry punch card, the stack of punch cards needed for this prayer book would be 500 meters high. In the final phase of the cards, IBM was still reaching the height of 50 meters before the material problem could be reduced through magnetic tapes.
The paper industry was yet to come and lagged behind the development of textile machineries. Something’s always lagging behind, and more often so. Mostly the material – inertia of the mass – or man himself, who has become material, is no longer able to follow his transitional objects. He is not far away from the cap he had thrown over a wall as a child, to follow it and to avoid further trouble in the parental home.
Man and material can be largely, if not completely, re-solved in ones and zeros. Salvaging (lat. solvere), dis-solving and finally procuding the Final Solution. At first, one exerts some pressure in all sorts of directions.
Now the matter of paper as the basis for printing started with Gutenberg around 1450. Basis, among other things, for the text, which in its linear reproduction was not only semantically similar to textiles. Gutenberg combines all the necessary components in one production process. Just like the former Jesuit student Vaucanson 300 years later in his textile factory.
In Gutenberg the material for the salvation of souls, or the power over souls, was reproduced, in Vaucanson the material for the nobility, also the Nobiltà nera, who knew how to use this power.
With some delay these developments became part of the proletariat, since in the first case this presupposed first the translation of the Bible, and thus also a high circulation, and in the second case the industrial revolution, with which the proletariat was assured of itself in negation: the absolutely replaceable, the pure nothing. As already suspected by Cartesius, another Jesuit pupil, the human bodies are machines of limbs or corpses. (1632 / Traité de l’homme)
Shoshana Zuboff writes currently: »Surveillance capitalism resembles the slaughter of elephants to get to ivory. The people are not the product, i.e. the ivory, but the carcass left behind.«8
What in the case of Giotto and the Franciscans pictorially takes a delicate beginning as a rebirth in the Enlightenment, implodes into the printing ink between the book covers of multiplied abysses, starts to ally itself with the promises of a protestant, calvinist work ethic, iconoclasm (second commandment) and the idea of reward in this world, as well as in the Beyond for work already done. Industrial capitalism, which is increasingly gaining momentum with the looms, is imploding into information capitalism, which Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. From this “prediction products” (Zuboff), algorithm-based forecasts from secret surveillance emerge, which regard humans as freely accessible raw material.
In Assisi there is still the dream of St. Innocent that Francesco might save his holy church, while a little later the now saved church tries to burn freely its souls in the purgatoria of the Inquisition, of which Descartes is also afraid. His writing, first written in 1632, therefore only appears after his death under a new title: De Homine.
Further down in time, as well as in space and in the pictorial space, below Giotto’s frescoes, the white of his master (Cimabue) mutates thanks to oxidation processes in black. These images already appear as precursors of the negatives, which in turn have disappeared again. Some of this still holds for the X-ray images – sediment of obsolete ideas of fluoroscopy and transparency.
On the other hand Cimabue’s frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco are a pretty, albeit involuntary metaphor of transition that leads to Masaccio’s Trinity Perspective in Santa Maria della Novella at the station of the same name in Florence. That Mary of message, of news, of information. In this view of the Enlightenment there is already a hunch of its self-destruction.
»I was what you are, what I am you will be« is written above the coffin, with the bones as the last remainder of this world or what the worms left behind. Passing the kneeling figures of the founders, the picture works its way into the otherworldly perspective, in which Masaccio places the God (is dead) who holds the cross with the Saviour, Salvator Mundi, curator of all curators and other auxiliary preachers, substituting up to the overglowing suffering and dying, at the place of the transition from all material things. Not even that remains an absolute limit for the enlightened human being. 400 years before Einstein puts the lid on it, in Brunelleschies’ correct perspective it relativizes itself. There, at the end of the light, it becomes particularly bright, before this glow disappears in the event-horizon. The question arises as to whether what is seen there has its condition in the outside, or lies just as much within ourselves.
It then also depends on how the color or sound spectrum behaves at this point. Hearing and seeing do not stop where it ends. The inner cacophony begins all the louder in the face of noiseless images. Conversely, the expectation devoted to the music longs for the ‘enlightenment’ of an illustration – it may also meander a little synaesthetically like Moldova – and finally I hear and see that it ends.
However, we know little about how these sounds and images or character strings are represented between the ears and behind the eyes. Because there are neither loudspeakers nor screens around, even if it sometimes feels this way.
Then again we seem to know little, but at least we hope to be able to extend this little knowledge a little bit by AI. Also the intelligence, or what one thinks it is, has arrived in the age of its technical reproduction, as God did before. With Gutenberg and Luther’s help, he is also in reproduction and thus manages to get out of art and, thanks to decoding, loses both aura and composure.
The God thus removed from the ‘essence of art’ is fed into the cycles. As long as He circulates, He generates surplus value from within. He now resembles capital as well as information. As information he follows the same laws as Mammon, who besides money simply designates what one trusts in:
In Wittgenstein? Higher beings cut by art (Dieter Roth). 20 volumes Hegel etc..
In Polke? Higher beings ordered: paint upper right corner black.
In Richter? As a painter? As a judge? As Ludwig?
In structuralism resp. its cognition? Deleuze : »The games need the empty field, without which nothing went ahead nor worked.«
In philosophy? Foucault : »In today’s world one can only think in the emptiness of the vanished man. This emptiness does not create a shortcoming, it does not prescribe a gap to be filled. It is nothing more and nothing less than the unfolding of a space in which it is after all possible to think.«
In machines? »A structure of a character string is a Turing machine that generates or accepts this character string.« (O.Wiener – each string has infinite interpretations)
In Bach? BWV 249, 249a and b. Cometh, hieth and runeth. / Runeth away, disappeareth, escapeth… / Hunteth, scattereth, shattereth…
In the Bible, the capital? As distillate? Bottled?
In injection? In ‘Verkochter Hund’? (which I inject myself)9
In boiling the violins? Smell of Violence, 12 tone distillate etc.
In Apple? Shredded. (by Herwig Weiser in Z-god-locator)
In information?
In money?
In God?
And in the world, for example?
If God is superior to us in one point, it is in his indifference. He shares this indifference with capital and information. Everything – equal – valid.
And no one knows more: Gossip like silence, the one causes the other to take off. Positive things are hoped for from the negation as a means of thinking. The nature of negative dialectics – negative questions of faith.
Ultrablack – A complementary of brown (as a reflection of all that lies behind it).
With Leonardo it was still the blue – an extra hertz. Anish Kapoor’s Knoff-Hoff Show / Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array, so-called VANTA Black, in which details or museum visitors are lost in favor of contour.
Here now the copyright of an overwhelming art for an audience which thinks little of the edibility of a roller coaster and which, in the admission of such a hole, also disappears gladly in it.
Against such a background, a look at this Brightness10 would be insightful which was founded in screams and noises, before switching from the acoustic to the optical register and becoming the bringer of Light – Lucifer of the Enlightenment. By its own principle, however, the Enlightenment turns into self-destruction and »fires the third (third stage of a diatonic scale) of those who authenticate themselves not by speaking (thinking), but by other sensory achievements.« (Eckhart Hammel) Maybe you should take a closer look at the cookbooks of Olafur Eliasson ?
The object of the text dissolves under its treatment by itself. Holy Scripture! Text is mapped on textiles, textiles into the text. From web like .Net to knitted fabrics, the work and its effects.
It is not this phenomenon of the late 20th or early 21st century. It already lies in the bitter orange (Apple), behind which hides, among other things, the knowledge that they could be lemons.
Last-Dance-music: 12er paint box extended by Ultrablack metallic – my personal opaque white.
Assignment of binary codes to frequencies proceeding from arbitrarily definable chamber tone A (440Hz 432Hz etc.). Rhythms result from this. The respective tone is struck at 1. 0 leaves a space. All notes of an octave are struck together in this way. Each as a result of its respective binary counterpart. E.g. chamber tone A 440Hz / positive 88 keys (negative equivalent for 64 keys).
Every Good Boy Does Fine, Forks And Chopsticks Everywhere!
1. A0/ 1000011001000111000 27.5000 Hz. 0111100110111000111 249.287
2. A#0/ 1000111001000011000 29,1352 0111000110111100111 232,935
3. B0/ 1001011010111000101 30,8677 0110100101000111010 215,610
4. C1/ 1001111110101111000 32,7032 0110000001010000111 197,255
5. C#1/ 1010100100101101110 34,6478 0101011011010010001 177,809
6. D1/ 1011001100111101001 36,7081 0100110011000010110 157,206
7. D#1/ 1011110111100101101 38,8909 0100001000011010010 135,378
8. E1/ 1100100100110000010 41,2034 0011011011001111101 112,253
9. F1/ 1101010100100110111 43,6535 0010101011011001000 87,752
10. F#1/ 1110000111010011101 46,2493 0001111000101100010 61,794
11. G1/ 1110111101000001010 48,9994 0001000010111110101 34,293
12. G#1/ 1111110101111011011 51,9131 0000001010000100100 5,156
13. A1/ 10000110010001110000 55,0000 01111001101110001111 498,575
14. A#1/ 10001110010000110001 58,2705 01110001101111001110 465,870
15. B1/ 10010110101110001010 61,7354 01101001010001110101 431,221
16. C2/ 10011111101011110000 65,4064 01100000010100001111 394,511
17. C#2/ 10101001001011011101 69,2957 01010110110100100010 355,618
18. D2/ 10110011001111010010 73,4162 01001100110000101101 314,413
19. D#2/ 10111101111001011001 77,7817 01000010000110100110 270,758
20. E2/ 11001001001100000101 82,4069 00110110110011111010 224,506
21. F2/ 11010101001001101111 87,3071 00101010110110010000 175,504
22. F#2/ 11100001110100111010 92,4986 00011110001011000101 123,589
23. G2/ 11101111010000010101 97,9989 00010000101111101010 68,586
24. G#2/ 11111101011110110100 103,8260 00000010100001001011 10,315
25. A2/ 100001100100011100000 110,0000 011110011011100011111 997,151
26. A#2/ 100011100100001100010 116,5410 011100011011110011101 931,741
27. B2/ 100101101011100010110 123,4710 011010010100011101001 862,441
28. C3/ 100111111010111100010 130,8130 011000000101000011101 789,021
29. C#3/ 101010010010110110110 138,5910 010101101101001001001 711,241
30. D3/ 101100110011110100000 146,8320 010011001100001011111 628,831
31. #3/ 101111011110010101110 155,5630 010000100001101010001 541,521
32. E3/ 110010010011000001100 164,8140 001101101100111110011 449,011
33. F3/ 110101010010011011100 174,6140 000111100010110001101
34. F#3/ 111000011101001110010 184,9970 000111100010110001101
35. G3/ 111011110100000101100 195,9980 000100001011111010011
36. G#3/ 111111010111101101000 207,6520 000000101000010010111
37. A3/ 1000011001000111000000 220,0000 0111100110111000111111
38. A#/ 1000111001000011000100 233,0820 0111000110111100111011
39. B3/ 1001011010111000101100 246,9420 0110100101000111010011
40. C4/ 1001111110101111000100 261,6260 0110000001010000111011
41. C#4/ 1010100100101101110110 277,1830 0101011011010010001001
42. D4/ 1011001100111101001010 293,6650 0100110011000010110101
43. D#4/ 1011110111100101100110 311,1270 0100001000011010011001
44. E4/ 1100100100110000011000 329,6280 0011011011001111100111
45. F4/ 1101010100100110111000 349,2280 0010101011011001000111
46. F#4/ 1110000111010011100100 369,9940 0001111000101100011011
47. G4/ 1110111101000001001110 391,9950 0001000010111110110001
48. G#4/ 1111110101111011011010 415,3050 0000001010000100100101
49. A4/ 10000110010001110000000 440,0000 01111001101110001111111
50. A#4/ 10001110010000110001000 466,1640 01110001101111001110111
51. B4/ 10010110101110001001110 493,8830 01101001010001110110001
52. C5/ 10011111101011110001000 523,2510 01100000010100001110111
53. C#5/ 10101001001011011100010 554,3650 01010110110100100011101
54. D5/ 10110011001111010010100 587,3300 01001100110000101101011
55. D#5/ 10111101111001011001100 622,2540 01000010000110100110011
56. E5/ 11001001001100000100110 659,2550 00110110110011111011001
57. F5/ 11010101001001101110000 698,4560 00101010110110010001111
58. F#5/ 11100001110100111010010 739,9890 00011110001011000101101
59. G5/ 11101111010000010100110 783,9910 00010000101111101011001
60. G#5/ 11111101011110110101010 830,6090 00000010100001001010101
61. A5/ 100001100100011100000000 880,0000 011110011011100011111111
62. A#5/ 100011100100001100010000 932,3280 011100011011110011101111
63. B5/ 100101101011100010100110 987,7670 011010010100011101011001
64. C6/ 100111111010111011101000 1046,5000 011000000101000100010111
65. C#6/ 101010010010110111000100 1108,7300
66. D6/ 101111011110010110101100 1174,6600
67. D#6/ 101111011110010110101100 1244,5100
68. E1/ 110010010011000001001100 1318,5100
69. F6/ 110101010010011011001100 1396,9100
70. F#6/ 111000011101001110111000 1479,9800
71. G6/ 111011110100000100111000 1567,9800
72. G#6/ 111111010111101101101000 1661,2200
73. A6/ 1000011001000111000000000 1760,0000
74. A#6/ 1000111001000011001001000 1864,6600
75. B6/ 1001011010111000100100100 1975,5300
76. C7/ 1001111110101110111010000 2093,0000
77. C#7/ 1010100100101101110001000 2217,4600
78. D7/ 1011001100111101001010000 2349,3200
79. D#7/ 1011110111100101101011000 2489,0200
80. E7/ 1100100100110000010011000 2637,0200
81. F7/ 1101010100100110111111100 2793,8300
82. F#7/ 1110000111010011101110000 2959,9600
83. G7/ 1110111101000001001110000 3135,9600
84. G#7/ 1111110101111011011010000 3322,4400
85. A7/ 10000110010001110000000000 3520,0000
86. A#7/ 10001110010000110000101100 3729.3100
87. B7/ 10010110101110001010101100 3941.0700
88. C8/ 10011111101011110000000100 4186.0100
Now there is a »variation« of two unequal, slowed, mutually shifted character strings, but of thousands of equal, mutually shifted character strings. Until the first and the last and what is in-between fall in One.
Cited Works
Ovid /Metamorphoses Book 10, verse 243 ff.
Culture industry / Enlightenment as mass fraud > Adorno / Horkheimer
Andy Warhol/ Heiner Müller / Hamlet machine
The improvement in Central Europe / Oswald Wiener
Swabian-Frankish noble family and cuirassier regiment of Gottfried Heinrich Pappenheim.
Mitchell / The Reconfigured Eye by Birgit Schneider / Processing Textiles
Shoshana Zuboff / SZ 7.11.2018 : “First we were told how happy we could be to get free services. When we found out that the companies were collecting data about us, we were “the product”. And we were told this was a fair trade. But we are not the product, but rather the source, the freely accessible raw material. This in turn is processed into products that serve the interests of those who benefit from our future behavior.”
Tatjana Doll : Der verkochte Hund
Etym.: screaming / loud and in Alvin Lucier’s sense also enlightening.
1Ovid /Metamorphoses Book 10, verse 243 ff.
2In the original text, the word ‚W/wesen‘ means an activity which for example Heidegger elaborated on. For Heidegger ‚ousia‘ (dt. ‚Wesen‘, being) is ‚parousia‘ (dt. ‚An-wesen‘). ‚Anwesen‘ means meaningful presence in correlation with the understanding of that meaning. It correlates also to ‚nearness‘, not as a spatial metaphor but as a designation of significance and meaningfulness of that object. (TN)
3Culture industry / Enlightenment as mass fraud > Adorno / Horkheimer
4Andy Warhol/ Heiner Müller / Hamlet machine
5The improvement in Central Europe / Oswald Wiener
6Swabian-Frankish noble family and cuirassier regiment of Gottfried Heinrich Pappenheim.
7Mitchell / The Reconfigured Eye by Birgit Schneider / Processing Textiles.
8Shoshana Zuboff / SZ 7.11.2018 : »First we were told how happy we could be to get free services. When we found out that the companies were collecting data about us, we were “the product”. And we were told this was a fair trade. But we are not the product, but rather the source, the freely accessible raw material. This in turn is processed into products that serve the interests of those who benefit from our future behavior.«
9Tatjana Doll : Der verkochte Hund
10 Etym.: screaming / loud and in Alvin Lucier’s sense also enlightening.