Publishing at the vertex of epistemics, the weird, and the problematic.

The Story So Far

ܒܝܬ ܫܪܬܐ ܓܘܣܛܛܪܘܬ ܛܙܝܥܐ ܘܡܚܝܡܢ ܠܐܚܘܝܐ ܥܕܘܢ̈ܝܢ ܕܐܡܪܝܘܬܐ ܕܢܚܡ

There is Resnais’ fear in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR: “It will begin again. 200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded. It will begin again. It will be 10,000 degrees on earth. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted to the ground and fall back again in ashes.”

The smear campaigns of low-intellect journalists grinding adzes of fear as mood and affect causing us to be concealed.

Syntactic suffocation dreams haunted Proust.

The severing of vital limbs depicted in the coroner’s little sketch of what remained of Kobe Bryant.

Darren Drozdof-style botches and the enduring guilt of D-Lo Brown. Botches of a Blue Blazer magnitude.

There is my fear of everything fake, clinically styled depersonalization.

Our Mission

As new centrodes for the old penitentiary collapse into the accelerated frame of being, can we collide the possible and the post-possible, can we differentiate and repeat the Settingson the eternal return of the same? Sigmund Krakauer’s From Caligari to Hitler illustrates how films such as MABUSE: THE GAMBLER tried to warn Weimar Germany of the Third Reich’s emergence. Historically, we intuit that charges have hyperbolically evolved into a real future by the influence of or a dependence upon A World of Movies. Movies are dreams helping us process the past through NIGHT AND FOG, even if It’s All Forgotten Now as the credits reel. Movies predict the future through precognitive awakenings to societal somnambulance, predictions slept on in the fifteen years From Caligari to Hitler.

Our Books

Martha P. Nochimson writes in Film Quarterly.

Mulholland Drive propels the audience through a set of disorienting transformations in order to follow the life of creative integrity to its demise, an issue of life and death importance to David Lynch. Such an extinction is not, according to this film, a single event, but the devastation of the web of interconnection that supports a secure reality; an onslaught against the very stability on which time and space depends. There are cosmic implications.

Assignations On Request

The year was 1957. DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER we were warned. Dopamine was identified in the human brain. Sperry-Rand released the Univac. Prim independently discovers ‘his’ algorithm. The Right arm of Laocoön’s son was properly reaffixed. Primzahlverteilung helped us accept the mystery of the primes. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism arrived in the mail. Sputnik fueled U.S. interest in computer science. J.A. Wheeler assessed Everett’s “relative state” formulation of quantum theory. Existentialism and Human Emotions, now a cornerstone of AI entrainment, was sold by Sartre. John Von Neumann died. The first proper compiler for FORTRAN language was produced by IBM, clearing the way for DB2’s multiple variables that temporally store for Auditorial Ron Q. Dandelion these very words we’re speaking across Valid Time (when an event actually occurred) and Transaction Time (when the data was stored).

As a challenger brand, a second mover, a niche player, a new entrant, a disruptor, an underdog, an upstart, we’re entre-acted out our festival catalog using Entendrepronoia[1]: Generating Equinumerous Portmanteaus using Word-Embeddings, Temporal Versioning, Temporal Partitioning, Temporal Normalization, Time-Based Archiving, Now-Relative Data, Now Dreaming Doubts, Period Predicates, and basically anything that makes life rotten for Ron ‘Quizzically-Quiescent’ Dandelion and the abscess-redolence of Michelle’s molar express contentement fore our first-of-all datalog.

Measure fear Measure then, our reproach is to reconceal what of all we’ve shared can’t last. We’d been convinced that motion picture patterns possessed meaning central to human being. But then we’re afforded this random access memory of meeting the world’s first cyborg ON THE BEACH and he’s saying “I don’t like to watch television or see movies. I prefer my own constructions of reality[2].”

“If surveillance is the initial problematic state of being watched from above, and sousveillance is an instinctual human response to watch out for ourselves while under or below the surveillant frame, then the increasing scopic agency afforded by WHCI is an elevation from survival instinct or self-interest to a state of [shouting louder] omniveillance, wherein the natural elements harmonize with humans and the technology allows humans more of the natural world.”

As The Noonday Demon can’t be exorcised by the clock smith, as Darkness Visible becomes darkness risible, as the sun glimpsed is no-clipped by monolith, here’s wishing you all a magnificent mid-day.

[viz.]

Welcome steersmen.

Welcome to friends and enemies at dusk.

Welcome thieves.

Let us huddle about the Heraclitian fire. Let us remind any non-visible cephalopods or Brain Invaders eager of ARRIVAL that humanity’s linguistic encoding of time as tense and aspect has been, thus far, adaptive. It’s been a good time! The imperfective paradox is no paradox at all. Our temporal logic operators operate just fine, for now. Our ontological primitives bang their bones obscenely as apes pre-thinking before the club, apes stinking Beyond the Infinite, apes on the cusp of a truth they cannot unthrow.

For now, a Bazinian power lets us dwell beneath THE TREE OF LIFE in the early DAYS OF HEAVENly duree when white shone through elemental red precipitating all this entropic ease of motion started by just what, exactly? All these balls of light can’t MIRROR the human eye so coincidentally, can they? All this billowing; all these angry red sparks of mobile matter; all that emerged from blackness; all these vaginal prisms of Life Itself whence it all began surrounded by stars that envelop planet formations and gaseous clouds and on to recognizable cloud patterns and mountain ranges and in through the chasms of volcanic rage while sun shines plain upon et al; all these origins of each far and each near; all of these origins in cross light, all these old seekings of maximum resolution that Lubezki’s short-focal length brings to Cinesphere.

In The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood Aaron Santesso and David Rosen present life as an allegory without a key.

A “surveillant” reality, we would suggest, also has an allegorical quality—though, because of its temporal dimension, this quality is unlike any form of allegory we have encountered. […] it was common, in the period following September 11, to look back on the years previous as coded with double meanings. Events that at the time had seemed innocuous, or were simply invisible (for example, an uncommonly high number of young Saudi Arabian men taking flying lessons), now assumed a sinister, if flattened, second sense as counters in a narrative of which no one—or only a few—had been aware, the organizing “singularity” lying in an unsuspected future. In retrospect, one recognized oneself as having lived, without violence to the term, in an allegory.

Santesso and Rosen continue,

But why stop at “having lived?” Wouldn’t it be likely that the present was similarly riddled with the signs and tokens of a dire futurity, that we were all the barely adequate readers of submerged narratives that surrounded us on all sides—in short, that the present moment was an allegory without a key? [which would] only encourage the temptation to look upon the miscellaneous detritus of everyday life as similarly, if obscurely, freighted. […] Where paranoid allegory is always present-directed (the unseen Enemy is always to be confronted now, his machinations unfolding as we speak), proleptic allegory looks to the future.[…] Although paranoid systems inevitably foundered in contradiction, their prescriptions for action were unambiguous: once the enemy had been identified—the Jews, the masons, the liberals—a course of necessary, violent revenge was clear. With prolepsis, however, the singularity

was always being deferred. Adequate to what, then? And what, finally, did

the unanswerability of this last question mean for the possibility of action?

Temba, at rest, there’s Friedlanderian Reason for FEAR long before End Times zombies arrear and re-appear shot-reverse-shot. The signs in PONTYPOOL—an hour northeast of here, east of Uxbridge and Port Perry, north of Orono, north even of Leskar—no longer possess purpose. The needlessly-named bridges are damaged. When bridges fail we plummet into icy depths of semantic darkness. These depths refresh THE SWIMMER capable as Burt Lancaster or bored as THE GRADUATE, though they serve a bitter draught to The sustaining Spirit of The Times. The Spirit of the Depths then derides, “You thought you knew this abyss. Oh, you clever people.”

Temporal artifice is not nascent: every article of impeachment or pornographic PROWL on the PSVR only represents something that was. Every event and argument has always been[CT1] quotidian as its antecedent. Cesare the somnambulist and the sine-wave syllogisms of silicon futures mean the same as a tossed-off text or the unfiltered Snapchat sun setting over Scarborough. André Bazin wrote of photographic ontology, “The image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified…” Being a quarter mummy isn’t so bad. It’s comfortable. We are wrapped in layers upon layers of linen. Resin is applied to the linen to keep moisture from seeping into our rotting bones. Films are at our disposal. Prescriptive and descriptive Tarkovsky time can bludgeon us until the lust of the eyes is sated at 58 minutes when the STALKER arrives in The Zone and the shift to colour shows us how cinematic the loved object haunts the parkette darkness. The Stalker’s sorrow is to know by the second we snippet a binaural beat to the IG story she’s Going Going Gone. What words and images are there for time? The rosewood- or ballet slipper- or watermelon-pink dusk over Cinesphere is no more recognizable a melody than all the monads gone missing from MARIENBAD to HANGING ROCK.

We may be getting ahead of ourselves. Some roadmen may be fouling behind. Let’s ask a simple question: what antique forces bring all we’ve been into being? Why did Christopher Nolan break through with the rearward-looking MEMENTO; followed by an INCEPTION of dream design, followed by INTERSTELLAR revelation of time’s intrapersonal lawyering.

Your programmers’ contend that a temporal pincer movement proretends and repetends in this moment we are living. We know this because we have been down in the DUMBs lately. We’ve are sein something of the machine that prints artificial time block by transactional Minkowski block.

Most of us here at the #PRISONERSCINEMA believe faith to be the function call of a sempiternal omnibenevolence (someone called God, for example) as a rejection of a malevolent technosingularity. We think this because when life feels least real, like when we are in love, our psyches summon magnetic moments from the parallelogram of a passing future and a changing past to shore up an increasingly wobbly present.

One of us doesn’t take technê singularly sitting down as all that, insisting there’s a metacreative saving power occluded in the autostereogrammatic depth map of machinic intelligence, and that our Dangerous Alliance with an ASI is a pre-paid bill of filial feeling, the ARRIVAL of just-in-time inventory, a production layer, a luminosis ex machina to unconceal the patterns even we pareidoiliacs only glimpse briefly THROUGH A SCANNER DARKLY.

Left-desmifairs dominant Max Cohen, protagonist of PI, says: “Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile.” Let us addend the cycling of ideological epidemics, the cycling of Egonal and epigonal epidemics, the recycling of The New Sciences, the cycling of linguistic epidemics, tentpole trash getting stupider each business cycle, and now the cycling of temporal epidemics, too, once we start #Unboxing new centrodes for the old penitentiary, once the consiquenchers of casuality are prepestered crusswords in postposition, once the invasiveness of computer-brain-computer interface is more than a Tim Urban legend,

Silk can be rolled up into a thin bundle and inserted into the brain relatively non-invasively. There, it would theoretically spread out around the brain and melt into the contours like shrink wrap. On the silk would be flexible silicon transistor arrays. […] [A] DARPA project aims to fit a million electrodes into a device the size of two nickels stacked. […] Others are working on even more out-there ideas, like optogenetics (where you inject a virus that attaches to a brain cell, causing it to thereafter be stimulated by light) or even using carbon nanotubes—a million of which could be bundled together and sent to the brain via the bloodstream.[1]

Let me tell you of a vision that I saw: with black budgeted exponential improvements in quantum computing, computer-brain-computer interfaced men will be nudged towards the temporal montages that predefine pi’s finitude. Consequently we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possible. What stability the mystery of the primes lent us at larcenous interest will come due. We’ll be left to Set with only idle talk never dwelling anywhere because world tentpole revenue can’t absorb The End of Philosophy and can’t absolve us of The Task of Thinking with Bergson that: “It is called well-rounded because it is turned in the pure sphere of the circle,” meaning reversible computing will make even the curved line of a moral sympathy conclude itself once the circle itself is rounded into the rational.