Statement

What is Crystalpunk?!

Crystalpunk is a simpleton stampede, a coxcomb carnival, a daydreamers cabal, a platitude-peddling potlatch, a nihilists ambulation on tiptoe, an incantation of the language in the corners of your eyes, a wild farrago of those who run before they can walk, an ABD of being Free from the NOW! NOW! NOW! We wear non-matching socks: that is who we are!

Past

Forum and Tournament.
Are we playing the game or is the game playing us?
Speakers: Christian Freeling, David Parlett and Alex de Voogt.
Part of Impakt Festival 2007.

13 JAN 2007:
The Crystalpunk Bonanza Of Origins

A Six Hour Search for the Origin of Life, Language and the Voices in our Head.
Speakers: Luc Steels, Bruno Marchal, Florian Cramer, Jonathan Kemp, Martin Howse, Otto Rössler.
Small Report Included

Blog/Blogject; My Blog Dreams

This (discontinued) blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can't store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.

Hacking the Language of Crowds

Just as crystalline-rocks, diamonds or stalagmites tell about the environment producing it, the crowd crystal is shaped in response to the flux of the converging paths inside the crowd. Crowd Crystals are structures from which we can read the crowd because they are formed in response to, and are the result of, crowd agitation. A crowd crystal is like a book produced by automatic writing, telling us about the system that produced it without interference of reason.

Stream of Consciousness

It is Nearly Here!
Observed: 16.May.2008

And even more Lexigrams
Observed: 15.May.2008

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from

The Other PrimatePoetic System
Observed: 15.May.2008

Premack's language system consisted of a series of colored plastic tokens, which the chimpanzees could manipulate and stick to a magnetic board. Each token stood for a word which was never spoken in the chimpanzee's presence.

List of tokens

Nouns

Sarah
Mary (Mary Morgan, Sarah's favorite trainer)
pail
dish
chocolate
apple
banana
apricot
raisin

Verbs

is
give
take
insert
wash

Concepts/Conditionals

same
different
no-not
name-of
color-of
"?"
if-then

Colors (tokens were not colored with the corresponding colors)

red
yellow
brown
green

Even More lexigrams
Observed: 15.May.2008

Street Doodle
Observed: 15.May.2008

Funky Street Doodle

Allen Ginsberg mastrubating to William Blake
Observed: 14.May.2008

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The idea I get about Allen Ginsberg from this biography by Bill Morgan's is very negative. Ginsberg was an emotional parasite, a perverted weakling, a gullible god-seeker, an egomaniac, a naive know-it-all, and a whole host of other things I dislike. There are some positive things about him, like his generosity but they are insignificant compared to his negative sides. All this could be redeemed by his writing but this I don't like either. As biographies go this one feels very unbalanced. The first half is fairly detailed, but as it progresses it stops explaining and it becomes a dull enumeration straight from Ginsberg's agenda. Here is a typical episode, it mentions the deep voice of Blake, but of course for all we know Blake might have sounded like Rod Stewart.

Allen had been attracted to the world Blake created in his poetry, but he couldn't crack the complicated code to reveal Blake's hidden secrets. He kept reading and rereading Blake's poem "Ah Sun-Flower! weary of time," over and over again in his room without fully understanding what Blake was getting at. At one point Allen masturbated as he read and as he orgasmed he experienced an auditory hallucination. He knew that he was hearing the deep voice of William Blake himself reciting the poem and for the first time he became aware of the poems significance. It wasn't that he imagined he heard Blake's voice, he actually did hear Blake speak directly to him, as surely as the saints heard the Virgin Mary speaking to them. As Allen stared out the window, another poem by Blake, "The Sick Rose," came to mind. When he gazed out across the rooftops of the city, the entire universe was revealed to him. Allen was intensely alive and alert for those few minutes. He realized that what he was seeing had been there all the time; it was an aspect of the imagination that is eternal, extending beyond this life and his former consciousness back as far as Blake and beyond. He saw not objects but the process of creation behind them. It was a sudden flash of recognition in which the secret of all universal mysteries was unlocked. He could almost say that he saw God at that moment. It was all there if only he observed. The most astonishing aspect of this vision was that the actual location of the guiding intelligence was within the objects of the world themselves, not in some remote corner of the heavens.

Selections from Maria Sabina
Observed: 14.May.2008

Maria Sabina (1988?-1985) was a Mazatec witch doctor who cured persons in magic mushrooms vigils. She is an unlikely stronghold for the hardcore hippie, but also one of the best studies oral poets of EthnoPoetics. And indeed it is Jerome Rothenberg who edits this selection of writing by and about Maria Sabina. There is so much I can say about this but will not until later. In the mean time this book is highly recommended for all you students of the various branches that find meaning in this woman.

The Masks of Marcel Janco according to Hugo Ball
Observed: 13.May.2008

Hugo Ball speaks. Picture is a mask of Tristan Tzara by Janco. Great Quote.

For our next event, Janco made a certain number of extraordinary masks. They evoked Japanese theater and Greek tragedy, yet were resolutely modern. Designed to be seen from a distance, they produced an incredible effect in the relatively small cabaret. We were all there when Janco came in with his masks. And the minute we saw them, we couldn't wait to try them on. When we did, something quite strange happened. Each mask dictated not only what costume should be worn with it, but also certain precise, pathetic gestures, which approached madness. Although we would never have suspected it five minutes earlier, we were soon moving in a bizzare ballet, draped and adorned with incredible objects, trying to outdo each other as we danced around the room.

The masks transmitted their power to us with an irresistable violence. We understood instantly why such masks are so important for pantomime and theater, for these masks simply forced anybody wearing one of them into an absurd and tragic dance.

As we examined these painted cardboard constructions more closely, their ambiguous character suggested various dances to us; and for each of these dances, we immediately composed a little tune. One dance was called the "Flycatcher". With the corresponding mask, the dancer heavily stamped his feet and raised his arms in broad, rapid gestures, as if he was trying to catch something as it flew by, to the sound of a shrill, nervous music. The second dance was called "Nightmare". The dancer emerged from a squatting position and hurled himself forward. The mouth of the mask gaped wide open; the nose was flat and crooked. The dancer's arms, raised in a threatening way, were extended with special tubes. The third dance was "Despair of Celebration". Long, golden hands, cut out of cardboard, were hanging from the dancer's curved arms. The dancer faced right, then left, several times, slowly turned around, and collapsed in utter despair before returning to the first movement.

What fascinated all of us in these masks was that they incarnated emotions and passions on a superhuman scale. Suddenly, the horror of our age, against the paralyzing backdrop of the war, was clearly perceptible."

DaDa Masks
Observed: 13.May.2008

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I feel all Crush-evil. Great Pics of Sophie Tauber in masked performance. The source of these makes a bit too much of them but one can see where the Storm Trooper came from.

Undoing the Doodle
Observed: 13.May.2008

Given the fact that Sumerian cuneiform is 5000 years old it is rather remarkable that we know how it developed. Can we look at this drift away from the image (how Pound) as a moving away from the doodle into logic?

The cuneiform script began as pictographic writing; each sign was a picture of one or more concrete objects and represented a word whose meaning was identical with, or closely related to, the object pictured. The defects of a system of this type are obvious; the complicated form of the signs and the huge number of signs required, render it too unwieldy for practical use. The Sumerian scribes overcame the first difficulty by gradually simplifying and conventionalizing the form of the signs until their pictographic origin was no longer apparent. As for the second difficulty, they reduced the number of signs and kept it within effective limits by resorting to various helpful devices. The most significant of these consisted of Substituting phonetic for ideographic values.

No. 11 is a picture of a water stream; it represents the word a, "water." This sign furnishes an excellent illustration of the process by which the Sumerian script gradually lost its unwieldy pictographic character and became a phonetic system of writing. As just said, the sign no. 11 was used primarily to represent the Sumerian word a, "water." However, the Sumerians had another word a which was identical in pronunciation with the word a, "water," but which had the entirely different meaning "in." Now this word "in" is a word denoting relationship and stands for a concept which is very difficult to express pictographically. To the originators of the Sumerian script then came the ingenious idea that instead of trying to invent a necessarily highly complicated picture-sign to represent the word "in," they could use the sign for a, "water," since both words sounded exactly alike. In other words, the early Sumerian scribes came to realize that a sign originally belonging to a given word could be used for another word with an altogether unrelated meaning, if the sound of the two words were identical. With the gradual spreading of this practice, the Sumerian script lost its pictographic character and tended more and more to become a purely phonetic script.

Human Faces are Racist Caricatures
Observed: 12.May.2008

Oh my... the hatred of man. From Magin Berenguer's 'Prehistoric Man and His Art'. Notice the great non-human looking pictures, are these Walt Disney's?

This series of portraits of bestial individuals cannot represent Cromagnon man. Nevertheless, the portraits are his work. In my opinion, Cromagnon man created these contemptuous and cruelly satirical representations to allude to individuals of another race with which he shared the lands of ancient Europe. [The Neanderthal!]

To Us Egocentric Men
Observed: 12.May.2008

Three smackers bought me the best book on rock art so far found. Published in 1973. It's by Magin Berenguer who has some pretty wild ideas.

To us egocentric twentieth-century man, everything that comes before historic man does not form part of our past; everything before him seems to be nebulous and unverifiable. However, prehistoric man, even at the initial movement of chance towards his more complete development in the palaeolithic, was endowed with faculties which are startling even today, if we try to envisage and understand certain details of his life. Prehistoric man is usually pictures as a shaggy creature wearing clumsily sewn skins, with a rudimentary brain - an intermediate stage between man and monkey. The reason for all this being that we judge our historical advances as if we started from zero. Thus the man in the street thinks that western culture has been developing only from Miletus to the present day to culminate in the magnificent specimen of man who is capable of splitting the atom and landing on the moon. He forgets, in his arrogance, that this present stage of superiority and intellectual development has an accumulated sediment from nearly one million years ago and of some 100.000 years in particular during which man did bot start from zero either, because he lived through that prologue when the spark of intellect strove to constitute what was 'really' man. The discovery and mastery of fire can be considered as important an advance as the discovery of atomic energy.