second-memory

I AM ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT FORGETTING THINGS

 The words forming in my mind are sounds, listening forward in time. I sense and feel you: the reader, listening as well (Ione's introduction to Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros)      



  

Sunday 26th October 2025 

two new words I learnt (from reading Joanna Walsh and Stephanie La Cava respectively) both have similar endings
SKEUMORPHIC / SOPHOMORPHIC

Skeumorphic is a design style where digital objects imitate their real-world counterparts, despite it being almost entirely performative often (like when a voice recorder app is designer with an interface that imitates a tape recorder)
Sophomoric: like a 'sophomore' student, doing with something with overconfidence and conceit but poorly informed and immature
Skeumorphic!!! fantastic, definitely favourite of the two


Saturday 25th October 2025

New top favourite film: The Future (Miranda July)

saving the link to this pdf to read: https://monoskop.org/images/2/20/Russell_Legacy_Glitch_Feminism_A_Manifesto_2020.pdf

 and this

I Don't Do Innocents (A Radio Play in One Act)  by Anne Carson

Thursday 23nd October 2025


Ideas for more radio plays other than one I'm working on now: Taking text excerpts from dystopisan Terma and Conditions, like spotifies new ones that refer to all technologies made now and unkown to us in perpetuity etc. . .
slightly bizarre guided meditations? Riffing on more earnest ones with frequencies

Yesterday I was checking out the market stability of Solana the cryptocurrency (because of NinaProtocol) and thought, how did I get here because 3 years ago I was just obsessed with books about ecology and nothing else and had this incredibly blinkered-gendered view of tech interests like blockchain etc. .  I was just trying to trace back in my head when my interest in ecology switched over to an interest in cyberspace / internet studies. Because 3 years ago at University my primary interest was ecology, fueled by a growing anxiety about climate change which I no longer experience. I then became fascinated with map-making and specialised my dissertation in cartography (specifically how it related to religious attitudes around land enclosure in England and rural dispossession in the 18th century). The worst drinking game in the world would be to read my undergrad dissertation and to take a shot everytime I wrote  'colonial cartographic imagination'). Then I fell in love with a lecture by Tim Ingold the geographer and his ideas around the arbitrary fiction of 'originality', and I applied his framework to my essays on digital image reproduction. My interest in cartography became an interest in information design generally, my (highly spiritual) interest in ecological interconnectivity became an (obsessive internet-related) interest in system design and I think from there, I just became increasingly bored with writing about the more-than-human  - which I began to feel was circumlocutory almost spiritual sort of pseudo-academic therapy posing as analysis. I lost interest in writers like Donna Harraway because it felt so out of touch with places of actionable change, like contemporary politics. And I literally couldn't bear to be recommended the Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes one more time.   

 In the end I'd rather just go for a swim in a lake than read that stuff now (might change my mind) . Initially I was obsessed with the ecological impact of the internet (data centres . . Gerry McGovern the Irish speaker. . .ethnographies of data centres) and then I realised that the writing about the internet was more exciting than anything else I was reading. I still have books purely about ecology on my shelf that I may never get round to reading.   


Wednesday 22nd October 2025

AUDIO / RADIO SHOWS I HAVE LISTENED TO THAT ARE INCREDIBLE 
https://extra.resonance.fm/episodes/teaching-computers-to-love-ruth-b-rupp-sienna-mustafa-r-2023-12-24#:~:text=Louis%20Grace%20presents%20Teaching%20Computers,20%20minute%20body%20of%20work.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000t4t3

before bed: https://www.rinse.fm/episodes/sound-sanctuary-16-08-2025-0900

also Sam Cottington's Phone Plays, still thinking about them and now about to read I don't do innocents A radio play in one act by Anne Carson

throwback to when the barbican sound exhibition turned a bedside fan into a rudimentary instrument and called it a modern piece of 'folk' music



Monday 20th October 2025


Miranda July's film The Future ; artists Eva and Franco Mattes ; this book, Library of Artistic Print on Demand, post- digital publishing in times of Platform Capitalism, 

If we listened carefully 
We could hear these little rules in out gut 
They worked together, naturally decentralized 
Their form was spread out, unlike ours used to be
They knew how to get us to spread their families 
Making us sneeze, or cough, or rub our nose
Or even give a kiss 
Thriving in extreme conditions
They proved to be more fit
Better at taking the next leap 
There was no doubt they could travel through space 
Distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids and spacecraft 
They might carry something of us as a parasite to the future 
Here at the edge of the world
We're calling you to join us, Ancestor+
In the Communion of Open Pores
Existence is no longer enclosed in the body 
We are not a collection of individuals 
But a macroorganism living as an ecosystem 
We are completely outside ourselves 
And the world is completely inside us
excerpt from Holly Herndon's song 'Extreme Love'

 
Wednesday 15th October 2025

William Basinski's tape digitisation in 2001 - The Disintegration Loops. Return to this
 

"Fisher's nostalgia for a time when culture had 'the ability to grasp and articulate the present' is the longing for an era whose vaunted cultural innovation excluded most of us. nothing much happened to most of the people I knew who were around in those exciting times. Excluded by geographical location, limited finances, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, they were more often culturally united by the opportunity to consume top-down aesthetic products: the same TV or radio show available on the same day, at the same time for everyone. If internet culture is more niche because it addresses a greater range of perspectives, including inauthentic reworkings of the past created with greater inclusivity in mind, this is not something to be mourned" Joanna Walsh Amateurs p75


 Tuesday 14th October 2025

I have just applied to be a founding member of the new music platform SUBVERT. Fingers crossed. 

Monday 13th October 2025


Gone back to using companion phones (a brick phone with hotspot and an iPod) after using a smartphone (albeit with a limiting OS by Balance Phone that makes it into a 'digitally minimal' phone', for the last 3 months. I went back to a smartphone after having several instances where I got completely lost or at one point went to the wrong location in London and struggled to navigate myself back or couldn't buy tickets for a last minute event. These instances all happened in the same week and it felt like a sign. But after going back to a smartphone following 2 / 3 years on a nokia brick, I can confidently say it is not worth it. 


Incredible music from this week (mostly I think new releases?) Midland's Fragments (just got on CD). TOXE2 by TOXE. Musicality by Haloplus+ and I've just discovered Tom Rowland's 2013 EP Nothing But Pleasure which is some of my favourite electronic music I've heard all year with the most fantastic surreal lead synth parts. I also have finalised a process for producing songs. I started properly producing with DAWs this year and weirdly the hardest part has been adapting how I write music with software as supposed to just voice and guitar / flute / piano. My initial instinct was to write serially, to record tracks minute by minute as I wrote them (i.e: recording a first verse before I'd written a chorus / finished the song structurally). But this completely disrupted my thinking process. Generally I live with a song in my head and only in my head for a week or so, and I sing it to myself (usually on my bike cycling around London or to open photobooth recordings), reiterating it constantly until the lyrics / melody and structure are synchronous and whole. With my most recent song I tried something different. I didn't record any vocals into the DAW until it was whole in my head and I'd done some good thinking / cycling / singing time. Meanwhile I 'pencilled' in all the instrumentals, first working with loops until I had the structure decided. I essentially used this as a kareoke track that I could change until the vocals were finished, marking out lyrics in word docx with the bar numbers according to the logic project like '65 - 93'. And now, the song structure is finished, the instrumentals are all pencilled in and I can start properly sculpting the production and recording in the vocals. It was much too confusing to get to a granular production level before I had the vocals done because they are such different levels of working for me.  




Sunday 13th October 2025

"There is nothing more amateur than the pursuit of the professional - as an aesthetic" (Joanna Walsh, 'Amateurs! How We built Internet Culture and Why it matters'. I haven't finished the book yet but the way she writes about Walter Benjamin is great. Benjamin is interesting but slightly irrelevant in a lot of art writing at the moment. There's a lot of texts online that perform his relevance in a critically uninteresting way, just to signal look I know who Walter Benjamin is. People writing something like 'look how this is nothing like the aura', or just using 'aura' as a stand in for a moving experience of art, without addressing any wider lines of argument by Benjamin.It's a type of content that wants to communicate nothing but its own legitimacy. I also think that extensively framing online art through pre-internet thinkers / writers requires proper justification.  

Both Walsh and Carlos Bramanti ( Conspiratorial Design by Carlos Bramanti ) are writing about the aesthetic of visual complexity in different terms. Walsh: Much of the art (Claire) Bishop describes plays with volume, repetition and space to provoke a feeling of overload. What Bishop calls the 'spectator' is no longer expected to process all this information. Spectatorship stops being an activity and becomes, itself, a performance.

Bramanti addresses the same phenomenon, in the context of conspiracy theory images - those red string all over a wall sized corkboard esque diagrams that show the links between government kabals and ur grandma's health problems etc. . . . Bramanti says that these diagrammatic sprawls populating boards like 4chan aren't actually intended to be understood, but rather to create a visual impression of complexity. It's a visual rhetorical device, with a desire to convince the viewer that the author has undergone a systematic and rigorous research process to produce it. 

  Here is where I disagree with Walsh. The spectatorship of complex graphic imagery that features in research based art as well as in the webbed networks of conspiratorial design, is not performative (at the very least performative is defo not the right word for it), it is just directed at something other than what the image, and often viewer, pretends. As Bramanti argues, there develops an aesthetic effect (affect?) of complexity itself that requires witnessing in order to come into effect. (What was that statistic that Dan told me? That most maps in history haven't been used to navigate geography. . .) The complexity in these instances is seeking to signal something and just because that something isn't the transmission of synthesised information like the image pretends, it doesn't mean that the spectatorship is performative exactly. It's kind of like when I post pieces of text to my instagram story. On one level, I'm digesting my experience of pleasure through the 'surplus pleasure' of UGC (user generated content): I saw something I liked so needed other people to literally like it. But on the other hand, especially whenever I've posted whole pages from a book - which I don't really do anymore, wow I'm such a good person - if I'm honest, I knew that no one was reading that. The text wasn't intended to be read, it was intended to convey a general impression of intellect? curiosity? in any case, a hopefully attractive aspect of my character. But in these cases, spectatorship is almost even more important, because without it, the doublespeak of virtue signalling is lost. The creator is maybe performative but the pretend-earnestness of the viewer is definitely not. When graphic doublespeak for diagrams / text is present in this way, the witness is paramount, arguably more so than with exhibition-space gallery art, and 100% in the case of online UGC.

I suppose this logic of these encounter then splits people into those who understand and those who don't. But it doesn't change who partakes. My question now is, does a knowingness that you are called to witness complexity rather than digest or synthesise it, actually change the encounter in a meaningful way? I find it hard to believe anyone is reading this but I'm enjoying myself.

.
 

Saturday 12th October 2025

I've been reading about Nancy Holt's exhibitions, but have never seen her work in the flesh. She said 'how can we become agents and not agressors to the planet'. Curators are constantly describing her interest in 'systems', electrical, astronomical etc . . . My favourite piece I've seen of hers (only on the internet) is Electrical Systems. There is a walkthrough of its exhibition on youtube. The piece bypasses the violence of the symbolic imagination by transposing existing systems rather than striving solely to represent them. It's not interested in invention or creation in a linear or industrial way, but more in attention's maintenance towards the right things.

Pauline Oliveros's book Quantum Listening . It's a tiny A6 volume. I bought it in the Barbican shop with my friend Naomi because I'd learned about her work in the documentary Sisters With Transistors (slightly terrible name but wonderful film with a lovely serial / chapteresque structure about women and trans women pioneering early electronic music). The first half (introductions by IONE and Laurie Anderon ) is much better than Oliveros' writing, which is wishy washy in trying to convey a theory of listening that evidently cannot be put into words. Anderson include that she works with an AI program whose algorithms are based on everything she has ever published / recorded. 'So it speaks with my vocabulary, syntax and, let's say, style'. In 2022 she entered Oliveros line 'In the 21st century we will be grappling with who we are as extended humans' and the program responded with this:

By the end of the movie, we'll all be sitting around in the twenty-first century with our heads as low as we can get. Where are we? Are we out of cigarettes? Or do we just smoke once and leave it at that? In the twentieth century, there were more humans on the streets than animals. Now, it's not so surprising: they're here all the time. Why don't you listen to me? I'm the only one left who knows how to talk to God. You know, I should really get a studio - do some commercials. You know it would be so much fun. They'd be able to play so many different songs - right down to who is pissing and who is tickling or brushing or blowing a fuse or getting their shoes laid or going to the store. Or just standing around watching the world go by. And who are these people - these grappling hooks? Human beings do things no one else can do. For instance, they go to war. and then come out the other side. The computer says. No And I say: Well, where do you want to go? Or what's for supper? Get me back down to the sea. Can't you see I'm full of human beings?

This wonderful , if slightly ominously sound-designed, episode from Montez Press Radio on the architecture and building landscape of New York through the lens of 9/11 'Still Falling' It's a radio version of a text by Joel Dean I was fascinated by the discussion about skyscrapers - the mirrored glass coatings of financial district architecture, that has 'presence without content', revealing nothing of the interior, merely reflecting the viewer back to themselves. Described as an aesthetic of 'finance, privacy and spectacle' / 'an example of interface'. It made me think about the way that skyscrapers' aesthetics so effectively displace the material frontier of their accumulation from their visual representations of it. The representation: how they reach into the sky in the name of progress. The displacement: the urban areas in their radius that suffer the inequalities subtexted in the resources required for these projects. I suppose there are lots of examples of this, but fewer that have such a profound and imposing graphic rhetoric.




This album: TOXE2 by TOXE