alex cruse

Soundwave ((7)) Architecture

DROUGHT SPA (kevin and me) will be performing as part of the Soundwave ((7)) “Re-Structured Futures” program. The night will also feature Surabhi Saraf, and Nonagon with Colin Evoy Sebestyen, yay.

28 May 2016 / 2 notes

did the photography for the new L'eoscombu Couti release (”Five Cambridge Utilities,” bottom-right) on Constellation Tatsu.

available for listening/purchasing here

24 May 2016 / 1 note

on Chantal Akerman’s NO HOME MOVIE

This is not a movie about home, or it is a movie about no homes.

At a certain height, wind is endless, until air disappears completely. Perverse Saussurean twist: Akerman’s tree signifies an attenuated signal–birthed out of some meteorological semaphore – we can’t see it, only hear it. Early on, the film instructs us to listen.

Language is labor. Care is labor. So much of care requires the labor of language: its banal logistics (are you hungry? are you cold? do you want to lie down?) still carry a necessary weight.

The body must compensate for a lack of physical fortitude through whatever language it is capable of. One’s presence is reaffirmed through all manners of speech.

“There is no distance,” Chantal declares to her mother Natalia, a Holocaust survivor, via Skype.

So there can be no ‘home’. We are merely everywhere, endlessly. A glitch from the present hereafter. Here, the camera (whether film or web) operates as a dormant household object. It holds vigil over many deaths. A subversion of Berger’s “men act, women appear.” There is only one male physically present (briefly) in this film, yet everyone is acting. Women are a layered collection of languages, histories, pregnancies, secrets, jokes; the camera just stands there.

“There is no distance.” We travel without papers. Orchids atop a table; inlaid teak cabinet; Ming vase; gaudy, confused artifacts that meld from their respective points in the global supply chain. By a sunlit window, a Kentia palm quietly synthesizes chlorophyll – subsuming a chemistry from the outside to sustain the life of an ornamental object. Framed family photographs, their analogs, anchor the rooms’ corners and reflect the project’s technicity back to the filmmaker. After a storm, panes of light warm rattan shades – a frozen moment, like warped electricity immediately before a CRT TV screen goes dark.

One scene sees Natalia remarking on her eyes’ loss of pigmentation. Once brown, now green. A decreasing of the self with age, as though microns lifted from the shell; our color profiles begin to shift, back to our species primordial version: “the earliest human ancestor species to develop photosensitivity were aquatic, and only two specific wavelength ranges of electromagnetic radiation — blue and green visible light — can travel through water” (1). Blue, like LOx (liquid oxygen.)

In a later scene, she is gasping for air as she eats, in the space of speech, liquid breathing. Chantal also includes an image of her shadow transposed upon a body of water. The substrate floats on its palette while genetic trauma shifts its outlines. Engulfs it.

Exhange, in Spanish, between Chantal and housekeeper. Clipped, cute discourse, lexical surface-level. Racialization of care-work is underpinned by linguistic supremacy of their employers. French is the language of the director, the household – we know whose (not) home movie this is. Earlier in the day i had learned that trabajo (in English, the first-person indicative form of trabajar, or, simply, “job”) may be etymologically linked to the tripalium, a torture device comprised of three stakes. Past present future.
This word is also the root of “travel”.

Pastoral landscapes appear as reality-simulators. She spends full minutes of the film on these flat vignettes; transit of exegesis. Dunes, plains, trees. Recoding the technology of our eyes to adroitly experience tedium as a part of passage, an extension of the self.

Back at home, a violent glaucoma of the lens. The chalcedonic light bleaches everything. A chaise lounge upends. Home dissolves.

1. Pamela Rosenkranz, “Jen, Jeans, and Genes”.

23 May 2016 / 2 notes

excerpts from “Weaponizing Sickness: Gendered Illness, Theory, and Capital” – publication TBA in a collection of essays on the Post-Crisis Militant Word, edited by Brian Ang.

22 May 2016 / 1 note

22 May 2016 / 2 notes

“SMALL IS HUGE”

taking their lives into my eyes; like god would plan this family; a frisson as his throat intakes light yellow tainted water; suhr’s gone but emanuel is still around; but also a little bit less Here; no excitement just nervous pinprick as trends spike and tick as sight and comprehension dissolves like saburo murakami’s augmented figure-made-hole passing through endless dilated paper surfaces, all one intensely somatic experience; an Actionist; an accumulated biogovernment of techniques; a woman is dead. count the number of times that her body is framed by property. objects are never not more alive.

death confirms that the chief’s role has been made too legible; plane of immanence: minor depressed K-wave cycle of state violence; accords a perverse collective faith to acts of Removal; really that absence is just a displacement of someone else’s air. the law does not behave legally (1). humans may not exist but jobs still do. how to temporally divest–and with cursors, and with eyes. maintaining superficial demarcation of fucked pneumatic zones.

“The past several months have shaken and divided our City, and tensions between law enforcement and communities of color that have simmered for too many years havecome into full view.” thinking on column in most recent SFAQ (2); the aesthetics of Black Cool; simmering as ‘heat’ is applied; the law brings heat, as it is friction; cool is slowing down; cool is Solidifying; cool is throwing shade, not full view; cool is looking away. cool is not what is in view but what lies beyond that. horizons are imperialism, still.

In 2012, Wells Fargo paid a $175 million settlement due to its brokers’ discrimination against Black and Hispanic families during the housing boom. Today US Black Chambers, Inc. in Washington, DC hosted a WF-sponsored presentation (conference day-rate: $200) entitled “From Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, the Movement Continues.” the bloc; the movement; entrepreneurial human capital; powerpoint as coda of an unnecessarily long century; the decorative tracery of neoliberalism plaiting the streets which are systematically emptied, then violently reclaimed. the Young Entrepreneur day-rate was $75 and did not include lunch.

(1) Nina Power. “Althusser: The Law, The Cop, and The Subject”. Los Angeles Review of Books. 15 May 2016.

(2) Sampada Aranke. “Style Wars: Shades Of Cool”. San Francisco Arts Quarterly. May 2016.

20 May 2016 / 1 note

i am not yet ready to be an “i”
halfway sentient lungs lunging
into a sepulchral mood, sifting and leaking
protein isolate;
just a smear of after-body on a carbon slab.
economically jamming prehensile attache, gripping
atavism, unflinching
release,
the recoil from boiled quartz
a vacant scalded public death
grip of the never
having been born.
pulling the blonde apart
index of anorexia liquids
parody of idiot voice
terror emblem of negentropy
dyads of certain organs

scoring the contours of chemical deposits,
the shape of a pocket.
tongues replaced by the jokes that hold them, or
wages in the gaps of bones, like rashes
full of smoke.
a degenerate square. a mouthful.

19 May 2016 / 18 notes

notes from my talk at LESS SPACE Gallery

SPACE:
What is chosen to appear (by outside forces)–what has agency, what has a calculable position in space. What it means to constantly map and reference a digitized copy of earth using ourselves, our homes, our time-specific locations, as the point of origin. It’s a form of narcissist cartography, as it is a relay between the self and these capitalist institutions, whereby one’s conception of one’s Self is either produced or reinforced.
Spatial representations are important to me, as well, because of how sites of actionable resistance are relentlessly dissolving into one huge Ellis Acted casualty. That being, what is missing from our maps. With these N-grams [IMAGE], this logic is extended to the level of language: what dictates how books are evaluated, what are the politics behind the digitization of this corpus, and how are projects like Google Books displacing indigenous forms of knowing and making.

IMAGING:
Imaging is merely a cultural consensus on how to represent one’s world. ocular snares like perspectivalism (that also lend themselves to linear chronologies, which in turn promote a proprietary logic governing who exactly can devise and decode that timeline–who ‘owns’ history, and who gets to be traumatized by it) or '3D’ imaging, when really everything is being transmitted via a flat surface. The work is literally dematerialized (we are taking matter 'out’ of it every time we reproduce an image; lossiness is inherent) and even its tonal content varies depending on the device upon which it is viewed. There is nothing static or reliable about the transmission of imagery–even the apparati, such as the Sephora/Pantone charts [IMAGE]–that we disseminate in order to totalize our knowledge around a concept, such as color. The only constant is our implicit appeal to objectivity (see: Ngrams, google earth, the diagram). The renderings of EXIF data are, then, a tongue-in-cheek exercise to 'spatialize’ that which has no material dimension…to require absurd, excess technologization of something removed from an expectation of visibility.

We can also see this in graphic design trends, wherein artists peel back the layer of mystique that would otherwise furtively blend into a formal 'art object’–an intentional error with the spellcheck markings in full view, or Photoshop’s immediately recognizable grid of grayscale inversely represents a _lack_ of image–and the image is perversely constitutive of that lack. These methods reveal not only the technology undergirding the artist’s idea or objective, but it is also speaks to a repetition and sameness–a depressing technical hegemony–within the field of computerized design. Such tropes of abjection are seductive to me *not* because they enable an ironic distance between the work and its cultural milieu, but because, in this hyper-materialist/capitalist moment, they reify histories of the creative labor between subjects and objects.
This also somewhat relates to the degradation of flags [IMAGE], because their meanings are also bound up in their material signification (which is abstracted from an actor’s real labor) and although the actual origins are still locatable in this remixed mess, i am interested in that additional layer of abstraction, by which any salient 'meaning’ or historical context is retained via an inscription from the 'artist’.

Writing on the “solution to the problem of how to make art that is both critical yet participatory,” Warren Lloyd introduced the term 'sobject’ in 2013:

Sobject explores subject/object relations conditioned by a culture of surveillance and visibility, sobject’s conclusions are really premises in which visibility, artifice and image are often imbued with non-reciprocated interests. These aestheticized forms traffic under objectivity on their way to public fact. Sobject asserts that it is subjective participation and critical collaboration between art and science that can `re-cord’ ports and `re-port’ visual `re-cords.’

These works fall within sobject’s rubric, as they form categories of mutant forms of objectivity: they are snapshots of a recursive game that requires a pre-existing, Othered, externalized technical profile (you exist as a swatch, a message, a coordinate) before you can even begin parsing the different faces and registers of your data selfie.

17 May 2016