Na sequência da aula de ontem, ficam aqui alguns textos que podem ser úteis como introdução às apresentações da próxima segunda-feira:

Guy Debord, “Théorie de la dérive” (no original francês)
http://www.larevuedesressources.org/article.php3?id_article=38
Publié dans Les lèvres nues n° 9, décembre 1956 et Internationale Situationniste n° 2, décembre 1958.

(tradução para inglês: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm)

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Guy Debord, ”Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine”
http://www.larevuedesressources.org/article.php3?id_article=33
Publié dans Les lèvres nues n° 6, Bruxelles, 1955.
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Ouytros textos introdutórios e acessíveis na net:
Cristian Nolle, “Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy Debord & Asger Jorn from 1957-1959″
http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html

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http://www.vitruvius.com.br/arquitextos/arq027/arq027_02.asp
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Ver também o seguinte livro na Biblioteca:

http://catalogo.up.pt:80/F/V4G284UANSP4JMRY5UY1Q2UIRS7R68BEP8X3XP8IGFDM142JMG-08113?func=short-0&set_number=358908

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ou:

Mark WIGLEY, Catherine de ZEGHER (ed.). The Activist Drawing. Retracing Situacoinist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond. The Drawing Center, New York/ MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001.

[este livro existe na biblioteca da FBAUP. COTA:

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Um texto de Eyal Weizman, como complemento ao artigo da MONO:
http://www.virose.pt/ml/alunos/docs/Weizman_lethal_theory.pdf

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Confessions of an English Opium Eater, de Thomas de Quincey (1822)

http://supervert.com/elibrary/thomas_de_quincey

http://www.lizthroop.com/KraussGrid.pdf

Color versions of some images in this essay.

LABELLE, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, New York/London, Continuum, 2006,
(versão pdf com algumas páginas em falta):
http://www.virose.pt/ml/alunos/docs/LaBelle_Brandon-Background_Noise_some_pages_mising.pdf

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A propósito de CAGE

KOTZ, Liz, “Post-Cagean Aesthetics and the Event Score”,  October no. 95, 2001.

http://www.virose.pt/ml/alunos/docs/KOTZ_Post-Cagean_Aesthetics_and_the_Event_Score.pdf

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CASCONE, Kim (2000), “The Aesthetics of Failure: «Post-Digital» Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”, Computer Music Journal, 24: 4, Winter 2000, pp. 12-18.
http://www.virose.pt/ml/alunos/docs/CMJ24_4Cascone.pdf

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LICHT, Alan, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, New York, Rizzoli, 2007 [mais informação <http://www.rizzoliusa.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780847829699>]

(a título de introdução, o primeiro capítulo do livro, intitulado justamente “What is Sound Art?”, pode ser descarregado aqui)

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Obras Escolhidas de Walter Benjamin ( 7 volumes a editar)

Tradução de João Barrento edição Assírio & Alvim (Lisboa). Todos os volumes são acompanhados comentários, variantes dos textos, excertos de cartas, anotações diversas e outros elementos para uma completa compreensão dos textos traduzidos. Os primeiros volumes acabam de ser editados:

3º Volume: A Modernidade. Este volume estará dividido em duas partes. A primeira intitulada “Charles Baudelaire, Um Poeta na Época do Capitalismo Avançado” inclui: “A Paris do Segundo Império em Charles Baudelaire”, “Sobre alguns motivos em Baudelaire, Parque Central”, “Notas sobre os “Quadros Parisienses” de Baudelaire” e o “Regresso do “Flanêur”". A segunda parte é dedicada à “Estética e Sociologia da Arte” e inclui: “A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica (3ª versão)”, “Pequena história da fotografia”, “Fragmentos estéticos: pintura e artes gráficas; sobre a pintura, ou sinal e mancha”, “O autor como produtor”, “Artigos e ensaios de política cultural” e “Carta de Paris (2): pintura e fotografia”.

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Ao que pude saber, o livro do Jean Clair está há muito esgotado. Encontrei uma cópia à venda por quase 200 €! <http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/2851081209/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&qid=1258474098&sr=8-1&condition=used>

No entanto, também consegui descobrir que o texto é retomado na íntegra num outro livro de Jean Clair, intitulado Sur Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, 335 p.

“On signalera plus précisément ici le dernier chapitre de l’ouvrage, intitulé “La boîte magique”, reprenant le contenu de l’ouvrage publié en 1977 sous le titre plus explicite de Duchamp et la photographie – essai sur le primat technique dans l’évolution d’une oeuvre, depuis longtemps épuisé.”

Este livro já é mais fácil de encontrar e muito mais barato…

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1970 Expanded Media Editions

http://www.virose.pt/bunya/burroughs.html

[Também existe versão portuguesa (ver na biblioteca da FBAUP>>>)]

FEEDBACK FROM WATERGATE TO THE GARDEN OF EDEN 

In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh … human flesh … In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future generations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING. Korzybski, who developed the concept of General Semantics, the meaning of meaning, has pointed out this human distinction and described man as ‘the time binding animal’. He can make information toother men over a length of time through writing. Animals talk. They dont write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannotwrite a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader’s Digestwith tactics for ganging up on digs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes. It is doubtful if the spoke word would have ever evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word ist inferential in HUMAN speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge along in an aural tradition BECAUSE THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TIME BINDING COULD NOT OCCUR WITHOUTTHE WRITTEN WORD. The written word is of course a symbol for something and in the case of hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbolfor itself that is a picture of what it represents. This is not true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no pictorial resemblance toa leg. It refers to the SPOKEN word leg. so we may forget that a written wordIS AN IMAGE and that written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING PICTURES. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate workingdefinition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal units that refer to thispictorial sequence. And what then is the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible.The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a stateof stable symbiosis with the host…(This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)

I quote from MECHANISMS OF VIRUS INFECTION edited by Mr. Wilson Smith, a scientist who really thinks about his subject instead of merely correlating data. He thinks, that is, about the ultimate intentions of the virus organism. In an article entitled VIRUS ADAPTIBILITY AND HOST RESISTANCE by G. Belyavin, speculations as to the biologic goal of the virus species are enlarged … ‘Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependant upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitizefor their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living…”

And I may add the environment necessary for any cellular structure they could parasitize to survive. Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis will any human creature survive? Is the white race, which would seem to be more under virus control than the black yellow and brown races, giving anyindication of workable symbiosis?

‘Taking the virus eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates in cells without in any way disturbing their normal metabolism.’

This has been suggested as the ideal biological situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving…’

Would you offer violence to a well intentioned virus on its slowroad to symbiosis?

‘It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign
equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected OR THAT IT WOULD NECESSARILY BE RECOGNIZED AS A VIRUS. I suggest that the word is just such a virus. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forth an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls BIOLOGIC MUTATION effecting the biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. One reason that apes cant talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alteration in inner throat structure were occasioned by virus illness … And not occasion … This illness may well have had a high rate of mortality but some female apes must have survived to give birth to the wunder kindern. The illness perhaps assumed a more malignant form in the male because of his more developed and rigid muscular structure causing death through strangulation and vertebral fracture. Since the virus in both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation of sex centers in thebrain the males impregnated the females in their death spasms and thealtered throat structured was genetically conveyed. Having effectedalterations in the host’s structure that resulted in a new species specially designed to accomodate the virus the virus can now replicate without disturbing the metabolism and without being recognized a virus. A symbioticrelationship has now been established and the virus is now built into the host which sees the virus as a useful part of itself. This successful virus can now sneer at gangster viruses like small pox and turn them in to The Pasteur Institute. Ach jungen what a scene is here … the apes are moultingfur steaming off them females whimpering and slobbering over dying males likecows with aftosa and so a stink musky sweet rotten metal stink of theforbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden…

The creation of Adam, the Garden of Eden, Adam’s fainting spell during which God made Eva from his body, the forbidden fruit which was of course knowledge of the whole stinking thing and might be termed the first Watergate scandal, all slots neatly into Doc Steinplatz’s theory. And this was a white myth. This leads to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specially malignant and lethal form in the white race. What then accounts for this special malignance of the white word virus? Most likely a virus mutation occasioned by radioactivity .All animal and insect experiments so far carried out indicate that mutations resulting from radiation are unfavorable that is not conductive to survival. These experiments relate to the effects of radiation on autonomous creatures. What about the effects of radiation on viruses? Are there not perhaps some so classified and secret experiments hiding behind national security? Virus mutations occasioned by radiation may be quite favorable for the virus. And such a virus might well violate the equilibrium with the host cell. So now with the tape recorders of Watergate and the fall out from atomic testing the virus stirs uneasy in all your white throats. It was a killer virus once. It could become a killer virus again and rage through cities of the world like a topping forest fire.

“It is the beginning of the end.” That was the reaction of a science attache’ at one of Washington’s major embassies to reports that a synthetic gene particle had been produced in the laboratory …”Any small country can now make a virus for which there is no cure. It would only take a smalllaboratory. Any small country with good biochemists could do it.”

And presumeably any big country could do it quicker and better.

In the Electronic Revolution I advance the theory that a virus IS a very small unit of word and image. I have suggested now such units can be biologically activated to act as communicable virus strains. Letus start with three tape recorders in The Garden of Eden. Tape recorder 1 is Adam. Tape recorder 2 is Eve. Tape recorder 3 is God, who deteriorated afterHiroshima into the Ugly American. Or to return to our primevil scene: Taperecorder 1 is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangleshim. Tape recorder 2 is a cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder 3 is DEATH.

Steinplatz postulates that the virus of biologic mutation, which he calls Virus B-23, is contained in the word. Unloosing this virus from the word could be more deadly that loosing the power of the atom. Because all hate all pain all fear all lust is contained in the word. Perhaps we have here in these three tape recorders the virus of biologic mutation which once gaveus the word and has hidden behind the word ever since. And perhaps three tape recorders and some good biochemists can unloose this force. Now look at these three tape recorders and think in terms of the virus particle. Recorder 1 is the perspective host for an influenza virus. Tape recorder number 2 is the means by which the virus gains access to the host, in the case of a flu virus by disolving a hole in cells of the host’s respiratory tract. Number 2, having gained access to the cell. leads in number 3. Number 3 is the effect produced in the host by the virus: coughing, fever, inflamation. NUMBER 3 IS OBJECTIVE REALITY PRODUCED BY THE VIRUS IN THE HOST Viruses make themselves real. It’s a way viruses have. We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder 1 we will record speeches and conversation carefully editing in stammers mispronouncing, inept phrases … the worst number 1 can assemble. now on tape recorder 2 we will make so a love tape by bugging his bed room. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it in with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say the senator’s teen age daughter. On tape recorder 3 we will record hateful disapproving voices and splice the three recordings together at very short intervals and play them back to the senator and his constituents. This cutting and playback can be very complex involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders but THE BASIC PRINCIPAL IS SIMPLY SPLICING SEX TAPE AND DISAPPROVAL TAPES IN TOGETHER. Once the associations lines are established they are activated every time the senator’s speech centres are activated which is all the time heavan help that sorry bestard if anything happened to his big mouth. So his teen age daughter crawls all over him while Texas rangers and decent church going women rise from tape recorder 3 screaming “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN FRONT OF DECENT PEOPLE.”

The teen age daughter is just a refinement. Basically all you need is sex recordings on number 2 and hostile recordings on number 3. With this simple formula any CIA sonofabitch can become God that is tape tape recorder 3. Notice the emphasis on sexual material in burglaries and bugging in the Watergate cess pool …Bugging Martin Luther King’s bed room …Kiss Kiss bang bang …A deadly assassination technique. At the very least sure to unerve and put opponents at a disadvantage. So the real scandal of Watergate that has not come out yet is not that bed rooms were bugged and the offices of psychiatrists ransaked but THE PRECISE USE THAT WAS AND IS MADE OF THIS SEXUAL MATERIAL. This formula works best on a closed circit. If sexual recordings and film are widespread, tolerated and publicaly shown tape recorder 3 losses ist power. Which perhaps explains why the Nixon administration is out to close down set films and reestablish censorship on all films and books. to keep close circit on tape recorder 3.

And this brings us to the subject of SEX. In the words of the late John O’Hara I’m glad you came to me instead of one of those quacks on the top floor …Psychiatrists, priests whatever they call themselves they wantto turn in off and keep tape recorder 3 in business. Let’s turn it on. All you swingers use video cameras and tape recorders to record and photograph your sessions. Now go over the session and pick out the sexiest pieces you know when it really HAPPENS. Reich built a machine with electrodes attached to the penis to measure this orgasm charge. Here is unpleasurable orgasm sagging ominously as tape recorder 3 cuts in. He just made it. And here is a pleasurable orgasm way up on the graph. So take the best of your sessions and invite the nabors to see it. Its the naborly thing to do. Try cutting them in together alternating 24 frames per second. Try slow downs and speed ups.

Build and experiment with orgone accumulators. Its simply a box of any shape or size lined with iron. Your intrepid reporter at age 37 achieved spontaneous orgasm no hands in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr/Texas. It was the small direct application accumulator that did the trick. That’s what every red blooded boy and girl should be doing in their basement work shop. The orgone accumulator could be greatly potentiated by using MAGNETIZED IRON which sends a powerful magnetic field through the body. And small accumulators like ray guns.

There is Two Gun Maggee going off in his pants. The gun falls from his hand. Quick as he was he was not quick enough.

For a small directional accumulator obtain six powerful magnets. Arrange your magnetized squares so they form a box. In one end of the box drill a hole and insert an iron tube. Now cover the box and tube with any organic material …rubber,leather,cloth. Now train the tube on your privates and the privates of your friends and nabors. Its good for young and old man and beast and is known as SEX. It is also known to have a direct connection with what is known as LIFE. Let’s get St. Paul off our backs and take off the bible belt. And tell tape recorder 3 to cover his own dirty thing. It stinks from the garden of Eden to Watergate.

I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described what then do they do with them?

ANSWER: THEY PLAY THEM BACK ON LOCATION.

They play these recordings back to the target himself is the target is an individual from passing cars and agents that walk by him in the street. They play these recordings back in his naborhood. Finally they play them back in subways, restaurants, air ports and other public places.

PLAYBACK is the essential ingredient.

I have made a number of experiments with street recordings and playback over a period of years and the startling fact emerges THAT YOU DO NOT NEED SEX RECORDINGS OR EVEN DOCTORED TAPES TO PRODUCE EFFECTS BY PLAYBACK. ANY RECORDINGS PLAYED BACK ON LOCATION IN THE MANNER I WILL NOW DESCRIBE CAN PRODUCE EFFECTS. No doubt sexual and doctored tapes would be more powerful. But some of the power in the word is released by simple playback as anyone can verify who will take the time to experiment …I quote from some notes on these playback experiments.

Friday July 28, 1972 …Plan 28 at a glance …First some remarks on the tape recorder experiments started by Ian Sommerville in 196. these involved not only street, pub, party, subway recordings but also PLAYBACK on location. when I returned to London from the States in 1966 he had already accumulated a considerable body of data and developed a technology. He had discovered that playback on location can produce definite effects. Playing backrecordings of an accident can produce another accident. In 1966 I was stayingat the Rushmore Hotel, 11 Trebovir Road, Earl’s Court, and we carried out a number of these operations: street recordings, cut in of other material,playback in the streets …(I recall I had cut in fire engines and whileplaying this tape back in the street fire engines passed.) These experiments were summarized in THE INVISIBLE GENERATION … ( I wonder if anybody but CIA agents read this article or thought of putting these techniques into actual operation) Anybody who carries out similar experiments over a period of time will turn up more ‘coincidences’ than the law of averages allows. The tech can be extended by taking still or moving pictures during playback. I have frequently observed this operation: make recordings and take pictures of some location you wish to discomode or destroy, now play recordings back and take more pictures, will result in accidents, fires, removals. especially the latter The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Center at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 TottenhamCourt Road, where a similar operation was carried out…

Here is a sample operation carried out against The Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street London W1 beginning on August 3, 1972 …Reverse Thursday …Reason for operation was outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisoned cheese cake…

Now to close in on The Moka Bar. Record. Take pictures. Stand around outside. Let them see me. They are seething around in there. The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy haired wife and slack jawed son, the snarling counter man. I have them and they know it.

“You boys have a rep for making trouble. Well come on out and make some. Pull a camera breaking act and I’ll call a Bobby. I gotta right to do what I like in the public street.”

If it came to that I would explain to the policeman that I was taking street recordings and making a documentary of Soho. This was after all London’s First Expresso Bar was it not? I was doing them a favor. Theycouldnt say what both of us knew without being ridiculous…

“He’s not making any documentary. He’s trying to blow up the coffee machine, start a fire in the kitchen, start fights in here, get us a citation from the Board of Health.”

Yes I had them and they knew it. I looked in at the old Prop and smiled as if he would like what I was doing. Playback would come later with more pictures. I took my time and strolled over to the Brewer Street Market where I recorded a three card Monte Game. Now you see it now you dont.

Playback was carried out a number of times with more pictures. Their business fell off. They kept shorter and shorter hours. October 30, 1972 The Moka Bar closed. The location was taken over by The Queens Snack Bar. Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is MY RECORDINGS of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are ACCESS. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is PLAYBACK. Adam experiences shame when his DISCRACEFUL BEHAVIOR IS PLAYED BACK TO HIM BY tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me. And what part do photos take in this operation? Recall what I said earlier about written and sopken word. THE WRITTEN WORD IS AN IMAGE IS A PICTURE . The spoken word could be defined as any verbal units that correspond to these pictures and could be in fact be extended to ANY SOUND UNITS THAT CORRESPONDto to the pictures …Recordings and pictures are tape recorder 2 which is access. Tape recorder 3 is playback and ‘reality’. For example suppose your bathroom and bed room are bugged and rigged with hidden infra red cameras. These pictures and recordings give access. You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience.

Now let us consider the arena of politics and the applications of bugging in this area. Of course any number of recordings are immediately available since politicians make speeches on TV. However, these recordings do not giveaccess. The man who is making a speech is not really there. Consequently more intimate or at least private recordings are needed which is why the Watergate conspirators had to resort to burgulary. A presidential candidate is not a sitting duck like a Moka Bar. He can make any number of recordings of his opponents. So the game is complex and competitive with recordings made by both sides. This leads to more sophisticated techniques the details of which have yet to come out.

The basic operation of recording pictures, more pictures and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems it depends on maintaining a monopoly position. If anybody can be tape recorder 3 then tape recorder 3 loses power. God must be THE GOD.

ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION

In THE INVISIBLE GENERATION first published in IT and in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1966 and reprinted in THE JOB, I consider the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the President’s speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows, through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums, music, traffic down windy streets, across parks and soccer fields. Illusion is a revolutionary weapon:

TO SPREAD RUMORS
Put ten operators with carefully prepared recordings out at rush hour and see how quick the words get around. People don’t know where they heard it but they heard it.

TO DISCREDIT OPPONENTS
Take a recorded Wallace speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic sputterings slobbering drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound effects and play it back in the streets subway stations parks political rallies.

AS A FRONT LINE WEAPON TO PRODUCE AND ESCALATE RIOTS
There is nothing mystical about this operation. Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. RECORDED POLICE WISTLES WILL DRAW COPS. RECORDED GUNSHOTS, AND THEIR GUNS ARE OUT.

“MY GOD, THEY’E KILLING US.”
A guardsman said later: “I heard and saw my buddy go down, his face covered in blood (turned out he’d been hit by a stone from a sling shot) and I thought, well this is it.” BLOODY WEDNESDAY. A DAZED AMERICA COUNTED 23 DEAD AND 32 WOUNDED, 6 CRITICALLY.

Here is a run of the mill, pre-riot situation. Protestors have been urged to demonstrate peacefully, police and guardsmen to exercise restraint. Ten tape recorders strapped under their coats, playback, and record controlled from lapel buttons. They have pre-recorded riot sound effects from Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent/Ohio. If they adjust sound levels of recordings to surrounding sound levels, they will not be detected. Police scuffle with the demonstrators. The operators converge. turn on Chicago record, play back, move on to the next scuffles, record playback, keep moving. Things are hotting up, a cop is down groaning. shrill chorus of recorded pig squeals and parody groans.

Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it’s a lot easier to start trouble that to stop it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon. You’ll observe that the operators are making a cutup as they go. They are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent Ohio with the present soundeffects at random and that is a cutup.

AS A LONG RANGE WEAPON TO SCRAMBLE AND NULLIFY ASSOCIATIONAL LINES PUT DOWN BY MASS MEDIA

The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken.

President Johnson burst into a swank apartment, held three girls at gunpoint, 26 miles north of Saigon yesterday.

you can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder. Consider the mutter line of the daily press. It goes up with the morning papers, millions of people read the same words. In different ways, of course. A motion praising Mr. Callaghan’s action in banning the South African Cricket Tour has spoiled the colonel’s breakfast. All reacting one way or another to the paper world or unseen events which becomes an integral part of your reality. You will notice that this process is continually subject to random juxtapostation. Just what sign did you see in the Green Park station as you glanced up from the PEOPLE? Just who called as you were reading your letter in the TIMES? What were you reading when your wife broke a dish in the kitchen? An unreal paper world and yet completely real because it is actually happening. Mutter line of the EVENING NEWS, TV. Fix yourself on millions of people all watching Jesse James or the Virginian at the same time. International mutter line of the weekly news magazine always dated a week ahead. Have you noticed it’s the kiss of death to be on the front cover of TIME. Madam Nhu was there when her husband was killed and her government fell. Verwoerd was on the front cover of TIME when a demon tapeworm gave the order for his death through a messenger of the same. Read the Bible, kept to himself, no bad habits, you know the type. Old reliable, read all about it.

So stir in news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, adverts and put the altered mutter line out in the streets.

The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated technique used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a PRIORI ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.

I suggest that the underground press could perform this function much more effectively by the use of cut/up techniques. For example, prepare cut/ups ofthe ugliest reactionary statements you can find and surround them with the ugliest pictures. Now give it the drool, slobber, animal noise treatment and put it out on the mutter line with recorders. Run a scramble page in every issue of a transcribed tape recorded cut/up of news, radio and TV. Put the recordings out on the mutter line before the paper hits the stand. It gives you a funny feeling to see a headline that’s been going round and round inside your head. The underground press could add a mutter line to their adverts and provide a unique advertising service. Cut the product in withpop tunes, cut the product in with advertising slogans and jingles of other products and syphon off the sales. Anybody that doubts that these techniqueswork has only to put them to the test. The techniques here described are in use by the CIA and agents of other countries …Ten years ago they were making systematic street recordings in every district of Paris. I recall the Voice of America man in Tangir and a room full of tape recorders and you could hear some strange sounds through the wall. Kept to himself, hello in the hall. Nobody was ever allowed in that room, not even a fatima. Of course, there are many technical elaborations like long-range directional mikes. When cutting the prayer call in with hog grunts it doesn’t pay to be walking around the market place with a portable tape recorder.

An article in NEW SCIENTIST June 4, 1970, page 470, entitled ‘ Electronic Arts of Noncommunication ‘ by Richard C French gives the clue for more precise technical instructions.

In 1968, with the help of Ian Sommerville and Anthony Balch, I took a short passage of my recorded voice and cut it into intervals of onetwenty – fourth of a second movie tape (movie tape is larger and easier to splice)- and rearranged the order of the 24th second intervals of recordedspeech. The original words are quite unintelligible but new words emerge. The voice is still there and you can immediately recognise the speaker. Also the tone of the voice remains. If the tone is friendly, hostile, sexual,poetic, sarcastic lifeless, despairing, this will be apparent in the altered sequence.

I did not realise at the time that I was using a technique that has been in existence since 1881 …I quote from Mr. French’s article … “designs for speech scramblers go back to 1881 and the desire to make telephone and radio communications unintelligible to third parties has been with us ever since”… The message is scrambled in transmission and then unscrambled at the other end. There are many of these speech scrambling devices that work ondifferent principles… “another device which saw service during the war was the time division scrambler. The signal was chopped up into elements .005 cm long. These elements are taken in groups or frames and rearranged in a new sequence. Imagine that the speech recorded is recorded on magnetic tape whichis cut into pieces .02 long and the pieces rearranged into a new sequence. This can actually be done and gives a good idea what speech sounds likewhen scrambled in this way.”

This I had done in 1968. And this is an extension of the cut/up method. The simplest cut/up cuts a page down the middle and across the middle into four sections. Section 1 is then placed with section 4 and section 3 with section 2 in a new sequence. Carried further we can break the page down into smaller and smaller units in altered sequences.

The original purpose of scrambling devices was to make the message unintelligible without scrambling the code. Another use for speech scramblers could be to impose thought control on a mass scale. consider the Human body and nervous system as unscrambling devices. A common virus like the cold sore could sensitize the subject to unscramble messages. Drugs like LSD and Dim-N could also act as unscrambling devices. Moreover, the mass media could sensitize millions of people to receive scrambled versions of the same set of data. Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did.

Take a card, any card. In most cases he will not suspect its extraneous origin. that is the run of the mill newspaper reader who receives the scrambled message uncritically and assumes that it reflects his own opinions independently arrived at. On the other other hand, the subject may recognise or suspect the extraneous origins of voices that are literally hatching out in his head. Then we have a classic syndrome of paranoid psychosis.Subject hears voices. Anyone can be made to hear voices with scrambling techniques. It is not difficult to expose him to the actual scrambled message, any part of which can be made intelligible. This can be done with street recorders, recorders in cars, doctored radio and TV sets. In his own flat if possible, if not in some bar or restaurant he frequents. If he doesn’t talk to himself, he soon will do. You bug his flat. Now he is really round the bend hearing his own voice out of radio and TV broadcasts and the conversation of passing strangers. See how easy it is? Remember the scrambled message is partially unintelligible and in any case he gets thetone. Hostile white voices unscrambled by a Negro will also activate byassociation every occasion on which he has been threatened or humiliated bywhites. To carry it further you can use recordings of voices known to him. You can turn him against his friends by hostile scrambled messages in a friend’s voice. This will activate ll his disagreements with that friend. You can condition him to like his enemies by friendly scrambled messages in enemy voices.

On the other hand the voices can be friendly and reassuring. He is now working for the CIA, the GPU, or whatever, and these are his orders. They now have an agent who has no information to give away and who doesn’t have to be paid. and he is now completely under control. If he doesn’t obey orders they can give him the hostile voice treatment. No, “They” are not God or super technicians from outer space. Just technicians operating with well-known equipment and using techniques that can be duplicated by anyone else who can buy and operate this equipment.

To see how scrambling technique could work on a a mass scale, imagine that a news magazine like TIME got out a whole issue a week before publication and filled it with news based on predictions following a certainline, without attempting the impossible, giving our boys a boost in every story and the Commies as many defeats and casualties as possible, a whole newissue of TIME formed from slanted prediction of future news. Now imagine this scrambled out through the mass media.

With minimal equipment you can do the same thing on a smaller scale. You need a scrambling device, TV, radio, two video cameras, a ham radio station and a simple photo studio with a few props and actors. For a start you scramble the news all together and spit it out every which way on ham radioand street recorders. You construct fake news broadcasts on video camera. For the pictures you can use mostly old footage. Mexico City will do fora riot in Saigon Chile you can use the Londonderry pictures. Nobody knows the difference. Fires, earthquakes, plane crashes can be moved around. for example, here is a plane crash in Toronto 108 dead. so move the picture of the Barcelona plane crash over to Toronto and Toronto to Barcelona. And you scramble your fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts.

You have an advantage which your opposing player does not have. He must conceal his manipulations. You are under no such necessity. In fact you can advertise the fact that you are writing the news in advance and trying to make it happen by techniques which anybody can use. And that makes you NEWS.And TV personality as well, if you play it right. You want the widest possible circulation for your cut/up video tapes. Cut/up techniques couldswamp the mass media with total illusion.

Fictional dailies retroactively cancelled the San Francisco earthquake and Halifax explosion as journalistic hoaxes, and doubt released from the skin law extendable and revenous, consumed all the facts of history.

Mr French concludes his article …”The use of modern microelectric integrated circits could lower the cost of speech scramblers enough to see them in use by private citizens. Codes and ciphers have always had a strong appeal to most people and I think scramblers will as well…”

It is generally assumed that speech must be consciously understood to cause an effect. Early experiments with subliminal images have shown that this is not true. A number of research projects could be based on speechscramblers. We have all seen the experiment where someone hears his ownrecorded voice back a few seconds later. Soon he cannot go on talking. Wouldscrambled speech have the same effect? to what extent does a language act asunscrambling in either-or conflict terms? To what extent does the tone of voice used by a speaker impose a certain unscrambling sequence on the listener?

Many of the cut/up tapes would be entertaining and in fact entertainment is the most promising field for cut/up techniques. Imagine a pop festival like Phun City scheduled for July 24th, 25th, 26, 1970 at Ecclesden Common, Patching, near Worthing, Sussex. Festival area comprised of car park and camping area, a rock auditorium, a village with booths and cinema, a large wooded area. A number of Tape recorders planted in the woods and the village. As many as possible so as to lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival. Recorders have tapes of prerecorded material, music, news, broadcasts, recordings from other festivals, etc. At all times some of therecorders are playing back and some are recording. The recorders recording the crowd and the other tape recorders that are playing back at varyingdistances. This cuts in the crowd who will be hearing their own voices back. Play back, wind back and record could be electronicly controlled with varying intervals. Or they could be hand operated, the operator deciding whatintervals of play back, record, and wind to use. Effect is greatly increased by a large number of festival goers with portable recorders playing back andrecording as they walk around the festival. We can carry it further with projection screens and video cameras. Some of the material is pre-prepared, sex films, films of other festivals, and this material is cut in with live TV broadcasts and shots of the crowd. Of course, the rock festival will be cut in on the screens, thousands of fans portable recorders recording, and playing back, the singer could direct play back und record. Set up an area for travelling performers, jugglers, animal acts, snake charmers, singers, musicians, and cut these acts in. Film and tape from the festival, edited for best material, could then be used at other festivals.

Quite a lot of equipment and engineering to set it up. the festival could certainly be enhanced if as many festival goers as possible bring portable tape recorders and play back at the festival.

Any message, music, conversation you want to pass around, bringit pre-recorded on tape so everybody takes a piece of your tape home.

Research project: to find out to what extent scrambled messages are unscrambled, that is scanned out by experimental subjects. The simplest experiments consists in playing back a scrambled message to subject. Message could contain simple commands. Does the scrambled message have any command value comparable to post-hypnotic suggestion? Is the actual content of the message received? What drugs, if any, increase ability to unscramble messages? Do subjects vary widely in this ability? Are scrambledmessages in the subject’s own voice more effective than messages in othervoices? Are messages scrambled in certain voices more easily unscrambled byspecific subjects? Is the message more potent with both word and image scramble on video tape? Now to use, for example, a video tape message with aunified emotional content. Let us say the message is fear. For this we take all the past fear shots of the subject we can collect or evoke. We cut these in with fear words and pictures, and threats, etc. This is all acted out and would be upsetting in any case. Now let’s try it scrambled and see if we canget an even stronger effect. The subject’s blood pressure, rate of heart beat, and brain waves are recorded as we play back the scrambled tape.

His face is photographed and visible to him on video screen at all times. the actual scrambling of the tape can be done in two ways. It can be a completely random operation like pulling pieces out of a hat and if this is done several consecutive units may occur together yielding an identifiable picture of intelligible word. Both methods of course can be used at varying intervals. Blood pressure, heart beat, and brainwave recordings will show the operator what material is producing the strongest reaction, and he will of course zero in. And remember that the subject can see his face at all times and his face is being photographed. As the Peeping Tom said, the most frightening thing is fear in your own face. If the subject becomes too disturbed we have peace and safety tapes ready.

Now here is a sex tape: This consists of a sex scene acted out by the ideal sexual object of the subject and his ideal self image. Shown straight it might be exciting enough, now scramble it. It makes a few seconds for scrambled tapes to hatch out, and then? can scrambled sex tapes zeroing in on the subject’s reactions and brain waves result in spontaneous orgasm? Can this be extended to other functions of the body? A mike secreted in the water closet and all his shits and farts recorded and scrambled in with stern nanny voices commanding him to shit, and the young liberal shits his pants on the platform right under Old Glory. Could laugh tapes, sneeze tapes, hiccough tapes, cough tapes, give rise to laughing sneezing, hiccoughing, and coughing?

To what extent extent can physical illness be induced by scrambled tapes? Take for example, a sound and color picture of a subject with a cold. Later, when the subject is fully recovered, we take color and sound film ofrecovered subject. We now scrambled the cold pictures and sound track in with present pictures on present pictures. We also project the cold pictures on present pictures. Now we try using some of Mr. Hubbard’s reactive mind phrases which are supposed in themselves to produce illness. To be me, to be you, to stay here, to stay there, to be a body, to be bodies, to stay present, to stay past. now we scramble this in together and show it to the subject. Could seeing and hearing this sound and image track, scrambled down to very small units, bring about an attack of cold virus? Is such a cold tape does actually produce an attack of cold virus, perhaps we have merely activated a latent virus. Many viruses, as you know, are latent in the body and may be activated. We can try the same with coldsore, with hepatitis, always remembering that we may be activating a latent virus and in no sense creating a laboratory virus. However, we may be in a position to do this. Is a virus perhaps simply very small units of sound and image? Remember the only image a virus has is the image and sound track it can impose on you. The yellow eyes of jaundice, the postules of smallpox, etc. imposed on you against your will. The same is certainly true of scrambled word and image it can make you unscramble. Take a card, any card. This does not mean that it is actually a virus. Perhaps to construct a laboratory virus we would need both camera and sound crew and a biochemist as well. I quote from the INTERNATIONAL PARIS TRIBUNE an article on the synthetic gene: “Dr. Har Johrd Khorana has made a gene-synthetic.”

“It is the beginning of the end,” this was the immediate reaction to this news from the science attache’ at one of Washington’s major embassies. “If you can make genes you can eventually make new viruses for which there are nocures. any little country with good biochemists could make such biological weapons. It would take only a small laboratory. If it can be done, somebody will do it. “For example, a death virus could be created that carries the coded message of death. A death tape, in fact. No doubt the technical details are complex and perhaps a team of sound and camera men working with biochemists would give us the answer.

And now the question as to whether scrambling techniques could be used to spread helpful and pleasant messages. Perhaps. On the other hand, the scrambled words and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will. More to the point would be to discover how the old scanning patterns could be altered so that subject liberates his own spontaneous scanning pattern.

NEW SCIENTIST 2 July, 1970 …Current memory theory posits a seven second temporary “buffer store” preceding the main one: a blow on the head wipes out memory of this much prior time because it erases the contents of the buffer. Daedalus observes that the sense of the present also covers just this range and so suggests that our sensory input is recorded on an endless time loop, providing some seven seconds of delay for scanning before erasure. In this time the brain edits, makes sense of, and selects storage key features. The weird DEJA VU sensation “now” has happened before is clearly due to brief erasure failure, so that we encounter already stored memory data coming round again. Time dragging or racing must reflect tape speed. A simple experiment will demonstrate this erasure process in operation. Making street recordings and playing them back, you will hear things you do not remember, sometimes said in a loud clear voice, must have been quite close to you, nor do you necessarily remember them when you hear the recording back. The sound has bee erased according to a scanning pattern whichis automatic. This means that what you notice and store as memory as you walk down the street is scanned out of a much larger selection of data which is then erased from the memory. For the walker the signs he passed, people he has passed, are erased from his mind and cease to exist for him. Now to make this scanning process conscious and controllable, try this:

Walk down a city block with a camera and take what you notice, moving the camera around as closely as possible to follow the direction of your eyes. The point is to make the the camera your eyes and take what your eyes are scanning out of the larger picture. At the same time take the street at a wide angle from a series of still positions. The street of the operator is, of course, the street as seen by the operator. It is different from the street seen at a wide angle. Much of it is in fact missing. Now you can make arbitrary scanning patterns – that is cover first one side of the street and then the other in accordance with a preconceived plan. So you are breaking down the automatic scanning patterns. You could also make colour scanning patterns, that is, scan out green, blue, red, etc. in so far as you can with your camera. That is, you are using an arbitrary preconceived scanning pattern, in order to break down automatic scanning patterns. a number ofoperators do this and then scramble their takes together and with wide angletapes. This could train the subject to see at a wider angle and also to ignore and erase at will.

Now all this is readily subject to experimental verification on control subjects. Nor need the equipment be all on control subjects. Nor need the equipment be all that complicated. I have shown how it could work with feedback from brainwaves and visaaceral response and video tape photos of subject taken while he is seeing and hearing the tape, simply to show optimum effectiveness.

You can start with two tape recorders. The simplest scrambling device is scissors and splicing equipment. You can start scrambling words, make any kind of tapes and scramble them and observe the effects on friends and on yourself. Next step is sound film and then video camera. Of course resultsfrom individual experiments could lead to mass experiments, mass fear tapes, riot tapes, etc. The possibilities here for research and experiment arevirtually unlimited and I have simply made a few very simple suggestions

“A virus is characterized and limited by obligate cellular parasitism. All viruses must parasite living cells for their replication. For all viruses the infection cycle comprises entry into the host, intracellular replication, and escape from the body of the host to initiate a new cycle in a fresh host.” I am quoting here from MECHANISMS OF VIRUS INFECTION edited by Dr.Wilson Smith. In its wild state the virus has not proved to be a veryadaptable organism. Some viruses have burned themselves have burned out sincethey were 100 per cent fatal and there were no reservoirs. Each strain ofvirus is rigidly programed for certain attack on certain tissues. If theattack fails, the virus does not gain a new host. There are, of course, virus mutations, and the influenza virus has proved quite versatile in this way.Generally it’s the simple repitition of the same method of entry, and if that method is blocked by any body or other agency such as interferon, the attack fails. By and large, our virus is a stupid organism. Now we can think for the virus, devise a number of alternate methods of entry. For example, the host is simutaneously attacked by an ally virus who tells him thateverything is allright and by a pain and fear virus. so the virus is now using an old method of entry, namely, the tough cop and the con cop.

We have considered the possibility that a virus can be activated or even created by very small units of sound and image. So concieved, the virus can be made to order in the laboratory. Ah, but for the takes to be effective, you must have also the actual virus and what is the actual virus? New virusesturn up from time to time but from where do they turn up? Well, lets see howwe could make a virus turn up. We plot now our virus’s symptoms and make a scramble tape. The susceptible subjects, that is those who reproduce some of the desired symptoms, will then be scrambled into more tapes till we scramble our virus into existence. This birth of a virus occurs when our virus is able to reproduce itself in a host and pass itself on to another host. Perhaps, too, with the virus under laboratory control it can be tamed for useful purposes. Imagine, for example a sex virus. it so inflames the sex centres in the back brain that the host is driven mad from sexuality, all other considerations are blacked out Parks full of naked, frenzied people, shitting, pissing, ejaculating, and screaming. So the virus could be malignant, blacking out all regulation and end in exhaustion, convulsions, and death.

Now let us attempt the same thing with tape. We organize a sex-tape festival. We organise a sex-tape festival. 100,000 people bring theirscrambled sex tapes, and video tapes as well, to scramble in together. Projected on vast screens, muttering out over the crowd, sometimes it slows down, so that you see a few seconds, then scrambled again, then slow down, scramble. Soon it will scramble them all naked. The cops and the National Guard are stripping down. LET’S GET OURSELVES SOME CIVVIES. Now a thinglike that could be messy, but those who survive it recover from the madness.Or, say, a small select group of really like-minded people get together withtheir sex tapes, you see the process is now being brought under control. Andthe fact that anybody can do it is in itself a limiting factor.

Here is Mr. Hart, who wants to infect everyone with his own image and turn them all into himself, so he scrambles himself and dumps himself out insearch of worthy vessels. If nobody else knows about scrambling techniques he might scramble himself quite a stable of replicas. but anybody can do it. So gon on, scramble your sex words, and find suitable mates.

If you want to, scramble yourself out there, every stale joke, fart, chew, sneeze, and stomach rumble. If your trick no work you better run. Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just better settle down a nice even brown colour. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way.

I have suggested that virus can be created to order in the laboratory fromvery small units of sound and image. Such a preparation is not in itself biologically active but it could activate or even create virus in susceptible subjects. A carefully prepared jaundice tape could activate or create or create the jaundice virus in liver cells, especially in cases where the jaundice liver is already damaged. The operator is in effect directing a virus revolution of the cells. Since DOR seems to attack those exposed to it at the weakest point, release of this force could coincide with virus attack. Reactive mind phrases could serve the same purpose of rendering subjects more susceptible to virus attack.

It will be seen that scrambled speech already has many of the charictaristics of virus. When the speech takes and unscrambles, this occurs compulsively andagainst the will of the subject. A virus must remind you of its presence. Whether it is the mag of a cold sore or the torturing spasms of rabies the virus reminds you of its unwanted presence. “HERE ME IS.”

So does scrambled word and image. The units are unscrambling compulsively, presenting certain words and images to the subject and thisrepetitive presentation is irritating certain bodily and neutral areas. The cells so irritated can produce over a period of time the biologic virus units. We now have a new virus that can be communicated and indeed the subject may be desparate to communicate this thing that is bursting insidehim. He is heavy with the load. Could this load be good and beautiful? Is itpossible to create a virus which will communicate calm and sweetreasonableness? A virus must parasitise a host in order to survive. It uses the cellular material of the host to make copies of itself. in most cases this is damaging to the host. The virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force. An unwanted guest who makes you sick to look at isnever good or beautiful. It is moreover a guest who always repeats itself word for word take for take.

Remember the life cycle of a virus … penetration of a cell or activation within the cell, replication within the cell, escape from the cell to invadeother cells, escape from host to infect a new host. This infection can take place in many ways and those who find themselves heavy with the load of a newvirus generally use a shotgun technique to cover a wide range of infection routes… cough, sneeze, spit and fart at every opportunity, Save shit, piss, snot, scabs, sweat stained clothes and all bodily secretions for dehydration.The composite dust can be unobtrusively billowed out a roach bellows in subways, dropped from windows in bags, or sprayed out a crop duster … Carry with you at all times an assortment of vectors … lice, fleas, bed bugs,and little aviaries of mosquitoes and biting flies filled with your blood …I see no beauty in that.

There is only one case of favourable virus influence benefiting an obscure species of Australien mice. On the other hand, if a virus produces no damaging symptoms we have no way of ascertaining its existence and this happens with latent virus infections. It has been suggested that yellow races resulted from a jaundice- like virus which produced a permanentmutation not necessarily damaging, which was passed along genetically. Thesame may be true of the word. The word itself may be a virus that hasachieved a permanent status with the host. However, no known virus inexistence at the present time acts in this manner, so the question of a benefit virus remains open. It seems advisable to concentrate on a general defence against all virus.

Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, says that certain words and word combinations can produces serious illnesses and mental disturbances. I can claim some skill in the scrivener’s trade, but I cannot guarantee to write a passage that will make someone physically ill. If Mr.Hubbard’s claim is justified, this is certainly a matter for further research, and we can easily find out experimentally whether his claim is justified or not. Mr. Hubbard bases the power he attributes to words on his theory of engrams. An engram is defined as word,sound,image recorded by the subject in a period of pain and unconsciousness. Some of his material may be reassuring: “I thinkhe’s going to be alright.” Reassuring material is an ally engram. Ally engrams, according to Mr Hubbard, are just as bad as hostile as pain engrams. Any part of this recording played back to the subject later will reactivate operation pain, he may actually develop a headache and feel depressed, anxious, or tense. Well, Mr Hubbard’s engram theory is very easily subject to experimental verification. Take ten volunteer subjects, subject them to apain stimulus accompanied by certain words and sounds and images. You can act out little skits.

“Quickly, nurse , before I lose my little nigger,” bellows the southern surgeon, and now a beefy white hand falls on the fragileblack shoulder. “Yes, he’s going to be alright. He’s going to pull through.”

If I had my way I’d let these animals die on the operating table.”

“You do not have your way, you have your duty as a doctor, we must do everything in our power to save human lives.”

And so forth.

It is the tough cop and the con cop. The ally engram isineffective without the pain engram, just as the con cop’s arm around your shoulder, his soft persuasive voice in your ear, are indeed sweet nothings without the tough cop’s blackjack. Now to what extent can words recorded during medical unconsciousness be recalled during hypnosis or scientological processing? To what Extent does the playback of this material affect the subject unpleasantly? Is the effect enhanced by scrambling the material, pain and ally, at very short intervals? It would seem that a scrambled engram’s picture could almost dump an operating scene right in the subject’s lap. Mr. Hubbard has charted his version of what he calls the reactive mind. This is roughly similar to Freud’s ID, a sort of built-in self defeating mechanism. As set forth by Mr. Hubbard this consists of a number of quite ordinary phrases. He claims that reading these phrases, or hearing them spoken, can cause illness, and gives this as his reason for not publishing this material. Is he perhaps saying that these are magic words? Spells, in fact? If so, they could be quite a weapon scrambled up with imaginative sound-and-image track. Here now is the magic that turns men into swine. To be an animal: a lone pig grunts, shits, squeals and slobbers down garbage. To be animals: A chorus of a thousand pigs. Cut that in with video tape police pictures and play it back to them and see if you get areaction from this so reactive mind.

Now here is another. To be a body, well it’s sure an attractive body, rope the marks in. And a nice body symphony to go with it, rythmic heart beats, contented stomach rumbles. To be bodies: recordings and pictures of hideous, aged, diseased bodies farting, pissing, shitting, groaning, dying. To do everything: man in a filth apartment surrounded by unpaid bills, unanswered letters, jumps up and starts washing dishes and writing letters. To do nothing: he slumps in a chair, jumps up, slumps in chair, jumps up. Finally, slumps in a chair, drooling like an idiot helplessness, while he looks at the disorder piled around him. The reactive mind commands can also be used to advantage with illness tapes. While projecting past cold sore onto the subject’s face, and playing him back to him a past illness tape, you can say: to be me, to be you, to stay here, to stay there, to be a body, to be bodies, to stay in, to stay out, to stay present, to stay absent. To what extent are these reactive mind phrases when scrambled effective in causing disagreeable symptoms in control volunteer subjects? As to Mr. Hubbard’s claim for the reactive mind, only research can give us the answers.

The RM then is an artifact designed to limit and stultify on a mass scale. In order to have this effect it must be widely implanted. This can readily be done with modern electronic equipment and techniques described in this treatis. The RM consists of commands which seem harmless and in fact unavoidable … To be a body … but which have the most horrific consequences.

Here are some sample RM screen effects …

As the theatre darkens a bright light appears on the left side of the screen. The screen lights up.

To be nobody … On screen shadow of ladder and soldier incinerated by the Hiroshima blast

To be everybody … Street crowds, riots, panics

To be me … A beautiful girl and a handsome young man point to selves

To be you … They point to audience

Hideous hags and old men, lepers, drooling idiots point to themselves and to the audience as they intone …

To be me

To be you

Command no 5 … To be myself

Command no 6 … To be others

On screen a narcotics officer is addressing an audience of school boys, spread out in front of him are syringes, kief pipes, samples of heroin, hashiesh, LSD.

Officer: “Five trips on a drug can be a pleasant and exciting experience…”

On screen young trippers …”I’m really myself for the first time” Etc. Happy trips …To be myself …no 5 …

Officer: “THE SIXTH WILL PROBABLY BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF”

Shot shows a man blowing his head off with a shotgun in his mouth…

Officer: “Like a 15 year old boy I knew until recently, you could well end up dying in your own spew …” To be others no 6 …

To be an animal … A lone Wolf Scout …

To be animals: He joins other wolf scouts playing, laughing, shouting To be an animal … Bestial and ugly human behaviour …brawls, disgusting, eating and sex scenes

To be animals … Cows, sheep and pigs driven to the slaughter house

To be a body

To be bodies

A beautiful body … a copulating couple … Cut back and forth
and run on seven second loop for several minutes … scramble at different speeds … Audience must be made to realise that to be a body isto be bodies

…A body only exists to be other bodies.

To be a body …Death scenes and recordings … a scramble of last words

To be bodies … Vista of cemeteries …

To do it now … Couple embracing hotter and hotter

To do it now … A condemned cell … Condemned man is same actor as lover … He is led away by the guards screaming and struggling. Cut back and forth between sex scene and man led to execution. Couple in sex scenehave an orgasm as the condemned man is hanged, electrocuted, gassed, garroted, shot in the head with a pistol

To do it later … The couple pull away …One wants to go out and eat and
go to a show or something… They put on their hats

To do it later … Warder arrives at condemned cell to tell the prisoner he has a stay of execution

To do it now … Grim faces in the Pentegon. Strategic is on the way … Well THIS IS IT … This sequence cut in with sex scenes and a condemned man led to execution, culminates in execution, orgasm, nuclear explosion …The condemned lover is a horribly burned survivor

To do it later … 1920 walk out sequence to “The Sunny Side of the Street” … A disappointed general turns from the phone to say the president has opened top level hot wire talks with Russia and China … Condemned man gets another stay of execution

To be an animal … One lemming busily eating lichen …

To be animals … Hordes of lemmings swarming all over each other in mounting hysteria …A pile of drowned lemmings in front of somebody’s nice little cottage on a Finnish lake where he is methodically going through sex positions with his girl friend. They wake up in a stink of dead lemmings

To be an animal … Little boy put on a pot

To be animals …The man has just been hanged. The doctor steps forward with a stethoscope

To stay down … Body is carried out with the rope around neck … Naked corpses on the autopsy table … corpse buried in quick lime.

To stay up …Erect phallus

To stay down … White man burns off a Negro’s genitals with blow torch … Theatre darkens into the blow torch on the left side of the screen

To stay present

To stay absent

To stay present … A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures … Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch

To stay absent … Sex phantasies of the boy … The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out

To stay present … Boy watches strip tease, intent, fascinated …A man stands on trap about to be hanged

To stay present …Sex phantasies of the boy …”I ponounce this man dead.”

To stay present … Boy wistles at girl in street … A man’s body twists in the electric chair, his leg hairs crackling a blue fire

To stay absent … Boy sees himself in bed with girl … Man slumps dead in chair smoke curling from under the hood saliva dripping from his mouth…

The theatre lights up. In the sky a plane over Hiroshima …Little Boy slides out

To stay present … The plane, the pilot, thew American flag …

To stay absent … theatre darkens into atomic blast on screen

Here we see ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday jobs and diversions … subways, streets, buses, trains, airports, stations, waiting rooms, homes, flats, restaurants. offices, factories …working , eating, playing, defecating, making love.

A chorus of voices cuts in RM phrases

To stay up

To stay down

Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders

To stay in

To stay out

Street signs, door signs, people at head of lines admitted to restaurants and theatres

To be myself

To be others

Customs agents check passports, man identifies himself at bank to cash cheque

To stay present

To stay absent

People watching films, reading, looking at TV …

A composite of this sound and image track is now run on sevensecond loop without change for several minutes.

Now cut in the horror pictures

To stay up

To stay down

Elevators, airports, stairs, ladders, hangings, castrations

To stay in

To stay out

Door signs, operation scenes … doctor tosses bloody tonsils, adenoids, appendix into receptacle

To stay present

To stay absent

People watching film … ether mask, ether vertigo … triangles, spheres, rectangles, pyramids, prisms, coils go away and come in regular sequence …a coil coming in, two coils coming in, three coils coming in … a coil going away, two coils going away, four going away

A coil straight ahead going away, two coils on the left and rightgoing away. three coils left right and centre going away, four coilsright left centre going away

A coil coming, two coils coming in, three coils coming in, four coils coming in … spirals of light … round and round faster, baby eaten byrats, hangings, electrocutions, castrations….

The RM can be cut in with the most ordinary scenes covering the planet in a smog of fear …

The RM is a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats. You don’t want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the slaughter house meat on a hook.

Here is a nostalgic reconstruction of the old fashioned Mayan methods. The wrong kind of workers with wrong thoughts are tortured to death in rooms under the pyramid … A young worker has been given a powerfulhallucigen and a sexual stimulant … Naked he is stripped down and skinnedalive … The Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time …The Ouab bird stands there, screams, washing through his wild blue eyes.Others are crabs from the waist up clicking their claws in ecstasy, they dance around and mimic the flaved man. The scribes are busy with sketches …Now he is strapped into a segmented copper centipede and placed gently on a bed of hot coals … Soon the priests will dig the soft meat from the shell with their golden claws … Here is another youth staked out on an ant hill honey smeared on his eyes and genitals …Others with heavy weightson their backs are slowly dragged through the wooden troughs in which shards obsidian have been driven …So the priests are the masters of pain and fear and death …To do right… to obey the priests … To do wrong? the priest’s very presence and a few banal words….

The priests postulated and set up a hermetic universe of which they were the axiomatic controllers. In so doing they became Gods who controlledthe known universe of the workers. They became Fear and Pain, Death and Time. By making opposition seemingly impossible they failed to make any provision for opposition. There is evidence that this control system broke down in some areas before the arrival of the White God. Stellae have been found defaced and overturned, mute evidence of a worker’s revolution. How did this happen? The history of revolutionary movements shows that they areusually led by defectors from the ruling class. The Spanish rule in SouthAmerica was overthrown by Spanish revolutionaries. The French were driven out of Algeria by Algerians educated in France. Perhaps one of the priest Godsdefected and organised a worker’s revolution …

The priest Gods in the temple. They move very slowly, faces ravaged with age and disease. Parasitic worms infest their flesh. They are making calculations for the sacred books.

“400,000,000 years ago on this day a grievous thing happened…”

Limestone skulls rain in through the porticos. The Young Maize God leads the workers as they storm the temple and drag the priests out. They build a huge brush fire, throw the priests in and then throw the sacred books in after them. Time buckles and bends. The old Gods, surfacing from the immemorial depths of time, burst in the sky … Mr Hart stands there looking at the broken sellae … “How did this happen?”

His control system must be absolute and world wide. Because such a control system is even more vulnerable to attack from without than revolt within… Here is Bishop Luanda burning burning sacred books. To give you an idea as to what is happening, imagine our civilisation invaded by louts from outerspace…

“Get some bulldozers in here. Clear out all this crap…” The formulae of
all natural sciences, books, paintings, the lot, swept into a vast pile and burned. and that’s it. No one ever heard of it.

Three codices survived the vandalism of Bishop Landa and theseare burned around the edges.

No way to know if we have here the sonnets, the Mona Lisa or the remenants of a Sears Roebuck catalogue after the old out-house burned down in a brush fire. A whole civilisation went up in smoke…

When the Spaniards arrived, they found the Mayan aristocrats lolling in hammocks. Well, time to show them what is what. Five captured workers bound and stripped, are castrated on a tree stump. the bleeding sobbing,screaming bodies bodies thrown into a pile…

“And now get this through your gook nuts. We want to see a pile of gold big and we want to see it pronto. The White God has spoken.”

Consider now the human voice as a weapon. To what extent can the unaided human voice duplicate effects that can be done with a tape recorder? Learning to speak with the mouth shut, thus displacing your speech, is fairly easy. You can also learn to speak backwards, which is fairly difficult. I have seen people who can repeat what you are saying after you and finish at the same time. This is a most disconcerting trick, particularlywhen praciticed on a mass scale at a political rally. Is it possible to actually scramble speech? A far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from anew language. In fact such a language already exists. It exists as Chinese, a total language closer to multileval structure of experience, with a scriptderived from hieroglyphs, more closely related to the objects and areas described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their language being structured for greater sanity. I notice the Chinese, wherever they are retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant peoples will lose their language in two generations. The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language.

This IS OF IDENTITY. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal”, you are not a “body”, because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the assignment of permanentcondition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the IS of identity. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS inthe sky, sun in sky suffices. The verb TO BE can easily be omitted from any languages and the followers of Count Korgybski have done this, eliminating the verb TO BE in English. However, it is difficult to tidy up the English language by arbitrary exclusion of concepts which remain inforce so long as the unchanged language is spoken.

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE THE. THE contains the implication of one and only: THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, The wrong, If there is another, then THAT universe, THAT way is no longer THE universe, The way. The definitearticle THE will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take it’s place.

THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF EITHER/OR. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of OR will be deleted from the language and replacedby juxtaposition, by AND This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where two concepts stand literally side by side. These falsifications inherent in the English and other western alphabetical languages give the reactive mind commands their overwhelming forcein these languages. Consider the IS of identity. When I say to be me,to be you, to be myself, to be others- whatever I may be called upon to be orto say that I am- I am not the verbal label “myself.” The word BE in theEnglish language contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message ofdamage, the categorial imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be an animal. If you see the relation of a pilot to his ship, you see crippling force of the reactive mind command to be a body.Telling the pilot to be the plane, then who will pilot the plane?

The IS of identity, assigning a rigid and permanent status, was greatly reinforced by the customs and passport control the came in after World War I. Whatever you may be, you are not the verbal labels in your passport. any more than you are the word “self.” So you must be prepared to prove atall times that you are what you are not. Much of the falsification inherentin the categorical definite THE. THE now, THE past, THE time, THE space,THE energy, THE matter, THE unIverse. Definite article THE contains theimplications of no other. THE universe locks you in THE, and denies the possibility of any other. If other universes are possible, then the universe is no longer THE it becomes A. The definite article THE is deleted and replaced by A. many of the RM commands are in point of fact contradictory commands and a contradictory command gains its force from the Aristotelian concept of either/or. To do everything, to do nothing, to have everything, to have nothing, to do it all, to do not any, to stay up, to stay down, to stay in, to stay out, to stay present, to stay absent. These are in point of fact either/or propositions. To do nothing OR everything, to have it all, OR not any, to stay present OR to stay absent. Either/or is more difficult to fomulate in a written language where both alternatives are pictorially represented and can be deleted entirely from the spoken language. The whole reactive mind can be in fact reduced to three little words – to be “THE”. That is to be what you are not, verbal formulations.

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsifications of syllabic western languages are in point of fact actualvirus mechanisms. The IS of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE. To survive at any expense to the host invaded. To be an animal, to be a body. To be an animal body that the virus can invade. To be animals, to be bodies. To be more animal bodies, so that the virus can move from one body to another. To stay present as an animal body, to stay absent as antibody or resistanceto the body invasion.

The categorial THE is also a virus mechanism, locking you in THE virus universe. EITHER/OR is another virus formula. It is alway you OR the virus. EITHER/OR. This is in point of fact the conflict formula which is seen to be archetypical virus mechanism. The proposed language will deletethese virus mechanisms and make them impossible of formulation in the language. This language will be a tonal language like Chinese, it will also have a hieroglyphic script as pictorial as possible without being tocumbersome or difficult to write. This language will give one option of silence. When not talking, the user of this language can take in the silentimages of the written, pictorial and symbol languages.

I have described here a number of weapons and tactics in the war game. Weapons that change consciousness could call the war game in question. Allgames are hostile. Basically there is only one game from here to eternity. Mr Hubbard says that Scientology is a game where everybody wins. There are no games where everybody wins. That’s what games are all about, winning and losing … The Versailles Treaty … Hitler dances the Occupation Jig … War criminals hang at Nuremberg …It is a rule of this game that there can be no final victory since this mean the end of the war game. Yet every player must believe in final victory and strive for it with all his power.Faced by the nightmare of final defeat he has no alternative. So all technologies with escalating efficiency produce more and more total weaponsuntil we have the atom bomb which could end the game by destroying allplayers. Now mock up a miracle. The so stupid players decide to save the game. They sit down around a big table and draw up a plan for the immediatedeactivation and eventual destruction of all atomic weapons. Why stop there?Conventional bombs are unnecessarily destructive if nobody has them hein? Let’s turn back the war clock back to 1917:
Keep the home fires burning
Through the hearts are yearning

There’s a long, long trail awinding … .

Back to the American Civil War…

“He has loosed the fatal lightning of this terrible swift sword.”
His fatal lightning didn’t cost as much in those days. Save a lot on the defence budget this way on back to flintlocks, matchlocks, swords, armour, lances, bows and arrows, spears, stone axes and clubs. Why stop there? Why not grow teeth and claws, poison fangs, stingers, spines, quills, beaksand suckers and stink glands and fight in out in the muck hein?

That is what this revolution is about. End of game. New games? There are no new games from here to eternity.

END OF THE WAR GAME.

Williams Burroughs

An Anthology of Chance Operations – La Monte Young, Ed. (New York, La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963)

A versão em pdf ode ser descarregada aqui
http://ubu.com/historical/young/index.html

ou aqui
http://www.virose.pt/ml/alunos/docs/La_Mounte_Young_AnAnthologyOfChanceOperations.pdf

Clément Chéroux on August Strindberg

August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a celebrated playwright, novelist and poet, whose whose writing was often filled with his own sense of despair, anxiety and gloom. During regular periods of writing inactivity, he was also a prolific painter and photographer. For Strindberg, the 1890s became known as the “Inferno Years”, during which he painted a series of tempestuous seascapes and produced a range of experimental photographs, as well as attempting alchemy and corresponding with occultists. Clément Chéroux explores the influence of the natural sciences on his photograph

The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was insatiably curious – a dabbler of genius who spoke five languages and devoted himself to scientific research and even alchemy as much as to writing. He also took a great interest in photography – an intermittent but constant presence in his life from 1886 to 1907, corresponding to two different kinds of motivation.

On the one hand, there were the photographic experiments that were an extension of his literary preoccupations. So when, in 1886, Strindberg photographed the French countryside – sometimes even from the train window – and then made a series of self-portraits and family scenes, it was with a view to illustrating the books he was writing at the time: a study of peasant life, Among French Peasants (1886), and his autobiography The Son of a Servant (1886). Together with Lewis Carroll, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw and Léonid Andreïev, he was one of the very first writers to engage in the fruitful dialogue between photography and literature. At the very end of the nineteenth century, and then at the beginning of the twentieth, Strindberg also carried out a large number of photographic experiments more in tune with his scientific investigations. In the 1890s, he used gelatin silver bromide plates to study the diffraction of light, before exploring the colour capabilities of photography. He captured the imprint of snow crystals on the photographic plate and then, moving from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, he tried to photograph the sun, the moon, the stars and the clouds. He took photographs without a lens and constructed a large-format camera that enabled him to obtain life-size images of faces. In Berlin, during the summer of 1892, he attempted to photograph the soul.

If Strindberg’s archives are full of notes, newspaper cuttings or sketches about this second level of scientific photographic experiments, sadly very few pictures have been handed down to us. The most significant surviving sets involve research into the capturing of crystalline formations, and astronomic photography. Of the first series, made between 1892 and 1896, the Royal Library of Stockholm has preserved six small prints obtained by placing the sensitive surface of the plate directly against a piece of glass covered with crystals of frost or fallen snow. It is hard to know exactly how he managed to make such pictures. In the press of the day, various articles described similar experiments, as well as their advantages for the scientific study of crystal formations, for making ornamental motifs, or just for simple amusement. For Strindberg, these “crystallographs”, as he called them, were a way of verifying his analogical, monist conception of the universe. He had noticed that the structure of ice crystals strangely resembled the branching forms of plants, and wondered about the basis of such a similarity: “Could water in vapour form, having passed through plants a number of times, have taken and kept the imprint of their shape? Could that same water, leaving the primitive state of its crystalline shape, be capable of developing and creating free shapes in crystal formations? Did water give plants their shape, or is it the other way round?”

At around the same time, Strindberg tried his hand at astronomic photography. Perfectly informed about the latest advances in the discipline, and an avid reader of journals and books on the subject, he was well aware that the difficulty of the exercise lay in the faint luminosity of the stars, along with the poor sensitivity of photographic plates. Just as music being played in the next room can be heard more easily when the door is open, Strindberg believed that light would be more intense if the obstacles between the source and the receiver could be removed. He decided, therefore, to dispense with the lens of his camera, convinced that “the effect of the rays must be stronger once freed from the work of passing through a medium such as glass”. Then, following his analogical train of thought, he reasoned that by getting rid of the camera itself, the intensity of the light would only be reinforced. This led him to the idea – in the face of all scientific rationality – of holding a photographic plate up to the starry dome, all on its own, submerged in the developing bath, in order to capture the luminous manifestations of the celestial bodies. About ten “celestographs” obtained in this fashion were sent to the president of the Astronomical Society of France, Camille Flammarion. Convinced that he had discovered a revolutionary method of photographing the sky, Strindberg could hardly have suspected that the clouds of white patches covering his prints were not in fact stars, but silver micro-oxidations produced as a result of poor handling of the material. He was clearly unaware of the old adage that warns against the illusions of an overeager imagination: “He who impatiently awaits a knight should not mistake his heartbeats for the sound of hoofs.”

‘August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer’ at Tate Modern 17 February – 15 May 2005

http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/brecht_chance.pdf

Chance-Imagery 

by George Brecht 

Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. 

TristanTzara1 

ubuclassics 

2004 

Chance Imagery 

George Brecht 

Originally published in 1966 as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press, 1966. 

ubuclassics 

www.ubu.com Series Editor: Michael Tencer 

CHANCE-IMAGERY 

“Knowledge is the source of all mystery.” 

Shen-hui. 

The purpose of this article is to encourage insight regarding chance-imagery, especially certain less intuitively obvious formal aspects. Every statement of opinion is as wrong in one sense as it is right in some other, for every distinction is an artificial one, an arbitrary subdivision of what is actually a unified whole. This is one of the reasons that words about art are so infinitely inferior to the art itself. Art unites us with the whole; words only permit us to handle a unified reality by maneuvering arbitrarily excised chunks. 

With this apology for juggling words at all, let us indicate how we intend to approach an infinitely broad and complex subject, chance and its relation to the arts. (“Arts” here is taken in a broadly historical, but actually no longer appropriate, sense.) 

First, a working definition (Chance). 

Some background (Dada and Surrealism). 

A focal point in development (Jackson Pollock). 

Some parallel developments in our culture (Historical Concurrences: Statistics, 

Science and Philosophy). Randomness. Some methodology (Ways of Invoking Chance). Coda. 

Chance 

The word “chance” (with a Latin root relating to the falling of dice) can conve¬niently be taken to mean that the cause, or system of causes, responsible for a given effect is unknown or unlooked-for or, at least, that we are unable to completely specify it. Of course, in the real world, causes are also effects, and effects causes. The fall of a die, 

for example, is the effect of an infinite number of (largely unknown) causes (among which we can imagine resilience of the die, hardness of the table, angle of contact to be included), and this effect, in turn, may be the cause of my winning a certain amount of money. 

It is sometimes possible to specify only the universe of possible characteristics which a chance event may have. For example, a toss of a normal die will be expected to give a number from one to six. Any particular face will be expected to turn up in about one-sixth of a great many throws. But the outcome of any one toss remains unknown until the throw has been made. It is often useful to keep in mind this “universe of possi¬ble results,” even when that universe is hypothetical, for this clarifies for us the nature of our chance event as a selection from a limited universe. We should note here that events are defined as due to chance in a relative way. There is no absolute chance or random event, for chance and randomness are aspects of the way in which we structure our uni¬verse. These are elementary considerations with many ramifications, but I hope they will serve as a conceptual base-line for the discussion to follow, which should clarify the nature of chance. We shall later discuss the random event, as a special type of bias-free chance event. 

In connection with art, and the affective image, we shall indicate two aspects of chance, one where the origin of images is unknown because it lies in deeper-than-con¬scious levels of the mind, and the second where images derive from mechanical process¬es not under the artist’s control. Both of these processes have in common a lack of con¬scious design. 

Dada and Surrealism 

In the sense that there is a certain lack of conscious control in everything we do, the use of chance in art could be traced (academically) to the cave drawings of prehistoric man; but the first explicit use of chance in painting seems to have come shortly before World War I. If we admit automatism as chance, then the improvisations of Kandinsky (1911), painted “rather subconsciously in a state of strong inner tension,” would take 

precedence over the first papiers colles of Picasso (1912), in which were incorporated for¬tuitous scraps of newspaper and cardboard. 

(The question of the chance nature of automatism might be endlessly debated. It seems to me that the answer lies in the distinction between our seeking immediate causes or ultimate causes of automatic actions. It takes little reflection to see that ulti¬mate causes might readily and reasonably be ascribed to chance, but psychoanalytic the¬ory has taught us to expect “conscious ignorance and unconscious knowledge of the motivation of psychic accidentalness” [2], and it does not always take very deep or lengthy probing to reveal immediate causes for the psychically accidental. At any rate, it is practical to consider chance as being defined by consciously unknown causes, and by this definition, at least, automatism is a chance process.) 

Since we are restricting ourselves to the generation of chance-images, and not to their appreciation, we shall indicate only the place of the unconscious (including the subconscious, or fore-conscious) as a source of significant images. The importance of chance to the unconscious has manifold facets, not only in modern psychology, but also (and particularly) in Oriental thought (such as that manifested in the I-Ching or in Zen). 

The Dadaists considered the unconscious to be a source of images free from the biases engrained in us by parents, social custom and all the other artificial restric¬tions on intellectual freedom: 

“We are now in a position to formulate the problem of art, more accurately the problem of expression, as it appeared to the writers of and Litterature group [Aragon, Breton, Soupault]: only the unconscious does not lie, it alone is worth bringing to light. All deliberate and conscious efforts, composition, logic are futile. The celebrated French lucidity is nothing but a cheap lantern. At best the ‘poet’ can prepare traps (as a physi¬cian might do in treating a patient), with which to catch the unconscious by surprise and to prevent it from cheating . . . .” Marcel Raymond (3) 

“The unconscious is inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct it.” Tristan Tzara (1) 

As far as affective form is concerned, chance is an aspect of the universe made significant by unconscious interactions, but it is not the only aspect. When the largely iconoclastic displays of Dada were superseded by the more systematic researches of the Surrealists, Breton, for one, in the “First Surrealist Manifesto” (1924), made this general interest in the unconscious explicit: 

“During the course of Surrealist development, outside all forms of idealism, outside the opiates of religion, the marvelous comes to light within reality. It comes to light in dreams, obsessions, preoccupations, in sleep, fear, love, chance; in hallucinations, pretended disorders, follies, ghostly apparitions, escape mechanisms and evasions; in fan¬cies, idle wanderings, poetry, the supernatural and the unusual; in empiricism, in super-reality.” (4) 

(This statement, written in 1924, followed The Interpretation of Dreams by 24 years, and Psychopathology of Everyday Life by 20.) 

It is useful practically to include automatism in a consideration of chance in art, and it is only our viewpoint which makes it a chance process, but there is actually no reason why the others of Breton’s categories could not also be included. We exclude them arbitrarily from this discussion only to preserve a certain tightness in our consider¬ation of the methodological resources of the contemporary research “artist,” which we will take up further on. Automatism is also an aspect of chance in the sense that we accept its product as something which it really is not. In all of Breton’s manifestations of the marvelous (a handy summary) we read into phenomena characteristics which they do not possess in an absolute way. Duchamp called this “irony” (“a playful way of accepting something”), and the concept is a critical one in understanding the vector through Dada, Pollock, the present-day chance-imagists, and the future. The idea will appear again in the section on Pollock, and shows up particularly as a method I’ve called the “irrelevant process” (also discussed later). 

We are more interested, though, in the mechanically chance process, and here Duchamp did the pioneer work. In 1913 he undertook what seems to be the first explicit use of chance for the creation of an affective image, in the “3 stoppages etalon.” He 

made these images by holding a thread one meter long, “straight and horizontal,” one meter above a blank canvas. After letting it fall onto the canvas, it was fixed with a trick¬le of varnish into the chance convolution in which it fell. This process was repeated to give three such canvases. 

Duchamp seems to consider three phenomena basic to his exploitation of chance: wind, gravity and aim. (This discussion is based largely on an article about Duchamp by Harriet and Sidney Janis; see reference 5.) The “3 stoppages etalon” illus¬trate gravity; wind was used to create the cloud formations for “La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme” (1915-1923): “Air currents blowing a piece of mesh gauze against a screen, imprinted a limpid rectangle upon it. The experiment repeated three times gave three chance images, variations on the square . . . . The third device in allow¬ing shapes to create themselves and thus void the responsibility of the hand, is termed by Duchamp adresse, that is, skill in aiming. Nine marks were made upon the glass by the impact of shots of matches dipped in paint, from a toy cannon . . . . Aiming nine shots at a given point, these formed a polygram as a result of variation in the aim-control and accompanying conditions. He then converted the flat polygram or floor plan into an ele¬vation plan. Here the nine points became the locations for the nine malic forms in per¬spective.” (5) 

Duchamp’s theories on the use of chance seem highly developed, but not exhaustive. Other Dadaists, especially Arp, Ernst and Tzara, later developed other important applications of chance: 

Arp composed collages by picking up chance scraps of paper, shuffling them, and gluing them down just as they fell (example: the “Squares arranged according to the laws of chance,” a collage of 1916). 

Ernst developed the “decalcomania of chance” (5), wherein, for example, ink was spread between two sheets of paper, which were then pulled apart (example: “Decalcomania, 1936” by Oscar Dominguez, illus. in ref. 4, p. 161). 

Tzara composed poems by drawing words from a hat. (“To make a dadaist poem/ Take a newspaper./ Take a pair of scissors./ Choose an article as long as you are 

planning to make your poem./ Cut out the article./ Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag./ Shake it gently./ Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag./ Copy conscientious¬ly./ The poem will be like you./ And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.” (6) 

Frottage was a “semi-automatic process for obtaining patterns or designs by rub¬bing canvas or paper which has been placed over a rough surface such as planking, embossing, a brick wall, etc.” (7) (example: Ernst, “The Horde,” ca. 1927). This is an example of a technique for which we shall later have a more general term – the “irrele¬vant process.” 

A very interesting technique of the Surrealists, which permitted the cause of an event to be lost, so to speak, in multiplicity, was that of the cadavre exquis, wherein several persons each made part of a picture, folding the paper to cover his addition, before pass¬ing the drawing to the next participant. (An example is the “Figure,” 1926-1927, by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Morise and Man Ray, illus. in ref. 4, p. 251.) 

The ability of the unconscious to reconcile opposites is nowhere so evident as in Dada, for within a periphery of nonsense the ridiculous and the profound were made to evince each other: “Dada wished to destroy the reasonable frauds of men and recover the natural, unreasonable order. Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of the men of today with an illogical nonsense. That is why we beat the Dadaist bass drum with all our might and trumpeted the praises of unreason. . . . Dada like nature is without meaning. Dada is for infinite meaning and finite means.” (Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, 1949, ref. 8.) Within such a (frameless) framework, chance played a major part, as testi¬fied by Arp himself (9): “Chance opened up perceptions to me, immediate spiritual insights. Intuition led me to revere the law of chance as the highest and deepest of laws, the law that rises from the fundament. An insignificant word might become a deadly thunderbolt. One little sound might destroy the earth. One little sound might create a new universe.” The almost incredibly incisive mind of Tristan Tzara, as early as 1922, 

even recognized the relationship of all this to Oriental philosophy (in one of the most convincing of Dada documents, the “Lecture on Dada”): “Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference.” (10) Such aspects of reality as Oriental thought-scientific thought-Dada-chance become somewhat clearer in such a light. Perhaps chance is the most allusive of the phenomena studied by the Dadaists and Surrealists because it is capable of being most widely gener¬alized. We shall see. 

The Second World War helped to disperse the European Dadaists and Surrealists, and many of the most original artists – Breton, Ernst, Tanguy, Masson ¬regrouped in New York, particularly around two New York galleries, the Julien Levy Gallery and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. 

Jackson Pollock 

Jackson Pollock’s first show was held at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in 1943. Here he was able to associate with the proponents of that “sacred disorder” which was later to become the key to his own original style. “To them Pollock owed his radical new sense of freedom, and he spoke more than once of his debt to their unpremeditated and automatic methods. By elevating the appeal to chance and accident into a first principle of creation, the Surrealists had circumvented the more rigid formalisms of modern art.” 

(11) It is not difficult to find their influence in Pollock’s paintings of the war years (for example, “Guardians of the Secret,” 1943). Pollock achieved a profound, sustained and irrational synthesis of all the principles which had preceded him in Dada, and in a way consistent with his contemporary world. His paintings seem much less manifestations of one of a group of techniques for releasing the unconscious (as the Dada experiments seemed), than they do of a single, integrated use of chance as a means of unlocking the deepest possible grasp of nature in its broadest sense. 

Not to get lost in conjecture, let us briefly give evidence for two points, first that Pollock’s calligraphy was truly automatic and second that there is a considerable element of chance in the ultimate arrangement of pigment in the chance-paintings of roughly 

1947-1951. 

First, part of a statement by Pollock (12), made in 1947: 

“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only 

after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about.” 

Again, from an earlier statement (13): 

“. . . the fact that good European moderns are now here is very important, 

for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I 

am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the uncon¬

scious. This idea interests me more than these specific painters do. . . . 

Aside from the lack of conscious control of paint application in these paintings, there are technical reasons for looking at this complex of interdependent forms as predomi¬nantly chance events. For one thing, the infinite number of variables involved in determining the flow of fluid paint from a source not in contact with the canvas cannot possibly be simul¬taneously taken into account with sufficient omniscience that the exact configuration of the paint when it hits the canvas can be predicted. Some of these variables, for example, are the paint viscosity, density, rate of flow at any instant; and direction, speed and configuration of the applicator, to say nothing of non-uniformity in the paint. Even if we deny automatism, and claim omniscience for an unconscious molded by a long learning period, it is obvious that in some of Pollock’s paintings of this period (in “One, 1950,” for example) differently-colored streams of paint have flowed into each other after application, resulting in a com¬mingling completely out of the artist’s hands. Never before Pollock were chance processes used with such primacy, consistency and integrity, as valuable sources of affective imagery. 

Paintings get to be what they are physically through an interaction of method and material, and they have their effect in an interaction between painting and observer. As far as the observer is concerned, Pollock has demonstrated that the ability of humans to appreciate complex chance-images is almost unlimited. Here I would like to introduce the general term “chance-imagery” to apply to our formation of images resulting from chance, wherever these occur in nature. (The word “imagery” is intentionally ambiguous enough, I think, to apply either to the physical act of creating an image out of real materials, or to the formation of 

an image in the mind, say by abstraction from a more complex system.) One reason for doing this is to place the painter’s, musician’s, poet’s, dancer’s chance images in the same conceptual category as natural chance-images (the configuration of meadow grasses, the arrangement of stones on a brook bottom), and to get away from the idea that an artist makes something “special” and beyond the world of ordinary things. An Alpine peak or an iris petal can move us at times with all the subtle power of a “Night Watch” or one of the profound themes of Opus 131. There is no a priori reason why moving images should originate only with artists. 

This leaves “art” to mean something constructed, from a starting point of pre¬conceived notions, with the corollary that as art approaches chance-imagery, the artist enters a oneness with all of nature. This idea has in essence been well expressed by Suzuki: 

“There is something divine in being spontaneous and not being hampered by human conventionalities and their artificial hypocrisies. There is something direct and fresh in this lack of restraint by anything human, which suggests a divine freedom and creativity. Nature never deliberates; it acts directly out of its own heart, whatever this may mean. In this respect Nature is divine. Its ‘irrationality’ transcends human doubts or ambiguities, and in our submitting to it, or rather accepting it, we transcend our¬selves.” (14) 

“Our inner life is complete when it merges into Nature and becomes one with it.” (15) 

When an artist achieves this essential oneness with all of nature, everything he creates illuminates nature, as well as himself. 

“Reason has cut man off from nature.” 

Hans Arp (16) 

Historical Concurrences: Statistics, Science and Philosophy 

I think it is interesting to look at these developments in the use of chance in 

painting against a background of our growing understanding of chance in other fields over the last several centuries. The conjuncture of statistical theory with mathematical physics, which occurred about 1860, resulted ultimately in a reformulation of our con¬cept of the workings of nature; the requirements of strict causality, which classical phi¬losophy had regarded as an a priori principle underlying the mechanics of the universe, were replaced by a measure of probability. The predominance of cause thus gave way to the predominance of chance (see ref. 17), and a climate in which chance-imagery seems an almost inevitable concomitant grew up. 

The first questions regarding probability were formulated by gamblers, and perhaps this is natural, for games of chance go far back into history and prehistory (at least to the third and fourth millennia B.C.). (See, for instance, David, ref. 18). The liter¬ature of games of chance began to collect in the sixteenth century, and about 1526 Gerolamo Cardano (who, himself, was both mathematician and gambler) wrote his Liber de Ludo Aleae, in which a probability was calculated by theoretical argument for the first time. In the seventeenth century, Galileo, Pascal and Fermat carried further the concepts of probability applied to gaming. In 1733 De Moivre, the English mathematician, pub¬lished his formulation of the so-called “normal law,” describing the distribution of events subject to a great number of independent chance influences, and these results were found to describe the distribution of errors of observation in astronomy, social sci¬ence and the physical sciences, largely through the work of Laplace and Gauss, about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. 

We now wish to trace a concurrent thread of events in physics, specifically in the kinetic theory of gases. In 1661 (two years before Cardano’s Liber de Ludo Aleae finally appeared in print) Robert Boyle had described the relationship between the volume of a gas and the pressure exerted by it on a closed vessel, and tried to account for this behav¬ior by comparing the gas particles to little springs lying on each other, which coil and uncoil. Twenty years later Robert Hooke suggested that the pressure of a gas was due to the impingement of hard, rapidly moving particles on the walls of the containing vessel, and this work was followed, in 1738, by the explanation of Daniel Bernoulli that Boyle’s 

Law would be true if the particles of a gas were considered to be infinitesimal in size. 

The subject of gas kinetics then lay dormant for almost a hundred years, until new progress was made in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Joule (1848) showed that the kinetic energy of gas molecules is proportional to the absolute tempera¬ture of the gas. Clausius then gave the subject both a wider and more rigorous treatment (1857), which resulted in a theoretical understanding of the simultaneous volume, pres¬sure and temperature relationships in a gas, which had already been empirically deter¬mined. Clausius had made several simplifying assumptions, however, which turned out to be untenable, for he had held that the gas molecules were all to be considered as mov¬ing at the same speed. Since the molecules must frequently collide, changing their speeds with each collision, even if the speeds of all the molecules were initially equal, they would not be equal for long. Two years later James Clerk Maxwell set out to determine the average speed of the gas molecules (allowing for the effect of collisions), and also the distribution of speeds of individual molecules about this average. 

Maxwell’s conclusion* was that the distribution of speeds of the molecules was described by the normal law, brought into scientific considerations by Gauss. That is, the macroscopic behavior of a gaseous mass (as exhibited, for example, by its temperature) was to be described by the average of the speeds of the individual molecules. The phe¬nomenon of temperature as an effect, measured, for example, by the expansion of mer¬cury in a thermometer, was therefore attributable not to a cause, but to a very large number of independent causes, the magnitudes of which were due to chance. Thus a change in the amount of heat energy in a body means a change in an average of many independent events. This explains why heat ordinarily travels from a hotter body to a colder, and not the opposite way. We expect an ice cube placed in a glass of water at room temperature to result in a cooler mixture; the liquid becomes cooler, and the ice melts. We do not expect the heat to travel from the ice cube to the warmer liquid, leav¬ing a yet colder ice cube and warmer 

*Rigorously proved by Lorentz in 1887, following a method developed by Boltzmann in 1868. 

liquid. This is the essence of the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, and this principle is made understandable by Maxwell’s statistical interpretation of gas kinet¬ics, because this interpretation lets us form a conceptual model of a mixture of gases with different temperatures, in which high-energy molecules of the warmer gas are col¬liding with low-energy molecules of the cooler, imparting some of their energy in the collision. The result is a total amount of energy which, after mixture, falls somewhere between the extremes of amounts of energy possessed by the two original volumes of gases. Since the macroscopically observable variables are averages, based on summation of individual chance events, an event such as our ice-cube-in-water becoming colder becomes, not impossible by a deterministic law of nature, but only highly improbable, based on laws of probability. 

We might argue that these developments do not in themselves require us to abandon strict causality, for we might hypothesize (as Laplace actually did) a superman, to whom the exact motion and speed of each molecule were known, and who would thus be capable of calculating the motion of each molecule after any specified length of time. 

The resolution of these questions of strict causality versus probabilistic predic¬tion came with Werner Heisenberg’s publication of his principle of indeterminacy in 1927. Specifically, Heisenberg showed mathematically that it was not possible to deter¬mine both the position and the momentum of an electron at the same time, that is, that as the precision with which the momentum of an electron was measured was increased, the precision with which the position of the electron was measured necessarily decreased, and conversely. This was later interpreted as reflecting our inability to meas¬ure the characteristics of the smallest particles without disturbing the particles them¬selves, for even when the photon itself is used as the most sensitive instrument for obser¬vation of these elementary particles, it has the same order of magnitude as the objects being observed. 

The causal descriptions of classical physics (and philosophy) then, (that is, such statements as: “When A happens, then B will always happen”) are idealizations, or sim¬

plified models of the actual state of affairs. The best we can do is to make statements with a high degree of probability (e.g., “When A happens then B will happen in a cer¬tain proportion of cases”), for we cannot exhaustively describe the causal structure of any real system. 

Thus chance became an underlying principle of our world-view. 

Of course, we don’t mean to imply that chance-imagery is the direct result of the artists’ knowledge of these trends. We only mean that the works of great artists are products of the same complex, interacting welter of cause and effect out of which came the results of mathematical physics. If we believe history to show that art of the past has fit into the cultural matrix of the time in which it was produced, we have incentive to look for the trends in contemporary art which are consistent with analogous trends in these other fields. Unfortunately, though this must have seemed like an over-long digres¬sion, we have only been able to hint at the parallelism in these trends here. 

“. . . Reason is an indispensable instrument for the organization of knowledge, without which facts of a more abstract kind could not be known. The senses do not show me that the planets move in ellipses around the sun, or that matter consists of atoms; it is sense observation in combination with rea¬soning that leads to such abstract truths.” Hans Reichenbach (19) 

Randomness 

Chance images are characterized by a lack of conscious design. When these images are “hand-made,” and conscious thought is evaded, so that the images have their source in deeper-than-conscious areas of the mind, we will prefer the Surrealists’ term “automatic” to the word “random,” though “random,” in the way it is used in everyday speech, might seem appropriate (as meaning, for example, “without definite aim, direc¬tion, rule, or method,” ref. 20). We will prefer this usage in order to restrict “random” to a technical meaning which it has more commonly in statistics, where it applies to special techniques for eliminating bias in sampling. The term “strict randomness” is useful for ensuring that the word random is understood in this technical sense, but, in general, we shall merely say random, and it should always be understood here that the technical 

meaning is implied. Chance is sometimes used in painting in such a way that the images are neither clearly automatic nor random, and here we can only refer to chance-images or chance-processes. 

It remains to indicate, then, what this technical meaning comprises, recognizing that, in general, the reason for the importance of randomness for purposes of scientific inference will be the same as the reason for its importance in the arts, that is, the elimi¬nation of bias. It is not intuitively obvious that strict randomness is difficult to achieve; therefore let us indicate the general presence of bias where human choice or ordinary mechanical systems are involved. This will give us an intuitive insight into approaches capable of eliminating bias, and will lead finally to a working definition of randomness itself. 

Concerning a general bias in human choice, Kendall and Smith (21) have made the following interesting statement: 

“It is becoming increasingly evident that sampling left to the discretion of a human individual is not random, although he may be completely unconscious of the existence of bias, or indeed actively endeavouring to avoid it. House-to-house sampling, the sampling of crop yields, even ticket-drawing have all been found to give results wide¬ly divergent from expectation.” 

Yule and Kendall (22) have given an example of human bias which was detect¬ed in the course of agricultural experiments carried out in England. The heights of wheat plants were to be measured at two stages in their growth. Of the sets of eight plants sampled for measurement at each of the two stages, two were selected “at ran¬dom” by eye, and the other six were selected by strictly random methods. Analysis of the measurements showed clearly that, in the samples selected by eye, there was a clear bias toward selecting taller shoots in May, before the ears of wheat had formed, while in June, after further maturation, another bias toward selecting plants of more like average height, and avoiding the extremely tall or short plants, was evidenced. 

I have attempted some one-hand typing of series of random digits, and found not only a bias toward a greater frequency of higher digits (regardless of the hand used 

for the typing), but also peculiar patterns in the series; digits being followed unusually often by certain other digits, for example. (For an interesting discussion of chance num¬bers, and further references on this subject, see section 12 of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.) 

One might expect to avoid human bias by using mechanical systems, but expe¬rience has shown that it is not easy to find simple unbiased mechanical systems. Perfectly balanced coins and roulette wheels, like perfectly cubical and homogeneous dice, seem to occur rarely in nature, if at all. Weldon (23), for example, threw twelve dice 4096 times. For unbiased dice the probability of a 4, 5 or 6 is 1/2, so that he should have obtained one of these faces 24,576 times. These three faces actually occurred 25,145 times, which is a statistically significant bias. Even an electronic analog of a roulette wheel, built by the RAND Corporation for the generation of random digits, after careful engineering and re-engineering to eliminate bias, was found again to have statistically significant biases, after running continuously for a month, in spite of the fact that tests showed the electronic equipment itself to be in good order (24). 

How can bias be avoided? First, it can be reduced by resorting to compound chance events, and, formally, it can be eliminated by the use of random numbers. 

By making the chance-event a compound of two or more independent events, elements in the compound event can be made more nearly independent of each other, and thus biases can be avoided. For example, in the Surrealist cadavre exquis, it was made impossible for any one person to foresee the overall result of combining the independ¬ently contributed parts of the drawing, so that bias in the relationship of elements in the compound chance-event (drawing) was avoided. John Cage has also used this technique in his “Music for Four Pianos,” wherein four pianists play independently of each other, the resulting rhythmic and melodic pattern being thus freed of personal bias. In fact, this technique has been used, in a much-refined way, to generate a table of strictly ran¬dom numbers (those published by the Interstate Commerce Commission, ref. 25). Independent columns of digits from waybills received by the commission deriving from numerical data such as shipment weight, revenue, car serial number, etc., were used as a 

basic set from which the final set was derived. 

Tables of random numbers provide a convenient and reliable means of avoid¬ing bias in selection; convenient because they allow random selection of anything which can be numbered, reliable because they can be verified to be statistically random. Tests for randomness in random number tables are described in references 21 and 26. The use of tables of random numbers is briefly described in the following section on methodology. 

Randomness, then, implies an independence of each individual choice from every other choice, plus an aggregate impartiality toward the characteristic being sam¬pled. In tables of random digits, for example, a state of randomness implies both that the occurrence of any particular digit at a particular point in the table is independent of the occurrence of all the other digits, and that the proportional occurrence of that digit in the long run is arbitrarily close to some pre-established value. Practically speaking, this means that in a table such as the RAND table, the digit 5 in a certain place is just as likely to be followed by a 6, 7, 8 or 9 as it is to be followed by a 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4, and also that in the table as a whole, the proportion of digits 5 should be reasonably close to one-tenth. 

Ways of Invoking Chance 

The technique chosen for making random or chance selections in the arts is largely determined by the number and nature of the elements from which the selection is to be made. In addition, the degree of randomness of the finished image can be made as great as the artist’s desires and capabilities allow. For example, a coin can simply be tossed to determine whether a pre-selected image shall be painted in black-on-white or white-on-black, or, at the other extreme, random number tables can be used to deter¬mine the field material (canvas, paper, etc.), size and shape of the field, medium, colors, method of application of the medium (brush, drip, etc.), components of the method (brush width, applicator dimensions, etc.), and any other characteristics of interest. 

It is practical to use coins, dice, or a roulette wheel where only a limited num¬

ber of elements are available for selection. Where the number of elements is large, these techniques become unwieldy, and others must be found. Where the elements can be numbered, tables of random numbers are relatively easy to use, otherwise automatism, or a very flexible approach, which (for want of a better name) I have called the “irrele¬vant process,” can be used. 

For convenience, I have listed these techniques below, with some examples. Readers may be able to add to the list. 

Coins 

One coin can fall either heads or tails. Two coins can fall in three different ways: both heads, one head and one tail, or both tails, and in general n coins can fall in n + 1 ways, without regard to order. With more than one coin, however, the different combinations are not equally likely. We are six times as likely to get two tails and two heads in a toss of four coins, as we are to get all tails, for example. If we desire to con¬sider HT different from TH, then two coins can fall in four different ways (NH, HT, 

TN, TT), three coins in eight different ways, and n coins in 2n ways. When coins are used for making chance selections, therefore, it is necessary to know the nature of the possible outcomes (events) which can occur, in order to avoid prejudice due to the char¬acteristics of the chance process. 

Dice 

The ordinary six-sided dice are somewhat limited with respect to flexibility, having only up to six spots per face. Two or more dice used at once lead to the same complica¬tions as met with in the use of coins, that is, the necessity either of knowing the proba¬bility of various outcomes, or of using sophisticated devices to obtain the situation desired with respect to probabilities. Two dice of different colors, for example, may be used, in order to make 4:3 distinguishable from 3:4, or the dice can be thrown one after the other instead of together. 

Though a die is now by definition cubical, analogous devices can be (and have been) constructed with other than six faces. David (18), for example, describes a rock crystal polyhedron of twenty numbered faces which dates back to ancient Greece. 

Numbered Wheels 

Small roulette wheels with 36 compartments are readily available, but are not likely to be unbiased. The device is very convenient to use, however, and gives quite usable chance series. Allan Kaprow has used the roulette wheel to arrange the elements in a composition for five voices, bell, flute, match-box, and scroll. 

Another form of the numbered wheel is that sometimes found in children’s games, a card with a circular series of numbers, and a pointer which can be spun. Paul Taylor has used this method to determine direction of motion in the dance. 

Cards 

Card shuffing must be very thoroughly done in order to approach randomness. Earle Brown has used the technique analogically in his “25 Pages” (of musical notation), designed to be played in any page order. 

Bowl Drawing 

Metal-bordered paper tags in a bowl provide a very convenient universe of chance instructions, if the tags are carefully and thoroughly mixed after having had the original set of instructions written on them. Some elements lend themselves to being drawn directly, without coding; for example, magnetic tapes containing a population of sounds can be cut into lengths, mixed in a bowl and drawn directly. A poem of Tzara’s arranged in this way is printed in the Motherwell anthology (6). 

Automatism 

A chance-process by definition, and probably the most commonly used among “action-painters.” 

Random Numbers 

Eight tables of random digits have been published, that I know of, but one or two of these are no longer in print. Two of those most readily available have been cited in references 24 and 25. After numbering the elements from which a random choice is to be made, the table is consulted, starting at any point and reading in any direction. Numbers with the requisite number of digits are taken in the same order as they occur in the table, discarding those too large for use and those previously selected (if unusable for that reason). For example, nine points are chosen on a field, and numbered 1 to 9: 

1 2 3 

. . . 

4 5 6 

. . . 

7 8 9 

. . . 

A random block of digits from the RAND table is: 

25412 

49703 

72007 

32309 

02069 

Reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom, and connecting the points above in order, we obtain the random pattern: 

Less naive approaches suggest themselves; placing the points unevenly (at will) (Brecht: “Random Form R3”) , using consecutive sets of two random numbers as sets of Cartesian coordinates (Brecht: “Random Form R4”), and so forth. Such systems for obtaining visual forms can be elaborated almost indefinitely. A special random process for the dancer exists in the ‘Random Walk,” a theoretical model developed in statistics to describe (among other things) the random motion (Brownian movement) of small parti¬cles suspended in a liquid, and acquiring their motion from numerous chance impacts. (See reference 27.) 

The Irrelevant Process 

In general, bias in the selection of elements for a chance-image can be avoided by using a method of selection of those elements which is independent of the character¬istics of interest in the elements themselves. The method should preferably give an irreg¬ular and unforeseen pattern of selection. 

John Cage has used this approach in a composition for orchestra, ruling a staff on a sheet of paper, and placing notes on the staff at points where certain minute imperfections in the paper occur. Inked marbles rolled over an irregular surface trace a pattern determined by unforeseen imperfections in the surface and chance rebounds of the marbles from each other (Brecht: “7-57”). 

More remotely, significant images occur as the result of processes over which we exercise no selection at all. The most moving collage I ever experienced was the 4 x 24 foot side of a truck carrying boilers, a piece of canvas patched irregularly with other pieces of canvas of various shades of gray. Map patterns, and the classical objets trouves, would also seem includible within this principle. 

Coda 

Chance in the arts provides a means for escaping the biases engrained in our personality by our culture and personal past history, that is, it is a means of attaining greater generality. The result is a method of approach with wide application. The meth¬

ods of chance and randomness can be applied to the selection and arrangement of sounds by the composer, to movement and pace by the dancer, to three-dimensional form by the sculptor, to surface form and color by the painter, to linguistic elements by the poet. Science tells us that the universe is what we conceive it to be, and chance enables us to determine what we conceive it to be (for the conception is only partly con¬scious). The receptacle of forms available to the artist thus becomes open-ended, and eventually embraces all of nature, for the recognition of significant form becomes limit¬ed only by the observer’s self. It must be obvious too that the infinite range of applica¬tion of these methods is compounded when the matter of materials is also considered, and this is a subject we have only incidentally touched on here. One hopes that so-called avant-garde painters will some day look beyond the classical oil medium with the same open-minded receptivity that, say, Pierre Schaeffer did in his field, in 1948. (“Quand on s’entete contre toute logique, c’est qu’on attend quelque chose d’un hasard, que cette logique n’aurait pas su prevoir. Mon merite est d’avoir apercu, entre cent experiences, celle, apparement aussi decevant que les autres, qui creait l’evasion. Encore fallait-il avoir l’audace de generaliser.” (28) 

I doubt that an increase in our ability to recognize significance in the chance-images which nature presents all about us will mean an end of the personal activities which we have been calling art. The artist will probably continue to make significant images, both because some such images rarely occur in nature, and because of a person¬al release which comes about from such activity: 

“The painter makes paintings in the urgent need to discharge his own emotions and visions.” Pablo Picasso (29) 

“Pictures are vehicles of passion, of all kinds and orders, not pretty luxuries like sports cars. In our society, the capacity to give and to receive passion is limited. For this reason, the act of painting is a deep human necessity, not the production of a hand¬made commodity. Robert Motherwell (30) 

But it seems to me that we fall short of the infinite expansion of the human spirit for which we are searching, when we recognize only images which are artifacts. We 

are capable of more than that. 

AN AFTER-NOTE 

In 1957, when this article was written, I had only recently met John Cage and had not yet seen clearly that the most important implications of chance lay in his work rather than in Pollock’s. Nor could I have foreseen the resolution of the distinction between choice and chance which was to occur in my own work. 

We are eight years farther on the spiral, and I prefer work to re-work. “Chance-Imagery” is presented in the form in which it was originally written. 

November, 1965 

Reference 

(1) Tristan Tzara. “Lecture on Dada” (1922). The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Edited by Robert Motherwell. The Documents of Modern Art series. Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1951, p. 248. We will hereafter abbreviate this anthology to “Motherwell.” 

(2) Sigmund Freud. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. English translation by A. A. Brill. The Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1938, p. 164. 

(3) Marcel Raymond. From Baudelaire to Surrealism. Quoted in Motherwell, p. xxix of the Introduction. 

(4) Andre Breton. “First Surrealist Manifesto.” Quoted by Georges Hugnet in one of his two introductory essays for Fantastic Art, Dada. Surrealism. Edited by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Third edition, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1947. Hereafter this book is referred to as “Barr.” 

(5) Harriet and Sidney Janis. “Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist” (1945). Motherwell, Appendix C, p. 306. 

(6) Tristan Tzara. “manifesto on feeble love and bitter love.” Motherwell, p. 92. 

(7) A. H. Barr, Jr. “A list of devices, techniques, media.” Barr, p. 65. 

(8) Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, “Some Memories of Pre-Dada: Picabia and Duchamp” (1949). Motherwell, p. 266. 

(9) Jan (Hans) Arp. “Dada Was Not a Farce” (1949). Motherwell, p. 294. 

(10) Tristan Tzara. “Lecture on Dada” (1922). Motherwell, p. 247. 

(11) Sam Hunter. Catalog of the 1956 Pollock retrospective show. Bulletin, vol. xxiv, no. 2 of the Museum of Modern Art. 

(12) Jackson Pollock. “My Painting.” Possibilities (N.Y.), no. 1:79, Winter 1947-48, pp. 78-83. 

(13) Jackson Pollock. “Jackson Pollock” (a questionnaire). Arts and Architecture, vol. 61. no. 2, February 1944, p. 14. 

(14) D. T. Suzuki. “Zen Buddhism.” Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki. Edited by William Barrett. Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, Anchor edition, 1956, p. 234. Used by permission of Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., London. 

(15) D. T. Suzuki. Ibid., p. 256. 

(16) Jean (Hans) Arp. “Notes from a Dada Diary.” Motherwell, p. 222. 

(17) Max Born. Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance. Oxford University Press, London, 1949, p. 92. 

(18) F. N. David. “Studies in the history of probability and statistics: I. Dicing and Gaming.” Biometrika. University College London, vol. 42, parts 1 and 2, June 1955, p. 1. 

(19) Hans Reichenbach. The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951. 

(20) Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second edition, copyright 1959 by G. & C. Merriam Co., publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionaries. Used by permission. 

(21) M. G. Kendall and B. Babington Smith. “Randomness and Random Sampling Numbers.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, London, vol. CI, pt. 1, 1938, pp. 147-166. 

(22) G. Udny Yule and M. G. Kendall. An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics. 14th edition, Hafner Publishing Co., New York, 1950. 

(23) Cited in M. G. Kendall. The Advanced Theory of Statistics. Fifth edition, Hafner Publishing Co., New York, vol. I, p. 199. 

(24) The RAND Corporation. A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1955. A description of the method used for production of the random digits is contained in the introduction. 

(25) Interstate Commerce Commission, Bureau of Transport Economics and Statistics. Table of 105,000 Random Decimal Digits. Washington, D. C., May 1949. Copies are available free from the Commission. Refer to Statement No. 4914, File No. 261-A-1. 

(26) G. Udny Yule. “A Test of Tippett’s Random Sampling Numbers.” Journal of the 

Royal Statistical Society, Vol. CI, pt. 1, 1938, p. 167. 

(27) W. Feller. Probability Theory and its Applications. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1950, vol. 1, chapter 14. 

(28) Pierre Schaeffer. A la recherche d’une musique concrete. Editions du Seuil, 1952, p. 16. 

(29) Quoted by Frank Elgar; in Elgar and Maillard. Picasso. Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1956. 

(30) Statement by Robert Motherwell; in “The New Decade” exhibition catalog. Edited by John I. H. Baur. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1955. 

Additional Reading 

The Growth of Physical Science. Sir James Jeans. Cambridge University Press, 1948. 

The Celestographs of August Strindberg

Douglas Feuk

Few outside of Sweden know that the playwright August Strindberg had periods of intense engagement with painting and photo-graphy in the 1890s, when his literary creat-ivity had reached a deadlock. In an essay from 1894 called “Chance in Artistic Creation,” he describes the methods that he employs, speaking about his wish to “imitate […] nature’s way of creating.“
¹This text is strangely prophetic, foreboding the automatic techniques of the 20th century. His method is to start more or less at random, trusting nature’s inherent desire for form (what he calls “matter’s drive towards representation”) to eventually make the picture develop out of the paint, almost by itself. 

In his paintings there is always a “motif”—often stormy skies, agitated waves, perhaps a lonely rock by the sea. But these landscapes or seascapes are still half-embedded in the material, like a world in the process of being created. Boundaries and differences are fluid: Air might have the same density as stone, and the rock seems mysteriously fused with the water—as if they were all but different manifestations of the same matter. In fact, the tactile surface in Strindberg’s paintings is at times emphasized so much that not only does it provide an image of nature, it also, in part, gives the impression of being nature. In the painting High Sea, for example, there are sections that Strindberg has blackened with a burner, but also patches of a brownish-gray, rough structure that seem to be not so much painted as oxidized, or in other ways created by some elementary process of nature. 

Convinced that he had changed the development of painting in a progressive direction, Strindberg published his essay on chance and artistic production in a Parisian journal. And in his experimental photography from the same year, there are examples of images that are even more in line with what he called “natural art.” I am thinking of his “celestographs,” where the surfaces not only look weathered with an atmospherically-created patina, but even seem to have been made in physical collaboration with the weather. 

Strindberg distrusted camera lenses, since he considered them to give a distorted representation of reality. Over the years he built several simple lens-less cameras made from cigar boxes or similar containers with a cardboard front in which he had used a needle to prick a minute hole. But the celestographs were produced by an even more direct method using neither lens nor camera. The experiments involved quite simply placing his photographic plates on a window sill or perhaps directly on the ground (sometimes, he tells us, already lying in the developing bath) and letting them be exposed to the starry sky. 

The black or darkly earth-colored pictures that eventually appeared are strewn with a myriad small, lighter dots that Strindberg thought were stars. That they might have been drops of dew, some kind of atmospheric particles, or just some dirt in the developer cannot be ruled out. As soon as the experiments were finished, Strindberg sent both photographs and a written account to the famous astronomer, Camille Flammarion, in Paris. But despite his own mystical inclinations, Flammarion must have considered this photographic method all too absurd and Strindberg never received the official recognition for which he was yearning. Indeed, as a contribution to science or as a representation of nature, these pictures are of course worthless. Their imaginary value, however, is an entirely different question. 

Certainly, the photographs often look like nocturnal celestial scenes. But you could just as easily see gravel or dust, a close-ups of worn asphalt, or a patch of dark soil. Actually, the pictures are not totally unlike the topographical earth studies that much later, in the 1950s, engaged Jean Dubuffet, which he named texturologies. The greatness of Strindberg’s photographs lies precisely in that they offer this double view, where starry sky and earthly matter seem to move within and through one another. 

Today, science believes that this is actually so. All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are created in nuclear reactions inside stars and then thrown out into space, especially in the gigantic eruptions of supernovas. Almost every atom that makes up our material world of stones, plants, and human beings must once have been inside of exploding giant stars. This would mean, in a dizzyingly material sense, that we are actually made out of stardust. But more symbolically, the celestographs also seem to meditate on the links between the dark earth and the celestial light and life force. I understand them as a reverie on correspondences between micro- and macrocosmos—or between light and dark, high and low, gold and dirt. 

This sounds like very traditional idealistic symbolism. But what is remarkable, and what makes these images so “modern,” is that they also concrete examples of a kind of chemical naturalism (as in the work of Polke, Kiefer, and many other recent artists). Strindberg insisted that art should try to “imitate […] nature’s way of creating,” and in these celestographs the image and the world have approached each other to the extent that they more or less merge. Whatever the coincidences were that created these pictures, the subject matter appears less as a photographic image than as a “work” by nature itself. 

The transforming processes of nature have continued to develop the photographs during the century that has passed since they were made. Thumbprints have left traces, and grease or ink stains on the back have in time wandered through the paper. Strangely enough, this has not ruined, but rather perfected these images of night—sometimes with light veils of bluish precipitates, sometimes with rusty brown oxidized spots that could possibly be interstellar dust clouds or just ordinary earthly skies lit up from below. 

It is highly likely that these “clouds” or this “circular nebula” are details that Strindberg himself never saw, and that they only appeared much later. But it is just as likely that this was a metamorphosis that would have been to his taste. After the mid-1890s he increasingly believed that nature is of a spiritual character and, in line with much of the Romantic nature philosophy of the time, he claimed that nature tended to manifest itself to man in signs and symbols that are difficult to interpret. During the last years of his life he was very preoccupied with clouds, and during 1907 and 1908 he often noticed cloud formations that returned in the same shapes and to the same places around Stockholm. In an attempt to understand what they could “mean,” he photographed and made a lot of drawings of these cloud banks, and he also described the phenomenon in A Blue Book. 

Goethe and Constable were early practitioners of an analytic, quasi-scientific study of clouds, and studying clouds was of enormous interest for many other 19th-century landscape painters. But Strindberg is not an open air painter. He reads the clouds less meteorologically than metaphorically. What they have to say about air pressure and weather changes interests him less than the fact that they sometimes look like mountains or a pile of boulders. It happens more than once in his paintings that the motif oscillates between images of clouds and images of the “Alps.” 

Earth and sky communicate with one another. “Everything is created in analogies, the inferior with the superior,” writes Strindberg. And for Strindberg as draftsman and painter and experimental photographer, the true subject is primarily these “correspondences” that the pictures seem to reveal. Even clouds that he draws become in some sense a celestograph; a kind of “heavenly script,” and yet another example of what he saw as nature’s artistic striving for form: an inherent cipher, hard to understand but still hopeful, like a glimpse of a great other, “boundless” totality. 

Translation: Birgitta Danielsson 

1. Strindberg’s text was written in French and printed in the Paris journal Revue des Revues under the title “Du hasard dans la production artistique.” It is available in English in Douglas Feuk, August Strindberg: Inferno Painting and Pictures of Paradise (Copenhagen: Edition Bløndal, 1991).

ver aqui:< http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/celesographs.php>