Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/SubReal Dracula Land - CTHEORY-

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Topic 265       SubReal Dracula Land - CTHEORY-L
peg:visionary   cyberculture zone       12:22 AM  Dec 17, 1993

DRACULALAND  -  m-angle-angel

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"CTHEORY is an international, electronic review of books on"

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m-angle-angel is the nom-de-cyberspace of Michael Boyce, who is the
author of The Vague Generation.  He is currently completing a video
documentary on the same subject.

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subREAL, DRACULALAND, Venice Biennial, (Open 1993)

"Besides being a THEORY, subREAL is a group which is supposed to
propagate it."

(subREAL are a collective from Romania which operated under and survived
that country's brutal and repressive administration. subREAL are: Calin
Dan, Josif Kiraly, Dan Mihaltianu.)

"Our emergency is SURVIVAL. Each day a new generation comes to life,
brilliantly pushing us toward the inevitable. Avoiding the end of the
century: survival versus human proliferation; millenaristic hysteria
versus the free acceptance of replacement; sterility versus the
inflationsim of creation. Survival at any risk, beyond and behind the
limits of good senses. Our indicator is CYNICISM. Funny cynicism
against professional seriousness. Skeptical cynicism against
enthusiastic dullness. Obvious cynicism against secret cruely. Sexual
cynicism against the hypocrite rejection of biological desperation;
political cynicism against the obsessional fight of the Power for the
Power; biographical cynicism against the massification of the
individuals; lethal cynicism against the exploitation of death as a
token image. Cynicism, a hopeless medicine for the terminal disease.
The cynicism of survival. An international trend in a nationalistic
context."

6:30 (18:30)

The recognition of media as weaponry, what is that if not the
recognition of the place of mediation in war. All war is mediation
surely, but is all mediation war? If so, then war is a gestural term,
for war must be, then, a constant thing and it is only referred to for
the sake of certain specifics. To mediate is to be at war. The
question, for the sake of identifying differences (i.e. choosing sides),
is, what kind of war is it, or, how do you fight? These are merely
qualitative questions.

And then, what is manipulation? Only a serviceable rendering. In war,
all sides attempt to render or proffer a version of reality (of life of
how to make a living) and represent it in a persuasive (if not
seductive) manner.

Spreading information is like spreading butter on toast; what is covers,
it augments. The world is made through augmentation it is made as we
speak.

Controllers are we all, big and small. The small speak often of the
big, especially if they consider themselves to be at a disadvantage.
Anyone can describe someone else from either vantage point, and to be so
targeted in worlds where the image (the imaginary) has high social and
political currency is to be metered or gauged in relation to power
amplitudes. Think of wealth within such a paradigm as intensity.

A well known image can serve as a battle-ground where determining its
meaning (and using an expose of the fabrication the imbuement of the
signification, is the strategy) is the fighting procedure. Indeed,
Draculaland is a term which means to indicate that both images and lands
share conceptual borderlines, and are, hence, both contrived and
invested in for the sake of fortifying and advancing principles.

Draculaland, also, is likened to a fairy tale in that its basic
parameters are mutable and easily accommodated by shifts in general
social concerns. They are adaptable, in other words, to various genres
of representation. In this case, Dracula's efficiency as a tale and
figure to capture the imagination is considered in light of a current
preoccupation with a sub-genre (although very popular) of
science-fiction known as Cyberpunk (where punk-rock aesthetics are
intermingled with cybernetics and in this way, it illustrates, by the
very entertainment of such a merger, a software/hardware dialectic so
very much a part of industrial concerns and which has also been, as of
late, extended intellectually so as to more or less create the following
formulation: software = aesthetic or idea, and hardware = tool or
practice* The language, too of philosophy's concerns with dialectics has
been conscripted or imported into computer-science vernacular such that
the term "dialectic" itself has been exchanged with "interface"). But
the particulars of the meaning of such a translation are, of course,
contentious.

If motive or intent are to be registered as an issue, it is in relation
to a notion of coincidence. Here, it would seem that coincidence
figures as what one might call the fortuitous condition of an arbitrary
sign (symbol, icon, image, whatever), for being mobilized for the
colonization of the imagination. The sign, then, as a thing in itself,
is considered a gamble in its deployment, and its effectiveness is
deemed lucky only after its usage proves to have great potential for
contradiction (for the more neutral or empty it is, the more it can be
given meaning). Coincidence, in this game, therefore, is procedural,
it is that which allows meaning to be provisionally, yet intensely,
attributed to something after the fact of its appearance, and which
allows intent to be always vague and, hence, always moot and
contentious. Coincidence, in this respect, can operate as a provocateur
of war. And this might be a rather large purpose in itself.

Dracula in particular, and vampires in general, allow(s) for the
fundamental war between life and death to function and register itself
at all levels (individual and collective or societal) at once. It can
be your struggle, his or her struggle, our struggle, their struggle,
it can be abstract, concrete, public or private, aesthetic, functional,
metaphoric, economic or territorial. In a certain way, it can function
as the site of the war between dialectical transcendentalism and a
species of nihilistic cybernetics, or it could thereby be the site of
war itself.

8:30 (20:30)

A dictionary is presented. Here are some of the lexical items: America,
blood, bluttworst, Bucuresti, buttock, can, castle, Coca-Cola, entropy,
Erzesbeth, exorcism, garlic, graveyard, hermaphrodite, indicator, map,
mititei, orphanage, stick, vampire.

There are footnotes and there are pictures.
What does it all mean?
Indeed!

A dictionary can be a battle-ground for the ascertainment of sense.
Imagine that such a thing is not innocent. Imagine that the denotative
and the connotative are yet to be sorted out. And while your at it, you
might imagine different ways of thinking about cynicism.

How many words are the pictures worth? It could be a hypertext (the
preference for tangential and associative reading). The proliferation
of a variety or expanse of meaning could be like scattering shrapnel.

If cynicism can in any way be typified as a disavowal of the
preciousness of the melancholy of meaning (indeed, in the wake of the
19th c., the disavowal of the Gothic), then perhaps its value is
pugnaciously recuperated, re-determined and restated against the thought
of being dismissed on the grounds of its being too hard, too cold, too
insensitive (too machine-like or too abstract), and done so by way of a
sympathetic collusion with hardware as the open potential for software
application what might be called the mechanics of play. Cynicism, in
this regard, could treat sensible objects (be they image, text, music or
whatever) as envelopes whose aesthetic (or interest) is developed (as
much as you like) by modification. It could be said to be a politics
against fixity, which somewhat fixates itself upon (others') fixation.

Draculaland, in view of this formulation, perhaps like its similar (if
you will allow) namesake Disneyland, is a contestable playground which
means to highlight and represent certain ecstatic and utopic icons of
possible worlds and entertaining as well as awesome and amazing
productions and developments within it, and by so doing, allows itself
to have exposed, certain peculiar contradictions which both undermine
and secure its mandate. If Disneyland could be said to be an utopia
bred by the industrial revolution and an American pioneer spirit which
has tagging along with it a history (or function) of destructive waste
production, demolition, and genocide (as well as the trivialization by
way of a commercial glorification of sentiment and collective good
will), then Draculaland could be said to be an utopia bred by a Gothic
melancholia and consumptiveness, industrial failure, darkness and
predatorial politics rooted in superstition and paranoia which becomes
overlaid with a victimization superiority complex ecstatic like St.
John's revelation for its imminent transcendent moment. An utopia of
deliverance.

Draculaland is where the feasted and preyed upon await the coming of the
Disneyland gods to feast and prey upon them some more, but with the
difference that these gods will pay for their meal and extend
invitations and enlist and initiate the food into the ranks of the
eaters. Bite me Dracula and give me eternal death. For God's sake, let
us at least become forever adolescents like you, so that we too can
wrestle to defer adulthood (that great transcendental inconvenience and
what could be worse in America then an inconvenience?).

But hearken to this: what is waited for has already arrived.
Didn't you notice? No, for vampires cast no reflection.

Here they agree with McLuhan: "blood: 1. A medium; 2. A message".

And the body and the machine (like a mirror and a Hollywood movie) are
not simply metaphors of one another, but interpolations of one another.

Erzebeth Bathory and Vlad the Impaler.

9:26 (21:26) Record Review

It's like Bataille and Deleuze through McLuhan and Baudrillard under the
collaborative production assistance of Zone Books and Semio-text(e),
with cover/liner art by Duchamp and Bunuel whilst trying to do a
social-realist rendition of Guernica for an Einsterzende Neubauten
video. Yeah Johnny, but does it rock?

Give it a spin, kid.

Oh, and there's a nod, I guess, to John Cage by way of reference to a
possible video piece which would be titled 2'33".

10:30 (22:30)

So, here's the flip: the simulation of reality to the reality of
simulation; fantasy park to reality park. This could be understood as
the kind of ironic reversal which reveals not so much a difference as
the kind of similarity which only confirms Baudrillard's seduction
thesis (i.e. seduction as the infinite reversibility of signs). Which
is to say that  again the matter is precisely one of mediation and an
operative capacity for distributive effects, whatever its target (its
feigned agency). Whether the thrust is on reality or on fantasy, power
and authority are exercised by a virtual command upon virtual bodies in
virtual space.

So then, why bother making the distinction? Because in the realm of the
virtual, gesture is everything, and the particularity of the gesture in
this case allows for a feedback mechanism vis-a-vis the imagination a
loop which secures the imagination as the true haven, and thus, as the
best space for colonization. After all, if reality park is as horrific
as its said to be, then it only begs comparison to that comfy gestural
inside it plays outside to. Reality could be thought of, therefore, as
a scapegoat to the virtual a ritual sacrifice to the gods of the
hologram (the holo-deck). Not to say that there aren't certain
advantages to this; some people go out of their way in industrial (and
so-called post-industrial) nations to obtain disability allowance and
infamy often pays just as well as, if not better than, fame itself.

Hey, maybe Romania can be the playground for Ballard-Crash aesthetes.

Draculaland as the holo-deck programmed for genuine interactive
dependency and the reaffirmation of the beauty and correctness of the
technopolis.

11:00 (23:00)

m-angle-angel.

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