Occulted energies: earth, alchemy, electronics and technology. Martin Howse. August 2015. Energies in the Arts conference, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW Art & Design, Sydney RE-CYCLING Provide by Arts, for the hardnesse of Nature, for one Sister weepeth without the other. [John Dee, A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits... [ Abbreviated to TFR.] p. 357] The first stage of this writing is fermentation. A quotation in the alembic is then heated again and again, re-cycling and circling with the years and in the Pelican, dripping through, feeding its cycling blood: Or we could call it RECYCLING. Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity— most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. [Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. p.480,481] The supposed Orouboric dream (or a fabrication thereof, a fake, a monkeyed island parody) is recycled with its serpent intruder shadowing the molecular structure of benzene, beginning a cycle which leads to a new foundation for organic chemistry, and thus to the development and escalation of the synthetic. This dream which apparently comes back (by omnibus) to the chemist or scientist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz equally proclaims a cycle of decay and death which is "violated" by its own application, the interpretation and use of that in-cycling carbon-carbon bonded ring. It is too easy to say that the autumnal alembic of any nature is broken or smashed by a science without seasons and cycles, excepting the measured fluctuations of branching, hardening tailed-toxic rivulets of sulphur (sticking as crystalline in the flasks, unmasks) or cyanide running down from the white hotel, the mount royal (Ballard, The Crystal World), which also cannot be seasoned. For that is also seeming circular, this (de re) metallica cycle of mining, vampire earth containments, leaky synthetics, refinement, and a forthcoming technology which then gets returned to the earth. And what precisely is being violated? A hunted, stag/g/ed (Diana) cybernetic for(who?)- loop attends a bachelor (party) machine, EM-bodied as any circuit made from the earth, as both violation (its application) and completion ("return 0;"); autumn is violation. A confusion of tailings is mentally al-imbibed, to fall down on the side of capital or entropy, accumulation's inverse, considered as natural, precisely where obscenely there is no nature. For it is presented that we are either all nature, as science would have it (the unconscious charted), or no nature, airs (sic) apparent to either a burning or emptied schizoid earth crown or thrown; either in that whole container, or with no outsiders. It all begins with the season of earth, a cycle and a dream, but it can't begin, again, in death or entropic tailing graphed. I can only insist that it is always necessarily autumn (in heaven), that an autumn slime time is crystalline both with a marked-mycelium beginning and not an end; there is always a time for fermentation and for putrefaction, for seasons of a writing which returns and is always re-visiting, but which could perhaps be subject to decay. So for the words themselves to be so subjected, as things, to fire and dissolution, they would need to be moulded of matter, and to admit the voiceless noise of angels. The letters and symbols forming these words, forged in crystal, locked in concrete, dragged through the snow as a bell calls, would previously have been written as a book of nature, now sadly declined and decaying, attempting to be revived but as surely as it is outside that dream it is destroyed by science (thrown away as it reveals a contained nothing and must be surpassed for engineering) and thus uselessly mourned. But what is exactly this hidden place of the now, where symbolic orders, where language becomes material change at a quantum level? Where words are subjected to literal and not literary un-angelled noise, not the simple noise of ghosted machine transmissions, where they become in themselves registers of shit? This non-place is the CPU or Central Processing Unit, anchoring any technology, AKA. the Dark Interpreter; the deteriorating Book of Nature is saved as all salvage, an electronic waste basket, as a processor or circuit skewed and etched in nature, in up-mined substrate, necessarily admitting that decline and declension of noise. Written in an opposed sense, the Dark Interpreter is nothing other than this being able to subject words to (material) change. There is always the desire to (on the surface) invert a magic which would subject materials to a transformation enacted by words which are thus the same as things, so that now these words changed do become as things, do become the expressed words of nature (where there is no difference between the thing named and the thing, it _is_ its multiplying and branching schizoid utterance); yet as things they can be subjected to attrition and to entropy and this is just to show and indicate (the Dark Interpreter at work) that this can be done to any container. That it can finally give words to death, and death to words; putrefaction and autumn without end in the non-returning, always closed vessel, and dissolution in a dream. The Dark Interpreter is that which is written, as words only, with no flesh, no non-transcendant body, words not of earth nor in the earth, but in a lake, IN the terror and Dee light of the lone lake (Poe) which is the return of truth. The processor is not broken, buried, mottled, melted; instructions are not pinned backwards and driven heartily yet without reason into the earth, proclaimed earthy OCR (optical character recognition) from after-times and end-times: "Thiu oipenest the greatest babilty and strength of toy power not such as it hath been btt such as it is. EK" Interpretation: background to that first quotation, obsession with pynchon who writes the conspiracy that is technology (only the earth, the city as a circuit board, psychogeophysics, the being substrate of the world, ones and zeroes - aside on electromysticism as key here - electromyst is the transitioning between matter and meaning and the implied question of transcendance or material.) Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz the chemist in 1862 supposedly daydreams the oroboric or snaking structure of the benzene molecule - paving the way for synthetic and organic chemistry. but aside from a rhetoric of profit and extraction, begin to doubt these oppositions, of the cyclical and resonant with the extractive and squandering. not so much about this expenditure in itself but rather ... exactly what? that perhaps there is a cycle which is embedded within technology as alchemical, as returning, as micro-electronic, and as world giving-and-holding which is not self-violating, which is natural and which must be violated. ... human works are variously the same as natural ones... For the fire of natural lightning and the fire thrown forth by a computer processor is the same fire. The natural ambient air and the artificial air produced by a climate control device are both air. The natural earth beneath our feet and the silicon produced by burning sand are both earth. Green salt, vitriol, arsenic, mercury and cyanide are natural and artificial. [Book of Hermes - late 13/14 century] it can name itself on one side decay and obsolescence - the cycle of technology, mined from the earth and returned to the earth with a leakage, the spreading blood of the sun bitten by the green lyon of science punctuating these cycles of mined-day and illuminated-night: Let there be LIGHTES in the firmament of the heaven, that they may divide the Day and the Night, and let them be for Signes and Seasons, and for the Dayes and yeres." [Dee. A playne discourse.] the pynchon quotation implies a cycle of decay and death which is supposedly "violated" by its own application, the interpretation and use of that in-cycling carbon-carbon bonded ring. the ouroboros- serpent eating its own tail, figure from greek (gnostic), indian and norse religion and philosophy later appearing as alchemical symbol birthing technology in a supposed re-birth is not for us NOW about cycles, about return but rather a holding WHO, we hold ourselves, one holds the world.. - what is exactly this contradictory holding? that the world is, but can never be said to be that which it is, but always is, over and over. that we can begin to see that it is a question of containing which is the same as holding; and of an outside to a cycling. alchemical symbol we'll see here (slides) at intervals: from the 2nd century Alexandrian text The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra encloses the words hen to pan - "one is all" or "one the all". snake holds all as itself. everything needs to _be_ to be that one: And where and when he will lacke an Unit, there and then that particular thyng shal be Discreated. [John Dee, Preface to Euclid's Elements of Geometry. 1570] THE CPU ... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform [...] Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. [Maxwell. 1871] But what [...] if the Demon exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the metaphor?" Nefastis smiled; impenetrable, calm, a believer. "He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor." She looked at the picture on the outside of the box. Clerk Maxwell was in profile and would not meet her eyes. The forehead was round and smooth, and there was a curious bump at the back of his head, covered by curling hair. His visible eye seemed mild and noncommittal, but Oedipa wondered what hangups, crises, spookings in the middle of the night might be developed from the shadowed subtleties of his mouth, hidden under a full beard. [Pynchon. Crying Lot 49] He (Smoluchowski) proposed that you try being a demon yourself: just buy one of those modern infrared-sensitive night glasses. In addition you need a bowl of water, a dark room, an ordinary spoon, and two thermos bottles, one red and one blue. Then just wait and sample, with the spoon. [Otto Rossler. Endophysics] Interpretation: parallel to maxwell's demon is an aside on what we can call thermal hacking - eavesdropping on the heat emissions of a computer's processor and graphics card. - also as a communications channel using thermal sensors. that what I call the CPU - the mundane central processing unit, this everyday, hidden piece of stuff, of silicon, exactly where programming instructions but always only as voltages, as energy and electricity are transformed - not really, are channeled graphically through twists and turns of demonic leverings and pistonings of electrons... this CPU is for me a talisman,an empty vessel, to be filled here and to become the world. the earth computer. that this CPU is precisely where symbolic orders, language, becomes and submerges or takes over material change at a quantum level. where words, literally, fight the subjection to angelic noise, or shit-becoming. Maxwell's world: An obsession, the only obsession there can be, with the word made flesh, our flesh which is now technology and which _was_ words (words of invocatory code). the word has been made this flesh (and this is also the link to alchemy where material action in the world is presented as a set of symbolic transformations (leading certain thinkers to conceive of alchemy solely as a practice of symbolic or unconscious transformation). so my interest is in precisely where this transition from word or symbol (in the case of say computer programming) to material takes place. what i call the site of execution? (explain? that cannot be located) This transition, this making of the world flesh is an energetic transformation, that it needs energy to do this, that this transformation which makes the world for us requires a declining energy gradient (increasing entropy through the consumption of energy), that is perhaps a mundane or profane sacrifice. the world literally burns for meaning. but does this imply transcendant meaning or simply a rebound/return to materials/only the earth? Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. [Crying] this transition or transformation in no place is not magic, and alchemy was never magical but natural, describing itself as "natural philosophy" - a philosophy in and of nature as a symbolic realm. and these energetic transformations can come be viewed as "energy state/level transitions" within the quantum entropy and maxwell's demon unite this obsession with the site of execution and the concerns of this conference and the conspiracy that is technology underwrites this UNITY, this ONE cycling. TO KEEP IT ALL RE-CYCLING is the key as we'll see.... in time. maxwell's demon marks the transition from material to information - that it was already about knowing which particle has so much energy... to sift and sort that all-times entropy gradient within some kind of apparatus (and what is that apparatus?) In an ordinary belfry, each bell has one rope which comes down through a hole in the floor to the bellringer's room. But suppose that each rope, instead of acting on one bell, contributes to the motion of many pieces of machinery, and that the motion of each piece is determined not by the motion of one rope alone, but by that of several, and suppose, further that all this machinery is silent and utterly unknown to the men at the ropes, who can only see as far as the holes in the floor above them. [Maxwell 1879] Belfry of abstraction. another demonic container in which something is happening which is either known or unknowable. we can call this describing constructivist in that this is how the world is to the scientist but also how the world will be made and thought by technology. under this sign and belfry boxing: world is written as a processor, as information or as CPU (pretending to be ignorant of energy, with entropy re- written as informational under the sign of Maxwell's Demon - that we can begin to call this Maxwell's world (his equations, the end of the energetic aether)), world as processor is the conspiracy of technology. reverse occultation in turning night into day. the sun unburied as a digital. this demon demonstrates by default that information is energy, and must necessarily follows an entropic inclination. memory is always subject to the work of re-ordering and refreshing, operating against the hardness or rather leaky softness of nature by the arts, operating against the angelic unsorted noise of matter. [We have no voyce, but a full noyce that filleth every place: which when you ones taste of, Distance shall make no separation. Dee] [core memory, RAM eg. RAM chips that store information are, in fact, ever so slightly heavier than RAM chips without information because of the relationship between energy and information, and the relationship between mass and energy (E=mc2). Particularly, information and entropy are very closely related concepts: lots of information is a low entropy state, less information is a high entropy state. So storing information, organising the bits on a computer chip into a less random pattern, requires energy to be pumped into a system to reverse the natural entropy experienced and organise the degrees of freedom available.] at the same time endophysical or container interpretation of maxwell's demon without going too far into that (Rossler re. proofs that Maxwell's demon does not work) To a being who is not confined to the world in question, however, all of the proofs break down. Indeed, when you sit at the keyboard of a computer in which a [...] universe is simulated, it is very easy to perform either of the above-mentioned magic tricks. [Rossler. Endophysics] Electronics Electronics can be described as the absolute and instrumental control and manipulation of electromagnetic energies (embracing the sun and earth) through principles of negative feedback and a necessary, flawed opposition to gradients of entropy on the inside. electronics is the imposition of order on electrons, and thus on flows of energy. computation can equally well use flows of air, water, the movements of other beings, a demonic skipping to compute. computation converts energy to information, realising the promise of maxwell's demon. that the imposed order is there - forbidden zones of energy transition, boundings, the electron locked in. but that was what was discovered after Maxwell. quantum control. dreamy acrostics of Fermi, Pauli, Bohr, Planck all of this stemming from radioactivity... order in all cases defining technology - the ordering of land under the sign of infrastructure, the ordering of states and subjects, the putting into order of synthetic and so-called natural molecules, the imposition of order on silicon, on mined and refined minerals ... a putting into order means a putting into symbolic order, so that it means something and will continue to mean something... and that it is held as that which is certain and maintains identity, and is thus contained, it does not leak, neither energy nor current spraying out into another now meaningless container electronics signals and signs that technology is (and this is obvious) the ordering and containing of the earth as energetic process in itself and for itself as a containing that this is obvious and can be spoken as such shows the holding of the world - as functional in itself, doing and meaning something... If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths [Vineland] from telegraphy (relay amplification), and the holy grid (de forests triode), the transistor, to the integrated circuit by way of the operational amplifier, to the logic gate, to the now invisible CPU and network of light the same principles of control and order: flow x is under the control of flow y. x cannot or at least should not leak into y (opening the demonic doors) the triode or audion - the first time was explicitly specified a control electrode Electrons flowing from the cathode to the anode have to pass through a charged screen or grid. A slight amount of charge on the grid can have a big effect on the current flowing between the cathode and the anode. Thus the triode is a simple amplification device, since a small signal charging the grid controls a large flow of current. next step is the transistor (1947): similar principle on a super-microscopic-level, the flow of electrons is controlled by changes in voltage potential in what is called the base, which enacts quantum/material energy-level-changes within a doped substrate. electrons are corralled in the transistor across energy bands within a crystalline structure. the result is amplification but also oscillation by way of feedback introducing indirect control into the material world, furthering abstraction one small step, but the next stage is introduction of feedback not only as POSITIVE oscillation _as_ transmission but as further control or negation of the material world of heat, noise, entropy and energy. control of the flow energy as information negates being energy. within the transistor amplification is runaway and dependent on environmental factors such as temperature. negative feedback (the amplified signal is fed back to the control signal in reverse or out of phase to temper this - self- adjustment, thermostatic control, tending towards self-consciousness) as an aside: the oroboric op-amp or operational amplifier presents a more perfect solution to the excesses of matter and materials, that unconscious solarian monster which cannot conform and form to the ordered, that cannot _be_. in short, as materials present differing and unknown excesses of amplification outside our control, some kind of taming must take place, yet a serpent yoked from the inside under the sign of negative feedback (as in transistor also). how to explain? eats own tail, but negatively, swallowing time and energy but it is the no-energy, the zero impedance of a tail which doesn't pull or push and cannot work but is only _for_ control. parallels with bootstrapping - that the earth is encouraged to use "its own" energies towards that ordering (tailings, mines, computation, feedback). all of these natural cyclings are PUT UPON the earth. too much to say that they work NEGATIVELY, operating against itself. next stage from the transistor and op-amp to the solid-state intelligencing that is the CPU, the central processing unit, the earth core by way of the logic gate and the truth table, Dee's angelic communication table: He standeth upon his round table of Crystal, or rather of Mother of Pearl: There appear an infinite number of letters on the same, as thick as one can stand by one another. The table is somewhat inclined on one side [Dee. TFR] but now a truth table of ones and zeroes, infinitely arrayed as a time series writing all Lullian possibilities as a new book of nature, somewhat similar in nature to the old one. how logic gates work? rather than one flow (of electrons, of water, of breath) effecting another, that two inputs designated demonically as a one or a zero are switched about by a few transistors to form an output (a one or a zero, a presence or an absence of a stream) which is always truly reproduced against infection and plague. Boolean logic, true or false, the OR gate, the AND gate from which we can make simple addition circuits, towards the Turing complete CPU and circuit, the first tree-like extensions into the being-CPU. Technology as conspiracy to view technology as a conspiracy means to see it as already occulted, hidden, something covered which is being planned for secret ends. that the project of science is not that which it publicly conveys? as if it could be, which is always the unrealised irony. conspiracy is thus un-conscious, a nature, invented as and under that name... underground and darkened. but how can technology be hidden when it is precisely that sun (heraclitus: how can one hide before that which never sets) which never hides and is so obvious? This world nature is described as a conspiracy (mocked up as a science standing against the human) which cannot be stated precisely because in being formulated we can point outside this container, this monument of a "saying so". That which is true cannot be how it is stated in the conspiracy, as that which is true can never be pointed outside once stated and cannot be meta-stated thus here and now. Nature is a place of technological hardnesse and holey stickiness, a falling into rock and slime. A conspiracy is coded in the earth itself and executed on the flesh; a conspiracy was unveiled as electromagnetic and geophysical in the nineteenth century, smog-veiled crypto-volcanic faultlines literarily stoking and coding the invention of an all time (writing) machine which would, as writing proceeds to word processing, turn some words, not all, into actions, supposedly without material bias and attrition, without magic; the modern, constrained and rationalist Enigma of Turing which can still turn bodies into slime, or fire. Containers for all life and death. This conspiracy was initiated when the blood ores (such as haematite) of the very first metallic veins were explored and exploited, and it is a conspiracy _commemorated_ in letters formed by the radon-rich standing stones, circles, qouits and chambers scattered across the now desolate, mined and exhumed landscape, to which the Time Traveller awakes. This world as certain, as particular and as island _is_ a monster, and there can be no other within the scribe of the danger or impossibility of an absolute clarity creating a new enclosure. The beginning is the vessel; the dream is always a container. to list or to catalogue the ways in which we can consider technology as being formed and forming itself and that these are all linked: - technology as that which it is doing after the fact (it does what it set out to do: the operational or material characateristics do not matter, are accidental). to do for the human to the world, instrumental and functional. as within a rhetoric of progress - as determining - Kittler/see Parrika. perhaps (reverse) conspiracy. writing us