12/4/2020 - Today marks one month since I started doing this newsletter. Honestly, I thought it would be harder to churn out something weekly but it has not been as bad as I’ve expected it to be. A lot of it comes from practice from many of the past projects that have helped me get used to producing and releasing content. Twitter has definitely helped me fine-tune my content enough that most people can approach it and take something out of it but simultaneously keep it “niche” enough by covering topics most people don’t really keep tabs on.
In terms of what I’m currently working on, I’m still making my way through Meta_Nomads new book, which I will be reviewing. This Sunday you can expect a podcast I had the pleasure of being invited to by Machinic Unconcious Happy Hour. In this podcast, we discuss the first chapter of “Libidinal Economy” by Jean Francois Lyotard. It was a blast recording and if you’re into critical theory I highly recommend subscribing to Cooper’s podcast.
Finally, this next section is just to give a very vague and rough roadmap of what I will be planning on doing with Cute_Noumena as a whole. For now, I will keep posting on both my Substack and Medium accounts every week. If persistent growth continues steady my next project will be keeping my word on releasing “Fanged Noumena II”, I know that sounds like a “Meme” and in a lot of ways, it is but that’s exactly why that book needs to be written. The next phase will be to finally release the promised Mark Fisher lecture series or “course” for Free, which will be set on really going into the works of Mark Fisher.
That’s currently what I’ve been working on and I know a lot of this stuff has been promised and then dropped and left in obscurity and it’s not that I’ve forgotten about these projects, believe me, they are coming, I just need to find a balance between my projects/work and my life in general, Covid-19 really hasn’t helped but this upcoming year should be somewhat more stable and reliable.
Hope you all had a wonderful week and i’ll catch you next week at the same time.
-C.N
Non-Space
The whole idea of a liminal space can be directly applied to Fisher’s concepts of the “Weird and the Eerie”.
“The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.” -Mark Fisher
The importance of liminal spaces as memetic nonplaces is directly connected with the unconscious. These images are deeply familiar to some because no places have infiltrated our understanding of inhabited space under capitalism… (continue reading)
The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time - Stages 1-6: is an art project by “The Caretaker”, his music which might be better understood as a multimedia art piece involving sounds and images is based on the idea of going through the stages of dementia. Arguably this 6 hr long project has been said to be incredibly depressing so please be advised if you do listen to it.
Levitating Apple: This video is exactly what it sounds like, its an apple exploding, but the only thing that makes it even somewhat interesting is that the apple explodes only using air. Words can’t do the video justice.
AlphaFold: This is a short documentary-style video on how DeepMind is working on A.I can predict and process protein folding. If protein folding can be fully unlocked the potential this has for humanity is unprecedented.
Podcast: This podcast is Meta-Nomad interviewing Justin Murphy. Honestly, regardless of what you think of either one of them, I found the conversation at the very least quite entertaining and definitely worth the listen.
Song of the Week: Heard this song in the car and to this day I still think listening to music in the car is one of the best places to listen to music. Something about motion and sound just pairs well.