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Matt Kriz's List: Vurt

Interview with Jeff Noon

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vurt on 2008-04-11
- I
  had never thought about this before, so I literally went
  home that night, turned the computer on, and started
  writing. And it just came out. So it was improvised.
  It was very closely worked with Steve, the other guy, who
  was the editor and publisher--so it was almost like I was
  a musician, improvising--just making it up as I
  went along, and then he was kind of every so often saying
  'let's take this bit' and 'let's go back to beginning
  now', and 'let's push it in this direction' and so on.
- I
  especially like music that sounds like its going to collapse
  at any minute-
- 4 more annotations...
- - It's the underground made flesh, almost. What I've
    noticed going around America is all these different
    tribes; they've all got different beliefs, but they're
    all slightly out of it somehow and they're all on The
    Internet, and I think its going to be really important
  - I
    personally see Vurt as a transitional novel, between
    cyberpunk and something else--I don't know what it is
    yet. One of the things about Vurt is there's no
    technology in it. It's organic--it's almost like magic.
    That was one of the things I wanted to do is to envisage
    a society where machines had become natural things. I
    think there's a lot of writing going on--people you could
    place into the mediatory phase of things.
  - That's what this whole thing about "pure is
    poor" is about, you know, the Nazis have this thing
    about purity of race, and all that--in Vurt they
    celebrate the exact opposite: the impurity of race, or
    the impurity of being; the more mixed-up you are the
    better it is! The authorities try and fight this--clamp
    down on it
  - So yeah, Scribble's journey is the acceptance of the Vurt
    within him. He starts out thinking he's pure--that's the
    overall arc of the novel--and he accepts it finally.
Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can't we writers have some fun as well? | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books

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vurt noon on 2008-04-10
- We are now living in the future. How disappointing this period seems compared with the world we promised ourselves. With the Dome, the millennial celebrations and the general feeling of "Was that it?" behind us, we have become slaves to cynicism, artificial passions and desperately forced excitements. It is not a time for great art. However, if it is fuelled by world-weariness alone, the future may not last long. Perhaps, in our imaginations, we could bypass this period entirely. I would like to discuss a possible literature, the kind of writing that will take place in the post-future age
- Yet we live daily in a web of connections, all of us becoming adept at riding the multiple layers of information. This is the fluid society. Tracing pathways through this intricate landscape needs a different kind of narrative art. It is in this spirit of adventure that I envisage the post-future novel.
- 1 more annotations...
- - As writers, we need to open ourselves up to this fluidity.
Roger Clarke's 'Human-Artefact Hybridisation'

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biopunk vurt on 2008-03-23
- Not content with merely replacing lost body functions, humankind has developed
  orthoses that supplement and extend human capabilities. Simple examples of
  'exo-orthoses' include walking sticks, cricket bats
M/C Journal

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vurt on 2008-03-23 and saved by 2 people
- It is also a fitting description of the apparent technology-induced paradigm shift in our contemporary perception of the world. Increasingly, solid, material structures are viewed in immaterial, informational terms and the boundaries between previously distinct categories are blurring
- In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads
- 6 more annotations...
- - The notion that biopunk's imaginative excesses can provide potentially useful insights into the contemporary condition is backed by the sense that the traditional boundary between the real and imagined worlds has become irretrievably blurred
  - Biopunk's fictional emphasis upon disorienting levels of fluidity reflects non-fictional concerns about the potential information overloading tendencies of digital technologie
  - were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new number
  - In the real world, the process of technological change causes flux and confusion. Cyberpunk fiction represents this by describing dystopian social environment
  - Biopunk's distinctive quality stems from its own peculiar perspective on such confusion, manifested in a distinctive attention to bodily substance and a whole bestiary of new hybrid life-forms
  - Perhaps as we leap-frog the mechanical technologies of modernity into a postindustrial world where information attains the status of the fourth element, biopunk is performing an idiosyncratic eulogy at the funeral of physicality
Ann Weinstone - Welcome to the Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality - Diacritics 27:3

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vurtually_done on 2008-03-16
- government-produced
- everything's an addiction
- 8 more annotations...
- - a]nd what if the passage to
    a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural
    one, or at least some part of it
  - the waning
    or death of the foundation of Western notions of transcendence. In
    this tradition, transcendence commences with the penetration of the
    self by a supra-enlivened Other, whether that other be a king, a god,
    nature, the voice of logos, the Law, or an abstracted version
    of vitality itself
  - ranscendental teleology of logocentrism achieves
    reproduction in VR discourses in part because the attribution "life" is
    shifting from the realm of the biological (DNA) and natural language to
    the postvital and code. Code is coming to function as the transcendental,
    unifying, and ideal substance of life--for the nonreferential, the
    unmediated--while at the same time, it retains attributes, or the trace
    if you will, of writing, replacing the body with a less mortal letter.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - Consider that materially, VR barely
    exists: there are few "objects," much
    [End Page 78]
    writing.
  - I'm forty-one now. I feel about twenty-five or so. Look it
    too. Living in Vurt really slows down the rate of change
  - Thus, writing enables the writer to assume a simulacrum
    of transcendent powers by representing the authoritative speech of the
    father
  - What we
    hold against the drug addict, Derrida claims, is that "he escapes into a
    world of simulacrum and fiction" ["Rhetoric of Drugs" 7]. The addict body
    is an irresponsible, irrational body
  - cybernetic code can never
    provide an adequate model for the metaphoricity, the nontotalizability
    of human consciousness. Postmodern literature, "the enduring attempt
    to model in words the activities of the mind in all its irrationality"
    ["Frothing" 259], provides more promising maps for evolving technology and
    ourselves
N. Katherine Hayles - Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink
Textuality - The Yale Journal of Criticism 16:2

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on 2008-02-26 and saved by 2 people
- Perhaps it is time for
  a Copernican revolution in our thinking about textuality, a revolution
  achieved by going back and rethinking fundamental assumptions.
- Here
  the comparison of editing with translation is especially apt, for the
  editor, like the translator, makes innumerable decisions that can never
  be fully covered by an explicit statement of principles. As McGann
  points out, these decisions inevitably function as interpretations,
  for they literally construct the text in ways that foreground some
  interpretive possibilities and suppress others.
- 5 more annotations...
- - My interest in this controversy points in a different direction, for what
    strikes me is the extent to which all three positions—Platonist,
    pluralist, and antirealist—focus almost exclusively on linguistic
    codes, and how this focus allows them to leave the document as a physical
    artifact out of consideration
  - To
    demonstrate that print is indeed unstable even at the level of a document,
    he performs experiments scanning a document with an optical character
    reader and reports that on different scans, the machine gives different
    readings. This does not demonstrate that print is not self-identical,
    however, only that the translation between print and electronic text
    is unstable. In other arguments he conflates the instability of a
    text—for example, variations in different copies of an edition
    or between different editions—with the instability of a print
    document, again to argue that print, like electronic text, is fluid and
    unstable.
  - The specter haunting textual criticism is the nightmare
    that one cannot then define a "text" at all, for every manifestation
    will qualify as a different text.
  - Tower of Babel
  - "Think,
    by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all
    erected over a common foundation. When they try to communicate with one
    another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower. It
    is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and
    communication proceeds very poorly indeed. But, when an individual goes
    down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to
    all towers. Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the
    persons who have also descended from their towers."
    ⁵³
    In context, Weaver believed the "great open
    
    [End Page 282]
    
    basement" would be a universal substratum common to all language
A Postmodern Reader - Google Recherche de Livres

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simulacra vurtually_done on 2008-02-25
Chapter & Verse Article

Noon

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vurt on 2008-04-10
- The idea that music represents something of God is common, both
  in literature and the wider community
- I can’t help feeling
  slightly uncomfortable with some of his descriptions of black musicians
  where, one feels, he is as impressed with the idea of blackness
  as a force that might subvert middle-class white America as with
  the music.
- 3 more annotations...
- - Nobody has difficulty recognising that jazz, with its sweat, energy
    and risk, is properly human. However there are many detractors from
    the art of the DJ. Jeff Noon (File under SciFi/Manchester) in his
    cult favourite Vurt, presents us with his hero as DJ making
    similarly divine claims for music.
  - working
    the decks like a pilgrim, searching for God
  - There’s something Protestant about both Kerouac’s
    jazzers and Vurt’s DJ; both are engaged in hard work
    in their questing for God.
Martin Heidegger

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vurt on 2008-03-31
- A fifth phenomenon of the modern age is the loss of the gods. [5] This expression does not
  mean the mere doing away with the gods, gross atheism. The loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one hand, the world picture is
  Christianized inasmuch as the cause of the world is posited as infinite,
  unconditional
- The loss of the gods is the situation of
  indecision regarding God and the gods
- 2 more annotations...
- - But one thing, surely, anthropology cannot do.
    It cannot overcome Descartes, nor even
    rise up against him, for how shall the consequence ever attack the ground on
    which it stands?
  - Where the world becomes picture, the system,
    and not only in thinking, comes to dominance. However, where the system is in the
    ascendancy, the possibility always exists also of its degenerating into the
    superficiality of a system that has merely been fabricated and pieced together.

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Matt Kriz

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Updated on 2008-04-11
Created on 2008-04-10

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Matt Kriz's List: Vurt

Interview with Jeff Noon

Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can't we writers have some fun as well? | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books

Roger Clarke's 'Human-Artefact Hybridisation'

M/C Journal

Ann Weinstone - Welcome to the Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality - Diacritics 27:3

N. Katherine Hayles - Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink
Textuality - The Yale Journal of Criticism 16:2

A Postmodern Reader - Google Recherche de Livres

Chapter & Verse Article

Martin Heidegger

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