Read Me #12: Inside Out

1.
Colourful pebbles in a clickable pond; a radio station controlled by six ducks.

2.
READ ME, TO ARTISTS: What are some books in your studio right now?

SABINE MIRLESSE: Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith, about deep sea consciousness; An Essential Solitude: Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field by Kathleen Shields; the catalogue of the exhibition Apocalypse, at the BNF.

(Sabine’s work is in fact part of Apocalypse: Yesterday and Tomorrow, which is showing at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – the National Library of France)

3.
I invented some words that are a bit like ‘vegetarian’, but for the increasingly urgent activity of setting limits on what we consume online:

ALGNOSTIC
Avoids anything that’s been pre-curated by an algorithm, especially feed-based social media. Often likes to browse in the old way, by actively checking newspaper home pages or the blogs of favourite florists. May also eschew stuff like Google search results and the Netflix homepage, depending on severity of creed.

DESKATARIAN
Limits attention-suck by only going online while sitting at a desk, probably by way of a laptop or desktop computer. Deskatarians are sometimes part of the dumbphone movement but not always (they may value other features of smartphones such as podcasts, music, etc). The risk would be gradually giving into the loophole that leaves you spending almost all of your day sitting at a desk, looking at Reddit.

MAILIVORE
A mailivore is someone who limits their consumption of screen-based media to the content’s of their email inbox. The practice is made viable by the newsletter boom, thanks to which a rich, varied content diet is possible entirely through email subscriptions. Spam folder aside, the inbox has the benefit of being unfiltered by algorithm and somewhat preferentially-balanced towards writings by actual people.

REALATARIAN
Only consumes material made by real people. No AI, nothing automatically generated. This ethos will become potentially quite far-reaching depending on an individual’s definition of ‘real’. Some adherents, feeling the internet to be irretrievably compromised, may decide it’s best to retreat almost completely into non-digital life.

GUTENBERG GUY/GIRL
In its purest form, someone who is only allowed to go online to look at the website gutenberg.org. Can also mean limiting oneself to cultural artefacts that are not particularly digital-first, from ebooks to music to magazines.

YEARLIPIAN
Decides to spend all time online dwelling in a favourite past year, usually one before 2016, such as 2012. Has strategies to limit searches and views to posts and updates made during their preferred annum. A year has an effectively infinite amount of content to catch up on, goes the thinking. So why not stay in one I actually like?

Try them out!

4.
A Fredric Jameson study group – free to attend – will take place online on 23 February.

5.
READ ME: What are some of the books in your studio right now?

KATERINA JEBB: The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann; World Within World by Stephen Spender; and Inside Out by Demi Moore.

6.
All the images in this issue were taken during the making of Total Resistance: a radio station by the Italian artist Nico Vascellari. To prepare the station, Nico spent two weeks visiting various quotidian locations in and around the city of Vittorio Veneto — the supermarket, the café, the church — with a chioccolatore, a traditional birdsong imitator. The pictures in this issue are of that process. Total Resistance is part of the new series of Five Radio Stations, as launched in January on Passage Molière in Paris, home of poetry bookshop EXC, lovely stationery store L’Ecritoire, and the Maison de la Poesie literary institution, all of which had the various stations playing in the background for a day. All the stations are now online. They range from peacefully atmospheric to full-on frenetic — please consider having them on in the background. As with the first series, I co-curated this new set with Silvia Guerra and it’s commissioned by Lab’Bel, the laboratoire artistique of the Bel Group, who elsewhere make cheeses such as the Laughing Cow.

The new season also means it’s lights out for the first guise of Infraordinary FM, my latest project with Daniel John Jones. A new version of that station will be announced in due course but if you just miss the station’s atmosphere, or need it to go to sleep (this is surprisingly common) then an automated, looping excerpt is still murmuring in the ether.

7.
From Walter de Maria’s Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics and Statements on his work of land art, The Lightning Field…

“The work is located in West Central New Mexico.

The states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas were searched by truck over a five-year period before the location in New Mexico was selected.

Desirable qualities of the location included flatness, high lightning activity and isolation.

The region is located 7,200 feet above sea level.

The Lightning Field is 11^^1/2^^ miles east of the Continental Divide.

[…]

The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics.

[…]

The average pole height is 20 feet 7^^1/2^^ inches…”

8.
The website Book Saboteur allows you to edit ebooks as you see fit e.g. replace James Bond’s name with your own in Casino Royale, transpose the setting of Jane Eyre to Mexico City, etc.

9.
READ ME: What’s a book in your studio right now?

ALEKSANDR AVAGYAN: Just Above My Head by James Baldwin.

10.
In Lithuanian chess boxing, Dymer ‘Prince of Peace’ Agasaryan beat Laimonas Vakancius.

11.
“The chemistry of life is an aquatic chemistry. We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us.” – Peter Godfrey Smith.