[syndicate] Sinter from audio notes

[Alan Sondheim]

Sinter from audio notes


(I'm interested not in noise (in the classical cybernetic sense), but in
grit in the system, irregular powders, micro-topographies which remain
unmapped. I'm thinking of sinter and its relation to topography and
topology, and I speak into a voice recorder and take down the notes
verbatim; the style is clumped, clumsy, the ideas are scattered, the voice
drones on but only for a little while. Transcription follows.) When you
think of the distinction between topography and topology, you also want to
think of the idea of grit in the system because the distinction might
really be on the basis of the sand grain or sinter. It seems to me that
sinter inheres to he real; in fact it may be even considered the found-
ation of such, at least in terms of lived experience, to the extent that
everything is always in a state of decay, a state of falling apart. And
one can consider the building and maintaining of cultural artifacts as a
kind of shoring-up against that. Sinter always references wearing down and
it can be applied, self-referentially, to a wearing down of itself; at the
same time it also acts as a kind of lubricant among larger objects in the
realm. We want to consider sinter in the sense, even in the absence of a
metric, in other words without considering geometry, not even necessarily
topology, but just something that invades the origin and coordinates of
Euclidean and other geometries. Sinter also implies the microscopic or the
atomic, not on the level of particle physics or even physics, but on the
level of those things that might create streaks or striations in everyday
life. Sinter isn't on the 'level' of the raster, nor is it below nor above
it, but it's a kind of noise that potentially could invade the rest on its
own level, so if you have a grid of x to x + 1, sinter would be around x +
1 - x, would be around that interval, that interval normalized, to a
certain degree of tolerance. Sinter may also be considered aligned with
plasma, with all those surfaces that are worn or chaotic, or which carry
history at the same time that they are erasing history. It's necessary,
when thinking about sinter, to think about the irregularity of particles;
however the irregularity is incalculable - in other words it's not based
on a lower order of smoothness, or rather a lower order of structure, but
it's based on what is at least taken to be on a phenomenological level,
deep irregularity. Sinter belongs in the level of the analog and the
wearing away of the digital. and that's why sinter is aligned with
topography, and topology itself might be considered digital to the extent
that it's abstracted, abstruse. Of course in this sense the digital
circumvents the analogic. I think you could apply these principles or
these ideas - this phenomenology - even to the organization of nature, of
nations, to notions of communications in the real world as opposed to
theoretical communications and so forth.