binary (a)

“Of course I’ll never make that film. Nonetheless I’m collecting the sets, inventing the twists, putting in my favorite creatures. I’ve even given it a title, indeed the title of those Mussorgsky songs: Sunless.”  —Sans Soleil, dir. Chris Marker ↩︎

“Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore.”  —Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto ↩︎

“When taken seriously, the Sabbath has the power to restructure not only the calendar but also the entire political economy. In place of an economy built upon the profit motive—the ever-present need for more, in fact the need for there to never be enough—the Sabbath puts forward an economy built upon the belief that there is enough. But few who observe the Sabbath are willing to consider its full implications, and therefore few who do not observe it have reason to find any value in it. … In a Sabbatarian economy, the right to rest—the right to do nothing of value to capital—is as holy as the right to work.”  — William R. Black, Let’s bring back the Sabbath as a radical act against ‘total work’ ↩︎

“The black mirror—an ancient gadget used by artists, magicians, and scientists from Mexico to India—offers an insight into another history of ‘techné’ that connected art, science, and magic, producing an enchanted technology of wonder. When a digital surface becomes a ‘black mirror,’ it reflects upon clashing forms of modern and premodern experience that coexist in contemporary culture. New ‘black mirrors’ engage with pictorial and photographic genres of the past to document a confrontation of modern industrial ruins and virtual utopias.”  —Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern / “If the black mirror is charged with passion, it is charged above all with poison—as were mirrors made with mercury. Thus, although this mirror does not necessarily provoke melancholy, it is quite apt to maintain it, if not actually to darken our minds, just like this black exhalation.”  —Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass ↩︎

“Think of the darkness and the great cold / In this valley, which resounds with misery.” —Brecht, Threepenny Opera ↩︎