Temporal Dynamics II - media and attention

Time is of the essence. Go back two posts or click here if you forgot all about Temporal Dynamics. If not, just read on.

I want to say something about the media. And boredom. And time. And how everything connects, enhancing my theoretic field of Temporal Dynamics.

Go back some more posts and listen to this, again. Really, try it. Take your time. Just click on the song, close your eyes and get into it. Do it.

What you just experienced was 6'32'' of highly structured time. Interesting or boring? Maybe you weren't able to pay enough attention to it since this is the internet and 6 minutes 32 seconds requires an almost excessive attention span in this medium. Meaning also that you decided to not listen to it at all because you already did that when I originally posted this. Or that you stopped listening after a couple minutes, seconds maybe. Right now, writing this and fighting for words, I feel a strong urge to go check my emails again, although I did exactly that a couple minutes ago. Thank God I don't have a facebook profile. Ok, so, on we go. Possible other reasons you were bored or distracted (a problem with or deficit in attention): You don't like that kind of music, probably don't like music at all. That would fall into the category of preference and has to do with seeking out of patterns. Maybe also with a whole lot of other stuff, that is too complicated to go into here (as if I knew). Let's say preference is an inclination to known (and somehow positively attributed) patterns. Those patterns arise, blablabla, socialization, chance events and such. Another reason for you having been bored with the piece of music might have been that you do not generally dislike that kind of music, but that you actually have no frame of reference whatsoever to process it, meaning there's no pattern recognition at all. When I went to see the world premiere of Stockhausen's complete Sonntag aus Licht last month, I was generally interested in music, also of course interested in Stockhausen's music, but since I didn't know shit about or had ever heard anything by him before, I just didn't know what was going on. And this is the highpoint of structural compositioning! So I just didn't have the proper tools to break the music down into recognisable and coherent pieces of information. So what was more interesting to me were the accompanying performances and certain aspects of the presentation. The music as such (which was for sale for about 350,- € on 5 CDs) was rather boring to me. Again, because I couldn't parse it's components and structure due to lack of a frame of reference. But that would hardly ever happen with the Bright Eyes song.

So, music is highly structured time and depending on recognized patterns either a) worthwhile and interesting (preferred pattern), b) anathema (aversive pattern, which is also interesting but not worthwhile) or c) boring and indifferent (no pattern recognition or an all too familiar pattern that evokes no attention).
The same with movies (where time is structured down to 1/24th of a second), tv, literature, newspapers, the internet, this very blog that you are reading, all kinds of media that distribute information (and isn't that a defining characteristic of media?).

The Big Question is what are you paying attention to. How do you want to structure your time? I actually wanted to write something about John Cage's 4'33'' (this is actually the most comprehensible version for internet use) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five's famous line "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" but got no more time on my hands right now. (Actually, I got loads of time at my hands, but am now moving into a time-zone that's very differently structured.)

Boredom, DFW and Temporal Dynamics

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from." - David Foster Wallace "The Pale King"

"Sein [des Menschen] Leben schwingt also, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langeweile, welche in der Tat dessen letzte Bestandteile sind." - Arthur Schopenhauer

I have distracted myself. I think. Or have I?

I came along a post about boredom and The Pale King earlier and a little essay (link is in the comments) about how to go through full boredom to make it more interesting and a rewarding experience. Having been bored at the time and also tired I didn't pay much attention to it. Yes, my boredom hadn't ceased for the time being. Also I think it did not make much sense. But that may solely be linked to the fact that sense-making and clarity are qualities that don't go well with boredom. The point made in the post (if I'm not mistaken) is that voluntarily entering a state of boredom makes the whole thing much more interesting and even rewarding because what follows is a better level of attention. And, well, yes, better attention is on the way, all right, because some form of attention always follows boredom, since lack of attention is one of the things at the dead center of boredom. Hence (symplified): boredom = no attention --> attention = more attention than no attention. But the other thing is quite impossible, to enter a state of boredom voluntarily. There's a twist in it that does not work.

I feel a strong connection to the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile and an inventor I once corresponded with regarding his plans to build one exploiting oceanic maelstroms. There was a point in his theory where he was mixing warm and cold water-masses and thought they would add up and thus provide the extra amount of energy that not only kept his machine running on its own but could also turn the lights on somewhere. But of course the temperatures of a cold and a hot mass of anything do not add up, they even out. Creating a lukewarm mass of something and that is what we call entropy (simplified). And entropy is certain. The only way to heat a lukewarm mass up is to heat it up. From the outside, that is. The water can't heat itself up just by entering a mental state of voluntariness. There is no voluntariness and thus no free will in the water. And we could have lenghty arguments over if there is free will in human beings or any living (or dead, what's that all about anyway?) matter, for that matter.

Now consider boredom a lukewarm mass of indifference, an entropic state of the mind. There is no way to voluntarily enter such a state other than yearlong sensory deprivation. And that is also not possible because our body needs input from the outside (and gives output from the inside) and this serves as massive stimulation if the other senses are shut down for awhile. And even the momentarily giving in to boring activities with the purpose to come up with another level of attention requires a not insignificant amount of attention and thought-provocation that renders the former boring and tedious task indeed very interesting. So what was proposed in the post is not going through boredom to gain better levels of attention but to come up with ways and techniques to instantly turn boredom into something useful, thus interesting, beforehand. It is a prepared stimulus that is supposed to kick in every time your mental state goes boredom. It is a machinery set up to provide you with impulses (from the outside) to prevent boredom. And doing so is a very paranoid form of dealing with boredom and brings us back to the underlying pain in human beings and the quote from The Pale King: "which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."

Let's imagine time as applying to the laws of thermodynamics, since a feeling of slowly passing time is also associated with the concept of boredom.

• First Law of Temporal Dynamics: there is a fixed amount of time. There is no way to produce more time than there is. No new time is added. No past time is lost. The present is the focusing of one's attention on a particular spot of time.
• Second Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time strives toward entropy.
• Third Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time with absolutely no content to focus on is it's dead center. This point of absolute zero can not be reached.

From these Laws of Temporal Dynamics we can further deduce (I never paid much attention in that Poe/Peirce seminar considering the differences between deduction/induction/abduction) some concepts:

• We can work with time. We can accelerate it or slow it down by putting it to use, filling it with various content and actions, structuring it.
• The quality of time's absolute zero is full entropy, an equilibrium of time. It is time that is completely unstructured by the mind.
• Boredom is the approximation of one's mind to time's dead center, approaching a mental state without impulses, without stimulation, without structure, without content.
• The underlying psychic pain that is associated with boredom is the experiencing of time's true nature, which is eternity.

So far for now. Any comments?

Hanna's Silent 3Dimensional Clueless Vamp-Hill-Adventure

IMDB is a great source of joy. Especially if you stumble upon something that interests you in such a way that minutes, hours, whole lifetimes seem to have passed in a couple of seconds. Actually it's just your attention span on digital speed leaving you with bloodshot eyes and a feeling of loss and wasted time that makes you want to kill yourself. But sometimes psychological backlash is not so severe and kills less of your brain-cells than you think (but still more than you wish for).

In this case of utterly useless information-spreading I want to direct your attention unto some upcoming films that might interest you. One of them is HANNA. I've seen it in a Sneak Preview two weeks ago. Scheduled for May 26 in Germany this is one of the weirdest films I've ever seen. It surprised me a lot. If you get the chance to see it OV, do it. Because Eric Bana has the most perfect German accent and a lot of the other actors have really bad ones, including the psychotic Reeperbahn-club owner slash assassin, which makes him an even more psychotic person. He whistles his own tune, too. I'm pretty sure this movie won't do well with Box Office #s but will gain some scholarly attention. Really worth watching, trust me.

The other big news is that Silent Hill: Revelation 3D started filming a couple weeks ago. I got tricked by a really good looking fan-trailer that is right here:

The 2nd movie-adaptation of the Silent Hill video game series seems to deal primarily with Heather and the storyline of Silent Hill 3. Just let's hope that director Michael J. Bassett does this one as well as Christophe Gans did with the previous adaptation, still one of the best videogame adaptations out there. And it makes so much sense to shoot it in 3D, too, with all the oblique camera angles and shifting of worlds/consciousness. I'm really looking forward to that one, scheduled somewhen in 2012 and having Malcolm McDowell (Clockwork Orange) on board.

Also with Malcolm McDowell on board is Amy Heckerling's Vamps, which marks her second collaboration with Alicia Silverstone as female lead, after 1995s Clueless. Richard Lewis and Sigourney Weaver also join this Vampire RomCom. Not much more information about this one, though.

Time, what a tricky little beeping fucker...

While contemplating what to do with my life, I saw several options. First, I could turn that darn cellphone off, that's been beeping at regular intervalls in my pocket for a while because it's low on battery. I choose to ignore that option and let it beep. It comes with a soft buzzing, you know, vibrating a little. Second... Ah, I'm ignoring that one, too. Actually, I ignore all the good and just mental impulses that promise a better future, a better present, past, and a better me, for that matter. I mean, the past is long gone, right? The present, shortly gone, but gone nonetheless. Present became past even before you finished reading this sentence. And the future? Never going to happen. But I digress.

Instead of going through all this mental garbage in my head, alone, and - here comes the point - again and again, I decided to just throw it out at whichever monkeys might be interested in it. That's where you come into play. FYI: If you don't prefer to be called monkeys from time to time, this blog is not for you (or is it even more so?).

So, what can you expect from this other than being mistreated? I don't know. Really, I don't. Expect nothing (else) therefore.