SCHOOL OF NO MEDIA: Beyond the Described & the Prescribed

MORE WORDS AND IMAGES TO COVER UP It’s not just about the so-called “rat race” and how every taste is an acquired taste… but every desire and human activity are addictive and constitute full-blown addictions – that’s what my three weeks in an intensive care unit led me to perceive, unhooked from all active living. Since then it is clear that, as Stephen Crane wrote, everybody “runs after the horizon,” and as Hans-Christian Andersen may have implied, we are all “naked emperors.“ The prospect of absolute oblivion generates either way too many words or moves one to be aghast. The knowlEDGE that we are addicted to our senses and our education (and blinded by them) lead me to create this site, a bottle in the ocean most unlikely to make it onto any shore. Everything is already too full, there is no more room for nothingness. –

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One More School?

Our “fullness” and busyness belies a systematic cover-up: as in a sleight of hand, we are blinded by speed and the surplus of images and sounds. Marton’s lifetime of teaching and working in media leads him now towards a search for “non-images” & “non-media.” The School of No Media represents a last-gasp-effort toward the elusive goal of standing outside a prescribed universe, surrounded by too many assumptions.

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Learning Nothing

This school which is no school… where education brings us to that precipice where we need to stand, lost. Before it is too late, we must learn this no-thing – instead of one more thing. Do we have room for more than ourselves? Is there room outside our inflated sense of knowledge? Paradoxically, this particular vertigo is essential to our survival. The myths of learning and understanding may need to be left behind.

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BLIGHT: Blinded by Sight

1. When we believe our eyes (and ears), all we do is verify what has been stored in our cataloged universe, and end up knowing only what we know & recognize. 2. Every age has its icons: photographers freeze that moment, cinematographers capture that movement. The traces of those fetishistic rituals are revered in museums, theaters and online. 3. Picture-perfect… Captive audiences…

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Undoing Media-cracy

Pseudo-Urgency-stop-Media Omnipresence-stop-Currency Engulfing Independence-stop-Colonization Secured-stop-Audience Consumes Molds-stop-Mimicry of Stale Themes-STOP-PRETENSE-STOP • We are to be consumed, but in other ways. “Non-media” is what air is to the flying fish as it escapes mortal danger: an existential exploration & revelation. Our tools to save lives – silence (occasionally vociferous), slowness, kindness, and time.

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We Are Nobodies

[YET WE ARE EVERYBODY] • The clamor is everywhere: BE SOMEBODY!… but those efforts are illusory. Beyond our names and our affiliations lies the same eternal nobody that we were when we were born – and that we will be when we die. What surrounds us – all the stuff, the concepts… – blinds us and entraps us into a fortress, a coffin. These facts, though, do not constitute any reason to become pessimistic, merely realistic. And freer.

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Fishing for Lures

Beyond the MonkeySee/MonkeyDo Paradigm! Well-known concepts and categories, and the institutions that support them, provide  us more with what I would call an “eduCUSHION” than with an exacting education.
We are amused by how easily cats can be distracted by a few dangling threads,  but similarly, just because we recognize some pattern around us,  we claim some major victory […]

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REcreate/REcognize/REpresent/REproduce/REplicate

Without considering what we are furthering, what gets duplicated becomes a form of fetishism and pollution. We love to perform, to present what is primarily acrobatics & technique…. overall just ready-made ideas, what one calls in French, “des idées toutes faites.” Thinking is always a lonely activity, EACH thought singular, all by itself.

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NOW & HOW, A Text

We constantly escape into our surroundings as potential distractions await their turn; most of our lives are invested into NOT being present. Our specialty is to fragment and distance a moment that will never appear again except as a reproduction of images and sounds. All is repeatedly lost. Are we able to perceive time and face how ephemeral our lives are? Can media help us....

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The Central Credo: Words

Each word is so full of itself; it assumes we should live by its side, but words, in creating their self-referential universe, only have the authority of other words. To escape our frailty, we invest them with power and soon, while blocking most of our senses, they become life-companions. To say something against words is indeed grotesque but after Rimbaud and Gauguin’s cultural departures....

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ON-OFF

Culture functions like a cult through which we live out our beliefs and celebrate (and inflate) ourselve. As much as “natural signs” such as thunder and fever will persist through time, above all we demand interpretations. We just don’t understand, and assuming we should, turn to specialists – “meaning” now stands for what escapes us; the more esoteric, the more we crave for those answers....

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O Vanitas, O Vacuum

We juggle words, sometimes with much prowess, but the uniqueness and aloneness of each experience will remain buried within us, intransmissible. Instead of living an unfiltered reality, we prefer to hide in the shadow of words and concepts that belong to another time, and seek transcendence at any cost. It would have been easier to participate in the main game, but at what price?....

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The Appearance of…

… COMMUNICATION, with words and images, only echoes itself. My sense of what green is CANNOT be yours, and yet the constant shortcuts, approximations, and bets point to the ever-present need for cohesion and its associated railings.
Moreover, IF there is any original thought/assessment at all, these are probably as solitary as they are unique. Hence the concept of non-images and non-words, and this school.

H.C. Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes…

…that story is not over ’cause we are all still naked.

Substance is what remains when everything you can think of has gone. Eli Siegel — Unlearn divisions, move beyond words. With kindness. Pier Marton

NOW

Reality is a cliché. — Wallace Stevens
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. — Kafka
Words impose their own world the way dictators dictate. — PM

Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. — Max Frisch
In my view, writing and communicating is about being able to make anyone believe anything. — J. M .G. Le Clézio
They have eyes but cannot see. — Tehilim

If I were to try to alert you by saying or shouting “NOTHING,” you would not notice… Even the multitude of words and images present here will be unable to shake up our current tautological system of denial.

The reigning hoax assumes its legitimacy while topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the prophet Mohamed are deemed controversial… but what about reality?!

At our very core, we are delusional beings.
While perceiving ourselves to be timelessly on top of a wave, “our lives,” we delight in that which may be just-around-the-corner and will at long last liberate us.

We surround ourselves with solutions and theories; they titillate and buffer us from reality, and thus we “manage our problems.” Such railings are a lure.

As early as possible in our lives, our self-serving educational system sets up the paradigm that posits that words stand for things, and that the more we learn, the more we will know.

Knowledge is the opposite of stupidity and that’s all there is to it.

What to know, what it is to know… these key questions are not to be addressed.

Through its pervasiveness, education has us assume that most of what we do is absolutely natural: the central process of naming ourselves and whatever surrounds us ignores its inherent violence.

What we know is choking us: our need for comfort fosters predictability and redundancy. As humanizing as its diverse ramifications may be, culture primarily mirrors, glorifies and perpetuates its existing value system.

We love what we love because we are reflected in it.

The very same elements that were meant to liberate us – words, concepts, and media – regurgitate “what-is-known” into worn-out concepts. Caught up in a monkey-see-monkey-do cycle, reality is off limits and immediacy has gone. Our universe is built up to the extent that alienation, separation, isolation – and for some of us, exile – have become the very fabric of our existence, our playpen.

Like some kind of self-gratificating monstrosity, we have become so full of ourselves, we are falling victims to our own centrality.

Centrality, normalcy, and certainty, three of our major hoaxes, have us cornered. With the fact that experience is not transmissible, our planet is seriously endangered.

Doing something, anything, has to be better than doing nothing – since we cannot imagine anything else, we would rather keep everything in place.

Wishful thinking permeates our lives… we continue to believe, and nothing is ever a surprise anymore.

In a digital age when everything is conveyed through 1’s and 0’s… we avoid anything resembling a zero.

By ignoring that imminent oblivion, the one that awaits us all, “tomorrow” has become our most significant taboo… and being lost has become a long lost art. We cannot be present, and crimes take place all around us.

Kupferberg’s “Is there life after birth?” and Kabat-Zinn’s “Is there life before death?” should remain our critical points of departure.

Images and words – not just the internet – keep us isolated within a bubble, a form of mass solitary confinement, exchanging looks and commenting on what has already been thought, said and lived.
It is conceivable that after the fluid wisdom of the Pre-Socratic thinkers and the Taoists, the cycle that defined knowledge/culture as being fixed and separate from living may finally be coming to an end.
Our digital realm, like a form of contemporary Ying/Yang dialectic, could constantly remind us of the relevance of the zeros (the void).

Can our lives consist primarily of reshuffling the prescribed and the described? Of course… that is how societies survive, but no more sacrifice is needed!

When all has been said and done, we seek a particular silence. When the noise has ceased.
The floor below us has dropped a long time ago, we just have been too busy to notice what lies beyond “the stuff.”

Provocation is a way of putting reality back on its feet. — Bertolt Brecht

1 of 3. Knowing what we know, we know nothing: we believe our eyes (and ears, and words) but they are too busy verifying what has been stored in our cataloged universe.

WHO

I appear to be wiser… because I do not fancy I know what I do not know. — Socrates

With all of my friendship, Jean (Baudrillard), Cultural Theorist/Philosopher
In the tradition of Abraham, the iconoclast… Pier Marton. — Dr. Sander Gilman, American Cultural/Literary Historian
a reflective, thoughtful presence/intellectual rigor with unbridled creativity and curiosity/integrity and authenticity characterized by an inner strength…— Bill Viola, Leading and Pioneer Video Artist
He is ahead of us all and behind everything that is. — Tamiko Thiel, Artist (“The Female Supercomputer Designer Who Inspired Steve Jobs”)
PM rakes the virtual screens and the tablets of our hypocrisies with the sharp claws of the avenging angel. — Aribert Munzner, Artist/Dean Emeritus
His “visceral” pedagogy…an essential and exceptional being… generosity and tolerance. Most striking is his mixture of humanity and intelligence. — Robert Cahen, Leading French and Pioneer Video-Artist
You write from an estranged place... — Charles Bukowski, Poet
Glad you think the same… Dr. Frans de Waal, Primatologist/Ethologist

The Unlearning Specialist at the school is Pier Marton. After teaching media for more than thirty years at major U.S. universities, and three weeks in an I.C.U., PM “imploded” (cf. below) and realized the urgent need to teach unlearning, and to focus on key blind spots: what is NOT being taught and NOT being perceived. We may start with media and the visible, but extend quickly to our “core concepts” – the source of our permanent distractions.

The arrogance of normalcy. — PM

“I am the irritant, that grain of sand that will bother you enough so that in time you may produce a pearl.” – PM

PM has lectured with his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum. Besides those museum collections, his work is also collected by Paris Beaubourg’s museum, Canada’s National Gallery of Art, and the Paris Mémorial de la Shoah. While his many peregrinations made him appreciate Artaud, Daumal, Grotowski, Jarry, Michaux, Gilbert-Lecomte, Porchia, Beckett, Voronca and many others,* his university teaching, and his “bleeding for art” (in his own work and in collaboration with Nitsch), have all prepared him to be fully receptive of the vacuum that awaited him following a brain hemorrhage with complications. Upon his release from the hospital, he could not not perceive “the arrogance of normalcy”; most human activity, short of the instinct to care, had become absolutely arbitrary – a point of no return to any kind of consensus or belief, however appealing or comfortable.
* like Álvarez, Anders, Barthes, Baudrillard, Berger, Borges, Brecht, Bresson, Cage, Larry David, Debord, Thich Nhat Hahn, Ivan Illich, Le Clézio, Marker, Lévinas, Melville (Bartleby), Morin, Naess, A.S. Neill, Rossellini, Rimbaud, Shalamov, Tarkovski, Tati, Turrell, U.G. and Watts.

The John Cage of the classroom. — Ann Hirsch, Artist
Intelligence, patience and kindness, an unmatched passion as an educator. — Aaron Duffy, Artist/Director
I have never met anyone who was born to teach as Pier is. — Paola Laterza, Artist/Educator
Your class was the one useful course I took in my whole college career and the one class I still use in my daily life. — MK, Composer/Entrepreneur

Individual identity, individual healing, individual transcendence are his subjects. — John Russell, The New York Times Nightmares, he insists can only be dreamed by a conscious mind. — Douglas Blau, Flash Art & Arts Magazine

Sometimes a little brain damage can help. — George Carlin
If only this were only a matter of aligning words or arguments the proper way… Rather, it is a matter of a knowLEDGE, in the flesh.

2 of 3. Every age has its icons: photographers freeze that moment, cinematographers capture that movement. The traces of those fetishistic rituals are revered in museums, theaters and online. Media has already transformed society; can visual artists, besides “doing it their way,” provide more than an ever expanding sensory massage?

We stop everything – We reflect – And it’s not sad [from Year 01/An 01 by/par Gébé]

HOW

Whatever you say it is, it isn’t. — Alfred Korzybski
An entire mythology is stored within our language. – Wittgenstein
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. — Mark Twain
With useful knowledge you can only do small things. — Agnes Heller

At the end of a semester: movie-making wisdom as would fit fortune cookies.

a «HOLE» within reality, like life passing, fleeting, evanescent, impossible to fix and retain. — Tadeusz Kantor
The only knowledge which is really alive is the one that expresses itself at its kindling point, bringing about its own destruction. — Dostoevsky
I apologize for being as blind and arrogant as most humans, and for still using words [this website/bottle-in-the-ocean]. — PM

Yes, more words here again… but it is to escape them and have them implode. Cosmic banana peels?!
After a lifetime of having surrounded ourselves with arbitrary concepts that we now take for granted, we urgently need to pierce our bubble and reach a state of constant bewildered incredulity.

One of the founders of Surrealism wrote in 1924: “Knock-knock. Who’s there? Ah good, let the infinite in.” We may not need to ask the shamans – we know now scientifically about the two trillion galaxies, the Laniakea, and the astounding extent of our insignificance.
A cold shower does much more than to freshen us up, it shakes us up. Yet, to shatter illusions all at once would be impossible; we can only chip away one crack at a time, and have to be patient, with a willingness to be bored – mountains owe so much to the valleys!
Along with intense “blindspotting” – locating the blind-spots – a particular useful technique involves a form of sustained implosion (as in Lumière’s short film “L’arroseur arrosé“).
What to trust? Without having recourse to drugs, we may require what Rimbaud pleaded for: a long, immense et reasoned derangement of all of the senses.
There is a physicality of action that bypasses the mind and grounds us, allowing a healthy perspective to arise. The animals that we still are know more than all our thoughts combined. Are we able to regain that presence?

My students exploring…

The ledge of knowLEDGE is nearby, we just need to approach it without fear.
Besides two examples for a curriculum, Bubbles and Quotes & an Unlearning Mind Map, here is a brief list of supporting materials:
– Experiences
Anechoic Chamber/Isolation Tank/Long Walks Going Nowhere/Letting Animals Speak/Shamanistic Practices/Boal’s Invisible Theater
– Writings
Artaud/Barthes/Carrière/Daumal/Debord/Bresson/Melville/Porchia/U.G. Krishnamurti (not the famous one)/Roustang/ChuangTze/LaoTze.
– Films
Rossellini/Álvarez/Bresson/Debord/Marker/Tarkovsky/Hersonski/Guzmán/Lanzman/Berger/Resnais/Serra/Robison/Soda/Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco/Pasolini

Two students in an anechoic chamber.

With all those instant-everything-avoidance means that technology offers us, not counting the exciting treasures Artificial Intelligence has in the wings, we could give it all up (or at least the cleverness)… but the physicality of having a body – as the animals [that we are] know too well – can lead us back to realize that presence is a major present – a gift awaiting us since our birth (along with decantation, the process of “active rest,” when sediments are allowed to float down to the bottom of liquids to achieve some clarity).

Instead of seeing all of this as a complete rejection of what we take for granted (just about everything) – may the intelligence of kindness be preserved! – it would be easy to relegate or reduce this site and what it stands for to one word, a metaphor, some kind of art project or manifesto, or as per the current trend, some life-coaching enterprise, or even another appeal for a richer sensory experience. No, no… before it is too late to do so, we must live our lives…

… to be alive is not to know, and to be lost. Or, in a gentle but direct manner: get lost!

Breath has no name and like any iconoclast, it is free to roam. — P.M.
I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. – U.G.

3 of 3. Picture-perfect… captive audiences… can we look into our blindness?
We seek and look, like Nasrudin, BUT only where there is light. Let’s go elsewhere!

BESIDES BEYOND BELIEF
– THESE ARE SOME OTHER FOUNDATIONAL REFERENCES –

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Oscar Wilde