logs

Selected Search Terms that led people to my web sites between 08/01/2009 – 08/16/2009

I am a web stats junkie. In addition to checking the number of visitors that come to my URLs (lab404.com, playdamage.org, deepyoung.org), I also check referral sites (other sites that linked visitors to my site), visited pages (where visitors went on my site), and search terms (phrases that visitors typed in at google which led them to my site). The search terms always surprising and surreal. They represent the linguistic intersection between my interests (as evidenced in my published online content) and other people’s desires (as evidenced by their search phrases). Not everything that everyone desires will lead to my published content, and some of my content won’t ever be desired by anyone; but these phrases represent those few points of connection between my personal idiosyncracies and the aggregate desires of the contemporary noosphere. These search terms are fascinating because they don’t simply arrive in the abstract form of aggregated numerical data. They arrive as specific English language phrases — some absurd in their occult particularity, some pathos-ridden in their anonymous banality. Taken as a whole, they form a kind of ongoing, unauthorized, biographical poem written about me by other people’s desires.

Between August 1 and August 16, 2009; 510 discrete search phrases led visitors to my sites. Below is an abridged selection of those phrases. Each line is a specific search phrase that someone typed into Google which resulted in them visiting some page of my site. (I welcome those who monitor their own stats to post similar “poems” in response).

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custom cars

creativity

spartan royal mansion

getty images license compliance

best frank zappa guitar solos

moment instant minute second exists gone

100 ways to ask youre mum if a friend can sleep

to hear a noise in dream

ways to wake up your roomate

sound bflat

farnsworth house

contrary to popular belief, underground fires are a

art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. it produces deepened perceptions of experience: art is not there simply to be understood; if it was, we should have no need of art

live video of cloninger speaking about theory

donnie darko ascii art

sentence complexion subtopics

klee

crank out the crap

cute 1950s borders

“what goes on”

how to catch lightning bugs

book of kells

italian design playgrounds

haughty levinas

vaughan oliver cd

what are the chacteristics of the web

history of rose of jericho and bougainvillea

what is ghost in the machine

galileo dropping an orange

daniel johnston beware of darkness, beware of evil

number of new york times prepared obituaries

rhetorical

waffle house integration

parajanov

cabinetry

cs lewis we are halfhearted creatures fooling around like ignorant child

artbase.dll

invention is the mother of necessities mcluhan

william

murakami haruki high res pics

scars in the hands of jesus

what advantages does multimedia have over a single medium?

deaf jesus

no one knows my heart

loud guitar solos

sweden

reason for 404

what is an artist’s statement

non linear narratives syllabus

now is the time of gods favor

radiohead

words

emily dickinson handwriting

neil young arguably greatest

figure

tightrope walker

what is internet art

gibby hanes

steez

the mobius palindrome

crest for fellowship

gradiation

communist

radar

prayer about the flesh that does you wrong

f0x

purple roses

robert venturi

what are 2 faces of breathing?

five properties of light

ethereal phrases

most technically proficient guitar solo

hijacking google images

pray super give me a power

lose of desire to live

plotfracture

how internet and telephony has revolutionized the way we watch tv.

beardsley

3d type design candy

circus posters

meister eckhart chicken and egg

history of bambini cologne

album sides

consumption and surfing subculture

n_gen

process

peter max

music

about

emily

memorabilia

primers

sweetheart plastics

facial rif for mocap

“without god” hildegard bingen

carnal torpor press thing

deleuze, apophasis

japanese candy vector

engulf

“to gather from the air a live tradition”

images

television test picture design bag

hue saturation value

jesus healing the blind

Scott Walker in pointy boots

I’ve been listening to Scott Walker all summer. I compiled this semi-chronological streaming mix of his “music,” alternately interspersed with other artists either directly or indirectly influenced by him. Walker starts off as a crooner and winds up as a kind of concrete noise poet (or something) — thus running the gamut from Nick Drake to Swans (a gamut no one else has even conceived of as a gamut). The following excerpts from Deleuze/Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 4, section III seem applicable:

Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogenous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly “machined,” it belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, or perhaps electronically generated (96).

When one submits linguistic elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led to treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the same fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same line of variation, in the same continuum (98).

It’s not that Walker is all that great of a poet per se, or all that great of a singer per se, or all that great of a composer per se. But he has gradually arrived at this deterritorialized trajectory modulating between embodied poetry and a poetic composing. It’s all the more disturbing when you listen to his practice (d)evolve over time in the mix (it starts unhinging at the song “Nite Flights”).