Cicerone´s Journeys: Twenty Two / Paused

Cicerone pauses to consider outcomes and eventualities. Events/Dualities. Bipolar actions, switchers. They would be digital, binary.

Like, when you're on you're on
and
when you're off you're off,
but if you are somewhere in between you are possibly nowhere at all, or in an image of nowhere, trapped between somewhere and somewhere else.

You can try to interpolate, animate, reanimate, reactivate. Or take it to the bridge, to the edge, to the max.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Twenty One

Cicerone is a hunter, tracking an elusive prey. What he wants to capture is:
Not the thing, but the shadow of the thing,
Not the thing, but the reflection of the thing,
Not the thing, but the echo of the thing.

He is searching for displacements, distortions, filtered representations, decontextualisations. He attempts to record a change of velocity in time, or a change of velocity in space. Maybe they are the same thing. He is riding on a jet stream, buffeted by western boundary currents, a turbulent cruise through the stratosphere.

He is looking for the appearance of the thing, not the thing itself. What is an appearance may be true or fictitious. He finds a formulation that says that the Apparent is True plus Fictitious: A = T+F. It seems to make sense, when most things have stopped making sense.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Twenty

Cicerone is locked into a private audio space and he is making a journey that has the provisional title "true/false". These are the places on his itinerary: Untrue, a place where he looks for The Bogus Man who is mixed up in a Shining Dub. We must Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions and avoid getting Stung On Tomorrow in the Valley of The Saroos. Every Next Day our Simple Heart needs Protein Protection from the Son Of King, to whom Aleister Explains Everything about a Scarlet Ceremony and Scarlet Ribbons, Scarlet Ribbons

Cicerone´s Journeys: Nineteen

Cicerone thinks that it would be good to feel like never before, to experience the shock of the new, to be a champion, to create an invention that changed the world, that made the world go round a little faster. He thinks about bodies approaching dissolution or collapse, spinning into oblivion. Loss of balance, teetering, spasms and awkward or unlikely movements. Communication fragmented into a sequence of stylised freeze-frames, a stroboscopic vision of the social. Blink, blink again. Now you see it, now you don't.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Eighteen

Cicerone thinks about alphabets, languages, accents and dialects, he thinks about communication and confusion. He thinks about how to speak, or how to speak in the absence of grammar, for example. He thinks about problems that can arise if, for example, one were to try to speak the language of birds, to explain the alphabet of clouds and sunsets. He sits at a table. He is sitting in a room. He looks at a television and he thinks; this is a television. He writes a list that begins;
the grammar of stones
the grammar of bridges
the grammar of waterfalls
the grammar of chimneys
the grammar of windows
the grammar of locks
the grammar of postboxes

the list continues.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Seventeen

Cicerone says it is always like this, more or less. We are all here, we are waiting, we are watching. Electric eyes behind curtain glass walls of watchful buildings, a malignant architecture, a social cannibalism.

Mirror wall to mirror wall, a closed circuit dialogue. Echoes of human presence trapped between matrices of self-desiring screens. It's an eternity box, a false infinity, a device for rendering the unreachable. It's a bounce-space, an image trampoline, an echo chamber of little horrors; horror of appearance and horror of disappearance. You need a black belt in click boxing, you click and tick the boxes to make the choices that fix your co-ordinates in the blink of an eye and eye and eye.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Sixteen

Cicerone says: come on, light me up, enlighten me, light my fire, take me to your dream house and break another little piece of my heart. From penthouse to pavement, it's a leap into the void, a Klein-blue moment on the eve of destruction. Let me be your demolition man. Let me take your world apart to put it back together again; same, same, but different.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Fifteen

Cicerone thinks about a remix of the future and the future of the past.

The future is not what it used to be but the future of the past can be rebranded in the present. Remade, remodelled, retrofitted, retooled, remixed, whatever.

Facelifting and image-morphing of urban blight. Utopian architecture of high modernism, icons of a future society that became social problems of a recent past, faulty towers in grey development zones of post industrializing cities, now repurposed as luxury nests for hedge fund operatives. Change the name , erase all traces of former occupancy, all traces of a vision of a future that never happened.

The past was a bright light future, forged in white heat, white light, a velvet-gloved iron fist of social programming. The past was the future, and the future becomes an inverse reflection of a vividly glowing past, or maybe not quite that, maybe a reflection of a reflection multiplied to infinity. Welcome to this hall of mirrors, welcome to the fun house.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Fourteen

Cicerone might be a man with a movie camera, his kino eye trained on a storyboard that maps the space of a database, based on aesthetics of disappearance and re-emergence. Vanishing acts and dramatic entrances. He has known for a long time that meaning in a given cultural text is not so much produced as post-produced and he doesn't need to be curated into a set of arbitrary relations to understand the syntax of the creative act. His scripts and treatments are playlists and remixes, dredged from the depths of memory, organic or silicate, to be recombined in a real-time stream of consciousness / reframed. Cicerone says it was always like this, nothing new, that there was maybe just no word for it earlier. So now he examines short intervals and points of contact on the circuit boards of geography, history, memory, encultured action. This is what it is like. It is like this. This is what it is, and has been, and will be.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Thirteen

Cicerone wears a cloak of shadows; he is swathed in five shades of darkness. What matters is the dark, and the residues of light within it. Faint memories, echoes, that can be amplified, refined, brought back into the realm of the seen, the seeable. Buried dreams, dreams of burial, an archeology of faint whispers and forgotten promises, hovering like wraiths at the edges of becoming.

Cicerone´s Journeys: Twelve

Cicerone reckons these are dark days, end times, scenes of disintegration recorded in grainy monochrome. An expanse of human flesh in dim blue light. Prone bodies, sleeping, or dead, maybe. Killing fields, dumping grounds, agony and ecstacy, a garden of unearthly delights. No fire burns, this hell hath frozen over. We skate over its glossy surface. The traces we leave etched in the ice are like heiroglyphs; ironic, stubborn, resisting interpretation. And Cicerone says to himself "I want to be able to see what it is".

Cicerone´s Journeys: Eleven

Cicerone looks at a sign that says; "I Want To be Able To See What It Is", and he wonders what that means. Is it possible to see what it is, or can he only see what it appears to be? Can what it appears to be, be what it is? Is this it? Is that all there is?

There is a small table (that once belonged to a retired doctor) on which a portable television stands next to a potted plant. The tv can not be turned on and the plant has no need of water. The entire arrangement is something other than that which it appears to be. A proposition, maybe, or a challenge.

Beyond the table/no table, a deep perspective; dark floorboards and heavy wooden beams, a claustrophobic architecture, with metal grilles and iron hooks. Suspended within this space he observes large numbers of dismembered and stuffed animals, like cast offs from a museum of natural history. In the distance, dimly lit, a small room in which hangs another ambiguous object, apparently part human, part animal. In its arms it holds a faceless and genderless mannequin. Cicerone thinks; that could be me, it could be anybody.

Cicerone's Journeys: Ten

Cicrone says that history is melting and geography has liquefied. The only thing he can be sure of is that he is no longer sure of anything. No constants, but interpretation, narrative. The analytic becomes subsumed into a poetics of spatial relations. Have you heard the news, have you really heard the news? The constructed event, dramatised for the world stage, stage managed, promoted and marketed as the revenge of the real, a space-bomb hurled into the fabric of time. Managed time, boundaried time, time shared and traded on a futures market that is past caring.

Cicerone's Journeys: Nine

Cicerone could be a spooky DJ, a grinderman, a miller, a granular synthesist, or a hooker's john, caged in silence, waiting for the sun.

Cicerone was a knight under the reign of umbrella makers, sheltering his riders from an iconoclastic storm. Because that knight belonged to lovers of flickering shadows, Cicerone guided his dream team through groves of incandescent screens, shimmering scenes, shape-shifting wraiths morphed from primitive forms and acid colours.

Cicerone's Journeys: Eight

Cicerone says: "ARM THE DISENFRANCHISED HORDES OF IMAGE ZOMBIES" Cicerone said "RELAX, DON'T DO IT". Cicerone whispers; "Let me be your guide aboard this raft of a seducer that will glide you over the broken surface of the mirror of your desires. You may dive if you wish, dive deep into memory, to surface again when time has stood still and the final scene is in the can."

Cicerone's Journeys: Seven

Cicerone says: consider this a dramatic dissonance or resonance, resonating and reverberating in a massive dub space where, just last night, a DJ saved your face from certain humiliations. When you get wrong-footed on the dance floor you'll be walking on the moon before you know what time it is. It's time for action, it's time for painting and you need some time to think: "Doctor, my head hurts, I need a pill to still the shrill drilling that is boring me to death, boring holes in my consciousness, my false consciousness, my bad conscience." Let Cicerone take you to his leaderboard and show you the ranking of riders on this storm of low-pressure signals, a barometric flux. He'll take you to the river and put you on a ferry to cross the merciless torrent of useless information that's supposed to fire your imagination but that only dulls your mental stimulation. No satisfaction guaranteed.

Cicerone's Journeys: Six

Cicerone thinks in frames and edits, loops and intervals, layers and masks. He cuts, splices and mixes the elements that coalesce in compounds of precipitated meaning. He's a mix doctor, which doctors the patient unravelling of narrative threads that were woven in webs and networks by spiders from mars. It's a war of the worlds, a war of the words that tell you what to think and who to buy or sell. If you are branded or stranded on a terminal beach by an ocean of indeterminacy, let Cicerone be your principle buoy, your guide aboard a starcraft that will warpdrive you to the Holy Woods beyond that land of nodding affirmation where opinions cluster around a totemic pole of dissociation; the meaning of the interval; a kind of dissonance.

Cicerone's Journeys: Five

Cicerone is a monk, jacked up on info-speed, drip-fed data from a wired world. He's google-eyed and dizzy with wonder at the prospect of embarking on a tour of that mirror world reflected in a pool of shared knowledge. He's a wicker man, a wikiman, a distributed entity, spellbound and cast in the role of interpretor.

Cicerone's Journeys: Four

Cicerone is a collector, hunting and gathering fleeting impressions that are the folklore of a dissipating culture. He stakes his pitch from here to here, from now to now, a barker harking back to vanished public fora where storytellers and soothsayers built architectures of narrative upon which cultural heritage would rest. There's a thin red line running through his cabinet of curiosities, a thin red line like the laser sight of a guided missile, a semantic bomb that is smart enough to explode on impact with meaning. After the explosion the dust settles and Cicerone sifts through the debris looking for clues, making links, hoping to reconstruct a chain of events. Once he finds out the circumstances, then he can go out and build another reality, draw another map, tell another story, translate another text, illuminate another manuscript.

Cicerone's Journeys: Three

Cicerone's journeys are constructs, relationally aestheticised assemblages of association, steeped in a history of artful manipulation. Every picture tells a story, then another one, then another one. Every picture is a liar. Every picture is the truth, literally, transliterally, an alliterated accumulation of inferred narratives. Cicerone is the guide aboard a tour bus, driving in circles and spirals on a road to nowhere, somewhere on or off a map that is drawn and redrawn in memory and song. Lines of song, lines of text, white lines that mark the road, red lines that are borders, thin lines that are easily crossed or erased, invisible lines that link events across unlikely distances.

Cicerone's Journeys: Two

Cicerone flips coins and rolls dice to ascertain the order of things, or to enhance the disorder of things, whatever. He's rolling and tumbling through a popular history of signs, his mojo is working on overdrive, superdrive, driving him crazy, driving through a landscape of dreams, of dreams, of dreams and dramatic pauses. All those dreams that money could buy, that money has bought, and sold.