Please do not try any of the surgical procedures at home. If you are squeamish, turn off your screens now. Gross stuff, we love it. But how gross is too gross? This is what they are. It's simple, two contestants, three questions, three disgusting videos, 50 pounds each.  Plain of day is Claire and Karis. Claire is 21 and loves popping pimples. I love spot picking. Karis is 19, she hates puss but loves watching cat videos. Oh, it's grim. Right time for round one. Watch the clip, care for me and wait for the question. This is absolutely not what I want to see. What is it? Oh, it's grim. No, no, no. Oh, no. Oh, my God. I don't like that. It doesn't look like blood. Karis looks like she's going to pass out already. But can she hold it together to answer the first question? How much pus came out of that guy's wound? 200 millilitres, that's about a glass of wine. 400 millilitres, that's just under a pint. 800 millilitres, that's a pint and a half. I think maybe not 800 because the whole liter of pus. I'm thinking 400. I think we should say 400 but I know it's going to end up being 800. We'll go for B400. Yeah. This is how much pus we have. Oh, my God. How much? That's not 400, is it? 800 millilitres. That's disgusting. One and a half pints of pus. That's disgusting. And the girls didn't win anything. The next chance to win 50 pound is a classic what happens next when if the girls hate needles they're going to struggle with this. Do you know burn? Oh. Oh, my God. Watch it's getting bigger. Oh, no. Needles, my other thing that I hate. This is awful. Oh, no. So a bank, 50 pounds. What happens next? A maggot calls out. A pus explosion. Or say, you never know, the patient pooms himself. The pus explosion is most obvious. The go for B is a pus explosion. Yeah. If it isn't, I'm going to hate it. You can see right there, the air is getting flat. Oh, no. The pus to be exposed like a cat. Oh, that is so gross. The girls got it right. Thank God. That's 50 pounds in the bank. Question three is an observation round. They've got to watch and listen carefully and wait for the question. Oh, God. That's gushing out. Oh, no. That's black. Girls, if you use a flinch like this, I don't know what you're going to be like on the flinch round. Guess what, Raymond? Looks like you're still infected here. Why is that black? That's like a snail. That was a river of pus and I've never seen anything like it. But the question is what's the patient's name? Reginald. Raymond. Or is it C. Rowland. To be fair, all begin with R. B. Say Daniel. B. I feel like it was Raymond. But then I'm slightly deaf. Are you going to trust her? I was trusting her. So we're going for B. Raymond. You get that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, guess what, Raymond? Oh, my God. Yeah! Claire and Karris have now won a hundred pounds.  I just hope they manage to take all the money home. All they have to do now is survive the flinch test. Don't look away and don't puke. And the money is theirs. A piece of this.  Girls, you've got to watch. You've got to watch. No, no. You make me want to look away. No, it's going to hurt. Karris, do you need to keep your eyes on the screen? No. Claire, keep your eyes on the screen. What? Did it? Did it? They won a hundred pounds? Those videos were on another level. See you next time for more gross videos on What The Yuck.


Okay so there's a really simple way you can stay lucid for longer and that is if you see something getting darker like say if you're in a room and the room starts to get darker as you're in it right or you can actually do is just go into another room where it's lighter because the thing about lucid dreams is when it gets dark in the dream usually what that means is you're starting to wake up or you're starting to lose lucidity and the dream's collapsing so all you really need to do is if you notice it's getting dark go into a light area and you'll stay lucid for longer. One of my most recent dreams is when I was sort of walking through a house and then there were loads of different rooms you know dozens of different rooms and each one would have a light either on or off so as I was walking through it some of the lights turned off for some reason and I thought I was lucid at the time I remember thinking okay well this is me waking up so if I just find a room that's actually got a light on then I can stay lucid for longer and it reminds me of I don't know if you've seen the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind I think that's what it's called with Jim Carrey that's pretty much the same thing he's in an unconscious state he's asleep having his memory wiped and then in order to stay in the memory or in order to stay lucid and aware he sort of runs towards the rooms that are light because the ones behind him that are in darkness they're sort of fading away and you know his memory's being wiped obviously your memory's not being wiped in a lucid dream but if you just go towards the areas that are lighter then it's a lot easier to stay lucid and you can stay lucid for longer one more thing is I've just launched my first udemy course which is going to be a complete comprehensive video course about lucid dreaming it takes you anywhere from beginner all the way to advanced it's actually on sale now a huge discount it's normally 190 pounds it's now on sale for 10.99 so it's only going to be like that for a few days I think I'm not sure exactly what the details are but anyway there's going to be a link in the description or you can just go into udemy and type in ultimate guide to lucid dreaming and my one is the one with the sort of four pictures of different dream scenes I'll put a picture of that here so you know what you're looking for anyway go and check it out and leave a comment subscribe see you next time


Dydw i'n wneud o hyn o'r gweithio cydwyngau iawn i'r cymdeithasol ac iddo, gyda'r ddweud cydwyngau cydwyngau rhai. Mae'r cydwngorau i'r gweithio cydwyngau iawn i'r ffordd y llunio sy'n ddigonio, mae'r cydwyngau ar y cydwyngau. I will start by explaining what they are not. Idealism and materialism are not what they are in the popular consciousness. Materialism is associated with the grubby preoccupation with wealth and material things, whereas idealism is associated with the pursuit of the lofty of things in equality and justice and self-sacrifice associated with idealism. Materialism and idealism in philosophy have a very different meaning to that. I will just start by outlining what materialism and idealism mean to philosophers, because they touch upon questions of the relationship between mind and matter. The idea of what is reality, what is true and false, how can we distinguish truth and falsehood? And for the materialists, which we as Marxists define ourselves as materialists, describe ourselves as materialists, and in fact materialism lies at the root, either unconsciously or consciously, of all natural science, really. It is an instinctive materialism lies at the basis of all natural science. And materialism simply explains that all that exists is matter in motion, that there is a world, an objective world of matter that exists independently of the human mind, and that the relationship between mind and matter is a similar relationship between the part and the whole, that mind is one of the products of matter in motion, that it is the product of the human brain, which itself is the product of a long period of evolution, of revolutions in the organisation of matter, from the most simple up to the most complex forms of matter, and it is one of the products of this, it emerges from matter organised in the human brain.  And as I say, the human brain is itself the long period, the product of a long period of hundreds of millions of years of evolution of matter from lower, less complex to higher, more complex forms of organisation, starting with the transition billions of years ago from inorganic to organic matter, the same substances organised in a certain way were led to the emergence of life, and over hundreds of millions of years of course we have the domination of simple unicellial organisms, and then about 550 million years ago we have a huge explosion, a revolution within the animal kingdom, within the sphere of biology, and the emergence of complex organisms during the Cambrian explosion, and one of those organisms led to what we call the chordates, a particular branch of organisms which led to vertebrates, where you had the emergence of a primitive spinal column, the centralisation of the nervous system, and increasingly at the head of the central nervous system, the brain, which emerged instead of simply transmitting from the sense organs to the motor organs, increasingly formed connections with itself, the neurons increasingly formed connections with themselves, reflected upon the world, interpreted the information of the world around us, formed memories which obviously helped in the evolution of the survival of these species, and eventually over hundreds of millions of years we've seen the growth of the brain, and then a quantum leap that separates human beings from the entire animal kingdom, and the emergence of human consciousness as you had this transformation of quantity into quality, but in the story of the emergence of human consciousness and the emergence of human beings from the animal kingdom, you actually have an interesting little diversion about 100 years ago, you had the discovery of a fossil, it was actually a giant hoax called the Pilthvow Man, which completely had the scientific community enthralled to it, it suckered in a lot of scientists, and basically it was a human skull with an orangutan's jaw attached to it, and that reflects quite a deep set prejudice about how humanity emerged from the animal kingdom, that what we were looking for in the missing link was basically an ape-like creature with a human-like brain, that essentially that consciousness occupies a certain pedestal if you like, it is raised above the rest of the material world. In actual fact, decades before the discovery of the Pilthvow Man, Engels actually wrote a book called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, a very excellent article called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, and he describes in this article how actually the key turning point in the transition from ape to man was not so much the emergence of an ape with a giant head if you like, but it was actually when human beings, or our ancestors, how many two to three million years ago, started to stand upright, and by doing so they freed the hand, which allowed all sorts of millions of an infinite number of complex operations that we can change the world around us, and this is what actually separates us as human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, is an ability to not take nature simply as it is, but to alter nature according to our will, if you like that the animal kingdom, all of the most intelligent animals are very much slaves to the concrete, to their immediate experience and immediate environment, but we see that human beings are very much distinguished by being able to project ourselves into the future, to think abstractly, to plan and develop how we're going to actually change the world. If you look at the most primitive human stone axe and compare that with the tools that are used by the higher forms of the animal kingdom apart from human beings, you see that the most primitive stone axe shows a level of planning that this was constructed in that primitive human mind before it was actually constructed materially, whereas the animals take what is concrete in front of them, they take the stick or the stone and so forth, and manipulate the world in that way, use the rock to break up a piece of fruit or a knot and so on, whereas we construct things within our minds, we're able to form very high levels of abstraction, we're able to pass those on through the means of language, and so actually by transforming the world through the means of labour created by the hands, human beings transforming their own environment actually transform themselves, they give an impulse to the evolution of the brain, which happens after actually the emergence of the upright stance, posture and the hands, but it is interesting what this hoax of the Piltdown Man says, it shows that there is actually a prejudice and tendency to raise consciousness above the material world, and there is actually an entire camp of philosophy, the camp of idealism, which opposes itself to materialism, which inverts the relationship between mind and matter, it doesn't say that matter is primary and consciousness forms out of that, it's a product of matter emotion, but on the contrary, it is our thought, our minds, it is consciousness which is something primary, which gives rise to the material world, either it's the mind of man or the mind of gods which is primary, and the material world is secondary, it's either a reflection of this mind, everything is a product of our mind and so on, it's an interesting philosophical inversion, and Engels describes, and this is where I want to actually begin really, is that Engels describes how in the human eye on the retina, the external world is reflected in an upside down way, the image is upside down on the human retina, and we explain that through the physics of optics, and in the same way, of course, in idealist philosophy you have this inversion of the relationship between mind and matter, and that too must be explained, but it must be explained through the laws of history, of historical materialism, explaining how our ideas are a reflection of the material world around us, and as we continue to change the material world, it didn't obviously stop two to three million years ago with the emergence of human beings, if you like, when evolution stopped, we continue to change our consciousness, we continue to change our ideas when we change the material world around us, as we change our conditions, we lay the basis for new thoughts, new ideas, new levels of culture and so on. So obviously the emergence of this split within idealism and materialism has to first of all be explained. But secondly, I think this is something that a lot of Marxists are guilty of on occasion, not all Marxist, but sometimes I think we can very much simplify idealism, not give it the credit that is actually due to it, because of course we associate idealism, the idea that mind is primary with mysticism, with religion and with organised religion, the church and so forth, which of course the church is the last bastion of idealist philosophy. However, there are of course attempts to wrap up idealism in a much more scientific sounding language, even in materialistic sounding language. There are much more subtle arguments which idealists use and I think it's worth us learning to recognise where idealism, how it sort of emerges, how it presents itself and the arguments which are used and the counterarguments which we as Marxists, as dialectical materialists, lay down in opposition to idealism. And finally of course, what is the relevance of this for us as revolutionaries? This is what it all has to come back to, you know, we as revolutionary Marxists describe ourselves as materialists, dialectical materialists, there are other brands of materialism, what distinguishes our ideas, if you like. And so first of all I want to talk about, as I say, the emergence of idealism. It seems like a very strange thing, this idea that consciousness is somehow independent of the material world, it was very much, what's the word? A common sense and easy to understand how this sort of thing emerged actually amongst primitive human beings. If you go back hundreds of thousands of years I described how we as human beings tend to actually bring the forces of nature under our control through the means of labour. But of course the earliest human beings had barely emerged from the animal kingdom. They had begun to transform their world around them.  But it was only a beginning and in many respects of course primitive human beings were barely distinguished from the animal kingdom, had barely emerged from the animal kingdom. And the forces of nature far from actually being under the control of human beings were barely even understood whatsoever. We've seen that the earliest minds would have been grasping in the dark trying to understand the world around it. And coming up with all sorts of explanations, magical and mystical explanations. And we see independently in all sorts of parts of the world the emergence of very similar animistic religions. The attribution to nature, of consciousness, of spirits, all sorts of things inhabiting nature. And therefore also the possibility of actually controlling nature. Of bringing nature under our control if everything is subject to these sort of spirits which inhabit it in these animistic religions. Of course those spirits could be appealed to. You can beg them to sort of change their ways to be less capricious or what have you. Or on the other hand you can threaten those spirits or threaten these gods if you like. These primitive gods. So you see that actually superstition and idealist modes of thought were very much sort of connected with attempts to control the natural. The supernatural and the natural sort of merged in together. And of course that was easy to understand how people saw that there were spirits in nature. After all, when we sleep does our consciousness not seem to rise out of our body? Do we not seem to carry on walking around in our dreams? Interacting with people who are perhaps dead or passed away, our ancestors and so on? So it was quite natural primitive peoples to come to these ideas, these animistic conclusions and try to bring nature under their control through means of exerting control over the supernatural. But of course to raise above that, to explain nature purely in terms of nature it was necessary to have a development of the productive forces to bring nature more and more under our control. And it's particularly amongst the Greeks that we see of course a high level of development of philosophy and one of the first attempts within Europe to really explain nature through the processes of nature. A lot of comrades may have been actually at the discussion on dialectics so if you were there I won't necessarily bore you with that because a lot of that has already been covered. And it's remarkable the fact that the majority actually of the Greek philosophers were materialists particularly the earlier Ionian philosophers that Scott was talking about earlier on were materialists, they didn't have any recourse to the supernatural that was all expelled from nature, there were attempts to explain nature in terms of nature. However of course there were very definite limits to the materialism of the ancient Greeks First of all of course it was not a revolutionary materialism for the liberation of a press class it was the materialism of a slave owning aristocracy within ancient Greece and actually the Lucretius, one of the great Roman materialists described his materialism as a little bit like being a man with his feet firmly on the shore looking over a stormy bay and you can see the ships are getting battered and so forth and you have a feeling of calm washes over yourself so by understanding the laws of nature it gives you a certain sense of internal calm and peace whereas you see all of the other peoples around you full of superstition and so on and completely unable to explain the laws of nature around them so it was a thing of personal consumption for the ruling class and it had a very qualitative nature to it if you actually read the writings of people like Lucretius and so on you can see that they have much more of a sense of poetry these are not like scientific papers and what have you with long mathematical details and so on obviously there were limits to the degree to which science could be developed amongst the ancient Greeks and within ancient society in general but at the same time as you had the emergence of materialist philosophy you also had strong impulses in the direction of idealist philosophy at the same time which also emerged with the emergence of class society you have of course the division between manual and mental labour which was a result of the fact that a certain layer of the population were freed from the burden of labour by the labour of the slaves who could obviously fed the plateaus and the pythagorases of the ancient world and therefore a tendency to actually elevate mental labour above manual labour and at the same time you see in particular in more abstract thoughts such as in mathematics and so on a tendency to forget the relationship that our abstractions about the world have to the concrete material world around us so we see in Plato he had this idea that you had a world of perfect forms that existed on another plane separate to the material world and that if we see for example roundness within nature if we see a plate is round, the moon is round and the sun is round that these all reflect a perfect round circular form that exists on another plane separate and independent from the material world and the material world is simply an imperfect reflection of this realm of ideas and so on in other words our abstractions had a sort of separate existence to the concrete world around us the essence of things was separated from the appearance of things and you can see that there was particularly the times that Plato was actually thinking in were extremely tumultuous times you had the defeat at the end of the Peloponnesian war the 30 tyrants that dominated in that period particularly of Plato's youth and this had a formative effect on his consciousness a tendency in periods of decline and crisis for a polarisation within philosophy of some people turning away actually from the material world which seems to be run by irrational people that seems to bear no resemblance to any rationality or reason that reason has abandoned the world in periods of decline and therefore turned to a perfect world of which the material world is merely an imperfect reflection and expression and particularly that period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was one such period of where everything seemed to be completely unreasonable the world seemed to be in a period of decline there was despair that infected not just the lower classes within society but sections of the aristocracy, sections of the old ruling class and a tendency for mysticism to creep in and pessimism to creep in and a tendency to see the possibility of a better life in the hereafter because there was no possibility of improving one's life in the present and all of these mystical ideas injected into the declining Roman Empire with the growth of different cults the growth of the spread of the Jewish and the Christian religions throughout the empire we see that in periods of decline and crisis a tendency amongst certain sections of the population to turn in a mystical direction to turn away from the material world so we see all of these elements which gave rise to the potential for the domination of idealism throughout a whole period of human history particularly in the feudal period idealist conceptions of the world when the Christian religion merged with the Roman ruling class to form the Roman Catholic Church the feudal church which was based upon many of the ideas of Plato and some of the ideas of Aristotle injected into Christian theology idealism became the official state philosophy and it became the divine justification for the material order that existed for the interests of the particular ruling class and the Catholic Church of course was in many respects the subjective factor in the transition from the old declining slave society towards the new feudal order now I don't have much time to go into all of those developments but it's interesting at the same time that this was of course a massive step back relative to the cultural achievements of antiquity what stands out in the period of the middle ages despite some attempts to revise this assessment the period of darkness in fact much of philosophy was only really retained amongst the Arab populations the Muslim Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula but you did have the re-emergence of civilization a growth after this sort of throwback within Europe and the emergence of course particularly in the areas between the great landed estates you had the emergence of a bourgeoisie of a class of traders, of artisans and merchants in the nooks and crannies of feudal society and increasingly this class emerged which increasingly depended for its wealth upon money rather than landed property and the bourgeoisie is a class in its revolutionary phase of course came into conflict with the old ruling class with the old feudal elite and it is a testament to the correctness actually of the materialist method its first opposition of course it took the intellectual material which existed in the world around it the first opposition of the bourgeoisie to the old feudal regime into the Catholic Church took the expression of a religious opposition of purifying the old Catholic Church of all of the trappings of feudalism and so forth and a return of purification and a return to the original Christian religion of course this was not a return to the religion of the twelve apostles this was actually the purification of all of the feudal rubbish and the creation actually of a bourgeois God the Protestant religion in many respects represents the interests of the bourgeoisie as opposed to the old feudal God and in the English Civil War the ideology under which Oliver Cromwell's army fought was of a purified religion and the same in Germany as well it was under Luther the Reformation and the peasant war was fought under the banner of a purified religion and its interesting actually that within decaying feudal society the extreme left wing for example in the Reformation within Germany amongst the anabaptists you had a movement in the direction of complete philosophical opposition to God and the Catholic Church under the guise of pantheism a sort of pantheistic atheism was beginning to emerge on the extreme left wing representing the most radical elements of the petty bourgeoisie and semi-prolitarian layers within Germany but as the bourgeois revolutions developed on a higher level particularly in the period prior to the French Revolution you have the emergence of the bourgeoisie using a militant materialism in opposition to the old feudal ideas of the Catholic Church and in particular in France in the period of the 18th century in the period of the preparation before the French Revolution you have the spread of all sorts of revolutionary ideas which in many of the philosophers within this period were themselves materialists man was to become the measure of everything they saw themselves as bringing in a new epoch of reason of the rights of man of justice and equality and so on and in many of respects they were actually influenced by earlier bourgeois philosophers such as the British materialists Francis Bacon and John Locke who were amongst the Locke in particular was a massive influence to the French materialists of the period of the 18th century now I think it's worth as pausing for a second to look at what is the relationship between the bourgeoisie as a class and the two great camps within philosophy between materialism and idealism and we can see in a certain sense of course a reason why the bourgeoisie particularly in its revolutionary phase and even to this day to a certain extent will promote a certain brand of materialism on the one hand the bourgeoisie has an interest in the development of science and science itself was one of the fields of battle between the Catholic Church and the rising bourgeoisie in the period of the late Middle Ages and at the same time of course the bourgeoisie comes into opposition against the old Catholic Church and amongst its most radical and revolutionary representatives you get the rise of this militant materialism who Engels describes the materialists in France as heralding the bourgeois revolution in France but they were by no means had the same bourgeois limitations of the class which they were representing in their revolutionary ideological struggle in the 18th century and so I think it's worth particularly pausing on the ideas of the sort of materialism which was developing at this time and looking at it in a bit more depth and the arguments that the idealists used encounter to this sort of materialism so Locke in particular took us his starting point the idea that knowledge has only one source really that the source of knowledge is the external world around us it is our sensations provides the source of knowledge and they provide a window to a material world which exists independently and outside of ourselves and then we take this information from our sensations we process it in our mind and through deductive logic we're able to tease out the laws of nature and of the material world which very much saw it as existing independently now it's interesting that some of his opponents who came from an idealist or an agnostic camp that is to say they didn't exert the primacy of a material world outside of ourselves people like David Hume they were sort of they denied the knowability even of a material world is there a world out there they didn't know so there are camps between materialism and idealism but people like Bishop Berkeley who was an idealist philosopher and David Hume who was opposed to materialism from an agnostic point of view actually took us their starting point the very same starting point as Locke and drew the exact opposite conclusion they said okay we agree that the only source of they in turn agreed that the only source of knowledge is sensations all that we know to be real are our sensations I see this, I hear that, I smell that and taste such and such this is all that we know to be real but what we conceive of as matter or what we conceive of as things if you like is the correlations of sensations that's all I can say for example if I have an apple before me I see red, I taste sweet and crunchy it has a round form I associate those, correlate those things and give them a name I call it an apple and therefore all that this is is really an idea it exists purely as an idea now Hume said it's impossible to know actually if there is a material world beyond these sensations that is causing these sensations to be created Bishop Berkeley took a quite categorical opinion that they didn't exist except in the mind if you like and there was no evidence for the material world and the lawfulness of the world was simply the fact that God was planting in our minds these ideas these sensations were directly implanted in our minds from God so it was a very clear idealist position that Bishop Berkeley took so as you see for the materialists our sensations act almost as a window to the external world for the agnostic and for the idealist our sensations are like a fence which are insurpassable if you like and Diderot the French materialist described this philosophy as a little bit like if you imagine a sentient piano and you play the keys of the piano in the same way that our senses are played upon by nature and he described this philosophy as a bit like a piano that imagines that there was no such thing as a pianist playing its keys that all of the world's harmonies existed purely within its head we would surely describe that as a completely insane piano and in the same way he described idealism as the most insane philosophy it is the most absurd philosophy yet he described it as the most devilishly difficult to actually disprove how do you know how can you actually disprove that there is a material world out there now Diderot to his credit came very close to a dialectical materialist point of view although he didn't quite overcome the limits that most of the French materialists all of the French materialists were subject to what was it worth us then having a look at what were the limits that we as Marxists would describe of this sort of materialism that existed in the revolutionary period of the bourgeois years of class well Engels actually described three fundamental limits to this sort of what he described as metaphysical materialism and Lenin also picked up on those in his book materialism and imperial criticism which I recommend all comrades read and I also recommend everyone read another short book by Engels called Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy it's not very long, it's reasonably accessible a lot of the names though you can obviously look on Wikipedia but it's very good and Engels and Lenin described three real limitations to this materialism on the one hand they described it very much as being a materialism of a mechanical character and I think I mentioned previously actually in Scott's discussion on dialectics what they meant by that was of course in the period that we're talking about even by the time you get to the late 18th century in which the French materialists were writing science was still yet to be put on a scientific basis in many fields particularly chemistry and biology lagged behind physics and astronomy which had far superseded them had marched far ahead and according to simple mechanics and according to astronomy the world operates according to these unchanging laws of simple cause and effect and you know you have the eternal rotations of the motions of the heavens and so on which very much appear like a piece of clockwork and these mechanical laws of motion were applied to try and explain by these philosophers the world of chemistry and biology and so on and you see attempts to explain organisms also as merely pieces of clockwork and Descartes for example was a very mechanical philosopher he imagined that animals were purely nothing but complex machines they were very complex machines that operated according to very deterministic laws and actually he described us as human beings as being merely machines that were on the other hand inhabited by consciousness that connected somewhere in our brain you imagine there was some sort of like God organ in the brain and you see this develops in different periods within neuroscience as well actually this idea that there is some sort of controlling centre within the brain because when you have a mechanical materialist conception you imagine that the brain operates in the same way that billiard balls operate when they interact with each other or a piece of clockwork operates where do you find the consciousness in that the brain is nothing more than the individual sum of its parts operating by very strict deterministic laws of mechanics if you like so it's very difficult to solve this question of where does consciousness fit into a mechanical universe on the other hand the angles criticize this materialism as being very much anti-dialectical and now if we go back to Locke for example he described the one source of our knowledge as being our sensations that give us a window onto the outside world that is true to a certain extent but of course do we simply speculate about the world around us do we just simply allow our sensations to bombard us from all directions and then draw conclusions about the world no and natural scientists don't operate in that manner in actual fact we also act upon the world and actually we act upon the world before we even begin to think about the world previously in the beginning human beings began transforming the world and in so doing laid the basis for human mind human consciousness, human culture that's the meaning of what Marx talks about when he said in his thesis on Feuerbach that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point however is to change it and practice plays a very important role in the question of the truthfulness of our knowledge is there a material world which corresponds to these laws that I have described and hypothesised from observation what the scientist does is they go into the laboratory and they test those things they put those things into practice and practice is for Marxist a key category in the theory of knowledge it is something which was disdained by many philosophers prior to Marx and of course for us as revolutionaries as revolutionary communists we see that actually there are a lot of people who put forward the idea that the level of consciousness of the working class is too low that first of all we have to educate everyone one by one and eventually when consciousness reaches a certain level it will be possible for the working class to transform society but it's actually through the class struggle it's actually through revolutions that the working class achieves its class consciousness and achieves its level of organisation it can be through no other means than through changing the world and entering into struggle that the working class achieves a certain level of class consciousness and is able to finally transform society so for us as Marxist we are not simply speculative materialists we are dialectical materialists we see that action forms a key part of our philosophy and finally Engels describes how these materialists were limited to a certain idealism sort of materialism below but idealism above as he described it in other words on the one hand whilst they described nature in terms of nature they didn't imagine that a supernatural existed and the French materialists in particular were completely implacably opposed to the idea of God and mysticism and all that sort of stuff and as I said made man the measure of things nevertheless this was not man historically given as the representative of a particular class or division or group within society a given historical stage in society this was man in the abstract that had certain abstract human rights and a human nature the rights of man would have been completely laughable because the ancient Romans the idea that everyone has inherent rights because actually a certain section of humanity were slaves and the whole basis of their civilisation was one of slavery the kind of ideals that the French materialists were fighting for were really the ideals of the bourgeois republic of the freedom to trade equality before the law they represented the interests of a certain class but of course they didn't express it as this they expressed it in terms of transcendental ideas of rights, justice and so on in other words there was no connection between these ideas if you like in the material world to go beyond that materialism of the great revolutionary materialists in France and others would necessarily mean seeing the bourgeois epoch as one stage in human society and one stage of human development of seeing that materialism as simply being the materialism of a revolutionary bourgeois class in other words it would have meant taking the class point of view of a proletariat of a new revolutionary class that is in opposition to the bourgeoisie and of developing such a position which of course was impossible for these thinkers at the time when the proletariat was basically barely emerging as a class there were very much limits to which they could develop this materialism and so it's fairly understandable why they came to these conclusions now I've gone into a lot of depth as to of course the materialism of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase and the differences between bourgeois materialism sorry I won't call it bourgeois materialism mechanical metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism which is the philosophy of Marxism however I think it's also quite clear that today the bourgeoisie whilst there are bourgeois materialists the bourgeoisie as a class is also the greatest funder and backer of all forms of organised religion all forms of mysticism and attempts to sort of if you like cloak the reality of the world around us in mysticism the bourgeoisie as a class particularly once it has become a ruling class we can see has an interest in propelling certain forms of idealism forwards in different guises some more subtle some less so and in fact I quite like there's a little dialogue in Les Miserables between the good bishop who of course is an idealist as one might expect from a bishop and the bourgeois senator who describes his materialism because he says I'm a materialist you know what I'm born I live and I die and whilst I'm fortunate to be a wealthy man I can enjoy good wine good food and so on this materialism is very much the materialism of a bourgeois he's not going to deny himself material things in life if he knows he's not going to live in the next life it was not very different the materialism of Lucretius and the materialism of the slave-owning class except far more hypocritical because the guy then goes on to say yes but there is room for idealism there is room for your philosophy he says to the bishop it's the butter that the sorry God is what the poor man butters his dry bread with in other words it's a means of solace for the working classes it's a means of solace for the poor and the oppressed classes within society and he goes on a raging rant about Diderot he's a very conservative sort of thing and he sees the room for religion, for mysticism and of course we can quite clearly see why that is the case but I think this points in the direction of why our for us as Marxists we are obviously materialists and we are scientific socialists and we are atheists therefore but our atheism has nothing to do with that certain strand of atheism like the new atheists that strand of bourgeois atheism that you see from people like Richard Dawkins and other essentially bourgeois atheists who see their own atheism as being you know gives them a certain superiority they feel a bit superior if there is atheism if there are peoples in other parts of the world that are killing each other supposedly because of religion if there are death cults and some gods in the Middle East or there are Buddhists in Myanmar or what have you chopping off the limbs of people this is because of their backwardness and actually it tends to lead to all sorts of racist and extremely backward conclusions on the part of these so called new atheists actually ignoring the fact of something that we looked at in another session on terrorism is that where do all of these movements spawn actually it's the same imperialists in the secular developed advanced countries that are at the same time backing the most backward mystical sort of sets and these death cults and terrorist groups in other parts of the world it's the same French ruling class that bans the burqa in the name of secularism and having an advanced sort of it's complete hypocrisy obviously and that has nothing to do with the atheism of us as marxists for us as marxists our atheism is our critique of religion is a critique of the material circumstances that seek people to try and find solace in a hereafter in a better world when you're dead basically we say let's build heaven on earth let's not wait until the afterlife to actually build to go to heaven and but of course between the most if you like what's the word blatant and undisguised and naked idealism and materialism there are much more subtle attempts to introduce idealism into the working class movement introduce this sort of philosophy in the interest of the bourgeoisie for example I might describe how I might say you as a worker if you're working 40-50 hours a week for a crack pay if you're lucky working that many hours a week or if you're living in a damp rat infested house or whatever else if your healthcare system is falling apart and all of these sort of things it's because of the objective laws of capitalism as a scientific socialist I explain that it is the exploitation of the working class which leads to this situation that you're living in the bourgeois idealist on the other hand will turn around and say what do you mean there are objective laws of capitalism there is no objective laws of capitalism in fact you might not like eating soup with dried reds but some people love that sort of thing some people love to just live off of crap food you call that a hovel but for someone else that is like a palace in other words the only truth that exists in the world is that subjective truth that exists in your head and therefore stop complaining some people like working hard a very subjectivist outlook you can see how that leads to the idea that you should give up in any attempt to try and change the world and we see this given a philosophical justification in university campuses and so on I know there was a session on postmodernism I didn't go to that but postmodernism it's very difficult to actually describe postmodernism as like a coherent theory but all it really is a rejection of any sort of meta narrative the idea that there is some sort of like overarching objective laws to society is completely dispensed with in other words there is only your own subjective view and how you subjectively see things and therefore if you want to fight for environmentalism or struggle for equality of LGBT people or women's rights and all of these sort of things that's fair enough but the idea that there are objective laws to society and you have to smash capitalism to solve these things no it's purely subjective in other words it serves to ideologically justify all of this identity politics and dividing the working class basically by gender, religion, race and all of these sort of categories so we see how it works its way into the left through the universities through the media not simply through the means of the conveyor belt of religion idealist for us if he finds its way in all sorts of ways also into the working class movement and here's the point the point is if you don't have your own philosophy you're going to absorb the philosophy of the world around you and how can we conceive of the working class transforming society without first of all adopting its own independent class point in other words until the working class has a clear view of the world which is independent of the view of the world that the bourgeoisie holds there is no question on earth of the working class being able to liberate itself until it has a party which is led by a certain philosophy dialectical materialism there is no possibility of the working class achieving its own liberation and we see that within the working class movement actually idealist concepts not consciously expressed as idealism but they find themselves left right and centre and Britain for example there is the idea that there is amongst the leaders of the trade unions and the labour party there is this idea that actually austerity and cuts and attacks on the working class are merely ideological in character of course they are ideological in character as in fact the Tory party does have a certain ideology and they are carrying out this austerity which is in line with their ideology but for us as Marxists of course ideology is not grounded it doesn't live in the air separate from the material world actually that ideology corresponds to a certain class interest it corresponds to the interest of bourgeoisie the capitalist class as a class and in the period of crisis they are determined to pass on basically that the working class will pay for this crisis through all of this austerity and attacks but the conclusions you are led to draw if you simply think this is an ideological attack and it's because of the anti working class ideology which for some reason unexplained enters the heads of these Tory politicians you are left with a conclusion that simply changing the politicians or even convincing and converting the politicians away from this insane ideology towards a more compassionate and rational ideology would lead to the end of austerity and would lead to an end of the attacks upon the working class in fact that's a very old idea that is not something that has been invented by the trade union leaders or the Labour party leaders that is the the ideology actually of the utopian socialist the pre-Marxist socialist had this point of view that it was only necessary to convince the ruling class of the superiority of socialism people like Robert Owen actually tried to appeal to the better nature of the capitalist class and they completely failed of course but we can understand why the utopian socialist drew that conclusion because the material conditions were not right for the development of an actual materialist scientific socialist view of the world were not right for Marxism because the working class as a class was still too small, still too underdeveloped, not sufficiently independent as a class and organised as a class for trade union leaders at the head of trade unions with six million members plus to continue to hold those views of these idealist views of the pre-Marxist utopian socialist is something unforgivable in my opinion however we understand they do not have their own philosophy therefore they absorb the bits of philosophy from the society around them we understand how that comes about and of course Marx and Engels started their life as philosophers, as students of philosophy and for them communism if you like Marxism, those ideas the revolutionary transformation of society started out with working out their own philosophical point of view and for Lenin and Trotsky as well I haven't had time to go into really Lenin's book materialism and imperial criticism although a lot of the arguments that I've laid down are found in that book he too saw it as in the period after the 1905 revolution when you had a wave of mysticism as a result of the defeat of the revolutionary movement and idealism finding its expression within the Bolshevik party he saw it as necessary to publish a book explaining why we are materialists and laying down all of the arguments against idealism in its various different forms and therefore the defence of the materialist method the defence of dialectical materialism is the defence of the building of the revolutionary party the starting point of the building of a party is the defence of this theory because after all the party is simply the mechanism by which to actually bring this philosophy and this outlook of the world into the working class movement


So, our next speaker is Sarah Joana Torreur. Sarah is a curator and writer focusing on time-based art practices and techno-social entanglements. She is a curator at Hauster Kunst in Munich, where she has been conceiving rich public programs and commissioning performances to artists such as Isabel Lewis and Christelio Yerri and works by Caston Nicolai and Yana Sutela. Together with Andrea Lissoni, she co-curated a retrospective on Fujiko Nakaya and co-edited a comprehensive publication on the artist. Torreur has previously worked at the Ninth Berlin Biennale and Transmediale Berlin and with performance groups like OMSC Social Club and the Agency. So, welcome Sarah. Thank you, hi. Introduction, thank you Bettina for the invitation. Thank you all for being here. I think I sort of want to pick up a few of the thoughts that Karen brought up and also in relation to the question that was posed last. But I'm going to start, I think, with this notion of the sampling. Michel Marieros has often been described as a visual DJ or his methods have been compared to sampling, as Karen you also mentioned that, bringing together fonts and motives from different cultural registers. And I want to highlight, I think, that these cultural techniques, such as sampling and remix, they originate in the Black Atlantic and we should note that, according to the people, I spoke with also in preparation of this presentation that Michel Marieros was not necessarily a raver. But then it's curious that in talking about his work, we come across all of these notions like remixing and sampling. So, yeah, I wondered, I wanted to go into this a little bit and also thinking about how these terms coming from a music background contribute to our understanding of techno culture or cyber culture, that we also find a lot of references in Marieros's work. These notions, like sampling and remixing, they continue still to shape our digital or fidgetle landscapes that we deal with today. So, I found that the rhythm could be an interesting way to look at Marieros' work and try to maybe find some order in what has been described so often as the digital chaos. And I'm starting with this work that we already looked at, which was installed at the Munich main station in 1998. I don't actually know how long it was up for. I just kind of often think of this painting, although I've never seen it, so to me it's really almost like a memory that I've never experienced. And I think it's interesting that this is a public space that I frequent quite regularly and I'm often exhausted and I'm actually wishing for more acceleration or for time to go by much more faster. And this is not an exhibition space, right? So, exhibition spaces often pretend to be timeless spaces. And the train station is a very busy sort of like semi-public space and it's composed of many different rhythms that are unfurling and parallel. There's, for example, the intervals of trains arriving and leaving, there's also the constant delays. There are shops and sounds and smells that only appear in specific times of the day or in specific seasons. There's the clock, which we can also see in that picture. And there's the individual rhythms of people, people's lives, of chance and encounters. And they're all sort of like nested together in a spatial simultaneously and in a coexistence. So, Bichlonegung, it's situated in the background, but it's still quite well visible and I feel like it really underscores these different rhythmic qualities of the space. It's also directly involved in this discontinuous sum of visual contents that we can see, like you see the advertising, the coffee cocoa, and it kind of like works in a similar way as Karen also mentioned the Coca-Cola and the sneaker example earlier on. So it's pierced into that wall, but it's also sort of, it's part of a rhythm that escapes it at the same time, right? And it also has a rhythm in itself, like these buttons appear quite often in his work. They seem to like bend forward towards the viewer, towards the public. And they emphasize a sort of temporal dynamic moment of the perception of this work. And they look a bit like, I don't know, like a bubble. It's about to burst. It also plays on these simple forms that we know from billboards and indicators to like a minimal attention span. And we also see the Carrera race track that like reappears in his work quite often. I'm citing from a book that was given to me by Bastian Grundorfer, who had worked with Michel Mayors in the past or in the last years. It's a book from 1995 and it's totaled localizer 1.0. It was handed to me with the words, this was some sort of Bible for the vibe and all. So I really dig into that book and doesn't actually speak so much about visual arts. In between the many pages dedicated to Hubble Sound and Techno Conscious and Camouflage as a strategy, which is quite interesting. Motion graphics as well. There's one essay on art as contemplated in Berlin by the turn of the millennium. And there's this quote that I'm just going to read. Here we are talking about a new meeting of the aesthetic creation with the public. A meeting that doesn't require the full attention of the onlooker, but rather includes itself in a field of experience to which non-plastic elements like music, nowadays the principal vehicle for a sense of life, the encounter with other persons, the movement, visual elements like light, lasers, etc. have to be included. So if we remember now the buttons of Beschlonigung that allude to somehow like rescaling or setting filter priorities. Yeah, maybe you can read it. There's like a priority and the other one that says like components and like a scale. So this really speaks to a commitment to mediation rather than representation. And I would say this also speaks to mayors embracing working and living in a mediated or fully mediated world. 1998 was still the dawn of mainstream internet, but I think we can see or sense that the images had already started moving. 1998 is the year of Hamster Dance, the world's first meme, if I may say that. And images are really no longer still on the canvas or in the TV and they are not switched on and off at will with the remote control anymore. It's a very different pulse. So again, I'll come back to rhythm. It's reported that since they were first released in 1985, I think Marius walked around with a Sony handicam and he was record and then potentially filter later. And unfortunately we will never know if he would have gotten around to sort out these materials that he had collected. But I think we all know that it's from our own experience that it's often unlikely to ever go back to all those recordings, bookmarks and screenshots simply because there are too many. And we find relatable slogans actually in Marius' work like it doesn't really matter what things look like if one cannot see them that well anyway or not much is thrown away because there are no places to throw it. That's something about from 99 the quotes. So looking at the Carrera race track and alluding to what Karen quoted earlier as like the chaos of the digitalization, the Carrera race track and the Beschlonigung the acceleration, all of this has led to the reading of the data stream as the stimulus vortex this endless loop that sort of unfolds but never really develops. And one year before Marius created Beschlonigung, he held a lecture on Polke and he talked about images and memory which I think is as interesting. I included this quote here. He says, there is never a chance of suppressing the memory of an image. This is generally the case with the past or the ephemeral. The desire for more pictures becomes a flow of moving images. There will be countless images as long as there's a desire for acceleration. Whether it's a new picture or the repetition of the same plays a big role. And that's interesting in general. Both have priority at the same time. So no camera, no image or series of images can show these simultaneous rhythms that he's talking about. The new pictures, the repetition of the same pictures and them having a priority at the same time. Aside from cameras or paintings or what have you, it requires a tent of eyes and ears and a memory and the memory grasps the present as it restores its moments and the movement of these diverse rhythms. I think one does not merely read the images of Marius but also really feels them. And that's something Karen had also mentioned previously, the installation part of it, like how you would walk over the floor that's installed and hear the sound of your footsteps. I think that all plays into the experience of the work. Marius writes in his notes, Techno only works through an abundance of abused bass rhythms. Abundance of serial work can be important again through an ultra-large rhythmic production of 160 by 140 paintings. That's a very specific reference. I don't actually know what it refers to. Things quick, serial and random will be an important trigger for me in the near future. The representational, which is usually surprising in comics, can be replaced by an extreme spectrum of versatility on the level of abstraction. The pictures mustn't appear too rigid. So here we're going back in time and we see again the Carrera Vortex race track enclosing the word advance. We also already see one of these main principles, the reconfiguration of the same elements, what has been described as Techno when looking at Marius's work, the effects of digital working production. And it's not necessarily just music, but this reconfiguration of temporal sequences was perhaps the most obvious in music, I would say. And time and this rhythm of all life can be stored and stretched thanks to the computer. Speed and acceleration, something that can be tempered with. The boxes, and these are actually the titles A1 to 7, T1 to 7, H1 to 7, and M1 to 7 have been compared to Warhol's Burlow boxes, but they're actually the size of the Macbooks that were sold back then. The box is 95 by 55 by 73 centimeters. And in the line of logos next to the Carrera track, we find references to Caval's Leaves of Dave Clark's 1995 release, the Red Three on the label Deconstruction and Richie Hawton's Plastic Man. I think what you can see here is really bad screen shots. I'm sorry. And this might have just been common knowledge but let's forget techno for a moment and look at musical meter, which is so closely tied to computer technologies and how it perhaps can make sense of this pile of boxes. So musical meter involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time. In the rhythm we could think of as timed movement through space. Most music dance but also of course poetry establishes and maintains a sort of metric level, which is a basic unit of time that may be audible or may just be implied. So it's the poles or as well the beat. So we have a basic unit, let's say these boxes and within these boxes we are on the boxes we see these logos, which are again sort of units and they are four versions of these logo sets. So we have like different discrete items that are recombinable at will. And they're all again all these like rhythmic elements they're like nested together and in this case they're accumulated and stacked. So the beat consists of these identical yet distinct periodic short duration stimuli perceived as points in time. And the beat obviously depends on repetition of a pattern that is short enough that we can memorize it. So here for example think of the brand logos as well. And the tempo of the piece is the speed or the frequency and this is measured and how quickly the beat flows. We'll go back to the question of like the quick beat later on. We'll think of beats per minute as the sort of time that we're thinking in. If the beat is too slow you don't really understand the succession anymore and the musical piece would become unconnected. If it's too fast it becomes a drone or in the case of Myeros and this would be the chaos that people spoke about. With the next work we go further back in time but we move forward in Myeros time because the series Space Invaders is from 2002. As an historical artifact actually Space Invaders or the original software from 1978 is a game that's now part of the architecture and design collection of MoMA and it's a classic of the history of gaming but specifically also of electronic interaction design. Like many early games Space Invaders doesn't have a storyline, it doesn't have heroes, it requires and trains skills and navigation shooting or jumping or driving in this case mainly shooting. So what do we train to navigate through with these paintings? Here we see still basically of the game which is an accelerating succession of pixelated poor images in the form of prehistoric or tribal like aliens and one might want or not want to remember how tribals were thing in the turn of the millennium and I think they're actually coming back as we speak. So let's think of this as a beat as well right the succession of alterations of differential repetitions. We see a determining rhythm that coordinates all these different aspects. An early version of the computer game Space Invaders had a hidden feature or a bug this is not decided or still a question that's in debate that allowed players to double fire by holding the reset button while shooting and my argument here would be that to my heroes it probably doesn't really matter whether it's a bug or a feature of a system but we'll come back to this later. These paintings are interesting because they're very unlike what we've looked at before in terms of my heroes work. They're black and white and they're sort of ecstatic. Six green on cotton there's like no depth really no depth of field to use this CGI term and I understand this work sort of imitates computer generated images and deals with this stimulus vortex but the stimulus vortex becoming normalized so it's like more sort of a gesture of annihilation than critique or distancing. It suggests the way to navigate the avalanche of visual contents and messages short basically shooting at them or maybe double firing at them while in the first work of the series the rhythm seems to be quite rigid and monotonous in the smaller versions we see these curious snapshots they suggest more sort of like a moving target in front of the lens or the eye. These paintings are trying to reflect I guess the fleetingness or the mobility inherent in electronic images or the virtual world. And I think what's interesting to note here I said earlier or I described them earlier as like poor images with technological progress images increase compression they don't actually increase their resolution they become like less high res for example think of the history of the GIF the way GIFs work was to identify repeating patterns and then simplify them they introduced a specific animation style short continuous soundless loop and it's interesting to relate the GIF to Mayoris' work I think divorcing this pictorial information from source material and combining it with text and sound is a lot like what we've been looking at or what have been described as sampling in Mayoris' work the text and image combination has so to say a higher bandwidth to convey nuances and I think that's something that Mayoris was extremely keen on using or tempering with. Another interesting aspect of GIFs is that they're not so they have this lack of authorship and that's something that I don't think we find so much in Mayoris' work but it would be interesting to look into Anyways today most of the GIFs are videos so I want to also come to speak of this one video work that Mayoris had made he created this work titled Michelle Mayoris in 2000 it's a looped stroboscopic interplay with light and image body typography disintegrating the artist's name into what's been described as formless energy and again I could trace back the formless energy analogy into this localizer book that I quoted up from earlier I really see it as a study on visual identity actually so visual identity is the visible elements of a brand such as color and form and shape which encapsulating convey a symbolic meaning that cannot be imported through words the main goals here would be visual distinction and singularity but they appear distorted and multiplied so in order to understand this work a bit better I reached out to the motion graphic designer Till Venich who had been commissioned with the graphic animation what really makes this piece what it is but maybe we take a look at it before I continue yeah I mean I guess you can see the repetitive and different rhythms and how they're animating the image it's a quick, it's a hard rhythm alternations of speaking of silence there's like outbursts and time appears broken and accentuated the colors are soft and pastel violet and acidic yellow sort of like washed out or faded and we see these geometric figures the triangles dissolving from grits and sort of a streamlined font that suggests speed there's a beautiful oral history piece by sound archivist Paul Pauloon from Berlin where an unidentified but apparently well informed member of the 90s club scene in Berlin mentions that there were not so many people working intensively with video and projection but Till the person who made this animation when Till arrived with his RGB stuff we were all blown away so this was like fairly new to look at at the time when the video was made and moving image Till Venich told me was back then mainly used as a light source in the clubs and I'm citing again from this book Localizer 1.0 the perfect interplay of light, music and stroboscope breaks down the dancing mass into formless energy form and shape are avoided the individual body becomes untethered there was never a sound for the video and this is perhaps also due to Till Venich never making sound for his videos because they were intended to be shown in clubs and he did say that he listened to music when working just to get a feeling for the rhythm and he probably edited this to like 180 BPMs but sometimes the DJs would use the animated works and slowing them down with a mixer this was a commissioned work and Myeros had delivered the colors and the letters and then the animation was done by Till Venich who had also worked on like bigger scale projects like the Zika Sardar the Victory Column during the 1999 Laugh Parade which is where reportedly Myeros saw Venich's work I didn't find a picture but the following picture was shared with me by Myeros Estate and I want to thank you at this point for your support in the research process we can see here sort of an inspiration for the video installation that was to be made this was obviously again not an exhibition space but a commercial space sort of semi-public with a video wall that was most probably showing commercials and this is the exhibition version pretty close to the inspiration we see again this very rigid grit that seems to be dissolved through the animation and I turn again to the localizer book it reads, I wouldn't like to give the impression of underwriting anything I'm talking about a techno-social process and the course of which the discussion in between painting and no painting could be fully superfluous I don't even speak of extending crusader like the aesthetic experience this is something almost fully achieved by publicity and social communication so it's interesting that the let's say norm or aims for our production within this let's say techno scene would acknowledge whatever marketing had already done or provided and so looking at the video through rhythm and seeing it as a cadence of visual signals flashing before our eyes we can understand really animation as a sort of formal strategy transforming static two-dimensional images into objects or objects into motion and playing with this illusion of life or abstract rhythm I think the flow actually really is important for the works also for the paintings because they help immersing oneself into this picture world which I understand is what my year is after how much time a frame has held for and how much time do I have to absorb it we can again remember what we said in the beginning about the rate and the tempo the frames per second can expand and compress time and the rate at which you blink can sync or not sync with the rate that the edit is cutting into and this video I think really communicates density just through the tempo it doesn't have to do anything with the content and it's perhaps easier to look at the content through memory as we said earlier and it's interesting to note the painting on the right on this image as the painting series from the painting series MM which is derived from screenshots of this video so it's really the sort of like the memory of this moving image and I want to close with another example of this serialized memories of an image which is this pop as Terra also a series and we learned from Bastian Krondorfer, my year's late assistant that this text was taken from a t-shirt that DJ Westbam had worn and now whether you know DJ Westbam or not I think we could argue about if Westbam himself was pop or mainstream but here I want to come back to the double fire function and the question of the bug and the feature and why maybe it doesn't matter it's not a bug, it's a feature it's one of the many offhand remarks that turn into catchphrase and it's perhaps part of what Jordan Wolfson had described as this cultural unconscious in the most conversation I've been mentioned earlier the bug or feature discussion reveals this ambiguity that has always haunted computer programming and thus also the computerized mass culture we feel it reverberating in my year's work too another way we can put this is the polyrhythm of the painting at the train station depending on preferences my year's work could look or feel like a bug or feature it could be painting on steroids but a bug could become a feature something desirable, a short cut, a cheat like the double fire function it just works thank you so much this analysis of Majerius' work through the lens of rhythm is like super original and fascinating and linked to that actually I was wondering if you could maybe identify different rhythm throughout Majerius' practice or like 10 years career wow that's an interesting question thank you yes I think so I saw the exhibition at KW that just opened with the early works which also draw a lot on animation and like comic, like early TV animations I mean now I have to be a bit careful I think the early work is in a way more rigid and has more slower rhythms then comes a period where there's a lot happening and then again we come to these more simple or slogan like works so I think yes there might be something like a rhythm that can be traced through the whole opera thanks any question in the audience thank you for your presentation this picture I didn't get what it is I don't have my glasses so I don't see exactly what it is which one? the one on the black and white no no the last one where we were on the left side this is a screenshot it's really hard to read I'm really sorry this is a screenshot of a documentation video on Michel Marier's and you can see here a photograph of DJ Westbam wearing a t-shirt this actually happens quite a lot and also from early on in Marier's work that he would like repeat things that he finds somewhere and I saw in that KW exhibition how he would take photographs of his paintings and then bring them back into the paintings so I think this was sort of the idea to give this direct reference and what's the date of this painting? sorry? what is the date of this painting? oh sorry okay and the series also of paintings there's like I don't know how many of them like a lot 30 maybe so you're saying something interesting that you know we understood that it didn't really matter as long as he was working in the painting you know what kind of slogan he's using so this is a very political one that is interesting in this context of music where you use these kind of slogans and you don't mean it but you mean it at the same time that I feel like and Karen was saying in an early presentation that there was something more critical and maybe more critical some kind of turn at the end of his practice so we're in 2000 then we're in 2002 in the Brandon book tour we didn't speak about any critical aspect so far on his practice would you say there was something could there be something behind this slogan here or was it just like really just an image I think it's never just an image I think it's always critical and joyful at the same time somehow if that makes sense I think this is what I try to say with this ambiguity right and feature at the same time if that makes sense but there's also interesting there was an exhibition I only remember the German title which was his favourite theme was security, his thesis which was really drawing on a hacker, actually a quite young person living in Berlin who had managed to hack the telecom system and was under very dubious and I think still undisclosed circumstances found that potentially murdered and I think there was definitely a moment when he like was more political than in the works that I have looked at now in this presentation I would also maybe just add because you were repeating that he was not a waiver but obviously this whole scene was something he was relating to so how political is it to actually not doing it but still it's a way of grasping these things and what do we know about him, why he wasn't maybe at ease to go or was there and still he wanted to I mean it feels like he's someone who is obviously I don't know how we should define being political as being an artist but he is very close to his, what was the world he was living in and what he was surrounded by so what? Sorry I think I didn't get the question Okay then thank you in this case Okay and thank you so much for this talk is there any other question? I already have a mic thank you Yeah, thank you Sarah so much and also thank you Karen for your brilliant introductions and curation of the arrangements of the different body of works that you presented here today for the introduction of Mayeros at MUDAM I would like to make a remark about the cultural unconscious that you referred to place the textualizing Jordan Wolfson quote here and I would rather say isn't it more like a hyper consciousness that you are witnessing here since maybe to study the electronic music electronic techno culture is more than understanding surfaces or ego driven celebrity culture but rather go into a post-industrial condition of humans and on that sense I would like to raise a question to you and maybe to you Karen since the imagery that we see here is not only referring to a certain cultural fabric but rather also focusing on and not only male artists, painters but also to very interesting male figures or male animal personifications since I don't know a bunny or a cowboy or an astronaut in plastic or Mario brothers could also refer to a certain kind of reflection on masculinity that maybe you have also reflected upon and I was wondering if you have some thoughts that were imbued in your presentations regarding this aspect I'll let you take this first Karen if you want to answer well I get the impression that he was really quite an introvert and that also this was also kind of an exemplary of his interest in painting or in gaming gaming is a very solitary activity and I also was curious to hear Sarah Joanna speak a little bit more about the stakes that he might have in raving or not raving I mean I for example with there's a collection piece in the state of Lick that's about club dancing and we've presented it a few times and every time they always want to go to the club and I'm like oh my god I'm 37 I can't do this anymore and it's just like okay you can work with that content but then what does it mean to actually have some sort of personal stake in that and I think that if you have not always going to want to go to the club or maybe you have a certain yeah I also got the impression that Majeris was not a partier like he wasn't someone known to drink a lot or do drugs and he had a very stable relationship so I think that there's something to be said about that and what I notice about his kind of approach to masculinity that is that it seems very kind of like conscious and very tender and I think that maybe part of rallying against someone like Kippenberger or Baselitz and this very very very like specifically male history of German painting is also to think through masculinity and I was just talking about this with my intern yesterday about how I specifically maybe have a little bit of an aversion to these German male painters like I can't even really say that out loud but I just did but what I really really resent about some of this work is that the tension in that work is that there are these great male painters who express some sort of vulnerability and that is seen as some sort of like edgy thing that a man would express some sort of vulnerability or femininity or emotion and then to counteract that sort of vulnerability you see these extremely misogynistic and macho personalities in a kind of personal social scene like in Düsseldorf and Cologne and I think that Majeros was completely the opposite I think that he was someone who was very much more carefully investigating that and then also as a person seemed to live a much more kind of like yeah yeah, self-reflective life I'm thinking of what I can add to that I thought it was interesting that in his notes he was like reflecting a lot on male artists but there was not that many female artists appearing in his reflections so I guess like Albert Kruger or Jenny Holzer could have been like references that might be worth looking into and he probably didn't I think these I think there was multiplayer functions already so I'm not sure if he actually played by himself when he was gaming or playing I thought it was also interesting how Kerstin Stakamai described not so much the work but Majeros as a user rather than a hacker or a programmer which maybe goes into this direction of someone being a bit more solitary and rather digesting yeah I think masculinity was probably something that was like the big abstract elephant in the room that wasn't addressed thank you okay thank you so much Sarah


Teaches at Whangarei Boys High School worked with Team Solutions facilitators to develop a more relational and reciprocal focus to their teaching. Creating classroom environments where students and their teachers work collaboratively to develop their understanding of new ideas. We identified that we had a number of students who were not achieving as highly as we wanted to and we identified that the relationship between the student and the teacher was particularly important in this field. From a relational point of view it was really important to encourage the staff to give a little bit more of themselves so every staff member has their own pepihā that they use for their classes when they meet them. We talk about getting to know the students, not just the boy who's sitting in front of you but where they come from, who they're connected to, what their local knowledge is, what their New Zealand knowledge is so that we are learning mutually from each other. The student-teacher bond and the dynamic between student-teachers has changed a whole lot over the years. I feel that it's more so being that teachers are higher than the student is completely changed now that we're all equal and it's more mutual. When I was younger I was afraid of some of my teachers because I didn't want to go up and ask for help because I felt that I would get put down because I don't know but now that level has changed it's more that I feel more comfortable asking my teachers for help and talking to them. The more students centric so when we're walking into a class they're not standing up at the front of the class drawing on the board, they're sitting with the student and teaching the class from there. They're more open to roam around and help others instead of sitting at a desk and expecting the students to come up to them. They like to feel as if we're all one class, not divided into little groups that you're smart ones or ones that don't want to learn the teachers are pushing for everyone. It's more relatable to younger students. There's not a difference between a teacher and a student. There's that personal level that makes it a lot easier to relate to the teacher to teach us and for us to be learning from our teachers. In terms of other changes that we've noticed around the school we were in a situation where we had a high stand down suspension and exclusion rate for Māori boys and again that was an unacceptable status quo to be moving forward with. So what we're seeing is unsurprisingly as students have become more engaged in learning their behaviour changes around the classroom and that our relational approach rather than a punitive approach has paid dividends to changing those statistics. So we're in a much better place going forward with managing behaviour. Part of the work we've done with Kiki Panaku is around surveying our boys and our parent community and they've come back year on year to say with improvements in those spaces about how it feels to be Māori at this school that the boys have every opportunity they need to succeed right down to how you're finding lessons, how you're relating to your teachers and we're seeing a steady improvement. The great thing about that is there's a direct correlation between what the boys are telling us, what the families are telling us, what the staff are telling us and what the results are telling us. Chase is my son. He's definitely made a change from when he first started. He actually at one point said, I don't know, I'll find some of the teachers don't understand us or I find that they're not more encouraging to Māori students when he first started but the difference now, especially encouraging them for their academic achievement, that's been a really good one. It's really helped Chase to think differently that I can do it and thus supporting him, you know, when he does an assignment and they encourage him, oh, look for you to get a better grade, do this. And he's like, oh, right, and so they're getting alongside, I think, more encouraging and give them a little bit more self-worth that you can do it. We tend to have the mindset sometimes that us as Māori, we're not going to make it or we're not going to do well but over that time he's seen a difference to, you know, through our conversations that we've had. Oh, they're a little bit more encouraging, you know, a lot more respectful. They're starting to understand us well and that's a conversation that he's had with me, you know, because I always ask him that stuff like that and yeah, it's made a big impact on him and he's off to university next year. Yeah, to study. He's excited.


Watching this nice theatrical and this is exactly what happened with Youth Packard Enterprise or what was once Mercury and the open source and the Selenium community. And I will guide you in today's presentation on how the market has shifted over the last 15 years, how everything looked like 15 years ago and how it looks like today. So a bit about myself, my name is Ory Vendett, I've been with Youth Packard Enterprise software for the last 6 years. I started my career as a testing engineer, I was an information engineer. I used the QTP Feast which is an internal tool also Selenium for the last few years and over the last year after I've been a QA manager for 3 years, then I switched into the world in the world of product management where I now lead the brand new offering later this year. I've been responsible for great products such as Youth Packard, QTP, Load Runner and the QTP Sporecard over my short term. So other than that, I'm Michael's father, new architect and I can promise you that over dinner we keep fighting about user experience. This is how Air Force Motoclater when we have time, then of course I'm a huge Star Wars fan, certified.


Hi and how are you all today? I am Priyanka and let us discuss the following question. Say solve minus 12x greater than 30 when x is a natural number, second part x is an integer. So let us start with our solution. The inequality given to us is minus 12x is greater than 30. Now on using rule 2 which says that both sides of an inequality can be multiplied or divided by the same positive number. But when both sides are multiplied or divided by a negative number that we are going to do just now, then the sign of inequality reversed. Right? So now we will be dividing both sides by minus 12 and as we have seen in our rule it is mentioned that the sign of inequality is reversed when we are dividing by a negative number. So now it will become less than 30 divided by minus 12. On simplifying we have the answer as x is less than 5 by minus 2 which can be written as x is less than minus 5 by 2. Right? So for the first part when x is a natural number, the solution set is since x is less than a negative number and we know that in natural numbers we cannot include the negative number so there is no solution of the problem in natural numbers whereas when it is given to us that when x is an integer then the values of x which makes the statement true minus 4 minus 3. Right? So the solution set obviously so on is minus 3 minus 4 and so on. So this is the required answer of the second part also. Bye for now.