Karl Palmås

Karl Palmås’ pairings of historical moments and audio excerpts explore suspensions of time during recent cultural, economic and political crises: 1989 chords play under tension; self-referential recordings reflect 2008; and musical dissonance reaches a total collapse of tonal harmony by 2020.

Geopolitics is not quite as simple as it is often made to appear. Karl Palmås and Jonas Lindberg explore the concealed relationships between global capital and bio-engineering, the ambiguous dependencies of rich and poor nations, and the nature of society itself in the modern world.

In the emergent “panspectric” order, human society is seen in terms of “information traffic”. It is not the actions of individuals that are observed, as in the Foulcauldian panopticon, rather those of the mass. Degrees of corporate and state surveillance are unprecedented; yet panspectric subjectivity also brings new forms of resistance.

The shot putter is the origin of movement while the surfer enters a movement that already exists. For Deleuze, therein lies the difference between traditional and new sports. Karl Palmås rides this wave of thought towards a philosophy of surfing.

Panopticism is waning; panspectrocism is the nascent social diagram that organizes our lives. Heineken and Wal-Mart use pattern recognition and computer-assisted predictions of future behaviours to secure their markets. Google, the panspectric corporation par excellence, tells us that the company wants to know what you’ll want to do tomorrow. This brings renewed poignancy to Gabriel Tarde’s contagion-centric thought, write Kullenberg and Palmås.