Monday, December 27, 2010

The reified future

From J. D. Bernal, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" (1929):
The whole question is one largely of numbers, and would become entirely so as soon as the quantity and quality of population were controlled by authority. From one point of view the scientists would emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind; from another, humanity - the humanity that counts - might seem to change en bloc, leaving behind in a relatively primitive state those too stupid or too stubborn to change. The latter view suggests another biological analogy: there may not be room for both types in the same world and the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them. If, as we may well suppose, the colonization of space will have taken place or be taking place while these changes are occurring, it may offer a very convenient solution. Mankind - the old mankind - would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.
That prospect should please both sides: it should satisfy the scientists in their aspirations towards further knowledge and further experience, and the humanists in their looking for the good life on earth. But somehow it fails by the very virtue of its being a possible and probable solutions on the lines of our own knowledge. We do not really expect or want the probable; all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. We want the future to be mysterious and full of supernatural power; and yet these very aspirations, so totally removed from the physical world, have built this material civilization and will go on building it into the future so long as there remains any relation between aspiration and action. But can we count on this? Or, rather, have we not here the criterion which will decide the direction of human development? We are on the point of being able to see the effects of our actions and their probable consequences in the future; we hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?
(emphasis added) 

Interesting to note that he classes "[man's] desires and fears, his imaginations and stupidities" under the Devil.

Note too the tight relationship between the notions of "science" and "the future"  (of which the making of both into opaque things is only a facet) -- as expressed here, they're co-dependent.

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Radical architecture

From Mark Dow, "Span: A Remembrance" (NYTimes, Opinionator, Dec 22/10):
Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) believed the pier, the lintel, and the arch to be the basic elements of architecture. He called these “the three physical facts, the three symbols, I might say the three letters, which constitute the alphabet of our art.” One might imagine pier and lintel to have come first, and the arch to have followed, but Sullivan felt that all three arrived together as the result of a single imperative: span.
...
Proposition: One has no right to move until one can say why, why what, or at least account for it all, from the chair one was sitting on to the floor underneath it, back in time to the beginning, and forward from his getting up, if I ever did, into all contingencies. Can each thing depend on the preceding and on the subsequent thing, and be independent of them, too? The same sound will sound different according to the notes that follow and precede. Goes something like this. Preceding one: one: one subsequent to. Till eventually, after pursuing philosophy a ways into its own willful removal from what supposedly mattered to it, or had, and where it did, in my mind, do me well, I realized I was always left wanting. Needed to try to articulate the underneath of the mattering, of which I felt more certain than of anything, though I didn’t have exact words for it, or did I. Now I think I must have been paralyzed first, and that the philosophy only came afterward to justify or bind or slip me down its rope-ladder toward exactitude and escape.
Late into the early morning, in the red brick of Connecticut Hall, a student sat scrutinizing each clause’s passage of Aristotle in English out of the preceding one into the next. Metaphysics doesn’t mean esoteric or philosophical. It means “after physics.” It was called that because it came after his chapter on physics and there was no other name for the stuff. The building, oldest in New Haven, its construction financed in part by the colonies’ sale of a captured French ship, floated on the illusion of a rectangle of lawn inset into a larger lawn. Sidewalks joined at right angles, passed under stone archways into which steel gates had been set. Unsupported assumptions and flawed links, tiny knots in the grain planed flush by repeated but abandoned curiosity, hiccuped in the passageways. The student had no way of seeing that teasing the tiny knots to the surface and scratching at them until they came undone would set nothing free, or did he. He picked at his fingernails to minimize himself and get the damn world aligned.

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Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Decadence and depravity

Decadence has both an outside and an inside. From the outside, it's simply a condition -- of resignation, self-contentment, ennui, without hope or despair. From the inside, though, it's a pose or posture -- as in Wilde or Beardsley -- a kind of rococo cool. Such a pose may or may not be itself a sign of genuine, or external decadence.

And depravity may or may not be an aspect of decadence. If it is, then it may be assumed, as part of the pose. But it can certainly be found on its own, as a condition characterized by indulgence in appetite, desire, or drive without moral considerations of any sort. Some may be born depraved, as in psychopathy, and some may become so. The latter at least have the possibility of extricating themselves from the condition -- the chance, in other words, of redemption.

Even psychopaths, i.e., the congenitally depraved, however, may learn to overcome their disability, as many do, to various degrees (making them notoriously difficult to detect). As a rule, we are all born with various instincts, including both moral and social instincts. The latter have to do with an implicit understanding of basic feelings and expectations in social situations, and those who lack these, even in varying degrees, are commonly assigned some position in a spectrum of autism disorders. The former, or moral instincts, have to do with an implicit understanding of basic fairness, justice, right and wrong, and it's interesting to consider the possibility that those who lack these, to whatever degree, might fit similarly on some spectrum of psychopathic disorders.

More interesting still is the question of how these instincts and their respective disorders might be related. Looking at them just as sets of instincts, one would tend to think of them as closely related, since social and moral behavior seem so intertwined. Yet psychopaths often have excellent social skills, and can use these skills to compensate for their lack of moral awareness; and similarly, I think, autistic people often have a strong moral sense, even if it's not always expressed in socially "appropriate" ways. So perhaps these kinds of instincts are more distinct than we might think?


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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Liberal guilt

A pervasive theme in Elementory -- the association of moral uncertainty with ontological uncertainty. It's a peculiar re-emergence at a time when the draining away of traditional religious "faith" has left people more exposed than ever, and when science only seems to spiral down into ever more incomprehensible and alien, even artificial, non-human "realities". The old religions, of course, had guilt aplenty to dispense, starting with Original Sin -- a concept insulting to the modern notion of the individual, but useful to a traditional social matrix as a way of asserting a kind of universal equality in compensation for hierarchy. But that was a taught guilt -- liberal guilt, on the other hand, is a free-floating, self-generating phenomenon, kind of like what happens to a flywheel when its load is removed. (But also consider Trillings' comment re: Freud, that his resort to a "death instinct" stemmed from a desire to find a source of moral gravity again, in the absence of religion; both metaphors, however -- flywheel and gravity -- may operate here.)

Let's say that such guilt constitutes a theme of Elementory, where it's especially pertinent to the first half -- in fact it becomes a lever in the hands of the main antagonist. To quote from some earlier notes:
And now consider how such a theme might relate to the larger theme of contrasting appearance-as-screen with appearance-as-foundation. The issue is complex, but free-floating, as opposed to specific, guilt acts as a source of moral gravity for those perpetually troubled by the sense of an abyss over which they hover -- i.e., specifically for those lacking a sense of a foundation or bedrock on which to stand.
This is the explanation for that bien pensant "concern" that so often manifests itself in these circles. In the second half, then, would be nice to contrast real or substantive guilt.


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Monday, December 13, 2010

Space/science/fiction/utopia

In the first place, we've seen that utopia needs the protection of fiction so as not to be merely sad. And we also know, of course, that utopia needs the protection of removal, either in space or time. And for these reasons, fiction that's removed in both senses -- i.e., fiction of the off-world future -- seems to have an inherently utopian element to it, as Jameson suggests, I think, in his Archeologies of the Future.

Along these lines, here's a wondrous site/sight, and a primary resource:  Atomic Rockets. Filled with facts, possibilities, calculators, links, and images -- e.g.:



That graphic was used for the end pages of a series of juvenile (these days "young adult") science fiction books published in the 1950's, and though it might seem innocuous enough now, then it inspired awe, nervous excitement (as did Gort the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still) , and a sense of a wondrously open possibility in stark contrast to the banality of everyday waking life. A sense that, when you think about it, is a principle characteristic of utopias of all sorts, is it not?


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Sunday, December 12, 2010

New blog: Paleo-future

"A look into the future that never was" (see Blogs on the right too). Organized by decade, from 1870's to 1990's (the 2000's, presumably, not being that paleo, yet), peaks in the 1960's. Sample, from 1957:

Full Image
DRIVERLESS CAR OF THE FUTURE

The "About Me" entry links to the Wikipedia entry on "Retro-futurism": "... retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology." More:
Retro-futurism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.
The first trend, retro-futurism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.
The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mélange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend.
In practice, the two trends cannot be sharply distinguished, as they mutually contribute to similar visions.


Space and utopia

Curious that more hasn't been made of that connection -- space as in "outer space" as a venue for utopia. There's Robinson's Mars trilogy, of course, and there's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but what else? The Soviet-era Andromeda hardly counts, since it makes no real use of space, and the same point rules out LeGuin's The Dispossessed, though both are certainly utopian. The point of space as a utopian locale is that, like any frontier, it represents the possibility of making a "fresh start", a possibility that the Mars trology exploits quite openly, and that Heinlein's novel obviously uses as well. In that sense, there might be a few other Heinlein books that are fringe utopian candidates as well, such as Farmer in the Sky, which (as best I can recall) does use the idea of creating a new society. And, for that matter, that's part of the appeal of apocalyptic fiction too, no? The idea that, having cleared out the social/cultural/political deadwood, we now have a chance to start over and do it right. But in general, though it's common enough to locate utopia in far off islands or lost valleys, and very common to locate it in the future, we don't often see them in space.

Well, but then I remember the spate of non-fiction books like Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier, or T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, certainly utopian tracts if they're anything -- e.g., the prominent blurb on the O'Neill cover: "Space colonies -- hope for your future", and on Heppenheimer's: "Take an expedition to dream cities in the stars!".

     

Something sad in those blurbs, isn't there? Not just their earnest naivete, or, more likely, their blatant hucksterism in attempting to appeal to people desperate for hope and dreams, but also, now, in their obvious failure. In all that, though, they're not unlike the architectural utopianism of modernism, as in Le Corbusier's "ville radieuse" or Hugh Ferriss' Metropolis of Tomorrow.


This too now just seems dated and silly, as, sadly, Metropolis itself does. Still, the point of fictionalizing utopia may well be to protect it from reality's dash of cold water.


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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Floating cities

See  Float!: Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion and Climate Change by Koen Olthuis and David Keuning

Reviewed in BLDGBLOG:
A remarkably stimulating read, Float! falls somewhere between design textbook, aquatic manifesto, and environmental exhortation to explore architecture's offshore future. Water-based urban redesign; public transportation over aquatic roadways; floating barge-farms (as well as floating prisons); maneuverable bridges; entire artificial archipelagoes...
... Float! is an excellent resource for any design studio or seminar looking at the future of floating structures in an age of flooding cities.
So, a start.

10 trillion human beings could have 10 times the surface space per capita of the average urban environment today and leave most of today's land surface clear of human occupation, but only by occupying perhaps as much as half of the current sea surface (double the total land area) with a global city extending below the surface at least a mile on average and rising perhaps two miles on average -- i.e., we'd need to layer human occupation. And, in order not to swamp the existing land with the water displaced by the city, would need to excavate the equivalent of half the ocean to an average depth of a mile -- big job! But perhaps just an aspect of finding the building materials with which to construct the city over the course of a millennium anyway.


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The idea of narrative

Imagine a great matrix of characters, events, places, scenes, conversations, causes and effects, motives, emotions, purposes, actions, etc. -- continual, pervasive. The raw material of narrative everywhere, in huge quantities. How then do you turn that material into actual narrative?

You need to add a structure. And, I think, you can do that with anything, literally. Just today, e.g., think of the young dad in the Blenz coffee shop with his bright, laughing, 3 year old daughter, who likes going up to the counter by herself asking for a napkin, head barely able to see over its edge, but who knows how to order a decaf lattay, the dad striking up a conversation with the young woman with her shopping bags sitting by herself with a picked up give-away tabloid, her starting it though, bringing up her niece and nephew.

Or the two boys maybe about 8 with the young mom in the Wendy's, the boys all "Dude! You're still afraid of the roller coaster!?" "Yeah," from the other off-handedly, no hint of chagrin, the mom with her iPhone, but which she's at least partly using to play some sort of guessing game with the boys, only one of whom I think is her son, and that one going at one point,"How did I live when I was in your belly?" (no idea what brought that up), and the mom saying, "Okay, you know your belly button? Right? Your belly button?" "Yeah," goes the boy, a little puzzled, "Well," says the mom, "that's where you had a tube that connected you with my uterus, which is a sack that held you and fed food to you through that tube".

Consider either as incidents that could seed a narrative -- at the start or middle or end or even climax. But those are the parts of the structure that's needed to turn raw material into narrative product, which is what's meant by the "arc" -- traditionally at least that arc is built out of tension, requiring some kind of conflict, that rises to a climax and then falls away. Like music.

The main point being that story is dense, thick, a plenitude, but in the raw or seedling form -- what realizes it as narrative is tension, that provides the possiblity (though not in itself the reality) of structure. And that's what requires invention.


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Friday, December 10, 2010

3011 AD

The 1000-year future  -- pop: 10 trillion. That's trillion.

This began as a thought experiment to do with the so-called "carrying capacity" of the earth, which is supposed to be strained or exceeded  at current levels of population. Consider 3 orders of magnitude:

  • First, look back some 8000 years, at a global population 1/1000 of today's, or about 10 million human beings -- some roaming bands, some fishers, some early farmers perhaps, all starting to crowd against one another. An early population crisis, as the earth approaches its carrying capacity for Neolithic cultures.
  • Then look ahead 1000 years, say, and consider a population 1000 times as large as our current.
    • A single super-city covering a substantial portion of the ocean surface area, as well as extensive underground capacity. (If the ocean city floated or extended below sea-level, it would displace enough water to possibly drown the continents, to avoid which would need supports.)
    • Would also need a belt of equator-girdling space elevators to move excess population off planet in mass numbers, to enable population growth generally while keeping a steady-state population level on earth, finally.
    • Also need radiator vanes (connected to space elevators?) to dump waste heat?
Think of a classic Utopian narrative -- the sleepers awake, 1000 years hence. Or perhaps they're artificial constructs, in cloned bodies, with memories and selves built out of fragments from the past -- something they only learn at the climax.


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Thursday, December 9, 2010

On the ambiguity of the anti-utopians

Berdiaff (or Berdyaev -- see p. 122) again:
The opponents of socialism say that socialism is a utopia and that it flies in the face of human nature. There is some ambiguity in this. It is not clear whether they do not want socialism on the ground that it is unrealizable, utopian, and a mere dream, or whether it is unrealizable because they do not want it and do everything in their power to hinder it and prevent it coming into being.
A good point, no? You might try to resolve the ambiguity by saying that what the anti-utopians struggle to prevent isn't the idealized but impossible utopia, but rather the all too possible attempt at utopia, which always turns dream into nightmare. But I don't think that's really Berdiaff's point -- nor Huxley's, at least in his Brave New World phase. No, their point is that the dream and the nightmare are really one and the same thing, the same social entity, simply seen from different perspectives....


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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Kung fu and practice

Intriguing essay by Peimin Ni -- "Kung Fu for Philosophers":
An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others. In the art of kung fu, there is what Herbert Fingarette calls “the magical,” but “distinctively human” dimension of our practicality, a dimension that “always involves great effects produced effortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible power that is itself intangible, invisible, unmanifest.”[2]
Consider the protagonist of Blood as one who, having a natural charisma, learns how to affect others.

And, more deeply, consider this philosophical turn, from a metaphysical/epistemological/ontological pursuit of truth, to a more aesthetic pursuit of a kind of beauty -- but beauty in the form of something done well, even a life done well.  Note too the link to speech as act as distinct from communication, referring to Austin's "performative" function of language.

All of which, however, is just a part of the Inversion -- to this Eastern emphasis on the practice of living we need to bring back, reintegrate a Western emphasis on knowledge, but constructed rather than discovered knowledge, and constructed on the basis of practice.


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The epigraph to Brave New World

Utopias seem to be much more realizable than we formerly believed them to be. Now we find ourselves presented with another alarming question: how do we prevent their definitive realization? …Utopias are realizable. Life marches toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of ways to evict utopias and return to a non-utopic society, less “perfect” and more free.”
Nicolas Berdiaff 

The source is a Russian writer (whose name is variously transliterated, often as Berdyaev), once a Marxist,   then a Christian existentialist theologian. The particular work is a French translation translated again into English under the titles of both The New Middle Ages (1924) and then as The End of Our Time (1933). Right in the midst of the great utopian "realizations" of the first half of the last century (The horror! The horror!) .

And so here we are now, a new century begun....


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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Inversion illustrated

Start with the Flammarion woodcut:


Only think of it as, in a sense, reversed -- with the figure turned around and poking his head into the real world on the right.

I know, of course, that that doesn't quite work -- the point of the Inversion isn't the discovery of some other level or realm of the real, but rather the difference between discovery and construction. But note how the realm on the left might be taken as either the spiritual or scientific "reality" that lays behind or beyond the embodied life-world. Perhaps, then, the real usefulness of this famous woodcut is simply to illustrate an ironic similarity in outlook of fundamentalist (to some degree) religion and a positivist science -- little wonder the two are so often seen as at war.

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The world, the flesh, and Merleau-Ponty

Which, I suppose, suggests that M-P is in some sense associated with the Devil -- well, at least in the sense of a rejection of the rejection of the world and flesh. That's important, but it isn't what distinguishes M-P himself. Here's an attempt to explain just that:
Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece, Phenomenology of Perception, was a bold, internally coherent attempt to overcome the problems of empiricism and rationalism in the Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy. As Dillon has shown in his Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, it is pedagogically instructive to introduce Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as an attempt to resolve Meno's paradox. Meno's paradox, of course, is from the dialogue between Meno and Plato in Plato's Meno. Meno poses a dilemma to Plato: "But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you found is the thing you didn't know?"
Merleau-Ponty's existential-phenomenological epistemology and ontology can be seen as resolving the problem of Meno's paradox, and it does so by relentlessly demonstrating how both empiricism and rationalism fail to do so. Merleau-Ponty writes: "Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism (rationalism) fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching." (Phenomenology of Perception)
...
Merleau-Ponty begins his phenomenology by giving primacy to perception. The phenomenologist, says Merleau-Ponty, returns "to the world which precedes (scientific description), (the world) of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language as is geography in relation to the countryside."
... In order to understand how Merleau-Ponty understands this subject-object dialogue, we first need to understand a new idea, something which Merleau-Ponty brought to phenomenology: the idea of the lived body.
For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. Recall that for Descartes the body is a machine and the mind is what runs the machine. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not a machine, but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies, and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh," made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world (see The Visible and the Invisible).
...
The idea of the lived body allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve Meno's paradox. The body is both transcendent and immanent. It is the "third term" between subject and object. I know that transcendent things exist because I can touch them, see them, hear them. But most importantly, I never know things in their totality, but always from an embodied perspective.
... I know when I've found what I'm looking for because the world is already pregnant with meaning in relation to my body. Things begin as ambiguous but become more determinate as I become bodily engaged with them. On the other hand, I do not already know what I am looking for, because the world transcends my total grasp. At any given time, the world as it is given includes not only what is revealed to me, but also what is concealed.


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Monday, December 6, 2010

"Touch"

This is the connector between the two parts of Elementory. So it needs to focus on the Inversion, as much as possible within the limits of this fictional context. Why not make an Escher print, then, the focus of the story? Because it's a connector, it's already out of the narrative pattern of the rest, and can be more free in its structure -- like to find a way to move in a spiral-like trajectory, starting from a very high altitude (where the preceding, "Earth", left off), and circling down into a self reference of some sort. Perhaps opening out again on the "other side" -- i.e., the inverted side -- in preparation for "Skin" that follows. ("Touch", of course, referring to the contact of self and world, flesh and earth.)

Could Nick (Air) be the protagonist, making him a sort of central figure for the whole, perhaps the only character who actually goes through the Inversion?

Consider an incident: the discovery of mind over matter (memory/flashback of an early acid trip) -- by a mere exercise of will, the grasping hand on the end of an arm can be raised and extended, its fingers opened and then closed around the cylinder of a glass, and the glass thereby brought to the table.... Ghost in the machine, and also ghost as machine, machine as ghost.

As for the Escher print, see "Print Gallery" for an example of a spiral at least, with its enigmatic blind spot at its impossible center:

Escher

Here's the that center itself, animated -- a kind of fractal perhaps:























P.S.: What's the difference between this and simply putting an exact copy of the same print in the gallery -- a print within a print? That too, obviously, has potentially infinite depth, but it's banal. What distinguishes this is that the print in the gallery is not a copy but is the same print as the one we're looking at. Escher has found a way of taking a part and merging it with the whole. It's impossible on a literal level, of course, which is why there's a hole in the center -- but it's a visual display of an idea that wholes and parts are mutually implicative.

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The antique future

It's not this:



That was the 50's, a couple of generations or more past (though of course the 50's generate their own notion of the antique). But here's the future now, pre-aged:

Ian McQue, Shore Leave
Or this:
McQue, The Last Airborne

A rusty, old future, in other words, rather than shiny and new -- and no rectilinear grid lines disappearing to a perspectivist vanishing point. But this clearly has an appeal all its own -- note the enduring interest in Blade Runner. It's related, at least, to the appeal of punk, and to its cyber- and steam- variations. Related also to the appeal of ruins as such -- the sense of great depths, possibilities, mysteries, beneath the broken surfaces, the sense even of time itself made a visible, tangible presence -- but in this case still with that imagination-teasing added dimension of the future.

There's no escaping the appeal of decadence as well, however, and the indulgent sentimentalism that carries with it.  Note how that fits so well with the theme of Conspiracy, both benign and malignant -- the sense of vast, inherently incomprehensible social totalities, with a few outsiders fitting into its interstices, both preying and preyed upon (in contrast to the rectilinear, Utopian future of the 50's). Gibson, of course, but Pynchon too. And caverns measureless to man....


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Sunday, December 5, 2010

Artistic politics/Political art

"Decolonizing architecture" -- description of a talk:
Decolonizing Architecture seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. Their practice continuously engages a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed.
The people involved (see the "imaginary denizens", overlaid on real people) :
Organized in conjunction with exhibition, a panel discussion co-presented by REDCAT and MAK Center for Art and Architecture will bring together Alessandro Petti, founding member and director of Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency; Iain Boal of RETORT, the Bay Area collective of writers, activists and scholars, and co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War;architect and UCSD professor Teddy Cruz whose work centers around urban research/design within context of the U.S.-Mexico border; and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Moderated by director of MAK Center Kimberli Meyer on Wednesday January 26 at 7:30pm at REDCAT.

"How to re-inhabit your enemy's house" (2009). Installation view, 11th International Istanbul Biennial. Courtesy the artists.
Caption: "How to re-inhabit your enemy's house" (2009)

Thanks to BLDGBLOG
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Elementory and the nature of narrative

Time for a fundamental rethink of what the short story collection is about. Still like the title, and the story titles themselves, though the latter are a bit throw-away. And still like the the overall structure -- four sets of paired stories, told and re-told, and one connector ("Touch"), for a total of nine. But the elaborate architecture built around Frye may be a layer of arbitrariness too many. Really want to just focus on the notion of the Inversion and its consequences, as manifested on a kind of micro-level -- the interactions of individuals. Also some experimenting with just fiction and narrative per se. So, some possible themes:
  • The notion of the "dirty earth" (re: the Bergman quote) as opposed to world-spurning. (Fire/Bone perhaps)
  • The notion of the world's "unfairness" as opposed to those who deal with what they're given. (Water/Blood)
  • The most subtle or difficult of all perhaps is the combination of a kind of Darwinian fatalism (or, perhaps better, acceptance) coupled with a sense of embedded engagement (related to the compatibility argument re: free will and determinism). (Earth/Flesh)
The first pair, Air/Skin, may allude to all of the above, first as preview, then as recap.

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Saturday, December 4, 2010

Hugh Ferriss and "the vertical sublime"

From the nonist -- "Verticles on wide avenues":



The caption reads:
Verticals On Wide Avenues by Hugh Ferriss. From the post Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham, Or: Rendering “The Vertical Sublime” which features images from the preeminent architectural draftsman’s 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Here's "Technology":



"The science center":




Which came first, I wonder -- Hugh Ferriss or Metropolis?

And again, the rectilinear, this time with perspective in order to awe with space or scale.

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Data/Information/Art/Structure

visual complexity -- e.g.:








See also information aesthetics blog on right.

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"The opaque civilization"

That's the name of an exhibition at the Guggenheim back in 1984, by a "theoretical" architect named Will Insley. From the review in the NYTimes:
''ONECITY,'' the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, ''very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present'' or with the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''
An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it is ''situated'' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ''Over-building'' and an ''Under-building'' and each containing nine arenas. Like the ''Star Trek'' scripts, the artist omits the logistical nuts and bolts, making paraphrase difficult.
It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they ''mutter a lot'' and ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.
Alluding to New Yorkers' apparent obliviousness to bag ladies, Insley makes plain that while he himself may be without morals, his fantasy is replete with them as well as with ironic wit. Criminals, by the way, are sequestered in the ninth arena (Dante's?), where they are free to do what they will, including playing team sports like football.
Here's an example taken from the BLDGBLOG:



Which goes on to say:
Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’"
And finishes:
ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.
More images, expandable, are available at the nonist (a moribund blog/site).

Intrigued by the gridlines particularly -- the rectilinear characteristic of the architectural/engineering drawing, of the blueprint, the draught. These are not maps, partly in that they have a different purpose, partly in that they refer always to the made, the consciously willed, as opposed to the so-called "natural". But, like maps, they are a representation of information. (Contrast maps/blueprints with knowledge of any kind, which is not a representation of anything.)

With the Game, looking to fuse various forms of visual information, including both map-type and blueprint-type. Interesting to think of being able to adopt different forms or instances of forms as one would put on clothes....

Think too of the idea of an imaginary architecture overlaid on a real city -- an imaginary complete with imaginary denizens, like "day people" and "night people". Overlaid, themselves, on the real people? "Unreal city", mythical city, ....

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Friday, December 3, 2010

Utopia and Conspiracy

Think of these as inverses, but related. Think of one being embedded in the other -- Conspiracy as being contained within Utopia, e.g. And then think of the inverse, or of the embedding turned inside out  -- Utopia contained within Conspiracy.

Think of twin narratives, or narrative layers. But what's the Utopian equivalent of Conspiracy's "revelation"? "Realization"? Or is there a Utopian revelation as well -- "Revelation" as the encompassing theme?

Well, that must be the case, given the Inversion -- Utopia's revelation the more profound, in other words.

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Thursday, December 2, 2010

The moving world

What this is about

Some themes:
    • Utopia, of course
      • Which includes Dystopia
      • and which includes all other bullet points
      • and contains an inherent ambiguity:
        • on the one hand, the impossibility of utopia and the folly/evil of utopian attempts
        • on the other, the Nozick/Rand utopia
        • and on the third hand, the imaginative reach for a New People (see Cherneyshevsky, Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, even possibly Pynchon, and see the Inversion theme below)
      • Conspiracy -- the concept, as distinct from the plot (see Art-narrative below)
          • The inversion and its consequences
            • Epistemological ontology -- this is the central idea (if Utopia stands for the encompassing idea, this is the core): that what is is determined by what's known, not the other way around (and "what's known" is determined by what works -- i.e., a relational as opposed to a representational epistemology)
            • "Inversion" describes the switch from let's say a "realist" ontology to the epistemological ontology noted above -- that is, from reality being something out there that we can only painstakingly discover to reality being, literally, right before our eyes (and nose, and ears, and touch, etc.)
          • Art
            • and religion
            • and Utopia
            • and narrative
              • Elementory
              • Conspiracy as plot (see below)
                • The plot, as distinct from the concept (see above)
                • the notion of "revelation" 
                  • as distinct from "epiphany" -- i.e., it's exogenous
                  • also as distinct from "solution" (of a mystery) -- this is a change in your understanding of the world
                • A multipart series (say, 5) -- larger revelations at the climax of each?
              • Space fiction
              • 3000 AD (the 1000-year future)
              • The Utopia Project itself
            • architecture/urban design/planning
            • The game
              • of Utopia
              • board/screen design
                • layers
                • fractal depth
              • and the social network
                • avatars
            • Space colonization
              • and utopia
              • Getting off the planet
              • the moon
              • Mars
              • Open space
              • Commercializing space
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