“There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
July 20, 2009
July 19, 2009
Manuel de Landa, again
“…despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counterparts share a crucial dependance on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge…’the flows of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.’ Our organic bodies are, in a sense, nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows.”- 1000 Years of NonLinear History, pg 104
cross reference this with the rise of google and the subsequent re-formation of news services.
“What’s interesting is what will happen next. Once the content companies get a basic business model down and the technology is debugged, it will open the door for all sorts of other configurations.“-Bits blog, NYtimes
July 18, 2009
Savage Detectives
November 2
“I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted ofcourse. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.”
November 3
“I’m not sure what visceral realism is.”
Savage Detectives, pg 1, Roberto Bollano
Massumi
“Another interstitial void, sundering with brain waves and fingers and word processor keys and paper pulp and consonants. The expressiveness of thought getting packed into letters and phonemes, into forms of content which enter other causal circuits:speech, print, and electronic media. Thought surrendering itself to pen and pixel.” Brian Massumi, “A user’s guide to capitalism and scizophrenia” pg 15.
Buckminster Fuller
“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”- pg 1 Comprehensive Propensities, “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”. by Buckminster Fuller
crash
pixel by pixel screen crash…
4k image / SCALE EFFECTS
From Lev Manovich’s essay, “Scale Effects” FILE, Brazil.
“When we think of technology’s effect on culture, we are used to considering the effects of new technological inventions. We are not used to thinking about the effects of scaling up already widely used technologies…for instance, faster networks, or higher resolution computer images? This is harder to think about-although if we are to go to the very source of contemporary thinking about visual media-Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media-we will discover that the idea of scale is central to McLuhan’s thinking….the railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road. It accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”
Bone
“In the Organic world, for instance, soft tissue(gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme until 500 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomeration of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures emerged:bone. “1000 years of non-linear history“, pg 26. manuel de landa
outer space
Joseph Campbell’s response to the ‘National Geographic Atlas of the Universe’:
“what those pages opened to me, in short, was the vision of a universe of unimaginable and inconceivable violence: billions upon billions–literally!– of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other, each thermonuclear furnace being a star, and our sun among them: many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas, out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now.” pg 28, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space”.
Koolhaas on Modernization
“Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. JunkSpace is its Apotheosis, or meltdown….Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low grade purgatory…Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we did not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids. “-Content, pg 162