[...]to effect the present is made over form. Form, with its strange logic and efficiency, has the capacity to freeze time. Life as we know it lies in the results of the processes that future forms come to effect the present. Any being's very survival depends on its ability to access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?
4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.
Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.
The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.
The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which might permit or prohibit seeing beyond its conditions.
In another level of description we will look at the concept of Hayula as a device in cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.
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(Wietske Maas)
materiality that is specific to the eye
similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.
unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.
the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.
in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.
if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.
material commonality (worth exploring)
incarnate an external organ of vision
our tie with the general metabolism of light
correlations between human vision and the organic world
using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter
in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns
![--> tech
wood grain Laura Marks Islamic art form techne shape force intensification
[source: wikimedia] wood grain Laura Marks Islamic art form techne shape force intensification [source: wikimedia]](images/ajayeb/0073.jpg)
different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making
mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter
drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)
“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)
chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation
here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.
our inseparable alliance with plants
our eyes are immersed within a vegetative metabolism of a kind. we look at plants, but plants have already cannibalized our gaze as they become part of us looking back at them.
complex architecture of light:
plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. it is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. however, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. it could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architecture of light”.
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(Ilana Halperin)
corporeal mineralogy
we are autobiographical trace fossils
what constitutes life in the world of geology?
microbes feasting on the mineral bodies of stones
more animal than mineral
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big bang, first second of existence, second second, what is going on with the materiality
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the dark matter, in Caecilian Kircher, we don't know what it is
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[Gholam Hossein Rahimi + Abd Al-Rasul Emadi, 79113902605.pdf]
it is “proven” that location is not hayula (nor apparition)
hayula is anything that can have many faces [this is greek]
according to Aristotle: matter cannot separate itself from hayula (bzw. its apparition) but it can from its location.
in another sense, location is sometimes close to the notion of ‘face’ (sura[...]