[...]pt that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others

cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity

**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass

21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches

(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject

posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)


20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)

robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution


(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans

(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•

consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer


(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]


(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning


figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@Chloe2

the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•

(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behaviour


posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence

--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity


(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
  1. “technology = means to an end”
  2. “technology is created by humans”
  }<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
 -the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*

technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)

(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire

*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviours for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other

global debates of:
•fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness

1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behaviour and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consumers want

**technology: an active force that both consumes & creates consumers**


(problem of) sustainability
1. to sustain: rest, retreat --> humannes is a major threat to all nonhuman planetary existence ==> the idea that radical threats to nonhumanness must be warded off by radical decreases in human population, consumption, normtive standards of living
<-- this notion of sustainability exists radically at the limits of human capability (more than ecological crisis or human inequality, more than the threat of terrorism or nuclear proliferation)
2. to sustain: to extend, strengthen --> the idea that if we are not here then nothing on the planet has worth; if humans ado not exists, then the earth does not exists ==> our efforts of ecological sustainability are intrinsically human-centered [--(implicit attitude)--> prolonging humanness]==> ecological problem = crisis: an intense, short-lived episode in human history + it will be solved by high-technology solutions


technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature

--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*

--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***

*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*

...................................

McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human

...................................

[title]
system attic

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(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*

what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?

(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts

technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information


(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher


marketing communication theory

[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing

•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]


how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)


(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human


1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)

1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism

[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning

**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace

mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**


advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized & technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***

...................................

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy

...................................


(techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction?
•ongoing abstraction of vision - Problems of vision
•transformation in the makeup of vision
•history of art <-> history of perception?
•onlooker (Zuschauer)
•historically important functions of the human eye ==> medical, military, and police hierarchies
•Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.
•where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide
•avoid mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation.


...................................

bad visual systems

narcissism as a cultural practice (that also motivates and steers technological inventions)

accelerationism
(Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.)

Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this submission of the unconscious to the globalized machine


latest theoretical buzzwords

control over the interpretation of the world

circulation of the global image machine

tree-made paper

who are (not) allowed (not) to have a body?

all forms of knowledge claims,

acting on the ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific (cinematic) objectivity

all seem just effects of delayed render algorithms in the play of signifiers in a virtual force field

space of simulations

not giving up to the paranoid science fiction

getting to know the world effectively by practising the sciences

tools of semiology

rhetorical nature of truth

not Romantic nor modernist objects:
1. infective vectors (microbes)
2. elementary particles (quarks)
3. biomolecular codes (genes)


view of the relationship of body and language (the problem of metaphor)
those of us who would still like to talk about reality

imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world
high tech (military) field

recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings,
life is semiotic as well as technology

(commitment?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world

Haraway writes: All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future. (reductionism?)

insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my positing in the work? ground me in an embodied vision? my situation. to situate me. not necessarily organic embodiment? what have i need to learn in my bodies?)

perverse capacity of the eye

culture disembodies. (nature embodies?)
to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything

visualizing technologies are without (apparent) limit?

linked to:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques

mapping is at stake. what kind of mapping the Kinect image provides? that is opposite to the zeiss lens?

how to go there with the technology and not fuck the world? carefully not give birth to mythical ideological seeing or promising transcendence

Kinect's generative, but not devouring vision

the perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the ‘object’

the exhibition is about a writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision
= and commit to deconstruction and passionate construction.
= and passionate detachment, which is dependent on the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) standpoints, in order to see well. (refer to lecture-performance Standing on the Shoulders of Giants - Sina Seifee 2015, on a critical epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with?

Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.

The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision? these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.


partial way of organizing worlds

is unlocatable irresponsible?
is my visual exhibition a knowledge claim?

To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker?) is neither easily learned nor unproblematic

ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i did not claim any of these - i didn't try even. i was there traveling with relation to my co-travelers and a technology relation) my issue with the images is their generality and perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to situate my knowledge and myself i am not solely depending on the image rhetoric. i was committed to mobile positioning, and that is critical.


mediate vision

knowledge potent for constructing worlds
trying to be less organized by axes of domination

Science has been utopian and visionary from the start? that is one reason ‘we’ need it.

my eye were crafted by the blood of mosquitoes...

translations and exchanges, material and semiotic
what has the property of systematicity in my Amazon?
orientations and responsibility in material semiotic fields of meaning.

is Here, Kinect's vision not immediately a very powerful metaphor or technology (for political epistemological clarification)?

The visual metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.

should i have an argue for (politics and) epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating?

view from a structuring and structured body

we love stuttering, and the partly understood

Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial

Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure

logic of culture (nature made flexible)

science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)



the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)

suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor


how can something work and not work?!

mathematical competition


what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?

...................................


In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensibility” as follows: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am. I have the feeling that my entire body is changed, even at times that it no longer exists. I touch an object, but it is not I who am touching it. I no longer feel as I used to. I cannot find myself. I cannot imagine myself. My insensibility is frightening, as if everything were empty.” Madame I was unable to recognize the position of her arms and legs and was completely insensitive to pain. According to Israel Rosenfeld's thesis, Madame I was unable to know her body as part of her memory. (her brain could not create a body image) She could not imagine, or create in her mind, images of parents or the houses where she had lived. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she could re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she had a body. (see Strange, Familiar and Forgotten pp 40-42)

“If all self-reference were destroyed, consciousness and understanding would not be possible.

“Meaning and understanding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a body image.” (p.55)

“Self-reference is not a hypothetical idea but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)



Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.

The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can become intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body image.



(Don Ihde:) “To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential relation with the world.” (Technology and Lifeworld, p.72)

Embodied relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing aids, blind man's cane, or driving a car) take the technology into the perceptual-bodily self-experience. The mediating technology becomes part of the body image, and achieves “instrumental transparency”

...................................

(Giuliana Bruno)

This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)

(materiality of) cultural surfaces

As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.

The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.

who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?

layered space of interaction between subject and object

surface can be read as an architecture

from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)

memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?



modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).  

(i don't do filmic voyage)

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By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)

...................................

the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)

one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity

the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people

Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms


when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.

...................................

when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?

are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?

co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?

...................................

(Amanda Boezkes)

the ontological purification apparatus

we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.

how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality

how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?

geo-aesthetics

information is not energy-specific (Gibson)

theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”

in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!

affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.

how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together

facts of environment

to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality

E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual sch[...]