[...]
(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.


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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?

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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”

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(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)

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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.

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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”?

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(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 schema that are geared to trigger pattern recognition, (art?)

visuality vs vision
the caricaturist does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new code of recognition. a visuality is nested into vision; vision is reciprocally primed to recognize a visuality ***

visuality involves more than pattern recognition

perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content and substance. john Onians concludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”

what kind of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates? (a techno-aesthetic eye?) (the diagrammatic eye?) (referring to the diagram project “sadistic statistics”)

the ways we see ...ly (historically, ecologically, evolutionary, technologically,) more part and parcel of the visuality of the anthropocene

the neuro-aesthetic eye

to “read” environment in terms of info pick-up and accommodation
to simply perceive as we do
but to parlay (double up) our perceptual system into a modality of processing, response, and responsiveness
(the aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the individual and the ecosystem

modulation of ethos in landscape?

Kinect is not bringing a knowledge that is neurobiologically imperceptible to the naked eye nor is it technologically making a worldview accessible.

“it is low tech”, its images are born of partial recognition, attunement, and attention

low-tech works may be critical for developing a visuality that is not yet integral to or explicit within new media, visualising the specifically neurological dimension of ecologicity and mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.

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(McKenzie Wark)

climate science, a key science of our time, rests on an apparatus of very powerful computers and communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as Paul Edwards calls it, between data and communication. it brings together global data according to global standards, mathematical models of physics of climate drawn from fluid dynamics, and massive computational power. the model and data coproduce each other in a way, as the data sets are all partial, and many data points have to be interpolated to make the models work. and then all of that has to be mediated back to human awareness via tables, graphs, computer simulations, and so forth.

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(Irmgard Emmelhainz)

(anthropocene) change in the conditions of visuality
transformation of the world into images
phenomenological + epistemological consequences

images participate now in the forming of worlds, they have also become forms of thought

the optical mind

the radical change in the conditions of visuality has brought about a new subject position or point of view, announce by the trajectories of:
1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)

this regime of visuality implies: automatization, tautological vision, and signs leading to other signs
resulted to => the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision

“vision cancelled”

linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan created the illusion of a view to the outside world, analogous to a window.

cubism: showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embedded in the picture plane.
invented a discontinuous space, making identity and difference relative (questioning the classical metaphysics), by subverting the relations between subject and object.

does my Kinect pictural model employs the architectural space? is camera architectural?

in experimental film, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision

identity and difference, rejection of a priori space

how to release the subject from human coordinates? what are references to human coordinates? screen's rectangular frame?

the machine (optical perception) delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, which announces, first the incipient (initial) normalization of perception as augmented reality and data visualization

displacement of the subjective center of operations

epitomize

subvert

fragmentation brought by mechanization, has an alienating character

its impossibility to give back an image or serve a reflective mirror

it is indifferent to “me”

the exhaustive visualization and documentation of wildlife is effectively concealing its ongoing extinction (one of the reasons i am not using the zeiss-lens-camera recordings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs [...] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir. [...] the very activity of taking pictures [...] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated (worsened) by travel.

cognitive activity

giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, welding image and discourse

the contemporary experience is also made of sharing/tweeting/liking images

the contemporary political economy: communicative capitalism derives surplus value from the volume and velocity of sings and data circulating in the infosphere.

proliferation of cognitive signs is another feature of communicative capitalism, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli

(for Berardi) seeing means accelerating perception in the fields of everyday experience, accelerated tautological vision derived from constant passive observation. this is another of communicative capitalism's form of governance, as this kind of vision generates techno-linguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning

is Kinect image-compilation a creature of infosphere? (boring question?)

normalization of groundless seeing (exemplified in google earth)

“picture does not make an image” (Serge Daney, before and after image)
image against vision

life persists irrationality, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, cold world)

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(Ada Smailbegovic)

nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)

related to temporalities and velocities (plant politics of movement)

the video registers different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change

the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)

binding times together

an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification

=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in a more tentacular mode of perception --> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (and therefore cognitive) relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect and sweating both propose modes of perception other than perspectival shadow casting system of vision.

(organic or inorganic/technological?) processes that constitute the planet/plant

=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/technological processes that constitute the planet

(my work is to create or find out) poetics and the methodologies that register the bite and indexes its significance
(+ bite of the critter on my skins)

(Chakrabarty in The climate of history:) “man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all”

the collapse of this age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history

plant writing
formulate transitional categories that would be responsive to differentiated modes of activity attuned to the difficulties of depicting natural phenomena that are continuously in flux.

reader of the meteorological registers

envision the temporal flux

the shifting edges (of the Kinect building generics)

(Kinect image) as architectural form composed of different (transitional) materially instantiated temporalities

transposition of qualities

within grammatical and figurative textures (of poetic)

between the material and the metaphorical

modes of materiality

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(W.A.G.E. working artists and greater economy)
for artists who don't have secondary jobs, their mobility--despite being underwritten in many cases by class privilege--is forced. they are wired-up, networked carriers of social and cultural capital set in perpetual motion, transforming cities in their passage through them on the art circuit--sophisticated nomadic clans who travel to survive.

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nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)

places marked with zones of limited habitation--you can't live there, you are a visitor

a place that is both wasteland and wilderness at the same time

wasteland tourism (museum in chernobyl)

1. the christian tradition: it was our obligation to use up the earth before the apocalypse
2. the romantic view: we humans are the servants of the land, we are its eyes, we are its expression

we are becoming visitors of waste wilderness, most natural and unnatural land simultaneously

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the moment the world enters my body it has already been transformed

for Elisa and me Bochum's forest was a location, with its decay, it's subtropical humidity and toxins, and because of the way it is trapped between the natural and the man-made.

“we are forever collecting ourselves” (Baudrillard)

we have always encountered the world via technology
(now internet)

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(Zoe Todd)
Zapatista (a revolutionary leftist political and militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico) principles of “walking the world into being” (as locus of thought and practice to decolonize posthumanist geographies)
(for Juanita Sundberg) the zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriversale, a world in which many worlds fit. [...] as we humans move, work, play, and narrate with multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.

the epistemic violence inherent both in academic treatment and dance (they both bring things to life?) (is dance controlled form of violence? does violence always bring things to life contrary to the belief that it kills life?)

(i don't want to) trivialize (Amazon and my Amazon trip) as case-study and neutralize its indigenous ontologies

(John Hartingan:) Anthropocene as “charismatic mega-category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy)
(which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof?)

(indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore & Jolene Rickard:) material might act as a bridge, instead of a mirror
(narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)

(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)

(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)

(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”

(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)

ecological imagination is a turn towards reciprocity and relationship

in Kinect the path of a journey is refracted, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with Hanno in the Amazon forest is a joyful and critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing tendencies.

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tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”



how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.

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close-range vision

how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)

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forest's “space”

Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.

Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.

or instead of how a forest looks like, what is the forest made of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)

in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception:
1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
of course both questions are phenomenological positions, but that does not mean that we no longer need representation to understand relationality. (Konh words)

needing or not needing representation to understand relationality

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(Latour)

not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”

... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)

(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)

christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.

redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image

are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?

do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.

(we need new forms of attention)

the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)

Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....


religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence

scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.

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is Aruz (عروض) interface? surface/face and meaning/inhalt/content dualism in Tasavof, Rumi breakings of Aruz. Tsavof believes that only through appearance one can get into the depth


science, religion, and politics all three take for granted an image of nature.

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(Peter Galison, in iconoclash)

wanting to know with eyes-open

it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical world remains In contact with the real world; and even though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”

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(Dipesh Chakrabarty)

(history of nature?) the nature of history as a form of knowledge

(Croce essay 1893 history subsumed under the concept of art) Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “when we peer into nature, we find only ourselves” we do not “understand ourselves best as part of the natural world” (is that not the image of Narcissus who looks into the nature and can only see himself--nature observation as mirror stage)
so as Roberts puts it “Croce proclaimed that there is no world but the human world, then took over the central doctrine of Vico that we can know the human world because we have made it.”
Croce's idealism “does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘don't exist’ without human beings to think about them. apart from human concern and language, they neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes” (not saying human symbolic system of thought)

man environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all. ***

the history of man's relationship to the environment was so slow as to be almost timeless

but now scholars are writing significantly different: destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human beings has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been.

vision of man “as a prisoner of climate” and not of man as the maker of it

is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom?
price we pay for the pursuit of freedom

politics: the most common shape that freedom takes in human societies.
politics has never been based on reason alone. (it seems politics is something that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming) [Global warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.

Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening

the crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.

as Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness of his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world.”

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(Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)

“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)

the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment

each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.

personal idiosyncrasies

this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer

the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer

heroic self-discipline

profoundly moralized vision

and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism

human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled

the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist

machines offered freedom from will

being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)

early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense


atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual


(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)


rejection of aesthetics (but what seduction exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)


average (is truth to nature?)


asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity


“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)

how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist


(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, image is used to actually engineer the whole thing. making and seeing coincide.


eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen

what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance

(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)

personal equation: a systematic error correction


to produce reliable images


While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.


(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.

scientific evidence

legal evidence

at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.

medico-legal concept of evidence

the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.

(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

trompe l'oeil (new note)

in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself

photographs did not carry a transparent meaning


once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own

in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)

=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity

testimony to objectivity

rejection of subjective temptation

sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)


The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.

extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs

inscription instruments

(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”

graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,

they were the words of nature itself

the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.


morality of self-restraint


(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.

the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined observer)

(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine


the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.

...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stood for authenticity: it was at once an observer and an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize, anthropomorphize, beautify, or otherwise interpret nature.

one type of mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of noninterventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to nature than hand-made images--but rather because the camera apparently eliminated human agency
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)

(mechanical) images that could be touted as nature's self-portrait

aura of stoic nobility
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)

moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative audience

by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.

humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.

objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations

subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,


varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives

it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)

photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances

objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity

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we must consider the paths people and trees have taken

entangled networks of matter and meaning

“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker

oaks were travelers and mixers

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(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization

planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor

native plants as a discursive field

complex and unmarked ways that plants have been  sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’

(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies

(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)

once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene

native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.

‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)

government of nature

invasive animals

the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.


Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)


the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant

..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...


(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.

(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.


treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.

Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)

(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world

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(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]

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lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature

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[Avital]

in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms

to enter areas of conflict [...] fragile zone where non-knowledge dominates knowledge

Self-dissolving and regathering, the subject became linked to the possibility of a new autonomy, and opium illuminated in this case (Baudelaire, though under De Quincey’s influence, was to use it differently) an individual who finally could not identify with his ownmost autonomy but found himself instead subjected to heroic humiliation in the regions of the sublime. Opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.

mapping the body as an intensive conflictual site

scenography and rhetoric of armed conflict

(Avital on) the maternal trace in the technological revealing from Heidegger to the Bushies


the readers and nonreader

the scene of the proto-pedagogy (involves only two persons): The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened


(for Levinas:) expérience =/= épreuve
•experience --> a knowing of which the self is master is always said
•épreuve (text, trial, proof) --> the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene’ ~~> a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk, life submitted to incessant probes, find themselves subjected to the rigors of the épreuve


conflict's another logic of rigor in certain types of non-Western practices (such as Zen and yogic teachings)

the pupil is led to an inner experience without interiority, to understanding without cognition, without a history ==> subjectivity

the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass

...understanding no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing



going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle

...cannot be properly located or possessed

the inaction hero


(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage

The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan

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My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.


Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could raise all actual agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] T[...]