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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)
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