[...];
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present

(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system

(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram

Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past


(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past


tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive


“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)

built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture


(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*

synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate

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

idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast مست] =/= “polites” ~ police [~=? mohtaseb محتسب (--from--> احتساب, شمارنده, بشمارآورنده)])
-syn- (“with”)


کرم + حلیه
hile + karam

سجده شوریده

خام کن پخته تدبیرها

اول او اول بی ابتداست
آخر او آخر بی‌انتهاست

کار فلک بود گره در گره


(expelled from the temple of science) the collector and the classifier --> to grosser objects that we can taste, touch, accumulate

the master of ceremonies to a cage of tigers

Bowker on Charles Lyell

Buckland: (generally speaking) all things on earth can be seen at once objects and archives:
•as objects: they function in the world
•as archives: they maintain traces of their own past

a rock:
•object of lithosphere
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)


earth: a variable legible palimpsest

(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs

bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system

(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time

[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]


time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time

industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time

information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)

(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)


watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)

“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)

}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)

(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)

*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”


fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”

•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator


chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity

working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)

machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs


Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer


ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo


arguments about rates of change = about facts of change

eternal, unchanging present


train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian world of abstract qualities size, shape, quanity, motion
==> space out of[...]