[...] a “humanism from below” =/= generic and top-down humanisms (~ monopoly of violence that states held over their individual subjects)

(Geroulanos not arguing that antihumanism was the driving force or the secret heart of intellectual movements and philosophies, nor claiming that it was a single movement, concept, idea, or trend; rather) antihumanism is what emerged from, shaped, and configured a major matrix of concerns


problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى

essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on universality
•prioritize themselves over any such universality

ideologies continue to disguise a *politics of the will* as a universalism

antihumanism = antiredemptive, antimoralist, antimessianist worldview

+ proliferation of tropes --> dooming contemporary man to an existence without meaning or future:
•last man (Nietzsche, Camus, Blanchot)
•death of Man (Malraux, Kojeve, Blanchot, Foucault)
•devirilization of man (Kojeve, Bataille, Queneau)
•terror (Marlaux, Bataille, Kojeve, Merleau-Ponty)
•

Kojeve and Jean Wahl --> antifoundational realism --> new anthropology

antihumanism
a precondition of thought
a fluid matrix of ideas
a philosophical attitude

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Malraux's (literary-metaphysical pursuits [echoes Nietzsche + intellectual Left]) heritage to us (to artists): the alternative to bourgeois individualism [can be achieved] through commitment to a justice based on a quasi-Marxist notion of human dignity --> the *uprooted, cultured, and powerless individual* who struggled against the nation-driven, science-executed destruction wrought by (arid and morally bankrupt) modern warfare [---> go to forensic architecture, apass] --> (the idea that death of man can be averted through) ***a recognition of the heroism of the resistance*** + turn to human creativity

how i have used a non-western voice (“i am from outside the west”) to provide for myself an escape from political categorization + claiming the knowledge of an insider and enjoying the analytical clarity of distance --> i make claims both *expertise in* and cool-headed *distance from* the essence of europe

(technique of) epistolary exchange


(to think of Kantian cosmopolitanism a) a genuine model for commitment =/= outdated illusion

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research method (a heritage of surrealism:) exquisite corpse technique --> (unpredictable and) innocent inventiveness

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for Sohrevardi and Avicenna: nature = chah چاه shahr gheyravan (material of nature/world: ghir قیر) --> zolmatkade ظلمت کده 

#comparative reading of stranded
ghorbat gharbia --> Crusoe

•daryaye sabz دریای سبز  (green sea) = donyaye mahsusat دنیای محسوسات (phenomenological world)
•دایه daye = nafse nabati (vegetal self)- khahar sister = alame made عالم ماده (hayula هیولا) --> (you should) wrap it in azab عذاب
•woman = shahvani شهوانی carnal, pas-mandani پسماندنی (the one who stays, Lot's wife leaving the catastrophic city ~= mashmul-e azab مشمول عذاب) =/= salek سالک wonderer==> ba shahvat nemitavan soluk kard =/= queer mysticism
•maghak مغاک ghaar chah قعر چاه (where abe hayat is آب حیات =/= abe heyvan آب حیوان) = riazat ریاضت

from the spiritual point of view we are always at the bottom of the pit




rigid bodies
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?=contextId=BULLETNODES
A rigid body is a polygonal or NURBS surface converted to an unyielding shape. Unlike conventional surfaces, rigid bodies collide rather than pass through each other during animation. To animate rigid body motion, you use fields, keys, expressions, rigid body constraints, or collisions with particles.
Maya has two kinds of rigid bodies--active and passive. An active rigid body reacts to dynamics--fields, collisions, and springs--not to keys. A passive rigid body can have active rigid bodies collide with it. You can key its Translate and Rotate attributes, but dynamics have no effect on it.



notes on The Rigid Bodies / (metaphysics of 3D)
the simulacrum / ideal / image --> Plato
mystic geometry --> Pythagoras (--> mathematization of the real, real ‘is’ math)
}--> what does it mean to perform 3D for these two thinkers?

fire simulation in Maya <--> cotton touching fire in Islamic philosophy

(<)>  -->{
() manifest image --> shader/topology/raytracing
<> underlying (scientific?) image --> C++ / physics engine / object oriented programming

the mode of production in current 3D-biz creates a sort of cultural collateral or collateral culture (term by Lazzarato). 3D practices are arising as series of activities, not recognized as “work,” rather involved in defining and fixing artistic/cultural standards, tastes, norms, and strategically public opinion.
“is this real or fake?” (you have to click)
--> when the productive mediation is smashed to pieces and replaced by this question.
either it is ‘made’ or ‘real’
[structural imposibility, a double bind, ...]
}--> the image-warrior who violently asks us to choose between the visible and the invisible
( <-)--?--(-> )

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the notion of “general purpose toolkit”
synthesis, patches,
environment --> media
interface --> physical
dataflow programming, rapid prototyping, indeterministic machine paradigms,
one-dimensional array of values
telemetry (duri-sanj دوری سنج)

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

an evangelist builds a monument
softimage monument
virtual?



movement and stillness in houdini?
who the 3d software, as an ontological device to recreate and study and understand being, is devided or made-up? the presebce of the notion of movement in it and essence. what is movement and apparition?
[we can have a workshop that teaches houdini just through movement. or a non-movement approuch to 3D making.]


nonrepresentational maya
epistemology and cognitive approuch to space and matter

ontology of matter in maya

worlding in autodesk industry (look at the trailers, tutorials, and so on.)
historical view?


i see maya and other 3D apps as visualization technologies enlisted as metaphors by Haraway and as languages that actively intertwine in the production of literary value


friction, forms of masks (shaders?), and play, and the dance of Dis-tanz
the separations and partings
nearness


transforming and transformative agencies

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“matter refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena” (Barad)
-let's look at my 3D-related practices again and investigate their ontological implications and rework how matter is defined, [matter, force, interdependency, appearance,,, phenomena, meaning,] Delanda-[intensification, articulation, flow-of,]


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#Femke workshop: on rigging and skinning, writing stories cultivating creation and creatures before their enrollment in George Lucas film, speculating on the inorganic skeletal animacies

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(Brey > Ihde:) [technology:] a special class of artifacts (for example telescopes, probes, hearing aids, etc) that are capable of engaging in ‘symbiotic’ relationships with the human body. [...] means through which the environment is experienced and acted on.


essential ambiguity of technology / of material human-technology relations

hermeneutic fluency (and the special enigma) of the connection between text and world

*bird's-eye=?/!~navigational~/?=.'<-phenomenological
[...in front of the open (blank) page (of the book) (we teach children to take the) position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher --> outside the page is outside and inside the page is inside ]@Eunkyung's scriptural enterprise --> Derridean proper space of writing
-the panopticon as observing instrument for human sciences is embeded in the page of the book we open. part of this tradition =/= first person shooter

(Ihde on) game-bodies: (on multistability -->) ‘modes of navigation’ [macro phenomenological conditions, modeling observational possibilities, ]:
[1]- third person (pretended) overhead view looking down a map-like world and plotting your course, one says “I go to X.” he calls it “the reading position” (usually a western navigator) --> using instrumental mediations to translate this (overhead) position, star patterns are with the north star
[2]- first person shooter, take your body as stable position, one says: “X is coming to me.” (usually a south pacific navigator) --> reading phenomena as instruments, dynamic motion of star patterns are without the north star
[3]-



every major culture/civilization watches the *movements of heaven*
technologies of temporality, lunar calendars (mostly migratory or non-agricultural people who were into smaller cycles) and solar calendars (people who were into lager cycles), knowledge of repeated patterns of environmental phenomena
from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]

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like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation

(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***

Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience

instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities

sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other

lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)

the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation

the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.

*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?

“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body

plasticity and polymorphism of our bodies (online) [Ihde]

programmers working in other programmers’ works (--not imaginative engagement with the other, rather) --through--> interfaces and folds in interpretation {tutorial voices, screen videos, scripts, help files, layers of codes and tools on each other, nested folders on one's own computer, named categories by oneself, horde of text files and renders, etc}--> these are (en-/de-)crypting extended bodies constructed of language
subjectively constructed phenomenon of the communed fold interpreted : the 3D computer programm
(=/= romantic refusal of all mediation)

-what is the nature of the technology involved in CG?

•what is the source of the somatic sense of place, if not the body (since Greeks) and animality (since Deleuze + Guattari), in the case of CG? --?-->{the way a good farmer will pick up soil and feel the dirt in his hands}
(Greek word) ‘soma’ refers to a corpse (in Homer,) not a living body (--> #lived-body)
Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name.
for Aristotle, ‘thinking’ part of the soul, had an existence from any connection to the body.
“to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out.” (Christian Hubert > John Schumacher)


a community whose members are aware of each others’ passive presence is different forms
(active =/= present)

these are issues of social subject in a technically mediated world

to look at CG embodiment relations:
•fold (Ihde)
•skill (Merleau-Ponty)
•theory of affordance (Gibson)
•intra-action (Barad)
•detour (Latour)

(Merleau-Ponty's) ‘body schema’ : space of the body = 'space of situation,’ orientation towards possible (not only existing) tasks ==> aspects of the external/virtual world
body understood in terms of their ability to enter into one's projects =/= spatial location
[what is the body schema of the hacker in CG? (an external world where there is no near or far.) what is experienced as their Gestalt? which grasp is automatically localized? what are their phantom limbs? ==> body immediately known to self]


(body as the) system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal “place” defined by its task and situation. “My body is wherever there is something to be done.”

kinaestheses, proprioception,

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what ‘play’ does to ‘ego’?

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([is for Lilia (? like Wittgenstein) all ‘certainties'] grounded in the) certainty of the body
{pain <--> certainty}--> trauma + memory

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(Christian Hubert > ) Rudofsky “unfashionable human body” (#veil)

Thomas Friedman “The Golden Straitjacket”
•political-economic garment of globalization era --> Straitjacket
(Cold War era:)
•Mao --> suit
•Nehru --> jacket
•Russian --> fur
•
•Islam --> hejab

(Tasavof-->{for which the body does not remain concrete and material, and soul is ambiguous and polymorphic}, Pythagorean:) veli: soul can clothe itself in different bodies =/= (Aristotle:) soul is the form of a particular living body { soul = organization of the body }--> “..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body” =/= (Descartes:) soul = enlightened machine (~=? proper organization of the brain)


***The body is a special image --> body image

body, the priveleged image, the world of consiousness (through self-reference), the brain's primary frame of reference [-constructed with libidinal intensity? --> a map of narcissistic investment] (=/= body without organs)
•condition of the subject's access to spatiality (of the [numero-computationally?] built environment)
•anatomy is always “imaginary anatomy”
•the (body-)ego is a formation of body image through primary narcissim (in terms of Oedipus complex)
•body image also incorporate external objects (implements and instruments --> intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body) ~--> the “detachable” parts of the body: urine, faeces, saliva, sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin--all retain something of the cathexis and value of a body

-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions

the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]

“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty

(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and his awareness can shift....The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and objective are actually only poles of attention.” (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)


sensuality is co-making


rituals and technologies are links between bodies and societies
(social) techniques for the inscription of locality into bodies
technology as an exteriorization of the functions of the body?

CG stands for:
•computer graphics
•computer games
•creature generator
•categorial grammar --> “==>”, “=/=”, etc
•conceptual graphs --> graph-based knowledge representation and reasoning model
•computational geometry --> geo-info-sys design
•*computational gesture* --> extracorporeal material culture
•
•(complete governance, chaotic God, commanding general, common ground, center of gravity,)
•

the well-equipped invalid (--> embodiment, Virilio)

(Foucault's radical exploration of:) body = (subject to the effects of) rhetoric of technical reason
techniques of punishment (, a “political technology”) : “an art of unbearable sensations” --to--> “an economy of suspended rights”

Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body...” (what are the affects of the CG bodies?)
-for them the “body” is a discontinuous and non-totalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations, a surface of intensities: *pure simulacra without originals*


erotogenic zones, sexuality, Freud, auto-erotic internalization, clinamen

(the formally female cyborg / techno-monster of the Ghost in the Shell:) the (masculinist) fantasy of leaving the body behind and reconstituting it as a a technical object under human control as both a desire for perfect knowledge and total power and at the same time as a way of escape... [Christian Hubert] #Haraway
•the question of the “soul” is read as the question of (certain technology of) power over bodiess

(traits of) cyborg:
1. boundary transgression
2. the recognition and re-scripting of myth
3. simulations of identity
4. coalitions of affinity


reembodiment of intelligence


Hubert > Serres: “My body (I cannot help it) is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go. Euclidean space was chosen in our work-oriented cultures because it is the space of work--of the mason, the surveyor, or the architect. [...] My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.” (Hermes, pp 44-45) (@Aela)

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(feminist open-source --✕-->?) I am actually coming from a masculinist closed-source culture-thing, that is to say, my background is in masculinist black-boxed concepts of being and beyond, that means i have a different relationship with interference and parasitism
•how and when a concept becomes black-boxed? by which processes?
@Sven: what matters is the input/output, stimulus/response [--> “black-box of the beyond” (#zolmat writing)] --> transfer characteristics, data-flow, the ontology of the “internal working” : “open” exchanges inforamtion about its interactions }--> open-source is part of the tradition of anthropocene system thinking: network synthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective

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what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?

***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds

technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح

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[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers

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(#workshop in Stuttgart 11.04.2017 with Femke http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging)
provisional sketch for a workshop on “Rigging,” notes and nodes


on the notion and practice of Rig in CG
(CG as in “computational gesture”)

[title]
on Rigging and skinning: stories for cultivating creation and creatures of the industrial empire.
a practice in: rhetoric of technical reasoning in inorganic skeletal animacies.


•I begin with the position that believes in the essential ambiguity of technology
•let's look at some terms and notions and the ways they are enacted, practiced, and embodied, and to practice some hermeneutic fluency in phenomenological conditions in what we call character animation


KEYWORDS: soft bodies, skin, skinnig, Rig, Rigging, unwrapping, fold, CG, animation, locomotion, kinectics, skeleton, mechanics, interface, technology,


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Rigs are about:
-ways of arranging space, time and matter : like a sentence, that sticks words sequentially together in a certain way. Rig would be a way those elements are attached to one another in time and space.
[*] --> one-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material human-technology relations], i would ask: what are the material objects that this language commits us to? to be more exact: what are the material objects that the language-Rig commits the CG-hacker to?
-ontological assumptions embeded in any “device” (English grammar,[...]