[...]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)

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

(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

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

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

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

[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers

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

(#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,


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

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, CG Rigs, architect's tools, a definition in language, etc.)
-Rigs are clever technological provisional constructions, (always) setup for a specific naturalization.
-Rigs articulate animacies, that is to say: they are almost linguistic structures that shape or determine our animations
-Rigs do consequential work
-how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a field, narrative, text, environment, etc

whenever you give a definition (a metaphor, a concept) and work with it, and find yourself committed to certain findings, tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?

in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.



skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms

mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather

rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg

an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28

(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements

how a being is Rigged into transformational particularities
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and techniques, interfaces and folds upon folds, constructions that do things for another constructions, Rigs that translate

kinematic equations, inverse kinematics, the math of it is called the Jacobian inverse technique
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Arc-welding.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Modele_cinematique_corps_humain.svg
“In robotics, inverse kinematics makes use of the kinematics equations to determine the joint parameters that provide a desired position for each of the robot's end-effectors. Specification of the movement of a robot so that its end-effectors achieve the desired tasks is known as motion planning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics
{\frac  {\partial p_{i}}{\partial x_{k}}}\approx {\frac  {p_{i}(x_{{0,k}}+h)-p_{i}(x_{0})}{h}}

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

Maya's interfacial iconograhies

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

how do we animate quadrupeds, invertebrates, phyla, rotifera (wheel-animals), and so on; for each a mathematics must be invented in order and terms of digital computationality.

“anatomy” is always “imaginary anatomy” (in CG, comtemporary dance, medicine, love, etc.)



a skin has to deal with:
“Global Stiffness Structural Optimization”



Rig talks to mesh, telling it how to move, how to be.
how we evolved from jelly to skelletal? something tense, intensified in space, some flesh attached to it. how the concrete mineral came back to assert itself in the terms of bones of the organism?
(a mesh is a matrix of points in which the neighboring points only matter to eachother. mesh is the result of the study of topology in mathematical notions of space and structure, with demands of an industry interested in the representation of surface. mesh is interested by creatures that have a skin, and have stakes in tactility?)
Rig is that constructed logic or grammar that allows mesh deformation in one way and not another. made of enfolded layers of code and constraint


story of the bone
the flow of matter and energy, flow of intensification between sortal processes, organisms, and minerals.


this is about how matter is defined, in everyday CG work


how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic

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

notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop

some post-workshop notes:

questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
•control: how can we have a more interesting ontology of constraints that allows more interesting articulations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’


[14.05.2017]

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

rig: a higher-level description of the motion of the part (of mesh) it is influencing (--> set of “bones” may not be hierarchical or interconnected)
[a] simplified user interface allowing animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry --> control the deformation of the mesh data (=/= imitate real anatomy or physical processes)

modern rigging = hacking (in 3D softwares)

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

Disney --> body-ege: feeling good about oneself

(via) the playful mastery over anthropomorphized machines


(Rickels > Hanns Sachs:) the last time machines were used for play and not work was during the time of the Greeks and Romans : culture's value of the human body ==> machine used for amusement

**narcissistic investment (of interest) in the body protects against submission to the machine** --> conceived no longer as plaything but as his own prosthetic extension

movement of fantasmatization

to fantasize aggression = to turn it around upon oneself

guild: the currency of the father function

both genders (at the beginning) are phallically aggressive when it comes to mother


Kafka and de Sade despised the body for its limitations and boundaries

body (which is always also the maternal body) comes only to its mutilation [~ skinning], rebuilding, and reanimation [rig]


body has been left behind in the wake of its media-technical range --> it can no longer be plugged back into any so-called *sensorium* or *corpus*


media --> (from the point of view of) identification with the dead [#rig #nonhuman]--> every medium acquires its only prosthetic aim on a target range of *projection* and *haunting*


media-technical innovation

3D animation industry --> new modes of disposal of the dead
-not on the side of life


phantasm of the missing child
(retrofashion and charge of child abuse)
modern military + *techno-mediatic expansion*

memory pictures
tableaux vivants


technologization
massification
teenagerization --> totally SM, friendly, cool, into being popular

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

the spaces between decent bodies

#waiting for render: relations between hacker as organism and the computing beast
what is being processed? intra-actions of both CPU and gut.
*waiting for a slow render to finish, i used to enjoy the process. unfinished renders, slow computers, lag, and queer forms of waiting

[title]
/waiting bodies and slow computing
/differentiated constitutions of the waiting body and the nunhuman computational labor

compositional waiting --> Stewart's attunement

the labor of the CPU, the graphical interfance, and the waiting body of the hacker are in an orientation (--> what am i asking here?)


(Alberti: among the Matis) the practice of ‘curare watching’ (the hours spent observing the process in excess of practical necessity) ["waiting,” looking at unfinished render...] is fundamental to the efficacy of the poison --> the physical and mental experience of making something has an impact on its ultimate properties

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

#a comparative software study: principles of worlding in Maya/Blener, Softimage, Houdini

which definitions are postponed?
•objective: that which is instantly defined
•subjective: that which its definition is postponed

change--{time, space, matter}-->
touch--{time, space, matter}--> data flow

in Maya
representation is postponed --> subjective mode of Maya --> an sculpturalist ontology?

in Softimage
the distinction between spatiotemporal modifiers is postponed --> dynamics paradigm?
(the viewport partial renderer in Softimage is part of the phenomenological experience of enacted interface =/= Maya's renderer pops up in another window) 4697942

in Houdini
the definition of the onject is postponed

*which differences are delayed in different 3D software applications?
(the difficulties of clean translation between them)

(when I was working as a 3D generalist I always reworked the default scence, setting up rigs to begin with...)
begining with:
•void
•camera
•light
•chaos
•soup
•turtle's back
•absolute geometry
•ornament
•


how the Latin language in software interfaces dominates the mode of thinking and conditions synthesis?
•how, for example, a Farsi inhabiter might craft a different spatial synthesis in terms of a different linguistic ontology?
[b + a = ba] =/= [آ + ب ~=> با] {a different effect}
•interface question
•phenomenological question
•in Farsi the joint attachments undergo transfiguration, different viscous relational property, adhesion refigured

what would be an interesting interface question posed to each of the 3D softwares?

one language ---{Bauhaus? De Stijl? nasta'ligh نستعلیق?}--to--> another language

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

painfully queer


*questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:
my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation
•pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
•Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning
--> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)
*exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive*
*objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena

(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people

in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)


(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)


(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.

...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality


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

kinetic, energies expressed in variables


integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero


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

metallurgy concerns matter in movement

matter-flow

what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?

form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default


[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter


*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence

skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities


skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)

hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)

CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)

(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally capable of subjectivity

(conventionally conceived) polygon modeling: reproducing, or representing a mental image of a completed body-pot

*?how CG artist can learn, like La Candelaria potters ****to take part in an aesthetics of care that is also a response to the threat of the inconstancy of all forms****, responding to perturbations in the movement of materials, to include knowledge of its inconstancy and of materials always capable of subjectivity
(this is significant for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)

my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]


3D model = partial subject

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

in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism



Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)

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

#veil
@Janina
@Ale


Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability

to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them

*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]

text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects

(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text

*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina

(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism

uniform = contemporary fashion's other

digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)

desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*

textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity

Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)



(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire

“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)


Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)

[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon

(brackets and bracelets)

...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)

Janina's wardrobe malfunctions

*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”

() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms

easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity

*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)

...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed


*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability


textile screens

textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities

(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’


textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire

capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable



embodied politics of impropriety

rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines

the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)

...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference

sartorial scheme

abstracting the concept of ‘the body’

attire

(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations


{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...


the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)

and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular

modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})

radical beauty of the quotidian

mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another

(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)


it-girl

Beatlesque escape

new paths that young people are charting requires clothes



(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry

the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**

[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]

relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns


couture خياط زنانه

animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made

perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)

social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**

***oppression =/= passivity***

Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*

{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)


Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”

Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify

“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”

(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali

(Zizek:) through fashion we learn how to desire --> how to desire our own subjugation, as well as the possibilities of our own freedom

*political potency of desire* (--> do we need to recognize and manipulate it to our advantage? @Foad)
توان سیاسی میل


[looking for?] proper names --> quickly recognized for offering some sense of sonic semblance in a sea of deconstructed phonemes in Anglo-shaped mouths

#wear my lecture


*fantastic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)

[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]

people who don't care about *dressing up* are situating dress reform (fashion) in a type of neutered and disembodied utilitarianism (--Janina--> ignorant to fashion's textures and to the ways that fashion's formal dimensions could motivate the body to move beyond the pleasure principle)

politics and feelings of pleasure and displeasure --Gernreich--> absolutely central to any critical understanding or experience of the world

@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray

(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)


post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as movements and so on)
that is why i cannot simply critique existing forms for their morality nor simply offer humanist solutions to the problems (of capitalism, Iran, etc.) like Gernreich, i am recognizing that by reinforcing or relaxing shapes and materials of the there-is, i could direct the ways our desires became caught-up in the system's works, or that certain materials only worked in certain ways



affordable (double)knit fabrics: made of variable columns of inter-looping yarns, [they] are made to stretch in a variety of directions =/= non-elasticated woven fabrics
--> texture of the night, (use it) to drape oneself over the arm of a couch, or to run after someone leaving a party a little too early

paths and forms of pleasure that Gernreich hoped to see all young people exploring

[...] Meanwhile ‘Man’ is temporarily bereaved. But they will find a new way. ***And the new way will have important consequences for clothes*** -Gernreich

capitalize: transformation of unexpected --into--> simple --into--> expectable --into--> convention/style

images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp

plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico

vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth


xxxx

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

(we are in) style wars***

critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices

*aesthetics of mending*

mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)

Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*

literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation

to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending

...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference


business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism

how each of us work to fix identities

to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us

relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire diff[...]