[...]xpertise on electromechanical devices (1902)

electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements

}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)

distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism

#title
international bureau of measurement

Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories

kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force

metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity

*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire

turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper

Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality

post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)

Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”

1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)

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

James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects

[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful

*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)

rigging
the code space of the software environment +  embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that environment)

*structural determination + emergent practice*

a key aspect of media today --Stiegler--> [*]selection: a decision is made to broadcast one story over another

testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event

the actual practices of riggers (technical animator)

animation industry
the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services and good

***technologies are affectively engineered*** <--Thrift--Ash-- microbiopolitics of the subliminal: doing without thinking, practices of anticipatory manipulation ==> position consumers of media as passive dupes (<-- زیرپوستی *hypodermic model of media power*)
--✕--> Ash: affective manipulation is necessarily a fragile achievement that is prone to failure and always reliant upon being continually reworked in the creative responses users develop in relation to the designed environments with which they interact [---> go to fandom and fan culture]

animation design (videogame): is a complex, problematic, and ongoing struggle between:
•the openness and performative play of contingency & chance (which emerge through the techniques and intelligences that users develop as they become skilled at these games)
•the mechanical systems and calculative rationalities through which these environments are designed

affective properties of contingency ==> commercially and critically successful

rig: assemblage of human and nonhuman actor
staging, managing, and controlling event [movement] within the limited computational architecture

(asking with Ash) how agency is distributed in the assemblages of various human and technical actors that make up rigging?

rig =/= architecture
shaping corporeal dispositions

(entertainment industry does work) to maintain and guard the contingent as a positive force

contingency: the unexpected, the random, the singular, the unrepeatable, or the surprising (that which cannot be pinned down by any process that attempts to pin it down) =/= boring
(Dastur, Dewsbury, Delanda)
--> you need *open skill: contingent tactically oriented understanding* (contextually-appropriate responsiveness, context-dependent ways, regulated improvisation) <-- hacker's talent

(Deleuzian) [*]affect: the outcome of an encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action

captivation --> the specificity of the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment

(game) design
cultivation of the right kinds of affects through quantitative variables in the game's database ~= (Latour's) laboratories: theatres of proof (through a process of decontextualization, the scientific experiment which isolates the factors it wants to study, an entity becomes nameable & calculable ==> predictable & knowable)
•Latour's laboratory --render--> a particular object/process =/=
•game develop --render--> contingency (contingent events [within an already existing horizon of expectation / coded structure])

emergence of intelligences (of the users) --> (Massumi's) analogue: something that cannot be purely reduced to measurement through quantitative states or mathematical modelling (for example vision --into--> imagination, noise in the ear --into--> music in the heart [body operating as transducer] --> *transduce energy*) =/= digital: exhaustively possibilistic (control represented and manipulated through discrete quantitative states)

game design as an essentially the *anticipatory practice* (practices that attempt to plan, preempt, and rationalise the potentiality of future events in order to bring this potentiality within a logic of calculation -Anderson)
•shape the potential actions of potential users --> rendering contingency visible

somatic bodily techniques + analytical ways of conceptualizing and responding to situations (within the game, or animation task in a software) --> reduce them to abstract and codified tendencies ~= rig

(design:) rendering contingency visible through the practices of testing --> build affect into anticipatory practices

airport: rigged architecture (passenger is faced with a situation in which forwards or backwards are the only directions they may go)

3D animation --> [using] digital (a form of calculative abstraction) + [to create positive encounter with] analogue body subject (irreducible to purely digital or discrete mathematical states)

rigging ~~--> envelopment: complex forms of difference (between the analogue and the digital) are transduced and rendered visible

event as a process of ecological emergence (outcome of a material assemblage of various entities, forces, and rules working together to encourage and prohibit specific forms of movement and action) --help--> *how the potential for events to happen are being designed into environments* (preemption, both digital and physical)

mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps us away and impresses us for fleetingness as the basic law of constancy <--Heidegger-- a logic that is central to our experience of modern technology
~/=
games involve the development of techniques for interacting with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body

•(gamer's) body <==shaped== through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they experience
•(game's) responses ==bring==> into being different bodily capacities and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined (by those who produce the images through the processes of design)

correct mixture of contingency and structure

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

prosthesis + castration complex --> “cyberspace: having your everything amputated”

prosthetic skill ~= mastery of the phantom limb
--> rigging

prosthetic --> vivid illustration of the human-technology relations in terms of the body [=/=? hyperobjects]

(set of) architectural metaphors --provide--> foundation of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies

prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***



rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe

homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)

philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist

rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)

--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)


automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]

(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules


Galileo --> geometrical concept of space (=/= differentiated qualitatively)


principles
1. rigging --> a form of understanding =/= form of sensibility
2. in animation (physics) the choice of geometry is pragmatic (=/= analytic, a priori) ---> go to visualization: empiricist conception of geometry

(rigging --> transformations are applied to) geometrical properties: characterized by an invariance with respect to certain transformations [for example a line] --> make it ready for action or animation

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

railway
primary symbolic artifacts of the 19th century
railroad + its carriages should be considered as one machine : “a railway, like a vast machine”

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

(affective arousal) images of beauty amid urgencies of death =/=> trigger the responses one hopes

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

(Deleuzian) [*]event: impact of chaos on the body

most problems don't have solutions --Grosz-->
concepts =/= solutions to problems
problems ==> ways of living =/= answers
concepts: align materiality with incorporeality

identify politics =/= the right to speak about the world, matter, nature
the reign of the i --> who am i, who recognizes me, what can i become --> the right to consumption

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


process ontology of transing : one of many reembodied sensory arts in transgender practices
--> viral vectoring

*flexible global cognition*

discrete threats of knowing
discrete threats of mattering

[*]trans: materialization of process
[*]transdisciplinary: materialization of labors (in & beyond academia) ==Katie==> possibility of care

animal studies --often--> encodes & decodes human

~
relational
trans
multiple
chimeric
liminal
--> relationships that bind humans to their nonhuman companions [...to virtual explosive demons of Charmed TV series --> how we embody animals and how they embody us? rigging demons (my digital folk tale), rigging as sensory medium (a mode of nearness), bodies bound through appropriation]

(in apass:)
zoosemiotic registers
meaning making registers
bodily contact zones

(Charmed demons state of trans:) modes of incorporation, intimacy, inhabitation
--> tranimals: trans animals, range of kinds of sapience and being in various distributed cognitions, syntaxes,and embodiments (and affects)

animals become “animals” not just in terms of plurality but in terms of a plurality that is located within spatiotemporal coordinations
(Kelley, Hayward > Katie)

‘here’ and ‘there’ ~ material partials

...
sensuous trafficking
from inorganic to organic
transcode sensoria
as refrain
by which life gets lived
play enjoyed
augmented states of being emerge


*distributed cognitions* (populated digitalities) ==Hayles==> abandonment of mastery (anthropomorphic fantasies of control)

my text rigging demons = (an unmetabolized knowledge,) play between technical animator programming + CG interface + soap opera + my affective involvement --> speciation bestiary style


not only tranimals, but national restructuring, political economies of sciences, images, culture industries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*

Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed[...]