[...]al 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 --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)

part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb

--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities

demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text

the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•

play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)

commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)

Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding

3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies

exosome explosive demons, as significant other?

we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)

careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)

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

(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives

emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects

writing technologie (~= activities + skills + devices in layered assemblages + material + conceptual inscription) --literalize--> tensions in grammatology:
•between writing's many possible referent/sign relationships in historical progression <-- Ignace Gelb
•call to account of assumptions about writing's derivations from speech built into the assertion of these relationships <-- Derrida


my writing on Charmed and rigging --> a mime of writing, mime understanding [#simulacra of knowledge], (using Katie's word) a literalizing attempt to work/write in the middle of writing technologies

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

lord of the rings (and similar movies) ~= new forms of evangelization
---> go to propaganda


temporality, time, day & night:

in ajayeb:
گویند که در حدود مغرب حیوانی است. چون آفتاب برآید، حالی بچّه بزاید و بچّه را در آفتاب نهد. به یک روز بزرگ گردد. چون آفتاب فرو رود، بمیرد و بچّه آبستن گردد. دیگر روز که آفتاب برآید، بمیرد وعمر وی یک شب و دو روز بود.

به حدود مکران وتیردابه یست بزرگ از دریا براید و در آفتاب مینگرد و بیهوش گردد تا به وقت زوال چنان شود که مرده، ملاحان با وی بازی کنند، چو آفتاب فرو رود زنده گردد، در آفتاب جان بدهد و از وی سیر نگردد

از اسکندر رومی پرسیدند که در عالم چه دیدی از عجایب؟ گفت در مشارق و مغارب گردیدم اعجوبه دیدم به چین و ماچین. در مفازهٔ درختها دیدم رسته، بوی مشک از آن‌ میدمید و از بامداد که آفتاب برآمدی تا وقت زوال از زمین برمیخاستی و پس از زوال به زمین فرو شدی، به وقت غروب تمام به زمین فرو رفته بودی، روز دگر که آفتاب بر آمدی درختها سر از آب بر آوردی.

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

in Nezami (with the notion of bamdad بامداد morning):

چو برزد بامدادان خازن چین به درج گوهرین بر قفل زرین

چو بر زد بامدادن بور گلرنگ غبار آتشین از نعل بر سنگ

بامدادان که صبح زرین تاج کرسی از زر نهاد و تخت از عاج

بامدادان که روز روشن گشت شب تاریک فرش خود بنوشت
صبح یک زخمی دو شمشیری داد مه را ز خون خود سیری

چو صبح از دم گرگ برزد زبان به خفتن درآمد سگ پاسبان
خروس غنوده فرو کوفت بال دهل زن بزد بر تبیره دوال

که چون بامدادان چراغ سپهر جمال جهان را برافروخت چهر
به جلوه برآورد خورشید دست عروسانه بر کرسی زر نشست

به نیک اختری روزی از بامداد که شب روز را تاج بر سر نهاد

چو آمد زلف شب در عطر رسائی به تاریکی فرو شد روشنائی
برون آمد ز پرده سحر سازی شش اندازی بجای شیشه بازی

چو مشگین جعد شب را شانه کردند چراغ روز را پروانه کردند
به زیر تخته‌نرد آبنوسی نهان شد کعبتین سندروسی
بر آمد مشتری منشور بر دست که شاه از بند و شاپور از بلا رست

چو شد دوران سنجابی وشق دوز سمور شب نهفت از قاقم روز
سر از البرز بر زد جرم خورشید جهان را تازه کرد آیین جمشید

شباهنگام کاین عنقای فرتوت شکم پر کرد ازین یک دانه یاقوت
به دشت انجرک آرام کردند بنوشانوش می‌در جام کردند
در آن صحرا فرو خفتند سرمست ریاحین زیر پای و باده بر دست
چو روز از دامن شب سر برآورد زمانه تاج زرین بر سر آورد
بر آن پیروزه تخت آن تاجداران رها کردند می بر جرعه خواران

سپیده دم چو دم بر زد سپیدی سیاهی خواند حرف ناامیدی
هزاران نرگس از چرخ جهانگرد فرو شد تا بر آمد یک گل زرد

چو شب زلف سیاه افکند بر دوش نهاد از ماه زرین حلقه در گوش

شبا هنگام کز صحرای اندوه رسیدی آفتابش بر سر کوه
سیاهی بر سپیدی نقش بستی علم برخاستی سلطان نشستی

چو شب روی از ولایت در کشیدی سپاه روز رایت بر کشیدی


night in Nezami's Khamse:
فرو زنده شبی روشنتر از روز جهان روشن به مهتاب شب‌افروز
شبی باد مسیحا در دماغش نه آن بادی که بنشاند چراغش
ز تاریکی در آن شب یک نشان بود که آب زندگی دروی نهان بود
سوادی نه بر آن شبگون عماری جز آن عصمت که باشد پرده‌داری
صبا گرد از جبین جان زدوده ستاره صبح را دندان نموده
شبی بود از در مقصود جوئی مراد آن شب ز مادر زاد گوئی
ازین سو زهره در گوهر گسستن وز آن سو مه به مروارید بستن
زمین در مشک پیمودن به خروار هوا در غالیه سودن صدف‌وار
ز مشک افشانی باد طربناک عبیرآمیز گشته نافه خاک
دماغ عالم از باد بهاری هوا را ساخته عود قماری
سماع زهره شب را در گرفته مه یک هفته نصفی بر گرفته
ثریا بر ندیمی خاص گشته عطارد بر افق رقاص گشته
جرس جنبانی مرغان شب‌خیز جرسها بسته در مرغ شب‌آویز
دد و دام از نشاط دانه خویش همه مطرب شده در خانه خویش
اگر چه مختلف آواز بودند همه با ساز شب دمساز بودند

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

climate in Nezami:

یکی شب از شب نوروز خوشتر چه شب کز روز عید اندوه کش‌تر
سماع خرگهی در خرگه شاه ندیمی چند موزون طبع و دلخواه

زمستان گشته چون ریحان ازو خوش که ریحان زمستان آمد آتش

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

in Shahnameh (night):

چو شب گردش روز پرگار زد  فروزنده را مهره در قار زد

سوی خانه رفتند هر سه چوباد شب آمد بخفتند پیروز و شاد
چو خورشید زد عکس برآسمان پراگند بر لاژورد ارغوان

به شادی درآمد شب دیریاز چو خورشید رخشنده بگشاد راز

شب تیره تا شد بلند آفتاب همی گشت با نوذر افراسیاب

شب تیره تا برکشد روز چاک نیایش کنم پیش یزدان پاک

شب تیره چون روی زنگی سیاه ستاره نه پیدا نه خورشید و ماه
تو خورشید گفتی به بند اندرست ستاره به خم کمند اندرست

ز شبگیر تا تیره شد آفتاب همی خون به جوی اندر آمد چو آب

به روز درخشان شب آمد سیاه چپ و راست لشکر بیاراستند

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

in old Farsi:
پرچم = دم گاو بزرگ
خانه = اتاق
هیجان = مستی جنسی (حیوان نر)، جنبش دریا
دانستن to know = توانستن to be able to
خسته شدن getting tired = مجروح شدن getting injured
سرشتن to create = مخلوط کردن to mix, compose
راه بردن = شناختن، بلد بودن
raftan = eshal gerftan
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan



TRAVEL*

-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )

world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,

traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration

investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies

trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity

which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?

pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?


(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius

an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)

intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***

Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)

--> separation ??? =/=? compose

media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video

why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.

practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.

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

[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance from the yoke of bondage”
The Globe of Gottorf and deliverance from the yoke of bondage
The cast of Golestan and the magnitude prison of Globe



Das Gesicht des Paradies und schlichtendes Gottorfer Riesenglobus
Adam Olearius and Sa'di in bondage

magnetic fields of

intermediate category
contiguous mass of flowers and tulips
magnitude prison
Others adopt Hell
...instead you are in paradise


traveling
post travel

Paradise Roads

Gesicht
Globe of Gottorf and Golestan of Sa'di


foreign affairs

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

Planthroposcene, the age of gardens

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

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”

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When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

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the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way

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Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)

dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere

the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line

the hand that sees
a hand that perceives

the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)

study of the Persian object

gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near

(an) art of viewing

how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other

optical visuality

erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed


*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open


a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)


celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye

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[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]


(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer

is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing

a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.

an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators

When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.

(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)

A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.

*locational imaging*

As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or anticipated memory in dialogue with the names, places, and forms on the map[...]

(Olearius drawings and frontispieces) establishes a geography, manufactured from cartographic elements

When a geography is given a sense of identification, of difference, doubt, a discerning gaze, or a critical reverie [the people, animals, subjects in the map cannot see how they are being mapped]


(how certain places are made to become the) simulacra of others*

perspective, visual style, narrative economy, scale, [...], the stakes of mimesis, and reception


story about the demise of nation and its cartographer:
(Dreamtigers by J. L. Borges)
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.

****
The one that is in the other forever betrays its differences with respect to its surrounding milieu in the field of the frame.


cartography at the time of its emergence in early modern print-culture [...] maps were tipped into books to call attention to the aspect and format of a medium for which seeing and reading were of a same character.


toward productive, critical, and even creative speculation


a map in a movie begs and baits us to ponder the fact that who we are or whomever we believe ourselves to be depends, whether or not our locus is fixed or moving, on often unconscious perceptions about where we come from and may be going.

To be able to say who one is depends on believing in the illusion that consciousness is in accord with where it is felt in respect at once to itself and to its milieus.***

maps ==> that we are naturally in the world

ontology is a function of geography

*** Figures in a topographic field are as they are because geography is destiny ***

(can be defined in a narrow sense) Identity: the consciousness of belonging (or longing to belong) to a place and of being at a distance from it.


map:
•a guarantee for “taking place”
•a sign of prevarication (a map is inserted both to establish a fallacious authenticity of a place and to invent new or other spaces)


We find ourselves immediately undone by the weightless fact that we have no reason to be where we are.


rhetoric of invisibility

maps are of a spatial scale

the history of cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power (as David Buisseret [1992], Michel Foucault [1975 and 1994 (1967)], J. Brian Harley [1988 and 2001], Denis Wood [1992], and others have shown)

symbolic and political effectiveness of cartographic diagrams

(to leave open) the art of living with space itself

what it means to be located and discerned in the world


they lead the viewer “all over the map”


regime of the “image-fact” --> implicit cartography
an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed

Conley > Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.



(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us

Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age

{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)

construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space

early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self

(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories

geographic literature


the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space

new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer

theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity

the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness

mimes the construction (of a world)

contemporary politics of statecraft

...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?

ingenieur du moi
medium engineers


imaginary space, nation, selfhood

*** the self-possessed individual ***

(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)


living conditions of vocal exchange


visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify

a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it


isolario: illustrating the islands of the world, a genre


“national” subjects attached to the geographies that they are both mapping and describing
graphic construction of the self
Olearius's globe of Gottorf (=/= Morton's hyperobject): the effect of totality, of having engineered a world through its own labors. [Ptolemaic-Aristotlian machinery of the spheres, which hold[...]