Like Potted Plants in an Office Lobby

Like Potted Plants in an Office L o b b y K a r l o s GIl

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Like knotted glands in an offish goby…

Holograms Roses

The Nose Issue

Filling a Hole with Plaster

Ghost in the Machine

Image Scanner

by William Gibson

by Edmund Husserl

by Belén Zahera

(and removing the surplus with a spatula)

by Karlos Gil

by Benjamin Cheverton and Jules Duboscq

by Nora Baron

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Towards an ergonomic telepathy.

Overlapping Figures (ii)

Holly Spam

Mutatis Mutantis

Moquette

Mysticism

by Florence Pike

by Bertrand Russell

by Carlos Fdez-Pello

by Karlos Gil

by Karlos Gil

by Martin Stevens and Sami Merilaita

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Summa Technologiae

Plastic Fragments

The Semiotic Hinge

Aestethics of Interruption

Objections to Representations

Tractatus Herbis

by Alfred North Whitehead

by Janne Vanhanen

by John Sutton

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

by Stanislaw Lem

by Jean-François Lyotard

Like knotted glands in an offish goby… … stands for ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’ at the level of speech and writing, in a somewhat similar form of utterance and appearance that even disregarding meaning nonetheless produces it. The experience of words echoing other words is reminiscent of Benjamin Cheverton’s invention - a reducing size machine - which was based on the mechanism of the pantograph: a structure that resembled an accordion, formed by a linkage of parallelograms with pointers placed in both arms, of which one would follow the model whilst the other would draw or sculpt a copy at a different scale.

‘Like potted plants in an office lobby’ [0]

By proportionally reproducing the location and distance between each point that informs a figure, what is repeated is not only the figure but its contour, the line that speaks of every position at once and reveals the transit from one form to the next. Thus, beyond the all too famous discussions on the original and the copy lies the question of this movement that makes replication possible. The phrase embedded in multiple shifts. The path traced by repetition.

A replica does not refer to a model at first but re-enacts the motion by which it is produced. The experience of objects echoing other objects expects and at the same time recalls this movement, which unites them in a sort of fraternity while keeping them apart.

…precedes ‘Like knotted glands in an offish goby’, where ‘like’ remains identical in both as to indicate or exactly reproduce the movement that connects distant figures, be it under the logic of resemblance or that of meaning. The ‘like’ entails remembrance and the retrieval of memories. Every time we reproduce this journey by saying ‘like’, we actualize this movement and anticipate the next.

[1]

Even if the word replica seems to emphasize the apparition of an exact copy the term itself contains a specific movement by which we are reminded of the Latin word ‘replicare’ meaning ‘to repeat’, ‘to fold again’ and later ‘to reply’.

So by uttering ‘like knotted glands in an offish goby’, I come back to ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’ to which I had replied ‘like knotted glands in an offish goby’ while overhearing ‘like dotted pants in a selfish hobby’.

‘Like knotted glands in an offish goby’… …sets in motion a play on words, ‘like potted plants in an office lobby’. Each case containing thirty one letters and seven words that look (a)like and sound (a)like but cannot merge. It is this reverberation, this distance: the evidence that one cannot speak in vacuum.

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Echoing suggests once again the movement created by enunciation, the reflection of sound waves, from one surface to another until they reach the listener.

For whenever one replicates, someone else repeats and responds.

T o w a r d s a n e r g o n o m i c t e l e p a t h y

Etymologically, telepathy describes remote experience - tele meaning distance and pathos meaning feeling or perception. Despite its theoretical coinage I propose to read telepathy beyond the caricature of getting inside someone else’s head or understanding the thoughts that others claim to be having at a given time, silently. That would somehow portray telepathy --and language-- as a set of clear cut meanings and solid concepts, notwithstanding the abstract process these two undergo in order to transform phenomenological inputs into inteligible outputs; ignoring a bodily and aesthetic process that is profoundly linguistic yet highly unstable. Telepathy shouldn’t be just a smartphone – although we can definitely use a smartphone telepathically. We can argue that the very moment we are aware of an experience we are remembering it already, distorting it, mediating it linguistically. “Live” experience would be an illusion generated by just-recorded stimulus: as it happens with the speed of light, saying we have a direct experience is a colloquial way of overlooking a delay, so small, that reveals itself only at a great distance: just because the delay is invisible to the eye we shouldn’t rule out telepathy as part of the process, dismissing it as an impossible psychic device of scientific fiction. In the contemporary scheme experience, as language, would not be what we have culturally constructed as our sensation proper but a relation of different exteriors; our “own experience” is always objectified; our senses are ways of sharing with something else. A caress, a reading, a landscape. . Even when we have an inner feeling, an internal experience of ourselves such as a headache, the flu or sadness, we submit to the reification of this pain or sensation as an autonomous object within “ourselves”, hence manageable.

We subdivide the self and treat the experience as a temporary hardrive partition so that even the internal propioception is materialized, that is, formalised or verbalized, and taken care of lingüistically. That is why, to feel the different parts of your body when you are still, you have to focus on them, name them, separate yourself momentarily through mental words or meditation, to give that inadverted constant feeling of being still a shape you can adapt the self to. This v e r s i o n of experience is not precisely new and can be easily related to the multiple psychoanalitic branches of the lacanian sort. However, linking our “own experience” to actual telepathy might prove to be a horse of a different color. The traditional telepathic tale of being able to transmit “what I feel” or “what I think” without saying a single word is built upon the assumption that there is something clear to transmit; that there is a total control of the subject; that we can truly decide and define what it is that we feel or see or read. It assumes that when we think we are basically talking in silence, which is quite an inaccurate statement. It indirectly classifies experience as something more truthful to the self than its equivocal rational idealisation. Eventually, this traditional approach considers the linguistic role of the body ignoring it as the continuous and blurry organ it is: instead, the body is depicted as the aristotelian proof of an unequivocal identity; it is the device where experience leaves an objective physical imprint allowing for one to know things better from the “inside” of this imprinted body than others do from the outside. However, I am inclined to believe that the illusion of owning the self is based on the quantity of our encounters with certain external objects and not on the “veracity” of these innner experiences which are, quite the opposite, consistently distanced, mediated and telepathic.This could help explain synesthetic phenomena, ghost limbs, intuition or analogue magic as adaptations of the self to objects beyond the constitutive neighbouring ones: a sign that we can be equally telepathic when we imagine a moving rock in the middle of the Arctic than we are when touching a keyboard with our finger.

In other words, it is the amount of dealing with our bodily objects that veils distance and creates the illusion of a consistent, enclosed form of sentience that is “ours”. And it is based on that, that we agree on a definition of experience that can be culturally integrated and socially shared – a unitarian non-transferrable “me”, that is, paradoxically, one of the greatest social conventions of capitalism and mass consummerism. So when we agree that our experiences are unique and non-transferrable other than by verbal or alphabetic forms of language we are ironically eliminating difference and undermining the equivocal nature of language and perception; we accept everyone knows positively who they are and what they are thinking at any time: we admit the only way for telepathy to exist is to be able to transfer this chimera of a true and positive self experience; we say that everything else, any other intuition or guess, is plain fiction, trickery or mere coincidence. Yet, if we think that the aforementioned blurriness of the continuous body is also linguistic –that language is not clear but a blur of feelings and signs of every sort-- and that experience is not a pure stimulus but that it starts by translating our own experience to ourselves in a dirty, delayed, mediated and contaminated manner –that I cannot be fully sure of what my “own” experience is unless I incur in a considerable amount of belief– , when all that happens, then our “own” experience becomes a regular byproduct of language and becomes subject to all the mediatic aberrations of translation, dissemination and interpretation, making telepathy a mundane, tangible material means of transfering it. Again, as postructuralist psychoanalysis would put it, it is not only that communication with the other is erratic and absent, but that the very subject proceeds from this negative othering and blind-spot; that we are already blindguessing what we experience ourselves without having to try it on someone else. The telepathic diferential would add to the theory that this constant and psychoanalytical blind-spot make us natural-born-telepaths, and that telepathy understood as some sort of technological feat for the positive transmission of information is quite a serious political threat to the otherwise open-ended etymological nature of telepathy itself: to hear the thoughts of someone else in plain english 5000 miles away is, I insist, degrading experience and language to mere letters that are decoded against a standardised dictionary definition.

On the contrary, if we embrace that telepathy is inherent to the way the subject experiments themselves, it is not that far-fetched to imagine it can extend that native ability to experience someone else’s through the same erratical speculation and assimilation they already use against their own experience. This approach to telepathy not only draws a scheme of the linguistic othering, but describes the mediated blurriness of the self to its “own” material being and dismisses erratic translation as the proof that telepathy with other things does not exist. In a world where experience is esentially elusive to err in our predictions is precisely what empowers us, telepaths, to participate of an experience that belongs to nobody completely. If the past 100 years have debunked the western positivist notion of the self, of language and of experience, telepathy becomes nothing near a paranormal power but a fundamental quality of matter: it reveals itself as the very way we culturally, socially and eccentrically invent our psychic uniformity, at a distance with ourselves and our bodily and physical borders. Telepathy becomes the ergonomic device for linguistic and cultural adaptation: it is the tool we use to adapta an absent identity to a set of physical things or the procedure by which the matter is dreaming about us; a body to a tool, a place to a mind. If we picture telepathy as a way of emancipating ourselves from the concept or “our own” thoughts and experiences and as long as we do not take any telepathic reading literally --starting with our own experience-- we can hastily give in to the pleasure of inconsistently and ergonomically predicting what others are thinking. As a matter of fact we are already doing it. We can’t stop doing it. Telepathy is acknowledging we have been doing it all a l o

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Summa T e c h n o l o giae

Talk about the future. But isn’t talking about future roses at least an inappropriate occupation for someone lost in the highly inflammable forests of the present? And the investigation of the thorns of these roses, the search for the problems of our great-grandchildren, while we cannot even deal with today’s abundance of problems, does such scholasticism not border absurdity? If only we had the justification of searching for means to strengthen our optimism or of doing it for the love of truth, clearly visible in a future without storms, even literally taken, after the possibility of climate control. The justification for these words, however, does not lie in any academic passion, nor in unshakable optimism which imposes the faith that, whatever may happen, the outcome will be favorable. The justification is at the same time simpler, more practical, and maybe more modest, since while I am preparing to write about the future, I am simply doing what I am able to do, no matter how good I am at this, since it is my only ability. But if this is true, then my work will be no less, no more dispensable than any other, because every work is based on the assumption that the world exists and that it will continue to exist. Thus having made sure that the intention is free of unprincipledness, let us ask about the extent of the subject and the method. We will talk about various aspects of civilization that can be thought up, and which can be derived from today’s prerequisites, however small the probability of their realization may be. The foundations for our hypothetical constructions, in turn, shall be given by technologies, i.e., the ways, dependent on knowledge and social abilities, in which goals are realized, goals chosen by the community as well as those which nobody had in mind initially.

The mechanism of the various technologies, existing as well as possible ones, is not of interest to me, and I would not have to deal with it, if the creative activities of man were, godlike, free of any spoiling caused by the unwanted - if we could, now or at some time, realize our intentions in a pure state, coming close to the methodological precision of Genesis, if, by saying “let there be light”, we could obtain, as a final product, the very light, without any unwanted ingredients. However, the above mentioned bifurcation of goals, or even the replacement of the chosen goals by different, often unwanted ones, is a typical phenomenon. Moaners find similar faults even in the work of God, especially since the introduction of a prototype for beings endowed with reason and the start of mass production of this model, Homo Sapiens - but this part of reflection is better left to theo-technologists. It suffices to say that, in doing anything, man almost never knows what he is actually doing - in any case he does not know it all the way. To reach for the extreme: the destruction of Life on Earth, so possible today, was not intended by any of the discoverers of atomic energy. Thus technologies are of interest to me somehow out of necessity, since a certain civilization includes all that the general public hoped for, as well as things which were nobody’s intention. Sometimes, even more often, a technology is created by chance, e.g., in searching for the philosopher’s stone, porcelain was invented, but the fraction of intentional, conscious goals, in the set of all events that are able to initiate technologies, is growing as knowledge progresses. What is indisputable is that, as they become rare, surprises can in turn grow to apocalyptic dimensions. As was actually mentioned above.

“Dilemmas” Cognitive ergonomics is concerned with mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system.[5] (Relevant topics include mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance, human-computer interaction, human reliability, work stress and training as these may relate to human-system and Human-Computer Interaction design.)

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There are only few technologies which are not double-edged, as is shown for example by the scythes attached to the wheels of the Hittite chariots, or the proverbial plowshares forged into swords. Every technology is, in principle, an artificial extension of the natural, inherent to everything that is alive, tendency to rule the environment, or at least not to be defeated by it in the struggle for existence. Homeostasis - the scholarly name for the striving for equilibrium, i.e., for survival in defiance of change - developed chalky and chitin skeletons which could resist the force of gravitation, legs enabling mobility, wings and fins, canine teeth making eating easier, horns, jaws, digestive systems, protecting armors and camouflage shapes, until this led to the independence of organisms from their environment by regulation of a constant body temperature. In this way small islands of decreasing entropy in a world of general entropy increase were created. Evolution does not restrict itself to this; from organisms, from types, classes and varieties of plants and animals in turn it creates superior entities, no islets anymore, but islands of homeostasis, forming the whole surface and atmosphere of the planet. The living nature, the biosphere, is at the same time cooperation and mutual eating, an alliance which is inseparably connected with fight, as is demonstrated by every hierarchy that has been investigated by ecologists: these are, especially among animal forms, pyramids, at the top of which rule the large predators, eating smaller animals, and these in turn others still, and only on the very ground, at the bottom of life’s kingdom, acts the green transformer of solar into biochemical energy, omnipresent on the land and in the oceans, which by billions of inconspicuous blades carries the changing, for taking on new forms continuously, but constant, for not coming to and end as a whole, massifs of life.

Homeostatic activity, which used technologies as specific organs, made man the ruler of the Earth, a powerful one actually only in the eyes of the apologist, which he is himself. In view of climatic perturbations, earthquakes, the rare, but possible danger of impact of a large meteor, man is in principle as helpless as he was in the last Ice Age

Sure - he developed methods of assistance for the victims of such and of other cataclysms. Some of them he is able to predict - if only approximately. He is still far from homeostasis on a planetary scale, not to speak of homeostasis of stellar dimensions. Unlike most animals, man does not so much adjust himself to the environment, as he rebuilds the environment according to his needs. Will this ever be possible with regard to the stars? Will there arise, maybe in a very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes, such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year fire? It seems to me that this is possible, and don’t I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnician to stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance that it might come true, will be possible. An improbability - I necessarily have to explain at once - which is not based on my faith in the necessary triumph of Ormuz over Ahriman. I don’t trust any promise, I don’ believe in assurances based on the so called humanism. The only way to deal with a certain technology is another technology. Today, man knows more about his dangerous inclinations than he knew a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years his knowledge will be even more complete. Then he will be able to benefit from it.

“Overlapping figures” Digital Metaplasticity describes plastic qualities of digital media configurations and its expressions through the applications of abstract art languages and methodologies to computational symbolic systems. The metaplastic media, one of discipline’s objects, within its own aesthetic and semantic codes define a new culture of the representation. Interaction processes defined with metaplastic codes, trace behaviors and plastic multisensorial qualities. 6

H O L O G R A M S O S E S

She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain. But each fr a g m e nt reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.

“Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...and the smell of dust. Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn’t met you yet; you’re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle - and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tapes ends. The inducer’s light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a flat packet of drugs - a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain. Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

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Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains– cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself.

Overlapping figures ii

“More and more people buy objects for intellectual and spiritual nourishment. People do not buy my coffee makers, kettles and lemon squeezers because they need to make coffee, to boil water, or to squeeze lemons, but for other reasons”.

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Discourse produces sense by maintaining regular spaces between terms; the figural produces sense by engaging the desiring body in its relation to signs that are plastic, visual, and dense.The issue of Discourse, Figure concerns thus the role of the signifier in the formation of sense. Is its plasticity a dimension that erases itself in the mechanical production of sense, or does it generate an excess of sense that involves a libidinal involvement with an object in its density and spatiality? The figural designates the gesture that breaks through language and reveals its purely visual forms. This aspect of signification, cannot be reduced to the logic of discourse, to its communicability and transparency, because language requires regularity, and desire is apriori irregular and labile. The issue of discursive communication is to transmit the sense of the phrase “the tree is green” by coding it an defficiently providing the code to as many subjects so that it can be decoded and understood. The issue of art in relation to the phrase “the tree is green” is to experiment with the rules of the sentence, transgress them and integrate into the sentence a type of experience that is foreign to the code itself: color the words, disintegrate their order, displace the syntax.

The sign cannot be reduced to signaling an exterior correlate. The correlate becomes a sign at the moment when it is denoted, revealing some of its components while hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate objects.To the contrary,the object becomes an object through signs, meaning that signs partially disclose the objects. Otherwise said, the act of relating to an object turns the object into a sign. However, discourses fail to entirely convey an exterior correlate, and that is because opacity is central both to the sphere of communication and to the exterior objects themselves. Language cannot assimilate an exterior correlate inside its structure without transforming it, delivering one facade and hiding others. Put inanalytical semiotic terms, language cannotinteriorize a denotatum, an existing referent,without a process of transforming it—the object is never rendered as such but isalways already a semiotized object, and its semiotization implies a selection of some of its qualities because the denotatum is anopaque entity, evincing one side at a time.

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The sign corresponds to a designatum, that is, to a class of object that gives it its regularity and justifies its sense. As a figure, the sign is affected in its plasticity and appearance.

H O L L Y S P A M

— Spam or aesthetics may have initially been a useful adaptation: this is the only way that it could have arisen in the first place (see Darwin on sexual selection, and Elizabeth Grosz’s recent gloss on this). But spam or art quickly outgrew this purpose; it has now become parasitic, and replicates itself even at its host’s expense (cf: peacock’s tails). It serves no further purpose any more. Spam or art is a virus; and, insofar as we have aesthetic sensibilities (including self-consciousness and dwelling just in the present moment), we are that virus.

—1 “I see a poem as a multi-coloured strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments.” —2 “I see a veil, a diaphonous tint, nearly invisible.”

— Our thoughts and bodies, our lives, are “needlessly recursive” and wasteful. Our lives are pointless luxuries in a Darwinian “war universe”. If we are the dominant species on Earth at the moment, this may only be because we are in the situation of flightless birds and marsupials, in areas where the placental mammals have not yet arrived.

Metonymy, which participates in the structuring of every metaphor and can sometimes be a metaphor itself, creates “chains of signification” that stretch in various directions (Fig. 21). The screen uses both metaphor and metonymy to structure space and time around appearances, and this is where it becomes particularly useful in art criticism. Metonymy has to do with the materiality of the sign, its potential for multiple meanings, ambiguity, and the creation of new meaning. Opposition creates an independent function capable of conveying abstract and invisible ideas. Light and dark, day and night, left and right come to stand for the most broadly cosmic and theological notions. The “composite structure” of the sign, described as the opposition of signified to signifier (s/S). By stressing the arbitrariness by which different signifiers are culturally “chosen” to signify things that must be common to cultural groups (tree, arbre, Baum, etc.), the autor was able to demonstrate the cooperative co-existence of two different realms of signification: a metonymic realm that allows for substitution, modification, and error; and a metaphoric realm that instates reality as a consistent and coherent whole.

The Semiotic Hinge (ii) What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. The mind, for its own self-preservation, finds and integrates scattered fragments. Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetualy collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory.

—3 “I hear a melody, screeching and scratching behind the bells.”

—4 “An old backside of a building. Small patches of navy and red lie indiscrimninately on top of white plaster. Where time peeled white, bare gray bricks remain. Decaying colors hinting its previous lives weathered its unique harmony.”

PHILOSOPHY is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the traditional doctrine: we can detect the oversights, the superstitions, the rash generalizations of the past ages. We know so well what we mean and yet were main so curiously uncertain about the formulation of any detail of our knowledge. This word `detail’ lies at the heart of the whole difficulty. You cannot talk vaguely about Nature in general. We must fix upon details within nature and discuss their essences and their types of interconnection. The world around is complex, composed of details. We have to settle upon the primary types of detail in terms of which we endeavour to express our understanding of Nature. We have to analyse and to abstract, and to understand the natural status of our abstractions.

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Theoretical ergonomics. Fudge Factor. Theory and practice come together through a type of Western confectionery, usually soft, sweet, and rich that it acquires a smooth, creamy consistency. Chocolate is necessary to hold back gravity and achieve a static universe. Fudge Factor is more than a unique confection, it is one of those simple pleasures that give us a moment of peace as we enjoy not only the fresh creamy taste but the warm flood of memories that it brings. E x perience meets theory through a viscous chocolate. The enjoyment of fitting a piece in a puzzle. The pleasure of touching the surface of the puzzle with the palm of the hand before it vanishes. Adapting elements that fit the characteristics of the agents who will use them. Naming a thing is filling a hole with plaster and rem ov i ng the surplus with a spatula. Speaking is covering cakes with sticky chocolate. Lambda is a joint in the skull, the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, the symbol for the fudge factor, the starting point of all prosthetic designs and the secret ingredient of chocolate.

mutatis m u t a n t i s The use of the term crypsis has caused disagreement over the last few years, but we argue that it comprises all traits that reduce an animal’s risk of becoming detected when it is potentially perceivable to an observer. In terms of vision, the term crypsis includes features of physical appearance (e.g. coloration), but also behavioural traits, or both, to prevent detection. To distinguish crypsis from hiding (such as simply being hidden behind an object in the environment), we argue that the features of the animal should reduce the risk of detection when the animal is in plain sight, if those traits are to be considered crypsis. Hiding behind an object, for example, does not constitute crypsis (see also Edmunds 1974), because there is no chance of the receiver detecting the animal. We opt for this usage for several reasons. First, this is broadly consistent with the literal and historical terminology; (albeit briefly) Poulton (1890) used the term to describe colours whose ‘object is to effect concealment’; Cott (1940) uses cryptic appearance to ‘encompass modifications of structure, colour, pattern and habit’; and Edmunds (1974) defines the terms crypsis and cryptic, in terms of predators failing to detect prey. By contrast, some researchers have defined crypsis as synonymous with background matching, largely because they rapidly adopted Endler’s (1978, 1984) definition of crypsis, where an animal should maximize camouflage by matching a random sample of the background at the time and location where the risk of predation is the greatest. However, in recent years, it has become clear that the above definition is wrong on a number of grounds. First, matching a random sample of the background does not necessarily minimize the risk of detection when an animal is found on several backgrounds (cf. ‘compromise camouflage’; Merilaita et al. 1999, 2001; Houston et al. 2007; Sherratt et al. 2007). Second, the risk of detection can be decreased by disruptive markings, where the emphasis is on specifically breaking up tell-tale features of the animal.

Similar points can be made for other camouflage strategies, such as self-shadow concealment (SSC). Finally, matching a random sample on even one background does not guarantee a high level of background matching or crypsis (Merilaita & Lind 2005). This idea of random sample is problematic even on simple backgrounds, because the animal may still be visible due to spatial or phase ‘mismatch’ with important background features, such as edges (Kelman et al. 2007). For these reasons, we simply refer to crypsis as including colours and patterns that prevent detection (but not necessarily recognition).

C R Y P S I S

C R Y P S I S

Despite the above, it is a subject of some debate as to which other forms of camouflage also prevent detection and should therefore be included under crypsis along with background matching (see below). One of the main arguments surrounding what should be included under crypsis regards disruptive coloration, and whether this prevents recognition or detection. While some researchers (e.g. Stobbe & Schaefer 2008) assert that disruption prevents recognition of the animal, we argue that disruptive coloration initially prevents detection by breaking up form (which in turn may also influence recognition) and is therefore a type of crypsis. For instance, disruptive coloration seemingly works by breaking up edge information, so that a predator may not detect a prey item because the salient outlines that may give away its presence have been destroyed.

In countershading, an animal possesses a darker surface on the side that typically faces light and a lighter opposite side. Most researchers seem to now agree that the term refers to the appearance of the coloration and not the function, especially as countershading may be involved with several functions. These include compensation of own shadow (SSC), simultaneously matching two different backgrounds in two different directions (background matching), changing the three-dimensional appearance of the animal, protection from UV light and others (Ruxton et al. 2004). For the purposes of this theme issue, the two most relevant functions are SSC, where the creation of shadows is cancelled out by countershading, and ‘obliterative shading’, where the shadow/light cues for three-dimensional form of the animal are destroyed (Thayer 1896). We argue that SSC prevents detection by removing conspicuous shadows, and obliterative shading prevents detection by removing salient three-dimensional information, so group both these under crypsis.

[9] —7 “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

—8 “You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.” —9 “And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.”

In principle, some of the issues of defining types of camouflage may be cleared up by specifically defining detection. However, at present, there are few good ways of fully defining camouflage object properties correctly with respect to the relevant viewer’s perception. Understandably, there is a real issue that distinguishing between detection and recognition in experimental situations is very difficult, and it follows that preventing detection may also lead to a prevention of recognition, e.g. the receiver does not recognize the form of the animal because it does not detect its edges. What matters is what the colour patterning or other camouflage features primarily do. As such, masquerade need not prevent detection but it does prevent recognition, whereas disruptive coloration and SSC, along with background matching, primarily prevent detection.

An additional form of camouflage, distractive markings, is also included under crypsis because they seemingly prevent detection. Although the distractive markings should be detected, the outline of the body or other revealing characteristics, and thus the main part of the animal, is not. However, we note that little work has specifically investigated distractive markings, and that one could also argue that if part of the object is detected, then recognition of the prey is also prevented. Clearly, there is much more work to be done.

— 12 “His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.”

— 10 “They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.”

— 11 “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”

— 13 “Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.”

Aesthetics OF INTERRUPTION

— In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As electricity has become the basic element of the world we live in, the steady hum of power grids and their flowing immaterial essences slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of everyday machinery, the ghostly rapport has also relocated into the domain of current fluctuations, radio interference and misread data. Early telegraph experimenters heard strange raps and clicks issuing from disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field, seemingly communication from some other side; Thomas Edison tried to put together a radio device to address denizens of other worlds; Constantin Raudive, Raymond Cass and Friedrich Jürgenson spent hours and hours attempting to capture voices of the dead onto magnetic tape; radio antennas at Arecibo Observatory are pointed skywards, waiting for extraterrestrial signals. The presence of some outside force has always been supposed to be apparent through interference and interruption.

[2] Actual facts about these manifestations are not really important. The interesting thing is that every new medium seems to open up a new kind of outside, every new mode of perception leaving out, or even creating, something imperceptible, and on the other hand bringing out something previously out of reach. Erik Davis has named the outside boundary of electronic media as the “electromagnetic imaginary,” meaning that many animistic or alchemistic notions of essential energies and life spirits have been translated into the concept of electricity, and remaining in the “technological unconscious.” Machines seem to be inhabiting some kind of life, even as it is an extension of ourselves. The sheer uncanniness of a disembodied voice transmitting via telephone line, as experienced by early telephone users, is quite hard to imagine now, but think of hearing a voice of a recently departed person on an answering machine.

—We can remember Marshall McLuhan’s words about electronic media having outered the central nervous system itself, thus making the world into a smooth plateau of perception. This rings true when considering digital media, which is characterized by its transparency, its smoothness. Any type of information is de- and recodable into another format. This kind of flux and mutability of digital media makes it into an immersive enviroment, rather like sound. So far, however, our conception of electronic media seems to have been very visually dominated and tied up to the more general link between the visual and the rational, which has been prominent in Western thought. However, many thinkers have also heard something new coming from the explosion of new media since the 19th Century. McLuhan wrote about the acoustic quality of the electronic global village he saw coming. German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in his essay “On the Way to an Auditive Culture?” addresses the problem of oculacentrism of the Western philosophical tradition and tries to create a conception of an auditive form of thinking. How to think of sound itself when the epistemological focus of our thinking and our concepts is located in a seeing subject? With its temporality and immersiveness, sound seems to avoid clarity, categorization and objectivity. Light and sight reveal objects, sound is the result of processes, of something happening — and of mistakes: there can’t be glitches without processes. The whole notion of glitch is tied up to an “auditive” thoughtform, which approaches the world as a multiplicity of processes rather than a pre-set field of objects.

The scratches and glitches of contemporary electronic music, its aesthetics of interruption and misuse, should be considered in relation to the ontology of the Outside, or its hauntology (to quote Derrida writing about hauntings and returnings). Contemporary thought has painstakingly strived to approach this outside of thought and perception. The subject and the world, if such separation can be made, are seen to be formed in complex interrations between both. The subject emerges from the processes of the world. Deleuze and Guattari give these processes a name: machines. Machines are defined as “a system of interruptions or breaks” (AO 36), cutting and redirecting the energetic flows of preconscious world, which can be thought of as an infinitely complex assemblage of machines acting upon other machines acting upon others etc. A subjectivity is emergent and residual, having only a limited perspective upon the underlying world of forces it inhabits. Looking at our surroundings we recognize things, we are creatures of habit and conventions. Thinking, ultimately a creative act, is not recognition but an encounter, violence to thought. Something comes from the outside that interrupts and grabs us and forces us outside of our habitual territory.

—By introducing the refrain Deleuze and Guattari have created a concept that illustrates the constantly shifting nature of relations between territorialized or habitual milieu and the chaos of the outside forces. A refrain, in the domain of music, can be described very vaguely as a rhythmic element, something marking out a territory amidst chaos: a nursery rhyme, a child’s song to comfort oneself, a birdsong to stake out a territory? Refrain doesn’t, however, have just a reactionary function against chaos; it is situated in the middle and has a potential to both reterritorialize and deterritorialize sound, constantly on the border of a territory. Art has posited itself onto this border. Or, to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, all creative activity, whether it’s art, philosophy or science, has to approach the outside of thought. To be able to create new ways to feel the world, new percepts and affects, one has to court the chaos and worship the glitch.

Machines Contemporary electronic music has approached this outside of thought, or outside of music, by distancing itself from the hierarchy of Western classical music tradition, which has valuated certain musical structures (such as melody/harmony) over another qualities (rhythm, timbre) and posited the score as a transcendent compositional principle. Deleuze and Guattari observe the deterritorializing tendency of refrain in music: — 25 Certain modern musicians oppose the the transcendental plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds. (MP 267)

— If art’s quest is to bring the imperceptible to perception, music seeks to make audible the inaudible forces of time and duration, to bring out an immanent sound plane, a pure sound block, in which “forms are replaced by pure modifications of speed.” (MP 267) How does one manage to get away from the grip of musical forms while being still able to retain a plane of consistency; to not regress into undifferentiated chaos which couldn’t hold any consistency? This is the question of the refrain.

— In order to become-other, one has to align with some outerior forces and create new machinic assemblages. That’s why Deleuze and Guattari write that refrain isn’t the origin of music but rather a means of preventing it, warding it off (MP 300). Becoming is an alliance. With music machines we have entered a new kind of musical alliance. Phonography, the art of recording sound, allows the production of a smooth sound plane, on which all relations between its various elements are immanent as recording extracts or constructs a block of time, a musical time that is present as sound penetrates our bodies, but emerges as a result from an (quasi)event which is distant from us spatially and temporarily.

One can see the effect of recording or sound processing technology as having helped in breaking with the traditional musical notation and the ideal of a pure musical form. Once all sound has become recordable and reproducible by machines, we can be done away with the concept of music as residing, ultimately, in the score. Phonography and electronic/digital media have flattened out the arborescent model of the actual sound’s relation to a higher structure, that is, the composition itself as actualized in various levels of perfection in the performances of musicians. From machinic point of view (or hearing) there’s no difference between voice and noise, we have only sonic stratum and various means to manipulate that sound matter.

The concept of frequency, according to German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler, brought about by recording technology, allows music to break with the Old European tradition of pythagorean harmony and notation as the preserver of clear and pure sounds (in opposition to the chaotic noise of the world). Since the 19th Century sound has been recordable, vibrations in a carrying medium transferable to a recording surface. “The phonograph does not hear as our ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such.” (Kittler 23) The phonograph hears sounds acousmatically, without a relation to the origin of a sound. Using the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, we can state that the phonograph deterritorializes sound, flattens down the hierarchical organization of music into a rhizome, which is an open, multiple and temporal form of organization and subsceptible to constant de- and recoding. The act of recording is in one way already a creative act of framing and selection. Any recording is a whole in itself, all its characteristics are immanent to itself, without an essential relation to an outerior or higher symbolic order. However, up until the 1960s and the expansion of recording studio technologies, record was generally regarded as referring to an original acoustic event, a performance, which would have more ontologic value (i.e. “realness”) than mere representation of it. Multitrack tape machines make that stance irrelevant; studioas-instrument does away with acoustic realism. A particular soundscape, experienced as a unified whole, could have been assembled during many different takes and places, or wouldn’t have to result from any acoustic events, as in computer music. Through the mixing board and the master tape, the record is the stratified surface of sound.

—I hear no great conceptual divide between various music machines. Whatever means there are available for recording acoustic phenomena or presenting sound, no matter what the source, making sound reproducible and thus variable, all phonographic technologies have the potential to deterritorialize sound and music. Maybe the greatest singular moment in nomadic use (= an act of capturing forces, making a new machinic assemblage of existing machinic formations) of phonographic machinery has been the emergence of hip-hop DJ’ing and the misuse of vinyl records, making a pair of turntables into a nomadic war machine. For a better part of the last century the record remained inactive, a storage capsule of time. Apart from few artistic experimentations vinyl records were used as passive playback devices which always referred to some original event captured onto the grooves of the disc. In a parallel to the reinvention of the electric guitar by finding the aesthetic potential of the feedback noise generated by the guitar— amplifier -circuit (and thus making electric guitar something other than an amplified replica of acoustic guitar), the DJ would find and learn to use the immanent forces within the record itself.

Radio, a medium which in the early 20th Century had a similarly all-pervading role as the internet has today, remained the primary medium of the DJ for a long time. The status of a radio jock rose from that of a salesman/entertainer to a central figure in pop business during the 1950s youth culture explosion. DJ as a sonic artist evolved somewhere else, however: in the discothèque, a club for dancing to recorded music instead of a live orchestra. The first discos were born in 1940s France during the German occupation that hampered the live music circuit. After the war some clubs stuck with the concept of dancing to records. This idea migrated elsewhere and in the 50s dance clubs experienced a massive leap in popularity with the advent of rock’n’roll and youth culture. We can see this as a sort of deterritorialization: instead of responding to the presence of performers the audience responds to the music and the forces it directs into the space it creates.

Disco as a musical style developed from the mantric/tantric heavy funk of James Brown, followed by others, which concentrated on the bass-heavy, steady and monotonously repetitive groove; a becoming-machine of the rhythm section. This style evolved into even more functionalist direction, downplaying the soul element of funk and delving solely in the groove. Record companies started producing long dance remixes of songs. Disco DJs wanted to create an all-night flow of music and that required a skill of seamlessly mixing records into one another. Any kind of music focusing on rhythm rather than melody could be used; DJ was becoming a curatorfigure in the emerging club spaces, such as the loft parties in 1970s New York.

The conceptual leap of DJ from a curator (organizing a collection of works) to an artist (creating a work) happened in 1970s Bronx NY, when local DJs invented the isolating of the breakbeat — and hip-hop: they would play only the rhythmic percussion breaks of funk records, alternating the same passage on two turntables, creating their own music. This rather crude skill of keeping the party going (with the help of an MC hollering encouragements to the party people) soon evolved into finer techniques of vinyl manipulation and collage. The DJ became a cut chemist. Grandmaster Flash’s 1981 record The Amazing Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel was almost literally an encyclopedia of DJ techniques: crossfading, punch-phrasing, backspinning, cutting and scratching... Not only percussion was used as a sound source, almost everything could be dropped into the mix, all kinds of noise, as long as it was on record. In some ways a popularization of musique concrète, this meant a huge shift in the perception of music:

After Flash, the turntable becomes a machine for building and melding mindstates from your record collection. The turntables, a Technics deck, become a subjectivity engine generating a stereophonics, a hifi consciousness of the head, wholly tuned in and turned on by the found noise of vinyl degeneration that hears scratches, crackle, fuzz, hiss and static as lead instruments.

The turntable becomes not only a new kind of percussive instrument, it becomes a syntax-destroyer and a connective synthesizer in a Deleuzian sense (mixing this AND this AND this...). Record is a diagram, a map, rather than a tracing or writing. A map is

entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real... susceptible to constant modification. (MP 12)

— Despite its inventors’ wishes to provide a surface for the representation of an original event, a stable protector of the preceding mode of organization, the record became a destabilizer, weapon in sonic warfare (a nomadic war machine of sorts). DJ’s hand is a terrorwrist “opening up a new field of objectile thought: fingertip perception” (Eshun 18). A deterritorialization of hand and record in the machinic assemblage of scratching. The phonographic diagram, given its direct transduction of physical wave to mechanical impulse or electrical signal, provides a code both precisely reproducible and potentially editable. ... [W]here the score represents, phonography simply transduces... As soon as the deterritorialization of sonic matter into vinyl abstracts it from the moment, and makes music into this random-access memory available time and time again, the sonic matter is susceptible to temporal mutation, warping, looping. (Mackay 250)

[0] DJ’s (ab)use of vinyl is a derangement in every sense of the word. Scratching deterritorializes the noise on the grooves, bends the spiral grooves into lines of flight; scratching rips its source material from the record, transforms the ideal into matter to be molded, cuts into syntax to isolate words and phrases, achieving an Artaud-style decoding of language systems (both human and musical). A scratch takes up a block of recorded time and folds it up in baroque flourishes like a cloth. Scratching makes audible the flow of time and matter, the flow and the machines that cut it, and creates a vinyl psychedelia = scratchadelia, a machinic refrain, a becoming-vinyl of music.

A digital counterpart to the scratch is the often-mentioned glitch. A precariously vague term, which however captures some of the slipperiness of digital media. If analog phonography has led to some sort of metallurgy of sound, made sound malleable and mutable, digital sound processing approaches sound as molecules. The term microsound is very appropriate for the digital music of today. Or, if we take heed of Kim Cascone, we should be talking about post-digital music, since the medium of digital technology has become so transparent it doesn’t reflect in the expression of music anymore. Instead specific sound processing tools, such as Max, AudioMulch or SoundForge produce an auratic sound, as well as providing amazing detail and accuracy in manipulating sound.

With glitches, however, electronic music producers embrace the uncertainty John Cage was talking about. Cracked and malfunctioning soft- and hardware, overloaded operating systems, wrong file types opened as sound documents produce unpredictable sounds, sometimes a ghostly unpresence of sounds outside hearing range or gaps in recorded time. Glitches, clicks and cuts are the sound of sound machines molecularizing, atomizing and ionizing sound, making audible the process of sound itself. If we must make a distinction between the scratch and the glitch, it is this: scratching is the folding of recorded time, metallurgy of sound, taking a flow of matter and producing variations of it. Common to music and metallurgy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the tendency to “”bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matter, a continuous variation of matter,”” in short to bring out the “life proper to matter.” (MP 411)

Glitch, in digital domain, happens on a more abstracted level of decoding that results in molecularized matter. Going beyond the matter—form -division (which scratching can be seen starting to evaporate with its variations on matter) the molecularization of sound

effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guarantees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond it formal limits. (MP 309) In both cases, the scratch and the glitch, sound has escaped the overcoding symbolic order of music, or the trancendental plane of organization of the score, in nomadic alliance of man and machines.

—James Brown’s Sex Machine and Kraftwerk’s Mensch Maschine define electronic music’s identification with machinery with their twin poles of “raw” physicality and “pure” spirit/intellect. To dance as mindless robots or to think music as an incorporeal AI. This all-too established dualism has been broken down at times by the music machinery’s potential to fuse down the two poles and to break down, to express glitches. Dance music, which might at first thought appear as a musical form most tied up with the reterritorializing function of the refrain, with its strict adherence to certain genre-bound norms, appears however as a machine for liberating sound-in-itself. Rhythm: blocks of sound arranged rhythmically, one after another, one beside another, like the instant pop images of Warhol paintings. Repetition makes the thing repeated (the thing not new anymore) present again. Each repetition (a simulacrum of the “original”, if any is to be found) is an event in itself;

Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singula-rity of any first time makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, first time is a last time.

This repetition, this constant now, can be seen in dance music’s lack of drama (or constant crescendo); the changes in music are quantitative instead of qualitative, its narrative is the happening of repetitions. Dance music seeks to build a plateau of intensity. Any vertical, arborescent models are flattened by the rhizomatics of repetition, which undoes the symbolical or critical form of thought. According to Roland Barthes, critique is always either historic or futurologic, its content is culture which equals everything that is inside us, except the present moment (Barthes 32). Electronic dance music sounds astonishingly non-temporal: repetition makes the track happen in the constant now, concentration on the sound of sound (timbre and “color” and texture, the most difficult-to-rememberafterwards- and the most deterritorializing aspects of sound and music) fades it from the memory. Repetition is a way of appearing without form, without identity: it multiplies the same element over and over again, juxtaposes the element with its each successive re-emergence, brings out the differences by bringing out the gaps between singular repetitions, forms a machinic assemblage out of the circulation of sound blocks. Musical repetition: loops within loops, clashing against each other, loopduelle. The audibility of these juxtapositions is a textuality of differences and differences mark out the repetitions = returnings = soundghosts.

R E P E T I T I O N

As

the

builds





up

a

smooth plane of constant present, deterritorializing the sound itself as a singularity, a sonorous force, there’s a tendency for that repetition to become reterritorialized as a cliché, an all-too expectable formula; this seems to be a potential dead-end for numerous genres of electronic dance music. A glitch appears: a wrinkle in time of the constant present. If we listen to an archetypal glitchy sound, an Oval track for example, we can hear a rich tapestry of sound and absence of sound. There are skips, something is missing, there are holes in the smooth space of sound. Or we can consider Kim Cascone’s concept of residualism that involves structuring a work around an absence, removing a signal and leaving only its effects to be heard. Scratching, sampling and the stuttering of malfunctioning soft- and hardware are means of derangement, seeking out a way to make a rhizome out of music, a way to place its elements in continuous variation, where absences, breaks, holes, folds and ruptures can be a part; a way to let ghosts of the outside in.

Love “[M]achines work ... by continually breaking down...” (AO 8), producing anti-production, creating gaps and glitches. One has to remember we?re talking about desiring machines and art’s ability to reflect the formative processes of machinic pre-conscious world, which is libidinal. As Jake Mandell observes in his liner notes for his album Love Songs for Machines, artists’ relation to their tools of the trade has always been fetishistic. A favorite pen of the writer, a beloved brush of the painter; it’s always been intimate. Mandell writes that the once-close relationship of artists and their tools has encountered a crisis in the digital age, the screen—and—mouse -interface is abstract and alienating. Still, as an immersive environment, digital media allow for an exceptionally affectionate experience.

— As tool-using creatures (among other such creatures) we’ve always been cyborgs. “”[T] ools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.”” (MP 90) That is to say, tools imply a symbiosis between two bodies in a machinic assemblage, deterritorializing them both. Think of Roland TB-303 Bassline Generator, becoming an Acid Machine through a glitch, a programming mistake, releasing a whole new spectrum of sounds, transforming both the musician and the instrument. It’s a two-way relation: we can well take heed of Kodwo Eshun’s conception of human beings as the sex organs of synthesizers. New sounds happen between things, in the movement that sweeps you and your computer to somewhere else: in order to effect deterritorializations you have to love your machines.

[3]

figure #1

figure #4

quote #1

quote #4

Cyberspace

Redundancy

Ghost Hieroglyphs

Atlantic Noise

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”

Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Informally, it is the amount of wasted “space” used to transmit certain data. Data compression is a way to reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy, while checksums are a way of adding desired redundancy for purposes of error detection when communicating over a noisy channel of limited capacity.

“His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.”

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

figure #2

figure #5

quote #2

quote #5

Silver Phosphenes

Fast Forward

Parallel Resonance

The Shift Register

The resonance of a parallel RLC circuit is a bit more involved than the series resonance. The resonant frequency can be defined in three different ways, which converge on the same expression as the series resonant frequency if the resistance of the circuit is small.

The Shift Register is another type of sequential logic circuit that is used for the storage or transfer of data in the form of binary numbers. This sequential device loads the data present on its inputs and then moves or “shifts” it to its output once every clock cycle, hence the name “shift register”.

“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.”

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”

figure #3

figure #6

quote #3

quote #6

Central Processing

Accelerationism

Event Horizon

Fragmented Dreams

A central processing unit (CPU) is the hardware within a computer that carries out the instructions of a computer program by performing the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system.

Accelerationism is the belief that in order to generate radical change, the prevailing system of capitalism should be expanded and its growth accelerated so that its self-destructive tendencies can be brought to their conclusion.

“There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”

“It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside culture.”

— 15

[11]

M O Q U E T T E

— The underground rail service is an iconic design symbol of London. This success can partly be attributed to its strong modernist identity, initiated by the Chief Executive of London Transport, Frank Pick (18781941) in the early 20th century. His aim was to integrate modern design with industry to create a distinct corporate style for the network. The Underground was to be a showcase of the very best of contemporary designers for an audience which today amounts to over one billion passengers per year.

— Most people are familiar with the roundel signage by Edward Johnson and the tube maps of Harry Beck, however my prizewinning essay focused in particular on the design of moquette, the often overlooked textile used to cover seating throughout the network.Moquette, the French word for carpet, is a woollen material woven on large looms, which is ideal for use on public transport due to its hardwearing properties. The colourful repetitive patterns often seen on moquette function to camouflage dirt. The moquette used by London Underground is currently woven in two factories, one in Huddersfield and the other in Lithuania, where manufacturing costs are considerably cheaper.

Both the manufacture and design of the moquette have been transformed since it first appeared on the Underground networks in the early 1920s. Frank Pick’s aim was to bring modernist design to the everyday commuter. He employed the best contemporary textile designers of the time, such as Enid Marx and Marion Dorn, whose designs displayed a strong modernist influence. The London Transport Museum Library and Transport for London’s archive contain revealing correspondence between these designers and the London Transport management team during the 1930s. The documents demonstrate the importance that was placed on a close collaboration between designer and manufacturer. They detail many important design decisions which ensured neither the style nor quality was compromised at any stage of the design process. The network underwent changes when Frank Pick’s influence faded after his death in 1941. My essay examined the founding principles and the debates between designers and manufacturers to consider how these changes affected the overall feeling of design unity within the network.

— In more recent years the moquette designer’s role has been transformed by the introduction of Computer Aided Design (CAD), greatly improving the efficiency in production and the style of the designs. To update the debates about design and industry in the present day, I visited the moquette factory in Huddersfield. Here I was able to draw on further historical resources and see production in action. I was also able to discuss with the designers at Holdsworth Ltd the ways in which modern technology has changed moquette and how financial restraints in the recent economic climate have altered manufacturing and design priorities. In the essay I close by exploring London Underground’s plans for the future design of moquette, in particular how design decisions are now being reached. A competition launched in 2009 gave members of the public an opportunity to design a moquette which will eventually be used on all the lines of the London Underground. Furthermore, in 2012 Heatherwick Studio was commissioned by Transport for London to design a new moquette for the redesigned Routemaster Bus. My essay considered the context and significance of this new approach to design for public transport, and concluded by discussing the need for London Underground to continue to employ the best contemporary designers so that the network maintains its position as an iconic design symbol of modern London.

— 16

— 17

— 19

— 18

— 20

— 21

Could memory traces be discovered? Wittgenstein sought to undermine our confidence in the empirical nature of representationism, asking “Why must a trace have been left behind?” (1980, paragraph 905). Do trace theorists misguidedly seek, on a priori grounds, to “dictate to science what to discover in the brain” (Zemach 1983, pp. 32–3)?

Objections to R e p r e s e n

tations

In a taxonomy and evaluation of criticisms of memory representations and traces, this section synthesizes the polemics of theorists who hold quite different positive views about memory. The answers sketched here to some of these criticisms leave open a number of issues. In particular, the issue of how the content of memory representations is determined is barely mentioned: and the question of how memory traces could provide the right causal connections between past and present if they are not static and permanent inner items is postponed to section 3. Again, the key question here is whether memory does involve representation of the past. One initial objection mischaracterizes its target. Some critics complain that trace theorists see an episode of remembering as entirely determined by the nature of the stored item. But, they note, many factors other than internal brain states affect remembering. As Wittgenstein notes, “whatever the event does leave behind, it isn’t the memory” (1980, paragraph 220). Trace theorists, however, accept this point: “the engram (the stored fragments of an episode) and the memory … are not the same thing” (Schacter 1996, p. 70). Traces (whatever they may be) are “merely potential contributors to recollection”, providing one kind of continuity between experience and remembering; so traces are relevant but not sufficient causal/ explanatory factors. In fact, psychologists’ attention is increasingly focussed on the context of recall: research on “synergistic ecphory” (Tulving 1983, pp. 12–14) addresses the conspiratorial interaction of the present cue and circumstances with the trace (Schacter 1982, pp. 181–9; 1996, pp. 56–71). Developmental psychologist Susan Engel argues that often “one creates the memory at the moment one needs it, rather than merely pulling out an intact item, image, or story” (1999, p. 6). So there is no inevitable reduction of the multicausal nature of remembering to a single inner cause (see further sections 3.4 and 3.5 below).

Some defenders of the trace in response drain it of empirical content. Deborah Rosen, for example, develops a “logical notion of the memory trace”, distanced from the “scientific notions for which the logical notion provides only a philosophical underpinning” (1975, p. 3). But giving up the ideal of an independent characterization of the trace may not be necessary. The postulation of traces is empirical, but the relevant domain is not psychology. What’s doing the work is the physical assumption that there is no macroscopic action at a temporal distance, that mechanisms in fact underlie apparent cases of direct action between temporally remote events. This assumption may be mistaken, but challenges to it must offer some positive alternative theoretical framework. The mere logical possibility of a unique “mnemic causation” which does operate at a temporal distance (Heil 1978, pp. 66–69; Anscombe 1981, pp. 126–7) is insufficient, as is the simple denial of any temporal gap between past and present (Malcolm 1963, p. 238). Critics deny that the retention involved in memory requires any continuous storage (Squires 1969; Malcolm 1977, pp. 197–9; Bursen 1978). This worry rightly requires trace theorists to be explicit on the relation between occurrent remembering and dispositional memories. We do need models of the mechanism by which enduring dispositions are actualized. But the criticism does not show that there is anything deeply mysterious in the notion of underlying causal processes which ground memory abilities (Warnock 1987, pp. 50–2; Deutscher 1989, pp. 58–63). The kind of ‘storage’ invoked by trace theorists need not be the storage of independent atomic items localized in particular places, like sacks of grain in a storehouse.

“A dilemma: circularity or solipsism?” How does the postulated trace come to play a part in the present act of recognition or recall? Trace theorists must resist the idea that it is interpreted or read by some internal homunculus who can match a stored trace with a current input, or know just which trace to seek out for a given current purpose. Such an intelligent inner executive explains nothing (Gibson 1979, p. 256; Draaisma 2000, pp.212–29), or gives rise to a vicious regress in which further internal mechanisms operate in some “corporeal studio” (Ryle 1949/1963, p. 36; Malcolm 1970, p. 64).

[8]

But then the trace theorist is left with a dilemma. If we avoid the homunculus by allowing that the remembering subject can just choose the right trace, then our trace theory is circular, for the abilities which the memory trace was meant to explain are now being invoked to explain the workings of the trace (Bursen 1978, pp. 52–60; Wilcox and Katz 1981, pp. 229–232; Sanders 1985, pp. 508–10). Or if, finally, we deny that the subject has this circular independent access to the past, and agree that the activation of traces cannot be checked against some other veridical memories, then (critics argue) solipsism or scepticism results. There is then no guarantee that any act of remembering does provide access to the past at all: representationist trace theories thus cut the subject off from the past behind a murky veil of traces (Wilcox and Katz 1981, p. 231; Ben-Zeev 1986, p. 296). We’ll see below (section 3.3) that this dilemma recurs empirically, in the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning rules in connectionist cognitive-scientific models of memory. There, as in this general context, the natural response is to take the second prong of the dilemma, and accept the threat of solipsism or scepticism. The trace theorist must show how in practice the past can play roles in the causation of present remembering. The past is not uniquely specified by present input, and there is no general guarantee of accuracy: but the demand for incorrigible access to the past can be resisted.

“Structural isomorphism” How can memory traces represent past events or experiences? How can they have content? This is in part a general problem about the meaning of mental representations (see the entry on mental representation). But specific problems crop up for naturalistic trace theories of memory. In stating the causal theory of memory, Martin and Deutscher argued that an analysis of remembering should include the requirement that (in cases of genuine remembering) “the state or set of states produced by the past experience must constitute a structural analogue of the thing remembered” (1966, pp. 189–191), although they denied that the trace need be a perfect analogue, “mirroring all the features of a thing”. But is there a coherent notion of structural isomorphism to be relied on here? If memory traces are not images in the head, somehow directly resembling their objects, and if we are to cash out unanalysed and persistent metaphors of imprinting, engraving, copying, coding, or writing (Krell 1990, pp. 3–7), then what kind of “analogue” is the trace?

6

One approach to content determination does retain resemblance as the core explanatory notion. According to the structuralist theory of mental representation developed by Robert Cummins (1996), Paul Churchland (1998), and by Gerard O’Brien and Jon Opie (2004), there is an objective relation of ‘second-order resemblance’ between the system of representing vehicles in our heads and their represented objects. ‘First-order resemblance’ involves the sharing of some physical properties, and is thus unlikely to ground mental representation, since no traces in my brain share relevant physical properties with (say) the elephants or the conversations which I remember. But in second-order resemblance, the relations among a system of representing vehicles mirror the relations among their objects. In the case of brain traces, second-order structural resemblances hold when some physical relations among certain brain states (such as distance relations in the activation space of a neural network) preserve some system of relations among represented objects. Whatever the fate of such a general defence of the notion of a structural analogue, there is another (compatible yet independent) response. We can weaken the requirement of isomorphism further, remembering that a theory of memory in the philosophy of psychology should not cover veridical remembering alone. Details in my memory of an experience need not have been permanently encoded in the same enduring determinate trace as that experience. We often tell more than we (strictly speaking) remember. Even where memory for the gist of an event is roughly accurate, details may shift as the trace is filtered through other beliefs, dreams, fears, or wishes. The causal connections between events and traces, and between traces and recollection, may be multiple, indirect, and context-dependent. The structures which underpin retention, then, need not remain the same over time, or might not always involve identifiable determinate forms over time. This more dynamic vision of traces, rejecting the idea of permanent storage of independent items, may satisfy both recent developments in cognitive science (section 3 below) and some of the positive suggestions with which critics of static traces have accompanied their objections. Wittgenstein had wondered “whether the things stored up may not constantly change their nature”. Gibsonian direct realists in psychology, like some phenomenologists and Wittgensteinians in philosophy, have sometimes assimilated all theories of memory traces to the vision of passive, separate entities each with a fixed location in an inner archive. But writers in these diverse traditions have rightly stressed various ways in which remembering often relies on information left in the external world, arguing that we should see the internal aspects of memory more as an active resonance or attunement to information of certain kinds than as the encoding and reproduction of determinate images. These ideas have had considerable influence on recent theorizing in cognitive science, and on views of memory and mind as embodied, embedded, and extended (section 3 below). But they do not rule out weaker, dynamic notions of the memory trace. As the great English psychologist of memory Frederic Bartlett argued, “though we may still talk of traces, there is no reason in the world for regarding these as made complete, stored up somewhere, and then re-excited at some much later moment. The traces that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined, interest-carried traces. They live with our interests and with them they change”.

M y s t i c i s m

— The warfare between science and theology has been of a peculiar sort. At all times and places - except late eighteenth-century France and Soviet Russia - the majority of scientific men have supported the orthodoxy of their age. Some of the most eminent have been in the majority. Newton, though an Arian, was in all other respects a supporter of the Christian faith. Cuvier was a model of Catholic correctness. Faraday was a Sandymanian, but the errors of that sect did not seem, even to him, to be demonstrable by scientific arguments, and his views as to the relations of science and religion were such as every Churchman could applaud. The warfare was between theology and science, not the men of science. Even when the men of science held views which were condemned, they generally did their best to avoid conflict. Copernicus, as we saw, dedicated his book to the Pope; Galileo retracted; Descartes, though he thought it prudent to live in Holland, took great pains to remain on good terms with ecclesiastics, and by a calculated silence escaped censure for sharing Galielo’s opinions. In the nineteenth century, most British men of science still thought that there was no essential conflict between their science and those parts of the Christian faith which liberal Christians still regarded as essential - for it had been found possible to sacrifice the literal truth of the Flood, and even of Adam and Eve.

[*] The situation in the present day is not very different from what it has been at all times since the victory of Copernicanism. Successive scientific discoveries have caused Christians to abandon one after another of the beliefs which the Middle Ages regarded as integral parts of the faith, and these successive retreats have enabled men of science to remain Christians, unless their work is on that disputed frontier which the warfare has reached in our day. Now, as at most times during the last three centuries, it is proclaimed that science and religion have become reconciled: the scientists modestly admit that there are realms which lie outside science, and the liberal theologians concede that they would not venture to deny anything capable of scientific proof. There are, it is true, still a few disturbers of the peace: on the one side, fundamentalists and stubborn Catholic theologians; on the other side, the more radical students of such subjects as biochemistry and animal psychology, who refuse to grant even the comparatively modest demands of the more enlightened Churchmen.

The present relations between science and religion, as the State wishes them to appear, may be ascertained from a very instructive volume, Science and Religion, A Symposium, consisting of twelve talks broadcast from the B.B.C. in the autumn of 1930. Outspoken opponents of religion were, of course, not included, since (to mention no other argument) they would have pained the more orthodox among the listeners. There was, it is true, an excellent introductory talk by Professor Julian Huxley, which contained no support for even the most shadowy orthodoxy; but it also contained little that liberal Churchmen would now find objectionable. The speakers who permitted themselves to express definite opinions, and to advance arguments in their favour, took up a variety of positions, ranging from Professor Malinowski’s pathetic avowal of a balked longing to believe in God and immortality to Father O’Hara’s bold assertion that the truths of revelation are more certain than those of science, and must prevail where there is conflict; but, although the details varied, the general impression conveyed was that the conflict between religion and science is at an end. The result was all that could have been hoped. But on the whole the fight is languid as compared with what it was. The newer creeds of Communism and Fascism are the inheritors of theological bigotry; and perhaps, in some deep region of the unconscious, bishops and professors feel themselves jointly interested in the maintenance of the status quo.

Thus Canon Streeter, who spoke late, said that “a remarkable thing about the foregoing lectures has been the way in which their general drift has been moving in one and the same direction…. An idea has kept on recurring that science by itself is not enough.” Whether this unanimity is a fact about science and religion, or about the authorities which control the B.B.C., may be questioned; but it must be admitted that, in spite of many differences, the authors of the symposium do show something very like agreement on the point mentioned by Streeter. Thus Sir J. Arthur Thomson says: “Science as science never asks the question Why? That is to say, it never inquires into the meaning, or significance, or purpose of this manifold Being, Becoming, and Having Been.” And he continues: “Thus science does not pretend to be a bedrock of truth.” “Science,” he tells us, “cannot apply its methods to the mystical and spiritual.” Professor Seb Haldane holds that “it is only within ourselves, in our active ideals of truth, right, charity, and beauty, and consequent fellowship with others, that we find the revelation of God.” Dr. Malinowski says that “religious revelation is an experience which, as a matter of principle, lies beyond the domain of science.” I do not, for the moment, quote the theologians, since their concurrence with such opinions is to be expected.

Ought we to admit that there is available, in support of religion, a source of knowledge which lies outside science and may properly be described as “revelation”? This is a difficult question to argue, because those who believe that truths have been revealed to them profess the same kind of certainty in regard to them that we have in regard to objects of sense. We believe the man who has seen things through the telescope that we have never seen; why then, they ask, should we not believe them when they report things that are to them equally unquestionable?

—Before going further, let us try to be clear as to what is asserted, and as to its truth or falsehood. When Canon Streeter says that “science is not enough,” he is, in one sense, uttering a truism. Science does not include art, or friendship, or various other valuable elements in life. But of course more than this is meant. There is another, rather more important, sense in which “science is not enough,” which seems to me also true: science has nothing to say about values, and cannot prove such propositions as “it is better to love than to hate” or “kindness is more desirable than cruelty.” Science can tell us much about the means of realizing our desires, but it cannot say that one desire is preferable to another. This is a large subject, as to which I shall have more to say in a later chapter But the authors I have quoted certainly mean to assert something further, which I believe to be false. “Science does not pretend to be a bedrock of truth” (my italics) implies that there is another, non-scientific method of arriving at truth. “Religious revelation … lies beyond the domain of science” tells us something as to what this non-scientific method is. It is the method of religious revelation. Dean Inge is more explicit: “The proof of religion, then, is experimental.” [He has been speaking of the testimony of the mystics.] “It is a progressive knowledge of God under the three attributes by which He has revealed Himself to mankind - what are sometimes called the absolute or eternal values - Goodness or Love, Truth, and Beauty. If that is all, you will say, there is no reason why religion should come into conflict with natural science at all. One deals with facts, the other with values. Granting that both are real, they are on different planes. This is not quite true. We have seen science poaching upon ethics, poetry, and what not. Religion cannot help poaching either.” That is to say, religion must make assertions about what is, and not only about what ought to be. This opinion, avowed by Dean Inge, is implicit in the words of Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Dr. Malinowski.

Science should be neutral, since the argument is —It is, perhaps, useless to attempt an a scientific one, to be conducted argument such as will appeal to the man who exactly as an argument would has himself enjoyed mystic illumination. But be conducted about an uncertain something can be said as to whether we others experiment. Science depends should accept this testimony. In the first place, upon perception and inference; it is not subject to the ordinary tests. When its credibility is due to the fact a man of science tells us the result of an that the perceptions are such experiment, he also tells us how the as any observer can test. The experiment was performed; others can repeat mystic himself may be certain it, and if the result is not confirmed it is not that he knows, and he has no accepted as true; but many mean might put need of scientific tests; but those themselves into the situation in which the who are asked to accept his mystic’s vision occurred without obtaining the testimony will subject it to the same revelation. To this it may be answered same kind of scientific tests as that a man must use the appropriate sense: those applied to men who say a telescope is useless to a man who keeps his they have been to the North Pole. eye shut. The argument as to the credibility Science, as such, should have no of the mystic’s testimony may be prolonged expectation, positive or negative, almost indefinitely. as to the result.

The chief argument in favour of the mystics is their agreement with each other. “I know nothing more remarkable,” says Dean Inge, “than the unanimity of the mystics, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, Protestant, Catholic, and even Buddhist or Mohammedan, though the Christian mystics are the most trustworthy.” I do not wish to underrate the force of this argument, which I acknowledged long ago in a book called Mysticism and Logic. The mystics vary greatly in their capacity for giving verbal expression to their experiences, but I think we make take it that those who succeeded best all maintain: (1) that all division and separateness is unreal, and that the universe is a single indivisible unity; (2) that evil is illusory, and that the illusion arises through falsely regarding a part as self-subsistent; (3) that time is unreal, and that reality is eternal, not in the sense of being everlasting, but in the sense of being wholly outside time. I do not pretend that this is a complete account of the matters on which all mystics concur, but the three propositions that I have mentioned may serve as representatives of the whole. Let us now imagine ourselves a jury in a law-court, whose business it is to decide on the credibility of the witnesses who make these three somewhat surprising assertions.

—We shall find, in the first place, that, while the witnesses agree up to a point, they disagree totally when that point is passed, although they are just as certain as when they agree. Catholics, but not Protestants, may have visions in which the Virgin appears; Christians and Mohammedans, but not Buddhists, may have great truths revealed to them by the Archangel Gabriel; the Chinese mystics of the Tao tell us, as a direct result of their central doctrine, that all government is bad, whereas most European and Mohammedan mystics, with equal confidence, urge submission to constituted authority. As regards the points where they differ, each group will argue that the other groups are untrustworthy; we might, therefore, if we were content with a mere forensic triumph, point out that most mystics think most other mystics mistaken on most points. They might, however, make this only half a triumph by agreeing on the greater importance of the matters about which they are at one, as compared with those as to which their opinions differ. We will, in any case, assume that they have composed their differences, and concentrated the defence at these three points - namely, the unity of the world, the illusory nature of evil, and the unreality of time. What test can we, as impartial outsiders, apply to their unanimous evidence?

As men of scientific temper, we shall naturally first ask whether there is any way by which we can ourselves obtain the same evidence at first hand. To this we shall receive various answers. We may be told that we are obviously not in a receptive frame of mind, and that we lack the requisite humility; or that fasting and religious meditation are necessary; or (if our witness is Indian or Chinese) that the essential prerequisite is a course of breathing exercises. I think we shall find that the weight of experimental evidence is in favour of this last view, though fasting also has been frequently found effective. As a matter of fact, there is a definite physical discipline, called yoga, which is practised in order to produce the mystic’s certainty, and which is recommended with much confidence by those who have tried it.[1] Breathing exercises are its most essential feature, and for our purposes we may ignore the rest.

In order to see how we could test the assertion that yoga gives insight, let us artificially simplify this assertion. Let us suppose that a number of people assure us that if, for a certain time, we breathe in a certain way, we shall become convinced that time is unreal. Let us go further, and suppose that, having tried their recipe, we have ourselves experienced a state of mind such as they describe. But now, having returned to our normal mode of respiration, we are not quite sure whether the vision was to be believed. How shall we investigate this question?

— First of all, what can be meant by saying that time is unreal? If we really meant what we say, we must mean that such statements as “this is before that” are mere empty noise, like “twas brillig.” If we suppose anything less than this - as, for example, that there is a relation between events which puts them in the same order s the relation of earlier and later, but that it is a different relation - we shall not have made any assertion that makes any real change in our outlook. It will be merely like supposing that the Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name. We have to suppose that there are no “events” at all; there must be only the one vast whole of the universe, embracing whatever is real in the misleading appearance of a temporal procession. There must be nothing in reality corresponding to the apparent distinction between earlier and later events. To say that we are born, and then grow, and then die, must be just as false as to say that we die, then grow small, and finally are born. The truth of what seems an individual life is merely the illusory isolation of one element in the timeless and indivisible being of the universe. There is no distinction between improvement and deterioration, no difference between sorrows that end in happiness and happiness that ends in sorrow. If you find a corpse with a dagger in it, it makes no difference whether the man died of the wound or the dagger was plunged in after death. Such a view, if true, puts an end, not only to science, but to prudence, hope, and effort; it is incompatible with worldly wisdom, and - what is more important to religion - with morality.

Most mystics, of course, do not accept these conclusions in their entirety, but they urge doctrines from which these conclusions inevitably follow. Thus Dean Inge rejects the kind of religion that appeals to evolution, because it lays too much stress upon a temporal process. “There is no law of progress, and there is no universal progress,” he says. And again: “The doctrine of automatic and universal progress, the lay religion of many Victorians, labours under the disadvantage of being almost the only philosophical theory which can be definitely disproved.” On this matter, which I shall discuss at a later stage, I find myself in agreement with the Dean, for whom, on many grounds, I have a very high respect. But he naturally does not draw from his premisses all the inferences which seem to me to be warranted. It is important not to caricature the doctrine of mysticism, in which there is, I think, a core of wisdom. Let us see how it seeks to avoid the extreme consequences which seem to follow from the denial of time.

The philosophy based on mysticism has a great tradition, from Parmenides to Hegel. Parmenides says: “What is, is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one.”[2] He introduced into metaphysics the distinction between reality and appearance, or the way of truth and the way of opinion, as he calls them. It is clear that whoever denies the reality of time must introduce some such distinction, since obviously the world appears to be in time. It is also clear that, if everyday experience is not to be wholly illusory, there must be some relation between appearance and the reality behind it. It is at this point, however, that the greatest difficulties arise: if the relation between appearance and reality is made too intimate, all the unpleasant features of appearance will have their unpleasant counterparts in reality, while if the relation is made too remote, we shall be unable to make inferences from the character of appearance to that of reality, and reality will be left a vague Unknowable, as with Herbert Spencer. For Christians, there is the related difficulty of avoiding pantheism: if the world is only apparent, God created nothing, and the reality corresponding to the world is a part of God; but if the world is in any degree real and distinct from God, we abandon the wholeness of everything, which is an essential doctrine of mysticism, and we are compelled to suppose that, in so far as the world is real, the evil which it contains is also real. Such difficulties make thorough-going mysticism very difficult for an orthodox Christian. As the Bishop of Birmingham says: “All forms of pantheism … as it seems to me, must be rejected because, if man is actually a part of God, the evil in man is also in God.”

All this time, I have been supposing that we are a jury, listening to the testimony of the mystics, and trying to decide whether to accept or reject it. If, when they deny the reality of the world of sense, we took them to mean “reality” in the ordinary sense of law-courts, we should have no hesitation in rejecting what they say, since we would find that it runs counter to all other testimony, and even to their own in their mundane moments. We must therefore look for some other sense. I believe that, when the mystics contrast “reality” with “appearance,” the word “reality” has not a logical, but an emotional, significance: it means what is, in some sense, important.

— When it is said that time is “unreal,” what should be said is that, in some sense and on some occasions, it is important to conceive the universe as a whole, as the Creator, if He existed, must have conceived it in deciding to create it. When so conceived, all process is within one completed whole; past, present, and future, all exist, in some sense, together, and the present does not have that pre-eminent reality which it has to our usual ways of apprehending the world. It this interpretation is accepted, mysticism expresses an emotion, not a fact; it does not assert anything, and therefore can be neither confirmed nor contradicted by science. The fact that mystics do make assertions is owing to their inability to separate emotional importance from scientific validity. It is, of course, not to be expected that they will accept this view, but it is the only one, so far as I can see, which, while admitting something of their claim, is not repugnant to the scientific intelligence. The certainty and partial unanimity of mystics is no conclusive reason for accepting their testimony on a matter of fact. The man of science, when he wishes others to see what he has seen, arranges his microscope or telescope; that is to say, he makes changes in the external world, but demands of the observer only normal eyesight. The mystic, on the other hand, demands changes in the observer, by fasting, by breathing exercises, and by a careful abstention from external observation. (Some object to such discipline, and think that the mystic illumination cannot be artificially achieved; from a scientific point of view, this makes their case more difficult to test than that of those who rely on yoga. But nearly all agree that fasting and an ascetic life are helpful.) We all know that opium, hashish, and alcohol produce certain effects on the observer, but as we do not think these effects admirable we take no account of them in our theory of the universe. They may even, sometimes, reveal fragments of truth; but we do not regard them as sources of general wisdom. The drunkard who sees snakes does not imagine, afterwards, that he has had a revelation of a reality hidden from others, though some not wholly dissimilar belief must have given rise to the worship of Bacchus. In our own day, as William James related, there have been people who considered that the intoxication produced by laughing-gas revealed truths which are hidden at normal times. From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions.

Breadth and calm and profundity may all have their source in this emotion, in which, for the moment, all self-centred desire is dead, and the mind becomes a mirror for the vastness of the universe. Those who have had this experience, and believe it to be bound up unavoidably with assertions about the nature of the universe, naturally cling to these assertions. I believe myself that the assertions are inessential, and that there is no reason to believe them true. I cannot admit any method of arriving at truth except that of science, but in the realm of the emotions I do not deny the value of the experiences which have given rise to religion. Through association with false beliefs, they have led to much evil as well as good; freed from this association, it may be hoped that the good alone will remain.

Tractatus Herbis

—A picture represents its subject from a position outside it. (Its standpoint is its representational form.) That is why a picture represents its subject correctly or incorrectly. —A picture cannot, however, place itself outside its representational form. —What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality. —A picture whose pictorial form is logical form is called a logical picture. —Every picture is at the same time a logical one. (On the other hand, not every picture is, for example, a spatial one.) —Logical pictures can depict the world.

—A picture has logico-pictorial form in common with what it depicts. —A picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. —A picture represents a possible situation in logical space. —A picture contains the possibi-lity of the situation that it represents. —A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false. —What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form. —What a picture represents is its sense. —The agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity. —In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. —It is impossible to tell from the picture alone whether it is true or false. —There are no pictures that are true a priori. A logical picture of facts is a thought. —A state of affairs is thinkable’: what this means is that we can picture it to ourselves. —The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.

—A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is possible too. —Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. —It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic.—The truth is that we could not say what an ‘illogical’ world would look like. —It is as impossible to represent in language anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist. —Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot. —If a thought were correct a priori, it would be a thought whose possibility ensured its truth.

—A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only if its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything to compare it with). —In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses. —We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. —The method of projection is to think of the sense of the proposition. —I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign.—And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world. —A proposition includes all that the projection includes, but not what is projected. —Therefore, though what is projected is not itself included, its possibility is. —A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it. (‘The content of a proposition’ means the content of a proposition that has sense.) —A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense.

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—1 The Society for Psychical Research. Holiday Isle Placemat pantograph pattern. 1865. —2 Les Palmiers Histoire Iconographique. French 1878 edition. —3 Tractatus de Herbis. A treatise of medicinal plants painted in 1440 and housed under shelfmark Sloane 4016 in the British Library, in London. —4 Carlos Fdez-Pello Plant Ergonomic. 2013. —5 Carlos Fdez-Pello Plant Telepaty. 2013. —6 Tractatus de Herbis. A treatise of medicinal plants painted in 1440 and housed under shelfmark Sloane 4016 in the British Library, in London. —7 Les Palmiers Histoire Iconographique. French 1878 edition.

—8 The head (without nose) of Nero. He used cyanide to dispose of unwanted family members. 1st-2nd century AD. Found at Pompey, Italy. —9 Head (without nose) of Hypnos. Possibly Roman, 1st-2nd century AD; copy of a Hellenistic original. Found at Civitella d’Arno, near Perugia, Italy. — 10 Nora Baron. Filling a Hole with Plaster (and removing the surplus with a spatula). 2014. — 11 Nora Baron. Filling a Hole with Plaster (and removing the surplus with a spatula). 2014. — 12 Hair Device (to describe all forms of concealment, including those strategies preventing detection and recognition). 1962. — 13 Hand Device (countershading, background matching and disruptive coloration). 1989.

— 14 Heraclides Ponticus Nose. c. 390 BC – c. 310 BC. Found at Athens, Greece. He is best remembered for proposing that the earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours. — 15 Julián Cruz. A Fluid Boomerang. 2014. — 16 Karlos Gil. Untitled (Ghost Device). 2014. Fragmented ceramic white vases from different historical periods. — 17 Karlos Gil Paperweight Quasicortex Lentiform. 2014. Glassblowing tubes, glassblowing supplies, concrete, ebony wood, olive wood, indian red wood. — 18-21 Karlos Gil Output Functions. 2013. 3d laser-cut acrylic. — 22 The Society for Psychical Research. Arboretum Placemat quilting pantograph pattern. 1865.

— Published and produced by Gasworks and AC|E.

— Acknowledgments: Belén Zahera Joaquín García Rowan Geddis Nancy Cooper Lorena Muñoz-Alonso Mira Loew David Altweger Rafa Prada Manuel Angel Carolina Rito Quino Monje The Warburg Institute London Science Museum Proyecto Rampa and all the participants.

— Editors: Karlos Gil and Belén Zahera

— Special Thanks: to Belén Zahera, you are my inspiration.

Concept: Karlos Gil

— All works reproduced here courtesy of: García | Galería, Madrid. Gasworks, London.

— Karlos Gil Like Potted Plants in an Office Lobby. Printed Paper. 2014. — Many have contributed to this book and I would like to give recognition to their efforts within the complex process that publishing entails. — This publication is published on the occasion of the international residency program at Gasworks, London.

Graphic Design: Karlos Gil Print: Imprint Digital, Devon (UK). Paper: Bookwove 80 Typefaces: Baskerville, Century Gothic

— Published: The Negative Press

— The Negative Press