Thursday 29 October 2009

artists talk











Emma Hart, Corinna Till and Benedict Drew @ five years @ JTP09

On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense

Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”
Fragment, 1873: from the Nachlass.
Compiled from translations by Walter Kaufmann and Daniel Breazeale.
Text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel.

(downloaded from http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm)

Sunday 25 October 2009

Desert























from
A Biblical and Theological Dictionary, John Farrar, 1884:

There is a difference between the meaning of the word desert as it occurs in Scripture, and the ordinary signification. The word generally rendered DESERT in Scripture, means a grazing-tract uncultivated and destitute of wood, but fit for pasture. The "pastures of the wilderness" are named in Scripture. Psal. lxv. 12; Joel i. 19. These deserts greatly varied with the seasons of the year. In summer they were burnt up with excessive drought; in the winter they were covered with pasturage. Whence it is that the Arabian tribes retreat into their deserts at the approach of autumnal rains, and when the drought commences they return to the lands of rivers and mountains, in search of the pastures which the deserts no longer afford. In the Bible, the different tracts mentioned as deserts are, Sin, Paran, Shur, Sinai, Kadesh, Judea, & c. The Hebrew word YESHIMON is applied to the desert of Arabia Petrea, in which the Israelites sojourned under the guidance of Moses. Numb. xxi 20; xxiii. 28. This was the most terrible of the deserts in which the Israelites dwelt: "A land of drought and of the shadow of death, a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt." Jer. ii. 6. "A waste howling wilderness." Deut. xxxii. 10

from
A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Walter Skeat, 1897:

Series, a row. [L.] L. series, a row. - L. serere, to join or bind together [pp. sertus].
desert [1], a waste. [F. - L.] O.F. desert, a wilderness. - L. desertus, waste; pp. of deserere, to desert, abandon. - L. de, away [negative]; serere, to join.

sacred and profane










Dürer's Saint Jerome in his Study has often been interpreted in conjunction with two other master engravings (Meisterstiche) by the artist, also from 1513-14- Knight, Death and the Devil (1513; AMAM inv. 44.29), and Melencolia (1514)--and viewed especially as a spiritual (if not formal) pendant to the latter work.

Weber suggested that the Saint Jerome and Melencolia corresponded to the traditional scholastic divisions of secular and divine knowledge; and that Saint Jerome, who consciously relinquished the former for the latter, was the perfect example of divinely inspired erudition. Panofsky further contrasted the brooding angst and disordered surroundings of the tormented genius in Melencolia with the peaceful diligence and ordered efficiency of Saint Jerome; the Saint Jerome "opposes a life in the service of God to what may be called [in the Melencolia] a life in competition with God."

http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/DurerSt.Jerome.htm

chen wei - the proposal sketch series

Friday 23 October 2009

dioptrics
catoptrics

dispositif








twenty one years ago

LOCUS














You are invited to reverberate in LOCUS initiated by Claire Morales

Voices utterances echoes resonant frequencies

Open Source.

Claire Morales utilizes the HOVEL time and space as a lab of transparent process to investigate sound transformation, creating a living system, detecting sound emission in out around the space.

Exploring environmental noise with custom-built software using Pure Data [Pd], a real-time graphical programming environment that is ever developing, ever changing according to the intentions of its users.

The frequencies that visitors create in the space are absorbed into the system interacting with the acoustics and fed back; the somatic dynamic nourishing the locus uroborus with presence.

This is the fifth intervention by an individual artist at HOVEL.

Address: 37 Evelina Mansions,

New Church Road

Camberwell, SE5 7JW

The space is Open for transverberation throughout the week starting Monday 19th October until Sunday 25th October 12 - 6pm.

Culmination: 25th October 4 - 8pm

02077036337 hoveltenant@googlemail.com

From Camberwell Rd. go to Bowyer Pl onto New Church Rd.

Transport: Elephant, Buses to Camberwell, 35, 40, 45, 171, 68, 12.

From Oval, Buses 36, 185, 436

Monday 19 October 2009

agents of the apparatus

“What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.”
Foucault

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--why not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses--one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.
Agamben

jill magid

Kelly Chorpening & Peter Morrens






Sun 18th October
12-6 Kelly Chorpening & Peter Morrens: Graphic Longing

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Technische Schriften

"As we know and simply do not say, no human being writes anymore. [...] Today, human writing runs through inscriptions burnt into silicon by electronic lithography [...]. The last historic act of writing may thus have been in the late seventies when a team of Intel engineers [plotted] the hardware architecture of their first integrated microprocessor."
(Kittler, Es gibt keine Software. In: ders.: Draculas Vermächtnis. Technische Schriften).


Da Vinci's Jerome in the Widerness