Monday 29 September 2014

benito juarez internatonal


The earliest maps of Mexico city are the 1524 Nuremberg Map and the Uppsala Plan from 1555 ....They consist of very few features - main streets, large rectangular areas, a few scattered houses, boats and fish.On close inspection, the first maps of the city are nothing more than Cartesian reduction of space, diagrams imposed upon a territory which was, to a great extent, only water.....


....Those tears are a simple moist tribute to landing on that great desert lake fed by rivers that have dried up or been channelled underground, and which today seem like little more than empty, arid words ; Churubusco, Hondo, Magdalena, Chico, Colmena, Piedad, Mixcoac, Tacubaya.


Luiselli

Sunday 21 September 2014

two tree island


 https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zeRAElhlCkO4.kT4X1d9hu04I
 http://www.inaturalist.org/
 http://www.latlong.net/
http://www.metalculture.com/
http://mapknitter.org/
http://scistarter.com/
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.4802/-0.0990&layers=ND
http://www.openscientist.org/
http://idea13.org/
http://www.t-a-p.org.uk/

A hair receiver

A hair receiver is a small pot, with a hole in the lid, kept on the dressing table in the Victorian era to store hair removed from brushes and combs. The hair was recycled in a number of ways—notably for stuffing small bags, about 8–10 centimetres (3–4 in) across, called ratts, used to bulk out women's hairstyles. Human hair was also used for stuffing pincushions and small furnishing cushions.
It was often paired with a matching trinket box or a powder jar or as part of a dressing table set, made mainly from porcelain, though glass, metal, and celluloid were also used. 

wikipedia

Thursday 18 September 2014

monsters and fossils


The species that resembles the human heart, and for that reason is named Anthropocardite . . . is worthy of particular attention. Its sub- stance is flint inside. The form of a heart is imitated as perfectly as possible. One can distinguish in it the stump of the vena cava, together with a portion of its two cross-sections. One can also see the stump of the great artery emerging from the left ventricle, together with its lower or descending branch.59 

The fossil, with its mixed animal and mineral nature, is the privileged locus of a resemblance required by the historian of the continuum, whereas the space of the taxinomia decomposed it with rigour.



The monster and the fossil both play a very precise role in this configuration. On the basis of the power of the continuum held by nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference. This differ- ence is still without law and without any well-defined structure; the monster is the root-stock of specification, but it is only a sub-species itself in the stubbornly slow stream of history. The fossil is what per- mits resemblances to subsist throughout all the deviations traversed by nature; it functions as a distant and approximative form of identity; it marks a quasi-character in the shift of time. And this is because the monster and the fossil are merely the backward projection of those differences and those identities that provide taxinomia first with struc- ture, then with character. Between table and continuum they form a shady, mobile, wavering region in which what analysis is to define as identity is still only mute analogy; and what it will define as assignable and constant difference is still only free and random variation. But, in truth, it is so impossible for natural history to conceive of the history of nature, the epistemological arrangement delineated by the table and the continuum is so fundamental, that becoming can occupy nothing but an intermediary place measured out for it solely by the requirements of the whole. This is why it occurs only in order to bring about the necessary passage from one to the other – either as a totality of destruc- tive events alien to living beings and occurring only from outside them, or as a movement ceaselessly being outlined, then halted as soon as sketched, and perceptible only on the fringes of the table, in its unconsidered margins. Thus, against the background of the con- tinuum, the monster provides an account, as though in caricature, of the genesis of differences, and the fossil recalls, in the uncertainty of its resemblances, the first buddings of identity. 

Foucault / Order of Things / 170-171- 




There is no limit to this line of curiosities. All sorts of subjects may be found — calves' heads, which are quite common, and eyes, birds, fishes, detached hands, feet, and ears, and human profiles. A large flint was kept for a long time at Mendon, on which everybody recognized the bust of Louis XIV. To such accidents M. J. B. Robinet, in 1778, devoted a part of his ingenious Considerations on the Efforts of Nature in trying to make Man (Considerations sur les essais de la Nature qui apprend à faire homme). As we turn the leaves of this curious work we see described, in distinct paragraphs, anthropocardites, representing the heart of man; encephalites, or brains; cranoïdes, or skulls; otites, or ear-stones; leucophthalmos, or white eyes; chirites, or hands; stones representing a muscle, and even the olfactory nerve, etc.

The drawing of the distinction between fortuitous resemblances and true fossils was protracted and made difficult by the fact that the two forms are often mingled, sometimes associated in the same specimen or originating in beds having the most essential characteristics in common.

 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_41/May_1892/Dendrites

emblematics of the prison

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/18/decoding-russian-criminal-tattoos-in-pictures

Wednesday 10 September 2014

grandfather



A month-duration, six-pillar, timepiece longcase clock with equation of time and further complications, the thirteen-inch break-arch dial having a silvered chapter ring engraved with a twenty-four hour dial, the centre having a 'penny-moon' with times of high water at both London Bridge and Plymouth and with both lunar and mean times shown by two further hands, the arch having a beach scene with rising tide automata showing the stages of the tide during the cycle, with a silvered scroll signed and dated by the maker 1933, with three apertures showing day, date and month, the earlier oak case having a swan neck pediment surmounted by three 'eagle and ball' finials, with brass capitals to the quartered fluted columns, the base with a raised panel and fluted canted corners, height: 222 (inc. finials). 

the eight-day movement with seven knopped and finned pillars, recoil anchor escapement, bolt and shutter maintaining power, rise and fall regulation with subsidiary dial to side of movement, with 1¼ seconds pendulum, quarter-chiming on three bells, striking on a large bell, with weights; case key
76½ in. (194 cm.) high; 14½ in. (37 cm.) wide; 7¾ in. (20 cm.) deep


Sunday 7 September 2014

a travelling discipline..

documentary stills / algorithmic dynamics
 ...

miniscule labour operations and techniques to sustain an experience of time for the privileged - yoga, slow food...  power-chronography @Juspar

...
a different order to history as experienced time

refresh rate of screen  - the specific time of the machine, material will be percieved not by human eyes.

...

microtemporal irritations.. discursive articulations of multiple temporalities

... unliked, unacknowledged posts, not retweeted..



habit / ostranenie

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic[...]. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. [...] The process of “ algebraization,” the over-automatization of
[the perception of] an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature — a number, for example —or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”
ViktorShklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism. Four Essays, trans. Lee
T. Lemon, and Marion J. Reis 


http://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/hidden-computing-curriculum/http://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/hidden-computing-curriculum/

Saturday 6 September 2014

pose slides

http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/56638

Pose slides were used to create a type of tableau vivant ("living picture") performance that was popular in vaudeville at the beginning of the twentieth century. An actress dressed all in white posed against a white background. Then, when a slide was projected onto her, it appeared as if she was in a costume or in a unique environment. http://hdl.handle.net/1811/56698