contract and contagion

walworth palm

virtù-potenza // O Fortuna

Political decisiveness is defined – as Augusto Illuminati will put it in reading Althusser –as “the Machiavellian ability to seize fortuna by the hair at the right moment, realising in the moment all of its virtù-potenza


http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/contractandcontagion-web.pdfhttp://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/contractandcontagion-web.pdf

pile

It is as if, speech having withdrawn from image to become founding act, the image, for its part, raised the foundations of space, the ‘strata,’ those silent powers of before or after speech, before or after man. the visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic. Not that we are taken back to prehistory (there is an archaeology of the present), but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed according to variable orientations and connections.

anaglyph models

Decima // fate

Decimation ( decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by senior commanders in the Roman Army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as mutiny or desertion. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". The procedure was a pragmatic, yet vicious, attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the practicalities of dealing with a large group of offenders.

A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing. The remaining soldiers were often given rations of barley instead of wheat (the latter being the standard soldier's diet) for a few days, and required to camp outside the fortified security of the marching camp.
Because the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in a group sentenced to decimation were potentially liable for execution, regardless of individual degrees of fault, rank or distinction.

If ever these same things happen to occur among a large group of men... the officers reject the idea of bludgeoning or slaughtering all the men involved [as is the case with a small group or an individual]. Instead they find a solution for the situation which chooses by a lottery system sometimes five, sometimes eight, sometimes twenty of these men, always calculating the number in this group with reference to the whole unit of offenders so that this group forms one-tenth of all those guilty of cowardice. And these men who are chosen by lot are bludgeoned mercilessly in the manner described above.

In digital signal processing, decimation is the process of reducing the sampling rate of a signal. Complementary to interpolation, which increases sampling rate, it is a specific case of sample rate conversion in a multi-rate digital signal processing system. Decimation utilises filtering to mitigate aliasing distortion, which can occur when simply downsampling a signal. A system component that performs decimation is called a decimator.

grimes graves

thames chalk

cement kilns 

material humiliations

that they are all glass, and therefore will suffer no man to come near them; that they are all cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead; some are afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders,

glass delusion   1613

People feared that they were made of glass “and therefore likely to shatter into pieces". 

 anxiety of new materials:

alien implants- bio-telemetry
"subdued by "small earphones" placed behind his ears"

alien implants appear to be ordinary materials such as a shard of glass, a jagged piece of metal, and a carbon fiber. The objects are often found lodged in extremities such as noses, toes, hands and shins.
normal objects picked up during a fall or by walking barefoot often become surrounded by scar tissue.

A US town has rejected plans for solar panels amid fears they would 'suck up all the energy from the sun'

a posthuman collectivity, 

an "I" transformed into the "we" of autonomous agents operating together to make a self. 

smith-and-the-devil

With the possible exceptions of the wolf, the raven and the crone, no one has a closer mythological connection with malevolence than the smith. One of the archetypes of northern European folklore is Wayland, the divine but evil blacksmith tutored by the trolls. He was maimed (becoming lame, like Hephaestus, the smith-god of the Greeks) and imprisoned by the legendary King Niduth, who forced him to use his magical skills to make trinkets for the court. The vengeful Wayland lured the king’s children into his forge, raped his daughter, killed his sons and turned their skulls into goblets from which the unwitting king drank. Then he fashioned himself a pair of wings and flew away cackling with delight. Throughout northern Europe his unquiet wight is said to haunt the Neolithic burial mounds reputed to be his smithies.
It is almost certainly Wayland who, in another incarnation, surfaces in the Fens of eastern England. There Will the smith, having been granted an extra life by the Devil, accumulated so much evil in his double span that he turned into the ghastly Will o’ the Wisp, the flickering blue flame of burning marsh gas.
There are stories of smiths using their powers to benign ends: St Dunstan, for example, seized the nose of the Devil (who came in the form of a beautiful temptress) in his blacksmith’s tongs. In other English folk tales a young man arrives at a forge and miraculously hammers an old horse into a young one, or an old woman into a lovely girl.
But these tales are far outnumbered by those which equate the smith with evil. Several tell of smiths entering into a pact with the Devil to get fire and the means of smelting metal; indeed it is arguable that the medieval vision of Hell represents the smith in his forge. His anti-Christian associations persisted into the 19th Century (there is still a sanitised version at Gretna Green today), when British couples who could not get the Church to bless their marriage would leap over a blacksmith’s forge together. In some parts of Britain, the introduction of iron tools was resisted for centuries, as farmers believed that the evil they contained would poison the soil.
Strikingly, archaeological evidence suggests that blacksmiths in Europe may, like the Nkunono, have been isolated, physically and culturally, from the remainder of their tribes. Iron Age forges appear to have been built outside the ramparts of settlements; the smiths’ ceramics, by contrast to those of the rest of society, are full of inclusions, suggesting that they did not have access to the same resources.

hedgehog brush

It seems there may be no way
Of moaning eloquently
Yet many man-made musical instruments
Are capable
In the right hands.

http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/apocalypsis-or-the-dragon-in-her-cave/

optical innoculation

optical innoculation - limetree pollen/wind/bike

henry mended

 

Henry Moore : Bronze : Two-part Reclining Figure N0. 3 1961 : Brandon Estate

foreshore

bank holiday

the technical composition of capital

zerowork

https://thesebonesofmine.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/guest-post-an-archaeologist-an-anthropologist-and-an-anarchist-walk-into-a-bar-by-stuart-rathbone/

Ri - to cut with something toothed

 

walworth sunday

bum

mise en place

a-tissue a-tissue we all fall down

give me an issue
i'll give you a tissue

choke point

In military strategy, a choke point (or chokepoint) is a geographical feature on land such as a valley, defile or a bridge, or at sea such as a strait which an armed force is forced to pass, sometimes on a substantially narrower front, and therefore greatly decreasing its combat power, in order to reach its objective.

fish knife - cut down tool

"Removing the ligature from a prisoner as swiftly as possible is crucial to ensuring the best possible chance of surviving and avoiding long-term or permanent brain damage."