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It is as if, speech having withdrawn from image to become founding act, the image, for its part, raised the foundations of space, the ‘strata,’ those silent powers of before or after speech,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