in memoriam Eduardo Galeano /// thanks SW

1520: Brussels Durer

These things must be emanations from the sun, like the men and women who made them in the remote land they inhabit: helmets and girdles, feather fans, dresses, cloaks, hunting gear, a gold sun and a silver moon, a blowgun, and other weapons of such beauty that they seem made to revive their victims.
The greatest draftsman of all the ages does not tire of staring at them. This is part of the booty that Cortes seized from Moctezuma: the only pieces that were not melted into ingots. King Charles, newly seated on the Holy Empire's throne, is exhibiting to the public the trophies from his new bits of world.
Albrecht Durer doesn't know the Mexican poem that explains that the true artist finds pleasure in his work and talks with his heart, because he has one that isn't dead and eaten by ants. But seeing what he sees, Durer hears those words and finds that he is experiencing the greatest happiness of his half century of life.


-->

The Mexica (Aztec) king Motecuhzoma greeted Hernan Cortés in 1519 with gifts of gold, silver, and precious stones, including jewelry, ornaments, headpieces, disks, garments, shields, and helmets. Cortés sent the tribute to Charles V, king of Spain and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who placed them on exhibit in 1520. Albrecht Dürer viewed the exhibit in Brussels and extolled its beauty in his travel journal: 

At Brussels is a very splendid Townhall, large and covered with beautiful carved stonework, and it has a noble, open tower. . . . I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of armor of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds, and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies [myths, fairy tales]. These things were all so precious that they are valued at 100,000 florins [guilders] All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.

-->


It is quite clear from the passage that Dürer’s admiration is of riches, curiosities, and craft. When he discusses Western “art” he uses different terms, such as proportion, or alludes to comparisons with antiquity. Contrary to usual interpretations, he doesn’t marvel at the “art” of the New World, he marvels at the “curiosities” and “craft.”
Yet by the eighteenth century what were “heathen idols” had become art. Europe was more secular and Mexico was less afraid of native religious revivals. When three Aztec sculptures came to light in the construction in the Zócalo of Mexico City in 1790, two were left visible and eventually moved to a new museum devoted to antiquity. The third, a colossal idol-like female figure, was reburied for some time for fear of its effect on the natives. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it had found its place in the museum too. Plaster casts were made of the sculptures and exhibited in 1824 in London for a public eager to see exotic monuments. 
http://www.columbia.edu/~ep9/articles_thinking.html
 

online / offline

They are states or conditions of a "device or equipment" or of a "functional unit". To be considered online, one of the following must apply to a device:

• Under the direct control of another device
• Under the direct control of the system with which it is associated
• Available for immediate use on demand by the system without human intervention

In contrast, a device that is offline meets none of these criteria (e.g., its main power source is disconnected or turned off, or it is off-power).

horse gin

In fact, animal domestication very often does involve the use of manual tools, but of

a kind we have not so far encountered. They are tools of coercion, such as the whip

or spur, designed to inflict physical force and very often acute pain (see Chapter Four,

p. 73). Another class of tools consists of those attached to the animals themselves and

operated as part of their performance. Thus the ‘handling’ of animals is really a two-stage

operation in which the human master, through the use of the instruments of coercion,

aims to control the skilled tool-using performance of his charges. Indeed there is an imme-

diate and obvious parallel here with slave-driving: like human slaves, similarly compelled

to work through the infliction of pain, animals constitute labour itself rather than its

instruments (Ingold 1980: 88).

theme from phonokinetoscope

i'm the i they failed to dot
from the land that time forgot
i just lost my train of thought
i saw someone sitting on a rock

search engines

[The engine] learns about subject categories from the bottom up, instead of imposing an order from the top down. It is a self-organizing system.... To come up with subject categories, Architext makes only one assumption: words that fre- quently occur together are somehow related. As the corpus changes—as new connections emerge between, say O. J. Simpson and murder—the classification scheme automatically adjusts. The subject categories reflect the text itself”; “this eliminates two of the biggest criticisms of library classification: that every scheme has a point of view, and that every scheme will be constantly struggling against obsolescence. 

Search Engines

Hartmut Winkler

 In a model of the world created by Robert Fludd, an English encyclopedist of the Renaissance, God had already abandoned the center position (“Integrae Naturae speculum artisque imago” [1617], British Library). Retained has been a system of strictly concentric rings that contains the things of the world, encompassing a range from minerals to the plants and animals of nature up to the human arts and finally the planetary spheres. The center is occupied by a schematic diagram of the earth, a forerunner of that blue ball the astronauts radio-relayed to earth. The representation looks like a man- dala in which viewers can absorb themselves in order to take up contact with a cosmic whole. The new, secularized solution becomes even more distinct in the memory theater of the Italian Camillo, which, frequently discussed in the meantime, itself belongs to the history of technical media.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Camillo built a wooden construction resem- bling a small, round theater (see, for example, F. A. Yates, Gedächtnis und Erinnern, Weinheim 1991, 123ff.). Those who ventured inside were con- fronted by a panel of 7 x 7 pictures Camillo had commissioned from highly respected painters of the period. The horizontal division corresponded to the seven planetary spheres, the vertical division to seven stages of develop- ment from the first principles up to the elements, to the natural world, to the human being, to the arts and, finally, the sciences. In this way, every field in the matrix represented a certain aspect of the cosmos. The images were merely there to convey the general picture, whereas behind them were com- partments with the texts written by the great writers and philosophers. It was in these compartments, then, that the user looked for sources, concepts and further information. To this extent, the whole thing was a system of access, and the analogy with search engines becomes evident in the clear separation between the access to the texts and the texts themselves.
Camillo’s theater has finally brought the human being, the viewer, into the center of the construction. The surface of the images is oriented to his view, and solely the beholder’s perspective joins up the forty-nine fields in the matrix.

raster : a scan pattern (as of the electron beam in a cathode-ray tube) in which an area is scanned from side to side in lines from top to bottom; also : a pattern of closely spaced rows of dots that form an image (as on the cathode-ray tube of a television or computer display)

A Martian Factory

To the outsider the threads connecting the delicate brains of the men with the indestructible organs of the machines were subtle and invisible.
Bogdanov/ 65

The earthly envelope of land, air and ocean – the realm of organic life, or biosphere – is doubled by a second skin of electronically mediated thought: the noosphere.
Brian Holmes

Digital Dark Spaces

 

A state apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock, the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public functions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of machinic enslavement: the first “megamachine” in the strict sense, to use Mumford’s term.5

DEUCE // Deus ex machine

digital electrical universal computing engine

http://deucecomputer.com/

 

http://users.tpg.com.au/eedeuce/

timemachine

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die.

Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles:François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 1859-1868

Between 1859 and 1868, the French sculptor François Willème perfected two distinct methods for producing sculptural portraits by photographic and mechanical means. Both were founded on the principle that the reassembly of the various "profiles" of a subject would yield a recognizable and complete likeness. The use of mechanical tools, derived in part from those of Collas and Sauvage, would provide for a realistic objectivity, while the finishing of the model by hand would guarantee the final product as a work of art. The apex of photosculpture's popularity and the critical discussions about it - by Théophile Gautier and others - coincided with the early work of Auguste Rodin in which he shared with Willème a fundamental system of "profiles comparées."

 Robert A. Sobieszek The Art Bulletin Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 617-630

our reconstruction of Willème's apparatus

		Photosculpture de la comtesse Walewska

burghers

Vannevar Bush / memex

/as-we-may-think

The Collas Machine / appareil réducteur

 The Collas Machine


Invented in 1836 by  French engineer Achille Collas, this machine uses a pantograph system to make proportionately larger or smaller duplications of a sculpture. The concept can be traced to ancient Greek and Roman artists, who wanted to reproduce the perfect proportions of the human figure in their sculpture. Their method was called pointing, which meant that measurements of the desired figure were taken, then proportionally increased or decreased on a model. Collas machines often look like lathes. On one turntable sits the plaster model. On a second turntable, connected to the first, sits a clay or plaster "blank" that has been roughly shaped to resemble the model but on a larger or smaller scale.

The Collas machine keeps the model and the blank in the same orientation as the technician uses a tracing needle, linked to a sharp cutting instrument, or stylus, to transfer a succession of profiles from the model onto the blank. Gradually the blank is worked so that it becomes a larger or smaller duplicate of the model.

Rodin and his skilled associate Henri Lebossé collaborated closely on reductions and enlargements

Around 1836 Collas developed a new machine permitting the mathematically precise reduction or enlargement of sculptural objects in full relief. Three years later he demonstrated its abilities by producing a two-fifths size reproduction of the Venus de Milo. His device became the main vehicle for the mass replication of antique and modern sculptures catering for a growing demand for inexpensive luxury items to decorate bourgeois interiors. In 1838 he entered into partnership with the manufacturer Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810-92) and the firm of Collas eventually employed around 300 workers and produced over a thousand bronzes each year. They reached an international audience with an acclaimed exhibit at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, which featured as its centre-piece a half-size reproduction of Ghiberti's principal door to the Baptistery in Florence. Even after Collas's death in 1859, his 'method' remained the mainstay of Barbedienne's enduring commercial success throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century.