age of technical reproducibility

/* * "Seascape" by Alexander Alekseev aka TDM - 2014 * License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. * Contact: tdmaav@gmail.com */ const int NUM_STEPS = 8; const float PI = 3.141592; const float EPSILON = 1e-3; #define EPSILON_NRM (0.1 / iResolution.x) // sea const int ITER_GEOMETRY = 3; const int ITER_FRAGMENT = 5; const float SEA_HEIGHT = 0.6; const float SEA_CHOPPY = 4.0; const float SEA_SPEED = 0.8; const float SEA_FREQ = 0.16; const vec3 SEA_BASE = vec3(0.1,0.19,0.22); const vec3 SEA_WATER_COLOR = vec3(0.8,0.9,0.6); #define SEA_TIME (1.0 + iTime * SEA_SPEED) const mat2 octave_m = mat2(1.6,1.2,-1.2,1.6); // math mat3 fromEuler(vec3 ang) { vec2 a1 = vec2(sin(ang.x),cos(ang.x)); vec2 a2 = vec2(sin(ang.y),cos(ang.y)); vec2 a3 = vec2(sin(ang.z),cos(ang.z)); mat3 m; m[0] = vec3(a1.y*a3.y+a1.x*a2.x*a3.x,a1.y*a2.x*a3.x+a3.y*a1.x,-a2.y*a3.x); m[1] = vec3(-a2.y*a1.x,a1.y*a2.y,a2.x); m[2] = vec3(a3.y*a1.x*a2.x+a1.y*a3.x,a1.x*a3.x-a1.y*a3.y*a2.x,a2.y*a3.y); return m; } float hash( vec2 p ) { float h = dot(p,vec2(127.1,311.7)); return fract(sin(h)*43758.5453123); } float noise( in vec2 p ) { vec2 i = floor( p ); vec2 f = fract( p ); vec2 u = f*f*(3.0-2.0*f); return -1.0+2.0*mix( mix( hash( i + vec2(0.0,0.0) ), hash( i + vec2(1.0,0.0) ), u.x), mix( hash( i + vec2(0.0,1.0) ), hash( i + vec2(1.0,1.0) ), u.x), u.y); } // lighting float diffuse(vec3 n,vec3 l,float p) { return pow(dot(n,l) * 0.4 + 0.6,p); } float specular(vec3 n,vec3 l,vec3 e,float s) { float nrm = (s + 8.0) / (PI * 8.0); return pow(max(dot(reflect(e,n),l),0.0),s) * nrm; } // sky vec3 getSkyColor(vec3 e) { e.y = max(e.y,0.0); return vec3(pow(1.0-e.y,2.0), 1.0-e.y, 0.6+(1.0-e.y)*0.4); } // sea float sea_octave(vec2 uv, float choppy) { uv += noise(uv); vec2 wv = 1.0-abs(sin(uv)); vec2 swv = abs(cos(uv)); wv = mix(wv,swv,wv); return pow(1.0-pow(wv.x * wv.y,0.65),choppy); } float map(vec3 p) { float freq = SEA_FREQ; float amp = SEA_HEIGHT; float choppy = SEA_CHOPPY; vec2 uv = p.xz; uv.x *= 0.75; float d, h = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < ITER_GEOMETRY; i++) { d = sea_octave((uv+SEA_TIME)*freq,choppy); d += sea_octave((uv-SEA_TIME)*freq,choppy); h += d * amp; uv *= octave_m; freq *= 1.9; amp *= 0.22; choppy = mix(choppy,1.0,0.2); } return p.y - h; } float map_detailed(vec3 p) { float freq = SEA_FREQ; float amp = SEA_HEIGHT; float choppy = SEA_CHOPPY; vec2 uv = p.xz; uv.x *= 0.75; float d, h = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < ITER_FRAGMENT; i++) { d = sea_octave((uv+SEA_TIME)*freq,choppy); d += sea_octave((uv-SEA_TIME)*freq,choppy); h += d * amp; uv *= octave_m; freq *= 1.9; amp *= 0.22; choppy = mix(choppy,1.0,0.2); } return p.y - h; } vec3 getSeaColor(vec3 p, vec3 n, vec3 l, vec3 eye, vec3 dist) { float fresnel = clamp(1.0 - dot(n,-eye), 0.0, 1.0); fresnel = pow(fresnel,3.0) * 0.65; vec3 reflected = getSkyColor(reflect(eye,n)); vec3 refracted = SEA_BASE + diffuse(n,l,80.0) * SEA_WATER_COLOR * 0.12; vec3 color = mix(refracted,reflected,fresnel); float atten = max(1.0 - dot(dist,dist) * 0.001, 0.0); color += SEA_WATER_COLOR * (p.y - SEA_HEIGHT) * 0.18 * atten; color += vec3(specular(n,l,eye,60.0)); return color; } // tracing vec3 getNormal(vec3 p, float eps) { vec3 n; n.y = map_detailed(p); n.x = map_detailed(vec3(p.x+eps,p.y,p.z)) - n.y; n.z = map_detailed(vec3(p.x,p.y,p.z+eps)) - n.y; n.y = eps; return normalize(n); } float heightMapTracing(vec3 ori, vec3 dir, out vec3 p) { float tm = 0.0; float tx = 1000.0; float hx = map(ori + dir * tx); if(hx > 0.0) return tx; float hm = map(ori + dir * tm); float tmid = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < NUM_STEPS; i++) { tmid = mix(tm,tx, hm/(hm-hx)); p = ori + dir * tmid; float hmid = map(p); if(hmid < 0.0) { tx = tmid; hx = hmid; } else { tm = tmid; hm = hmid; } } return tmid; } // main void mainImage( out vec4 fragColor, in vec2 fragCoord ) { vec2 uv = fragCoord.xy / iResolution.xy; uv = uv * 2.0 - 1.0; uv.x *= iResolution.x / iResolution.y; float time = iTime * 0.3 + iMouse.x*0.01; // ray vec3 ang = vec3(sin(time*3.0)*0.1,sin(time)*0.2+0.3,time); vec3 ori = vec3(0.0,3.5,time*5.0); vec3 dir = normalize(vec3(uv.xy,-2.0)); dir.z += length(uv) * 0.15; dir = normalize(dir) * fromEuler(ang); // tracing vec3 p; heightMapTracing(ori,dir,p); vec3 dist = p - ori; vec3 n = getNormal(p, dot(dist,dist) * EPSILON_NRM); vec3 light = normalize(vec3(0.0,1.0,0.8)); // color vec3 color = mix( getSkyColor(dir), getSeaColor(p,n,light,dir,dist), pow(smoothstep(0.0,-0.05,dir.y),0.3)); // post fragColor = vec4(pow(color,vec3(0.75)), 1.0); }

reconstruct depth

stop sending me noods


In 'A Berlin Chronicle' (1932) Benjamin describes a lost diagram:

I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous- situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them—at least those that remain in our memory—for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life.

Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, 1932, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso, pp. 293–346

sue-anne's cat

she's gonna do it again

everything is always better with a pony

or...

FU and the horse you ride in on

poets are useless

"You will remember how Plato deals with poets in his ideal state: he banishes them from it in the public interest. He had a high conception of the power of poetry, but he believed it harmful, superfluous - in a perfect community, of course. The question of the poet's right to exist has not often, since then, been posed with the same emphasis; but today it poses itself. Probably it is only seldom posed in this form, but it is more or less familiar to you all as the question of the autonomy of the poet, of his freedom to write whatever he pleases... A more advanced type of writer does recognize this choice. His decision, made on the basis of class struggle, is to side with the proletariat... Such writing is commonly called tendentious. Here you have the catchword around which has long circled a debate familiar to you. Its familiarity tells you how unfruitful it has been, for it has not advanced beyond the monotonous reiteration of arguments for and against: on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality. This second formulation is not uninteresting, and, moreover, it is correct. I adopt it as my own. But in doing so I abstain from asserting it dogmatically. It must be proved... the tendency of a literary work can be politically correct only if it is also literarily correct. That is to say, the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straightaway: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that work."

("The Author as Producer")

A 3D illustration of a metasurface skin cloak made from an ultrathin layer of nanoantennas (gold blocks) covering an arbitrarily shaped object. Light reflects off the cloak (red arrows) as if it were reflecting off a flat mirror.

it happened again, bring the mops, bring all of the mops

The work is the death mask of its conception.

japanese toys //

The Ningyo-Do Bunko Database has more than 100 albums of late 19th/early 20th century watercolour sketches of toy designs.

dogs

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v018/18.3.allen.html

horsey

fouquet's stone

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’

But as well as supporting Surrealism’s analyses of kitsch and clutter and all their utopian and dystopian investments, Benjamin and friends are compelled to propagandize for the opposite, more conventionally Modernist strategy of wipe-out, emancipation from clutter. In 1931 Benjamin invents the persona of the ‘destructive character’ - enemy of the comfort-seeking ‘etui-person’:

The etui-person seeks comfort, and the case is its epitome. The inside of the case is a velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world.

The destructive character is a type opposed to repression in its political and psychic senses, who - causing havoc by cutting ways through - removes the traces which sentimentally bind us to the status quo.

The destructive character knows only one slogan: make space; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful, for destroying rejuvenates by clearing away traces of our own age... .

The destructive character wants to make possible the formulation of experience according to revised and appropriate tenets.

 

...

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’, ‘Efface the traces!’, Brecht insisted in one poem in his 1926 lyric cycle ‘Handbook for City-dwellers’. For those traces, the monograms, screens, knickknacks on mantlepieces secreted like sprays of dog-piss, are also tied up with possession; and so signal class society. Brecht’s poetic sentiment details the issue of autonomy at stake: Efface the traces, rather than have someone else efface them. ‘Efface the traces’ - screeched Benjamin in February 1933 in ‘Live Without Traces’, a tiny fragment which presented a horror-vision of the cluttered bourgeois parlour, and detailed the new, potential, lives to be led within shiny, translucent steel and glass. In his 1939 commentary on Brecht’s poem, Benjamin noted that the phrase ‘efface the traces’ now seems to have been a secret indication of the strategy of crypto-emigration by communist activists. By 1939 it had long been obvious to Benjamin and others that it was ‘Jewish trash’, plus other bits of social refuse, which power decreed must be swept out. 

esther leslie

nymphs

The exchange of letters with Adorno in the Summer of 1935 clarifies the sense in which the extremes of this polar tension are to be understood. Adorno defines the concept of dialectical image starting from Benjamin's notion of allegory in the Trauerspielbuch, which speaks of a 'hollowing out of meaning' carried out in objects  by the allegorical intention.

With the vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out, and as ciphers, they draw in meanings. Subjectivity takes possession of them insofar as it invests them with intentions of fear and desire. And insofar as defunct things stand in as images of subjective intentions, these latter present themselves as immemorial and eternal. Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things and incoming and disappearing meaning - and instantiated in the moment of indifference between death and meaning.

Copying this passage onto his notecards, Benjamin comments 'with regard to these reflections it should be kept in mind that, in the nineteenth century, the number of 'hollowed-out' things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation. Where meaning is suspended, dialectical images appear. The dialectical image is, in other word, an unresolved oscillation between estrangement and a new event of meaning.  Similar to the emblematic intention, the dialectical image holds its object suspended in a semantic void.

Agamben/ Nymphs / 28-30

-->

The 3-D body is hollow...

Her anxiety doesn’t seem to come from the threat of physical pain. Rather, she is overwhelmed with the amount of information she must process: coordinates, shuttle manuals, ornate procedures.

Gravity presents the body as mere operational device, a cursor, an avatar who performs a set of actions. It is workflow cinema.

Her task, like ours, is simply to organize the overwhelming flow of visual data she receives through her visor.

Gravity shows a contemporary ideal of femininity still more sinister than the pinup. It presents woman as an intricate machine, strapped to dozens of wires, working her ass off with the goal of appearing weightless.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/body-mass-index/

wb/ prehistory /

V

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

 ....

Agamben / philosophical archaeology/ 2009
 
And it is something similar that Benjamin might have had in mind, when, in Overbeck’s footsteps, he wrote that in the monadological structure of the historical object are contained both ‘prehistory’ and ‘post-history’ (Vor- und Nachgeschichte), or when he suggested that the entire past must be immersed into the present in a ‘historical apocatastasis’ (Benjamin 1982, p. 573). (Apocatastasis is the restitution in the origin which, according to Origenes, takes place at the end of times; qualifying an eschatological reality as ‘historical’, Benjamin uses an image very similar to the foucaultian ‘a priori’.)

WB // Commentaries on Poems by Brecht

The War Primer is written in 'lapidary' style. The word comes from the Latin lapis, 'stone', and describes the style which was developed for Roman inscriptions. Its most important characteristic was brevity. This was conditioned, first, by the effort required to chisel the words in stone; second, by the realization that for one who speaks to a succession of generations it is seemly to be brief.
If stone - the natural condition of lapidary style - is no longer the material of these poems, what has taken its place? What justifies their inscription style? One of them hints at an answer. It reads:

On the wall was chalked;
They want war.
The man who wrote it
Has already fallen.

The first line of this poem could be placed at the head of each of the War Primer poems. These inscriptions are not, like those of the Romans, intended for stone but, like those of underground fighters, for fences.

Boris Groys ///Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive

However, the internet has become not a place for the realization of postmodern utopias, but their graveyard—as the museum became a graveyard for modern utopias. Indeed, the most important aspect of the internet is that it fundamentally changes the relationship between original and copy, as described by Benjamin—and thus makes the anonymous process of reproduction calculable and personalized. On the internet, every free-floating signifier has an address. The deterritorializing data flows become reterritorialized.

_{Google data servers}

Walter Benjamin famously distinguished between the original, which is defined through its “here and now,” and the copy, which is siteless, topologically indeterminable, lacking a “here and now.” Contemporary digital reproduction is by no means siteless, its circulation is not topologically undetermined, and it does not present itself in the form of a multiplicity as Benjamin described it. Every data file’s address on the internet accords it a place. The same data file with a different address is a different data file. Here the aura of originality is not lost, but instead substituted by a different aura. On the internet, the circulation of digital data produces not copies, but new originals. And this circulation is perfectly traceable. Individual pieces of data are never deterritorialized. Moreover, every internet image or text has not only its specific unique place, but also its unique time of appearance. The internet registers every moment when a certain piece of data is clicked, liked, un-liked, transferred, or transformed. Accordingly, a digital image cannot be merely copied (as an analogue, mechanically reproducible image can) but always only newly staged or performed. And every performance of a data file is dated and archived.

Boris Groys ///Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive

The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power: In conversation with Giorgio Agamben

The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power: In conversation with Giorgio Agamben

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1729&fulltext=1

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good…. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.

WE HAVE A NEW ATTORNEY, Dr. Bucephalus 

We have a new attorney, Dr. Bucephalus. Little in his external appearance reminds one of the time when he was still Alexander of Macedon's battle steed. But those who are familiar with the circumstances notice certain things. Indeed, I recently saw, on the outside staircase, even a quite simple court employee admire the attorney with the professional look of a modest regular of the races as, lifting his thighs high, he went up from step to step, his footfalls ringing out on the marble.

In general the bar approves of the admission of Bucephalus. With amazing understanding they tell themselves that Bucephalus is in a difficult position in today's social order and that therefore, as well as because of his world-historical significance, he deserves some accommodation anyway. Today -- no one can deny it -- there is no great Alexander. Yes, many people try to murder; also there is no lack of people with the skill to strike their friend over the banquet table with a spear; and many find Macedonia too cramped, so that they curse Philip, the father -- but no one, no one can lead to India. Even back then, the gates to India were unreachable, but the king's sword showed the way. Today the gates are elsewhere entirely and further and higher; no one shows the way; many have swords, but only to wave them about; and the gaze that wants to follow them gets tangled up.

So maybe it's really best, as Bucephalus has done, to sink into law books. Free, his sides unvexed by the loins of the rider, by a quiet lamp, far from the racket of Alexander's battles, he reads and turns the pages of our old books.

University of Muri

 

Amtliches Lehrgedicht der philosophischen Fakulät der Haupt-und-Staats-Universität Muri.

sibyl

Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on... "They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry" (One Way Street 449-50

When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 100)

Got almonds and left with my package to the Piazza.