leaf

 

… the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning… [T]he same objection necessarily applies to all moving objects, which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory'. Only after it had fallen to the ground was a leaf available for impression, when it rejoined the world of inert things.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion p44 commenting on Daguerre's experiments.

heritage futures

Turkeys circling a dead cat


In the last few years many other messaging projects have been initiated, most of which will send your message to space for a fee. This individualisation and monetisation is entirely in keeping with neoliberalism and with the increasing privatisation of space exploration. There have also been gifts to celestial bodies, such as the small aluminium sculpture on the moon sometimes called the ‘fallen astronaut’ . and the Lego mini-figures which are on board the Juno spacecraft which will crash into Jupiter soon.

*****

 RIP Gustav Metzger
 Computer Art Society Journal Archive
http://computer-arts-society.com/page?startidx42606=36

wales

Wales by csm_photosculpture on Sketchfab

The flat summit of Hay bluff overlooks the middle Wye Valley and the book town of Hay-on-Wye is marked by a triangulation pillar at a height of 677 metres (2,221 ft). 

falling fitty

she'll be coming down the mountain

geological flow and tumble

She will take us to the portals, When she comes . . . . 

If Western multiculturalism is relativism as public policy, then Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multinaturalism as cosmic politics.

Pascal's abyss // la peur des espaces

Shortly after his coach was nearly thrown into the Seine while crossing the Neuilly-Sur-Seine bridge in 1654, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal became convinced that an abyss had formed on his left-hand side.

Le Gouffre

Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.
— Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,
Parole! Et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève
Mainte fois de la Peur je sens passer le vent.

En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève,
Le silence, l'espace affreux et captivant...
Sur le fond de mes nuits Dieu de son doigt savant
Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve.

J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou,
Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où;
Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenêtres,

Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté,
Jalouse du néant l'insensibilité.
— Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des Êtres!
— Charles Baudelaire

In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves,

I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well... I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn't thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was... It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight... It's a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate, it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature."
"I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture"

Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval 

builder's language

Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur

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--> The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar" "slab", "beam". A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. Conceive this as a complete primitive language. (PI 2.)

-->

Later "this" and "there" are added (with functions analogous to the function these words have in natural language), and "a, b, c, d" as numerals. An example of its use: builder A says "d — slab — there" and points, and builder B counts four slabs, "a, b, c, d..." and moves them to the place pointed to by A. The builder's language is an activity into which is woven something we would recognize as language, but in a simpler form. This language-game resembles the simple forms of language taught to children, and Wittgenstein asks that we conceive of it as "a complete primitive language" for a tribe of builders.

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{5}Here, above all, is the basis of the profound affinity between the adventurer and the artist, and also, perhaps, of the artist's attraction by adventure. For the essence of a work of art is, after all, that it cuts out a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of perceived experience, detaching it from all connections with one side or the other, giving it a self-sufficient form as though defined and held together by an inner core. A part of existence, interwoven with uninterruptedness of that existence, yet nevertheless felt as a whole, as an integrated unit - this is the form common to both the work of art and the adventure. Indeed, it is an attribute of this form to make us feel that in both the work of art and the adventure the whole of life is somehow comprehended and consummated - and this irrespective of the particular theme either of them may have. Moreover we feel this, not although, but because, the work of art exists entirely beyond life as a reality; the adventure, entirely beyond life as an uninterrupted course which intelligibly connects every element with its neighbors. It is because the work of art and the adventure stand over against life (even though in very different senses of the phrase) that both are analogous to the totality of life itself, even as this totality presents itself in the brief summary and crowdedness of a dream experience.

Georg Simmel The Adventure

 

dynamitage de l'obélisque

All space is already occupied by the enemy

Gustave Courbet is one of the leaders of the Commune. He instigates the demolition of Napoleon's statue in the Place de Vendome because it is a symbol of militarism and imperialism. He writes I get up, I eat breakfast, I sit down and preside for 12 hours a day, my head begins to feel like a baked apple. But despite all this unaccustomed turmoil of the head and brain, I’m in a state of enchantment. Paris est un vrai paradis. The poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are also involved. In the last days of the Commune, Edward Manet draws heartbreaking pictures of the Communards slaughtered at the barricades by the French Army


http://marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/index.htm

May 16th 1871 /// to demolish the Vendôme Column

Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism

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http://www.ccwgraduateschool.org/a-conversation-between-michael-asbury-and-sean-lynch/

The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid: the charge of the Mamelukes

History / kill zones


ABC

Gertrude Stein supports the strike

Anne Carson /
Uncle Falling

Locker Room

Realism = making the conditions of the present available.


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Toby is reading The Time Machine by HG Wells.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then …
I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling…
I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback - of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing…
The twinkling sensation of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye… The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band… Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring…

The Phenomenon of the Future

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Gibson / Neuromancer

Over the world as it ends in decrepitude is a pale sky that may perhaps dissipate with the clouds - streaks of used sunsets that bleed into the dormant waters of a river, submerged beneath rays and drops. The trees are bored, and beneath their whitened foliage [whitened by the dust of time, not by the dust of roads], rises the tent of the Revealer of Things Past…
Mallarme / Divagations / 11

The sky is thin as paper here.
Burroughs / Cities of the Red Night


The narrow staircase pushes me into the attic where the wall paper is loose. There are no images because the room is itself an image.
The yellow-orange cloth wrapping the skylight seems to hold a fallen sun; a softly illuminating sun of about one meter diameter, flat like a coin. I sweat and dream, washed up on a cold beach at midday.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Pynchon / Gravity's RAINBOW


‘The sea had receded and the ground was grey and brownish like the sky. Abstraction grey. Calmly, intensely, hopelessly, the ultimate abstraction took hold of me.’ It seems to me that the ‘abstraction grey’, which recalls Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ of theory, is the place to begin not so much thinking the ‘future’ as thinking the present.

noys/ beradi 

"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13 

1

The sky had lifted at least thirty feet.

I sat there, not moving. The shock must have cracked the

pavement, my right hand fumbled in the rubble. As I breathed,

the silence stilled the explosion of stars whose sparks still

crackled in my head. The white lines in the pavement showed

dimly in the darkness: my hand left the ground, felt up my left

arm, up to my shoulder, back down my ribs to my hips: noth-

ing, I was intact, I could go on.

I stood up. Falling flat on my face, sprawled out like a cross, I

remembered that I had forgotten to check over my legs as well.

ASTRAGAL /sarrazin

fall

weißer Papierfläche

Muybridge, The First Fall, 1867























Muybridge/ Pi-Wi-Ack (Shower of Stars), Vernal Falls, 400 Feet, Valley of Yosemite 1872 photograph | albumen print

The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface (weißer Papierfläche) on which it is inscribed. We might even deny it that identity by thinking of it as surge of white waves (though these might not even be distinguishable to the naked eye.) (eventuell mit bloßem Auge nicht unterscheidbarer) (604/83).

Framing Pictures, Transcending Marks: Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Paintings, Signs
and Marks’

Andrew Benjamin

fanny stevenson's painted pony throws itself off a cliff, samoa

not to fall

Second Circle

DANTE FAINTED