owl saw me

Museum of Vancouver

invisible man / ralph ellison

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Prologue

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

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.

img

pictures not homes

The Sevillian Pedro Luis Enriquez goes off to ten years in prison for having affirmed that by taking a rooster to a field where there was no sound of dogs, and cutting its head off at midnight, one would find a small stone like a hazelnut, rubbing one's lips with which would make the first pretty woman encountered die of love for the one doing this, and that killing a cat in January and inserting a bean into each of its joints and burying it, the beans growing from it, if bitten while looking at oneself in the mirror, would have the virtue of making one invisible; and because he said he was a tough fellow and a healer, in token of which he had a cross on his breast and another on the roof of his mouth, and claimed that in prison he saw splendors and smelled the sweetest of fragrances.

viewshed

 He who from the top of AEtna casts his eyes leisurely around, is affected chiefly by the extent and diversity of the scene. Only by a rapid whirling on his heel could he hope to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness. But as, on the summit of AEtna, no man has thought of whirling on his heel, so no man has ever taken into his brain the full uniqueness of the prospect; and so, again, whatever considerations lie involved in this uniqueness, have as yet no practical existence for mankind.
 http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/eureka.html

A viewshed is an area of land, water, or other environmental element that is visible to the human eye from a fixed vantage point. The term is used widely in such areas as urban planning, archaeology, and military science. In urban planning, for example, viewsheds tend to be areas of particular scenic or historic value that are deemed worthy of preservation against development or other change. Viewsheds are often spaces that are readily visible from public areas such as from public roadways, public parks or high-rise buildings. The preservation of viewsheds is frequently a goal in the designation of open space areas, green belts, and community separators.

In digital imaging, a viewshed may be a binary raster indicating the visibility of a viewpoint for or from an area of interest. A pixel with a value of unity indicates that the viewpoint is visible from that pixel, while a value of zero indicates that the viewpoint is not visible from the pixel. In certain disciplines, such as radio communications, 'visibility' may be probabilistic, therefore viewshed may be represented with non-integer values.
In radio, a viewshed is the area where a specific combination of transmitter, antenna, and terrain allow reception of signal.

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Avebury// googleearth

wol

A Guided Tour of the Visible Human

The Visible Human Project has generated over 18000 digitized sections of the human body

porta dei cieli

Windows, doors, airport gates, and other thresholds are those trans- parent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of volumetric delivery, of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable.

The Unworkable Interface // Alexander R. Galloway

block

 

The struggle for depth (presence) is always effaced (blocked and/or hijacked) by surface-as-information (mediation),or that information flowing through mediatic (mediatized) capital and across the face of commercial architectures as  both style and apparent “surplus” value. 

  

“UPSTREAM”: WHAT IS “IN” FORMAL AGENCY?  
 gavin keeney

invisories

"When they use to ride abrod, they have invisories, or masks, visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, he would think hee met a monster or a devil; for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them".
Phillip Stubbes / Anatomie of Abuses / 1583























A mask . . . This is a thing that in former times Gentlewomen used to put over their Faces when they travel to keep them from Sun burning....Visard Mask, which covers the whole face, having holes for the eyes, a case for the nose, and a slit for the mouth, and to speak through; this kind of Mask is taken off and put in a moment of time, being only held in the Teeth by means of a round bead fastned on the inside over against the mouth.

concealed






















The face itself is a redundancy. It is itself in redundancy with the redundancies of significance or frequency, and those of resonance or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye." (Deleuze-Guiattari Thousand Plateaus 168)

on the Campus Martius a storm burst with violent thunder

A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth.

Livy 1.16 (Romulus)

apalache

the micmacs

thought them witches


they could raise

a fog,

through which

to escape

fern seed

n.

The dustlike spores of ferns, formerly believed to be seeds and once thought to have the power of making their possessor invisible.

We have the receipt of fern seed, we walk invisible (1 Henry IV., act iv. 4).
The seed of certain species of fern is so small as to be invisible to the naked eye, and hence the plant was believed to confer invisibility on those who carried it about their person.
It was at one time believed that plants have the power of imparting their own speciality to their wearer.