rti assembly files

 concave japanese lacquer

 plastic googly eye

 glass game dice

 pill packet

 ruby

 lodestone

 pearl

pearl diving

POWER
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

AR

halo

In general, kairos and chronos are opposed or heterogeneous, which is certainly true. But decisive here is not simply the opposition, but the relationship between them. What do we have when we have a kairos, an occasion? The most beautiful definition of kairos I have ever found is in the Corpus Hippocraticum, and it is one which in fact characterizes kairos with respect to chronos. I will quote this definition: chronos esti en ho kairos kai kairos esti en ho ou pollos chronos, "the chronos is where we have kairos and the kairos is where we have a little chronos." Mark the extraordinary implication of the two concepts, which are literally the one within the other. The kairos—to translate it simply as "occasion" or "chance" would be trivial—is not another time: what we get when we grasp a kairos is not another time, but only a contracted and abridged chronos. The precious pearl in the ring of chance is only a small portion (porzione) of chronos, a time which is left. This is the same as the old rabbinic apologue that Benjamin once told to Bloch, according to which the messianic world is not another world; it is this same profane world, but with just a little shift, a very small difference. But this little shift, which results from my having grasped the disconnection with respect to chronological time, is in every way decisive.

..
Paul defines the relationship between chronological time—that is to say, the item that goes from "creation to" resurrection of Christ—and messianic time, by means of two fundamental concepts. The fist one is typos, foreshadowing, prefiguring, figure. Paul recalls here, in I Cor. 10:1–11, a series of episodes in the history of Israel: "Brothers, I want you to know that our fathers were all under the cloud, that they all crossed the sea and all were dipped in the sea and they all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink. They drank from a rock who was the messiah." Then he adds, "all these things happened to them as types, as figures of us, in order that we do not desire bad things, as they did." And a few lines later, he takes up the same mode: "these things occurred to them in a figural way [typicos], and were then written for our instruction, for us, for whom the extremities of the times have met (ta tele ton aionon katenteken; anatao— the "anti" signifies ‘face to face’.")
Auerbach has shown the importance of this "figural" conception in medieval culture (I say "figural" because Jerome translates typoi in I Cor. 10:6 with in figura), when it becomes the ground for a general theory of allegorical interpretat ion. Through the concept of t ypes, Paul establ ishes a relationship—which we from now on call typological relationship—between each event of the past and ho nym kairos, the now-time, present-messianic time. Thus in Romans 5:16, Adam, through whom sin entered the world, is defined typos tou mellontos, "figure (or foreshadow) of the future," that is to say, of the messiah, through whom peace will abound among men. And in Hebrews 9:26, the temple built by men is an antitype of the heavenly one, which could indicate a symmetrical relationship with respect to the type.

The point here is not simply that each event of the past becomes a figure or allegory of the present time and finds its fulfillment in it; decisive is rather the transformation of the time structure that the typological relationship brings about. It must imply a question of interpretation of the scripture, of the hermeneutical relationship that is established between two texts, between types and antitypes, as in the allegoric paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture. The hermeneutical relationship is only a secularization of the typological-messianic relationship. What is at stake in the figure, is not a hermeneutical problem, but a tension that transforms and binds together past and present, types and antitypes, in an inseparable constellation. The messianic is not one of the terms of the typological relationship: it is the relationship itself. And this is what Paul means when he says "for us, for whom the extremities of the times have met, are face to face." The two extremities of the olam hazzeh and the olam habba contact one another—their face-to-face is messianic time.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/the-time-that-is-left/

flint / chalk /

Each event, however commonplace and insignificant, thus became the speck of impurity around which experience accrued its authority, like a pearl.

Agamben / Infancy & History / 14

The majority of silica found in flint nodules is biogenic (produced by living organisms or biological processes). Although today's flint nodules are inorganic, the silica that formed them was originally sourced from the remains of sea sponges and siliceous planktonic micro-organisms (diatoms, radiolarians) during the late cretaceous period (60-95 million years ago). Flints are concretions that grew within the sediment after its deposition by the precipitation of silica; filling burrows/cavities and enveloping the remains of marine creatures, before dehydrating and hardening into the microscopic quartz crystals which constitute flint.

 

 The exact mode of formation of flint is not yet clear but it is thought that it occurs as a result of chemical changes in compressed sedimentary rock formations, during the process of diagenesis. One hypothesis is that a gelatinous material fills cavities in the sediment, such as holes bored by crustaceans or molluscs and that this becomes silicified. This theory certainly explains the complex shapes of flint nodules that are found. The source of dissolved silica in the porous media could arise from the spicules of silicious sponges.^[3] Certain types of flint, such as that from the south coast of England, contains trapped fossilised marine flora. Pieces of coral and vegetation have been found preserved like amber inside the flint. Thin slices of the stone often reveal this effect.

 

How flint is formed

David Bone – West SussexGeology

The formation of flint is a complex process which began in the chalk seas millions of years ago and is, summarised below:

Organisms such as sponges (on the macro scale) and radiolaria/diatoms (on the micro scale) use silica from sea water to manufacture the biogenic opal which forms their skeletons. When the organisms die and the organic parts decay the microscopic silica is scattered on the sea bed and becomes incorporated in the accumulating sediment.

At depths of 1 to 5m within this sediment, the biogenic opal breaks down, enriching the water between the sediment particles (sediment pore water) with silica.

At sediment depths of less than 10m, there is an oxic-anoxic boundary where hydrogen sulphide rising from the decomposing organic material within the sediment diffuses upwards meets oxygen diffusing downwards from the water column above. At this interface, the hydrogen sulphide is oxidised to sulphate with hydrogen ions as a by-product. The hydrogen ions lower the local pH, dissolving the chalk and thereby increasing the concentration of carbonate ions. These act as a seeding agent for the precipitation of silica.

Silica precipitates by the molecule-by-molecule replacement of chalk. The silica is initially in the form of crystalline opal but gradually transforms to quartz (flint) during later burial and with time.

The chalk sea bed is deeply burrowed by many different organisms, such as shells, echinoids and worms etc. Some of these burrows are quite deep or branching, or have open living spaces. The burrows fill with sediment after the organism has died, this is slightly different material from the sediment around it. These filled burrows act as preferential pathways (conduits) for the chemical reactions to occur. Flint formed within these old burrows often has a nodular shape which reflects the whole, or part of, overgrown remnants of such burrow systems.

There are two possible explanations for why flint forms in bands or layers. Firstly because chalk sedimentation occurs in cycles and secondly because the process above exhausts the silica within a given depth of sediment and flint formation can only recommence when there is enough silica to start the process again.

 

pearl binder

pearl binder

Artists' International Association (AIA) 
The association's aim was to promote the 'Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development'. It also aimed to promote wider access to art through travelling exhibitions and public art projects. The Artists International Association was a response to the social and political conflicts of the 1930s. It embraced all aspects of practice and held a series of group exhibitions. The AIA supported the left-wing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War through exhibitions and other fund-raising activities. The Association was also involved in the settling of artists displaced by the Nazi regime in Germany. Many of those linked with the Association were also pacifists.

An association of left-wing British artists founded in London in 1932 with the aim of achieving ‘the unity of artists against Fascism and war and the suppression of culture’. Originally it was called Artists International, but it added the word ‘Association’ to its name when it was reconstituted in 1935. It continued until 1971, but abandoned its political objectives in 1953, thereafter existing as an exhibiting society. Initially there were 32 members, mainly commercial artists and designers, although they also included the German-born Marxist art historian Francis Klingender (1907–55), who described his work as ‘theoretical and historical studies designed to elucidate the role of art as one of the great value-forming agencies in the social structure and social change’. The first chairman was the industrial designer Misha Black (1910–77), who later played an important role in the Festival of Britain. At the outset the position of the group was avowedly Marxist and its activities included producing pamphlets, posters, and other propaganda material (making use of facilities at the Central School of Art, where one of the founder members, James Fitton (1899–1982), taught lithography). Modern art, with its ‘negation of content’, was viewed with some suspicion as a sign of bourgeois decadence, but after the Association was reconstituted in 1935 it became much less doctrinaire and attracted support from artists working in a wide range of styles. Its exhibition ‘Artists against Fascism and War’ (1935), for example, included work by Robert Medley, Henry Moore, and Paul Nash, and by the end of the Second World War the Association had more than a thousand members. In addition to holding exhibitions, the AIA published a journal (sporadically and under different titles and formats, beginning as Artists International Bulletin, 1934–5) and also a book of essays entitled 5 on Revolutionary Art (1935). This was edited by the sculptor Betty Rea and the five contributors were Eric Gill, the ethnomusicologist A. L. Lloyd, Klingender, Herbert Read who gamely made the case, unpopular in the AIA, for the avant-garde against realism, and the writer Alick West.

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2010/05/01/pearl-binder-artist-writer/

corporation of the dying

red cabbage soup
carbonic acid bath
marzipan
ochre-yellow Italian scarf
whipped cream
meringue
coffee
a fur outfit with variegated pearls
felt footwear
program for a materialist encyclopedia



tungus

pearl diving

Pearls, too, were one of Tesla's phobias. If a woman guest at a dinner party to which he was invited wore pearls, he was unable to eat. Smooth round surfaces, in general, were an abomination to him; it had even taken him a long time to learn to tolerate billiard balls.

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Kissy Suzuki is a fictional character introduced in Ian Fleming's 1964 James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice.

Ama // Sea Woman // female pearl diver – 

famous hokusai shunga tako to ama - seduction of the pearl diver

https://032c.com/hood-by-air-barneys-new-york-windows#image1

graces

pearly horses

The Triumph of David

about 1445-55, Francesco Pesellino National Gallery London

La Peregrina

An attractive girl admiring a string of costly pearls just presented to her would in no few cases make the one seeing her in an advertisement exclaim: “I wish that I, too, might have a set of these pearls and so enhance my personal appearance.”  Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture /// Stuart Ewen 1976

pearl diving - such a general sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man

barocco

With respect to the rich pearl earrings above mentioned, it may not be uninteresting to remark, that Elizabeth seems to have been particularly fond of pearls, and to have possessed the same taste for them from youth to even a later period than "her sixty-fifth year." The now faded wax-work effigy preserved in Westminster Abbey (and which lay on her coffin, arrayed in royal robes, at her funeral, and caused, as Stowe states, "such a general sighing, groaning, and weeping, as the like hath not being seen or known in the memory of man") exhibits large round Roman pearls in the stomacher; a carcanet of large round pearls, &c. about her throat; her neck ornamented with long strings of pearls; her high-heeled shoe-bows having in the centre large pearl medallions. Her earrings are circular pearl and ruby medallions, with large pear-shaped pearl pendants. This, of course, represents her as she dressed towards the close of her life. In the Tollemache collection at Ham House is a miniature of her, however, when about twenty, which shows the same taste as existing at that age. She is here depicted in a black dress, trimmed with a double row of pearls. Her point-lace ruffles are looped with pearls, &c. Her head-dress is decorated in front with a jewel set with pearls, from which three pear-shaped pearls depend. And, finally, she has large pearl-tassel earrings. In the Henham Hall portrait (engraved in vol. vii. of Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England), the ruff is confined by a collar of pearls, rubies, &c., set in a gold filagree pattern, with large pear shaped pearls depending from each lozenge. The sleeves are ornamented with rouleaus, wreathed with pearls and bullion. The lappets of her head-dress also are adorned at every "crossing" with a large round pearl. Her gloves, moreover, were always of white kid, richly embroidered with pearls, &c. on the backs of the hands. A poet of that day asserts even that, at the funeral procession, when the royal corpse was rowed from Richmond, to lie in state at Whitehall,—

"Fish wept their eyes of pearl quite out,

And swam blind after,"

elizabeth of bohemia

pearl diving