black box // last words

 the black box functions as a perfect synecdoche: one surviving part that at a human and material level, can reassemble the disintegrated whole

http://planecrashinfo.com/lastwords.htm

Eric Partridge suggests that it is in use from 1945 in RAF slang to signify any mysterious, clever piece of equipment on board a plane (interestingly, he says it was first applied to a device that allowed bomb aimers to see through clouds or darkness). Presumably the term gets transferred to one specific device, the flight recorder, not because the insides of such a thing are particularly intricate or mysterious (it’s just a sound recorder), but because they are made to be inaccessible. But, in either case, the ‘black box’ seems to point to a new phase of machinery, one in which machines, traditionally things which can be made fully explicit, and opened up to show their workings, start to have the same magical inaccessibility as selves, persons or souls.

http://literature-technology-media.co.uk/?p=280

the cavern full of shadow where Cacus is murdered

a reading of the configuration of surfaces

To take the auguries is to believe in a world without man; to inaugurate means to give homage to the real as such.

Serres/ Rome / 12

quasi objects

the plate stabilises the social relation of eating

pass-the-parcel

Serres’s meditations on the intermediary and the circumstantial dimensions of communication in The Parasite come to a climax with an extraordinary evocation of what he calls the ‘quasi-object’. The quasi-object is a form of mediation which originally comes into being as a way of fixing or stabilising social conflicts which might otherwise tend to degenerate into absolute chaos, or all-out, all-against-all war. In that it marks the boundary between the subjective and the objective, Serres’s quasi-object resembles Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’. But, where Winnicott’s model explicates the way in which an individual negotiates its relations to the world, Serres’s model concerns the complex interchanges involved in collectivity. What lies between partners in a dialogue, combatants, or opponents can be thought of like the mobile objects employed in games: the ball in a game of rugby, the parcel in pass-the-parcel, or the ‘furet’ (‘ferret’), used in a French game resembling hunt-the-slipper. Serres explicates the process whereby the rapid passage of the furet both distinguishes and connects, fixes and dissolves, the parties to the collectivity and their relative positions:





a farmer dying of hunger stuffs Poverty, a wizened old woman, into an empty marrowbone and throws it into a pond; some lord fishes out the bones or perhaps merely finds the old woman again and invites her home with him, thus bringing unhappiness into his own house

Leiris / manhood / 49

Kneading

‘The system grows old without letting time escape; it garners age - the new emblems are caught up and subsumed by old ones; the baker molds memory...Time enters into the dough, a prisoner of its folds, a shadow of its folding over’ (Serres 1991: 81)














Tomb of the freedman baker, Eurysaces, Porta Maggiore
One of the most striking features of this 33-foot-tall tomb is the series of cylindrical holes along the sides. This is very different from the classical Roman styles of tombs, and thus, allows Eurysaces’ tomb to stand out on the very busy Via Praenestina and Via Labicana the streets that intersected next to the monument. It was later discovered that these unusual holes are the exact size of one unit of grain. Wikipedia















The route from local time to global time, from the instant to time, from the present to history, is unforeseeable; it is not integrable by reason, as analysis has shaped it. It seems to go crazily, no matter where, and drunkenly, no matter how. If the baker knew how to write, she would lazily follow the fly’s flight, the capricious foldings of proteins, the coastline of Brittany or of Ile d’Ouessant, the fluctuating fringe of a mass of clouds. (Serres 1991: 82).













spelt

Ichnography

The flat projection is the noise, the ichnography is the background noise, any scenography, any profile, and any appearance, are forms sprung from this background, signals come from this noise, percieved things born of these apperceptions.

Serres, Genesis
op cit

Live VLF Natural Radio

http://abelian.org/vlf/
The Cape Coral stream is fab.Nasa have some samples of 'sferics, tweeks and whistlers here:
http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/inspire.html

I hear without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analyzing, the ear knows how to lose track.. We breathe background noise, the taut and tenuous agitation at the bottom of the world

World Wide Lightning Location Network
http://webflash.ess.washington.edu/

Time as weather... a cloud is an aggregate, a nebulous set, a multiplicity whose exact definition escapes us....

Serres M. Genesis, University of Michigan Press 1998