apolo de pinedo

Museo de Prehistoria de Valencia

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

search engines

[The engine] learns about subject categories from the bottom up, instead of imposing an order from the top down. It is a self-organizing system.... To come up with subject categories, Architext makes only one assumption: words that fre- quently occur together are somehow related. As the corpus changes—as new connections emerge between, say O. J. Simpson and murder—the classification scheme automatically adjusts. The subject categories reflect the text itself”; “this eliminates two of the biggest criticisms of library classification: that every scheme has a point of view, and that every scheme will be constantly struggling against obsolescence. 

Search Engines

Hartmut Winkler

 In a model of the world created by Robert Fludd, an English encyclopedist of the Renaissance, God had already abandoned the center position (“Integrae Naturae speculum artisque imago” [1617], British Library). Retained has been a system of strictly concentric rings that contains the things of the world, encompassing a range from minerals to the plants and animals of nature up to the human arts and finally the planetary spheres. The center is occupied by a schematic diagram of the earth, a forerunner of that blue ball the astronauts radio-relayed to earth. The representation looks like a man- dala in which viewers can absorb themselves in order to take up contact with a cosmic whole. The new, secularized solution becomes even more distinct in the memory theater of the Italian Camillo, which, frequently discussed in the meantime, itself belongs to the history of technical media.  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Camillo built a wooden construction resem- bling a small, round theater (see, for example, F. A. Yates, Gedächtnis und Erinnern, Weinheim 1991, 123ff.). Those who ventured inside were con- fronted by a panel of 7 x 7 pictures Camillo had commissioned from highly respected painters of the period. The horizontal division corresponded to the seven planetary spheres, the vertical division to seven stages of develop- ment from the first principles up to the elements, to the natural world, to the human being, to the arts and, finally, the sciences. In this way, every field in the matrix represented a certain aspect of the cosmos. The images were merely there to convey the general picture, whereas behind them were com- partments with the texts written by the great writers and philosophers. It was in these compartments, then, that the user looked for sources, concepts and further information. To this extent, the whole thing was a system of access, and the analogy with search engines becomes evident in the clear separation between the access to the texts and the texts themselves.
Camillo’s theater has finally brought the human being, the viewer, into the center of the construction. The surface of the images is oriented to his view, and solely the beholder’s perspective joins up the forty-nine fields in the matrix.

raster : a scan pattern (as of the electron beam in a cathode-ray tube) in which an area is scanned from side to side in lines from top to bottom; also : a pattern of closely spaced rows of dots that form an image (as on the cathode-ray tube of a television or computer display)

killed by fire

feed the guns

Trafalgar Square, October 1918 : War Savings Campaign: 'Feed the Guns'

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/23497
A ruined farmhouse was built on the fountain, the Gordon statue was hidden by a crumbling church tower, next to it were two military lookouts camouflaged as tree trunks, and trenches built of sandbags surrounded the whole village.

The devices of the theatre were frequently invoked at home to stimulate civilian morale and publicise the War Loan

a spectacular ruined village erected in Trafalgar Square helping to draw in £29 million from Londoners in just 8 days in October 1918

blurg

time travel// parallel photography

one moment /// many points of view
reversed panopticon
the crowd executes the sovereign
a revolutionary device


“The idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings – concealed in its own form – an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) , every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others… The idea is a monad – that means briefly: every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.”
Benjamin encapsulates his monadological theory in a famous astronomical metaphor: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”. The constellation becomes Benjamin’s term for the configuration or network of ideas that create, so to speak, a holographic image (an “abbreviation”) of the world in its entirety. His subsequent career was to be devoted to mapping such constellations. 
 ...
The constellation became the “dialectical image”, a view of history reachable only from a particular perspective, in much the same way that a stellar constellation such as Orion can take the form we see, only when viewed from our own planet at this particular time (since its stars are actually unrelated, lying at very different distances from Earth, and are all in motion with respect to each other). The image is “dialectical” in the sense of our engagement with it: we actively bring it into being, and the knowledge it produces can bring about change. Despite the apparent idealism of Benjamin’s theory, the constellation or dialectical image remains an abbreviation of objective fact and historical truth. Leibniz had already expressed something like this in Monadology (1714): "And just as the same town when seen from different sides will seem quite different, and as it were multiplied perspectivally, the same thing happens here: because of the infinite multitude of simple substances it is as if there were as many different universes; but they are all perspectives on the same one, according to the different point of view of each monad."
 CRUMEY


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Benjamin Arcades    Y PHOTOGRAPHY / 689

It was the pantograph, whose principle is equally at work in the physiognotrace, that undertook to transcribe automatically a linear scheme originally traced on paper to a plaster mass, as required by the process of photosculpture­. Serving as model in this process were 24 simultaneous views taken from different sides. Gautier forsees no threat to sculpture from this process. What can prevent the sculptor from artistically enlivening the mechanically produced figure and its ground? “But there is more: for all its extravagance, the century remains economical. Pure art seems to it something expensive. With the cheekiness of a parvenu, it sometimes dares to haggle over masterworks. It is terrifeied of marble and bronze.. But photosculpture is not so daunting as statuary… Photosculpture is used to modest proportions and is content with a set of shelves for pedestal, happy to have faithfully reproduced a beloved countenance.. It does not disdain an overcoat, and is not embarrasses by crinolines; it accepts nature and the world as they are. Its sincerity accommodates everything, and though its plaster casts of stearin can be transposed into marble, into terracotta, into alabaster, or bronze… it never asks, in return for its work, what its elder sister would demand in payment; it requsests only the cost of materials.’ Theophile Gautier / Photosculpture: 42 Boulevard de L’Etoile 


The Seven Old Men

To Victor Hugo

Teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where specters in broad day accost the passer-by!
Everywhere mysteries flow like the sap in a tree
Through the narrow canals of the mighty giant.

One morning, while in a gloomy street the houses,
Whose height was increased by the mist, simulated
The quais of a swollen river, and while
— A setting that was like the actor's soul —

A dirty yellow fog inundated all space,
I was following, steeling my nerves like a hero,
Arid arguing with my already weary soul,
A squalid street shaken by the heavy dump-carts.

Suddenly an old man whose tattered yellow clothes
Were of the same color as the rainy heavens,
And whose aspect would have brought him showers of alms
If his eyes had not gleamed with so much wickedness,

Appeared to me. One would have said his eyes were drenched
With gall; his look sharpened the winter's chill,
And his long shaggy beard, like that of Judas,
Projected from his chin as stiffly as a sword.

He was not bent over, but broken; his back-bone
Made with his legs a perfect right angle,
So that his stick, completing the picture,
Gave him the appearance and clumsy gait

Of a lame quadruped or a three-legged Jew.
He went hobbling along in the snow and the mud
As if he were crushing the dead under his shoes;
Hostile, rather than indifferent to the world,

His likeness followed him: beard, eye, back, stick, tatters,
No mark distinguished this centenarian twin,
Who came from the same hell, and these baroque specters
Were walking with the same gait toward an unknown goal.

Of what infamous plot was I then the object,
Or what evil chance humiliated me thus?
For I counted seven times in as many minutes
That sinister old man who multiplied himself!

Let him who laughs at my disquietude,
And who is not seized with a fraternal shudder,
Realize that in spite of such decrepitude
Those hideous monsters had an eternal look!

Could I, without dying, have regarded the eighth,
Unrelenting Sosia, ironic and fatal,
Disgusting Phoenix, son and father of himself?
— But I turned my back on that hellish procession.

Exasperated like a drunk who sees double,
I went home; I locked the door, terrified,
Chilled to the bone and ill, my mind fevered, confused,
Hurt by that mysterious and absurd happening!

Vainly my reason tried to take the helm;
The frolicsome tempest baffled all its efforts,
And my soul, old sailing barge without masts,
Kept dancing, dancing, on a monstrous, shoreless sea!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles:François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 1859-1868

Between 1859 and 1868, the French sculptor François Willème perfected two distinct methods for producing sculptural portraits by photographic and mechanical means. Both were founded on the principle that the reassembly of the various "profiles" of a subject would yield a recognizable and complete likeness. The use of mechanical tools, derived in part from those of Collas and Sauvage, would provide for a realistic objectivity, while the finishing of the model by hand would guarantee the final product as a work of art. The apex of photosculpture's popularity and the critical discussions about it - by Théophile Gautier and others - coincided with the early work of Auguste Rodin in which he shared with Willème a fundamental system of "profiles comparées."

 Robert A. Sobieszek The Art Bulletin Vol. 62, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 617-630

our reconstruction of Willème's apparatus

		Photosculpture de la comtesse Walewska

spaces between

 

He can boast an extraordinary discovery; he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the "outmoded", in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution - no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects - can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism ... Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything we have experienced on mournful railway journeys ... on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance of the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of "atmosphere" concealed in these things to the point of explosion.

astrid zydower expo 67

zangezi

In 1923, Vladimir Tatlin designed, directed, and starred in a performance of Velimir Khlebnikov's play Zangezi that was presented by an amateur troupe at the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd. Khlebnikov had died earlier in the year, and the performance was to be a memorial to Tatlin's favorite poet. To Khlebnikov's construction of words, where sound was the principle building element, Tatlin attempted to find a counterpart in tangible construction, built with a variety of materials in different surfaces and shapes.

The limmes of these great Triumphall bodies [lately disjointed and taken in sunder]

The Print in Stuart Britain 1603 -89 / Griffiths / British Museum

Triumphal Arches 1604 Stephen Harrison

Dekker The Magnificent Entertainment 1604

Londinium

Garden of Plenty

The New World

Temporary architectures erected for ceremonial events

‘an entry’ into the city

7 plates show 7 arches erected along the route of James 1 procession which passed beneath each of them. Orations and songs performed as they passed.

40 > 70 feet across, wood construction

Parry The Golden Age restored/ 1981

The limmes of these great Triumphall bodies [lately disjointed and taken in sunder] I have thou seest [for thy sake] set in their apt and right places again. So that now they are to stand a s perpetuall monuments, not to be shaken in pieces, or to be broken downe, by the malice of that envious destroyer of all things, Time..

London pageants:

I. Accounts of sixty royal processions and entertainments in the city of London; chiefly extracted from contemporary writers : II. A bibliographical list of Lord mayors' pageants

The last Arch at Temple Bar represented a Temple of Janus. The principal character was Peace, having War groveling at her feet; by her stood Wealth; below sat the four handmaids of Peace, Quiet treading on Tumult; Liberty treading on Servitude; Safety on Danger; and Felicity on Unhappiness.

image stands in for face, sign stands in for image

The descendants of every man who had borne a curule office were entitled to an image of that person, and at the funeral of every member of a family thus ennobled, all the images to which the ius imaginum entitled him, were produced and formed the most important part of the procession. As many as three hundred are said to have been displayed at the funeral of one person. The mind is immediately struck with the resemblance which this custom bears to that, which arose after the introduction or armorial bearings, of exhibiting at the funerals of the noble the banners and pennons to which the laws of arms entitled them, and the testimonies of their high descent and honourable connections.

Encyclopaedia heraldica

The ius imaginis is a Roman custom that (1) allowed a member of the nobility to have a wax mask (imago) of himself that would be handed down to descendants and (2) granted the privilege of a public funeral at state expense. At the funeral, the imago would be worn by an actor in the procession. The actor would also wear the clothing and insignia of the highest office and play the part (persona) of the deceased. [Incidentally, persona is the term for theatrical mask. The personae covered more than the face; the imagines, only the face.] Other actors would play the role (also, personae) of ancestors and wear their masks.

To obtain the ius imaginis right required obtaining one of the curule magistracies:

• curule aedile,
• praetor,
• censor, or
• consul.
• 
  
• 
  
• Although often called death masks, since they were used in funerals, the imagines are now thought to have been life masks, made during the lifetime of the office holder, if possible.

  Ancestral maps were displayed in the cupboards (armaria) of the family atrium, and were considered symbols of high status. They were displayed during special festivals and public sacrifices, as well as in funerals and in the atrium.

  Pollini says there is substantial evidence that the wax ancestral mask began in the second half of the 4th century B.C., after the passage of the Lex Licinia Sextia [367 B.C.] requiring that at least 1 consul be plebeian and later laws that led to the creation of a new, plebeian nobility. By obtaining a curule office, such a plebeian became a noble, a novus homo, and entitled to the ius imaginis. This was also the time the Senate first sanctioned theatrical performances (ludi Scaenici), which is worth noting, given the theatricality involved in the funeral parade.

  Source:
  Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean #13 "Ritualizing Death in Republican Rome: Memory, Religion, Class Struggle, and the Wax Ancestral Mask Tradition's Origin and Influence on Veristic Portraiture." John Pollini, University of Southern California.

the median of his right arme

On Sunday the first of November, and the eighth day of his sicknesse… was drawne out of the median of his right arme, seven or eight ounces of blood; during which time he fainted not, bleeding well and abundantly, desiring and calling them to take more, as they were about to stop the same, finding some ease as it were upon the instant.

processual <> scenic
>
political

science of origin

pub proscenium

feed the guns

1. Trafalgar Square became a mock battlefield during the 'feed the guns' campaign of september and october 1918

How to Construct a Time Machine
Alfred Jarry

5. Time as seen from the Machine has two Pasts: the past anterior to our own present, what we might call the real past; and the past created by the Machine when it returns to our Present and which in effect is the reversibility of the Future.
Likewise, since the Machine can reach the real Past only after having passed through the Future, it must go through a point symmetrical to our Present, a dead centre between future and past, and which can be designated precisely as the Imaginary Present.
Thus the Explorer in his Machine beholds Time as a curve, or better as a closed curved surface analogous to Aristotle's Ether. For much the same reasons in another text [Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Book VIII] we make use of the term Ethernity. Without the Machine an observer sees less than half of the true extent of Time, such as men used to regard the Earth as flat.
From the operation of the Machine there can easily be deduced a definition of Duration. Since it consists in the reduction of t to o and of o to -t, we shall say:

Duration is the transformation of
a succession into a reversion.

In other words:

THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY

problema/ obstacle

project tic toc

time tunnel

framework