comet

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/08/Comet_on_3_August_2014

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on 3 August from a distance of 285 km. The image resolution is 5.3 metres/pixel.

The Commune of 1871

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. In his space capsule he carried the remnant of the red flag flown over the Hotel de Ville in the heart of the Paris Commune in 1870.

 

the French insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), ... spent most of his adult life in prison, and whom Walter Benjamin (writing in the 1930s) judged the most famous revolutionary before Lenin. Blanqui was elected as leader in absentia by the Paris Communards who offered to release hostages in exchange for him, but were refused, and it was in the wake of the Commune’s failure that Blanqui wrote his cosmological treatise L’Eternite par les astres (1873). In an infinite universe made from atoms of a finite number of types, Blanqui argues, the same combinations must arise again and again.

“The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal… Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death… What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing… The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space… These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.”
Whereas Tegmark emphasises spatial repetition and variation (the idea that there is another “you” reading this article right now), Blanqui additionally highlights temporal repetition, leading him to conclude that progress is illusory; everything that can possibly happen has already occurred. It was this aspect that led Benjamin to see Blanqui’s cosmology as a precursor to the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5).
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin considers Blanqui’s significance as both revolutionary conspirator and pseudo-scientist, concluding that Blanqui’s cosmology is a capitulation to the principles of bourgeois capitalism that Blanqui had spent all his life fighting against. Blanqui’s multiverse is, says Benjamin, “the phantasmagoria of history”, a nightmare projection of capitalism itself. 


Andrew Crumey

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)

Einstein Tomb by Lebbeus Woods

 

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/lebbeus-woods-1940-2012.html

assorted meteorites

Any element which bends space around itself, makes other
elements dependent upon itself and translate their will
into the language of its own. ....






tektite - meteorite silica glass
campo del cielo / iron

We trail no wires

Our policy is SPACE.

Anything that favors or enhances space programs, space exploration, simulation of space conditions, exploration of inner space, expanding awareness, we will support. Anything going in the other direction we will extirpate. The espionage world now has a new frontier.

Burroughs / Western Lands / 25

Get out of prison free / geometric revolution

school folder

lick my decals off baby

monument to gagarin

moscow 1994

wow

transit

TO THE PLANETARIUM










mars flight simulator

The Invasion of the Moon 1969

Forty years ago this week, mankind's attempts to land on the Moon took a giant leap forward with the maiden spaceflight of the Apollo Lunar Module.

Komarov's cabin

image source


J.G. Ballard
The Atrocity Exhibition
A New Algebra

The Russian astronaut Col. Komarov was the first man to die in space, though earlier fatalities had been rumoured. Komarov is reported to have panicked when his space-craft began to tumble uncontrollably, but the transcripts of his final transmissions have never been released. I'm sceptical of what may be NASA-inspired disinformation. The courage of professional flight-crews under extreme pressure is clearly shown in The Black Box, edited by Malcolm MacPherson, which contains cockpit voice-recorder transcripts in the last moments before airliner crashes. The supreme courage and stoicism shown by these men and women in the final seconds running up to their deaths, as they wrestle with the collapsing systems of their stricken aircraft, is a fine memorial to them, and a powerful argument for equal frankness in other areas.

Wikipedia:
Just before impact, Soviet premier Alexey Kosygin told Komarov his country was proud of him. An American National Security Agency listening post in Istanbul noted Komarov's reply was inaudible, though persistent rumours stated that Komarov died cursing the spacecraft designers and flight controllers. Whatever the truth of the matter, a tape from a West German tracking station bearing some of Komarov's brief phrases was forwarded to the Command-Measurement Complex of the Soviet Union after the disaster and was reported to contain the word "killed", mixed in with Komarov's distraught unclear transmissions, among other flight data recorded on radio by the West Germans. The recording was made, apparently, on one of the last orbits, if not the final one.

space cell