Thought I’d try an experiment for today: presenting the basis for a holograph(em)ic ‘pataphysics based on the work of Don Ault.My hope is that it might foreground some significant features that we can work with.
This ‘pataphysics draws on now-defunct holographic model of science espoused by physicist David Bohm and neuroscientist Karl Pribram.In holographic technology, lights are bounced off an object at intersecting angles, and the patterns of interference are recorded; when the recorded pattern is similarly illuminated, it reproduces an image of the object.One of the weird and wonderful things about holographic recording is it is distributed or interspersed.Unlike a scratched record, which loses a particular bit of information, a scratched holographic plate loses overall definition; the more information is lost, the ‘fuzzier’ the image becomes, but no specific segment is lost entirely.Even a fragment of a holographic recording will produce some image, albeit deformed.Pribram suggests that the brain records experience in a similar manner; memories are dispersed throughout the brain so that a particular memory cannot be removed, let alone isolated.Bohm’s theory is that the material universe works like a hologram.
Enough about holographics—back to holograph(em)ics.The (em) stands for em-space, a standard typographical unit.In addition to punning on ‘grapheme’, it indicates the intrusive nature of anomalies, which he suggests are frequently accompanied by conspicuous punctuation (and which conspicuously punctuate the textual field).
This ‘pataphysics breaks from the tradition Bok outlines by situating itself outside the tradition all together; I don’t think that Ault is particularly well-acquainted with the ‘pataphysical tradition, and his writing on holograph(em)ics does not directly mention Jarry, et al.Further, this ‘pataphysics was developed as a critical project, rather than artistic one, radically reorienting its values as an imaginary science.Rather than focusing on the ‘pataphysical tropes, Ault’s tactics affects them in its critical environment. In swerving away from traditional and popular critical approaches, it establishes an intentional syzygy in its unique approach to anomalous textual and narrative phenomena, internally (within a text) and externally (across fragmented and variable texts).
Ault’s ‘pataphysics additionally chooses alternative tropes, much like Oulipian ‘pataphysics’ revision of Jarry’s tropes.These tropes seem to be interference (incommensurability), interconnection (dispersal), and singularity (self-reflexivity /-reference).Interference is the idea that poetic details and aspects can contrast and conflict with one another.Such paradoxes aren’t reconciled; rather, interconnection suggests that every instant or detail in a poetic work connects with every other, and the value is in understanding their development and interaction.Singularity provides an inroad: these are points that concentrate textual forces, making them more visible against a relatively less intense ground.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Pruitt-Ilinx
Moving through Caillois and away from a rational understanding of games and play, we can get a better understanding of the social instability that the Pruitt-Igoe projects exhibited.
The social vertigo is a major point in most discussions of PI; in areas of 20 or more families, residents had difficulty distinguishing fellow residents from intruders--cooperators from potential defectors.
Such space itself is disorienting, but in a specific way. Turlington Hall, with its multiple entrances, twists, turns, double-backs, and no windows, is a complex and disorienting space because of its lack of repetition; PI is disorienting precisely because of its total repetition.
The quantification that invariably accompanies grids, and the process of gridding, rationally compensates for this--we know that number 312 will be on the third floor, and between 311 and 313.
Now, lets imagine a grid without numbers--a grid without the very thing that makes it rationally comprehensible. The space would have to take on qualitative features as a means of facilitating navigation.
A Turlington without numbers: navigation would involve spatial direction and identifiable landmarks. "Go in through the north stairwell to the top floor, turn right through the double doors, look for the door with William Blake and Donald Duck posters." Relatively simple in a space that is qualitatively heterogenous. But how would one navigate extremely homogenized space like PI without recourse to simply counting off floors, doors, and corridors?
The social vertigo is a major point in most discussions of PI; in areas of 20 or more families, residents had difficulty distinguishing fellow residents from intruders--cooperators from potential defectors.
Such space itself is disorienting, but in a specific way. Turlington Hall, with its multiple entrances, twists, turns, double-backs, and no windows, is a complex and disorienting space because of its lack of repetition; PI is disorienting precisely because of its total repetition.
The quantification that invariably accompanies grids, and the process of gridding, rationally compensates for this--we know that number 312 will be on the third floor, and between 311 and 313.
Now, lets imagine a grid without numbers--a grid without the very thing that makes it rationally comprehensible. The space would have to take on qualitative features as a means of facilitating navigation.
A Turlington without numbers: navigation would involve spatial direction and identifiable landmarks. "Go in through the north stairwell to the top floor, turn right through the double doors, look for the door with William Blake and Donald Duck posters." Relatively simple in a space that is qualitatively heterogenous. But how would one navigate extremely homogenized space like PI without recourse to simply counting off floors, doors, and corridors?
A Savage Journey
Pruitt-Igoe was part of a response to the mass homogenization of St. Louis. The response to this widespread and aggressive degradation ('slumification') was a similar the homogenization of lower class housing and an inverse condensation into housing blocs consisting of homogenous, bare-bones units and landscapes.
The embodied experience here is comfort without excess. For the residents, it was the pursuit of the American dream. This isn't the contemporary American dream, of making it big with a minimum of effort; it's an older, more modest one, the American dream of Horatio Alger: of achieving success through hard work, and receiving a commensurate and relatively modest reward.
The initial degradation of St. Louis is a result of this--people fled the city for the suburbs, an ideal realm of comfortable homes with well-kept lawns behind the archetypal white picket fences. Pruitt-Igoe was an attempt to urbanize the dream.
The embodied experience here is comfort without excess. For the residents, it was the pursuit of the American dream. This isn't the contemporary American dream, of making it big with a minimum of effort; it's an older, more modest one, the American dream of Horatio Alger: of achieving success through hard work, and receiving a commensurate and relatively modest reward.
The initial degradation of St. Louis is a result of this--people fled the city for the suburbs, an ideal realm of comfortable homes with well-kept lawns behind the archetypal white picket fences. Pruitt-Igoe was an attempt to urbanize the dream.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
/Part1 : Fatal Strategy
“We’re living in the future.” – Orlando Cordero, roommate
“You need to be rich to live in the future.” – [yours truly]
The accident, as the sight of a new ontology, shows us something of the real—it shows us our own agency, removed from us, coming back to haunt us. We give up our own agency in the form of our creativity in favor of technoscience and the better, more convenient, more comfortable future that it promises. Investment in ‘objectivity’ promises that this future will be the same for us all.
In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, we want the future—an elegantly geometric future that expresses how far the old ontology of science has taken us. Unfortunately, that metaphysics is no longer relevant; we have to figure out a new future, and come to grips with the fact that the object will lead us there, co-opting our agency to bring itself & ourselves out of the present and further into the new metaphysics.
“Some called him a ‘pretext’. Others said he was a point-for-point microcosm.” – A Spokesman for the Counterforce
“That could be a building, that was so general.” – Ian Roberts, improv comic
In Pruitt-Igoe, the infinite exchangeability of the object—the commodity relationship of living in futurity, the desire for technoscientific utopia—breaks down and bites us like a carnivorous coffee table. Or, rather, it bit the lower-class residents who lacked capital and thus the capacity to consummate (after all, it is seduction) a range or variety of commodity relationships with different objects. The infinite repetition of living space fills in for the (missing) infinite exchangeability of capital.
The grid shows us a certain ideal, a world wherein everything is calculable and placeable, but this disregards the bending or deformation that is the grid’s force. This deformation is the accident—in Pruitt-Igoe, in Game Theory, the logical approach hits a breaking point. Instead of imposing the subjective logic of literacy’s metaphysics onto the object, we have to let the object dictate our new strategy.
En abyme, the grid subdivides itself into smaller and smaller increments, like the fine calculation of a curve, infinitely expandable and contractible. The golden spiral of Modulor is more poetic, and though we find this pattern in nature, Le Corbusier’s scale makes man the measure of all such objects. But what happens to these at Planck scale, when time and space purportedly break down?
“Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived.”
“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”
- Blake, “There is No Natural Religion” [a&b]
The case of Watson, of Wolfram|Alpha, is the desire to bend the object to our will. Instead of letting the object speak in its own way, we want the object to speak to our own understanding. This seems like it will take us further from being able to ‘speak machine’ and grasp the accident as a sign, from being electrate. Not the fatality we’re looking for.
The image of graffiti on the bare walls of Pruitt-Igoe keeps coming back to me; the logical zero-sum game of funding left a blank canvas for inhabitants (not necessarily residents). If human and technological enetelchies are intertwined, this is the object co-opting us to bring it to ecstasy, to make it what it already is. Pruitt-Igoe replaced St. Louis slums with a vision of the future of architecture-as-human-habitat that came to be worse than what it replaced—more slum than slum.
The task now is to find the poetics of space. To liberate the image from the aqualitative grid and let it become artistic.
Of course, the only way out (past limit) is through (and on into ecstasis--abyme, Eternity, infinity).
“…in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music,
And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man.
Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and only
Science remains thro Mercy: & by means of Science, the Three
Become apparent in time & space, in the Three Professions
Poetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physic & Surgery:”
- Blake, Milton
Of course, the only way out (past limit) is through (and on into ecstasis--abyme, Eternity, infinity).
I've come across poetic renderings of self-referentiality (the cultural archetype or myth I've found) more than a few times: Blake does it obliquely on several occassions, and Mark Danielewski depicts it explicitly in House of Leaves when his protagonist finds a copy of the book itself; Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde make a similar gesture when they make play the subject of the play (in Shakespeare's case, it's usually overtly metatheatrical; Wilde is subtler). Being placed en abyme is what breaks mathematics (Godel and Principia) and machines (Euclid and the 216-digit number).
Mise en Abyme en Abyme : ^n+1 ?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Deformation & Fetish Objects
Deformation’s been on my mind all semester. A big part of this chronic fixation is my puppy-love for Jerome McGann’s book radiant textuality: literature after the world wide web. (It’s a spectacular book. Really.) Deformation is McGann’s instruction; he advocates precisely the sort of image manipulation we started our semester with, and shares his experience messing around with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art that lead to new insights on his own part. His dictum is that no text (or image, I suppose) is ever self identical—so why not bring the image (or text, I suppose) into its ecstasy by helping it along? McGann uses the term deformation to foreground the function of criticism and interpretation. Transformation works equally well, and sheds any negative connotations that deformation might carry.
In a response to one of Wendy’s emails earlier this semester, I wrote a little about the deformation of the accident as an event into the static, flattened image of the accident, the sign; and about the deformation into pixilation (which allows us to make all those fun transformations). This is implicit in McGann, particularly his discussion of how a high-powerd scanner never produced the same facsimile twice. ‘Pixelation’ is also implicit in Newton’s calculus, which divides a curve into numerous discreet segments that resemble the original curve, and the same with Cartesian arithmetic, which transforms an algebraic statement into a geometric form mapped onto a grid—my figure for the Pruitt-Igoe disaster. The design of the buildings was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier’s philosophy of architecture (thanks, Todd!) which relies heavily on formal properties and geometric space. Le Corbusier is a pseudonym, a transformation of the identity, which corresponds with Le Corbusier’s Modular scale, a transformation of the physical body—the human form—into a mathematical exemplar, a harmony of ratios. Even the name, Le Corbusier, suggests the force of bending and deforming.
I’ve looked briefly at the fetish-object, the relation between dominoes and punched cards. Part of that examination was the difficulty of deciding just how far back to trace in pursuit of the object. Both of these are, of course, cases of transformation/deformation, but the dominoes seem more interesting to me as a transformation of aleatory play. Dominoes were, allegedly, derived from dice; in a physical sense, the dice are flattened out in the transformation to dominoes, but the luck of the throw is transformed into the luck of the draw, which seems like a sort of flattening out (maybe Caillois will be able to help me with this). Dominoes also have the added feature of physical extension, of creating an emergent structure, form from number just as Le Corbusier’s architectural philosophy extols. The difference between the domino-structure and the Pruitt-Igoe grid is the difference between liberal-aleatory and conservative-utilitarian deployments of space.
What’s the difference between Pruitt-Igoe and a stack of dominoes? The stack of dominoes has a better chance of staying upright.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Singularity
Self-referentiality is the ecstasy of the object, the passing of a rational limit—math becomes more logical than logic can accommodate, Euclid becomes more intelligent than its systems can sustain. Baudrillard’s dimension collapse.
The allure of the object in this case is the promise of the future; it seduces us with the possibility of becoming futurity.
These themes come together in the theoretical Singularity—the belief that technoscience’s exponential growth of capacity, and the diminishing time needed to achieve this growth, will culminate in a radical historical event that will usher in a new type of technology and civilization. One possibility is that computers like Euclid would no longer have to worry about self-referential meltdowns; artificial intelligence would be the new standard of electronic technology.
[In physics, a singularity is a similar impossible event. The event of technology reaching a point of infinite improvement at infinite speed is much like the time-space event of the black hole, a point of infinite density and infinite gravity. Nature abhors a vacuum, but she abhors infinites even more—at least, according to physics, which does not allow for infinite values, unknowable quantities. A popular theory is that a singularity was the source of our universe; or, in its ecstatic form, that singularities are the wombs of universes.]
All of this, of course, relies on acceleration, speed, a greater or even qualitatively new condition of circulation in the dromosphere. At the moment, we still have the luxury of critical thought, but after the singularity (if it does indeed happen), unpredictability will be the condition of the moment; we’ll have no choice but to think at the speed of light. We’ve got to be faster than Watson.
The principles of the International school of architecture gave Pruitt-Igoe this shine of the future. Theorizing the singularity and attending the inauguration of Pruitt-Igoe are both anticipations of the future. The commodity relationship in a techno-utopic culture, reliant on science and mathematics, is the promise of the future, today.
The end of duration?
But what if the myth holds? Could the singularity turn out to be π all over again?
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