Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

Link to this comparison view

Both sides previous revision Previous revision
Next revision		 Previous revision
Next revisionBoth sides next revision
alchorisma_reader [2018-11-12 09:28] – majaalchorisma_reader [2018-11-12 09:49] – maja
Line 2: Line 2:
  
 (foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader -> https://fo.am/events/alchorisma/ ) (foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader -> https://fo.am/events/alchorisma/ )
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good day. Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. (...) The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually. 
 +Eventually. (...) Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years. 
 +- NK Jemisin
 +
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across atemporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. (...)  Human immediately becomes posthuman as a consequence of the enlarged temporal frame that geology demands. Such a stone-etched counter-vision invites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet is intimately continuous with us. (...) Rocks possess much of what is supposed to set humans apart.They are neither inert nor mute, but like all life are forever flowing, forever filled with stories.
 +
 +- Jeffrey Cohen
 +
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +
  
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
Line 18: Line 35:
  
 The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, but scrutable patterns—Conway's Game of Life frozen inside a crystalline snapshot. So, the stones become a collective unconscious for dynamical systems, an oblique strategy for algopoetic revelry, and a divination system for generative pattern recognition. The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, but scrutable patterns—Conway's Game of Life frozen inside a crystalline snapshot. So, the stones become a collective unconscious for dynamical systems, an oblique strategy for algopoetic revelry, and a divination system for generative pattern recognition.
- 
-(...) forms can encapsulate themselves across dimensions, rhythmically repeating themselves to create diminishing echoes of their own signatures towards a proposed infinity, in sometimes maddeningly giddying recursions, mise en abyme.  
  
 (...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that "Nature's computers are that which they compute" and who maintained that "We cannot read off numbers" from these calculations "because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them". The sealed language of stones... (...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," might he be imagining a kind of geological Turing Completeness?—a universal lithic calculating machine whose solution is its own morphology (Turing). This possibility echoes the inklings of tantric cybernetician Stafford Beer in Pebbles to Computers who saw that "Nature's computers are that which they compute" and who maintained that "We cannot read off numbers" from these calculations "because nature does not put labels on its solutions—it becomes them". The sealed language of stones...
Line 30: Line 45:
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
  
-In its exile from the Earth's simmering interiority, crustal rock provides a platform and venue for biological life. Living things can approach, engage, even ingest this [End Page 8] minority of minerals. Indeed, here rock and life transform each other, generating composite formations—rocks assembled out of once-living bodies, biological bodies composed in part of minerals. But we should not forget that this florid organic-inorganic interface is but a 'gloss on the surface' of our astronomical body (Fortey 415), and that the stone that invites life's embrace is a chilled and pallid shadow of its seething progenitors. +In its exile from the Earth's simmering interiority, crustal rock provides a platform and venue for biological life. Living things can approach, engage, even ingest this minority of minerals. Indeed, here rock and life transform each other, generating composite formations—rocks assembled out of once-living bodies, biological bodies composed in part of minerals. But we should not forget that this florid organic-inorganic interface is but a 'gloss on the surface' of our astronomical body, and that the stone that invites life's embrace is a chilled and pallid shadow of its seething progenitors. 
  
 -Nigel Clark  -Nigel Clark 
Line 47: Line 62:
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
  
-Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a "machinic phylum," which they define as "materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression" (409). Because of its constant flow and variation, the machinic phylum is very hard to measure indeed. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the "matter-flow can only be followed" -Patricia Pisters+Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a "machinic phylum," which they define as "materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression". Because of its constant flow and variation, the machinic phylum is very hard to measure indeed. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the "matter-flow can only be followed"  
 + 
 +-Patricia Pisters
  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
Line 55: Line 72:
 Stones in Chinese gardens or natural settings that are so distinct as to seem out of place are sometimes referred to as Stones That Flew Here. This designation references an obscure Buddhist myth about stones that were magically transported from India to China, landing in unlikely locations where they were incompatible with the local geology. The myth is most likely a way of explaining stones that have been moved by glaciers great distances from their places of origin. Stones in Chinese gardens or natural settings that are so distinct as to seem out of place are sometimes referred to as Stones That Flew Here. This designation references an obscure Buddhist myth about stones that were magically transported from India to China, landing in unlikely locations where they were incompatible with the local geology. The myth is most likely a way of explaining stones that have been moved by glaciers great distances from their places of origin.
  
-We extract millions of tons of minerals from the earth annually for the manufacture of computers, mobile phones, television sets and other electronics. When these products become obsolete, they are returned to the earth in the form of e-waste, which often pollutes the earth and can be a significant health hazard for workers involved in processing the e-waste. -Richard Turner +We extract millions of tons of minerals from the earth annually for the manufacture of computers, mobile phones, television sets and other electronics. When these products become obsolete, they are returned to the earth in the form of e-waste, which often pollutes the earth and can be a significant health hazard for workers involved in processing the e-waste. 
  
-</blockquote> +-Richard Turner 
- +
-<blockquote> +
-Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across atemporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. (...)  Human immediately becomes posthuman as a consequence of the enlarged temporal frame that geology demands. Such a stone-etched counter-visioninvites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet is intimately continuous with us. (...) Rocks possess much of what is supposed to set humans apart.They are neither inert nor mute, but like all life are forever flowing, forever filled with stories. +
- +
-- Jeffrey Cohen+
  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
- 
-<blockquote> 
-"Here is the Stillness, which is not still even on a good day.  
-Now it ripples, reverberates, in cataclysm. Now there is a line, roughly east-west and too straight, almost neat in its manifest unnaturalness, spanning the girth of the land's equator. (...) 
-The line is deep and raw, a cut to the quick of the planet. Magma wells in its wake, fresh and glowing red. The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its lie to bisect stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash - enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness's face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve. Winter will come early, and hard, and it will last a long, long time. It will end, of course, like every winter does, and then the world will return to its old self. Eventually.  
-Eventually.  
-The people of the Stillness live in a perpetual state of disaster preparedness. They've built walls and dug wells and put away food, and they can easily last five, ten, even twenty five years in a world without sun.  
-Eventually meaning in this case in a few thousand years.  
-Look, the ash clouds are spreading already. (...)"  
-- NK Jemisin 
- 
-</blockquote> 
- 
  
  
  • alchorisma_reader.txt
  • Last modified: 2019-08-12 15:20
  • by nik