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alchorisma_reader [2018-11-12 14:28] – majaalchorisma_reader [2018-12-20 10:23] – maja
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 —Jeffrey Cohen —Jeffrey Cohen
  
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无。(Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.)
 +—Cao Xueqin 
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
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 <blockquote> <blockquote>
-In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, rather suck on amethyst for the rest of their life than touch organic matter, even when it is as profane as centipede-excrement. Mineral cults evoke in us absolute horror and disgust, suggesting crystal-phobia lurking at the deep of our instincts. Crystalpunks are challenging the basic conditions of their humanity. But at least one standard metaphorical use of the crystal, that of the crystal as object of utopian perfection, as pure geometrical-molecular-ethnicity, in most cases turns out to be a chemical fiction. One of the most interesting qualities of crystals is their ability to encapsulate alien particles. Crystals too produce noise, as one flaw entered during packing distorts tessellation for ever after." 
  
-—The Crystalpunk Manifesto+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  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
 +In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, rather suck on amethyst for the rest of their life than touch organic matter, even when it is as profane as centipede-excrement. Mineral cults evoke in us absolute horror and disgust, suggesting crystal-phobia lurking at the deep of our instincts. Crystalpunks are challenging the basic conditions of their humanity. But at least one standard metaphorical use of the crystal, that of the crystal as object of utopian perfection, as pure geometrical-molecular-ethnicity, in most cases turns out to be a chemical fiction. One of the most interesting qualities of crystals is their ability to encapsulate alien particles. Crystals too produce noise, as one flaw entered during packing distorts tessellation for ever after."
  
-A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions. +—The Crystalpunk Manifesto
- +
-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. +
- +
-(...) 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... +
- +
-—Paul Prudence+
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
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 —Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek —Paul A. Harris, Richard Turner, A.J. Nocek
  
-</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 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  
- 
-</blockquote> 
- 
-<blockquote> 
- 
-Rock is passionless. "Stone hearted" and "cold as stone" are as much a part of our lithic vocabulary as various expressions for stony silence. Without a human hand to impress meaning upon it, stone would be blank, impassive, aloof. Immobile and sterile, stones do not do much. Or perhaps our lexicon for stone is impoverished. When observed within their particular and nonhuman duration, stones are forever on the move.  
- 
-—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen  
- 
-</blockquote> 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- 
-<blockquote> 
-假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无。(Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.) 
-—Cao Xueqin  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
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 —Tim Morton —Tim Morton
 +
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +The necessity of changing methods is all the more obvious when it is a question of finding the explanation of a phenomenon that nature offers in all of its complication. There, where the givens are by their very existence more complicated than the results we seek, direct synthesis becomes inapplicable, and it is necessary to take recourse either to direct analysis if possible, or to indirect synthesis, to feeling around (tâtonnement) and explanatory hypotheses.
 +—André-Marie Ampère
  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
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 —John Tresch —John Tresch
 +
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +
 +Rock is passionless. "Stone hearted" and "cold as stone" are as much a part of our lithic vocabulary as various expressions for stony silence. Without a human hand to impress meaning upon it, stone would be blank, impassive, aloof. Immobile and sterile, stones do not do much. Or perhaps our lexicon for stone is impoverished. When observed within their particular and nonhuman duration, stones are forever on the move. 
 +
 +—Jeffrey Jerome Cohen 
  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
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 </blockquote> </blockquote>
 +
  
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
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 Despite software's abstraction the geological maintains a particular attraction, as earth substrate, that which surrounds us, our material. Substrate equally presents a set of economic, political and economic consequences which contrast with software's lack of coded visibility, its inevitable "encryption". Despite software's abstraction the geological maintains a particular attraction, as earth substrate, that which surrounds us, our material. Substrate equally presents a set of economic, political and economic consequences which contrast with software's lack of coded visibility, its inevitable "encryption".
 —Martin Howse —Martin Howse
- 
  
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
-A few related algorithms... 
  
 <blockquote> <blockquote>
-When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following an algorithm. When you put a sharp edge on a piece of flint by executing a precise sequence of strikes with the end of an antler—a key step in making fine stone tools—you’re following an algorithm. Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age. 
  
-—Christian & Griffiths+A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions. 
 + 
 +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. 
 + 
 +(...) 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... 
 + 
 +—Paul Prudence
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
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 https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary https://github.com/fcampelo/EC-Bestiary
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following an algorithm. When you put a sharp edge on a piece of flint by executing a precise sequence of strikes with the end of an antler—a key step in making fine stone tools—you’re following an algorithm. Algorithms have been a part of human technology ever since the Stone Age.
 +
 +—Christian & Griffiths
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +<blockquote>
 +
 +Since their translation more than a century ago, it has not escaped the notice of esotericists that there is a distinctly alchemical idiom to the Pyramid Texts with their reference to stones, metals and distinct processes of magical transformation. If geo-polymerisation was used in the Old Kingdom's grand, astrotheological building project it certainly becomes a part of the legend that grew over the millennia into what we now call alchemy. 
 +
 +From earlier cultures Egypt inherited much of its star lore as well as the sanctity of stone. The innovations she brought to these beliefs were dramatically improved forms of masonry and a calendrical and mathematical sophistication that went unequaled for thousands of years. (...) We may speculate here that entangling one's consciousness with certain stars lead to certain 'inspirations/innovations', which improved the technology of consciousness entanglement, which lead to further 'inspirations/innovations'. Think of it like a cosmic version of runaway climate change. 
 +
 +—Gordon White
 </blockquote> </blockquote>
  
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   * Blohm, H., Beer, S. Suzuki, D. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread   * Blohm, H., Beer, S. Suzuki, D. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread
   * Caillois, R. [[https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/52af6179307888c801000016 |The Writing of Stones]]   * Caillois, R. [[https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/52af6179307888c801000016 |The Writing of Stones]]
 +  * Christian, Brian and Griffiths, Tom. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
   * Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman   * Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
   * Cohen, J. Stories of Stone   * Cohen, J. Stories of Stone
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   * Sonic Acts. Living Earth   * Sonic Acts. Living Earth
   * Sonic Acts. The Geologic Imagination   * Sonic Acts. The Geologic Imagination
-  * Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions+  * White, Gordon. Starships 
 + 
 + 
 +---- 
 + 
 +Other Alchorisma related pages: [[stones-workshop]] and [[alchorisma daily reflections]]
  
  • alchorisma_reader.txt
  • Last modified: 2019-08-12 15:20
  • by nik