NOTE [2003]: This page hasn't really been updated since 1998, but if you are interested in what I'm thinking about at the moment, I suggest you have a look at my weblog, Cluster.
The tree is already the image of the world, or the
root the image of the world-tree [...] nature doesn't work that way: in
nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular
system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind
nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal
spine and surrounding leaves...
Deleuze and Guattari -- 1000 Plateaus
This entire globe, this star, not being subject to
death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature,
from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts.
There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position
in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies.
Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the
universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.
[...] The secret which got lost neither hides nor
reveals itself, it shows forth
tokens. And we rush to catch up. The body
whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the
elixir
In the roar of Spring, transmutations [...]
Charles Olson -- from Variations Done for Gerald
Van De Wiele
Architecture: from the Latin -teks--To
weave (as a net); also to fabricate, a root shared with text,
textile, context, subtle ("the finest thread of the weave") and technology.
More especially, to build a dwelling, with tools.
American Heritage Dictionary
A mnemonic architecture facilitates memory
and desire, a cluster which seeks to cluster. A process architecture
provides access to tools. Most architectures exhibit both process
and mnemonic aspects, either together, or in varying spatial and temporal
aspects -- this shelter from the rain, this arbour in which I dream.
Darrell Berry -- The Poetics of Cyberspace
One of the most striking features of classical memories as
revealed in Ad Herennium is the sense of space, depth, lighting
in the memory suggested by the place rules; and the care taken to make
the images stand out clearly on the loci, for example in the injunction
that places must not be too dark, or the images will be obscured, nor too
light lest the dazzle confuse the images.
Frances A. Yates -- The Art of Memory
Not only do most synesthetes contend that their memories
are excellent, but cite their parallel sensations as the cause, saying
for example, "I know it's 2 because it's white." Conversation, prose passages,
movie dialogue, and verbal instructions are typical subjects of detailed
recall. The spatial location of objects is also strikingly remembered,
such as the precise location of kitchen utensils, furniture arrangements
and floor plans, books on shelves, or text blocks in a specific book. Perhaps
related to this observation is a tendency to prefer order, neatness, symmetry,
and balance.
A liquid architecture is an architecture whose form
is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that
opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without
doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be
and what it needs to be. It is an architecture that dances or pulsates,
becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities,
cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different
backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with ideas
held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve.
...rooms adrift in foundering cities, room and streets,
names like wounds, the room with windows looking onto other rooms with
the same discolored wallpaper, where a man in shirtsleeves reads the news
or a woman irons; the sunlit room whose only guest is the branches of a
peach...
Octavio Paz -- Sunstone
...acentered systems, finite networks of automata
in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or
channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangable, defined
only by their state at a given moment--such that the local operations are
coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central
agency.
Deleuze and Guattari -- 1000 Plateaus
...since immense is not an object, a phenomenology
of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing
images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being
of pure imagination.
Gaston Bachelard -- The Poetics of Space
Later, he remembered certain moments in which the
power of this moment was already contained, as in a seed. He thought
of the hour [...] when the call of a bird did not, so to speak, break off
at the edge of his body, but was simultaneously outside and in his innermost
being, uniting both into one uninterrupted space [...] On that occassion
he had closed his eyes, so that he might not be confused, in so generous
an experience, by the outline of his body, and the Infinite passed into
him from all sides [...]
Rainer Maria Rilke -- An Experience
...there are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are
too big and magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely
trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can
carry them.
And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the
frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a
thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously,
they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result,
white spots appear in our biography--scented stigmata, the faded silvery
imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights
and days--while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements
itself, and towers over us in wonder and wonder...
Bruno Schulz - Cinnamon Streets (?)
Song lines are the sound equivalents of the
spacial [sic] journeys of the ancestors, the lines of which are found also
inscribed in Aboriginal paintings and carvings. They detail the travels
of the ancestors and each verse may be read in terms of the geographical
features of the landscape. Encoded within them are the great ceremonies
which reactivate the Dreamtime in the present.
Mudrooroo -- Aboriginal Mythology
It is the intuition of space which most fully
reveals [the] interpenetration of sensous and spiritual expression in language.
The essential role of spatial representation is most clearly shown in the
universal terms which language has devised for the designation of spiritual
processes. [...] Particularly, the languages of primitive peoples are distinguished
by the precision, the almost mimetic immediacy, with which they express
all spatial specifications and distinctions of processes and activities.
The languages of the American Indians, for example, seldom have a general
term for "going", but instead possess special terms for "going up" and
"going down" and for countless other shadings of motion; and states of
rest--position, standing below or above, inside and outside a certain limit,
standing near something, standing in water, in the woods, etc.--are similarly
differentiated...[these] languages can express a thought such as "The man
is sick" only by stating at the same time whether the subject of the statement
is at a greater or lesser distance from the speaker or the listener and
whether he is visible or invisible to them; and often the place, position
and posture of the sick man are indicated by the form of the word sentence.
All other specifications are thrust into the background by this spatial
characterization, or are represented only indirectly through it.
Ernst Cassirer -- The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
The initial clarity and concreteness, built up from
colour entities and enclosed forms, are now contrasted by these rounded
looming shadows. This new mythical element is described by Malevich as
a sensation of infinity, of the new space in which there is no human measure
[...] It is not a moment of nature held on canvas, nor an ideal world existing
independently, it is a corner of the cosmos caught on its journey through
time [...] More and more these half-present shapes drown the brilliant
flags of colour, the "semaphore in space" as Malevich called it.
Camilla Gray -- The Russian Experiment in Art
1863 - 1922
For true philosophy, music or poetry is also painting
and true painting is also music and philosophy, and true poetry or music
is a kind of divine wisdom and painting and Elsewhere I have discussed
how any painter is naturally an establisher of infinite images who, by
means of this image forming power constructs from sights and sounds by
combining in a multiplicity of ways.
Giordano
Bruno -- De imaginum, signorum, et idearum compositione
Through my perceptual field, with its spatial horizons,
I am present to my surroundings, I co-exist with all the other landscapes
which stretch out beyond it, and all these perspectives together form a
single temporal wave, one of the world's instants. Through my perceptual
field with its temporal horizons I am present to my present, to all the
preceeding past and future. And, at the same time, this ubiquity is not
strictly real, but is clearly only intentional. Although the landscape
before my eyes may well herald the features of the one that is hidden behind
the hill, it does so only to a certain degree of indeterminancy: here there
are meadows, over there perhaps woods, and, in any case, beyond the near
horizon, I know only that there will be land or sky and, as far as the
limits of the earth's atmosphere are concerned, I know only that there
is, in the most general terms, something to be perceived, and of those
remote regions I possess only the style, in the abstract. In the same way,
although each past is progressively enclosed in its entirety in the more
recent past which has followed it, in virtue of the interlocking of intentionalities,
the past degenerates, and the earliest years of my life are lost in the
general existance of my body, of which I now know merely that it was already,
at that time, confronted by colours and sounds, and a nature similar to
the one I now see before me. I possess the remote past, as I do the future,
therefore, only in principle, and my life is slipping away from me on all
sides, and is circumscribed by impersonal zones. The contradiction which
we find between the reality of the world and its incompleteness is the
contradiction between the omnipresence of consciousness and its involvement
in a field of presence.
M. Merleau-Ponty -- Phenomenology of Perception
Sometimes a work is at iys [sic] best when
most threatened by the weather. A balanced rock is given enormous tension
and force by a wind that might cause its collapse. I have worked with colourful
leaves, delicate grasses and feathers made extra vivid by a dark, rain-laden
sky that cast no shadow. Had it rained, the work would have become mud-splattered
and been washed away.
To achieve the end of yugen, art had sometimes
been stripped of its color and glitter lest these externals distract; a
bowl of highly polished silver reflects more than it suggests, but one
of oxidized silver has the mysterious beauty of stillness, as Seami realized
when he used for stillness the simile of snow piling in a silver bowl.
Or one may prize such a bowl for the tarnished quality itself, for its
oldness, for its imperfection, and this is the point where we feel sabi.
[...] The love for the fallen flower, for the moon obscured by the rain,
for the withered bough, is part of sabi. Unlike yugen (to
which, however, it is not opposed) sabi does not find in these things
symbols of remoter eternities. They are themselves and capable in themselves
of giving deep pleasure. Sabi also differs from the gentle melancholy
of aware: here one does not lament for the fallen flower, one loves
it.
Tsunoda, et al -- Sources of Japanese
Tradition (I)
Writing in 1927, the art historian Christopher Hussey
attributed seven characteristics to the sublime, based on his reading of
[Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful]: obscurity, both physical and intellectual;
power; privations, such as darkness, solitude, and silence; vastness,
either vertical or horizontal, both of which diminish the relative scale
of the human observer; infinity, which could either be literal or
induced by two final characteristics of the sublime: succession
and uniformity, both of which suggest limitless progression.
John Beardsley -- Earthworks and Beyond
It must be said at once that the religious experience
of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable
to a founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation,
but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the
world. For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be
constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all
future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany,
there is also revelation of absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality
of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically
founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no
point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established,
the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.
Mircea Eliade -- The Sacred and the Profane
And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists
to make one feel things, to make the stone STONY. The purpose of art is
to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they
are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make
forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because
the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Victor Shklovsky -- Art As Technique
I think there's a basic fascination in technology
which derives from the fact that there's always a hidden space--a control
room, a projection booth, a source of light of some kind--from which the
image comes. A painting on canvas, no matter how good it is, is to our
eyes more or less flat, or at least flatter than the luminescent image
of cinema, television, or the transparencies [...] The luminescent image
is fascinating because it's lit with another atmosphere. So two atmospheres
intersect to make the image. One of them, the hidden one, is more powerful
than the other. In a painting, for example, the source or the site of the
image is palpably in front of you. You can actually touch the place where
the image comes from, where it is. But in a luminescent picture the source
of the image is hidden and the thing is a dematerialized or semi-dematerialized
projection. The site from which the image originates is always elsewhere.
And this "elsewhere" is experienced, maybe consciously, maybe not, in experiencing
the image. Rimbaud said "Existence is elsewhere", and Malevich once wrote,
"Only that which cannot be touched can be sacred". To me, this experience
of two places, two worlds, in one moment is a central form of the experience
of modernity.
Jeff Wall -- Introduction to Transparencies
This site is a preliminary archive of sources and influences
for my Poetics of Cyberspace document, currently undergoing revision.
For more information, email me at <darrell@ku24.com>
Thanks to: John Ricketts, Michael Frank, Jamal Ali,
Martin Haywood, Jason Nolan, Stephen Ashley, Caroline Parsons, Ben Russell
Copyright (c) 1998 Darrell
Berry URL: <http://www.ku24.com/~darrell/mnem-arch1.html>
Last modified: 16 jun 98