Poetics of Cyberspace -- Sources  

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.

Giordano Bruno -- De la causa, principio, e uno



[...] 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. 

Richard E. Cytowic -- Synesthesia: Phenomenology And Neuropsychology -- A review of current knowledge, in Psyche 2(10) July 1995

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.
Marcos Novak -- TransTerraFirma: After Territory

...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. Andy Goldsworthy -- Introduction to Bath web site                                         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