Agent 86's Cone of Present-ness(Kaos' answer to the Cone of Silence)

Bonjour les amis,

I went to see the new Vittorio Rossi play the other night... an autobiographical melodrama about his father dying from Alzheimer’s. For me, the most interesting aspect of the play was the portrayal of the dissolution of the linkages of memory. As memories went off-line, from the latest to the earliest, the present refused to come to be because that which allows linkage to the past is no longer there. How can I walk forward if there is no back-there left to walk from? As time moves on, the gap between the actual present and the front edge of the past gets wider and wider to the point where there's no past, just a perpetual unfolding of present without future. Without the immediate past, the immediate future (read present) cannot take form; without a succession of immediate pasts there can be no actualizations of presents (perpetual becomings).

This brought me to think of Deleuze’s peaks of present and how to visualize them. The past can never become the present in the same way that the future can never be the present; in this conception/presentation, past and future become present at infinity and for zero duration. In considering the present in an asymptotic relationship to the past/future, I feel like I can see the linkage between the paradoxes of Zeno, ideas about constant movement and change, the intensity in touch, Deleuze’s formulation of past/future and the present, etc. I came up with the following figure in trying to make sense of the cone image and it started making sense.

infinity

The vertical is a measure of present-ness (i.e. the quality of an instant of time to be the present) that continually “scrubs” the horizontal line that denotes time passage-ness—like working the cursor on an Avid timeline. The left of the ordinate “quantifies” past-ness and the right, future-ness. As the circle (denoting any present whatever) scrubs left or right, the past-ness and present-ness keep moving alongside to keep up, but the curves depicting present-ness as a function of past-ness or future-ness will never touch at a static definite present; past-ness and future-ness could fuse into a present in infinity but infinity does not happen, so neither does the present. The present exists as a discontinuity within the continuum of past and future; the present is an ever-becoming peak that never actually happens. The present cannot be reconstituted with immobile sections because it is never static—as a continuous succession of events of zero duration it is always in the process of becoming or un-becoming, always moving without ever having become, except at a dsicontinuity called infinity.

The theme of movement seems to recur under different guises in the readings and I thought the drawing useful, but for all I know, it could be way off base. Feel free to comment.

Regards,

Felix

Ch-ch-changes

I think this little quote about change and transformation (by Jason, the main character in David Mitchell's novel, Black Swan Green), will tickle and titillate your thought processes, if not provoke them profoundly:

In the second mirror was a Gelatinous Cube. All face, no body, just twiggy limbs waving at its corners. By puffing out my cheeks I nearly doubled its size. No, answered the Cube. You can only change superficial features. An Inside-You must stay unaltered to change the Outside-You. To change Inside-You you'd need an Even-More-Inside-You, who'd need an Inside-the-Even-More-Inside-You to change it. And on and on.

(249)

Besides being just a novelist, British writer David Mitchell is something else. I can't put a label on it, and if I do, I fear that something will lose its aura. I find it amazing how Mitchell smuggles philosophical language (not just ideas, mind you) into his story in a way that just works perfectly but completely alters the way the genre has been achieved heretofore. A great number of the accolades for this latest book Black Swan Green rant and rave about how wonderful it is and how it doesn't use gimmicks like Cloud Atlas did.
Gimmicks? How much sophistication do you need? Cloud Atlas was highly accessible. I think that these people are afraid of its political potency. If I had my way, I would use huge chunks of Cloud Atlas for manifesto material at political rallies.
As wonderful as it is, Black Swan Green is only a coming-of-age or bildungsroman. Cloud Atlas is much more than what it is. Which is what every book should be. I would say what it is is tranformative, in the way that that the Cube mirror in the carnival wants Jason to be inside himself.

Theo Jansen: Flexible geometries, movement, evolution

Hi All,

Yesterday's presentation on Dymaxion geometries made me think of two things: The second thing is the way we have started to study the brain, modeling it into a flexible geodesic sphere, and then stretching it and moving it enough to make it look like an individual's brain. I can show you cool pictures of that in class, but I cannot post them here yet as they are lab property!! From there on, we seek to define the difference and the similarities and etc.

But the more important idea that popped in my head was the the work of Artist/scienceist Theo Jansen, a sample of which you will see below.



It is of course importatnt to see his "animals" (as he calls them) in motion.



His objective is to have these "beasts" survive in nature.

I highly recommend that we watch This video

Cheers
Naj

Lesley Plumb's Audio Piece

Hi all,

I was reading Guatarri's Chaosmosis and fell upon a section that I thought was relevant and interesting to Lesley's audio piece she played for us on Thursday afternoon.

The passage in question comes from Chapter 1 entitled "On the Production of Subjectivity". I really enjoyed listening to the work and it's cool when something is "pleasing to the ear" but also resonates with the intellect, so here's the intellect: 

 

"In the domain of poetry, in order to detach itself, autonomise itself, culminate itself, creative subjectivity will tend to seize upon:

1. the sonority of the word, its musical aspect;

2. its material significations with their nuances and variants;

3. its verbal connections;

4. its emotional,intonational and volitional aspects;

5. the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation of a signifying sound, including motor elements of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which the whole organism together with the activity and soul of the word are swept along in their concentric unity.

And it is in this last aspect, declares Bakhtin, that encompasses all the others.

 

Regards,

 

Felix