diatriba

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

“

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: ‘Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.’ Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

“

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

Image: The world as a near-continuous coastline around one global ocean. By Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology

“Making truly accurate maps of the world is difficult,” New Scientist points out, “because it is mathematically impossible to flatten a sphere’s surface without distorting or cracking it. The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to ‘unfold’ and cut into the Earth’s surface in a way that minimises distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum.”

from BLDGBLOG

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

Taken with an EOS 5d Mark II with no slow-motion effects.

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

reblogged from iheartmyart

iheartmyart:

Stuart Brisley, Bath Works, 1974

Stuart Brisley has been at the forefront of experimentation and political debate within the visual arts as performance artist, painter, writer and teacher. He first achieved notoriety in the 1960s and ’70s and is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances, but his work extends over four decades and has also embraced painting, print, sculpture, installation, films and fictions and large-scale participatory projects.

Tuesday | January 5, 2010

“

Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and someimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim, he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened.

— Huckelberry Finn

Monday | January 4, 2010