Jan Provoost, Sacred Allegory, XVIe siècle
The radical mystic Suso of Cologne, v. 1330: “Whence have you come?” The image answers, “I came from nowhere.” “Tell me, what are you?’ ‘I am not.’ ‘What do you wish?’ ‘I do not wish.’ ‘This is a miracle! Tell me, what is your name?’ ‘I am called Nameless Wilderness.’ ‘Where does your insight lead to?’ ‘To untrammelled freedom.’ ‘Tell me, what do you call untrammelled freedom?’ ‘When a man lives according to all his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after…’
Suso’s explicitly anti-time utterance = an element of time refusal.
A new level of spatialisation was involved in the defeat of the 14th century resistance to time; the emergence of the modern map in the 15th c. and the ensuing age of great voyages / Braudel’s phrase regarding modern civilisation’s “war against empty space” is best understood in this light.
The first document known to have been printed on Gutenberg’s press in the mid 15th century was a calendar (not a bible).
Notes from John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal
Harry Sanderson, Human Resolution @ Arcadia Missa
HB: We should talk about Haptics, where artist Yuri Pattison invited you to make a touchable 3D hologram within his Faraday Cage project (a Faraday cage is a 19th century invention that blocks out external electric currents, which Pattison recreated as a residency space in SPACE Studios). What's the difference between this work and Human Resolution?
HS: [...] Haptics was just a straight desire to reproduce this technology that I'd heard about, which was this touchable hologram, which I thought was potentially quite beautiful: that you could touch something [...] that wasn't actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense [...] The promotional video for that technology contained one line that was "a floating image in mid air is no longer just a dream." There's this desire to give technology a physical form so there's at least there's something that will push back at you. I think I found that profound, in a way, because it means that people still desire each other, even if it's so mediated that they just desire to create some kind of holographic representation of something. [...]
Human Resolution's a bit more negative, saying "look at you here as nothing but data". There's that Ashbery poem we were reading the other day where he says "much that is beautiful must be discarded so that we may resemble a taller impression of ourselves." There's a constant aspiration toward this image we've created of ourselves that we can't ever quite get to which is this, I suppose, want or desire: the "big other." You can't ever get it, you can't touch it. And data and Cloud computing perfectly fits into that as an ideological form because it's completely inaddressible.
[...] The desire to make machines instantly responsive to the body plays on a strange sort of humanism, which is so close to digital property protection. We have these swipe screens and fingerprint scans under the remit of protecting oneself against identity theft, but it's also the protection of private property, which is inseparable from force in some sense.
Harry Burke / Harry Sanderson, hitherr >?>>>
"The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit." (Waite)
This card consequently means the life of the soul in particular, the feelings and sentiments, emotions (not only fear, etc.), changes wrought in existence by them, water and the female element in general. It is the sign of panta rei: everything passing, flowing or ebbing away in life, consequently uncertainty. It may relate to dreams, to exhibitions, popular plays, and games, theatres, and to the lower class of people. Physically it means the brain and the stomach.
"Servile spirits (the dog), savage souls (the wolf), and crawling creatures (the crayfish) are all present watching the fall of the soul, hoping to aid in its destruction." (Papus) That is true. And it may happen to us, that a lower current of the Moon brings our way people who have no higher aim than to 'aid in our destruction' even if we ourselves have no intention whatever of 'falling'.
Unfortunately, so firmly were the prevailing nineteenth century conceptions committed to the notion of man as primarily homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker, that […] the first discovery of the art of the Altamira caves was dismissed as a hoax, because the leading paleoethnologists would not admit that the Ice Age hunters, whose weapons and tools they had recently discovered, could have had either the leisure or the mental inclination to produce art – not crude forms, but images that showed powers of observation and abstraction of a high order.
"The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit." (Waite)
This card consequently means the life of the soul in particular, the feelings and sentiments, emotions (not only fear, etc.), changes wrought in existence by them, water and the female element in general. It is the sign of panta rei: everything passing, flowing or ebbing away in life, consequently uncertainty. It may relate to dreams, to exhibitions, popular plays, and games, theatres, and to the lower class of people. Physically it means the brain and the stomach.
"Servile spirits (the dog), savage souls (the wolf), and crawling creatures (the crayfish) are all present watching the fall of the soul, hoping to aid in its destruction." (Papus) That is true. And it may happen to us, that a lower current of the Moon brings our way people who have no higher aim than to 'aid in our destruction' even if we ourselves have no intention whatever of 'falling'.
Unfortunately, so firmly were the prevailing nineteenth century conceptions committed to the notion of man as primarily homo faber, the toolmaker, rather than homo sapiens, the mind maker, that […] the first discovery of the art of the Altamira caves was dismissed as a hoax, because the leading paleoethnologists would not admit that the Ice Age hunters, whose weapons and tools they had recently discovered, could have had either the leisure or the mental inclination to produce art – not crude forms, but images that showed powers of observation and abstraction of a high order.
Notes from Lewis Mumford, Tool Users vs. Homo Sapiens and the Megamachine
Theodore Kaczynski in Lutz Dammbeck's The Net (2003)
