This is a prototype for a book of poems, many of which were constructed with Infinite Monkeys and are now available for download vis a vis the Infinite Monkeys homepage on google code.
It contains roughly 4-5 years worth of poetry, which much like The Gospel of Echo, is a significant time investment in the construction of the work. It lacks the visual flair of TGOE, but retains the pseudo-religious feel for which I am prone.
Have a look if you please:
http://code.google.com/p/infinitemonkeys/downloads/detail?name=The%20Book%20of%20the%20Damned.pdf&can=2&q=#makechanges
Monday, June 27, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Lossy Compression
It's akin to a mandate, an impulse, a drive, an energy, a desire, things only in an abstract sense, energies, causes, processes, pulses, motion, things too unstable to become "a-thing", thinged nonetheless.
When I think about the impulse of western ontology, I think about it in terms of a mapping of a set of objects onto a smaller set of objects. The ontological impulse being always a reduction of the number of the objects in the explanation set. If this process is carried out to its logical extreme you are generally left with a choice between the following things: Being, Time, Nothingness, objects, properties, nouns and adjectives and sometimes even verbs.
The impulse here then in terms of functionality is then to create a sort of meta-map. What is crucial and irreducible, is also vague and all-encompassing. But it is precisely this impulse to encompass that allows it to be the container with the most objects.
The question now of the map becomes crucial, for it is precisely a matter of mapping that is relevant to this process, and an issue of scalability becomes central. Scaling out of the actual terrain is an image of it as a totality. In the process new information is gleaned but several details are lost. A new perspective is gained but the old one is (temporarily) lost. If the map "maps" to reality, then the map itself is included in one of the objects that the map represents and this is manifested in the ever-present desire to find yourself on the map.
What is present now is a mere antagonism, an uncertainty principle which pervades the pervasions of the map. This principle can be described as follows:
The more you know about the overall shape of an object, the less you will know about its details, and the more you know about the details, the less you know about the shape and as we can readily intuit, this would also apply in the world of objects as distance.
The pervasion of self-containment destabilizes the container logic of the set, and this is the technique I would argue Derrida uses in attempting to deconstruct western metaphysics. The search also yields the desire to externalize the set from its own self-membership and relay it to something on a "higher" hierarchical chain. The chain itself will point to either Being, Time, Nothingness, God or an origin which itself implies the mandate to relay it on a higher link.
The highest link is also the vaguest. In it all manner of potentialities roil. Nothingness is not an emptiness, it is absence of a "thing" which is here defined as an object in the world. No-Thing-Ness itself a transcendental noun of a thing which is no-thing. The image of the thing-in-space, its apparent self-containment, has been transmuted from a property as in a the transcendental noun, onto the image of an object.
So in the process of mapping, things are abstracted into sets of things, which are themselves object-after-transcendental-function with actual things-in-space as properties, potentialities, variations of, etc...
...more to come...
"Lossy Compression" in framing this ontological impulse, has cast it in the best possible light. Filtration issues are present when transcendental-objects are treated as things-in-space. There is also generally a degradation in the awareness that all things-in-space are not static unitary images, but processes which our senses have not evolved to process such as the dynamic processes of atoms and interactions with the environment, which are both intrinsically connected with the real-object which is at this point in human understanding a matter of guesswork.
In delineating these issues of ontology as such I hope to define a link between these processes and projection geometry.
When I think about the impulse of western ontology, I think about it in terms of a mapping of a set of objects onto a smaller set of objects. The ontological impulse being always a reduction of the number of the objects in the explanation set. If this process is carried out to its logical extreme you are generally left with a choice between the following things: Being, Time, Nothingness, objects, properties, nouns and adjectives and sometimes even verbs.
The impulse here then in terms of functionality is then to create a sort of meta-map. What is crucial and irreducible, is also vague and all-encompassing. But it is precisely this impulse to encompass that allows it to be the container with the most objects.
The question now of the map becomes crucial, for it is precisely a matter of mapping that is relevant to this process, and an issue of scalability becomes central. Scaling out of the actual terrain is an image of it as a totality. In the process new information is gleaned but several details are lost. A new perspective is gained but the old one is (temporarily) lost. If the map "maps" to reality, then the map itself is included in one of the objects that the map represents and this is manifested in the ever-present desire to find yourself on the map.
What is present now is a mere antagonism, an uncertainty principle which pervades the pervasions of the map. This principle can be described as follows:
The more you know about the overall shape of an object, the less you will know about its details, and the more you know about the details, the less you know about the shape and as we can readily intuit, this would also apply in the world of objects as distance.
The pervasion of self-containment destabilizes the container logic of the set, and this is the technique I would argue Derrida uses in attempting to deconstruct western metaphysics. The search also yields the desire to externalize the set from its own self-membership and relay it to something on a "higher" hierarchical chain. The chain itself will point to either Being, Time, Nothingness, God or an origin which itself implies the mandate to relay it on a higher link.
The highest link is also the vaguest. In it all manner of potentialities roil. Nothingness is not an emptiness, it is absence of a "thing" which is here defined as an object in the world. No-Thing-Ness itself a transcendental noun of a thing which is no-thing. The image of the thing-in-space, its apparent self-containment, has been transmuted from a property as in a the transcendental noun, onto the image of an object.
So in the process of mapping, things are abstracted into sets of things, which are themselves object-after-transcendental-function with actual things-in-space as properties, potentialities, variations of, etc...
...more to come...
"Lossy Compression" in framing this ontological impulse, has cast it in the best possible light. Filtration issues are present when transcendental-objects are treated as things-in-space. There is also generally a degradation in the awareness that all things-in-space are not static unitary images, but processes which our senses have not evolved to process such as the dynamic processes of atoms and interactions with the environment, which are both intrinsically connected with the real-object which is at this point in human understanding a matter of guesswork.
In delineating these issues of ontology as such I hope to define a link between these processes and projection geometry.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Is Literature Intrinsically Evil?
.
According to Georges Bataille writers are guilty of a kind of evil. I have my own thoughts on this, and I think it's an interesting and worthy question to ponder, but will pace my response for later this week. In the meantime, enjoy Georges, and try to remember that the greatest evil committed by either of the authors mentioned by Bataille was the unnecessary guilt that they placed on themselves for being writers. This was also true of Chaucer and is something that has really haunted Western literature for many centuries: the fact that a well written book is a distraction from the "real truth" of the Holy Bible.
More soon,
Dave
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