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- | ==== Alchorisma Reader | + | ==== Of things written in stone ==== |
(foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader -> https:// | (foam_earth contribution to the Alchorisma Reader -> https:// | ||
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+ | < | ||
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+ | Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes... | ||
+ | —Ursula Leguin | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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+ | < | ||
+ | Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across atemporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. (...) Human immediately becomes posthuman as a consequence of the enlarged temporal frame that geology demands. Such a stone-etched counter-vision invites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet is intimately continuous with us. (...) Rocks possess much of what is supposed to set humans apart.They are neither inert nor mute, but like all life are forever flowing, forever filled with stories. | ||
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+ | —Jeffrey Cohen | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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+ | < | ||
+ | 假作真时真亦假,无为有处有还无。(Truth becomes fiction when the fiction' | ||
+ | —Cao Xueqin | ||
+ | </ | ||
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</ | </ | ||
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- | Human beings have from prehistoric times recognized the potentialities within the lithic to send communication across vast spans of time. Hence our fascination with structures like Stonehenge, designed to persist across atemporal duration no human culture can surmount. As information endurance devices, such rocks communicate long after their successive human co-dwellers have been obliterated. (...) Human immediately becomes posthuman as a consequence of the enlarged temporal frame that geology demands. Such a stone-etched counter-vision invites reflection on what it means to inhabit a world that is potentially indifferent to humanity and yet is intimately continuous with us. (...) Rocks possess much of what is supposed to set humans apart.They are neither inert nor mute, but like all life are forever flowing, forever filled with stories. | ||
- | —Jeffrey Cohen | + | In its exile from the Earth' |
+ | —Nigel Clark | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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+ | < | ||
+ | In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, | ||
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+ | —The Crystalpunk Manifesto | ||
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</ | </ | ||
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+ | When our animal senses are all awake, our skin rippling with sensations as we palpate the surroundings with ears and eyes and flaring nostrils, it sometimes happens that our body becomes part of the larger Body of the land—that our sensate flesh is taken up within the wider Flesh of the breathing Earth—and so we begin to glimpse events unfolding at other locations within the broad Body of the land. | ||
- | A post-digital re-reading | + | The smartphone replicates something |
- | The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined | + | Perhaps it is easier to understand, |
- | (...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," | + | —David Abram |
- | —Paul Prudence | ||
</ | </ | ||
+ | < | ||
+ | So, image for a moment an object, a material, which can literally do anything. It can move across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what do I mean? I mean that if you possess the philosopher' | ||
+ | |||
+ | —Terence McKenna, Lectures on Alchemy | ||
+ | </ | ||
< | < | ||
+ | Charisma makes us hesitate, wavering in its force field. What if charisma were actual? What would the emission of such an energy field imply? It would imply, for a start, that art isn't just decorative candy. It would imply what " | ||
- | In its exile from the Earth' | + | Appearance |
- | —Nigel Clark | + | What art gives us, argues Kant, is the feel of data, the data-ness of data, otherwise known as givennes (datum, Latin for what is given). This data-feel is, he argues, an attunement space, the one place in the whole universe where mesmerizing hesitation can happen—a very important mesmerising hesitation, because it underwrites the existence of a priori synthetic judgement, because in this experience, I get a magical taste of something beyond my graspable experience, a transcendental beyond-ness... |
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+ | Attunement is the feeling of an object' | ||
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+ | —Tim Morton | ||
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+ | The necessity of changing methods is all the more obvious when it is a question of finding the explanation of a phenomenon that nature offers in all of its complication. There, where the givens are by their very existence more complicated than the results we seek, direct synthesis becomes inapplicable, | ||
+ | —André-Marie Ampère | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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+ | < | ||
+ | The response to technology in this period thus confounded familiar oppositions: | ||
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+ | —John Tresch | ||
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+ | </ | ||
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- | Stones in Chinese gardens or natural settings that are so distinct as to seem out of place are sometimes referred to as Stones That Flew Here. This designation references an obscure Buddhist myth about stones that were magically transported from India to China, landing in unlikely locations where they were incompatible with the local geology. The myth is most likely a way of explaining stones that have been moved by glaciers great distances from their places of origin. | ||
- | We extract millions of tons of minerals from the earth annually for the manufacture of computers, mobile phones, television sets and other electronics. When these products become obsolete, they are returned to the earth in the form of e-waste, which often pollutes the earth and can be a significant health hazard for workers involved in processing the e-waste. | + | Despite software' |
+ | —Martin Howse | ||
- | —Richard Turner | + | </ |
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+ | < | ||
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+ | A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois' | ||
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+ | The crystal deposits in stones might now chronicle the arching trajectories of boids as they trace pathways defined by chaotic parabolas of a Lorenz Attractor. In other rocks, mineral accretions may delineate facsimiles of reaction diffusion patterns—the scattered pointillist aftermaths of activator-inhibitor liaisons. Other patterns tell tales of cellular automata self-assembling themselves into unpredictable, | ||
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+ | (...) their values are intrinsic and without external reference," | ||
+ | |||
+ | —Paul Prudence | ||
</ | </ | ||
< | < | ||
- | 假作真时真亦假,无为有处有还无。(Truth becomes fiction when the fiction' | + | The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, |
- | —Cao Xueqin | + | |
+ | https:// | ||
</ | </ | ||
+ | |||
< | < | ||
- | In all of history the crystal is perhaps the most overloaded symbol; used by writers, prophets, medicine-man and orators of all times to express in one clear psychogeonamic object otherworldliness. Novalis, poet and student of mining, held the crystal to be a dark, soul-eating parasite transforming the human heart into the dead cold of a stone; some believe it to be an early apocalyptic warning against the cyborg. The sentiment is easily understood; is it, after all, not true that it is with more than just amazement we listen to the stories about that Indian sect that refuses to eat anything organic and, consequently, | + | When you cook bread from a recipe, you’re following an algorithm. When you knit a sweater from a pattern, you’re following |
- | —The Crystalpunk Manifesto | + | —Christian & Griffiths |
</ | </ | ||
+ | < | ||
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+ | Since their translation more than a century ago, it has not escaped the notice of esotericists that there is a distinctly alchemical idiom to the Pyramid Texts with their reference to stones, metals and distinct processes of magical transformation. If geo-polymerisation was used in the Old Kingdom' | ||
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+ | From earlier cultures Egypt inherited much of its star lore as well as the sanctity of stone. The innovations she brought to these beliefs were dramatically improved forms of masonry and a calendrical and mathematical sophistication that went unequaled for thousands of years. (...) We may speculate here that entangling one's consciousness with certain stars lead to certain ' | ||
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+ | —Gordon White | ||
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</ | </ | ||
- | < | ||
- | The field of meta-heuristic search algorithms has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classics such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, | ||
- | https:// | + | etc. |
- | </ | + | |
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References | References | ||
+ | * Abram, David. Magic and the Machine | ||
* Amato, J. A. Dust: a history of the small and the invisible | * Amato, J. A. Dust: a history of the small and the invisible | ||
* Blohm, H., Beer, S. Suzuki, D. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread | * Blohm, H., Beer, S. Suzuki, D. Pebbles to Computers: The Thread | ||
* Caillois, R. [[https:// | * Caillois, R. [[https:// | ||
+ | * Christian, Brian and Griffiths, Tom. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions | ||
* Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman | * Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman | ||
* Cohen, J. Stories of Stone | * Cohen, J. Stories of Stone | ||
* Calvino, I. & McLaughlin, M. L. Collection of sand: essays | * Calvino, I. & McLaughlin, M. L. Collection of sand: essays | ||
+ | * Emergence Magazine Issue No. 3: Technology https:// | ||
* Harris, P.A. Turner, R., Nocek, A.J. Rock Records, SubStance Volume 47, Number 2, 2018 (Issue 146) | * Harris, P.A. Turner, R., Nocek, A.J. Rock Records, SubStance Volume 47, Number 2, 2018 (Issue 146) | ||
+ | * Howse, Martin. [[https:// | ||
* Jemisin, N.K. The Broken Earth Trilogy | * Jemisin, N.K. The Broken Earth Trilogy | ||
+ | * Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative | ||
+ | * Morton, Tim. Attune | ||
* Ogden, J. G. The Kingdom of Dust | * Ogden, J. G. The Kingdom of Dust | ||
* Thacker, E. In the dust of this planet | * Thacker, E. In the dust of this planet | ||
+ | * Tresch, John. Romantic Machine | ||
* NIST. Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. https:// | * NIST. Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. https:// | ||
* Sonic Acts. Living Earth | * Sonic Acts. Living Earth | ||
* Sonic Acts. The Geologic Imagination | * Sonic Acts. The Geologic Imagination | ||
+ | * White, Gordon. Starships | ||
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+ | Other Alchorisma related pages: [[stones-workshop]] and [[alchorisma daily reflections]] | ||