Jules Moloney
Collapsing the Tetrahedron: Architecture with(in) Digital Machines
Keywords: architecture, history, drawing, computing
http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart1999/papers/moloney.html
Projections
For theorist / historian Robin Evans, architecture is inextricably linked to geometry and in particular the technique of projective drawing. As he wryly notes in his earlier Translation from Drawing to Building the actual output of an architect are drawings1. The buildings are translations from these drawings and often this resultant built form is as much constrained by drawing knowledge as by construction technology. His last book The Projective Cast builds on this observation to expose the history of architecture as a series of explicit or implicit references to developments in projective geometry: Piero della Francesca's 'turned heads' is selected as the ultimate virtuoso performance in Renaissance perspective projection 2; the use of traits by Gothic architects pushed the masons craft to gravity defying feats 3; techniques of ruled surfaces borrowed from advances in engineering enabled Le Corbusier to develop and realize Ronchamp, the High Court Building at Chandigarh and the Phillips Pavilion 4. All of these remarkable innovations required developments by mathematicians and exacting drafting technique. Thus, The Projective Cast demonstrates the historical development of Architecture as being limited by the ability to describe form on paper, and hence related to the drafting tools and techniques available at any given period.
Historian as draftsman detective, Evans engages drawing in his own text, culminating in a final diagram of the relationships between the designed object (realized building) and projective geometry. In this diagram "Projection and its analogues" (Fig 1) Evans proposes that all architectural activity - thinking, sketching, building and evaluation - is carried out via, in his words, "projective transactions".
Figure 1: Projection and its analogues, Evans 1995
Within this diagram the idea forms as an internalized 'picture' (9,10), it is explored via the architectural sketch (2,4,6), sold to the client via perspective drawing (5) and realized by orthographic drawings (3). The 'designed object' (8) is but one node within this tetrahedron of projective transactions - the majority of creative activity is spent describing the architectural object via drawing. Evans diagram makes explicit the separation between the creative activity of architects and the end result of these activities - the realized architecture.
Design is action at a distance. Projection fills the gaps; but to arrange the emanations first from drawings to buildings, then from buildings to the experience of the perceiving and moving subject, in such a way as to create in these unstable voids what cannot be displayed in designs - that was where the art lay 5
Evans' thesis is an admirable history of architecture and his diagram a useful summary of architectural activity in which drawings is the dominant activity. While Evans is aware of the closure implicit within such diagrams and proposes it merely as a tool to summarize his thesis, in his words a "a reasonable good rough guide" 6, the particular closure I would like to address is the exclusive preoccupation with drawing as the medium for conceiving and developing architecture: physical models are accommodated within Evans' thesis as intermediate modes which require translation via projective drawing; the observation that since the advent of cinema we have had successive generations whose experience of vision has been dominated by the mobile image is not addressed; the fact that by the early nineties computers were increasingly prevalent in architectural studios does not deserve a mention. As an investigation of the influence of geometry via media it is a history that stops with the advent of photography.
Leaving the question of physical models and cinema for another discussion, the questions addressed in this paper are the implications posed by the adoption of digital media. What changes, if anything, by projecting the digital into Evans' diagram? Could new digital technology address the problem of design as "action at a distance"? Would it be possible to revise Evans' diagram, to close down the distance between representation and building?
A review of developments in architecture and computing unearthed three procedures that to my mind have the potential for such a revision - emergence form, immersive editing and computer aided construction. These procedures are presented here via the following examples: artist William Latham serves to illustrate the use of the computer to produce emergent form; technology developed at the University of Illinois suggests the possibilities of the immersive editing of digital models; while the precedent of Frank Gehry's Bilbao project serves to demonstrate the reality of computer aided construction.
Emergence
William Latham is a British artist who, after observing evolutionary processes in nature, experimented with hand drawn systems as a means to extend his formal vocabulary. Taking large sheets of paper, Latham would draw 'evolutionary trees' in which simple geometry is subject to repeated deformation by the application of a few repeated rules. Latham describes his initial discovery of emergent form and his decision to utilize computers.
Simple as the rules of FormSynth were, they seemed to have a creative power of their own. Even though I created and applied the rules, they produced imaginative forms I had not expected ... Systems can assist an artist to create imaginative forms, and computers are good at applying systems, and very fast at drawing. It seems natural to apply the power and speed of computers to realize the potential of artistic systems and extend the creative power of the artist. 7
Latham collaborated with computer programmer Stephen Todd to develop a sophisticated computer application in which the artist delimits the rules by which form can emerge. The initial 'genes' are random numbers that produce a vast quantity of form. This runs autonomously and form emerges according to parameters determined by the designer. The act of designing is the design of the mathematical functions that describe these parameters.
Figure 2: Mutator
It can be argued that once activated, such codified geometry is outside Evans' diagram. Form starts 'life' as a projection - Latham has either a drawn or mental picture of form that may emerge from the definition of parameters. However, subsequent to this initial picture the generation of form is outside Evans' regime of projective representation. Forms exist as algorithmic description rather than projective geometry. Not for long. Latham quickly asserts control in a process analogous to gardening. Form that is of interest to the artist is used as the seed gene for a second program, 'Mutator'. This program produces nine mutations from the chosen seed gene. The artist then intervenes via a range of functions - Latham describes this editing process as being analogous to gardening.
From the artist's viewpoint, using Mutator is like being a gardener. The gardener breeds, weeds out, destroys and selects forms to steer evolution, replacing survival of the 'fittest' by survival of the most 'aesthetic'. 8
Latham's emergent form is literally 'cultivated' according to subjective editorial procedures. He is a visual artist and while he describes the form as digital sculpture his 'pruning' is based on projected images. We are firmly back within the cyclic procedures of projection and evaluation defined by the Evans. There is though, a rustling of 'life' outside the tetrahedral diagram. Emergent form, prior to being represented by perspective projection for editing, is removed from the regime of projective transaction.
Immersive editing
Editing digital sculpture through the evaluation of perspective pictures suits Latham's ends. His 'pruning' is based on evaluating perspective projections which are satisfactory given the final designed object is a picture. However the evaluation of an architectural proposal requires the ability to intuit space as well as form. Evans demonstrates that the architecture evaluation of form and space has been developed primarily on the basis of drawn orthographic and perspective pictures. For those interested in the spatial aspects of architecture recent advances in computer simulation offer the potential for 'experiential' editing of three-dimensional models. Such developments suggest potential for the architect to edit from the point of view of simulated occupation. The aim would be to approximate the spatial experience of the building during the act of designing by 'inhabiting' digital models.
Figure 3: CAVE, University of Illinois
The most advanced technology available in this field is computer automated virtual environments known by the acronym CAVE. Originally developed at the University of Illinois there are now several throughout the world 9. A CAVE is a physically existing room with high quality stereo graphics projected on the walls and on the floor. Real time images of the virtual model are projected from behind and the participant can interact with the virtual model using input devices such as a pointer or data glove. The visual illusion is augmented by three-dimensional sound that interacts with the simulated movement through space.
In terms of architectural space, critics of attempts at such simulation quite rightly make the point that the sensory experience of real space is a total body experience and that we will never be able to reproduce all the nuances of the experience of actual architecture. 10
However as argued by Alan Bridges 'perfect simulation' is not necessary for virtual environments to be applicable.
... virtual environments should not attempt to model the 'real' world in either increasing detail (like Borges' map makers who drew maps at greater and greater levels of detail until they produced a map that fitted exactly over the real space), but rather recognize that the participant/observer can cope with discontinuities. 11
The obvious precedent for such discontinuity is that of film, which, after preliminary attempts to simulate live theatre, has evolved into a genre incorporating spatial and temporal montage. I would argue that virtual environments are in a similar stage of development to early film and that it that a 'language' for interacting within virtual environments will likewise evolve. One can anticipate that visual and aural senses will be adequately catered for, and it is not beyond the realms of imagination that approximations of such phenomena as air movement, temperature, texture, and incline will be simulated. The approximations will be discontinuous between spaces and through time yet, just as we have learnt to accept such discontinuity in film, so we will also willingly engage with immersive environments. Already what is evident within present examples, such as CAVE, is the potential to supersede the 'perspective snapshot' as the means by which architecture is developed and appraised.
Computer Aided Construction
Techniques of emergence and developments in computer simulation described above have the potential to allow an architect to evade the 'projective transactions' between perception and orthographic and perspective drawing. What remains of Evans' tetrahedral model are the transactions between representation and the realization of the actual architecture.
Digital models used in such applications as CAVE exist as three-dimensional mathematical descriptions, precisely the format required to bring computer numeric controlled (CNC) machines to life. Frank Gehry's recent Bilbao Museum is perhaps the highest profile building to be realized via such machines. Bilbao was initially conceived via a cardboard model and then, utilizing 3D digitizing techniques, an accurate computer model was generated. The outline model was supplied to engineers who devised a series of vertically stacked trusses that closely follow the curving wall profiles. Prior to construction a scale model was produced with computer controlled milling machines to allow the architect to compare the developed project with the original cardboard model. The project was then realized by transmitting the computer files to the fabricators who utilized C.N.C. machines to cut the structural steel and titanium cladding panels.
During this conception and development there was no engagement with historical methods of representation as defined by Evans. The project was conceived in a physical medium, developed utilizing digital models, appraised via a computer generated physical model and realized by transmitting digital instructions to CNC machines.
The importance of Bilbao is that it marks a fundamental shift in the relationship between representation and construction. Unlike forms of art or science where medium and object are concurrent, architecture normally operates at least twice removed from its object - the architectural project is developed in a representational medium (traditionally drawing) and then realized via the filter of scaled plans and sections. The working methods utilized for the Bilboa project enabled Gehry to in effect work directly with the final architectural object. Gehry describes this experience in terms of craft.
In the past, there were many layers between the rough sketch and the final building, and the feeling of the design could get lost before it reached the craftsman. It feels like I've been speaking a foreign language, and now, all of a sudden, the craftsman understands me. 12
The impact on Evans' diagram of such a working paradigm is substantial. Orthographic projection as the means to convey information to the construction industry is made redundant. Dimensioned plans, elevations and sections are substituted by digital information that can be used to generate scale models for evaluation purposes and to realize the project via CNC machines.
Impact of digital machines on Projection and its Analogues
The impact of emergence, immersive editing and computer aided construction on each of the transitive paths of Evans' diagram is summarized below (Fig. 1).
Transitions between designer and the designed object (7)
As discussed in the example of Latham and Todd the transition from designer to emergent form is largely outside Evans' web of projective transactions. It may be possible to visualize some of the expected outcome but emergent form is by definition unforeseeable. While highly unlikely, this 'unseen form' could be implemented via C.N.C. machines to directly produce architecture without editing via projection. In a reverse process it would be possible to take existing building and use these as the 'gene pool' for further mutations.
Transitions between designer, orthographic and perspective drawing (2, 4, 6)
It has been shown that it is possible for drawn orthographic and perspective projection to be replaced by the immersive editing of computer models. Ideas can potentially be developed by designing while 'occupying' the model. The experience would be totally immersive and interactive. Such visual systems exist, aural systems are well advanced and it is anticipated that most sensorial experience will be likewise synthetically stimulated. It is not expected to match the sophistication of human senses. It would be satisfactory to induce an augmented version of the experience induced by cinema. The digital model would function as the new work space for the editing of architectural form and space and allow the testing of program requirements, all from the point of view of inhabitation.
Transitions between orthographic and perspective drawing and designed object (3)
The existing practice of translating architecture to scaled two-dimensional drawing to enable physical construction has been removed. The designed digital model would be 're-constructed' by C.N.C. machines that translate the digital code to reproduce the model in physical form. In addition the need to produce fixed perspective views of proposed building is removed by use of the real time digital model. In a reverse direction existing or demolished buildings can be 'experienced' via the digital model.
Figure 4: Collapsing the Tetrahedron, Moloney 1999
Collapsing the Tetrahedron: Architecture with(in) Digital Machines
In summary the alternate procedures outlined above - emergence, immersive editing and computer aided construction - allow a re-evaluation of Evans' framework. The nodes of Evans diagram dissolve and the distinction between designer, digital model and realized project is blurred. Perhaps to the extent that the designer in effect works directly with the final architectural object as opposed to 'action at a distance' via drawing. Hence it can be proposed that the use of digital 'machines' allow a sense of working on the architecture as against working with representations of the architecture. The impact of the above arguments is that the tetrahedral model proposed by Evans is at the point of collapse. As suggested in Figure 4 the nodes dissolve and the distinction between designer, emergent form, immersive model and architecture are blurred.
In an extreme version it has been demonstrated that architecture can be conceived, developed and manufactured without recourse to any systems of projection, drawn or otherwise. This is not to suggest the architecture had not been designed. In this direct path between emergent and architectural form the activity of the designer is directed towards the design of parameters within which form evolves. A more likely version would involve the subjective evaluation and editing of these models generated by emergent systems. Design in this case would involve both the parameters and the intuitive manipulation of the model with(in) the digital machine. In both cases CNC machines can be utilized to construct the designs without the need for translation of the digital model to projective drawings.
As suggested by the examples various paths within this framework are being progressed in isolation in a variety of disciplines. Within architecture Bernard Cache is one who comes close to implementing the full range of possibilities.13 Cache sets form in motion as trigonometric functions, these are evaluated by clients on the internet via video images, and realized as designed objects by transferring code directly to C.N.C. machines. The output of Cache and his collaborators is modest (furniture and various machined panels) but the implications of the process are wide ranging. Not the least for historians who will document the architecture of the twenty-first century.
Notes
1 Evans, R. (1997), Translations from Drawing to Building and other essays, London, Architectural Association.
2 Evans, R. (1995), The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, pp.147-158, London and Cambridge, M.I.T. Press.
3 Evans, R. (1995), Ibid pp.179-202.
4 Evans, R. (1995), Ibid pp.305-314.
5 Evans, R. (1995), Ibid p.363
6 Evans, R. (1995), Ibidp.369.
7 Todd, S. and Latham, W. (1992), Evolutionary Art and Computers, p.6, London, Academic Press Ltd.
8 Todd, S. and Latham, W. (1992), Ibid, p. 98.
9 Developed by the Electronics visualisation laboratory at the University of Illinnois in 1992 CAVE are now in use for scientific research and visualisation within a number of institutions world wide. See the CAVE research network for ongoing applications. http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/vrserver.html.
10 As an example of such criticism see Cheng, N.Y. (1995), 'Linking the Virtual to Reality', pp.303-311 in CADD Futures 1995, Singapore: National University of Singapore.
11 Bridges, A. (1995), 'Design Precedents for Virtual Worlds', p.300 in CADD Futures 1995, Singapore: National University of Singapore.
12 Gehry, F. (1992) 'Gehry Forges New Computer Links', p.105 in Architecture V.81, Aug. 1992.
13 See Cache, B. (1995), Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, London and Cambridge, M.I.T. Press for theoretical underpinning of his architecture.
24.1.10
CYMATIC GARDEN
WHAT : The project is to study diverse spaces as geometry and diverse temporalities as rhythms in the concrete; The body. Exploring the alignment of rhythms in repetition of everyday life. Overtime landscape changes with rhythm of everyday life; so do architectures. The alliance of space and function changes at different speed; as the result, fusion of landscape and architecture in a polyrhythmic system. The question is how rhythm of the self and the rhythm of the others oriented and distributed? In other words, revealing the beating hearts of the body to simplifying the complexity
WHY : Architecture is not a static object. - An architecture over its life occupies more than a topography, it occupies a timeography, a period over time in which it is affected by forces which alter it and it will get synced with these changes. Architecture does not sublimate only the functional or aesthetic rule: it has an ethical function. In its relation to body, to the time, to the work, it literally illustrates life of body.
HOW : Resembling the idea in a system; model of the idea; A Cymatic Garden; Presenting a system of combination of diverse polyrythmic object which are moving constantly under circular and linear vibration. Each performs different from the other; synced and in contrary with each other, however as a whole the texture remains constant. Exploring the result from a contradiction resistaforces
SALMA ZAVARI
TUTOR: PHIL WATSON
WEBLOGS: http://whenireadidontwrite.blogspot.com/ & http://wheniwriteidontread.blogspot.com/
WHAT : The project is to study diverse spaces as geometry and diverse temporalities as rhythms in the concrete; The body. Exploring the alignment of rhythms in repetition of everyday life. Overtime landscape changes with rhythm of everyday life; so do architectures. The alliance of space and function changes at different speed; as the result, fusion of landscape and architecture in a polyrhythmic system. The question is how rhythm of the self and the rhythm of the others oriented and distributed? In other words, revealing the beating hearts of the body to simplifying the complexity
WHY : Architecture is not a static object. - An architecture over its life occupies more than a topography, it occupies a timeography, a period over time in which it is affected by forces which alter it and it will get synced with these changes. Architecture does not sublimate only the functional or aesthetic rule: it has an ethical function. In its relation to body, to the time, to the work, it literally illustrates life of body.
HOW : Resembling the idea in a system; model of the idea; A Cymatic Garden; Presenting a system of combination of diverse polyrythmic object which are moving constantly under circular and linear vibration. Each performs different from the other; synced and in contrary with each other, however as a whole the texture remains constant. Exploring the result from a contradiction resistaforces
SALMA ZAVARI
TUTOR: PHIL WATSON
WEBLOGS: http://whenireadidontwrite.blogspot.com/ & http://wheniwriteidontread.blogspot.com/
Reference List
What:
Design a "Cymatic Garden" to study diverse spaces as geometry and diverse temporalities as rhythms in the concrete.
Why:
Rhythmanalisis; henri lefebvre; 2004 1992; He shows the interrelation of understanding of space and time in the comprehension of everyday life.
How:
Cymatic; Henry jenny, physical study of geometery od importing a rhythm in different frequencies to a range of diverse matters
Riemann Theory "on the hypothesis that lie at the foundation of geomagnetic" 1867..which distinguished between bordered and infinite space and divergence significantly from Euclidean principles of transformation which produced geometric figures that are "locally" and "globally" differentiated.
Design a "Cymatic Garden" to study diverse spaces as geometry and diverse temporalities as rhythms in the concrete.
Why:
Rhythmanalisis; henri lefebvre; 2004 1992; He shows the interrelation of understanding of space and time in the comprehension of everyday life.
How:
Cymatic; Henry jenny, physical study of geometery od importing a rhythm in different frequencies to a range of diverse matters
Riemann Theory "on the hypothesis that lie at the foundation of geomagnetic" 1867..which distinguished between bordered and infinite space and divergence significantly from Euclidean principles of transformation which produced geometric figures that are "locally" and "globally" differentiated.
22.1.10
QUESTIONS ON RHYTHM
what is the difference between rhythm and movement?
what is the difference between rhythm and repetition?
which rhythms can be explained by the capturing of image?
what is the difference between rhythm and repetition?
which rhythms can be explained by the capturing of image?
Thoughts on the Common Toad
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N. 1, and they can't stop you enjoying it … So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it
(George Orwell, Thoughts on the Common Toad)
(George Orwell, Thoughts on the Common Toad)
20.1.10
WHY---WHAT---HOW
WHY 1: The project is to discover the dynamic field between the object as an architecture and space and a location in a temporary condition; as this temporarily with no fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject, subject finds realization and reconciliation with it's vibrating truth. with no fixed nature or inveterate tendency. In the space between science art and philosophy... The SCIENCE of emerging technologies describes the collective behavior of decentralized but self-organized system in a context of time... concept of rhythm of object in time concerns the repetition of a measure at a frequency that changes the geometry of location. The entropy of the system cause it to operate and it comes from .... . The ART of production of an infinite subjective series as morphic gestures through the finite means of a material subtraction. Art is the impersonal production of a truth by means of architecture that is addressed to everyone. the transformation of the sensible into an happening of the Idea.
WHY 2: In architecture we have almost all sectors of knowledge. Recently the idea of rhythm has entered to the realm of knowledge instead of remaining just the object of art. This project tries to discover the dynamic field between the object as an architecture and space in a temporary condition; increasing the speed of time and discovering the rhythm between components in a polyrythmic system to reification (thingfication) a concept which is rhythm of matter/mood/...
WHAT:
HOW:Each event leave a trace in the world full of bodies. we can record this events via their trace to an abstract body. This is what science does. Also we can trace the abstract events via their trace to a concrete object or gesture. This is what art does.The project works through the combonation of these two methods combine to translate an event to another concrete event through the geometry of an object and it's location. ie. pattern can be read to a rhythm and the rhythm make an object to perform
WHY 2: In architecture we have almost all sectors of knowledge. Recently the idea of rhythm has entered to the realm of knowledge instead of remaining just the object of art. This project tries to discover the dynamic field between the object as an architecture and space in a temporary condition; increasing the speed of time and discovering the rhythm between components in a polyrythmic system to reification (thingfication) a concept which is rhythm of matter/mood/...
WHAT:
HOW:Each event leave a trace in the world full of bodies. we can record this events via their trace to an abstract body. This is what science does. Also we can trace the abstract events via their trace to a concrete object or gesture. This is what art does.The project works through the combonation of these two methods combine to translate an event to another concrete event through the geometry of an object and it's location. ie. pattern can be read to a rhythm and the rhythm make an object to perform
19.1.10
Rythmanalysis
To study diverse spaces and diverse temporalities - rhythms in the concrete.
Thought strengthens itself only if it enters into practice: into use
the body (and rhythm) and the everyday
Normally we only grasp the relations between rhythms, which interfere with them. However, they all have a distinct existence. Normally, none of them classifies itself; on the contrary, in suffering, in confusion, a particular rhythm surges up and imposes itself: palpitation, breathlessness, pains in the place of satiety
Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm
Repetition (and difference)
No rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns … But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference … Not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them
(Lefebvre 2004: 6-7)
the metronomic and the rhythmic
Rhythms are the music of the city, a picture that listens to itself. No camera...
struggle between a measured, imposed [tahmily] and exterior time, and a more endogenous [daruni] time.
the show the appropriation of spaces in a non-political way,
In social practice, scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation, an ancient tradition separates time and space..
Modernity curiously enlarged, deepened and dilapidated [virane] the present.
The trap of the present; the immobility of things; a moving but determinate complexity
Repetition, difference and the passage of time; Cartesian geometry, changing places and phenomenological space
The body (and rhythm) and mobility
Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot … The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world
Rhythmanalysis as a discipline:
Rhythmanalysis has the aim of the least possible separation of the scientific from the poetic.
Rhythms are lived (and you must have lived them) but to analyse them you have to be out of them. To listen to the rhythms require attentiveness and a certain amount of time....
study rhythm you need eyes, ears, a head, a memory and a heart
Any study of rhythms are necessarily comparative.
Forms of rhythms (in order of the texts):
Intervals,
clusters,
time broken and accented,
intense rhythms,
slower rhythms,
superimposed rhythms,
variation and non-variation,
increase and decrease,
accumulation points,
repetitive and different rhythms,
longer durations,
emptiness,
polyrhythmicality (symphonicality),
simultaneity,
synchronicity,
succession of alterations,
differential repetitions,
interactions,
hierarchy,
determinant rhythm,
order of grandeur,
humane scale,
stop/resume,
currents, streams,
flux and reflux,
the immediate in its moments and movements,
remembrance of other moments and of all the hours,
that what remains to scale,
rhythms always needs a reference,
complexity,
loops,
plurality of rhythms,
all gatherings of bodies are polyrhythmical,
an open totality,
a meta-stable equilibrium,
movements and differences in repetition.
There are two forms of repetition: cyclical and linear - inseparable even if the analyses must first distinguish and separate them and the rejoin them. Mathematicians clearly distinguish two types of movements, rotations and trajectories, [seire khaty] and have different measures for these two types.
1) Cyclical rhythms (big and simple intervals [modat/fasele] , social organisation manifesting itself, or alternating rhythms with short intervals, day and nights, hours and months, seasons and years, tides, solar rhythms and lunar rhythms). Generally of cosmic origins and numbered with duodecimals based on twelve. Each have a determined frequency or period, and also new beginnings.
2) Linear rhythms (succession, routine, perpetual, chance, encounters, predetermined encounters). Defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close regular intervals. The metronome. Generally emanates from human and social activities and particularly from the motions of work. The point of departure of all things mechanical. Linear rhythms have a tendency to oppose themselves to what is becoming. The linear, including lines, trajectories and repetitions is measured on a decimal base (the metric system).
The cyclical and the linear enter into a perpetual interaction and are even relative to each other, to the point that one becomes the measure of the other.
Polyrhythmy always results from a contradiction and also form a resistance to it - a struggle between to tendencies, the tendency to homogeneity and the one to diversity.
Other kinds of rhythms than cyclical and linear:
• Speech have two kinds of expression:
a) rhetorical [manaayee] and frontal
b) immediate and spontaneous
• Rhythm of the self and rhythm of the Other (BG: of the same person):
a) The rhythms of the Other are the rhythms of activities turned outward, towards the public, the rhythms of representation, more contained, more formalised (corresponding to frontal expression in speech);
b) The rhythms of the self are associated to rhythms more deeply inscribed, organising time more towards private life, more silent and intimate conscious forms, presence;
The Self and the Other are not cut off from each other.
• The rhythms and interactions of the multitude of social actors and roles
• The rhythms of groups
• Ritual have a double relationship with rhythms
What rhythms are studied more in detail:
• bodies (alive and human, walking, feet, pedestrians, alone, groups, crowds, stretching out, hurried carryings, nonchalant[sahlengarane] meanderings, encounters, see and meet each other, looking, going home, leaving home, appearance of faces in windows, also dogs);
• daily rhythms (rush hours, late evening, nights, dawn, schedules, times with prohibition, regulated time; preparing food, sleeping);
• gestures (hand-in-hand, waving hands - messages not being signs, - conventions, ways of being, chewing and eating e.g. gum, sandwich, hot-dog; mannerisms, habits);
• movement and traffic (pedestrians, cars, traffic lights, flows, comings and goings, passers-by, stopping, drifting);
• exchanges of all kinds (material and nonmaterial, objects and words, signs and products);
• sounds (tongue, speech, noises, voices, mumblings, rumours, cries, calls, words, silence, different languages);
• sudden events (accident, explosion, fire engine);
• festivity (opening, adventure, games, agitation); The extra-daily (dancing, singing, making music)
• ritual;
• rhythm of moods (calm, melancholic, sadness);
• seasons (trees, flowers, lawns, plantations, leaves, seeds, fruit; spring, autumn, winter; the time of each being);
• weather (downpour);
• built environment and urban functions (streets, junctions, avenues, houses, facades, monuments, places, squares, courtyards, gardens - including their ageing; doors, windows, balconies, terraces, fountains, (little) bistros and shops, shop windows, workshops, markets, attics; meeting places, scene settings, spontaneous popular theatre; closed and enclosed; public and private, outside/intimate; room, apartment; areas; palaces, churches; steps and stairs);
• light and darkness:
• colours (grey, multicoloured, white, green);
• smells (stink of fumes);
• the present-absent (money and its circuits, the omnipresent State, logic, division of labour, leisure as product, opacity and horizons, obstacles and perspectives);
• what one hides /shows/goes to see outside,
• the tide, and waves;
• Americanisation.
Thought strengthens itself only if it enters into practice: into use
the body (and rhythm) and the everyday
Normally we only grasp the relations between rhythms, which interfere with them. However, they all have a distinct existence. Normally, none of them classifies itself; on the contrary, in suffering, in confusion, a particular rhythm surges up and imposes itself: palpitation, breathlessness, pains in the place of satiety
Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm
Repetition (and difference)
No rhythm without repetition in time and space, without reprises, without returns … But there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference … Not only does repetition not exclude differences, it also gives birth to them; it produces them
(Lefebvre 2004: 6-7)
the metronomic and the rhythmic
Rhythms are the music of the city, a picture that listens to itself. No camera...
struggle between a measured, imposed [tahmily] and exterior time, and a more endogenous [daruni] time.
the show the appropriation of spaces in a non-political way,
In social practice, scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation, an ancient tradition separates time and space..
Modernity curiously enlarged, deepened and dilapidated [virane] the present.
The trap of the present; the immobility of things; a moving but determinate complexity
Repetition, difference and the passage of time; Cartesian geometry, changing places and phenomenological space
The body (and rhythm) and mobility
Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot … The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world
Rhythmanalysis as a discipline:
Rhythmanalysis has the aim of the least possible separation of the scientific from the poetic.
Rhythms are lived (and you must have lived them) but to analyse them you have to be out of them. To listen to the rhythms require attentiveness and a certain amount of time....
study rhythm you need eyes, ears, a head, a memory and a heart
Any study of rhythms are necessarily comparative.
Forms of rhythms (in order of the texts):
Intervals,
clusters,
time broken and accented,
intense rhythms,
slower rhythms,
superimposed rhythms,
variation and non-variation,
increase and decrease,
accumulation points,
repetitive and different rhythms,
longer durations,
emptiness,
polyrhythmicality (symphonicality),
simultaneity,
synchronicity,
succession of alterations,
differential repetitions,
interactions,
hierarchy,
determinant rhythm,
order of grandeur,
humane scale,
stop/resume,
currents, streams,
flux and reflux,
the immediate in its moments and movements,
remembrance of other moments and of all the hours,
that what remains to scale,
rhythms always needs a reference,
complexity,
loops,
plurality of rhythms,
all gatherings of bodies are polyrhythmical,
an open totality,
a meta-stable equilibrium,
movements and differences in repetition.
There are two forms of repetition: cyclical and linear - inseparable even if the analyses must first distinguish and separate them and the rejoin them. Mathematicians clearly distinguish two types of movements, rotations and trajectories, [seire khaty] and have different measures for these two types.
1) Cyclical rhythms (big and simple intervals [modat/fasele] , social organisation manifesting itself, or alternating rhythms with short intervals, day and nights, hours and months, seasons and years, tides, solar rhythms and lunar rhythms). Generally of cosmic origins and numbered with duodecimals based on twelve. Each have a determined frequency or period, and also new beginnings.
2) Linear rhythms (succession, routine, perpetual, chance, encounters, predetermined encounters). Defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close regular intervals. The metronome. Generally emanates from human and social activities and particularly from the motions of work. The point of departure of all things mechanical. Linear rhythms have a tendency to oppose themselves to what is becoming. The linear, including lines, trajectories and repetitions is measured on a decimal base (the metric system).
The cyclical and the linear enter into a perpetual interaction and are even relative to each other, to the point that one becomes the measure of the other.
Polyrhythmy always results from a contradiction and also form a resistance to it - a struggle between to tendencies, the tendency to homogeneity and the one to diversity.
Other kinds of rhythms than cyclical and linear:
• Speech have two kinds of expression:
a) rhetorical [manaayee] and frontal
b) immediate and spontaneous
• Rhythm of the self and rhythm of the Other (BG: of the same person):
a) The rhythms of the Other are the rhythms of activities turned outward, towards the public, the rhythms of representation, more contained, more formalised (corresponding to frontal expression in speech);
b) The rhythms of the self are associated to rhythms more deeply inscribed, organising time more towards private life, more silent and intimate conscious forms, presence;
The Self and the Other are not cut off from each other.
• The rhythms and interactions of the multitude of social actors and roles
• The rhythms of groups
• Ritual have a double relationship with rhythms
What rhythms are studied more in detail:
• bodies (alive and human, walking, feet, pedestrians, alone, groups, crowds, stretching out, hurried carryings, nonchalant[sahlengarane] meanderings, encounters, see and meet each other, looking, going home, leaving home, appearance of faces in windows, also dogs);
• daily rhythms (rush hours, late evening, nights, dawn, schedules, times with prohibition, regulated time; preparing food, sleeping);
• gestures (hand-in-hand, waving hands - messages not being signs, - conventions, ways of being, chewing and eating e.g. gum, sandwich, hot-dog; mannerisms, habits);
• movement and traffic (pedestrians, cars, traffic lights, flows, comings and goings, passers-by, stopping, drifting);
• exchanges of all kinds (material and nonmaterial, objects and words, signs and products);
• sounds (tongue, speech, noises, voices, mumblings, rumours, cries, calls, words, silence, different languages);
• sudden events (accident, explosion, fire engine);
• festivity (opening, adventure, games, agitation); The extra-daily (dancing, singing, making music)
• ritual;
• rhythm of moods (calm, melancholic, sadness);
• seasons (trees, flowers, lawns, plantations, leaves, seeds, fruit; spring, autumn, winter; the time of each being);
• weather (downpour);
• built environment and urban functions (streets, junctions, avenues, houses, facades, monuments, places, squares, courtyards, gardens - including their ageing; doors, windows, balconies, terraces, fountains, (little) bistros and shops, shop windows, workshops, markets, attics; meeting places, scene settings, spontaneous popular theatre; closed and enclosed; public and private, outside/intimate; room, apartment; areas; palaces, churches; steps and stairs);
• light and darkness:
• colours (grey, multicoloured, white, green);
• smells (stink of fumes);
• the present-absent (money and its circuits, the omnipresent State, logic, division of labour, leisure as product, opacity and horizons, obstacles and perspectives);
• what one hides /shows/goes to see outside,
• the tide, and waves;
• Americanisation.
General concept of rhythm
General concept of rhythm
Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm concerns the repetition of a measure at a frequency. He identifies two kinds of rhythms: cyclical rhythms, which involve simple intervals of repetition, and alternating (or linear) rhythms. An example of a cyclical rhythm would be day fading into night, and night brightening into day; a linear rhythm might be the flow of information from a television set. Additionally, rhythms may be nested within each other; for example, the broadcast of the local news at set intervals throughout the day, throughout the week, is an example of a nested rhythm. In a less abstract fashion (or perhaps only abstract in a different fashion), Lefebvre asserts that rhythms exist at the intersection of place, time and the expenditure of energy.
Lefebvre posits that the human body is composed of several rhythms; in order to observe rhythms outside of the body, the rhythmanalyst must use his or her own rhythms as a reference to unify the rhythms under analysis. Properly put, the rhythm is the conjunction of the rhythmanalyst and the object of the analysis.
[edit] The act of rhythmanalysis
Rhythms are only perceptible through the traditional five senses; accordingly, it is possible to conceptualize rhythms as being composed of sense triggers (smells, sights, sounds, etc.) Lefebvre cautions against this conceptualization however; he specifically notes that rhythm is not meant to refer always to its more traditional referents, musical and dance rhythm (although it could, so long as the rhythmanalysis concerned either music or dancing). He also cautions against taking the mere repetition of a movement to indicate a rhythm.
The object of rhythmanalysis is to access the obscure property of the rhythm called ‘presence.’
The sensory events through which the rhythmanalyst perceives the rhythm are called ‘simulacra,’ or simply ‘the present.’
The need for rhythmanalysis arises out of the propensity [ tamayol]of the present to simulate presence..... Entropy
[edit] Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis)
I do not agree
. (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit] Present
The present consists of one’s sensory perceptions. Lefebvre frequently warns of “the trap of the present” wherein the present is always trying to pass itself off as presence, the rhythmanalytical truth of a situation. “The trap of the present” relies on false representation. Lefebvre argues that the present engages in a commodification of reality when it successfully passes itself off as presence.
[edit] Characteristics of rhythms
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
* Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
* Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
* Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
* Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm concerns the repetition of a measure at a frequency. He identifies two kinds of rhythms: cyclical rhythms, which involve simple intervals of repetition, and alternating (or linear) rhythms. An example of a cyclical rhythm would be day fading into night, and night brightening into day; a linear rhythm might be the flow of information from a television set. Additionally, rhythms may be nested within each other; for example, the broadcast of the local news at set intervals throughout the day, throughout the week, is an example of a nested rhythm. In a less abstract fashion (or perhaps only abstract in a different fashion), Lefebvre asserts that rhythms exist at the intersection of place, time and the expenditure of energy.
Lefebvre posits that the human body is composed of several rhythms; in order to observe rhythms outside of the body, the rhythmanalyst must use his or her own rhythms as a reference to unify the rhythms under analysis. Properly put, the rhythm is the conjunction of the rhythmanalyst and the object of the analysis.
[edit] The act of rhythmanalysis
Rhythms are only perceptible through the traditional five senses; accordingly, it is possible to conceptualize rhythms as being composed of sense triggers (smells, sights, sounds, etc.) Lefebvre cautions against this conceptualization however; he specifically notes that rhythm is not meant to refer always to its more traditional referents, musical and dance rhythm (although it could, so long as the rhythmanalysis concerned either music or dancing). He also cautions against taking the mere repetition of a movement to indicate a rhythm.
The object of rhythmanalysis is to access the obscure property of the rhythm called ‘presence.’
The sensory events through which the rhythmanalyst perceives the rhythm are called ‘simulacra,’ or simply ‘the present.’
The need for rhythmanalysis arises out of the propensity [ tamayol]of the present to simulate presence..... Entropy
[edit] Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis)
I do not agree
. (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit] Present
The present consists of one’s sensory perceptions. Lefebvre frequently warns of “the trap of the present” wherein the present is always trying to pass itself off as presence, the rhythmanalytical truth of a situation. “The trap of the present” relies on false representation. Lefebvre argues that the present engages in a commodification of reality when it successfully passes itself off as presence.
[edit] Characteristics of rhythms
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
* Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
* Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
* Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
* Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
18.1.10
Characteristics of rhythms
Characteristics of rhythms
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
* Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
* Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
* Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
* Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
* Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
* Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
* Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
* Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
'There are two ways to build. One way is to strive for absolute perfection and then wage a desperate and invariably losing battle to preserve it. The other is to accept that perfection is not just unattainable but also unnecessary, thereby making time's passage an ally instead of an enemy' - Arrol Gellner
Architecture is not a static object. - A building over its life occupies more than a topography, it occupies a timeography, a period over time in which it is affected by forces which change it. Once an architecture is born (built) it begins its life in its perfect state then begins to change due to the forces acting on it. The inevitability of change is a reality that architects rarely embrace on the design table. Change in buildings usually takes the form of decay - where the original design state degrades and no longer resembles its intent. Decay is a term which describes change that is either unanticipated or was not embraced as a future model of existence for the building. Buildings are built for the present. They are designed to be and to look, as they do the day they are "born". A building designed only for the present - is not designed for a real context - but a fictional one. (le corbusiers building and how it looked after time-oliver).
Few buildings today embrace change, anticipating the forces that will act upon it and using these to evolve the building aesthetically or formally-through design. A building of this kind is never finished, it navigates between different states of being. It matures, it changes, but it does not decay.
Cities are, even more so, agents of time. A city is never static - it is constantly evolving, growing, regenerating itself. I reject any notion of a city that is designed as an artifact, rather than a system for inevitable growth or adaptation. The design of a city should therefore be more of a choreography, an orchestration of change, not a final vision in-the-making.
In our current context, change is becoming increasingly noticeable. The acceleration of technology, the rapid expansion of cities, the diminishing timescales of style in fashion, music, and even architecture which were once transforming over centuries, are transforming our surroundings and our lifestyles in decades - to a degree noticeable several times over within our lifetimes.
Perhaps human beings are not very good at thinking along long timescales. The general attitudes toward oil consumption and surmounting evidence on global warming and its effects are good examples of an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward the future. I propose that we as designers reconsider the way we view design - understanding it in the fourth dimensional context in which it exists, and examine a possibility for architecture far deeper and richer in its experience than the sum total of a rendering can offer.
--- i think i've distilled my interest into this one topic which can help simplify my project to a focus (and away from meaning through architecture and my interpretations of civilization being at the foreground) This single theme ties both the crawling city and the archive together to a single interest or investigation and sets up the reasoning for why to choose an post-civilization archive as a program precisely as a program which both organizes (programmatically) and is precisely intended for changes over time and long timescale thinking about architecture. I will steer the project more in this direction.
Architecture is not a static object. - A building over its life occupies more than a topography, it occupies a timeography, a period over time in which it is affected by forces which change it. Once an architecture is born (built) it begins its life in its perfect state then begins to change due to the forces acting on it. The inevitability of change is a reality that architects rarely embrace on the design table. Change in buildings usually takes the form of decay - where the original design state degrades and no longer resembles its intent. Decay is a term which describes change that is either unanticipated or was not embraced as a future model of existence for the building. Buildings are built for the present. They are designed to be and to look, as they do the day they are "born". A building designed only for the present - is not designed for a real context - but a fictional one. (le corbusiers building and how it looked after time-oliver).
Few buildings today embrace change, anticipating the forces that will act upon it and using these to evolve the building aesthetically or formally-through design. A building of this kind is never finished, it navigates between different states of being. It matures, it changes, but it does not decay.
Cities are, even more so, agents of time. A city is never static - it is constantly evolving, growing, regenerating itself. I reject any notion of a city that is designed as an artifact, rather than a system for inevitable growth or adaptation. The design of a city should therefore be more of a choreography, an orchestration of change, not a final vision in-the-making.
In our current context, change is becoming increasingly noticeable. The acceleration of technology, the rapid expansion of cities, the diminishing timescales of style in fashion, music, and even architecture which were once transforming over centuries, are transforming our surroundings and our lifestyles in decades - to a degree noticeable several times over within our lifetimes.
Perhaps human beings are not very good at thinking along long timescales. The general attitudes toward oil consumption and surmounting evidence on global warming and its effects are good examples of an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward the future. I propose that we as designers reconsider the way we view design - understanding it in the fourth dimensional context in which it exists, and examine a possibility for architecture far deeper and richer in its experience than the sum total of a rendering can offer.
--- i think i've distilled my interest into this one topic which can help simplify my project to a focus (and away from meaning through architecture and my interpretations of civilization being at the foreground) This single theme ties both the crawling city and the archive together to a single interest or investigation and sets up the reasoning for why to choose an post-civilization archive as a program precisely as a program which both organizes (programmatically) and is precisely intended for changes over time and long timescale thinking about architecture. I will steer the project more in this direction.
17.1.10
RHYTHMANALYSIS
Rhythmanalysis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rhythmanalysis is a collection of essays by Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The book outlines a method for analyzing the rhythms of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces. It builds on his past work, with which he argued space is a production of social practices.
The book is considered to be the fourth volume in his series Critique of Everyday Life. Published in 1992 after his death, Rhythmanalysis is the last book Lefebvre wrote.
General concept of rhythm
Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm concerns the repetition of a measure at a frequency. He identifies two kinds of rhythms: cyclical rhythms, which involve simple intervals of repetition, and alternating (or linear) rhythms. An example of a cyclical rhythm would be day fading into night, and night brightening into day; a linear rhythm might be the flow of information from a television set. Additionally, rhythms may be nested within each other; for example, the broadcast of the local news at set intervals throughout the day, throughout the week, is an example of a nested rhythm. In a less abstract fashion (or perhaps only abstract in a different fashion), Lefebvre asserts that rhythms exist at the intersection of place, time and the expenditure of energy.
Lefebvre posits that the human body is composed of several rhythms; in order to observe rhythms outside of the body, the rhythmanalyst must use his or her own rhythms as a reference to unify the rhythms under analysis. Properly put, the rhythm is the conjunction of the rhythmanalyst and the object of the analysis.
The act of rhythmanalysis
Rhythms are only perceptible through the traditional five senses; accordingly, it is possible to conceptualize rhythms as being composed of sense triggers (smells, sights, sounds, etc.) Lefebvre cautions against this conceptualization however; he specifically notes that rhythm is not meant to refer always to its more traditional referents, musical and dance rhythm (although it could, so long as the rhythmanalysis concerned either music or dancing). He also cautions against taking the mere repetition of a movement to indicate a rhythm.
The object of rhythmanalysis is to access the obscure property of the rhythm called ‘presence.’ The sensory events through which the rhythmanalyst perceives the rhythm are called ‘simulacra,’ or simply ‘the present.’ The need for rhythmanalysis arises out of the propensity of the present to simulate presence.
[edit]Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis). (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit]
Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis). (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit]Present
The present consists of one’s sensory perceptions. Lefebvre frequently warns of “the trap of the present” wherein the present is always trying to pass itself off as presence, the rhythmanalytical truth of a situation. “The trap of the present” relies on false representation. Lefebvre argues that the present engages in a commodification of reality when it successfully passes itself off as presence.
[edit]Characteristics of rhythms
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
[edit]Editions
Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rhythmanalysis is a collection of essays by Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The book outlines a method for analyzing the rhythms of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the inhabitants of those spaces. It builds on his past work, with which he argued space is a production of social practices.
The book is considered to be the fourth volume in his series Critique of Everyday Life. Published in 1992 after his death, Rhythmanalysis is the last book Lefebvre wrote.
General concept of rhythm
Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm concerns the repetition of a measure at a frequency. He identifies two kinds of rhythms: cyclical rhythms, which involve simple intervals of repetition, and alternating (or linear) rhythms. An example of a cyclical rhythm would be day fading into night, and night brightening into day; a linear rhythm might be the flow of information from a television set. Additionally, rhythms may be nested within each other; for example, the broadcast of the local news at set intervals throughout the day, throughout the week, is an example of a nested rhythm. In a less abstract fashion (or perhaps only abstract in a different fashion), Lefebvre asserts that rhythms exist at the intersection of place, time and the expenditure of energy.
Lefebvre posits that the human body is composed of several rhythms; in order to observe rhythms outside of the body, the rhythmanalyst must use his or her own rhythms as a reference to unify the rhythms under analysis. Properly put, the rhythm is the conjunction of the rhythmanalyst and the object of the analysis.
The act of rhythmanalysis
Rhythms are only perceptible through the traditional five senses; accordingly, it is possible to conceptualize rhythms as being composed of sense triggers (smells, sights, sounds, etc.) Lefebvre cautions against this conceptualization however; he specifically notes that rhythm is not meant to refer always to its more traditional referents, musical and dance rhythm (although it could, so long as the rhythmanalysis concerned either music or dancing). He also cautions against taking the mere repetition of a movement to indicate a rhythm.
The object of rhythmanalysis is to access the obscure property of the rhythm called ‘presence.’ The sensory events through which the rhythmanalyst perceives the rhythm are called ‘simulacra,’ or simply ‘the present.’ The need for rhythmanalysis arises out of the propensity of the present to simulate presence.
[edit]Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis). (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit]
Presence
Lefebvre describes presence as the “facts of both nature and culture, at the same time sensible, affective and moral rather than imaginary” (author’s emphasis). (Elden and Moore translation) Rhythmanalysis stresses that presence is of an innately temporal character and can never be represented by any simulacrum of the present (people walking down a street, the sun going down), but can only be grasped through the analysis of rhythms (people walking down a street through time, the sun’s movement through time).
[edit]Present
The present consists of one’s sensory perceptions. Lefebvre frequently warns of “the trap of the present” wherein the present is always trying to pass itself off as presence, the rhythmanalytical truth of a situation. “The trap of the present” relies on false representation. Lefebvre argues that the present engages in a commodification of reality when it successfully passes itself off as presence.
[edit]Characteristics of rhythms
Lefebvre describes four alignments of rhythms. They are:
Arrhythmia, conflict or dissonance between or among two or more rhythms, such as might occur (biologically) in an ill person;
Polyrhythmia, co-existence of two or more rhythms without the conflict or dissonance that suggests arrhythmia;
Eurhythmia, constructive interaction between or among two or more rhythms, such as occurs in healthy creatures;
Isorhythmia, the rarest association between rhythms, implies equivalence of repetition, measure and frequency.
[edit]Editions
Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum, 2004.
The Topology of Time
It's natural to think that time can be represented by a line. But a line has a shape. What shape should we give to the line that represents time? This is a question about the topology, or structure, of time.
One natural way to answer our question is to say that time should be represented by a single, straight, non-branching, continuous line that extends without end in each of its two directions. This is the “standard topology” for time. But for each of the features attributed to time in the standard topology, two interesting questions arise: (a) does time in fact have that feature? and (b) if time does have the feature in question, is this a necessary or a contingent fact about time?
Questions about the topology of time appear to be closely connected to the issue of Platonism versus Reductionism with Respect to Time. For if Reductionism is true, then it seems likely that time's topological features will depend on contingent facts about the relations among things and events in the world, whereas if Platonism is true, so that time exists independently of whatever is in time, then time will presumably have its topological properties as a matter of necessity. But even if we assume that Platonism is true, it's not clear just what topological properties should be attributed to time.
Consider the question of whether time should be represented by a line without a beginning. Aristotle has argued (roughly) that time cannot have a beginning on the grounds that in order for time to have a beginning, there must be a first moment of time, but that in order to count as a moment of time, that allegedly first moment would have to come between an earlier period of time and a later period of time, which is inconsistent with its being the first moment of time. (Aristotle argues in the same way that time cannot have an end.)
It is also worth asking whether time must be represented by a single line. Perhaps we should take seriously the possibility of time's consisting of multiple time streams, each one of which is isolated from each other, so that every moment of time stands in temporal relations to other moments in its own time stream, but does not bear any temporal relations to any moment from another time stream. Likewise we can ask whether time could correspond to a branching line, or to a closed loop, or to a discontinuous line. And we can also wonder whether one of the two directions of time is in some way priveleged, in a way that makes time itself asymmetrical.
Suggestions for Further Reading: On the beginning and end of time: Aristotle, Physics, Bk. VIII; Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, esp. pp. 75ff.; Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, Ch. V; Swinburne, “The Beginning of the Universe;” Swinburne, Space and Time. On the linearity of time: Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, Ch. III; Swinburne, Space and Time. On the direction of time: Price, “A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics;”Price, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time; Savitt, Time's Arrows Today; and Sklar, Space, Time, and Spacetime. And finally, on all of these topics: Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time.
One natural way to answer our question is to say that time should be represented by a single, straight, non-branching, continuous line that extends without end in each of its two directions. This is the “standard topology” for time. But for each of the features attributed to time in the standard topology, two interesting questions arise: (a) does time in fact have that feature? and (b) if time does have the feature in question, is this a necessary or a contingent fact about time?
Questions about the topology of time appear to be closely connected to the issue of Platonism versus Reductionism with Respect to Time. For if Reductionism is true, then it seems likely that time's topological features will depend on contingent facts about the relations among things and events in the world, whereas if Platonism is true, so that time exists independently of whatever is in time, then time will presumably have its topological properties as a matter of necessity. But even if we assume that Platonism is true, it's not clear just what topological properties should be attributed to time.
Consider the question of whether time should be represented by a line without a beginning. Aristotle has argued (roughly) that time cannot have a beginning on the grounds that in order for time to have a beginning, there must be a first moment of time, but that in order to count as a moment of time, that allegedly first moment would have to come between an earlier period of time and a later period of time, which is inconsistent with its being the first moment of time. (Aristotle argues in the same way that time cannot have an end.)
It is also worth asking whether time must be represented by a single line. Perhaps we should take seriously the possibility of time's consisting of multiple time streams, each one of which is isolated from each other, so that every moment of time stands in temporal relations to other moments in its own time stream, but does not bear any temporal relations to any moment from another time stream. Likewise we can ask whether time could correspond to a branching line, or to a closed loop, or to a discontinuous line. And we can also wonder whether one of the two directions of time is in some way priveleged, in a way that makes time itself asymmetrical.
Suggestions for Further Reading: On the beginning and end of time: Aristotle, Physics, Bk. VIII; Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, esp. pp. 75ff.; Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, Ch. V; Swinburne, “The Beginning of the Universe;” Swinburne, Space and Time. On the linearity of time: Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, Ch. III; Swinburne, Space and Time. On the direction of time: Price, “A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics;”Price, Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time; Savitt, Time's Arrows Today; and Sklar, Space, Time, and Spacetime. And finally, on all of these topics: Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time.
16.1.10
Computer Sound Transformation
http://www.trevorwishart.co.uk/transformation.html#F7
Spectral cleaning was developed using a comparative method - part of the spectrum deemed to be (mainly) noise (and, in some options, part of the spectrum deemed to be clear signal) being compared with the rest of the signal and appropriate subtractions of data or other modifications made.
From a musical point of view, the most innovative early new developments were spectral banding, a rather complicated 'filter', which enabled the spectrum to be divided into bands, and various simple amplitude-varying (and in fact frequency-shifting) processes to be applied to the bands, spectral tracing and spectral blurring.
Spectral tracing simply retains the N channels with the loudest (highest amplitude) data on a window-by-window basis. If N is set to c. 1/8th the number of channels used in the PVOC analysis, this can sometimes function as an effective noise reduction procedure (the value of N which works best depends on the signal). When N is much smaller than this, and a complex signal is processed, a different result transpires. The small number of PVOC channels selected by the process will vary from window to window. Individual partials will drop out, or suddenly appear, in this elect set. As a result, the output sound will present complex weaving melodies produced by the preserved partials as they enter (or leave) the elect set. This procedure is used in Tongues of Fire (14).
Spectral blurring is an analogous process in the time dimension. The change in frequency information over time is averaged - in fact, the frequency and amplitude data in the channels is sampled at each Nth window, and the frequency and amplitude data for intervening channels generated by simple interpolation. This leads to a blurring or 'washing out' of the spectral clarity of the source.
Arpeggiation of the spectrum (a procedure inspired by vocal synthesis examples used by Steve McAdams at IRCAM to demonstrate aural streaming) was produced by 'drawing' a low frequency simple waveform onto the spectrum. This oscillator rises and falls between two limit values - values of frequency in the original spectrum - specified by the user. Where this waveform crosses the spectral windows, the channel (or surrounding group of channels, or all the channels above, or all those below) is amplified. Spectral plucking was introduced to add further amplitude emphasis (and an element of time-decay of the emphasized data) to the selected channels.
timestretch or compression and its range
segment density and its range
segment size
segment transposition and its range
segment amplitude and its range
segment splice-length
segment spatial position
segment spatial scatter and its range
segment timing randomisation
segment search-range in the source
Spectral cleaning was developed using a comparative method - part of the spectrum deemed to be (mainly) noise (and, in some options, part of the spectrum deemed to be clear signal) being compared with the rest of the signal and appropriate subtractions of data or other modifications made.
From a musical point of view, the most innovative early new developments were spectral banding, a rather complicated 'filter', which enabled the spectrum to be divided into bands, and various simple amplitude-varying (and in fact frequency-shifting) processes to be applied to the bands, spectral tracing and spectral blurring.
Spectral tracing simply retains the N channels with the loudest (highest amplitude) data on a window-by-window basis. If N is set to c. 1/8th the number of channels used in the PVOC analysis, this can sometimes function as an effective noise reduction procedure (the value of N which works best depends on the signal). When N is much smaller than this, and a complex signal is processed, a different result transpires. The small number of PVOC channels selected by the process will vary from window to window. Individual partials will drop out, or suddenly appear, in this elect set. As a result, the output sound will present complex weaving melodies produced by the preserved partials as they enter (or leave) the elect set. This procedure is used in Tongues of Fire (14).
Spectral blurring is an analogous process in the time dimension. The change in frequency information over time is averaged - in fact, the frequency and amplitude data in the channels is sampled at each Nth window, and the frequency and amplitude data for intervening channels generated by simple interpolation. This leads to a blurring or 'washing out' of the spectral clarity of the source.
Arpeggiation of the spectrum (a procedure inspired by vocal synthesis examples used by Steve McAdams at IRCAM to demonstrate aural streaming) was produced by 'drawing' a low frequency simple waveform onto the spectrum. This oscillator rises and falls between two limit values - values of frequency in the original spectrum - specified by the user. Where this waveform crosses the spectral windows, the channel (or surrounding group of channels, or all the channels above, or all those below) is amplified. Spectral plucking was introduced to add further amplitude emphasis (and an element of time-decay of the emphasized data) to the selected channels.
timestretch or compression and its range
segment density and its range
segment size
segment transposition and its range
segment amplitude and its range
segment splice-length
segment spatial position
segment spatial scatter and its range
segment timing randomisation
segment search-range in the source
Mathematics as Intuition
For intuitionists like L.E.J. Brouwer (1881-1966) the subject matter of mathematics is intuited non-perceptual objects and constructions, these being introspectively self-evident. Indeed, mathematics begins with a languageless activity of the mind which moves on from one thing to another but keeps a memory of the first as the empty form of a common substratum of all such moves. Subsequently, such constructions have to be communicated so that they can be repeated — i.e. clearly, succinctly and honestly, as there is always the danger of mathematical language outrunning its content.
How does this work in practice? Intuitionist mathematics employs a special notation, and makes more restricted use of the law of the excluded middle (that something cannot be p' and not-p' at the same time). A postulate, for example, that the irrational number pi has an infinite number of unbroken sequences of a hundred zeros in its full expression would be conjectured as undecidable rather than true or false. But the logic is very different, particularly with regard to negation, the logic being a formulation of the principles employed in the specific mathematical construction rather than applied generally. But what of the individual, self-evident experiences which raise Wittgenstein problems of private languages? Do, moreover, we have to construct and then derive a contradiction for a proposition like a square circle cannot exist rather than conceive the impossibility of one existing? And wouldn't consistency be more easily tested by developing constructions further rather than waiting for self-evidence to appear?
http://www.textetc.com/theory/truth-in-mathematics.html
How does this work in practice? Intuitionist mathematics employs a special notation, and makes more restricted use of the law of the excluded middle (that something cannot be p' and not-p' at the same time). A postulate, for example, that the irrational number pi has an infinite number of unbroken sequences of a hundred zeros in its full expression would be conjectured as undecidable rather than true or false. But the logic is very different, particularly with regard to negation, the logic being a formulation of the principles employed in the specific mathematical construction rather than applied generally. But what of the individual, self-evident experiences which raise Wittgenstein problems of private languages? Do, moreover, we have to construct and then derive a contradiction for a proposition like a square circle cannot exist rather than conceive the impossibility of one existing? And wouldn't consistency be more easily tested by developing constructions further rather than waiting for self-evidence to appear?
http://www.textetc.com/theory/truth-in-mathematics.html
The use of space in musical performance.
the use of space in musical performance....around the potentialities of audible space.
http://gilmore2.chem.northwestern.edu/articles/steven_art.htm
The spatial location of musical sources has often been a concern in the theatre. There are many examples of on or off stage bands in opera, here the concerns are clearly with the shaping of the dramatic action. However, musical space has clearly been an area of interest for a wide range of composers within the Western Canon.
The age of the machine brought new inspiration for defining space with sound.The ‘intonarumori’ or noise instruments of Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), inspired originally by the sounds of war, where designed to project noises into an auditorium. His futurist manifesto 'The Art of Noises' rejoiced in the acoustic and spatial character of the modern mechanised environment.
Motion is a device for musical expression and as such has become a musical paradigm. Musical space is often measured in the dimensions of pitch, harmony, texture and rhythm or time. Musical motion occurs within this space. In addition to this usage of space, much musical discussion is embued with dynamic qualities of human emotion. These ideas have contributed to the multilayered, metaphoric connotations of space whose relations are wholly paradigmatic or associative.
Traditionally, musical aesthetics has dealt with the issues of meaning and aesthetic value. I would like to look at some contemporary perspectives on the use of space in electroacoustic music. Much in musical language is arbitrary and its function rests on convention. It is likely, however, that our auditory perception of space and its relation to meaning is grounded in every day experience of the physical world. Moreover, the expressive gap filled by the metaphor of motion in music may be closed when actual spatial motion becomes a part of compositional practice.
....
Stockhausen uses three orchestras situated around the audience. In this piece he attempts, according to Worner[5] , to establish a polyphony in time and in space. Here we see space compared with the traditional compositional elements of pitch, harmony and time. Polyphony of space suggests the interplay of two or more sound spaces as well as space being one of the musical properties of a melodic line. Stockhausen adopts a seemingly formalist approach to space. For him the property of space is an entirely intrinsic property. He uses space in order to better articulate the temporal complexities of his composition.
....
Wittgenstein’s discussions on musical understanding may help to shed some light on the contrast between the abstract and the referential in musical language. Wittgenstein suggests that understanding a musical theme is easier than understanding a sentence. This is because the music does not bear complex relations of linguistic referents that are found in the words of a sentence. Still we understand a sentence in much the same way we understand a musical theme. Space like other musical parameters does not bear semantic meaning and yet we can interpret audible space by applying our experience and an innate or learned set of governing rules. For Wittgenstein music is highly abstract and yet we understand it by understanding the system of rules within which it operates. Our ability to understand audible space is a product of our experience and understanding, in Wittgenstein’s terms, this implies a degree of expertise. This is true of both language and music.
...
Denis Smalley:
space as one of his ‘indicative fields’. He posits the argument that musical apprehension of sounds exists on a continuum between merely informational use of sound and a more aesthetically involving, interactive engagement with the subtle qualities of a sound.
These aspects of space are those which lie within the interactive relationships between the listener and musical sounds. His discussion centres on the indicative character of space and its interpretation by the listener.
He describes the indeterminacy arising from what he calls the ‘superimposed space’ which is the combination of the properties of the composed space and the listening space. This may result in the alteration of the indicative interpretation of the piece.
describes three indicative properties of space:
. The principal property is ‘spatial texture’. This concerns the topology of the audible space. Size, he argues, is the most important indicative property. It may express a range of meanings which are fundamental to human experience: he outlines the contrasts between 'intimacy and immensity' and 'confinement and vastness'. He suggests the psychological or emotional states that may result from either of these extremes. Other aspects of spatial texture include the density of distribution of sounds, the spatial contiguousness of sounds and the movement of sounds.
The second spatial property which may bear meaning is ‘spatial orientation’. He employs the metaphors of 'sound confronting from ahead or stealing up from behind' to describe the potential of spatial orientation. Interestingly, he follows Wishart[8] in suggesting that there is no differentiation between left and right. This position is countered by Truax[9] and Wallin[10] as I will outline later. He does, however, include the case of circumfrentially enclosing sound which Wishart conspicuously excludes from his seemingly exhaustive enumeration of spatial possibilities.
The final spatial property in Smalley’s exposition is ‘temporal space’. This describes the evolution of space over time resulting in impressions of stability, permanence or rapid change. Smalley coins the term ‘spatio-morphology’ to describe the evolution of the spatial components, described above, in electroacoustic composition.
Trevor Wishart :
His stated objective is to analyse the vocabulary of spatial motion without attempting to define its language. comment on the meaning-bearing aspects of each type of motion. He denies that beyond the subtle aspects of left and right handedness, there can be any significant differentiation between sources coming from or moving to either side of the listener.
This position is refuted by N. C. Wallin in his book 'Biomusicology - Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purposes of Music'[12] in which he details the functional asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain and its influence on the perception and processing of musical sound.
Barry Truax takes up this point. He details the role of the two hemispheres in the different levels of hearing that may be involved in the perception of different The location of the speech function in the left hemisphere and this hemisphere’s popular association with analytical processes stands in contrast to the supposed synthetic and associative powers of the right hemisphere.sounds.
l however, that listeners cannot share a common experience or interpretation of audible space. Or, indeed, that the composers intentions will not, in some form, be perceived by the listener. Obviously, the fact that space has been employed successfully by so many composers in the past, and that it continues to be explored as a musical device, means that it has earned its place in musical language and will surely continue to grow in importance. Theoretical interest in the use of space in composition has occupied much space in the literature of contemporary music. Analysis of its use and exploration of its potential by theorists and composers presents great scope for research and development.
The technical difficulties outlined above are being continually addressed by research and advanced electroacoustic practice. Great progress is being made both in the predictable use of electroacoustic devices and in the treatment and control of acoustic spaces. New auditorium designs, sensitive to the needs of electroacoustic performance must surely help to narrow the gap between the composers spatial design and its performance realisation. New techniques for spatial encoding and advanced signal processing[16] for multi-channel playback are presenting a viable way forward for the development of spatial composition. These developments do not inhibit the performance of live sound diffusion, where this is seen as the aesthetically appropriate approach to the realisation of the inherent spatial properties of a piece. On the contrary, they will provide the performer with new and flexible tools and enhance the expressive possibilities of this form of live interpretation.
Being aware of the limitations and potential pitfalls of spatial expression can only improve our understanding of this exciting dimension in musical language. This understanding must help us to explore the wealth of musical material that exploits audible space and open the horizons to new and innovative work in the future.
http://gilmore2.chem.northwestern.edu/articles/steven_art.htm
The spatial location of musical sources has often been a concern in the theatre. There are many examples of on or off stage bands in opera, here the concerns are clearly with the shaping of the dramatic action. However, musical space has clearly been an area of interest for a wide range of composers within the Western Canon.
The age of the machine brought new inspiration for defining space with sound.The ‘intonarumori’ or noise instruments of Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), inspired originally by the sounds of war, where designed to project noises into an auditorium. His futurist manifesto 'The Art of Noises' rejoiced in the acoustic and spatial character of the modern mechanised environment.
Motion is a device for musical expression and as such has become a musical paradigm. Musical space is often measured in the dimensions of pitch, harmony, texture and rhythm or time. Musical motion occurs within this space. In addition to this usage of space, much musical discussion is embued with dynamic qualities of human emotion. These ideas have contributed to the multilayered, metaphoric connotations of space whose relations are wholly paradigmatic or associative.
Traditionally, musical aesthetics has dealt with the issues of meaning and aesthetic value. I would like to look at some contemporary perspectives on the use of space in electroacoustic music. Much in musical language is arbitrary and its function rests on convention. It is likely, however, that our auditory perception of space and its relation to meaning is grounded in every day experience of the physical world. Moreover, the expressive gap filled by the metaphor of motion in music may be closed when actual spatial motion becomes a part of compositional practice.
....
Stockhausen uses three orchestras situated around the audience. In this piece he attempts, according to Worner[5] , to establish a polyphony in time and in space. Here we see space compared with the traditional compositional elements of pitch, harmony and time. Polyphony of space suggests the interplay of two or more sound spaces as well as space being one of the musical properties of a melodic line. Stockhausen adopts a seemingly formalist approach to space. For him the property of space is an entirely intrinsic property. He uses space in order to better articulate the temporal complexities of his composition.
....
Wittgenstein’s discussions on musical understanding may help to shed some light on the contrast between the abstract and the referential in musical language. Wittgenstein suggests that understanding a musical theme is easier than understanding a sentence. This is because the music does not bear complex relations of linguistic referents that are found in the words of a sentence. Still we understand a sentence in much the same way we understand a musical theme. Space like other musical parameters does not bear semantic meaning and yet we can interpret audible space by applying our experience and an innate or learned set of governing rules. For Wittgenstein music is highly abstract and yet we understand it by understanding the system of rules within which it operates. Our ability to understand audible space is a product of our experience and understanding, in Wittgenstein’s terms, this implies a degree of expertise. This is true of both language and music.
...
Denis Smalley:
space as one of his ‘indicative fields’. He posits the argument that musical apprehension of sounds exists on a continuum between merely informational use of sound and a more aesthetically involving, interactive engagement with the subtle qualities of a sound.
These aspects of space are those which lie within the interactive relationships between the listener and musical sounds. His discussion centres on the indicative character of space and its interpretation by the listener.
He describes the indeterminacy arising from what he calls the ‘superimposed space’ which is the combination of the properties of the composed space and the listening space. This may result in the alteration of the indicative interpretation of the piece.
describes three indicative properties of space:
. The principal property is ‘spatial texture’. This concerns the topology of the audible space. Size, he argues, is the most important indicative property. It may express a range of meanings which are fundamental to human experience: he outlines the contrasts between 'intimacy and immensity' and 'confinement and vastness'. He suggests the psychological or emotional states that may result from either of these extremes. Other aspects of spatial texture include the density of distribution of sounds, the spatial contiguousness of sounds and the movement of sounds.
The second spatial property which may bear meaning is ‘spatial orientation’. He employs the metaphors of 'sound confronting from ahead or stealing up from behind' to describe the potential of spatial orientation. Interestingly, he follows Wishart[8] in suggesting that there is no differentiation between left and right. This position is countered by Truax[9] and Wallin[10] as I will outline later. He does, however, include the case of circumfrentially enclosing sound which Wishart conspicuously excludes from his seemingly exhaustive enumeration of spatial possibilities.
The final spatial property in Smalley’s exposition is ‘temporal space’. This describes the evolution of space over time resulting in impressions of stability, permanence or rapid change. Smalley coins the term ‘spatio-morphology’ to describe the evolution of the spatial components, described above, in electroacoustic composition.
Trevor Wishart :
His stated objective is to analyse the vocabulary of spatial motion without attempting to define its language. comment on the meaning-bearing aspects of each type of motion. He denies that beyond the subtle aspects of left and right handedness, there can be any significant differentiation between sources coming from or moving to either side of the listener.
This position is refuted by N. C. Wallin in his book 'Biomusicology - Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purposes of Music'[12] in which he details the functional asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain and its influence on the perception and processing of musical sound.
Barry Truax takes up this point. He details the role of the two hemispheres in the different levels of hearing that may be involved in the perception of different The location of the speech function in the left hemisphere and this hemisphere’s popular association with analytical processes stands in contrast to the supposed synthetic and associative powers of the right hemisphere.sounds.
l however, that listeners cannot share a common experience or interpretation of audible space. Or, indeed, that the composers intentions will not, in some form, be perceived by the listener. Obviously, the fact that space has been employed successfully by so many composers in the past, and that it continues to be explored as a musical device, means that it has earned its place in musical language and will surely continue to grow in importance. Theoretical interest in the use of space in composition has occupied much space in the literature of contemporary music. Analysis of its use and exploration of its potential by theorists and composers presents great scope for research and development.
The technical difficulties outlined above are being continually addressed by research and advanced electroacoustic practice. Great progress is being made both in the predictable use of electroacoustic devices and in the treatment and control of acoustic spaces. New auditorium designs, sensitive to the needs of electroacoustic performance must surely help to narrow the gap between the composers spatial design and its performance realisation. New techniques for spatial encoding and advanced signal processing[16] for multi-channel playback are presenting a viable way forward for the development of spatial composition. These developments do not inhibit the performance of live sound diffusion, where this is seen as the aesthetically appropriate approach to the realisation of the inherent spatial properties of a piece. On the contrary, they will provide the performer with new and flexible tools and enhance the expressive possibilities of this form of live interpretation.
Being aware of the limitations and potential pitfalls of spatial expression can only improve our understanding of this exciting dimension in musical language. This understanding must help us to explore the wealth of musical material that exploits audible space and open the horizons to new and innovative work in the future.
Art for Heiddeggar +postmodernism + Technology for him
ART:
Art means know-how: not technique as such, but the means of "bringing forth". And when, as at the present time, the gods have fled and there is no world to open up, great art was no longer possible. Heidegger indeed felt that great art was already on the wane when aesthetics appeared with Plato and Aristotle.
he believes art has an unique relationship to truth, but that relationship is not spelt out. No doubt Heidegger felt that his philosophy went beyond aesthetics, but then the larger political arena is not without its problems: Heidegger came to despise Nazi propaganda, but never renounced his allegiance to National Socialism.
POSTMODERNISM:
Martin Heidegger, whose meditations on art, technology, and the withdrawal of being they regularly cite and comment upon. Heidegger's contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from oft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being” (Heidegger 2000, 217), and “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time, the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962, 95-107). The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. The experience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being's withdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway over beings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments of anxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return of being, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience of being opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus.
Heidegger sees this as the realization of the will to power, another Nietzschean conception, which, conjoined with the eternal return, represents the exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger 1991a, 199-203). For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternal recurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is the terminal moment of the metaphysics of presence. On this reading, becoming is the emerging and passing away of beings within and among other beings instead of an emergence from being. Thus, for Heidegger, Nietzsche marks the end of metaphysical thinking but not a passage beyond it, and therefore Heidegger sees him as the last metaphysician in whom the oblivion of being is complete (Heidegger 1991a, 204-206; 1991b, 199-203). Hope for a passage into non-metaphysical thinking lies rather with Hölderlin, whose verses give voice to signs granted by being in its withdrawal (Heidegger 1994, 115-118). While postmodernists owe much to Heidegger's reflections on the non-presence of being and the de-realization of beings through the technological enframing, they sharply diverge from his reading of Nietzsche.
Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for being they do not share. They prefer, instead, the sense of cheerful forgetting and playful creativity in Nietzsche's eternal return as a repetition of the different and the new. Some have gone so far as to turn the tables on Heidegger, and to read his ruminations on metaphysics as the repetition of an original metaphysical gesture, the gathering of thought to its “proper” essence and vocation (see Derrida 1989). In this gathering, which follows the lineaments of an exclusively Greco-Christian-German tradition, something more original than being is forgotten, and that is the difference and alterity against which, and with which, the tradition composes itself. Prominent authors associated with postmodernism have noted that the forgotten and excluded “other” of the West, including Heidegger, is figured by the Jew (see Lyotard 1990, and Lacoue-Labarthe 1990). In this way, they are able to distinguish their projects from Heidegger's thinking and to critically account for his involvement with National Socialism and his silence about the Holocaust, albeit in terms that do not address these as personal failings. Those looking for personal condemnations of Heidegger for his actions and his “refusal to accept responsibility” will not find them in postmodernist commentaries. They will, however, find many departures from Heidegger on Nietzsche's philosophical significance (see Derrida 1979), and many instances where Nietzsche's ideas are critically activated against Heidegger and his self-presentation.
TECHNOLOGY:
Technology means
The essence of technology never could be revealed to human as essence of everything else and technology is bringing forth and revealing and unconcealed where Alethea, truth happens...the revealing that rules technology is challenging. Modern technology essence is enframing; gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man. techne which is defined "the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts", i the means for sourcing true forms and ideas that exist before the figure we perceive.Plus he mentioned how technology has changed man's relationship not only in earth, but also to being itself. and there is nothing too technological about the true essence of technology.
And to human, his enframing is putting in position of man to reveal the actual as original; so the essence of modern technology is putting in position of man to reveal the actual as original and still present, if concealed... the truth exists outside of human work. man is inconsiderate as we do not know the origins; to find them we must listen but not simply obey. The great danger for martin is technology becomes determined of it's truth, rather than humen becoming knowing of concealed truth. The "saving power" of modern technology is thinking and seeing unfolding it's essence rather than become transfixed in the will to master in technology as an instrument. the truth is constellation, the stellar course of the mystery distant from human perception. And thus the essential unfolding of modern technology may not lead us to the ultimate truth... in fact modern technology likes to be dominant to the things, therefore not only it will not reveal the truth, but also some how cover it under it's flourish demonstration.
and then I said:
System creativity (design a creative/ self conscious system) as a response to Heidegger point of view to technology; He like Karl Marx didn’t think of technology as a creative variable therefore the relationship between technology and human was always in a shadow. of mechanical materialism. however, Bergson and after him Deuluze introduce an alive system and then a creative organism as a machine and therefore as technology.
CONSIDER TECHNOLOGY AS WHAT IS MEANT OR BEING SAID NOT A THING..THE OBJECT HAS NO INTRINSIC TRUTH OR STATUS IT IS MERELY A RECONCILLIATION OF TECHNIQUE..MACHINES ARE PRIMITIVE STONES RECOMPOSSED / ASSIMILATED PRODUCTS..THEY CONTAIN A FORM OF DECEIT AS WE FORGET HOW AND OUR TEXTURES..THEY ARE AT A POINT METHODS OF FACILITATING AND NOTHING MORE..WE HAVE NOT ADAPTED TO THIS IDEA OF THE EXQUISIT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN US AND MODES OF BEING.
Art means know-how: not technique as such, but the means of "bringing forth". And when, as at the present time, the gods have fled and there is no world to open up, great art was no longer possible. Heidegger indeed felt that great art was already on the wane when aesthetics appeared with Plato and Aristotle.
he believes art has an unique relationship to truth, but that relationship is not spelt out. No doubt Heidegger felt that his philosophy went beyond aesthetics, but then the larger political arena is not without its problems: Heidegger came to despise Nazi propaganda, but never renounced his allegiance to National Socialism.
POSTMODERNISM:
Martin Heidegger, whose meditations on art, technology, and the withdrawal of being they regularly cite and comment upon. Heidegger's contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from oft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being” (Heidegger 2000, 217), and “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers, but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact, as he writes in Being and Time, the presence of beings tends to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962, 95-107). The essence of technology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces the being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993, 311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. The experience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being's withdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway over beings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments of anxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return of being, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience of being opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus.
Heidegger sees this as the realization of the will to power, another Nietzschean conception, which, conjoined with the eternal return, represents the exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger 1991a, 199-203). For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternal recurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is the terminal moment of the metaphysics of presence. On this reading, becoming is the emerging and passing away of beings within and among other beings instead of an emergence from being. Thus, for Heidegger, Nietzsche marks the end of metaphysical thinking but not a passage beyond it, and therefore Heidegger sees him as the last metaphysician in whom the oblivion of being is complete (Heidegger 1991a, 204-206; 1991b, 199-203). Hope for a passage into non-metaphysical thinking lies rather with Hölderlin, whose verses give voice to signs granted by being in its withdrawal (Heidegger 1994, 115-118). While postmodernists owe much to Heidegger's reflections on the non-presence of being and the de-realization of beings through the technological enframing, they sharply diverge from his reading of Nietzsche.
Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for being they do not share. They prefer, instead, the sense of cheerful forgetting and playful creativity in Nietzsche's eternal return as a repetition of the different and the new. Some have gone so far as to turn the tables on Heidegger, and to read his ruminations on metaphysics as the repetition of an original metaphysical gesture, the gathering of thought to its “proper” essence and vocation (see Derrida 1989). In this gathering, which follows the lineaments of an exclusively Greco-Christian-German tradition, something more original than being is forgotten, and that is the difference and alterity against which, and with which, the tradition composes itself. Prominent authors associated with postmodernism have noted that the forgotten and excluded “other” of the West, including Heidegger, is figured by the Jew (see Lyotard 1990, and Lacoue-Labarthe 1990). In this way, they are able to distinguish their projects from Heidegger's thinking and to critically account for his involvement with National Socialism and his silence about the Holocaust, albeit in terms that do not address these as personal failings. Those looking for personal condemnations of Heidegger for his actions and his “refusal to accept responsibility” will not find them in postmodernist commentaries. They will, however, find many departures from Heidegger on Nietzsche's philosophical significance (see Derrida 1979), and many instances where Nietzsche's ideas are critically activated against Heidegger and his self-presentation.
TECHNOLOGY:
Technology means
The essence of technology never could be revealed to human as essence of everything else and technology is bringing forth and revealing and unconcealed where Alethea, truth happens...the revealing that rules technology is challenging. Modern technology essence is enframing; gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man. techne which is defined "the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts", i the means for sourcing true forms and ideas that exist before the figure we perceive.Plus he mentioned how technology has changed man's relationship not only in earth, but also to being itself. and there is nothing too technological about the true essence of technology.
And to human, his enframing is putting in position of man to reveal the actual as original; so the essence of modern technology is putting in position of man to reveal the actual as original and still present, if concealed... the truth exists outside of human work. man is inconsiderate as we do not know the origins; to find them we must listen but not simply obey. The great danger for martin is technology becomes determined of it's truth, rather than humen becoming knowing of concealed truth. The "saving power" of modern technology is thinking and seeing unfolding it's essence rather than become transfixed in the will to master in technology as an instrument. the truth is constellation, the stellar course of the mystery distant from human perception. And thus the essential unfolding of modern technology may not lead us to the ultimate truth... in fact modern technology likes to be dominant to the things, therefore not only it will not reveal the truth, but also some how cover it under it's flourish demonstration.
and then I said:
System creativity (design a creative/ self conscious system) as a response to Heidegger point of view to technology; He like Karl Marx didn’t think of technology as a creative variable therefore the relationship between technology and human was always in a shadow. of mechanical materialism. however, Bergson and after him Deuluze introduce an alive system and then a creative organism as a machine and therefore as technology.
CONSIDER TECHNOLOGY AS WHAT IS MEANT OR BEING SAID NOT A THING..THE OBJECT HAS NO INTRINSIC TRUTH OR STATUS IT IS MERELY A RECONCILLIATION OF TECHNIQUE..MACHINES ARE PRIMITIVE STONES RECOMPOSSED / ASSIMILATED PRODUCTS..THEY CONTAIN A FORM OF DECEIT AS WE FORGET HOW AND OUR TEXTURES..THEY ARE AT A POINT METHODS OF FACILITATING AND NOTHING MORE..WE HAVE NOT ADAPTED TO THIS IDEA OF THE EXQUISIT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN US AND MODES OF BEING.
Being and Time with Heideggar
Being and Time
What is "being" asks Heidegger in Being and Time? His answer was to distinguish what it is for beings to be beings (Sein) from the existence of entities in general (Seindes). Seindes was "ontic" — i.e. makes reference, allows us to talk about things. It was simply a "place holder" and applied to relations, processes, events, etc. Sein was more fundamental: Heidegger was concerned with something he felt had been overlooked since the pre-Socratics. Descartes, for example, simply sidestepped the problem of ontology (philosophy of being) by dividing the world into three (God, the exterior world, and mental processes) and depicting the essentials of the exterior world in terms of time and the three spatial dimensions. This leads him in all kinds of difficulties, and evaded the question we must ask as to what being really is.
Heidegger was very idiosyncratic. He indulged in extended word play, and employed his own spelling, vocabulary and syntax. One famous coining was Dasein: literally "to be there". Dasein has no essence beyond what it can make itself be — i.e. no fixed nature or inveterate tendency. Man alone has Dasein, and he cannot escape it. Nor is there anything more fundamentally human, to which he can dedicate his life. The world is disclosed to us through and in Dasein: disclosed without mediation by concepts, propositions and inner mental states. Truth is Dasein's disclosedness. We are "thrown" into the world. Heidegger rejected the correspondence theory of truth, and regarded as a scandal the continual attempt by philosophy to centre knowledge on mental processes.
What is this Dasein? Start with things in the world, said Heidegger: everyday things like tools, materials, workspace. Are they not there for a purpose, to do something? They do not exist in isolation, waiting for the philosopher to extract the essence "tool", for instance, and then worry about enclosing and defining the term properly. Their complex relationships with other things (people and material objects) is what is most relevant about them, and this cuts across the usual boundaries of objective/subjective, animate/inanimate, or past/present/future. Time is not an abstract entity, something in which we are borne passively along, but an opportunity to do something. Or it is for us human beings who have Dasein (choice) and we therefore owe things in the world a duty of care (Sorge).
But if we continually define ourselves, we also change the way we regard the world. And that in turn redefines us. Nothing is innate, not even Dasein. Other things in the world (Seindes) may be relatively fixed but man is different. Above all he faces conscience, dread, awareness of death, all of which call man back to himself, to question his authenticity. Hence the importance of these in Heidegger's writings, which he viewed ontologically, not merely matters of psychological or sociological explanation.{3}
What is "being" asks Heidegger in Being and Time? His answer was to distinguish what it is for beings to be beings (Sein) from the existence of entities in general (Seindes). Seindes was "ontic" — i.e. makes reference, allows us to talk about things. It was simply a "place holder" and applied to relations, processes, events, etc. Sein was more fundamental: Heidegger was concerned with something he felt had been overlooked since the pre-Socratics. Descartes, for example, simply sidestepped the problem of ontology (philosophy of being) by dividing the world into three (God, the exterior world, and mental processes) and depicting the essentials of the exterior world in terms of time and the three spatial dimensions. This leads him in all kinds of difficulties, and evaded the question we must ask as to what being really is.
Heidegger was very idiosyncratic. He indulged in extended word play, and employed his own spelling, vocabulary and syntax. One famous coining was Dasein: literally "to be there". Dasein has no essence beyond what it can make itself be — i.e. no fixed nature or inveterate tendency. Man alone has Dasein, and he cannot escape it. Nor is there anything more fundamentally human, to which he can dedicate his life. The world is disclosed to us through and in Dasein: disclosed without mediation by concepts, propositions and inner mental states. Truth is Dasein's disclosedness. We are "thrown" into the world. Heidegger rejected the correspondence theory of truth, and regarded as a scandal the continual attempt by philosophy to centre knowledge on mental processes.
What is this Dasein? Start with things in the world, said Heidegger: everyday things like tools, materials, workspace. Are they not there for a purpose, to do something? They do not exist in isolation, waiting for the philosopher to extract the essence "tool", for instance, and then worry about enclosing and defining the term properly. Their complex relationships with other things (people and material objects) is what is most relevant about them, and this cuts across the usual boundaries of objective/subjective, animate/inanimate, or past/present/future. Time is not an abstract entity, something in which we are borne passively along, but an opportunity to do something. Or it is for us human beings who have Dasein (choice) and we therefore owe things in the world a duty of care (Sorge).
But if we continually define ourselves, we also change the way we regard the world. And that in turn redefines us. Nothing is innate, not even Dasein. Other things in the world (Seindes) may be relatively fixed but man is different. Above all he faces conscience, dread, awareness of death, all of which call man back to himself, to question his authenticity. Hence the importance of these in Heidegger's writings, which he viewed ontologically, not merely matters of psychological or sociological explanation.{3}
an object in the midst of other objects
Franz Fanon tells us that he "came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, [his] spirit filled with the desire to attain the source of the world" and then found that he was "an object in the midst of other objects."
As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable.
So spoke of the existence of things,
An unmanageable pantheon
Absolute, but they say
Arid.
A city of the corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact
Tho it is impenetrable
As the world, if it is matter,
Is impenetrable.
George Oppen, Of Being Numerous
An unmanageable pantheon
Absolute, but they say
Arid.
A city of the corporations
Glassed
In dreams
And images
And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact
Tho it is impenetrable
As the world, if it is matter,
Is impenetrable.
George Oppen, Of Being Numerous
alain badiou on art
http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html
Below are the 15 points by Alain Badiou to which Jean referred during her lecture in the first week of the kit theory course. The question Badiou started his talk with is the following: How can contemporary art avoid being formalist romantic? By form he possibly means organization, anything you need to make art with, in the general sense of the word. It is not form as opposed to content. By romantic he means for example when one considers our reality to be bad, when one strives a better reality, when nihilism is the dominant mode of thinking.
1. Art is not the sublime [inspiring, inspirational] descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. On the contrary, it is the production of an infinite subjective series, through the finite means of a material subtraction.
2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.
3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible qua sensible. This means†: the transformation of the sensible into an happening of the Idea.
4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalising this plurality.
5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.
6. The subjects of an artistic truth are the works which compose it.
7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which in our own contemporary artistic context is a generic totality.
8. The real of art is ideal [Èelle] impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalisation of the advent of a hitherto formless form.
9. The only maxim of contemporary art is: do not be imperial. This also means: do not be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.
10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense: it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalises this gesture of abstraction.
11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.
12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.
13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this in-existence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which, for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.
14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.
15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent.
alain badiou
Below are the 15 points by Alain Badiou to which Jean referred during her lecture in the first week of the kit theory course. The question Badiou started his talk with is the following: How can contemporary art avoid being formalist romantic? By form he possibly means organization, anything you need to make art with, in the general sense of the word. It is not form as opposed to content. By romantic he means for example when one considers our reality to be bad, when one strives a better reality, when nihilism is the dominant mode of thinking.
1. Art is not the sublime [inspiring, inspirational] descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. On the contrary, it is the production of an infinite subjective series, through the finite means of a material subtraction.
2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.
3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible qua sensible. This means†: the transformation of the sensible into an happening of the Idea.
4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalising this plurality.
5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.
6. The subjects of an artistic truth are the works which compose it.
7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which in our own contemporary artistic context is a generic totality.
8. The real of art is ideal [Èelle] impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalisation of the advent of a hitherto formless form.
9. The only maxim of contemporary art is: do not be imperial. This also means: do not be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.
10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense: it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalises this gesture of abstraction.
11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.
12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.
13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn't exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this in-existence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which, for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn't exist.
14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.
15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent.
alain badiou
13.1.10
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