"Say, why doesn't anyone fix it?"

 

"ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE"

“A prayer for all the possibilities outside of these failed frames” 

"The transit of Venus and the solar parallax... 

Any measurement is only as accurate as the measuring instrument. Prior to 1874, astronomers had to rely on highly trained specialists for their observations. These specialists activated a timekeeping device once the Transit began and stopped the device to mark its end. But every observer had different reflexes, resulting in different times, and thus different calculations. 

Another obstacle stood in the way of accurate observation. As Venus approached the border of the Sun, the planet appeared to liquefy. A phenomenon caused by distortions in the planet's atmosphere as well as the lens of the telescope. Astronomers called this phenomenon the Black Drop effect. The act of observation obscures the observation. 

Where the world meets the image of the world, the image falls apart.

For scientists, the transit provided a unique opportunity for technology to overcome the limitations of the imperfect human observer. But not everyone was convinced of their success. The philosopher Henri Bergson, writing on the Transit, said that any attempt to record a true measurement was doomed to failure. Venus, as it appeared to the scientist, did not reflect the true nature of Venus, but merely the limitations of human observation. 

He writes: 

There is no form, since form is immobile and reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of transition."

"The photographic revolver inspired by the semi-automatic Gatling gun. Applying automation to observation. The human observer is removed. There are no original plates of the 1874 transit left in existence."

"Your camera. Your mount. And your hand. The only time it should leave your body is when it is on its charger. On your body. At all times." 

"The Axon body camera's recommended placement is on the centre of the chest. It does not capture the direct field of view of the operator, but from a slight parallax. The operator is not seeing for themselves, but as an extension of the state. The wide angle of the lens is meant to capture as much of the surrounding environment as possible. But the wide angle also exaggerates motion. Subjects appear closer than they are. Their movements more severe.

Axon is the literal frame through which an event is seen. These elements are used to prove that the image was captured at a certain place, at a certain time, and according to a set of standard protocols. These protocols allow the image to be admitted into court as evidence. A neutral witness, free from the imperfections and bias of human memory. But a blind spot is exploited. The frame of the body camera erases the officer from its view. A view is placed in the body of the officer, watching what happened to them, and not what they did. The courts view this image as an objective witness, but the camera is designed to limit what can be seen by this witness. 

There's always a body, behind the body camera." 

Marey invented a new camera that improved and miniaturised Janssen’s design. He called his invention the photographic rifle. It was the first portable movie camera. With his rifle, Marey turned his gaze from the stars to life on Earth. In the studio, Marey performed a series of experiments that studied the mechanics of motion. To Marey, these cameras were not just a better eye, but an entirely new sensory organ, capable of revealing the invisible patterns of the world. He writes: 

“Not only are these instruments sometimes destined to replace the observer, but they also have their own domain where nothing can replace them. When the eye ceases to see, the ear to hear, the touch to feel, or indeed when our senses give deceptive appearances, these instruments are like new senses of astonishing precision. 

Our senses may lie to us, machines cannot.”

“Marey went beyond simply photographing motion, when motion was captured, it was automatically converted into data. Seeing and interpretation were already combined in the same device. Before these machines, the world becomes a resource for the extraction of data. They see. They measure. They compute. As a scientist, Marey hoped to uncover the natural order of the world. But his methods actively concealed the unnatural conditions of this process. These instruments do not reproduce the world, they produce new worlds. 

His subjects were not in nature, but in the controlled setting of the studio. What would these images be without this theatrical set? Who gets to frame another as subject?”

“What is a science where the self is held intact?” —Donna Harway, ‘Persistence of Vision’ 

“The eye only sees in each thing that for which it looks, and it only looks for that of which it already has an idea.” 

In Neubronner’s diary we encounter a dream: “A dream last night where I was flying over Kronberg. At some point in my journey, I looked down to see a man on top of a roof. On closer inspection, I saw that it was not a man, but one of my pigeons. A great vertigo overcame me. I didn’t know who was flying and who was standing still. I realised that we must be orbiting each other, tethered by the mutual gravity of our gaze.” 

“We all feel that there is something more. That the curtain has not yet been lifted. There is a prophet within us, forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen.” —Frederick Douglass 

“An act of seeing is always an act. An intervention into the world. We do not see the world. We see this intervention.” 

“The frame excludes the world beyond its edges. But if we look hard enough there’s always an edge that creeps back in.” 

QANAT

DISAPPEARED FOR 5 YEARS 

STUDYING THINGS I’VE NEVER SEEN 

KAREZ 

QANAT

FALAJ

[But now I’m back 

+ someday]

“Qanats milk the earth while deep wells suck earth blood” 

Truth has weight. If we consider substance, water, Truth becomes unavoidable. 

Couldn’t get into any of this, and I didn’t throughout my studies. The work is practical, it will stay that way. 

But now I can admit it, I was always distracted. Reading about the mechanics and the social infrastructure of the qanat made it difficult for me not to think about Tawhid, Abubakr Mohammad Karaji’s The Extraction of Hidden Waters, Whitehead’s ideas about bodily sensation and causal transmission, prehension, conceptual reversion, and the ingress of novel propositions as the origin for evolutionary processes / Schelling’s discussion of interior/exterior ecologies, or dynamic polarities unified in the Absolute, Kant’s 12 “pure” concepts, and, yes you know, Negarestani’s ()hole complex.

This idea that the universe works mechanistically toward beauty, aesthetic beauty, alright, I don’t know about that. I cannot corroborate this. But I like Whitehead’s ideas about bringing conflict into contrast: intensity (the foundation of beauty) is achieved through simultaneously holding as many contrasts as is possible. Who was so ‘myriad-minded,’ the progenitor, that they blended oppositions to such a degree that the original qanat was born over 3,000 years ago? They had to start by valuing barrenness and aridity deeply enough to transform it. 

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"... Schelling is not asserting this organic conception of nature as a regulative principle. The organizing principle which grounds natural organization is an objective entity. Moreover, Kant’s system of ends must bottom out in some unconditioned final end, which must, because it is unconditioned, be external to nature. For Kant, this is the human being under the moral law. Schelling’s difference in terminology—calling nature an organism rather than a system of ends—indicates a substantive philosophical difference. Nature, for Schelling, is not teleologically grounded in an external end, but rather is its own end, much like an organism. Schelling refers to nature as “a whole that is in-itself complete [ein in sich selbst vollendetes Ganzes].” Like an organism, it is cause and effect of itself. This self contained completion is in contradistinction to Kant’s externally dependent and directed nature. It is noteworthy that Schelling’s formulation universal organism is paradoxical in the context of Kant’s philosophy: organisms are grounded in particular forms of organization, mechanism is that which is universal. Schelling is drawing these together in the claim that the highest kind of organization is universal in scope—it subsumes all of nature—but also unitary and particular—it is an organism."  --N. Fisher 

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“In ()hole complex, on a superficial level (bound to surface dynamics), every activity of the solid appears as a tactic to conceal the void and appropriate it, as a program for inhibiting the void, accommodating the void by sucking it in to the economy of surfaces or filling it.”

“Once nemat-space begins its infestation, the periphery on the zone of excitations does not necessarily start from visible surfaces on the crust: Active surfaces emerge from everywhere, from the surface-crust mode of periphery to innermost recesses. The ()hole complex carves ultra-active surfaces from solidus when it digs holes, unleashes delirious itinerant lines and constructs its nematical machines, installing peripheral agitations on the surfaces it cuts from internal solid matrices. Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented. When the despotic necrocratic regime of periphery-core, for which everything should be concluded and grounded by the gravity of the core, is deteriorated." 

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"Mohammed Hassan related a saying that at the rise of a star you can feel a breeze on your face for a

moment,– so you do not even need to see the star to know it has risen. There is also a saying that

when all is frozen, Suhayl has struck (risen), and their babies may urinate blood. This star is said to

rise in the east but to set a bit off west, which does not fit with the usual (literary) identification of

Suhayl as Canopus (α Carinae), which rises SSE." --Nash 

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Category V.: The Category of Conceptual Reversion 

There is secondary origination of conceptual feelings with data which are partially identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects forming the data in the primary phase of the mental pole; the determination of identity and diversity depending on the subjective aim at attaining depth of intensity by reason of contrast.”

“… Then in synthesis, there must always be a ground of identity and an aim at contrast. The aim at contrast arises from the depth of intensity promoted by contrast. The joint necessity of this ground of identity and an aim at contrast. The aim at contrast arises from the depth of intensity promoted by contrast. The joint necessity of this ground of identity, and this aim at contrast, is partially expressed in this Category of Conceptual Reversion. This ‘aim at contrast’ is the expression of the ultimate creative purpose that each unification will achieve some maximum depth of intensity of feeling, subject to the conditions of its consecrescence.” 

“An enduring object gains the enhanced intensity of feeling arising from contrast between inheritance and novel effect, and also gains the enhanced intensity arising from the combined inheritance of its stable rhythmic character throughout its life-history. It has the weight of repetition, the intensity of contrast, and the balance between the two factors of the contrast. In this way, the association of endurance with rhythm and physical vibration is explained. They arise out of the conditions for intensity and stability. The subjective aim is seeking width with its contrasts, within the unity of a general design. An intense experience is an aesthetic fact, and its categoreal conditions are to be generalised from aesthetic laws in particular arts.” 

“God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality, there are two concrescent poles of realisation—‘enjoyment’ and ‘appetition,’ that is, the ‘physical’ and the ‘conceptual/For God, the conceptual is prior to the physical; for the World, the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles.” 

“Opposed elements stand to each other in mutual requirement. In their unity, they inhibit or contrast. God and the World stand to each other in this opposed requirement. God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion. Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other.” 

“In every respect God and the World move conversely to each other in respect to their porcess. God is primordially one, namely he is the primordial unity of relevance of the many potential forms; in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs in its own unity. The World is primordially many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occasion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the primordial character. Thus God is to be conceived as one and as many int he converse sense in which the World is to be conceived as many and as one. The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.”