In this micro-essay, Le Guin sets out her approach to the novel. Her bag is the antithesis of the myth of modern technology as a heroic, Promethean anIn this micro-essay, Le Guin sets out her approach to the novel. Her bag is the antithesis of the myth of modern technology as a heroic, Promethean and inevitably tragic enterprise. It is a "bag of stars", perhaps a womb, full of "wimps and klutzes". Stories emerge from an utterly non-linear process "of initiations, losses, transformations and translations", so different from the ballistic trajectory of the spear that ends in the hairy flank of a mammoth. The bag is more than a metaphor. It is metaphysics. As Donna Haraway suggests in her opening essay, the story that emerges from the bag is "the life story". It encapsulates the generative forces of life. It is the sediment of a genuine process of 'poiesis'. It is magic! ...more
This is a sober publication from the hand of W.C., by which is meant Wim Cuyvers. He is nowhere directly identified as the author of the publication (This is a sober publication from the hand of W.C., by which is meant Wim Cuyvers. He is nowhere directly identified as the author of the publication (only his initials are used), but it is easy to identify him thanks to the many clues given in the introductory text. Cuyvers is a Belgian architect, conceptual artist and forester who lives and works on the flanks of a mountain, Le Montavoix, in the French Jura. What exactly Cuyvers does there is an interesting source of speculation. A cursory glance might suggest that he manages his estate and makes his living by selling wood. But there is more. Somewhere on the mountain there is a simple hut, run as a 'refuge'. For Cuyvers, this is the manifestation of a radical concept of public space. The public character of any place is determined by the extent to which people are able to bear witness to their state of need. The Refuge is also the setting for the story, in the form of a play, contained between the covers of this booklet. The text on the inside covers, reproduced above on this GR page, provides some context. It basically recounts how a small group of drug addicts ended up at Montavoix. In addition to the introductory text, there is an extra element of context: an image is included in the booklet. It is a landscape picture, cut in the middle, with the left and right sides swapped, and printed on the title page and the end page respectively. It shows the refuge at Le Montavoix, seen from the same height on the opposite side of the valley. It looks like a tightly composed telephoto image. We see only the hut in its wedge-shaped clearing, surrounded by seemingly endless woods. Remarkably, the picture was taken in winter after a fresh snowfall. One can't help thinking about Caspar David Friedrich's 'Der Chasseur im Walde'. However, these were not the conditions experienced by the guests featured in the booklet, as their visit began just before the summer solstice in 2010.
This introduction and setting may raise more questions than they answer. What begins as an idea framed as a scientific experiment - let's see if a change of context affects the way poor people think and act - turns into a parody - let's pretend we're making a film, but without the intention of making a film. The guests play themselves as actors. But where is the crew? Who is the director (tentatively even in the plural)? Why does Cuyvers remains hiding behind his initials while it is easy enough to find out who is in charge here? What about the romantic tropes that suddenly appear in the second paragraph? Should we take them seriously after the soapbox tenor of the first paragraph, with its vernacular staging in a 'brown' Brussels café, its (ironic?) references to publications elsewhere discussing (we would almost add 'the most learned doctor') Cuyvers's ideas about public space? And then this potentially dubious manoeuvre of W.C. eavesdropping on the conversations of his guests, pondering over these fragments for three months before committing himself to writing (no, rather collating) a story which, surprisingly, revives the original intention of making a film, as it can be read as a script with dialogue and detailed descriptions of the setting and props in the dining room of the refuge. And then there's the typical Cuyversian ploy of "writing against his hand": as a Limburgian, he doesn't speak the Antwerp dialect, but he decides to phonetically transcribe the fragments that have been floating around in his head anyway. Just as he would later make a film about the Winterslag terril ('DodeNberg', see below), when he explicitly professed not to have a mastery of the cinematic medium (although, clearly, he had been thinking about it for more than ten years). Finally, the suggestion of a wintery setting, which does not correspond to the actual circumstances of the week-long visit of the guests from Antwerp's Sint-Jansplein. As readers, we are confronted here with shifting perspectives and undeclared intentions. Are we dealing here with an innovative format for social work? A subpolitical stratagem? A vernacular and performative art work? Or all at the same time? ...more
I would like to see this essay republished, in larger type, with double spaced lines and blank pages in between, and a few colouring plates (particulaI would like to see this essay republished, in larger type, with double spaced lines and blank pages in between, and a few colouring plates (particularly of Modigliani faces) here and there....more
My life partner was very enthusiastic about this book. I found it less compelling. It was certainly an enjoyable read during the Christmas holidays. BMy life partner was very enthusiastic about this book. I found it less compelling. It was certainly an enjoyable read during the Christmas holidays. But there is nothing in the book that raises fundamental questions about who we are or how we think as humans. Every puzzle in the book - and there are many - can be neatly solved within the contours of relativistic physics or sociobiological competitive and mutualistic dynamics. Compare, for instance, classics such as Michael Crichton's Sphere or Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, which are clever and even poignant exercises in speculative hermeneutics. These stories confront humanity with the unknown, leveraging that confrontation as a catalyst to reevaluate our role in the cosmos – a task we might not succeed in. In "Project Hail Mary," in contrast, the focus seems to be on preserving the existing order rather than exploring new ways of being. 2,5 stars. ...more
Robotic Landscapes charts the tantalising convergence of several elements: 1) physical, more or less structured landscape forms, 2) dynamic processes Robotic Landscapes charts the tantalising convergence of several elements: 1) physical, more or less structured landscape forms, 2) dynamic processes of biogeophysical evolution and erosion of landscapes, 3) cyber-physical systems functionally able to intervene in and morphologically give shape to landscape forms, 4) computational strategies underpinning adaptive behaviour of said cyber-physical systems, and 5) human intentionality and preferences about function and aesthetics of landscapes.
In practice this comes down to robotic processes that iteratively shape landscape formations in response to a future that unfolds in an unpredictable way. The computational system acts as mediator between external forces and flows and the systems's internal logic and constraints (that partially reflect human agency).
Qua design conception this opens up a paradigmatic shift, away from a static and finite understanding of design towards an active participation in formation processes. The landscape architect is not called to conceive a finished form but becomes an actor, amongst others, in a dynamic process of landscape formation. The design activity situates itself at a nodal point in the cybernetic interaction between human, vegetative, animal, artificial life forms and physico-chemical processes of weathering and erosion.
The book sketches the conceptual contours of this emerging design conception, discusses technical and functional building blocks, and hypothesises the structure of a design research process as a recursive application of three basic activities - framing, forming and finding - across an activity chain that connects an initial survey to ongoing maintenance activities.
The ideas are illustrated by the results of real-life lab experiments at the Swiss Polytechnic (ETH) Zurich and by a speculative exploration of two real-world cases.
The book itself has been beautifully designed, by Janic Fotsch. The idea was to translate the unbounded nature of the design process into the linear logic of a book publication. Conceptual and visual coherence is achieved by a strong triadic structure. The sequencing of the texts and (mainly) black-and-white visuals is very sophisticated. The lay-flat binding adds to the eloquence of the design.
All in all a recommended read for landscape architects, futurists, philosophers and cyber-physical experts. ...more
“Not to remain stuck to one’s own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flies ever higher to see ever more below h“Not to remain stuck to one’s own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird who flies ever higher to see ever more below him - the danger of the flier. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us. One must know how to conserve oneself: the hardest test of independence.” — F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 41.
“I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.” — E. Jünger, Eumeswil.
“Gymnastics does not require that one get naked to exercise freely. Quite to the contrary, it freely exercises in order to rediscover nakedness. (…) It has become the naked body of nobody. I think naked and I am nobody. I dance naked. I am nothing.” — Michel Serres, Genesis.
Eumeswil is the late Jünger’s literary testament. He didn’t write any major works after the publication of this tome in 1977. It’s labeled a ‘novel’ but it reads as a meandering essay, or rather, as a typically Jüngerian capriccio that blends essayistic, diary-like and narrative elements. Substantively Eumeswil offers an extended character study. The sole focus of the work is the figure of the Anarch, and how it constrasts with the anarchist.
The Anarch is a multivalent archetype, but it is essentially rooted in the way it relates to political power. The Anarch embodies a very particular mode of resistance, quite unreadable to anarchists who are wedded to more activist strategies in pursuing their political goals. The Anarch is provocatively aloof, inoffensive, non-interventionist. Inwardly, he does not commit to any party or any social project. Society may involve him in a conflict and obligingly he will march in rank and file. But inwardly he will not participate. “The archaic figure of the mercenary is more consistent with the anarch than is the conscript, who reports for his physical examination and is told to cough when the doctor grabs his scrotum.” The sole and only project of the Anarch is the embodiment of an aristocratic, existentialist conception of freedom.
The fictional background against which this portrait is drawn, is the autocratic regime of the Condor in the city-state of Eumeswil. The story’s protagonist serves there in the very centre of power, as a scholar-historian by day and as a bar tender in the ruler’s dining quarters by night. This makes him complicit with authoritarian rule in the eyes of those who resist the Condor and are conspiring to bring about a return of the Tribunes. For the anarch these historical movements are merely foam on the waves. Whatever the label, autocracy is the inevitable template for human governance - “even the tribunes need their general” - and society tends to generalised mediocrity by consuming freedom for so-called ‘equality’. Opposition merely serves to reinforce the old templates: “Opposition is collaboration.”
Jünger’s Anarch feels much like Nietzsche’s ‘Free Spirit’. The ‘Freigeist’ distinguishes himself from the ‘Freidenker’. The weak version of the latter - mockingly labeled by Nietzsche as ’all these goodly advocates of modern ideas’ - are not satisfied by any regime. Their resistance is merely a pose. The strong version of the ‘freethinker’ mirrors the anarchist’s ethos in radically challenging the powers-that-be, even if that means imprisonment or death. The Anarch, however, is detached even from his own feeling of detachment. He suspends his achievements and demands. He is the ’neutral observer’ par excellence.
Becoming an Anarch requires intellectual and spiritual self-discipline: “There are, en passant, three dialectical stages: first the personal and material task, then its transcendence through exercises, and finally the liberation leading to universal - which, for me, are historical - perceptions.” The protagonist is a historian, or more precisely a meta-historian, who, via a prototypical internet browser (the ‘luminar’) has access to a vast database of historical data. From his vantage point he looks at the waves and eddies of history with a dispassionate eye, identifying systemic patterns without moral judgment. “As an anarch, I owe it to myself to get to the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect - by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.”
However, the Anarch’s freedom is not rooted in any transcendental datum. There is nothing metaphysical about it. The basis of his self-confidence is his awareness of being able to kill, both himself and other people. He is free to kill himself, if he finds himself inadequate. And this is what happens in the book, obliquely, when the protagonist eventually vanishes in the forest. The killing of others is a totally conscious and originary act. The anarch’s stance of unconditional freedom creates the gap in which respect and self-respect balance out. Hence, he kills only where and when he likes; it matters little whether he ever actually does. He also grants the possibility to everyone else. Killing is one of the fundamental acts. “It reaches deep in the organic, nay, inorganic world. Every moment is deadly for every other.”
Jünger’s Eumeswil offers a stimulating intellectual adventure. It is certainly challenging for a reader steeped in the political climate of liberalism and social democracy. Because it is precisely that which is trampled underfoot by Jünger’s individualist and elitist worldview. I am willing to be challenged by these ideas. There is no doubt that the hubris of western-style democracies is misplaced. We don’t have answers to all the pressing questions, practical, moral and spiritual.
Note: I perused several editions for this reading. The English version has the advantage of being available for e-reader. Joachim Neugroschel's translation is excellent. The German printed version (included in the Sämtliche Werke) provides unfiltered access to Jünger's scintillating prose. The Dutch translation (by Henry van Sanderburg, Uitgeverij Aspekt, 2016) is rather wooden and tiresome.
[image] The Sun, Edvard Munch, 1912
“Man should not be the sun’s friend, but the sun itself.” — E. Jünger, Eumeswil....more
I enjoyed this well written and cleverly organised book as an introduction to the legacy of visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller. Keats recaps the myI enjoyed this well written and cleverly organised book as an introduction to the legacy of visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller. Keats recaps the myth behind the man, deconstructs it, and astutely reassesses Fuller's contribution by discussing the 21st century relevance of six key visions: the Dymaxion Car (mobility), the Wichita House (shelter), the Two-Way TV (education), the Geoscope (planning), the Dome over Manhattan (environment), and the World Game (peace). The final chapter examines how Fuller's legacy has been shaped by acolytes (Lloyd Kahn), independent visionaries (Victor Papanek) and corporate innovators (Google). In the book's final pages Jonathon Keats lays down a compelling program for a revitalised 'comprehensive anticipatory design science' that is able to significantly contribute to solving the many wicked problems confronting humanity. Excellent read that in its tautness mirrors the design principles that Fuller held so dear.
„ … there is still something to this nothing-something, something other than the nether, either inner or outer, neither together nor apart, father nor„ … there is still something to this nothing-something, something other than the nether, either inner or outer, neither together nor apart, father nor feather, earth nor theater. This something is nothing but the great and irreal ether.”
The book is not a full-fledged history of the ether in humankind’s cultural history. Milutis in fact dispatches that millennia-long time interval when cosmology and theology were animated by a pneumatic, animistic version of the ether in a short section of the book. He really picks up the thread when the ether threatens to be relegated to the sphere of cosmic lore by advances in modern physics. The key question for Milutis is then: „Why, when it has been so definitively debunked, does the ether continually reemerge in public as well as in scientific consciousness?”.
The author’s central thesis is that since the end of the 19th century we have been caught up in a simmering ‚ethereal crisis’, a tug-of-war between two diametrically opposed concepts of ether. For a start, up to the present day the ether has continued to animate a multifaceted artistic avant-garde that wants to leverage a vitalistic, analogical impulse as embodiment of the limits of longing and the frontier of meaning. On the other hand, just as nature abhors the void so also power and capitalism adore the protean, cryptic ubiquity of the ether.
By the very nature of its subject matter, Milutis’ cartography of „the conflict between an impulse to abstract all energies in terms of work, money and the commodity versus the theosophical and vitalist insistence on a kind of inalienable bioenergy” has a nebulous and incidental character. He charts the friction through a sequence of four chapters.
Chapter 1 surveys a transitional period, roughly from the beginning of the 18th century to the end of the 19th. The emergence of a science of electricity that resonated strongly with the new position of a growing commercial class is counterpointed by the occultism of the Viennese physician Anton Mesmer, who built on the work of Newton and Ben Franklin. His spiritualist legacy has been extended in the 20th century in the work of Federico Fellini and Gilles Deleuze, amongst others, and in the practices of Reiki and hypnotherapy.
Chapter 2 zooms in on the 1880-1905 time interval when advances in particle physics and a series of rapid, interlocking industrial disruptions pushed the ether to the brink of extinction. Paradoxically this spawned an artistic scene populated by theosophists and yogis, symbolists and decadents who capitalized on „a profusion of dream times, hallucinatory ontologies, intellectual-mystic revelations and theaters of the mind.” Milutis explores the artistic legacy of this time through etherealists as diverse as Helene Blavatsky, Strindberg, Bill Viola and Japanimators.
The final two chapters relate specific ethereal moments in 20th-century technology. In Chapter 3 the militarization and regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum is countered by various forms of analogical, radio-based artistic experiment, starting with the Futurists and all the way to a contemporary avant garde that seeks to move closer to the signified material behind sound relying on strategies such electromagnetic hacking and flaneurship. Chapter 4 zooms in on the American 1960s space program with its concomitant mediatization and banalization of space as a site of scientific, nationalistic and corporate concerns. A critique is provided by countercultural film makers such as Jordan Belson who refigured outer-space narratives into metaphors of inner-space journeys.
In a short epilogue, the author explores current affiliations of a 21st-century, electronically mediated data sphere with absolute space and time. There is no doubt that capitalism is wanting to appropriate the ethereal resonances of the digital revolution. Apple originally plugged its Macintosh computer as a countercultural device and has been seen to channel these emotions for wider corporate ends. So the tug-of-war for the ether is entering a new chapter.
There is no way I could do justice in a short review to Milutis’ sprawling and outlandish argument. It has been a fascinating but bewildering read. The vistas opened up by the book’s central argument struck me as mostly unfamiliar. I felt I gained a new perspective on an important undercurrent in our recent cultural history. But the author’s runaway erudition doesn’t make it easy for the reader. The narrative jumps to and fro to explore exotic niches of the 20th century artistic ecosystem, leaving us often breathless and disorientated. Milutis’ prose is, for this reader, an oddly attractive mix of the academic and the experimental. At times it has an almost incantatory, etherealizing quality as is obvious from the quote prefacing this review.
I have a strong suspicion that I will revisit this book. It resonates, quite indistinctly, with works by authors such as anthropologist Tim Ingold, media theorist Vilem Flusser, cyberneticians Geoffrey Vickers and Gregory Bateson, social scientists Bruno Latour and Annemarie Mol, philosophical materialist Manuel DeLanda, and architect Lars Spuybroek. Over the last years I have been hunting for a perspective ‚beyond systems’ and maybe there is a synthesis to be made after all from these miscellaneous materials.
Anyway, just a few days ago news came through of Einstein’s gravity waves being observed for the first time. Maybe the ether is making its comeback with a vengeance....more
I read Orfeo over the summer and felt as if I had feasted on caviar. Vintage Powers: an epic horizon, a tangle of crisscrossing, zeitgeisty story lineI read Orfeo over the summer and felt as if I had feasted on caviar. Vintage Powers: an epic horizon, a tangle of crisscrossing, zeitgeisty story lines, and in recounting a composer’s life the most perceptive writing on music imaginable.
I had to give it a rest before I could pen my thoughts into a review. And then I happened to take on Hallelujah Junction, the autobiography of America’s best known living composer, John Adams (published in 2008). The two books echoed of each other. Powers has referred to multiple sources in writing Orfeo but not too Adams’ autobiography. Still, I’m convinced that Powers read it and used it as the scaffolding for his novel. Here I’ve unwound Orfeo’s fractured narrative, synchronized its protagonist’s life with the biography of John Adams and filled in some music history gaps.
Orfeo’s main character is Peter Clement Els, born in 1941, who lived through a chequered career as a modernist composer. Adams’ and Els’ biographies throw up superficial symmetries: both start their musical journey by studying the clarinet, both marry and divorce before their artistic maturity, an avant garde theatre director has an important influence on their artistic development (Peter Sellars for Adams, Richard Bonner for Els).
More important is the parallelism in the vectors of their composing lives. To appreciate that we need to reiterate the complicated predicament faced by post-war composers. Els puts it like this: „ … an eight-year old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started to write music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last. The accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of the smash-up.”
Roughly in the middle of that seventy-five year time interval 1838-1904 there was the earthquake of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865). The famous Tristan chord, unstable and vagrant, started to dig the grave of the functional harmony that underpinned four hundred years of Western music. Harmony’s ability to sustain large scale musical structures unravelled and the quest was on to find something, anything that could usurp that architectural role.
Another momentous occasion in that same period was the invention of the phonograph, in 1877. The device captured and replayed sounds and noises of all sorts, thereby expanding the sonic field for aesthetic appreciation. It also naturalized voice and music, revealing them simply as vibrations that could be rendered by a machine.
The result of these developments was a process of increasing musical abstraction, both towards the super-representational (pure form) and the sub-representational (pure sensory experience).
The modernist winter didn’t by any means end with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Within five years Schoenberg wrote a piece as Klangfarbenmelodie and Bartok was first to employ a group of twelve notes consciously for a structural purpose. Eventually the twelve-tone technique would replace the structural force of tonality by the ordering power of increased motivic coherence. It led to the serialist orthodoxy of the post-war avant-garde. Composers gathered in a stern, isolated brotherhood that seemed to have as its only purpose to chase audiences out of concert halls. John Cage didn’t buy into the serialist credo, but developed an activist practice of music composition and performance in worship of chance and pure sound.
Even today most people wouldn’t recognize what emerged from these arcane compositional strategies as music. That was the ‚smash up’, the aporia evoked by Peter Els: the frantic rush of modernist experimentation had reduced the space for novel compositional strategies to nil. There was nothing left to discover. Concurrently it led many protagonists to doubt whether this flight forward into abstraction and emotional deficit would ever provide a long-term future for music.
The predicament faced by the young post-war composer has been fittingly captured by the British musician and musicologist Thurston Dart: „The eighteenth century musician was taught to see the whole of musical history as a hill rising gently and undulatingly out of darkness, with the music of his own time standing on the sunlit summit; the modern musician is encouraged to view it as a rather alarming slope, studded like Eastern Island with titanic heads, far larger than life. And he may have an uneasy suspicion that the slope is a downward one, and that the noisy and polemical modernists who lead the way are, like the maiden in one of Ernest Bramah’s incomparable stories, uttering loud and continuous cries to conceal the direction of their flight.”
John Adams’ autobiography Hallelujah Junction is an eloquent evocation of a personal struggle to find his own voice in this tangle. Initially he surrendered to a youthful infatuation with avant-garde experiment, particularly inspired by Cage and very often involving electronically generated sounds. The work challenged him intellectually but left him emotionally starved.
Peter Els in Powers’ Orfeo faces a similar quandary: „Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war of taste.” Much of Els’ early years are spent waging this battle, driving him into ever more arcane corners of the sonic universe.
Eventually it is love that pulls both composers, the real and the imagined, back into tonality’s gravitational field. Adams’ epiphany came in 1976 driving his car through the foothills of the Sierras whilst listening to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. That day it dawned on him that he had to embrace the power of tonal harmony if he wanted to build expressive, large scale musical structures. He tells the story as follows: „ … this music, especially the quiet opening bars of Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, with its graceful leaps of sixths and sevenths and soft cushions of string chords, spoke to me. I said out loud, almost without thinking, „He cares.” I was puzzled by my own statement. Who „cares”? Evidently Wagner. „What does he care about?” That was harder to answer. I was experiencing an intuition not so much about Wagner as about myself and the nature of my relationship to music.”
In Orfeo this caring reflex is played out in a different register. It’s the love for his five-year old daughter Sara that sets Peter Els on a course back to old tonal pleasures. „In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes.” A new style of composing makes itself felt, „a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.” Obviously we can’t listen to Els’ piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano to words from Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, but Powers describes it as consisting of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed.” A description that seems to add up to the Minimalism initially adopted by John Adams in his re-appropriation of the pleasure principle in music.
As Els grapples with his own voice as a composer his life falls apart. Eventually he withdraws to a New Hampshire cabin where he continues to compose whilst living simply and earning a little money as a handyman. His music „abandoned all pretense of system. He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. (…) Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming right around the corner.” We can imagine Els writing the kind of „virtuoso kitsch” - no disrespect intended - that has emerged over the last decades from John Adams’ studio (think Grand Pianolo Music, the Chamber Symphony, or The Dharma at Big Sur for that matter).
Iconoclast Bonner, with a commission for a grand opera in his pocket, smokes Els out of his reclusive life. This will be the protagonist’s magnum opus: an epic tale about a late medieval city that proclaims itself city of God and perishes in that fateful search for transcendence, backed up by a score of 170 minutes of ecstatic music. Powers’ scene by scene description of this imaginary masterpiece is jaw dropping and rivals Adrian Leverkühn’s fabulated oeuvre in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (and the latter had Adorno at his side to take care of the musical technicalities). But just as Els’ opera is about to go live, April 1993, hundreds of American law enforcement agents move to end the 2-month siege of the Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas. 76 Branch Davidians, including two dozen children, do not leave the compound alive. Peter Els’ „three-hour exercise in transcendence got dragged into the shit-storm of human events.” The eery synchronicity between the Waco tragedy and the premiere of his opera shakes Els to the bone. After an initial round of performances he withdraws the work and ceases composing.
The uneasy intersection between opera and traumatic real life events provides another fascinating parallel here with John Adams’ life story. Late in the 1980s Peter Sellars approached Adams with an idea to write an opera on the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front. One of the passengers, wheelchair-bound Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer, perished into the Mediterranean. To this very day The Death of Klinghoffer has remained a contentious piece because of its alleged anti-semitism. Since the 9/11 attacks the controversy has only deepened.
Now Els’ and Adams’ stories begin to fundamentally diverge. John Adams continues to compose, straight through all the artistic and existential turmoil, refining and deepening his artistic ethos. For Els, however, there is a long hiatus. He retreats into the sustainable oblivion of a teaching life. The crushing routine of assistant professorship purges him of any artistic ambition. It suits him well. Occasionally he enjoys the insouciance with which the most gifted and zealous of his students colonize the sonic universe. For two years Els listens to nothing but Bach. Meanwhile he ponders the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?
The creative stasis is a prelude to an esoteric yet familiar coda in his life’s home key. In the fall of 2009 the mute composer has a quiet epiphany whilst walking his dog Fidelio: „Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything else he’d ever written.”
Two things come into play here: the abundance of potential isomorphisms between the natural world and the universe of sound, and because of that abundance, the futility of the act of transcription of one into the other. Els is struck by the fragile beauty of this „music for forever and for no one …” And so the idea is born to compose his own Song of the Earth in a weird experiment of reverse engineering. Rather than to transcribe what nature offers aplenty, Els comes to think of writing into the fabric of life a composition of his own. Turn the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale into DNA’s four letter alphabet of nucleotides, inscribe this sequence into the genome of a bacterium and that’s that. „No storage medium longer-lasting than life. (…) You’d have to allow for the slow drift of mutation that reworked every genome. But that endless change in musical message would be more like a feature than a bug … he might send a tune abroad again, into the very distant future, unheard, unknown, everywhere. Music for the end of time.” Here the faustian hubris of the innovator meets the humility of the wizened master hand.
And then, just as the project is taking flight: a door ajar, a peek of two police officers in the composer’s home laboratory sets, a frantic hunt across America for the „Bioterrorist Bach”. ...more
This book starts from the observation that today we have unprecedented access to vast amounts of data, reflecting the most diverse aspects of urban liThis book starts from the observation that today we have unprecedented access to vast amounts of data, reflecting the most diverse aspects of urban life: air quality, cellphone use, crime levels, transportation patterns, and much more. What does this mean for our practice of mapping? What does this do to our image of the city? These are the questions that Amoroso studies, in a first part of the book, through the contributions of a number of important urban `mappers': urban designer Winnie Maas (MVDRV), landscape urbanist James Corner (field operations), information designers Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, urban theorist Kevin Lynch. Remarkably, the discussion is grounded in an idiosyncratic body of work, namely Hugh Ferris' graphic interpretations of the 1916 zoning Ordinance of New York City. His gothic 3D charcoal renderings revealed the building envelope defined by the new laws. Amoroso argues that they can be considered as 3D maps, at once analytical and, because of his exquisite draftsmanship, also artistic and hence emblematic for a new generation of mappers.
This is the key to Amoroso's argument: powerful maps are informative, revelatory, seductive and suggestive (the precise relationship between these four terms remains unclear). They combine the analytically revealing with the performative power of a work of art to move people (designers, policy makers, the general public). There is a subsidiary, much hazier, point which is that these abstract, conceptual representations function as a powerful guide for designerly interventions in the real world.
These are interesting claims but I found the argument that the author brings to bear rather scrappy and unconvincing.
For a start, the logic behind this particular selection of `mappers' remains to an extent obscure. Their differences, particularly in terms of the kinds of data they work from and the intended aim of their visualizations, seem to be more eye-catching than their commonalities.
Wurman and Tufte are information designers. Their diagrams are not in the first place crafted to guide design work. They are not showing the city itself but aggregate data about the city (as an aside: I have always found Tufte's work a little bit overrated compared to the more serious and technical work of William Cleveland (Visualizing Data)). Ferris' work is interesting, but despite a longish, 35-page essay I fail to see the capital importance that Amoroso seems to associate with it. Ferris came up with a clever and seductive way to visualize a building envelope, starting not from quantitative data but from a qualitative, legalistic narrative. Even we could see these drawings as 3D maps, I wonder what the big deal is. Kevin Lynch came up with cognitive maps, reflecting people's phenomenological experience of moving through a city as input to design decisions. Maas represent a more technical approach, starting from large amounts of quantitative data, which are volumetrically represented as a `datascape'. Arguably, this allows for a very intuitive grasp of particularly large numbers which are difficult to comprehend (what does it mean if 242 million people have to live at an average of 2.43 persons per residential unit?). Corner, as a landscape urbanist, inevitably has a wider, territorial vision on his study object. His technico-artistic maps, mixing detailed renderings with collage techniques, emerge in counterpoint to aerial photographs. Obviously, this is a cross-cut through very different mapping practices.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the combined goal of analytical acuity and artistic persuasion is an elusive one. Particularly the examples included in the second part of the book, an annotated portfolio with a lot of work of Amoroso's students, leave me unconvinced. Whether one uses sophisticated 3D modeling techniques, visualizing crime statistics as `threatening' teeth, is from my point of view trivial. Simpler, more elegant techniques (albeit less spectacular but with a much better data/ink ratio) would be more effective. Quite a few maps are, frankly, difficult to decode even for a person with significant experience in data visualization and I wonder how uninitiated policy makers or the general public would deal with them.
Another difficulty with Amoroso's argument I have alluded to is that it remains unclear how these kinds of maps can help in guiding design work. In and of themselves they do not suggest how their abstract logic translates to real world interventions. In a short interview, Winnie Maas explains how the Datascape work contributed to the development of specialized design (optimization) tools such as the Optimixer and RegionMaker, but the connection is not further discussed. Corner is perhaps the most articulate of all, but his discourse is very conceptual and one would wish a more detailed view on his way of working.
Another key point is how mappers come to select the relevant variables to be included in their maps. Monitoring capacity will soon be pervasive, with sensors embedded in every nook and cranny of our urban environment. However, this data glut does not guarantee a `better' picture of urban reality. How do we pick those variables that reveal the `essence' of the city? That requires a mix of intuition and a deep conceptual understanding of what urban processes are about. Iteratively experimenting with maps can help us to an extent to form that understanding, but it is not enough. The practice has to be embedded in a much wider, systemic grasp of urban realities. How this grasp emerges is not part of the discussion.
Finally, this book is not a pleasure to read. Amoroso's prose is particularly wooden, annoying the reader with academic mannerisms, numbing repetitions and irritating hyperbole. The stilted prose and limping argument seem, unfortunately, to be a reflection of unclear ideas. In short, I don't recommend this book and would rather refer to some of the monographs or articles on individual `mappers' published elsewhere....more
I read this novel almost in a single sitting. The first half was terrifically absorbing: an outlandish plot, supple and well-cadenced prose, convincinI read this novel almost in a single sitting. The first half was terrifically absorbing: an outlandish plot, supple and well-cadenced prose, convincing characters. But at a certain point the narrative becomes unmoored and it gets ever more obvious that the author has no idea how to steer it towards a compelling finale. The book would have been much stronger if Lennon would have narrowed his focus to the destructive dynamics of a very peculiar family relationship, without relying on the protagonist’s perplexing and ultimately vapid identity crisis. Possibly in the author’s mind these two elements are inextricably linked. However, I felt that the increasingly convoluted plot makes that connection just one hypothesis amongst many others. Sadly, for me the overall feeling after finishing the book was one of disappointment. ...more
A young girl strikes a big American city like a meteorite. She fled a civil war and, via Paris and Montreal, disembarks in the metropolis. Her radiancA young girl strikes a big American city like a meteorite. She fled a civil war and, via Paris and Montreal, disembarks in the metropolis. Her radiance and appetite for life transfixes those who have the privilege of orbiting around her.
The circumstances remind us of the real-world work of epidemiologist Aaron Antonovsky who, in the 1960s and 70s was struck in his research by how certain women who had survived the Holocaust were able to sustain a rich and positive outlook on life. Antonovsky reoriented his research to try to understand how this was possible (“Had it been just one woman, it would still have been important to find out why”!) which led him to develop an original and important theory of health.
Also Richard Powers takes this phenomenon as the start for a process of inquiry. From the immigrant’s dazzling presence he conjures two major questions: ‘How are we to live?’ and ‘How are we to know?’. The novel lets then two sense-making and life-making paradigms collide: the scientific and the narrative. The scientist (or, better, the scientist-entrepreneur) is on a visionary quest to lay bare the order in things and to explore the upper limits of human ingenuity (in sofar as this continues to provide venture funders with a reasonable short-term return). And that includes rewiring our genomic apparatus to “make ourselves over into anything we want”. Happiness should not be left to chance; it’s a neurochemical design challenge.
For the narrator (or novelist, or mythographer) happiness emerges from a tangled web of relationships. “Happy people have stronger social relationships, more friends, better jobs, higher salaries, and stronger marriages. They are more creative, more altruistic, calmer, healthier, and longer lived.” But the causalities aren’t always clear. And there are contingencies, and human fallibility. From this messiness and from this abundance of possible relationships the narrator constructs a story, and hence imposes some sort of sense on the world.
The paradigmatic difference between the ‘objective’ and utopian scientist and the narrator who is all too conscious of the inescapable fragility of human life is played out quite literally in this novel. Powers overlays it with another dilemma that is rooted in the foundational problem of freedom. Imposing order is never an innocent business. Narrators make normative judgments. And those judgments may have unwanted or unintended consequences. One of the characters in a short-story authored by one of the protagonists (drawn from real life) commits suicide because he rebelled against the irreversible framing by the narrative. So how to navigate this dilemma between order and freedom? How to write a story of “the kind that, from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there’s no choice but chance?”
Scientists have to deal with a similar conundrum. In the hypercomplex universe of genomics, the data are always more or less inconclusive. “Genes don’t code for traits. They synthesize proteins. And single proteins can do incredibly different things, depending on where or when they’re produced … “ Deciding where to put the line between nature and nurture, between determinism and freedom, is, for the time being, also in science an unresolved issue.
Richard Powers’ books invariably are novels of ideas. This double dilemma – between science and story-telling, between determinism and freedom – seems to me to be the philosophical backbone of the book. There are other themes that Powers weaves in with characteristic brio. But at the center remains the young girl, Generosity, for whom the whole challenge of ‘happiness’ is a mirage: “People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours. ...more
An unidentified space vessel ("Rama") enters the solar system. The human species has no other option than to try and figure out what it means. That isAn unidentified space vessel ("Rama") enters the solar system. The human species has no other option than to try and figure out what it means. That is the basic datum around which Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated novel has been constructed. Clarke opens four windows on this process of sense making: an aesthetic, a scientific, a political and a religious.
The aesthetic dimension of the encounter with Rama is, for me, the most compelling. Rama exhibits a minimalistic but refined architecture based on a threefold symmetry. It is truly a thing of beauty and a pleasure to behold for one's mind's eye. On top of that comes the awe-inspiring vastness of this contraption and the author is very skillful in evoking the frisson that goes with the feeling of desorientation when navigating through this enormous space (a very good example of what in Kantian aesthetics would be called an experience of the negative sublime).
Rama presents us also with a scientific puzzle. As the story progresses, we understand that it is a kind of ark, or repository of an alien culture's artefacts and life forms. It does this by relying on a clever combination of thermodynamical and biological principles - the elegance of which reinforces the beauty of the ship's architecture. However, as there is much which remains unfathomable to its human explorers, the story strikes a good balance between the anthropically accessible and the fundamentally mysterious. At the end of the book, just before the human visitors leave Rama, their desire to know overcomes their infatuation with the ship's tantalising beauty and they puncture its smooth inner skin to inspect some of the cargo. The ship doesn't seem to mind but to the reader the moment has a weight similar to Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden.
The cleverness and elegance of the scientific and aesthetic perspectives contrast heavily with the one-dimensionality of the political and religious outlook on Rama. For the religiously minded, the arrival of the space ship constitutes an act of grace. It has come to rescue mankind from its fallen state. For politicians, Rama constitutes a threat to the power equilibrium in the solar system. Hence, it needs to be destroyed. Clearly, this constitutes a dilemma which is, however, neatly resolved by Rama leaving the solar system for some unknown destination. One wonders how deep the wedge would have entered into human civilisation if the dilemma would have persisted for a longer while.
What is missing from Clarke's narrative is a deeply philosophical perspective. The questions and tensions remain at the level of the self-centerdly functional and never transcend the "us" versus "it" perspective as exemplified by questions such as: what does Rama mean? How might we make use of it? What could it do to us? Nowhere this leads us to question the deeper purpose of mankind, to re-appreciate our position in a universe which brings forth incomprehensible felicities (and threats) and sustains life in a most surprising way. Clarke could have asked those questions without letting the story slide into new agey utopianism (Crichton did it in a most refreshing way, in his "Sphere", very comparable in setting and atmosphere). Without this deeper perspective, the rendezvous with Rama is a compelling but ultimately a rather trivial anecdote in the history of mankind. ...more