Jean Baudrillard

"Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. Realism had already inaugurated this process.
AXEL HÜTTE, Covbile de Pizza, Venezia, 1988-1989, Color coupler print

The rhetoric of the real signaled its gravely altered status (its golden age was characterized by an innocence of language in which it was not obliged to redouble what it said with a reality effect). Surrealism remained within the purview of the realism it contested - but also redoubled - through its rupture with the Imaginary. The hyperreal represents a much more advanced stage insofar as it manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself.

An excerpt from "Symbolic Exchange and Death," originally published in Paris, in 1976.

A HUMUMENT is a work in progress by Artist Tom Phillips (whom i find out about via thingsmagazine), who started his treatment of W.H. Mallock's Victorian novel "A Human Document" (published in 1892), in the mid sixties and an initial complete version was privately published by the Tetrad Press in 1970. The Thames and Hudson's first trade edition in 1980 made it a cult classic. It was seen to be a defining product of post modernism linking traditions as various as medieval illumination, experimental poetry and non-linear narrative with the procedures of modern art. I have 'fallen' in to his Art only last night, and I want to share this with who ever you might be, that is visiting here. For me this have a Biomorphic-Chartographic as well as poetic and aesthetic affinities. more

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

via thingsmagazine

 

 The 3,600 year old Sky Disk of Nebra is the world's oldest image of the cosmos... see more:

 

 
Tribute to Giordano Bruno.( 1548-1600 )

 

Giuseppe CRESPI, Bookshelves c. 1725
Oil on canvas. Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna
 

"People think of art as pictures, an experience beyond words. They may never know how recently painting grew apart from text..Right into the Renaissance, manuscripts teemed with images. In the world between two hands, shared by only a reader and an anonymous artist, art held individual experience rather than public spectacle." text taken from: Picture books John Haber

LUKAS FELZMANN Dictionary

"All over the world, images grew apart from the architecture of a page, but very slowly. ..The change came in fifteenth-century Europe, and it took people getting used to painting, from portrait panels and altars. Book illustrations at last turn into windows, rectangles conceived apart from the text and marginal decoration...Even then, painting remained all about text. It told stories about God or mortals, and its method had a lot in common with a rebus..So painting started out as a kind of animated gif."

LUKAS FELZMANN "Library" - The Headlands Center for the Arts, 1991
Installation with motorized pendulum, books and photographs

 

"Reduced to a single frame of the gif, the storyteller found a glorious silence. That silence for its own sake is what the average person today means by fine art. Picture books are for children. Thanks to Postmodernism, however, art is once again becoming child's play. Is it a matter of stories, words, or nostalgia for the hand made? Is it an allegory, and of what?"

 

 

Artist Nicholas Galanin explores his own Thingit culture and art derived from the people of Alaska. Creating forms of faces from books, Galanin brings a new medium to the art form of sculpture. Link. via makezine

 

 "Yet books refuse to let go. They compile, interpret, and catalog signs; they describe and contain a world."

 

Hydrolibros-Carved wooden books covered with earth from different river and ocean shores are embedded with natural matter from each site to create 'words' and 'paragraphs', forming an international ecological language.

Anselm Kiefer The secret life of plants (La vie secrète des plantes) 2002
lead collage

"Anselm Kiefer takes the hand-made book for civilization's forgotten history...For artists in love with the hand made, text is again something fearsome and yet something to be transcended. It made me wonder again about Western art and private readers. They grew up together and grew apart, and what happened then? Why did the metaphor of art as text catch on recently, and why do artists keep returning to its limits?..Modern art already recovers a love of text. For Russian art, words meant a revolution. For Dada art learned happily to mix propaganda posters with Cubism. René Magritte stuck all the wrong words into the modern still-life. "

John Haber 'By the Book'

HN30 was commissioned by KN for HN's 30th birthday. It is two illustrations for Trude and Ersilia from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, by rodcorp

 

"In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form." Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities

 

 Oscar Guzmán The City of Galvez

  

"If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages,signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard andspoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically,looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

"You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes." Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities

 

Konstantin Gorbatov The Invisible City of Kitezh (1913)

 

The Fizzgiggious Fish...

 

There was an old Person of Cromer,
Who stood on one leg to read Homer;
When he found he grew stiff, he jumped over the cliff,
Which concluded that Person of Cromer. (via plep)

Lertices and Blemmyae from the 'Marvels of the East', in a Scientific Miscellany

"In the world of Ts’ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of the labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend… [Ts’ui Pen] did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exit in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us." The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges

 

A quoting i liked from a book by Seth Lloyd, "Programming the Universe : A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos" that I've read in the excellent blog: orbis-quintus

This early modern reading machine was designed by Agostino Ramelli who published the idea in his Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostina Ramelli in 1588. It was apparently never built in the early modern period itself, but rumour has it that Daniel Libeskind built a version for the Biennale in Venice in 1985.

The machine consists of a big wheel that can house several books, and which can be turned in order to bring the right book in front of the reader’s eyes. Ramelli writes:

"This is a beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anyone who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are indisposed and tormented by gout. For with this machine a man can see and turn through a large number of books without moving from one spot. Moreover, it has another fine convenience in that it occupies very little space in the place where it is set, as anyone of intelligence can clearly see from the drawing."

Some see this reading machine as the forerunner of the modern computer. The funny thing is that the latest developments in the field of computer screens are paradoxically directed towards the emulation of the old-fashioned sheet of paper. Philips and Polymer Vision are developing the Readius: a screen so thin and flexible that you can roll it up and put it in your pocket, like a scroll of paper. Ideal for reading e-books on.

 

via

William Faulkner. [Map of Yoknapatawpha County]

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. Soon the family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, but by the time William was five, they were settled in Oxford, the county seat of Lafayette County.

The layout of the real Lafayette County became, in Faulkner's imagination, the basic outline of Yoknapatawpha County: the same rectangular space divided by roads, rivers, and a railroad into four quadrants, divided further by diagonal secondary roads.

Faulkner drew two maps of this territory, one to accompany the first edition of Absalom, Absalom! in 1936, and the second more condensed and including the titles of his Yoknapatawpha novels in big capitals, prepared in 1946 for the Viking Portable Faulkner. Both indicate that Faulkner is the creator of the region, either the ׂsole owner and proprietor׃ or the person responsible for the surveying and mapping.

Of all Faulknerױs novels, by far the majority are concerned with Yoknapatawpha County and its people. Read More

via incoming signals

visual poetry-

Ariel Malka is a designer and programmer from Tel-Aviv, working freelance on a wide range of new-media projects. Occasionally teaching at Camera Obscura School of Art, he spends most of his spare time developing the concept of chronotext.

Given a certain acquaintance with the Metaphysics of Spirals, it is possible to represent a landscape using one single continuous line...

Naturally using the underlying spiral as a medium for the text: The Book of Isaiah, Chapter 40.

This book is the only Dead Sea Scroll found in its entirety and chapter 40 deals with the return of exile, from Babylon to Jerusalem, through the wilderness.

 

 
Starting to look for readability solutions...
In this sketch, it is possible to read the whole chapter by positioning the camera at the zenith.

 

 

via time is Art

Diary of a Nobody. A Victorian satire in diary form.