The Medium is the Message

Today many people are active on the internet and communicating globally. If our technology was still limited to shortwave communications, I doubt so many would feel the need to broadcast themselves around the world.  Perhaps the key factor here is the preference for written over verbal communications?  Compare the preference people have to "text" rather than speak over their telephones.

For a quick glance at the contemporary world of shortwave radio communications, please click HERE.

Q.E.D.

The Amazon description is similarly convincing.  Please click HERE.

Pendant

Venus and Cupid astride a fanciful fish.  Gold, enamel, rubies and pearls.  Italian or German, ca. 1580?

Meanwhile, 249 miles above the Earth's surface...

International Space Station

The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the sky. Click HERE to track the station as it passes overhead.

propaedeutic

adient ipseity inter alia

Logarithmic Image of the Universe by Pablo Carlos Budassi

To learn more about Budassi's work, please click HERE.

Professor Hodges on the July 2 Talk

My International Authors colleague Horace Jeffery Hodges has blogged on the paper I read Sunday, July 2 at the WAH Center.  The title of his brief essay is "Carter Kaplan on Truth and Free Speech."

In the introduction to my paper, I equivocate (in a good way) about the presence of politics (and, significantly, the absence of politics) in the editorial process. Of course, that "absence" of politics itself has antecedents worth looking at, hence the attention I give, again at the beginning of the paper, to Milton's Areopagitica. To view Professor Hodges' reflections, please click HERE.

To learn about Professor Hodges' new collection of poetry, Radiant Snow, please click HERE.

Illustrating the Visions: Alloys of Art, Poetry, Politics, and Philosophy

Terrance Lindall has published an on-line ebook with with the full text of my paper and photographs from the July 2 talk. To view the free book, please click HERE.

Aesthetics over science, or a deliberately inaccurate image of the Earth?

I don't have to explain to the Highbrow Commonwealth the thoughtfulness Stanley Kubrick put into his films, where each image, each movement, each word of dialogue, each character's expression, each subtle turn of plot... is is some way nuanced to exact an aesthetic response, or is designed to produce meaning, or is suggestive of complex themes--some of which take decades to surface in one critical discussion or another.

Today I would like share an image from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  What has captured my attention is the vague appearance of the surface of the Earth. The film was released in 1968, and for years astronauts in orbit had been taking photographs of our planet.  Now, look at a sample of those photographs, and then compare them to the image of the Earth's surface from the film.  Why in this particular detail--and Kubrick was nothing if not a stickler for details--I say, why doesn't the Earth in the film resemble the photographs that had been taken of the Earth's surface by Mercury or Gemini astronauts?

Earth as photographed from Gemini 11

Southern tip of the Indian subcontinent from an altitude of 760 kilometers (Gemini 11).

Now look at this still from 2001.  It's beautiful, but it's also--what? Let's say, "scientifically vague". Was this the director's deliberate intention? I want to emphasize that Kubrick was meticulous in such matters--the technological artifacts and astronomical subjects exhibited in the film were each carefully-guided representational exercises based upon the latest scientific information. Naturally, apropos to the image of the Earth, Kubrick had the resources to create a more authentic image in these orbital scenes.  But instead we get this exuberant aquamarine fantasy, moreover juxtaposed alongside a spectacularly detailed technological marvel.

Terrance Lindall endorses Radiant Snow

To purchase Radiant Snow, please click HERE.

July 4, 1776

IN Congress, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Please click HERE to read the rest of the document.

Please click HERE to read about the origins of these ideas..

Talk at the WAH Center, July 2, 2017

河鍋 暁斎

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), Skeleton Shamisen Player in Top Hat With Dancing Monster, 1881-1889

Occultation of Saturn

"...in a free and open encounter..."

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

                              --John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644 

David Martin, "Paul at Areopagus",  1639-1721

Statement: Christopher Arabadjis

Two pieces from artist Christoper Arabadjis appear in Emanations: 2 + 2 = 5; and then a great many more appear in Emanations: I Am Not a Number, which presents a number of his designs with an "hexagonal" theme (incidentally reflecting the number of the volume). His work combines science and fine art intelligently and suggestively, and so fits very well with our purposes. Here is a statement of his aesthetic idea:

I draw nearly every day using ballpoint pen. I have done so for over six years. I start every drawing the same way with a mark (or shape) and a rule for how to repeat it. A rule usually consists of specifying how different the second mark can be from the first. For example, Untitled (2016-12-001) [below] started with a red square somewhere in the middle of the paper. The rule for repetition was that the next mark had to be red, four sided, and touch the corners of the first, but its internal angles could change turning it into, say, a parallelogram. The pattern resulted in a wavy checkerboard.

As I make marks I try to rigorously adhere to the rules. Once this process is set in motion, I let go and see where it takes me. Of course each mark is a small yet conscious decision, but I work quickly enough that it does not feel that way. In fact I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I am like two people when I draw. The other is an observer who watches a creator who looks like he knows what he is doing and where he is going.

If a drawing seems to stall under the weight of too much homogeneity I will re-calibrate the rule, loosening it to allow for greater diversity. If there is not enough tension, a second system will be introduced consisting of a new mark and rule combination. In the aforementioned drawing I introduced a second mark that was a blue four sided shape that had to fully touch all of the red marks around it, e.g. it filled in the white areas of the red checkerboard wherever it extended to. However, when they reached the edge where the red marks ended, they could extend beyond the boundary in the same way the red marks had colonized a region. 

Sometimes the second system is one of opposition and sometimes one of compatibility, but the goal is for the systems to complement each other for the greater good of the whole. There is no limit to the number of systems that I would introduce, but the more systems, the more difficult it is to resolve a piece. 

I currently use red and blue ink to explore the way color interacts, but only two colors in order to limit the outcomes and isolate the connection between cause and effect. I work like a scientist because I was trained to think logically from a young age, and because I studied physics for fifteen years. I think of these works as mini physics calculations or simulations. Like building my own universe from scratch, or as we say in physics from first principles. The development of each drawing mimics the process of growth with a built-in mechanism for mutation – the inability of my hand or my mind not to make a mistake. In fact I’ve come to see mistakes as acts of creation.

Christopher Arabadjis's work will be on view during my talk this Sunday at the WAH Center. To learn more about the event, please click HERE.

Through Optic Glass

…his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, 
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.

-- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

Milton visiting Galileo, colored engraving after a painting by Annibale Gatti

Galileo's drawings of the moon, 1610

"...nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness..."

Milton visiting Galileo when a prisoner of the Inquisition. Alexander Hart, 1847.

“There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish.”

― John Milton, Areopagitica A speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, 1644

And on Facebook...

Please click HERE.