Archive for the 'D' Category

Headfarm: Luft – Linie

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

R: Dein Haus ist nicht mein Haus, ist nicht kein Haus, wenn es auch nicht mein Haus ist, das keines ist, das Du Haus nennen würdest.
H: Vertreiben wir uns aus dem Haus der Sprache!
M: Krieg den Palasthütten des Kleingeists!
R: Gut, gehen wir nicht mehr auf Heidiegger ein.
D: Eine Linie ziehen, Sand mit einem Finger teilen, dass etwas, ein Kontinuum (sie, die Linie)  im Sand, ein Tunnel sichtbar wird, bleibt, bis das Wasser kommt, Wind, Wetter, Zeit; schneller verstreicht der Laut, den ich in die Luft drucke.

Headfarm: Solo (gen Babel)

Saturday, March 15th, 2014

D: Meine Finger verhaken sich im Gottesauge. Ich suche nach einem Wochenbeginn
und finde ihn nicht auf der Bahn. Mein Bruder wird meine Schwester wird mein Bruder in der Geometrie der Planeten. Schon kommt die Abfahrt, Auffahrt; am Strassenrand die Gebeine der Toten, deren Schuhe nun andere tragen. Ich zahle mit Visa, suspendiere mich vom Pensum, verliere Halt. Im Hotel ist es dann sicher wieder besser.

Headfarm

Friday, July 6th, 2012

Ich markiere eines durch …

ein anderes mittels __

.

Eines ist ein Zeichen, das andere auch, allerdings ein Zeichen, dafür, dass ich nicht das rechte Zeichen finde.
… verbinde ich mit Worten, Namen, Helden (Ritter, deren Geschichten, sich wie Schrauben  lösen und anziehen lassen);
__ mit Worten, Fragen, die Spannungen auslösen oder Gelassenheit verleihen.

Turing, Kues, Spinoza, Jabès, Duchamp: Namen, die auf Werke verweisen, auf das das Jahr 1912,  und damit auf mindestens zwei Weisen, Maschinen zu verwenden:

Um zu herrschen;
um sich einer Herrschaft zu fügen.

1 I (T) v 1 – (T)
2 I (U) v 2 – (U)
3 I (R) v 3 – (R)

Athanasius Kircher: A sunflower clock. The flower turns naturally to the sun. A pointer fixed to the flower (F) indicates the time on a ring (DE) that encircles it *

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

[ZB Magnet 3] Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), Magnes sive De arte magnetica tripartium ( Köln: Iodocus Kalcoven, 1643), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, Z 113, fol. 644.

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Instrument for the Drawing of Wiggly Lines

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Albrecht Dürer, Unterweisung oder Underrichtung der Messung, in: Opera (Arnhem: Johann Jansen, 1604), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, ZB XXII, D. III.

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Headfarm: A Discussion on Globes, Pointers, Stones

Friday, February 25th, 2011

Determing the circumference of the earth by measuring the different angles of a star appearing above Bale and Cologne. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel: Henricus Petrus, 1544), Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Alte Drucke und Rara, Res 121, p. 5.

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Alexander Neckam: … and the sailors will thus know how to direct their course when the pole star is concealed through the troubled state of the atmosphere

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Realo at Headfarm understands everything in terms of texts and writing.
H (andy) is a figure of thought. H insists that discussions should be productive.
J. discusses implicit or hidden structures of power and chances to subvert them.
Magnes wants to find out how the others have constructed their relation to him.
D. is an artist.

Realo: Suddenly, it’s there …
Magnes: Suddenly? It was there already, used by sailors.
Realo: By men who didn’t write, you mean?
H.: Men who didn’t have time to write.
J.: Men who didn’t think about writing.
Realo: Men who didn’t pay attention, because they weren’t writing.

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Luchsharn, Magnetberg, schreiende Steine – Medieval Magnetic Wonderland

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

D: Now, fasten your seatbelts for a fantastic journey. On board you’re invited to drink urine from an eagle eyed cat, the lynx.* You will pass stones which are able to gather fish on a spot, others which make horses noiseless, others which makes them noisy and above all stones which serve as pigments. They connect our eyes with the world under our feet.

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Headfarm: Stones as Means

Friday, January 14th, 2011

D. Bon, again bon. Bon, Mister wise man. I hope you’ll take pleasure in this book I’d like to show you. It offers a fascinating list of magnetic stones. The problem is: Nobody knows for sure who has written the book and at what time. It’s said that Alexander the Great wrote a letter to his teacher Aristotle. He wrote about spectacular, but strange stones he found on his way to India. Modern scholarship has argued that parts of the text are coming from a novel, again a special novel, a novel which grew over centuries and found a wonderful form in Nizami’s The Book of Alexander the Great (known variously as the Sikandar Nama or Iskandarnama). The book was written ca. 1202, more than 100 years later than Marbod of Rennes’ (1035-1123) poem on magnets.
Handy (the man for today’ s problems at Headfarm): Why should I note this?
Realometer: Because of Christianity. It deduces from a certain text that man gains power over the world, over animals, plants, stones, everything which is under heaven.
Jabès: Man or woman?
Realometer: At this time women were regarded as inferior to men. Women were subjected to the will of men. At least in the medieval Christian context. According to Lynn White this is when the ecological crisis of today begins. The crisis is an effect of a special interpretation of the biblical text. With his lapidary Marbod of Rennes then introduces a new approach to stones. Stones become means. They become means which man uses to dominate the world under heaven.

Magnes=Christ?

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

D.: Bon. Again very good, we’ve learned that a text is generated by other texts like a secret is made out of secrets or out of books. Your attitude is very similar to Umberto Eco’s, who is a great teacher of things that can only be perceived by reading texts artists are usually not willing to read.
J.: I don’t want to start a discussion on teaching attitudes. Please do not strengthen the connection between writing texts on one hand and teaching on the other. Writing and reading are subversive strategies. They can be, at least.
D.: They’re also artistic, as well as technological, strategies. Or rather technological possibilities for artistic strategies. This is the reason why Cage was so fascinated by Buckminster Fuller and almost everything he heard about electricity. We are talking about an energy which enables us to publish posts.
Magnes: Electricity and digital media have inspired a form of digital theology. Magnetism offers a different approach. I would say it leads to polytheism, not to monotheism (Zeus, God: The masters of lightning and thunder). Magnetism is an invitation to take the risk of looking beyond, into the transcendental or into the suprasensible another way.
D.: Okay, I will tell you something.
Realometer: Before you start, please allow me to add why I find the images of staffs and of the shoe important. We could look at them in the blog yesterday. The shoe and the staffs are mentioned by Pliny and not by Claudian. They are important because via staff and shoe a fiction was possible: The fiction of Magnes the shepherd who was the first to discover magnetic attraction. So far no image from antiquity, neither a fresco nor a stone cut, that shows Magnes has been found. The antique notion of Magnes – as far as I can see today – is limited or restricted to texts. Nevertheless, the images of Jesus Christ as a shepherd can somehow be read as representations of Magnes by non-pictorial means.