Like Potted Plants

in an Office
L
o
b
b
y



K
a
r
l
o
s

GIl

 i
n
d
e
x

t
e
x
t
s

text #1

text #4

text #7

text #10

text #13

text #16

Like knotted
glands in an
offish goby

Holograms
Roses

The Nose
Issue

Filling a Hole
with Plaster

Ghost in
the Machine

Image Scanner

by William Gibson

by Edmund Husserl

by Beln Zahera

(and removing the surplus

with a spatula)

by Karlos Gil

by Benjamin Cheverton
and Jules Duboscq

by Nora Baron

text #2

text #5

text #8

text #11

text #14

text #17

Towards an
ergonomic telepathy.

Overlapping
Figures (ii)

Holly
Spam

Mutatis Mutantis

Moquette

Mysticism

by Florence Pike

by Bertrand Russell

by Carlos Fdez-Pello

by Karlos Gil

by Karlos Gil

by Martin Stevens
and Sami Merilaita

text #3

text #6

text #9

text #12

text #15

text #18

Summa
Technologiae

Plastic Fragments

The Semiotic
Hinge

Aestethics of
Interruption

Objections to
Representations

Tractatus
Herbis

by Alfred North Whitehead

by Janne Vanhanen

by John Sutton

by Ludwig Wittgenstein

by Stanislaw Lem

by Jean-Franois
Lyotard

Like knotted
glands in an
offish goby
stands for like potted plants in an office
lobby at the level of speech and writing, in
a somewhat similar form of utterance and
appearance that even disregarding meaning
nonetheless produces it.
The experience of words echoing other words
is reminiscent of Benjamin Chevertons invention - a reducing size machine - which was
based on the mechanism of the pantograph: a
structure that resembled an accordion, formed
by a linkage of parallelograms with pointers
placed in both arms, of which one would
follow the model whilst the other would draw
or sculpt a copy at a different scale.

Like potted
plants in an
office lobby
[0]

By proportionally reproducing the location

and distance between each point that informs
a figure, what is repeated is not only the figure
but its contour, the line that speaks of every
position at once and reveals the transit from
one form to the next. Thus, beyond the all
too famous discussions on the original and
the copy lies the question of this movement
that makes replication possible. The phrase
embedded in multiple shifts. The path traced
by repetition.

A replica does not refer
to a model at first but re-enacts the motion by which it
is produced. The experience of objects echoing other
objects expects and at the same time recalls this movement, which unites them in a sort of fraternity while
keeping them apart.

precedes Like knotted glands in an offish

goby, where like remains identical in
both as to indicate or exactly reproduce the
movement that connects distant figures, be
it under the logic of resemblance or that of
meaning. The like entails remembrance
and the retrieval of memories. Every time
we reproduce this journey by saying like,
we actualize this movement and anticipate
the next.

[1]

Even if the word replica seems

to emphasize the apparition of
an exact copy the term itself
contains a specific movement by
which we are reminded of the
Latin word replicare meaning
to repeat, to fold again and
later to reply.

So by uttering like knotted
glands in an offish goby, I come back to
like potted plants in an office lobby to
which I had replied like knotted glands
in an offish goby while overhearing like
dotted pants in a selfish hobby.

Like knotted
glands in an
offish goby
sets in motion a play on words, like
potted plants in an office lobby. Each case
containing thirty one letters and seven words
that look (a)like and sound (a)like but
cannot merge. It is this reverberation, this
distance: the evidence that one cannot speak
in vacuum.

[2]

Echoing suggests once

again the movement
created by enunciation,
the reflection of sound
waves, from one surface
to another until they
reach the listener.

For whenever
one replicates, someone else
repeats and responds.

T o w a r d s
a n
e r g o n o m i c
t e l e p a t h y

Etymologically, telepathy describes remote experience - tele meaning distance and

pathos meaning feeling or perception. Despite its theoretical coinage I propose
to read telepathy beyond the caricature of getting inside someone elses head
or understanding the thoughts that others claim to be having at a given time,
silently. That would somehow portray telepathy --and language-- as a set of clear
cut meanings and solid concepts, notwithstanding the abstract process these two
undergo in order to transform phenomenological inputs into inteligible outputs;
ignoring a bodily and aesthetic process that is profoundly linguistic yet highly unstable. Telepathy shouldnt be just a smartphone although we can definitely use a
smartphone telepathically.
We can argue that the very moment we are aware of an experience we are
remembering it already, distorting it, mediating it linguistically. Live experience
would be an illusion generated by just-recorded stimulus: as it happens with the
speed of light, saying we have a direct experience is a colloquial way of overlooking a delay, so small, that reveals itself only at a great distance: just because the
delay is invisible to the eye we shouldnt rule out telepathy as part of the process,
dismissing it as an impossible psychic device of scientific fiction. In the contemporary scheme experience, as language, would not be what we have culturally
constructed as our sensation proper but a relation of different exteriors; our own
experience is always objectified; our senses are ways of sharing with something
else. A caress, a reading, a landscape.



. Even when we have an inner feeling, an internal experience
of ourselves such as a headache, the flu or sadness, we submit to the
reification of this pain or sensation as an autonomous object within
ourselves, hence manageable.

We subdivide the self and treat the experience as a temporary hardrive partition so that even
the internal propioception is materialized, that is, formalised or verbalized, and taken care of
lingistically. That is why, to feel the different parts of your body when you are still, you have
to focus on them, name them, separate yourself momentarily through mental words or meditation, to give that inadverted constant feeling of being still a shape you can adapt the self to.
This

v

e

r

s

i

o

n

of experience is not precisely new and can be easily related to the multiple
psychoanalitic branches of the lacanian sort. However, linking our own experience to actual telepathy might prove to be a horse of a different color.
The traditional telepathic tale of being able to transmit what I feel or what
I think without saying a single word is built upon the assumption that there
is something clear to transmit; that there is a total control of the subject; that
we can truly decide and define what it is that we feel or see or read. It assumes
that when we think we are basically talking in silence, which is quite an inaccurate statement. It indirectly classifies experience as something more truthful
to the self than its equivocal rational idealisation. Eventually, this traditional
approach considers the linguistic role of the body ignoring it as the continuous
and blurry organ it is: instead, the body is depicted as the aristotelian proof of
an unequivocal identity; it is the device where experience leaves an objective
physical imprint allowing for one to know things better from the inside of
this imprinted body than others do from the outside. However, I am inclined to
believe that the illusion of owning the self is based on the quantity of our encounters with certain external objects and not on the veracity of these innner
experiences which are, quite the opposite, consistently distanced, mediated and
telepathic.This could help explain synesthetic phenomena, ghost limbs, intuition or analogue magic as adaptations of the self to objects beyond the constitutive neighbouring ones: a sign that we can be equally telepathic when we
imagine a moving rock in the middle of the Arctic than we are when touching
a keyboard with our finger.






In other words, it is
the amount of dealing with our bodily objects that veils distance and creates
the illusion of a consistent, enclosed form of sentience that is ours. And
it is based on that, that we agree on a definition of experience that can be
culturally integrated and socially shared a unitarian non-transferrable me,
that is, paradoxically, one of the greatest social conventions of capitalism and
mass consummerism. So when we agree that our experiences are unique and
non-transferrable other than by verbal or alphabetic forms of language we
are ironically eliminating difference and undermining the equivocal nature of
language and perception; we accept everyone knows positively who they are
and what they are thinking at any time: we admit the only way for telepathy
to exist is to be able to transfer this chimera of a true and positive self
experience; we say that everything else, any other intuition or guess, is plain
fiction, trickery or mere coincidence. Yet, if we think that the aforementioned
blurriness of the continuous body is also linguistic that language is not clear
but a blur of feelings and signs of every sort-- and that experience is not a
pure stimulus but that it starts by translating our own experience to ourselves
in a dirty, delayed, mediated and contaminated manner that I cannot be fully
sure of what my own experience is unless I incur in a considerable amount
of belief , when all that happens, then our own experience becomes
a regular byproduct of language and becomes subject to all the mediatic
aberrations of translation, dissemination and interpretation, making telepathy
a mundane, tangible material means of transfering it.

Again, as postructuralist psychoanalysis
would put it, it is not only that communication with the other
is erratic and absent, but that the very subject proceeds from
this negative othering and blind-spot; that we are already blindguessing what we experience ourselves without having to try
it on someone else. The telepathic diferential would add to the
theory that this constant and psychoanalytical blind-spot make us
natural-born-telepaths, and that telepathy understood as some sort
of technological feat for the positive transmission of information
is quite a serious political threat to the otherwise open-ended
etymological nature of telepathy itself: to hear the thoughts
of someone else in plain english 5000 miles away is, I insist,
degrading experience and language to mere letters that are decoded
against a standardised dictionary definition.

On the contrary, if we embrace that telepathy is inherent to the

way the subject experiments themselves, it is not that far-fetched
to imagine it can extend that native ability to experience someone
elses through the same erratical speculation and assimilation they
already use against their own experience. This approach to telepathy
not only draws a scheme of the linguistic othering, but describes
the mediated blurriness of the self to its own material being
and dismisses erratic translation as the proof that telepathy with
other things does not exist. In a world where experience is esentially
elusive to err in our predictions is precisely what empowers us,
telepaths, to participate of an experience that belongs to
nobody completely.
If the past 100 years have debunked the western positivist notion of
the self, of language and of experience, telepathy becomes nothing
near a paranormal power but a fundamental quality of matter: it
reveals itself as the very way we culturally, socially and eccentrically
invent our psychic uniformity, at a distance with ourselves and
our bodily and physical borders. Telepathy becomes the ergonomic
device for linguistic and cultural adaptation: it is the tool we use to
adapta an absent identity to a set of physical things or the procedure
by which the matter is dreaming about us; a body to a tool, a place to
a mind. If we picture telepathy as a way of emancipating ourselves
from the concept or our own thoughts and experiences and as
long as we do not take any telepathic reading literally --starting
with our own experience-- we can hastily give in to the pleasure
of inconsistently and ergonomically predicting what others are
thinking. As a matter of fact we are already doing it. We cant stop
doing it. Telepathy is acknowledging we have been doing it all

a

l

o

n
g.

Summa
T
e
c
h
n
o
l
o
giae

Talk about the future. But isnt talking about future roses at least an inappropriate occupation for someone lost in the highly inflammable forests of the
present? And the investigation of the thorns of these roses, the search for the
problems of our great-grandchildren, while we cannot even deal with todays
abundance of problems, does such scholasticism not border absurdity? If only
we had the justification of searching for means to strengthen our optimism
or of doing it for the love of truth, clearly visible in a future without storms,
even literally taken, after the possibility of climate control. The justification for
these words, however, does not lie in any academic passion, nor in unshakable
optimism which imposes the faith that, whatever may happen, the outcome
will be favorable. The justification is at the same time simpler, more practical,
and maybe more modest, since while I am preparing to write about the future,
I am simply doing what I am able to do, no matter how good I am at this,
since it is my only ability. But if this is true, then my work will be no less, no
more dispensable than any other, because every work is based on the assumption that the world exists and that it will continue to exist.
Thus having made sure that the intention is free of unprincipledness, let us
ask about the extent of the subject and the method. We will talk about various
aspects of civilization that can be thought up, and which can be derived from
todays prerequisites, however small the probability of their realization may
be. The foundations for our hypothetical constructions, in turn, shall be given
by technologies, i.e., the ways, dependent on knowledge and social abilities,
in which goals are realized, goals chosen by the community as well as those
which nobody had in mind initially.

The mechanism of the various technologies, existing as well as possible ones, is not of interest
to me, and I would not have to deal with it, if the creative activities of man were, godlike,
free of any spoiling caused by the unwanted - if we could, now or at some time, realize
our intentions in a pure state, coming close to the methodological precision of Genesis, if, by
saying let there be light, we could obtain, as a final product, the very light, without any
unwanted ingredients. However, the above mentioned bifurcation of goals, or even the replacement of the chosen goals by different, often unwanted ones, is a typical phenomenon. Moaners
find similar faults even in the work of God, especially since the introduction of a prototype
for beings endowed with reason and the start of mass production of this model, Homo
Sapiens - but this part of reflection is better left to theo-technologists. It suffices to say that,
in doing anything, man almost never knows what he is actually doing - in any case he does
not know it all the way. To reach for the extreme: the destruction of Life on Earth, so possible
today, was not intended by any of the discoverers of atomic energy.
Thus technologies are of interest to me somehow out of necessity, since
a certain civilization includes all that the general public hoped for, as well
as things which were nobodys intention. Sometimes, even more often, a
technology is created by chance, e.g., in searching for the philosophers stone,
porcelain was invented, but the fraction of intentional, conscious goals, in the
set of all events that are able to initiate technologies, is growing as knowledge
progresses. What is indisputable is that, as they become rare, surprises can in
turn grow to apocalyptic dimensions. As was actually mentioned




above.

Dilemmas
Cognitive ergonomics is concerned with mental processes,
such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor
response, as they affect interactions among humans and
other elements of a system.[5] (Relevant topics include
mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance,
human-computer interaction, human reliability, work
stress and training as these may relate to human-system
and Human-Computer Interaction design.)

[5]

There are only few technologies which are not double-edged, as is shown for
example by the scythes attached to the wheels of the Hittite chariots, or the
proverbial plowshares forged into swords. Every technology is, in principle, an
artificial extension of the natural, inherent to everything that is alive, tendency
to rule the environment, or at least not to be defeated by it in the struggle for
existence. Homeostasis - the scholarly name for the striving for equilibrium,
i.e., for survival in defiance of change - developed chalky and chitin skeletons
which could resist the force of gravitation, legs enabling mobility, wings
and fins, canine teeth making eating easier, horns, jaws, digestive systems,
protecting armors and camouflage shapes, until this led to the independence
of organisms from their environment by regulation of a constant body
temperature. In this way small islands of decreasing entropy in a world of
general entropy increase were created. Evolution does not restrict itself to
this; from organisms, from types, classes and varieties of plants and animals in
turn it creates superior entities, no islets anymore, but islands of homeostasis,
forming the whole surface and atmosphere of the planet. The living nature,
the biosphere, is at the same time cooperation and mutual eating, an
alliance which is inseparably connected with fight, as is demonstrated by
every hierarchy that has been investigated by ecologists: these are, especially
among animal forms, pyramids, at the top of which rule the large predators,
eating smaller animals, and these in turn others still, and only on the very
ground, at the bottom of lifes kingdom, acts the green transformer of solar
into biochemical energy, omnipresent on the land and in the oceans, which by
billions of inconspicuous blades carries the changing, for taking on new forms
continuously, but constant, for not coming to and end as a whole, massifs of life.

Homeostatic
activity, which used technologies as specific organs, made
man the ruler of the Earth, a powerful one actually only in the eyes of the
apologist, which he is himself. In view of
climatic perturbations, earthquakes, the
rare, but possible danger of impact of
a large meteor, man is in principle
as helpless as he was in the
last Ice Age

Sure - he developed methods of assistance for the victims of such and of other
cataclysms. Some of them he is able to predict - if only approximately. He is
still far from homeostasis on a planetary scale, not to speak of homeostasis of
stellar dimensions. Unlike most animals, man does not so much adjust himself
to the environment, as he rebuilds the environment according to his needs.
Will this ever be possible with regard to the stars? Will there arise, maybe in a
very distant future, a technology of remote controlling of intrasolar processes,
such that creatures which are inconceivably small compared to the mass of the
sun are able to arbitrarily control its billion-year fire? It seems to me that this
is possible, and dont I say this to praise the human genius, which is famous
enough in itself, but, on the contrary, in order to make room for contrast. Up
to now, man did not turn into giant. Immense became only his possibilities to
do good or bad to others. He who will be able to light and extinguish stars will
have the power to destroy whole inhibited globes, turning from astrotechnician
to stellar murderer, a criminal of a special, the cosmic, class. If the former was
possible, then also the latter, however improbable, however small the chance
that it might come true, will be possible.
An improbability - I necessarily have to explain at once - which is not based on my faith in
the necessary triumph of Ormuz over Ahriman. I dont trust any promise, I don believe in
assurances based on the so called humanism. The only way to deal with a certain technology
is another technology. Today, man knows more about his dangerous inclinations than he knew
a hundred years ago, and in another hundred years his knowledge will be even more complete.
Then he will be able to benefit from





it.

Overlapping figures
Digital Metaplasticity describes plastic qualities of digital
media configurations and its expressions through the
applications of abstract art languages and methodologies to computational symbolic systems. The metaplastic
media, one of disciplines objects, within its own aesthetic
and semantic codes define a new culture of the representation. Interaction processes defined with metaplastic codes,
trace behaviors and plastic multisensorial qualities.
6

H O L O G R A M S
O

S
E

S

She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No,
history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History
was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab
driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fr

a

g

m

e

nt reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but
delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.

Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body.
European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the
smell of dust...and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasnt met you yet; youre hardly
out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl
up and circle - and static takes loves body, wipes it clean and gray.
Waves

white sound

break along a

beach that isnt

there.

And the tapes ends.
The inducers light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered
and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling
toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing
a whole hell never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary
conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a flat packet of drugs
- a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: Were each others fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer
now, or more real, for his having been there?

[3]

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains
cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote
stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the
temptation of rhythm and music. The rush
evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms
used for habitat selection, metastasize into
art. Thrills that once had to be earned
in increments of fitness can now be had
from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise
unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors,
and the system moves beyond modeling the
organism. It begins to model the very process
of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with
endless recursion and irrelevant simulations.
Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every
natural genome, it persists and proliferates
and produces nothing but itself.

Overlapping
figures ii

More and more people

buy objects for intellectual
and spiritual nourishment.
People do not buy my coffee
makers, kettles and lemon
squeezers because they
need to make coffee, to boil
water, or to squeeze lemons,
but for other reasons.

The
T

n
o
s
e
Issue

Discourse produces sense

by maintaining regular spaces between terms; the gural produces sense by
engaging the desiring body in its relation to signs
that are plastic, visual, and dense.The issue of Discourse,
Figure concerns thus the role of the signier in the formation
of sense. Is its plasticity a dimension that erases itself in the mechanical production of sense, or does it generate an excess of sense
that involves a libidinal involvement with an object in its density and
spatiality? The gural designates the gesture that breaks through language and reveals its purely visual forms. This aspect of signication,
cannot be reduced to the logic of discourse, to its communicability and
transparency, because language requires regularity, and desire is apriori
irregular and labile. The issue of discursive communication is to
transmit the sense of the phrase the tree is green by coding it an
defciently providing the code to as many subjects so that it can
be decoded and understood. The issue of art in relation to the
phrase the tree is green is to experiment with the rules of
the sentence, transgress them and integrate into the
sentence a type of experience that is foreign to the
code itself: color the words, disintegrate their
order, displace the syntax.

The sign cannot be reduced to signaling an exterior

correlate. The correlate becomes a sign at the moment
when it is denoted, revealing some of its components
while hiding others. Signs do not simply indicate
objects.To the contrary,the object becomes an object
through signs, meaning that signs partially disclose
the objects. Otherwise said, the act of relating to
an object turns the object into a sign. However,
discourses fail to entirely convey an exterior correlate,
and that is because opacity is central both to the
sphere of communication and to the exterior objects
themselves. Language cannot assimilate an exterior
correlate inside its structure without transforming it,
delivering one facade and hiding others. Put inanalytical semiotic terms, language cannotinteriorize
a denotatum, an existing referent,without a process
of transforming itthe object is never rendered as
such but isalways already a semiotized object, and
its semiotization implies a selection of some of its
qualities because the denotatum is anopaque entity,
evincing one side at a time.

[7]

The sign
corresponds to a
designatum, that
is, to a class of
object that gives it
its regularity and
justies its sense.
As a gure, the sign
is affected in its
plasticity and
appearance.

H O L L Y
S P A M

Spam or aesthetics may have

initially been a useful adaptation: this is the only way that
it could have arisen in the first
place (see Darwin on sexual
selection, and Elizabeth Groszs
recent gloss on this). But spam
or art quickly outgrew this purpose; it has now become parasitic, and replicates itself even at
its hosts expense (cf: peacocks
tails). It serves no further purpose any more. Spam or art is a
virus; and, insofar as we have
aesthetic sensibilities (including
self-consciousness and dwelling
just in the present moment), we
are that virus.

1
I see a poem as a multi-coloured
strip behind peeling plaster, in
separate, shining fragments.
2
I see a veil, a diaphonous tint,
nearly invisible.

Our thoughts and bodies, our

lives, are needlessly recursive
and wasteful. Our lives are
pointless luxuries in a
Darwinian war universe.
If we are the dominant species
on Earth at the moment, this
may only be because we are in
the situation of flightless birds
and marsupials, in areas where
the placental mammals have not
yet arrived.

Metonymy, which participates in the structuring of every metaphor and can sometimes be a metaphor itself,
creates chains of signification that stretch in various directions
(Fig. 21). The screen uses both metaphor and metonymy to structure
space and time around appearances, and this is where it becomes
particularly useful in art criticism. Metonymy has to do with the
materiality of the sign, its potential for multiple meanings, ambiguity, and the creation of new meaning. Opposition creates an independent function capable of conveying abstract and invisible ideas.
Light and dark, day and night, left and right come to stand for the
most broadly cosmic and theological notions. The composite structure of the sign, described as the opposition of signified to signifier
(s/S). By stressing the arbitrariness by which different signifiers are
culturally chosen to signify things that must be common to cultural
groups (tree, arbre, Baum, etc.), the autor was able to demonstrate
the cooperative co-existence of two different realms of signification:
a metonymic realm that allows for substitution, modification, and
error; and a metaphoric realm that instates reality as a consistent
and coherent whole.

The Semiotic
Hinge (ii)
What if everything that
exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted,
events with ends but no beginnings with us
constantly making categories, seeking out, and
reconstructing, until we think we can see total
love, betrayal and defeat, although in reality
we are all no more than haphazard fractions.
The mind, for its own self-preservation, finds
and integrates scattered fragments. Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetualy collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out
of things, to make everything respond in one
unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory.

3
I hear a melody, screeching and
scratching behind the bells.

4
An old backside of a building.
Small patches of navy and red lie
indiscrimninately on top of white
plaster. Where time peeled white,
bare gray bricks remain. Decaying
colors hinting its previous lives
weathered its unique harmony.

PHILOSOPHY is the product of wonder. The effort after the

general characterization of the world around us is the romance
of human thought. The correct statement seems so easy, so
obvious, and yet it is always eluding us. We inherit the
traditional doctrine: we can detect the oversights, the
superstitions, the rash generalizations of the past ages. We
know so well what we mean and yet were main so curiously
uncertain about the formulation of any detail of our knowledge.
This word `detail lies at the heart of the whole difficulty. You
cannot talk vaguely about Nature in general. We must fix upon
details within nature and discuss their essences and their types
of interconnection. The world around is complex, composed of
details. We have to settle upon the primary types of detail in
terms of which we endeavour to express our understanding of
Nature. We have to analyse and to abstract, and to understand
the natural status of our abstractions.

obstacle

obstacle

obstacle

obstacle

obstacle

obstacle

Theoretical ergonomics. Fudge Factor. Theory and practice come

together through a
type of Western
confectionery, usually
soft, sweet, and rich
that it acquires a smooth,
creamy
consistency.
Chocolate is necessary to
hold back gravity and
achieve a static universe.
Fudge Factor is more
than a unique confection,
it is one of those simple
pleasures that give us a moment of peace as we enjoy
not only the fresh creamy
taste but the warm flood
of memories that it brings.
E x perience meets theory
through a viscous chocolate. The
enjoyment of fitting a
piece in a puzzle. The
pleasure
of touching the surface of the puzzle with
the palm of
the hand before it
vanishes. Adapting
elements that
fit the characteristics of the agents
who will use
them. Naming
a thing is
filling a
hole with
plaster
and rem ov i ng
the surplus with a spatula. Speaking is covering cakes with
sticky chocolate. Lambda is a joint in the skull, the 11th
letter of the Greek alphabet, the symbol for the fudge factor, the starting point of all prosthetic
designs and the secret ingredient
of chocolate.

mutatis
m
u
t
a
n
t
i
s

The use of the term crypsis has caused disagreement over the last few years,
but we argue that it comprises all traits that reduce an animals risk of
becoming detected when it is potentially perceivable to an observer. In terms
of vision, the term crypsis includes features of physical appearance (e.g.
coloration), but also behavioural traits, or both, to prevent detection. To
distinguish crypsis from hiding (such as simply being hidden behind an object
in the environment), we argue that the features of the animal should reduce
the risk of detection when the animal is in plain sight, if those traits are to be
considered crypsis. Hiding behind an object, for example, does not constitute
crypsis (see also Edmunds 1974), because there is no chance of the receiver
detecting the animal. We opt for this usage for several reasons. First, this is
broadly consistent with the literal and historical terminology; (albeit briefly)
Poulton (1890) used the term to describe colours whose object is to effect concealment; Cott (1940) uses cryptic appearance to encompass modifications
of structure, colour, pattern and habit; and Edmunds (1974) defines the terms
crypsis and cryptic, in terms of predators failing to detect prey. By contrast,
some researchers have defined crypsis as synonymous with background
matching, largely because they rapidly adopted Endlers (1978, 1984) definition of crypsis, where an animal should maximize camouflage by matching a
random sample of the background at the time and location where the risk of
predation is the greatest.
However, in recent years, it has become clear that the above definition is wrong on a number
of grounds. First, matching a random sample of the background does not necessarily minimize the risk of detection when an animal is found on several backgrounds (cf. compromise
camouflage; Merilaita et al. 1999, 2001; Houston et al. 2007; Sherratt et al. 2007).
Second, the risk of detection can be decreased by disruptive markings, where the emphasis is
on specifically breaking up tell-tale features of the animal.

Similar points can be made for other camouflage strategies, such as self-shadow concealment
(SSC). Finally, matching a random sample on even one background does not guarantee a high
level of background matching or crypsis (Merilaita & Lind 2005). This idea of random
sample is problematic even on simple backgrounds, because the animal may still be visible due
to spatial or phase mismatch with important background features, such as edges (Kelman et
al. 2007). For these reasons, we simply refer to crypsis as including colours and patterns that
prevent detection (but not necessarily recognition).

C
R
Y
P
S
I
S

C
R
Y
P
S
I
S

Despite the above, it is a subject of some debate as to which

other forms of camouflage also
prevent detection and should
therefore be included under
crypsis along with background
matching (see below). One of the
main arguments surrounding
what should be included under
crypsis regards disruptive coloration, and whether this prevents recognition or detection.
While some researchers (e.g.
Stobbe & Schaefer 2008) assert
that disruption prevents recognition of the animal, we argue that
disruptive coloration initially
prevents detection by breaking
up form (which in turn may also
influence recognition) and is
therefore a type of crypsis. For
instance, disruptive coloration
seemingly works by breaking
up edge information, so that a
predator may not detect a prey
item because the salient outlines
that may give away its presence
have been destroyed.

In countershading, an animal possesses

a darker surface on the side that typically faces light and a lighter opposite
side. Most researchers seem to now
agree that the term refers to the
appearance of the coloration and not
the function, especially as countershading may be involved with several
functions. These include compensation
of own shadow (SSC), simultaneously
matching two different backgrounds
in two different directions (background matching), changing the
three-dimensional appearance of the
animal, protection from UV light and
others (Ruxton et al. 2004). For the
purposes of this theme issue, the two
most relevant functions are SSC, where
the creation of shadows is cancelled
out by countershading, and obliterative shading, where the shadow/light
cues for three-dimensional form of the
animal are destroyed (Thayer 1896).
We argue that SSC prevents detection
by removing conspicuous shadows, and
obliterative shading prevents detection
by removing salient three-dimensional
information, so group both these under
crypsis.

[9]
7
The sky above the port was the
color of television, tuned to a dead
channel.

8
You needed a new pancreas. The
one we bought for you frees you from
a dangerous dependency. Thanks,
but I was enjoying that dependency.
9
And in the bloodlit dark behind his
eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from
the edge of space, hypnagogic images
jerking past like a film compiled of
random frames. Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala
of visual information.

In principle, some of the issues of defining types of camouflage may be cleared

up by specifically defining detection. However, at present, there are few good
ways of fully defining camouflage object properties correctly with respect to the
relevant viewers perception. Understandably, there is a real issue that distinguishing between detection and recognition in experimental situations is very
difficult, and it follows that preventing detection may also lead to a prevention
of recognition, e.g. the receiver does not recognize the form of the animal because it does not detect its edges. What matters is what the colour patterning or
other camouflage features primarily do. As such, masquerade need not prevent
detection but it does prevent recognition, whereas disruptive coloration and
SSC, along with background matching, primarily prevent detection.

An
additional form of camouflage, distractive markings, is also
included under crypsis because they seemingly prevent
detection. Although the distractive markings should be
detected, the outline of the body or other revealing
characteristics, and thus the main part of the animal, is not.
However, we note that little work has specifically
investigated distractive markings, and that one could also
argue that if part of the object is detected, then recognition
of the prey is also prevented. Clearly, there is much more
work to be done.

12
His vision crawled with ghost
hieroglyphs, translucent lines of
symbols arranging themselves
against the neutral backdrop of
the bunker wall. He looked at the
backs of his hands, saw faint neon
molecules crawling beneath the skin,
ordered by the unknowable code. He
raised his right hand and moved it
experimentally. It left a faint, fading
trail of strobed afterimages.

10
They damaged his nervous system
with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis
hotel, his talent burning out micron
by micron, he hallucinated for thirty
hours. The damage was minute,
subtle, and utterly effective. For
Case, whod lived for the bodiless
exultation of cyberspace, it was
the Fall.

11
Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators,
in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts . . .
A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every
computer in the human system.

13
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle,
his feet tangled in coils of discarded
fiberoptics. The arcades sea of
sound washed over him, receded,
returned. Rolling over, he sat up and
held his head.

Aesthetics


OF



INTERRUPTION

In science fiction, ghosts in machines

always appear as malfunctions, glitches,
interruptions in the normal flow of things.
Something unexpected appears seemingly
out of nothing and from nowhere. Through
a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting
glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As
electricity has become the basic element of the
world we live in, the steady hum of power
grids and their flowing immaterial essences
slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of everyday machinery, the ghostly rapport has also
relocated into the domain of current fluctuations, radio interference and misread data.
Early telegraph experimenters heard strange
raps and clicks issuing from disturbances in
Earths magnetic field, seemingly communication from some other side; Thomas Edison
tried to put together a radio device to address
denizens of other worlds; Constantin Raudive, Raymond Cass and Friedrich Jrgenson
spent hours and hours attempting to capture
voices of the dead onto magnetic tape; radio
antennas at Arecibo Observatory are pointed
skywards, waiting for extraterrestrial signals.
The presence of some outside force has
always been supposed to be apparent through
interference and interruption.

[2]
Actual facts about these manifestations are
not really important. The interesting thing
is that every new medium seems to open
up a new kind of outside, every new mode
of perception leaving out, or even creating,
something imperceptible, and on the other
hand bringing out something previously out
of reach. Erik Davis has named the outside
boundary of electronic media as the electromagnetic imaginary, meaning that many
animistic or alchemistic notions of essential
energies and life spirits have been translated
into the concept of electricity, and remaining
in the technological unconscious. Machines
seem to be inhabiting some kind of life, even
as it is an extension of ourselves. The sheer
uncanniness of a disembodied voice transmitting
via telephone line, as experienced by early
telephone users, is quite hard to imagine now,
but think of hearing a voice of a recently
departed person on an answering machine.

We can remember Marshall McLuhans

words about electronic media having outered
the central nervous system itself, thus making
the world into a smooth plateau of perception. This rings true when considering digital
media, which is characterized by its transparency, its smoothness. Any type of information
is de- and recodable into another format.
This kind of flux and mutability of digital
media makes it into an immersive enviroment,
rather like sound.
So far, however, our conception of electronic
media seems to have been very visually dominated and tied up to the more general link between the visual and the rational, which has
been prominent in Western thought. However,
many thinkers have also heard something new
coming from the explosion of new media since
the 19th Century. McLuhan wrote about the
acoustic quality of the electronic global village
he saw coming. German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in his essay On the Way to an
Auditive Culture? addresses the problem of
oculacentrism of the Western philosophical
tradition and tries to create a conception of
an auditive form of thinking. How to think
of sound itself when the epistemological focus
of our thinking and our concepts is located
in a seeing subject? With its temporality and
immersiveness, sound seems to avoid clarity,
categorization and objectivity. Light and sight
reveal objects, sound is the result of processes,
of something happening and of mistakes:
there cant be glitches without processes.
The whole notion of glitch is tied up to an
auditive thoughtform, which approaches
the world as a multiplicity of processes rather
than a pre-set field of objects.

The scratches and glitches of contemporary

electronic music, its aesthetics of interruption and misuse, should be considered in
relation to the ontology of the Outside, or its
hauntology (to quote Derrida writing about
hauntings and returnings). Contemporary
thought has painstakingly strived to approach
this outside of thought and perception. The
subject and the world, if such separation can
be made, are seen to be formed in complex
interrations between both. The subject
emerges from the processes of the world.
Deleuze and Guattari give these processes a
name: machines. Machines are defined as a
system of interruptions or breaks (AO 36),
cutting and redirecting the energetic flows of
preconscious world, which can be thought
of as an infinitely complex assemblage of
machines acting upon other machines acting
upon others etc. A subjectivity is emergent and
residual, having only a limited perspective
upon the underlying world of forces it
inhabits. Looking at our surroundings we
recognize things, we are creatures of habit
and conventions. Thinking, ultimately a
creative act, is not recognition but an encounter, violence to thought. Something comes from
the outside that interrupts and grabs us and
forces us outside of our habitual territory.

By introducing the refrain Deleuze and

Guattari have created a concept that
illustrates the constantly shifting nature of
relations between territorialized or habitual
milieu and the chaos of the outside forces.
A refrain, in the domain of music, can be
described very vaguely as a rhythmic element,
something marking out a territory amidst
chaos: a nursery rhyme, a childs song to
comfort oneself, a birdsong to stake out a
territory? Refrain doesnt, however, have just
a reactionary function against chaos; it is
situated in the middle and has a potential
to both reterritorialize and deterritorialize
sound, constantly on the border of a territory.
Art has posited itself onto this border. Or, to
paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, all creative
activity, whether its art, philosophy or
science, has to approach the outside of
thought. To be able to create new ways to feel
the world, new percepts and affects, one has
to court the chaos and worship the glitch.

Machines
Contemporary electronic music has approached this outside
of thought, or outside of music, by distancing itself from the
hierarchy of Western classical music tradition, which has
valuated certain musical structures (such as melody/harmony)
over another qualities (rhythm, timbre) and posited the score as
a transcendent compositional principle. Deleuze and Guattari
observe the deterritorializing tendency of refrain in music:
25
Certain modern musicians oppose the the transcendental
plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated
all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound
plane, which is always given along with that to which
it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and
carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind
of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds,
tenths and hundredths of seconds. (MP 267)

If arts quest is to bring the

imperceptible to perception,
music seeks to make audible the
inaudible forces of time and duration, to bring out an immanent
sound plane, a pure sound block,
in which forms are replaced by
pure modifications of speed.
(MP 267) How does one
manage to get away from the
grip of musical forms while
being still able to retain a plane
of consistency; to not regress
into undifferentiated chaos which
couldnt hold any consistency? This
is the question of the refrain.

In order to become-other, one

has to align with some outerior
forces and create new machinic
assemblages. Thats why Deleuze
and Guattari write that refrain
isnt the origin of music but
rather a means of preventing it,
warding it off (MP 300).
Becoming is an alliance. With
music machines we have entered
a new kind of musical alliance.
Phonography, the art of recording
sound, allows the production of
a smooth sound plane, on which
all relations between its various
elements are immanent as
recording extracts or constructs
a block of time, a musical time
that is present as sound
penetrates our bodies, but
emerges as a result from an
(quasi)event which is distant
from us spatially and
temporarily.

One can see the effect of

recording or sound processing technology as having helped
in breaking with the traditional musical notation and the
ideal of a pure musical form. Once all sound has become
recordable and reproducible by machines, we can be done
away with the concept of music as residing, ultimately,
in the score. Phonography and electronic/digital media
have flattened out the arborescent model of the actual
sounds relation to a higher structure, that is, the composition itself as actualized in various levels of perfection
in the performances of musicians. From machinic point
of view (or hearing) theres no difference between voice
and noise, we have only sonic stratum and various means
to manipulate that sound matter.



The concept of frequency, according
to German media philosopher Friedrich
Kittler, brought about by recording
technology, allows music to break with
the Old European tradition of pythagorean
harmony and notation as the preserver
of clear and pure sounds (in opposition to
the chaotic noise of the world). Since the
19th Century sound has been recordable,
vibrations in a carrying medium
transferable to a recording surface. The
phonograph does not hear as our ears that
have been trained immediately to filter
voices, words and sounds out of noise;
it registers acoustic events as such.
(Kittler 23) The phonograph hears sounds
acousmatically, without a relation to the
origin of a sound.
Using the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, we can state that the
phonograph deterritorializes sound, flattens down the hierarchical
organization of music into a rhizome, which is an open, multiple
and temporal form of organization and subsceptible to constant
de- and recoding. The act of recording is in one way already a
creative act of framing and selection. Any recording is a whole
in itself, all its characteristics are immanent to itself, without an
essential relation to an outerior or higher symbolic order.
However, up until the 1960s and the expansion of recording
studio technologies, record was generally regarded as referring to
an original acoustic event, a performance, which would have more
ontologic value (i.e. realness) than mere representation of it.
Multitrack tape machines make that stance irrelevant; studioas-instrument does away with acoustic realism. A particular
soundscape, experienced as a unified whole, could have been
assembled during many different takes and places, or wouldnt
have to result from any acoustic events, as in computer music.
Through the mixing board and the master tape, the record is the
stratified surface of sound.

I hear no great conceptual divide between

various music machines. Whatever means
there are available for recording acoustic phenomena or presenting sound, no matter what
the source, making sound reproducible and
thus variable, all phonographic technologies
have the potential to deterritorialize sound
and music. Maybe the greatest singular
moment in nomadic use (= an act of
capturing forces, making a new machinic
assemblage of existing machinic formations)
of phonographic machinery has been the
emergence of hip-hop DJing and the misuse
of vinyl records, making a pair of turntables
into a nomadic war machine. For a better
part of the last century the record remained
inactive, a storage capsule of time.
Apart from few artistic experimentations
vinyl records were used as passive playback
devices which always referred to some original
event captured onto the grooves of the disc.
In a parallel to the reinvention of the electric
guitar by finding the aesthetic potential of
the feedback noise generated by the guitar
amplifier -circuit (and thus making electric
guitar something other than an amplified
replica of acoustic guitar), the DJ would find
and learn to use the immanent forces within
the record itself.

Radio, a medium which in the early 20th

Century had a similarly all-pervading
role as the internet has today, remained
the primary medium of the DJ for a
long time. The status of a radio jock rose
from that of a salesman/entertainer to
a central figure in pop business during
the 1950s youth culture explosion. DJ
as a sonic artist evolved somewhere else,
however: in the discothque, a club for
dancing to recorded music instead of a
live orchestra. The first discos were born
in 1940s France during the German
occupation that hampered the live music
circuit. After the war some clubs stuck
with the concept of dancing to records.
This idea migrated elsewhere and in the
50s dance clubs experienced a massive
leap in popularity with the advent of
rocknroll and youth culture. We can
see this as a sort of deterritorialization:
instead of responding to the presence of
performers the audience responds to the
music and the forces it directs into the
space it creates.

Disco as a musical style developed from the mantric/tantric heavy funk of James Brown,
followed by others, which concentrated on the bass-heavy, steady and monotonously repetitive
groove; a becoming-machine of the rhythm section. This style evolved into even more functionalist
direction, downplaying the soul element of funk and delving solely in the groove. Record companies started producing long dance remixes of songs. Disco DJs wanted to create an all-night
flow of music and that required a skill of seamlessly mixing records into one another. Any kind
of music focusing on rhythm rather than melody could be used; DJ was becoming a curatorfigure in the emerging club spaces, such as the loft parties in 1970s New York.

The conceptual leap of DJ from a curator (organizing a collection of works)

to an artist (creating a work) happened in 1970s Bronx NY, when local DJs
invented the isolating of the breakbeat and hip-hop: they would play only
the rhythmic percussion breaks of funk records, alternating the same passage
on two turntables, creating their own music. This rather crude skill of keeping
the party going (with the help of an MC hollering encouragements to the party
people) soon evolved into finer techniques of vinyl manipulation and collage.
The DJ became a cut chemist.
Grandmaster Flashs 1981 record The Amazing Adventures of Grandmaster
Flash on the Wheels of Steel was almost literally an encyclopedia of DJ techniques: crossfading, punch-phrasing, backspinning, cutting and scratching...
Not only percussion was used as a sound source, almost everything could be
dropped into the mix, all kinds of noise, as long as it was on record. In some
ways a popularization of musique concrte, this meant a huge shift in the perception of music:

After Flash, the turntable

becomes a machine for
building and melding
mindstates from your
record collection. The
turntables, a Technics
deck, become a subjectivity
engine generating a
stereophonics, a hifi
consciousness of the head,
wholly tuned in and turned
on by the found noise of
vinyl degeneration that
hears scratches, crackle,
fuzz, hiss and static as lead
instruments.

The turntable becomes not only a new

kind of percussive instrument, it becomes a
syntax-destroyer and a connective synthesizer
in a Deleuzian sense (mixing this AND this
AND this...). Record is a diagram, a map,
rather than a tracing or writing. A map is

entirely oriented toward an

experimentation in contact
with the real... susceptible
to constant modification.
(MP 12)

Despite its inventors wishes to provide a

surface for the representation of an original
event, a stable protector of the preceding mode
of organization, the record became a destabilizer, weapon in sonic warfare (a nomadic war
machine of sorts). DJs hand is a terrorwrist
opening up a new field of objectile thought:
fingertip perception (Eshun 18). A deterritorialization of hand and record in the
machinic assemblage of scratching.
The phonographic diagram, given its direct
transduction of physical wave to mechanical
impulse or electrical signal, provides a code
both precisely reproducible and potentially
editable. ... [W]here the score represents,
phonography simply transduces... As soon as
the deterritorialization of sonic matter into
vinyl abstracts it from the moment, and makes
music into this random-access memory
available time and time again, the sonic
matter is susceptible to temporal mutation,
warping, looping. (Mackay 250)

[0]
DJs (ab)use of vinyl is a derangement
in every sense of the word. Scratching
deterritorializes the noise on the grooves,
bends the spiral grooves into lines of flight;
scratching rips its source material from the
record, transforms the ideal into matter to
be molded, cuts into syntax to isolate words
and phrases, achieving an Artaud-style
decoding of language systems (both human
and musical). A scratch takes up a block
of recorded time and folds it up in baroque
flourishes like a cloth. Scratching makes
audible the flow of time and matter, the flow
and the machines that cut it, and creates a
vinyl psychedelia = scratchadelia, a machinic
refrain, a becoming-vinyl of music.

A digital counterpart to the scratch is the
often-mentioned glitch. A precariously vague term, which however captures
some of the slipperiness of digital media. If analog phonography has led to
some sort of metallurgy of sound, made sound malleable and mutable, digital
sound processing approaches sound as molecules. The term microsound is very
appropriate for the digital music of today. Or, if we take heed of Kim Cascone,
we should be talking about post-digital music, since the medium of digital technology has become so transparent it doesnt reflect in the expression of music
anymore. Instead specific sound processing tools, such as Max, AudioMulch or
SoundForge produce an auratic sound, as well as providing amazing detail and
accuracy in manipulating sound.

With glitches, however, electronic music producers embrace the uncertainty John Cage was talking about. Cracked and malfunctioning
soft- and hardware, overloaded operating systems, wrong file types
opened as sound documents produce unpredictable sounds, sometimes a ghostly unpresence of sounds outside hearing range or gaps
in recorded time. Glitches, clicks and cuts are the sound of sound
machines molecularizing, atomizing and ionizing sound, making
audible the process of sound itself. If we must make a distinction
between the scratch and the glitch, it is this: scratching is the folding
of recorded time, metallurgy of sound, taking a flow of matter and
producing variations of it. Common to music and metallurgy,
according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the tendency to bring into its
own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form, and
beyond variable matter, a continuous variation of matter, in short
to bring out the life proper to matter. (MP 411)

Glitch, in digital domain,

happens on a more abstracted
level of decoding that results in
molecularized matter. Going
beyond the matterform -division (which scratching can be
seen starting to evaporate with its
variations on matter) the molecularization of sound

effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and
slownesses, which guarantees a continuum by stretching
variation far beyond it formal limits. (MP 309)
In both cases, the scratch and the glitch,
sound has escaped the overcoding symbolic
order of music, or the trancendental plane of
organization of the score, in nomadic alliance
of man and machines.

James Browns Sex Machine and Kraftwerks Mensch Maschine define electronic
musics identification with machinery with
their twin poles of raw physicality and
pure spirit/intellect. To dance as mindless
robots or to think music as an incorporeal AI.
This all-too established dualism has been
broken down at times by the music machinerys potential to fuse down the two poles
and to break down, to express glitches. Dance
music, which might at first thought appear as
a musical form most tied up with the
reterritorializing function of the refrain, with
its strict adherence to certain genre-bound
norms, appears however as a machine for
liberating sound-in-itself. Rhythm: blocks
of sound arranged rhythmically, one after
another, one beside another, like the instant
pop images of Warhol paintings. Repetition
makes the thing repeated (the thing not new
anymore) present again. Each repetition (a
simulacrum of the original, if any is to be
found) is an event in itself;

Repetition and
first time, but also
repetition and last
time, since the
singula-rity of any
first time makes of
it also a last time.
Each time it is the
event itself, first
time is a last time.

This repetition, this constant now, can be

seen in dance musics lack of drama (or
constant crescendo); the changes in music
are quantitative instead of qualitative, its
narrative is the happening of repetitions.
Dance music seeks to build a plateau of
intensity. Any vertical, arborescent models
are flattened by the rhizomatics of repetition,
which undoes the symbolical or critical form
of thought. According to Roland Barthes, critique is always either historic or futurologic,
its content is culture which equals everything
that is inside us, except the present moment
(Barthes 32).
Electronic dance music sounds astonishingly
non-temporal: repetition makes the track
happen in the constant now, concentration
on the sound of sound (timbre and color
and texture, the most difficult-to-rememberafterwards- and the most deterritorializing
aspects of sound and music) fades it from the
memory. Repetition is a way of appearing
without form, without identity: it multiplies the same element over and over again,
juxtaposes the element with its each successive
re-emergence, brings out the differences by
bringing out the gaps between singular repetitions, forms a machinic assemblage out of the
circulation of sound blocks. Musical repetition: loops within loops, clashing against
each other, loopduelle. The audibility of these
juxtapositions is a textuality of differences
and differences mark out the repetitions =
returnings = soundghosts.

R
E
P
E
T
I
T
I
O
N

As

the

builds

up

smooth plane of constant present, deterritorializing the sound itself as a

singularity, a sonorous force, theres a tendency for that repetition to become
reterritorialized as a clich, an all-too expectable formula; this seems to be a
potential dead-end for numerous genres of electronic dance music. A glitch
appears: a wrinkle in time of the constant present. If we listen to an archetypal glitchy sound, an Oval track for example, we can hear a rich tapestry
of sound and absence of sound. There are skips, something is missing, there
are holes in the smooth space of sound. Or we can consider Kim Cascones
concept of residualism that involves structuring a work around an absence,
removing a signal and leaving only its effects to be heard. Scratching, sampling and the stuttering of malfunctioning soft- and hardware are means of
derangement, seeking out a way to make a rhizome out of music, a way to
place its elements in continuous variation, where absences, breaks, holes, folds
and ruptures can be a part; a way to let ghosts of the outside in.

Love
[M]achines work ... by continually breaking down... (AO 8),
producing anti-production, creating gaps and glitches. One has to
remember we?re talking about desiring machines and arts ability to
reflect the formative processes of machinic pre-conscious world, which
is libidinal. As Jake Mandell observes in his liner notes for his album
Love Songs for Machines, artists relation to their tools of the trade
has always been fetishistic. A favorite pen of the writer, a beloved
brush of the painter; its always been intimate. Mandell writes that the
once-close relationship of artists and their tools has encountered a crisis
in the digital age, the screenandmouse -interface is abstract and
alienating. Still, as an immersive environment, digital media allow for
an exceptionally affectionate experience.

As tool-using creatures (among other such creatures) weve always been cyborgs. [T]
ools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them
possible. (MP 90) That is to say, tools imply a symbiosis between two bodies in a
machinic assemblage, deterritorializing them both. Think of Roland TB-303 Bassline
Generator, becoming an Acid Machine through a glitch, a programming mistake, releasing
a whole new spectrum of sounds, transforming both the musician and the instrument. Its
a two-way relation: we can well take heed of Kodwo Eshuns conception of human beings
as the sex organs of synthesizers. New sounds happen between things, in the movement that
sweeps you and your computer to somewhere else: in order to effect deterritorializations you
have to love your machines.

[3]

figure #1

figure #4

quote #1

quote #4

Cyberspace

Redundancy

Ghost Hieroglyphs

Atlantic Noise

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination

experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts... A graphic
representation of data abstracted from banks
of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data.
Like city lights, receding...

Redundancy in information theory is the

number of bits used to transmit a message
minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Informally, it is the
amount of wasted space used to transmit
certain data. Data compression is a way to
reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy,
while checksums are a way of adding desired
redundancy for purposes of error detection
when communicating over a noisy channel of
limited capacity.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs,

translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the
bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his
hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling
beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable
code. He raised his right hand and moved it
experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of
strobed afterimages.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the

white noise that is London, that Damiens
theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul
is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some
ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of
the plane that brought her here, hundreds of
thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls
cant move that quickly, and are left behind,
and must be awaited, upon arrival,
like lost luggage.

figure #2

figure #5

quote #2

quote #5

Silver Phosphenes

Fast Forward

Parallel Resonance

The Shift Register

The resonance of a parallel RLC circuit is

a bit more involved than the series resonance.
The resonant frequency can be defined in three
different ways, which converge on the same
expression as the series resonant frequency if
the resistance of the circuit is small.

The Shift Register is another type of sequential logic circuit that is used for the storage
or transfer of data in the form of binary
numbers. This sequential device loads the
data present on its inputs and then moves or
shifts it to its output once every clock cycle,
hence the name shift register.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes,

silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of
space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a
film compiled of random frames. Symbols,
figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala
of visual information.

Night City was like a deranged experiment

in social Darwinism, designed by a bored
researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button.

figure #3

figure #6

quote #3

quote #6

Central Processing

Accelerationism

Event Horizon

Fragmented Dreams

A central processing unit (CPU) is the hardware within a computer that carries out the
instructions of a computer program by performing the basic arithmetical, logical, and
input/output operations of the system.

Accelerationism is the belief that in order to

generate radical change, the prevailing system
of capitalism should be expanded and its
growth accelerated so that its self-destructive
tendencies can be brought to their conclusion.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event

horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be
more derivative, more removed from the source,
more devoid of soul.

It will be like watching one of her own

dreams on television. Some vast and deeply
personal insult to any ordinary notion of
interiority. An experience outside culture.

 15

[11]

M O Q U
E T T E

The underground rail service is an iconic design symbol

of London. This success can
partly be attributed to its strong
modernist identity, initiated by
the Chief Executive of London
Transport, Frank Pick (18781941) in the early 20th century.
His aim was to integrate modern
design with industry to create a
distinct corporate style for the
network. The Underground was
to be a showcase of the very best
of contemporary designers for an
audience which today amounts
to over one billion
passengers per year.

Most people are familiar with

the roundel signage by Edward
Johnson and the tube maps of
Harry Beck, however my prizewinning essay focused in particular on the design of moquette,
the often overlooked textile used
to cover seating throughout the
network.Moquette, the French
word for carpet, is a woollen
material woven on large looms,
which is ideal for use on public
transport due to its hardwearing properties. The colourful repetitive patterns often seen
on moquette function to camouflage dirt. The moquette used by
London Underground is currently
woven in two factories, one in
Huddersfield and the other in
Lithuania, where manufacturing
costs are considerably cheaper.

Both the manufacture and design of the moquette have been transformed since it first appeared
on the Underground networks in the early 1920s. Frank Picks aim was to bring modernist
design to the everyday commuter. He employed the best contemporary textile designers of the time,
such as Enid Marx and Marion Dorn, whose designs displayed a strong modernist influence.
The London Transport Museum Library and Transport for Londons archive contain revealing
correspondence between these designers and the London Transport management team during the
1930s. The documents demonstrate the importance that was placed on a close collaboration
between designer and manufacturer. They detail many important design decisions which ensured
neither the style nor quality was compromised at any stage of the design process. The network underwent changes when Frank Picks influence faded after his death in 1941. My essay examined
the founding principles and the debates between designers and manufacturers to consider how these
changes affected the overall feeling of design unity within the network.

In more recent years the moquette

designers role has been transformed
by the introduction of Computer Aided
Design (CAD), greatly improving the
efficiency in production and the style
of the designs. To update the debates
about design and industry in the
present day, I visited the moquette
factory in Huddersfield. Here I was
able to draw on further historical
resources and see production in
action. I was also able to discuss with
the designers at Holdsworth Ltd the
ways in which modern technology has
changed moquette and how financial
restraints in the recent economic
climate have altered manufacturing
and design priorities.
In the
essay I close by
exploring London Undergrounds
plans for the future design of moquette, in
particular how design decisions are now being
reached. A competition launched in 2009 gave
members of the public an opportunity to design a
moquette which will eventually be used on all the lines of
the London Underground. Furthermore, in 2012 Heatherwick
Studio was commissioned by Transport for London to design a
new moquette for the redesigned Routemaster Bus. My essay
considered the context and significance of this new approach
to design for public transport, and concluded by discussing
the need for London Underground to continue to
employ the best contemporary designers so that the
network maintains its position as an iconic
design symbol of modern London.

 16

17

 19

18

 20

21

Could memory traces be discovered? Wittgenstein sought to undermine our confidence in the
empirical nature of representationism, asking Why must a trace have been left behind?
(1980, paragraph 905). Do trace theorists misguidedly seek, on a priori grounds, to dictate
to science what to discover in the brain (Zemach 1983, pp. 323)?

Objections to
R
e
p
r
e
s
e
n

tations

In a taxonomy and evaluation of criticisms of memory representations and traces, this

section synthesizes the polemics of theorists who hold quite different positive views about
memory. The answers sketched here to some of these criticisms leave open a number of issues.
In particular, the issue of how the content of memory representations is determined is barely
mentioned: and the question of how memory traces could provide the right causal connections
between past and present if they are not static and permanent inner items is postponed
to section 3. Again, the key question here is whether memory does involve representation
of the past.
One initial objection mischaracterizes its target. Some critics complain that
trace theorists see an episode of remembering as entirely determined by the
nature of the stored item. But, they note, many factors other than internal
brain states affect remembering. As Wittgenstein notes, whatever the event
does leave behind, it isnt the memory (1980, paragraph 220). Trace theorists,
however, accept this point: the engram (the stored fragments of an episode)
and the memory are not the same thing (Schacter 1996, p. 70). Traces
(whatever they may be) are merely potential contributors to recollection,
providing one kind of continuity between experience and remembering; so
traces are relevant but not sufficient causal/ explanatory factors. In fact,
psychologists attention is increasingly focussed on the context of recall:
research on synergistic ecphory (Tulving 1983, pp. 1214) addresses the
conspiratorial interaction of the present cue and circumstances with the trace
(Schacter 1982, pp. 1819; 1996, pp. 5671). Developmental psychologist
Susan Engel argues that often one creates the memory at the moment one
needs it, rather than merely pulling out an intact item, image, or story (1999,
p. 6). So there is no inevitable reduction of the multicausal nature of remembering to a single inner cause (see further sections 3.4 and 3.5 below).

Some defenders of the trace in response drain it of empirical content. Deborah Rosen, for example, develops a logical notion of the memory trace, distanced from the scientific notions for which the logical notion provides only a
philosophical underpinning (1975, p. 3). But giving up the ideal of an independent characterization of the trace may not be necessary. The postulation
of traces is empirical, but the relevant domain is not psychology. Whats doing
the work is the physical assumption that there is no macroscopic action at a
temporal distance, that mechanisms in fact underlie apparent cases of direct
action between temporally remote events. This assumption may be mistaken,
but challenges to it must offer some positive alternative theoretical framework.
The mere logical possibility of a unique mnemic causation which does operate at a temporal distance (Heil 1978, pp. 6669; Anscombe 1981, pp. 1267)
is insufficient, as is the simple denial of any temporal gap between past and
present (Malcolm 1963, p. 238).
Critics deny that the retention involved in memory requires any continuous storage (Squires
1969; Malcolm 1977, pp. 1979; Bursen 1978). This worry rightly requires trace
theorists to be explicit on the relation between occurrent remembering and dispositional memories. We do need models of the mechanism by which enduring dispositions are actualized. But
the criticism does not show that there is anything deeply mysterious in the notion of underlying causal processes which ground memory abilities (Warnock 1987, pp. 502; Deutscher
1989, pp. 5863). The kind of storage invoked by trace theorists need not be the storage
of independent atomic items localized in particular places, like sacks of grain in a storehouse.

A dilemma:
circularity or solipsism?
How does the postulated trace come to play a part in the
present act of recognition or recall? Trace theorists must
resist the idea that it is interpreted or read by some internal homunculus who can match a stored trace with a
current input, or know just which trace to seek out for a
given current purpose. Such an intelligent inner executive
explains nothing (Gibson 1979, p. 256; Draaisma 2000,
pp.21229), or gives rise to a vicious regress in which further internal mechanisms operate in some corporeal
studio (Ryle 1949/1963, p. 36; Malcolm 1970, p. 64).

[8]

But then the trace theorist is left with a dilemma. If we avoid the homunculus
by allowing that the remembering subject can just choose the right trace, then
our trace theory is circular, for the abilities which the memory trace was meant
to explain are now being invoked to explain the workings of the trace (Bursen
1978, pp. 5260; Wilcox and Katz 1981, pp. 229232; Sanders 1985, pp.
50810). Or if, finally, we deny that the subject has this circular independent
access to the past, and agree that the activation of traces cannot be checked
against some other veridical memories, then (critics argue) solipsism or scepticism results. There is then no guarantee that any act of remembering does
provide access to the past at all: representationist trace theories thus cut the
subject off from the past behind a murky veil of traces (Wilcox and Katz 1981,
p. 231; Ben-Zeev 1986, p. 296).
Well see below (section 3.3) that this dilemma recurs empirically, in the difference between
supervised and unsupervised learning rules in connectionist cognitive-scientific models of
memory. There, as in this general context, the natural response is to take the second prong of
the dilemma, and accept the threat of solipsism or scepticism. The trace theorist must show
how in practice the past can play roles in the causation of present remembering. The past is
not uniquely specified by present input, and there is no general guarantee of accuracy: but the
demand for incorrigible access to the past can be resisted.

Structural isomorphism
How can memory traces represent past events or experiences?
How can they have content? This is in part a general problem
about the meaning of mental representations (see the entry
on mental representation). But specific problems crop up for
naturalistic trace theories of memory. In stating the causal theory
of memory, Martin and Deutscher argued that an analysis of
remembering should include the requirement that (in cases of
genuine remembering) the state or set of states produced by the
past experience must constitute a structural analogue of the thing
remembered (1966, pp. 189191), although they denied that the
trace need be a perfect analogue, mirroring all the features of a
thing. But is there a coherent notion of structural isomorphism
to be relied on here? If memory traces are not images in the head,
somehow directly resembling their objects, and if we are to cash
out unanalysed and persistent metaphors of imprinting, engraving,
copying, coding, or writing (Krell 1990, pp. 37), then what kind of
analogue is the trace?

One approach to content determination does retain resemblance as the core explanatory notion.
According to the structuralist theory of mental representation developed by Robert Cummins
(1996), Paul Churchland (1998), and by Gerard OBrien and Jon Opie (2004), there is
an objective relation of second-order resemblance between the system of representing vehicles
in our heads and their represented objects. First-order resemblance involves the sharing
of some physical properties, and is thus unlikely to ground mental representation, since no
traces in my brain share relevant physical properties with (say) the elephants or the conversations which I remember. But in second-order resemblance, the relations among a system of
representing vehicles mirror the relations among their objects. In the case of brain traces,
second-order structural resemblances hold when some physical relations among certain brain
states (such as distance relations in the activation space of a neural network) preserve some
system of relations among represented objects.

Whatever the fate of such a general defence of the notion of a structural analogue, there is another (compatible yet independent) response. We can weaken the
requirement of isomorphism further, remembering that a theory of memory in the philosophy
of psychology should not cover veridical remembering alone. Details in my memory of an
experience need not have been permanently encoded in the same enduring determinate trace as
that experience. We often tell more than we (strictly speaking) remember. Even where memory
for the gist of an event is roughly accurate, details may shift as the trace is filtered through
other beliefs, dreams, fears, or wishes. The causal connections between events and traces,
and between traces and recollection, may be multiple, indirect, and context-dependent. The
structures which underpin retention, then, need not remain the same over time, or might not
always involve identifiable determinate forms over time.

This more dynamic vision of traces, rejecting the idea of permanent
storage of independent items, may satisfy both recent developments in cognitive science (section 3
below) and some of the positive suggestions with which critics of static traces have accompanied
their objections. Wittgenstein had wondered whether the things stored up may not constantly
change their nature. Gibsonian direct realists in psychology, like some phenomenologists and
Wittgensteinians in philosophy, have sometimes assimilated all theories of memory traces
to the vision of passive, separate entities each with a fixed location in an inner archive. But
writers in these diverse traditions have rightly stressed various ways in which remembering
often relies on information left in the external world, arguing that we should see the internal aspects of memory more as an active resonance or attunement to information of certain
kinds than as the encoding and reproduction of determinate images. These ideas have had
considerable influence on recent theorizing in cognitive science, and on views of memory
and mind as embodied, embedded, and extended (section 3 below). But they do not rule out
weaker, dynamic notions of the memory trace. As the great English psychologist of memory
Frederic Bartlett argued, though we may still talk of traces, there is no reason in the world
for regarding these as made complete, stored up somewhere, and then re-excited at some much
later moment. The traces that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined,
interest-carried traces. They live with our interests and with them they change.

 M
y
s
t
i
c
i
s
m

The warfare between science and theology

has been of a peculiar sort. At all times and
places - except late eighteenth-century France
and Soviet Russia - the majority of scientific
men have supported the orthodoxy of their
age. Some of the most eminent have been in
the majority. Newton, though an Arian, was
in all other respects a supporter of the Christian faith. Cuvier was a model of Catholic
correctness. Faraday was a Sandymanian,
but the errors of that sect did not seem,
even to him, to be demonstrable by scientific
arguments, and his views as to the relations
of science and religion were such as every
Churchman could applaud. The warfare was
between theology and science, not the men of
science. Even when the men of science held
views which were condemned, they generally
did their best to avoid conflict. Copernicus, as
we saw, dedicated his book to the Pope; Galileo retracted; Descartes, though he thought it
prudent to live in Holland, took great pains to
remain on good terms with ecclesiastics, and
by a calculated silence escaped censure for
sharing Galielos opinions. In the nineteenth
century, most British men of science still
thought that there was no essential conflict
between their science and those parts of the
Christian faith which liberal Christians still
regarded as essential - for it had been found
possible to sacrifice the literal truth of the
Flood, and even of Adam and Eve.

[*]
The situation in the present day is not
very different from what it has been at all
times since the victory of Copernicanism.
Successive scientific discoveries have caused
Christians to abandon one after another of
the beliefs which the Middle Ages regarded as
integral parts of the faith, and these
successive retreats have enabled men of
science to remain Christians, unless their
work is on that disputed frontier which the
warfare has reached in our day. Now, as at
most times during the last three centuries, it is
proclaimed that science and religion have
become reconciled: the scientists modestly
admit that there are realms which lie outside
science, and the liberal theologians concede
that they would not venture to deny anything
capable of scientific proof. There are, it is
true, still a few disturbers of the peace: on
the one side, fundamentalists and stubborn
Catholic theologians; on the other side, the
more radical students of such subjects as
biochemistry and animal psychology, who
refuse to grant even the comparatively modest
demands of the more enlightened Churchmen.

The present relations between science and

religion, as the State wishes them to appear,
may be ascertained from a very instructive
volume, Science and Religion, A Symposium,
consisting of twelve talks broadcast from the
B.B.C. in the autumn of 1930. Outspoken
opponents of religion were, of course, not
included, since (to mention no other argument)
they would have pained the more orthodox
among the listeners. There was, it is true,
an excellent introductory talk by Professor
Julian Huxley, which contained no support
for even the most shadowy orthodoxy; but it
also contained little that liberal Churchmen
would now find objectionable. The speakers
who permitted themselves to express definite
opinions, and to advance arguments in their
favour, took up a variety of positions, ranging
from Professor Malinowskis pathetic avowal
of a balked longing to believe in God and
immortality to Father OHaras bold
assertion that the truths of revelation are
more certain than those of science, and must
prevail where there is conflict; but, although
the details varied, the general impression
conveyed was that the conflict between religion
and science is at an end. The result was all
that could have been hoped.
But on
the whole the fight
is languid as compared with
what it was. The newer creeds
of Communism and Fascism are the
inheritors of theological bigotry; and
perhaps, in some deep region of the
unconscious, bishops and professors
feel themselves jointly interested
in the maintenance of the
status quo.

Thus Canon Streeter, who spoke

late, said that a remarkable
thing about the foregoing
lectures has been the way in
which their general drift has
been moving in one and the
same direction. An idea has
kept on recurring that science by
itself is not enough. Whether
this unanimity is a fact about
science and religion, or about
the authorities which control the
B.B.C., may be questioned; but
it must be admitted that, in spite
of many differences, the authors
of the symposium do show something very like agreement on the
point mentioned by Streeter.
Thus Sir J. Arthur Thomson says: Science
as science never asks the question Why? That
is to say, it never inquires into the meaning,
or significance, or purpose of this manifold
Being, Becoming, and Having Been.
And he continues: Thus science does not
pretend to be a bedrock of truth. Science,
he tells us, cannot apply its methods to
the mystical and spiritual. Professor Seb
Haldane holds that it is only within
ourselves, in our active ideals of truth, right,
charity, and beauty, and consequent fellowship
with others, that we find the revelation of
God. Dr. Malinowski says that religious
revelation is an experience which, as a matter
of principle, lies beyond the domain of
science. I do not, for the moment, quote the
theologians, since their concurrence with such
opinions is to be expected.

Ought we to admit that there is

available, in support of religion,
a source of knowledge which lies
outside science and may properly be described as revelation?
This is a difficult question to
argue, because those who believe
that truths have been revealed
to them profess the same kind
of certainty in regard to them
that we have in regard to objects
of sense. We believe the man
who has seen things through
the telescope that we have never
seen; why then, they ask, should
we not believe them when they
report things that are to them
equally unquestionable?

Before going further, let us try to be clear

as to what is asserted, and as to its truth or
falsehood. When Canon Streeter says that
science is not enough, he is, in one sense,
uttering a truism. Science does not include
art, or friendship, or various other valuable
elements in life. But of course more than
this is meant. There is another, rather more
important, sense in which science is not
enough, which seems to me also true: science
has nothing to say about values, and cannot
prove such propositions as it is better to love
than to hate or kindness is more desirable
than cruelty. Science can tell us much about
the means of realizing our desires, but it
cannot say that one desire is preferable to
another. This is a large subject, as to which I
shall have more to say in a later chapter



But the authors I have quoted certainly mean to
assert something further, which I believe to be false. Science does not pretend to be a bedrock
of truth (my italics) implies that there is another, non-scientific method of arriving at truth.
Religious revelation lies beyond the domain of science tells us something as to what this
non-scientific method is. It is the method of religious revelation. Dean Inge is more explicit: The
proof of religion, then, is experimental. [He has been speaking of the testimony of the mystics.]
It is a progressive knowledge of God under the three attributes by which He has revealed Himself to mankind - what are sometimes called the absolute or eternal values - Goodness or Love,
Truth, and Beauty. If that is all, you will say, there is no reason why religion should come into
conflict with natural science at all. One deals with facts, the other with values. Granting that both
are real, they are on different planes. This is not quite true. We have seen science poaching upon
ethics, poetry, and what not. Religion cannot help poaching either. That is to say, religion must
make assertions about what is, and not only about what ought to be. This opinion, avowed by
Dean Inge, is implicit in the words of Sir J. Arthur Thomson and Dr. Malinowski.

Science should
be neutral, since the argument is
It is, perhaps, useless to attempt an
a scientific one, to be conducted
argument such as will appeal to the man who exactly as an argument would
has himself enjoyed mystic illumination. But
be conducted about an uncertain
something can be said as to whether we others experiment. Science depends
should accept this testimony. In the first place, upon perception and inference;
it is not subject to the ordinary tests. When
its credibility is due to the fact
a man of science tells us the result of an
that the perceptions are such
experiment, he also tells us how the
as any observer can test. The
experiment was performed; others can repeat
mystic himself may be certain
it, and if the result is not confirmed it is not
that he knows, and he has no
accepted as true; but many mean might put
need of scientific tests; but those
themselves into the situation in which the
who are asked to accept his
mystics vision occurred without obtaining the
testimony will subject it to the
same revelation. To this it may be answered
same kind of scientific tests as
that a man must use the appropriate sense:
those applied to men who say
a telescope is useless to a man who keeps his
they have been to the North Pole.
eye shut. The argument as to the credibility
Science, as such, should have no
of the mystics testimony may be prolonged
expectation, positive or negative,
almost indefinitely.
as to the result.

The chief argument in favour of the mystics is their agreement with each other. I know nothing
more remarkable, says Dean Inge, than the unanimity of the mystics, ancient, mediaeval,
and modern, Protestant, Catholic, and even Buddhist or Mohammedan, though the Christian
mystics are the most trustworthy. I do not wish to underrate the force of this argument, which I
acknowledged long ago in a book called Mysticism and Logic. The mystics vary greatly in their
capacity for giving verbal expression to their experiences, but I think we make take it that those
who succeeded best all maintain: (1) that all division and separateness is unreal, and that the
universe is a single indivisible unity; (2) that evil is illusory, and that the illusion arises through
falsely regarding a part as self-subsistent; (3) that time is unreal, and that reality is eternal, not in
the sense of being everlasting, but in the sense of being wholly outside time. I do not pretend that
this is a complete account of the matters on which all mystics concur, but the three propositions
that I have mentioned may serve as representatives of the whole. Let us now imagine ourselves a
jury in a law-court, whose business it is to decide on the credibility of the witnesses who make
these three somewhat surprising assertions.

We shall find, in the first place, that,

while the witnesses agree up to a point, they
disagree totally when that point is passed,
although they are just as certain as when they
agree. Catholics, but not Protestants, may
have visions in which the Virgin appears;
Christians and Mohammedans, but not
Buddhists, may have great truths revealed to
them by the Archangel Gabriel; the Chinese
mystics of the Tao tell us, as a direct result
of their central doctrine, that all government is bad, whereas most European and
Mohammedan mystics, with equal confidence,
urge submission to constituted authority. As
regards the points where they differ, each
group will argue that the other groups are
untrustworthy; we might, therefore, if we
were content with a mere forensic triumph,
point out that most mystics think most other
mystics mistaken on most points. They might,
however, make this only half a triumph by
agreeing on the greater importance of the
matters about which they are at one, as
compared with those as to which their
opinions differ. We will, in any case, assume
that they have composed their differences, and
concentrated the defence at these three points
- namely, the unity of the world, the illusory
nature of evil, and the unreality of time.
What test can we, as impartial outsiders,
apply to their unanimous evidence?

As men of scientific temper, we shall

naturally first ask whether there is any way
by which we can ourselves obtain the same
evidence at first hand. To this we shall receive
various answers. We may be told that we are
obviously not in a receptive frame of mind,
and that we lack the requisite humility; or
that fasting and religious meditation are
necessary; or (if our witness is Indian or
Chinese) that the essential prerequisite is a
course of breathing exercises. I think we shall
find that the weight of experimental evidence
is in favour of this last view, though fasting
also has been frequently found effective. As
a matter of fact, there is a definite physical
discipline, called yoga, which is practised in
order to produce the mystics certainty, and
which is recommended with much confidence
by those who have tried it.[1] Breathing
exercises are its most essential feature, and for
our purposes we may ignore the rest.

In order to see how we could test the assertion that yoga gives insight,
let us artificially simplify this assertion. Let us suppose that a number of people assure us that if, for a certain time, we breathe in a certain way, we shall become convinced that time is unreal. Let us go
further, and suppose that, having tried their recipe, we have ourselves
experienced a state of mind such as they describe. But now, having returned to our normal mode of respiration, we are not quite sure whether
the vision was to be believed. How shall we investigate this question?

First of all, what can be meant by saying

that time is unreal? If we really meant what
we say, we must mean that such statements
as this is before that are mere empty noise,
like twas brillig. If we suppose anything
less than this - as, for example, that there is
a relation between events which puts them in
the same order s the relation of earlier and
later, but that it is a different relation - we
shall not have made any assertion that makes
any real change in our outlook. It will be
merely like supposing that the Iliad was not
written by Homer, but by another man of the
same name. We have to suppose that there
are no events at all; there must be only the
one vast whole of the universe, embracing
whatever is real in the misleading appearance
of a temporal procession. There must be
nothing in reality corresponding to the
apparent distinction between earlier and later
events. To say that we are born, and then
grow, and then die, must be just as false as
to say that we die, then grow small, and
finally are born. The truth of what seems an
individual life is merely the illusory isolation
of one element in the timeless and indivisible
being of the universe. There is no
distinction between improvement and
deterioration, no difference between sorrows
that end in happiness and happiness that ends
in sorrow. If you find a corpse with a dagger
in it, it makes no difference whether the man
died of the wound or the dagger was plunged
in after death. Such a view, if true, puts an
end, not only to science, but to prudence, hope,
and effort; it is incompatible with worldly
wisdom, and - what is more important to
religion - with morality.

Most mystics, of course, do not accept

these conclusions in their entirety,
but they urge doctrines from which
these conclusions inevitably follow.
Thus Dean Inge rejects the kind
of religion that appeals to evolution,
because it lays too much stress upon
a temporal process. There is no law
of progress, and there is no universal progress, he says. And again:
The doctrine of automatic and
universal progress, the lay religion of
many Victorians, labours under the
disadvantage of being almost the only
philosophical theory which can be
definitely disproved. On this matter,
which I shall discuss at a later stage,
I find myself in agreement with
the Dean, for whom, on many
grounds, I have a very high respect.
But he naturally does not draw from
his premisses all the inferences which
seem to me to be warranted.
It is important not to
caricature the doctrine
of mysticism, in which
there is, I think, a core
of wisdom. Let us see
how it seeks to avoid the
extreme consequences
which seem to follow
from the denial of time.

The
philosophy based on mysticism has a great tradition, from Parmenides
to Hegel. Parmenides says: What is, is uncreated and
indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end.
Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous
one.[2] He introduced into metaphysics the distinction between reality and
appearance, or the way of truth and the way of opinion, as he calls them. It is
clear that whoever denies the reality of time must introduce some such distinction,
since obviously the world appears to be in time. It is also clear that, if everyday experience is not to be wholly illusory, there must be some relation between appearance and
the reality behind it. It is at this point, however, that the greatest difficulties arise: if the
relation between appearance and reality is made too intimate, all the unpleasant features of
appearance will have their unpleasant counterparts in reality, while if the relation is made
too remote, we shall be unable to make inferences from the character of appearance to that of
reality, and reality will be left a vague Unknowable, as with Herbert Spencer. For Christians, there is the related difficulty of avoiding pantheism: if the world is only apparent,
God created nothing, and the reality corresponding to the world is a part of God; but if
the world is in any degree real and distinct from God, we abandon the wholeness of
everything, which is an essential doctrine of mysticism, and we are compelled to
suppose that, in so far as the world is real, the evil which it contains is also
real. Such difficulties make thorough-going mysticism very difficult for
an orthodox Christian. As the Bishop of Birmingham says: All
forms of pantheism as it seems to me, must be rejected
because, if man is actually a part of God, the evil
in man is also in God.

All this time, I have been supposing that we are a jury, listening to the
testimony of the mystics, and trying to decide whether to accept or
reject it. If, when they deny the reality of the world of sense, we took
them to mean reality in the ordinary sense of law-courts, we should
have no hesitation in rejecting what they say, since we would find that
it runs counter to all other testimony, and even to their own in their
mundane moments. We must therefore look for some other sense. I
believe that, when the mystics contrast reality with appearance,
the word reality has not a logical, but an emotional, significance: it
means what is, in some sense, important.

When it is said that time is unreal, what should be said is that, in some sense and on some
occasions, it is important to conceive the universe as a whole, as the Creator, if He existed, must
have conceived it in deciding to create it. When so conceived, all process is within one completed
whole; past, present, and future, all exist, in some sense, together, and the present does not have that
pre-eminent reality which it has to our usual ways of apprehending the world. It this interpretation
is accepted, mysticism expresses an emotion, not a fact; it does not assert anything, and therefore can
be neither confirmed nor contradicted by science. The fact that mystics do make assertions is owing
to their inability to separate emotional importance from scientific validity. It is, of course, not to be
expected that they will accept this view, but it is the only one, so far as I can see, which, while
admitting something of their claim, is not repugnant to the scientific intelligence. The certainty and
partial unanimity of mystics is no conclusive reason for accepting their testimony on a matter of
fact. The man of science, when he wishes others to see what he has seen, arranges his microscope or
telescope; that is to say, he makes changes in the external world, but demands of the observer only
normal eyesight. The mystic, on the other hand, demands changes in the observer, by fasting, by
breathing exercises, and by a careful abstention from external observation. (Some object to such discipline, and think that the mystic illumination cannot be artificially achieved; from a scientific point of
view, this makes their case more difficult to test than that of those who rely on yoga. But nearly all
agree that fasting and an ascetic life are helpful.)
We all know that opium, hashish, and alcohol
produce certain effects on the observer, but as we
do not think these effects admirable we take no
account of them in our theory of the universe.
They may even, sometimes, reveal fragments of
truth; but we do not regard them as sources of
general wisdom. The drunkard who sees snakes
does not imagine, afterwards, that he has had a
revelation of a reality hidden from others, though
some not wholly dissimilar belief must have
given rise to the worship of Bacchus. In our
own day, as William James related, there have
been people who considered that the intoxication
produced by laughing-gas revealed truths which
are hidden at normal times. From a scientific
point of view, we can make no distinction
between the man who eats little and sees heaven
and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.
Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and
therefore has abnormal perceptions.

Breadth and calm and profundity may all

have their source in this emotion, in which,
for the moment, all self-centred desire is
dead, and the mind becomes a mirror for
the vastness of the universe. Those who
have had this experience, and believe it to
be bound up unavoidably with assertions
about the nature of the universe, naturally
cling to these assertions. I believe myself
that the assertions are inessential, and that
there is no reason to believe them true. I
cannot admit any method of arriving at
truth except that of science, but in the realm
of the emotions I do not deny the value of
the experiences which have given rise to
religion. Through association with false
beliefs, they have led to much evil as well as
good; freed from this association, it may be
hoped that the good alone will remain.

Tractatus

Herbis

A picture represents its

subject from a position outside
it. (Its standpoint is its
representational form.) That is
why a picture represents its
subject correctly or incorrectly.
A picture cannot, however,
place itself outside its representational form.
What any picture, of whatever
form, must have in common
with reality, in order to be able
to depict it in any way at all, is
logical form, i.e. the form
of reality.
A picture whose pictorial
form is logical form is called a
logical picture.
Every picture is at the same
time a logical one. (On the other
hand, not every picture is, for
example, a spatial one.)
Logical pictures can depict
the world.

A picture has logico-pictorial

form in common with what it
depicts.
A picture depicts reality by
representing a possibility of
existence and non-existence of
states of affairs.
A picture represents a possible
situation in logical space.
A picture contains the
possibi-lity of the situation that
it represents.
A picture agrees with reality
or fails to agree; it is correct or
incorrect, true or false.
What a picture represents it
represents independently of its
truth or falsity, by means of its
pictorial form.
What a picture represents is its sense.
The agreement or disagreement of its sense
with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.
In order to tell whether a picture is true or
false we must compare it with reality.
It is impossible to tell from the picture alone
whether it is true or false.
There are no pictures that are true a priori.
A logical picture of facts is a thought.
A state of affairs is thinkable: what this
means is that we can picture it to ourselves.
The totality of true thoughts is a picture
of the world.

A thought contains the

possibility of the situation of
which it is the thought. What is
thinkable is possible too.
Thought can never be of
anything illogical, since, if it
were, we should have
to think illogically.
It used to be said that God
could create anything except
what would be contrary to the
laws of logic.The truth is that
we could not say what an illogical world would look like.
It is as impossible to represent in language anything that
contradicts logic as it is in
geometry to represent by its
co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to
give the co-ordinates of a point
that does not exist.
Though a state of affairs that
would contravene the laws of
physics can be represented by
us spatially, one that would
contravene the laws of
geometry cannot.
If a thought were correct
a priori, it would be a thought
whose possibility ensured
its truth.

A priori knowledge that a

thought was true would be
possible only if its truth were
recognizable from the thought
itself (without anything to
compare it with).
In a proposition a thought
finds an expression that can be
perceived by the senses.
We use the perceptible sign
of a proposition (spoken or
written, etc.) as a projection
of a possible situation.
The method of projection
is to think of the sense
of the proposition.
I call the sign with which we
express a thought a propositional
sign.And a proposition is a
propositional sign in its
projective relation to the world.
A proposition includes all that the projection
includes, but not what is projected.
Therefore, though what is projected is not
itself included, its possibility is.
A proposition, therefore, does not actually
contain its sense, but does contain the
possibility of expressing it.
(The content of a proposition means the
content of a proposition that has sense.)
A proposition contains the form, but not the
content, of its sense.

L I S T

C O L O

O F

P H O N

I M A G E S

1
The Society for
Psychical Research.
Holiday Isle Placemat
pantograph pattern. 1865.
2
Les Palmiers Histoire
Iconographique.
French 1878 edition.
3
Tractatus de Herbis.
A treatise of medicinal plants
painted in 1440 and housed
under shelfmark Sloane 4016 in
the British Library, in London.
4
Carlos Fdez-Pello
Plant Ergonomic. 2013.
5
Carlos Fdez-Pello
Plant Telepaty. 2013.
6
Tractatus de Herbis.
A treatise of medicinal plants
painted in 1440 and housed
under shelfmark Sloane 4016 in
the British Library, in London.
7
Les Palmiers Histoire
Iconographique.
French 1878 edition.

8
The head (without nose) of Nero.
He used cyanide to dispose
of unwanted family members.
1st-2nd century AD.
Found at Pompey, Italy.
9
Head (without nose) of Hypnos.
Possibly Roman, 1st-2nd century
AD; copy of a Hellenistic
original. Found at Civitella
dArno, near Perugia, Italy.
10
Nora Baron.
Filling a Hole with Plaster
(and removing the surplus with
a spatula). 2014.
11
Nora Baron.
Filling a Hole with Plaster
(and removing the surplus with a
spatula). 2014.
12
Hair Device (to describe all
forms of concealment, including
those strategies preventing
detection and recognition). 1962.
13
Hand Device (countershading,
background matching and
disruptive coloration). 1989.

14
Heraclides Ponticus Nose.
c. 390 BC c. 310 BC.
Found at Athens, Greece.
He is best remembered for
proposing that the earth rotates
on its axis, from west to east,
once every 24 hours.
15
Julin Cruz.
A Fluid Boomerang. 2014.
16
Karlos Gil.
Untitled (Ghost Device). 2014.
Fragmented ceramic white vases
from different historical periods.
17
Karlos Gil
Paperweight Quasicortex
Lentiform. 2014.
Glassblowing tubes, glassblowing
supplies, concrete, ebony wood,
olive wood, indian red wood.
18-21
Karlos Gil
Output Functions. 2013.
3d laser-cut acrylic.
22
The Society for
Psychical Research.
Arboretum Placemat quilting
pantograph pattern. 1865.

Published and produced by Gasworks and AC|E.

Acknowledgments:
Beln Zahera
Joaqun Garca
Rowan Geddis
Nancy Cooper
Lorena Muoz-Alonso
Mira Loew
David Altweger
Rafa Prada
Manuel Angel
Carolina Rito
Quino Monje
The Warburg Institute
London Science Museum
Proyecto Rampa
and all the participants.

Editors:
Karlos Gil and Beln Zahera

Special Thanks:
to Beln Zahera, you are my inspiration.

Concept:
Karlos Gil

All works reproduced here courtesy of:

Garca | Galera, Madrid.
Gasworks, London.

Karlos Gil
Like Potted Plants in an Office Lobby.
Printed Paper.
2014.

Many have contributed to this book and I would like to

give recognition to their efforts within the complex process
that publishing entails.

This publication is published on the occasion of the

international residency program at Gasworks, London.

Graphic Design:
Karlos Gil
Print:
Imprint Digital, Devon (UK).
Paper:
Bookwove 80
Typefaces:
Baskerville, Century Gothic

Published:
The Negative Press

 The Negative Press