(no title)

The doctrine of eternal change is summarized in the assertion that + ACI -one cannot step into the same river twice + ACI – – the river is never + ACI – the same +ACI – from one moment to the next, and for Heraclitus the first principle of the world is not + ACI – being + ACI – but + ACI – becoming. + ACI – change, change, change…’

‘It is here important to refer to Greg Ulmer’s essay, “The Object of Post Criticism” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. In this essay Ulmer succinctly describes a set of potentials related to new forms of critical writing. Ulmer presents the following concept:

I will argue, following White’s lead, that ‘post-criticism'( -modernist, -structuralist) is constituted precisely by the application of the devices of modernist art to critical representations; furthermore, that the principal device taken over by the critics and theorists is the compositional pair collage/montage. (Ulmer, 1983, p. 83)

Recombinant Poetics seeks to build on this concept of the incorporation of collage/montage, through the technological construction of an enabling electronic mechanism, capable of making collage/montage operations which are not fixed, but are, mobile, fleeting, and continuously operational. Unlike the collage/montage environment that Ulmer suggests, A Recombinant Poetic environment enables the vuser to explore a set of modular elements within a continuously active, non-fixed, relativistic environment. An environment that exhibits the qualities of non-closure. Continue reading →

Théodore Géricault’s Study of a Torso for The Raft of the Medusa

‘Mechanism and organism share the ideal notion of an endless, empty repetition without difference, of an overall functionality and a rigorous subjection of the parts.’

Raunig G, A Thousand Machines, semiotext(e), pp.28

“By the end of the eighteenth century a sense of anxiety and crisis began to preoccupy European writers and artists in their relationship to a heroic past. The grandness of that history no longer fit into the framework of the present, and artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment.This was soon reflected in artistic representation, from Fuseli on. The partial image, the “crop”, fragmentation, ruin, and mutilation — all expressed grief and nostalgia for the loss of a vanished totality, a utopian wholeness. Often such feelings were expressed in deliberate destructiveness, which became the new way of seeing: the notion of the modern.In The Body in Pieces, the noted critic and art historian Linda Nochlin traces these developments by looking at work produced by artists from Neoclassicism and Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and beyond.”

Continue reading →