Sorglose Nacht

We have there two orders of order: sequential and jussive. (JD: Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1)

Hristina Tasheva worked for years cleaning houses in Amsterdam.

"Tasheva has collected hundreds of notes used to communicate with the people whose houses she cleaned, with messages such as: ‘Hi Hristina, how are you? Do you please want to clean the fridge? Thank you. The cat is back home. Nice weekend.’

[ … ]

Tasheva, who studied agricultural economics in Bulgaria, thought she was wasting her time. She feared that if she had children, they might call her stupid for leading such an empty life. To do something meaningful, she started taking photographs of herself at the houses she cleaned." (Do you please want to clean the fridge?)

[ … … … ]

“A phantom can…be sensitive to idiom.” (Archive Fever, 85-86)

“…the archive is made possible by death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation.” (Ibid, 94)

“The last door opens, of course, at the last sentence of the book. A remarkable and necessary notion, decisive precisely where nothing is decided. It is not by chance that this last door takes the form of a promise, the promise of a secret kept secret. What happens when a historian promises to keep secret on the subject of an archive which is yet to be established?” (Ibid, 71)

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us.

- Bataille, L’Art, exercise de la cruauté

The image above was created by Martin Klimas, who describes the process in the following way:

The shooting environment must be controlled and kept consistent. The lighting is clear and direct, head on. My background is neutral, but bright enough so that the shattering object completely stands out. I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second. I do this procedure many times or until I find the one frame that is just right. I keep just one such picture for every figurine.

- Interview with Rosecrans Baldwin, The Morning News.

So here we are again; at the double-paralysis, the uncanny encounter with technology.

¶ One

Klimas, self-decribed as “in [one] sense a sculptor, but [with] only a 5000th of a second to build my sculpture,” is in fact the curator of the camera’s monuments.

One could not capture these images; the precision required is too great. One needs an array of prostheses: audio-sensors, custom camera circuitry and photodiodes, an onboard computer … At this rate of speed, our hands are dumb, paralyzed.

The photograph is too fast for us: It is the time equivalent of the incessant scientific photographs of DNA or the Milky Way.

¶ Two

One initially inclines to read these photographs as monuments to the destruction of porcelain, cassette tapes, cellular phones, flowers. As one looks, however, this inclination itself self-destructs - the images memorialize something that we all know we must have missed.

Now (but from a “now” that is clearly too precise) the uncanny surfaces: More and more, one cannot help but see instead monuments rendered to the unfazed, precise and complicated computer-controlled camera that captures moment after moment of the fall.

Everything is wrong, one realizes. These images are perverse, fetishistic…

But the trap is not reducible to the bait. It supposes not only the hand that places it but the end pursued. What happens to someone who takes the bait? What are, for the individual who gives into fascination, the consequences of his weakness?

- Bataille, Ibid.

0. “The animal is there before me, there close to me, there in front of me- I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also - something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself - it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.”

1. “Dressing oneself would be inseperable from all the other forms of what is proper to man, even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift and so on.”

2. “God destines the animals to an experience of the power of man, in order to see the power of man in action, in order to see the power of man at work, in order to see man take power over all the other living things … God gives Ish alone the freedom to name the animals … This ‘in order to see’ marks at the same time the infinite right of inspection of an all powerful God and the finitude of a God who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language.”

3. “…nature (and animality within it) isn’t sad because it is mute… On the contrary, it is nature’s sadness or mourning that renders it mute and aphasic, that leaves it without words. For what, for so long now, has been making it sad…is in the first place the fact of receiving one’s name … seeing oneself given one’s proper name is something like being invaded by sadness.”

I was browsing Netlex today, and I came across the work of Mark Lombardi, which is paper drawings visualizing the networks of relationships between all the players in, for example, the The BCCI Affair.

Now if this sounds familiar to denizens of the network art community, it is no surprise - Josh On’s “They Rule” has been a staple example of the data-visualization era of multimedia work since it first arrived on the scene in the early part of this decade. If you haven’t spent some time map-making on this site, I strongly recommend you do so right away. The difference here, of course, is the difference between a map and a cartographic technology.

Not too long ago, I was visiting my friend Rick Silva in Boulder, and he pointed me in the direction of the work of Lee Walton, who seems to be working the border of whatever it is that the network can do for visual art, and a more flatland style of data visualization. (I recommend immensely looking through some of his baseball drawings.)

I guess the point here is that while it seems like data visualization might seem like a dead-end anymore, there are still great things happening with it. Particularly with the institution of the ability to create data-visualization tools for wide public use, as well as the technology of “stem” or RAW data, the possibilities have become more interesting. In short, data visualization is a framework for creating pictures, “interactive” or otherwise, and there is nothing like looking at some pictures on a Saturday morning.

Except perhaps reading some Heidegger on a Saturday morning:

It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.
-From The Question Concerning Technology (my italics)

Now the interesting question of the Gestell becomes a bit more blurry as it has clearly never been the exclusive province of science, but it has also never been more concrete that it is also precisely the movement of the “beaux arts.” And of course, this is the very solicitation of the above notion of the Gestell, which is to say (rather obviously) that the dis-ordering of the order of the enframing of the world is itself also the enframing of the world. Curiously, Gestell is also the name for a skeleton.

Lee Walton: Market Street Observations, #4, 2002 (detail)