Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, c. 1490-1519
Hilma af Klint, The Mahatmas Present Standing Point Series II No. 2a, 1920
nickkahler reblogged
Karina Smigla-Bobinski, ADA: An Analog Interactive Installation / Kinetic Sculpture / Post-Digital Drawing Machine, c. 2015
‘«ADA» is much larger, esthetical much complexer, an interactive art-making machine. Filled up with helium, floating freely in room, atransparent, membrane-like globe, spiked with charcoals that leave marks on the walls, ceilings and floors. Marks which «ADA» produces quite autonomously, athough moved by a visitor. The globe obtains aura of liveliness and its black coal traces, the appearance of being a drawing . The globe put in action, fabricate a composition of lines and points, which remains incalculable in their intensity, expression, form however hard the visitor tries to control «ADA», to drive her, to domesticate her. Whatever he tries out, he would notice very soon, that «ADA» is an independent performer, studding the originally white walls with drawings and signs.’
The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be "a patriot to heaven," and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Homage to Victoria Ocampo," c. 1979
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, “On Creative Destruction,” c. 1980
nickkahler reblogged
W. Funke, Entry to the Tribune Tower Competition, Chicago, IL, 1922 (via archiveofaffinities)
Elena Damiani, Victory Atlas Series, 2012
- The Heavens
- The World 1
- The World 2
- The World in Hemispheres
Given the necessities of military intelligence, men have made themselves the servants of energy, that is to say, of violence. … The various energy particles, which are at once vehicles and projectiles, thus accomplish a global disintegration, that is to say, ecological and social.
Paul Virilio, “Military Space” in Bunker Archeology, 1997
The fault line between mythic past and real past is not always easy to draw - which is one of the conundrums of any politics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized, just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects. In sum, memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe.
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, 2000