Works of art exist in infinite solitude.
Rainer Maria Rilke in Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
I actually really like to think about OOO in architectural terms. You know Doctor Who, the British TV series? You know Doctor Who, this time traveling, free wheeling deus ex machina, and his machina is called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space. The TARDIS is famous for being “bigger on the inside”. His companions, when they first encounter it, run around the TARDIS trying to figure out why it’s so different on the inside than the way it appears on the outside. And in fact, they go on to discover that it’s infinite on the inside. On the outside, it’s a police call box from the 1950s.
Timothy Morton, “On Object-Oriented Ontology,” 2016
It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On the shores of the darkest known river,
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks
And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;
Then to the great court with its marble yard
Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there
In the sunken silence of the place and speak
Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,
And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,
Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,
The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything
Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,
As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,
Against the water’s will, where all the condemned
And pointless labor, stunned by his voice’s cadence,
Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled
Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled
Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,
To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.
As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,
Which was followed by days of sitting around
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes
Closed, trying to will her return, but finding
Only himself, again and again, trapped
In the chill of his loss, and, finally,
Without a word, taking off to wander the hills
Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken
The image of love and put in its place the world
As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure
Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,
And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place
Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept
The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,
And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,
And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain
And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light
Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing
Rose from its depths and shone as it never had.
And that was the second great poem,
Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest
Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable,
Invisible source of all longing to be; it came
As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard
Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement
Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep
Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,
Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,
Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees
By a weaving stream, brushing the bank
With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs
Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,
With his severed head rolling under the waves,
Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl
Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language
Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,
Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,
So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope
Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.
Mark Strand, Orpheus Alone, c. 1990
The specific is infinitely more difficult to name than the general.
Elizabeth King, From Teresita Fernandez’s Commencement Address, 2014
For what we believe to be love, our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous, indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.
It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1601
In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1606-7
I have no interest or intention of reopening old discussions of the pros and cons of hand versus computer drawings—they simply go nowhere. I’m willing to grant, for the sake of exploration, that one day a computer will be able to draw exactly like Masahiko Yendo. I repeat, exactly, with all the infinitely varied tonality and all the nuance of texture, shading, and illusion of light and darkness. For that to happen, of course, the pixels of the computer drawing would have to be infinitely small, creating the actual spatial continuity of the hand drawing. Assuming that this technological feat could be achieved, what difference would there be between the hand and the computer drawing?
Absolutely none—if we consider only the drawing itself, as a product, as an object, which—in our present society—is our habitual way of perceiving not only drawings, but also the buildings they describe.
I repeat: absolutely none. IF, however, we think of drawings—even the most seductively product-like ones shown here—as evidence of a process of thinking and making, the difference is vast. Indeed, there is no way to close the gap between them. In the hand-drawn image, every mark is a decision made by the architect, an act of analysis followed by an act of synthesis, as the marks are built up, one by one. In the computer-drawn image, every mark is likewise a decision, but one made by the software, the computer program—it happens in the machine, the computer, and does not involve the architect directly. In short, in the latter case, the architect remains only a witness to the results of a process the computer controls, learning only in terms of results. In the former case, the architect learns not only the method of making, but also the intimate connections between making and results, a knowledge that is essential to the conscious development of both.
Lebbeus Woods, "On Drawing," 2011 (via heumann)
John McCracken, Infinite / Electron / Star / Dimension, 2010
A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement... Polka dots are a way to infinity.
Yayoi Kusama, "On Flower (D.S.P.S)," 1954
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges, "On Literature," c. 1960 (via quote)
nickkahler reblogged
Edgar Chambless, Project for Roadtown, 1910 (via structuras)
Source: gizmoweb.org
The amount of information available to us has expanded almost infinitely.... The organization of disparate pieces into a coherent narrative is one of the crucial distinctions between twentieth- and twenty-first century assemblage. Although like their predecessors they are amalgams of discrete objects, the structure of the sculptures of the twenty-first century resemble not a newspaper, but a McSweeny's magazine, with its individual stories and articles printed in multiple typefaces and interrupted with footnotes, rhetorical inserts and illustrations.
Laura Hoptman, "Going to Pieces in the 21st Century" from Unmonumental, 2007
In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.
Mircea Eliade, "On the Eternal Return," c. 1960
nickkahler reblogged
Calvin Stables, The Infinite Repository of the Collective Now: Visualising Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, 2012 (via drawingarch)
The dream was composed like a tower of layers without end, rising upward and losing themselves in the infinite, or layers coiling downward, losing themselves in the bowels of the earth. When it swooped me in its undulations, the spiraling began, and this spiral was a labyrinth. There was no vault and no bottom, no walls and no return. But there were themes repeating themselves with exactitude.
Anais Nin, Excerpt from Winter of Artifice in Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, 1939 (via highbeam)