A Red Turn

It has been awhile. I pondered long and hard (which is to say I was in a state of prolonged excitement) over whether I should abandon this blog to the musty mothballs of the silicone wastelands, or revive it with the sudden kiss of a terribly lost, hopelessly haggard, and entirely unattractive future potentate. Needless to say that Grimm visage prevailed, and here I am once more, ready to kick ass, take names, and chew bubblegum.

As some of you might be aware, I only recently got back from an extended visit to my homeland, Sri Lanka. The trip and its various implications I will not speak of here, for the sake of brevity, but if you see me face to face then we can discuss it over a tankard or two of good lager.

I will say one thing about that journey. It has cemented my core in ways I, in all my prior extrapolations, could not have fathomed. I realize now that I am a Sri Lankan first, then a Canadian. I lived there for most of my life. Sixteen years. Going back was like slipping into a still-warm blanket beside an always-warm lover after making some morning coffee. I felt at ease there, no matter if I was navigating the barely organized chaos of Colombo or Kandy, or trekking the remote foothills of a tiny village. I am more comfortable in this skin. I am stronger.

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And in more local matters, Stephanie Posavec has created some of the most arresting textual visualizations I have ever seen. Her primary source is Jack Kerouac’s seminal beat classic/manifesto, ‘On The Road’. But she also dissects Faulkner’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’, and Orwell’s ‘1984′. She has painstakingly analyzed every single word in the book and created mathematically precise renderings of recurring lingual patterns. The results seem like flowcharts to some yet-to-be-conceived Quantum computer, and brings up some very interesting issues in regards to experiencing textual information. What is it to ‘read’ a book? What kind of an experience could we have if we could somehow bypass the words themselves, delve into our other senses? Is the essence of a book (if there is some such unchanging quality – Barthes would vehemently disagree) in the words themselves, or elsewhere, in some meta-pattern churned out in an immense, invisible loom? Looking at what Posavec has created, especially her “Sentence Drawings” series, where her deconstruction of sentence-structures into simple colour-coded line drawings transforms the text into precise spatial dimensions, I can come to a very clear understanding of the character of the book. We can begin to talk about the text as we would looking at a particularly revealing photograph of a person: “On The Road” is flighty, irreverent, intense, drunk, undisciplined, and honest. ‘1984′, meanwhile, is logical, cold, meticulous, completist, harsh, structured, and a somewhat hopeless. Posavec has created a personal labyrinth for the text, placing the viewer into it as an experimenter would a mouse. What is startling is that these constructions are ultimately linear, but when viewed as a whole, come off as organic and simultaneous. Check it out.

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It has occurred to me that I should probably be a bit more consistent in my updates to this blog. So I shall try to make at least one post a week from now on. That might change when I’m in the thick of academia, but till then, you can expect a regular dose of the not-so-random.

abbey-sense

I have been absent from these plains. I apologize.

Wait… I’ve said that already.

Well anyway, the primary reason was the neglect of my computer, which happens whenever I come to an electronic ’saturation point’, and the sight of anything remotely evocative of diode-intelligence becomes irrelevant and vaguely nauseating.

I have been fighting a battle with myself. The outcome is still not clear. Large, roving armies clomp about on blood-stained fields, and the dismembered bodies of foes and friends alike constitute the charred, organic landscape in their death-poses. I am besieged and running out of food. We have a well in here but each day the water we draw out is less clear, muddied with a rustic silt. I fear that the blood that is being spilled outside the city walls is seeping far into the soil and tainting the ground-water. We are growing accustomed to imbibing the life of our dead.

A bleak sight, to be sure. But I have a trick or two stashed in the cow-shed. We must be discrete with ourselves. It is the only way to assure victory.

Check out these remarkable drawings by zoologist and artist Ernst Haeckel.

He was one of the primary influences of Darwin himself, coined many of the biological terms that have become ubiquitous today and even mapped out a genealogical tree connecting ALL lifeforms far before any such thing was even deemed possible. Many of his theories seem remarkable and futuristic even today, the most fascinating of which is in these three words: “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny”.

Which is to say that the course of individual physiological/psychological development parallels or mirrors the course of the species’ physiological/psychological development. This is especially fascinating when you start to think about how many social theorists have argued along the same lines, including those stalwarts Freud and Marx. “Civilizations and Discontents” rests its entire logical postulate on this relationship, as does the connective tissue between Marx’s individual nature and collective nature. Even Hegel to an extent argues the same thing with his Historical Reason.

But this opens up an entirely new can of squid: If individual psychology can be altered to experience transcendental states, then, if we accept the former postulate, how do those states manifest themselves in larger social structures? Do they become objectified in architecture and art? Do they have the capacity to change the underlying ontology of civilization itself?

Bah, humbug! I must get back to the ramparts. The enemy has found a crack in the walls.

Our invisible fields of chatter

Here is an amazing student project that seeks to re-conceptualize our ideas of radio-waves as emitted by our various and variously hued electronic gizmos. Wifi, Bluetooth, GSM and others all emit very specific electromagnetic patterns that until now have remained abstract models on computer screens. But after seeing some of these immaculate visualizations, I can’t help but imagining these giant, blobbish monsters throbbing their way around our cityscapes.