The Six of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 11, 2024
The World card is a cosmogram, meaning it depicts the whole of the cosmos. We find a naked woman floating within a ring, her legs crossed and something flowing about her. She is Maya, the embodied force of creation and illusion. Her dancing and spinning manifests the material world. The Four Cherubs frame the corners as symbols of the states of matter…
Name: Science
Number: Six
Astrology: Mercury in Aquarius
Qabalah: Tiphereth of Vau ו
Chris Gabriel May 18, 2024
The Six of Swords is a rare positive card in the suit. Here the winds of thought are well directed, and applied with intention and effect. This is a card of knowledge, and the acquisition thereof.
In Rider, we find a ferryman guiding a skiff with a huddled woman and child. The sky is grey, and the waters before them are still. This is a card of safety and retreat, and especially in the context of the grim visages that fill the suit of Swords, this is a positive card.
In Thoth, we find six swords aimed directly at a rose within a cross. About the swords are a geometric figure, a squared circle that has formed out of the chaotic shapes fluttering about the borders. We have the purplish greys of Aquarius and the gold of Mercury. This is the cross of the Rosicrucians. This card is the mind understanding the machinations of the universe.
In Marseille, We see six arched swords and a central flower. Qabalah tells us the six of swords is Tiphereth of Vau, or the Beauty of the Prince.
The Beauty of the Prince is his science, the way he learns, understands, and applies that knowledge.
As I’ve expressed before, the suit of swords evokes Hamlet, and this is the image of Hamlet the Scientist, Hamlet the Psychologist. Seen as such, we can interpret a great deal of Hamlet’s actions as experiments; consider the Mousetrap. Hamlet hypothesizes that Claudius kills his father, he puts on a play he calls “The Mousetrap” to prove this. The play’s the experiment!
As for Rider, we can think again to Hamlet, to his general ability to survive the treacherous court, feigning madness, going unpunished for murder, making off with pirates, evading execution, etc. His death is in many ways a suicide (which we’ll see later in the suit). But clearly, his understanding of his situation allows him to survive and escape death.
Thoth shows this science applied to the rosy cross, which is the symbol on the back of all Thoth cards. The rosy cross is a cosmogram, whose arms are the four elements, and whose petals are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In essence, an esoteric depiction of the universe, making this card a symbol of esoteric study itself.
When dealt this card we are being given an opportunity to develop our understanding of the things around us, to create a science of ourselves, and to then apply that knowledge in our lives.
More Than Meets the Eye - 1. Light, Science, Life.
Matthew Maruca May 16, 2024
In 1917, halfway through a career of developing theories and equations that changed our understanding of the world, Albert Einstein famously said “for the rest of my life, I will reflect on what light is.”
"Spectra of various light sources, solar, stellar, metallic, gaseous, electric" - Les Phénomènes de la Physique (1868). René Henri Digeon
Matthew Maruca May 16, 2024
In 1917, halfway through a career of developing theories and equations that changed our understanding of the world, Albert Einstein famously said “for the rest of my life, I will reflect on what light is.”
Substance or energy? Particle or wave? Light is a mysterious force, which links our internal experience to the external world. Or, does it create our internal experience, from the external world?
In our basic experience, light allows us to see. From the youngest age, we come to know that the “light switch” illuminates a dark room, allowing us to experience the room, without bumping into objects, tripping over things, and hurting ourselves. The world is already there, and we are a part of it, but without visible light, our conscious experience of the world is significantly limited. And it is vastly expanded by the presence of light.
We must then ask if this biological, biochemical, photochemical phenomenon that we call “light” allows our brain to consciously experience the material world around us, or if it is light that is actually creating our experience of the world. When the light is gone, we don’t have the same experience of the world; and when it’s present, we do. So it must be - in some way - creating our experience. What then, are we actually experiencing? To answer this, we must understand what exactly light is.
Light. And Science.
From the Bible to the Big Bang, several of the most influential stories of creation start with vibration or energy, which is not light. In many religions, this is the “Word”, the Cosmic Sound “Aum”, the voice of God the Creator; in science it is simply considered vibrational energy. And then, after the vibration, there is light.
Le Monde Physique (1882). Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
(Genesis 1:1-5, KJV)
This Biblical account of creation, where the voice of God is speech, is sound and vibrations, and comes before light is reflected in the scientific accounts of the origin of the universe. Light did not appear until some 380,000 years after the initial “Big Bang”, and while the first photons were created shortly after the Big Bang, they were immediately re-absorbed by different particles and so the universe was “opaque” during this time. Only after the universe cooled to a temperature of around 3000K, could protons and electrons begin to combine to form hydrogen, allowing perceptible light to move freely without being immediately absorbed. And then, there was light, in the form that we see.
From the perspective of science, light is a form of energy, the result of one of the four fundamental forces (a.k.a “interactions”), which govern everything in the known universe. Light is the term we use to describe the visible range of the broader spectrum of “electromagnetic radiation”, which comprises both the light we can see, and forms of radiation we cannot see, such as radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, gamma rays, and so on. The photons responsible for light are one of the fundamental particles created by the initial Big Bang.
It wasn’t until 1801, when a British physicist named Thomas Young performed an experiment called “the double-slit experiment”, that we began to grasp what light really is, a question we are still grappling with. Young projected light through two parallel slits in one surface, with another surface behind it. When the light hit the back surface, he expected to see a pattern showing the slits through which the light had passed. Instead, what he saw was several, spaced-out lines of light, indicating that the light traveled more like waves, canceling itself out in certain places, while becoming stronger in others. This opened up the debate as to whether light is really a particle or a wave.
It is understood that electromagnetic radiation, a spectrum that includes visible light as well as forms of radiation we cannot see, is created and emitted in the process of nuclear fusion. This began first in the origin of our universe and now occurs in stars such as our sun, when hydrogen atoms are pushed together under tremendous pressure to form larger helium atoms. Some of the matter which makes up these atoms is converted, but not created, into energy and radiated out as light.
Another common way that light is emitted is from electromagnetic interactions between energy and atoms. In a fluorescent lamp, electricity is injected into a tube filled with mercury vapor. The mercury atoms absorb this electricity but then become unstable and quickly re-emit it as mainly invisible light. This light is then absorbed by the phosphor coating on the inside of the tube, which converts it in a range that is visible to the human eye. and is then re-emitted. This process of conversion of photons with higher quantum energies into lower ones is called “fluorescence”. The energy began in the form of electricity on a copper wire being injected into the light tube (before this, it may have been energy trapped in coal, oil, or moving in the form of wind, solar, or geothermal energy, as well).
That’s just a brief summary of the science of light, what it is, and where it comes from. There is still so much we don’t understand about the nature of light but, we know, at least, that light is absolutely fundamental to our existence.
Light. And Life.
What would happen if the sun didn’t come up tomorrow or the next day and ever after? Very quickly, within days or weeks, Earth would begin to freeze. The energy of the sun provides the warmth which is a prerequisite for life on Earth but the sun offers more than warmth. The light that comes to earth powers photosynthesis—the production of all plant matter, powered by sunlight splitting water, allowing it to bind with carbon dioxide and make sugar, the basic building block of all plant matter. Without sunlight, no crops could grow and just as importantly, all of the ocean’s phytoplankton, and land’s jungles and rainforests would die, robbing the atmosphere of its oxygen. Without oxygen, complex life, which is based on energy-producing mitochondria that use oxygen to generate energy, would fail. Life on Earth is the result of the conditions provided by sunlight. Life is not just built by sunlight, but it is sustained by its power. Light is essential for keeping the “system of life” in motion.
Cloud Shadow With Red Diffusion Light During the Disturbance Period (1884). Eduard Pechuël-Loesche.
Earlier on, we established that light is a fundamental part of our conscious experience of the world. And while there are still questions as to the nature of lightself, we know even less about the nature of consciousness.The two are closely linked, and great spiritual teachers throughout history have described our consciousness as a form of energy which is either directly connected or very closely related to light.
Traditional Chinese Medicine speaks of “Qi”, the life force energy which courses through our meridians, giving us life, and, when out of balance, can lead to disease. People have practiced exercises like “tai chi” and “qi gong” for millennia to care for this energy. A very similar perspective exists in the traditional religions of India as the concept of “prana”, and practices like meditation and “pranayama” breathwork sustain, nourish, and enhance this vital “life force” energy. In the West, scientists have found tremendous benefits from meditation (a PubMed search on the term yields over 10,000 results), yet they lack clear, definite mechanisms to explain these effects. Many doctors and leading healthcare institutions are beginning to prescribe alternative treatments like acupuncture and meditation to support patients’ health and well-being. This “life force” energy may not exactly be light; it may be more like electricity. But in the same way that solar power can be converted into electricity, and electricity can be converted back into light in a lamp, these different forms of energy within us are related, even if we don’t fully understand them.
It’s clear that the existence of life on Earth is inextricably linked to the conditions given by sunlight. We could even say that life on Earth is the result of the conditions provided by sunlight. Life, as we know it, is a product of the interaction between sunlight and the elements on the Earth’s surface.
Matt Maruca is an entrepreneur and journalist interested in health, science, and scientific techniques for better living, with a focus on the power of light. He is the Founder & CEO of Ra Optics, a company that makes premium light therapy products to support optimal health in the modern age. In his free time, he enjoys meditation, surfing, reading, and travel.
What Do The Fungi Want?
Tuukka Toivonen May 14, 2024
Creative ideas grow, mutate and flourish through conversations between people. However casual or mundane, these exchanges have the potential to reveal novel possibilities, or dramatically shift the course of a fledgling idea. Direct interactions are a tremendous source of motivation for creators. The best ones possess a much-overlooked generative power…
Fly Agaric Watercolor, 1892. Leigh Woods.
Tuukka Toivonen May 14, 2024
Creative ideas grow, mutate and flourish through conversations between people. However casual or mundane, these exchanges have the potential to reveal novel possibilities, or dramatically shift the course of a fledgling idea. Direct interactions are a tremendous source of motivation for creators. The best ones possess a much-overlooked generative power.
This was the basic premise of the research I was involved in as a sociologist until, a few years ago, I stumbled across interspecies creativity. I had become intrigued by how certain colleagues – designers and artists, especially – spoke passionately about how they sought to ‘create with and for nature’ or even ‘as nature’ when making new textiles, garments or artworks. They felt strongly that it was time to start treating living organisms and ecosystems as genuine collaborators and co-creators in their process.
Atlas des Champignons (1827). M. E. Descourtilz,
Spellbound by the prospect of novel ideas and designs emerging from humans collaborating with algae, mycelium and slime mould, I started to wonder about the practical and philosophical implications of such phenomena. For me, the question was not only about understanding the material qualities of particular organisms, it was about how humans might transform themselves into genuine co-creators in relation to nonhumans.
The notion of ‘creating with nature’ can be confounding – it was for me. Beyond the crude physical barriers that keep nonhuman and human lives separate, prevailing worldviews order us to place animals, plants, insects and fungi in a fundamentally different category from humans who – whilst animal – have developed complex cultures, technologies and societies, making us ‘unstoppable’, even ‘superior’. As a result of this human-centric conditioning, we are hopelessly unaccustomed to viewing nonhuman life as intelligent. Experts of human organizational life argue that perspective-taking – in essence, making an effort to imagine the point of view of another person or persons – is key to successful communication and management, and even constitutive of our ability to be ‘fully human’. There is no such chorus calling us to seriously listen or sensitize ourselves to the perspectives of nonhumans.
To explore species-crossing creativity further (in the hope of transcending or ameliorating the non/human barrier), we decided to hold in-depth conversations with a dozen biodesigners and bioartists, as well as a few progressive entrepreneurs. The creators were growing sneakers with bacteria that produce nanocellulose, working with microalgae to purify water contaminated by fashion dyes, and sewing fabrics from wild plants, among other fascinating experimental practices.
One outspoken participant explained that, in the early stages of the creative process, he always sought to engage as directly and viscerally with a living organism as possible, relentlessly looking for promising ways to collaborate. Having developed a particular interest in working with mycelium at a mass scale, he soon became curious not only about the material co-design possibilities of this organism, but also its behaviours and its needs. A simple yet pivotal question emerged: ‘What does the fungi want?’ His next steps as a designer and entrepreneur would be derived from that simple query.
Nearly all the creators we spoke to expressed an active curiosity about the needs of the organisms they were engaging with. Working with diverse plant species as well as digital technology, one participant recounted how she explored the way plants sense the world, their sensitivity to light and sound, and their ways of communicating with other organisms. Another spoke of the profundity of learning to collaborate with organisms whose existence on earth predated that of humans by millions of years.
“By subtly observing and interacting with diverse organisms, creators can establish equality of existence with all forms of life.”
The Intruder (c.1860). John Anster Fitzgerald.
What does it mean, really, to think in terms of what a nonhuman organism ‘needs’, ‘wants’ or ‘likes’? Do such queries belie a deeper significance, an alternative way to view human-nature relations?
The visionary work of the British anthropologist Tim Ingold may help us understand why inquiring into the ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ of organisms is not just naïve anthropomorphism. In his discussion of how the people of the North American Cree Nation situate themselves in relation to their surroundings, Ingold uncovered a relevant mode of being that transcends central dichotomies that govern our (Western) thinking with regards to nonhuman life:
“From the Cree perspective, personhood is not the manifest form of humanity; rather the human is one of many outward forms of personhood. And so when Cree hunters claim that a goose is in some sense like a man, far from drawing a figurative parallel across two fundamentally separate domains, they are rather pointing to the real unity that underwrites their differentiation” (from Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment, 2001).
Ingold explains that, unlike Western approaches that begin from an assumption of fundamental difference between humans and animals (leading us to search for possible analogies and anthropomorphisms, describing many animal behaviours and features in terms of their resemblance to humans), indigenous communities have typically done the opposite: starting from an assumption of similarity. For this reason, in such communities “it is not ‘anthropomorphic’ […], to compare the animal to the human, any more than it is ‘naturalistic’ to compare the human to the animal, since in both cases the comparison points to a level on which human and animal share a common existential status, namely as living beings and persons”. It is owing to this holistic worldview that the Cree assign personhood and utmost value to animals, forests, rivers and other parts of the living world, the all-important commonality with humans being their aliveness, animateness, or their potential to become an animate being.
And so we find that hidden inside our question – what does the organism need? – lies an entirely different, non-dichotomous approach to being. Indeed, by subtly observing and interacting with diverse organisms, creators can establish equality of existence with all forms of life.
It is not that we should believe that fungi or microalgae – or larger animate entities such as rivers or lakes – possess a will or preferences exactly like those of humans. Rather, it is that through these acts of curiosity and questioning, we place ourselves on a single life plane, opening up space for genuine interaction. . From this vantage point, asking ‘what does the fungi want?’, is a radical act in the context of a technological society, contesting the deep dichotomies of ‘modern’ life. Importantly, adopting this orientation rejects the totalizing tendency to position science as the only legitimate route to gaining knowledge, by restoring our ability to enter into direct, unmediated and authentic relations with other forms of life. This way of questioning can take us a surprisingly long way towards transforming ourselves into genuine collaborators and co-creators for other species.
So, what did the fungi want? In the case of the particular designer mentioned earlier, one Bob Hendrix, the answer turned out to be that they wanted to digest and recycle organic matter, specifically, humans. That insight led the designer down a path of developing mycelium-based coffins, with a view to helping humans to become useful, welcome participants in more-than-human ecosystems at the end of their lives, gifting life-giving soil with precious nutrients and energy.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
The World (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 11, 2024
The World card is a cosmogram, meaning it depicts the whole of the cosmos. We find a naked woman floating within a ring, her legs crossed and something flowing about her. She is Maya, the embodied force of creation and illusion. Her dancing and spinning manifests the material world. The Four Cherubs frame the corners as symbols of the states of matter…
Name: The World
Number: XXI
Astrology: Saturn
Qabalah: Tau ת
Chris Gabriel May 11, 2024
The World card is a cosmogram, meaning it depicts the whole of the cosmos. We find a naked woman floating within a ring, her legs crossed and something flowing about her. She is Maya, the embodied force of creation and illusion. Her dancing and spinning manifests the material world. The Four Cherubs frame the corners as symbols of the states of matter. This card, while containing lofty spiritual imagery, pertains to mundane material reality.
In Marseilles, our lady has a wand and a red/green sash. She is smiling and looking down. In the corners sit a winged angel, an eagle, and a lion, each of them bearing a Nimbus. Only the Bull, the Cherub of Earth, is uncrowned. The ring is a blue wreath with yellow ties, set on a pure white background.
In Rider, she has two wands and a gray, saturnine sash. She has a Mona Lisa smile and is looking down. Here the Cherubs are emerging out of clouds and have no nimbus. The ring is vegetable green with red ties and the card is set on a blue sky.
In Thoth, we have a drastically different image. World gives way to the vast Universe and the lady is no longer human, but living gold. Her sash is a serpent, and she is dancing. The Cherubs appear almost as a fountain structure, pouring fourth energy. The ring is the perspective of a round sky, the wheel of the Zodiac, and the endless stars beyond. The card is set on a resurrected Saturn, no longer dead, but verdant. The eye of God is looking down at the motions within the ring, and below is the geometric emanation of these lofty elements.
How are we to make sense of this beautiful but complex imagery?
Let’s start with a sort of spiritual “math”. Just as our journey through the Major Arcana begins with airy Zero, here we find the empty hole of the number filled in by material reality. Potential becoming actualized.
0=2, as the magicians declare. Nothing is lonely, and in it’s loneliness begets difference. By dividing itself into what we call light and dark, good and evil, night and day, masculine and feminine, it creates the tension necessary for the theater of existence.
And of course it doesn’t stop there, two makes itself four, and on and on until we have our endlessly varied World.
The sash is the serpentine, spiraling energy of creation and the direction of this divine expansion flows along
The Cherubs are the four Living Creatures of Ezekiel, the four elements, and the four fixed signs of the Zodiac. They are the divided Tetragrammaton:
The Lion is Leo and Fire
The Eagle is Scorpio and Water
The Angel is Aquarius and Air
The Bull is Taurus and Earth
These four elements, as our study of tarot will make clear, make up reality itself. We can bring this to a more scientific view, as we often struggle with differentiating the Philosopher’s elements from mundane elements.
Water is not H20, but all liquids, Earth is not dirt, but all solids, etc. The philosophical elements are states of matter and their corresponding mystical significance.
In this way, this card provides a view of all physical reality.
When we draw this card, we are often reaching a standstill, a moment of pause to look at ourselves, our actions, and our world from the distance of the heavenly machinations that form it.
Footnotes to Plato (c.428-347BC)
Nicko Mroczkowski May 9, 2024
Ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation. Art, agriculture, and commerce had progressed to the point of creating, apparently for the first time, a culture of intellectuals. Many of the things that we now call ‘institutions’ – democracy, the legal process, the education system – had their start in this period. It was even here that ‘Europe’ got its name…
Rafael's School of Athens, 1511.
Nicko Mroczkowski May 9, 2024
Ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation. Art, agriculture, and commerce had progressed to the point of creating, apparently for the first time, a culture of intellectuals. Many of the things that we now call ‘institutions’ – democracy, the legal process, the education system – had their start in this period. It was even here that ‘Europe’ got its name.
In this flourishing new culture, thinkers began to try and understand the world in a more organised way. From this, Western philosophy was born, and science came along with it. These thinkers asked themselves: what is the world made of, and how does it work? This was not a new question, most likely every culture before had asked it in some way, but what made the Ancient Greeks unique was their systematic approach. Because they also asked a secondary question, which, arguably, is still the starting point of any scientific inquiry: what is the correct way to talk about what something is?
L. Vosterman, after Rubens. c. 1620.
Each of the very first philosophers answered this question with one thing: ‘substance’, or stuff. They believed that the right way to understand the world is in terms of a single type of matter, which is present in different proportions in everything that exists. Thales of Miletus, perhaps the earliest Greek philosopher, believed that all things come from water; solid matter, life, and heat are all special phases of the same liquid. For him, then, the true way to talk about an apple, for example, is as a particularly dense piece of moisture. Heraclitus, on the other hand, believed that everything is made of fire; all existence is in flux, like the dancing flame, of which an apple is a fleeting shape.
We don’t know much more about these thinkers, as not much of their work survives; most of the accounts we have are second hand. We only know for sure that each proposed a different ultimate substance that everything is made out of. Then, a little while later, along came a philosopher called Plato.
Despite its prominence, ‘Plato’ was actually a nickname meaning ‘broad’ – there is disagreement about its origin, but the most popular theory is that it comes from his time as a wrestler. His real name is thought to have been ‘Aristocles’. Whatever he was really called, Plato changed everything. Instead of arguing, like his predecessors, for a different kind of ultimate substance, he observed that substance alone is not enough to explain what exists: there is also form. In other words, he more or less invented the distinction between form and content.
One could spend a lifetime analysing these terms, and there are whole volumes of art and literary theory that address their nuances; but it’s also a common-sense distinction that we use every day. The form of something is its shape, structure, composition; the content, or substance, is the stuff it’s made of. So the form of an apple is a sweet fruit with a specific genetic profile, and its content is various hydrocarbons and trace elements. The form of a literary work is its style and composition – poetry or prose, past or present tense, first- or third-person, etc. – and its content is its subject matter, what it describes and what happens in it.
An attempt at a classification of the perfect form of a rabbit. (1915)
We can already see Plato’s influence on modern knowledge in these examples. The correct way to talk about something, for him, was primarily in terms of its form, and only secondarily in terms of its substance. This is still the case for us today. There is a powerful justification for this preference: it allows us to talk about things generally. This is basically the foundation of any science; we would get absolutely nowhere if we only analysed particular individuals. There are just too many things out there. No two animals of the same species, for example, will ever have exactly the same make-up – even if they’re clones. They have eaten different things, had different experiences; they also, quite frankly, create and shed cells so rapidly and unpredictably that differences in their substance are inevitable. What they do have in common, though, is their anatomy, behaviour, and an overall genetic profile that produces these things.
Forms are peculiar, however, because they don’t exist in the same way as substances do. While there are concrete definitions of substances, the same cannot be said for forms. There are, for example, no perfect triangles in existence, and we could probably never create one – zoom in enough, and something will always be slightly out of place. So how did Plato come up with the idea of something that can never be experienced in real life? The answer is precisely because of things like triangles. Mathematics, and especially geometry, is the original language of forms, and it can describe a perfect triangle or circle, even though one may never exist. The success of mathematical inquiries in Plato’s time allowed him to recognise that the concept of forms which worked in geometry can be applied to understand the world more generally.
Forms are perfect specimens of imperfect things, are exemplars, or things we aspire to – they are the way things ought to be, in a perfect world. ‘Form’ in Plato’s work is also sometimes translated as ‘idea’ or ‘ideal’. And so, Plato’s answer to the question of how to conduct scientific inquiry was this: the correct way to talk about something is in terms of how it should be. Despite our imperfect world, rational thinking – the capacity of the human mind for grasping things like mathematical truths – can do this, and that’s what sets human beings and their societies apart from the rest of nature.
Perfect Platonic Solids
It gets a little strange from this point on: Plato believes that forms really exist, but in a separate, perfect world. Our souls start out there and then make their way to the material world to be born, but still have implicit knowledge of their original home, and this is where reason originates. Improbable, yes, but not completely absurd. Plato was clearly trying to explain, to a society that was just beginning to understand the importance of perfect knowledge, how it could exist in our imperfect world of change and difference. Two millennia later, Kant would show that it’s due to the way the human mind is structured, but we don’t really know how this happened either.
Really, we’re still playing Plato’s game. The basic realisation that to know the world, we must study the general and the perfect, and ignore the non-essential characteristics of particular individuals – this is his legacy. Of course, this way of thinking is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that it can be hard to grapple with; it’s so fundamental that we take it for granted. But what we call knowledge today would not be possible at all without it. Seeing this, we can imagine what the influential British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead meant when he wrote that ‘the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato’.
Nicko Mroczkowski
Children’s Drawings
Ale Nodarse May 7, 2024
Children’s drawings abound. They have few dates and fewer titles, but nonetheless they pile up. Assembled on fridges or tucked away in shoeboxes, they belong to a world of their own. It’s a world they, with few inhibitions, create –– and a world which is fragile. If such drawings survive, it’s most often because they have been saved by someone else. In other words, if drawings from your childhood survive, then you most likely have someone to thank…
Ale Nodarse May 7, 2024
Children’s drawings abound. They have few dates and fewer titles, but nonetheless they pile up. Assembled on fridges or tucked away in shoeboxes, they belong to a world of their own. It’s a world they, with few inhibitions, create –– and a world which is fragile. If such drawings survive, it’s most often because they have been saved by someone else. In other words, if drawings from your childhood survive, then you most likely have someone to thank.
Children’s drawings may be quaint, but they are powerful, too. In Bologna, in 1882, an Italian archaeologist and art historian called Corrado Ricci took shelter from the rain beneath a covered archway. That portico, to Ricci’s amazement, was filled with adolescent scribblings, with graffitied words and drawings. Here was a “permanent exhibition of literature and art” — one of rare modesty and more than occasional impropriety¹. The exhibition moved him and led him to collect children’s drawings, assembled in a book titled ‘The Art of Children’ (L’arte dei bambini). Lamenting the drawings’ anonymity, Ricci was determined to trace their history. The Art of Children is replete with works from his collection. It charts a course from first lines to full figures and makes a case for the life of a child’s mind. It charts, as well, the beginnings of a particular branch of developmental psychology. One in which, for instance, a “Table and Chair” becomes a proof of spatial cognition; and where a quickly dashed “Sun” rises in attestation as if to say: Observe the work of a child, year six.²
Human children have drawn for millennia (and so, quite likely, did their neanderthal cousins)³. Remarkable though it is, this fact ought not surprise us. Ricci’s revelation, that such drawings have much to teach us, did however seem surprising (at least to many of his peers). Turning away from the product of children’s drawing to the process of its collection (on the fridge or in the shoebox), we might wonder: What causes us to marvel at a child’s drawing in the first place?
This act of marveling has a history. One of the earliest images of a child’s drawing was not by a painter, but by an archaeologist and antiquarian. That painting, Giovanni Caroto’s c. 1515 Portrait of a Boy With Drawing, is marvelously strange.⁴ Strange, given that children were rarely depicted apart from their parents — as having their own distinct lives.⁵ And stranger, still, because this child holds a drawing. Curving slightly at the grasped edge, the paper reveals a standing figure, a partial head, and, just above the boy’s thumb, an eye placed in profile.
Why set such a drawing in painting? Scholars have sought a familial link between the artist and the boy.⁶ His carrot-colored hair has provoked speculation that he is indeed the artist’s son (or younger nephew), namely since Caroto means “Carrot.” But Caroto’s other vocation remains suggestive. As an archaeologist, he spent years compiling a list of the antiquities in his hometown of Verona, tasked with the setting of “timeless” fragments back into time.⁷ Viewed as testimonies of human creation, every fragment –– drawn and discovered –– could be beheld as eloquent. Whether made by his relative or not, Caroto found the boy’s drawing worthy of similar preservation.
Children’s drawings, a marvel in their own right, raise a question that children do not ask. What do we — looking back, looking ahead — consign to loss? And what do we save?
¹Corrado Ricci, L’arte dei bambini (The Art of Children) (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887), 3–4.
²Helga Eng, The Psychology of Children's Drawings: From the First Stroke to the Coloured Drawing (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1931). (Fig. 62, reproduced from her text.)
³Jean-Claude Marquet (et al.), “The Earliest Unambiguous Neanderthal Engravings on Cave Walls: La Roche–Cotard, Loire Valley, France,” PLoS ONE (2023): 1–53.
⁴The painting, made with oil on board, is kept at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy.
⁵Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 43. Ariès proposed, not without significant controversy, that the turning point for the representation and understanding of the child as such was the beginning of the seventeenth century. .
⁶Francesca Rossi (et al.), Caroto (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2020), 134.
⁷Caroto captured Verona’s antiquities through a series of engravings first published in 1540, with a text by antiquarian and humanist Torello Saraina.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
Strength (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel May 4, 2024
Strength depicts a woman with power over a lion. She has overcome this extremely dangerous beast by means of influence and control, though each deck posits a very different form of control…
Name: Strength, Force, Lust
Number: XI or VIII
Astrology: Leo
Qabalah: Teth ט
Chris Gabriel May 4, 2024
Strength depicts a woman with power over a lion. She has overcome this extremely dangerous beast by means of influence and control, though each deck posits a very different form of control.
In Marseilles we find a well-dressed noble woman opening the mouth of the lion. She is smiling. While one hand is opening his mouth, the other is in front of it, revealing her degree of control. The lion’s eyes, like his mouth, are wide open, he looks up as she looks down. The card is called “La Force”, the force being that bestial force of the lion, and the taming, civilizing, force of the woman.
In Rider, we see a similar image. Our lady here is dressed in white and adorned with flowers. She is crowned by infinity, an explicit mirroring of the hat in Marseilles. The lion here is far more tame, almost reduced to a dog, licking at her happily, with his eyes closed. She is closing his mouth. This card is called Strength, which is the strength of the woman to close the lion’s mouth, and of course, the physical strength of the lion himself.
In Thoth we are given a drastically different image, and evocative name, Lust. Here we have a reinterpreted scene from Revelation: the Whore of Babylon and the Great Beast. Moving beyond the repressive, chaste attitudes of the past two cards, here the woman controls the lion from on top. She has reigned the beast, and rides him. She is naked and bearing a cup, and the beast not only has many faces, but a serpentine tail (the Serpent is the ideogram of Teth).
The profound differences across these decks reveal just how significant this particular card is.
This is a card about Sex. Of course one can interpret these means of control as they appear in relationships, but this is a mystical art, and the important work here is understanding how this relates to self control.
The Freudian Libido, immense and dangerous, is given an emblem here. In the past, repression or chaos were our only options for dealing with this energy.
We tame the beast, or we are devoured by it. The radical, psychoanalytic development of sublimation, is shown in Thoth. Here we are given the option to not simply repress and subdue our animal urges, but to ride them where we will. Primal drives are the most powerful forces of nature, effectively directing them means harnessing a great power. Yet, this is difficult and dangerous thing, so much so that we even have a phrase for it: riding the tiger.
This is a card of creative and developmental energies, how they can overwhelm us, and how to understand and utilize this overflow.
When dealt this card, we are to consider our own creative energies, our sexuality. One can often expect an influx of these! And how will you deal with it? Use force to tame it, spiritual strength to control it, or ride the tiger of lust?
Boltzmann Brains — 1. Chaos in the DVD
Irà Sheptûn May 2, 2024
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe…
Celestograph, 1893. August Strinberg.
Irà Sheptûn May 2, 2024
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Carl Sagan
Let’s pretend it’s 2006. You’ve just come back from the kitchen to continue watching a movie on DVD. The screen has now faded to black and the DVD logo is bouncing slowly from wall to wall in the box of the screen. You observe over time, the logo hits many different points within the rectangle of the box. One wouldn’t be alone in wondering how often the DVD logo will lock perfectly into one of the corners of the screen before bouncing back again. Naturally, this varies depending on the pixel size of the screen as well as the logo itself and its fixed velocity, but for a standard NTSC-format DVD Player with 4:3 aspect ratio, we can approximate the phenomenon to occur roughly every 500 – 600 bounces, or once every 3 hours. Now, suppose we blew up our screen slowly to the size of the observable universe, how often would we score a perfect corner lock-in then? The idea becomes completely absurd: we can all safely agree the probability is inconceivably, astonishingly tiny. But not impossible.
Celestograph, 1893. August Strinberg.
In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, physicists were busy laying the foundations of what we now understand as statistical thermodynamics – the art of using the rules that govern the very small components of a system that are probabilistic in nature, to build up a clear picture of the system’s behaviour in general. These small components (individual particles amongst many) have position and momenta that are constantly changing. It is useful to think of a closed system as a new deck of cards, with each particle represented by a single card in the deck. A central concept of statistical thermodynamics is entropy, often synonymous with disorder, where higher entropy systems are subject to greater randomness and uncertainty in their behaviour. If I were to take a random card and place it somewhere else in our new deck as you observed, you’d probably have an easier time reverting the deck back to its original order than if I shuffled it thoroughly. You might say the one-card rearrangement is of lower entropy than the thoroughly shuffled deck, due to the degree of disorder inherent to the shuffling of the cards from their standard order, right? Well, you’d be correct! There are many more possible configurations in our higher entropy shuffled deck that are all equally likely compared to any one-card manoeuvre. However, this description of entropy as a measure of disorder can often be misleading, as we’ll soon discover.
Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who alongside his contemporaries, was concerned with understanding how the properties that define the state of a closed system (such as average energy, temperature, or pressure) could be interpreted from the more probabilistic behaviour of the individual particles that make up a given thermodynamic process. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy of a closed system can only stay constant or increase over time. Boltzmann contested that perhaps entropy could be thought of more as a statistical property – the chances of staying the same or increasing are high, however the chances of decreasing are not zero, subject to behavioural fluctuations in the particles of the system. Recall our shuffled deck of cards: it’s highly unlikely to return to its original order through constant random shuffling, but the possibility must occur with infinite time!
“The system experiences a fluctuation to lower entropy; an ordered state arising from a more disordered one.”
One might now see how the description of entropy as a measure of disorder can cause some problems. Let’s say we have a deck of cards arranged by suit, and another arranged by increasing number. Which is more inherently entropic? Both decks are undeniably examples of a certain order within their own closed systems. If we accept that both are rearranged from the same initial structure, one must have higher entropy than the other to account for the number of rearrangements to get the structure it is now in. In this way, we can properly define entropy as a measure of the number of ways you can arrange these particles without changing the overall state of the system. In other words, how many ways can I shuffle the deck without adding new cards or taking any away?
Celestograph, 1893. August Strinberg.
But wait! Aren’t these so-called entropic fluctuations to order not a gross violation of the Second Law? If entropy is a statistical property, these fluctuations become inherent to the nature of the Second Law and not a violation, because the net direction of entropy will still tend to increase. Returning to our DVD Player (assuming that the little DVD logo travels around the box with random motion) we can say our closed system will increase in entropy as with every wall bounce the DVD logo makes as it loses predictability in its path. Over infinite time, all possible positions of the DVD logo in the two-dimensional box will be true, and shall increase steadily in entropy with every bounce.
But what of our exciting statistically improbable instances where the logo perfectly locks into a corner? According to Boltzmann, in these instances, the system experiences a fluctuation to lower entropy; an ordered state arising from a more disordered one. However, this is all still outweighed by the increasing net entropy of our DVD Player; the energy used up to power our little dancing logo on its journey of increasing uncertainty, and the heat expended by its humble efforts’ ad infinitum. With this same reasoning, Boltzmann introduced new ideas around the nature of our early universe and how it came to be well before the formulation of Lemaître’s theory of the Primeval Atom, or as it’s now known, The Big Bang Theory.
Now, try to imagine a vast cosmos, infinite in age. All the different regions of this system have more or less reached an equal share of energy: it is uniformly distributed, or what we call in Thermal Equilibrium. At this stage in the lifecycle of a cosmos it has reached maximal entropy, or Heat Death. As we know, it’s not impossible for such infinitely large systems to experience large fluctuations. Given the infinite age of this cosmos, any statistically unlikely event (no matter how improbable) must be true. It is not impossible that one of these local regions in space and time might fluctuate just enough from maximal entropy to form a new ‘world’, if only for a short period of aeons. This new ‘world’ might be indistinguishable from the world that you and I live in; a lower-entropy state of unspent energy and potential, arising by sheer improbability, from an otherwise vast and dead cosmos, trapped in maximal entropy.
There is a chance, then, that we are ‘the moment’ in the truest sense of the term. Could we be special and lucky enough to exist within such an unlikely ‘new world’? Could ours be the moment the DVD logo locks perfectly into the corner of the screen - a Boltzmann Universe?
Nonviolent Communication - Our Brains, Stereotypes, and Strategies
Wayland Myers April 30, 2024
Fifteen years ago, learning that I'd written a book on Nonviolent Communication, my wife's Community Nursing professor asked if I would come to the community clinic and share some of what I knew about NVC with a small group of men. They were beginning the process of reintegrating themselves into civilian life after having completed multi-year prison sentences and a six-month stint in halfway houses. The evening was part of a support program made available to them and I was keen to share some of the wisdom and humanity I’ve derived from this unique framework for helping people create compassionate connections with others and themselves.I readily agreed...
Fragment from an 18th Century Memento Mori, Poland
Wayland Myers April 30, 2024
Fifteen years ago, learning that I'd written a book on Nonviolent Communication, my wife's Community Nursing professor asked if I would come to the community clinic and share some of what I knew about NVC with a small group of men. They were beginning the process of reintegrating themselves into civilian life after having completed multi-year prison sentences and a six-month stint in halfway houses. The evening was part of a support program made available to them and I was keen to share some of the wisdom and humanity I’ve derived from this unique framework for helping people create compassionate connections with others and themselves.I readily agreed.
When preparing for talks like this one, I think about the particular audience I'll be speaking with and try to imagine which parts of NVC they might find interesting and relevant. When I thought about what to share with these men, I drew a blank. I also unhappily discovered that when thinking about the evening with them, I felt anxiety about how the evening might go far more than I usually do. What was going on? composition, and we are enjoying the tremendous benefits this makes possible. We are not alone in these skills nor in their benefits, just ask the ants, bees, and termites.
It wasn’t until recently, when in preparation for writing a new book on NVC of which these articles are a part, that I explored the most recent findings concerning how our brains work and discovered that the strength of my anxious feelings wasn’t my fault. Particular brain structures and neurological processes that bestowed the most survival and reproduction advantages to our ancestors had kicked in. Without my conscious involvement, my brain had, in an instant, automatically performed a safety assessment using whatever information concerning people who’d been in prisons I absorbed up to that point in my life. The problem was,having never met someone who had done a multi year prison sentence, the only information my brain had to work with was whatever I’d seen in movies, TV, documentaries, and the media. Oh boy! The more primal parts of our brains go to work even before we become consciously aware of things, and they aren’t sophisticated enough to discern the difference between reasonably reliable information and total fictions. As a result, mine had created a stereotype of “these types of men” that it felt was accurate enough to sound the prophylactic alarms (generating feelings of anxiety). This was not the mental and emotional energy I wanted the men to encounter when I met them. My dream was for them to have the happy surprise of meeting someone who was open-minded, respectful, and had no pre-existing prejudices. But back then, I just criticized myself for not being a very good practitioner of what I was trying to teach.
“To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views”
In the practice of NVC stereotypes, preconceptions, and any other ways that we formulate or work from assumptions about the “type” of person another is are barriers. They make it much more difficult to practice the “in-to-me-see” part of NVC, which is its heart, and where its power to calm conflict and facilitate mutually beneficial relationships comes from.
To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views and the emotions offered up by your primal brain to try and keep you safe. Good luck creating mutually enriching connections wearing those glasses.
Yet, given how automated the creation of this prejudice is, what can we do? I don’t know how to stop my brain from doing what it is designed to do, but I have discovered that I can stay alert to the possibility that it may happen. When it does, I remind myself that the stereotype and whatever emotions accompany it are simply the products of well intended but unsophisticated parts of my brain. Sustaining this perspective enables me to relate to those most likely incorrect phantasms my mind has produced in a detached, observing, kind of way. “There’s nothing to necessarily believe here.”, I say, “You can move on.” Doing this greatly helps me to proceed along the path I’d prefer to follow, which is to learn from the person in front of me who they actually are.
In my next instalment, I will return to the story of my night at the community clinic with the six men who were ex-prisoners. I will share how I handled a difficult moment then, and how I would handle that moment now with the deeper, more mature understanding of NVC I have 15 years later.
Wayland Myers, Ph.D. is a psychologist who writes books and articles on Nonviolent Communication and other applications of compassion. He was introduced to the Nonviolent Communication process in 1986 by its creator Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, and has since used it extensively in his personal and professional lives with profound and deeply valued results.
The Priestess (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 27, 2024
The Priestess is the first woman of the tarot, we meet her enthroned, crowned, and bearing her book or bow. She is calm. From her we will learn a great deal about our journey through the Major Arcana. She is old and wise, yet ready to bear fruit, weep, or sing. She is the Feminine…
Name: The Priestess
Number: II
Astrology: Moon
Qabalah: Gimel ג
Chris Gabriel April 27, 2024
The Priestess is the first woman of the tarot, we meet her enthroned, crowned, and bearing her book or bow. She is calm. From her we will learn a great deal about our journey through the Major Arcana. She is old and wise, yet ready to bear fruit, weep, or sing. She is the Feminine.
In Marseille, we find La Papesse, the female Pope., Legend tells us of only one woman pope, Joan, who held the position for two years before she was swiftly put to death, as women of wisdom so often were throughout history. She is adorned in the papal tiara, fine robes, and a book, likely a Bible. She is the eldest of the three cards, not only chronologically, but in appearance.
In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.
In Thoth, we meet the divine lunar goddess Diana. She is naked but for her triple moon crown. In her lap are arrows and a bow, for she is a huntress. Unlike the past two cards, her arms arch upwards but she carries nothing, instead she brings down energy, which is woven toward the flowers, fruits, and crystals beneath her. We also find the Camel, which is the ideogram of her Qabalistic letter, Gimel. Gimel forms the longest path along the Tree of Life, from Kether to Tiphereth, from the Heavens to the Human. She guides us through this long path down, like a camel in the desert.
In Rider and Thoth we are met with a great deal of triplicity. Though the Moon has four primary phases, only three are present here: Waxing, Full, and Waning. This is the very symbol of the feminine, and we find it embodied in the ancient goddesses who form the character of this card.
The first of these is Hekate, the triple lunar goddess, made up of “Maiden, Mother, and Crone”. She is a goddess of magick and witchcraft. Consider the spell from Hamlet:
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate's ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life, usurp immediately.
Etymologically, we can connect her directly to the Egyptian goddess of magic and medicine, Heka, whose name literally means magic.
And finally, the one directly depicted in Thoth: Diana, the Roman goddess of the Moon who is known by the epithet “Diana Trivia” or Diana of Three.
In Rider, we find another triple, this one taking the form of the anagram in “TORA”, which takes us from “Teaching” to ROTA, or wheel, to our subject, TARO. Tarot teaches us the nature of cyclical change.
From these associates we can begin to grasp the Priestess as a card of wisdom – the wisdom of magic, nature, and the feminine.
When dealt this card, we are being shown the influence of nature and of the feminine in our situation, and we can be sure she will teach us a valuable lesson.
Machine Sex, SRL
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance…
Poster for "Machine Sex", San Francisco, February 1979
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance.
At a Chevron gas station in San Francisco in February, 1979, encircled by a modest crowd, Pauline brought out “The Demanufacturing Machine,” a creation built of sharp blades, a conveyor belt, a plastic dome and an ejector. The performance began when Pauline placed eight self-caught dead pigeons into the jaws of the machine. The birds whisked through the machine’s innards and came flying out onto the crowd as blood and guts. The pigeons placed in the machine were dressed as “OAPEC dignitaries” wearing traditional middle eastern outfits and, throughout the performance, a loudspeaker played The Cure’s Killing of an Arab at a volume that was reportedly “too loud.”
“When you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”
The Demanufacturing Machine, February 1979
The fact that Machine Sex took place at a gas station and coincided with the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ensuing oil crisis suggests some political commentary on the part of Pauline. On what, it’s hard to be sure. Most of SRL’s performances have exploited a similar kind of absurdity, weaving together seemingly disparate, and often bizarre, cultural references into their machine based theatrics to create an intense experience for the viewer. As one onlooker put it, “when you see an SRL show, you either see God or the insides of your eyelids.”And, as new performances were brought to the “stage” following Machine Sex, the spectacle only grew.
The team spends years dismantling advanced technologies, modifying them and recasting them as characters in their performances which often involve violent clashes between machines, pyrotechnics, and even blood and gore. The charismatic machines, set upon each other to produce military-grade theatre, are themselves impressive feats in engineering. The 1985 New York show starred the flame shooting Stu Walker, the world’s first robot in a performance controlled by an animal, Pauline’s Guinea Pig, and the 1997 Austin show featured the monumental Hand O God, a massive hand of air-cylinder fingers holding 8 tons of pressure. Audiences consistently reported fearing for their safety. The drama swelled as more and more ingenuity was pumped into SRL’s creations, which were often destroyed in the process of performance, sacrificed for the viewer’s entertainment.
The violence alone makes it easy to interpret SRL’s shows as commentary on the threat of technological advancement, especially when set in the context of the late-1970s, early-1980s and the rapid growth of the Bay Area’s tech industry. That interpretation may have even more salience today, in the era of Artificial Intelligence, when it often seems as though technology’s evolutionary drive has been let loose, sheared from our own, wholly out of our control. At a time when the media is inundated with thought pieces on AI’s imminent take over through means most of us hardly understand, a performance that frames the man vs. machine dynamic as a straightforward showdown has resonance.
“The immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.”
Mark Pauline and Matt Heckert operate the Inchworm, Inspector, and Big Walker
But despite the gruesome nature of their performances, SRL’s machines also touch on a more profound, spirited side of man’s relationship to machine, a side seldom considered amidst today’s progressively less enchanting experiences of technology. The machines in combat do more than play out a dystopian tech prophecy, they are deliberately made as masterpieces in engineering. Years of unimaginable effort go into rewiring these machines of their designed functions, removing their utilitarian value, rendering them incarnations of time spent. In that sense, the immense workmanship behind SRL’s creations says more about what it is to be human than what our future with machines might look like.
Pauline once described the project of SRL—his life’s work—as a “decade long prank.” This prank, he explained, has been “executed with an unfathomable degree of meticulousness and precision, the uncompromising pointlessness of it revealing the banality of most everything.” In committing his life to the task of undoing purpose in machines, Pauline makes clear an essential difference between man and machine: humans, like Pauline, have the freedom to be pointless, to do pointless things. Goalless in their undertaking of a silly amount of violence, his machines have been endowed with uniquely human qualities. Freed from their banal fates, their irreverence is matched by only that of their makers.
There’s a gleeful thrill in watching the world’s most inventive machines go up in flames for no apparent reason at all. Though they may be perceived as no better than teenage boyishness, SRL performances are life affirming for their audiences. As one critic writes, “Mark Pauline has spent the last 37 years making machines that remind you that you’re going to die.” But perhaps it's not only the machines’ destruction that reminds us of this fact but the machines themselves. As our lives become increasingly tethered to technology, and we ourselves live more mechanically, more efficiently, entrenching deeper technological systems into each and every one of our experiences, SRL’s crazed machines, ironically, wake us up to human life.
“What escapes the machine, even the computer, even networks of computers, even the human mind in its automatic phases is this capacity to escape from its own determination.” - Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and revolution in France, David Bates”
Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.
Body Typologies
Robin Sparkes April 23, 2024
In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension…
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
Robin Sparkes April 22, 2024
In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension when the leg is lifted in derrière (to the back) at a 90-degree angle. It is a delicate balance; the head, neck, chest, back, and suspended leg are held in balance while the supporting leg acts like a stabilising column — a structural support.
From railway to cultural sanctuary: The metamorphosis of Musée d'Orsay, Orléans, France. Originally a train station built in 1900, the building was repurposed into a museum in 1986. The open hall facilitates public exchange, preserving its original geometry which once served the purpose of the train platform, now transcended into a place of contemplating art.
Understanding the body as a structure helped me to understand the body within a structure. Buildings confine the body, and the body responds to their latent potential. The architectural shell produces both positive and negative space. The body’s existence is facilitated by its container, and the movements made within that container affect the manner in which the container is perceived. Movements made within a space can expand that space’s potential uses and, in this way, we can view the body as an architectural object. As the presence of the body alters the description of the built environment: it introduces the body as a type, a vessel within a vessel. Reimagining the body as a typological unit, a part of architecture, can we imagine what it means to live with architecture?
***
“Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them.”
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
Buildings are physical philosophies. Structures frame experience. Architecture can shape and influences us beyond the material realm. Our sense of place affects our emotions, perceptions, and even our spiritual realities.
The architectural landscape is an archive. Buildings encapsulate the ideologies of the era in which they were built. As time unfolds, buildings may be repurposed, yet they retain the qualities that mirror the values, beliefs, and priorities of the society that built them.
Amphitheater Euripides 300-340 BC.
Different building types are categorized into architectural typologies, which are a system that is used in the process of both design and analysis. These 'types' are defined by the functions that a building provides, such as a library, a swimming pool, or an amphitheatre. Typologies are not set, but evolve to accommodate the requirements of our changing lives, of rapidly evolving technology, new societal needs and belief systems. This is often reflected in a buildings architectural plans. An architectural plan is a detailed drawing outlining the layout, dimensions, and features of a building. The drawing represents the design’s concept, structure and materials. The architectural plans for buildings of the same type can often resemble one another. The plans for the Amphitheater of Euripides, for instance, (dated 300-340 BC) emphasize circulation. Two millenniums later, in 1926, Allied Architects relied on that same emphasis to create the Hollywood Bowl.
Hollywood Bowl, Allied Architects (1926). Various acoustic interventions have been made since by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry.
Architecture not only frames but also shapes how we translate and read body language. The way we perceive and interpret movement and sound is influenced by the architectural context in which they occur. Dancing alone in a living room offers a personal and intimate experience, where one's movements are framed by the domestic space. Conversely, performing on a stage with an audience amplifies the gestures and tones, as the architectural setting shapes the communicative exchange between performer and spectator. The relationship between movement and sound in space influences our perception of temporality. Time is an essential current of interpretation, a shared continual reality. The buildings we inhabit construct our experience, and therefore help us construct time itself; shaping how we perceive and interact with the passage of hours, days, and seasons.
“With the sun at its centre, architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression.”
Archaeologists suggest that early architecture built for the collective often hosted rituals. These spaces embodied the inherent bond between human expression and the built environment. For instance, Blombos Cave in South Africa reveals remnants of organized rituals among its ochre-painted cave drawings, suggesting caves may have been architectural settings to host communal dance ceremonies. An understanding of architectural space is intrinsic to the creation and understanding of artistic expression, and our interpretation of culture.
***
Once bacteria, now human, every cell in our bodies have evolved under Earth's closest star, our Sun. Contemplating the body’s role with architecture, and our architecture’s place in the universe draws our focus to sunlight as an all-encompassing force that influences the body’s experience of time and space. With the sun at its centre, architecture and design can serve as a type of choreography, directing the body’s language and facilitating sociological progression. The designer, with sensitivity to the tempo, rhythm, and ritual of life, has the potential to guide the body to light.
City Metaphors (1982), O.M. Ungers
On a planet of severe ecological stress, what are the possible futures of architecture? Modular, flexible designs that build upon and expanding from existing structures like tentacles—that can constantly adapt to our changing needs and climate. Drawing from raw, natural materials, would help us to reimagine space and society by fostering our relationship with nature.
We turn to our environments to meet our needs and desires. In turn, we affect ecosystems both near and far when considering the resources this requires. Similarly, when we enter a building, we shape its purpose and definition—we affect its architectural typology. This process of human interaction with space plays a pivotal role in the evolution of architecture over time. Our presence today shapes future archaeological perceptions and understandings of architectural type as a reflection of our societal values. Can we imagine a type of architecture that lives with us, where time itself is allowed to be an architect?
Robin Sparkes, a is spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
The Queen of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 20, 2024
The Queen of Swords is a court card. Court cards in tarot differ from the face cards in a playing deck only in their inclusion of a fourth face, the Princess. Each court card in tarot is elemental, all Kings are Fire, all Queens are Water, Princes are Air, and Princesses are Earth. So the Queen of Swords is the watery part of air, thus the clouds that surround her.
Name: Queen of Swords
Astrology: Libra, Water of Air
Qabalah: He of Vau ה of ו
Chris Gabriel April 20, 2024
The Queen of Swords is a court card. Court cards in tarot differ from the face cards in a playing deck only in their inclusion of a fourth face, the Princess. Each court card in tarot is elemental, all Kings are Fire, all Queens are Water, Princes are Air, and Princesses are Earth. So the Queen of Swords is the watery part of air, thus the clouds that surround her.
In these three cards she is enthroned, and she bears the sword indicating her suit. Her expression remains essentially the same, a slight frown.
This is a card of great wit, beauty, and cutting words.
In Marseille, we find her with a simple crown, fine colored robes, and bearing a red bladed sword. In a playing card deck her equivalent would be the Queen of Spades. She is blonde. Her left hand is kept before her.
In Rider, we find her with a crown of butterflies, a robe covered in clouds, and sitting atop a throne of babes and butterflies. She is the most expressive of the three, with a more intense frown and glaring eyes. She is brunette. Her left hand is raised, as if gesturing for one to come toward her.
In Thoth, we find her at her most evocative. Her crown is enormous, made of green crystal, and adorned with a babe’s head. Her breasts are bare, but she has a blue skirt, and she is enthroned by the clouds themselves. She is without a care, her sword is held low and in her left hand the fruits of its labor, the head of a man.
We can grasp the nature of the Queen of Swords by looking for her historical counterparts. We find one in Judith, who beheads her unwanted suitor Holofernes in his sleep, protecting her virtue. And another, in “reversed” form, in Salome, who demands the head of John the Baptist be brought before her on a silver platter.
The Queen of Swords is a woman who knows exactly what she does and does not want.She is both a symbol of purity and of the ruthlessness required to preserve it.. Her character being Libra, we know that this is not wanton violence, but literal justice and a maintenance of balance by her sword.
She is, in fact, a figure of Lady Justice, in her original, unblinded form. The phrase “Justice is blind” is a misunderstanding of a joke on the uncaring nature of the state. Human Justice may be blind, but divine Justice has 20/20 vision.
When dealt this card, we may be forced to “cut off” a negative influence in our lives.
Fork
Mason Rotschild April 18, 2024
"Language keeps me locked and repeating", shouts Ian MacKaye over and over again in the Fugazi song ‘Stacks’. The mantra is raging against the profound influence of language on our perception of reality…
Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624), Giovanni Battista Bracelli
Mason Rothschild April 20, 2024
"Language keeps me locked and repeating", shouts Ian MacKaye over and over again in the Fugazi song ‘Stacks’. The mantra is raging against the profound influence of language on our perception of reality.
Words are a kind of magic, they are spells that shape our understanding of the world. In our infancy, we are tiny explorers, eager to touch everything and put all of it in our mouths, attempting to grasp existence itself. But without language, we do not have containers for the concepts and ideas we meet and so we thrash and flail and cry. As we mature, we gain the ability to comprehend objects and their permanence. We learn that the sounds emanating from our mouths can represent these objects, and that written symbols can represent both these sounds and ideas. We join these foundational elements together and form a framework of understanding.
Our understanding of the world is not static. Where at first we remain malleable in our definitions and concepts, as we grow up we create a dictionary in our minds and solidify the meanings of words with a sense of certainty. We are beings with linear timelines, born and destined to die, with limited time to allocate and we cannot endlessly dive into the meaning of each word. At a point we must say we know, and move on.
Consider the word ‘fork’. I know that a fork can be made of various materials: metal, wood, plastic. I know that a giant six foot fork is kind of funny to me. I know that one can ineffectively eat soup with a fork. Imagine that I then take these pieces of knowledge, peel open the top of a little brick shaped box in my mind and put everything I know ‘fork’ to be in there. At some point I'm not learning what fork means anymore and I close that little box up and place it on the ground. I stack up more little bricks full of definitions and pretty soon I'm in a house. This house is my reality.
“Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.”
Reality is subjective. We may both gaze upon a flower, but what we truly experience is our own interpretation of what a flower means. We’ve already closed the flower box. Unless we revert back to a state of childlike wonder, allowing the flower's form, color, and scent to wash over us as if for the first time and shove it in our mouths to discover what it is, we merely project our preconceptions onto it. Our realities are constructed from the definitions we gave to objects, places and ideas. Each symbol in our mind is a cornerstone in the architecture of our personal reality.
Yet, while this mode of boxing works well for something like ‘fork’, what's a little terrifying is that ‘love’ occupies the same symbolic space. We enshrine our understanding of love within a mental container and fill it with images of fairy tale romances, our parents' failed marriages, some Beatles lyrics, and poetic verses and then we shut the little box and move on.
In doing so, we condemn ourselves to stay locked and repeated in our understanding of complex and malleable concepts. If our fairytale, Beatles, poetic type love should fail to show up in our lives, we fail to see the other ways we might love and be loved. The solution is simple – We possess the power to deconstruct our reality by deconstructing our definitions. Though the process may be messy, intentional dismantling allows us to become architects of our own existence. We are the magicians, wielding the simple act of focusing intention to shape our world. Thy will be done! We have the agency to change our understanding and relationship with the concept of love, and in doing so realize the love we have and the love we need. We don’t have to open up every word. It may serve us to have a closed box around ‘fork and it may not be so with Love. At least the Greeks had eight words for love. We English speakers have but one and we lock it up quick.
Examining what is going on behind our curtains provides more usefulness than not. Let’s lay around and open some boxes, and paint pictures, and put things in our mouths.
Mason Rothschild is a reformed touring fool turned occultant obsessed with contributing to the evolution of the collective human vision as we look away from accumulation and toward community.
Becoming Alive to the More-Than-Human World
Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024
Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviors can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing…
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Tuukka Toivonen April 16, 2024
Sometimes life brings us in contact with people who help us discover aspects of reality we did not know existed. Their behaviours can serve as gentle guides to new ways of seeing.
Recently, an old friend and bandmate from South Africa came to visit me in Finland with his wife. On his first morning in a totally new environment, he had taken a dip in the sea and ventured out into a nearby forest. There, he picked up a humongous edible mushroom – the kind I had never noticed before – that he promptly delivered to a hotel chef who generously turned it into a delicious dish on the spot. This delightful episode reminded me of how, by being actively curious and alive to one’s surroundings, it is possible to let joy and wonder emerge.
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
Years ago, when I was a foreign student in Japan, I shared a university campus – and on occasion, a communal bathtub – with a remarkable young Tongan. A towering man with an angelic singing voice and the warmest smile; it was impossible to walk across the campus with him in any reasonable amount of time, as friend after friend after friend would stop us to say hello. Having grown up in a tight-knit village with around a thousand people whose names and life events he kept track of, he had developed an extraordinary power to connect. Able to detect the nuanced facial expressions and emotions I would miss, it dawned on me that my friend saw reality as something more finely textured than I did. For him, it appeared rich with possibilities for genuine moments of connection.
Several other friends have aroused similar feelings of fascination in me when they have instantly recognised (and eaten!) wild plants; spotted rare birds by ear; or when they have shared magical encounters with nonhuman animals. I also find myself inspired when art and design school colleagues explain how they have learned to create art with multiceullular organisms (like slime molds) or developed new materials from fungi or seaweed.
Compared to the friends just mentioned, I seem to be only half alive to my surroundings, nonhuman living beings and other people, perhaps numbed by long years of indoor living and the stresses of my adopted cities of London and Tokyo. Music became my partial window into this more-alive world through a well-nurtured teenage obsession with electric guitar. In spite of my overall slumber, music opened that window just enough so that I could imagine that a different way to experience the world might exist.
Having subsequently become a sociologist interested in regenerative making and organizing, I have started to wonder whether the mysteries of aliveness could be fruitfully approached by re-engaging with the notion of the more-than-human world. Introduced by the ecological philosopher-anthropologist David Abram in his now-classic book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (1996). This curious term points to a way of being that recognises and embraces our deep entanglement with the world as experiencing beings. Perhaps by revisiting Abram’s work, we can better comprehend why attuned ways of being feel inaccessible for many of us.
“Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.”
Etidorhpa (1895), John Uri Lloyd
For Abram and the philosophers he draws upon (most notably, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1908-1961), everything begins with the contention that human reality is fundamentally rooted in the embodied, perceivable world. Abram invites us to notice the strangeness of how quantified abstract knowledge and measurable ‘systems’ have been given ‘realer’ status in society over the fluid experiential world. He challenges us to think how we might reclaim the primacy of experiential life and knowledge, overcoming our culture’s tendency to de-value direct experience in favour of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge and data.
Re-establishing the centrality of direct experience does not imply (or urge) a withdrawal into hermetically sealed, private experiential worlds – far from it. For in the sensuous, more-than-human world, experience and perception are inherently bound up with meaningful, responsive participation and interaction. For Abram, engaging fully in perception is a gateway to interchange and the formation of relationships:
“In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympathetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Perception, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own tones and textures”.
Whether that which we perceive is a rock, butterfly, another planet, a person or a mushroom does not matter – perception opens up the possibility of discerning rich qualities in another and their environment.
This brings us to a challenge: modern society directs us to treat things as dead objects; as materials for consumption or narrow instrumental use. We enjoy wooden furniture but rarely think of where that wood was grown; we enjoy trees as beautiful objects in our parks and forests without considering that delicate habitat that tree provides wildlife, or the mycelial network connecting it to others.
To gain entry to the more-than-human-world, we need to not only acknowledge the intrinsic worth and beauty of all the things we may encounter, but also their animateness, their potential for aliveness and interaction.
Moving beyond societal inhibitors, one assumes, greatly increases the potential to find aliveness in the social and ecological world. Aliveness always has the potential to emerge from the attuned interactions between us and the world when we are willing to imagine that there may be qualities, resonances and possibilities just below the level of conscious awareness that can be brought forth through an active process of ‘perception as participation’. I now realize it is precisely this kind of willingness to imagine (and openness to possibility) that I found so remarkable in my friends from South Africa and Tonga.
“If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.”
What The Spell of the Sensuous teaches us is that, through the process of attuned perceiving and imagining, we can enter into an authentic relationship with the world. Conversely, when we refuse to view the world as animate and intelligent, or other people as interesting and worthy of our attention, we deny the possibility of rich, nuanced and mutually nourishing relationships. It is this refusal to perceive and imagine – whether personally, societally or philosophically induced – that kills the potential for aliveness. If I so choose, I can allow the living world to have a voice – a voice that ‘beckons to me’, that engages my senses, that calls me to participate in its rhythms and mysteries, that blends with my own presence.
To make these philosophical and ecological ideas more personally relevant, you may wish to think back to episodes in your own life that have given you a sense of aliveness or that have hinted at new possibilities for relating to other humans and the living world in a more imaginative, responsive way. Is there something in those episodes that might nourish you today and that might invite you to try new ways of connecting with the world?
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
The Nine of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 13, 2024
The Nine of Swords is elemental air brought down to nearly its lowest form. This is a card of violence and regret. When it comes up in a reading, beware of your own and others unconscious outbursts, and the regrets that inevitably follow.
Name: Cruelty, the Nine of Swords
Number: 9
Astrology: Mars in Gemini
Qabalah: Yesod of Vau ו
Chris Gabriel April 13, 2024
The Nine of Swords is elemental air brought down to nearly its lowest form. This is a card of violence and regret. When it comes up in a reading, beware of your own and others unconscious outbursts, and the regrets that inevitably follow.
In Thoth, we find nine rusty, chipped, well used swords still dripping with blood. There is the rusty brown of Mars and the orangey red of Gemini. This card is explicit about the violent action of which we only see the regret in Rider. One is reminded of the image of Slayer’s “Raining Blood” or the mythical Lance of Longinus, which has continuously dripped blood since it first pierced Christ’s side. As Mars in Gemini, this is again, violent action mixed with indecision.
In Rider, we see clearly the character of regret. A man is weeping late at night, his bed bears a murderous relief, and his blanket is embroidered with astrological symbols, the weight of fate itself. Above his bed, he awakes to a field of nine swords. He is one who has used violence and has great regret..
In Marseille, we see eight arched swords and a central ninth sword; we must use Qabalah to grasp the esoteric significance of this mundane image. As a nine, this card is of Yesod, the Foundation, and as a Sword, it is of Vau, the Prince..
Thus we have the Foundation of the Prince.
A dark image indeed! The Foundation of the Prince is Cruelty. His very nature being secondary, his drive is always toward ascent, not to his own goals, but simply to the position of his Father, the King. A goal which can be achieved only through intellectual, machiavellian schemes built upon a base violence.
It brings me very clearly to a brilliant line from the Diaries of Anaïs Nin: I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
It is image of both Claudius and Hamlet in this card, the regret of Claudius’ fratricide, and the indecision of Hamlet’s revenge. Both our actions and thoughts can be profoundly violent and cruel, and as we see in these cards, we remain filled with regret long after these terrible things take place.
We can also look at the image of swords dangling over one's head and be brought to Damocles, whose desire to be King puts him on the throne, and above the throne, a sword hanging by a hair, which could fall at any moment.
This card calls us to reflect on our desires and their ultimate consequences. Often when wronged, we want revenge, but can you live with the result?The Prince wants to be King, but can he live with himself if he murders his father?
When we are dealt this card, we should prepare for an outburst, or the consequences of past actions. Our actions must be perfectly aligned and just. Regret must be accepted and understood to be overcome.
Gesticulate Wildly
Isabelle Bucklow April 10, 20204
For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful.
Isabelle Bucklow April 11, 2024
For time immemorial we’ve been gesturing: toward something over there, to each other, that something tastes good, that we are in pain, in love and sometimes for no (conscious) reason at all. We might gesture alongside language, but gesture is not necessarily a substitute for language. Gestures articulate states of mind or sensations that cannot be encased by language. Gestures can fill gaps left by language or create a gap which they then fill, or overfill. Gestures represent and relay information aesthetically, symbolically; others see them and recognise them as meaningful. Those meanings, however, are not fixed. They are hinged on cultural, economic, environmental and psychological variables. But before going further, hell, how do we even distinguish a gesture from other movements we make with our bodies? This question leads to others regarding voluntary and involuntary actions, inculcation, the very notion of freedom itself!
Le Centre de l’Amour (ca. 1687), Peter Rollos
Because we’ve always been gesturing, we’ve also always been thinking about gesture. Aristotle disparaged gestures as crude tools used by orators to manipulate their audience. Cicero’s De Oratore asserted that ‘every emotion of the mind has from nature its own peculiar look, tone, and gesture’.¹ Around 95 AD Quintilian set out a foundational system for gesture, called Institutes of Oratory, suggesting that shrugs, nods, pointing, furrows, pursing and flares (expressed by shoulders, head, hand, eyebrows, lips and nostrils respectively) might ‘be a language common to all’.²
By the 18th century, everything had been thrown into great doubt; we weren’t simply recording what gestures the great orators were making, but asking more fundamentally what is gesture, and why do we gesture? With the dawn of industrialisation, the metaphysical why turned into a technical how. How do new environments create new gestures? The production line was a shining example of how gesture can be broken down into goal-oriented parts, then standardised and forced to repeat indefinitely. Gestures can be mistaken for machines. Machines can also malfunction.
In one of the most frequently quoted essays on gesture – titled Notes on Gesture (1992) no less – Giorgio Agamben claimed: ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.’³
In Agamben’s account, gesture isn’t lost definitely and entirely into the ether, it remains embodied, we just lost control of it. He begins with an example of measure and mastery, introducing Gilles de la Tourette’s 1886 treatise on ‘gait’, the first ‘strictly scientific analysis’ of human movement.⁴ With a forensic eye, prophetic of unflinching machine vision, Tourette detailed the weight distributions, stride lengths and joint rotations involved in walking. The year before, Tourette had published Study on a Nervous Condition characterised by lack of Motor Coordination accompanied by Echolalia and Coprolalia (what we now call ‘Tourette’s syndrome’). Unlike the dependable pedestrian gait, these gestures were arrhythmic and proliferating.
In his patients, Tourette observed muscle spasms and tics without recognisable intent or interpretable justification. For Agamben, these incomplete and partial gestures evidenced ‘a generalised catastrophe [of the sphere of gesture].’⁵ Then, in the second half of the 20th century, reports of gestural glitches ceased. Perhaps, Agamben suggested, they had become the norm. This hypothesis could well be supported by Charlie Chaplin’s jittery skits and the modern hops and convulsions of dancer Isadora Duncan. And so, to Agamben’s next pronouncement: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.’⁶
Contemporary artist Martine Syms’ video piece, Notes on Gesture (2015), took its title from Agamben's 1992 essay. It was first shown in ‘Vertical Elevated Oblique’, an exhibition whose title referenced earlier texts on gesture, like John Bulwer’s Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia: Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644). Bulwer’s illustrated compendium set out a ‘universal’ vocabulary of gestures (the ‘universal’ was, for Bulmer, the Anglo-Saxon white male). Syms’ work creates an alternate inventory, interrogating black identity, media representation and the hand’s ‘natural’ language. Syms says that through ‘modernity, migration to cities and away from our kin, family, familiar networks, we lost our movement or embodiment and we put it into cinema.’⁷ Body, gesture and video are innately linked, and innately political.
In the film, Syms’ collaborator Diamond Stingily reacts to title cards (WHEN DEY GOT YOU FUCKED) and makes hand gestures accompanied by phrases (‘Real talk,’ ‘Check yourself,’ ‘Point blank, period’). Through stutters and loops (reminiscent of Vines) these sounds and gestures glitch between authentic and dramatic. Syms has said the work was inspired by a riff on the joke “Everybody wanna be a black woman but nobody wanna be a black woman,” referencing the media appropriation of black culture (of which gestures are integral) that drains politics and ethics from the aesthetics of blackness. Further, Syms has written, ‘mass media allows for narratives – and subsequently, ideologies and typologies – to be industrialised.’⁸ Syms’ looping bitesize gestures anticipated the structure and style of TikTok and Instagram reels. If, in the 19th century, we lost our gestures and put them into cinema, then TikTok seems to cannibalise gestures at the same rate it produces and transmits them – an algorithmic factory of gestures consumed by users and fed back into the loop.
In 2021, during the pandemic, a medical report was published about an overwhelming global increase in tics in children and young people. Many of the patients had watched TikTok videos of young people with Tourette’s syndrome and adopted their gestures and utterances. A New York Times article published last year reported TikTok videos labelled #Tourettes have been viewed 7.7 billion times. These TikTok tics not only demonstrate that gesture is innately quotable, but also how that quotability can be hosted, networked and monetised.
Liz Magic Laser is a performance and video artist whose 2023 work, Convulsive States – an investigative report-cum-hallucination – explores the history of spasmodic gestural expressions of mental distress. Laser considers these gestures as both a symptom of trauma and its possible antidote. The artist visited Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where Tourette's mentor Dr Jean-Martin Charcot studied the phenomena of hysteria (now called ‘psychogenic nonepileptic seizure’) by unconventional means: performance lectures and photography. His methods have been criticised for being exploitative and theatrical, something Laser finds dismissive. Laser notes, ‘at a time when underclass women were incarcerated and ignored, Charcot offered patients an opportunity to express their trauma, vocally and physically, which was probably healing for some and damaging for others…Charcot put them on stage and facilitated their erotic display of rage. Was it good or bad? Yes, both.’⁹
In her film, Laser also highlights the TikTok tic phenomenon. TikTok is a much bigger, more visible stage to display and work through existential changes. It is also a stage where performer and audience aren't separate and distinct, but merged (into what art historian Isobel Harbsion calls ‘the prosumer’).¹⁰ Gestures are not so much lost and reclaimed/recorded here, but trapped in an infinite, insatiable economy of exchange. Multimodal AI tools (like Open AI’s new text-to-video model, Sora, released in February), will alter and amplify this exchange by contributing ever more ‘realistic’ AI generated bodies into the short-form video landscape; their morphing synthetic gestures ripe for virality, but trained on what ‘universal’?
TikTok and Sora are experiments that ‘innovate first, regulate later’. Over two decades since the launch of social media, concrete causal patterns between a teen mental health crisis and social media use are becoming increasingly apparent (leading to a federal lawsuit against meta raised in late 2023).¹¹ We do not yet know all the virtualities inherent in TikTok and short-form social media, let alone spatial computing; TikTok is now available on the Apple Vision Pro (a virtual and augmented reality headset), and according to one tech news platform, ‘ready to eat up your gestures.’¹²
Since the release of Apple Vision Pro, there have been numerous videos shared online of wearers on the subway, crossing roads, making bizarre pinches and swipes through the air. Currently only a select few can afford the hardware, and when spotted in the wild their gesticulations appear absurd and anti-social. It seems we are in another crisis of gesture. As media theorist Vilém Flusser wrote, in my favourite collection of essays on gesture, ‘whenever gestures appear that have never been seen before, we have a key to decoding a new form of existence.’¹³ And so, in attending to the gestures of today, as well as those of the past, these signs – or symptoms – might inch us closer to decoding the strange phenomena of living and all that entails.
¹ Cicero, De Oratore [Book III], ed. A.S.Wilkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 215
² Quintilian, “Institutio Oratoria” in The Loeb Classical Library [Edition Vol. IV] (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1920)
³ Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000) 50
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid., 52
⁷ Martine Syms quoted in Hannah Ongley “Martine Syms illuminates a space between secular and sacred at Prada Mode Los Angeles”, Document Journal, February 22, 2022
⁸ Martine Syms quoted in Colby Chamberlain “Review: Martine Syms, Bridget Donahue” Artforum
⁹ Liz Magic Laser quoted in Wendy Vogel “Liz Magic Laser on hysterical crisis and alternative healing” Artforum, October 5, 2023
¹⁰ See Isobel Harbison, Performing Image (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019)
¹¹ Kari Paul “Meta sued by 33 states over claims youth mental health endangered by Instagram” The Guardian, October 24, 2023
¹² Rowan Davies, “TikTok is now on Apple Vision Pro, ready to take over your view and eat up your gestures” techradar, February 16, 2024
¹³ Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal.
How To Call Yves Klein - A Pataphysical Sèance
Derek DelGaudio April 9, 2024
To combat the bulimia with which these times stain the symbolic world, follow the steps below:
Photo by Hal Schulman
Derek DelGaudio, April 9, 2024
To combat the bulimia with which these times stain the symbolic world*, follow the steps below:
1. Find a quiet space. Acquire the latitude and longitude of that location and measure its distance to The Void† . Now, convert that number of miles to inches, reducing it to a length you can hold.
2. Fashion a line that length from strips of torn canvas‡ , dyed blue with the anointed pigment § , all tied together by knots. Lay this line in your space for others to find at their seat.
3. You will also need a special variation of the Monotone-Silence Symphony**, specifically crafted to contact Klein††. Find it here for your convenience.
4. Play the tune‡‡ and hold the line.
5. Close your eyes. Become a silent and static witness to the messages you receive §§. DO NOT LET GO OF THE LINE.
Photo by Hal Schulman
*The crisis of the Symbolic World was first identified by the retired fortuneteller who can be found sitting at Le Bergamote, located at 169 9th Ave, New York City, NY.
†The Void is located at 48°47'13.3" N 2°17'32.3"E.
‡Buy raw cotton canvas from the garment district and tear it into long strips, each roughly two inches wide. Tie them together with knots, making one long cord. Measure and trim as needed.
§Go to Kremer Pigments located at 247 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001. Tell them you need enough International Klein Blue pigment to dye the distance between yourself and The Void.
**Variation on Monotone-Silence by Bon Iver x Derek DelGaudio © 2024. To truly be felt, the numinous requires a physical manifestation. We recommend pressing this piece on vinyl.
††Born in the nice part of Nice, in 1928, Yves Klein, the Judoka/Artist/Mystic, began drawing with milk from his baby bottle and went on to own the Sky. He established the Void in 1957 and later made headlines by leaping into it on November 27th, 1960.
‡‡In human time this piece lasts 40 minutes. In the void, it is eternal. We recommend playing it for at least one eternity.
§§ These are the messages from Klein.
Derek DelGaudio is a writer, director, and magician. DelGaudio created the award-winning theater show and film, In & Of Itself. He wrote the acclaimed book, AMORALMAN, served as the artist-in-residence for Walt Disney Imagineering, and co-founded the performance art collective A.Bandit. He is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University and co-conspirator at Deceptive Practices, a creative firm known for designing illusions and providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”
The Ten of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel April 5, 2024
The Ten of Disks is an earthly card, at the end of its fall from Heaven. Unlike Air and Fire, Earth is happier on the ground than up in the Heavens. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of a great investment or a great home. This card is about something stable but not stagnant.
Name: Wealth, the Ten of Disks
Number: 10
Astrology: Earth, Mercury in Virgo
Qabalah: Malkuth of He ה
Chris Gabriel April 6, 2024
The Ten of Disks is an earthly card, at the end of its fall from Heaven. Unlike Air and Fire, Earth is happier on the ground than up in the Heavens. When this card comes up in a reading, one thinks of a great investment or a great home. This card is about something stable, but not stagnant.
Mercury is domiciled in Virgo, a sign that it rules. Thus Mercury, God of money, is intelligently utilizing the wealth accumulated over the past 9 cards. Mercury is in fact the root of words like “Merchant” or “Commerce”
This is a card of accumulated resources, and their correct usage.
In Thoth, we are given an image of ten coins in the form of the Tree of Life. Each bears a Mercurial sign with Mercury atop and Virgo below. All about these ten golden coins are the purples of royalty.
In Rider, we see the Pentacles forming the Tree of Life, as in Thoth. Behind this superimposed tree, we see a beautiful scene. It is a kingdom at peace: lovers talking, a child playing with two dogs, and an old man sitting. Rather than the literal wealth depicted in Thoth, this is the wealth of security -all are well dressed and even pets can be fed. A far cry from the Five of Pentacles earlier in this suit.
In Marseille, we see a more mundane layout of the ten coins, more like the fives that appear on a pair of dice. Through Qabalah, we can understand this card as Malkuth, The Kingdom, at the very bottom of the tree of life, which corresponds to planetary Earth. Being a disk, it is of He ה, the Princess and as the final letter of the Tetragrammaton, represents elemental Earth. Thus the kingdom the card refers to is the Kingdom of the Princess.
In some ways, this is the final card in the deck. It is here we reach the end of a long descent down the Tree of Life, through the paths along it, and through the Tetragrammaton. This is a joyous ending. As opposed to the great rises and falls, joys and sorrows of the deck, here we find a very solid, very comfortable, material reality. At last, everything is in its place.
When we think of the Fall to Earth, we often think of fiery Satan, displeased with his crash landing, but our Earthy Princess is very happy here. This is the perfection of our world.
In the Bible, I’m brought to Revelation 21, when the Apocalypse has ceased, and God does away with how things were, and all are united. Yet even this sort of ending is not forever, this is the wisdom of the Aeon, that there are no ends, only ceaseless transformation, and so this happy earth is bound to change to some new form so soon as the deck is shuffled.
We can look to William Blake to help see the relation of the lofty Heavens of Kether with this most earthen Malkuth: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
This is the nature of the Ten of Disks, the lovely productions of time.
When dealt this card, we are asked to look upon our journey, what we have all been on: a long, colorful, rainbow path (ס) and here at last is the pot of gold (מַלְכוּת) !
A Story of Three Bones
Vestal Malone April 4, 2024
In a sacred moment, 3 friends begin an epic journey. Manifesting from the primordial ooze, they float together. Their innate destiny is a collaborative effort of strength, support and love. They protect and nurture the pulse of their own existence and grow into being.
Vestal Malone, April 4, 2024
In a sacred moment, 3 friends begin an epic journey. Manifesting from the primordial ooze, they float together. Their innate destiny is a collaborative effort of strength, support and love. They protect and nurture the pulse of their own existence and grow into being.
Mandible, Sacrum and Sphenoid. Three bones together with the heart and the nervous system are the start and core of our physical being. More than 200 bones join the team as the body grows in a glorious journey to last a lifetime.
Mandible, the jaw bone, takes its duty seriously. It protects the heart with honor and has the strength and courage to do it well. When you try to avoid feeling a heartache, the jaw clenches and the tail tightens in an attempt to stop the 'flow 'of emotions. A newborn baby's lip quivers before the audible cry releases the tension. Adults tend to “keep a stiff upper lip” and not express their fear, anger or sadness. The heart does not forget how the mandible protected it, the two are connected from utero and for the rest of their lives together. Mandible has help in its task from Sacrum, the pelvis, and his little buddy Coccyx, the tailbone. They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity. The sacrum looks after the cerebral spinal fluid, the flow of this nectar controlling our physical health and emotional well being. As our tail wags, it pumps this life juice up the spine to bathe our brain with nutrients. Remaining in lockdown in response to the travesties of life leads to physical duress. A relaxed body is truly a relaxed mind. Muscle tension and physical injury stop Sacrum from wagging, impeding the flow of our perfect divinely designed system.
Sphenoid, the bone of all bones, is fragile and shy. The keeper of the pituitary gland and the nervous system, it takes the brunt of our existence. Without the pulse of life moving through our body, all systems stagnate, especially little Sphenoid. Its shape resembles a butterfly, with bony wings just as delicate. It lives just behind the eyes and in front of our gray matter, hovering and swaying in harmony with the sacrum like a hammock to distribute “food” for the brain and body. Sacrum handles the cerebral spinal fluid while the Spheniod handles the self regulating chemicals produced in house. It is a pharmacy with a remedy for each challenge, and a nutritionist chef to serve the perfect meals for growth and vitality. If Sphenoid can't dance and sway, the party's over.
“They exist in a synchronistic dance and sway, the three together are the physical guardians encasing the developing heart, and then the emotional guardians as they grow solid and emerge into gravity.”
After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music), Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan, hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.