Thursday, July 28, 2022

Alfred Jarry's Time Machine is still happening

In 1899, Alfred Jarry published his 'Commentary and Instructions for the Practical Construction of the Time Machine', under the pseudonym of Dr. Faustroll. In it, Dr. Faustroll explains: "The machine consists of a jointed, ebony frame, analogous to the steel frame of a bicycle... Under the seat and a little in front are the storage cells of the electric motor... The anterior fly-wheel clicks with each complete revolution, and four ivory dials, concentric or juxtaposed, mark the days, thousands of days, millions and hundreds of millions of days, by the agency of a grooved wheel and an endless chain... We shall later see that the return to the present from the future is achieved by slowing down the Machine's motion, and that travelling forwards into the past requires an even greater speed... than that required for travelling into the future. To stop at a chosen point in the duration, simply pull the lever of the triple brake to lock it. / The machine, once up and running, always sets off in the direction of the future… Travelling back in time consists in the perception of the reversibility of phenomena… since the Machine cannot reach the real Past until it has first shot into the Future, it must pass through a certain point, symmetrical to our Present.. Which we should call the imaginary Present. To the Traveller on her machine, Time thus presents itself as a curve…" — Alfred Jarry, "Practical Construction of the Time Machine" [1899] in Adventures in Pataphysics, Collected Works 1 (Atlas Press, 2001) p.215-217.


associative image, Jean Tinguely "Cyclograveur" (1960)






Saturday, July 23, 2022

The origin is now, and we are in the middle of it

 

“The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space, millions of light years away; nor does it reside in a space of which we no longer have a trace. It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic… like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway between the two.” 

 

Emanuele Coccia



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

associative image:
a paper wheel cosmos, or "volvelle", from a 16C edition of Johannes Sacrobosco's 13C De Sphaera Mundi (via. wikipedia) 

Sunday, June 5, 2022

Listening Spaces to build and defend!

"As an activist on the left, I long assumed that my role consisted entirely of raising awareness, sounding alarms, and deploying arguments. It took me years to realize that I needed to help build and defend spaces in which listening could happen, too."

     — Astra Taylor, "Right to Listen" in Remake the World (Haymarket Books, 2021) p163.

#listening #architecture #democracy

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1635-remake-the-world



Thursday, May 12, 2022

Poetry is in Everything?

 Understanding poetry as human making, makes the poetry of architecture easier to comprehend, but risks obscuring poetry’s meaningful, musical, and magical complexity.

“It’s not just building… it’s building worlds.”

— John Hejduk

Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be moving and transformative. ...One way to reopen human practices of worldmaking — architecture, theatre, poetry, teaching — is by risking more inclusive collaborations.

“Poetry is in everything / the city / this table / the streets,

in each minimal, common, and ridiculous motion”

— Fernando Pessoa

 Where do the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture meet? 

Find more here: http://www.artslettersandnumbers.com/calendar/2021/9/6/archi-poetry-amp-invisible-theatre 

Thank you Lisa, Andria, Max and Saba; thank you Grant Guy and David Gersten. 

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Getting Lost in the Act of Poetry

"...getting lost is an act of the imagination, one that redefines reality, often through moral implications..."

"...poetry often occurs beyond or outside 'the way', extending the borders of language."

"The poet resembles the paramedic in that she or he arrives first at the accident of language. Poetry is born of crisis or will seek it, often beginning in medias res... to find an emergency through language that leads to... new realities..." 

— Mark Irwin, "Poetry Reality & Place in a Placeless World of Global Communication" in Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry (Peter Lang, 2017)

Saturday, January 22, 2022

For a friend: "that work is being done on"

(you perhaps):

"...all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process... it is available, heard once, or... always at hand... that climate of excitement... announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self."
— Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry [1949] (Paris Press, 1996) p174-175.