thanksgiving laser

This is a photo of the laser measuring the prime meridian from the Greenwich Observatory.

These are happy physicists after a successful proton collision on Wednesday at the Cern Massive Hadron Collider (above) under the Swiss Alps, near to Geneva.

These experiments help recreate conditions as they existed billionths of a second after the Big Bang, which formed the universe and space-time, no big deal. The protons in turn break down into smaller constituent parts and enable physicists to study the fundamental nature of matter.

We are looking into infinity
What do you mean by infinity?
Infinity means eternity
How do you explain eternity?
By eternity I mean a seemingly endless time interval (waiting)
Such as?
Forever and ever
and what does that mean?
Infinity (?)

Remembering Milton in the Night at Sea

...Through the gloom were seen
Ten Thousand Banners rise into the Air
with Orient Colours Waving....
-Milton's Paradise Lost

The night was pitch dark. The whole sea luminous.
Every part of the water which by day is seen as foam
glowed with pale light. The vessel drove before her bows

Two billows of liquid phosphorus. Her wake was a milky train.
As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright;
& from the reflected light the sky-just above the horizon-

not so utterly dark as the rest of the Heavens.
Impossible to behold this plain of matter, as it were melted
& consumed by heat, without remembering Milton!

yesterday + today

Summit Screening

difference

This week I finished the third chapter of Baudrillard's For the Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, entitled Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction. I was interested to is description of Fetishism not as manifested ideas represented by objects (typical of Marzist analysis of fetishization) but as an obsession with the reflection/refraction in the code of the system of objects, or words, the fetish is then embedded in the act of play with structural differences of the sytem in question. This is a systematic analysis of the systems themselves.

In The Politics of Difference: An Intro To Deleuze by Todd May, I found an interesting correllary, which I believe applies the significance of negative space in another way:

"We do not want to say, one should live in such a way. There is no general perscription. We have done globalizing concepts. It is not a question of how we should live; it is a question of how we might live. Seen from Deleuze and Guattari's viewpoint, the question might become something like this: "What connections might we form? Or, What actualizations can we experiment with?" If we ask the question this way, we need to bear in mind that "we" is not a given we. It can be a group. It can be an individual. It can be an ecosystem or a pre-individual part or a cross-section within an environment or a geographical slice. What makes it a "we" is not the stability of an identity. It is the participation in the formation of connections.

Wil this participation be a matter of living together? Will it involve power? Yes to both questions. Politics is an experiment in machinic connections; it is not a distribution of goods to those who lack them. To ask how we might go about living is not to repeat the dreary question of who needs what. It is instead to probe the realm of difference that we are in order to create new and (one hopes) better arrangements for living, in the broadest sense of the word living.

I think this exerpt is an incredbly beautiful one, I felt like the nihilism of Baudrillard needs to be balanced out somehow.

They totally look the same.

Conversations with myself

Botched Taxidermy

prints, porcelain, and hand-dyed silk

Zack and I Summit Baltimore

Weird

stuff going on

Google sky

I've been using this program quite a bit lately in my work, when I listen to the tutorial I feel like it will be amusing to look back at this in a few years..

More

Halloween At Robert E. Lee

Walked to Robert E. Lee at dusk, got caught in the rain. Watched a 1922 Swedish/Danish silent film by Benjamin Christensen, Haxan: The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages. Based partly on Christensen's study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts.The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish krona. Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.