Islamic Aesthetics and New Media Art Points of Contact
One of the most incredible works of architecture I've ever seen: The Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra, Granada. The dome is equanimous of a multitude of tiny, pixel-similar cells known every bit muquarna.
"The universe is non dualistic, but folded, so spirit is separated from matter simply by caste" – Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010, p. 271).
* * *
As someone deeply invested in using networks to understand a wide range of phenomenon, I was thrilled to run into Laura Marks' new book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Just I had little sense of just how amazing this book was going to be. I can't recommend it highly enough.Across fine art, this is a work of philosophy, and I'll get to Marks' ontology shortly. But it'southward worth proverb that while not a systematic primer in Islamic thought, but rather a piece of work of radical syncretism, Marks' text tin can besides nicely serve as an excellent introduction to classical Arabic philosophy (philosophy written in Arabic language), describing everything from Islamic atomism and Illuminationism to crucial figures similar ibn-Sina and al-Sijistani. The text is full of gems like a quote such a as this, all placed in historical context: "Know this world is a mirror from head to human foot/ In every cantlet there are a hundred blazing suns" (Shaykh Mahmud Shabistani). Ane doesn't have to imagine far to see a forerunner of Leibniz hither, a figure whose influence on the gimmicky digital age is well known, and who seems more prescient by the day.
How sameness can give rise to diversity: Interactive architecture that changes shape equally you move inside it, my own photograph, from the great mosque of Cordoba, Spain.
Marks' goals, even so, are wider than an introduction to philosophies under-studied in the Euro-American world. Building upon a Deleuzian ontology, and making use of C.S. Peirce and Henri Bergson as primary interlocutors, Marks develops a serial of links betwixt these gimmicky philosophers, and the algoritmicity that links new media fine art, computation, and various forms of Islamic fine art, architecture, and philosophy. More than than a work about art and compages, or even new media, this is a work virtually our age and its increasingly algorithmic foundations. The stakes couldn't be higher, or more general in import.
Marks' Algorithmic Ontology: Infinity, Information, and Image
Marks starts off her work by describing her ontology of enfoldment. She synthesizes Deleuzian and Peircian models to fence for iii levels of understanding computational formations, which she describes as infinity, information, and image. To put this in more familiar Deleuzian terms, these are the notions of the virtual, code, and the actual. In everyday linguistic communication, nosotros have computational images (ie: webpages), and these are always produced by algorithms (ie: estimator code), a term estimator scientists have devised for anything that tin be thought of equally a "fix of instructions," frequently described as a similar to recipes in a cookbook. Computational images and algorithms are ii of Marks' three levels, but they need to be brought together by a third level, considering there needs to exist something to activate code and actualize its potentials, bringing to life what Deleuze and Guattari might phone call a "abstruse motorcar" as a "concrete aggregation," which in this case, takes the course of an epitome. That which activates code is what Marks calls infinity, which is her third level, along with algorithm and image.
The Legible Universe: Words with Wings (right) or mirrored into Images (left)
Building on the Deleuzian commitment to immanence, Marks works to describe how her notions of infinity, algorithm, and epitome tin exist intertwined using Deleuze's notion of "the fold." For Marks, images are unfolded patterns/codes, and patterns/codes are enfolded infinity. Or to keep the other way, infinity unfolds into lawmaking which unfolds into image. Taken to its extreme, everything nosotros see can be thought of every bit merely enfoldment and infinity, with code as the twist in the Moebial band that intertwines the one within the other without ever breaking into an otherworldly dualism. Building upon the Arabic distinction between that which is zahir (surface) and batin (hidden, enfolded) Marks argues that Islamic art tin help u.s. see the potentials of an "immanent space" hidden in the world around u.s.a., waiting to be unfolded in all its potential differentiations.
For an example of Marker'due south tri-level model in relation to our contemporary mediascape, when we encounter a webpage, the epitome on our screen is the result of a code which is the potential for this webpage, which needs to activated past something which tin bring potential to life, namely, free energy. Energy actualizes the potential webpage within code, and in this sense, the energy can be thought of as a pure virtuality, code every bit a specific virtuality (a "potential to be x"), and image is an actualization of code by free energy. But all of this is just unfolded energy in different forms, which is to say, infinity, information/code, or image. While Marks is clear that she is slightly modifying Deleuze, she does and then in a Peircian manner, which is to say, in a manner friendly to Deleuzian methods, and the result is a world composed of energy unfolded into signs and signs into things, fifty-fifty though ultimately these are all versions of the same.
Try to trace a pattern without finding yourself in another i: Virtual Proliferation and the Incompossibility of Control in Geometric Art, Exterior from Registan in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
And while Marks' attentions are clearly on new media formations, she seems to besides exist describing a general ontology. Building upon Deleuze's notion of an ontology of low-cal present in the Cinema books, which itself builds on the Bergson of Matter and Retentivity, Marks describes crucial links between this model and diverse forms of Arabic philosophy. For Deleuze and Bergson in these works, the world can be conceived of as a pure coaction of light and various reflectors, refractors, and impediments (a notion not all that far fetched to contemporary quantum theorists), such that impediments subtract from pure manual of light to give rise to bodies, perceptions, affects, and e'er more circuitous forms of being, So long every bit we think of this lite metaphorically equally emanation of rays of influence from God, this notion permeates Standard arabic thought, particularly in the late Illuminationist schoolhouse, which builds upon Suhrwahardi'south "metaphysics of lite." Surhwahardi in fact describes all the world infoldings of various forms of light and darkness, with physical light as a less perfect version of the intellectual active light which emanates from God and gives rise to all the forms in the world. Writing virtually a thousand years before Deleuze and Bergson, however, such notions seem not only gimmicky, but indicate powerful moments in the history of idea which have been erased from traditional Western histories of thought. In this case they underscore the debt of these thinkers to a figure such as Spinoza, whose debt to Islamic thought past means of Moses Maimonides is well known, even as this particular case indicates the larger contours whereby the West has only erased a wide variety of its intellectual filliations, specially to those arising from domains it was colonizing, or which it otherwise considered inconvenient.
Going beyond Marks' theories for a moment, it's perhaps worth noting that theorists working inside contemporary quantum physics have argued that it'south not impossible that all the light we see in the globe is in fact the upshot of one light particle, or photon, refracting in spacetime, giving rise to the all the electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos every bit a result. This refraction of unity into multiplicity past means of its interference with a refraction matrix of some sort is something which seems uncannily to be anticipated past some of the philosophical models described here. Whether or not this is testify that our gimmicky models are permeated with an unintegrated Islamic intellectual heritage, or that ancient philosophers were able to grope by metaphor to what science now seeks to describe with different ways, is certainly a question worth considering .
Whatever the concrete analogues, however, according to Marks, the similarity between many contemporary Western models, such equally those seen in Bergson and Deleuze, and a variety of Islamic predecessors, tin can be read as potential evidence for a perhaps unconscious and subterranean influence of Islamic thought on the nowadays, often via intermediary bondage of influences (ie: Spinoza, Leibniz). And in fact, the Standard arabic philosophical tradition, via ibn Sina (Avicenna) and ibn Rushd (Averroes) influenced the Christian medieval theologians (ie: Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham) which when combined with Maimonides, who wrote in Standard arabic and was widely influenced by thinkers like ibn Faradi and ibn Bajja, influenced Spinoza so much. Both Christian and Standard arabic models were in fact influences of Neoplatonic models propagating from Plotinus to Porphyry, Proclus, Ammonius, absorbing various Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean influences on the way to form a 1000 Neoplatonic synthesis that dominated philosophico-religious thought from the flow of tardily Antiquity (about 500 CE) to the early mod period (the rising of Carteisianism effectually 1650 CE). It'due south my sense that agreement the neglected genealogies of the westward, from Neoplatonism to Islamic thought, can help u.s. to understand some of the potentials of our age, and Marks provides a starting point to bring so many of these threads together.
Neo-Medievalism: Techno-Images and the Render of the Repressed of Backer Modernity
While Marks argues that Islamic thought helps provide some of the missing links in chains of transmission of some of the most important trends of gimmicky philosophy, her goal seems to non simply exist provide new genealogies for diverse philosophers, only to assistance us understand networked postmodernity itself. If early on European modernity found philosophical expression in the individuality given philosophical class in the Cartesian cogito, which was then radicalized via Kantianism, it seems today that with the rise of networked formations, such equally global capitalism and the net, that perhaps the trend to more post- and supra-individual modes of idea, such as structuralism or various postmodernisms, tin can be seen equally a response to the manner in which gimmicky networked formations are refiguring subjectivity such that today, individuals are increasingly nodes in nets. From Facebook to GPS systems, production customization and the narrowcasting of news, nosotros're never not linked in, and at many levels of scale.
Aperiodic Tiling: Anticipating contemporary mathematical discoveries by hundreds of years, and involving the viewer in it's process, as figures await unlike depending on if y'all start with them as your eye moves through the patterns. Interactive art, before computers!
While in some sense this has ever been the example, perhaps not least via the massive network that is human language, some take argued that we're seeing a shift in scale in form, the germination of increasingly complex forms of networking, many of which accept visual course. Certainly Guy Debord argued that we alive in an age perchance all-time described as a "society of the spectacle," but some have even gone as far as describing the coming age as neo-Medieval. Villem Flusser, for example, believes that we are inbound a "second visuality" in which "techno-images" will increasingly absorb texts into themselves, and become the main mode information is transmitted, similar to how images functioned in the eye ages, only with the twist that techno-images are based on texts, algorithmic codes, while traditional images are not. So in a sense, while possibly we are inbound a second visuality, unlike previous eras of visual say-so, these images all share an implicit, enfolded textual basis, i which isn't read linearly, simply in networked links of commands and executions. And as Bernard Stiegler has argued, since so many of u.s.a. have no idea how to read these often hidden codes, we are the first generation in history that has hidden its memory of how to produce itself from itself within its own products, a massive form of forgetting which is radically disempowering and which needs to be actively countered.
From such a perspective, thinking of our historic period as potentially neo-Medieval might be true in more senses than one. For if we imagine the earth as a network of algorithmicized images, peculiarly when nosotros use the word "image" in the sense employed by Bergson (and later Deleuze) as whatever piece of "flowing matter" (thereby including bodies and everyday objects within the notion of images), so only supplant the notion of "God" which centered the medieval world with that of the network formations which are increasingly knitting our world into a fractal network of networks, you take something similar a neo-medieval worldview. God serves as a metaphor for the "ghost in the machine," the distributed spirit in the earth of our capitalist mediascape. None of which is to say we are simply going back to the Medieval, rather, this is a return with a difference, at a college level of complexity perhaps, some sort of grand "return of the repressed" of modernity. And this is why I think philosophers with a "networked God" at the center of their worldview, such as Spinoza or Leibniz, can be used to help us think out networked age.
For example, building on some of Max Pensky's descriptions of Leibniz's philosophy of monads, it seems that Leibniz's worldview describes few things better than a network of computers connected to the internet, with a virtual "God" at the center. And Spinoza'southward immanent networkology seems to exist an ideals of how to bargain with this, an attempt to sympathize the deeper logics of the ghosts within the machines. That is, if Leibniz is maybe the philosopher of the reified backer mediascape, so perhaps Spinoza is a theorist who indicates paths beyond this, towards immanent yet also democratic relationalism based on a God of infinite creativity. And the question then becomes, what sort of God exercise you envisage, the radically creative i of Spinoza, or the centralizing and hierarchizing i of Leibniz?
Spinoza and Leibniz both wrote at the birth of capitalism,but seem to have grasped its networked structure avant-la-lettre, and largely by reworking Medieval sources inspired by Standard arabic and Neoplatonic Hellenistic philosophies, as a way of getting around the limitations in the Cartesian project. Few things could exist more contemporary perhaps than examining the various networked gods that dominated idea in the and then-called centre ages. And restoring Islamic idea to its rightful place in the genealogy of contemporary "western" philosophical models tin perhaps make full out this genealogy, particularly because it shows u.s.a. so many of the political, upstanding, and aesthetic consequences of various theories in relation to widely unlike social circumstances than those of Spinoza and Leibniz.
Of course, while the Islamic capliphates and their global trade networks were maybe an early phase of globalization to those involved, it is the algorithmic use of code which provides one of the many means Marks links classical Islamic art with new media formations. This may seem anachronistic in some ways. Just perhaps the world was ever already algorithmic, and but particular historical circumstances bring this to the fore. That is, perhaps our new algorithmically textual times have simply allowed us to see what was perchance always already there, an algorithmic manner of relating to reality ready to reveal itself whenever the socio-historical circumstances shine a light upon it.
Fractalizing Emanation since the Timurids: Dome Interior, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Deleuze and Guattari argue, for example, that the world is composed of "concrete assemblages," any of which can be mapped by an "abstract machine" that can explain how a set of singularities actualize in particular situations to requite ascension to the aggregation in question. For case, if we think of development every bit an algorithm (and about evolutionary theorists practice, often speaking of evolution as a bio-informational procedure), we tin think of the Deoxyribonucleic acid of whatsoever organism as a lawmaking which when given energy and an environment, will actualize in a fuzzy set of particular means. Likewise, even an inorganic molecule, which doesn't accept an "instruction manual" inside it similar living organisms practise with DNA, can be seen equally actualizing a virtual, implicit programme that scientists then map out with things similar molecular diagrams. And today scientists are increasingly using the algorithmic aspects of our world to produce designer molecules, organs, and even organisms. Perchance and so it is not all that much of a stretch to recall of all that is as algorithmic, a massively networked intertwining of potential, algorithms, and actualities. And every bit Marks indicates, this model finds a precursor, in the very source of Medieval European philosophy, namely, Medieval Islamic thought.
Islamic Philosophies as Algorithmic Networkologies
Simply how might information technology be possible to think of Islamic philosophy equally algorithmic? Much of Arabic philosophy portrays the world equally a giant network of sorts, with God as the infinite that powers the whole matter. And as described past Marks, the Qur'an acts in much Islamic thought as the algorithmic code that gives the world society and pattern, such that the individual things of the world are mere incarnations of the forms of this pattern within the degraded world of matter. Many Islamic theorists argue that as the word of God, the Qur'an isn't created but rather eternal. Furthermore, written forms of the Qur'an are merely traces of the spoken class, which is the act of God which brings the world along, which is why recitation is so important in Islam. This also helps explain why humans shouldn't try to compete with God equally creator, and hence images which resemble college beings are often prohibited, a notion commonly known as "aniconism" (an-icon-ism). Inside all this, Marks is conscientious to show the potential political applications of such a notion of God, how it tin be repressive of divergence, or radically liberating, depending upon how the relation to this infinite is conceived. Here lies the politics of her work, about which we'll say more presently.
Inside such a model, however, speech is performative action, the means whereby God brings the created world into being, and the written trace is simply there to aid humans reactive the link to God. Literally, to recite the Qur'an is like establishing a network connection to the eternal, unchanging source of all creation, that from which all emanates. In this sense, the text can exist seen every bit both data and interface, an enfolding of the virtual potentials which are emanations of God's eternal creative power. The Qur'an (literally, 'The Reciting'), as God's active discussion, literally then functions as an algorithm, a code that makes things happen, for it is not just a writing, but a doing. And for a human to recite the Qur'an is then to participate in him and his work, to sync with information technology, in a sense, even if the bureau for it and yourself all comes from God in the beginning place. The Qur'an is a therefore a sort of main lawmaking for actualizing in the world.
And for some theorists, there'southward potentially more in the Qur'an there than meets the eye. Some philosophers felt the text needs to exist understood allegorically every bit containing massively more meanings than present on the surface (ie: Shi'a interpretations valued this, indirectly influencing Aquinas in his emblematic readings of Christian scripture), while others felt at that place is just one way to execute this code (Sunni theologians in fact often argue confronting all interpretation, for and hence for pure ritualized recitation). At the nearly radical farthermost, and in a manner similar to Jewsish Kaballistic approaches, the characters of the Qur'an could be converted to numbers, producing yet more than layers of potential significant to exist unfolded.
Worlding the Legible: Kufic Script, Foliated and so Floriated
Marks describes this attempt to numerically decode the text as every bit one side of the vogue for "computational magic" and "sacred geometry" popular since late antiquity, a trend but vanquished with the rise of mod scientific discipline. So once again, it seems reasonable to debate that without such computational and geometric symbologies, with its search for correspondences and affinities between things like planets, metals, numbers, animals, etc., modern science would likely non have emerged. And if in fact these predecessor procedures for having symbolic efficacy on the world are some of the "vanishing mediators" (to use a term from Fredric Jameson) of gimmicky science, and so perchance we'll need to understand them if we are to move across the limitations which contemporary forms of scientism which turn science into engineering in the name of its industrial masters.
Whether in more textually fundamentalist Sunni form, Shi'a allegorical class, or Sufi mystical radicalizations of either, Marks describes how the Qur'an tin exist seen as the lawmaking linking God and created beings, thereby linking into her general model of virtual/infinity, information/code/algorithm, and image/thing. Later establishing these connections, she then describes twelve primary characteristics that she feels can be seen as unifying the otherwise radically disparate corpus of classical Islamic art, characteristics which are also shared in various ways by new media formations, including art.
From here, Marks so proceeds to a serial of semi-historical chapters, which lay the groundwork for understanding the nets of transmission of Islamic ideas to the West. According to Marks, we are the unconscious inheritors of a hidden genealogy of Islamic thought, one which was erased equally vanishing mediator of modernity, and which is only at present making itself seen once more. Marks carefully traces the network of influences between Alexandria, Constantinople, Damascus, and Venice, and describes how Venetian culture during the catamenia of the crusades was absolutely permeated with that of the more developed Islamic earth. This Islamo-Venetian network is then largely destroyed when the monopoly of trade to the Far East is cleaved by Portuguese discovery of a sea route to the Indian Ocean, equally well as the discovery of frontiers across Europe and Asia, all of which allowed European coffers to eventually develop the surpluses which were able to spur evolution in nearly every field (eventually giving rise to the Industrial revolution). But as Marks shows, Islamic models nevertheless snuck themselves into everything from carpets to design patterns, more than just philosophical models, frequently lurking in the collective unconscious of the European imaginary, with influences that can be felt fifty-fifty today. For Marks these traces serve equally reservoirs which periodically resurface, and whose effects are being seen today in various new media formations.
Oh No, Hubby and Wife are connected by a Giant Islamic Brain-Image!: Islamic Noo-Signs in Western Painting, 'Husband and Wife' by Lorenzo Lotto, 1525
Islamico-Algorithmic Aesthetics: Pixel, Vector/Raster, Arabesque/Fractal, Texture/Screen, Morph/Effigy, Figural/Textural
After Marks' general description of her project, which she and so historicizes with her genealogy of Islamic art's influence upon "the due west", the 2nd half of the volume truly jumps into uncharted terrain. Synthesizing various aspects of Deleuze's philosophy into a coherent aesthetic theory, Marks finds analogues in classical Islamic art, philosophy, and aesthetics which can assistance u.s. empathize developments in contemporary new media art and life. Taking the notions of point, line, aeroplane, figure, and text as reworked past Deleuze and his sources from Worringer to Foncillon, Marks links these to new media art formations, such as pixel, vector/raster, texture/screen, image/text, even every bit she continually shows how these can be contextualized in relation to various forms of Islamic art, and with profound political implications.
For Marks, the pixel is the contemporary equivalent of the cantlet of Islamic atomist philosophers (ie: the Ash'arites), which finds artistic expression in the unit-similar muquarnas from which many Islamic dome interiors are composed. These can also be thought of as the "cells" from which Islamic geometric artwork like tiles are formed. And nonetheless, the muqarna/pixel seems a method to contain the very power to leap beyond its bounds, that of which pixels are formed.
Here she turns to the notion of the vector, which finds historical ancestor in the style seemingly everything in Islamic faith points towards Mecca, and from there to God, such that and then much fine art in the Islamic world, and fifty-fifty the practices of which the fine art is often simply a trace, take on a fundamentally vectoral form. This finds artistic expression in the ways in which lines oft seem to have a life of their own in a diversity of Islamic patterns, such that these lines can be thought of as points leaping outside themselves, giving ascent to forms by ways of the forces they trace. This can either be disciplined, every bit seen in rigid geometries which represent but highly ordered and stable shapes, which she compares to the raster's disciplining of vector graphics today, or accept the grade of the arabesque, the line which continually breaks abroad from figures and texts, misbehaving, giving ascension to "haptic" textural spaces rather than screen-similar planes, often producing a multiplicity of potential readings and patterms. These haptic spaces are somewhere between lines and planes, like lines with depth and planes that introject "the void [crucial to Islamic atomists] into the heart of matter" (p. 177).
This is Not UnVirtual Reality: Against the 'Illusionism' of Western Art, Fragment from a Persian Carpeting, Safavid Menstruation
Describing how these lines give rising to proliferation of potential figures, or how various Islamic calligraphies were disciplined by the state, only to keep having various images arise from their edges, Marks describes how at that place was a constant endeavour to tame lines and their voids, to keep images from creeping into words and words from exploding into images, to prevent figures dissolving back into patterns, and to eliminate various other unruly aspects which came about from the productive constraint of aniconism. And when Islamic art did allow for images of people, such equally in Western farsi painting, Marks shows how the defamiliarizing aspects of these works, with their unattached spaces and times, and other generally anti-illusionist forms, has similarities to contemporary virtual reality, which Steven Shaviro has described as manifesting mail-cinematic affects by means of what Deleuze describes every bit "any-place-whatsoevers" and "any-times-whatsoevers."
In all this Marks' goal is liberation, exploding objects into objectiles, pixels and rasters into vectors, screens into textures, figures into abstract patterns, and texts into psychadelic refractions of images. For if an infinity, for Marks, is something that you relate to "similar another person," her goal is to help united states of america imagine ways that our relation to every attribute of the world can be like this. Which is to say, she wants to help usa see the potential for the unfolding of infinity, and its infinite potential for folding and unfolding, within and between every fold.
From Mystification to Date: Genealogizing Network Politics of Aesthetics from Classical Islamic Fine art to Techno-Image
From morphing calligraphies and figures to virtual spacetimes, Marks keeps tracing a struggle betwixt the powers of centralization and those of proliferation and creation. For Marks, "art is a primitive swamp that liberates differentiation equally a force in itself" (313), and this force shatters points, lines, planes, figures, and texts to give rise to new differentiations, something which tends to terrify those in power. For some Islamic governments during the classical menses, strict measures were taken to rein things in. Some required using ratios to produce a proportioned relation between individual characters and the flourishes allowed in calligraphic inscriptions. Others prohibited emblematic readings of texts, or banned calligraphic writing which plough into images or vice-versa. For others, pure geometric patterns and the void were all that were allowed, and ofttimes in austere, centralized forms, producing a mathematical sublime with no sense of connection to human production, leaving merely the spectacle of grandeur and complexity stabilized by a deviously omnipresent absent center.
Western Inheritance: How the Indeterminacy of Figure and Ground, and the Haptic Line Invage Western Spacetime via Aubrey Beardsley's Destabilizing Proto-Modernist Foliations
Mystification, for Marks, is a powerful force for repression, and she sees the austere geometric pureness of some Islamic works every bit similar to some modernisms which emphasize purity of geometry, or new media works that emphasize spectacle rather than interactivity. For instance, Marks differentiates those geometrically patterned works of mathematical art that give rise to proliferating refractions of departure (ie: Mandelbrot fractals, enfolding massive diversity into elegant lawmaking) from those which just echo and reflect a centralized sameness, a deviation which, building on Deleuze, could exist described as that between reflection and refraction (and for more than on this in regard to political formations, meet here). And while Marks values the insights of Sufi mystics, both in fine art and philosophy, she expresses concern that the Sufi notion of fana' (annihilation before God) might pb to political and intellectual quietism, every bit evidenced in how some forms of Sufism went from being repressed to endorsed by the Country, with political implications for today in the ways in which engineering often leads to awe and spectacle, yet also passivity and detachment of the form described by Guy Debord every bit 'the club of the spectacle.'
Proto-LeCorbusier: State Architecture, sans Arabesque, the Mosque of Samsarra
Describing the European tradition every bit ane of the depiction of confront and trunk (Deleuze's notion of "faceity"), Marks argues that the emergence of ornament and figural line in modernism (ie: pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, etc.) shows the return of a repressed Islamic influence which, for Marks, had been hiding in, amongst other places, the Venetian patterns that carried algorithmic fine art forms into the centre of the European visual unconscious. Marks nicely shows how carpets with Islamic patterns evidence up in a wide diversity of European paintings, and tin can exist seen to part equally sorts of 'images of thought,' what Deleuze describes every bit "noo-signs."
In all this, the tension betwixt neo-Baroque proliferation and the forces of centralizationplays out, from classical Islamic art and philosophy to new media formations. Just as modernism was torn between the drive for purity and that of neo-Baroque excess (ie: Corbusier and Loos versus Art Nouveau, The Union of Socialist Writers versus Constructivst rebels in Russian federation), so new media fine art is torn between that which fosters proliferation and distributed agency, and that which but attempts to 'shock and awe' the states before technological spectacle, all in a manner which can exist seen to play out in the formal languages of Islamic arts. In terms of new media, agreement these two types of what Jameson calls the "technological sublime," that which furthers activity and change versus that which furthers passivity and disengagement, tin can assist united states runway some of the political implications of the techno-images which seem to increasingly structure meaning in our networked age.
How to Tame a Wild Line: Centralization of Ornament at the Tomb of Isma'ili Samani
Mark'due south book is a profound attempt to develop an aesthetics which is besides an ontology likewise as an ideals, linking Deleuze'southward Spinozism to the side of Islamic idea which fought against the powers of centralization.
Haptic, Textured, Folded Space: A Dome that Won't exist Tamed, Isfahan, Iran
In the process, she not merely provides a guide for navigating our algorithmic times, but as well a much needed recurperative work. For equally I argued in a previous post, it is fourth dimension that "the West" and its history to begin to integrate the fact that it didn't only 'go to sleep' after Rome, but rather, that its heritage crucially runs through the Islamic earth. That is, we are all inheritors of the ways in which Greek learning moved from Rome and Byzantium to Alexandria, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordoba, Toledo, Damascus, and other centers of learning in the Islamic world, where it built upon the Neoplatonic heritage, mutating it in the process, and advancing substantially in regard to medical, mathematical, and scientific knowledge, before the leading edge of that tradition moved dorsum to Europe.
Morphing across the Figure: Caucasian Dragon Carpets (actually, in that location's Dragon's in in that location, morphing and demorphing into various things, and between generations of carpeting makers, a 4D morph!)
All of which is to say that "the West" every bit we know it today is the kid of Islam, whether information technology wants to admit this or non. Of course, contemporary Islam is besides an inheritor of its ain classical menstruum, and understanding the commonalities between these cultures and so often at odds today, their common heritage, is something that may assist to produce bridges which may help us develop more robust and liberatory futures in common. Marks' work of radically hybrid scholarship is precisely the sort of thing that can assist point us in this direction, while providing the states with tools whereby to imagine future work of this sort.
And it's a corking read! I actually couldn't put the book down, highly, highly recommended. I expect to exist drawing from the conceptual resource this book provided for a very long fourth dimension. A crucial text to help empathise our speedily changing globe.
Source: https://networkologies.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/algorithm-islamic-art-and-virtual-philosophy-thoughts-on-laura-marks-enfoldment-and-infinity/
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