Saturday, January 5, 2019
Raiders of the Inarticulate
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Raiders of the Lost Articulation
Tom Hanks as Indiana Langdon in Raiders of the Lost Articulation :
An unarticulated (but colored) cube:
A 2x2x2 articulated cube:
A 4x4x4 articulated cube built from subcubes like
the one viewed by Tom Hanks above:
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Where the Joints Are
An image related to the recent posts Sense and Sensibility:
A quote from yesterday's post The Eight:
A possible source for the above phrase about phenomena "carved at their joints":
See also the carving at the joints of Plato's diamond from the Meno :
Related material: Phaedrus on Kant as a diamond cutter
in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .
Monday, August 11, 2014
Syntactic/Symplectic
(Continued from August 9, 2014.)
Syntactic:
Symplectic:
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of
articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern
this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that
govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not
discursive . They do not present their constituents successively, but
simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped
in one act of vision."
– Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
For examples, see The Diamond-Theorem Correlation
in Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
This is a symplectic correlation,* constructed using the following
visual structure:
.
* Defined in (for instance) Paul B. Yale, Geometry and Symmetry ,
Holden-Day, 1968, sections 6.9 and 6.10.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Trickster
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde’s
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art –
“Trickster,” says Hyde, “feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” (71) As Hyde says, “… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters,” (158), although the reverse is not the case. “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.” (159)
What is “the next world”? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
See also George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner, Trickster.