The Digital, a Continent?

Front matter

The Digital, a Continent?

Architectonics Books Vol. ı

APPLIED VIRTUALITY BOOK SERIES VOL. 22

Contents

Acknowledgements Instead ofa Preface, a Frontispiece Incipit, aChord

Tempered in the Time ofthe Analemma Harmonics and Architectonics, an Appeal to the “Digital Dignity” of Nature

Didascalicon (de Studio legendi intellectus artificialis)

Dedication

This text is dedicated to the mythical figure Europa, the princess who, in her dreams, has two mother figures. Europa is given a rest from the claims of their jealous appropriation through being seduced and abducted by Zeus, who carries her across the sea to an island that will forth on be called a continent. Europa brings along in a basket her fate, her destiny, not yet concluded, but curled up and, perhaps, asleep; at least given a rest, if only for the duration of the abduction. The myth is told by Moschos, one of the first known grammarians who lived in the 2™ century in Syrakus. Europa’ basket is one ofthe early instances of ekphrasis, an art especially reserved for the rhetorically well-versed poets because it involves a mimetic strategy that works not only ina double way but also in a way that packages self-referentiality within what it strives to achieve: the poet has to describe an object in words by fabulating a situation in which the words can contain their meaning ina manner that sets the object free, that acknowledges its autonomy; but the poetalso has to endow this object with liveliness by narrating the fabulation of the description within a vaster scope, a scope vaster than can be expected. In this vaster scope, the depicted elements of the fabula—the tableau with which the description is to work—can link up and make sense variously, pursuing arbitrary directions. A fable is also called the story space of a lie, or a ruse for this reason, or a story with a lesson, a gift, or something to be taken away from it after reading it. But how does one think of that ideational space where ekphrasis places its fabula? It is not the space of geometry and its projections. It is also not that ofa painting and its colored surfaces, lines, and figures. At stake is an ideation that is zealous, entirely unoriginal but full of ardor, devout and yet in pursuit of something it cannot and does not hope to ever grasp in full.

In the case of Europa and her basket, the poet places the fabula within the circuitous scope of a myth, which like all myth, must count as speech that captures what it presents in full, and because of the fullness of its speech can never conclude itself in one particular ending, nor one particular beginning. And yet, despite the fullness ofmythic speech, ekphrasis has something to add to it. Something that leaves the cycle and that steps out of its compass; a tale that does not stay put in the phrasis ofa mythic plot, a tale that seeks a certain amount of autonomy, that wants to invert direction: this ideational space is not without reason, but its fabulations ask to be placed on the grounds of a reason that is best called abductive.

This Ode to Europa is written in praise of Inchoate Form, literally meaning form that “commences.” Inchoate form is form that has “recently or just began,” from Latin inchoatus, past participle of inchoare, alteration of incohare “to commence, begin.” Such a form has actuality too, but the time of its extension is not given. The actuality of form that just commences is given, but it lacks a place in time that would be proper for it. How can we picture, mentally, the scope of such an extension?

I

The first component is Vitruvius’s Books on Technology, Books IX and X of De Architectura.? He begins the introduction to Book IX, his treatise on gnomons (sundials) and, more generally, the use of science in architecture, by recalling how the Greek ancestors appointed great honor to the Athletes at the Olympic games; he recalls how they were applauded and greeted in public and with great public expense, and he is astonished that the same kind of honor has not been bestowed to those whose “boundless services were performed for all times and all nations,” and whose training not only strength-

9 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. by Morris Hicky Morgan, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1914.

ened their own bodies but that of humankind in general—namely Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Hiero, all “men spent in constant industry, yielding fresh and rich fruit not only for their own countrymen but also to all nations,” and all of them “men whose tender years are spent in plenteous learning which this fruit affords.”° Their knowledge, mentioned by Vitruvius mostly as knowledge in geometry, arithmetic and mechanics, introduces civilized ways, impartial justice and law, “things without which no state can be sound.” His examples of the general resourcefulness of their insights all concern the counting, keeping, and planning time according to mechanical processes. This becomes evident also in Book X, Vitruvius’s treatise on machinery. Here Vitruvius writes:

All machinery is derived from nature and is founded on the teaching and instruction of the revolution of the firmament. Let us but consider the connected revolutions of the sun, the moon, and the five planets, without the revolution of which, due to mechanism, we should not have had the alternation of day and night, nor the ripening of fruits. Thus, when our ancestors had seen that this was so, they took their models from nature, and by imitating them were led on by divine

10 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, p.289. 11 Ibid.

facts, until they perfected the contrivances which are so serviceable in our life. Some things, with a view to greater convenience, they worked out by means of machines and their revolutions, others by means of engines, and so, whatever they found to be useful for investigations, for the arts, and for established practices, they took care to improve step by step on scientific principles.”

At stake here is clearly a mimetic relation to nature. It involves copiousness, literally the variation of constellations, of formulations, much in the same sense in which Erasmus of Rotterdam, some 15 centuries later, astonished his contemporaries by giving more than 250 copious variations of one and the same sentence, a simple “thank you for your letter,” whose version expanded in laying out this one phrase eloquently, using all his available resourcefulness in terms of modulating emphasis, by maximizing, minimizing and tempering contrasts through playing with distances, angles, the use of comparatives, superlatives, and so on. Starting with “From my dear Faustus’ letter I derived much delight.” He goes on with modulations of this sentence’s content, as in “At your words, a delight of no ordinary kind came over me,” or “I was singularly delighted by your epistle,” or “In these Faustine

N vi letters I found a wonderful kind of delectation,” or “To be sure, how your letter delighted my spirits!” and one more, “Your brief missive flooded me with inexpressible joy.”

Erasmus’sis a great play in exuberance! The gifts in articulacy expressed by the list escalate to the point where in some instances, he places the worth ofhis entire life purpose in the sender of this letter, knowing that he is grateful for having received it. What kind of scope of extension are we dealing with here? It is one where there is an efficacious convertibility between desire, the wish to be made whole, and pleasure, an enjoyment in expenditure, concerned with a making-whole on a great variety of vaster (or minor) scales of which none fit “properly” to the scale that balances one’s “indigenous” scope of extension. Is it really so different to Vitruvius’s claims concerning mathematics and mechanics, but now for Architecture? Anne Carson, again, has a beautiful figure that captures well the point I wish to make—on the delight we take in metaphor, she says that:

[...] a meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent.

What is the relation of impertinence to the hope ofunderstanding? To delight? The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope."

When asking about the scope of extension at stake with mechanical resourcefulness, our concern is not so much the demonstration and exposition of positive knowledge buta kind of wonder about this peculiar relation between impertinence and form whereby form also seeks delight, and the hope of understanding is nourished by delight itself:

As components for our tableau, let’s hold onto the figures of 1) mechanical resourcefulness, 2) mimesis that delights in copiousness, and 3) the relation between impertinence, delight, and hope for understanding.