some of the images on the walls of the room that we organised toward

dear montreal, aarhus and turku…please find us: diagrammed

on the morning of the second day of the sydney workshop we watched the montreal diagram…entranced. We looked at the danish lunch plate, we laughed with the giraffes, we thought about network echoes and politics and we listened to the sound echo of a dinner conversation eaten during the day before. Someone said: ‘the lines of force in the montreal diagram are like the games of “elastics” kids play’. Someone else said: ‘we should dance an elastics diagram while listending to the sound echo file from aarhus’.

in the afternoon we talked about networked diagrammatics and textures. We organised into groups according to which diagram – there were many images on the walls in the room we had spent two days together – we liked. We transduced these images into movementscapes. We imaged snatches of these and laid them out against the sound echo file. Here is our collective diagrammatic response, an assemblage of a number of different groups all diagramming with elastics

….this is what a network can do, this is how a diagram, collectively enunciated across four cities, 3 or 4 days, and a multiplicity, can capture an echo, can be affected, can become an echo affect….

a collective diagram to come

aarhus, finland and montreal we in sydney are in the process of collectively and now dispersedly responding to your diagrams and/or diagrammatic exchanges….we will be posting an assemblage soonish ( next couple of days) from the last hours of our collective thinking yesterday

…the echo never ceases/only intensifies!

but in the meantime…thanks so much for the distributions…safe to say, we’ve all had a ball!

environment as expression of an echo – diagram for aarhus, turku and montreal from sydney

1.From the captured echo in the sponge, create a sponge phone.

2.Answer the sponge phone while transducing the texture of the sponge

2a – for example:

Here somone is scratching texture against the phone, so the listener feels the texture of the sponge’s absorbed echo.

3) Find your own way of transducing the diagram of an echo as it expresses environment

textures of (computationally aided) diagrams

Just reading Pia’s great article on Textures of Diagrams where she fruitfully, daringly and differentially compares diagrammatic texturing in Francis Bacon and Greg Lynn. What I really love about this article is the way she gets in with the diagrammatic….I think Grant wrote in his post something about what the diagram might ‘look’ like from within. And  I think Pia gets at this via texture rather than vision. The diagram’s ‘from within’ is  granular (non) synthesis, a crunchy stretching, a silky knotting across…except that there is no across, as given ground, to traverse. Only the production of texture through generating, spatializing. The architectural processes of Lynn are interesting because one can see a kind of constant struggle in his spatializing, to be taken up by, to smooth and surrender to nonhuman elements of computational code and to the life and death of information. This then really resonated for me with Deleuze’s primacy of affectivity in power:

‘We can therefore conceive of a necessarily open list of variables expressing a relation between forces or power relation, constituting actions upon actions: to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or diiftcult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on.’ ( from Foucault, 70)

I thought I’d just throw these images of Lynn’s up here as we might want to reference them when working ‘in accompaniment’ with Pia’s text on Thursday during the Sydney workshop. The first are Lynn’s ‘blob’ animations for ideas for the Korean Church; the second an image of the built church from 1999:

spacetime – a life. Quantum diagrams and singularity

So this is another diagram of a life…

.

in this case it is a life’s trajectory through spacetime toward a blackhole. AS you will see from the wikipedia text I have pilfered below, what happens to ‘a life’ as it approaches the black hole depends on whether the black hole is not moving ( a single point) or rotating (and generating a smear). In the first scenarion ‘a life’ becomes zero voulme but infinitely dense ( I love this – it resonates with the idea of pure immanence for me). In the second scenario, ‘a life’ might travel through/traverse across the smear and in so doing fold back into meeting up with  its own past.

This seems to me to resonate with ideas of the outside folding back into meet the actual ( taken up in both Deleuze’s readings on Foucault’s diagrams and in Sher Doruff’s Diagrammatics). At any rate, if the readings seem difficult, console yourselves with quantum physics, which is soooo conceptually accessible!!

From wikipedia:

At the center of a black hole as described by general relativity lies a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite.^[52] For a non-rotating black hole this region takes the shape of a single point and for a rotating black hole it is smeared out to form a ring singularity lying in the plane of rotation.^[53] In both cases the singular region has zero volume. It can also be shown that the singular region contains all the mass of the black hole solution.^[54] The singular region can thus be thought of as having infinite density.

Observers falling into a Schwarzschild black hole (i.e. non-rotating and no charges) cannot avoid being carried into the singularity, once they cross the event horizon. They can prolong the experience by accelerating away to slow their descent, but only up to a point; after attaining a certain ideal velocity, it is best to free fall the rest of the way.^[55] When they reach the singularity, they are crushed to infinite density and their mass is added to the total of the black hole. Before that happens, they will have been torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the noodle effect.^[56]

In the case of a charged (Reissner–Nordström) or rotating (Kerr) black hole it is possible to avoid the singularity. Extending these solutions as far as possible reveals the hypothetical possibility of exiting the black hole into a different spacetime with the black hole acting as a wormhole.^[57] The possibility of traveling to another universe is however only theoretical, since any perturbation will destroy this possibility.^[58] It also appears to be possible to follow closed timelike curves (going back to one’s own past) around the Kerr singularity, which lead to problems with causality like the grandfather paradox.^[59] It is expected that none of these peculiar effects would survive in a proper quantum mechanical treatment of rotating and charged black holes

when diagrams become sonorous

John Cage’s diagrams are not simply or even visual but more importantly generators of music and sonic process. The image below is a flattened score made up of 20 pages of notations and relations. Here the diagram’s relationality is both worked on and released. To perform the sounds one has to generate the relations of the score vertically through an implied ‘z’ axis and then extensively to sonic properties (pitch, volume, timbre etc) in a determined manner ( but which also allows for the indeterminate becoming of the diagrams relations). This seems interestingly connected to Guattari’s notion that both mathematics and music are asignifying systems not at all related to language but rather are purely made up of forces and functions.

Here’s an extract of text from the Media Art Net online database about the image below which is a flattened diagram of Cage’s score for ‘Fontana Mix’ from 1958:

“«Fontana Mix» consists of a total of 20 pages of graphic materials: ten pages covered     with six curved lines each, and ten sheets of transparent film covered with randomly-placed points. In accordance with a specific system, and using the intersecting points of a raster screen, two of the pages produce connecting lines and measurements that can be freely assigned to musical occurrences such as volume, tone color, and pitch.”

score for 'Fontana Mix' John Cage 1958

Anna Munster

Hi, I’m Anna Munster and I am organzing the Sydney workshop next week. I collaborate with Andrew a lot and we have been thinking through the synchronous hosting of these workshops and the online exchange over the last few weeks. I’ll be facilitating the day to day running of the workshop in Sydney and assisting Brian Massumi and Erin Manning who will be in key generative roles at the Sydney end. Jondi Keane and Pia Ednie-Brown will also be making key contributions over the two days.

Looking forward to intensive and extensive diagrammatic activities over the next 2 weeks. In the meantime and because I am in the Australian country for a few days ( or bush as we call it over here), matters are reasonably prosaic…or not. My daily actions cluster around gardening, but gardening quite often returns us/me to immanence. So, here is my first attempt to diagram ‘a life’….