Mandala

At the risk of being labelled a damn hippy (having already posted links to dolphins and new-agey aphorisms) – i’m eternally fascinated with the Kalachakra Mandala and the strange desire and various projects to extrapolate it in new media forms – an echo of the techno-utopian promise of virtual reality and the way it came to be figured as a space for the extrapolation of an internal/conscious/sub-conscious mindscapes -its as if our minds were more at home in representation than in the body/world… – I love the way it ends up looking like a garish mc-mansion when rendered in 3D..

You can see those renderings here: http://kalachakranet.org/mandala_kalachakra.html

The ritual rendering in sand here…

a simple life.

my diagrams are always absurdly complicated but the forms of emergent complexity I’m interested in are often formed of a mutual recursion of relatively simple/minimal terms or functions.

so while its simple to the point of aphorism and might well belong on a gap tshirt I quite like this from designnotes.info..

perhaps – to add some meat to this – there might be a point of discussion/exploration about the generative potential, or perhaps the instrumentality of diagrams, their relation to/within a ‘sea-tossed world’ – the relative virtues or dangers of complexity and simplicity/clarity in diagrammatic interventions – thinking of Anna M’s engagement with network diagrams, and the diagrammatic energies, continuities of the neurosciences and/or cybernetics..

A Life

My initial thoughts are two-fold on this diagramming of a life –

I was struggling to come up with a way to depict a virtual unity – life as a groove – propelled by the virtual gravitas of the coming beat as a kind of attractor but always most interestingly actualised before or after that beat – modulated by context, circumstance, or serendipity….the complex play between anticipation and suspense as energising an intense and tenuous continuity. Circles depict event-intensities which are also becoming/rippling-orbit-paths folding/modulating past with present/perception so that polyrhythmic foldings might emerge in perpetuity..

on the other hand I kept thinking about spiralling molecular incorporations and expulsions…once again orbits and gravitas – although here embodying and describing centrifugal energies as the basis for integration/disintegration..I was thinking of the game Osmosis….

thought through some scribbling in haste maybe some more later – maybe some sound:

This is perhaps a far more eloquent diagramming of a life:

although.. this perhaps gets more to the core as a diagram of a life as the unfolding of diagrammatic absurdities;

More later..

Mat Wall-Smith

I am a digital media theorist/producer/experimentalist currently taking a break from a perpetually unfinished PhD. Very broadly- my thesis is concerned with the integral relation between affect and technics and works toward what might well be described as a diagrammatic encounter of and with their interactions.

I have long being concerned with the recursive dynamic of implication (intensities) and extension (of an always ‘technical’ becoming) described by the body’s particular ‘ways of carrying variation’ and the way this sees the body become instrumental(ised) in a variety of  ‘unities (continuities) of movement and sensation’ (Massumi).

Sometime long ago I worked in sound and music production and both signal-flow and the stubbornly relational in-excess of sound and music remain deeply inscribed in the way I think-feel the world, the way I figure and interact with technics. This informs/propels my analysis of the industry/industries of mind and the design (and implementation) of architectures (models and technologies) through which they extend and are extended.

I dunno – mostly I’m just confused.

Re: Diagramming a life….. I think the Virgo’s amongst us would like that in another post. As a lower piscean i’ll go with that…