space-time | Into the Diagram

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

My recent interest is to be able to understand – and maybe make a diagramme – of new media interfaces in relation to haptic spaces and relations. My understanding of ‘new media’ includes the electronic signal and the way the feed-back noise and the real-time sensation of magnetic pulses, digital codings or foldings shape the relational spaces of ‘now’ created in the interfaces. The interface ‘spaces’ created since the 1960s might thus (with Michel Serres) be understood as mediators ‘in-between’ an outside and an inside sensation of the body (Anna Munster). In that sense ‘space’ in its ‘interfacial’ form might inspire to reflect on the ethymological meaning of space, namely ‘openness’ and ‘to contain’. In Danish we can both talk of a ‘timespace’ (et tidsrum), meaning a period or a duration of time; and about a ‘space of time’ (en rum tid), meaning time in the condition of space. In its latter meaning a haptic interface including the sensations of the body (as the center of the registration of affect – like Justines measuring instrument in Melancholia) might be an openness toward a diagramming of the “between-times, between-moments” that Deleuze writes on in “Immanence: a life”: “it doesn’t just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.” Instead of my own diagramme I will refer to the diagramming ambition of the website of Melancholia (this includes the instrument for ‘measuring the planet’ from the bodily-relative sensation of it: http://www.melancholiathemovie.com/