# las.quotes ## [[flusser]] ### [[line and surface]] If, then, we call the time involved in reading written lines “historical time,” we ought to call the time involved in reading pictures by a different name, because “history” has the sense of going somewhere, whereas, while reading pictures, we need go nowhere. The proof of this is simple: it takes many more minutes to describe what one has seen in a picture than it does to see it. #stone #image #video #3d **However, the stone we have offered as an example is not really typical of our present situation. We can walk right up to a stone, but we can do nothing of the sort with most of the things that determine us at present— either the things that occur in explanations or the things that occurin images. The genetic information or the Vietnam War, or alpha particles, or Miss Bardot’s breasts are all examples. We may have no immediate experience of any of these kinds of things, but we are nonetheless determined by them. ** #fiction #intro #facts #video #vertov We must therefore ask how the various symbols of the world of fiction relate to their meanings. This shifts our problem to the structure of the media. If we take advantage of what was said in the first paragraph, we may answer the question as follows: Written lines relate their symbols to their meanings point by point (they “conceive” the facts they mean), while surfaces relate their symbols to their meanings by two-dimensional contexts (they “imagine” the facts they mean — if they truly mean facts and are not empty symbols). Thus, our situation provides us with two sorts of fiction: the conceptual and the imaginal; their relation to fact depends on the structure of the medium. ---- #dimension #prophets (We need no prophets to tell us that the “one-dimensional man” is disappearing.) ---- #dimension (We do not have a two-dimensional logic comparable in rigor and elaboration to linear Aristotelian logic.) ----- #dimension #reading #temporality This gives us the following difference between reading written lines and pictures: we must follow the written text if we want to get at its message, but in pictures we may get the message first, and then try to decompose it. And this points to the difference between the one-dimensional line and the two-dimensional surface: the one aims at getting somewhere; the other is there already, but may reveal how it got there. This difference is one of temporality, and involves the present, the past, and the future. It is obvious that both types of reading involve time—but is it the“same” time? --- #temporality On the other hand, would it not be more sensible to say that the times involved in the two processes are different, and that their measurement in minutes fails to reveal this difference? If we accept this last statement, we may say that the reading of pictures takes less time because the moment in which their messages are received is denser; it is more compacted. It also opens up more quickly. If, then, we call the time involved in reading written lines “historical time,” we ought to call the time involved in reading pictures by a different name, because “history” has the sense of going ---- #visionaries #peoplewhohearvoices #film Visually, films are surfaces, but to the ear they are spatial. We are merged in the ocean of sound and it penetrates us; we are opposed to the world of images, and it merely surrounds us. The term audiovisual obscures this distinction. (It seems that Ortega, like many others, has ignored this difference when speaking of our circunstancia. Visionaries certainly live in a different world from those who hear voices.) ----- #intro #dimension Written lines relate their symbols to their meanings point by point (they “conceive” the facts they mean), while surfaces relate their symbols to their meanings by two-dimensional contexts (they “imagine” the facts they mean—if they truly mean facts and are not empty symbols). ----- #intro #fiction #concept When we translate image into concept, we decompose the image—we analyze it. We throw, so to speak,a conceptual point-net over the image, and capture only such meaning as did not escape through the meshes of the net. Therefore, the meaning of conceptual fiction is much narrower than the meaning of imaginal fiction, although it is far more clear and distinct. Facts are represented more fully by imaginal thought, more clearly by conceptual thought. The messages of imaginal media are richer, and the messages of conceptual media are sharper. ----- #fiction #elite #society For the elite, the problem is that the more objective and clearer the linear fiction becomes, the more it is impoverished, because ittends to lose contact with the facts it wants to represent (all meaning). Therefore, the messages of linear fiction can no longer be made satisfactorily adequate to the immediate experience we still have of the world. For the mass culture, the problem is that the more technically perfect the images become, the richer they become and the more completely they substitute themselves for the facts they may have originally represented. Therefore, the facts are no longer needed; the images can stand for themselves, and thus lose all their original meaning. They no longer need tobe made adequate to the immediate experience of the world; that experience is thus abandoned. In other words, the world of linear fiction, the world of the elite, is more and more disclosing its merely conceptual, fictitious character — and the world of surface fiction, the world of themasses, is masking its fictitious ---- The sciences, and other articulations of linear thought such as poetry, literature, and music, are having increasing recourse to imaginal surface thinking; they are able to do so because of the technical advance of surface media. And, in a similar way, these surface media, including painting, graphics, and posters, are having increasing recourse to linear thought, and they can do so because their own technical advance permits it. Although ------------- ------------- ------------- ### [[codified world]] #image #reading The red traffic light means “Stop!” and the obnoxious green of peas means “Buy me!” This explosion of colors means something. ----- #intro #surface #image #temporality The fact that humankind is being programmed by surfaces (images) should not be considered a revolutionary piece of news. On the contrary, it apparently signifies a return to a primitive origin. Before the invention of writing, images were a decisive means of communication. Because most codes are ephemeral, such as the spoken word, gestures, and song, we are dependent on images to decipher the meaning that man has given both his deeds and his suffering from the time of Lascaux to the time of Mesopotamian tiles. ----- #suns_sequence The scenic character of codes gives rise to a specific way of life of societies that they program. One can call it the “magical form of being.” An image is a surface whose meaning is suspended in a moment: It “synchronizes” the situations that it represents as a scene. But, after this moment of suspension, the eye has to wander around the image, to receive its meaning as it is. It has to “diachronize synchronicity.” For example: It is clear from the first moment that this scene signifies a situation of the type “walking.” But, only after the diachronization of synchronicity does one realize that what is meant are the sun, and two people and a dog going for a walk. ------------- ------------- ------------- https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z8aiVRywvJYDB9gvpCDxa4KUBcKr8R4geNAi ------------- ------------- ------------- ## Walter Benjamin ### Arcades #image History decays into images, not into stories. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 476. ------------- ------------- ------------- "Já si nemyslím, že film má bejt nějakej virtuální svět, ve kterým se ztotožníte s hrdinou a projdete s ním až do konce a tím příběhem se všechno řekne" -# ## [[Vachek]] ------------- ------------- ------------- ## [[nelson]] ------------- ------------- ------------- ## [[Warburg]] #about There were other problems that made the work on the Atlas an infinite endeavour. Warburg was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration that connected civilizations from the beginning. _Technology_, for example in the form of printing,was also the direct link between Dürer’s engravings and the 28 telephones in his avant-garde library building. He had already written an article entitled „Airship and submarine in medieval imagination“ that suggested that former societies had anticipated what he called “vehicles of thought” and imagination that we dispose of today. Images were their vehicles. ------------- ------------- ------------- ## Edward O. Wilson ### Conscience chapter 5 #### Magician to Atom ?? #fillin #### snakes #offtopic Snakes and dream serpents provide an example of how agents ofnature can be translated into the symbols of culture. For hundreds of thousands of years, time enough for genetic changes in the brain to program the algorithms of prepared learning, poisonous snakes have been a significant source of injury and death to human beings. The re-sponse to the threat is not simply to avoid it, in the way that certain berries are recognized as poisonous through painful trial and error, but to feel the kind of apprehension and morbid fascination displayed in the presence of snakes by the nonhuman primates. The snake image also attracts many extraneous details that are purely learned, and as a result the intense emotion it evokes enriches cultures around theworld. The tendency of the serpent to appear suddenly in trances and dreams, its sinuous form, and its power and mystery are logical ingredi-ents of myth and religion. ## WS Burroughs > Cut word lines Cut music lines Smash the control images Smash the control machine Burn the books Kill the priests Kill! Kill! Kill! > - William S. Burroughs - The Soft Machine (1961) ## Dziga Vertov