Monthly Archives: August 2008
Aug 24, 2008 – 9:02 pm
Electromagnetic Fields and Betweeness
Conversation between Christine Hume and Rosmarie Waldrop from the Barbara Guest Chicago Review issue:
“I found it very exciting to discover how ubiquitous the image of the electromagnetic field is in the twentieth century. In the field, everything happens between, relation is everything. Whitehead posits the actual world as built up of “occasions” rather than “things” (which he calls “already abstractions from actual occasions”). Kurt Lewin describes mental states as balances of forces and vectors. Fenollosa examined the sentence and concluded: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature….Thing and action cannot be separated.” W.C. Williams says, “the poem is a field of action.” Pound writes, “the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, a force transfusing, welding and unifying.” And of course Olson: “At root (or stump) what is, is no longer THINGS but what happens BETWEEN things, these are the terms of the reality contemporary to us—and the terms of what we are.”
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/index_53_4.shtml
Aug 24, 2008 – 2:45 pm
from Juhani Pallasmaa and Wolfgang Welsch
http://www.design.upenn.edu/arch/news/Human_Settlements/essential.html
Certain animals, such as spiders and some wasp species, eat their structures in order to reuse their building material. The capture net that certain spiders eat, bypasses their digestive system and re-enters directly the silk glands and spinnerets; this short-circuit prevents the unnecessary breaking down of proteins.
-Juhani Pallasmaa
http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/
Or think of Marcel Duchamp who introduced true contingency into art – into this sphere which is usually believed to be one of the utmost coherence and necessity. He didn’t finish his “Great Glass” but simply declared it “definitively unfinished” in 1923. And when in 1926, during transportation, the work was broken he called this – to the relief of the transport company and the surprise of many art fans – “the happy completion of the piece”. He had the piece put back together so that the cracks are today effective elements of the composition.(15) This is a clear case of the acceptation of contingency.
15.) I am referring to the original piece, today located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
-Wolfgang Welsch
