Origin of Measurement
There’s a hill over there (gestures)
No there’s a couple of hills
Wait I’ll be right back
It’s like skin
I’m uncomfortable skinning around here
I skinned that hill
“Btw I’m still working with the .obj files as you can see from the scanner
– one of the things I’m interested in is the phenomenology of measurement
– how the digital is extracted, along with attendant institutionalization, from the analog – and the images, with their ‘peelings’ and ruptures (Blender can deconstruct the Geomagic assemblages) are guides in this of course. The particular series I’m working with is based on the ruler – which is only an object with repetition – in any environment.
“Btw again – the rotation of the turntable incrementally connects with the perceptual stitching of motion in film – which connects again with the phenomenology of interpenetrating image stage, etc. etc.”
What constitutes a mark or token? When does a surface anomaly become demarcation or inscription? What constitutes discrimination?
The images constitute the skin of the ruler in the real, a ruler whose surface plays tumor, eruption, swelling. This is difficult theoretically – the trialectic among the physico-inert of the world; measure; and body / symbolic – the playing of the surface is, after all, inscription. I hunt; I return; I’m scratched. Therefore I was hunting. I walk; I return; I’m stung. Therefore there were bees. The simplest model – that of the gesture (Tran duc Thao) – in combination with the reading of the world. Already; bees read. But our reading is plastic, deductive, transformative, morph- ing.
This is what the body brings to the ruler; this is what the ruler brings to the body.
Measure is tally is measure; what is brought to writing, accountancy, tokens in Sumer, elsewhere. Fingers always already are enumerations, mnemonics; pigeons recognize specific quantities.
Perhaps a false derivation, _etymology_: our very nakedness, the ‘naked ape,’ creates an inscribable surface, Peirce’s sheet of assertion. Already there; without fur or scale, nothing is obliterated, forgotten; what is traumatic, scars. Fur covers, re/covers; continuous growth is continuous erasure. Ruptures of the skin already are rulers, Rulers by detour of writing, skin carried into the social, inhabitation – skin as construct of inhabitation. Our nakedness sexualizes, effaces, inscribes.
The digital inscribes the ruler into the analog/abject _or so it appears._ This is what is presented here, accompanying this text, which is no doubt more accurate than one might be led to believe (by the voice, all but obscuring the skin).*
http://www.asondheim.org/ originofmeasure jpgs
*(Therefore the skinwork in my world/work in relation.)
[Sondheim to webartery@yahoogroups (et al)- ma 4/09/2006 18:46]
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branch and ruler
when the branch and the ruler meet and demarcate each other, it is the branch which has created the ruler, and the ruler which has measured the branch; every tool has ancestry; we are near the beginning, near the clout on the head, the massacre, the cannibalism, the torture by fire, the death by drowning, the skinning-alive, the gouging of the eyes, twisting the testicles, desecrating the womb; we are in the primordial when the sign is read wrong, when the sign is a sign, when a branch is after all just a branch, when a ruler is a shadow of the future anterior, when nothing is read but as-if everything is read, as if everything were readable, as if gods created things, readings, writings, bodies, slaves, corpses, the raped, the robbed, the wounded, the slaughtered, the megafaunal extinc- tions, our pride and our joy, our little baby girl or little baby boy, one flesh is tasted, there’s no stopping
http://www.asondheim.org/pulul.jpg
[Sondheim to webartery@yahoogroups (et al)- di 5/09/2006 9:38]
