Dilettantery

"Amédée Ozenfant wrote of the art in the Les Eyzies caves, 'Ah, those hands! Those silhouettes of hands, spread out and stencilled on an ochre ground! Go and see them. I promise you the most intense emotion you have ever experienced.' He credited the Paleolithic artists with inspiring modern art, and to a certain degree, they did. Jackson Pollock honoured them by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'" -Barbara Ehrenreich "Should we not say that we make a house by the art of building, and by the art of painting we make another house, a sort of man-made dream produced for those who are awake?" -Plato, Sophist "The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations." -Leo Tolstoy, Virgo "I am a great believer in the creativity of the selective, perceptive act. I once read an article in the International Herald Tribune about a man named Jean-Claude Andrault who had an exhibit, in a small Paris museum, of various pieces of wood he had found over a many-decade span, which resembled all sorts of objects: “landscapes, writhing polyps, an erupting volcano, abstract visions and so on", to quote Michael Gibson, the author of the article. In fact, let me continue quoting Gibson’s opinions: 'He [Andrault] wanted to know if I thought these objects were art I said I did not — because they do not voice any human intention. These objects are a case of nature imitating art...But a work of art in its proper dimension is more than order, pattern, suggestion It conveys an intention and thus reveals itself to be a product and an expression of culture taken as the web of all human purposefulness.' Gibson clearly likes Andrault’s stuff — he just doesn’t consider it art. I find this absurd. In a sense I agree that art has to 'voice a human intention', but the act of selection by Andrault is a deep human intention, just as deep as a photographer’s selection of a scene or an event to capture. In fact, Gibson overlooks one further level of human intention: the very idea of collecting pieces of wood and exhibiting them is an excellent example of original human intention. Indeed, it's the invention of a whole new art form!” -Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot “The very first artistic act executed by man was one of adornment and, above all, the adornment of his own body. In adornment, that primordial art, we find the seeds of all subsequent art. And that first artistic act simply consisted of the union of two works of nature that nature itself had not united. Man placed a feather upon his head, or strung together tiger's teeth to hang about his neck, or clasped a bracelet of colorful stones around his wrist; and behold, the first babblings of that complex and divine discourse on art.”  -José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on the Frame (1990) Sources/place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y3ixbp/33_the_origin_of_art_or_homo_aestheticus_part_2_a/?

“The modern system of art is not an essence or fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old. It was proceeded by a broader, more utilitarian system of art that lasted over two thousand years, and it is likely to be followed by a third system of the arts.” -Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001) (What do you think this third system of the arts would look like?) "...a therianthrope combining a feline body, human hind legs and Oryx horns.” -Archaeologist Juergen Richter describing a figure painted on a stone slab in Namibia 25 000 years ago (New Excavations of Middle Stone Age Deposits at Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia: Stratigraphy, Archaeology, Chronology and Past Environments, (2010)) "...The artist's gift is of this order. [They are the person] who has learned to look critically, to probe [their] perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest. Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, [humans were] aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in language. Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to the powers of the creative mind to create and dissolve new classifications. It is the unpractical [person], the dreamer whose response may be less rigid and less sure than that of his more efficient fellow, who taught us the possibility of seeing a rock as a bull and perhaps a bull as a rock. And artist of our own day, Georges Braque, has recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier." -E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1962) “The secret of the day and night is in The constellations, which forever spin Around each other in the comet-dust;— The comet-dust and humankind are kin.”  -Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (973-1057 CE) See many of the hunter disguises mentioned in this thread (and follow @evolving_moloch/https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/): https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1448229624899457027 Sources/place for discussion:  https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/xstblv/32_the_origin_of_art_or_homo_aestheticus_part_1/?

"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" -William James “Ways of scientific seeing are where body and mind, pedagogy and research, knower and known intersect…once internalized by a scientific collective, these various ways of seeing were lodged deeper than evidence; they defined what evidence was. They were therefore seldom a matter of explicit argument, for they drew the boundaries within which arguments could take place. Atlases provide a rare and precious glimpse of ways of seeing in the making, as a place where established practices are transmitted and innovations explicitly advanced.” -Daston and Galison Sources and place for discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/xlthqx/23_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

Chapter One: Wachtel and Superposition 0:00:00 Chapter Two: Azéma and Thaumatropes 0:22:13 Chapter Three: Gatton and Camera Obscura 0:43:48 Chapter Four: Archaeo-optics 2:16:14 Epilogue: Chauvet Cave 3:19:19 "…the shadows of man and beast flickered huge like ancestral ghosts, which since the days of the caves have haunted the corners of fantasy, but which the electric light has killed." -Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) “[Lewis Mumford, in 1934,] said that film—with its moving camera, its cuts and superimpositions—displays time and motion in a unique way. Additionally, he linked film's display of time and space to what he called ‘the emergent world-view’ of the twentieth century.” -Edward Wachtel (1993) Follow along with visuals:  0:00:20 The twitter thread mentioned: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1403914695128457219 0:19:50 An example of the "jumble" typical of plaquettes https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1548603870711926784 0:24:40 Azéma showing examples of animation-by-superposition in the wild https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528654029793812480 0:33:32 Recreation of bone disc thaumatrope https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528653193336410112 0:39:25 Liliana Janik's interpretation of thaumotrope involving bear paw https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1537167816347947008 0:44:20 Thread on Newgrange, Dowth, and Knowth https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1545398294800744450 0:49:10 Roofbox at Newgrange https://imgur.com/a/gYP01tJ 1:00:48 Balnuaran of Clava cairns, studied by Ronnie Scott and Tim Phillips in the 1990s: https://imgur.com/a/Nbn0EsH 1:14:30 Camera obscura explanatory diagram https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1281/0471/files/BONFOTON_Camera_Obscura_Diagram_W2000_WEB.jpg?v=1617094297 1:54:41 Photographs from Ronnie Scott and Aaron Watson's camera obscura experiments across Britain https://imgur.com/a/aQNnqYX 3:08:21 The Bison Man shadow animation (Spain) https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1559349567337820160 3:14:45 Pueblo shadow and light animation (thread) https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1559821120118747136 3:26:30 Chauvet cave animated: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1528640107078512641 Rock art threads: Rock art threads: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/y1i1x6/rock_art_threads/ Sources/place to discuss:  https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/x3bh42/31_prehistoric_animation_and_protocinema_the/?

“…the atlas maker’s plight: nature is full of diversity, but science cannot be.” -Daston and Galison “…a race of eunuchs…neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but always and only neuters or, to speak more cultivatedly, the eternally objective.” -Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1873-1876) “What, the religions are dying out? Just behold the religion of the power of history, regard the priests of the mythology of the idea and their battered knees! Is it too much to say that all the virtues now attend on this new faith? Or is it not selflessness when the historical man lets himself be emptied until he is no more than an objective sheet of plate glass?” -Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1873-1876) “The reproduction of nature by man will never be a reproduction and imitation, but always an interpretation...since man is not a machine and is incapable of rendering objects mechanically.“  -Champfleury (aka Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson), (1821-1889) Sources:  https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/x0ajue/22_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know -John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1819 “The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” -Thomas Huxley, 1870 "My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other I usually chose the beautiful.” -Hermann Weyl, 1885–1955 “Objectivity came to seem at once stranger - more specific, less obvious, more recently historical - and deeper, etched into the very act of scientific seeing, than we had ever suspected.” -Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, 2007 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/wxt6us/21_was_the_concept_of_objectivity_invented_in_the/?

“We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space…The medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age.” -Jean Baudrillard “The natural world is a spiritual house, where the pillars, that are alive, let slip at times some strangely garbled words” -Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Associations, 1856 "I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for ear alone...'Write for the ear,' I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an audience." -WB Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 1961 "Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed." -Futurist Manifesto "There are two kinds of societies: those who animate objects, and those who turn people into objects.” -David Graeber “The sense of touch, as offering a kind of nervous system of organic unity in the work of art, has obsessed the minds of the artists since the time of Cezanne. For more than a century now artists have tried to meet the challenge of the electric age by investing the tactile sense with the role of a nervous system for unifying all the others. Paradoxically, this has been achieved by ‘abstract art’, which offers a central nervous system for a work of art, rather than the conventional husk of the old pictorial image. More and more it has occurred to people that the sense of touch is necessary to integral existence.” -Marshall Mcluhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 1968 Audio clips:  The Mcluhan song I play a bit of is called "The Medium (O Meio)" from the great album "The Beginning, the Medium, the End and the Infinite" by IKOQWE (aka Batida and Ikonoklasta, two Angolan musicians): https://batida.bandcamp.com/album/the-beginning-the-medium-the-end-and-the-infinite David Graeber clip from an interview on the great podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episode #99 (I def recommend): https://connerhabib.com/2020/02/11/conner-habib-david-graeber-talk-supernatural-politics-on-against-everyone-with-conner-habib-99/ Clip about Bonfire and Pauline Oliveros from the podcast Weird Studies episode #112 (I recommend checking it out, especially if you want more about mcluhan) https://www.weirdstudies.com/112 Michael Garfield short story titled "An Oral History of The End of 'Reality'" is episode #91 of the Future Fossils podcast (you guessed it, I also recommend - extremely cool podcast) https://www.patreon.com/posts/21616410 (Please let me know of any audio/editing mistakes, I didn't listen to this one all the way through) Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/wxsmrg/131_the_four_dimensions_of_reality_and_the_two/?

“Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns” -Marshall McLuhan “There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the parts creating the whole), and vice versa the composite system exerts downward effects on its components, which form constraints on the behaviour of those components. The interactions of the components that lead to the self-organization of the emergent system are non-linear because of that upward and downward causation. The lateral non-linear causation of the components of the system among themselves actually creates the emergent system. The emergent system then in turn acts downward on those components of which it is composed.” -Robert Logan, 2017 "Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. **A new technology does not add or subtract something. it changes everything.** In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have the old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.” -Neil Postman, 1992 “...there is a spiritual dimension to formal causality, as there is to all acts of creation. But for those who prefer a more scientific outlook, let me simply note that formal cause corresponds to the systems view of Gregory Bateson, to the dissipative structures of physicist Ilya Prigogine, to the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot and the metapatterns of Tyler Volk, to the autopoietic systems of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and in general to the systems concept of emergence.” -Eric McLuhan, 2011 “From the very beginning of Western philosophy and science, there has been a tension between mechanism and holism, between the study of matter (or substance, structure, quantity) and the study of form (or pattern, order, quality). The study of matter was championed by Democritus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; the study of form by Pythagoras, Aristotle, Kant, and Goethe. Leonardo followed the tradition of Pythagoras and Aristotle, and he combined it with his rigorous empirical method to formulate a science of living forms, their patterns of organization, and their processes of growth and transformation. He was deeply aware of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole.” Fritjof Capra, 2008 “[McLuhan's formal causality and tetrad] enhances media ecology, obsolesces content analysis, retrieves Einstein’s four-dimensional space time continuum and flips into the reversal of cause and effect.” -Lance Strate, 2017 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/s437w4/130_formal_cause_part_2_chairs_memes_graham/?

“Without an understanding of formal causality, there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have all the character of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. Since environments change constantly, the formal causes of all the arts and sciences change too.” -Marshall McLuhan "Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time. The effects - those long shadows - arrive first; the causes take a little while longer. Most of the effects of any medium or innovation occur before the arrival of the innovation itself. A vortex of these effects tends, in time, to become the innovation…David Hockney’s recent study, Secret Knowledge, details how Flemish and other artists of the early 15th century literally paved the way for the Gutenberg press a decade or so later with their optical experiments. Their lenses and mirrors enabled them to explore in depth as never before precision of point of view, perspective, and chiaroscuro, greatly intensifying the visual stress they could bring to bear in their paintings, and paving the way for the press. First come the effects.” -Eric McLuhan, 2011 "History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past."  -John Berger, 1972 “What kind of logic is there to the illogic of creativity?” -Douglas Hofstadter, 1997 "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." –Martin Luther King Jr., 1963  “The people / want / to topple the regime!” -Teenage boys, Dara’a, Syria, 2011 "Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present." -T.S. Eliot, 1941 Sources and place to discuss: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rxdp4e/129_formal_cause_part_1_technological_determinism/?

"Human bodies are words, myriads of words..." -Walt Whitman, Song of the Rolling Earth, 1856 "What Western philosophers, right, left, and center, have continued to ignore is that matching the old excludes making the new. Concepts always follow percepts. In fact they are a kind of ossification of percepts - endlessly releated percepts which frequently obscure invention and innovation." -Marshall Mcluhan and Barrington Nevitt, Causality in the Electric World, 1973 Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rk8rg6/128_the_tetrad_cliches_archetypes_andthe_fifth/?