toward an emblem

A team of researchers have created a digital avatar which speaks using a reconstruction of what they believe Richard III would have sounded like. Mixing local accent, historical pronounciation of English, and cranio-facial modelling based on skeletal remains.

This fable of family origins, of the loss of and gaining of a name, of the trauma of migration is the opening narrative, the 'set up', for Paul Auster's novel 4 3 2 1, which follows the American story of the middle years of the twentieth century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

Dublin Collage #7; emblem collage and text; proposal for Front Page Back Page publication by CAMP, October 2022.

and then how might a new emblemata be deployed in the present? does the lack of a meaning help? the multiple excessive meanings the overflow and overspill of interpretation, is it too much? too much for what? where is the measuring coming from? what is the .0 that can act as the reference? like excessive decoration in rococo where the too-muchness can offer a sanctuary a retreat from certainty into doubt or into possibility or into a continuation or into cyclic repetition not progression but going on nonetheless

thinking of the system or devices for guiding reading, a set of wheels or discs are rotated within each other or a grid of elements are cross referenced to produce an answer to decode the data so that F x B >> ***  or 13 + F plus * implies XXY, this formulation or code sequence has its own character and suggests its own set of stories set of relationships between the code as generative it can produce the story or the code as translation it is a version or form of the story;

recalling the image of lautreamont’s that is a touchstone for surrealism with its potential for interpretation patrolled by paralleled by freud's work on dreams but such systems of reading served to show the lack or excess at the core of reading lack in the sense that her definitive meaning cannot be found and excess in the proliferation of possible meanings the emblem is the meaning machine or a generator of readings;

ICESHOWFALLS. A layering of natural spectacle framed for human appreciation, with shell house detail gathering the homes of other creatures to decorate a folly, and the solitary hero figure who can comprehend and classify all this wonder.

LAVADATAFLOW. A sense of the spill of stuff, and the swamping of excess surfaces, of data gathering, of the collection and storage of information, the crust of the earth, a skin over a swirling swelling mass of magma.

GROTTHENGE. a gathering of lists, of layers, of skins and surfaces, drawing together artifice, surface decoration, accretion, collecting, excess.

Another badge, thinking about the relations of form, shape, text, image, symbolism within the limited scope and need for legibility of the emblem.

Looking at badges, emblems, and amulets while thinking about communication and showing of allegiance or category in public, online, or in work.

When electrons meet each other “halfway,” when they intra-act with one another, when they touch one another, whom or what do they touch? In addition to all the various iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons, indeed all material “entities,” are entangled relations of becoming, there is also the fact that materiality “itself” is always already touched by and touching infinite configurings of other beings and other times. In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of response-ability. Touching is a matter of response. Each of “us” is constituted in response-ability. Each of “us” is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other. (Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1)’ in Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier eds., Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2018.)

All touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others, including the “self,” and touching the “self” entails touching the strangers within. Even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude. Each “individual” always already includes all possible intra-actions with “itself” through all the virtual others, including those that are non-contemporaneous with “itself.” That is, every finite being is always already threaded through with an infinite alterity diffracted through being and time. Indeterminacy is an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of non/being. (Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1)’ in Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier eds., Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2018.)

When touch is at issue, nearly everyone’s hair stands on end. I can barely touch on even a few aspects of touch here, at most offering the barest suggestion of what it might mean to approach, to dare to come in contact with, this infinite finitude. Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. Is that not in the nature of touching? Is touching not by its very nature always already an involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted, of the stranger within?  (Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v1.1)’ in Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier eds., Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2018.)

The body, the corpus is flesh, limited, wounded, challenged and challenging. The body senses rather than consents. To touch is to engage in a con-sensing that is confronted by the spectre of incommunicability, of dissensus, of unknowability. The challenge, the terrible violence of a politics of touch, is that is excribes presence, denying me the possibility of presenting myself to as you always already whole. Touch faces the trace, effacing you as presence, inviting you to be a corpus in writing, in process, in touch. (Erin Manning, Negotiating Influence: Argentine Tango and a Politics of Touch, borderlands ejournal, 2.1, 2003, paragraph 57;)