meta-observation dep't: as information becomes more oceanic, we're moved to
using language derived from large scale, and small scale physical (and
biological) events. Oceans, currents, weather, webs, gels, blobs, streams,
oozes, slicks, eruptions, quarks, gluons, gravitons, toroids, storm
systems, DNA, pregnancies, plasma, magnetic fields, playing fields, orgies,
gene pools,
swimming pools, shark infested waters, decompression, zero-gravity, life
suport systems, knowledge nipples, nutrinos, schwartchild radii, topology,
cryogenic tempering, nuclear fission, reality tunnels, gels, ecosystems,
niches, protective coloration, intellectual warts, mutual gravitation,
hurst exponents,
bugs, gremlins, demons, sphincters....
but I think we live for the erotic, the voluptuous, the satisfying...
the artist maps the eros of information as a way of shaping a reality
tunnel...
Was there another property that art had, besides *aboutness*, and
besides *quality*, that made it distinct from, say, science. There is, and
it's *eros*... eros in the sense of the fusion of the maker of the work and
the work itself. In this regard, the scientist has another goal in mind,
*elegance*, conceptual elegance, proceedural elegance, explanatory
elegance. But science, per se, never struck me as particularly erotic. That
doesn't mean that one has nothing to teach the other, but there is a chasm
between them, with elegance on one side, and eroticism on the other...
For instance, society has an ongoing problem with pornography; is is
harmful, beneficial, degrading, instructive, liberating, exploitive,
repulsive, mob controlled, a legitimate art form, never was and never will
be an art form, what ? Pornography, the standard fare, is very rarely
erotic, and then only barely so, I suppose, because the "interface" between
the outer world and the inner is so harshly drawn; the bodies could be made
from silicone elastomer, or porcelain, the outer is mechanical (almost in
the same way that the risk-pleasure machinery in Las Vegas is !) while the
inner is thinking "hope I can make my car payment...", "if anybody back
home sees this...."
A video was released a while back that had a scientific solution, and a
rather compelling one, to this problem; (Wired had a small blurb on the
film)... the performers, who were actually hot for each other, were
recorded not with visible light, but with an infrared camera that saw the
patterns of heat and blood flow through their bodies... it saw under the
skin, the normally reflective dermal barrier gave way to the function of
muscle and vascularity...
A solution that was both elegant and erotic..... these polynesian
seafarers who made beautiful current maps had a different order of
relationship with the water than a trawler with a sonar device dredging out
the last of the ocean's fishes, a lover/kali connection... one thinks of
Yukio Mishima's title, "the sailor who fell from grace with the sea"
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