On Ditko and Abstraction

Image | | Paul Greer



“The script is dominant, the story is what matters, images are subservient. This is what I would call–to borrow a term from deconstruction–the logocentric view of comics. “Logocentric” as centered upon the logos, which means not only “speech” or “discourse,” but also meaning, as in a verbalizable meaning.”



“Obviously, I’m a proponent of an anti-logocentric view of comics. Ditko and Kirby, in this view, only achieve their heights of artistry when they reverse that hierarchy, when the script becomes subservient to the art, rather than the reverse. Is this such a novel view of art? Not at all. As a matter of fact, the reversal has happened repeatedly in one of our most popular arts, or forms of entertainment, which most of the time is enjoyed precisely from this perspective: specifically, music.”

— Andre Molotiu

Hausu (1977)

Video | | Paul Greer

“The film company Toho approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, Obayashi developed ideas for a script that was written by Chiho Katsura. After the script was green-lit, the film was put on hold for two years as no director at Toho wanted to direct it. Obayashi promoted the film during this time period until the studio allowed him to direct it himself. The film was a box office hit in Japan but received negative reviews from critics.”

Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber

Image | | Paul Greer
The First Italian Technology Manuscript
The First Italian Technology Manuscript

“A generation before the extraordinary machine drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, the first technology manuscript of the Italian Renaissance was produced by a Venetian scholar who had familiarised himself with the handful of books on the mechanical arts from the Greek and Arabic traditions.”

The First Italian Technology Manuscript
The First Italian Technology Manuscript

“Giovanni da Fontana (?1395-1455) obtained degrees in arts and medicine in Padua and was appointed physician to the Venetian army in Brescia. He had a wide range of interests and studied historical works on optics, astrology/alchemy (intrinsic medical studies back then), pneumatic and hydraulic mechanics, military machines and the art of memory.”

–from Bibliodyssey

“What I’m Talking About When I Talk About Magic”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“…What I’m suggesting is that feng shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don’t necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed, and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, ‘How would a dragon live here?’ We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve, but we know how organic creatures live. We’ve never seen a dragon, but we’ve all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, ‘Well, if a dragon went through here, he’d get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn’t see that and he’d wave his tail and knock that vase over.’ You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy here, and lo and behold, you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it’s worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move farther and farther into the field of digital or artificial life, we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn’t an actual God, there is an artificial God, and we should probably bear that in mind…”

— Douglas Adams, “Is There an Artifical God?” (Extemporaneous speech given at Digital Biota 2: Cambridge, SEPTEMBER 1998)

via ekstasis

1000 followers

Aside | | Paul Greer

…on tumblr.

Well that’s something.

I started this as a scrapbook, largely for myself, so never really set out to get lots of followers, and as I have said before, I post stuff largely on gut instinct rather than any thought through policy or pre conceived plan (apart from not going too NSFW). But then I suppose one plan is to find out where my head is at generally, in the way I used to with actual “scrapbooks”.

It does mean a lot to me that there are so many people that have found this particular internet snail trail worthy of following, and, most of all, that amongst those there are people who I am proud to say have become actual friends.

So a big love out to you guys.

Although I don’t follow everybody back, I do try to check everyone out from time to time, I have a lot on my plate in general, so the time I spend here is limited and if things go well for me, may be getting less (but that is a good thing, it’ll mean I’m making more stuff!).

Anyways, thank you tumblr, thank you tumblrs.

Always yours

Burningfp

x

(cross posted on tumblr)