ORPHEUS
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Matteo Magnabosco
II. HOW TO MEASURE THE ARCHIVE?
Pausing for a moment on these knots might offer the opportunity to create tools and elements for more widely tasting the soil this research is made of.
To complete involves a more specific understanding on what are considered as elements for the investigation and how they are considered, in relation to the overall picture and in relation to each other as parts. In one word I would condense this web of relations in the system of assigning meaning called measure.
Measure demands to define the elements partaking to the whole as units and to set the unit of measurement, what allows to operate on them, the thread that ensures the possibility to draw a composition of the parts and carries simultaneously the seeds of contradiction:
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How to bring together by separating?
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The intent of synthetizing and cohering into oneness, is based on this contrasting paradigm. Under these terms, the contradictive capsula becomes:
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How is it possible to describe the play between synthesis and cohesion as generative conflict composing one navigation line?
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A sense of time comes towards a primary solution, allowing to define as two different and consequential moments the actions of taking apart and weaving together.
If this sense is shifted towards a timeless perspective, where these two aspects are understood as parallelly and continuously happening, the question lands inevitably, as the word perspective and parallelly are hinting to, in the landscape of space:
Where to find a ground and how to set a field for a conflictual event to grow, while being restrained to the possibility of a linear description?
Meaning by linear that it is simply possible
to be delineated as a map.
While this question is pointing to the limit of a system of measurement, it is also indulging the understanding in an opaque and yet satisfying sense for completeness, or incompleteness.
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These thoughts immersed into the context of geometry, as measurement of geographical regions, announced clearly, not with little investments and consequent, silencing evidences, the divergencies in understanding human capabilities applied to space; not because caused by contrasting interpretations or models on how to divide and describe it in units and operate measurements upon it, but because inherent to the relation between the matter and the agent of operation.
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First this relation was set by the geometry of surfaces according to the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, meaning that his theory was celebrated for centuries as the way humans organized spatial impressions through a priori settings described by unconditionally given hypothesis and naturally following demonstrations.
Within the term surfaces it is important to make distinctions. According to Euclid mass of work only plain surfaces were acting a role in his geometrical plays. Meaning that any solid, so-called three-dimensional representation, is only to be understood as an extension or a complex assembling of many plain ones. There was never a full and independent consideration of wider shapes than the ones possibly drawn as flat ones on a paper. Still these one, figuratively represented with a pencil, need also their context to be defined and located. If ideally a construction and operation upon solids is possible, it is only based on analysing bi-dimensional wise the slices of the three-dimensional figures considered.
To contemplate independently and fully three-dimensional shapes, the immersion in space, as it is only given to human capabilities, is necessary; meaning by it the diving into figurative perspective. Making this point serves the question: is it the geometry of perspective in any relation to the geometry of plain surfaces? Extremely relevant, but not yet deciding for the developing of the following reflections, if accompanied by the understanding of solid as intersection of plain figures.
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Only with Gauss, almost two thousand years after Euclid, this for humans empowering declaration that space exists, no matter what, as pre-ordered settings for computing reality in its primary appearance to our perceptions, as fundament of our cognitive capabilities, was set in doubt. No matter what it refers to the fact, that the nature of space, as innate human system of coordinates, was intended to be enough to justify the incorruptible assumptions made upon it, the later called axioms, not less intended as pure, original intuitions. So undoubtful not only by themselves, but also their developed consequences carried the original intuitive nature and could not come to any contradiction.
When this was not inevitably the case anymore, because examined with a less humanistic drive of intentions, then it opened the possibility that maybe the measurement of space could become the fundament of these axioms, as negotiation between matter and agent of observation, operation.
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The strategy for this intent was anchored by Gauss on the so-called demonstration through absurdity, extremely efficient in logical fields. Applied to the context of Euclidian geometry and measurement of space, it meant to assume that this theory is not reliable. Based on this absurd, meant as the opposite of what it was aimed to, if anything that consequentially follows, comes to a contradiction, it proves the absurd assumption as not reliable, therefore its opposite it is. If measurements, non-coherent to Euclid´s theory, yet concrete, are found in the natural display-ment of geography, these mistakes would support the validity of the fictive non-Euclidean condition and therefore the original Euclidean geometrical rules are becoming less reliable. To deliver the numbers that could bring to this demonstration, he needed to pull far over valleys and rivers his strings, signed by meter sized steps, to seek for these errors and this condition of proportion signified soon to confront with the curved surface of Earth, which scratches with the assumptions of operating within field of actionability of Euclid´s theory, the validity of which was only restricted to flat surfaces. The absurd finds signs for being relevantly considered as a gate for a theory out of Euclidean principles; it loses its consistency as mean for capitulating the celebrated geometry, but remains as the critical mean to enter physically the limitation of Euclid´s investigation and to collide with its innate, cognitive must be.
This was the only valuable discover Gauss came back with, from his travelling and tracking the lineaments of his native land´s geography, to demolish the aprioristic understanding of space as default setting in the human cognition.
Of larger applicability and more relevantly for the enfoldments of this research, he shown the possible incommensurability between definitions of units, as differentiated elements, and a sense of completeness by measurement, towards their unification.
What are the unitary elements of this research?
What are the many it is composed by?
What the unit of measurement?
How is the operation of measurement defined?
If, to complete the geographical map of this research
is against the assumption of in becoming,
to be with the map, in its becoming and towards a sense
of completeness, is for me aliveness and life-generating.
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“This new soul should have sung, not spoken!
What a loss that I did not dare to utter as a poet
what I had to say at that time.
Perhaps I might have been able to do that. “
From The birth of Tragedy
by F. W. Nietzsche, 1872
I. THE ARCHIVE IS EVERYWHERE?
Archive understood as of human history or considering who is writing as human
belonging to history under very specific coordinates are two diverse ways to stand in front of what this word evokes.
My first step into deciding how to understand Archive was to consider the scope of Matteo's
experiences, at long large and at long relevant, during his walk through life so far.
Orpheus was there, at the beginning of this convergence, between a spontaneous
appearance and the intentional bend given to the becoming of the Lab through the launch of the Letter to the modern mind Proposition. Even though I said it was hard to move elsewhere from Orpheus, I sensed that along the way till now, his location shifted coordinates and became at some moments blurry in its resolution, but indeed now more defined.
My intent will be to communicate, sometimes through a figurative use of words, where
I find myself, while dealing with the meaning that the word Archive is whispering to my ears.
It wishes to be a description that serves as orientation map and not to appear as traces of a
dissolutive process into many parts. With map I intend so far, the play between tracking and
designing the walk through the Archive, a meta-action to the happening itself of taking steps on this ground of innumerable appearances, that momentarily encompasses the acquired and soon after shatters and recomposes it into a projection of a wider scale.
The research is driven by a unifying intent of integration while expanding.
Integration as process of synthesis and cohesion. Analyzing, differentiating, taking apart and
reducing to essential the whole collected so far, while defining the connections that bring
together the many so generated into a whole as unity, dictated by a sense of coherency.
From two different perspectives, one towards the end of this process, one towards the
beginning of it, the same question reveals itself as:
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How far to collect, so that the process pictured by
this map will be captured in a complete form?
Does this approach on researching contain the
germs of completeness or flow against them?
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III. WHAT IS ARCHIVE MADE OF
MEMORIES
LIMBS AND SOULS
The following is enfolded from the question:
Is the material of the research defined by the way it is finding its concrete shape and offering itself to further eyes than the writer´s ones?
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If, as architect of this investigation, the map, as condensed, unified material, served as gradient of consistency and fluidity of movements from one configuration of meaning to the next, how can this map serve the ones who are reading along these pages?
My intention is to serve it as dialogical field of correspondences.
And platform for more intimate interrogatives.
To describe better what I wish to lay under the light by these words, I will widen the question:
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Why to choose writing as the medium for exposing the coordinates of my diving experience into the Archive?
Basing growth of insight on awakening significant materials and sources elaborated along lifetimes and collected as memories, by finding the ways to re-call them to accessibility as if just freshly made, according to Plato´s description, written words become under this view only good instruments to evoke instants and instances from the pasts, bringing them back to visibility, as crossing the projections of our relevant experiences stored in our core-memory, but not integrating them to this body of significant memories which can contribute to growth.
In this context, writing can only make sense if build as dialog to involve the reader and make the written words open to iteration and therefore becoming more experienceable.
Etymologically, traces of this view upon writing are still available and clearly speaking through words of common use. In Italian language, to recall to memory, is condensed in the word ricordare, to bring back to heart, which hits straight into the centre point of Plato´s universe, announcing evidently that memories are collected in our soul, represented by our heart. What is meant by soul, is not yet in any terms defined, but still this etymological hint talks and takes the understanding on a narrowing path towards it.
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From a more poetical and of older time context, ricordare was expressed by rimembrare, which is widening the range of actionability space to our memories and therefore, the accessibility offered to their beholder reaches all over his body, through his limbs. Overlaying the past and present etymologies, a soul of body or body of soul takes shapes and lead to the next link that seems to belong appropriately to these just made. Shifting to English, to remind. As if there would be something of that platonic soul and the followed interpretation of body and soul, as one that could still be carried along eras and offer elements to taste possible evolutions of what is currently investigated as mind.
If, on a very playful etymological ground, ricordare comes back to light and it is interpreted as to iterate on cord, on rope, to keep account and accessible to memory, this less scientifically based insight offers elements for very scientific propositions, which will be soon shared.
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In the platonic exposition, the considerations upon writing come to a limit-potential coexistence: the narrative takes its origin from myths, tales, imagines that wishes to talk more than the following penetrations of the chosen matter between Socrates and his reference in each dialog. Potent revelations narrated through figures and scenarios, belonging originally to oral transmitted traditions, which invited consistently to reflect and extract meaning, but never necessarily exposed a theory, only functioning as prologues, space openers, contrasts, shadows definers, supporting as a platform Plato´s positions. The limit is coming together exactly with the extraction of meaning from the tale and the reference taking part in the dialog, simply because in form of interrogatives Plato, with Socrates words, conducts firmly the event of re-discovering, articulating questions that appears to explain themselves soon after, as self-evident and apparently invites to a confrontation, but actually puts always the reflector in an immutable position of admitting: there was no other way to go; the issues are not simply laid out and open to be possibly re-understood or available to eventual modification in the moment the questions are uttered in words. From this limit, there was no chance to call Socrates guests counterpointing references.
On one side the power of storytelling that almost shuts the audience to silence and gives so consistent impressions as reflective material to meditate upon; on the other side a one spotted dialog, with the shared intention to involve more the audience and the limit of walking a programmed set of explanations, definitely and extremely valuable, still very well anchored.
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FLEEING WORDS
INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS
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The play taking place on this constellation of elements so far exposed, contributing to light fire on the spot of writing, first gives an impactful sparkle in the moment the written words are considered as basically available to any kind of audience, strong influencing variable in the event of becoming material for iteration; in a second moment, once they are delivered, they are supposed to talk for themselves, as far as the combinations of letters can contain in terms of sharable insight, without a voice and a body that stands by each articulation behind them.
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The source of pronunciation appears in front of the readers eyes as long and as far he intends to let this happen. The dialogic nature is irremovably shifted only into the readers hands.
Later in history, after the Roman civilization took solid shape, a motto expressed directly and almost univocally the position of this culture in front of writing, which definitely plays as a counterpoint in this walk towards the question previously posed: why exposing in form of writing?
Verba volant, scripta manent.
Undressed from juridical pragmatism, tightly belonging to Romans physiognomy, this formulation brings to light the availability of written words to walk life on the audience´s side and offer themselves, any moment the interest emerges, as playground for iteration and more aggregated understanding. This evokes already, in its more positive interpretations, a sense of responsibility. A reader, solo player, that responds of his actions the moment is entering the text.
Settled already the actionability of the writer only relatively to reader´s intentions, the scenario of an inner dialog emerges and invades the scene. Adding the condition, not easy to achieve, that this more intimate dialog is a simulation of interactions happening on a wider arena and involving the writer himself and perhaps more reflectors, a life generating wind permanently influences each of the reader´s actions, while moving his eyes from word to word, as physical forces determinate our movability in nature.
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To arrive to give shape and life to a dialogic simulation is demanding skills of certain weight. Before simulation, maybe imitation may be considered as a way to taste the efficiency that already experienced and practiced models of enfolding scenarios can have on the making of a dialogical process. Imitation of natural phenomena, revealing and attracting to more essential and less artificially constructed meanings and forces coming at play.
The decision of composing and sharing this research in form of writing wishes to appear on this edge, where the playful mode and the aspect of multiple resonances are accompanying us along the enfoldments and only stand there, if they stand, to invite to a dialog as intimate and as widening as it will reveal itself, for the writer, as much for the reader.
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SOURCES
PASSEGGIATE
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The actual researching caused by the Proposition, according to the second meaning assigned to Archive, as of a human belonging to history under very specific coordinates, indirectly taken or so to say positioned directly on the spot where Matteo finds himself at this moment in life, shifted the centre of gravity from where Matteo´s directional lines departed.
A permanently existing source of definition and origination, since Matteo took his first looks into life, floated up to become visible. A source that was there since at all there was a call for an overall perspective that could describe experiencing life in its widest lines.
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What is this source?
Where did Matteo´s life began according to this source?
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Before describing possible lines for an answer to these questions, I would like to focus more on how this source came to visibility within Lab latest steps, by going through what was undertaken by Matteo in relation to the Research and what was considered as less intimately motivating to reach towards.
Drawing more approximately my perspective of responding to the Proposition, I consider it a way to confront with the Archive, not to breath into some parts of it, but to breath the whole, so far filtered and contained by Matteo´s skin, in opposition to: Matteo is looking at humanity in history and see what comes out as relevant for the Modern Mind, without meaning by it that it is necessarily the only sense this Proposition could have been interpreted.
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There is nothing that it exists in the Archive, if it didn´t cross my senses, emotions and thoughts and still finds its way to declare its relevancy or to call for accurate dedication; accompanied by the will of looking in reflective motion into the experience collected by an alive body of attraction, not selected from a bibliothek, library of recorded experiences, not finded out from the given, independently by Matteo´s permeated interaction with it, but re-discovering what and where this body of attraction found his way to be plugged, applied to life.
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The word attraction I wish to define with the generative scenario based on the principles: Truthful value of experiences along the passing of time and Bleib dran! – Hold on to the experience in order for it to reveals its potentially different values.
A mutual commitment between life as it appears in its most clear ways, and a careful, alert intention of partaking in it, recognizing or assigning values to the experiences.
The announcement and the space created by Lab Call brought into emergence an Archive intersected with Matteo´s experiences originated from the original source that I now present as:
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Is there an absolutely comprehensive understanding?
As a first intuition of a thought, that glimpsed and attracted my attention, as an invitation to suddenly walk. Later this pole, like a container demanding for attempts of being filled by meaningful materials, explicated and amplified itself as:
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Is there an overall including and coherently describing image, that doesn´t
allow any particular manifestation to be left apart or to be necessarily excluded?
Influenced by a very specific and broad encounter along studies that followed under the wide perspectives of mathematics and that included the outstanding demonstrations conducted by the logician Kurt Gödel.
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This intersection between Archive and Matteo´s scope, appears to me as a map, which was laid on the ground while tapping into life, that only looked for the availability to be taken in consideration, to be walked and to reveal itself, to be put on the top layer of the display, asking for a new and fresh elaboration. With this availability and the Umwelt it has been growing since, referring to the Event of the Lab, this is how this map has been taking shape along my elaborations during the last months. A first passeggiata, souverain walk, weaving together the main reflective views upon which the balcony of my research is standing and is aiming to hold its parts together, as far as they allow.
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The narrative upon which I wish to develop this writing will be constantly, sometimes less evidently, shifting between two lines of storytelling: the local one, departing from the experiences the body of attraction permeated, and the non-local one, weaving together threads, which will bend arches of abstractions and conjectures over these more concrete elements.
The point of writing, from the writer´s point of view, can also now take the configuration of reporting and resuming, while letting the principle of in becoming continue to run. Photographically, a still in motion and progressive resolution.
This is what I see in front of me and I am taken to, or, better to say I´m already immersed in.
If there will be a product, may this product become of flesh and blood.
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IV. EYES , ARCHIVE
HEAT, ORIGIN
AS ULTIMATE SELF
How does the researcher stand in this research?
What are the coordinates of his standing in it? What gives motive to this research?
What motions bring the researcher to act? Before asking, what the research is about.
A first answer I wish to compose is: departing from and coming back to the personal experience of the dive into the Archive, first making this from-to experience become the material the research is made of. Meaning by personal experience the ground of relevant participation in life, of life, as base to step towards the matter of the research, which demands also to be experienced.
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How can this matter be expressed, when we are getting closer to it, be preserved and shared intact, if not by an impersonal eye, that walks towards it, tracking the narrowing distance from the player to the play itself of getting in touch with the matter of researching, becoming thermometer of the intensity provoked by this encounter?
How do the contents of the research offer themselves undressed by any identification of the eye with them, but only dressed by the identification, meaning now diversification, of the things we take in consideration while researching?
How do these things actually stand by themselves, while eye looks at them?
INTO THE SHINE
OF IMMUTABLE SHAPES
If these lines might have dealt sometimes more with the forms of the observation and the ways of reporting on the research, it is also because through these forms and structures the actual matter of the research wishes to be enfolded. There is nothing new in what I researched on, there is a new Call, evocated by Lab Event, in its dimensions and layers of participation.
There is a new Audience and new Ways of reflecting upon the material this research wishes to be. In the Orpheus presentation I shared with You, all the criteria of the approach to the Archive mentioned so far were included already; not necessarily intended, but present.
In this frame of Research into the Archive, they now become the only ones possible for me to be handled to the entrepreneurs of the Proposition.
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What do I have to win or lose in presenting, sharing the work that accompanies this process, manifesting it in front of other eyes?
If it means sharing significant lineaments of what I have been experiencing the closest so far along life, then I do take a moment before I bring it to the light of the arena and ask myself:
How to do it?
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Assuming the actual researching to be a kind of reading of a self in research, a medium to let a self find its space to accommodate and reflect upon itself through this reading, it seems that this self becomes it-self, not only the medium for the research to come to light, but also the material this elaboration is made of.
Experiences of books, more than from books.
Observing the eye becoming the observed.
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Laying the map as an open book, a descriptive, narrative self.
Carried maybe by a naïve impulse, but still of a consistent value as soon as it appears, this question follows and calls for its legitimacy to be taken in consideration:
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How do we become alive signs on papers?
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I think, an answer can only be revealed by the making of this open book.
The making evokes a sense of textured, threads weaved together to let the cut and composed become a new textile, layer that redefines and lets maybe appear differently the body of materials laying underneath and dressed by it. As if a constellation, a way to link its already set coordinates, is emerging as new, but only because reflected and therefore reflecting as anew.
A geographical map that refers much to astronomy, in the sense of bringing to light the connective structure of the elements of the research, as if this textured could reflect a different light on them. Not touching their nature, which wishes to be preserved and observed as closely as possible as it might be, but letting these elements talk, present themselves and mostly their relations to each other. Drawing a new constellation, without shifting stars coordinates and pointing to the stars which apparently belong to far universes, but inherently call for a fresh, naïve, intuitive experience based new configuration and language.
There will be weak intentions of interpretating, mainly acts of extracting and tracking lines of meaning, choosing which to let shine more than others, not according to a personal preference, but to their more intimate nature and aspiring to envision a wholeness, which might whisper its accessibility for understanding, but also might be washed away by any attempt of imposed clarification.
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All what was enfolded so far goes in direction of an abstraction.
It is only to be understood based on experience related and aims to be shared a newly, iteratively as an experience to depart from. A research that doesn´t exclude the original experience and that its main condition is to be experienceable.
With the only intent of coming closer and understanding better and better the Language of the Lab as carrier of an Insight that goes beyond the medium it is carried by, so various and rich.
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A drop falls and, by contacting the ground, splits, spreading in various directions;
and reaches surfaces of dissimilar materials.
Through the films of these drops splits, laid on these materials,
by the way they reflect back traces of wet rays of intelligence,
you can recognize there was only one original drop that fell,
from which these splits all departed.
The seed is there.
The ground expended.
Its roots are growing deeper and wider.
What will be its fruits?
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