p repro - nature
One of the favourite imaginings of whale chroniclers, was of the living island, the animal island, the whale-island. The notion of a sleeping whale, with its dark rocklike back, being mistaken for an uncharted island is as old as maritime literature itself. An early reference of such an occurance, comes from the Physologus (Greek, 2nd century B.C), a collection of anecdotes dealing mainly with natural history. “There is a certain whale in the sea called the aspidoceleon,
that is exceedingly large like an island... Ignorant sailors tie thier ships to the beast as to an island and plant thier anchors and stakes in it. They light their cooking fires on the whale, but when it feels the heat it urinates and plunges into the depths, sinking all the ships.” The first creature God releases into the waters is the whale. “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that have life... And God created the great whales.”- symbol of evil, focal point of all human fears, embodiment of unmitigated power - that the Lord created on the fifth day of Creation as a warning to mankind. Its gaping mouth is terrible to behold; nothing can equal its strength; its heart harder than stone. The people in Papua New Guinea tell the tale of Dudugera, literally translated as ‘The Leg Child’. The story concerns a child who was conceived by a mortal woman who was frolicking in the sea one day when a god, disguised as a dolphin, appeared and swam around her, through her legs, brushing against her skin, magically impregnating her. When the child was born, he was
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given the name Dudugera, or ‘leg child’, to denote the unique way in which he has been conceived, and for this he was mocked as he grew older. In his anger, he vowed to take revenge on the uncaring world into which he had been born by setting fire to it. In his anger, he vowed to take revenge on the uncaring world.
the first clouds to obscure the sun, and thus tamed the wrath of her own sun, the unhappy child born of the dolphin god.
One day he soared into the sky and started hurling spears of fire towards the earth – he thus became the sun. His mother, filled with fear for her safety, cowered in a cave and began to throw mud towards her son in an attempt to stop the searing heat from scorching her friends and her village. In doing so, she created 22
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Plans and diagrams isolated from "Presentationpanel 1", "Presentationpanel 2" and "Presentationpanel 3" from the Event park Rotterdam group: Nils van der Waal, Vera Kreuwels. http://www.veldacademie.nl/en/news_items/display/event_park_rotterdam/14/ 5
e research project Event park Rotterdam at Veldacademie, Rotterdam, 2008.
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1.Plastics can be very resistant to chemicals. Consider all the cleaning fluids in your home that are packaged in plastic. The warning labels describing what happens when the chemical comes into contact with skin or eyes or is ingested, emphasizes the chemical resistance of these materials. While solvents easily dissolve some plastics, other plastics provide safe, non-breakable packages for aggressive solvents. 2.Plastics can be both thermal and electrical insulators. A walk through your house will reinforce this concept. Consider all the electrical appliances, cords, outlets and wiring that are made or covered with plastics. Thermal resistance is evident in the kitchen with plastic pot and pan handles, coffee pot handles, the foam core of refrigerators and freezers, insulated cups, coolers and microwave cookware. The thermal underwear that many skiers wear is made of polypropylene and the fiberfill in many winter jackets is acrylic or polyester. 3.Generally, plastics are very light in weight with varying degrees of strength. Consider the range of applications, from toys to the frame structure of space stations, or from delicate nylon fiber in pantyhose to Kevlar速, which is used in bulletproof vests. Some polymers float in water while others sink. But, compared to the density of stone, concrete, steel, copper, or aluminum, all plastics are lightweight materials. 4.Plastics can be processed in various ways to produce thin fibers or very intricate parts. Plastics can be molded into bottles or components of cars, such as dashboards and fenders. Some plastics stretch and are very flexible. Other plastics, such as polyethylene, polystyrene (StyrofoamTM) and polyurethane, can be foamed.
Plastics can be molded into drums or be mixed with solvents to become adhesives or paints. Elastomers and some plastics stretch and are very flexible. 5.Polymers are materials with a seemingly limitless range of characteristics and colors. Polymers have many inherent properties that can be further enhanced by a wide range of additives to broaden their uses and applications. Polymers can be made to mimic cotton, silk, and wool fibers; porcelain and marble; and aluminum and zinc. Polymers can also make possible products that do not readily come from the natural world, such as clear sheets, foamed insulation board, and flexible films. Plastics may be molded or formed to produce many kinds of products with application in many major markets. 6.Polymers are usually made of petroleum, but not alway. Many polymers are made of units derived from natural gas or coal or crude oil. But building block repeat units can sometimes be made from renewable materials such as polylactic acid from corn or cellulosics from cotton linters. Some plastics have always been made from renewable materials such as cellulose acetate used for screwdriver handles and gift ribbon. When the building blocks can be made more economically from renewable materials than from fossil fuels, either old plastics find new raw materials or new plastics are introduced.
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(...) He stammers bravely on, but with each sentence he only digs himself in deeper: "This is not a pipe, but the drawing of a pipe; this is not a pipe, but a sentence saying that it is a pipe; this painting, this written sentence, this drawing of a pipe, none of this is a pipe ...." But as his voice is drowned out by his students' laughter, a strange cloud takes form above his head, mimicking the original pipe of which he has vainly tried to speak. Somehow the original object of his demonstration has slipped through his words and drawings, to float above, in silent mockery of all attempts to grasp its truth. The children take up a cruel chant: "It's a pipe! It's a pipe!" Yet the schoolmaster is not quite mistaken for all that. For what floats above his head is not a pipe. It is a cloud that simulates a pipe; or rather, a cloud mimicking the drawing of a pipe; or perhaps the painting of a cloud that simulates the drawing of a pipe, that in turn is meant to illustrate the phrase "This is a pipe." In short, it is not a pipe at all, nor even the representation of a pipe, but the simulacrum of a pipe. "But in what sense," our schoolmaster might ask, "is this 'pipe' a simulacrum? Is it, in accorance with the classical definition of the term, a copy of a copy?" No doubt it can be described in these terms: the ghostly "pipe" would be the double of the pipe drawn on the board, which would in turn illustrate the schoolmaster's written sentence, and thus, moving backward through a string of copies toward their model (through, that is, the schoolmaster's spoken utterance, to the mental image he has of a pipe, and finally to the ideal or real pipe-in-itself), we would at long last reach the original to which a schoolmaster refers when he says "This is a pipe." There is, however, more to this pipe's performance in the classroom than this definition of the simulacrum as "the copy of a copy" might suggest. Surely what is most remarkable about this pipe is not so much its repetition of the 9
schoolmaster's drawing as the provocative position in which it appears. This "copy of a copy," not content to be subordinated to a model, hovers above the schoomaster’s head like a cartoon bubble, in mocking homage to his faith in True Pipe. From this exalted position, it lays claim to being, not a copy of this Pipe, but the Original itself that all his copies are assumed to resemble. (...) The model ceases to lord it over its copies and merely lies alongside them, like the lion with the lamb. And just as the utopian lion (who in the eyes of prophetic vision appears as the lamblike bedmate of its former prey) is at once the same and other than the king of beasts we know from imperial heraldry, so the simulated original that no longer reigns over its copies is at once the same and other than itself. Suspended between its repetions, the simulacrum of a pipe is at once the pipe we recognize and not a pipe at all. Like one of Watt's pots, it seems like a pipe, is almost a pipe, but is not quite a pipe of which one can say, Pipe, pipe, and be comforted. And this is the first lesson that Foucault's schoolmaster unwittingly teaches us: this indefinite and reversible movement-which subverts the hierarchical relation of model to copy and suspends the identity of the original within and between its repetitions - is what constitutes the simulacrum as a form. (...) SCOTT DURHAM From Magritte to Klossowski: The Simulacrum, between Painting and Narrative Foucault on Magritte, or How to Paint a Simulacrum
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to
endless
fecundity
an
inexhaustible
Demiurge has no monopoly on creation. matter is prone
vital force. Its beguiling power of temptation
lie
show
way
behind the submissive
hidden.
outward
on
in
of
plastic
the
forms
impulse.
untold is every
matter
which
entices us to be creators. its inertia is merely an life
feminine
result of astonishing fermentation of nature.
the actors of one gesture. secon hand exodus .
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Beach, rocks in the distance, some trees on top of them... does these written words give you a clear picture in mind? Are they just labels to indicate a mental picture, or could you consider them as reproductions of the real thing?
For ages, people have tried to capture nature onto the two-dimensional plane, by means of writing, printing, drawing, painting, photographing or other techniques, just for the sake of description, for keeping an experience alive, because of feelings of awe, with the intention to honour god(s) or even to understand nature itself. Whatever the technique, does the capture cause a separation from nature, only after which a reproduction of nature can follow? Or is it still an act within nature itself? Narrowing the range of these questions a bit: how unnatural is writing really? Let’s consider this first from a material point of view. Paper is made of wood or cotton fibres. The pencil I use is made of wood and a specific form of carbon, graphite, which is a naturally occurring mineral. And in case I use a pen: ink is nothing more than a liquid that contains pigments or dyes, historically all of natural origin, like the oak gall inks or carbon inks. The first are made from oak galls, outgrowths of oak tree tissue caused by parasites, fungi or bacteria. Carbon inks are made from soot with a binding agent of animal glue or natural gum, which is taken from acacia trees. Nowadays, a lot of inks are of course synthetically made, but still: are not these made of naturally occurring materials?
Writing on a piece of paper with a pencil or pen is becoming rare these days. Even now, I am typing these words on my computer, a screen shows me what I write. Where is the nature in that? A computer does not understand the characters I type; it is only just capable of distinguishing between different levels of charge, plus or minus, denoted as 1 or 0. Every character has therefore to be represented as a series of 0 and 1, for example, an ‘t’ is ‘01110100’. As long as I have not saved this document, this series of digits is stored in the random-access memory of my computer, a large array of small buckets that can be filled with electrons to store a 1, or that can be empty to store a 0. These buckets are made from silicon, the same material sand mainly consists of. As soon as I save this document, the series of digits will be stored on the hard disk that actually consists of several disks made of aluminium or glass and ceramic substrate with a ferromagnetic layer. The alternating direction of magnetization in the grains of this layer determines the digit: reverse revere is 1, non-reverse reverse is 0.
Words written on paper with an ink pen are not much more than pieces of wood and soot. It strikes me that even computer written words are actually made of sand or iron-like material, all naturally occurring stuff. So from a material point of view, writing is not so far away from nature itself as I imagined. What strikes me even more, all the things I need for writing are beneath my feet: trees grow from soil, galls grow on these trees, soot can be made from wood; graphite, aluminium, ceramic and iron-like materials can be mined, sand can be found in rivers, in deserts, at sea... 3
Wandering along the beach, I walk on words of sand. The rocks I see in the distance contain a complete archive of stored documents. On top of the rocks, I barely distinguish some little trees that take the form of wrinkled shopping lists. My gaze is brusquely interrupted by a fluttering noise behind me. I turn around; along the floodmark, a whole series of journals is swirling and spinning in the wind...
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Index Vanja Smiljanic..................................................1 & 22 Rui Vilela..........................................................................2 Sylvia Galon.......................................................3 & 20 Rosie Heinrich..................................................4 & 19 Eric Philippoz...................................................5 & 18 Ane Ă˜strem......................................................................6 Marija Sujica......................................................7 & 16 Magdalena Mellin............................................8 & 15 Lara Morais........................................................9 & 14 Ingeborg Entrop...........................................10 & 13 Sander Uitdehaag..........................................11 & 12 Nanci Tjion-Kim-Sang............................................17 Toeh Meisami..............................................................21