The Fragment Corpora by Allan Parker

T H E F R A G M E N T C O R P O R A /

LITERARY SCHOLARS ARE PIECING TOGETHER

HER LAST UNPUBLISHED NOVEL FROM FRAGMENTS OF A RECENTLY DISCOVERED MANUSCRIPT

l u e - d o u b l e - q u o t e s ” .//<He form’d a line and a plummet To divide the Abyss beneath; He form’d a dividing rule; He formèd scales to weigh, He formèd massy weights; He formèd a brazen quadrant; He formèd golden compasses, And He began to explore the Abyss, And he planted a garden>//! 0 , ” d o c t y p e - f i r s t ” : !

e ” : ! 0 , ” s r c - n o t - e m p t y ” : / ! 0 , ”

n ) . l e n g t h ) & & ( n = a .

d e f a u l t R u l e s e t ) , t = t . r e p l a c e ( / ^ \ s * < ! - - \ s * h t m l - h i n t r e p l a c e ( ( ? : ^ | , ) \ s * ( [ ^ : , ] + ) \ s * ( ? s + ( [ ^ \ r \ n ] + ? ) \ s * - - > / i , f u n c t i o n ( t , a ) { r e t u r

( r = ! 0 ) , n [ a ] = r = = = e ? ! 0 : r } ) , ” ” } ) ; v a r r , i = n e w –

P a r s e r , s = n e w a . R e p o r t e r ( t , n ) , o = a . r u l e s ; f o r ( v a r l i n n ) r = o [ l ] , r ! = = e & & n [ l ] ! =

r m a t = f u

ch(function(e) //< …it was some of these other items that impressed Bocchi the most; these included a head of Julius Caesar “made of precious stone, which is blue, and most beautiful in its artiﬁce”, and which was beyond all comparison in “the value of its extraordinary manufacture”; a “mound of pearls and jewels” made by Grand Duke Francesco himself; and a turned ivory globe incorporating six ovals of pure ivory with the portraits of the Duke of Bavaria, his wife and children.>//{ v a r a = 4 0 , s = a + 2 0 , o = e . e v i d

t h , c = u >

n g ( c - 1 , f ) , c > 1 & & ( o

+ r . r e s e t ) ; v a r g = u - c , h = o . s u b s t r i n g //< The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all the that man has ever said or women whispered/ s?u+s:d;a+1>u&&(f+=au+1),o=o.replace substring (/\t/g,”“) the track of every canoe, of every vessel which has yet disturbed the surface of the ocean remains for ever registered in the future movement of all suceeding particles which may occupy its place. The waters and the more solid materials of the globe bear equally enduring testimony to the acts we have committed.>// ( 0 , g ) . m a t c h ( / [ ^ \ u 0 0 00 - \ u 0 0 f f ] / g ) ; n u l l ! = = h & & ( g + = h . l e n g t h ) , n . p u s h ( r . w h i t e + t ( i ) + t ( ( l + ” ” ) . l e n g t h + 3 + g ) + ” ^

//< Benjamin Franklin now wrote to Banks describing something even more fantastic: a series of aerial experiments involving very large paper bags. These bags had apparently been flown in the open air to a considerable height by a paper manufacturer near Lyons in June that year. The paper-maker was bringing his bags to Versailles to give a public demonstration before King Louis XVI. It was scheduled to be held in the large courtyard in front of the palace that September.>//{

SOME OF THE FRAGMENTS DISPLAY FEATURES CONSISTENT WITH A LARGE EXPLOSION

o : f u n c t i o n ( e , t , a , n , r ) { t h i s . r e p o r t ( “ i n f o ” , e , t , a , n , r ) } , r e p o r t : f u n c t i o n ( e , t , a , n ,r , i ) { f o r ( v a r s , o , l = t h i s , u = l . l i n e s , d = l . b r L e n , c = a - 1 , f = u . l e n g t h ; f > c & & ( s = u [ c ] , o = s . l e n g t h , n > o & & f > a ) //<

Times on times he divided, and measur’d space by space in his ninefold darkness, unseen, unknown; changes appear’d like desolate mountains, rifted furious by the black winds of perturbation.>// ; c + + ) a + + , n - = o , 1 ! = = n & & ( n - = d ) ; l . m e s s a g e s p u s h ( { t y p e : e , m e s s a g e : t , r a w :

v i d e n c e : s , l i n e : a , c o l : n , r u l e :{ i d : r . i d , d e s c r i p t i o n : r d e s c r i p t i

l o c k s = [ ] , e . l as t E v e n t = n u l l } , m a k

the American explorer Captain Robert Peary made the last of his ill fated expeditions to discover the North Pole, during which he was forced to abandon his ship which had become lodged in the ice. Peary and his small team trekked northwards towards the pole, obliged to travel as fast as was possible to conserve such supplies as they were able to carry. Taking readings with a sextant on the ﬁ rst day they were able to establish their position. By the end of the second day their readings indicated that they were much further south than they had hoped. By the third day they were almost back where they had started. Initially it seemed that the instrument might be faulty, or perhaps they were just unaccountably lost, but gradually they came to realise that they stood on a gigantic ice floe, slowly drifting in a southerly direction >// aniswang/HTMLHint/wiki/”+r.id}})

. p r o t o t y p e = { _

ript,style”),e._a //< the word “algorithm” derives from the Medieval Latin ‘algorismus’, which is a mangled transliteration of the Arabic al-Khwarizmi “native of Khwarazm”, (present day Khiva in Uzbekistan), the surname of the scholar whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West.>// a r r B l o c k s ; f o r ( c . f i r e ( “ s t a

; ) i f ( r = n . i n d e x , r > p & & ( d = t

[ 1 ] ) || ( o & & i = = = o & & ( d = u .

) , o ) ) //< Layers, oxidation, accretion, patina and decay are the language of the analogue world. It is the language of geology, of libraries, of the periodic table, chemical variation and carbon dating. The accumulations of time recorded in the material substrates of our surroundings.>// i f ( o ) u . p u s h ( n [ 0 ] ) ; e l s e i f ( i = n [

T ) ; ) { v a r x = y [ 1 ] , //< The Cabinet of curiosities is synonymous with delight and surprise, with marvels and rare objects, but it is also the mirror and representation of the world in its entirety>// M = y [ 2 ] ? y [ 2 ] : y [ 4 ] ? y [ 4 ] : ” ” , N = y [ 3 ] ? y [ 3 ] : y [ 5 ] ? y [ 5 ] : y [ 6 ] ? y [ 6 ] : ” ” ; s . p u s h ( { n a m e : x , v a l u e : N , q u o t e : M , i n d e x : y i n d e x , r a w : y [ 0 ] } ) , H + = y [ 0 ] . l e n g t h } // < “The houses that are the dwellings of today will sink between shower and sunshine to decay, but storm and rain shall never mar the palace I have built with my poetry”

THE VARIOUS FRAGMENTS INTERACT WITH

EACH OTHER BUT ONLY IN LIMITED WAYS

i m a g e lastEvent=null},makeMap:function(e){for(vart={},a=e.split(“,”),n=0;a.length>n;n++) t[a[n]]=!0;returnt}, //< The garden, in which the painter had once strolled with Leon Trotsky, was surrounded by a wall painted a deep violet blue, the strong afternoon light creating an intensity of colour that would defy any attempt at representation. In front of it, orange and pink poppies vibrate on hairy, convoluted stalks.>//parse:function(t) {functiona(t,a,n,r){vari=n-b+1;r===e&&(r={}),r.raw=a,r.pos=n,r.line=w,r.col=i,L.push(r),c. p o s : p , l i n e : w , c o l : t . l e n

ﬁre((vars;s=m.exec(a);)w++,b+//< In between his walk on the moon in 1971 and his death from a heart attack twenty years later Jim Irwin made six trips to Mount Ararat to look for Noah’s Ark. In spite of all the pre-flight medicals, his heart condition was only diagnosed once he was on the moons’ surface, picked up by monitors in his space suit. Looking back at the earth from the lunar rover, he was overwhelmed to see the earth ‘through the eyes of God’. On his return to earth he founded a Biblical fundamentalist group called the ‘High Flight Foundation’ and devoted much of the remainder of his life to searching for the Ark on the slopes of Mount Ararat>//o l + i

f ” i n x s | & | ” i n p u t ” i

: f u n c t i o n ( t , a ) { a = = = e & & //< The Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, was completed nearly 1000 years ago. Over the years many editions of Ferdowsi’s classic have been produced, its 50,000 couplets often illustrated with luminous miniatures. Despite invasions, changes of regime and religious purges the book has continued to help cement the Persian identity up to the present day. The relative stability of the Persian Language has enabled even the oldest versions to be read without difficulty by Farsi speakers today. Generations of nonreaders have also had access to the stories as part of an oral tradition of story telling which continues into the present. Its presence in the memory of Iranians represents a kind of invisible membership of a race deﬁ ned by the words and phrases of its poetry, the nation drawn together by mutual love of the stories it contains. Its themes pursue the rise and fall of kings and dynasties from a mythical pre-historical period up to and beyond the Arab invasion. The concept of “Royal Farr” is a central feature of its verses and its possession was seen as a requirement for kings to rule. Farr is divinely bestowed, but can also be lost, and its loss is often seen as the precursor to the downfall of kingdoms. A divine light was supposed to emanate from holders of Royal Farr, to the extent that those in their presence were forced to protect themselves from its intensity with their hands, an action sometimes supposed to be the origin of the military salute>//

THE

ROAD WAS COVERED WITH FRAGMENTS OF GLASS FROM THE SHATTERED WINDOWS

f u n c

) //< By the element of fi re all that is imperfect is destroyed and taken away, as, for instance, the five metals, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Saturn.* On the other hand, the perfect metals, Sol and Luna, are not consumed in that same fi re.>// ;c ++)a++,n

e s p u s h ( { t y

;

(

) //< Titan is the largest of Saturn’s moons and the fi rst to be discovered. When the Cassini mission dispatched the Huygens lander there in 2005, the images taken by the Cassini spacecraft, before it plunged into the gas giant Saturn, revealed a huge plain of shining wet ground on Titan thought to be the result of a rainstorm, making it the only world apart from our own where rain is known to fall. It is the only moon in the solar system known to have a signi ficant atmosphere; nitrogen and methane extend ten times as far into space as Earth’s atmosphere. and consequently hydrocarbon-fi lled lakes and rivers form part of its landscape as do mountains, the largest of which rises to around 11,000 feet. Titan’s average surface temperature is −179 °C. Methane is liquid at this temperature and the raindrops which fall on its surface would be the size of large marbles falling in much the same way as snowflakes fall on earth, because of the low gravity and thick haze. Methane rain apparently falls on Titan’s north pole from clear skies and space scientists have yet to explain the missing clouds.>//

The inter-war “Little Magazines” supplied the matrix of modernist literary monuments such as The Wasteland, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and it’s perhaps no suprise that the experience of reading them should mirror the means of their production; that they were constructed and presented in discontinuous segments. Finnegan’s Wake was published as fragments of a work in progress in a range of little magazines across two continents over a period of a decade and a half which Joyce said he hoped that in time they would “grow together of themselves.” We have learned to read both texts and images ‘spatially’ collecting and connecting points of interest across an expanded ﬁeld>// \ x 0 0 - \ x 0 F \ x 7 F \ x 8 0 - \ x 9 F ] + ( ?

//< The 18th-century English biographer James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769), included blank pages for readers to illustrate their own copies. The practice of adding illustrations, etchings and other material obtained from other sources, became known as Grangerization, a process which led to the creation of some vastly expanded folios, as well to the the partial destruction of many valuable books.>//

THE APPARENT SERENDIPITOUS ISOLATION OF THESE

FRAGMENTS IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN

//< Therefore it is necessary at this point to know what is the mean in this Art, and what powers and properties it has ; also by what means it is to be ruled >’// ( d ) : a ( “ t e x t ” ,

s t e n e r s , i = t . s p l i t ( / [ , \ s ] / ) , s = 0 , o //< Somewhere in Bulgaria the truck stopped at a disused ﬁ lling station in the middle of a large pine forest. There was a gravel turn-around pitted with wheel ruts in front of an abandoned office. Weeds grew out of the roof. We got out of the cab and stood on the gravel with our backs to the office smoking and looking at the forest. Suddenly several women emerged from amongst the trees on the opposite side of the road from the gas station. They seemed to be spaced out at intervals of twenty or thirty feet and they all broke cover at about the same time. They carried handbags and wore high heels and twin-sets in pastel colours. This strange choreography gave all the signs of having been pre-planned as if a chorus line had been beamed in to a Balkan forest from a 1950’s musical>// i f ( o )

, r , { t a g

: a//< During Henry the VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-16thC many of the churches in England buried their stained glass windows in the hope that they could be saved from destruction and re-installed during some more tolerant period in the future. Many were recovered in later years, but they were often badly damaged and sometimes new designs were assembled from the remaining fragments leading to the creation of ‘medley windows’, in which the biblical scenes and the depictions of religious ﬁ gures became hopelessly jumbled and ceased to carry their original meanings.>// ( “ t e x t ” , n [ 0 ] , r ) e l s e ( n [ 2 ] | | n [ 3 ] ) & & a (

g t h > p & & ( d =

h - b + 1 } ) //< One of the few coloured images of the dodo made from a living specimen has been attributed to Ustad Mansur and dated to the period 1628-1633. Mansur was a Mughal painter and court artist who practised during the reign of Jahangir, during which period he excelled at depicting plants and animals. He is thought to be one of the ﬁ rst Mughal painters to illustrate the Siberian crane and among the last artists anywhere to draw the dodo from life. An act which represents a fundamental lesion between the object itself and subsequent representations which can be compared to Durer’s rhinocerous, an animal which the artist never saw.>// }

EVERY GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS HAS AN AGREED SET OF EMOTIVE FRAGMENTS

Qazwini (1203-1283) completed his most famous work <The Wonders of the Creation and the Oddities of Existence> [sometimes called ‘Wonders and Rarities’] in around 1270 in his home town of Qazwin in north western Iran. In this work he gives an account of the entire cosmos from the movements of the heavens to details of minerals buried beneath the earth. He also included descriptions of animals (both real and mythical) as well as notes on astrology, natural magic, mathematics and geography. The book circulated for centuries in the islamic world, where it equated religious feeling with wonder, inspiring a performative expression of piety through the design of its illuminated pages. Although Arabic numerals were fully adopted in England by the mid-16th century, throughout the course of colonial modernity, Qazwini’s universe of marvels eventually contributed to the notion in the West that Muslims continued to live in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, and despite the antiquity of the text, its sentiments were gradually eroded by changes of attitude promoted by the European enlightenment >// H T M L

( “

t i o n ( n ) //< The naturalism of seventeenthcentury art is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical view of the world. It is for this reason that the familiar objects of visible reality may be looked on as emblems of a higher invisible reality.>// {v a r r , i = n . t a g N a m e . t o L o w e r C a s e ( ) , s = e . g e t M a p A t t r s ( n

t t r s ) , o = n . c o l + i . l e n g t h + 1 ; ” i m g ” ! = = i | | ” a l t ” i n s ? ( “ a r e a ” = = = i & & ” h r e f ” i n s | //< ‘Emblems’ originated as a humanistic attempt to give a modern equivalent of the hieroglyphs (as interpreted as a purely ideographic form of writing) with which the Egyptian priests foreshadowed divine ideas>//| ” i n p u t ”

a [ h r e f ] ”

o , a , n . r a w ) ) ) //< <The Iconologia> is an illustrated dictionary compiled by Cesare Ripa in 1593 which lists symbols, attributes, and personi ﬁcations in alphabetical order. The name of “emblems” is usually given to these simple allegorical designs which are accompanied by an explanatory motto and designed to teach a moral, presented in an intuitive form. The work was endorsed by the Catholic church and operated as a handbook for European artists in the Baroque era>// (

; //< with the fragmentation of the phenomenal world in Baroque allegory, legends become necessary to mark the way and bridge an image with its meaning, with the result that the images themselves signify only as elements in a pictorial script)>//

AN ESTABLISHED SET OF PRIORITIES IS USED TO CODE THE FRAGMENTS

) } } ) , //< The Foundation For Economic Education in the United States puts the number of bank robberies carried out during the frontier period (1859 -1900) at between 6 and 10. This would include all bank robberies committed over the 41 year period in all the frontier states; a grouping which includes Arizona, California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. There are more bank robberies in modern-day Dayton, Ohio in a year, than there were in the entire Old West in a decade.>// H

//< I had never met my mothers parents but here they stood in an Edwardian garden in Essex. There was my grandfather, an affable looking man in a rumpled tweed suit, which he also wore in the only good photograph I have of him. Beside him, my grandmother in a loose, pale blue chemise and a calf-length pleated skirt with a long string of beads around her neck. Spread out before them were all the insects they would have known –a living display, something inbetween a zoological illustration and a living atlas of the entomological life of the time. Cocooned in an atmosphere thick with sound and life, stag beetles displayed their precisely moulded antlers and black carapaces, whose microscopic striations refected atomised spectra. Emerald coloured scarabs were rendered luminous as if by an illustrator somehow able to commit both mystery and precision to these animated gems. The dream had bestowed a sense of individual character to huge range of creatures that photographs have rendered generic. Like our forebears, it seems as if they have all disappeared, like miniature dinosaurs, marching stoically back into the oblivion of prehistory from which they once emerged.>//

ch(o),null!==r){var

=escape //< “Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands Rifled the bowels of the Earth For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Opened into them hill a spacious wound, And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best deserve the precious bane…”>// ( r [ 0 ] ) . r

e s &. //< The disparate objects whose images Warburg collected for the panels of his Atlas are like the material from which poetry, according to Hofmannsthal, is made. They are objects taken from different levels of the past, freed from functionality, abandoned to a strange ﬁ gural floating>/

THE SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE GATHERED DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE AS THE RECORDINGS ARE CORRUPTED AND THE REMAINING DETAILS FRAGMENTED

”,description://< Rorschach never intended the ink blots to be used as a general personality test, but developed them as a tool for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was not until 1939 that the test was used as a projective test of personality, a use of which Rorschach had always been skeptical.>// ”A

: ” //< Long and thin objects include pencils, bottles, chopsticks, umbrellas, rabbits (ears) rivers, train tracks or roads: when counting these long and thin objects all the numbers end in -hon, except the number 3 – which ends in -bon, and the numbers 1, 6, 8 and 10 which end in pon.>// Scancss with css lint.”,init:function(e,t,a){varn=this;e.add Listener(“cdat a”,function(e){if (“style”===e.tagName.toLowerCase()){varr;if(r=”object”==typeofexports&& require?require(“csslint”).//< Warburg’s Mnemosyne panels function as screens on which the phenomena shown in succession by the cinema, are reproduced simultaneously.>//{ v a r i = e . l i n e - 1 , s

; t [ “ w a r n i n g ” = = = e . t y p e ? ” w a r n ” : ” e r r o r ” ] ( “ [ “ + e . r u l e . i d + ” ] //< “Cannon” is most frequently found used in the sense of “a large gun,” and can be traced to the Old Italian word cannone, which means “large tube.” Canon, however, comes from the Greek word kanōn, meaning “rule.” Although canon has a variety of meanings, it is most often found in the senses of “a rule or law of a church,” (eg) “an accepted rule,” or “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.” A loose cannon is “a dangerously uncontrollable person or thing.” There are no loose canons>//“ + e . m e s s a g e , i

a t c h ( l ) { } } } } ) } } ) , H T M L H i n

Paul Flowers, once chairman of the Co-Operative Bank, suffered a spectacular fall from grace that sent shockwaves through the corporate world. He faced multiple allegations including buying illegal drugs such as ketamine and crack, as as a series of ‘inappropriate relationships’ and ﬁ nancial improprieties. If there were flaws in Mr. Flowers personality why weren’t they picked up? The tabloids christened him “The Crystal Methodist”, in reference to his ecclesiastical past. Psychometric tests assess personality, numeracy and verbal skills and Flowers took one when he originally applied for the position. But his subsequent failings raised questions – Did Mr Flowers distort the scores by faking the right answers? And are psychometric tests reliable indicators of potential behaviour? Experts in psychometric tests say that although the questionnaires have a growing role in key appointments, they should never be used on their own. Openness to experience is one of the big ﬁve scales in personality testing, and clearly one that Mr Flowers may have scored highly on.>//”Doct y p

It is the nature of synaesthesia that the senses lose their boundariessound and vision collidethe sun breaks through the clouds and crashes to the ground at the speed of light

THE SPLITTING ALGORITHM CUTS OUT

ALL THE UNWANTED SUBTREES AND RECOMBINES THE FRAGMENTS LEFT OVER

i d d o c t y pe) //< Further inspection, which we do not carry out here, suggests the same results beyond the corresponding fragments. If too small a unit is chosen the data will be hopelessly fragmented; a division into departments, for example, would be impossible to interpret; Just as post-structuralism fragmented the subject, ecological theory objecti ﬁed biological contexts as stable systems>//b

! 1 | | / ^ D O C T Y P

//< The 17th century was marked by Galileo’s discovery that the sky extends to inﬁnity, and Blaise Pascal’s enquiries into the vertiginous abyss of the human soul; this resulted in a growing awareness of the vastness that surrounds us but also of the inﬁnitesimal presences that exist within the pulsating mechanism of the human body>// ( “ D o c t y p e m u

r e m o v e L i s t e n e r ( “

(

nt”,a),e.removeListene r (“tagstart”,n) i//< the ﬁ lmmaker describes the history of cinema as a “saturation of magni ﬁcent signs that bathe in the light of their absence of explanation.” This beautiful phrase, which echoes Mallarmé, also holds true for Mnemosyne>// }varr=this ; e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ a l l ” , a ) , e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ t a g s t a r t ” , n ) } } ) , H T M L H i n t . a d d R

l e ( { i d : ” h

- s c r i p t - d i s a b l e d ” , d e s c

i p t > //< The elements in a group have similar physical or chemical characteristics of the outermost electron shells of their atoms, because most chemical properties are dominated by the orbital location of the outermost electron>// t a g c a n n o t b e

r s ( a . a t t r s ) ,o = n . t y p

” //< The early heroic period of ballooning, between 1783 and 1800, came to an abrupt end after a series of horriﬁc accidents, often winessed by crowds of onlookers, together with the realisation that reliable navigation presented insurmountable problems. After the marriage of Alexandrine, daughter of Etienne Montgolﬁer, to Barthélémy de Canson, the paper business continued as Canson Paper which was used by artists such as Delacroix, Degas, Miró, Léger, Chagall, Picasso, and Matisse.>//= = = l & & ( s = ! 0 ) , s ! = = ! 0 | | ”

/ ^ //< Alone in the lab Martha liked to carry out small experiments of his own design. Imperial College had an exceptionally accurate set of digital scales. She dipped the edge of a ﬁ lter paper momentarily into the stream of water from a running tap and placed it on the scales. Fleetingly, it reminded her of a communion wafer. Turning her attention to the digital display she watched the numbers tumble as the water molecules flew heavenward.>//

THE SATELLITE HAD FRAGMENTED AND BURNED AS IT FELL THROUGH THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE

Later she took another ﬁ lter paper from the packet and placed it on the scales. Removing the circular paper, she took a biro out of her lab coat pocket and wrote I LOVE YOU on it and replaced it. She was then able to make a simple calculation to discover the exact weight of the words she had just written>//

//< from some points of view it doesn’t matter whether these fragments originated as invading parasites or breakaway rebels>// {v a

o l + i . l e n g t h + 1 ; ” i m g ” ! = = i | | ”

//< Warburg called his Mnemosyne Atlas a ghost story for adults>//

n <i m g > e l e

. ” //< Michelangelo, then 30 years old, had been commissioned to work on Pope Julius II’s tomb, which was to eventually stand in St Peters Basillica. At some point during this process the Pope had asked Michelangelo and the architect Sangallo to investigate the recent discovery of a sculpture which had been partially unearthed on the Oppian Hill in Rome. The friends left Sangallo’s house with Sangallo’s eleven year old son and when they arrived at the site, a vineyard belonging to Felice De Fredis. Sangallo at once recognised the partially exposed group of marble ﬁ gures as the Laocoon. The sculpture had lain undisturbed and unremarked for over ﬁ fteen hundred years and had once been described by Pliny the Elder as ‘the greatest work of art in the world’. >\\ n.line,o ,a,n.raw)})}}),HTM

tbeinlowercase.”,init:function(e,t,a)//< A glitch provides a hiatus in the stream, revealing the discourse as a fabrication, not a conversation. We ﬁ nd ourselves suddenly returned to the present, to the room in which we sit, reminded that there is no direct human presence behind such oracular electronic presentations. If we were being addressed by an android which presented a flawless impression of a human being, a glitch would immediately reset our point of reference, instantly reminding us of our abduction into uncanny valley:>// {v a r

//< “Research is the work of trying to paint a fuller picture—of humanity, of history—with each person working within their own niche, and each contributing their small, speci ﬁc bit. We might never get there completely, but at least we can manage to put together some of the pieces.” A. Walley, Univ. Oregon>// - 1

AS EXCERPTS FROM A WORLD THAT WAS THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE UNDERSTANDABLE AS FRAGMENTS

rni//< The earliest European encyclopedic work to have survived into modern times is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder. The work was published around AD 77–79, although it is unlikely he ever fi nished proofi ng it. At the time he was commander of the Roman naval fleet based at Misenum, about fi fty kilometers up the coast from Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. Having witnessed the initial eruptions he ordered a boat be made ready to make further investigations. As he was about to leave, a note arrived from a friend, Rectina, in which she implored him for his help. Realising that he was now involved in a rescue mission, he launched a small fleet of ships to assist the population, as well as rescuing Rectina. He died in this attempt and his death was recorded by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who notes that his uncle already had respiratory problems and gives asphxiation as the probable cause of death. He was encouraged to write this account by Tacitus who wrote “I know that immortal fame awaits him if his death is recorded by you.” In most modern encyclopaedias and in vulcanology in general, the type of volcanic activity which destroyed Pompeii is described as a “Plinian Eruption” >// r - n o -

. n a m e , o [ r ] //< every few months I would receive an envelope through the post - addressed to me by name in a rather childlike hand by an anonymous sender. The envelopes contained one or sometimes two colour-copied sheets of A4 paper on which were printed drawings of space ships and occasionally submarines. The drawings were in felt tip pen and looked as if they were created by someone of about fourteen. Various parts of the vessels were drawn in cross-section and underneath them the author had written descriptions such as “Loading bay”, “Propulsion unit” and so on. Underneath, the author had thoughtfully translated these legends into Chinese.>//= = = ! 0 & & t .

“ D

e - c h a r s ” , d e s c r i p t i o n : ” A t t

we approached the buildings we began to see that they looked built for a race of giants—wide stone steps led up to darkened doorways, many of them twice the height of an adult. >// ,init: f u n c t i o n ( e , t

, i ( “ D u p l i c a t e o f a t t r i b u t e n a m e [ “ + n . n a m e + [0] n = i [ l ] , r = n . n a m e , o [ r ] ( “ D o c t y p e m u s t b e d e c l a r e d f i r s t . ” , r . l i n e , r . c o l , a , r . r a w ) , e . r e m o v e L i s t e n e r ( “ a l l ” , n ) ) } ; e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ a l l ” , n ) } } ) , H T M L H i n t . a d d R u l e ( { i d : ” d o c t y p e - h t m l 5 ” , d e s c r i p t i o n : ’ I n v a l i d d o c t y p e . U s e : “ < ! D O

” ’ , i n i t : f u n c t i o n ( e , t ) { f u n c t i o n a ( e ) { e . l o n g = == ! 1 & & ” d

. //< Once over the Gobi desert, we travel over a rumpled spread of striated rocks and grassland which looks more like a sea and there, in the distance is the airport, looking as if someone had left a few toy planes on a garage roof >// v a r r = t

FRAGMENTATION IMPLIES DECAY AND LOSS

IN RELATION TO SOME SUPERSEDED WHOLE

r n i //< The Uffizi Gallery was itself created as a cabinet of curiosities, that is to say a place of wonders. It was originally the Magistrates’ Palace, as built by Giorgio Vasari “on the river, almost in the air” Over the course of the centuries the Gallery lost the deﬁning quality of being a journey through a series of wonders for which it had been known at the time of the Medici, in favour of enlightement ideas which categorized art and embedded it into established narratives. >//>// r

] / / < The Ulam spiral, or prime spiral, is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963. It is constructed by writing the positive integers in a square spiral and specially marking the prime numbers. Ulam and Gardner emphasized the striking appearance in the spiral of prominent diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines which contain large numbers of primes. The location of the primes is a subject of deep mystery in mathematics. As the depictions reveal, there is structure and pattern, but it is always disturbed by irregularity into disorder. > / / }

{ f u n c t i o n a ( a ) { v a r n = e . g e t M a p A t t r s ( a . a t t r s ) ,o = n . t y p e , l = a . t a g N a m e . t o L o w e r C a s e ( ) ; ” h e a d ” = = = l & & ( s = ! 0 ) , s ! = =

! 0 | | ” s c r i p t ” ! = = l | | o &

> t a g . ” , a . l i n e , a . co l , r , a . r a w) } f u n c t i o n n ( t ) { “ h e a d ” = = = t . t a g N a m e . t

( ) & & (e . re

e L i s t e ne r ( “ t a g s t a r t ” , a ) , e . r e m o v e L i s t e n e r ( “ t a g e n d ” , n ) ) } v a r r = t h i s , i = / ^ //< . Archaeological evidence suggests that the population was able to escape, taking their valuables with them, except for a few items assumed to have been hidden, such as the solid gold Ibex found under the floorboards of one of the houses. >//= = = !( “ D u p l i c a t e o f a t t r i b u t e n a m e [ “ + n . n a m e +

[ l ] , r = n . n a m e , o [ r ] { f o r ( v

> l ; l + + ) n = i [ l ] , r = n . n a m e , o [ r ] = = = !

a s f o u n d . ” , e . l i n e , s + n . i n d e x , a , n . r a w ) , o [ r ] = ! 0 } ) } } ) ,//< Elsewhere, however, the dominant impression is of a piecemeal, even fragmented network, in which many pathways had been started but few entirely ﬁ nished//> { ( t e x t \ / j a v a s c r i p t | a p p l i c a t i o n \ / j a v a s c r i p t ) $ / i , s = ! 1 ; e . a d d L i s t e n e r( “ t a g s t a r t ” , a ) , e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ t a g e n d ” , n ) } } ) , H T M L H i n t . a d d R u l e ( { i d : ” h r e f - a b s - o r - r e l ”, d es c ri p ti o n : ” A n hr e f

( e , t , a )

//< We set off towards the buildings over a ground of ﬁ ne black dust in which our boots left delicate and precise impressions, like the backs of spoons pressed into flour; or Neil Armstrong’s photograph of his footprint on the moon.//>

THE HYBRID JUXTAPOSITION OF THESE FRAGMENTS CAN BE READ AS VISUAL ANALOGUES

//< He had dreamed, rather sketchily it seemed, of a rural holiday idyll. At night ﬁ reflies ﬁ lled the wood between the rundown makeshift cabins while a variety of small animals rustled in the undergrowth. >// & & (

(

)//< We began to realise that some of the farmworkers, many of whom had been nomads and had come from much further east, were unable to recognise what the photographs portrayed. If the image had a lot of red in it, for example, they would guess objects that they knew to be red like “tractor” or “tomato” when in fact they were being shown an image of a red dress on a washing line >// r - n o - d u p l i ca t i o n ” ,

. l e n g t h + 1 , o = { } , l = 0 , u = i . l e n g t h ; u > l ; l + + ) n = i [ l ] , r = n . n a m e , o [ r ] //< “Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent— something that speech does just as much as photography.” >//= = = ! 0 & & t . e r r o r ( “ D u p l i c a t e o f a t t r i b u t e n a m e [ “ + n . n a m e + ” f e - c h a r s ” , d e s c r i p t i o n : {v a r r , i = n . t a g N a m e . t o L o w e r C a s e ( ) , s = e . g e t M a p A t t r s ( n . a t t r s ) , o = n . c o l + i . l e n g t h + 1 ; ” i m g ” ! = = i | | ” a l t ” i n s ? ( “ a r e a ” = = = i & & ” h r e f ” i n s | | ” i n p u t ” = = = i & & ” i m a g e ” = = = s . t y p e ) & & ( “ a l t ” i n s & & ” ” ! = = s . a l t | | ( r = ” a r e a ” = = = i ? ” a r e a [ h r e f ] ” : ”

” , t . w a r n ( “ T h e a l t a t t r i b u t e o f “ + r + ” m u s t h a v e a v a l u e .”, n . l i n e , o , a , n . r a w ) ) ) ” A t t r i b u t

v a l u e s c a n n o t c o n t a i n u n s a f e c h a r s . ” , i n i t : f u n c t i o n//< Kordylewski’s Clouds were ﬁ rst observed by the astronomer in 1961. There are two clouds each about 3 times the size of the earth positioned between the earth and the moon, but not in a direct line with it. They are mainly composed of sub-atomic material and dust particles measuring between 0.1mm and 0.5mm making them extremely difficult to observe. Their existence was eventually con ﬁ rmed by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2018.>// ,: t . w a r n ( “ A l l a t t r i b u t e s m u s t b e p r e s e n t o n <i m g > e l e m e n t s . ” , n . l i n e , o , a , n . r a w ) } ) } } ) , H T M L H i n t . a d d R u l e ( { i d : ” a t t r - l o w e r c a s e ”

n g t h + 1 , o = 0 , l = i . l e n g t h ; l > o ; o + + ) { a = i [ o ] ; v a r u = a . n a m e ; ( e , t { f o r ( v a r

e n e r //< “An image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer or ﬁ lm-maker” >// ( “ t a g s t a r t ” , f u n c t i o n ( e ) { f o r ( v a r n , r = e . a t t r s , i ( “ D u p

19.2/

HE READ A FRAGMENT OF THE STORY

The Cambridge Dictionary team chose “hallucinate” as its Word of the Year for 2023. The original defi nition of the word is to see, hear, feel, or smell something that does not exist, usually because of a health condition or because of the effects of a drug. It now has an additional meaning relating to arti ficial intelligence systems which generate texts that mimic those written by humans. The dictionary provides usage examples of “hallucinate” as it relates to AI. Large Language Models are notorious for hallucinating – generating completely false answers, often supported by fictitious citations. The latest versions of available chatbots are greatly improved but are still capable of hallucinating facts.>// S c

( e , t ,

//< Only during such a time as this could an object be conceived and constructed to be, ﬁ guratively speaking, as big as the world itself, to be a metaphor and an image of the world.>//

< !

, n ) } v a r r = t h i s ; e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ a l l ” , a ) , e . a d d L i s t e n e r ( “ t a g s t a r t ” , n ) } } ) ,

“We have the Idea of the World, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. There are ideas of which no presentation is possible, therefore they impart no knowledge about reality (experience); They can be said to be un-presentable.”>// (“Doctype must be decl ared first.”,r.line,r.col,a,r.raw),e.removeListener (“all”,n))};e.addList ener(“all”,n)}}),HTM LHint

”’,init:functio

()&&t.warn(‘Invalid doctype. Use: //< Sudden changes in cosmic rays recorded by Voyager 1, launched in 1977, indicate that the craft has ﬁ nally left the solar system and is now in inter-stellar space. Travelling at over 15 km per second, it is now almost 19 billion km from Earth. However, as astronomers are quick to point out, it would not approach another star for tens of thousands of years.>//( { i d : ” h e a d - s c r i p t - d i s a b l e d

c a n n o t b e u s e d i n a < h e a d > t a g . ” , i n i

cigarette leaning on the doorframe of the car. It was a moment easily committed to memory. In the stillness, our small maroon car sat there on the stony waste, which spread out from under our feet towards the biblical snow covered mountain on the horizon.>//