Abstract Intimacy

The New Worlds magazine discussed in the previous post, was something I “stumbled upon”. I got there because I did a search for ‘Harrison 2002 Light’ and found this useful review of M J Harrison’s 2002 sci-fi novel Light. This contains a link to something about New Worlds , which doesn’t go anywhere, but obviously I persisted and found info.

Now, I did that google search because of a footnote in Nigel Thrift’s Knowing Capitalism, a book I finally got hold of this week. I was enraptured by this footnote, which I will quote in entirety:

Already, the proliferation of code is producing a dynamic new ecology. Perhaps we will end up surrounded by a kind of junkyard of old code: “Though from a distance [it] resembled vegetation, it was neither alive nor dead. It was just some mad old algorithm which, vented from a passing navigational system, had run wild and then run out of raw materials. The effect was of endless peacock feathers a million different sizes: a clever drawing ramped into three dimensions. Mathematics trying to save itself from death. Plush and velvety, surrounded by a vanishingly thin mist of itself, this structure defeated the eye at all scales. It did something strange and absorbent to the light. It lay brittle and exfoliated, fragmenting into a viral dust of itself, a useless old calculation which had accidentally become an environment.” [Harrison, 2002, pp. 226.7]

Nigel Thift, Knowing Capitalism, Sage Publications, 2005, n.20, p.19.

This wonderful passage reminds me almost immediately, and vividly, of the work of Alisa Andrasek, or biothing. I have written about her work a number of times (see 2006 in this list) but its her more recent work that you can see on her site that illustrates the passage above so well.

As hinted at in the previous post, there is something of an abstract intimacy going on here that interests me, and that I hope to discuss and develop here in more detail down the track. This issue is something will be important, I think, for thinking about the SymbioticA workshop in November.