An impressive project with deep theoretical implications, or at least deeply psychedelic imagery.
More information on Nikolas Schiller, here.
Selections from Los Angeles, often wrapping and weaving the interchanges in ways that simulate the circuitous navigation of this city’s commutes.
“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation, as to spare it the burden of existence? Or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.”
Arthur Schopenhauer Sufferings of the World 1851
Springtime comes and a trans-cultural, almost universal celebration of procreation explodes around us. Every egg and tight bud threatens to become another metaphor for the unique beauty of pure potential, in life anew. As winter gives way to warmth and the days overtake the dark, it is tempting to find solace in this predictable and certain rebirth. “All is well, it has happened again,” the trees shake. As if some unity in a circle of life were enough to justify life itself. It is the logic of nature that all things happening naturally are good.
Research on desert outposts leads to more watery retreats. Trace a ven-diagram around these societal experiments: Daniel Defoe’s Libertatia and Slab City, the squatter village in the shadow of California’s Chocolate mountains. Perhaps today’s galleons are double-wides and their piracy is really a more passive tactical diversion/disappearance - no property, no taxes, no law (not necessarily stealing). An autonomous zone, temporary for some snowbirds but an unimaginably hot reality for the sun-stroked and strong that make it their year-long home. A more nuanced comparison is in the works…
Hakim Bey touches upon both the idea of a Pirate Utopia and the dearth of “free” land in The TAZ. :
The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance–not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of “territorial gangsterism.” Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed… in theory.
This was written towards the end of our last century, but what about our current age where not even a speck of spectrum, a byte of information, a single naturally occurring resource goes unpoliced or unnoticed?
How crazy beautiful is this 500-year old book?!
Perhaps an ideal literary artifact: unintelligible script, an unknown author and beautiful pictures. Illustrations creep up and across the text threatening to leave the pages, images that still, many generations later, signal future life and untold growth. And yet, this is an object so wrapped up in its own cryptic story, so colored by the fingers that have passed it through the years, that it shatters any concerted interest in its formal/material conditions. Like a crystal which refracts a million beams of light, the Voynich Manucsript launches even the casual investigator down infinite and endless (branching and galactic) paths of inquiry: magic, alchemy, astrology, art fraud, John Dee and Roger Bacon, ciphers, micrography, glossolalia, and stegotexts.
This note is taken from the Beinecke library that hosts this incredible online gallery.
Scientific or magical text in an unidentified language, in cipher, apparently based on Roman minuscule characters; the text is believed by some scholars to be the work of Roger Bacon since the themes of the illustrations seem to represent topics known to have interested Bacon. ,,, Although several scholars have claimed decipherments of the manuscript, for the most part the text remains an unsolved puzzle. R. S. Brumbaugh has, however, suggested a decipherment that establishes readings for the star names and plant labels … (Beinecke Library)
