User:Inge Hoonte/Foucault's Sleep

IC-98, Foucault's Sleep - Models for a Proposal Iconoclast Publications, Turku, 2005

This book is a loose project sketch using diagrams and drawings they've devised themselves, but mostly reprinting texts by other authors relating to islands, utopia, self-protection. It's not really until the last text, the Postscript, which they wrote, that you gain a bit more understanding of the project, although it's still a bit vague to me. The selection of reprinted texts shapes a landscape of ideas, concepts, but not enough to hold on to.

p7
Initial concept is based on a dream about a mountainous desert island, surrounded by the open sea. The island contains thousands of surveillance cameras, aimed at the sky, horizon and sea.

p69
IC-98 feels this concept developed in relation to Foucault, who "lived on the thin line between total exposure and an urgent need for privacy." This booklet is to be seen as the phase before the actual proposal, the models/fragments a proposal is based on. The thought process which never reaches what a proposal should eventually realize.

According to Gilles Deleuze in "Desert Islands" (Desert Islands and other Texts 1953-1974. Semiotext(e) 2004), "Dreaming of islands - whether in joy or in fear - is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone - or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew."

In "Bartleby and the Formula," Deleuze writes that the world is composed of floating relations, moving points, winding lines. IC-98 states that in the archipelago it's about the in-between, the routes, the currents, creating temporary assemblages. They say we're not islands but the ocean, in flux. I don't quite agree with this metaphor, as islands are also constantly in flux! The tides bring new sediments, new land. The ocean is charted as well, there are maps of the ocean floor, most people, including myself most of the time, just have the very romantic notion that the ocean is total freedom and unrestrictedness.

They go on to say that islands are fixed, and therefor we fix our belief systems to them, as they need a fixed basis, so we can cling to them. So just as well, I think that we can fix unfixed notions to unfixed things.

p10 creatures
HG Wells, The Time-Machine:"And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt - pink under the lurid sky." Red mountains becoming a monstrous crab, moving towards him. Protagonist almost attacked by another crab. Then he moves the lever of the time machine he's sitting upon, and moves a month ahead in time. The world is appalling. He moves on another 100 years, and finds the same dying sea and crustaceans. Thousands of years later, the sun is bigger and duller, and there are no more animals. There's green slime. An eclipse occurs. It's silent, and as a planet transits before the sun, it gets increasingly cold. Narrator almost faints in nausea, terrified to lie helpless in this twilight, when he gets back on the saddle.

p13 end of life ritual
Sky burial. Tibetan monk cut up a dead body into small pieces, then smashes the bones and bits into pieces with a hammer. Then he signals the vultures, who eat the remains. They think they just eat, but really they are completing a life cycle.

p14 surveillance
"IT IS, PERHAPS, UNNECESSARY TO ADD"
report from 1824, Camera Obscura at a Fair, through which a burglar was observed, caught in the action. Article poses these cameras should be placed everywhere in town, and communicated by telegraph to Police or Jail. "... every thing would then take place, as it were, under the eye of, the Police" and they can act immediately by speeding to the place where it happened.

illustrations on next pages seem to suggest that vultures can be surveillance, watching over.

p18-21
methods to
1. protect your privacy,
2. disappear from society, acquire a new identity
3. publicly make available all of your information so everyone can become you, and you, yourself, can disappear into the crowd of your own copies.

becoming anonymous by becoming public

imagined/never seen before creatures

creatures p25
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: creating life. Cross-link to Tibetan burial and end-of-world Wells?

p29-32
drawings of men with extra body parts

p33
HG Wells, the Island of Dr. Moreau -> small sum-up of creatures, mixed of various creates and people-like features.

p34-35
Report on live giant squid caught in 2005. It got entangled in hooks from which the photography device was hanging. After 550 pictures and four hours, it escaped by tearing off its own tentacle. The 5.5m body part was still sucking and grabbing when prodded later on deck. They are a dying species, as trawling boats destroy the eggs on the ocean bottom. As a result,sperm whales, who eat the squids, starve and wash up on the beaches in NZ.

p36
HP Lovecraft, Dagon -> diary-type entry, being captured in the Pacific by or in something slimyish. Wikipedia [1] inspired by a dream. 1917. He finds a monolith, inscribed with imagery of fish-people, and ocean creatures. Then he sees a big monster, who grabs the monolith with its tentacles. His next memory is coming to in a SF hospital, where no one believes his story and there's no record of such a place in the Pacific. He sees the creature as a worshipper of the sea god. Comparable to the mythical cyclops Polyphemus, the character in Odysseus.

shelters & man on an island p37 image of Mont Saint-Michel, an abbey turned prison during French Rev. link to religion, belief system, turning surveillance?

p38 Homer, Odyssey -> Island of Cyclops, escape under sheep.

<-- similarity betw these: hiding oneself as part of other creature vs hiding in a built structure -->

p41 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe -> protecting oneself against unknown creatures: savages or wild beasts. Building protection against available natural structure to find shelter in: build tent against plain side of a big rock. Describing a manner of building something. As a reader: you have to build the structure in your mind while reading. Also: the writer builds the structure inside the mind of the reader. Then he locks himself up inside the structure, much like the way the men did during the Nova Zembla expedition. Only problem with this is, that once something does get in through the top, it's hard to get it out. You pretty much have to kill it on the spot. He sleeps sound because he thinks he's safe. So that's also about building safety in the mind. Almost like a grave tomb, which for some men in Nova Zembla, among whom the captain, it became. Then he carves out part of the rock, to make a cave-like structure part of his shelter.

man-made or conquered islands p42-47 Thomas More, Utopia. Utopia is a 200mile long island with a bay and continuing stream that harbors another piece of land. Getting into the bay of Utopia is very dangerous as there are many rocks that lie under water. The natives are very familiar with navigating through it, but strangers will most surely shipwreck. Utopus conquered it and organized the inhabitants in such a good government that they now far excel mankind. The terrain used to be connected to the mainland, but he dug a huge channel around it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau reports on St. Peter island, in the middle of the Bielersee (Lake Bienne) in Switzerland. It's half a league in. Rousseau thought he could be a bit more separated from mankind here. He "bade adieu to the world" and set out to catalog all plants of the island. A day spent away from the island seemed to him "a loss of so much happiness". He did not want to leave. Thinking about having to leave, of being deprived of the island.

Is the size of an island of importance to its survival, and more importantly, to the people who strand upon it?

Cross-link with another book I'm reading on book-making. The author states he often reads a book three times. Once he glances over it to get a feel for the paper, the build-up, the sequences. Then he goes in deeper and if it's a good book, he'll read it a couple more times. I can say more honestly now that I had already made up my mind about this little IC-98 book... I kept saying "this is what I want to make, but better" and "why would you publish a collection of other authors' content without inserting your own opinion?". And now that I'm actually studying the book more closely, and the texts in it, I know again why I was so captivated by it from the very beginning. This type of collection, which it is, does allow the reader to form their own connections between content, and relate it to their own practice (in my case).

Rousseau on Robinson Crusoe -> posing the story can be used as play material for kids. "... make a reality of that desert island which formerly served as an illustration." and later on: "This novel... begins with Robinson's shipwreck on his island, and ends with the coming of the ship which bears him from it..."

finally - the models
p48-62 This section is comprised of drawings/sketches that seem to be based on texts by Borges' library, DNA structures (because part of DNA is part of guano), basic needs in life, basic build-up of territory, claiming territory. Borges: the library would contain everything published & unpublished, it would contain "the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog." He sees his library as a horror, as it exists in the mind, and "One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings."

p54 "The amount of information should always exceed the capacity of computation."
Should it, or does it, is it a given?

p59 Claiming territory by contaminating it. This is partly an accurate introduction to the guano trade. There already was guano on the islands, then the US claimed the territory and started putting more contamination on it.

My project Under/Up the Stairs does something similar but different. Claiming space by beautifying it, decorating it with things that make you feel more at home. Or that positions the work as a place you can call home. The work itself becomes home.

p64 Johnston Atoll. What makes an atoll one of the most isolated atolls in the world? Atoll = collection of small islands. Closed to the public. Unincorporated territory of the United States. Discovered in 1796, used for its guano until the 1890s. Designated bird refuge in 1926, but made quite the animal-unfriendly change when it was used as nuclear and missile test site in 1950-60s. Two aborted launches resulted in plutonium scattering over the atolls and into the sea. Also site for tests on rhesus monkeys. Up until 2000, the atolls were used to deactivate and destroy rockets, bombs, projectiles, mortars, and mines containing chemical weapons. Now US responsible for cleaning it up and making it safe again.

p67 Explanation why guano, or bird poop, is so profitable: it contains porassium nitrate, and has been used since the 17th century for making gunpowder. Also used as fertilizer for crops. The US claimed the guano from Pacific islands by passing a law that stated if a US citizen every found guano anywhere without jurisdiction by any other government, they could claim the land.