User:Jules/translatingpatternsalongdiagonalroaming

Translating patterns along diagonal roaming

(I didnt even need a generator for this title)

An array of elements

One thing I really appreciated as I started reading Robert Smithson's essays was the abundance of references extracted from different domains. His thoughts roam along science fiction, mainstream cultural items, architecture, technology, geology, landscaping and eventually to the human mind. All these elements aggregate together in his essays, opening widely the scope of the analogies that can create meaning.

This had even more echo to me as I started reading Media Ecologies from Matthew Fuller, starting with the following statement :“This is a media ecology made of bits of paper”. Matthew Fuller refers to the Dada aesthetic of collage and some observations made by Deleuze regarding North American literature and more particularly exemplified by the work of Walt Whitman, constituting a “hungry combination of many heterogeneous parts”.

Fuller starts with some reflective observations over a writing practice that has become aware of the way in which it gathers elements to reproduce a situation that has to be depicted by words. Or at least we understand these demonstrations in a ways that display analogies with networked technologies. An assemblage of heterogeneous elements that can recombine to recreate original configurations.

In the case of Robert Smithson, the practice of writing is a mean to express a vision of the world as a system, that is not anthropocentric (McLuhan) but includes human activity within a bigger ensemble of elements aggregating all together. These relations are not new but the materialisation of such processes evolve in time.

“The manifestations of technology are at times less "extensions" of man (Marshall Mcluhan's anthropomorphism), than they are aggregates of elements. Even the most advanced tools and machines are made using the raw matter of the earth. Today’s highly refined technological tools are not much different in this respect from those of the caveman.”
Smithson, A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Project, 1968