by Daniel Rourke

In my last 3quarksdaily article I considered the ability of science-fiction – and the impossible objects it contains – to highlight the gap between us and ‘The Thing Itself’ (the fundamental reality underlying all phenomena). In this follow-up I ask whether the way these fictional ‘Things’ determine their continued existence – by copying, cloning or imitation – can teach us about our conception of nature.

Seth Brundle: What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I…

by Daniel Rourke

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders how his machine would allow him to watch them crumble further in decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed…

by Daniel Rourke

About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately…

posted by Daniel Rourke

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola,…

by Daniel Rourke

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye…

Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon completion of the tomb he himself will be sealed inside with the dead Pharaoh. How is it possible to build the most secret catacomb, a labyrinth impossible to breach, without passing on its secret through the workers who build…

A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: there is nothing here one might caress with fumbling fingers, or, a millennia ago, pick between to lovingly tease out a louse or mite. The figure balances uneasily on stumps for legs. Its waxen surface bears no resemblance to skin. It is a shade saturated…

by Daniel Rourke

According to the film industry, to director James 'billions at the box-office' Cameron, Avatar is the first 'true' 3D movie. It takes the experience of cinema to the next (natural?) level, and it does it in a way that makes the movie industry gasp. According to the industry, Avatar is the 3D film that other film makers will be watching for years to come; Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema.

It is at this point that I could repudiate this position,…

by Daniel Rourke

“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.” Jacques Derrida, Economimesis As the day drew closer to its end so I strained… ]]> Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/01/on-seeing-an-imitation.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html by Daniel Rourke "The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tal. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world." Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image Take 12 images and splice them end to… ]]> Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:06:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/12/the-work-of-the-moving-image-in-the-age-of-its-digital-corruptibility.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/mapping-the-cracks-part-two.html In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion? Part Two "There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about... writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and... I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for… ]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:02:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/11/mapping-the-cracks-part-two.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/10/mapping-the-cracks-part-i.html Part One by Daniel Rourke "The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel." - Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper… ]]> Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:04:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/10/mapping-the-cracks-part-i.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html by Daniel Rourke Japan. That's where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served - on holiday... I am the ultimate gaijin 1 and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an… ]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:05:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/on-being-in-japan-and-elsewhere.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html by Daniel Rourke This article is an edifice, a mockery of the freedom needed to create it. It is rigid, it is linear. Its sentences end only to lead onwards to the next, pulling the reader's eye through a series of limited, and limiting pathways. And yet, reading does not have to be this way. In the process of writing this article little time was spent laying out the path of words you now follow to their conclusion. The process of writing is non-linear, perhaps more like a network of ideas spanning out from nodes… ]]> Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/07/desire-paths-reading-memory-and-inscription.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html by Daniel Rourke I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time. Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren… ]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:22:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/i-discovered-the-ants.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/05/a-bomb-wont-go-off-here.html by Daniel Rourke   A bomb won't go off here... (Click to enlarge) Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative. X: Oh yeah. Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story. X: And that there’s people there all the time. Y: That they are always on this street. X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long,… ]]> Sun, 17 May 2009 21:15:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/05/a-bomb-wont-go-off-here.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html “We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers.” Barack Hussein Obama, 20th of January, 2009 (Originally published at 3quarksdaily) As a British citizen I watched the inauguration speech of America’s 44th President with a warm but distanced interest. But as someone who was brought up in a non-religious family, and has thrived without a belief in a deity, I listened to Barack Obama’s… ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 08:31:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/01/obamas-address-to-the-state-of-nonbelief.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability… But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment… A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed.… ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 07:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html Grapholectic Thought and The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part Two) “There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of… ]]> Mon, 04 May 2009 07:17:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/02/writing-hypertext-and-image-a-polyptychal-discursion.html A Polyptychal Discursion: This text, designed with its own concerns in mind, diverges on many trajectories, crossing over itself, intersecting its arguments and statements with images and forms which question the traditional logic of the essay. This text will become enabled not through a writer's statements, but through a reader's response. A spiral of concepts ruptures the words, burrowing underneath the palimpsest, pulling you, the reader, into the written phrase. Response is required of any reading. The internet is a form capable of allowing a reader's response to influence the writer's trajectory; to send the written back into itself, melding… ]]> Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:07:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/02/writing-hypertext-and-image-a-polyptychal-discursion.html