All entries for Thursday 03 June 2004

June 03, 2004

I am just plain stupid

Oh what a stupid stupid thing to do! The old BMW motorcycle that I use to commute from Leamington station has leaded cylinders heads. To cope with modern unleaded fuel I have to add a small quantity of additive to every tankfull. This comes in a plastic bottle that I always carry with me. Not a problem.

Recently I offered to put up some posters in the Humanities Building for Steve B. I needed a sufficient supply of drawing pins to achieve this, so I grabbed a box from the stationary cupboard and put them into a side pocket of my bag. The same pocket that I keep the fuel additive in. Heading for a problem.

At some point the box of pins must have opened, spilling out its contents at the bottom of the pocket. The bottle of fuel additive must have become pressed down onto the pins, puncturing a hole in the bottle. Problem.

So now my bag smells like a petrol station, and is probably rather flammable.


Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 19:53 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem

Tati, Gursky, machines, gadgets and structures – Part 2

What stimulates something 'to be', to endure? Obviously one cannot answer that by refering to the identity and existence of the thing itself, a paradoxically self-contained sense, or a non-sense. The alternative is a continuous and repetitive abrasion of sense. A stimulation by difference. Of a being in state A and then state B, such that it irreversibly loses some aspect of state A without possibility of reconstruction, but with a memory of that loss. The difference between states A and B being unstatable but ever present, a pure sense. The subjective registers are pure sense machines, prospecting virtual Universes far from equilibrium.

From this chaos, value is a kind of temporary arrangement of sense into a repetitive structure, a cooling down that is necessary for the further production of sense. Structures have the possibility of exchangeability, a trade-off necessary as the multiplicity of desiring machines simultaneously seek the balance between constituting subjective registers and prospecting unknown and unknowable virtual Universes. A structure never deterritorializes alone, but rather constitues it's subjective register with other structures along a plane of consistency. A pattern of irreversibile changes, arrangements of pure sense, a partial objectification.

...occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return…

This flocking behaviour exploits the relative efficieny of large numbers of distinct entities constituting the 'same' arrangement of subjective registers, exploiting the same tricks, extending a phyla of technical apparatus in response to a plane of consistency. As a strata of such uniform entities develops, it provides a generic code that can be repeatedly connected with and manipulated. The phyla is arranged into a strata and becomes a gadget.

The photographs by Gursky, as undercurrent identifies , picture the great machines in their vast expanse, their plane of consistency or environment, but with the action stalled, posing the question: is this a strata of gadgets or a mechanosphere?

Human beings in Gursky' photographs, where they are shown, are shown in anonymous arrangements, distributions in space…. Often (e.g. isKlausen Pass 1984) humans are scattered, scarcely noticeable, like a handful of gravel thrown over the landscape, but nevertheless transforming the surface on which they crawl; making of it a territory, a map, a plan.

The traders in the stock market photo are machines belonging to a specific phylum and existing within a specific plane or environment, defined by values belonging to the adaption of those machines to the environment. An image of cooperation and differentiation together on a massive scale.


Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:37 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Tati, Gursky, machines, gadgets and structures – Part 1

Writing about web page http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/archives/000266.html

I'm working on a long text in response to reading Guattari's Chaosmosis. So far it's a bit delirious, but then reading Deleuze & Guattari is quite hard and requires a high degree of experimentation to get anywhere. It is an oversimplification. I haven't as yet included my thoughts on Guattari's diagram. Here it is, so far…

Undercurrent's recent post on Tati made me think about machines and gadgets:

They show humans as tiny gadgets hopelessly under the influence of a 'machine for living' with its own unfathomable vectors and desires.

For a modernist understanding of the 'machine for living' this would be a mistaken inversion. The modernist project concieves of humans as being full of 'unfathomable vectors and desires' to be mastered by a machine that is a limited and rigidly defined structure. Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, sees the human as merely a temporary structure arising by coincidence from the aleatory development of complex machines. In this case, the 'machine for living' is that which sustains the 'tiny gadgets' by feeding them with experience, difference and desire.

This inversion gets right to the heart of schizoanalysis, which redefines the relative nature of machines and gadgets, and provides an explanation of how the latter arises from the behaviour of the former – a kind of transcendental logic of machines.

In the chapter on Machinic Heterogenesis in his book Chaosmosis, Guattari gives what is perhaps the best definition of machines, structures and (implied though not referred to) gadgets, which are a special kind of structure:

The difference supplied by machinic autopoiesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual Universes far from equilibrium.

Every gadget or structure is actually part of a machinic assemblage that borders on the inexplicable, unpredictable and irreversible. Take for example a train. What is it's drive? What makes it happen repeatedly? One could say that it is the timetable, but really that is only its method, its structure. Alternatively it could be the specific flow of capital that makes the train journey viable. But why does that capital flow? Why do people make the journeys, buy the tickets? The train is only a gadget driven onwards repeatedly by a machine (or machines) persuing something more than repetition, prospecting for difference to fuel their engines. So ask again what drives the train? Clearly the passengers are its primary drive, as they come together for a thousand different reasons. Why do they do this? Each passenger is themselves operating to construct some sense, to encounter interactions that produce a definite effect in some subjective register that they constitute. So the key to the drive of the train lies in the individual and collective desire of the passengers, in a diverse range of subjective registers, as diverse as the subjects that constitute them.

To understand the drive behind the train, one must first understand how these subjective registers operate. Only then can we go on to consider how structure emerges out of this complexity, in this case, how the value of the train journey is created. And finally we can consider how as a result of this value humans are produced as structures then gadgets.


Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:36 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Clobbered

The title of this entry doesn't refer to my recent bike crash, but rather to an annoying problem that we have faced when creating applications that use an Oracle based object persistence technology. When I built the Virtual Gallery system I used Java Data Objects with Oracle as the host database. Unfortunately, I found a limit of 4000 characters on Character Large Object fields (CLOB). JDO offered no reliable way of getting around this. I quickly settled on a rather inelegant solution, creating my own TextField class that would split large bodies of text into 4000 character chunks and store them in a collection.

Why is this of interest now? BlogBuilder is being built using a similar approach, this time with the Hibernate persistance system on top of Oracle. Again we have the clob problem. Rather than just creating a hack like mine, Kieran is looking for a proper solution to this bug/feature in Hibernate.

For now, however, there is a 4000 character limit on the size of entries, which is why my next entry is split into 2 (or more) sections.


Robert O'Toole : 03 Jun 2004 11:35 |  Comments (5) |  Report a problem