Months later I outlined some of the marks I made during these experiments in black and some in gray which had the effect of differentiating foreground and background.
I also rotated the orientation.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
glyphmachine.0.1
The following drawings form an experiment I conducted involving the Cascajal block. The experiment consisted of taping the Cascajal “block” (the paper reproduction) to a window and taping another blank piece of paper on top of it. The ensuing productions represent the movement of a pencil approximating the movements of my eye muscles as they “read” the paper. What I mean by “read” here is not at all clear. That is why there are seven productions—each one represents a different kind of “reading” and thus a different definition of what a reading is. Since the drawings represent physical muscle-stimuli response, explaining the logic behind the reading would take a fierce effort of translation that would not be exact in any sense of the word. I have been working over the past 10 months to describe in some way the varying features of each of these distinct readings. I have been completely unsuccessful. Translate for me the feeling of holding a body.
Months later I outlined some of the marks I made during these experiments in black and some in gray which had the effect of differentiating foreground and background.
I also rotated the orientation.
Months later I outlined some of the marks I made during these experiments in black and some in gray which had the effect of differentiating foreground and background.
I also rotated the orientation.
block notes
The Cascajal Block was uncovered in 1999 by a group of gravel poachers, it was accidental, not useful, anti-rubbish that could have become part of a patched up road. Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez and Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos, a married anthropologist couple, flew to the stone, it’s a better mousetrap, a lottery ticket or a confession, almost an invention—either way. They kept it a secret for the next six years, like a new marriage unfurling out of an old one; a fraud? For six years, they got to keep it. Mute, dumb, incomprehensible missive. Now open this letter.
“Features of the block. Carved of serpentine, the Cascajal block weighs about 12kg and measures 36 cm in length, 21 cm in width, and 13 cm in thickness (Figs. 2 and 3). It displays five slightly convex sides. The remaining side shows the text, which consists of 62 signs. Scrutiny of this surface shows variable patina, vestiges of local orange clay, and the workings of two blades: one blunted thus ideal for outlines, the other sharper to make incisions within signs. Unpatinated areas were highlighted by image processing in Adobe Photoshop CS (Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, CA); other, unprocessed images are made available here as supporting online material. Enlargements of the high-resolution photos, taken with a Canon EOS 20D SLR (Canon, Tokyo, Japan) camera in raw format at 23:45 Mbytes per file, show unmistakable weatherings, including pitting over incisions, with mineralization around the pits and inside the carved lines, a secure sign of ancient surface alteration. This was confirmed by 20X magnification and mineralogical analysis courtesy of Ricardo Sanchez Hernandez and Jasinto Robles Camacho of the Laboratorio de Geologia INAH. In ancient times, the surface of the block had been carefully ground to prepare the incised text, possible as an erasable document that could be removed and revised.”
— Science. “Oldest Writing in the World”. Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez, Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos, Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube, Alredo Delgado Calderon. Vol. 313 15 September 2006 p. 1611.
To find something roughly the same size, I googled the dimensions 36cmx21cm, and I got something in so many scripts besides my own, the 36x21 bleeding through like a mistake in a whisper. Yes, that’s right, we use inches. Convert. Translate.
ok. let’s try 15in.x8in. A roll of ply paper. A standard tooth handsaw. A yellow toner cartridge. Crayola Art Kit. Staub Rectangular Roasting Dish. Djembe. Ditty bag. Touch screen monitor. Powerbook G4. Soft-side tackle station. White ABS PA Speaker. Freestanding ice-maker. Fog free mirror. 15-inch/M Class/ TFTColor/ AC/XGA/ 8MB.
Patina, and vestiges of local orange clay: the passage of something becoming marked as old, as becoming more and more different from what is current.
Another aspect worth dragging out, woah, worth unhooking, reknitting, is the fact that the glyphs contain marks made by two different instruments. The one, “blunted, ideal for outlines, the other, sharper to make incisions within signs”. Here, there is a whole theory of texts, of texture. Drawing figures, is, after all, figural. The cross-hatchings of these two layers of text: the big, the bold, the obvious, the dominant, with the interior, the soft, the lovely, the intricate, somehow means that meaning is stitched onto a frame, that there is order beneath order, at least that there are two different types of order. And that they are at least different enough to be crafted using two different kinds of writing implements / that there is some way that meaning and grammar end up cohabitating the same location.
And that there is nothing too disparate about stone and paper, after all.
“Features of the block. Carved of serpentine, the Cascajal block weighs about 12kg and measures 36 cm in length, 21 cm in width, and 13 cm in thickness (Figs. 2 and 3). It displays five slightly convex sides. The remaining side shows the text, which consists of 62 signs. Scrutiny of this surface shows variable patina, vestiges of local orange clay, and the workings of two blades: one blunted thus ideal for outlines, the other sharper to make incisions within signs. Unpatinated areas were highlighted by image processing in Adobe Photoshop CS (Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, CA); other, unprocessed images are made available here as supporting online material. Enlargements of the high-resolution photos, taken with a Canon EOS 20D SLR (Canon, Tokyo, Japan) camera in raw format at 23:45 Mbytes per file, show unmistakable weatherings, including pitting over incisions, with mineralization around the pits and inside the carved lines, a secure sign of ancient surface alteration. This was confirmed by 20X magnification and mineralogical analysis courtesy of Ricardo Sanchez Hernandez and Jasinto Robles Camacho of the Laboratorio de Geologia INAH. In ancient times, the surface of the block had been carefully ground to prepare the incised text, possible as an erasable document that could be removed and revised.”
— Science. “Oldest Writing in the World”. Ma. del Carmen Rodriguez Martinez, Ponciano Ortiz Ceballos, Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, Stephen D. Houston, Karl A. Taube, Alredo Delgado Calderon. Vol. 313 15 September 2006 p. 1611.
To find something roughly the same size, I googled the dimensions 36cmx21cm, and I got something in so many scripts besides my own, the 36x21 bleeding through like a mistake in a whisper. Yes, that’s right, we use inches. Convert. Translate.
ok. let’s try 15in.x8in. A roll of ply paper. A standard tooth handsaw. A yellow toner cartridge. Crayola Art Kit. Staub Rectangular Roasting Dish. Djembe. Ditty bag. Touch screen monitor. Powerbook G4. Soft-side tackle station. White ABS PA Speaker. Freestanding ice-maker. Fog free mirror. 15-inch/M Class/ TFTColor/ AC/XGA/ 8MB.
Patina, and vestiges of local orange clay: the passage of something becoming marked as old, as becoming more and more different from what is current.
Another aspect worth dragging out, woah, worth unhooking, reknitting, is the fact that the glyphs contain marks made by two different instruments. The one, “blunted, ideal for outlines, the other, sharper to make incisions within signs”. Here, there is a whole theory of texts, of texture. Drawing figures, is, after all, figural. The cross-hatchings of these two layers of text: the big, the bold, the obvious, the dominant, with the interior, the soft, the lovely, the intricate, somehow means that meaning is stitched onto a frame, that there is order beneath order, at least that there are two different types of order. And that they are at least different enough to be crafted using two different kinds of writing implements / that there is some way that meaning and grammar end up cohabitating the same location.
And that there is nothing too disparate about stone and paper, after all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)