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Carpets Imagine the Universe Art historians sometimes interpret carpet designs as models of the universe, and I have adopted this slightly old-fashioned practice. For example, a number of Persian carpets look a bit like a universe in which everything emanates from God, as in Islamic Neoplatonism. From a central medallion radiate patterns that become ever more complex: sometimes their motifs are entirely abstract, sometimes they are floral, and sometimes their vinelike forms intertwine tiny creatures. The most complex such carpets were woven during the Safavid period, 1501-1732. They imply a relationship between infinitesimal and infinite, for from any point of view you can reconstitute the generating center, as the monad reconstitutes the universe from its point of view. Ultimately they confirm a whole, though, because the individual motifs do not make sense independently of the center that gives rise to them.

Figure 4 Carpets Imagine the Universe Art historians sometimes interpret carpet designs as models of the universe, and I have adopted this slightly old-fashioned practice. For example, a number of Persian carpets look a bit like a universe in which everything emanates from God, as in Islamic Neoplatonism. From a central medallion radiate patterns that become ever more complex: sometimes their motifs are entirely abstract, sometimes they are floral, and sometimes their vinelike forms intertwine tiny creatures. The most complex such carpets were woven during the Safavid period, 1501-1732. They imply a relationship between infinitesimal and infinite, for from any point of view you can reconstitute the generating center, as the monad reconstitutes the universe from its point of view. Ultimately they confirm a whole, though, because the individual motifs do not make sense independently of the center that gives rise to them.

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Keywords: embodied perception, algorithimic media, Deleuze, carpet as machinic phylum. I have been slowly returning to cinema from long visit to Islamic art and philosophy: Enfoldment and Infinity. There I learned: once you suspend figurative image making, a world of creativity opens up. Large-scale forms, such as figures and narrative, cramp the creative energy of the lines and colors that compose them. But as you know, Islamic art is often aniconic. Freed from representing figures, its lines and forms take on a life of their own. Figures are molar, but life is molecular. So I propose thinking like a carpet as a way to release the life contained by figures. Is it possible to release the energy contained in small units, instead of making them conform to human-scale forms? What would it be to inhabit the point of
Keywords: embodied perception, algorithimic media, Deleuze, carpet as machinic phylum. I have been slowly returning to cinema from long visit to Islamic art and philosophy: Enfoldment and Infinity. There I learned: once you suspend figurative image making, a world of creativity opens up. Large-scale forms, such as figures and narrative, cramp the creative energy of the lines and colors that compose them. But as you know, Islamic art is often aniconic. Freed from representing figures, its lines and forms take on a life of their own. Figures are molar, but life is molecular. So I propose thinking like a carpet as a way to release the life contained by figures. Is it possible to release the energy contained in small units, instead of making them conform to human-scale forms? What would it be to inhabit the point of
Oe ee We hear from such free particles a couple of times in The Movement-Image when Deleuze describes how the smallest elements of “flowing-matter” are perceiving, acting; alive. We do not need to see things, for things themselves already see: “The eye is in things,” he writes, referring to Bergson, who imagined that every point has a point of view that can be, as it were, photographed: “taken in the interior of things and for all the points of space” (Deleuze 1986, 60). These kinds of photographs taken from inside particles are now cropping up in scientific imaging. Similarly, Deleuze identified a gaseous perception in the films of Dziga Vertov, American experimental cinema, and video (we might think of the analog video synthesis of Eric Siegel): works that do not connect movements together but privilege the energy of each freely moving particle. They attain “a pure perception, as it is in things or in matter, to the point to which molecular interactions extend.” Gaseous perception, then, achieves the radical openness to the universe implicit in Bergson’s philosophy of perception: the interval between perception and action becomes so minute that the particle’s entire existence consists of perceiving and acting in a single instant. consists of perceiving and acting in a single instant. Deleuze thus attributes life to the tiniest particles of matter. This theme occurs also in The Fold, where Deleuze extends Leibniz’s already generous definition of the soul, or the monad, from organic entities to anything that “perceives,” i.e. discriminates among and reacts to its environment. Thus cells, proteins, molecules, photons, and atoms can all be considered to perceive. The universe swarms with infinitesimal souls! This attribution of life to all entities calls to mind Charles Peirce’s statement, “Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing Deleuze thus attributes life to the tiniest particles of matter. This theme occurs
Oe ee We hear from such free particles a couple of times in The Movement-Image when Deleuze describes how the smallest elements of “flowing-matter” are perceiving, acting; alive. We do not need to see things, for things themselves already see: “The eye is in things,” he writes, referring to Bergson, who imagined that every point has a point of view that can be, as it were, photographed: “taken in the interior of things and for all the points of space” (Deleuze 1986, 60). These kinds of photographs taken from inside particles are now cropping up in scientific imaging. Similarly, Deleuze identified a gaseous perception in the films of Dziga Vertov, American experimental cinema, and video (we might think of the analog video synthesis of Eric Siegel): works that do not connect movements together but privilege the energy of each freely moving particle. They attain “a pure perception, as it is in things or in matter, to the point to which molecular interactions extend.” Gaseous perception, then, achieves the radical openness to the universe implicit in Bergson’s philosophy of perception: the interval between perception and action becomes so minute that the particle’s entire existence consists of perceiving and acting in a single instant. consists of perceiving and acting in a single instant. Deleuze thus attributes life to the tiniest particles of matter. This theme occurs also in The Fold, where Deleuze extends Leibniz’s already generous definition of the soul, or the monad, from organic entities to anything that “perceives,” i.e. discriminates among and reacts to its environment. Thus cells, proteins, molecules, photons, and atoms can all be considered to perceive. The universe swarms with infinitesimal souls! This attribution of life to all entities calls to mind Charles Peirce’s statement, “Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing Deleuze thus attributes life to the tiniest particles of matter. This theme occurs
Figure 1. Screenshots from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind Points Connected to the Universe
Figure 1. Screenshots from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind Points Connected to the Universe
Related topics:
Algorithmic MediaEmbodied Cognition and Cinema
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