I haven't yet had time to absorb or consolidate the three (and about to be four) days spent at the NIEA Experimental Arts Conference. But this! Wow.
These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's brush hair, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John
Wilkins" in "Other Inquisitions 1937-1952", 1964, p. 103.
fantastic! in an unexpected way. what context did you come across this? JSF
ReplyDeleteIt was in a talk about bark beetles, and the devastating impact they're having on pine forests in the US, Canada and Mexico. The two guys working on it are a physicist and a composer. The composer has been using little homemade devices to record the sound of these beetles in the trees. They then discovered that different species (wrong term I'm sure) of these beetles use different sounds to paralyse the reproductive processes of the other species. They're now developing ways of using sound (rather than pesticides for example) to actually manage the beetle population. Very cool. LW
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome. The next step will be an audible incesticide.
ReplyDeleteHa! Did you actually mean incesticide? LW
ReplyDeleteBut of course... I'm country!! JSF
ReplyDelete