photography

[David Morris]

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0005&msg=45798&keywords=muybridge

----------
(567.9)  "So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas.  Like
signals set out for lost
travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter
but won't interpret, not anymore.  The most persistent of these, which seem to
show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so
many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely
_wet_ gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low
horizons.  They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis.  Three
hundred years ago mathemeticians were learning to break the canonballs rise and
fall into stairsteps of range and height, delta-x and delta-y, allowing them to
grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking
midgets galloped up stairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet
growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound.  This analytic legacy has
been handed down intact - it brought the technicians at Peenmunde to peer at
Askanian films of rocket flights, frame by frame, delta-x and delta-y,
flightless themselves... film and calculus, both pornographies of flight."
----------
Pornography akin to that by Eadweard Muybridge?
http://masters-of-photography.com/M/muybridge/muybridge_ascending_stairs_full.html



On 3/7/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> From Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003), Ch. 1, "The Annihiliation of Time and Space," pp. 1-24 ...
>
> ... the essayist and judge Oliver Wendell Holmes exulted over the way photographs of the material world seemed to eclipse their subjects: "Form is henceforth divorced from matter.  n fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped.
>
> [...]
>
> One way to describe this transformation of the world whose great accelerations came in the 1830s, the 1870s, and the age of the computer is as increasing abstraction. Those carried along on technology's currents were less connected to local places, to the earth itself, to the limitations of the body and biology, to the malleability of memory and imagination.  They were moving into a world where places were being homogenized, where a network of machines and the corporations behind them were dispelling the independence of wilderness, of remoteness, of local culture, a world that was experienced more and more as information and images. It was as though they sacrificed the near to gain the far.  (pp. 21-2)