Laura U. Marks Evening Lecture

NOTE: As with all my notes from the EGS, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

The students are required to attend evening lectures given by the faculty each evening as part of our curriculum. Laura U. Marks was the fifth person to give an evening lecture during the August sessions.

"Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art"

Does the perceptible give rise to the infinite?
Finn Brunton's site Manners of Unfolding

The algorithmic art of our time, prior to our perception; arts of latency....

New Media Art points us to this world, an immanence.

Several modes of historiography were employed, genealogy included, here we will tease-out some of the Western absorption of Islamic aesthetics.

9th century CE, Iraq
Minimal parts doctrine -- the world is composed of discrete particles and there is no need to explore the nature of reality any further because the whole of the universe is underwritten by Divine Grace.

• Epicurean atoms: in motion, varying sizes
• Kalāmic atoms: stable, one size

The universe only exists of God and atoms in accidents

Absolute Occasionalism -- God sustains the universe in a series of commands, one body at a time, "continue to exist, continue to exist, continue..."

This was continuous command hypothesis was opposed by the Willing of God.

We can see the anxiety of living in a universe that is constantly on the verge of being eradicated.

The Sunni world closed-off the rational exploration of the Qur'an

In the 13th century there was the rational ordering of how the letters of of the Qur'an would be written. The letters were based on the point in a rhomboid shape. These square shapes harmonize with the square pixel and both serve as the entry to an exploration of the infinite.

What interpellates the subject isn't the image but the jump-cut

Islamic Atomism can help account for the appearance and disappearance in lived experience. The on-off of the signal, the pixel, the voxel; digital media rely on a minimal parts model.

While the Sunni Caliphate held a prohibition against exploring the parts comprising the minimal parts, in Cairo the Shiite Ismaelis were exploring these composing elements.

As writing developed the tiny writing of letter began to become tiny fields of intensive expressions of the infinitesimal sublime