<nettime> The Animate Network and One-Bit Shifts: How La Gioconda's True Name Changes Everything

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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The esperienza allegory hypothesis, which for the first time in known scholarship argues that La Joconde is a portrait of experience and experiment, personified by Leonardo as "the one true maestra," is now increasingly viewed as a legitimate, viable, and original multidisciplinary approach to Leonardo and hence to all modernity and all its origins.

For example, just read what Robert Zwijnenberg wrote for Routledge in 2008, in Renaissance Theory, pp. 409-410:

"My consideration of Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger is not meant to support the conclusion that this installation can explain Leonardo’s mirror room or that in any way Leonardo is a precursor of twentieth-century installation art. Rather, this detour served the purpose of creating a specific anachronistic moment, one that allowed me to conceive of the mirror room as an historical object in which the experience of the body, the body of Leonardo, is at the very center. All its meanings – anatomical, optical, artistic – are secondary to the way in which it enables him to experience his own body, to its relevance as a technological tool that helps him relate his body to the world by mediating and making visible what he cannot otherwise see or understand, even if only in fragmentary fashion.  This conclusion opens up a new historical approach of Leonardo in which the experience of the human body in the world -- that is, in nature, in society, in natural philosophy, in technology, in religion -- needs to be considered as the starting point and driving force of Leonardo’s studies of nature and man. We need to approach Leonardo’s ideas and activities involving art and the philosophy of nature by looking at how he articulates the experience of his body in his texts, paintings, and drawings, in order to understand the interconnectedness of his various activities."

Many details are still confidential, but later this fall there will be a much higher profile for the esperienza hypothesis.  Everyone knows the Mona Lisa, and everyone knows what a name is, and everyone knows what a real name is.  Everyone can get the idea that the Mona Lisa's real name (especially since Leonardo never named the portrait anything) is Esperienza, Italian for experience and experiment, which Leonardo wrote was "the common mother of all the arts and sciences," same as the Statue of Liberty is a statue of liberty.  Sure it's a little Magritte but it would be false to say 1500 didn't understand masks, and codes (Alberti was born in Florence fifty years before Leonardo and invented European cryptography), and mirrors, and lying, and unveiling, and lying to protect the good versus lying to speed slaughter, and the idea that right makes might which doesn't always defeat the idea that might makes right.  Leonardo and Machiavelli are the only two examples you need for proof all that was very well understood indeed so doubting it is just obtuse.  

One perfectly suitable general platform for this new and revised discussion of modernity's start (to help explain its middle, where we are now, and help us get safely to its goal which may be called sustainability) is Ken Burns' film on Leonardo due out November 18-19, his first non-American subject matter, press release at PBS' website.   

Note the film's quotation, as the title of Part One of the film, of Leonardo's mid-career statement of purpose or SoP amidst the double-helical torii of Atlanticus 520r, circa the Virgin of the Rocks:

Body born of the perspective of Leonardo of Vinci, disciple of experience.
[below]
Let this body be made not of examples from another body, but only of simple lines.  

Corpo nato dalla prospettiva Leonardi Vinci, discepolo della sperienzia.
[sotto]
Sia fatto questo corpo sanza esemplo d’alcun corpo, ma solamente con semplici linie.

https://teche.museogalileo.it/leonardo/foglio/index.html?num=ATL.1039.1&lang=en

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Therefore starting now we must take heed of our net-cultural responsibilities, to the extent we have agency and can choose our informational expression in any mode this month, and set forth the political reality of the 2024 elections in the manner most helpful to the translational shift of the Esperienza hypothesis functor.  That means choosing normal constitutional democracy with hybrid economics over a regressive klepto-demagoguery intent on war and plunder short-term specifically in hotspots of which we all are aware keenly.  War profiteering will grease the klepto-demagogues' wheels with great lubricity, but will not make their faith that might makes right right.  They would commit grave wrongs, their nature being the path of resolving conflict by violence, and great harm against all living things human and non-human, relative to peaceful ways.  So we who favor peace must exert our efforts too; there is no great-granma and granpa in the sky who will save peace for us.  If we don't make it possible and real it won't be.  We shall reap what we sow, in November as in October, so if no one offers a counter-offer to what's on offer from libertarian tech bros, apt architects of the nightmare-net who despise democracy, then what they offer will prevail.  

The keys to the election as always, being a one-bit choice (yes or no to klepto-demagoguery) in the longtime two party system, are unity and turnout.  A unifying message makes the big tent, and turnout brings in the campers.  The best of both is that which harmonizes each to each, even to the point of resonance, inspiring strong cooperation among all participants.  Leonardo is well-nigh perfect to harmonize the two keys, since he has full mastery of traditional values from ancient and medieval times as well as the finest modern progressive credentials possible in terms of environmental protection, ethical economics, and imaginatively holistic science and art in the service of both.  It's rather he pity he is so infrequently read, much less read well, for the author that he is; but he spoke and wrote concisely, therefore catch up can be done in a week via wikiquote, and if you need permission from a modern Paul Valery, Italo Calvino, and Walter Pater — who wrote the first modern poem according to Yeats, about La Joconde no less, inspiring Proust, Joyce, Stevens, Stein, and all other moderns — are all easy to find.  One week is plenty of time to get caught up; and what's even better, Leonardo even includes strong light bridges leading back to lost indigenous wisdom regarding all those topics of which the ancient, medieval, and yes modern eras were so assiduously denuded during many long centuries out of a kind of sorrowful envy.  So lack of time is no excuse.

Another solution-ingredient for these two factors is ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is.  My mom said to remove the Occupy Wall Street reference because it's too distracting and tangential, but I do think it's a necessary if aromatically slightly bitter nutrient for this particular planting.  The left and center need to unify; that means a slight twist of discomfort for each, not tearing any ligament but unavoidably stretching fibers unaccustomed to stretching.  But it's not orthodox or identical, this reference; we all occupy democracy whether we choose to admit it or not and no one can or should tell all occupants what to think and do.  Basic decent involvement a la Hamilton, leaving a great many details to be sorted out later after the defeat of klepto-demagoguery's latest example, is enough to win if we are smart enough and decent enough to do our parts.  Klepto-libertarian demagogues and their AI/GPT chatbot farms love to sow confused inchoate anxiety and inaction among free agents, therefore a degree of counter-exertion is every voter's obligation.  Their feeds to you are dumbing you down, down to the ground, and will gladly keep you there forever as they go on with "Selling Paradise" as Leonardo warned against, but you are free to say no — or like Bartleby the Scrivener, "I prefer not to" — and then go from there.

So, unity and turnout are the order of the day and Leonardo can help with both.  Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their society.

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What then, we must ask ourselves, is to be expected should it be found true, this Esperienza Allegory Hypothesis?

A stampede of art historians agreeing is not immediately likely.  More probable is one or two, then push-back, then contention, grudging tolerance, a shifting of disciplinary consensus over multiple topographical regions, then preponderance a la Darwin or disappearance from consideration.  The hypothesis is that precipitous. 

All of a sudden, there will be a fulcrum not manageable by any machine exactly because it has no precedent that can be copied and pasted with predictable results.  Humanity will have a choice, or to be precise the network of active human persons today will encounter a network of choices, pertaining uniquely to each human familiar with the image and their situation, of what word to apply, what one word, to Leonardo's painting of a woman on a balcony.  Indeed it is another one-bit decision, yea or nay, to attach the word Esperienza to said image -- temporarily goes without saying since all word-image attachments are temporary and in flux, at least as much as the cells and calls of every living body are — involving almost every person who knows the painting.  

Some will say yea, others nay, as irrefutably has already occurred, and more and more as examples proliferate.  Still, even for those who say nay a new body of work will have appeared, not because it wasn't here all along but because we couldn't see it before.  We couldn't match the words to the images, but now we can.  This changing of a single major node in European history, this painting and its name, like one brain region changing function, will change the entire network of European and Euro-derived human activity.  Since art and science are one the whole network will change.  This is the particular advantage of biological networks — they truly are webs of life — over computer digital networks.  The latter are not alive; they are tools used either for good or ill and with greater or lesser waste production and damage to living things.  It is humanity's shirt of Nessus, this layer of created techne, or the double garment — la doppia vesta — of sustainable technological balance.  That we get to choose is the paradox; and if you think there is no choice then why won't you get out of the kitchen?  When you're talking about choice and conscience the network is not the wires, any more than in 1924 it was the ink and newsprint and uniforms and loudspeakers, but something else entirely, the man within the monk.  

Many doubt the existence of such a thing as virtue, but if we take it to mean health as in the health of nature's biodiversity then we might persuade them a little, and might also explain why the increase of virtue even among a very few people or even only one, even for a day or just an hour, makes the principle that right makes might in its manifest influence not just our human theory of same stronger and more real in the world of history and events relative to its rival the subordinate or lower-truth-level might makes right.  So enhancing virtue, increasing the wellbeing of the awareness that chooses how to use an instrument as distinct from the instrument itself, is both possible and completely necessary; or as Dante said, "trasumanar significar per verba non si poria," and as Leonardo said "every instrument (strumeto) requires to be made by experience (sperieza)."  

Then we may read better this by Leonardo: "Wisdom is the daughter of experience"  (La sapietia e figliola della sperietia).  And then, even more importantly for technology network theorists and commentators, we may read his tiny parable "Of the Instrument":  "Any one who spends one ducat may take the instrument, and he will not pay more than half a ducat as a premium to the inventor of the instrument and one grosso to the workman every year.  I do not want sub-officials."

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The new name-label of the portrait, so freely testable without fear since it can always change back the same as you can change your own name from A to B, calling La Gioconda, finally and for the first wondrous time, Esperienza and really meaning it which is to say knowing what you're saying, will make a new cultural vocabulary, a vocabulary of words and images like the Pointing Lady, RCIN 912581, who points to something, available to all cultures extant today:  that is, to all present culture be it modern, medieval, ancient, or indigenous, in all places, and in every variety of combinatoria and recombination.  This in fact was the author's design -- and Leonardo was an author, absolutely, indeed a great one, that is to say one who set long term goals of significance and largely achieved them despite the terrors of erasure, confusion, censorship, and falsity -- and as such proves itself a design or desegno which compels us to acknowledge Leonardo understood networks with extraordinary intelligence even to the point of designing and engineering them as well as or better than any other single human has ever done.  

His goal in such design was to assist the great transition of humanity and hence the planet (which he saw would soon be at humanity's mercy, to live or die as we decided) from unsustainable to sustainable planetary life, or as he called it, the world's vegetative soul.

Some like to compartmentalize and separate parts of complex systems so they can be experts and get consultant fees and or gatekeepers who charge admission.  Such pointless subdivision has been of limited use since it began, little more than a stalling tactic, and is now almost totally wasteful.  The good news is that Leonardo foresaw all this, and designed a renewable network, the parts of which all remain intact due to deep redundancies and need only our simple decision to be reactivated. 

Therefore, despite all doubt, it really is true that all the planet needs in a sense is to pair one specific image with one particular word.  That's the tumbler-click (the A = B) or ratchet-tooth which every good renaissance mechanic knew to begin with.  It is what allows timing, this tooth, same as with watches, and every case of even biological evolution needs to know how to work with time.  It's what allows waiting, but also acting when the time is right and when there is no more time to wait.  

If you dont believe me, which you shouldnt without verifying with your own eyes, try the experiment.  Ive spelled this out many times but here goes again:  "Look at La Joconde, any copy, for 5 minutes, aware of your breathing, focusing on the bridge.  When done share your experience."

Then China can fast forward past a second cold war to enlightened cooperation with the rest of the world which has also fast forwarded.  Then China's choices vis-a-vis other conflict zones can adjust accordingly, choosing peace — really choosing it, as if the eternal light of truth is beamed upon you in full power which in truth it truly is — and doing what is necessary to follow the path of peace.  That is the best and wisest way to tamp down the hotspots from bursting forth fully into ever-worsening horrors.  A cultural guide not exclusive to Europe, articulated by a map-maker who saw the earth aright and as one, which is to say Leonardo and Esperienza, is the means of transit for all this information flow or path which can link to the network cycle of peace bypassing war and leaving it unused.  

The cultural learning necessary for peace will have accelerated so much that a whole century of war can be skipped, if European and other global verbal and visual imagination can interact positively with authors like Guobin Yang, Gao Xingjian (who has called for a new renaissance), Mengying Li, Peter Hessler, and Aifeng Ma to influence the decision-makers of the Chinese state along the better path of cooperation not confrontation, reform not regress, and trust not fear among all.  Leonardo designed his portrait in fact for non-romance languages, because, as he wrote, being an author as well as a painter, a picture can be understood without knowing the language of its author whereas a poem cannot.  And the same word transited from Latin to English, experientia or "out of many attempts," as "experience" in Bacon's Opus Majus, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, and Bacon's Novum Organum, whence inevitably to Hume and then Hamilton in the closing paragraph of the Federalist Papers (no. 85), and thus intact to our election next month.

What else?  A lot. 

And after all, we all might ask ourselves, is not each birth the crossing of a bridge, emerging from within to the without, the microcosm to the macrocosm, and as a bridge a path from one place to another?  


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