I'm tracing the regular roots of Surrealism back through Symbolism to the Romantic, and especially to F. Schlegel. In this image I am concerned to use the techniques of both symbolism (landscape as a symbol-avatar of data) and the construction of the landscape visually as indicative of visionary Surrealism. Whereas in works like Caspar Wolf produced, there is presented a Romantic Naturalism, in this work, Naturalism becomes restated as a representation of memic subjectivity as represented by the digital, whose "exegenesis"
would include things like Bruno Latour's Empirical Metaphyics and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In my own "Irronic" version of Schlegelian 'Witz', the anthropomorphic figural element in the composition echoes ironically the actual term "ant" which echoes my post-telic anthropological concept of "Syntaxis", a term whose meaning is Essay in Latin, but is also of the same format as is used in Entomological studies related to insect / animal perception / conception. The bridgeform also relates to the architectonics of the copula as represented by things like "The Holy Pontiff" which comes from pontifex or bridge builder. As religion is reduced to worshiping language, so is language reduced to stucturality, the copula becoming cognate with bridges and liminality, things like the river styx. Instead of Error, we find a universal portal to multiple worldings, also cognate with Bruno's Empirical Metaphysics. Also, there is a translation, transmutation, of the mind / body unity extant in the occult roots of R/S/S, a mind body unity cognate to an 'Empirical dialecticism' of the material-virtual rendered classical by Heraclitan / Socratic epiphenomenalism. This Socratic-Romantic connection was also made explicit by Schlegel in terms of Irony. In this instance we found a further instance, perhaps, of Ironic species, namely Dialectical Irony which is perhaps only a restating of ANT, or Memics in general, or more probably a way, or bridge of translation onto the concerted stage of Evolutionary theory via some modulus of Biological Fitness, or better Biosemiotics. What would a Romantic Biosemiotics look like?
What if, this image were a functional representation and a GUI? What if an actor could enter into the network
as in various online simulations, and be able to extract unknown data from a system spatially? Is this image a version of what the search engines of the future might look like? What if data could be made to look like dendritic veins? What if virtual material systems could be designed so as to produce a geology of data?
Here the philosophy of reflection, and the physicality of a reflective science are conjoined in a phantasm, or fantasy of interface, a mythic dream of 'access' and of rhapsodic inter-subjective epistemics... Or in terms of Peter Sloterdijk' Spherology, Are we now beginning to fantasize, and contruct "the spherical absolute"? Can it be other than Nature, and our own proper maintenance? Or can we somehow inhabit our own non-representational theory, a chaotic Nietzschean gothic dialectic of will as cultural impasse, and willed impasse as culture.
