Clocking Time in the Doubled-Scope of the Analemma - Tall Tales Told in Time that Passes Massively

Abstract

This talk explores whether and how the register of "style" becomes helpful again with respect to AI-employing design. As a classic and rhetorical register, "style" can perhaps help us to overcome the classification frenzy that currently characterises the theorisation of our coding practices. Especially when coupled with the poetic register of "meter", modelling could thus be attended to via acoustics and mathematical harmonics, hence via listening rather than picturing. I will characterise such modelling as the telling of tall tales in the time of the analemma. The primacy of coding with respect to what we render or write inevitably gives as schematic exaggerations at hand (tall tales), whose proportioning and constellatory articulation becomes the aim of the art(s). Projected upon the plane of the analemma, time passes rhythmically and "massively": the word rhythm describes "return statements", but it also comes from a Greek word meaning "to flow monotonously". Such modelling becomes a form of architectonic story telling whose abstract reference ground is a chiastic crossing of light with time. The proportioning of the exaggerations can thus be approached as cosmic. The classical muses would have a part to play again in the didactic conveying of the arts and disciplines: assuming a primacy of the bodily muses (Pantomime and Dance) before the language muses, a promise of this approach is that canons could be sculpted of how embodied knowledges can co-habit in a domain of wisdom and ethical respect, where truth is neither claimed nor sacrificed as the price to be paid in order to remain in touch with "realism".