Quotes from The Vision Machine

Sullivan: "The germ is the real thing; the seat of identity. Within its delicate mechanism lies the will to power: the function of which is to seek and eventually to find its full expression in form."

Arnheim: "The structural theme must be conceived of dynamically, as a pattern of forces, not an arrangement of static shapes"

Frazer: "'Imaginative use' in our case means using the computer...to compress evolutionary space and time so that complexity and emergent architectural form are able to develop."..."Life indeed exists on the edge of chaos, and this is the point of departure for our new model of architecture." ..."It is further recommended that the concept is process-driven; that is, by form generating rules which consist not of components, but of processes."

Bohm: "Whenever we find a theoretical reason for something, we are exemplifying the notion of ratio, implying that as various aspects are related in our idea, so are they related in the thing that the idea is about."

Paglia: "Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau."

Thompson: "Morphology is not only a study of material things and of the forms of material things, but has its dynamical aspect...in terms of force, of the operations of energy...available energy was the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world."

Reading: "The aesthetics of the banal imitation of some motif of fractal geometry is simply missing half the picture! Aristotle implied that the proper investigation required was one of telos, of form being the result to the process that engendered it" (av: the media being about itself: Fellinis' 8 1/2 is a simple example)

Hegel: "The sublime in general is the attempt to express the infinite, without finding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves to be adequate for this representation."

Hopkins: "The power of the film image to (mis)represent the material and social world lies...in its ability to blur the boundaries of space and time, reproduction and simulation, reality and fantasy, and to obscure the traces of its own ideologically based production."

Russell: "- the concept of dream time, for example, which is a fundamental part of the way an Australian Aboriginal sees life, or the apparent phenomenon of extra sensory perception - have been subordinated in Western culture because they couldn't be perceived by ordinary logic and measure."

Nietszche: "This is the Apollonian state of dreams in which the world of the day becomes veiled, and a new world, clearer, more understandable, more moving than the everyday world and yet more shadowy, presents itself to our eyes in continual rebirth."

Bergson: "How should it be otherwise, if psychology has for its object the study of the human mind working for practical utility, and if metaphysics is but the same mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action to come back to itself as to a pure creative energy?"

Burke: "If the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as those emotions clear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of a dangerous or troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime."

Hooker: "Painting lost its traditional audience and had its representational function usurped by photography. In response, painting, like philosophy, developed a characteristically inward-looking Modernist tendency, but did so as a reaction to the material pressures which directly affected it."

Hanes: "Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet."

Lechte: "What is fundamental to myth, is not the original creation, but in the telling of it. In short, the interest in the myth is not so much in its previously established narrative content, but in the improvisations that take place in the light of indications (often very elementary) established by that content. Myths, then, are like the grammar of a language: what they are in themselves is less important than what they enable to be accomplished".

Taaffe: "beauty can only be the outcome of our aspirations for sublimity"..."The art isn't in what you're seeing- it's what's been awakened inside of you."

Nietzsche: "Almost everything we call 'higher culture' is based on the spiritualization of cruelty."