La Commedia Meccanica: Intelligent Modernity of Experience, Experiment, and Esperienza
Abstract: Early Anthropocene culture centers on fear of technological tragedy. The anticipated losses may be of any type: cultural, ecological, ethnic, institutional, climactic, even planetary. Great loss has already occurred and its pace is accelerating, sweeping all events before it, including the practice of art and science from ekphrasis to chatbots and AGI. The counterbalance to tragic awareness has in most traditions taken the form of comedy, such as trickster narrative, partial detachment, or fear-extinguishing play, which preserves positive imagination and helps people adapt. Through-lines and threads connecting the fabric of human events are both necessary and easily lost. One such strand in European modernity is the concept of Esperienza, Italian for experience and experiment, which is central for Dante and precursors like Nicolaus Cusanus or Roger Bacon (in the Latin experientia) as well as successors like Leonardo, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Emerson, Pater, Valery, Joyce, Proust, Calvino, Jung, and Tokarczuk. Thankfully there are equal threads outside of European countries – every person and group has and always has had experience – which can be engaged by all others. Machine and non-machine experience meaningfully differ. If La Joconde is an allegory of Esperienza – Renaissance scholarship has never proposed this despite Leonardo’s declarations that his unique written personification is “the common mother of all the sciences and all the arts,” “the interpreter between humans and nature,” and “the one true maestra” – then its situation of human experience (the sitter) relative to the landscape, architecture, garment, and bridge, i.e. inhabitation and transit, nature plus time, offers a root model of machine and non-machine sharing a relational membrane that reaches as far back in history as one wishes to go and perhaps as far forward. Pater’s dictum of exactly 150 years ago – “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end” – extends Leonardo’s vision that “artists of the future will wear garments ornamented according to their pleasure, and wield the lightest of brushes with the most vivid colors.” In the famous Mona Lisa or ML, mirror to European modernity, human experience traverses and wears the technological fabric while weaving into it by subtle not omnipotent finger-touch the patterns of nature itself: water flow, erosion, circulation and atmosphere. Leonardo warned against failing to see this in his fragment “Of the Cruelty of Man” which destroys Nature for blind pleasure (through Adorno’s introversion of sacrifice). Fatal technological history is akin to the shirt of Nessus, a byproduct of compulsive dominance as in Machiavelli’s mirror for princes. Sustainable cycles among Art, Nature, and Humanity are the foundation of survival and repair. How machine and non-machine perform the history of ekphratic process and catabasis will determine the outcome. If these hypotheses were only fictional, or impossible to prove, it would be even more important to demonstrate them fully and without reserve. References: Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/ Bacon, Roger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon Calvino, Italo, trans. Creagh, Patrick. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane). 1996, London, Vintage. Cusanus, Nicolaus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Cusa Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. The Dawn of Everything. 2021, London, Allen Lane. Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works of C. G. Jung. 1968, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Keizer, Joost. Leonardo's Paradox: Word and Image in the Making of Renaissance Culture. 2019, London, Reaktion Books. Kemp, Martin and Pallanti, Giuseppe. Mona Lisa: the People and the Painting. 2017, Oxford UK, Oxford University Press. Leonardo da Vinci, “Of the Cruelty of Man.” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci#XX_Humorous_Writings Marmor, Max. "'Par che sia mio destino': The Prophetic Dream in Leonardo and in Dante." Raccolta Vinciana 31, 2005, p.145-180. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. 1988, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press. Quanta Magazine podcast about experience: https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-nature-of-consciousness-20230531/ Richter, J. P. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Vols. I&II. 1970, New York, Dover. Tokarczuk, Olga. Flights. 2018, Riverhead Books, New York NY. Ibid, “Ognosia,” 2022. VALÉRY, P., Cowley, M., & Lawler, J. R. (1972). Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 8: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme. Princeton University Press. Warburg, Aby. Mnemosyne Atlas. https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/ Zwijnenberg, Robert. "Walls and Bridges," Anno x, 2020 / Fasciolo 1 / p.116-125 - www.rivista-incontri.nl
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