+++
No person in the first five hundred years after Leonardo's death suggested in
any known writing that the world's most famous artwork, a rather small portrait
that English-speakers call the Mona Lisa, is an allegory of experience.
What does it mean that five hundred years and six months after Leonardo's
death, someone did? Maybe nothing, but maybe something. We know with
certainty that one "bit" in the network we call human history changed from a
"No" to a "Yes": "has anyone ever suggested that the portrait is of
Experience?" No or yes.
Whether a one-bit change in the the planet's information fabric can have a
multi-bit impact is a question of circumstance and other environmental factors
including free choice. To know if any given local change might affect the
macrocosm, we can ask what it does to a given microcosm when it occurs. This
is like how fungi work; what is adaptive on a small scale may lead to
adaptation on a large scale.
When a person looks at the Mona Lisa -- and despite everything that has
happened, many still do -- what do they see? What happens to them? Many
different things, of course. Mostly however they are saying to themselves "I
am seeing the Mona Lisa; it's a famous painting; it's kind of ugly; she is
smiling; I kind of like it but not really." That is about all that happens.
If they are in the Louvre seeing the real canvas, they might add "it's cool
that I'm in the Louvre seeing the real Mona Lisa so I'll take a photo of myself
and the Mona Lisa in this cool moment to show my friends and family and the
whole world if they care to see. I am somebody."
Now, we can ask, what would change in the final outcome -- for, as we know,
they who would have the cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding --
if the average ordinary person said, in addition to the above, "someone said
this is a picture of experience, like the statue of liberty is a statue of
liberty."
What might this average microcosm of human perception, cognition, and
experience then say? It's all subject to chance and specifics, of course.
They might say, "who cares that stuff is all stupid." Or, they might say "my
friend A said they think it's experience. What even is experience? You can't
paint a portrait of something invisible. Who cares." They might say "I heard
that someone said this might be a portrait of experience, I like ideas and
discussion topics about paintings, I saw it on a web site, maybe it is
experience. In my native language, Italian, that word is 'esperienza' which is
kind of a nice name for a painting. And hey, after all, am I not
'experiencing' this painting? So it has to be experience! Oh funny. I'm
hungry oh there's the cafe I'll get a croissant."
The point is, people could say or experience something, or nothing, in great
variety if they were to engage with the small one-bit question "Is it
Experience?" when they are looking at the Mona Lisa. This variety could occur,
let's say, in July and August when so many visitors from every athletic nation
are in Paris for the Olympics. (In ancient Olympic days, in Greece, the word
for experience was "empeira," as in the English word "empirical" or based on
fact and observation not theory. If we pay respect to the Olympics, we should
also pay respect, you could easily argue, to their word for experience
"empeiria" and the high value they placed on it just as they placed high value
on throwing the discus and javelin and running fast and jumping high, and
wrestling, even boxing.)
Suppose an Olympic visitor from nation A and one from nation B stood together
before the Mona Lisa, La Joconde in French, and said to each other "have you
heard the idea this might be an allegory of experience? In my language the
word for that is 'experiencia' and I wonder if it's true." The other person
could say "the word for experience in my language is 'Erfahrung' and I don't
think it's an allegory. There's no concrete features of experience in the
image and if it were an allegory the artist would be explicit; and if it were
originally a quiet secret we'd have deciphered it by now. No, it's just a
mysterious smile." That could be the end of the conversation and could ruin
the friendship. Or, a third person C nearby could say "my word for experience
is Erfaring, and there's no doubt at all we're experiencing this canvas right?
And the painter probably knew people who spoke different languages would look
at it, even sometimes together. So it is a painting of an experience, prima
facie, and therefore a painting about the word experience, and isn't that a bit
of an allegory?"
All three might laugh a little, or feel charmed by this chance exchange, or
might even become friends and have lunch together, share stories, and foster
hope and goodwill. It certainly could happen, but realistically only if the
hypothesis -- and we may or even must leave it at that -- of the portrait being
an allegory of experience were to have been published. It's too unlikely, like
a tornado hitting a junkyard and building a jetliner, to ever happen if no one
has published the hypothesis first. Too much entropy, and no matter how much
you stir you can't unmix the chocolate milk (cacaomaelk in Danish, like
Erfaring).
Now what if a person from nation D, and another from nation E, heard the people
talking from nations A, B, and C; and suppose the nations of D and E were at
war or contemplating war but some citizens of each also wanted to find a
peaceful way to avoid war. These two other nations, D and E, might use
different words for experience: let's say, "experience" and "esperienza." They
might say, these two people from D and E, not knowing each other or where they
were from but liking each other's faces and the cuts of their respective jibs,
that "if only all nations could share the one thing they have in common --
experience -- and build a just peace on that." "One can dream," the other
might say, and smile.
In the midst of all these tenuous, intangible, evanescent conversations in the
big room at the Louvre, what if let's say some little bit of buzz started to
happen as these things sometimes do. No one throws soup over it, but let's say
some goofball started jumping up and down saying "Experience! Experience!
Experience is her name!" like a complete fool. Then maybe a half dozen other
clowns joined in. No harm done, they would get told to be quieter, but in July
that place will be a madhouse anyway. People will be crammed into that room
with a tall ceiling like a layer of sardines at the bottom of a shipping
container. They'll be burping, farting, sweating, and cursing like sailors
every one even though they maybe got there by a flying not a floating ship. No
one will care much if one shouts like a lunatic "Her name is Experience!" and
laughs like a buffoon; some might even smile slightly at the sight. It might
break the monotony of the long lines, cramped corridors, and overbusy
lavatories.
Suppose then a bit of a topical kerfuffle set in about these holy clowns at the
museum. Some experts or commentators might say "oh she's not Experience, we
have no documents stating that, and no one painted allegories of Experience in
1503 anyway." Then another expert, needing to advance themselves and covetous
of the first expert's high salary and status, dissents, heaven forbid, and says
"Well what if Leonardo was the first? He made written allegories of Experience
so why not a painted one? And De La Hyre painted Experience in 1650. There's
always a first time." The second, aspiring expert might get brutally punished,
fired from their job even, but they might not care, thinking "I was sick of
that stupid place anyway." Or, they might recant. Then a third and a fourth
expert, or non-expert, one established and one aspiring, might rinse and repeat
for no particular reason at all, just because people bore easily and like to
have something to talk about.
You might also see a lot of dissenters crawl out of the woodwork to say "We
should give this possibility a chance; what if it is Experience? That would
mean a lot to world culture. It would connect us all, and provide us with a
common set of roots from this famous artist and scientist, and might even give
us a canopy of branches to shade us from the ever-crueler sun as the planet
shrinks and the climate changes. I say why not? Where's the burden of proof?
This isn't a criminal or even a civil trial, it's art for heaven's sake. It
deserves a hearing same as all these swimmers and bikers deserve a race be it
by road or river."
Without doubt, if the above happened it would count as a "black swan" event.
No one could have predicted it, but it would have an inordinate effect. The
Summer Olympics of 2024 might be known forever after as the Paris of
Experience, where for some fortuitous reason the European tradition and the
rest of the world's traditions rebalanced themselves successfully into a better
place, as so many Parisians have hoped for and despaired of these last long
centuries.
Could this weird constellation of chances be an at least measurable
contribution to the good, however anyone might define good, a lucky break for
the planet amid a long history of unlucky ones? Maybe. It might be worth a
toss. No one can say for sure.
+++
________________________________________
From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-boun...@lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of
Max Herman via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2024 6:10 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Cc: Max Herman
Subject: [NetBehaviour] a few random items
+++
Prehistoric science, a la Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything," from the
preface to an old book from 1969 by Giorgio di Santillana:
"This time I was able to grasp the idea at a glance, because I was ready for
it. Many, many years before, I had questioned myself, in a note, about the
meaning of _fact_ in the crude empirical sense, as applied to the ancients. It
represents, I thought, not the intellectual surprise, not the direct wonder and
astonishment, but first of all an immense, steady, minute attention to the
seasons. What is a solstice or an equinox? It stands for the capacity of
coherence, deduction, imaginative intention and reconstruction with which we
could hardly credit our forefathers. And yet there it was. I _saw_.
Mathematics was moving up to me from the depths of centuries; not after myth,
but before it. Not armed with Greek rigor, but with the imagination of
astrological power, with the understanding of astronomy. Number gave the key.
Way back in time, before writing was even invented, it was _measures_ and
_counting_ that provided the armature, the frame on which the texture of real
myth was to grow."
+++
Don Quixote, who circa 1605 said "Experience itself, the mother of all the
Sciences" and used the word "experiencia" forty additional times, discussed in
a post about avoiding the European/Ottoman conflict's new variation in the
US/China rivalry by using lessons from early modern Spanish fiction:
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2404/msg00000.html
+++
Tampere University has a study center for the History of Experience:
https://research.tuni.fi/hex/
+++
Mary Baine Campbell article about alchemy, AI/GPT, and the homunculus, which
argues that metaphor was "the supreme figure of early modern poetry":
https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i02_02campbell_comp3_083010_JM_0.pdf
+++
“We know that, during the Renaissance, a lot of imagery was intended to be
enigmatic — it was intended to be interpreted in many ways and to kind of spark
discussion,” Nogueira said. “And so if we find some of it confusing today, it’s
not just because we’re centuries removed — it was intended to be that way.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/style/hidden-faces-met-museum-renaissance-portraits/index.html
+++
Whitehead quote about Leonardo from "Science and the Modern World," perhaps not
quite right if indeed La Joconde is Esperienza, and given that Leonardo wrote
"Experience, the interpreter between formative nature and the human race,
teaches how that nature acts among mortals":
"Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon and the whole
modern point of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived almost exactly
a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrates the theory which I was
advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an
important ingredient in the formation of our scientific mentality. Indeed,
Leonardo was more completely a man of science than was Bacon. The practice of
naturalistic art is more akin to the practice of physics, chemistry and biology
than is the practice of law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s
contemporary, Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, that
Bacon ‘wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the
modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various
strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality
and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists."
[Some believe it was actually Leonardo who discovered the circulation of the
blood.]
+++
Book from 2016, "Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature":
https://academic.oup.com/book/26933
+++
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