Consider two visual representations of statistics. The first is a spiral, in which the downward trend of world trade ensnares national economies in a web-like graph (image 1). The graph, as it appeared in 1933, in the League of Nations’ World Economic Survey, registers the contraction of trade in the wake of the 1929 Wall […]
Congress of Idling Persons
The races had stopped some months earlier and the horses had been laid off. Most of the owners had private stables, but some horses remained at the horse track, where they roamed around in groups of three, making their demands in sad horse argot before meal time. In the afternoon, their braying sounded, at least […]
What Remains is Constant
1. John Hutchinson (1811–1861) grew up in the coal-mining region of Newcastle upon Tyne, in northeast England, and came from a middle-class family of parish clerks, farmers, and coal merchants. During his lifetime, he worked across the fields of physiology and mechanical engineering, by way of being an assistant physician at the Hospital for Consumption […]
Sonic debris : Rebuilding former spatialities through reverberations
“Multiplicity and variety of inflections produce “events,” or vibrations, “with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples.” Movement of a concept that has bearing upon a subject’s impressions of the physical world does not elevate according to a spiral plan, which belongs to philosophy. but radiates or ramifies everywhere in the geography of experience. such that […]
Encountering “Allouchi”
In Max Weiss’s In the Shadows of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010), a scholarly exploration of the gradual “institutionalization of Shi’i difference” in Lebanon, Weiss quotes a passage from Lebanese film critic Mohammed Soueid’s interview with Omar Amiralay, in which the late Syrian filmmaker reflects on a “fantastical” childhood vision: ‘I saw […]
ر.ق.م (Number)
“Arrival”, the first episode of British science-fiction television series The Prisoner, first aired in the UK, on ITV, in September 1967. The opening title sequence is a frenetic montage that starts with a shot of a cloudy sky and a thunderous boom, followed by a shot of a sports car zooming across a runway, manically heading […]