Δευτέρα 4 Ιουλίου 2011

Code Lexomorphes; iconic dimension of Greek language.



CODE LEXOMORPHE 
Numerical modelling of Greek words
on the edge of truth and deceit
by
POLYXENE KASDA

Could a word swallow you in its invisible orbits, toss you up and down until it empties you, structure you according to its image and throw you out, while it remains indifferent, unchanged?

End of the eighties. I had just published my interdisciplinary essay The Conscious Eye, an eye that sees itself seeing, thinking itself thinking as it undergoes the crisis of self consciousness that sealed the arts and sciences of the XXth c. and revealed the linguistic sub-scaffold of visual reality
I was left with a sense of dissatisfaction: something deeper was still exerting its irresistible attraction on me, something essential was missing (SEM, as I call it)) and I knew that I had to go through it in order to go beyond it and be delivered from its insisting pressure. Only through 'methexis' can you comprehend, without undestanding, those matters of the soul and my art allows me to give tangible form to those unreachable states of being, on the edges of logic, where I breathe more freely. 
 performance Persephone in the temple in the bottom of the Lake of Mornos 1990
photo doc. Stefanos Samios
I decided to surrender to this SEM irresistible attraction and it dragged me in the bottom of a Lake. I found myself inside my own reflection, trapped in the other side of the mirror. The scenery was the bottom of the Lake of Mornos (in Lidoriki, on the way to Delphes) which had surfaced, for a while, in 1990, because of the drought, revealing an ancient city, a village and a sumptuous stone church, all dressed in oysters. 
Instinctively, I headed to the altar and I started digging in the mud as though I were looking, blindly, for something in the dark. My tentative movements gave rise to hundreds of primordial earth sculptures, which I instinctively named Chrysalii. I did not know it then, but I was dunk inside a vortex; a warped dimension, that was about to change my life.
My internal and external landscape had fused and I had the impression of stepping inside myself in a soft, spongelike, space of presence; In fact, I was captured in the force field of the word Chrysalis, which had, imperceptibly, swallowed  me like a shark hiding behind its own light.

Chrysalii installation in the bottom of the Lake of Mornos 1990. photo Samios
 This performance was followed by a series of parallel installations of the Chrysalii mud sculptures, around the globe with the creative interaction of artists and scientists, who installed them in around 300 spots around the world, in 27 countries (project launched in the Meeting of the Worlds in Joensu, Finland 91). The Chrysalii were fractal clones of the same Chrysalis which had demonstrated the 'butterfly effect'; the power of its own entelechy.
Soon, the resulting biodegradable, global, 'geocaching' installation melted in the rain, leaving behind the spectral dimension of its transformative name Chrysalis. Thus, I moved, in 1990, from the bottom of a lake, into the planetary dimension, without the use of high technology; without the help of internet (in  early nineties, the fax was still considered as a breakthrough). The magnetic word  was carrying me, like a spaceship, from the bottom of the waters to the aeronautic dimension of the future present. 
In the context of the structural exhibition, in the Municipality of Athens, titled Concept/Form, in 1991, I knailed the letters of the Greek word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ, on a horizontal board laying on a mirror and I pulled out of each letter, strings, with lengths analogous to their ancient numerical charge.  “number is the wisest of beings and second in wisdom is the name-maker”, according to Pythagoras. At the quantum level there are only numbers, anyway.
Lexomorphe Chrysalis ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ (Homage a Stazewski, Concept/Form, 1991}photo S.Samios
Horizontal configuration
The vertical geometrical configuration of the word Chrysalis
 breeds the momentous form of the Grail 
is language growing  space points connected with the gravity of the word?

Continuing my experimentation, I lifted the board with the word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ in a vertical position, I pivoted the constructionand the form of the Grail emerged. 
Was the archetype of eternal quest shrouded in the numerical orbits of a Greek name which, according to Anaxagoras, is a “Speaking Sculpture”? Was it the very archetype of eternal quest that had hurled me in this quest?
 True or false, in my self-consistent story, it made sense; archetypes are the generic source of  ideas, that may, or, may not find their way in the insufficiencies of spacetime. The weird thing is that you cannot be conscious of their workings unless you recreate them from  inside out, swallowed in their vibrational belly. Archetypes are ever promiscuous and ever virgin; they are always new.
Lexomorphe Chrysalis was to become, 14 years later, in 2004, an Olympic, logocentric monument,  which connected vertically, the event of the return of the Olympic games to their seed principle of Dionysian regeneration, seeded in 14th BC Arcadia Lykaia games, in which, the champion, like a chrysalis, on the verge of life and death, trespassed, with a leap of self- hypervasis, his mortal condition and was venerated as an Immortal, regenerating, through resonance, the natural world with this act.The olympic games are not games of survival, but, contests of trespassing the instinct of survival itself. In Greek they are called Olympic Agones; the agony of striving towards Being.
In the internal coherence of my system, the whole 'Grail' adventure (1990-2004-   ) was encapsulated in my ritual performance, in the sunken altar of Mornos lake, in 1990.
 The Word itself seemed to be endowed with the power to stretch the idea from its atemporal inkbed into the insufficiencies of spacetime. 
Was the word Chrysalis a warped passage to our  fourth dimension? Was its Grail-like shape analogous to its 'spectral dimension' while touching the building blocks of spacetime?  
Through art I could play and tinker concretely with abstract ideas and get insights into the true nature of things "which likes to hide"(Heraclites).  

the word monument Chrysalis hosts the Olympic Flame, Floisvos, Athens 2004
peformance Persephone in the temple in the bottom of the lake 1990



The numerical scaffold of the word ΧΡΥΣΑΛΛΙΣ 2004 was dressed, for the Olympiade, with my innovative material PXK; a lace-like, flexible and light, aluminum-based material, named after the initials of my name, which, coincidentally, turned out to be the scientific name of a homo sapiens gene connected to mutation. It was the Human Genome year 2003.

The next five years I was busy realizing the open-ended  planetary installation PXK ROUTE 2004-09-. The planet had shrunk to the size of my home: I was starting a PXK installation in the Biennial of Beijing 05, to continue it, after a few days in the Biennial of Poetry in Italy, to extend it to the Biennial of Tashkent 07 and the next day to continue the installation in the White Night event, in Paris 07.....It was a thrilling, skin-shedding adventure, carrying rolls of PXK under my arm, travelling throughout the globe,  leaving behind, PXK extensions, converting old things, into still older and precious works of art, like the Midas touch. PXK became the symbol of the Biennial of Poetry in Alessandria, Italy 04, titled Truth and Deceit and in 2008 my PXK dress was awarded a golden medal in the Olympic Fine Arts of Beijing. The whole installation PXK ROUTE, which looked like a fossilized remnant of a lost civilization, detected in the sea bed of time, from some point in the future, was presented in the international symposium organized by the Biennial of Beijing 2008.
It was obvious to me, by then, that whatever was related to the word Chrysalis had the winged dimension of the butterfly; the Logos (reason to be) which gave meaning to the Chrysalis' life and  death. Is language the career of our entelechy?
In the same way, the Greek word Psyche/ ΨΥΧΗ revealed, through its numerical modelling the form of a butterfly, the word ΜΈΔΟΥΣΑ/Medusa generated a spinning wheel, image of mental acceleration (Gorgon). The word ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ generated an Eagle, symbol of the Spirit. The word ΟΝΟΜΑ/Name took the form of an amphora; the container that gives form to the void .
DAKRY (teardrop)
ANTHROPOS
 MEDOUSA

Always on the edge of truth and deceit, like all this story, the Lexomorphes have something of the Troubadours' Gai Savoir, with the double ambivalent meaning. They feed the elusive Erotimatikon which snowballs, like its derivative Eros, keeping us in creative tension.
The Lexomorphes are a polysemantic code that could be carved on rocks, just in case of, God forbid, nuclear disaster, or, on space-communication plates. It is a meaningful information system tool, which can be easily programmed in the computers, maybe as a tribute to the ancient Greek computer of Antikythera. 
Code Lexomorphes is an elegant information code, deeply rooted in our Pythagorean cultural heritage. True or false it is a way to create a self-consistent system that generates ontological and formalistic questions..  

ΟΝΟΜΑ, ΕΛΠΙΔΑ, ΨΥΧΗ, ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ/ name, hope, psyche, anthropos
Lexomorphes applications by P. Kasda, A. Papantoniou, A. Sitra
Number sets, according to Banach -Tarsky, can cross dimensions, re-scaling without losing their characteristics. The Lexomorphes are number configurations that help us understand the gravity of words.
According to Heraclites «the name is uttered from the invisible and it is a physical law".
Fred Hoyle compares the letters of the alphabet to genes of cosmic origin which contribute in the evolution of life. For Burroughs, language is an extraterrestrial virus which tortures us but saves us from entropy.
Could language be an extra-dimensional virus; the Virus of MAN which transmutes us from animals to human beings? In Greek language, a process of self -birth is latent, a drive pushing us to  self-surpassing heroic fits, that challenge our own survival needs. 


Architectural simulation applications of  the numerical modelling of the  word ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΣ
Poly Kasda -Anna Sitra (architect)
The Lexomorphes are elegant logocentric structures, which could be embedded in the urban architecture, for a renormalization of our rhythm, which is systematically, disrupted by the systems of power .
Walter Benjamin had sustained that the seat of ontological experience is language.
Here, I deposit a parcel of my adventure in the morphic fields of a word-that-swallowed me; a game of hide and seek with the Zopyron; the 'Fire' that makes us grow out of ourselves, creating culture within civilization; Culture is based on open possibilities and self -hypervasis, Civilization is based on self maintenance and survival needs (L. Blaga). In Greek language these two words coincide: 'Politismos'.
Survival without self-supercedence, is not possible, in Greek culture
Truth/ αλήθεια means fishing for the divine/ «θεία άλη». Greece follows, incessantly, the muddy steps of God. Our language reflects the Horrible Mystery of the fractal fission of this 'indescribable Logos' from Α το Ω, in which Being, or, PAI, dies and is, uninterruptedly, reborn.

synthesis of Lexomorphes ONOMA, PSYCHE, ELPIDA, ANTHROPOS
(Kasda-Sitra- Papantoniou)
On August 22 NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has left a dot Morse code track on Martian soil.
Here, I propose an elegant code rooted in ancient Greek Pythagorean tradition. 

 

In the Australian Kalkatoungou aborigine dialect, the word for ‘eye’ stands also for ‘seed/ star/ raindrop’, that is the analogical way the aborigine embed themselves in the world. This netlike approach was similar to what was happening in the Magistrus kitchen, around the table covered with plums, olives, bread and endless coffees; we were treating the void as solid water: Huge word-structures, were rising like alien ship prows, opening up into other word structures; the world was transformed into a holographic acropolis of talking sculptures, sliding on infinite layers, which started from the everyday things to reach a realm of ideas in the depths of my memory, lying anywhere else, outside my brain. In fact, we were creating a meta- space, with transcendental coordinates, hovering above the usual space”. P. Kasda {extract from The word that swallowed me, unedited}


-Code Lexomorphes was first presented in Greece in the congress on Greek language 2009, organized by the Chamber of Visual Arts ΕΕΤΕ in the ancient Parliament, with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
- In the congress Urania's Gardens, for the Year of Astronomy 09, in the Cultural Center of the Municipality of Athens, Code Lexomorphes was proposed as a code for interspace communication 
- Project-research Lexomorphes was  first published in Poesia e Spiritualita, Italian review, issue 1. 
- The digital illustrations of the Lexomorphes were made by gameimager Antonis Papantoniou.

@ Polyxene Kasda



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