Arts Being the Skyline
posted by on October 23 at 10:10 AM
Something special appears in the pages of Graham Harman’s short essay on the ideas of Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda:
To use one of DeLanda’s own examples, a city has a certain infrastructure that can be viewed as material, but also has facades and skylines, an excessive surface unnecessary for their current functions. The term “skyline” is so nice that it ought to be made into a technical term in philosophy: objects are not just hidden material strata, but each has a skyline with which it greets the others.
How does one turn this…
…into a term like “ontology” or “hauntology” or “ontic”? What could a science or theory of the skyline do for us?
where can i find this essay?
Pseudoscientific asshole. Skyline a goddamn word, a nice word but still just a word. Learn to use them the normal way, faggot.
How does one turn this…into a higher resolution image?
(beautiful)
Try "topography"--there's 'natural' topography and there's 'man-made' topography, but it's all topography.
I'm not exactly clear what functions facades and skylines (shouldn't there just be one skyline??) have with respect to their material-ness. Might it just be for decoration, or to one-up the last tower that was built by out-designing the previous buildings? Or do skylines participate in a sign-exchange?
Also, if there were no beauty in any given building--no artistic facade, at least--would it follow that there could be no (imaginary) communication between this building to that building, or this city's skyline to that city's skyline?
Atmosauric.
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