[-empyre-] Camera Obscura and inner winds

[Johannes Birringer]

that's rather fascinating, John, and reminds me of something I heard from the audiometrics
medical people, regarding the "inner wind" - I did not fully understand what it is  - I think it's a
Chinese Qigong related concept having to do with hearing and hearing problems; 

I think there is no silence ever, is there? (not even in the anechoic chamber -  and strangely, 
I can now hear my pulse or heartbeat in my  left ear, quite often, and I hope that's all good wind.
 

So i was thinking back to the first week of the thematics Christina opened up (on data-mining, sonification, and visualization projects early in July)
and especially the sonics that had perhaps less play here in the discussion (though Aviva mentioned a project of hers - the 'Blued Trees' ecoproject; 
and the reference to "audits"   (    )  and "archival silences" (Lauren Klein) interested me a lot in retrospect after I came across a newspaper article
by an audio artist yesterday on "Die dunkle Seite der Zahl"* [the dark sides of numbers].

It tells the convoluted history of the invention (by Herman Hollerith) of the electromechanical punched card tabulator (for data processing) in the 1880s, 
to assist in summarizing information and, later, accounting; already in 1890 the US deployed it for the census, then censuses in England, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Canada, 
France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, & the Philippines used the technical system. 
(Hollerith was founder of The Tabulating Machine Company that was consolidated in 1911  to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed IBM). 
The audit sytem/Hollerith code was used effectively during the Nazi era to identify Jews; numbers were tatoo into the arms of prisoners in concentration camps.
('Lochkartenvita', a number as ID).

This makes me think back again to your discussion in the first week on the limits of critique (and I disagreed later on the 'machine vision' idea and therefore posted the
photo of "Those that are near. Those that are far" from the Synagoge Stommeln), and on the question of design and postrepresentation. Erin Leland wrote eloquently
on how bodies are inhabited through a replication of body languages, and I found much resonance in this and wondered whether we can continue to discuss a bit,
as our moderator, Christina McPhee, has not closed the debate yet?


regards
Johannes Birringer

*  Martin Burckhardt, "Die dunkle Seite der Zahl," FAZ 9 August 2016, p. 13

>>
[Jon Ippolito schreibt]

A footnote on a possible intersection between the phenomenology of the camera obscura and John Cage: Eigengrau is the "almost black" color your brain sees in complete darkness--a visual analog to the quasi-silence Cage heard in an anechoic chamber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9ZOlFB-kI
>>