holon

#body in space #to read #linguistic definition #active words #issue

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"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

-Maurice Sendak

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p.34

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A holon (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was used by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48) and the phrase to hólon is a Greek word preceding the Latin analogue universum, in the sense of totality, a whole. 

A holon is a system (or phenomenon) that is an evolving self-organizing dissipative structure, composed of other holons, whose structures exist at a balance point between chaos and order. It is sometimes discussed in the context of self-organizing holarchic open systems (or, SOHO systems).[3] A holon is maintained by the throughput of matter–energy and information–entropy connected to other holons and is simultaneously a whole in itself and at the same time is nested within another holon and so is a part of something much larger than itself. On a non-physical level, words, ideas, sounds, emotions—everything that can be identified—is simultaneously part of something, and can be viewed as having parts of its own, similar to sign in regard of semiotics.

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In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo.

Tiresias is presented as a complexly liminal figure, mediating between humankind and the gods, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, this world and the Underworld.

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rework

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disarray

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His not being here evoked a sense of apartment

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Yet it is ultimately debatable whether any of the seemingly trivial actions happen at all. Everything is veiled in a cloud of uncertainty, and it seems that the more trivial the task (like getting a glass of water) the more impotent the narrator be- comes in completing it.

“The experience of translating the essays was one of the most di cult I ever had, in translating. As though the experience were in fact, a piece of  ction by Blanchot, the meaning of a di cult phrase or sentence would often become a physical entity that eluded me, my brain becoming both the pursuer and the arena in which the pur- suit took place. Understanding became an intensely physical act.”

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“I take my lead from the French thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907- 2003). In his view an artwork is not an “accomplishment” or a pro- duction as such, a work of bringing to light, but has an imaginary centre that opens in what he calls “unworking” (désoeuvrement), somewhere beyond being grasped by knowledge and naming.” - Harri Laakso

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désoeuvrement

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Home of the architect Albert Frey

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Tadashi Kawamata, 25.2.2020 (Exhibition Laboratory)