untitled 16
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
50cm x 65cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“But what is an apparatus? First of all, it is a skein, a multilinear whole. It is composed of lines of different natures. The lines in the apparatus do not encircle or surround systems that are each homogeneous in themselves, the object, the subject, language, etc., but follow directions, trace processes that are always out of balance, that sometimes move closer together and sometimes farther away. Each line is broken, subject to changes in direction, bifurcating and forked, and subjected to derivations. Visible objects, articulable utterances, forces in use, subjects in position are like vectors or tensors. (…) Untangling the lines of an apparatus means, in each case, preparing a map, a cartography, a survey of unexplored lands – this is what [Foucault] calls ‘field work.’ One has to be positioned on the lines themselves; and these lines do not merely compose an apparatus but pass through it and carry it north to south, east to west or diagonally.”
Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?” (1988)
Filed under: Drawings, Gilles Deleuze quotes | Leave a Comment
Tags: apparatus, Michel Foucault, dispositif, What is a Dispositif?
untitled 15
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky…
(…)
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear. (…)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (1832, 1842)
A big thank you to Gene Acompanado for digitizing this image.
Filed under: Drawings, Poetry | Leave a Comment
Tags: Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott
Apparatus
Detail of a zine prepared for the Fools’ Experiments exhibition at the Bournemouth Natural Science Society (BNSS), 24 August 2009 – 5 September 2009.
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
42cm x 30cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“In the naturalist’s collection things happen to plants that have never occurred since the dawn of the world. The plants find themselves detached, separated, preserved, classified, and tagged. They are then reassembled, reunited, redistributed according to entirely new principles that depend on the researcher, on the discipline of botany, which has been standardized for centuries, and on the institution that shelters them, but they no longer grow as they did in the great forest. The botanist learns new things, and she is transformed accordingly, but the plants are transformed also. (…) Knowledge derives from such movements, not from simple contemplation of the forest.”
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (1999)
Many thanks to Rachel Worth, Dominic Shepherd, Richard Hurst, Jamie Yeates, Pauline Stanley, Denise Poote, John Cresswell, and Melinda and Terry Williams-Wilson for their great help and support. This project was sponsored by The Arts University College at Bournemouth (AUCB) Research Fund.
Filed under: Bruno Latour quotes, Drawings | Leave a Comment
Tags: BNSS, Bruno Latour, Charles Darwin
New Metaphysics
For the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press, edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour.
New Metaphysics
Pencil on paper
42cm x 30cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
I am very grateful to Martin Jones and Daniel Montecillo for all their assistance in bringing this image to publication.
Filed under: Illustrations, Philosophy | Leave a Comment
Tags: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, New Metaphysics, OHP, Open Humanities Press
untitled 14
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
42cm x 30cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. It is clear that ever since Homo sapiens first appeared, there have been apparatuses; but we could say that today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.”
Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” (2006)
Filed under: Drawings, Giorgio Agamben quotes | Leave a Comment
Tags: apparatus, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, What is an Apparatus?
untitled 13
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
50cm x 65cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“All that had happened was merely a phenomenon from the realm of vital systems. Clothes, when abstracted from the flow of present time and their transmogrifying function on the human body, and seen as forms in themselves, are strange tubes and excrescences worthy of being classed with such facial decorations as the ring through the nose or the lip-stretching disk. But how enchanting they become when seen together with the qualities they bestow on their wearer! What happens then is no less than the infusion, into some tangled lines on a piece of paper, of the meaning of a great word. Imagine a man’s invisible kindness and moral excellence suddenly looming as a halo the size of the full moon and golden as an egg yolk right over his head, the way it does in old religious paintings, as he happens to be strolling down the avenue or heaping little tea sandwiches on his plate—what an overwhelming, shattering sensation it would be! And just such a power to make the invisible, and even the nonexistent, visible is what a well-made outfit demonstrates everyday of the week.”
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualitites (1930-1943)
Filed under: Drawings, Robert Musil quotes | Leave a Comment
Tags: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
untitled 12
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
30cm x 30cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“The ‘atmosphere’ (…) designates this gaseous layer that envelops solid Earth and that makes us all ’students of the air’ (…). (…) [W]hat we share with all other living beings is the destiny of being nurtured on air. Air is the absolute teacher and the education it gives us is constitutive and infinitely discreet. It never speaks, but it brings everything together and makes everything possible.”
Peter Sloterdijk, “Foreword to the Theory of Spheres“ [PDF], in Cosmograms (2005) by Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux
Filed under: Drawings, Peter Sloterdijk quotes | 1 Comment
Tags: Cosmograms, Jean-Christophe Royoux, Melik Ohanian, Peter Sloterdijk
Variations
For the front cover of Taylor Adkins’s translation of François Laruelle’s Dictionary of Non-Philosophy [PDF]. Thank you to Nick Srnicek, Ben Woodard, and Taylor Adkins of Speculative Heresy for creating this publication and adopting my design.
Untitled (details)
Pencil on paper
50cm x 65cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
Thank you to Paul Roberts for his help with digitising these images and to Sharon Beeden for her advice on typography.
Filed under: Book covers, Drawings, François Laruelle, Illustrations | Leave a Comment
Tags: Ben Woodard, Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, François Laruelle, Nick Srnicek, non-philosophy, Speculative Heresy, Taylor Adkins
untitled 11
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
65cm x 50cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu
“groping for a switch–he hit it
and the room sprang towards him
[...]
At what point does one say of a man
that he has become unreal?
[...]
We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods
It is state-of-mind that discloses to us
(Heidegger claims) that we are beings that have been thrown into something else.
Something else than what?”
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (1998)
Filed under: Anne Carson quotes, Drawings | 1 Comment
Tags: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, Martin Heidegger
untitled 10
Untitled (detail)
Pencil on paper
46cm x 42cm
© 2008 Tammy Lu
“For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere Accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his Modes and habilatory endeavours an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and the Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower up in high headgear, from amid peaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell out in starched ruffs, buckram stuffings and monstruous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an agglomeration of four limbs, –will depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea…”
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833)
Filed under: Drawings, Thomas Carlyle quotes | Leave a Comment
Tags: Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle
