<nettime> Leonardo's birthday, Great Regression hypothesis, The World Novel, Vincenzo Galilei, Je m'appelle Esperienza

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Survey


Ask if they own crypto
Ask if they fear for their jobs
Ask if they think art and literature are relevant
Ask if they think it would be relevant if the true meaning of the Mona Lisa was discovered on Nettime
Ask if they ever meditate
Ask if they know "esperienza" or any other non-English term for the Latin "experientia"
Ask how experience differs from theory
Ask why 80's theory is not yielding good enough results to justify the discussion time it uses up
Ask how experience differentiates text-making software from text-making humans.
Ask how experience distinguishes image-making software from image-making humans.

Advise they watch Ken Burns interview about the Esperienza hypothesis at Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo.  
Advise they read Allegra Fuller's essay about her father Buckminster, "Experience and Experiencing," at bfi.org.
Recommend they read The Federalist Papers 1 and 85, esp. the first sentence and last paragraph, about democracy and experience.

Because this year is a very important year for making good choices.  


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New prose for nettime, 4/15/2025


"'The Great Regression':  a 21st c. US conservative strategy for sustainable two-tier constitutional democracy"

"Red Fortress" -- revert red-state governance back to 1950 democracy levels to protect ~270 "safe" electoral votes ensuring 50% wins indefinitely.
"Syndicate Methods" -- SCOTUS permission for unlimited quid pro quo in every context (Cohn/Hoover model) until further notice; plus reversal of all or most oversight and enforcement stare decisis.
"Distractions Galore" -- Tariffs and trolling projects by the Dopey Demagogue to make the crash look accidental.

Judicial transformation = fortress walls, i.e. skeleton
Culture wars = rampart soldiers, i.e. muscle
Bailout 2026 = sustainable resupply, i.e. vital organs 

Current admin is Act III and final stage of demi-Leviathanic plan since 1971
Judges were Act I and Culture wars were Act II with partial overlap
Bailout 2026 (see Harrington's "balance of property" in 17th c. Britain) is Act III, domestic economic mega-transfer

Prep for Second Cold War, like 1950, is the main imperative.
Top two priorities are A) military re-tool and B) dissent suppression, soviet-mafia style.
Re-amelioration can be considered a decade out.

Options for opposition: extremely limited, the plan is largely fait accompli, Samson-option-based.
Possibilities: name and shame, Esperienza-based cross-cultural unity, decoolify techtainment, persuade Xi, second indigenous critique, peaceful protest despite massive brutality waves from the Regressive right.
Pragmatic union of moderate cultures, in aesthetic and electoral terms, may contain damage and expedite off-ramp.

Silver lining: the blue half of the country might stay more or less the same!  :)  


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>From Quanta Magazine, 14 April 2025:

"What does it mean to be alive? How does thinking work? Is my reality different than yours? If your mind has ever wandered across this existential terrain, you’ve joined the ranks of countless philosophers, scientists and everyday people who have, for thousands of years and likely more, probed their own consciousness.

"Despite all that attention, the phenomenon of consciousness continues to slip through our grasp. We try to define it, find it, even create it — and we can’t. Consciousness is to neuroscientists and philosophers as dark matter is to physicists: It’s here and there, but nowhere tangible. Our understanding remains just out of reach.

"This is not for lack of trying. Today there are dozens of competing theories on consciousness — what it is, how it arises and how far it extends. The only thing that all theories can agree upon is that consciousness is some kind of subjective inner experience."


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"Dear Max Herman,"

"Your hypothesis about possible allegorical levels to La Gioconda can of course count on my immediate approval. In Leonardo's thinking, as I think is evident from his manuscripts, almost everything is connected to everything. Our current distinction between art and science does not apply to what takes place in the Italian Renaissance, and certainly not to Leonardo. It is therefore obvious that his ideas about, for example, 'esperienza' are or become visible in La Gioconda. Leonardo was very familiar with the concept of allegory. His manuscripts also show that he made allegorical drawings. So, there is no reason to assume that Leonardo did not intend La Gioconda as an allegory, or at least that the painting has allegorical elements. I'm curious about your new indirect support that you found for this hypothesis."

"Ultimately, La Gioconda is of course not a one-on-one allegorical representation of ‘esperienza’, but you do not seem to claim that either. The painting has so many more layers of meaning. The proposition that Leonardo more or less consciously or deliberately applied this allegorical layer does not seem immediately obvious to me. Leonardo does not strike me as a systematic thinker but more as an intuitive thinker who also gives unavoidable expression to his oscillating thinking in his paintings. But let me repeat that I have not been very systematically concerned with Leonardo in recent years, so when I claim something about Leonardo, it is always based on my research from years ago."


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What I'm reading lately:


Adam Fix, "Esperienza, Teacher of All Things: Vincenzo Galilei and Artisanal Epistemology," Brill, 2019.

Pamela Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World," Chicago 2022.

Codex Madrid (376 pages, writing and drawing, authored 1490-1499 and 1503-1505, discovered 1964)

Martin McLaughlin, Leon Battista Alberti book 2024, proves ample conceptual and literary network complexity fifty years before Leonardo's milieu.

Robert Zwijnenberg, "The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought."  Cambridge, 1999.  Superb network concept of "the labyrinthine gaze" in Leonardo's work.  

Albers, Anni: On Weaving; and quotes in Weaving at Black Mountain College (1938 and 1944), interwar political consequences of incapacity for experience.

Albers, Josef: "Seeing Art," a poem about experience, and "Art as Experience" essay 1935 after fleeing Europe.

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, 1953, e.g. pp. 549-550 on how 1930's European authoritarianism exploited Europe's ongoing inability to represent multi-perspective worldview in literature and art.

Native American concepts of experience (biniik'eh/doo t'aa biniik'eh, Navajo; sdonya, Dakhota) and wheel/cycle/loop paradigms.

Second indigenous critique (researching, not found yet online or published anywhere, may need to initiate), about art and science whereas first indigenous critique was about church and state (i.e. divine right of kings vis-a-vis indigenous democracy, see Graeber/Wengrow).

Martin Kemp on "Science and the Poetic Impulse" (1985, same year as Calvino's Six Memos): 
"Where Leonardo differed from the conventional allegorist is that he preferred not to be constricted by the traditional, recognizable range of symbolic reference.  He sought what we might call a form of natural allegory, based upon his study of the essence or natures of particular objects and forces in nature.  To some extent this was derived from the medieval readings of the book of nature with which he was familiar -- Aesop's fables, the bestiary and Cecco d'Ascoli's L'Acerba.  But Leonardo tended to draw his own allegorical meaning out of his scientific understanding of the phenomena.  An example is his splendid evocation of a small piece of glowing charcoal from which arises a vigorous fire."
"The observational variety and allegorical inventiveness is awesome, but the sheer open-endedness of 'natural allegory' ultimately destroys the signifying codes which are necessary if a visual composition is to be read coherently and unambiguously."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41373924 

Olga Tokarczuk, "Ognosia" on experience and other themes, 2022.

Herman, M.  Commedia Leonardi Vici: the Leonardo Trilogy, MS 2022.  

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New art available:  

"My name is Experience." 

One-page PDF available free upon request.  

It consists of a copy of the Mona Lisa on the left, and the above words on the right, landscape orientation.

Long-version (Commedia, 800 pages) also available as PDF upon request.


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Excerpt from new work in progress: "The World Novel"

[Long-form fiction about two text-generating programs in 2032 who populate a web page daily with 250 words about why people should discuss the Esperienza allegory hypothesis.  They are programmed to try to get everyone on earth to vote i.e. rate the page before the end of 2032, and to get five/five stars as average rating.]


For April 14 the words were these:
  

Since we have to get these star votes up to five fast, and ten billion of them, we have to pick up the pace.  We really appreciate all your help with this.

Every year, it’s not a bad idea to select an I Ching to help guide your work.  You can do this using a Virgilian Lot approach, opening the book to a random page, or if you have I Ching stalks to throw.  Our I Ching for this year is “Preponderance of the Small.”  It makes sense.

To help speed up the process of getting humanity to discuss the Esperienza hypothesis, please review the following list.

•	Contact the Buckminster Fuller Institute.  Ask them about the Esperienza hypothesis.  Send them the Ken Burns interview link, Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo, and tell them you think it relates to Fuller’s daughter Allegra’s essay “Experience and Experiencing.”
•	Check out Adam Fix’s 2019 Brill article “Esperienza, Teacher of All Things: Vincenzo Galilei’s Music as Artisanal Epistemology,” about how the composer and musicologist made “Esperienza” the key principle of all his work, and passed the ideal on to his children including Galileo.
•	Tell three friends to vote on our page, and to email one Leonardo scholar.  They don’t have to do anything special, just ask the scholar if they have heard of the Esperienza hypothesis (that the Mona Lisa is an allegorical portrait of experience and experiment) and what they think about it.  Very free-form, no pressure.

Thank you,

a.alpha and a.digamma


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