Enfolding-Unfolding

Title

Enfolding-Unfolding

Description

In the aesthetics of unfolding and enfolding that I am proposing, three levels—image, information, and the infinite—enfold each other and unfold from each other. I borrow the term enfoldment from quantum physics, where it was most beautifully expressed in the writings of David Böhm …
Enfolding-unfolding aesthetics starts from the investigation, in Deleuze’s cinema books, into how certain images arise to us (or to the more disinterested perception of the cinema), by being selected from what Bergson called the universe of all images, which I here call the infinite. My intervention in Deleuze’s theory of signs is to insert another image plane between images and the infinite: information—a plane through which the semiotic process passes before images can arise. This step draws attention to the nonperceptual forces that intervene in the process of semiosis. In the three-ply model I am proposing, information unfolds from the infinite, and image unfolds from information. We cannot perceive the infinite as such. It is a vast field of virtuality, the plane of immanence. But now and then, certain aspects of it unfold and become actual, as information or as image. Information may also unfold into an image. Images and information come into the world and roll back into the infinite in a ceaseless flow of unfolding and enfolding.

Designer

Marks, Laura

Date

2010

Source

Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art

Bibliographic Citation

Marks, Laura U. 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. The MIT Press. Figure 1.4. Pages 5-6.

is composed of

Spiral

Circle

has attribute

Curve

Arrow

Zigzag Line

Solid Line

depict things of type

Conceptual

Coverage

aesthetics

art

cosmology

film