2010, MIT Press
Enfoldment and Infinity establishes points of contact between classical Islamic art and contemporary computer-based art. For example, both are often aniconic, both are performative, both unfold from an invisible source. Demonstrating and inventing Islamic “roots” for new media art, the book argues that specific moments of classical Islamic thought give us new and fruitful ways to think about contemporary art. The book also traces what I call “the haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line”: how Islamic aesthetics journeyed westward from medieval times on, drawing out powers of abstraction and embodiment, ultimately to inform modernism and contemporary new media art. It demonstrates meeting points between Islamic thought and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and it proposes an enfolding-unfolding aesthetics to explain how artworks (and other things) unfold from the universe through a filter of information. The books is richly illustrated with 141 b/w illustrations and 31 color plates.
Contents:
Chapter One: Getting things unfolded
Chapter Two: Islamic aesthetics and new media art: points of contact
Chapter Three: The haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line, part I
Chapter Four: The haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line, part II
Chapter Five: The haptic transfer and the travels of the abstract line, part III
Chapter Six: Baghdad, 830: Birth of the algorithm
Chapter Seven: Baghdad, 1000: Origin of the pixel
Chapter Eight: Cairo, 972: Ancestor of the morph
Chapter Nine: Herat, 1487: Early virtual reality
Chapter Ten: Karabagh, 1700: Seeds of artificial life
“Manners of Unfolding,” a beautiful web site by Finn Brunton, with nine original works by artist-programmers, demonstrates several of the “manners of unfolding” the book describes.
“After reading Laura Marks’s lucid Enfoldment and Infinity, which leads us through the deep time layers of Arabic-Islamic arts and sciences, we have to give up our established concepts of media history. … Chapter by chapter, it becomes evident that some of the most important modern paradigms like pixels, algorithms, morphs, or even virtual reality and artificial life have not been originally generated by the Occident, but through L’Age d’Or of the Orient.” — Siegfried Zielinski
“The most inventive synthesis of European and Islamic thought since Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia” —James Elkins
“Admirably researched, beautifully documented, and written with dedicated passion” —Patricia Pisters
Left: View of dome, tomb of Sheikh ‘Abd al-Samad (1304-1325), Natanz, Iran. Photograph by Laura Marks
Right: Still, Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, Ima Traveller, interactive media work (1996)