The multiplication of lumen - Roger Bacon (1214-1294)
“We say that the lumen of the sun in the air is the species of the solar lux in the body of the sun, and lumen falling, perchance, through a window or an aperture is sufficiently visible to us, and it is the species of the lux of a star… lumen is that which is multiplied and generated from that lux and which is produced in air and other rare bodies, which are called media because species are multiplied by their mediation.”
Roger Bacon considered the ‘species’ of a thing to be “the force or power by which any object acts on its surroundings”, within an infinite network of interpenetrating and emanating forces. In the fluid language he uses when referring to the ‘species’, he connects numerous definitions and meanings. It is at once similitude, image, sense, intellect, idol, phantasm, simulacrum, form, intention, shadow of the philosophers, virtue, impression and passion. In mediating the ‘species’ we perceptually receive, we of course create and emanate whole new ‘species’ of our own. The act of mediation itself ‘multiplies’ the species - we emanate.
The Roger Bacon quotes are from David Lindberg’s translation of De Multiplicatione Specierum (Of the Multiplication of Species).
Ferns, emanating their species… Koli, Finland.
“When we fashion images rightly, our spirit, if it has been intent upon the work and upon the stars through imagination and emotion, is joined together with the very spirit of the world and with the rays of the stars through which the world-spirit acts. And when our spirit has been so joined, it too becomes a cause why (from the world-spirit by way of the rays) a particular spirit of any given star, that is, a certain vital power, is poured into the image – especially a power which is consistent with the spirit of the operator.”
Masilio Ficino (1433–99)
From A. Voss, Marsilio Ficino (2006)
“Thus light, which is the first form created in first matter, multiplied itself by its very nature an infinite number of times on all sides and spread itself out uniformly in every direction. In this way it proceeded in the beginning of time to extend matter…”
Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253)
(Trans. by Riedl, 1942, p. 11)
Birch bark, with lichen
From the tears Aino’s mother, there arose three rivers:
“Out of each of these three rivers
Rose in turn three rushing rapids;
In the foaming of each rapid
There arose three tiny islands;
On the shore of every island
There arose a golden hillock;
On the peak of every hillock
There grew up three little birches;
On the tip of every birch tree
Sat three golden cuckoos singing.”
The Kalevala, Runo 4, 480
(Trans. Eino Friberg)
New birch skin, Koli, Finland
“And now my mind is misty,
Often like a child bewildered,
Wandering through the withered grasses,
Crawling through the bushy thickets,
Slinking stealthy through the grasslands,
Wallowing in the scrubby hollows.”
The Kalevala, Runo 4
Trans. Eino Friberg
Birch trees, Koli, Finland
“Then he cut a swathe quickly,
Cut out an enormous clearing.
Leaving only one birch tree
Standing for the birds to rest on -
For the cuckoo’s calling-tree.”
The Kalevala (Runo 2 - 257)
Trans. Eino Friberg
Pielinen Lake ice fissure, shadow, Koli, Finland
Stan Brakhage:
“Really, I mean it’s wonderful to live. And what worries me the most is that so much of the time I don’t want to live, and then I try to figure out why. Why not?”
(from a 1974 interview, Remarks Following a Screening of The Text of Light)
(nostalgia) 1971, Hollis Frampton
“I take some comfort that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this portrait of its face.”
From (nostalgia) 1971 by Hollis Frampton. In this film Frampton incinerates his own photographs, one by one, over a hotplate. The personal biographical narration (written by Frampton but narrated by filmmaker Michael Snow) for each photograph relates to the next photograph in the sequence, rather than the one in view. He did not incinerate these photographs with the contagion of a match, but with a hotplate, a slow heat as if rising from the depths of the earth, forcing combustion, decay, dissolution into vapour and carbon. It is one of the most existentially melancholic films I have seen.
Two images from the Man Ray film Emak Bakia (1926)
Man Ray superimposes the upside down eye upon the camera lens, while later superimposing the eye between the headlights of a car. Sight becomes both a receptive, optically mediated experience and as an active emanatory light of illumination. Early theories of vision saw seeing in this way, as a light that emanates from the eye. The headlight/eye as a lens mediated emanation of light, the camera/eye a lens mediated receptor for light.
The Pirate & The Crystal Ball - The Incredible String Band (circa 1970) - a sequence from their film “Be Glad For the Song Has No Ending” directed by Peter Neal. I fear there are few who will truly appreciate the complete genius of this film. It fills me with a strange kind of longing, something quite beyond nostalgia.
See the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjql6I4ecu0
And here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG2ld15o12w
The industrial alchemy of film…
Silver nitrate was one of the most important ingredients in alchemical processes, known as luna caustic or lapis infernalis (hellish stone). Silver was the moon, the feminine counterpart to the sun of gold. The silver moon could be sublimated by dissolving it in nitric acid (‘strong water’ or ‘aqua fortis’). Evaporating the solution gave silver nitrate crystals. When applied to an organic substrate, such as leather or paper, silver nitrate solution becomes photo-sensitive and deposits tiny particles of silver, seen as a silvery black colour, upon any area exposed to light. Silver nitrate becomes silver chloride with the addition of common salt - these two became the most important ingredients in the history of photography.
“At the Eastman Kodak Company, the principal U.S. producer of silver nitrate, 99.95% pure silver bars are dissolved in 67% nitric acid in three tanks connected in parallel. Excess nitric acid is removed from the resulting solution, which contains 60–65% silver nitrate, and the solution is filtered. This solution is evaporated until its silver nitrate concentration is 84%. It is then cooled to prepare the first crop of crystals. The mother liquor is purified by the addition of silver oxide and returned to the initial stages of the process. The crude silver nitrate is centrifuged and recrystallized from hot, demineralized water.”
Did they know they were making a solution of Luna? Is this why photographs have so much of the moon about them?
The photograph is from the collection at the Baker Library, Harvard University. The Kodak part of the above text is from Etris SF, Cappel CR. (2003) Silver compounds. In Kirk-Othmer encyclopedia of chemical technology, 4th edn. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
The generative and transformative properties of the sun and stars magnified in their potentials through the use of lenses and mirrors concentrated upon a substance. The true precursor to photography. Catoptrics has philosophical roots in early Greek and Arabic optics, the Kabbala and more recently in figures including Robert Grosseteste, Paracelsus, John Dee, Giambattista Della Porta, Tycho Brahe, Heinrich Khunrath, and Robert Fludd.
This image is from an unidentified author in PH209-AB / M79.2 Alchemical recipes; Miscellanea. 2 vols., Royal Library (KB) in The Hague.
