Tag Archives: Newtonian space

Time and Place

“If the place is different, the time is different. If the place is the same, time has not changed.” This pithy two part aphorism by Julian Barbour, actually extracted by me from his book, seems at first surprisingly Heraclitan for … Continue reading

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Julian Barbour

Physicist Julian Barbour was in town to give a talk and I was very disappointed to miss it. I had child minding duties while my wife was about her gainful employment. Barbour has been mentioned on this blog before. In … Continue reading

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Time and Ai Weiwei

I’ve just finished writing a review for the magazine Yishu. It’s a comparison between two recently published books, Ai Weiwei’s blog posts and Gao Minglu’s historical study of the Chinese avant-garde, Total Modernity. I love Ai’s whole attitude. He is … Continue reading

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Cyclical Time

Many tribal cultures, such as those on the west coast of Canada, were itinerant. They had  a summer village and a winter village, and set up temporary camps where the resources were in season—salmon runs, ripe berries. This travel was … Continue reading

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More Opticality

This post comes out of Shep Steiner’s comments on the Olitski post, both his questions to me and my questions to him. It’s an attempt to get to the fundamental level of what it means to say that pictures are … Continue reading

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The Fiction of Newtonian Space

To improve on the previous post: ask the question—where is that thing? And answer, the only possible answer—in relation to what?

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Newtonian Abstraction

In the Newtonian system there is a stable framework within which all bodies can be placed, an absolute space, an empty box that extends in all directions. Newton himself understood this as a simplification, and it is viewed by scientists … Continue reading

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Grids in the World

It is possible that my argument that grids are too conceptual, meaning that they are too much a pre-existent form and therefore block experience, might apply less to three dimensional work than to two dimensional. So, apropos of Morellet, for … Continue reading

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