The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

automorphism

"...a guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: _Whenever
you have to do with a structure-endowed entity E try to determine its
group of automorphisms,_ the group of those element-wise transformations
which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a
deep insight into the constitution of E in this way. After that you may
start to investigate symmetric configurations of elements, i.e. configura-
tions which are invariant under a certain subgroup of the group of all
automorphisms; and it may be advisable, before looking for such configu-
rations, to study the subgroups themselves, e.g. the subgroup of those
automorphisms which leave one element fixed, or leave two distinct
elements fixed, and investigate what discontinuous or finite subgroups
there exist, and so forth." (Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, p. 144; E = sigma.)

I propose this principle as critical guidance in the phenomenology of a
virtual world: textures, motions, manifolds and surfaces, curves and
geodesics may be analyzed in such a way as to _eliminate the object or
process_ - an elimination that brings forth subtextual dynamics without
subject or object.

These the images present here are at best a lure implicating us in abject
desire, that is desire seducing away from the inverse punctum of the
absent object or process. It is here that our _interest_ lies in critique
in the first place, a place which is dis/placed into that very structure
that forms and effaces its basis. Leave the human behind, confront the
human - two sides fucking with dissipation and exhaustion the only result.
Then nothingness is apparent to everyone, that encounter with death in the
wires, in the last glance of the supercession of thought.

http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped2.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped3.jpg