<nettime> Last list serv post for year, November 15 - The World Novel

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The World Novel is still on target for completion, ETA January 1, 2026.

What's it about?  The story is set in 2032, after some democracy setbacks, during a tense peace, and just before the opening of the Louvre's new wing.  Two semi-intelligent computer programs try to convince the world to discuss a brand-new hypothesis that Leonardo's famous smiling portrait in the new wing is an allegory of Experience, the "one true maestra" he wrote about so often time and time again.  They try to match his words to his images, and much folly ensues.

Here is an excerpt.

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These were the words for October 13.

If you are combing the internet for art historians to contact, look for Erik Inglis.  He gave a great talk in 2013 about Jean Fouquet, who painted in France thirty years before Leonardo painted in Italy.  Here is the link: vimeo dot com/64730165.

Inglis explains how modern French painting was, how strange with regard to literature and even politics.  It was already by 1452, Leonardo’s year of birth, improvisational and genre-crossing and politically strategic in a highly modern, and self-consciously later modern or “aftermodern” way.  It was unruly and unpredictable, already.

Fouquet exemplified all this and helped create the nation of France (per Inglis’ book) which would later adopt, rescue, and appreciate Leonardo.  It’s all of a piece.  The lecture explains.

But Inglis also studies the book art of Fouquet’s time.  Very importante.  He mentions that Oberlin, where he gave the talk to donors, was one of a very few schools in 2013 who bought free JSTOR subscriptions for all alumni, so they can study more.  Study matters even after graduation.

Therefore look up the Roman de Fauvel, written around the time of Dante, in France, very comedic.  Fauvel, or “false veil,” is a horse-acronym for all the sins of the ruling classes – flattery, avarice, vanity, envy, lust, et cetera – as in “to curry (groom) favor (Fauvel).”  The style is episodic, like the old charivari or parade of mockery for public wrongs.  There is a charivari in the charivari, as it were, and all the wrongs are allegorically personified.  By 1300.  See?

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Also a reminder to watch Ken Burns' new film on the American Revolution premiering Sunday.  I see a lot of correspondences between Burns' recent work and Martin Jay's latest book Magical Nominalism (2025), highly recommended, and his earlier Songs of Experience (2005).  Experience is a concept that many different time periods have taken seriously, not least postmoderns and from across a wide spectrum, medieval, ancient, modern, and certainly non-western and indigenous, despite the occasional cul de sac, and both current neurosci and comp sci are struggling mightily to deal with it very well at all even as an idea.

In any case there's no disputing that Alexander Hamilton cited it as the main justification for the Union and Constitution in 1788 (the same year William Blake's first work of verbal/visual etching declared Experience to be "the true faculty of knowing").

All best and good luck!

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