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• 1 2018-07-31T20:42:37+00:00 Roger Caillois Mineral Collection 29 gallery 1 2018-08-11T18:07:47+00:00 Roger Caillois bequeathed his renowned mineral collection to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The collection, featured at the 2013 Venice Biennale, can be seen at the galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie. The following pages present images of selected pieces from the collection, paired with passages from Caillois's The Writing of Stones (Trans. Barbara Bray, University of Virginia Press, 1985). This content supplements but also contextualizes the excerpts from Caillois's Pierres réfléchies featured in Rock Records, as well as treatments of Caillois in the issue by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Paul Prudence, and Paul A. Harris. 
  
  Caillois's opening words in The Writing of Stones provide a portal through which to enter this virtual gallery.
  
  "Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of color or pattern. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They act through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation" (The Writing of Stones, 1-2).
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
     
  
  
  
  
   
   
   
• 1 2018-08-09T21:56:15+00:00 "The Dragon or The Mask" (jasper) 8 plain 2018-08-16T14:42:50+00:00 "The jaspers of Oregon are probably unrivaled for the almost morbid complexity of their curved designs and their range of contrasting or merging colors: a graphic madness attained by no other mineral.... We have here a universe of scrolls, branches, pleura; from them flayed countenances emerge, muscles laid open in their cavities of bone.... A mauve and lunatic life, proliferating without law or limit, feverishly breeding tumors and goiters; a ravenous, shifting universe in which details are so clear it is almost endless.... Still, it is a charming image, full of invention and surprises, for the easy-going connoisseur who confines himself to color and composition" (The Writing of Stones, 70; 74-75).
  
  Paul Prudence provides a marvelous post-digital reading of this specimen: "It seems as if we have before us a generated multi-passed render of a procedural landscape of tunnel systems bored with sinusoidal waves perturbed by noise functions. In cross-section, this dense hypogean system contains a calligraphic architecture of Byzantine proportions. The sinusoidal coefficients create networks of oscillation chambers fit for troglodytes who are entranced by the algorithmic beauty of digital sedimentation" ("The Algorithmic Writing of Stones," p. 79).
  
  Paul Prudence, "The Algorithmic Writing of Stones: A Cybernetics of Geology," in Rock Records (SubStance 146): pp. 71-83. Access the essay online