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"The Dragon or The Mask" (jasper)

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"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

 

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  1. Roger Caillois Mineral Collection Paul A. Harris

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