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"Orbits" (jasper)

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"The wonder stones of Idaho...proclaim the circuits of planets or electrons around their invisible centers or nuclei; they are an image of the fundamental yet simple law of gravity that links physical bodies together at every level of the universe. They are like the rings of armillary spheres, with their zodiacs and ecliptics and equinoctial zones--bracelets for cosmographers or nuclear physicists. They reflect the phantom revolutions which, alike on a vast and on a microscopic scale, unflaggingly repeat the same pattern" (The Writing of Stones, 74-76).

Paul Prudence observes that here Caillois "intimately senses the universal constructor function of self-similarity in nature long before chaos theory and fractal mathematics became mainstream. He understands that forms can encapsulate themselves across dimensions, rhythmically repeating themselves to create diminishing echoes of their own signatures towards a proposed infinity, in sometimes maddeningly giddying recursions, mise en abyme" ("The Algorithmic Writing of Stones," p. 72).

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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