A thousand plateaus, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

“Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. … It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills“.

“Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction, neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system with a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states“.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, CIG, 2004.

M. Lombardi, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper, Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and international terrorism.
Ever since the United States invaded Iraq in what seemed to many a puzzlingly indirect reaction to Al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attacks, questions about the Bush administration’s real motivations have been a matter of debate and speculation. Was the purpose really to spread freedom and democracy, or were there other unacknowledged plans? Many people who knew Lombardi and his work have wished he were still around to connect the dots.

Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) draws on the major political and financial scandals of the day to create large-scale linear diagrams that at first glance look like celestial maps; a closer reading reveals the intricate web of connections that lurk beneath current headlines. From Whitewater to the Vatican Bank, Lombardi uses

Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

From Cyberpunk to Logofreak. An intense story about cool-hunter and web-hunter.

Why should you read it? As the author says:”If you really want to understand an era you have to investigate its most shining nightmare. A lot of thing would become clear in the light of our darkest fear“
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948, Conway, South Carolina) is an American-born science fiction author who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, partly due to coining the term “cyberspace” in 1982, and partly because of the success of his first novel, Neuromancer, which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1984.
In 1967, Gibson went to Canada “to avoid the Vietnam war draft”, appearing that year in a CBC newsreel item about hippie subculture in Yorkville, Toronto. He settled in Vancouver, British Columbia five years later and began to write science fiction. Although he retains U.S. citizenship, Gibson has spent most of his adult life in Canada, and still lives in the Vancouver area.

Hey, by the way, do you know what the “patter recognition theory” is about?