<nettime> A web of possibility in four-four

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

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(Some notes written yesterday, after listening to some music.)




A Geology of Experience: Palmieri, Fix, Byrne, Seth, Hinton, and the Humanities


I write a lot about Esperienza, early modern Italian for experience and experiment, and how this was the highest ideal for both Leonardo and Galileo, maybe even Dante, and is personified allegorically in the world's most famous smiling painting.

This novel hypothesis, never yet published anywhere, is catching on to say the least and might soon alter the history of art, literature, and even philosophy if it stays on its current course.  That might ultimately affect technology and the areas of life affected by technology including its networks.

Until yesterday, Leonardo was the earliest author and artist of which I was aware, European or otherwise, to personify experience outright in either written or visual form.  We know he personified it all the time in his writing, but no one has ever even asked aloud if he personified it in paint.  (Despite being hard to believe they didn't, it's easy to prove with a quick search.)  No one before Leonardo, and very few after, have personified it visually.

I used to think Leonardo was the first to personify Esperienza in writing but yesterday I read about Matteo Palmieri, a geologist and theological theorist from quattrocento Florence, who personified it in his "City of Life," citta di vita, much as Leonardo would a bit later, as "the teacher of all things," or "maestra di tutte le cose."  But be that as it may.

Later, not before Leonardo but after, Vincenzo Galilei, Galileo's father and Florentine musician, would also declare Esperienza to be the teacher of all things.  Who knows if he read Leonardo or Palmieri; the phrase was probably in the air nonetheless.  Vincenzo ran with it, and applied it to music both performatively and physiologically.  Adam Fix's great 2019 article about all this called "Esperienza, teacher of all things," was where I learned about Palmieri.  It's a great article in Nuncius and will fill you in.  It even summarizes one of Leonardo's key writings on the topic, worth noting here:

"The most famous artist to invoke esperienza in this way was the godfather of
disegno, Leonardo da Vinci. In the notebooks that would be published as the
Treatise on Painting, Leonardo sought to guard against the inevitable attacks of
those who “possess a desire only for material wealth and are entirely devoid of
the desire for wisdom.”97 He continued:
"I know well that, not being a man of letters, it will appear to some pre
sumptuous people that they can reasonably belabour me with the allega
tion that I am a man without learning[…] They will say that since I do not
have literary learning I cannot possibly express the things that I wish to
treat, but they do not grasp that my concerns are better handled through
experience [speriētia] rather than bookishness. Though I may not know,
like them, how to cite from the authors, I will cite something far more
worthy, quoting experience, mistress [maestra] of their masters.98"
Leonardo deemed esperienza “the common mother of all the sciences and arts”
and saw it as the key to transforming his practice into genuine natural sci
ence. He justified many assertions (on the structure of the eye, or the effects
of perspective) through esperienza, which he understood not in the scholastic
sense of authoritative, common knowledge but as the keen observations of one
perceptive and intelligent [person]. Like Vincenzo, Leonardo construed esperienza
as an intellectual and empirical process that could transcend the limitations
of plain sensation or pure speculation. “True sciences are those which have
penetrated through the senses as a result of experience,” he proclaimed. These
sciences would attain a degree of knowledge beyond the reach of “delusory sci
ences of a wholly cerebral kind.”99


Why bother?  Well, music is geology too, because when anthropocene technology digs up fossil fuel and burns it to print and transport information and fabricate materials for storage and manufacture it's geology, like water flowing underground, as David Byrne has been quoted here saying.

And Byrne's words of praise appear on a 2021 book about experience, or esperienza, by Anil Seth, who says human consciousness (including perception, memory, and imagination) is best described as the experience of controlled hallucination.  I'm no expert but I think Seth distinguishes AI-GPT's from humans in part because of experiencing.  In any case experience as such, though not personified allegorically only organismally, is the key in Seth's book too.

Even Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing AI, called his 1992 article about it "How Neural Networks Learn from Experience."  He also wrote about Max Ernst, in 1975, and how a surrealist painting used writing on the back to put science and psychology into the form of art.  (Hinton overlooked however, as many have, that Ernst was quoting Leonardo's Codex Leicester for astro-psycho-physiological purposes in said painting with writing on the back; and may not have known that Leonardo at age 21 was already writing on the backs of portraits e.g. the Ginevra de' Benci.)

Or as Fix writes,

"Galileo’s Esperienza"
"The greatest disciple of esperienza in the seventeenth century also happened to
be Vincenzo’s son.  Galileo dedicated his life to using mathematics and experi-
iment to flout scholastic authority. He inherited his father’s style of experi-
mental reasoning, disregard for received wisdom, and penchant for sarcasm:
“if experiments [l’esperienze; Galileo usually avoided esperimento or cimento]
are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without
once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and histori
ans,” he asked in The Assayer,“this will mean nothing and we must believe their
words rather than our own eyes?” Galileo’s affirmation of physicalized theo
ries of sensation– that “tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere
names” and “reside only in the consciousness”– emulated Vincenzo’s denun
ciation of the superficial “colors” and “forms” obscuring music’s nature.104 As
Schmitt noted, Galileo’s early works employed esperienza in a general and pas
sive sense, unlike the active interventions of his later writings.105 As Baroncini
added, Galileo’s sensata esperienza exhibited a “multiplicity of methodological
and epistemological styles” that varied by topic (astronomy, mechanics, etc.)
and by the stage of Galileo’s career in which it appeared.106
At every stage, Vincenzo’s influence was evident...."


Excerpts from:

"Esperienza, Teacher of All Things
Vincenzo Galilei’s Music as Artisanal Epistemology"

by Adam Fix, 2019

Nuncius 34, Brill


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