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Schlechthin Unvergleichlich


There is a city where, for the traveler, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes. A map of this city would include all routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden.
It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city. - Italo Calvino
Impossible to map, capture, or be known: the map is an impossibility because it is not the authentic topography. But in this suspension, in the dropping and spiraling, all combinations are possible and all points are dominated because the rules (as in writing and other attempted representation) are flouted.
James Powers’ immersive topographical ocean, made more potent in frozen, mirrored stillness, moves as we move, runs to the edges, defies capture.

We build things to carry shock and absorb it for us, to be conduits and conveyances. Suspension theory gives us the chassis and her springy geometry to suspend (but not contain) the impact of rocks, roots, dips, drops. - Rockshox Suspension Theory Guide
The city never stops growing, adding a maze of little streets and squares; there are no fixed boundaries to all they might encompass. The body never stops receiving, like a resonating vessel. Stimulation turns inward, is folded into the body, except that there is no inside for it to be in, because the body is radically open. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Brian Massumi
Kellie Romany’s explosive golds and creamy browns stretch, pooling, giving more, evaporating.
Kathryn Miller’s geometry is unhinged and uncontained, darting, excused from the frame.

The virtual map (more real than the physical, some argue, in its adaptability), has a different temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present. Like the body, it crests in a liminal realm of emergence, where half-actualized actions and expressions arise like waves on a sea to which most no sooner return. - Massumi
Kyle Thompson’s floating, rotating rock tempts with the promise of eternal pleasure (a comedy). XYZ coordinates are a guide to making the cloud real.
Lewis Feuer’s swimmer is trapped between waves, floundering, subsumed and spat, suspended.
For his soul was bidding farewell to everything that had been his life, which was now ending, because what could come now, he asked himself, but he only saw waves as the boat cleaved through them, the waves, that was the answer to his question as to what could come, because --- well, what could come; waves, waves, one after another, thousands and thousands, millions and millions of waves. - László Krasznahorkai