Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In her essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector, Laura U. Marks uses examples from Islamic art to “show that an immanent Infinite is imaginable in contemporary society,” and suggests a number of ways in which “contemporary works of computer-based art may […]

In the ninth century the Abbasid caliphate, like other burgeoning bureaucracies, needed an efficient and legible script in which to keep its documents in order. Ibn Muqla (885-939), geometer and vizier to the Abbasid court in Baghdad, created a standardized, proportioned Arabic writing based on geometry (al-khatt am-mansub or “proportioned writing”). This standardization was based […]

Calligraphy, or beautiful writing, has the qualities of abstract line at the same time that it signifies words. Calligraphy is the most privileged form of decoration in Islamic art. Art historian Oleg Grabar writes of ornament in The Mediation of Ornament – those signs that seem to mean nothing in themselves – that it has […]

While the focus of the research of TCR 2-50 contributor Laura U. Marks remains primarily on the vector-like qualities of Islamic calligraphy, she does draw our attention to one of the origins of the free and lively line of Islamic art:
I will just note that both writing and curvilinear patterns function in very similar […]

One goal of the research presented in Laura U. Marks’s essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector is to underline connections, to show the Islamic roots of modern abstract art, which find a certain flowering in computer-based art. Another goal is to […]

Laura U. Marks’s essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector follows important continuities in what at first may appear as disparate traditions in art history: classical Islamic art, European modernism and contemporary new media. Comparing several tendencies shared by both classical Islamic […]

Laura U. Marks / Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector
Une ligne pour le plaisir d’étre ligne, d’aller, ligne. Points. Poudre de points.
Une ligne rêve. On n’avait jusque-là jamais laissé rêver une ligne.
Henri Michaux, “Aventures de lignes,” on the art of Paul […]