“It is about the concept of the “evil opening”: a structure corrupting space and experience through the physical and metaphysical opening point.”
Malignum Aditum Puncti
Malignum Aditum Puncti is a balancing act. Literally. On the sisal rope through the brick wall hang a painted table, Figure A, balanced by a number of wooden chairs, Figure B. But what is the point? So to speak.
In recent years, much of Piotr Syzhalski’s work has evolved around an investigation of deep time – the unknowable time before history about which we can nevertheless speculate, from the earliest sounds that may have been made on a flute-like instrument over 8,000 years ago to a geological timescale on which speaking/writing/thinking humanity is but a blip.
These strata are related to James Garrett Junior’s SCHMO: strata, surface, time but on a vastly different scale than that of architecture. And Malignum Aditum Puncti is not even about geological deep time. It is about the concept of the “evil opening”: a structure corrupting space and experience through the physical and metaphysical opening point. In contemporary terms, in a sense, it is about the relationship of the virtual – infinite, unbounded, everywhere – to the physical. What happens when the transmission device is miniaturized to the point of a point? That is evil.
“Giambattista Vico had observed that the concept of geometric point is a metaphysical concept, which furnished the malignum aditum, the ‘evil opening’ through which metaphysics had invaded physics. Vico’s words on the geometric point could also be applied to the instant as a ‘point’ in time. This is the opening through which the eternity of metaphysics insinuates itself into the human experience of time, and irreparably splits it.” From Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience by Giorgio Agamben
“Through what path (via) does geometry derive truth or its likeness from metaphysics? There is no other via but ‘through the malign gateway of the point’ (per malignum aditum puncti). What makes the gateway malign is evident: when the geometer defines punctum as “‘hat of which there is no part,’ he is giving a definite nominis, “because there is no thing that is extended, which has no parts, and yet you draw it in the mind or with a pencil.” From Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy by Robert C. Miner
Piotr Szyhalski and the Labor Camp Orchestra will present the world premiere performance of Malignum Aditum Puncti at 9:45 pm on Friday, September 18.
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