Chapter 2. THE PROSE OF THE WORLD Foucault introduces chapter 2. with an analysis of the representational system up until the end of the sixteenth century. He divides the system into what he calls The Four Similitudes: Convenientia, Aemulatio, Analogy and Sympathy. I use these ‘similitudes’ as a means to describe two stop-frame animations of the night sky. 1. Convenientia Things which come close enough together to be in juxtaposition to one another, ‘So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears.’ ‘It pertains less to the things themselves than to the world in which they exist. The world is simply the universal ‘convenience of things.’[1]
Convenience My daughter draws with her nimble finger on her iPad. The sun, the moon, the earth, the stars in the night sky. All of these approximately circular objects are placed in the space of the frame created by the iPad, linked together by digital pixels and the neurons firing like lemon yellow stars in the space of my daughter’s brain. 2. Aemulatio A sort of ‘convenience that has been freed from the law of place and is able to function, without motion, from a distance. There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror: it is the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another. [2]
Emulation I too create an image of the night sky, an animation depicting the Southern Cross, Night Sky: Southern Cross. My reference is a photograph taken with an app on my daughter’s iPad which reveals the constellation of stars present at a particular moment in the night sky. Originally known by the Latin name Crux, the Southern Cross is a constellation of stars which is only visible south of the equator. It was not observed by people in the northern hemisphere until the Age of Discovery (from the early 15th to early 17th centuries). The first Europeans to observe the constellation were the Portuguese, who mapped it for navigational purposes while rounding the tip of Africa. “Grounded in the history of colonial expansion, it offers a kind of prototypical global positioning system that allows the viewer to know precisely where she stands depending on what she can or cannot see”. [3] I love my daughter’s digital drawing, our two different but corresponding representational systems of the night sky, and ask her if I can use her image for an animation.
