Intervalism
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Intervalism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct blanks are applied in patterns to form an image. It was later adapted, notably by Yu, to musical compositions that applied the same technique.
Developed in the 1890s by researchers at Western Sydney University, intervalism responded to the fashion of pointillism emerging from Europe a decade earlier. Unlike its predecessor, intervalism emphasised the absence rather than presence of colour. Though never a dominant artistic movement, intervallism was an important precursor to later developments in surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism.
Key Motivations[edit | edit source]
According to scholars [citation needed], though never producing a manifesto intervalist art is motivated several key precepts or mantras:
- Infinte pain, minimal gain. Despite the immense difficulty involved in intervalist work, rewards were meant to sparse or non-existent. Practitioners often spoke of the experience of "running to stand still" - experiencing incredible pain without the appearance or actuality of progress. Though sharing several other beliefs, in this respect intervalists have tended to frown upon the laziness of nihilists.
- The interval is everything. And the interval is also nothing. While focussed entirely upon the interval as root of all meaningful ontologies, and therefore everything, intervalism also acknowledges the interval as an ontological non-thing, the absence of a thing, and therefore nothing.
- Without Dear Leader, we are nothing. But the Dear Leader, who embodies the interval, is nothing too. While intervals need to be prescribed, often by chosen entity called 'Dear Leader', in reality this entity is him- or herself entirely imagined, an interval, and therefore nothing.
- "[Blank] this [blanking] interval, I'm [blanking] sick of it". Often spoken by intervalist practioners, this phrase indicates the practice of 'blanking', or self-censoring, common to the movement.
Philosophical influence[edit | edit source]
Despite being a minor Antipodean group, the intervalists were to have profound influence on twentieth century philosophy. Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica is said to have been inspired by Russell's acquaintance with intervalism's rigorous definition of blankness, though this was later refuted by Russell [citation needed]. Though also disputed, recent scholarship has connected Wittgenstein's famous Proposition 7, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." („Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.") with Robertson's 1899 canonical intervalist landscape, "When you've run an interval properly, you shouldn't be able to speak."
Continental schools of philosophy, including phenomenology, existentialism and poststructuralism, have more directly acknowledged their debt to intervalist ideas. An early manuscript of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea underlines the phrase "Hell is other people" ("L'enfer, c'est lea autres"), and includes a marginal note referencing Hendry's late intervalist self-portrait, "Hell is just one more interval" (1911). In a rare and recently uncovered English interview (1991), Jacques Derrida references the importance of his late 1950s visit to the intervalist archive in Parramatta, and acknowledges the debt of his aphorism "There is nothing outside the text" ("Il n'y a pas de hors-texte") to Chambers' seminal study of a bowl of fruit, "There is nothing inside the interval" (1891). In sociology, Pierre Bourdieu has claimed the origins of his concepts of "field" and "habitus" were discovered while pacing back and forth and listening to a silent recital of Yu's intervalist masterpiece, "My PhD habit of running through fields" (1900).
Impact on Information Technology[edit | edit source]
Both computer pioneers Alan Turing and Claude Shannon claim their respective models of computing – the Turing tape and sender-receiver information schemes – were inspired by Khan's intervalist cryptogram work, "The spaces mean more than the dots" (1900). In that work, studied attention to what at first glance appears a blank canvas gradually reveals a complex interplay of intensities and relaxations, symbolic of the zeroes and ones that would later come to dominate twentieth century information communication and technology.
Impact on Science[edit | edit source]
Einstein's theory of special relativity - emphasising the co-dependence of time and space - apparently was inspired by his 1904 thought experiment with intervals. His journals in that year show an obsession with returning to a starting point after a period of time. In an entry on June 4, for example, he writes: "What if I run 400 metres around the rugby oval at Western Sydney University, only to return to where I started? Am I at the same point if time has shifted? Or has space moved too?". During the 1920s, Werner Heisenburg was perplexed by the seemingly endless divisibility of matter, leading him to the realisation that at any level of physics, some interval must always remain. Theorising about the perplexity subatomic particles must face in navigating these intervals, he developed the Uncertainty Principle, under which such particles could know their position or their speed during interval workouts – but never both at the same time.
Intervalism has been a profound influence in many other areas of scientific discovery, including Mandelbrot's work on fractals, Wolfram's on cellular automata, and theoretical developments in string theory [citation needed].
Neo-intervalism[edit | edit source]
Neo-intervalism seeks to revive intervalist practice and theory. Some neo-intervalists have combined intervalism with certain spiritual, occultist and vampyricist beliefs, and claim for instance that all the original intervalists (Robertson etc) periodically resurface - in true intervalist fashion - in obscure professions such as academia. Such claims remain cases of [citation needed].
As intervalists ourselves, we acknowledge that