The world is like this. New objects proliferate like flora. Environments get printed out. Hybrid forms bloom. Backgrounds are rendered, divided into sections, transferred.

The world is like this. It is cut on the floor, it is patterned across the slope. It comes in various resolutions. There are compression artifacts, blocky forms of blur that confuse discreteness with continuity. They are metabolic, spreading like organisms. There is something molten about a digital file just as there is something molten about a jelly-fish or a fragment of lace or a seashore or a plastic bottle of detergent. Everything depends upon the scale.

Moiré means “watered silk,” 1650s, from the French moire (17c.), or mohair. Mohair is from the 1610s, earli- er mocayre, 1560s, fine hair of the Angora goat, also a fabric made from this, from French mocayart (16c.), Italian mocaiarro, both from Arabic mukhayyar or cloth made from goat hair, literally “selected, choice,” from mu-, noun prefix, + khayar “choosing, preferring.”

A moiré is an optical effect created by the superimposition of one transparent pattern onto another pattern. The patterns are nearly the same, but with a difference. It usually has something to do with screens, with the interference patterns that emerge from screens or screening operations. Maybe one screen is a textile, and an- other is made of diodes. A third screen produces blurry clusters of ink. The effect is always more or less the same: watery, rippling wavelike over the surface. It’s not quite right to say surface, because you are somewhere in between the surface and the depths. In fact, you choose neither, prefer neither. Enchanted where wave- lengths cut you. A certain liquidity emerges here, a function of two different registers, two different levels, nei- ther selected. A liquid has hard edges. You are cut apart by wave-break upon wave-break.

The world is like this. I draw a curtain across my window. Something like lace. Behind it, a screen. Behind it, a sea-garden. In it, flowers. Rose cut in rock. Border on border of scented pinks. Framework of the wing of a dove. I draw a strip of curtain across the too insistent greatness of the world without. I establish grids and co- ordinate points. I put a veil over the view.

H.D. writes about the clarity of screening out, of obscuring. The clarity of the veil. It’s a kind of liquid percep- tion: a cap of consciousness over your head, affecting, a little, your eyes. It’s like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space, like a closed sea plant, jelly-fish, or anemone. Enchanted where wave-lengths cut you. Optical apparatuses. One lens or two? Opera glass or jelly-fish or microscope? What is this clarity, these cuts, this piercing focus, this severity? These edges in a field of soft focus? A rose is a clear rose, a rose cut in rock, a hard rose, hard like hail. A flower is an attractor in whatever material. You are the world-edge. Your hand caught at this; the root snapped under your weight. Sand cuts your petal, furrows it with hard edge.

We are dealing with signal processing, with questions of interpolation and aliasing. What happens when you scan or sample a source and later try to reconstruct the source? What kinds of disorienting reversals, shifts in scale and motion, might take place?

H.D. writes about media of transmission and storage. If we had the right sort of brains, she says, we would receive definite messages from the figures we see, like dots and lines ticked off by one receiving station, received and translated into definite thought by another telegraphic center. Each bend of the arm, each draping gar- ment, each whorl of hair, each angling of the chin, each tilt of the head: these are telegraphic centers, informa- tion sources hiding behind transmission stations. The fruit tree and the human body are both receiving sta- tions. A soap dish is a receiving station. A meat hook is a receiving station. A plastic flower is a receiving sta- tion. The world is not made of things but of communication. This must be accounted for, decomposed and re- composed in code. We want receiving stations for dots and dashes.

The world is like this. Perhaps ordinary things never become quite unreal.

— Alec Mapes-Frances