Welcome to SPOT Operations!
What is SPOT Operations? It's a website – this one – devoted to exploring implications of the SPOT System and related issues of symbol processing and sensory awareness.
SPOT operations, on the other hand, are specific steps in image processing that use configuration-expressive digital operators based on the SPOT System.
This site is devoted to both the technical and the expressive faces of visual art, those ever-present aspects of making and using any image. But, since SPOT operators are so useful, occasionally we jump, grasshopper-like, out into other arenas of techne/art as well: linguistics/writing, sound/music . . . .
This section is devoted to technical considerations of the SPOT System and its derivative techniques, LAVA/SILK and CDM. On the other side of the wall, over there, is the Salon where you'll encounter works of art and the people who make and enjoy them. To provide a convenient separation between techne and art (though they're never really apart, ever), the Salon side is styled differently than this more technical side, which aims to be clean, simple and orderly. The Salon, on the other hand, aspires to being open, light, fluid, unpredictable . . . all the mercurial traits of truly imaginal beings.
While we're at it, consider that word: imaginal. Doesn't it usually relate to imago, a term from entomology ("An insect in its sexually mature adult stage after metamorphosis.") or psychology ("An often idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood.")?
Well, depending on the context—or the dictionary—it may. But, unless we happen to be discussing adult insects or psychological profiles, here the terms, imaginal and imago, will have more fundamental import, i.e., archetypal and archetype, especially in relation to roles of imagery and imagining within human culture and the greater context wherefrom humans derive intimations of "meaningfulness" within the universe.
The SPOTops slogan arises from Ernst Cassirer's observation, in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, that the fundamental task of every individual is "to make sense of the senses." So, you see, SPOT Operations embraces it all, from the innermost whisper of private prospect to fully comprehensive dimensions of all that there is, was or ever may be. Both extensional and intentional aspects of consciousness — the entire universe of imaginal being.
So. Welcome to our operations. Come in, get settled in your own little spot. We're pleased to have you among us, helping us all make sense of our senses.
