Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (review)

If I had to use one word to describe this book, it would have to be fascinating. It is a courageous Westerner who analyzes and writes about Islamic art and culture itself, but to draw parallels with new media art and develop a sophisticated aesthetic philosophy of these connections shows a fearless and confident scholar. As she writes:

I intend to use classical Islamic thought to discuss new media art as if it were the most natural thing in the world. If someone puts down this book believing that the Mu'tazila atomists invented the pixel or that the concept of artificial life originates with the carpet weavers in the sixteenth-century Caucasus, that is fine with me

(p. 26).

Enfoldment and Infinity is a fast-paced scholarly tour de force. Marks's depth of understanding of Islamic culture and the various philosophies that historically have been used to produce its art—including poetry, architecture, utensil decoration, music and of course carpets—is quite profound. Perhaps more than in any other religion, an understanding of the political influences involved is as important as understanding the various scriptures and their interpretations. Marks considers these factors and describes clearly how and why the various forms of Islamic art were created the way they were. She argues "that new media art, considered Western, has an important genealogy in the aesthetics, philosophy, and science of classical Islam" (p. 149).

The book has a center color-plate section together with numerous black-and-white illustrations. As Marks mentions herself, the photographs cannot do justice to the texture and relief features of carpets and the domed ceilings of mosques. There are 10 chapters, followed by an extensive notes section and an excellent index. The chapters are as follows:

1. 1. Getting Things Unfolded

2. 2. Islamic Aesthetics and New Media Art: Points of Contact

3. 3. The Haptic Transfer and the Travels of the Abstract Line, Part I

4. 4. The Haptic Transfer and the Travels of the Abstract Line, Part II

5. 5. The Haptic Transfer and the Travels of the Abstract Line, Part III

6. 6. Baghdad, 830: Birth of the Algorithm

7. 7. Baghdad, 1000: Origin of the Pixel

8. 8. Cairo, 972: Ancestor of the Morph

9. 9. Herat, 1487: Early Virtual Reality

10. 10. Karabagh, 1700: Seeds of Artificial Life

Chapter 1 is basically an introduction and description of the approach taken in the following chapters. Chapter 2 proposes several properties that are common to Islamic art, regardless of its historical period, and contemporary abstract and new media art. Chapters 3 to 5 follow the westward travels of Islamic aesthetics from the 12th through the 20th centuries. Chapter 4 argues that by the 19th century, the subjective states that accompany Islamic art had without doubt begun to manifest in Western art and popular culture. Chapter 5 suggests that Islamic aesthetics subtly informed the aesthetics of aniconism and algorithmicity in the cybernetics of the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter ponders whether networks are the haptic space of our age. Chapter 6 proposes a historical parallel to new media in art of the Sunni world from the 10th and 11th centuries that privileged geometric forms. Chapter 7 is mainly devoted to atomism, a brief and fascinating movement in 9th-century Iraq, which holds that the world consists of accident and fluctuation, changing at God's command. Chapter 8 looks at calligraphy whereby letters and words start to look like bodies. While Chapter 7 shows that in some contexts the point or pixel is thought to be the inner limit of thought, Chapter 9 examines the infinitesimal dimension—the idea that the smallest point has an inside. Chapter 10 explores the idea that unfolding is like life itself. This chapter is devoted to another fascinating commonality between new media art and much Islamic art: qualities of nonorganic life, self-organization or autopoiesis (pp. 33-35).

Marks covers a huge amount of ground with this book and as...