The Baroque Style

baroque

Folding Space

The Baroque Style

The Baroque View of the World

After the Middle Ages comes the Baroque. Knowledge divided into compartments, systems divided into layers and folds, diplomacy becomes a formal game, elevation of intimacy and secrecy.

> references

The Baroque Style has been popular at certain times in history.

It is characterized by a complex elaboration of features, and a complicated enfolding of the functional space.

It is now typical of much modern technology, which revels in excessive complexity.

At the surface level, this design style can be found in many widely used software products, including Microsoft Office.

At a deeper level, this design style is found in emerging software and business architectures:

There is also a Baroque view of the world, and the entities and processes it contains. One of the primary sources for this view is Leibniz, whose monads can be compared with objects or components.

This leads to a topological way of understanding a variety of business and system questions.

This also links to a view of Internet as Labyrinth.

> topological notions

references


Gilles Deleuze. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley, 1993. University of Minnesota Press London: Athlone Press	A rich and difficult work, using Leibniz theory of forms to illuminate contemporary and modern arts and manners. Chapter 6: What is an Event? (html) Review by Andrew Benjamin (html)	buyme@amazon.com
Werner Künzel/Peter Bexte Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Barock-Projekte, Machinenwelt und Netzwerk im 17. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1990.	Künzel is a software engineer at Siemens by day, and a philosopher by night. Review by Geert Lovink: The Archeology of the Computer Assemblage (html)	Edition Olivia Künzel, Holsteinsche Str. 37, 1000 Berlin 31, Germany.
Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn Reprint edition (September 1991) Anchor Books/Doubleday;	Read the title essay about Walter Benjamin.	I

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