Pablo Picasso, The Bull, Lithograph Series, 1945

If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the modern age, with the decision to transform the world, and to do so by means of science, analytical knowledge and the implementation of technology-- that is to say that it begins, in Hannah Arendt's words, with the invention of an Archimedean point outside the world (on the basis of the invention of the telescope by Galileo and the discovery of modern mathematical calculation) by which the natural world is definitively alienated. This is the moment when human beings, while setting about analysing and transforming the world, take their leave of it, while at the same time lending it force of reality. We may say, then, that the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very same time as it begins to exist. By their exceptional faculty for knowledge, human beings, while giving meaning, value and reality to the world, at the same time begin a process of dissolution ('to analyse' means literally 'to dissolve').

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

Len Lye, Kaleidoscope, 1935

Francis Haar (Haár Ferenc)
Irene Sunbathing
1932

Twisted Ark (Trisidos tortuosa Linné).

From “Shells: forms and designs of the sea” by Andreas Feininger, 1983.

Maya Deren with her Bolex, early 1950s