Re: [-empyre-] incoming

["clare" <oclare@paradise.net.nz>]

Kia Ora Sean,
fromnz2nz...

the exploration of 'new' media in terms of theory as opposed to or in
association with 'practice' is interesting because i think in lots of ways
there's a real disconnect between whats happening in 'industry', commercial
worlds and whats happening behind the classroom doors...

maybe thats a bit of a generalisation but i would like to see more
engagement across the academic/industry worlds where 'playspaces' in
discourse can be mirrored with playspaces in research and development, and
then commercialisation of cool ideas.

you'll see some of this in origin from mit's media lab www.mit.media.edu and
the nz version about to establish www.medialab.co.nz and also in terms of
your interest in human/computer interface at the newly formed HIT lab in NZ
or Human Interface Technology lab.

the quest for survival for artists - whatever medium - is finding an
audience that will purchase their work as well as discuss it, critique it,
challenge it and be challenged back.

also the terrain of interactive games as a new literary genre - lets pull
that to pieces - and create new genres within games, the romance game, (the
sims?:))  the thriller (?) not just action or even militaristic strategy. at
the recent www.E3expo.com in l.a. that was definitely on the cards...how do
we create new content for interactive media/games when most of the creators
are still young-ish white males?

interesting ..

go sean...lets meet up

clare o
----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Cubitt <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>
To: <empyre@imap.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 6:31 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] incoming


Kia Ora Empyricists

melinda tells me to start with an intro, and some idea of what is
interesting me at present.

We moved to Aotearoa at the end of 2002 after a motley career in communty
media, arts and teaching. I like to write. I am also fascinated by the
relationship between writing and writing about
(http://130.217.159.224/~seanc/). I make my living as a teacher, so veer
between the pursuit of clarity and the realisation of complexity, ambiguity,
overdetermination.

Apart from an essay in Polish, my most recent publication is the Third Text
Reader, co-edited from the journal. My inspirations are green,
anti-imperial, feminist, transnational, indigenist, queer and marxist. I'm a
jobbing theorist. Currently I am trying to complete a manuscript about
cinema. The project is slightly odd, for me at least: it has to be
disciplined (film studies is very established) and it has to be clear
(rather than poetic in tone)

The first section (reflected in the pages called 'The Hours') is about three
moments of early cinema that I take as elements of moving images: the moment
of raw sensation in the Lumières' Workers leaving the factory, the moment of
objectification in Melies (and an Indian pioneer, Phalke), and the moment of
meaning (Emile Cohl, an early animator). Various triplets shape it: Real,
Imaginary and Symbolic; referent, signified, signifier; valueless,
use-value, exchange-value; Peirce's 1stnes, 2ndness, 3rdness; zero,
unity/multiplicity and infinity. I call the three elements pixel, cut and
vector to establish a retrospective history from a digital perspective. I
think it has to do with analysing sensation into the perception of objects
in space-time (and the subject-object split that accompanies it) and then
re-stitching space and time back together in the social moment of
interpretation. As you can infer, it's a reasonably (unreasonably?)
technical argument.

The Hours I bashed together as an example for a discussion among NZ media
academics about what we might publish as a journal; what might we do to make
our research chime with the media on which it is conducted. Not a great
example, but something for a group to develop or reject. It makes some of
the metaphors in the manuscript explicit.

It is also an example of a wider theme. Digital media make it increasingly
obvious that media mediate. I believe that communication is fundamental
(after a couple of beers I'll say the universe communicates; at the very
least humans, animals and machines communicate). All communication is
mediated (barring telepathy, but the attempts at signalling telepathically
undertaken on a daily basis by NZ drivers suggest there are limits to it).
At the time of cinema's invention, the commodity was the dominant form of
mediation. Today it is money, more specifically electronic data flows of
which money forms a wildly significant proportion. Digital money doesn't
represent, it mediates.

That's probably what I have to say. I think, I hope, that the work I'm doing
on fundamentals of mediation in the early moving image will help clarify
what media do when they mediate: what it does to the world to be made object
or made meaningful; what it does to subjectivity and sociality; what options
those processes open to makers a hundred years later. Topics that interest
me greatly include human-machine dialogue, and the opportunity we now have
to grant autonomy to machines, so that we might have someone else in the
universe to talk to (while we're waiting for the aliens to show)

There are a few negatives that come up from this argument. There are bits of
the ms (some of which will have to be edited out) which offer criticisms and
critiques of concepts widely used as basic in media and art discourse.
Against representation; against resistance/subversion; against play; against
genre. Oddly, I find myself *for* authorship, in a guarded way. I'm also
going to have to work through a difficult idea of audience, or rather
'audiencing', in terms of the cosmopolitan media (Matrix, Crouching Tiger,
The One, Moulin Rouge) that address a de-differetiated, global market by
mixing North Atlantic and East or South Asian styles, techniques and themes.
(Equally true of games industry titles like Lara Croft). The first draft of
that section is deeply depressing. One other thing (it relates to
authorship, the role of the artist, the activity of audiencing): I think
communication comes before the people who communicate, and that 'we' are
effects of communication, and even more specifically media of communication
(from the point of view of global finance, 'I' am only a node through which
money flows; if language is a virus, 'I' am just a medium in which it
replicates and mutates)

Any of these might well be empyre topics.

I've been enjoying sleeping on the list for the last month or so. Looking
forward to renewing acquaintances and making new ones. Apologies in advance
for various asynchronicities, but then we all know that the sociological
line about 'instantaneous communication' bears no relation to the experience
of communicating. Morgenstern: 'von Korf has invented a new kind of joke.
You never get it at first. But you wake up in the middle of the night
gurgling like a drain'.


sean





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