[-empyre-] emit time

["Sean Cubitt" <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>]

> ...mel, r u referring 2 the idea here that space is s.sentially
> collapsible|inconstant & how this relates 2  the idea that
> virtuality|networked arenas r conceptualised as unique, rather than
> contextualised as fundamentally trajectoric?

I've been reading Hegel's logic. Yeah, I know. Anyway, there's a line where he says'The divorce between thought and thing is mainly the work of the Critical Philosophy [ie Kant], and runs counter to the conviction of all previous ages, that their agreement was a matter of course' (para 22, susatz)

This might explain why representation has been so central to the western tradition, all the way up to is necessary collapse in simulation. 

Larry Grossberg adds (its in the intro to his collected essays) that kant was responsible for dividing space and time as well. Shortly after the invention of cinema, Einstein starts trying to sticth them back together again. He uses the speed of light - a trajectory - to do the job. One way or another, the C20th seems to move from representation of an object-world made up of space and time to trajectories that establish space and time, which don't exist without the movement through them. 

By and large the media arts have been researching this (while to my mind, with the exception of his own later work, the most significant western art since 1912 has merely rehashed Duchamp's fountain). Networked art extends, broadens and remakes the work, as mel says "to an end of possibility, to everything being a
mathematical probability."

Probability: statistical likelihood at the bifurcation/multiplication of paths which arrives at every moment of the present. A trajectory whose next swerve is never foreseeable . . . 

Like the phrase from Adorno's leter about high and low culture as 'two torn halves of an integral freedom to which howver they do not add up' -- but things have changed since he wrote that to benjamin, and now our job is to reintegrate them

s