[-empyre-] operational constructs and erotic space
dear Kate, Patrick and -empyreans-
Recent posts and url quotes lead to a long romp (or tromp! or tromp
l'oeil) that I hope will pulse back to Kate's (aes)ethics of border
crossing somehow, via violence, post-corporeal, vision machine, the
operational construct, conceptual art practice, and sense of place . No
conclusions here, just collaging thoughts from many people with a few
observations within the thread.
Following Jim Barrett's lead, i went to
<http://www.carceldeamor.net/vsc/textos/textorze.html>
He quotes Remedios Zafra,
http://www.carceldeamor.net/vsc/textos/textorze.html
the Net has not resisted the invisible writing and blind eye of
patriarchal power.
Instead, it continues to reiterate models of domination, .. merely
acts as a disguise for the repetition and sublimation of the collapse
of
androcentric power."
Let's consider an inscription on real sexed bodies, perhaps a 'sense of
place' as a code that re-presents us to the 'world' or the
'post-corporeal context....as Zafra notes,
http://www.carceldeamor.net/vsc/textos/textorze.html
...effects materialized through strategies of invisibilization
(normalization of symbolic violence) as well as strategies of
blindness (seeing with the eyes of the Other). Politics and creativity
are vital, then, because violence never rests; it constantly reworks
its foundations and the gains of its effectiveness in the inscription
of power on sexed bodies and now too in the reiteration of its codes
on new agents that represent us (or who we are) in an online world.
These creative and political exercises reveal that in a postcorporeal
context, forms of sexual domination are still hidden and strategies of
blindness towards the act of symbolic and real violence against women
are still being normalized.
So effective is this tendency towards repetition (and by extension,
normalization) that for the artist and the (feminist) political
activist who confronts forms of sexual domination on the Internet, a
mere “gaze” with visibilizing intentions is not enough. They must go
beyond the mere discovery of encrypted (invisible) writing in online
structures and habits. It is also necessary to overcome trances of
blindness; that is, the dilemmas of any position of discourse whereby
it acts simultaneously as object and reflexive subject, so that by
being included in that which we wish to delimit, we unconsciously
incorporate structures of the masculine order as structures of
perception (it would be, then, a blindness provoked by looking through
the eyes of the Other).
So perhaps vision itself is implicated as part of the operational
system, as Virillio prophesied in The Vision Machine. Blindness
provoked by
looking through the eyes of the Other, as the Other is the inscription,
or operational coordinates of IT.
Ryan Griffis, (on empyre: RE; re-delineations )
i'm wondering how art using IT can also be a criticism of it, in a
meaningful sense. with the histories of conceptual art and inst. crit.
pretty accessible now, i think there is firm ground from which to ask
how these practices' challenges hold up. i'm wondering how art that
relies on the same mechanisms it is trying to critique presents a
meaningful challenge to those mechanisms. this seems especially
relevant to tech-based art, which is utilizing, without question, one
of the most rapidly developing product markets as a base. there are
all kinds of concerns here, from labor to environmental justice. at
the least, i think we could be asking what is driving our need to
solve problems through technology in the way that we are. how are we
even arriving at a consensus of what the problems are? my feeling is
that the problems a lot of IT-based art, even the critical work, seems
to ask are very similar to the ones the IT industry is - and the
solutions are: more technology, more places.
Ryan's asking the same question about repetition, too: mere 'gaze' ,
e. g. , tracking, mapping, is not enough; indeed perpetuates violence
against sexed bodies.
Jordan Crandall explored this theme powerfully in his installation
"Heatseeking" in the Bitstreams show at the Whitney in 2001.
http://www.firstpulseprojects.net/jordan_crandall.html
His definition of 'the observational construct' observes a 'drive to
eliminate the intervals between observation, analysis and engagement....
as, in full, here:
http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?cspaces;crandall
The operational construct can be positioned as part of a larger
historical discourse on technology, culture, and power in the West -
visible in the fields of computer science, economics, media studies,
or an emerging culture of navigation and "location awareness." Broadly
defined, the operational construct is an assemblage of
computer-assisted operations through which objects are analyzed,
tracked, and negotiated, in order to facilitate an arrangement of
power. It helps to orchestrate a perceptual coordination, positioning
its subject-objects within a determined situation whereby an operation
of enforcement is conducted. It helps to structure a field of
representation and a mode of attention that is particular to it. As it
seeps into general use, it becomes a model for thought, a metaphor in
language, a model of identification, and an agent of material
transformation. It is the source of new concepts and metaphors, which,
necessarily, need to be understood in a political relation. Think, for
example, of the extent to which one "tracks" or scans rather than
simply sees: a machine-aided process of perception and knowledge
accumulation that is bound up within the demands of an emerging
security regime.
The operational construct is a product of the drive to eliminate the
intervals between observation, analysis, and engagement and thus to
generate an improved knowledge-action-time. One could see the entire
history of military development as having been driven, in one way or
another, by this need. The operational construct is motored by the
need for an instantaneity of action, where time delays, spatial
distances, and "middlemen" are reduced through computational systems
that facilitate the sharing of human and machinic functions.
Possibly conceptual art practice as a critique of information and
information technology must counter that 'drive to eliminate the
intervals between observation, analysis and engagement.." and in fact
to impair or occlude "the sharing of human and machinic functions" in
order to resist being inscribed and desexed, to be de-territorialized.
The sense of place arrives in the experience of intervals. The sense
of place reasserts zones of experience that cannot be fit into the
"operational construct." This is a site for critique and conceptual
practice in IT-related arts: that refuses repetition and tends to see
both indexically, scanning, through the eyes of the Other (eg the
machine), and corporeally, through an erotic experience of place and
body.
Drew Hemmett http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?cspaces;hemmett
Within all these projects, however, the reliance on the clinical
precision of digital tracking, and the emphasis on point-to-point
correspondence, is rarely critically engaged. In most cases ambiguity
- or disruption of machinic precision - arises only in the negotiation
of land features and the resolution or granularity of technical
hardware. Clinical, clean precision is the limit point of locative
art, its realisation and its undoing. While error may introduce sites
of disturbance, when reduced to statistics it offers deviation but not
disruption of the norm. The technical conditions of possibility of
such projects, and the denotative relationship between contents,
wherein location is unambiguously designated or assigned, is rarely
addressed....... Locative art's condition of possibility is a prior
abstraction, and as a consequence its emphasis on location is
accompanied by a distancing from embodiment, physicality and context,
which - within such a reductive understanding of spatiality - become a
mere residue of the coordinate system.
Displacement, or distancing from embodiment actually can be explicitly
used as a strategy for allowing feeling to erupt inside the
'operational' coordinates' . The nomenclature of 'user' as the human
component of the operational construct implies "distancing from
embodiment" -- the human is just a gerund, a frozen verb, "--ing" , a
"distancing" : and here we arrive at an erotic condition within the
coordinates of the vision machine: a snippet from a recent event at
Deitsch Projects New York, sent to me by Joseph Nechvatal yesterday:
Josefina Ayerza, editor of Lacanian Ink
http://www.lacan.com/issue24-25.htm
With Jacques-Alain Miller eroticism draws in space, subsists over
time... Not a Euclidean linear space, the route to the desired object
makes detours, circuits... - the obsessive renders the actual object
impossible to attain... the hysteric turns it elusive.
With the obsessional the obstacle becomes the cage itself in which the
subject is enclosed, and this conveys the subjective experience of the
obsessional - of being caged. The obsessional promenades with his
cage... he is mobile, but always in the space of the cage. And it is
in this cage that he can experience the affect of mortification, which
tends to transform the cage into a coffin.
In hysteria every object I attain is not the object of my desire. In
other words, if I attain the object, by this very fact it ceases to be
the object of my desire. The displaced object is found elsewhere: "I
desire caviar on condition of not having it."
A conceptual art strategy in IT-related arts might involve
intensifying, through displacement, a a sense of place outside the
operational coordinates -- perhaps, because of the enmeshment of the
'operational coordinates', accompanied by the sense of entrapment,
impossibility and longing?
I explore this a bit further elsewhere:
http://naxsmash.net/public_html/texts/McPheeNaxsmash_files.htm
---looking forward to seeing this blasted apart or remixed,
thanks to everyone for great posts so far,
Christina
This archive was generated by a fusion of
Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and
MHonArc 2.6.8.