[-empyre-] clarifying noiseless challenge

["sergio basbaum" <sbasbaum@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

There are some observations I'd like to make in order to clarify
issues related to "noiseless age" as I understand it, and some of the
messges that have come up to now.

- First of all, I think it is important to notice that in my statement
of the discussion, I never mentioned the name of Benjamin's essay, but
only the fact that it deals with technological reproducibility of art
works. To think that "mechanical" is not "technological" is to have a
very limited notion of what is technology. For example, many and many
accounts on the relations among  images and technology start already
from linear perspective, so there's absolutely no reason why
"mechanical" should not be also "technological".

In this sense, a very good discussion - through the paths I've been
exploring such problems of art, technology and perception -  would be
to find  more operative distinctions between "technical" and
"technological". I have some ideas I've written about this in my
thesis  but that's not what the present debate would like to adress
and thus come to a broader understanding about;

- Second then, I feel it is important that we find different readings
of Benjamin's essay. To get back to problems already over discussed
like the concept of "aura", or the problem of the magic powers
assigned to images before the invention of photography is always
interesting, of course, but then we fail to develop many interesting
insights that are also  embedded in this striking text, including some
in footnotes  - and were certainly under-developed given Benjamin's to
early tragical death.

One of these questions, the way I'm dealing with it, contains seeds of
ideas that would be later developed both by McLuhan - the way
technologies re-shape our perception, and its enormous consequences in
the way we feel and think - and Vilém Flusser - the way technologies
are wraped to a certain understanding of the world which they express
and reify. To make this last point clear: photography, as regarded by
Flusser, is not an image of the real, but of the real as seen by a
certain conceptual way of looking to the real, that is, that of
science - thus,  photography treats reality as "objects", pretends to
be "objective": it is the vison of science. And, as Benjamin suggests,
the camera submits human beings to a king of "testing", and the
winners in this test are the movie-star and the dictator (those who
identify themselves with the mechanical nature of the apparatus and
thus derive from this a mechanical power for themselves: they are
empowered by the apparatus).

This is one example of questions not so usually discussed about this
essay, and by trying to make a quotation of its title (but also in a
certain way of Heidegger's "The age of the world image") what I
intended was to bring its way of approaching the real to our
contemporary technologically saturated environment. What is this way:
is to give great emphasis to the living experience ("erlebnis") in a
certain society, in certain time.

I think Johannes captured this very well, and also up to now Hamed's
contribuition has been
precious in making us all think a little more about Benjamin's work as
a whole. In this sense, I think it is interesting to remember that
Benjamin's seminal essay on History is possibly his last writing,
published after his death, and written under the impact of Hitler's
greements with Stalin, that have been schocking to those who
understood themselves as marxists (I´m not at all diminishing the
insight offered by Miguel's and Maria's first posts, which open
directions to the debnate themselves. I´m jus trying to clarify issues
of my proposal I felt were not clear) ;

- My last point (and I intend to stay here just as a moderator) is to
take the question of the "hacker as noise-maker", put by Johannes.
Critical Art Ensemble has written on this, and if things were that
simple, hackerism as the answer to a system more and more regulated by
all sort of digital networks, databases and devices, the whole
discussion I'm proposing would be born dead. But hackers - and I´m not
even taking in account the problem already raised by CAE that
unfortunately hackers are not political activists, they do what they
do for the sake of measuring their own technological habilities - , to
be hackers,  have to develop and practive a way of thinking already
shaped by the demands of technology. They have to think technically
and through algorithms and programming languages and their narrow
logic to attain their goals. They have to be precise, they have to
think and formalize their actions in the terms demanded by digital
apparatuses and tools. Thus, they have to think noiseless, otherwise
things simply do not work. I suggest this is "noiseless noise".

Simple as that, this is the paradox I feel urges critical reflection.
Because digital apparatuses today mediates all social processes, from
sexual relationships to war training.
(just a few our ago, I was reading about Brazil being one of the first
countries to buy a large amount of Nicholas Negroponte's U$$ 100,00
laptops.). This is not gonna stop, of course.

So, if we accept that technologies shape the way we perceive reality
and formalize knowledge, and that this shaping is promiscually related
to a certain world-view from which they emerge - so that they are
supposed to help engineering of a certain kind of society -,
then we have the challenge of de-constructing this kind of perception
of the lived experience that presents reality as omni-calcullable and
life as the practice of calculus aiming efficiency, productivity,
precision, velocity, etc. - the utopia of a perfect informational flux
- which we project over our bodies, our affections, our language, our
lives, our work, and which, in my view, is in many levels consequence
of the impact of digital mediation over all aspects of our
contemporary experience.

This challenge, the way I see it, is something we can expect from art
- the suvbersion of the algorithm through poetry. So ativism is nice,
we have a wide troublesome world, with many and many things  to which
adress our energy and desire of a fair world, things to fight. But if
we are not able to understand the impact of technological mediation on
the way we perceive and make sense of contemporary environment, seems
to me we're not going very far, because we're not really questioning
the matrix from which our experience derives. That's why I think of
art as perceptual guerrila, as opening the present to understanding.

These kind of questioning, which opens for me landscapes of the
present which I cannot refuse  - is what moved me to propose this
discussion. We have here very well prepared artists and authors and we
are already accesing landscapes of the present which may present new
answers or new questions on this paradox. I think it's not trivial at
all.

regards from Brazil

S.