Re: [-empyre-] clarifying noiseless challenge

Henry Warwick <henry.warwick@sbcglobal.net> · Fri, 3 Nov 2006 12:41:14 -0500

Greetings.
Some observations on observations:
On Nov 2, 2006, at 6:00 PM, sergio basbaum wrote:

- 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.

Agreed.

- Second then, I feel it is important that we find different readings
of Benjamin's essay.

I have always found it very useful as a menu in a restaurant. "I'd  
like the Aura of the artwork reified please? Yes, and I'd like  
mechanical reproduction on my visual culture to turn art into  
entertainment - but only as a side dish? That'd be swell. Thanks!  
Oh... Dessert.... Hmmmmmm. Not part of the Benjamin plan - so, I'll  
look at that after I drink a bottle of French language theory..."
 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).

Movie star? To an extent - the real winners are the entertainment  
development and distribution corporations and the military/industrial  
complex. The movie star and the dictator are just the "front end" -  
the "user interface" for the machine behind them. We can (examples  
off the top of my head) vilify Tom Cruise or adore Angelina Jolie, we  
can vilify George Bush or adore Hugo Chavez. Their contributions to  
their realms are of varying significance (some more or less  
intensively) but there is an entire technological / political /  
economic  system of which they are simply a facet. Example: some  
movie is made called "Modifier Object" with Cruise and Jolie. They  
make millions, true, but the film company makes much much more, and  
that company is made of hundreds, if not  thousands, of people, and  
the film itself employs hundreds of people. Hence, it is Los Angeles  
itself that is complicit in this operation of getting Modifier Object  
into theatres - which in itself is an industry, as well as the video  
rental market when Modifier Object bombs in the theatre.
Ebert and Roper gave it two thumbs down... The gaffer on the Ebert  
and Roper show makes a living, too. He made his mortgage payment from  
helping Modifier Object bomb at the box office.
I think it's fairly useless to discuss symbolic roles (movie star,  
dictator) outside of their appearance as embedded in a context of  
political economy and the culture thereof. The apparatus is the  
camera, but the camera is just one tool in a vast entertainment  
industry - a larger industrial apparatus of bills to pay, families to  
raise, food to buy, etc. on the constituent end and governments to  
control, resources to exploit, and worlds to despoil - one that I  
would submit has largely swallowed the Gallery/Museum Industrial  
Complex whole, chewed it up, and spat it out as entertainment for the  
educated.
 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".

What? you must be working with a bunch of very different programmers  
than I do. Programming is messy, noisy, and often haphazard. You are  
confusing the result with what is underneath it, and the processes  
involved with arriving at the results. There is a vast, nay, VAST,  
continuum in programming standards, practices, and results.
Example: it's been known for sometime that Object Oriented  
Programming has certain advantages - especially in automatic "garbage  
collection" - preventing memory leaks an suchlike. However, the first  
several versions of a Very Popular Video Editing Program were all  
programmed in C. Not C++. C. As a consequence, there were memory  
leaks and programming bugs galore, and the first version of the  
application actually shipped with over 800 known and unresolved bugs  
- many of them attributable to the language used. Why was it written  
in C when better languages were available? Because the lead  
programmer learned programming in C, likes programming in C, and sold  
the project as a product of C code.
Programmer make stuff that breaks, all the time. Why? Because SQA  
(Software Quality Assurance) people get paid to develop conformance  
tests and find the bugs. The programmers run unit tests that run in  
their limited environment. They put the code into a repository, where  
it is then "built" to a test environment. SQA tests it in a more  
rigorous way, and then it goes to production. This is NOT a noiseless  
process, and to discuss high technology development (software or  
hardware) as such, indicates a complete misunderstanding of how the  
stuff actually happens.
I remember when I was working at Napster in 2000- 2001, it was such a  
noisy production system, once there was a fist fight between two  
engineers! That was a messy day... Due to the pressures at the  
company there were a number of attempted suicides. Shouting matches  
were common and routine.
But: to the user - it was a seamless experience of file trading....
So, no - programmers do not operate in a noiseless environment. THEY  
WISH they did, but even when they block themselves off in a quiet  
office with headphones on, they are creative individuals tinkering  
(Lyotard) with code instead of nuts and bolts.
http://www.kether.com/words/lyotard/lyotard01.html
and they make mistakes. ALL THE TIME.

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 -,

So, if A, (and if A=pR+K and if A=pR+K then determines V to make S)
And if we don't accept "if A"?
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

Why? As I noted above, it's not a noiseless process, and since it is  
completely predicated on an utterly unsustainable industrial system  
of resource extraction, overpopulation, and energy production - why  
deconstruct it? It's deconstructing itself before your very eyes!

This challenge, the way I see it, is something we can expect from art
- the subversion of the algorithm through poetry.

You think the intellectual wing of the entertainment industry is  
going to save us?
Think again.
So ativism is nice,

I realise English isn't your first language, and while you write very  
well and clearly, I think this is a crucial misspelllling...  
"ativism" is not a word - I'm confused: are you suggesting aCtivism  
is nice, or atAvism is nice? I think you meant aCtivism, but given  
the anti-technology bend of your argument, atAvism also fits.... but  
provides a completely different idea...
That's why I think of
art as perceptual guerrila, as opening the present to understanding.

So the machine can exploit it?
Interesting stuff. Thanks!
HW