[-empyre-] message from maria Moreira (Re: clarifying noiseless noise)

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

A good initial question could be:

Which type of dreamwork line(s) the digital realm  belongs to?

Let us put forward two, for start:

- a dream of efficiency, focusing on targeting, data control, smooth
operations [enter the first person shooter and  his/her wiser brother
the forensic investigator?];

- a  dream of expression, related to the apprehension of
multiplicities – a 'delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of
communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous
potentials and intensities'1, there to be experienced
in the pluralities of cultural times active inside any contemporary
urban living, for instance  [enter the surfer as flâneur?].

Volker Schlöndorff, in one of his less know film, Die Falshung [1981],
had an interesting scene addressing efficiency in a crumbling world.

The action happens in a late 70s newsroom in Lebanon, where an old
school German reporter, covering that long lasting war, is being
bullied by his colleagues on his eagerness on sending reports back
home about the never-ending catastrophic events. Out of exasperation
he asks them: 'What is wrong with efficiency?

The effect on the viewer is sharp. With this single question,
Schlöndorff turned a subtle eye on the values of his own culture.

Could we update this question to 'What is wrong/right with 'digital' efficiency?

We could start with reporting and real time, for instance, and the
power it has to morph repeated catastrophic events into
wallpaper/screensaver/ computer game imagery [noiseless noise?], but
also the beauty of spontaneously organized response to appeals/ rescue
operations, and also the mixing feelings about inter-prisons
rebellions and executions managed through mobiles phones, or the
over-mapping of our lives by surveillance cameras [another daily
noiseless noise?], and yet the bizarreness of having the 1984 threat
fully carnivalised/ cannibalised by the international Big Brother
series...

This ability of the digital realm, as technology of enhanced flow, to
force a constant exteriority, may lead to distancing or proximity
depending on the social ground of its insertion.

Inverting this equation, one could take the pulse of a social ground
by attempting to trace how the digital realm is effecting on its
gestures/gestural of distancing and proximity, that is, how digital
activity is interacting with old atavisms, even maybe
just reproducing them in acceleration...


Cheers, Maria

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1 - Deleuze, Gilles.(1968) Difference  and Repetition. London: The Athlone
Press. 1994. p.50