Re: [-empyre-] clarifying noiseless challenge

[miguel leal <ml@virose.pt>]

Hi

I'm returning a little late to this discussion, sorry. But I have been 
following it from here. And as I could see, the last few days were 
quite silent... Probably as a tribute to November's theme at -empyre- 
soft-skinned space  :-)

Even so, there are lots of threads to follow, and being impossible to 
follow all of them, I am choosing something that I think it's important 
and latent since my first (and only) statement posted to the list.

Johannes (and Paulo Chagas) posts are exactly posing, indirectly, the 
question I would like to rise.

In fact, I also think it's erroneous to define 'digital' technologies 
as 'noisless'. All technologies are noisy by nature, and digital ones 
are not different in the results they produce. Technology is noisy 
because it's capable of acting in an unexpected way. Brendan presented 
it very clearly (even if in a simplified way) in his post about hackers 
and programmers as noise producers. Probably his mistake, in my point 
of view, was to present those hackers and programmers as the main 
engines of all that messy noise we can follow in every piece of 
software, or in any machine, even the analogical devices we are still 
surrounded of:

> "Spirit has been displaying some anomalous behavior," said Project
> Manager John Callas, who noted the rover's unsuccessful attempts to
> flip itself over and otherwise damage its scientific instruments. "And
> the thousand or so daily messages of 'STILL NO WATER' really point to
> a crisis of purpose."   [...]

That's why to say about programmers
> and they make mistakes. ALL THE TIME.
is the least we can say about technologies and its owns effects (and 
sometimes, why not, affects), but is still not enough. There is always 
a technological shadow, there is always a surprising 
being-in-the-machine-itself, that configures a technological 
unconscious. That's precisely, as I can put it in a few words, what we 
can get as one of the strongest shadows of Benjamin text (yes, a text 
as its own shadows). Ricardo points it out in one of is posts, 
underlining the 'optical unconscious' that appears, as a strong 
suggestion in Benjamin's text:

> -- by sugesting that the photo and cinema experience interferes in
> perception -- for example, opens a "visual unconscious", thorugh which
> we perceive previously unnoticed visual dayly realities -- he
> anticipates McLuhan's thesis of media re-shaping our perception;

In my opinion, thats most important contribute of this text to our 
conversation: the revealing of a tecnological shadow, of a blind 
imagination that comes from the technological devices and the things we 
make with them.

******
Let's return to the suggestion of a noisy technological world to rise 
the question in the field of art practice, an important place to find 
some partial answers to our discussion. Being art, as we all now, 
confronted ever-since with the management of noise and the 
imprevisibility of the technological apparatus, it was obliged to 
develop different approaches to that same problem.
Sometimes, artistic practice acts by excess, by an excess of 
transparency, revealing everything to build a secret (we can be secret 
showing everything). In this case, art is dealing with the noise and 
excesses of technology in an homeopathic way — as with a kind of 
moebius band — turning technology over its own noisy shadow. By the 
other hand, art choses many times a complete opacity, a complete and 
austere silence as an answer to that noise. In this case we are dealing 
with a model that builds technological phantoms.
Both ways are capable of producing a strong thinking on technology and 
its particular noises — now becoming predominant in our world —even if 
one produces cacophonies and a bodily effect, and the other something 
phantomatic. Both approaches are able to produce unperceivable, 
unpersonal and inoperant things. Both strategies are a grant of 
survival.

to be continued...

ml