[-empyre-] Fwd: noiseless art / redemptive 2

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

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk>
Date: Nov 26, 2006 10:44 PM
Subject: RE: noiseless art / redemptive 2
To: sergio basbaum <sbasbaum@gmail.com>



As Miguel suggested:


> Let's return to the suggestion of a noisy technological world to raise
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.>>


Can we look at examples of these practices, and how effective they
are, and how would one measure effect or affect in the age of the
biocybernetic reproducibility?


has anyoneone looked at language(s) amongst the practices of writers
who use words and code?

one of the claims made for hypertext is that it's evolving a new genre
in which narrative, culture and technology intersect (as multiple
narratives about contemporary information cultures ). Looking at the
digital as a medium, the question then arises whether it indeed can,
following Miguel's thesis, work by excess (of transparency) or by
complete opacity.

Katherine Hales, in her writing on the posthuman, and literature
regarding distributed networks, has suggested that we probe our
technologically saturated/determined environment in order to learn how
it is altering how we perceive ourselves as indvidual subjects. She
argues that the instances of illegibility, partial readability, and
symbolic text hybridizations in a "work" such as <Lexia to Perplexia>
point to the relationships between the embodied human subject and the
abstract materiality of the screen. It is complexity/ complex
relationships that such work challenges us with, challenges the regime
of contemporary technical reproducibility with [which W.T.J Mitchell,
in an essay for ARTLINK's special issue on biotechnology, has modified
Benjamin's "age" to the future regime of biocybernetic reproduction].

Hayles' notion ot the universal distributed consciousness and the
telematic embrace: This is slightly futuristic, then, perhaps utopic.

As Hayles implies, illegibility is not simply a lack of meaning, but a
signifier of distributed cognitive processes that construct reading as
an active production of a cybernetic circuit and not merely an
internal activity of the human mind. Illegibility becomes an index of
the difference between human body and computer system, a difference
that materializes once the human subject cognitively enters the world
of a hypertext such as Talan Memmott's text (Lexia to Perplexia).

The assumption here is 'production' ----- composition as (a) creative
collective activities. not reproduction, but generative evolution. The
assumption here is that both human and non-human engines, clicking
mouse (or biocapture, as in the digital image I sent you from the
dance duet in my previous mail) and dynamic HTML text, are co-evolving
agencies, also involved in continuous inter-action - as -
creolizations of language and webbased computer code (not
purification).

the principle of the digital within the biocybernetic regime of
technical producibility is contaminative, mutant, radioactive.

here is the link to Lexia: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/newmedia/lexia/


xx
Johannes Birringer