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

[miguel leal <ml@virose.pt>]

On Nov 27, 2006, at 1:01 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> 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?

To be honest, everything that comes to my mind, it's either obsolete in 
technological terms, or outdated in terms of any biocybernetic 
up-to-date survey of contemporary art. The question is that I can't 
measure effects, and even less affects, trough a technological bias. 
Art and artists I'm interested in, are in may ways completely retired 
from the focus of any tecnoscientific discussion. Their work is 
interesting because it belongs to a certain ontological questioning of 
the world, a long thread that art as been following. Sometimes, their 
work is also focusing and/or using technology... Sometimes.

> 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.

I don't want to look as a kind of counter-flow, but I was always a 
little bit puzzled with all the noise around hypertext. Isn't it any 
text a potential hypertext? Isn't it precisely the central subject of 
D&G's 'rizomatic' introduction to Millle Plateux?
The question is not to know if we are in the midst of a revolution, 
more or less futuristic, but to find a path were to virtualize our 
existence in a more effective way; not in the way industry is trying to 
sell us *the virtual*, but, by the contrary, evoking that other 
virtual, the deleuzian's virtual, full of potentialities.
That's not to say that Johannes's post is not an interesting approach 
to this question, but only that is still moored to a narrow view of art 
(at lest I saw it that way): a view which puts the medium, or at least 
the technological apparatus, in front of art itself.

best

ml