[-empyre-] A Post-Futurist or a Neo-Baroque perception?

[davin heckman]

I enjoy reading Virilio's works, so maybe this is the result of some
congenital defect on my part, or maybe it is something that I caught
through reading, but i really think the question here is one of a
"human scale."  Clock time is not the same thing as human scale,
rather it is a rationalization built around a human scale of
perception, a parsing of the years, seasons, and days.  Following
Stamatia's account of the industrialization of the human into
something inhuman, we have reached a point where the clock time is
considered relatively human next to other regimes of temporality and
acceleration...  but clock time is the point of departure for further
manipulations of scale.

On the other hand, there is the experience of time through sequence,
memory, and narrative, which might at times attach itself to various
techniques and technologies of objective measure, but whose content is
radically different from its rational measure.  For example, in cases
of extreme boredom, where one becomes increasingly agitated while
waiting for someone else....  the invocation of the clock is the
supplement to the human experience ("I've been waiting for three
hours!  Where were you?).  Conversely, when someone is having fun, the
passage of time can be invoked to supplement the subjective
experience.  ("It's been three hours!  I was writing and lost track of
time!")  Time, here, functions as a medium upon which parties can
agree, but it is not the same thing as the experience itself, whose
time is unrepresentable.  This time is so hard to deal with and
communicate....  that this might be precisely why we'd need to invent
some external judge, the clock, who can supposedly arbitrate for us.

I think once we debate the "human" and the "posthuman" on the
dialectical grounds of competing regimes of technique, we highlight
differences which distort the basic question of being.  If we say the
time of "human being" is the time of the clock, then it follows that
"human being" is called into question when the scale of the clock is
eradicated.  But, if we consider that "human being" has always been
supplemented by various regimes of external temporal regulation which
try to impose order upon the subjective experience of time, then we
have a great deal more in common with people across history.  In a
sense, how is "clock time" much different from a dictionary?  Both try
to fix meaning for a community.  But we know that signs are always
more than the dictionary tells us.

To put this in the context of this month's discussion, I think that
those arts which are based on the movements of the human body and
which require the active participation of the human being are tied in
some sense to issues of presence and scale in very literal ways.
Technologies of capture, acceleration, magnification, or
objectification are used upon/used by these persons in a way that
highlights the relationships of scale between the human and the
particular technique.  Particular instances might distort or magnify,
exalt or diminish the relative importance of agents, but as a system,
such art represents the relationships of scale that are being enacted
across the globe by willing and unwilling participants on a daily
basis.

Peace!
Davin



On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 12:14 PM, G.H. Hovagimyan <ghh at thing.net> wrote:
> Manifestos are really old fashioned especially in the digital age.
> Information systems are constantly being changed and updated.  The
> truth is that any programming language or software tool can be
> learned in a couple of weeks. In terms of manifestos the only rule I
> find interesting is the one that is about the democratization of art,
> this is the consequence of the networks.  All information is
> equivalent on the networks. Time and space really don't exist or
> rather all information exists at the same time on the networks. The
> meaning of any bit of information is created by it's use. This goes
> back to Wittgenstein's axiom, the meaning of word is it's meaning and
> the meaning of a word is it's use.
> Since I am an artists, the meaning that I create is art.  As an
> example my group Artists Meeting is doing a series of video shows of
> curated youTube videos.  We use the found material to create art.
> This is a consequence or result of web 2.0 and the democratization of
> art.  Here's a link -- http://artistsmeeting.org
>
> On May 7, 2009, at 12:01 PM, stamatia portanova wrote:
>
>> In short, my final question is: given our intensive, Post-Futurist
>> conception of time, how do we critically respond to the small-scale
>> quantifications and restrictions, or accelerations, of space-time
>> by digital technology, without going back to a simultaneous
>> chronological and metric conceptions? In the end, one moment can be
>> as long as a life...
>
> G.H. Hovagimyan
> http://nujus.net/~gh/
> http://artistsmeeting.org
> http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/plazaville
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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