[-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen

Thu Sep 3 03:22:38 EST 2009

I follow your reading of the materiality of a medium through Deleuze,  
but not through Heidegger's presence-at-hand and the relevatory  
ontological possibities that exist at the momment of breakdown, at  
least as applied to the issue of revealing medium specificity at the  
nexus of reception. I don't deny the ontologicial effects of  
thrownness in breakdown generally; I only question your application of  
the theory as having specific application to emerging art forms... In  
fact, I think there is an implicit danger here and I am curious as to  
your thoughts.

Assuming the premise that one of the things that artists possess is a  
special autonomy to probe new media for their underexplored  
possibilities, and potentially catalyzing their quasi-independent  
agency as media (again, Deleuze), then aren't we severely delimiting  
the range of this autonomy by situating it in a discourse that takes  
place at the momment of audience reception? This would seem to me to  
foreclose many possibilities for experimental practices specifically  
because it devolves into a conversation about error conditions that  
become an antithesis to the normalized aesthetic conditions under  
which a medium is experienced. "Error conditions" may in fact be  
highly reinforcing of nominal assumptions in many if not most cases.

Whereas other possibilities include an intentionality to make a thing  
do something it was not intended to do. Artists are good at this,  
indeed it may be the only reason that art departments continue to  
exist in progressive research universities. Why wait for your computer  
to freeze? Organized research efforts can do a lot more in the mean  
time.

--
Brett Stalbaum
Lecturer SOE, Vis Arts, UCSD
http://www.walkingtools.net

Students: my office hours change quarterly, please contact advising  
for my current office hours.

On Sep 2, 2009, at 9:53 AM, José Carlos Silvestre  
<kasetaishuu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, let me kick-start this discussion. Forgive me if I start with  
> a message too long:
>
> I would like to consider the "thickness of the screen" primarily as  
> a disclosure of the materiality of the medium; and connect this to  
> theme of the error, which both I and Menkman have, through different  
> paths, paid particular attention to. Two key concerns, first off,  
> are the materiality and the specificity of media. By materiality I  
> mean that media devices are, after all, physical machines; under  
> specificity I am grouping both the particularities embedded in the  
> physical device - which are often inherited from previous machines,  
> and also often result of arbitrary engineering decisions - and the  
> conventions around its human usage which define a "normal" mode of  
> operation. I like to think "specificity" according to the genesis of  
> the technical object as described by Simondon, or the ontogenetic  
> machinic phila of Deleuze and Guattari.
>
> There is a paradox in speaking of the materiality of a medium, since  
> media are, by definition, marked by abstraction. A medium device, in  
> layman's terms, means a device which produces, stores, transmits, or  
> provides access to content of some kind; and this content is  
> informational, or immaterial. In more materialistic terms, this  
> means that:
>
> 1. A medium device is such that part of its pattern of operation can  
> be abstracted from the overall functioning of the machine. In the  
> case of cinema, this is a pattern of light and color projected onto  
> a screen - this is only a small part of the overall physical  
> operation of the projecter, only a small part of the physical  
> operation of the camera, etc. But it is a small part to which we  
> would like to grant a certain degree of autonomy and consider on its  
> own right;
>
> 2. This abstraction is crucial. Of course, the experience of a  
> medium is not limited to the transmission of content, and nowhere is  
> this more evident than in cinema - it has been a truism at least  
> since Adorno that audiences seem more interested in the movie  
> theater than in the movies themselves. Nevertheless, this  
> abstraction of a pattern of operation plays a central, organizing  
> role over the general functioning of the media system.
>
> This abstraction, which characterizes media as such, is decided by  
> the specificity of the media devices implicated. Not only is part of  
> the physical operation of the machine foregrounded and part  
> occluded, etc, but the audience is also trained to filter out and  
> interpret a message from the physical processes it witnesses.  
> Specificity, therefore, converges towards the possibility of its  
> disappearance, which is also the disappearance of any experience of  
> materiality as such.
>
> But something can go wrong: film rolls burn, computers crash or  
> freeze, typography is rendered illegible. In these situations -  
> which I will broadly call "error conditions," aware of the fact that  
> this label might sometimes have inappropriate connotations - the  
> audience can no longer abstract the pattern of information that it  
> expects, and is then forced to look into the medium device as a  
> machine. These are also situations in which operations that are  
> usually hidden from the viewer are regurgitated into plain sight, or  
> that we can no longer filter out the effects that we usually ignore.  
> Materiality - the thickness of the screen - is only possible in  
> error conditions, that is to say, in conditions that impede the  
> normal, abstracted-out experience of the medium - and this must take  
> place, moreover, as a detour or a deviation from "normal" modes of  
> operation.
>
> I hope there's enough flamebait in there. ^^
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 10:26 PM, Gabriel Menotti <gabriel.menotti at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
> The obscured dimension of audiovisual circuits we are going to explore
> this week is the /thickness of the screen/.
>
> The first meaning of this expression is quite literal. We normally
> consider screens to be mere surfaces, composed of only height and
> width. We talk about their area, aspect ratio and resolution, as if
> these characteristics were all that mattered to the structure.
> However, to hold an image, the screen must also have some density –
> and in order to be dense, the screen must be thick. A work that
> illustrate this in a very poetic way is Guy Sherwin’s performance
> /Paper Landscape/.[1]
>
> But the thickness of the screen implies in a metaphor as well: it
> likewise means the space that is produced by or contained within the
> image – for example, the setting of the original recording, in which
> camera, director and crew have once been present. This could also be
> an appropriate paradigm to analyze digital images, which, from a
> trivial structural-materialistic perspective, are just manifestations
> of the computer physical and logical architectures.
>
> In the debate, we are going to give more attention to this latter
> meaning of the expression. To discuss it, our first three guests are
> specialists in computer imagery – either pre-planned and programmed,
> either contingent and accidental. In their works and research, the
> space within the system is revealed in different ways. They are:
>
> Rosa Menkman
>
> Every technology has its own accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch
> visualist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in
> digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches,
> compressions, feedback and noise. Although many people perceive these
> accidents as negative experiences, Rosa emphasizes their positive
> consequences. By combining both her practical as well as an academic
> background, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory
> artifacts (a glitch studies), in which she strives for new forms of
> conceptual synesthesia between sound and video. She has have shown my
> work at festivals like Haip (Ljubljana), Cimatics (Brussels), Video
> Vortex (Amsterdam) Pasofest (Ankara) and Isea 2009 (Belfast), and
> collaborated on art projects together with Alexander Galloway,
> Govcom.org, Goto80 and the internet art collective Jodi.org. In 2009
> she finished her master thesis (on digital glitch) under the
> supervision of Geert Lovink, and started a PhD at the KHM (on the
> subject of Artifacts).
>
> Jose Carlos Silvestre
>
> José Carlos Silvestre is an Engineer in the Telecommunications field
> by the University of Brasilia - Brazil and is currently pursuing a
> M.A. degree in the Catholic University of Sao Paulo with a
> dissertation on the aesthetics of error in the digital arts. As an
> artist, he has participated in exhibitions and festivals in Europe and
> Latin America, such as ISEA, the E-Poetry Festival, Vivo Arte.Mov, and
> the Biennals of Seville - Spain and Yucatan - Mexico.
>
> Scott Draves
>
> Scott Draves (Spot) is a software artist and VJ based in New York and
> San Francisco. He holds a PhD in Computer Science by Carnegie Mellon
> University and is involved in the free software community. His
> award-winning work is permanently hosted on MoMA.org, and has appeared
> in Wired and Discover magazines, the Prix Ars Electronica, the
> O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the main dance-floor
> at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. His last project, the evolving
> painting HiFiDreams, is permanently installed in the lobby of Google's
> headquarters.
>
> Scott might be a little off the discussion until the weekend, because
> right now he is preparing a symphonic live presentation of his Dreams
> in High Fidelity animation – to be held on Thursday, in Brooklyn. Y 
> ou
> can check for more information about it in his blog. [2]
>
> (Other guests are to be announced soon)
>
> Cheers!
> Menotti
>
> [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RZi_Nzyho
> [2] http://draves.org/blog/archives/000632.html
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090902/43d753ab/attachment.html 