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

[José Carlos Silvestre]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Brett Stalbaum <stalbaum at ucsd.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

I have privileged new media mostly for its being our topic here; I do
believe that the same effect can and has been produced in traditional media.
One example I am particularly fond of are Michelangelo's unfinished
sculptures: the sculptures's incompleteness, that would ordinarily signify
imperfection - and thus fit the broad operational concept of error
conditions presented here -, instead communicate, in virtue of their faults,
vitality and the "effect of life" (Walter Pater's words, which I have to
second). I argue that this happens because the sculptures's imperfection
brings to the foreground the materiality of stone as raw material from which
sculpture is hewn, creating a tension between materiality and abstract form.
The effect of "throwness" in art is of course not limited to the breakdown,
especially in traditional media where speaking of "breakdown" would often
make little sense.

And this brings us to what's particular to modern and new media in this
respect. A painting is customarily already approached as, or assumed to be,
present-at-hand, in a scenario that is entirely congenial to the celebration
of its uniqueness; new media, on the other hand, establish modes of
reception in which the attentive, contemplative gaze can not be so readily
assumed. Modern media and new media, moreover, have a temporal quality in
its reception that is lacking in traditional media (except perhaps in
music), so that we might model reception assuming the operation of a machine
over time. This creates a possibility of interruption that did not exist
before.



> 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.
>

We are, I agree. I have unduly emphasized the nexus of reception, assuming
all deviations would finally propagate to this point. As for the risky
reduction to normality vs error, we might put it the other way around: any
such experimentation with the medium will appear, from the point of view of
its normalized use, as a deviation that disturbs the conventional process of
abstraction, i.e. as an error. I do not think we can ever disregard the
normalized conditions of the operation of a device, as these conditions are
constitutive of the device itself; the shadow of normality - of
*some*normality - is always cast, centers and margins. Or would you
disagree?


>
> 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.
>

Well, exactly!


> --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>
> 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. You
>> 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>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6RZi_Nzyho
>> [2] <http://draves.org/blog/archives/000632.html>
>> http://draves.org/blog/archives/000632.html
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