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

Thu Sep 3 06:56:36 EST 2009

This is an interesting introduction. It begs a lot of questions. To  
begin with, there's your distinct use of the terms "medium", on one  
hand, and "medium device" on the other. Your application of the terms  
would suggest that there exist media which are not devices. I would  
argue that every medium is a device.

Next, I have to take issue with your definition of media as devices  
that "produce, store, transmit or provide access to content". Media is  
something in the middle that passes information on. In the case of  
art, we could say that media is used to transfer information from the  
mind of the creator to the that of the beholder. If we try to claim  
that media is capable of "producing" information then it's no longer  
in between things. We must then assume that the artist herself is a  
medium. If you really stretch things, such an argument could perhaps  
be made but that would seriously undermine the role of the artist as  
the initiator of her "message". Then we get into "god" territory.

Finally, I would say that defining media as devices that store  
information ignores the primary function of media which is to transfer  
or transmit information. Something that only stores information  
without also delivering it can't be called media because it doesn't  
mediate. We could say that it "stores and transmits or transmits" but  
not that it "stores or transmits".

Pall Thayer
artist
http://www.this.is/pallit

On Sep 2, 2009, at 4:53 PM, José Carlos Silvestre 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. 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
> [2] http://draves.org/blog/archives/000632.html
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