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

[José Carlos Silvestre]

I think I might not have expressed myself well in a few points.

We can be very nitpicky over definitions of medium and device. (I like for
example how Bolter and Grusi sidestep this issue completely with recursive
non-definitions in Remediation.) One might replace "medium" there with, say,
"media ecology" or "media system"; what I call "media device" is sometimes
referred to as "apparatus", etc. I am singling out technical objects -
pertaining to a subclass of technical objects that is defined in the terms
of the first post - from the larger systems they are embedded in; surely you
wouldn't find this an impossibility?

"The screen is a medium but you can't pick
out an "abstractable pattern of operation" because it only has one
operation which is to produce colored dots and this is where these
issues really begin to affect your argument."

What kind of screen do we mean here? A computer screen is a very complex
machine; the activation of a matrix of colored "pixels" on the screen being
only part of its physical operation. This is what is made most evident to
the viewer, whereas other parts of its operation are usually hidden, as
pointed out before. A silver screen in a movie theater is likewise not so
flat as you present it there - for an analogical example, see Rauschenberg's
empty canvases and John Cage's explications thereof.

"These don't necessarily involve unintentional
errors."

They don't. What I called error conditions need not be unintentional - my
examples might have been misleading here -, and I find both of your examples
actually pretty illustrative of what I am trying to describe. An error
condition is defined by its friction with the normalized operation of the
machine, and with the normalized process through which a pattern of
operation is expected to be abstracted from the physical machine. The fact
that you are looking at liquid crystals in line radiating colored light and
see a "picture" - and by so doing, disregard all the physical operations
carried out in a visual display unit, up to and including the matrix of
liquid crystals of the screen, while also likely granting to that picture
certain ontological autonomy in relation to the screen and the other devices
implicated in its production - is what I am calling "abstracting a pattern
of operation." I use "abstract" in the sense of making abstract and
detaching, not of erasure i.e. abstracting *out*.
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