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

[José Carlos Silvestre]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Pall Thayer <palli at pallit.lhi.is> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
> Obviously here I'm referring to a television or computer screen but that
> doesn't really matter.
> The function of this type of screen as medium (i.e. the means by which it
> mediates) is colored
> dots. The technology behind it affects our experience of it but it doesn't
> change the fact that
> what it delivers to us is colored dots. This is what we expect from it.
>
>
This is *exactly* what I'm describing. From a strictly materialistic,
technical point of view, the coloured radiation emanating from the screen is
just a small part of the overall functioning of a complex machine (which at
this point you can slice and blend together conceptually at will). For the
viewer, however, it is the only thing that matters - it is what it *delivers
to us* and what we *expect* from it. I was saying that this possibility -
that a small part of the operation of a machine can take such a crucial role
as to overpower everything else, to become, indeed, ontologically
autonomous, and that this is something we *expect* to happen - characterize
the technological objects that we associate with media. For this reason, for
example, a computer screen is a media device and an engine is not.


> I think we actually agree on many points despite defining them differently.
> I understand your
> use of the term "abstracting" and I don't disagree with it per se. However,
> in the context of
> what you're discussing, I think it would be clearer to speak of abstracting
> distinct media
> rather than patterns of operation. With this wording we have to ask
> ourselves, "So, is this
> 'operation' NOT a medium?" Is that perhaps how you see it?
>

Actually, I'm trying not to take the concept of medium for granted, and
start off the quest for materiality from the perspective of how
technological objects we associate with media operate. All this, I
reinforce, is dependent on a human environment which I have included under
its "specificity." I think this abstraction of a pattern of operation
characterizes media - if we should identify this operation with media,
subordinate it to media, or simply associate with media, I do not know. I
like to think that the pattern of operation exists within a space of
possible patterns, defined by the program of the apparatus (or of the media
ecology, or of media devices), in Flusser's sense. So I don't immediately
equate them, no.



> Also, I'm not sure that we agree on what the "thickness of the screen" is.
> I get the feeling
> that you see the screen as having a thickness because it's so packed with
> technology
> whereas I see it as having a thickness because it's so prominent that it
> overshadows all of
> the other layers of media involved. So you end up saying that an awareness
> of the other
> media thickens the screen whereas I say that an awareness of the other
> media renders the
> screen more transparent, therefore reducing the thickness of the screen. Am
> I correct?
> Anyway, I hope you see why I think these seemingly minor distinctions are
> in fact important.
>

Indeed they are important - I tried to summarize a little too much in that
first message, postulating an operational model that is not quite perfectly
applicable everywhere, and so on. Indeed, we are defining thickness in the
opposite extremes of the same axis. This is the old transparency/opaqueness
paradox of interfaces that pops us then and again. (Sherry Turkle makes an
interesting reading of this paradox in Life on the Screen, have you read
it?)
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