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

[Simon Biggs]

I was responding to Pall¹s emphasis on the material, not your orginal
posting.

I approached this subject from an A-N-T perspective, which absorbs aspects
of Heidegger and Deleuze on technology but assumes an expanded ontology
regarding its subjects. Thus the social and technical are not kept so
separate from one another and can be conflated as elements of the apparatus
or system. What you distinguish as a definable material object, which can
also be a medium (such as the screen), within A-N-T cannot be dealt with in
such an isolated manner. The screen is a psych-social thing as well as a
material thing. It may or may not be composed of pixels. It may or may not
be something that radiates or reflects light. It may or may not be our
mind¹s-eye. The screen is a socially assembled construct and from time to
time its elements can vary, including material aspects such as whether it is
passive or active, flat or three dimensional, actual or imaginary. That is
why I ended my previous post stating that the screen can vary in thickness
from nothing to anything (not quite those words, but that was their implicit
meaning).

If you want a better understanding of where I am coming from you can refer
to my writings, found in the textworks section of my website (url in my
signature).

There are plenty of theorists following this line of thought, from Latour
and Law to Hayles, etc. It¹s not new and has its roots in venerable
post-structuralist discourse.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk



From: José Carlos Silvestre <kasetaishuu at gmail.com>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 06:32:18 -0300
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen

I have intentionally excluded "performative" media that lack a physical
substrate from my operational definitions of medium and media device,
because I wanted to focus on the problem of materiality and especially of
the materiality of audiovisual media - the "thickness of the screen." How
materiality is played out in such "immaterial" media sounds like a
fascinating problem, if somewhat off-topic; have you worked on this? I'd
love to hear.

I have emphasized material properties - again, for obvious reasons -, but I
do not see why you claim I discard soft and social aspects. For instance, I
have made clear that I was thinking the technological object in a
Simondonian-Deleuzian sense, and have repeatedly emphasized that human usage
and expectations are constitutive not only of the media device but of its
possibility of materiality.


On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:42 AM, Simon Biggs <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk> wrote:
> I think this is a highly reductivist and materialist understanding of
> mediality. If we always employed such an approach much of our media theory
> would never have been written (perhaps not a bad thing).
> 
> A medium is far more than simply its physical substrate. It involves soft and
> social aspects too. Soft media, such as language, cinema and software. Social
> media, such as ritual and the performative. The medium of film, which Pall
> proposed, is a good example. Much of what we experience today as film doesn¹t
> involve film. It is shot on 4k HD and digitally projected within a cinema
> context. Our experience of the artefact is little different to what it has
> always been and we continue to call it by its traditional name ­ film, flick,
> cinema, etc. However, its materiality has profoundly changed.
> 
> This is not to say these changes are without consequence. Even liminal changes
> in technology and media can affect our reception of the work. However, to
> persist in an exclusively materialist approach to mediality will likely lead
> to a narrow view of what a medium is, overlooking how media evolves and even
> entire areas of mediation that are of a non-physical character. The medium of
> film is far more than its material parts. It is as much a function of its
> social characteristics as its mechanical (and increasingly electronic and
> digital) elements.
> 
> As Pall observes, media are assembled as apparatus, the projector being one
> element. However, the components of an apparatus are not always material.
> Apparatus and technologies are composed of numerous elements, many of which
> are not immediately visible or exist in the social as well as, or rather than,
> material. Also, it should be noted that whilst an element may be a critical
> part of a medium in one state in another it may be nothing to do with media at
> all (eg: a screen that becomes a wall).
> 
> Just as Pall disagrees with a definition of media that confuses media with
> technology I disagree with a definition that determines media as necessarily
> material.
> 
> A screen may have no thickness at all ­ or be as thick as our imagination
> permits.
> 
> Best
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> From: Pall Thayer <palli at pallit.lhi.is>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 01:18:43 +0000
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen
> 
> 
> Literature is not a medium. The medium of literature is  
> print. Film is a medium but only if you're talking about the film that  
> you wind up on spools. The wider class of "film" or "cinema" is a  
> collection of various media.
> 
> Simon Biggs
> Research Professor
> edinburgh college of art
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk <http://ac.uk>
> www.eca.ac.uk <http://ac.uk>
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ <http://ac.uk/circle/>
> 
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> www.littlepig.org.uk <http://www.littlepig.org.uk>
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number
> SC009201
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 


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