[-empyre-] Process as paradigm: Time/Tools/Agency

[davin heckman]

I have been far too busy to really get into the discussion that's
taking place, but I like it.  I used to, on the one hand, seeing a
computer as a tool.  I also like seeing the activity of processing as
something with value as content.  I also like the idea of the computer
as an environment.  Maybe computers are more like cages for
consciousness....  that keep us tied to a particular mode of
experience/expression so that our labor is more easily harvested.
Each of these frames has different implications, and might be true
within particular modes of practice.  And where they play against each
other, itself, is an important point to scrutinize.

When a process is self-contained, it functions as a unit within a
larger context.  A hammer, for instance, is a hammer when you are
using it to hammer.  But when this process is opened up, say, the
hammer is broken apart for some reason or put together, is it still
properly regarded as a "tool" or as an end in itself?  Similarly, if a
hammer is incorporated into a larger apparatus, as Yann points out....
 would you say that the hammer is the tool of the apparatus or a
component of the apparatus?  And what would you say of the operator of
the apparatus?  Or the shareholders who ultimately drive the machine?

When we step out of the instrumental consideration of the tool, the
raw materials, or the apparatus, then how do these various ways of
thinking about a hammer become strange?  Does the tool in the context
of my rustic philosophizing become something other than a tool?  Does
it become a figure of speech?  A paranoid delusion?  A winning
argument?  An object of derision?  Do my feeble musings even succeed
at altering the hammer at all?  (Maybe this is the real test of art:
Does a work create more than it consumes?  Maybe this is why I am not
an artist!)

I think nothing is hermetically sealed off from the imagination.  A
tidy little system, itself, is subject to the imagination, like
Shrodinger's cat, the material fact of the closed system of potential
outcomes is the creative fact of theory.  The material fact of the
compromised, opened, corrupted system becomes the creative fact of
practice.  Each of these approaches can lead people to new thinking
and new feeling.  In other words, isn't one of the values of art that
it can work to draw people out of the delusion of fixed systems,
rigidity, purity?

Which gets us to that question of "serious shit."  Art seems to
perform an inherently critical function, though I am suspicious of the
efficacy of the "critical" function when the work in question simply
reiterates an argument that could be communicated more effectively
through technical writing.  At the end of the day, I want art to
initiate an affective response, as opposed to a purely intellectual
one (which isn't to say that intellectual arguments can't alter one's
way of being).

Davin