[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 76, Issue 3

[christina]

How a field becomes visible, when,

something comes into sight-site

something in the field

that the field doesn't know,

'the field doesn't know'...

something crops up

something is a-crop

some thing is a-cropped

something is cropped

cut off

'from the language compound'

something is a body

some thing at just the edge of seen

scene

that comes out of the field

something we didn't know

something we can't quite see

  I am scene, I am seen

I am a field


"the field doesn't know"










On Mar 3, 2011, at 6:35 PM, Alex Gibson wrote:

> Drawing with computers has been something of an obsession of mine  
> for nearly 7 years (http://alexgibson.com.au/image/tid/9). It's  
> important to remember that the computer is programmed. The machine  
> carries out the logic, the cause and effect, to the letter (and  
> BIT). The concepts and relationships developed in the program are  
> considered, included or discarded by the programmer, a human.
>
> Agency is a strange idea, and one that is difficult to place. We  
> rarely talk about the agency of pencil and paper, but often we  
> speculate on the agency of code, circuits and complex machines.  
> Computer vision algorithms are breaking down an old specialisation  
> that we humans pride ourselves on, namely being able to recognise  
> stuff within a field of vision and related it to other stuff. But it  
> is the viewer (a human) that places the image within a complex  
> symbolic or imagined system of language and culture, not the computer.
>
> Visibility is the organisation of sense data into inter-subjective  
> and social realities. We see what we know and what we are  
> conditioned to see. This is perhaps most evident in a life drawing  
> class, where participants are all making marks of what they know,  
> and perhaps (as Zizek would say) what they don't know that they  
> know; anatomy, gesture, feeling, perspective, proportion, etc. The  
> subject is isolated, framed and rendered according to the skill and  
> limit of the artists. A computer drawing is no different, except  
> part of the mechanical act of looking is deferred. The wet camera of  
> the human eye and its relational brain to the dry obscura of the cam  
> and its various wares. The machine is programmed with the  
> instructions of the programmer, and these instructions betray  
> prejudices', preferences, aesthetic whims and other culturally  
> conditioned limits that are visible, if we decide to look.
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