[-empyre-] Matter

Mon Jul 9 08:22:41 EST 2012

Well.. I would not simplify the very complex relations between power, the
material nature of technology and the commercial imperatives that are
driving pervasive media and its growth. I agree with Sean that Data can
confer invisibility by its very complexity or by a lack of provenance, but
the screen to me has now become more like a device for cutting into data at
a specific point or angle to realise an image.

My point is that when data is omnipresent and can be related to location we
should think of the screen as a movable object inserted into the cloud to
create  a 'slice' through a world which has its own dimensionality-not just
a 'virtual' one but one linked to 'the real in many ways'- this  phenomenon
can be seen in the uses of Layar , Four Square etc, but also in artworks
which exploit the convergence of real and virtual affects.

I will try to add examples as the discussion continues.

Martin

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Kriss Ravetto <kravetto at ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear, Ian, Sean, Richard, Martin, and all
>
> Thank you for your responses,
>
> It is Sunday, and I have committed myself to take two nine year old boys
> to a bad movie (I don't know if it will be projected on film or digital),
> so I will try to be brief.
>
>
> Ian would not put Martin in your lament, I think he is asking us to think
> about the relation of data to microprocessors (when I asked him about the
> relation to maps to visual information, he dismissed the software, in a
> Kittleresque move), but yes, I think he is interested in the in the
> interactive (the bridge, which means more than one system or material at
> play), and Brian is interested in how human error or innovation can disrupt
> protocols (those groups like the pirate party that defy patents and
> copyright).
>
> I think Richard put it very nicely:
>
> "For those like me (and I think others on this list) who agree with Ian
> about material specificity and about the ontological continuity among all
> "objects," but who are also interested in affective and agential
> specificity and the affective and agential continuity among humans and
> nonhumans, it is crucial to find a way to talk about the complex
> interrelations among agency, affectivity, materiality, temporality,
> mediation, and so forth.'
>
> Ian I can see you are interested in the ontology of objects, and am glad
> that you are interested in impact, etc., but dialectics (material
> practices)? I found that really surprising. How would screens/screening/on
> screen fit here (just to keep on topic)?
>
> I am interested Sean's notion of "material."  (I know Ian will have gone
> through these debates with OOO, but I don't read Sean's work as
> speculative, correct me, if I am wrong).  Take for instance Martin's Data,
> or Brian's data users,  data perse is not protected by copyright or patent
> law, so this leads us to other questions about data as such.  Once data
> turns into a picture, it is subject to copyright, and therefore can be
> plugged into your assemblage. To keep on topic, this assemblage is a
> process of screening?
>
>
>  "the assemblage concept includes not only hardware and software but the
> social arrangements in which they are produced (see above, and also
> consider the contexts of production in the maquiladoras/offshore plants,
> and the ecological consequences of materials extraction and manufacture,
> not to mention energy use) --- and the contexts of their consumption/use"
>
> Does data have a social without the picture, grounding organization, etc?
> Does the screen disappear Martin?
>
> In your blog Sean, you seem to argue with Martin: "The database is
> dimensionless: it has taken the logic of converting time into space (the
> graph, the calendar) and eradicated space as well. The database is
> decreasingly visible, hidden behind the screen displaying the results of a
> specific search. Thus the invisibility of database-driven sites to search
> engines."
>
> "I'm with Ian in wanting to hang on to materiality. But equally, I'm
> concerned as we all are with the social. So let's consider some modes of
> socialisation. I don’t expect our discussion to go off on issues of
> internet and electronic standards governance, but these are forms of the
> social that have a deep significance for screen/screening. They introduce
> (sorry) the issues of power and wealth which also slip out of discussions
> of the agency of end-users of equipment. Most users don't know, and if they
> do don't give a hoot, about the MPEG patent pool, IP v6 or HTML5 codec
> wars. But if Alex galloway and Eugene Thacker have even half a thesis,
> these are protocols and as such will make massive differences to the
> affordances of screens and screening, and to the societies of control we
> inhabit. Ie, the social is by no means other than material."
>
>
> Sean, I am particularly interested in your argument about patents, power,
> and surveillance.  Take for example the patent, it is material in the sense
> it is paper, but of course it is not the paper that has 'power' in the
> sense of a Society of Control, it is the screen — but one that also has
> some material reality of its own (if it is recycled or not, use of
> chemicals in its production etc.).  It is the text, the legal discourse,
> that is often predicated on something that is not 'material' perse.  The
> way that legal cases, even patent cases work is that they are argued using
> an analogy to other cases.  How can an analogy be material? Unless, of
> course, you mean invention rather than patents — that we don't give a hoot
> about? Then yes, we are in the material, but the relation between
> innovation and patent or copyright, control, protocols does involve "the
> social." At least the name of "the social." I put the social in quotes,
> because I am not sure if the social referred in the law is material or an
> abstraction or should I say the decreasingly visible hidden behind the
> screen?  Unless we are talking anti-social socials like riots and occupy.
>
> Thank you all for the discussion.  I look forward to next week.
>
> best,
> Kriss
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 8, 2012, at 7:35 AM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>
> More than one and a half cents, Sean!
>
> And the simple point, really, is that these material details matter in
> discussions of the social experience of media. The relationships between
> those layers are complex and hard to see, and sometimes it's necessary to
> get our hands dirty for a while, even without agenda, inside the materials
> of media in order to have a sense of how their structure and operation
> might impact us, and then on the flipside how those historical and cultural
> trends influence the development of media in a kind of dialectic way.
>
> This is why I lament that Martin Rieser (and probably others) think that
> materiality is bogging us down. I think instead, generally speaking, we're
> (still) largely ignoring it, or relegating it to a sideshow, so we can get
> on with the main event.
>
> Enough of that from me though, as I'm not really adding anything to what
> Sean already said below.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jul 8, 2012, at 7:19 AM, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>
>  Hi Martin, and thanks to Richard for building a bit of a bridge across
>
>
>
>  With that out of the way, let's consider physical screens as devices in
> use: after all, the assemblage concept includes not only hardware and
> software but the social arrangements in which they are produced (see above,
> and also consider the contexts of production in the maquiladoras/offshore
> plants, and the ecological consequences of materials extraction and
> manufacture, not to mention energy use) --- and the contexts of their
> consumption/use
>
>  At the crudest there's on/off, then selection of channels, then play,
> then content creation; and parallel to that there's individual, domestic
> and crowd experiences. Other features are significant: watching sport live
> on an urban plaza big screen is a different experience to watching recorded
> material, or even interacting with a creative work. If, as Richard
> suggests, we are going to have a skilled understanding of such
> experiential, social and possibly political events we need both to home in
> on specifics (the angle of vision provided by big-screen LED panels and the
> degree of illumination under daylight, plus sound of course) and situations
> (the wonderful sight of Indigenous Australians turning their backs on masse
> on a dumb politician's screen image during the Sorry Day broadcasts in
> Melbourne's Fed Square)
>
>  And then there is the question of how exactly we enter a particular form
> of content – axonometric or point perspective, Street view or map, data
> visualisation or text, and any specific combination of those, alongside the
> presence or absence of advertising and other supplements . . .  In some
> sense the con-text and the text are indissociable (seeing the news of the
> 7/7 London bombs in a crowded bar in Woolamaloo was immensely different to
> seeing the 9/11 attacks on a hotel TV in Northern Ireland)
>
>  This by way of saying that materiality is not exclusively about, say,
> how the restricted colour gamut of my laptop is boosted by using a powerful
> backlight, but also about the Madagascan sapphire substrates of the diodes
> and their unusual (and undeserved) status as conflict gems, and the fact
> that I am using it to participate simultaneously  in the life of the
> venerable dog at my feet (happy 15th birthday Zebedee) and a community of
> all-too-fascinating discussion.
>
>  The reason why media are such fascinating objects of study is that we
> are not bound to the disciplinary; and that we have in mediation the
> privileged avenue to understand what human beings do when they're being
> human (and indeed when they're being post-human)
>
>  One and a half cents worth
>
>  Sean
>
>
>
>   From: Martin Rieser <martin.rieser at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Sunday, 8 July 2012 07:57
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Pervasive media
>
>  Well..where to start- I think we are bogged down in the materiality and
> I am looking at a social changes in the nature and uses of screen (of
> course predicated on that materiality) -how we enter them , access them and
> use them in an age of pervasive and interactive media, and therefore what
> concepts of the nature of content and its experience we are now
> constructing-I do think we are getting well off beam.
>
> Martin
>
> On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:20 PM, Simon Biggs <simon at littlepig.org.uk>wrote:
>
>> What have you got in that baguette?
>>
>>
>> Sent from a mobile device, thus the brevity.
>>
>> Simon Biggs
>> simon at littlepig.org.uk
>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk
>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk
>>
>>  On 7 Jul 2012, at 19:10, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 07/07/2012 03:46 PM, Ian Bogost wrote:
>> > On Jul 7, 2012, at 5:50 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
>> >
>> >> I think the current debate, about types of screens, is off piste
>> >> from the original theme, which was to do with agency. Yes,
>> >> different types of screens will have different affects and effects.
>> >> But the key point was that we have moved from the more or less
>> >> passive screen (whether a blank surface and projector assembly or
>> >> an all in one CRT, plasma or LCD panel) to active and pervasive
>> >> screens. Screens that we interact with, that form our environment,
>> >> that control other devices - screens that actively mediate agency
>> >> and can, in some cases, act upon things without human involvement.
>> >
>> > But, as has been said already, those devices are not screens. They
>> > are, most often, computers.
>>
>> Computers are significantly correlated with screens at present.
>> Televisions are now computers (or their thralls) following the death of
>> analog broadcast and recording. Even cinemas are transitioning to digital
>> projection with increasing speed.
>>
>> > Many of which have screens of particular
>> > kinds. If we're ready to simply call all those things "screens" then
>> > I'm not sure why we wouldn't also call them automobiles or
>> > architecture or sandwiches.
>>
>> I'm currently watching "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" on a baguette so I see
>> your point.
>>
>> Screens serve to conceal as well as present. Think of hospital screens
>> (or the back wall of the cinema). In Simon's comment, the screens have
>> served to conceal the computers. What the computers conceal probably has
>> something to do with agency.
>>
>> I'm not sure screens were ever passive though. Cinema was persuasive and
>> broadcast TV showed news and opinion.
>>
>> - Rob.
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Martin Rieser
>
> Professor of Digital Creativity
> De Montfort University
> IOCT: Faculty of Art Design and Humanities
> The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH
> 44 +116 250 6578
>
>
> http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk
> http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com
> http://www.martinrieser.com
>
>
>   _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

-- 
Martin Rieser

Professor of Digital Creativity
De Montfort University
IOCT: Faculty of Art Design and Humanities
The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH
44 +116 250 6578

http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk
http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com
http://www.martinrieser.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20120708/79c215f2/attachment.htm>