[-empyre-] Matter

Mon Jul 9 19:07:48 EST 2012

Apologies for distracted participation. My responses to some of Kriss's questions (hey, I didn't know anyone actually read my blog ;) would go off-piste again, but for clarity's sake, the legal (like the social you so rightly hedge with scare quotes) is not a thing as such but a specific organisation of mediations – verbal in court, written I legislation, a matter too of uniforms, rituals, architecture – ie legal power like all power has to be mediated, by media like truncheons and riot shields as well. Exactly how we assemble the elements, with which degrees of emphasis etc defines the type of legality and its effects (or lack thereof) on one or another segment of population (theft in the banking system v. 'looting'?)

Back to screens: the metaphor you raise, along with divides and blinds, is screening as security process. I'm far from averse to metaphors and analogies but they are tricky (see frst chapter of Agamben's Signatures book); and they can become obsolete or cliched or simply misleading. A metaphor typically takes one aspect of the object in hand and extrapolates from that, leaving other aspects behind (My love is a rose – not the thorny bit, or the mildew . .  .) so is "abstract", but a different order of abstraction to that of databases,

Screening then: screen as process for excluding unwelcome travellers from elsewhere (immigration screening), for marking the excluded and reviled (criminal records), an actuarial process for screening out those likely to die young from health insurance schemes on the basis of probabilities – not a total account of what the screen (as technology, as process) does, but an aspect thereof?

S

From: Kriss Ravetto <kravetto at ed.ac.uk<mailto:kravetto at ed.ac.uk>>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
Date: Sunday, 8 July 2012 18:56
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Matter

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<mailto:martin.rieser at gmail.com>>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:simon at littlepig.org.uk>
s.biggs at ed.ac.uk<mailto:s.biggs at ed.ac.uk>
http://www.littlepig.org.uk<http://www.littlepig.org.uk/>

On 7 Jul 2012, at 19:10, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org<mailto: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<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto: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.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/>
http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com<http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com/>
http://www.martinrieser.com<http://www.martinrieser.com/>

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20120709/205014d7/attachment.htm>