[-empyre-] stepping out of the frame to play around
Baruch Gottlieb
bg at transmediale.de
Wed Jul 25 05:29:39 EST 2012
Dear Sean and Empyrians,
The screen, unassuming, semi-transparent at first, has brought us into an interesting discussion. We sit all on one side of our screens and reflect in the screen on the screen. The thinness of our reflection on our screen barley visible before this text still irritates reminding us of ourselves, the moment in time we are here in fron of a screen, looking through a screen into a screened world when the 'world outside' procesds 'behind our backs' so to speak.
I'm going back a couple of steps in the exchange...
>
> There are two threads to this. One is the idea of compulsory participation
> which Jodi Dean has made a central platform of her critique of
> communicative capitalism; and the other about the materiality of screens.
The notion from Sean of the compulsoriness of being screened, the filtering which inevitably takes place for something to enter the world on the other side of the screen. We inherited the screening protocols... and now must live with them as they are intrinsic to all digital systems we use today. Will there ever be another? Quantum computing, (one of potentials and probabilities) or biocomputing (hybrids, cyborgs, maybe Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a foretaste) might produce future displays which are not screens in the sense of grids.
> Played out on the grid of a now universal and
> increasingly immutable formal platform, play becomes play-on-a-grid, and
> affect affect-on-a-grid, and these are not the same as older, or
> culturally different modes of affect or play
This distinction is fundamental. Just as the grid filters and regiments what will be displayed on the screen, it liberates new interpretation and 'play' in the inadequacy of aesthetic experience, if you will take McLuhan's 'cool media' here for the gridding effect intensifying 'participation' of the user. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube etc. are compelling not because of the detail of information they offer, but rather because of the limitedness of the information presented there, which allows for more interpretation and re-appropriation. So we have a new kind of (anyway not necessarily 'good') play as we contort ourselves through the limits of the screens. This recalls a section from my book from 2009... https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19650126/gottlieb_g4t_frames_and_screens.pdf to which I would add today, the screen allows us to get much closer to our interest, whether it is a person or a war, because we are protected by the screen. Play-on-a-grid is a highly protected play, however, once we subsume grids as given, our sensibilities readjust and attend to the new shades of threat and desire engendered as we imagine to meld coherency across the gridlines.
This reminds me of the Manifesto of the Third Landscape by Gilles Clément mentioned by Salvatore. An interesting study what grows on the gridlines...
all the best
Baruch
On Jul 20, 2012, at 10:57 PM, Sean Cubitt wrote:
> I've been holding back on the idea of the aesthetic as a technical issue,
> but steal permission from two comments from Johannes and Scott:
>
> On 20/07/2012 20:55, "Johannes Birringer"
> <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> we were talking here about (screen and
>> after-screen) interfaces and participatory imperatives in
>> consumption-play-
>> driven modalities).
>>>>
>> Scott Mcquire schreibt:
>>
>>
>> I think we ignore the affective, sensory dimension of play -- which is the
>> aesthetic ‹ to our own loss.
>
> There are two threads to this. One is the idea of compulsory participation
> which Jodi Dean has made a central platform of her critique of
> communicative capitalism; and the other about the materiality of screens.
>
> To sketch the history: half-tone photo-lithography took off in the news
> industry in the late 19th century, but was hampered by the time it took to
> get images from the event to the printing press. The solution was
> drum-scanned photographs transmitted telegraphically. This scan is the
> principe behind the Dzworykin tube; it is made more rigid with the
> Trinitron shadow mask, which minimised overflow of phosphorescence between
> molecules on the CRT; and was bound into the move to progressive scanning.
> More specifically, the RGGB bayer masked pixel/sub-pixel structure used in
> LED, LCD and plasma screens built the structure into the graphics cards of
> computers, including features of WYSIWYG text displays and printer
> drivers. Matched to the locked structure of amplification of CCD and CMOS
> chips, the diagram is now unavoidable. As Alvy Ray Smith argued in
> Melbourne last year, you can make geometric images (vector) any day, but
> you just can't display them any other way than arithmetically (bitmap)
>
> Now, this permits play, fantastic works of art and popular culture: and
> you can't criticise a piano for not being a violin. But it does mean that
> quite apart form the frame the constitution of the image as a (p or I)
> scan is the invisible (unconscious, ideological) a priori structure on
> which play or affect is laid out - which means that we have to recognise
> that play and affect have histories (along with order and power and the
> commodity form). Play and affect are not "good": they are instincts like
> sex and hunger, which can be good, indifferent or violent and
> (self)destructive. Played out on the grid of a now universal and
> increasingly immutable formal platform, play becomes play-on-a-grid, and
> affect affect-on-a-grid, and these are not the same as older, or
> culturally different modes of affect or play
>
> Working with the very specific temporality of the scan (like Daniel Crooks
> for example, opr Cory Archangel's Colours), or its framing, or on the
> blockiness (something Robert Cahen is especially good at exploiting) is
> one of the strategies; I rather think that some of Jeffrey Shaw's expanded
> cinema moves also work on this formal level, to release unwanted,
> repressed affordanaces locked into the internal contradictions of the
> unstable presentation/ present tense of screen displays.
>
> In the scanned screen, completion is permanently held out as presence, and
> permanently denied -- a dialectic of the unstable attept to construct a
> permanent present.
>
> What is missing so far is a screen design that is open-ended, whose
> orientation is not about her/now but future . . .
>
>
>
>>
>>
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>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
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> Baruch Gottlieb | digital archive project
> BWPWAP - transmediale 2013
> 29.01 – 03.02, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
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