[-empyre-] stepping out of the frame to play around

Sat Jul 28 19:52:56 EST 2012

Hi Baruch and list

sorry to have fallen off the discussion: usual (and unusual) excuses

thanks for the great text Baruch - I've acquired a copy of the book too: congratulations

will there be another screen? The architecture of the oscilloscope, once ubiquitous in games machines, has been my touchstone for years: not a scan, but a directed response. Remember the plasma screen was also an abandoned dead end before its resurrection as a device for extracting more money from a market already saturated with screens (perhaps given its frightening disposal prospects it should have stayed - or perhaps more subtly is still - a dead end in itself)

But in principle, we have to doubt, profoundly (in the manner of Dscrates) whether we can design our way out of the aesthetic, economic and ecological crisis of old screens but replacing them with new ones

s

On 24 Jul 2012, at 20:29, Baruch Gottlieb wrote:

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<mailto: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
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29.01 – 03.02, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
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