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

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

thanks for these references (to Baruch Gottlieb's book , GRATITUDE FOR TECHNOLOGY),
and I tried to track some information about it and came across Baruch;s blogs where there is
a reference to a "McLuhan in Europe 2011 project creating a pan-European conversation that spans art, communications, and technology....."
(had not known about this), and then to Baruch's interest in MIMEOLOGRAPHY, "a kind of body language" .... would you tell us more about this,
Baruch?

In the pages that you excerpted for us, on frames and ("con-torturing") screens, you say:

>>
At the edge of the projected illusion of the media, the physical limits of the frame are always material. They express the material limits of the technology providing the field of
digital information. If our frame is 1024 pixels wide, it is not 1025 pixels wide. At the 1025th pixel, another materiality asserts itself with its own complementary historicity. The 1025th pixel also asserts the material budgetary limits of whomever procured (or produced) the frame.
Manovich's more recent lectures extol the apparent ascendancy of the non-rectilinear frame, with plenty of examples of media surfaces coating buildings in public space, what he calls “augmented architecture”64. However, round or square, a frame of digital media still frames a screen, and encloses the digital media discourse with its immanent factual materiality.
>>

In this last passage, are you not implicitly also commenting on the posting by Rafael the other day?

 >>). Interactive arrays for displays are here to stay and we need to continue thinking about how exactly these displays require different screen theory>
..... The grid array can and will disappear. My project "Autopoiesis" uses a laser projector which does not have a lens as the image is focused on all planes. Granted the resulting image is pixelated but that is because of the source not a function of the projector. The laser projection is polar, angular, and someone soon will think of a way to serve it non-cartesian continuous feeds...>>


Could we discuss this?  

Perhaps even in light of last night's curious opening ceremony for the Olympic Games?

We talked about the mass ornament here. And I vaguely remember the massive precision-choreographies at the opening of the Beijing Oylmpics.
To choreograoh such massive choirs, one needs very good navigation tools, or mimeolographies?

Last night, i did not watch with much focus, i was distracted viewer, i just let it happen somewhere in the background (and I did recognize the Beatles and Stones songs cited)
But at one point near the end, I think a band named Arctic Monkies was playing, i noted the immense laser or film projections that were showered over the
spectators in the stadium in the dark, i could not see the audience, only the lights, words, colors and flashes streaming over them. The spectators themselves probably could not see 
these screen effects or body movies on their bodies, only the bird's eye view of the camera captured it. 


Shortly before that, the german commentator announced a more "somber" interlude, a dance choreographed by Akram Khan, which I have forgotten now,
only remember hand wringing, and at the end he picks up a [sacrificial] boy and is swallowed by the group (Sacre de Printemps?). 

Before that, about two hundred disco dancers were playing along, inside the frame, to the pop hit parade citations and the youtube clips beamed
onto that british house standing in the middle of the stadium. I did not gather the meaning of the house (although at the end a man was revealed underneath, sitting at his
desktop, then standing up and clapping; apparently an inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who, the german commentator noted, had written a program called "Enquire Within Upon Everything".
I remember the Queen being there too, and Mr Coe addressing the royalties and eminences. 

Most curiously, on my TV screen, was the disco dancing to the Stones and the other rock bands. 
While the young people danced, on my screen there were these twitter messages popping up, above their bodies, about dating or wanting to date someone.

I did not catch that meaning, of twitter dates, for the Olympics, and maybe that only showed up on the german screen (since it was already past midnight when the erotic hotlines keep arriving).


can someone provide, perhaps, a better critical synopsis of the London opening?


with regards
Johannes Birringer