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

[Sean Cubitt]

(I know we are passing on the baton but . . . )

Patricia asked about:

a specific computational technology of abstraction   that puts something like affect on a grid.

and Baruch comments

There are no "continuous feeds" in electronics.

this might be the space to address - the space evoked in Martin's posts earier this month - for affect, which I take to be both the emotional and the flux of continuous conection that Deleuze calls immanence: a reality of flux under the surface of the thingyness of things (which I would call mediation)

I was reading this morning Chris meigh-Andrews note on Robert cahen's 90s video piece Juste le temps: citing a comment of Robert's about video expressing or exposing a bodiliness beyond image capture. Just as film struggled to present a reality which its two-dimensionality masked and denied, and an emotional life that its mechanical mature opposed, so electronic media arts work still in that cool space of MacLuhan's, or could:

most of the time (as in the pervasive Olypics coverage on UK TV) the plot is to inveigle us into the screen; but where, as in cahen's piece (and many more workds described and evoked in these discussions) the eye slides off the glass or the reflective screen, distracted, thinking about other things, such as the shadows Robert Cahen describes sliding impercptibly in and out of vision that video (in its pre-digital form) was a privileged witness to.

there will be perpetual struggle between discrete and continuous modes of existence as long as the discrete form of digital visualisation remains dominant; and (though I know the term dialectic is anathema to many) the contradiction is what makes the work of video so important, so political, so tragically beautiful. We make our own art; not under conditions of our own choosing, but still we make it

sean


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