[-empyre-] whose "our systems" & body weather

[Sean Cubitt]

just a little thought from a lurker, so open to being ignored, on the first of Alan's points: raster/bitmap display (specifically) is the heir to a series of electronic technologies back through drum-scanned photographs sent by wire for half-tone printing. As Alan knows well, the alternate is vector graphics, and there have been vector screens (video games, radar, oscilloscopes) that have now been crowded or priced  out of everything but the laboratory. It is feasible to imagine a vector camera. The problem is that everything else has been standardised, from keyboards to motherboards, to bitmap. Vector has to be translated to read on bitmap displays. Vector, dating back to Sutherland and the Utah pioneers, is the still unexplored capacity for a different digital. 

What this might imply for embodiment or subjectivity? Klee's expression in the Pedagogical Notebooks: 'taking a line for a walk', and Hogarth's in the Line of Beauty, 'leading the eye a wanton chase' . Where bitmap maps, vector evolves; where bitmap concerns the actual, vector concerns the virtual, and thus (ontologically, eh Simon?) the virtual points to the non-identity of what presents itself as given, ie data.  or the subject (of data, as data)

sean

On 5 Jul 2014, at 18:06, Alan Sondheim wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> 
> Just a couple of quick points, probably askew or slant -
> 
> The digital, at least in everyday media use, is always implicated with the raster; it's the raster that roughly maps the granularity of the analogic. And the raster is predetermined, all the way back through the abacus, by economic/power considerations - all those elements you speak of are interelated through interoperability, mappings. They also require money, institutions, to produce; this isn't the body running in the wilderness, this is the wired body, and even to some extent, often the academic body as well.
> 
> Second point, the most askew, is an entry in the Assyran Dictionary, G, Volume 5 - the mix of symptom, analog, barrier, etc. touches on all these problems:
> 
> gabbu B s.; (part of the human or animal body); NB*
> 
> [su-u]su = ga-ab-bu [...] (preceded by sa(var.sa).lah = ha-dan-tum coagulated blood, sa(var.sa).lah.lah = ha-s[a-ar]tum dried mucus) [...] [Assyrian quote] one g. and the sibtu (assorted intestines?) of the sheep. [...] [Assyrian quote] the intestines, the g., the ribs. [...] The content of the vocabulary pasages which refer to the human body suggests that gabbu denotes a semi-liquid part of the human body, or a secretion, while the passages from NB texts indicate that the gabbu of animals [...] was an edible uniteand denoted an internal part of the animal body, although it is never mentioned among the exta. Possibly gabbu denotes the brain.
> 
> I'm not sure of the relevance here, except that the (Assyrian?) abject travels through semiosis into an attempt at a determinative unit ending up with the brain. The technology here would be cuneiform.
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