[-empyre-] week two - MATTER

[Daniel Rourke]

More echoed thanks to Ashley for bringing us all here and each of the
previous occupants of the conversation for kicking things off...

Reading Nicolas's thoughts on interruption I was reminded of a text very
much* not *about digital materiality, that is Bill Brown's playful
treatise *'Thing
Theory' *(2001).
<http://faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/brown.thing-theory.2001.pdf>

Eschewing Heidegger's definition of a 'thing', in which objects are brought
out of the background of existence through human* use*, Bill Brown marks
'things' through the jolt, the interruption, the encounter. An object
becomes a thing when it stops working for us; when the smear on the window
halts our treatment of the window as something we merely 'see through'. I
can only consider the MATTER of the digital through similar encounters, no
doubt one of the main reasons why I am drawn to (digital) art that engages
with interruption, failure, glitch, and jam in its conception and/or
making. To blend Brown's ideas into Nicolas's analogy of a journey, I don't
experience interruption as the choice I make to drive off the road, to
knowingly halt the journey. Rather, that decision is only the first step I
make in my search for the 'elusive moment of terrified separation from
humanity/civilization'. Glitch artists do not *create *glitches, rather
they manifest behaviours in environments (physical or mediated) that are
more likely to lead them towards the elusive glitch, the sublime
interruption. If one smears the window on purpose then the window+smear
continues to function precisely as you wished it to. Your making of the
smear cancels out any chance it has to jolt you into thingly confrontation
with the window. Glitch artists flirt with this problem in their work, and
the further problem that comes from most glitches leading to absolute
failure. One must therefore court the glitch, whilst not letting it take
over completely. Artist Daniel Temkin <http://danieltemkin.com/> has talked
extensively on this.

If we consider 'the digital' to be more than zeroes and ones, to exist in
the relationship between materials and software/hardware protocols,
then the idea of a digital 'thing' is intimately bound up with an idea of
human autonomy and mastery (or lack of). Entropy marks all physical
processes in the universe, and so in order for digital processes to carry
on carrying on we invented certain protocols and rules of parity. In short:
error checking routines are fundamental to what constitutes the digital.
Again, the thingliness of the digital comes to the fore when these error
checking routines fail, when the parity bit is not parsed correctly and the
jpeg won't load. In that moment, as the OS repeats its message of apology
and the jpeg continues to remain unvisible, only then do I encounter the
jpeg as thing, the computer as thing, the digital as thing. The glitch
artist, of course, does not want the jpeg to fail absolutely, rather they
want it to fail *just enough* to produce a file that still opens, but has
been radically transformed.

This opens up into a larger set of political questions concerned with the
privilege of 'flow' over 'interruption'; of 'signal' over 'noise' in our
digitally mediated world. As Mark Nunes has noted
<https://www.scribd.com/doc/58881843/Mark-Nunes-Error-Glitch-Noise-And-Jam-in-New-Media-Cultures>,
following the work of Deleuze and Guattari:


"This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a
rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising
system... The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or
making to speak that which cannot communicate."


Is the will we have to encounter the digital object / to radically
transform it / to impose an aura onto it - perhaps a violent one? How do we
render this violence productive, without also rendering it inert?

I am going to end there I think. Hopefully the distinction between the
terms 'object' and 'thing' is a useful one for our discussion, and also
perhaps the distinction between an intended interruption and a stumbled
upon encounter. Really looking forward to seeing where this conversation
takes us.


Daniel





On 13 Oct 2014 16:44, "Nicholas O'Brien" <nicholasobri at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hello empyre:
>
>
> Thanks so much to Ashley and the other moderators for inviting me to be a
> discussant this month. I've been following the conversation and am
> definitely excited to contribute!
>
> As a way of getting started I wanted to pick up on two things that Ashley
> wrote with regards to the materiality of digital objects:
>
> *From hidden communication between smart devices to the algorithmic
>> computation of actionable futures, many of the processes inherent to "the
>> digital" are taking place outside of the phenomenal field of human
>> perception. To this end, not only is the performative "stuff" of the
>> digital functionally evasive, but the reiterative and regenerative
>> executions that drive its operation also suggest that even when we do "see
>> something," it is nothing more than an ephemeral apparition... *
>
>
>> *As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of what we refer to when we
>> speak of "the digital" takes place outside of the field of human
>> perception.*
>
>
> This statement makes me think about driving in nature. I live in NYC now
> and don't really get to act on the "Did you know New York has 10,000 miles
> (or whatever amount) of snowshoe hiking trails?" as much as I'd like to.
> That being said, The "ephemeral apparition," - or as I like to call it,
> experience - of the digital reminds me of taking the offramp on the
> highway to observe a scenic overlook. I grew up in Northern Virginia and my
> family didn't have a lot of money when I was young to go travel or book
> hotels for long weekends. Instead we would go down US interstate 81 until
> we got to the historical scenic route Skyline Drive. We would cruise up
> and down the windy road, listening to tapes on the car stereo or playing
> guessing games until my brother and I would get tired and fall asleep in
> the back seat. From time to time, however, we'd pull over and take a look
> out into the Blue Ridge Mountains and rolling hills of the lower
> Appalachian Trail.
>
> More recently, whenever I make long car trips (in that
> ever-so-quintessential Americana way), I rarely remember the mile marker,
> or the commemorative plaque, or where I was on my journey, or even the
> actual view. What I do remember is that I turned off the road and
> interrupted my trip - and that this interruption is often a way of
> reminding myself of my journey through the "stuff" of the road (or
> information superhighway if you will).
>
> So, then, what is the objectification of that experience? What is the
> matter that consolidates or crystallizes that moment of rupture? It could
> be a photograph, or a video, or a tweet, or a sound recording, or a text to
> a loved one - some digital artifact of remembrance, a keepsake of data. But
> I'd wager that the real substance of experiencing the ephemeral occurs in
> the moment of interruption. With a slight nod to Kev Bewersdorf, I'd say
> that the materiality of the digital only happens AFK - removed from the
> torrent of being plugged in, reflecting on it only when one has fully
> stepped away from its monotony. The moment in which one pulls off the road,
> interrupting their electronic activities, is the moment when the digital
> becomes material. It is when the onslaught of digital stuff becomes sublime.
>
> For me the experience of the sublime is the elusive moment of terrified
> separation from humanity/civilization. In that moment of (self) recognition
> away from the digital, I am deeply troubled by what I see in front of me. I
> see the sublime as a terrible thing, or else a thing of terror (ala Burke).
> It is terrifying and horrific to reflect on the digital - and it is in that
> moment of terror that the digitial becomes "real," or else it becomes
> "matter." The "terribleness" - as described by Burke - of that feeling
> transforms the ephemeral into the actual, and in doing so it shapes the
> digital into an object.
>
> ***
>
> Perhaps the terror that I see during (self)reflection away from the
> digital speaks to the dangers that occur within a disappearing submedial
> space. The invisibility of surveillance and the political work that goes on
> within network culture is often only visible en masse - as is the case with
> OWS, the Arab Spring, and the current Hong Kong protests. The problematic
> posed by Groys' analysis of 21st century submedial space suggests not only
> that the presence of such a space is becoming hard to perceive but also its
> affect is becoming harder to feel. This lack of emotional (or
> psychological) tactility that occurs from observing these mass-produced (or
> mass-represented) forms of political action from the outside creates a
> dangerous type of association - one that is inherently built on distance,
> absence, and othering.
>
> When affect has been evacuated from social exchange a different type of
> objectification happens, one that I don't actually know how to define, but
> certainly feels different. The matter of a digital object is one that is
> quickly losing its affect, one that gets subsumed into an infinite scroll.
> It doesn't feel like pulling off the road, at least. Instead it feels more
> like a self-driving car.
>
> --
> Nicholas O'Brien
>
> Visiting Faculty | Gallery Director
> Department of Digital Art, Pratt Institute
> doubleunderscore.net
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>
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