[-empyre-] materiality, scanning, Kanye West

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Thanks to Alessandra and the other editors of liquid blackness for
organizing this month and to Derek hooking it all together initially.

I was asked to write about "materiality" this week, and that might be
because I'm a stickler for the material. The work that I did as a
founding editor of liquid blackness was often centered around the
material conditions that gave rise to that material--from the British
uprisings of the latter half of the 20th century to the thermodynamics
that might surround conceptions of liquidity itself.

A piece that I return to over and over again is the video for Kanye
West's "Black Skinhead" and the question of the material. It's a video
that takes place almost entirely in a 3D space starring a very buff 3D
model of West. It's a fairly accurate representation of the performer,
and the animation is high-quality across the board.

What the piece calls to mind for me is the operation of the liquidity
of liquid blackness--the moment of abstraction of blackness from the
lived body into a different mode of material. The video shows how
blackness "stretches," becomes deepened, or becomes more pronounced
when it is put into the material operations of computer hardware
rather than the hardware of the human body. The video, I believe,
gives us some great leverage for understanding how material gets
overdetermined or delimited by blackness itself--the black hole in
West's face, the extended perfect replication of West's body, and the
retexturing of the model with a shiny, spiny series of artifacts.

What I think is so interesting here is that the material capabilities
of the hardware and software that Kanye West gets scanned into allow
for modulations and alterations that liquid blackness as a paradigm is
always-already tracing. The materiality of digital image manipulation
quite literally renders Kanye West into a visual generation of
something that, as last week's writing's suggest, is happening in many
ways across lots of artistic productions.