Introduction
p.2 It is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a large milieu. What we used to call "media messages" no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms.
p.4 In particular, I will follow the Autonomist Marxist suggestion that the extension of production to the totality of a social system (the 'social factory' thesis) is related to the emergence of a 'general intellect' and 'mass intellectuality' pointing to capital's incapacity to absorb the creative powers that it has effectively unleashed.
Chapter 1 Three Propositions on Informational cultures
The Meaning of Information
(a)s a historical concept pointing to the definition, measurement, analysis and control of a mathematical function, information does not coincide with the rise of a digital media system. On the contrary, the appearance of information theory parallels the emergence and development of modern mass media such as telegraphy, telephony, radio and television. Unlike previous media such as print and writing, modern media, in fact, do not use the code of workday language, but 'make use of physical process which are faster than human perception and are only susceptible of formulation in the code of modern mathematics.'1 We could refer to the informatization of culture as starting with the analogue function of frequency, that is with the encoding of sound in the grooves of a gramophone record, where speech phonemes and musical intervals were recognized for the first time as complex frequency mixtures open to further mathematical analysis and manipulation, For Friedrich Kittler, it is also with telegraphy that information, in the form of massless flows of electromagnetic waves, is abstracted for the first time. In this sense, information is not simply the content of a message, or the main form assumed by the commodity in late capitalist economics, but also another name for the increasing visibility and importance of such 'massless flows' as they become the environment within which contemporary culture folds. In this sense, we can refer to informational cultures as involving the explicit constitution of an informational milieu– a milieu composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such 'massless flows.'
(1. Friedrich Kittler "The history of communication media")
Information and Noise
Proposition I: Information is what stands out from noise
Corollary Ia: Within informational cultures, the struggle over meanings is subordinated to that over "media effects"
corollary Ib: The cultural politics of information involves a return to the minimum conditions of communication (the relation of signal to noise and the problem of making contact)
p14 (a)n informational culture marks the point where meaningful experiences are under siege, continuously undermined by a proliferation of signs that have no reference, only statistical patterns of frequency, redundancy and resonance.
p15 The minimum condition for communication is contact– a temporary suspension of the multitude of tiny and obscure perceptions out of which information emerges as a kind of fleeting clarity, as if a space had been successfully cleared.
The scene of communication is reduced to its minimum condition: that of making contact by clearing a channel from the threat of noise.
p 16 The first condition of a successful communication becomes that of reducing all meaning to information– that is to a signal that can be successfully replicated across a varied communication milieu with minimum alterations.
p18 The relation of communication for (Gilbert) Simondon does not take place between two reconstituted individuals, but between the preindividual (what within the formed individual resists individuation) and the collective (the dimension within which another type of individuation takes place)
p19 In as much as information concerns the problem of form it also poses the question of the organization of perception and the production of bodily habits which it foregrounds with relation to the emergence of social meanings. Within design and architecture, for example, information is also about the active transformation of bodily habits as this takes place around keyboards and chairs, games, trains and cars, buildings and small objects with which we perform all kind of daily actions. Information is not about brainwashing as a form of media effect, but it does informs habits and percepts and regulates the speed of a body by plugging it into a field of action. In this sense, the informational dimension of communication is not just about the successful delivery of a coded signal but also about contact and tactility, about architecture and design implying a dynamic modulation of material and social energies. Information works with forms of distracted perception by modulating the organization of a physical environment.
The Limits of Possibility
Nonlinearity of Representation
p28 Because information theory draws its theoretical underpinnings from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, it understands material processes as implying a nonlinear relation between macrostates (such as averages, but also identities, subjectivities, societies and cultures) and microstates (the multiplicity of particles and interactions that underlie macro states in as much as they also involve irreversible processes). This has a double consequence for our understanding of the cultural politics of information: on the one hand, it implies a shift away from representation to modulation which emphasizes the power of the mutating and divergent; on the other hand, it locates informational dynamics outside the perspectival and three-dimensional space of modernity and within an immersive, multidimensional and transformative topology.
p 34 (t)he cultural politics of information does not address so much the threat of "disembodiment," or the disappearance of the body, but its microdissection and modulation, as it is split and decomposed into segments of variable and adjustable sizes.
The emergence of information as a concept, then, should also be related to the development of a set of techniques, including marketing strategies and techniques of communication management– as they attempt to capture the increasing randomness and volatility of culture.
The New Economy apologists, for example, famously postulated three stages of media power: broadcasting, narrowcasting and point casting. The latter corresponded to a digital mode in which messages were not simply directed at groups but tailored to individuals and even sub-individual units (or as Gilles Deleuze called them, 'dividuals', which results from the decomposition of individuals into data clouds subject to automated integration and disintegration. )
p35 Gender, race and sexuality, the mantra of the cultural politics of difference in the 1980s and 1990s, have been reduced to recombinable elements, disassociated from their subjects and recomposed on a plane of modulation– a close sampling of the micromutations of the social, moving to the rhythm of market of market expansions and contractions.
p.35 (t)he foregrounding of informational flows across the socius also implies a crisis of representation (both linguistic and political). The statistical modulation of information is highly disruptive in its relation to representation because it undermines the perspectival and three-dimensional space which functions as a support for relations of mirrors and reflections as they engender subjects, identities and selves.
eg. recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence representational map replaced by a direct relationship between sensors and motors
p.37 Space becomes informational not so much when it is computed by a machine, but when it presents an excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our knowledge, and a nonlinear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables and different intersecting levels of observation and interaction. ... An informational space is inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic... It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements, mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it, recompose it and carry it along.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Genomes and What to Make of them
Genomes and What to Make of them
University of Chicago Press
New in Paperback–The announcement in 2003 that the Human Genome Project had completed its map of the entire human genome was heralded as a stunning scientific breakthrough: our first full picture of the basic building blocks of human life. Since then, boasts about the benefits—and warnings of the dangers—of genomics have remained front-page news, with everyone agreeing that genomics has the potential to radically alter life as we know it. For the nonscientist, the claims and counterclaims are dizzying—what does it really mean to understand the genome? Barry Barnes and John Dupré offer an answer to that question and much more in Genomes and What to Make of Them, a clear and lively account of the genomic revolution and its promise.
Friday, April 19, 2013
Architecture of Constructivism: Universal Forms in Local Socioeconomic and Cultural Contexts
Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art (Ekaterinburg, Russian Federation) welcomes submissions for International interdisciplinary workshop “Architecture of Constructivism: Universal Forms in Local Socioeconomic and Cultural Contexts,” which will take place in Ekaterinburg on July 5 2013
Soviet constructivism was among many instances of the Bauhaus architecture taking root in a distant cultural and architectural milieu. The universal values embedded in the Bauhaus style interacted with socioeconomic conditions of a particular region and received unique interpretations in local aesthetic traditions. The case of Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinburg demonstrates the way, in which the presence of the Bauhaus experts, whose creative principles and expertise were adopted by local specialists, contributed to the formation of a distinct regional tradition in architecture and town-planning. This tradition emerged under the influence of numerous factors, such as the geographical remoteness of the territory from large metropolitan centers, specific socioeconomic conditions of the industrial region, and many others. The principles of the constructivist architecture penetrated the fabric of the social life in Sverdlovsk to such extent that they continue to shape the ways, in which the city’s territory, its actual and symbolic spaces are organized today, and they constitute its most prominent and recognizable visual emblems. However, in both popular and scholarly literature constructivism is often presented in terms of “cultural heritage,” a “museum in the open air.” When writing about constructivism, both historians of architecture and authors of popular tour guides focus on its stylistic features, while the social and the everyday aspects of this phenomenon are either ignored or downplayed.
The organizers of this workshop share a belief that in order for the city’s residents to connect to the constructivist architecture in a meaningful way, the constructivist ensembles ought to be conceptualized not only as “cultural heritage,” but as the indispensable part of the city’s present and the future. The goal of the current workshop is to expand the disciplinary frameworks, under which constructivism is generally studied and to try to look at the constructivist architecture in a variety of contexts: social, political, economic, aesthetic, the context of humanitarian geography and urban studies. We invite proposals that reflect on the ways, in which constructivism was and continues to play role in economic and social developments of the territory, in shaping the patterns of the citizens’ daily lives, of actual and symbolic spaces of the urban center.
The organizers welcome submissions from historians, architects, sociologists, anthropologists, specialists in political science, cultural studies, aesthetics and other disciplines, who analyze the legacies of the Bauhaus tradition and its metamorphoses in national, regional and local contexts.
Contributions related but not limited, to the following topics of interest are expected:
• What was the impact (if any) of the constructivist architecture on the urban ways of life: patterns of behavior, modes of social interaction, people’s habits?
• To what extent the Utopian images, embedded in the symbolic matrix of constructivism are relevant in today’s cultural paradigms?
• Do the aesthetic principles of constructivism, such as the cult of simplicity, minimalism and functionalism speak to aesthetic sensitivities of contemporary city dwellers?
• To what extent does the constructivism translate itself into the modern “concrete and glass” architecture, both world-wide and in the local case of Ekaterinburg?
• What were the factors that contributed to the emergence of the local tradition of constructivism in Sverdlovsk? How does the case of Sverdlovsk relate to other examples of the universal Bauhaus style taking root in distant territories and producing local architectural traditions?
• What are the theoretical, social and political discourses, which the architecture of constructivism is capable of producing in the current academic and popular discursive fields?
The following keynote speakers are expected to take part in the workshop:
Prof. Dr.h.c. Wolfgang Schuster (Germany)
Dr. Britta Kaiser-Schuster (Germany)
Prof. Leonid Salmin (Russia)
Eduard Kubensky (Russia)
Dr. Micha Gross (Israel) – via Skype conference
The organizers of this workshop share a belief that in order for the city’s residents to connect to the constructivist architecture in a meaningful way, the constructivist ensembles ought to be conceptualized not only as “cultural heritage,” but as the indispensable part of the city’s present and the future. The goal of the current workshop is to expand the disciplinary frameworks, under which constructivism is generally studied and to try to look at the constructivist architecture in a variety of contexts: social, political, economic, aesthetic, the context of humanitarian geography and urban studies. We invite proposals that reflect on the ways, in which constructivism was and continues to play role in economic and social developments of the territory, in shaping the patterns of the citizens’ daily lives, of actual and symbolic spaces of the urban center.
The organizers welcome submissions from historians, architects, sociologists, anthropologists, specialists in political science, cultural studies, aesthetics and other disciplines, who analyze the legacies of the Bauhaus tradition and its metamorphoses in national, regional and local contexts.
Contributions related but not limited, to the following topics of interest are expected:
• What was the impact (if any) of the constructivist architecture on the urban ways of life: patterns of behavior, modes of social interaction, people’s habits?
• To what extent the Utopian images, embedded in the symbolic matrix of constructivism are relevant in today’s cultural paradigms?
• Do the aesthetic principles of constructivism, such as the cult of simplicity, minimalism and functionalism speak to aesthetic sensitivities of contemporary city dwellers?
• To what extent does the constructivism translate itself into the modern “concrete and glass” architecture, both world-wide and in the local case of Ekaterinburg?
• What were the factors that contributed to the emergence of the local tradition of constructivism in Sverdlovsk? How does the case of Sverdlovsk relate to other examples of the universal Bauhaus style taking root in distant territories and producing local architectural traditions?
• What are the theoretical, social and political discourses, which the architecture of constructivism is capable of producing in the current academic and popular discursive fields?
The following keynote speakers are expected to take part in the workshop:
Prof. Dr.h.c. Wolfgang Schuster (Germany)
Dr. Britta Kaiser-Schuster (Germany)
Prof. Leonid Salmin (Russia)
Eduard Kubensky (Russia)
Dr. Micha Gross (Israel) – via Skype conference
two titles and architecture and the digital
Elizabeth Grosz Architecture from the outside: Essays on virtual and real spaces
Alicia Imperiale New Flatness: surface tension in digital architecture
Alicia Imperiale New Flatness: surface tension in digital architecture
Getting under the Skin: The body and Media Theory (Bernadette Wegenstein) MIT Press
Foreword by Mark Hansen
what does Wegenstein argue agasint?
1) ix "challenged prevailing conceptions of the body as an integral organization that is bounded by the skin and differentiated systematically from the environment"
2) Katherine Hayles how information lost its body
xi the burden of Hayles's argument is to demonstrate the impossibility of a disembodied instance of information, since the latter always must take on some concrete material form.
Rather than expanding discussion of how humans are now "seamlessly articulated with" computers (Hayles) or how humans retain a distinct form of embodiment that differs categorically from the materiality of computers, even though the two can be "interactively coupled" through "indirection"(Verela, Hansen), Wegenstein here charts her own course: specifically, by welcoming the capacity of the (human) body to disappear, while insisting in the incapacity of (human) embodiment to do likewise.
Xii-Xiii Thus, she can insightfully claim that "the holistic discovery of the body as constitutive mediation has converged with an age of mediatic proliferation, such as what we are in fact witnessing in the apparent continuing fragmentation of body is the work of mediation itself as the body." ...Wegenstein here clarifies exactly how the terms for the holism or integrality of embodied function now coincide perfectly with the radical fragmentation of the body."
Xii the human as a form of distributed embodiment, an "organ instead of a body," that does not so much demarcate itself against an environment as extend seamlessly and robustly into the now ubiquitously digitized technosphere.
XV Her conception of human embodiment as distributed, temporary, and organ-centered manages to reconcile the humanist dimensions of McLuhan's thesis (those dimensions most distasteful to Kittler) with a post humanist conception of technics, demonstrating in the process that technical autonomy need not come at the expense of human perceptual ratios.
Conclusion chapter
161 As new technologies have allowed for the opening of the body and its dispersal into fragmentation of information, these technologies have in turn served as strategies for understanding and ultimately controlling the body, which artists, architects and others have deployed in the realization of the new bodily configurations. What the outcome of this process may mean in the long run certainly is not yet determined.
In this understanding there is no body as "raw material," which would imply that there is something like an original body, a body that is prior to inscription and semanticization. But no, the current body under the influence of media technologies can merge and bend; and by inhabiting it, we– the viewer-participants can become part not only of its genotype, but also of its phenotype.... What is at stake in these examples is a holistic body notion that has been fed or informed by a fragmented body.... But the output of this process does not assume a unified subject that archives its "wholeness" only through the interrelation of the various body parts. The holism in question in these media art and architecture installations is of a different kind. It is a holism that authorizes every bit and every piece of the fragmented body to take over the body as a whole, to serve as interface. In late-twentieth -century popular culture the body and all its organs no longer simply serve as a medium of expression, as a semiotic layer toward the outer world. Rather, the body and its parts themselves have adopted the characteristics of a medium, wherein lies the return to a holistic body concept.
Chapter 1 Wegenstein's summary of Hayles
(p10) According to N. Katherine Hayles, the post human is not a being, but a point of view that privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, that views consciousness as an epiphenomenon rather the seat of human identity( a perspective similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger), that considers the body as an original but replaceable set of prostheses, that– most important– is capable of seamlessly articulating humanness with intelligent machines. For Hayles, the "posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material - informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.(p 3 in how we became posthuman)"
what does Wegenstein argue agasint?
1) ix "challenged prevailing conceptions of the body as an integral organization that is bounded by the skin and differentiated systematically from the environment"
2) Katherine Hayles how information lost its body
xi the burden of Hayles's argument is to demonstrate the impossibility of a disembodied instance of information, since the latter always must take on some concrete material form.
Rather than expanding discussion of how humans are now "seamlessly articulated with" computers (Hayles) or how humans retain a distinct form of embodiment that differs categorically from the materiality of computers, even though the two can be "interactively coupled" through "indirection"(Verela, Hansen), Wegenstein here charts her own course: specifically, by welcoming the capacity of the (human) body to disappear, while insisting in the incapacity of (human) embodiment to do likewise.
Xii-Xiii Thus, she can insightfully claim that "the holistic discovery of the body as constitutive mediation has converged with an age of mediatic proliferation, such as what we are in fact witnessing in the apparent continuing fragmentation of body is the work of mediation itself as the body." ...Wegenstein here clarifies exactly how the terms for the holism or integrality of embodied function now coincide perfectly with the radical fragmentation of the body."
Xii the human as a form of distributed embodiment, an "organ instead of a body," that does not so much demarcate itself against an environment as extend seamlessly and robustly into the now ubiquitously digitized technosphere.
XV Her conception of human embodiment as distributed, temporary, and organ-centered manages to reconcile the humanist dimensions of McLuhan's thesis (those dimensions most distasteful to Kittler) with a post humanist conception of technics, demonstrating in the process that technical autonomy need not come at the expense of human perceptual ratios.
Conclusion chapter
161 As new technologies have allowed for the opening of the body and its dispersal into fragmentation of information, these technologies have in turn served as strategies for understanding and ultimately controlling the body, which artists, architects and others have deployed in the realization of the new bodily configurations. What the outcome of this process may mean in the long run certainly is not yet determined.
In this understanding there is no body as "raw material," which would imply that there is something like an original body, a body that is prior to inscription and semanticization. But no, the current body under the influence of media technologies can merge and bend; and by inhabiting it, we– the viewer-participants can become part not only of its genotype, but also of its phenotype.... What is at stake in these examples is a holistic body notion that has been fed or informed by a fragmented body.... But the output of this process does not assume a unified subject that archives its "wholeness" only through the interrelation of the various body parts. The holism in question in these media art and architecture installations is of a different kind. It is a holism that authorizes every bit and every piece of the fragmented body to take over the body as a whole, to serve as interface. In late-twentieth -century popular culture the body and all its organs no longer simply serve as a medium of expression, as a semiotic layer toward the outer world. Rather, the body and its parts themselves have adopted the characteristics of a medium, wherein lies the return to a holistic body concept.
Chapter 1 Wegenstein's summary of Hayles
(p10) According to N. Katherine Hayles, the post human is not a being, but a point of view that privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, that views consciousness as an epiphenomenon rather the seat of human identity( a perspective similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger), that considers the body as an original but replaceable set of prostheses, that– most important– is capable of seamlessly articulating humanness with intelligent machines. For Hayles, the "posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material - informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.(p 3 in how we became posthuman)"
Friday, April 12, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
New Media in CTMS Mark Hansen
177-178
In Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler has articulated a history of media that moves from monopoly on storage long exercised by the alphabet to the media differentiation of the nineteenth century and finally to the contemporary convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer processing. At the core of his media history is an appreciation for technics as a material production (a production of the real) that is not preadapted to or constrained by the sensory and perceptual thresholds of human experience.
eg, sound analysis that developed out of the phonographic revolution
the capacity of technical sound recording to inscribe frequencies outside the range of human hearing allows for an inscription (or "symbolization") of the flux of the real that is not narrowly bound to human modes of symbolization.....
whereas the inscription of nature language operates on the discrete ordering of the alphabet, the inscription of sound operates on a far more fine-grained discretization of the sonic flux. One technique for such discretization, Fourier analysis, symbolizes the raw flux of sound by means of intervals that periodize nonperiodic, innumerable frequency series. According to Kittler, what is most important about these so-called Fourier intervals—and what makes them exemplary of digital signal processing per se — is the recourse to real number analysis (a mathematical technique encompassing the continua between whole numbers) they make necessary.
In Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler has articulated a history of media that moves from monopoly on storage long exercised by the alphabet to the media differentiation of the nineteenth century and finally to the contemporary convergence of media in the form of digital code and computer processing. At the core of his media history is an appreciation for technics as a material production (a production of the real) that is not preadapted to or constrained by the sensory and perceptual thresholds of human experience.
eg, sound analysis that developed out of the phonographic revolution
the capacity of technical sound recording to inscribe frequencies outside the range of human hearing allows for an inscription (or "symbolization") of the flux of the real that is not narrowly bound to human modes of symbolization.....
whereas the inscription of nature language operates on the discrete ordering of the alphabet, the inscription of sound operates on a far more fine-grained discretization of the sonic flux. One technique for such discretization, Fourier analysis, symbolizes the raw flux of sound by means of intervals that periodize nonperiodic, innumerable frequency series. According to Kittler, what is most important about these so-called Fourier intervals—and what makes them exemplary of digital signal processing per se — is the recourse to real number analysis (a mathematical technique encompassing the continua between whole numbers) they make necessary.
Systems in CTMS by David Wellbery
Niklas Luhmann
distinctions Consciousness/communication, form/medium, system/environment, operation/observation
the feature distinguishing psychic and social systems from all other autopoietic systems is the fact that they constitute themselves within the medium of meaning... Meaning is the referential excess that carries each presentation beyond itself to other presentations. In Luhmannian patios this is captured by the dictum, meaning the is the unity of the difference of actuality and potentiality. .... a relation, because any occurent phenomenon within the space of meaning is what it is only by virtue of its relations to other possible phenomena...
Structural coupling occurs at the border between autonomous systems and enables them to affect one another without, as it were, entering into each other's (after all, autonomous) operations.
This way of describing things marks an important distinction between systems theory and all varieties of structuralism. In fact, given the emphasis of systems theory on such notions as "event," "contingency," and "improbability," the concept of "structural determination," so dear to the sociological tradition, falls into desuetude.
distinctions Consciousness/communication, form/medium, system/environment, operation/observation
the feature distinguishing psychic and social systems from all other autopoietic systems is the fact that they constitute themselves within the medium of meaning... Meaning is the referential excess that carries each presentation beyond itself to other presentations. In Luhmannian patios this is captured by the dictum, meaning the is the unity of the difference of actuality and potentiality. .... a relation, because any occurent phenomenon within the space of meaning is what it is only by virtue of its relations to other possible phenomena...
Structural coupling occurs at the border between autonomous systems and enables them to affect one another without, as it were, entering into each other's (after all, autonomous) operations.
This way of describing things marks an important distinction between systems theory and all varieties of structuralism. In fact, given the emphasis of systems theory on such notions as "event," "contingency," and "improbability," the concept of "structural determination," so dear to the sociological tradition, falls into desuetude.
Networks in critical terms for media studies by Alexander Galloway
Paul Baran conceived of distributive network
adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency at U.S Department of Defense
The distributed network is the new citadel, the new army, the new power.
1) Data is parsed, not "read" in any conventional sense. Media objects are defined at the intersection between two protocols (two technologies) but not as a result of some human being's semantic projection onto that data. This is readily illustrated via McLuhan's notion that any new medium contains within it older media.... Since all is information, any recognizable "content" is merely the artificial parsing of that substrate data into predictable, template-driven chunks,... in short, a new model of reading will have to be explored, one that is not hermeneutic in nature but instead based on cybernetic parsing, scanning, rearranging, filtering, and interpolating. This new model of reading will need to be based on an immanent or machinic notion of software, The question now is not simply logos (discourse) but ergon (work). Networks are not simply textual entities, they are entities in a constant labor with themselves.
p 293-294
one might cite all the network-centric diagrams for political resistance viable under modernity and the passage into postmodernity: grassroots organizations, guerrilla warfare, anarcho-syndicalism and other rhizomatic movements, These are all "formally within" the network mode because they are themselves formally constituted as distributed or decentralized networks of some kind or another.
P296 n14 This is analogous to how "noise" is defined in information theory.... more noise (generally) means more information. Hence noise is an intra-information problem, not an extra-informatic problem.
adopted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency at U.S Department of Defense
The distributed network is the new citadel, the new army, the new power.
1) Data is parsed, not "read" in any conventional sense. Media objects are defined at the intersection between two protocols (two technologies) but not as a result of some human being's semantic projection onto that data. This is readily illustrated via McLuhan's notion that any new medium contains within it older media.... Since all is information, any recognizable "content" is merely the artificial parsing of that substrate data into predictable, template-driven chunks,... in short, a new model of reading will have to be explored, one that is not hermeneutic in nature but instead based on cybernetic parsing, scanning, rearranging, filtering, and interpolating. This new model of reading will need to be based on an immanent or machinic notion of software, The question now is not simply logos (discourse) but ergon (work). Networks are not simply textual entities, they are entities in a constant labor with themselves.
p 293-294
one might cite all the network-centric diagrams for political resistance viable under modernity and the passage into postmodernity: grassroots organizations, guerrilla warfare, anarcho-syndicalism and other rhizomatic movements, These are all "formally within" the network mode because they are themselves formally constituted as distributed or decentralized networks of some kind or another.
P296 n14 This is analogous to how "noise" is defined in information theory.... more noise (generally) means more information. Hence noise is an intra-information problem, not an extra-informatic problem.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Materiality (Bill Brown)
different dimensions of materiality-- different meanings of "dematerialization"--- What sort of materialism would help us access the materialities of dematerializing media?
p59-60
(m)aterialism that displays the multiple orders of materiality— or the order of materialities— between a phenomenological account of the interface between user and technology, an archeological account of the physical infrastructure of the medium, and sociological account of the cultural and economic forces that continue to shape both the technology itself and out interactions with it.
different dematerialization hypothesis:
1) medium prevents some more immediate access to "things themselves"
2) Marx the particularities of any object or action disappear within the regime of value
3) Georg Simmel money facilitates the preponderance of calculation
4) Allan Sekula "The Traffic in photographs"
Just as money is the universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the world('s) goods in a single system of translations, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence.
Jonathan Crary the new "autonomy and abstraction of vision"
the development of photography shapes "an entire territory on which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate."
5) New media studies
* indexical vs digital
* dematerialization of the original medium itself homogenized within the hegemony of the digital
kittler "with numbers, everything goes"
The materiality of communication
Mark Hanse "thus grants one version of the dematerialization hypothesis—the homogenizing, the dematerializing effects of digitization, a process that dislodges any image from its traditional spatial coordinates, a process that remains mere process until the "affective body" makes sense of the flow it has arrested and stabilized."
Attention to materiality within media studies shares the objectives of a "new materialism" that has distinguished itself from historical materialism, structuralism, and semiology by reengaging phenomenology, by focusing on material culture, and by drawing attention to a materiality of the signifier, now understood as the signifying effects of matter itself.
p59-60
(m)aterialism that displays the multiple orders of materiality— or the order of materialities— between a phenomenological account of the interface between user and technology, an archeological account of the physical infrastructure of the medium, and sociological account of the cultural and economic forces that continue to shape both the technology itself and out interactions with it.
different dematerialization hypothesis:
1) medium prevents some more immediate access to "things themselves"
2) Marx the particularities of any object or action disappear within the regime of value
3) Georg Simmel money facilitates the preponderance of calculation
4) Allan Sekula "The Traffic in photographs"
Just as money is the universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the world('s) goods in a single system of translations, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence.
Jonathan Crary the new "autonomy and abstraction of vision"
the development of photography shapes "an entire territory on which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate."
5) New media studies
* indexical vs digital
* dematerialization of the original medium itself homogenized within the hegemony of the digital
kittler "with numbers, everything goes"
The materiality of communication
Mark Hanse "thus grants one version of the dematerialization hypothesis—the homogenizing, the dematerializing effects of digitization, a process that dislodges any image from its traditional spatial coordinates, a process that remains mere process until the "affective body" makes sense of the flow it has arrested and stabilized."
Attention to materiality within media studies shares the objectives of a "new materialism" that has distinguished itself from historical materialism, structuralism, and semiology by reengaging phenomenology, by focusing on material culture, and by drawing attention to a materiality of the signifier, now understood as the signifying effects of matter itself.
"image" in critical terms for media studies W.J.T. Mitchell
p45 The numerical or "digital infrastructure" beneath the "eyewash" of analog experience remain the province of technicians, not ordinary users, who treat digital images in much the same way as analog images....... If the ones and zeros did not add up to an image that massages the familiar and traditional habits of the human sensorium, it is unlikely that the digital revolution would have gained any traction at all.
P45 quoting Mark Hansen
"It is not simply that the image provides a tool for the user to control the "infoscape" of contemporary material culture.. but rather that the "image" has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body. Specifically, we must accept that the image, rather than finding instantiation in a privileged technical form (including the computer interface), now demarcates the very process through which the body, in conjunction with the various apparatuses for rendering information perceptible, gives form to or in-form information. In sum, the image can no loner be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience. This is what I propose to call the digital image."
I would agreee with everything in this passage except for the tense of the predicates; the image, I would suggest, has always been bound up with the body, but the interconnection is now made evident by the onset of digital imaging, in the sense of binary computation. Just as photography reveal unseen and overlooked visual realities, an "optical unconscious" in Walter Benjamin's phrase,.... digital imaging may be uncovering yet another layer of the perceptible cognitive world that we will recognize as having always been there.
P45 quoting Mark Hansen
"It is not simply that the image provides a tool for the user to control the "infoscape" of contemporary material culture.. but rather that the "image" has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body. Specifically, we must accept that the image, rather than finding instantiation in a privileged technical form (including the computer interface), now demarcates the very process through which the body, in conjunction with the various apparatuses for rendering information perceptible, gives form to or in-form information. In sum, the image can no loner be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience. This is what I propose to call the digital image."
I would agreee with everything in this passage except for the tense of the predicates; the image, I would suggest, has always been bound up with the body, but the interconnection is now made evident by the onset of digital imaging, in the sense of binary computation. Just as photography reveal unseen and overlooked visual realities, an "optical unconscious" in Walter Benjamin's phrase,.... digital imaging may be uncovering yet another layer of the perceptible cognitive world that we will recognize as having always been there.
"body" in critical terms for media studies
by Bernadette Wegenstein
N. Katherine Hayles in How we became posthuman proposes embodiment vs body
"In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology and culture, which together compose enactment."
Hayles names this tendency to privilege the manipulation of information over specific materiality the "posthuman."
ideology under this previliging of pattern: disembodiment of information allows for fast and easy translation across divergent systems
traditional chinese medicine
Merleau Ponty (phenomenology of perception)--- Bernard Stiegler--- deconstruct the division between
a natural state of human being and tis technological, medial usurper
---- Mark Hansen
The subject's auto-awareness of interacting on more than one level of representation has been pushed to its extreme in the unified platforms of the entertainment industry's theme parks, for example, where film, video game and comic book franchises are marked to consumers in fully combined forms, as shown by Angela Ndalianis.
an example of "media architecture" blur building " space has been made wearable"
The Möbius strip has been a standard metaphor for theorists from Jacques Lacan to Elizabeth Grosz, who have used it to conceptualize the body and subjectivity as an indivisible complex, in which the outside flows to the inside without any apparent break.
N. Katherine Hayles in How we became posthuman proposes embodiment vs body
"In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology and culture, which together compose enactment."
Hayles names this tendency to privilege the manipulation of information over specific materiality the "posthuman."
ideology under this previliging of pattern: disembodiment of information allows for fast and easy translation across divergent systems
traditional chinese medicine
Merleau Ponty (phenomenology of perception)--- Bernard Stiegler--- deconstruct the division between
a natural state of human being and tis technological, medial usurper
---- Mark Hansen
The subject's auto-awareness of interacting on more than one level of representation has been pushed to its extreme in the unified platforms of the entertainment industry's theme parks, for example, where film, video game and comic book franchises are marked to consumers in fully combined forms, as shown by Angela Ndalianis.
an example of "media architecture" blur building " space has been made wearable"
The Möbius strip has been a standard metaphor for theorists from Jacques Lacan to Elizabeth Grosz, who have used it to conceptualize the body and subjectivity as an indivisible complex, in which the outside flows to the inside without any apparent break.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Monday, April 1, 2013
Modernism London Style THE ART DECO HERITAGE
With Photographs by Niels Lehmann and an Introduction by Adam Caruso
216 pages | 300 halftones | 9 1/4 x 11
In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city’s architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings—from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York’s Rockefeller Center—communicated the city’s aspirations as a thriving, modern metropolis.
IntroSpection ART FROM XIAO HUI WANG AND WANG XIAOSONG
236 pages | 2 volumes, 200 color plates | 10 x 12 1/2
Abstract art is poised for widespread popularity in China, its appeal in recent years increased by the artists like Xiao Hui Wang and Wang Xiaosong, whose work created a sensation as part of the Collateral Events of the 2012 Venice Biennale. The two-volume Introspection looks at both of these important Chinese artists. Photo artist Xiao Hui Wang creates digitally enhanced and seemingly abstract photographic works that are closely linked to the pictorial tradition of Chinese culture. Her most recent work explores the nanocosmos. Wang Xiaosong is an installation artist whose practice includes painting and video and whose most recent exhibition sees him addressing social issues, such as the collision between East and West and the crisis of faith in contemporary culture.
With one hundred full-color illustrations, Introspection analyzes the latest works by these two renowned artists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)