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.
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