Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 00:00:56 +0000
Subject: Re: <ambit> Topic of the month: Remote
From: Catriona Macaulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2. The return of the subject - perhaps this is what emerges from the
meaningless medium. in a world of simulation and unlimited semiosis in
the
form of transcoding, anything can effectively become anything else, so
what
value does the medium have, not very much! the medium is no longer the
message, to paraphrase McLuhan. Focus returns to the message and not
how it
is delivered.
Can't see how Manovich's examples of transcoding lend any support at
all to your suggestion that the new media media (as it were) facilitate
unlimited semiosis/transcoding. (Not sure I spotted Cubitt's comments
on this but then I was too busy trying to find a rift in the time space
continuum so I could slip away from the Idiot's Guide to Infinity and
Number Systems).
Take Manovich's example of the work that claimed to map the web on to
pixels. Of course it was no such thing. The web itself is not just a
collection of web pages, no more than a database is a collection of
cells or a human a collection of atoms. The web is not just the pages,
but their elements, the inter and intra connections afforded by web
technology, the people who use it, their activities, moods, contexts,
the wires and ethers that carry it etc. If he had been content to claim
that this was an example of mapping web pages as discrete units I'd
have bought it but he kept trying to claim it as a representation of
the web itself.
Manovich's example was merely of a rather crude kind of mapping that
took a rich phenomena (the web), distilled out from it a simple subset
of its complexity that lent itself well to the intended medium for
mapping and mapped that (and only that). The persistent problem with
visualisation as an exercise is that you inevitably end up mapping only
those things that lend themselves to your mapping schema. Visualising
(or auralising - a lovely rich field they managed to ignore) eg stock
market trends is the modern day equivalent of bones on the temple floor
- stock market visualisations can only map quantifiable data - not
activity, emotion, current events and the numerous other richly
subjective things that impact the markets. You can easily visualise a
human's body temperature changes across the course of a day. But how do
you visualise their dreams?
Of course the irony is that artists are actually very good at
visualising the richly subjective phenomena of the world (like dreams).
Seems to me this visualisation trend in new media art is just falling
into the same old trap Cartesians, politicians, cognitive and computer
scientists have been falling into for years and buying into the idea
that anything can be number crunched (which is handily enough what
computers are so very good at...). Things can't be infinitely
transcoded as everything (material or ideal) is situated in a web of
contexts.
Anyway have to say I was deeply unimpressed by the event - both the
'star turn' speakers were poorly prepared and clearly had no
understanding of the event's real focus. The fact that they both
delighted in telling us this on several occasions during their 'chats'
(not sure they warrant the label 'talks') added insult to injury. A
pretty piss poor show all in all from two people you would have thought
knew better.
-------------------------------------------------
a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland
post: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
archive: http://www.mediascot.org/ambit
info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
and write "info ambit" in the message body
-------------------------------------------------
