Unlimited semiosis, occurs all the time everyday, everytime we have a thought, experience something or try to understand something - this is basically the semioticians view of the interlinked contents of a mind prehaps best considered in the notion of a train of thought.
In Manovich's examples of transcoding i think he is approaching what Baudrillard called the 3rd level of simulation, where we have copy upon perfect copy of images and no discernable original. I think digital media perhaps exemplifies this notion even more than obvious examples of commodity, and is in a sense a momentary concretization of this semiotic process. >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 I totally agree with this, and i think Manovich was basically pointing out how utterly pointless this visualisation thing is, his arguement seems to me to be based on this notion of continual transformation of data from one form to another. My point is really what does this say about new media, what are the qualities of this medium? This is a question that can be approached on many different levels i think, but as an artist trained to respect and understand the qualites of a medium 'a la Henry Moores truth to materials' notion, i am interested in what are the fundamental qualities of digital media in a similar way to what are the fundamental qualities of clay for example. >there's no such thing as a meaningless medium (Gair) Well if this is true, and in terms of physical things like clay or stone i agree with you, they have an inherent quality which at least if nothing else offers some form of resitance to form, if not an affordance to certain forms. But does digital media do that? I don't know the answer to that. Manovich's example of looking at visualisations, or artists using visualisation seems to me to be a critical exploration of artists that are exploring these questions. What Manovich is pointing out is the concern artists have with the qualities of the medium, which arises in the 'truth to materials' ideologies of the Bauhuas, Henry Moore and on into McLuhan and Baudrillards theories. Visualisation i think, in this instance is used to point towards the maleable, unfixed qualities of digital media which in somerespects results in a state of flux where the message apparently inherent in the medium (according to McLuhan)becomes destabalized. Hence anything can become anything else and a kind of semiosis takes place. The return of the subject seems to me to be a call for an escape from this theoretical hangover. and a move away from the medium and back to the message. I ask is this possible and to what extent do the qualities of a digital medium help or hinder this process? ------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------
