Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:41:31 +0000
Subject: Re: <ambit> Topic of the month: Remote
From: Catriona Macaulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 11:40 AM, O'Neil, Shaleph wrote:
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.
Okay confession time - my feeling on picking up one of his books was
that life's too short to read Baudrllard but rank ignorance has never
stopped me before and am enjoying this conversation so here goes.... my
point is exactly that they are not perfect copies, very far from it.
They are merely crude abstractions from a richly complex phenomenon
(the web). This is not some semiotician's wet dream but just playing
around with data because data (a very low form of life) is what
computers know how to handle.
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.
Ah well I'd maybe drifted off at the point - I got the impression he
was just showing us a few 'cool things what my mates in warm - haha -
California get up too'. Again my point is that the web is not data -
data is just the clay, the medium not the form.
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.
Of course they do - can you make a hot and filling pie out of digital
media - no. Does digital media afford the visualising of one kind of
quantifiable data stream into another - yes.
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.
Agreed that looking at how artists respond to the medium is inherently
interesting - just not that visualisation is anything more or less than
a straightforward exercise in mapping (with all the inherent
limitations and degradation of the original that happens) rather than
copying/transcoding etc...
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.
Not sure I get why being maleable and unfixed makes digital media any
different from any other - is there such as thing as an unmalleable
unfixed media? Maybe what you are interested in is the idea that
'digital media' are somehow immaterial and therefore very different
from traditional media. Digital media challenge the deeply material
Western psyche (not universal by the way - anthropology reveals
numerous cultures which eg emphasise the apparently immaterial world of
sounds, or of myths and ghosts etc. But in all the concern with digital
media's lack of materiality we loose sight of one important thing -
digital media are pretty straightforward and rather dull - it's all
just 0s and 1s at the end of the day with a wee bit of electricity
thrown in for good measure. Why McLuhan argued media were important and
the message could not be divorced from them was not that there is
something inherent in their make-up that makes them come to our
attention, just that there is no message without a medium and given
that most of us now accept the deeply contextualised nature of life we
can no more afford to ignore the medium's impact on the message than we
can the fact that a living being in the context of an oxygen-less
atmosphere will die.
cheers
