On Fri, 11 May 2012 08:12:05 +0100, ruth catlow wrote: > Thanks Rob, > > I agree. Well worth the read. An illuminating article after all the > "clopping" ; ) > > Though even in this account the machines are imbued with agency and > autonomy - strangely disconnected from natural and (human) political > and > economic forces that drive technological developments.
Manuel de Landa aside, Charlesworth describes: "...this fantasy of machine agency that seems to lurk in the New Aesthetic’s enthusiasm..." the machines do move, he writes: "...but only because humans have deployed them to do so..." Crucially: "The New Aesthetics is a demand-side aesthetics. It doesn’t matter who transmits, only what is received. Say Sterling: ‘Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished.’ It may seem impoverished, but without a more robust concept of the creative, initiating human subject, it is also an accurate reflection of the current condition." This is politically and philosophically damning, but not for TNA: for its chosen subjects. The TNA tumblr was *visual rhetoric*. It very successfully demonstrated the quantitatively distinct current historical moment of pervasive digital distortion of the real. To ask it to do something else is to ask it to be less successful at what it did. And if it had been less successful at what it did, we wouldn't all be arguing about it. We cannot exhaustively replace new pictures with old texts. The messenger is now so filled with lead that we could use him as a pencil. So let's write. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
