Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.
It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.
[...]
Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.
So, bandwidth is becoming scarce again. We heard all this less than a decade ago: sure, the Internet as it was could still be used for e-mail (the object of choice for derisive comparisons), but when media-rich applications came around, which were just around the corner, things would change. Videoconference research by 2002 assumed expensive hardware and expensive pay-by-minute corporate plans; telephony might change its piping radically, but would still end up being charged as usual; video would be bought and downloaded on-demand. The bubble burst only reinforced the notion that the Internet business model was untenable, and that it was just a matter of time till online services were normalized into the old modes.
Sure, it is possible that at some point availability will be overcome by demand. There will come a time the tubes will be clogged, and we will have to unearth all those regrettable QoS protocols of yore, perhaps even the beast that went by the name of RSVP, and leave anarchic ol’ Internet for people who use email. I suspected at the time, though, and even moreso now, that this was not so much about a short-sightedness over the exponential growth of transmission capacity (brought by innovation in software as well as in hardware), but that there was an eagerness to see infrastructural scarcity back into the game. It was a problem people saw too big an opportunity to cash in with. One will need to do better than this to scare the public into buying it - once people do, though, there will be no technological revolution to revert it.
Bruce Sterling once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.” And much else besides.
He could write the next Palmer Eldritch, which he won’t; he will still be the guy who once wrote the sentence: “It’s war to the knife in the neon-lit backstreets of cyberspace.”
—
I would like to found the José Saramago Award for the obvious and heavy-handed, so that I could hand it to Richard Powers every year. I read Galatea 2.2 a few years ago; when I think of its last 50 pages - I’m being literal here: my jaw still locks, my teeth are still grinded.
—
Up to this date, William Gibson still thinks that Japan is the future.
—
Sure, you can add the cyber- prefix to the once fashionable word punk. You can associate yourself with Philip K Dick, the adorable schizophrenic hack. But Science Fiction, quote unquote, is perenially haunted by the ghost of Isaac Asimov. Being into it indicates an Asimoviness of the soul. The didacticism, the will to enlighten; the authoritarian exercise of the hypothetical society, with a clear-cut moral lesson in the end; the surrendering fascination-cum-despair over the thought of giant robots fighting. Daze over gimmicks, gadgets and devices (the most interesting thing about Batman is the bat-belt, right?). Nerds trying to be hip but never wavering nerdy self-righteousness, desire for control, anxiety, anal-retentiveness: more heavy metal bands, more adventures of Hiro Protagonist.
—
Which is a pity; what is there to write about, in 2009, that is not about technology? That is not, in a certain sense, also science fiction?
Ehm: A survey of teens and young adults released last week reported that 1 in 5 teens — and one-third of 20-somethings — have electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.
Of course, producing such pictures of minors amounts to child pornography, even if the photographer is himself underage and the victim, himself. So teens are being brought to court over such self-pics. If found guilty, they are, you know, child molesters. Besides the jail time, and the social stigma, they are forced, for example, to keep a certain distance from schools and other places minors dwell. Note that in most Western countries, possessing these pictures and videos is also in itself a crime.
Zany, isn’t it? And 1 in 5 teens, report says. But let us stop for a moment and consider: what exactly needs to be changed in the laws? What legislation would cope reasonably with this new situation? You see, that’s not such an easy question.
The first trap, we learned, would lead us back to the streets of Rayuela, to the structuralist frenzy of the couplage and the combinatoire; or to the Proppian machine that vows to tell, by permutations of a fixed program, each and every possible fairy tale that could be told. The hero is herein transformed into a goose. Oulipo.
The second trap leads to where it’s led us: Ludology, Cybertext, “Interactive Fiction,” the consecration of the Choose Your Adventure Book as very serious experimental fiction or, alternatively, a bizarre mass migration from Experimental Fiction to Videogame Studies. Either the added difficulty is now paradoxically a tool for reader’s immersion (as Murray would have it), or the participation turns reading into a game - the Aarseth alternative -, with a story that fades into backdrop.
Plot-based hypertext, with its interlacing stories and its mysteries to be navigated through - from Infinite Jest all the way to Joyce’s afternoon - looks today like clumsy first attempts, Meliès magic tricks to be shelved under Historical Curiosities hardly one or two decades after their bombastic inceptions. Plot, so unfashionable throughout the past Century (it was, it was), was never the point. Some recognized this from the start - Caitlin Fisher, Shelley Jackson - and plot couplage gave way to the associative operation of memory, or to an identity that is dispersed and diffused in the body, quite non-cartesianly. Almost before everybody else, Milorad Pavic invented the Encyclopaedia: linking as an explosion of the point of view, the multitude of perspective, veiling as it reveals, ever incapable of retrieving the original, the thing in itself in the gleam of its presence. The Dictionary of the Khazars is the story of the failed reconstruction of the Dictionary of the Khazars. But where does this lead us?
Of course, it doesn’t need to lead us anywhere. We don’t need to go anywhere. We can stay put, or we can go at our own pace, excited with the long footnote.
The book is a convention: the XVIII/XIXth turn of the Century reader is trained, Kittler and Hayles reckon, to disregard whatever is specific and variable in the physical artifact of the book, and focus instead on the legal fiction of immaterial text (or, according to Hayles, to the legal fiction of style). Whatever media effects cannot be effectively erased in the cognitive process of reading become an intromission. Contra this a tradition of “Artist’s Books” - lovely artifacts nobody reads -, and William Blake, and the history and pre-history of printing itself (the Incunabula, the Golden Ratio in Gutemberg’s page).
Is immaterial text to be denounced? Insomuch as “immaterial text” is an entity that can only comfortably manifest itself in print, why, of course. It is an awfully impractical idea. But please, good folks at the ELO: let us not denounce immateriality, for literature has always been, in the good sense, immaterial, and being media-specific has little to do with being immaterial or not. Even though there is still a readership for Jane Austen’s novels, media have effectively freed text from the “recording of the Real” and the “hallucination of the Imaginary” Lacan-Kittler speak of, and can now focus on the by definition untouchable realms of the symbolic, where it, in a sense, belongs. The struggle with materiality as condition will only eventually restore text to a novel concept of immateriality. Literature won’t be reduced to videogame and animation by today’s material constraints just as the embellishment of the medieval page did not make of literature one of the visual arts.
Tom Moody writes about a recent schism in Digital Art and proposes a new taxonomy: “new media artists” vs “artists with computers.” Here:
New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don’t care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. (…) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich’s principles (”new media objects exist as data,” etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.
Boy, do we even need to state this? The kids that are making fancy wallpapers and squiggly trippy things in Processing do not belong with the conceptual artists with works about code they can’t write themselves.
By the end of the post:
New media artists scoff at the art world’s notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.
Tom Moody is saying: what the coder guys do is not art, but there is no telling them that. His divide is clear: there are “new media artists”, as there are, for example, “circus artists.” Nothing wrong with that. And then there are Artists, capital A, and among those, there are some who happen to be interested in computers right now. High Art and Low Art, all over again - do we really want to start this discussion? I don’t even think the two groups are moving apart - they have always been separate, far apart in spirit, and only meet when they are lumped together by curators and critics who don’t know any better. This is not the case with photography, that, early experimentation aside, branched out in different movements from a fairly singular origin. Lush, superficial spectacle and arid, challenging works you need the catalog to understand do not mix, and there are more, rather than less, people who don’t understand this today.
i made this. you play this. we are enemies., a, er, game-art work, is making the links rounds this week. Suffices to say that net-art pretty much started with dadaist collage, and it’s been a while since then, and I don’t get the what whole new excitement is all about. The oft-copied recipe now includes a ball you can move around, which I guess is why this is cool again.* And: screenshots, newspaper cuts, logos for large Internet corporations, self-reference, text about links: everything feels so dated!
Taking the opportunity to bitch some more: at least we are not seeing another offshoot of the weaker theories of Electronic Fiction. A misguided emphasis on interactivity - and, for some, even on immersion through interactivity - back in more innocent days eventually led theorists, Stuart Moulthrop all the way to Janet Murray, to shift interests from literature to videogames, where the stuff might find some practical use. Losing your scholars to Videogame Theory is quite a punch on the stomach. Poor e-lit.
* of course you could use just the same argument over the jodi link there.
* (You see, I say “Digital Art” without a blink, and other such very silly things. But “Video Art” and “Game Art” never ceased to sound funny when I hear them.)
Everyone is linking this around, even far outside the Data Visualisation circles, so I’ll try not to be redundant. But let’s look at this one map, of books published / country:
Afaik, this is not averaged by population, which would make an even more eurocentric (and far-east-centric, except for China) map than this one already is. Not to be disingenuous, I’m surprised things haven’t changed so much on that front afterall.
I feel more and more of late that all the snobs might be correct, and we - we in Brazil, all excited over “Contemporary American Literature” and shit - are just distracted by the glitter of a second-rate tautological insularity. Quantity does not equate quality, sure. But how many of us can claim knowledge of what really is happening in the old continent and the east, beyond the handful of widely-publicized cliché authors? Maybe it’s my wishful thinking, but: things can’t be so bad that Dave Eggers actually has any relevance in World Literature whatsoever. Please say it isn’t so.
I bought The Recognitions from a used book store. Sometimes these books are, like advertised, as new; sometimes they contain charming sidenotes and scribbles. Mine had, next to a line of Wyatt Gwyon (in the context of discussing his relationship), one of these interesting sidenotes, written with a yellow-marker pen. It read:
“BULLSHIT!!!”
I took this and other telling signs left by the yellow-marker reader (and by the blue-marker reader, who I suspect was the same person, though there is room for controversy) to speculate what this person was like, and, in a curly, roundabout way, review The Rec elsewhere.
The Recognitions is one of my favourite books, but I’ll admit that it is, how shall we put it, rather uncompromising. This has kept away the ruckus surrounding other writers of long, ambitious novels, but it takes its burden on the reader, and sometimes it is quite a burden. There is, for example, the infamous 80-page long party scene everyone complains about, and I too had a hard time slogging through it (and believe me, I have been to my share of terrible parties). Wyatt Mason, in Harpers Magazine, has decided to share with us one of the notes he made in this scene:
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In the Guardian:
Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara’s hat trick, the surrealists’ automatic writing or Burroughs’ cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?
So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic. Meade himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. I can but concur. Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts - and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext? In spite of all this, Amerika may well be on to something when he claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a “digitally-processed intermedia art” in which literature and all the other arts are being “remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed”. My feeling is that these “other forms” will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?
This kinda nailed my concerns about e-lit: sure, the earlier experiments were still clumsy, expanding on modernist strategies or unskillfully recycling the easier recipes of post-modernism. But then the second wave came, and the incipient bud of electronic literature found itself devoured by Media Art folks, realizing text is one among many other possible media. (Which by the way I argue it isn’t: textuality is something more basic and encompassing.)
Of course all literature is, in a sense, meta-linguistic: usually tacitly, in the form of an imperative of honesty. But there is a key difference between textual Media Art, or Media Art about text, and literature; it is difficult to spell out, but it is akin to the distance between Andrei Tarkovsky and Bill Viola. The novelty and the challenges of the new medium steal the scene, and because of this we stray away from engaging with the literary tradition and remembering what’s specific to literature as an art form. In Brazil, we have nigh endured 50 years of “concrete poetry,” which was actually lousy media-art-about-text disguised as literature, and it pretty much ruled universities for a big portion of that time: so trust us, by now most of us can tell the difference. Readers such as the author of the Guardian post can, too, hence their disappointment.
(Need I point this out? I’m all for media art and all that, I even practice the stuff. And the times ask for a revision of what we know about text, and for careful study of what is changing on that front. The ground is moving beneath our feet, and moving ground demands accounting for. But I am also growing weary of this false, throwing baby away with tub-water dilemma. Drawing this distinction is as difficult as it is easy to topple it down; but does anyone honestly think this is not one worth making?)
Electronic Literature in Europe conference in Bergen starts today, and most papers are available online.
Of note: Serge Bouchardon addressing one of my current obsessions (The Aesthetics of Materiality); Katarina Peović Vuković will talk about hypertext, cybertext, networked text, and their political function; Alice Ferrebe will talk of Japan and Electronic Literature; and Maria Engeberg looks for an Aesthetics of Noise, another obsession here, though her focus is on the literary.
It follows from that that a few years ago I was going through adolescence, and then through the sophomoric stage around 18-21. By then I experienced that urge, typical of those two phases, for newness; of being my own contemporary, of keeping a firm grip on the Zeitgeist (preferably by the balls), of being aware and maybe part of what was going on. (This led me - again pretty typically - to flirt with the works of some authors and artists I am terribly embarrassed about today. And in public, sometimes, to boot.)
Not that I don’t still care about these things. But I have realised of late how dated most of my, oh, adolescent/sub-21 Zeitgeist feels, looking from today. Milorad Pavic is still on the crush-list, for example, but as a grandfatherly figure, as someone whose high time was when I was a toddler. But if Paul Auster had published his New York Trilogy today, I would have just met it with a yawn. (Don’t ask me about Foster Wallace; I have no idea what I was thinking.)
I complain that Peter Greenaway has gone senile, from one of cinema’s last hopes to the director of Tulse Luper and the man responsible for that dreary Last Supper installation. But could we suffer The Pillow Book today? Text, body, inscription? The easy gimmicks of his non-narrative cinema promises?
And on the more popular front - which is where the Zeitgeist really is, I would inform you by the time - I find it funny how movies like Lola Rennt or bands like the Flaming Lips are intolerable now. Even the stuff that is still likeable, like Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, anime), again I can’t quite imagine happening today.
I was excited over Takashi Murakami when reports and pictures of the 2001 Los Angeles “Superflat” exhibition spread. Today I roll eyes most impatiently when the eager arts or design student mentions his name.
The list goes on. Sometimes I would feel there was something missing in the whole Zeitgeist thing, some story that was not being told, blame it on the sorry state of culture (it’s easier when you are in the Third World) and feel the need, like Alec Linderbergh, that someone sound a Call-to-Arms - this expectation itself dated, quite High Modernist. The irony is there is not really a Zeitgeist when you are young, it hasn’t quite formed yet, there is only the shadows of older people - who will either give you anxiety of influence or embarrass you shitless as you wise up. To make matters worse, ours was a post-modernist, post-structuralist shadow that makes the whole “Zeitgeist” concept troublesome (though I never really met a bona fide sub-21 po-mo kid. Of course a lot of us have tried.). So, what, it’s been less than a decade, which makes this then versus now talk sound funny. I don’t really know what “is going on right now”, but I think my grip now is tighter than when I was certain I had it mostly figured out.
I am reporting this because I just learned earlier tonight that there is a transhumanist friend-of-friend in my social network. Yes, a transhumanist in 2008, in Brazil, 2-step distance in my social bloody network. I’m baffled.
Lately I have been thinking about Glitch-Art, an emerging aesthetics inside Digital Art which takes the computational error as its subject. If this is your first contact with the subject, here are two examples to get started:
What Bruegel’s Tower of Babel might look like, seen through the Glitch Browser
Browse around, there are many different examples on the web, I’ll stop at two before I am unfair for not including something.
The first comprehensive study of Glitch Art was Iman Moradi’s monograph in 2004; he and Ant Scott have written a book that will be out soon, and which I’m looking forward to. In the 2004 work, Moradi draws many interesting comparisons between Glitch and twentieth century aesthetics such as cubism (with its jarred images that might look to us today as glitchy). One very interesting parallel is with Mondrian - an artist both of straight, computer-like geometry and of intentionally inserted imperfections, affirming the human behind what is often perceived as coldness in his composition. He also points out the established role of noise and distortion in music and video.
I don’t know what Moradi and others have been up to lately (I have learned he is writing his doctorate on the subject right now), but reading his monograph and looking at the glitch art scene I have formulated three interlocking hypotheses:
Number 1: It is perhaps obvious that most computational art tries to conceal the underlying layers of processing and machinery which generate the pieces: from virtual reality and immersive environments, passing through computer graphics and animation all the way to webdesign, any glitch in the transparency of the interface is a flaw to be corrected: the user/the public should be able to forget, at least momentarily, all the technology that is running below the surface, if they are aware of it at all. And even where the focus is in the process itself - algorithmic art, generative art, fractal art - the algorithm is then treated as a pure, mathematical construct, not as a set of instructions for a physical machine. To refer to this, Katherine Hayles has coined the term “Regime of Computation“: a philosophical attitude or sensibility which projects the algorithmic onto the world, thinking of algorithms as pure objects abstracted from the machines to which they serve as instructions of operation, and as possibly existing in nature itself.
Glitch Art reverses this philosophical attitude - I am tempted to use the word “deconstructs” - by bringing to the foreground the layers of processing and physical operations which otherwise remain hidden to the user (and which he is usually invited to ignore). As opposed to the pure, abstracted interface or to the Regime of Computation of mainstream digital art, Glitch Art is an aesthetics of the materiality of informatics: it affirms both the non-human-like operation and the physicality of computing machines.
Number 2: The computational error has been the domain of hackers from the start. Since the early days, knowing how to creatively exploit a flaw in a computer program was one of the most praised traits of hackerdom (see for instance the Story of Mel in the Jargon File). There is a subversiveness in the glitch, at least as metaphor, in that it defies the totality of a system which by its very nature is hostile to individual expression and tends towards constancy, repetition and homogeneity. The praise of the error in the Story of Mel - and in all of hacker culture - is the praise of creativity, of taking roads less traveled. As computational systems, in an analogy with social systems, are procedural by nature - defining steps both for itself and for the user to follow - any path other than the previously traced path is glitch, often literally. Much of the popularity of glitch art resides, I speculate, in that it so poignantly expresses these tensions.
Number 3: I speculate also that Glitch Art perhaps could be grouped inside a broader category of aesthetics, not only of the error but also of the imperfect, the accidental and the incomplete. This is a troublesome claim because these words are not exactly interchangeable, and this aesthetics is more one of affinities we might trace than the continuity of a tradition.
–
Ok.
Moradi makes a number of very good parallels in his monograph, but I want to add a few of my own, some of which might be surprising at first.
The absence of symmetry in Japanese art objects has been often commented on by Western critics. This, also, is a result of a working out through Zennism of Taoist ideals. Confucianism, with its deep-seated idea of dualism, and Northern Buddhism with its worship of a trinity, were in no way opposed to the expression of symmetry. As a matter of fact, if we study the ancient bronzes of China or the religious arts of the Tang dynasty and the Nara period, we shall recognize a constant striving after symmetry. The decoration of our classical interiors was decidedly regular in its arrangement. The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection, however, was different. The dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea-room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposefully avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered fatal to the freshness of imagination.
Moreover:
In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle, the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea-caddy of black laquer. In placing a vase of an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in the exact centre, lest it divide the space into equal halves. The pillar of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room.
So in the tea-room, the decoration avoids symmetry by very carefully avoiding anything that could suggest it: it looks wrong and mistake-ridden as the result of an effort one takes years to master fully. This is justified on a reasoning that symmetrical, “perfect” environments communicate monotony, repetition and homongeneity, and ultimately stifle the imagination. True beauty is found instead by freshness of imagination, when it finds room to mentally complete the incomplete. Note this is a free, individual pursuit: it is left to each guest to complete (…) in relation to himself. This is, surprisingly, very close to point number 2.
Engraving by Uzaki Sumikazu which illustrates some of these compositional principles.
Another artist “working out through Zennist ideals” was American composer John Cage. Though extremely relevant here, his considerations on what constitutes “silence” and “noise” merits a separate, more careful discussion. But he was a composer of chance operations - the aesthetics of the accidental - and of the prepared pianos, which, as the video below shows, is more of a piano in error conditions than a “prepared” piano:
Now for another surprise, let’s look into Michelangelo.
On the subject of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, Walter Pater wrote:
[t]his effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de’ Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is Michelangelo’s equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect finish.
One of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures. Click to enlarge.
We have, again, the aesthetics of the incomplete and the imperfect, as a reaction against the totality of a complete work which stifles imagination and drains art of its vitality. But I’d also like to add a second reading to this: this incompleteness works as “the equivalent of colour in sculpture,” communicating liveliness to pure form, because it brings to the forefront the materiality of sculpture. When contemplating a finished, complete statue of a human figure, it is very easy to forget that it was once a rude block of stone (now turned into a gentle block of stone); we take it as pure, abstract form, and remembering it is stone only empowers this triumph of form over conquered matter. Michelangelo instead brings the hidden layers and processes of the work to the foreground: one is forced not only to acknowledge that form is sculpted into stone, but to face it directly, and all that it implies. This clash (or maybe interplay) between materiality and ideality is where the overwhelming sense of vitality of these sculptures comes from. Though of course there are very important differences, compare this to point number one.
Then there is Pollock (which I don’t think I need to illustrate), who interestingly denied any role of the “accidental” in his Action Paintings method. This brings in the question: as glitch art grows, at what point the carefully planned mistake, not radically dissimilar to previous works, starts functioning itself as a system and a language of its own? This has for instance happened to noise in music and video, where it has lost its signifying power and became cliché, no longer processed as disruptive by their audience.
Finally what I think is the most important parallel, the experiments of a previous generation of video-artists with error in video and television; as they examined a new medium - one whose threats of “totality, homogeneity, and repetition” were far more obvious, though not necessarily greater -, it would be easier to catalogue those who used video and television in its “correct” mode than the crowds that “misused” it. Take for instance Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV, TV sets whose images are distorted by magnets:
Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV
We can probably make points number 1 and 2 for most of such works with video and television (point number 3 is complicated), though they obviously had a different context, a simpler one I suspect. And the examples are endless, from Stan Brakhage working on the materiality of film to the exciting emerging technique of Camera Tossing. Though I’m drawing a bunch of comparisons here (and I like talking about most of this stuff, to boot), please don’t take these as equivalencies: there is something very specific about the computational error and glitch art, as to the tea ceremony or to Michelangelo. And to add a fourth hypothesis to the mix, maybe it is in examining these specificities - what the difference is between pointing out the materiality of informatics and the materiality of sculptures, a computer program in error and a television in error - that the really cool stuff’s to be found.
Mariana Manhães‘ Liquescer was the only artwork at FILE Installations exhibit I really liked.
Virtually everything exhibited in FILE is interactive, by which they mean the works have sensors, usually haptic or of some sort of computational vision. So when you walk past Mariana Manhães machines and they start yapping and rotating helices, you can only assume it is reacting to your presence. But as you look into these extravagant machines - with rubber and wood parts, and a display showing a jar gradually filling with water, or a glass - you fail to figure out exactly what it is that they are doing, in response to what, and you can’t find the sensors. Eventually you find (or read it in the walls) that the machines have no sensors whatsoever: they are operating and reacting to processes of their own, and they are not interactive, though they are made to look like they are.
In a festival that is allegedly about “electronic language”, this was the only work that actually adressed that core issue: machines work according to a logic of their own, a language that is strange and indifferent to that of humans - and when you realise the machine was /not/ interacting with you, you feel sort like an intruder. But would it have made any difference if in the end of this closed, inscrutable system (inscrutable beyond the technical, obviously, though her machines communicate a strong sense of strangeness even there) you had a sensor, the work inevitably asks.
This reading might be context-dependent - in a festival of sensorless artworks, this illusion of interaction (which most people had, at least at first.*) would probably be subdued, though the work would remain interesting. In FILE, however, its high-pitched, irritating yapping comes out like a hollow, phantasmatic mocking of the shallow promises of human-machine interaction of the other pieces; a machine eerily laughing at the travesty the entire exhibition at that point seems to entail, and our disregard of their utterly distinct nature.
* I’m fond of watching the crowds and their reactions to the works. This is often more fun and more compelling than the works themselves, at times more beautiful, even.
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On Saturday we went CCTV hacking with !mediengruppe bitnik. I’m one of the kids in this video:
ennead: Nine gods tangle in lust, they reach with long arms into the mineshaft where Persephone has fled their gifts: Circ, god of the never ending; Zero, everything; Grid, architect of mazes; Point, ethereal sky; Merge, mother of long distances; Stop, who can’t; After, where all things begin; Line, overseer of the past tense; and Curve, god of detour. They share a liver and a singular, booming voice, but they won’t abide this nine-way split for a woman who smells like Jack Daniels and cigarettes. Heaven’s hair is on fire; on the ground, it is snowing.
