>One work sits in a phone, another in a frame - but that
>doesn't make it necessarily different.
...snip...
>a free network is a political response
...snip...
>As a structure
>it seems no different to a picture frame
A picture frame designates the status of that which it encloses as an art
object, at the same time as it separates the art object from the world. A
further act of distancing occurs by virtue of the critical distance of the
perceiving subject and the physical distance from the perceiving body
within the gallery context.
This might be opposed to what Walter Benjamin identified as a 'tactile'
mode of perception, one characterised by distraction rather than
concentration: 'Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by
attention as by habit.' Benjamin relates this 'tactility' to the way in
which architecture touches and directs the lives of those who move around
and within it, not as a distanced object, operating on a more subconscious
level, its affect all the more powerful for getting under the skin.
For a long time I have been interested in how Benjamin's thinking on cinema
relates to the musical event, and it again comes to mind in relation to
mobile and locative media. Technology (if by that you mean gadgets) is not
the issue. Equally, I think we would only get so far by arguing whether
what is at stake is a fragmentation, multiplication or expansion of the
frame. What is interesting to me is precisely where things become blurred,
where mobility and embeddedness within the social cause us to view the
possibilities for art in different ways. Marc's comments on the vehicle
suggest another metaphor here. To quote a passenger on Shanghai’s new (but
yet to catch on) airport train, "the farmers' plots were reduced to
streaking geometrical abstractions, and time seemed to bend, with the thick
traffic on the parallel highway down below zooming in reverse."
Drew
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