Thanks Charles,
Kim Cascone actually contacted me out of the blue yesterday to say he
liked the essay (for what it's worth).
Shannon and Cascone came up several times at the conference where the
paper was presented ( http://gli.tc/h ). Rosa Menkman begins with
Shannon in her understanding of flows through systems and points at
which noise may be inserted. I suppose I'm less interested in what
happens in the machine (in and of itself) than I am in the point at
which what happens in the machine intersects lived human language.
The essay is admittedly vague as to the specific ways in which
immanent affects color human language. I don't mean to assert that
they merely/vaguely/impressionistically do, and then stop there
forever. I think Virilio comes closest to getting at the specific,
contingent nuances of how machinic and electronic affects modulate
and modify us (although he is still implicitly critical of these
affects as unnatural and hyper-real). It fits that he is building The
Museum of the Accident.
I actually wish that all my insights were medieval insights, but I'm
rarely able to pull it off.
Best,
Curt
>On Oct 13, 2010, at 9:49 AM, Maria Chatzichristodoulou wrote:
>
>> On a different note, also to thank Curt for the beautiful essay on the
>> glitch.
>
>You know, I thought it carelessly collapsed the distinction between
>noise and a glitch. To elaborate on Glenn, lots of electrical
>appliances work quite happily with a "noisy" supply. The whole point
>of Shannon's work in the 1940s was to develop noise-tolerant
>systems. With respect to glitch, whatever happened to Kim Cascone's
>"aesthetics of failure"?
>
>"...all of these are real-time, embodied affects that color the
>language of the book in the same way that the breeze through my
>wife's hair colored the language ("welcome") she uttered when she
>met me in the yard."
>
>What I think we end of with here is a kind of impressionism (à la
>Jameson's Conrad) of noise. Is this even a 20th century insight?
>
>Best wishes, Charles
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