Big picture (though) this is a (natural) philosophical question. In quantum
physics the universe is discrete and thus digital. There is no analogue.
Analogue exists only as an illusion, a series of discrete moments where
every moment is itself binary.
Best
Simon
On 06/03/2011 19:52, "Goebel, Johannes E." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Sean,
>
> Even though I might be German and have a beard I could pluck, I am not a
> Kunst- or Bildwissenschaftler, but come from the time-based art per se, music
> ...
>
> I did not want to make any statement in the depth you are going, but made a
> very - potentially seemingly -superficial statement about digital. And mind
> you I did not talk about "analog".
>
> Independent of the philosophical thoughts you are following / presenting and
> independent of the (from my perspective absolutely correct) statements
> regarding code and codecs - digital indeed implies "steps", the difference
> between one state and the other, and the never ending possibility to add
> another step in between two steps. And thus I thought I did not create an
> analogy with between fingers and digits, but was rather pointing out the
> potential common root, which started way before digital computers were
> invented - it started with the observation that two things with a boundary
> delimiting them from something else, can be seen as discrete things, and that
> we might be able to associate their number with our fingers.
>
> And coming to the world of digital technology, indeed the steps of clocked
> computer time are the fundamental principle of all of it. (And computer clocks
> are also stepped, dividing time in discrete steps).
>
> In how far a picture of an oil painting that has been reconstructed for our
> eyes from a stream of computer digits, is as much determined by the time
> factor of its capture and processing until it meets our eyes again as it is by
> the color space, pixel depth etc. might have to be looked into closer. I am
> talking still pictures here for the moment. If you print a picture at half the
> speed or twice the speed, makes a difference in the generation of the picture,
> but not for the perception (as opposed to music where playing things at half
> or twice the speed makes a great difference). Which then certainly is
> absolutely different for moving images.
>
> And I would agree wholeheartedly that the speed of image processing (and sound
> processing for that matter) has inherently influenced the images we get - all
> compression schemes in image and audio technology has influenced and shaped
> deeply our perception as much as the images, our sense of moving image
> (quality) as much as that of sound quality.
>
> Johannes
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Cubitt S.R.
> Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2011 1:08 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Analogue/Digital Art
>
> thought-provoking stuff from Charlie, as ever.
>
> Some years ago I attended a German conference that brought film/video people
> together with the massy tradition of German art history. Three ancient
> Kunstwissenshâftligher presented their conjoint research of thirty years.
> Tugging at beards, and picking up one another's sentences they told us
>
> we are now ready to make some preliminary statements about the nature of the
> image. We are almost at the point of being able to identify the immediate
> problems of the diptych. But what we fail to understand is what you mean when
> you speak of the "moving" image . . .
>
> Collapse of stout parties in the audiovisual ranks
>
> Some 20 odd years later the story reverberates still.
>
> Moment the first: if (as they held) there is something which constitutes the
> image as a unity, a coherent whole, then for the moving image there is a lack
> of such coherence, unity and wholeness. This is doubly true of electronic
> images where scanning means that the image is never contemporary or
> simultaneous with itself. Whether analog or digital, scanned images contain
> time in a way that even cinematic frames do not
>
> This is why the Johannes' analogy with digits (spot Derridean pun moment)
> doesn't work: it may well be that the digital condition concerns a dialectic
> of coherence and incoherence, but it is very definitely not about an essential
> discretion of units:
>
> Technical footnote: there is a temporality: the duration of the exposure, in
> wet photography, but the whole frame is exposed for that duration
> simultaneously; digital cameras for the most part receive the light similarly
> across the array of sensors simultaneously but in the process of draining
> charge form the photo chip and converting to digital form, they rely on the
> clock function)
>
> Moment the second: this failure of the moving image to exist in the same time
> as itself can be expressed as non-identity: the toxin of substitutability, of
> relation between images (exactly the problem of the diptych, bit also of the
> frame, the title, the institution) make sit apparent that once we look at
> historical images from the standpoint of the moving image, they too lose their
> coherence
>
> Technical explanation: where for the German tradition of Bildwissenschaft, the
> image is the image, A=A, this is not the case of the indefinitely
> substitutable condition of the moving image, in whatever technical form though
> with substantial technical differences (see moment the third below). Crumblies
> who read badiou or Miller will recognise the nod to Frege who's mathematical
> philosophy starts from the observation that since everything that exists is
> identical with itself, nothing is not identical to itse;f, therefore he can
> define the swymbol zero (0) as the non-identical. He then demonstrates that
> every counting number (1,2,3,4 . . . .) in some sense contains an element of
> this unstable non-identicality. For further reflections, and for a critique of
> some incorrect accounts of the supposed privilege of analog photography see jy
> Latent Image, forthcoming in the online Journal of the Image)
>
> Moment the third: there is little point saying that digital and analog are
> different unless you want to slip into abstraction. In concrete, material
> terms, and sticking with photography, the camera body, interior light trap,
> lens construction, use of coatings, tools of measurement for exposure and
> focus etc, tripods and other peripherals are all of a kind. Moreover, not all
> processes are alike: it is different to use Photoshop or Gimp; Microsoft,
> Linux or Apple; to display on screen, printed in bubble-jet or transparency
> and so on. We must take the concept of medium specificity in its real
> specificity: the medium of any one digital expression ios a one-off assemblage
> of specific tools and practices. It is not some abstract "digitality"
>
> definitonal note: "code" will not do as a marker of the digital. we must
> specifiy protocol, codec, machine code, programming language, software,
> operating system, application . . . . these are at least as different as say
> french and sinhalese, and probably as different as radio and bark painting
>
>
> Historical comment: when MacLuhan wrote about electronics ot print in the
> 1960s it made more sense: film was a stable medium use din stable
> institutions; television was made using these tools in a clearly defined
> cultural practice. These conditions no longer obtain. But that does NOT put us
> in a post-medium condition -- absolutely the contrary: we can learn from
> (deeply apolitical and therefore suspect but nonetheless useful) Latour that
> the human-physical assemblage of a device is extremely specific - so much so
> that generalisations of difference based on vast de-differentiating of
> practices is unlikely to help us.
>
> best from m y new berth at Winchester UK
>
> sean
> Sean Cubitt
> Professor of Global Media and Communication
> Research Centre in Global Art and Culture
> Winchester School of Art
> Park Ave
> Winchester SO23 8DL,
> United Kingdom
>
> E: [log in to unmask]
> Web: http://wsa.soton.ac.uk/
> Skype: seancubitt
>
> Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
> http://leonardo.info
>
Simon Biggs
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http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
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