Hi Charles,
> > Shannon and Cascone came up several times at the conference
>
>I was referring to Claude E. Shannon, who published "The
>Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the _Bell System Technical
>Journal_ in 1948.
Yes, Claude Shannon.
cf: http://bit.ly/btTLtR
> >From Lord Jim:
>
>"There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too
>passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of
>color like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling
>white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock cart with
>a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark
>heads marching in dusty laced boots, a native policeman in a sombre
>uniform of scanty cut and belted patent leather." [p.96]
>
>And Jameson:
>
>"The very activity of sense perception has no where to go in a world
>in which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have
>little enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by
>considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like.
>This unused surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize
>itself into a new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces
>its own specific objects, new objects that are themselves the result
>of process of abstraction and reification, such that older concrete
>unities are now sundered into measurable dimensions on one side,
>say, and pure color (or the experience of purely abstract color) on
>the other." [p. 229]
Thanks for these. It seems like these binaries (abstract surplus of
affect | scientifically quantifiable utility) are ripe for
explosion/deconstruction/[re]entanglement. Because they are always
already entangled. Human language foregrounds their entanglement. It
is easy to dismiss some of the more abstract/formal visual glitch art
as a kind of neo-expressionism, but it is more difficult when human
language is glitched, because glitched language is never fully
reduced to "pure affect."
Regearding the semantics of the term "glitch," Glenn's definition for
me is just a starting point. A glitch can be caused by hardware
"circuit bending," but also by software "databending." So it has come
to mean (at least to some) something broader than an electrical spike
that crashes a system. A glitch is a machine-mediated event
deciphered by humans as an accident (although the machine itself may
interpret and process the event just fine).
Regarding the semantics of the term "noise," here again, I'm
interested in noise from the perspective of humans parsing received
media as either signal or noise. As Cascone points out, early "glitch
/ post-digital" music is perceived by some humans as mere noise.
Best,
Curt
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