“What you say might be nice and interesting but it has no cosmological relevance because it only deals with the subjective elements, the lived world, not the real world.”
http://e-flux.com/journal/view/217
On Mar 23, 2011, at 7:07 PM, NEW-MEDIA-CURATING automatic digest system wrote:
> Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:26:25 -0400
> From: Curt Cloninger <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: quantum/digital/analogue
>
> Hi Simon (and all),
>
> I have been following the dialogue thus far. Here are some thougts:
>
> First, it is surprising how quickly the discussion headed toward
> sub-atomic physics. There seems to be a kind of
> formalist/essentialist consensus that if we can sort out the
> differences between digital and analog at that "fundamental" scale,
> we will have definitevely sorted out all the differences. But things
> happening at that scale don't seem all that pragmatically relevant to
> the scale(s) and speed(s) of new media art. Unless these principles
> from physics are interpreted in a kind of metaphorical or symbolic
> way, in which case we are back to Derrida.
>
> Perhaps the relationship between analog and digital things (and our
> model for understanding that relationship) varies and modulates as we
> change scales and speeds. At the scale and speed of a human body, the
> analog and digital are in one kind of relationship; at the scale and
> speed of a city or a global economy, the analog and digital are in
> another kind of relationship. Is there some "unifying" meta-principle
> governing these shifts in scales/speeds? (And is this governing
> meta-principle analog or digital!) Are there certain critical
> state-changes along this scale/speed continuum that rupture and
> radicalize the differences between analog and digital?
>
> Also, regarding new media art, there is another kind of significant
> distinction between those receiving the art, and those making the
> art. As a practicing new media artist, I may be greatly concerned
> with the nuanced material differences between analog and digital (as
> I perceive them at the scale with which my art is engaged). But these
> process/production differences may pragmatically mean very little to
> a person in the gallery experiencing my art. Here I would be
> interested to hear from a third perspective, a curatorial one. How
> does curating new media alter one's understanding of the differences
> between digital and analog? What new differences arise that are not
> encountered from the perspective of either the artist or the
> user/patron/viewer/actant.
>
> In my experience, media theorists and practicing artists (and
> academic ontologists policing the borders of overlapping artistic
> genres) make a whole lot more fuss over analog/digital distinctions
> than most new media works actually warrant (at least from the
> perspective of a gallery visitor). Some new media works may be
> metaphorically or (re)presentationally "about" the digital/analog
> divide, but oftentimes the work itself fails to enact these
> distinctions as an affectively experiencable event. So perhaps the
> distinctions between analog and digital blur and are not so relevant
> at both the sub-atomic scale/speed and the dividuated human body
> scale/speed (although in different ways and for different reasons).
> What happens at macrocosmic scales/speeds? What happens at chip-level
> scales/speeds? What may happen at future scales/speeds? Probably
> qualitatively different things happen. The differences between analog
> and digital themselves differ at different scales/speeds. Ye olde
> difference differing.
>
> Regarding language, I have to throw Bakhtin into the mix. By adding
> Bakhtin, Peirce's tri-partism doesn't always have to bear the entire
> constructivist burden of overcoming Saussure's dualism. (Traveling
> east toward Bakhtin thus avoids a a kind of pan-Atlantic, historical
> meta-dualism.) Bakhtin's concept of "the utterance" means that the
> (digital?) semiotic aspects of language as a system of meaning are
> always dependent upon and colored by a series of event-based,
> affective (analog?), embodied historical utterances (and vice versa).
> Language as a force in the world, tweaked and modulated by the forces
> of the world. This understanding of language heads toward
> Lakoff/Johnson, and perhaps to/through Deleuze.
>
> And, as if things weren't confounded enough:
> http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_licb3pwkSG1qb58eqo1_400.jpg
>
> Best,
> Curt
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