Transmateriality is a notion I'm working on that treats the digital as always and everywhere material - embodied from "end to end" - while maintaining a sense of how the digital functions as if it were immaterial. The core idea is well stated by Kirschenbaum (blogged earlier): "Digital systems are material systems designed to support an illusion of immateriality."
My proposal is that this view of the digital as material is particularly useful in looking at contemporary media arts. It resonates with practices across visual and sonic modes, generative art, data aesthetics; for me it also connects with Gumbrecht's presence and its tropes of manifestation and revelation. I'm trying to frame it through a handful of aspects or themes, provisionally: specificity, transduction, presence, ubiquity, materialisation and propagation. These aspects are inevitably connected - I'll add the links as they accumulate. In this post, specificity.
The digital is premised on generality; the ability to transduce a pattern from one instantiation to another, such that the pattern is effectively (but only effectively) independent of its substrate.
As Kirschenbaum points out, computing machinery works hard to support this generality, with the careful tuning of tolerances and threshholds, and the active interventions of error correction. Without these mechanisms a million entropic, material variations would creep in; dust motes, temperature variations, mechanical wear, noise. (Note how often these relate to the materiality of the substrate.) These would be incursions of specificity into the digital: local accidents, conditions of this or that substrate. The aesthetics of glitch reveal the material specificities of digital media systems by focusing on these incursions and cataloguing their qualities. So while the digital in general relies on holding specificity at bay, there seems to be a wave of creative interest in the specific material conditions of how the digital is manifest. Glitch is one clear example, but so is fabbing - more on that later.
The screen is the ultimate general-purpose substrate of the media arts: a homogeneous, uniform, dense, self-effacing surface. Yet recently we've seen a wave of arrays that can be read as anti- or post-screens: special-purpose displays that acknowledge their physical substrates. Think of Troika's Cloud (or indeed Rokeby's Cloud), Daniel Rozin's mirrors (above, his Wooden Mirror), or Art+Com's kinetic array for the BMW Museum (video). These "displays" show a renewed interest in the specific conditions of the manifestation of data - its local materiality (even presence) - rather than its abstract generality. They are also open displays of transduction: they tease apart the elements of the display to show how each one is discrete, addressable; a single micro-instantiation.
Digital sound and music - especially where it is real-time performed / improvised - also illustrate this turn towards specificity. A musician's rig is often a highly specific bricolage of hard- and software, acoustic and material sources, diverse technologies patched together. Oren Ambarchi's networks of effects pedals, motorised cymbals, and vestigial guitars for example. Performance in this genre is focused again on the conditions of instantiation, on specific transductions again, and how these circuits are materialised, how they vibrate in the air and in the assembled bodies, PA, room. Music also shows the interplay of specificity and generality at work here (and in the visual examples) - in Hayles' formulation this is incorporation and inscription. I can download Ambarchi's recordings and listen to them in my lounge room; I can make a faithful transduction, store it, back it up, copy it to my phone (always still materialised). The specificity that marks the artist's process recedes and instead becomes content for the functional illusion of digital generality. And then as it is reincorporated, materialised coming out of the speakers, it's specific again, folded into the everyday present of the lounge room and the evening.
Transmateriality is a useful concept, I'd argue, because among other things it can encompass this whole process without introducing ontological distinctions (or magical transformations) between one kind of thing and another - between data and matter. How does our view of computation - and the media arts - change if we think of it all as ultimately the propagation of material patterns? This involves throwing all kinds of useful abstractions out the window, at least initially - like data itself for example, or software. But my hunch is that if we can suspend them temporarily, they might return in a more interesting form. Your thoughts welcome, as ever.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Aspects of Transmateriality: Specificity
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Technology, Presence Aesthetics and the Frame (more Gumbrecht)
Continuing to think through Gumbrecht's theories of presence and aesthetic experience, I want to focus briefly on his comments on technology, and especially media technologies, in relation to presence. Gumbrecht is understandably ambivalent: "I am trying to neither condemn nor give a mysterious aura to our media environment. It has alienated us from the things of the world and their present - but at the same time, it has the potential for bringing back some of the things of the world to us." [140] Gumbrecht links this alienation with a "Cartesian" desire for omnipresence - the decoupling of experience from the body. But he also suggests that "the more we approach the fulfillment of our dreams of omnipresence ... the greater the possibility becomes of reigniting the desire that attracts us to the things of the world and wraps us into their space" [139]. So the Cartesian tendencies of communications media drive us back towards a consciousness of, and a desire for "presence." This reaction is clear in new media art (and theory), which seems increasingly focused on embodied experience despite, or because of, its (critical) immersion in technology.
Elsewhere in Gumbrecht's writing technology, and even media art, crop up again. In a recent paper on "Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds" Gumbrecht considers how presence-type experiences can manifest outside the stale, exhausted realms of Art, and perhaps bring about a "re-enchantment of the world."
It might be that, at the intersection between some possibilities offered by contemporary technology with that longing for re-enchantment ... we have a chance of discovering the potential for a much more dispersed and decentralized map of aesthetic pleasures, and of a much less "autonomous," stale and heavy-handed style and gesture of Art. ...
Should such a possibility exist indeed, much will depend on the capability of artists and intellectuals to avoid its transformation into a "program." For I am not talking of the complicated merits of new art forms like "video art" or "digital installations" here but ... of straightforward pleasures like driving a high-powered car, riding on a speed train, writing with an old fountain pen or, for some of us at least, running a new software program on the computer - pleasures that do certainly not require the institutional status of aesthetic autonomy." [316]
From a media arts perspective this passage comes over as a sort of theoretical rollercoaster. "Dispersed, de-centralised aesthetic pleasures" and the "re-enchantment of the world" seem like excellent descriptions of the aims, if not always the outcomes, of current media arts. But apparently not! The "complicated merits" of these "new art forms" (sheesh) are no good; give us everyday kinesthetic pleasures instead. And then a final twist: "running a new software program on the computer" might just qualify as one of these dispersed, non-Art aesthetic experiences - echoing one of the refrains of software art.
Gumbrecht is probably most useful for new media art when taken at an angle, rather than head-on. One resonant concept in this "Everyday Worlds" paper is the device of the frame, a "structural threshhold in the flow of our perception" that draws our aesthetic attention to a section or "view" of the everyday world; Japanese culture is held out as an example here. For Gumbrecht this ubiquitous frame is a key device for the potential re-enchantment of the everyday. There are some striking parallels here with new media practice. In the systems art tradition, the frame plays a similar role, isolating or condensing a zone of reality in order to draw our attention to its immanent dynamics. Hans Haacke's 1963 Condensation Cube (above) is the perfect example. In data art, too, framing is a central, constitutive process; in one (idealised) sense data art simply selects and presents segments of the real, with the implication - just like Haacke's Cube and the temple gates - that what's here, is everywhere else; that this beauty (or whatever) is ubiquitous, all-encompassing.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Presence Aesthetics and the Media Arts - First Thoughts
Following Gumbrecht's candid approach, I'll be autobiographical for a minute. I've been trying recently to frame what it is that unites all the practices I'm interested in (and that this blog has been covering): generative art, glitchy / improvised / realtime sound, music and audiovisuals, "fused" or "synaesthetic" AV, data visualisation and sonification, live coding, software practices, systems art. I've been trying to use "inframedia" as a point of connection - this idea of art that refers to, or rather manifests or makes present its own underlying systems. Presence, or at least what Gumbrecht calls "presence effects", might be a more powerful and elegant way to express the same connection.
This work seems to be seeking out those moments or sensations of intense presence that Gumbrecht describes as aesthetic experience. This is no surprise - if Gumbrecht is right then all art pursues those moments. What unites all these practices is a sense of making-themselves-present that we can contrast, again following Gumbrecht, with "meaning culture" uses of the same systems. To pick a more or less arbitrary example, consider Carsten Nicolai's Telefunken (above - image from here). In its released form, the work was an audio CD carrying a signal designed to generate both video and audio; plugging the Telefunken CD into your TV set makes the TV/CD media system, and importantly the signal, present. Flip to broadcast television and you're back in "meaning culture." The point of intensity that Telefunken can induce is precisely a sense of presence, of a circuit of (electronic / audio / visual) materials being themselves. Not (at least not wholly) a sense of the work as an artwork, a manifestation of artistic will, a general or specific commentary on media or art, a self-conscious performance of media-hacking. All those elements are latent in the work, but on the "meaning" side of this binary. In a sense they follow on from that moment of intense presence that, in this work and others like it, seems to be primary. Like Gumbrecht I'm not outlawing interpretation (what critic or theorist would?); instead there's an "oscillation" between presence and meaning. The key is that this theory asserts presence as an autonomous or incompatible mode of experience. Presence can be interpreted, but not interpreted away.
How does data art fit with this schema? There are some striking conjunctions around modes of knowledge. One characteristic of Gumbrecht's "presence culture" is that "legitimate knowledge is typically revealed knowledge. It is knowledge revealed by (the) god(s) or by difference varieties of what one might describe as 'events of self-unconcealment of the world.'" And this is an unconventional form of knowledge: "substance that appears, that presents itself to us (even with its inherent meaning), without requiring interpretation as its transformation into meaning." [81] We can find a similar sense of revelation in artists' discourses around data art; a sense of the revelation of what is inherent in the data; and a transcoding between data-substance and sensory material. Lisa Jevbratt described her data images as "abstract realism" and "objects for interpretation, not interpretations" (the image above is from 1:1). Data art seeks out "events of self-unconcealment of data" - data as materially present. Data artists typically defer or avoid attributing meaning to the data material (though as I've also argued, meaning always leaks in); once again we find an oscillation between presence and meaning, but an emphasis or movement towards the presence side of the binary. We could align, more or less, presence and meaning binary with the data/information distinction I've used recently to critique this practice.
What about generative art? My hunch is that presence is relevant here too, and it has something to do with the generative process; it's that process, and the model or system it entails, that presents itself in generative art. In Jonathan McCabe's Butterfly Origami works (above) we see a complex visualisation of a generative process (an accumulating series of spatial folds and transformations). If there's an aesthetic experience - a moment of intensity - here, perhaps it is some kind of felt revelation of that process. Again we can pursue the work's ramifications on the meaning side, at both the image and system level; but these seem secondary to me. There's much more to do in thinking this through; are there any obvious counterexamples, cases where generative art is not a materialisation or making-present of its own system?
Gumbrecht identifies music as a form in which the "presence dimension" is dominant; as a lapsed musician this seems intuitively right to me. It's interesting then that music plays a role, either as disciplinary background or aesthetic model, in much of the work that I've written about here. My AV poster boy Robin Fox is a practicing musician; his signal visualisation practice (above) is a clear extension of his sound-only work. Peter Newman is a musician and painter. Speaking in 2005 about his work Drift, Ulf Langheinrich comments: "I try to create music ... It is almost like a CD, but visual. And when I see the image, I think this doesn't really need much sound. The reason is that the image is the music - the music is happening there on the screen, so I don't need to amplify it with another source." Contemporary generative art is always nestling up to music; I have a hunch that this affinity is more than superficial. Angela Ndalianis emphasises the visual and representational in her account of neo-baroque aesthetics (blogged earlier); but perhaps the musical aesthetics of the Baroque, which manifest moments of real sensory intensity within abstract formal constraints, are a closer analogy for generative art?
The theory I'm fumbling for here is: that there are practices across all these forms - digital sound and music, audiovisuals, data art and generative art - that are unified by an aesthetics of presence. They push against "meaning culture" by simply manifesting themselves, seeking out moments of embodied intensity in concrete networks of media and computation. More to follow; meantime, as always, thoughts & counter-arguments very welcome.
