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
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sound.Music.Design Symposium
A belated start to a busy new year... if you're still out there, thanks for hanging around. Last weekend I was in muggy, grimy Sydney for a symposium at UTS. Music.Sound.Design was a sort of transdisciplinary talkfest, loosely organised around the planning of a new sound/music/whatever degree. There were film sound guys, music educators, interaction designers, sonifiers, theorists, experimental musicians; and while the question of what a modern, interdisciplinary sound degree looks like remained elusive, some good stuff came out along the way.
My picks from the symposium included Darrin Verhagen's presentation on audiovisual relations, in particular how the power of the synchretic weld can link incongruous materials together, fooling our cognitive "zombie agents" into thinking that normal causality is operating, when in fact we're being carefully manipulated. Also on the AV line, artist and theorist Ian Andrews gave a detailed historical overview of the whole visual music / fused audiovisual tradition, emphasising structuralist or materialist film and the trajectory from the Russian avant garde, seeking to prepare our senses for the new post-Revolutionary world, to the Modernist trope of "mediumicity". In discussion Andrews shared an interesting point about his own AV practice and how it relates to this tradition; he disavowed anything like "expression" in his work; instead he described it as the exploration of a concrete and constrained field of possibilities. So the stripped-down "mediumicity" of this practice is not reductive or reflexive so much as generative - the medium proliferates, rather than being reduced to some essence.
On another topic altogether, Julian Knowles gave a passionate keynote on the state of tertiary music education in Australia; timely especially from where I'm sitting, as the Canberra School of Music faces up to possible extinction. He was preaching to the choir here, with the crowd well stacked with experimental musos, laptoppers and the like; so his quotes from local "heritage arts" crackpots got the laughter they deserved. But Knowles also deftly showed how every single assumption made in the classical conservatorium approach - such as valuing interpretation over creation, and demanding a specific technical skillset rather than adaptability and innovation - is contradicted in the living culture of contemporary music practice. You could design a pretty interesting curriculum, he suggested, by simply inverting all those assumptions.
It was great to see Tom Ellard - now vehemently ex-Severed Heads, but a hero of my youth nonetheless. He too was seeking to get a grip on a contemporary music industry in flux, wondering whether participatory virtual environments could be a new form of "album"; and thinking, like Kandinsky, about music as a model for all kinds of art practice and education. As Ellard demonstrated, VJ tools make visual composition and semiotics literally playable - more on his site. The thirty seconds of live AV scratch video that illustrated this point had me grinning all day.
I also made it to the final performance night of this event, which featured Robin Fox, Peter Blamey, Darrin Verhagen and Yasunao Tone, all playing a lovely eight-channel surround rig. The whole night was impressive, but special mention goes to my friend Peter Blamey's set. (Image above is by mr.snow, from back in 2002). Blamey plays a sort of "no input" mixer rig - an old Tascam four track with its ins and outs all tangled up. In this set he barely touched the mixer; he didn't need to, this network was delicately poised, putting out shuddering, accelerating ramps of static, ephemeral stereo crackles, and these superb, delicate chirps from somewhere in the feedback. But unlike other feedback-driven audio I've heard, there was a total absence of drone; Blamey's mixer is wracked with spasms, waves piling up, overloading then quickly dispersed. Never exactly repeating, but completely, organically self-consistent; like Ian Andrews' work, no sense of "expression", but for me that only heightens the poetry. More on/from Blamey here and here.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
going DEAF: Pneumatic Sound & Hardware Surrealism
After a short and jetlag-altered visit to Rotterdam, I've been reflecting on some more works from DEAF. My documentation was pretty poor (phone cams don't like dark exhibition halls) but luckily Anne Helmond has some excellent photos from the show, and we liked many of the same works. Helmond also shared my observation that despite the theme ("Interact or Die!") the strongest works were non-interactive (even non-computational).
One other work that rates a mention was Edwin van der Heide's Pneumatic Sound Field, an outdoor installation made up of a suspended grid of 42 pneumatic valves under electronic control. Rapidly switched, the valves emit tiny bursts of white noise - not to mention (as the artist points out) actual air, the material substrate of sound itself. The result is visually underwhelming - a metal spaceframe snaked with little hoses - but sonically and perceptually amazing. Impulses of sound and air flicker over the grid, moving between discrete rhythmic pulses and fused granular clouds that traverse the space like waves. The valves are tiny, perfectly discrete sound sources, so the textures they create are packed with spatial detail, even if they are limited in sonic variety. Van der Heide frames the work as a perceptual and acoustic experiment, but its reception is equally shaped by techno (post-techno, whatever) and its language of immersive pulse and timbre. In other words, it reminded me of Pan(a)Sonic. And like Roots and especially Ondulation (blogged previously), Pneumatic Sound Field uses physical media to create a perceptual field that is richer, higher-res, and more inherently dynamic, than the computational equivalent.
Finally, a work that isn't post-computational at all, but tightly and ironically wedged inside digital culture. Exonemo's Object B is in part a Half-Life mod with a case of Surrealism. Your gun emits oil drums, trucks, furniture, cows and lumps of masonry, which accrete into bizarre composites. What's more, the mod seems to have leaked out of the computer; most of the "players" are controlled by spastic robotic sculptures made from home hardware and electronics shop detritus. It's a beautiful and incisive satire of human-computer interaction, as well as the whole paradigm of 3D graphics. The mass culture readymades of game geometry and home hardware converge in a mad, twitching clump. Documentation online is a bit sparse, but check out this video from tagr.tv.
