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FCJ-125 From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Troy Rhoades. Concordia University, Montreal. [Abstract] Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 197) Science and Art When encountering John F. Simon Jr.’s software artwork Every Icon (1997) on his website, it can be difficult for viewers to know whether they are seeing the visual execution of a mathematical theorem or experiencing a work of artistic expression. [1] This is because they are presented with a stark white and black thirty-two by thirty-two square grid on the right side of the website and three statements that read like a mathematical theorem on the left side. They state: Given: An icon described by a 32 X 32 grid. Allowed: Any element of the grid to be coloured black or white. Shown: Every icon (Simon, 1997b). [2] But…
FCJ-124 Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Christoph Brunner. Zurich University of the Arts & Concordia University, Montreal. Jonas Fritsch. Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus Universitet. [Abstract] Introduction Digital and interactive technologies have evolved dramatically as the traditional desktop computer has given way to ubiquitous computation. Computation is now an integrated part of many people’s everyday lives, a question of experience more than simple use, as John McCarthy and Peter Wright have argued in their seminal book on the subject Technology as Experience. Yet while all this might be a simple given, accounting for and working with the reality of newer interactive technologies is less straightforward. Ubiquitous computation provides a digital layer that can be added to almost anything, offering radically new contexts of use and technological possibilities (McCullough, 2004). This changes the way one can—and must—imagine the design of digital and interactive technologies. Design is often now for what Terry Winograd has termed ‘interspaces’,…
FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Kristoffer Gansing. transmediale – festival for art and digital culture School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University [Abstract] The generic no doubt cuts across the contemporary operators of thought, like the transversality of Deleuze-Guattari, or Foucault’s diagonality.—Francois Laruelle (2011: 252) ‘Take, for instance, an overhead projector’ as Bruno Latour wrote in a 1994 article (36). And why not? Introduced as a non-human actant by John Law in 1992 (3), Latour further employs this standardised piece of presentation equipment as an example of a generic black-box technology whose operation is hidden from the user. Most likely drawing on his own immediate experience as a lecturer, Latour described a situation where the technological complexity of the overhead projector only reveals itself in breaking down, when technicians come to the rescue and open up the machine, revealing components in a seemingly never-ending network. Today, one may assume that Law and Latour have long…
FCJ-122 Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Vince Dziekan Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University, Melbourne [Abstract] In the electric age all former environments whatever become anti-environments. As such the old environments are transformed into areas of self-awareness and self-assertion, guaranteeing a very lively interplay of forces. – Marshall McLuhan This article initiates a course of research that takes as its focus the transdisciplinary practice of United Visual Artists (UVA). At the heart of UVA’s distinctive art and design practice is a prevailing interest in testing the spatio-temporal relations that exist between site, the performed work and audience perception. Concentrating primarily on the example of their kinetic light and sound sculpture, Chorus, the following text will investigate the aesthetic conditions that underwrite the work’s exhibition. By doing so, this enquiry will speculate on how the integration of digital processes and spatial practice embodied by this particular artwork operates transductively as part of its framing as…
FCJ-121 Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
John Tinnell. Department of English, University of Florida. [Abstract] Over the past decade, the humanities disciplines have played host to an explosion of ecologically themed transformations, which continue to open up new (sub)fields of research and teaching. The development of the ecological turn in English studies (conceived broadly to house the study of literature, composition, film, and new media) resonates with the general evolution of the eco-humanities; indeed, English departments have led this movement in many respects. A survey of English’s recent appropriations of ecological ideas (and their failings) establishes a point of departure for rethinking the eco-humanities. Ecocriticism, with its reputable journals and popular conferences, has no doubt become the most institutionalised of English’s eco-fields, while more pointed approaches continue to gather loosely around terms such as green cultural studies, ecofeminism, ecocomposition, and ecomedia studies.[1] At the turn of this century, much of the early work in ecocriticism was…
FCJ-120 Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
Petra Gemeinboeck College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Rob Saunders Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney ‘… unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. … However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do fall apart.’ —Philip K. Dick (1995: 262) One of the most curious characteristics of computing processes and the medium of the digital is that they evoke, reinforce, produce and nourish two disparate positions of understanding us and the world: the reductionist, generalised and objective; and, the situated, partial and multiple. The first looks at…
FCJ-119 Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production
Phoebe Moore University of Salford [Abstract] Introduction Free (Libre)/Open Source Software (FLOSS) is an open, evolutionary arena in which hundreds and sometimes thousands of users voluntarily explore and design code, spot bugs in code, make contributions to the code, release software, create artwork, and develop licenses in a fashion that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the otherwise hugely monopolised software market. This ‘computerisation movement’ emerged as a challenge to the monopolisation of the software market by such mammoth firms as Microsoft and IBM, and is portrayed as being revolutionary (Elliot and Scacchi, 2004; DiBona, Ockman, and Stone, 1999; Kling and Iacono, 1988). Its ‘ultimate goal’ is ‘to provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do and thus make proprietary software obsolete’ (Free Software Foundation, 2005). However, if it is to succeed in bringing about a new social order (Kling and Lacono, 1988), this movement…
FCJ-118 Faulty Theory
Matthew Fuller Goldsmith University [Abstract] Theory suggests a certain means of cleaving closer to the world by arranging a trick of distance from it, to be able to stand back from the onrush of things by attending to a pattern and thus recognising them more deeply. It offers partaking in a dance of expansion and contraction of thought, one of immanence and transcendence twisting and running through each other in recursive yet unrepeatable movement. This range of dynamics is one that may often be frozen, codified, subject to measurements or called to order in numerous ways and which in turn may offer its own sets of tests and cruelties. Yet it has no inherent speed, or necessary scale of operation, but it is the activation of the movement in which it is found. An examination of theory’s trajectories through media ecologies could take a number of turns. One might: follow…
FCJ-117 Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory
Matteo Pasquinelli Queen Mary University of London [Abstract] Introduction Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus. (1987: 76) After the age of the machinic, the bios reenters the zeitgeist. Cybernetics and hacker culture in the 80s, the ‘network society’ in the 90s, the dot-com bubble around 2000 and the ‘long tail’ of the metadata of Web 2.0 marked the evolution of the digital phylum. In the last decade, a different conurbation of forces—climate change and energy crisis, ‘pop genetics’ and protests against GMOs, bioterrorism hysteria and bioethical crusades—started to sediment a new episteme concerned with the living. This affected the technological discourse too. If, according to Michel Foucault, modern biopolitics was about the management of populations and corporeal discipline, then since WWII a new interest has emerged around the microscopic scale of…
FCJ-116 Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings
Jussi Parikka Anglia Ruskin University [Abstract] Just as capacities of thought, of being, are made in lived bodies, in complex and delicately conjoined tissues and processes, and just as powers are inherent in all matter, materialism also requires that the capacities of activity, thought, sensation, and affect possible to each composition whether organic or not are shaped by what it is, what it connects to, and the dimensions of relationality around it. (Fuller, 2005: 174) Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally.’ (Guattari, 2000:43). In addition to the realisation that theory should be seen as situated practice, we can also consider practice as theory. Practices are in themselves theoretical excavations into the world of ‘things’, objects of (cultural) research conducted in a manner…
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