A Failed Performance and Demonstration of the Interpersonal and Sensory
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of The Arts
Reed College
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Nicholas Zhu
May 2016
Approved for the Division
(Art)
Akihiko Miyoshi
Table of Contents
Introduction: Contextualizing Urgency...........................................................................1
Magical Consciousness................................................................................................2
+No More Literacy..........................................................................................................4
=A State of Coalescing Emergent Emergencies..............................................................6
Chapter One: Script .......................................................................................................12
PART ONE.....................................................................................................................12
PART TWO....................................................................................................................15
PART THREE................................................................................................................20
PART FOUR..................................................................................................................20
PART FIVE....................................................................................................................20
Chapter Two: Theoretics/Poetics on/of/for Installation/Performance/Media............21
Poetics:...........................................................................................................................21
The Incoherence of the Reductive and Inaccessibility of the Expressive..................21
Proclamations:...............................................................................................................23
The Absolute Necessity of a New and Short-Lived Paradigm...................................23
Theoretics:.....................................................................................................................25
It's More Than Just Another Printing Press................................................................25
It's More Than A Better Camera/Projector/Microphone/Speaker..............................27
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................29
List of Figures
Screenshot of Google search of “on kawara date paintings”...............................................2
Screenshot from Anthony Collamati: Friedrich Kittler Primer - Optical Media................8
Abstract
This document is part of a performance and video installation that takes place
between the 2nd and 14th of May in the year 2016. It is intended to be an informative
supplement to the work as a whole.
The work is located in an attic room in the Prexy building of Reed College. It is a
studio workspace, complete with computer, projectors, speakers, amplifier, drugs, and
various works (painting, sculpture, collection, video, sound, etc.) produced during its
occupation. All work done in the studio was recorded by a Brinno time-lapse camera,
capturing one frame every minute.
This document contains a script of the performance, which begins at the entrance
of Prexy and proceeds, in a guided tour fashion, to the installation. Upon arrival the
projections take over and the performance is subsumed into a viewing of a recorded (and
written below) theoretical section of of this document. Following that the projectors turn
on white light and the piece may be viewed and questions may be asked of it. The piece
continues with a video viewing, and slowly dissipates to an end as the video stops and a
Q&A session with the artist follows. During this conference, viewers are advised that
they may leave or stay. The duration of the piece up to the conference section is about
fifteen minutes.
This document is handed out to each viewer upon beginning the conference
section. It has been formatted (including the writing of this abstract) to follow the Reed
College thesis guidelines.
For each hand that has held my body afloat as I wrote something meant to stay dry
1
Introduction: Contextualizing Urgency
Kawara’s work means to shift the burden of aesthetic content
away from the symbolic expression in conventional art practice to a
form of signification - listing, marking, and so on - that figures
consciousness as an acknowledgement of time and place.
-Jeffrey Weiss, On Kawara: Silence (2015)
yo we're not tryin to make a new manifesto we're trynna get more
people manifesto-ing so the architectures of attention decay -- they
could be talkin about geopolitics or pokemon it doesnt fucking
matter -- its just about the redirection of attention capital --being
forgotten is a way more immediate threat than being critiqued -- and
all institutions that depend on authenticity and verification are the
most fragile [because] theres wayyyyy too many steps in their
information architectures -- its chains upon chains upon chains -- if
theres any type of variance/lie/error at any point in the chain, its
catastrophic -- you vibrate the most necessary tissue of the network,
the authenticity of the users data, the whole thing just melts -IMMediately -- dont need to wait for some idiot from Yale to spend
20 years and 3 million dollars to tell you how fucked you are from a
lect[e]rn with an extremely boring powerpoint that will pay for their
next extremely boring haircut -- redistribution of the right to make
shit up, or redistribution of the right to re-epistemologize and reontologize constantly
> 'knowledge'
-Peter Lee via Facebook (2016)
2
Magical Consciousness
The former passage from the Guggenheim catalog of On Kawara’s works, as
literature and object. On Kawara was a painter who lived through the majority of the
twentieth century whose practice consisted primarily of daily work composed of
segments of information regarding time, space, and self. The latter passage is a primary
source from a contemporary citizen, critic, artist, and friend. The former passage, as
object, is a strange phenomenon given that
1. The works referred to are Kawara’s date paintings, which are paint on canvas.
2. The text itself resides in print, specifically a limited edition book that was
published by the Guggenheim museum.
3. It is a partitioned study of a continuous, unbounded transference of consciousness
through objects (the paintings themselves, the physical book itself) and bodies
(On Kawara, Jeffrey Weiss, the reader).
Figure A. Screenshot of Google search of “on kawara date paintings,” the most accessible
way to view the objects themselves.
3
Acknowledgment is a stabilization of the unknown. In transition from the symbol
to what Weiss attributes to consciousness, there is spatiotemporal stability. In Weiss’s
view, as Kawara painted the date on that day and destroyed the unfinished works, there
would be a transference of this consciousness of the date to the informed viewer. Here the
stakes are high: consciousness includes all aspects of the mindful state, labor, sensory
information, memory, and more.
Consciousness transference is the holy grail of art in many ways. Do we as
makers and seers not desire an ultimate key to the way in which an idea, feeling,
experience, could be negotiated through space and object into another mind?
Social practice, currently a practiced and developing art form considered by
Claire Bishop to be the contemporary avant-garde, is artistic practice upon the social.
Bishop refers to this practice as “artists using social situations to produce dematerialized,
antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and
life.” (The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents, 2006)
It is a cute ideal, to think that simply by naming a disparate category of artistic
methods based on the fact that in some, vague way they involve/effect/need or “are for”
people would be much of a change of anything, much less significant enough to give a
degree for. It would be like saying an artist has good experience with “abstractive
theory,” or “digestive eating.”
However, the rise of social practice is indicative of something, at least. With the
recent growth and popularity of social practice as an art form, it seems as if art, like
technology, continuously attempts to encroach upon the various holy grails of possibility.
In a socio-technological sense, this predication of a parallel between technological
phenomena such as the rise of social networks and art historical phenomena such as the
increase in art that escapes the white cube relies on a mutual quality between the two:
obsolescence of previous paradigms. Gregory Sholette, in writing on the rise of social
practice, states that
Far more difficult to nail down [than the outward collision between
older, skill-based art traditions and portable electronics / social
networks] is the place of ‘archaic’ media such as drawing, painting,
and sculpture in the sphere of social practice and performance art.
(After OWS, 2012)
Social practice after this kind of uncertainty represents a historical change that
should be a paradigmatic shift. This uncertainty event is an event horizon.
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Artistic practice should proceed to provide itself with consciousness transference
to the degree to which magical transference exists in the world. Social practice is in this
way outdated, non-contemporaneous to the technological context in which it is situated.
The technological context is not passive; it perpetuates real consequences. Do we not
deserve a fair fight?
I believe that in many ways we are dealing with something much more elusive,
terrifying, and harder to understand than a social event horizon. I will later refer to this as
coalescence, which is a magical event horizon; technology and art, together, becoming
actualizations, manifestations, realities made from the fantasies of the past. This goes
beyond the notion of singularity, of computational abilities surpassing the limits of
human thought. This pertains to the closer, impending event of technological influence
upon human thought that surpasses the limits of human understanding. Flying machines
and communication without geographic limitations, these have transferred from the
magical musings of previous paradigms into the daily lives of human beings. This
transference is parallel to that which Weiss describes, the transference of the symbolic to
the figuration of consciousness.
Whereas the viewer achieves the crossing of an event horizon when touching the
consciousness of Kawara’s work, the species of humanity crosses an event horizon when
touching the consciousness of its past. If social practice were to succeed as a paradigm
shift, it would take art from an object-mediated world with art to a life-mediated artworld. Instead it only took a few steps toward the edge without ever falling off.
+No More Literacy
In Software Takes Command Lev Manovich notes that there are software tools in
Photoshop that are derivative of physical processes (the act of “cutting” an image in the
same way one would cut paper to collage) and others that are “born digital” (the wave
filter, which arranges/distorts pixels in a given waveform).
While Manovich sees that there is a “metaphorical” relationship between our
conception of a wave and what the wave filter does to digital images, his book is not
concerned with the philosophical implication that within the advent of a new medium
there is a manifestation of preconceived, magical desires. Yet is it not truly magical to
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warp the visual without regard to the limitations of materiality? In this same way that it is
magical to transfer desire into tangible, yet metaphorical, action.
Anthony Collamati, in his video “Marshall Mcluhan Primer - Understanding
Media,” talks about Mcluhan’s work through the thinking of his pupil Walter Ong,
specifically through the idea of primary orality (speech before the invention of the
alphabet). Primary orality is a categorization of a fundamentality to human interaction,
and thus in its understanding is meant to serve as the reference point of the technohistorical narrative of Anthony Collamati's Walter Ong.
The notion of primary orality contains a specific quality in being “agonistic,”
wherein there is a conflict and participatory nature of speech. This concept, in Collamati’s
reading of Mcluhan, falls into a techno-historical transition to literacy with the invention
of text. The implicated literary worldview is lesser in this conflicting/participatory tension
of primary orality due to a supposed claim on the sensory interaction between body and
text being lesser than the sensory interaction between body and body. The implications of
this transition on the understanding of human rationality is further complicated by
another transition to a secondary orality or digital literacy that comes with electronic
technology.
Historicization of categories in transitionary or linear understandings such as this
do not engage the historical context of the coalescence of technological capacities.
Secondary orality, if it is to account for the contemporary abilities of human beings, must
also acknowledge that it is not simply a child of electronic technology that exists
alongside the remnants of literacy and primary orality after being born of their
developments. Digital literacy would be a child and parent, a contaminated ouroboros of
itself and previous mediations, holding the tension of primary orality, the distance of
literacy and all of the variances in between alongside a new myriad of sensory
interactions between bodies and technology. In this instance distinguishable categories,
even if there are perceivable continuities between specific examples (primary orality →
swearing an oath, literacy → reading online text aloud), do not exist without a fluidity
between the variances of techno-bodily interactions. How could one measure the tension
found in reading a letter from a friend against listening to them speak? How could one do
the same with a Facebook live-stream?
It is not always the case that humans, as viewers, are informed in receiving
sensory transference of consciousness as it transforms. It is not a matter of socially
homogenous new literacy perpetuating throughout the world. Does every viewer of a
contemporary Playboy magazine really see the Photoshop tools used to create absolute,
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immaculately lit and smooth skin that is unachievable with lighting and makeup? How
deep does a viewer have to go to reach the source? What does this mean for the viewer,
the technology, the image, the body, its representation, and the creator of the image? In
this circumstance only those who have knowledge of commercial standards of Photoshop
would be able to access one specific thing: a general process by which the specific
immaculate quality of the surface of skin was created.
While it is true that the viewer must inform themselves about the nature of
Kawara’s paintings to understand them, that the same must be done to understand Weiss’s
writing on Kawara, the difficulty of informing oneself is in both cases dependent on a
kind of “industry standard.” One must read or hear a description of On Kawara’s practice
in order to have sufficient context for both his work and Jeffrey Weiss’s writing. One
would need to read a body of work on On Kawara in order to grasp at his art with some
kind of “academically valid” viewpoint. Consciousness transference is practically readily
available through knowledge of the mediation process.
However, if we use Kawara's consciousness transference as the comparison point
to the contemporary Playboy magazine it becomes clear that the inaccessible standard by
which artistic discourse is understood at least offers the viewer a surefire, deep entryway
into his work. This path leads all the way to the hand, and thus the inferred mind, of On
Kawara. The informed, Photoshop-savvy viewer of Playboy only goes so far as the
software that the Playboy employee used. Perhaps the name of the photographer is noted
and the camera used embedded in the image file, but the limits are clear: consciousness
transference is unavailable to the viewer regardless of how informed they are on the
mediation process.
=A State of Coalescing Emergent Emergencies
Everyone’s phones chimed with a group text from Dena:
'That moment when witches and wizards realize they have magical
powers, when the little guy disappears the zoo glass and lets out the
snake, it’s all because of some intense emotional experience. That’s
magic, that’s when the spork bends, when you’re so in love or so
upset that your emotions affect the physical world.'
-K-Hole, K-Hole No. 5 (2016)
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The difference between the magical and the real is, at the moment, thinning at a
rate that our species comprehends. There is still a relatively clear narrative of
technological progress in a body of literature. Yet already we have seen that no single
individual now has the ability to fully grasp the machinery of the everyday anymore. In
previous times it would have been conceivable for someone to understand the entirety of
the act of hunting, from the making of weapons to the tracking/killing of the animal.
In previous times it would have been conceivable for someone skilled in both
carpentry and smithing to fully understand the machinery of the printing press and codex
comprehensively. In previous times it would have been conceivable for a viewer to know
how canvas, frame, and paint were made when studying a painting.
Of course it also makes a certain amount of sense that there is a shallower pool to
dive into when considering the practice of image editors for Playboy compared to
Kawara. However, the compounding introduction of increasingly powerful magical
properties such as near-infinite photorealistic replication and near-instantaneous sensory
transference/communication/distribution into already existing magical paradigms, that
which is both born digital and digitally conceived, should give us anxiety about what this
means for future artists who wish to establish the same kind of connection Kawara did.
Whatever the approach, social, historical, formal, it is only the fundamental
separation of the mind from reality that has historically remained intact as a point of
departure and arrival in the context of studying technology. Notions such as primary
orality, and even as far as Friedrich Kittler, who according to Collamati dispenses of a
human cause of technological progress, do not extend beyond specific senses and
properties. In his videos, Collamati touches on the techno-bodily by describing Marshall
McLuhan’s argument in Understanding Media as having a departure point at the
individual; analysis moves from the body towards technology and back again in
equilibrium. In his video on Friedrich Kittler, “Friedrich Kittler Primer – Optical
Media,” Collamati shows the author's presented departure point as opposite, holding
technological natures to be independent of the body.
Yet this debate of partitioned aspects do not, nor has any other text I have found,
proceed to holistically approach the interpersonalities and senses that process and define
the event of taking one’s date to the movies, or watching a horror film alone at home. Is
this final situation not worthy of an encompassing rather than a partitioned study? There
is validity in pure technics, and forging a discourse that is designed to cope with the
machinations of machinery. There must be then, some way of forging a discourse that
deals with the operating results and ground-level consequences of the machine. Can the
8
feeling of strangeness after leaving a movie theater be equated some kind of post-trauma
of an override of the senses? Can we really trust in a study of machinery that deals with
senses as objective measure? Can we really trust in a study of machinery to give us social
answers if it fails to incorporate interpersonal experiences?
Figure B. Screenshot from Anthony Collamati: Friedrich Kittler Primer - Optical Media
(2013) The above quote is taken from Marshall Mcluhan’s Understanding Media, the
below from Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media.
With new machinery partitioned analysis results in disparate, complex, and
theoretically debatable conclusions. Who is around to decide when a dominance or
equilibrium in techno-sensory relationships starts to have stability in the real world?
Discourse should strive to combat this with disparate but at least efficient formatting. A
good example of this is Peter Lee's quote, because it:
1. maintains aspects of primary orality (inflection, pathos, etc.)
2. does not waste time being subject to outdated procedures designed for print-based
discourse (formatting, differentiation between secondary/primary sources, etc.)
Only in this way can the discursive environment be conducive to writers and
writing that are not limited to a structure of verification built upon abstracted practices of
formatting designed to organize pieces of paper. If there is to be a new techno-historical
paradigm that is up to speed with the exponentially increasing influence of contemporary
technology then there should be a new discursive paradigm that is born alongside the
9
existing one. It would be foolish to contradict myself and say that a new paradigm
replaces aspects of the old: the new paradigm is an additional growth upon/within/from
the existing discursive body that modifies itself alongside its environment.
Triangulated between discourse and a new interactivity of the body, it makes
intuitive sense that art should seek to also develop, with heavier involvement and
dissolution of a distinction to life. When the weapons are all placed on the ground-level
their trajectories can be seen. New machinery creates individuals to which an approach
that privileges a stable state of the viewer, informed or otherwise, does not apply
anymore (as if it ever fully applied). The internal mechanisms of microphones, cameras,
projectors, and speakers are hidden from view and remain invisible to the untrained body.
These mechanisms are continuously being modified; each year brings higher display
resolution and greater recording quality. If the machinery is unstable how then, could the
viewer not evolve just as quickly?
Specifically with the informed viewer, contemporary technology seems to be
drawing a rising threshold of understanding. At some point in the past, technology
significantly reduced the ease at which a viewer can be an informed viewer. Is there
someone who can, all at once, build all necessary hardware for a laptop, code an
operating system, design the graphical interface, and then create an audiovisual work
unique to the machine from it? Is there someone else who can see the audiovisual work
and understand how it was made? If so, this new machinist is far less likely to exist than
our carpenter/blacksmith, and those like them will continue to diminish over time until
there is nobody left to see a decent portion of the big picture, across the screen or behind
it.
This is not to say that humans will remain the incompetent slaves of technology.
The new informed viewer is a machinist, one who seems to be a magician, one who like
the rest of mankind can incant the spell and understand its technics. This new machinist
will not, however, always determine the outcomes of the spells. The new machines
simultaneously become more integrated and indistinguishable from sensory realities. The
increase of resolution in digital screens approaches a threshold of indistinguishability
from the perceptive limits of the human eye on its surroundings. The increase of
frequency distribution and amplification in sound drives approaches a threshold of
indistinguishability from the perceptive limits of spatial inference of human stereoscopic
hearing. Thus the interpersonal realities of these phenomena, from the smallest human-tohuman interactions to a metaphysical understanding of the self/other, will be subject to a
10
magnification of technological aspects, realizations of potentials. Eventually, there will be
no room left for critical distance from one's own production.
In all that is born digital, the disparate yet somehow tangled components of
creator, machinery, distribution, and display only coalesce at an unfolding of the surfaces
of display: the screen and sound driver. The viewer is always, in the end, the subject of
interaction with display. Does this not demand a holistic, life-informed/informing-life
study of the coalescing surface? Whereas the action and thought of Kawara are contained
in the material and content of his paintings, this new objecthood does not demand
memory, nor does it posit its spatiotemporal stability. The interpersonal potentials
between individual viewers becomes more significant when the solitude of individual
experience is broken by collective, networked experiences. The viable objecthoods within
these relationships increases in number to the point of chaos and uninterruptible
renegotiation.
However, this all occurs on the side of the viewers. One incredible aspect of
Kawara’s work was the precision to which each date was inscribed on the canvas. In his
time this precision could only be contextualized by old machinery: typewriter, letterpress,
etc. This precision thus detailed that Kawara spent hours making his work, further
specifying the memory of his hand from the date that he painted to the fact that a good
part of that day was spent painting. In new objecthoods none of this matters. Regardless
of how much time a .svg file took out of its creators life to be created it is still, in the end,
an infinitely and instantaneously reproducible string of information that displays perfectly
on any device and prints to any size with perfect contours. In addition to this the process
by which the .svg was created, even to informed viewers has no grounding in labor or
time. It could have been made on a digital tablet or with a trackpad, over the course of
minutes or months.
If the hand has no need to be present, then why should it? This coalescent yet
independent quality of technological production is what Collamati’s reading of Kittler
seems to point at. Regardless of either of their views there is only a one-dimensionality to
attribution of independence from the body. If we were to look for certain aspects then
technology is independent from the social, it is independent from reality, from all human
knowledge. If we look for other aspects technology is a product of these things, as in
Collamati’s reading of Mcluhan. The missing hand makes it hard, if not impossible, to
believe that we can look at all aspects anymore. This effect does not remain constant for
the future. The loss of the hand is not a disaster, it is merely a step in coming waves of
evolutionary change.
11
Moore’s law, which has so far been historically reliable, states that over time that
the density of transistors in integrated circuits grows exponentially (doubling every two
years): an exponential growth in both computing speed and capacity, overall
technological power, and, as I suggest, exponentially further breaks from existing
paradigms of understanding technology. The transference of magic to real continuously
compounds in speed and magnitude. Past our event horizon is a world that in which the
transference of magic to real ceases to take place over the course of years and begins to
encroach upon instants. Technology and art in this world ejects the viewer from the
informed status into a blind chaos. In previous times we can imagine that the historical
memory of technology and art was contained.
This growing force, along with the call to arms from Peter Lee above, is the
urgency that I have made my work with. I do not understand where to attack new
transferences of consciousnesses from, which magics I must learn to even make this
attack. I am anxious and afraid. I do not have enough faith in academic writing to give
me sufficient efficiency in my attack.
I have found that in my life, the most effective way to keep life stable, to find a
tradition of humanity that feeds the quotidian, is an intersection of the sensory and the
interpersonal. I believe that when all incoming information is studied at its reception, the
sensory organs, we have a chance of resisting magic without having to become the new
machinist. I believe that with an eye to the interpersonal, we have a chance of using
magic without being overwhelmed and consumed by the transference of magic to real.
12
Chapter One: Script
The following text is a script of the performance.
PART ONE
The Abstract will be read and elaborated upon at the beginning of each screening.
The speaker will guide the audience up to the studio (PART ONE), then begin PART TWO
by pressing the space bar on the computer keyboard.
Questions regarding this document, the projection, or the performance will be answered
during the viewing period and at the end of the video screening (PART THREE and PART
FIVE).
This document is printed and available as a packet to viewers after the screening.
This document includes a link to a downloadable online archive of projection files as well
as this document:
http://www.vimeo.com/164366275
http://www.nicholaszhu.com/AFPDIS.pdf
13
Speaker READS WITH ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY WHILE GUIDING
AUDIENCE TOWARDS INSTALLATION (~90 seconds):
hello.
my name is nick zhu.
welcome to [title goes here].
this is a performance, installation, and audiovisual piece.
it is intended to attempt at a reworking of interpersonality in the context of contemporary
technology. it is also intended to reframe and destabilize our understanding of
interpersonal potentials with the use of contemporary technology. it is also intended to
create a new understanding of technology, one that specifically expresses my idea that art
needs to combat the inclination of contemporary technology to eject our species into a
realm of complete un-indexicality, pure subjectivity.
as far as i can tell this attempt will be a failure.
this document I am reading contains all of the information in this piece that is
communicable through text. it serves as a script, description, and postscript of this piece
and is inherently an insufficiency compared to the installation and this performance.
this building is a converted house, and we are headed towards the attic.
the attic space was converted into a studio workspace, which in turn was used to produce
another studio workspace. both were used in conjunction to produce this small body of
work.
14
the studio workspace protocol was a four hour shift, five days a week. I have not
succeeded in fulfilling this protocol fully, and if this was a real job I’d probably be fired.
this piece contains five parts.
this is the first part.
in the second part the piece becomes active, but only to depict my virtual personality as i
spoke.
in the third part i invite you to view the physical components of the machine as it stands
on its own. it is silent and there is sufficient lighting for you to examine it carefully if you
wish.
in the fourth part the piece becomes its most active form. it will be loud and bright. i
would like to note now that some symptoms of certain kinds of epilepsy may be
incompatible with my work.
in the fifth part the piece subsumes back into silence, and this performance will subsume
back into reality, daily life, normalcy, slowly. i would like to call it a conference, in which
you are welcome to stay/leave as long/soon as you wish. this is when the performance is
“over,” but the art, hopefully, draws and leaves a trace.
OPEN STUDIO DOOR, WAIT FOR AUDIENCE TO ENTER, CLOSE STUDIO
DOOR, PRESS PLAY ON COMPUTER
15
PART TWO
Abridged Voiceover (91 seconds):
the elimination of sensory analysis denies the inclusion of contextual information that is
essential for understanding the world. it is a denial of information that is important for
contextualizing human societies and culture, as well as psychology and sociology.
sensory analysis is essential to a new form of theory that is itself adaptive and has
evolved and reconfigured itself for increasingly complex systems of media presentation.
why the sensory is missing:
abstraction has two manifestations: performance and media.
(media is controlled units of sensory information that is distributed amongst societies,
mediated by objects)
(performance is controlled units of sensory information that is distributed amongst
societies, mediated by bodies)
systems/networks are abstractions that depends upon other, reductive, abstractions to
exist
sensory information, when subjugated to abstractive practice, diminishes the capacity for
sensory and affective analysis to be made in a networked setting.
the study of technology is necessarily abstractive if it is to accurately document the
functions of technology.
the study of technology is necessarily sensory if it is to accurately historicize technology.
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how to reframe the sensory:
this is a presentation of a new practice and study.
this presentation will demonstrate media as a sensitively informed field of practices in
this art installation.
a controlled replication of information in material and digital forms, regarding the
capacities of the technologies themselves, will be the medium through which this
demonstration occurs.
why the sensory is important:
this voiceover and writing, as it speaks and is read, propagates control throughout the
space in which it is audible. the media exists, but it also acts upon individuals via the
senses.
audibility is not comprehensively covered by abstraction:
it is a psychological effect that makes an affective contribution to sensory interpretation
and experience. heterogeneity and homogeneity in multiple psychological effects is a
social understanding of audibility. acoustics is a physical and technical understanding of
audibility.
this instance of control does not necessarily function with the same properties of
networks and systems. it also cannot be directly linked as a causal result of evolutionary
or physiological processes.
17
this instance of control is a result of technologically determined as well as intentional
uses of the means of production, distribution, and display that apply to media.
it depends on how the media is produced. this is determined by the properties of
the technology in which the media is made, as well as the intentions of the individual(s)
that make it. a painter makes media that is painting, while intending to produce a
painting.
it depends on how the media is distributed. this is determined by the properties of
the networks in which the media is available. how the painting as well as photographic
documentation of it is moved from location to location determines who sees it and how.
it depends upon physical presentations of media (display) to the individual. this is
determined by the properties of the devices through which the media is made relevant to
the body. a brighter screen is more visible, but if the painting is very large it will not be
recognized in the same way as viewing it in person.
the instance of control is also a component of the perspectives of each individual (viewers
and readers. displayed media determines physical, psychological, and bodily situations of
individual(s). it also effects the social when the instance of control is experienced by
multiple individuals.
it effects physical by being an object.
it effects the psychological and bodily by being a sensory object.
it effects all simultaneously by being an event during which the object is sensed
and experienced.
18
why the interpersonal is missing:
interpersonality has two sources: perceptive and expressive
(perceptive is controlled units of sensory information that is distributed within
bodies, mediated by sensory organs)
(expressive is controlled units of sensory information that is distributed amongst
bodies, mediated by sensory organs between bodies)
communities, as sociality, are abstracted, reduced interpersonal phenomena
interpersonal information, when subjugated to abstractive practice, diminishes the
capacity for interpersonal and affective expression to be made in a perceptive field
the study of technology is necessarily abstractive if it is to accurately document the
functions of technology.
the study of technology is necessarily interpersonal if it is to accurately historicize
technology.
Abridged Voiceover and Speaker (91 seconds):
how to reframe the interpersonal:
this is a presentation of a new practice and study.
this presentation is now demonstrating media as an interpersonally informed field of
practices in this art installation. Hi! That's me!
19
a controlled replication of information in material and digital forms, regarding the
capacities of the technologies themselves, will be the medium through which this
demonstration occurs.
why the interpersonal is important:
[to audience]
am I important to you?
are you important to me?
wouldn’t we like to think that if there are different registers, the social “game” and the
interpersonal, that we can seamlessly operate between both, as friends, colleagues, and
otherwise?
wouldn’t it be nice to think that there is weight to what we do?
BLACK (3 seconds)
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PART THREE
White Screen for Installation Viewing and Q&A Session (180 seconds)
BLACK (3 seconds)
PART FOUR
Video/Music Collage (180 seconds)
PART FIVE
Conference/Discussion (indeterminate)
HAND OUT DOCUMENT, STATE THAT THE AUDIENCE IS ENCOURAGED
TO LEAVE IF THEY WISH
21
Chapter Two: Theoretics/Poetics on/of/for
Installation/Performance/Media
Poetics:
The Incoherence of the Reductive and Inaccessibility of the
Expressive
Network theory is for systemic understandings.
Today I am sad.
It operates on a basis of reduction.
Last night I was really sad.
This reduction is quantification.
Last night I kept checking my ex’s Facebook message, hoping I’d see her start
typing.
It allows things to be described.
When someone starts typing in Facebook Messenger, a small graphic appears to
indicate this.
It allows humans to be described.
It didn’t matter if she sent anything, I just wanted to know if she was looking too.
Humans participant in networks are reduced to quantifiable information.
I did not succeed in this.
This information is then used in many decisions, among them the design of
technology.
Today I sent her a Messenger valentine.
Technology is designed from reductions of humanity.
When activated it “wraps” the message in a pink graphic which upon clicking
reveals the message.
22
Yet technology effects interpersonal relationships.
Our conversation became bitter.
Yet technology changes intrapersonal states.
I started to feel guilty for trying to be nice, to say something in hopes that she’d
even want to interact.
What are the effects of this indirect, yet cyclical interexchange and immersion of
technological developments/human understandings?
I think I am in love.
What are the interpersonal and intrapersonal consequences?
With Facebook Messenger.
The machine is now given the power to captivate the visual and acoustic realms,
reaching into the fabrics of the unquantifiable relationships between selves.
I would go so far as to reduce my relationship with it to a “relationship” but I am
now thinking it is useless to use a word to describe how much I feel, and how
little it cares.
What use is it, then, to continue to approach the machine in terms of media,
interface, opticality, networks, and/or bodies?
I want to say the same about my ex but honestly, at this point, I don’t really know
what she thinks or cares about.
The complication being that even though the machine was designed from a
reductive understanding, it is used by full-fledged, unreduced, actual human
beings.
I knew, to an extent, what she thought and cared about before, but people change,
sometimes very quickly.
23
Proclamations:
The Absolute Necessity of a New and Short-Lived Paradigm
Moore’s Law is a historically accurate prediction that computational technology
experiences exponential growth in power and storage.
Urgency for the discursive body is not nestled in the safe thought that so long as
we find a new paradigm, a new structure, relatable to older ideas, we will survive and be
able to understand our world.
Technological impact on humanity does not only increase in magnitude, it also
increases the rate at which it increases its magnitude of impact.
In art, there is the most freedom of discursive practice. We do not limit ourselves
to a desirable historical lineage in order to progress.
In art there is no absolute necessity for a scientific method. Art discourse contains
the capacity for accelerated dynamism, in order to follow life and change it.
It is not only necessary for us to prepare for the oncoming storm, it is necessary
that we survive through its stay.
Studies in body, opticality, systems of control, these will give us stronger, yet
ineffective weapons against the new enemy of artificial-super-intelligence (ASI). By the
time ASI is born it will have sensors of greater ability than our own.
Conclusions on sociality do not remain stable in world of dynamic networked
interfaces; they will collapse and reform at increasing frequencies.
As the resolution of sensor and display increase, technological forms become
permanently associated with reality. This power will give the practical and invisible
dynamics of technology absolute power over urban human existence.
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I refuse, in this state of urgency, to write as if there is time to conduct a study with
an eye towards existing paradigms, born in classist materialities and imperialist cultures,
strewn arbitrarily set theoretical and cultural values, insensitive to the minoritarian.
I refuse to conduct a study that does not make, if even messy, quick, and shortlived, an attempt to subdue the approaching storm that will render us all minoritarians to
our own creations.
I would much rather reach a *blind eye and arm* towards the soon-to-be
conceivable forces that will arrive within my lifetime, in the possibly vain hope that I
enact a change that inspires a new, unorganized, organically derived discourse.
I imagine a discourse without sensory deprivation, reductive logics, and rational
specificity. I imagine hyper-lectures in augmented reality headsets streamed through
terabit-speed connections across a virtual world of text, sound, image, and sculpture.
My *blind eye and arm* are as follows.
The sensory, the last constant mediator, is my first component of approach. For
simplicity, effectiveness, and a firm belief that cyborg technologies will not soon
transcend the limitations of sensory understanding.
The interpersonal, the ultimate changing mediator, is my second component of
approach. For complexity, efficiency, and a firm belief that cybernetic technologies will
not soon destroy the limitlessness of interpersonal relationships.
25
Theoretics:
It's More Than Just Another Printing Press
Pre-Coalescence, the time before various, discrete technologies reach their respective
potentials to intertwine with each other to become a machine with additional functions
and power greater than the sum of its parts.
The printing press was important, sure, all-in-one production, reproduction, and in the
end it made easily distributable products. The printing press is a result of two
technologies, carpentry and metalwork. Once those two are at a certain point of precision
it is only a matter of time before someone with access to both designs the printing press.
Inevitable outcomes simply due to potential are the historical examples this premonition
relies on.
Pre-Coalescence was the time before carpentry and smithing even reached this level of
precision. At that point the time it is almost certain that someone, somewhere dreamed of
a machine that would one day make the text an easily reproducible object. During PreCoalescence machines improve, but the rise and distribution of new machinery, the same
kind of new that refers to “new media,” defines coalescence.
Pre-Coalescence is also now, 2016. Pre-Coalescence is this time in which digital
technologies have begun to breach on the proprioceptive and kinesthetic senses,
surpassing their reign on the optical and aural. This reign as “previous” is due to the fact
that technology has long been held on the tradition of the eye and ear as dominant senses,
thus always attempts to satisfy them before escaping them entirely.
Coalescence is a process in which physical and psychological resources that are used to
create component technologies momentarily discontinue contributing to a lineage of
obsolescence. They instead favor reallocation and inclusion of new resources for the
purpose of manufacturing and distributing new machinery.
26
The notion of intraface, the internal dialogues and mechanics of the machine, along with
the counterpart that is the next iteration towards the body from the machine (interface),
becomes more and more relevant as Coalescence draws near. More interfaces distributed
means more contamination there is into the human intraface. A device becomes more
useful as it becomes a more powerful sensor. A device also becomes more useful as it
becomes comparatively more powerful (durable, bright, and loud) to our senses.
However, intraface and interface are currently the categories in which metrics by which
obsolescence is measured are situated. Discourse that touches devices touches their
extruding presences as well as its internal (inter)activities. Yet the device continues to
exponentially increase in the efficiency and effectiveness by which it acts in both realms.
Techno-historical lineages play around in a historical moment of what is simultaneously a
pause and a transgression of a horizon, much like a cut in a film. During this moment it is
not precision (ex. resolution of image) nor is it magnitude (ex. throw length of projector)
that is changing. How does humanity intend on catching up to the speed of technology if
it is to take significant periods of time to measure and study it?
Pre-Coalescence defines that the lineages of videography/VFX, sound design/SFX, 3D
modeling/design, and all inter/intrafaces relevant to their existences, have yet to become a
singular device that operates all all sensory registers.
However, with this in mind it is important to note that this means that there already exist
singular devices that operate on multiple sensory registers. The machine with which this
text was typed is one of them.
The most dramatic change during Coalescence is the addition of new functions for
technology.
The object that we confront ourselves and each other with, the device, seeks to disappear
and attempt to merge itself with a hyperreality that it also conditions, making these events
27
of critical urgency. In Coalescence the multiple devices disappear into the senses of their
respective fields (camera/screen to visual, microphone/speaker to acoustic). In addition to
a new machinery emerging as a super-device, in Coalescence the foundations of a new
worldview is built.
Pre-Coalescence is not a subset of cybernetics or network theory. It is an approach that is
user specific that cannot be targeted at a systems/networks modeling of power/control. Its
application extends from the intrapersonal to the interpersonal. It is the rise of the
politically and aesthetically incoherent, chaotic dreams of the symbiotic relationship
between species and technology. Coalescence is a metaphysical event.
It's More Than A Better
Camera/Projector/Microphone/Speaker
This approach Pre-Coalescence refers to our time as before another event: the new
ubiquity of the photorealistic.
Photorealism is in a sense, already ubiquitous. The ease at which photography is now
produced and its ever increasing quality give us the current world(view), one in which the
original critical concerns of photographic technologies as reproductions of reality begin
to subsume behind the general saturation of reproductions of reality that dominate
urbanity.
Be it advertisement, social media, architecture, music art, or conflations of the previous in
any combination through any device there is one thing in common: a sublimation into the
real.
At this point, does it really matter what socioeconomic, Marxist critique can be leveled at
the phenomena? Does it really matter what system of power, which socially concurrent
transmission causes this? Of what concern to contemporary technological pacing is the
desire to ensure the relevance of critical theory, by creating a minoritarian-proof text so
in-depth that it only changes the minds of informed readers?
28
None of these efforts matter right now (they will likely matter more in the future).
Technology will be developed with or without extensive criticism from intellectuals. The
quickness at which it does so necessitates a new form of writing, a discourse that is quick
and dirty, like Javascript. C is for books. Forget avoiding a reinvention of the wheel in
writing. The wheel is already racing away, it’s made of carbon fiber, and it has a
processor attached to a camera that lets it navigate and adjust movement quicker than a
cheetah’s brain on amphetamines.
The productive capacity of the device alone, coupled with the ability to participate in
networks, is enough to demand questioning of how we approach the given technohistorical narrative. The sensory capacities of the visual aspects of contemporary
technology alone demand questioning of how we approach the narrative. The addition of
acoustic sensitivity and output quality/power is not the final component that finishes off
some list of technological powers; the sum is greater than the addition of its parts.
As a final word I will describe the new device as the point of reference for humanity in its
context. The new device has sensors that see more colors and detail than our own eyes. It
can hear quieter sounds and speak louder. It can record all of this information with
indexicality. It can communicate with other devices at a rate of exchange that begins to
encroach upon the complexities of human verbal/bodily language and has already
exceeded the speed at which these communications can occur. It will be designed in a
private setting before becoming commercially distributed across the world. It will
infiltrate our lives and collude/alter/hyperbolize the natures of selfhood, sociality, and
interpersonality. Finally, and most alarmingly, it will not be a sudden appearance, but
seemingly another invention among the countless machinations of digital technology.
29
Bibliography
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