Kevin Hamilton
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Getting started - 2006/05/08 20:58
Thanks so much for the invitation here, Sara, and for getting us started in some important directions. I'll add to your beginning some broad but hopefully provoking propositions.
Preoccupations by artists and designers with constant connection and newly transparent exchanges remind me of mystic dreams of immanence, and romantic dreams of fusion. We have plenty of critical tools at our disposal - decades of good work on how and why we construct an Other. Let's put them to use in analyses of tele-presence, to uncover who benefits from the illusions of communicative presence conjured by new media art and design.
Dreams of perfect connections, of static-free signals, of presence so powerful as to transcend space, tooquickly ignore difference. By instead acknowledging and preserving absence, we avoid the temptation to seamlessly fill voids of difference and trauma.
But take care - let's also not mistake absence for loss, inventing stories of theft where there was never a treasure to steal. Also be vigilant against fetishizing voids that opened only at the expense of the oppressed, the invisible, the disappeared.
All those modernisms left us with a perilous strait - on the one hand, utopian dreams of immanent presence that secretly long for death; on the other, formalist fascination with fragmentation and absence, ignoring death as it happens all around.
In her extremely helpful update on de Certeau by way of Perec and mobile phones, Caroline Bassett wonders whether a presence/absence dichotomy even fits anymore. When mobile devices make all spaces potentially present, the walker is never off the grid, never really writing a new path. For Bassett, the choice is no longer between presence and absence, but between attention and inattention. She also looks at the cell phone not as a Manovichian database of stored numbers, but as a mnemonic inventory straight out of Perec.
"Consideration of attention/inattention rather than presence/absence on the one hand, and of the inventory that distends, rather than the database that compresses, on the other, come together to suggest an approach to thinking about (telephonic) mobility and everyday life that does not focus on fragmentation as an assumed starting point. Rather, it produces a focus on how connection and continuity get made across and between spaces."
But you should check out Bassett's whole essay for yourself.
'How Many Movements?' Mobile Telephones and Transformation in Urban Space
NAI Publishers / SKOR 2005
Happy to be present for this exchange, and looking forward to some provocation to production (and some opportunities for trust.)
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Sara Diamond
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Re:Getting started - 2006/05/09 06:50
>In her extremely helpful update on de Certeau by way of Perec and mobile phones, Caroline Bassett wonders whether a presence/absence dichotomy even fits anymore.<
I cannot help but agree with many of your points and I am familiar with the argument about the loss of loss and the proposal that “absence” is no longer relevant. I have some wariness in not wanting to write off the beautiful interventions of Cixous or Irigaray who messed up writerly process and dignified slips, gaps and leakage, all relevant to new media’s irresolvable nature, the non-presence of its presence. That said, it’s not an elegant era.
You made a point in your abstract about the transcendence that many new media artists and theorists seek. I see a taut, perhaps quite knotted, string of debate in new media theory at this moment--with Ascott and those who completely immolate the relevancy of the Frankfurt school to new media theory, to the phenomenology/cognitive science camp who argue a different kind of essentialism, to the Deleuzians and on towards the Frankfurt School and neo-marxists and then on to you….(I have to confess that in my own theory bricolage I lately have embraced Braidotti and other feminist flirtations with Deleuze because it’s optimistic and also have been trying to understand the problem of time…) and…on and on…There are aesthetic positions within this, as you note, about monumentality, spectacle, immersion (and presence), versus decay, subversion (which assumes that there is something to subvert that is tangible). But, lately, I am less interested in the aesthetics than the ethics.
Within these debates, there is a tension in the ways that subject/collective is produced. So, my question back to you, really is about ethics--returning to the question of Community Domain, is, can you articulate an ethics within your argument. Could you talk more about agency (or however you want to position it) in your analysis of the new media work that you have taken up?
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Kevin Hamilton
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Re:Getting started - 2006/05/10 16:31
In my paper I do some close readings of a few works, and maybe we can get to some of that in this thread as well. For now though, in response to Sara's question I'd like to spend more time on the theory and merely allude to the works. (To the artists and designers I reference, I hope you'll read my paper later for the closer analysis the work deserves.)
My art education took me from a discourse centered on vision, epistemology and material investigation to one that emphasized the construction of space and subjecthood through movement and intervention in public space. This path took me from a stable eye to a roaming one, occasionally embodied but often just as blind to the specificities of how vision implies action, and power.
I became aware of mobile technology and the internet as a new space for social action around the same time as I found the work of Michel de Certeau. In his articulation of tactics and strategies I found a resonant and potent definition of agency - subjecthood as constituted through movement in relation to a dominant power.
The Situationist derive and de Certeau's description of 'walking as reading' seem readymade for application in the construction of new domains through networked, mobile technologies.
After the Enlightenment's scopo-centric discourses located knowledge, and therefore agency, in a disembodied, mobile eye, was there anything new in de Certeau's vision of a city of practitioners? Putting aside for now the question of whether his notion of "practice" as resistance is really resistance, what type of agency does a mobility of resistance achieve, and for whom? De Certeau's city (and that of a lot of locative media projects) is not unlike New Babylon, the hypothetical city designed by Situationist architect Constant. Isolated, autonomous points roam around a grid - no interdependence, no intersubjectivity.
For those who are even allowed such agency, the experience of absence is inevitable. We're seeing Beckett all over again in a lot of mobile work - I like Beckett, but better on the stage than on the street. Sometimes it seems like we're re-living Existentialism, only now with the aid of expensive tools.
From the work of Ong through Mulder, we see how each new application of technology in space implies a new sensorium, and each sensorium implies a new agency. New media work that seeks to create new social relations or communities deserve an especially close look. I'm curious to find examples of work that relies less on autonomy as manifested through mobility.
Jean Luc Nancy's notion of the Inoperative Community gave me a helpful aid in this search. He critiques the choice between autonomy and communion offered by modernity as one that always leads to death, and locates the problem in the definition of individual. John Durham Peters demonstrated how hopes for clear communication damned us to isolation from the start - Nancy does the same for the definition of selfhood.
In lieu of the individual, Nancy proposes the notion of the singular. Instead of defining self from the phenomenological center, a point in Cartesian space, he invites us to define the self from the boundaries, the points where difference clearly begins. In this way, singular persons achieve being and agency THROUGH their relations with others, not in spite of or in absence of others. Community is only possible through recognition of limits.
Absence seems to be still an essential part of this, actually - just not as a primary structuring principle, or eschatology.
To get more to your question, Sara, I've found myself trying out an "ethics of inoperation" on works in new media that propose spaces of communion or relation. When and how do works begin to, like Nancy, build in (and on) the boundary between self and other, instead of ignoring or celebrating it? When does death serve as a way to realize the other, instead of re-constituting the self? Memorials serve as an obvious starting point for this search, though I want to look beyond these as well.
Ulrika Wachtmeister's winning entry for Holland's Fusedspace competition resonated with me in this regard. She's proposed a new way of memorializing loved ones through tying online memorials to a unique physical site. Visits to an online memorial would trigger the illumination of a light on the artificial island of Pepparholm, which lies along a bridge that connects Sweden and Denmark. The online destination is personal, the physical space anonymous and transitional (no one can stop on the island of Pepparholm, and the lights would not be named after the dead). In this way, two strangers might have contact - one from the car or train, the other from the net - but what they have in common is distance between each other, the presence of an other, and the absence of a third person. I'll say more about this in my paper.
Based on the documentary and lore, the Mojave Phone Booth also holds some promise for me in this way - strangers found each other not only through the phone called or answered, but through standing around in a non-place when the phone's NOT ringing.
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Brightbadwolf@hotmail.com
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Re:Getting started - 2006/05/20 14:26
You mention ripping off the oppressed. You'd better look upsome of your sponsors who are bring us artists here to the epicenter of the worlds war biz. Check ot Hewlett Packard...They made their fortunes doing war contracts as well as printers. Check them out. You have search engines,that you aren't using. It's very cynical and an insult to the power of the arts to turn it over to PR for the War-Pimps.
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zenfleshzenbones@hotmail.com
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Re:Getting started - 2006/05/20 14:35
If you are really interested in Ethics as opposed to Aesthetics, you should look closely at who's sponsoring this 'artists gathering' and find out which weapons systems financed the foundations that belong to the Hewlett-Packard PR firms. As I remember they were exposed as major supporters of the Saddam Hussein regime for a few decades that cost millions of lives at a tidy profit from which they contributed a few sheckles to the arts. This is a big image making event for them,and it keeps them from looking like the merchants of death they are.
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