Kevin Hamilton
Visitor
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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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