Frank Gillette

4/16/81 Re: Proliferation of Sources

"The point at which the process [proliferation] begins, or rather at which growth begins, is the point at which ambiguity has been reached. The ambiguity that is so favorable to the poetic mind is precisely the ambiguity favorable to resemblance." - Wallace Stevens

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace upon the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." - Virginia Woolf

"The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted." - T.S. Eliot

"Every image is a restatement of the subject of the image in the terms of an attitude." - Wallace Stevens

4/20/81 Re: Teleconferencing and Binary Analogs

Among other things there is a potential for a sub-discourse in the relative methodological peculiarities of science and art (and/or science versus art).

Kierkegaard answered Hegel by opposing the impersonal rationality of history with the irrational reality of the individual. The dynamics initiated by these antipodes (complete with the "personality traits" of each) continues to exist in the present. The teleconference "space" is the theater-of-operations in which these antipodal orientations engage each other's "texts."

"Text" is understood as a body of "data" in any sort of units or elements: sounds played, phones uttered, acts effected, colors applied, sentences written, stars contemplated, geographical features surveyed, which smack of systematization, given an observer. From such units or elements, systematically apprehended, are derived music, speech, actions, paintings, paragraphs, constellations, maps, respectively. (Re: Levi-Strauss, Boon, et al)

Re: Parallels between Teleconferencing et al and Video

If our "reality" is merely a subset of possibilities, then, in Barthes' words "techniques are developed and intended to fix the floating chain of signified in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs." Video can be appreciated as the means to a radical naturalism grounded in observational method and ways of viewing. It fixes (records) specific events which are basically undifferentiated from the unrecorded (unfixed) specific events around them. By juxtaposing sets of observed events in "real time," a novel range of intentional and non-intentional associations and meanings emerges. How or why one image is "selected" over another, or how and why one image is recontextualized with another, is a matter of subjective codes and ciphers employed by the observer. The "observer" in video and the player in teleconferencing are parallel.

The "teleframe," the monitor's convex and sinosoidal screen, delivers a phenomenalist paradox with every image, whatever its content. There is an impacted spacial immediacy accompanied by a temporal anteriority (or temporal remoteness) with every synchronized duration of images. Spacial immediacy and temporal anteriority, experienced simultaneously, is the equivalent to having the sense of being there with the sense of having-been-there.

Barthes calls the photograph (and by extension: cinema and video) a "decisive mutation" of the "informational economies." "The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message. . ." In video the symbolic or connotative message unfolds in real time (heard as well as seen) via subjectively chosen signs composed of angle-ofvision, focal length, orientation to horizon, frame composition. It is possible therefore to speak of the density of connotation in a given video composition. The complexity of symbolic (or connoted) elements is reflected in the flow of natural (or factual) denoted events. What is represented becomes transformed by virtue of the method or strategy of representation.

Re: Transformations Across Systems of Sensory Orders

". . .their inscription in networks of generalities infinitely articulated in the genealogies of a structure of whose crossweaving, coupling, switching, detouring, branching can never be derived merely by a semantic or formal rule..." - Derrida

Premise: Art and science possess radically distinct epistemic affiliations. Practices within the domain of one or the other establish a different kind of knowledge. Art and science represent competing epistemologies. This terminal--Texas Instruments model 765 with bubble memory(hard and soft network) is an instrument of science. It is imbued with the perceptual bias and cognitive habits of the normally practiced "scientific method." The hunch is that art's ways and means are sufficiently protean to complement the paradox of terminal adaptation. "Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor of that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding."(Julian Jaynes)

Re: The Core of the Matter

"In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity." - Simone Weil

Teleconferencing, as currently constituted, has produced its own kind of conceptual metric. Its chief characteristics lie in the vagaries of ambivalent ebb and flow. What's going in is uncertain, and the rules for uncertainty are found in the powers of irrelevant thinking. An increase in certainty (explicit goals, minimum contingency) will be accompanied by an increase in coherent relevance. Until this threshold is established and/or synchronized, play is atomized among players and, when present, reflects a player's own particulars which the uncertainty of the situation has drawn. This condition rubs up against what is central to the process, the issue of identity, or a defined and expressed modus operandi evident in the actual text of the teleconference.

Thus far two distinct positions have emerged: the Cybernetic Adept and the Bricoleur.

The Cybernetic Adept's position is clear:

It associates the descriptive principles of cybernetics with ideal operational methods in teleconferencing. The shift to a more complex and inclusive procedure is seen as the result of a more expanded and efficient utilization of already available alternatives or as a result of the introduction of new hardware. The Cybernetic Adept is alert to the nuances of change in computer and allied technologies, possessing a most sophisticated grasp of what is practicable and when. Naturally, this provides for a quick and sure grasp of what is potentially possible, given the circumstances.

The Bricoleur's position is less clear:

Whereas the Cybernetic Adept is direct, the Bricoleur throws curves, beginning with an intuition of necessity that originates in the actual experience of the terminal sending/receiving entries. Its working hypothesis is that the "network" creates a field of metaphoric interconnections apprehended as an intangible theater-of-operations whose limits and boundaries are unknown, but knowable. [end  thread]

Poser

4/21/81

Brendan's phrase "the expansion of the aesthetic text" sticks in my mind. My best guess is that this "text" is the constellation of sensibilities, concepts of what constitutes the work of art, ideas about its syntax, its mode of address to the audience, how it means, the conceptual shape and poetics of objects that would link them to a particular historical sensibility. It would include a sense of strategy, of conviction as to its formal shape and sufficiency, the sense of wholeness and meaningfulness that prompts its being put forward as a work.

Then he says that there has been no "direct expansion of the aesthetic text that both stems from and embraces the new technologies"--that efforts to date have simply "added them on as effects for reasons which emanated from the aesthetic text before the advent of these possibilities."

I take this to mean that, as a matter of historical fact, the uses of new technologies have been basically ornamental or pressed into the service of an extrinsic or preconceived aesthetic. The contrast is to an immanent aesthetic, one that is discovered within the medium as a consequence of investigating its specific nature and special properties. I am wary of the idea that significant advances in sensibility, in scientific model-making, and creative work generally are best thought of in terms of the medium they are expressed in. Yet acquisition of a new instrument can be catalytic in the formation of new ideas. Brendan writes that what we're doing stems from and is directly within some of the newest technology available which makes possible a conscious expansion of the aesthetic text.

Specifically, we are involved with the means of collapsing the processes of time, space, and information. But what is the nature of the expansion inherent in that collapse?

I am interested in Bateson, for example, because within his work are the rudiments of a new picture of the psyche. If anything in history gives us a new idea of what art is, it is a new model of the nature of the mind. If epistemology can be understood as part of the natural history of the human species, then we are at the access points to new ideas about art, thinking, and creative activity. Cybernetic modes will influence aesthetics, but only a new brain can make new art.

One recent example of "expansion of the aesthetic text" is the appropriation of the context of sculpture which allowed artists to see sculptural form in processes, activities, and events extended and disembodied in time and space. This clear conceptual leap brings into existence a new object and creates a new ontology by which to "frame" new objects.

The questions we are addressing here (and I take many of Frank's entries this way) are procedural: How do we formulate, by our participation in a teleconference, a poetics of thought and interaction that gives content to new concepts of shapeliness? Are these concepts immanent in the technology or do they rather adhere to the climate of mind around these instruments? The technology seems to offer a way of reconceptualizing the realm of the mind; since art-making and the total experience of art seems most like a form of thought, if our models of the mind and organism evolve, so must the ecology of art. [end  thread]