*older fm01 discursive framework (kind of)*
examines a new discursive space which has been exposed by radical software art through the heuristic possibilities opened up by software abstraction: conceptualisations/conditions of coding practice (languages, models, environment) extruded along the fault-line of user/programmer notion collapse.
we propose to examine this new space through the example of ap's fm01 project: an attempt towards endless cinema which asks the radical question of how data can be represented for the machinic without the supervenience of meta-data or the demand for the purely functional impacting on abstraction.
our proposal thus centres around the domains of:
1) new operational zones created by post-humanist ontologies 2) the specific exposition of a radical space for code art and its
subthemes in relation to these two domains are:
a) the decoding and recoding of data under non species dependent symbolic orders b) the form space of code and environment and its autopoeitic engineering
in presenting the fm01 project, there is an underlying assumption that the audience is familiar with some current issues and practices in contemporary software art/cultural practice including digitally expanded cinema. a general synopsis of current paradigmatic thought around issues specifically of digital cinema may be found in Peter Weibel/Jeffrey Shaw's accompanying book for ZKM's 2002/3 FutureCinema exhibition 1, where they write that, for example, "the biggest challenge for the digitally extended cinema is the conception and design of new narrative techniques that allow the interactive and emergent features of that medium to be fufillingly embodied", and outline three overlapping areas of recent praxis:
1) modular structures of narrative content which allow indeterminate numbers of permutations or parallelisms (eg Lev Manovich's "soft cinema"; Jon Jost; Eija- Lisa Atthila; Raymond Tomin's AVRA software; Jennifer + Kevin McCoy?; Marc Lafia's Max/Msp based "variable montage")
2) algorithmic generation of narrative/mnemonic sequences/markers that could be modulated by the user (eg. Martin Reinhart + Virgil Widrich's "tx transform"; Marnix de Nijs "run, motherfucker, run!"; the work of George Legrady)
3) digitally extended cinema inhabited by audience who become immersed agents and protagonists in its narrative development (eg. Jeffrey Shaw; Michael Naimark; Margarete Jahrmann + Max Mosswitzer's "nybble-engine-toolz")
Outline of fm01:
Future Cinema was cast as a show where "the medium is the message" yet was situated in the familiar terrain of the hegemony of the species, the subjugation of machinic cinema embodiments to the plateau of pure reason, and the enslavement of technology to an ontology of relational functionalism
theres a lot of data flying about that isn't species dependent for its encoding, decoding or recoding, and in many ways we are no longer the sole traders in the realm of the symbolic as a species: for example, within the interaction of human text with machine coding, language is not the exclusive domain of human thought but also that of the internal logic of computers - fm01 is an attempt within this context to offer a total software environment for the semi-automated production, scripting and editing of endless cinema outside the humanist realm of meta-data. fm01 is not conceived as an editing engine for the manipulation of generic clips (in an expanding database of all possible scenes categorised according to a huge number of elements and relations) but rather offers an enmeshing within script, data streams and environment.
fm01 rather transposes non-metaphoric systems and grammar theory (of computer languages, abstraction and data containers) to the realm of expanded cinema. a relational, nodal language of connection will be formulated to descend through levels of scene, shot and frame (stored and to be shot.
fm01 is a large-scale project which builds on previous ap research and process to push the envelope of what can be achieved in terms of computer languages and data visualisation; a re-thinking hard-wired notions of input, algorithmic processing and output through the elaborating notion of environment-as-code, code-as-environment (nodal point expressed in expansive software of environmental code), fm01 examines the critical notion of a representation for the machinic (and its necessary coupling with a machinic representation for the changed user). Such an exploration involves an essential negotiation with machinc abstraction, endodata and a careful examination of the status of meta-data within contemporary software (narrative and functuional implications.)
fm01 is a speculative software/social-ware project that doesn't embody any one defining or teleological goal (as, for example, the immune system doesn't orientate itself to the survival of its host); nor is the project concerned with functional problem solving.
the conceptual basis of this project centres around the domains of knowledge engineering and the exposition of a radical space for code art - we believe that as structures and processes blur and complex stratas of self-organizing interactions present themselves, human-machine polyvalency may overcome traditional ontology and help expel us from the habits of humanism (the teleological attractor). fm01 as a project could be conceived as a mixture of speculative conceptualising and programming, moving asymmetrically, exploring the morphospace it produces, where autopoeitic engineering can generate expanded and endless fields.
fm01 is melancholic, fascist, and auto-destructive; melancholic, because we cannot understand because it is not an exclusively path dependent nor exactly analyzable; fascist because it demands a space outside the operation of pure reason in to the realm of practical reason (things in themselves); and auto-destructive in that it seeks its own destruction as an art-object.
within such a framework we could speculatively start with the releasing of the Heideggerian anthropomorphism we project onto computer technology - a reversal that would release that technology from the ontological idea of its usage, and permit its own ontological structuring as unknowable - placing it in the unknowable Kantian realm of practical reason (like infinity, god, morality, things in themselves) and outside of the operation of pure reason, (a sphere of necessity, of laws of cause and effect, syllogism, the law of identity/singularity, of the excluded middle); and evading the logic of the universal / particular coupling.
1. Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel (Eds.); FUTURE CINEMA The Cinematic Imaginary after Film ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe/The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002