at the same time that technology moves from magic to machine, philosophy becomes delirious, and machines turn back into magic…..
fmo1 is a speculative project attempting to release technology into its ontological otherness… in an age that subsumes both highly rational intensive expert systems production and the quasi-anarchy and promiscuity of information flows; the most dominant powers are formed in the re-ordering of information in categories of intellectual property in order to accumulate power/capital (in effect, iterating the double-bind of a re-reading of http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/PHONO_KITTLER.html Kittler so that technology is made-in-the-likeness-of the dominant power). #1 1 the situation is volatile, and environments are unstable and predatory and, so it goes for some, on the one hand, we need more intelligent knowing machines to deal with this uncertainty, risk and contingency, or, on the other, we need new political institutions to do the same
BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND MELANCHOLIA
in an age where legitimizing narrative, ideological and discursive dependencies are often reduced to the level of mannerist excess, and where information is so fast that there is hardly any time for reflection, unintended consequences proliferate information is produced rich and out of control previously there were the dominant mediums, kairotic narrative and discourse; now it is the message, the bit and the byte (8-bit) chronos like message spread across machinic interfaces
kairotic narratives are made to begin, continue, and end, with plotted causes and effects; discourse is about using conceptual frameworks, well formed speech acts backed up with justified reasonable beliefs (further backed up by propositional logic if required); information is none of these, the bit of information having its effect on you without recourse to legitimating arguments, logics or frameworks, existing in chronological time kairotic time can't be experienced - meaning is conveyed in kairotic time, which organizes the past and distant future, sedimented in institutions, transferred to machine technologies (their most durable carrier). the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina #2 2 has shown that the message for international currency traders has a value for only twenty seconds - a timespan within which most international trading takes place
kairotic narratives get inscribed in machines, (and conceptually stall software art re: Lev Manovichs http://manovich.net/ soft cinema and its Proustian model of memory) and blackboxed, ignoring the technology, by conventions dictating which actions should be tied together
Heidegger #3 3 says of the frenzy of technology entrenching itself everywhere with its enframing (gestell) of humanity as a way that excludes other ways of encountering the world because of its reductive process - he warns of the shaping power that technology has over our destiny - although he envisions a kind of liberation through a conception of art as a mode of revealing , a "setting-forth", because its being far closer to the essential nature of humanity.
what if we were to embrace the very integration of species and technology, without adhering to a kind of determinist reading of Gutenburg, and parallax through the reductionist reading of Heideggers account? #4 4
under this aegis of information, the epoch can be viewed as being subjected to forces beyond control, but also as an epoch where we can compose affiliated, pliant, coherent and localized strategies, and in so doing re-invigorate an epistemology founded on the idea from Leibnizs Ars Combinatoria , that dynamic teleology of combinatorial changes in identity taking place within degrees of complexity
BECOMING METANOID
1.the nature of fm01 is about a proliferating distribution across nodal surfaces using non-descriptive, non kairotic tagging (eg. numerical mark ups) rather than employing metatagged datbases - developing a new language changing the ontological status of the time-image
2. images have always been metatagged, referred to by some kind of textual data signposting us to this or that meaning
3. images are now calculable, digitised and numerized, metadata can be replaced by what some physicists call endodata, and such streams can be rendered in hugely variable manners through differing interpretations and uses, through distributed processes, slow interactions, coincidences of independent events.. all marking a point of departure from the naive epistemology of causality and determinism (re: Weibel/Roessler discussing http://meta.orang.org/OMA/orang/culture/847001.html endophysics)
4. this is the shift, not to have an ontological idea of the image thats always looking for a meaning
5. so that in fm01 the conception is of a scripting? engine that uses data and itself in a continuous baroque flow whereby quasi-objects, in the sense of endodata?, are selected from a field of expanded objects to spawn further pixel assemblages, frames, sequences and streams
6. fm01 is not the treatment of its objects as forming vast databases,
7. databases have two basic qualities: comprehensiveness; and retrieval of contents at the user's will
8. the material qualities of databases demand the ability of its objects to withstand outside force and return to its original state, whilst ascribing a living, regenerative quality to its inert condition
9. the use of databasing in expanded cinema employs teleological descriptions of voluntary and involuntary memory; that the processes of their contents disassembly and re-ordering disrupt the free-flow of familiar narratives and allow for otherwise unknown insights in a tradition stretching back to Edison and Freud.
I think that if our task is to have to re-establish our memories, to replace the basic mechanisms of memory on which we currently depend upon to create our identities - mechanisms that include narrative, placement, teleology, and including economy, architecture, cinema, archiving (in classical sense) 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.
we could make a memory machine according to a range of efficiencies, taken from, say alchemy, where there is a powerful overlap between the literal and metaphysical goals of alchemy. in alchemy, theres a fairly clear teleology which assumes that, for example, the transmutation of base metal into gold is both a material practice and also analogous for some kind of a spiritual evolution (for a contemporary perspective on alchemy and technology http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/3/delre.htm see). in a speculative sense the ap project fm01 attempts to engage with this for the ontological release of technology.
NOTES
11 ever since its inception, psychoanalysis has been keeping a list of partial objects to separate from the body, and to excite desire - breasts, anus, faeces. Lacan added two more: voice and gaze, co-producing culture with technology, as a psychoanalysis of a media age, where cinema could restore the disembodied gaze, and the could transmit a disembodied voice……where previously, as observed by Nietzsche, our writing tools are also working on our thoughts, conspiring with the Gutenburg universe of mnemotechnology
22 Karin Knorr-Cetina, a German sociologist, develops a theory and methodology of epistemic cultures - she analyses the technical, social and symbolic dimensions of expert systems which are combined into the epistemic machineries of scientific knowledge construction. Knorr Cetina, Karin D. (1999), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. quoted by Scott Lash in http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/nordic/cbslash.htm informationcritique
33 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977)
44 Gutenberg's innovation was movable type, though it was probably invented more than 200 years earlier in Korea, before he re-invented it in 1450. Gutenberg introduced a whole range of typographic elements and operations that today we take for granted. the printed book started to create its own format, eventually formatting society by making mass - literacy possible and going on, by pagination, indexing and referencing, to hyperlink the reader from the book at hand to the complete text corpus of the library. from there then came keyword searches (encyclopedias, catalogues, dictionaries etc) and browsing. the library became permanent, and growing (with a high quota of redundancy inbuilt), until the two-fold onslaught of endogeneous acid attack on paper, and digitilisation while all previous media relied on the human mind to be active in the processing, in the Information Age data is produced, stored, transmitted, and received that is not directly readable by human senses anymore. but the more complex the functionality technology offers, the more institutionally inscribed, the more "user- friendly" and more metaphorical it gets, the more the machine turns into a black box. this is the crux of the ontological argument at the end of the essay Heidegger writes "whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth"
Aristotle thought there was a particular way of living that allowed us to 'come to pass" as our best for the kind of creatures we are (the entelechy gained by accordance with the "virtues"). in the Judaeo-Christian tradition it is considered that it is in the life of charity or love that humankind releases its greatest potentia - this means that we become the occasion for each other's self-realisation and it is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own, and vice versa. this, in turn, is the ethical basis to socialism for which the free development of one is the necessary condition for the free development of all if it is a material fact that we are dependent on others for our material survival ( http://www.umsl.edu/~rkeel/280/class/callon.html eg. see actor-network theory) then it is a material fact that is extensible
try reading (!) Aphasia and Parrhesia: Code and Speech in the Neural Topologies of the Net http://www.neural.it/english/aphasiaparrhesia.htm Aphasia, http://www.christinamcphee.net/texts/Aphasia%2BParrhesiaCMcPhee.htm Aphasia 2 [comment by Christina McPhee?]
see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_highway.html Hubert Dreyfuss on Heidegger (and Albert http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/borghayl.html Borgmann)