...ICONS OF THE INVISIBLE

(First A Brief Digression And I Am Sorry)

Since going over Rhizome's "Best of 2012" (e.g here and here) this morning, I have been considering emergent, intersecting philosophies of New Media Art.
...It's a topic that has been engaged critically at least since the mid-1990s (The Robot In The Garden and other writings on telepistemology come to mind), but curatorial practice really hadn't yet developed an sufficient vocabulary around New Media at that time. Domenico Quaranta writes, "Whatever one may think about new media art, when it comes to curating the definition becomes strictly technical and medium-based. New media art is the art that uses new media technologies as a medium – period. No further complexity is admitted."
Hito Steyerl--definitely one of the most interesting cultural theorists writing right now--situates these new conditions in a way that is historical yet still completely relevant and provocative. Her essay "A Thing Like You and Me" (which functioned as a prefatory note for one of her solo shows a couple years ago) extends Benjamin's idea that "...[i]n the medium of reflection, the thing and the knowing being merge into each other." Perfectly apt when talking about computer-based art, a landscape of hybrid-cognition and multiplied spaces/experiences, overrun with immersive technology--which then becomes grounds for participation: "Accordingly, participating in an image is not the same as being represented by it. The image is the thing in which senses merge with matter. Things are not being represented by it but participate in it" (Steyerl again.)
She posits, "But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actually—in its corporate media version—a barrage of commodified intensities?" But that's what fucks me up: can we (New Media/Net artists) contribute to and participate in an image (or image-system) in a way that is "authentically" egalitarian; from outside the network of commodified intensities? Isn't celebrating its "thingness" and the "message" of its medium (vis-a-vis the actual hard/software, going back to Quaranta) naively abstracting the thing from its site within pervasive, geopolitical conflict? 

anyway...

(via The Serving Library; see also this)

"In the early 1980s, on the pages of academic design journal Visible Language, a classic thesis-antithesis-synthesis played out around the technological and philosophical fine points of computer-assisted type design. Stanford professor Donald Knuth begins with his article, “The Concept of a Meta-font” (Winter 1981). Two years prior, Knuth had conceived and programmed MetaFont — a software that enabled users to generate unlimited numbers of fonts by controlling a limited set of parameters. The article is a performative account of his intervening attempts, using MetaFont to harness the essential “intelligence” of letterforms. In Knuth’s view, the way a single letter is drawn — an a priori A, say — presupposes and informs all other letters in the same font. This information can be isolated, turned into a set of instructions, and put to work computer-automating the generation of new characters by filling in the features between two or more variables such as weight or slant."



Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt)



"20Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception."


Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Relational Architecture 9"

"Frequency and Volume enables participants to tune into and listen to different radio frequencies by using their own bodies. A computerised tracking system detects participants' shadows, which are projected on a wall of the exhibition space. The shadows scan the radio waves with their presence and position, while their size controls the volume of the signal. The piece can tune into any frequency between 150 kHz and 1.5 GHz, including air traffic control, FM, AM, short wave, cellular, CB, satellite, wireless telecommunication systems and radio navigation."


"I AM NOT EXOTIC I AM EXHAUSTED."
Yto Barrada