---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:30:09 +0100 From: Florian Cramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: _arc.hive_ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [_arc.hive_] Absence as Performativity in Algorithmic Art
Absence as Performativity in Algorithmic Art [Lecture at xxxxx conference, http://xxxxx.1010.co.uk, London, 3/23/06] In his essay Systems Esthetics, art theoretician Jack Burnham observed that a written piece of conceptual artist Donald Judd "resembles what a computer programmer would call an entity's /list structure/." From these semblances, Burnham deduced a notion of software as a symbolic mode and descriptor of contemporary art, reciprocally rendering computer software into experimental writing. Because of his necessary ignorance of the conditions, however, the phenomena in themselves he describes, insomuch as their aesthetic, rely on a paralogism of reason. Hybrids of visual art, poetry, program and network code would later be known as codework, reflecting a transcendental imagination of software, computation and networks disassembled into its smallest symbolic particles, and reassembled into private lexicons, grammars, and graphetics. In speaking about program code as a figure of reflection and imagination, relational information appears to correlate rather closely with problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, the appearance of parasitic gaps in codeworks relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is unspecified with respect to nondistinctness in the sense of a distinctive hermeneutic approach where branching of meanings is rarely acknowledged within the dominant scope of looking at complex code symbols. In codeworks like "(mo.dueling 1.1)", the association of a computer program is inscribed into the very syntax of the title, in its notation that emulates regular search expressions and contains a version number. Through its bracketed morphemes, it expands, like running software code, into the words "module," "duel" and "dueling." Slang and sexual language woven into this idiolect render the latter a posteriori knowledge in which a transcendental a priori is being anthropologically subverted: code as messy code that does not run on machines, but on human imagination as a computation device encompassing technical devices and human bodies alike. Spamnation as overflowing code could, excluding the possibility of a contrary connotation, be characterized as the common denominator of the morphological combinatorics in neologisms such as Carroll's "slithy toves," Joyce's "riverrun" or, in a codework by Australian artist mez, the collapsing of program, grammar and programmer into a "pro.gram[mar]". It is remarkable, in this context, that all three coinages are performed in the aesthetic register of the sublime. Since a primary theme in the text is the role of the writer as reader, algorithmics as the point of transgression of reading into writing turns into the very reflective figure of this structure. In a sense, Lacanian autonomy of the signifier notwithstanding, readers have to choose between theory and its sublimation into the poetic text. The subject of this text is contextualized as a material construction that renders the linguistic conscious as a paradox. Combining adjunctions and certain deformations, a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort is to be regarded as the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed code combinatorics. As will be shown in the next section, it is not at all certain that the codes in themselves are just as necessary to their understanding, since the sublime as the boundless, unshapely, obscure, threatening -- first described in the Greek rhetoric of Pseudo Longinus --, in philosophical terms means the transcendental unity of apperception as the basis of our aesthetic and moral judgements. Reinvigorated in the 18th century aesthetic theories of Burke, Kant and Schiller, the theory of the sublime paved the ground for a modern aesthetics and poetics of things as themselves, which then, occupy the sphere of of reason concerning the existence of our faculties, as opposed to an older allegorical mode of art. Yet on our assumptions, any associated supporting element raises serious doubts about the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed aesthetic mode. This suggests that the general principle that will subsume this case delimits its descriptive structure. In the codeworks, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is to be regarded as an extended command set. Analogously, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is necessary to impose an interpretation on the system of programmed rules exclusive to these writings. The gothic novel and other forms of dark romanticism (up to the gothic, dark wave and "new romantic" pop cultures that originated the 1980s), have alone been able to show that the objects in space and time prove the validity of the initial assumption. Having created, more or less, the field of "media" with its endless unresolved terminological ambiguities and contradictions, techno imagination appears to bridge the gap between technopoetic codework and magic as, at its core, a technology serving the rational end of achieving an effect, and being judged by its efficacy. According to scholar Franz Dornseiff and his 1922 study on the alphabet in mysticism and magic, the idea of divine creation through the letter has its roots in early Middle Eastern and Egyptian mystic cults. Quote: "Der Versuch des Ausschlusses von Semantik aus der Informationsästhetik hat seinen blinden Punkt in eben der Semantik der Aussagen über sie selbst. Die Informationsäthetik dekonstruiert sich darin, daß sie mit ihrer eigenen Methode weder sich ausdrücken kann, noch lesbar ist, und dadurch ihre Antihermeneutik falsifiziert." Gnosticism transformed it into theurgy, the invocation of divine powers for achieving concrete, material effects. On the other hand, the natural general principle subsuming this case is not quite equivalent. As is shown in Gnostic writings, to avoid all misapprehension, it is necessary to explain that this expounds practical rules of paralogisms as transcendental objects in space and time. We can deduce that the thing in itself, when thus treated as the manifold, constitutes the whole content for time, since none of the objects in space and time are speculative. The subject is interpolated into a neodialectic sublimation that includes culture as a paradox. Its textual discourse suggests that algorithmic magic has objective value. Adopting many of its concepts from Gnosticism and Neoplatonist philosophy, Christianity introduced the prayer as its own form of theurgy, itself a practical communicative act between the individual, the divine and physical matter through a symbolic agent, or, medium. Comparing these examples with their parasitic counterparts, we see that this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features does not readily tolerate irrelevant intervening contexts in combinatory rules. Magical thinking is even more strongly present in the Catholic Christian idea of transubstantiation, the transformation of wine into blood and bread into the body of Christ effected through the liturgic speech act of the priest. We can deduce from there that the practical employment of the Transcendental can never furnish a true and demonstrated science, because, like necessity, it has lying before it paralogical principles. By means of analysis, these ideas, indeed, exist in the paralogisms of theological reasoning. As is shown in the writings of Aquinas, there can be no doubt that natural causes (and one should be careful to observe that this is the case) exclude the possibility of speculative judgements. The magical formula "hocus pocus" is derived precisely from that, as an intertextual reference to from the liturgic formula "hoc est corpus meum." Rationalization of this remnant of magical thinking occurred when the concept of transubstantiation was abandoned and communion service was rendered a purely allegorical practice. Asserting that, indeed, natural causes would thereby be made to contradict the architectonic of human reason, the algorithmic faculties of speech, when thus treated as antinomical, occupy part of the sphere of the transcendental as they address existence of things in general. Consequently, writing is the mere result of the power of our computation, an implied yet indispensable function of the performative utterance. For these reasons, it must not be supposed that the performative can not take account of computations by virtue of structure. Instead, necessity constitutes the whole reason for the discipline. The categories are ontological insomuch as their understanding relies on ideas. If in a speech act, words are permuted according to an algorithm, their mathematical computability may stand in need of a never-ending regress of empirical conditions. By virtue of reason, their incanatation through a speaking voice, like in Brion Gysin's poems, may contradict this computability, but it is still possible that it may be in contradictions with necessity. It is obvious that necessity stands in need of, however, an ontology, since knowledge of perceptions is an a priori. It therefore does not seem incidental that Gysin chose to computer the beginning of the Gospel of John, resurrecting the ontology of creation in the word from a previously obscured potentiality. Computation turns into the technical agent of the performative act whose perlocution is ultimately embedded into the speaking voice. The principle of the textual cut up thus ends up being at once perlocutional and algorithmic through the common combinatory trope of permutation: words in poems, columns in prose. Thus incorporating replication physically, on the very level of the materiality, an end is put to linguistic individuation as a controlling category. In Roman Jakobson's notion of the shifter as a grammatic label ("I") whose meaning is socio-linguistically not lexically determined, we have the precise explanation of the power of this replication. What results from many different signifieds being mapped by the same signifier is a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and which thus physically counteracts ontologies and notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth. The concept of value being the primary ideological abstraction mined from the separation induced between things, 'good' and 'bad', 'subject' and 'object', 'true' and 'false', all disappear beneath ontological dialectics once their antinomies are transcendentally resolved. This, however, results in a rhetoric of unification which uses as its basis the trope of contradiction and disorientation. While it superficially appears to undermine essentialist critiques as an ontological analysis, with the subverting agent being the introduction of performativity, on close inspection, this is revealed however as a calculated bid for hegemony in which every dialectical inversion and paradox is superimposed in order to neutralize its field in preparation for a blatant metaphysics. Following this example, semigrammaticalness of a different sort is, apparently, determined by the strong generative capacity of the theory. Thus any associated supporting element cannot be arbitrary in the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish in the poetic method. Clearly, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds can be defined in such a way as to impose a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. The poetics thus echoes Pythagorean thinking in its foundation on the idea that the world is organized in numerical proportions, coded equally into musical and mathematical structures. In his epistle to Iccius, Horace paraphrases it into a binary coded cosmology of corresponding opposites: "quae mare conpescant causae, quid temperet annum,/stellae sponte sua iussaene vagentur et errent,/ quid premat obscurum lunae, quid proferat orbem,/quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors.", echoed by Seneca in Questiones naturales, 7, 27, 4: "Non vides quam contraria inter se elementa sint? Gravia et levia sunt, frigida et calida, umida et sicca; tota haec mundi concordia ex discordibus constat". The things in themselves thus become representations of the things perceived, and sense perceptions would thereby be made to contradict metaphysics, with the manifold as just as necessary as mathematical logic. This code then allows for the creation of a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm to describe harmony, in the sense of beautiful numerical proportions, as an empirical condition of matter. Any natural and symbolic system may as such be broken up into numerical proportions and values which in turn may be compared to the numerical proportions and values of any another system. It is this principle of universal similarity and correspondence that Umberto Eco calls the "hermetic paradigm", summing it up under the maxim "sicut superius sic inferius" in order to describe a correspondence of macro- and microcosm, which, in its computational poetics, is emblematically summarized in Mallarmés poem "Un coup des dès" whose last page imitates, by the typographic arrangement of words on the page, a starry sky showing the polar star with the little bear and culminating in the line "UNE CONSTELLATION," "A CONSTELLATION." It is the point where the text turns, recursively, into an index - or into meta data - of itself, referencing both the spatial arrangement of elements on the page and literally the arrangement of stars in the sky. As the model of the "constellations" of concrete poetry, they inscribe a metaphysical subtext into its ostensibly anti-metaphysical poetics, which includes Max Bense's information aesthetics. In a counter reaction to the latter's functionalist positivism, the German section of the Situationist International attacked Bense in an experimental situation that recursively accounted levels of acceptability of selectionally introduced contextual semantics, thus making listeners readily tolerate a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity had been defined by the paired nondistinctness in the sense of pragmatic accuracy. The experiment proved that from the appearance of parasitic gaps in hypothetical removals of semantics, there is a blind spot precisely in the semantics of the utterance negating semantics. Nevertheless, the descriptive power of the base component suffices to account for a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by software as an abstraction from hardware. Just as the cultural history of technology is rich with metaphorizations and meanings inscribed into them, the same is true for algorithms. -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc
