An Era of Transformation

From Rodowick to Guattari to Massumi

Bijvoorbeeld: Russian Ark

• Whether viewed projected in theatre or watched at home on a hogh-definition screen, it does not involve me in time.

• Problem: it is ignoring that the assumptions of perceptual realism are indeed paradoxical.

• Contradiction: it is no uninterrupted sequence nor is it film: it is montage. Meurer: it includes more than 30.000 digital events.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so_tB8UxGjA

The digital event:• Light recorded on charge-coupled devices is already

fragmented into a discrete mosaic of picture elements, which are then read off as distinct mathematical values.

• Corresponds less to the duration and the movements of the world than to the control and variation of discrete numerical elements internal to the computer’s memory and logical processes.

• The digital event depends on montage, on being a one-way street (its translation) and compositing (the separate layers are not spatial wholes but numerically defined values: simulated and intentional.

The Ontology of Digital Worlds• Analogue= invisability of layers, continuity of

movement and devaluation of filmic editing– Digital space needs no cuts and is not anymore a

combining of spaces. Editing is consequence of the analog automata

– Nothing moves: duration turns into durée of realtime.– There is no presence other than myselfConclusion:

a block of duration => codecontinuity in space and movement => montage or combination (there is no difference anymore between creation and modification, Manovich)

The digital event= a manipulation of the layers of the modularized image subject to a variety of algorithmic transformations.Digital information expresses another will to power in relation to the world (174)Nietzsche: WTP is ambitie, streven, voltrekking zonder teleologie.

Hoe verandert de digital onze ontologie?

• Er is geen andere wereld (we control, manage, communicate): matter and minds have become information. Even time is managed as information. Manovich: will is a ‘database complex’.

• Jurrasic park tells us that reality is only recognized in its photographic appearance.

I think because I exist in a present time of exchange with others, who are not present to me in space

Wat voor samenleving bestaat er dan vandaag?

• Massa media zijn nog steeds zeer invloedrijk, het maakt nog steeds collectieven, het bepaalt nog steeds onze manier van communiceren.

• Maar met een andere ecologie, een andere technologie, andere sociologie, vindt “het gesprek” daar steeds minder plaats.

http://vimeo.com/61119443

Guattari (eind jaren 80) over het nieuwe landschap: the Post-media Age

‘This rocking motion that brought us to a dangerously retrograde subjective reterritorialisation might spectacularly turn around the day when are asserted, in a sufficient manner, new emancipatory social pracices and, above all, alternative assemblages of subjective production capabale of connecting – on a mode different than that of conservative reterritorialisation – to the molecular revolutions that work our era’. (293).

Herdenk het Postmodernisme.

• Postmoderne conditie. (Lyotard). – Einde grote verhalen, die ons handelen rechtvaardigen. – ‘Little narratives’ als antwoord. (G 294).

• ‘Be they painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of postmodernism have this in common; they all think that today’s crises in artistic and social practices can no longer result in anything but a total refusal of all collective project-making of any importance. Let’s cultivate our garden, and preferably in conformity with the practices and customs of our contemporaries’ (Guattari, 295).

Post-modernisme.

• ‘post-modernism comes down to nothing more than the final spasms of modernism, that it is a reaction and, to a certain extent, a mirror of the formalist and reductionist abuses of the latter, from which it ultimately isn’t really different. (…) But there will be no revivial of the creative phylum that they had hoped to bring back’(292).

Post-media• ‘The emergence of these new practices of subjectivation of a post-media

era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted reappropriation of communicational and information technology, assuming that they increasingly allow for:1) the formation of innovative forms of dialogue and collective interactivity and eventually, a reinvention of democracy;

2) Be means of the miniaturization and personalization of equipments, a resingularization of the machinic mediatized means of expression; we can presume, on this subject, that it is the connection, through networking, of banks of data which will offer us the most surprising views;

3) The multiplication to infinity of ‘existential operators’, permitting acces to mutant creative universes’ (G 300).

Post-media.

‘The coming post-mediatic revolution must be called on to take the relay (with incomparable efficiency) of minoritary groups which are the only ones, even today, that have become aware of the mortal risk, for humanity, of problems such as: - the race to stockpile nuclear weapons, - world hunger, - irreversible ecological damage, -mass-mediatic pollution of collective subjectivity.’ (Guattari 300)