Enfolding and Unfolding

7/29/2019 Enfolding and Unfolding

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Enfolding and Unfolding: An Aesthetics for the Information Age

How many things in your perceptible world are not only themselves, but the

visual, aural, and tactile manifestation of information? Of course your computer

screen, your mobile telephone if you have one, and the pages of your books are

the visual faces of information. You may gasp with wonder at the stunning effectsof blockbuster movies, knowing full well that they are computer generated. Your

digital photographs, DVDs, and digital sound recordings reach perceptible form

through the mediation of software; you are reminded of this when they are

damaged and reduced to jittering bits. Advertisements, recorded music, pictures

of celebrities tacked to the wall were information before they arrived to your

eyes, ears, and fingers. Your Calvin Klein socks and your ergonomic toothbrush

are really market research, materialized in plastic and acrylic. The corn and

potatoes in your refrigerator, bred to be hardy and long lasting and selected for

the supermarket, are the gustatory expression of information. Your oriental

carpet, if you have one, is the visual and tactile expression of algorithms, whether

digital (Iranian factories commonly employ carpet-weaving software) or analog(a weaver draws on algorithmic patterns, mental or on paper, when composing a

carpet).

Realizing that your perceptible world is merely the tips of imperceptible,

information icebergs, you may well cast around for something that just Is. Maybe

you'll hear your neighbor singing, you'll catch a whiff of asphalt from the road

construction, you'll see your dog come into the room. What a relief. This is raw

experience, right? But wait - what's that pop song she's styling? Why was your

neighborhood scheduled for development? How much did your dog cost?

The interactive diagram of the relationship Enfolding-Unfolding that you willfind here demonstrates an aesthetic model for the information age. We have long

sensed that representation was not where the real action lay in contemporary

art and popular culture. Images themselves are increasingly composed of

information. Visual images, aural images, tactile images, and even gustatory and

olfactory images - tastes and smells - often index not raw experience but

information. In general, the most important events in contemporary society do

not occur at the level of the image but at the level of information; they are

imperceptible. The financial transactions whirling around the globe at satellite

speed are perhaps the best example. Information is as old as human society, and

information has long underlain aspects of the perceptible world. The differencesnow are quantitative: more aspects of contemporary society are impregnated by

information than ever before; and qualitative: information now is closely

intertwined with capital. Information is often synonymous with capital because

it consists of those aspects of the world of experience that can translate into

market value.

But the fact that most images are expressions (explications) of information is

only one-third of the story. The carpet weaver daydreams as she works; the

person feeding code into a digital loom does too. The agronomist puzzles over

factors of longevity and economy, as the hybrid corn rustles in the wind. And of

course an army of code-writing drones is named in the credits at the end ofdigital blockbusters, in type so small it disintegrates into lozenges when the


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movie is transferred to a DVD. Some person, working in Palo Alto, Mississauga,

Shanghai, Bombay, wrote (or compiled) the software that animates the movie

dinosaurs, works your DVD player, patterns the factory-made carpet. Maybe that

person was tired, took a sip of tea, spoke to a colleague, and made a mistake that

will cause the program to crash, the dinosaur to twitch, the carpet to look dodgy.

In Agnes Varda's documentary of gleaners scraping a living from the leftovers ofcommercial agriculture, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), perfectly shaped

potatoes translate effortlessly from being simply there to being capital. They are

harvested, a kilogram of potatoes is translated into a price, and they are sold. The

other potatoes, left behind because they are knobby or oversized, are valueless

as capital. The gleaners collect them for food, in activities that remain under the

radar of capital. This kind of direct relationship between Experience and

Experience, I argue, is exceptional, for now most of what arrives to us as Image,

or in Experience itself, has already been mediated by Information. But in short,

not only is the image (in all its forms) an expression of information; also,

information is an expression of experience.

So what is experience? It is not necessarily personal experience, but experience

as the medium of change. Charles Sanders Peirce wrote, "Time, as the universal

form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change." The

programmer, the weaver, the corn, the plastic all undergo change, and this

constitutes experience. Experience is a plane of immanence, in Deleuze and

Guattari's term: an infinite membrane between the virtual and the actual. We

can think of Experience as infinitely enfolded: containing everything, folded into

itself.

Information and Image are also planes of immanence. Like Experience, they are

infinite, though, as mathematics permits, they are smaller infinities. Experience

is the most infinite of these three planes of immanence because all Information,

all Images, cycle around to be re-enfolded in Experience. In turn, only a very few

of its contents are actualized, or unfolded. This can happen in two ways:

Experience unfolds directly into an Image, or experience unfolds into

information.

I have chosen the terms enfolded and unfolded (or their Latinate synonyms,

implicate and explicate) to echo Gilles Deleuze's explication of the Baroque

aesthetics of Leibniz. Leibniz's principle that the smallest element of matter is a

fold makes it possible to conceive of the plane of immanence as composed ofinfinite folds. The actual is thus infinitely enfolded in the virtual. To actualize

something is to unfold it. How do things that are virtual - that are immanent in

Experience - become actualized? They are drawn into being by the magnetic pull

of one of the other planes. They are selected, from the infinite expanse of

Experience, to be actualized. They unfold from Experience to become

Information. They unfold to become Image.

I want to draw attention to the vast amount of stuff that remains enfolded in

each of these planes of immanence. A vast amount of Experience is never

unfolded, never becomes Information or Image: like the experience of the corn

plant, the weaver, or the programmer. A vast amount of Information remains


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imperceptible because it is not unfolded as Image. And a vast number of Images

are forgotten to experience.

The triadic diagram Experience : Information : Image has traits of Peirce's triadic

epistemology. Experience has the quality Peirce called Firstness, or of being in-

itself and referring to nothing but itself. Information has the quality ofSecondness, difference, or "struggle," because it is selected from Experience in

order to be put to use. Image has Thirdness, because it mediates between

Information and Experience. Looking at an image, we can understand how

Information mediates Experience. In example 6, Michael Joo's beautiful

installation Bodhi Obfuscatus (2005), we experience the Buddha (a 7th-century

statue that enfolds the Experience of centuries of worshippers) not directly but

through the Information from surveillance cameras monitoring the statue. It is a

mediated spiritual experience appropriate to our age. As Third can become First,

so all Information and all Images become enfolded once again into Experience.

They may re-enter the cycle, or they may lie there like leaves in a pile, children's

drawings on a refrigerator (example 4), or people who pass away withoutattaining fame. Experience is a vast archive whose contents are almost entirely

enfolded.

I offer Enfolding-Unfolding as a dynamic diagram of contemporary aesthetic

experience. It provides sophisticated tools of aesthetic explanation and

evaluation. Enfolding-Unfolding allows us to evaluate how artworks (and other

things) facilitate the flow among Experience : Information : Image. It allows us to

account for the ways in which they select from each of the three planes: which

virtuals of Experience are actualized (unfolded) as Information, which virtuals of

Information are actualized as Image, and in turn what happens when Experience

actualizes Information and Image. This diagram pays attention to the intelligence

and grace with which these relationships are enacted. In example 3, a

sophisticated work of online art, Apartment (2001) by Marek Walczak and

Martin Wattenburg, the Image results from a playful, social interaction between

the Information of database and algorithms and the Experience of thought,

programming, and viewer interaction. In information aesthetics, beauty lies not

in representation but in internal complexity. Baroque art, and what Sean Cubitt

calls the "neo-Baroque" cinema, use Image to draw attention to the elegant

artifice whereby Information mediates Experience. "As we reach the end of a film

like Snake Eyes," Cubitt writes, "we should survey the whole plot as if it were a

knot garden, a spatial orchestration of events whose specific attraction is itselaboration of narrative premise into pattern." In Baroque art, the perceptible

Image is the expression or unfoldment of a legible level of information. This

Baroque relationship of Image to Information is recapitulated in contemporary

computer art; it is prefigured by the aniconic art of Sunni Islam. All these art

forms invite us to admire not a naturalistic reflection upon Experience but an

Information-driven artifice.

As a triadic diagram, Enfolding-Unfolding avoids some of the pitfalls of dualism.

For example, it does not evaluate art on the basis of its authenticity, which wouldbe the seeking of a correspondence between Image and Experience. And it


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bypasses the modernist criteria of reflexivity and criticality, for these criteria

apply to a dualist model as well. The "critique of representation" evaluates Image

in light of Experience but does not account for the crucial mediation of

Information. Enfolding-Unfolding offers a positive, Experience-embracing

criterion for criticism: what Experience is privileged, what passed over, in the

selection of information and Image? What Information is privileged to unfoldinto Image? The aesthetic analysis I offer does not condemn Images mediated by

Information, nor fetishize the purity of Experience untouched by information

culture. Paying attention to what is left enfolded is similar to a materialist

critique, whereby we evaluate Image in terms of its reference to the Information

and Experience that underlie it, except that it doesn't oppose (true) material and

(false) ideal, a dualist model, but attends to all the Experience that composes the

Information and Images that arrive to us.

Enfolding-Unfolding also shows that much art is concerned with the nature of

en/unfolding rather than with producing images. It privileges performativity

over representation, as unfolding is a performative, time-based, social act. Forexample, the writing on a Fatimid mosque (example 7) requires the person

contemplating it to unfold its meaning, thus emphasizing the act of

interpretation that is key to Shi'a Islam.

Enfolding-Unfolding pays attention to the invisible, the forgotten, or what an

artwork deliberately leaves enfolded, and so it allows us to appreciate quiet or

barely visible artworks in terms of what they keep latent. One of my colleagues

in the previous issue of Vectors, Rick Prelinger, returns in Panorama Ephemera

to his famous film archive. Working against the tendency of other artists to

unfold significant Information from the images, Prelinger builds a private story

from them, inviting the viewer to attend to the Experience enfolded in the image.

Enfolding-Unfolding also has political implications. Power lies in the ability to

make things unfold, circulate, and enfold. Example 2, the stock market, shows

how capital selects only a very few aspects of Experience as relevant to

Information, and in turn broadly influences Experience in a feedback loop. Power

is also the ability to hide things in the image. One of my colleagues in this issue,

Trevor Paglen, shows how power disdains the image. The "Black World" of

secret U.S. military bases is an example of how power entirely bypasses the

visible, yet continues to circulate and has real effects. Paglen goes to great

lengths to unfold that world of secret Information and make it available asImage. Example 5 shows that fame is an index of how many times an event

generates movement around the diagram. Example 1, a family photograph, and

4, a child's drawing of a popular icon, show that private experience, intensely

meaningful though it may be, does not circulate. Example 8, surveillance, shows

how a totalitarian society is concerned with absolute unfolding, leaving no

experience private, and thus forms private experience to the shape of

Information. Thus, resisting unfolding can be a political act, as can actively

unfolding parts of Experience that are usually deemed insignificant.

The diagram you see here enfolds and unfolds the creative intelligence of

designer Raegan Kelly. An audiovisual thinker exquisitely attuned to theexpressive capacities of the line, Kelly was able to translate my ideas and


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descriptions into moving images that capture the qualities of implication and

explication: the magnetic pull of one plane on another, the hesitation to unfold,

the brutality of selection, the gradual dwindling of an event into stillness;

qualities of playfulness, ephemerality, recalcitrance, inexorability. Kelly is a true

animator who understands the nonorganic life of the line.

The Unfolding-Enfolding diagram comes to you by way of eight examples. I hope

these will facilitate your understanding of the relationships between Experience,

Information, and Image and invite you to map your own examples onto it. You

will find a text that discusses the example. You will also come across my verbal

description of how the diagram should behave, which will allow you to

appreciate Raegan Kelly's translation of this description into images and to

compare how ideas are unfolded verbally and audiovisually.

Enfolding and Unfolding

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