MATERIALITY
“Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well.”
- Hayles, N. Katherine. "Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis." Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67-90.
A reflexive approach to materiality makes it possible to re-conceptualize materiality itself as ‘the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies’. Rather than thinking in the mediums’ material as fixed in physicality, a re-definition of materiality is useful because it opens the possibility of considering any text as embodied entity “while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers.”
Reflections on materiality should not just happen on a technological level. To fully understand a work, each level of materiality should be studied: the physical and technological artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of reader, artist and audience. [the choice of any] digital material is not innocent or meaningless. With enough knowledge of the material, an investigation into digital materialilty can uncover stories about the origin and history of the material, by others.
▁∣∖▁╱◝◟.❘╱▔▔╲̸/╲╱▔▔▔╲∣∖╱▔╲▁▁∣∖▁╱◝◟.╱▔▔╲________
The slides underneath are from the course ‘Materiality’, which took place over three meetings during the New Media class ‘Beyond Resolution’ I thaught as substitute professor at the KHK (Kassel) in 2018. During these weeks we unpacked the term ‘materiality’ via a research into various file formats. The slides are clickable; they either link to the work reference or zoom.
Videoscapes 2008 - ...
How many efforts are required in order to watch?
Whenever I use a ‘normal’, transparent technology, I aim to see 'through' the actual machine. I have learned to unsee its interface and all its structural components. I am able to understand its message and use the technology as fast as possible. In a way I have learned to become blind to (certain parts of) technology.
Similar lines of development have taken place in my perception of sound. As Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer wrote: "We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen. But this does not mean our ears are always open." Over the years I have learned to close my ear lids and even might have lost (or never developed) some of the sensitivities needed for 'deep listening' (or ‘deep watching’).
The quest to make the public re-hear certain sounds, to educate the listener and to 'open up ear lids', has been a subject pursued by many different sound artists. Acousmatics for instance, a strand of sound art developed by the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer, lets the audience listen to the sounds originating from behind a "black veil". The source or instrument of the sound remains unseen and unknown while the non-representational or formalist sound forces the audience to focus on active listening.
Has similar research and work been made in the visual arts? Does some form of acousmatic video or even acousmatic videoscapes exist? What would this look like and could glitch play a role in this?
While watching glitch art, the audience perceives glitches without (often) knowing how they came about, which gives them an opportunity to concentrate on their form - to interpret its structures and to learn more from what can actually be seen. In a sense many glitches follow the principle of acousmatics visually.
A videoscape should be a place where artists can create a new, visual ecology that can give playful feedback on the technological conventions that control the spectator in their everyday life. In these conceptually fueled videoscapes we can open our eyes for the unreasonable and give form to what we so often have tried to obfuscate in both audio and visual media, namely artifacts.
The main subject of most glitch art is 'critical perception'. Critical in this sense is twofold; either criticizing the way technology is conventionally perceived, or showing the medium in a critical state. Glitches release a critical potential that forces the viewer to actively reflect on the technology.
The acousmatic videoscape thus uses critical trans-media aesthetics to theorize the human thinking about technology; it creates an opportunity for self reflexivity, self critique and self expression.
The acousmatic videoscape is a space in which I can perceive output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability. The new structures that unfold themselves can be interpreted as a portal to an utopia, a paradise like dimension, but also as a black hole that threatens to destroy the technology as I knew it. Here is a purgatory; an intermediate state between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a possible continuation into a new form of seeing and using, a new perspective…
︎ Videoscapes
Unresolved (2020)
8448 x 4 CM long painting on canvas,
or
data file to be wrapped
on hardware
8448 x 4 CM long painting on canvas, or data file, to be wrapped over hardware (a painting of 32 x 32 pixels wide, 1 pixel deep, both sides)Inspired by the 2011 works “Beyond Yes and No” and “29 PARALLEL STRIPES”, by glitch artist Beflix, Unresolved explores an alternative method of painting data.
Using a bitmap image, Menkman followed the linear organization of pixelelated data: in a BMP file, the image data (luminocity and chrominance) is encoded pixel by pixel, in a linear fashion, one after the other.
In Unresolved, every pixel or point of data is painted on a 64 meter long canvas strip, and then mounted on a frame.
When hung correctly, unrolled over hardware with the right dimensions, Unresolved displays a double sided image - on one side Menkmans portrait, and on the other side a message in DCT (Menkman’s cryptographic tool from 2015): BEYONDRESOLUTION.
Through this work, Menkman presents the ways in which a bitmap file, when ‘opened’ on different hardware, can create alternate modes of reading and seeing: the hardware defines what is perceived.
some images of the making of: 32 stripes of canvas were encoded, sewn into a very long strip, and painted.
