Texts and Signs

Experimentation with the branching out stucture of (hyper)texts and signs is now commonplace in digital art practices (among other fields).  Artists like Jeffrey Shaw use this metaphor to forge varying cosmologies of  digital spaces.  Such cosmologies consist of visual, textual, and aural spaces, which are meant to be traversed by visitors/ users (in the case of “interactive” installations) in non-linear ways.  Art curator Soke Dinkla labels such works as “floating works of art” which create “the urban space of today not just as a moving, fragmentary and non-linear order, but also as a hypertext that can be perceived spatially and explored associatively.”

Urban spaces such as Tokyo have the capacity of turning the visitor into a traveler whose decisions structure the text/ space in new ways, depending on individual experiences, personal decisions, and associations.  If we look at Tokyo as a floating work of art, then we can say that Tokyo as an experiential space negotiates between physical experience and intellectual cognition. Any good example of brandscaping taps into its consumers cognitively, viscerally, and emotionally. Even though branding can arguably be seen as a homogenizing act of product standardization – through, paradoxically, differentiation – it can also be a customizable consumer experience simply because consumer responses are not quite uniform. A brand’s polysemy is achieved through the consumers’ varying emotional, intellectual, and visceral responses. Like the immersive installations above, each set of  eyes – and every singular mind – travels to different parts of the space.  Of course, this semblance of diversity is counterbalanced by the homogeneity of the producer-directed [or desired] response, which is always the same: spend money!

” The city of today can only be known by an activity of an ethnographical type: one cannot orientate oneself in such a city by means of the book, the address, but by walking and seeing, by familiarity and experience. Here every experience is intense and fragile. It can only be rediscovered through the memory of the trace left behind: to visit a place for the first time therefore means: beginning to wire it: since the the address is unwritten, it needs to create its own script.”  – Roland Barthes, Das Reich der Zeichen

Is Barthes’ analysis applicable to blogs and other kinds of websites? Can one orientate themselves by familiarity (of web navigation) and experience (both practical and emotionally-triggered) ?

Do blogs inevitably create precarious experiences which can only be rediscovered through digital traces? Is this the best response a blog can hope for?

A transient affective response

The Affect as Part of the Experience Economy

How does the affect find its way through the logic of the general economy? One example of the affect being used as a “brand” or a marketing tool is the emphasis on the consumer’s product experience. Experience commodified; experience as capital.

Product researchers such as industrial designers associate product experience with affective experience, and often use these terms synonymously.

Cultural, social, and personal experiences interfere with, affect, stimulate and often guide a consumer’s product experience. Of course, this depends on the kind of product as well.

In reading marketing research surveys and analyses, I noticed that the affect has become an emblem of consumption. The affect is now used for branding consumer experiences, and thus assumes a material form – in more ways than one.

No, this is not enough, yet too much. Let’s just call it affect for now.

Affect

“[M]y body is not only an object among all objects, . . .but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Affectivity = the potential for experience ?

” … affectivity names the capacity for the body to be radically creative, that is, to be the agent of a framing of digital information that generates images independently of all preexistent technical frames.” – Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media

Hansen’s argument has been contested, especially in the ways in which he implicitly privileges vision over all other senses, and in the inferred attributes of the [largely asexual, non-gendered] body he envisions. Nevertheless,  Hansen’s approach is  useful because it points out that the requirements for perceiving new media (not just new media art) are new. Affection/ affectivity, in this respect, is not quite synonymous to the Deleuzian understanding of affect as “pure quality”, and does not quite designate a “particular modality of perception”.

Vivian Sobchack’s essay, “What my Fingers Knew: the Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh”, calls for the affect in cinema. However, her approach is limiting in the sense that she mostly focuses on embodied experience and -like Lev Manovich- on the cinema’s mimetic potential. Nevertheless, Sobchack’s essay is yet another example of the intellectual inquiry that the [affect/ the visceral/ whatever you want to call it] stimulates… and another example of the “fact” that the affect escapes interpretation precisely due to its very “essence”. [words are inadequate]

Pie chart: We can’t help but rationalize the affect, albeit in a cognitive way

No Comment (for now)

“… it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

- Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act V, Scene V)

Naked Landscapes

I showed the Spencer Tunick documentary Naked States to my students once. I got no response, just embarrassed looks and no eye contact. That in itself was a response. Affect renders us [speechless].