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

Tour de (techno)Force

Interact !

more about “ZKM | ZKM_slippy“, posted with vodpod

“…we are not really living in ‘a civilization of the image’ – even though pessimistic prophets have tried to make us believe that it has become our evil spirit par excellence, no doubt because it had been mistaken for an angel for such a long time. We have gone beyond the image, to a nameless mixture, a discourse-image, if you like, or a sound-image…”

Raymond Bellour

An Obligatory Post

Blanchot Vs. Barthes: (Non)Dialectic battle, Round 1 Warmup

Bathes sees myth as a specific kind of speech. “…Myth is a system of communication, that is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form”.  For Barth, myth’s function is “to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.” (Barthes, Mythologies, 1973)

It is unfortunate (for Barthes) that even his choice of words (e.g. “literally”, “reality”, “perceptible”)  points to the inherent contradictions in his argument.

On the other hand, Blanchot directs our attention away from signs and signifiers by introducing the concept of the mythical or hyperbolic cancer. On the surface, cancer signifies symbolizes “the refusal to respond.” But more than this, “it destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message: it wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs.” According to Blanchot, this kind of cancer is “one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate… the universal programming and signifying power.” (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980)

But, the experience economy attempts to make the cancer relevant by manipulating its mythical nature. The cancer may not signify within the system, but it is made to exist through the system by cancer’s very attempt to dislocate it. The system validates the cancer, out of fear that the cancer will dislocate it … or out of denial that this cancer has already dislocated it.

>> Jump to Walls for the Match, and take this with you:

Media Reports: Arsonists torched two cars outside a Greek consulate in southwestern France yesterday, scrawling slogans in support of the youth riots gripping Athens, according to an account by the Associated Press. Police found graffiti on a wall opposite the consulate, and on a nearby garage door, reading “Support for the fires in Greece,” “Insurrection Everywhere” and “The Coming Insurrection.”

walls

Mythical or Hyperbolic Cancer: Repetition with a difference:

” … here is a cell that doesn’t hear the command, that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic.” More so, this cancer “destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message…

Cancer, from this perspective, is a political phenomenon*, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate, through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power…

Something we cannot understand maliciously neutralizes the authority of a master knowledge.” (Blanchot).

* If mythical cancer is a political phenomenon, then Bathes’ assertion that “myth is depoliticized speech” is flawed (even though he offers a broader understanding of the word “political”,  as the network of human relations and their influence in creating the social order).  Ding, Ding, Ding! >>  Round 1 winner: Blanchot >>