affects and intentions

John Hopkins 27::October::2009 12:04 → permalink

The idea comes that I can place different narratives and sonifications in the aporee context, making a global mapping of ideas mixed with sounds mixed with voices. But somehow this seems flat. Not that the platform lacks some aesthetic appeal, but the tendency would be to continue the same old process of archive-building (with the same old criteria of acquisition of material). Or, I thought about making a performative series in the Speakers Corner in the Domain. Still, the best idea to this moment is the one where I would simply engage with this material with one Other, expanding on it, presenting it in a dialogic setting, and reproducing that. Or this dialogic situation as a live performative undertaking with an audience.

[and there is always the wrestling between the tendency to overly-formalize the potential outcomes rather than going with my intuition. This arises from that historic/sporadic lack of confidence in the execution of 'public' works. Although ultimately the more spontaneous the production, the less pre-tension, the better and more energizing the outcome for the audience/participants. If only creative action came as easily as teaching (which, of course, is a subset of that creative action)].

Then there is this idea that technology impresses itself on the individual (a form of techno-determinism). I can remember working on the graveyard shift at Rockville Crushed Stone, an open-pit quarry in a greenschist facies area mined for concrete aggregate. It supplied the entire Washington, D.C. area with aggregate until the year after I was working there, the whole short-fiber asbestos scandal broke — the aggregate was found to be full of it! That’s another story. At the end of a ten hour shift of mucking (shoveling), clearing random piles of spilled rock from the monstrous crushing machines and the conveyor systems between them, my hands would start to lock around the shovel handle. To this day, if I spend an afternoon with a shovel, this still happens. Embodied presence re-configured at the effect of technology. One of my offices at UTS is on the 16th floor of the building reputed to be the ugliest building in Sydney. I decided a number of years ago that if I had the possibility of skipping the elevator and taking the stairs, I would do that. Some of my colleagues think this is a amusing quirk. It is, but it is rationalized by the idea that using or relying on the elevator to get there is re-forming my body in a certain way that I’d rather it not do. Or perhaps, I’d rather challenge my legs to get some exercise else they wither away, as they sit lifelessly propped on the desk chair below my torso as body is only engaged in finger-twitch typing-at-screen in this moment.

Is there any instance that a technology does not re-form the embodied presence of the user? If one is using the field/flow model of the cosmos, the answer is definitively, NO! Even at great (Cartesian) distance: even as subsumed by tele-presence. Then affect merely becomes an issue of what, how, and how much. Hypothesis? Yeah, okay, it is a hypothesis, but there is abundant evidence to let it lie for the moment as a principle. What would be counter examples? A human-constructed technology is a temporalized shift in the ordering of ambient matter/energy in a localized/distributed region. A negentropic ordering along anisotropic fall lines (thermal, chemical, or simply difference gradients). (Just as the body is the same shift or change or difference in the order of a region — and the body is a primary technology).

[One way of looking at technology is that it is a subset of the alterations that self-organizing life systems apply to the flows that they are immersed in. Uff, mouthful, when working from zero acronyms... Well, it's not really a subset, but it would apply, as the traditional definition of technology does, to a certain limited number of tool-wielding species. What is the difference between the air being a tool that a bird utilizes, shaping it, albeit in very a limited temporal framework, to allow the (necessary) utility of flight? Technology-as-means to re-form the flow of energy in the active system. Perhaps too basic a definition. It certainly then would include all life, which then suggests that life itself has, as one characteristic function: as a system for altering the flow of energy in the system.]