A group gathers
to be immersed into a world of another’s design, the programmer Adalberto Müller, working through the subtext of the image
on the projector screen and the technological transmission of his voice to his
audience. Müller describes to us, through the philosophy of Vilem Flüsser, how written
language has brought us to a world dictated by lines/text/reason/discreteness from a
world of surface/images/nature/continuity. Through the linearity of his speech,
his presentation, and his allotted time window, Müller spurs in the audience
the true sense of disruption this linearity has caused humanity and the
challenge of considering technology a vehicle in art to move toward a new poetic sense of the digital world.
THE PROJECTION
The presentation
seems to outline a rough lineage regarding images and text associated with the
way we experience the world:
Before written language, images were inseparable from the physical
world. Müller talks of the cave
paintings in the documentary film “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” which are the
oldest human-painted images to date.
The paintings seem to present a world in which humans’ existence was not
yet pared down to lineage. Early human experience of the world was pliable; the
physical world was existed with
images of it, as did their spiritual concepts of the world. For them, to
represent the world was to experience it.
Through the advent of the written word, experience was made linear. History became the lens through which
we saw our place in the world. Lines of text paved the one way street of
experience, and humans began to move in a singular direction. What is more,
written language devices came to fight and banish images, replacing the
representation and understanding of the world through image-based means with a
projected world through text. This form of communication has thus shaped the
way we see images in light of the advent of text and numbers.
Eventually, images became shaped and created through text. A text is
hiding beneath every photographic image as the mechanisms of technological
production of that image. These texts are unchangeable, and furthermore unreachable,
for the photographer, and by the program that is the camera, his “click is
designed.” His practice is inseparable from the codes behind the image—the machine
shapes the image. And thus the final photograph, according to Flüsser (as
presented by Müller), is the projection of a world through the reality of the
text it is hiding.
MAKING THE
CONTINUOUS DISCRETE
As we have come
to a digitialized world, reason (the discrete) triumphs nature (the continuous)
by coding it with lines. Müller tells us in the beginning of the lecture that Flüsser
came to the advent of mechanized communication without a criticizing air. Flüsser
attempted to look at the ways media may be applied to humanity rather than
humanity applied to media in order to integrate the two in a more positive way.
However
optimistic this outlook seems, Müller gives the audience a problem we are faced
with today: life being digitalized. Moments
of nature we may experience are disjointed through a constant digital
collection. Because there is no connection for humans today between the
projections and the text underneath, our life is made discrete. Our connection
to a continuously flowing nature is interrupted through the computation of
nature, and humanity runs the risk of being detached completely from the nature
that was once so alive in our cave paintings.
BRIDGING THE GAP:
HUMANITY AND NATURE
As artists what
do we have to say about the natural world made discrete through humans? What do
we have to offer that moves us beyond
the sense we may have of humans as rigid enforcers of computation on the world
around us?
Müller puts on
the screen an image of a pink petunia as part of a project by Eduardo Kac. Kac’s
mission in the "Edunia" piece in The
Natural History of the Enigma series is presented as being to “alter
genetic codes as to write in living
organisms.” The Edunia shows a way to express mankind in nature through the
codes brought to make nature discrete through science: DNA. A piece of the
artist’s genetic code is inserted into the plant, creating a direct expression
of the human-created textual world within nature. Thus the flower becomes (as
the photograph is) a projection.
Müller goes on to
define the flower as a poem. He tells us the Edunia is a creation where the
expression and application of text as linear and discrete is central to the
ability to create the projection, and thus a new world.
Life is created
through the projection that is the Edunia. Through this piece, it is clear that
artists and image-makers in the digitalized world must harness text toward
poetry. Through science and technology’s application of text and code to nature,
there is the act of inscribing human to the non-human. As we touch the
continuous with our discrete, perhaps there is an increasing sense of closeness
between computing and nature that is not
holding nature back, or striving to control it, but rather giving it a new
shape that is equally poetic as when it was untouched.
The end of this
lecture restores hope, and it seems as though the problem Müller presents of
life being digitalized can be solved through the active efforts of artists to
utilize the digitalization to bring us back to nature. Photographers and
artists working with the invisible text of mechanics behind them are able to
insert new life into our poetically
projected worlds.
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