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Subject: <nettime> documentaX Forum: Blast
From: ricardo dominguez <rdom@thing.net>
Date: 11 Aug 1997 17:07:39 +0200

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DocumentaX Forum: Blast

Moderated by Jordan Crandall

An overview by ricardo dominguez




"Habit is a great deadener."

--Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"If my language quavers, trembles or is
obscure, quavering and obscure are then
also the ideas it tries to express. Still when
it is to my taste precise, I then feel it
attained simplicity. So I'll send - separately - the
'home-affect and co/in-habit(u)ation' murmurs
that deals with'co-spasming' and recurrences."

--Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger


Homo Neticus is the outcome of multiple dead
machines congealing into ugly social habits.
Aesthetic and political discourse is moving from
the analysis of place, to that of bandwidth.
From the movement of people to the flow of
information. These have become our prime
critical habits. Digital economies of signs and
space have pushed ethics and the polis towards
the 'fourth discontinuity.' First Copernicus,
then Darwin, followed by Nietzsche and Freud.
Pushing us out of our comfortable homes to
linger and reside alone in our fragile 'meat
space.'

Now "meta-attributes have replaced physical
attributes..." (John Beckmann, Blast), thoughts
with hyperlinks, and activity with instant
remoteness. The rush of being-on-line over comes
the becoming of Being. The online forums at
DocumentX attempt to suture the wound by
inhabiting our disappearance--the 'home-affect
and co/in-habit(u)ation' of the matrix.

In 1968 Edmund Leach said that what frighten
him, "more than the complexities now being
presented to the mind was the impulse to respond
with a reductive omniscience." These forums
certainly are not reductive and they capture the
process of social introjection which new media
dialogues engender. Of the three forums offered
at DocumentaX, the Blast forum moderated by Jordan
Crandall, has created the most impassioned leaps
in the darkness which swerve across the
electronic nervous system. Perhaps, because it
attempts to suture the wounds of art with the
formal "protocols" of a new media aesthetics.
That may create unfamiliar routes back towards a
new "art."

But, this new 'art' of increased bandwidth,
connectivity, and distributed informatics may
set the conditions of an aesthetics which will
be unrecognizable by the very hands and eyes
that set it forth. New media maybe the last
trace of art and the artist--they have been
introjected into the everyday exchange of market
realism. Art within the frame of new media is a
traumatic thing, an "...aching, and we do not
know where it hurts and that it hurts. It
struggles unsuccessfully to re-approach psychic
awareness, but only finds momentary relief in
symptomatic repetitions or, by subterfuge, in
artwork, where its painful encapsulation partly
blows up," (Blast, Lichtenberg-Ettinger).

The Blast forum then is spillage management for
something that is already lost and attempts to
find, "an aesthetic that saves...to reverse the
seemingly irreversible destiny of the modern
subject; to develop the phenomenology of
perception," (Attila Sohar, Blast). The Blast
forum is a life boat floating on a net without
islands, holding a cargo of empty figures, fading
into an invisible horizon--and they ask, "what
name do we have for defining our relationship to
blindness and calamity? These are questions for
the emerAgency." (Greg Ulmer, Blast). These are
the whimpers of our digital "Ate"--the tragic
impure net of co-aphanisis.

http://www.documenta.de/

ricardo dominguez

Thing Mag
http://www.thing.net/
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