Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Simulation, remediation

I think my reply to David more or less explains what I understand things and
experiences to be. As for apples and eating, the apple, the eater and the
eating are an event, a set of contigencies. The individual components of
that set of relationships cannot be undone or separated, although aspects of
that contingency can appear in other sets of relationships with other
characteristics (eg: bananas and oranges, even exotic fruit).

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs

Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk

Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk

From: Leo Cardoso <leocardoso@mail.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:32:09 -0600
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Simulation, remediation

discussing mediation/simulation in terms of the relationship between the
receiver's body and the immersive environment is interesting and may lead to
phenomenological questions, in the sense that the observer is conscious of
his/her own immersion, and hence consciousness of the mediation itself;
simulation necessarily implies mediation.

a point in which the simulation/mediation coupling collapses is perhaps the
direct simulation of experience from our very cognitive apparatus (i'll
mention Vanilla Sky just to avoid the obvious matrix example...).
at that point, however, (a) the awareness of mediation disappear, (b)
simulation and reality become ineffective terms, and (c) the aesthetic
experience (and i'm equating artwork with mediation) also fades away.

immersive art is simply a mode of engaging the body in an aesthetic
experience, which is quite the opposite of concealing that experience as a
mediated one.

Simon writes:
"It is possible to argue that the thing being experienced and that
experiencing are part of the same thing; that existence is found in the
interaction between things".

i'm not sure if i understand what you mean (english is not my primary
language), perhaps you mean "thing *as* being experienced" or something like
that.
the thing being experienced = apple
experiencing the thing = me eating the apple, experiencing the apple's
taste, etc.

what do you mean by 'part of the same thing'?

what existence are you referring in 'that existence is found in the
interaction between things'? if you talking about me experiencing the apple,
then i certainly agree with you, as any other verb put between me and the
apple in a sentence will refer to the interaction between these two things
(me and the apple).

how are we defining 'mediation'? what mediates my experience eating the
apple?

best,

leoC


On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:15 PM, fmarineo@libero.it
<fmarineo@libero.it>wrote:

> Simon writes:
> "It is possible to argue that the thing being experienced and that
> experiencing are part of the same thing; that existence is found in the
> interaction between things".
> I think this leads us to rethink the status of representation in accordance
> with the "scientific" idea that the observer and the observed are part of
> the same phenomenon. A very interesting perspective, and surely an
> antirelativistic one, is that offered by Karen Barad in her book "Meeting
> the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and
> meaning", whose key concepts can also be found in her previously publsihed
> short essay "Posthumanist Performativity: How Matter Comes to Matter"
> (Signs, vol. 28, n. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831). Here, she develops the notion of
> "agential realism" drawing on a critique of Bohr's physics, which I find
> very fruitful for those working in between the artistic and the scientific
> field (like me, on a theoretical level). Barad shifts from a
> representationalist perspective to a performativist one (and here is where
> feminist theory gives a great contribution), one which attributes
> performativity to matter, and at the same time propose!
> s an anti-representational form of realism.
> Here, "relations do not follows relata", in Barad's words, but mattering is
> itself a differentiating process (which also means that differences are not
> pre-given). Barad's theory is very complex and fascinating, and I do not
> want to enter into much detail here, but I firmly believe that her idea of
> agential realism allows to reconceive the intra-actions between humans
> (post-human in Barad's sense), non-humans, and the environments they live in
> so as to abandon any metaphysics of purity or essential truth ( as well as
> of immediacy), without nonetheless abandoning the possibility of
> objectivity.
>
> Jennifer, about "Avatar": personally, the level of hypermediacy it carries
> with it all the time made me have a filmic experience of total detachment.
> Every second, I was so totally aware of its excess of mediation, that I was
> never emotionally involved. Maybe, an alternance of hypermediacy and
> immediacy would have catched me a little bit more.
>
> Pier Luigi: incidentally, the van de Vall's article I was mentioning in my
> previous post talks about Cronberg's ExistenZ too...
>
> Best,
> Federica
>
>
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--
Leo Cardoso
Graduate student
Butler School of Music
University of Texas at Austin
leocardoso@mail.utexas.edu
(512) 216-8205
http://leocardoso.org/
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