Jordan Crandall on Mon, 7 Oct 96 15:39 MET |
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nettime: notes on pages/J Crandall |
notes on pages _Blast_ has set out to reflect changing practices of reading and viewing, in terms of a publication. This has led to investigations of changing modes of perception, and changing ways in which a reader/viewer is figured. This leads to an exploration of changing modes of production, and various techniques of systematization and regimentation. Think of such givens as the "binding." The binding is not only the glue that connects the pages, but the organizational structure the upholds the glue--the process of structuring and systematizing. It is the forces and practices that seek to hold together, to structure an experience and a form of perception, to enforce roles, to mobilize or immobilize a body. What kinds of bodies, capacities, and behaviors does this binding help to shape? And what publicational forms do those bodies and behaviors help determine? Think of the page and how a reader interacts it. You hold the publication and you read the page, and sometimes your imagination takes you away from your chair and into a story. If you read a compelling story you inhabit it slightly; you get a taste of the scenery and a feel for the people there. Good editorial takes you somewhere else, and in the process, broadens your everyday reality. The page, however, is not only something you hold in your hand, and it may not even be attached to anything. New technologies enable new forms of pages and more powerful mechanisms for their engagement. For example, there is the Web page. The Web more powerfully offers the illusion of transporting you. Maybe it's not so much an illusion anymore, but a new form of transportation. (In fact, maybe pages were always about transportation.) More immersive, three-dimensional pages are developing that allow us to submerge ourselves in new realities. These pages and their apparatus not only transport, but they grip the body, affecting it in powerful ways--more effective than "imagination." (That mode of transport has been updated like a new car model.) Your body physiologically responds-- your heart pounds, your eyes dart about, and your hands clutch the air. One could therefore see pages in terms of techniques of the body. But now the page itself has a body, and it houses bodies and agencies within its confines, which are no longer confines in the traditional sense. What constitutes the page? If the term refers to both printed sheets and computer screens, there is something that they both share. This could be regarded as the interaction of code and interface. Codes are arrayed on a surface ("representation"), and that surface is part of a mechanism of conveyance--an apparatus that transfers and arranges the codes, while being determined by them. In the printed book, it's not only the pages, but the machinery of their assemblage and distribution--that is, the production paradigm that upholds the book form. On the computer, it is not the screen, but the mechanism that arrays the codes there, along with its production paradigm. The latter contains strata: layers of codes and interfaces, visible as one probes beneath the user-friendly surface. While these paradigms are very different, the page is a kind of switch term that is able to traffic between them. Not in the sense of linkage, but of conduction. Interfaces and codes are enmeshed in practices, where they might be called "technology" and "discourse." These interfacing and inscribing practices coalesce in a form that might be called a page, but it could just as well be some other form. It needs to be embodied, in order for it to be recognized. And it needs to locate a viewing body, a reader, to recognize it. As such it affects the way it is viewed, even as it is located through viewing-effects. These incorporations--reader, page--bound and determine each other like dual ends of lassoes, each linked to incorporating forces and practices that form their conditions of possibility. Viewing trajectories can splinter off into mobile viewpoints within the body of the page. The gaze does not hit the page from one side, because the page opens up into a hall of mirrors and becomes a social field. It is part of an apparatus of vision. It is inhabitable. It looks back. Pages are enmeshed in matrices among embodying practices, technological practices, and discursive practices. Pages "face" for these practices and forces: they are facings that might operate as walls, interactive apparatus, or representations, where they increasingly open onto spaces, which they heretofore have only represented. A mesh of interfaces, codes, and incorporations, indelibly linked and codetermining, influence each other in complex, performative and processual loops. To diagram these components is to depict them in endless chains, chains that form various fields of knowledge and practice. This diagram resembles a hypertext. But like hypertextual diagrams and web metaphors, a birds-eye view is problematic, and presupposes and exteriority from which to view it from above. The viewpoint is always enmeshed in its fields. And the hyperlink vector positions an empty, interstitial space, a ground which seems to have distance, where there is no longer space nor distance. Such diagrams are better turned sideways, into a horizon. Links vanish. What replaces them are patterns of overlap and conduction. The diagram looks like the opthlamologist's Phoroptor, the device that tests for vision. These conductions are temporary aligned in "moments" of a discourse, and ordered in articulatory acts. The "orderer" has no stable distance from which to master them. It calls forth and orders but does not finalize, and it performs itself in that act of ordering. Articulatory acts are bounded into various editorial formations, which are unstable and incomplete. The publication attempts to give them an illusory completeness, to frame, bind, reproduce these formations as its pages, to systematize and circulate stacks of them in line with normalizing techniques and assumptions. But what other social forms bubble up from this new ecology? Perhaps a matrix, in Lyotard's sense. The page merges with space, or unleashes space. The library, bank, trading floor, shopping space, and theater, for example, are built of pages and spaces. How is a page accessed, navigated, and determined? How is a space accessed, navigated, and determined? And what kind of reader/navigator do these locate, what visionary faculties, what forms of figuration, what modes of navigation? Perhaps "pacing" might provide a metaphor. (It may not be the best one, but in any case it is better than "browsing," which evokes the consumer endlessly wandering through shopping aisles.) In one sense pacing is a way of mapping one medium or realm upon another, as when the artist draws from life, his or her eye pacing back and forth between the real and its drawn representation in order to align the two realms in some way. At the same time, it never fully aligns those realms, maintaining unresolved motions and spaces between them. It suggests a visual, nonlinear figuration, where the eye paces within and between frames, not in fixed sequence, registering meaning through differences and correspondences. At the same time, it de-emphasizes the visual, because pacing suggests a rhythm, a beat, which underlies and undercuts the optical, as when one suddenly jumps to one's feet to pace about a room, generating a rhythm that upholds and informs thought. This is done through abstraction and localization. The body moves about in order to spatialize and mobilize thought, while at the same time, focusing it, wrestling it to the ground. Boundaries of space and body are abstracted through this movement, while at the same time reinforced, because pacing generates a mappable pattern and reinforces physical presence. It is highly carnal, but it arrives at this carnality through interstitial forms. Through its rhythm, bodies, spaces, and representations are converted into one another. Space is suspended through the page, and this suspension is itself a structuring principle. -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de