<nettime> CULTURAL GEOLOGY, CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY

[Tom Sherman <twsherma@mailbox.syr.edu>]

CULTURAL GEOLOGY, CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY

When I think about content aggregators, the fabricators of digital
multimedia, I get the feeling they are making or forging new rocks, not
cultural objects.  The word aggregate is so closely associated with
geology.  Humans now exert geophysical forces, forging new aggregate
compositions.  This isn't just about sticking things together with a
glue-gun, but it is an act of fusion, the permanent bonding of previously
discrete elements.  And in terms of the geophysical, it is the elimination
of geography, of specific location...this is the view from the macroscope.  
The different kinds of rocks and their respective mountains are
compressed, and locales, definable differences of place, are eliminated.

What is the magic process, the power that forges aggregation?  Is it a
massive, sustained pressure, like that that crushes carbon into diamonds,
or is it a sophistication of knowledge, simply knowing precisely how to do
it?

So much of the electronic culture is paper thin, only skin deep--or
dilute, like the weakest solutions.  The music, TV, movies, whatever, they
all seem incredibly thin, adhering inadvertently to the 20% rule (cultural
elements today generally have only 20% resolutions), functioning as mere
potential components-- everything has to be nice and thin and dilute to be
mixed together productively, successfully...

There are cheap formulas or recipes for aggregation...procedures for
dealing with the mix, and from the user's perspective, the fix...  When we
speak of the fix, this implies addiction.  The info mix and the info fix.  
The information provider is the dealer--the user is the junkie.

Everyone is massaging the message.  Sampling and recombination are
displacing contemplation.  Updating equals freshness.  In terms of
refreshing reality, come back next week and it'll be a whole different
story...  One week I've got cancer and the next, I'm totally healthy.  
Actually I'm as healthy as an unknown virus on the surface of the warm
waters just off the south coast of the Dominican Republic.  We would like
to make all of life's sequences or progressions reversible, curing
diseases, reversing or stalling the aging process, defying death,
eliminating taxes, and creating breathing space and room for creativity in
bureaucracies...
 
The predominant idea in digital multimedia is the creation of density and
mass through aggregation.  Although in biological terms, genetic
engineering permits the fusion of biological traits through a physically
articulate, more precisely targeted process of aggregation.  The idea of
accelerating evolution or simply growing varieties of Frankenstein is far
more sophisticated than multimedia's characteristic parallel sources and
overload (content aggregation via density and mass).


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HYBRIDITY, TRANSPARENCY AND LOSS

Increasingly there is nothing new to watch, or to listen to, or to think
about.  This is a loss due to the homogenization or blend of cultures.  
It reminds me of the announcers on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio program saying we no longer have to call world music 'world music.'
Canada is a multicultural nation and therefore world music produced and
appreciated in Canada is 'Canadian music.'

Nationalism is the ultimate aggregator.  Diverse cultures are amassed and
totalled into composite national cultures.


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SUPER-MORPHING SAGA

New technologies will come and go, but human nature advances or regresses
slowly...  We always look to new technologies to stimulate social
interaction.  We want to buy friendship, dialogue, community, presence and
influence...ultimately respect.

We are the content of any new medium.  First the content is the people,
then the medium itself, and finally people emerge again as the content of
any new, but aging, medium.

It's a story of people transcending or overcoming media--it is a kind of
super-morphing saga where people transform into and emerge from inanimate
objects.

We are just as genetically hardwired as the birds and bees, with our
instincts, our most fundamental behaviours, plus we have our religious
conditioning, family values, societal engineering, class status and
politics...

We carry large complex architectures of thought with us wherever we
go--architectures of thought unique in detail, but surprisingly uniform in
architecture and overall assembly.



Tom Sherman


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Syracuse University
Department of Art Media Studies
102 Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse, NY 13244-1210
tel) 315-443-1033
fax) 315-443-1303

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http://www.allquiet.org/
http://www.screenarts.net.au/tool/tool20b/sherman/org.html
http://thing.at/granular-synthesis/html/shermte.htm#shetop

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