Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 17:43:15 -0400
From: ostrow-AT-is2.nyu.edu (Ostrow/Kaneda)
Subject: Re: ostrow


O's last statement upholds traditional and contemporary
>examples of painterly thought against how digital aesthetics- which are
>certainly more representative of societal values, shape everything,
>especially in an ever more global-economy world - which some think is
>headed for one big, homogenous digi-dodo-culture.


While I do think we are headed for one big, homogenous digi-dodo-culture,
I do not think it is inevitable but will only be once again the result of
ignorance and  an enforced forgetfulness. The fact is that I do think that
with each advancement  of technology the stakes get higher and because our
relationships to one another have not significantly changed in the last 150
years we find ourselves being technological returned  to the romantic state
of the "self" which is merely a socially defined role  that will
re-establish us as  mere objects of the social and cultural.  With this
"Will" as a collective desire is dissipated, the ideal ( even if it is only
mythic ) of Subjecthood is diluted and returned to us as a discussion of
the Subject.  As I pointedly announced for me this exchange is political,
it has to do with world view, the will to power and its economy-- in other
words how will we and to what end  form our symbollic reality.

Technology even in its as yet still only partially connected state has and
does create an incredible attraction to give ourselves over to the
instruments and institutions that lurk within it.  As with all mass media
the world that is to be transmitted is out of our hands --  though  the
producers of labratory cultures ( both experimental and redemptive)  have
traditionally resisted being incorporated  by upholding  and promoting
models   the mass media can never meet or promote. Part of the problem at
present is that there is a real desire ( fabricated or induced)  not to
miss out on the new.

 I for one see the digital as a powerful tool one we must determine what it
is we can do with it rather than whgat it can do with us.  My resistence to
something like Brace's project lies in the fact that  it makes his images (
dare we still call them photos) just like everything else, secondary to
their delievery system. Distribution takes priority over what is
distributed.  My problem with this is that at present  much of what at
present distributed via this medium is primarily geared to the reproduction
of the means of distribution.  Given that this is a social and economic
structure being replicated as acultural one it moves what little cultural
autonomy that remains closer to its final demise, and culture will have
become totally dominated in form, content and mode of distribution a
conponent of what Adorno in the 1930's identified as the culture incustry.
An industry that is characterized by producing a need for the very products
it produces.

I find that it is interesting that exchanges such as these concerning  the
nature of aesthetic culture vs information culture ( be they couched in
terms of accessiblity or nihilist rhetoric)  more often then not focus on
the questions of the effects these systems  have on thier respective
consumers   or  debate the previleging of one over the other  ( which is in
itself is a not very post-modern stance ) but   seldom  focus on the subtle
issues  that the   specific systems  or conceptual  networks  that form
our ability to interpret  such events conceptually depend on a
historically  determined  systems of thought and desire that continue to be
left  untouched by the critique of post structuralism  and thus allows us
to nearly acritically embrace the progress  of the digital.  In other words
why is so much of this premised on an  ideal of a world of representations
available only to the mind in which all  other sensory data is made
subordinant?

Beyond this , or perhaps because of it,  Joseph I find your  formulation
which pits  painterly thought and digital  aesthetics  against one another
somewhat strange.  I would have thought that what I  represent ( if I
represent  anything) is a painterly ( sensuous) aesthetic  at least in this
case versus Digital thought.  I would suppose this only because the
aesthetic is an appeal to the senses and the digital has no such appeal as
of yet given that in the main its continues to exist either behind the
glass of my screen or dressed up in the borrowed appearences of other
mediums (predominantly film, photography and that of printing) .






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