File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1997/avant-garde.9704, message 22


Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 14:11:15 +0200 (METDST)
From: jnech-AT-imaginet.fr (NECHVATAL Joseph)
Subject: Re: intermedia


SO:
>I don't think this is mine in that while I made reference to the end of the
>reign of the panoptic I would have never premised the global village on it
>but merely the end of the fragmentation of the senses associated with
>modernism.  The reason that the digital may be discribed as constituting
>what is concieved of as  intermedia is that it is, once fully realized
>connstitute a universal medium-- the same zero's and one's  can be played
>out as text, image,music, animation, sensation, etc.  The global village
>snd its accompanying conception of the nomadic and the tribal were
>concieved of as being effects of capital re-enforced by   television and is
>premised on the sense of immanence that htis medium induced which is
>significantly different that that of the virtual associated with the
>digital.

...which is characterized by its excesses. Auge names three such excesses
in supermodernity. In contrast to accounts of postmodernity in which there
is a general "collapse of an idea of progress", in supermodernity there is
an "acceleration of history" that results, not in meaninglessness, but  in
the excess of meaningful events. This excess of historical significance,
rather than leaving us complacent, "makes us even more avid for meaning".

Virilio argued that the acceleration of history actually makes possible the
transformation of space in what he calls the "shrinking effect" (village
not burb or citie) . Referring to this phenomenon, Virilio quotes French
physicist Chappes on the telegraph, "The best response to journalists who
think France is too spread out to form a republic is to install the
telegraph. The telegraph shrinks distances and in a way joins an entire,
huge population into a single point. Electronic digi media = supermodernity
= compressed AND blown out space.

Digital-supermodernity works on the principle of spatialy shrunk
overabundance - in which the unfamiliarity and expanse of space is
compressed into the familiarity and knowability of place (the village
people). This compression results in excessive possibilities for
assimilating spatial overabundance as knowledge within one's rhetorical
territory, because the compressed digital becomes the focal point into
which knowledge from all over the world is funneled.

The third excess of supermodernity is the individual's response to the
other two excesses.

X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X
Joseph Nechvatal, Paris, France, Europa
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech
X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X 




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