from my previous post in thinking about documentation, I was of course thinking largely about the digital space. an essay/writing in viola's Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House explores this idea in depth and there are a lot of mind-blowing things in it... I typed up some of the most valuable parts here.. (though all of it was valuable)
originally, I was searching for that one quote that blew me away - which is actually the first sentence, which is:
p.98 Possibly the most startling thing about our individual existence is that it is continuous. It is an unbroken thread - we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives us the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods, or sections, of certain times or "highlights." Hollywood movies and the media, of course, reinforce this perception.
If things are perceived as discrete parts or elements, they can be rearranged. Gaps become most interesting as places of shadow, open to projection. Memory can be regarded as a filter (as are the five senses) - it is a device implanted for our survival.
...and everything after this was endlessly fascinating too, but I won't type out the whole thing. just some, and I'm going to attach images of the pages.
p.99 ...This reincarnates one of the early curses of video art - "record everything," the saturation-bombing approach to life which made so many early video shows so boring and impossible to sit through. Life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting.
...Artificial memory systems have been around for centuries. The early Greeks had their walks through temple (footnote: The Greeks perfected a system of memory that used the mental imprinting of objects or key points to be remembered onto specific locations along a pathway previously memorised from an actual temple. To recall the points in their proper order, one simply had to take the walk through the temple in one's mind, observing the contents left at each location along the way.), and successive cultures have refined and developed so-called "mnemo-technics" - Thomas Aquinas described an elaborate memory scheme of projecting images and ideas on places; in 1482 Jacobus Publicius wrote of using the spheres of the universe as a memory system; Giulio created a "Memory Theater" in Italy in the early 1500s; and Giodano Bruno diagrammed his system of artificial memory in his work Shadows, published in 1582. Frances Yates describes this entire remarkable area in her brilliant book The Art of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Greek temple memorisation: Method of Ioci
'The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique.'
p.100-1 The interesting thing about idea spaces and memory systems is that they presuppose the existence of some sort of place, either real or graphic, which has its own structure and architecture. There is always a whole space, which already exists in its entirety, onto which ideas and images can be mapped, using only that portion of the space needed.
In addition to the familiar model of pre-recorded time unfolding along a linear path (as evidenced by many things from our writing system to the thread of magnetic tape playing in a videotape recorder), there is another parallel to be linked with modern technology. "Data space" is a term we hear in connection with computers. The information must be entered into ao computer's memory to create a set of parameters, defining some sort of ground, or field, where future calculations and binary events will occur, In three-dimensional computer graphics, this field exists as an imaginary but real chunk of space, a conceptual geometry, theoretically infinite, within which various forms may be created, manipulated, extended, and destroyed. The graphics display screen becomes that mysterious third point of view looking in on this space(we often call it our "mind's eye"), which can be moved about and relocated from any angle at will. The catch is that the space must exist in the computer first, so that there is a reference system within which to locate the various coordinates of points and lines called into being by the operator.
In our brain, constantly flickering pulses of neuron firings create a steady-state field onto which disturbances and perturbations are registered as percepts and thought forms. This is the notion that something is already "on" before you approach it, like the universe, or like a video camera which always needs to be "video-ing" even if there is only a blank raster ("nothing") to see. Turn it off, and it's not video anymore.
p.101 When I had my first experience with computer videotape editing in 1976, one demand this new way of working impressed upon me has remained significant. It is the idea of holism. I saw then that my piece was actually finished and in existence before it was executed in the VTRs. Digital computers and software technologies are holistic; they think in terms of whole structures. Word processors allow one to write out, correct, and rearrange the whole letter before typing it.l Data space is fluid and temporal, hardcopy is for real - an object is born and becomes fixed in time. Chiseling in stone may be the ultimate hard copy.
p.102 Poetry has always had a level that video or film cannot approach (at least not yet): the existence of the words on paper (how the poem looks, how the words are placed on the page, the gaps, the spacing, etc). The whole poem is there before us, and, starting at the top of the page, we can see the end before we actually get there.
Our cultural concept of education and knowledge is based upon the idea of building something up from a ground, from zero, and starting piece by piece to put things together, to construct edifices. It is addictive. If we approach this process from the other direction, considering it to be backward, or subtractive, all sorts of things start to happen. Scientists always marvel at nature, at how it seems to be some grand code, with a built-in sense of purpose. Discoveries are made which reveal that more and more things are related, connected. Everything appears to be aware of itself and everything else, all fitting into an interlocking whole. We quite literally carve out our own realities. If you want to make a jigsaw puzzle, you must first start with the whole image, and then cut it up, The observer, working backwards into the system, has the point of view that he or she is building things up, putting it together piece by piece, The prophet, Mohamed has said, "All knowledge is but a single point - it is the ignorant who have multiplied it."
p.106 As in the figure/ground shifts described in Gestalt psychology, we are in the process of a shift away from the temporal, piece-by-piece approach of constructing a program (symbolised by the camera and its monocular, narrow, tunnel-of-vision, single point of view), and towards a spatial, total-field approach of carving out potentially multiple programs (symbolised by the computer and its holistic software models, data space and infinite points of view). We are proceeding from models of the eye and ear to models of thought processes and conceptual structures in the brain. "Conceptual Art" will take on a new meaning.
In addition to the familiar model of pre-recorded time unfolding along a linear path (as evidenced by many things from our writing system to the thread of magnetic tape playing in a videotape recorder), there is another parallel to be linked with modern technology. "Data space" is a term we hear in connection with computers. The information must be entered into ao computer's memory to create a set of parameters, defining some sort of ground, or field, where future calculations and binary events will occur, In three-dimensional computer graphics, this field exists as an imaginary but real chunk of space, a conceptual geometry, theoretically infinite, within which various forms may be created, manipulated, extended, and destroyed. The graphics display screen becomes that mysterious third point of view looking in on this space(we often call it our "mind's eye"), which can be moved about and relocated from any angle at will. The catch is that the space must exist in the computer first, so that there is a reference system within which to locate the various coordinates of points and lines called into being by the operator.
In our brain, constantly flickering pulses of neuron firings create a steady-state field onto which disturbances and perturbations are registered as percepts and thought forms. This is the notion that something is already "on" before you approach it, like the universe, or like a video camera which always needs to be "video-ing" even if there is only a blank raster ("nothing") to see. Turn it off, and it's not video anymore.
p.101 When I had my first experience with computer videotape editing in 1976, one demand this new way of working impressed upon me has remained significant. It is the idea of holism. I saw then that my piece was actually finished and in existence before it was executed in the VTRs. Digital computers and software technologies are holistic; they think in terms of whole structures. Word processors allow one to write out, correct, and rearrange the whole letter before typing it.l Data space is fluid and temporal, hardcopy is for real - an object is born and becomes fixed in time. Chiseling in stone may be the ultimate hard copy.
p.102 Poetry has always had a level that video or film cannot approach (at least not yet): the existence of the words on paper (how the poem looks, how the words are placed on the page, the gaps, the spacing, etc). The whole poem is there before us, and, starting at the top of the page, we can see the end before we actually get there.
Our cultural concept of education and knowledge is based upon the idea of building something up from a ground, from zero, and starting piece by piece to put things together, to construct edifices. It is addictive. If we approach this process from the other direction, considering it to be backward, or subtractive, all sorts of things start to happen. Scientists always marvel at nature, at how it seems to be some grand code, with a built-in sense of purpose. Discoveries are made which reveal that more and more things are related, connected. Everything appears to be aware of itself and everything else, all fitting into an interlocking whole. We quite literally carve out our own realities. If you want to make a jigsaw puzzle, you must first start with the whole image, and then cut it up, The observer, working backwards into the system, has the point of view that he or she is building things up, putting it together piece by piece, The prophet, Mohamed has said, "All knowledge is but a single point - it is the ignorant who have multiplied it."
p.106 As in the figure/ground shifts described in Gestalt psychology, we are in the process of a shift away from the temporal, piece-by-piece approach of constructing a program (symbolised by the camera and its monocular, narrow, tunnel-of-vision, single point of view), and towards a spatial, total-field approach of carving out potentially multiple programs (symbolised by the computer and its holistic software models, data space and infinite points of view). We are proceeding from models of the eye and ear to models of thought processes and conceptual structures in the brain. "Conceptual Art" will take on a new meaning.
