deleuze in Constant 2009
entail.
I am of course taking my cue here from the philosopher Manuel DeLanda who in his 1991 book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines,
asked what would the history of warfare look like from the viewpoint
of a future robot historian? An exercise perhaps in creative imagination, DeLanda's question also served other ends relating to physics of
self-organization. My point is not to discuss DeLanda, or the history
of war machines, but I want to pick an idea from this kind of an
approach, an idea that could be integrated into media archaeological considerations, concerning actual or imaginary media. As already
said, imagining alternative worlds is not the endpoint of this exercise
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in ‘insect media', but a way to dip into an alternative understanding
of media and technology, where such general categories as ‘humans'
and ‘machines' are merely the endpoints of intensive flows, capacities, tendencies and functions. Such a stance takes much of its force
from Gilles Deleuze's philosophical ontology of abstract materialism,
which focuses primarily on a Spinozian ontology of intensities, capacities and functions. In this sense, the human being is not a distinct
being in the world with secondary qualities, but a “capacity to signify, exchange, and communicate”, as Claire Colebrook has pointed
out in her article ‘The Sense of Space' (Postmodern Culture). This
opens up a new agenda not focused on ‘beings' and their tools, but
on capacities and tendencies that construct and create beings in a
move which emphasizes Deleuze's interest in pre-Kantian worlds of
baroque. In addition, this move includes a multiplication of subjectivities and objects of the world, a certain autonomy of the material
world beyond the privileged observer. Like everybody who has done
gardening knows: there is a world teeming with life outside the human
sphere, with every bush and tree being a whole society in itself.
To put it shortly, still following Colebrook's recent writing on the
concept of affect, what Deleuze found in the baroque worlds of windowless monads was a capacity of perception that does not stem from
a universalising idea of perception in general. Man or any general
condition of perception is not the primary privileged position of perception but perceptions and creations of space and temporality are
multiplied in the numerous monadic worlds, a distributed perception
of a kind that according to Deleuze later found resonance in the philosophy of A.N.Whitehead. For Whitehead, the perceiving subject is
more akin to a ‘superject', a second order construction from the sum
of its perceptions. It is the world perceived that makes up superjects
and based on the variations of perceptions also alternative worlds.
Baroque worlds, argues Deleuze in his book Le Pli from 1988, are
characterised by the primacy of variation and perspectivism which is
a much more radical notion than a relativist idea of different subjects
having different perspectives on the world. Instead, “the subject will
be what comes to the point of view”, and where “the point of view is
not what varies with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to
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the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends
a variation (metamorphosis). . . ”.
Now why this focus on philosophy, this short excursion that merely
sketches some themes around variation and imagination? What I am
after is an idea of how to smuggle certain ideas of variation, modulation and perception into considerations of media culture, media
archaeology and potentially also imaginary media, where imaginary
media become less a matter of a Lacanian mirror phase looking for
utopian communication offering unity, but a deterritorialising way
of understan
contexts for contemporary analysis and design of media systems. In a way, then, the concept of the ‘insect' functions here
as a displacing and a deterritorialising force that seeks a questioning
of where and in what kind of conditions we approach media technologies. This is perhaps an approach that moves beyond a focus on
technology per se, but still does not remain blind to the material forces
of the world. It presents an alternative to the ‘substance-approaches'
that start from a stability or a ground like ‘technology' or ‘humans'.
It is my claim that Deleuzian biophilosophy, that has taken elements
from Spinozian ontology, von Uexküll's ethology, Whitehead's ideas
as well as Simondon's notions on individuation, is able to approach
the world as media in itself: a contracting of forces and analysing
them in terms of their affects, movements, speeds and slownesses.
These affects are primary defining capacities of an entity, instead of
a substance or a class it belongs to, as Deleuze explains in his short
book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. From this perspective we can
adopt a novel media archaeological rewiring that looks at media history not as one of inventors, geniuses and solid technologies, but as a
field of affects, interactions and modes of sensation and perception.
Examples from the 19 th century popular discourse are illustrative.
In 1897, New York Times addressed spiders as ‘builders, engineers
and weavers', and also as ‘the original inventors of a system of telegraphy'. Spiders' webs offer themselves as ingenious communication
systems which do not merely signal according to a binary setting
(something has hit the web/has not hit the web) but transmits information regarding the “general character and weight of any object
touching it (. . . )” Or take for example the book Beautés et merveilles
de la nature et des arts by Eliçagaray from the 18 th century which
lists both technological and animal wonders, for example bees and
ants, electricity an
experimentation with
new bodily realities is a form of becoming-insect of the technological
human body. Imagining by doing is a way to engage directly with
affects of becoming-animal of media where the work of sound and
body artists doubles the media archaeological analysis of historical
strata. In other words, one should not reside on the level of intriguing representations of imagined ways of communication, or imagined
apparatuses that never existed, but realize the overabundance of real
sensations, perceptions to contract, to fold, the neomaterialist view
towards imagined media.
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Literature
Ernest van Bruyssel, The population of an old pear-tree; or, Stories
of insect life. (New York: Macmillan and co., 1870).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Roger
Lancelyn Green. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Claire Colebrook, ‘The Sense of Space. On the Specificity of Affect
in Deleuze and Guattari.' In: Postmodern Culture, vol. 15, issue 1,
2004.
Steven Connor, fly. (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. (New
York: Zone Books, 1991).
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Transl. Robert
Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988).
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Transl. Tom Conley. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. (Braunschweig:
Druck und Verlag von George Westermann, 1877).
William Kirby & William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology,
or Elements of the Natural History of Insects. Volumes 1 and 2.
Unabridged Faximile of the 1843 edition. (London: Elibron, 2005).
Eric Kluitenberg (ed.), Book of Imaginary Media. Excavating the
Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium. (Rotterdam: NAi
publishers, 2006).
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of
Victorian Nonsense Literature. (London: Routledge, 1994).
Jussi Parikka, ‘Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies.' In:
(Un)Easy Alliance - Thinking the Environment with Deleuze/Guattari, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, Forthcoming 2008).
Siegfried Zielinski, ‘Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola. A Case
Study on Athanius Kircher's World of Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real.' In: Book of Imaginary Media, edited by Kluitenberg. (Rotterdam: NAi, 2006).
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PIERRE BERTHET
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
EN
Extended speakers
& Concert with various extended objects
We invited Belgian artist Pierre Berthet to create an installation
for V/J10 that explores the resonance of EVP voices. He made a
netting of thin metal wires which he suspended from the ceiling of
the haunted house in the La Bellone courtyard.
Through these metal wires, loudspeakers without membranes were
connected to a network of resonating cans. Sinus tones and radio
recordings were transmitted through the speakers, making the metal
wires vibrate which, in their turn, caused the cans to resonate.
figure 2
deo itself is a prime example of contemporary DSP at
work. Two aspects of this promotional video for the UMPC, the UltraMobile PC, relate to digital signal processing. There is much signal
processing here. It connects the individual's eyes, mouths and ears
to screens that display information services of various kinds. There
is also much signal processing in the wireless network infrastructures
that connect all these gadgets to each other and to various information services (maps, calendars, news feeds). In just this example,
sound, video, speech recognition, fibre, wireless and satellite, imaging
technologies in medicine all rely on DSP. We could say a good portion
of our experience is DSP-based.
This paper is an attempt to develop a theory of digital signal processing, a theory that could be used to talk about ways of contesting,
critiquing, or making alternatives. The theory under development
here relies a lot on two notions, ‘intensive movement' and ‘centre
of envelopment' that Deleuze proposed in Difference and Repetition.
figure 117
A promotional video
from Intel
for the UltraMobilePC
1
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GFS2TiK3AI
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However, I want to keep the philosophy in the background as much as
possible. I basically want to argue that we need to ask: why does so
much have to be enveloped or interiorised in wireless or audiovisual
DSP?
How does DSP differ from other algorithmic processes?
What can we say about DSP? firstly, influenced by recent software
studies-based approaches (Fuller, Chun, Galloway, Manovich), I think
it is worth comparing the kinds of algorithmic processes that take
place in DSP with those found in new media more generally. Although
it is an incredibly broad generalisation, I think it is safe to say that
DSP does not belong to the set-based algorithms and data-structures
that form the basis of much interest in new media interactivity or
design.
DSP differs from set-based code. If we think of social software such
as flic
n messy configurations of buildings, things and people, which
obstruct waves and bounce signals around. The same signal may
be received many times through different echoes (‘multipath echo'
). Because of the presence of crowds of other signals, and the limited spectrum available for any one transmission, wirelessness needs
to be very careful in its selection of paths if experience is to stream
rather than just buzz. The problem for wireless communication is to
micro-differentiate many paths and to allow them to interweave and
entwine with each other without coming into relation.
So the changing architectures of code and computation associated
with DSP in wireless networks does more, I would argue, than fit in
with changing geography of computing. It belongs to a more intensive, enveloped, and enveloping set of movements. To begin addressing this dynamic, we might say that wireless DSP is the armature
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of a centre of envelopment. This is a concept that Gilles Deleuze
proposes late in Difference and Repetition. ‘Centres of envelopment'
are a way of understanding how extensive movements arise from intensive movement. Such centres crop up in ‘complex systems' when
differences come into relation:
to the extent that every phenomenon finds its reason in a difference of intensity which frames it, as though this constituted
the boundaries between which it flashes, we claim that complex
systems increasingly tend to interiorise their constitutive differences: the centres of envelopment carry out this interiorisation
of the individuating factors. (Deleuze, 2001, 256)
Much of what I have been describing as the intensive movement
that folds spaces and times inside DSP can be understood in terms
of an interiorisation of constitutive differences. An intensive movement always entails a change in the nature of change. In this case,
a difference in intensity arises when many signals need to co-habit
that same place and moment. The problem is: how can many signal
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