Light (2)

The multidimensional mysteries facing the analyst of light in the early 21st century are neither more nor less characteristic of our times than the explorations of Grosseteste or the indications of Newton were to theirs. The answer, the first part of the answer, to the question "What is Light?" is "Light has a history", not only as practice, nor even as an experience, but as an idea. Informing and informed by technologies and techniques, evidence and sensation, light changes.

Gnosticism

What has always repelled materialists from the hermetic tradition is not its whimsy but on the contrary the solemnity with which its priesthood has historically erected ever more complex cathedrals of theodicy and theogeny on the intuition that something 'more' inhabits, locates and frames the givenness of the world. It is sad therefore to note that materialism has often – though not universally – eschewed any address to the sacred. By this I do not mean that materialism in any way fails for lack of a theology, nor that the sacred forms some ontological ground on which the material world is more deeply founded. Rather, what has been often lacking is a commitment to understanding that affect which we recognise under the rubric of sacredness, an elevation beyond not merely the instinctual but also the intellectual pleasures, a yearning apart from the desire for justice, peace and plenty for all. Since the term sacred has, moreover, been tainted by centuries of mouthing in institutions that have done little for justice, peace or plenty, we need another term, one that might displace the materialist reluctance to address affect in general and this affect in particular. I propose a mediological enquiry into the nature of wonder.

(from a review of Siegfried Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media for Leonardo Digital Reviews)

1962

1962: the year of the Cuban missile crisis, also saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the book that launched ecology as a global political movement. In less than fifty years, we have moved from the fear that politicians would annihilate us through their actions to the fear that they will annihilate us through their inaction.

(from "16 Theses on Meteorological Art" for the exhibition The Trouble with Weather at the UTS Gallery, Sydney, June-July 2007)

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

It turns out to be harder to get agreement on engineering standards and capabilities of video and digital technologies than, in my naivety, I had expected. Between boosterism and bench-test, even the range of tones between black and white in greyscale is moot. Learning about the edge-finding contrast lines deployed in digital video to boost apparent resolution, the need to balance the different optics – quantum, physical, physiological and neural – has never seemed more pressing.

Mystery is not confined to the infinitessimal fabric of the universe, or to the vast complexity of the brain. It irrupts at the heart of engineering. The kind of obscene familiarity Heidegger so fears in technology depends on a lack of inquisitiveness about every term in the mediation of light, a process which appears less and less to possess anything corresponding to an essence.

(Partial response to
http://highdefinition-nomercy.blogspot.com/2007/05/hd-smaytchd.html)

In memoriam Thierry Kuntzel

there is the awful leaden weight of death over the thought of Heidegger. what is so depressing about it is the absurdity which he gives it: the meaninglessness. I don't mean that deatth is intrinsically meaningful, but that it has many meanings, for specific dyings. And each is embedded in a locale, in a world, among the living and the dying, for whom it means immensely

Thierry Kuntzel's Nostos is currently showing at ACMI in the Beaubourg touring video retrospective. It is a lovely thing, the inhabitance of a room with light, recorded in greyscale, on a bank of (memory supplying details) nine monitors in a 3x3 grid (might be 4x4). They are heritage boxes, and the light trap is excellent, so you are alert to the fading of light, the flare in the camera - which would have been a tube camera, liable to comet tails and saturation - and the sluggish decay of the phosphors in the old tubes, longer and slower than the modern ones, and longer and slower than the simple line scan overwriting a flare of brightness. Because the light trap is so good you're aware of the blaze of light - you are basically in night-vision mode, all rods, few cones, straining after the photons, but when they burst your rods flare out and carry the afterimage.

These beautiful artefacts (as engineers will call them - unexpected or unwanted products of the technology) are integral to the devices it is shown on (I recall seeing a single channel version years ago at the Institut Francais in London, in a dimmed but ambient-lit room, very differently - i recall a blue tone to the image there, but that might be a trick of memory). These screens will eventually lose the capacity to show the work, and it will be reconstructed, in a new form on new screens. With luck it will be around for years to come, transferred to new storage media. Perhaps the archivists will try to register some of these artefacts - tone the screens with an ambient grey to denote, or point towards, the off-black quality of video black back in the day.

The archive of digital materials points us always to the fundamental ephemerality of this seeing, this version, this event, this mounting and staging, this moment of viewing which is so tragically tied to time, but which makes its statement against panic by offering, as the obverse of tragedy, the utterly now.

Kuntzel's Nostos is its own tribute to the way electronic media more perhaps than any other except performance -- which Nostos records in the actions of the woman in the room we see passing light over the walls -- , or the media of everyday interactions, kisses, kindnesses - the way electronic media can, if they wish, announce their own fading as integral to their experience.

In this way Nostos teaches us not to mourn, or to mourn in the knowledge that life is for the living, but dying is for the living too.

(post to empyre list 27 April 07)

Rods and Cones

120 million rods, but only 5, 6 or 7 million cones (depending who you read) in each human eye, the cones concentrated in the fovea centralis, the 0.3mm pit at the focus of the lens. The rods are more sensitive, accented towards blue-green, night vision, motion sensing, peripheral visionand reds ths appear blacker at night. They have a tendency to burn out in bright light. Cones specialise in the RGB range, with an overlap between 'red' and 'green' receptors in the yellow range, which thus appears brightest.

Materialist accounts of light should span the scale from quantum optics to physical optics (refraction etc), and thence to physiological optics and to the brain's handling of light. This scale begins and ends in mystery.

But perhaps there is something to add, in the thesis of the social construction of science as discourse – a process that materialism has its hand in – and in the social nature of perception. The latter emerges from the relative inability of stereoscopic vision to give a clear sense of distance, which requires two pairs of eyes or more to triangulate fully, which in turn may be why, when we see someone staring intently towards something, we follow their gaze to see what they see.

Glove puppet

The fascination of the autonomy of things we count as things: a child's mobile, a falling leaf, even the glove puppet you operate yourself. What is significant is not the Spaltung*, nor the discovery that 'je est un autre**, but the realisation that the Other is a "Je".

* (splitting)
** (I is an other)