Underskog

THE FORART LECTURE 2010:
MARK B. N. HANSEN, Professor, Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Duke University.
24 og 25 september, Universitetet i Oslo og Nasjonalmuseet

I senere tid har en rekke kritikere og teoretikere behandlet spørsmålet om hvordan vår mangfoldige bruk av sosiale medier og mobile nettverk er i ferd med å endre hvordan vi oppfatter oss selv, vår tilknytning til verden og til de ulike miljøene som omgir oss. Det som kjennetegner disse teoriene er imidlertid at de nye sosiale mediene sees som del av en større teknostruktur som først og fremst handler om informasjon og underholdning.

I sin FORART-forelesning presenterer Mark B. N. Hansen en annen innfallsvinkel til dette temaet. Heller enn å snakke om hvordan informasjon lagres og overføres, fokuserer han på hvordan vi erfarer de nye mediene. Og fra et slikt erfaringsperspektiv kan man se et grunnleggende skille mellom det 20 og det 21 århundres ”nye medier”. Med de nye sosiale mediene blir medieteknologier for første gang virkelig dagligdagse. De er intimt knyttet til hvordan vi tenker, handler og opplever og kan dermed også fungere som utgangspunkt for å både utforske og utvide et erfaringsliv i ferd med å utfolde seg.

Mark B.N Hansen vil behandle dette temaet i én forelesning og ett seminar:

Recording (for) the Emergent Future, or Data and Experience in 21st Century Media
Fredag 24 September, Aud. 2 Helga Engs Hus, Universitetet i Oslo, kl 18:00

Creativity and Mediation from Husserl to Whitehead and Back
Presentasjon og paneldebatt med Eivind Røssaak og Asbjørn Grønstad.
Lørdag 25 September, Museet for Samtidskunst, Foredragssalen 2.etg. kl. 13:00,

Mark Hansen er en av de mest prominente bidragsyterne til ny tenkning om forholdet mellom kunst, teknologi og filosofi. Han er professor i Cultural Theory og Comparative Media Studies ved Department of Art, Art history and Visual Studies at Duke University, der han også er tilknyttet Program in Information Science + Information Society, Arts of the Moving Image and the Visual Studies Initiative. Hans mest kjente bokutgivelser er Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), og Bodies in Code (Routledge 2006) og han har publisert en lang rekke essays om kulturteori, medieteori og nyere kunst og litteratur. Han har vært redaktør for The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (med Taylor Carman), Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago 2010), med W.J.T. Mitchell, og Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Cybernetics (Duke 2009), med Bruce Clarke.
For tiden er Hansen i ferd med å ferdigstille en bok om teknisitet og tidsbevissthet som utforsker forvandlingen av tid og media i forhold til nyere neurobiologi og computerteknologi.

Asbjørn Grønstad er professor i visuell kultur og forskningsleder for Nomadikonprosjektet ved Institutt for Informasjons-og medievitenskap, Universitetet i Bergen. Hans siste bokutgivelser er Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics (redigert med Øyvind Vågnes, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010) og Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Hans pågående prosjekt er boken Screening the Unwatchable: Art Cinema and the Negation of Pleasure, som ferdigstilles for Palgrave i løpet av 2011. Grønstad er redaksjonsmedlem i flere tidsskrift og ansvarlig redaktør for Ekfrase: Nordisk Tidsskrift for Visuell Kultur."

Eivind Røssaak er førsteamanuensis ved forskningsavdelingen, Nasjonalbiblioteket. Han har skrevet bøker og artikler om avant-garde film, nye medier, postmoderne filosofi og arkivteori og har ledet konferansepaneler om kunst og nye medier i Asia, Europa og USA. Han har vært Visiting Scholar ved Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2008). Hans nyeste bokutgivelse er Negotiating Immobility: The Moving Image and the Arts (2008) og han er redaktør for The Archive in Motion og Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (begge under utgivelse).

MER INFORMASJON OM FORELESNINGENE:

Recording (for) the Emergent Future, or Data and Experience in 21st Century Media

Many critics of contemporary culture have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which social media and wireless computing are currently reshaping how we experience ourselves and our relatedness to the worlds in which we live and the environments that encompass us. To such critics, who may equally well be neuroscientists as literary scholars, web 2.0 sites and mobile devices form part of the technical infrastructure of contemporary life which, despite a general acceleration and a massive spatial expansion, continues to center around the circulation of information and entertainment.
On such a view, what we do with our cellphones or our ipads differs more in degree than in kind from what we used to do with analog telephones or televisions: in all cases, the function of mediation is to facilitate communication and deliver entertainment, or (from what is perhaps a more scholarly, if also more technical perspective) to broker the transmission of information from sender to receiver and to transmit stored information in order to facilitate new opportunities for reception of the past in the present.

With its focus on the content of recorded and transmitted information, what this prevalent view fails to entertain is the experiential impact of social media, wireless computing and other applications of the new computational paradigm central to technical mediation in our world today. From the perspective of experiential impact, 21st century media differ markedly – that is, in kind – from 20th century media: specifically, they operate on a temporal background that owes more to the microtemporality of computation (and perhaps, as if in recompense, of neural processing) than to the macrotemporality of what phenomenologists from Husserl on have called “lived experience” [Erlebnis].
In addition to providing new, more convenient because more ubiquitous and more portable, means for transmitting and accessing media content, 21st century media broker a fundamental shift in the mode of access not just to that content but to the experience that it mediates. Specifically, 21st century media no longer records human experience as content – that is, the contents of consciousness – as photography and film once did (and arguably still do); on the contrary, with its much expanded capacities for recording and its microtemporal operation, today’s media captures the underlying data, both bodily and environmental, from which such content emerges (via selection) and which remains primary to it. And it records such data, not to store it for re-presentification of the past, but rather to facilitate future-oriented action in the future-directed present.

What this means is that, with the advent of 21st century media, media becomes for the first time, at least as a nonexceptional element of everyday life, an instrument for exploring – and also for expanding and intensifying – the texture of embodied living as it happens, which is to say, prior to the abstraction that yields conscious experience. What is more, media ceases to focus narrowly on human conscious experience and on the objectification of that experience and becomes liberated to capture what, with Whitehead, we could call the “cosmological situation” from which consciousness is only a late, much reduced, and relatively unimportant (in terms of causality) emergence.
In my talk, I present a post-phenomenological account of sensation as the correlate of this new paradigm of media or recording for the emergent future. Focusing on concrete artworks and media phenomena, I try to demonstrate how this theoretical perspective allows us to grasp the specificity of 21st media as an opportunity both to understand our own experience from a perspective not beholden to consciousness and to influence how that experience may develop in the future.

Creativity and Mediation from Husserl to Whitehead and Back

In this shorter, more methodologically-focused presentation, I turn to the issue of creativity at the crossroads between phenomenological/post-phenomenological accounts of experience and 21st century media.

I begin with a brief overview of the problem of creativity (the emergence of the new) in the age of ubiquitous mediation, where I explore the difficulty of imagining a future that is not modelled on – and thus unduly constrained by – past experience. I then sketch a lineage of philosophical efforts to couple creativity and media beginning with Husserl’s late efforts to liberate protention from its initial symmetrical correlation with retention (in the lectures on time consciousness). In addition to Husserl, I explicate the contributions that Eugen Fink, Jan Patocka, Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon, and A. N. Whitehead make to resolving the problem of the new and I end by suggesting a supplementation of Whitehead’s conception of creativity that finds its source in Husserl’s late work on (the limits of) time-consciousness and the ensuing (if never fully recognized) necessity to think worldly time as primary in relation to the time of consciousness.

In correlation with the development of this philosophical lineage, I shall present two or three media technical analyses designed to concretize the correlation of creativity and media facilitated at different stages in the lineage. Time permitting, I shall offer some methodological reflections on the difference between two modes of approaching the correlation of perception and media: on one hand, a “direct” mode which argues that media allows the pre-perceptual, sensory conditions of perception to seep into the perceptual experience it conditions; and, on the other, an “indirect” mode that insists on the gap between the pre-perceptual and perception proper and the irreducible temporal delay involved in any perception of pre-perceptual sensation.

To illustrate the methodological stakes of this difference, I shall comment on Erin Manning’s recent deployment of Whitehead to think technical media and proffer an alternate account of chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey as, in some sense, the progenitor of contemporary theorizations of the technical distribution of perception.