I'm just starting work on my book chapter for Mark Nune's "Error" project, and really enjoying re-reading the texts from the m/c issue.
It is also really nice to be rethinking et al.'s pieces and wondering about how they anticipate so many of the things I want to write about now. Walter Benjamin has popped his head up and is whispering in my ear about testing. I tried to think this through in some work around digital materiality and now realise it should have been done here in relation to discussions of noise and information not there. Benjamin argues that without testing (a form of experimental method) cameras really would have not changed, and the concept of the masses would not have quite emerged in the form it did. I'm thinking about this as I read the latest
Cabinet (do these really just get better and better?
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/34/index.php) about "testing" and realising that the test is the ultimate encapsulation of error and that the APU in
the fundamental practice (et al. Venice 2005)
http://www.etal.name/index.php?/ongoing/the-fundamental-practice/ are themselves a form of test. They test us as viewers but they also test the boundaries of the space, and the operations that can and can't occur within them. In the
Cabinet are the usual suspects: phrenology, ink blots, monkeys, spcae travel, and cats, but also an article on Conlon Nancarrow a composer who labouriously re-worked player piano rolls. And it is Nancarrow's approach to experimentation that excites me as a way into my piece on et al. noise error and information. Dolven writes in the article "Nancarrow offers an occasion for thinking about why you would ever want to sound like a machine. Machines, after all, are mostly built to imitate us, right? What are we up to when we try to imitate them back?" I think that what we are up to is thinking through the processes of information as a structure rather than as a form of communication. It is in this structure that Nancarrow finds his method of scoring and replaying the pianolo roll and that et al. embrace as the APU simultaneously engage and repulse our attentions. In
Cabinet Williams describes Nancarrow's work : "If you don't listen, you are lost, and if you listen too much, you are lost as well, so it's a very strenuous state of mind."(p.50). Once in an exam room, I found the sonic space of the room begin to take over my thoughts so much that after an hour I was fully attuned all the bodies, all the sounds, all the movements both inside and out. I was receptive, yet error ridden. I had made the wrong choice by paying attention to sound. It goes without saying that I did not do well in the exam. Testing in this sense becomes about pushing at the boundaries of listening and not listening enough especially in our engagements with technologies. I've also just come home after a lecture by Simon Ingram about his painting machines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d_Cmuoh1aU And I was struck by the need to continue to discuss these works within the discources of painting. Of course this should not be abandoned, and I wanted to ask, lets think more about the machine. In Deleuze and Gauttari's machinic sense, is not every painting made by a painting machine? The creature that paints is no more mystical to me than the robot that completes instructions. More subjective, less subjective...All these paintings (which I do really love) are instructional projects. Sets of questions, problems to be solved, tests for either the human who paints or the robot who paints. It is no surprise then that one begins to imitate the other. Dolven again: "Do we become more mechanical at the point of our intersection with a machine?" (p.52). The structures of information encompass those of noise, yet we continue to hold onto this idea of a pure space where we can understand what each other mean. We can't really do this without testing, checking, confirming, questioning, and here error comes into its own....But you said ... no I said... but what I meant was... wern't you listening?...
