bitacora + media
Simon Biggs
File Script :: REVISTA DIGITAL
The sublime is generally seen as something impossible to define and more or less unattainable. Conversely, the computer is seen as a tangible and very practical device useful in solving real world problems. It would seem a reasonable assumption that if one was seeking to approach or to reveal the sublime then amongst the least profitable of strategies would involve the use of computers.
However, as is often the case, things are never as they seem. If we are to be so certain of our assumptions we need to look very carefully at what computers are whilst, at the same time, attempt to understand the traditional means by which people (in this instance, artists) seek the sublime.
How do we understand what the sublime is and what its relationship is to the making of meaning?
The sublime is commonly regarded as something beyond meaning, beyond tangibility or legibility. It is the recognition of something that, by definition, is beyond definition. Nevertheless, artists have sought, through the centuries, to represent it, if not as a means of consciously coming closer to it then at least as a strategy in creating effects that would be all the more powerful in arousing their audience.
The problematic here has always concerned the rendering into the symbolic and meaningful world of art something that is apparently beyond representation, beyond our capacity to render meaning. There is an inherent contradiction at work here. Artists, as producers of meaning, employ strategies that are essentially linguistic in form. It has been argued that there is an aspect of art that is non-linguistic (whether supra-linguistic or proto-linguistic is a further question) but the sustenance of this argument depends on a narrow definition of what the linguistic, and by implication human consciousness, can be which, in itself, is a contentious issue.
If we accept the implication of Foucault’s general argument about the relationship of the individual to the social, where each individual is regarded as an instance of language, instantiated from a linguistic body that is society as a whole, then we also have to accept a very generalised and expansive definition of the linguistic. Within this framework all human (and, in many cases, non-human) activities have to be defined as linguistic acts and thus instances of semiosis. It therefore becomes impossible for the artist to achieve the velocity required to escape the linguistic and social body of which they are part and begin an approach to the sublime. The artist, like anybody, is encumbered with the weight of centuries of encrusted meaning which to reject would be a form of self-denial that only mystics, probably always failing, entertain at their peril.
What is computing and how does it relate to representation and meaning?
Computation consists of symbolic operations. Alan Turing’s suggestion that the computer is the machine that can be any machine because it is a symbolic machine is predicated on the concept of a machine that can alter itself. Turing developed his hypothesis following on from Goedel’s (Incompleteness Theorem) prior conflation of mathematics and linguistics and the manner in which this allowed the abstract system that is mathematics to function similarly to the way in which language operates on things.
Turing’s first working computational system was not an electronic device, as we expect computers to be today, but was instead composed of pieces of varying coloured and shaped paper. These symbols carried both the information (data) that was to be operated upon and the rules (instructions) for those operations. Although very limited the system was, in this regard, recursive and self-referential and thus able to compute and modify itself. The system contained within it all the basic elements of computability. Everything that needed to be known about what would happen to what, and what would result from the process, was either explicitly or implicitly contained within a very simple system.
It is this idea of a system that is symbolic, and thus virtual, that is interesting. When you take from one computer some code, a piece of software that does something to something, and run it on another it usually still works. The code is not necessarily connected to the physical instance of the electronic machine nor does it have to exist in an electronic form. Printing out the code places it in a more familiar context where it is immediately recognisable as language (if not easy to understand) and this print-out can then be re-input into another machine and, again, it will still work. In a very real sense it is the code that is the computer, just as Turing’s pieces of paper were in effect a computer. The conventional electronics and other bits of hardware that we usually associate with the computer certainly represent a context for the code to work, but one could typify this relationship between hardware and software in the same manner that De Saussure described linguistic events as being formed of two components, langue (linguistic potentiality) and parole (the instance of use). So, it is possible to postulate the hardware as supplying the potential for meaning whilst the software creates the instance of meaning.
