A Mat­ter of Per­cep­tion: Ex­plor­ing the Phys­i­cal­ity of Elec­tronic Art

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• The Matter with Media

• A Mat­ter of Per­cep­tion: Ex­plor­ing the Phys­i­cal­ity of Elec­tronic Art

• Martijn Stevens

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: The Matter with Media

  It has often been said that the dig­i­tal is com­pletely void of ma­te­r­ial and sen­sual qual­i­ties, as phys­i­cal ob­jects are re­duced to a shared lan­guage of bits with­out colour, size, vol­ume, weight or smell. As a con­se­quence, the di­rect or in­dex­i­cal re­la­tion­ship with a tan­gi­ble and there­fore ‘real’ re­al­ity is bro­ken. This does not mean, how­ever, that the dig­i­tal is merely a realm of bi­nary code, math­e­mat­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion and il­lu­sory sim­u­la­tions, al­though dig­i­tal data is not in­dex­i­cal of re­al­ity ei­ther. Using quan­tum physics to ex­plore the ma­te­r­ial basis of elec­tronic art, Laura Marks sug­gests that the phys­i­cal­ity of the dig­i­tal is rather lo­cated in ‘the tiny dance of sub­atomic par­ti­cles’ or the wave forms of elec­trons. In a sim­i­lar vein, Jim Al-Khalili ar­gues that ‘noth­ing­ness’ is al­ways teem­ing with vir­tual par­ti­cles. In­ter­fac­ing the pos­i­tivist rhetoric of the nat­ural sci­ences with an un­der­stand­ing of art and media that is in­formed by no­tions of ma­te­ri­al­ism, af­fect and processes of doing and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing, I would like to ad­dress the phys­i­cal­ity of elec­tronic art by fo­cus­ing on the non­rep­re­sen­ta­tional, the non­hu­man and the nonor­ganic, thus down­play­ing the vi­sual in favour of other modal­i­ties of per­cep­tion.

Category:

• Panel