In "Introduction to Info-Aesthetics" Manovich states, "if you want to know if something is 'new media' or not, simply ask if you require a computer to experience it." However, he later qualifies, " the adoption of digital and networked computers in almost all cultural areas was to continue, and therefore in a few years the distinction I was able to maintain in 'The Language of New Media' between 'new media' and other cultural practices would become less and less useful." This would seem to suggest a collapse of "old media" into "new media;" mankind's progression into the future continues unabated.
However, Guru Meditation instead suggests Hayle's, "feedback loop that [runs] between technologies and perceptions, artifacts and ideas." As I attempted to find a meditative state under the layers of glass and brushed steel it instead flattened. I realized there were not layers but instead elements, which cannot and have never existed independently, of the "mesh."(Morton) We move beyond the divides of the digital or the analog, which can exist only in "resonation"(Massumi) with each other.
Furthermore, this resonation manifests itself beyond digital and analog. Guru Meditation demonstrates the resonation of Capitalism and Marxism, Consumerism and Essentialism, Spirituality and Humanism. These ideas cannot be divided of separated; they rely on each other completely. They are not binary opposites but pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which never ends and whose picture we can never see, if it exists at all.
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iBooks is the Apple e-book reader. It comes pre-packaged with the iPad and media is distributed for it through a section of the App Store. Its library is not as large as the Kindle's and works that overlap between the two are often more expensive in the iBook format. However, Apple continues to develop this product and consumers continue to purchase; where the iBook app succeeds is in its interface.
The first thing that one notices is the bookcase; it has shelves which are “wood,” you can see knots, grooves, rings. Your books are propped up on these shelves and when you touch one it zooms toward you and the cover peels back to reveal the text. Around the text we see evidence of other pages and beyond these the cover and binding of the book. When you progress the pages “turn” in an illusion of three-dimensional space; you ge the impression that each of these pages exists somewhere other than in the RAM allocated to the program.
This is the third order of the simulacra; “[it] no longer [constitutes] the imaginary in relation to the real, [it is itself] an anticipation of the real.” The bookcase is not a reprodcution of an “actual” bookcase, it is an actual bookcase; “real” bookcases are its “alibi,” justifying its aesthetics while performing the same function. iBooks, and its model of the now Utopic “real,” is a “map [that] covers the whole territory;” “the principle of reality disappears,” because the model has become our reality.
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Your analogy of a "jigsaw puzzle which never ends and whose picture we can never see, if it exists at all" to describe the varied elements of Guru Meditation intrigues me--in part, b/c I love jigsaw puzzles, and in part b/c of how your description of this particular kind of infinite puzzle seems to hit directly at the collapse between "old media" and "new media" with which you opened this post. What I remain somewhat puzzled about myself, however, is exactly what you mean by this collapse that you claim to see happening in Manovich's writings. For example, how might Guru Meditation help us to understand, to define, or to push against this? Likewise, your calling of Hayles, Morton, and Massumi into the response presents suggestive material with which we might approach Bogost's app; I'm just not sure exactly how *you* are using their ideas/rhetoric. I wonder, for example, how Massumi's concept of "resonation" might, well, resonate, with Morton's mesh and/or Hayle's "feedback loop," according to your own rendering of the Guru app as a critical object.
ReplyDeleteI greatly appreciate your focus on the specificity of interface to ground your second response. What's more, the idea that iBook's interface is contingent on--only to be divorced from--creating a replica of, for example, the physicality of your home library (down to the knots of wood and the fanning motion of opening a book), sets up the idea of a Baudrillardian "alibi" quite nicely. I would like to know more about the distinction b/w "actual" and actual that you propose here, and how perhaps the latter constructs that "map [that] covers the whole territory." (I also wonder how Benjamin might have faired in this discussion... although I know that wasn't asked of you.)