Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further, information technologies create what I will call flickering signifiers, characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions. Flickering signifiers signal an important shift in the plate tectonics of language.
— Hayles, N. Katherine. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” October 66 (1993): 69-91.
According to Glissant, such compulsion to establish the principle of universalization would be unthinkable for the inhabitants of the Caribbean. They do not live on territory that is enclosed but on fragments of land separated by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The absence of something that could unify the islands and their peoples is not felt to be a lack. On the contrary, the only unifying, or standardizing, factor they have ever experienced is an invisible trace running along the sea floor — the chains of the slave trade. (…) Their musical expression is song with highly disparate voices. By contrast, the European invention of polyphony is “the uniform and complete dissolution of all differences in tone and voice for these are vieweed as being inadequately distinctive in themselves.
— Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. 2002. Trans. Custance, Gloria. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006.
While the ability to program does not bring absolute freedom (you can never step outside of culture, and of course programming languages are themselves tools embedded in culture), it does open up a region of free play, allowing the artist to climb up and down the dizzying tower of abstraction and encode her own biases, dreams and political realities.
— Mateas, Michael. “Procedural Literacy. Educating the New Media Practicioner.” On The Horizon. Special Issue. Future of Games, Simulations and Interactive Media in Learning Contexts 13.1 (2005).
A constructive hypertext should be a tool for inventing, discovering, viewing and testing multiple, alternative organizational structures as well as a tool for comparing these structures of thought with more traditional ones and transforming one into the other.
— Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 1996.
Constructive hypertext quits the text and enters the laboratory. Constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge or writing process. Like the conference or the classroom or any other form of the electronic book, constructive hypertexts are versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist. For silence.
— Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 1996.
{Media theory is based on a new aesthetics,] if you define aesthetics as the “theory of perception.” The eye absorbs five gigabytes per second. This is such an enormous amount that the biggest mainframes can only barely equal it. With the eye, one can absorb much more information than with any other sense or intellectual capacity. This means that information processing must be visual in the future, because the eye possesses the potential for processing large quantities of information in a meaningful way.
— Bolz, Norbert. “Rethinking Media Aesthetics.” Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Ed. Lovink, Geert. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. 18-27.
[Nelson] Goodman regards languages as symbol systems. Symbol systems are what people use to communicate, and art is fundamentally about communication; in Goodman’s view, art in general is a collection of symbol systems.
— Lee, John. “Goodman’s Aesthetics and the Languages of Computing.” Aesthetic Computing. Ed. Fishwick, Paul A. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006. 29-42.
Human-computer activity may be divided into two broad categories: productive and experiential. Experiential activities, such as computer games, and undertaken purely for the experience afforded by the activity as you engage in it, while productive activities such as word processing have outcomes in the real world that are somehow beyond the experience of the activity itself. (…) “Productivity” as a class of applications is better characterized not by the concreteness of outcomes but by their seriousness vis-a-vis the real world.
— Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
For example, he thinks there are important distinctions between notational and non-notational types of works. Consider a painting such as the Mona Lisa: the work is unique and its identity is completely bound up with the question of who produced it; a faithful reproduction can be illicitly presented as the original, thus constituting a forgery. Novels, by contrast, cannot be forged; any sequence of letters that corresponds with the original text is a genuine instance of the novel.
According to Goodman, when Pierre Menard happens to write a novel identical to Cervante’s Don Quixote, in Borges’s story, Menard’s novel just is the Quixote — who wrote it, and where or when it was written, are irrelevant to its identity as a work. Goodman calls paintings an “autographic” type of work, whereas notational or literary works are “allographic.” Music, of the typical Western kind, is notated, and the creation of the notation Goodman calls the “execution” of the work, but it still needs to be “implemented” through performance to properly exist. This idea of implementation is given considerable prominence. A novel is implemented by being printed, published, promoted, circulated, and ultimately read. A play is implemented by through performance before an audience in a theater, an etching by the taking of impressions, a paining perhaps by being framed and hung. A work is somehow incomplete until it has fulfilled its communicational destiny: execution is the making of a work, but implementation is what makes it work.
— Lee, John. “Goodman’s Aesthetics and the Languages of Computing.” Aesthetic Computing. Ed. Fishwick, Paul A. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006. 29-42.
Far from being simply art for machines, software art is highly concerned with artistic subjectivity and its reflection and extension into generative systems.
— Cramer, Florian, and Ulrike Gabriel. “Software Art”. 2001.
