While this is supposed to be the mid-term writing assignment/ final writing
assignment, I fear that it may turn out to sound more like a glorified book
report. Anyway there is this book “Scrolling Forward” by, David Levy,
which I read and I think is very interesting though I haven’t yet thought
about it much, so I am going to take this opportunity to try to understand it.
I also am interested in discussing the relationship between art and Levy’s
definition of the document.
I want to begin by Levy’s definition of a document as that which speaks,
“[a document is something] we’ve imbued with the ability to speak......
writing is the act of ventriloquism.” People traditionally perceive the
idea of a document as a written form such as a book or a lease. He looks at
examples of the document such as the little momentous exchanged in the middle
ages which represented and closed deals on exchanged land, simple deli receipts,
tax forms, photos, etc. In this era of digitization and technology the traditional
concept of a document is immediately challenged by the fact that everything
on your computer “desktop” is coming to be know as a document; including
pictures, videos, music, etc. Levy’s idea of the document as, that which
speaks for you, is very interesting in relation to the documents on your digital
desktop. Yet almost anything speaks for you; if I drive a BMW it is “saying”
certain things about me, which is why Levy also says that documents are “representational
artifacts”
I think that art can also be defined as a representational artifact which is
imbued with the ability to speak for someone or something. Looking at art with
this definition starts to allow the technologically based arts a much easier
entry into the concept of art. The key difference between art and document may
just be the subject of representation; the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
To me these ideas about documents are extremely interesting in that they really
begin to encompass the internet and modern forms of media into the family of
books and traditional documents (a statement many bibliophiles would be horrified
by). When we create a computer file (whether it be word processing or image)
we create the “original” which are the bytes stuck in the computer,
there is also the visual copy which we see on the screen and then another similar
copy which is physically created when it is printed out. Yet what is the document
here? Is it the printed copy, the file or is it the file, the software and the
hardware put together. With technology media has become perceptibly non-permanent,
yet almost exactly repeatable. We can watch a video over and over and yet when
we are not watching it we cannot perceive its visual document.
Is this need for technology to create a perceptible document or art form really
a new thing? I see literacy as a similar technologies required to understand
a book. In regards to art, I feel that even though a specific technology is
now needed to perceive a work of digital art, there are many more people who
have an inner techno-literacy then those who may be able to appreciate an older
work of art. [this is an idea that I am not particularly sure about but there
seems to be something here]. In the time of the flemish paintings if you did
not know all of the symbolism in the painting it was like looking at a newspaper
in a foreign language, but almost everyone had the visual vocabulary to understand
them in that time. I feel that likewise people now are gaining a certain techno-vocabulary
allowing them to understand the arts and the documents of today. This doesn’t
totally answer the idea of needing a vcr to play a movie or issues with the
need for repeatability in order to call something a document and to call something
an instrument, but there is a definite connection.
Many people have claimed that paper is a fixed medium while digital is a fluid
medium. Levy’s claim is that both have a controlled movement that each
has an “assumed fixity which allows for movement”. He shows through
multiple published copies of the same Walt Whitman poem, “leaves of grass”,
that books are not as fixed as might be assumed. Levy sees bibliophiles and
technophiles both fetishising books in either there claim that technology is
the answer to communication or that one cannot live without books.
The idea of fixity is one that comes up very often in discussions of art, books
and performance, especially in regards to their relationship with technology.
This seems to be a strange obsession of ours which may have something to do
with the existential longings discussed in the next paragraph. Buddhist butter
sculptures or rice mandelas all have a beauty of impermanence (though there
may very well be a strict repeated form each time they are created). Time makes
everything fluid and as technology gets faster it appears to have greater fluidity
but it seems to me that it just has more speed. Many of the questions of technology
and art are a misunderstanding or inability to comprehend this new speed.
The later half of “Scrolling Forward” deals almost exclusively with
the organization and classification of books and documents, talking about the
obsessive need of people like Dewey to create ways of organizing the world,
i.e. the documents which are representing the information of the world. Levy
goes of on a tangent about existentialism and Kierkekard’s fear of death;
Becker’s fear of the empty and Loy’s fear of the ever-slipping present.
He sees these ideas as what fuels people’s needs to have these little “immortality
projects” called documents, and a way to organize them. Along with documents
being an immortality project, they also represent the common feeling that knowledge
will set us free from the anxiety and the feeling of lack. The internet acts
as “the portal through which one can see every point in the universe”
(a quote from Borges “The Aleph). This is of course an extreme view yet
an interesting perspective on technology which helps to explain how people latch
to and become addicted to technology similar to religions or cults.(Rachel's
mom)
The new speed that technology offers allows us to begin to approach the speed
of information. Similar to the speed of light where everything begins to become
fluid when information changes fast enough it gains a feeling of fluidity. While
the concept of Borges Aleph is to see everything at once it is speed that ultimately
allows us to be able to perceive it all at once. It is no coincidence that there
are certain similarities between the internet, techno-performance and Tibetan
Buddhist butter sculptures; all have a desire to perceive the world at once,
let everything become so fluid that it merges into one. The technology may be
a false Messiah in that, like the speed of light, the faster we get the further
we are from where we started, resulting in a totally ungrounded experience.
Richard Lanham claims that “the scarcest commodity turns out to be not
information but the human attention needed to cope with it.”
One point which I thought was not stressed specifically is the idea of the document
as communication. Communication more than information seems like what people
are searching for to combat the feelings of “lack”. Defining documents
as things “imbued with the ability to speak” does define them as means
of communication, but I believe that it is really this basic need to communicate
which drives the creation of documents, and that the reason that the internet
will, in the end, gain almost an Aleph like standing as a portal into the Universe,
is because of its incredible ability to allow for communication at a fluid speed.
This has been a bit rambling and just a start into some ideas that I am interested
in and want to pursue. There is no defined conclusion yet hopefully there will
be a couple that will come soon. I feel that concepts of the document, art,
and performance in this “mediatized” age can all be discussed in similar
ways and should be looked at in terms of their changing speeds.