Signaletic, haptic and real-time material
In her article Signaletic, Haptic and Real-Time Material, Bodil Marie S. Thomsen, an Associate Professor at The Department of Aesthetics and Communication of Aarhus University (Denmark), approaches 'signal' as "a theoretical and analytical category to inspect a conceptual shift from the dominant mode of linguistic 'sign' to the flexible and omnipresent modality of 'signal'.
Departing from McLuhan's idea that "all media are spatial extensions of human senses", she argues that digital interfaces with new mechanisms of real time control have changed our perception of time and space:
The linguistic sign prioritized linearity, the ability to differentiate between past, present, and future time, as well as cause and effect relationships. The prevalence of the electronic signal and the ability of digital technology to synthesize waves by codes and to create interfacial relations between (in Anna Munster’s phrase) ‘‘being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside’’ can hardly be understood within the parameters of classical time and space. (Thomsen, p. 2)
According to Thomsen, the transition from the sign to the signal became evident in the 1960s, when television and video became one of the first agents of a new regime, grounded on electronic signal and digital code. Within the art scene, the electronic live signal of video played an important role and was appropriated both by the the avant-garde movement and popular culture. With the recent advance of technology, "the operations of the signal has become ubiquitous in all art- and media-genres", and therefore the contemporary study of the signaletic media reaches the new level of importance.
Similarly to Italian philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, Thomsen advocates for the unique capacity of video to make time visible. In turn, synthetic images and digital programming deprived of the indexical impression of light, have created the illusion of "duration as a spatial phenomenon". All together, this made the interaction between the user and the interface direct and immediate, and eventually resulted in "the new kinds of affective involvements between bodies and bodies and machines".
How can real-time interfaces produce affective connections and encounters between actual spaces, sites and bodies and signaletic renderings of these?
In her further analysis, Thomsen turns to G. Deleuze and his books on cinema. Deleuze suggested that the sense of conversion in cinema is achieved via movement image and time image. While the former can be understood as a "movement of images with represented space", the latter is expressed by "signifiers of 'pure time', no longer related to the cause-effect chain of narration nor to the representation of space and movement". Using Deleuze's definition of 'signaletic material' and relying on his disagreement with the postulates of narration and semiology, which they employ to understand cinema, Thomsen labels Deleuze’s research of the cinematic 'signaletic material' as "succeeding Walter Benjamin’s interest in the automatic movement of film".
[Signaletic material] includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). [. . .] But, even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous, and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable.
(Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 29 )
Through an assemblage of relevant quotes from Benjamin, Deleuze, Manovich, Lazzarato and Munster, Thomsen builds an argument that "the signaletic material" has eventually supplanted "the image as sign". This process resulted in time is being materialised into the live signal on the one hand, and in time as "the dominant vector of digital variation", on the other. The term 'haptic' surfaces as it is described by Alois Riegl, Deleuze, Guattari, and Laura U. Marks, for this and other reasons, transcended the "inscription of the materiality of the grid" and became "a movement space for time as such".
This transformation of sign into signal brought forth social and cultural changes ranging from the birth of performativity and digital capitalism to Deleuze's 'dividuals'. This is why Thomsen strives to establish a distinction between sign (and object) and signal (and interface), "where the latter refers to the real-time transmission of electronic and new media in particular, since manipulation, feedback operations, and control are integrated parts of both the electronic signal and the digital code".
This diversity of the thinking 'haptic' finds its evidence in the juxtaposition of two approaches: Laura U. Marks's on the one hand, and Deleuze's and Guattari's on the other.
For Marks, she attaches to the 'haptic' a meaning of "an almost physical encounter with the screen surface as body". In this understanding, the 'haptic' means to experience a sort of 'visual touch', when by looking at the screen we can virtually experience the physical features of represented objects.
One of the illustrative examples that Thomsen provides us on this account is Nam June Paik’s installation Point of Light (1963), which transmitted a signal of a radio into an electronic signal of light. Most of the real-time installations and performances alike present time as 'event' inside the signal and give the sense of a real-time experience of time here and now.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the 'haptic' is a potential feedback on versatility of spaces (physical and artistic), when "lines are active between dots and points, and do not create conjunctions and connect one point to another".
A haptic line has no beginning and no end, and its law is variation. It has expression, but no form, and it creates repetition and rhythm without symmetry. Relating this to the haptic surfaces of new media, the electronic transmission has become inseparable from the salt-and-pepper dots or digital pixels that obstruct illusionary depth.
This suggests a broad consensus that the 'haptic' surfaces can have a multiplicity of meanings and, in turn, as Thomsen writes, transposes the analysis of signal into a broader context of affect.
In order to engage the affect theory in the discussion, she makes a transition from the 'haptic' surfaces of new media to the interfaces between humans and machines. She defines the latter via Anna Munster's writings as the interspace in which the affective experience becomes "a folded experience".
According to Thomsen, Munster therefore adheres to Benjamin and Deleuze in the acknowledgement that the technological subjectivity traverses the affective sensations.
To support this statement, Thomsen chooses Peter Campus’ installation Interface (1972), in which he creates a short circuit connection between a body, a mirror and a camera so as to evoke an affective interspace between "an actual body (experienced from the inside) and a virtual body (experienced from the outside)".
Affect arises relationally and is produced out of the difference between being in the body and representing/mapping the body from the outside. Affect sustains the singularity of sensing and of representing as a differential experience of embodiment, one in which alterity has a place. And in any interface between bodies and technology we will always encounter this difference. Informatic affect is a process of subjective bodily recomposition that occurs in relation to the alterity that pattern and code renderings open up for us.
(Munster, Materializing New Media, p. 142)
For Thomsen it is clear that Munster relies on Brian Massumi's theorising of affect, and therefore, as Thomsen suggests, it is important not to overlook the reversal side of the affective encounters generated by new media. Given that for Massumi affect can arise from a huge variety of spaces (and not only from new media interfaces), Thomsen warns that these interfaces have "the potential to create affective encounters of many kinds", including those that are meant to control us.
In her understanding of digital electronic media, Thomsen deviates from McLuhan's canonic expression 'the medium is the message' and leans toward Lazzarato's understanding of electronic and new media images as
transformations and combinations (compositions) of intensities,energies and fields that are played out in the flow of power. Electro-magnetic power in the case of video, optic power in the case of the telematic algorithmic flow of the computer.
(Lazzarato, Videophilosophie, p 87)
It is not the message but the (electronic) signal that affects us.
The signal is not just that by which messages are sent or fictions created. Nor is the viewer/reader/listener inserted in the waves of the signal. We should rather understand the ‘‘signaletic interface’’ as the creation of situations in which the flow of information infinitely could generate actions and thus creative time. (Thomsen, p. 5)
Drawing conclusions, Thomsen highlights the importance of a further research into the nature of electronic signals, its haptical surface and the real-time sensations they give to us.
In contemporary culture narration as a forthcoming, historical production of memory according to the operations of the sign has gradually been superseded by rhizomatic grids of modulating haptic surfaces. This has to be analyzed in relation to the a-syntactic transmissions of the electronic signal. The perspective of Western thinking based on a topologically centralized eye and corresponding gaze from the outside has to be reflected in relation to the new interfaces in which the image-screen has been replaced by affective folding between inside and outside. (Thomsen, p. 9)
http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/18148