#digital iconography

[art-pospelov]

The concept of the series is technocratic spirituality. It is an attempt to aestheticize the logic of circuits, charts, and interfaces, granting them the weight and significance of a religious artifact. It transforms engineering geometry into an object of contemplation.

Modern technology has become so complex and has diverged so far from the basic tools used by humanity for millennia that an average person looking at a schematic of a modern device sees only a graphic pattern of symbols. it explains nothing—neither how the device works nor how it is constructed. This is no longer a knife, a needle, a plow, or a hammer. A tool's description no longer fits its function: a hammer is a heavy stone or metal weight fixed to a handle, used to drive a nail or strike an enemy; a figurative image of a hammer explains both its structure and purpose. A modern device can no longer be described through traditional figurative language; its technical description becomes geometric abstraction. As understanding fails, technology acquires the traits of a divine phenomenon. We cannot comprehend or explain it; we are left only with faith—without doubt, without proof, and without any possibility of renunciation. We can no longer survive without smartphones and AI.

The color palette is limited to three poles: gold, matte black, and white. Gold leaf is a direct intervention into the space of the icon, a reference to ecclesiastical tradition. Black represents the structural skeleton: its textured imprints, resembling microchips, set an industrial rhythm. Sterile white acts as a technological gap or an interface window, creating a spatio-temporal pause for decoding. Functional geometry becomes a cult object, and the strict symmetry of the works mimics altar compositions, turning familiar loading indicators and barcodes into mandalas of the digital age. This is the aestheticization of the algorithm—an iconography of the new age, where behind the impersonal geometry of circles and squares lies not the face of a saint, but the absolute order of the information field.

[teachglobalsoundart]

will.i.am & Britney’s “Scream and Shout” does something really musically interesting. The track features Britney: she went into a recording studio to lay down vocals specifically for this track. However, her most musically significant line—that is, what she sings that do the most structural or compositional work in the song, or what she sings at climactic moments—is a sample (or a reperformance meant to sound like a sample) from her 2007 single “Gimme More.” “Scream and Shout” clips the “it’s” from “Gimme More”’s “It’s Britney, bitch,” and cuts this in right before the track’s rather understated drops (e.g., at 1:13-14). So if the most important vocal Britney delivers is actually a sample of one of her earlier songs, why bother to “feature” her, to pay her for a custom vocal? Seems like it would be cheaper to pay for the sample than for a new performance, right? Or, if you want to feature her, why use this sample (or a reperformance that sounds exactly like it was lifted from “Gimme More”)? [...] The Britney sample is a musical analog to what Steven Shaviro calls the non-indexical character post-cinematic visual media. Conventional notions of “aura”—the idea that reproductions refer back to an original—are indexical in the same way that “cinema” is indexical. As Shaviro explains, “cinema therefore always assumes—because it always refers back to—some sort of absolute, pre-existing space” (17). The film camera records what passed before it IRL. The “Britney”-sample “does not refer back indexically to [Britney Spears’s] body as a source or model. It does not image, reflect and distort some prior, supposedly more authentic, actuality of [Spears]-as-physical presence” (18). It re-presents an already-distorted vocal recording—the referent is the recording, not Spears the person/performer. Spears’s performance in “Scream & Shout” is still indexical—it just indexes a profile—a “complex, aggregated and digitally coded electronic signal” (Shaviro, 19) rather than a subject. Or rather, it understands the subject it references as a profile and not as an “individual.” This profile can be used to generate any number of different “Britney”s.

more from Robin James at It's Her Factory

I'd kind of agree, but I'd also say the "Britney, bitch" has also become something of Spears' trademark in social media. Check out her twitter profile. Maybe the "Britney, bitch" is about Spears/will.i.am referring to a digital social networking utopia where artist and post-human sampled artist can co-exist instead of falling into the depths of litigation...