representation format

The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across different forms of representation. The outcomes of this experimentation could illuminate our knowledge of creative processes. As part of our research on glitch pedagogy and transmediation over the last two years (Peña, James & DLC, 2016), we have experimented with the functionalities of raw data by comparing patterns of mis/representation between textual, aural and visual data. Our inquiries have allowed us to engage in the intervention and purposeful disruption of these patterns while shedding light on the underlying processes behind these disruptive practices. Delivered as a performance, this paper will demonstrate a few such practices. In our role as noise-musicians, we will improvisualize a transmediatic piece while describing the process behind it. This performance/presentation will start with the production of a natively visual digital artifact (i.e., a digital photograph). This artifact, produced during the session involving attendees, will be then translated into while modifying the sound with analog synthesizers. Simultaneously poetry will be performed, recorded and interpolated with the raw data of the pictures' sound file. This step will effectively involve passing digital data through an analog channel before its re-digitization in real-time. Finally, the intervened artifact will then be re-presented in its visual form. Our presentation will not only contrast between performance as a process and performance as a product, it will allow participants to compare the aesthetic properties of an artifact when presented both in a native and in a non-native format, and will reveal the patterns-in-common between these different media by merit of disrupting them.

Sources: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/854/Trans…; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327163262_Transmedia_an_improv…

Digital approaches to information processing foreground the unique interdependence between
knowledge and its representation that has been characteristic of western epistemology for the past five centuries. The essential role representation formats play in modern knowledge construction is generally accepted in all disciplines, attributing, learning and intellectual progress less to one's direct engagement with actual phenomena, and more to notational structures that convey its formulation. In this paradigm, knowledge follows exclusively from its theoretical articulation, not the other way around.

As such, the actual world cannot but appear symptomatic; its material presence reduced to little more than a kind of referential conceit. Michael Heim speaks to this very issue philosophically as early as the 1990s, recognising clear ontological paradoxes in the then newly emergent VR technology: just how our culture understands the term "reality" as an actual environment, he observes, can only weaken and become less physically uncertain "as it stretches over many virtual worlds.”2 Heim's comments recall digital culture's especially complex interactions with the material world around us; yet they capture as well the increasing ontological impasse that has developed over the course of at least a century of intellectual and artistic debate on the relationship of patterns, ordering and schema to what we perceive to be material actualities.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)