the XTC of communication

more:

1) Total Information Loss (TIL) part II: if a signal is basically information, then the types of data we store on our portable devices (phone books, day planners, alarms, location technologies, email etc) ensures the probability of their use. Remember when we used to carry around little phone books of our friends and relatives contact information? Can you even remember anyone's phone # these days besides your own?
Bearers of information must have the security of potentiality. Back up your address books, kids.

2) Inadvertant social experiment in action: today as I was playing phone-and-email monkey-in-the-middle while trying to meet a client's deadline, the project mgr's phone rudely switched off its voice capabilities while commuting; for the next hour I was subject to flurries of email & text messages being sent from his phone to the phone of an on-site colleague, who would vocally relay his managerial anxieties. His only role was to provide a front end filter to the client, the subterfuge of which became increasingly complex in an almost sitcom way as the emails, txt msgs, and phone calls exponentially crossed and misfired.

3) Off topic for a minute, I can understand the design convergence of aerodynamically engineered cars and shoes, but why make cell phones look like that too? I suspect that that play off deeply coded cultural signifiers of speed & mobility.

4) More references: "I'm Losing You" by Bruce Wagner (the title refers to the utterance said during imminent signal loss on cells, but of course has deeper symbolic meaning–read the book!); also, Ghost in the Shell graphic novels. Side by side, at their core, these are two very different and beautiful examinations of spirituality and human value as mediated by telecommunications & signal interference.

5) Music: Scanner, Oval, PreFuse 73; we have to consider the aesthetic of hiphop, cliqhop, and IDM– musical forms which are ecstatic over the corrupt or fragmented signal information in a transmission medium (scratches, pops, CD clicks, phonetic deconstruction). Evocation of nostalgia through the act of disappearing.

6) I ran some of these ideas by the proprietor of a gallery space and plan on revising these ideas into a formal curatorial thesis. Please drop any suggestions my way about artists who are working in any medium that addresses the physical, visual, technological, or metaphorical social spaces engendered by the anxiety–or relief– of signal disappearance.

7) How could I forget– Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. A most wonderful book which, aside from its many complex themes and morals, explores how the clarity of communication–the gradual learning of a language– hinders the free association and imagination of more symbolic means of story-telling.