whether reality is objectively perceivable or not but rather the affect of
perception upon what reality appears to be, is quite compelling. Barad¹s
argument, using the example of the apparent duality of light, is that it is
through the process (or perhaps, more accurately, the ³interaction²) of
perception that reality, the material, is made. How we look at light
determines what light is (wave or particle?). This is what she calls
Oagential realism.¹ It does allow a reconciliation between positions of a
sort although after some thought it does appear to be a phenomenological
position. Barad does take sides here, just with a lot of smoke and mirrors.
Perhaps that is all one has to work with when discussing such a subject.
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
simon@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
From: "fmarineo@libero.it" <fmarineo@libero.it>
Reply-To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:15:18 +0100
To: yasmin_discussions <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Simulation, remediation
Simon writes:
"It is possible to argue that the thing being experienced and that
experiencing are part of the same thing; that existence is found in the
interaction between things".
I think this leads us to rethink the status of representation in accordance
with the "scientific" idea that the observer and the observed are part of
the same phenomenon. A very interesting perspective, and surely an
antirelativistic one, is that offered by Karen Barad in her book "Meeting
the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and
meaning", whose key concepts can also be found in her previously publsihed
short essay "Posthumanist Performativity: How Matter Comes to Matter"
(Signs, vol. 28, n. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831). Here, she develops the notion of
"agential realism" drawing on a critique of Bohr's physics, which I find
very fruitful for those working in between the artistic and the scientific
field (like me, on a theoretical level). Barad shifts from a
representationalist perspective to a performativist one (and here is where
feminist theory gives a great contribution), one which attributes
performativity to matter, and at the same time propose!
s an anti-representational form of realism.
Here, "relations do not follows relata", in Barad's words, but mattering is
itself a differentiating process (which also means that differences are not
pre-given). Barad's theory is very complex and fascinating, and I do not
want to enter into much detail here, but I firmly believe that her idea of
agential realism allows to reconceive the intra-actions between humans
(post-human in Barad's sense), non-humans, and the environments they live in
so as to abandon any metaphysics of purity or essential truth ( as well as
of immediacy), without nonetheless abandoning the possibility of
objectivity.
Jennifer, about "Avatar": personally, the level of hypermediacy it carries
with it all the time made me have a filmic experience of total detachment.
Every second, I was so totally aware of its excess of mediation, that I was
never emotionally involved. Maybe, an alternance of hypermediacy and
immediacy would have catched me a little bit more.
Pier Luigi: incidentally, the van de Vall's article I was mentioning in my
previous post talks about Cronberg's ExistenZ too...
Best,
Federica
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