Three vectors reject cultural and technical standardization and invent alternative accounts of globalized digital culture. First, proximity represents the ability of information to represent a corporeal and situated experience. The antinomy: proximity-distance explores social, corporeal, and technical experiences online and offline. Second, lag proposes that temporal delays function as devices that disrupt standardization and homogenization in global information culture. Thirdly, distribution considers the emergence of information aesthetics as dispersed time restructures data-space. These new media forms shift away from data as bit-mapped graphics to data as vectors. This implies that the informatics image no longer distributes what the original encoded and stored, for example a scanned photo turned into a bitmapped graphic. New media artists experiment with asynchronicity to disturb expectations of easily accessible and smoothly flowing global information. The three vectors represent place and material conditions in the experience of new media.
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from Camila Alvarez’s review of Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media. (rhizomes.net).
Munster’s baroque theory of the digital resonates. I need to know more.
