Leave No Trace

(the teeming void) has just published an interesting essay that touches on the philosophical implications of the nature of digital media, with reference to the work of HC Gilje. I like Blink, with its connotations of distorted squash court markings and glowing reflections on polished wood surfaces, but I’m not convinced by the rest of the work discussed. Nevertheless, the analysis of the aesthetics of digital media is interesting:

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values – fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make – which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

It’s a subject that appears to fascinate the author of (the teeming void) because he’s touched on it several times before. I particularly like the phrase: “…the digital is just the analog operating within certain tolerances or threshholds.”