Is there a technology more contemporary yet timeless than sheet glass or mirrors?
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- Jim Hamlyn
- Glasgow and Aberdeen, Scotland
- Artist and lecturer interested in contemporary art practice, philosophy and teaching. Thanks especially to Peter McCaughey for encouraging me to start this blog and Lesley Punton, without whom I would never have continued. Thanks also to Donald Brook whose work on representation and cultural evolution continues to lead me to significant new insights about the nature of mind and imagination.
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Unless otherwise credited, all work (images, text etc) on this site is by Jim Hamlyn and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
9 comments:
containers? perhaps fall under the same category though.
Interesting - vessels no less - holders of people, things or substances which allow them to be kept or moved as a body. What strikes me as interesting is that these things (containers and especially mirrors, sheet glass) are all mediators - who's presence is barely felt and this absence or immateriality seems inextricably connected to their timelessness.
Oh and how could we forget that most deceptively transparent of containers of the lucid and opaque: language itself. Though arguably not a technology (http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/2009/05/is-language-a-technology.html) language nonetheless mediates experience in a way which also conceals its existence.
Fantastic essay there! And you're right about mediators. Would it not be lots of fun to see some sort of family tree/diagram of mediators/vessels? Complete with little drawings of each object (how does one draw Language?).
What do you mean by sheet glass? instead of just glass. (glass jars, optics etc)
The play between what is contained (jam/jar, vision/eyeglasses, the internet) and peoples interactions with these, the implications made by various containers. A mirror or water surface can f.e. be tools of Narcissus, while language itself is a collective affair "Language is no good without a group of users".
In regards to timelessness i enjoyed the bit where Edison quotes Pinker “The crux of [my] argument is that complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation—not because they are taught.”.
p.s.
Excuse the delayed reply. I wish one could get an email notification when stuff happens.
Thanks Tor,
By sheet glass I mean the flat stuff we use in windows. Glass bottles, jars and drinking vessels etc must always take a physical form (design) and all designs are bound by “style” which is the very antithesis of timelessness. So I guess I’m drawing a correlation between formlessness (and immateriality) and timelessness. I really like your idea of a family tree - though I have to say I’m not great with Venn diagrams - it took me ages to work out the simple one in my last post and I’m still not happy with it.
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Don't know how I could miss the subscribe button! Spielraum am fail!
I understand what you mean, by sheet glass now, and I can see the importance of naming the object before it takes on a particular design.
The problem with immateriality, for example digital media, is that it has such a sneaky form. It has no form, compared to sheet glass. Which is concrete. Relating back to your text on eccentricity - it is helpful to have a norm, like sheet glass, to be able to detect articulation.
Things like Hipstamatic (for iPhone) are too heavy handed in execution perhaps out of some sort of primitive longing for underlying form norm?
Digital language has replaced photography as the most formless language. Photography has become concrete, although still of course misunderstood.
Personally I like media where I can have a sense of its presence. Like water. An invisible gas form is hard to deal with. Water is as timeless as gas although being more 'material'.
how would paper fair?
would this count as a technology?
Hi Scott,
Nice one! Yes I think paper would count as a technology and 20 years ago I'm sure we'd definitely say it's timeless but considering the fact that right at this moment we're communicating without it I'm not so sure. Once again it's a sheet though isn't it - and a "blank" one too which is generally used to mediate communication. It makes me think of those other white sheets between which we loose consciousness and dream. I think there's something really interesting at the heart of all this but I haven't quite put my finger on it yet. Thanks for the comment though - it really helps.
"I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case." -Jonathan Miller
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