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Minima Memoranda Original URL: http://www.n5m.org/n5m3/pages/streamingmedia/memoranda.htm Walter Benjamin's idea of "philosophical salvage of scraps" gives us a basis to strategically utilize the prevailing technology towarda different way to deconstruct the power system that the technology supports. Today's electronic devices consist of modules that soon become inexpensive junks. Given the hybrid potentiality, even such junkscan be redeemed as totally new modules that could be brought into different contexts and functions. This really happened in theMini-FM micro transmitter. Mini-FM starting as a Japanese counterpart of the Italian and French free radio in the late 70s was also an analogue counterpart ofthe fashionable 'new media' in the 80s in Japan, which were unable to bring its digital ability into full play yet. The free radio was free from the exiting state-controlled or mass-oriented radios in the 70s. However, they started absorbing theelement of free radio into themselves. In the 90s, the Internet has ended the authentic function of the free radio. Advertising techniques such as "market segmentation" had preceded the method of narrowcasting and multi-channels. When Mini-FM found that nobody listened to it, Mini-FM learned its really radical potential of "micro revolution". Radio is also an invisible architecture of airwaves and creates a 'public' art in the post-public age. The paradox of technology is that it erases *bodiness* and at the same time revives it. This difference refers to the differencebetween "hi-tech" and "low-tech". The meaning of 'low' of 'low-tech' must be inexpensive. It shouldn't have nothing to do with inferiority of the technology. Inexpensiveness will ultimately refer to non-profit system--a post capitalist society where profit as "excess of returns over outlay"alternates itself to an "eternal circulation" of information. The Informational Capitalism today is the beginning of such a stage andthe end form of Capitalism. Hi-tech is not "high-touch" but wants to exist without human body. *Bodiness* does not consist of organs but exits "without organs". It is invisible just as air and airwaves while body and organ arevisible. The re-interpreted body from the perspective of the invisible *bodiness* should be heard rather than seen. To hear this *bodiness* needs not voice. *Bodiness's* 'voice' is silence. Gesture and 'gestus' are more intimate with the*bodiness* rather than voice. Voice is mere a representation of the *bodiness*. Each bodies can communicate in the resonance. Resonance does not exchange information but synchronizes between bodies. The resonance media will not exchange anything. It will create a new emotion, that is change the prevailing emotional space. Every person has his/her feeling. Emotion is a resonance of various feelings. But too many feelings cannot create themselves intoa good resonance. Be careful of a 'powerful' resonance because it should be fabricated by integrating variety of feelings ofnumerous persons into a monotonous feeling, 'resentiment'. Mass media is a device to fabricate 'resenmtiment'. The resonance cannot take place in too large radius of feelings. If communicative community does matter, the resonance mustdecide the size of community. As "global" media have developed, local media have had to become more local. In the age of satellite and internet, every local medium has to be potentially global. That is why it is called *translocal*. "Sender"-"medium"-"receiver", the popular model of communication has become obsolete as late as the Internet has started. Themedium is not a "tube". As Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela wrote, there is no "transmitted information" incommunication. Communication is a "structural coupling". Sender and receiver can be separated only in a theoretical abstraction and a forced operation in the power system. Sender andreceiver should get together. The separation between transmitter and receiver is mere a political operation. Technologically, thereis no separation in them. "Message' is also problematic. Media don't transport message but do refer here to there. Airwaves relate to casting and resonating. As a casting medium, airwaves spread information upon the audience. As a resonatingmedium, however, airwaves create various enclaves of emotions in the audience. The Internet and cable media depend on lines. Lines relate to binding, weaving, and streaming. They can bind audience up into atightly integrated "network", a marionette-like circuit. However, lines are not always tight but loose. Loose lines weave webs. In theweaving-weaved web, the signal does not cast itself but streams by itself. Casting is an one-way process while streaming isinteractive: streaming in and back. Collaboration between airwaves
and lines will create *polymorphous space*, the space that consists
of *poly* (many and diverse)+ *morph* (form and shape). Given
that the concrete model of polymorphous space is our body, electronic
media can only re-findand rethink the authentic character of
our body. |