Page 272 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 263
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place any of the items filling the installation space on the pedestal. When the
system senses something new on it, it records an image of the object. It then
performs many levels of image processing, which are visible on a computer
screen or video projection. The results of these analytical processes are used
to stimulate a metaphorically linked associative knowledge-base of about
150,000 known objects, ideas, sensations, words, etc. The sentence that the
computer produces from what is recorded is not random, yet it often does not
make sense – these sentences could be described, in terms of mimesis, as
Dadaistic poems rather than an adequate relation to what is seen. Rokeby
says that works like The Giver of Names present the (mimetic) challenge of
replicating parts of the human mental system in computer code. Many of the
functions of the human (or even animal) system that we take for granted are
actually remarkably complex. This does not mean that the function cannot be
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replicated by computer code; the question remains open , but speaking in
terms of mimesis, the complexity of the visual world we inhabit generates
equally complex interpretations of the seen, and mimesis, as aletheia, seems
to be an impossible dream to achieve the truth.
But what does the mimetic challenge of The Giver of Names look
like? Lacoue-Labarthe postulates that the idea of a pretending world with
perfect categorization of the whole demands an image that a finite subject
from this pretending produces. An image can no longer be an apparition of
the whole, it is only a space opened to existence by this subject, like a
lightened scene where the subject could measure the relations between
different elements. There is no truth, no aletheia in its purity of revelation the
existing world without a certain adequation. But this adequation, says
Lindberg, made possible by a representation, does not mean the pure
adequation between idea and thing, as was the case for Plato, but in the desire
to produce adequation as mimesis: resemblance, representation. Rokeby says
– with special emphasis on mimesis – that The Giver of Names knows a fair
bit about language, but all it knows of the world is kind of bookish
knowledge. It may have read a novel or two and glanced through an
encyclopaedia, but it has never cuts its finger, fallen in love, been hungry or
lonely. The sentence is the expression of a naïve, highly idiosyncratic,
subjective point of view. The adequation produced by this being cannot be
interpreted as the sameness of an idea, even though there has to be possibility
to interpret and understand reality for limited minds – like the one of The
Giver of Names – as well. Its only function is to name a thing, and thus, to
understand. Rokeby says that the computer offers us the opportunity and a
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device through which to ask in a new way what it means to be human :
allobiography as “presented” image of the human.
For Margaret Morse The Giver of Names explores the symbolic field
and the correspondence between signs and objects created through the
enunciate power of words. The results are not necessarily predictable, for