Page 285 - Cyberculture and New Media

276 Desistant Media
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hyperbological accordance to a substantial subtext of dispossession. I suggest
that besides the historical phases we must also look for the ahistorical threads
– the very continuums through the phases of different media technologies.
Dispossessive media modes of both Baroque and Romanticism show that
modern and modernist media art are not plain historical paradigm shifts but
also certain continuums of dispossession produced by media differencing
from the possessive mode, theorized historically by the onto-typology within
Western thinking. This onto-typological safeguard of mimesis now has its
twin, not oppositional to the first mentioned but as an Unheimlich pair, or
strange couple.
Desistance, finally, is an oscillation protocol of media art that cannot
be historicized as a historical paradigm but as a manifestation of an artist free
from the constraints of technology. As a Kunstkammer, art is a trace of
ahistorical motifs and themes, pedagogically concerned with a myth of
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man. Even though the resistant mode of information can be seen as
domesticated, still many indicators let us speculate that the “Kunstkammer” –
the media lab – is still a place for magic to occur.

Notes

1
Cf. Puetz 2002.
2
Cf. Bolter & Grusin 2000, 236.
3
Johnson in Derrida 2004, viii-ix.
4
Sparks 1997, xxii-xxiii. Compare “mimeme” to “meme” in Fuller 2005,
109-116.
5
Oswalds 1994, 254.
6
Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe 1995, 46 and Lacoue-Labarthe 1994, 152 and
especially Lindberg 1998, 33-36. About Nazi onto-typology, see Lacoue-
Labarthe 1990, 93-99.
7
Lacoue-Labarthe 1994, 152.
8
This discussion is described in Tikka 2005, see e.g. 106 and 120. The very
problematic substance of this thinking is cited in a direct quotation from Jean
Mitry: “a film is a mirror in which we recognize only what we present to it
through what it reflects back to us: all it ever reflects is our image”. This is a
loop (of consciousness). See also Zapp 2002, 78.
9
Bolter 1991, 226. See also Bacon 1994, 80: audiovisual experience in
general functions as a substitute for the lack of participation in the world;
there’s a movement away from tactile towards visual experience as a
movement toward greater abstraction and formalism divorced from actual
experience that, according to Bacon, increases the sense of consciousness as
something separate and alienated from the world. What is behind this thought