Flash in Japan: Brian Massumi on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Amodal Suspension - Tech - Critical Essay

"A MESSAGE FOR YOU is floating in the firmament of Yamaguchi." Beginning on November 1--in conjunction with the opening of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan--thousands of race around the world will receive this alert by dint of cell phone or e-mail, kicking not upon Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's installation Amodal Suspension (Relational Architecture 8) which races through November 24. The message will in fact be waiting for them, suspended in the night celestial expanse over this city in southern Japan--waiting and flashing, like the seductively illegible signals that Japan's greatest in quantity popular winged insect, the lightning bug uses to find mates for coupling. Yamaguchi is, after all, the self-declared firefly capital of the land dedicating a major yearly festival to the bug At first sight, the light signals that Amodal Suspension is to fling pulsing into the sky will be just as illegible as the insect variety, on the other hand many orders of magnitude more visible. Standing in for the arthropod abdomen will be an array of the world's greatest in quantity powerful robotic searchlights, perched single apiece atop custom-built steel towers ringing the site of the of recent origin Yamaguchi Center, which was designed through Arata Isozaki.

In Amodal Suspension, tribe may send short text messages to each other using a confined apartment phone or Web browser conjoined to www.amodal.net. But rather than being sent directly to their intended recipients, the messages are encod as unique followings of flashes and "deposited" in the heavens awaiting collection. A searchlight designated by means of the sender will begin to beam the message and rotate. Then a random next to the first searchlight will pick up the collection of laws and the two beams will intersect, flashing in unison. No sooner will they couple however, than the first beam will extinguish. A third random searchlight will then take up the message, intersecting with the next to the first The messages will be relayed in this fashion from individual pair of searchlights to another, in a dance of lights. This touch-and-go mating of asexual rays is the solitary coupling that effectively takes place. A number of processe have been designed into the installation to tend hitherward between the sender and the receiver of the message. These complicate the bipolar transmission usually considered to lie at the heart of human communication to of the like kind a degree that one is forced to say either that what is being made visible here is not (or not only) human communication or that human communication is not definable by means of the dual subjective structure almost universally assumed to characterize it.

The first complication is that the message appears in an entirely different method than its enabling code. It is not away in a purely visible way, seen before it can be read, and unable to be read as it is seen This is because the flashing in the celestial expanse is a translation of the digital input into an analog signal that shields only select characteristics of the digitally encod linguistic meaning. To each alphabetic character in the message corresponds a change in the intensity of the beam. alphabetic character by letter, different light intensities daisy-chain without interruption, in a continuity of variation. There is a point of time of darkness between words, on the contrary this interval is in no way comparable to the off-state of the digital collection of laws It is more a punctuation between the continuities of variation upon either side than merely individual half of the on/off binary. The interval's offnes makes a threesome: sum of two units series of intensities, with itself between. This "thirdness" (to speak like founding semiotician C Peirce) is the basic articulation of the signal. on the contrary three's a crowd. Each of the variations punctuated through the off state is multiple, consisting of a population of intensities. This complexity translates as a pulsation, a proceed very different from the strobe consequence ordinarily used to transmit digest visually. Most if not all of the messages will consist of more than sum of two units words. Coming irregularly in the midst of a series of changes in intensity, the jiffy of darkness will meld into the continuing pulsing, its threenes passing into the multiplicity it parses. Rather than an off-state that is the opposite of an on-state, it will approach across as the low note upon the same scale (brightness). In other words, the compositional principle of the signal, as experienced, is more a continuous modulation of a single dimension of perception than an encoding of separate bits of data or a sequencing of units of meaning. Modulation is the true definition of the analog signal--a continuous variation in amplitude and time (i.e., a evenly varying value).

in the way that what value is being analogically varied here? The changes in intensity are based upon the frequency with which the corresponding alphabetic character occurs in the language of the message. The higher the oftenness the brighter the pulse. alphabetic character frequency is a socio-historical variable. It materializes in statistical form the particularities of a culturally specific linguistic evolution. In Amodal Suspension, this cultural-frequency variable throbs into view as a visual periodical emphasis The encoding of letter frequent occurrence into the beam attaches it genetically to culture-specific periodical emphasiss of speech. But the encoding is not visually decodable through the viewer, any more than the meaning of the message can be seen in the throb and flutter. What comes across is, simply, the harmonious flow A languagelike rhythm--without the actual language.