DocumentaX Forum: Blast
Moderated by Jordan Crandall
An overview by ricardo dominguez

"Habit is a great deadener." –Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

"If my language quavers, trembles or is obscure, quavering and obscure
are then also the ideas it tries to express. Still when it is to my
taste precise, I then feel it attained simplicity. So I'll send -
separately - the 'home-affect and co/in-habit(u)ation' murmurs that
deals with 'co-spasming' and recurrences." –Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger

Homo Neticus is the outcome of multiple dead machines congealing into
ugly social habits. Aesthetic and political discourse is moving from the
analysis of place, to that of bandwidth. From the movement of people to
the flow of information. These have become our prime critical habits.
Digital economies of signs and space have pushed ethics and the polis
towards the 'fourth discontinuity.' First Copernicus, then Darwin,
followed by Nietzsche and Freud. Pushing us out of our comfortable homes
to linger and reside alone in our fragile 'meat space.'

Now "meta-attributes have replaced physical attributes…" (John
Beckmann, Blast), thoughts with hyperlinks, and activity with instant
remoteness. The rush of being-on-line overcomes the becoming of Being.
The online forums at DocumentX attempt to suture the wound by inhabiting
our disappearance–the 'home-affect and co/in-habit(u)ation' of the
matrix.

In 1968 Edmund Leach said that what frightened him, "more than the
complexities now being presented to the mind was the impulse to respond
with a reductive omniscience." These forums certainly are not reductive
and they capture the process of social introjection which new media
dialogues engender. Of the three forums offered at DocumentaX, the Blast
forum moderated by Jordan Crandall
[http://documenta.de/english/blasta.htm], has created the most
impassioned leaps in the darkness which swerve across the electronic
nervous system. Perhaps, because it attempts to suture the wounds of art
with the formal "protocols" of a new media aesthetics. That may create
unfamiliar routes back towards a new "art."

But, this new 'art' of increased bandwidth, connectivity, and
distributed informatics may set the conditions of an aesthetics which
will be unrecognizable by the very hands and eyes that set it forth. New
media maybe the last trace of art and the artist–they have been
introjected into the everyday exchange of market realism. Art within the
frame of new media is a traumatic thing, an "…aching, and we do not
know where it hurts and that it hurts. It struggles unsuccessfully to
re-approach psychic awareness, but only finds momentary relief in
symptomatic repetitions or, by subterfuge, in artwork, where its painful
encapsulation partly blows up," (Blast, Lichtenberg-Ettinger).

The Blast forum then is spillage management for something that is
already lost and attempts to find, "an aesthetic that saves…to reverse
the seemingly irreversible destiny of the modern subject; to develop the
phenomenology of perception," (Attila Sohar, Blast). The Blast forum is
a life boat floating on a net without islands, holding a cargo of empty
figures, fading into an invisible horizon–and they ask, "What name do
we have for defining our relationship to blindness and calamity? These
are questions for the emerAgency." (Greg Ulmer, Blast). These are the
whimpers of our digital "Ate"–the tragic impure net of co-aphanisis.