[artinfo] SERIES: DETAIL - Call for participation

[Eva Gyarmati]

Begin forwarded message:
>
> INCIDENT.NET / SERIES: THE DETAIL
> Call for participation
>
> -> Until September, the 30th of 2006
>
> Thank you to send us your netart/videoart projects and your  
> biography by email (incident at incident.net).
> Only the works using technologies (interactivity, generativity,  
> network, etc.) will be selected.
>
> http://incident.net
> incident at incident.net
>
> ---
>
> Between the subject and the object, between the perceiver and the  
> perceived. As we shift from the detail to the entirety, the change  
> in scale is ascertained through comparison. Can a detail exist all  
> by itself? Would it still be a detail? Do we have to stop once we  
> arrive at the detail? Can't we just keep going until the detail  
> breaks up into endless fragments of further details?
>
> We go from a human being to the body to the hand to the skin, the  
> material of the skin, to pigments, eventually are we even looking  
> at matter at all? The detail is a voyage of perception. What does  
> perception see in a detail? Does it reflect? Is one detail ever  
> alone? Once we reach the detail through this tortuous path of  
> perception, don't we actually find ourselves in an infinite  
> multiplicity? If our perception is shifting, doesn't this imply  
> heterogeneity? How do we decide what is revealed by the visible,  
> and what we see, and how relevant it is to us?
>
> Today's technologies of memory also propose new ways of navigating,  
> travelling through memory, radicalizing the question of the detail  
> and of the other to which it necessarily refers. A detail is never   
> alone, and when it is, it is testament to its isolation, because it  
> is missing something. What is a detail on the Internet? How do we  
> define a hierarchy by which we can go from the detail to the whole  
> or vice versa? If it is hopeless to attempt to find anything which  
> could be called 'the final detail' which would complete our whole,  
> how can we even begin to speak of details?
>
> Yet, we get the sense of never seeing anything more than  
> fragmentary details. The whole is a default, as is reason. As we go  
> from one detail, one perception to the next, we can stop, we may  
> pause, but there is never a good reason to. The world is disconnected.
>
> The detail concerns aesthetics as much as it does thinking. The  
> word itself implies a hierarchy: a detail is something particular,  
> an ornament, nothing of importance, something which may even be on  
> the edge of nothingness. But it is also precision, sophistication,  
> if not subtlety. It is still part of something, a piece, a remnant.  
> The detail is not a concept.
>
> Walter Benjamin described "a thought of detail": Let's remember  
> this garden, this grass, these blades of grass, each blade is  
> unique and has as much to do with the next blade as with anything  
> else. It is through the irremediable vulgarity of thinking that we  
> perceive anything that could be described as 'grass' forgetting the  
> singularity of each detail.
>
> How do interactive cross-referencing, database stratification, and  
> the capacity for unceasing movement of today's technology account  
> for this implied 'other' which is the aesthetic of details? Is it  
> possible to elaborate a perception of details which does not refer  
> back, through the sign of missing something, to an initial  
> totality? A detail, but without nostalgia.
>
> Gregory Chatonsky
>
> ---