User:Emily/RW&RM/Trimester 02/03
The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems
Intro
Benjamin’s text published in 1936, when film was still young; while Nichols’s was published in 1988, when video games and other simulation media were young. Within this text, Nichols will discuss this shift from fetishisation of the object to fetishisation of the process of interaction, of simulation. With some examples of simulation to video games and genetic engineering, it reveals ideology becomes more clearly a subject.
page2
Cybernetic systems include an entire array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power., which all exhibit a capacity to process information and execute actions. The computer is an icon and a metaphor symbolising the entire spectrum of networks, systems and devices.
With in the article Nichols contrast characteristics of cybernetic systems with those of mechanical reproduction and establish a central metaphor to help to understand these cybernetic systems, and prompt the question that how this metaphor acquires the force of the real. The work of culture will be discussed in focus
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What at the heart of the change in mechanical reproduction that effects the work of art is the impossibility of reproducing its authenticity. However, it emancipates art from its parasitical dependence on ritual, and turn to a new basis in politics, which are held in check by the economic system surrounding the means of mechanical reproduction.
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A radical change in the nature of art implies that our very ways of seeing the world have also changed. Through montage film achieves the changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator, which strongly testifies to this new form of machine-age-perception.
page5
What potential can be located in the computer and its cybernetic systems, similar with the situation of cinema, must be defused and contained by the industries of information. The process of adopting new ways of seeing that consequently propose new forms of social organisation, which becomes a paradoxical, or dialectical process but goes forward all the same.
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Nichols puts forward the question is our "sense of reality" being adjusted by new means of electronic computation and digital communication? Then he lists the power, products and human sense in the age of industrial capitalism.
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Cybernetic Systems and Electronic Culture
Simulacra introduce the key question of how the control of information moves towards control of sensory experience, interpretation, intelligence, and knowledge. The power of the simulation moves to the heart of the cybernetic matter.
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Human identity subject to change vulnerable to challenge and modification as the very metaphors prompted by the imaginary Others that give it form themselves change. The concept of text in electronic communication and in cybernetic system.
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Unlike in the mechanical reproduction, we encounter simulacra that represent a new form of social practice in their own right and represent nothing in cybernetic systems. What's more, "I" and "you" are strictly relational propositions attached to no substantive body, no living individuality. In place of human intersubjectivity, a systems interface is discovered.
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Like for example in ELIZA, cybernetic interaction achieves with an intelligent apparatus the simulation of social process itself. Cybernetic dialogue offers the illusion of control, but a predominantly masculine fascination with the control of simulated interactions replaces a (predominantly masculine) fascination with the to-be-looked-at-ness of a projected image. Engagement with the process of computational system becomes the object of fetishization.
page11
Within in cybernetic systems, individuals 'choices' are always the permutations and combinations of a predefined set. What's more, the other scene from which complex rule-governed universes actually get produced recedes further from sight. The governing procedures no longer address us in order to elicit a suspension of belief; they address the cybernetic system, the microprocessor of the computer, in order to absorb us into their operation.
page12
Chip replaces the copy. It reveals the power of postindustrial capitalism to simulate and replace the world around us. The copy reproduces the world, the chip simulates it. Cybernetic simulations offer the possibility of completely replacing any direct connection with the experiential realm beyond their bounds.