“Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

via Adobe Design Center – Columns and articles from experts on web design and motion graphics.

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• Physicists normally distinguish two main categories of energetics: potential (static) energy, and kinetic energy, which causes movement. Perhaps we might now need to add a third category: kinematic energy, energy resulting from the effect of movement, and its varying speed, on ocular, optical or optoelectronic perception.

• The space of sight is accordingly not Newton’s space, absolute space, but Minkovskian event-space, relative space. And it is not only the dim brightness of these stars that comes to us from out of the distant past, out of the mists of time. The weak light that allows us to apprehend the real, to see and understand our present environment, itself come from a distant visual memory without which there would be not act of looking.

• The age of the image’s formal logic is the age of painting, engraving and etching architecture; it ended with the eighteenth century.

• The age of dialectic logic is the age of photography and film, or if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. The age of paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography and computer graphics…as though, at the close of the twentieth century, the end of modernity were itself marked by the end of a logic of public representation.

• Paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real time subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very concept of reality on its head. Whence the crisis in traditional forms of public representation (graphics, photography, cinema…), to the great advantage of presentation, of a paradoxical presence, the long-distance telepresence of the object or being which provides their very existence here and now.

• This is, ultimately, what “high definition” or high resolution means; andit no longer applies to the (photographic, television) image, but to reality itself.

• With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object’s real-time presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical imagethus acquires a status something like that of a surprise, or more precisely, of an “accidental transfer”.

• Paul Klee’s phrase: now objects perceive me

The Art of the Motor

• Numerous innovations in computer technology were spin-offs of the effective installation of this warning system, which used a real-time radar network for the very first time. One example we might site is the notion of time-sharing, the coupling of the computer and the telephone that would give rise to telematics, computer simulation and even the beginnings of digital imagery. .. In its way, the SAGE system opened the door to the world of virtual reality, that otherworld made necessary by the delivery speed of nuclear weapons.

• Immediately after the war, you will recall, MATTER, until then considered in terms of MASS and ENERGY, was rounded off by the addition by the notion of INFORMATION.

• With the subsequent emergence of computerized simulation and the boom in telecommunications, evidently promoting TELEACTION, information comes to the fore as an entirely separate form of energy: sound and image energy, the energy of long-distance touch and contact.

• This telematic fusion/confusion of energy and live information ended up leading to the absolute equivalence of electronics and computer science, as though the energy of electricity had slyly turned into computer energy.

• BEHAVIORAL METHODOLOGY – elaborated by advocates such as Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow… “The method consisted of privileging BEHAVIOR in studying whatever kind of phenomenon, whether natural or artificial. In other words, the changes the phenomenon undergoes due to its relationship with its environment. For a long time the object of mathematics had been the RELATIONSHIP between various phenomena, but the novelty of the behavioral method consisted in its virtually universal application and its radical character: there was no reality other than that constituted by the relationships between phenomena. (p. 155)

• Speed is not a phenomenon, it is the relationship between phenomena. When we bring both definitions together, we can see that they are identical and that if there is no “reality” outside the relationship between phenomena, then the reality of information is entirely contained in the speed of its dissemination. And so INFORMATION (matter’s third dimension) is only ever “the designation of the state a phenomenon assumes at a given moment.” In other words, its “relief: – whence the current use after this of the terms “high resolution” in relation to sound and image.
• CYBERSPACE, or, more exactly, “cybernetic space-time,” will emerge from the observation, popular with the press, that information is of value only if it is delivered fast; better still, that speed is information itself!
• It was between the research centers at Bletchley Park in GB and Los Alamos in the US that the destiny, not to mention behavior, of our fin de siecle would be played out. The simultaneous inventions of the bomb and the computer would in fact perfectly illustrate the marriage of inconvenience between energy and information. The “microchip revolution” today extends the damage done by the disastrous fallout of the “macroenergetic revolution”… (p. 156)