decomposed.org


2013, May.
22

Dialectical Virtualism

A virtual image has undergone a transduction, whereby the vehicle of affective content is transformed from one substantive format into another but the affective content only allows for absorption as if it were the original, or --rather-- of the original’s order of materiality. What is striking about watching the fractured image recapitulate into darkness is the realization that this parameterization of virtuality is formulaically open. That is, open to recursive embedding. The definition of virtuality as a second order materiality that carries the affective force of the first can be generalized: virtuality is a m+1 order of materiality. Thus, we do not make claim to the ‘originality’ of the first order or the substantive priority of material, nor does it posit an immaterial force ever transcendent, hovering above the material. Rather it makes the claim that the divergence of virtual and material rests in a functional or translational relationship. In other words, any virtuality entails a materiality and that virtuality is the platform for another level of materiality. Thus, materiality becomes an disfinite string of functions relating levels of virtuality to the correspondent materiality. The only stable relation is the hollow recursive field of embedding, itself a material-virtual order.


9/20

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