Medium Affect Desire: Hybridising Real Virtual and the Actualised through Affective Medium Ecology

Authors

  • Marc Boumeester

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.8.1.802

Abstract

Underneath the turbulent surface of the ubiquitous media-scape lies an even more agile and aggressive set of relations. A central figure in this turmoil of desires seems to be the asignifying sign, which has a hybridising liaison with both the realm of the real virtual and the realm of the actualised. The main question is what does it want? This new materialistic, non-anthropocentric liberty of affect is creating an arena of strange attractors and other topological vector fields in which our own unconscious drive is as effective as that of the steel ball in a pinball machine. Could we isolate the intrinsic drive of the medium from its subservient position in the aesthetic, freeing its desire from the anthropocentric dominion? What does it Yen for? Perhaps this gap is not meant to be filled, as it is this yearning what it yearns for. The asignifying sign cannot be isolated, it is neither here nor there, yet it is conditionally omnipresent, it inhibits the gap, its desire is to affect.

Author Biography

Marc Boumeester

Marc Boumeester worked for various major television- and film-producing companies and actualized dozens of audiovisuals in a range from commercials to feature films. He is appointed as researcher and lecturer at the Delft University of Technology, theory section at the faculty of Architecture and he has co-founded (and leads) the department of Interactive / Media / Design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He lectures in the field of media philosophy and design theory. His research focuses on the liaison between affect, socio-architectural conditions and unstable media, in particular cinema.

Downloads

Published

2014-04-01

Issue

Issue # 14 | Spring 2014 | Asignifying Semiotics: Or How to Paint Pink on Pink

Section

Article

License

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.