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• W2920565547 abstract "The Inaudibility of Contemporary Technics:Carsten Nicolai's Telefunken Ian Kennedy (bio) Today, we need to understand the process of technical evolution given that we are experiencing the deep opacity of contemporary technics; we do not immediately understand what is being played out in technics, nor what is being profoundly transformed therein, even though we unceasingly have to make decisions regarding technics, the consequences of which are felt to escape us more and more. —Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time An important strand of contemporary media theory takes up the problem of what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to, in the epigraph to this essay, as the deep opacity of contemporary technics. Stiegler's phrase registers the challenge posed by the fact that the vast majority of everyday technologies have evolved to operate quasi-autonomously from human cognition and on timescales below the threshold of human perception. Tellingly, Stiegler's language casts this problem in visual terms. Opacity here suggests not only cognitive impenetrability but also literal invisibility, a thickness through which light (and hence sight) cannot pass. [End Page 308] To restate in terms of a concrete example, even though I use my laptop virtually every day, I do not know what is happening inside the machine while I type these letters, nor do I see those computational operations take place directly, beyond the screen, in their microtemporal execution.1 For media theory, the challenge that this example presents is theorizing in an age in which most media operations shape our sensible world without ever being sensually encountered, let alone basically understood. Media theory has several names for this perceptual inaccessibility, corresponding to several different but deeply related phenomena. To name but a few, the figure of a depth of digital code operating behind the surface of a screen;2 the black boxing of consumer electronic devices, such that the processing of inputs into outputs happens invisibly;3 and most recently, the invisibly embedded networks of so-called atmospheric media.4 My central thesis in this essay is that Stiegler's formulation, deep opacity, is symptomatic of a broader visualist bias underpinning all of the aforementioned figures: a general conflation of imperceptibility and invisibility in the ways we construe the evolution of technics beyond the human senses. I argue that this bias toward visuality and the invisible gives us a limited point of entry into the subperceptual depth of technical infrastructures. After all, there is more to imperceptibility than invisibility. The occasion for my thesis is Carsten Nicolai's Telefunken (Germany, 2001), an artwork that addresses the deep opacity of contemporary technics in sonic rather than visual terms. Telefunken features a CD composed of impulse frequencies and test signals that Nicolai designed to be viewable as abstract linear patterns when fed, as an audio signal, directly into the video input on a typical analog television. The CD's packaging instructs the user to plug the left audio channel into the television's video input and the right channel into the television's audio input so that the piece is simultaneously visible and audible.5 When I first hook up Nicolai's piece to my television, my inclination is to take on a conventional spectatorial role by sitting back and taking the piece in from beginning to end. At first, the visuals appear to move in lockstep with what I hear. Lines shift upward and downward in perfect synchrony with the rhythm of the sound signal, and as different frequencies increase and decrease in loudness, corresponding lines fade in and out from the screen. Moreover, these audiovisual correlations appear to be fixed and determinate at first; my sense (at least initially) is that Nicolai's sparse, minimalist frequencies would generate exactly the same sparse, minimalist visuals if I were to play the CD a second time. [End Page 309] Eventually, however, I find that what I see and what I hear are not as tightly correlated as I initially assumed. For instance, I begin to detect a horizontal flickering pattern (what looks like a rotating barber's pole turned on its side) that recurs seemingly at random throughout the piece; its patterned motions correlate with neither the rhythm of the sound signal..." @default.
• W2920565547 created "2019-03-11" @default.
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• W2920565547 date "2018-01-01" @default.
• W2920565547 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
• W2920565547 title "The Inaudibility of Contemporary Technics: Carsten Nicolai's <em>Telefunken</em>" @default.
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• W2920565547 doi "https://doi.org/10.13110/discourse.40.3.0308" @default.
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