Eleni Ikoniadou – Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event

Event date: 29 October 2011
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum,
6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London,
Strand Campus,
London, WC2R 2LS

THE LONDON GRADUATE SCHOOL

presents

Rhythm and Event

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Eleni Ikoniadou (Kingston University)
Splice, Freeze, Stretch and Mutate: Digital rhythm as harbinger of the event

As digital media become more ubiquitous, pervasive and dominant, attempts to theorise their limitations and possibilities start to seem mundane. Whether positive or negative, most accounts agree on the capacity of digital technology to converge and redistribute older media forms, to reorganise production, consumption and transmission, and to fundamentally alter our understanding of spatiotemporally distributed events. The machine aesthetics of digital media art have contributed to the idea of a reality generated out of bits and bytes, zeros and ones, the atomistic ontology of code. Yet the age old dilemma ‘is the universe discrete or continuous’ now translated to ‘is reality digital or analogue’, appears to miss the complexity of the event by confining it to an actual, or at best possible, state of affairs. The paper argues that experimental digital sound techniques such as splicing, freeze frame, time-stretching and others, commonly used in new media artworks today, may be able to challenge the metaphysical distinction between continuity (duration) and discontinuity (the instant). Emerging at the margins of time, these art events become rhythmmachines of the future, exposing our human timescales to a time that is not ours, is no longer or does not yet exist. As this talk will suggest, this rhythmic time summons and expresses the contingent side of the event, a dimension beyond the present that actualises it.
Eleni Ikoniadou is Lecturer in Media at Kingston University and an executive member of the LGS. Her research looks at the relationship between technology, art and media theory and the capacity of their encounters to generate new concepts and alternative experiences. She is currently working on a monograph that investigates the underlying dimensions of rhythm in experimental sound and media art events.

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