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This may … be a primary function of art: to make tangible and subject to scrutiny the nameless psychic dimensions of new experience. Pictorial space couldn’t be “seen” at first. P 28

McLuhan, Through the vanishing point.

This is the principle on which Through the vanishing point is based: juxtapose two aesthetic artifacts.

We can look to Cubism and the modernists for an aesthetic of understanding. Turn to the antenna of the race. A rhetoric of presentation? Is hopeful but grounded in the material as was modernism. The apparition of those faces in a crowd was a material apparition, not far off the arcades of modern Paris. So I want to draw a line from Benjamin to Pound through BLAST.

“The process by which the work is made becomes a model for the process by which the work functions”

Apollinaire makes clear that he locates the significance of aesthetic activity within the process rather than in any aspect of closure or signified value which might fix the signifying activity within a static resolution which could displace or replace the activity itself: “But reality will never be discovered once and for all. Truth is always new” (p. 11). Thus the power of the art object lies not only in its original formulation and in the processes of appropriation and presentation attendant to its creation, but in its capacity to promote invention in the experience of the viewer or reader. The original process by which the work is made becomes a model for the process by which the work functions, and in the typographic, calligraphic, works of Apollinaire, this attitude will become evident. There is an “originating” act rather than an “original work” and the play of signifying elements is put into motion rather than set into fixed place. In creating a critical basis for understanding Cubist painting, Apollinaire found the means of articulating a new aesthetic grounded in what would come to be recognized as characteristic of the modern position in these first decades of the twentieth century: a rhetoric of presentation rather than representation, one grounded in the material factuality of the work as the locus of its existence. P 145

Drucker, The Visible World: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. Print.

What they have in common is aesthetic process that defines imagining by process. A reliance on signifying processes - semiosis - for meaning. Not decoding. Not static. In Pound, Benjamin, Lewis, we confront the semiotic invention of experience. The motivated play of signifying elements. Semiosis that establishes knowledge. And Holmvik for video games as experiential hothouse for understadning, as in Inter/Vention, chapter on Ludology.

An aesthetics used for understanding is semiotic.

And this leads to network aesthetics

This book, then, turns to narrative, visual, and procedural art forms that encourage an active, critical, and even transformative engagement with the network as the new dominant configuration and category of life.

Connect with his repeated commentary that we discover space and time as we differentiate media from each other.

Commentary in Network Aesthetics: the idea that we need alternative aesthecits - images, visual and auditory models - with which to understand networks.

Very different (?) is this A schematic of aesthetic as epistemic, drawn from Flately. Modernis

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