The Space of Possibles

Reflective thinkers may more easily spread their conceits through complexity rather than strict reduction, or so it seems. Modern, industrial and information ages have their many examples of loss of meaning in the subject, reduced to a number: note their imaginative exploration in science fiction like THX 1138, with characters attempting to cope with a bold imposition of technics onto humans. Science and technology may also be seen as impositions on humanity with their effects on the social commonwealth, while technology has simultaneously created new social practices that invest desire into this imposition. Mechanical imposition is not therefore, necessarily reductive by default, and poses the question of how to reconcile the physical with the social. While classical uses of the physical to explain culture have been very reductive, i.e. in behaviorism, still, transforming the imposition of mechanics into a superimposition of two qualitiatively different entities breeds metaphor, and not lightly.

Now what is meant here by "explain" is not total explanation: if social processes are reductively thought of as underlied by physical ones, meaning will be the use this framework performs. When an artist or scientist makes a connection between spatial and social phenomena, is he or she trying to remove a topic or subject matter from the collision of these two explanatory phenomena, or does this collision reside in him or her, as a point of mediation between physical space and social action?

In 3D modeling and animation, we are given physical, material means of reconstructing an idea about the world even if we are attempting to explain social phenomena. How might modelers and animators link social or cultural practices with physical ones (what we inevitably do with the software) without reductively equating human experiences--the very culture we are trying to represent--with restricted or inhibited meaning?

Plastic media have historically "glown" as material culture. In fact Karl Marx, the 19th century social theorist of Capitalism and Communism, argued that material conditions always preceed spirit (or its presumption). This can be shown by the example of painters constructing physical objects that allowed them to participate in the dialogue between media and mediation, or vision and writing. Objects are required for "non-objects".

Animators' ad-hoc means of producing simulacra or artificial realities are similar movements from material to quasi-spirit, through the artistic construction of stellar and dynamic effects. The potential of film to refer outside of itself approximates the social through the material. Yet if we look at the functional aspects of 3D tools, we see that a leap is taken from physical construction to cultural construction. Animation is a partial symbol system created through inevitable physical denotation of the cultural.

So goes the story of Western logos, or writing and symbol systems: the symbol is created through writing, sketching, calculating, or drawing-- involving a leap from the conceptual to the cutural according the physical. Latour's notion of inscription devices is useful here, as we are unable to transcend inscription and the very attachment to material conditions frames everything we do--even if objects flirt with a quasi-transcendence.

If meaning is dependent on material conditions, while it can seem "elsewhere" in human experience, then meaning is a collective experience of materiality and immateriality or disjunctive materiality. The materiality and quasi-immateriality of the physical and the social can be shown in geek-amour, in which, despite a subject's reduction of his or her lover by the designation "R34L0", a sensibilité or desire becomes invested in their relation, seemingly "elsewhere".

Numerical equivalents move beyond their immediate reduction into a 21st century desire motivating beings, vivants in love. Through this process of expanded contextual meaning for a reduced sign, the reduction becomes meaningful culturally/socially. We humans sometimes perceive the material as indeed, "elsewhere"

Inherently-material visual production, like 3D, can then stress the qualitative nature of meaning arising relationally or combinatorally. Objects can be photographed and described in ways in which their material relationships -- inside and outside mutual representation -- transform cultural and social meaning. They are material, but seemingly "elsewhere".

Animators always expect a quasi-immaterial experience. Visualization needs to choose whether or not to apply reduction explicitly. In writing without likely redaction -- ever -- the opposite of the choice of explicit reduction is to represent in a fully limited way. But the keen eye sees the physical and social collide, and reduction becomes a space of possibles.

Non Reductive-Reduction

Animation, then, can inaugaurate possibilities by using two methods: aggregation of the qualitative, and a reflexive turn of reductive measures back upon themseleves, in order to show how culture/society is NOT IN FACT reduced.

With 3D modeling and animation, the blank screen (from which we start) communicates that our representation is at first devoid of the social or cultural. It is not actually, and includes open possibilities for cultural construction. Virtual spaces emerge parallel to the "real" world and show us possibilities for meaning. In the same way, language can limit us by creating an abstraction to physical principles, we may use the symbol-processing machine to construct social/cultural content with the flexibility of a large lexicon.

3D Modeling and animation then, is one more tool for enlarging our production environment, either "virtual" or "actual". Mutually-reflecting, parallel virtual and actual worlds remain hybrid, spatialized by languages, reflected onto the physical world "in you", back onto the social world "out there". The physical initiates the social and cultural, physical too. Moving beyond formal invention requires a procession of philosophical thinking or value attribution to life -- and these days, often through systems of numerical, or technical abstraction.

In modeling physical attributes to get at social attributes, and vice versa, we co-locate the two tendencies between the intuitive and the conscious. The physical is at once the social, and the social highlights material conditions of existence.

The space of possibles, then, is a space of the intersection of physics and social physics. Maybe Comtean "social physics" truly worked as an expert system, after all. Whatever the metaphor of global knowledge, tabular or networked, agents refine this fundamental dialogue between physical stuff and experience which lies, perhaps in our minds, but feels -- "elsewhere".