Friedrich Kittler: “The realm of the dead has the same dimensions as the storage and emission capacities of its culture.”

For all their impact on the living and the lived environment, new technologies also mean new forms of death: the airplane, aerial death; the automobile, high-speed death; the atomic bomb, sudden mass death; and perhaps now, through the cumulative effects of technological development, its concomitant destruction of the natural environment through urbanization, deforestation, and the emission of greenhouse gases, we are coming up against a new form of death: a slow death, a death of populations protracted long into the future. As Kittler points out, however, it is not the mere fact of destruction and devastation or the manifold actual deaths that make up the realm of the dead. The realm of the dead is the realm of the representability of death. So, in a way, this new form of death—the realm of future deaths—could be thought as the result of information models capable of anticipating death. The expanding realm of the dead would, through this understanding, have everything to do with the storage and emission capacities of simulation, a system of models capable of reproducing death in advance, preproducing death, as it were. For us the realm of the dead is simulation.

smao;ht

This blog centers on my considerations of cinema in the history of technology. The unusual title, smao;ht, comes from a happy coincidence: One day when I was in the middle of a particularly galvanizing Gmail chat with my good friend David I reached a point at which no words would express, well, whatever it was that I wanted to express, and rather than responding to the previous message with some carefully or not so carefully typed line, I simply struck my hands on the keyboard and produced: smao;ht.

I loved it. From the first moment. David seemed to like it as well. I don't know that I'll ever know exactly why it seemed so perfect, but if I were to impose a meaning, a reason, and a history of the exclamation, it would go something like this:

The semicolon (;) was introduced into typesetting by Aldus Manutius, a 15th century Italian scholar and printer, who is also credited with inventing italic type. Manutius originally used the symbol as a placesetter between opposing terms. As such, the semicolon inhabited the space between the poles of a binary. If there is anything that I would like this blog to do, it is that: to work in the space between binaries, to proceed in the spirit of deconstruction and perhaps, if we can say, in the spirit of the semicolon.