As Daina Tainina claimed early on during her intervention, it is not sufficient to write about the intersection of meanings, words and material. Rather, it is necessary to make these intersections happen, by concretely practicing or experiencing such intersections, in the same way Leibniz did with calculus, an attempt at creating a universal method to determine symbolic calculation.
Tainina spoke of her attempts to represent non-euclidian geometry, in particular the hyperbolic plane, by evoking the Deleuzian notion of the Fold, which manifests as simultaneously form and process that intersect and correspond and cannot be separated. Rather than working with mere models, she tried to reproduce hyperbolic planes as crocheted objects. This process is not unlike exploring the (physical) folds of Sta Teresa’s dress in Bernini’s Ecstasy.
This practice also reveals unexpected intricacies and complications that lie underneath the rather smooth and perfected theoretical assumptions that make computer models and simulations. when we observe computer model, we cannot avoid noticing their smoothness, their precisions of contour. this is definitely not the case when we try to reproduce such model with our own hands, or in the case of Tainina, by crochet-ing it.
Her experience reflects Anna Munster‘s conception of information aesthetics where…
“The digital conceived as part of a baroque flow, now unfolds genealogically out of the baroque articulation of the differential relations between embodiment and technics.. . in this baroque unfolding, the binary pairs that have populated the understanding of digital culture and new media technologies, can be seen to impinge upon each other rather than be mutually exclusive (from A. Munster, Materializing new media, 2006).”
