Enfolding and Unfolding: An Aesthetics for the Information Age How many things in your perceptible world are

not only themselves, but the visual, aural, and tactile manifestation of information? Of course your computer screen, your mobile telephone if you have one, and the pages of your books are the visual faces of information. You may gasp with wonder at the stunning effects of blockbuster movies, knowing full well that they are computer generated. Your digital photographs, DVDs, and digital sound recordings reach perceptible form through the mediation of software; you are reminded of this when they are damaged and reduced to jittering bits. Advertisements, recorded music, pictures of celebrities tacked to the wall were information before they arrived to your eyes, ears, and fingers. Your Calvin Klein socks and your ergonomic toothbrush are really market research, materialized in plastic and acrylic. The corn and potatoes in your refrigerator, bred to be hardy and long lasting and selected for the supermarket, are the gustatory expression of information. Your oriental carpet, if you have one, is the visual and tactile expression of algorithms, whether digital (Iranian factories commonly employ carpet-weaving software) or analog (a weaver draws on algorithmic patterns, mental or on paper, when composing a carpet). Realizing that your perceptible world is merely the tips of imperceptible, information icebergs, you may well cast around for something that just Is. Maybe you'll hear your neighbor singing, you'll catch a whiff of asphalt from the road construction, you'll see your dog come into the room. What a relief. This is raw experience, right? But wait - what's that pop song she's styling? Why was your neighborhood scheduled for development? How much did your dog cost? The interactive diagram of the relationship Enfolding-Unfolding that you will find here demonstrates an aesthetic model for the information age. We have long sensed that representation was not where the real action lay in contemporary art and popular culture. Images themselves are increasingly composed of information. Visual images, aural images, tactile images, and even gustatory and olfactory images - tastes and smells - often index not raw experience but information. In general, the most important events in contemporary society do not occur at the level of the image but at the level of information; they are imperceptible. The financial transactions whirling around the globe at satellite speed are perhaps the best example. Information is as old as human society, and information has long underlain aspects of the perceptible world. The differences now are quantitative: more aspects of contemporary society are impregnated by information than ever before; and qualitative: information now is closely intertwined with capital. Information is often synonymous with capital because it consists of those aspects of the world of experience that can translate into market value. But the fact that most images are expressions (explications) of information is only one-third of the story. The carpet weaver daydreams as she works; the person feeding code into a digital loom does too. The agronomist puzzles over factors of longevity and economy, as the hybrid corn rustles in the wind. And of course an army of code-writing drones is named in the credits at the end of digital blockbusters, in type so small it disintegrates into lozenges when the

movie is transferred to a DVD. Some person, working in Palo Alto, Mississauga, Shanghai, Bombay, wrote (or compiled) the software that animates the movie dinosaurs, works your DVD player, patterns the factory-made carpet. Maybe that person was tired, took a sip of tea, spoke to a colleague, and made a mistake that will cause the program to crash, the dinosaur to twitch, the carpet to look dodgy. In Agnes Varda's documentary of gleaners scraping a living from the leftovers of commercial agriculture, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), perfectly shaped potatoes translate effortlessly from being simply there to being capital. They are harvested, a kilogram of potatoes is translated into a price, and they are sold. The other potatoes, left behind because they are knobby or oversized, are valueless as capital. The gleaners collect them for food, in activities that remain under the radar of capital. This kind of direct relationship between Experience and Experience, I argue, is exceptional, for now most of what arrives to us as Image, or in Experience itself, has already been mediated by Information. But in short, not only is the image (in all its forms) an expression of information; also, information is an expression of experience. So what is experience? It is not necessarily personal experience, but experience as the medium of change. Charles Sanders Peirce wrote, "Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change." The programmer, the weaver, the corn, the plastic all undergo change, and this constitutes experience. Experience is a plane of immanence, in Deleuze and Guattari's term: an infinite membrane between the virtual and the actual. We can think of Experience as infinitely enfolded: containing everything, folded into itself. Information and Image are also planes of immanence. Like Experience, they are infinite, though, as mathematics permits, they are smaller infinities. Experience is the most infinite of these three planes of immanence because all Information, all Images, cycle around to be re-enfolded in Experience. In turn, only a very few of its contents are actualized, or unfolded. This can happen in two ways: Experience unfolds directly into an Image, or experience unfolds into information. I have chosen the terms enfolded and unfolded (or their Latinate synonyms, implicate and explicate) to echo Gilles Deleuze's explication of the Baroque aesthetics of Leibniz. Leibniz's principle that the smallest element of matter is a fold makes it possible to conceive of the plane of immanence as composed of infinite folds. The actual is thus infinitely enfolded in the virtual. To actualize something is to unfold it. How do things that are virtual - that are immanent in Experience - become actualized? They are drawn into being by the magnetic pull of one of the other planes. They are selected, from the infinite expanse of Experience, to be actualized. They unfold from Experience to become Information. They unfold to become Image. I want to draw attention to the vast amount of stuff that remains enfolded in each of these planes of immanence. A vast amount of Experience is never unfolded, never becomes Information or Image: like the experience of the corn plant, the weaver, or the programmer. A vast amount of Information remains

imperceptible because it is not unfolded as Image. And a vast number of Images are forgotten to experience. The triadic diagram Experience : Information : Image has traits of Peirce's triadic epistemology. Experience has the quality Peirce called Firstness, or of being initself and referring to nothing but itself. Information has the quality of Secondness, difference, or "struggle," because it is selected from Experience in order to be put to use. Image has Thirdness, because it mediates between Information and Experience. Looking at an image, we can understand how Information mediates Experience. In example 6, Michael Joo's beautiful installation Bodhi Obfuscatus (2005), we experience the Buddha (a 7th-century statue that enfolds the Experience of centuries of worshippers) not directly but through the Information from surveillance cameras monitoring the statue. It is a mediated spiritual experience appropriate to our age. As Third can become First, so all Information and all Images become enfolded once again into Experience. They may re-enter the cycle, or they may lie there like leaves in a pile, children's drawings on a refrigerator (example 4), or people who pass away without attaining fame. Experience is a vast archive whose contents are almost entirely enfolded. I offer Enfolding-Unfolding as a dynamic diagram of contemporary aesthetic experience. It provides sophisticated tools of aesthetic explanation and evaluation. Enfolding-Unfolding allows us to evaluate how artworks (and other things) facilitate the flow among Experience : Information : Image. It allows us to account for the ways in which they select from each of the three planes: which virtuals of Experience are actualized (unfolded) as Information, which virtuals of Information are actualized as Image, and in turn what happens when Experience actualizes Information and Image. This diagram pays attention to the intelligence and grace with which these relationships are enacted. In example 3, a sophisticated work of online art, Apartment (2001) by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenburg, the Image results from a playful, social interaction between the Information of database and algorithms and the Experience of thought, programming, and viewer interaction. In information aesthetics, beauty lies not in representation but in internal complexity. Baroque art, and what Sean Cubitt calls the "neo-Baroque" cinema, use Image to draw attention to the elegant artifice whereby Information mediates Experience. "As we reach the end of a film like Snake Eyes," Cubitt writes, "we should survey the whole plot as if it were a knot garden, a spatial orchestration of events whose specific attraction is its elaboration of narrative premise into pattern." In Baroque art, the perceptible Image is the expression or unfoldment of a legible level of information. This Baroque relationship of Image to Information is recapitulated in contemporary computer art; it is prefigured by the aniconic art of Sunni Islam. All these art forms invite us to admire not a naturalistic reflection upon Experience but an Information-driven artifice.

As a triadic diagram, Enfolding-Unfolding avoids some of the pitfalls of dualism. For example, it does not evaluate art on the basis of its authenticity, which would be the seeking of a correspondence between Image and Experience. And it

bypasses the modernist criteria of reflexivity and criticality, for these criteria apply to a dualist model as well. The "critique of representation" evaluates Image in light of Experience but does not account for the crucial mediation of Information. Enfolding-Unfolding offers a positive, Experience-embracing criterion for criticism: what Experience is privileged, what passed over, in the selection of information and Image? What Information is privileged to unfold into Image? The aesthetic analysis I offer does not condemn Images mediated by Information, nor fetishize the purity of Experience untouched by information culture. Paying attention to what is left enfolded is similar to a materialist critique, whereby we evaluate Image in terms of its reference to the Information and Experience that underlie it, except that it doesn't oppose (true) material and (false) ideal, a dualist model, but attends to all the Experience that composes the Information and Images that arrive to us. Enfolding-Unfolding also shows that much art is concerned with the nature of en/unfolding rather than with producing images. It privileges performativity over representation, as unfolding is a performative, time-based, social act. For example, the writing on a Fatimid mosque (example 7) requires the person contemplating it to unfold its meaning, thus emphasizing the act of interpretation that is key to Shi'a Islam. Enfolding-Unfolding pays attention to the invisible, the forgotten, or what an artwork deliberately leaves enfolded, and so it allows us to appreciate quiet or barely visible artworks in terms of what they keep latent. One of my colleagues in the previous issue of Vectors, Rick Prelinger, returns in Panorama Ephemera to his famous film archive. Working against the tendency of other artists to unfold significant Information from the images, Prelinger builds a private story from them, inviting the viewer to attend to the Experience enfolded in the image. Enfolding-Unfolding also has political implications. Power lies in the ability to make things unfold, circulate, and enfold. Example 2, the stock market, shows how capital selects only a very few aspects of Experience as relevant to Information, and in turn broadly influences Experience in a feedback loop. Power is also the ability to hide things in the image. One of my colleagues in this issue, Trevor Paglen, shows how power disdains the image. The "Black World" of secret U.S. military bases is an example of how power entirely bypasses the visible, yet continues to circulate and has real effects. Paglen goes to great lengths to unfold that world of secret Information and make it available as Image. Example 5 shows that fame is an index of how many times an event generates movement around the diagram. Example 1, a family photograph, and 4, a child's drawing of a popular icon, show that private experience, intensely meaningful though it may be, does not circulate. Example 8, surveillance, shows how a totalitarian society is concerned with absolute unfolding, leaving no experience private, and thus forms private experience to the shape of Information. Thus, resisting unfolding can be a political act, as can actively unfolding parts of Experience that are usually deemed insignificant. The diagram you see here enfolds and unfolds the creative intelligence of designer Raegan Kelly. An audiovisual thinker exquisitely attuned to the expressive capacities of the line, Kelly was able to translate my ideas and

descriptions into moving images that capture the qualities of implication and explication: the magnetic pull of one plane on another, the hesitation to unfold, the brutality of selection, the gradual dwindling of an event into stillness; qualities of playfulness, ephemerality, recalcitrance, inexorability. Kelly is a true animator who understands the nonorganic life of the line. The Unfolding-Enfolding diagram comes to you by way of eight examples. I hope these will facilitate your understanding of the relationships between Experience, Information, and Image and invite you to map your own examples onto it. You will find a text that discusses the example. You will also come across my verbal description of how the diagram should behave, which will allow you to appreciate Raegan Kelly's translation of this description into images and to compare how ideas are unfolded verbally and audiovisually.