Vectors Journal: Enfolding

and Unfolding
— Vectors Journal Editorial Staff

Enfolding and Unfolding

An Aesthetics for the Information Age
By Laura Marks
Design by Raegan Kelly

Editor's Introduction

For thirty years, film theory has located much of the force
of its analysis on the flickering signifiers that dance across
the cinema screen, zeroing in on representation as a key
site of cultural analysis and theoretical reflection. In
particular, cultural studies has asked us to attend to the
power of representation as a locus for the formation of
subjectivity and identity. This work has produced
important insights, but one wonders if such modes of
analysis are sufficient to the networked age of electronic
information. Can an analysis of representation tell us
much about the bitstream?

Pushing past the surface of the screen, beyond the image,

and, indeed, beyond the material world that surrounds us,
Laura Marks challenges us to imagine an aesthetics that
no longer need fixate on representation. Rather, she
insists on an aesthetics better suited to the digital era, an
aesthetics of information that expands beyond the
contours of the perceptible world toward the realms of
information that so underpin almost all of contemporary
experience. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic
epistemology, she offers us a tripartite mode of analysis in
which experience, information and image function as
planes of immanence, a conceptual framework that helps
us to understand the dynamic, mutable relationship
between these interlocking dimensions. Experience is the
most expansive of these planes, as all information and all
images unfold from (and are, in turn, enfolded in)
experience. As Marks observes, "Experience is a vast
archive whose contents are almost entirely enfolded."

Marks' goal in creating an aesthetics of enfolding and

unfolding is to analyze more precisely the ways in which
artworks and other objects facilitate (or perhaps inhibit)
the movement between experience, information, and
image. In effect, she is crafting a dynamic aesthetic model
that begs for an equally dynamic implementation; her very
writing pulsates and vibrates, folding in upon itself in an
effort to capture the constant mobility she seeks to
theorize. Enter designer Raegan Kelly. In this piece, Kelly's
elegant animations help distill and enact the abstract
contours of Marks' theory, percolating them into a new
realm of experience without reducing their complexity. At
one level, the piece functions as a translation of Marks'
writing into a time-based, animated process, perhaps
integrating "form" and "content" to a lesser degree than
many Vectors' projects. Yet the ability to inhabit the
diagram allows a new understanding of Marks' work to
unfold, operating on different sensory and epistemological
registers. The aesthetic model presented here "privileges
performativity over representation," process over product.
In the collision of text and animation (and in the gray
boxes that illustrate the lines of communication between
Marks and Kelly during the construction of the piece), we
come to see the process of enfolding-unfolding in its
dynamism.

It is important to observe that, in sketching this analytical

model, Marks does not divorce the aesthetic from the
political. In fact, she locates her project within a materialist
framework that recognizes that "power lies in the ability to
make things unfold, circulate, and enfold." As she
illustrates, such an analysis begins to explain the function
of surveillance or the circulation of capital in an electronic
era, elements of experience that impact us all yet typically
escape our theories of representation. In offering up this
interpretative diagram, Marks and Kelly ask us to perceive
the image differently.