#Extract and added #thought from #Flusser, V. (1999). Shape of Things. Reaktion Books.

matter / form. – content / container

• Hyle = wood material content
• When the Greek philosophers took up the word hyle, they were thinking not of wood in general but of the particular wood stored in carpenters workshops.
• Morphe = form
• Forms concealed behind the illusion of the material.
• Forms are neither discoveries nor inventions, neither Platonic Ideas nor fictions, but containers cobbled together for phenomena (‘models’). And theoretical science is neither ‘true’ nor ‘fictitious’ but ‘formal’ (model-designing).

The world of phenomena that we perceive with our senses is an amorphous stew behind which are concealed eternal, unchanging forms which we can perceive by means of the supersensory perspective of theory.

The possibility of looking through time into eternity and of representing what can be perceived in the process has only become relevant since the third millennium. Newly invented screen ‘materialise’ the forms. The form itself doesn’t have a purpose, as it is a model, it shows the content the way of reading, receiving. In cyberspace, it is not focused on materialising the content but materialise the form, because the content itself has no original present to compare or witness. Purely immaterialised material/content flowing around within stew Universe. This newly wailing universe space do not control but contents forming itself.

When the wall painting by first homo-sapience trying to representing the content/matter in the form of the picture, it was the question how precisely grasping the apparent matter in the form of the painting. The purpose of the painting was to show the evidence of the real world. However, now it became a “question of making a world appear that is largely encoded in figures, a world of forms that are multiplying uncontrollably”. Such artificial images not because they show up in the electromagnetic field but because they display material-free, empty forms, it does matter what is the language or the form in-form the contextualised formal space. There were several program languages such as JAVA, HTML5, C or newly started Swift. It is not only how they are having a competition but how they will in-form the information of the content. The form makes eternal since I can imagine it anywhere and at any time.

In-formation, in other words, imposing forms on materials. Forming the idea into the shape of the formality. #Flusser Therefore, the question is “To what extent are the forms being imposed here capable of being filled with material? To what extent are they capable of being realized? To what extent is the information practical or productive? Discovered, indeed, in such a way that one recognizes how the amorphous phenomena flow into forms, occupy them in order to flow out into the amorphous once more.

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For further information

Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages – Alex WrightSPAN 2017 Pittsburgh – Livestream Day 2 – YouTube
SPAN 2017 Pittsburgh – Livestream Day 2