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Electronic Linguistics
[Written by George Quasha, in part in dialogue with Gary Hill, and with a view to further dialogue with Chrissie Iles, as preliminary statement in contribution to Thomas Bartscherer’s project of a collection of art-centered essays on information technology. The views expressed herein are George Quasha’s, reflecting many years of collaboration with Gary Hill, who expresses agreement with these views, as well as Charles Stein.]
The notion of “language” is subject to radical reframing in any unprecedented context, and indeed, albeit subtly, in any actual unexampled use. “Information technology,” due in part to its continuous demand on new descriptive terminology as well as its appeal to artists, may be regarded as a continuous opportunity for reframing further the possible understandings of what language is. This seems particularly true in the artistic uses of new technologies
As an instance of such an artist’s response to new technological use, Gary Hill from early in his work developed a parallel interest in new uses of technology and in innovative uses of language. He discovered, for example, a language function that kicks in when working with specific electronically generated processes of image formation (initially with a Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer). Visual abstractions through synthesized video, of which there are a potentially infinite number, take on a self-limiting and self-organizing quality of “identity” manifestation; that is, they come to seem somehow entitative, even though the boundaries of a given emergent entity are relatively fluid. There comes a point where the emergent entity assumes a sort of responsive intelligence with which one feels oneself in dialogue, even to the degree that it appears to embody a condition of request, as if it wants to be a certain way. It is at this point that one feels oneself to be in a state of language. Understanding this state may make use of innovative notions, such as the one Gary Hill proposed: “electronic linguistics,” languaging that arises uniquely within an electronically generated process.
If one’s response to this state of language were to turn to existing vocabularies pertaining to a given domain of, say, information technology or formal philosophy, then the state of language might withdraw from one or refuse further access. That is, if one interferes with the dialogic state of responsive listening by supplying an