One goal of the research presented in Laura U. Marks’s essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector is to underline connections, to show the Islamic roots of modern abstract art, which find a certain flowering in computer-based art. Another goal is to allow the history of Islamic art, and the Islamic philosophy, theology, and science that accompany it, to pose questions to new media art.
There are presently about eight tendencies that I posit are shared by Islamic art and computer-based art. In this article I explicate one of these common tendencies, namely an emphasis on performativity rather than representation. In both Islamic art and computer art, the work of art plays out in time. This can occur in the carrying out of algorithms or the attentive recognition of observers, or both. Here we will see this performativity in terms of the relationship between point and line.
In “Point and Line to Plane,” Wassily Kandinsky suggested that the line itself is invisible; it is “the trail left by the point in motion … It comes about through movement – indeed, by destroying the ultimately self-contained repose of the point.” This is a line that destroys as it creates; it is a time-based line that has no existence independent of movement. In figurative art, the line serves representation or depiction, such as when it is a contour that defines a figure. The line Kandinsky describes is a line that is free to be itself and to become; it is what Deleuze and Guattari call an abstract line. We see the freedom of the abstract line in modern painting such as work by Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Here the line is in dynamic tension between figuration and becoming, between concrete and abstract. Klee himself spoke of taking a line for a walk, and in his works the lines do indeed stretch their legs and test their powers. The poet Michaux writes that never before Klee had a line been allowed to dream, to be a line for the pleasure of being a line. In fact the abstract line had been permitted to dream quite extravagantly long before it returned to European painting.
Computer media historian Claus Pias suggests, in “Point and Line to Raster – On the Genealogy of Computer Graphics,” that the lively and destructive line of which Kandinsky wrote points forward to the vector of computer graphics. Pias’ point is that vector graphics are the true modern art, being a direct effect of the action of the medium, while pixel-based images are tired old naturalistic illusionism. Here is the incarnation in phosphorus of Kandinsky’s principle – a line that has only a momentary existence as a connection between points. In vector graphics the line emanating from the center of the monitor is actually a moving point that leaves behind it a trail of light as it connects one point to another. Vector graphics are still used in oscilloscope and radar, those wonderfully analog screen-based media. Vector graphics can draw quickly in real time with very little data, making them ideal for early computer arcade games.
The line of vector graphics, which is drawn as a vector from the center of the screen, is actually a moving point that leaves behind it a trail of light as it connects one point to another. It exists as a momentary leap between programmed points. It doesn’t have independent existence. The living-dying line of vector graphics is taken up poetically by film scholar Sean Cubitt in The Cinema Effect. Cubitt defines the vector generally as “any quantity that has magnitude and direction” and specifically as a line that describes not being but becoming, not identity but mobile relationship. The television disciplined the vector into the raster, drawing the electron beam across the screen into 525 parallel lines (NTSC). The digital screen replaces even this time-based act of drawing with the mosaic-like array of pixels. Vector graphics are still used in 3-D animation software like Flash, which relies on their speed and economy to draw contours in real time. Elsewhere, vector graphics have been mostly surpassed by the pixel-based screen.
Both Pias and Cubitt note with regret the subsumption of the vector to the bit map, the realtime drawing on the computer screen by the discrete sample. Cubitt’s film theory sees the vector as a principle of narrative, which invents the future in a universe that is ultimately open. At the level of narrative, its obsolescence is tragic, as the vector’s principle of becoming gives way to the fixed universe of what he calls neo-baroque cinema. Similarly, Pias, the modernist scholar of computer media, finds it a shame that the transparency of the vector-based screen, which allows us to see how it builds its image, has given way to the opacity of the pixel-based screen, which obscures the image’s origins in machine and software. In the vector was movement and connection; in the pixel, connections are hidden, and movement stops.
Pias’s genealogy from Kandinsky to vector graphics points forward from modern art to computer media. One can also follow this genealogy backward. Where in history do we find nonfigurative works of art whose lines suggest free movement, self-direction, and fearless becoming? In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari look for the abstract line in art that does not tame the line into a contour:
Whereas the rectilinear (or ‘regularly’ rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, … the nomad line is abstract in an entirely different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth.
Deleuze and Guattari, following the art historian Wilhelm Wörringer, find the abstract line in Gothic art, and also in nomad art and children’s art. But the unsubordinated, lively line is also moving in Islamic art as early as the 9th century. Here, I’m suggesting, is one of the deep roots of the vector. Needless to say, the aniconism of Islamic art, in other words, its tendency to avoid figurative representation, is a healthy environment for abstraction, or at least for lines to be free not to depict. In Islamic art, the fleeting, immaterial nature of the line and the sense of the point pulling it along in a trajectory arrive to us inscribed in stone, stucco, ceramic, and on paper. Looking at Islamic art compels me to redefine the vector as the power of signification that propels a sign to have meaning for a certain receiver. Islamic art is performative in that its vector, though supposedly coming from the divine to the human, is nonetheless activated by the human receiver.
Laura U. Marks Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector
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