The "excluded moment" is here.

Define the space between zero and one.

The space between breadths, the sliver of an instant after moment ends; before moment begins. Begin.

It is a quandary made especially salient by a postmodern understanding of space and time, an understanding which has been reflected and in many cases anticipated by our culture�s art. It is a puzzle which signifies the ways in which Western thought�s tradition of binary oppositions no longer describes our increasingly complex reality (binary oppositions being the juxtaposition of "opposites" which supposedly make a cohesive whole reality; male/female, good/evil, and so on). It is a question which realizes the significance of the smallest most basic particle of reality, or really, the lack of such a basic particle of reality. When Einstein tells us that we can no longer think of space and time as a backdrop against which our lives are played out, but rather as the fabric of which our lives are composed, where does this leave us? When quantum physics reminds us that there is no way of being sure that the smallest point of matter really exists at all, but that atoms are nothing more solid than swiftly moving energy, how can our concepts of time, space, motion, language, or selfhood remain the same? Indeed, how can one place faith in any idea of a static subjectivity?

Today�s digital media are a physical manifestation of this understanding of interconnectedness within systems of living as well as the antimatter we now recognize as being the fundamental building blocks of reality. This idea relates to binary systems in technology, new discoveries in transmission of information within the Internet, as well as themes in art and literature concerning the nature of space, time, and self. Modernist authors were among the first to recognize the implications of an underlying web of communication, which now represents itself in the Internet. Visionary artists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce explored this web of reality, realizing the different layers of reality that exist simultaneously, and this concept�s impact on a person�s sense of self. In the spirit of the Internet, science has mimicked art, with the discovery of atomic theory, multiple dimensions, quantum physics, and the superstring theory. Postmodern critics and theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari have mused on these various connections and offered explanations for this new direction of thought by proposing a psychology for contemporary society�s new patterns.

Wait: Deleuze and Guattari.

Here is their metaphor for an unseen condition of irrational connections. Just as an Internet search engine brings up random flurries of similarities (according to the keyword entered), so does Deleuze and Guattari�s rhizome rupture between organizations and connect disparate elements.

Rhizome: There is a structure, a plane of consistency in all things: This is your body, your subconscious, society, this is the Internet. This body is all structure, defined simply by its filling a space to a certain point. This territory is predictable, is mundane, and takes care of the partial objects in it. Organs within a body, thoughts within a consciousness, hyperlinks within a website. But the body is unable to sustain itself by these contained series of blips. It is rebelling against this organization. It really really sustains itself by a certain deterritorialization, a rare rupture, "a line of flight" out of the certain limit of itself and into the certain limit of another territory, because it then becomes �not�, and is able to see itself in the absence. This is rhizomatic ecstasy: a rhizome being a root that connects partial objects to partial objects.

Machine: Guattari coined this term to escape the pesky notion of self, the "�subject� which is often mistaken for consciousness itself. A machine is any point at which a flow of some sort (physical, intellectual, emotional, etc.) either leaves or enters a structure."

Example: the mouth-anus engine is a representation of the uncharted flights of sustenance within everyday eating. The movement of rhizomes is the bridging of space between zero and one, as occurs in any binary code. Thus it is necessary for rhizomatic rupture within a program because a program�s agency depends on the changes between its smallest parts (zeros and ones, or ons and offs). Video as well relies on change between frames, since it is the moving* of the frames that creates an image, just as it is the reader�s act of reading that connects the words to make a novel or poem. Each video frame is divided into two interlaced, layered fields. Each field consists of multiple lines, which create the unified image we see. And so it is true in physics today as well, with the superstring theory proposing the presence of blinking interdimensional strings within each electron and neutron, that the physical world consists of fields of dimensions with strings blinking through each one of the fields. Therefore, a computer screen blinks, a televised image blinks, a table, a window, even a human body, all blinking. We are living in continual strobe.

Epileptic Mama

And you ask, oh come on, I am an organization of blinking? I am some epileptic mama? Yes. Oh, yes.

James Joyce and VA Woolf both understood and anticipated this layered flickering reality. For Woolf, it was most significant in its effects on a person�s subjecthood. How can one have faith in an idea of a unified, solid, tangible self, knowing that we are composed of energy, flickering in and out of dimensions, real and unreal at the same time? In Woolf�s experimental, lyrical novel The Waves, six characters reveal their perceptions and innermost revelations through a series of monologues. One of the six, Bernard, says, "What am I? I ask. This? No, I am that�then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many." Later, Louis acknowledges this same truth, saying that he has become aware "that these attempts to say, �I am this, I am that,� which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false." Still later in the book, Bernard realizes that they six are all petals on the same flower.

Likewise, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce expresses the rhizomatic epiphany, a stampede of the patterns of life. Within the cry "Stephen Dedalus! Bous Stephenoumenous!" which ignites Stephen�s most substantial epiphany, is the word �noumenon.� A noumenon is the direct object of the Numen, the �recording energy� that snags it, insensibly. The Numen disrupts the mundane cubicle of living patterns and "causes absolute decoded flows of desire" and "undoes all territorialities." This is a function of Stephen�s realization of the connectedness of disparate particles which substantiates reality.

Arguably, we now are existing in an age of intersubjectivity, like the characters in The Waves, like Stephen Dedalus. "Subjectivities have always been networked � context based�the internet has given us a powerful externalising metaphor for our own immersion and constitution by and through the slop and flow of social intercourse � through language or semiotic system. Deleuze and Guattari recognised this in the implicit cyberorganisation of the body without organs." See! We weren�t making it up.

Time.

The idea of time which started with the Modernists is a manifestation, not of a singular rhizome�s organization or rupture, but in fact, it is a representation of the entire process of stability and movement, of containment and release for the rhizomes in the system. Likewise, one of this idea�s scientific counterparts, Einstein�s theory of relativity, expresses the ways in which space and time are inextricably linked, and are changeable. Time is the conscious equivalent to the movement of, within, around, involving every ablative of the rhizome. This movement that �time� represents is the constant behind every changing event in this process: a rhizome�s organization, corruption, and eventual rupture into another rhizome within the system. This constant is a paradox: it is unending movement, it produces instability in all organized structure, but it, itself, is the only �stable� thing within all of life, through it�s consistency of inconsistency, in it�s unchanging process of change. Therefore, it could be argued that �time�, which stands as a metaphorical symbol for a constant that is incomprehensible, also stands then as human being�s conceptual symbol for a spiritual entity which is the unnamable, ungraspable unit of existence. Therefore, VA Woolf�s obsession with time, a theme prominent in many of her works including The Waves, is actually a spiritual search for the harmonious constant.

Time: Oh Boy

Time is a paradoxical process. In each moment that it designates, it recreates and destroys itself all at once. It always is, and always isn�t, continually disappearing into its next new self. VA demonstrates this impeccably with the image of the waves: "The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell�.the waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping." The waves are a consistently reoccurring beat of tide; one wave washes out the last path of the wave before it, while, at the same time, recasting it�s own inevitably impermanent path, which is erased immediately in the next beat. �Time� is the paradox of infinite resurrection. Like the written word, it must be consumed for it to exist and move on.

* Movement: Here Goes Nothing

Everything occurs within time. Actions have reactions necessarily constructed in them; they ebb and tow throughout life. Time is the backdrop and carrier of these things, these actions; time is the movement behind them: so what is �movement�? It is destruction and reconstruction; it is the making of mess and the clean-up of mess. Movement isn�t an object, it cannot be held, but also, it is made up by every object and matter that changes. There�s a paradox! Within every atom, there is change.

Super String Theory: "In some sense what string theory does is that it stretches � smears out � point particles into loops of string." Used to help define the nature of the smallest particles in nature. But wait�doesn�t that sound just like video? The epileptic mama is back?! Super string theory also allows for the existence of multiple dimensions, much as modernist and postmodern art allows for many different layers of reality. "Bosonic strings vibrate �counterclockwise� (it�s just a convention) in 26 dimensions while super strings resonate �counterclockwise� in the more standard ten dimensions. With one more dimension for the thickness of the string itself it allows for eleven or twelve dimensions." It also echoes the way electronic music breaks down sound into its smallest particles and remixes disparate sounds. This metaphor works for experimental video and other manifestations of technological art as well.

There is a continual flux within all matter, but movement isn�t contained within that matter; it is the continuation of that matter�s change. So what is �change�? Change is the presence of inconsistency: when something changes, it becomes nothing for a moment, it disappears in its disorganization. So movement is essentially the presence of inconstancy, the demonstration of unmaking. There it goes: nothing. A paradox, you ask? Of course.

A Rhizome: The Big One

Technology was the giant rhizome that erupted the physical world of the early-mid twentieth century through scientific inventions and discoveries, thereby destroying the stability in scientific theorems and hypothesizes, and disrupting the set specification of man�s control over natural power ( with the atom bomb). This set up an immediate reaction for society mentally, where as, previously one could find comfort in certain set institutions of thought, now life and all the living were extremely vulnerable again. Society was spiritually dislodged as well, since all trust in a divine will, in an immutable destiny, was erased, and replaced with instability of every moment. The reassurances of the Christian time-line, and of a predicted but distant apocalypse, had been shattered, and the new modern time, one of consistent impending doom, had erected in its place. In reaction to theses changes set forth by the technological rhizome, human beings each experienced a copy-cat rupture, and broke from their comfortable isolations of organization, in an attempt to replace what had been lost: the sense of structure, the god of stability.

Not only has this emergence of technology screwed with art, it has created art of its own. Digital technologies are naturally an effective medium with which to confront these issues of binary ruptures of the time-space continuum. For example, video physically manifests this idea of the excluded moment, of reality residing in the changes between connected but disparate moments. The luminescence (the black and white part) of a video transmission lies exactly precisely between zero and one volt; the energy which defines the images exists solely within this fluctuation.

And then there�s this guy.

Deleuze: " The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one of us is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numeral (which doesn�t necessarily mean binary)."

So.

The space between zero and one involves the process of a word being read, devoured, discarded, transformed in one�s head to represent and finally create an alternate reality. The space between zero and one is the reading of the word, not the word itself. It is the meta-word. It is the transduction process, similar to how today�s technology changes information into electrical pulses which in turn create a sound on the telephone or a picture on a computer screen. It is our understanding and acceptance of the reality of the book. And it is not just written language; language is simply a convenient example. It is all art, and the idea is especially relevant to digital multi-media artwork. The meta-video, the mind�s reconstruction of flickering images into a fair approximation of reality. The act of reading, of seeing, is the space between.

Likewise, a computer program is comprised of how zero and one change. It is the change, the transmutation, the connecting of disparate flickering elements, which constitutes movement or what we perceive as progressing time. It is this web of connected but separate points, and the movements between them which constitutes our technology, science, art, and social context. It is this constant shimmering flux which illustrates our late 20^th, and very very early 21^st (hey, it�s January) ideas of ourselves.

And there you have it.

Or maybe, you don�t.