Notes on Logic of Substrate. No Medium. Dworkin, Craig.

The following is a summary of the text Dworkin text through the understanding of Inscriptibility
which can be broadly explained as the historical and social contexts of any given medium. The
significance of mediums can also be understood through the layers of its substrate which are
inscribed with contexts (The substrate in this instance meaning the material properties from which
an artwork is built and also the social/historical milieu within which it exists).

The significance of Nudisme is: As it appears empty of representation (writing, illustration, expected
content) is in fact representative of the book itself and we see through the removal of content the
highlighting of the substrate. The blank pages reveal the ‘field’ of poetic communication and textual
information. And it becomes apparent that ‘every signifier is itself a sign’.

p.8. ‘In the absence of inscription, the substrate can be seen not as a transparent signifier but as an
object in its own right, replete with its own material properties, histories, and signifying potential. …
Omissions within a system permit other elements to appear more clearly’.

Artists and works used as examples:

John Cage: Lecture on nothing at the Artists’ club in New York “I have nothing to say and I am saying
it” because “What we require is silence; But what silence requires is that I go on talking”. This is a
logical explanation of the metaphysical made manifest as it describes the substrate as both
things..talking is relative to context and is therefore inscribed with social content and silence is
relative to context also and in the same way. He is describing the how the two need each other yet
each form (talking and silence) require each other in order to be anything understandable.

Mediums are also gender inscribed:

P.21 Teresa de Lauretis: (Author of Technologies of Gender, Alice Doesn’t and The practice of Love).

The “Blank page awaiting insemination by the writer’s pen” is “a notorious cliché of Western Literary
Writing”.

P. And also Susan Gubar: (Author of The Mad Woman in the Attic, Memoir of a Debulked Woman).

Describes herself as…One that “participates in a long tradition” of figuring imposition on the “virgin
page” as a masculine activity.

Activating the feminine: Nancy Spero cutting out historical women

Michel de Certeau: we never write on a blank page, but one that has already been written on
because the blank page is not blank as it is already culturally inscribed, gendered and exists
therefore within its own context, it has a past a future and a present.

P.25 the most conceptual works are always caught up with the most material specifics.
P.28 Dworkin uses the example of Lisa Gitelmen’s important corrective to media history….

Meaning of the term Medium:

Historically deriving from Latin adjective medius (“in the middle”), medium takes on the sense of an
instrumental intermediary from the late sixteenth century on. Oxford English Dictionary terms:
Broad classes or modes; Conduits and venues.

The sense of venue expanded to denote what used to be called “mass communication” radio, TV,
magazines or “the media”. All three senses come together in what might be a synonym for genre or
discipline. From there the word came to denote the materials used in fine art practice and then any
physical material used for recording or reproducing data, images or sound. More recently we have
“new media”.

P. 30-31 there are two main points made:

1. First one can never locate a medium in isolation.

Media-if there are such things-are only recognizable as collectives. For example compact disks need
a media player and speakers in order to be received/discovered of its contents.

Only become legible as a network or a complex (Krauss)

2. We are misled when we think of media as objects.

Herman De Vries “An empty sheet means more than a written one, only meaning is absent.”

Particular social milieus make that meaning available. For example an empty compact disk within an
avant-garde context takes on a certain set of definitions that the same disk would if viewed in an
office supply store.

Blankness: possibility and potential

The extreme nature of the blank works that is part of the way that work functions. Provocation

Conventions neurotypical or non-neurotypical

The space-time continum is the continual context of

Activities, collectives

Paratext, paragon is the context which a work is viewed