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Bratton","content":"66. “ In mid-2014, the group released a video entitled ‘ The End of Sykes-Picot ’ featuring an English-speaking Chilean national named Abu Safiyya. The video announced the group ’ s intention to eliminate all modern borders between Islamic Middle Eastern countries; this was a reference to the borders set by the Sykes-Picot Agreement during World War I. ” See Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), Wikipedia, October 4, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global\\_Islamic\\_Media \\_Front\\_(GIMF).\n\n67. This is so even if those narratives are actually based on the postnarrative aesthetics of databases, as developed, for example, in Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan ’ s Database Animals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).\n\n68. These examples chosen should in no way be taken to imply a unique association between Islam and the sort of politico-theologic violence described. Certainly any variant of Abrahamic monotheism could offer up case studies for us. There are other research projects that examine the relationship between Islam and the GUIs that are much more rigorous than my scans of convenience. For example, Laura Marks ’ s work on Islam and interfaces is instructive of the specific relationship between Islamic modes of art and inscription and the nested swirls of intra-signification in GUIs. See her Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Construed in the context of this essay, it would suggest that the Islamist activation of the interfacial image as a geo-graphic medium is less a modern appropriation than a historical continuity of formal visual syntax “ in which image, information, and the infinite interact: image is an interface to information, and information (such as computer code or the words of the Qur ’ an) is an interface to the infinite. ” She writes, “ An aniconic turn is stirring the contemporary visual and media arts. Less and less is present to perception; more and more is latent, in quiet surfaces that seem to be ‘ hiding something in the image. ’ The latent image waits to be ‘ unfolded, ’ either subjectively, by the viewer, or by the force of its interior logic. Figural images are increasingly being subordinated to information, performativity, communication, and other relatively nonvisual contents. This contemporary aniconic tendency, a general movement in the arts of information societies, occurs particularly with computer-based art. One of the origins of this aniconic tendency in contemporary art is the influence of Islamic art and thought on Western modernism. Fascinating subject though it is, the Islamic genealogy of Western modernism is not my focus in the present essay. It does, however, inform my claim here that the parallels between tendencies in contemporary computer art and tendencies in classical Islamic art are not happenstance but the manifestation of historical connections. In turn, this Islamic genealogy of Western modernism should make it possible to examine contemporary computer-based art in light of the impressive variety of philosophical questions and aesthetic solutions found in the varied works of Islamic art of past centuries. ”\n\n69. Consider by analogy the strange story of three schizophrenic patients who all believed themselves to be Jesus Christ and were placed in the same room to proclaim their divinity to one another. Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study (New York: Knopf, 1964).\n\n430\n\nNotes","previous_page":429,"next_page":431}