#Immateriality
'I would associate the immaterial with the immediate, in the sense that mastery over time implies the abolition of any delay, and the capacity to intervene here and now.'
Jean Francois Lyotard 'After six months of work'
Maybe, like with de-materialisation, now some decades ago, it is possible to keep questioning what really constitutes the ‘im-’ of ‘immateriality’.
For example:
"The break with the traditional opposition of matter and form led not – as many, including some of the artists themselves, thought – to a ‘dematerialization’ of art … but rather to various displacements and rethinking of materiality itself” (Michael Newman)
And:
”I think that I am really just a materialist" (Lawrence Weiner interviewed by B. Buchloh)
So many refer to the immateriality of digital media, but this is only an illusion – one founded on a forgetting of all the minerals, all the energy, needed to support the fabrication and use of digital devices. The "cloud" is a nice metaphor, but its airy transience belies the tremendous energy use of data centres.
Autocorrect persists in changing the 'im' to the 'I'm'. There is something we cannot get our hands on, but which nontheless is here. Typing 'im' is typing 'not'. Every attempt so to do is thwarted.
To dismiss as inconsequential and of no use, especially to the matter at hand: 'The angels are utterly immaterial in this instance, your Holiness.'