To what extent are some artworks always already algorithmic?
To what extent are media forms infrastructural, or infrastructure a form of media?
An artform has an algorithmic potential to the extent that it can be calculated or is computable. There is a logic that underpins algorithmic computation which predates computation itself. Cinema is an inherently metric form, rooted in the industrial, mechanistic age that flowed from the principles of mathematics and physics; this logic is not only built into mechanism, it is indivisible from the mechanism. Going back yet further, the foundations of western tonal music (‘classical’ music) are not only metric and harmonic notation, but the classification of tones and pitches in logical scales, an application of the mathematical to the auditory. Some scholarship suggests that the origins of tonality can be found as early as the 16th century – synonymous with the western rediscovery of classic mathematical principles, as well as the widespread development of printing technologies.
J.S. Bach was writing his Mass in B minor in the same period Leonhard Euler was solving the seven bridges of Koenigsburg; both were working seventy years after Leibnitz and Newton, an age that gave birth to symbolic logic, calculus, geometry, statistics; foundations of modern physics and modern technology. Tonal music is mathematical not because math is an inherent property of the universe, but because the art form and the scientific and technical knowledge of its day arose from shared epistemic foundations. Are these epistemic foundations, then, also infrastructural?
To what extent does the existence of mathematical knowledge, and its diffusion into culture, make the extraordinary compositions of Bach possible? To what extent did both depend on the widespread advent of accessible, reproducible printing technologies? Are mathematical principles Is the printing press infrastructure, and sheet music a media form? Is the sheet music infrastructure for the pianist?
Returning to cinema in a modern incarnation, more closely examining the concept of the digital non-linear editor, we can see that editing is already algorithmic. A layer of abstraction -- patterned on the operations of traditional cinema editing -- masks a series of operations that are algorithmic in nature. Operating directly on the footage through programmatic methods peels back a layer of abstraction, permits new approaches forbidden by the rigid logics of industry editors, allows for formal experimentation that takes fuller advantage of the capacities of the machine. Is the editing software media, and the algorithmic layer an infrastructure? Are both infrastructure for the media industry?