Compression

[This is an abridged version of the catalogue essay I wrote for an exhibition I curated entitled Compression that is currently running at Crane Arts, Philadelphia. The full essay and other info about the show is available here]

Hereafter, here no longer exists; everything is now. – Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio has been saying for over a decade that digital media that has brought about what he sees as a collapse of the physical into the digital. Virilio theorises this collapse as a kind of “temporal compression”, a situation where the nature of space, time and distance are fundamentally altered due to the speed that the global flow of information has now attained through digital communications and imaging technologies. (Virilio, 2000, p.13) Virilio’s views are reflective of those put forward in the mid 1990s and early 2000s as to the nature and impact of digital media on everyday life. While they vary considerably, from the enthusiastic like the artist Stellarc to the cautious and cynical like Virilio, these views were based on the one fundamental assumption that ‘the digital’ represented an immaterial alternative to everyday ‘physical’ life. Most often this relationship was characterised in terms of the binary of real/virtual. Canadian theorist Arthur Kroker reflected on this perceived capacity of the virtual to consume, if not colonise the real completely. He also recognises that this viewpoint was very much tied to the specific decade he called “the flesh-eating 90s” in a book title in 1996. (Kroker, 1996)

In that decade the distinction between real and virtual worlds was commonplace. Its extension into theories of photography is also evident, where digital images are seen as immaterial surrogates of ‘real’ film-based photographs. It is also the idea that underpins the spatial metaphors we use when talking about the internet. The terms site, domain, gateway, navigate and of course, cyberspace indicate that we understand the digital as possessing at least some of the spatial characteristics of real space rather as possessing any of its own positive inherent characteristics. The ‘version’ of space that the digital offers however is infinitely customisable, limited only by the individual desires of users. Inevitably, the binary of real and virtual space propagates the same distinction within concepts of identity; the real identity inhibited by its ties to flesh, opposed to the infinitely customisable virtual identity. One example of this tendency is William J. Mitchell’s (1995, p. 11) City of Bits, published in 1995, in which he discusses online textual identifiers, such as email addresses as being s eparately constructed, disembodied identities that need not have a relationship with an embodied originator:

it is not trivial, and perhaps not even true, to say that wjm@mit.edu is Dean@mit.edu or that either one is the embodied William J. Mitchell! When names float around without precise, unambiguous attachment to unique things, referential complexities abound.

However more recently, and in line with other reflections on 90s media theory, Mitchell has questioned his own assumptions. In Me++ from 2003, Mitchell re-evaluates the basis of his previous thinking:

The trial separation of bits and atoms is now over. In the early days of the digital revolution it seemed useful to pry these elementary units of materiality and information apart. The virtual and the physical were imagined as separate realms – cyberspace and meatspace… The metaphor of “virtuality” seemed a powerful one as we first struggled to understand the implications of digital information, but it has long outlived its usefulness. Bits don’t just sit out there in cyberspace… it makes more sense to recognise that invisible, intangible, electromagnetically encoded information establishes new types of relationships among physical events occurring in physical places (Mitchell, 2003, pp. 90-92, 139).

By conceding that extreme distinctions such as real and virtual are unproductive in our understanding the actual impact of digital technology, Mitchell comes to the realisation that many everyday users of the medium experienced around the turn of the 21st Century.

A nostalgic blog post from a veteran blogger known as ‘Joe’ (2005) on his Livejournal blog bostonsteamer, tells how it was actually blogs that contributed to this refashioning of the relationship the Web had with offline life:

It's fun to look back on the old days of blogging, when everyone was so wide-eyed and naive. People really opened their hearts so their readers could take a look inside. Every blogger had the same "coming of age,” where they'd post something that hurt another person, and after the fallout they'd realize, "hey, what I blog about really does affect my meatspace life.

Essentially what has occurred is a greater general understanding and assimilation of a particular technology. The virtual does indeed have a major impact on the real but they are more intimately connected than we initially thought.

More recently however, new theories are emerging that again take up the analysis of the impact of digital media on everyday life. This is predictable in a sense as the media itself undergoes such massive changes in relatively brief timeframes. The “new aesthetic” is one such theory. It essentially makes a case opposite to that of Virilio in that it theorises the “explosion of the digital into the physical” (Sterling, 2012) rather than the collapse of the real into the digital. This explosion of the digital into physical refers to particular emergent design aesthetics, architectural features and art practices that incorporate or otherwise engage with ‘the digital’ in some way. Some examples given include the Telehouse West data centre, in London which appears to have a pixelated facade or a three dimensional version of a primitive digital water fountain that would look at home in a primitive 80s video game environment. The new aesthetic, as a theoretical perspective, attempts to make sense of rather unwieldy, impermanent and non-specific phenomena, and its critical value will no doubt reveal itself over time as its objects and practices become more familiar. Its usefulness cannot be underestimated as things have clearly changed since the 90s and new critical perspectives are needed. As the examples above show, the digital future that was a seductive theoretical fantasy has become our lived reality and in the process the flaws in its attendant theories have been revealed.

However, current perspectives put forward in discussions of the new aesthetic actually operate on precisely the same binary opposition of real and virtual, only the direction of the force of one side into the other has changed. While the new aesthetic brings previous theories like those of Virilio and Mitchell full circle by initiating the reversal of this trajectory, it does not overcome it. In order for the ‘digital’ to explode within the ‘physical’ the two must remain materially distinct domains: real and virtual. What such a distinction ignores is much of what has been learned about digital media in the past decade, as Mitchell’s confession indicates. Rather than witnessing the sudden explosion of one into the other we have instead come to terms with a new material reality that incorporates digital media, at times almost as a mere aesthetic curiosity. This is of course a fundamentally different world than the one that existed before the digital, in the same way that internal combustion engines and photography shaped new worlds of their own. However what is usually at stake in theories based on the real/virtual binary is the simple fact that we experience the world, not through photographs, motorcars or computer screens, but through our bodies.

N. Katherine Hayles has been the most articulate voice in arguing for more critical attention to be paid to embodied experience as the way in which humans generate meaning from the physical world, be it through art, architecture or digital media, rather than toward the physical world and its objects. Hayles (1999, p. 1) criticised the concept of virtuality very early on in her book How We Became Post-Human by deconstructing the several theories that saw “virtuality as a division between an inert body that is left behind and a disembodied subjectivity that inhabits the virtual realm.” Crucial to Hayles’ strategy for overcoming this division is a particular understanding of materiality. Materiality, she says, encompasses this idea of embodiment but is distinct from physicality as it relates to how this physicality comes to have meaning for us. Hayles explains this in her later book, Writing Machines:

An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations and as well as conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning. (Hayles, 2003, p. 33)

Understood in this way materiality emphasises the body, or the embodied viewer, as the site of all experience, the point at which all meaning is generated. It makes very little sense then to oppose the digital and the physical as the digital is, of course, just as capable of generating embodied experiences as any other medium. Therefore, far from being an immaterial version of the real, ‘the digital’ is a site of unique embodied experiences which of course will be fundamentally different to those of any other medium but they will be no less physical and no less real.

How then, could the digital be seen to be exploding within the physical? It would seem, initially at least, that this idea has come about as a similar kind of coming of age process that occurred in the blogosphere around a decade ago, and that William J. Mitchell experienced a couple of years later. James Bridle is the foundational voice of the new aesthetic and describes his purpose at the end of his recent blog post on the topic: “My point is, all our metaphors are broken. The network is not a space (notional, cyber or otherwise) and it’s not time (while it is embedded in it at an odd angle) it is some other kind of dimension entirely.” The echo of Mitchell’s sentiments cited earlier is obvious but so is the echo of Mitchell’s reluctance to re-embody meaning. Bridle continues: “But meaning is emergent in the network” not, as Hayles demonstrates, in the body of the viewer. Meaning is indeed emergent but it can only be a disembodied meaning if it exists only in the network. It is important to get these debates right, that is, to ask the right questions, because new technologies need to be engaged with critically and it is important for artists in particular to engage with these issues, to use and indeed misuse technology for the sole reason that it is not humans who are in control of the distribution and implementation of them but the languages of the market and consumption. These are the true disembodied, immaterial forces at work in contemporary society, and art has the capacity counteract them by communicating on an embodied level.

When Virilio warned that “here” no longer existed and that it was being replaced by “now” through the speed of digital communications, he was imagining a particular kind of future. We now live in that future and not only have we adapted to the rapid changes in technology, nostalgia has become a powerful cultural force. However, this nostalgic impulse is possibly a more pervasive virtualising force than digital media precisely because it trades in an appreciation of the present moment for an idealised version of the past, an embodied experience located in a place for a disembodied memory of somewhere else. This is the real effect of the unchecked advance of technology but it is far more subtle and indirect than most theories of disembodiment that focus on technological objects themselves. And it is for this reason that a critical eye needs to be cast on these indirect effects that appear to have nothing immediate to do with new technology. There is nothing wrong with being in the now but we also more than ever need to remember that we are here.




References:

Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines, MIT Press, Cambridge

Joe (2005) "Girl on a Bike: 5 Years Later" [Blog] bostonsteamer, July 06 2005 [accessed 07 July 2005] from http://bostonsteamer.livejournal.com/734917.html (no longer available)

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, MIT Press, Cambridge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2003) Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Sterling, B. (2012) “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”, Beyond the Beyond [blog] April 02 2012, [accessed 12 June 2012] from www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

Virilio, P. (2000) The Information Bomb (trans. Turner, C.), Verso, London.

Guns Don't Use Social Media, People Do: A lesson in meme ethics

Today I was as shocked as everybody else to hear about the shooting in a Denver cinema at the premiere of the new Batman film. It is indeed a tragedy not only because what happened was a truly terrible thing but also because there are responses to it that are a tragedy in themselves.

As would be expected social media came alive immediately as the news broke. This happened in the usual ways: twitter trends, facebook posts and memes, etc. and of course happened with phenomenal immediacy to the event. But today I found myself booted off a facebook page that I had previously "liked" and was being accused of spamming by its moderator for participating in a discussion about the appropriateness of an image posted on this site in that image's comments section. This is a first for me, as I don't consider myself a troll by any measure. The problem I had was the use of the image posted with the intention of paying respects to the victims of the shooting and their families, which was the same as the image below but had "REST IN PEACE" in large type across the top.

My issue was, as I posted, that this is in fact not a tribute, it doesn't pay any form of respect to anybody, and is actually quite insulting to both the victims and our intelligence (both intellectual and emotional). Using a movie poster to pay respect to the victims of such a horrible event reduces their experience to the pop cultural realm of movies and entertainment. It happened at the movies not in the movies.

I was not the only person to notice this. In fact, the first comment on this post was, "This picture is in bad taste." There were then three or four other comments that were collectively addressed by the moderator who protested that the image was "not about taste, it was about trying to pay respects to the victims of such a terrible tragedy" and later that it was not the intention of the author to upset people and the all further comments against the image would be regarded as spam and their authors would be blocked from the page.

I resolved that I didn't really "like" the page anyway and that I would to try to set the moderator straight. What he didn't realise, and what so many people don't realise is that images are actually very difficult to use as an effective form of communication. We have a responsibility as image makers, and indeed image users, to be aware of this. With the surge of digital text-based communication that occurred 15 - 20 years ago, everybody in their own way came to terms with the realisation that text and voice, while they both used words, actually possessed very disparate expressive qualities. We all struggled over the fact that email and SMS could not capture the tone of voice adequately. But we've never given a thought to how the speed of this manipulation and the quick digital transmission of images might impact on our understanding of how they communicate. This is because, for some reason, we think we understand images and how they work.

There is still, surprisingly, a heated argument going on in photojournalist and professional photography circles about the digital manipulation of images but this argument focusses mainly on whether or not the photograph is "true" if it has been digitally altered, and under the guise of ethics its pundits are actually arguing over aesthetics. That argument is way too boring to address here but I will add that these arguments rarely, if ever, address the much more ethically pertinent question related to the speed with which images can be manipulated and how quickly that manipulation is distributed. Manipulation is now the norm, the nature of its use and distribution is what we should be looking at critically. What does it say about our visual intelligence, not that an image such as the movie poster memorial can be created, but that it can be created so quickly and without even a split second of reflective thought about what it might mean, and what it might mean in all of the many and varied contexts it will appear in over the next few minutes?

I have since found about three versions of this "tribute", one of which even mentions "God" in the text. I admit that I don't recognise the source image, I don't know if it is actually a movie poster, a production still, publicity shot, or frozen action from one of the films, or something else altogether. And I've got no hope of figuring where its life as meme began either, who its original author was, but what this kind of viral culture proves more than anything is that origins matter very little. But it seems also that destinations matter even less. Like the ye olde chain letter, it doesn't matter where it ends up as long as it keeps going, perpetuating and replicating itself ad infinitum... they are called "memes" after all. When these images are posted in desperate attempts to generate long flowing streams of comments and a four or five digit "like" counter, we lose sight of the actual message that is being perpetuated.

Take a moment to think. How would one of the survivors of the massacre feel about seeing an image of Batman, as respectful and as solemn as his pose is, as well-meaning as the memer's intention is, as respectful as the text may be? The trauma of this kind of event is impossible to imagine, and the image of Batman may have very little negative affect on a victim, but the point is: we don't know. The reality is that images do in fact have origins, and in this case it is enough to say that it comes from the general quagmire of popular culture and entertainment. And if the text on these tributes is to be taken literally, they also have a destination, which in this case is actually the victims themselves (see image below). The trouble is that this origin and destination are not actually what the memer thinks about. Despite the presence of presumed addressees in the text they are not the intended audience, really. People share or like these kinds of images in accordance with the myth of solidarity the act implies.

The real point of this image, or more acurately, the point of its use, is to express one's shock and sympathy. But what actually happens is that because of the viral distribution of the image, and of course its ridiculous content, the very real trauma of witnessing the shooting, being shot at, or losing somebody close is simplified and sanitised down to a corny pop culture reference. These memorial memes become a generic emotional response despite the sharing being driven by a presumably very specific emotional response. The speed with which these memes are created and distributed prevent the intervention of a critical viewpoint which is an absolute necessity when this is fast becoming the primary mode of our interaction with images. I made this mistake recently, immediately reposting a hoax image from Back to the Future showing that particular day's date which had been digitally altered.

The point of what I have written here is to be mindful of the power of images. But it is also a caution to not overestimate that power. Just as the Kony 2012 viral campaign a few months back did nothing, an image you share on facebook will not comfort the victims of the Colorado shooting. But what it can do is diminish and trivialise the seriousness of the real event. But to his credit, the moderator of the page in question did take the image down in the end, hopefully he will now treat images a little more carefully.

Air Blogging

Right now I'm on the plane between Philadelphia and LA. Wifi on the plane might be common place for Americans but it's new to me. Anyway, I'm on my way back home from a few days in the US, New York and Philly specifically. New York was fantastic, I could go back in a second. I met up with Rebecca Ross and we went for dinner in Hell's Kitchen, despite the waiter forgetting Bec's meal it was really nice.

After New York I met up with Matt Ditton in Philly. We visited Crane Arts and checked out the 100ft projection screen and the Icebox space it's in and it's actually more impressive than it sounds. It's difficult to explain exactly what it's like, and nothing anybody told me about it prior could have prepared me for the experience of being in there. Likewise viewing the video made for the massive screen. So we're looking forward to puling something together for the show in September.

NYC/Phili

I'm preparing right now for a hastily organized trip to the US. Myself and Matt Ditton are curating an exhibition of digital work from QCA at Crane Arts in Philadelphia. We're going to check out the space (that houses a100ft projection screen) and meet the Phili team etc. But I've got few days in New York beforehand, so I'll no doubt distribute posts about the exciting bits between here, twitter and facebook.

Mike Kelley

About a week ago I read in shock as my twitter feed delivered news of Mike Kelley's death. It was enough to move me to devote my first ever tweet to him, in which I said that he is the reason I am an artist. Below is a more detailed version of that sentiment that I couldn't fit into 140 characters.

Admittedly, my first exposure to the work of Mike Kelley was not in an art context. While I was still at school around 1992, I bought the Sonic Youth album Dirty. The bizarre hand-made stuffed toy on the cover was intriguing, cute and frightening all at once. Sonic Youth had, up to this point, always interesting covers: Raymond Pettibon's cool post-pop rebellious youth comic style cover for the previous album Goo and one of Gerhard Richter's candle paintings for Daydream Nation. However it wasn't until I got Dirty home and played it that cover art really stood out as much more than a decorative image. The cover unfolded revealing a series of more mugshot-style portraits of similar stuffed toys. The odd thing was though, that this was a lot of space to give to the cover art, there were very few liner notes and no song lyrics, just these toy portraits. But there was also a picture of an adolescent kid with acne and longish black hair staring out, not smiling. To top this off there was an image behind the orange transparent piece of plastic onto which the CD was mounted, of something very... well... dirty! I later found out that the people in the image getting dirty with the stuffed toys were the performance artist Bob Flanagan and his wife Sheree Rose.

There is a line in a Smog song that I relate to: "While I listen to a record/ I stare at the cover/ don't come over." Back then when you could actually hold album covers, I could get lost in those private moments of listening to an entire album doing nothing else but staring at the cover. Despite there not being that much to read on the cover of Dirty, found myself fixated on this cover for months trying to figure what the fuck was going on in the Bob Flanagan picture and why the images of a pimply kid and some stuffed toys disturbed me so much. But it wasn't until about five years later when I started art school that this all started to make sense. I should have figured it out earlier because unlike most other albums that credit an artist with the "cover art", the credit on Dirty simply read: "Art: Mike Kelley". What they had done was actually include a complete work of art in, or even as, the album packaging.

The Bob Flanagan image was one of two images Kelley took in a collaboration with him, not part of the Ahh Youth! series of stuffed toys but they worked together under the 'dirty' theme of the album context. This I found out once I started art school, as I managed fit Kelley into any project I could, I had constant library fines from always keeping the only three books they had on Kelley in a continual state of "overdue".

What I learned from Kelley in those undergraduate years are many of the values that I teach my students today. Art should not be an easy answer to a question, art should challenge its viewers, and also its creator. Kelley's work embodies all of this. The incongruity of the adolescent self portrait in amongst the children's stuffed toys is simple yet completely captivating device. What is the relationship between the adolescent (or adolescence) and the children's toys? Are they his? Were they his? At what point do we let go of such toys? Is this moment as precise as that captured in the photograph, is it that locatable in memory? In Ahh... Youth the ambiguous and confusing experience of "growing up" is communicated on a visceral level, beyond the reach of words or numbers, like the child's height measurements etched into the door frames of family homes over time. Not only does Kelley's work communicate this experience, it simultaneously emphasises the inadequacy of the linguistic labels of "child", "adolescent", "adult" in attempts to differentiate and categorise these lived physical and emotional states.

That is the kind of thing I want art to do, and Mike Kelley is what I want artists be. Let's hope that is his legacy.

Mike Kelley, Ahh... Youth!, 1991