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.
