Compression Crane Arts Space Philadelphia

It is a phenomenological curiosity that the digital environment permits the intertwining of intrinsic and extrinsic points of view. "This Flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it, and it encroaches upon the world." (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) Written at the onset of the true digital age, Merleau-Ponty's worlds still hold true for worlds born of imagination, computing and mathematics. No matter how strange and surreal these worlds are, they are still part of us and of this world.

In respect to the algorithmically derived surfaces, objects and sound exhibited in the works, there perhaps a singular idea that dominates - that there is no separation from a world of 'things'. Rather, our world is a fractal phenomenon, a vast set of interrelatedness existing recursively at all scales and extending in all dimensions of complexity. Our senses do not just bear witness to these phenomena but are touched, in the full sense of the word, by that generally assumed to be untouchable.

Nothing is unreal, the works are a construction of mind, and utilise matter. In a digital sense, that matter is the ordering of electrons and the projection of photons and frequencies into the electromagnetic spectrum. The only parlour trick is to look for semblances of the reality that we think we know in order to grasp the notion that the subject and object are actually inseparable.

The field of research is aesthetics, the relationship of subject to object, of participant to image and sound. The context is in regard to what occurs in participatory space, how the viewer of the works not only engages their sense of vision and hearing, but also proprioception and in particular, vestibular sense. The research question is “How does the participant engage with the virtual object in space” The works produced for exhibition have set out to challenge the aesthetic engagement of the viewer, by introducing environments and objects that are born of algorithm, but possess some ‘uncanny’ connection to the real world. This blurred distinction between the real and virtual is important to sensorially engage the participant and begin phenomenological enquiry.

The contributions to the field of research are of a phenomenological nature, the works exhibit new fractal constructions of form and new algorithmic generations of sound. The aesthetic rationale is to permit the visual and aural existence of something newly derived from mathematics, to allow the participant to reach an understanding that the unreal is real, that the works are born of this world.

The phenomenological dilemmna is that the viewer has to accept the virtual, it is right here and can have a profound multi-faceted sensorial affect. The fractal forms in particular that have been generated for the works were created for their low level of correlation with observable real world phenomena, but there always exist aspects of semblance with some ‘thing’. In contrast to the modelled realism of their environment, these forms set in place the questions of what is real or not.

Dr Asley Whamond , in the Essay for Compression, the exhibition these works were created for states; “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 curiousity. 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”.

The works depend upon, and are successful as a result of bodily experience, the complex, and at times unnerving integration of sensory stimuli, the simple and quiet visuals, the intriguing and haunting sound and the subtle assault on vestibular sense.  The significance of the works in terms of the field of aesthetics is a result of considered integration of multisensory experience.

COMPRESSION

by Ashley Whamond

Hereafter, here no longer exists; everything is now. – Paul Virilio In bringing together an exhibition of Australian artists in the United States, several issues arise immediately relating to distance, space, place and time. These logistical issues inevitably give rise to other more conceptual issues such as history, culture, difference and globalisation. This exhibition however, has as its thematic focus a foil to many of these issues: a focus on work that is primarily digital in nature rather than “physical”. Of course digitality does not negate any of the above issues completely, but it does force a reconsideration of them, in fact, in most cases they command more attention in a digital context. The artists have been attentive to these issues in creating the works and the results raise some engaging questions about the relationship between the digital and the physical, or the virtual and the real.

As Paul Virilio has been saying for over a decade, it is precisely this 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 separately 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 time frames. 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 Westdata 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 bringsprevious 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.

The works in Compression are forced to engage with all aspects of the real/virtual debate simply by virtue of the unique spatiality of the ICEBOX where they are displayed. The works, in having been made specifically for the 100ft by 25ft screen, use digitally generated spatial forms in direct opposition to the imposing spatial presence of the ICEBOX. Crucially however the key consideration in this installation is not the spectacle of the medium where the novelty of technology so often eclipses the more meaningful aspects of the work, rather it is the embodied experience of the viewer. Untouched by Daniel Della-Bosca and Scott Roberts, with Sound by Andrew Brown, presents a familiar submarine environment animated using fractal mathematics to achieve naturalistic movement of the water surface and the floating object. The play between this visual familiarity and the artificiality of the work’s construction raises questions about nature and natural forms; fractals are of course used to make mathematical sense of seemingly random natural forms. The natural and virtual, the familiar and alien, are brought face to face through the use of fractal mathematics. They are not, however, presented in binary opposition to each other, as conflicting forces vying for dominance. Untouched allows us to see the virtual within the natural, that our understanding of the world relies heavily on its virtualisation into data sets such as fractals but also in our imaginations, our bodies, ‘untouched’ in the physical, but not the material sense. Andrew Brown’s sound makes use of the unique protracted echo in the ICEBOX as a positive force. The echo is the effect by sound moving about and bouncing off the boundaries of a particular space. Hearing an echo gives us an aural sensibility of the space, which in this case incorporates liquid and submarine atmospherics. These are not just recorded natural sounds, they retain enough reference to the natural to be familiar but the effects Brown has used make them strange operating in the same uncanny manner that the Della-Bosca’s fractal object looks at once like some exotic sea creature and something completely unnatural.

In Senti Della-Bosca and Roberts have generated an undulating, pulsating surface that refuses to settle completely as a solid or liquid, horizontal or vertical, natural or artificial, massive or microscopic. The space created here is not a definable space as in Untouched, but it incorporates movement in a manner that affects the viewer’s sense of spatial orientation as the fractal forms reveal an infinity of scale and volume refusing to rest at any definite point of logic and instead continually adding layers of possibility. Our sense of, and perhaps desire for, such a resolution is disrupted, revealing that much of our proprioceptive understanding is conventional in nature, three dimensional space is systematic and organised rather than a naturally occurring, objective phenomenon. When the virtual has such a profound realworld effect, it is difficult continue to regard it as such.

Louise Harvey’s animation Continuous Scrolling: Enabled, also uses fractals but in a more geometric form. A continuously moving field of vision, the work has profound physical impact on the body of the viewer. The work takes the viewer on a journey through fractal environments, the spatial infinity of which is felt physically rather than merely observed. This work uses the ICEBOX space, incorporating it into its field of experience rather acting against it. It exploits the immensity of the screen and the viewer’s proximity to it to induce proprioceptive sensations. That is to say that the spatial illusion here is keenly felt by the viewer on a bodily level but as the fractal spaces reveal their infiniteness, their spatial depth also becomes a sublime expansion of our natural conceptual understandings of depth and space, a unique experience that skillfully merges the space we inhabit with the space we imagine, or at least try to imagine.

The works of Paul Cleveland and Nasan Pather engage with the complexities of identity and nationhood in a digitally mediated world. In Cleveland’s generative work Colonial Song 1 the emergence of images are dictated by the fluctuations in pitch, tone and volume in the accompanying music. This music is a piece entitled Colonial Song by Australian composer Percy Grainger,who became an American citizen in 1918. The song was received well in America upon its release in 1914, but was less of a success in his home country. Grainger was attempting to express something of the Australian landscape in this piece; that is, to transfer something of the experience of that landscape to the listener. Was there something missing in Grainger’s musical interpretation of the landscape the meant that it failed to connect with Australian audiences? Is it in fact even possible to capture through music, something so tethered to personal experience as landscape? Cleveland’s work questions the capacity of any medium to capture the full complexity of the national identity. The images that gradually build up as the piece progresses are drawn from the informational signposts that warn motorists of the presence of local fauna in particular areas but they also evoke the kitsch souvenir store representations of 'Australia'. They are at once representations of the real and factual elements of culture ('these animals are here'), and the virtualisation of that culture through tourist-centred iconography ('these animals are Australia').What is the real landscape to which Grainger’s piece refers? What is the real identity that it attempts to communicate? Does it exist in reality at all or only as a virtualisation of the cultural imaginary?

Nasan Pather’s work is a sound piece entitled Gondwana, referring to the prehistoric landmass that is said to have once been constituted of the main southern hemisphere landmasses including Australia, South America and Africa and also some of those from the present-day northern hemisphere such as the Indian subcontinent. Pather has used synthetic sounds generated from ‘virtual’ synthesisers as a way of connecting with another time and another place. The sound of the synthesiser evokes an instant impulse of nostalgia, tied, as it is, to the specific time of the late 70s and 80s. The arrangement of the sounds flirts with repetition but introduces subtle changes each time, much like the process of memory and our romanticisation of the past, and even evolution. In this context, Pather’s invocation of Gondwana in the title invites questions pertaining to origins, change and borders remembering of course that Gondwana was not simply an originating mass from which other continents were formed but itself was constituted from other land masses. Borders are therefore purely virtual, no matter how real and permanent they may seem, they change. The virtual sounds Pather creates and the contemplative manner in which they are arranged echo this process while introducing allusions to nostalgia and technological evolution.

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.

Ashley Whamond, 2012

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-thenew-aesthetic/

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