Oleg Filyuk
War inside Clon 80X86 (1993)
Язык оригинала: русский
The eye, that will dare to determine the place of art within the existent compass of things, will be doomed to the life of a nomad with no permanent residence, always on the move to visit ephemeral horizons of contemporaneity. The world glides perpetually, therefore we have problems in descrying traits of the previous century, those desires and motivations, that have woven its fabric. As we are inside the stream, we cannot remember that glance, but we must speak of those dissimilarities in order to really feel the difference of circumstances, the pattern of preferences and choices, that we see as a “daily occurrence” and that separates our days from those of the past. Despite our ambition “to pioneer”, such “discussion” of the eye has to rely on something, on destiny or names of cult heroes from the past, in order to find a “new voice” under the preassure of the clipped consciousness, generated by multi media technologies.
What was specific of Benjamin’s eye, that of the Passages, is that when he walked around those glass pavillions, he was, perhaps, the only one, who saw the 19th century, packed in those expositional spaces, so tangibly. It was somehow related to his innermost rhythm, his destiny. It seems, he was not alone there. At least in Moscow there are rumours of a woman, who accompanied him on those walks, although it doesn’t matter, it was rather a dream, escorting him on his walks around those glass galleries.
Even back then he seemed to realize, that both he (as much as he was contemporary) and his girl-friend, the expectation of a child were part of an odd shopping tour and existed in the emotional atmosphere of those expositional spaces, that all of it would be really important for understanding of the time and the events. All, what is invested in a human life, is already related to the 19th century, reflected by the fascinating charm of the glass showcases, dispayed at the border of transparency amid the glamour of the bazaar.
It is essential to realize, that architecture, which absorbs the architect’s eye ( an old tradition, in the 20th century constantly addressed by Foucault) and which is related to prisons, public executions and the panopticum of power, runs through all Benjamin’s passages. Guided by his aesthetics of the expositional eye we get into still more ephemeral digital worlds, where our eye is modelled by the geography of virtual objects and events, becoming very similar to computer models; perhaps, it approaches that radical experience, when the architectonics of neuronic reactions will be linked directly to the architectonics of computer processors.
From the architecture of 486 processor, long before the appearance of the graphic options and visual landscapes, which it can process, one could read all myths and aspirations of the 20th century, all, what it has missed. Only now it becomes clear, that the processor should be multi-media; apart from being a computer, it must generate a space of various sensory modalities and a field of vision to synchronise their challenges and addresses. Today processor architecture allows to establish contacts between such modalities as hearing, sight, kinetic sensation, only through perpherals with the help extension plates. Multi-media objects are not represented in the architecture of the processor proper. Similarly, in the models of consciousness, that are used even in the most radical art projects of the 20th century, multi-media “performances” are impossible. As Paul Virilier said, the 20th century consciousness is crushed by cinematography, it is “crucified” on the screen, it lacks the volumes and sub-modal passages, that can be easily rendered by the plasticity of digital environments.
I think, that network and processor architecture, the marketing strategies, through which computer companies distribute a new way of life will be described by a new art history. Such analysis will have to deal with extremely antropomorphous virtual architecture of technologies, which always emerges at the borders of subjectivity and redefines the latter. A research into the network space, the space of the virtual machines’ architecture is the task of contemporary art. To reach the zone, where one can experience a measurable contemporaneity means to redefine subjectivity, for these materialized signs of contemporaneity are formed by certain images; it also means to engage in relations of communication and power, defining love or hate towards certain images. The task of art history is to read them now, at the border of scriptual culture. The options of discourse are relegated to the dull past; philosophy recedes to make room for expression and rhythm of the artisitc gesture.
What really matters now is the speed of on-line interaction. I can’t single out the most important thing here, yet for me significant is the fact, that almost all media artists I know from ATI 2, also work as video DJ-s in techno-discotheques, mixing video-sequences on several monitors, weaving different videotracks into one space of techno-trance. They would consider any attempt at a plot, any analysis of the content extremely slow and boring. So what is left are only speeds of data highways: pure speeds, pure energies and pure expression. Perhaps, there is something else to it. Probably, somewhere at a different level there formed a different pattern of time, where the information massage (the preassure of TV news and newspaper columns) just begins to be felt, is only a possibility (using the terms of McLuhan and Gibson’s cult books), where it materialises from fantasies in the clip-like density of films, computer games and virtual worlds. And this clash, this materialised return kicks the expressive hacker’s jargon further, to dense kinetic fields of cyberspace. The type of subjectivity, produced by literary machines, can’t stand the tension of the data world, its non-linear perception.
In these ruptures between literary strategies work artists like “violent” Tarantino: due to its hypertrophied plot, his “Pulp Fiction”, a parody of recycled literature, balances on the verge of seriousness, yet on the other hand, it was made to conquer hearts by maximal realism, by that processing of speed, which breaks our identification with the characters and which mocks our ability to construct a scale of values and expectations.
A friend of mine begins her day by choosing a role she is going to play, then she enters INTERNET and chooses her image, that is a whole community with its own laws of intimacy and trust - you are free to give your interlocutor your phone number and the number of your credit card. For her these communications are a kind of massage, that fills her with energy for the whole day. She needs this daily body irritant, that variation of her image in order to feel her identity, to stay with her self beyond the limitations of usual expectations. Mass communications permeate the style of any contemporary work of art, always playing with ecstatic gestures. Pathos of an ecstatic glance, of the leaving ship of fools is transcendental, it is pregnant with breaking of identities.
This glance is (or, at least, was before we met it) quite unequivocally defined in terms of geography; it can be understood in the New World of American spaces with their nomadic passions and poems of data highways. Our collision with this glance should be understood as the return of the ships of fools, which had set sail from Europe to conquer the new continent with the energy of madness.
As the glance of geographical sites and physical spaces becomes exhausted, it has no more room to expand, so this is a return, although a return nowhere. If all American cinema is founded on endlessly unfolding sky, which has a part to play in almost any American movie, then children, brought up on such cinema, amid these running away stars and infinite roads, cut by the speed, lose the right to open space, to the capital, permitting to live in any point of this huge continent. Now Russia is a country of children, the children of America. They know, what have formed their fathers, but nobody is going to invite them in this domain. And what will form them is so far unknown.
These children, like any other children, live in the virtual field of a closed and evasive landscape. Topology of evasion and distortion and forces, operating in this space are the subjects, constantly addressed by Foucault, that is a marginal community and a way to evade the power, to go beyond social order with its exchanges and circulation of the symbolic capital. In fact, evasion is a kind of supreme power, a certain point inside the global cycle, embracing birth and death. One must possess the will of a tyrant in order to get the ship ready, in order to make those, whose bodies bear no trace of the use of power, who don’t fit into desire production of the consumerist society leave the circle of power.
Therefore, “Moscow children” are children by preference, by force of certain geo-political circumstances. Works by Moscow media artists conform to all stereotypes of the generation, gliding on data highways: excessive use of hackers’ slang, attempts to convert the experience of psychedelic voyages into options of virtual worlds, unnatural self-identification with the criminal sub-culture, where one’s authority is determined by his/her ability to break codes and to enter systems, safely protected from tresspassing. Of course, these are traits of a sub-culture with no established hierarchies. The power of the “last hero”, acting here, is determined by his ability to get - with the help of latest technologies - an unsanctioned access to information and control systems, rather than by excessive muscles, valuable contacts or money.
Art’s transcendental pathos, the ecstasy of getting beyond the realm of the “reasonable” is always present in these stereotypes. It seems, that Leonardo da Vinci started his carrier as a hacker: he carves a human body to become for his contemporaries a monster, who violated the norms of decency. The experience, which helps him to draw a body, is possible only as the experience of a surgeon and anatomist, and is already processed by these technologies and models of treating corporeality. The same happens to the new Haus character, the hero of computer revolutions. His physical experience is born in some infrastructures, first of all in projects, which link computer to the human body (this is done by Stelorg, but the idea is relevant for many other media artists as the generation project). Body art, which interferes with physicality somewhere between the peripheral and central nervous system, gives birth to new practices of challenging physicallity, a kind of new athletism. In fact, such new athletism, such newly developed impossible organs become the subject-matter of an artistic gesture, dramatically redifining the production of physicality in gender experience or in the powerfull edification of medical technologies. Such artistic gesture circulates and grows in an entirely different realm, where physical experience is broken by the computer world to make room for futurist projects, which combine peripheral sections of visual, audial and kinetic analysers into the user’s communicative net.
Already now our daily navigation begins to acquire featuress of this new order: recently Novell corporation started to develop the global NEST (Novell Systems Technology) strategy to create a new living and instrumental environment. Various house-hold devices, kitchen equipment, copying machines and energy counters will be linked to NetWare nets, so that one could control them from any point within the net. This project will entail hyper-intensification of daily life, so the level of its complexity could be compared to navigation in the military jet’s cabin.
Now the artist gradually restores his image of a magus, who can change with a wave of his hand, like Copernik, the entire structure of science and picture of the world. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he is a magus. Standing on the border of contemporary art, the artist “plaits” his desires into neurobiology, he transforms art into research, into testing devices, into new digital technologies and architecture of computer nets. He must be able to find his bearings in new desire producing strategies, springing up in the world of computer entertainment; he must be competent to judge these jargons and models. He involves the previously authentic pathos of these fields in his work. The energy and life style, generated by digital technologies, drastically changes the idea of art production. Now art is born in entirely different infrastructures, avoiding art magazines, exhibition halls and artists’ studios: it can be much nearer, in the physiology of our perception, and simultaneously much farther, at an immeasurable distance, making explicit the experience of telepresence, which now becomes part of the “new man’s” daily routine and destiny.
New creative models, emerging in communicative projects, absorb a certain virtual geography: data highways, zones of stable satellite reception, location of ground telecommunicative operators etc. In a certain sense, the “geography of exchages”, its real and fake landscapes, its speeds, intensities and streams of “induced” images constitute the matter of creative desires, weave the fabric of “bodies of entertainment”. With these bodies the policy of representation is impossible. These creative desires cannot be represented, they are in continuous transformation, every moment they emerge anew at the junctures with higher intensity of “commutation” streams. To bring these bodies into existence requires permanent effort at maintaining the intensities. Yet what I call “streams of creative desires” have a body, which always balances between entertainment and “instability” of encounters. A gesture, that combines and presents options of these futurist spaces, is the gesture of contemporary art.
Already now the picture from the TV camera can be transferred via computer straight to human brain, returning eyesight to blind people. As to art space, it would be ridiculous to behave as though art could still appeal to some absolute “eye”. Computer technologies “break” physical identity of human organs, upsetting the order in which anatomy entered a work of art and its perspectives. It is highly probable, that soon we shall live in a fairy tale with elements of indian mysticism, where an organ and an object of perception are born simultaneously, in the perpetual inconstancy of moments.
In the “discussed” compass of things, where, indeed, a fact of contemporary art takes place, there acts, side by side with the artist, another picturesque character, a philosophizing futurologist, who, like William Gibson or Marshall McLuhan, measuring the world with his own destiny, allows other people to accept this emerging space of contemporaneity. He is rather irresponsible, he produces irresponsible statements, which eventually become the basis for understanding of this new art infrastructure.
And almost at once these cult figures of “pure visionism” and “pure art” are ivolved in the force field of signs of power.
The biggest computer companies have already started to employ futurist designers and philosophers. Behind “marketing constructions”, which could be understood as a promotion of a whole complex of new technologies (such as hypertext, decision making systems, multi-media and telecommunications), one should see a promotion of a complete way of life and a new man, accepting this image.
On the other hand, even strategies of computer companies may become an object of artistic and philosophical reflection. Thus, the San company develops a strategy, titled “Dispersed Objects Everywhere” (even the slogan seems to be a fascinating subject for an art historian). It means parallel computing, where fragments of one programme may be physically installed on different computers, sometimes very far away from each other, but when the programme must turn on, these dispersed modules interact in accordance with certain rules, and the virtual machine starts working. Probably, the same may be done with neuro-interface, so sensory experiments will be dispersed in cyber-hyman machines.
The most interesting thing in new technologies still remains the futurist pathos, the energy of an artistic gesture, which compells one to turn down to digital art. There must be some social rootes here, it seems to be the return of the European civilization from the American continent, and simultaneously it is a return nowhere, since virtual reality and neuro-interface are the spaces, where human eye doesn’t feel at home, the spaces with no acces for the physical eye. All dominants of contemporary art are present in this return nowhere. In course of this return we shall have to restore our basic suppositions about physicality, about its continuity and the possibility of commutation with other minds - that is to return to subjects, which belong to pre-European experience, to the experience of traditional culutures.
In traditional cultures there is no objective and shared by all world, as there is no relay of this world. The European civilization always appeals to an object, a third party, which is between myself and another (and even the relation to one’s self, to one’s own identity is part of this trilateral relation). This is not so in traditional cultures, since for them the available world is no less illusionary, than the world of our emotions and mental images. And states of consciousness may be transmitted directly, without a mediator, the consciousness of a teacher may flow directly to the disciple. In fact, to be in a state of transmission means to be able restore states, blessed by tradition. Our picture of the world will be subjected to a dramatic transformation in the nearest future. This will happen, when the book culture, the bearer of an objective outlook, starts to mutate and transform in the world of multi-media technologies, when to create a visual environment for us becomes as natural as to write now, when our dreams and fantasies become tangible and materialisable. Not very steadily, yet the world moves towards what Marshall McLuhan called a resturation of the sensory balance, and in our dreams we see man liberated from the dictatorship of speech and graphic form. And when subjectivity loses the status of the interpretative body, when it becomes possible to get access to processors avoiding the symbolic space of the keyboard, when processors commute via layers of the nervous system, then we will have to consider problems of new organs. In fact, such experiments has been conducted by Soviet psychology. Leontiev made experiments to develop skin sight, when an image was projected to the skin of blind men, and special devices registered the reaction. Potentially, man can alter his organs, for they are not so rigidly fixed. The familiar subdivision into modalities is a product of social machines, of certain technologies, of which the most important ones are surgical ways of treating life and interfering with our body and the scriptorial culture, which structures our expressive means and defines the intruigues of our life.
As soon as we get into the space of new computer-based technologies, this order of social machines starts to shatter, and with it the traditional notion of perception: the organs, that are used by the processor interface, have to go through a certain training, but already now appropriation of these organs by man is quite feasible. The states of neuron chains, a kind of “sensory tissue” contains not only objects of perception, but also opposite micro-movements. These micro-movements constitute, in fact, the “body of distinction”, which “tunes in the organs” and which is unique for every act of perception. However, this “tuning”, this “sensory tissue” can be shared to form the environment of communication.
The previously impassable border, the one, which separates the world of physiology from that of consciousness, is breached. So we can hope, that computer technologies and the possibility to transfer organs into the processor’s commuicative space will allow to combine two visions of the world, similarly to physics, when the corpuscular theory of matter extended to include the wave one.
Foot notes:
1.This article includes fragments of a bigger work “Architecture of Processor 489 DX4”, a project of a remake, dedicated to Passages by Walter Benjamin.
2. Art Technology Institute.
In Russian: Война Внутри Клона 80Х86
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