"Les nouveaux cobayes. Les nouveaux otages.
Crucifies sur l'autel de l'information, au pilori de leurs consoles.
informatises vivants"
Yes, we do. All of us. This image haunts me as well.
> The position of sitting at the
> monitor is charged with expectations and demands
> (...)
> One wonders what these nonusers were
> thinking, and to what extent they were aware of the charged space
> between their body and the interface, or for that matter, the
> 'placeless' realms on the other side of the screen.
Is a monitor expecting a user ?
Is the net expecting the blast forum ?
Aren't we all "nonusers" of the net in this text-based forum, compared
to a digital community within a shared 3D VRML world ?
But it is by no means necessary to subordinate art to technology.
Jordan's visually stunning example seems in fact close to the classical
example of looking at a perspective drawing and interpreting it as some
illusory "space", or the well-known example of African tribesmen
looking at pictures of themselves and saying "I don't know this animal".
(I will skip here, with your permission, an endless discussion on the
cognitive vs cultural basis of perspective)
One idea has nevertheless been missing in the discussion up to now.
The monitor is not just the "'placeless' realms on the other side of the
screen".
It is a *computed* space. Created by billions of digital instructions and
number crunching steps.
Space exists here as long as time exists to create it.
Interactions can be anything and give rise to
processes of unbounded complexity.
An example of this paradigm shift can be apprehended (for those with a
mathematical inclination) in Gregory Chaitin's theory of algorithmic
complexity and entropy, versus physical entropy of standard thermodynamics.
Being more proagmatic, a click on the mouse might give rise to anything from
downloading gigabits
of useless information to crashing down your system via a virus .
Much has been written on the way technology used as a prothesis in shaping
the world changed our conception of space in the modern and post-m words, etc.
My point is rather that in "the other side of the screen"
we just don't know what happens, we just don't know what power is used for a
given action, and this differs strongly from our everyday "modern"
technological
prostheses.
I have no way to control that my future click on "send" will
deliver this mail to you blasters, thank you Microsoft (tm) ...
And, yes, maybe Big Brother is watching me, and who else also ?
Moreover, we do not know what to do if something go wrong in an interaction
(OK, shutdown is always an option) or if we cannot decode
some piece of information.
We are totally impotent, and the Cyberscreen Gaze (Bracha) is indeed that of
domination, making us nevertheless feel that the machine is ours.
> The position of sitting at the
> monitor is charged with expectations and demands
> (Jordan)
Indeed. The cyberscreen commands ... Informatises vivants !
> Can a body be awaken by the
> cyberscreen's Gaze? Does interactivity offer a key to joint home-formation
> and affectuation? Certainly not.
> (Bracha)
Going back to the body is not of great help in my view.
I do not see how the matrixial borderspace can cope with the
"cogitatio coerca" of the computer
(and I will again here skip an endless discution about Leibniz and
Hobbes motto "cogitatio est computation").
However, there has been for some time a strand in art to use cogitatio coerca
and blind combinatorics as an "ars inventendi" (Leibniz) to explore
new territories in a non-dialectical manner.
I am refereing here to Duchamp, of course.
Computers might be of some use for continuing this,
rather than in re-creating perspective pictures (VRML) as if abstraction has
never existed or in implementing worldwide Dazibaos (forums).
Philippe