Today’s incredible systems of description shape the ‘real’ world as much
as reflect it. In so doing, they both enable and circumscribe our
existential possibilities. It is a simple fact, however, that it is
impossible for anyone to be fluent in every language that orders our
experience. Obscure functions, principles and vocabularies govern the
everyday lives of rocket scientists and street cleaners alike. This is
to say - The contemporary phenomenology of techno-capitalist-science is,
for most people, occult; a paradoxical condition that drives much
cultural production today.
What do I mean by occult? For most people the term invokes the
domain of hocus pocus, Halloween costumes and heavy metal - a field
devoid of intellectual credibility. I want to use it in a more specific
sense: In medicine the adjective occult is applied to a disease or process
that is not accompanied by readily discernable signs or symptoms. The
Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of blood ‘abnormally
present, e.g. in faeces, but detectable only chemically or
microscopically’.1 The term comes from the Latin occultare (‘secrete’), which is frequentative of occulere
(‘conceal’). How does this pertain to our discussion? Imagine a digital
image: Something kitsch, like a woman sitting on a tropical beach. The
scene is only the surface of an architecture that is of a different
descriptive order altogether; a process whose technical foundations are
not readily discernable, though they underpin the final effect. I know
what you’re going to say: “Most people have no idea how their jpegs are
made, but you don’t have to know how to take an engine apart in order to
drive!”. To this I must respond – so-called driverless cars exist, and
they are already taking people for rides.
Even as it synthesizes palm trees and lagoons, the digital support can do other things. Constant Dullaart’s work Jennifer in Paradise
exemplifies this, operating not only on the level of the image but its
code – which contains a steganographically encrypted message. The
content is pay-walled, its decryption key only made available to the
work’s purchaser. Herein, a commercial function ‘abnormally present’
within the image of Jennifer’s body – like a fleck of microscopic blood.
Beyond Dullaart’s work, countless particles – of what else? –
are distributed throughout the ever proliferating corpus of digital
images, and by extension – this is important – within so many novel
systems of social representation. These occult process are the core of
virtuality.
Our lives play out in digital representations, yet most of us are adrift
on the image surface – never diving into code: The constantly changing
skein, the façade, dazzles as it obscures. We delight it the way it
refracts, the way it seems capable of producing a panorama of selfhood.
Its glittering mutability hints at our own proliferation and rebirth – a
million selfies; pouting and posing, informed by the discourse of
‘performativity’ as digested by the culture industry. But what moves
through the guts of this cornucopia? Within this image matrix (and here I
use the term in its traditional sense, as womb) we fail to
discern our twin: that is, the real (foreign) body that is being made
for us – and which may yet take us for a ride. Our digital doppelganger
is not a photograph or a status update, much less a manifestation of
playfulness or unfettered possibility. It is a parasitical cluster of
instrumental functions and disciplines that would collapse us into their
own image. It is our actual body that is at risk of becoming the avatar
of this virtual twin. In this sense we are living the emergence of
machines in the areas we thought our ghosthood – consciousness, memory,
desire and sensation.
Most of us are not coders or cypherpunks, but more of us must be.
Without an ability to penetrate the screen, to influence the mutations
and parasitical functions of our government and corporate approved
virtual agency, then we will remain at the mercy of processes beyond our
control; languages that we do not speak. It is just as important that
more coders become philosophers – so that the dross of
techno-capitalist-libertarianism can be challenged. Artists need to be
both. But until that time (and because, as I mentioned earlier, we on
cannot become fluent in every descriptive system) they must also do
other things. Specifically, they must help us understand the stakes in
dealing, and
living, with the occult processes of our day-to-day machine imaging.
If we cannot avoid having an unchosen double (save for complete luddite
renunciation of online experience), and we do not understand the
internal functions of this virtual self, then let us have a critical
engagement with the phenomenology. The metonyns, the ciphers and symbols
by which we navigate this terrain must be examind and challenged. We
must develop a vernacular idiom – an set of aesthetic tools - capable of
describing how formal languages produce everyday experience.
Performing the obscure captures attention in a culture whose ideological
rhetoric – at least – priviliges visibility. Manifeting opacity – not
making transparent, not hiding, but publically invoking the hidden – is a
timely strategy. Here are a few examples of this approach:
Surf clubs involve the creation and display of a private language, one
that is on full display to outsiders, but which can only be understood
by initiates fully immersed in the play of iconography. You can look at
one icon but will not understand what it means unless you are proficient
in recognizing how it fits into a semantic topography – a constellation
of meaning. Of course, many of the well known clubs have since wound
down, but a similar play of revealing opacity – like the iconography of
the freemasons on banknotes and public buildings – is at work in
projects like the Eternal Internet Brotherhood: a group who go on a
retreat to a greek island (a mythical place) and tell everyone that
they’re going but do not invite an audience.
Elsewhere, the performance experiments of Ed Fornieles, Ben Vickers and
Relational Data in London involve artists’ role play in real social
space, appropriating the avatars and pseudo-agencies associated with
cybernetic capitalism: working in marketing, operating a social media
profile according to genre conventions – in the case of Ed Fornieles’
work, in the performative guise of an unreflective American college
student. Here, the criticality turns around being seen to live a virtual
double – the coded doppelganger.
That this coded doppelgander so often resembles a zombie is most
apparent in the work of Ryan Trecartin: Communication between
Trecartin’s characters plays out as a fast-extending scroll of
pseudo-aphorisms – both spoken and given as on-screen subtitles – whose
individual brevity indicates their equivalence to the commands of a
computer program or search query. Despite the fact that the characters
address one another their incessant verbiage seems to be more a case of
instructions issued in staccato bursts of
text(uality) than a conversation. Trecartin’s footage is often sped up
and the consequent pace at which his characters operate is at odds with
lived time as we know it. In this respect they seem like grotesques from
a parallel universe. The nature of this temporal shock – compounded by
Trecartin’s quick cut montage technique – is also bound up with virtual
space. The characters’ ‘conversations’ jump around and so the initial
effect on the viewer is disorienting. Yet this seeming diffusion is –
somewhat paradoxically – the
result of constant self-situating: When the characters talk about a
subject they make extreme horizontal references to related information
in a manner somewhere between free-association and hyperlinks. What
appears to be lack of concentration on their part is the manifestation
of a subtending ‘web’ of information processes. Their social patterns
reflect the structure of browsing and, accordingly, they spew forth data
without respite. Again, the question of agency rears its ugly head.
Wild-eyed and smeared with colourful makeup, Trecartin’s people are like
terrible puppets mouthing the master speech of twenty-first century
information capitalism – ‘dummies’ in more than one sense.
The tighter the ratio, the more opaque our virtual double becomes – the
less we control its limbs, its speech, its intellectual and economic
functions. Our 1:1 other is alienation itself. If we cannot be fluent in
every code or descriptive system, artists and thinkers must set
themselves the task of addressing the phenomenology of opacity, so we
may yet survive our collapse into the technical image.