A Theory

Malevich (1928-32) Complex Presentiment

“I think it’s very true that we are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on, and it’s because everything that science fiction was about through its historical named period, the twentieth century, has kind of come true. And also we live in a world that is so intensely structured by science and technology that we can’t get out of it. If we were to get out of it would still be a science fiction move, the retreat to the farm. So it’s hegemonic, you can’t escape it, we’re in that world created by science and technology.

And also there’s this intense sense of futurity, in that if you opened up your newspaper or laptop tomorrow and it said, “They’ve cloned six South Koreans successfully and they’re all named Kim,” you would believe it, there would be no surprise there. Anything could happen. You could say, well, we just got a signal from Alpha Centauri, there are intelligent aliens there, they sent us the code for pi and the Pythagorean Theorem. There’s no reason to disbelieve that, either. So we live in this world of anticipation of strangeness, of change, rapidly accelerating change.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, from a Franklin Humanities Institute/Polygraph event on January 28, 2010 which preceded the “Science, Religion, Ideology” lecture presented by Robinson in Competing Cosmologies, Effecting Worlds: Intersections of Science and Religion. Durham, Duke University, 2010.

In many ways this is a story of Modernity.  Modernity and its various forms of visual representation as the screws tighten on a century of unprecedented horror and destruction. The polar dynamics of the trauma of the real – as experienced firsthand – and the detachment that the perception of that trauma engenders – as experienced by the documentation and visualisation of Modernity through media arts production – are embedded in these cultural markers.

The central thesis of what these markers represent: an aesthetic darkness – or as Jaron Lanier hypothesises as a ‘new Dark Age’ – is underpinned by Paul Virilio’s ‘image loop’ of the mediated apocalypse.  The concurrent disconnect of the global audience from these recurring themes of ‘end times’ as entrenched in popular culture and the networked mass media haunts this aesthetic with an anxious gothic tone.  This is not to say that the majority of the text is dedicated to the examination of an apocalypse of faith, society, economics or other, but rather how the technological fantasies – both real and imagined – of the 20th century have a deep cultural history which may or may not have given rise to an apocalyptic moment frozen as it were at the dawn of the new millennia.

My Endless Dystopian Summer Blockbuster (Catastrophe : Asteroid_Strike) Glitch # 02

And if, as it would seem, this does not represent an ending, perhaps it demonstrates an endlessness – a state which Slavo Zizek refers to as the dystopian horror of an unending “utopia” of things (Mossop 2011).  In his essay, Anorexic Ruins, Baudrillard states that “everything has already become nuclear, faraway vaporised.  The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now”(Baudrillard 1989).  Foreshadowing the final simulacra of disconnect he would canvass when observing Gulf War 1.0 and 2.0’s mediated reruns of infra-red fire fights, combat vapour and the endlessly victorious yet endlessly defeated soldier, Buadrillard precedes Virilio and Zizek’s critiques with the concept of the “weak moment”.  This is important, as the metaphor for nuclear annihilation has a deep history in the 20th century – less as a documented event but rather as an embodiment of fear and anxiety of an imminent future event – but nonetheless a hollow prophecy.  Whereas 9/11 would earn Buadrillard’s observation as a “strong event” the failure of the Cold War to produce the final apocalypse left a distinct vacuum from which all subsequent equations seem somewhat dull and diluted.

Yet this bedding down of fear in the western psyche is a behavioural pattern well learnt.  As the representation of its consequences were continually articulated – predominately through the cinematic metaphor in the guise of foreign forces (ie the alien invasion, the plague, the creature from the wilderness’ edge, the ecological terror, the unseen all seeing Other) – the DNA of this fear has transferred across a range of media art genres.  Attaching itself with increasing verve to a range of seemingly foreboding technologies (the tools of production and distribution) that operate at the intersection of nature, physics and material invention up to and including – most instructively for this discussion – the emergence of so called “ecologies” of the network.  Here the incessant lack of consequence of previous iterations breeds a deeper more totalising anxiety of the collective unseen and their impending implications.

In the fibres of the network, nuclear annihilation sits ominously alongside the growing clutter of other equally opaque yet suitably apocalyptic distractions – global terror, religious fundamentalism, environmental collapse being the dominant pathologies – and allows then the observer the room to examine the cultural object as a link in the hyper-real redaction of the present.  While this is not an examination of the end as a social or political invention, as it is for Zizek and his contemporary Evan Calder Williams, the end of the capitalist ideal is perhaps a collective consequence which one may be able to draw from the evidence discussed herein.

Certainly, the restructuring of the communist/capitalist narrative via the “New World Order” which Baudrillard wrote of so extensively provides an over arching diffusion of what these forces mean in a global and local context but they are more of a distraction than a causal effect of the techno-futurist narrative.  In fact the “weak event” that Baudrillard refers to in his 1989 essay is the fall of the Berlin Wall.  And while this may historically represent the end of the communist state as a global force it also represents – in aesthetic terms – the beginning of the end of the West’s technological fantasy.  Linearity gives way to rhizomatic information, the first age of electronic media gives way to grunge and analogue nostalgia, and the turn of the decade becomes the countdown to an uncertain future in the new millennia that bares a strong historical loop back to an earlier time.  Yet where Modernity, as described by Paul de Man, must “severe” itself from the past to understand its future it is essentially a  contradictory experience that “makes the past irrevocable and unforgettable because it is inseparable from any past and future” (De Man and Godzich 1983).  This paradox has been brought into even sharper focus with the accumulation of the cultural archive that is the World Wide Web and its associated network operations.  A data space where history can be annotated, challenged, reorganised, redrawn or rejected; rather than a dustbin it has become an idealogical database.

While the lessons of history do in fact become weak due to their cyclic repetition and their accumulated meaning can become diluted – transient or even unfashionable – it essentially becomes an unregulated simulation of events as digital objects.  As this simulation weaves its way through the blizzard of detritus data on the network it picks up the emotions, prejudices and characteristics of the user, and in the context of this discussion, pulls into startling relief the permutations of digital culture’s associated fears and anxieties.  The 20th century then becomes a data space in which the device and its associated applications become the supposed remedy for the informational sludge and the screen and its interface the ‘gateway’ to knowledge.  If the techno-futurist’s dominant impression of the last 100 years of human history is of ever decreasing concentric circles of order and logic as we spring towards a network Utopia it simultaneously belies the fact that its ‘ecology’ is underpinned by chaos and uncertainty.   This new (dis)order, that is in many respects playing itself out as the meta-myth of this period across the network and even more tellingly across the wider spectrum of mainstream culture, feeds off the inherent weakness of the present as a Utopian promise.  Rather the anxiety and detachment from the real its disorder evokes amidst a backdrop of a world – both physical and virtual – seemingly out of our control defines the apparent endlessness of the gothic high-tech narrative that is the framework of the Dark Euphoric moment.

It therefore presents the question : What effect has the 20th century futurist narrative of technological Utopianism (and therefore its Dystopian mirror) had on the contemporary digital aesthetic?

This text will seek to map out this territory by following the twin parables of digital aesthetics and the concurrent marketing of a technological engagement with the future via dense and at times contradictory mediascapes.  Here the eulogising of technology – through manifestos of light colour and pixels – belies the fact that the sales pitch by governments, corporations and cybernetic theorists is manifesting a darker shade in the cultural fabric of media art production. In short the work of the Italian Futurists, the designers of the World’s Fairs, the marketeers of communication and information consumption, the evolution of the camera from documentary provocateur to cinematic war machine and the emergence of the Cyber City as a networked enclave of digital culture and counter-dystopian thought are the pretext for this examination.

This is not a lesson in Art History or the mechanics of media distribution but rather an examination of the cultural artifacts which presuppose the current state of things.  There are dramatic links between machines for art making and the undoing of the technological narrative which mythologised such machines.  In this context we can look to the narrative arc of the 20th century as a cycle of technology driven art making as much as we can map the creation and disruption of the systems and practices which drive their development and the Schadenfreude that the West’s apocalyptic yearnings seem to engender.

The information network – the archive, the torrent stream, the social network, the virtual marketplace, the cyber city – plays an important role in this examination as it has become the point of entry for the production of media art and the proliferation of digital culture at the crossroads of the new millennia.  While this is not a study of how this change came to be, as this has been covered comprehensively elsewhere, it is important to emphasise that as a research tool it plays an important role in mapping the emergence of a dark pervasive aesthetic which constitutes the current post-post-Modernist moment which I will seek to define as Millenniamodernity.