something & nothing - march 1995

Introduction - "An apparently insolvable paradox. The idea though is not dead" ( BAUDRILLARD)

There has been a great deal of interest and speculation aroused by the invention of the term Virtual Reality and the digitally generated experience of multimedia-simulation and interactivity that it is applied to. It has often been accused of being an oxymoron and so justifies a perusal of the shorter Oxford dictionary.

If we then take virtual as meaning, 'capable of producing an effect' and reality as meaning , 'a quality suggestive of or resembling what is real', we have VR defined as 'something that is capable of producing an effect that is suggestive of what is real', ( an adequate term for digital potential) and the notion of an oxymoron disappears leaving in its place a paradox and a question of degrees.

The interplay between the digital and the analog gives a new twist to ideas of experiencing space and time raising issues of the perception of reality that have already long been a preoccupation of artists and theorists alike. It is likely not only to modify our perception of reality but also the reality we perceive.

Art, literature and music might all be classified as capable of producing an effect that is suggestive of what is real and their advocates have often laid greater claims as if everyday reality were but an illusion. Surrealism is an obvious example but terms such as inspirational, ecstatic, prophetic and transcendental are scattered liberally throughout the entire history of what we might bundle together as the arts. We arrive inevitably at an eternal discourse of meanings, significance and ultimately perception. This essay will address the question of degrees with regards the potential form and function of the digital in relation to the arts whilst bearing in mind Negropontes statement that, "The best way to appreciate the merits and consequences of being digital is to reflect on the difference between bits and atoms..... A bit has no color, size, or weight and it can travel at the speed of light. It is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white." (Being Digital, part 1) In the field of art this immateriality brings with it many possibilities but it also represents the paradox of 'something and nothing'. "Modern science also incorporates an anti materialist bias, the dialectical outcome of its war against religion - it has in some sense become religion. Science as knowledge of material reality paradoxically decomposes the materiality of the real. Science has always been a species of priestcraft, a branch of cosmology; an ideology, a justification of the way things are. The deconstruction of the "real' in post classical physics mirrors the vacuum of irreality which constitutes "the state". Once the image of heaven on earth, the state now consists of no more than the management of images. It is no longer a force but a disembodied patterning of information. But just as Babylonian cosmology justified Babylonian power, so too does the finality of modern science serve the ends of the terminal state, the post nuclear state, the information state. Or so the new paradigm would have it, and everyone accepts the axiomatic premises of the new paradigm..The new paradigm is very spiritual." (HAKIM BEY, The information war) I have taken the term virtual reality in a broader sense, encompassing all of the potential of the digital communications technology, to represent this new paradigm where there is not a digital revolution but a digital evolution of the status quo. It seems to me that the virtual represents a marketing strategy that is selling technology (or making it more humane) as art, aswell as exploiting the commercial possibilities of games and other information and entertainment products (a culmination of capitalist expansionism). B.N.F.L. in a recent public information TV advertisement presented itself as developing VR for, of all things, virtual shepherd training. We are already experiencing the virtual joke much in the same way as there is the psychoanalytical joke. This is before the vast majority of people have any experience of VR (but then what percentage of people have analysts). "Use values must never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist.... The never ending augmentation of exchange value is achieved by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation." (MARX,K., Capital, p.152) With the swing from real estate to virtual estate we are to experience the invention of new forms for the manipulation of perception where the idea is perhaps more significant than any notions of function and practicality. "We cannot separate the special importance of the visual apparatus of man from his unique ability to imagine, to make plans and to do all the other things which are generally included in the catchall phrase 'free will'. What we really mean by free will, of course, is the visualising of alternatives and making a choice between them.. In my view the central problem of human consciousness depends on the ability to imagine." (BRONOWSKI, 1978) The ability to imagine and, of course, the ability to manipulate the imagination. The virtual is likely to prove a rich territory for both. "Much can be gained for the present, then, by the investigation of the tendency to collapse all sensory experience into the visual and the human body, specifically, into an assemblage of its projected optical effects. What had been one of the chief forces for enlightenment - making visually accessible inaccessible domains - has turned into the creation of, and demand for, ghostly simulations." (B.M.STAFFORD, from HILLIS) This dissertation will look at the paradoxical and speculative territory of the virtual with regards memory, language and art.

CHAPTER 1 This chapter looks at the implications of digitalised information. There is an accumulation of memory, both backwards and forwards in time. This accumulation, where fact and fiction can be difficult to differentiate, is like a cultural imperialism that moves towards the filling out of all interstices. The resulting monument of virtual data represents an enormous resource that must nevertheless inevitably contain the memory of degeneration and the degeneration of memory.

CHAPTER 2 This chapter looks at the omnipresence of media as representing the bombardment of a language of signs of lost significance. It suggests that meaning can only exist through juxtapositions - viewed and structured, as with dreams, through a subjective eclecticism.

CHAPTER 3 It can be accepted that media and commercial art represent the exploitation of images. This chapter proposes that Fine Art, in the public domain, no longer represents an exploration through image but a negotiation of influence, through signs and postures, sustaining an established structure.

CHAPTER 4 This chapter proposes that where the necessary is taken care of, administration should be a straightforward task. Art can exemplify the unnecessary yet resists egalitarian principles remaining a vehicle of, and liberally promoting, an elitism and exclusivity that reflects economic and political force.

Chapter 1: Virtual memory "In meam commemorationem" (LUKE, 22:19.)

Neither real nor imaginary, the world of digital simulation has brought into existence another category. That of the virtual. The virtual exists without really existing. It exists potentially, condensed in the possible. In this sense the virtual is not the opposite of the real but rather an artificial tangent that can run parallel to what is here, what is manifest. The digital image is theoretically nondegradable and therefore absolutely permanent and can bestow this quality onto any images that undergo the transformation. Films, photographs and paintings can now all be saved for posterity in digital form. What might be the implications of this memory overload? It seems likely that how we generate, disseminate and access memory will become more the issue than remembering. "The mark of the encyclopaedia, which is its fragmentation of all knowledge into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time, points only to the burlesque of fiction, to the incompetence of fiction itself which is endlessly arranging things." (DONATO, The Museums Furnace, Textual Strategies, p215) Never has a society accumulated so many vestiges, so many documents and archives. Things, products, works, from the most banal to the most extraordinary, from the most ancient to the most recent, everything and anything can now be conserved and categorized in the public interest. The march of imperialism is on its way to constructing an endless monument. An universal memory whose building blocks are to be cemented with the digital accumulation of all memory. "Another significant paradigm is the "virtual museum". This is not a museum in the traditional sense but more like a"memory theater" where an interactive meta-architecture embodies audio visual information in a form that hybridizes the functionality of a museum, a library and a game arcade. Furthermore the extension of such virtual museums onto the Net creates a ubiquitous and universal space of access to informational and artistic structures." (SHAW, Art, Science and Interactivity) Nothing is, both in principal and in effect, more modern than a memory constructed in the public interest. Nothing is less pertinent than to see in this a resistance to obsolescence, offered and controlled by the industrial society, or a poetic reminder of mortality. There is not, on the one hand, a noble collection of sacred relics and on the other a modern consumerism that is vulgar and triumphant. That which enters into a public memory is separated not only from its past, but also from the present in that it becomes memorable. It becomes indirect, it has lost its continuity and implies simultaneously a memorable past for the present and a present that remembers. It represents aconsuming of the past but also of the present. The contemporary object that enters a public memory becomes the memorable present, as opposed to the transient present.This process of self commemoration magnifies the present whilst projecting a memory of the present into the future but rather than creating a suspension of time this desire to conserve becomes a celebration of the ephemeral. Whatever is preserved digitally will act as an exponential record of the passage of time. A frightening idea if we take into consideration Baudrillards assertion that, "Celebration and commemoration are nothing but the soft forms of necrophagus cannibalism, the homoeopathic form of killing us softly." and that, "... history itself has become interminable." (BAUDRILLARD, Strike of Events) History is itself historical. A historical fact, if it is regarded as a historical fact, is itself already conceptually caught in the web of history. The politics of memory do not act to preserve either the past or the present but are concerned with the structuring of a linear representation whereby the manageable and manipulable segments of the past, present and future are continually brought up to date for a shifting present in fictitious time. Collective memory is creating modernity, like a Frankensteins monster, constructed out of a collection of parts that create a fractured whole and, "This deregulation of events no longer raises or incites critical consciousness, only singular objective irony." (BAUDRILLARD, Strike of Events) This construction has its parallels in the arts and is like Narcissus attempting to touch his likeness and distorting his reflection. Collage, cut and paste, scratch are accepted forms for the contemporary artist and a just representation of the contemporary media environment where the TV reigns supreme as a window onto a world of disjointed shadows that nevertheless pass as coherent even when clicking a remote control that allows for a random browsing through a plethora of broadcasts. "All that remains are current events, a kind of cinematographic 'action', an 'auction, ie, the price tagging of the event in an overbid of information.... Simulation is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this linkage of things as if they had a meaning, so that they are no longer controlled or regulated except by artificial montage and non-sense.....One gets the impression that events are hurled headlong in isolation as they abruptly get diverted to the peripheral void of the media that remains relentlessly bent on filling up all interstices. We are unquestionably indebted to this physically pleasing sensation: the sentiment that collective or individual events are plunged into a hole of memory." (BAUDRILLARD, Rise of the Void towards the Periphery) As Burroughs puts it in textual terms, "I think the novelistic form is probably outmoded and that we may look forward perhaps to a future in which people do not read at all or read only illustrated books and magazines, or some other form of abbreviated reading matter. To compete with television and photo-magazines, writers will have to develop more precise techniques producing the same effect on the reader as a lurid action photo." (Creative Camera 215,1982) Perhaps to grab the attention of an increasingly juvenile, well informed, distracted and apathetic, yet avid, Pavlovian consumer who has learnt to salivate at the dinner bell rather than the dinner. "Their impotence and their fascination with imagery make them ideal victims of the information state." (HAKIM BEY, The Information War) Reduced to binary circuits of on and off and the formalised language of algorithms everything seems possible but sanitized. The mass media environment keeps us at a comfortable distance from the brutality and impertinence of the world and computers are helping to surround us in an artificial world that is increasingly intangible. A digital environment exists outside of real time and space unlike its human generators and interpreters. The breadth of possibilities offered by a simulated model depends on the limits of the model itself because it exists within defined systems and laws. A fractal simulation program for generating an oak tree will not produce bamboo even if the program allows for an infinite number of more or less probable variations. If we want to push the model beyond its limitations, the laws imposed upon it must be transgressed. The programming must be changed and another virtual world is created. I have seen computer generated models but I have yet to hear of computer degenerated models. Degeneration is conceivably subject to a greater diversity of influences,age, the weather, the worm.... "On the Net, there is no art of this kind (yet): it has had no time to develop a notion of the Other, the vanishing point of which would be death. The algorithms used by the engineers and artists who are working more or less secretly on the orders of the Circe Telecom, have been copied from the bio-logical, life form(ula)s translated into mathematics. For art it would be worthwhile to attempt to invent algorithms of (self) squandering, of faltering , of ecstasy, and of (self) destruction - in full recognition that there might not be much to see or hear, these would be turned into sounds and images." (ZIELINSKI, 7 Items on the Net) There will always be the argument that humankind, in its biological mortality, can only access the spiritual through the discourses of decomposition, carnal lust and chance. It is ultimately the human element that will bring into the digital sphere the richness of physical experience and the perversity of culture and language that is subject to older, more expansive and compelling algorithms. New skin for old ceremonies. "The beat of our life is a relentless drive to discharge our forces in things left behind... Our bloodshed, breast milk, menstrual blood, vaginal discharges and semen are what is sacred in us, surrounded from time in memorial with taboos and proscriptions. Bodies festering, ruins crumbling... extend the zone of the sacred across the mouldering hull of our planet." (LINGIS, abuses,1994) To master such diverse complexities digital simulation will have to transform itself into an infinite variety of ephemeral hybrids. Seen from this perspective the expansion and development of the virtual world is likely to be piecemeal, bit by bit, much like Kafkas story of the Great Wall of China. There will be an inevitable interplay between the real and the virtual environments as the evolution of the one effects the perception of the other. As with dreams and memory the digital environment represents an infinite space that we will fill out with the baggage of an accumulated and evolving real. As with dreams and memory the imagination should be able to explore the digital environment for ideas. "To be present is an act which requires a decision of existence, like a jump out of the dormancy of immanence. All representations are sleeping presences. A representation is not a new presence, it is only a re-mediation. All representations are weak: they all lack presence. However, by pointing so clearly to the void they reveal, representations, and especially virtual representations, may give us back the nostalgia for presence, the taste for the act of presentation, the sense of indicible awakening to being here and now rather than there and ever. The present is, as its name indicates it, a gift that we should always struggle to deserve." (QUEAU, The Present of Presence)

Chapter 2: Virtual language "I am not fond of reading... I invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature." (FREUD) "Yagé is taken at night, and its effects are much the same whether or not one is a Tukano. A flashing light is soon seen, phosphenes emerge in blue and orange, the field of vision is shaken by sideways vibrations, large felines and serpents make their appearance together with staring eyes, often with double or triple outlines. These are the guardians of the yagé universe, and the Tukano having long familiarity with these experiences assign definite meanings to the elements they are made of. Circles are yagé flowers or suns, and when concentric with a central spot are signs of impregnation or combined with arcs, of women; zigzag lines are also flowers, besides being songs and the fertile power of the sun father, while patterns of lozenges signify snakes. There is in all quite a dictionary of patterns they know of, out of which a world of meaning is formed leading to further visionary experiences of more individual significance. The reason that everyone sees staring eyes, large felines and serpents when taking yagé must be another organizational function of the imagination, that it makes images out of its own sensations.' (F.HUXLEY, The eye, p17) This account of entoptic visions induced through narcotics and given significance is not an isolated case but to a great extent can be regarded as an universal part of human heritage. We make images out of all of our sensations not only the hallucinatory and shamanistic ones as we try to make sense of the world (be it mythological or science fiction) and manipulate it to suit our needs. As we invent new gods we do not neglect to (or cannot help but) attribute to them our most basic instincts. "In the popular mythology the computer is a mathematics machine: it is designed to do numerical calculations. Yet it is really a language machine: its fundamental power lies in its ability to manipulate linguistic tokens - symbols to which meaning has been assigned." (WINOGRAD,1984, from LAUREL p225) The image in art can be taken as a linguistic token of significance in the broad sense of a landscape of perception and is dealt with by the organizational function of the imagination. Photography gave us representation as documentary, the sign as truth in a sense. Film and video have given us a self contained multimedia language, the sign constructed into sentence and story. "Reality has always been too small for human imagination. The impulse to create an 'interactive fantasy machine' is only the most recent manifestation of the age old desire to make our fantasies palpable - our insatiable need to exercise our imagination, judgement and spirit in worlds, situations and personae that are different from those of our everyday lives. Perhaps the most important feature of human intelligence is the ability to internalize the process of trial and error. When a man considers how to climb a tree, imagination serves as a laboratory for 'virtual' experiments in physics, bio-mechanics, and physiology. In matters of justice, art, or philosophy, imagination is the laboratory of the spirit." (LAUREL, 1989, p453) By the language of the arts we have extended reality by way of the imaginary. We have been taken through the realms of fantasy and to the heart of darkness. Death and pornography have come together in what could be regarded as a most powerful artform, the snuff movie - that is the antithesis of the conventionalised fantasy machine of Disney and yet somehow a parallel when seen in the light of a new wave of commercial films such as Natural Born Killers and the revived critical acclaim of cult exploitation movies. An opening out of space, of time, and of morality as we recreate heaven and hell under the banner of entertainment for consumers that will always be tempted by the the seduction of something more, something new and the shock of the new. "With the era of books,the trend away from active participation commenced. Recorded music, then radio, film and finally TV accelerated the pace. Increasingly, entertainment became a thing you watched, not did. The experience was ever more distant from the individual, observing became something that was done remotely. The individuals' state of consciousness was more passive. Feedback was not required. Entertainment became a pervasive part of society, it did not engage the mind because it was always there. This migration along the continuum of the entertainment experience, moving from active participation to passive observation with decreasing levels of feedback, has paralleled the evolution of society itself. For example, the movement from community involvement to secular survival; from self determining, empowered individuals to the disempowered; from no boundaries and self control to boundaries and being controlled; from collective vision to individual vision; from feedback for survival to survival against feedback. All these can be seen as parallels to the changing dynamic of entertainment and its relationship to society." (R.C.HEALE, Interactivity - Social Phenomena) In the virtuality of art anything goes. Virtual arenas and virtual gladiators. Real transgressions of taboos are still sick and criminal but virtual excess is in the domain of ideas and of art, so both entertainment and the very source of intellectual discourse. 'Film is truth at 24 frames per second,' said Godard - and text is truth in the time it takes you to read it and painting in the time you see it in and sound the time you hear it in. All are stored asynchronously as an association of ideas and images in the virtual space of the mind. Fantasies may constitute reality but there are the constraints of consensus. Media especially, with regards commercial viability, tend to find formulas. The novel, the magazine, the pop song, the film etc.. The formula for digital art is already set. The game, the commercial break, the magazine, MTV, there is always the question of degrees but with the increasing march of consumerism, attention spans are not likely to grow. Digital information may exist in a theoretical exponential asynchronicity but an individual consumer or creator does not. The new media are searching for new marketable formulas of expression. " The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace, something for the modern stage made with no loss of time. A prose kinema. Certainly not the obscure reveries of an inward gaze." (POUND) In the aesthetic landscape, in a contemporary art perspective, the image is evolving and accumulating visual linguistic tokens. If we transcribe this to the digital environment it is then not surprising that working in the multimedia language is referred to as authoring. It will allow an individual to create in the same way as an author at the typewriter but it is unlikely that what is created (if we consider again Burroughs prediction) will take the form of a novel or traditional narrative - to a novelist it might seem concentrated, to a painter diluted, to a film maker disjointed. "We've been laboring under some cognitive illusion. Because some experimental fiction has led people to believe that fiction and interactive might cohabit, designers have been led on a snipe hunt. The illusion is that there is some extraordinary new narrative structure out there waiting to be discovered that will make multiple outcome narratives work. Don't hold your breath." (M. BACKES, Hollywood and silicon valley) Here the notion of working is applied in the commercially exploitable sense of mass production formatting. It is unlikely that new narrative structures will be discovered but it is likely that abandoned forms might find they are in for a revival in the context of a new medium. For example the forms of an oral tradition. We have been experimenting with narrative structures since language began. Artists are perhaps always on a 'snipe hunt'. If we think of Queneau's, 'Cent mille milliards de poèmes', and the hypothetical millions of years required to read it, we have a minuscule representation of the Borgesque labyrinths of the potential data universe. It is well beyond containment on the human scale and navigating in hyperspace becomes an interminable space of mirrors reflecting mirrors. But so is the real world and we humanise the infinite scale by being eclectic according to our sensibilities. This is the nature of our understanding and invention. The creative force of a multimedia hypertext might better be defined as a 'poesy kinema' rather than a 'prose kinema' and follow the more flexible forms of poetry as represented by Pound for example in his Cantos and his theories of imagism. "Pounds theory of the Image is not simply a postulate of form or style, but a theory of generative and dislocating force-in a sense a theory of translation or better transcription. The image, by which he means the poem as a condensation, defines stylistic precision as an objectification which overthrows the aporia between two senses of figural language, between trope as visual representation and trope as displacement, between form and force. Metaphor as analogy or as symbolism- that is, interpretation that translates displaces, transcribes; a metaphorics that disturbs the theory of the metaphor." ( RIDDELL, Decentering the image.) If we think that the notion of a digital on line archive can become a public domain cyberspace of universal memory, filled out with virtually everything, we can envisage a vast poetic memory that can furnish all the virtual signs necessary to reconstruct any particular poetic vision. "Whales are purported to have a longer history than man, stretching over several tens of millions of years. If so, their songs could include the feelings of whales of ancient times. Their singing customs and attitudes towards the world passed down from generation to generation, may be accumulated in their songs, just like the writings and visions of human beings. their song may have a past a present and a future simultaneously, as a built in order." (ITO, I. The Future Form of Visual Art) ....an imaginative speculation on the poetic accumulation of memory, with an organic and open ended breadth of significance that on a human level is an idea similar to the jewish Cabala. "The most complex mysticism praxis with the most complex language I know of is the theoretical Cabala: "a technique for exercising reason or, instructions for use of the human intellect...it is said, that the angels gave the Cabala to Adam after being expelled from the Garden of Eden as a means whereby to return there" (Wolff). The ten Sephiroth with their twenty two connecting pathways constitute a sheer inexhaustible, network like reservoir of associations, connections, punctuations; its construction principle is binary and it is built of the basic tensions of theoretical reason (CHOCKMAH) and the power to concretize, to form (BINAH). The only meaningful mode in which the Cabala can be read and re-revealed over and over again is that of interpretation. In this the Cabala and art are akin." (ZIELINSKI, 7 items on the net.) All languages living and dead. All faces, places and styles will be there in the digital, virtual supermarket of signs; all experience translatable at the push of a button. From science fiction to the prehistoric we will have all the signs of an immense non exclusive culture only hinted at in the disjointed meanderings of Pounds cantos. "Everything is summed up in a logistic which integrates all the perceptual domains in a way even more undifferentiated than before. Everything is now received in a manner that is indistinct, virtually indistinct, in fact." (BAUDRILLARD, Vivisecting the 90's) Not only a continuous accumulation of everything but also a continuous distillation of an everything that is infinitely interchangeable and manipulable - and perhaps even the esoteric means of a return to the garden. In order to navigate we will have to follow, without faltering, the guiding star of the godhead as it shines as the faith (and the song) in our hearts as we march ever onward (as to war) to fulfil the mapping of our righteous destiny. "The image, Pound wrote, may be defined as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. As a complex the image would constitute a kind of mapping (and thus a figural displacement) of its mental object. But the image has no object as such. It displaces time linearity (and succession) into a figural space (a moment of time), producing a formal mirage. The unconscious has no time, nor any object. It is displaced as time, as consciousness and thus as a movement of images. Time therefore does not represent, but is presented as the explicit (and explicatory) movement of language, its presencing/absencing. Time is a play of figure. The poem as figure. The poem as image then, can, translate only by constellating this play of images. Pounds psychological metaphor for the image as complex anticipates the deconstruction of Freuds unconscious as a term for presence or non difference, and the dream work as a mise en scene of writing. The complex is image of differences known only in the play of translations. The complex is translation and interpretation of symptoms, signs and not of experience. The image is a layering of other signs or texts." ( RIDDELL, Decentering the image.) In the imagist lexicon there are three terms that correspond to the three tenets of imagism. Phanopoeia that suggests the play of images, melopoeia of sounds and logopoeia of meanings or ideas. In phanopoeia the images are thrown not intended. The visual exists as a play of differences that decenters any imagistic representation, the throwness of images over one another. It is like a graph or a mapping of memory. Pound gives priority to the image as hieroglyphic writing, and the graphic play that is therefore opened up. Here we have an exact parallel to the way we receive and incorporate images of any kind but most obviously in the context of the media in general and of television in particular. One of the aspects of multimedia and the most important of virtual reality is that of interactivity, " Interactivity: Trivial and non trivial. The first is a closed system with a finite set of elements. The second is open ended and infinite in its capacity to accommodate new variables." (ASCOTT, Interactive Terminalogy) The phanopoeia of television (Virilios museum of accidents) tends to fall into the first of these two categories at least with the advocates of the virtual. An imagist approach to multimedia, however, could allow for a phanopoeia, through random and interactive elements, that represents an extremely rich territory of creative exploration. The image could become, in the projected reality of cyberspace, a radiant node or cluster, an evolving vortex, a form that resists any collapsing of differences into unity; even as it is transformed through open dialogue. "The continuum is turning back on itself. We are going full circle. We have become increasingly uncomfortable with the comfort we once desired and created for ourselves. Society is moving to an age of virtual community; towards self determination and empowerment; to reclaiming control and breaking down the boundaries; to re-awakening our collective vision; and assuring survival through feedback. Entertainment must reflect our regained consciousness. Through the interactive factor now available, the opportunity exists for us to reclaim active participation." (R.C.HEALE, Interactivity, social phenomena) In Flauberts words,"I have got indigestion from books. I burp in folio." Or if we consider the connection between seeing and defecation (Levi-Strauss, Bataille), with digital tools we will be able to evacuate and recycle the constipation of images once the appropriate plumbing is in place. Let us hope the bowels of communication can evacuate, through the partaking of this virtual roughage, before the foie is too gras and explodes. Let us hope that we can sustain and encourage a healthy social preoccupation with the scatological. Metaphorically and virtually that is.

Chapter 3: Virtual art "Art today no longer has any influence except in the magic of its disappearance." (BAUDRILLARD) "There is in all the arts an element that can no longer be regarded or treated as before, that cannot be subtracted from the modern enterprises of knowledge and power. For twenty years - matter, space and time are no longer what they used to be. We can expect such great transformations in the technique of the arts that even the notion of art itself will be modified." (VALERY, Pieces sur L'art.1931) This statement made a lifetime ago has remained somehow very contemporary, perhaps through a kind of perpetual reiteration. It seems that the notion of art is always (in our modern and even post-modern times) awaiting a great transformation through the advent of some kind of technical innovation or other. The latest of these is of course digital and virtual. How in the meantime has this notion changed? Has it perhaps become, "pasteurized, stereotypical, anaesthetizing to the extent that we can no longer feel anything, impersonal, emotionless, anonymous, cynically commercial, absent of all life, without the slightest hint of originality or sensibility, without depth, artificial, superficial, insignificant, mundane, phoney.... the work of Warhol has been qualified 'positively' in all these terms." (H.OBALK, l'argument du paradoxe) What proves that superficial, in art, is a bad thing? Or that signing an urinal isn't art. A new critique in a new environment. An artist is framed in time and place but the critique of art, and perhaps in this its value, lies in the paradoxical. The notion of what constitutes art is a perpetual debate of the form and the content. A rigorous definition might be proposed but then there are likely to be antagonists aswell as protagonists. The arguments could quite easily find a parallel in the theological, ie Does God exist? How can you prove that God doesn't exist? How can you prove God does exist? and so on and so forth. How can doing nothing be justified as an art activity? Perhaps the solution is only to be found in the idea of a contradiction that exists for its own sake as in 'art for arts sake'. A fluid paradox that is presented as the ultimate unsolvable mystery. There is a story that in the early sixties, at the opening of an exhibition in Philadelphia of Warhols work, there was such a gathering of fans that the gallery owner took down the paintings (for their own protection) so giving rise to the notion of an exhibition without exhibits. A virtual exhibition in a sense, whereby the cult of the personality of the artist is what is virtual ie, something that is capable of producing an effect. But more importantly it points to the fact that art is bound to controlling structures of exhibition, publication, consumption and economics where even if nothing is exhibited it becomes an art something. The form or structure frames and qualifies the content. There can be no laughter at the emperors new clothes. He has posed and gesticulated in a wild array of costumes, he may as well stand naked if the climate warrants it. We know he has a full wardrobe. The notion of art can appear to be a strange animal. The art of which I am talking is of course modern art. Modern, occidental, imperial and historical. An art that is forever declaring its own demise and resurrection. A veritable phoenix of the fashion season of eternal return. An art that is historicized as it is being created and that can only exist and derive its potential through this process and the infrastrucure of this process. A perpetual dialogue of the visible.To be is to be seen. The image, the material and the artist are all translated into media icons that in turn become media wallpaper. In media terms we might say that art and artist have become part of the vocabulary in a language of signs and that, "This fetishistic transmutation of signs and images is what separates Warhol from Duchamp and from all his predecessors in the revolution of modern art.. Because Duchamp, Dada, the surrealists and all those who worked towards deconstructing representation and exploding the work of art, were still part of an avant-garde and represented a kind of critical utopia." (BAUDRILLARD, Le snobisme machinale) In a mystic vision, the illumination of the smallest detail comes through divine intuition and a notion that it contains something transcendental. In Warhol and the contemporary environment he exemplified it is the contrary. The world is stupifyingly self evident and devoid of any illuminating essence. According to Baudrillard this comes from, " a meticulous perception of the simulacrum, and more precisely of the mediatised and industrial simulacra. Such is Warhol and his serial images, of the pure and empty form of the image and its ecstatic and insignificant iconography. It is at once a new mystical and absolutely antimystical in the sense that each detail of the world, each image is an initiation but an initiation to nothing." (BAUDRILLARD,Le snobisme machinal) ....but now there will be the new mystical of virtual illumination and inevitably this will carry with it contradictions. These are exemplified in the work of Latham a virtual sculptor and his 'Conquest of form, 1988'. Questions are raised concerning process and presentation. Latham is not the creator of his images, fractal 3D forms 'that have an extremely organic aspect'. The algorithms that generate them are created by computer programmers for example 'the Art Evolution Programme called Mutator'. He selects from a range of variations. His sensibility works on an editorial basis. The results can then be displayed on the computer or as cibachromes or as video. They are never more than virtually sculpture. There is a minimum of input from the artist who seems to be a scarecrow on which the work can be hung and a protagonist of the technology. 'The works are the photographs of objects which do not exist and which have been produced by a computerized process of evolution.' (Latham,Art of the Electronic Age, p96) A work that is interesting in the paradox of the notion of a virtual sculpture but otherwise resembles paste jewellry photographed on black velvet or illustrations from science magazines. If the virtual sculpture of Latham presents a paradoxical aspect of digital art with regards physicality and process, then the work of the Butler brothers poses a kind of moral dilemma that has long been familiar to the artist. "The Butler brothers installation,'The Dream of Freedom', (V-TOPIA, 1995) satirizes the impersonal consumer culture developing with the growth of interactive home shopping and entertainment systems. This virtual world, inhabited here by computer modelled bunnies, has the wealthy fleeing from urban violence to safer rabbit hutches in the suburbs. Their migration, together with their adoration of the glittering carrot, takes place within an authoritarian state containing glaring inequalities. The technology that has brought about an abundance of material possessions is also used to punish dissent within the system. We can interact with the work via a touch screen which requires that we enter information about ourselves, including details of our private lives. In turn, we are given a code number to enter at key points when the safety of the animated rabbits are threatened, and it is at such points that we recognise our lack of power within such a system. The lesson in authority is underscored by unfolding slogans such as "Technology Can Reward Virtue" and "Society's Malcontents Will Learn Responsibility". These echo the way corporate, political and advertising messages can combine to form an ethos of compliance in our own technologically driven, aquisitive culture." (V-Topia exhibition guide, 1995) Art as satire through simulation. Art no longer with any positive creative force or direction but as a pseudo conscience of the establishment. A rearguard of the self contained, elitist conspiracy that preempts a subversive access to the technology and the infrastructure. Or are they fighting fire with fire? Its hard to tell. It seems like a futile, 'Yes but,'. A 'yes but' that has the gallery as its temple and control as its patron. "Dissuasion is a rather particular form of action: it is that which causes something not to happen. It allows for strange events which do not in any way advance history, instead play it backwards by wedding an inverse, unintelligible curvature to our sense of history (ie. that one cannot have any sense of history unless one falls in line with what is being forwarded as historical sense); one that no longer discloses any negative power (progressive, critical, revolutionary), consequently their only negativity would be the fact that they would not have happened. Disturbing" (BAUDRILLARD, Rise of the Void Towards the Periphery) It seems that a picture no longer (necessarily) paints a thousand words in the sense of a story. Rather no words, or a thousand words of critical, philosophical double takes. Modern art and the modern artwork is conceptual and must be regarded conceptually. A play of distances with regards the fetish and in so much represents an illumination of the unselfconscious culmination of the deconstruction of the image. "Even theory is no longer in the state of reflecting on anything anymore. All it can do is to snatch concepts from their critical zone of reference and transpose them to the point of no return, in the process of which theory itself too, passes into the hyperspace of simulation as it loses all objective validity, while it makes significant gains by acquiring real affinity with the current system." (BAUDRILLARD, Pataphysics of year 2000) The contemporary environment is composed only of readymades, a can of soup, a bottle rack, so that anything made is born a, 'Can you tell the difference between?' readymade. Prepackaged for the super-hypermarket of a consumer paradise. The original quest and desire for illumination and thus salvation has been seduced and redirected into endless consumption through the mechanisms of technology and the capitalist economy. The modern cogito is, 'I consume therefore I am.' or for the artist, 'I create about consuming an art that is to be consumed therefore I am.' The digital image is cellophane wrapped at its conception and may even go further and breakdown the cult of the personality of the artist unless this is artificially produced and marketed as having some kind of commercial value. Seamless, fantastic, science fiction transformations from the cinema and heavily pixelated images of computer electronic games are already part of the readymade landscape and the notion of art or the artist are barely discernable in these corporate ventures. It is nevertheless likely that this anonymous landscape shall be recreated traditionally for the gallery by a personality associated with the representation (of Sonic) in much the same way as Warhol reiterated the image of Marilyn because it was there. Contemporary art is no longer concerned with the notion of an avant garde but rather of a rear guard of a post modern public domain. A cycling of the fashion show and the stripshow where anything goes but this is what is happening. Everything that is media-visible is now a part of an art is language communication. What you see is what you get or this is what you want this is what you get or this is what you get this is what you want - and this is the manifestation and the substance. "Fine art becomes just one more source in the image bank, but who's got the copyright and the authority when we can recolour it, collage it and play it right out of context? In the contemporary world, commercial art - visual manipulation - it goes without saying, is infinitely more powerful, resonant, cleverer and more proficient than fine art, because it is more practised and competitive, dishing up the surreal every day and giving you all the texts and subtexts you want to work it out for yourself. Up against all that, the role for fine art becomes commentary, interpretation, high touch refuge, just part of the cocooning process that was supposed to proof you against the modern world. Or, saddest of all, currency. ( YORK, P., From Goddess Art to global groupie) Modern art has gone a long way in deconstructing the objet d'art and the significance of Warhol lies perhaps in a deconstruction of the creative act and therefore of the notion of the artist aswell as of art. The utopia (no place) of the arts has become a here and now that in turn is becoming no place and the notion of art is becoming no notion. (And so paradoxically a there and then that is everywhere and everything) This utopia, like Warhol, is euro-american and it is where the global future is being distilled under the standard of the dollar. The measure of contemporary cults. "Copyright law is totally out of date. It is a Gutenberg artifact. Since it is a reactive process it will probably have to break down completely before it is corrected." (NEGROPONTE, Being Digital, p58) Are the current systems of control out of date? How might they be broken down? What might replace them?

Chapter 4: A virtual solution "Utopia, a word that means no place." (MORE) "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." (MARX, K. Critique of Political Economy, p.20) There is of course much more talk currently, in our capitalist age, of a digital revolution than of a social one although the former is speculated upon as implying to some extent the latter. "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions have matured in the womb of the old society." (ibid.) Perhaps in the miraculous potential of the digital we are witnessing the culmination of our productive forces and the advent of new higher relations of production. Perhaps digitalisation is a maieutic process and we can soon herald a new social order of immaterial conditions that have been matured in the womb of capital. "While on the one hand capital must thus seek to pull down every local barrier to commerce, i.e. to exchange, in order to capture the whole world as its market, on the other hand it strives to destroy space by means of time, i.e. to restrict to a minimum the time required for movement from one place to another. The more developed capital is, and thus the more extensive the market through which it circulates and which constitutes the spatial route of its circulation, the more it will aspire to greater extension in space for its market, and thus to greater destruction of space by time." (MCLELLAN, D., Marx's Grundrisse, p141) The destruction of space by time and the destruction of the material by the virtual - the digital revolution surely heralds a momentous fin de siecle. Once at a lecture of Bruce Maclean, he drew parallels between the political and military strategies of the second world war and the contemporary art scene. Although presented in a jokey manner the point was more than adequately made that art is administered and therefore inevitably followed political patterns. With the speculation over the advent of virtual reality it is as if there is a whisper that peace may break out and with it a wave of heady postwar idealism. It is presumably going to be a capitalist postwar, so in purely capitalist terms somebody is paying. What are they getting out of it? "If postmodern consumers are slaves, then those who make the rules for consumption, the capitalists, are the masters; together they produce the master slave dialectic of late capitalism. Consuming more won't make the slaves masters, and becoming capitalists won't free them from the dialectic, for their power is constrained by the need for slaves to feed their profits." (WHITE & HELLERICK, Nietzche at the mall.) The notion of the significance of the value of a personal metaphysics both pales and is magnified in the light of the constant competitive struggle of the rat race. If it exists there is always the question of who for. There is a flourishing diversity of work exhibited in galleries but this cannot disguise the infrastructure of hierarchies and the ensuing tendencies of a justification of form and process over an involved personal content. "When the city can no longer be conceived materially or systematically, but can be seen as mental space, the question is: By whom and how will sensory experiences be shaped? How will the shapeless, the immaterial, be shaped?" (G.LOVINK, The Digital Dandy) Computer sales have given birth to the marketing idea of virtual reality as art and its essential motivation may well imply something more than marketshare for the irresistible, digital entertainment, hotcakes. "Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped." (NEGROPONTE, Being Digital, p229) Everyone will have to jump on the bandwagon or be left behind. By way of the virtual it is being sold as egalitarian and universal. Liberating certainly but isn't it likely that those being liberated will tend to be those who already have everything. Consumers will have more to consume and producers more to produce in a virtual reality that is exponentially competitive. Sometimes less is more. The controllers will perhaps have less to do, and more time to do it in, as the masses are educated, entertained and work sat as new age troglodytes in boxes eighteen inches away from little screens no longer needing to travel even for virtual holidays. "Capital penetrates to the very DNA which allows us to replicate and makes us reproducers - makers of the same. We make children who will have good jobs and good spouses and who will make good children who will have good jobs... Jobs always figure prominently in this economic scheme. We are producers of producing machines who are makers of machines. Capital replicates itself indirectly through the creation of progeny who act as job seekers and job holders. The value of the replicas predicated on the job worthiness of their progeny, and so the replicators will always strive to replicate, to produce more of the same."(D.ROTHLEDER, From False Consciousness to Viral Consciousness) In Gibsons Cyberspace horses are extinct and only exist in the virtual. The horse is traditionally a loaded symbol and metaphor; it represents power, freedom, mobility, wealth and a domination of nature, a successful relationship to the land, and can even represent the people. " But with electronic culture no artefact remains. Culture, in a word has been dematerialised. It only exists as a series of 0's and 1's at the level of digital code. This is a formidably new process with huge psychological implications. How do you value what you cannot touch?" ( BARLAS, The end of the word is nigh) The immaterial has a huge history of mysterious value. We need only consider religions and especially the one true religion. Money itself has no value except as a token of exchange that reflects the less tangible negotiations of controlling infrastructures or as Debord put it, "Secrecy dominates this world and foremost as the secret of domination." The immaterial has traditionally functioned as a means of dividing up the material amongst conspirators, that are often quite happy to deny the value of the material (an interesting paradox). And what of those who are perhaps less immaterially adept. Shall they (spiritually) inherit the world? Shall they inherit immateriality in abundance? "Technologies of networked communication offer remedies for the deracinated cultures of modernity." (T.DRUCKERY, Thinking Digital) Virtual reality may provide the most humane way of disposing of the alienated and marginalised, "they call themselves bitniks and cybraians, their nuptials are in cyberspace. Today they are the salon des Refusés, but their salon is not a café in Paris. Their salon is somewhere on the Net. It is being digital." (NEGROPONTE, Being Digital, p226) ...sending them off to the cyberspace equivalent of a remote colony where they can surrender themselves to the fashion and hype of virtual consumerism whilst wandering nomadically around the data universe, leaving reality to those who, either through nature or nurture, have mastered it. Especially if we consider that, "..we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon transform the whitecollar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor." (NEGROPONTE, Being Digital, p227) The material occupations of necessity have been hugely reduced even as the idea of what is necessary is enlarged and it seems that even the immaterial sinecures need to be reconceived. We may as well all be artists. For an example of how the mysterious values of the immaterial are distilled we might look into the realms of the arts and more specifically at the sphere of fine art, the gallery and the museum. Hypothetical values are negotiated so that the one is priceless and the other worthless, the one valid the other redundant. Fine Art practice has evolved towards a broad range of activities that could be less mysteriously defined as visual event design or gallery event design. This is due to the increasing familiarity with art in all its forms and its complete dependence on an evermore undefined yet increasingly controlled infrastructure. "A delirium with process has quite recently gotten hold of us and at the same time, a seizure or a delirium with responsibility, precisely because it is becoming increasingly elusive." (BAUDRILLARD, Reversion of History) You are either in or out and out is nowhere. The lesson in authority is underscored. We are to be , as Nietzche put it, 'without solitude one and all...unfree and ludicrously superficial.' The diversity of fine art practice means that electronic art can enter the arena of the art gallery and so function as art without any hint of intrusion. At the moment the idea of its irresistible novelty (as elsewhere) makes it seem as though it is getting a special case induction. It has appeared in galleries. It is therefore art and will be subject to the same rigorous socio- political rites of entry and patronage. The same open ended discourse of critique and mediatisation. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of digital art within the traditional gallery structure will be in its physical effect. The exhibition space is already gloriously antiseptic, if we combine with this the prophylactic effect of technology and the digital screen we should be able to peruse the selected offerings without the slightest risk of infection. Its immateriality should oust any idea of physical value and desire for possession and the tainted notions of bourgeois support will be restricted to the idea of gaining office. Artists could be seen as civil servants or corporate salarymen, fitting neatly into the standardised architecture of an intensely commodified culture - in a brave new world. The reign of art and aesthetics (as with memory) has been a kind of ordering and containment of illusion and its extreme effects, allowing a kind of sublimation of the total illusion of the world that would otherwise destroy us. The recent history of art in all its demonstrative posturing has been about finding forms of containment that allow for a shifting play of illusion. Virtual reality is being hyped and historicized preempting its own existence and promises through its virtuality a complete opening out of illusion within the realms of the digital. A multimedia language of illusion where everything is possible and can exist free from constraint because it is only virtual. In your mind you are free, in virtual reality you are free etc. By entering into a gallery, objects and activities are magically transformed into art. By entering into the virtual gallery everyone is a virtual artist and cannot be ignored in the virtual march of history. In the late seventies there was a scheme in Holland whereby state registered artists were paid a set rate for a set number of works per annum. The results of this experiment were, as one might imagine, a shortlived godsend for the lesser artist and a vast accumulation of nothing, in terms of cultural significance. A waste of space, with regards the problems of stocking physical work that had no function in the cultural, socio-political infrastructures of art. Nothing underlines the uselessness of art more than this accumulation without a context. But if we think of a digital equivalent of this scheme it becomes more viable and less shockingly wasteful than butter mountains or wine lakes. If the works were recorded digitally and incinerated or preferably only ever existed digitally, a great waste of resources is avoided. Administration must be easier where there is nothing to administrate. Unemployment, ever a worry, is reduced, the artist is no longer a marginal and the infinite virtual resource is expanded. This would be especially valid if governments considered seriously that, "In this boundless and ubiquitous cosmography the invention of meaning is the essential task of both science and art. Multimedia telecommunications signals fundamental transformations of our social and cultural paradigms. Art is bound to traditional structures of exhibition, publication, consumption and economics. The so called digital superhighways should offer the opportunity for the development of new forms of propagation and dissemination of creative activity. Space, time and interaction become the design parameters of the televirtual ambiance, and the mass address of the televirtual ether can take the practice of art from the periphery into the center of all social discourse." (J.SHAW, Art,Science and Interactivity) Everyone will be an artist simply by entering into Virtual reality, be they maximalist or minimalist, figurative or abstract because art is a language and everyone will be anonymous yet part of the infinite, exponential, multiversal dialogue of digital consciousness. This kind of introduction to digital potential, as if the spoken word or the picture or the music, not to mention consciousness itself, had just been invented, underlines the fact that Virtual reality is promoted essentially as an art phenomena preparing perception for an inevitable and ubiquitous digital presence. In the beginning was the idea then came the sales pitch and it was addressed to all in sundry. And we saw, from many angles and many perspectives, that it could only be good. Virtual reality is the new art that modern art has existed only to herald. It is the new reality that modernity only existed to herald and of course non of this is as ridiculous as it sounds. Anything goes in an utopia for corporate and consumer expansion protected from any hint of repression by the promised existence of a virtual freedom - here and now, there and forever. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." (Hassan I Sabbah.)

Conclusion: Virtually dead "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate; tunc autem facie ad faciem"( CORINTHIANS 13:12.) In the speculations over the digital, with its binary and fluid nature, it is not surprising that the Tao is often borrowed from oriental philosophy as a parallel. This is a metaphysical and poetic way of thinking and being. It is surprising however that although there is a certain amount of speculation of a, shall we say, pragmatic nature aswell, that the Confucian systems are not cited as frequently (if at all). It is as if the virtual is being sold as a yin without a yang (or vice verse). Perhaps the Confucian aspect is so established that we should not see the wood for the trees. If the virtual is metaphysical, poetic and art we should not forget that the digital had previously been the domain of the other polarity. I believe that the analogies of memory, dreams, imagination and poetry are all valid with regards virtual reality and all are the familiar and traditional territory of the artist whatever the medium. Despite contemporary attempts to shift the role of the artist ie that art is just another job, and thereby shift the notion of art into line with more commercial and corporate values, the eternal return of the artist will be unchanged. Even if, "Art was formerly focussed on the appearance of things and their representation, and now its concerned with systems and coming into being and follows the five fold path of connectivity, immersion, interaction , transformation and emergence: always in flux, unstable in structure, undecided in form, uncertain in outcome." ( ASCOTT, An interfacial glossary) The human condition is still one of life and death. Mortality and transience. The real work of any artist will still be about the tragic realisation and expression of love and loss (practically, conceptually and virtually) and will not be recompensed (you are paid to work for others not to work for yourself). There are of course, as Graves would have it, more apollonian strategies. Death in life in the private domain, life in death in the public. A struggle and inevitably a compromise (if it can be negotiated) between the conscience and the consensus and the filling out of the middle ground. It will be the same old story. Virtual reality may see the birth of a new world but it will be another dead world. We have gone beyond the age of romance and the heroism of the private evolution and failed to achieve the impossible. All that remains is to achieve a simulated equivalent of success and excess in a public domain that cannot either be heroic or romantic (except nostalgically and fictitiously) and is beyond any sentimental or spiritual value. The something has been replaced by the nothing. We are the dead. The digital world will be the book of the dead. It is the 'all new' orphic mystery and our love will be turned to stone as we dig it up and piece it together. There is nothing to search for but an oblivion that is delayed through distraction. If we look through the 'Myst' of time we are all playing 'Doom'. "When art becomes independent, represents its world in dazzling colours, a moment of life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated with dazzling colours. It can only be evoked in remembrance. The greatness of art only begins to appear at the dusk of life." (GUYDEBORD, The society of the spectacle.p71) But perhaps virtual reality like drugs promises a readymade transcendence and we will not have to wait for the dusk of life as there will no longer be a dusk or a dawn of life in asynchronous cyberspace and if thats the case, "...who cares? Its all relative isnt it? I guess we'll just have to evolve beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a quantum leap. Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the social, which is carried out through the machinery of the media, increases the intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information rather than on direct experience. In this sense the media serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by re-defining spirit as information. The essence of information is the image, the sacral and iconic data complex which usurps the primacy of the material bodily principle as the vehicle of incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond corruption. Consciousness becomes something which can be down loaded, excised from the matrix of animality and immortalized as information. No longer ghost in the machine, but machine as ghost, machine as holy ghost, ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our mayfly corpses to a pleroma of light. Virtual reality as Cybergnosis. Jack in, leave mother earth behind forever." (HAKIM BEY, The information war.) The symptoms of consumer society have in general been neurosis and obesity. The cure is probably in a new world order where paranoid schizophrenia is the psychological norm. A sublimated notion of the self in a historically and geographically liberated culture of intellectual nomads. A new conception of the management of resources in time and space. "Phreno-fractals: Freud is dead and the myth of the unified individual has been destroyed. We are each made up of many selves, decentered, distributed and tele-schizophrenic. Our minds have an infinity of phreno-fractals constantly creating alternative realities in which every thread of meaning is woven by us. Telenoia: The old sense of the individual - solitary, anxious, alienated, private, paranoid, was totally distasteful. We celebrate Telenoia (telematic consciousness at large), not the paranoia of the old industrial culture. Telematic imperative: When there are no more geographical boundaries, territorial aggression is as irrelevant as polarised politics. The only imperative is to connect. Nowadays even the self is permeable." ( ASCOTT, Interactive Terminalogy) This would at least be a forward looking and perhaps even an optimistic conclusion. On the other hand one might feel that as Pound put it, "The whole of great art is a struggle for communication...And this communication is not a levelling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences." In the end I must agree with Guy Debord when he so eloquently wrote in his 'Society of the Spectacle', that telecommunications, "reunites the separate but reunites it as separate." Isn't this not only the likely but also the inevitable bottom line when considering the speculation over the possibilities of digital potential manifesting a virtual world in cyberspace. Guy Debord committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 62. "At the age of 23 he made a film with a dialogue seemingly organised on random principles. The title was"Howlings in favour of Sade". At one point the second voice says, "The perfection of suicide is in ambiguity." In the script this is followed by a stage direction: "5 minutes silence during which the screen remains dark." (ZIELINSKI, 7 Items on the net) If one is to speculate one might speculate on how the persistence of paradox encourages speculation especially when it concerns intangible, imagined realms. Could a virtual asceticism be a cure for virtual obesity? We always have the switch off option. Don't we? It is reassuring when things may not be divided equally that everything may be negotiable. I would hope that in the exponential growth of the virtual there will be room for a healthy negotiation with the physical before it is exponentially reduced to nothing. "...Everywhere humans move, we leave sweat, stains, urine, fecal matter...What we call construction and creation is the uprooting of living things, the massacre of minute creatures whose hearts throb with life..." (LINGIS, Abuses, 1994) But if the material proves disappointing or oppressive and we find ourselves redundant, let us be grateful for the immaterial and learn to be completely contented within the virtual worlds of fantasy and imagination. " Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess." (HAKIM BEY, The information war.) Does the virtual represent a new and more potent opiate for the masses? A spiritual lesson? "These societies that no longer expect anything from a future succession of things and have less and less faith in history, societies that bury themselves in the backdrop of their prospective technologies, behind their stockpiles of information and in the cellular networks of communication and where time is finally obliterated in pure circulation - these generations may indeed never wake up, yet not be aware of it." (BAUDRILLARD, Pataphysics of year 2000) Et in virtua ego. To be or not?

Summary "It is still not out of season to write obituaries. Much as we might want to be rid of Baudrillard, the need to declare the 'death of' still persists because the simulations of dead powers continue to plague us, even as actual genocides spread and right wing hegemony takes over." (WEINSTEIN) This essay has looked at the implications of digital potential with regards art and has suggested that virtual reality is the marketing of this potential as representing both a new form and a new perception.

Chapter 1 - looked at the accumulation of the resources of memory and the problems of navigation and significance within a memory overload.

Chapter 2 - looked at the spread of signs away from nature and direct experience into media and indirect experience and suggested that language is moving towards a phanopoeia of mixed metaphor montage.

Chapter 3 - put forward the idea that art is less concerned with creation, as such, but exists as a focus for the negotiating and reestablishing of values within a system of control.

Chapter 4 - put forward a virtual administrive solution.