15.8.01

I have just finished my MA in Creative Technology. I have returned to the university library where quite soon, I will no longer have access. I have taken 12 books which I will be reading over the next few weeks, and one of the most important is War of the Worlds: The Assault on Reality, by Mark Slouka. I noticed it on the shelves about six months ago and felt I could not read it, interesting as it was. It contradicted parts of my MA, and I could not afford to reflect on its central message: that the growing digital culture might threaten social and psychological health, hidden behind unexamined ideas.

Part of the reason I am writing this essay is to recover "a sense of psychological well being that one gets from coming clean after having become entangled in a net of lies and half truths" (Slouka 1996: 136).

Setting the Scene

The Salford University site I frequented is located in a desolate and ugly area. The building won architectural awards and has been used as a location for television programmes like Cold Feet. At the beginning of the course, there was a student who only attended for a few weeks. It was she and an archotectural colleague that designed what she admitted was "a pile of crap". It looks stylish from the outside, but using it as a working and social space is a different matter. It's like spending hours in an airport lounge. There is only one tiny communal area, offering uncomfortable metal seating. It looks like a prison, with metal flooring and large open plan windows, so you see people all the time as you walk along the corridors. Very sterile and dehumanising, and I discovered that a few years ago one of the large plate glass windows fell out of its socket. If anyone had been nearby, it would have been fatal.

The problem here is that of form and content: the building looks impressive, but is an uncomfortable social space. This theme links to my present analysis - the content and form of digital work.

The Wider Context

The 12 books are academic critiques of digital culture, based on a media studies outlook. They locate digital culture in a wider perspective, and question the effect it is having on social and psychological life.

I attempted to introduce humanistic content into my MA, referring to poets, novelists, filmmakers and psychologists; this was the basis for some of my work. However the prevailing ethos did not encompass this; the use of sophisticated technology was a self-referential and self-justifying criterion. As long as we did this it was accepted, regardless of wider theme - or absence of theme. It is an advanced degree, yet I attended discussions where Internet games were considered worthy of serious attention, and bombarding a museum server with e mail was conceived as 'art'.

Slouka opens his book with the following:

In 1990, a reporter for the New York Times, following the famous case of a man accused of murdering his pregnant wife and then blaming the assault on un unknown black assailant, asked a neighbour of the couple her thoughts on the tragedy. Do you accept his story? She was asked. Does it seem possible to you, knowing this man, that he made up the whole thing? 'I don't know', the woman replied, 'I'm dying for the movie to come out so I can see how it ends (Slouka 1996: 1).

He uses this dramatic and emotive example to indicate what he regards as a growing separation from reality. His position is extreme, but he identifies a legitimate critical argument.

I do not reject digital culture as Slouka does. I have invested a large amount of time and energy learning how to understand and use it, and believe that it can and does enhance life in interesting ways. I continue to work with it. However critical thinking is often dialectical, and I balance my own interest with an awareness of wider social and psychological considerations.

There is a 'digital ethos' with its own rhetoric; in a post-modern sense, it is a 'text' like any other. Slouka notes that what he reacted against was what he called 'technological absolutism'. As an example, he refers to the belief in immortality, and how this might be achieved by projecting human consciousness into sophisticated computers. This involves a rejection of the body and a belief in a finer and more sophisticated dimension of existence:

Individual identity, physical space, reality itself, had turned plastic and malleable, mere constructs we might choose to buy into, or reinterpret, or discard altogether - as we saw fit (Slouka 1996: 24).

For Timothy Leary, the Internet was equivalent to the drug culture of the 1960s: a means of transcending physical limits and hierarchical society. One seminar on my MA focussed on 'artists' who imagine that they reconfigure their physical existence by attaching technological devices to their body. The body is regarded as an ideological construct, a composite of "attitudes, beliefs and preconceptions, themselves dependent on larger economic and political forces at work in the general culture (Slouka 1996: 28). The rhetoric is seductive, but hallucinatory: technology - and language - acts like a drug.

In another MA seminar, a discussion began about 'cyberspace' and if it is somehow 'spiritual'. I chose not to engage with this because the terms were not defined: what 'spiritual' means and how it must refer to something that is not physical. If we do not consider these questions with some rigour, we are susceptible to "the leap from mechanics to theology" (Slouka 1996: 36). The enquiry into consciousness has existed for thousands of years; it is not subject to the parameters or limitations of digital culture.

Sociologically, 'digital artists' are a kind of sub-culture in the sense that their work is not yet mainstream. The concepts used to justify their practice are sometimes flawed. Jean Baudrillard, for example, is often used to account for the idea of 'cyberspace' and digital simulation. A piece of Internet or 'virtual reality' art seems to have credibility if you do this. As Christopher Norris notes in Uncritical Theory, the fact of simulation culture does not mean it accounts for the nature of 'reality':

The main confusion is Baudrillard's thought is his habit of equating what is currently, contingently 'good in the way of belief' with the limits of what can possibly be known from a critical or truth-seeking standpoint (Norris1992: 16).

In other words Baudrillard has presented not a critical analysis, but a simple observation. When 'digital art' refers to Baudrillard, it justifies itself with conceptual flaws. The term 'hyperreality' may well describe contemporary life, but that does not mean that is all we can hope for, or all that now exists.

Norris notes that "truth is defined solely in performative or rhetorical terms, i.e. as what presently counts as such according to the latest feedback consensus" (Norris 1992: 13). This is conceived as a progressive counterpoint to obsolete notions of definitive truth, where 'reality' is perceived only as a discursive phenomenon, the product of signifying systems which are always relative. Baudrillard famously claimed that the Gulf War 'never happened'; Norris is alarmed that people take his ideas seriously, and exposes them as a "widespread cultural malaise" which is philosophically flawed.

Language

During one conversation, one of my fellow MA students referred to 'cyberspace' with neither qualification nor quotation marks. The conceptual basis for this term is suspect; it may make sense only in terms of metaphor. On another occasion someone used the term 'cyber-rape' in a similar fashion. Both of these expressions have important ambiguities. Language conditions both perception and understanding; defining terms is the basis for critical analysis.

The 'cyber-rape' example is part of a wider social pattern where the term 'rape' is used in an entirely metaphoric sense. Equating the online experience with the physical reality

Is not only absurd, but dangerous, for it elevates the words to the status of acts, and dilutes acts themselves into abstractions. One only has to talk to a woman in the 'engendered flesh' who has suffered through the real thing to understand the full fatuousness - not to mention ethical irresponsibility (of this) (Slouka 1996: 47).

Slouka dismisses a famous case of 'cyber rape' that occurred in a MUD as "a sort of high-tech obscene phone call - disturbing, even upsetting, but not rape" (Slouka 1996: 47). I considered this story as part of my research and I find Slouka's conclusion acceptable.

Hallucinogenic drugs blur boundaries between self and other, between imagination and the sensual world, and between reality and illusion. Technology does this too, and there is a substantial amount of rhetoric to encourage it, demonstrating that language can alter perception. Reality is blended with metaphor, and the physical world is demoted and made abstract. Gozzi (1999: 29) notes that metaphoric language accompanies electronic media, and is characteristic of contemporary living. As he says:

The metaphor cyberspace is a a conceptual blend. It blends the notion of a computer network with the notion of physical space, producing something that is a combination of both but having distinct new properties of its own (ibid: 58).

And:

Terminology does not determine dicsourse, bit it tends to open up certain pathways, and close down others. This happens all the more when the terms are metaphors that have not been carefully examined (ibid: 91).

Digital culture does not reconfigure reality with technological wizardry. These ideas are at best descriptive and aesthetic rather than philosophical; at worst they are hallucinatory, actually believed by some 'digital artists' and 'cyberspace theorists'.

'Virtual reality' is an oxymoronic term that is more accurately defined as 'synthetic' reality, equivalent to a computer game. The monitor is a "distraction" (Morse 1998: 99) similar to a shopping mall or television. The same principle applies to 'cyberspace'. These terms are acceptable metaphors, but their metaphoric status is sometimes forgotten so you have

A blending of reality and metaphor: a willingness to equate the real highway with the digital one, physical space with cyberspace, real communities with virtual ones" (Slouka 1996: 68).

The "strange alchemy of simulation" (Slouka 1996: 99) is apparent in the hyper-realities of advertising, television, news media, Gulf war footage and digital art. Fantasy replaces reality: but this is a descriptive rather than a philosophical, critical, or conclusive stance. Self-knowledge is thus threatened by the abstractions of digital culture, because the metaphors undermine human identity.

Cyberspace mimics social life and confirms you in your isolation in front of a computer. Hubert Dreyfus (2001) notes that Internet culture privatises human experience and ignores human capacities like trust, moods, risk, and shared commitment.

For my final MA project, I quoted from a book called On Video:

What is surely needed is a complementary system of communication that will put men and women in touch with each other and with the world around them. It will need to feed their desire for art, entertainment and information, bring their immediate present into contact with the historical past, and cater for their senses and emotions as well as their intellect. Video, it seems to me, is ideally placed to occupy this role (Armes 1989: 212).

I am interested in a "direct intervention in life" (Armes 1989: 213). While I research, enjoy and work with digital technology, if it is presented as an alternate reality or an alternate aesthetic, it can undermine human needs. Technology mediates; it does not create another world but encourages us to reject the real one. Computer representations have a flattening effect which limit imagination, compared to "the spaces and silences of a text or, better yet, its contacts with the physical world (where) the imagination can roam at will, can create and flourish" (Slouka 1996: 133).

Digital Art

When digital artists justify themselves by referring to fashionable post-modern formulations, they can be evaluated not only in aesthetic terms, but also at a philosophical level.

In many respects, digital art is liberating and empowering: the artist is unencumbered with the need for arduous craftsmanship, and anyone with a computer can do it. It suggests political egalitarianism. However, mediated reality is inherently collective and capable of manipulation, where we "may come to mistake mass opinion for our own" (Slouka 1996: 135). Computers are "the ultimate technology of an irreversibly imploding system bringing about the disappearance of the real and meaning, the growth of fascination with surface and hyperconformity" (Darley in Hayward 1990: 61).

As the novelty value of electronic culture evaporates, naive enthusiasm will be replaced with healthy critical analysis. This has already happened with the commercial Internet. We can acknowledge and promote the possibilities offered by new technology, whilst maintaining a more balanced view of its value and significance. Electronic and telematic media are a significantly new conduit for creativity, but creativity and human psychology are still the same.

Digital art is a 'text' like any other, located in a wider context; it is subject to analysis and often based on flawed and unexamined concepts.

References

Armes, Roy 1989 On Video Routledge, London

Dreyfus, Hubert 2001 On The Internet; Routledge

Gozzi, Raymond 1999 The Power of Metaphor In the Age of Electronic Media Hampton press, USA

Hayward, Philip ed. 1990 Culture, Technology and Creativity John Libby and Co., London

Morse, Margaret 1998 Virtualities IUP, Indiana USA

Norris, Christopher Uncritical Theory 1992; Lawrence and Wishart

Slouka, Mark 1996 War of the Worlds Abacus, London