Technology: transfigurations of the real
Rory du Plessis
May 2011
In Designs of nature,
several of the artworks are described as commenting “... on technologies that
are encroaching on our inner space, invading our bodies and consciousnesses”.
Such a perspective is indicative of inhabitants from highly
technologised cultures that have an overarching sense
that the entire world has undergone a techno-cultural change. In particular,
this is related to the fact that we have conceived of a virtual world of
information highways, cyberspace, virtual reality and the internet. This
world is populated by cybernauts and infonauts. In
the real world, they appear sedentary, catatonically locked down by the glare
of pixels. However, in the virtual world they are not immobile, rather they
move at the absolute speed that information travels in; a world in which bits
and bytes travel instantaneously and immediately in the Infobahn of
fibre-optics. Even when appearing mobile and
detached to the umbilical cord of ADSL, the flâneur of our age, walks
the city streets through wi-fi hotspots and
Bluetooth zones; constantly accessible to the vectors of radio-waves, signals
and satellite transmissions. Thus, the spaces and architecture of the city
become platforms for the infrastructure of cyberspace and access points to
the virtual world.
In
the above descriptions, a profound sense of being immersed in a technological
complexity becomes apparent. One of the means of representing this in popular
culture has been to figure the human subject as immersed in a vast and
complex technological space – the matrix. This is a space, not of materiality
but of interface, the linking of human’s to vast technological networks. A
space that is
conceptualised as a series of
life-supports fitting for our age: communication, information and immediacy.
This
re-articulation of space as a matrix provides a trope to investigate the
simultaneous incorporation of real and virtual infrastructure of technology;
and thereby permitting the ‘real’ and virtual to become interconnected facets
of daily living. One expression of this is the boundary surfaces of the city
appear more like an osmotic membrane which is continuously being transformed
by information technologies that pass through its physical boundaries. Thus,
this concept of the matrix allows for us to negotiate a multiplicity of
spaces and practices simultaneously – real and virtual – and in doing so
develop strategies for the interpretation of life and nature which will come
closer to accepted ‘reality’ than those approaches which demarcate the real
from the virtual.
Furthermore,
this strategy also indicates the influence of the virtual on the real; a
change that negates the hallmarks of the real’s epistemology and metaphysics.
This is best exemplified in the very attributes of the virtual; the virtual
is seen to possess neither locale nor stability, since it exists only as
vectors of a momentary and instantaneous expression. This definition has
consequences for the real / nature. To elucidate further, with the use of
information carrying waves that travel at absolute and instantaneous speeds,
geographical space, the difference between here and there is obliterated. The
inhabitants of technologised spaces can no longer
distinguish between the here and there, private from the public, space from
time. In other words, with the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket and
airwaves), the instantaneousness of action at a distance corresponds to the
defeat of the world as a field, as distance and matter. In this regard, the
real and natural, originally defined in terms of geography and locality, is
transfigured to be defined not in terms of its position but as a world-city,
totally dependent on telecommunications – a world shrunk to the scale and
quality of the city. A world-city that partakes in the shared communion of
tsunamis, hurricane Katrina, earthquakes in Japan and the hounding of bin
Laden through chasms, deserts and foxholes.
One
interesting response to these developments – of our reality, of our ‘natural’
as interconnected to technology and the virtual – is the development and
recourse to the concept of ‘natural nature’. This is a concept that is tied
to purity, the organic, nature as good and harmonious and utterly devoid of
technology. Yet, this very space is a myth and a falsehood. As our ‘natural
self’ can no longer be solely dependent and defined in terms of ‘natural
nature’ – the provisions of ‘natural nature’ appear more fitting for human
beings in the sense of primordial-nostalgia than able to sustain twenty-first
century life, a survival in which the fittest is defined in terms of access
to cyberculture and the virtual. In this regard, it
is clear that technology has not only changed our concepts of the real but
also human nature. Our ‘natural self’ has come to be defined in terms of
connectivity, reflexivity, and embodiment in the virtual. As such the concept
of ‘natural nature’ appears more like a wasteland; utterly devoid of human
life and unable for habitation. The white noise of technology is the
funeral march of ‘natural nature’.
Technology
is figured in multiple and heterogeneous manners throughout the works on
show. In Jenna Burchell’s Portrait of Anderson,
the work consists of the mouth fragmented from the body. In doing so, we do
not see the mouth in relation to the body but rather as a mechanism – a tool
for communication. But deemed as a mechanism, a device, it is placed
alongside machine mechanisms, software and technology; the overarching view
of this placement is that the mouth is filled with limitations, errors, and
is seen as defective and deficient. This view is a trait shared with
cyborg and posthuman debates
that call for modifications, insertions and augmentations of the body in
order for it to better suited to the processes and hardware of technology.
In
Lilies, we are confronted with the materiality of technology. As an
installation piece, the room is threateningly intersected by wires. The piece
requires interaction but not through a headset, telephone receiver, computer
console or a touch-screen, rather interaction is only available through
touching the actual wires that are menacingly exposed. This is an ingenuous
act as it removes the interfaces that have come to define communication through
cyberspace – handheld, ergonomically portable devices. In the removal of such
interfaces, we are confronted by thoughts of technology as a structure of
labyrinth proportions and perplexity.In Frikkie
Eksteen’s work, we see the body of his figures forged in
Computer Aided Design (CAD). This technique marks a change in the conventions
of art production and aesthetics. Previously, artists meticulously studied
and inspected human anatomy – from Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy dissections to
Muybridge’s photographs. Yet, today we see the absence of skeletal and
muscular studies in favour of proportions pinpointed by CAD. Of interest
though is that Eksteen overlays the CAD with oil paint to capture the
ethereal subjects of his portraits. This very process exposes the
juxtapositions of the two mediums: CAD’s mathematical exactitude with the
imprecision and elusiveness of painting. This very juxtaposition may also be
read in cyborg culture as a metaphor. A metaphor
for the flesh and the natural as ‘messy’, ‘full of contagion’ and abject as
it lacks the borders, precision and demarcations of the cyborg
/ posthuman body that is aided / superseded by
technology.
Christiaan
Hattingh shows through several works the representation of forms derived from
algorithms, geometry and the graphs of statistics. These are all objects that
are not found in nature but in the textbooks of science and mathematics. As
such, it encourages us to read his works in terms of verisimilitude: no
longer as ‘truth to nature’ in the natural sense but rather in the truths of
science and mathematics in which sequences and equations only take on
specific forms / representations through following the correct formula. Thus
his works are a verisimilitude of ‘mathematical truths’ in order to take the forms
that they capture.
In
the work of Rina Stutzer it is interesting to note that the materials she
makes use of will change over time. This change is dependent on external
factors and will be gradual and indeterminate. Such transformation – gradual
and over time – is directly opposed to the precision and exponential growth
of cybernetics. In other words, while materials (organic and inorganic)
transform over time, this act is not only gradual, but is also uncertain and
open to decay. Yet, in cyberculture,
transformations involve creation and regeneration that will never perish. In
this regard, I find in Stutzer’s work with the
elements of transformation and the risks of decay, indicative of the genre of
artistic creations based on the Latin phrase Memento mori
‘remember your mortality’. Yet, in Stutzer’s work,
Memento
mori is not related to focus on the afterlife
but is an acceptance of the changes, transformations and eventual breakdown,
corrosion and decay that
characterise material life.
This is directly opposed to the endless and eternal transmissions carried
through sound and light waves – the primary transmission routes and vectors
traversed in cyberculture’s communications.
Readings
consulted:
Rutsky, RL. 1999. High
technē. Art and technology from the machine
aesthetic to the posthuman. Minneapolis &
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Virilio, P. 2004. The
overexposed city, in The Paul Virilio reader,
edited by S Redhead. New York: Columbia University Press:83-100.
Virilio, P. 1977. Speed
and politics. An essay on Dromology. Translated
by M Polizzotti. New York: MIT Press.
Virilio, P. 1995. The
art of the motor. Translated by J Rose. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
