Palimpsestic Bodies November 26, 2009

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“The dramatic stakes are raised and the philosophical issues are more mind-bending, because in Dollhouse neural control extends all the way to the core self. If Topher’s chair can make me in every sense a ninja assassin, complete with memories, beliefs, and skills, then what am I—the person I went to sleep as, the assassin I woke up as, or just so much neural putty in Topher’s hands?”
- Ed Connor on Dollhouse.

Undoubtedly, this is one of the most intriguing questions Dollhouse raises. And I think it’s one that speaks to a lot of the ideas we have been considering throughout the course. Most of the interactions with technology that we’ve observed and thought about offered a variation on a basically similar tension. This tension pits an inherent originality against the dissonant impositions of technology. Look back at avatar use, the dream of being liberated from menial labour, our myriad technological dependencies, augmented reality, virtual actors, technological mediations, etc. The class tackled concept after concept that pointed toward a recapitulation of similar binary oppositions: the real vs. the virtual, the natural vs. the technologically imposed, techné vs. technology, mother/daughter relationships vs. mother/machine/daughter relationships, and so fourth.

In each case, there was some implicit (or overt) claim to an innate, baseline state. Something pure and ‘right’. Against this, you have the technology that inflects and/or insidiously bonds with that state. However, considering that the concept of bodily transcendence was ambivalently considered throughout the course, there was never a sense that it was ever going to end up being one state over the other. These binaries always seemed closely imbricated, more mongrel than neatly differentiable. In other words — technology may mediate between us but it does not consume us entirely. Augmented reality does not subsume an inherent conception of reality, but its more subtle iterations may blur the lines between the imposed and the real. Virtual actors exhibit astonishing verisimilitude but are tempered by awkward flaws. And so fourth. The point is — even if technology obfuscates that innateness, or make us question our strict adherence to the term, it may never be fully obliterated. Instead, we’re left with the sort of hybridity Ed Connor discusses above.

This recalls the notion of a palimpsest: “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” or, more directly related to the concerns of this post: “something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”.

I’ve mentioned the term before in relation to augmented reality, but Dollhouse is an even better fit. The show ostensibly offers its viewers a motley infantalized crew of uniform ‘Actives’ with little nuance or personality. Each Active is a similarly amenable tabula rasa. They all walk around in a blissful stupor, caught in the docile reverie already suggested by the show’s sonorous, opening theme (side-note: the lullaby-esque tone of the theme compliments this idea of regression, especially if you’ve read any of Julia Kristeva’s work regarding prenatal bliss and the comforts of the indecipherable/purely sonorous maternal voice from within the womb). Except, Actives like Echo eventually begin remembering who they were and have been since their wipe — they begin attending to the myriad layers of the palimpsest. The show’s primary hook is thereby in keeping with what we’ve studied — technology does not obliterate so much as bring us new, hybrid forms to consider.

Dr. Saunders is an especially strange example of this, wherein she is: 1) whoever she once was 2) The Active, ‘Whiskey’ 3) the deceased Dr. Saunders. All of these personalities may not be irreducible to one, but stand in some murky coexistence. But that’s not really a problem since there is little that gives away this eclectic medley of selves. For all intensive purposes, she is Dr. Saunders (with some useful modifications that preclude any gender dissonance, and grant her better computer skills). In other words, her scars are the only palimpsestic trace of her life before the Dr. Saunders imprint was applied.

This recalls one of Lia Hotchkiss’ stand-out quotes from a few weeks back: ”Human manipulation becomes itself a part of the plurality and complexity of nature rather than interference with an otherwise freestanding entity” (25). This points toward an interesting idea. While our conception of nature as an inherent truth may still be viable — that is, there is still some innate aspect of nature that we have defined — human manipulation may become so organic and insidious that you won’t be able to tell the difference between the two. Such is Dr. Saunder’s tragic case, who is able to convincingly operate like the original Saunders and fulfill all of his obligations post-humously. Recalling our discussion from two weeks ago, this is technology at its most transparent. Tiger Woods walking around with enhanced vision in order to up his game seems really benign by comparison.

(Note: I’m going refer to something that happened in the official, Fox-regulated finale for the first season, “Omega”, in the next few paragraphs. Those who are wary of spoilers can feel free to skip over this bit. I haven’t got around to watching the second season yet, so any of the following interpretations are going to pertain strictly to the first season.)

It’s in “Omega” that Dr. Saunders first discovers she is an imprinted Active. Confronting Topher, she morosely quips, “I guess I understand why they wouldn’t want to waste an investment. And I suppose, why hire a new physician when you can just imprint the broken Doll.” In other words, she represents the excess of amoral, ‘practical’ thinking. Recalling our week on technology and work, the implication here is that if we can use technology to mitigate the costliness of new employees and ‘hardware’, then we will. This, of course, also recalls the theme of impetuous insatiability that has permeated so many of my blog posts throughout the term. As Kevin Warwick said: “We cannot prejudge ethics. When people become aware of what we have done and the result obtained, hopefully they will discuss the issues and ethical conclusions will result.” In other words: get the technological ball rolling first, see where it goes, and let people clean up the mess later (for the worst prospective result of such impetuous thinking, see “Epitaph One”).

Even more intriguing is another comment that Saunders makes during this confrontation. Rejecting the chance to look at the data that would reveal who she originally was, she asserts: “I know who I am“. A somewhat ambiguous line. It either indicates an Echo-like level of oblique, exponential awareness or a disavowal of that which she believes can never return (thereby implying she has become irrecoverably attached to the Saunders imprint). Given the fact that Dr. Saunders has a brief meltdown with another Active in an earlier scene, wherein she claims that whatever is in the past is irrevocably lost, the second interpretation seems more apparent. Then again, perhaps Saunders, like Echo, has inadvertently become cognizant of her former selves. By knowing who she is, perhaps she means that she knows who she has been, and is thereby implying a Donna Haraway-esque acceptance of multiplicity.

But it’s interesting to consider the idea that Saunders is actively rejecting an awareness of her palimpsestic body. Presumably, she would prefer to stake an unequivocal claim to a stable and fixed sense of self. Alpha (a character we didn’t get see in the two episodes screened in class) is a schizophrenic mess of imprints. He’s a reminder of the joys associated with being free from multiplicity. It’s thereby understandable that Dr. Saunders would seek the recourse of an inherent (or at least fixed) self — not unlike the “freestanding entity” definition of nature that Hotchkiss contested. After all, as this course has pointed out, hybridity and technological impositions can be controversial things. This is what the alarmist realists of eXistenZ reacted against, what compromised Jaimie-Smith Windsor’s bond with her child, or characterized the uncanniness of Final Fantasy’s Aki Ross, etc. Even Haraway, for all her championing of muddled binaries, betrayed a bit of ambivalence regarding the notion of hybridity and dissonance: “To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God [...] One is too few, but two are too many.” Basically: being solitary has its advantages, too.

Another interesting layer to this discussion is offered in the Ollivier Dyens article, “Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over”. Considering Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Dyens notes:

“The more transformed Gregor becomes, the more estranged from both the organic world and his own self he becomes. Moreover, at the time of his death, Gregor is no longer Gregor, he has turned entirely cockroachlike, becoming an autonomous entity, a true insect with no ties to human reality” (62).

Here, the palimpsestic multiplicity of Gregor’s body — wherein he is at once human and a grotesque insect — subsides into uniformity. There is no lingering trace of his former self, the palimpsest is obliterated. In its place, he gains a bleak version of autonomy wherein his new self has subsumed any trace of his old, natural self. Is this the stability Dr. Saunders suggests when she claims she knows who she is? It seems more in line with her situation in “Epitaph One”, wherein she has once again been reduced to the stasis of a docile, yet slightly autonomous, Active. In other words, the terrible implication of both Gregor and Saunder’s situations is that the innateness of the self has been obliterated and ‘stability’ has been found in a new self that is inferior, fabricated and imposed. Multiplicity is disconcerting, but a re-conceptualization of an ‘inherent’ body may be just as troubling. In the interest of offering a few more, final prognostications I’ll suggest that these examples may foresee an age where the tension between the innate and the technological is finally obliterated. This would not result not in the consolidation of the real and inherent, but the supersession of such conceptions by our own technological impositions (not dissimilar to the fear of having the purity of reality absolutely supplanted by the ubiquity of high-fidelity simulacra). While such a dystopian outcome may seem farfetched, it at least points toward the value of a balance between the natural and the technological.

As Dyens points out, another troubling prospect awaits within Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein “bodies have no absolute rights; they are but ephemeral and unstable aggregates whose form and function emerge from specific conditions at specific time [...] its basic nature appears only when molded and rendered plastic by culture” (59).

This points toward an appropriate conclusive question — is such fluidity and multiplicity endemic to contemporary, technologized life? Is a disavowal of multiplicity inherently futile? Perhaps the culture of technology has already begun to render our bodies plastic by transforming our inner conceptions and epistemologies. Is there still an especially stable innateness to fall back onto? Our bodies may remain tethered and inescapable, but people like Warwick evince their permeability. Meanwhile, our inner selves are being consistently augmented by various technologies. From the acceleration of work noted in Sconce’s article to the projection of new personalities onto virtual avatars, technology has the ability to fundamentally change the way we execute daily activities and conceive of ourselves. This course has demonstrated the variety of ways in which the innate and the technological have found themselves in a tense dialogue, or opposition. Broadening the concept of technology, we may even find such multiplicity in the earliest iterations of man where a hominid first grasped that preliminary tool/weapon and thereby augmented his or her base capabilities. Transcendence remains a myth, bodies remain tethered, but our conceptions of ourselves are becoming more pliable and ephemeral. A dream of an inherent, natural state is being spurned in favor of rapidity, hybridity and insatiability. The ambivalence of technology lies in its ability to facilitate these changes, to offer us new ways of imagining ourselves, of projecting new selves into virtual worlds, finding new ways to perform old tasks, new ways of perceiving old realities.

Perhaps one solution is to allow the ‘natural’ that has long served as a frame of nostalgic reference to become archaic and outmoded. Perhaps we can learn how to ‘know who we are’, how to grasp onto some new sense of constancy and stability, by redefining our frame of reference to include the tenacity of technology and by refusing to compare it to an arguably long lost, increasingly abstract past.

Technological Mediations November 20, 2009

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1. “The Cyborg Mother” and Ectogenesis:

Jaimie Smith-Windsor’s “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary” served as an excellent compliment to Donna Haraway’s article from last week. While Smith-Windsor didn’t employ the term ‘cyborg’ in quite as abstract a sense as Haraway did, she similarly emphasized the elasticity of the term. As she notes, her daughter’s birth allowed her “to grapple with [...] the amalgamation between the technological and the biological, and ‘not just in the banal meat-meets-metal sense’” (278).

I also appreciated the way she oscillated between personal and academic poles. Her article is posted at CTheory.net and the concluding blurb puts it quite well: “Becoming a first-time mother to a special needs child provides her with a unique perspective on the relationship between contemporary technology and the maternal instinct that comes with motherhood”. Indeed, it’s an effective approach that encourages a little bit more of an immediate engagement, mostly because her academic musings are tempered by something real and applicable.

After doing some research on some of the issues Smith-Windsor addresses (namely, technology and the loss of maternal agency), I came across the notion of ectogenesis. Irina Aristarkhova’s “Ectogenesis and Mother as Machine” (available here) offers a good analysis of what she refers to as the “‘ectogenetic desire’” (44). As Aristarkhova explains, “Recent claims with regard to ectogenesis and ‘artificial womb’ technologies have renewed interest in, and intensified the politics around, the maternal body and its definitions” (43). Moreover:

“Ectogenesis, as it has been defined thus far in its philosophical and scientific usages, refers broadly to ‘genesis outside of the womb’. Thus, by its very definition, it has an inherent connection to the maternal body, even if through a desire to ultimately disconnect from it. Ectogenesis promises a technological dream of developing ‘outside’ the maternal body by enabling gestation ‘inside’ a machine that strives to simulate the conditions of the womb; a machine that acts as if it were a mother” (43).

However, as Smith-Windsor emphasizes, these kinds of technological mediations are highly problematic. While Smith-Windsor’s daughter’s life was certainly saved through the support of a neonatal intensive-care unit, this nonetheless ruptured ”the relationship between Mother and child [...] the mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb” (280). I found this emphasis on the sanctity of this close, early connection between mother and child to be the most compelling aspect of her article. Especially since this technological mediation seemed to only grant Smith-Windsor an approximation of this connection. As she explains, “infancy becomes disembodied from the biological Mother and goes forward unmanned” (280) and “the machine takes over the Mother” (282).

If such maternal usurpation is one of the extreme negatives associated with such technological mediation, Aristarkhova’s article offers us some of the commonly posited ‘justifications’. She cites the following three goals as impelling the research into ectogenesis:

“(1) removing the maternal body from reproductive processes, through an underlying assumption that it is ‘just a clever incubatory’ whose function can be ultimately substituted; (2) that it is socially desirable to relieve mothers of the reproductive function insofar as women thus freed of maternal obligation would be able to spend more time and energy on their professional development [...] (3) that it affords access to and control of the processes of conception, gestation and birth at any stage through various means, such as chemical intervention, monitoring of prenatal development, scientific observation and analysis, etc.” (43-44).

However, it is clear that these goals are all highly contestable when you consider the compromised role of the biological mother.  They certainly don’t shield this research from vehement criticism, either. As Aristarkhov explains, “many feminist scholars condemn the overt or covert desire on the part of philosophers to give birth to themselves or to dissociate birth from the maternal body” (44) and there are “a variety of debates currently raging in philosophical and scientific circles (e.g. legal definitions of personhood; maternal ownership and rights over the unborn child; surrogacy; paternal body; the ‘human-animal’ distinction, etc.)” (44). Thus, Smith-Windsor isn’t the only one to react to such compromising, technological mediations with marked ambivalence.

Aristarkhov’s article also goes on to directly address Smith-Windsor’s argument, highlighting her particularly negative portrayal of technological mediations:

“Throughout the article Smith-Windsor positions herself as an observer of the workings of the ‘life-support machine’ on her baby. What is important for us here is how the author, in an attempt to think of herself through the notions of ‘fractured identities and broken boundaries’, reinstates and even desires to distinguish her experience of mothering from reproductive technologies [...] Smith-Windsor denies the machine most of the things she claims for herself – love, physical body, reality and, ultimately, goodness” (49).

Aristarkhov concludes that Smith-Windsor ultimately “leaves us with despair, drained of any options and opportunities to fight ‘evil’ machines” (50). Moreover, “If pregnancy is taken as the most natural function of a woman, it is no surprise that the maternal body and experience of motherhood seems fundamentally opposed to and dissonant with such machinic substitutes as incubators” (50). Thus, “the concept of the cyborg, as it has been used by Smith-Windsor and others [...] still reinforces ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ distinctions” (51).

Thus, Smith-Windsor does seem to offer a partially negative portrayal of such technological mediation, despite insisting that she is not trying “to discredit the technologies that taught my daughter the art of living” (284). As the articles and issues addressed in this course keep emphasizing (inadvertendly or otherwise), technology is rarely perceived as an unequivocal force of good but can always accommodate a good measure of ambivalence…

2. The Double-Bind of Technology – Assistance and Surveillance:

Moreover, Smith-Windsor and Aristarkhov’s points emphasize the dual nature of technology — its simultaneous capability to support and harm us.

Smith-Windsor’s understanding of the double-bind of technology recalls an aspect of the Lev Manovich article that we read a few weeks back, “The Politics of Augmented Space”. Therein, Manovich discusses the role of ‘intelligent’ cellphones that can acquire and utilize information from its users and notes the following:

“A similar relationship exists in the case of software agents, affective computing, and similar interfaces that take a more active role in assisting the user than the standard graphical user interface. By tracking the user—her mood, her pattern of work, her focus of attention, her interests, and so on—these interfaces acquire information that they use to help the user with tasks and automate them. This close connection between surveillance and assistance is one of the key characteristics of a high-tech society” (77).

This also relates back to Smith-Windsor’s incorporation of ‘panopticism’ (a concept employed by Michel Foucault, based on philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s designs). She notes that “the making of cyborg bodies is simply panopticism [...] It is about exposure, about making visible each privacy of the human body for the purposes of controlling life.” (283). Thus, while much technology is designed to assist people, this function can be skewed to the point where the lines between assistance and harm become a little hazy. Of course, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles explicitly deals with this by having Cameron (Summer Glau) possess the problematic dual functionality of benevolent assistant and indomitable huntress. While I haven’t watched the series beyond the two episodes screened in class, I assume that ZieraCorps’ technological research is funded and supported on the assumption that their innovations are going to be of some beneficial (rather than nefarious and unethical) use. What this points toward is clear: most ostensibly good intentions (or pretenses) have their downsides.

While there are a lot of great examples of the excesses of surveillance that I could reference in order to elaborate on this point, I thought I’d instead discuss the more unique case of Rob Spence — AKA “Eyeborg“. His circumstances are somewhat reminiscent of Kevin Warwick insofar as they are pretty strange and somewhat off-putting.

As this Wired.com article explains, he’s “a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker” based in Toronto who “wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around“. He’s pictured at the left with a prosthetic eye and a prototype of the sort of ultra-tiny camera that it might one day be fused with. I think this is a pretty striking example of how the sort of technology that should be unequivocally aimed toward assisting individuals (the prosthetic eye) is being embellished by more questionable features like surveillance technology. In Spence’s case, this prosthetic eye won’t actually restore his sight, but one of the staff members at OmniVision Inc. (the company helping Spence with his project) claims that such dual functionality may not be that far off. Yet again, technology offers us an uneasy amalgamation of the arguably beneficial and the ethically murky. While Rob Spence’s example is not necessarily demonstrative of the sort of state sanctioned surveillance that is typically the target of much ire and criticism, it does point to an equally interesting prospect wherein the everyday civilian becomes just as complicit in the surveillance-saturated state of the world.

Moreover, “Spence is not the only one attempting to implant a video camera in his eye socket — artist Tanya Vlach is working on a similar project — but if he’s successful he will be more than just another cyborg. The documentary film he’s making about his efforts, plus the experience of living with a video camera in his eye, could help build greater awareness about the culture of surveillance in our society today, he says”. Or he could very well become emblematic of just how far out of hand that culture of surveillance has gotten. Similar to how the four goals that dubiously ‘justify’ the research into ectogenesis did not automatically render its ethical issues moot, Spencer’s arguably good intentions don’t make what he’s doing any less disconcerting. Rather, he and Vlach may very well be ushering in a whole new batch of privacy related issues. If you’d like to learn more about Spence, check out this YouTube video.

The average civilian’s complicity in “the culture of surveillance” can be found elsewhere, as well. As demonstrated through Joe’s self search via Google a few weeks back, the Internet can be understood as a locus of personal information. Thus, one might look toward social-networking websites as another example of an allegedly benign technology contributing to the trend in especially invasive surveillance methods. After all, Facebook has had to face a whole slew of privacy concern despite it being a website benignly predicated on bringing people together. As this article explains:

“The popularity of social networking may be simply a fraternal exchange, or innocent “friendly encounters of the voyeuristic kind.” But it can also be “complicit surveillance” committed by the individual and sinisterly co-opted [...] In a heavily mediated environment, what is private, what is public, and what is publicly permissible (on the basis of consent) are elusive and contested concepts. Lines change quickly, and Facebook is often at the fore. In 2007, it launched Facebook Beacon, which enabled members to see the net activities — even online purchases — of their friends. Many users considered the application to be off-limits and the political civic action group MoveOn.org launched a campaign against Facebook. Facebook switched the application to an “opt-in” program and apologized to users.”

This can be related back to one of the concluding statements from Smith-Windsor’s article:

“The genesis of the cyborg goes well beyond the physical union of machine with body. [...] The human condition is mediated by technology [...] Technology is, quite literally, beginning to rewire the way we do family, the way we know humanity” (284).

Social-networking websites also exemplify Smith-Windsor’s claim that “Becoming cyborg is not merely a physical condition: it is a condition of being mediated by technology” (282). As we continue to mediate our communications, self-expressions and personal lives through technological means, we are compiling a wide array of vulnerable and arguably accessible information. Given the precarious nature of privacy on the Internet, the idea of the human being as a de-facto surveillance agent with a plethora of information at his or her disposal is not so farfetched. After all, as this article notes, the hacker who managed to get into Sarah Plain’s e-mail inbox last year found it to be a relatively easy task. As he explains: “after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)“.

Moreover, CBC recently reported a controversial case involving a Quebec woman who was put on sick leave due to major depression, only to have her benefits revoked by her insurance company. Apparently, her insurance agent came across her Facebook profile and found “several pictures posted [...] including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday” and determined this was “evidence that she is no longer depressed”. While security measures are a constant point of concern for e-mail services and social networking websites, these two examples indicate how insubstantial the Internet’s claim to privacy actually is. Evidently, we don’t have to wait for Spence’s audacious project to come to fruition in order to observe some crafty and questionable instances of civillian surveillance.

As Smith-Windsor notes, “technology and knowing [have] become bound within perception” (282). This carries particular resonance given that most of us have become quite comfortable connecting with others through the simultaneous distance and immediacy of screens. As we construct and present aspects of ourselves through these mediating technologies, our awareness of technology’s dual ability to offer benign assistance and accommodate unwanted encroachments has become a necessary burden.

Breaking Boundaries November 13, 2009

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1. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto:

Tuesday’s discussion of Donna Haraway’s seminal essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, touched on the fact that it has been co-opted and utilized for a variety of purposes. In seeking out examples of this, I came across Allucquére Rosanne Stone (AKA Sandy Stone).

Inspired by Haraway’s work, Stone was able to produce a seminal article of her own in “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.”. Haraway’s scholarship informed her own approach toward transsexuality (you can access the article here).

Not unlike Haraway, Stone is evidently drawn toward muddling those boundaries, binaries, and preconceptions that otherwise tend to stifle a more liberated understanding of gender and sexuality. Stone expresses particular discontent over the fact that the “highest purpose of the transsexual is to erase h/erself, to fade into the ‘normal’ population as soon as possible” which would thereby preclude one from being able to “authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience” and would also sacrifice “that aspect of ‘nature’ which Donna Haraway theorizes as Coyote — the Native American spirit animal who represents the power of continual transformation which is the heart of engaged life”. As Stone insists, a transsexual can only “generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse [...] from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible”. In other words, you have to get outside of the deceptively static strictures that surround you in order to stake your claim as an idiosyncratic, self-possessed individual that is not bound to exterior definitions, binaries or prescribed roles.

As Haraway explains in her manifesto, “certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others” (35). Therefore, stepping outside of the dualisms concomitant with domination (and the stagnation of prescribed gender roles) is a liberating experience that can be best understood through the permeable and fluid image of the cyborg. I think that Haraway is drawn to the cyborg as a metaphorical device because it offers a lot more room for play, nuance and the constitution of an identity that is neither static nor defined by any socially-ingrained, domineering forces. While I may have found Haraway’s polemic a little less than cogent at times (the explication of her article by other sources certainly helped), I believe she wants to circumvent those domineering forces so as to to facilitate various reconstitutions of the self. With this in mind, it is clear how Haraway’s work would function as an inspirational boon to someone like Stone, who similarly seeks to spurn the “production of universal, totalizing theory [...] that misses most of reality” and tries to “explain our bodies and tools to ourselves” (Haraway, 37). Thus, Stone encourages the acceptance of transsexual difference, rather than a conformity to existing binaries and norms. Haraway and Stone can both be understood as having iconoclastically embraced the notion of identities that do not neatly fit within widely perpetuated myths and binaries (i.e., male/female, which clearly does not accommodate any slippage or nuance of any kind).

2. Transparent Technology:

Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (referenced during Tuesday’s lecture) explores another type of boundary breaking. Therein, Clark investigates “Information appliances”, a concept coined by Donald Norman. The three characteristics of the concept are outlined as follows:

1. An information appliance is geared to support a specific activity, and to do so via the storage, reception, processing, and transmission of information.

2. Information appliances form an intercommunicating web. They can ‘talk’ to each other.

3. Information appliances are transparent technologies, designed to be easy to use, and to fade into the background. They are poised to be taken for granted.
(44).

The last characteristic definitely recalls Lia Hotckiss’ article from last week. Discussing the role of the salamander in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Hotchkiss noted that it represented a “melding of the technical and natural” (25) and a “thoughtful use of special effects to create a diegetic world that portrays the collapse of the nature/culture split” (26). In last week’s blog post, I used this idea as a springboard to further consider augmented reality (AR) and how it might one day become indistinguishable from what we consider our innately physical reality. As Hotchkiss explains: “human manipulation becomes itself a part of the plurality and complexity of nature rather than interference with an otherwise freestanding entity” (25). Although I didn’t mention this last week, Hotchkiss also cites Haraway’s “A Manifesto For Cyborgs”, noting that “eXistenZ‘s critical position with respect to virtual reality and manipulation of the material [...] is in keeping not only with Haraway’s suspicion of transcendence but also with her celebration of the permeable boundary between humans and machines, namely, our cyborg status” (26).

Thus, Clark more or less joins Hotchkiss, Haraway and Stone in a consideration of muddled boundaries. While Haraway used the cyborg metaphorically in order to unsettle binaries and socially ingrained preconceptions in her manifesto, Clark attends to the the more literal role of technology as an exceedingly discreet force that may insidiously change the nature/technology and body/technology divides in particular.

More specifically, he appropriate Norman’s concept in order to coin his own: “dynamic appliances” (57). As Clark explains,

“The combination of dynamic appliances and transparent technologies are surely a match made in cyborg heaven [...] The biological brain is constantly striving to streamline, chunk, compile, and automate, and it does so by attending to repeated patterns of activity and use. Dynamic information appliances would, when appropriate, do just the same. The combination of brains that learn about technologies, with ubiquitous, increasingly transparent technologies that ‘learn’ about individual brains, sets the scene for a cognitive symbiosis whose full potential and implications none of us can yet fully appreciate” (57-58).

In other words, Clark is following the pursuit of intuitive and unobtrusive technology to its farthest, logical conclusions. Not only is he picturing a world where the ubiquity of technology accompanies its utterly seamless integration into our daily lives, but where it also functions in a way not entirely dissimilar from our own brains. The idea of cognitive symbiosis is certainly a fascinating concept that may nonetheless seem a little too farfetched as of right now. However, considering Kevin Warwick‘s audacious work and goals, I thought it would be worth looking into some of the similar (albeit less mind-blowingly sophisticated than what Clark seems to be picturing) examples of covert interactions between machine and human-beings.

Consider Swiss company IMI’s “Intelligent Retinal Implant System”:

This article from Gizmodo (conveniently enough, the site is doing a “This Cyborg Life” week) explains the process as follows:

A Swiss company called IMI has been putting its “Intelligent Retinal Implant System” [IRIS] through clinical trials for the past three years. When it’s ready, it could help restore sight to the blind. The use of a high-speed digital signal processor allows the provision of “intelligent information” to the implant (and the nerve cells) by using tuneable software to approximate the information processing normally carried out by the healthy retina. The entire process enables patients to optimize their visual perception during the learning phase. Indeed, using the patient’s feedback on perception as an input for the tuning of The Pocket Processor is the unique, patent-protected feature of the System and constitutes the ‘learning’ capability of the Learning Retinal Implant System.

While this isn’t quite as advanced as the cognitive symbiosis between machine and human (and it’s still in the vaporware stage), it does substantiate the fact that new and interesting ways of augmenting our biological functions is a consistent point of research. Moreover, tuneable software emulating healthy retinas that can more or less learn from us could be considered an important first step toward realizing Clark’s projections. IRIS would also qualify as an transparent act of technological interaction. Thus, this concept, if brought to fruition, might be best understood as a more or less organic mediation between technology and the human body.

Another example of the body’s accommodative nature would be Tiger Woods. As this Gizmodo article notes, he’s had “two LASIK surgeries to achieve 20/15 vision, when what we consider the best of natural vision to be is a mere 20/20. Before his first LASKI surgery, Woods had lost 16 straight tournaments. Immediately following the surgery, he won 7 of his next 10. Advantage through technology, or not?”

Here’s what he had to say about how much this technology bolstered his game:

For years I played golf with an invisible handicap, invisible to everyone but me. It was my contact lenses. My eyes would sting burn and water all the while I was trying to concentrate on championship golf. I had the Lasik procedure with a TLC laser eye center surgeon and the results were fabulous. I’m 20/20 with no contacts. My vision is so crisp I feel I can read all the subtleties of the green and look down the fairway hundreds of yards and focus perfectly on the fly. I’m very happy with the results, and grateful for my TLC center experience.

As Kevin Warwick declared, “the step to Cyborgs offers humans a natural, technological upgrade in the technological world we have instigated. Yes I feel it will be the next evolutionary step. Indeed we will need to do it if we are to compete with intelligent machines“. If the gap between computers and human-beings is closing, we can look back and note that it all started when the idea of upgrading your body (rather than your hard-drive) no longer elicited dismissive laughter. While Warwick’s experiments are more audacious (and somewhat unsettling) than those Woods undertook, the latter example is nonetheless striking proof of how the interaction between our bodies and technology is becoming fairly inconspicuous. As Tiger indicated, perhaps contacts and glasses are on their way to being scorned as ridiculously obtrusive prosthetics.

Clark further explores this idea of latent, intuitive technology in relation to augmented reality. He ends up discussing AR in pretty much the same vein that Hotchkiss considered eXistenZ‘s salamander, thereby complimenting my own concerns/points from last week. That is, not as a patently artificial eyesore but a seamless continuation of our physical (and/or biological) worlds:

“the key innovation is to allow the physical and the informational realms to seamlessly merge and mingle, in ways that unobtrusively support daily activity and that make maximum use of our normal means of embodied, socially embedded activity” (53)

Allow me to supplement this quote with one from Norman himself, taken from Eric Bergman’s Information Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products:

“So, I see a change occurring from the one massive, centrally located infrastructure, the personal computer, to a set of rather small, widely distributed devices that we won’t even think of as computers, we won’t think of as telecommunication devices even though that’s what they will be. We’ll just think of them as a natural part of our daily activities and the tools that we us” (12).

As Clark further explains, Norman is looking ahead to a world where technology is “maximally nonopaque [...] What matters is that as far as our conscious awareness is concerned, the tool itself fades into the background, becoming transparent in skilled use” (45). As Joe explained, this can be a psychological effect — our use of a device becomes so habitual that we no longer attend to its novelty. Moreover, this effect can also be supplemented by the actual design of the device. A cumbersome, massive computer bound to your desk certainly isn’t going to blend into the background. However, this is a problem of the past. ‘Think Small’ has become more than a pithy milestone in advertising but an entire philosophy that defines companies like Apple. Thus, while Tiger Woods offers an example of technological manipulation at its most covert, I’m also intrigued by the less advanced iterations of human/technology convergence. Namely, the physical devices that we use (or may eventually use) on a daily basis that are adopting more inconspicuous designs…

Admittedly, the Chamelephone (at the left) is still moored in the realm of vaporware, but it’s nonetheless a relevant example of the trend toward more subtle technological devices. It’s listed on Wired.com among other forthcoming, high-tech cellphone designs. The concept behind it involves having the phone take on the texture of whatever surface you happen to place it on top of. Joining Tiger Woods and IRIS, it’s examples like these that render the possibility of increasingly transparent and intuitive technologies a little less preposterous.

Then again, I should be wary of becoming overly certain in my own projections. The boundaries have yet to be entirely broken. There was a discussion during Tuesday’s class about how the difference between those who talk out-loud into their bluetooth headsets and those who tend to talk out-loud to themselves was somewhat negligible (at first glance). This speaks to the idea that conversations via these headsets are still a somewhat off-putting and unnatural thing to observe despite the device’s (arguably dubious) claim to discreet intuitiveness. As a final note, I can’t help but defer to Larry David on this one:

Not exactly the inconspicuous, seamless integration envisioned by Clark and Norman. Evidently, technology and humans haven’t quite converged to the point where we’re entirely free from such obtrusively obnoxious/bemusing side-effects. Even Warwick’s experiments are pretty off-putting despite their concealed nature (mostly because they further confirm the violability of the human body). I think it might be a while yet before we become fully comfortable with these more preliminary and cumbersome (or just downright discomfiting) convergences with technology.

Real Worlds, Virtual Logic November 7, 2009

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Last week I focused on the glaring artificiality of virtual actors and environments. This week, I intend to reverse that focus in order to consider the confusing imbrications between virtual spaces and reality itself. Since we live in an age where highly customizable virtual representations and spaces are becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is important to consider the following question. What do our current interactions with manipulable simulacra already indicate and how might these interactions change if those simulacra were to lose any discernible mark of artificiality?

One possibility is that nothing would dramatically change. The fundamental desires that have always impelled these interactions would remain, only they would be more keenly felt and more morally questionable. In fact, these desires (for control, excessive manipulation and satisfied subversive urges) can be traced from our current forms of manipulable simulacra (i.e., puppeteering the virtual actors of Final Fantasy) to the less artificial game worlds we see in Gamer and eXistenZ. Those latter two films indicate that, even if the artificiality of our virtual creations were to be more or less purged, the baseline logic and motivations that compelled us to interact with those creations in the first place may become all the more pronounced and deplorable.

In the diegetic ‘game worlds’ that Gamer and eXistenZ establish, the mark of artificiality is subdued into something elusive or simply nonexistent. In Gamer‘s case, the blatantly synthetic quality of the virtual spaces we are used to (i.e., video-games, CGI-enhanced films, modern-day MUDs like Second Life) are eliminated but their capacity for control and manipulation is retained. Basically, Gamer‘s diegetic reality co-opts the rationale of our virtual spaces. Thus — real worlds, virtual logic. Moreover, by turning the manipulatable stimuli of our video-games into flesh and blood people, the Uncanny Valley suddenly becomes a moot issue. The downside? As one of the characters insists in the trailer for Stay Alive, “When you die in the game, you die for real!”

eXistenZ similarly refuses to foreground the artificiality of its game world (in terms of its diegetic universe). In “‘Still in the Game’: Cybertransformations of the ‘New Flesh’ in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ“, Lia M. Hotchkiss notes the following:

“This melding of the technical and the natural appears in the matter-of-factness with which the games of transCendeZ and eXistenZ portray the use of neural webbing grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with synthetic DNA and the harvesting of mutated amphibians for, on the one hand, lively technical devices such as game pods and, on the other, a rather outré lunch. The cheerful fascination with which Gellar regards a two-headed salamander as a ‘sign of the times’ resonates on several levels” (25-26).

Moreover, the salamander “blends in seamlessly with the landscape as a new creature of the environment rather than a spectacular defiance of such physical fundamentals as gravity” which Hotchkiss views as a “philosophically thoughtful use of special effects to create a diegetic world that portrays the collapse of the nature/culture split that Canguilhem and Rabinhow are positing” (26). Thus, the salamander is not an incongruent augmentation, but an accepted component to an existence where the line between the ‘real’ and the synthetic is quite nebulous. The salamander isn’t there to function as an eyesore that gives the lie to the ‘real’ world of eXistenZ nor does it automatically guarantee those world(s) are synthetic. As Hotchkiss indicates, the film views the binary of the real and the virtual as being more problematic. Thus, the salamander becomes indicative of reality’s “ability to be superseded, embedded, arbitrary, and above all, determined by representation” (28). Moreover, it recalls the fact that the game worlds in the film refuse “to stabilize any frame of reference as definitively real” (24). eXistenZ thereby insists that the polarities of the real and the synthetic have become increasingly imbricated and permeable, and it has thereby become much harder to make a distinction between them. Transcendence is impossible. In its place lies a perpetual uncertainty as to what constitutes the real and the virtual.

However, it is this very distinction that allows people to vicariously direct their ostensibly subversive desires through virtual outlets. Thus, violence by proxy is made available through a game like Gears of War (or other more controversial ones) and The Sims grants players pseudo-omniscience and control over their subservient avatars (as Gas gleefully declares in eXistenZ, “God — the mechanic!”). In the scenarios that Gamer and eXistenZ propose, the virtual subjects and worlds that we submit to our vicarious whims have become indistinguishable from material reality. The perceptual consequences of such a scenario are both fascinating and troubling. For instance, recall how eXistenZ‘s Allegra Gellar (Jennifer Jason Leigh) blithely shoots down Kiri Vinokur (Ian Holm) near the end of the film. As Ted Pikul (Jude Law) reminds her, “What if we’re not in the game anymore?” (click here to rewatch this scene). Indeed, we certainly wouldn’t be able to shrug our shoulders at the concept of committing violence (among other things) via proxy and and people like Jack Thompson would likely end up feeling quite vindicated. But therein lies the assumption that these desires are okay so long as they are relegated to virtual realms (more on that later).

This recalls Lev Manovich’s consideration of augmented space. If you were to follow the exponential growth of augmented spaces to its worst (but perhaps logical) conclusion, the inviolable sanctity of the ‘natural’ world does become an increasingly dubious notion. Similar to eXistenZ‘s salamander, digital augmentations may irreversibly (and seamlessly) assume their place in the accommodating fabric of our phenomenological existence. Hotchkiss does a good job of exploring this very point:

“The more physical forms of cyborging, specifically, the technologization of biology and biologization of technology evident in eXistenZ and so many of Cronenberg’s other films, figure the breakdown of the nature/culture binarism that has led philospher of science George Canguilhem to argue that machines are ‘organs of the human species’ and that ‘technology is a universal biological phenomenon’ (55, 63). Not only has nature not been free from human manipulation for millennia and hence is irretrievable as a purely natural state, but also nature itself is ‘a blind bricoleur, an elementary logic of combinations, yielding an infinity of potential differences’ [Rabinow 249] rather than a strict teleology tending toward homeostasis. Once that view of nature is accepted, human manipulation becomes itself a part of the plurality and complexity of nature rather than interference with an otherwise freestanding entity. As Allegra tells Ted, ‘It’s the future—you’ll see how natural it feels’ (25).”

eXistenZ compliments this view by approaching the ostensibly real and the virtual without necessarily pronouncing the latter’s artifice. Instead, that ‘artifice’ can be understood as being part of a new conception of reality where the virtual and the real are more muddled. With all of our current technology and essential portable devices, the proliferation of augmented space may result in a similarly ambiguous scenario. As I mentioned in my blog post on augmented space, “Some may be justifiably worried that the world we know and love will slowly change — turning itself into some sort of digital palimpsest where the once familair vestiges of reality become hazier and hazier”. Taking this new view of nature that Hotchkiss refers to, the elements of augmented space may no longer be understood as incongruent additions but organic components. Moreover, as the battle against the Uncanny Valley rages on, the markers of artificiality will eventually become harder and harder to spot. Thus, our current examples of augmented space and films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within might one day be understood as having been prototypes for an age where the virtual and the real are no longer so easily demarcated.

However, if the augmented spaces Manovich discussed are going to deliver us to an eXistenZ-esque world, where the virtual and the real are confused and imbricated, then that’s more reason to sincerely consider the desires already bound up with our virtual worlds. While there may be a danger in following Gamer’s projected scenario to its ostensibly alarmist conclusions, the film nonetheless does a decent job of interrogating some of the questionable reasons people flock to and/or create virtual characters and spaces. For instance: the tenacious obsession with technological advancement, the vicarious pleasures (sexual urges, violent urges, subversive urges, etc.) facilitated via virtual surrogates, and the battle against the Uncanny Valley (which culminates by opting out of the process altogether by just using real people, apparently). While these factors may be more or less acceptable in terms of modern MUDs like World of Warcraft, they become a lot more questionable once brought into the so-called material world. Gamer also touches on what I’d call the puppeteer impulse. We began with inanimate objects dangling off marionette strings, followed long after by gaudily fashioned Sims on computer screen and then, if we are to take Gamer at all seriously…

This aspect of the film definitely recalls one of this blog’s apparently inescapable themes, insatiability. Perhaps when we get bored of Second Life and the thousandth incarnation of The Sims, we’ll turn to this. Full control, full clemency and real world stakes. However, even if a real-world equivalent to Gamer‘s more satirical “Society” may never happen, its inclusion in the film at least encourages us to scrutinize the more questionable ways our already virtual spaces can be used. Consider the following quote taken from a Wired article entitled, “Virtual Rape Is Traumatic, but Is It a Crime?”:

“Last month, two Belgian publications reported that the Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen’s allegations of rape — in Second Life [...] If it is a criminal offense to sexually abuse a child on the internet, how can we say it is not possible to rape an adult online? But I have a hard time calling it ‘rape,’ or believing it’s a matter for the police. No matter how disturbed you are by a brutal sexual attack online, you cannot equate it to shivering in a hospital with an assailant’s sweat or other excretions still damp on your body“

There are two ways Gamer can be said to respond to this imbrication of real world emotions/vulnerabilities with virtual spaces. First, the film may confirm the idea that our virtual activities (barring a few obvious examples) are kind of insignificant so long as they do not forcefully impact our physical world. Second, the film is using a hypberolic scenario in order to hint at the notion that what happens in virtual spaces already matters quite a bit. While I think it’s obvious that Angie’s (Amber Valletta) experience would not have been as devastating had her virtual avatar (rather than her physical body) been controlled by some random stranger, I still think the second point holds some credence as well. In fact, this issue points toward a new way of looking at the reality/virtual imbrication explored by this week’s course materials. We should not be solely concerned with the idea of virtual logic being imposed onto reality (or something indistinguishable from it) but also attend to the fact that we are already bringing our own ‘natural’ logic and emotions into virtual spaces. In other words — virtual worlds, real logic. This still emphasizes the idea that nature may not be a “freestanding entity” (Hotchkiss, 25) that exists apart from man’s technological manipulations. There is too much dialogue and rampant interaction between those two poles. As the author of that Wired article eventually admits:

“That’s not to say I dismiss the trauma a person suffers after being raped online. Virtual rape is not just a prank, one the target needs to get over or expect as part of a role-playing world. (And if you are inclined to pooh-pooh this, first read author Julian Dibble’s chapter about a rape that occurred in a text-only MOO in the early ’90s.) [...] If you’ve never immersed yourself in online life, you might not realize the emotional availability it takes to be a regular member of an internet community. The psychological aspects of relating are magnified because the physical aspects are (mostly) removed.“

What I find particularly interesting about issues like these is that people always seem so initially uncertain about how to respond to it. There is something about the concept of certain virtual crimes that sets off moral and epistemological uncertainties. If transcendence is impossible and bodies are perpetually moored to their seats, then the assumption is that we’re at a safe remove from any of our virtual worlds. This makes me wonder about the individuals actually committing the contestable crimes themselves. Should they be ignored in favour of the notion that the idea of virtual rape is silly?

I’m inclined to disagree. The sophistication and prevalence of modern-day MUDs comes with a significant propensity for customizable identities, new types of interpersonal relationships, and hours (and hours) of commitment. It’s factors like these that make it harder to believe that we become imperviously aloof and leave our emotions and feelings at the door whenever we dive into a virtual space. It may be that we are more inclined to question the deplorability of these crimes when they enter the real (or live-action) space of flesh and blood human-beings. For instance, touching on the puppeteer impulse long before Gamer, Being John Malkovich had Craig (John Cusack) not only burrow his way into John Malkovich’s mind but learn how to control him, too:

This disturbing (yet somewhat hilarious) example joins Gamer‘s own deplorable instance of dropping outdated Sims for real live human beings. But I don’t think we should rush to view these examples as a legitimate portent of some dystopia where we’ll actually be plugging into each other’s minds through holes in office walls or remote control access. Instead, the real-world applicability of both these films comes down to those baseline desires for control and realized subversive urges that already inflect our current interactions with virtual spaces/avatars. And, of course, that all too common desire for disembodiment, wherein the limitations, reputation, and stigma attached to your own body can be cast off for the tabula rasa of a new flesh. This reminds me of Hotchkin’s thoughts on Dave’s role in The Thirteenth Floor:

“As David’s particular thrill suggests, however, cyberspace is also posited as an environment that creates problems as well, for not until he discovered his love of killing through being able to carry it out with impunity did he become a corrupt and abusive person. Virtual reality both gives him license and shields him from legal, if not moral, consequences, and a great deal of the film’s energy goes into rather tediously and sanctimoniously mulling over the ethical consequences of playing God by creating simulations in one’s own image and then possessing—in both senses of the term—by appropriating their bodies and lives on a whim or to serve one’s own ends” (21).

As Gamer‘s requisite corpulent slob and Being John Malkovich‘s flesh avatar use emphasizes, anonymity tends to elide questions of morality. As that disturbing scene in the elevator from Gamer indicates, virtual spaces and avatars open new opportunities to become aware of latent desires that would have otherwise remained latent had the right technology not come along. This recalls the question of whether technology is best understood as a pernicious force in and of itself or if its users are more to blame. I’m inclined to agree with the latter. Pointing a finger at the technology itself seems silly, even if you were to note that that its capacity for facilitating malicious deeds/thoughts exists independently from human-beings. Which it doesn’t, since human beings designed their technology to hold such capacities in the first place. Moreover, it’s always the human-being who is bringing his own independent choices and desires and choosing to express them through technological means.

Thus, I would say that the very opportunity and possibilities that virtual spaces and avatars present have made it easier to explore certain desires. If you open the virtual floodgates, people will inevitably gravitate toward the possibilities therein. While the strictures of society may force subversive desires to their latent positions, the virtual anonymity of games and the internet offer a potent loophole. However, in an age where Amazon has to ban a virtual rape videogame from its website, there’s obviously reason to be concerned about the kinds of desires and urges being made available through this anonymity (especially if the boundaries between the real and virtual break down but the desires remain the same). If we are to buy the idea that an allegation of virtual rape within an virtual world should be responded to with appropriate gravity, this would necessitate a rethinking of the boundary that separates flesh and blood feelings/vulnerabilities from their virtual spaces. Even before videogame logic intrudes onto reality in a Gamer-esque scenario, it is imperative to consider the possibility that the perks of virtual spaces ([insert desire here] by proxy) are not being played out in abstract and inconsequential environments with no bearing on our real lives.

Versatile Actors & Negotiating The Uncanny Valley October 30, 2009

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ABOVE: 156 LED lights and Emily O’Brien, an actress undergoing high-res face scanning via Image Metric‘s Light Stage 5 device. The process is explained in this brief video.

The advent of digital cinema has brought more troubling (yet arguably unwarranted) fears to the fore. One of the worries spurred on by the rise of digital media is based around the idea that human actors will one day be displaced by their digital ‘superiors’. I think a lot of us tend to treat this particular anxiety with a certain degree of levity given that digital media’s now long-existent (and ever increasing) ubiquity has not yet dramatically compromised the necessity of actors. They’re still pretty popular and more or less essential. However, as the image above hints, this is not to say that absolutely nothing has changed…

In his article, “After Arnold: Narratives of the Posthuman Cinema”, Roger Beebe discusses the gradual death of the action hero at the hands of his tenacious nemesis, the digital morph (AKA the T-1000 from Terminator 2, who Beebe describes as the film’s “effective and affective center of interest and pleasure” [170]). T-1000 and his various successors and predecessors unsettled the once stable notion that wholly real human beings were the primary draw for moviegoing audiences. As Beebe reaffirms, “It is not the humanly embodied Patrick but rather the T-1000 (i.e., the morph and morphing technology) that is the center of interest in T2” (169). T2 can thereby be understood as just one out of many seminal moments in cinematic history that recur every now and then, if only to momentarily rekindle our latent anxieties about obsolete actors.

Looking toward another one of these seminal moments in Jurassic Park, Beebe notes the following:

“Jurassic Park (or, more properly, nearly a billion dollars in international box office receipts) shocked Hollywood into the realization that a blockbuster need not be either a star vehicle or even a narrative centered on the plights and adventures of a single human subject [...] when we return to Jurassic Park, we simply want to see more of the computergraphic dinosaurs” (171-172).

However, similar to the case of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Jurassic Park may have been revolutionary but it didn’t turn out to be a devastating blow to actors everywhere. It is certainly true that both films showcase the allure of digital cinema, wherein actors are not always the primary attraction (rather, we have: prehistoric beasts, spectral aliens, and Uncanny humans being brought to ‘life’). However, that doesn’t mean that either film totally rejects the importance of an actual, human element. Thus, while Sam Neil may not be responsible for Jurassic Park‘s record-breaking revenue, he and a variety of other actors were nonetheless integral to the film. That is, I think it is fair to say that a significant part of the film’s attraction was based on the collision between dinosaurs and man. As fantastic as the former may have looked, the film wouldn’t have been quite as exciting without its motley crew of disposable humans. This is a trend that is still continuing today, ensuring that human actors remain consistently relevant and alluring… even if they happen to be located within primarily digital expanses every once and a while (the latest example of this being the forthcoming Avatar). And when it comes to wholly synthetic ‘realities’ like that of Final Fantasy, wherein live-action actors are pretty much nonexistent (visually), the importance of high-profile voice actors ensures that a link to actual people is nonetheless maintained.

As for the practical benefits associated with replacing a costly star-system with a digital ersatz, they seem dubious at best. Not only is it highly doubtful that the public would want to wholly relinquish their fascination with a good, ‘old-fashioned’ performance, the cost-effectiveness of such an actor-less scenario is fraught with flaws. As Bebee notes:

“One of the more obvious of these dystopian aspects of the posthuman is that the shift away from the 1980s star system may simply represent Hollywood’s attempt to overcome its reliance on the troublesome human labor of stars. (Indeed, much of the panic over the use of computergraphic technologies seems to center on this possibility of the succession of actors and acting). Of course, this strategy has already begun to fail as, ironically, a number of ‘star animators’ have emerged who require the same costly investment in human labor as the action heroes that they helped to displace” (173).

Having considered the resilience of the human actor, I’m thinking that digital cinema is best understood as a partnership between actors and synthetic creations (rather than a straight-up, or inevitable, usurpation of the former by the latter). Even when it comes to those films dealing with exclusively synthetic ‘realities’, actors aren’t always demoted to voice-acting. As an example, consider the possibilities of Contour, a semi-recent step forward in motion capture technology developed by former-Apple engineer Steve Perlman (its possibilities and advantages are discussed in this article). The process involves applying a generous amount of phosphorescent powder onto actors’ faces, and then putting them before a couple of cameras that attend to the various details and nuances of their appearance. Then, as the article explains, “the captured images are transmitted to an array of computers that reassemble the three-dimensional shapes of the glowing areas”. This is the kind of technology that allowed Angelina Jolie to not only voice a digital character in Beowulf (Grendel’s mother) but also end up informing her look (however, a marker-based method of motion capture was used for that particular film). In other words, even if there were to be a sudden dearth of films oriented around live-action footage, actors seem to have already resiliently ingratiated themselves with the possibilities of digital cinema.

Thus, perhaps we can rest easy when it comes to our concerns regarding actors and labour vis-à-vis digital media (for now). However, that’s not to say that there aren’t a variety of other interesting issues related to digital cinema that are still worth diving into. This brings me to the second concern of my post, the Uncanny Valley, and its relation to the actress pictured above, Emily O’Brien. On one hand, she represents the adaptability that I have been talking about, wherein actors take digital cinema for the accommodating business opportunity that it is rather than some immovable obstacle. On the other hand, she also relates to a lot of interesting questions regarding the seeming insurmountability of the Uncanny Valley. Allow the following video to introduce her (or, moreso, her digital doppleganger), Image Metrics, and how the folks behind the company were able to capture her digital likeness without resorting to the old-school methods of powder or face markers:

Note the transition at the 1:30 mark, wherein the real Emily O’Brien is briefly revealed. When this video first hit the net a while back, I remember a lot of unchecked hype surrounding it. There was a healthy dose of doubt and cynicism, of course, but this video was treated by many as a significant blow against that seemingly indomitable force, the Uncanny Valley. For instance, check out this article and the exuberant reactions therein: “I’m one of the toughest critics of face capture, and even I have to admit, these guys have nailed it. This is the first virtual human animated sequence that completely bypasses all my subconscious warnings. I get the feeling of Emily as a person. All the subtlety is there. This is no hype job, it’s the real thing.” Really? It’s undeniably impressive and all but it’s certainly not perfect. Admittedly, the video I linked to in the caption underneath the image up-top really showcases the amount of detail Image Metrics was able to create. It was evidently a pain-staking process, performance analysis and all (i.e., analyzing Emily’s face to see how it moves and changes). It is all pretty astounding and their techniques are commendably innovative. But I’m still left feeling that something, unfortunately, falls short. A testament to the tenacity of the Uncanny Valley obstacle, perhaps.

I find that the video of Emily recalls the lesson learned from Michael Najjar‘s series of photographs (titled “Nexus Project Part 1″) that Joe introduced to us last class. Having edited their eyes, Najjar’s photographed subjects straddle that fine line between the real and the synthetic (wherein the eyes suddenly become a gateway to keenly felt eeriness, rather than the soul). While Digi-Emily’s eyes aren’t quite as vacuous as Najjar’s disconcerting creations, something about them seems nonetheless artificial and grafted on. A lot of Emily’s facial expressions were awkwardly rendered at times, as well. It’s pretty good, and I know that Image Metric was able to capture places (lips, tongue, teeth, etc.) with more finesse than prior modes of motion-capture, but the general awkwardness of the animation is still there.

Most of the problems I’m noticing with Emily’s video more or less cropped up in Final Fantasy, as well. While Final Fantasy looked arguably better than Emily’s digital clone at times, the film more often mirrored her off-putting, stilted quality. This NYTimes article notes a similar problem in regards to Beowulf, claiming that it is impossible to watch the film “without sensing that the ‘actors’ are being pushed around by invisible forces, not living and breathing on their own”. That would serve as an astute description of Final Fantasy as well, as I believe the film falls victim to the second Uncanny Valley pitfall mentioned during Tuesday’s class: mismatch of cue realism. This refers to an instance where digital characters fail to compel us because of the dissonance between the rich detail of their appearance (although there are problems there, too) and the awkwardness of their movements. Indeed, it often felt as if the attempts at natural movement and overall verisimilitude were more foregrounded than those intermittent instances where something actually seemed authentic. Dr. Sid ended up impressing me the most (although he wasn’t without his problems) — I attribute this partially to Donald Sutherland’s voice acting, and the fact that he, unlike Aki, wasn’t conspiculously clean and virtually free of any nuance or facial blemishes. In regards to this last point, I think Roger Ebert put it best in his review:

“Not for an instant do we believe that Dr. Aki Ross, the heroine, is a real human. But we concede she is lifelike, which is the whole point. She has an eerie presence that is at once subtly unreal and yet convincing. [...] The first closeup of her face and eyes is startling because the filmmakers are not afraid to give us a good, long look–they dare us not to admire their craft. If Aki is not as real as a human actress, she is about as real as a Playmate who has been retouched to a glossy perfection.“

Sounds about right to me. This is, of course, a problem shared by entirely synthetic, ‘original’ characters like Aki and those, like Emily, who are definitely informed by specific people (then again, Aki’s look may also be based on a specific person or several, I’m not sure). It seems that, while actors are not on their way to becoming obsolete, the technology that is bringing them into the digital realm still leaves something to be desired. Yet, perhaps the incessant comparisons to the real world only serve to obscure the possibilities already provided by our digital image-making technologies. As Ebert notes in his review: “Maybe someday I’ll actually be fooled by a computer-generated actor (but I doubt it). The point anyway is not to replace actors and the real world, but to transcend them–to penetrate into a new creative space based primarily on images and ideas.” The implication here is that we can move beyond exhausting, perpetual comparisons between the world we know and its synthetic counterparts. Such comparisons may be entirely futile exercises that keep us from enjoying the fascination, visual richness and creativity already awaiting us in the Uncanny Valley. Then again, it’s typical of human nature to tenaciously strive toward such ideals. Even if our continued attempts happen to be repeatedly beset by the dissonance between that which is real and that which can’t help but subtly betray its own artifice.

Works Cited:

Beebe, Roger. “After Arnold: Narratives of the Posthuman Cinema”. Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. Ed. Sobchack, Vivian. Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2000. 159-182.

A New Coat of Paint October 24, 2009

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Does the example of augmented reality (AR) pictured above seem farfetched to you? While the image itself may be a fake (you can find it and other similar images here), the concept behind it is pretty much feasible. In fact, the concept of AR seems to have set itself apart from the arguably platonic ideals associated with virtual reality by virtue of its very feasibility. If the prospect of VR has lost most of its credibility in a sea of rhetoric that may never substantiate itself, AR has aimed a little closer to the here and now. As Sconce’s warning from a few week’s back indicated, perhaps it’s worthwhile to momentarily unmoor ourselves from vapory speculation and consider the transformations that are already taking place today.

For instance, consider Layar. It’s an augmented reality browser that can be downloaded onto your cellphone (a variety of similar applications are available for the iPhone, as well):

This application definitely recalls the following bit from Lev Manovich’s “The Poetics of Augmented Space”:

“A tourist with AR glasses that overlay dynamically changing information about the sites in the city onto her visual field. In this new iteration, AR becomes conceptually similar to wireless location services. The idea shared by both is that when the user is in the vicinty of objects, buildings, or people, the information about them is delivered to the user—but in cell-space it is displayed on a cell phone or personal digital assitant (PDA), in AR it is laid over the user’s visual field” (79).

Given the existence of an application like Layar, perhaps we aren’t that far away from further, advanced manifestations of AR. One of the news blogs posting about Layar made special note of the fact that a fictional concept was finally becoming a reality (perhaps they were accustomed to VR musings that never leave the realm of abstract theories). This speaks to the possibility that, when it comes to AR, the gap between conceptual promises and their realization may be significantly smaller than that of VR. Submerging ourselves into a convincing, synthetic world certainly seems like more difficult a task than increasing AR’s presence.

Perhaps it is this very realization that accounts for the change Manovich notes in the following quote: “The demise of popularity of VR in mass media and the slow but steady rise in AR-related research in the last five years is one example of how the augmented space paradigm is taking over the virtual space paradigm” (79). While even the most hyperbolic VR ideals are certainly fascinating and worthy of consideration, their ostensible unattainability may account for the surge in AR research. Then again, it might have less to do with issues of feasibility and more to do with preference. Elaborating on the differences between AR and VR, Manovich notes:

“A typical VR system presents a user with a virtual space that has nothing to do with the immediate physical space of the user: in contrast, a typical AR system adds the information directly related to this immediate physical space [...] the display adds to your overall phenomenological experience but it does not take over. Thus, it all depends on how we understand the idea of addition: we may add additional information to our experiences—or we may add an altogether different experience” (79).

Thus, AR refers to a technologically mediated relationship with our reality that does not efface that reality. Whereas VR offers the murky—yet intriguing—possibility of escaping from that reality all together. Given that the prospect of such virtual escapism is usually wrapped up in ambivalence whenever it is discussed, perhaps the more pronounced presence of augmented space is indicative of our true desires. We don’t really want to escape reality, we just want to make it a little more interesting (thus, like the Kindle, AR tech is being used to give our increasingly ‘archaic’ books a digital facelift). This is not to say that the dream of bodily liberation is an ideal that we never really wanted, but that the implications of such an ideal are always going to be tempered by some pragmatic dissent. The popularity of AR may thereby be symptomatic of the fact that not all of us are quite so eager to jettison the body and fly forward into brave new (digital) worlds. AR offers a much more agreeable, yet nonetheless exciting, alternative insofar as it is a seemingly friendly compromise that A) isn’t bound by the frustratingly fanciful dreams of VR discourse, and B) refuses to totally eclipse a reality that we, more or less, quite enjoy (or are at least accustomed to).

However, while one of the principal charms of AR may be that it does not imply a disconcerting break from reality, that’s not to say that the transformations it delivers won’t end up being a point of concern for some. In fact, just yesterday the Montreal Gazette posted an article focusing on the prospect of AR that hints at some of its potential excesses and arguable misuses. Consider the following:

“Its proponents predict it will change everything, from education (point your camera at a church and read its history) to games (hunt zombies walking around in your house) to advertising (see the day’s sales when you aim your camera at a store) to training (gaze at the tangled bowels of an airplane engine and an animated screwdriver shows the part that needs to be replaced). Expect to hear a lot about it next year, observers say, as cellphones increase in sophistication and computing power, and as advertisers rush to jump in the newest trend in consumer technology.“

While the concept of AR has some built-in temperance (insofar as it doesn’t seek to entirely replace our reality with virtual spaces), it seems that it is nonetheless susceptible to appropriation by techno-fanatics who want to explore its every possibility. Considering this from a position of technological ambivalence, this might mean that while the concept of AR promises us that the world isn’t going to go anywhere, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will remain recognizable. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if doomsayers were already readying their cries of dissent. Some may be justifiably worried that the world we know and love will slowly change — turning itself into some sort of digital palimpsest where the once familair vestiges of reality become hazier and hazier. Then again, this is probably an extreme way of looking at things. Probably.

Regardless of the credibility of such pessimistic views, the fact remains that AR tech is (at least partially) being propelled by a voracious, profit-oriented mentality. It’s important to consider who is pulling the virtual strings whenever new and exciting technology comes along. After all, the last bolded bit in the quote above refers to AR as “the newest trend in consumer technology”. Of course, this recalls Manovich’s discussion of Rem Koolhaas and “‘brandscaping—promoting the brand by creating new spaces: ‘Brandscaping is the hot issue. The site at which goods are promoted has to reinvent itself by developing unique and unmistakable qualities‘” (89). Thus, insatiability, one of the themes from my last blog post, also comes to mind here. We generally aren’t fond of stasis and we thrive on new and exciting stimuli. Thus, AR tech is simply another way of ensuring that our products and our world doesn’t get stale. Or, as Manovich so astutely puts it:

“The space that symbolizes the information age is not a symmetrical and ornamental space of traditional architecture [....] rather, it is space whose shapes are inherently mutable, and whose soft contours act as a metaphor for the key quality of computer-driven representations and systems: variability” (88).

In other words, the dynamic nature of AR’s stimuli can be read as yet another means of combating the awful prospect of stagnation. The fact that commercial interests have co-opted these means and recognized an undercurrent of insatiability in consumers shouldn’t be all that surprising. As the philosophy that Manovich cites declares, “forget the goods, sell thrilling experience to the people” (90). The fact that the goods themselves aren’t sufficiently alluring anymore, but have instead become one component of a far more complex and alluring experience, only further evinces that insatiability. Consider this in relation to the following from the Gazette article:

“ABI Research predicts that revenue from AR will grow from $6 million (US) last year 2008 to more than $350 million (US) in 2014. The growth will come largely as advertisers pay software developers to create apps that promote a brand in some way. Lego is already doing this. At some stores in the US, a buyer can pick up a Lego box, point it at a screen, and see an animation of the assembled toy.”

Apparently kids were dissatisfied with the old method of picking up a Lego box and assembling it themselves. Reinvention seems to be the name of the game, and AR is the latest way of getting it done. The variability that Manovich claims is an integral aspect of AR aligns itself perfectly with the idea that we have tacitly demanded that the world remain in flux. Stasis is boring. With that in mind, consider this next bit from the Gazette article:

“When asked if AR is simply another hype like VR once was, its proponents are quick to swear to its long-term viability. ‘When you walk down the street it’s usually pretty boring,’ said Ori Inbar, founder of AR game maker Ogmento in New York City. In fact, he entered the field so he could find a way to blend his kids’ love of the computer screen with the outside world. ‘With AR, everything around you comes to life. You can be part of a story that you experience when you’re doing everyday tasks,’ he said.”

While Inbar’s comments certainly reflect this desire for flux and freshness, his enthusiasm is slightly infectious and understandable. There is an optimistic side to all this, after all. For one, applications like Layar and its inevitable successors will likely prove to be highly practical. Secondly, the idea that the physical world is becoming a virtual canvas of sorts that grants audiences a new level of participation and empowerment is certainly exciting (i.e., the user-controlled robotic searchlights in Mexico City that Manovich mentions on pg.87). However, there is also the question of who might dominate this canvas, or who we might have to share it with. As the Gazette’s article notes, corporations are already eager to utilize AR as a new trend in “consumer technology”. It might only be a short while before those same corporations use AR to flood our perspective with a whole new surfeit of annoyingly dynamic stimuli that more intensely demand our attention…

…Tom Cruise certainly doesn’t seem to be enjoying that scenario. While this clip (and this one, wherein his character enters a futuristic and excessively-ingratiating Gap store) isn’t necessarily reflective of the here and now, the partnership between commercial interests and AR tech makes it seem somewhat plausible. Perhaps one day Minority Report‘s take on futuristic advertising will be retroactively acknowledged for its prescience and these clips, like the image at the top of this post, will reflect concepts that are not only feasible but already here. After all, Manovich seems to be describing a similar scenario when he discusses the collision between surveillance and assistance, wherein “affective computing [...] take a more active role in assisting the user than the standard graphical user interface. By tracking the user—her mood, her pattern of work, her focus of attention, her interests, and so on—these interfaces acquire information that they use to help the user with their tasks and automate them” (77). Perhaps AR will usher us into a Minority Report-esque age where dynamic advertisements recognize us, and we can thereby no longer blithely ignore garish billboards or zap past annoying commercials.

Thus, as a virtual blanket of dynamic stimuli is slowly being laid over our physical world, I’m left wondering who will gain the most from these changes. As Manovich notes, “today’s electronic dynamic interactive displays make it possible for these messages to change continuously and to be the space of contestation and dialog, thus functioning as the material manifestation of the often invisible sphere” (87). In other words, perhaps the virtual canvas of multi-media information that AR is providing will set up an interesting tension between populist and other (i.e., commercial) interests. The fact that Koolhaas snuck a subtle criticism of consumer culture into his design for the Prada store (juxtaposing screens and actual clothes to ironically refer “to what everybody today knows: we buy objects not for themselves but in order to emulate the certain images and narratives presented by the advertisement of these objects” [89]) may be indicative of the fact that this new technology is not going to result in simple commercial co-optation.

Perhaps Manovich is correct in foreseeing an intriguing and complex dialogue, wherein the dynamism and possibilities AR provides are exploited and utilized by a variety of interests, whereby something other than the rote encouragement of sales will make its way out onto the canvas.

Technology-Addled Minds October 17, 2009

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Our reliance on technology in terms of work and recreation was one of the suggested topics presented during last Tuesday’s class. Given how prevalent technology has become, I feel like most of us, whether we want to admit it or not, do find our various devices of choice pretty essential (even Obama had trouble curbing his Blackberry addiction after he was elected). But while we enjoy working, communicating, and relaxing via technology, there’s obviously more than a couple compelling reasons to check our potential dependencies.

It’s certainly gotten to the point where it’s almost banal to note that the screen itself has become ubiquitous. That observation seems to have entered the realm of mundane facts a long time ago. We’re in front of screens when we need to do school work, when we need to communicate, when we feel like being creative, when we want to watch the latest episode of our favorite TV show, etc. If we let it, technology can help fill up our day quite easily.

This also means that old methods of getting down to work and recreation just don’t cut it anymore. For instance, with the soaring popularity of Amazon’s Kindle, the tactile allure of traditional (AKA “old”) media like books just won’t hold the same value for some. It’s cost-effective, sidesteps the cutting down of trees, eliminates the necessity for storage and distribution, and it stops you from having to worry about overloaded bookshelves or strained backpacks. On the other hand, its popularization (which will inevitably increase, what with rumours stating that Apple is interested in joining in on the craze) means that we have yet another screen to add to our already prodigious pile. Thus, I find myself returning to a question that most of these blog entries have been pushing me towards: is this a good thing? As the following blurb from a New Yorker article focusing on the Kindle indicates, every supposed upside comes with a downside:

A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

We do seem to prefer focusing on the upsides instead of the pesky downsides when it comes to our gadgetry. Yet, consider this brief article from Wired.com and the real-life example it presents: a physician who spends most of her workday interacting with electronic health records, only to return home and fill her down time with e-mails, Google Chat, blogs, video-game consoles, downloaded TV shows, and, of course, Facebook. In other words, the article may be right in noting that TheOnion’s recent headline (“90 percent of waking hours spent looking at glowing rectangles“) was an instance of their satiric humor hitting particularly close to reality.

Tracking down different views on this topic across the net, I came across The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, an inquiry into the woes of technological advancement written by Maggie Jackson. From what I gather, she believes an increased inability to focus is a direct result of our technology-tethered lives. The following blurb, taken from a review of the book, highlights some of her insights:

Addicted to instant-click access, we expect knowledge to come in quick fixes and easily digestible info-bits, trading depth and nuance for bullet points and sound bites– some books get taken off school reading lists if they don’t make for good PowerPoint presentations, Jackson notes– and swapping sustained thought and close attention for the shallow skimming and skipping encouraged by our online reading habits. The result, Jackson warns, is that “we are losing our capacity to create and preserve wisdom and slipping toward a time of ignorance that is paradoxically born amid an abundance of information and connectivity” (16).

Jackson’s concerns certainly recall Sconce’s comments about the acceleration of work from last week while also pointing toward the troubling (but not so shocking) possibility that our reliance on technology may be hurting us as much as it is helping us. Perhaps this isn’t something that most people want to spend too much thinking about, seeing as technology has found itself an indelible home in most of our lives. Even so, the increased concern over how our minds have been affected by our reliance on technology is definitely worth attending to.

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is a really great article to peruse if you’re interested in this topic. This is not only because it compliments Jackson’s apprehensions but because he offers himself as an example of the modern, technology-addled mind. Consider his confession:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

If we follow the teleological argument that says technology will only get bigger, better and faster, then we can only expect these subtle changes to our mind to become all the more evident. That’s a scary thought, mostly because the problems that Carr is discussing are troubling enough. Thus, we should probably consider what exactly is happening to our minds as technology invades both work (wherein traditional office meetings suddenly become extinct thanks to programs such as Skype) and the home. This next blurb from Carr’s sheds more light on this issue:

“The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.”

In other words (and once again echoing Sconce and the others from last week), work isn’t quite what it used to be… but that doesn’t mean it’s any better. This quote is particularly interesting because it points to the actual allure of technology as well as the mentality that propels it forward: insatiability. After all, it seems a touch disingenuous to say that the progress of technology is all about hurtling us forward toward some far-off moment of satisfaction. Humans beings are difficult creatures to sate and, naturally, technology’s functions and progress will be informed by this fact. This is exactly why the Internet – ever updating, always evolving and offering new possibilities, is so damn popular. There’s no end goal, no satisfiable conclusion. As Joe mentioned in class, even Facebook just might be going the way of the dinosaur as people become increasingly bored by what was once their favorite social networking website. We may be reliant on technology, but we also expect it to impress us every now and then. It has to stay fresh and fast. Carr astutely observes and elaborates on this very point in relation to the Internet:

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

The rapidly accessible information and stimuli made available through technology has trained our minds to want what we want when we want it. The prospect of being able to complete our work faster (and arguably more thoroughly) is so alluring that some of us are bound to only perfunctorily consider the possible downsides. And with the uprise of services and features like the excessively pithy Twitter or the captions at the bottom of newscasts, perhaps we’re less keen on mulling over information so much as receiving and apprehending it as quickly as possible before moving on to the next juicy bit of stimulus.

Seeing as I find this to be an particularly fascinating topic, I can’t help but return to one more excerpt from Carr’s article. Especially since Carr’s statement recalls our discussion regarding the definition of technology — that is, whether we we should define it broadly (going all the way back to the caveman and his club; technology as tools) or categorically (electronic devices only). With that in mind, consider the following:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

This is an interesting way of considering any technology that falls under the broader definition. It indicates that even before we started feeling all ambivalent about our electronic technology, our old-school devices were already insidiously working away at our minds and shaping our outlooks. While a good bit of Mischa’s “Exit Meat: Digital Bodies In A Virtual World” considers the idea of physical changes to the body (or the outright abandonment of the body), it’s interesting to consider the idea that our reliance on technology is already changing our minds more subtly. These type of changes may not be visible or obvious but may nevertheless be operating under the surface.

And while the criticism that claims we are living in a pernicious age of distractions isn’t exactly a new one, it will inevitably become even more valid as time goes on. With technology propelling itself forward towards new heights and forms, all while stealthily transforming our minds, we can only expect such concerns to become all the more pronounced.

All Play And No Work… October 10, 2009

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“For those who herald cyberspace as the fulfillment of homo ludens, as the new sphere of the playful intellect, the disappearance of homo faber is considered an accomplished fact; postwork is taken as a given of the contemporary world” (Stanley Aronowitz, 137).

As technology increasingly transforms our conception of work, are we finding ourselves on the cusp of a new and more leisurely state of existence? Does the promise of a techno-utopia, wherein work is either made significantly easier or just outright eliminated, hold any weight? Maybe not. Far from asserting technology’s role as a force capable of liberating us from menial drudgery and all of our niggling problems, this week’s readings seemed more interested in scrutinizing, questioning and deflating the pieties surrounding technological progress.

Consider the following quote from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars: “They continued working on the habitats and talking through most of that night, too excited to fall asleep” (100).

Judging Red Mars based solely on these type of quotes might lead one to think that Robinson portrayed the expedition to Mars a little too lightly. After all, there isn’t a lot of talk about missing home, family, friends or any of the luxuries of terrestrial life anywhere in the assigned excerpt. The crew also apparently has everything they need, even if most of it happens to be simulated (i.e., “the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same)” [101]). Indeed, at first glance, this seems like a suspiciously utopian conception of a future where technology is very much our friend and we’re perhaps not that far away from the decadent leisure and automation pictured in the Wall-E posters above.

Of course, Robinson does temper this sense of optimism and adventure. Consider the following example: “Nadia and Samantha’s miner was more stubborn. In the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatigue” (104).

Apparently, the same technology that allowed a crew to travel to Mars and begin cultivating the land hasn’t quite toned down the drudgery of work — obstacles and annoyances still abound. As far as Red Mars is concerned, human beings and technology actually haven’t converged comfortably yet. Instead, the former seems to view the latter as a suspect and occasionally inept ally (see bottom of 102-103 for another example). But… “’That’s life on Mars’” (104).

That resigned acceptance of technology’s limitations seems to speak to the idea that we shouldn’t place too much faith in the rhetoric of improvement surrounding technology. After all, there’s still an excessive amount of demanding labour going on in Red Mars — technology certainly isn’t pictured as a wholly liberating force. This fits in quite well with Jeffrey Sconce’s comment in “Tulip Theory”, wherein he emphasizes that technology can just as easily make problems as solve them:

“There has been much written about how computers change the act of writing itself, but if we were to boil this trend down for its impact on academic culture, we might consider if the ease of writing afforded by the computer is countered by a lack (or at least an acceleration) of critical reflection […] it may mean, in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, more and more of us will realize faster and faster that, in the end, we have less and less to say” (185-186).

Thus, whether technology is busy insidiously changing the way academics write and do research in ‘the real world’ or aggravating the tolerant crew of Red Mars, it’s not always given the kindest consideration. And maybe this is for good reason. Perhaps we need to be persistently reminded (and across different media, no less) that unchecked faith in the prowess of technology isn’t necessarily the best position to assume. After all, the possibility that technology will utterly subsume those occupations once dependent on human skill is still a significant source of anxiety for some. And while many might interpret this as a means towards ushering in a much needed era of leisure and self discovery, Aronowitz posits a different view wherein such an era would require the purging of arguably essential human qualities:

“We can rejoice at the possibility that humankind is being liberated from the oppressions of tradition, even of the newly eclipsed mechanical era. These include drudgery, boredom, repetitive mind-numbering operations, and many of the dangers of the old industrial factory. But computerization also entails the passing of a certain type of skill, that associated with the close coordination of feeling and reason, of intuition and calculation” (142).

Keeping in line with the aforementioned readings, Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina reaches similarly ambivalent conclusions.

Consider one of its primary tensions – whether Mitchell can better serve the world as a public servant or by embracing his unique abilities. Sconce’s article focuses on a similar tension, albeit transposed onto the obviously different context of academia. The questions these texts (along with Aronowitz’s) face remain fundamentally similar. Should we enthusiastically embrace new technologies or find solace in the comforts of tradition? Taken in this light, perhaps Mitchell’s rejection of his super powers is meant to encourage (or reflect?) a general hesitancy within society that might stall the excesses of the technological imperative. Of course, Ex Machina could just as easily be read as a strong proponent of the vapory technological utopias that the other readings questioned to varying extents. Even so, judging from the first volume alone, I have the sense that Ex Machina isn’t a series that is going to resolutely situate itself on one side of the fence or the other.

What’s particularly interesting about the series is that Mitchell’s dilemma isn’t entirely removed from reality. Vaughan may be encouraging his readership to consider the benefits and detriments associated with an increasingly plugged-in universe. Do we embrace the uncertainties of a new technological world — wherein our much lauded vaporware slowly materializes into something we may not have anticipated — or should we moor ourselves in the safe conventionality of the here and now? If we choose the latter, we might risk squandering an opportunity to let technology do all the heavy lifting for us, thereby liberating us into an unknown future. As Aronowitz notes, “the freeing of labor from routine and back-breaking labor in order to free subjective time” just might remedy the “estrangement of humans from their worlds” (137). Or perhaps the link that technology is threatening — the “coordination of feeling and reason, of intuition and calculation” (142) that Aronowitz associates with labour — should instead be safeguarded. After all, if technology continues to subsume a vast array of occupations — lines of work that some people might rely on for their conception of identity or self-worth — it’s easy to picture an imminent crisis.

As the presence of technology becomes more and more pronounced, it might be best to pause a little before wiring ourselves in deeper. After all, it’s certainly fortuitous that a guy who (presumably) has a decent sense of right and wrong got the techno-super powers in Ex Machina. This of course begs the question, what would someone else do with Mitchell’s abilities? Or, taking it one step further, what if the entire world could lay claim to such a communion with technology? As an ostensibly prescient work, one of the more disconcerting implications of Ex Machina is that its not-so-farfetched concept might one day become a reality. Perhaps we are already, slowly but surely, undergoing a Mitchell Hundred-like synthesis with technology that might one day culminate in easy control over all our myriad devices and networks. Considering our sense of security and our lives are increasingly bound up with technology, that doesn’t seem like the soundest prospect. In other words, the “gleaming Tomorrowlands of the techno-utopians” (Sconce, 189) just might be considerably murkier than advertised.

So, what does all this criticism, uncertainty and disillusionment amount to? If there is a moral that would sufficiently unite this week’s readings, it may have to something to do with the idea that a little hesitation just might be preferable to impetuously abandoning that which is allegedly archaic for the dubious promise of that which is new, shiny and alluring.

The Virtual You October 2, 2009

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Is the body a piece of baggage we secretly (or even openly) want to dispose of? This week’s readings touch on this idea to varying extents. What’s behind the need to jettison the flesh and move onto something (or anything) else and is this desire actually a good thing? Consider the following snippet from David Bell’s “Identities In Cyberculture”:

If we type ourselves into cyberspace, the argument goes, we can make and remake who we are endlessly, liberated from the ‘meat’ of our RL bodies and all the identity-markers they carry. (116)

Virtual realities and the highly customizable avatars therein could thereby be understood as being yet another step towards satisfying a long existent desire for malleable identities.

More than just being about the opportunity to act differently within anonymous circumstances, there also seems to be a great emphasis placed on cosmetic alterations when it comes to these virtual worlds (as manifested in games, films, and literature). Consider Bruce Willis’ lurid blonde hair in Surrogates or Jobe’s sudden sex appeal in The Lawnmower Man. Both of these films contribute to the discourse around virtual reality by implying that it’s at least partially about perfecting ourselves. The poster for Surrogates echoes this idea. This kind of ties into the fact that Tom’s (played by Bruce Willis) wife’s surrogate, and her excessively pristine/Uncanny Valley look, kept reminding me of botox laden celebrities. Perhaps you could say both methods (adopting a surrogate, opting for plastic surgery) are marked by the same vanity, artificiality and necessary self deception. Perhaps the impulse to purge/demote our bodily baggage has a little to do with trying to perfect one’s look. In that respect, consider the following blurb from this article:

The seven million or so inhabitants of Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, have spent millions of dollars on digital makeovers, clothing and other goods and services for their avatars.

That’s a great deal of money to spend on outfitting avatars, especially since the ones you can make in Second Life aren’t exactly the most realistic (see below). People are obviously willing to adopt a little willful disavowal when it comes to enjoying their secondary lives, though. It’s not quite real (yet), but it’s good enough. Perhaps this means there is a necessarily deceptive bottom line to most of these types of virtual excursions. After all, while these virtual worlds could grant someone the opportunity to finally express the real person that has been waiting inside of them, it could just as easily turn into one big masquerade.

The fascination with the prospect of virtual reality may also have something do with how it might be able to remedy that niggling gap between someone’s conception of themselves and who they actually are. Virtual worlds like that of Second Life or World Of Warcraft offer people an opportunity to ‘realize’ those dreams, fantasies, aspirations, or delusions (albeit virtually). But are the possibilities really that boundless? Does virtual reality promise that blank of a canvas? Consider the following from Bell’s article:

some critics have suggested that computer technology represents yet another space of exclusion or domination for women [...] At the same time, the possibilities of identity-play already signalled in this chapter mean for some theorists that gender will cease to carry its RL ideological loadings in cyberspace, or might cease to matter or even exist there. (122)

The idea that virtual reality can reinforce dominant power structures just as easily as it can facilitate change is something Anne Balsamo and Katherine Hayles discussed as well. Consider the following from Balsamo’s “The Virtual Body In Cyberspace”:

Fictional accounts of cyberspace play out the fantasy of casting off the body as an obsolete piece of meat, but, not surprisingly, these fictions do no eradicate body-based systems of differentiation and domination (128).

Or, as Hayles notes in “The Seductions of Cyberspace”:

issues of class, race, and gender are likely to be replayed in a different key, in which the mark of privilege is access to cyborg modifications. (310)

In other words, life outside of the flesh isn’t guaranteed to be an utopian escape from all our earthly and fleshy troubles. Regardless of technological advancements, the burdensome mores of life in the real world may just keep on following us into our virtual oases. Then again, I don’t want to sound totally pessimistic about the possibilities of VR… I’m just pretty ambivalent about the whole prospect. Maybe Surrogates‘ blunt disapproval of life via proxy (as well as its championing of actual, tactile connection) rubbed off on me. There’s a good part in Bell’s article that reflects the kind of anxiety most people probably feel when it comes to accepting and/or taking the plunge into virtuality (despite most of us already having one foot in the door):

a male psychiatrist masqueraded on-line as a disabled woman, and built up a close circle of online friends. When his conscience got the better of him, he decided to ‘kill off’ his online persona, ‘Julie’, and then came clean about the whole incident. Those who had befriended ‘Julie’ felt bitterly betrayed by the deception. (126)

While that’s somewhat of a tame example, it sums up the troubling contingencies of virtual worlds pretty well. While this type of deception may be exciting or cathartic for the person doing the masquerading, it’s a little more bothersome for the people who are used to having a surer sense of who they are interacting with. Surrogates certainly played this anxiety up when it revealed that the real person hiding behind a nubile, young girl might just be an excessively corpulent, grown man. That’s where I found the unsettling quality of Surrogates‘ universe to be most pointedly expressed, at least.

As a final note, I thought I’d post a few pictures from this slide-show showcasing various people and their virtual counterparts (as they exist across various game worlds, not just Second Life):

Looking at these, I’m thinking that perhaps it’s all just harmless fun and games. Maybe the ambivalent (or downright opposed) stance that most films assume when it comes to technology has influenced me too much. There’s obviously an element of fun and creativity here that’s easy to apprehend. Or are we actually just a few updates away from unshackling the untold (and ostensibly dangerous) potential of the mind, thereby allowing identities to become all the more fluid and capricious? That could mean giving people the opportunity to fully embrace/reveal their inner selves, but it might also mean having to continually struggle with the troubling dissonance between who we really are (or were) and who we pretend to be.

Fauxtographic Dilemma September 25, 2009

Posted by Matt in Uncategorized.
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In his article, “An Introduction to Visual Culture”, Nicholas Mirzoeff keeps returning to the idea that, in today’s visually saturated world, the image may no longer be as reliable as it was once was. I think that this unreliability has probably gotten a lot worse since Mizoeff wrote his article. It definitely still seems like—despite our ability to withstand so much visual stimuli on a daily basis—we can never be quite sure that what we are seeing is the ‘real deal’. Or, as Mirzoeff himself puts it, “the visualization of everyday life does not mean that we necessarily know what it is that we are seeing” (2).

He later goes on to note that “the filmed or photographic image no longer indexes reality because everyone knows they can be undetectably manipulated by computers” (8). He also indicts the pixelated image near the end of his article, noting that it is “too contested and contradictory a medium to be sublime [...] Unlike photography and film which attested to the necessary presence of some exterior reality, the pixelated image reminds us of its necessary artificiality and absence” (30).

The fact that the manipulability of images has increased exponentially over the years likely isn’t going to be news for anyone, but I nonetheless think that this is one of the more relevant (and interesting) issues that Mirzoeff touches on. After all, the unreliability of images is still very much a factor today. And apprehending the truth (or fiction) of an image can still be somewhat of a challenge. Especially since the pixelated image seems to have (in some cases, at least) lost that blatant artificiality that Mizroef laments, thereby making the image all the more subtly unreliable. For example, images can now be doctored with a lot more finesse than ten years ago. Of course, the viewer is expected to keep up by staying extra vigilant and skeptical in light of these advances. But while we’d like to claim that we always know a fake when we see one, we aren’t quite that infallible (yet). In fact, there seems to be an interesting tension at work within visual culture. There are those using their ingenuity (and some advanced tools) to dupe others for all kinds of reasons, and then there’s the camp that is scrambling in its own way to suss out the frauds. Those who are a part of the latter camp end up having to accept the fact that while they may be able to frequently ascertain a fake, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are beyond getting fooled every now and then.

Consider this pretty infamous photograph, as well its less embellished alternative below:

The fact that the doctored image (the one that shows four missiles being fired) received so much publicity before its authenticity was even questioned just goes to show that we haven’t quite made it out of what Mirzoeff calls “the (post)modern destruction of reality” and we may not be totally adept at immediately recognizing “the collapse of reality in everyday life from the mass visual media” (17). As this article explains:

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

In other words, it seems clear that the once (allegedly) blatant artificiality of the pixelated image has made way for something a little more insidious and sophisticated. To our credit, it didn’t take that long before the first image of the missile test was treated to some closer scrutiny from viewers who knew all too well that “One photograph no longer shows the truth” (18). Even so, I find it interesting that while we can somewhat comfortably exist in a highly visual world (as Mirzoeff notes, “The hyper-stimulus of modern visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present day has been dedicated to trying to saturate the visual field, a process that continually fails as we learn to see and connect even faster” [5]), we still struggle a little bit when it comes to separating fact from fiction. Again, we are expected to remain critical of the visual stimuli we are bombarded with (either voluntarily or otherwise) but we’re not necessarily beyond being duped. The ‘reality’ of most images thereby remains an ostensible ‘fact’, necessarily elusive and not always easily guaranteed.

I came across this interesting interview between Errol Morris and Hany Farid (“a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography”) that I would recommend to anyone interested in this issue (the article that follows after the interview is really good, too). The following blurb particularly connects to what I have been talking about and is definitely worth a look:

ERROL MORRIS: But, as we become more and more sophisticated about images — about how images are processed — haven’t we become more sophisticated about detecting fraud? Photoshop manipulations are relatively easy to detect. They fool the eye, but they don’t necessarily fool the expert.

HANY FARID: The answer is: yes and no. It depends on the image source. So, if we have the raw files[8], if we have the original footage from someone’s digital camera, you can’t fool us anymore. We have enough technology today where, given the camera, the original images that came off the camera, we can tell if you’ve manipulated them. If, however, you are talking about an image that has been cropped and reduced and compressed and posted on the web, then we might be able to do it, but there’s no guarantee. The task is decidedly harder because a lot of information has been thrown away. You’ve compressed the image; you’ve resized it. This is why all the Loch Ness monster and ghost images are always so tiny and grainy, because then you can’t see the signs of tampering. With low-res images it’s much harder to detect a fake. Definitely, when we have a high-res original image, we are much better at it.

Farid goes on to admit that the Iranian missile image even fooled him (however briefly). Thus, if the visual experience is as important and ubiquitous as Mirzoeff suggests, then we may have to adopt a more astute understanding of the kind of manipulations that can fool even the best of experts. It seems that the responsibility that comes along with being a critical participant in such a visually saturated world involves arming yourself with an especially vigilant eye (and maybe some handy tools)… or otherwise remaining especially susceptible to all kinds of deception.

As a final aside, I think it’s interesting that this type of photo doctoring has a pretty long pedigree. I came across the following two images from a slideshow on ScientifcAmerican.com that showcases photo tampering throughout history (Farid put together a similar collection that can be found here). As the accompanying blurb explains, Stalin apparently had a habit of airbrushing his enemies out of photographs in an attempt at ‘removing’ them from documented history (this also comes up in that Morris/Farid interview). In other words, the relationship between the image and reality has pretty much always warranted some degree of contestation (even before we entered “Life in the pixel zone” [30]).

While verifying the authenticity of an image is a lot easier now than it was way back when, it’s interesting that A) we’re still not quite faultless arbiters of authenticity after all this time and B) there’s almost always been a consistent desire to use the visual in order to deceive and manipulate (with varying motives and degrees of success). Since we can only expect the ingenuity and technology behind these manipulations to improve, it’s almost like an arms race of sorts, wherein the expert skeptics and the expert fabricators are constantly trying to one up each other. And everyone else, being so immersed and implicated in visual culture, is left trying to keep up.