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
Posted by Matt in Uncategorized.add a comment
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.
