What the body misses or looses, the brain produces, in the form of hallucinations. This, Oliver Sacks demonstrated in his latest book ‘Musicophilia’. The integrative activity of the human brain entertains dynamic systems that generate perceptions, images and hallucinations that are automatic, uncontrollable and non-pathological. Strong phantom sensations deliver precise data, even long after a limb is missing. Today, they even feed the willed phantom movements of the bionic industry.
What returns with the specter, is no longer the visionary future haunted by the past, but a kind of present that no longer has to be in order to exist. In this vast field of hallucination, doubles of originally disabled selves are invited to look around and check, if there is something ‘for them’ to explore and exploit.
As observers, they can will a new kind of history, extra-human, re-invented. Connected to some terminal neural mind, they can bring about the reality of their choice in unaccountable number of ways.
Never mind, here, the ‘real’ only springs into existence when and as long as it is observed.
Impact is more than technique and effect, especially so when done with media. Media turn impact into a force field, in which models and modeling of world-making are tested out physically and virtually, staged as well as performed. Here, impact also serves as an operating parameter to evaluate which qualities are being achieved by it.
The Warum 2.0 media arena made the public visible as a phenomenized object. ‘I am seen and I see that I am seen.’ ‘I see myself seeing myself.’ This doubled sensation of seeing and being seen, makes visible the invisible public. For them, besides being controlling and repressive, panopticism is empowering. Being in public, what one already is in private, in front of the tv set and the computer, makes panopticism seem like part of everyday life. It can be managed.
We gaze at our screens, and at the same time, at our doubles on the screens, even at the streamed data of ourselves displayed live on the screens. ‘The media-environment’ of war and its cognates in everyday life is the operating arena for this new visual subjectivity.’ Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the ‘simultaneous display and interaction of a variety of modes of visibility, intervisuality.’ The switching between logos, stations and connected media ‘reveal that the images are not purily visibility but highly mediated representation, itself an expression of a chain of images, discourses and material reality.’
We can paraphraze Mirzoeff further suggesting that in Warum 2.0 the public artfully mixed the Nike ‘Just Do It’ mantra with Arjun Appadurai’s observation that in globalization, the imagination is a social fact. If this scenario made any sense to the visitors, it must have been precisely so, because they had it all seen and experienced before: seeing battlescenes from the point of view of the weapons themselves; experiencing terrorism as if cinematically directed; complementing executions with personal chats on the mobile; staging sexual, thug and adventurous tourism, digitizing one’s desire by means of self-surveillance and self-display.
In the meantime, ‘the audience had learnt to see like computers, taking the digital gaze for granted, with vast eyes perched on insignificant bodies.’ ‘In this naturalized panoptic space of media, ‘the body is a vehicle for visual surveillance unhindered by a self or an identity.’ ‘Mind and body, they simply do not belong together.’ The gaze itself becomes indifferent to what it sees. Derrida writes, there becomes visible ‘there where they were already there without being there.’
‘What seems to be critical at the present moment is precisely the means by which cultures and peoples are connected – the medium of cables and electricity, the linking computer code, and the attention economy.’ Warum 2.0 in Leuven was a demonstration of endless return that is nonetheless different on each occasion. ‘Think of the ghost in Hamlet, who is visible to all in Act One but only to Hamlet in Act Three.’
(Quotes from Nicholas Mirzoeff, in ‘The haunted house: Visuality in global culture’, published in ‘architecturanimation’, CDAC, Barcelona, 2002).
As they entered the ‘bastard space’ of Warum 2.0 (see post here under), the visitors entered a different time. ‘Re-structuring and articulating time – re-ordering speeding up, slowing down, halting and reversing – is equally essential in cinematic expression.’
Teleportation, surveillance webcam streaming, remote control and sensor driven animation – these were some of the means for the visitors ‘to encounter themselves and their own being-in-the-world in an intensified manner, activating their imagination in an extraordinary way.’
Sensitive and bodily experience was essential in Warum 2.0: the body moving, size and speed; the eyes; the ears; the hands touching sensors, teleporting live into Second Life. The thinking hand of Heidegger. ‘The hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp… Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘What calls for thinking?’. Basic Writings, Harper&Row, New York 1977).
The structuring of the place, space, situation, scale, illumination, etc… reframed the human existence of the visitors. It also offered them a chance to test their deep defense against this kind of terror.
‘Media are magical mediators of experience, feelings and affects. They possess a hallucinatory quality: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’, writes Georges Duhamel in 1930 of the secret power of cinematic images.
‘Images open up streams of association and affect. They strengthen our sense of self, and the existential experience, and they sensitise the boundary between ourselves and the world.’ Networked media spaces give us the primary horizon of the world we live in. I exist in a space, and the space settles in me. ‘I am the space where I am’, the poet Noël Arnaud aknowledges. We do not live separately in material and mental worlds: these experiential dimensions are fully intertwined.
(Quotes from Juhani Pallasmaa, in ‘The haunted house: Visuality in global culture’, published in ‘architecturanimation’, CDAC, Barcelona, 2002).
Did Warum 2.0 invite the viewer to engage in the world as an act of perpetual proposition, continually in search of a constant and a point of reconciliation? And more specifically, what would ‘reconciliation’ mean in that situation?
To be further investigated for sure. In any case, the notion of ‘disappearance’ by Paul Virilio, will never cover the whole thing. As the Chinese word says, the notion of the ‘moving image’ says ‘electronic shadow’. This definitely points to its own implications.
Hundreds of people visiting Warum 2.0 during the Artefact Festival reacted very enthusiastically. Why did they? Projected portraits of war victims stared at them from all sides. The soundscape assembled out of explosions, gunfire and screams was more than disturbing. And yet, they all ‘enjoyed’ the environment. Could they, because of the arena aspect of the space? Or did they, as Michael Warner says in his book ‘Public and Counterpublics’, because ‘the publicity (of the images and sounds) was made available to them for their appropriation.’ Indeed, in this installation arena, it was not the initiators who took hold of the power of the staged media, it was left to the visitors to possess it, if so required.
Far from Impact, then, is not without any danger. Put in more constructive terms, distance from impact creates a new space and context, in which threats of media and techniques of impact can be carrried out and staged in full view.
Did the visitors have the impression of being addressed as a ‘public’, instead of as a ‘community’ (from the art scene, from the art school); or even worse, as a scripted subgroup, strategically assembled, called up and prepared (as consumers, as tourists)?
With Michael Warner, again: ‘(as a public) We’ve become capable of recognizing ourselves as strangers even when we know each other’.
Did the visitors appreciate the space between people? In Warum 2.0 observation could hardly be reduced to its audiovisual elements and their presentation alone.
With Stephan Doesinger: ‘Wherever physical and media space fuse new spaces also evolve. Bastard spaces. In the force field between these two poles, a new awareness of space is generated in which the absence of presence has become normal.’
Because of its centrifugal structure, Warum 2.0 lacked a central space. Did it engage (trap?) the visitors within the circularity? Was is then the infernal character of the space that attracted them? In the way Italo Calvino suggests in his ‘Invisible Cities’?
We ask the question with Norman Klein: ‘At which point historically does the viewer begin to literally enter as a central character in the story – inside the electronic media, or inside shopping environments?
What then was the role of the viewer in Warum 2.0? Did the absence of presence contribute to the lightness of doom?
With Stephan Doesinger, once more: ‘As with all 2.0 driven media, all projects involve something we might term ‘the virtual home’. Wherever we are, we carry our media, our ‘home’ with us. ‘This is convenience space. An almost infantile feeling of security when the responsibility of accepting responsibility is taken from you’.
Warum 2.0 as the kind of cheerful nightmare, we know from computer games and immersive special effects cinema. A second stage ‘before the fact’; a kind of ‘utopia, as that what can be built after all hope is gone’. Klein: ‘Underneath, the pleasure remains that these spaces are pathologically dangerous. They are the war of all against all’.
(Quotes from Stephan Doesinger and Norman Klein, in ‘Space between people’, Prestel, 2008; and from Michael Warner, in ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Zone Books, 2005).
However, during the presentation, and notwithstanding all these comments, Warum 2.0 did include some very outspoken warnings by Paul Virilio. There he addressed the visitors directly again and again, and talked to them about the (ab)use of these kind of pictures of war victims. He referred to techniques of ‘synchronization of affects’, of ‘storytelling’ and of ‘impact’ as fascist, and he introduced some alternative ways of dealing with this ongoing trend.
