NOTES ON SURREALISM AND CYBERCULTURE (1999)
(Lecture delivered at the Montesquieu Fortnight, Spain.)
Aziz & Cucher
In several occasions in which we have had the opportunity to show and discuss our recent work, a sort of interpretive consensus has emerged in which terms and ideas originally associated with Surrealism are often brought up. We have formerly recognized a certain influence of Surrealism in our work, but never in an effort to continue or emulate the surrealist path. Rather, it is that the best images of the surrealists, as well as some of their formal methods, have become part of our "collective visual unconscious" and as such part of the tradition and artistic vocabulary of the West. Yet, recently we came across an article by Kevin Robbins, "The Virtual Unconscious in Post-Photography" (published in "Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation", Aperture, 1996); and the discussion he develops based on the term "Virtual Unconscious" made us reflect in a more deliberate way upon the possibilities of observing through a surrealist gaze this moment of our lives, in which the development of communication and simulation technologies has intensified the porosity of the barriers between the real and the virtual.
These notes are nothing more than an effort to rationally articulate some of these observations, and moreover, to relate them directly to our recent work, both in form and content.
Robbins writes:
"Through the new image and vision technologies our powers of seeing have been dramatically expanded, and so it seems that rational knowledge and control have made a great leap forward in their inevitable progress.[...] But rational utopias have always been marred by a fear of the technological power that makes them possible, by a profound anxiety about what that power can create and at what cost. Walter Benjamin believed that another nature spoke to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gave way to a space informed by the unconscious. He described it as the optical unconscious. We can perhaps develop this metaphor. We can consider what has happened to this unconscious now that optics has given way to virtual seeing. And we can also suggest how this virtual unconscious relates to the instinctual unconscious. In our culture it has seemed that vision is associated with the project of reason and the logic of power and control. But vision also mobilizes unconscious forces, primitive and pre-rational desires, anxieties and fantasies."
The logical step to follow this idea of the virtual unconscious is that it is possible to psychoanalyze it, that it brings about a whole new zone of the mind that also struggles to find its balanced place within the traditional Freudian hierarchies, revealing the individual's relationship with the virtual world as a new territory for dreams and fantasies. Moreover, we can follow Jung and postulate a Collective Virtual Unconscious, which is expresses from archetypes and a whole series of symbologies that act as a cohesive force against the centrifugal impulse of individuality. Yet, being artists and not psychologists, we run the enormous risk of wanting to find similarities where there are none, or to reduce to the commonplace the complexity of a whole branch of knowledge.
Still, the idea of the Virtual Unconscious is attractive to us, and just as in the 1920's Breton and his followers looked into Freud for a way to make an art that would reveal the newly understood depths of the human mind. We, when faced with cyberculture, are presented with a phenomenon that re-defines and extends our understanding of the mind and of human identity, and we feel it is of vital importance to try to make an art that reflects and reveals this new consciousness and its unavoidable mirror, the Virtual Unconscious.
What in these notes we are calling the virtual world is in reality something far more complex than the merely simulated, since it involves as well the interaction between the simulated and the real. It's scope is wide enough to include any endeavor where the digitalization of data allows for the traffic between the real and the virtual: robotics, nano-technology, genetic engineering, the internet and its vast web of commerce and information.
Borges tells in one of his texts the following story: a man dreams that he goes to paradise and in his dream receives a rose. The marvelous thing is that when he wakes up, the actual rose is there by his pillow. What in Borges is surely an allegory about the power of metaphor, becomes much more tangible and confusing when dealing with the interaction between the real and the virtual that defines our moment.
The Internet user pushes a few keys in his computer and, collapsing space and time, can communicate with any other terminal to obtain information, shop, have an affair, etc. As an image it is the exact reverse of our perception of the natural world, where small structures - atoms or cells - come together to create increasingly complex organisms: the Internet contains the whole Universe within a microchip. Of course, we know that the web-surfer is traveling only in a figurative sense, the collapse of space-time happens only at the symbolic level, but that does not negate the very reality of the information exchanged, of the emotions felt in the affair, or of the pair of shoes that arrives the next day via UPS. This permeability between the symbolic and the real is precisely that liminal moment that the surrealists looked for as a tabula rasa for the beginning of the creative process. When we casually refer to the world we live in as "surreal" it is because we are now in that permanent limbo where the actions of the mind have the full potential to become material. We have finally arrived at that point that Breton imagined in his First Surrealist Manifesto: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states -- apparently so contradictory -- that are dream and reality in a sort of absolute reality, surreality."
The surrealists made use of several strategies and games to reach this liminal edge: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, chance games; and in their search they helped to end the conventions of spatial representation as a way to bring the viewer closer to that other reality of dreams and the unconscious.
One of the preferred forms of Surrealism is collage, not only because it can incorporate so many different materials, including the most banal, but also because this heterogeneity is equalized within the pictorial plane, negating the hierarchies of narrative and perspective, giving way to irrationality.
Something similar happens with digital technologies, through which any material can be reduced -- or let's say, translated -- to a mathematical function of ones and zeros. Images, sounds, poems, genetic sequences, operating instructions, shopping lists, et al., translated to their digital essence can become "raw material" to be indistinctly used and re-combined at will, giving way to the formal logic of digital culture: collage, hybrids, hypertext, links superstructure, the hologram in which every part contains the whole.
Going back to Jung, there are those who would like to see in this formal logic the archetypes and symbols that express the ultimate principles in nature: order within chaos, the infinite patterns of fractal geometry, the universal connection between all things, synchronicity. It is enough to read some of the statements of the gurus of virtual reality to see the prevalence of this kind of mystical interpretation.
But this kind of reading actually hides the irrational, and it looks to us to be more than anything a commercial stratagem that wraps the new technologies in a sweet and attractive cover that does not inspire the fears and anxieties mentioned by Robbins in his article as fundamental in the relationship of humankind with technological progress. A lot more interesting as a peek into the depths of the Virtual Unconscious is the work of artists such as Julia Scher or the Dutch team Jodi.org, which submit the viewer to situations where we are confronted by technologies out of control or which subvert our expectations about the digital order. In many of Scher's surveillance installations there is a sweet electronic voice that recites the "system's inner monologue," full of doubts, insecurities, lost or misfiled data. OSS, an internet work by Jodi is nothing less than an attack to the operating system of the viewer's computer: it wreaks havoc on the screen in an enthropic panic, a storm of rogue icons takes over the desktop, windows multiply like flies, images open and close at their own will. If one tries frantically to click it off, the pace accelerates. Only restarting the computer brings back the lost order destroyed by this artistic virus.
Beyond art, the dark side of cyberspace includes the ever-present menace of increased surveillance, down to every one of our consumption habits, and our increased frustration at the mystery behind operating systems, software programs, and planned obsolescence. Also, the digital world lives under the constant threat of all kinds of sabotage: evil viruses that erase the information in hard-disks and hackers that steal credit card information. We could imagine that under the apparent control and power of the digital consciousness -- ruled overall by the rationality of corporate/technological systems -- there lurks a vulnerable and unpredictable unconscious, where, under the repression of the commercial super-ego, there are the teeming demons that threaten personal identity, privacy, and all that we are accustomed to define as "human."
|
