http://timeart.kr/language/en/the-interface-at-the-edge-of-parallel-worlds
The world is all that happens. - David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress[1]
The digital universe is this falsely cloudy and immaterial[2] doppelganger evolving in parallel with our tangible and very concrete world. Screens and related devices of diffusion allow us access. And by doing so, we also access things unthought, located somewhere beyond the uncanny valley[3]. While the use of a projector tends to make us forget the conditions of existence of CGI, the screen device reminds us of the complexity to which these images are attached: they have no reality outside the software and computer constraints. They present themselves to us most often as visions of parallel worlds, so different from what we experience in our reality that we could qualify them as alien in the sense of extreme otherness. Think of the luminosity, the brightness, the glitch, the way forms merge and fragment, move and interweave. Let’s also think about hyper-realism which is itself another level of strangeness. This radical distance before the visual potential of the digital is short-circuited by the proximity that we maintain with these technologies in everyday life: their omnipresence now has the weight of an almost permanent mental load. This results in our paradoxical relationship with the digital world; it is simultaneously ultra-familiar and hyper-foreign. And this constant negotiation escapes us as it has become intrinsic to our lives. Technological objects have this not-even-hidden agenda of acting as extensions of ourselves: they are almost prostheses with intentions, interactive mirrors. The reality of the hardware behind the code, and the software that “animates” the foreground, is inseparable from the device that allows the coherence of the whole. Whether it is a TV monitor, a tablet, a cell phone, a virtual reality headset screen, or any other surface receiving data from a DIY micro-controller or a super-powerful computer, the surface of the screen is that indefinable space that allows the unthought of to emerge.
Quebec City-based artist Baron Lanteigne’s installation work often presents itself as screen arrangements through which we access a form of life internal to the hardware, suggesting that the CGI unfolding before our eyes is not so much a creation from the device as an autonomous entity evolving within it. With a work like In Extremis (2019) for example – created in collaboration with Montreal artist Dominique Sirois – we approach this idea of a portal giving access to a parallel world. This gateway then multiplies and loops in on itself, unfolding into a multidimensional and, in a way, metaphysical maze. Through this “mise en abîme”, which seems to lead to the heart of the machine, it is the very infrastructure which conveys the digital content that is put into question. We are, of course, in the logic of the medium which is also the message[4]. And if the materiality is the content as well, we find ourselves in front of the interface of the screen with a particular issue: it is about a surface on which either there is nothing other than a vitreous black gloss covering a diversity of components, or where any visible thing could appear. It is, in short, a space of potentiality. And its uniqueness lies in being multiple. This idea of the digital as a ubiquitous formlessness waiting to exist behind the screen invariably brings me back to Borges’ Aleph, and his eponymous short story[5]. That is to say, a tiny point, a microscopic sphere containing the whole of everything that exists, and where the notions of infinity and simultaneity[6] are central – a singularity. Although inconceivable in terms of material reality, the accuracy with which this concept of Aleph resonates with the digital world – think of the Internet – is surprisingly appropriate. To this image is added that of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), where the troubled relationship between digital and analogue is not foreign to Marshall McLuhan’s theories[7].
From analogue to digital, the work of Sabrina Ratté – a Montreal artist currently based in Marseille – has gradually transformed over the past ten years to reach a formal complexity that is as confusing as it is seductive. Most recently, Ratté has created an interactive and generative installation in collaboration with Montreal artist Guillaume Arseneault – and Montreal musician Roger Tellier Craig for the sound element. Distributed Memories[8] (2021) brings together a variable number of screens, tablets, monitors and CRTs of equally diverse dimensions. Distributed in the space according to a modular logic – suspended from the ceiling, hung on supports, placed on the floor or on elements of furniture – this ensemble presents itself as a vast atomised interface behind which moves a digital entity with almost hypnotic properties. Connected in generative mode to the contents of hard drives representing more than ten years of work archives – both completed works and experiments that have never been presented – these portal screens become the vectors of a kind of stream of consciousness, or rather of subconsciousness, of the artist. The interactive element, more specifically a reset button placed in the centre of the installation, is an invitation to move on to the next memories, at least those that the algorithm will have selected for us. In doing so, the work evokes the mechanics of memory and its fragmentary, discontinuous character. It is also a reflection on the intertwining of electronic memory with the human one, for which our capacity for mental projection is nothing more than an integrated internal screen. The fact of “seeing” from inside our own thoughts is in itself an almost indefinable phenomenon. The same is true for the logic, or lack thereof, according to which thoughts follow one another. Similarly, the sequences in Distributed Memories unfold according to an alternation where algorithmic randomness establishes a rhythm that, in the end, becomes a logic in itself. And although the hard drives feeding the device are filled with visual propositions that are not necessarily related to each other, there is no doubt about their kinship: they are digital entities that seem to come from the same genetic line.
Our proximity to these entities, these spectres whose DNA consists of zeros and ones which reliably reproduce on our portable screens, has largely intensified these last years. The distance that we maintain from the interface is narrower than ever, and virtual reality is one of these modalities of access that is currently very present – and yet not so new[9]– in the artistic landscape by which we connect with the digital. It is a way to get inside the screen and to move within it that is offered to us: a radical proximity. Floralia (2021), Sabrina Ratté’s very first virtual reality work, invites us to explore a fictional space where four different assemblages of plant specimens are “preserved”. Our wandering through the space causes a momentary transformation of these simulated ecosystems: the assemblages of flowers, plants and trees are disorganised by our passage, offering destabilising views both around and within these organic representations. Floralia is just one example of a veritable cornucopia of VR art proposals today. Alongside these increasingly accessible forays into the digital realm, augmented reality presents itself as another facet of what is known as XR or extended reality, which, in short, refers to all mixed realities combining real and virtual environments. Calling Upon The Digital Touch (2020) by Montreal artist Marie-Ève Levasseur, is an AR work that questions this proximity to the digital. Through the appearance of ghostly arms and hands touching the real, the proposal suggests a form of connection and communication between the two worlds.
The fantasy of a convergence of the real with the virtual is not particularly new, even if the concept of a metaverse[10] seems to be of the utmost topicality, notably with the recent media release of Mark Zuckerberg announcing the consolidation of his platforms under the name Meta. In his book The Language of New Media[11], Lev Manovich, writing about interfaces in relation with the body, mentions the 1992 American science-fiction film The Lawnmower Man directed by Brett Leonard. This proposed a scenario of virtual reality directly connected to the human brain, and generating a being-avatar with exponential superhuman capacities – a nod to the theory of the technological singularity. The scenario goes so far as to imagine a form of fusion between the two worlds, suggesting that the digital is in fact an imperceptible dimension of material reality, a sort of subatomic level of the tangible. Although we are a millisecond away from 2022 – 20 years after The Lawnmower Man and almost 30 years after Videodrome – our thoughts are connecting to the network at a very low bandwidth. Brain-computer interfaces and brain-wave devices, notably, in development since the 70s, are still not part of our everyday “routines”, at least not for most of us. Perhaps Elon Musk’s Neuralink startup, founded in 2016, will contribute to filling that gap. However, for now, some fictions remain fiction. But our perception of the world is already permanently affected by the evolution of our relationship to the digital. And in parallel to the impermanence and the shifting of our perceptions, the world itself continues its transformation and integrates continuously what emerges and happens.
Notes
1 Free translation from the French version: “Le monde est tout ce qui arrive.” in David Markson, La Maîtresse de Wittgenstein (Paris: P.O.L., 1989), 98. This sentence comes originally from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), written by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world is all that is the case”.
2 In reference to cloud computing: “The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions”. James Bridle, New Dark Age (London: Verso, 2019) 7.
3 In reference to the video essay by Alan Warburton, Goodbye Uncanny Valley (2017).
4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1964) 11.
5 Jorge Luis Borges, L’Aleph (French translation) (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
6 Ibid., 207.
7 Swapnil Dhruv Bose, ‘How Marshall McLuhan influenced David Cronenberg masterpiece ‘Videodrome’ in Far Out (October 2021): https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-marshall-mcluhan-influenced-david-cronenberg-videodrome/?fbclid=IwAR1c5QsbKkEd2eGxcxSIrpyNMNaV6SQTdOEUXDHWa6XNjxYX4025Rz3-3_s
8 Presented as part of Mutek Festival, August 2021, Montreal, Québec, Canada.
9 Let’s mention the work of Canadian artist, Char Davis, one of the pioneers of virtual reality with works such as Osmosis (1995) and Ephémère (1998).
10 Term created from the words meta and universe.
11 Lev Manovich, Le Langage Des Nouveaux Médias (French translation) (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2010) 223.
© 2022 timeart and the author