[Syndicate] Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual Unconscious IV

["anna balint" <epistolaris@freemail.hu>]

Convulsive Beauty Then and Now (part 2)


Agatha is introduced as a 'country girl' whose first appearance is
accompanied by an audio file of a folksy guitar song sung by a woman and
accompanied by children in which the line "goodbye Jack and Sue" is simply
repeated.(66) No doubt the song is intended to signify generically Agatha's
humble country origins. However from the outset the static, montaged
figures of the systems administrator and Agatha both sport clothing made
from textual fragments taken from the computer's interface. The systems
administrator's body is made up of the line: "EndUser - Doc_Catalogue" and
Agatha, in the first scene, wears a dress whose 'pattern' is the line
"B-Dir 22-97". In both cases it seems likely that these records of data
indexing relate to the production of the artwork itself. A physical
equivalent to this might be the artist's inclusion of her paint palette in
the final painting. The explicitly Informatic surface of both characters
implies that Agatha was always already determined by a proximity to
information and that her movement from Internet naif to fully 'teleported'
or uploaded digital entity is the inevitable movement from the ontological
in-itself to the for-itself of the information age.
However, the implied inevitability of this movement does not inure Agatha
to the shock of her own disintegration into information and subsequent
sentence to diasporically wander the lattice of networked computers. Until
the moment of teleportation, the dialogue which passes between Agatha and
her systems administrator occurs in the status bar at the bottom of the
browser where, ordinarily, information is displayed about the connection to
and download rate of a particular digital file. As the two characters
approach the bed in the systems administrator's apartment (the symbolic
launch pad of teleportation), the dialogue suddenly switches from the
status bar to a Script Alert window which pops up on the screen. This box
is usually only displayed when a compatibility error occurs between the
browser and the file being viewed (for example, it might require a plug-in
which the browser does not have), and its redeployment as the vehicle for
dialogue not urgent technical messages inflects the dialogue with a sense
of alarm. The dialogue in the Script Alert window reads as follows, with
each line accompanied by an 'ok' button which the viewer is compelled to
click before moving onto the next line and a 'cancel' button which s/he
must click to exit the sequence:

"No, definitely, your legs are too long"
"but what can I do?"
"Just a moment, I'll make a shortcut"
"U tried it before?"
"Many time[s]"
"What is error 19? Maybe better tomorrow?"
"No, no. It's ok. Careful! Ok"
"Shoulder! Shoulder!"
"Sorry, can I take my lipstick with me?"
"Red?"
"A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!"
"What?"
"A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!"
"What is there?"
"A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!"
"Agatha, dear, what?"
"Millions of zeros, laughing and screaming"
"Strange"
"Disgusting"
"I'm sorry, it always worked"

It is this blunt use of the word 'disgusting' to describe a disaggregation
of the subject within the digital rhizome that distinguishes Lialina's work
from that of Antiorp and Cosic. And it is the Baudrillardian overproximity
or 'obscenity of information', the point at which the autonomous subject
and the symbolic order are exploded into 'millions of zeros, laughing and
screaming' to which, in my opinion, the word 'disgusting' refers. Despite
Lialiana's obvious fascination with computer networks - which is here
figured as the romantic frisson between Agatha and the systems
administrator - there is an open admission of the disgust of digital
'noise' never made by Antiorp or Cosic.
After this scene, and before embarking on her diasporic Net journey, Agatha
meets the systems administrator, quite anachronistically, at a railway
station, late in the evening and in the rain. Lialina evokes the railway
station atmosphere by situating the characters next to a time-table and
setting the dialogue in the status bar into motion. The text and ASCII
symbols move from right to left, and the dialogue itself is interspersed
between long bracketed sets of hyphens and characters designed to look like
train carriages. Part of this dialogue includes the system administrator's
conviction that the Internet is not merely a matter of applications,
scripts or the sum of its technological parts, but a "new world, new
philosophy, new way of thinking" with the conclusion that to understand the
Net "you must be inside". Importantly, Agatha's individual departure into
the digital dimension uses the historical springboard of industrialised and
bureaucratised travel and romantic film and fiction (one needs only think
of Anna Karenina as a reference here). The linear and modular sequence of
passing railway carriages appears to provide the techno-historical
counterpart to the sequence of frames passing through a projector at speed.
Agatha's departure into the 'new world' of the Net is thus also accompanied
by a shift from linear narrative (although nominally preserved by the
choreographed movement through the piece's set of hyperlinked webpages) to
the database logic of the underlying computer network. Several 'clicks'
into her journey, as can be seen in the series of URLs listed above, Agatha
has left the original C3 server behind her and is moving through a sequence
of servers most of which are owned and run by members of the net art
'community', and the first of which is tellingly named 'distopia.com'. Her
movement from one node of the Net to another is only represented through
the alteration of the URLs displayed in the location bar, as each new
downloaded page retains the same static image of Agatha against a black
background. Finally we arrive at the homepage of a net art site called
'superbad.com' and the URL's suffix informs us that Agatha
"lost_the_interest.html". Agatha Appears does not, therefore, posses a
clear ending but instead involves a segue from one artwork into another
suggesting the non-discrete nature of any single artwork and, as the last
URL seems to underline, an entropic slide from ordered narrative into the
distraction of information play.
The three key narrative moments in Agatha Appears, I would suggest, are her
first experience of teleportation involving her 'disgust' at the chaotic
spectacle of "millions of zeros screaming and laughing", her departure from
the unitary location (and associated narrative logic) of the c3 server into
a diasporic journey through the network and finally the entropic slide of
the discrete artwork (and with it Agatha's own narrative) into the
distraction of nonlinear information play across the network. Ironically
given the subject of the narrative which centres on the entropic pull
towards Bataille's 'nauseating void', the very fact that this work can be
described in terms of three pivotal moments demonstrates its inherent
resistance to this selfsame destitution. In this sense, the very existence
of a coherent narrative cuts against the overt meaning of the narrative and
reserves a space for the possibility of meaning or order within the riotous
reign of noise. It is perhaps the fact that Agatha Appears, in contrast to
the works of Antiorp and Cosic discussed above, ventures a coherent
articulation of what is inherently incoherent - the paralogy of postmodern
language games amidst an overabundance of information - that she is also
able to articulate something as concrete as disgust. Here it is pertinent
to remark that Agatha Appears does not make use of automatism in the way
that Cosic does in Deep Ascii, that is to say, she does not harness any
single procedure in order to overcome the repressive controls of the Ego or
Superego to release the obscured dimension of the unconscious. Instead, her
hypertext narrative consciously controls the distributed network logic of
the Internet and narrativises its atomising effects (e.g. binary code,
hyperlinks, data packets, packet switching; ). For instance, she uses the
distributed storage system of the Net's many servers to produce the unusual
spectacle of the same page downloading time and again from different
locations and, although the Net's automatic procedures are relied upon to
produce this, the spectacle itself is nonetheless thoroughly determined. In
this instance, the Net's distributed structure produces a metaphor of
Agatha's own sense of deterritorialisation within the information age.
Automatic processes are therefore viewed both in their own right and as
metaphors for subjective experience, but never as autonomous agents of
creativity. Lialina's resistance to the technological autopoesis solicited
to a certain degree by Antiorp and to a much greater degree by Cosic
suggests her recognition and mistrust of the 'deathly stake' with which
such derepressions flirt. The voiding of egotistical and superegotistical
controls and the heteronomous reign of non-order that this augurs risks, in
social and subjective terms, a terrorisation by illegible and nonlocatable
forces which threaten an irreversible entropic slide; the drive of
Thanatos. In its aesthetic constellation or presentation of Informatic
chaos, Agatha Appears comes extremely close to Breton's category of the
fixed-explosive wherein the entropic drive of nature is momentarily frozen
into a highly organised cultural sign and conversely, where the sign is
interrupted by the chaotic force of nature. However, in so creating this
fixed-explosive image of Informatic chaos, Lialina reflects the movement
beyond a faith in derepression's promise of liberation and automatism's
guarantee of an insight into a unified but hidden other.
The instrumentalisation of chaos versus the indeterminateness of art and
natural beauty
On the subject of the threat inherent in the increasingly chaotic models of
economic, social and natural phenomena both Hayles and Zizek seem to agree
on an important point, and one that has not been concretely posed by my
discussion of these artworks. The point has to do with the
instrumentalisation of chaos to certain ends - an instrumentalisation which
I cannot simply extend to these artworks, especially when considering them
in line with some of Adorno's formulations of natural and art beauty which
we will briefly examine here. For Hayles, chaos theory and nonlinear
science do not ultimately constitute a radical break with modern science
and a move into the postmodern, but rather an intensification of the
former. Hayles has discussed how, in fact, chaologists often use the
principles of deterministic chaos to negate its effects through, for
instance, the conversion of nonlinear behaviour into linear behaviour.(67)
In
contrast to Lyotard's optimistic reading of the paralogy of postmodern
science (which ensures the never ending renegotiation of game rules),
Hayles together with the chaos theorist Stephen Kellert argue that the aim
of chaos theory is largely instrumental. Kellert suggests that to "see
chaos theory as a revolutionary new science that is radically discontinuous
with the Western tradition of objectifying and controlling nature falsifies
both the character of chaos theory and the history of science."(68)  It is
on
this point that the poststructuralist adoption of chaos both differs and
converges with its scientific one. As Hayles explains, "for
deconstructionists, chaos repudiates order; for scientists, chaos makes
order possible", i.e. scientists use chaos theory to perceive further forms
of order in the world whereas poststructuralists use chaos theory to deny
that order exists.(69)  Hayles views the poststructuralist transformation of
the non-order of chaos into anti-order or disorder as a way of attacking
traditional ideas of order which are held to be coercive. But for this
reason, and here is where its scientific and cultural adoptions reconverge,
Hayles perceives the poststructuralist celebration of disorder as another
kind of  instrumentalisation of chaos theory and one that contributes to,
rather than subverting, the production of master narratives.
Zizek, however, in contrast to Hayles' insistence that master narratives
continue, is convinced that the so-called post-Oedipal society or, in other
terminology, the reflexivity of the risk society has a profound impact on
the subject as a result of the loosening of societal ties to tradition and
nature. For Zizek, this Unbehagen (uneasiness) of the risk society comes
down to the decline of symbolic trust as, due to the extreme reflexivity of
contemporary life, the big Other recedes and symbolic efficiency wanes:
"The disintegration of the big Other is the direct result of universalised
reflexivity: notions like 'trust' all rely on a minimum of non-reflected
acceptance of the symbolic Institution - ultimately, trust always involves
a leap of faith: when I trust somebody, I trust him because I simply take
him at his word, not for rational reasons which tell me to trust him."(70)
But, whilst recognising that master narratives or the symbolic institution
are destabilised by the reflexivity or recursiveness of the risk society,
Zizek also acknowledges that many master narratives are subsumed under one
inalienable narrative: the naturalisation of the market. Zizek historicises
this by reference to Marx's observation that, under market relations, "all
that is solid melts into air" - a reference to the unheard of dissolution
of traditional forms under capitalism. Instead of this dissolution
guaranteeing new freedoms, Marx saw the 'invisible hand of the market'
ironing out the multiplicity of small risks involved in market speculation
into a single global welfare. This, in short, is the ideology of the free
market. Marx's idea is that this one market-driven fate could be superseded
and social life brought under the control of humanity's 'collective
intellect'. It is, argues Zizek, this self-transparent ideal that the
theory of the risk society abandons but in so doing naturalises and
deploliticises the global market:
"Theorists of the risk society often evoke the need to counteract the reign
of the 'deploticised' global market with a move towards radical
repoliticisation, which will take crucial decisions away from state
planners and experts and put them into the hands of the individuals and
groups concerned themselves (through the revitalisation of active
citizenship, broad public debate, and so on) - however, they stop short of
putting in question the very basics of the anonymous logic of market
relations and global capitalism, which imposes itself today more and more
as the 'neutral' Real accepted by all parties and, as such, more and more
depoliticised."(71)
How do these instances of the instrumentalisation of non-order relate to
our discussion of net art's preoccupation with complex information systems
and the associated unraveling of subjective and objective stability? Does
it participate in a similar naturalisation and obfuscation of what we might
describe as the constructedness of the virtual unconscious? Does its
exploration of a chaotic, Informatic world determine the subject as
impotent, without agency? Here I would resist any too easy comparison of
scientific, economic and theoretical applications of nonlinearity to art's
own. Although, as Adorno persuasively argues, art cannot but participate in
the domination of nature to which its own development belongs, it is its
way of "resembling without imitating" the world, of consciously positing
itself, which at once distinguishes it from "the arbitrariness of what
simply exists" and at the same time allows empirical reality to become
eloquent.(72)  Adorno's discussion of the mutual reflectedness of art beauty
and natural beauty also opens up the way to discussing the relationship of
art to the complex second nature manifested by technological and Informatic
systems. In his discussion of art beauty and natural beauty he locates the
dimension of appearance as a crucial basis of their correspondence. Natural
beauty (a historically determined quality and distinct from any totalising
concept of nature as such) lies in its elusiveness, the fact that it is
never perceived voluntarily. The elusiveness its appearance, argues Adorno
in line with Hegel, is due to the fact that it is not created for or out of
itself, but that it takes form only through its external perception.
Natural beauty, experienced as always in this state of becoming, always on
the verge of revealing itself, therefore eschews any categorisation of what
does and does not constitute it:
"According to the canon of universal concepts it is undefinable precisely
because its own concept has its substance in what withdraws from universal
conceptuality. Its essential indeterminateness is manifest in the fact that
every part of nature, as well as everything made by man that has congealed
into nature, is able to become beautiful, luminous from within."(73)
Adorno finds this resistance to determination also evidenced in the
greatest works of art and their close resemblance to nature. "The more
perfect the artwork" he writes, "the more it forsakes intentions?f the
language of nature is mute, art makes this muteness eloquent"(74)  But this
articulation is always haunted by its impossibility which stems from the
insurmountable contradiction between the conscious attempt to make the mute
eloquent and the revelation of that part of nature which "cannot in any way
be willed."(75)
It is in this respect that, unlike the various instrumentalisations of the
virtual unconscious exposed by Zizek and Hayles in poststructuralism,
science and economics, we should consider these artworks as evidencing the
indeterminateness of art and natural beauty. It is possible to see in all
the works discussed in this chapter the struggle both to articulate the
second nature created by information systems and to solicit it to
articulate itself. Where surrealists engaged dissociative processes to
dislodge the grip of rationality and consciousness over experience, net
artists engage computational processes and rationale to destablise the
instrumentality that those self-same technologies epitomise. In a sense
then, net artists engage technocratic rationality to reveal its opposite -
an inability to map the concept onto the thing. Although net artists, like
surrealists, are attracted to automatism and the suspension of conscious
control, they do not invest the same confidence in the rupture of
inconsistency in the fabric of reality. What is important here is that, as
Zizek and Hayles point out and the artworks exemplify, chaos or the
uncertainties of the second Enlightenment have become the order of the day,
threatening human agency and promoting the naturalness of the market by
turns. But identifying the instrumentalisation of what I have been calling
the virtual unconscious does not exhaust its potential. Returning to
Adorno's identification of nature's resistance to 'universal
conceptuality', it seems that net artists are equally drawn to the
unpredictable mutations, the constant state of becoming that information
systems unleash. This state of becoming refers not only to the purely
technical behaviour of digital information but its social relations as
well, both of which are capable of resisting any totalistic
instrumentalisation. If information's deterritorialising atomisation is
sometimes experienced as 'disgusting', it also brings into being formations
which counter this lost sense of control. The technologically accelerated
exchange of information between people around the world reveals an equally
unpredictable social agency which is always-in-becoming. Antiorp's
interruption of the smooth running of mailing lists through the
introduction of noise can here be seen as test running the noisy
interruption of global techno-bureaucratic business as usual by the noise
of dissent. The disobedient dance of Cosic's ASCII characters points to a
potential explosion of the spectacle from within (one need only think about
the ongoing challenge of media monopolies by the multiple agencies on the
net). The threatening darkness of Agatha's diasporic wonderings might even
be suggestive of a real world dissolution of national boundaries and the
creation of global citizenship. Although I could be accused of falsely
imposing a reading on the works, it is their shifting, mutagenic forms
which allows such things to be glimpsed - as with the sudden revelations of
beauty in nature. If automatist processes have ceased to promise the
divulgence in art of a universal truth, they nonetheless provide a key
which unlocks the dual character of the virtual unconscious; a force which
by turns threatens the deathly entropy of chaos and the salutary hope of a
second nature whose unfathomable state of becoming can resist the total
penetration of instrumental rationality. It is this muteness which certain
net artists seek to make eloquent.

44)  Louis Aragon, La R?volution Surr?aliste 3 (April 15, 1925), cited in
Hal Foster's Compulsive Beauty, p.20
  One is tempted to argue that the opposite is true - that in fact to
reveal the consistency with which inconsistency is proffered as a
descriptive model of the postmodern world might pove to be a far more
disruptive gesture.
45)  Andr? Breton, Second manifesto du Surr?alisme cited in Foster,
Compulsive Beauty, p.xviii
46)  Ibid, xix
47)  Breton, in Ibid, p.23
48)  Foster, Ibid, p.23
49)  See Ibid, p.9
50)  Ibid, p.28
51)  http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/deep.htm
52)  At the time, Luka Frelih was a colleague of Cosic's at the Ljudmila
Digital Media Lab in Ljubljana
53)  The UNIX manual, cited in Lev Manovich's 'Cinema by Numbers: ASCII
films by Vuk Cosic', Vuk Cosic: Contemporary ASCII, (Zaloznik: Galerija
S.O.U. Kapelica, Ljubljana, 2000), pp.9-10
54)  Vuk Cosic supplied me with this information in a private
correspondence, (February 10, 2001)
55)  Manovich, Vuk Cosic, p.8
56)  Foster, p.5
57)  See History of Moving Images, www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film
58)  Vuk Cosic, 'The Ascii Art Ensemble', interview by Josephine Bosma,
(Telepolis, September 1998),
59) http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/2458/1.html
60)  See the section 'Eroticism' in The Bataille Reader, eds Fred Botting
and Scott Wilson, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
61)  Georges Bataille, 'The Phaedra Complex', ibid, p.257
62)  In 2000 Cosic was commissioned by the Video Positive Festival in
Liverpool to create a site specific work in the city. Cosic photographed
the St. George's Hall and translated its proportions into a series of ASCII
images which he then projected back onto the building at night, which
appeared as a large three dimensional ASCII sculpture, with parts of the
building remaining visible underneath the projection. See
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/architecture/
63)  Commenting on the by now commonplace archiving of museums on CD-Roms,
Manovich explains: "Although such CD-Roms often simulate the traditional
museum experience of moving from room to room in a continuous trajectory,
this "narrative" method of access does not have any special status in
comparison to other access methods offered by a CD-Rom. Thus the narrative
becomes just one method of accessing data among others." Lev Manovich, The
Language of New Media, op. cit., p.220
64)  Ibid
65)  Cited in 'Olga's Artists Statement: NETFILM', Telepolis, date unknown,
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/kunst/nk/3040/2.html
66)  This song is played several times throughout Agatha Appears acting as
a deliberately crude soundtrack.
67)  Ward, The Literary Appropriation of Chaos Theory, p.58
68)  Kellert, Wake of Chaos, pp. 115-16, cited in ibid, p.59
69)  Hayles, Chaos Bound, pp.22-3, cited in ibid, p.56
70)  Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p.342
71)  Zizek, ibid, p.351
72)  Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p.78
73)  Ibid, p.70
74)  Ibid, p.78
75)  Ibid





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