VIDEO
Fragments Are Not People
Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century. The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people. Nevertheless, it is sometimes referred to as "open culture."
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.
Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.
"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful."
Not sure why there's this recurring wave of the idea that we are not attached to our own bodies when clearly they aren't going anywhere, at least anytime soon (and I wonder if they ever truly will.) Or that computers and the internet aren't tied to any physical materials, money, or manual labor at any point in the process...but apparently people have to keep being reminded? The same with reminding people that individuals are still creating content and data, it's not autonomously spouted out by a hive mind ecosystem or by the machines themselves. Sometimes the divide is between people who have had more prolongued access to the back-end of technological processes and those who are skimming the surface at the user end only. Beyond that it becomes a difference in almost religious beliefs about technology and the future, and I can only attribute the waves to the struggle between the mind and the rest of the body which seem to be amplifying. I think the main thing aiming to be established is that different realms have different effects, which seems so obvious from the start, but now you have people stating they would rather look at art objects online than in an offline space which is of course both positive and negative where the body is concerned.
Everyone keeps scrambling for a new distinction because apparently "online" and "offline" aren't good enough. Maybe because this places too much distinction on the internet as a descriptor of space, or because artists don't want to be pigeonholed into net art and want to drive home that certain things online are merely representations or notes of an offline work that functions better in that space with the whole gamut of body presence, sensory awareness, scale, physics, etc., and sometimes vice versa. Each realm has its own limits, of course. Spaces are also becoming more and more blended between this distinction and consequently providing artists with more blended options.
All the means of content dispersal, archiving, researching, platforming, and networked sharing seem like old news or at least an established and obvious part of the process by now. Still worth critiquing, sure, but not with any kind of mystique or shock at their existence and use in contemporary art. This translation (art from a site to a room) topic is always a good one, but to me the most interesting thing about the situation at the moment is making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario that you know will never occur due to various constraints, especially physical or equipment-related ones. Most projects can move between instantiations but this brings up some interesting possibilities and questions. There is also more online startup curation happening than before, by people all over the world who just need your files to put on a show. This results in an artist being more aggregated and experiencing a lot of their shows through documentation only. Also of interest is the idea of being able to materially understand a lot of online realms, as in literally revealing materiality or making models of "essences" that can only be understood as a result of "second nature" online processes and creative software. This is what I'm focusing on in a category of my own practice and what I hoped to present at that doomed immateriality panel but it didn't really end up there.
As usual everything is just case by case, work by work, space by space. It's just another option in a pool of options. For some people the computer is more of a primary medium than others but I'm not sure why that's surprising or confusing to anyone, especially considering the usual history of technology in art-making and human culture in general. It's good for people to still be puzzled by the speed and seeming invisibility of the internet, but not by the use of of it.
From the commercial gallery space to the commercial technological space.
The factory workers, engineers, brands, and CEOS supporting your "free art."
The dumps, garbagemen, ewaste camps and villages cleaning up after you, contending with the material you use, consume, and discard every day.
La mayoría de la gente prefiere la certeza a la verdad.
"the luminous in place of the eye, the opaque in place of the object, and shadow in place of projection" -
THE FOLD, Gilles Deleuze; Jonathan Strauss
"La religión es lo que la gente común ve como cierto, los sabios como falso, y los gobernantes como útil."
Seneca
"Our Earth, as well as the other celestial bodies, is the repetition of a primordial combination that is always reproduced in the same way and that exists simultaneously in thousands of identical copies...
The confusion, the sacred horror that the infinite produced in Goethe and Stifter, gives way a hundred years later to a fanciful astronomy not unlike a nightmare - or, one might say, to a supreme ataraxy which posits that there is no longer, in the universe or any of its phenomena, any beginning, becoming or end, but merely eternal repetition."
The Imaginary
Lacan thought the relationship between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order". This relationship is also narcissistic. So the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues how the visual field is structured by symbolic laws. Thus the Imaginary involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations; in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with its own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis (see Écrits, "The Directions of the Treatment"). He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."
The Symbolic
In his Seminar IV "La relation d'objet" Lacan asserts that the concepts of Law and Structure are unthinkable without language: thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. Yet, he does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich) and the death drive which goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic. Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.
The Real
Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e. presence/absence, "there is no absence in the Real."[11] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place."[23] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real", in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things - things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being.[24]Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. In his Seminar "La relation d'objet", Lacan reads Freud's case on "Little Hans." He distinguishes two real elements which intrude and disrupt the child's imaginary pre-oedipical harmony: the real penis which is felt in infantile masturbation and the newly born sister.Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced w ith which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."[11]
Desire
Lacan's désir follows Freud's concept of Wunsch and it is central to Lacanian theories. For the aim of the talking cure - psychoanalysis - is precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, but this is only possible if that desire is articulated, or spoken.[25] Lacan said that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."[26] "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[11] "[W]hat is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence." Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.[25]In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire. Slavoj Žižek puts it "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire." For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand (Dylan Evans). Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or asIt is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.