Intangible Media: Atemporality and Digitization

Buy ye not Betamax -- Good Omens

Theres more than enjoyment attached to entertainment media today. We dont watch movies or browse the Internet to find happiness, only to kill time. We carry the media around with us in our minds. We use screens and computers to access original content, but where it really exists is in our memory. Screens are becoming more diverse: both bigger and smaller. Screens are also disappearing: into consciousness, perception, and culture. The media are an intangible part of the world, and the world becomes irreconcilably mediated as an effect. When my computer breaks down I become restless, helpless. The last time it happened I paced, tried to read but couldnt concentrate. What I wanted to do was Google, watch some videos on Youtube, check my email: all that locked inside the dead laptop. I was bereft. I had some old 8mm reels in my trunk, so I pulled them out and started scanning. A tactile entertainment, an active engagement with the physical media: such contact is missing in digital media. Its true that I had a digital transfer of that same 8mm reel. Looking at each of them side by side, its immediately apparent that the divide between celluloid and digital media is one based in tangibility. The film reel is tangible, visible, immediately interactive in the sense that you can cut the film to edit, and in various senses transparent. The miniDV tape is fixed in its form, requires a separate media in order to access, and the content that it contains is compressed, digitized, in a technological manner so as to separate the human from her creation.

Digitization of analog material turns a solid material into a series of digits made of code, changing the meaning and composition of the material but not the appearance. The content stays the same, but the core of our cultural artifacts have changed. For example, Googles book project has made a storehouse of knowledge available at the press of a button; ebooks and PDFs, accessed via a computer, changes the way we interact with print material (see Nicholas Carr). Many of Jean Baudrillards writings have extended the claim that people desire to live in the space mediated by the image. But is this statement lasting? Photographic or cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of

projection), whereas the TV image, the video image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative and hence without negativity and without reference. They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to events. At a stroke, the contagion of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image?1 Baudrillard goes on to explain how digital media dry out the relationship of the image to the thing, the symbol to the act. He calls the screen an "empty space of representation," "the non-site of the event," "the virtual space of the event" and the location of the event that was represented: "the street itself becomes a virtual space." User generated culture evaporates the imaginary divide between amateur producers (who were once the inert subjects of the media) and the digital image. Digital culture is the world we live in, the space as well as the mindset. What we are seeing more and more of these days is a disappearance of screens. Monitors turn into projection displays. Peripheral devices disappear in the wake of the gestural interface. The computer becomes easier to interact with, and more connected to our physical reality without a solid, specific interface. If the screen marks the separation of the image from reality, what happens when the representation and the object hold similar, if not equal, weight in the corporal world? We carry around all this prosthetic memory: images from the past, recollections of events that may or may not be from a movie, someone elses anecdote that you remember as your own. The dream is as real as you remember it. So is the movie. The digital media are as real as our culture makes it out to be; and the more you watch, the more of it you remember, the more it becomes you. Information as catastrophe, wrote Baudrillard. The web explodes with so much information, to the point where cognition breaks apart: a scattered, ADD, schizophrenic attitude. You need to suck it all in at once, hold your breath, and allow for it to compress, into one single whole, in order to make any sense of it. This simple process leads to misinformation on one end and learning disabilities on the other. When the information folds in on itself, it loses meaning and requires a revisionist attitude that the information explosion breeds. If you cant find it on Google, it doesnt exist. The ironic effect of the Internet/the Web is that while the intent is to expand our reach, it inevitably makes its users more incapsulated in their own virtual reality. The Internet hides its infrastructure from users so that the everyday browser doesnt have an understanding of the relationship between their operations on their PC with the vast infrastructure that supports the Internet: fiber optic cables, data farms, electricity, and servers
1

Jean Baudrillad, The Illusion of the End, 55.

Mobile and wireless technologies further mystify the process. WiFi, for example, is an invisible technology. We know that it works, but not necessarily how. Users may have a recognition of the router and the card in their computer that connect over the air, but certainly that recognition is not made apparent in everyday use due to its very invisibility. UbiComp, the next generation of computing, carries with it this same invisibility. Ubiquitous computing, in the 4G network, enables users to connect to the network anywhere and any time. If you can have anything at any time, the weight of information lessens; continuous connectivity to the Internet filters in to a weakening of the perception of the Internet so that it comes to equal Reality. This is entirely a product of a consumer society that is conditioned to the supply and demand way of existence. When its readily available, the value of the product decreaces. Virtual reality and social reality (the physical kind) become equal. Finally, with the advent of microblogging, media and culture became too fast for one to be able to recognize the temporality.

Augmented reality map application nearest tube http://www.cnx-software.com/wpcontent/uploads/2010/12/augmented_reality_map_application_nearest_tube.jpg

When you look at a thing, whether natural or not, you perceive it in the paradigm of design. A natural thing is no longer itself but a culturally constructed object that has been modified by technology: language, media, electricity, and code. it is remarkably difficult if not impossible to set oneself apart from contemporary technology, even in an unmediated environment (Zengotita, Debord). A pixilated frame.

An improper codec. An interrupted satellite television signal.

Liam Cooke, Hkgpwgegmlkw, Flickr, Web. Taken May 31, 2006.

Habeebee, Pieces of a puzzle, Flickr. Taken July 2007.

Record on a used tape, and youll most certainly generate digital artifacts. Looking at it may be disturbing those images shouldnt look like that. Something went wrong. However, its a modern day palimpsest of digital video and technology that we see everyday, though most times ignore. Such instances fade into the surroundings. You see it so often, its common place. Its reality, after all. Its no fault of your own. You are not the technology, but it is manmade. Have you ever seen a pixel? In fact we see pixels everyday: too many to be able to tell between the part and the whole. Zoom in really close to your computer screen and it will become apparent. Forget the original. If youve seen the Simpsons version of Mr. Burns childhood, then youve already seen Citizen Kane. Internet memes abound, rehashing popular cultures

and making it new again. User-generated content is full of references built upon references, and the link to the original is lost. On Wikipedia, reference links are broken and citations are second-hand sources. Web 2.0, net culture, is a sphere of repetition and re-fabrication, everything interlocked and self-referential. Only thing is, whos to tell what came first? Baudrillards inventive and inspired use of Borges forking paths became a clich long ago. For one thing, Im in love with clichs. Secondly, the map preceded the territory is a transcendental statement. Its true. Its a shame that anyone shies away from clichs, especially one as good as this, so I am breaking from tradition here. The map is no longer ink on paper. We hold maps in our hands all the time, but we dont think of them as maps; we call them 4Gs or droids or iPhones. Its incredible the power we have at our fingertips (Im speaking generally here because I want to be one of you, but sadly dont yet own a smartphone). You can interact to a higher degree with your environment by seeing the world through your phone. Im thinking specifically of augmented city guides and maps. Before the printing press there was the palimpsest. the approach to history, and in a way the approach to objective truth, on a global, cultural and social level, were different in ages dominated by these two writing technologies. The palimpsest connotes an awareness of time like sand dunes. The truth of history gets blown away with every turn of the page and every erasure and scribble. History exists in the minds of the representers, the writers, those who are congealing events and making truth into knowledge. With the printing press, history received the gift of concretion. Truth in a way became fixed, that is if you could read Latin. In sixth grade, I bought a package of pencils at a book fair. As they wore down, the sharpener making mincemeat out of the compressed wood and graphite, layers of paint underneath started to wear through as well. Beneath the sparkling silver metallic outer layer was mickey mouse. These were secondhand pencils. I guessed last year the Disney theme hadnt sold, so they had taken a different tactic. The idea of a hidden layer beneath has haunted me ever since. I grew up in the heyday of analog video and VHS, and I remember when I was younger I had nightmares that the video was erasing and that there were layers, worlds, unexplored images beneath the broadcast. I played with the VCR compulsively, broke a few in fact, by thumbing the cassette upward while in the carriage so that the TV would show up snow and interference. Sometimes it was to see if there was anything underneath, sometimes just to annoy the parents. Just as cause and effect is a logical fallacy, your eyes deceive you when you see the light bulb turn on from the light switch: the fictionalizationmythologizationof experience through technology. Do we really understand what technology is, and how it effects our basic everyday operations? We can function on two levels, but the intellectual cogitation of *knowing* that there's an electric infrastructure in place and *acting* by making coffee when the power is out tells us that there's a gap there.

because electricity is intangible. Just like the difference between a celluloid and HD: it's tough to tell the difference. The same way that we generally neglect electric infrastructure (like when you try to make coffee when the power's out, it's become instinct to believe that the electric in your house is a part of the house, inert, rather than connected to a national grid and that grid is fallible), we neglect the difference between a real book and an eText. Tom Standage, in his Victorian Internet, relays the story of a woman trying to send soup to the men on the war front. She was told that you can send the messages over the wires. Early telegraph messengers found it occasionally difficult to describe exactly what they were doing in their office. Dont laugh. We experience similar disjunctions nowadays. The other day, the power went out. Someone went to make coffee and had to take a moment to recognize why the pot wasnt simmering. No power: no coffee. Invisible infrastructures confuse. We have expectations, too. Sometimes the two dont jell. The use of old terms to describe the way that the telegraph, a new technology, worked created a lot of confusion. People make up stories about intangible technology in order to make sense of the world. We believe the hoax because it's easier to bear than the reality. The fake and the 'real': what's the difference? When you think about art forgery, what comes to mind is the forgers' flying in the face of an artistic and historical institution, not to mention the destruction of a cultural belief - that the artist who had been claimed as the author is not who he was presented to be. We have faith in a universe that presents real objects as culturally and historically sound. When a forgery is discovered as a fake we feel that something has been stolen from us, our history, from our very faculty of sight. But what if these forgeries were never uncovered? What would you say if i told you that every painting hanging on the walls of some venerable museum was a forgery? Something has been stolen. Someone like Emile de Hory could have stolen our history out from under our very noses. But today, when we talk about originality and truth, there is not so much a difference between the real painting and the forgery. We have too much history behind us and too many experts. Today when something is true it is only either the expert opinion or the cultural consensus (popular?) that says so. History lies. Star Trek is an historical document of equal value to the Declaration of Independence. The argument put forth in the popular film Galaxy Quest should not be taken lightly; Given a level playing field, and accepting the suspension of disbelief, creativity in the production of cultural artifacts disintegrates the truth value of both. Truth and fiction bear equal weight in a postmodern digital universe. We write the history of our own past from the perspective of today while taking artistic license. Turnbulls Signing of the Declaration of Independence presents its own truth of

the event, and hanging in the venerable position in the halls of Senate, do we believe the representation? Even historical pictures tell lies. There can never be an American history, (John Adams, HBO). The same injustice is performed when burning historical records to rewrite your present as the past (Orwell, 1984). Such crimes happen everyday.

Screenshots from Apples 1984 commercial.

The media make time travel possible in a very real way, and today we experience temporality in a very surreal manner. Just as we can witness the second presidents first glimpse of that portrait that would become famous one day, or how we can see the future in films like Blade Runner and Total Recall, we also make the future and the past real through the media. For example, Apple relied heavily upon Orwells vision of 1984 in its inaugural campaign ironically in that same year. We can look back on the artifact today and see how well it rings true in an oddly self-reflexive way (iPads lock their material inside so we cant change it. We have no control. The isight watches us). The difference between the fiction and the historical (or future) reality has less and less relevance. Taking from Lev Manovich (there is only software) as well as from his contemporary Friedrich Kittler (there is only hardware), there is no digital media without hardware and software. The content of our cultural material is locked inside both technological entities. In the manner of Orwell, I like to imagine what the world will look like in 50 or so years. Given that many technologies we use today will die out, some as quickly as Betamax or 8 tracks, how much of our cultural material is lost because of its digital intangibility? And how much of it will be retained because of its popular status, either in the popular mind or stored inside transmedia devices? What will our descendents think of us? I have the sinking suspicion that our way of life is finite, that we will be misunderstood, like the army wife with her pot of soup in the telegraphers office. And a century from now this world will be irrevocably changed by digital technology in a way that makes natural life indistinguishable from artificiality. Such progress is slow, and for that very reason just as intangible as the media we rely upon to hold our cultural consciousness.

Bibliography: Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Print. Benjamin, Walter. "A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print. Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print. De Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Print. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print. Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. New York: Ace, 1996. Print. Galaxy Quest. Dir. Dean Parisot. Perf. Tim Allen, Allen Rickman, and Sigourney Weaver. Dreamworks, 1999. DVD. Hooper, Tom, dir. "Unnecessary War." John Adams. HBO. 13 Apr. 2008. Television. Kittler, Friedrich. "There Is No Software" CTheory.net. Oct. 1995. Web. 09 May 2011. <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74>. Landsberg, A. "Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner." Body & Society 1.3-4 (1995): 175-89. Print. Manovich, Lev. "There Is Only Software" Software Studies. Apr. 2011. Web. 09 May 2011. <http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-thereis.html>. Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print. Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker, 2007. Print.