The Holographic Universe

The Universe is a Hologram, seriously...

(please click on the link above to view the original article)

I believe I have brought this up several times over the course of the semester.  In light of this week's readings, now seems an appropriate time to reconsider this idea.  Enjoy!

codes

The readings for this week brings to mind the Dutch artist Aernout Mik who uses photographic and videographic installations to present group behavior in a disconcerting interplay between individual and multitudes, thereby allowing events to become fully unconstrained situations. Cause, time and place can never be exactly determined and the stage like settings generally testify clearly to an exemplary artificiality.




Such an interplay of space can be very powerful in the post 911 (cliched I know) world where the so-called societies of control have the greatest functionality. Within the chaos of a terrorist attack, or the sheer notion of the possibility of such an attack. Critic Naomi Klein calls this "shock treatment", where the powers that be shock (using torture or terror) detesters or "insurgents" into a child like state, apt for manipulation. This is further amplified by the coded economic disphoria that we find ourselves in today, where numbers where created from pure imagination of a mass of greed.


Mik's work is interesting, because the disfunctional cadre of his interest loose all their individuality, becoming nothing more than "dividuals", elements of a code that can be turned on or off.

Deleuze even calls these codes "banks" with floating rates of exchange, no longer bound by the tenable moleculs of a gold standard, free to be manipulated by societies of control.

Technology and Text

I was first introduced to the concept of big brother, during high school upon, reading “1984”, by George Orwell. In Orwell’s novel, humans are ultimately subjects of observations, monitoring and are manipulated in many ways by the ‘one’ in control, “Big Brother”, also referred to as the government.

The discussion in the article, Virtual bodies and Flickering Signifiers, by N. Katherine Hayles in some ways reflects the concept “Big Brother”. In virtual reality however, humans become the ‘Big Brother’, who can control and manipulate another dimension. The dimension explored is not one that our bodies physically enter, but instead our mind. Hayles explains on page 72 that, “Questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage in this situation, for the puppet both is and is not present, just as the user is and is not inside the screen”. Hayles goes on to discuss what she considers of greater importance, exploring “questions about pattern and randomness’.

Hayles explains technology does “more than change modes of text production, storage, and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of the signified to the signifier”. Hayles refers the film, The Fly, when the “human becomes post human”. The artist Lalla Essaydi doesn’t use computer technology, but instead the technology of written text. Her photographs display Muslim women, who are fully clothed, typically only their eyes can be seen. Words of the Koran are written on them and throughout the photograph. Using previous knowledge one can assume these are in fact women, however, one may say they have been dehumanized, as many are forced to wear traditional Muslim clothing and are considered 2nd class citizens.

Hayles explains that, “it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space”. Considering tech support is often needed, as computers tend to malfunction, I actually find comfort in the written text. One may say human immortality is only as good as its vessel.

Testing 1 2 1 2

One is never finished with anything

I found the Deleuze article to be especially forward looking for its early 90s publication date. His assertion that codes and passwords are key for the society of control is right-on. We now have pass codes and passwords for all kinds of things. "Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports." Web surfing in 1992? If not, just another example of his very forward looking essay. I'm not quite sure what he means by, "Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into
the open circuits of the bank." Art as commodity, investment? One art this has given rise to is the art of hacking and code jamming. There are now many conferences devoted to, and groups of hackers practising their art. The iPhone is a good example, they make the device to control which cellular network you can use, but you can hack the phone, or "jail break" it in order to use it on any network.
Stelarc's "Prosthetics"
While I can see that genetic engineering is a way to continue the species by redesigning and not reproduction as stelarc states, many of his ideas seem absurd and merely attention getting stunts. To think we can escape our biology seems naive. His assertion that off the earth we'd be better served by a hollow hard and dehydrated body makes me think back to the Egyptian mummies. Stelarc gives us a manifesto, but his ideas seem far from reality.