Reversal Through Extension, Working Over The Illusion
Like Kate, I dislike terms like “virtual,” “cyber,” or “interactive” since they are often used uncritically and tend to allude to a simple binary between digital and non-digital.
One thing that I think is productive – or at least a topic that I’m interested in – is complicating or critiquing utopianistic and oversimplified views of technology. Technological utopianism often overlooks the raw and beautiful complexity of mundane, everyday life.
For me, tactics for rethinking this include extending communication and representation technologies beyond their normal scope or range of use. This is a way we, in Baurillard’s terms, work over the illusion. When extended to their limits, media technologies can invert themselves, which I think is nicely articulated by McLuhan through his tetrads of media.
Towards the end of his life, Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric embarked on a project to update the 1964 book Understanding Media in response to critics’ requests to provide a solid basis for his drastic and metaphoric claims; the result was Laws of Media: The New Science (1989), published by Eric eight years after Marshall’s death. The book articulated that media technologies have the potential to change in four distinct ways, and constructed a poetic four-region model to envision their concept with characteristics of obsolescence, retrieval, enhancement, and reversal. The reversal, in McLuhan’s eyes, occurs when something is pushed to its limits.
The main point of relevance to this discussion on simulations is that when mediating technologies are pushed beyond their ordinary limits, they can reverse or flip in their intent or use. The McLuhan diagram gives me a visual graph to think about how projects simultaneously amplify, invert, revive, and subsume – they swirl around and don’t simply proceed in a straight line.
When a simulation is taken beyond its role as a safe fantasy and pushed to envelop and take over reality, it becomes perverted. Problematizing a binary virtual/physical view of the world, for example, can be done by taking virtuality to an extreme. In the process, beliefs are “perverted” (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Perverting Technological Correctness, Leonardo 29:1, 1996). By taking a belief or simulation too far, it stops being a comforting diversion and flips into an absurdity, an obsession or a dark dream.
I don’t envision my work as building an alternate social space, but see it as primarily exploring the interstitial space between ordinary life and simulations of it. In the case of the OutRun project, for example, it plays within a space where reality and dream are intentionally blended, confused and blurred: the video game becomes reality and reality becomes a video game. In some ways it’s intentionally trying to create an uncanny valley between the familiar and the almost-familiar (Masahiro Mori, 1970). The “virtual” has always been with us in different forms through history and is not something unique to digital technologies. However, the continued proliferation of digital media technologies has created a lot of interesting opportunities between everyday life and representations of it.
The work that we’re doing might be thought of as exploring an in-between space, or as I’ve heard Tim Durfee refer to it as a spandrel: an in-between space that has evolved into something new. I think that artists serve as good navigators and explorers of the in-between.
