Posts Tagged ‘death’

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org) is an approximately sixteen minute video depicting a diptych of video images.

In the video to the right of the diptych, one views a young man who has (it appears) hung himself to death.

In the video to the left of the diptych, one views a continually changing series of random computer users who are responding to the sight of this hanging man.

More specifically, the video is a documentation of the Chatroulette interface in which one of the artists (Franco Mattes) performs the role of the hanging man and leaves it up to the algorithms of Chatroulette (and the pool of Chatroulette users online at the time) to generate the bulk of the video’s subsequent content.

The first thing to note is that one’s focus through the duration of the video is nudged further away from the video of the hanging man and closer towards the video of users’ varied reactions to the sight of the hanging man.

What one takes away is the picture of a virtual public responding to the possibility of a real suicide.

In most cases, a legible pattern forms in which, first of all, a shock occurs where the user confronts the image of the suicide and exhibits a strong reaction.

The sight of a suicide online or off is obviously going to be unsettling, but, there’s something about placing a suicide in this context which is unsettling in a very particular way.

For example, the hanging man here is “live” in the sense that their virtual persona is functioning, but the user (the actual hanging man, himself) is “dead” in the sense that his biological body is no longer functioning.

So, can one really say that he’s definitely not there?

(Like a ghost, his presence in the bedroom is palpable.)

But, can one really say that he is there?

(Of course not, he’s dead.)

So, one asks one’s self:

Is a dead body the same thing as the real person?

And, then:

Is the online persona of a person representing themselves as their own dead body the same thing as the person?

Furthermore, the body here is suspended in the air – both floating, free from the laws of gravity and falling, on the precipice of physical collapse, which only adds to this confusion regarding its location.

After this initial shock effect, then, a range of reactions occur from apathy, to pondering, to sexual excitement, to denial, to the need to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, to amusement, to vicious insulting, to hilarity, to confusion, and, in one case, to calling the police.

Some people assume it’s a joke, some people think it might be real, and most people aren’t quite sure.

Within this range of reactions, though, there is one underlying theme which remains as constant as the presence of the hanging man himself:

The question:

Is this real?

That is to say, first of all, is this really a dead body or is it rather a clever fakery perpetrated by, say, a performance artist?

And, second of all, is this real, as in is this the sort of real human situation wherein I – as a real human being – am ethically called upon to really act (whether it’s real or whether it’s fake)?

That question is by far and away the most common theme brought up by the users throughout the video’s runtime.

Is this real?

NOTE: This post might be read in conjunction with the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” by Julian Dibbel (1993)

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Thursday, April 29th, 2010

The world of Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World is literally moving forward.

Indeed, the world is, one learns, a large mechanical sphere moving on continuously built-out tracks which are plotted by people such as the novel’s protagonist, Helward Mann.

Mann’s only job, as a “Future,” is to survey ahead of the track-work, making sure that the world’s journey towards what is referred to as “optimum” is as smooth as is reasonably possible.

The reason the world engages in this peculiar activity is the oft-mentioned fear of a centrifugal force in the natural world which, as Mann can attest to, would suck the mechanical world into a Hellish entropic spiral – a void.

(Mann saw this).

Now, this would be fine were it not for the fact that this world – in its endless march towards “optimum” – is overrun with mountains of its own feces.

One can hardly look around the world without viewing its own crumbling mechanical apparatus, its own genetic aberrations, and its own unapologetic human exploitation and warmongering – all conditions contingent upon the world’s progress in one way or another.

But, surely – as Mann would argue – there is simply no other option – one must keep going.

Indeed, Mann, as a professional surveyor into the future, would know – he has, after all, seen it:

If Man(n) stops working, Man(n) goes to(ward)s Hel(l).

(This is what Helward Mann saw.)

For Mann, one must choose the lesser of two evils and march on into the future.

The problem with all this, though – as the novel’s foil to Mann, Elizabeth Khan, demonstrates – is not that Mann is wrong per se, but rather that his question is badly stated.

It’s not that there is a binary between going forward towards the Truth and backwards towards Hell (as if time were a piece of string); but rather that there are a plethora of radically incomplete goings – never forward (as if towards “optimum”), but simply “on.”

All one can do here, then, is be reasonable and present to what is in front of one; that is to say, see things.

In the case of the world of Inverted World, the paradigm of seeing must shift or the world will drown in the endlessness of the ocean (in a sort of reversal of Mann’s own understanding of the void).

Again – it’s not that Mann is “right” or “wrong” here but that his vision is for better or for worse in ruins.

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Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

At Light Industry in Brooklyn, the artist Paul Slocum recently exhibited a re-constructed 1966 Dr. Who episode which long-time fans of the series feared was “lost in time” following a spat of sweeping reductions from the BBC’s entire television archive during the 1960s and 70s.

The BBC’s discarding of this particular Dr. Who episode was not personal, but economic – they were looking for a way to save money on media storage.

In the current epoch of media storage technology, though, the data cloud affords ample room to archive and database this or any other Dr. Who episode.

And, indeed, in response to this hunger, fans of the show and, eventually, the BBC itself have subsequently played the role of the “time-lord,” travelling back in time and re-constructing several of these lost episodes.

As one views-through this particular episode re-construction, which was conducted by the BBC, one listens to an original audio track and views two key visual elements:

1. The first is the rough-hewn re-construction of the episode itself which consists of explanatory text as well as black-and-white production stills and video footage scraps depicting low-budget sci-fi sets and costumes intermingling with actors frozen in time.

There’s a surrealistic, dreamy quality to the visual rhythm here and the lack of clear connection between the images on the screen to the soundtrack reminds one of, say, the Chris Marker film La Jetée which is, likewise, a time-travel story told through an audio track and a series of black-and-white still frames.

2. The second key visual element in the re-construction, though, is the shifting background of solid colors intermingling with random number and letter strings under which this episode re-construction plays-through.

This shifting background imagery reads as “tech” or “sci-fi future” or “futurity”; however, it does so in a notably different way than those same words would find their meaning in the imagery of the episode re-construction – (they read here – not as better or worse – but simply as if from a different era – perhaps the mid-1990s [there’s something Gattaca about the background’s look] – in any event, equally historically dated – dead).

At the end of the episode’s narrative, the Doctor (one vision of the future) “dies” and is – then – re-generated into an entirely new Doctor (another vision of the future) with an entirely new take on the role of the “time lord” who will, nevertheless – play-out an old story:

Like the Doctor before him – this new Doctor will die and be re-generated and, then, that Doctor will die and be re-generated and so on and so on and so on and so on.

Slocum’s further re-contextualization of the episode re-construction itself provides an even deeper layer of re-generation:

One views here neither the obsolete imagery of the episode re-construction nor the obsolete imagery of the background of the re-construction nor the collision of the re-construction and its background, but rather an endless chain of dead re-generations of the future extending forever.

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Friday, January 22nd, 2010

In 2009, Seth Price showed previously unaccounted for work that he originally produced in 2004.

He says: “Sometimes it’s good to go forward and then double back, and circle around again. To those who turned their feet around so that their tracks would confuse their pursuers: why not walk backward?”

This particular slip into Price’s personal history, though, is not totally arbitrary as the work, itself, is a set of 2004 calendars.

There are few things as worthless as an out of date calendar.

This irony is amplified as the calendar’s content is composed of pre-AbEx American painting and graphic design tropes dating from the early 1990s that read as “futuristic.”

Painters like Thomas Hart Benton, who was one of the most famous painters of his own time, are now only modestly well known.

The “hot” cursive fonts and gradiated neon backdrops read the same way: they are – for better or for worse – part of the dustbin of history, not unlike an out-of-date wall calendar.

By combining all of these obsolete elements, Price creates a portrait of obsolescence itself. The fact of obsolescence.

Memento Mori.

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