Replacing Nature: Freedom and Wildness in Virtual Space by rca-issuu

Replacing Nature Freedom and Wildness in Virtual Space

Ollie Ma' Royal College of Art MA Photography Tutor: Nina Trivedi 9971 Words 2019

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The most alive is the wildest

Chapter 2: Preservation, creation and prediction

Chapter 3: Literacy in the system

Conclusion

Bibliography

Illustrations

Figure 1

p.10

Soth, A., 2007. The Arkansas Cajun’s Backup Bunker [photograph]. <https://alecsoth.com/photography/projects/broken-manual> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 2

p.12

Genitempo, M., 2016-2017. Jasper [photograph]. <https://www.matthewgenitempo.com/jasper> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 3

p.16

Steegmann, D., 2015. Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name [exhibition]. <http://myartguides.com/exhibitions/daniel-steegmannmangrane-kingdom-of-all-the-animals-and-all-the-beasts-is-my-name/> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 4

p.16

Steegmann, D., 2015. Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name [exhibition]. <http://www.danielsteegmann.info/works/41/> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 5

p.19

Cheng, I., 2015-2016. Emissary Forks at Perfection [still from live simulation]. Available at: <https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/ian-chengemissaries> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 6

p.21

Atkins, E., 2015. Safe Conduct [video still]. Available at: <http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/34547/1/ed-atkins-hyper-realharrowing-new-films-hisser-safe-conduct-corpsing> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 7

p.24

Steyerl, H., 2019. Power Plants [exhibition]. Available at: <https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/hito-steyerl-power-plants> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 8

p.29

Lek, L., 2019. AIDOL 爱道 [video still]. Available at: <https://vimeo.com/331655114> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Figure 9

p.31

Rossin, R., 2017. Peak Performance [exhibition]. Available at: <http://ssiiggnnaall.com/exhibitions/rossin2/gallery.php> [accessed 20 June 2019]

Preface

#include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << “I look out into a vast white space that is broken only by a sparse mesh of points that measure its depth. While the space beneath my eyes, the portion of my reality that is usually reserved for my body, is empty, I still feel affected by gravity, and I am aware of my position in this space. The only grip that I have on this environment is through a pair of blue translucent hands that mirror the rhythm of my hands, the contradiction of which punctures my sense of reality.

Lines sweep across my vision and a new space loads in.

‘Welcome’

According to the text that appears, floating in the space in front of me, I am now home. This room feels much larger than the other room that I inhabit. The floor consists of bright white tiles, the walls are a rich mahogany, and the furniture is modern. There is an open veranda that provides a view across a landscape of rolling hills, forests and mountains.

I also know that the floor is made of a vinyl that has been designed to look like wood and lifts in places, the walls are pitted with holes that reveal previous coats of paint behind the current faded white, and the furniture is worn. The view from the window reveals a council estate that is halfway demolished, three train lines, two depots, and a distant London skyline.”; }

return 0;

Introduction

The advent of digital technology has expanded the amount of space that is available to humans. Before these technologies, the only space that we could occupy existed in either the physical or the imaginary, whereas now we can also occupy the space of the screen, the internet and the video game, which all fall into the categories of virtual and augmented reality. As these new types of spaces become more frequently populated, it is important to consider their implications on the structures and hierarchies of society, as well as on ourselves as individuals. This dissertation will consider the consequences that the technologies of virtual space have had on the natural world and on our personal freedoms, alongside some popular reactions to those consequences. These ideas will be considered through various combinations of key writings by Franco Berardi, James Bridle, Federico Campagna, Mark Fisher, and Hito Steyerl.

My first chapter will question whether the concept of Nature has been compromised by technological progress. To do this, I will connect the theories on the beginning and end of the Anthropocene era, as studied by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Eileen Crist, and Steyerl, with Henry David Thoreauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s final essay, Walking (1862), which was written during the 19th century as western colonial expansion settled upon the wilderness of North America. I will use these findings as a foundation to study the works of Alec Soth and Matthew Genitempo, who have both made photographic series that document people who have withdrawn from society to live in the wilderness as a reaction to the relentless exhaustion and imbalances of power that have resulted from the pervasion of the networked world.

These ideas will lead into my second chapter, where I will begin to study, alongside the work of Daniel Steegman, what effect the archiving of a physical space into virtual space has on both the space itself and the body of its inhabitant. I will use this research to underpin an inquiry into the ability for wilderness to exist in a virtual space without a physical referent, an example of which can be witnessed in the work of Ian Cheng. This will also drive a study of the implications that these spaces have on the privacy of their inhabitants that will flow through into my critique of Ed Atkinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Safe Conduct (2015), which is a video installation that uses computer graphics to question the violence of technologies of surveillance through the metaphor of the airport security check-in. Throughout this chapter, I will have questioned the widespread reliance on the output of machines and predictive technologies, which will culminate in a critique of

Steyerl’s Serpentine exhibition Power Plants (2019), due to her use of predictive technologies and artificial intelligences in the forecasting of potential evolutionary paths.

From the inquiries that I will present in my first two chapters, an updated structure of society should emerge, which I will establish in my final chapter. To critique the implications that these structures have on freedom, I will present the work of Lawrence Lek, whose practice is engaged with imagining the future relationships of technology and humanity. Lek has produced multiple installations, through the economy of the videogame engine, that centre around the future omnipotent conglomerate Farsight. Of these, the most relevant to this discussion is AIDOL 爱道 (2019), due to the protagonist’s desire to opt out and return to the wilderness. I will end this chapter with an inquest into the loss of the body as more time is spent in virtual space; this is a theme that is present throughout many of the works discussed in this essay, but it has been specifically approached by Rachel Rossin in her exhibition Peak Performance (2017). I will examine this work in relation to various writings on the body from Jean Baudrillard, Campagna, Maurice Merlot-Ponty, and Steyerl, while considering these findings in relation to the wider body of the social with the hope of finding an appropriate reaction to our newly formed societal structure.

Chapter 1: The most alive is the wildest I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. 1 It might seem distracting to begin an essay on virtual space by checking in on Nature; by any definition the digital and the natural are not very closely related. Nature, in its wildest state, operates entirely independently of humans, while the virtual depends on humans for its creation, its space is controlled by code that was written by humans, and it is usually owned by some form of private interest. Additionally, as Franco Berardi argues in his book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015), ‘modern progress was essentially aimed at reducing the dependence of human life on the unpredictability of Nature,’ and the development of virtual space exemplifies that process by removing the human from the physical world and shielding them from Nature in a digital environment whose properties are completely under human control. 2 This discourse begins to suggest that Nature struggles to exist simultaneously with the virtual; one must negate the other. However, due to the speed with which technology has integrated into society in recent years, slow moving regulation has left virtual space in a state of wilderness; writing in 2000, Helen McLure compared the internet to the wild west, describing it as an ‘electronic frontier [that] is still generally lawless territory.’ 3 This analogy is still commonly used today to describe a virtual space that is difficult to regulate. Progress in fields such as medicine, infrastructure, technology and even the military, which are intended to increase our control over Nature, have instead been responsible for ‘human exploitation, total warfare and environmental devastation,’ which has arguably amplified Nature’s unpredictability. 4 As such, the idea of a return to Nature, alongside less specific ‘political theories of withdrawal and escape,’ has proliferated as a reaction to the societal and ecological harm that capitalist technological progress should be held responsible for. 5

An early example of a romanticizing of Nature is provided by Henry David Thoreau, who lived on the boundary that separated civilization from the wilderness during the westward expansion of North America in

Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, The Atlantic, June 1862, <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 2 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London; Brooklyn: Verso, 2015), p.202. 3 Helen McLure, ‘The Wild, Wild Web: The Mythic American West and the Electronic Frontier’, Western Historical Quarterly, 31(4) (2000), 457-476 (p. 463) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/970103> [accessed 20 June 2019] 4 Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p.27. 5 Zach Blas, ‘Opacities: An Introduction’, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, 31(2 (92)) (2016), p.149, <https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-3592499> 1

the 19th century, the so-called pioneers of which are described by Roderick Nash to have been ‘principally concerned with transforming wilderness into civilization.’ 6 Obviously, there are issues here with the definitions of wilderness and civilization; humans had occupied North America for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and the destruction that resulted from what Nash refers to as the ‘removal’ of those humans, by a culture that Thoreau would disparagingly refer to as civilised, is one of the more violent examples of societal and ecological exploitation. Thoreau’s final essay, Walking, detailed his aversion to society and his desire to walk west into land that is yet to be interrupted, due to his position that ‘all good things are wild and free.’ 7 It becomes clear throughout the essay that the freedom that Thoreau was searching for is placed out of reach when sections of the wilderness become privately owned due to the reduction in physical space.

In some ways, the phase of discovery and settlement that Thoreau inhabited relates closely to the phase that we inhabit now; once again most of civilization is settling into an unknown territory, however, this time around the territory is virtual and the violence has been abstracted, which I will discuss in greater detail in the following chapters. This link can be deepened by theories on the beginning and end of the Anthropocene. In their research paper, Defining the Anthropocene (2015), Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin explain that for an environmental change to demarcate a new geological era it must cause a GSSP, which is an international standard for the point at which changes in the strata become significant enough to be considered as the start of a new epoch. Lewis and Maslin note that these must be documented globally over multiple years or decades, and they found this to only be clearly marked by events that are associated with well-mixed atmospheric gases. 8 The earliest event in human history that fits this criteria can be observed in 1610, when a significant dip in the levels of atmospheric CO2 was caused by the rapid decline in the population of the Americas between 1492 and 1650 due to the war, enslavement and famine that arrived with the Europeans. 9 As a result, they hypothesise that the year 1610 should mark the beginning of the Anthropocene, which would place the responsibility for the geological change upon the legacy of the society that Thoreau shunned.

Roderick Nash, ‘The Value of Wilderness’, Environmental Review: ER, 1(3) (1976), p.15, <https://doi.org/10.2307/3984308> (accessed 3 April 2019) 7 Thoreau. 8 Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature, 519(7542) (2015), p.177, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273467448_Defining_the_Anthropocene> [accessed 20 June 2019] 9 Ibid., p. 175. 6

Discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has been a popular point of contention in the art world and beyond since around 2013, when the idea ‘picked up velocity in elite science circles … and the IUGS convened a group of scholars to decide by 2016 whether to officially declare that the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has begun.’ 10 However, that deadline came to pass with no official decision due to the overlapping and contradicting theories on which GSSPs are valid, or if there even exists ‘a single clear signal that can be found globally in the geological record, as opposed to acknowledging the progressive impacts of humans on the world.’ 11 Despite the scientific bureaucracy surrounding the specifics of the Anthropocene’s existence, many writers and philosophers began to consider the consequences of a planet irreversibly altered by humans, as well as the tone of the discourse surrounding the theory. For example, Eileen Crist argues against much of the popular Anthropocene discourse, as contributed to by science, environmentalism, journalists, and other media. This is due to its interpretation that the deliberate alteration of the planet by humanity ‘must be rationalized and sustainably managed, [while] our inadvertent, negative effects need to be technically mitigated.’ 12 For Crist, this way of thinking, which places human expansion and technological progress above all else, is inherently violent as it minimizes the resulting suffering of other forms of life that inhabit our planet.

In a lecture titled Bubble Vision (2017), Steyerl hypothesises that technological progress has induced an end to the Anthropocene; if the period is to be defined as a time in which humans have had a significant effect upon Nature, the ‘handing over [of] this power to opaque automated procedures, to black box algorithms, [and] all sorts of crystal ball gazing’ removes the human from the centre of the scene. 13 For Steyerl, this destroys the Anthropocene as it is no longer humans that are directly affecting the planet but the invisible and accelerated processes that were made possible by new technologies. This theoretical exercise forks the idea of the Anthropocene, from its origin as a geological era, into some sort of philosophical era that is no longer tied to the geological record but is instead connected to our current reality-system; it is unlikely that the current transfer of power would produce a GSSP that is clear enough to

Joseph Stromberg, ‘What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?’, Smithsonian, January 2013, <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 11 Meera Subramanian, ‘Anthropocene now: influential panel votes to recognize Earth’s new epoch’, Nature, 21 May 2019, <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01641-5> [accessed 20 June 2019] 12 Eileen Crist, ‘On the Poverty of our Nomenclature’, Environmental Humanities, 3 (2013), 129-147 (p. 131). 13 Serpentine Galleries, Hito Steyerl; Bubble Vision, 7 October 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boMbdtu2rLE> [accessed 20 June 2019] 10

define a new era geologically as its ecological effects are not changed, only accelerated due to their automations.

So, if the Anthropocene is over, what has come to replace it? In his book Technic and Magic (2018), Federico Campagna labels our current reality-system as Technic and presents this ‘cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world-making activity is revealed by its internal structure.’ 14 Campagna’s idea that there is a substantive, yet unthinkable force governing our reality gives a name to Steyerl’s theory that control, after the Anthropocene, has been given to machines. This discourse also expands on the ‘perception that Technic’s recoding of reality is a mortal threat; specifically, the loss of one’s own presence in the world and the presence of the world itself.’ 15 This suggests that this is a forced removal of humanity who must struggle to survive in a world that seems to be disappearing.

Figure 1, The Arkansas Cajun’s Backup Bunker (2007)

14 15

Campagna, p. 6. Ibid., p. 52.

As we first encountered in the writings of Thoreau, one of the most devoted reactions to the issues presented so far is to reject society and return to Nature, which is also what was opted for by the inhabitants of Alec Soth’s photographic series, Broken Manual (2007). The subjects of these images are depicted as isolated figures, they are centred in the frame, and they seem to have forgotten about the presence of the camera. According to Julian Stallabrass, this is a mode of photography that ‘[works] to fix a firm identity as [an] alienated adolescent, bohemian, or lumpenproletarian,’ which, in the case of Broken Manual, frees the human from the conventions of Technic and recalls them to the position of power at the centre of the scene. 16

Additionally, the makeshift homes that feature in these photographs are mostly detached from the technologies that today’s society has grown accustomed to; there are no phones or computers, there are few televisions, and as a result there is little obligation to pay bills. The rejecting of financial commitment, and the escape from both ‘a fascist government with a capitalist base behind it’ and a democracy in decline, are some of the motives given by a subject of Soth’s during a conversation that was captured for a film on the project, titled Somewhere to Disappear (2010). 17 These symptoms belong to late capitalism, under which, as Berardi explains, ‘work, production and exchange are all transformed into a battlefield whose only rule is competition.’ 18 The momentum of this environment breeds exhaustion and leads to depression, which speaks to a position held by Victor Lund Shammas in 2018, who writes on the importance of ‘“rewilding” areas ... that allow workers to rejuvenate and rejoice in themselves.’ 19 These are spaces that are detached from capital to an extent that Shammas compares to the suspension of particles in a fluid; capital is there but will not settle as it relies on spaces that are less affected by its reach to revive a burnt-out workforce. As a result, and unless one commits to the wilderness as fully as the subjects of Soth, a break from the ‘hyper-accelerating urban world’ works in the favour of capitalism. 20

The spaces that are depicted throughout this series provide their inhabitants with the freedom to create their own realities that are not defined by the structures of a wider society. This is important when

Julien Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, 122 (2007), p.73 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368490> (accessed 3 April 2019). 17 Somewhere to Disappear, dir: Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove,(Mas Films, 2010). 18 Berardi, p.26. 19 Victor Lund Shammas, ‘The Illusion of Non-Capitalist Spaces’, Public Seminar, 14 September 2018, <http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/09/the-illusion-of-non-capitalist-spaces/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 20 Ibid. 16

considered in relation to Crist’s instruction that ‘living in integration with wild nature is not a veiled invitation for humanity to return to its pre-Neolithic phase.’ 21 To escape from the control of technology is not to abandon the pursuit for comfort or stability entirely. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth; Campagna writes that ‘life’ resists the violence of Technic, and the pain that is induced by this violence ‘resounds also as a request to find a place of stability to call its own.’ 22 As we discovered in the introduction to this chapter, Nature is unpredictable. So, to live in integration with nature, without also introducing some form of predictability, would just replace the violence of Technic with the violence of Nature. This logic isolates the isolation of Nature from the network of Technic, alongside the resulting increase in agency that one has over their local environment, as the main forces in the reduction of Technic’s control.

Figure 2, Jasper (2016-2017)

Also dealing with the desire to escape is Matthew Genitempo, whose series, Jasper (2016-2017), documents those who have abandoned society for the solitude of the Ozarks. While this work can be

21 22

Crist, p. 143. Campagna, p.224.

differentiated from Soth’s Broken Manual by the decade that separates them, both projects operate on similar themes and are presented within the same traditions and visual language of a more lyrical form of documentary photography. It would be remiss not to critique the similarities between these projects as symptomatic of the fear and cynicism that Fisher cites as the prevailing mood of late capitalism; these emotions do not ‘inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful.’ 23 This direction might seem to discard the work as derivative of Broken Manual, but I would rather argue that Jasper, as an art project, speaks to, reinforces, and continues the ideas presented by Soth, which is necessary to reactivate those who have become exhausted by the relentless systems of control that we have found to be fundamental to Technic. I will concede, however, that the competition of the marketplace in which the project was published as a product contributes to late capitalism; financial success is ensured through its conformity with works that have already been successful, and through Twin Palms Publishers’ assurance of ‘long-lasting value and collectability.’ 24 Under this paradigm, art itself is transformed into a ‘networked, decentralized, widespread system of value,’ that is subjected to the same conditions of Technic due to the algorithmic control of its circulation. 25

Genitempo’s ‘fascination with running away’ also has roots in divisive politics, originating with the election of Donald Trump. 26 The success of Trump, despite mass public outrage, is thought to have been largely influenced by social media bubbles. In his film Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis cites this phenomenon as the basis for his prediction that Trump would win the election; when liberals expressed their outrage of Trump online, ‘the algorithms made sure it only spoke to people who already agreed with them.’ 27 So, to inhabit the virtual space of social media is to exist within, and contribute towards, an echo chamber; Steyerl describes these spaces as ‘parallel information universes’ that fracture and fragment society through the separation of opposing views into disconnected virtual realities. 28 As a result, the algorithms that control what information is presented online are complicit in the automation of the disruption of democracy, which results in an acceleration of the societal issues that we found to be responsible for the retreat of the Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Hants: 0 Books, 2009), p. 76. Twin Palms, ‘About’, <https://twinpalms.com/about/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 25 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London: Verso, 2017), p. 182. 26 Matthew Genitempo, Jasper by Matthew Genitempo (interviewed by Colin Pantall for British Journal of Photography), 13 February 2019, <https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/jasper-genitempo/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 27 Hypernormalisation, dir. By Adam Curtis (BBC, 2016). 28 Hito Steyerl; Bubble Vision 23 24

inhabitants of both Broken Manual and Jasper. This process also provides a foundation for the argument that capitalism benefits from the destruction that it causes; as Curtis goes on to explain, the increased engagement that is generated through the algorithmic delivery of content financially profits the corporations running the platforms as higher levels of attention drive an increased advertising revenue. 29

So, how does a return to Nature protect against this more recent threat of the echo chamber? To answer this, Genitempo refers to a quote from Chris Hedges, who reiterates Campagna’s logic that isolation from society provides stability in the form of endurance; this form of isolation means that there is nobody who can physically affect one’s personal space. However, Hedges extends this thought to propose that the isolation of Nature also acts to ‘wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture,’ which suggests that it is also the disconnection from a global network of information that is necessary to take back control. 30

Hypernormalisation. Chris Hedges, ‘Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle’, 2010, quoted by Matthew Genitempo, Photographer, British Journal of Photography, 13 February 2019, <https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/jasper-genitempo/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 30

Chapter 2: Preservation, creation and prediction The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and the wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. 31 An increasing tension between the virtual and Nature became clear in the first chapter of this dissertation, as well as the ability for Nature to provide some sort of refuge from the relentless onslaught of technological progress. However, that refuge is jeopardised by the relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster, which Fisher deems to be ‘neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s ‘need of a constantly expanding market’, its ‘growth fetish’, means that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.’ 32 Just as capitalism benefits from the destruction of democracy, it also benefits from the destruction of the environment; its excessive growth relies on excessive consumption. An example of this process can be observed as the acceleration of melting sea ice due to climate change ‘could potentially open a new trade route from Europe to east Asia.’ 33 The shorter channel would cut transit time by at least ten days, which would decrease the cost of importing goods at the expense of swollen sea levels and increases in extreme weather across the globe.

As a result, it becomes clear that the physical location of capital ceases to matter; as James Bridle argues in his book New Dark Age (2018) ‘there is no such thing as a local effect in a networked world.’ 34 This means that those particles of capitalism that were suspended when detached from capital, as encountered in the writings of Shammas earlier, have started to settle due to climate changes that cannot be restrained geographically. This is a process that has been accelerated by what Steyerl refers to as ‘today’s main real artificial intelligence … the invisible hand of the markets, which supposedly knows and fixes everything.’ 35 The power that the financial markets possess over the physical world, with a maximum regard for profit and no capacity for compassion, demonstrates how the handing over of processes to algorithms that occupy virtual space can affect the physical world, in this case automating and accelerating a reduction in the space of Nature.

Thoreau. Fisher, pp. 18-19. 33 Guardian, Melting Arctic ice opens new route from Europe to east Asia, 28 September 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/28/melting-arctic-ice-opens-new-route-from-europe-to-east-asia> [accessed 20 June] 34 James Bridle, New Dark Age (London; Brooklyn: Verso, 2018), p.3. 35 Hito Steyerl; Bubble Vision 31 32

Figure 3, Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2015)

Figure 4, Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2015)

However, with his virtual reality simulation Phantom (2015), Daniel Steegmann attempts to prove that virtual space can have the opposite effect. The work maps an area of Brazillian rainforest, which Steegmann labels as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;one of the fastest disappearing environments of the world,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; and archives it in virtual 16

space. 36 This seems to be an attempt to protect its image from eco-disaster, and from what Campagna describes as a world enframed by technology, which rewrites the substance of the world as: nothing but the accumulated instrumental value of everything and anything. A forest is no longer a forest, but a stockpile of timber ready to be sent to production; a waterfall is no longer a waterfall, but a stockpile of hydro-electrical units ready to be extracted; a person is no longer a person, but a stockpile of labour ready to be employed and so on. 37 Within the contexts of capitalism and exhaustion that I have presented so far, these processes of reduction become violent; to participate as a member of society is to be reduced to units of labour. Many of the processes are also automated by the invisible financial markets that Steyerl considered, and that we have found to be incapable of compassion.

At this point it seems relevant to interrogate the legitimacy of a space reproduced virtually. With the use of contemporary technology, the most effective way to duplicate a space is through photogrammetry. This technique involves photographing an environment from many different angles and using an algorithm to stitch the images into three-dimensional data, which can subsequently be translated into the illusion of three-dimensional space by the virtual reality headset. The additional grip, to reuse Maurice MerleauPonty’s term, that is provided by the motion tracking of one’s point of view around the image space, as enabled by the headset, allows for ‘a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible,’ which produces a deeper immersion than was possible with preceding imaging technologies such as film, photography or painting. 38 Despite this, the experience inside a virtual reality headset is one that is undoubtedly different to experiencing the physical world; I am aware of the pressure that the headset exerts onto my skin, of the visible pixels and the micro delay of the monitors in front of each of my eyes, of the solitude caused by inhabiting this space alone and without my body, all of which ultimately illuminates the gap between my world and the world presented to me. These issues are obvious even before addressing Baudrillard’s view that ‘the closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum, … the more evident it becomes … how everything escapes representation, escapes its own double and its resemblance.’ 39 The spectacle of a perfect duplicate, witnessed through the spectacle of technological innovation, makes overt what Alexander Provan describes as the ‘elaborate work of abstraction and quantification that goes into

Daniel Steegman, ‘Phantom, Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name)’, <http://www.danielsteegmann.info/works/41/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 37 Campagna, p. 27. 38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979), p. 292. 39 Baudrillard, p. 106. 36

collapsing the gulf between representation and perception.’ 40 The power that man has commanded over Nature by capturing its image becomes the subject of the work, as opposed to Nature itself.

From a more practical point of view, the appropriation of the space of the rainforest into digital information that can presented within the Oculus Rift does little to protect its referent from destruction; a virtual space cannot serve as a habitat for wildlife and the surfaces of its vegetation cannot absorb CO2 from our physical climate. This is because our current simulations only approximate objects by translating their surfaces into a series of digital vertices and edges. Bridle refers to this process as a conflation between approximation and simulation, under which ‘the high priests of computational thinking replace the world with flawed models of itself; and in doing so, as the modellers, they assume control of the world.’ 41 For Bridle, this control is enabled by a widespread conditioning of society into believing that computers increase human cognizance, which is problematic because data inputs into machines are inherently limited; today’s obsession with computational thinking means that flawed computer outputs that have the power to overwrite reality.

The issue outlined above deepens the critique of life after the Anthropocene has ended; humans are missing from the scene and blindly following the flawed output of machines. It seems that Steegman’s Phantom is aware of this; despite the room scale motion tracking, the viewer inhabits the virtual space without a body. Steegman hopes that the absence of the body would ‘render a physical experience of dissolution into the world,’ which becomes overt when one realises that the direction of their gaze is the only form of control that one has over the environment that is presented, and that the absence of one’s body is equal to an absence of power. 42 It is through this discourse that the work negotiates the idea that control of the world has been transferred from humans to technology and that this transfer has been responsible for the acceleration of the ecological disaster that has introduced precarity to the rainforest that Steegman has depicted.

However, in similitude with the physical experience of retreating into nature, the experience of virtual space also makes apparent the absence of other bodies. This is supported by Fisher, who notices that the use of

Alexander Provan, ‘Formatting Reality’, Surround Audience: Catalogue of the New Museum Triennial, 2015, p. 50. Bridle, pp. 34-35. 42 Steegman. 40 41

headphones by students in his classes is not something ‘which could have impacts upon public space, but [offers] a retreat into private ‘OedIpod’ consumer bliss, a walling up against the social,’ despite the technology’s guarantee that one is still plugged in and the network is still contactable. 43 This effect is compounded within the virtual reality headset due to the saturation of both hearing and sight; one becomes completely isolated from the physical other. In the case of Phantom, the virtual space is completely isolated too, rendering the inhabitant of the space into complete solitude.

Figure 5, Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015-2016)

It is clear then, that the preservation of Nature within virtual space is problematic, but what about invented spaces that are simulated to contain elements of wilderness? In his trilogy of live simulations titled Emissaries (2015-2017), Ian Cheng creates a space that sits somewhere between the virtual and Nature; there is no beginning or end, and not everything is under his control, but the chaos must adhere to a set of parameters that were defined during the creation of the space. Cheng references Nature in his work as ‘an analogy to the out-of-control-ness that a simulation can contain, and also to speak of the out-of-controlness that we experience in our lives.’ 44 The virtual inhabitants of Emissaries operate under a model of the mind that combines different modes of artificial intelligence, all of which must compete to be the dominant mode of thought within each character.

Fisher, p. 24. Louisiana Channel. Ian Cheng Interview: A Portal to Infinity, 19 October 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO6Luilc4Bo> [accessed 20 June 2019]

43 44

This speaks to what Berardi refers to as a contemporary precariousness of life, which is a mode of existence in which the rules that govern the present are impermanent and unstable causing an uncertainty for the future. In the field of communication, precariousness has been introduced by alternating interaction between other humans and technology in early human development. The differing speeds of these communications result in a Lacanian schizophrenia, which Berardi argues to have reduced time ‘into a vortex of depersonalized, fragmentary substance that can be acquired by the capitalist and recombined by the network-machine.’ 45 The loss of time is exaggerated within this trilogy of simulations, each of which exists as one iteration of an endless simulation of either the past, the present or the future of the community. Cheng forces this idea to refer to the human experience through his use of ‘computergenerated simulations like those used in predictive technologies for complex scenarios such as climate change or elections.’ 46 The tradition into which the visual language of Emissaries falls, through its use of artificial intelligence and aerial views, is usually reserved for scientific diagrams that relate to the physical world.

If we continue to consider the inhabitants of Emissaries as human, issues of privacy, representation and democracy are raised. The display of the simulations in a gallery space, rendered in real-time and projected onto large screens, comments on what Steyerl deems to be the ‘growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, [and] satellite views.’ 47 The entities that operate within the space, and their actions, are under a constant, invisible, and non-consensual surveillance. This reduces them to what Fisher might refer to as worker-prisoners, which is exaggerated by their mode of forced existence within the simulation. This should be substituted by the debtor-addict when humans inhabit virtual space under a model of ‘cyberspatial capital [that] operates by addicting its users,’ due to the possibility, however impractical, to unplug from the machine and return to Nature. 48 The mechanics of the simulation were implemented by Cheng in a way that is comparable to the implementation of rules that govern more commercial virtual spaces, which is responsible for a loss of democracy for the inhabitants of that space; Cheng’s subjects have no way to vote on the structures that govern their space, they are subjected to the

Berardi, pp. 49-50. MoMA, Ian Cheng: Emissaries, 2017, <https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3656> [accessed 20 June 2019] 47 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), p.24. 48 Fisher, p. 25. 45 46

schizophrenia of multiple personalities and they are forced to repeat the simulation until infinity, with no ability to opt-out.

Figure 6, Safe Conduct (2015)

Speaking more directly to humans, whose daily lives are increasingly forced into contact with technology and the virtual spaces that inhabit those technologies, is the art practice of Ed Atkins. Atkins is mostly interested in the representation of humans within computer-generated spaces, which, in the case of Safe Conduct (2015), emerges as a video installation that depicts a dirtied and damaged CGI surrogate compulsively dismembering sections of his body and placing them into uniform grey trays in a bizarre airport security instructional video.

The invention of air travel has contributed substantially to the acceleration of globalisation, due to its introduction of a complex global network of airports, flights, passenger data, security and surveillance, which are all systems that exist either entirely within, or in constant contact with, the virtual. As a result, the airport becomes a temporally and geographically indeterminate space; this is a place that exists between time-zones and between borders, which, in the case of Safe Conduct, describes humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current positioning between the virtual and the real.

During the security clearance process all bags and bodies must be screened using a combination of advanced imaging technologies, metal detectors and more traditional pat-down procedures, before they are permitted into what is officially referred to as the ‘sterile’ side of the airport. In addition, airport security authorities ‘[work] closely with the intelligence and law enforcement communities to share information,’ which means that one’s potential as a threat is predicted in the virtual space that connects the passenger to the airport, significantly sooner than one arrives there physically. 49 In an artist talk on the work, Atkins admits that the tone of the instructional videos that Safe Conduct references is traditionally one of innocence, ‘when actually what’s really happening when you have to take everything off and go through these machines … to my mind at least is symbolically quite a violent thing.’ 50 The surrogate’s nervous presentation of limbs, organs, blood and bones alongside weapons and the occasional everyday object acts as a metaphor for the unconscious submittal of society to technologies of control and surveillance that exist beyond those found in airport security.

However, I would argue that a deeper violence is represented here through the compulsive rendering into data of multiple levels of ontology within the work, which includes the rendering into data of oneself as a threat to safety by the airport security clearance process; the motion capture of the artist’s performance; the shapes and positioning of the banal objects that together form the material of the security checkpoint; and the performance of the work as a commodity through its display in the space of the gallery. This contributes to the discourse of Shoshana Zuboff, who writes, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), that ‘every time we encounter a digital interface we make our experience available to “datafication,” thus “rendering unto surveillance capitalism” its continuous tithe of raw-material supplies.’ 51 This recalls Campagna’s findings that, under Technic, the world has been reduced to instrumental value, which we have already discovered to be a violent process. This is taken further by surveillance capitalism through the application of violence directly upon the human through the de-materialization of experience, and the body (which we know to already be lost) into opaque data. For Bridle, these forms of surveillance are implemented because they are possible, ‘not because [they] are effective: and, like other implementations of automation, because

Transport Security Administration, Security Screening, <https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening> [accessed 20 June 2019] SMK – National Gallery of Denmark. Safe Conduct: Ed Atkins in the x-room, 11 June 2016, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY17qZLMUcg> [accessed 20 June 2019] 51 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2019), p. 234. 49 50

it shifts the burden of responsibility and blame onto the machine.’ 52 It is difficult to make an individual or a company accountable for the shortcomings of their technology.

This is also the case if we replace the shortcomings of machines with the shortcomings of standardised systems. Atkins purchased his CGI surrogate from an online marketplace, finding that the most detailed ‘3d models that you can buy are white figures … and the ones that aren’t are like versions of that made darker.’ 53 This speaks to the discarding of human identity when it is reconstructed in pixels, which is symptomatic of capitalism’s cult of minimal variation. These aspects are also made apparent in the similarities between the cuts that the surrogate makes into his own body and the identical trays into which the body parts are placed. In addition, the piece is set to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928), which consists of one-movement that is repeated several times. Writing on the repetitious patterns found in videogames, Alfie Bown argues that repetition is encouraged ‘since subjects are easily governable when they stick to repetitious routines … [and] repetition serves to ingrain not only the compulsion to repeat itself but particular ideological ideas.’ 54 In this way, repetition becomes a technology of control that operates to addict people to the virtual spaces that it inhabits. When combined, these ideas also speak to the standardization and automation of the modern assembly line, which is simultaneously in the process of replacing humans with machines and algorithms, and replacing physical production with the immaterial production of language and images.

Throughout this chapter, we have discussed in detail two prominent themes; the first was the problematic nature of re/creating space virtually, and the second was the issues of control and privacy when experience transitions from the physical to the virtual. However, another idea has been building throughout this discourse, which is that processes that exist virtually can predict and affect the future of the physical world.

Bridle, p. 180. Safe Conduct: Ed Atkins in the x-room 54 Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), p. 80. 52 53

Figure 7, Future Plants (2019)

Commenting directly on this thought is Steyerl’s exhibition Power Plants (2019), which is a collection of works that use virtual and augmented realities, artificial intelligences, and smartphone applications to critique the social and economic structures of the area surrounding London’s Serpentine Galleries. Of these works, the most relevant to the discussion of this dissertation is Steyerl’s series of video sculptures whose subject is the prediction and generation, by artificial intelligences, of what the artist calls Future Plants (2019). Steyerl discloses that the work mainly attempts to understand and display the limitations of artificial intelligence, having found that ‘if you actually look into the future using an AI, then you will very quickly see that this future is blurry and you won’t be able to recognise anything.’ 55 As we discovered earlier in this chapter, these technologies can become dangerous due to the pervasion of computational thinking, which renders into reality the approximations of simulations. Steyerl’s Future Plants appear glitchy, their movements are inorganic, and in some scenes the artificial intelligence appears disoriented. Despite this, none of the plants feel incredibly dissimilar to those that inhabit our world currently, which entitles the work to critique the contemporary use of ‘deep data mining, AI technologies and predictive modelling … to ascertain housing and social benefit provision.’ 56 When these processes, which are imperative to the

The Vinyl Factory. Hito Steyerl on Power Plants, AI and music, 3 May 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v08U5-BKnE> [accessed 20 June 2019] 56 Adrian Searle, ‘’Much of the experience is meant to be horrible’: Hito Steyerl review’, Guardian, 10 April 2019, <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/10/hito-steyerl-review-serpentine-sackler-gallery-london> [accessed 20 June] 55

survival and wellbeing of various human demographics, are handed over to machines and simulations that we have found to be flawed and lacking in compassion, the implications can be catastrophic; a companion app to the exhibition augments reality with statistics that demonstrate the dramatic inequality of the area.

This critique of the hierarchies of power and inequality within society seems to be an extension of the critique of freedom that Steyerl began in her collection of essays titled The Wretched of the Screen (2012). At the time, Steyerl had noticed that the nature of freedom had flipped, and, under this new paradigm, freedom had started to exist as ‘the freedom of corporations from any form of regulation, as well as the freedom to relentlessly pursue one’s own interest at the expense of everyone else’s.’ 57 This makes relevant issues surrounding the current controversy of the Serpentine’s relationship with the Sackler family, who are ‘widely blamed for profiting from the opioid epidemic in the United States, which has killed more than 200,000 people since 1999.’ 58 In response to this, Steyerl wrote into the exhibitions companion app code ‘predicting’ that the Sackler family would eventually be disassociated from the gallery by visually removing their name from the building’s façade when viewed through the augmented reality of the app, which relies on, and reinforces, the argument that we have built towards the output of computers overwriting reality.

The adjustment to freedom that is being approached here belongs to neoliberalism, which is a political philosophy that tends towards deregulation and privatization, and the ideology that ‘competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.’ 59 In their essay, The Californian Ideology (1995), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron argue that this shift towards the political right was made possible by the rise of a ‘virtual class’ who ‘simultaneously [reflect] the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship.’ 60 For Barbrook and Cameron, this hybrid of ideals provided the foundation for virtual space, as much of its early development took place in California, and can be traced back to the colonisation of America due to the common idealism that the nation was built out of the wilderness by the individual. The two writers go on to reinforce the idea that individuals in this period ‘can prosper only through the suffering of others,’ rendering the Californian Ideology as violent, and reinforcing the path that we took between the

Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, p. 123. Naomi Rea, ‘Artist Hito Steyerl Made an App That Removes the Sackler Name From the Serpentine Sackler’s Façade’, artnet, 10 April 2019, <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hito-steyerl-sackler-1513042>, [accessed 20 June 2019] 59 Stephen Metcalf, ‘Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world’, Guardian, 18 August 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world> [accessed 20 June 2019] 60 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, Mute, 1 September 1995, < http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology> [accessed 20 June 2019] 57 58

ideologies of Thoreau at the start of the Anthropocene, and the ideologies of the present day as control is handed over to machines. 61

Ibid.

Chapter 3: Literacy in the system At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only. 62 Democratic Process Government Currency Experience The Body

Free Market Capitalism Corporations Attention Data Obsolete

If we are to take as fact Steyerl’s theory that the Anthropocene has already ended, and Campagna’s philosophy that we are now experiencing the crisis of a reality disintegrated by Technic, it becomes important to consider how these changes have shifted the structures of power within society. In a world that is increasingly charted, interpreted, predicted, replaced, and restrained by technological conglomerates, artificial intelligences, machine learning, virtual spaces, and automation, previous systems of authority lose control and are forced into obsolescence. I have mapped some of these shifts in the table above, and I will theorize on some of the consequences of these changes throughout the rest of this chapter.

I would like to start with the trend towards pseudo-public spaces in large cities such as London. These exist as ‘large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers,’ and, as a result, private security and surveillance is often introduced, operating under different rules to those that govern truly public spaces. 63 This transfer of ownership of a space from local councils to private entities severely limits its democracy, and any extra restrictions imposed on the space often lack transparency. The proliferation of this form of ownership, which has been encouraged by the neoliberalism that we found to have inverted freedom in the last chapter, has reduced the amount of truly public space exacerbating the reduction in democracy.

Issues such as these are becoming even more pressing in the human occupancy of virtual space. As Bown proposes, ‘the discourses of the capitalist corporation are already taking a firm hold in cyberspace (which is

Thoreau. Jack Shenker. ‘Revealed: The Insidious Creep of Pseudo-Public Space in London.’ The Guardian, (24 July 2017). <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseudo-public-space-pops-london-investigation-map> [accessed 3 April 2019] 62 63

increasingly indistinguishable from space itself).’ 64 This is especially true of the current trend in the commercial development of videogames, which is towards the creation of expansive worlds that are advertised to extend the possibilities of the physical world. In an example of the ‘ceaseless boom and bust cycles’ 65 that Mark Fisher explains to be fundamental to the rhythm of capitalism, linear, level-based stories have experienced a demographic decline. In place of this, popularity has been divided between open worlds that create the illusion of free will to do as one pleases within the virtual space, and online-only battle-royales in which up to one hundred participants land on the same island with a safe zone that is constantly shrinking. Of these environments, the most populated are created by large corporations that retain legal ownership of the image space, and presumably any experiences encountered within.

Freedom within these pseudo-public virtual spaces is made even more precarious by an ongoing legal battle in the United States to reclaim net neutrality. According to the New York Times, the legislation ‘would prevent companies from blocking or slowing the delivery of content,’ which they are currently free to do in most states. 66 The lack of net neutrality exemplifies what Dan Hunter refers to as a tragedy of the anticommons, which occurs when virtual territory becomes restricted due to the ‘[reduction in] public ownership of, and public access to, ideas and information in the online world.’ 67 In addition to the echo chambers of social media and the virtual solitude of the head mounted display, the reduction in net neutrality is yet another way in which technological progress has limited democracy.

I am subtly aware of this form of ownership as I write the preface to this dissertation while sat in front of a virtual computer screen suspended in my Oculus Home; as far as I know, nobody else inhabits this space alongside me and I own the equipment that allows me to visit the space, but the code that projects the space into an image is owned by Facebook and is constantly uploaded to Facebook’s servers so that my Facebook friends can visit depending upon my privacy settings, and so that I can download my Home wherever I am. 68 This starts to address what Steyerl introduces as ‘a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze, outsourced to machines and other objects.’ 69 Due to its storage online, my Oculus Home is always

Bown, p. 3. Fisher, p. 35. 66 Cecilia Kang, ‘Net Neutrality Vote Passes House, Fulfilling Promise by Democrats’, New York Times, 10 April 2019, <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/net-neutrality-vote.html> [accessed 20 June 2019] 67 Dan Hunter, ‘Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticommons’, California Law Review 91(439) (2003), p. 446. 68 Oculus created one of the most popular virtual reality headsets, the Oculus Rift, and was subsequently acquired by Facebook. The Oculus Home is a customizable virtual space that one is loaded into on entering the Oculus Rift. 69 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, p. 24. 64 65

subjected to the potential gaze of Facebook, making it tempting to speculate on whether the company tracks how long I spend in virtual space, where I look, and what other applications I use. As experience is made increasingly digital, the discussion surrounding how much trust one must place upon corporations that are endlessly creating and acquiring virtual spaces becomes much more urgent, especially as humanity unconsciously hands over data and power to machines and it becomes increasingly difficult to opt-out.

Figure 8, AIDOL 爱道 (2019)

This calls for what Bridle refers to as a literacy in the system, which ‘goes beyond a system’s functional use to comprehend its context and consequences’ and is required to regain public control of technology. 70 A pursuit for this form of literacy is central to the practice of Lawrence Lek, who has created a series of works that are centred around his fictitious Farsight Corporation, which ‘seeks to utilise the advances of AI in order to revolutionise three key industries: Finance, Property and Entertainment.’ 71 These are arguably the three industries that have the most impact on our daily lives, and that technological progress has altered the most. Throughout these works, Lek uses elements of computer graphics, videogame language, and site specificity to address ‘contemporary anxieties and fixations [such as] the rise of AI, the formulaic

Bridle, p. 3. Bold Tendencies, Lawrence Lek: Farsight Corporate Launch, 2018, <http://boldtendencies.com/event/lawrence-lek-farsightcorporate-launch/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 70 71

dictates of celebrity, [and] the hegemony of global brands and technological giants.’ 72 The most recent of these works is AIDOL 爱道 (2019), which is a feature-length film that is set to 12 tracks that were written and orchestrated by Lek, and was produced using 3d rendering and the video-game engine to imagine a world where artificial intelligences are capable of competing in videogame tournaments, creating art and even altering the weather.

AIDOL 爱道 takes place in the year 2065 during the lead up to that year’s eSports Olympic final, in which humans must compete against machine-inhabiting artificial intelligences. The film’s main protagonist is a faded superstar called Diva, who is suffering from what Tim Wu would refer to, in his book The Attention Merchants (2017), as a ‘form of extinction peculiar to the attention economy, not dying but being forgotten.’ 73 After achieving fame through the release of a hit-single, Diva had decided to opt-out from society, finding refuge in the wilderness of the virtual space in which the film is set. However, in line with Zuboff’s findings that ‘surveillance capitalism’s rendition practices overwhelm any sensible discussion of “opt in” and “opt out,”’ 74 a representative of Farsight Corporation forces Diva to return and produce a new, generic hit-single that will provide humanity with an anthem that will unite them against the machines in the upcoming competition. In the universe of the film, Farsight is both a global conglomerate and a political regime, and they have the power to force compliance by cutting off the life-force of dissenting members of society such as Diva.

Unable to produce a track that satisfies Farsight and realising that ‘originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick,’ Diva enlists the help of AI artist Geomancer. 75 The collaboration between human and sentient machine produces a track that sounds similar to Diva’s previous hit but has been changed just enough to satisfy the algorithms. When this event is combined with the totalitarianism of Farsight and the mainstream adoption of videogames, it forces the work into conversation with the reorganisation of desire that we are experiencing today. As Bown warns, the increased habitancy of the space of the videogame, alongside other less captive virtual spaces ‘is a particular concern, considering that increasing corporate

Sadie Coles, Lawrence Lek AIDOL 爱道 (press release), 2019, <https://www.sadiecoles.com/exhibitions/708/press_release_text/> [accessed 20 June 2019] 73 Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads (London: Atlantic Books, 2017), p. 217. 74 Zuboff, p. 241. 72

Sadie Coles, Lawrence Lek AIDOL 爱道.

organization of technological space means increasing potential for corporate control of desire itself.’ 76 In Diva’s reality, and increasingly in our own, corporate algorithms decide what content is original or relevant, and the intimacy of the connection between the unconscious of a virtual space and that of its inhabitant provides a channel through which this information becomes a force of reprogramming. This reinforces the idea that attention, under this latest structure of society, has become a form of currency due to the value of its potential to change opinions and even control one’s actions.

Figure 9, Peak Performance (2017)

Working closer to the present is Rachel Rossin, whose practice is involved with the intersect between the virtual and the real, and as such the artist spends much of her time within the virtual space of the head mounted display. Rossin’s exhibition titled Peak Performance (2017) was made after the artist was overwhelmed by the feeling of loss for her body when she inhabited those virtual spaces. The project consists of sculptures that the artist made during her time in virtual space, that reference ‘the memory of what it felt like to have a body, and what parts of my body I remembered the most.’ 77 She then painted those sculptures with oil on canvas, and also printed them onto an acetate composite, which she moulded

Bown, p. 76. Rachel Rossin, Rachel Rossin talks about her life and work (interviewed for Artforum), 2017, <https://www.artforum.com/video/rachel-rossin-talks-about-her-life-and-work-71956> [accessed 20 June 2019] 76 77

into self-supporting, body-like forms using a blowtorch and her physical body. I will consider the consequences of this work in relation to a combination of theories on the body written by Baudrillard, Campagna, Ponty and Steyerl.

Writing in 1981, long before commercial virtual and augmented reality headsets were widely adopted, Baudrillard was interested in the desire to transform the self into a holographic double. He imagined these holograms as projections onto the physical world, and that in passing one’s real hand ‘through the unreal hologram without encountering any resistance … the hologram has rendered your hand unreal as well.’ 78 This discourse becomes relevant to the work of Rossin when we consider the virtual space of the head mounted display to be a sort of a hologram in which the body is mostly absent; in most commercial virtual spaces its representation is usually limited to a pair of disembodied hands that track the movements of one’s physical hands through the grip of the physical controllers. For Baudrillard, this process would yield the power of God through the transformation of oneself into immateriality, which encourages the study of ‘technology [as] the mortal deconstruction of the body - no longer a functional medium, but the extension of death.’ 79 Technology forces the body into obsolescence as it is no longer needed to navigate virtual space, which renders the plexiglass sculptures of Rossin’s Peak Perfomance into archives of a body that is lost.

For Campagna, however, technology provides a ‘process through which an individual negotiates its own limits and thus its own form, in the context of a mutual relation with the world around it.’ 80 So instead of deconstructing and destroying the body, as in Baudrillard’s writings, an individual becomes defined by their form within the technology. In the case of a virtual environment that reduces its inhabitant to a pair of transparent hands that allow for grip upon the virtual world, it can be argued that the body is fragmented but not eliminated. This argument is strengthened by Merleau-Ponty’s theory on the perception of one’s body as ‘no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body;’ 81 the representation of the inhabitant’s hands within virtual space proves that there is still a space reserved in which a person can take place. This desire to take up space is amplified in Peak Performance by the large plinths on which Rossin’s fragmented bodies have been placed.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994) (original work published in 1981), p. 104. 79 Ibid., p. 108. 80 Campagna, p. 27. 81 Merlot-Ponty, p. 117. 78

The precarity of one’s body in virtual space must have implications within the new systems that we have found to structure our society; towards the end of her lecture on Bubble Vision, Steyerl questions whether it is all ‘just a training scheme to adapt humans to a world from which they are increasingly missing?’ 82 This thought might have been answered by Bown, who argues that the dromena encountered within virtual spaces ‘[puts] you into a dreamlike state from which its ideology is imposed as natural.’ 83 If part of that ideology is the fragmentation and loss of one’s body, then feelings of disembodiment might start to become more accepted and more commonplace. For Berardi, the fragmentation of the body in virtual space results in the transformation of oneself into ‘distant [entity] whose body does not belong to a sensitive and sensible space,’ which limits the ability for one to communicate effectively with others. 84

This makes relevant the inquiry of one of Bridle’s recent group exhibitions, Digital Citizen – The Precarious Subject (2019), which asked if we are ‘still able to form a community, or has the fragmentation of the present moment deprived us of the capacity of being active enabled citizens?’ 85 The research that I have presented throughout this dissertation tends towards the devastation of the public sphere, which is, as Tiziana Terranova describes, ‘a distinctive space where private individuals assemble to form a public body.’ 86 As a result, we are unable to form any sort of collective movement, which would be necessary to take back the control that we have given to machines through the algorithmic control of information, unchecked private ownership of space, fragmentations of the individual and social bodies, and the solitary experience of Nature (despite its ecological destruction) should one decide to opt-out.

Hito Steyerl: Bubble Vision Bown, p. 84. 84 Berardi, p. 48. 85 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Digital Citizen – The Precarious Subject, 2019, <http://baltic.art/digital-citizen> [accessed 20 June 2019] 86 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 132. 83

Conclusion

This dissertation has traced a path of destruction that began when Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to colonize the communities indigenous to the Americas, which triggered the start of the Anthropocene. When this force reached California, it ran out of land and people to exploit, so the violence was abstracted through the ingraining of networks of globalization that have allowed for unchecked capitalist expansion. Due to their colonial roots, these systems were built on the ideals of individual freedom at any expense and have provided the foundations for neoliberal control and environmental destruction. Since much of the development of cyberspace took place in California, the original trail of colonization was reignited, however, this time around the territory was virtual and the scope was infinite. As we found through the study of Steyerl and Campagna, this would end the Anthropocene and usher in a new structure of reality called Technic.

Many of our modern technologies are developed to reduce human reliance on Nature and increase control over our environments. We found this to culminate in the development of virtual space, due to its comprehensive shielding of the human in an environment that is completely under human control. However, it also became clear that these technologies are inherently violent. To begin with, the excessive development and consumption of marginally improved iterations of technologies has reduced Nature to a stockpile of resources, and the human to a stockpile of labour. Through this logic the progress of these advances only benefits the companies that profit from their sales. The violence of this process is increased when we consider that the direction of investment is dictated by the invisible algorithms of the financial markets, which is interested in the infinite generation of profit at the expense of human freedoms and the environment. This equates to the transfer of control of the world from humans to machines, which is the process that Steyerl believes to have ended the Anthropocene; it is no longer humans affecting the environment but machines.

In fact, under our new structure of reality humans are missing from the scene; when one inhabits a space virtually, they do so without their body which becomes fragmented and obsolete, further reducing an individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agency over the environments in which they take place. This becomes even more problematic when virtual spaces are inhabited through the isolation of the head mounted display, due to the added fragmentation of the social body, which severely limits collective politics and democracy. The trend towards 34

private ownership of space is amplified when space becomes virtual as these environments are created out of nothing by some form of private entity. This further reduces democracy as regulation is limited and the introduction of any sort of democratic process is purely optional. The corporate control of virtual space has also transformed attention into labour; value is captured online by serving adverts in front of content, and the dreamlike state in which one inhabits those virtual spaces makes for a mind that is receptive to control. So, the participation in virtual space profits the owners of virtual space and makes the experience of inhabiting those spaces laborious, which is exaggerated by the difficulty to detach from the network due to the inherently addictive repetition of those spaces.

So, how should we proceed from here? Wu calls for a ‘a human reclamation project,’ which involves the reclamation of consciousness and mental space, as a logical starting point in the battle to take back control. 87 However, due to the pervasion and addiction of these structures it is becoming increasingly difficult to opt-out, so the most effective option would seem to be to withdraw to Nature. We found this response to recharge workers who participate briefly, and to provide freedom to those who choose to create their own, more permanent, realities in integration with Nature. But, it has also been found to be problematic as the space of Nature is quickly disappearing, and its solitude rejects society. It seems then, as John Cheney-Leopold argues, that we must find a way ‘to orient our algorithms away from profit-seeking and towards something more humanistic and equal.’ 88 This is obviously difficult considering our current inability to form a movement, but Bridle argues that the process will become easier as long as we continue to build on our understandings of the ‘systems and their ramifications, and of the conscious choices we make in their design.’ 89 If we are able to commit to developing new technologies with both the human and Nature re-centered in the scene, perhaps we will be able to reverse some of the damage that has been inflicted upon the environment, and reclaim our personal freedoms in both physical and virtual spaces.

Wu, p. 350. John Cheney-Leopold, John Cheney-Leopold: We Are Data, (interviewed by Chris Richardson for This Is Not A Pipe Podcast), 14 February 2019, <https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/wearedata> [accessed 20 June 2019] 89 Bridle, p. 252. 87 88

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