Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 13:20:43 -0500
From: CTHEORY EDITORS <[log in to unmask]>
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 23, NO 1-2
Event-scene 91 07/05/00 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Eye-Through Images
==================
~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~
The Post-Alphabet Future
------------------------
The real world of digital reality has always been post-alphabetic.
Probably because the letters of the alphabet were too slow to keep up
with the light-time and light-speed of electronics, the alphabet long
ago shuddered at the speed of light, burned up and crashed to earth.
Writing can't keep up to the speed of electronic society. The result
has been the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the beginning of the
Image Millennium. Images moving at the speed of light. Images moving
faster than the time it takes to record their passing. Iconic images.
Special-Effect Images. Images of life past, present and future as
culture is fast-forwarded into the electronic nervous system. Images
that circulate so quickly and shine with such intensity that they
begin to alter the ratio of the human sensorium.
This is probably why artists, scientists and engineers from Xerox
Parc have created a creative installation titled "Experiments in the
Future of Reading" (XFR) at the Tech Museum in San Jose, California.
All these experiments in the "Future of Reading" project have a very
practical purpose: to suggest new consumer products for
post-alphabetic society. Here, the alphabet is blasted apart and
creatively reconfigured by the shock-wave of electronic culture.
Touch screens fill with texts which shift at any moment to follow
another story line: single words that open up into continents of lost
dreams; paragraphs that recombine into novellas; stories that
compress into a single emotion. Or huge, gleaming light-tables on
which are displayed graphic puzzles that can only be solved by
physically tilting the table back and forth by hand, watching the
letters of the alphabet slowly roll across the screen, forming new
creative combinations. Literally, *hand-writing* for the new
electronic cave-dwellers. A paradigm-shift in the form of ideas for
new consumer products in which writing itself bubbles to the
electronic surface, searches anxiously for its lost chain of
(alphabetic) signifiers, dances hesitatingly across the old literary
divide between metaphor and metonymy, finally realizes that words are
on their own in a liquid digital world, and comes to life as
light-through and sound-through and eye-through electronic words. The
words slide up and down, mutate one to the other, creating new
digital meanings. Pixel events, light-screen language, and soundscape
texture.
Consider our personal favorite. A children's book telling the
story of a cool cat doing the jazz scene in San Francisco. Except
this time, rather than reading the book, ~you play the reading~. Sit
in a comfortable armchair equipped with micro-speakers (with a
mega-computer tucked away behind the chair), open the book, run your
fingers over the pages, and the sounds of jazz on the written page
suddenly surround-sound your ears. The cool cat at the ~Purple
Onion~, at the ~Hungry I~, at an after-hours club down by the docks.
In traditional reading culture, the eye was privatized, shut up
inside the privacy of the central nervous system, isolated from the
other senses. In the future of (electronic) reading, the eye goes
public. It reconnects to the other senses, notably to the ear and the
hand. Tactile Reading. Touch the page at any point and the sounds of
jazz being written about can be instantly heard. You are actually in
the sound-field of the book. Move your hand closer to the page or
further away, and the sound intensifies or fades accordingly. The
end, therefore, of passive reading, and the beginning of in-depth
participation in the electronic book. The future of reading will be
fun. It will be experimental and immersive. It will be unpredictable.
It is a full-body, full-mind, full-ear, full-eye experience. It will
certainly involve the complete ratio of the senses. ~Instantly, you
are the reading~.
Or are you? If this project is about the 'future of reading', then
what's really being read? Not words rolling off light tables or books
as soundscapes, but the eye of human flesh itself. Seduced by
electronic reading as a packaged consumer product, the eye is
externalized in the transcendent form of a light-object, a sound, a
liquid consumer graphic, a simulacrum of ocular perception.
Virilio's "sightless vision"
or an immersive game of alphabet soup?
Clicking-in to the Global Show
------------------------------
Did you catch _Quantum Project_ on the net? According to its promo:
What the _Jazz Singer_ did for the age of talking motion pictures,
_Quantum Project_ will do for the Internet as the global cinema.
_Quantum Project_ is the holy grail of the tech future, that magical
point where two previously separate media - cinema and the Internet -
touch and spark and converge. More than a made-for-TV movie in the
_Matrix_ mode, _Quantum Project_ is the planet's first big budget
Hollywood style made-for-the-Internet movie. Here, Hollywood crosses
Silicon Valley, and the result is digital cinema with a big twist.
Because what's really converging in _Quantum Project_ is not simply
two media - one millennium new, the other twentieth-century old - but
something much more interesting. Here, the real software of Hollywood
- its star system together with its high-intensity promotional
culture - merges with the streaming software of the Internet to
produce an Internet cinema that is global, immediate, and intense.
When Hollywood promotional culture meets the planetary distribution
system of the Internet, the result will be the world instantly
retooled as a global cinema. When the world becomes a global show,
the Internet will finally be experienced as popular consciousness. It
will have its stars and its stories and its tragedies and its
scandals and its blockbusters and its failures. The Internet will be
the _geist_ of electronic life. Going to the Internet will be the
ticket to the future.
What Hollywood does best is streaming mythology with electronics,
bundling charismatic stars and advanced (imaging) technology to
produce a celluloid vision of life in the high-tech future. In these
sometimes wonderful, sometimes haunting cinematic images, electronics
is directly downloaded into the human imagination. For its sheer
consumer appeal, nothing beats it. Cinema is iconic, fascinating,
seductive, and, of course, often extremely profitable. Consumer
electronics of a special sort blown up to the size of an IMAX screen.
Maybe this is why the secret dream of all the Palm and PowerPc's and
interface devices of the world of consumer electronics has always
been to leave behind their purely instrumental work-day role as
enablers of fast communication, becoming instead real players in the
creation of human dreams - *interfaces to the stars*. Which is why
_Quantum Project_ can attract such a crackle of media excitement.
Because what is really a quantum project is not just digital cinema,
but the future of consumer electronics. Following the thread to the
stars is the quantum project of the global show. Interfacing hot
consumer electronics with cold cinematic stars is the future theater
of eyeball culture.
But, of course, digital cinema won't leave the Hollywood star system
unscathed. Because let's face it: the real stars of digital reality
are *special-effects*. Cool software programs that realize impossible
perspectives: special-effects sequences that can be so fascinating
and seductive because they always deal with reality hyped-up to the
point of hyperreality. _Matrix_ bodies moving faster than speeding
bullets. _Star Wars_ warp jumps. Morphed flesh. Streamed vision in
every movie. Invisible digital editing in every televised newscast.
And this is just the way it should be. In the age of the Internet, we
are already living in a special-effects culture. Fast communication.
Speed economy. Java memories. Linux open-architecture as a model for
living by the dot.com generation.
The seduction of special-effects is where the Internet has the jump
on Hollywood. And this makes sense. Special-effects is what digital
cinema streamed on the Internet does best. The future stars of all
the Quantum Projects of the future, therefore, as special-effects
hybrids probably being dreamed up right now in the image-factories of
the global cinema. Producing digital stars for the global show,
therefore, as one future of electronic society. Not the _Jazz
Singer_, but clicking-in to the Digital Eye.
_____________________________________________________________________
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker edit CTHEORY, and will be at Boston
College next year, working on a new CTHEORY project involving the
future of biotech. For 2000-2001, Arthur has been appointed
Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at
Boston College.
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology
* and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews
* in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Austin),
* R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln),
* Stelarc (Melbourne), Richard Kadrey (San Francisco),
* Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson
* (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross
* (New York), David Cook (Toronto), William Leiss (Kingston),
* Shannon Bell (Downsview/York), Gad Horowitz (Toronto),
* Sharon Grace (San Francisco), Robert Adrian X (Vienna),
* Deena Weinstein (Chicago), Michael Weinstein (Chicago),
* Andrew Wernick (Peterborough).
*
* In Memory: Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Correspondents: Ken Hollings (UK),
* Maurice Charland (Canada) Steve Gibson (Sweden).
*
* Editorial Assistant: Grayson Cooke
* World Wide Web Editor: Carl Steadman
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