CRDM 701
Week 12 - Jon
Something I have been grappling with in my paper is the idea of the "screen" and the space it creates between viewer and artifact. By using the term "screen," I am referring to both physical and imaginary screens. In the context of my paper, I discuss largely physical screens, such as that of a computer monitor or the separation between a museum exhibit viewer and the artifact being viewed. Screens not physically tangible would be those that we use to navigate and make sense of our surroundings.
These readings helped me to think about this topic. For one, I was glad that Peters's "Machines, Animals, and Aliens" reminded me of the Walter Benjamin article from earlier in the semester. Prior to this gentle nudge, I was, for reasons tied up in the roughness of my draft, extremely downgrading the power of, what I might term, the "museum screen." In a comparison to the computer screen, I was greatly privileging the digital, and I now consider this somewhat of a mistake.
What these readings did, primarily, was blur the screens that we use when we think about, broadly, different types of communication. For example, Hayles's description of the movie Avalon merges reality with simulation. Towards the end of her discussion of the film, Hayles describes Ash's place in a world known as "Class Real": "When she emerges, she finds herself not in the war-torn game world but, significantly, back in her own apartment" (p. 19). Thus, the screen through which Ash views the world, the VR helmet, reconstructs and places her into a simulation of reality. The screen thus serves as a mirror. Importantly, this is a mirror that leads us to question everything about reality, the "reality" of reality. Given that Ash remains in "Class Real" at the end of the movie, we are lead to believe that this is a screen that is more than just peered through. I wonder if this is a feature unique to virtual reality. There is no question that individuals become entrenched in MMORPGs, which, seemingly, become their priority, their reality. Where is the line between presence (in reality / virtual reality) and absence (from virtual reality / reality)? Or is there no line at all? In the terms of museum exhibits, I suppose, Ash has crossed the red velvet rope and made her way into the glass, becoming, in some way, part of the slice of virtual reality that is a museum exhibit.
Gannon and Hayles's "Mood Swings" discusses House of Leaves, a unique text that seems to redefine the act of reading. We have a tendency, I think, to read texts in particular ways, such as through different theoretical lenses, our experiences, etc. House of Leaves seems to challenge all traditional ways of thinking about the idea of a book. Specifically, the space that exists between reader and text in the case of House of Leaves and a traditional text seems different. Where a traditional text is interactive in the sense that encourages the reader to visualize the text, House of Leaves appears to engage in a more direct, physical interactivity -the book is as much something to read as it is an artifact to be examined. The great variety of medias present in this one text makes me wonder if our world will ever become so intermediary that there will no longer be a need for separation between different medias. Why should going to a movie and reading a book be two separable activities when they can be combined into one multi-mediated experience? Will all of the screens that we are presented with, such as video game, movie, book, and museum, become one?
As I was reading the Peters chapter, I kept thinking of Miguel Nicolelis's experiments on mind control at Duke University. I think his experiments blur the boundary between machine, animal, and alien communication. For one research project, he attached electrodes to a monkey's brain and taught it to play a video game with a joystick. Over time, the monkey learned that it didn't have to physically move the joystick in order to play the game. From that point forward, the monkey controlled the game with its mind. Thus, the monkey is able to escape the boundaries of its body. Peters mentions the significance of the animal body in regards to how it constraints communication with humans:"If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him. . .We would need to live in a lion's body and experience the lion's form to understand the lion's speech" (p. 244). The implications of Nicolelis's research suggests that humans and animals may be able to meet out of body and communicate with one language - the language of the brain. However, as Nicolelis demonstrates, the language of the brain is only static at this point, literally and figuratively. Peters indicates that communication with aliens is in a similar situation, a desire to sort through the noise of space: "SETI seeks a true signal amid an infinity of noise; thus by far the most effort has been put into listening rather than sending" (p. 251). Unlocking the codes of these different types of static will continue to blur the boundaries between machines, animals, aliens, and humans.
Posted at 11:29AM Nov 14, 2007 by jtburr in Week 12 | Comments[0]