Brutally Beautiful -
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In the end, Blade Runner Rick Deckard is left with only an ugly artificial toad, a disappointing outcome for the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" In contrast with the film version, the book devotes lengthy passages to the issues involved in keeping pets in an era when the boundaries between real and artificial animals are fluid. For people living in the radioactively poisoned atmosphere of Los Angeles after the Third World War, it's a status symbol to keep real animals in the rooftop gardens of their apartment blocks. But since not everyone can afford a genuine pet, some people opt instead for a man-made alternative - as does the novel's protagonist, android hunter Rick Deckard. In the course of the story Deckard spends time perusing two kinds of texts: a catalogue with prices for real animals, and lists describing androids that have escaped from space colonies and illegally infiltrated the Earth. There is a connection between these two forms of reading material: in order to fulfill his desire for a real pet to care for in his spare time, Deckard has to supplement his salary by earning bonuses. He earns the extra money by hunting down androids, robots made to seem virtually identical to humans. Deckard reckons that he will have to find and terminate "5 Andys" in order to afford "a black Nubian goat." In the dualistically structured story, Deckard can only practice his job as policeman and android hunter if he banishes robotic creatures from his life - including the electric sheep that has been grazing on his roof ever since his real pet died: "My occupation demands this from me... It's a matter of prestige." The electric sheep that he and his wife Iran are keeping on the roof of their high-rise at the beginning of the novel, whose artificiality they are trying to conceal from their neighbors, "undermines" his "work ethic." Deckard lives in his own isolated world, which he can only bear if he doesn’t have to deal with such things as man-made pets. In his private realm he has to ensure a clear separation of his feelings toward real as opposed to artificial creatures, a distinction that has been called into question in the outside world. The opposition between artificial and genuine is used here to draw a convincing profile of the protagonist and thus to construct a story based on the energetic law distinguishing real vs. artificial as diametrically opposed positive and negative poles. In his film version of the story, "Blade Runner," director Ridley Scott omits the issue of pets, which was used in the 1968 novel to define the psyche of the protagonist and elucidate why it is so important for him to hold onto his clearly regulated private world. Using sensual cinematic means, Scott blurs the borders of this duality: he reveals the fascinating beauty of the androids and modulates them both aesthetically and ethically. This modulation is an expression of a more advanced sensibility for the finely shaded nuances in the relationship between the artificial, the technological and the natural. The cinematic rendering of the story marks a changed awareness tending toward a more flexible traversing of the boundary between real and false. Dualism can be recognized today as a product of the Cold War, which for a long time obstructed opportunities for a more differentiated handling of the challenges of artificial systems. Differentiated approaches were already in evidence before the Second World War, before cybernetic and radioactive nightmares blocked the way for an elastic treatment of the relationship between artificial and natural. Between the First and Second World Wars Ernst Cassirer distinguished between false and genuine "cognitive tools." For Cassirer, the abstract symbols used in mathematics and physics are better suited for investigating reality than are mere human approaches. This is attributable to the fact that reality is more finely structured than can be perceived by the human senses alone. Cassirer thus sketched a chief paradigm for media art. During the Weimar Republic, the philosopher developed a cultural theory of relativity by comparing the concepts of space and time discernable in modern physics, art and myth and demonstrating that human consciousness has a dynamic relationship with reality. This dynamic is made perceivable by symbols that humans have created to help them find orientation in reality. Cassirer demonstrates this fact using counting words that he learned from anthropological reports on the languages spoken by peoples native to Africa and the South Seas. He compares these with the number concepts used in modern mathematics, which between the wars developed the cognitive tools and operational methodology that after World War II would make the construction of cybernetic brains and robots possible. The push toward modernization in mathematics, which prompts Cassirer to rate the human approach as "pseudo" and the mathematical continuum as "genuine," is something we today have learned to regard as part of the industrialization process, the ruins of which can be seen in the exhibition "Drawn by Reality - Encapsulated in Life." "Hashima," a work by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad, calls upon us to take several steps backward into the nineteenth century. The artists show the ruins of buildings on the island of Hashima in the Nagasaki district, where coal used to be mined. The island is a relic of the drive toward modernization triggered by the steam engine and the coal it required as fuel. In the wake of industrialization, wide swaths of land were dug up, mountains carried off, and the rocky island of Hashima, on which no autonomous human life is otherwise possible, was settled. Hashima is a monument to the technological power that shapes humans' relationship to space and time. The historian Herbert Mehrtens argues that, as a consequence of industrial modernization, our classic ideas of easily comprehensible spaces and times began to corrode. Contrasts such as near and far, fast and slow were no longer at opposite poles, but rather experienced as dependent upon the given technical conditions. This is a central concept in today's artistic handling of technical media, but one that has been obscured by apocalyptic anxieties, as in the stories of Philip Dick. Whereas industrialization and burgeoning world trade forced a standardization of spaces and times at the end of the 19th century, entailing for example the establishment of universally recognized prime meridians and standard time zones, the possibilities are instead multiplied in the modern natural sciences, leading to an understanding of the relativity of space and time. Ever since Einstein, the general consensus in physics has been that space and time are not absolutes, but rather relative to one's own system of reference. Space and time thus become constructive media, as can be read in the receptions of Einstein's revelation. But using building construction as a metaphor is deceptive. The kinds of constructive media we're talking about here are not fixed elements like the building blocks making up a house or a bridge, but are rather defined using mathematical signs and are firmly anchored nowhere, as was recognized in the so-called "crisis in the foundations of mathematics." This crisis anticipated the criticism of the lack of inherent meaning in these mathematical signs, which would surface decades later in the theories of Baudrillard and Debord as a telling symptom of the society of spectacle, which operates using the concept of the constructed situation: "What is a constructed situation? A definition contained in the first issue of the Internationale Situationiste states that this is a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified milieu and through a play of events." The facades of the smart family homes and small villas presented by Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer in "Say Hello to Peace and Tranquility" can be seen as an expression of the ruinous state of the category of genuineness. Nothing is moving in this artificial world; the ripples on the garden pond are frozen in place, the boughs of the ornamental trees and the petals of the flowers in the decorative pots set before the entryways are motionless. |
Even the camera is rooted in place; the model houses drift past its lens, with varying facades that Baudrillard would have perceived as the expression of a program: the capitalist program of a varied selection within the tightly defined scope of a calculated production model. "Say Hello to Peace and Tranquility" evinces parallels with the social theory that views capitalism as having arrived at the phase of spectacle. Just like the static camera in Keller and Wittwer's video, this theory constructs its view of social reality from a static viewpoint. Agamben, for example, speaks in his marginal notes on Debord's texts of the absolute alienation of speech in the media society. He thus locates the site of cultural production in the realm of the unreal and non-genuine, which passes before his eye in its relentlessly terrible monotony. Agamben sees the development described by Cassirer as a negative omen. The increasing abstraction of modern symbolic processes does not lead to a more differentiated exploration of reality, but instead reinforces our estrangement from reality, a development that finds striking expression in the Rumanian television "revolution" of Timisoara. The alienation of speech is even surpassed by the perversion of true and false in television until they are no longer distinguishable: "Timisoara is, in this sense, the Auschwitz of the age of the spectacle: and in the same way in which it has been said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, after Timisoara it will be no longer possible to watch television in the same way." The straight path of modern alienation descends into the depths of the improper and the false. Agamben places his hopes in a reinforced devotion to language, a language that is pure and does not pursue journalistic or media-economic ends. Miriam Bäckström's video gives Agamben's hopes a perceivable contour using televisual means. She tapes a young woman, who introduces herself as an actress named Rebecka. Rebecka agrees to an interview, but this interview is obviously based on a script. As the viewers can easily discern, the woman behind the camera, who is probably also the interviewer and the director, is also using this script. She poses questions in Swedish and gives her interview partner stage directions, for example: "Here you cry. Look into the camera." Rebecka reacts by changing her facial expression and, shortly thereafter, tears roll down her cheeks. Rebecka performs genuinely, able to produce emotions on cue, but at the same time her feelings are not genuine, since the sadness or joy that she is called on to display do not come from within her, but are instead just part of her job within a constructed situation created by a script, cuts, costume changes and camera angles. The video leads the viewers into a state of fluctuation, in which the relativity of the supposed opposites of real and false behavior becomes clear. Bäckström explores here the phenomenon of acting, the fundamental paradigm of the spectacle. She looks at the alternation between the media of speech, text and image and the diverse forms that result from the use of these media, such as reading aloud from a manuscript, reciting texts learned by heart or extemporaneous speaking. The interview provokes questions as to who is using whom, and which media allow her to do so. Is the woman behind the camera using the woman in front of the camera in order to form a picture of the credibility of acting; or is the woman in front of the camera, who introduces herself at one point as a 28-year-old actress and at another point as a 35-year-old, using the woman behind the camera in order to develop an authentic picture of the contradictory nature of her personality as an actress? Or are the viewers the ones waiting in the wings to pick up on inconsistent answers, breaks and contradictions in the behavior of the actress, in order to find out where she is play-acting and where her feelings are genuine? Are they using this staged situation in order to confirm their own prejudices about actors, the protagonists in our society of spectacle, or are they beginning to sense their own role as media, whose opinion of real and false is wavering according to what is being said both in front of and behind the camera? The viewers are not given any tools that might help them to reach a decision on the authenticity or falseness of the filmed situation. They don't know if and when the actress is saying something true. But in the course of the video they experience the interaction between form and content and hence the relativity of what makes up authentic, believable behavior. It cannot be definitively stated whether Rebecka is a self-confident actress, or when Rebecka is acting and when she is being herself, because Rebecka oscillates believably between performance and being. This sets the two opposed categories into motion and forms a fascinating situation, but only on certain conditions: only when viewers are able to leave behind their self-contained, closed world of strict distinctions and to empathize with the transitions between an assumed role and being oneself; and when they are able to see in Rebecka's performance more than just a means for unmasking the artificiality of acting and can instead find the courage to take the plunge into a world of oscillating categories. Only then is it possible to ascertain that the opposition between genuine and artificial is an artificial one. What becomes then of the fundamental critique of the society of spectacle? In Dick's science fiction fantasy, the protagonist, caught up in a battle against artificial life forms, clings to the prestige of possessing a genuine animal. But this real pet is then taken away from him and he is left behind with nothing but a man-made toad. In the film version, the story ends with a different twist: Deckard falls in love with an android and discovers for himself the atrocious beauty of the artificial. Although neither of the alternatives presented in the book and movie is available to us today, we still have the opportunity to set our self-concept and its conventionally accepted poles into dynamic motion by means of art, and to carefully observe how contradictions unfold and dissolve again in endless succession.
Media theorist NILS RÖLLER teaches Cultural Studies and directs the Program for New Media at the Academy for Design and Art in Zürich (SUI). He is an affiliated researcher of the Vilém Flusser Archive of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (GER) and collaborates with the Institute for Basic Research at the ZKM Karlsruhe (GER), where he developed his essay /Ahabs Steuer – Navigations Between Art and Science/ - to be published by /Berliner Merve Verlag/ in 2005. More information on Röller's work can be found at www.romanform.de |
Drawn by Reality - Encapsulated in Life |
October 1st - December 31st, 2004 |