In theory, in the digital Habitat, nothing ever dies. As I pointed out before, the digital habitat is an environment that is purely transcendental, no bodies allowed.
The notion of a universe that is 100% virtual is nothing new. All religions build their empire on that fundamental notion of „spirit“ as something opposed to „body“. The body dies, but the spirit survives. Philosopher Hegel found that spirit only manifests itself in the form of negation. “But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself ... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel If you look at old paintings, the forerunners of our overexposed visual environment, you understand that they served the purpose to show that the transcendental universe from time to time becomes visible. In the form of „revelations“. The angels and all of god’s entourage reveal themselves, they show up in rather mundane situations and leave the witnesses in awe and transformed. There were always, of course, also the darker revelations, in the form of ghosts, vampires and zombies. In the digital habitat, there are only „revelations“, but this time around, they are generated by a computer. Which means, they lack a materiality, but that doesn’t mean they are not real. A new term for that techno-revelation had to be invented, and the term is „virtual“. There is a new movie out and I think this particular one shows like no other movie the „state-of-the-art“ of what „digital“ means. It is a documentary called „They shall not grow old“, by Peter Jackson, a director famous for his „Lord of the Rings“ movies, among many other blockbuster fantasy films. They shall not grow old is based on original footage from World War I from the British Archives. But Jackson has digitally enhanced this footage to the point where it looks like it was filmed today on a 4k RED movie camera or something like that. The footage is no longer black and white, it shows a lot of detail and depth, the movements are fluid and natural, not irregular and bumpy. Take a look for yourself here. The point is - that film is no longer what we used to call a „documentary“. Why? Because a documentary is build on the assumption of analogy - technically and philosophically. A genuine documentary would show us not only what had been documented but also the mechanism of documentation that had documented it. Not long ago, there had been a few minor scandals when it became evident, that some New York Times and National Geographic Photographers had manipulated their images. The ethics of the NYT (quote: „There’s probably no more troubling issue facing photojournalism than the digital manipulation of images that are supposed to faithfully represent what’s in front of the camera.“) had been infringed, because the newspaper obliges every contributing photographer to not manipulate his pictures in any way. Those times are over, this brief period of analogue photography and reporting, and the thinking that came with it. The new revelations are all around us and in the digital age, the old maxim „Seeing is Believing“ has been turned on its head to „Believing is Seeing“. And with that, we’re back to the 14th century. The dark ages are here again!
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What exactly makes us say that something is „very well designed“ and what is it that makes us say: „This design is a mess!“ We could look at Design as a form of organisation that happens naturally or is man-made. There are certain forms, typologies and shapes that we take for a more or less stable, more or less distinguishable unit. The horse, the tree, the city, the electrical grid , the computer network, etc. When we see that unit, we are usually not inclined to say „My, that horse is very well designed or organised!“ Horses are what they are, their design follows a genetic script, the horse is an organism that has developed over millions of years, and all its’ internal organisation is „natural“, which means, it is „self-organised“. The grand design for a horse has never been made by someone. Nobody ever said: This animal will look like that and it will operate in this way and now, let’s build it. The principles that led to the existence of horses are the same that have led to all other natural phenomena. Horses are optimised to live in a certain environment. That’s why Shetland ponies are smaller and heavily coated. Generally, a colder and harsher climate leads to smaller and more „compact“ organisms, due to the requirements of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is one intrinsic design property of all living things. Think coniferous trees that use needles instead of leaves. Having said that, one should recognise that this property alone stands in sharp contrast to the capitalist principle of maximising profit. Then comes the city. Here it gets a bit more complicated. Where does the city begin, where does it end? Are there clear boundaries? Traffic is a mess, but does that mean that the city is a mess, too? The city center has been build in the 13th century, so how can it be NOT a mess with all today’s traffic? The environment for the city has changed, so its actual state is not optimised for the new environment. Because of a changing environment, you need a high potency for flexibility. Is that flexibility already designed into the structure of ____________ (whatever it is that you are building) ? The human brain has a remarkable potency for flexibility and adaptation. It can „upgrade“ quite easily, compared to other, man-made operating systems, like computer networks or electrical grids. These are rather rigid and actually very vulnerable, as the latest blackout in South America has shown. (the two are actually co-dependent - as in "CDM = co-dependent mess" - which makes both of them even more vulnerable) . So, if you want to survive and thrive in the digital habitat, remember that, unlike the natural habitat, that operates with the principles of energy efficiency and some degree of flexibility (like, for example, mobility), the design of the digital habitat is man-made and that makes it rather rigid, it’s not energy efficient and its organisation is most probably not „intrinsic“. I don't recall having asked for it, but Google now sends me an e-mail every month to tell me where I have been roaming, I am getting a monthly review of my whereabouts plus a total of hours spent in the car, how many kilometers I have walked, etc.
It always surprises me to „learn“ about the places I have visited, because sometimes, I have no recall of that place and I start to wonder if that could be a mistake. But then it comes back, oh yes, I have been to a concert in that town, but actually, I do not remember anything aside from the concert. In my memory, I haven’t been at that town, I have been at that specific concert. So, there has to be a huge difference in what is „digital“ memory and what is „human“ memory. It all has to do with images. Today, tourists are those who, by taking pictures, keep vivid memories of places where they do not stay for long and where they might never return. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) said, “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. All photographs are memento mori.” The way Sontag uses the phrase memento mori (remember you must die) highlights the profound difference of old-school, analogue photography and the new digital kind of memory that suggests rather the opposite: remember that you don’t have to die. What Sontag means is, of course that when we die, our memory dies with us. Digital Memory will never die. Everything will be stored, forever. It doesn’t matter if we die, or if we are unable to recall certain events - the evidence is there. A photograph preserves faces, places and cultures in pictures before they disappear from the real world. Ethnographic Photography is a famous example for that. The kind of perception that Google tries to match with my own, individual memory finds its equivalent in the view of those who suddenly rediscover the images of their own culture in museums and archives. That what was deemed familiar appears all of a sudden strange and in need of interpretation, in the same ways, as did the images of other cultures before. Our brain has the natural skill of transforming places and things that fade away in time, into images and these images, once captured, are stored in memory and activated by memory. But this „activation“ of memory, sometimes triggered by the strangest synaesthetic cues, like smells or the famous taste of a „petite madeleine“, are thoroughly transcendental, there is no physical support mechanism for these memories, and that’s precisely why they are so precious. The law of time turns all images into images of the past. Our own memory's historical authority gives us permission to participate in a community of the living and the dead. Our memory itself is an endogenous, neural system of now fictitious places of remembrance. Our cognitive agency builds up a network of places where we can only see those images that make up the fabric of our own memory. The physical experience of places that our bodies have made in the real world, informs the design of places that our brains have saved. You know what I mean, the thousands of digital photographs (they are not exactly photographs any longer, but I will talk about that in another post) that we take every day, we don’t even bother to look at them anymore, they are of no value, they are not precious, they are like the information Google sends me about my trip to that small town. My memories of the concert there in that town, on the contrary, are very dear to me, I remember every single minute of that concert, yet I haven't taken a single picture of it. We are now only seeing the beginning of fake news and the potential dangers of faked audio and video.
There was a time, not long ago, when news used to be mostly textual, and I think that whenever my father read the newspaper over morning coffee, he wouldn’t think for one second that what he was reading could be all made up - fake news. Roughly 500 years ago, when Columbus made his epic journeys to what he believed to be the far side of India, photo- or videocameras were not at hand, so Columbus, in order to prove that he had discovered new lands, had to bring back several items from the newly found continent, items that had never been seen before by the people in old Europe. In the world before Columbus, there was no technology that would allow the capturing of images from the discovered continent; no airplane or satellite could take the bird's eye view to chart the new territory. Columbus would eventually return with unknown plants such as potatoes or tobacco, he would bring back exotic animals or samples of the indigenous population of the new continent. After a while, it must have become clear that the new world had indeed many new things to offer. Had Columbus decided to bring just a drawing or a painting of the new continent, or had he just brought a written document - I think it is fair to assume that nobody back home would have believed him. Why? Because paintings and prose is something that we generate in our mind and elaborate with our hands. The relation of this elaboration with reality is never of the same kind as a physical proof, or better, many of those items. For the majority of people on the old continent at the time, it was impossible to travel to the unknown territories in Africa and America; therefore they had to be content with botanical and zoological gardens, where plants and animals from overseas could be exposed to a wider audience that could not take the rigors of such journeys, out of fear, lack of money or other impediments. So, the public exhibits of exotic material in zoos and botanical gardens were the discovery channels of ancient times. In some cases, it was also necessary to artificially reproduce the climatic conditions in the overseas colonies; that was achieved with greenhouses, made out of glass or in aquariums and these new ways of displaying exotic content were the early forerunners of today's screen devices. My father would look at his morning newspaper in exactly the same way people would look at the exotic content in the zoo. From a safe, convenient place, over coffee, he could look at terrible, dangerous animals, deserts and mountain ranges, violent wars and uproar. Somebody witnesses something for him, so he could look at it with the eyes of this „mediator“. He was living in a pre-digital age, where analogue technology was all that was available. So whenever he saw a photograph or a TV Newscast, he was rightly convinced that these images had some resemblance with reality, they had captured, documented reality, and this analogue representation of some form of reality could also be expressed in writing. Then there was fiction. But even fiction was based on the same premise. The images captured some kind of real events - in this case, staged events - that really happened in front of a camera lens. The digital age has changed these premises profoundly. Why? Because the images we see now are no longer representations of reality, like an analogue photograph was. Digital images are being generated by computers, they are encoded data, they cannot exist without code and a computer. That means, they are not, by default, showing us some captured slice of reality. They are showing us a „generated“ image, not a „captured“ image. The fake news era we are now entering has this distinction at its core. When we go back to the analogy of the exotic plant or animal that we would look at from behind a glass screen, then digitally altered video and audio would be comparable to some sort of scientific glove boxes, where you could handle „hazardous“ material from a safe distance. You would be able to alter (to „doctor“) whatever reality it is that is inside the box. And that could even further erode and undermine public trust in journalism and harm democracies with the intent of deceiving an audience - until the point where the distinction fake/real will become obsolete as well. This quote by Buckminster Fuller, arguably a Cybernetic, can be seen as the scientific principle par excellence, perhaps only matched by the Einstein quote: God doesn’t play dice. These two quotes taken together is all we need to embark on a career as a scientist. The premise is that there is one reality, and we just have to find the right model to explain it, and then act accordingly. So far so good, but if God (Einstein meant „nature“, but that is irrelevant here) does not play dice, there are certainly people who do play dice, including gambling and deceiving and cheating, right ? We have to understand that these people operate with different premises since they don’t feel any obligation to respect the set of scientific ethics. The only way to understand them (and perhaps find efficient counter-strategies to keep them in check) is to apply Game theory. In a game, there is no such thing as a „truth“, that can be discovered, or a better „model“, that makes the old one obsolete. No, in a game there only winners and losers. If you hear politicians or business people talk, you will see that they often use these terms, whereas in the scientific community, you rarely hear these words. In real life, we often see constellations, where „gamers“, such as politicians and businesspeople, will use and abuse scientists. Business and political leaders will use scientific inventions and findings for their next victory. If science can be held against their convictions, they will dismiss the scientific findings as „biased“. No matter if you are an American president or a football coach in the English premier league, you can choose to simply destroy any effort of your adversary to come up with a new, better model - one that would make your own model obsolete. You can even behave in a way that provokes everybody around you to try to „fight existing reality“, aka you. - That will guarantee you that your adversaries will spend all their energies on the wrong focus - namely, fighting existing reality, instead of building a new model - to change something. Oh, wait a minute, I am drifting into uncharted territory. Yes, the subject of my blog is the Digital Habitat, so be assured that „All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” |
AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
January 2021
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