VIRB

INTRODUCTION

It was the philosopher Immanuel Kant who said there were two
things he admired the most;
The endless stars in the vault of heaven and the moral law of
mankind.
I think and hope we still reverence the stars, the solar system
and galaxies where each unit is counted in thousands, millions and billions.
Just by thinking about it the earth even seems quite
manageable, a place where everything is reachable.

We are all unseparable parts of this world, but what is meant
by the word ìthe worldî?
Is it the image each one of us has of life in general with all its
fragmented contradictions?
Or is there any other conclusion?
A contribution from science or theories of today,
which probably will not develop until we are not longer part of
this strange scene.

The time spent within the studies has been a time of
thinking and a time of contemplation.
It has been about looking.
A mental and physical travelling contemplating on art and life.
A gaze at strangers,
tourism in other peoples reality,
shut up in own thoughts experiencing language as a collection
of sounds, forced to the surface of words where meanings
vanish.

A contemplation on how one values existence, reality, copies,
simulation, digital, distance, identity and the self and how it
effects the society we live in.
A contemplation on how we are getting further away from older
values and getting accustomed to life through a different
reality.

Through my work I am trying to define my vision and deal with
appearances.
We live in the times of new media where we move more
towards a society which functions less on finding the correct
way to do things and attempting to reproduce a sense of near
perfection.
Perfection is not a measurement of truth and reality, it is more
experiments with multiple versions of real.
Maybe it is what we make of it?

A flow of time, documenting the present to watch in the future,
when watching, watching the past.

MANIPULATION OF TRUTH

Is there something true about every image we see?
In the same sense we look at a photograph, is it taken for
granted that something real did exist at the time and place it
took place and in some way beyond mediation that reality is
evident in the resulting image.

In the case of a photograph there is always truth in it.
Does the same apply to our memory,
do we not create our own reality?

A photograph always has to be of something, it must depict
something that existed, there is always a referent.
Beyond this truth what can we rely on in a photographic image?
We can recall in memory a place, people, situations etc.,
but are they all true?

Truth is difficult to define without a great amount of
contingency,
But if we accept the indexed relationship to the referent as the
real truth then what questions are there to this relationship by
the coming of digital media?
The appearance of digital technology into images allows the
production of images which have no reference in the concrete
world of objects and things.
The challenge would be that these images will be
indistinguishable from conventional images predicated upon the
existence of such a referent.
Do binary codes have profound implications for how we view
the referent and what an image of something might mean to us.
If I make a realistic representation of something that has no
referent or if I transform the real into a simulation,
does the truth then loose its power to convince and we loose
the reference to the real?

What is true about my images?
While photographs appear to be objective they are in fact very
mediated and subjective documents,
never the less there is something special about photography
which we place our faith in as means of representing reality.
The relationship to truth is located in the direct physical
relationship to what it represents.
Unlike in my drawings where the resemblance is rendered by
imitation or maybe it only depends on our own perception of
real.
There is the index to what it depicts.
This bond between subject and object provides a viewer with a
form of knowledge, That the subject portrayed existed more or
less as it has been represented.

Susan Sontag states:

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing has
happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption t
hat something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. (1)

But the trust we give to the image is overbalanced by the
condition of reference.
The referent is only a part of the images and it can even be not
the most important one.
While the truth of images is reliant upon what is actual, all that
photography really tells us about the referent is that it exists.
Beyond the guaranteed existence of the referent everything
about the images or its subject is contingent, manipulated and
only partly true

Heideggerís definition of truth:

The true is the actual. Accordingly we speak of true gold in distinction
from false. False gold is not actually what it appears to be. It is merely a
ìsemblanceî and thus is not actual. What is not actual is taken to be the
opposite of the actual. But what merely seems to be gold is nevertheless
something actual. Accordingly, we say more precisely: actual gold is
genuine gold. Yet both are ìactualî, the circulating counterfeit no less
than the genuine gold. What is true about genuine gold thus cannot be
demonstrated merely by its actuality. The question recurs: What do
ìgenuineî and ìtrueî mean here? Genuine gold is the actual gold the
actuality of which is in accordance with what, always and in advance, we
ìproperlyî mean by ìgold.î Conversely, wherever we suspect false gold,
we say: ìHere something is not in accordî. (2)

I find this definition interesting in relation to my work because
we need a term to establish ìtruthî against.
We cannot determine the true gold from the false unless we
have decided what we consider to be true.
That the true gold and the false gold can be said to be true is
not simply a result of both being actual.
Though the virtual worlds of cyberspace can be as ìtrueî as the
actual world of physical objects if we erase our historical group
of the actual and the real, and let the real to be determined not
by what we know to be physically concrete according to our
vision, but by our responses to what we experience.

One of the basis of my work is to frame an instant of time within
a limited space. Fragments of the world.
It involves manipulation of the truth.
An image as seen by the eye contains far more information
than can be captured on a film,
but unlike the photograph some of the images we capture in our
memory are not controlled like when capturing them on
purpose,
controlled of what fraction of a second and what field of view is
captured,
but still limited by physical limits,
the perspective, purpose and personality.
Taken into regards that every individual has his own sense of
seeing things, just like there is no identical fingerprints or no
identical snowflake in our world, no two individuals see, think
or respond in identical ways,
every respond is an individualized and inimitable act.

When digital media offers new challenges, there have always
been questions about the integrity of images and we will always
have the desire to control our environment by reducing it to limit
elements.
Just as we seek the answers to all human science in the X and
Y chromosomes of our DNA, and as we reduce our forms of
communication and production to the binary code of 1s and 0s,
so do we seek truth in our representation by removing
unnecessary variables.

The context and the caption of the moment which we constantly
assert in order to establish truth also serve the purpose to limit
and control the meaning.
By proclaiming to help our understanding these signs attempt to
divert us from their transparent dictaicism.
Another function is also being fulfilled by the caption of the
moment.
It provides a certain distance which suggests that the most
open reading that we could have of an image or a post image is
in some sense not desirable.
Whatever the motivation the transcribing of a moment while
appearing to add information to our understanding of an image
is in fact limiting the scope of our reading of it.
For instance we often go very quickly through exhibition spaces
looking and studying the images after briefly looking at them.
With so much visual information we cannot take everything in,
so the shorthand of a caption functions to tell us what we are
looking at.
That an image is by its nature more ambiguous than words is
self evident so in our rationalist struggle to erase ambiguity the
caption acts to define the image or what we see.
The caption or this moment positions itself between the viewer
and the image itself allowing us to look at it to confirm its
content but keeping us from entering its space.
Even without the caption we are always removed from the
referent of time and space but we are always in proximity to it.
And there is no definition of proximity that allows for contact.
To be approximate is to be at a distance.

DIGITAL

The process of fragmentation has the ability to make its subject
into an object and to displace moments of time.
In terms of digital manipulation it has this plasticity that allows
us to speed up our deconstruction and individualization of the
world we live in.
The optical lens that first enabled us to see the world in close
up, fragments our vision and draws attention to details maybe
previously we did not notice.
As we look more closely for the building blocks which will allow
us to reconfigure what we see before us.

In ìThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionî
Walter Benjamin (1935) states,
ìthe presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticityî.
In the digital realm where copies and originals are
indistinguishable, Benjamin's proclamation becomes
inapplicable.
Our only way to know what is original or unaltered is to caption
the item and provide verifiable evidence that the caption is
valid.
Our whole concept of authenticity, predicated on the existence
of an original object which we can distinguish from its
pretenders becomes meaningless because copies of digital
code are always identical. We will need to realign our notion of
authenticity to be verifiable by the registration of the particular
order of pixels.
In the same way we identify ourselves human beings by the
uniqueness of the fingerprint, we can recognize originals by
indexing them.
No particular signature of authorship will be sufficient,
probability will need to be assigned in advance.

The entire notion of authorship is at doubt because if its
dependency on the concept of originality.
Where original works are replaced by works that have a point of
origin, but are continually evolving, the idea of authorship is
altered.
Images can be reworked and adapted over time to a point of
mutation that might end up leaving no trace at all of its original
contents.

ìSo we must abandon the traditional conception of an art world
populated by stable enduring, finished works and replace it with
one that recognizes continual mutation and proliferation of
variants - much as with oral epic poetry. Notions of individual
authorial prestige are correspondingly diminished.î
(mitchell, 1992:52)

By cataloguing originals it is possible to assure registration of
unique ideas but for the viewer the difference between the
original and the copy is obliterated.

The relationship between the image and the fingerprint is also
brought up by Andre Brazin in writings on the philosophy of the
arts, but in a different context:

ìThe aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from
that of the world about him.
Its boundaries enclose a substantial and essentially different
microcosm.
The photograph as such and the object itself share a common
being, after the fashion of a fingerprint.
Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the
order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.î
(1992:279)

Here the fingerprint is not only an indexical record of
uniqueness, but a property of the object where it cannot be
separated from.

Andre Bazin is suggesting that the photograph is not a
reproduction as much as it is a part of reality.
Susan Sontag also makes this point:

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the
world so much as pieces of it,
Miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.
(1987:4)

Computer generated images cannot make such a claim.
Without the physical connection to the real world,
virtuality cannot reproduce the sense of distance that exists
between the object and the image and cannot reproduce its
aura, but this is only true in a physical sense.

Walter Benjamin's argument about authenticity to describe how
an original object possesses an aura which does not exist in its
reproduction. Benjamin's definition of the term aura depends
upon the objects uniqueness.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in
one element: its presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique
existence of the work of art determined the history of which it
was subject throughout the time of its existence
(1935)

The main point here is on the individual history of a singular
object.
The aura of an image derives from the same essential
conditions which Benjamin details but does not have to depend
on the objects uniqueness.
As he expands upon his idea Benjamin also defines the aura as
ì the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may
beî.
This idea is interesting because it locates the notion of the aura
within the realm of time and space and not only in its effect on
the object.
So where the unique object possesses aura because of the
effect of time on its physical presence, then the image can be
said to possess aura even in its reproduction because of the
effect of time on its content.
The uniqueness of a captured moment, maybe a fraction of a
second which cannot and maybe will never be repeated
generates an aura because of the displacement within the
temporality of time.

Benjamin also explains that the decay of the aura is also the
result of, ìthe desire of contemporary masses to bring things '
closer' spatially and humanlyÖÖ.î.
It is the nature of photographs to allow us to relocate time and
space.
Which comes to the subject of being displaced in time and
space.
The subject of images imparts an aura because of the distance
from that what is depicted.
An aura in subject or object is derived from the distance we
experience in time and space.

Distance creates an aura because we are aware of it, our
perception of the separation between ourselves and the object
or the subject is what is fundamental to the experiencing of
aura.

The human urge to bring things closer to ourselves is maybe
less obvious than Benjamin suggests.
It is clear that from our technological development that time and
space are more and more able to be more easily and more
quickly navigated.
There are other psychological reasons for supposing that there
may be inhibiting factors in play which Benjamin does not
account for.
While a photograph bridges time and space to allow us to see
objects outside of their physical location it also always keeps us
at a distance from them.
You cannot experience the moment of creation simultaneously
because it is by its very nature removed from its original
temporal and spatial location.
In a way our technologies keep the world at a distance, they
provide the means to insulate ourselves from the immediacy of
the world of contact.
The idea of being outside time is a suggestion of when looking
at an image we become trapped in some sort of a limbo.
The act of contemplation where our awareness of time is
suspended, becomes enhanced by the image looked at which
can represent a simulation of the past or from memory.
If this is some sort of a gateway to eternity then eternity is a
neurological response to the confusion of our sense of the
present.

When looking at an image we can be looking at the past and
the present simultaneously so when we cease to distinguish
between representations and manifestations we abolish our
linear convention of time.
The aura as walter Benjamin sees it derives from the artist's
direct connection to the work of art he is doing, while a
photographic image produces an aura because of its
fetishization of time as an object.
A reproduced image can resonate in our minds because it
transcends time and space.
The digital image, eroding the division between subject and
object reunifies us with the condition of the original, albeit as
simulation.
The simulation becomes inseparable from the actual.
The space before invested with aura stops existing.
Our imagination always adapting is left to develop in response
to its new limits.
But does this also apply to the production of digital images?
If images become inseparable from other forms of production
then they will be missing the aura either in Benjamin's sense as
unique objects or in the so called post-modern condition through
their representation.

All reality is subjective, there is no objective reality.
No two people share an identical sense perception, so no one
can experience any circumstances without their own
subjectivity intervening in the form of interpretation.
Pure objectivity is a hypothetical construct of a thought process
in need of a control group for its science of comparison and
differentiation.
What we refer to as objectivity is pre agreed commonly held assumptions.

Although we all apprehend it through our own unique
consciousness.
A hole in a wall is accepted to be a hole in a wall.
Vision is probably the least individuated of the senses is
pushed to the forefront because of its concurrence with our
need for agreement on the existence of some form of objective
truth.
When we look at images we can be looking at suspended
moments and because of those suspension we can afford
these moments infinite scrutiny.
We can expose a moment of time to a lifetime of observation.
The freezing of time and its subsequent expansion creates a
new reality severed from the original.

DISTANCE

Computer based media offers new challenges to our notions of
subject and object and time and distance.
Although composed of the flexible integers of binary codes,
synthetic images come in many forms.
There are two uses of technology which must be considered first of
all here,
the introduction of synthetic objects into photographs and the
synthesizing of photographic elements into virtual environments.
While both of these uses are for the most part capable of producing
similar effects.
The creation of a virtual environment breaks down traditional notions
about the relationship between viewer and participant and subject
and object in ways which are less challenged by the introduction of
digital media into two dimensional images.
The later may cause us to realign our appreciation of images as we
know them, but it is the former that places us in a completely new
relation to the image.
No longer will we have to content ourselves with voyeurism,
we will now be able to participate.
If Benjamin's supposition that we are seeking to bring things closer
to ourselves is right,
then this project is almost completed.
The creation of virtual environments which appear real in every
detail will mean that we have finally achieved the removal of all
distance.
With no distance at all then there will be no aura.
If we don't perceive a separation between the virtual and the real
then it will be the one and the same.
Virtual environments would not only let us see the cathedral in
Bourges from our homes but to travel to it with a similar absence of
effort.
While we may retain our awareness that real is real and virtual is
virtual the aim of synthetic environments must be to occlude us from
this separation while we are experiencing it.
The rationalist search for realism will be fulfilled.

REAL - SIMULATION

Post-modern theory informs us of how images become a some
sort of currency that circulates as a surrogate reality.
The photograph is taken not to be a representation but is seen
as reality itself.
We can for example look at images we see all the time around
us, images of people who's faces are overexposed in public,
on covers on magazines, newspapers etc.
Such a comprehensive exposure of a persons life leads viewers
to feel a proximity based on a visual evidence,
people feel like they know this exposed person in own person.
This leads to a reality they are quite removed from.
The image becomes the reality,
it begins to usurp the function of representation by replacing the
reality it has copied.
The image is substituted for the object.
But this replacement is always dependent on a pre existing
physical truth and is therefore ultimately limited in its ability to
completely occlude us from other exterior truths.
The digital image has the potential to blur the distinction
between concrete objects and their representation.
Without the dependency on a pre existing physical reality,
the digital image will transcend the association between realism
and representation of the actual.

Jean Baudrillard's definition of the relationship between
representation and simulation:
Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by
interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the
whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
This would be the successive phases of the image:
-it is a reflection of basic reality
-it masks and perverts basic reality
-it masks the absence of a basic reality
-it bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum (1983:11)

Digital media takes up where photography leaves off through
its capacity to incorporate computer generated objects that
have no point of origin in the phenomenological world.

Baudrillard's argument that the hyper real object is created by
the severance of the link between our apprehension of
something and its actual form is really a continuation of Walter
Benjamin's thesis that the reproduced image has no aura.
The stripping of the aura is the severance of the link.
The ability to simulate the presence of a real object encourages
the viewer to believe that realities before out of reach are now
accessible.
Where circumstances might make it difficult to obtain a
photograph we can now substitute a simulation that appears
just as realistic as the object it seeks to portray.
Further than this imitation the simulation affords us the
opportunity to engage with objects in ways which go beyond the
abilities we have in the physical world.
The effect of computer generated simulation has developed to
a relocation of the viewer within the field of visual
representation.
No longer positioned as a voyeur,
looking in from the outside, the viewer now becomes
incorporated into the frame as an active participant.
This has repercussions for our fetizhiziation of the image as an
object because of our fusion with the scene it eliminates the
distance required for objectification.
If we sense no separation between our representations and the
object they define then we are no longer voyeurs in the same
sense.
Yet these impulses continue to be fed, not images but now by
the interface itself.

Without any separation between ourselves and the image the
interface becomes the site of fetishism.
The computer addict fetishes cyberspace and develops an on-line
person in a way accelerated by the lack of distance.
And many of us know the amount of time that passes when
logged on,
which is really indicative of the timelessness engendered by
virtual environments.
These environments through their interfaces gain an aspect of
an aura,
but really inverted in that the absence of a sense of distance
allows the user to become absorbed in the process.

IDENTITY - SELF

The desire to free ourselves from our bodies is complex and
goes beyond the seeking of objectivity.
But it clearly converges with the search for objective truth even
if its initiating impulse involves other psychological urges.
The submerge of self also goes along with more general
questions about identity and the body.
An important product of computer generated environments is
the ability to easily mask, construct or falsify new identities.
Digital media offers new ways to combine and create forms and
therefore allows us to have much more interpretation of the
images and environments we create.
Virtual worlds allow us to hide information about ourselves
which would normally be available in physical encounters.
We allow us to reinvent our personality entirely according to our
own imagination.
Our relationship to the images of photography is one in which
we ourselves are as much of the subject as the external
referent.
As Roland Barthes says:
I am the subject of every photograph, and this is what
generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the
fundamental question: whys it that I am alive here and now?
(1993: 84)

Most writers on the subject draw a clear distinction between
what is real and what is virtual. But does the term virtual reality
not suggest that virtual is an component of reality?
If imagination is a function of the human thought process then
is not virtuality a function of reality?
The notion that reality is only the concrete physical world
apprehensible by our immediate senses is maybe the product
of our striving for a manageable rational definitions.
The virtual is different from the concrete but reality includes
virtuality .
If the realist quest for truth is a trip where we seek the greatest
degree of objectivity then the removal of the gaze becomes
essential to attain the position of least subjectivity.
Our language lacks a clear term to define the participant of the
virtual.
We compare the viewer of images to the interactor with
multimedia.
Disconnected from our prior language of vision and experience,
the participant sees and judges what is before him but is the
creator and participant at the same time.
We respond subjectively but our lack of self makes the
responses seem universal.
If we can remove ourselves from the consciousness of viewing
and replace our sight with the sensation of immediacy then the
differentiation between the object and subject becomes
immaterial.
The removal of self consciousness from our environment allows
us to control the spaces we inhabit.
We acquire a perspective that allows the environment to be an
extension of ourselves.
The referent refers to the image rather than the image referring
to the referent.

EPILOGUE

In memory, images engraved somewhere in the back of our
heads or in digital imagery, it is not an objective truth that
something appearing did in fact exist in the phenomenological
world.
This can be the indisputable truth of a photograph taken,
the fact that something really took place at the time a picture
was taken.
We live in world with a vast quantity of images all around us,
so the value of each individual image is reduced and reality
is easily blurred.
Images are used for all sorts of reasons but it becomes more
and more difficult to find ones that can convince.
The photograph has lost its aura and our newer forms of
representation will need to find different ways of resonating in
the minds of their viewers.
The aura so much to do with time and memory becomes
consigned to history as time itself finds new forms of
representation.
Benjamin argues that the aura remains in the original object
and cannot be transferred to the mechanical reproduction.
Perhaps this is true, but original , not original images develop
aura of their own, a fetishized, voyeuristic, rationalist and
authoritative aura that eventually in a post-modern culture
displaces the role of the original aura.
Images become new objects, referents in their own right.
Self referential documents that causes us to invoke reality to
mimic the reproduction.
This is what Baudrillard characterizes as the progression
towards hyper reality.
The original can no longer be identified because it has
simulated its own representation.

The freezing of a moment of time suggest a power of
observation.
The blow up of a detail can show us a minute aspects invisible
to the naked eye but conversely strips away context and at the
same time limits our ability to see.
Arresting time and using the fragments to construct reality.
But each fragment is only one reality, a reduction of our ability
to apprehend the world as a totality.
The fragment however becomes isolated from its parent and
the vast quantities of information that we assume will make it
easier to track the parent only obfuscate the return path.
The orphan must content itself with reinventing the image of its
progenitor and as each piece mutates in manipulation it cannot
fit back into the puzzle.
The image becomes the referent.

Our notions of the boundary between object and subject are all
brought into doubt by the growth and persuasiveness of digital
media.
While simulations and virtuality will doubtless become parts of
our representational landscape, it is hard to do more than
speculate about their consequences.
Post-modern theories about our relationship to reality tend to
abstract the larger picture, while helping us to think about the
effects of new technologies.
Changes to our sense perception and social organization
cannot be accounted for in how we imagine the future.
That our relationship to images will change is certain. Remember, don't remember, weeks, months, years!
I guess in an uncertain way the little things are important.
The fragments.
Fragments from memory, fragments from reality, glimpses,
gazes.
Or have other media taken over memory?
what am I?
Fragments for the big puzzle, ongoing.
Art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach that
soul.

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