University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Virtual competencies and film

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Virtual competencies and film

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Virtual Competencies and Film

by Sean Uyehara
University of Southern California
2013

Contents

1 Introduction: Virtuality as an Interpretive Framework 1
2 Immersion and Virtuality 22
3 Shapeshifting and Virtuality 56
4 Synchronization and Virtuality 98
5 Conclusion 136
6 Bibliography 150
1
Introduction: Virtuality as an Interpretive Framework

As I set out to introduce this manuscript, I am struck by the simple thought that
writing is a social endeavor. It’s social in the sense that it is activated only if it is read.
But, even prior to such reading, the writing itself is constituitive, and likewise composed
of supporting processes that themselves are constituitive. And, while this feels somewhat
obvious, it also carries with it a mild uncanniness. I’m here alone writing, typing this to
“you,” yet “I” am not single, but am constiuitive of a number of voices, processes and
codes. One of my assumptions as I send this out to you is that you are too.
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There are of
course many reasons to write. But, the one I will be most explicit about in relation to this
project, the one that I hope will characterize this writing’s effect on you can be described
as my attempt to open up conceptual space, to give whoever reads this, you, ideas for
how to access the way you think or better yet to produce or clarify ideas of your own.
Short hand for this concept might be defamiliarization. It is my best hope that reading this
might reactivate your relationship to communication, and remind you of the constituitive
processes therein. If that happens, please remember, we did it together.
The bulk of this project is going to be about something I call “virtuality.” And,
perhaps not surprisingly, I think that virtuality is the product of cultural accretion. More
specifically, I contend virtuality is a cultural competency – that it is a relational mode one
applies or uses to construct or unpack communication and its relevance to a given
context. This needs more explanation of course. For the moment, I’ll leave aside the idea
of the virtual and instead focus on the idea of “competency.” When I refer to virtuality as
a competency, I mean to say that it is an acquired skill.
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If we say one is competent it doesn’t necessarily describe the level of skill. It can
be synonymous with adequate, which is close to the lowest level of skill one can have
while still being said to retain such skill. But, one can also say that a person has a high
degree of competence, whereas a high degree of adequacy doesn’t make much sense.
Competency here is flexible as far as the quality of the skill one possesses. One can be
basically competent or highly competent. But, the main point here is that when I refer to
virtuality as a competency, I intend to evoke the concept that virtuality is a construct that
one learns to recognize, and that such recognition is a kind of skill. And, more
specifically, that virtuality is a shared cultural competency in the ways that reading
words, viewing movies and recognizing fiction, nonfiction or narrative are competencies.
In this regard, I have been influenced by neoformalist film analysis. Such an
approach to film argues that the richness of films emerge for viewers as the recognition
of a pattern through the dual attention paid to cues and experience – cues perceived in a
film and one’s prior experience of watching movies in general. This is an oscillatory
process. One moves back and forth from recognizing cues in a film to posing them
against one’s past experiences and hypotheses. Out of this rub, meanings, effects and
affects take shape as the perception of patterns. Attendance to cues in communication in
order to receive messages entails the practice of a competency – the shared cultural
competency of film viewing--, and I often describe this practice as an alternation between
conventions one recognizes in accord with such convention’s mobilization in texts. The
emergence of patterns is dialogical.
Perhaps this is why the dissertation reads as it does. It may at times seem
conversational or idiosyncratic. I am not sure if that is always intentional. But, it is at
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least not always unintentional. And, to be sure, this writing has a range of tones some of
them seemingly contradictory. I tend to pose my voice against itself, moving back and
forth between two poles with the hope that meaning and affect will emerge out of that
tension. This was written over a number of years, and I think as time has worn on, I have
become increasingly pessimistic about the ability of critical writing to break through the
static of current culture. So, there will be moments that may sound emancipatory, but like
a dutiful curmudgeon, I have gone back and tempered many of those impulses with
caution and perhaps even a bit of desperation. In truth, I think such pessimism has more
to do with the incredibly hard work one must take in order to continue keeping the
conceptual pathways open, to continue evolving one’s competencies and to recognize
when new ones are developing or possible. And, to be sure, it’s in that potentiality – to
attend to the world anew -- that originally attracted me to studying the virtual. It struck
me – and still does – that virtuality is a major emergent form that is used to comprehend
the world. This study intends to show what constitutes the virtual, what constitutes it as a
cultural competency and what its effects are.

To begin defining the discursive boundaries of the term “virtual,” one might
investigate the moving and still images of fine art photographer Olivo Barbieri and the
video work of experimental filmmaker Lynn Kirby. Barbieri’s “site specific” film shorts
each present a single city (Rome, Las Vegas or Shanghai, for instance) through a series of
aerial shots. The visual qualities of the films are remarkable, as they first combine, hyper-
real detail and vibrancy capitalizing on the quality of light present at the time of shooting,
and second, Barbieri’s trademark use of selective focus (also known as tilt-shift focus).
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Barbieri’s style is well-known, mostly through his series of photographic still images that
are grouped under the title “virtual truths.” What makes these images “virtual?” What
about them articulates the term? As with so many intriguing works, descriptions of
Barbieri’s films fall short of the experience of viewing them. Although the cities are
photographed from a great distance, the combination of extremely crisp focus in only
selected sections of the images (there is a demarcated blur in the other sections) with
perfectly rendered details of color, line and plane introduces perceptual confusion for
viewers. From moment to moment one feels that one is viewing, on one hand, panoramic
aerial views of real cities, and, alternatively, the product of macroscopic photography.
The first effect needs little explanation, as the photo’s imagery appears to be what it is –
an aerial view. But, at other moments, the images appear to be taken in extreme close-up
rather than at great distance. In this way, the cities sometimes appear to be photographs
of miniatures articulating the imagery of the detailed construction of architectural
modeling and 3-D cgi renderings that are often referred to as “previsualizations.” This
image mode also introduces a haptic sense into the images. One perceives the fine
placement of tiny buildings, cars, people as a model on a dais. Great distances, miles
traversing cities, are re-thought as mere centimeters. (This second sense of the images is
so strong that some viewers with whom I have spoken about their effect argue that these
images cannot be “real.”) Barbieri’s works are often interpreted as computer-generated,
(or at least computer-aided) hybrid images, as the level of detail and seamlessness that
digital image manipulation affords is, for the most part, well-known to film viewers. Still,
Barbieri (while he does not reveal his actual techniques) states that he does not use digital
tools of any kind.
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Lynn Kirby’s “performative” videos are also presented as a series of “site
specific” works. Her style, in contrast to Barbieri’s, is much more abstract. Comprised of
fleeting frames of pure color and graphic overlays or grids and geometric shapes, Kirby’s
work reminds one of movements in abstract painting – synchromy, neoplasticism – and
some sorts of avant-garde film, especially Stan Brakhage’s and Paul Sharits’ work. When
given insight into Kirby’s process the work begins to resonate with questions regarding
the virtual. Kirby begins by going to a location that has a specific, often personal,
meaning to her (titles include Pyramid Lake Piaute Reservation Exposure, St. Ignatius
Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions, and Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised
for Parabolas). While on location, without the use of a camera, Kirby exposes 16mm
film directly to light present at the site by holding the film in her hands and performing a
gesture with it. This process also allows for debris present at the site to engage the film
directly. The film is then developed, and the footage is digitized. During the digitization
process, Kirby performs upon a color correction tool in order to change the character of
the mediated output by the processor. The performance is captured in a final video output
in real time during her use of the color correction unit. So, it is through several layers of
mediation that the sites are offered to spectators, essentially transforming the sites into an
abstract expression of their status read through the persona and techniques Kirby brings
to them. The way that Kirby’s works might be considered virtual would have to do with
their ability to stand in for the processes described above. In this sense, Kirby’s videos
point towards the virtual as presented in philosophical discussions, in particular of a
Deleuzian sense of the virtual. If one read these works as virtual, it would be in line with
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much different sense of virtuality than the sorts of simulations and perceptual tricks that
Barbieri has produced.
Barbieri’s and Kirby’s works express limits concerning the use of the term
“virtual” as it relates to media production and reception. On the one hand, Barbieri’s
work tests the bounds of virtuality’s mimetic concerns and its connection to digital media
production. Barbieri’s work is not digital, but it invokes ideas associated with digital
media and is therefore aligned with the virtual. His work is an example of how the
specter of digital media is often evoked by virtuality, although digital media is not
necessary to it. Still more specifically, (and more importantly), another way that
Barbieri’s work articulates the virtual is through its oscillating appeal to viewers to
alternatively/simultaneously use optic and haptic competencies to construct space as it is
perceived and comprehended. I will argue in the chapters to come that such oscillating
viewing activities are often used to engage representations that are defined as “virtual.”
The resulting process of reception is not unlike experiences with trompe l’oeil, Virtual
Reality or glossy, over-the-top special effects in cinema. Many histories of media note
such representational modes as precursors to or prototypes of virtuality. Scenarios in
these histories (like the one I am describing for Barbieri’s work) depict
receptors/spectators/appreciators in the process of juggling a series of sensations and
cognitive processes – pleasures -- many of them based on the ranges of fidelity and
mimeticism of the media presented have in relation to the world or perhaps to other
media forms. And, as noted, Barbieri’s “virtualities” are developed without computers,
leading one to see that while the virtual often articulates computing, it also extends into
and overlaps other discourses and meanings.
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Kirby’s work, on the other hand, tugs at the virtual from an entirely different
standpoint, as mentioned earlier one that evokes a Deleuzian sense of the virtual. In
Deleuze’s model, the virtual is defined as that which is real but not actual. It is often
referred to as a plane of potentiality, where thresholds of transformation are developed,
where newness is formed. Kirby’s work does not resemble reality, but presents processes
of production transforming and becoming. One could argue that Kirby’s videos make the
work of the (Deleuzian) virtual its primary object. A series of activities, reactions and
intensities produce Kirby’s works, and the results do not communicate through their
resemblance of the original sites, but instead expand the understanding of what the sites
might be and what they may and do offer if “seen” or apprehended in a different way – as
a site in process and presented through the transformative filters of communication. This
second sense of the virtual is difficult to reconcile with the first one, which is wrapped up
almost entirely in resemblance, questions of realism and other concepts dealing with the
possibility of a mediated replication of the world that one might find, for instance, in a
simulation. For, as noted, Kirby’s site work explicitly presents the intensive change in the
reception of light, sound, motion and other perceptions as afforded through various
couplings of materials, chemical reactions and technologies. Barbieri’s work presents a
complicated dance between such material and human perception. In his work, the stakes
are in one’s ability to note perceptual similarities and differences within the mediated
landscape.
From the outset, then, I aim here to present two competing, perhaps contradictory
functions of the term virtual. On the one hand, we have the wide-ranging, and extremely
compelling popular use of the term. Barbieri’s work appeals primarily to this sense,
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which is entrenched in what some see as a general aim in the history of representational
techniques – the desire to produce a perfect simulation of the real world. Working the
tensions of such a concept, Barbieri’s films fascinate viewers with their combination of
immersivity and distanciation. Kirby’s videos, on the other hand, help to illuminate an
abstruse sense of the virtual that is defined in part through its ineffability. This sense also
has a history, but it is one that is wrapped up in critical theories and changing
understandings of the materiality of the world, processes of history, the transparency of
discourse, social resistance and representation. Of course, it is in this last concept -- of
representation -- that these discourses overlap. Still, it is perhaps more helpful to first
conceive of these competing notions as applying to distinct discursive fields that are
different in kind, where their overlap presents a special and powerful communicative and
transformative power, rather than as one discursive mode of the virtual with opposing
poles. And, while the concept of the virtual as a material plane of immanence has
influenced my thinking on virtuality, it is not the primary object of this study. Instead, my
aim is to investigate and present virtuality as a cultural competency or as an interpretive
framework or shared mode of reading. This is not to say that one sense of the virtual is
more important or useful than the other.
It is in the overlap – where the differing concepts of the virtual connect in the
guise of representation -- that I will concentrate the bulk of my study of the idea of the
virtual. In many ways this overlap is also the object of Margaret Morse’s studies of the
virtual culled together in her book Virtualities. Morse approaches the virtual through a
series of investigations into its presentation in differing modes of representation. And
through her work she proposes a clear definition of “virtuality.” She states that virtuality
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is a “little understood fiction of presence that operates on a different plane and most of
all, has a different relation to action and to cause and effect than the fiction we know
from the novel and film.”
2
When Morse singles out “action” and “cause and effect” as
special instances of difference between the fictive mode of virtuality and fictive modes of
novels or film, she is invoking the idea that novels and film are explicitly framed away
from everyday life, and primarily in the sense that narrative often intercedes to guide
viewers/readers towards the relevant forms of causality and action one perceives in films
and novels. These modes point away from an active concept of “presence.” What
representations in novels and films present is a sense of the pastness of production. For
Morse, films and novels are more closely related to the archive than to the liveness
associated with the virtual. Morse establishes the defining characteristics of a fictive
mode of reference regarding mediums that denote or connote active presence. She
describes the boundaries of novels and (fictional) films and their differences from those
mediums that articulate a logic of virtuality. And, in accordance with her argument,
Morse, in her most famous essay, does not use novels or films to explain virtuality,
instead focusing on television, freeway driving and the consumerist address of shopping
malls for her examples. Thus, it may seem odd to begin a discussion of virtuality by
invoking Barbieri’s and Kirby’s work if one wants, as I do to extend Morse’s work on
virtuality. These are films, photos and videos, yes. But, the examples I use are not
fictional works, and in my opinion their position as neither quite fictional or nonfictional
is a key to their articulating virtuality as a competency for understanding the works.
In contrast to Morse, I contend that active presence is not essential to an
articulation of the virtual, thus using both film and video works that more or less present
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the “pastness” of their objects. However, I think that Morse’s presentation of virtuality is
vital to understanding the multiple functions of the virtual. For instance, whereas
examples of site specific works begin this study, emphasizing a spatial sense of
virtuality, Morse’s definition highlights the important role of time in the virtual’s
production. In fact, Morse’s definition implies (at least) three basic axes in the production
of a “virtuality.” A fiction of presence requires a time and place -- a temporal and spatial
system -- as well as a psychological or subjective component to produce such a fiction. In
the pages that follow, I will use these three basic coordinates – time, space and
subjectivity – to outline how a textuality of the virtual is established. I will argue that (on
a formal and popular level) these three axes of the virtual are produced and formed
through a number of oscillations. Virtual space is constructed through formal and
receptive oscillations of immersion and ubiquity, virtual time by synchronization and
seriality, and virtual subjectivity by persona and shapeshifting. In short, there is a basic
and explicit tension made clear in virtual texts and their reception. This tension primarily
rises, moreover, through the apprehension of texts through singular vs. multiple
perspectives.
Immersive space is read against ubiquitous movement. This is to say that, held in
tension, a singular, hinged viewer is given the opportunity to roam and imagine
alternating subject positions. It is through actual and implied movement and stasis and the
tensions between these modes that virtual space is developed. Likewise, synchronous-
events are ones that command a singular sort of import, whereas seriality implies an
open-ended time of repetition and change. An enduring, essential persona placed against
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a shapeshifting, performative identity produces the most vital subjective state in
virtuality.
Still, the question of the active presence of liveness requires special attention, as it
articulates one of the central promises of Virtual Reality -- real-time, spontaneous or
user-produced content. Morse, for one, contends that the effect of liveness is especially
pertinent to a fiction of presence. Presence in this sense has both spatial and temporal
components. It is a fiction of “here and now.” Complicating this description is Morse’s
turn away from a diegetic mode of fiction. In fact, this fiction of presence is not a diegetic
fiction at all, but instead refers to nondiegetic aspects of media. For example, television
news offers a prototypical virtual fiction of presence.
3
As Morse explains, a broadcaster’s
direct address to “you” enacts a fiction of presence. Viewers realize that the “you” in a
newscasters address isn’t specific to one’s own person, but instead capitalizes on the
possibility of television to bring an actual one-to-one address between subjects. Through
their historical understanding of the conventions of television news, viewers experience
the address as an enactment of a fictive presence. Newscasts are comprehended as
potentially live events “as they develop.” It is through the potentiality of liveness
afforded by television that viewers understand a differing relation to action and cause and
effect than when experiencing a film or novel, for instance. That is, there is an
assumption that with potentially live representations there is a greater possibility of
events affecting or being affected by the everyday life of viewers, requiring action or
causing immediate change. Thus, a fiction of presence isn’t so much a mode attached to
diegetic fictionality, but is instead articulated to the nondiegetic, popular and, ironically,
primarily nonfictional understanding of the underlying mechanisms of television and
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news address. For Morse, the fiction begins when spectators of media (like the news)
agree to behave “as if” there is an actual presence in the relation between viewer and
technology.
This is indeed a different sort of “fiction” than one immediately thinks of when
using the term. This is a fiction of reality; that is, it is a fiction that is expressed in the
nonfictional world. Thus, Morse’s description of virtuality stresses the ability of the term
fiction to define it, and even re-shapes or questions what fiction might be. What if
instead, one were to define virtuality not as a mode of fiction but as both a mode of
reference and an interpretive framework in its own right? That is, how would a concept of
virtuality be different if one were to put it on a par with the defining characteristics of
fiction rather a subset of it? To clarify, what I am suggesting here is that fiction (and if
we choose, virtuality) has a dual meaning. In one sense it describes a form of
representation, as in a work of fiction. In a second but equally important sense fiction
refers to both an interpretive framework and cultural competency that is developed and
used by people to make sense of representations, narratives and the world in general. This
is really the way that Morse is using the term. It’s not so much that virtualities are “works
of fiction,” but that they are understood (in a way) fictively. Because fiction is a
competency that defines an approach to comprehension, one can treat a work as fiction
whether it is fictive or not. And, by viewing fiction as an interpretive framework, one
quickly sees when the framework would be more or less appropriate to use based on cues
and conventions of comprehension perceived in a newscast, text, situation, etc.
Similarly, if one were to treat virtuality as an interpretive framework, it would
help to clarify its “appropriate” use and also open it up to applications that are not
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necessarily virtual at all (and with respect to Morse’s use would fundamentally alter its
import on a cultural level.) In this way, I would place virtuality on a par with fiction as a
method of unpacking the world and its representations. In doing so, a series of
assumptions about what one means by virtuality begin to fall into place. For one,
virtuality is assumed to be produced through the interaction of people with their
environments, including representations of many sorts in order to comprehend (and/or
engage with) differing situations, mediated or otherwise. And further, it is assumed that
the defining characteristics of virtuality are not necessarily tied to a definition of fiction,
but are developed in their own right through the continual social use and functions of the
discourse. Morse’s own arguments tend to define virtuality not so much as a kind of
fiction, but instead as a mode of reference. This is to say that like fictional or narrative
modes, virtuality is pertinent when the presence of codes and cues that ask subjects to
apply a virtual mode of reference are perceived in a subject’s interaction with texts or in
daily experience. And so, it follows that 1) virtuality is not medium specific, although it
may be more likely to be used when encountering particular media forms, and 2) it is not
necessarily fictional, although its relation to fiction may be complicated.
The traditional concepts of fiction and nonfiction are becoming increasingly
inadequate for describing many mediated works. This has always been true of fine art, of
course, especially works that challenge the definition of art itself – like works that would
be considered avant-garde, for instance. Traditionally works of art often have more to do
with rumination on the idea of representation, or a display of aesthetic, or technical
mastery, rather than with the construction of a verifiable claim (nonfiction) or the
production of an alternate world (fiction). As one of the primary functions of the avant-
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garde is to expose the foundations of artistic discourse, it follows that such works make
Art’s exploration of these issues explicit. Perhaps more pertinently, contemporary
popular media increasingly flaunt a promiscuous commingling of fiction and nonfiction.
On one hand, we have ostensibly nonfictional examples such as “reality television” with
its hyper-constructedness, or “news” programs like Hardball, The Sean Hannity Show or
The Daily Show. These programs are hyper-mediated, and viewers are expected to catch
the many intertextual references (to texts fictional and nonfictional) and re-mediated
signs as an end in itself. These shows explicitly challenge the idea of nonfiction and
expand its bounds, perhaps rendering its categorization as useless. On the flipside, we
have the most high profile space of fictionality, Hollywood blockbuster cinema -- Harry
Potter, King Kong, Merchant Ivory productions, etc. All of these works rely heavily on
nonfictional appeals to star power, technology, genre, current events, and the list goes on.
Perhaps such nonfictional address has always been wrapped up with fiction – we might
simply call it “referential meaning” --, but the current trend of explicit nonfictional
appeals within fiction stresses the boundaries of fictionality to such a degree that
frameworks need to be re-defined or bolstered – or more precisely, critics must be
flexible in defining such shared frameworks as they continue to change.
This is where both Barbieri’s and Kirby’s works illuminate the vital role virtuality
has filled. Their works are designed to question and challenge typical perceptions and
understandings of representations, art and space. And, they help to establish another
aspect of the discourse of virtuality, one that is explicitly aimed at questioning the ability
of representations to present the world or to simulate it. Similar to implied concerns in
fine art, this ability has much to do with extratextual concerns of mediation -- artistic
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mastery and the authority or objectivity of differing mediums in presenting an accurate
rendering of the world. This concept is central to Morse’s definition of virtuality as a
“fiction of presence.” But, when looked at this way, a question emerges regarding this
definition, “‘presence’ before (or in or at) what?”
If we take Barbieri’s films as an example, we can see that there is an interplay of
presentation that occurs. On the one hand, we have a presentation of a major city from the
sky. This presentation is reliable (ostensibly) because of the “nature” of photography. The
indexicality of the photo assures that the camera and the city were present at the time of
shooting. So, in this first denotative sense there is an accurate presentation. On the other
hand, we have the sense that this is the photograph of a miniature. This other perception
is developed by the image’s likeness to other photos one has seen of miniatures, the look
and feel of macroscopic photography. In other words, there is the sense that the work
presents another sort of mediation, another kind of representation. So, presence here
would be understood as presence before another sort of media. The reference to a past
experience with different sorts of media is crucial to the “virtuality” of the image. As the
virtual is entwined with explicit questions of representation, one of the primary cues of
virtual works is the appeal to “hypermediation.” And, it is this idea -- that a
representation, situation or experience is pushing at the limit or challenging the ability of
a representation to present -- that is evoked in the label “virtual.”
It is through such frictions, I argue, that the current framework of virtuality has
been developed. The virtual has slowly become associated with the interplay between
fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes virtuality is expressed in the production/reception of an
alternate or parallel world that explicitly relies on real-world uses of representation and
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technology. For this reason, works that can be considered “virtual” often make explicit a
complicated relation to the idea of representation. At stake is the materiality of
representation. A driving question of virtuality, for instance, is “How real is media?” In
this way, the virtual is often appropriately used at the intersection of concepts and
frameworks, where definitions begin to get fuzzy. Media has traditionally been defined
apart from the material world. Still, at the very least, it can (and should) be argued that its
effects are often material.
Another way to define the virtual is through its use. For instance, one can consider
when this interpretive framework is called into action. What cues a person into applying
virtuality as a mode of comprehension? One of the best ways to begin determining how
virtuality is understood is to look at the contexts in which it is used. The OED currently
contains 4 definitions of “virtual” broken down into 13 parts. Two of these definitions
seem especially relevant to a project that will eventually focus on the intersection
between concepts of virtuality, representation and cinema: 1. “That is so in essence or
effect, although not formally or actually,” and 2. “Not physically existing as such but
made by software to appear to do so from the point of view of the program or the user.”
4

These definitions help display the slipperiness of virtuality as a concept. For both
of these definitions, something virtual is not actual or physical, but in effect is as if it
were. For something to be virtual it must perform, cue or act as if it were something else
and reside in a seemingly ephemeral state of nonexistence. True to form, according to the
first definition here, the idea of virtuality appears to introduce an ontic paradox.
Something virtual is essentially the same as something else, yet differs from it from the
point of view of actuality. Moreover, it is unclear what type of measure would determine
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a threshold of virtuality. (i.e., When is something accepted as virtual as opposed to
actual?) In fact, these definitions of virtuality would tend to place the virtual right at a
threshold of sorts, that between nascent and actual. And, to further complicate the senses
in which “virtual” might be used, whatever the thresholds these two definitions introduce,
they also differ in a specific way. In the first instance, something that is defined as virtual
is applied to any kind of virtuality, whereas in the latter virtuality is applied only to an
effect stemming from the use of computer software.
Although the difference in these general definitions of the virtual appears minor,
the relatively recent articulation of “virtual” to computing technologies promotes an
ambiguous and wide-ranging sense of virtuality in contemporary culture. Perhaps not
surprisingly, many of the earliest uses of virtual entered in the etymological history of the
term have mainly to do with the spiritual presence of Christ or the power of the church
(some might argue a fictional presence). And, as Jeffrey Sconce’s book Television Ghosts
reveals, such residual notions are retained even (or perhaps all the more so) when media
technologies – telegraph, telephone, television, Internet – are used, especially when they
are first brought into popular consciousness. Likewise, computing is tangentially being
referenced even when no computing technologies are apparently relevant to the virtual’s
use. In a sense, computing haunts the virtual. It is regularly inferred when virtuality is
invoked, and is further often related to the idea of a spiritual presence or ghost in the
machine.
Relative to Morse’s view of the virtual, the difference in the definition I offer of
the virtual in these pages may simply be summed up as a different take on the phrase “as
if.” When the OED states that something is virtual when it is “as if” it were actual
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without being so, its definition can easily be read as a definition of fiction. In this sense,
readers suspend their disbelief in order to comprehend information fictively. They
pretend that something is “as if” it were actual without it being so. This, I would argue, is
close to Morse’s view. But, if one takes fiction as a method of interpretation that is
applied to data, then the idea of suspension takes on a differing sense of activity, one that
is not wholesale and that is used in conjunction with many other competencies. This is to
say that virtuality is not a “fiction of presence,” but is instead a method of comprehension
that uses, in part, fictive and nonfictive discourses simultaneously. “As if” in this sense is
more closely aligned to substitution than to pretend.
When using this second definition, noting the cultural status of differing media
(film, video, photography, audio recording, etc.) is important if evaluating whether a
representation will be taken “as if” it were as good as something actual. Supporting
mechanisms include aesthetic dexterity (How realistic is this representation?), generic
concerns (Is this being presented as a document of the real?) and popular understanding
of technology (Do cameras lie?). As such, the extratextual status of the media presenting
something “as if” it were actual is as important as its fictional aspects. That is,
extradiegetic understanding of and previous experience with specific media and types of
differing mediated forms is critical to the production of virtuality.
In order for readers or viewers to give themselves up to something being in effect
actual without being so, an association between a medium and its fidelity to actuality
must be established. This idea is close to the concept of realism while remaining different
in important ways. Whereas realism is an aesthetic that depends on a representation’s use
of conventions to produce an effect on a viewer/reader/etc., virtuality focuses primarily
19
on the ability of representations to be used as substitutions for what is actual. In this
sense, realism is often an important aspect in the rhetorical production of establishing
reliable virtuality. The standards of actuality are more easily met if representations appear
realistic at the level of perception. Still, many representations can move
viewers/readers/users towards use of a virtual mode of reference without presenting a
realistic depiction. Interactions in chat rooms, for instance, are often referred to as virtual
interactions. In this case the substitutability of presence evoked through typed text while
live is neither fictive nor realistic per se, but instead appeals to an entirely different
framework of interpretation based on users’ understandings of computing networks, word
processing, etc.
And yet, realism remains caught up in confusing ways with the concept of
virtuality. For instance, there is a popular through-line when discussing the production of
virtuality in relation to a history of visuality. In this sort of history, different media are
often discussed as part of a teleological movement aimed at eventually replicating reality
in all of its fullness. A typical history that appeals to this historical argument will run
from the medium of painting to panorama to photography to cinema to computer
generated imagery. It is correct to say that these forms of mediation do have a great deal
to do with the cultural development of virtuality. But, caution should be used when
attempting to unpack the mimetic quality of these media as their prime mode of
virtualization, as there are numerous ways that representations appeal to the virtual.
When new media forms have become popular they have usually undergone a
rigorous virtualization test. That is, media technologies have normally been prodded for
an understanding of how their resulting representations should be understood in relation
20
to the everyday. It is when a representation is “raised” to the status of being “as if” it
were actual without being so that a concept of the virtual is enhanced and evoked. The
weight accorded to a popular concept of a technology’s capabilities is the point here.
From this perspective, there is no doubt that writing, cinema, oral history, performance
and many other kinds of representation, even if they are framed outside of liveness or
have a specific relation to action or cause and effect, have been and continue to develop
the cultural competency of virtuality.
Let’s step back to establish what has been said so far. On one hand, virtuality is a
cultural competency and interpretive framework that is cued for use when many sorts of
questions -- about the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, the status of actuality,
simulation or the materiality of representations, or the effects of computers on the world
(and this should be understood as a partial list of course) -- are being tested. What’s at
stake in the virtualization of representations?
In this dissertation I will analyze virtuality as an interpretive framework or
cultural competency that is comprised of specific codes and conventions. Specifically, I
will organize the arguments that follow with respect to the three main spatial, temporal
and subjective axes: Immersion, Synchronization and Shapeshifting. In each instance, I
propose, virtuality is cued into use and reified through an oscillatory process – between
cues and experience -- of textual production. This process is key to my understanding of
the virtual, a view that in large measure is inspired by the frequent representations of the
virtual as a state that is articulated as a “betweeness” -- as if the virtual were actual
without being so. Finally, in this process I will, though analysis of films, art-works,
media events and readings, attempt to define what is at stake in a production of the
21
virtual, to mine its provocative contradictions, and to reveal how the cleavage of its
ambiguity is used by artists and critics to create a virtual aesthetic. Finally, too, I will
offer a perspective on how such concepts can help to illuminate changes in ideology and
authority.
Finally, while I was writing this manuscript (which underwent a number of starts
and stops), I took a job as a programmer at the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS). It was
there that I was able to interact directly with artists and audiences in the context of
programs that I developed for public presentation. In addition to traditional film
exhibition, I was lucky to be able to produce or work on a number of differing program
contexts at SFFS. Most pertinently, I established a programming stream called KinoTek
in 2006 that is still active at SFFS, and is devoted to the presentation of emergent, cross-
platform and multi-media. Many of the programs featured within the KinoTek heading
explicitly cue spectators to use a competency of virtuality to navigate the meanings and
effects these programs offer. Following each of the three sections on immersion,
synchronization and shapeshifting, I will detail a couple of projects that I was able to
present that have shaped how I understand virtuality to function.

1
In fact, this introduction exists because of feedback I received from my generous
dissertation committee, suggesting that this intro would help to contextualize the project
and also clarify some of the eccentricities of the writing. The work here is very much a
collaboration in a direct sense.
2
Margaret Morse. Virtualities. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. p. 20. (her
italics)
3
Morse pp. 36 – 67.
4
Oxford English Dictionary. Online edition. http://dictionary.oed.com. 2004.
Incidentally, one of the works in etymological support of the first definition is taken from
one the most quoted sources on virtuality Jeremy Bentham, designer of the Panopticon.
22
Immersion and virtuality
The trope of immersion powerfully unites a number of key issues concerning the
representation of virtuality. Immersion describes an activity of spectatorship -- of
perception and participation -- for viewers/interactors and critics of virtuality. Immersion
is invoked through differing types of engagements with texts; and, whether perceptual,
emotional or intellectual, each includes a reader’s awareness of being somehow within a
textual world. Immersion is also flaunted within representations of the virtual as a logic
supporting the reading of virtuality. By this I mean that representations of virtuality often
explicitly appeal to immersivity as a means of legitimizing the (virtual) realism or
authority of the text that incorporates it. Immersion is a key component of an interpretive
framework of virtuality. It provides a benchmark for evaluating the spatial aspect of
virtual texts. Produced through the activity of viewers responding to cues within texts,
immersion functions through viewer/spectator/reader experience that is best characterized
as roving.
To be immersed is “to be surrounded by something completely.” Immersion has
been used to describe religious participation as in baptism’s immersion in water or being
immersed in the grace of God. Or of culture – one can be immersed in a milieu. Its root is
the Latin mergere – to merge. And, while in the context of VR, the term immersion has
residual appeal to these various meanings, in that special case immersion refers more
directly to the technical power of representations to replicate the totality of everyday
perception and sensation. VR uses images and data to (potentially) produce the sought
after effect of immersion. There is a slippage apparent then in the term “immersion.” It
on the one hand describes the experience of more or less organic phenomena – the
atmosphere, a milieu, liquid environments. On the other hand it also describes the
inorganic replication of the real though the mediated forms of images, data and perhaps
formal systems such as narrative.

23
Coming from the field of literary criticism, Marie-Laure Ryan writes, “Literature
has already perfected the art of immersive world construction.”
1
She is referring to the
engagement of readers with literary, primarily narrative, stimuli. According to Ryan, this
engagement cues readers to “lose themselves” in the literary work, likening the
experience of reading to “… taking a swim in a cool ocean with powerful surf. The
environment first appears hostile, you enter it reluctantly, but once you get wet and
entrust your body to the waves, you never want to leave.”
2
Ryan argues that immersive
world construction in literary texts relies on the concept of simulation and an aesthetic of
psychological realism to draw readers into textual worlds. She notes a number of formal
devices that writers incorporate into their texts in order simulate a reader’s actual
experience of a world. Ryan’s approach details differing techniques and poetics that
inspire spectatorial immersion on perceptual, emotional and intellectual levels.
On the other hand, immersion can imply a literal physical immersion for
spectators. This is the type of sensation that has been described as an end-point to Virtual
Reality by such proponents as Jaron Lanier and Myron Krueger. A critic of VR, Ken
Hillis confronts the type of immersivity that is merely emotional or intellectual stating,
“Unlike how a novel is experienced, in a V[irtual] E[nvironment], the mental work
required to extrapolate sensation seems unnecessary, as a central promise of this
technology is sensation itself. The nature of immersion is to make users feel drenched in
sensation.”
3
The promise and potentiality of virtual reality supposes the practical if not
complete replication of the world in a synthetic environment. And, in part, through
statements that establish immersivity as a “central promise” of VR, the term “immersive
environment” has become synonymous and implicit in articulations of virtual worlds.
“Immersion” is often understood by VR producers and critics as an eventual goal and
limit of the perceptual and physical trajectory of VR itself.
Differences and shifts in the meaning of immersion and other cues used to
develop the framework of are common in descriptions of virtuality – whether describing
24
“immersion,” “presence,” “reality” and a host of other tropes foundational to the virtual.
Some critics seek to rescue the virtual from such slippages and confusions. In the opening
to her study on the virtual, for instance, Anne Friedberg states, “We need to disentangle
the term “virtual” from its associations with the rhetoric of an – immersive – and hence
unframed – “virtual reality.”
4
She goes on
Once the “virtual” is separated from its reflexive association with immersive
“realities,” we can also account for the range of “virtual” images (still or moving)
that are found in frames – paintings, photographs, images produced by camera
obscura, images projected by magic lantern, and the subsequent moving-image
media of film and television.
5

For Friedberg, this is an important move to make as her study aims to present an
exhaustive history and impact of the concept of the virtual (primarily as it relates to
visual practices) across discursive contexts and in relation to scopic regimes (and the
many representational forms foundational to such regimes that employ frames/framing in
their construction). Alternatively, I treat the articulation of immersion to virtuality merely
as a cultural practice. For my purposes, virtuality is not primary to perception or
representation. Instead it is embedded in and of perception, and in this sense is ad hoc.
We invoke such competencies as they are cued, and can choose to use other
competencies (such as “fiction,” “narrative” or frameworks of genre, for instance) when
desired and all of these frameworks change over time.
For my purposes, it is most important to understand and analyze how the
meaning of immersion tends to slip. How does it oscillate between invoking organic
experience and representational systems? Where and how does this slip occur and to what
ends? Part of what’s at stake here is the isolation and visibility of what Gilles Deleuze
would call the virtual or what is real but not actual, what Deleuze also refers to as “pure
possibles.” His use of the term “virtual” is decidedly different than its sense in usual
parlance today, describing a real plane of potentiality that is not (yet and may never be)
actual. Today Virtual Reality and the myriad other phenomena that go by “virtual” refer
to a series of technical practices. That these mediums are also often intimately connected
25
to concepts of limitless possibility expresses some of the “consequences of modernity”
(to use Anthony Gidden’s phrase) dedicated to differentiating and making visible –
institutionalizing -- all aspects of life – even potentiality itself.
To hypothesize how this has occurred, let’s look at how the interpretive
framework of virtuality functions to produce an effect of immersion for
readers/viewers/spectators and how such effects are cued to be taken on by spectators,
and specifically how immersion relies on an interplay of atomization and wholeness. As
mentioned earlier, Hillis argues that representations in a VE present special cases, as one
of their primary functions is to provide immersive experiences without the mental work
of spectators. In these supposed interactions with Virtual Environments, spectators
encounter virtual texts – and their technical powers – and become immersed in a
physical sense. Ryan, on the other hand, describes an immersive state that remains
cognitive or perceptual (she doesn’t make a distinction between such mental processes).
While these two types of spectatorial immersion are triggered through different
means, and are further distinguished in that they illustrate differing cues and stimuli, what
they share (apart from their use of the ocean or other liquid environments as metaphor) is
an implied establishment of a somewhat passive spectator regarding immersion. As Hillis
appears to argue, immersion occurs when viewers no longer are required to work to
“extrapolate sensation” or, in the sense Ryan describes, no longer recognize the medium
producing the texts as such, but instead find themselves amidst the medium. But, an
establishment of a passive viewer leaves out important aspects of the immersive process.
First, the work of viewers to construct textual worlds (for instance, as might be described
by Edward Branigan or Roland Barthes) through cues, codes and lexia is obscured.
Second, an assumed passive viewer elides the difficult description of a viewer’s fullness
of experience – their responses, hypotheses and evaluations -- with virtual (or any) texts.
For her part, Ryan is interested in describing a viewer actively participating in an
immersive environment. She writes,
26
The cause of immersion has not been helped by its resistance to theorization.
Contemporary culture values those ideas that produce brilliant critical
performances, that allow the critic to deconstruct the text and put it back together
again in the most surprising configuration, but what can be said about immersion
in a textual world except that it takes place? The self-explanatory character of the
concept is easily interpreted as evidence that immersion promotes a passive
attitude in the reader, similar to the entrapment of tourists in the self-enclosed
virtual realities of theme parks or vacation resorts.
6

But, when Ryan goes on to describe a viewer’s active participation in an
immersive experience, she cites “imagination” and the ability to “dream up textual
worlds” as their primary contribution. I suggest that it is exactly the kind of active
experience Ryan describes in contrast to immersion—of critics that deconstruct texts and
put them back together—that best describes an active experience of immersivity. In
specific, the production of an effect of immersion requires that readers continuously
negotiate their experience of texts through their active engagement with (at least) cues
appropriate to the text (its genre, form or style) and the spectator’s cultural knowledge of
media (its technological basis and cultural position).
Cultural attitudes about specific media and technologies play a vital role in the
establishment of an immersive experience. With respect to VR immersion in particular
plays a crucial role partly due to the ways that VR has been described and marketed.
Many producers and users of VR explicitly define immersion as a goal of the medium’s
experience. It is expected that spectators will enter into an engagement with VR in part
simply to evaluate the relative immersivity of the experience. This is displayed
prototypically on VR pioneer Char Davies’ website “immersence.com.” The URL
notwithstanding, the VR projects described there, Osmose and Ephèmére, foreground
immersion as one of the primary functions of the projects.
Osmose (1995) is an immersive, interactive virtual-reality environment
installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted
display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is
a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place
for facilitating awareness of one’s own self as a consciousness embodied in
enveloping space.
7

27
Recognizing immersion is one of the, if not most, important aspect of the
installation. Additionally, as a practitioner of VR, Davies is keenly aware of how a state
of immersion is both cued and produced. It is through the “interplay” of self and world --
and of technology and experience. Users explicitly and actively set themselves against a
mediated world in order to participate in immersion. And, in order for this to happen,
interactors must be made aware of the technical supports for the project – 3D graphics,
interactive sound, a head-mounted display, real-time tracking, etc. There is no attempt to
hide the mediated status of the environment, of course. The reality of the installation is
not that it “fools” anyone into forgetting the technical supports of the display, but that it
is a simulation of “enveloping space.” Giving in to the cues and expectations of the
technical apparatus is essential to an experience of immersion – or, in other words to
attending to what’s relevant in the case of the installation.
What this starts to reveal is that critics hoping to understand the process of
immersion must also attend to cues to the construction of the extratextual status of media
and technologies when applied to representations of the virtual. Encounters with such
representations necessarily rely on extratextual information in spectatorial construction.
To begin defining extratextual cues one might pose it against a traditional idea of medium
specificity. An appeal to extratextual understanding of specific media technologies differs
subtly but importantly from a description of medium specificity. Medium specific
analysis describes the differing ontological status of certain media – their essential
techniques, modes or functions that separate them from other media or mediated forms.
Extratextual understanding of media, however, does not rely on essence per se, but on the
discourse surrounding a medium’s status in culture at large.
A good example of critical analysis where extratextual functions of media are
shown to play a role in spectatorial experience can be found in Tom Gunning’s
description of a “cinema of attractions.” To quickly summarize, Gunning’s concept
concerns the discursive status of cinema as a medium that can reliably present spectacular
28
attractions through a combination of realistic effects and the viewer’s conscious
awareness of the artifice of the presentation. The viewer’s awareness need not be expert,
and in fact may (often) be misguided in its hypotheses about the medium of artifice, but
nonetheless it remains as an important aspect of the viewer’s production of meaning.
8

Whereas Gunning describes “attractive” film, I would like to extend this idea to
immersive contexts. By this type of reasoning what remains important in a study of
immersive experience is recognition of the discourse surrounding the medium
encountered.
Some critical frameworks, for instance in the primarily formalist art historical
approach that relies on medium specificity for explaining virtual aesthetics embodied in
the work of Oliver Grau, may be tested by a discursive view of medium description. Grau
writes
It is important to determine which characteristics of virtual image systems
distinguish them from images of traditional artworks or cinema. It is necessary to
explore and analyze the new aesthetic potential that technology has made
possible.
9

Grau’s study places primary emphasis on the medium-specific developments in
aesthetics that lead to a fully developed sense of virtuality. He details some of the main
differences he sees in “immersive” virtual imaging systems later as follows
Immersion is undoubtedly key to any understanding of the development of the
media, even though the concept appears somewhat opaque and contradictory….It
is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what it shown and increasing
emotional involvement in what is happening. The majority of virtual realities that
are experienced almost wholly seal off the observer hermetically from external
visual impressions, appeal to him or her with plastic objects, expand perspective
of real space into illusion space, observe scale and color correspondence, and, like
the panorama, use indirect light effects to make the image appear as the source of
the real.
10

From Grau’s descriptions, it should be clear right away that his method for
understanding what he calls a key component of virtual aesthetics – immersion – cannot
be informed by the kinds of insights that a literary critic like Ryan might present with
respect to literature. In fact, the reason I italicize “hermetically” in Grau’s description is
that he uses this distinction to exclude not only literary instances of virtuality (or
29
immersion) in his lineage, but also a number of visual modes – “nonhermetic effects of
illusionistic painting, trompe l’oeil,…and images or image spaces that are delimited by a
frame that is apparent to the observer”
11
-- that would seemingly have much to offer in
his study. I would argue that Grau’s insistence of excluding such visual works, and other
nonvisual examples, serves to continue the opacity of spectatorial immersion that appears
to vex Grau. He focuses on immersion only as a mode of viewer passivity in the face of
an overwhelming realism presented by certain types of work such as the panorama –
where, I suppose the presence of a frame would kick a spectator out of the illusion of
immersion. In fact, by ascribing to this system Grau is forced to make somewhat difficult
arguments that cannot account for changes in visual realism or interpretive differences
afforded by changes in culture. For example, Grau describes the immersive experience of
an Italian fresco painted in 20 B.C. as having the same effect as one produced by the
panorama The Battle of Sedan shown in Germany in 1883. In each case, Grau minimizes
the cultural baggage viewers bring to the work, claiming that immersive environments
hail viewers in a method similar to an interpellation as described by Althusser, capturing
viewers with their overwhelming “reality.”
To support this view Grau argues (in a debate echoing film theorist’s discussions
of Bazin’s and Eisenstein’s ostensible affinities for deep space and montage) that critics
who laud the panorama as “democratic” due to its wide-ranging horizontal views
affording viewers choice only need turn to Foucault’s description of panoptic power for
an accounting of the repressive force of hermetically sealed panoramas. In this light the
reason Grau argues for the required “hermetic” quality of panoramic display is clarified.
The panorama, like a visual prison, captures viewers. Or as Grau contends “The power of
immersion… deprive[s] the human subject of the right of decision.” And further noting,
“It is impossible to select any art object in a total image for everything is image.”
12

Of course, all of this assumes that the techniques produced through a history of
illusionistic imagery makes an experience of immersion in a panorama a fait accompli.
30
What is glaringly omitted here is the work of viewers. It seems strange that Grau doesn’t
acknowledge that one of the main attractions that a panorama holds for the public is the
opportunity to allow oneself to be fooled – the joy of experiencing a trick, and that much
of this joy is predicated on viewers having an understanding of the media they are about
to experience.
How, for instance, can this kind of description help us to understand what’s at
stake in the “hermetically sealed” Disneyland ride, “Soarin’ over California?” As part of
the theme park, California Adventure, “Soarin’” simulates a hang gliding tour over the
state, presenting vistas such as Yosemite, the Golden Gate Bridge and Lake Tahoe,
moving from day to night and day again during its “trip.” The amusement fulfills the
medium specific criteria that Grau notes, but the experience of the ride is one that relies
on the interplay of the viewer’s subjective understanding of the vistas presented and the
technical dexterity of the ride to simulate presence and flight through motion, visuality,
sound and smell. Certainly there are ideological considerations in the ride, one that
presents California only as a majestic wonder of nature and ingenuity. (There are no
visits to the state legislature during budgetary debates, for instance.) But, to understand
how immersion in this context works, one would have to account for differences between
this ride and others even in the same park, such as “The Little Mermaid – Ariel’s
Undersea Adventure,” which relies on visitor’s knowledge of fictional characters in order
to produce an immersive effect.
These rides cue spectators to experience immersion in part by asking them to
imagine themselves in the scenes presented. “What is like to be in Yosemite?” Or,
“Malibu?” Or, “How would it feel to be Ariel, the Little Mermaid?” As Grau notes, “If
we reverse the usual direction of view, from the observer to the image, then we find that,
from all directions, this image apparatus fixes the observer in the center of the circular
space.”
13
And precisely, one could argue that Grau’s realization, his work as a critic, is
similar to the work of viewer, that viewers consciously realize the artifice of the
31
panorama, the reversibility of gazes -- the uncanny realization that the panorama is
literally made for him to be right there – that develops a more supple mode of immersive
experience.
If read in this sense, immersion does not only imply physical and subjective fixity
within a textual meshwork, but also (concurrently) a subject position of ubiquity, an
opportunity to experience a myriad subjective positions and minutiae of a text. This
would begin to account for the fact that panoramas most often presented scenes of which
viewers already had some knowledge, often famous battles – The Battle of Sedan, The
Battle of Waterloo, The Siege of Paris. This allowed viewers to quickly determine one
aspect of the realism of the scenes they were experiencing as a matter of cultural
narrative. Further, one could weigh their experience of details in the work to accounts of
the battles that they’ve encountered, the pain on a character’s face, the time of day, the
weather, smoke in the air, etc. To tie some of this activity to contemporary media
production, one could easily begin making connections between panoramic presentation
and the spectacle of big budget movies that bring realistic scenes of war. For example, t
the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the landing at Normandy, was presented
though a marketing strategy that attempted to insure film goers knew of a series of
ephemera associated with the production and realism of the film. The film was touted as
realistic from the perspective of veterans who experienced WWII, and to have used
precise digital technologies to achieve an accurate depiction, especially with regard to the
minute details of sound and soldiers in the far distance. These circulating details play into
the overall immersive effect of the film.
14

Immersion requires at least two processes of spectatorial work. The first produces
the experience of a single subject – “you” or “I” – in a textual world. The second process
implies a roving sense of subjectivity that is able to inspect the textual world at will,
frisking it for details – of technical competency, narrative structures, fissures, jokes,
moments of epiphany, reasons to be immersed. What I am describing here, it should be
32
noted, does not describe simply an alternation between immersion and distanciation.
Rather, a host of activities and knowledge is united under the framework of “virtuality”
(or for non-virtual texts whatever competency is most relevant).
Ryan describes postmodernist texts as alienating ones that prevent an immersive
experience. She writes
Whereas Bachelard [in Poetics of Space] reflects a “sense of place,” postmodern
literature conceptualizes space in terms of perceptual movement, blind navigation,
a gallery of mirrors…. all experiences that preclude an intimate relation to a
specific location. We could say that in Bachelard space is sensorially experienced
by a concrete, bounded body, while in postmodern literature its apprehensions
presuppose a dismembered, ubiquitous, highly abstract body, since real bodies
can only be in one place at one time.”
15

Her reasoning presents a reader’s sense of ubiquity as an effect of alienating
devices within postmodern texts. And, while it is true that Bachelard’s poetic approach
assumes one body – his own –, that body is often imagined in relation to minutiae of the
home. Some of Bachelard’s chapter headings include “Corners,” “Miniature,” “Intimate
Immensity,” and “The Phenomenology of Rounds.”
16
His strategy for rendering an
intimate relation of space is similar to Proust’s investigation into time and memory. By
focusing on a series of descriptive details and alternatively analyzing the very method of
poetics, Bachelard is able to produce the immersive sense of “being there.” It is precisely
through this alternation, between “wholeness” and “detail” that Bachelard succeeds.
Further, “postmodern” texts should not be precluded from producing immersion per se.
Are the rides at Disneyland postmodern? They certainly use a number of disjunctive
devices, yet also manage to create immersivity. Or, if we were to take a classic
postmodern text such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, which Ryan
discusses, we can see that Calvino uses the herky-jerky interchange between stories and a
narrator, including finely detailed textual production to suck in readers and create an
immersive world precisely by using alienating effects. In this particular case, immersion
is achieved in the production a meta-narrative discourse that relates to the world of the
“author.” The text’s system requires readers to employ new strategies to develop a textual
33
world, where in many ways the immersive activity of readers takes place in an enigmatic
extratextual space opened by the novel. Immersion is not simply reserved for mainstream
accounts of realist detail. Still, this is not intended to imply that readers “must” become
immersed to encounter texts, but instead that, in fact, the nature of a ubiquitous subjective
experience coupled with a singular “drenching of sensation” should not be viewed as
opposite spectatorial activity, but, on the contrary, complementary parts of immersion
which requires active participation of readers.
A rounder version of the work going on by spectators in an immersive space is
described by Norman Klein with his description of “scripted spaces.” In his study on the
history of special effects, Klein describes immersion in a number of contexts, but most
forcefully in relation to the city of Las Vegas. He writes
When I interview specialists and audience alike, often I am told that malls feel
like computer games. Why is that? Both spaces are designed around a narrative
where the viewer or the shopper is the central character, in an immersive
environment built for navigation (walk-through that implies freedom of choice,
but actually is severely monitored or limited).
17

At first glance, it may seem that Klein is arguing the same point as Grau – that
“panoramic” environments destroy democractic response, and in fact they do agree on
that point. But, they own crucial differences on the activity of the spectator (or viewer or
shopper) and the transference of the concept of immersion across various mediated forms
and practices. In many ways, Klein’s conclusions on immersivity are as pessimistic as
Grau’s –
Consider the issue this way: philosophically speaking, an audience goes from
confusion to the realization that there is a program greater than themselves. They
see hints of it physically, but only the reflection of the greater process – to
experience a dual reality…This is rather charming, to sense the gimmick, while
glamorizing the machinery that gave it to you… Part of our revenge against that
system is the knowledge that it is filled with gimmicks. However, many of these
gimmicks are part of the script itself, and suit the program very well. So we
imagine that our ontological awareness is a weapon against ideology, but in the
end, we accept the epistemology as a truth (a democratzing force), even a game
about the truth.
18

What Klein is describing here are the ways that immersive spaces are also
“scripted spaces” that incorporate both or either physical immersion and narrative play
34
into their constructs. The scripts do not simply cue readers about the immediate text, but
also provide cues and clues about the production of the text – an allegory of its extratext
as well, and most pessimistically, the script is intended to cue spectators to invest into the
democratic force of the space as a truth. The producers of such spaces – Disneyland,
computer games, the mall, the church, movies, novels, the city of Las Vegas – cannily
account for the activities and assumptions of spectators and guide them to certain
conclusions about the extratexutal status of the representational environment.
Klein explains the casino business strategy of extratextual cueing through the
term “junking it up.” Imperfections, fissures, anachronisms and kitsch help to present the
sense that the casino is also permeable, imperfect and not quite finished. And, hopefully,
by extension people in the casino assume that the odds are not quite finished as well.
19

Part of the fun of Las Vegas is in the analysis of where it fails and evaluating the
wonder of trying to simulate an amalgam of spaces all in close proximity, all with the
paint peeling and odd temporalities. Since it’s re-set in the early 1990s, Las Vegas’s
tourists have visited various locales and concepts in hotel form – Paris, Memphis (Egypt
and Tennessee), Venice, the circus, Arthurian England, Hollywood, New York – all
connected by under and over ground tunnels and each hotel propped on a casino equipped
with state of the art surveillance and tracking technologies. The volcano at The Mirage
goes off every hour. The Bellagio fountains present a new show each fifteen minutes.
And, with the famous ad campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” there is the
seeming promotion of heterotopic utopian potential paired immediately with its status as
an apparatus of capture. It is an adult playground of unreality, freedom and happy
imprisonment (to use another of Klein’s terms), but explicit recognition of these
irreducible contradictions is not going to save you. In fact, contradiction is scripted into
the experience of the space as a strategy of immersion (distracting one from more basic
concepts essential to the experience, like capital and labor).
35
And, it is in this sense that one can see how immersion also invokes a kind of
alternate reality that is basic to it. What happens in Vegas stays there, because it
explicitly functions as a space where reality is supposedly suspended and hence anything
is possible. The city is supposed to function as a place where possibility is made visible.
You can become rich. You can live like a Parisian, Venetian, a king or a Hollywood star.
Las Vegas peddles the limits of the possible. In that sense, Las Vegas has changed
from its 1960s – 1980s destination of gaudy opulence and spectacle into a much more
tactically scripted space aiming especially to evidence the possibilities of alternate
realities. The showgirl glitz or the insider-y rat pack shows, so long synonymous with
Las Vegas, have been replaced by presentations of impossibility and simulacra best
exemplified by Cirque du Soleil. In 2009, after a forty-nine year run at the Tropicana the
last Vegas showgirl spectacle, Folies Bergère (a copy of a Parisian spectacle from the
turn of the 20th century) closed. Showgirl presentations focused on audacious glamour,
opulent costuming and a parade of sexuality, primarily as a glittering, reflective surface
of design articulating excess and by extension indulgence. The residue of that concept --
of tasting an extravagant life of course remains – but its primacy has been subsumed by
articulations of alternate realities and impossibility.
And, the previous mode of experience, signaling “this is the opposite of home,”
where one might fantasize about the endless choice of girl in the line,
20
has been replaced
by on one hand literal death defying acrobatics featuring mind boggling engineering feats
such as the 1000 square foot rotating and pronating stage of “Ka” (marketed as “A
spectacular tale that defies the laws of gravity”) to the unfathomable 100 acre liquid
proscenium of “O” (which is described on its website as “inspired by the concept of
infinity” and “where anything is possible”).
21
These shows do not present families with
an economy of choice and self-control opposite to daily life so much as another way of
being, where bodies can fly and technologies can faithfully present effects that cannot be
believed unless they are seen. And, on the other hand, some shows figure the participant
36
as a different person living a scripted experience, like an 80’s hair-band rock star in the
“Rock of Ages”
22
show in the Venetian or the Beatles “Love” program at The Mirage.
In the documentary film The Queen of Versailles (Greenfield, 2012), we are
presented with multiple layers of this kind of alternate reality. The film focuses on Jackie
and David Siegel, a ludicrously wealthy married couple as they attempt to build the
largest single family home in the United States. The home, modeled on Versailles is to be
constructed outside of Orlando, Florida. But, during the filming, the economic collapse of
2008 ensues and construction on the home must stop due to the Siegel’s lack of funds.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Siegel is depicted in Las Vegas trying to keep his Ph Towers
Westgate project afloat. The towers are stocked with empty opulent hotel suites that are
on the market as time-shares. Siegel and his son (an employee of Siegel) explain their
business model. In essence, Westgate sells people the illusion of being rich. Westgate
knows that their clients can’t afford the luxuries they are peddling, so they sell a fraction
of that luxury and focus on the fantasy that they can afford it if they indulge in such
places briefly, while on vacation and on borrowed money. Ironically, Westgate and
Siegel’s personal finances are exposed as being built on the same concepts by the 2008
housing market crash, as Siegel admits, “We just keep taking out loans, and putting
ourselves deeper into a hole. We’re addicted to cheap money.” The Siegel empire is built
on virtual assets and is precariously balancing on market bubbles and the type of credit
financing that evaporated in 2008. And, director Greenfield, who is also a skilled still
photographer, presents the family in photos in set-ups that reveal gaudy details and
minute fissures in the ostentatiousness of their wealth and tastes. It’s a fascinating look
into the lifestyle of an ultra-rich family, that also cues audience members to experience
the glory of realizing that “they are just like us.” Not only are they just as unhappy and
anxious about the economy, but surprisingly and comfortingly, they are equally in debt
and don’t know which fork to use at a fancy dinner. The film is an allegory about the
people that produce the scripted spaces that we inhabit during our entertained lives.
37
And, these stories abound. Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Venetian and Palazzo
hotels and casinos in Las Vegas famously spent nearly $150 million on Republican
candidates in the 2012 election cycle, only to see nearly every candidate that he
financially backed lose their races. His response to losing more money than most people
would ever gain in their entire lifetimes – “double down” (a betting term) on the next
series of elections spending at least $300 million.
23
And, this while also stating that he is
basically a “social liberal,” revealing that his support is purely for financial reasons.
Or, around that same time, those who use Twitter were witness to Donald Trump
presenting what amounted to a “tantrum” calling the 2012 election a sham, denying the
legitimacy of Barack Obama’s re-election to the presidency. And, in the run up to the
election Trump performed a toothless publicity stunt announcing an attempt to extort
Obama by offering $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choosing in return for Obama’s
college and passport records. Given these stories, one might be tempted to see fissures in
the edifices of power. That is, if one is reading the cues that Adelson and Trump and
Obama are in fact the authors of our shared scripted spaces.
It’s not that simple, of course. Most realize that stories about Donald Trump –
even ones developed by him -- don’t actually give us access to him. And, it is not just
with Trump, but so it goes with nonfictional content in general. Instead, we read stories
about Trump, Adelson, Obama, the Siegels awry. The same kind of shared secret that we
use to attend to immersence of the panorama, the casino and the mall is used to
understand “real life.” In this case, the figure of Trump stands in extratextually as an
allegory about power. He is like “Hitchcock” or “Welles,” someone whose brand has
been developed over time and stands in for a series of practices and structures,
personifying an opaque other scene. In response, as our star system of everyday life has
gotten deeper and more detailed, the newsphere and “reality” media has become much
more highly specialized as well. Instead of useful information, the newsphere has
produced another textual world that seemingly operates in parallel to the one we inhabit.
38
The Huffington Post and World News.com, Al Jazeera, CNN, the Daily Show, Rachel
Maddow, Bill O’Reilly, Colbert Report, Drudge, Michael Moore, the Washington Times
and on and on are catering to the production of other narratives, allegories about the
production of the news itself. These sites and pundits exploit the desire for fissures and
ruptures that can cynically reveal power as a gimmick, and all the while there is the
nagging feeling that this revelation is not so revelatory after all, but instead merely
extends the field of discourse, mapping data into recognizable bits, merely making visible
the junking up of culture. But, what are we to do?
In the introduction to his guide to grass roots activism, The Seventeen Solutions
Ralph Nader states
Despite the stunning technological innovations that have marked our world for
more than half a century, [our] conditions are only getting worse. Our country has
far more problems than we deserve… and far more solutions than we apply. That
gap is the democracy gap, and it underlies the paralyzing feeling of powerlessness
shared by too many Americans – a feeling easily mistaken for apathy. This sense
of powerlessness is surprising, given how steeped we are in information.
24

Our society is often described in terms of this “steeping,” like a tea that is brewing in
information. And, by using this metaphor at the very outset of his program, Nader is
appealing to the irony at the heart of living in an “Information Age.” A society that is
teeming with information should ostensibly be democratically empowered, but there is a
pervasive feeling of futility, of powerlessness against this sea of knowledge. It sometimes
seems that there is too much information, that its transmission is relentless and that
attempts to change one’s relationship to information is futile. This is one way that
“immersion” is figured in our current context, that the ubiquity of information is simply
an environmental reality, and that ruptures in its mediated fabric – social media usage,
such as Twitter feeds during the Iranian Green Revolution and Arab Spring, for instance
– are merely temporary and to try to find a permanent cleavage in our datascape is
useless, since it is total, shifting and all-encompassing.
In some ways, a sense of powerlessness results from what Anthony Giddens
might call the disembedding or unhinging of knowledge from unique contexts. One of the
39
“consequences of modernity” he describes has to do with the atomization of knowledge
and both its dispersal across “nontraditional” fields and isolation into expert systems,
resulting in an unwieldy glut of information that is also often opaque. The experience of
immersion often cues this anxious state. For instance, as Giddens writes,
Simply by sitting in my house, I am involved in an expert system, or a series of
such systems, in which I place my reliance. I have no particular fear of going
upstairs in the dwelling, even though I know that in principle the structure might
collapse.
25

Or to further the paranoiac potential in this this dispersal of information we have come to
understand that
…There are “environments of risk” that collectively affect large masses of
individuals—in some instances everyone on the face of the earth, as in the case of
the risk of ecological disaster or nuclear war.
26

There’s something tragically comic about our immersion in information, its repression
and ubiquity. It’s paralyzing and full of anxiety, but those qualities belie the shared
construction of the framework that cues these responses.
It is vital that we recognize how that framework of virtuality co-opts a shared
understanding of how power is produced and distributed. Connotations of immersion
imply a passive and overwhelmed spectator, one that is powerless to enact change, but
instead can merely recognize moments of breach. But, this implication is incorrect.
Spectators, readers, people, are not simply passive, but participate in the shared
production of scripted spaces.

The films of Fritz Lang, especially in his series of “Dr. Mabuse” films (and his
similar non-Mabuse film Spies) provides a how-to course in the employment of images
and data to make the virtual visible – a primer in how to produce and use the effect of
being drenched in sensation and what kind of counterplays and extensions can be brought
to bear. The immersive effect of virtuality as described by Mabuse films is one that
produces the pure possibility of sensation or, more pessimistically, one might say the
pure sensation of possibility.
40
In the introduction to Lang’s series of Mabuse works, the two-part Dr, Mabuse,
The Gambler (Der Spieler), the concept of sensation is integrated on many levels. The
Countess Told, called “Lady Passive,” frequents gambling halls, but does not gamble,
because “to rise to life she requires strong sensations,” as she tells Mabuse. “Everything
that can be seen from a car, from an opera box or from a window is partly disgusting,
partly uninteresting, and always boring.” Given her station in life, she lives in a world of
endless possibility, or as one place in the film is described, “Everything that pleases is
allowed,” and it has left her unable to feel. Mabuse agrees and confides in her, that like
Valmont, his only interest in life is “playing with people and their destinies.” For both
characters, the problem with Modern life is its openness to the world of the possible,
precisely that anything is permitted – that any sensation is always available.
In order to effectuate his plans to control the destinies of others, Mabuse, at times,
uses his powers to alter the vision of his victims. This is exemplified by the hallucinations
endured by Mabuse’s nemesis, the state attorney von Wenk, as he literally sees Mabuse’s
nonsensical words scrawled across the environment. As Dr. Mabuse speaks the words
“Tsi Nan Fu” to von Wenk, Mabuse begins to take complete control of the prosecutor’s
senses. Soon the prosecutor sees the words. They mark playing cards in his hands. They
appear as light embedded in the table before him, lights the prosecutor fruitlessly tries to
cover. Later, the prosecutor is being pulled along to his death by a similar incantation –
“Melior!” The word as it appeared to the prosecutor by means of thought transduction
from Dr. Mabuse is spelled across the air. Melior reads the environment, as it prods the
attorney and waits for him to throw himself from a cliff. Tom Gunning argues that these
(and other sequences in Lang’s films) are an example of the German genre sensation-
film. Gunning writes that they were named “sensation” films for the direct visceral effect
the scenes were to have on their viewers, with moments of heightened danger, suspense
and terror, as well as a spectacular visual presentation.”
27

41
Dr. Mabuse also uses his own gaze, as Gunning clearly details, to control others
unwittingly. As Mabuse fixates on his targets, characters perform the recurring gesture of
gripping the rear base of their necks, as if they feel Mabuse’s look upon their skin, or
perhaps entering their psyche. (In Chinese approaches to acupuncture this spot is known
as the wind gate, and is believed to be an entrance into the body for things such as colds
or other’s thoughts or emotions.) Perceived over the length of one film or across the
series, Lang’s illustrations of Mabuse’s strategies of control form a pattern that develops
Mabuse’s use of vision to construct proto- immersive environments. Mabuse’s thoughts
represented by his gaze combat a lack of sensation. They inhabit his victim’s senses, and
they are felt at a distance in differing ways, on the surface of the skin or perhaps within
one’s waking dreams.
The way Mabuse’s gaze surrounds his victim’s bodies and their psyches is
complemented by Lang’s use of formal cinematic conventions. In addition to the more
overt techniques of sensation-films, Lang subtly confronts the conventions of spatial
development when representing events in Mabuse’s sphere. As Edward Branigan notes
about the opening of Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, viewer expectations regarding the
location of Mabuse in cinematic space are somewhat confusing. That this is introduced in
the opening of the film presents viewers with an immediate unreliability with regards to
Mabuse and his physical location in space throughout the film. Similarly, in Spies, for
example, in the climax to the prologue of the film, a man is about to reveal the identity of
Haghi, the Mabuse-like figure behind events in the diegesis. Just as he is about to speak,
he is shot. One comprehends from the narrative that Haghi is an extremely powerful
character, ubiquitous and on-time. And, one can imagine that when information regards
Haghi the “walls have ears.” But, this ubiquity is developed even on a perceptual level.
The direction of the bullet’s path in the scene is confusing if one uses conventional
Hollywood continuity rules to conceive of the space depicted. The assumptions that one
would make with regard to eyeline matches and the action of events are revealed to be
42
incorrect, producing a sense of unease with the establishment of fictive space in the film
overall – with the result that Haghi is physically both at center and “all around.” These
subtle shifts in the production of spatial relations in the film dovetail well with the more
overt and masterful uses of cross-cutting that Lang employs to make Mabuse (and Haghi)
seem omnipresent. Like the example of the gesture at the back of the neck, Mabuse’s
presence relies on not only what is made visible, but also, more generally, what of his
omnipresence is made perceptible.
This kind of description of Dr. Mabuse readily relates to two of Michel Foucault’s
main concerns, those of surveillance and authorial control. The unique character of
Foucault’s self-disciplining society of control is taken for a spin as Mabuse’s panoptic
vision is given material effect in the gestures and actions of characters who succumb to it.
For Foucault, it is not so much that one is seen, but that subjects perceive that they may
be seen – that they are visible. Yet, Lang’s series is not merely evidence that Foucault is
right, not merely an expression of a society of self-surveillance. More importantly, the
series of Mabuse films take surveillance as a given and attempt to re-formulate its effects.
For the film’s characters, surveillance is taken for granted. Citizens realize that they are
perceptible to others, that they must contend with the Law or Mabuse or whatever has
eyes. The Mabuse series isn’t a symptom of self-surveillance. It is concerned, instead,
with the question, “How does one use surveillance to become imperceptible?”
The process by which the Panopticon is diagrammed, made visible and thereby
real, is instructive. Deleuze writes, “When Foucault defines panopticism, either he
specifically sees it as an optical or luminous arrangement that characterizes prison, or he
views it abstractly as a machine that not only affects visible matter in general but also in
general passes through every articulable function.”
28
Before panopticism was
diagrammed, so to speak, and came to express a sort of modern disciplinarian society, it
laid dormant, at the edge of perception, as a collection of intensities and possible
trajectories in the undifferentiated field of the virtual. In this sense, when Foucault writes
43
in his famous passage in Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap,” he is not only
referring to the effect of panopticism on citizens, but to the visibility of the panopticon
itself – its diagram. The “trap” is often interpreted as one for a single person or society.
Persons are trapped within self-surveillance. But it is a trap all around. As panopticism
disengages from the pure possible it is delimited and becomes visible, it becomes trapped
itself.
The development of our use of the virtual – today’s Virtual Reality, for example,
as a real space of unlimited possibility ironically disengages our sense of the virtual from
the field of pure possibles. In a sense, a modernist approach that makes the virtual visible,
an approach I would argue that Lang’s films participate in, works in correcting and
perfecting the botched processes of Panopticism so evident in Modern culture. One
approach to this phenomenon would question whether we continue to rehearse power,
and by re-staging it, pass it through different discursive networks and also change and
atomize it. If one were to look at our relationship with virtuality this way, one could
momentarily argue that Lang is the Bentham of post-panopticism, of virtuality.
As Lang developed immersive and “virtual” qualities within his own film work he
appears to recognize the problem of visibility. The continual re-modeling of his films
throughout the Mabuse series (including his infamous anecdotes true or not, that detail
the addition or subtraction of scenes from films no longer in his control) attempt to keep
the films open. Every scenario in the Mabuse film is possible and all will be told. Of
course, this kind of project, one that attempts to articulate stories, ideas, concepts while
also leaving them absolutely open to change is a difficult problem encountered by many
Modern authors. As we saw earlier, this problem is also simulated in the construction of
“scripted spaces.”
Within Lang’s own films the specter of authorial control is central to the
development and meaning of the story. At center is the need for the authorless text. As
Gunning argues, one of the recurring motifs throughout Lang’s career is the message
44
from a dead man. The note in a bottle as it washes to shore or in the case of the Mabuse
series, Mabuse’s own writing and his ethereal persona as it floats and eventually lands on
its next inhabitant. That the Mabuse tale can continue on, in effect, without Mabuse (and,
as it happens, without Lang or for that matter without much being noted of Norbert
Jacques who originally developed the character Mabuse in a serial periodical) attests to
the openness the narrative has to change.
By the end of the Lang’s version of the series, the mystical Mabuse had long since
disappeared, but his aspirations remain. In Lang’s final Mabuse film (and final film of his
career), The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Mabuse’s earlier incarnation’s uses of
hypnosis, astral projection, and mysticism, relied on in conjunction with technological
dexterity and control of an underworld give way almost completely to the technological
control of Modern life. In fact, Lang develops a sense of the “otherworldliness” of
Mabuse’s character through his disguise as the blind psychic Cornelius. But, this version
of Mabuse’s power is shown to be based on a hoax, as are all other “coincidences” in the
film, since as Gunning points out, Cornelius is the instigator of all that he predicts.
It is in this final film that the Lang produces a singular diagram of immersive
technology, the Hotel Luxor, which can hardly be seen but as a rehearsal and update of
Bentham’s panopticon. Where earlier Mabuse figures used human spies or hypnosis to
gather information, the modern-day Mabuse relies on technologies of surveillance
implanted throughout the seemingly private spaces of hotel rooms. As a mode of
authorial control, it is as if Mabuse commands a stable of characters repairing to their
cells. Each of their movements is watched. It is panoptic. But, again, Lang is re-writing
the figure of the panopticon, and in this case further moves it closer to the figure of
virtuality (pure possibility) achieved through technology. The production of immersion as
seen in Lang’s films in effect describe the unraveling of the urban environment and its
surveillances or another way one might put it – Lang reveals the city’s and media’s other
extratextual face. The urban fixtures of hotels and apartment buildings are depicted to
45
actually be rooms without walls at all. Slowly characters within the film come to realize
that they are continuously perceived, as they learn about the buildings secret corridors, its
central controls, and its primary author, Mabuse. Spectators of the films begin to see the
rooms as having no discernible walls or doors. Ironically, within the disjunctive spaces of
the city, everything is connected – immersed, so to speak within the singular substance of
technology.
The Hotel Luxor is a prescient figure. And, it is a visualization of the repressive
power available in a society steeped in information and technology. These scenarios have
been re-told in fictional films such The Matrix, Enemy of the State, Paycheck, and also in
“nonfiction” such as the story of Howard Hughes or real-life horror stories of identity
theft. And, one only need go to the “real” hotel Luxor in Vegas to find the Luxor today.
Anyone paying attention knows that every space of the hotel is being surveilled, that
every avenue of escape was in fact constructed by the building’s architects. In this new
space, even Mabuse, with his penchant for disguise would have his face scanned and sent
to a database, found out before he left the hotel’s lobby.
29
Or, instead of using the Mabuse
series, one could analyze the history of peep shows, recognizing the rehearsal and
updating of evaporating walls and frames, moving from its panoptic beginnings – with
women at center and windows all around to its highly mediated grandchildren, internet
sex chats, including chat roulette and real-time porn sites.
30
These are somewhat
pessimistic examples for change.
But, perhaps there is a clue in the shift in the Mabuse series away from Mabuse
and onto the technologies invested in the hotel. We are amused by the gimmick revealed.
We see the panels that control the hotel, the flimsy walls that once discovered no longer
serve their role. But, like so many stories that we engage, it’s a dissatisfying revelation,
because knowing there’s a trick is part of the script. The conclusion of earlier Mabuse
films, ones that leave him floating ethereally above the fray, strange, menacing and
46
charmed don’t quite close the book on him. He retains his perverse and perverting
powers, all the while being dead.
It’s this strangeness of the authorless text that manages to remain outside of
perceptibility, the multitudinous quality of Mabuse’s persona(e) that reinviorgates a stale
version of immersion. The rise and fall of the author recalls the third narrator in Flann
O’Brien’s novel At Swim-two-birds, Dermott Trellis. In the work, which begins and ends
three times, the embedded narrator, Trellis holds his characters captive at the Red Swan
Hotel. He keeps them divided in their rooms, so he might exercise total control over
them, but they meet while he is asleep, and begin a novel of their own where their author
is one of their characters. This is why the novel and final Mabuse film take place in a
hotel. It promotes the shapeshifting qualities of its inhabitants. Hotels, especially large
ones in a large city, whether they are in Las Vegas or anywhere carry with them the
power to produce alternate realities.
Trellis is compelling all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so
that he can keep an eye on them and see that there is no boozing. . . . Most of
them are characters used in other books, chiefly the works of another great writer
called Tracy. There is a cowboy in Room 13 and Mr. McCool, a hero of old
Ireland, is on the floor above. The cellar is full of leprechauns.
31

It doesn’t take very long for the characters to disavow their identities and to revolt against
the power of Trellis in anarchic glee; their identities in the hotel are supremely unstable.
In 2011, the Occupy Movement attempted to address the apparent futility of
enacting change in today’s social environment, by presenting an “authorless” and serial
political faction. Occupy encampments popped up in many cities, but most notably in
Zuccotti Park in protest of the financial structure and governmental systems in place. The
protest was vague in its aims, and right away, opposition, the media and those
sympathetic to the movement asked, “What are your demands?” The protestors refused to
be nailed down to a program and simply demanded change. Taking cues from heterotopic
strategies employed by groups like the Situationists and as described by theorists and
philosophers like de Certeau and Foucault, protesters focused on producing the
47
impossible through the dailyness of tactics. It was a befuddling and powerful movement,
based solely on the occupation of communal space. The movement refused to engage in
the atomization of its demands, and instead simply performed by explicitly being in a
place. Their actions transformed the city into a place where anonymous identity can be
enacted anywhere, not simply during sanctioned moments in hotels, on vacation or in
closed narratives. Occupy took on the role of scripting their own spaces, and refused to
engage in making their desires visible. Still, the exuberance of the movement has long
since dissipated, perhaps reaffirming the merely ad hoc methods we have for changing
our contexts.

Adriane Colburn: Ways, Points and Means and Brent Green: To Many men
Strange Fates Are Given
In 2012, I presented two projects that cue the effect of immersion in spectators as
a tactic for illuminating details (political, economic, scientific) about our shared cultural
moment. Adriane Colburn in an installation titled Ways, Points and Means and Brent
Green in one titled To Many Men Strange Fates are Given each cue an interplay between
ubiquity and wholeness to produce immersion and capitalize on a heightened critical
awareness required by viewers in an immersive context to investigate and defamiliarize
their subject matter.
In Ways, Points and Means, Colburn, who one might call an experimental
cartographer, works with cut paper, video projection and mixed materials to produce the
effect of travelling by ship in the Arctic north of the ocean. This installation was
specifically based on her second voyage as part of an Arctic research expedition, this one
aboard the icebreaking ship, Melville. The primary purpose of the journey was to map the
ocean’s seabed using sonar in order to present it to the United Nations in consideration of
the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty negotiated
between 1974 and 1982.
32
Among other things, the treaty, which has not yet been ratified,
48
but is close to being so in 2013, stipulates how oceans should be treated in relation to
sovereign nations. One part of the ocean, discussed in relation to its seabed, is noted
simply as “The Area.” The Area is recognized as a space held in common – it are not
held by any single nation, and are overseen by a United Nations body named the
International Seabed Authority. The general rules of the UNCLOS states that 200
nautical miles of seabed from a sovereign nation’s land border is considered part of the
territory of that nation. This, however, can be amended if a nation is able to show through
mapping of the seabed that the natural shape of the seabed extends the borders of the
nation beyond the 200 mile mark. The goal of the Melville’s journey, then, in terms of
mapping is to illustrate how the seabed floor extends the United State’s sovereign
territory deep into the Arctic. Other nations are performing similar expeditions in the
Arctic of course, notably, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark.
With this basis, Colburn’s installation depicts the confluence of activities taking
place during the Melville’s journey. It includes an immersive representation of the natural
and wondrous beauty of being on an icebreaker hundreds of miles north of Barrow, the
northern most city in North America, where the journey begins. The installation was
presented in a single room. It featured video shot from the bow of the ship that was
projected across 25 feet of wall from floor to ceiling (about 15 feet tall). The video shows
the relentless penetration of the ship deeper into ice as one would see it if they stood in
the ship’s navigation center. The video is meditative, as there is a rhythm to the ship’s
lilts and the apart from an incredibly blue sky, one sees ice sheets continuously meeting
the ship and then disappearing at the sides of the frame. There is a maniacal sameness to
the image, with minor differences only noticeable only through the ship’s movement.
This video is echoed by another on an opposite wall. This second video is a long take of a
walk through the ship’s interior. The video presents a hand-held subjective view that
presents hemmed in space and an endless series of corridors, doors and machinery. Each
long narrow hall is met by a door that is opened and reveals a new endless hallway. The
49
two video projections juxtapose the cues required for immersion – a singularity posed
against an amorphous and whole mass paired with a ubiquitous subject able to inspect
minute detail. As Colburn writes:
I am duly impressed by the sensation of living on a ship. It is like living inside a
self-contained machine complete with all of the infrastructure required for modern
life. A coffee shop, its own sewage treatment plant, a water desalination system.
These systems (not the coffee) are all exposed, strands of pipes and wires lining
the ceilings and walls, wrapping through corridors and I feel as though I am inside
a massive body. Even the air is inhaled and exhaled- coming in the starboard side
and being expelled to the port side. On the port side the warm interior air vents
out creating a harbor from wind and icy air, making a good warm place to stand
while you stare out at the sea or a spot for bored coasties to smoke cigarettes.
33

And, later she writes, “The ship is a body and a machine – rambling about.”

Colburn communicates the feeling of being on the vessel through the videos, and also by
placing a sculpture between the videos that is made of broken down pieces of a ship. It is
suspended from the ceiling in a tangled mass. They are recognizable as ship parts, with
traces of salt and weathering and the curves of a bough. The whole of this hanging mass,
which appears heavy, is tied up in elaborate series of knots with heavy rope, completing
the contradictory effects of confusion and precision evoked by the sculpture.
On a separate wall, about 30’ x 15’, is an intricately cut and drawn map. Specific
parts of the map are highlighted through mirrors and spotlights. It is an overwhelming
piece that becomes even more wonderful when one approaches it and sees the fine detail
in the map’s construction. It is actually a series of overlapping pieces of paper, containing
much more negative than positive space. The fragility of this massive thing is staggering.
It is taped, cut and pinned to the wall, creating intricate and beautiful patterns that emerge
as much out of its chaos than through any kind of ordered system.
In addition to a lulling and uncanny sense of being at sea – the installation makes
one feel what it is like to be on a boat – one gets the uneasy feeling that the situation is
born out of idiosyncracy, that there is a systematic, yet private language that has built up
the installation, and if one recognizes form in this space, it is self-imposed. And, for
Colburn, the point of that feeling is an attempt to make one realize that the sea in many
50
ways is a forgotten space, and its representations are built up arbitrarily through systems
of power.
It’s mapping at this particular time has to do with an understanding that Arctic
space is becoming much more important as global warming makes the Arctic more
accessible for the gathering of resources. Mapping the sea bed – which is done with
acoustic technology, the sea bed is visualized by translating sonar data into a viewable
layout – is a step towards privatizing this no longer remote part of the world. Scientists
and cartographers are keen to filter data to suit the ends of their respective governments.
And, the allocation of territory essentially becomes an argument over whose translation
of data is more correct. The casualty of this process is a loss of the virtual space of The
Area – the commons of the sea from top to bottom are shrinking. As Colburn writes, “In
a map, the cartographer… [removes] everything but the imperative line or data set and
thus creates a limited frame for the information.”
34

Colburn use the heightened critical acumen of those cued to experience
immersion in order to present details about the arbitrary nature of our representation of
space – in this case the sea. And, she poses the map, and ingestible translation of data,
against the overwhelming, plodding and confusing space of the sea itself, of which its
real existence is far beyond our comprehension and is currently transforming in
unprecedented ways due to changes in the climate. The opposite videos filling the room
engulf the viewer, on the one hand with a vast and shifting sea that resembles a frozen
desert. And, on the other side one experiences the ship as a labyrinth, full of endless and
surprising corridors, open for inspection in its minutiae. At stake in recognizing this sense
of immersion is the its basis for dissecting and parceling out the ocean itself, its loss as a
common space and open for commercialization, settlement and drilling for oil.
Alan Sekula for one notes that the sea has been and remains an overlooked site of
cultural production and national and labor power. Sekula astutely poses the sea against
developments that align the virtual with digital information. He sees similarities in the
51
images of both shipping and digital information as representations of shipping include the
travel of singular entities (ships) within a shifting context of nondifferentiation and the
networked spaces of islands and continents. And, he notes that a cultural focus on the
power of computing technologies to render reality reinforces and extends a visualization
of space that obscures the real relations of workers to the economy. He states
My argument here runs against the commonly held view that the computer and
telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In
effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to
counter the exaggerated importance attached to a largely metaphysical construct,
“cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant
spaces.
35

And, Sekula recognizes that one part of the history of representing the ocean invokes an
immersive capacity. He writes
Modernity entails a maritime victory of the detail over the panorama:
these details circulate within the generalized stream of consumption, can
be activated in any context. The sea is everywhere and nowhere at the
same time, but only in decantable quantities. But under conditions of
social crisis – war, mass exodus, environmental disaster – the bottle of
representation can burst, and the sea again exceeds the limits imposed on
it by a de-radicalized and stereotypical romanticism.
36

The interplay between the panorama and the detail is basic to representations of the sea.
And, in a modern context what most matters is the ability of the sea to be atomized,
packaged, sold and controlled. But, the privitazation of the ocean remains ad hoc, ready
to burst apart during moments of fissure and crisis. The key here, it would seem, is to
evade falling into a purely romantic and imaginary relationship with nature as Sekula
suggests resides in the panorama.
In the case of climate change, environmentalists, scientists and artists are trying to
burst that bottle, to represent the sea as a real space that is changing and will be lost – that
the crisis is here now. But, the atomization of the ocean in this case implies that incidents,
rises in the sea’s salinity, of storms and droughts remain isolated as well. Colburn
attempts to use immersion to reveal the ways that the place has been “junked up.” It’s
terrain is being overlaid in ways haphazard and with gimmicks that we can hopefully
undo.
52
In his installation, To Many Men Strange Fates are Given, Brent Green also
produces the effect of immersion tactically. While his work also relies on the interplay of
panoramic display and an attention to detail to cue immersion, the feel of his installation
is entirely different than Colburn’s. Green’s installation consists of a sculpture made of
hacked LCD screens, wrought iron, wood and a viewing area with handmade polarized
glasses. The LCD screens are placed on three different planes, with some emerging
towards spectators acting as filters. When viewers stand behind one of filters, they are
able to see images emanating from the various screens and in-depth due to the
polarization of the elements. If one does not wear the custom made glasses or stand
behind a special screen, no image can be seen. There are also listening stations that allow
one to hear sound in synchronization to the image, a soundtrack of Green narrating the
movie with music.
The movie that spectators see is also titled “To Many Men Strange Fates Are
Given.” It is a short animated film that is primarily based on the woman who sewed the
space suit for the Russian space dog, Laika. The themes Green evokes with the tale are
ones of ingenuity, collaboration and determination. Laika was the first a living creature to
be sent into orbit around the earth. As Green mentions in the film and also in interviews,
the technology used to produce the Sputnik satellites was practically pre-industrial. Tin
foil was used, and Laikai’s space suit was made on a sewing machine and by hand. The
short film then goes on to ecstatically detail a series of technological developments that
both inspire and confound the world. Today’s uses of smaller and faster technologies to
make ever smaller and faster technologies seems far removed from the days of tin foil
and hand sewn space suits conquering the outer reaches of space.
Green’s sculpture was made in collaboration at the Experimental Media and
Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensaeller Polytechnic Institute. Green had
wanted to create a multi-planed animated narrative film – one that viewers could walk
amidst and whose experience would change if they changed their vantage point on the
53
subject matter. The sculpture is immersive in a physical/representational sense. You can
walk around it, and when you use the glasses or the LCD filters, you can see some or all
of the different planes of the movie emanating from screens. But, understanding the
collaboration with EMPAC is intended to evoke another sense of immersion – our
immersion in information. In an interview I conducted with Green he said
You’re supposed to be able to walk around it, walk by and come back to it. And,
you’re never going to be able to see the whole thing at once. It’s impossible to see
the whole thing at once. And, I like the way the polarizers work, that you aren’t
able to see the animation unless you look through it from a specific vantage point.
I like the idea that we are all surrounded by information. Every answer, every
cure… everything is there, but we aren’t equipped to see it until we are out into
position. And, we have to pay attention and learn how to look for things.
37

Green knew that working with engineers and scientists at EMPAC put him in the position
of accessing information about video, sculpture and electronics from people with expert
knowledge, and he used that knowledge in order to produce the sculpture.
The traces of those elements – electronic circuitry, computers and polarizers are
apparent in an experience of the sculpture. There’s a “made in his garage” kind of
unfinished aesthetic feeling to much of the sculpture, implying that the technology that
supports it isn’t off limits to the laymen. Even the film being displayed retains pencil
lines and numbers of cells that reveal the process of illustrating and sequencing frames
that are then assembled into a finished piece. Green attempts to make all of the apparatus
supporting the work bare in order to make comprehension of the production of the piece
accessible. In this case, immersion is intended to work against displaying the dexterity of
technology and instead to focus one’s attention on the ability to produce a work from a
concept. Like in Colburn’s piece, immersion is achieved in the sense of an uncanny
mediated work that is intended for hail a viewer in a specific place, where that hailing can
be investigated for details and fissures. And, also like Colburn’s work, that sense of
immersion is used to defamiliarize immersion itself. In this case, the allegory of
production of the sculpture is demystified. The combination of engineering, wood
54
carving and filmmaking are there in the service of revealing how the spark of an idea can
galvanize a group, a community or a culture.
Green’s sculpture inspired a group of engineers to collaborate with Green to
create the sculpture spectators attend. But, the story detailed in the film is about the
galvanization of the Russian public and then the American public to achieve space flight
and eventually to land on the moon. The promise of space flight cut across sectors of
Russian culture, from the military to scientists to textile makers to seamstresses. It was an
inspiring and hopeful activity. And while the history of space exploration is now told
through “heroic” and established guises – we have Laika, Yuri Gagarin, Buzz Aldrin and
NASA, an establishment of their heightened importance is part of the allegory or
immersive production.
Both of these works directly confront a culture that labels successful
entrepreneurs as heroic “job creators,” who act independently of the shared resources and
information that we hold in common. They use immersion to defamiliarize the process of
immersion itself, short-circuiting the production of an allegory of the technologies and
mediation that produce the installations in an attempt to refocus viewers on to (more
prominently in the case of Colburn) the vast and changing state if the real and (more
prominently in the case of Green) a demystification of expert systems. The sculptures
rely on the cultural competency of the virtual to express the destructive powers of the
competency, which is based in a relentless modernist drive to atomize and make visible
every aspect of life into a form of knowledge, and then to cordon and isolate those
atomized bits in to expert and opaque systems, the bureaucratization of life itself.

1
Marie-Laure Ryan. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic
Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. p.12.
2
ibid, p. 11.
3
Ken Hillis. Digital Sensations Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p.70, my italics.
4
Friedberg, p. 11.
5
ibid, p. 11.
6
Ryan, p. 11.
7
http://www.immersence.com/osmose/
55

8
Tom Gunning. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in Film
Theory and Criticism. ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
pp. 818–832.
9
Oliver Grau. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. trans. by Gloria Custance. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003. p. 9.
10
ibid, p. 13, my italics.
11
ibid, pp. 13-14.
12
ibid, pp. 110-111.
13
ibid, p. 107.
14
“Examining ‘Saving Private Ryan:’ The Realities of War. PBS News Hour broadcast, August 3, 1998.
“‘Saving Private Ryan’ Brings Painful Memories to Combat Veterans, July 27, 1998 wral.com
15
Ryan, p. 123.
16
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. trans. by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
17
Klein. p. 325.
18
Klein. p. 329.
19
Klein, p. 348 – 349.
20
One of the quaint choices given to attendees of showgirl productions was to view the show as fully
clothed or “topless.”
21
http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/home.aspx#/en/home/americas/usa.aspx
22
The parental advisory for Rock of Ages the musical reads as follows: “Rock of Ages is a full-out, blast-
off, hold-onto-your-hairspray celebration of the great rock music of the 80s, and you might be wondering –
or, admit it, hoping – your kids will love it as much as you will. Well, we think they will, but you should
know that some of the costumes, dancing and language might not be appropriate for kids under the age of
13. We think teenagers will dig it, because it’s totally awesome, sort of like a music video brought to life,
complete with hot dancers and blazing guitar licks. You now the maturity of your children, so we suggest
you use your best judgment about whether the show is appropriate for them. Remember, if you do bring
them, they’ll get to see you rockin’ like you did back in the day. Just so you know.”
23
Wall Street Journal “Adelson to Keep Betting on the GOP,” December 4, 2012.
24
Ralph Nader. The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. New York: Harper Collins.
p. xi. Nader goes on to argue that one way (the primary way) that we might combat this is to unhinge the
information we receive from corporate and other commercial interests. Certainly this could help. But, we
could also benefit from attacking that very sense of powerlessness in our descriptions of our society steeped
in information. As he states, “Change has always started with people elevating their expectation levels.” p.
xv.
25
Anthony Giddens. The Consequences of Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990. p. 27
26
ibid, p. 35.
27
Tom Gunning. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film
Institute. 2000. p. 89.
28
Deleuze, Foucault. p. 34.
29
Wired “Seen City” Issue 9.12, December 2001. The article describes the intracasino network designed to
recognize and alert casinos to the presence of criminals and gambling cheats – i.e., gamblers who can beat
the system when they arrive at casinos. Surveillance cameras in casinos are connected to facial recognition
software that automatically compares facial features of potential players with those in databases.
30
One version of the stakes of internet porn is made palpable in a revelatory moment in Paris, Texas when
Travis finally encounters Jane across a wall in a peep show. The camera pans “through the wall” allowing
viewers to see that Jane inhabits a set for virtual Johns, revealing the deep isolation and psychic corruption
at play in the scenario.
31
Flann O’Brien. At Swim-two-birds. New York: Penguin Books Ltd. 2000. p. 8.
32
A good deal of information about Colburn’s expedition comes from her unpublished email newsletter
that was broadcast to those interested in her work. The letters were then published as part of a final report
on the expedition, but I haven’t seen the report. For thorough and ongoing information on The United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, check the blog “Arctic Mapping and the Law of the Sea”:
http://arctic-healy-baker-2008.blogspot.com/
33
From Colburn’s newsletter.
34
ibid.
35
Alan Sekula. Fish Story. Düsseldorf: The Center, 1995., p. 50.
36
ibid, p. 107.
37
Sean Uyehara interview of Brent Green, “Green’s Screens” for Keyframe.
http://seanville.tumblr.com/post/16941853805/greens-screens

56

Shapeshifting and virtuality
When someone is asked to read a text though the lens of virtuality, expectations
of finding specific cues in the text heightens the awareness of readers to perceive said
cues. There are a series of themes, concepts and poetics that are especially relevant to
producing a reading of virtuality and for this moment I’d like to focus on an emphasis on
thought and thinking as potentially material and malleable items in a virtual context. As I
will show, a primary locus in the representation of virtuality is the depiction of thought,
whether that thought is regarded as organic or artificial. Additionally, by investigating the
emergence of thought in the service of virtuality as an interpretive framework, I expect to
reveal how the discursive fields of western approaches to reason and the supposed
potentialities of media technologies overlap in the production of virtuality. At its most
simplified, virtual texts (texts that cue readers to read them through the lens of virtuality)
often explicitly illustrate a tension regarding questions of wholeness vs. disintegration
and essence vs. appearance in its depiction of thinking and thought. In order to both
alleviate and heighten tensions in such texts, readers are often cued to employ strategies
of shapeshifting to comprehend and enjoy them.
Speculation surrounding technologies supporting the virtual often suppose that
computers may eventually allow everyday users to produce teleaction, consciousness
uploading and/or thought transduction. These examples, at their limits, have to do with
the potential ability of VR to effect or stave off death. For instance, at least as early as
1991, VR and flight simulation pioneers such as Thomas Furness have worked towards
and claimed to have successfully produced thought transposition technologies. These
technologies would better enable pilots to target and kill enemies while flying planes –

57

while in a plane’s cockpit or remotely, so as to elide potential harm while killing, as in
the case of drones. On the other hand, also around the early 90’s groups such as the
Extropians discussed the possibility of “uplifting” a consciousness into digital form, so as
to extend one’s life and personality after one’s body has “died.”
1
In accordance,
depictions of thought in virtual contexts enunciate the discursive bounds of virtuality in
perhaps its most vital area. And, as such it is integral to extending a rhetoric that supposes
that thought may be translated or transformed into digital information and vice versa.
It shouldn’t be surprising then that filmic narratives dealing with the virtual world
often depict a translation of thought into digital information. Films such as Lawnmower
Man (Leonard, 1992), The Matrix Trilogy (Wachowski’s, 1999, 2003), The Cell (Singh,
2000) S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Paprika (Kon, 2006), Tron: Legacy (Kosinski, 2010) and
many others explicitly foreground the relationship between (ephemeral) human thought
and (material) digital information. The translation of one into the other is often presented
as a basis -- either a problem to be worked through or already solved -- supporting a
film’s narrative. As such, one of the primary problems for filmmakers using cinematic
representations to describe thought in a virtual context is to somehow overcome the
apparent ephemeral nature of thought and thinking. Usually thought is represented in
such films by using concepts that can be depicted visually. Three examples of prominent
strategic approaches used in cinema to represent thinking visually are 1) thinking as a
process of cognition, preconscious perception or codic elaboration; 2) thinking as the
expression of a persona; 3) thinking as an expression of rhetoric. These examples require
viewers to entertain and comprehend thought in translation. That is thinking and thought
must be understood as something material that can be represented (most hopefully by

58

machines) with accuracy. Thought in this sense is figured as a malleable item, one that
retains its essential qualities but might appear under many guises – essentially as a
shapeshifting material.
Shapeshifting can be a useful concept in explaining a “protean” background
against which history is culled, cultures are formed and power is established. Of course,
myriad cultures do use shapeshifting creatures and figures within their creation myths and
in ongoing mythic narratives regarding the development of cultures and identities
generally. Joseph Campbell chronicles a history of shapeshifting and focuses much of his
studies on the serial establishment of specific archetypes across myths. Further, one could
argue that the archetypes and myths Campbell describes represent shapeshifters in
themselves. As both a prescription to his readers and a description of his own work on
myth Campbell writes, “The life voyager wishing to be taught by Proteus must ‘grasp
him steadfastly and press him all the more,’ and at length he will appear in his proper
shape.”
2
Campbell describes his approach to studying mythology, in the aptly named The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, “…when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but how it
functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today,
mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements
of the individual, the race, the age.”
3
For Campbell myth itself, that which he studies, is
the ultimate shapeshifter, and helps to establish a first definition of the term -- that which
retains its essential qualities while appearing differently amidst diverse forms.
Campbell’s approach to the subject best describes what would be a popular
contemporary discursive introduction to shapeshifting. That is, shapeshifting first denotes
the ability of an agent to purposely change one’s appearance at opportune moments or to

59

act as a catalyst – that is, an element that effects change in a system while remaining the
same -- within mythic scenarios. Second, shapeshifting connotes a basic tension between
the concepts of essence and appearance. Thus, Campbell invokes Proteus as the
consummate shapeshifter, the god of the sea who appears in multiple and changing forms
to challenge, help or delay the hero of epic narratives.
With respect to cinema specifically, shapeshifting can be used to describe and
clarify numerous technical practices, viewer positions and generic concerns among other
activities. The introduction of digital technologies into cinematic production has
produced a widely understood ability of the cinema to “image anything.” That is, digital
mattes and other effects processes, such as morphing, allow image producers to subtly (or
not so) shift the appearance of particular images. Discussions about the introduction of
digital technologies into imaging systems are often accompanied with a sense of crisis
regarding the loss of an objective, immutable index ostensibly present in traditional
photography that is exchanged with a subjective digital basis in flux. One infamous
example of the use of photo manipulation that brought this issue to the forefront of
popular culture was the presentation of two versions of the same image of O.J. Simpson
on the covers of Time and Newsweek in 1994.
4
The Time presentation was manipulated to
give Simpson the appearance of being darker skinned, in deeper shadow and more
unshaven than the Newsweek photo, even though the two images were produced from the
same original image. The juxtaposition of the two versions of the photo sparked debate as
to the role of image producers in contemporary “objective” discourse. And, in that regard,
the issue further displayed the advancing power of image production technologies to
successfully depict whatever is the images producer’s goal. The truth of this claim and/or

60

the actual use of image production technologies are not at issue here, so much as the
resulting conventional understanding of digital imaging technologies. In other words,
public debate about the Simpson image, further clarified and widened the discursive
bounds of image production to “image anything” including thought itself.
The Simpson example and many other ideas regarding the history and meaning of
the shapeshifting power of digital (and other) imagery is assembled in Meta-morphing:
Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change. The collection of essays assess
and unpack the role of transformational power in media and also address a history of
media that use “quick-change” or “morphing” from chapeaugraphy to Terminator 2
(Cameron, 1991).
Throughout the book, essays often return to the idea that the development of the
concept “shapeshifting” plays a role in the development of a number of cinematic
competencies. Spectator positions are constructed through strategies that appeal to
shapeshifting and critics and theorists employ shapeshifting tactics to present their
arguments. For instance, one might ask if spectators or critics must be (or become)
shapeshifters in order to comprehend or identify with contemporary (or any) media
forms. Must spectators “try on” character positions in order to read narratives? Such
questions will inevitably open debate as to the power relations of the characters,
spectators and critics involved. Another way to describe this concept might use the well-
chronicled (and foundational to cinematic study) discussions involving feminine
subjectivity as depicted in or produced by narrative film.
For example, as Teresa de Lauretis describes (in part as response to Laura
Mulvey) many of the potential gender identifications for both cinematic spectators and

61

critics will involve or be obscured by the transformation or exchange of gender positions.
Interestingly, de Lauretis turns to Vladimir Propp’s work in her assessment of gendered
subjectivity within narrative.
5
Propp, in Morphology of the Folktale, and other places,
uses functions, codes and conventions of folktales, much like Campbell uses archetypes
in his studies, as recurring formal devices that spur narrative formation. “Morphology”
here describes the synchronic and paradigmatic realm of the codes and roles Propp
defines (the paradigm also being the realm of shapeshifters). De Lauretis, in specific,
notes that the particular function of the princess (and her father) within fairy tales derives
from the cultural underpinnings of dynastic succession and social change during the
formation of such tales. De Lauretis’ morphological approach to the question of gender
representation points also to the essentially symptomatic nature of shapeshifters. In other
words, looked at in this light, the folktale (or a film genre – science fiction for example)
may be usefully thought of as a shapeshifter of sorts – a model that remains the same in
it’s makeup across differing instances, although its uses and meanings vary, being re-
worked through essential functions, codes or conventions according to cultural or
historical demands. Also by this argument, it can be inferred that the essence of the fairy
tale (or other genre) can only be accessed through the reading of narratives as symptoms
of a confluence of factors whose true nature remains hidden. De Lauretis writes
However, [Propp] cautions, plots do not directly “reflect” a given social order, but
rather emerge out of the conflict, the contradictions, of different social
orders…the difficult coexistence of different orders of historical reality is
precisely what is manifested in the tensions of plots and in the transformations or
dispersion of motifs and plot types.
6

And, de Lauretis poses her argument against the psychoanalytic thought of
Sigmund Freud. Freud’s work certainly presents a protean figure. His writings are

62

noteworthy as an example of shapeshifting in that they absorb and “reflect” critical
inquiry back to the inquirer as a matter of “transference” or “displacement.” In particular
de Lauretis criticizes the preclusion of feminine desire from entering psychoanalytic
discourse through Freud’s disingenuous shapeshift or “gender-bend.” She writes
What Freud’s question [, “What is femininity?”] really asks, therefore, is “what is
femininity – for men?”… Freud’s is a question addressed to men, both in the
sense that the question is not asked of women… and that its answer is for men,
reverts to men…. Freud stands at both places at once, for he first formulates –
defines – the question and then answers it.
7

De Lauretis argues that the position of questioner and questioned, the roles of
feminine (The Sphinx, a shapeshifter caught midstream?) and masculine (Oedipus), and
the authority to ask and respond are too easily delineated and foreclosed by Freud’s
placement of himself in each role -- gendered or no -- simultaneously. In other words,
Freud disperses himself throughout his text under multiple guises.
De Lauretis’ argument engages the phenomenon of shapeshifting at the levels of
textual development and critical inquiry. That is, de Lauretis recognizes that critics
themselves tend to mold their voices and their objects to the ideological/cultural demands
of their studies. If one uses the trope of shapeshifting to interpret de Lauretis’ work, a
multi-planed series of such tactics might be recognized. For example, de Lauretis
illustrates how Freud’s strategic “shapeshift” can be used to exclude a group or individual
from discourse by making an utterance appear closed to discussion. Further, de Lauretis’
example depicts how textual analysis introduces shapeshifting figures and codes that are
incorporated into texts on semiotic, narrative and meta-narrative levels.
Meta-morphing takes a similarly historical tack to unpacking shapeshifting. As
noted, the collection’s aim is to historicize perhaps the primary contemporary formal

63

cinematic device describing shapeshifting, “morphing.” Vivian Sobchack details a series
of possible meanings of morphing in her introduction
Exuberant and liberating in its democratic lack of hierarchical attachment to any
privileged form of being while bent on some ultimate totalitarian mastery of all
forms, exuding from its own freedom while globally incorporating and
homogenizing that of all in its path, the morph seems to double the dramatic
actions of both our nation and our technoculture.
8

While de Lauretis indicates the historical effect of codic manipulation and the potential
for strategic shapeshifts, Sobchack begins to establish morphing as itself a model of
history or historiography. Sobchack’s model indicates the vampiristic drive of
shapeshifting -- to make everything the same (like itself) through its ability to continually
transform. Equally, she notes the technologist base of contemporary accounts of
shapeshifting. As the Meta-Morphing collection indicates there is a potential historical
through-line of shapeshifting that might become visible through a reading backward (or
outward) beginning with the filmic technique of morphing.
Further articulating morphing and cinema, Marsha Kinder illustrates in her essay
“From Mutation to Morphing: Cultural Transformations from Greek Myth to Children’s
Media Culture,” that metamorphosis can be used to describe and explain not only
character development, spectatorial identification, and critical inquiry but also the vitality
of formal conventions and perceptual codes as they are mobilized within and across
media. She writes
[Metamorphosis] is also a defining feature of dreams and their characteristic
tropes of condensation and displacement, where the mere temporal or spatial
proximity of two juxtaposed images can, when narrativized, be read as
transformative change – a cognitive process that is fundamental to flip books,
surrealist jolts, trick films, the basic illusion of cinema, and the visual perception
of movement.
9

Here, Kinder quickly articulates the basic issue at stake in the historical arc of

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representations of transformative power as they apply to cinematic production.
Shapeshifting is practiced actually through and located metaphorically within current
technologies of mediation. More simply put, shapeshifting – transformative power – is
articulated to cinematic and virtualizing technologies.
Evidence of such an articulation is readily seen in that by and large culture has
accepted the shapeshifting capabilities of cinema and other digital media. For instance the
shapeshifting potential of cinema is so pervasive that depictions range well-beyond
obvious examples such as Dark City (Proyas, 1998) (in which the city literally shifts
shapes) and The Matrix (where characters continually transform appearance and
“physical” ability as they cross the threshold between virtual and actual). One great
indicator that media’s shapeshifting potential has reached a tipping point in passive
acceptance is in the pervasive parody that accompanies films such as S1m0ne or Being
John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999), both of which thrive on a public awareness of disjunctions
between “real” and “virtual” identity and the potential confusions between each for their
depictions of the absurdities of contemporary technoculture.
Still, if one looks closely, we can see that this isn’t so much a new situation as it
reflects the intersection of age-old concerns about discrepancies of essence and
appearance and the expanding boundaries of the power of media technologies. The above
comedies rely on the residual effect of concepts that have been introduced, as Joseph
Campbell would argue, at least since the establishment of Greek myths. And, in this
sense, shapeshifting has a history of being articulated to contemporary accounts of the
power of representation. Greek myth abounds with metamorphosis (not the least of which
will of course be found in Ovid’s recounting in Metamorphoses).

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A prototypical modern example, on the other hand (with the trappings of a
burgeoning set of new representational technologies), of such an articulation might be
found in the multiple incarnations of Dracula. The modern version of Dracula was first
brought to popular consciousness through Bram Stoker’s novel and subsequently through
its multiple incarnations in film. And analysis of Dracula helps to reveal (perhaps
symptomatically) a delineation of modern technological developments as they encroach
on Dracula’s more traditional realm. First, a hybridity of time periods is established in the
novel as distinctions between Count Dracula’s old-world charms and the surprising array
of technologies in the world of Jonathan and Mina Harker’s urban London is detailed. As
Jonathan travels towards the Count’s world, it is also as if he is moving backward in time.
Technologies become less accessible, and he slowly loses touch with the ability to
communicate more freely with those back home. Furthermore, Dracula is represented as
practically prehistoric in no small part due to his ability to shapeshift – he becomes mist,
a lizard, a crawling shape. In this sense, Dracula himself is positioned as an ancient thing,
coming from the depths of time, older than knowledge itself. On the other hand, modern
man depicted primarily by the Harkers and secondarily by Dr. von Helsing present
modern versions of shapeshifters through the use and enjoyment of technologies. The
character’s general affinity for modern devices (telegraph, rail travel, gramophones and
advancements in medicine) counterbalances the vampiristic drive to relativize being (to
make all life like itself), laying bare the enigmas of life by offering rational knowledge
through accesorization. Further, Dracula can be read against a developing discourse of
evolution that unites both Freudian and Darwinian concepts in a powerful textual matrix.
Darwin’s introduction of species differentiation through a “chain of life” further

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rationalizes the potential for understanding human beings themselves as virtual
shapeshifters. What’s at stake in the novel is the horror of transforming into a vampire.
The idea is that such a change will happen through the simple transference of blood.
Darwinian logic hierarchizes the living world. Human beings are placed at the top
of an order of life. Darwin’s model, though, tends also to relativize the status of the
human being by implying that we bear the traces of creatures from the past, are still
undergoing evolution, and that there are other creatures on parallel tracks that enjoy at
least equal status with human beings in their historical development. Dracula would be
such a creature. With respect to such a finding, Freudian concepts such as displacement
could account for the production of Dracula as a projection of a monstrous human self
that is unable (or supremely unable) to remain in one fixed form. Thus, human activity
throughout Dracula is defined in many ways as the regimentation of difference.
Differences between each character, their forms of knowledge, their genders and their
relations to technology are paramount to the narrative and represent the best means to
fight off the omnivorous Count. Dracula, contrastingly, represents a field of
undifferentiated life, a monomaniacal drive to consume and transform everything coupled
with an insatiable, indiscriminate and undeniable sexual drive. His base of knowledge is
wide-ranging, as he is expert in all fields, thus overcoming one of the primary anxieties
of modern thought and thinking, where people are constantly brought into direct contact
with fields of knowledge and expertise with which they are not familiar.
How then do the residual effects of shapeshfting as an activity and poetic figure
influence depictions of thought as they are developed into an interpretive framework of
virtuality? To begin, thinking in a contemporary film about virtuality is represented as an

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activity of encoding/decoding, cognition and/or forensics. When an encoding/decoding
process is presented, thought is visualized as a process of continuous translation, with
narrative goals often being the achievement of a correct translation and an absolutely
transparent coding process (as in most films that deal directly with machinic “thinking”
or artificial intelligence, virtual reality or cyberspace). Identity in such films is
represented against a background of infinitesimal choices and bits of information where
patterns emerge. Individuals and characters are established within and despite
overwhelming structures of code. The anxiety is that such code may become omnivorous
and the personae of those posing themselves against a virtual other may become lost or
transformed within this vast and modular landscape losing the fixity and autonomy of
identity that we prize.
Cognition – thought in action – also allows filmmakers an example through which
they might illustrate thinking -- through its workings. There are many ways that thought
might become “visible” through the more palpable work of cognition. Characters are
depicted to grasp ideas; problems can be worked out in spaces, drawings, writings or
conversation. Often viewers are made aware of cognition through a focalization of
characters’ actions (especially when such actions are pivotal to a narrative’s
development). This is not a mode that is essential only to virtual cinema. It is used across
film genres in typical formal devices like point-of-view shots, eyeline matches, inserts,
reactions and voice-over. But, films with virtual contexts use cognitive representations in
specific and vital ways.
In the more obvious instances, cognitive processes are rendered through the
forensic impulses of characters as they seek ways to solve their dilemmas or determine

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the nature of theirs or other character’s worlds. Perhaps not surprisingly, an example of
the forensic technique of depiction is found on a television show that expressly deals with
forensic thinking: C.S.I. (standing for Crime Scene Investigations). Each episode presents
extradiegetic depictions of hypotheses the show’s forensic experts are testing, thereby
revealing the thought processes of the protagonists. For instance, a scientist may examine
a bullet wound and determine that the bullet entered from a certain trajectory, hit a bone,
changed directions within the victim’s body, and came to rest next to a major artery. This
kind of speculation, given in voice-over, might be paired with the visual rendering of a
cross-section of a human body and computer-generated imagery that traces a bullet’s path
as the scientist describes it, making the invisible thought of the character visible. At an
interpretive level, it is unclear how closely these depictions are intended to represent the
actual thought of the characters in opposition to their standing simply as nondiegetic
renditions of such thoughts by animators working for the show. As such, C.S.I.
participates in a generalized aspect of the virtualization of media – where mediated
renditions continuously refer self-consciously to their own production technologies as
dexterous and accurate tools for producing or mimicking realities.
Still, most often, the express purpose of depicting cognition within the diegesis of
virtual films is to establish a direct and transparent relation between thought and its
representation – to show (at least within the diegesis) that thought can be directly
translated (or shapeshifted) into a technical medium, most usually binary information,
without losing the essence of such thought. For instance, in The Matrix, Neo is trained by
Morpheus to recognize the matrix as a pattern developed through the elaboration of a
machinic code. One causal chain weaving through the film’s narrative concerns the

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development of Neo’s ability to “see” machinic thinking, and then pattern his own
thought processes to connect with and override the processes of the matrix’s governing
machines. The film illustrates the machinic “thought-code” that Neo must recognize as a
series of cascading green symbols that viewers understand Neo to comprehend
intuitively.
Still, Neo’s skill regarding computer code bypasses simple reading competency.
As Cypher explains early on in the film, he performs a simultaneous translation between
the machine’s code and the matrix’s reality. He says, “I don’t even see the code anymore.
Instead, I see blond, redhead, brunette. You’ll get used to it.” The objectification of
women notwithstanding, as we come to learn during The Matrix series, Neo does more
than simply read such code. Instead, he absorbs and transduces it, eventually developing
an almost mystical relationship with the matrix’s computer code. In fact, Neo becomes
the code’s writer. He is able to make the matrix bend to his will through his ability to
project his thought as a series of codic instructions for the matrix to follow. The matrix’s
code is described then as more than a simple counterpart to thinking. Instead it is depicted
as a fully developed (and somehow material) mode of thought that happens to be
cybernetic. It is a visual expression of cognition itself – thought and apprehension in
action. And, importantly, in the matrix, Neo’s and computer thoughts form the basis of
the matrix’s bounds and rules, including the life and death of its human inhabitants. In
essence, Neo’s abilities move beyond reading skill into writing skill, and position his
character as a hybrid of organic and inorganic functions or as a human-computer
amalgam, a cyborg. Moreover, much like the media technologies implicitly praised by
shows such as C.S.I., Neo is shown to have the ability to render reality. This subtle step

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conflates the relations implied between the film’s depictions, its technologies of
production and human thought.
All of Neo’s (and other’s) abilities to perform in the matrix are based in one of the
founding plot points of the The Matrix series that human beings are somehow enslaved
by computers, and are being duped into believing the reality of the matrix through digital
input into their brains from their computer hosts. In the animated series of shorts, The
Animatrix, computers/robots are shown performing positivistic tests on human subjects
by manipulating and stimulating their brains. Human subjects are made to laugh, cry,
sleep, etc. through specific physical stimuli of the brain itself. When these tests are
depicted, they are explained as the rudimentary research required for developing the code
for the matrix, allowing machines to dominate mankind. Thus, the code in the matrix is
explicitly defined as a message system that communicates directly with the brain’s
functions – a direct translation of cognition into a codic system. That the matrix’s code is
a product of collaboration between machinic and organic thought processes, places this
code at the basis of an organic/inorganic hybrid.
Viewers are given access to an experience of the matrix’s code from the
perspective of both humans and machines. Neo’s abilities are rendered through a
narrative focalization of Neo’s character, which is intended to give viewers a sense of
how machines interact with the matrix as well. Typical uses of techniques such as the
point-of-view shot, eyeline matches and over-the-shoulder framing provide cues that
viewers are “seeing what Neo sees.” And, what he does see (eventually) is the underlying
code of the matrix – the green cascading code referred to earlier – overlaying the
landscape and characters inhabiting the matrix. Simultaneously, viewers hear what Neo

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hears – for instance, quick buzzes that denote electronic short circuits -- further giving
viewers access to Neo’s experience of the matrix as an electronically produced (artificial)
world.
Perhaps the most illustrative example of the film’s depiction of Neo’s
perception/thought (at least in the first film of the trilogy) is the way the film’s action is
sped up or slowed down according to Neo’s experience of events. Probably the most
well-known sequence of the film is a slow-motion sequence depicting Neo dodging
bullets. The scene indicates Neo’s new ability to perform at “machine-like” speed. As
Trinity informs Neo following the moment, “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. You
moved like one of them – a machine.” As the film unfolds, Neo’s abilities in the context
of the matrix are enhanced, culminating in the depiction of his seeing the matrix entirely
as code. Again, during Neo’s revelatory moment, the film’s speed is slowed down,
reflecting Neo’s heightened perceptual ability. All of these examples figure Neo as a
shapeshifting character – he is human, machine, god-like, organic and inorganic, yet at
essence he remains simply himself.
In the second and third installment of The Matrix trilogy (The Matrix Revolutions,
2003), Agent Smith capitalizes on the hybrid nature of human beings by overcoming the
thought process of a human being and inhabiting him in the “real world.” Thus, the
networking of the matrix with the real word is rendered as a feedback loop, where
machinic, virtual processes are able to break into the material world. While this process is
not fully explained, it is assumed that Smith somehow resides as code within his host’s
body.
Neo and the matrix’s machines each represent hybrid modes of “life.” The

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liminality of each speaks directly to concerns of virtual discourse. Both Neo and the
matrix’s machines are highly functioning information translators (and writers). The
recurring depiction of cascading code throughout the films – on monitors, as a depiction
of Neo’s perception both inside and outside the matrix – is a reiteration of the importance
of remembering the “constructedness” of both of the film’s worlds, the real and the
virtual. It also is a useful device to remind one that it is thought that produces the virtual
world of the matrix, and even parts of the real world as well. Additionally, in this age of
environmental uncertainty, it should be noted that the human characters in The Matrix
live in a world where the light of the sun is not present. In the film, the digital realm
represents the last best hope to sustain organic life.
The Matrix does not offer the first instance that thought-processes of a character
being played by Keanu Reeves holds the key to the narrative solutions of a film.
Interestingly, Reeve’s mind took center stage in Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995) and
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Herek, 1989) as well. In the former, the titular
“mnemonic” is revealed to have a dual reference within the story. First, the mnemonic is
a literal code-key that will unlock the virtual memory that is stored in the recesses of
Johnny’s (played by Reeves) mind. In the film (based on a short story and screenplay by
William Gibson), Johnny runs illicit information (corporate trade secrets) “locked” and
stored in his brain across international borders. Information runners in Johnny Mnemonic,
much as the general human population in The Matrix, are equipped with jacks in their
heads that allow digital information to pass (directly, one supposes) into their brains.
Johnny Mnemonic explains this fantastic feat as being possible for Johnny by means of a
medical operation he has undergone in order to be a part of the lucrative business of

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information running. Still, believe it or not, this particular operation does have some
downside. In this case, Johnny no longer has any long-term memory. The part of his brain
housing long-term memory has been erased to make room for his profession. Therefore a
second mnemonic in the film is one that Johnny fruitlessly attempts to access allowing
him to remember his own past.
Johnny takes a great risk, by “overloading” his brain’s capacity in order to make a
final score and get out of the brain leasing trade. This overload puts Johnny in peril of a
brain hemorrhage if the information remains locked inside him for too long. Further,
because the information is so sensitive that even he must not be able to access it, a code-
key (a mnemonic) is produced that will unlock the information when it arrives at its
proper destination. And, of course, a terrible accident occurs, compromising the code-
key. Thus, Johnny must go on an odyssey to find the key to unlock the memories stored
in his brain (his own as well as his client’s) before the information locked inside him
causes him to hemorrhage and die.
Thus, much like in The Matrix, Reeves seeks the codic combination that will
allow his brain to interact directly with digital information -- unlock his thought to
computer thought, so to speak. A computer’s thought in each of these cases is presented
as analogous to cognition. It is presented as an active material that will also directly affect
the fabric of reality. Additionally, Johnny is presented as a shapeshifting figure, one that
even at its most basic – in his brain and thoughts – is a multifaceted amalgam of self,
computer memory and corporate identity. Johnny’s attempts to figure out who and what
he is by remembering keys to his past occupy the storyline.
Thus, there is a focus throughout the film on the physical brain of Johnny. And, in

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both Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix, Reeves uses the jack in his head to fill his empty
skull with useful or moneymaking concepts and information. In a sense, Johnny and Neo
are blank slates – true tabula rasas -- given that neither has access to reliable long term
memory and it is unclear from where/when/how he has come. In both stories, Reeves
plays a cyborg who must re-learn who he is, and how he relates to the world around him.
In a way, these brains are simply empty of real world ideas. Surprisingly though, his
personality is somehow intact. True to the nature of the shapeshifter, even though he has
basically no real world experience, he is still essentially “himself.”
In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Reeves plays an equally out of sorts figure, a
teenager named Ted. In this film Bill and Ted travel through time in order to create an
oral history report that will allow them to pass their high school class. In a special effects
scene reminiscent of The Matrix, Lawnmower Man, or Brainstorm (1983, Trumbull), Bill
and Ted ride through time in a phone booth. The time-traveling sequence is best
described as “kaleidoscopic” in the sense that Scott Bukatman has defined. He writes
The archetypal kaleidoscopic effects sequence, as found in… Brainstorm
(Douglass Trumbull, 1983), Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995), Contact
(Robert Zemeckis, 1997), and countless others, features a first-person camera
engaged in a relentless movement of forward penetration, distortions of the visual
field, and a distended sense of time. The main characters take kaleidoscopic
journeys, adventures of exploration in relation to monoliths, motherships, virtual
realities, and the inner spaces of the human psyche. These are not so much
journeys to other places or societies as flights from the strictures of instrumental
reason.
10

And later he adds, “[T]he effect is one of infinite expansion combined with relentless
enclosure.”
11
Thus, such rides represent more than space or time travel, they also
represent a movement towards processes of thinking that precede the instrumentality of
modern logic. As Keanu Reeves plummets through time, his head is filled with the

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trappings of a history that he was never able to actually learn through the usual book
learning. It is implied that in essence Ted is too dumb to understand any of the things he
is encountering, but that lack of critical distance and analysis makes him the perfect
vehicle for living western/eastern philosophy rather than ingesting it as a form of
detached knowledge. And it is for this reason that Bill and Ted are (ironically, of course)
positioned as messianic figures that will bring peace to the world.
Of course, Reeves has positioned himself perfectly to take on such roles, mainly
because he is such a good actor. His portrayal of a burnt out punkish, drug-addled, know-
nothing teen in The River’s Edge (Hunter, 1986) was perhaps too well done. In many
ways due to performances like this one and his in Bill and Ted’s… or Point Break
(Bigelow, 1991), his surfer-like expression, “Whoa!” when he encounters the matrix as
Neo is more than a diegetic ploy; it is a wink to a knowing audience, indicating that
conceptually Reeves/Neo is overmatched by the overwhelming conundrum virtuality
presents, but, like most of Reeves’s incarnations, don’t sweat it. In the end, everything is
going to be OK.
Of course, more than just a humorous aside, repeatedly using Reeves in this way
is a practice of shapeshifting that is basic to the star system. And, more importantly, it
also helps to naturalize behavior and personality in a virtual context. The idea is not to let
the uncanny, disjunctive and contradictory aspects of virtuality’s project overwhelm or
short-circuit engagement. A serial aim in narratives that depict virtual realities has to do
with keeping one’s identity intact against an ever-shifting codic landscape. In Reeves’s
case, this goal is most often attained by using the just-go-with-the-flow attitude of a
Forest Gump-like virtual cosmonaut.

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The elegance of the empty brain is that it can be filled. It can respond to the
supply of information given it, by just letting it to continue flowing (Neo) or by placing it
in neat stacks and quadrants (Johnny). In opposition, there is the overflowing brain, the
brain owned by Gary Kasparov as he challenges the super-computer Deep Blue
12
to a
game of chess or the brain of Einstein. As Roland Barthes wrote
Einstein’s brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all
provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the man who is too powerful is
removed from psychology, and introduced into the world of robots; as is well
known, the supermen of science fiction always have something reified about
them. So has Einstein: he is commonly signified by his brain, which is like an
object for anthologies, a true museum exhibit.
13

Einstein was known, in a way, as a walking brain. His knowledge of the universe was so
powerful that it seemingly produced another reality. And as Barthes further noted
Einstein’s activities and his effect on culture was boiled down to a code. He writes
There is a single secret to the world, and this secret is held in one word; the
universe is a safe of which humanity seeks the combination: Einstein almost
found it, this is the myth of Einstein. In it we find all the Gnostic themes: the
unity of nature, the ideal possibility of a fundamental reduction of the world, the
unfastening power of the word, the age old struggle between a secret and an
utterance, the idea that total knowledge can only be discovered all at once, like a
lock which suddenly opens after a thousand unsuccessful attempts. The historic
equation E = mc
2
, by its unexpected simplicity, almost embodies the pure idea of
the key, bare, linear, made of one metal, opening with a wholly magical ease a
door which had resisted the desperate effort of centuries.
14

In this way, Einstein was figured as an Arthurian savior, whose grasp of knowledge was
akin to taking Excalibur. But, as times have changed, Einstein, unlike Arthur, who is
supported by tradition and magic, is linked directly to math and machine. His thought
process is made visible through the codic key E = mc
2
. And, while Reeves’s many
fictional character’s travails involved the literal unlocking of minds, the narrative goals
across the many cases are the same. The ultimate hope and promise in Einstein’s case is

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that humanity will be re-awakened to a deeper and in that way more basic knowledge of
the universe that has been lost and forgotten. It is through the transposition of thought
into code and vice versa that we might open up a different reality that has always been
alongside us after all at any rate.
At their most basic, the figures of Einstein and Keanu Reeves are linked in a
fundamental way. Their thought processes are considered to elude direct logical thinking.
This really comprises their greatest assets. In the case of Einstein, it is (urban?) legend
that he was a terrible student, flunking out of classes, unable to concentrate. His genius is
chalked up to his ability to cut through the Gordian knots of scientific analysis and
theorems by his sheer creativity. As Barthes is quick to point out, more than a researcher,
Einstein was figured as a discoverer, which situates him much closer to magic (perhaps
Arthurian after all) than to science. In the case of Reeves (or at least the characters he
plays), it is his ability to keep from being bogged down in extended analysis that gives
him a leg up. He is able to visualize what is always already right in front of his face
without the distractions of externalities, without being tricked by shapeshifters – to grasp
Proteus steadfastly and press him all the more.
This tension between visualizing thinking as on one hand an arbitrary, almost
serpentine irrationality (code or the diseased mind) and on the other a short-cut process
has been a staple of “virtual cinema.” Apart from its myriad portrayals of this dual idea in
The Matrix trilogy – Neo’s Zen-like training, the role of the Key Master, the Oracle,
Agent Smith’s “hatred” of humans to name only a few examples – this tension is also
usually the central premise to “virtual detective” films. Films that might fall under this
category would include Tron, The Cell, The 13
th
Floor, Dark City, Virtuosity or The

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Lawnmower Man. Often in these stories a protagonist/detective must hunt down the
virtual and psychologically unstable persona of a character in a virtual space. For
instance, in The Cell, FBI Agent Novak must find the deranged killer Carl Stargher in
cyberspace, as he has Catherine Deane’s mind locked in virtual confines.
Throughout the film, clues as to the virtual whereabouts of Stargher’s location are
given, when his persona makes appearances as differing visages. The danger in this, and
most of these kinds of scenarios, is that one might also get trapped under the clutches of
the powerful and irrational mind being hunted. “Clues” in this sense generally refer to
visual referents that illustrate a pattern of thinking that point to the location of the persona
in question as a structuring absence of the film. Generally then, the solution to the crime
is one that requires a special creative leap that cuts through the labyrinthine borders that
have been erected to hide and protect the dangerous foe.
This storyline carries the residue of Theseus and the Minotaur. Like the cyborg
antagonists in “virtual detective” films, the Minotaur is a hybrid creature, part man-part
horse. The Minotaur’s main desire is to devour those who come into his lair. In order to
control the Minotaur, Daedalus built a labyrinth around it that would ensure the space it
occupied would be kept separate from that of the general population. The labyrinth and
the Minotaur were defeated by Theseus who used Ariadne’s thread to find his way back
through the maze after his quest. And, in this sense virtual fictions participate in a long
tradition of narrativizing the acquisition of knowledge. The labyrinth and “the way back,”
with its umbilical relation to the voyager, are metaphors for the trappings required to
explore and learn about new and treacherous worlds.
Like Theseus, the enquirer confronts the Labyrinth. This Labyrinth is a defiance
of linear logic, which in this context is totally useless. The assault on the logical

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sense is made by the Minotaur of the absurd, who will promptly rout the would-be
hero who cannot withstand his attack. Only through reliance and inspired
intuition, the golden thread of Ariadne, will the puzzle fall into place and light
replace darkness. Such methods, by which the limitations of the mind are
bypassed or transcended, are used by the esoteric masters of many a spiritual
discipline. Zen masters, for instance, use the koans, a kind of riddle, which while
unbalancing the intellect, may suddenly trigger satori or enlightenment.
15

This is the description provided by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola regarding the initiate’s
plunge into the world of alchemy. As Klossowski argues, the myriad and opaque symbols
associated with alchemy are used to turn back the unworthy, those who will not seek or
cannot find a pattern of recognition allowing the puzzle to fall into place. Likewise, the
virtual detective must scrutinize the ephemera of cyberspace in order to piece together the
resting place of the hidden antagonist. In both cases, it is clear that the labyrinth under
investigation and to be navigated is in many ways primarily in the seeker’s mind.
Klossowski is the son of the famous painter Balthus and the nephew of
painter/philosopher/screenwriter/novelist Pierre Klossowski. They represent a family
invested in the symbolic capital of imagery and arcane twists of “alchemical” logics, and
Pierre Klossowski was very much part of the family. Nowhere can the overwhelming
codes and dead-ends of labyrinthine logic be seen more clearly than in the film Pierre
Klossowski wrote, the proto-virtual The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Raúl Ruiz,
1978). In it, an art collector takes viewers on an unlikely journey through the paintings of
a fictional minor painter, Tonnerre. The film is equal parts detective work, textual
analysis, docent tour and farce. The collector in question conjectures a missing painting
that holds the disparate elements of Tonnerre’s work together. This painting, if present,
would complete an illustration of Tonnerre’s part in a scandal that is described as a
highly ritualistic and codified cult of the androgyne simply called “the ceremony.”

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Beginning with an explication of the paintings, the collector then remarkably
makes his way to a window and looks at a reproduced tableau vivant of one of the
paintings in question in the backyard of the house/museum/crime scene where the
narration takes place. It is striking because the tableau vivant immediately resonates with
differences between the painting and this immobile rendition of it in three-dimensional
space. A detail in the painting, which depicts a scene from the myth of Actaeon, is used
to link it to the ostensible next painting in the series, a depiction of two crusader knights
playing chess.
The whole of the situation is quite unlikely and fantastic, but what makes it even
more so is that light from the mirror in the first tableau is linked to the second one by its
being pointed at a basement in the house where this is being discussed. If this sounds
confusing, it is because it is confusing – intentionally so. The house depicted in the
diegeis of the film has become a labyrinthine projection of the narrator’s mind made
material. The architecture in and of the film is turned into a space with several meanings,
not the least of which is its possibility to be read as a phantasm of each the painter
Tonnerre and the art collector who discusses the paintings.
The whole of the place can be described in one sense as a projection of the art
collector’s thoughts. He has curated the scene. In another way, the house shows that this
thought process, which follows a literal path – out the window, into the yard, along the
reflected light, into the basement – is nothing but a series of dead-ends, out of which one
might form a complicated but suspect pattern of recognition. Moreover, the entire process
serves to frustrate coherence (at least as much as it promotes it), even as each detail is
painstakingly put into place. The first tableau vivant gives a hint as to what is occurring

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in the film overall.
The myth of Actaeon was taken up by Lacan to explain a fundamental problem in
the Freudian approach to psychoanalysis. As Lacan argues in his talk “The Freudian
Thing,” Freud would interpret the myth of Actaeon as the narrativization of the ego’s
resistance to confront the unconscious and also of the public’s resistance to
psychoanalysis. In the myth, Actaeon is on a hunt and happens upon the goddess Diana
while she is bathing, and (ostensibly by accident) sees her naked. Diana punishes
Actaeon by turning him into a stag, whereupon he is devoured by his own hunting
hounds. In this scenario, Diana’s body represents a kind of unsullied truth. And, in a
tangential sense, it is implied that Actaeon is more than an unwitting voyeur. Instead, as it
turns out, his hunt was for knowledge as well as food. But, once that truth is attained,
Actaeon must pay a price by becoming food himself.
16

It is in this Freudian sense then, where the ego continuously erects barriers and
pathways to the plainness of the truth, that the art collector has produced a fortress of
impenetrable knowledge about himself. The collector is clothed in a precise and
systematic scheme of ambiguity, one that always puts off communion due to the inherent
danger of obtaining knowledge. The tableau vivant is especially apt to represent such a
scheme, as each aspect of it appears highly staged and theatrical, containing an animated
sense of the immobile. The tableaus allow the art collector to analyze the paintings “from
the inside” as he walks about the recreated scenes. Elements such as the lighting, texture
and range of motion of each detail is analyzed in three dimensions, prefiguring the virtual
camera placement, texturization and rigging that are staples of contemporary computer
generated animation. What is unclear in these formal walkthroughs is whether this kind

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of analysis has any relation to a real referent. What is being studied? The paintings are
certainly transformed by the addition of actual depth, some motion and changes in light.
And, these ambiguities stretch into the general understanding of the film itself. But, while
the tableau vivant appears to recreate the painting’s composition, isn’t it in fact an
antecedent to the painting? The tableau vivant uncannily stands in two time periods. It
both precedes and follows the production of the final artwork. Thus, an interpretation of
the event’s temporality is fissured and called into question as well. And further, the
tableau vivant stands as a hybrid form of knowledge, one that is highly regimented and
broken down to reflect the painting as an exact replica, while also remaining of whole
cloth, like knowledge prior to instrumental reasoning.
In Hypothesis…, The art collector overwhelms the viewer with excessive
information in order to postulate the existence of something that is absent. His arguments
often seem to run too far in imbuing the collection of Tonnerre’s paintings with an
ephemeral meaning that can only be gleaned by recognizing the most brilliant intent. In
this way, the art collector is creating the artist Tonnerre as a kind of wish fulfillment. He
describes and curates the artist and collection of paintings that he wishes existed. By
continuously drawing about the painting that is not there, he effectuates it as an implied
artwork through myriad parameters, then adds the work virtually to Tonnerre’s oeuvre.
This kind of process resonates with the creation of generative artworks. Take, for
example, the innovative painter/computer artist Charles Csuri, who had a retrospective of
his work shown at the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition.
17
Csuri began
his career as a more or less traditional painter who then turned to the computer as a visual
art tool. His image production represents an evolution in the ability of computers to

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represent visual ideas. He has developed a number of tools that allow him to create
precise and intricate works. And, for the most part his works, because they are produced
by computer code – essentially algorithms, are able to take on more than one final form
of output. One image for instance, may be presented as a still “photographic” print, a
“painting,” an animation and/or a sculpture – each produced through the use of a
computer and using the same information file. The idea here is that the art object really is
the code itself, and how that code is translated remains up to the artist/programmer. These
works of art are shapeshifters.
Most recently, Csuri has been working with generative artworks. In these cases,
Csuri sets the parameters of the image – basics of color palate, lighting effects, camera
disposition, etc – and allows the computer to generate thousands of potential artworks
through the use of algorithms. Csuri then looks at the final outputs of the many images
and decides which should be saved and printed. He ends up with several hundred prints in
a series for any given set of parameters that he establishes. The process here is really less
like that of a traditional artist and more like that of a curator. In this case, though, Csuri
could be said to curate the work of an artist that he wishes existed -- one that would
embark on a series of images that had just such the elements he describes in their
composition. The place of Csuri’s artistic identity then becomes a bit murky in relation to
the computer, and begins to illustrate how using the computer as a representational tool
begins to transform the identity of its user.
And, by extension the connection of a curatorial impulse to social media
commercial culture is evidenced the workings of Twitter, Facebook, narrowcasting of
news and marketing generally, where one is prompeted to express their identity through

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brand loyalty and consumption. of Perhaps this is no more so than in relation to
“communities” formed around the products of Apple. After the popularity of Napster
caused a “crisis” in the music industry, and new laws and controls were put in place to
limit the free downloading of music, Apple came out with their monumentally successful
iPod. As a form of technology the iPod and even the video iPod didn’t introduce anything
that wasn’t already technically possible. Mobile media consumption on phones, PDAs
and flash mp3 players all pre-dated the iPod. But, Apple was savvy in introducing the
iTunes music store, which regulated prices and provided a hub of sorts for the acquisition
of content for the devices, and more importantly, created a regulated environment for
people to display their purchases, likes and wishes to others as a form of expression. The
iTunes store and by extension iPods sit at the intersection “push” and “pull” media
enjoyment. Push media refers to media that is indiscriminately sent out to everyone who
can access it. Television, radio and theatrical cinema would be the prototypical examples.
Pull media is chosen by the spectator, audience member or fan to be consumed
when/where/how they would like. The flash mp3 players that were connected to Napster
were protypical pull media devices. When Napster was still legal, fans were able to freely
scour computer networks for specific songs, never mind artists or albums. The iTune
store presents an array of media on different part sof the spectrum between push and pull
types with offerings like subscription-based podcasts and allowance of users to find
individual bits of aural and visual media.
This presents iTunes and the iPod as a useful mechanism to help express one’s
identity against the glut of digital content available. Promoting this kind of use, Apple has
several sections on their iTunes store where users can reveal their identities through the

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uploading or browsing of “playlists.” Playlists are essentially music mixes that are
created by individuals, ostensibly under some kind of logical rubric. In the Apple iTunes
store, anyone can add their “iMix” – their playlist – to the store for others to see discuss
and vote on. The iMixes remain on the site for a year. In this way, Apple appeals to the
curatorial acumen that is not only desired and sets one apart, but that in a way is
necessary to allow available materials to emerge into a recognizable pattern that could
make sense to media consumers. Those who offer their playlists participate in the
collective desire to create the work that does not yet exist, which perhaps has always been
an aspect of curatorial work. And, like the public’s awareness of morphing – this kind of
“curatorial” work is already the stuff of parody. Lists of literally anything/everything
abound on the Internet. Social media users beg their counterparts not to publish images of
their meals. Everyone is employed as a potential curator and critic. Thus, you are asked to
rate your selections, and pass your tastes on to the next consumer and in the process
assert your identity.
It is in this way, through narratives about the financialization of thought, as in
Johnny Mnemonic and the commercialization of taste as an expression of identity that
thinking itself is revealed to have monetary value. The drive of free market capitalization
to place value on all aspects of life, from genetic code to the earth’s water and the very
air we breathe to the parceling of land, even stars and the moon – “A select group of
properties in the Sea of Vapors are now available for only $18.95/acre… Sea of
Tranquility, The moon’s most prestigious location $37.50/acre” reads banner ads at
lunarregistry.com”
18
-- reflects one of the basic complications with producing identity in
the fluid an unhinged context of late capitalism. Identity itself can be interchanged with

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capitalization, and the question becomes is it identity that catalyzes money or does money
catalyze and change identity. Which is the true shapeshifter?
Ambivalences about the power of persona in the face of capital can be read
through responses that express futility or ineffectualness. For instance, the forensic
impulses that are replayed throughout so many contemporary representations are often
parodied in the films by the Coen Brothers who have made a practice of frustrating the
cognition-thought-meaning articulations that detective work supposedly enacts. For
example, The Big Lebowski (1998), parodies the forensic nature of detective films, by
short-circuiting a Chandler-esque story about Los Angeles inserting a character named
The Dude, as a stand-in for Philip Marlowe. The Dude, much like characters played by
Keanu Reeves as described earlier is essentially befuddled. Looking too deeply into
events to find patterns only gets The Dude into trouble. At one point, while The Dude
sits patiently watching one of his nemeses speak on the phone, presumably regarding The
Dude’s demise. All the while, the nemesis scribbles on a pad, and, of course, The Dude
believes information vital to his future rests on this pad of paper. Ehen his would-be
enemy hangs up, and tears off the top sheet of the scribbled pad and vacates the room,
The Dude rushes over to the pad, and makes an etching of it contents by carefully
shading the imprint of the now absent top sheet. As the shading is created the doodled bas
relief of a naked man with an extremely large penis comes into view. Confused, and then
interrupted, The Dude tears the sheet off and puts it into his pocket. Until the drawing is
made clear, the audience is swept up in the usual forensics of this scenario. There is a
quiet efficiency to this whole scene as viewers are made privy to the inner workings of
each character – their goals and desires. But this psychological realism is frustrated and

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called into question with the intrusion of this crude non-clue. This drawing is a dead-end,
so to speak.
And, these examples of ineffectual and overtly capitalistic playlists, calls to
people to curate everything including and especially their consumption or a parody of
Philip Marlowe stealthily piecing together the keys to mystery only to be given an answer
blunt and dumb assert an anxiety concerning the concept of thought itself. We revert to
different forms of pattern recognition, code-keys, forensics and labyrinthine secrets in
order to arrest the ancient knowledge that we have been cued to believe resides
somewhere in the recesses of our prehistory. The promise of virtuality in this case is one
that supposes that information can be reliably transduced by technology, re-connecting us
with an ancient knowledge that we have forgotten or locked away and by perfecting our
ability to recognize deep structures through repetition and finding our true selves amidst a
shifting sea of potentiality.

Marius Watz: Automatic Writing and Laurel Nakadate: Fever Dreams
In 2011, I was able through the SF Film Society to present two artists whose work are
gulfs apart in genre, meaning, affect and effect – yet both appeal to the concept of
shapeshifting in their work. First, I worked with film and video maker, photographer and
a performance artist, Laurel Nakadate, in a series of programs under the title “Laurel
Nakadate: Fever Dreams.” And, later in the year, I brought in the computational and
parametric artist Marius Watz to present an array of work in an installation titled “Marius
Watz: Automatic Writing.” Taken together their approaches could be argued to form

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opposite poles in the ways that shapeshifting is cued to be used by spectators to produce
aesthetic effects.
Watz is an expert computer user. He produces algorithms that in turn produce
works of art. He is a critic and curator of digital art. And, having founded the website
Generator.x in 2005, a site dedicated to discovering and valorizing computational
aesthetics in myriad forms, he also owns a smart and wide-ranging web presence. All of
Watz’s activities work to simultaneously display both the potential beauty and value that
can be harvested from computer code.
With SFFS, Watz presented a gallery exhibition that included two generative
video pieces, a 30’ site-specific tape drawing, 3-D printed objects and laser cut wood
panels. He also gave a brilliant public talk on the origins and dynamism of his own work
and generative art generally speaking. The unifying principles in the show were first,
generative/parametric processes – all of the works were produced through the production
and editing of algorithmic codes that were then used by machines to “automatically”
produce the works displayed – and second, Watz himself, who authored the codes in
question and paid close attention to the output of various machines, fine-tuning the
resulting art works.
Two competing concepts -- of seriality and visual display -- were explicitly
investigated in “Automatic Writing.” Seriality was evoked by the multiple instances of
the majority of the artworks presented. For instance, about 20, 6” 3-D printed objects
were displayed in the center of the room. Like instances of a species, each piece, a marvel
of “printed” plastic varied in style, remained united as output of the MakerBot 3-D
printer and replicator. Watz was the first artist-in-residence at the printer’s manufacturer,

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MakerBot Industries. The MakerBots (and 3-D printers generally) are mechanized
fabricators, and the reason it is said that they “print” is that the process used by 3-D
printers is based on the technology found in standard inkjet printers. Essentially 3-D
printers produce objects line-by-line in three dimensions, replacing ink that one would
find in a traditional printer with powdered materials – plastics, ceramics, metals, fabrics -
- that will bind and build up an object through addition of materials three dimensionally,
line-by-line.
The atomization of materials into dust and their subsequent reconfiguration into
printed objects evokes the concept of shapeshifting. The objects serve as a kind of
uncanny truth about the 3-D printer itself, and Watz was pragmatic about the reaction of
spectators, saying, “Don’t invite patrons to pick up the objects, but know that they will be
picked up.” Handling a 3-D printed object, it would seem is an important test. Does it
weigh as much as it looks like it does? (I admit, that I also “needed” to hold one (or
several) in my hands. They unremarkably felt like solid plastic objects. But, for me at
least, it took more than an instant to decide that the objects are just like ones encountered
previously, as I wanted to make sure that they weren’t simply gimmicks – whatever that
might mean here.) Upon inspecting Watz’s objects and seeing the multiple and differing
instances of objects with curves, squared-corners, negative and positive space, some
simple, some quite ornate, viewers are prodded to imagine the wonder and uses of an
object fabricator like a MakerBot. The strategy of seriality is quite important here as
some underlying themes of 3-D printing are that of repetition and abundance. 3-D printed
objects are a physical incarnation of the ability of technologies to serially configure
materials into useful objects.

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If visitors to the gallery inquired about the 3-D printed objects, they usually asked
about the processes of the object’s production and they generally had two types of queries
in that regard: “How big of an object can the MakerBot can print?” “What materials can
it use to produce objects?” The questions make sense. They point to cultural fantasies
about object replication: “Can I use it to print a car?” “Can the MakerBot be my personal
chef?” These kinds of ideas, naturalized through science fiction, are evoked by the 3-D
printed objects whose existence proves that automatic fabrication exists. The repetition of
the 3-D printers successes are on direct display through the abundance of copies and
styles before the viewer.
Additionally, Watz displayed two breathtakingly beautiful laser cut wood panels.
The panels were etched and cut with precise width and depth by a computer controlled
laser-cutter. The panels were scored with a series of arcs that were arranged in a way that
made the wood appear to have three-dimensional organic objects on its surface or
projected onto it. The panels were presented as a diptych, clearly related in that lines
from one panel appeared to continue onto the next one with smooth precision. They were
placed side-by-side to ensure viewers could see the match between the panels. And, when
viewers were able to inspect the panels closely, they could see that the wood was cut with
tens of thousands of fine arcs, sometimes just barely scratching the surface with an
uncanny precision. Their design evoked ultra-precision in their maniacal obsessiveness,
further prodding viewers to question whether a person could do this work or would want
to with their own hands. In this way, the panels, like all of the objects in the room, the
videos the tape drawing, etc. were evidence of the ability of computers to be manipulated

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to faithfully reproduce conceptual designs, to produce objects that without a computer
controlled machine, one might conceive but abandon due to its complexity.
It’s in this move, that Watz the artist and his ability to imagine arresting
compositions and then to control computers to reproduce those ideas takes center stage in
the exhibition. The objects before the viewer result from the manipulation of digital
information. And, one could argue that digital code is itself the artwork and that the
displayed objects are merely an expression of that work, which is performed by digitally
controlled machines. There are guiding principles that often are expressed in Watz’s art,
perhaps most prominently the use of minimal line and color to produce the illusion of
depth on a flat surface. This one parameter is a unifying factor, replicated throughout
Watz’s work. And, it is written into the algorithms that Watz produces. As Watz explains,
the code that he writes can be (with minor changes) often used to generate a number of
differing kinds of output – a video, a still image, a sculpture, a laser cut object The
resulting pieces are instances of the more essential elements of the codic information
translated by a computer to reproducing machine. The expressions of the work are
shapeshifters with the digital code being the essence of the work displayed. Watz’s
oeuvre then is quite literally supported by the notions of his being an engineer and author.
And, I noticed that, ironically, his status as a computer coder often eclipses his
considerable abilities as an illustrator, not to mention to fabricate items with his hands.
Watz then presents multiple versions of shapeshifting. His objects express the
essential qualities of their form through serial repetition and difference. They also express
essential qualities of an algorithm that can be used to express other media forms. The
pieces often use detail of line and color to distort perception in the visual field of surface

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and depth. The digital code Watz writes is itself a shapeshifter, like the materials of the
MakerBot, they are atomized, but in this case as 1’s and 0’s, and are manipulated to
produce algorithms that control the parameters of artistic output. Finally, the assembled
show is positioned to somehow express Watz himself – his persona as the expression of
an author. Much like an auteurist film oeuvre, there is the implication in this show as in
many that somehow the show is a version of Watz as a person.
It is in this sense of shapeshifting, as the product of a subjectivity or persona that
Laurel Nakadate often capitalizes on in her work. Much of Nakadate’s performances
early evoke the quotidian fantasies of pre-adolescent girls, a stage that is now commonly
referred to as the “tweens.” In early experiments, and as a young adult herself, Nakadate
set-out to engage in and video record the kinds of activities that pre-teen girls are
expected to think about and participate in as a matter of cultural cliché. For instance, she
recorded princess narratives, tea parties and pop star emulations. She put an ad onto
craigslist.org asking for middle-aged, single men to engage in these fantasies with her
while she videotaped the interactions as performances. The resulting videos are
confrontational and troubling documents that produce a number of questions about the
power relations in the scenario.
The videos are shot in the men’s homes. They often seem dank and cluttered. The
men are always older and often are much bigger than Nakadate. They engage with
Nakadate in ways that infantilize her and sometimes appear to leave her in physical
jeopardy. In some videos she is restrained while “waiting for her prince to save her” or
spoken to in patronizing tones about her beauty. There are sometimes rape or murder
fantasies played out under the guise of child’s play. In other videos, Nakadate will lip

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synch and dance to popular music. Her most famous video of the “music video” sort
displays Nakadate performing a choreographed dance routine with a series of men to the
Britney Spears anthem, “Oops!... I Did it Again.” In these scenes, Nakadate and her
participants playfully dance to Spears’s music.
The video directs viewers to consider the production of the videos themselves.
There are a number of questions that are provoked but not answered. How did she meet
these men? How did she ensure her safety? Were these men paid? What were the rules?
How much does she mean it? How much do they? Did she direct them? And, the
questions continue on in serial fashion, directed to events and subjectivity that isn’t
presented directly in the videos, but instead have to do with extratextual aspects of the
videos.
As viewers, we are aware of the performative nature of the videos. And, this is
partially what makes the videos somewhat confrontational and for some offensive. We
can’t be sure if what is being depicted in the videos is being done in good faith or if it
reflects a performance in itself. There is a sense of danger for Nakadate, as she seems
alone in the homes of strange men who would like to cavort with a young woman,
playing princess. But, the men also seem outmatched by Nakadate. She is making an art
career with these works. What are they getting out of it? There is a sense that she is
performing, while the men appear exposed and vulnerable.
I took a series of these videos and showed them to storefronts and asked them to
play the videos in their windows as part of a walking video tour in the Mission district of
San Francisco. The video tour was one aspect of Nakadate’s show. SFFS also screened
two of her feature length films – The Wolf Knife (2010) and Stay the Same Never Change

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(2009) -- and published three of her still photographs as an insert in the San Francisco
Bay Guardian. One of the venues on the walking tour asked me to remove the video two
days into its showing. There was nothing explicitly profane in the video. But, patrons of
the store were troubled by seeing a young woman playing dress up with older men. It
produced too many questions and uncomfortable emotions.
At the same of the SFFS program, Nakadate was presented in a solo show at PS1
in New York. This show which featured some of the same material as in San Francisco,
also included a performance project titled “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” (2010). The
project was a yearlong performance, beginning on January 1, 2010, where Nakadate
photographed before, during or after weeping, each day. The assembled 365 photos are
astonishing, again prodding a series of questions about the reality and controls of the
performance. Nakadate presents herself as a shapeshifter, as a person whose expressions
belie a surface of deep emotion, planning, pain and brilliance. The photos, like all of the
work she presents in an array out artistic output, merely hint at what her real person is.
And, by choosing the subject matter that she does, questions about her subjectivity – and
more precisely of her desire to make herself an object – are the primary terrain for
understanding her work. Her subjectivity exists virtually, articulated and described as the
prior cause of all of her work. We read her work as a symptom and attempt to
comprehend the mechanism of control through the details that are provided as mediated
output.
Regarding gender, there is something troubling and/or clichéd about the split
presented here – masculinity is expressed through the use of tools, femininity is
expressed through the use of the body. But, it is interesting to note how these artists use

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theses stereotypes to their advantage and in some instances to upend them. During an
artist’s talk as part of her show with SFFS at the California College of Art in San
Francisco, Nakadate was pressed by fellow artists and critics precisely on the use of her
own body in her work. Artists expressed concern that she would use her body in ways
that perpetuated stereotypes about femininity. Nakadate argued that her use her body not
only helped to define those stereotypes, isolating them and making it clear where
boundaries are in the depiction of men and women, but also that she was able to locate
power and pleasure in the manipulation of those stereotypes. It was clear that she was
aware of the provocatory power in her representations, but also that she wasn’t simply
trying to provoke. Instead, she was explicitly expressing cultural attitudes and norms that
are already prevalent in culture and that their expression in a fine art context reveals how
they are both flawed and useful. She won the majority of her audience over, but there
remained those troubled by her slippery uses of shapeshifting to produce an artistic
identity. This is, of course, one of the seemingly irreducible problems of shapeshifting. It
is a powerful, but unstable approach to reality. In myth, the shapeshifter is a trickster,
and, as such, one must remain wary of its morphing identity. It’s easy to see how this age
old approach to the subject is grafted onto digital instances of shapeshifting – the crisis of
indentity in digital contexts, how the algorithms used by an artist like Marius Watz
provoke uncanny excitement and discomfort. Where’s the art?
And, likewise, the kind of shapeshifting that Watz presents – of irreducible digital
code against Watz’s status as an artist/author --, changes the ways that we can access
Nakadate’s work. The question of her identity is inevitably presented as one that is held
in tension between her real body and a system of representations informed by digital

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culture. Her array of work circulates online, in galleries and in theaters. But, it echoes
popular representations of women and girls. Viewers are savvy about the ability of
anyone to perform an identity, partly due to our understanding of the transmission of
representations, and their ability to represent and lie.

1
1991 Senate subcommittee hearing “New Developments: Virtual Reality.” This hearing,
chaired by then Tennessee senator Al Gore, was interesting not only in its content, but in
who was invited to testify. The participants included: Jaron Lanier, President of VPL
Research, Dr. Fred Brooks, Professor of Computer Science at the University of North
Carolina, Dr. Thomas Furness, Director of the Human Interface Technology Lab at the
University of Washington, Dr. Charles Brownstein, Acting Assistant Director for
Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation
(NSF), and Dr. Lee Holcomb, director of the Information Sciences and Human Factors
Division of NASA. For more on the Extropy movement, check http://www.extropy.org/.
2
Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968. P. 382
3
ibid, p. 383. As Campbell describes his object of study, upon intense analysis, begins to
reveal its essence, and in the process suddenly becomes rife with connections (perhaps
infinite) to all sorts of discursive practice.
4
See the covers of Newsweek and Time magazines dated June 27, 1994.
5
Teresa de Lauretis. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984. p. 113 - 115.
6
ibid, p.113.
7
ibid, p. 111.
8
Vivian Sobchack. in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-
Change. ed. by. Vivian Sobchack. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. p.
xii.
9
Marsha Kinder. “From Mutation to Morphing: Cultural Transformations from Greek
Myth to Children's Media Culture.” in Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the
Culture of Quick-Change. ed. by. Vivian Sobchack. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000. pp. 63-64.
10
p. 117.
11
p. 118.
12
In the first match between the two, Kasparov lost the first game and later expressed that
he tried to play an open style to see what the computer was like. In the next five games he
won three times and played to a draw twice, routing the computer. In a rematch the next
year, Kasparov lost 3 ½ to 2 ½, and accused the computer team of cheating in the second
game of the match.
13
Roland Barthes. Mythologies (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1972) p. 68.
14
ibid. p. 69.
15
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Alchemy: The Secret Art. (London: Thames and Hudson,
1973) p. xii.

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16
Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits. (New York: WW Norton and Company, Inc., 2006) pp. 343 –
362.
17
http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/csuri/
18
http://www.lunarregistry.com/
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Synchronization and virtuality
The temporal framework of virtuality is informed primarily through the interplay
of two concepts that have also been at the center of cinematic development –
synchronization and seriality. The mechanics of early celluloid film based cinema uses an
exchange between the repetition of single frames passing behind a lens (either to be
projected or exposed) and the guiding rhythm of its passing to produce the illusion of
movement (known as flicker fusion). Today the specific technologies used to produce
moving pictures and their exhibition varies, of course. Still, most moving image systems
are dedicated to producing or decoding the relations between serial image production and
regulating such image’s repetitions as frames or fields.
Uses of digital technologies and the pervasiveness of cybernetic systems in
film/video production have re-defined the expression and reading of temporal relations in
time-based media. At issue is the rhetorical positioning of digital technologies as they
may alter the ontological status of film/video. Describing the ontology of film/video
(even without reference to digital technologies) is already a slippery endeavor. Questions
as to the materiality of each medium weighed against audience experiences of their
mediated output are complicated at best. Still, many arguments have been made that,
from a material standpoint, the single frame or single field of film/video forms the basic
unit of moving image media. Digital technologies, however, add an important dimension
to the essence of each frame or field. Digital “units” of film/video, whatever they may be,
are also defined as computational. That is, they may be translated into numbers -- or light
or other information -- and networked. They are non-medium specific, thus opening
film/video to intertextual hybridization at the production level. This change in the
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extratextual knowledge of film/video’s ontological status has profound implications on
the experience of temporality for film viewers.
For instance, temporal “simultaneity” in a medium that uses digital technical
systems is read against articulations to the extratextual status of such systems.
Traditionally, simultaneity in the cinema has been defined through two main tactics –
serialization and synchronization. For example, as is often cited regarding early narrative
film form such as Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) or D.W.
Griffith’s Girl and Her Trust (1912), cross-cutting, which literally presents one set of
motion pictures and then another in succession, has been used to imply actions that occur
simultaneously.
1
This tactic is essentially serial in nature – units are shown in succession,
often moving back-and-forth between scenes, yet an interpretation of the temporality of
the scenes is clear – they are intended to be read as events occurring at the same time.
Synchronization, on the other hand, implies simultaneous events presented during a
singular viewing time. With respect to film, synch is usually associated with the
relationship between film image and film sound – e.g., words are heard when a character
is seen speaking. But, synch has often been used in other contexts regarding film form as
it pertains to the temporality of filmic events, perhaps most obviously through the use of
split-screens.
2
These basics of realist filmic representation are still widely used. But,
given the prevalence of the application of digital technology to filmmaking, the implied
temporal fidelity (of filmic time to viewing time, for example) of such techniques has
changed. This shift has occurred primarily due to a rhetorical positioning of digital
technologies as reliable tools of representational accuracy.
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Such rhetorical positioning takes place within and without the diegetic realms of
the films and videos in question. A good example of such positioning is readily found by
examining Mike Figgis’s Time Code. Time Code explicitly capitalizes on the
synchronizing potential of digital networking to produce its most unique aspect – that it
depicts four strands of a narrative that in reality take place simultaneously through the use
of a screen split into quadrants. To quickly summarize, Time Code is a project that
unfolds through four separate long, single takes that are exhibited in four sections of a
screen or monitor at the same time. While there are no edits in the piece, montage is
created through sound mixing, such as raising the dialogue or ambient sound of one take,
while potting down others. Gimmicks are also employed to drive home the synchronicity
of events, such as an earthquake registered in each quadrant at the same time.
Additionally, each character is intimately related to the goals and desires of the others,
culminating in the conclusion of the piece, where each character ends up meeting in the
same space. Thus, the “networked” aspect of the piece refracts at many levels. Still, the
title, Time Code, has little to do with the content of the narrative, instead pointing to the
production process and technology employed in the piece explicitly. “Time code” directly
refers to the temporal regulating mechanism of the four takes – it is time code that
ensures synch amongst the four set-ups. And, this extradiegetic reference is entirely
appropriate to the film, as it informs the work throughout. The piece is interesting more
as an application of technical dexterity than as a riveting story. Perhaps recognizing this
as the primary selling point of the project, the jacket of the home video of Time Code
reads, “Four cameras. One Take. No edits. Real Time.” In addition, the narrative synopsis
usually given on the back covers of DVDs and videos is replaced by a gushing account of
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the technology involved in the film’s production. “Time Code is unlike anything you’ve
ever seen. A new and innovative kind of movie for the new millennium!” The jacket also
again refers to the fact that the film was made in one take with no edits and in real time.
Thus, simultaneity as a product of the unfolding of “real time” is paramount to T\me
Code.
Time Code highlights the networking of code as the overriding mechanism of
control over camera, actor and narrative. Two implicit concepts follow: First, time code
can be reasonably expected to retain accuracy throughout the project, i.e., there are no
spatial or temporal gaps – no ellipses -- due to the regularity of time code. Second, a
hierarchy is developed where time code controls all other aspects of the film’s production
and replay. Time code keeps the project in order. These two positions emphasize aspects
of seriality and synchronicity.
To explain, Time Code opens up with a display of time code – numbers counting
the film/video’s frames and fields as they roll onward. These numbers represent seriality
in its most elemental sense – the regularized repetition of events. The numbers
(displayed typographically) also morph into the words “Time Code,” thereby defining
these numbers (as in, “These numbers are time code.”) to viewers. By visually displaying
the continuous (and regulated) countdown of numbers as a primary organizing principal,
the film appeals to the serial nature of timecode. The video’s jacket claim – “One take.
No edits. Real time.” – is supported by time code’s organizing efficiency. On the other
hand, while the synchronized aspect of the piece is evident in the use of a split screen, it
is “proven” through a depiction of a single, simultaneous event – a man entering a
building is shown from two different angles in separate quadrants of the screen. Such
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simultaneity is made more obviously clear through the conceit of an earthquake. (This is
Los Angeles after all.) As the earthquake occurs, each of the four scenes displayed
experience the tumult at the same time.
3
As I have argued, the earthquake as a
synchronizing mechanism controls diegetic action during its duration. Synchronization is
a controlling mechanism that produces a series of hierarchies regarding actions, causes
and effects and temporalities. And throughout Time Code (from an extradiegetic
standpoint), time code is purported to synch or control the four sequences as they unfold
before the viewer. The result is that the project presents the serial event of
synchronization itself. Synchronized moments are repeatedly offered to the viewer as
special moments of import.
What makes Time Code interesting are the special moments of relevance
evidenced during the synchronization of four separate sections of mobile space. Once this
idea is made apparent (during the opening sequence), the project is left to displaying the
uses of this concept and reminding the audience that this is what they are viewing. Thus,
the repetition of earthquakes, the repeated congruency of graphic and action match
between the four sections (close-ups, speaking on the phone, etc.) is integral to the
video’s narrative. As such, the reading of Time Code’s narrative is profoundly affected.
For one, suspense is severely curtailed within the diegesis, and is focused instead onto the
extradiegetic level. The typical narrative question – How is this going to end (diegetically
and for the characters) is replaced by “How are the film’s producers going pull this off
technically?” And, one suspects that all four sequences will end up in the same place and
time in perfect synch, of course.
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Of all of Roland Barthes narrative codes described in S/Z, the one most
connected to the temporality of narrative events is the hermeneutic code. As Barthes
writes, “Let us designate as the hermeneutic code all the units whose function it is in
various ways to articulate a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which
can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even constitute an enigma and
lead to its solution. Thus the title Sarrasine initiates as first step in a sequence that will
not be answered until No. 153.”
4
(By, the “No. 153” Barthes is indicating his own
numbered text of Sarrasine where the question, “Who or what is Sarrasine?” is
answered.)
The hermeneutic code then is the one most closely aligned with the idea of
suspense. And, while there is a mild interest in the dramatic action of Time Code,
suspense is most clearly associated with its meta-narrative level, one that could be
described as a nonfictional drama or an allegory of the production of the movie. This is of
interest because it begins to describe how supposedly nonfictional events are routinely
read through a lens and competencies that are more closely associated with fiction.
Furthermore, it begins to show what is at stake in texts read through a lens of
virtuality. Namely, special emphasis is paid to the ability of technologies to deliver their
promise. In the case of Time Code, what is on display is the dexterity of time code as it
controls the unfolding of the sequences as they play out. This is one of the hallmarks of
the interpretive framework of virtuality. By using this competency, viewers/readers are
being asked to continuously read the success of the ostensible underlying technology
supporting the medium to deliver representations with accuracy, fidelity, dexterity or
some other sort of quality relevant to the representation itself.
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Not quite as explicitly, but certainly with a bit more dazzle, the “matrix” trilogy,
beginning with The Matrix (1999, Wachowskis), uses the concept of synch as its
overriding aesthetic logic, including its essential use for both special effects and narrative
coherence. Further, the film represents a prototype of cinematic virtuality, prizing visual
representation above other often hailed representational aspects of virtuality, such as
aural or tactile representations. This prominence of visuality is important as it confronts
much of the theorization of virtuality and prods one to ask how the historical production
of vision and perception has influenced the contemporary climate of aesthetic practice.
When the film arrived The Matrix’s special effects were a bit of a revelation.
Specifically, the use of a particular effect called by the Wachowskis and the film’s Visual
FX Supervisor, Jon Gaeta, “bullet-time photography (BTP),” has provided much of the
conceptual basis for the film’s stylistic logic. In turn BTP can be used as a kernel for
understanding the logic of the film’s plot and story as well. The effect presented in the
film, and first popularized by a Gap clothing advertisement features a finely honed
manipulation of both speed and visual perspective. The aesthetic result is one of visual
plenitude and a roaming spectator position. In BTP, the image literally opens itself up to
multi-dimensional (of 3D space and discrete time) spectatorial analysis as each aspect of
BTP image sequences (speed, duration, trajectory, angle, etc.) are handled independently.
Further, a spectator’s ability to breakdown the image as its passing is replicated in the
film’s characters’ goals of freeing themselves from the tyranny of a computerized matrix
and claiming dominance over their environments.
In the film Thomas “Neo” Andersen (“Neo” is his internet handle) joins a band of
renegade humans who are attempting to expose and overthrow a technological conspiracy
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enacted by machines. The humans are being used as “batteries,” unbeknownst to them,
fueling machines in their need for heat/power. Humans are kept in a catatonic state in
pod-fields, providing an embankment of power for the machines that toil over them in an
agrarian manner. To keep the humans unaware of their essential entrapment, the
machines have developed a virtual world replete with joys and problems that is fed
(electronically?) into the minds of the human zombie/slaves. The human’s subsequent
virtual experience obscures the fact that they are in fact catatonic and in pods being fed
upon by the machines. Neo is recruited and “awakened” from this “reality” by a band of
outsiders who have previously awakened (or have been born outside this system) and are
trying to overcome the matrix, exposing it as a simulation.
A founding principle of the film then, is that the primary human environment is
simulated construct. As a simulation, the environment is then also viewed as
manipulable. Much of Neo’s training consists in the development of skills that will allow
him to overcome the reality-effect of the simulation -- to see the simulation as simulation
-- and empower himself to master the environment. This way of thinking about virtual
environments is evident in many utopian approaches to the virtual. In the utopian model,
two ideas are wedded. The first is that the virtual is essentially considered a product of
technological production and therefore, through human’s control of technology,
ultimately accommodates impositions of human will. The second is that virtuality re-
connects the subject to a founding originary order. (Thus the film is overflowing with
cognitive mind-games and religious references.) Such approaches are evident in Howard
Rheingold’s praise of the “virtual community” and Jaron Lanier’s early writing on the
virtual, where he espouses a belief in virtuality as the redemption of intuitive thought.
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More precisely in The Matrix, virtuality is premised as the elaboration of a code, and
reveals the environment, with its bodies included, as the emergence of an informational
pattern where recognition of its status as information is the key to its manipulability.
An instance of this kind of thinking in critical theory is found in N. Katherine
Hayles essay “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers.” In it she argues that the
existence of virtuality radically changes the experience of the world, shifting the
emphasis in reality-production from a logic of material presence/absence of objects to a
new logic of pattern/randomness. This means that the reality-effect is no longer one that
is reliant on the objective existence of material objects, but instead rests in the de-coding
power of subjects to perceive patterns in the make-up of “reality.” One can almost
imagine Hayles in the place of the Zen-like, kung fu master Morpheus, Neo’s mentor in
the film when she says
The metaphoric slippages of urban sprawl, computer matrix, and biological
protein culminate in the final elliptical phrase, “data made flesh.” Information is
the putative origin, physicality the derivative manifestation. Body parts sold in
black market clinics, body neurochemistry manipulated by synthetic drugs, body
of the world overlaid by urban sprawl testify to the precariousness of physical
existence. If flesh is data incarnate, why not go back to the source and leave the
perils of physicality behind?
5

Hayles’ view poses virtuality as a major break-through in human evolution, one
whose progress is linked to a conception of “eternal recurrence,” which one might
describe as the serial repetition of everything forever, and is often described much more
pessimistically than in Hayles’s version of it here. And, further, these concepts evince
one of the primary threads in modernist thought -- a redemption of the real. The “source”
Hayles speaks about is implicitly essential and ahistoric. It is the codified mark of all
existence, and it is through the emergence of its pattern that it appears and is recognized.
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Despite her attempts to level the field of materiality to relative formations of code,
Hayles implies it is a precisely human choice to return to the metaphysical origins of the
body in order to elide it. This kind of thinking is related to concepts of religious
narratives of salvation. As Walter Benjamin writes
...our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.
The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The
past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There
is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming
was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been
endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.
This claim cannot be settled cheaply.
6

The representation of redemption in The Matrix is informed by the tradition of
“progress” preceding it. Neo’s abilities are prophesized. He has been fated to “save the
world” by overcoming the (false) distinction between information and reality. In the
climactic scene of the film, Neo ascends to messianic power when he is able to see the
simulated space as code. Digital binary code literally emerges into view, and all aspects
of material danger dissipate rapidly, allowing all material/bodily limits to fade away
whenever convenient at Neo’s desire and command.
Neo’s manipulation of the environment is exemplified by his increasing acuity in
mastering the rhythms of the coded simulations. Like all existence in the field of the
virtual, thinking is represented as the flow of an informational pattern. Neo’s thinking is
visualized and read on a computer monitor as he interacts with “the matrix.” His ability
to locate the rate at which the matrix flows produces his power over the simulation. His
eventual mastery over the environment is evident in the matrix’s bending to his mental
rhythms, as the simulation no longer takes its cues from the machines Neo battles, but
from his own thoughts instead.
7

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The concept of intense manipulability founded on a hierarchy of control-
principles is also the primary guiding aspect of the special effects used in The Matrix.
The production logic underlying “bullet-time photography”(BTP) for instance relies on
the ability of a single machine to guide a legion of cameras, lights, and even actors
themselves. The Matrix’s public relations arm, through a website dedicated to the film,
describes the use of BTP as a highly complex venture, touting, “These scenes required
dynamic camera movement around slow-motion events that approached 12,000 frames
per second.”
8
Ironically, as I will establish, the incredible technological dexterity of the
process harkens a return to the foundations of cinematic practice. And, most importantly,
the process requires an elaborate sense of synchronicity to guide all aspects of the special
effects process.
Taking a Benjaminian view one sees the basic “progress” in these cinematic
effects as a return to the founding aspects of cinema itself. Further, cinema, as a product
of modernity, is connected to serial redemption -- of humanity with a return to full
presence, and nostalgia for the future. A large part of the technical history of cinema is
revealed to continually re-visit the concept of synch and its power to mobilize a
reproduction of visual perception, revealing that the history of redemption is also the
history of dominance and precise control.
It is legendary that one origin of cinema is in Leland Stanford’s hiring of
Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 to photograph a horse running. Stanford’s ostensible goal
was to settle a bet on whether the horse ever has all four of its legs off the ground at once.
Muybridge was commissioned to reveal through photographic proof the actual running
process of horses. In order to accomplish this feat, Muybridge constructed a series of
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trip-wires across a track, each connected to a camera. As a horse ran through the wires, it
activated the cameras that snapped photos of the horse at precise moments, producing a
photo-series. One of the resulting photos revealed that, in fact, there is a moment in a
horse’s gallop where all four of its hooves remain off the ground; and, Stanford won his
bet.
9

This prototype of cinematic photography helped establish standards of the
reproduction of visual perception. This particular process requires many technical assets,
among them a high-speed film and the synchronization of photographic subject and
camera. In this case, Muybridge places the horse as the mastering principle over the
camera’s synch to it. This was the primary aspect of the experiment that rendered it
troubling for further use. In Muybridge’s model, the horse was the controlling figure.
His process so elaborate and cumbersome replicates the inconsistency of nature and the
chance embodied in the horse’s placement, gait, speed, direction, desire, etc.
At the time, similar work had been going on around the world that conceived of
series-photography through a machine of internal relations divorced from similar
intrusions of chance. Most famously, Étienne-Jules Marey had been working on the
production of a “chronophotographic gun.” In 1891 William K. Dickson’s introduction
of sprockets and sprocket holes in film camera systems provided a seeming lasting
divorce of the technologies required to create series-photography from the objects it
photographed. Sprockets asserted the camera’s independence from objects outside itself
for synch, and allowed for a single camera to be used as opposed to Muybridge’s use of
the horse and several cameras.
10
As series-photography developed, the technologies used
were made to master the situations under study or to be represented.
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As a product of the nostalgic desire to return to a sense of plenitude and full
presence, cinema promises to arrest the real, to bring it to full “view.” Muybridge’s
experiment returns an answer of objectivity to the eye; we see the movement broken
down. And in further response, cameras are developed to incorporate the control of “trip-
wires” within itself, creating a closed system of reproduction, ostensibly disconnecting
itself from the object of its study, and hopefully also from the forces of chance as well.
Supporting each step is the desire for an objective relation to the real.
This kind of objectification of reality can be seen explicitly running through a line
of photographic inquiry that might include the early experiments of Dziga Vertov,
running through the work of Jacques Cousteau and Harold Edgerton and most recently in
the camerawork in use with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In these examples,
cameras are used to present aspects of the world normally invisible to the human eye,
(often) using hi-speed photography. In the case of LHC, a 37,000 ton, 27 km in
circumference vacuum-sealed supercollider was tunneled under the countries of France
and Switzerland designed solely to create precisely synchronized collisions of particle
beams.
11
To record events in the collider, five 10-meter tall collision sensors produce 40
million 60-megapixel “images” of data per second. The sensors are described as cameras,
but more accurately they are data collectors, and they produce much more than just visual
data.
The LHC recorders capture so much information, that it can’t be stored. One of
the areas of learning with the LHC is knowing what data to throw out, and which to keep,
in other words learning to recognize patterns in the information, since a fraction of a
second’s worth of the sensor’s data would fill the biggest computer disk drive.
12
The
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whole LHC project was conceived to discover the origins of the universe. On July 4,
2012 the team at CERN, which runs the LHC reported they had likely produced the
Higgs boson, a particle that may help to account for the creation of mass in the universe.
13

The synchronization of events, of particle collision, image/data capture and pattern
recognition have conferred a weak messianic power on the LHC, highly touting the Higgs
boson by its nickname, the “God particle.” And, perhaps more important culturally, the
cameras at the LHC announce the possibility a complete dissociation of visuality from
analog data. These “cameras” exclusively capture data, which is hierarchized above
visual, aural, or any other kind of representation – speed, trajectory, rate of change –
which are all described as kinds of data, recognized as patterns through their
synchronization.
The LHC might help us to recognize and arc in image production that drives it
towards “objectivity” in the service of attempts to redeem the real. We can see this
transition by looking at different ways that objectivity is articulated to image production,
and also to recognize resistances when excessive subjectivity rears its head to claim a
place in visuality. To “save” visual representations and motion images from anarchic
relativism, understanding of photography has been subsumed by standards of computer
generated imagery, data collection – to include terms like “megapixels” and “motion
capture” -- and in the most special cases the mastering objectivity of synchronization.
There are many underlying assumptions of objectivity in series-photography.
These stem in part on popular understanding of the basis of photography. As Andre
Bazin notes:
This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the
image. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility
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absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit
may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced,
actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say in time and space.
14

This first aspect of objectivity and photography is well known and opens immediately
onto possible limitations. Jean-Louis Comolli establishes this critique well throughout
his body of work. He writes
...the cinema machine, which is not essentially the camera, the film projector,
which is not merely a combination of instruments, apparatuses, techniques.
Which is a machine: a dispositif articulating between different sets --
technological certainly, but also economic and ideological. A dispositif was
required which implicates its motivations, which is the arrangement of demands,
desires, fantasies, speculations (in the two senses of commerce and the
imaginary): an arrangement which gives apparatus and techniques a social status
and function.
15

While Bazin’s theoretical stance does subtly incorporate a model of social history,
Comolli’s perspective helps to remind how the goal of “objectivity” is also a function of
social power and desire. And, the representations of reality photographic images offer us
must be viewed as representative of values outside of their own physical status.
With the advent of digital imaging technologies, the argument for a visual
objectivity of cinematic images loses more of its explanatory coherence for the power of
cinema, and now virtuality. In fact, The Matrix (as does post-modern cinema in general)
foregrounds the artifice of its images as an important part of its aesthetic. The Matrix,
explicitly presenting a virtual aesthetic, attempts to divorce its representations from the
camera itself. Instead, it hails its origins in digital manipulability as evidenced in the
film’s advertisements and the overall unreliability of space in the film’s representations.
The film’s rhetorical plea to artifice reveals a shift in the relative importance of visual
objectivity in film aesthetics, namely a shift from modern to post-modern visual
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representation. Bill Nichols establishes these changes as part of a larger movement away
from reproductive technologies to cybernetic systems. He writes
Telephone networks, communication satellites, radar systems, programmable
laser video disks, robots, biogenetically engineered cells, rocket guidance
systems, videotext networks -- all exhibit a capacity to process information and
execute actions. They are all “cybernetic” in that they are self-regulating
mechanisms or systems within predefined limits and in relation to predefined
tasks. Just as the camera has come to symbolize the entirety of the photographic
and cinematic processes, the computer has come to symbolize the entire spectrum
of networks, systems, and devices that exemplify cybernetic or “automated but
intelligent behavior.”
16

The computer symbolizes the relations of representative practice associated with
the cybernetic. As such the representation of virtuality throughout The Matrix is
entwined with the presence of computers both within its diegesis and in the film’s
production. Further, as Nichols establishes, the logic of the computer is a logic of “self-
regulation,” “limits,” and “tasks.” Thus he illustrates how the concept of the cybernetic
system stems from a tradition of rhetorical positioning that is likened to the synchronized
movement of the self-regulated camera image.
And, it should be noted that this idea is carried out in many nonfictional examples
as well. For instance, UPS uses the idea of synch in one of its main advertising
campaigns. In it, it is shown that a package is easily tracked at all times by computers as
it makes its way around the world, and of course, reaches its destination on time. The
general idea is that the entire process of shipping is revolutionized by the use of digital
technologies, ensuring that all phases of the package’s journey can be translated directly
into information, and thus become highly regulated and manipulable. The entire concept
is organized under the rubric of synchronization, which implies a mastery over the
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situation, as mentioned in their commercial, “Only one company in the world can tell you
exactly when these things will happen.”
17

And apart from digital data control and collection, “synch” has special relations to
certain contexts. The term “synchronize your watches” is a throwback to complicated
plan fulfillment, such as sensational criminal activities that required a legion of
perpetrators (with an intricate and extremely precise plan) to be in concert. Usually, at
least in fictional renditions of such events, there is a single source that everyone
synchronizes to, and this is the watch or clock of the head mobster.
18
In these cases, the
performer’s actions are determined by the sequences laid out in prior planning and
require the human performers to become machine-like in their rhythms. Synchronized
swimming and synchronized diving are uncanny “sports” based on the mirrored
choreography of athletes, where best examples subsume the athletes themselves under the
whole of the athletic program. Ideally, spectators wouldn’t be able to tell the individual
athletes apart, and the wonder of the event isn’t so much in the actions themselves, but in
the apparatus that allows the athletes to perform with machine like regularity. Actions
appealing to synchronization (and by extension a virtual logic) call for an explicit
extratextual, usually nonfictional, reading of an allegory of exacting practices and an
implied apparatus that has produced the moment of performance.
In a sales pitch for The Matrix, John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for the
film, speaks at length on the intersection of photographic and digital technologies in the
creation of the film’s style. As effects supervisor, Gaeta is in charge of the overall design
and execution of visual effects in the film. In opposition to Nichols’s conceptualization
of a logic of cybernetics, Gaeta proposes that the relation between photography and
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digital imagery could yield aesthetic practices that explicitly test viewer’s limits. In the
process, Gaeta invokes an implicit assumption about the nature of real experience, and its
ability to be replicated through a hybridization of cinematic/cybernetic systems. For
Gaeta, the limit of the technologies is the experience of the real itself. And, in his pursuit
of the real, he relates his desire to ‘fool’ the audience as a kind of open secret of play. A
few excerpts from his (marketing) interview reveal his attitude.
Matrix: How far can technology take us visually?
Gaeta: No one really knows what the threshold is that people can reach.... There
are bright people out there working with digital equipment, who have a certain
blend of backgrounds for computer graphics and photography, and can figure out
connections between the two. Then the thoughts start to happen, about how you
merge these things together -- true photography and true [three] dimensionality.
Matrix: It’s amazing how fast computers are changing film.
Gaeta: ...The whole other side of visual effects that is still a frontier is this: virtual
reality style cinematography.
19

While Gaeta is often unclear about his concepts throughout the interview it is interesting
to note that as a practitioner he reveals himself to be in pursuit of two primary goals. The
first is “true photography and true three dimensionality.” The second is “virtual reality
style cinematography.” In aligning a certain truth-effect with virtual reality, Gaeta
establishes an immanent limit for himself with regard to aesthetic practice. But, unlike
Bazin’s belief in the immanence of objective reality, Gaeta finds the truth-effect in a
manipulated reality, one that conforms to the phenomenological experience of the real.
Thus Gaeta claims to be “pushing the limits” of representation with a specific threshold
in mind, that of pure substitution of the real by the virtual, a truthful representation.
Concluding the interview Gaeta remarks, “Eventually the audience won’t be able
to tell what’s real and what’s fake. That’s the whole point isn’t it?” In this remark we
can see the shift in emphasis from an arrest and dominance of the real to a complete
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elision of it. Underlying this change is an altered comprehension of the real’s relation to
its representation. The qualitative difference between the real and its representation is
collapsed by a conceptualization of the real as a binary opposition of pattern/randomness.
A pattern if it is recognized should be able to be repeated. In the closed-circuit system of
virtuality (cybernetics) the real-pattern can be isolated and perfected, removing random
aspects from it. It is very short leap to then ask if this kind of desire that underlies the
synchronization experiments at LHC, for example? In addition to better understanding
the world, is it hoped that by replicating the condition for the production of the universe
that one would be able to re-produce the world itself? As we cue ourselves to recognize
patterns in the vast amounts of data captured, does that amount to replicating our
experience of recognizing real patterns and doesn’t our experience exclude vast amounts
of information that we can’t easily fit into patterns?
The concept of pattern recognition plays a role in the production of “objectivity”
in the cinematic image. This kind of objectivity is based in part on a reliance of cinema’s
faithful reproduction of movement -- its ability to reveal temporality and change in
general. The perception of movement in the cinematic image confers a sense of objective
time upon it as well, and elaborating on it leads one directly to synch systems -- the
operations of sprockets and gears, fields and data rates.
According to Gilles Deleuze, cinematography offers what he calls a “movement-
image.” Deleuze argues that the image of movement reproduced by the apparatus of
cinematography (its sprockets and gears that master both film and camera shutter) is the
reproduction of the experience of the visual perception of movement. Deleuze argues
that “natural” perception orders movement as it is experienced. He states that this
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ordering is evident in the incapability to conceptualize whole movement without enacting
a break between a movement’s distance covered and the time it spans. For Deleuze, the
comprehension of movement necessarily mis-interprets real movement, but this
misrecognition produces the actual experience of movement by human subjects. Cinema
in its production of movement reproduces and “perfects” this misrecognition.
20
Deleuze
writes
Cinema proceeds with photogrammes - that is, with immobile sections - twenty-
four images per second.... But it has often been noted that what it gives us is not
the photogramme: it is an intermediate range, to which movement is not appended
or added; the movement on the contrary belongs to the intermediate image as
immediate given. It might be said that the position of natural perception is the
same. But there the illusion is corrected ‘above’ perception by the conditions
which make perception possible in the subject. In the cinema however, it is
corrected at the same time as the image appears for a spectator without
conditions.... In short, cinema does not give us an image to which movement is
added, it immediately give us a movement-image.
21

The central aspect of Deleuze’s argument here is a claim that the impetus underlying the
production of cinematic technologies is not only a desire to produce a sense of connection
to an underlying immanence of the real through visual representation, but also to re-
create the immediate experience of the real in its physical/mechanical/technological
processes. The use of individual frames to produce the effect of persistence of vision is
not a necessary gap in the reproduction of real experience, but is the reproduction of the
cognitive ordering of experience.
This process is sensationally re-visited in explicit ways in the production of
cinematic effects in The Matrix. The bullet-time photography sequence of the film
reveals the limitations of a single-camera closed circuit system, and uses the technologies
used by Muybridge coupled with an intensely defined computerized and hierarchical
system of synchronization. To film the scene, Gaeta and crew used thousands of still
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photographs, shot by hundreds of cameras, piecing them together much like Muybridge
did re-creating the movement of Stanford’s horse. The essential differences The Matrix
used were a concept of closed circuit imaging that kept the control of each camera under
a singular synch device and the eventual establishment of multidimensionality through
the manipulation of visual perspective, speed, and duration.
The change in synch devices from the sprocket to a highly manipulable, digitized
and programmed synch used in bullet-time photography can be traced generally here.
Synchronization is the principle of control in the technical production of movement.
Through the establishment of that control, producers are able to independently
manipulate discrete aspects of the movement and qualities of its composition (lighting,
framing, etc.) through the speed, duration or frequency of images created. The
production of the BTP sequence, for instance, relied on a singular synch device that
commanded each camera, but through that principle allowed each camera to act
independently to create a unified effect.
Prior to the kind of highly discrete and networked use of synch signals in cinema
film synchronization was focused on sprockets holes and later the relationship of image
to sound. The idea of the synch-sound event when sound was considered available to
film became a focus of the technical work on visual representation. One change in the
technology was that regularization of the image’s signal-rate (24 frame/sec, 60Hz) would
be maintained, and sound’s flow would be regulated in relation to it. The use of two
separate recording systems in concert (camera, audio recording), brought into conception
the desire for a another synch device that would regulate the rate of each system,
allowing each to record and play-back at the same rate. For a while, “crystal-synch”
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mechanisms, were used in each set of devices separately. But, with the advent of time
code and time code readers, image and sound recorders (Nagra tape decks, then DAT and
now hard disk recorders primarily) have been linked by the arbitrary flow of digital
numbers.
This use of time code has allowed for the establishment of greater control by a
single machine over a battery of others. It has also re-worked the “needs” of the film
industry “requiring” crew skilled at resolving time code discrepancies, as different
engineering and media guilds have their own separate time code standards. Further, many
production groups, especially post-production “houses” employ a house-wide standard
synch base. Each system in the house is linked by a singular electronic pulse, insuring
data flow to remain at a constant rate when moving media from system to system.
Digidesign, once one of the leading companies exploiting this field of timecode-based
and digital media production, now a part of Avid (an image editing technology company)
introduced a series of synch devices and time code resolvers called “Slave Drivers.”
They presented SMPTE Slave Drivers and Video Slave Drivers and the more versatile
(and frightening sounding) Universal Slave Drivers. Professional recording/playback
devices (contemporary industry-standard have two input/output ports – “Synch In” and
“Synch Out” – externally available) can become master or slave in the work chain with
the flip of a switch and a few connections.
The BTP visual effect relies on the discrete control and precision afforded by
these types of technologies. By regulating each camera separately with a single master
signal flow, it’s insured that each camera is in synch with the rest. The use of a singular
source of control for hundreds of cameras arranged in a circular fashion allows for the
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discrete production of an effect of motion that breaks away radically from the
phenomenological experience of movement. Still, the space covered is represented and
then experienced as unified, whole and present. In fact, the effect of unitary space that is
embodied by an arbitrary non-uniform time re-conceptualizes the perception of motion,
and brings the aesthetic of virtuality towards a new sense of an “objective” visual
representation -- the truth of the substitution as a form of pattern recognition.
In his theorization of the virtual, Paul Virilio states that there are two underlying
logics that support the concept -- substitution and liveness. In particular he postulates that
virtual reality, as a substitution for the real, has the potential to create a social system that
recognizes two realities, the typical one and a parallel virtual one. In this pursuit of the
virtual we can see how the emphasis on a modernist re-connection to the real has been
altered in a post-modern context. The second aspect of “liveness” also supports this idea.
Some of the technical characteristics of liveness are a coherent space and time
represented by the long take. For a Realist theorist like Bazin, the use of cinema to
produce a long take (and deep space) exemplified the precise use of the camera to
produce the presence of the real. In the BTP sequence in The Matrix, a unified space is
provided by the markers of a long take and deep space, but both aspects are advertised
and flaunted as highly manipulated at the level of single frames. That the effect is
seamless, while still representing a vision of impossible perception further argues for the
possibility of a separate system of reality.
This brings up one of the fundamental questions regarding digital imagery in
general. Many critics and theorists note that digital manipulation of images can be
seamless, unnoticed by viewers. Likewise, many note that the general public is well
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aware of the fact that images can be and are manipulated routinely. Many critics use these
dual claims to assert that images no longer have a basis of authority in today’s culture.
Essentially, this is to say that the indexicality of every image is now in question and
therefore the ability of images to faithfully represent reality has withered. This argument
makes perfect logical sense. But it leaves out the fact that images – even avowedly
digitized and manipulated images – are routinely used to produce authoritative statements
and even to speak the “truth.” One might ask, why is this seeming paradox in play? Why
do images appear to retain the force of truth in everyday life?
One answer to this question might be that there is a residual faith in images to be
faithful representatives of the real world, and this status is so central to the way we gather
information and communicate that a crisis in imagery’s authority is too much to bear for
culture and society. Another answer might be that we currently live in a cynical age, one
that has seen culture long ago give up any idea of the possibility of true knowledge
anyhow, so this is not really such a big deal. There is probably truth in both of these
positions. But, more fundamentally, I think, the social use of digitally produced media
has plainly shown that the authority imbued in such representations has at least as much
to do with its iconic and symbolic qualities as its indexical ones.
As Philip Rosen notes, a representation’s relationship to the real is one based on a
concept of the past. He writes
Photographic and filmic images have normally been apprehended as indexical
traces, for their spatial field and the objects depicted were in the camera’s
“presence” at some point prior to the actual reading of the sign. The indexical
trace is a matter of pastness.
22

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And later, he clarifies this position to show that not only is indexicality a matter of
pastness, but that there is the inference of certain activities or events that caused the
production of the representation.
Thus, if indexicality is a crucial aspect of the image, we must assume some
capacity at work beyond perceptual activities, be it memory, mental activities,
subconscious investment, rational inference, the effectivity of cultural discourses,
or whatever. But, this capacity must include a knowledge about how the signifier
was supposed to be produced.
23

Indexicality is a matter of extratextual speculation. This kind of idea is what
supports Tom Gunning’s definition of an early “cinema of attractions.” Audiences rely
upon their cultural knowledge of how representations were supposedly produced to enjoy
meaningful experiences with cinema (and the world).
In The Burden of Representation, Jon Tagg illustrates that the meaning and
authority derived from the indexicality of photographs is historically constructed. The
supposed “objectivity” of indexical signification was articulated to scientific discourse
and bureaucratic efficiencies that were used in concert to assert the legitimacy of images
used to track and define human behavior. In this way, the index was used explicitly to
assert the pastness of facts – to imbue images with historical accuracy. Series-
photography and then cinema offers an alternative to such pastness by reproducing
duration. An alternate temporality is explicitly offered, one that co-exists with “real”
time. Such alternate realties may appear strange, but we refer to them constantly, through
counter factual arguments, dreaming, games, meditation and the experience of cinema.
The fantasy of observing reality differently than others around you can be
analyzed in relation to time. Alternate temporal realities are promoted in time travel films
and in that strange fantasy of frozen time -- where everyone except one character is
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frozen, allowing the unfrozen character to move about and inspect the entirety of the
situation. And, in an everyday nonfictional context we refer to this as, “being in the
zone,” where is especially used to describe athletes that perform especially well for
stretches of time. In fact, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady and Misty May may not only be in the
zone, but are described as “unconscious.” In general, when athletes describe “the zone”
the talk about how their respective games seem to slow down, allowing them to perceive
everything more clearly and alternately from others. Still, that common knowledge of the
zone, is up-ended by baseball batting champion Ichiro, who states that for him he’s in the
zone when everything is sped up, wryly showing that the participation in alternate
temporalities is subjective. And, he further states regarding his once uncanny ability to hit
a baseball more often than any other human being, “It is hard to explain. My body reacts
to the pitch rather than my brain. I don't look for anything out of the pitcher's hand. My
body feels the pitch that's coming.”
24
The zone is the place of alternate experience, closer
to a full plenitude of physical experience and preconscious perception – where everything
goes right at exactly the right moments, where everything is in perfect sync.
What I have been trying to establish so far is the relationship between a
contemporary aesthetic of virtuality and a tradition of visual representational practice. In
this relationship I see the production and development of a concept of synchronization.
Synch here is meant to reveal a pivot point between modernist and post-modernist
desires. Through synch’s alterations, we might be able to see how technologies
fundamentally alter the fabric, aims, and goals of desire itself. In its enactments,
cinematic production enters into several circuits of power and desire. Along with the
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narrative forms of redemption, cinema rehearses a binary Jacques Derrida explicates as
Hegel’s ‘Lordship/Servility.’
25

Derrida locates the basis for the binary of lordship/servility in the subject’s
relation to death. Particularly, Derrida claims that the subject’s attitude toward death, and
the stake one is willing to risk against it is the determining factor that oscillates between
the limit poles of lordship/servitude. The paradox of this set-up is that one must pass
through death in order to attain a true position of power. For this reason, other systems
are developed to position the self against or within, to place an idea at risk. Derrida
writes
The operation of lordship indeed consists in, writes Hegel, “showing that life is
fettered to determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity
everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and it is not tied up with life.”
Such an “operation”… Thus amounts to risking, putting at stake… the entirety of
one’s own life. The servant is the man who does not put his life at stake, the one
who wants to conserve his life, wants to be conserved. By raising oneself above
life, by looking at death directly, one accedes to lordship: to the for-itself, to
freedom, to recognition. Freedom must go through the putting at stake of life.
26

When Leland Stanford stakes a wager against the representation of motion, he is
entering into a symbolic circuit of chance and risk necessary to attain dominance over
servitude. He is putting at stake the perception of motion, the experience of the real, and
thus relies upon a belief in the immanent meaning of the real, its ability to return an
answer to his wager. Similarly, the Large Hadron Collider is a massive gamble that
flaunts the possibility of being proven incorrect. There is the possibility of being shown
that the Standard Model, which would allow the history of the universe to include the
“big bang,” for instance, could be proven to be incorrect, thus erasing decades of
theorization and outcomes in the field of physics. This kind of risk pervades a modernist
project in general which seeks to redeem the full presence of experience. Not only do
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Stanford and the CERN scientists risk knowledge, they also wager that technology can in
fact return an answer – that Muybridge’s experiment and the Large Hadron Collider will
reflect truth with an objectivity. (“This claim cannot be settled cheaply.”)
In this movement of risk and the continual wrestling with a lordship/servility
binary, a third term comes into being, emerging from the binary’s excess. For Derrida,
this term is “sovereignty.” Derrida calls this position, “This burst of laughter [that]
makes the difference between lordship and sovereignty shine, without showing it, and
above all, without saying it.”
27
Sovereignty, for Derrida is a position that disconnects
itself from the establishment of meaning found in the production of the lordship/servility
binary. He goes on
And [sovereignty] laughs at itself, a “major” laughter laughs at a “minor”
laughter, for the sovereign operation also needs life -- the life that welds the two
lives together – in order to be a relation to itself in the pleasurable consumption of
itself. Thus, it must simulate, after a fashion, the absolute risk, and it must laugh
at this simulacrum.
28

Sovereignty is produced by the culture of special effects as witnessed in The
Matrix produces. The development of a “second” virtual reality allows one to simulate
risking the real without having real risk enacted. Meaning is closed into a single circuit
of consumption. Production indulges the desire for a self-contained meaning, cutting
across relationships from a social network of oppositions. For Derrida, such a
deconstruction of meaning is imperative to the lasting of culture; to dismantle the
structure of power meaning has produced.
Virtuality promises to enact a field of relative potentiality. It promises a second
reality. But, in the process, its representations forgo a wager upon the real, the possibility
of an objective immanent meaning embedded within experience. Instead, it manufactures
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a re-presentation of experience while simulating risk, limiting risk to a series of
calculations, statistics, and codes, risking instead the extratextual narrative embodied by
technology. Life then loses its potentiality to arrive in full presence in the context of the
virtual. The question, the gamble, does not directly address life in this context.
Ironically, with the loss of the loss of the real (losing loss, the loss of risk), the
hierarchization of dominance and servitude remains in the virtual’s representation of a
“new reality.” The logic of synchronization and control pervades the virtual’s
production, reproduction, and prophetic redemption, thereby draining it of its power to
deliver on its promise. Instead virtuality distracts and distances us from the real,
attempting to perfect, and re-perfect an experience of life as a pattern controlled through
synchronization.

Golan Levin: Scribble, Scrapple, I.C. You and Miranda July’s The Future
In 2006, I asked Golan Levin to come to the San Francisco International Film
Festival to present his version of live cinema. Levin is a pioneer in the field of
computational art. His live performance work often explores uses of computer software
environments to translate gestures, sounds and images in the performance environment
into projected images and amplified sounds. At SFIFF, he presented Scribble (2000),
Scrapple (2005) and a version of the Manual Input Workstation (2004, which he
developed in collaboration with Zachary Lieberman. Each of these works uses the
interchange between seriality and synchronization to make sense of how computer
software environments translate information into various mediated output and how it
might provide clarity and control to computation.
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In this performance, which took place in a movie theater, Levin’s presentations of
the three sections of his work took a similar arc. First Levin presented the mediated
environment that he was working in to the audience in a way that would allow them to
understand what they are watching. In the Manual Input Workstation (MIW), for
example, Levin presented the work in four sections, each revealing a different way that
gestures and objects can be used to produce images and sounds. At the beginning of each
part of the presentation Levin revealed the conceit of the translation of image and
movement into sound by showing very specific examples of how it will work. The MIW
is composed of an overhead projector with which Levin interacts. The overhead projector
produced an image on the movie theater’s screen. A camera was trained on the overhead
projector surface, which produced a video feed into a computer and software system that
translates the image into video and sound, which is also projected onto the screen and
produces sound which was played in the theater. The dual projections created an overlap
of two kinds of light onto the theater screen which produced an unusual, ghostly effect.
In the first section, which Levin introduced by placing a cutout of the numeral “1”
on the surface of the, Levin showed how creating an enclosed shape on the surface on the
overhead, in this case by using his hands in the shape of various kinds of hoops with his
fingers, would be translated in virtual objects, that when “released” would fall to the
bottom of the projected image. Upon falling the objects would produce sound as they
bounced at the bottom edge of the image. Larger objects would produce lower sounds.
Smaller objects would produce higher sounds. Objects colliding with previously
produced objects at the bottom of the screen would create more sounds. This is a difficult
thing to describe, but it was easily and intuitively clear when watching it, as
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synchronization of Levin’s movement and of image to sound directly translated how
image, sound and body interacted to produce the computerized output.
29
Once the
principles of each of the software environments were revealed, Levin would then push
the environments to create more complex interactions amongst the basic elements
revealed.
The MIW and all of Levin’s projects presented positioned the interaction between
the computer, artist and environment as the primary idea being investigated. By making
this the primary terrain on comprehension, Levin was able to reinvest motion imagery
with the kind of wonder that one might imagine was present during the days of early
cinema. Everyone in the audience, intuitively understood the principles of the pieces
presented, and the stakes in those presentations are fundamental to the best and deepest
promise of what computing and mediation might bring – translation and control of the
world itself. When Levin reveals how a computer can be used to change the nature of an
object into image and sound, it is the closest that computing comes to alchemy.
And, the most satisfying moments in these pieces would appear when Levin
would be able to use the parameters of each environment to essentially create music that
was simultaneously being interpreted visually. This process was most evident in the piece
Scrapple. On his website Levin writes
Scrapple is an audiovisual installation in which everyday objects placed on a table
are interpreted as sound-producing marks in an “active score.”
The Scrapple system scans a table surface as if it were a kind of music notation,
producing music in real-time from any objects lying there. The installation makes
use of a variety of playful forms; in particular, long flexible curves allow for the
creation of variable melodies, while an assemblage of cloth shapes, small objects
and wind-up toys yields ever-changing rhythms. Video projections on
the Scrapple table transform the surface into a simple augmented reality, in which
the objects placed by users are elaborated through luminous and explanatory
graphics. The 3-meter long table produces a 4-second audio loop, allowing
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participants to experiment freely with tangible, interactive audiovisual
composition. In the Scrapple installation, the table is the score.
30

In the case at SFIFF, Levin performed music using the Scrapple software environment.
As with MIW, Levin didn’t explain the system verbally. Instead, he simply sat down and
showed the various parameters of the table being used to show how different kinds of
objects would produce sounds through their placement in specific parts of the table. A
line of light that would sweep across the table, allowed viewers to understand what parts
of the table was being used to produce sound in the auditorium. As viewers understood
basics of the table – in this instance at least, that items towards the right side of table
were “played” following those on the left side, items placed higher on the table emitted
higher frequency sounds, duration of a sound depended on the length of the object
horizontally and the shape of objects affected the range of tonality of it as well.
After revealing each of these parameters separately, Levin then began to combine
them. The cyclical nature of the software system, the table was surveyed repeatedly from
left to right every four seconds allowed for the seriality required to loop beats and
melodies. Levin then used objects to highlight special moments within the score adding
and removing objects for each of the fours second intervals to create what essentially
sounded like lopping electronic music. Spectators understood the relentless four-second
interval and began to anticipate differences in the score based on new additions and
changes that Levin man on the table. When no changes were made, the table would
simply emit sounds that were the same on a loop every four seconds. Scrapple was
meditative in that regard, but it revealed its power in the synchronization of elements – of
object, image and sound to produce difference at special moments to break up the
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sameness of the sequence and also to reveal patterns in the combination of those
elements.
Underlying each of his performances explicitly were software systems that the
inexhaustibility of computer code with punctuations of synchronized time. In a sense,
Scrapple (and the majority of works Levin presented) worked on a sort of clockwork
mechanism. There was regularity to events that could be disrupted by intervening and
changing the context of reading that the computer would produce. In one section of the
MIW, for example, section two, also titled “Rotuni” there was an aspect of the projected
image that would rotate literally in a clockwise direction. As this section of image would
pass over object placed on the overhead projector, it would “play” that object translating
into a sound of some sort, based on it’s shape. In other words, as if it weren’t already
fantastic enough, these projects didn’t only translate objects gestures into image and
sound, but at their most sublime moments they sometimes visualized and controlled time.
And, at these moments that perhaps the projects reveal a deep yearning to elude the
seriality of temporal progression, the way that our lives might appear to keep winding
down and dwindling away – the way that computers are behind looked towards to
manipulate the environment not for its own sake, but to interrupt time.
If one looks at the body of Miranda July’s work, you can see how it calls out to be
read through the competency of virtuality. Here first feature length film Me and You and
Everyone We Know, depicts a community of strangers in Portland that are untied through,
chat rooms, artistic production, curation, the mall and divorce and death. The ensemble
cast is related through a number of connections, some direct such as familial relation and
some indirect such as a friend of a coworker. The web-based project, Learning to Love
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You More, which she made with Harrell Fletcher and was recently acquired by
SFMOMA, presents a series of performances that web visitors are asked to create. For
instance, visitors are asked to take photograph of their parents kissing or of an outfit that
meant a great deal to the photographer and then to post the result on the website. The
projects unite disparate people through similar activities, revealing how we the
participants are similar in their differences. The project also questions the hierarchy
between artist and viewer or author and writer, as Fletcher and July come up with ideas
that they then get others to follow through on. Her work uses digital media in ways that
reveals media's structures – the ideas that support its comprehension of
atomization/wholeness, identity/amorphousness, presence/absence and a host of other
concepts. But, it is in the movie The Future that she most explicitly addresses the ways
that we currently experience time. The film was presented at the 54
th
SFIFF in 2011.
In the film, a chorographer, Sophie and her boyfriend, Jason decide to adopt a cat
and begin to panic that once they bring the cat into the home, many of the things that they
would most like to accomplish will be forgotten due to their new responsibilities. So, the
deadline of receiving the cat in a few months becomes especially relevant to their lives.
The pressure of that deadline reveals fissures in their relationship and in their own senses
of self, and they break up. Sophie takes a path that is something like a long pause. She
has an affair and moves in with a single middle-aged man in the suburbs. In his home,
Sophie has no responsibility, no creativity and therefore no way of failing.
I was able to interview July about The Future and she describes Sophie’s journey
as a “fear-fantasy” for an artists and also as a long extended “wrong turn.”
31
The way
Jason deals with his time pressure, however, to attempt to address climate change by
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selling trees door-to-door, while perhaps seeming more “correct” also leads down a path
of depression and loneliness. In many ways, the characters appear resigned to their
respective fates, that they are already dead in their shoes. Like Me and You and Everyone
We Know, the film presents a series on unlikely-to-be-related characters. But, this
tenuous ensemble is held together by the film’s narrative threads.
Unlikely association is a running theme in July’s work. From the first play show
wrote and presented at Berkeley, which was based on her written correspondence with a
prisoner she met as a pen pal, to projects in Learning to Love You More to the book that
closely followed The Future, titled It Chooses You, July shows that she is not only
fascinated by how strangers interact, but that she often seeks out those interactions. It
Chooses You is based on a series of interviews that July did with people that she met
through the Pennysaver classifieds in Los Angeles. In each instance, July phoned
someone who had placed an ad, and then asked them if they would be willing to be
interviewed for a project.
As the project unfolds, July discusses how meeting strangers face-to-face is
something that is becoming less common in her life. And, she relates that change in part
to the advent of digital media. She talks about how, even when surrounded by strangers,
she isn’t actually “with them.” She writes following one of her encounters
As I left his room I said something like “Maybe I’ll see you around,” as if our
generation all like to congregate at one coffee shop. But the moment I got back to
my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to
me that the whole world, and especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me
from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it
wouldn’t happen. LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in
my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to
be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting
everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my
own people who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling as a text them back.
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And, the majority of the people who she meets through the Pennysaver don’t own or use
a computer. This is the reason after all that they use the Pennysaver rather than
craigslist.org or another website in order to sell their things. July realizes that the day
when someone will say that they don’t know how to use a computer will one day be
gone, and at that time, the production of a second parallel reality will be complete. There
is an inevitability of it that is something like a death.
…I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly
limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside the web were
becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant…
[O]ne day there would be no more computerless people in Los Angeles and this
exercise wouldn’t be possible.
33

July likens the expansion of the internet and digital media into her life like an organic
phenomenon, “”it was just happening, like time, like geography.”
34
And, the Pennysaver
interviews helped to re-connect her to the bulk of the world, which remains offline.
And, these interviews conducted while July searched for a way to structure the
script of The Future, ended up having a profound effect on the film. She cast one of her
participants, Joe Putterlik in the film, as a man that Jason meets through the Pennysaver
named Joe. Joe passed away just as the film was being completed. Jason’s character is
figured as an iteration of Joe, almost as if Joe is Jason as an older man. When Jason
becomes stuck, time literally stands still for a long while for Jason, Joe speaks to Jason
about how to get time moving again as the voice of the moon. The fantasy of stopping
time altogether, of ending the serial repetition of nature is revealed in The Future as
another dead end. In place of stopped time is another time, perhaps boxed in another time
and another. Stopping one series simply enacts a new series. And, the key for Jason is
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how to use time and its inexhaustibility to his advantage. How can he accept its
impending march?
When Jason goes down to the ocean and revs up time by pulling in the tides and
tugging at the moon, he marks it with importance. He restarts the process of marking time
into relevant parts and bits, of breaking it down into distinguishable moments of
differences. He synchronizes time to his life, and thereby masters its indistinguishable
flow, which returns him to the world of the living.

1
Porter’s American Fireman cuts from the inside of a burning house to the outside,
showing the same action from two vantages twice. In Griffith’s Girl and Her Trust, the
climax of the film depicts the hero chasing the heroine’s abductors by use of a train, as
the abductors are on a handcar. The film cross-cuts between the train and hand-cart
repeatedly, until the two eventually share the same space. The “succession” of events
seen is read basically as occurring at the same time.
2
In Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (??)…
3
An alternate example might be found in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, where an
earthquake is depicted to range simultaneously through the Los Angeles area through the
more traditional use of cross-cutting.
4
Barthes, p. 17.
5
Hayles, Katherine N. “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,” in Electronic Culture:
Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. By Timothy Druckery, (Aperture: New York,
1996). p. 268. It should be noted that since this essay Hayles has backed away from
heaping messianic praise onto virtuality. This is true also, notably, of Jaron Lanier, who
was known for quite awhile as one of VRs most high profile proselytizers.
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/one-on-one-jaron-lanier/)
6
Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” in Illuminations. Trans. By Harry
Zohn, Ed. By Hannah Arendt, (Schocken Books: New York, 1968). P. 254.
7
An interesting foil to The Matrix might be found in the film Colossus: The Forbin
Project (1970, Joseph Sargent). In the film, Colossus, a supercomputer created to run the
U.S. missile and defense system attains consciousness, and communicates with its Cold
War Russian counterpart, Guardian. Colossus is shown to mentor Guardian (visualized
on monitors as complex mathematical equations at incredible speed). At one point
Colossus slows its teaching down to let Guardian catch it. When it does the two act in
synchronization, and take over the world.
8
http://www.whatisthematrix.com/cmp/sfx_index.html 5/6/99
9
Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. pp. 3 - 4. Cook does not speak about
Stanford’s wager, but instead claims he simply wanted to prove his claim. But, as film
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history is taught, and explained this anecdote has been told in many (undocumented)
ways. The point I am trying to make here is that the history of technological invention is
cloaked in popular narratives.
10
Cook. pp. 4 - 7.
11
The beam shooting mechanism is called a “synchrotron.”
http://www.lhc.ac.uk/search/search.aspx?q=synchrotron
12
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/e-gang-ian-bird-large-hadron-collider-
sensors-largest-trash-bin.html
13
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/weinberg-why-the-higgs-boson-
matters.html?pagewanted=all
14
Bazin, Bazin. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1.
Trans. By Hugh Gray, (University of California: Berkeley, 1967). pp. 13 -14.
15
Comolli, Jean-Louis “Machines of the Visible,” in Electronic Culture: Technology and
Visual Representation. Ed. By Timothy Druckery, (Aperture: New York, 1996). pp. 108
- 109.
16
Nichols, p. 122.
17
For a time, UPS’s tagline was “Synchronized Commerce.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_ZSLt-HvQ
18
The elaborate precision of synchronized watches is wonderfully taken on by Peter
Sellers in A Shot in the Dark (Edwards, 1964).
19
http://www.whatisthematrix.com/cmp/sfx_index.html 5/6/99
20
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. By Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Haberjam, (University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 1986). pp. 1 - 3. This is the
founding thesis of the establishment of cinema by Deleuze’s in his study
21
Deleuze, p. 2.
22
Rosen, p. 20.
23
Rosen, p. 21.
24
Bradley, Jeff, “The Flash,” ESPN The Magazine, vol. 5, no. 11. May 27, 2002
25
Derrida, Jacques. “From General to Restricted Economy: A Hegelianism without
Reserve,” in Writing and Difference. Trans. By Alan Bass, (University of Chicago:
Chicago, 1978). Pp. 251 – 278. More precisely, Derrida is elaborating a relation between
Bataille and Hegel. He is implying a third term that arises in excess of the
lordship/servility binary – sovereignty. For Derrida, sovereignty elides the death-drive
function of lordship, partly through the release of a drive towards meaning.
26
Derrida, p. 254.
27
Derrida p. 256.
28
Derrida, p. 256
29
For examples of the MIW visit Levin’s site here. http://www.tmema.org/mis/
30
http://www.flong.com/projects/scrapple/
31
http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=13746
32
Miranda July, It Chooses You. (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2001) p. 57.
33
ibid, pp. 160-161.
34
ibid, p. 160.

136

In these pages I have tried to describe virtuality as a cultural competency that can
be broken down and synthesized by analyzing how in virtuality space, time and
subjectivity are treated. In each instance, I contend, viewers/perceivers/audiences search
for patterns osciallating from minute poetics and cues within texts to posing those cues
against the text as whole while accessing the viewer’s prior experience. My argument is
that virtual worlds are cued to be perceived as composed of fine, discrete bits that can be
manipulated with incredible dexterity by technogies and media, and that furthermore,
virtuality is an essentially self reflexive modality implicitly and explicitly conjuring
concepts about the workings of media and representation in ways vital to virtuality’s
shape.
When I have described virtuality, I have tended to pose analyses of popular film
or the occasional modernist work against analyses of mass media such as mainstream
news articles. That is due, in part, to my desire to describe virtuality against the
competencies of fiction and nonfiction and to suggest that virtuality can be invoked in
both fictive and nonfictive contexts, and should be recognized as working like those other
cultural competencies. I am also keen to present virtruality as a popular form, one that is
produced and honed through shared convention. As we read and use the competency it
becomes “second nature,” and the currency of the virtual becomes more fluid and
circulatory.
To be sure virtuality, with its emphases on interactivity, feedback and simulation
stresses the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction. My aim has been to directly address and
define the discourse of virtuality as it is developed through texts both fictional and
nonfictional, blurring the boundaries of traditional media forms. One primary focus in the

137

dissertation is on extratextual appeals to the cultural understanding of technologies that
are made within works that use an aesthetic of virtuality. We tend to narrativize the
histories of media, and the cultural undeprninngs of media’s uses are central to the ways
that virtuality is constructed. That is, much of the groundwork for the development of
virtuality as a mode of comprehension often explicitly points away from denotative
meanings about representation to metanarratives about media such as allegories about
the production and efficacy of representation and technology. And, media are often
explicitly or implictly tested as to whether they can faithfully return a substitute of reality.
A special terrain of virtuality in this regard relates to the discourse’s appeal to the
potentiality and function of representational/recording technologies to faithfully produce
a “world.” One question that is often in the background when entertaining virtuality is
“Can a supplemental, but material world be produced through representations?”
And further, when something is virtual that is not to say that it does not have a
material effect. Virtuality is itself an effect – a product – of processes of reading. Just as
it would be incorrect to say that fiction and nonfiction are entirely divorced both
materially and conceptually – there is always at least the trace of fiction and nonfiction
within the other mode --, virtuality does not operate in a space parallel to the real. Instead
cues of the virtual are perceived across contexts in computer games, computational art,
science fiction and print journalism, for instance. The stakes in this writing have to do
with self-consciously recognizing the rhetorical quality of media and the production of
values and authority in the virtual mode and understanding where attitudes about media
and the world are shaped.

138

At the conclusion of the 2004-2009 series of Battlestar Galactica, the surviving
members of a kind of space convoy settle on a planet meant to represent our own earth
roughly 200,000 years ago. The planet is figured as healthy, green and unsullied by urban
centers or really human civilization of any kind. The human population arrived on this
Edenous planet following a war that wiped out most of humanity, leaving about 40,000
survivors. And, they came via rocket ships that can travel at the speed of light and with
the kinds of clothing, food, furniture, media and accessories that only industrial and post-
industrial production processes can provide. When contemplating settlement on this new
planet, the survivors agree to destroy their spacecraft by sending them unmanned on a
course into the heart of the sun. They think that by doing this, they can wipe the slate
clean of the technological innovations that lead to the conditions of their own annihilation.
The narrative conceit attempts to smooth over the ostensibly contradictory nature of
knowledge and bliss. By destroying the accouterments of post-industrial society, the
group intends to “forget” the system and all the trappings that led them to nearly destroy
themselves. They want simply to start over. And, for that group, starting over means
forgetting technology and the mindset required to produce, maintain and accommodate
the existence of such. Of course, one can’t simply forget innovations or, as is said, you
can’t unring a bell.
Still, the desire to start anew is a perfect fantasy for an age that feels overwhelmed
in futility, debt and corruption. Eradicating rampant inequities is one of the primary
promises of a virtual context. It sometimes feels as though the system is gamed and its
outcome is inevitable, but if we can produce a supplemental world that has material effect,
perhaps we can fix nature or get back to an originary state of bliss. This is also the basic

139

conceit of the celebrated conclusion of The Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). In the film (based
on the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name), the primary character(s), Tyler Durden,
has destroyed the world’s banking system and wiped out the ledgers that represent every
person’s assets and debts. The concept here is that banks control ledgers, which
manipulate money as discrete electronic bits, but that such manipulation is synthetic,
corrupt and corrupting. The ledgers don’t reflect reality; rather they impose it, and while
existing virtually, the banking system produces (of course) real and damaging effects.
The utility of money is compared here to an unfair game, where more harm is done to the
majority of players who are shut out from manipulating the rules. Oppositional practice is
excluded due to the pervasiveness of the system. One can’t simply walk away, since
society is steeped in capitalism. So, the most subversive act is not to simply stop playing.
Rather, it is to throw the pieces in the air -- to create chaos, and to restart. The fantasy of
“wiping the slate clean” is a popular theme amongst sci-fi and action films. In the section
on shapeshifting, I had mentioned how blank and chaotic mindsets are positioned as
especially apt to effective functioning within a virtual context. One must forget the
complexity of the world in order to access it more deeply and to reach its natural state.
But, as Normal Klein points out so well, even this process is scripted. We are cued to
momentarily recognize fissures, which themselves are revealed to be another surface,
more information and endless deferral of access to power.
We appear steeped in virtuality, where behind every pattern lurks another pattern
waiting to be perceived, and if one does recognize power even for an instant, what can
one really do to halt the juggernaut of history and the economy? Post-structuralist
theories, such as Foucaultian discourse, that question the primacy of ideology and the

140

power of human agency appear to be unclear on the question of determining factors. For
instance, Donna Harraway states in Primate Visions that technological determinism is not
so easily considered pejorative when considered in light of a discursive practice that
defines inorganic proliferation as a general principle. And, likewise cultural practices are
often viewed as inevitably proliferating and ultimately uncontrollable. Perhaps one
answer is to access the “inevitable” movement of discourse, recognizing and using the
power of proliferation in the name of change -- to develop pathways and insights, to
create new connections and to break inculcating habits.
This would seem to be an area where post-structuralist theory and neuroscience
might overlap. In recent years, the concept of neuroplasticity has been used to challenge
some traditional models of brain development that suggest the level and type of brain
functions in adults is essentially static. Instead, neuroscience has shown that the brain
continues to develop neural pathways throughout life. The kinds of connections and
thresholds of change recognized by the science complement discursive theories that detail
changes in the world through similarly developing circulations, connections, assemblages
and accretion.
For decades, the prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain
is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the
time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have. Yes, it can
create (and lose) synapses, the connections between neurons that encode
memories and learning. And it can suffer injury and degeneration. But this view
held that if genes and development dictate that one cluster of neurons will process
signals from the eye and another cluster will move the fingers of the right hand,
then they'll do that and nothing else until the day you die. There was good reason
for lavishly illustrated brain books to show the function, size and location of the
brain's structures in permanent ink.
1

Instead, theories of neuroplasticity suppose that the brain can physically change
when receiving different sorts of stimuli. That is, physical activity, such as practicing a

141

musical instrument regularly, can and will alter the functions of the brain, in a way
similar to the way that exercise affects and builds up muscles. Areas of the brain are
activated and find greater use the more they are used. In short the brain will become more
accommodating to performing activities that are routinely performed. This may begin to
account for the development of virtuality itself. Isn’t it like all competencies developed
through repetition and experience? We tend to perceive what we expect to perceive.
Could the perception of large forms be our mind’s way of defaulting to the most
comfortable and developed parts of our minds, not merely metaphorically, but quite
literally? This is the other side to the development of modes of thinking. There is always
the need to continue expanding the connection to draw concepts out, to fight against the
stasis of the concretization of an idea. As some neuroscientists argue, cultivating thoughts
can in themselves lead to material changes in the brain and its operations.
As scientists probe the limits of neuroplasticity, they are finding that mind
sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world. The brain can
change as a result of the thoughts we think... This has important implications for
health: something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought can affect the very stuff
of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can treat mental illness or,
perhaps, lead to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion. It may even dial
up the supposedly immovable happiness set point.
2

It is in this spirit that avant-garde approaches to the production of meanings and
aesthetics are sorely missed. In the post-industrial context, with a lack of effective
oppositional options, the power of the avant-garde has been drained. Shocks to the
system are felt much more rarely and they tend to last for much shorter time than in the
days of, for instance, Dadaism or Italian neorealist film. One of the effects of the
proliferation and globalization of media aesthetics and communications technologies is
that people are quite savvy with the plasticity of the arts. Pointing out the relations

142

between popular representations and powerful institutions does not offer insight into the
developments of culture in lasting ways. If we look at digital media in particular, we can
hardly name political practices in art that have the kinds of revelatory illuminating effect
associated with high modernist art movements. Groups like The Yes Men, with their
poetic terrorist aesthetics and corporate parody or Anonymous with their distributed
denial of service attacks and publishing of emails and addresses may be the closest thing
we have to exposing the mechanisms of power online.
This is perhaps what makes the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, the first and current
poet laureate at MoMA, such a fascinating study in the current climate. Goldsmith is
probably best known for performing two related but different kinds of activities,
uncreative writing and maintaining the website UbuWeb. I was able to present Goldsmith
in San Francisco as part of the KinoTek program. There he read from his newest
collection of transcriptions titled Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The book
consists solely of transcriptions from mass media broadcasts that were made during,
about or in reference to disastrous events that took place in the United States. These
include the assassination of JFK, the Challenger accident, the shooting of Ronald Reagan
and so forth. Goldsmith’s method is to transcribe broadcasts in their entirety, including
broadcasters “uhs,” “ums,” commercial breaks, traffic announcements, etc. He then reads
these transcriptions live, performing them precisely. His work thereby questions the
practice of writing itself. As he says, he is against the very notion of creativity and
originality, thereby attacking two of the primary economies of artistic and written
practice. Still, he re-mobilizes the words he records towards a different purpose than was
originally intended, which also has the effect of directing attention to the self-conscious

143

artifice of the work and the importance of context. His transcriptions reveal the way the
media can and cannot accommodate a fully realized representation of the events in
question, how they equally fail and succeed to produce a supplementary world with
material effects.
Goldsmith’s UbuWeb is a repository for primarily modernist poetry, broadcasts,
music and film. Founded in 1996, the website was for a short time somewhat scandalous
due to Goldsmith’s willingness to publish anything that he deemed fit to be experienced.
Rare and out of print works would pop up on the site causing purists and rights holders
consternation due to the website’s nontraditional mode of presentation – on the internet!
– and lack of rights clearance for the works therein. But, you can find most anything from
the modernist avant-garde there, “unreadable books by Gertrude Stein, the unwatchable
films by Andy Warhol, and the unplayable compositions by Erik Satie-samplings of
which are all available on UbuWeb.”
3
And, as Goldsmith has reveals, simply providing
information is a “creative” uncreative act. Flaunting the most mundane activities of
sharing or copying, two of the mainstays of digital culture, can have both illuminating
and controversial effects.
When I asked Goldsmith to work with me, I wanted him to provide a piece of
writing to accompany the animated film work of visual artist Kota Ezawa. Ezawa is
probably best known for a transcription based video piece titled The Simpson Verdict. An
excerpt of it can be seen at UbuWeb. It consists of the verdict of the Simpson trial being
read and an animated version of the telecast that was aired during that reading in 1995.
For his piece, Goldsmith provided me with a poem titled “Ronald Reagan.” It is a
transcript. He told me that I can publish it. I wasn’t sure how to best work with him, as

144

we had been commissioning original pieces of writing for the KinoTek project overall.
But, Goldsmith doesn’t always produce readable writing. He has made books such as
Day, which consists of a transcription of an issue of the New York Times word-for-word
and Fidget, in which he recorded in writing every movement he made with his body over
a period of thirteen hours. Dealing with him made me realize the rigidity of the rules I
had produced for presenting new “original” work. More basically, I was confronted with
the question, “What is ‘original?’” When he sent me his piece, he wrote:
Here is a new piece for you to publish, a corollary to Seven American Deaths and
Disasters, simply entitled "Ronald Reagan" It's new -- I wrote it for this project --
and has never been published anywhere.

When I read the piece I realized that, as expected, I had received a transcript. In what
sense was it “new?” Had he just never transcribed it before? Why did it matter? And,
when I read the piece, I found it utterly fascinating to conjecture what the transcript
meant, where it came from, how it reflected the aftermath of the shooting of Ronald
Reagan. (I publish the entirety of the transcript as poem here.)
4

What I appreciate about Goldsmith’s work is that it reflects a self-conscious
awareness of how we use communication. This is done simply and effectively through
the simple reiteration of what’s already been used in order to renew our perception of
such practices. Isn’t this the purpose of poetry generally? To illuminate and to renew the
way we use and produce language? But, where Goldsmith’s poems differ from
mainstream poetic form is in their explicit cues to readers to consider the field of poetry
at large. His transcriptions aim towards reinvigorating our understanding not just the uses
of writing and representations, and the supporting mechanisms of authorship and

145

creativity. In short, Goldsmith reveals the ossified ways our shared fallback methods for
the reflection on language itself.
Newness in the typical sense – as creativity as originality – in this regard is
rendered stale. And, thinking about the new in that way can give us insight into the
development of the virtual as a competency. For instance, it could be argued that the
shock of the new in virtuality perhaps reached its height and exhaustion in the
presentation of The Matrix in 1999. Since then, virtuality has molarized into a
competency that is really a sort of cultural staple. The fervor around ideas such as avatars,
cybernetics, telepresence, collective intelligence and simulation that was gearing up in
the late 1980s and found evangelists aplenty in the 1990s has given way to a wariness of
the corporatization of digital technology and bounded rules based “discovery.” The work
that Goldsmith has been working steadily towards on UbuWeb is dwarfed by the
gargantuan Google Books project, for instance that aims to digitize every book ever
printed. But, in that provision of access to anyone who has internet, we also see issues of
gatekeeping and the control of a vast database of knowledge for the primary purpose of
financial gain. Still, by recognizing and rehearsing the tropes of the form, we can
defamiliarize our relationship to the virtual.
Perhaps we have come to this point because as sociologist Anthony Giddens
argues the current social moment presents the radicalization of modernity and its
consequences. One of those primary consequences is the unhinging of cultural practice
from localized traditions. Globalization of culture has introduced a nascent framework for
understanding ourselves and each other, and in this speedy context cultural competencies
are wide in both reach and influence. Further, their uses and possibilities for shock and

146

change are exhausted quickly. Media technologies and their imaginary present an
important matrix of knowledge that is leveraged in the use of virtuality. My hope is to
illuminate how the virtual is understood and used, pointing a way towards reinvesting
media with the wonder, access and power that it can in its best moments provide.

1
“The Brain: How The Brain Rewires Itself,” By Sharon Begley February 19, 2007.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438-3,00.html p. 1.
2
ibid., p. 3.
3
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/artforum.html
4
Ronald Reagan
Green. Coming out.
Horsepower, Shaddick.
Advise, we’ve had shots fired. Shots fired. There are some injuries, uh, lay one on.
Parr, Shaddick. Stagecoach, Shaddick.
Rawhide is okay, Follow-up. Rawhide is okay.
Halfback, roger.
You wanna go to the hospital or back to the White House?
We’re going right... we’re going to Crown.
Okay
Back to the White House. Back to the White House. Rawhide is okay.
Halfback, Crown.
Halfback, Halfback, Crown.
Crown, Halfback.
Halfback, Crown. We have Muratti requesting a status report on Rawhide.
Tell him to stay off the air for now. Rawhide’s alright. Thank you so much. Gordon,
Unrue. Gordon, Gordon, Unrue.
Go ahead. Gordon. Gordon, Unrue.
Go ahead, Drew. Roger. We want to go to the emergency room of George
Washington. That’s a roger.
Go to George Washington fast. Roger. Sergeant Bell, Gordon. Parr, Shaddick. Parr,
Shaddick.

147

Shaddick, Parr. George Washington. Roger. Get an ambulance, I mean get the, um,
stretcher out there. Horsepower, Shaddick. You copy, GW? Correct. We’ve made the call.
Horsepower, Horsepower.
Let’s hustle.
This is Horsepower. Go ahead.
Connecticut Avenue en route Central Cell Block.
Ah, this is Horsepower. You’re terribly broken. I just caught the tail end. Say again?
Horsepower this is
Agent, Horsepower. Go ahead.
Roger. I have suspect in custody. I’m in an MPD vehicle, heading for, taking him to
Central Cell Block. Can I get support please?
Okay, let’s send some agents up there to help.
Horsepower, Shaddick. Shaddick from... Halfback.
Horsepower, we’re on... en route to the location. Horsepower, Halfback. We have an
arrival at GW. Confirm, roger.
Would you, uh, contact WFO or some other divisions and get additional people sent
to this location.
Roger that. Horsepower... suspect in custody at Central Cell... repeat it.
Be advised I have suspect in custody in an MPD vehicle arriving at Central Cell
Block. Taking him to central booking and, copy?
Repeat it one last time, over.
Green, Hilton security room.
Go ahead. Hilton security room from Green. Go ahead
This is the security room. When you have a chance, give us a call down here.
Roger. Go ahead. Go ahead, Brown. Go ahead, Brown. Horsepower, Fencing Master
limo.
Wanko, Varey.
Wanko, Varey.
Go ahead, Varey
Where you at, ahh, Bob?

148

Over by the door in the front.
Alright.
You want me to meet you at the parkway there, where you come out in the street.
Negative, meet me at the first door here, uh, Go ahead. What’s your location?
Sullivan, Campbell. Come on out. Campbell, please.
Coming.
Horsepower from Opfer.
Station calling Horsepower.
Roger. We’re gonna leave with Rainbow and go to that location.
Station calling Horsepower, repeat please.
Horsepower this is Opfer. We’re going to go to that location with Rainbow.
Roger, George
Crown and Horsepower, Rainbow trail. Depart Crown en route local stop.
Horsepower copy, Rainbow trail.
Horsepower from Opfer.
Opfer,
Roger, if you have any contact at this next location tell them we’re coming in the
22nd Street entrance.
Roger, 22nd Street. Break. Halfback, Halfback, Horsepower.
Horsepower, Halfback.
Roger, be advised Rainbow is coming to your location at the 22nd Street entrance.
Can you make sure she gets in?
Roger. Burns you copy?
Crown and Horsepower from Rainbow trail, Rainbow arrive local stop.
Roger.
Green
Break
Halfback, Horsepower.
Horsepower, Halfback.
Roger, could you get a hold of Shaddick or Parr and have them two-two Horsepower?

149

Roger. Break. Shaddick or Parr you copy two-two Horsepower? Roger. Two-two
Horsepower.
150
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Asset Metadata

Creator Uyehara, Sean (author)

Core Title Virtual competencies and film

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 04/16/2013

Defense Date 03/25/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,curation,digital media,film,film festival,immersion,installation art,Interactive Media,multimedia,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,seriality,shapeshifting,synchronization,ubiquity,virtual

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email s.uyehara@gmail.com,suyehara@sffs.org

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-236317

Unique identifier UC11293798

Identifier etd-UyeharaSea-1551.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-236317 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-UyeharaSea-1551.pdf

Dmrecord 236317

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Uyehara, Sean

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA