A New “Situation”: Drifting in Virtual Reality

I am interested in the emergence–or at least consummation–of immersive virtual reality as a “site” of artistic production in the early 1990’s. While artists have been working with VR since the late 1970’s, the “site” of virtual reality (is it a medium?) has been more widely associated with its technocratic, informational, and spectacular uses: military simulation, advanced hypervisual surgical techniques, and various pacified (non-introspective) forms of individual, immobilized pleasure. In all of these uses VR is clearly assimilated to a much older administrative mediation of social relationships through images, or, speaking more generally, a (nineteenth-century) reconfiguration of bodily, local, and kinship-based relationships into the “modern” form of deterritorialized, vision-based relationships that raise “reading” people as “types” to a general social imperative for all classes, and which reconceptualizes pleasure as quasi-individuated looking: mass printing, hot air balloons, the panorama, diorama, cyclorama, “humbug” side-shows, world’s fairs, voyeuristic Bowery “museums”, art museums, touristic sight-seeing, photography, stereoscopes, cinema, television, and GUI-mediated computer software and net navigation. In many instances VR is presented as an intensified form of this social alienation, isolating people and duping them into believing that simulated environments are “real” environments and avatars are “real” people. But, following Debord, we should reject this idealist dichotomy between “real” and “unreal” aspects of the society of spectacle: in the ontological sense, they are all real. It would be more useful to position VR within Debord’s problematization of reality: the spectacle is simply the unreality of what we take as the real (capital-administered and image-mediated human relationships), a kind of limit point or surface wavering between vision and the unseen (perhaps “virtuality” as Guattari’s imminent possiblity, rather than any particular digital interface). Among other things, Situationist strategies aimed to disrupt the administered, unilateral flow of images (a condition the Internet may still avoid?) and particular sites of visual consumption (planned urban space), to create temporary spaces of altered human relationships through 1) altering the unilateral, mystifying flow of images (appropriation, detournement) and 2) raising the question of power relations, pleasure, and structural disruption (essentially carnival, in its revolutionary sense). Unfortunately, Situationism is among the least understood elements of the 1960’s, and Debord’s texts, in particular, often are presented as just some kind of critique of images rather than the administrated mediation of human relationships by images.

In the next days, I hope to do a series of entries on some VR-based art and the performance of various loosely “Situationist” strategies in their work.

Media Heads Meet With Rove To Coordinate Campaign Strategy

From the Assimilated Press.

“Hilton Head Island, South Carolina – Executives from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN & Fox met with White House Political Adviser Karl Rove in this luxurious resort community to discuss how they can best coordinate their efforts for the upcoming campaign in November. The first day of discussions focused on determining a set of themes upon which the fall campaign will be based. It was decided that the primary themes would be “strong leadership” and “staying the course.” Rove also received assurances from the assembled network executives that they would televise a series of weekly prime time addresses from President Bush leading up to election day that would serve to emphasize these themes. They also promised Rove that their broadcast and cable news operations would continue to maintain their current ten-to-one proportion of Republican to Democratic commentators throughout the entire election cycle.

On the second day of meetings, they were joined by Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas for the purpose of exploring the negative impact of a high minority turnout and how best to distinguish between legitimate Republican ballots and illegitimate Democratic ballots. No decision was reached but Scalia assured everyone present that if a problem arose it could be dealt with before the votes were counted.

The third day of planning saw the arrival of a large contingent of high level executives from the Diebold Corporation. Thomas Swidarski, CEO of Diebold, briefed the attendees on Diebold’s latest paperless recount-proof technology that uses Microsoft’s Windows Operating System as a platform. At the end of his presentation, he received a standing ovation and Karl Rove’s personal word that he would have the President send to Congress, early next year, legislation that would make Diebold voting machines mandatory in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

On the final day of the conference, a private Boeing 767 arrived on the Island carrying a full load of Halliburton executives. They spent the day finalizing details on no-bid contracts that are scheduled to be awarded after the November elections. Later in the evening, after all the work was done, all of the participants were treated to a concert by Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith before heading home secure in the knowledge that the elections would go exactly as planned.

Publisher’s note: All of the meetings at Hilton Head Island were behind closed doors and off the record. No participants consented to be quoted and cameras were banned from the hotel lobby. However, Assimilated Press was able to talk to a number of hotel employees and lower ranking officials who provided us with the information that is in this story. We have guaranteed their anonymity to protect them from reprisals and dismissal.”

Sure it’s satire. I guess…

Benjamin Franklin and Colonial American Race Relations

Found this Ben Franklin quote as I was doing reading:

Why should the Palatine boors [the Germans] be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will soon be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.

Which leads me to one remark: That the number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawney. And in Europe the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only being excepted, who with the English make up the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers increased. While we are scouring our planet by clearing America of woods, and so making our side of the planet reflect a brighter light to the inhabitants of Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red.”
I find this quote interesting for a number of reasons. Franklin’s hatred of Germans and Scots-Irish people is well-known, but it is surprising to see how deeply ingrained in American history this kind of world-view is. What I also think is remarkable is the last sentence–is he referring to Indians [red] as lovely? Or does he mean pink-cheeked whites?

It seems to me that he is speaking about Indians–which catches us off guard today. It is hard to grasp the complexities of colonial society, wherein Franklin could could designate the French (“swarthy”) as racially different and relatively undesirable while referring to American Indians as “lovely.”

Not something you hear everyday, that’s for sure.

Bucky, the Invisible Man

I was skimming through indianz.com this morning and came across something surprising: “cop killer” Bucky Phillips is Seneca. What I found surprising was that Bucky’s indigenous status was never mentioned in the mainstream coverage of the manhunt. Perhaps the media was being sensitive, fearing that the image of an “Indian” alluding the government in a remarkable 5-month run (a la Geronimo) through upstate New York would prompt anti-Indian sentiment. Or, more likely, they just didn’t know or care: with his thick mustache he didn’t look Indian enough for American visual culture. In the bizarre and contradictory collective American mind, he would signify a “fake Indian” the way Central American illegals signify “foreign Indians.”

According to postings on indianz.com discussion boards, the self-identified Seneca posters say Bucky was likely finding refuge with sympthetic Seneca people, on and off the three Seneca reservations. It was not so much that they like Bucky, but that they dislike (for a variety of long-standing reasons) the state police (who have no jurisdiction on federal reservations, but have been used in the past any way). Some believed the reward offered for Bucky was only offered to motivate impoverished tribal members to turn him in. Didn’t work.

Now, I am not defending Bucky and neither were the posters at indianz.com. From all accounts he is a miserable human being. But regardless, the issue at stake is the lost opportunity to discuss what leads someone like Bucky down his road of life-long crime. The lost opportunity to discuss the vexed relationship between the six Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations and New York (and Canada), which was the background to this case. Instead, the implication from the coverage was that “Bucky” was just some deer-hunting, camo-hat and thick-mustache wearin’ “hillbilly.” This is American code for a person of inferior moral status, prone to violence and irrationality on a grand scale.

Some might argue that most Americans are wholly ignorant of Native issues because the issues are unrelated to what counts as the “most important” news. But here was a perfect opportunity to incorporate some of those issues into the coverage of the sensationalized 5-month manhunt. The fact that it was totally overlooked is just more evidence that a variety of other forces keep these issues from being broached. And, even if there was a desire to protect Seneca people from bounty-hunting vigilantes during the course of the hunt, the opportunity still stands. But I will bet that Bucky will remain, like most lower-class criminals, a fully dehumanized caricature rather than a complex human whose behavior is largely an adaptation to social conditions.

What was Bucky thinking when he fired at the gun-toting representatives of the colonial state? What is the relationship between being an indigenous person within a settler colony and the experiences that clearly turned Bucky into a bitterly anti-social person, a lifelong criminal with an acknowledged vendetta against the police?

We all knew Bucky was invisible for 5-months, evading the police. But he remains invisible–because we refuse to look him in the eye, and prefer to have him hustled away in the back of a squaking police car rather than have to deal with his sheer physical presence or the sound of his voice.

The unwritten story for the past five months is this: Bucky Phillips was invisible because America refused to look at him, not because he could hide in the woods.

Good News Source for Israeli Invasion of Lebanon and Global Peacemaking

Check out “The-Flashlightnet” for well-written updates on the Israeli invasion. For those arguing against the global war, the posts provide a useful perspective. It also includes updated information on Christian and other peacemakers trying to mitigate the effects of war.

Also, for illuminating first-person accounts of present-day Iraq and other reflections on institutionalzed violence, check out Peace Talk.

Indigenous Rights and Liberalism

First, I apologize for my lack of posts over the last couple of weeks–it has been hectic to say the least, and I do not have steady Internet access.

However, I wanted to point your attention to a series of fascinating editorials in Indian Country Today. They explore some of the various ways in which canonical Western political philosophers have conceived of indigenous rights (and related issues). They also make the extraordinary assertion that “indigenous rights fare better…in the medieval philosophical tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas than they do with the early moderns like John Locke, who inspired the American Declaration of Independence.“

I highly recommend reading through these editorials, as well as the rest of the paper. It’s some of the best writing on North American politics you’re going to find, as well as the best source for the broader global politics of indigeneity.

We understand. After all, we are from the land of chocolate.

Man, there is chocolate, candy, and deserts all over Berlin. MUCH MORE SO than in New York. What is the obesity rate in Germany? Does it come close to the US?

I would like to read more about this. How can a country like Germany, which is basically built on beer and sugar, not be outrageously unhealthy? Is it a positive attitude exercise and the body in general (free body culture!)?

When I am in New York, it seems like people are very overweight but they appear to be eating semi-healthy food, or at least not beer and sugar.

We Germans are not all smiles and sunshine…

Note to readers–I am not getting lazy with my blogging but over the next few weeks I am in Berlin and haven’t determined a clear schedule of Internet access. Thanks to those who have commented and cited my blog on their blogs. I plan on keeping up with my posts and responses to comments after things settle down in the coming days.

Auf Wiedersehen!

Well I’m glad they took care of that…

“A super computer, considered one of the most powerful in Europe, has been given a boost in its brain power for the UK’s fight against bird flu. Blue C, based at Swansea University, has been made 20% [yes, 20%!!] more powerful so it can work out more quickly the best way to tackle a possible disease outbreak…By modelling bird flight patterns, experts hope the machine will work out how best to confine the disease, through culls and quarantines, should more birds carrying the disease migrate to the UK in future.”

“IBM-made Blue C, the size of a tennis court, is derived from Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion.”

Your move, mother nature.

Read the rest here.

American Teenagers: “We Don’t Believe in Politics”

“We believe the world will continue to get worse but that our lives will continue to get better.” – an American teenager

This is a quote from a fascinating essay written by a high schooler in Virginia. I am not sure what to make of it—which is very typical of how I, a mid-20-something, often feel about people a few years younger than myself. Sometimes I find it amazing that when I was in middle school and high school people here in the US still listened to Nirvana, there was no global war, and someone as articulate as Bill Clinton was president. This was before the rise of hardcore “retro” culture (I know some will debate me on when retro culture emerged–I would say, at least, there has been a categorically-different acceleration of retro culture since 2001), the global war, and a person seemingly without any of the qualities of a traditional leader being twice elected president of the US. This was also the brief period between the “simulated” war (Desert Storm) and the global war, that is, in the happy time before even the earth beneath our feet became endangered by the abstract, diffuse forces of global warming– (itself becoming a media trope for the uncontrollable destruction of global capitalist development, with the understated implication that even if the USA DID SOMETHING about global warming it wouldn’t matter because India and China would just plow right ahead.)

However, people under the age of twenty probably do not remember this time at all. For them, Pearl Jam has always been a crappy, backwards looking band–I remember when Vitalogy seemed like the cutting-edge! But more seriously, people who are high school seniors–like the author of the linked essay–were not mature at the time of 9/11. Their entire metamorphosis into adulthood has occurred within this environment of global war, popular discussions of global catastrophe (especially pandemics and, over the last couple of years, the “tipping point” of global warming), and the emergence of what I tend to think of as Hardt and Negri’s “Empire”: a global network of geo-political formations (esp. the WTO and G8, but also the North American super-state created by NAFTA) that exceed the political-economic boundaries of the nation-state, roughly ranked with information economies on top, then industrial, and then agricultural/tourist economies. When NAFTA first went into effect, there was still the (misguided) hope that the US would somehow retain its role as an industrial and agricultural economy–it’s clear no one really believes this any more. In the cultural sphere, grunge music walked the line between the time when America still had a flannel-wearing, white working class and the rise of transnational industrial and agricultural servitude and migrant labor. In 1994, NAFTA went into effect–and Kurt Cobain killed himself, with warm flannel and overworked jeans being totally assimilated into the cold sphere of America’s empty signs, i.e. fashion and retro (simulacra).

It is within this American context that I read statements like “We don’t believe in politics.” It is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, in so much as politics is rooted in Aristotle’s conception of how to best organize and manage a city-state. There is nothing further from a city-state than Empire, and while for people my age who came to maturity in the booming nationalism of the 90’s tech boom the nation-state and traditional politics (to me Bill Clinton is the last politician, so to speak) seemed operative, but people under the age of 20 apparently do not remember this era.

The essay continues:

“We don’t believe that protests or the media can create change. In short, today’s teens have given up on traditional ways to participate in politics.“

“What do we believe in? We believe in technology, that newer, cleaner machines will help save the environment. We believe in education, and that investing in college will help us find better-paying jobs–which we’ll need because we sure don’t place our trust in Social Security. We believe that, as we are less racist and sexist than our parents, so too our children will be less biased than we are. We believe the world will continue to get worse but that our lives will continue to get better. We believe, in an abstract way, in justice, peace and freedom, but we mostly fail to see our connection to those ideals. Teenagers today aren’t “apathetic”–most of us just don’t see the point of politics.“

There is a lot that can be said about this essay. I would love to hear someone else’s opinions about it.

This last paragraph is disturbing to me because it suggests being “stuck,” so to speak. What I mean is that 1) it is clear to most young people that established democratic political strategies are completely compromised, and 2) there isn’t an alternative. All that is currently available to young people is the pie-in-the-sky hope that “technology”–itself a reification of a variety of processes and developments that are inseparable from the political sphere itself–will stop the looming world disaster of global warming, that college will assure a more stable life (which, as recent graduates have found, is definitely not the case), and, most paradoxically, that even though “the world” will continue to get worse, “our” lives will continue to get better (a total, reactionary refusal of the old modernist dialectic between Self and Other).

Out of these incoherent beliefs emerges less a particular consciousness or a generational “experience” than a collection of singular expressions of fear and, I believe, an isolation that marks off the individual and her “good life” from the general good life of the world to which she is (unconsciously) bound. There is no feeling of responsibility to an other, seemingly no feeling that one’s own happiness is bound up with the person on the street–rather, the essay expresses the feeling that although “the world” might well be going to hell in a handbasket, “we” (always an almost self-conscious recoding of “the privileged”) will still be better off. To me, this kind of statement always rings hollow: it comes off more like bravado in the face of uncertainty than any expression of sustainable, heartfelt belief.

This feeling of being unbound from a community and “the world” is probably the major theme of the essay, and the basic reason that politics seems to have no point. Combined with the sadness in the writing, and the fearfulness beneath the surface of its many assertions, it seems evident that for these high schoolers a feeling of radical unboundedness is a way of expressing a sense of indescribable confinement.

To be unbound–what does that mean?

The essay suggests a youth with no space to explore, to think, to develop relationships that may be entirely stupid but also entirely fruitful. This isn’t just romanticism but, truly, social and ethical connections are space, and to assert the absence of connection to either “the world” or to “ideals” is another way of expressing a kind of metaphysical suffocation. The room without walls is a debilitating schizophrenia–not the productive “new-connections-making” schizophrenia of D&G, but a total “unplugging” from the world and consequent loss of means through which one establishes identities.

But, I struggle in reading this essay–as I said before, for me its overarching message is one of alterity. I do not feel this way, and I DEFINITELY did not feel that way when I was 17 or 18. This attitude of floating detachment is, in most way, wholly other to me.

For those of us from a different “world,” so to speak, we must approach this generation with a difficult combination of openness and distance. We must remember we were not like them, the generation whose consciousness is molded by catastrophist war and rhetoric.

The most dangerous response to this teenager’s essay, I fear, will be the most common one: “Oh, it’s always been like that.”

For those of us who are older, we must maintain the truth.

In short, we must maintain that, on the contrary, it hasn’t always been this way–and it needn’t be this way.