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Digital Delirium Introduction (Part 3)
Media Delirium
In the 90s, there is no medium, and there certainly is no message. We're living in the eclipse of the mass media. And why? Because a medium of communication implies reciprocity, exchange and a minimal degree of interaction. Mass media have never been about reciprocity, exchange, interaction, or even communication. They replace reciprocity with false simulation, exchange with the tyranny of information overload producing a numbed culture that shuts down for self-protection, interaction with a dense operational network subsituting polls and focus groups and high-intensity marketing warfare for genuine human solidarity, data for communication, and speed for meaning.
In the modern era, we were specialists, trapped in private identities. In the hypermodern era, identity goes public. It gets netted and webbed and digitally nested. Today, the hyperreal body, the hypermedia body, travels in exactly the way that McLuhan predicted: lighter than an astronaut, but at an accelerated speed. The Web is the digital mirror that reflects back to our nomadic bodies its fate as it is externalized in a world of artificial intelligence, recombinant genes, and spliced data streams. As the spectre that haunts the vanishing of mass media, the Web is our privileged window onto the 3d millennium.
A dream of pure operationality - transparent, fluid, circulating, a smooth semiurgy of data flows, digital reality is haunted by its own approaching catastrophe. Digital reality wants to impose the positive law of the Code, but human reality will not be denied. Human reality always contains a hidden, but powerful, reflex towards the rejection of the Code. A violent and primitive impulse of rejection that works less by open refusal than by excess, parody, and delirious intensity.
Digital Futures, Slow Suicide, 30 Cyber-Days in San Francisco, Net Politics, Memetic Flesh and the Global Algorithm: these are natural antibodies secreted by the cyber-body as ways of protecting itself against the sterility of dead digital codes. And ironically, digital reality requires this moment of excess for its very survival. But, as in ancient myth, by absorbing the anti-codes of Net reality, by drinking deeply of this song of slow suicide and delirious speed, digital reality only hastens its own disappearance.
Web Delirium
Severed Nets
There is another Net world: less visible, hidden from easy access, spiralling outwards in the digital archipelago like floating webs of glimmering vectors. Severed nets, populated by a global community of experimental media artists, techno-theorists, net activists, and android writers. Take a voyage on the free side of the Web, and you might just run across some of these wanderers. Like yesterday, when we received a cryptic note from Shu Lea Cheang asking for the URL for Taiwan Data Heaven, saying that it might provide a thread to memories of a lost homeland. When we wrote back saying that Taiwan Data Heaven was cyber-fiction, she replied: "maybe not." And gave us a thread of her own to Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker, a web site linking Tokyo, Okinawa, and the Internet in a thousand poles of repressed memory.
okinawa project
artist in residence: shu lea cheang
"Radarweb" site artists: sawad brooks + beth stryker
"Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker"
project shifts sites among
Okinawa, Tokyo and the
Internet. A "Radarweb" is
created tracing the remains of
memory.
This project borrows the radar
detect central Elephant Cage
(nickname for US Sobe
communications in Yomitan
Village, Okinawa) as memo-data
processing site.
19.5% of Okinawa island is
leased out to US military bases
enforced by Japan's Central
government. Okinawa is being
developed as a subtropical resort
complete with its own species
of butterflies. Okinawa people
believe that butterflies guide
souls to heaven. Butterflies
jamming; butterflies tracing
memo-data.
As Nietzsche intimated, the Web has a skin and that skin has a memory: it's Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker. Reappropriating the visual iconography of the radar web installed by the US military in Okinawa, Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker tells the story of colonization suffered by Okinawans under the delirious pressure of the war machine. Stories of rapes and murders and official indifference and ecological genocide, Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker is a pole of resistance. Using the radar technology of the war machine against itself, this is one multimedia art project that transforms itself into a pole of memory: a Web butterfly "jamming, tracing memo-data."
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