So, the classroom has been emptied with the students and tutors fleeing online to populate and interact, supposedly often in greater intimacy, in multiple online spaces. The material reality of ‘here’ has given way to imagined ‘there’, a fluid space with ‘few, if any fixed compass bearings’ (Barnett, 2007). The physical body has been discarded too in favour of the spectrality, the disembodied presence , strangely enough, the embodied absence, the representation of you living online long after you’ve logged off. The temporal and multiple synchronicity deepens the ontological blurring even more.

Instead of attempting to normalise the situation by bridging the gap created by temporal and spatial disjunctures, Bayne (2010) suggests embracing thus induced uncertainty as something generative, constructive and transformative.

In general I agree with such a proposition – planes of doubt look to me as environments which might be more conducive to creativity than fixed frames of traditional practices and the liminal space of becoming seems much more interesting than the fixed point of departure or the destination, something I tried to capture in my video on liminal spaces I produced last year for IDEL.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is however one issue I’ve got with the ontological turn the uncanny pedagogies are trying to implement. What is the limit of stretching one’s capacity for assimilating and producing strangeness? Is there a limit? Should this be even mentioned in the discourse with lack of boundaries as the basic premise?

If I’m rendered a ghost online how can online-me be there or anywhere? Does haunting equal being? What could anchor me in the online environment? Even the lifestream seems a hoax, breadcrumbs left by me but swept and arranged by technology according to its will. A fabricated piece of evidence. The growing isolation. The mounting uncertainty. The fragmentation of me, the online doppelganers render the physical-me a ghost too, as I close off from the physical reality and latch onto the online. I am neither there or here. It might be a productive space, yes, but there are limits to how much of intellectual uncertainty an individual can bear without going insane. Or is that a part of the ontological turn too, reaching the threshold of tolerance where the balance is tipped and you plunge/are thrown into the deep waters? Perhaps the limit I’m feeling frustratingly as very close is like other boundaries, ‘illusions, wisps of white that beckon to use just out of reach, that dissolve as we pass our hands in front of our faces’ (Kochhnar-Lindgren, 2009:5).

The reasons for such festive inclinations are numerous but the most important one is that of the need to emphasise the process, the flux, the instability as inherently natural and human.  This way she avoids positioning herself as an opponent of humanism as abandoning binary dichotomies and blurring the boundaries might establish, in her view, a  rich breeding ground, where transformation is born, which echoes the rhizome proposal of Deleuze and Guattari.

What Shildrick also stresses in her paper is the promise embodied in the liquidity, not the threat. While reading about the uncanny digital technologies last year I was not sure if the fragmentation caused by the multiplying online traces of my digital escapades and practices are something worth seeking after. I felt simultaneously attracted and threatened by the prospect, thrilled by the enhanced modes of being and feeling but alarmed by the possibility of losing sanity, succumbing to the power of my avatars, becoming dehumanised, the everlasting friction between the technoutopia and dystopia, a view still entrenched in ‘either … or’ perception of the world and subjectivity, based on binarism and thus on exclusion. The exclusion can never be complete according to Shildrick as the boundaries are liquid and permeable, allowing multiple incorporations which are at the forefront when it comes to innovation, creativity and imagination and so opening up different world, modes of being and becoming. This is a richer reality, enlarging not restricting  human subjectivity, embodying it and not disembodying.

While researching monstrous bodies I came across digital manipulations of the human body in art, crossing the boundaries between the human and machinic, between the disabled and the healthy. One of the projects struck me in particular. In the process of digital imagining the basic senes of smell, sight, taste and hearing got overgrown with thick layers of skin (thus excluded), giving an overall grim and dystopic look to the technological face, this way probably emphasising the desensitising threats. I would argue that this could be indeed the case if we persist identifying and maintaining the boundaries sealed.

The eyeless body might appear anti-human but uncannily by liquidising some of the senses and leaving one, the skin a very sensitive organ, it fosters new receptiveness.

I went for a wordle representation of the beginnings of my lifestream because I feel it is still in its infancy, when it’s being shaped out of a mass of disorganised threads, scraps and traces left by me on the Web. I wove the word cloud with short statements signalling different moments of the first week formative phase: moments of panic when the computer crashed and when the pages loaded slowly but also moments of apprehension when I couldn’t get to grips with the whole concept of lifestreaming, analysing each link whether it was ‘postable’, feeling the ‘stick’ of assessment but wanting to be fair in choices as for me the course is about Learning, not passing.

When posting quotes from Hand (2008) on Tumblr, I started looking for images of ‘circulation’, ‘deterritorialisation’, ‘networks’ and while selecting the pictures the ideas started slowly milling around in my head, strengthened with time by visual associations. At night, the fermenting scraps of online activity built into new understandings and a few new connections were forged between the concepts. I’m still struggling with them but I wouldn’t have made this little step if it weren’t for the lifestream. What if I had a port built into my brain which would transmit my entangled thoughts into the lifestream, with a little sizzling sound here and there to document a small connection being temporarily secured?

Lifestream by Night

These bio-ports are quite interesting in a sense that they are linked to the spine via a sort of a umbilical cord, which is a metaphor in itself referring to the relationship between a mother and the foetus (physical interdependence, nourishment) and then a child throughout his/her life (more emotional). The relationships between the mother and the child, especially a grown-up one are complex, from unconditional love to control , jealousy, hatred. In this intimate relationship between the gamer and the tech, who assumes the position of the mother (nurturer but maybe a controller) and who that of the child (the nurtured, the controlled, possibly the rebel)? Allegra being the game designer could be perceived as a mother at first but quickly the roles seem to revert as the natural and machinic spheres start to blur to an extent that the characters cannot distinguish between the actual and virtual reality, and their agency gets affected (this is a big question for me this week, the influence of the tech on humans’ free will). So, the blurring is also visible in how the game characters surface more strongly in the main characters and persist in taking over their actual selfs (interesting links to Gee’s theory of self in gaming – it seems to me that the projected self being the bridge between the virtual and actual selves undergoes rapid shrinking in eXistenZ and is thrown into non-existence?) So for example, Pikul starts abusing and killing people. Interestingly enough, he resists the temptation of killing Allegra but it is made clear that the relationship has been built around trust. Is it the old human trust that prevents Pikul from pulling the trigger of the organic gun when for fun he pointed it at the Demoness of Armageddon?

The sequence in the restaurant is interesting from the point of view of nature vs tech. The organic bones (mind you the ‘two-headed friend’ cannot be 100% natural, it’s another example of cross-contamination between nature and tech) are assembled very naturally into an organic gun. Is that dystopic, in a sense that tech corrupts nature? Or rather utopian – after all the tech, physically at least, assumes the organic, natural form. Does it become sacred? Does it become god as the previous film (and the title of the film, Isten meaning ‘god’ in Hungarian) would indicate?

Deus ex Machina

Pic by ekud on www.deviantart.com

Synopsis: A man goes up a big mountain where, in answer to his invocation and in a flood of eerie light, a machine descends from heavens. He brings it down to his compatriots who immediately knock down a bull from the pedestal and start worshipping the Machine. The TV Set, as the machine turns out to be one, is slightly wicked but in a playful way, showing gleeful pictures and playing seemingly innocent pranks on its followers. When one of them accidentally gets killed, another wants to take revenge on the TV set and resorts to violence against it. To stifle possible rebellion, the TV Set undergoes transformation and shows its truly evil side, grows horns and grins like a demon. The pictures it shows also become more vivid, if not terrifying, thus manipulating people’s emotions and so the (oppressive) cult of the Machine is born. The evil festival goes on and on until a thunderstorm in which the TV set gets struck, and in a fit of wild passion/agony, it wreaks havoc among flames and whining sirens. The worshippers keep kowtowing, but to save their fragile lives put on gas masks as if they knew how the seeming apocalipse is going to end. What follows is tragic – a mightier machine appears and shoots down the TV Set – its remains are shoved off into a precipice to share the fate of the bull and other fallen idols.

However, the show must go on and so the story repeats itself and soon the subsequent machine is also replaced by a stronger and better one …

Questions:

Bendito in Spanish means ‘blessed’. Is the machine already blessed with a holy status when it descends to live amongst humans? Or, like in Roman Catholic religion, is beatified upon its death? Or maybe it’s blessed cos it is capable of reincarnating, reinventing itself continuously, each machine being created a better image of the Ubermachine? The question here arises whether this process is never-ending or whether there is some nirvana point to achieve?

Who’s dwelling in the heaven – Is that some Ubermachine or Urmachine, machine-god/god-machine sending its messengers to teach the humans a lesson? If so, is it a loving utopian lesson or a dystopic evil lesson?

There is a striking resemblance between the man praying for the Machine and Moses receiving stone tablets with 10 Commandments on Mount Sinai – the first set of tablets got smashed as the humans didn’t understand fully how great a gift the commandments were. Do we understand the goodness of technology being brought to us or just throw ourselves into senseless consumption, using it unreasonably or even misusing or abusing and thus forcing the technology to turn into an wicked being that attacks us?

The idols replace each others in a quickening succession – isn’t it the time of time accelleration, and does it point to a possibility of exhaustion or will it contrinue into eternity?

Finally, is the machine inherently evil and its sole plan is to deprive us of agency or rather it is us who project our own evilness onto it?

Zero Commandment(s)

When musing over the term ‘digital culture’, I thought naively it’s like culture but digital, which made me think what culture is. If culture is a set of assumptions, beliefs, symbols and behaviours typical of humans grouped in a society, is ‘digital culture’ the same but transplanted into the digital world? A kind of Human Circuitry?

Being a linguist and into a word play, I cannot help noticing that the root of the phrase in question is ‘culture’, which makes it carry the main meaning, the adjective ‘digital’ being just a modifying element. You could say then that the word ‘culture’ has a kind of hegemony over the phrase. Taking it further, you could say it is trying to colonise the phrase, imposing its values, customs and habits … Yes? Or am I taking it too far?

But why on our wallwisher wall, Sian complains about digital texts replicating analogous writing instead of coming up with new formulas or, on the course design module site, somebody rants about colleagues trying to use e-platforms to hand out PDF worksheets. Wouldn’t it be ‘culture’ invading and colonising the ‘digital’? Following Cousin’s argument from last term that often technology is perceived as a tool in the hand of a human and so pushed to a subservient role, it seems to me that the term ‘digital culture’ might be often and easily misconstrued, especially in popular beliefs. The terms ‘organic’ and ‘machinic’ might sound incongruous on the surface but as Jeremy points out below they do mingle smoothly in a metaphorist interplay. So perhaps the two could penetrate each other more persistently, blurring the boundaries and growing together into something novel (uncanny?) instead of invasive transplantation and transgression? The blurring would facilitate, in my view, the process of becoming, a space in-between the definite points, where things are less certain, experimented on, tried out and therefore exciting , a breeding ground for new seeds … Am I being overidealistic? Is it too much of utopia?