Josephine Berry on Thu, 23 Aug 2001 11:50:31 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual UnconsciousIII |
Convulsive Beauty Then and Now In 1924 Louis Aragon wrote: "If 'reality' is the apparent absence of contradictionŠthe marvelous is the eruption of contradiction in the real." (44) Contrasting this statement to the positions of Antiorp, Zizek and Baudrillard makes clear that the prevailing picture of 'reality' at the turn of the 20th century is something very different. Since our reality today is dominated by 'truths' such as the 'irrational exuberance' of the market or the unquantifiable probability of an epidemic outbreak of CJD, a radical aesthetics can no longer tenably be premised on revealing the false illusion of consistency.(45) But conversely, as Hal Foster has persuasively argued, the Bretonian surrealists' interest in uncovering repressed psychic and social content to reveal its marvelous contradictions, was not aimed at the radical disaggregation of the subject or society that this might imply. Foster makes a case for the uncanny being, paradoxically, the repressed content of Bretonian surrealism but one that is 'everywhere treated'. In other words, the surrealists were drawn to the uncanny - the repressed material which returns to disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms and social order - but resistant to its truly disruptive, compulsively repetitive and deathly force. In the Second manifesto du Surréalisme, Breton explains that the primary urge of surrealism is to 'fix[] the point' at which core opposites such as life and death, the real and the imagined, the past and the future, "cease to be perceived as contradictions".(46) For Foster, this wish to reconcile what cannot be reconciled reveals that: "[t]he paradox of surrealism, the ambivalence of its most important practitioners, is this: even as they work to find this point they do not want to be pierced by it, for the real and the imagined, the past and the future only come together in the experience of the uncanny, and its stake is death." (47) >From what could be exaggerated as the safety of the Bretonian surrealist position, the uncanny provided the opportunity for the aesthetic concept of the 'marvelous' whose key components were 'convulsive beauty' and 'objective chance'. In the discussion that follows here, we will be mostly concerned with the formulation of convulsive beauty because of its ability to grasp in images the interpenetration of the conflicting impulses operative in the unconscious: the life drive (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos). Through a consideration of the ASCII movie Deep Ascii by Vuk Cosic (1998) and Olia Lialina's online narrative Agatha Appears (1997), I will discuss the net artists' similar interest in the interpenetration of the binaries order and disorder, and animate and inanimate, but show how here the 'repressed' of Bretonian surrealism - the threat of disaggregation without reconciliation - comes to its conscious articulation. In the Manifesto, Breton gives several examples of the marvelous: romantic ruins, a train trapped amidst vines in the jungle and shop mannequins. Both these emblems, cherished by surrealists, involve a coincidence of opposites; the ruin and the train suggest the forces of culture in conflict with those of nature, the submission of history and 'progress' to entropy, and the mannequin encapsulates the inhuman or inanimate in the human - an emblem of capitalist reification. Breton's ability to conceive as convulsively beautiful these revelations of the immanence of death in life is for Foster evidence of Breton's own resistance to the 'grim connection' which betokens the uncanny. Breton elaborates on the beauty of the marvelous in L'Amour fou, declaring: "Convulsive Beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magical-circumstantial or will not be"(48) Particularly pertinent to a reading of Cosic's Deep Ascii are the images Breton offers of the veiled-erotic which entail reality convulsed into writing: "a limestone deposit shaped like an egg; a quartz wall formed like a sculpted mantle; a rubber object and a mandrake root that resemble statuettes; a coral reef that appears like an underwater garden; and finally crystals deemed by Breton a paradigm of automatist creation."(49) Foster interprets these images of 'natural mimicry' as exemplifying the uncanny because what alerts us to its presence is the return of something familiar in the guise of something alien and threatening. In psychoanalytic terms, the uncanny is characterised by the return of a familiar phenomenon made strange by repression and transformed into a "ghostly harbinger of death". In The Uncanny, written in 1919, Freud argues that there is an instinctual compulsion to repeat, to return to a prior state, i.e. of inanition, and that whatever reminds us of this repetition compulsion is uncanny. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud finally formulates the uncanny as the manifestation of the struggle between life and death drives, or between Eros and Thanatos.(50) For Freud, it is Thanatos that ultimately dominates Eros, but for Breton the possibility of the drives' resolution is preserved. His inventory of the beautiful involves precisely this 'fixed-explosive' balance; the shock by which entropy is arrested to reveal something significative and self-positing. As Foster stresses, however, the coincidence of order and disorder, and/or sign and referent, also point towards the underlying presence of disorder or the 'informe' within what appears to be highly organised and meaningful. In this sense the experience of the marvelous is less that of beauty than of "the 'negative pleasure' of the sublime.(51) If the surrealist concept of convulsive beauty can be said to involve the usurpation of the thing by the word (nature convulsed into writing), then Vuk Cosic's 1998 'ASCII movie' Deep Ascii would seem to present an inversion of this relationship.(52) Cosic has taken the 1972 classic pornographic movie Deep Throat as a highly schematic erotic 'sign' and engineered its semiotic subversion and partial erasure through a purely technical conversion. Crudely speaking, what Cosic, with programming assistance from Luka Frelih, has done is to translate a sequence of film images into a sequence of moving ASCII characters.(53) This process effectively updates an old technique used to print images from computers in the days before the widespread availability of printers capable of outputting raster digital images. Using a UNIX programme called 'toascci' the computer was able to "print[] textual characters that represent the black and white image used as input."(54) Cosic and Frelih used an equivalent process called 'ttyvideo' by which a video image can be converted into its equivalent ASCII output. They then made a Java applet to play the video in a Web browser. (55) As Lev Manovich argues, where films such as George Lucas's The Phantom Menace ("the first feature-length commercial abstract film: two hours worth of frames made up of numbers") hide the digital nature of the image under the appearance of traditional film, Cosic's ASCII movies "'perform' the new status of media as digital data."(56) In actual fact, what we view is no less a mediated representation of the underlying processes than The Phantom Menace in that the figurative play of ASCII characters on the computer screen is by no means a direct encounter with the binary functions which underlie the Java script and HTML functions which produce the image. Nonetheless, the translation of the fixed and indexical nature of film into a shimmering display of discrete and shifting characters is the result of the images' conversion into binary digital code and it is this process which the ASCII characters signify or 'perform'. The struggle produced by Deep AsciiI between legibility and chaos, or information and noise, is a struggle for signification conditioned by the 'compulsive' activity of the software's automatic processes. Cosic has set up the terms of the image translation, after which all number of variables beyond his control decide upon whether the film sequence suddenly becomes legible or remains obscure. This is ultimately quite different to the surrealists' use of automatist processes such as hypnosis, frottage or objective chance which were understood as a dissociative means capable of producing a synthetic end; an asymmetrical means/end relation of causality in which something irregular, undetermined or serendipitous brings forth a deep, underlying unity (the liberated unconscious). With Deep Ascii by contrast, the automatic-automatist process of the 'asciimator' converts what was already often a hypnotically repetitive sequence into a densely intricate scramble of green characters and numerals in which a recognisable image is constantly lost and found. The viewer's struggle to decipher the video likewise inclines her, in turn, to a kind of automatist state, a suggestible frame of mind, triggered by the swirl of indistinct images and dancing green characters, condensing into recognisable scenes and then exploding into total abstraction. One is often uncertain if one is looking at, say, a woman crossing the road or a couple engaged in fellatio. The regularity of the software's procedure reveals the underlying irregular, mutating tendency of Informatic behaviour and the instability of visual perception. Although this regularity is certainly at odds with the dissociative strategies of surrealism, the attempt to bypass the conscious control of the image's production and to reveal an underlying chaos do create parallels between the two moments. Hal Foster's reading of the outcomes of these processes which the surrealists' ultimate decision to abandon denies or represses, is helpful in reading Cosic's much later variant of automatism. Foster sees the logic unleashed by automatism, contrary to the surrealists' intentions, as forcing the same conclusions as those reached by Freud in his late theory of the primal struggle between the life and death drives: "Of course, Breton and company framed the question of automatism very differently. For them the problem was one of authenticity, i.e., of the threat posed by calculation and correction to the pure presence of the automatist psyche. But this formulation missed the more fundamental problem - that automatism might not be liberatory at all, not because it voided the controls of the (super)ego (such was its express purpose) but because it decentered the subject too radically in relation to the unconscious. In short, the question of the constraints of the conscious mind obscured the more important question of the constraints of the unconscious mind."(57) In light of these remarks, it is interesting that Cosic - who has converted many shorter classic film clips into ASCII movies- chose a pornographic film for conversion into the only movie that approaches full length.(58) Cosic, passing over the sexual content of the film, has explained that the choice of Deep Throat was a result of its ubiquitous use of close-ups which provide a bolder image when converted into moving ASCII: "ASCII rendering of an image does not allow you to use a lot of noise. You can use an image with a lot of detail, but it will not render well in ASCII." (59) In this explanation, Cosic somewhat repurposes the term 'noise' to imply the less bold elements of an image, rather than meaning that details are non-meaningful per se. Although it is clear that Cosic is using this idea of noise to make a quite technical point, his choice of words also illuminates something essential in his selection of pornographic material which he does not mention. Pornography makes use of film and the conventions of cinema in a highly efficient and schematic way. For example, a pornographic film typically dispenses with the necessity of a narrative plot as soon as the basic erotic conceit has been established. Similarly, the introduction of contextualising or mood setting shots is kept to a minimum in order to reserve the majority of the film for the undisturbed display of sexual acts. These acts themselves typically illustrate the inherent instrumentality of the genre as erotic pleasure is whittled down to the mechanics of stimulation and penetration in its full permutative range. Metaphorically speaking then, pornography is a filmic genre that attempts to keep 'noise' to a mimimum in the interest of keeping the potential for erotic 'information' at a maximum. Ironically, the mechanistic logic of pornography is reminiscent of the compulsive repetitions associated with the death drive and yet it is difficult not to associate pornography's erasure of 'noise' with a repression of the very violence and deathliness which underpin eroticism. In this sense, pornograpy, like Bretonian surrealism, courts the deathly void of the unconscious - by way of repetitive, mechanical techniques - whilst eschewing an encounter with its 'deathly stake'. Georges Bataille - who, it is worth remarking, was a dissident from Breton's surrealist circle - wrote extensively about the intimate connection between eroticism and death.(60) As Bataille noted, in most societies both sexuality and death are the sites of extensive prohibitions and taboos, and it is the danger of our attraction/repulsion to this pullulating complex of life and death forces that the prohibitions seek to control. For Bataille the precondition of life is an excessive, non-conservative and luxurious expenditure premised on death, and conversely the putrefaction of death is also productive of the fecundity of life. Eroticism, which itself partakes in this economy of excess, is shot through with a desire for annihilation: "Just as the crime, which horrifies her, secretly raises and fuels Phaedra's ardour, sexuality's fragrance of death ensures all its power. This is the meaning of anguish, without which sexuality would be only an animal activity, and would not be erotic. If we wish to clearly represent this extraordinary effect, we have to compare it to vertigo, where fear does not paralyse but increases an involuntary desire to fall; and to uncontrollable laughter, where the laughter increases in proportion to our anguish if some dangerous element supervenes and if we laugh even though at all costs we should stop laughing. In each of these situations, a feeling of danger - yet not so pressing as to preclude any delay -places us before a nauseating void. A void in the face of which our being is a plenum, threatened with losing its plenitude, both desiring and fearing to lose it. As if the consciousness of plenitude demanded a state of uncertainty, of suspension. As if being itself were this exploration of all possibility, always going to the extreme and always hazardous. And so, to such a stubborn defiance of impossibility, to such a full desire for emptiness, there is no end but the definitive emptiness of death." (60) Curiously perhaps, Cosic's insistance on a minimum of noise in his original material, although on one level merely a straighforward requirement for achieving any degree of legibility at all, is also the precondition for producing a newly 'noisy' erotica. This is an erotica, if that is in any way an adequate word, in which the image is constantly threatened with disaggregation and the compact delivery of erotic information is constantly undermined by the interference of the informe. Taking the highly Apollonian material of Deep Throat, in which the destructive stake of eroticism is bound and stabilised, Cosic releases a Dionysian disorder which, in my opinion, reintroduces the 'nauseating void' of death into the erotic spectacle. In this sense, Deep Ascii evidences what here has been termed the virtual unconscious - an externalised and societal derepression in which the repressive mechanisms which undergird the consistency of identity are destabilised and wherein the subject is not spared a nauseating confrontation with the void of self-cancelling chaos. In the shift from the fixity of analogue film (whose frames can be spliced together but which, in themselves, cannot be altered) to the mutability of the discrete units of information (its binary code) this movement from a system premised on order (Enlightenment rationality) to one based in deterministic chaos (the 'second Enlightenment')is concisely apprehensible. Relatedly, the material instability of information, its 'flickering' state as N. Katherine Hayles has described it, provides a rather different kind of automatic process. Unlike the industrial machines of the pre-information age whose output was, and still is, regular and repetitive, the output of the automatic processes of computation is mutagenic and unpredictable. Its capacities to iterate or parse and thus transvalue information, although orderly procedures in themselves, are key to its more unruly potential. In this respect, the automatic functions of computers produce unexpected effects with surprising parallels to those automatist techniques of surrealism such as frottage, hypnosis, and objective chance. In other words, the result of an algorithm more closely approximates the creative output of the human psyche than the holes punched by, say, an automated steel cutter. This uncanny aspect of computers - neither dumbly, mechanically repetitive nor posessed of a psychology - entails the same 'fixed-explosive' contradictoriness as the surrealist notion of the marvelous. Strangely, the tools of the information age have come to resemble the vying forces of the life and death drives, the action of the Freudian unconscious. Computation then is not only productive of a derepression, an exteriorised, virtual unconscious, it is also emblematic of it. However, what a work such as Deep Ascii reveals is that, in contrast to the Bretonian faith in the resolution of opposites achieved by such a derepression, these tools tend to reveal the disaggregated chaos before which the viewer swoons in the same attraction-repulsion dynamic as we experience in the face of sex and putrefaction. Noise opens up a vertiginous void before which we often feel dazzled and powerless. Agatha Appears (Disgusted): the Informatic Dissolution of the Autonomous Subject So far we have encountered Antiorp's experiments with nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos which present a view onto an illegible but nonetheless meaningful universe which delightedly contemplates our ethical suspension 'beyond good and evil'. The nonlinear dynamics articulated and celebrated in the work of Antiorp are, however, constantly indexed to a variety of relatively orderly, rule-bound systems such as natural and programming languages or the social codes developed in mailing lists. We have also encountered Cosic's Deep Ascii which is one in a series of works that translate stable forms (analogue films or physical buildings (62)) into their unstable Informatic equivalents. In these translations, however, the initial referent is always perceivable in some residual form, be it in the intermittently recognisable sequences of a film or a building glimpsed beneath its projected ASCII overlay. It is the tension maintained between order and disorder, or stable referent and unstable Informatic sign - perhaps an image of non-order - which triggers a sense of convulsive beauty reminiscent of Bretonian surrealism. But Antiorp and Cosic also both display something reminiscent of a Bataillan erotic exhilaration that pivots between disgust at dissipative chaos of information systems and an attraction to their complex, negentropic fecundity. At the outset of this chapter we encountered Adorno's concept of repressive desublimation and the associated impact on the bourgeois autonomous subject. Adorno argued that in liberal bourgeois society, the repressed Id also provided an unreachable psychic repository which both prevented the unmediated expression of drives but also protected the unconscious from direct Superego manipulation. Towards the end of the 20th century, we encounter the idea of the 'non-oedipal' subject or cyborg for whom a key attribute, as theorised by Haraway, is said to be "a different logic of repression", a logic which is evidenced in the work of Antiorp and Cosic. In contrast to the fascist co-optation of the Id by a repressive Superego embodied in the singular figure of the Führer today, in these purportedly 'non-oedipal' times, the big Other terrorises through its infinite complexity - the chaotic universe. A derepression of the Id, as epitomised by the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s, coincides with an immense complexification of the big Other in the form of epistemological crises and the exponential growth of IT. In other words, the widespread social injunction to express ones desires and live out ones fantasies is accompanied by the inability to settle on the nature or mandate of authority. As Western societies become increasingly atheist, the power vacuum left by religion and unsuccessfully occupied by money, leads to a questioning of authority or, in Zizekian terms, an attempt to fill out the consistency of the symbolic order. This derepression is sometimes experienced, and celebrated in culture as a release from individuality, a radical interconnectedness with people, ideas, cultures, information, technology, interdisciplinarity and so on, but as often it is experienced as a threatening destablisation of subjectivity. If Antiorp's and Cosic's work seems to operate ambivalently along this line of tension which runs between the fear of complete disintegration and the delight in the marvelous "eruption of contradiction in the real", Olia Lialina's work articulates a more concrete and horrified sense of subjective decentrement within the non-llinearity of the Net's dynamic. Lialina's investigates this sense of instability through her hypertext narratives which use the hyperlinked and decentralised structures of the Net to create a literal and metaphorical sense of our inability to cognitively map. In her 1997 work Agatha Appears - as with her 1996 work My boyfriend came back from war. After dinner they left us alone discussed in Chapter One - Lialina collides the sequential frame logic of film narrative together with what Lev Manovich has termed the 'database logic' which subtends computer narratives. For Manovich, narrative is just one amongst numerous options for the sequencing of data in computer databases.(63) Unlike film whose frame by frame sequentiality inherently lends itself to narrative, from the point of view of the computer's data storage and retrieval systems, it is irrelevant whether data is arranged according to chronology, alphabetical sequence, keyword or any available criterion. For Manovich, this underlying logic is best expressed in the medium of the Net: "Where the database form really flourished, however, is on the Internet. As defined by original HTML, a Web page is a sequential list of separate elements: text blocks, images, digital video clips, and links to other pages. It is always possible to add a new element to the list - all you have to do is to open a file and add a new line."(64) >From this particular perspective we re-encounter the same nonlinearity and multidimensionality that Antiorp explore in its work in the question of hypertext narratives. Indeed the Internet in its entirety can be seen, and often is, as a gigantic symbol and concrete example of a nonlinear system. However, what is interesting in the work of Lialina, is her sensitivity to the fact that the movement through a website entails a sequential logic strongly reminiscent of film: "Hypertext is the best way to tell stories, hundreds of stories simultaneously. And interaction is merely a field for experiment, the same as stage, film, brain. Net language is closer to film than video. Video doesn't think by frame. Web does. Not only. It gives a chance to operate with such ideas as line, parallel, associative (digital, wow) montage. Its a fascinating experience."(65) Although in this quote, Lialina makes clear that frame logic is only one amongst multiple narrative dimensions offered by the Net, her online narratives are intentionally reminiscent of film. As with the tensions between order and disorder in the work of Antiorp and Cosic outlined above, Lialina's work engages in an equivalent formal struggle between linear and nonlinear sequence. We might say that, for her, film is the writing which the Net threatens to convulse into a kind of nonsignificative 'nature', and the characters in her narratives are directly under threat. Agatha Appears can, in a limited respect, be described purely in terms of its plot which follows a system administrator recently fired "because some important files disappeared from his network". In a disgruntled and perplexed state he meets Agatha, a 'lost country girl'. He asks her "Baby, have you heard about the Internet?", to which she replies in the negative, whereupon he invites her to his apartment and offers to 'teleport' her, or upload her into the Net. Although they encounter some difficulites due to her 'long legs', she eventually experiences a kind of dissolution in the universe of "millions of zeros laughing and screaming". This experience, which she finds both 'disgusting' and exhilarating, eventually separate her from her system administrator beau and she is left to wander the lattice of connections, from server to server, ad infinitum. The story is brought to an end not through a resolution of the plot's inherent conflicts but by a kind of apathetic or entropic resignation in which "Agatha los[es] interest". The plot itself is mirrored through an ingenious use of browser functionalities as well as the system for storing the work's digital files on the Net. As touched upon in Chapter Four, Lialina is highly conscious of the location and names of digital files, seeing them as the only index of originality available. In the plagiaristic environment of the Net, where anyone can clone any website, the artist's URL is the only guarantor that one is viewing the 'original', most up to date and uncompromised version of the work. Her work also repeatedly reveals an interest in how the name of a file is its location and that, in this respect, language very literally controls the movement and behaviour of digital information - an example of the new performativity of words in the Net. In this piece Lialina's files are distributed across various servers and, as we shall see, the names of the servers and files play an increasingly central role in the narrative. Agatha Appears commences at http:www.c3.hu/collection/agatha, a file in the collection of the Hungarian mediacentre C3's archive. After the initial scene in which the flat cut-out figure of the system administrator appears alone, the suffixes appended to the file names begin to set the various and typically noirish scenes that unfold between the two characters. In the second scene in which the equally flat and wooden figure of Agatha makes her first appearance, the location bar reads, http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/big_city_night_street.html and thereafter: http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/next_night_sysadms_apartment.html http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/late_evening_railway_station_heavy_rain.html http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/there1.html http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/here1.html http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/alone1.html http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/alone.html http://www.here.ru/agatha/cant_stay_anymore.htm http://www.altx.com/agatha/starts_new_life.html http://www.distopia.com/agatha/travels.html http://www2.arnes.si/~ljintima3/agatha/travels_a_lot.html http://www.zuper.com/agatha/wants_home.html http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/agatha/goes_on.html http://www.easylife.org./agatha/already_tied.html http://www.irational.org/agatha/wants_to_teleport.html http://www.tema.ru/agatha/has_no_idea.html http://www.thing.at/agatha/teleports_and_teleports.htm http://www.superbad.com/agatha/lost_the_interest.html Agatha is introduced as a 'country girl' whose first appearance is accompanied by an audio file of a folksy guitar song sung by a woman and accompanied by children in which the line "goodbye Jack and Sue" is simply repeated.(66) No doubt the song is intended to signify generically Agatha's humble country origins. However from the outset the static, montaged figures of the systems administrator and Agatha both sport clothing made from textual fragments taken from the computer's interface. The systems administrator's body is made up of the line: "EndUser - Doc_Catalogue" and Agatha, in the first scene, wears a dress whose 'pattern' is the line "B-Dir 22-97". In both cases it seems likely that these records of data indexing relate to the production of the artwork itself. A physical equivalent to this might be the artist's inclusion of her paint palette in the final painting. The explicitly Informatic surface of both characters implies that Agatha was always already determined by a proximity to information and that her movement from Internet naif to fully 'teleported' or uploaded digital entity is the inevitable movement from the ontological in-itself to the for-itself of the information age. However, the implied inevitability of this movement does not inure Agatha to the shock of her own disintegration into information and subsequent sentence to diasporically wander the lattice of networked computers. Until the moment of teleportation, the dialogue which passes between Agatha and her systems administrator occurs in the status bar at the bottom of the browser where, ordinarily, information is displayed about the connection to and download rate of a particular digital file. As the two characters approach the bed in the systems administrator's apartment (the symbolic launch pad of teleportation), the dialogue suddenly switches from the status bar to a Script Alert window which pops up on the screen. This box is usually only displayed when a compatibility error occurs between the browser and the file being viewed (for example, it might require a plug-in which the browser does not have), and its redeployment as the vehicle for dialogue not urgent technical messages inflects the dialogue with a sense of alarm. The dialogue in the Script Alert window reads as follows, with each line accompanied by an 'ok' button which the viewer is compelled to click before moving onto the next line and a 'cancel' button which s/he must click to exit the sequence: "No, definitely, your legs are too long" "but what can I do?" "Just a moment, I'll make a shortcut" "U tried it before?" "Many time[s]" "What is error 19? Maybe better tomorrow?" "No, no. It's ok. Careful! Ok" "Shoulder! Shoulder!" "Sorry, can I take my lipstick with me?" "Red?" "A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!" "What?" "A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!" "What is there?" "A-a-a-a-aaaa!!!" "Agatha, dear, what?" "Millions of zeros, laughing and screaming" "Strange" "Disgusting" "I'm sorry, it always worked" It is this blunt use of the word 'disgusting' to describe a disaggregation of the subject within the digital rhizome that distinguishes Lialina's work from that of Antiorp and Cosic. And it is the Baudrillardian overproximity or 'obscenity of information', the point at which the autonomous subject and the symbolic order are exploded into 'millions of zeros, laughing and screaming' to which, in my opinion, the word 'disgusting' refers. Despite Lialiana's obvious fascination with computer networks - which is here figured as the romantic frisson between Agatha and the systems administrator - there is an open admission of the disgust of digital 'noise' never made by Antiorp or Cosic. After this scene, and before embarking on her diasporic Net journey, Agatha meets the systems administrator, quite anachronistically, at a railway station, late in the evening and in the rain. Lialina evokes the railway station atmosphere by situating the characters next to a time-table and setting the dialogue in the status bar into motion. The text and ASCII symbols move from right to left, and the dialogue itself is interspersed between long bracketed sets of hyphens and characters designed to look like train carriages. Part of this dialogue includes the system administrator's conviction that the Internet is not merely a matter of applications, scripts or the sum of its technological parts, but a "new world, new philosophy, new way of thinking" with the conclusion that to understand the Net "you must be inside". Importantly, Agatha's individual departure into the digital dimension uses the historical springboard of industrialised and bureaucratised travel and romantic film and fiction (one needs only think of Anna Karenina as a reference here). The linear and modular sequence of passing railway carriages appears to provide the techno-historical counterpart to the sequence of frames passing through a projector at speed. Agatha's departure into the 'new world' of the Net is thus also accompanied by a shift from linear narrative (although nominally preserved by the choreographed movement through the piece's set of hyperlinked webpages) to the database logic of the underlying computer network. Several 'clicks' into her journey, as can be seen in the series of URLs listed above, Agatha has left the original C3 server behind her and is moving through a sequence of servers most of which are owned and run by members of the net art 'community', and the first of which is tellingly named 'distopia.com'. Her movement from one node of the Net to another is only represented through the alteration of the URLs displayed in the location bar, as each new downloaded page retains the same static image of Agatha against a black background. Finally we arrive at the homepage of a net art site called 'superbad.com' and the URL's suffix informs us that Agatha "lost_the_interest.html". Agatha Appears does not, therefore, posses a clear ending but instead involves a segue from one artwork into another suggesting the non-discrete nature of any single artwork and, as the last URL seems to underline, an entropic slide from ordered narrative into the distraction of information play. The three key narrative moments in Agatha Appears, I would suggest, are her first experience of teleportation involving her 'disgust' at the chaotic spectacle of "millions of zeros screaming and laughing", her departure from the unitary location (and associated narrative logic) of the c3 server into a diasporic journey through the network and finally the entropic slide of the discrete artwork (and with it Agatha's own narrative) into the distraction of nonlinear information play across the network. Ironically given the subject of the narrative which centres on the entropic pull towards Bataille's 'nauseating void', the very fact that this work can be described in terms of three pivotal moments demonstrates its inherent resistance to this selfsame destitution. In this sense, the very existence of a coherent narrative cuts against the overt meaning of the narrative and reserves a space for the possibility of meaning or order within the riotous reign of noise. It is perhaps the fact that Agatha Appears, in contrast to the works of Antiorp and Cosic discussed above, ventures a coherent articulation of what is inherently incoherent - the paralogy of postmodern language games amidst an overabundance of information - that she is also able to articulate something as concrete as disgust. Here it is pertinent to remark that Agatha Appears does not make use of automatism in the way that Cosic does in Deep Ascii, that is to say, she does not harness any single procedure in order to overcome the repressive controls of the Ego or Superego to release the obscured dimension of the unconscious. Instead, her hypertext narrative consciously controls the distributed network logic of the Internet and narrativises its atomising effects (e.g. binary code, hyperlinks, data packets, packet switching; ). For instance, she uses the distributed storage system of the Net's many servers to produce the unusual spectacle of the same page downloading time and again from different locations and, although the Net's automatic procedures are relied upon to produce this, the spectacle itself is nonetheless thoroughly determined. In this instance, the Net's distributed structure produces a metaphor of Agatha's own sense of deterritorialisation within the information age. Automatic processes are therefore viewed both in their own right and as metaphors for subjective experience, but never as autonomous agents of creativity. Lialina's resistance to the technological autopoesis solicited to a certain degree by Antiorp and to a much greater degree by Cosic suggests her recognition and mistrust of the 'deathly stake' with which such derepressions flirt. The voiding of egotistical and superegotistical controls and the heteronomous reign of non-order that this augurs risks, in social and subjective terms, a terrorisation by illegible and nonlocatable forces which threaten an irreversible entropic slide; the drive of Thanatos. In its aesthetic constellation or presentation of Informatic chaos, Agatha Appears comes extremely close to Breton's category of the fixed-explosive wherein the entropic drive of nature is momentarily frozen into a highly organised cultural sign and conversely, where the sign is interrupted by the chaotic force of nature. However, in so creating this fixed-explosive image of Informatic chaos, Lialina reflects the movement beyond a faith in derepression's promise of liberation and automatism's guarantee of an insight into a unified but hidden other. The instrumentalisation of chaos versus the indeterminateness of art and natural beauty On the subject of the threat inherent in the increasingly chaotic models of economic, social and natural phenomena both Hayles and Zizek seem to agree on an important point, and one that has not been concretely posed by my discussion of these artworks. The point has to do with the instrumentalisation of chaos to certain ends - an instrumentalisation which I cannot simply extend to these artworks, especially when considering them in line with some of Adorno's formulations of natural and art beauty which we will briefly examine here. For Hayles, chaos theory and nonlinear science do not ultimately constitute a radical break with modern science and a move into the postmodern, but rather an intensification of the former. Hayles has discussed how, in fact, chaologists often use the principles of deterministic chaos to negate its effects through, for instance, the conversion of nonlinear behaviour into linear behaviour.(67) In contrast to Lyotard's optimistic reading of the paralogy of postmodern science (which ensures the never ending renegotiation of game rules), Hayles together with the chaos theorist Stephen Kellert argue that the aim of chaos theory is largely instrumental. Kellert suggests that to "see chaos theory as a revolutionary new science that is radically discontinuous with the Western tradition of objectifying and controlling nature falsifies both the character of chaos theory and the history of science."(68) It is on this point that the poststructuralist adoption of chaos both differs and converges with its scientific one. As Hayles explains, "for deconstructionists, chaos repudiates order; for scientists, chaos makes order possible", i.e. scientists use chaos theory to perceive further forms of order in the world whereas poststructuralists use chaos theory to deny that order exists.(69) Hayles views the poststructuralist transformation of the non-order of chaos into anti-order or disorder as a way of attacking traditional ideas of order which are held to be coercive. But for this reason, and here is where its scientific and cultural adoptions reconverge, Hayles perceives the poststructuralist celebration of disorder as another kind of instrumentalisation of chaos theory and one that contributes to, rather than subverting, the production of master narratives. Zizek, however, in contrast to Hayles' insistence that master narratives continue, is convinced that the so-called post-Oedipal society or, in other terminology, the reflexivity of the risk society has a profound impact on the subject as a result of the loosening of societal ties to tradition and nature. For Zizek, this Unbehagen (uneasiness) of the risk society comes down to the decline of symbolic trust as, due to the extreme reflexivity of contemporary life, the big Other recedes and symbolic efficiency wanes: "The disintegration of the big Other is the direct result of universalised reflexivity: notions like 'trust' all rely on a minimum of non-reflected acceptance of the symbolic Institution - ultimately, trust always involves a leap of faith: when I trust somebody, I trust him because I simply take him at his word, not for rational reasons which tell me to trust him."(70) But, whilst recognising that master narratives or the symbolic institution are destabilised by the reflexivity or recursiveness of the risk society, Zizek also acknowledges that many master narratives are subsumed under one inalienable narrative: the naturalisation of the market. Zizek historicises this by reference to Marx's observation that, under market relations, "all that is solid melts into air" - a reference to the unheard of dissolution of traditional forms under capitalism. Instead of this dissolution guaranteeing new freedoms, Marx saw the 'invisible hand of the market' ironing out the multiplicity of small risks involved in market speculation into a single global welfare. This, in short, is the ideology of the free market. Marx's idea is that this one market-driven fate could be superseded and social life brought under the control of humanity's 'collective intellect'. It is, argues Zizek, this self-transparent ideal that the theory of the risk society abandons but in so doing naturalises and deploliticises the global market: "Theorists of the risk society often evoke the need to counteract the reign of the 'deploticised' global market with a move towards radical repoliticisation, which will take crucial decisions away from state planners and experts and put them into the hands of the individuals and groups concerned themselves (through the revitalisation of active citizenship, broad public debate, and so on) - however, they stop short of putting in question the very basics of the anonymous logic of market relations and global capitalism, which imposes itself today more and more as the 'neutral' Real accepted by all parties and, as such, more and more depoliticised."(71) How do these instances of the instrumentalisation of non-order relate to our discussion of net art's preoccupation with complex information systems and the associated unraveling of subjective and objective stability? Does it participate in a similar naturalisation and obfuscation of what we might describe as the constructedness of the virtual unconscious? Does its exploration of a chaotic, Informatic world determine the subject as impotent, without agency? Here I would resist any too easy comparison of scientific, economic and theoretical applications of nonlinearity to art's own. Although, as Adorno persuasively argues, art cannot but participate in the domination of nature to which its own development belongs, it is its way of "resembling without imitating" the world, of consciously positing itself, which at once distinguishes it from "the arbitrariness of what simply exists" and at the same time allows empirical reality to become eloquent.(72) Adorno's discussion of the mutual reflectedness of art beauty and natural beauty also opens up the way to discussing the relationship of art to the complex second nature manifested by technological and Informatic systems. In his discussion of art beauty and natural beauty he locates the dimension of appearance as a crucial basis of their correspondence. Natural beauty (a historically determined quality and distinct from any totalising concept of nature as such) lies in its elusiveness, the fact that it is never perceived voluntarily. The elusiveness its appearance, argues Adorno in line with Hegel, is due to the fact that it is not created for or out of itself, but that it takes form only through its external perception. Natural beauty, experienced as always in this state of becoming, always on the verge of revealing itself, therefore eschews any categorisation of what does and does not constitute it: "According to the canon of universal concepts it is undefinable precisely because its own concept has its substance in what withdraws from universal conceptuality. Its essential indeterminateness is manifest in the fact that every part of nature, as well as everything made by man that has congealed into nature, is able to become beautiful, luminous from within."(73) Adorno finds this resistance to determination also evidenced in the greatest works of art and their close resemblance to nature. "The more perfect the artwork" he writes, "the more it forsakes intentionsŠif the language of nature is mute, art makes this muteness eloquent"(74) But this articulation is always haunted by its impossibility which stems from the insurmountable contradiction between the conscious attempt to make the mute eloquent and the revelation of that part of nature which "cannot in any way be willed."(75) It is in this respect that, unlike the various instrumentalisations of the virtual unconscious exposed by Zizek and Hayles in poststructuralism, science and economics, we should consider these artworks as evidencing the indeterminateness of art and natural beauty. It is possible to see in all the works discussed in this chapter the struggle both to articulate the second nature created by information systems and to solicit it to articulate itself. Where surrealists engaged dissociative processes to dislodge the grip of rationality and consciousness over experience, net artists engage computational processes and rationale to destablise the instrumentality that those self-same technologies epitomise. In a sense then, net artists engage technocratic rationality to reveal its opposite - an inability to map the concept onto the thing. Although net artists, like surrealists, are attracted to automatism and the suspension of conscious control, they do not invest the same confidence in the rupture of inconsistency in the fabric of reality. What is important here is that, as Zizek and Hayles point out and the artworks exemplify, chaos or the uncertainties of the second Enlightenment have become the order of the day, threatening human agency and promoting the naturalness of the market by turns. But identifying the instrumentalisation of what I have been calling the virtual unconscious does not exhaust its potential. Returning to Adorno's identification of nature's resistance to 'universal conceptuality', it seems that net artists are equally drawn to the unpredictable mutations, the constant state of becoming that information systems unleash. This state of becoming refers not only to the purely technical behaviour of digital information but its social relations as well, both of which are capable of resisting any totalistic instrumentalisation. If information's deterritorialising atomisation is sometimes experienced as 'disgusting', it also brings into being formations which counter this lost sense of control. The technologically accelerated exchange of information between people around the world reveals an equally unpredictable social agency which is always-in-becoming. Antiorp's interruption of the smooth running of mailing lists through the introduction of noise can here be seen as test running the noisy interruption of global techno-bureaucratic business as usual by the noise of dissent. The disobedient dance of Cosic's ASCII characters points to a potential explosion of the spectacle from within (one need only think about the ongoing challenge of media monopolies by the multiple agencies on the net). The threatening darkness of Agatha's diasporic wonderings might even be suggestive of a real world dissolution of national boundaries and the creation of global citizenship. Although I could be accused of falsely imposing a reading on the works, it is their shifting, mutagenic forms which allows such things to be glimpsed - as with the sudden revelations of beauty in nature. If automatist processes have ceased to promise the divulgence in art of a universal truth, they nonetheless provide a key which unlocks the dual character of the virtual unconscious; a force which by turns threatens the deathly entropy of chaos and the salutary hope of a second nature whose unfathomable state of becoming can resist the total penetration of instrumental rationality. It is this muteness which certain net artists seek to make eloquent. 44) Louis Aragon, La Révolution Surréaliste 3 (April 15, 1925), cited in Hal Foster's Compulsive Beauty, p.20 One is tempted to argue that the opposite is true - that in fact to reveal the consistency with which inconsistency is proffered as a descriptive model of the postmodern world might pove to be a far more disruptive gesture. 45) André Breton, Second manifesto du Surréalisme cited in Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p.xviii 46) Ibid, xix 47) Breton, in Ibid, p.23 48) Foster, Ibid, p.23 49) See Ibid, p.9 50) Ibid, p.28 51) http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/deep.htm 52) At the time, Luka Frelih was a colleague of Cosic's at the Ljudmila Digital Media Lab in Ljubljana 53) The UNIX manual, cited in Lev Manovich's 'Cinema by Numbers: ASCII films by Vuk Cosic', Vuk Cosic: Contemporary ASCII, (Zaloznik: Galerija S.O.U. Kapelica, Ljubljana, 2000), pp.9-10 54) Vuk Cosic supplied me with this information in a private correspondence, (February 10, 2001) 55) Manovich, Vuk Cosic, p.8 56) Foster, p.5 57) See History of Moving Images, www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film 58) Vuk Cosic, 'The Ascii Art Ensemble', interview by Josephine Bosma, (Telepolis, September 1998), 59) http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/2458/1.html 60) See the section 'Eroticism' in The Bataille Reader, eds Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) 61) Georges Bataille, 'The Phaedra Complex', ibid, p.257 62) In 2000 Cosic was commissioned by the Video Positive Festival in Liverpool to create a site specific work in the city. Cosic photographed the St. George's Hall and translated its proportions into a series of ASCII images which he then projected back onto the building at night, which appeared as a large three dimensional ASCII sculpture, with parts of the building remaining visible underneath the projection. See http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/architecture/ 63) Commenting on the by now commonplace archiving of museums on CD-Roms, Manovich explains: "Although such CD-Roms often simulate the traditional museum experience of moving from room to room in a continuous trajectory, this "narrative" method of access does not have any special status in comparison to other access methods offered by a CD-Rom. Thus the narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among others." Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, op. cit., p.220 64) Ibid 65) Cited in 'Olga's Artists Statement: NETFILM', Telepolis, date unknown, http://www.heise.de/tp/english/kunst/nk/3040/2.html 66) This song is played several times throughout Agatha Appears acting as a deliberately crude soundtrack. 67) Ward, The Literary Appropriation of Chaos Theory, p.58 68) Kellert, Wake of Chaos, pp. 115-16, cited in ibid, p.59 69) Hayles, Chaos Bound, pp.22-3, cited in ibid, p.56 70) Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p.342 71) Zizek, ibid, p.351 72) Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p.78 73) Ibid, p.70 74) Ibid, p.78 75) Ibid the divine diva of websites ->- www.metamute.com -<- has risen again * ->- www.ouimadame.org -<- * to follow # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net