Final Fantasy, First Citizen

LiveJournal Entry July 11, 2001 alone again…

well, i’ve been fighting wiht my dad asgain. god, why dose he hav to be SUCH a basterd to me? its like he dosent even CARE about me. i woud run away from home, but i dont think i could carry my stereo and all my cds with me. coudnt live without linkin park, KoRN, soad, ALIEN ANT FARM, stabbing westword, KITTIE, billy jole, NIN, pere ubu ect. ect. if olny the internet was faster i coud download evrythng from napster and i really coud run.

saw a movie y-day; final fantasy. realy mad. cloud wasnt in it. plus the solider guy looked like ben affleck but not t like him to. creepyyy…just made me SADDER

Current Mood SAD
Current Music the Cure – “Lovesong” (ohmigod save me Robert SMith)

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WORDPRESS Online Blogging OS [Version 4.2.616] CMD LINE INTERFACE

COPYRIGHT IN PERPETUITY WORDPRESS INC.

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Uncanny can't be canny can he?

Sorry about that glitch. Blogging about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within must’ve accidentally reset my systems to a savepoint somewhere in 2001; oh LiveJournal, how I miss the halcyon days when you ruled the internet. But enough of this witty banter, onward to impenetrable academe!

Jason Sperb on Temporality and Post-Modernism

Sperb’s article is about David Cronenberg’s creepy/cool 1983 horror flick Videodrome, but the key point to take away from is his suggestion that we consider particularly timely films as projecting a sort of field of stasis around themselves and their immediate surroundings. Films themselves can become dated, but they also preserve some part of the context in which they came to be. As my flip little LJ flashback demonstrates, for those who saw it at the time Final Fantasy is a film that sheds little bits of 2001 all over your freshly vacuumed 2009 carpet. Like the games from which it is loosely derived, its portentous story and heavy-handed metaphors are but pretext for the experience; one plays the games, but the film’s purpose is merely for one to look at the accomplishment of man and his fabulous machines.

It’s all in the film’s opening sequence. The “camera” cranes up over a desolate alien landscape. There is an abrupt cut to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye. We are expected to note the incredible “realism” of the reflection of the sun on her iris, the detail of said iris, the way the eye moves, the pores of her skin. Gradually the film reveals more of both landscape and protagonist, demonstrating the circumference and volume of its reality. Suddenly, in the film’s most oft-reproduced shot, the camera whirls and we are presented with a view from directly below Ross, who now appears to be standing on top of a sheet of water. This is real enough to fool you, it says, but unbound from reality’s petty rules. Somewhere it’s 1991 and Bono’s singing “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Somewhere it’s 1895 and Maxim Gorky is up late writing a thoroughly unnerved account of a still photograph of a train that is jumping suddenly into a silvered chaos of motion.

I am reminded of critic Robert Spadoni’s account of audience reception to the advent of sound pictures. According to Spadoni, at certain points of momentous technological change (i.e. motion, sound, colour, 3D) audiences briefly become hyper-aware of the cinematic apparatus. This type of audience member, termed the “Medium Sensitive Viewer,” is so struck by the newness of the innovation that the actual content of the film becomes secondary. Audience-members in 1927 spent as much time celebrating the novelty of synchronized sound as they did grousing about its drawbacks and inconsistencies relative to natural sound. An uncanny valley had opened up, wherein its unprecedented proximity to the real thing invariably drew attention to its minute differences. Familiar and unfamiliar, and thus uncanny. For a little while. But they got used to it, and now we never notice that the sound we interpret as issuing from an actor’s lips is in fact bursting from a loudspeaker elsewhere in the room.

Same thing goes for the visual effects of Final Fantasy. What was once revolutionary now seems commonplace, next even to the videogames of recent years. At the time, some were willing to overlook its formulaic plot and stock characters for the wonder of its very existence; Roger Ebert gushing review hurriedly disposes of the plot to wax lyrical about its strangeness and newness. Square Pictures planned to turn digital “actress” Aki Ross into a star who could work on the same variety of projects as fleshly counterparts like Angelina Jolie. Hyperbolic predictions ensued. The stun value has worn away now; its graphics would be impressive in a videogame, but hardly revolutionary. We are left with a pedestrian sci-fi actioner, an archaic digital film whose characters lack the charm and lasting appeal of simpler creations like Buzz Lightyear.

Yet still it holds the distinction accorded it by Ebert, “the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm.” And still it bears the impression of the time when it was the only denizen of that realm, that time when blogs were a place for teen angst and not university assignments.

Current Mood WISTFUL
Current Music The Cure – “Untitled”

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Oh I'm gonna get all up Within that Spirit.

Root Deep, Tower High

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augmENT? (By Rob Mason)

“Tangible interfaces: treating the whole of physical space around the user as part of a human-computer interface (HCI) by employing physical objects as carriers of information.” – Lev Manovich on one element of the technologically “augmented space.”

“Once populated biotechnological interfaces can be deployed on a large scale to transform the landscape into a vast kinesthetic garden. Habitation of the landscape is based on one’s own movement and tactile relationships with the space. Pressure sensitive turfed areas respond to footsteps, long grasses chime to be stroked, artificial scents are diffused through the air at the tap of a leaf whilst vast arrays of LED’s change colour in response to your movement.” – Conceptual architect Guido Macioci

Guido Macioci’s Augmented Ecologies

Often in ancient creation myths our world comes into existence via sound. The makers in the Finnish Kalevala sang this earth into being; the Biblical God said “Let there be light” and we were illuminated whole. Suppose then that we lived in an environment where every plant rang out at the brush of a hand, and from their sound emerged new colours and shapes drawn vast down the sides of skyscrapers. Such are the ambitions of Macioci, who has managed to outfit plants with sophisticated (yet commercially available) digital sensor arrays which generate vibrant images on nearby LED screens. This preliminary rig is far short of the “kinesthetic garden” he envisions, but it demonstrates the possibility of a newly holistic integration of the organic and the technological.

I’ve written before in this blog about the immanence of nature (specifically here); there is no such thing as unnatural because we are always within nature. This argument is typically advanced in response to concerns that we verge upon becoming to detached from our traditional arboreal environs. In this case, however, we see the possibility to bridge the digital divide with leaf and vine. It’s a stark contrast to the glaring fluorescent horror of the New York Prada store described by Manovich as the vanguard of augmented spaces, as well as the neo-Luddite character of many leading “white cube” art installations. We might even take Macioci’s project as taking to one logical extreme Manovich’s prediction that the 2000s would be “about the physical – that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information.” Regardless of whether we can accept the conceptual “naturalness” of the advert-laden hyper-reality Manovich discusses, there is something inherently grounded and physical about plants that we sense at the reptilian stem of our brains. The verdant is expected and accepted innately.

Of course, the cynics out there among you (and I’m a card-carrying member) will likely notice right away that, for all of this project’s logical inevitability in a realm of pure theory, it is being conducted within the sheltering aegis of a university rather than the “real” world. Augmented spaces in reality have been appropriated, promoted and brokered by business, and their goal has been mostly to encourage and expand the toothless vampirism that is consumer culture. Leaves don’t sell products, but they do cost money to be rooted into circuit boards, to have their vines jacked into I/O ports. But Macioci’s plan, for all its lack of obvious “use” anticipates this; his outline emphasizes the availability and relative cheapness of all the technology involved, two key factors to any significant grassroots change.

After all, if leaves can learn to sing and draw from computers, perhaps they can teach their plastic partners a thing or two about growing organically.

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Coming soon to a graphic t-shirt from Blue Notes!

No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom

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Someone forgot the spandex on their mo-cap suit.

“There is no way I want to stay merely human.” – Kevin Warwick

“The disappearance of the body will not just result in the exit of ‘the meat,’ but also likely to go will be parts of our identity, our pleasures and desires.” – Mischa Peters

Amongst those interested in the intersections between human beings and technology, Kevin Warwick needs little introduction. A British pioneer in the field of robotics and cybernetics, Warwick has spent the last twenty-plus years pushing the boundaries of what it means to be ‘human.’ He has surgically implanted himself with various computer chips and transmitters, allowing him to achieve a variety of effects such as remote manipulation of simple machines such as lightswitches and doors by thought alone. More radically, he has with the cooperation of his similarly implanted spouse managed to electronically transmit physical sensations directly into another person’s nervous system. He hopes the result of the latter project will eventually lead to a form of technological telepathy, or “thought communication.”

Speaking bluntly, Warwick’s research leaves me scared shitless. This could be the atomic bomb of our era, except that where the bomb had the potential to destroy us physically, the technological advance Warwick heralds could lead to our cultural and experiential annihilation. I skirt the perilous edge of hyperbole with such statements, so bear with me a moment longer as I attempt to explain myself. Here is an excerpt from the FAQ on Warwick’s webpage (I’ll provide the link at the end of the blog):

“Will this technology [neural transmitters] change the way we communicate?

I feel so. At present our method of communication, speech, is very slow, serial and error prone. The potential to communicate by means of thought signals alone is a very exciting one. We will probably have to learn how to communicate well in this way though, in particular how to send ideas to one another. It is not clear if I think about an ice cream are my thoughts roughly the same as yours – we will have to learn about each other’s thoughts. Maybe it will be easier than we think, maybe not. Certainly speech is an old fashioned, out dated means of communication – it’s on its way out!”

Consider the implications of this statement. Already, due to the intercession of media, we live in a more globally homogenized society than ever before. While the eccentricities of regional spoken and textual communications are worn down by the memetic viruses of the internet and the cinema, we have at least the silent spaces in our skulls within which we are alone. In that moment between thought and expression we may have to shape what we wish to say to suit another, but the thought itself can remain as idiosyncratic or conformist as we are inclined. To learn another’s thoughts, to reshape the way we think has the potential to be the final death of difference.

As Mischa Peters aptly summarizes, most proponents of techno-organic hybridization “hope that the posthuman will eradicate some of the lesser traits of the human subject, such as dichotomizations, whether according to gender, race or class, or the infamous mind/body split.” Yet, when one considers how most cultures function in this world, the posthuman is less likely to be “queer, cyborg, metamazoan” than it is to be the ‘perfected’ Caucasian heterosexual. Homogeneity of this type is vastly more efficient than the panoply of ethnicities and orientations we have now. And of course, there’s a good chance might soon no longer care about the loss of such basic differences.

Cybernetic enhancements to human brain capacity and our perceptual mechanisms suggest the elimination of those cognitive limitations against which humanity has defined itself. Since the human brain contains something like 300 megabytes of information (roughly 0.0004% of my current hard drive storage), imagine how we might think with the storage and processing capability of a computer. Or rather, try. It is literally impossible for us to conceive of how something so many orders above us thinks; it would be less like a dog attempting to imagine how we think as it would be a dog trying to imagine how God thinks. Popular media that deals with the addition of computer storage to human brain tissue tends to shy away from these questions for this reason; in Johnny Mnemonic we see a dolphin raised to the level of a human genius, but human enhancements are limited to weaponization and data-transfer.

In her discussion of such basic ‘upgrades’ Peters quotes Elisabeth Grosz: “The limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘container,’ the skin. The body image is extremely fluid and dynamic; its borders, edges and contours are ‘osmotic’ – they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange.” I have little fear of this purely physical experimentation (a la the Great Machine of Brian K. Vaughn’s Ex Machina), because it lacks the potential for direct alteration of our minds. But once the transmission equipment which makes it possible is within us, the door is irreversibly open.

Whether we are held down by our governments and implanted with GPS-trackers and thought monitoring devices, or become schools of likeminded fish who from birth have never had a chance to think alone, or indeed ascend to another plane of comprehension, I want none of it. I hope to be long dead, not lingering, when we come to Warwick’s evolution.

Warwick’s Webpage: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/
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[EDIT: I've just noticed that the class is going to be looking at Warwick's webpage in a few weeks. Regardless, I'm sure I'll have no shortage of other things to say about the man's work in light of the readings/screenings that week. Or I could just talk about Screamers that week instead.]

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I liked them better when they just squeaked.

Spirits in the Material World

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I don't know, but it's powdered by pixie dust and Satan

“At last, according to some, the full development of the individual is possible, because we have finally objectified both our physical and mental capacities in a machine.” – Stanley Aronowitz

“But computerization also entails the passing of a certain type of skill, that associated with the close coordination of feeling and reason, of intuition and calculation. Now the old organic self is subsumed under the cyborg self: we are wired, simulacra.” – Aronowitz again

In his article “Technology and the History of Work” Stanley Aronowitz attempts to chart and interrogate the progress of thought on the value of what we might term technologized labour. Reactions to the egress of the machine into the sphere of the workplace, and particular that of manual labour, has tended to fall into a fairly Manichean binary alignment; one tends to either believe that it holds the key to liberation from the drudgery of the workplace (a “postwork” environment to use Aronowitz’s word) or that it portends the destruction of a tradition of cooperative labour and the ruination of the common man’s power to self-determine (a “fuckedover” situation to quote the average Michigander). Aronowitz doesn’t really come down on one side or the other, rather choosing to give one side’s opinion before countering it with the opposite perspective, and continuing to repeat the process until the various buzzwords employed by each school of thought become shuffled together in the reader’s mind. Marx actually crops up under both banners.

Perhaps the most interesting concept that Aronowitz introduced to me was Heidegger’s techné: “Where modern culture views technology as a regime of powerful tools by which human purposes may be served, particularly the domination of nature, techné signifies an uncovering, a way to the truth. Heidegger’s point is that techné signified human activity itself rather than a ‘tool’ of production and organization.” Leaping from this idea to the question of the cyborg, Aronowitz mentions the idea that there is no “separation of spirit from ‘dead’ matter…: all there is [is] the material world.” This is a radical idea that threatens to explode the binary opposition of the organic and the technology. If nature can be conceived as non-static, as being wherever we stand, then terms like “simulacra” lose all meaning. Phrases like “even better than the real thing” lose all meaning, because any thing is the real thing, even if it is experienced on a computer screen. William Carlos Williams’ belief of “no ideas but in things” recast as metaphysics.

Of course, as any number of aforementioned Michiganders can tell you, priority number one is having food on the table, and even though there be may be no true binary dividing the digital thing from the corporeal thing from another in experiential terms, we can’t yet eat circuit boards. And even if we could, there’s a good chance we would have to pay for them. It’s this perceived lack of practicality that leads Jeffrey Sconce in his delightfully curmudgeonly “Tulip Theory” article to equate the boom in digital studies to the fad of speculating on flowers which ruined several European economies in the seventeenth century. Similarly, virtually all of the gritty, hard science fiction written over at least the last thirty years (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars included) tend to look at technology as tool rather than techné. This is because on some level we find it difficult to believe in a “postwork” society as anything but pure fantasy; it’s why Aronowitz, after making some compelling points as to the nature of techné still concludes with a dour warning about ruining the “real.”

Yet North America has already transitioned to a point where our economy produces little, but sells much. Our work is largely in the service sector these days for which we are paid not for what we make but for what we do. It stands to reason that, if we reach a point of total automation in every sector of work that we could similarly automate the current transfer of currency and leave ourselves free to “number the streaks of the tulip” as we please. It’s all material.

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Even a digital flower is possessed.

Your Time Will Come, Virtual Boy

Yeah, well, uh, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal, huh?

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Note: Nothing I say in this blog applies to Japan. They's crazy.

If this were a standard bitingly cynical pop culture blog about the film The Lawnmower Man, I would probably spend my time musing on why Pierce Brosnan chose to perform every scene as if he had just snorted a rail of coke backstage, or deciphering Jeff Fahey’s bizarre interpretation of how to perform as a mentally-disabled character, or perhaps even itemizing the ways in which the film is one of the most strikingly homoerotic science fiction films ever made.

But it isn’t! This is an academic bitingly cynical pop culture blog. That being the case, what can this film tell us about the intersections of humanity and technology in contemporary culture?

The Lawnmower Man is a film made in 1992 cresting off of a wave of heightened interest in what I’ll refer to as ‘classical virtual reality.’ In the late ’80s and early ’90s it was widely thought that we were on the cusp of a new age of highly immersive, interactive technology. I recall every vision of futuristic entertainment involving bulky head-mounted displays and plated gloves more suited to operating a blowtorch than simulating reality. As Anne Balsamo says in her article on the subject, the buzzword was “experience:” it’s “a new kind of theatrical entertainment experience” and we have to “experience it live.” The idea wasn’t to watch it was to be in (now there’s a gender-loaded distinction…). Since then, the technology has stagnated, with mass-marketed exponents like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy failing catastrophically and more advanced units being simultaneously massively expensive (Balsamo quotes one unit as costing $250 000 in 1991) and unable to provide satisfactorily visceral experiences. Our fantasies of disembodiment continue unabated as evinced by films like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky, but we have largely left behind for the moment the belief that such advances will come in the immediate future. We are content to live our second lives at a point of remove from the screen.

This why I refer to the cyberspace The Lawnmower Man envisages as ‘classical VR.’ At the time of its creation, highly realistic computer simulations (a la Star Trek‘s holodeck) were thought of as a relatively distant fantasy, but we were eager enough to submerse ourselves in primary-coloured unrealities of the sort we see in The Lawnmower Man‘s groundbreaking FX. It’s unconvincing, but somehow more convincing than the holodeck because we had all seen demonstrations of actual machines capable of producing the basic experiences shared by Jobe and Peter in the film:

From the film

From the DOS Lawnmower Man videogame

Thus, the events seemed closer to imminence than in films which posited graphics “even better than the real thing.” These days, the conceptual view The Lawnmower Man has of VR seems very much of its time, and thus dated. One sequence that I found intriguing, however, was Jobe’s rampage through town. The majority of our conceptualizations to date about using VR to “escape from conventional reality, a way out for those who confront the severe limitations reality imposes in the form of corporate ideology, determining social structures, and the physical body itself” (Balsamo again). Yet here we have Jobe bringing cyberspace into the ‘reality’ of the film; impressed as we were in 1992 by the film’s effects, no one was even slightly misled by the ‘fire’ Jobe uses to ignite the abusive priest. Instead, cyberspace ceases to be a safety net and becomes instead a part of everyday experience. That its power is wielded by a psychopath is a danger inherent to any object or concept in real life.

I think that says something more about what we deal with today than much of the rest of the film. For every World of Warcraft shut-in there are a million others who spend more time in the real world, and the contemporary virtual realities of handheld computers and digital interfaces are always with them. The lawnmower man is in our heads…

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We go now to a braver future, where our love dares speak its name...