Context
Being and Seeming: the Technology of Representation
Richard Powers
If I had to name the preeminent art form of the pre-informational era, I would go with architecture. It is at once the most durable, representative, and comprehensive of our available artistic utterances. Buildings embody our most profound, ambitious, and capital-intensive attempts to overhaul the conditions of existence. More than any other aesthetic instrument, monuments stand metonymically for whole cultures and eras. Old chestnut definitions for the field attest to how it incorporates the expressive capabilities of the other arts. Cathedrals are the bible in stone. The exterior of a classical faade sounds as frozen music in the mind. Archaic spaces are said to open onto pure theater, infinity made imaginable. The architect Mulciber was one of the first to be cast out of heaven. Writers, painters, and musicians had to take a number and get in line behind him. And this demonic creators masterpiece, the city of Pandemonium, has stood the test of time, outlasting all other created works except, perhaps, the first.
Because our idea of art is still grounded in the Romantic myth of individual achievement, we often try to tell the history of architecture as we do the other arts, in a litany of names like Phidias, Sinan, Wren, and Wright. But Architecture has always been a profoundly collective enterprise. It exists in that unique interface between individual, aesthetic impulse and public, material necessity. The problems of form and function will yield only to a joint solution that makes the ingenuities of the most ambitious novel writing seem like a five-finger exercise. From the Temple of Nike Apteros to the Guggenheim Bilbao, architecture takes on the massive—and massively social—challenge of assembling a thing that is at once useable, beautiful, and sound.
But I single it out above the other arts for another reason altogether, one that seems more profoundly strange the longer I reflect on it. Where painting and writing and even music represent things, architecture is one of our few pre-information age arts whose products are the things they stand for.
Now if I were to go out on a not-so-daring limb and predict the preeminent medium of the new age that we are just now in the process of bringing about, I would say, without a hesitation, that the great art of the future will be the data structure. Like a good stone monument, the data structure lays claim to comprehensiveness, sweeping all the other arts up into its compass. The bitmap file promises to encode the full arsenal of visual expression. The MIDI file—written in the selfsame binary medium—provides for all the elements of music that can be formalized, every would-be composers Esterhazy in a box. Hypertext markup represents a kind of superset of the syntax of prose, making simple linear fiction a kind of zero-case boundary condition of a more daring, far-flung toolset. And while they do not yet command the required specificity and resolution for us to fully credit them, V-CAD (Virtual Computer-Assisted Design) and VR promise to port even architecture into the realm of what the digital Platonist might call the universally-deformable Forms.
Here, then, is the motive of worldwide digitization: to render every impulse, whether aesthetic or utilitarian, in the same, fully-transformable panglossary. And like architecture, the target medium of this world-wide conversion blurs the line between representing and being. The digitals great source of peculiar leverage lies in its rendering equivalent the operand and the operator. When data and the commands that operate upon that data are made of the same, indistinguishable stuff, the way is clear for recursive feats of representational manipulation heretofore unseen outside the human brain. Strings of binary digits are totally fungible. You cannot tell, upon cursory inspection of an array of memory, whether youre looking at an account or at a behavior, at data or at an algorithm. Even upon program execution, that old distinction gains a new kind of protean permeability. A MIDI file might also be a self-performing score. A bitmap image can become a set of encoded commands made to drive an analog painting machine.
Looked at from the representational side, a data structure of—to invoke the ghost of John Stuart Mill—a chair is just an image, a string of bits given over to modeling color depth and volume and spatial orientation, perhaps realized with a zeal for surfaces that would be the envy of Dutch Golden Age painters, yet a mere depiction nonetheless. But looked at from the operational side, that same encoded chair becomes a set of computational algorithms that can instruct other digital bodies below a certain virtual weight to conform to it and stay aloft in space. The digital chair can creak or break. It can possess tensile strength, texture, pliancy, abrasion, any affordance its joiner might care to give it. Set free to execute, it becomes an instance of its own description.
The digitized world increasingly releases symbols, frees them to become actors and agents. The digital data structure hovers in a place not quite material, yet not simply emblematic. Like architecture, the data structure can join aesthetic impulse with functional accountability. As we now copyright verbal descriptions, we will come to copyright scenes so rigorously specified that they become a place much like the one they depict. Legally secured characters will perform their characteristic personalities upon a sea of public data. Authors will hold patents on certain kinds of anger, certain expressions of computational elation, certain curves of encoded denouement. Hip literary agents have already begun to sniff whats in the wind, negotiating into tired old iron-age boiler-plate contracts the rights for new media, that is, everything that lies beyond print and film.
This is the futures architecture beyond architecture, an operant beyond opera. What Bayreuth was to the sum of music, drama, and design, the artistically realized data structure will be to the sum of imaginable, real-world Bayreuths. We will live in the shadow of these things, as we once lived in the shadows of the Hagia Sophia and we now live in the shadows of the World Trade towers. We will live in a realized Van Goghs Bedroom at Arles, one that detects its occupant and grows around him. What the epic recitation or the cave painting once worked in the guts of their receivers, these operational sculptures have already begun to work on the hearts of the revised human community. Art and story have always dreamed of this transport: the script, the name of God, placed under the Golems tongue that will bring the imitation body to life and be the thing it has heretofore only stood for. And since the beginning of symbolic reference, this is the translation that life has feared. From Islam to medieval iconoclasts to Baudrillard and Lacan, we have heard the cry: in the image is the murder of the thing.
Imagine two square blocks of a small Midwestern town in one of the great Fly-over states, a residential neighborhood of older houses, call it Oak Street between Market and Lincoln. Thirty houses face the street, sheltering, for the rough purpose of this exercise, an even one hundred lives. Now imagine an 18-hour period, from dawn until midnight, on a day sometime early in this millennium: make it Labor Day, 2020.
Now suppose that every datum of every event in this two-block universe during this 18-hour period has been digitized. The days document, the complete space-time graph of the life-lines passing in and out of this tesseract has been captured in a single, immense data structure, the kind of linked, modular, multidimensional array of arrays that NASA satellites make of the surface of Jupiters moons. The entire two-thirds of a day has been recorded, as on a thousand dispersed panoramic video cameras, and the structure transported to a state-of-the-art quantum computer, where it can be retrieved and projected into that wonderfully opaque medium, the invention we call real-time, creating a kind of life-sized, walk-through holographic Main Street or Our Town, traversable in six-by-ten foot scrolling intervals.
You can move through this space as often as you like, starting anywhere, and traveling any space-time path that you wish, up to the boundaries of the representations container. Since you are just a shade passing through this world image, the bits that make up a door or a wall will be permeable to you. Some compact, thought-driven joystick gives you dominion over all dimensions, allowing you to float in any direction, up to the rooftops or down to the cellars. You can enter the world at dawn, stand invisibly by and watch, laughing, as the residents fumble out of bed, trying to find the snooze button, the coffee maker, the showers hot water tap. You can join them at breakfast, without attracting the slightest attention. You can stand in the middle of the streets morning traffic, and the cars will pass right through you.
At a little before seven, near the intersection of Market and Oak, two neighboring residents on their way to work stop and exchange a few words. They will do this each time the data structure runs, whether you are there to see them or not. Should you wish, you can follow either one, until they leave the edges of the recording and pass into data incognita. At a little after seven, the single parent in number 507 walks the children to school, just off of the holograms northern border. And so the day begins, and so it continues, a day that you can reenter and relive at will, journeying up to midnight, free to discover the webs of quiet desperation and clandestine connection between these lives, the petty deceptions and surprise faithfulness, the incapacitating fears and the acts of impulse generosity.
For a while, you get off on straight-up voyeurism. You learn the exact moment of everyones showers. You watch them in bed with one another, and in their would-be solitary rituals. You see how people really behave, when they are not you and when you are not there. Then, tiring of this dramaless standing Now of existence, perhaps even after a matter of mere days, you ask, Why am I doing this?
And I say, This is the futures supreme art form.
You disagree violently. Art? But this is tedious. This is boring. As an old, second-millennium comedian would say (you say), if I wanted to sit through a long, pointless story, I have my own life.
If
its boring, I say, make it New York. Make it Lower Manhattan, Horatio
Street, between Washington and Hudson. Surely, with that much more
density and diversity, you can find something of dramatic interest on
any given day.
You try it for a while. Somebodys unemployed. Somebodys just been
hired. Someone is the target of a racial animosity you cant begin to
understand. Some fight substance abuse, others depression. A lot of
screw-ups are sleeping out in front rooms on flip-down futons. Here and
there, would-be artists spend the day potting about in archaic
media—paint and music and words. A Russian woman who never learned a
stick of English is dying by inches up on the third floor of the
Northwest corner of Greenwich.
Its frustrating, you say. The point of view, the focalization—arbitrary geography—is too constraining. The story of life is not in the place; its in the people. No sooner do you begin to get intrigued by someone than they head uptown, falling off the edge of the known simulation.
Fine, I say. Weve just upgraded the hardware. We can give you all the way to the far border of the East Village.
You hold out for Midtown. While you are busy negotiating, Moores Law coughs up the whole damn island, from the Battery all the way up to Washington Heights.
Now you see how you might begin to be in real trouble. You could get lost here, really hurt, although none of the traces of these lives can impact yours. You could give this playground more interest, more engagement, more zeal than you have ever given your own existence. This is your chance to see the top of Trump Tower or safely sample the desperation of certain northern neighborhoods, where the life expectancy is shorter than that of Bangladesh. You press up against the map paradox so beloved by Borges and Lewis Carroll: here is a representation of the whole island, at the scale of an inch to an inch. Only: how do we make room to unfold it, where do we lay it out? How can we possibly use the thing to navigate?
It begins to nag at you: if what you want is to move through a web as wide and deep and dense and varied and unpredictable as New York, why not go to New York? And yet, this safe representation confers on you certain irrefutable advantages: invisibility, permeability, repeatability—being anytime, anywhere, and as often as you like. For real life is constrained in the stream of time, while here, for a while, you can see the stream at last, from up on the raised vantage of the dry stream bank.
You race around town, overwhelmed, your head turned by local prettiness or pathos. Yet for all the exhilarating chase, you cant seem to enter in to the simulation. You dart off again, uncertain how to turn or where the story lies, exactly because the story lies everywhere.
You come out of the simulation after several extended excursions, more agitated than enlightened. You cant get hold of it, you say. The place is too big.
First it was too small, I say.
To which you say, OK, all right, I know.
And then you find the point. This thing is not pointed. This thing is at best sociology, you say. You say: art has to be composed.
And I say bingo. Wish granted. Well make it composed, then. I clap my hands or tap my heels or invoke the interrupt request handler of digital creation, and we are back on Horatio Street, or on Oak, but this time with all the artifice of compression, all the evident design of narrative. The walk-in hologram is no longer a transcript, but an elaborate, artful script. Make that scores of playscripts, six long, ten wide, and three deep.
Do not underestimate the scale of the undertaking here. We are talking Chartres. Angkor Wat. The Taj.
You go back in to the simulation, aware that the sampler of random stories has now been put together for your viewing discovery. You begin to savor the constructedness of the lines, the ironies and the reverses. The hapless veterinarian in 402 who unwittingly becomes everyones confidant, planning to take his own life. The estranged daughter, just down the block from him, coming across a long-forgotten family heirloom at a garage sale. Letters crossing in the mail, going to the wrong recipient, slipped under the door and accidentally slipping under the carpet as well, lost forever to their intendeds. The block is suddenly thick with plot, and you could roll around in it for days like a possum in a dumpster. The shape of things as you change your viewing angle now carries the patina of meaning.
You want it to grow, to become. You want to be a part of it, to touch and alter its contents. You want it to know that you are there. To change with you, to change you, your standing in it.
And I say: Whatever you say.
You take on a virtual character and move in. For a while you are thrilled, the thrill of dice baseball, of dress-ups, of massively persistent, parallel, populated role-playing games, the rush of lying to someone at a wild party, completely reinventing who you are, and, for a while, getting away with it. You have finally found another life, a sculptable, moldable, replayable thing. You make yourself into the Count of Monte Cristo, come back to set this sleepy little bourgeois fable alight. You make yourself into Tess or Anna or Emma, and vow to stay alive, to get it right this time. You thrill to your growing stats, the heaping up of fortune here, the unlooked-for, surprising, incremental addictive payoffs of this alternate existence.
And then, in time, another sadness sets in. The sadness of consummation. The sadness of infinite freedom. Of save and reboot. Of having the world, in all its heft and bruise and particularity, go utterly your own way.
We dream that a new tool might put us closer to the thing that we are sure lies just beyond us, just outside the scale of our being. A little heavier throw weight, a few fuller colors, a finer brush, another dimension, greater syntactical innovation, stylistic breakthrough, twice the trombones, a bigger set budget, a few extra megabytes or megahertz is all we need to do the trick. Artists and their audiences are both like that robber baron—Carnegie I think—who, when asked, How much is enough? replied, Just a little bit more. The curse of the body is that it habituates, and every signal from outside our senses already starts the cycle of its own attenuation. The brighter the insight, the quicker our pupils contract.
Innovation has been arts time-honored way of countering the fade of time. New media have forever promised to take us to the place we can no longer get to. And the fate of a new medium is invariably to be celebrated for exactly the thing that most impedes the power of artistic representation.
Without question, new technologies do add to the available palette of human expression. But it follows that they will necessarily do so at a cost. Take the single most destabilizing technological development of all time. I picture the great, singing bards sitting around the campfire the day after writing was invented, throwing their hands up in the air, proclaiming, Damn it all, there goes our collective memory. The price of innovation is endless. The payoff for each destabilizing increase in artistic techne is usually misunderstood to be an increase in leverage, verisimilitude, or articulation. Our dream of a new tool inclines us to believe that the next invention will give us a better, fuller, richer, more accurate, more immediate image of the world, when perhaps just the opposite is the case. Television does not improve on the verisimilitude of radio, nor photography on that of painting. The more advanced the media, the higher the level of mediation.
The hypersymbolic nature of the digital—the fact that its descriptions have that odd ability to rise up and walk—leaves it particularly vulnerable to this mistake. More than ever, we are in danger of reifying our artifacts, of mistaking them for a priori entities. Consider the way that the digital age has completely reversed the sense of the word transparent. We speak of transparent applications, of transparent operating systems, and transparent interfaces, when what we really mean, here, is opaque. We want these new, active, symbol-like actants of ours to hide from us everything under the hood. The problem with the digital promise lies not its frivolity or its shallowness. (Remember that only upon its deathbed has the novel no longer needed to defend itself from being only a novel.) The problem with the digital promise lies in its potential depth, in the degree and the force of an emulation that might make us content to take the map for the place, the sign for the thing signified.
We want of art something that will break the tyranny of space and erase our defeat at the hands of time. But we tend to look for this deliverance in the wrong place, shooting for a victory that overplays itself in the domain of the way-too-literal. New media have to date suffered not from a surfeit of virtuality but from not being virtual enough. They struggle to reproduce the world image where they might much more profitably engage in interrupting it. For the full force of art depends only in part on the audiences identification with the represented thing. In the presence of a transforming representation, we must still come to feel the full, reflected force of the representer.
What new art can give us is not better images of the world, but better images of the gazers at that world. Every act of depicting, Bakhtin reminds us, is itself a depiction.
Now more than ever, the world is too much with us. Late-day commodity capitalism depends on making sure that we are never alone, never away from the world image, never out of ear- or eyeshot, never outside the flood of signals that stand in for the source that they are signaling. To turn arts time-honored trick and subvert this comfort, I suggest that new media look, for a model, to that last act performed in solitude that consensual society doesnt yet consider pathological.
Imagine, for a moment, that there is no frigate like a book.
You say, OK. I can still do that.
And I say, imagine an act performed in solitude that is not solitary. One that depicts the flow of time, and in the fluidity of its aerial depiction, shows the stream to be a man-made canal.
Run that one past me again, you say.
And I say, what is the rate of time of a book? A mother carries her son upstairs, and that might last forty pages. You may take an hour to release it. Yet World War One can pass in a sentence and a half. And now consider: what is the rate of time of time?
You laugh nervously. One second per second?
And I say: and you believe that one? Breaking the illusion of that man-made flow gives us the closest thing to a sense of immortality were ever going to get. When we read, we stand in the flow of thought and outside the flow of ephemeral event. This is the magic re in representation. New media too often reverse this relation. In place of the time of thought—the time of Chartres, of Angkor, of the Taj—they serve us real time, transparent time. Time too much like the one that we are already too inclined to believe in.
But the beauty of a book lies in its ability to unmake us, to interrupt our imaginary continuities and put us head to head with a maker who is not us. Story is a denuding, laying the reader bare, and the force of that denuding lies not in our entering into a perfect representation, but in our coming back out. It lies in that moment, palpable even before we head into the final pages, when we come to remember how finely narrated is the life outside this constructed frame, a story needing only some other minds pale analogies to resensitize us to everything in it that weve grown habituated to.
Now that we may lose forever the art of contemplative and private fiction, the novel has developed an urgency of purpose it never had when it was the new tech on the block, when it had to be defended against being only a novel. Now there is another new tech, another only, and reading as we once knew it must find a place to hide its timelessness, harder to reach, harder to destroy. Michael Heim, one of the great prophets of the new media, nods to this urgent purpose in this passage from his book, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality:
We can only hope that the postmodern hyperflood will not erode the gravity of experience behind the symbols, the patient, painstaking ear and eye for meaning. . . . Cyberspace . . . should evoke the imagination, not repeat the world. . . . The final point of a virtual world is to dissolve the constraints of the anchored world so that we can lift anchor—not to drift aimlessly without point, but to explore anchorage in ever-new places and, perhaps, find our way back to experience the most primitive and powerful alternative embedded in the question . . . Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?
For like a book, digital representation, in all its increasing immersiveness and free agency, may finally locate its greatest worth in its ability to refresh us to the irreducible complexity of the analog world, a complexity whose scale and heft we might always have underestimated, without the shortfall of its ghostly imitations.
Our technologies are the congealed projections of our hopes and fears. Like our art, they are the engrams of our unwillingness to live in any place that would treat us the way this place does. And like our preeminent arts—like building, like architecture—our new techs strive to remake the world in our own image, to re-form, through re-presenting, the place we recognize but cannot yet find. The data structure transports that old battle of building to the true locus of our discontent: the restless, reified image of the outside that we carry around in our own mental spaces.
Our constantly increasing ability to alter the terms of material existence will necessarily alter, beyond recall, the shape and content of our arts, even if those arts somehow choose, impossibly, never to change their means. What we build will naturally depend upon the available building materials, but it will not be determined solely by them. From the beginning, part of us has always sought to assemble the cathedral that would rise without material constraints. But any building, however monumental, however disembodied or virtual or gravity-defying, will always be constrained by the material of collective story, the plot of its appearance here, the narrative shape of its makers, the hopes and fears passing underneath its tentative, constructed canopy.
No change in medium will ever change the nature of mediation. A world depicted with increasing technical leverage remains a depiction, as much about its depicters as about the recalcitrant world. We shape the data that we aspire to live in. But the place that we make will stay at best a running approximation, a long act of iterated guess, of near-miss metaphor, of like-thisness. The course of technology, like the course of information, like the course of art, which it always informs, takes as its sole available topic people talking to one another, revising, revisiting, re-presenting, re-presenting this open conversation, this short glimpse of long time, our condition of hindered need and standing bewilderment. Our answer to thats all. Thats all.
And Oh!, you answer. Maybe.
And Yes, I say. Maybe. Oh.
