NOT CUT OFF FROM THE WORLD

This remediation of consciousness, even into the space created between worlds in art, does not sever consciousness completely from the engaged worlds in which it interacts. The spectator must always be engaged. Just as consciousness creates physical and digital worlds within subjective reality, presupposing the externality of one or many universes, so too must consciousness construct itself in relation to such worlds. While worlds and consciousness are Virtual entities, their conditions are mutual in this Virtuality of the self-positing subject.

Benayoun’s work Stolen Life (2006) demonstrates this need to maintain an engagement with both worlds even while attempting to create a space in between to reach a critical distance towards our engaged parallax position. The work contains two rooms, two conceptual worlds.

One contains a tree with computer-controlled lighting and watering. The other allows a spectator to enter, thus triggering the light and water and keeping the tree alive. Images are taken and displayed on screens outside the rooms each time there is movement of the spectator or the tree (when, for example, a leaf falls). The tree’s continued survival depends on the engagement of the spectator. If the spectator is not in one world, neither world can exist. The work approaches Bohm’s notion of utopia, in which “communication would take place as a creative act” (1994, 223), which is here extended to the on-going participation of spectators in communication with the world and the tree. Benayoun derives the project from the rise of two concepts in contemporary creation: “the first is the idea that it is the spectator who creates the picture and the second is that the life of a creation can be dependent on its owner (the Tamagochi)” (Benayoun 2006b). It is worth noting here Žižek’s placing of

Tamagochi as god, a technological big Other (in Wright and Wright 1999, 108), the Virtuality of a non-existent entity that controls and mediates desire through the signals of an engaged communication. The desire of Stolen Life is that the subject be in the world, in the work, and thus bring about self-posited emergence of a creative communication between the engaged spectator and both physical (tree) and digital (computer controlled environment) worlds.

The visibility of the work to the external world, however, emerges positively and negatively: during a spectator’s engagement; after a time of dis-engagement (the tree is dying and leaves fall). Here Benayoun is making clear the antagonism of a parallax between

the ‘survival structure’ and ‘observation structure’ of the work, between a dying tree and the flow of spectators whose temporary engagement passes through the worlds of the work as a point on their nomadic line of the Virtuality of their own continued consciousness. The

partitioning of the work and its display on two distinct screens could thus be said to create the effect of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe” (1994, 187). The very structures of the ‘frame’ in Stolen Life bring to light the desire for continued engagement within one specific arrangement of worlds (the rooms of the work) while acknowledging the impossibility of such permanence in the necessarily nomadic and fleeting nature of each individual spectator’s engagement. The work displays the tree to the outside world only as it dies, promoting an emotional engagement of the spectator across the mediated space in the causal relation of the individual to the death of the tree, a possible sense of guilt arising from the ontological responsibility of engagement that underpins parallax reality in the causal gesture of subjective reality.

This shifting interrelation and interpolation between the constant realignments of Existence and Meaning within the structure of the Virtual and the Real within consciousness, displays an increasing permeation and permutation of digital and physical worlds by one another. What we conceive as two separate worlds, held apart by the gap within

consciousness, is becoming a blurred assemblage of fragmented worlds that coalesce around the void-core of the human psyche to form subjective reality. Benayoun acknowledges this process as an increasing ‘impurity’ of digital technology:

This impurity might characterize the mature stage of the medium, and the merging of the virtual and the physical world is probably the extension of the human trend of converting the objective environment into an informational system. These concerns affect the art world as well. The artist is more and more involved in the development of the understanding of medias, creating new interfaces, adapting the narrative and the building of meaning to new media, bringing the breaks through coming from technology far from the pixel, the sound sample, and the HMD [head-mounted display] straight to the other fields of human activity. (Benayoun 2001)

Fig.7 Stolen Life (2006) ©Maurice Benayoun

The tree and the artwork are inversely dependent on the spectator’s engagement; the tree’s life is dependent on a spectator’s presence, while the artwork is visible only when as leaves fall and the tree dies.

These conversions between worlds across the parallax gap of consciousness reveal a great deal in the nature of their translation. The creative intervention that brings the evolving nature of technology into art, broader cultural significance and everyday life displays a trace or stain of the artist making such a conversion, defined by their own parallax position as engaged spectator of worlds. Benayoun engages with these notions in The Art Collider (2010) project. Utilising ‘IN/OUT’ research at CITU, the project enables a collaborative and

experimental ‘peer-to-peer’ creative network, whereby one collaborator (research institute, artist, etc.) takes an input of data from another user, enacts a creative process upon it and outputs it to another collaborator. The inputs and outputs can be a range of media, including text, image and sound feeds, while the processes occurring in the ‘black box’ of the individual subject evolves the input or converts it into another medium (for example, converting a stream of text into images drawn from a database or online search engine). This unseen process, in the Real-Meaning of the individual institution’s server, is not only the code of a specific process but the unobservable parallax position that underlies any human-world system. As Ashby describes in relation to cybernetics, “what is being suggested now is not that Black Boxes behave somewhat like real objects but that the real objects are in fact all Black Boxes, and that we have in fact been operating with Black Boxes all our lives” (1957, 110). Any and all systems between a subject and a world it constructs contain unobservable (quantum/psychological) variables and forces.

The transition across the gap of a subject in The Art Collider is the creation of impurities, the nomadicity of the work emerging across a landscape of functions that convert each computer in the network from a tool to an affective weapon (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 435f), a force that deterritorialises the data and the medium itself in its constantly shifting remediation between locations and specific manifestations of information. In doing so, the project is attempting to redefine the nature of art as an emergent process across the gaps within the world created by human cognition of the digital, insisting on subjects’ engagement in the evolution of cultural paradigms. Another such adaptation and corruption of the cultural notion of space is seen in Benayoun’s concept art work Art Total (2010), taken from The Dump (2006a), an ongoing online repository of unrealised works existing only as Idea without the need for concrete actualisation. The Art Total concept is to fill a gallery space with an inflatable structure that exactly replicates and fills the entire physical space. It is impossible not to see the logic of the digital medium here intruding on physical space.

The filling of the gallery moves beyond similar conceptual works, such as Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977) which inserts a large quantity of earth 56cm deep into a highly urban gallery location, or Martin Creed’s Half the Air in a Given Space series (1999;

2007; various others), which half fill a gallery with balloons. While the Earth Room juxtaposes forms of physical space and a disjuncture of landscapes, Art Total recalls a digital image file where even blank space is filled with data for every pixel. While Creed’s balloon works use a similar method of filling the space, they appear as a collection of partial objects that spectators can walk through compared to the impenetrable surface of Benayoun’s inflated BwO. The excess of Benayoun’s work within the gallery renders the entire exhibition invisible, only accessible to a spectator through any glass walls the gallery might possess (Benayoun identifies a glass-walled gallery as the ideal location as it confronts the audience directly with their inability to enter the space). Thus the excess of the Real reveals a lack of usefulness, weaponising the gallery for artistic purposes beyond the ‘tool’ logic of a productive space for an audience experience. The negation of perspective inside the work brings forth a literal void of parallax whereby the spectator is disengaged from the world by its very fullness – a

simultaneous lack and excess that denies and critiques our engaged spectatorship – exposing the world as a whole as a lost object. As Lacan insists, “the objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze” (1977, 105), and common throughout Benayoun’s work is the exposure of the parallax position as the stain in the world despite the subject’s necessary engagement with it.

The denial of the gaze in penetrating the work forces our perspective into a nomadic relation with art as a force which always emerges as process through and across worlds. The

disruption of Existence by Meaning in these works displays an insertion of digital modes of thinking the world even into the familiar physical environment in a short-circuiting of the modes of consciousness.