REDEFINING THE PARAMETERS

New methods of thinking the apparent solidity of ‘objective’ reality have been at the forefront of scientific theory for the past hundred years. Even earlier than explicit interpretations of quantum theory, Thomas Young’s ‘double-slit experiment’ (1802; 1807, 457-71) established the theoretical foundation for both the wave/particle duality and the integral role of the observer in defining the material world. The expansion of science into quantum mechanics has brought many questions concerning the nature of Existence, the role of the Virtual in defining it, the underlying Real of the universe and our understanding of its Meaning. Lying outside our everyday experience, the role of consciousness has proven increasingly complex and fervently debated in relation to both the objective and subjective conditions of reality. A key interpretation of this dilemma is the de Broglie-Bohm theory, established by Bohm as the

‘hidden variable’ theory (1952). While Bohm’s developments attempt to remove the role of the observer, the focus on a hidden or implicate causality and a simultaneous wave-and-particle reality display great similarity with an observer-dependent construction of Existence between two forms of reality (to Bohm wave and particle or classical and quantum; here physical and digital) through a parallax of the material universe governed by the nature of the observation between two apparently contradictory states coexisting according to an

unobservable factor. Bohm’s labelling of this theory as a ‘causal’ or ‘ontological’ interpretation of quantum mechanics displays the role of his ‘hidden variable’ within subjective experience as the Real of all realities. Mark Buchanan states that no interpretation of quantum theory yet defines how superpositions occur, or even which variable (position or speed, according to

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is superposed, but that “neither picture is more correct than the other” (Buchanan 2007, 17). What is brought into the defining role becomes the structure in which we make such decisions: the problem of the appearance of materiality or its potential for truth and its understanding. This is the core ontological-epistemological debate that defines philosophical study, and it is also the problem of the inversion of Existence and Meaning between physical and digital worlds. The unknown position from which we view such shifts, the void of subjectivity, forms the key dilemma which neither philosophy nor science has been able to resolve. Critical digital culture takes this unknown position as its subject, expressing the multiplicity of an observer’s viewpoint; opening the engaged creative subject to the parallax of its wave/particle duality, its uncertainty and its hidden causality, through the very failure of expressing the inexpressible. This superposed dualism that maintains both sides of the antagonism simultaneously is seen in the expression of Real-Meaning against Virtual-Existence through technological mediation and subsequent subjective remediation.

The Art is Motion (2013) project by Sergio Albaic for the Lexus IS 300h converts the car, a key signifier of technological innovation and objectified movement in contemporary culture, along with the computer, into a creative medium.² The generative art piece reconstructs a photo of the driver according to the nature of their driving style: speed defines the accuracy and abstraction of the brush strokes; the choice of electric or petrol engine shifts towards

‘colder’ or ‘more virulent’ colours respectively; acceleration speed and RPM insert red and blue strokes for aggressive or gentle driving. The remediated face constantly evolves over time, emerging as a fixed work through the motion of the car. From the initial digital photograph to the final image uploaded to the project’s website, the mediating forces of the driver, the technology (of the work and the car) and the rules of the artwork set up by the artist in the rigidity of the code transform the human and its interaction with the environment into a real-time art work. The links to nomadicity are made clear, while the position of the ‘artist’ is obscured. Is the creator of the work the designer of the code (Albaic), the car-manufacturer (Lexus) or the driver? The position from which the work is viewed displays a parallax of Meaning depending on whether the image is seen in real time or in its final incarnation, as a wave or a particle, and differs when viewed as a visual expression or as a collection of data (the speed, RPM and engine hybridity values over time are also collected for analysis by Lexus) according to the potentiality of the stream of fixed values determined by the physical experience of the driver. The everyday interaction with a physical vehicle in the physical world is reduced to the Real-Meaning of data, mediated by the Real-Meaning of the work’s code and

2 See http://www.artismotion.com/ for a video of the project and examples of the works.

constructed as a Virtual-Existence both in the car and online. The artist defines the project as

“the construction of the identity as a hybrid between genetics and experience, which will be represented by a photograph of the driver and the driving experience” (Albaic in Lexus 2013).

The layering of multiple Meanings, of genetic disposition, interpretation of the driver and code of the work, is combined with the Real of the subjective experience and its unknowable position, to highlight the position of the individual subject across worlds. The participant engages with a series of Real-Meanings derived from a cultural assemblage surrounding the work. Bohm says of Meaning, that “in society we have a culture. I say a culture is basically a shared meaning” (1994, 189), foregrounding the role of possibility and potential assemblage that emerges through the interaction of subjects and their worlds. Wheeler, a proponent of the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, further defines Meaning as “a joint product of all the information that is exchanged between those who communicate” (in Brown and Davies 1986, 68), emphasising the collective assemblage that in contemporary global society spreads out through digital media across space and time, across social particles and waves into a flexible assemblage built around the perspectival gaps between subjects.

However, the flow of information in Art is Motion remains under the control of stratifying capitalist machines that seek to fix Real-Meaning as data points that track the movements of the driver through the collected information, reducing the mobile subjective experience to a static set of particles to be used to increase profit. Furthermore, the entire project rests in the realm of advertising, inserting corporate desire into the Real of the

subjective viewpoint that is expressed through the work, tainting the free and open critique of the parallax of physical-digital worlds. It is possible to locate similar relations between

technology, the subject and the antagonistic superposition of parallax worlds in the work Google Street Ghosts (2012), a purposefully nomadic and artistic intervention by Paolo Cirio.

The ongoing global project uses images of human subjects as seen in Google Street View, selected for their obvious disruption of or disjuncture with their physical location. These images are printed and pasted onto the location in which they were originally photographed, converting the Real-Meaning of the code that is gradually fixing the streets of the world within the structures of Google’s databases into a Virtual-Existence between physical and digital locations. This is further remediated by Cirio photographing the new images fixed into their physical location and displaying them digitally on the project website, appropriately displayed as pins on its own Googlemap. This triple expression of subjects deemed excessive to Google’s codifying of world space, labelled as “victims…obscure figures…biopolitical surplus” (Cirio 2012) by the artist, explicitly engages and critiques the multiple layerings of realities and their respective control by the original subjects, corporations and the artist. The

exploitation of exploitation offers a creative intervention in the fixing of the digital by

“confronting the public with the aesthetic qualities of the data” (Ibid.) to make clear the parallax of physical and digital worlds and the superposition of iterative remediation between subjects, worlds and technologies. What is brought into play through this process echoes the

‘decoherence’ that governs the blurred lines between quantum and classical realities, what Phillip Ball describes as “a sort of leaking away of quantum behaviour when a particle interacts with its surroundings” (2008, 23). This disappearance of the underlying nature of matter that physicists are constantly trying to observe and explain is the same process that Cirio is attempting to bring into view through “ghosts haunting the streets and sometimes

reappearing from the ethereal hells of digital archives…the murky intersection of two overlain worlds” (Cirio 2012). The presupposed causality of a subjective engagement with a world or environment, whether (classical or quantum) physical or digital, will always revert to the state of ‘hidden variable’ in the void at the heart of parallax reality.