TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION

It is this rethinking of our relation to technology that draws out the confrontation of thought as a mediator in Dombis’ work. He has said of his relationship with new technologies that they are “tools, and nothing else but tools” (Dombis in Debailleux 2008a, 37), that enable a

challenge to traditional tools and cognitive processes in the creation of his work. This focus on process mirrors not only the functioning Virtuality of consciousness that Dombis confronts in his hyper-rational irrationality but also the notion that “contemporary physics essentially is a purely operationalist theory” (d’Espagnat 2011, 1714). It is the disruption by proliferation through which Dombis acts, reiterating the gaze onto simple objects fragmented across the surface of spectatorship. This is his relation to a parallax of technology: a simultaneous positing of too many views to comprehend that creates a rupture of lack within the gaze.

Heymer says of Dombis’ lenticular works that “depending on the observer’s point of view it can generate different pictures and create a three-dimensional ever changing impression that prevents the perception of a complete form” (Heymer 2012), and it is this step beyond the simple visual parallax that draws digital technologies into a role of lack through excess. The BwO as complete surface becomes a lost object when we try to view and map it in its entirety.

Consciousness is larger than its own gaze, and it is the failure of such a gaze that draws the engaged spectator into the ““phenomenology” of an absent reality” (Buci-Glucksmann 2009) that is created through Dombis’ works. This lack through excess is explored more thoroughly in What_Next? (2011),⁹ which uses images drawn from internet search engines to answer questions of our origins, purpose and future. These images are projected onto three screens on the ceiling of a church, played in series at aleatorically varying speeds, from slow fades that make visible the individual pictures to rapid flourishes that render the visual stimuli

incomprehensible.

Patrick Amine comments that instead of answering the questions posed, this

“iconographic maelström finally appears as a phenomenological suspension of the world, as it does lead to the terminal formula: “Know Thyself”” (2011). Dombis’ semantic and iconic questioning amid a disruptive relation to parallax spectatorship through technology displays Bernard d’Espagnat’s confrontation with the dilemmas of contemporary physics concerned with operations rather than matter. Indeed, d’Espagnat points out that in quantum physics, matter is “a set of mere appearances to consciousness” (2011, 1715). This counters the materialist scientific imperative of the primacy of matter towards an emergence of

9 See http://dombis.com/works/what-next/ for video and images.

consciousness from appearance in a self-referential loop of Virtuality in the self-positing of the individual subject against a non-existent material reality. To resolve this, d’Espagnat claims, there is necessarily an inaccessible reality from which consciousness emerges to posit the accessible reality of matter and appearance, so that “consciousness emerges from something that lies beyond our intellectual grasp” (Ibid.) in the most absolute and necessary sense. This expresses within the limitations of a scientific framework what Rancière describes as the unrepresentable in art (2007) and Galloway expands to the digital (2011); what we have here insisted on as the inaccessible void of subjectivity from which consciousness emerges Virtually in self-positing an ‘objective’ (and objectified in the Real) reality. This reality is thus always lost beneath the appearances of the BwO, the void remains inaccessible from the surface of the subject. Dombis’s questioning of our existence and purpose thus offers a direct challenge to the smooth functioning of reason that obscures the conditions for subjectivity beneath the perpetual proliferation of a fragmented desire for function.

The rupture in such a surface that is necessary to challenge our smooth functioning of consciousness and insert a contact with the Real, through which we might conceive a concept of the void, is brought into plain view in relation to contemporary technological and cognitive mediation in Dombis’ Crack (2010-13).¹⁰ Applying the use of internet image searches to the word ‘crack’, the results are here displayed split across two adjacent screens, each of which is on a vibrating motor with a randomly shifting speed that also controls the rate at which the images change on that particular screen. Between the two monitors a spatial parallax is formed by the splitting and vibration of the images and a temporal parallax is formed when the two displays change and vibrate at different rates. Within this parallax of mediation by technology a new critical space is allowed to emerge which “makes it possible for the viewer to immerse himself or herself in the cracks of our time” (Dombis 2013). This work exemplifies a critical approach to constructing a challenge to the self-mediation of the emergence of

consciousness from that which is necessarily inaccessible to consciousness (a world from consciousness from the void), leaving an open question as to what lies between the cracks of our society. What is presupposed as a mind-independent reality is the flux of the void and, through the use of Virtual processes taken again here to the extreme in rendering the information incomprehensible by representation, it is possible in these works to create a space in which the relation of the subject to what lies beneath can be staged. The reality of this space between the cracks is, like a quantum vacuum, “by no means a simple empty space where nothing ever happens” (Lambrecht in Figger, Meschede and Zimmermann 2002, 197),

10 See http://dombis.com/works/crack/ for video.

but rather a space of the genesis of subjectivity. The parallax of consciousness that must be sought in these disruptions of self-mediating Virtuality is thus between the two stages of the creation of the subject: the first stage Žižek describes as the process through which

“embodied reality is the result of the “actualization” of pure eventlike virtualities” (2012, 22), and the second he describes as the moment in which “the emergence of thought and sense signals the moment when the constituted reality, as it were, reconnects with its virtual genesis.” (Ibid., 23). What works like Crack create, through literal visual and technological parallax, is a rupture between these two stages in which the Virtuality of the creation of the subject can be made clear, a confrontation with the inaccessible void can be staged, and a new perception can emerge of our own engaged spectatorship in subjective reality. The project of Dombis, as with Baecker or Bolognini, is to use technology to render visible that which is unrepresentable, not by creating images of such inaccessible notions, for such a gesture would remain empty of critical content regarding the void, but rather by creating disruptions in the smooth functioning of our self-mediated perceptions through which we might catch a glimpse of the parallax position of our Virtual consciousness.

Fig.17 Crack (2012) © Pascal Dombis

The two screens are mounted on servos that move at randomly different rates, controlling the disjointed progression of images across the crack between the two interfaces.

2.5 INACCESSIBILITY

Before concluding this chapter, the persisting problem of attempting to understand and represent the void must be confronted. Rancière’s failure of representation (2007) remains, and artistic gestures relating directly to the void only further the notion of its

unrepresentability. The Void collection of works by Polish digital art collective Goverdose 2.0 (2012-2013) shows this dilemma of expression, as each individual artist or image seeks to represent the concept only through a specific framework, whether spatial (including cosmology and biology) or conceptual (including technology and semantics). These works largely enter only one side of the debate, focusing on an individual internal or external void, rather than bringing into our awareness new and challenging notions of the void as such. All that emerges from these symbolic works is a representation of the desire-for-representation.

Only Trisme Trs’ Avoid, Void Archipelago and Interdimensional Void make steps in directly confronting the unrepresentable nature of the void, placing a human figure or the words

‘avoid’ and ‘void’ (with the ‘i’ styled as a key) against ethereal spaces. This highlights the symbolic distance of human perception and language from the void, suggesting an alternative space of representation (and, by extension, cognition) in which to confront the void.

Fig.18 Void Archipelago (2012) © Trisme Trs

John Smythies draws from string theory such an alternative notion of the place of the subject in the universe, positing “three fundamental entities – space-time, matter and

consciousness” (2003, 47). Here the subject, as the construction of the void beneath the forces of functioning consciousness, emerges as “a new space in addition to all currently postulated physical space-times…a brane of its own” (Ibid., 52). What Smythies is suggesting is an extra dimension to our understanding of the universe, with the implication that the membrane of consciousness is an abstract surface beyond our comprehension of space and time. As Smythies describes, “consciousness may be in the brane not in the brain” (Ibid.), that is, held across an epistemological void by our inability to comprehend our construction as a multi-dimensional hyperspace, drawn from Andrei Linde’s conception of consciousness as an abstract and inaccessible part of physical reality (1990). The role of art must then be to represent not the void itself, but the relations and structures of this hyperspace of the subject that allow the void to emerge through its absence in our view of the work, for example in the simple addition of the word ‘void’ in Trs’s work that points out the absence of a true void in the image while implying a consideration of its relation to the visual space beyond representation.

This expresses François Cheung’s conception of the void as a “nodal point where potentiality and becoming interweave, in which deficiency and plenitude, self-sameness and otherness, meet” (Cheung 51), which is here the originary parallax position of lack and excess from which the BwOwB of the subject can emerge.

The impossibility of accurately representing the void is thus an integral element of the construction of consciousness. Beyond our modes of perception in the position of parallax, is it then possible to alter our perception in such a way as to make visible to consciousness the void of its own subjectivity? Buci-Glucksmann tells us, in analysing the work of Dombis, that

“with the virtual, you may work on the complex and original forms of humanity, as well as exercising a temporal and increasingly global mode of art” (Buci-Glucksmann 2009). Between the dimensions upon which the work acts – individual or social, local or global, physical or digital, material or cognitive – we can open a space for critical perception of the emergence of consciousness and the creation of subjectivity. As was discussed in Chapter 1, the

self-mediation of consciousness is what must be disrupted, to insert a rupture of perception within the Virtual surface of the BwO towards the Real as the objectification of the void. By bringing into artistic representation the failure of representing the void, and the Real as merely a lost fragment of it, we can create a space in which the implication of the true void of subjectivity can emerge even in its explicit absence. Carl Jung tells us that “the artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflict” (2001, 173), and this inherent relation to antagonism is seen in the parallax of consciousness and the void. Žižek states that the artist of parallax is one who

shows both sides of the argument at once, necessitating an act of “self-destruction, which is itself a symbolic statement, the only work of art available” (Žižek 2009b, 128). Pursuing a creative parallax gesture that makes contact with the void of subjectivity requires the symbolic destruction of the structures of consciousness. Critical digital culture must exploit potential remediations of technology in order to reveal the self-mediating forces of

consciousness, challenging the relations between the Virtual and the Real and the structures of such self-mediation that block the void from its representation and comprehension by consciousness.

If the inaccessibility of the void is an integral part of the construction of consciousness, we must question the need to dissemble the Virtual structures and attempt to make contact with the necessarily unknowable. If the unrepresentable is a necessary condition of

representation, then it is possible that we must accept the void as being beyond our

comprehension. However, the culturally unrepresentable only appears at the discovery of the limits of representation, which are being ever furthered into new areas of creative

apprehension. Blackhawk notes Dombis’s staging of “impossible figures somewhere between what the human eye can see, the human mind can encompass, and that oft-regarded,

evanescent suggestion of infinity” (2003), suggesting a specific negotiation of these boundaries – what we have called the surface of the subject – and into the realm beyond consciousness. Deleuze and Guattari state that “creation is the aesthetic varieties or scientific variables that emerge on a plane that is able to crosscut chaotic variability” (1994, 207), which is to say that artistic practice, in confronting the limits of consciousness, inserts a movement across the void through contact with the Real. Between these structures of consciousness and the chaotic flux of the void is the region our culture must navigate. Indeed, Buci-Glucksmann has pointed out that “contemporary art has never ceased to waver between monumental

“archaeological” art and an art of the ungraspable and the ephemeral” (Buci-Glucksmann 2009). Between the edifice of Virtual structures and the unattainable void of the Real is the location of the intervention within consciousness by contemporary art. If contemporary art is also post-conceptual art, that which “articulates a post-aesthetic poetics” (Osborne 2010), then applying this to the subject necessitates an articulation of a post-subjective expression.

Critical culture necessitates a disruption of the structures of consciousness, in a reorganisation that brings into view the subject’s position. While the parallax of the void remains inaccessible to the human subject, a post(human)-subject enables a view of the self that includes the position of parallax and an understanding of the void.

2.6 CONCLUSION

This chapter delineates the problems in confronting the void of subjectivity. Žižek’s

conception of the void as the unrepresentable point of reference for parallax is read alongside Rancière’s understanding of the necessity of an unrepresentable element as the condition for representation to occur. The function of the Real, the objectification of the void as part of the assemblage of the subject, is therefore a necessary blind spot in our understanding of

consciousness. This is expanded through the Deleuzian BwO by placing the body, seen here as the Virtual in the surface assemblage of consciousness, itself as a lost object to

representation. We can never fully apprehend the functioning of the subject – there is a necessarily unrepresentable stain on any hyper-cartographies of physical, digital and Virtual spaces – and this Virtual assemblage thus appears as a BwOwB. The shift in cultural

conceptions of reality and the increasing tendency in creative practices away from

representation of fixed subject towards a functional representation of the processes by which subjects and realities form, leads the discussion to the underlying unknowable nature of reality itself. The void as it appears in quantum physics provides an array of perspectives attempting to draw this unrepresentability into consciousness, through the forces at work in even a vacuum state and the many unobservable particles that are necessary for the universe to form. These differing conceptions, when brought together, offer a series of parallax perspectives that inform our view from physical and digital modes of consciousness in approaching the void of the subject. The decentred subject has therefore been reconsidered as desubstantialised, a ‘nowhere’ of the subjective assemblage as pure function, expressed in relation to code, abstraction and digital machinic processes in Dombis’s work dealing

explicitly with the inherent irrationality at the heart of reason within the formation of the world and a critically engaged cyborg subjectivity. The discussion has drawn these threads together under Rancière’s notion of the unrepresentable to negotiate the relation between the Virtual formation of the subject (itself a lost process to its own understanding) around the presupposed Real (as an objectification of the subject’s inaccessible core). The following chapter furthers this investigation into the Real of specific physical and digital worlds in the form of the body and its digital representation as a lost object within the Virtual assemblage of cyborg consciousness.