Syndicate: once upon a time /1997

["Ventsislav Zankov" <venci@osf.acad.bg>]

BECAUSE . . .

'.  . .  the sky is blue it makes me cry. . . '
 `The Fool on the Hill', The BEATLES


We've picked it up, we really did. We've got the access to the world,
at last, the access to 'here & now'. We were slow to get it: it's the
peculiar 'sterility of our recent past. Our past: to the East of the
West. Our past: lost into the dead ends of Hi-story. The story of a
different world: the story of our own happened to be too painful to be
told. 

Funny how easy it was to press the DELETE button on the keyboard.
Amnesia pushed us into the present . . .

`PORTAPAK . . .PORTAPAK was in the beginning'1. Not for us, though: we
could not find our beginning. Trying really hard to put up the puzzle
of our world, we belonged to chaos. Our groping hands, the hands of a
kid over his first drawing. Our past: still holding us back. Our
future: still hoping to come true. Our being: still clinging to the
present. And the present has always been the faithful companion to
oblivion. Oblivion that invitingly teases us away . . . and away from
the distortions of 'keeping you informed', from the instant access to
the world, the Access anytime anywhere, anyhow. . . 

We've been sinking into the 'uni-sex' everyday life, deprived of the
time zones, missing the sunset and missing the sunrise. A virtual
everyday life, a barren reality, caught into the web of optic cables,
magnetic waves, licked into the tight hold of 1 to 0. It's the
everyday life without scent or colour, that painfully pierces through
my delicate present. 

We seem to be fully obsessed by the power of the feminine: after all
that's the power of obsession. We seem to have broken with the
piercing power of the masculine. We seem to be sheepishly waiting for
the pregnant time to give birth to . . . something. How funny that a
human population of negative birth rates for a long time now,
consistently ignores sterility as most unlikely.

We've plopped into the chaos of uncontrollable PROGRESS. The rules of
the quantum theory baldly rushed into the macro world. Our virtual
spaces: do we really have them? They rather belong to the world of
COMPUTING: CD ROMs, evoking memories of casting spells for happier
dreams. Reads Only Memory. Whose is this memory anyway? 

D'you want to review your last dreams? D'you want to open them and
play for a while? We-e-e-e-ell, Random Access Memory (RAM)2 is all you
need. RAM, that is Raging Animals, Man: it is the way you process your
emotions; the active stage of sleep. WAKE UP is the EXIT. THE GAME IS
OVER.

The cutting edge of chaos, smoothly threading our minds: everything's
under control. You have the access. The access to the Network. No
Guarantee, though. Trust it the way kids do. Wide-eyed, curious . . .
and cunning. Like teenagers pick-pocketing the Worlds virtual
supermarkets. It's a super INTERNET, isn't it?

It feels like holiday- making: we are occidental tourists, most of us.
It's a  dazzling breath-taking  journey away from our bodies. They are
still desperate to hold us, yet we keep our eyes on the endless
virtual reams, endlessly attractive . . . As soon as you want to know
who made INTERNET, you've got the answer: YOU do. INTERNET lives on
reality, kills reality, turns into its ridiculous substitute. The
NETWORK feeds on YOUR LIFE, squeezing your blood and flesh into
digital units, taking your freedom and giving you the absolute freedom
instead. Seducing you with the absolute gift of unlimited
communication. And in the meanwhile the absolute freedom slowly and
irreversibly takes the shape of pure chance.

Our meetings in the network, all by chance, the things we come upon,
again by chance, there, the small escapes we make, BY CHANCE . . .
Like the walks downtown on Saturdays: we know the streets, the
avenues, we meet the people we know and the people we don't, we meet
new people, and sometimes we have accidents. Staying home feels safer.


The network is full of friendly 'creatures', of risk-free presence-s.
No way to get into a personal (nor physical) contact with anybody.
Risk being reduced to zero. Like emptiness, like the very absence of
action. Viruses can get your computer, but they can't get YOU. It's
the computer that you share, after all, not your body. It's a screened
love, safe sex. Life-saving sex. Computers like condoms. 

And we . . . we remain legal aliens in the network. Map-less3, locked
into our horizontal roots, missing the bliss of the vertical. No
horizons, you need your horizon, I need mine, we badly need our
horizon.

The road map of the city, the cross-roads, the tourist sites, the
churches, the hotels, the airport and the station, the stadiums, the
gardens, the city buildings, all these signs, these inviting
pictograms, these sweet guiding lines, we miss them. The rest is the
NETWORK.

Staying home feels safe. It feels home. My home is my fortress. Next
comes my neighborhood, my town, my country, the region, the continent,
the E. . . . All these parallel cycles going round me. Parallel cycles
of information, levels of being informed, levels of feeling home.
Following the outer circle turns out in the end to be like moving
along a straight line. This is the weird geometry of information. 

The bits of everyday life, tiny drops in the sea of information, get
imbued with the resonant power of phenomena, and phenomena, in their
turn, dying out like gentle waves without a virtual trace.

The order of logic chains has been violated. We've been attacked by
the code of values of global mass media. Self-generating,
self-interpreting, interfering with one another vampires. Reality
brought to destruction, reduced to few bare traces over the screen.
Light flooding out of it: without source or reason. 

Shooting pictures, hunting for sweet memories, video memories:
Japanese tourists in front of the LOUVRE. The camera brings
experiences back home, the camera recording your experiences, keeping
the proofs that you are alive. The camera watching instead of you.
Watching and recording. You once and fo ever relieved by the burden of
remembering, of telling stories and proving: the camera will tell it
for you, will give you a lift to the TV screen and you will BE there,
GOLGHOTA LIVE. It's your life, Your adventure, that is but part of the
Global Adventure4. The adventure of TV. TV improvises events LIVE.
Watch CNN. The Global EYE. The World being substituted, NOW, with its
present image. NOW, at this very moment. The TV technology of
watching, the almighty ruler of our time. Your watching ability grow
wildly: and you can see the past NOW5, you can see the ends of the
earth . . . NOW . . .You won't miss the ends of the world: you will
have it LIVE6 on your TV. Feeling dizzy, standing indifferently in
front of our TV screens, we seem to meditate. Like Buddha, watching
its meditating virtual image, now and forever. Spectator of his own
self in present continuous tense7. A closed circuit for distant
observation, the last stage being to give back to reality . . . its
distorted image. The TV screen is the real place of events. Once you
reach for the screen you violate the event8. This ritual is older than
SONY, older than PORTAPAK. From now on and forever after the TV set
shall be part of the VIDEO ART9, but TV programs shall not. Because
the art of watching is an intimate ritual, the most intimate act of
man. You don't share your eyes, do you? The TV programs give you a
rent offer, they watch for you . . . until you get lost into millions
of watchers . . . sharing the TV eye. Yet we can see things in
different ways10.

The TV sabotages reality through its substitution. We live in the age
of global communications, substitutes and simulations all around us,
we enjoy instant access to everywhere and anytime . . . which leads us
back to the deadlock of virtual reality. The ghastly shadow of
substitution. We, on our turn, are being teased to substitute reality
with its image, to simulate reality. We have the video for that. We
can have the water run like water through our screens, we can have the
swimmer swim from one TV screen to another11. . . 

The Age of Substitute. Object-ivity has been substituted with its
reflection object-ivity, with a relevant information about it. The
compression of information is skyrocketing, eating our beings, jamming
our computers. Mona Lisa is reduced to USD and bytes12. The same goes
for Claudia Schiffer. We keep upgrading the memories of our PCs to
enter the Louvre, with our bums closely embraced by the armchairs we
sit in, our eyes fixed on the PC screens, our hands clicking now and
then over the mouse. . . as long as the enchantment goes. . .And  one
summer day, when we happen to get there, our stupid holiday smiles on
our faces, what will our helpless tourist eyes see. . . maybe that the
millions of reproductions are true with the original? . . . Ready or
not, here we go, . . . the next step in the sprint of progress is the
chance to be subject to the common denominator of `interactivity' .
The next step into the abyss of the virtual this journey away from the
bodies we live in, away from the places, that our bodies know so well,
away from the simple lessons that gravity taught us. And the pains,
the sweet pains, that our bodies give us, our precious bodies that we
need to keep fit for the sake of others . . . Our heavenly bodies need
maintenance, . . . like our expensive cars. These are our signs of
luxury. Our expensive bodies have been launched into the orbit of an
universalized aesthetics, `ORBIT sugar fee': go to fitness, the
plastic surgery is unbelievable, escape the jaws of time, erase the
traces it leaves on your body, . . . the bodybuilding will lend you
the figure of an Old Greek hero. . . or god. How very much delightful
is the epic effort to be the sculptor, shaping our own body.
Michelangelo's David has been magnificently shaped . . . and for long
dead now. How very much delightful is the effort to join the museum
collection of the 20th century: the realm of movie stars, pop singers,
fashion models, of beauty and grace, of pin-up proportions, of
dazzling teeth . . . Yet Michelangelo did not care a fig if David had
a tooth cavity or not . . . 

Museum pieces have become useless: they can easily be preserved as
artificial memory. On the other hand the strife to describe and
restore, to embalm and preserve has grown far beyond any human
potential for grasping the accumulated and carefully preserved traces
of human activities. The mummies never belonged to our world. They
never tried to conquer our time, they never lived our lives until they
got them exhumed. Exhumation is a deficiency in giving evidence for
real life, striving to find its own grounds for existence beyond
itself. Its' the life deprived of its memory, groping helplessly for
support in history14.  

Museums will be closed down when we succeed to dismiss our bodies . .
. or maybe when we get rid of our necessity to have material evidences
for our existence. 

We've tried really hard to cling to the material part of our world . .