What if the study and crafting of fiction and fact happened explicitly, instead of covertly, in the same room, and in all the rooms? Donna Haraway (1997)
All human agency is documented and archived. Access to information is made through relational modes. Acquisition of abstract, theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills implies communicative processes at personal and social levels. [1]
At last, with the end of motors, bidirectional wheels and roads, the Greeks have been surpassed. At the core of belief is now the individual — a self-aware, active agent within the social landscape. In the present there is no place for the self-centered individual, submissive to the idea of the hero. For centuries, the socially anonymous had been the collective response to the idyllic figure, which was called by many names: author, artist, genius, thinker. These were the dark ages of ecology and struggle in the planetary crisis. From this morbid age of melancholy and guilt, neither anonymous people nor economical systems survived.
Tom is a 14-year old boy, a dreamer, living the extraordinary experience of exploring his own powerful imagination. He is a compulsive reader of words, images, sounds and movement, with a strong taste for the gloomy literature of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. Tom and three adults constitute a group. The adults had been together for about three years before they received Tom to look after. Together they travel;seeding, growing and cropping very nutritious vegetables and trading these for other goods. At irregular periods the group relocates, according to landscape and climate changes, in order to find the best possible conditions. These conditions also change irregularly, so they keep moving around.
The virtual as a technological concept is not new, nor separate from, nor a representation of the physical. Instead, together they form an entity — and their relations are of dependence, which works in both ways. The virtual becomes perceivable in physical reality, through actions and processes, and all these result in virtual-physical space, or entity, also termed vireal. The virtual has become more important and more interesting, more accessible and powerful. Its two most evident output channels are the auditive and the visual, although there are more. Its nature is cybernetic. [2] Being increasingly interconnected and ubiquitous, the vireal entity, which large parts of the Earth have become, fulfils dreams, creates possibilities, but also exerts new types of power and control. When a system becomes highly complex there is a degree of unexpected effects between possibilities, entropy and feedback effects. [3] By employing the newest technologies, materials and control systems, some of the effects within the entity / complex system assume features of what was once called the ghost world — magic. So far, depending on our point of view and state of knowledge, this may be explained simply in terms of processing speed and memory space. But what other points of view could one have and observe, regarding precisely these same effects? Generically we could refer to control processes, whether implemented technologically or operated by social systems, originated from a will to realize an objective or considering actions to achieve it, as cybernetics. So what if, from some particular or even unconsciously suggestive point of view, we would use our conceptions of the vireal entity and its manifestations to construct connections, make reason, imagine trajectories, to arrive at involuntary narratives? Attempts at such narratives have been made throughout the 20th century, before the idea of a technological virtual entered common discourse and vocabulary. The cut-up [4] and the dérive [5] are techniques developed, or rather discovered, in the 1950s and 1960s. A personal mood determines awareness, an attitude determines feedback: understanding these general observations gives us a deep feeling of the connection between our moods and attitudes and our use of technology, our social settings and the notion of vireal entity. Hence all three determine our perception of the world and what sort of narratives we construct during everyday life. This is not so much about writing novels, directing movies or inventing a computer game. It goes deeper into the narratives of our lives with all their subplots, connecting, interweaving with other people’s narratives.
Tom is the only child in the group. They travel and live together. “It has been amazing for Tom the experience of traveling,” Raf said. The afternoon weather is an invitation for everyone to rest outdoors. All adults have acknowledged the importance of travelling, but it is Tom who obviously takes a special pleasure, constantly interacting with new places, changing reality. While watching Tom follow the trajectory of an invisible being or object, Rachy continued: “He goes walking into populated areas often and likes the old, historical parts especially. In there he merges reality and fiction. In this mergence, Tom meets local writers and learns about local history.” They smiled in contemplative concordance. The experience of observing Tom growing up has been important to all three of them. Raf then stated: “Tom has been contributing to local databases with recent knowledge. He documents his own history which interweaves with the history of each place where he is.”
What is our interest in exploring the vireal entity? We want to be immersed in what were once unknown areas of the world or of our lives, which are constituted, based on interactions and evolutive connectivity. Involuntary narratives will use peripheral, subconscious, collateral information in order to provide new perspectives on familiar settings. Transformations are useful to deliberately change such a familiar setting into something new, surprising and challenging. In the hypnagogue state, all external sensory input will help to conduct drifting thoughts — a mental state without apparent will, with almost no limits, with a tendency to construct fantastic connections. The environment is dreaming, the hypnagogue person will make this hers/his dream, by rendering the environment in a curious mix of physically real and virtual. Time is not consistently structured anymore. It is easier to close eyes than to close ears. But if the eyes and ears are linked, one will not work without the other. They will add up. With closed eyes the audio input will create dream images. Just as a trance inducing music or as a music which makes one drift away and enter a hypnagogue state. When the realm beyond the actual sound, with origin in the meeting of sound and development of resultant neural connections, becomes navigable as a source of memory, knowledge and inspiration develops to offer paths not travelled before. The dream elements fuse with physical reality and make distinctions between the physical and the virtual, in a multitude of evolutive alternatives. The genesis of virtual precedes computer programming history. It existed before, related to ghosts and demons that populated the environment of our ancestors, and exists today still in the vireal space of those who live within religious beliefs, contemporarily and historically. Therefore, computer-controlled virtual environments, computer games or virtual networks, all work so incredibly well and successfully, meeting our desires to escape and transcend life filled with physical efforts.
The difference between virtual and physical is unnoticeable: the social is of a vireal nature. There are many ways to enter in transformed realities, one example being the hypnagogue state mentioned above. A few mechanical aids were developed and improved throughout the 20th century: the Ganzfeld (complete field), which involves white noise as sound source and red light as light source — both aiming to mask any external signal by audiovisual noise —, the Isolation Tank and the Dreamachine. The Isolation Tank especially has been used in the field of medicine and therapy.
Tom is the only child in the group. They travel and live together. “It has been amazing for Tom the experience of traveling,” Raf said. The afternoon weather is an invitation for everyone to rest outdoors. All adults have acknowledged the importance of travelling, but it is Tom who obviously takes a special pleasure, constantly interacting with new places, changing reality. While watching Tom follow the trajectory of an invisible being or object, Rachy continued: “He goes walking into populated areas often and likes the old, historical parts especially. In there he merges reality and fiction. In this mergence, Tom meets local writers and learns about local history.” They smiled in contemplative concordance. The experience of observing Tom growing up has been important to all three of them. Raf then stated: “Tom has been contributing to local databases with recent knowledge. He documents his own history which interweaves with the history of each place where he is.”
By means of today’s virtual and physical technology and the vireal condition that results, the environment is dreaming. Post-musical sound is embedded in everyday life, especially in urban soundscape, in mobile phone ringtones, computer alert sounds, signals in public transport and vending machines. The last 15 years have made it for a sonically enhanced world, based on the sample or the sound icon. Involuntary narratives are induced by mobile phone ring tones, which in turn, refer to music pieces previously recorded, possibly with a history of their own. The content of those music pieces — recognizable melodies, text phrases or fragments — are already symbols of a parallel reality. In contrast to what actually happens around, a person walking down a street whistling, singing, or just thinking a song, has the mind set between the reality the song represents, and the reality the street dictates. At this moment the ringtone symbolizes the song, especially if it contains only one or two bars of the refrain or the main melody. We have entered a second layer of representation and appropriation — with the song symbolized and becoming virtual. The user appropriates possible meanings and makes the representative use of the song an element of her/his personal narrative. A sound of a passing car, the melodious squeak of breaks or a car horn might trigger the song memorization. At this moment, the condition of this song for this person has changed, and not only that, the authorship becomes more complex as the narrative is not and cannot be reviewed by the original author of the original song anymore.
The whole group was seated outdoors in front of the house. Tom introspectively looked at the leaf of a plant. Rachy said: “To experience life, with all its challenges, is the big learning process — I had been told this over and over in my youth. When borders between realities were still very clear, we had virtual tutors. Tom has no tutors at all, but he understands good manners, knows about books and about their writers, as well as he knows how to be careful with his health, caring and living according to what is good for him and in accordance to the way he likes. All this in an exploding world of imagination he creates for himself.” Devices are used to prevent mental illness by inducing health habits into the device since early stages of life. “So far this has been wonderful. Previous devices caused many problems, especially some models with attached constructed memory, provokers of new diseases in the devicer’s [i] nervous system.” The adults observe Tom playing fantasy and reality. The device is a tool for life and in later stages will induce memories based on collected emotional data and imagination.
Within the area of public transport, the environment that contains acoustic signals and their mechanical origins (the machine intelligence controlling the speakers, horns, buzzers) interacts with the commuter. Ticket vending machines have replaced the ticket seller; those acoustic signals which indicate buttons pressed, credit card approved, or the arrival of the train itself, have replaced the announcer addressing the commuters. [6] The history of such sounds is a succession of representations of earlier, prevalently mechanical technology. [7] Many signals have mutated, from bell sounds to beeps, which all refer to musical instruments, up to the digital synthesizer — once a sonifying symbol of Modernist future. Contemporary to the synthesizer, concrete sound was equally important in the construction of auditive utopias. A synthesizer can both emulate concrete sound, as also can create unheard-of sound. Concrete sounds can represent, symbolize the actual mechanical sound source, the awareness of it, as well as they can also be used to transform reality outside their original context. The advent of user-recordable mobile phone ringtones (and before, answering machines) made it possible to introduce concrete sound sampled from anywhere into the realm of everyday personal objects. Stepping back from the representational, one can be the audience of a fantastic soundscape.
How Tom started to use the device: one day, his lunch became more interesting than usual as food turned into a combination of pleasurable colors and squeaky sounds. Everyone remembers when he suddenly started to laugh out loud looking at his food. Then Trishy explained he had been experimenting with the new device. It was his first attempt to overlap imagination with reality. He was seven. Since that day he is pushing the device further and further. Soon after this lunch episode, going out for a walk was for Tom a marvellous adventure through dark forests, swamps and finding hidden doors on huge trees — places to find ghosts and demons.
We also have to consider the visual and haptic channels of physical/virtual interfaces. The semantic history of buttons for example is longer than the history of touchable, clickable action-linked areas within the graphical front-end of a computer system, including earlier instances that had a pronounced 3D-effect. The history goes back via foil-embedded sensor buttons to mechanical push-buttons and switches, keys of the typewriter, eventually tracing back to the symbol-laden token which existed as an object for thousands of years already — and which in itself bridges over to the virtual content of some game it is used for — and lastly, possibly even to the clothes button which opens to a world beyond the cloth, behind the surface of socially encoded representation, to the flesh.
Knowledge and the many skills related to healthy living, body care and disease prevention (especially on issues related to memory) are acquired through the use of personal devices. Educational systems and methodologies are gone with the past dark ages of ecology. Art, and war before it, which constitute the most luxurious landscapes for the hero, are obsolete as concepts. Music can be created by everyone and, as any other manifestation of creativity, is an experience, a scenery for an environment to share, or a gift to exchange. Profession, another vanished concept. Each individual is a specialist since the combination of knowledge is infinite. Knowledge is fragmented into tiny compartments while its mass is growing constantly.
While moving in vireal space, objects will be able to resound even more vividly than in reality. Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making, [8] by U.S. artist Robert Morris, is older than the first computer game. It needs, nonetheless, an obvious cable to connect to the hidden loudspeaker inside to play back the recording made at the wood workshop where the box was made. There was not yet any wireless technology to make the box appear magical. The auditive layer is therefore attached to the physical object to represent non-visual and temporal aspects of it, but it can also turn a virtual object into an audiovisual entity.
Total conversion of nature into human formulas, reinforces culture as the species’ auto-created nature. Log from Tom’s private diary: “Some time ago I found an uninvited persona in my environment. I was scared at first and didn’t react to her presence. Yes, the persona was a very tall girl with a long dress made out of strings, the sound of it slowly fading from the textile hush of moving silk to a sub aquatic beat suggesting the rhythm of her heartbeat —unforgettable. The record of activity was checked and the error acknowledged and the almost impossible coincidence had happened: two environments, accessing the same combination of databases, overlapped in the same spot of physical space. This is a myth, a story that I only heard from someone trying to amaze and impress novice devicers. My personal device is learning to be unique and that is why I could notice her presence right away. I am unique and so is the environment I created. We evolve in this trio of organic, inorganic and ethereal. Constructed, construction and how to construct in flow. I was told that the use of the device will smoothen, or even render unnoticeable memory gaps and errors which will come with age. Since being aware of this I consciously construct for myself an environment of memories, interweaving literature, the history of places where I have been, and my own history.”
Electromagnetic radiation, as a usually hidden layer of reality, can be experienced through a sonic gateway. Sound is rendered audible by technical means such as VLF or ultrasound detectors. In her Electrical Walks, [9] German artist Christina Kubisch scans urban environments for electromagnetic fields, using custom headphones that work with electromagnetic induction (similar to a telephone induction microphone, but with 3D localization), probing additional context beyond the naturally perceivable. This unseen and unheard layer of energies ultimately gives us information about health risks through the intensity of radiation present. Radiation also influences our mood. Our mood influences our perception. The electromagnetic energy fields connect us.
As usual, he is immersed in conversations with literary personas. Layers of stories, stored in many databases, are presented by authors who had lived throughout the centuries. This is the way Tom learns literature. He presents himself in the persona of a bohemian, in a dandy fantasy reinvented for himself. It is perhaps by accident that someone, a stranger, logs in. Perhaps an interference or an error. It is a female character in a dress that combines a dark aura with colorful details, a long dress made with many strings that float slowly and wavily. Sounds like silk moving in touch with silk, then sonically transmutating. Tom knows she is neither a writer nor a character of his constructed reality. There is no indication of unwanted advertising. She is a beautiful noise.
Each object has a history and a context, which can manifest itself aurally, going deeper than only one layer of representation, far from mere sound design. Newly created, unique objects in virtual space, which are based on parameters of physical modelling, embody the history of those parameters, of physical space transformed fantastically. For example, the sound of a million chick peas falling from a high place onto a 100 m wide sheet of five centimeter thick copper. The sound provoked exists parallel to visual imagination even if, visually, it is entirely different. A process that can undermine the indexicality, the unique connection between the referred physical object and the resulting sound, leaving us with something entirely non-representational. Like a video zoomed in until it becomes pixels. Through this transformation, it starts referring to itself, its means of production, light, colour and speed. It may also offer a gateway…
Technology is not perceivable. Animated characters populate the everyday life of this quiet living environment for three adults and a child, located in a specific but common, average populated area — similar to many in the post-structural economy of the global landscape. Such assemblies of characters are, in their appearance, either desirable or invisible. They all serve a practical purpose; some are appliances, domestic ‘maids’ — droid look-alikes, some others are informational devices for ear and visual senses. All of them switch between active and inactive at a recognizable voice or communication device request. Personal devices come as templates and become gradually unique during their use. These are the most powerful tools to shape individual space, combining reality and fiction, virtual and physical, according to the imagination of the devicer.
Successions of transformations, of temporary states applied to any audiovisual object can be logged, and we can move within its history. The idea of alienation by transforming the context of an object or action was widely put to application by the Surrealists — relying on elements of surprise, of plays of thoughts, exploring hidden connections, some under the influence of mind-altering substances or actions. [10] We might speculate what could have possibly happened if the original Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s had been able to employ computer technology to create such logs. The techniques of transformation and re-contextualizing were cultivated at a time when the interest in psychoanalysis and the importance of dreams was emphasized. Dreams as a way to explore the previously hidden connections in the familiar, the obvious — equal to experimenting with the hypnagogue state. Once in the vireal space, the previously hidden connections become the overlay of physical reality. They become more important.
The device has two components: output and input. Once attached to the body it is imperceptible. These devices cause a vireal experience of the world. The input is composed of a non-intrusive attachment to the spine, right below the user’s neck. It is a detector of body movement and life signals. An insert into the individual’s ear, the output, provokes vibrations resulting in profoundly synaesthetic effects. What the individual sees is audio induced. What the individual listens to is an overlay to the sound of the physically real or the transformation of it. Audio and visual together induce and stimulate other senses. The result is a personalized experience, a perfect mergence of virtual and real, onto what one senses as real interaction with the world.
The idea of the collective in the computer-controlled virtual environment is evident and normal to us now, after the days of Cyberpunk, although electromagnetic collectives exist since humans do. Within a virtual environment, data is accumulated and changed dynamically according to interaction and movement. In daily life, electromagnetic energy flows and always interact with energy fields. Our bodies’ electromagnetic fields are in permanent transformation, influenced and overlapping. The mass of all fields together is most complex and changes dynamically at all times. The shape of this ever-changing, all-encompassing electromagnetic field of Earth is a collectively produced vireal entity. [11] We are here imagining a constant flux in the fabric of invisible electromagnetic energy. When a strong emotional event takes place, at a specific point in time and space, transformations will affect the fabric, and the presence of once-lived extreme emotional events will remain in it. This fluctuating common fabric is then altered and will influence and affect all beings coming close, also causing subtle changes in their electromagnetic fields.
There has been scant research into the psychotropic attributes of electromagnetic fields or, to put it more broadly, into the entire connection between physical conductivity and electromagnetic properties of our organisms, and likewise electromagnetism in the environment. […] Is electromagnetism carcinogenic, or at least exerting influence on the moods of human beings? After all, our own nervous system is based not least on electrical impulses used to transport messages within the body and brain,
but artists, alternative doctors, parapsychologists, writers and filmmakers have hinted to such effects since the advent of the exploitation of electrical energy, which lies at the base of all contemporary activities with computers, digital networks and telecommunication. [12]
Log from Tom’s private diary: “It is hard to write a description about the experience of mixing reality and fiction. It has to be experienced in order to be understood. I have been developing the device for a few years to remember my own story. I can unfold an alternative environment of similarities and be comfortable anywhere. Very often I mix up people I find randomly, in real space, with people I know, from my own history. Like my grandmother for example — I keep seeing traces of her face in old ladies all over the world. This is a sort of induced déjà vu. But one that I force to happen.”
References
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Breton A, 1924. Manifesto of Surrealism. In: 1969. Manifestoes of surrealism. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor.
Burroughs W S, 1970. The Electronic Revolution. Pociao Books: Cologne
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Deutsch A J, 1950. A Subway Named Möbius. In: 1952. The Omnibus of Science Fiction. Crown: New York.
Haraway D, 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge: New York.
Medosch A, 2008. Hartware MedienKunstVerein, In; Šmite R, Šmits R, Arns I (Eds.), Waves — Die Kunst der elektromagnetischen Gesellschaft, Waves — The Art of the Electromagnetic Society. HMKV/Kettler: Dortmund/Bönen (Westfalen), pp. 124–130.
Schafer R M, 1977. The Tuning of the World. Knopf: New York.