Christina McPhee 2002

http://www.naxsmash.net

Inside the screen is a phenomenological space of indeterminate dimensions.

Transverse landscapes of scale-less and shifting ruins, at the edge of Dante’s dark wood, from a Piranesian montage perspective, of a nocturnal net empire, a view of a newly ancient Rome from the edge of the Campo. Moving about the edges, one finds potholes, wormholes in the lunar-lit fields. There are holes in the fields. I fall into a couple of them, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Into dreams of the underground. Under the spell of eros and memoria, an internet search for mimetic collisions and catastrophes under the surface of the media skin-a search not coded in Google – might occasion some views of Baroque topologies in the virtual space of hypermedia online.

The pictorial space of painting in the Baroque, like its musical styles, concerns bridges, leaps, jumps, crashes, highs, lows, extremes of every kind. Layers of polyphony crash and burn and reformulate recursively, as if to challenge every move within a countermove, or to call into question lush patterns just as they form. Virtual inscape translates as of a series of seductive gestures.

The seduction beckons a series of recursions, sets and resets, inside a infernal cantos without benefit of guide, at the periphery of imagined sound and vision: as if you might just glimpse and hear the roar of chaos at the edge of the battlefield: you ask yourself how to take measure of those disclosures; how to negotiate the barriers from screen to inside the screen; how to find a way past peripheries and move with purpose towards the deepest circles of the underground?

47REDS came about as a leap into that zone, an imagined realm. The techno body of the net-based self is imagined as cyborg: her memory stretches and slips, sets and resets elastically through a neuro-sensual landscape of death and transformation, inside a world city whose eyes, ropes, relays, snows, shifts, and smashes are transpersonal portals of repression and desire. Transpositions of sound slipstream towards entropy, then catch themselves and call out in layered voices. The texts, culled from bits of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, casually appeal, not only to the free play of memory or its obliteration, but also to irrepressible revival like the phoenix in ashes, hence the ‘reds’ of the title. 47 is a prime number. Interactive panoramas trigger themselves like elastic membranes, the radiant skin of a net-Aphrodite, whose movements and gestures are subliminally felt but remain off screen.

Should the cyborgian landscape be imagined as a dependent colony of Blade Runner slaves, invisible cities of the net might project as a series of carcieri—a Piranesian terrain. Might any visitor enter, but never really leave? From the cyborg’s vantage, the net hosts a potential lockdown. It is a place that might seem to valorize an invisible reality, despite the saturation of image. From the underground posts, the cyborgs listen for signs of life.

The space of net art makes use of sound mapping to make a spatial phenomenology. Interactive music becomes a form-making and form-sensing tool. As if we have come to a new level of neuro-sensorial integration as primates at the very moment that we leave the purely human realm of meaning, and begin to connect with the cyborg’s realm. I think we want to hear the cyborg and explore her mind.

She is the Other, the repressed reflection, the Persephone buried in Hades.

As one’s brain is jammed and is jamming with multiple ‘lines’ of music that, in effect, are in a constant state of recombination, so that it seems that the neural structures that generate memory of musical threads aren’t borne of a linear process at all, but rather, of a quasi-visual live feed that continually reconfigures itself playfully. I find intense range in the possibilities of sound as trigger to memory, to a neurological and emotional kinesthesia. Strangely, since the net is such a visual medium, the subliminal presence of interactive sound fugues move you past the visual into an interactive random pattern of intense distillations of electronic electro acoustical distortions, left, like ruins, touched, here and there, by lines of architectonic melody. Sonic Persephone desires to sing between the cracks in the walls of her prison, through the interstitial spaces between one present moment and the next present moment: a hyper now.

In this ‘now’ the cyborg is adumbrated as felt landscapes, poorly seen, barely remembered, acoustically driven triggers to traumatic and erotic memory. As the adumbration of the Other, she is transpersonal, just like digital interactivity itself, she is a cross- boundary: the thresholds between becoming and staying hidden are constantly violated by looped sound threads of increasing density and elaboration, away from formal structures, and towards the mode of fragmented layering that are driven by user interaction. In 47REDS, the loops of sound are trancelike and passive. The sound functions as if to move through an emotional archaeology like the deserted streets of de Chirico. The sense of the cyborg moving through the darkness of the city, evading death, seeking escape. There, I wanted to make sound loops shatter and reconfigure like waves of signals from the underground world, and from this desire came sonic Persephone, made with interactive Flash movies. Persephone became another metaphor for the cyborg, this time as an imprisoned one, looking out at you from behind the screen so that the sounds project out at you. Your only way to communicate with and reach her is to move the mouse around. Still, her ambient world remains fluid and inscrutable, and untouchable. The sound wants to suggest the tumultuous passages inside her mind. Because it loops in endless interactive combinations there is no real possibility for connecting behind the prison wall of the screen. Texts are collaged fragments from various writers, including Calvino, Virilio, Cather, Bachelard, and Cixhous. They shatter and reform continuously until you find the right mousecllick that will rationalize the text into a palimpsest of almost coherent nonsense.

This is text the way the cyborg might read it. She gets it but she doesn’t get it: she can read it but she can’t make sense of it. Her screen text recalls subtitles for some invisible or future film: Sonicpersephone becomes a sort of trailer for a film that will never arrive.

Net art desires a paradox of space, time and memory, or no-memory. Multiple events dissolve into one another as soon as the simultaneity is noticed, like play, like paradoxes of fictions. You can never get at one place, into one time. You can never find your way to the end of the thread to the end of the trail. You can never say, “meanwhile, back at the ranch,” because “back at the ranch” something else, simultaneously, is dissolving: entropy is matched only by a nonlinear logic of play. Net art shape-shifts as it engages in the interaction of events and is emergent in that interaction as a third, fourth or nth integer event); its motion tend, towards the absolute zero, the event horizon, a digital sublime, I imagine , to which Sonicpersephone continuously aspires, towards which prison doors open, onto the invisible city of 47REDS. Entropy recurs, as we try to set and reset the boundaries of things, fix things, set coordinates, or sail to the island of the day before, to paraphrase Eco.

The kinds of meaning constructs capable of flourishing in the baroque atopias of the net are creations of our narcissistic regard, but also echo our desires for the erotic and the sublime, beyond the edges of the ruins, past the range of surveillance and control. The technobody presence of a net art work is a double memory package. Anna Livia Plurabelle cries as she slipstreams into the Liffey at the end/beginning of the Wake: mememorme! is this “me me more me”; or is this “(re)member me!”. Luckily it is both/and. So it is that net art is performance of memory, a play within play. Like Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake, the net artistic identity is both a self and a non-self, dissolved in the river of media. She calls “mememoremee”—is it both “me me more me” and “(re)memory” ? - a sybilline call, whose primal tone is a verb: dissolve and shift.

© Christina McPhee 2002

Aphasia and Parrhesia: Code and Speech Abstract (critical text)

Memoires of a Cyborg - (expo)