Denise Robinson, 'Transistory Tyrants'
In: Annotations 3: Frequencies: Investigations into culture, history and technology. Edited by Melanie Keen. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998,
pp. 72-75.
In Lola Young's introduction she referred to Australia as a somewhat 'shadowy' place in terms of the debates on new technologies. I like this word 'shadowy' - it could invite us to consider new technologies, and a moment in Australia's cultural history, in a momentary half light - no promise of the blinding clarity of the new.
To begin at an oblique with Aragon's Transitory Tyrants - a characterisation he gives to the emergence of the commodity in its infancy at the beginning of the 20th century - introducing what we have naturalised, an inexhaustible desire for the new. Yet, rather than seeing this aspect of modernity as determining the conditions for alienation, Aragon presents a kind of magical form to this scene of the new.
"The way I saw it an object became transfigured it also seemed to me that time played a part in my bewilderment. While time lengthened in the same direction that I advanced each day, each day enlarged the influence that these still disparate elements exercised over my imagination. I began to understand that their kingdom (commodities) derived (their) nature from their newness and that a mortal star shone over the future of this kingdom. So they appeared to me in the guise of transitory tyrants". [1]
In the 1980s and 1990s in Australia, I was the Director of the Australian Centre for Photography during a time when our gaze was turned towards new technologies of reproduction in the context of Australian culture - driven and at times distorted by the associated initiatives of arts funding structures. Anxiety also seemed to drive this discussion in the face of the potential shattering of current modes of representation - assuming that there was, and will be again, somewhere, sometime unmediated forms of representation to fulfil a desire for origins. The status of press photography and news reportage was seen (as elsewhere) as threatened forever by the digitalising of the image. [2] The many prior mediations of the image were seemingly naturalised, invisible let's say, and discussion of change taken for granted, seen as an inevitable consequence of the technology - as Deleuze observed, always measuring change from the simple to the complex: technology produces complexity, increases information overload, and inevitably leads to dystopia. The utopian position argued the internet as of a means of resolving the problems of global communication, creating global communities no longer constrained by the controlling media apparatus. Going so far as to propose a means of producing an identity covertly, outside of the cultural nominations of gender, class, history and race - ignoring the place from which such categories arise. While artists and writers were exploiting the fissures this debate generated.
Aragon's experience of 'newness' is obviously not an idea about change in this way, he sets out from elsewhere, his 'newness' is connected to immanent loss. It's not that we can escape imagining the future as it collapses into the new, but the discourses on this future pass over this thorny territory of change. Irigaray has her say here, 'if humans are at least partly social product then to project our current versions of ourselves into the future would be to arrest change, to see the future as an alternative version of the past. Such a future would be closed to the possibilities of new social or ethical forms still to be invented'. [3]
Susan Hiller's work Dream Screens for the Internet raises the spectre of how it is that visual and auditory 'utterances' survive, by paradoxically engaging with the Internet through its conceptual and sensory obstacles: the logic of this technology's quantifiable economy seemingly incompatible with her ongoing project . Hiller recognises archives everywhere, including the internet - adding to them: archives replete with the representation of dreams, visions, hallucinations and telekines, recording also their appearance through language. Collected by her in a prolific gathering of voices, scenarios and formats it's no emulation of an outside or a beyond, another world, neither does it refute them as experiences, but asks where one experience ends and another begins. [4] Dream Screens, itself an intense, guileful game eludes the utopian/dystopian dead end. Amongst the layers of lists, colour fields, languages and archived fragments, Dream Screens presents 'Programmes for reprogramming ... Hypothetical question: when is art a critical part of technological society? Hypothetical answer: when it goes beyond culture by going into it as deeply as possible ... When it goes SAMPLER to freely misuse cultural icons.'
Graham Harwood's work Rehearsal of Memory produced in collaboration with the staff and inmates of Ashworth High Security Hospital is described as: '(embodying) the collective life experiences of those taking part, the skins of the participants were scanned to assemble the physical traces of their lives'. For security reasons no identifiable image could be taken of the interior or the inmates - the indexical under stress. Moving through the CD-ROM no person can be identified, raising the question: how do you image the unimageable? The censoring which constrained representation, by default produced a liminal space where 'our current versions of ourselves' are confronted. As in 'Dream Screens' we are reminded that however shadowy the world between the event and the conditions of its appearance, it's here that the work gets done.
[1] Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, published by Exact Change, 1995
[2] This fantasy of the real has strangely re-appeared with a vengeance in photographic work in the new century.
[3] The Irigaray Readers, introduction Margaret Whitford, edited by Margaret Whitford. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
[4] The connection to the history of the invention of computer technology is not lost either - a technology which enjoyed an exponential growth, co-existent with the official (and unofficial) experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s.
This text was written in 1998, revised/ abreviated for publictation here.
Two works were screened during the presentation.
Susan Hiller's Dream Screens 1997, produced by DIA Centre for the Arts, and
Graham Harwood in collaboration with inmates of Ashworth High Security Hospital Rehearsal of Memory, 1995.