As he travels through the distorted but familiar world of Virtua he collects souveniers from his travel to bring back to the terra world. These pieces become examplers of the misinterpretation allowed by a flood of information but an absense of knowledge and understanding, or simply the distortion created by the digital medium.
He also constructs tools to mediate the unpredictable terra world, and to simulate his virtua environment - and as substitute should the network of power he is so reliant upon, ever be ‘switched off’…
- Compartments, Drawers, slots, Grids and boxes within boxes : These displays of heirarchy and order point potentially to both larger and smaller framework (scales become multiple)
- Present themselves as both framing and framed by larger cosmologies andf cosmogenies.. micronomies and macronomies
- I like the relation of order that is made back to the screen (the frame) of the computer and the ordered grid of the desktop.. spilling out to its surrounds
The virtual traveller visits Detroit, ‘The Arsenal of Democracy’.. Motor City, the birthplace of Techno (tributed to the Roland tr909)..
This drawing absorbs my readings of Detroit as information as Salt Mountains are redrawn as snowy peaks and the dials of a studio mixer overlaid as a landscape.
Architects should reinforce the materiality of the world
Ballard - Intro to CRASH “Its is the task of the artist to reinvent reality”
Human relationships are controlled and guided by genes that will take thousands of years to change.. sensorty mechanisms havent changed much since cavemen
Historicity + Biological nature of human being should not be forgotten
IMPORTANCE OF TACTILITY : understand propositions in scale reduction.. but we do not understand the tactile in less than 1:1 —-> TACTILITY CANNOT BE SCALED
I would be the book if I wasnt on a self imposed bookbuying famine..
“Users of Google Maps can have the impression that they have seen (and therefore know) the streets of Paris, New York or Pittsburgh without ever having set foot there. With their series of collective performances and actions, Kinsley and Hewlett create an analogy between their carefully planned and coordinated artistic events and the equally fictitious reality presented by Google. As images cannot replace direct, physical experience, they always constitute a reconstruction, if not indeed manipulation, of the real world, but one that we are led to regard as real in today’s media-driven society.”
Come now, let us get up, we must take ourselves off.” Immediate objections thwarted his orders. What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently? Was he not even now in London, whose aromas and atmosphere and inhabitants, whose food and utensils surrounded him? For what could he hope, if not new disillusionments, as had happened to him in Holland?
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Huysman’s ‘Against Nature’ - I finally refined the second hand quote from Will Self by (skim)reading this novel. It looks really interesting and I WILL return to it with more depth as soon as I can.
The main character is sitting in a bar in Paris on his way to London to experience what he has been imagining.. the bar is full of Englishmen and the weather is grey and overcast.
I realised i hadnt sat down and drawn for a while - I missed it.
- Development of previous sketch looking at the constructed surroundings of a new vernacular which forms out of immersion in Virtua
- Description of where the Real and Virtual worlds meet. The heterogenous nature of countries is partially shown within their reflected virtua self, but the medium means a level of homogenuity and cross-pollination is inevitably going to emerge.
This drawing also redraws a geography based up proximaty to virtua, with 3rd world countries existing on the edge of such a constellation.
‘Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an inivisible man should need light, deserve light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I AM invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form’
—
A quote from ‘The Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison (1952) seems relevant to ideas i have had about the need for tangible ‘things’ for the Virtua Traveller.
The book inspired the work by Jeff Wall below, which I also like the hoarding aspect of.
Re-living real world ‘terra’ experience through a digital ‘virtua’ mediated environment in order to seperate oneself from, and desensitise, a traumatic experience.
The Cottingley Fairies are a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins living in Cottingley, near Bradford, England, depicting the two in various activities with supposed fairies.
When Mr. Wright, upon developing the plates, saw fairies in the pictures, he considered them fake. After the taking of the second picture, he banned Elsie from using the camera again. Her mother, Polly, however was convinced of their authenticity.
In the summer of 1919, the matter became public and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) wrote an article for a leading magazine claiming that they were authentic.
For fifty years the girls avoided publicity and the hoax continued to be believed by many. In late 1981 and mid 1982 respectively, Frances Way (née Griffiths) and Elsie Hill (née Wright), who took the photographs admitted that the first four pictures were fakes. Speaking of the first photograph in particular, Frances has said:
“I don’t see how people could believe they’re real fairies. I could see the backs of them and the hatpins when the photo was being taken.”
Both of the girls claimed, right up to their deaths, that the fifth photo (pictured below) was, in fact, authentic.
