PANOPTIC MIND: untitled

EYEDRUM

Jan .6-27 2001

Two of the great specular machines of the twentieth century, the telescope and the microscope, drastically extend mundane human perception into the realm of a something/somewhere else and in a very materialist way. Along the way it has given us incredible metaphors with which to further view cultural realities. (One immediate effect is to create multiple realites where previously we were stuck with one.)

Likewise the camera and the computer unpack the everyday life around us and mobilize, define and extend our perceptions in ways quite different from ways known to previous generations. And most likely effecting us in ways still quite difficult to detect.

The questions which are most pressing to us concern the extent to which these machineries feedback their examinations into the phenomenology of what it means to be human; of concern also is the extent to which the feed back whine of our machines into our identities, our souls, our communities is invisible and inaudible and goes largely unremarked because of the depths to which the machines penetrate. (A frightening concept given the fact there are a great many effects which ARE very visible and de/re-forming. As the great philosopher Peggy Lee says, Is that all there is? The answer artists invariably give is most likely not.)

At the very least we know that traditional psychological, social, and narrative structures begin to warp under the pressures of videos omniscient eye, whether the latest reports from the front on the evening news, the surveillance cameras at the end of the block, or the pornographic video no longer hidden in the bookcase but broadcast on HBO.

Many have been dismayed by the flatness and lack of horizon of our contemporary universe (the so-called disenchantment of the world). The exciting thing about these perceptual machines we have built is that they perforate the world, exposing phenomenal materiality itself as an incredible experience, as spooky as a sance, as suggestive as any witches Sabbat. It could be said, with very little exaggeration, that we are getting the magic that we as a species have always wished for.

The question is and will become even more pressing: how far are we willing to go to become accomplices to the machine, what (and who) are we willing to sacrifice to become the sorcerers apprentice?

One thing that we do seem to know is that the machine, taken in its broadest sense, from the video to the computer to the car, brings a Great Gift and like all gifts it has consequences and reciprocities both intended and unforeseen.

This is the gift of impersonality (the same hard gift that religion has given us) and a treasure that can give new insights as well as turn into the terror of the inhuman: the objective cruelity of a face ripped off, as well as the nuanced impartiality of a fair witness, the bland but bountiful repeatability of science as well as the de-humanizing effect of the social wing of the machine, the bureaucracy.

The future is well underway. And is being videotaped at this very moment no doubt.

Robert Cheatham and Sloane Robinson

Secial thanks to: Woody Cornwell, Pel Robinson., Bill Spence, Randy Castello, Artisian Pictureworks, Sarah Hornbacher, Mike Mokoni.