First off, here's a link to one of the "reborn" babies Nakamura mentions. Not wanting to get a nasty post, I'll try to cite the seller: name is "piphel", Helen Jalland Gerba; the reborn was sculpted by Marissa May; selling price is around $3,600! If the link gets broken, here's a photo -->
This "reborn" is actually a pretty good opening to what struck me about the second-half of the text: namely, the influence of technology on the relationship between original and copy. Nakamura raises a great (albeit overly-long) question which she relates to the Matrix movies: "Do images of characters rendered via a computer interface--that is, images of humans that are digital from the ground up--threaten the notion of authenticity, singularity, and identity...?" (101). This is a great question, but not just about the construction of synthespians. Connecting this idea to that of Benjamin, the question becomes one that asks about the reproducibility of ourselves (in literature, painting, sculpture, digital imaging) and the implications of these actions.
Nakamura touches on this in a variety of ways throughout her last three chapters. For example, the notion of American Girl Dolls paralleling the replicants from Blade Runner with respect to the process of "self-replication" (141), or the idea she borrows from Stabile about how medical technology is turning the body inside out (156). This goes to the heart of Nakamura text as a whole, that in the digital age the "work of art" that we are reproducing is ourselves, and that this medium has provided us new and more complex ways of doing so.
Within the conversation of physical vs. virtual, she says that "Random access is an essential principle of the structure and logic of new media that respatializes media experiences" (111). If random access causes what Manovich calls a "flattening of data" with respect to information, what does this do the hierarchy of our various on- and off-line identities? Nakamura quotes Haraway who says that this flattening results in " 'self-alienation' and dispossession of the body as a result of technoscience" (96). But is self-alienation really an accurate term? If we were to take a liberal (and idealistic) psychoanalytic approach, we might say that the flattening and fracturing of identity allows for the examination of multiple sides of ourselves. Which raises the question that goes back to Benjamin again, what happens to the original? Which "me" is the "real" one?
Here I'm reminded of a movie trailer I saw a while ago called The Nines. It looks like one of these shows that you've got multiple versions of the main character struggling to find out who they are, how they relate to each other and what is real. Is this a new problem? Why is this so much more pressing now that representations have become so visual and so good? Does it stem from this facet of the interface Nakamura is warning us about, the immediacy that is the result of the transparency of the technology? Does this transparency interfere with our ability to distinguish between our various avatars, or does it help to extend our perception of our disseminated identities? I would submit that, yes, each individual avatar we contribute to can be codified and used for dataveillance against us and therefore needs examined. However, collectively perhaps these replicas of ourselves create a more diverse and thorough picture of ourselves than even we were aware and in a manner of reverse-production, produce the original.
3 comments:
This "reborn" is simultaneously one of the cutest and CREEPIEST things I have ever seen. The winning bid was $5,560!
The production and popularity (in certain circles) of these material reproductions is fascinating in light of our discussions of digital (re)productions/avatars/manipulations. Perhaps this points to a continuing desire for something tangible (but not "real") in our digital society? In my opinion, these reborns "threaten the notion of authenticity, singularity, and identity" more than do "images of humans that are digital from the ground up."
Of course, these days the lines are blurred between digital and physical reproductions: CGI characters (such as Gollum in "LOTR" and the stylized characters in movies like "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf") are created using motion capture of real people, and material creations like "reborns" certainly make use of a variety of computer-assisted models, calculations, etc.
Your post has helped me to put a finger on something I've been unable to articulate in my head, Andy. So here's a shot at it in your comments section.
There is a tension created by that "flattening of data" that random access causes. In part, this flattening goes nicely along with one strain of postmodernism that would set everything equal: high and low art, for example. On the internet, students can access Harvard's library online, but they can also access Joe Dude's Ranty Blog. The OED and Wikipedia. Sites for opera lovers and for furries. Those old distinctions our civic, cultural and political institutions have worked so hard to erect in some ways fall away in random access structure and logic. An MP3 player set to "random" will play Mozart and then Victor Borge. (Although, I have to admit, if that happened to me, I'd be ecstatic.)
It also seems, though, that this flattening is in line with neoliberal distaste for admitting certain kinds of distinctions: if we say everyone/everything is equal (if we embrace technologies that "flatten" data) that will make it so.
On the other hand, nobody actually wants that. Nobody wants a world without distinctions, where craft could be mistaken for art. (If you're the artist, at least.)
Perhaps more insidiously, though, "we" (digital elites - am I/are we even in that crowd? Let's say that above us there are the super-elites, like Steve Jobs. Anyway - "we") also know that we benefit in many ways from the way the current hierarchy works. I have the opportunity to shoehorn myself into the upper-middle class with graduate education, which is better than staying in some other middle class. In a flattened world, though, my shoehorning doesn't matter. If my university-account-accessible encyclopedia isn't inherently better than Wikipedia, what am I doing in the university?
Similarly, when Michael Powell gets his Mercedes, he'll be hoping that that divide is wider than ever (4).
I'm pretty flagrantly conflating data flattening with the flattening of other things and ideas, but I think that this is part of what I was thinking about when I mentioned democracy in my blog post about this. Our country, for example, wants democracy (of data, of political control), but not too much. We participate in cultural/racial/gender hierarchies just as we participate in an election system that doesn't trust the popular vote, that uses delegates and electoral colleges. We may protest them, but we rarely do anything about them. As long as hierarchies aren't too challenged, though, we don't worry too much about the flattening.
I'm not sure how this would connect to the direction you go in, which is towards our on/offline identities. Hm...
Random Access intrigued me, too, though I mostly avoided anything near to it in my post.
The implications on ideas of Authorship are important to me and while I don't have the answer top authenticity, I certainly enjoy questioning it and, as the Author, encouraging my Readers to question it. In this way, I was hoping to have Nakamura explore more connections or disconnects with Baudrillard (hyperreality) and Haraway (cyborgs).
Also, your post relates to something I think I noticed on the periphery of Nakamura's text: the conflict between historicism and Marxism. RA is all about nonlinear, ahistoric models, to me. LN uses some standard Marxist language, but also seems to advocate a historicist vision of history (progress) wrt the more "anthropological" claims (not data) she drops regarding social structures and constraints on users. It would be interesting to read "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" along side "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and smash those into Digitizing Race.
I also think that there is an interesting discussion between collage and RA, in the sense that both have filter/composers, as well as the breakdown binary notions of genre, as well as race.
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