Here/there: telepresence, touch, and art at the interface 9780262035729, 0262035723

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Here/There

Leonardo Roger F. Malina, Executive Editor Sean Cubitt, Editor-in-Chief White Heat and Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980, edited by Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason, 2008 Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, 2010 Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, George Gessert, 2010 Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks, 2010 Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956–1975, Stephen Jones, 2011 Hybrid Cultures: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West, Yvonne Spielmann, 2012 Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, Karen O’Rourke, 2013 The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, revised edition, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 2013 Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, Erkki Huhtamo, 2013 Relive: Media Art Histories, edited by Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas, 2013 Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, 2014 Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, Pasi Väliaho, 2014 The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Sean Cubitt, 2014 The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology, Frances Dyson, 2014 The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema, Gloria Sutton, 2014 Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, Laura U. Marks, 2015 Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, edited by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka, 2015 Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, Seb Franklin, 2015 New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978), Armin Medosch, 2016 Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region, Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams, 2016 Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities, Gary Hall, 2016 Social Media Archeology and Poetics, edited by Judy Malloy, 2016 Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, edited by Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen, 2016 Machine Art in the Twentieth Century, Andreas Broeckmann, 2016 Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface, Kris Paulsen, 2017 See for a complete list of titles in this series.

Here/There Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface

Kris Paulsen

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paulsen, Kris, author. Title: Here/there : telepresence, touch, and art at the interface / Kris Paulsen. Other titles: Herethere Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017] | Series: Leonardo book series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025430 | ISBN 9780262035729 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Art and telecommunication. | Telepresence--Psychological aspects. | Television--Psychological aspects. | Remote control--Psychological aspects. | Video art. | Virtual reality. Classification: LCC N72.T45 P38 2017 | DDC 777--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025430 10

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For the artists

Contents

Series Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Touching the Interface, Interfacing Touch 1 The Index and the Interface 17 Uncanny Confusion: Early Video and the Fantasy of Presence 39 Touching Television: Chris Burden’s Anti-Spectacular Video and the Ethics of Observation 67 4 Inhabiting the Interface: The Mixed Reality of Satellite Telecommunication 95 5 The Presence of Others: Telerobotics and the Digitization of Touch 121 6 The View from Here: Remote Action and the Trauma of (Not) Being Touched 147 Epilogue: Fingerprints 183

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Notes 187 References 229 Index 241

Series Foreword

Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST) Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have some very simple goals: 1. To advocate, document, and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars developing the new ways that the contemporary arts interact with science, technology, and society. 2. To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet, exchange ideas, and, when appropriate, collaborate. 3. To contribute, through the interaction of the arts and sciences, to the creation of the new culture that will be needed to transition to a sustainable planetary society. When the journal Leonardo was started some forty-five years ago, these creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at that time by the “Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow. Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work individually and collaboratively bridging the art, science, and technology disciplines. For some of the hard problems in our society, we have no choice but to find new ways to couple the arts and sciences. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leonardos,” hybrid creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a meaningful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs.

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For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks, please visit our websites at http://www.leonardo.info/ and http://www.olats.org. Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Nina Czegledy, Greg Harper, Marc Hebert (Chair), Gordon Knox, Roger Malina, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong

Acknowledgments

In one way or another, I have been working on this book since I graduated from college, and as such I have accrued a long list of mentors, friends, and institutions to thank for their support. Here/There began as a dissertation written under the direction of Kaja Silverman in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California at Berkeley. I could not have asked for a more inspiring and impressive mentor or a more open and stimulating place than UC Berkeley, which provided me with my other advisors, Anne M. Wagner, David Bates, and Ken Goldberg, whose profound influence can be seen on every page of this book. Even before Berkeley, Roger Mayer, Michael Silverman, Paul Badger, Elizabeth Weed, Kermit Champa, and K. Dian Kriz at Brown University all shaped this project in ways they could not possibly have foreseen. I need to thank all of my colleagues in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University for their patience and support of this project. Judy Andrews, Gwyn Dalton, Mark Fullerton, Amanda Gluibizzi, Ron Green, Barbara Groseclose, Barbara Haeger, Byron Hamann, Christian Kleinbub, Erica Levin, Tim McNiven, Andrew Shelton, Karl Whittington, and Mollie Workman all deserve my profound appreciation. In particular, Lisa Florman and Namiko Kunimoto, who read every word of this manuscript several times over, deserve my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation. This book has been greatly improved by their help and friendship; I cannot thank them enough. Columbus, Ohio has provided an exceptionally rich intellectual community, the members of which have made my time and work here more fruitful and enjoyable. I have been aided in numerous ways by The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Columbus Museum of Art, the OSU Film Studies Program, the OSU Department of Art, and the Arts Initiative. In particular I need to extend my appreciation to Bill Horrigan, Sherri Gelden, Chris Stults, Jennifer Lange, Dave Filipi, Amanda Potter, Shelly Casto, Tyler Cann, Drew Sawyer, George Rush, Aspen Mays, Chris Bedford, Roger Beebe, Vera Bruner-Sung, Danny Marcus, Richard Fletcher, Mike Olenick, Alejandra Rojas, Carmen Winant, Luke Stettner, Max and Kaz Woodworth, Adam and Nina Fazio, Merijn Van Der Heijden, and Valarie Williams. My students at Ohio State have also played an important role by helping me think through the ideas and arguments that appear in this book. I must thank Kristin Brockman, Ahyoung

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Yoo, James Hansen, Julie Defossez, Julie Dentzer, Annie Jacobson, Ricky Crano, Brian Michael Murphy, Michael Kellner, Linda Huang, Christopher Jeansonne, and Mabi Ponce de Leon for their openness and engagement. In particular, I must single out Kristin Brockman, who acted as my assistant while finishing the book and skillfully cleared all of the images and managed all of my formatting and footnotes. I could not have finished without her. Friends and scholars who generously responded to drafts of chapters, commented at conferences, provided conversation at crucial moments, or helped me through parts of this manuscript (and the time it took to write it) include James Harker, Sarah Hamill, Chris Lakey, Michael Kunichika, Michael Allen, Brooke Belisle, Meredith Hoy, Wendy Chun, Frazer Ward, Melissa Ragona, Elizabeth Ferrell, Laura U. Marks, Erkki Huhtamo, Tung-Hui Hu, Andrew Weiner, Amy Rust, Scott Ferguson, Julie Napolin, Tara McDowell, Zabet Paterson, Andrew Uroskie, Jessica Davies, Colin Cooperman, Daniel Rosenberg, William Kaizen, Richard Reinhart, Jill Dawsey, Lisa Dent, Stacen Berg, and David Norr. The research for this project was supported at many different stages by The Ohio State University, The University of California at Berkeley, The Doreen B. Townsend Center, The Getty Research Institute, and The Pacific Film Archive. Several of the chapters had previous lives as articles, and I am grateful for the editors and staff at Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Representations for their guidance and assistance. I must, of course, extend special thanks to my editor Douglas Sery at the MIT Press and to the Leonardo Book Series for supporting this project. I am also in the debt of Susan Buckley, Matthew Abbate, and the anonymous readers of my manuscript drafts who provided great insight and assistance in finishing the book. I am very lucky to work with living artists. Each of the artists I discuss in this book has helped me in very generous ways, from extended, multiyear conversations to graciously providing images and waiving reproduction fees. It has been an honor to work with them as well as their foundations and galleries. Thank you, Vito Acconci, Basma Alsharif, Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, Wafaa Bilal, James Bridle, Chris Burden, John Canny and Eric Paulos, Jaime Davidovich, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Ken Feingold, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Ken Goldberg, Joan Jonas, Trevor Paglen, and Hito Steyerl. I would like to especially thank some of the people who assisted directly in securing the image rights: Marty Ritchey at the Stanford Research Institute, Benjamin Handler and Joel Searls at Chris Burden Studios, Anny Oberlink at Electronic Arts Intermix, Zachary Vanes at Video Data Bank, Matthias Rajmann at Harun Farocki GbR, Nathalie Boutin at gb Agency, as well as all of the staff at Wafaa Bilal Studio, The Man Ray Trust, ADAGP Paris, Driscoll Babcock Gallery, Greene Naftali Gallery, ERRATA BEER, Altman Siegel Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, and Artist Rights Society. David Norr and James Cohan Gallery deserve special thanks for smoothing out the last-minute hitches in image permissions. Lastly, I must thank my family for putting up with me for these long years and helping me cope with the anxiety and stress of writing a book. My parents, Lucille Berrill Paulsen and David Paulsen, and my brother Erik have been a great help throughout, particularly in

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knowing when not to ask about the book. Shana Lutker, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, and Angie Waller, while not technically “family,” have always offered invaluable advice on what was really important and often reminded me that there was an outside to all of this. I offer my husband Ryland Wharton my sincere love and gratitude for his support throughout this long process. Finally, I must thank Ingrid (who had no idea that I was writing a book) for being the most wonderful distraction and for helping me keep everything in perspective.

Introduction: Touching the Interface, Interfacing Touch

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart famously changed the future of computing. His presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco introduced the world to the oNLine System (NLS), which he developed with his team from the Augmented Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute. In the brisk 100-minute lecture, later known as the “Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart demonstrated, among other things, live text editing on a cathode ray tube monitor, hyperlinked documents, the computer mouse, networked interaction, video conferencing, and the idea of a personal computer with a display screen.1 The importance of the demonstration was not just in what Engelbart showed the audience, but how he did so. Though he sat on a stage facing a packed 1,000seat auditorium, he addressed the crowd through a 22-by-18-foot screen displaying a live video image of him at the computer workstation. An Eidaphor video projector, borrowed from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and networked by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), beamed the high-resolution image across the lecture hall while a team of assistants, including Stewart Brand, the producer of the psychedelic 1966 Trips Festival, were at the lab in Menlo Park remotely controlling and choreographing the images on the screen.2 Despite being in the same room with his viewers, Engelbart indicated that he would address them “primarily through this medium,” pointing into the television camera and thereby to the center of the video projection (figure 0.1). In this casual gesture, he shifted attention from his physical presence on the stage to the mediating surface of the screen. But the giant screen was not there simply to show the engineer in close-up for the benefit of the large audience. During the presentation, the conference attendees saw the documents Engelbart was producing on his computer superimposed on live shots of the engineer looking into the screen or of his hands at the computer’s new and unusual controls (figure 0.2).3 The dramatic mediation of the event cinematically sutured each viewer into a series of point-of-view shots that allowed her to imagine herself either face to face with Engelbart across the mediating boundary of his terminal’s screen, or at the keyboard of the workstation. When Engelbart pointed at the screen, he did not just point into the camera and at the audience; he pointed at the interface that had suddenly materialized before their eyes.

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Introduction

Figure 0.1 Video still of Douglas Engelbart taken from a recording of the 1968 “Mother of All Demos.” Courtesy of SRI International.

The Mother of It All I begin this book on telepresence and mediated touch in contemporary art with an extended description of Engelbart’s legendary presentation because it marked a watershed moment in the history of technology, and because it unveiled the basic component parts of the video and interactive telematic art of the following decades. “Telepresence” is the feeling of being present at a remote location by means of real-time telecommunications devices. One can be visually, aurally, and even tactilely present to distant, mediated environments through networked devices, such as video cameras and telerobots. The “Mother of All Demos,” I would like to argue, is an early example of a telepresent experience: despite the fact that Engelbart was seated in the auditorium, he tactilely and interactively extended his body into and through a screen. The engineer used the live video screen as a mediating surface for executing actions and connecting with networked others at his lab and in the audience, rather than as a transparent, unidirectional, spectacularized “window onto the world,” as it was understood

Figure 0.2 Video stills of Douglas Engelbart taken from a recording of the 1968 “Mother of All Demos.” Courtesy of SRI International.

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by conventional broadcast television.4 While Engelbart only hinted at its existence in the presentation, the Internet, too, was coming into being at the time of the demo. By 1969, Engelbart’s NLS would be one of the first two nodes of the ARPANET, which would later be transformed into the Internet and give birth the World Wide Web. The NLS also came at a significant moment for artistic production and practice. 1968 was the year video emerged as a consumer technology, and artists took up its potential as an artistic medium. They began to explore the particular properties of video, testing its social and technological differences from broadcast and cable television, and imagining how the video screen might be a means of disrupting the normative relations established by TV, to become instead a site for interactive and even bidirectional contact with viewers.5 I call special attention to Stewart Brand’s involvement with the “Mother of All Demos” to underscore the hallucinatory and synesthetic effects of what could have been an otherwise dry lecture.6 The live multimedia presentation was nearly as complicated as the NLS system itself. It involved Engelbart leasing microwave lines, transmitting video signals thirty miles up the San Francisco peninsula, and bouncing them off of eight borrowed television antennas, all with the technological and financial cooperation of NASA and ARPA.7 The investment in the presentation indicates how important communicating the extended sensory experience of the NLS technology and its interactive elements to the audience was for Engelbart and his colleagues. In order to highlight the effects of live interaction with a computer for the audience, the Augmentation Research Center reframed the NLS experience as a “cinema of attractions.” Tom Gunning coined this term to describe some of the earliest films ever made, films that aimed not to communicate a narrative but to revel in “the power to show something.”8 Theirs was a technique that “spoil[ed] the realistic illusion of cinema … by establishing contact with the audience,” usually via figures who looked at or gestured toward the camera, thereby acknowledging both its presence and the construction of the scene for a viewer.9 In his own “cinema of attractions,” Engelbart pointed at the screen to acknowledge it as an interface. In doing so he “solicit[ed] the attention of the spectator” by rupturing the “self-enclosed” scene, aggressively subjecting the viewer to “sensual or psychological impact.”10 The “Mother of All Demos” figured the screen as a site for sensation—for vision and hearing, but also, as facilitated by the mouse, for touch. Engelbart held on to a small device that extended his hands and his actions into the ethereal space of the computer monitor. This book takes 1968 as a starting point for examining how video screens became spaces for communication and physical, tactile intervention. Over the next four decades, the video screen would become increasingly networked and interactive, following the lead of Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center. Through the video camera, closed-circuit television, computer monitors, telecommunications satellites, fiber-optic cables, and the World Wide Web, video screens developed into sites for live connection with other users, distant places, and mediated—but not necessarily “virtual”—worlds.11 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Engelbart’s pointing finger would soon emerge as a meme within the history of video art and web

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artworks that engaged with the problems of mediated experience and networked contact.12 Similarly, the mouse developed from a tool that only allowed a user to intervene in the coordinates of screen space into a remote control enabling the operation of distant devices in real space via the computer interface. In the chapters that follow, I trace an arc of increasing interactivity and intervention in the twin developments of video and computer interfaces through tools that extend individual presence via “touch”—both figurative and literal—into the mediated space of the screen. I will do so through an art historical lens, looking to artists who took up these tools in the very moment of their emergence to explore their potentials and to critique their current, normative uses. By transforming monitors into sites for tactile as well as visual and aural interaction, the artworks I discuss in this book question the aesthetic, social, and ethical stakes of media that allow one to manipulate and affect far-off environments and their inhabitants. As such, this book is not simply an art historical account of the ways in which artists have refigured video screens by making them interactive and tactile; it is also a meditation on how our relationships to the world change when we can touch things that cannot touch us back. While we now live in a technological milieu crowded with touch screens, I will not be addressing these technologies per se, or the user’s tactile or haptic engagement with them, but systems that enable physical action on the other side of an interface screen.13 The central claim of the book is that a critical and retrospective look at artworks ranging from the earliest artists’ videos to the most technologically advanced interventions into today’s military robotic technology offers a way of understanding the rapid mediatization and remediation of contemporary sensory experience, and suggests how we might preserve embodied social and political relationships to mediated people, places, and things in the face of such technological extension. Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface establishes a history of telepresence in contemporary art that puts contemporary digital technologies and artworks enabling remote action in the context of earlier artworks in analog electronic media that examined very similar conditions of liveness, mediation, and networked telepresence. There is a strong tendency in media theory and media art to stress the radical “newness” of contemporary technologies and effects. However, a clear lineage can be drawn between “new media” art and certain works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, enabling us to see how artists and engineers have long sought to explore the phenomenological, existential, and epistemological effects of mediated images, interactive interfaces, and remote action. Networked robots and unmanned drones may seem far removed from early experiments with graphical user interfaces, recorded analog video, closed-circuit television, and telecommunications satellites; however, those things too were once at the cutting edge of networked technology and foreshadowed the ethical and phenomenological effects of today’s networked actions. This book demonstrates not only how they prefigured contemporary manifestations of remote presence and action, but also how they might help us begin to make sense of the expansion of our senses in a technological moment in which, as philosopher Paul Virilio puts it, “real time supersedes real space,” and

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to model strategies for engagement and interaction with mediated others.14 Virilio’s work has long examined the transition from chronology (the logic of time—before, during, after) to “dromology,” or the logic of speed. Real-time technologies, he writes, “are killing present time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a communicative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with ‘concrete presence’ in the word, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discrete telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery.”15 Hence, we now understand the world through a different basic interval—no longer simply that of space or time, but “the interval of light-kind (the interface) … [which takes over] from the notion of succession in the measurement of present duration as well as from the notion of extension in immediate physical presence.”16 The artworks and artists discussed here provide much-needed reflection and commentary on media that tend to spectacularize the world and distance users from the effects of their actions. In her 2010 book Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, Kate Mondloch points to a growing interest in theorizing the proliferation of screens and interfaces in contemporary media theory, but very little work has been done to consider these technologies and their effects in an art historical context.17 In Here/There I address this lacuna while also taking up two other topics that are suppressed in the history of art—television and tactility—as well as a recently maligned concept that once held a firm place in film and media studies, Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the index. These three themes—tactility, television, and indexicality—run through the book, and I argue that they are inherently intertwined in the concept of telepresence. The artists and artworks I analyze use televisual screens attached to antennas, VCRs, satellite feeds, telerobots, computer terminals, and unmanned drones to examine how we can touch and, in attenuated ways, be present in mediated environments, and what the stakes of this reconfiguration of the body ultimately are. Telepresent Touch As defined in 1991 by techno-utopian artist and theorist Roy Ascott, “telepresence” is the condition of being “both here and there … whether mediated by computer networks, interactive video, slow-scan television, fax, digital image transfer, videotex, teleconference, videophone or online communications by means of telephone, cable or satellite link.”18 Ascott’s list of existing telematic devices and technologies would be significantly extended over the next two decades. Today one might add webcams, chat rooms, message boards, online video games, telerobots, and unmanned drones, as well as any number of other banded and generic, wired and “wireless” technologies for getting “in touch.” While Ascott’s examples are limited in relation to the present state of consumer and industrial technology, his general definition is perhaps overly broad. According to his formulation, almost any experience mediated by telecommunications technology can induce a state of telepresence. For many other theorists, artists, and engineers, “telepresence” is a much more specific category of experience. Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence

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Laboratory, who coined the term in 1980, used it to designate remote manipulation of robots by means of “high-quality sensory feedback.”19 In Minsky’s account, then, telepresence is specifically related to haptic engagement; it is different from mere telecommunication in that getting “in touch” is a far less metaphorical description of one’s actions. In the early days of the Internet, Minsky envisioned coupling new networked technologies with physical machines and feedback actuators so that computers could be used to “translate feel into feel,” that is, to recreate the physical sensation of touch for far-off “teleoperators.”20 In his 1980 paper, he described yet-to-be invented technologies that would wire a user’s hands to sophisticated tools through haptic sensors so that she could “‘work’ in another room, in another city, in another country, or on another planet.”21 New media artist Eduardo Kac, too, names touch as the primary sense that distinguishes telepresence from simple telecommunication. “Telepresence,” by Kac’s definition, is “telecommunications coupled with telerobotics,” or, as he has put it slightly more capaciously, “combining telecommunications with remote action.”22 That is, to be telepresent to another person or place, one needs to be able to physically manipulate and affect the remote environment, not just see or hear it. Telepresence is grounded in touch, but that does not mean that it is an embodied experience. I, too, will be adopting a broad definition of telepresence, which is necessary for drawing the longer historical arc I aim for in this study. While several of the chapters (1, 5, and 6) focus on remote physical manipulation, other chapters (2, 3, and 4) deal with fantasies of touch and physical presence though (potentially) live telecommunications media that seem to structurally or institutionally prohibit this kind of interactivity. In Ascott’s, Minsky’s, and Kac’s discussions of telepresence there is a problem with the physical, phenomenological status of the user’s body, and where, exactly, it is.23 Kac describes telepresent interactions as responsive and “reciprocal” because the teleoperator receives information about the mediated location through video, audio, and (perhaps even) tactile force feedback, and then adjusts her behavior based on that information. She may move the robot one way, see the effect, and then execute her next action based on the results observed. Information moves in two directions.24 There is cybernetic feedback. Yet this does not, in fact, mean that the system is reciprocal. In most telematic artworks and industrial applications of telepresence technologies, information may flow in two directions, but agency moves only in one: in Kac’s telepresence works, for example, a teleoperator can intervene in a remote environment, but her body is not made vulnerable or available to those on the other side of the screen.25 The driving force behind Minsky’s own conceptualization of telepresence is to insulate the teleoperator’s body from actual, physical contact with the mediated environment. Telepresence allows people to “enter” hazardous or hostile environments with no risk to their physical safety.26 Minsky names outer space, the ocean floor, and nuclear reactors as the potential contexts for telepresence, but one may easily extrapolate from this field of action to include conflict zones, protests, and other sites in which some bodies are protected by remote technology, while others are exposed and vulnerable without the power to strike back at anything but a machine.

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Introduction

In Ascott’s broad formulation, the locational presence of the body is even further abstracted. Networked interaction via telematic devices, according to him, leads to an “out of body” experience; “it is to be at once everywhere and nowhere.”27 Through networked telecommunication the user’s body is “fragmented” and “dispersed.”28 Ascott imagines users leaving their bodies and their specific places in space and time (as well as their specific races, ethnicities, cultures, and genders) to connect with a shared, planetary consciousness.29 Networked telematic technologies, in his view, can create a digital version of Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere,” “a thinking layer, enveloping the biosphere of the earth,” that would connect all people to each other and “contribute to the harmonization of the planet.”30 In Ascott’s formulation, then, to lose one’s corporeal body and its specific coordinates in space and time is to grow closer to others by overcoming physical constraints. Ascott’s disembodied user illustrates well Marshall McLuhan’s notion of technology as an extension of the body across time or space that shifts the “scale of our affairs.”31 But each extension is simultaneously also an “amputation.” In the electrical age, McLuhan writes, the central nervous system extends outside of the body and becomes disconnected from it by means of information technology and communication devices.32 Our minds are set free into the ether, as our bodies are left behind. Despite the utopian (as well as deterministic) rhetoric of McLuhan’s and Ascott’s claims, N. Katherine Hayles rightly describes this logic as a “nightmarish” continuation of the Western humanist tradition that conceives of consciousness as “the seat of human identity.”33 Liberal humanism, she writes, imagined the subject as possessing a body but not as being integrally, essentially tied to that body. In the guise of “posthumanism,” the body is refigured as the “original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.”34 Hayles’s narrative makes it easy to imagine not only how our concepts of presence might become separated from our bodies, but also how our tendency to imagine touch as a unidirectional and nonreciprocal phenomenon has been exacerbated through networked interfaces and other technological devices. Telepresence can easily be seen, then, as the unnerving next step in the Western liberal humanist tradition that, in its posthumanist phase, has detached the mind from the body, while giving the former unprecedented powers through extended, mechanized, physical prostheses. Hayles’s project in How We Became Posthuman is to contest the logic of disembodiment and point to the ways in which information technology makes visible its materiality. My own project in Here/ There continues along this line, by looking to the ways in which artists have resisted the dematerialization and disembodiment telematic technologies seem to foretell or promise by focusing on the materiality of the screen and reformulating it as a surface open for occupation. While I will, like Hayles, seek to add the body back in, I will also ask what might change if we consider screens and other pieces of equipment as active collaborators in our actions.

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VR/TR The insecure material status of the networked body leads to a set of epistemological and ethical problems. Individuals can carry out physical actions in distant environments, but the conditions of virtuality can often make it unclear to the user of the interface whether her actions are simulations or merely mediated. Ken Goldberg, the engineer and artist responsible for putting the first robot on the Internet, distinguishes “VR” (virtual reality) from “TR” (tele-reality).35 The distinction between the two, he writes, “is vital: VR is simulacral, TR is distal.”36 Virtual reality presents what Oliver Grau calls “spaces of illusion” in which a “panoramic view is joined by sensorimotor exploration of an image space that gives the impression of a ‘living’ environment.”37 In virtual reality, then, the user engages with a simulated world through a variety of controls that communicate visual, auditory, and even haptic sensations of that fictional world.38 As Jaron Lanier, an early pioneer in virtual reality, puts it, VR allows the user “to see, hear, and feel things that aren’t really there.”39 Tele-reality is something quite different. It shows things that are real but that may not be “there” with the viewer or user. It presents mediated access to a real place, usually in real time. This is not a novel concept; television and video in their live forms fit this description, and Thomas J. Campanella suggests that a “genealogy of visual synchronicity” could stretch quite far into the technological past to link telepresence to early optical devices for augmenting vision, such as the telescope, binoculars, and the microscope, as well as technologies that mediate direct vision, such as the camera obscura and camera lucida.40 Given this list of devices, the distinction between the distal and the virtual seems clear—a real place mediated versus a simulated place screened—but in practice as well as in language, the difference, I would like to suggest, is often much harder to parse. First, the term “virtual” does not simply mean “simulated,” “invented,” or “inauthentic.” It has a much more complex usage and etymology. The contemporary uses of the term alter and even invert its original meaning. Derived from the Latin virtualis, “virtual” was initially used to describe the particular, even physical, qualities—or virtues—of a person or thing: “Inherently powerful or effective owing to particular natural qualities.”41 Over time, however, the “particular” slid into the “essential,” the actual into the ideal. “Virtual” came to mean “in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality; supposed, imagined,” and, at the same time, for “practical purposes, although not according to strict definition; very near, almost absolute.”42 That is, the word now functions as a contranym.43 This quality of meaning both something and its opposite is particularly confusing in regard to the virtual, for it specifically clouds the distinction between VR and TR, between total simulation and mere mediation. When we perceive or describe something as “virtual,” do we mean that it is simulated rather than real, or that is near enough to the actual to be used as a practical and effective substitute? Certainly the live video image of an event is not the thing itself—it has been converted into an electronic image—but we are likely to accept it as an operational substitute for the event that it transmits. The twinned media of television and video both have etymological roots

10

Introduction

that point to how the mediation is easily accepted as one’s own vision—they are, from Greek and Latin, respectively, “vision at a distance” and “I see.”44 They are technologies that extend and stand in for our natural senses. In the hope of containing the contradictory senses of the “virtual,” media theorist Anne Friedberg has offered a more generic definition. For her, the virtual is “any representation or appearance (whether optically, technologically, or artisanally produced) that appears ‘functionally or effectively but not formally’ of the same materiality as what it represents.”45 Virtual images may depict simulations or fictional environments; or they may be mediations of views of real, real-time environments. Of course, Friedberg’s expansive redefinition only exacerbates the problem of undecidability in relation to telepresence and teleaction—or what Goldberg describes as “telepistemology.” According to phenomenological philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, telematic technologies have not only given new life to the Western humanist tradition of imagined disembodiment; they have also threatened to compel a renewed Cartesian skepticism in which “our bodies seem irrelevant” and “our minds seem to expand to all corners of the universe.”46 But at the same time, the godlike omniscience and omnipotence that telepresence and teleaction produce are countered by a radical epistemological doubt that might force us to believe that everything we engage with through our senses (and our interfaces) is illusory and simulacral. If all mediated vision, as Dreyfus suggests, could inspire instrumentalist as well as Cartesian doubt, then comprehending the type of image and one’s relationship to it becomes more pressing as our ability to act upon the image or scene through an interface becomes more powerful and more commonplace. Our bodies seem “irrelevant” because, by the power of our minds coupled with networked machinery, we can functionally be in two places at once, something bodies—by their very nature—are not able (at least not yet) to do. But does the other’s body become irrelevant too? We may feel protected (if not omnipotent) and without risk of reciprocity by virtue of our physical separation from the scene of action (if not by our literal “disembodiment”); but if all of our information about our teleactions is inherently mediated—distanced from the body and its direct sensory apparatus—will we accept without question the reality of our teleactions and their effects on those bodies that lack the privilege of disembodiment? Certainly from the other side of the interface or “under the shadow of the drone,” the idea of neo-Cartesian doubt and the “irrelevance of the body” seems very different, and is in great need of revision and new perspective. In this book I am concerned specifically with screen-based media that engage with these ethical and philosophical questions through the effects of televisual telecommunication, be they examples of early video art or contemporary new media works using networked telerobots or unmanned aerial drones. Telepresence and its tactile interventions in and through screen space complicate the boundaries of our bodies, extend our corporeal agency and influence, and blur the distinctions between physicality and virtuality. The works I discuss take advantage of the video screen’s simultaneous undecidable authenticity and the pressing urgency of its images. Moreover, they all aim to make both sides of the screen matter. I have

Touching the Interface, Interfacing Touch

11

chosen to narrow my focus to video-based works in order to engage a particular set of aesthetic, social, and political effects that arise from video’s grammatical quality of signaling the “I see” and what Samuel Weber calls television’s “uncanny confusion,” that is, the inherent inability of viewers to distinguish recorded video images from live video images and the ways by which television—as a medium and as an institution—has aimed to exacerbate this confusion.47 The chapters that follow examine how video images—live or recoded—place the viewer in specific social and political as well as somatic relationships to what they show. I discuss television in its most basic form as video that delivers (or appears to deliver) live vision-at-a-distance.48 While there is still much to be said about the role of broadcast and cable television in the experimental arts of this same period, this book primarily addresses uses of video that have happened outside corporate delivery systems, instead focusing on closedcircuit environments and online channels.49 Chapter 1 offers a rereading of Peirce’s semiotic concept of the index and establishes the theoretical and conceptual groundwork of the chapters that follow. My aim is to counter typical understandings of the index, which view it as a material trace of a past moment of physical contact that provides evidence of an existential truth. This formulation has led to claims of the index’s “death” in the digital age. The argument is that, since the index is a sign grounded in materiality, and this materiality is what assures its evidentiary and impartial truthfulness, the “immateriality” of digital media and their electronic processes of recording result in the loss of the indexical trace in the image. This would be a significant loss, since it would stand to reason that if the index were gone, so too would be the element of the image that communicates existential and epistemic information, and that compels belief in those who apprehend it. In opposition to these claims, I establish the index as a type of “immaterial” touch and a sign of real-time engagement, but one that is always mired in uncertainty despite its evidentiary qualities and applications. Returning to Peirce’s discussions of the index, I aim to demystify and dispel claims about the digital “death of the index.” Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, William J. Mitchell, Lev Manovich, Laura Mulvey, and Laura U. Marks, I argue against the established narratives in art history and photographic theory to claim that rather than being “dead” in the digital age, the index is the operative sign for understanding mediated images and experiences through virtual interfaces, particularly those using live video, television, and networked media. By establishing the index as a doubtful and dubious sign that nonetheless (potentially) points to a real, ongoing and unfolding event, I both argue for the necessity of believing in the index and examine how it is in its nature to deceive its receiver, as well as the consequences of such deceptions. The second chapter takes up the redefined index, its indeterminate nature, and its potential for deception, to examine the ways in which early video artists used the new medium of videotape to expose the ontological indeterminacy of television and the powerful yet fantastical experiences of presence and contact it could create through transmission. These effects, I argue, hinge on the self-conscious production and circulation of indexical signs. Apparently

12

Introduction

simple early videos, such as Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971) and Theme Song (1973) and Joan Jonas’s Left Side Right Side (1972) (1972) and Duet (1972), accurately and effectively diagram the complex temporal, spatial, and semiotic structures of broadcast television that intentionally confuse viewers as to their space-time relationships to the event depicted. The videos in question cause the viewer to mistake the past for the present, the far for the near, the there for the here, and the recorded for the live. Each of the works dramatize video’s and television’s indexical nature—that is, their status as signs that create a strong existential connection between themselves and their receivers (which, in turn, results in feelings of surety and belief), even as they are at the same time of fundamentally dubious and indeterminate origin. Building on the work of television theorists such as Mary Ann Doane, James Friedman, and Jane Feuer, I argue, moreover, that it is through the circulation of other indexical signs within video images—deictic shifters and pointing fingers, for example—that television broadcasts create their confusing spatial and temporal effects. In my analysis, Acconci’s and Jonas’s videos reveal the ontological ambivalence of both the index and video/television by means of another ambivalent effect—the uncanny. As Samuel Weber has explained, under the technological logic of film and cinema, screens typically re-present something that has already taken place. There is a clear temporal relationship between past and present: the screen image is a mimetic copy of a previously existent original. But this is not the case with television, which completely unsettles the hierarchy of original and copy.50 The inability to distinguish the live from the recorded, the now from the then, transforms the screen into a site of “uncanny confusion.” Chapter 3 takes up another confounding contradiction: Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 claim that, despite television’s reputation as a machine that conditioned passivity, it was an inherently participatory medium and its participation was primarily rooted in tactile engagement. This tactility had nothing to do with flipping switches or turning dials. Rather, because of the low fidelity of the television image, with its broken scan lines and constantly shifting electronic surface, the viewer’s eyes had to act as a hand, smoothing the disjointed image into a complete picture. The image on the screen was created by the “scanning finger” of the electron gun, and the viewer’s eyes repeated this gesture in response, transforming her sight into a touch that made contact with the surface of the glass.51 This chapter looks to experimental video works from the late 1970s that aimed to transform the viewer into an active agent and producer of what appeared on the screen. Focusing on the work of Chris Burden, I argue that he reworked the television screen as a site for interactive, physical intervention as a challenge to the medium’s apparently spectacularizing, distancing, and immobilizing effects. In a world in which all of our engagements always already appear as mediated, I claim that Burden, surprisingly, used television to create situations that demanded immediate, direct intervention. A sculptor by training, Burden is best known for his 1972 performance Shoot, in which a live audience sat by and watched a marksman take aim and fire at his impassive body. Speaking at the time, Burden connected his desire to be shot to a need for an empathetic

Touching the Interface, Interfacing Touch

13

engagement with the images of violence—fictional and real—that he saw on television. Shoot, I argue, commuted a televisual experience into real space for Burden, but it also mediated direct experience by imposing a televisual structure onto the performance that made it apparently impervious to audience intervention and touch. The audience appeared to be spectacularly “screened” from the live, proximal event. In the years following Shoot, Burden began to use screens and video monitors as a means of mediating his live performance to telepresent audiences. This chapter addresses a series of Burden’s live closed-circuit television performances executed in the wake of Shoot. Perhaps counterintuitively, I argue that he used the video screen to combat the immobilizing, televisual passivity that structured his unmediated performances. The screen in Burden’s video performances of the mid-1970s became a site for interaction, urgent intervention, and physical touch. Comparing live “unmediated” performances such as Shoot (1971) and Doomed (1975) to his CCTV performances Back to You (1974) and Do You Believe in Television (1976), I contend that his use of television forced viewers to become actively and tactilely involved with the represented event by crossing to the other side of the screen, thereby transforming McLuhan’s notion of televisual touch into an ethical imperative. Chapter 4 looks to the work of video artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz to examine how the televisual image might go beyond mediating distant places and become a “place” itself. In 1977, Galloway and Rabinowitz began collaborating with NASA on a series of live satellite video performances that variously refigured the television screen as an interface for embodied interaction. While their 1980 installation Hole in Space (1980), which connected public sidewalks in Los Angeles and New York City with a cinema-scale satellite video portal, was their most sensational and well-documented work, I focus instead on their very first satellite artwork, Satellite Arts 1977 (1977). Satellite Arts 1977, too, was a bidirectional, bicoastal, real-time television link between two locations. But the artists did not simply put the remote participants in audiovisual contact by using the monitor as a “window” onto another place, as they did in Hole in Space, or adopt the split-screen format of conventional television broadcasts, which manifests physical distance and separate spaces as a graphic divide in the image. Instead, they transformed the television screen into a surface on which embodied interaction occurred. The artists exploited the inherent latency of the “real-time” satellite image to have the participants route all of their bodily actions through the delayed feedback of the television monitor. To be present to one another in the specific space-time of the composite satellite image, the performers had to embody a quarter-second delay in all of their actions. I propose that by combining the two video feeds into one and synesthetically collapsing vision and touch, Satellite Arts held in suspension the binaries that structure embodied existence—here/there, now/then, self/other, real/virtual—and actualized Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “chiasm,” a condition of simultaneity that is only ever eminent in the physical body. Galloway and Rabinowitz used satellite technology and “realtime” video images to hypothesize an ethics of engagement with others in mediated environments and to model a phenomenology of telepresence.

14

Introduction

Satellite Arts 1977 forced its participants to transform their haptic and kinesthetic senses into visual ones in order to meet others in the ethereal no-place of the television screen. They used their physical bodies to steer their images toward each other to “immaterially touch.” Touch, as a metaphor, has deep roots in telecommunications. All manners of telecommunication, whether audio, visual, or textual, are forms of “getting in touch,” “keeping in touch,” or even, to borrow from AT&T’s 1979 ad campaign, “reach[ing] out and touch[ing] someone.” One of the most tactile of telecommunications metaphors is the one that calls the high-pitched electronic audio squeal that marks the process of modems, networks, or buses connecting devices a “handshake.” The noise makes the moment of contact perceptible to the user, but the name transforms the audio feedback into an imaginary image of courteous, tactile interaction. The synesthetic transfer of audio to vision to touch calls the user’s attention not only to the very physical infrastructures of cables that “hug the globe”52 and enable all of our wired and “wireless” connections, but also to the presence of others—to other users facing terminal screens, holding mice, waiting to get “in touch.” In chapter 5 I move forward in time and technology, to discuss telepresent experiences enabled by new cable infrastructures and the World Wide Web that allowed users not only to be in touch but to physicalize the metaphor of the modem’s handshake. Some twenty years after Engelbart demonstrated the computer interface and the mouse as technologies that gave the user sensory access into data space, artists and engineers began using the Internet and the newly established World Wide Web to extend the user’s vision and touch into distant yet real environments. Drawing upon Vilém Flusser’s analysis of “technical images” as composed of infinitesimal particles and “quanta,” I attempt to extend the arguments of the previous chapter to articulate a phenomenology of the screen that realigns the digital with the fingertips. In this chapter I look to some of the earliest artworks that enabled viewers to become “users” by operating remote technologies to control what they could see and hear as well as touch. Looking to Jaime Davidovich, Ken Feingold, and Ken Goldberg, among others, I examine how remote presence is indexed on the interface and in real space on both sides of the screen. The artworks trace an arc of increasing physical presence and haptic intervention in distant environments via remote control. Telepresence and telerobotic technologies appear to undo the baseline phenomenological properties of sensory reciprocity and reversibility in which the seer is always (potentially) seen, and the toucher is always both a subject and object of touch. When we can act upon distant objects and things without embodied feedback to confirm our actions, the consequences of those actions can become hard to trust, especially if we have bought into the rhetoric of the “death of the index” and the epistemological and existential doubt it inspires. It is very easy to treat a distal world as a simulated one, and to understand the lack of reciprocity as lack of responsibility and accountability. That so many telerobotic artworks take the shape of what one might commonly understand as a game or toy further complicates the user’s relationship to her mediated actions. Drawing on the environmental work of political philosopher Jane Bennett, I use these artworks to posit an ethics of engagement through and with technology.

Touching the Interface, Interfacing Touch

15

When Ascott, Engelbart, McLuhan, and Minsky outlined their ideas of a technologically enabled future, their predictions seemed equal parts science and science fiction. However, their fantasies of remote action and disembodied presence have quickly become commonplace in military and consumer contexts. The omnipresence of drones in contemporary life and exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2014 reemergence into the public sphere as a telepresence robot offers a timely opportunity to investigate these early iterations of remote presence and their connection to contemporary existential conditions. Chapter 6 takes up a series of artworks that investigate the stakes of remote action today. They ask what it means to touch something that cannot touch you back, and how one’s presence is made present when one’s agency but not one’s body is manifest at a location. It is commonplace to argue that drone operators, seated at their virtual interfaces thousands of miles from the “theater of war,” engage in a kind of play akin to tinkering with motorized toys or video games. While their controls may be structured like game interfaces, however, drone operators typically understand their experiences as very real; moreover, the hypermediation of their encounter makes the event seem both immediate and unmediated. This final chapter uses artworks about drones to investigate the existential conditions of the teleoperator, target, drone, and screen. I look to video works by a wide range of artists, including Wafaa Bilal, Omer Fast, Trevor Paglen, Harun Farocki, James Bridle, Basma Alsharif, and Hito Steyerl, to understand how drone vision functions in relation to conventional discussions of trauma and traumatic witnessing, as well as to critique Bennett’s understanding of the “mosaic” dispersal of accountability and blame under the logic of “vibrant matter.” The artworks addressed in this chapter use footage of military drones in action, appropriated (and leaked) flight recordings, interviews with drone pilots, and virtual reality simulations to examine how telepresent touch reaches back and touches the operator in his air-conditioned suburban bunker. These works are far more complicated than they seem, for they do not just address the existential conditions of operator and target, but also propose subject positions in between. The works of Paglen and Steyerl, in particular, propose ways of thinking about the drone and the screen as sites (and subjectivities) for political resistance. If, as Virilio theorized in the 1990s, war in the dromological era has become a strategic occupation of the screen, these artists point to the possibility that to survive in this contemporary state, one might have to consider identifying with the drone or thinking like a pixel. Here/There The slash in the title of this book acts as an interface. It is a boundary, a dividing line, “a surface lying between two portions of matter or space,” “a means or a place of interaction between two systems.”53 It separates the here from the there and creates a site for their encounter. It is a place where opposites touch. Moreover, it stands in for a series of possible coordinating conjunctions: here and there, here or there, here but there, here yet there, neither here nor there. Interfaces cause problems for distinguishing the here from the there. If

16

Introduction

bodies, as Samuel Weber has argued, are things that occupy one place at a time, then media like television that interface separate places in real time “can be neither fully there nor entirely here.”54 While for Weber the slash would stand in for “neither … nor,” the effects of telepresent action suggest that it could simultaneously represent “both … and.” That is, telepresence creates a situation—a site—in which the incompossible coincidence of “here and there” and “neither here nor there” becomes paradoxically—and effectively—possible. Interfaces do not mark but rather blur the boundary between the here and the there. “Here” and “there” are deictic shifters—indexical words that rely on context for their clear use and meaning. On the interface, indices play their parts well—shifting, pointing, implicating. The here becomes the there, the now becomes the then, the I becomes the you, the self becomes the other. Be it a television screen or a networked computer, the interface upsets Weber’s basic principle that if one is embodied here, now, one cannot be somewhere else at the same time. Here/There is an attempt not just to think through the possibility (or indeed inevitability) of this “impossible” situation, but to propose how we might act, feel, and be on and through the surface of a screen—given that, like it or not, this is where we all now increasingly do live, act, fight, love, and touch.

1

The Index and the Interface

In 1996, visitors to the website www.counterfeit.org were invite� to t��e ��rt in �n e��eri� ment. The site, orchestr�te� by �rtist �n� roboticist Ken Gol�berg, �resente� two $100 bills for e��min�tion, one re�l �n� one, �llege�ly, counterfeit. Visitors were �s�e� to tell the two ���rt (figure 1.1). To �i� their investig�tions, Gol�berg en�ble� � series of �ctions they might �erform on the notes with � telerobot.1 The visitors, now “users,” coul� choose to �uncture, �br��e, burn, st�in, or sim�ly observe the �ist�nt money �n� see inst�nt�neous vi�eo fee�� b�c� of the results of their comm�n�s.2 Gol�berg’s investig�tors were �ro�igious mutil�tors of the tele�resent currency. They chose to �uncture or burn the bills more often th�n �ny� thing else, �erh��s bec�use the results were so cle�rly �n� imme�i�tely ����rent. A user woul� clic� the comm�n� �n� �rom�tly see the robot move �n� the m�r� ���e�r �t the in�ic�te� �l�ce. Des�ite the re�l�time fee�b�c� �n� the robot’s res�onsiveness to the user’s comm�n�s, � �oll on the site re�orte� th�t �lmost none of the o�er�tors believe� th�t wh�t they s�w w�s true: not only were the $100 bills in�uthentic, the users cl�ime�, but the �ctions �erforme� on them with the very re�l robot in Gol�berg’s l�b were mere simul�tions �s well.3 Gol�berg’s Legal Tender surely �ime� to r�ise questions �bout �uthenticity in reg�r� to both the bills �n� the e��erience of m�ni�ul�ting them through � �igit�l interf�ce. The �roject �ointe� to �n �ge�ol� e�istemologic�l issue th�t h�s been reinvigor�te� in the �igit�l �ge: �s technologies e�ten� sight �n� he�ring �n� re�ch into f�r�off �l�ces, we �re given re�son, or �t le�st �ermission, to �oubt wh�t we see �n� �o. While � history of �oubt in the me�i�te� im�ge c�n be tr�ce� b�c� through Desc�rtes’s win�ow into Pl�to’s c�ve �n� to the beginnings of Western �hiloso�hy, the recent rhetoric surroun�ing �igit�l technology �n� the concomit�nt “�e�th of the in�e�” in �hotogr��hic �iscourse h�s given new relev�nce to this �eb�te. Digit�l technologies, it seems, h�ve intro�uce� new uncert�inty into our un�erst�n�ing of me�i�te� im�ges’ rel�tionshi�s to re�lity. Or, worse, some schol�rs cl�im th�t the very �rocesses of their m��ing h�ve elimin�te� the in�e�ic�l connection between sign �n� referent, so th�t �oubt h�s necess�rily become the �ef�ult mo�e of ju�gment for me�i�te� im�ges. C. S. Peirce’s semiotic c�tegory of the in�e�, which �esign�tes signs th�t h�ve �n “e�istenti�l rel�tion” to the things �n� events they signify, h�s come un�er �tt�c�

18

The Index and the Interface

Figure 1.1 Ken Gol�berg in coll�bor�tion with M�r� P�uline, Eric P�ulos, John C�nny, Ju�ith Don�th, �n� Will Linn, Legal Tender, 1996. Courtesy of the �rtist. Photo: Ken Gol�berg.

The Index and the Interface

19

in contem�or�ry me�i� theory.4 Photogr��hic theory h�s ty�ic�lly un�erstoo� in�e�ic�l signs �s m�teri�l tr�ces of ��st moments of �hysic�l cont�ct th�t therefore �rovi�e incon� trovertible evi�ence of some e�istenti�l truth. Accor�ing to this logic, the foot�rint, the �e�th m�s�, the we�ther v�ne, �n� the �hotogr��h �ct �s in�e�ic�l signs of events bec�use one m�teri�l h�s �resse� �g�inst �nother, resulting in � �hysic�l recor�. Digit�l technolo� gies, one might �ssume, sever the in�e�ic�l lin� with the worl� th�t the �hysic�l �rocesses of �n�log me�i� once ensure�. Digit�l �n� electronic im�ges �re “imm�teri�l,” �ccor�ing to this view, in th�t they �re not m��e by � �hysic�l touch or im�rint but by numeric�l sensors th�t tr�nsl�te light into ��t�. Accor�ingly, theorists such �s Anne�M�rie Willis, Willi�m J. Mitchell, �n� Lev M�novich, �mong others, suggest th�t the in�e� is irrelev�nt to �n un�er� st�n�ing of �igit�l iter�tions of formerly �n�log me�i�, such �s �hotogr��hy, film, �n� vi�eo. Such cl�ims—were they true—woul� be hugely consequenti�l, insof�r �s the in�e� is � sign th�t com�els belief in its receivers �n� communic�tes inform�tion �bout e�istemic �n� e�istenti�l con�itions. The loss of the in�e� in contem�or�ry me�i�, then, woul� sug� gest �n imminent crisis of belief. As I will �rgue in this ch��ter, however, this conce�tu�liz�� tion of the in�e� is re�uctive �n� n�rrow, if not entirely in�ccur�te. Moreover, Peirce’s un�erst�n�ing of the in�e� is much more com�lic�te� �n� interesting th�n these re��ings �llow. The in�e� is not (�n� never h�s been) � sign b�se� sim�ly in m�teri�lity; it �oes not necess�rily serve �s � recor� of the ��st or testify to cle�r evi�enti�ry truth. In f�ct, returning to Peirce’s �iscussions of the in�e� will hel� to �emystify cl�ims �bout �igit�l uncert�inty �n� the “�e�th of the in�e�.” R�ther th�n being “�e��” in the �igit�l �ge, I will �rgue, the in�e� reemerges �s � ��rticul�rly hel�ful c�tegory for un�erst�n�ing me�i�te� inform�tion, “�igit�l �oubt,” �n� e��eriences through virtu�l interf�ces, such �s those in live tele�res� ence wor�s li�e Legal Tender.5 Contr�ry to the �omin�nt n�rr�tives of �hotogr��hic theory, the in�e� is �n inherently e�hemer�l, �oubtful, �n� �ist�nt sign th�t hinges on � s�lit tem� �or�lity. Reg�r�less of when it w�s �ro�uce�, the in�e� est�blishes � forceful �resent�tense connection with its receiver. It is im�ossible to un�erst�n� how in�ices o�er�te without �tten�ing to this curious tem�or�l �imension. Peirce’s theories on logic, ��rticul�rly his conce�t of the �b�uctive inference, will hel� us to un�erst�n� how the tem�or�l connec� tion between in�e� �n� receiver functions �n� comes to hol� such e�istemic weight. By ree��mining �n� reem�h�sizing this su��resse� i�entity, the in�e� will emerge �s the o�er� �tive sign for me�i�te� �n� �igit�l im�ges. Index Undead The in�e�, �ccor�ing to Peirce, is “� re�l thing or f�ct which is � sign of its object by virtue of being connecte� with it �s � m�tter of f�ct.”6 In th�t reg�r�, it �iffers from the icon �n� the symbol, which signify their referents by virtue of resembl�nce or �gree��u�on conventions, res�ectively.7 Peirce �escribes the rel�tions �mong the signs �s follows:

20

The Index and the Interface

An icon is � sign which woul� �ossess the ch�r�cter which ren�ers it signific�nt, even though its object h�� no e�istence; such �s � le����encil stre�� �s re�resenting � geometric�l line. An in�e� is � sign which woul�, �t once, lose the ch�r�cter which m��es it � sign if its object were remove�, but woul� not lose th�t ch�r�cter if there were no inter�ret�nt. Such, for inst�nce, is � �iece of moul� with � bullet hole in it �s � sign of � shot; for without the shot there woul� h�ve been no hole; but there is � hole there, whether �nyone h�s the sense to �ttribute it to � shot or not. A symbol is � sign which woul� lose the ch�r�cter which ren�ers it � sign if there were no inter�ret�nt. Such is �ny utter�nce of s�eech which signifies wh�t it �oes only by virtue of it being un�erstoo� to h�ve th�t signific�tion.8

Icons, such �s re�resent�tion�l im�ges, geometric�l figures, �n� �i�gr�ms, signify by me�ns of ch�r�cteristics sh�re� with the signifie�, but the signifie� nee� not e�ist in re�lity (in the c�se, for e��m�le, of � ��inting of � chimer�, merm�i�, or other mythic�l figure). Symbols e�ist for the �ure function of signific�tion—they �re �rbitr�ry signs �esigne� to communic�te � s�ecific me�ning �etermine� by rules, l�ws, or conventions.9 A re� tr�ffic light in�ic�tes “sto�,” �n� � green light “go,” sim�ly by “consequence of h�bit.”10 In�ices, however, �re not �rbitr�ry, nor coul� they o�er�te if their referents (or “groun�s”) �i� not, in f�ct, e�ist. Des�ite this necess�ry connection between sign �n� groun�, �n in�e� m�y e�ist �s � sign even without ever being notice� or inter�rete� �s such. The in�e�, then, h�s � re�l �n� necess�ry connection to wh�t it signifies, unli�e the symbol’s �rbitr�ry connection or the icon’s rel�tionshi� which c�n be re�uce� to mere imit�tion or re�resent�tion. The in�e�’s e�istenti�l rel�tionshi� to its referent h�s m��e it � ��rticul�rly useful term for theorists of �hotogr��hy �n� film, who see the sign �s �escribing the com�elling effects of �hotogr��hic me�i� �n� their �bility to c��ture �n� communic�te � vision of re�lity. “Photogr��hs, es�eci�lly inst�nt�neous �hotogr��hs,” Peirce wrote in the e�rly twentieth century, “�re very instructive bec�use we �now th�t they �re in cert�in res�ects e��ctly li�e the objects they re�resent. This resembl�nce is �ue to �hotogr��hs h�ving been �ro�uce� un�er such circumst�nces th�t they were �hysic�lly force� to corres�on� �oint by �oint to n�ture. In th�t �s�ect, then, they belong to the secon� cl�ss of signs [in�ices], those by �hys� ic�l connection.”11 Signific�ntly, this �escri�tion of the �hotogr��h comes in the mi�st of Peirce’s �iscussion of icons, those signs th�t o�er�te by me�ns of resembl�nce. Photogr��hs evi�ently constitute � s�eci�l ty�e of re�resent�tion�l sign in th�t they �re both icons �n� in�ices. They loo� li�e their referents, but this resembl�nce is � �ro�uct of �n e�istenti�l, necess�ry connection, one Peirce �escribes in this ��rticul�r ��ss�ge �s “�hysic�l.” Photo� gr��hs h�ve long serve� �s m�r�ers of truth �n� “incontrovertible evi�ence” bec�use of their in�e�ic�l st�tus �n� the trustworthy e�istenti�l connection it in�ic�tes. The �hysic�lity of the in�e�ic�l sign h�s often been construe� �long these lines �s one m�teri�l touching �nother. In the c�se of the �hotogr��h, ��rticles of light “touch” � �hoto� sensitive surf�ce �n� tr�nsfer �n im�ge to film without the �i� of the hum�n h�n� or im�gi� n�tion. Sus�n Sont�g, in her c�reful me�it�tion On Photography, e��l�ins the �hotogr��h’s e�istemologic�l �n� ontologic�l i�entity by �escribing it �s � sign m��e by �hysic�l �n� e�is� tenti�l cont�ct, thus im�lying � connection between the me�ium �n� Peirci�n in�e�ic�lity.

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Photogr��hs, Sont�g writes, �re “�ble to usur� re�lity bec�use first of �ll � �hotogr��h is not only �n im�ge (�s � ��inting is �n im�ge), �n inter�ret�tion of the re�l; it is �lso � tr�ce, some� thing �irectly stencile� off the re�l, li�e � foot�rint or � �e�th m�s�.”12 P�intings, even ones th�t meet “�hotogr��hic st�n��r�s of resembl�nce,” by contr�st, �re “never more th�n the st�ting of �n inter�ret�tion, [where�s] � �hotogr��h is never less th�n the registering of �n em�n�tion (light w�ves reflecte� by objects)—� m�teri�l vestige of its subject in � w�y no ��inting c�n ever be.”13 The �ifference she �r�ws between the �hotogr��h �n� the “�hoto re�listic” ��inting is the �ifference between the in�e� �n� the icon. In this ��ss�ge, Sont�g �ligns the �hotogr��h with some well��nown e��m�les of in�ices from Peirce’s t��onomy— foot�rints �n� �e�th m�s�s. Both of these signs, which loo� li�e the things they re�resent, were m��e by �ressing one m�teri�l into �nother: � foot �resses into cl�y �n� m��es � foot� �rint; �l�ster is �l�ce� on � f�ce �n� �ssumes its ��rticul�r sh��e. Both �re �lso signs th�t en�ure: they �reserve � moment from the ��st in � �hysic�l, m�teri�l, �n� re�resent�tion�l form. Sont�g’s �escri�tions of the �hotogr��h, foot�rint, �n� �e�th m�s� em�h�size these ch�r�cteristics—they �re “tr�ces,” “m�teri�l vestiges,” �n� “�irect stencils off the re�l.” An�ré B�zin, the gre�t theorist of cinem�, in his l�n�m�r� ess�y “The Ontology of the Photogr��hic Im�ge,” �escribes filmic im�ges �s “ch�nge mummifie�.” It is �s if, li�e the bones, s�in, �n� r�gs se�le� in � s�rco�h�gus, the film “im�ge is the object itself, free� from the con�itions of s��ce �n� time,” c��ture� �n� “emb�lme�,” just �s “the bo�ies of insects �re �reserve� int�ct, out of the �ist�nt ��st, in �mber.”14 An� while �ll of this m�y be true, one of the conse� quences of �rguments such �s these, es�eci�lly for the history of �rt, is th�t the qu�lities of ��stness, �erm�nence, truth, �n� resembl�nce resulting from �hysic�l cont�ct h�ve come to be seen, in�ccur�tely, �s �efining ch�r�cteristics of in�e�ic�lity r�ther th�n �s the s�ecific con�ition of the �n�log �hotogr��h.15 Accor�ingly, some theorists of new me�i�, such �s Willis, Mitchell, �n� M�novich, h�ve cl�ime� th�t the rise of the �igit�l h�s ushere� in the “�e�th” of the �hotogr��hic in�e�.16 Digit�l �rocesses, they �ssert, sever or �egr��e the in�e�ic�l, e�istenti�l lin� th�t once g�ve �hotogr��hy its i�entity �s � me�ium �n� �s � gu�r�ntor of truth.17 Ag�inst the current “me�i� �rch�eologic�l” ti�e, �igit�l me�i� �re, in their �ccounts, “imm�teri�l” �n� therefore nonin�e�ic�l.18 Moreover, they suggest th�t without the in�e�ic�l, “�hysic�l” connection of the sign to its referent, one nee� not trust wh�t one sees. Following this logic, the users of Legal Tender were justifie� in their �oubt. Its interf�ce w�s �igit�l, �n� the fee�b�c� users s�w of their �ctions w�s electronic�lly me�i�te�; therefore �rior un�erst�n�ings of in�e�ic�l signs �n� their e�istenti�l cl�ims �i� not necess�rily ���ly.19 Willis, writing e�rly in the �igit�l er� (1990), �escribe� the shift �w�y from �n�log im�ging �rocesses in truly gruesome terms: “Digitiz�tion is � �rocess which is c�nnib�lizing �n� regurgit�ting �hotogr��hic �n� other im�gery, �llowing the �ro�uction of simul�tions of simul�tions.”20 Li�e � “zombie,” �hotogr��hy’s cor�se, she writes, is “re��nim�te�, by � mysterious new �rocess, to inh�bit the e�rth.”21 The “�ost��hotogr��hic” �n� the “�ost� ��oc�ly�tic” merge, it seems, when the �hotogr��h loses its “in�e�ic�l” (re��: m�teri�l)

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rel�tionshi� to its referent �n� thus to truth. Photogr��hy’s “cl�im to be more truthful th�n ��inting,” she writes, “h�s relie� … on its in�e�ic�lity, the f�ct th�t �s � sign it is ��rti�lly �ro�uce� by the referent. It is �s if the scene or object �t which the c�mer� w�s �ointe� imprinted itself on the film. With �igitize� �hoto im�gery the viewer will never be �ble to be sure of this �ny more—the in�e� will be er�se� �s the �hoto becomes �ure iconicity.”22 Photogr��hy becomes just �nother form of ��inting. Lev M�novich, writing more th�n � �ec��e l�ter, echoes �n� u���tes Willis’s cl�im: cinem�, once “the �rt of the in�e�,” w�s “�n �ttem�t to m��e �rt out of � foot�rint.”23 But �igitiz�tion h�s ch�nge� th�t rel�tionshi�. Film, which c�n now cre�te im�ges th�t ���e�r to be “�hotogr��hic” without � c�mer�, “is no longer �n in�e�ic�l me�i� technology, but, r�ther, � subgenre of ��inting.”24 The effects of this ch�nge �re insi�ious: one c�n cre�te im�ges th�t loo� e��ctly li�e �hotogr��hs but h�ve no e�istenti�l connection to wh�t they re�resent, therefore c�lling into question the in�e�ic�lity of any �hotore�listic im�ge. In M�novich’s �rgument, the �ower to cre�te convincingly �hotogr��hic icons �mounts to � forgery of the in�e�. If the �hotogr��hic effect c�n be so e�sily simul�te�, the result is th�t �ll in�e�ic�l im�ges �re com�romise� by the new influ� of �oubt. Willi�m J. Mitchell, who in The Reconfigured Eye �rovi�es �n e�ten�e� �ccount of �n�log �hotogr��hy’s long involvement with forgery �n� �ece�tion, closes th�t boo� with � w�rn� ing �bout the thre�t of �igit�l technology: For � century �n� � h�lf �hotogr��hic evi�ence seeme� un�ss�il�bly �rob�tive. … Photogr��hs ���e�re� to be reli�bly m�nuf�cture� commo�ities, re��ily �istinguish�ble from other ty�es of im�ges. They were comfort�bly reg�r�e� �s c�us�lly gener�te� truthful re�orts �bout things in the re�l worl�. … But the emergence of �igit�l im�ging h�s irrevoc�bly subverte� these cert�inties, forcing us to ��o�t � f�r more w�ry �n� vigil�nt inter�retive st�nce.25

The thre�t of the �igit�l, here, is so overwhelming th�t it m��es �n�log �hotogr��hy’s �lw�ys� �ubious st�tus seem nost�lgic�lly secure. The �n�log �hotogr��h retro�ctively becomes � more st�ble �ocument in the b�c�w�r� gl�nce from the �igit�l er�. New vigil�nce, he �rgues, is necess�ry now th�t the m�teri�l m�r� th�t �ligne� �hotogr��hy with in�ices—the foot� �rint, the bullet hole, the �e�th m�s�, those com�elling signs th�t be�r e�istenti�l witness to their referents—h�s been re�l�ce� by �n electronic ��ttern. Arguments such �s these �re �roblem�tic for sever�l re�sons. First, h�ving �osite� in�e�i� c�lity �s the �efining ch�r�cteristic of “the �hotogr��hic,” they �ssume th�t �ny ch�nges to the w�y in which � �hotogr��hic im�ge is m��e will �utom�tic�lly �lter the sign’s rel�tion� shi� to in�e�ic�lity. Th�t is, if in�e�ic�l signs �re un�erstoo� to be signs m��e by m�teri�l cont�ct—by one subst�nce liter�lly touching �nother—then re�l�cing silver emulsion with electronic light sensors woul� short�circuit the in�e�ic�l mech�nism of the �hotogr��hic c�mer�. Since m�teri�l cont�ct h�s been t��en to be the gu�r�ntor of truthfulness in these �rguments, it, too, f��es with the ch�nge in technology. The �ssertion is th�t �igit�l me�i� �ren’t in�e�ic�l bec�use of the “imm�teri�lity” of their �rocesses. Contr�ry to such cl�ims,

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�n� following the le�� of Germ�n me�i� theorists such �s Wolfg�ng Ernst, I woul� �rgue th�t �igit�l technologies �re in no w�y imm�teri�l.26 The equi�ment they em�loy �n� the elec� tronic sign�ls they recor� �re ��tently m�teri�l entities. Yet even were this not the c�se, the “m�teri�list” �rgument for the nonin�e�ic�l st�tus of the �igit�l bre��s �own bec�use, �s we will see, m�teri�lity is not � necess�ry fe�ture of the in�e�.27 Another �ssum�tion embe��e� in m�ny of the �hotogr��h��s�in�e� �rguments is th�t bec�use of their in�e�ic�l st�tus, �hotogr��hs �re truthful im�ges th�t tr�ns��rently testify to some s�ecific f�ct. But this cl�im, too, misre�resents the �hotogr��hic, �s �ny number of �oststructur�l theorists of �hotogr��hy h�ve �ointe� out, inclu�ing Rol�n� B�rthes, John T�gg, All�n Se�ul�, �n� Geoffrey B�tchen.28 Photogr��hs h�ve � loose rel�tionshi� to �roof �n� truth, these �uthors �rgue, bec�use their me�nings shift �e�en�ing on the conte�ts in which they �re �resente� or use�. While � �hotogr��h usu�lly re�resents something very s�ecific—it �rovi�es � cle�r im�ge of � cert�in moment in s��ce �n� time—�ny �hotogr��h c�n be use� in � v�riety of w�ys �n� c�n testify to multi�le �n� contr��ictory things. This is not the c�se for �hotogr��hs only but for in�ices in gener�l. The in�e�, li�e its subs�ecies the �hotogr��h, h�s �lw�ys been �n in�etermin�te sign th�t relies on conte�t �n� n�rr�tion for its �bility to serve �s evi�ence or to testify to � ��rticul�r event or �ction. In�ices �re, by n�ture, �lw�ys o�en to inter�ret�tion �n� �oubt. The �hotogr��h is � com�le� �n� �ty�ic�l in�e�. The most st�rtling �s�ect of �hotogr�� �hy is its �bility to c��ture �n unc�nnily �ccur�te—in�ee� iconic—im�ge of the scene before the lens. Most in�ices, however, c�rry little or no resembl�nce to their referents. In f�ct, �ccor�ing to Peirce, in�ices “re�resent their objects in�e�en�ently of �ny resembl�nce to them, only by virtue of re�l connections with them.”29 Elsewhere in his e�tensive writings on semiotics, Peirce �escribes unc�nny resembl�nce �s the s�ecific semiotic �om�in of the icon through the e��m�le of ��inting: “So in contem�l�ting � ��inting, there is � moment when we lose the consciousness th�t it is not the thing, the �istinction of the re�l �n� the co�y �is���e�rs, �n� it is for the moment � �ure �re�m, not �ny ��rticul�r e�istence, �n� yet not gener�l. At th�t moment we �re contem�l�ting �n icon.”30 One woul� never mist��e � foot� �rint for the �erson or �nim�l who m��e it in the w�y one might �oint to � �hotogr��h �n� s�y, “This is my mother.” Resembl�nce �n� its �bility to m��e the viewer believe she is seeing the thing itself belong to the �ower of the icon, not the in�e�. The icon must resemble wh�t it re�resents, the in�e� nee� not. Peirce’s se��r�tion of re�resent�tion from in�e�ic�lity might seem �er�le�ing. The �ho� togr��h, however, is � s�eci�l �in� of in�e�: the c�mer� is � m�chine th�t m��es icons through �n in�e�ic�l �rocess. As I note� e�rlier, Peirce �escribes �hotogr��hs �s h�ving been “�ro�uce� un�er such circumst�nces th�t they were �hysic�lly force� to corres�on� �oint by �oint to n�ture.”31 As L�ur� Mulvey �oints out in her 2006 boo� Death 24x a Second, in this quot�tion Peirce est�blishes “� lin� between �hysic�l �resence �n� �hysic�l inscri�tion” in the �hotogr��hic, �n� this tr�it in�ic�tes the in�e�ic�l element of the �hotogr��h.32 While Peirce �oes suggest th�t the �hotogr��hic in�e� is � �hysic�l tr�ce th�t

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results in resembl�nce, it is � le��, I �rgue, to thin� th�t he is here �efining the in�e� in gener�l by me�ns of � �iscussion of the rem�r��ble �n� singul�r mech�nism of the �n�log c�mer�. Point�by��oint resembl�nce, inscri�tion, �n� “n�ture’s” role in the �rocess �re ��rt of the �n�log �hotogr��h, but not of the in�e� in gener�l.33 Convention�l theories of the �hotogr��h �s in�e�, however, h�ve often coll��se� the �istinctions between the �hoto� gr��h, with its �istinctive combin�tion of in�e�ic�l �n� iconic tr�its, �n� the in�e� in gener�l, resulting in the un�erst�n�ing th�t “�hotogr��hy” �n� “the in�e�” �re virtu�lly synonymous �n� interch�nge�ble. Mulvey, for e��m�le, confl�tes the two terms: “The in�e�, �n incontrovertible f�ct, � m�teri�l tr�ce th�t c�n be left without hum�n interven� tion, is � �ro�erty of the c�mer� m�chine �n� the chemic�l im��ct of light on film.”34 Mulvey cl�ims to �escribe the in�e�, but inste�� she writes �bout the �hotogr��h s�ecifi� c�lly. The �hotogr��h m�y be �n “incontrovertible” f�ct which is m�teri�l �n� left without hum�n intervention, but this is not � sufficient or even �ccur�te �efinition of in�ices in gener�l (�n� is only �rgu�bly true for �hotogr��hs), which �re not necess�rily m�teri�l, �erm�nent, re�resent�tion�l, recogniz�ble, or c�use� by �hysic�l touch. In Peirce’s writings, the in�e� �ossesses no such secure i�entity. In f�ct, �s we sh�ll see, the in�e� is the root of the �hotogr��h’s o�enness to inter�ret�tion �n� �oubt, not its gu�r�ntor of truth. Photo� gr��hs �re illusive �n� confoun�ing objects not �es�ite their in�e�ic�l qu�lities, but bec�use of them. In�ices �re never �s cle�r �s they might seem. E�rly �hotogr��hs, es�eci�lly before the coming of so�histic�te� lenses, f�st film, �n� quic� shutters, sel�om c��ture� � goo� li�e� ness. Even � sh�r� �hotogr��h m�y c��ture � �oor re�resent�tion of its subject or be com� �letely unrecogniz�ble �s �n im�ge, �erson, or thing. The first permanent �hotogr��h, Jose�h Nicé�hore Nié�ce’s View from the Window at La Graz (1826; figure 1.2), h�� only � loose hol� on re�resent�tion. E�rlier �hotogr��hs, such �s those t��en by Thom�s We�gwoo�, were not �erm�nent �n� �i� not en�ure for more th�n moments �fter their c��ture. M�n R�y’s R�yo� gr��hs (figure 1.3) �re �hotogr��hs (�lbeit m��e without using film or � lens) th�t were cre� �te� by objects liter�lly touching the �hotosensitive surf�ce, but they �re b�rely resembl�nces. The m�sters of mo�ernist �hotogr��hy, �s Tom Gunning �rgues, “wor� with (�n� �g�inst) the recogniz�bility �n� reference of the �hotogr��h.”35 “Photogr��hic” re�resent�tion is not necess�ry for the in�e� or the �hotogr��h. The �hotogr��h, the foot�rint, �n� the �e�th m�s� m�y �ll be signs from the ��st th�t resemble their referents, �re c�use� by touch, �n� en�ure in time �n� s��ce, but this m��es them unusu�l, �ty�ic�l in�ices. In�ices �re signs of �resence, but this �resence is not necess�rily s��ti�l or �hysic�l; it is, however, �lw�ys tem�or�l. Though one m�y encounter the in�e�ic�l sign after the fact, �s with the �hotogr��h or foot�rint, in�ices �re �lw�ys cre�te� simult�neously with the �ction or event th�t they in�ic�te.36 This is es�eci�lly true for technic�l im�ges, �n� h�s become more �n� more the c�se for �igit�l im�ges. Ernst insists th�t we must un�erst�n� “the in�e�i� c�l b�sis of technic�l im�ges [�s] no longer s��ce but time.”37 The centr�lity of tem�or�l co� �resence m�y not seem evi�ent in rel�tion to in�ices th�t �re �hysic�l m�r�s of ��st

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Figure 1.2 Jose�h Nicé�hore Nié�ce, View from the Window at La Graz, c. 1826.

encounters, but it becomes ����rent with other e��m�les th�t Peirce evinces, ones th�t �o not le�ve �erm�nent “m�teri�l tr�ces” or occur in the ��st: � �ointing finger in�e�es some� thing to be seen; smo�e rising on the horizon is �n in�e� of �ist�nt fire; � sh��ow is �n in�e� of �n object obstructing light; � mirror reflects the fleeting im�ge before it. These four in�ices h�ve much more tenuous cl�ims to m�teri�lity th�n �o the �revious e��m�les.38 They �ll �lso occur in the �resent. Li�e Peirce’s e�em�l�ry in�e�, the wor� “this,” �s well �s other �eictic shifters such �s “here,” “there,” “I,” �n� “you,” in�ices rely on � conte�tu�l �resent to e�ist �s signs. They �re in�ic�tors of the �resent, not the ��st. The “This” Perh��s the most �ccur�te �n� hel�ful �ccount of the in�e� in rel�tion to the �hotogr��h, �s well �s to m�teri�lity �n� touch, comes from Rol�n� B�rthes’s Camera Lucida, �es�ite the f�ct th�t the �uthor never mentions in�ices there by n�me. Photogr��hs, unli�e other icons, cont�in wh�t he terms “the This,” which is the �hotogr��h’s connection to “the re�l.”39 Li�e other theorists of �hotogr��hy, B�rthes relies on “touch” �s � me�ns of e��l�ining this

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Figure 1.3 M�n R�y, R�yogr��h, c. 1925. Courtesy George E�stm�n Museum. © 2015 M�n R�y Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Yor� / ADAGP, P�ris.

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connection. But the touch in question is not the “m�teri�l” touch (of light on emulsion) th�t cre�tes the in�e� in other �ccounts of �hotogr��hy. R�ther, it is the effect the �hoto h�s, the w�y it touches him. “The This” is not made by touching; it is inste�� � thing that touches, whose effect is l�rgely se��r�te from the �e�ictive qu�lities of the �hotogr��h. E�ch �hotogr��h, B�rthes writes, cont�ins �n “�ver�ge �ffect” th�t elicits � gener�l interest in wh�t the �hotogr��h �e�icts—its figures, subject m�tter, �n� so on—which he n�mes the studium.40 While the studium is forme� by the in�e�ic�l mech�nism of the c�mer�, it �esig� n�tes wh�t might be thought of �s the iconic �s�ect of the �hotogr��h: it communic�tes wh�t the �hotogr��h is “�bout” �n� wh�t objects, �eo�le, �n� �l�ces it re�resents. There is, however, �nother element to the �hotogr��h th�t goes beyon� �e�iction or “mere interest.” Photogr��hs �lso �rovo�e wh�t B�rthes c�lls “tiny jubil�tions” in the viewer th�t in�ic�te something beyon� wh�t is re�resente�. B�rthes n�mes this the punctum—or �g�in, “the This.” It is wh�t re�ches out �n� touches him: The secon� element will bre�� (or �unctu�te) the studium. This time it is not I who see� it out (�s I invest the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it li�e �n �rrow �n� �ierces me. A L�tin wor� e�ists to �esign�te this woun�, this �ric�, this m�r� m��e by � �ointe� instrument. … This secon� element which will �isturb the studium I sh�ll therefore c�ll punctum, for punctum is �lso: sting, s�ec�, cut, little hole—�n� �lso the c�st of the �ice. A �hoto� gr��h’s punctum is th�t �cci�ent which �ric�s me (but �lso bruises me, is �oign�nt to me).41

This is � curious �escri�tion of � �hotogr��h. As � function of “the This,” the punctum is focuse� on the rel�tionshi� between the sign �n� its viewer, not the sign �n� its referent. It eru�ts from the �hotogr��h �n� re�ches out to the receiver. It is �n �ctive �gent �n� � con� front�tion�l sign. It o�er�tes by ch�nce or within � fiel� of contingency. The �hotogr��hic punctum, B�rthes writes, is “�n �nti�hon of ‘Loo�,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; it �oints � finger �t � cert�in vis-à-vis.”42 “The This” of � �hotogr��h c�lls out to the viewer in the im�er�tive, “See, here!” It �oints; it solicits her �ttention �n� seems to loo� b�c� �t her. It eng�ges her in � �resent�tense rel�tionshi�, even if the �hotogr��h is � sign of � ��st event. The viewer is not ��ssive in the encounter, but nor is she the sole �ctive �gent. The rel�tionshi� to the �hoto� gr��hic im�ge is mutu�l �n� refle�ive. The punctum re�ches out �n� touches the viewer, �ierces her, bruises her, �n� then c�uses her to re�ch b�c� �n� e��lore its root �n� its c�use. B�rthes writes, “I w�nte� to e��lore [�hotogr��hy] not �s � question, but �s � woun�: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe �n� I thin�.”43 The punctum c�uses � sensory encounter (from groun� to the sign to the receiver), which then st�rts � ch�in of �ssoci�tive �n� e��lor�tory thoughts. The punctum, then, “e���n�s” �n� �oints to something “beyon�” wh�t is merely re�resente�. B�rthes’s �escri�tion of the punctum, its �gency, contingency, �n� effects on the receiver, m�y seem �n�chronistic or even m�gic�l, but it corres�on�s closely with Peirce’s �escri�tions of in�ices �n� their rece�tion. Throughout Peirce’s wor�, his �escri�tions of in�ices, li�e B�rthes’s �escri�tion of the �hotogr��hic punctum, hinge on the w�y in which the sign

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“touches” the receiver, �em�n�ing th�t she ��y �ttention, �n� he el�bor�tes this function through � series of e��m�les th�t e��ctly m�tch B�rthes’s �escri�tions of the punctum: the in�e� is � �ointing finger, � �eictic shifter, � bolt of lightning, � c�ll of �ttention—“lo!”44 Just �s the punctum summons the viewer’s �ttention in �n urgent, forceful, sensuous w�y, so �oes the in�e�. In�ices, Peirce writes, �re in the “im�er�tive, or e�cl�m�tory [moo�], �s ‘See there!’ or ‘Loo� out!’”45 They focus the receiver on the �resent situ�tion r�ther th�n � ��st conte�t. Peirce re�e�te�ly m��es this �oint in his v�rious �iscussions of the in�e�. For e��m�le, he e��l�ins th�t the �emonstr�tive �ronoun “this,” �s well �s “th�t,” “here,” �n� “there,” �re in�ices bec�use “they c�ll u�on the he�rer to use his �owers of observ�tion, �n� so est�blish � re�l connection between his min� �n� the object; �n� if the �emonstr�tive �ronoun �oes th�t—without which its me�ning is not un�erstoo�—it goes to est�blish such � connection; �n� so is �n in�e�.”46 It is the sign’s �ower to force � connection between the object �n� the receiver’s min� in the �resent moment th�t m��es it �n in�e�. As with B�rthes’s �unctum, if the in�e� is b�se� in “touch,” it is not the m�teri�l touch th�t cre�tes the sign, but the w�y in which the sign touches its inter�reter. Throughout his m�ny ess�ys on semiotics, Peirce consistently e��l�ins wh�t in�ices �re by �escribing how they ins�ire thought in the receiver �n� �ut her in � �resent�tense rel�tion� shi� with the referent. M�teri�lity �n� �hysic�l touching �o not �l�y im�ort�nt roles. He writes, for e��m�le, “When � �river to �ttr�ct the �ttention of � foot ��ssenger �n� c�use him to s�ve himself, c�lls out ‘Hi!’ … so f�r �s it is sim�ly inten�e� to �ct u�on the he�rer’s ner� vous system �n� to rouse him to get out of the w�y, it is �n in�e�, bec�use it is me�nt to �ut him in re�l connection with the object, which is his situ�tion rel�tive to the ���ro�ching horse.”47 This �efinition of the in�e� is interesting: it is �s � sign th�t �uts the receiver into “re�l connection” with � conte�tu�l situ�tion. If it were � m�tter of sim�le, �hysic�l m�teri�l� ity, the shout woul� in�e� the �river’s vibr�ting voc�l cor�s. But it �oes not. It in�e�es � �resent situ�tion of ��nger. If it were �n en�uring sign of �n incontrovertible f�ct from the ��st, it woul� h�ve no relev�nce to the situ�tion �t h�n� �n� woul� not nee� �ny inter�ret�� tion or res�onse. But it is not. It is � sign th�t h�s �n e�istenti�l rel�tionshi� to wh�t it re�re� sents, �n� it tr�nsfers th�t connection to its receiver. E�rlier in this ch��ter I quote� the first h�lf of one of Peirce’s �efinitions of the in�e�ic�l sign; it is worth �tten�ing to the full quot�� tion now: “[The in�e�] is � re�l thing or f�ct which is � sign of its object by virtue of being connecte� with it �s � m�tter of f�ct �n� by �lso forcibly intruding upon the mind, quite reg�r�� less of its being inter�rete� �s � sign.”48 The first, “e�istenti�l” ��rt of the �efinition c�n encom��ss un�erst�n�ings of the in�e� �s �hysic�l tr�ce, but the secon� h�lf �oints to the w�y the sign �ulls the receiver into this rel�tionshi� of �resence �n� �resentness. The in�e� is � sign th�t c�lls �ll three terms—sign, referent, �n� receiver—into � conte�tu�l, �resent� tense situ�tion. The in�e� is � sign, �n� it is �n event. The secon� ��rt of Peirce’s �efinition—th�t of “forcibly intru�ing u�on the min�”—h�s ten�e� to be overloo�e� in �iscussions of �hotogr��hy. The in�e�’s solicit�tion m�y be somewh�t less mysterious th�n B�rthes’s punctum, yet it wor�s simil�rly to em�h�size how

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tem�or�l co��resence �s well �s the receiver’s rece�tion �n� inter�ret�tion �re �ll ��rt of the in�e�. In�ee�, the s�ecific�lly tem�or�l rel�tionshi� between the sign �n� the viewer’s min� is the �efining ch�r�cteristic of the in�e� in Peirce’s writings. An in�e�, he e��l�ins, is “� sign, or re�resent�tion, which refers to its object bec�use it is in �yn�mic�l (inclu�ing s��ti�l) connection with both the in�ivi�u�l object on the one h�n�, �n� the senses �n� memory of the �erson for whom it serves �s � sign, on the other h�n�.”49 Peirce’s ��renthetic�l st�tement in this quot�tion is signific�nt: e�ch time he �escribes the in�e�, he m��es it cle�r th�t the sign is in � live, �resent�tense rel�tionshi� to its viewer; he �lso suggests th�t it c�n—but evi�ently nee� not �lw�ys—h�ve �s � com�onent � s��ti�l or �hysic�l connection to its refer� ent. Much �s with B�rthes’s �ccount of the punctum, Peirce’s e��l�n�tion of the in�e� focuses on the sign’s rece�tion, on the cruci�l lin� between the receiver �n� the referent. The in�e� must, then, be un�erstoo� not �s m�r� of resembl�nce, �roof, or truth, but r�ther �s �n inst�nce of rel�tion�lity, inter�ret�tion, �n� �ecision. Of course, the f�ct th�t the in�e� issues � c�ll �oes not gu�r�ntee th�t the sign will be recognize�, or, even if it is recognize�, th�t it will be un�erstoo�. Most in�ices in Peirce’s �ccount �re not �s legible �s �hotogr��hs, �n� while they m�y e�ist �s f�cts, they �re by no me�ns “incontrovertible.” In �nother hel�ful �escri�tion of the in�e� �n� its connection to thought, Peirce highlights the �otenti�l un�eci��bility of the sign: “A r�� on the �oor is �n in�e�. Anything which focuses �ttention is �n in�e�. Anything which st�rtles us is �n in�e�, in so f�r �s it m�r�s the juncture of two �ortions of e��erience. Thus � tremen�ous thun�er� bolt in�ic�tes something consi�er�ble h�s h���ene�, though we m�y not �now �recisely wh�t the event w�s.”50 In�ices require inter�retive wor� bec�use they �re, in Peirce’s own wor�s, sim�ly “sym�toms.”51 A sym�tom—� fever, �n �che, �n� so on—in�e�es something, but wh�t th�t something is c�n be quite uncle�r or h�ve multi�le e��l�n�tions. In�ices nee� to be �eco�e�. T��e, for e��m�le, two ��rticul�rly enigm�tic e��m�les of in�ices from Peirce’s writings: “I see � m�n with � rolling g�it. This is � �rob�ble in�ic�tion th�t he is � s�ilor. I see � bowlegge� m�n in cor�uroys, g�iters, �n� � j�c�et. These �re �rob�ble in�ic�tions th�t he is � joc�ey.”52 The w�y � m�n w�l�s or �resses c�n in�e� his �rofession, yet it is h�r�ly � tr�ns��rent sign. The in�e� is a clue th�t �oints to something not yet �nown or to something one c�n’t be sure of. The gre�t �chievement of the in�e� is its �bility to signify without the benefit of convention, resembl�nce, or �irect observ�tion.53 This �bility comes from the thought �rocesses it �ctiv�tes in the receiver. Logic as Semiotic Although Peirce never e��licitly �iscusses his theories of logic in his �et�ile� t��onomy of signs, the title of the ess�y “Logic �s Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” m��es it cle�r th�t he reg�r�s this lin� �s im�er�tive.54 For � sign to signify, the receiver must inter�ret it. His three semiotic c�tegories, symbol, icon, �n� in�e�, �re connecte� to his c�tegories of logic: �e�uction, in�uction, �n� wh�t he c�lls �b�uction or hy�othesis. In�uction is re�soning by

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resembl�nce, just �s icons signify by me�ns of li�eness; �e�uction is re�soning by the ���lic�� tion of � l�w or rule, much �s symbols signify by me�ns of �gree��u�on me�nings.55 As for �b�uction �n� in�ices, Peirce �rovi�es the following e��m�le in �nother ess�y of the �in� of sleuthing both involve: A cert�in �nonymous writing is u�on � torn �iece of ���er. It is sus�ecte� th�t the �uthor is � cert�in �erson. His �es�, to which only he h�s h�� �ccess, is se�rche�, �n� in it is foun� � �iece of ���er, the torn e�ge of which e��ctly fits, in �ll its irregul�rities, th�t of the ���er in question. It is � f�ir hy�o� thetic inference th�t the sus�ecte� m�n w�s �ctu�lly the �uthor. … If the hy�othesis were nothing but �n in�uction, �ll th�t we shoul� be justifie� in conclu�ing, in the e��m�le �bove, woul� be th�t the two �ieces of ���er which m�tche� in such irregul�rities �s h�ve been e��mine� woul� be foun� to m�tch in other, s�y slighter, irregul�rities. The inference from the sh��e of the ���er to its owner� shi� is �recisely wh�t �istinguishes hy�othesis from in�uction, �n� m��es it � bol�er �n� more �erilous ste�.56

Induction is foun�e� u�on resembl�nce: ch�r�cteristics of the sign �n�logic�lly corres�on� to elements of the referent. It is, therefore, limite� to the �irectly observ�ble. But in the c�se of re�soning by hy�othesis or �b�uction, things �re �ifferent. The scr�� of ���er in�e�e� not the f�ct th�t it w�s torn, but its ownershi�. It �ointe� to things not �irectly witnesse� �n� therefore nee�s � cert�in �mount of conjecture even to �etermine wh�t the relev�nt f�cts were, much less how to inter�ret them. Ab�uction infers inform�tion in e�cess of the evi� �ence �t h�n�. It is � guess, �lbeit � very com�elling one, �n� the only me�ns by which one �ro�erly inter�rets �n in�e�. There is �lw�ys the �ossibility, if not the necessity, of �oubting inform�tion one �oes not observe �irectly. If in�ices �re signs th�t often come to their receivers �t � s��ti�l or tem�or�l remove �n�, unli�e icons �n� symbols, nee� conte�tu�l inform�tion to signify, how is it th�t they �re �ble to ins�ire conviction on the ��rt of their receivers? Moreover, if this is the c�se, why h�ve theorists of �hotogr��hy �ssoci�te� them with cert�inty �n� �roof? To �nswer this question, we will h�ve to loo� � bit more closely �t the me�ns by which they signify. Ab�uction, which, �g�in, Peirce �ltern�tely c�lls “hy�othesis,” “is when we fin� some very curious circumst�nce, which woul� be e��l�ine� by the su��osition th�t it w�s � c�se of � cert�in gener�l rule, �n� thereu�on ��o�t th�t su��osition.”57 Th�t is, in cert�in inst�nces when one is confronte� with � f�ct or sign out of conte�t, one must guess its me�ning. Ab�uction, he writes, “furnishes �ll our i�e�s concerning re�l things, beyon� wh�t �re given in �erce�tion.”58 It is the me�ns by which one ���s inform�tion to in�ices, which, �s I h�ve �lre��y est�blishe�, �re signs in nee� of conte�tu�l or su��lement�l inform�tion. This is the gre�t fe�t of �b�uction: it ���s to one’s �nowle�ge by �rovi�ing �n e��l�n�tory theory for wh�t w�s not �irectly witnesse�. An� this is wh�t m��es it ��rticul�rly useful in �eco�ing me�i�te� im�ges, whether �n�log or �igit�l. Photogr��hs, �s well �s Gol�berg’s Legal Tender, �re �ist�nt im�ges (in s��ce or time) th�t nee� inter�ret�tion th�t goes beyon� the �irectly observ�ble. Ab�uction m��es the in�e� intelligible.

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Peirce’s e��l�n�tions of �b�uction hinge u�on e��m�les of in�ices. Throughout “De�uc� tion, In�uction, Hy�othesis,” he e��l�ins the logic�l �rocess vi� �n �nec�ote reminiscent of the joc�ey �n� s�ilor e��m�les he use� in “Logic �s Semiotic”: I once l�n�e� in � se��ort in � Tur�ish �rovince; �n�, �s I w�s w�l�ing u� to the house which I w�s to visit, I met � m�n u�on horseb�c�, surroun�e� by four horsemen hol�ing � c�no�y over his he��. As the governor of the �rovince w�s the only �erson�ge I coul� thin� of who woul� be so gre�tly honore�, I inferre� this w�s he. This w�s � hy�othesis.59

Peirce guesses the occu��tion of the m�n by his mo�e of convey�nce. Ab�uction, then, is when one jum�s from wh�t is �irectly observ�ble to something th�t is su��lement�ry to the evi�ence �t h�n�. Peirce follows the e��m�le of the Tur�ish governor with �nother inst�nce of �b�uction by me�ns of �n in�e�: “Fossils �re foun�; s�y, the rem�ins li�e those of fishes, but f�r into the interior of the country. To e��l�in the �henomenon, we su��ose the se� once w�she� over this l�n�.”60 In other wor�s, �fter encountering � fish fossil f�r inl�n�, �n� rec�lling the rule th�t “fish live in the w�ter,” the �b�uctor surmises th�t “w�ter w�s once here.”61 Such �n e��l�n�tion m�y h�ve come to the observer inst�nt�neously in � fl�sh of insight �n� m�y be �erfectly re�son�ble, even scientific�lly soun�, but it is im�ort�nt to be�r in min� th�t other conclusions �re �lso �ossible: �n �nim�l m�y h�ve left the fish’s rem�ins long �go, the fossil m�y h�ve been �l�nte� �s � ho��, �n� so on. The situ�tion is the s�me with �ny in�e�, �n� with �ny �hotogr��h, �igit�l or �n�log. It h�s � “re�l” connection to its groun�, but it is the observer who gives it the �ower to re�resent �n� who must inter�ret wh�t it me�ns. Abducting the Index The origin, �uthenticity, �n� signific�nce of �hotogr��hic im�ges �re never �s obvious �s they seem. This is not � con�ition brought on by the �igitiz�tion of �n�log me�i�, �igit�l m�ni�ul�tion, or the �ros�ect of tot�l simul�tion �n� virtu�l im�ging. It is the con�ition of in�e�ic�lity, the o�enness of the sign to inter�ret�tion �n� �oubt. To un�erst�n� wh�t in�e�ic�l signs signify �n� how they communic�te inform�tion, one must eng�ge in �b�uc� tion. Ab�uction is, in its most gener�l sense, “the �ction of �r�wing or le��ing something �w�y.” Peirce’s “�b�uction” is no less � le��ing �w�y; it le��s one �w�y from the f�cts �t h�n� to � hy�othesis b�se� on conjecture.62 In this ch��ter, I h�ve �ttem�te� to “�b�uct” the in�e� in two w�ys. First, I le� the conce�t of the in�e� �w�y from the qu�lities lin�e� to it in the �n�log er�—m�teri�lity, �hysic�lity, �roof, �n� the ��st—in or�er to bring into focus its i�en� tity �s �n e�hemer�l, �oubtful, �ist�nt, �resent�tense sign th�t h�s � s�ecific tem�or�l rel�� tionshi� to its inter�reter. Secon�, following Peirce, I connecte� this ty�e of sign to the logic�l c�tegory of �b�uction, �n intellectu�l �rocess by which one ���s inform�tion to � sign in or�er to inter�ret it. Ag�in, �b�uction is essenti�lly � le��ing �w�y from the f�cts �t h�n� to something th�t goes beyon� liter�l, f�ctu�l, �n� m�teri�l inform�tion.

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The connection of the in�e� to �b�uction returns us to the interesting �roblem r�ise� e�rlier: if �oubt �n� error �re built into the me�ns by which in�ices �re inter�rete� �n� e��l�ine�, �n� �b�uction is � “we��” form of logic, how is it th�t in�ices �n� their corre� s�on�ing �b�uctive inferences ten� to com�el such strong belief? As Peirce e��l�ins, the results of �b�uction �re often e��erience� by the thin�er �s �ossessing the cert�inty of � f�ct or even inn�te �nowle�ge. The �b�uctive inference, li�e the in�e� itself, stri�es the receiver with � �in� of �henomen�l force. Peirce writes: When our nervous system is e�cite� in � com�lic�te� w�y, there being � rel�tion between the elements of the e�cit�tion, the result is � single h�rmonious �isturb�nce which I c�ll �n emotion. Thus, the v�ri� ous soun�s m��e by the instruments of �n orchestr� stri�e u�on the e�r, �n� the result is � �eculi�r music�l emotion, quite �istinct from the soun�s themselves. This emotion is essenti�lly the s�me thing �s � hy�othetic inference, �n� every hy�othetic inference involves the form�tion of such �n emotion. We m�y s�y, therefore, th�t hy�othesis �ro�uces the sensuous element of thought, �n� in�uction the h�bitu�l element.63

Ab�uction is � �henomen�l �n� embo�ie� �in� of thought. As Peirce �escribes it, the receiver e��eriences something in e�cess of the in�ivi�u�l elements �t h�n�, �n� yet in th�t moment feels the s�me �egree of cert�inty th�t usu�lly �ccom��nies �irect �erce�tion. Although only conjectur�l, the hy�othesis feels true. Des�ite—or in�ee� bec�use of—its emotion�l ch�rge, the �b�uctive inference is not �lw�ys e�sy to recognize: it “fl�shes so n�tur�lly u�on the min� �n� is so fully �cce�te�,” Peirce writes, “th�t the s�ect�tor quite forgets how sur�rising those f�cts �re which �lone �re �resente� to his view.”64 The �b�uctive e��l�n�tion is often so r��i� th�t Peirce figures it �s �n instinctu�l �ower of the hum�n min�. “We often �erive from observ�tion strong intim�� tions of the truth,” he writes in “Guessing,” “without being �ble to s�ecify wh�t were the circumst�nces we h�� observe� which conveye� those intim�tions. … Our f�culty of guess� ing corres�on�s to � bir�’s music�l �n� �eron�utic �owers; th�t it is to us, �s those �re to them, the loftiest of our merely instinctive �owers.”65 Hum�ns, Peirce cl�ims, h�ve �n inher� ent �bility to m��e �b�uctive inferences �n� to be (very often) right. But, �g�in, the �b�uc� tive inference is �lw�ys only one �ossible e��l�n�tion; however emotion�lly com�elling, it rem�ins merely � guess. It �lso requires th�t the receiver ���ro�ch the sign in goo� f�ith; she must not �ssume th�t the sign is � simul�tion sim�ly bec�use of its me�ium. Peirce’s e��l�n�tions of the in�e� �re integr�lly rel�te� to �b�uction. He uses not only e��m�les of in�ices to e��l�in �b�uction but �lso �b�uctive �rocesses to e��l�in wh�t in�i� ces �re �n� wh�t they �o. Just li�e the �b�uctive inference, the in�e� “�cts u�on the [receiv� er’s] nervous system.”66 It forces itself onto the receiver’s eyes, e�rs, �n� s�in. It is � �henomen�l �n� embo�ie� �in� of sign, just �s �b�uction is � sensuous, emotive, embo�ie� �in� of thought. Both require inform�tion �n� le�� to inter�ret�tions th�t e�cee� wh�t one is given. For this re�son—�n� �es�ite the receiver’s own sense of cert�inty—�oubt h�s �lw�ys sh��� owe� both �b�uction �n� the in�e�. F�ce� with the contem�or�ry “thre�t” of the �igit�l—its

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imm�teri�lity, its m�ni�ul�tions—one forgets th�t forgery, m�ni�ul�tion, �mbiguity, �n� uncert�inty h�ve const�ntly �ccom��nie� the �hotogr��hic in�e�, �n� the in�e� in gener�l. The �igit�l revolution h�s not �estroye� or un�ermine� the in�e�; inste�� it h�s c�lle� �tten� tion to the in�e�’s true i�entity �s � sign from which one is se��r�te�, with � me�ning one must guess. In�ices �re signs unusu�lly subject to �oubt, �n� this �oubt is em�h�tic�lly �re�igit�l. Virtuality and Indexicality In this ch��ter I h�ve �ime� to show th�t the �igit�l �n� the in�e�ic�l �re not in o��osition. The Peirci�n in�e� h�s wrongly been �ssoci�te� with m�teri�lity, surety, ��stness, �n� truth, where�s none of these qu�lities �re �ctu�lly inherent in it. In f�ct, the o��osite qu�lities coul� be lin�e� to the sign just �s well, if not better. In�e�ic�l �n�log me�i�, �n� �hoto� gr��hs in ��rticul�r, �s Tom Gunning �oints out, �re only �ble to “tell the truth” bec�use they �re �lso c���ble of telling lies. “In other wor�s,” he writes, “the truth cl�im is �lw�ys [only] � cl�im �n� lur�ing behin� it is � sus�icion of f��ery, even if the �ef�ult mo�e is belief.”67 For �oubt to be the �ef�ult mo�e of belief where �igit�l im�ges �re concerne� is no more or less sensible th�n with �n�log me�i�. Shoul� one �oubt wh�t one s�w in Legal Tender bec�use it comes through � �igit�l interf�ce r�ther th�n �n �n�log one, li�e convention�l television? W�s its inform�tion less reli�ble bec�use it w�s live �n� res�onsive r�ther th�n � recor�ing of the ��st? To �isbelieve me�i�te� inform�tion sim�ly bec�use there is the �ossi� bility of �ece�tion, I woul� �rgue, is inconsistent with the w�y me�i� h�ve been use� �n� un�erstoo� in the ��st. As �oubtful, �ist�nt, �n� �ubious �s �n�log �hotogr��hs were, they still ins�ire� strong belief in their ver�city. Moreover, were �isbelief to become the norm in reg�r� to �igit�l me�i�, the consequences woul� be �ire. The contem�or�ry subject woul� be �lien�te� from the worl� �roun� her �n� from the consequences of her �ctions. In Digital and Other Virtualities, Antony Bry�nt �n� Grisel�� Polloc� e��l�in the rel�tion between the in�e�ic�l �n� the �igit�l by s�ying it is no longer � question of “truth” with �igi� t�l technology, �s it w�s with in�e�ic�l �n�log me�i�, but r�ther one of “trust.”68 Digit�l me�i� might be virtu�l �n�, therefore, untrustworthy. However, just �s I h�ve cl�ime� th�t the �igit�l �n� the in�e�ic�l �re f�lsely o��ose�, Bry�nt �n� Polloc� �rgue th�t so �re the virtu�l �n� the re�l. They �oint out th�t the wor� “virtu�l” is � “contr�nym—� wor� th�t me�ns its own o��osite. … Virtu�l me�ns both ‘not re�lly e�isting’ �n� ‘�lmost the s�me.’”69 The former sense, Bry�nt �n� Polloc� e��l�in, c�me �bout in the 1950s, with the invention of “virtu�l memory,” � technique for “fooling” � com�uter into “believing” th�t it h�s more memory th�n it �oes. This un�erst�n�ing of “virtu�lity” �s � �r�ctice of “fooling” someone (or something) with wh�t is only �n illusion grew into the term “virtu�l re�lity” by the 1990s.70 In these com�uter�b�se� systems, “users c�n be ‘foole�’ into thin�ing �n� e��erienc� ing things, environments �n� inter�ctions th�t �o not h�ve �ny m�teri�l e�istence.”71 Virtu�l systems gener�te re�resent�tions �n� simul�te events th�t h�ve no “m�teri�l” or e�istenti�l

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connection to the worl� �s in�e�ic�l signs; however, �s the �uthors m��e cle�r, the e��eri� ences within them c�n h�ve re�l effects on the users, emotion�lly, �sychologic�lly, fin�n� ci�lly, intellectu�lly, �n� �hysic�lly. The common un�erst�n�ing of virtu�lity �s “not re�lly e�isting” ten�s to oversh��ow its �ltern�tive me�ning of “ne�rly the s�me.” This secon��ry �efinition, Bry�nt �n� Polloc� �oint out, suggests something th�t is effective, wor�ing in ��r�llel to, but �t � �ist�nce from the concrete, �ctu�l, m�teri�l or live� re�lity. There is � simil�rity with the �ctu�l thing, but it is not the thing itself. It is not the re�l; yet it is not f�lse. It �is�l�ys, nonetheless, simil�r enough tr�its for our inter�ctions with the virtu�l to function �s if they were in�ee� re�l.72

In this ��ss�ge, Bry�nt �n� Polloc� s�e�� of virtu�lity �s if it were � �in� of sign, in�ee� �s if it h��, li�e � �hotogr��h, elements of both the in�e�ic�l �n� the iconic. Li�e �n icon, virtu�l� ity �s they �escribe it here is simil�r enough to function �s the thing itself; yet li�e the in�e�, it h�s �n e�istenti�l rel�tion to its referent, without in f�ct being the thing itself. This is � hel�ful �escri�tion, for it �oints to the �ifferences between virtu�lity �n� �ure simul�tion. Wh�t their �iscussion �voi�s ���ressing, however, �re virtu�l interf�ces li�e Legal Tender’s th�t �o in f�ct give the user inform�tion �bout the re�l worl�, �n� re�l events th�t �o not sim�ly “function �s if they were in�ee� re�l.” Interf�ces of this sort, be they re�resent�tion�l, li�e television screens or webc�m fee�s, or �bstr�ct, li�e r���r �n� tr�c�ing equi�ment, �re both me�i�te� �n� in�e�ic�l. They �re virtu�l but not simul�te�. The �istinction here is sig� nific�nt: the interf�ce m�y be virtu�l, but the re�resente� events �n� �ny �ctions one t��es vi� the interf�ce �n� its controls �re (�otenti�lly) re�l; the im�ges �re me�i�te� �n� in�irect, but they, li�e the �hotogr��h, �re e�istenti�lly connecte� to the worl�. Gol�berg’s telero� botic �rt �rojects f�ll into this c�tegory, �s �o more f�mili�r technologies such �s remote we��ons systems �n� �rones. These interf�ces �re often �igit�l �n� �bstr�ct, r�ther th�n �n�� log �n� �hotogr��hic, but the �l�ces, �eo�le, �n� things they re�resent h�ve � �hysic�l, e�istenti�l re�lity, �n� the user’s re�l�time eng�gement with them h�s ethic�l consequences. Borrowing from Bry�nt �n� Polloc�’s secon� �efinition of virtu�lity, I woul� li�e to stress th�t interf�ces such �s these �re “effective, wor�ing in ��r�llel to, but �t � �ist�nce from the concrete, �ctu�l, m�teri�l or live� re�lity” of the user. This �oes not me�n th�t virtu�l inter� f�ces h�ve no connection to concrete, �ctu�l re�lity in gener�l. Wh�t they re�resent m�y just be �ist�nt from the user. The interf�ce �rovi�es � ��r�llel �n� effective �ort�l for eng�ging with � remote re�lity. To un�erst�n� virtu�l im�ges �n� interf�ces �s nonin�e�ic�l by �ef�ult is �n ethic�lly �n� e�istemologic�lly ��ngerous �osition, �s Legal Tender �oints out on � sm�ll sc�le. In The Virtual Window, Anne Frie�berg offers � �efinition of the virtu�l, slightly �ifferent from th�t of Bry�nt �n� Polloc�, which seems to h�ve room in it for both the re�l �n� the in�e�ic�l, �s well �s the im�gin�ry �n� iconic. She tr�ces the me�ning of “virtu�l im�ge” to seventeenth�century o�tics �n� �hiloso�hy of vision. Even then, she writes, the term h��

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two me�nings: it coul� in�ic�te “�n im�ge �ro�uce� in the br�in without referent in the worl�” or “�n im�ge �ro�uce� out of some o�tic�l me�i�tion,” such �s mirrors or lenses.73 In these two �efinitions, the iconic rests une�sily �g�inst the in�e�ic�l. The virtu�l im�ge is either without referent or tethere� to some e�istent thing. Either it is �n im�ge th�t re�re� sents something, though th�t thing nee� not e�ist, or it is the sign of � re�l�time event in the worl� th�t is merely me�i�te� �n� only in�irectly or ��rti�lly �v�il�ble to view. Negoti�ting between these two ����rently o��ose� me�nings, Frie�berg consi�ers the term more bro��ly. The virtu�l is “�ny re�resent�tion or ���e�r�nce (whether o�tic�lly, technologic�lly, or �rti� s�n�lly �ro�uce�) th�t ���e�rs ‘function�lly or effectively but not form�lly’ of the s�me m�teri�lity �s wh�t it re�resents.”74 Screen�b�se� im�ges, such �s film �n� television, �n� mirror reflections woul� f�ll into this c�tegory, �s well �s � whole r�nge of re�resent�tion�l �n� nonre�resent�tion�l in�ices. Bli�s on � r���r screen �re not of the s�me m�teri�lity �s the fighter jets they re�resent, nor �o they loo� li�e the �l�nes, but they st�n� in for them �s me�i�te�, in�e�ic�l im�ges �n� �re use� �s such. Frie�berg’s �efinition of the virtu�l o�ens u� the term to encom��ss both the me�i�te� �n� the simul�te�. The �b�uctive cru� in the current me�i� �ge, then, is to �etermine which virtu�l im�ges �re me�i�tions (�n� therefore in�e�ic�l) �n� which �re simul�tions. Peirce’s notion of the in�e�’s c�ll to the receiver �n� the emotion�l, intuitive �b�uctive thin�ing it �uts into �ction suggests th�t the �istinction m�y not be �s h�r� to ��rse �s one might thin�. Accor�ing to this logic, the receiver woul� h�ve strong intim�tions of the truth or of being �eceive�, th�t is, if she �i�n’t �ismiss the situ�tion imme�i�tely bec�use of its m�teri�l or technologic�l b�sis. The Index and the Interface I o�ene� this ch��ter with the e��m�le of Legal Tender �n� the �mbiv�lent res�onses it �rom�te� from its users in or�er to c�ll �ttention to the w�ys in which the rhetoric of the “�e�th of the in�e�” �l�ys � ��rticul�rly �ivisive role in the current me�i� environment. Legal Tender c�n �ct �s � c�se stu�y for the w�y the in�e� e�ists �n� o�er�tes in new me�i� environments, whether they �re �igit�l, virtu�l, me�i�te�, or �ny combin�tion thereof. Gol�berg’s �roject ���e�re� �t �n interesting moment. In 1996 the web w�s still � new thing. The Internet h�� been �roun� for �ec��es, but only �s the n�rrow �rovince of rese�rchers �n� the milit�ry; it w�s just then emerging �s � �ublic s��ce, one th�t w�s ri��le� with the �n�ieties th�t �nonymity �n� o�enness seem to bring.75 Legal Tender com�oun�e� the �n�iety of forgery �n� the �ev�lu�tion of currency with the insecurities of the virtu�l worl� �n� the new e��eriences it ���e�re� to en�ble. Users coul� see � me�i�te�, �ist�nt environment �n� �ffect it �s well, com�lic�ting the custom�ry uni�i� rection�lity of televisu�l e��erience. These new �owers �i� not come without � hitch: before �erforming �ny �ction, in�ivi�u�ls h�� to register their cont�ct inform�tion �n� confirm th�t they un�erstoo� Title 18 of the US Co�e Section 333, which forbi�s the “mutil�tion of n�tion�l b�n� oblig�tions.” With � clic� of � button, they “�cce�te� res�onsibility” for

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�nything they might �o through the interf�ce. Un�er the l�w Gol�berg cite�, the crime they were investig�ting (forgery) w�s on the s�me �l�ne �s the one they were committing (mutil�� tion). The l�w re��s: Whoever fr�u�ulently �lters, �ef�ces, mutil�tes, im��irs, �iminishes, f�lsifies, sc�les, or lightens �ny of the coins coine� �t the mints of the Unite� St�tes, or �ny foreign coins which �re by l�w m��e current or �re in �ctu�l use or circul�tion �s money within the Unite� St�tes; or Whoever fr�u�ulently �ossesses, ��sses, utters, �ublishes, or sells, or �ttem�ts to ��ss, utter, �ublish, or sell, or brings into the Unite� St�tes, �ny such coin, �nowing the s�me to be �ltere�, �ef�ce�, mutil�te�, im��ire�, �iminishe�, f�lsifie�, sc�le�, or lightene�—Sh�ll be fine� un�er this title or im�risone� not more th�n five ye�rs, or both.76

This 1994 version of the l�w, current �t the time of Legal Tender, mentions both �ctions— forgery �n� mutil�tion—in � single bre�th. By “investig�ting” the forgery on counterfeit.org, the users were, �otenti�lly, committing �nother �n�logous crime. Both �iminish v�lue, one by m�rring or �estroying the notes (by �ef�cement, sh�ving, filing, �n� so on), the other by un�ermining their �bility to convince the user of their ver�city. One is �n �tt�c� on the e�is� tent thing; the other thre�tens the currency’s cl�im �s � symbol or st�n��in for v�lue. The first �ss�ult is in�e�ic�l, the other symbolic or iconic. Wh�t is ��rticul�rly concerning is not the users’ �oubt �s to whether the bills were �uthentic or counterfeit, but their �oubt in their �ctions u�on those re�l or forge� bills. Legal Tender’s investig�tors/mutil�tors cl�ime� they �i�n’t believe in wh�t they s�w �n� �i� through the interf�ce, �es�ite seeing the re�l�time fee�b�c� �n� in�e�ic�l results of their �ctions (burn holes, st�ins, �n� �in�ric�s ���e�ring on the surf�ce of the bills). Users s�w their �ctions �s inconsequenti�l bec�use they were “virtu�l” �n� therefore �ssume� to be simul�tions. This is � more com�le� re�ction th�n it initi�lly seems. It �resu��oses �n o��osition between the virtu�l �n� the re�l �n� between the �igit�l �n� the in�e�ic�l th�t �llows users to br�c�et or �isreg�r� their e��eriences in these environments. Of course, it �lso offers �l�usible �eni�bility �s � motiv�ting f�ctor. It m�y h�ve been �recisely bec�use they were worrie� �bout the �uthenticity of their �ctions �n� their �otenti�l cul��bility th�t they chose to cl�im �oubt. Either w�y, �igit�l �oubt o�ens u� � �roblem�tic ethic�l situ�� tion: users c�n �isreg�r� their me�i�te� �ctions (or cl�im to) when it is convenient for their own �hysic�l or emotion�l security. This logic is m��e �ossible by the f�lse o��ositions of the virtu�l �n� the re�l, �n� of the �igit�l �n� the in�e�ic�l. There is no �oubt th�t this �in� of logic is ��ngerous. It le��s to �n Ender’s Game scen�rio in which � user might �ssume th�t there �re no consequences to �ctions vi� virtu�l interf�ce. Legal Tender’s ethic�l st��es were rel�tively low in com��rison to other technologies th�t en�ble �ction �t � �ist�nce, ��rticul�rly surveill�nce �n� we��ons systems. The �iscl�imer Gol�berg require� e�ch user to sign, however, �cte� to intro�uce the thre�t of leg�l re�ercussion: the user w�s �ble to m�ni�ul�te—to �uncture, burn, injure—� �ist�nt object with no ris� to her own �erson, but �unishment might h�ve come �t � l�g.

The Index and the Interface

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Gol�berg’s �roject �ctiv�te� the n�scent fe�rs �bout the thre�ts �igit�lity �n� virtu�lity might �ose for the in�e�ic�l sign �n� our rel�tion to it. The site ��ire� convention�l in�e�i� c�l signs (the burn, the cut, the hole) with more illusive in�e�ic�l tr�its (�resent�tense eng�ge� ment, re�l�time fee�b�c�, �n� the eng�gement of � receiver with � �yn�mic�l sign th�t requires imme�i�te inter�ret�tion �n� �ction). It �lso intro�uce� � �in� of (im)m�teri�l touch into the user’s inter�ction with the sign. Through the virtu�l interf�ce, the user coul� touch �n� �ffect the thing without e��eriencing the �utom�tic, reci�roc�l e��erience of being touche� b�c� th�t occurs in embo�ie� �ction—if I touch � surf�ce, it touches me too. When the virtu�l in�e� touches the user, it is in the Peirci�n register: the sign �rovo�es the user to ���rehen� its signific�nce �n� m��e �n �b�uctive le��. If in�ices, �s I �rgue� e�rlier, �re signs th�t �re often not �irectly witnesse�, th�t come to their receivers �t � s��ti�l or tem�or�l remove, �n� require hy�othetic�l or �b�uctive infer� ences bec�use the user must furnish inform�tion beyon� the �irectly observ�ble, Legal Tender �rovi�es � �rovoc�tive test for how we will un�erst�n� me�i�te� im�ges �n� our own me�i� �te� �ctions in the w��e of the “�e�th of the in�e�.” As more �n� more of our �ctions �n� e��eriences �re me�i�te� by �igit�l me�i� �n� virtu�l interf�ces, this is more th�n � m�tter of semiotic theory, �n� it h�s ethic�l, e�istemologic�l, �n� e�istenti�l consequences f�r beyon� �iscussions of Internet �rt. The ch��ters th�t follow t��e u� these �rom�ts to e��m� ine how we �ct �n� how we beh�ve in �n� through interf�ces, es�eci�lly when those on the other si�e �re not mere �v�t�rs or simul�tions but others li�e us. The �igit�l �oubt I h�ve �iscusse� in this ch��ter becomes �ressing ��rticul�rly �s we e�ten� our sense of touch into �ist�nt �l�ces �n� h�ve �hysic�l effects on those on the other si�e of the screen. The virtu�l �n� the re�l, the in�e�ic�l �n� the �igit�l, e�ist �s str�nge be�fellows. The in�etermin�cy of the virtu�l im�ge’s ontologic�l st�tus �s simul�cr�l or sim�ly me�i�te� m�y seem to be s�ecific to �igit�l technologies �n� their unc�nny c���bilities to fool the viewer. This is not, however, � con�ition of �igit�lity or virtu�lity. All me�i� �re me�i�te�. All involve signs. But some of these me�i�, �n� some of their signs, communic�te inform�tion �bout the e�istent worl� to their receivers while others �o not. Me�i�tion is �n inherent ��rt of the in�e�—it is � sign th�t st�n�s between the receiver �n� the event. This h�s �lw�ys been the c�se. The current w�ve of �igit�l �oubt �n� the rhetoric of the loss of the in�e� only serve to c�ll �ttention to wh�t in�ices �re �n� �lw�ys h�ve been: �ubious, o�en�en�e�, �resent�tense signs whose me�nings �re �e�en�ent u�on conte�t �n� cl�mor for �ttention �n� inter�ret�� tion. Un�eci��bility �n� s�e�ticism �re ��rt �n� ��rcel of the in�e�ic�l sign. R�ther th�n becoming irrelev�nt in our current me�i� moment, the in�e� is �n e�ce�tion�lly useful semi� otic c�tegory bec�use of the uncert�inty it re�resents �n� the urgent c�ll it issues for inter�re� t�tion �n� �ction. If the in�e� is � sign th�t inherently sets u� connections between it, the event th�t cre�te� it, �n� the receiver’s senses �n� min�, it is ��rticul�rly well suite� for the �n�lysis of e��eriences en�ble� by �igit�l �n� telecommunic�tions technologies. The inter� f�ce is �n in�e�. The in�e� is �n interf�ce.

2

Uncanny Confusion: Early Video and the Fantasy of Presence

Criticism of early video art pivots on the fulcrum of Vito Acconci’s index finger. Rosalind Krauss’s 1976 essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” turns on Acconci’s 1971 tape Centers, which shows the artist “pointing to the center of a television monitor” in real time for 22 minutes (figure 2.1).1 Krauss argues that Acconci’s video diagrams the structural and

Figure 2.1 Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971. Video still courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York. © 2016 Vito Acconci / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Uncanny Confusion

conceptual underpinnings of the medium in a single gesture: the instantaneous, mirrorlike reflections produced by the video apparatus trap the artist in a closed circuit of narcissistic self-fascination. Anne Wagner, too, has hinged her reading of the impact and importance of early video on Acconci’s pointing finger. In “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” she argues that video demands a very different response than Krauss describes. Rather than locking itself off in a formal tautology of self-regard, video, like all other arts, “needs witnesses.” It is not “self-absorptive,” she argues, but “coercive”: it aims to aggressively “summon the viewer present.”2 Krauss’s and Wagner’s arguments seem to take conflicting positions on just what Acconci’s gesture, and video in general, does. While my own sympathies lie with Wagner’s understanding of video as opening out to the viewer rather than closing in upon the artist, both of the readings, despite their apparent opposition, describe the medium remarkably well. Video is both narcissistic and relational at once. This may sound like a contradiction, but what I am suggesting is that video is an inherently ambivalent and contradictory medium. Like its “parent” medium, television, video can be recorded or live; it can be transmitted over vast distances or locked in closed-circuit systems.3 It can connect viewers or isolate them, or it can appear to be doing the former while actually doing the latter. In this chapter I examine the ways in which early video artists used the new medium to expose the ontological indeterminacy of television and the powerful yet fantastical experiences of presence and contact it could create. These effects, I argue, hinge on the self-conscious production and circulation of indexical signs. Through close analyses of Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971) and Theme Song (1973) and Joan Jonas’s Duet (1972) and Left Side Right Side (1972), I propose that early video art, often thought to be oriented against or in opposition to television, actually accurately and effectively diagrams the complex temporal, spatial, and semiotic structures of broadcast TV, which intentionally confuse the viewer as to her space-time relationship to the event depicted. Through their manipulation of video equipment and the conventions of television transmission, the artists create fantasies of television as telepresence: they establish the illusion of real-time, bidirectional contact through a video interface only to frustrate the user when what appears to be a transparent window becomes an opaque and impenetrable surface. By failing to deliver the experience their language and the technology seem to promise, Acconci and Jonas instill in their viewers the pressing desire to touch the screen and the body that appears to be waiting on the other side, and to make their own bodies available for physical contact. In the process they also disable the metaphors—of video as window or mirror—most often used to explore distinctive features of the medium. Centering Video Art Centers begins with Vito Acconci staring calmly into the camera. After just a few seconds, he raises his right arm into the frame and centers his pointing finger in the middle of the monitor (figure 2.1). Like a marksman looking at a far-off target, he levels his gaze along the length

Early Video and the Fantasy of Presence

41

of his outstretched arm. His clenched fist is a hazy, out-of-focus blur that completely blocks his eyes from view. His jutting index finger seems to be right up against the glass, touching it from the other side. For the remaining 21 minutes of the tape, Acconci struggles to keep his arm up and his finger centered. The soundtrack catches his soft groans and heavy breathing. As he strains and repeatedly shifts his weight, his finger drifts from its precise location. In these moments, Acconci once again exposes his gaze as his finger seeks and circles the center point of the frame (figure 2.2). In “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Krauss provocatively claims that video is not like other types of visual art. Most media, such as painting, sculpture, and film, rely on “objective, material factors specific to their particular form.”4 Video and its effects, however, rely on a “psychological” rather than a physical condition: narcissism.5 In Centers, Krauss argues, Acconci uses the video monitor as a mirror. He simply transfers his own real-time image to the television’s surface and points at it. This setup, then, forms a “tautology”: it is a closed circuit that relays Acconci’s reflection back at him, “illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object.”6 “The two terms,” she writes, “fuse.” Acconci’s performance demonstrates how the live feed of video “brackets out” one of the key modalities of modern art: reflexivity.7 Modernist art, Krauss writes, reflexively “performs and portrays a separation between forms of art and their contents, between the procedures of thought and their objects.”8 Reflexivity creates parallel yet oppositional relationships in an artwork—modern painting, sculpture, and film unbalance the relationships between picture and support, subject and object, figure and ground, artwork and context.9 Video takes another path—that of reflection. Rather than using reflexive practices to fracture the work and separate out its parts, video, acting as a mirror, “vanquishes separateness.”10 It is not, therefore, concerned with the investigation of material states, Krauss argues, but with the psychological effects of narcissism. It may be the live-feed capabilities of the apparatus that enable its use as mirror, but she does not read Acconci’s gesture as intentionally revealing the structural or formal characteristics of video. Instead, she explains, he inadvertently diagrams the medium’s tendency toward narcissism by “parodying the critical terms of abstraction.”11 Acconci’s centering gesture fuses rather than fractures the component elements of the reflexive work of art. According to the art historian, “There is no way for us to see Centers without reading that sustained connection between the artist and his double.”12 Krauss’s move here is a strange and strategic one. She sidesteps Acconci’s gaze and pointing finger, removing herself from the viewer’s position in order to imagine the moment at which Acconci recorded the tape. Her claim, however, depends on a misrepresentation of how Acconci actually made Centers; if in the video he appears to be pointing at the center of the television monitor, and thereby at his own image, it is nonetheless the case that, during its making, he was actually gesturing at the camera. There are moments on the tape when Acconci’s exposed eyes dart to the edges of the frame, perhaps to check his image in the live-feed receiver, which cannot be at the tip of his finger or the very center of his gaze. Rather than proving that Acconci does, in

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Uncanny Confusion

Figure 2.2 Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971. Video stills courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York. © 2016 Vito Acconci / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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43

fact, occasionally use the monitor as a mirror to check his image, these moments emphasize that he is looking into the camera’s lens the rest of the time.13 He stares into the camera not to see his own image but to meet the gaze of his future viewer, who will one day be facing him. When one recognizes Acconci’s position in front of the camera, and its function of establishing a “face-to-face” encounter between the artist and a viewer, the tautological, closed circuit of Krauss’s argument fractures open.14 The monitor can sometimes function as a mirror, but here it connects Acconci to a future audience and context.15 In “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” Wagner takes issue with Krauss’s coy insistence that she can avoid being “targeted” by Acconci’s pointing finger. Wagner argues that Krauss refuses to acknowledge the reflexive relationships that this gesture initiates. Centers’ reflexivity is, in fact, twofold in Wagner’s argument. By pointing into the center of the monitor (that is, by pointing directly into the lens), Wagner explains, Acconci indicates the subject/object relationship between the artist and the viewer that video enables, and the figure/ground relationship of video to television. The mirroring metaphor blinds Krauss to the way in which Centers reflexively fractures the hermetic circuit of reflection: For a viewer to decide she can elude being targeted by Acconci’s index finger is to try to opt out of what video aims to do: to summon you into the present moment, as an audience, and sometimes, under selected circumstances, to make you all-too-conscious of that fact. By these means the performance becomes double-sided; actor and viewer are locked in a pas de deux.16

Krauss, then, according to Wagner, disregards both “the language that Acconci’s body actually seems to speak” and the rhetorical implications of his gaze and gesture.17 That language, that rhetoric, is interpellative. That is, it forcefully introduces the viewer into a relationship and a conversation. Wagner translates Acconci’s gesture as “Yo” or “Hey,” colloquial, exclamatory salutations that, just like the pointing finger, breach “the middle-class protocol of decent non-involvement with one’s neighbor; insistently selecting and specifying, [threatening] to invade privacy’s buffer zone.”18 It functions as an apostrophe: it is an emphatic address to an unseen person meant to “conjure the viewer into life and presence.”19 The pointing finger, just like a salutation, implicates the viewer in a present-tense exchange and establishes a shared context. The sign is at once generic and specific. It has the ability to single out anyone and everyone. It is the index. The power of Acconci’s pointing finger is disorienting, for it simultaneously sustains two apparently opposing logics. As Wagner argues, the tape calls the viewer into a present moment with the artist. At the same time, however, Krauss is right: Centers is, in fact, an image of Acconci alone with his equipment (if not actually looking into his monitor/mirror). The relationality that Acconci so forcefully creates in Wagner’s account is a fiction—the video is not live; the screen is not a window. Centers calls the viewer present and refuses a relationship with her. The viewer sees Acconci, but he cannot see her back despite the overwhelming feeling to the contrary. These logics, as well as Krauss’s and Wagner’s arguments, however, are not inherently oppositional, or at least they are not mutually exclusive. The

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Uncanny Confusion

apparently contradictory effects are, in fact, part of the normal functioning of video and television, particularly in the live forms of broadcast TV that involve direct address, such as the evening news. Live television programs do what Centers does: they call the viewer into a shared present moment of what appears to be direct address and contact, and at the same time deny interaction, highlighting that, in fact, the viewer, too, is alone with her machine. Acconci simultaneously points to the viewer and at the monitor.20 In doing so, he points to the screen and its functioning as an interface: it is a surface that “lies between two portions of matter or space, forming their common boundary. … It is a means or place of interaction between systems.”21 In his thorough history of the concept, Branden Hookway explains that “the interface is defined in its coupling of the processes of holding apart and drawing together, of confining and opening up, of disciplining and enabling, of excluding and including. The separation maintained by the interface between distinct entities or states is also the basis of the unity it produces from those entities or states.”22 Or, as he puts it in a slightly different way, “the interface comes into being in the maintenance of its contradictions.”23 In Acconci’s video, the TV screen forms the site where a series of opposite or opposing systems both come into contact and are separated from each other: it forms the boundary between Krauss’s and Wagner’s arguments, between Acconci and his viewer, as well as between the past and the present, and here and there. The video screen, then, is a site where things and their opposites touch. While Wagner understands Acconci’s impolite gesture and its aggressive posture as performing a “negative reversal” and “necessary refusal” of television’s “illusions of presence, intimacy, and belonging,” I would like to suggest that Acconci does not refuse the pleasures of television.24 Rather, his actions call the viewer’s attention to television’s role as an interface by establishing it as a transformational boundary where things become (or are uncannily indistinguishable from) their opposites—where pleasure slides into discomfort, absence becomes presence. He does not invert or oppose the normal functioning of television, but distills the televisual tropes of false presence to their most basic forms, and thereby exposes the structure of TV. He delivers TV’s illusions of presence, intimacy, and belonging with an intensity and directness that makes the viewer uncomfortably aware of this deception and of the manipulations of conventional TV. Like Krauss and Wagner, I, too, will balance my argument on Acconci’s pointing finger. But Acconci, in my account, achieves his critique of broadcast television through an emphasis on indexical signs and the role their open-ended ambiguity plays in sustaining the fictions of connection and presence. He populates his early video images with indices: pointing fingers, deictic shifters, relative pronouns, and urgent calls to attention and presence. As I will emphasize, indices in general, and video images in particular, have an ontological indeterminacy that enables them to appear to be two things at once—here and there, now and then, generic and specific. Acconci demonstrates that television’s power to create such vertiginous collapses of space and time is semiotic rather than simply structural or technological.

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Indexing the Viewer Watching Centers, one is overcome, if only momentarily, by the feeling that Acconci is pointing at the viewer—at you. What is unnerving is not simply finding yourself at the receiving end of a rude and insistent summons, but that, by implication, you, the viewer, are every bit as visible to Acconci as he is to you. Even more unsettling is the knowledge that, despite Acconci’s determination and one’s own visceral feeling of this reciprocal visibility, this is, of course, impossible: television monitors are merely “receivers.” They do not have the power to transmit images and sound; they are unidirectional by design.25 Given this obvious structural limitation, Acconci’s ruse is impressive. Over the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of physical and temporal distance, as well as technological implausibility, he makes the viewer feel his presence. He points from the past, from Nova Scotia in February 1971, to the present time and place of the viewer. The screen appears to be a transparent window onto another space, rather than an illusory re-presentation of another place and time. The image gives the impression of being “live” despite all of the evidence to the contrary—the blackand-white, low-resolution image is formally and aesthetically marked as “historical.” The facts of space and time are not of consequence here: the Acconci of 1971, as he puts it, “lies in wait” to catch a present-day viewer on the other side of screen.26 He has set a trap, and his finger, acting as an index, is the snare. It catches the viewer and causes a disorienting collapse of space and time. This is something indices do. They create a present-tense relationship between the viewer and the sign even when the spaces and times of creation and reception do not coincide. When Wagner writes, “video summons you present,” she is, I believe, making an implicit connection between Peircean indexicality and the operations of video. This is not a risky leap: Acconci’s pointing finger makes video’s summoning power clear, and the pointing finger is one of Peirce’s archetypical indexical signs. As I explained in the previous chapter, indices are signs that are existentially connected to what they represent, and which compel rapid, hypothetical—or abductive—inferences about the surrounding context and circumstances that gave rise to the sign. This connection is often understood (by way of photographic theory) as a permanent or semipermanent material trace of a past event, such as light touching photographic emulsion, or a footprint that preserves the cast of a once-present foot in mud.27 Indices, however, have much more complex and confusing relationships to space and time than examples like the footprint or a photograph illustrate. Pointing fingers and deictic shifters (this/that, I/you, here/there, now/then) are also examples of indices. These indices call attention to how, as signs, they rely on context, especially the present context, for meaning and interpretation via the abductive inference. According to Peirce, all indices call attention to the here and now both by maintaining a connection with the event they represent and by forging a “real” connection between the represented event and the person who apprehends the sign across space and time.28 The index, he writes, “is a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and by also

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forcibly intruding upon the mind.”29 Indices are signs that grab the viewer’s attention and force her to take notice of the sign and interpret what it might signify. That is, to borrow Wagner’s words, they “summon you into a present moment, as an audience.”30 Indices like pointing fingers and deictic shifters put emphasis on the present tense in both creation and reception. Unlike photographs which make reference to the past through what Roland Barthes calls their “this-has-been” structure, indices rely on the present context to be understood; they are also able to make or fabricate context. This is precisely because of the index’s power to create a “real” and existential connection with the viewer. Another wellknown image of a pointing finger—James Montgomery Flagg’s 1917 U.S. Army recruitment poster featuring Uncle Sam (figure 2.3)—makes this relationship clear. Wagner draws this same connection between Uncle Sam’s gesture and Acconci’s. She writes, “Pointing is [a] kind of violation, concentrated in a single digit: surely it is best left to grand symbolic figures to whom mere manners can never apply: to God, to Lord Kitchener, and, of course, to Uncle Sam—to those lofty paternal figures, in other words, with the authority to summon, rebuke, and specify.”31 Pointing is a powerful gesture: it calls, names, and judges. Regardless of its origin in space or time, it initiates a present-tense relationship with the reader of the sign. It does not matter if it is Acconci pointing from 1971 to a viewer in a gallery in the present day, or a live televisual image at the scene of an unfolding crisis, or someone in the same contiguous physical space. As Uncle Sam so clearly demonstrates, for the index, medium does not matter: the sign can be painted, photographed, or physically enacted. The index is a means of establishing presence, even if over and against the structural limitations of time, space, and technology. Uncle Sam’s pointing finger is not the only index in operation in Flagg’s poster. The deictic shifter “you” does quite a bit of work reinforcing the message of the gesture. It, too, establishes a contextual and present-tense relationship with the viewer. Peirce is clear that demonstrative pronouns are indices. If the purpose of indices is, according to the semiotician, to connect apprehension to meaning, then the “demonstrative pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’ are indices. For they call upon the hearer to use his powers of observation, and so to establish a real connection between his mind and the object.”32 Roman Jakobson, drawing on the work of Otto Jespersen and Emile Benveniste, among others, extended Peirce’s discussion of indexical words to include deictics or “shifters,” words that “cannot represent [their] objects without ‘being in existential relation’ with [the] object.” Such a word clearly designates that “the utterer is existentially related to his utterance, and hence functions as an index.”33 As Mary Ann Doane explains it, “deixis is the moment when language seems to touch ground, to adhere as closely as it can to the present reality of speech.”34 The category of deictic shifters includes all words that require information about the current context to be understood. Or to put it in Peirce’s language of the index, they forge real connections between the utterer of the sign and the receiver. In addition to demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns (I/you) and indicators of place (here/there) and time (now/then) are deictic shifters and, therefore, indices. If Centers followed Uncle Sam’s lead by taking advantage of the power

Early Video and the Fantasy of Presence

Figure 2.3 James Montgomery Flagg, U.S. Army recruitment poster, 1917.

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Uncanny Confusion

of the pointing finger to automatically summon a present-tense relationship between sign and viewer, Acconci’s 1973 video Theme Song adopts the deictic shifter to more subtly draw— even seduce—the viewer into a contextual (though perhaps not consensual) relationship with him. Theme Song (figure 2.4) shows Acconci lying on the floor of a living room. His face is presented in an exaggerated close-up, and his foreshortened body trails off into the background, terminating in the hem of a boldly striped couch. Just as in Centers, Acconci made the tape by facing the camera, but the effect, once again, is that the artist seems to be looking through the monitor at the viewer. Acconci’s prostrate, childlike position on the floor in front of the couch strengthens this illusion—his face appears in the room where one would assume a television set would be. The mise-en-scène implies that Acconci’s set functions as a window, and that this window looks directly into the viewer’s own space. He has crawled close to the screen so that he might better see the viewer and shake off the formality that the furniture and its respectful distance maintains.

Figure 2.4 Vito Acconci, Theme Song, 1973. Video still courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York. © 2016 Vito Acconci / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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If the suggested homology between Acconci’s living room and the viewer’s own screening space is not made immediately apparent by the scenography, the artist’s monologue makes this connection explicit. Over the course of the 33-minute, unedited tape, he speaks directly into the camera—or, rather, to the viewer. While the performance is clearly one-sided, it is also, like Centers, a sustained apostrophe. But rather than addressing the heavens, stars, God, or the “Dear Reader,” as more classical forms of apostrophe might do, Acconci’s apostrophe speaks to “you.”35 After fussing with a pack of cigarettes, he pushes play on a tape deck off camera, and begins to sing along with the music. The song, The Doors’ “I Can’t See Your Face,” well describes Acconci’s situation: while it might feel as if he is looking through the screen at the viewer, he is, of course, sealed off in time and space. Ventriloquizing Jim Morrison’s lyrics, Acconci croons at the viewer, “I can’t see your face in my mind.” After repeating the line twice alongside Morrison, he departs from the singer’s script. Acconci breaks away from the verse to emphasize the parallel between Morrison’s words and his own technological situation: “No, of course I can’t see your face. I have no idea what your face looks like. You could be anybody. Right now there’s got to be somebody, there’s got to be somebody watching me, somebody who wants to come in close to me.” Acconci may be speaking into the ether or the echo chamber of the feedback monitor, but his words carry a perplexing contradictory force. He claims he cannot see the viewer, yet the word “you” marks the viewer in her place, facing him, and pulls her into the context of his speech. He knows that somebody is watching him, and that that somebody is “you.” He does not know who you are, but he knows when and where you are—right now, in front of the screen. Though a recorded video, Theme Song plays with the logic of network television. It is a one-way communication, but Acconci knows, just as the broadcasters do, that someone—you—will eventually be watching on the other side, and he will be waiting to catch you in that shared moment. If Acconci’s initial words seem to indicate doubt as to whether he actually has an audience, he quickly becomes confident that the viewer can see him and will get close to the screen for intimate contact. The “you” in Acconci’s first few lines could be understood as naming a generic figure—“anybody” or “somebody” as he puts it. However, after suggesting that “somebody will want to come close” to him, Acconci’s use of the second-person singular becomes very specific, and the unidirectional terms of engagement become remarkably unclear. He continues: Hey, look, I could just wrap myself around you. Don’t you want to come in here? Sure, sure, you’ll come in here. Ah, now, don’t cry. I should be the one crying. I don’t even know if there’s anybody there. … Look at me with your eyes. I’ll look at you. … Just come here. We both need it. Come in close to me. All that counts is now. My body is here; your body could be here.

Acconci, gesturing to the open area of carpet in front of his body, suggests that the viewer could “come in here,” that is, cross to the other side of the screen and inhabit the space over there. Acconci’s language, while still staying close to Morrison’s, puts particular emphasis on

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deictic shifters and demonstrative pronouns—I/you, here/there—which, acting as indices, both imply and establish real-time contextual interaction, even across space, time, and the mediating interface. Over the course of the tape and the many songs he sings, Acconci’s words speak a language of co-presence and indexical, existential connection. Not only can the viewer see him, but he indicates that he can see the viewer as well. Acconci describes the viewer’s reaction to his solicitation—he has made her cry. He summons the indexical force of deictic words to reach across the physical threshold of the screen and the temporal boundary of recorded media, thereby momentarily blinding the viewer to the technological limitations of her “receiver.” Acconci’s come-on is a violation; it offends the viewer’s notion of privacy and the assumed structural relationship between broadcaster and viewer. (How often has she said or done something private or intimate in view of the TV?) What is even more disturbing is that Acconci does not allow the viewer to remain securely present. He is always on the screen, always talking, always maintaining his existence for the viewer. The viewer, on the other hand, slips in and out of relation to the artist’s monologue. Immediately after reading her emotions and discomfort, the artist renders her invisible again (“I don’t even know if there’s anybody there”). As disconcerting as being made (ostensibly) visible through the televisual interface is, the moments when Acconci denies the viewer’s presence are the ones that are truly disorienting. Claiming to see her might disrupt the viewer’s rational understanding of the mechanics of televisual recording and transmission, but negating her presence altogether goes against the discursive logics of broadcast TV, which, as Wagner explains, “center on illusions of immediacy, pleasure, and belonging.”36 So accustomed are viewers to the wooing seductions of programmers, marketers, and anchors seeking to capture and maintain their attention that Acconci’s indifference—or rather ambivalence and equivocation—makes the viewer alarmingly aware of both the screen’s potent illusions and her desire for these seductions. Acconci does not simply reverse, invert, or negate these pleasures; once again he oscillates between specific effects or affects and their opposites. The screen is the site where this oscillation can occur. The Uncanny Index The collapse of time and space, presence and absence, that Acconci affects through indexical signs is, I argue, a form of what Samuel Weber calls television’s “uncanny confusion.” Television and video, as I have already described, have the power to be both here and there at the same time. This is a feature of the electronic video medium that sets it clearly apart from film. In his book Mass Mediauras, Weber points to just how ontologically complicated this distinction and its effects are. With film and photography, he explains, the screen “re-presents” something that has already taken place; therefore “the temporal relation of past and present,

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the mimetic relation of a previously existent original and a subsequent copy seems to remain essentially intact.”37 Television, however, is another case entirely: In television … the hierarchy implied in this relationship is severely perturbed; and consequently, the logic and ontology that govern the traditional relationship of mimesis, reproduction and representation are unsettled. … The minimal difference necessary to distinguish reproduced from reproduction, model from copy, repeated from repetition, is reduced, tendentially at least, to the imperceptible. … We must be informed whether or not what we are seeing is “live”. In short, we cannot distinguish through our senses alone what we take simply to be “alive” and what as reproduction, separated from its origin, is structurally posthumous. The television is a site of such an uncanny confusion and confounding.38

The formal and structural possibility of transmitting live video images, following Weber, is ontologically and existentially destabilizing. If television is something that we perceive as—and has the effect of being—both here and there, this means that it can really be “neither fully here nor there” according to traditional notions of bodies and objects and how they occupy space and time.39 The medium sustains an ambivalence that seems to present the far as near, the dead as living, the then as the now. It is always both and neither. The video screen in Weber’s account, as in mine, is something that simultaneously sustains a set of uncanny contradictions or impossibilities. The concept of the uncanny, as developed by psychoanalysts such as Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, is easily applicable to Weber’s description of television. Jentsch first outlined his theory of the uncanny in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” in which he described this emotion as a curious feeling of uncertainty or undecidability that results in or from a lack of stable orientation toward an object.40 Specifically, Jentsch associated the experience of the uncanny with the inability to determine whether a particular object or being was animate or inanimate, living or dead.41 Wax figures, dolls, and automata can all readily elicit this sensation, which Jentsch believed activated a latent primitive, animistic impulse still lodged deep in the human psyche. Freud extended and refined Jentsch’s account in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” Like Jentsch, he found great interest in the German word for uncanny, unheimlich. The term points back to its root in heimlich, which means “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, intimate, dear, tame, homely,” but can also refer to something “concealed” or “kept hidden.”42 The latter definition of heimlich, according to Freud, “merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich. … This reminds us that this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory.”43 What Freud takes away from this etymological investigation is that unheimlich is not the opposite of heimlich but a subset or “species” of it. “Children,” he wrote, “make no sharp distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and they are especially fond of treating their dolls as if they are alive. … Here, then, a sense of the uncanny would not derive from an infantile fear, but an infantile wish, or simply from an infantile belief.”44 In the doctor’s view, the uncanny is a result of the repression of childhood fantasies that reemerge in relationship to specific objects and

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experiences. It marks the blurring of the boundary between fantasy and reality. The uncanny is both familiar and hidden, or familiar because it is hidden, that is, repressed. It is evidence of an old and intimate thought lodged deep within the individual’s psyche. Like the video screen, it marks the experience of an effect and its opposite—wish/fear, living/dead, presence/absence. The ambivalence that I described as part of video’s and television’s ontological condition is uncanny. The viewer is unable to distinguish the live from the dead (or recorded), the animate from the inanimate, the real from the simulation. Acconci exacerbates this effect in his early videos by invoking the power of the index, which, too, can elicit uncanny effects. It is entirely possible to describe the functioning of the index as fundamentally uncanny. As I have discussed here and in the previous chapter, the index destabilizes the receiver’s relationship to space and time, to the present and the past, between the live and the recorded. It activates the uncanny’s “intellectual uncertainty” and powerful emotional response, as detailed in Freud’s account. Laura Mulvey also made the connection between the index and the uncanny in Death 24x a Second. Mulvey, however, sees the connection exclusively in relation to (analog) photography and cinema because of their ability to cause “the return of the dead,” the former making images of the past live again (even if only in a this-has-been tense), the latter reanimating sequences of photographic stills into moving pictures. I would like to adjust, and perhaps invert, Mulvey’s claim, using the uncanny as a means of discussing not the reanimation of the “dead” but, rather, the indeterminacy of the live. The index, like television itself, always acts as “live,” regardless of whether or not it is. It pulls the then into the now. It is not a sign of a dead past; it marks and moreover creates the effect of an unrelenting present. Television’s False Promise In 1975, David Antin offered an explanation of the complex and indeterminate relationship between video (particularly video art) and television in his essay “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent.” The two media, he writes, share “the essential conditions of production and viewing,” so that “no matter how different from television the works of individual artists may be, the television experience dominates the phenomenology of viewing and haunts video exhibitions.”45 Antin’s language of “haunting” cites a relationship to the uncanny effects of video as an eerie double to television. Video cannot escape reference to conventional television. Television and video, as I have already established, are very closely related media—one the “parent” of the other—and thus they share a strong familial resemblance and common formal language, or what Eric Cameron calls a “grammar.”46 The resemblance is so close that in most cases the two cannot be distinguished. This is the case regardless of how we define “television”—whether we take it to mean networked, distributed video images, or live vision at a distance (tele-vision) as opposed to video’s closed circuit and recorded forms.

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Most early artists’ videos negotiate relationships to conventional television, Antin explains, “only the most obvious of which manifest themselves directly in quotes, allusion, celebration, parody and protest.”47 In Centers and Theme Song Acconci subtly engages with TV’s ambivalent structures, as well as its pleasure and frustrations. If TV is video’s “parent,” Acconci does not pursue Oedipal struggles to challenge or eliminate conventional television; rather, he makes video in the image of its parent, highlighting and exacerbating the familial hereditary traits.48 While the most “distinctive” feature of TV is, according to Antin, “the capacity for instantaneous transmission,” that is, tele-vision, this is not the feature that defines TV or video in their most common operations.49 Liveness may set television and its heirs apart from their close relatives film and photography, but it is “equivocation” that marks TV and video most distinctly (or perhaps better, indistinctly).50 In both TV and video, “liveness” and “recordedness” are, as Acconci demonstrates, virtually—and uncannily— indistinguishable from one another. “So television,” Antin writes, “provides video with a tradition not of falseness, which would be a kind of guarantee of at least a certain negative reliability, but of a profoundly menacing equivocation and mannerism determining a species of unlikeliness.”51 As with the photograph’s inessential connection to “photographic” reproduction, Antin reminds the reader, “the fabled instantaneity of television [is] essentially a rumor.”52 TV passed the trait of ontological indeterminacy to its offspring. Centers and Theme Song show the dominant traits of their lineage as equivocation, ambivalence, and a penchant for deception. Television, like Acconci’s finger, wavers. TV and video have the uncanny power to appear live even—or especially—when they are not. This is a result of their technology, but only in part. Liveness is a myth or, as Antin put it, a “rumor” propagated by the conventional uses of network television. Jane Feuer argues that while “network practice scarcely ever (indeed never in pure form) exploits television’s potential for ‘unmediated’ transmission,” television theorists such as Herbert Zettl confound ontology and ideology to make live programming the definition of television.53 She notes that “in this way, television as an ideological apparatus positions the spectator into its ‘imaginary’ of presence and immediacy,” an effect so strong that “even as television in fact becomes less and less a ‘live’ medium in the sense of an equivalence between time of event and time of transmission, the medium in its own practices seems to insist more and more on an ideology of the live, the immediate, the direct, the spontaneous, the real.”54 Curious taxonomies of television space and time such as “live in front of a studio audience,” “live on tape,” “recorded live,” “eye witness news,” and “reality television” deliberately confuse the viewer as to the temporal status of the program and its relationship to truth by referencing the ontological power of the “live” in recorded programs. Even television news, always brought into the home “live,” has a specious relationship to time. James Friedman points out that television newscasts put great effort into giving the “feeling of happening to events that we know have already happened” by “the use of language [that] helps to mask the carefully interwoven temporalities, as well as the spatial separations or layers, within the broadcast.”55 The newscast, he writes, is a mixture of live direct address

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from the anchorperson and other news personae, intercut with tightly edited features of prerecorded material. If correspondents are “reporting live,” it is from the location where an event occurred earlier or from an analogous location, so that, as Mary Ann Doane explains, “presence in space compensates for the inevitable temporal lag” and is used as an “indexical truth” that “touches the ground of the real.”56 We can hear in this statement an echo of Doane’s description of deixis as “the moment when language touches ground,” and indeed it is the circulation of indexical, shifting words that helps newscasters capture their audiences and create the effect of liveness. TV personalities fill the air with continual phatic patter to make sure they remain in the company and present tense of the viewer, “always there, a constant and steady presence, keeping [the viewer] in touch.”57 The direct address of television news and disaster/crisis coverage in particular, she writes, puts great “emphasis on the presence and immediacy of the act of communication, with constant recourse to shifters which draw attention to the shared space and time of reporter and viewer: terms such as ‘today,’ ‘here,’ ‘you,’ ‘we,’ ‘I.’”58 Doane is describing the typical structures of broadcast television, but she could easily be describing Acconci’s performance in Theme Song, which is no more present, no less relational than that of the evening news.59 Television, then, is coded and misrepresented as always “live” through the use of indexical signs and effects, despite rarely actually being so. Definitions of “live broadcasting” are so broad in some critical accounts, such as Jerome Bourdon’s, that the term merely indicates that one is watching a recorded show at the time of broadcast, rather than on a recording device.60 “Watching television ‘live,’ even though one is dealing with the broadcasting of recorded programmes,” he argues, “offers a guarantee that, at any given time, the flow can be interrupted by a special newsflash. Thus, even when we are completely engrossed in a [televised] major fiction film, we are not completely cut off from the world of events.”61 That is, there is the opportunity for liveness, for connection, for the real to break through to those who are watching. Like Acconci, television lies in wait for the moment when it will catch the viewer on the other side of the screen. Terminal Conditions Acconci mimics television’s own practices for creating the false effects of liveness, using indexical snares to trap a viewer into an uncanny experience of ambivalence and oscillating indeterminacy. The idea of the monitor as a site for the uncanny confusion between the living and the dead, the live and the recorded, the animate and inanimate, may be lodged deep in our cultural memory. The very idea of a screen or receiver as a “terminal,” an end node in a network (whether distributed, centralized, or closed), harks back to the Roman god Terminus, protector of boundaries. He was recognized in the form of altars that marked the line between properties. Landowners on either side met on his festival day to make sacrifices to him and to recognize the separation he maintained.62 Scholar of Roman mythology W. Warde Fowler has suggested that Terminus may have been an animistic numen, and

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therefore the boundary stone was not a mere symbolic representation of the god, but a physical object animated from within by a spiritual presence.63 The idea of a television terminal as Terminus, the spirit-imbued numen, is evocative. It marks the boundary between the here and there, and is also imbued with an uncanny animation that draws individuals to it as a potential site of crossing over. Acconci’s early videos call the viewer’s attention to the fantasies of transparency and connection that TV sustains by promising to make the screen permeable and then frustrating that possibility. He points to the interface as an opaque informational surface. Joan Jonas’s videos of the same period further complicate the video screen and its functioning as a interface. She, too, reveals the screen as an impenetrable surface by unmaking all of the metaphors (of window, door, or mirror) that typically inform our understanding of its functions. Jonas’s 1972 video Duet begins with an image of the artist’s face tightly hemmed in by the striped edges of a TV set (figure 2.5). Jonas appears to have done what Acconci did— facing the camera, she has transferred her live image to the screen to use it both as a mirror

Figure 2.5 Joan Jonas, Duet, 1972. Video stills courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York.

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and as a terminal to a viewer. Rather than blocking her eyes, Jonas gazes softly toward the viewer. She greets her audience in a strange manner connected to the domestic setting the home television receiver implies: she begins to howl in the long and punctuated manner of a dog left alone in its yard. No less unsettling is the fact that Jonas’s monitor is not perfectly centered in the video image. A narrow strip of negative space runs along the left edge of the viewer’s screen, disrupting the fantasy of direct connection that Centers and Theme Song sustained. The gap reveals a small swath of the room that Jonas’s monitor inhabits. The image now appears as a doubled monitor—Jonas’s bordered by the viewer’s own, a screen within a screen. The doubling evidences the fact that there’s more than one camera involved. There are multiple layers of space and time between Jonas and the viewer. Suddenly, as if responding to the viewer’s realization that she is looking at two screens, another figure appears within the frame, sandwiched between Jonas’s monitor and the viewer’s own. Wearing a headscarf, she is in three-quarter profile, turned away from the viewer and toward Jonas on the interior screen. She kneels before the set and gives it her full attention, answering Jonas with an eerily identical cry. For four minutes, the two figures call out and respond to each other. Like neighborhood dogs that unite a suburban block, the two figures reach out with their voices to claim a common circumstance and temporal connection, if not a spatial one. They seem to say: I am here, alone like you but also together with you. The two voices stretch, elongate their howls, and sync up. The voices become harmonic echoes as the two women match and part their songs. Without warning, however, Jonas goes quiet, her stare suddenly blank and unfocused. She looks at nothing, at no one—not at the other figure, and not at the viewer. The woman in the foreground continues to howl though she receives no reply. Her cries, which a moment earlier signaled commiseration, sympathy, and connection, go painfully unrequited. Jonas’s image then dissolves into a field of static, breaking into a disjunctive bit of tape, over which the howling appears to have been recorded. Duet is at once sad and comforting. It marks the television as a lonely device that also provides “company.” Its companionship relies on the viewer’s acceptance of the illusion. It is easy enough to recognize that both women on the tape are Jonas, and that the video is not live but a recording twice over. Even so, just as with Centers and Theme Song, the viewer can be swept into the fantasy. Jonas responds to a recording of herself howling as if it were live, and one might feel compelled to imagine a third link in the chain, imagine that the viewer facing the monitor is also being recorded from behind, thus fulfilling a deep-seated wish for television to live up to its ontological claim, to be live vision-at-a-distance. A further viewer, present or future, might watch from behind as well, creating a mise en abyme of staggered images of call and response, rather than the corridors of electronic feedback that video cameras produce when pointed “narcissistically” at their own monitors. It would be four minutes of self-deception, but it would not be an unfamiliar practice. What Jonas offers in her recorded video of interlocking segments of space and time is a formal analysis of the deceptive operations of broadcast television I outlined in the previous section of this chapter. Television, too,

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seduces the viewer into an experience of relationality, synchronicity, and connection by circulating the signs of liveness, which momentarily disguise the fact that the viewer, like Acconci and Jonas, is actually all alone. It would be easy to describe Duet, as Krauss did with Centers, in the terms of narcissism. Jonas does, indeed, seem to be acting the part of a modern-day Narcissus. Rather than looking into a reflecting pool, as Narcissus did in Ovid’s version of the story, Jonas looks at her electronic image. Krauss borrowed the Roman myth and its Freudian pathologizing to explain Acconci’s behavior in Centers. She saw his actions—unrelentingly trying to sustain a perfect and unmoving image of himself in a live, reflective, indexical medium—as narratively and structurally akin to Narcissus’s self-obsession. Both figures are subject and object of their own gazes. While Acconci struggled to maintain his pose, Narcissus committed fully to his task and spent the rest of his days looking into the unwavering eyes of his double. As I have already pointed out, Acconci’s tape simultaneously sustains two contradictory structural readings—one in which he is narcissistically looking at his “reflection” in the video-mirror, the other in which he points into the camera and out through the screen at a future viewer. In both interpretations, the screen is a surface, an interface, that connects and separates Acconci from his partner. Ovid’s version of the myth sustains a similar ambivalence. It is clear, but only in the final moments, that Narcissus knows he has been captivated by his own image.64 For most of the story, the youth misrecognizes himself as another, or at least willfully engages in a delusory fantasy. Forever separated from his beloved by the water’s surface, Narcissus issues his hopeless, lamenting cry to the trees that surround him: “Has anyone suffered for love like me? Whom can you remember? I’ve looked and longed. But looking and longing is far from enough. I still have to find!” (His lover’s delusion was overpowering.) … “All that keeps us apart is a thin, thin line of water. He wants to be held in my arms. Whenever I move to kiss the clear bright surface, his upturned face strains closer to mine. We all but touch! The paltriest boundary thwarts our pleasure.”65

Narcissus, according to Ovid, is “in love with an empty hope, a shadow mistaken for substance.”66 While (as argued earlier) I find it difficult to imagine Acconci in Centers as caught in a narcissistic trance or as simply staring at his own image rather than imagining the presence of another, Jonas seems to accurately model and perform this myth in Duet. Not only does she show herself face to face with her “reflection” across a mediating boundary, she also reenacts Narcissus’s misrecognition. She responds to the image as if it were not her own and as if it were live rather than recorded. She matches the narcissistic misrecognition of self as other with the uncanny televisual effect of confusing the recorded for the live. By repeating her own primal howls, in addition to doubling her image, Jonas also includes the first half of the Narcissus myth, which chronicles the fate of pitiful Echo. The young nymph is condemned by Hera to speak only by mimicking the words of others. Out of frustration and sorrow Echo wastes away, leaving only her voice, which now seems to emanate from the

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inanimate forms of the landscape, giving uncanny life and animistic presence to lifeless objects. Here that object is the terminal screen. Jonas’s appropriation of elements of the Narcissus myth, whether intentional or coincidental, highlights and exacerbates the uncanny confusions of the video medium, but it also calls attention to the fact that video is not a mirror. Unlike Narcissus’s reflection, the video does not mimic Jonas’s every move. It is strangely misaligned in both time and space. It seems to be connected to her but also separated from her. Duet is a layered, recorded performance, of course, and is not “live” as a mirror would be. If it were live, however, the viewer would quickly recognize that video and mirrors are far from the same. In some sense, as I will explain in what follows, they are in fact opposites. The video-mirror comparison is tempting, insofar as it uses an ancient, conventional object to explain the functioning of a complex electronic device. But that metaphorical substitution disguises what actually appears on the television screen. Unlike a mirror, video produces “true” images: they are not reversed. When one looks into a mirror, the image is flipped along the horizontal axis; if Narcissus raised his right hand, his reflected partner would appear to raise his left, text on a t-shirt would appear in reverse, and so on. Video, on the other hand, produces what someone standing opposite the subject would see. This is why video images of ourselves often look strange. Jonas pretended not to recognize her image in Duet, but it’s also true that the image she faced did not seem to be her, or not exactly. The image would have appeared both familiar and strange. We are accustomed to seeing our own faces reflected in reverse in mirrors, rather than as we appear to others in the world. What seems right and familiar to our own eyes is the inverse of what others and the video camera see. This effect—or rather noneffect—causes self-images to look unfamiliar, distorting, or inaccurate to the subject, perhaps even uncanny, despite looking perfectly normal to others, who always see the subject in her “true” orientation. So when Krauss writes that video creates “mirror reflections which [vanquish] separateness,” I feel compelled to asterisk her term. For while she may be right that video does not easily achieve reflexivity, the “reflection” produced by the camera and the screen does indeed insert separateness into the structure of the image and object, and uncouples the artist from his or her image. The familiar reflection that one encounters in the mirror is turned strange by becoming “true.” Jonas used mirrors in many of her early performance, film, and video works, most prominently in the performances Mirror Piece I (1969), Mirror Piece II (1970), and Mirror Check (1970).67 In each of these performances she employed mirrors to disrupt the coherent organization of space. In Mirror Piece I and Mirror Piece II performers carried full-length dressing mirrors. As they navigated the performance space with their awkward loads, the mirrors caught images of the audience and inserted them into the visual field of the performance. Mirror Check, on the other hand, withheld the mirror image from the audience. Jonas, naked, stood in front of the spectators and used a small hand mirror to inspect close-up details of her body. The mirror image always faced toward the artist and away from the audience, so that it always remained private and exclusively “Jonas’s.” Our reflections are, in many ways,

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essentially private things since they look right only to us and “wrong” to everyone else. To experience the mirror image in Mirror Check, the viewer had to look at that same segment of Jonas’s bare body and flip it in her own mind. Jonas’s most compelling use of mirrors comes in combination with video, and thereby stresses the startling, disorienting difference between video and mirror reflection. Left Side Right Side (1972) shows Jonas caught in a visual trap or puzzle. On the tape, Jonas looks out toward the viewer, as she did in Duet. She lifts her hand and touches the flesh just beneath one of her eyes and says, “This is my right eye” (figure 2.6a) A moment later she does the same thing on the other side of her face, announcing that she is touching her left eye. At first, this action seems perfectly intelligible. She is pointing to parts of her body and naming them. Her right eye, she shows the viewer, is on the left side of the screen, and her left eye is on the right. That is, the viewer sees Jonas as if she were sitting right across from her. For a moment, mediation disappears. The image quickly shifts to show Jonas sitting next to a television with her own image (figure 2.6b). A video monitor, with its distinctive rounded corners, sits high in the frame on the left side of the viewer’s screen. Beside it, Jonas, in a medium shot, occupies a narrow rectangle of space on the right side. The monitor appears to show a live feed of Jonas who is sitting next to it. If this were the case, they would both be “true.” However, the two images are in sync but reversed. They capture the same moment in space and time with uncanny difference. When indicating her right eye, the TV image of Jonas touches the eye on the left edge of the screen, and the other Jonas points toward the right (figure 2.6b). Jonas’s indexical gesture is reinforced by the deictic declaration, “This is my right eye.” The doubled indexicality of each image—of both images, simultaneously—does not clarify the situation; they are all real-time images of Jonas, but one is “true” and the other, it seems, is “lying.”

Figure 2.6 Joan Jonas, Left Side Right Side, 1972. Video stills courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York. In each still, Jonas points to her right eye.

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Figure 2.7 Joan Jonas, Left Side Right Side, 1972. Video stills courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York. In each still, Jonas points to her left eye.

To make Left Side Right Side, Jonas faced a video camera and a monitor, which showed the camera’s live image. Next to the monitor she positioned a rectangular mirror that reflected her reversed image. A second camera, shooting over Jonas’s shoulder, framed the image to crop her body out of the final image. What we see is an image of a monitor next to a mirror, but the setup produces the illusion of Jonas sitting next to a monitor with her own image, or being shown in a split screen with the live feed of the image. Because of this, the monitor image seems to be mediated and reversed, and the mirror image direct. Over the course of the nearly nine-minute tape, Jonas plays with the disorientation caused by the juxtaposition of a mirror reflection with a video image. While the mirror image is undoubtedly more familiar to a subject than her video image, it operates by an inverted logic. In the early parts of the performance, Jonas confidently names each side of her face, touching each eye and viewing the results on the monitor, the mirror, or both simultaneously. She only gets into trouble when she begins to use the monitor and mirror to differentiate her left side from her right side. With the monitor image tightly framed by the second camera, Jonas reaches into the space in front of the set and uses her hand to point out her left eye on the screen (figure 2.7a). Her index finger slowly weaves and circles in front of the monitor as she tries to make a decision. She begins to speak the reoccurring phrase, “This is my …,” but hesitates. She raises her other hand to her face to confirm her suspicion that she is touching the video image of her left eye. Switching hands, she then attempts to do the same on the mirror image, again with great difficulty and uncertainty (figure 2.7b). She must touch her own face to confirm what she sees on the mediating surfaces of the screen and mirror. To operate the interface, she has to use her physical body as a map. This is a very disorienting experience for the viewer as well. To unlock what is happening in the complex play of reflections and nonreflections, it seems necessary for the viewer to touch her own face to try to imitate what Jonas is doing as a way of understanding her actions in space and time. To understand what is happening on

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the screen, the viewer needs to turn around and face away. By looking in the same direction as Jonas’s monitor image, one can match the artist’s mirror reflection, as if Jonas’s image is one’s own. Unworking the Interface What is uncanny and confounding about video, particularly as it appears in Acconci’s and Jonas’s work, is that it is not a reflection.68 It does not behave like a mirror. This does not mean, however, that it is a “window”: it is not a transparent surface either; one cannot simply see or break through to the other side, even if Acconci is able to use indexical signs to create this effect. When watching Centers or Theme Song one may feel as if Acconci is merely on the other side of what Narcissus called a “paltry boundary,” that one might do as Acconci asks in Theme Song and simply cross over to the other side and join him on the carpet. Narcissus’s mirror reflection on the surface of the water broke apart when he tried to reach in and touch his beloved. In Acconci’s videos the monitor’s surface seems transparent and permeable. His indexical language and gestures imply that he shares time and context with the viewer. He enacts and exaggerates all of the fantasies of television transmission to draw the viewer in. But if she gets closer, if the viewer attempts to cross over, she is deflected by the glass. Jonas uses the same techniques to denaturalize and disable the interface, rendering it problematic and therefore visible. In the process we see how video actually works. It is not a window or a mirror. In his book The Interface Effect, Alexander Galloway explains that media interfaces—video or computer screens, keypads, ATM kiosks, and so on—are often not understood as the surfaces they actually are but as “doorways or windows.” “Following this position,” he writes, “an interface is not something before you but rather is a gateway that opens and allows passage to some place beyond.”69 The more seamless the interface, the more virtuosic its usability and connectivity, the less visible the interface becomes. Mediation seems to disappear when the interface is working correctly and felicitously: As technology, the more a dioptric devise erases the traces of its own functioning (in actually delivering the thing represented beyond), the more it succeeds in its functional mandate; yet this very achievement undercuts the ultimate goal: the more intuitive a device becomes, the more it risks falling out of media altogether, becoming as naturalized as air or as common as dirt. To succeed, then, is at best selfdeception and at worst self-annihilation.70

Galloway borrows an example from Michael Serres to make his point. If a station sends a message and the delivery succeeds perfectly and immediately, then the relation between sender and receiver erases itself, becomes invisible. If the relation remains apparent, it is because the transmission has somehow failed—it is broken, delayed, absent.71 As Louise Poissant puts it, “We forget the ‘good’ interface precisely because it is transparent.” Visibility is synonymous with dysfunction.72

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Acconci and Jonas call attention to their interfaces through various levels of dysfunction, or what Galloway calls “unworkability.” Galloway offers an explanation of the “unworkable” through an enlightening comparison between a Norman Rockwell painting and a Mad magazine parody of the same image—a comparison, I would argue, that has close connections to the formal and semiotic structures in Acconci’s and Jonas’s videos. Rockwell’s Triple SelfPortrait (1960) shows the artist from behind, seated at his easel. To the left, a mirror throws back his front-facing (though reversed) image, which he transposes, with significant differences, to the canvas. In the mirror, Galloway points out, the artist looks worn and tired, and his eyes are disguised behind the reflective surfaces of his spectacles. On the canvas, however, he paints an image of a lively, bright-eyed, more youthful version of himself. While this is an image that is clearly about the interface and “presents a dazzling array” of interfaces within it, it ultimately disguises its own function as an interface between the viewer and the Saturday Evening Post, to which it serves as a cover. The functioning of the image as an interface to the magazine is, according to Galloway, rendered “invisible because all of the viewer’s energies that might have been reserved for tackling those difficult ‘meta’ questions about reflections and layers for reflexive circulation of meaning are exercised to exhaustion before they have the opportunity to illustrate the frame of the illustration itself.”73 Already in this analysis one can hear echoes of Krauss’s and Wagner’s arguments about reflection and reflexivity, of centering, interfacing with an audience, and indexical relationships. In the Rockwell image, Galloway writes, “there is a circulation of coherence within the image that gestures toward the outside, while ultimately remaining afraid of it.”74 The image, despite being an interface and being about interfaces, functions invisibly, remaining self-enclosed and autonomous. Rockwell may look straight out at the viewer from the mirror, but the reflective surfaces of his glasses—another set of mirrors—disrupts this contact. Richard Williams’s take on Rockwell’s image for Mad magazine, on the other hand, creates “a kind of semiotic short circuit” that ruptures the coherence and workability of the image and the many interfaces at work in it. The image is nearly identical to Rockwell’s. Like Rockwell, Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, sits on his stool and looks into the mirror. But Neuman does not paint his own face, not even in Rockwell’s reversed and idealized manner. He paints himself from the viewer’s perspective; in that sense, he depicts a “true image.” The viewer sees the back of Neuman’s head twice over—on the stool and on the canvas. Neuman, reflected in the mirror, directly—mischievously—meets the viewer’s gaze. The “self-portrait” fractures the easy working of the interface. It makes the interface visible and the viewer’s position in front of it felt. The Mad satire, Galloway argues, splinters the “circular coherences” of Rockwell’s images and replaces them with “orthogonal spikes that break the image apart.” Here, “Every ounce of energy within the image is aimed at its own externalization.”75 Through its specific mode of direct address, which Galloway, like Wagner, calls “apostrophe,” Williams’s image of Mad’s mascot shatters the interface. Addressing the viewer, Galloway writes, has always been “a very special mode of representation. … It appears in

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debased forms like pornography, or folk forms like the home video, or marginalized political forms like Brechtian theater, or forms of ideological interpellation like the nightly news.”76 The Mad image, by including the direct address and solicitation of the viewer within its own frame, reflexively (not reflectively) calls the viewer’s attention to the edges and away from the center. “The tension between these two images,” Galloway argues, “is that of coherence versus incoherence, of centers creating an autonomous logic versus edges creating a logic of flows, transformations, movement, process, and lines of flight. The edges are firmly evoked in the second image. They are dissolved in the first.”77 Uncanny Interface Returning to Jentsch’s, Freud’s, and Weber’s notions of the uncanny via Jonas’s and Acconci’s videos and their unworkable interfaces, I am compelled to add another view to the discussion: that articulated in Masahiro Mori’s “The Uncanny Valley.” In this 1970 essay, the engineer explains the emotional sensations many people have when they encounter humanlike robots. Mori plots a series of artificial prostheses and devices along a graph that charts their relative lifelikeness against their tendency to produce affinity or eerie revulsion in observers (figure 2.8). Industrial robots look little like humans, and thus

Figure 2.8 Mashiro Mori, Uncanny Valley graph, 1970. Originally published in Energy (1970). The graph maps the animated and inanimate objects that tend to elicit uncanny reactions from viewers. Mori, a roboticist, found that there was a critical point at which lifelike resemblance in a robot became unappealing, even terrifying to people. He called this dropping off of affection “the uncanny valley.”

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individuals tend to feel little affection for or affinity with them. Toys and humanoid robots, which come closer to human form but do not accurately achieve it, tend to produce feelings of affection, pleasure, and love. Mori notices that this trend toward human form does not continue to produce positive reactions as objects approach human verisimilitude, however. Instead there is a critical point at which positive feelings steeply drop into disgust and revulsion, or what Mori calls “the uncanny valley.” He illustrates this tendency with the example of a prosthetic hand that an observer mistakes as natural. “Once we realize that the hand that looked real at first sight is actually artificial,” he writes, “we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny. In mathematical terms, this can be represented by a negative value.”78 With the addition of movement, the effects become even starker, in that it is even more difficult to tell the living from the dead, the natural from the artificial, the animate from the inanimate. Mori’s observations about robotics adhere relatively closely to the concept of the uncanny as presented by the psychologists discussed above. Both Jentsch and Freud use robots and automata as examples of uncanny objects in their accounts, principally via reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman.” I bring Mori into the discussion here as he—along with Weber—helps to theorize how technologies produce uncanny effects. For Weber it is video’s ability to perturb the hierarchies of model and copy—the distinction between the live and the dead/recorded—that grounds the medium’s uncanny effects. In Mori’s account, too, the threshold between the living and the dead, between the model and the copy, must be easily and instantly legible or else it profoundly unsettles our relationship to the world. Mori frames it as an instinct that protects us from “proximal” rather than “distal” dangers, such as corpses, disease, and other species.79 For him, a sense of the “uncanny” is a suspicion that helps to protect us from others. When Acconci and Jonas unwork the interface, they drop into the uncanny valley. The direct address of talking heads on TV may not disturb or alarm the average viewer, but Acconci’s pointing finger and come-hither catcalls tend to produce immediate responses of recoil. Jonas’s juxtaposition of video and mirror images destabilizes the viewer’s relationship to her own body and image as well as to the ones on the screen before her. The artist comes face to face with doubles that are familiar and strange, opposites and twins. By denaturalizing video and separating it from its easy association with windows, doors, and mirrors, Acconci’s and Jonas’s works call attention to the mediating surface and its effects. Interfaces, according to Galloway (at this moment ventriloquizing Gérard Genette), are “zones of indecision” that must always “juggle between two things (the edge and the center) at the same time.”80 As unworkable interfaces, Acconci’s and Jonas’s videos operate reflexively to bring together a series of opposites—edge and center, reflexivity and reflection, the arguments of Krauss and Wagner, seduction and refusal, live and “dead,” homely and unhomely, desire and fear, as well as all of the indexical, deictic possibilities of temporal and spatial relationality: I/you, now/then, here/there. The uncanny valley as it

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appears on and through telecommunications technology switches from a case of proximal uncertainty to one of mediated, distal undesirability. Acconci and Jonas begin a narrative continued throughout this book about the uncanny, indexical indeterminacy of the telecommunications interface and the viewer’s relationship to the events depicted on the screen— about how we might reach out to touch the image on or through it. The circuits of video, whether one considers them reflective or reflexive, draw the viewer into an uncanny and confounding trap. Neither Jonas nor Acconci plays the role of a modern-day Narcissus. Rather, they present themselves as Terminus.

3 Touching Television: Chris Burden’s Anti-Spectacular Video and the Ethics of Observation

Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool is better remembered for its dizzying conflation of reality and fiction than for its plot. The film is set in Chicago during the summer of 1968, and it was filmed then and there. Wexler’s characters wander through the tumultuous protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The demonstrations and resulting violence were part of the plot, but they were not staged. Wexler, and everybody else, knew that the protests would draw the attention of the authorities, and that the police, the National Guard, and news media would be ready and waiting. They all predicted the confrontation and planned their actions, outfits, and attendance accordingly. Even though Wexler and his cast and crew were there on the scene, they were not necessarily participants in the events, as the police and protesters were. They meandered through the crowds and clashes, but they did not intervene; instead, they watched. On Wexler’s reel, thousands of kids sit in the street chanting, “the whole world is watching,” and Wexler was part of that watching world.1 Medium Cool is a careful meditation on observation and nonintervention, which mirrors Wexler’s own position as observant bystander. The film opens with the unwavering blare of a car horn. A wrecked car sits on an empty stretch of highway, just beneath an overpass. The vehicle has hopped the median and collided with a metering light. A young woman’s body lies on the pavement, thrown from the passenger seat. Two men hustle toward the crash. They are a news crew. They do not comfort or help the victim; rather they quickly get to work documenting the scene. Cameraman John Casselis (Robert Forrester) rapidly sets up a few shots. The soundman Gus (Peter Bonerz) reaches under the hood of the car and cuts the horn. He leans his microphone toward the woman’s body to pick up her soft moans. She is still alive. Casellis steps over her limp body to get a close-up. He and the soundman then leisurely walk back to their car and pack up the equipment. As the men leave, they radio the TV station to let them know they have film for the evening news and that someone should send an ambulance. They are just there to witness, not to intervene. In the final moments of the film, Casellis suffers the same fate as the woman he recorded in the opening scene: after a devastating car crash, he is left on the side of the road. Rubberneckers in a passing car casually take his picture from their moving window and continue on.

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Figure 3.1 Haskell Wexler (dir.), Medium Cool, 1969. Film still.

The last shot of the film pulls out from the wreck, and widens along the length of country road. The shot pans to show Wexler behind another camera, perched on a scaffold high above the ground (figure 3.1). He turns his camera toward the film’s audience, breaking the fourth wall. He meets the audience’s gaze with his own. One eye is strangely extended by the camera’s gargantuan lens; the other is open, rather than being tightly shut to properly use the monocular device. His eyes, mediated and unmediated, stare dispassionately at the viewer. Like Casellis, the audience has watched the events—real and fictive—unfold from the other side of a lens, from the other side of the screen. Wexler positions his characters and his audience in parallel positions: they are detached, distant observers, no matter how close they might be. The director presses his audience to recognize their responsibility for, or complicity with, the scene. Of course, Medium Cool is a film and the events within it are all in the past. This does not, however, prevent Wexler from illustrating the problematic relationship between viewer and viewed in live video and television. Medium Cool is a film about television—about the networks and the “boob tube,” and also about “tele-vision,” that is, vision at a distance. It considers what it is like to experience a distant event in real time, and how this televisual logic can be displaced into real space. When Medium Cool was filmed, television was in the process of expanding. 1968 was not just the year of the DNC protests and Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos”; the year also marked the popularization of the portable video camera, and the beginning of the first wave of video art, examined in the previous chapter.2 In this chapter, I turn to the work of Chris Burden, a sculptor known for his daring body performances, to examine how the screen—and particularly the television screen—was understood as an interface that at once connected viewers to a live, “immediate” scene while at the same time keeping them distant and insulated from the physical effects and social consequences of what they witnessed on or through it. Drawing upon Guy Debord’s analysis

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of “the society of the spectacle” and Marshall McLuhan’s curious proposition that television, as a medium, is inherently tactile and participatory, I will argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that while Burden’s live performances of the 1970s imported a spectacularizing, “televisual” passivity into unmediated spaces, his CCTV video performances from the same period worked to remake the video screen into a potentially “anti-spectacular” site. The TV screen in Burden’s works became a place for interaction that demanded urgent intervention and physical touch. Comparing live “unmediated” performances such as Shoot (1971) and Doomed (1975) to CCTV performances Velvet Water (1974), Back to You (1974), and Do You Believe in Television? (1976), I contend that Burden’s use of video invited viewers to become actively and tactilely involved with the represented event by making conscious choices to cross (or not cross) to the other side of the screen. Like Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, discussed in the previous chapter, Burden used the televisual interface as a means of connecting with an audience and, at the same time, placing that audience in a spatially and temporally indeterminate relationship to what the screen showed. In Burden’s works, however, the viewers were also implicated in ambiguous ethical relationships with what was on the screen, and their potential action or inaction carried serious moral implications. As such, he did not simply use the screen as a “window” onto a distant place, or as an “unworkable interface” that simultaneously solicited and denied contact.3 Rather, he figured the video screen as a physical threshold that demanded to be crossed. Unlike Wexler, Burden pressed his audience to become directly, physically involved with the events on the other side of the lens or screen, and in so doing challenged the loss of presence, participation, and physical relationality associated with the immobilizing effects of the televisual interface and spectacular culture. Are They Going to Leave Me Here to Die? At 8:20 pm on April 11, 1975, Chris Burden lay down behind a sheet of plate glass in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. He did not get up—or move—for 45 hours and 10 minutes. Before ensconcing himself in the makeshift vitrine, Burden set an office clock to 12:00 and hung it on the wall adjacent to his “piece.” The clock kept a running count of the hours and minutes he spent on view, as well as the consecutive hours that the museum was forced to stay open to accommodate his performance. For nearly two days, a rapt audience sat watching and waiting for something to happen. Photographs of the performance, Doomed, show the crowd sitting on the ground in a semicircle in front of the screen (figure 3.2). While discussing this work in terms of a screen may seem out of place—Doomed was, in fact, a direct and unmediated live performance—the comparison is hard to resist. The crowd of viewers sat cross-legged and hunched over, like children during a Saturday morning cartoon marathon. Even Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, carefully watched the event. Burden was barely a “moving image” but Doomed activated a series of associations with television and cinema.

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Figure 3.2 Chris Burden, Doomed, 1975. Video still. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

Doomed finally ended at 5:30 pm on April 13, when Dennis O’Shea, a museum security guard, placed a pitcher of water behind the glass, near Burden’s head. Burden immediately got up, picked up a hammer and smashed the clock, “recording the exact amount of time which had lapsed from beginning to end.”4 He then handed a sealed envelope to the museum staff. A note inside revealed the parameters of the performance: it would go on indefinitely until a staff member disturbed one of its three elements—Burden, the glass, or the clock. By placing the water behind the screen, O’Shea had directly intervened in the scene.5 Museum Director Ira Licht had earlier requested that Burden do something more temporally substantial than his infamous performance Shoot (1971) (discussed below), which lasted only a matter of seconds, so as not to disappoint any museum members who might arrive late. Burden designed his performance in reaction to Licht’s irritating request: “I thought, if he’s concerned about how long the piece will be, I’ll do a piece in which he has complete control over the length.”6 In the early hours of the performance, the crowd of nearly 400 spectators did make some attempts at rousing Burden—they whistled, clapped, jeered, and one even threw a brassiere

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at the glass—but they were all kept at bay by the museum staff.7 The audience called out to be entertained; as Ebert put it, they “expected more,” they “had come to see blood.”8 The audience wanted to see something happen, another indication, perhaps, that the situation appeared to be something like television—it was there to provide action and entertainment. Doomed, however, was structured less like a form of entertainment programming than like a “continuously covered” news event, which one watches in the hope that action will emerge and unfold. Radio and news stations picked up the “story” and reported on its progress over the two days.9 In the media as well as in the gallery, Doomed was a standoff between Burden and the museum, but one in which the museum was ignorant of Burden’s demands. The staff assumed he wanted to be left alone. They kept the crowd calm and blocked any attempts to disturb Burden or the scene. In the words of the museum’s publicist, Arlene Valkanas, they “felt a moral obligation not to interfere with Burden’s intentions. … We thought the rules of the piece required us to do nothing.”10 In the context of the museum, one could argue that Burden appeared as an artwork behind glass, subject to the institutionally maintained aura that permitted viewers to look but not touch. Walter Benjamin famously defined the aura as “the unique phenomena of a distance no matter how close it may be,” and Burden seemed to be far out of reach.11 But Burden’s assumptions about the auratic properties of his body, and how the event would unfold, as he later explained to Ebert, were quite different: I thought perhaps the piece would last several hours. I thought maybe they’d come up and say, “okay, Chris, it’s 2 a.m. and everybody’s gone home and the guards are on overtime and we have to close up.” That would have ended the piece, and I would have broken the clock, recording the elapsed time. On the first night, when I realized that they weren’t going to stop the piece, I was pleased and impressed that they had placed the integrity of the piece ahead of the institutional requirements of the museum. On the second night, I thought, my God, don’t they care anything at all about me? Are they going to leave me here to die?12

The performance ended precisely when a single person stopped treating the glass as a screen and Burden as if he were a spectacle, and instead tended to his needs as a living being in directly shared space. O’Shea’s act of placing a pitcher of water next to the artist, behind the screen, signaled two things: first, he thought about what Burden might be feeling (“He must be thirsty”), and second, he realized he could do something about it. The staff and audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art were reluctant, even unwilling, to sustain Burden while he was in their space. He was merely on view for observation. The museum consulted doctors and specialists to shape their decisions, but they never asked the artist. The work’s title, Doomed, points to the rather bleak expectations Burden had of being “saved.” The glass sheet seemed to mark a boundary between Burden and the public. For the audience that gathered in front of the screen for two days, Burden’s body appeared as impervious and remote as a television image. In his play-by-play description of the “action,” Ebert writes, “Burden seemed removed to a great distance.”13 It was as if he was merely telepresent—live in real time, but not in real space.

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Spectacles and Screens The passivity, inactivity, and alienation that characterized Burden’s performance, as well as the (non-)actions of the staff and the audience, place Doomed squarely in the logic of spectacle. Written in 1967, on the brink of the various “revolutions” of 1968, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle offers a Marxist critique of consumer culture and a theory for understanding the spectator-audience relationships that would emerge in Burden’s performance works of the 1970s. Commodity culture is organized, Debord argues, around the alienation of individuals from their labor and the isolation of individuals from one another.14 Individuals in this atomized culture engage with the world as if it were always already mediated. “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail,” he writes in the first line of his book, “presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”15 Workers produce and sustain technologies, systems, and structures that in turn reinforce the separation, isolation, and alienation that began in the restructuring and reorganization of their labor, such that “[t]he product of contemporary society is ‘separation itself’.”16 It would be easy to mistake mass media as spectacle itself, but Debord is clear that spectacle is not simply “the product of the technology of mass dissemination of images”; rather, it is a “Weltanschauung that has become actualized, translated into an objective force.”17 Spectacle may be easiest to describe or illustrate by means of these technologies and the images they produce, but it is actually something much more insidious, profound, and hard to locate. “The spectacle,” Debord writes, “is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people mediated by images.”18 While technologies of mass communication such as television and cinema are not the cause of spectacular culture, they emerge in Debord’s text as what Thomas Y. Levin calls “privileged figures” that help “concretize” his theory of spectacle as the condition of late capital.19 There are compelling reasons, however, for paying close attention to the roles mass media play in sustaining or modeling spectacular culture. As Jonathan Crary points out, Debord located the emergence of the society of the spectacle at a very specific historical moment: 1927, the year of the first synchronous sound film, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, and of Vladimir Zworykin’s patent for an early video tube.20 To Crary’s list one could add John Logie Baird’s invention and demonstration of mechanical television in the early 1920s, his first long-distance transmission in 1927, and the first trans-Atlantic broadcast in 1928, as well as Philo T. Farnsworth’s 1927 demonstration of his own electronic television system.21 The invention of television and the speedy organization and institutional regulation of broadcasting, Crary writes, arrived just at the moment when “an awareness arose of the age of mechanical reproduction” and when the political and social effects of photography and cinema were first being analyzed. With this technology, “a new model of circulation and transmission appeared that was to exceed the age, one that had no need of silver salts or

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permanent physical support. The spectacle was to become inseparable from this kind of new image and its speed, ubiquity, and simultaneity.”22 Television’s unidirectional, instantaneous delivery of images and sound to individual home receivers well illustrates Debord’s general conceptualization of spectacle, which “unites what is separate, but … only in its separateness.”23 When watching television, isolated viewers consume the same images as their neighbors, and potentially as everyone else in the world at the same moment but from different locations. They are unified in time but not in space. They are connected to each other, via the centralized node of the broadcasting station, only because each is in front of his or her individual home receiver. The viewers feel linked to a shared world precisely because they are distanced and mediated from it. Ironically, the image appears unmediated because of its extensive mediation.24 But spectacle is not confined to those technologies such as cinema and television that appear to give us the world and community while isolating us; their logic of distance, inaccessibility, and unidirectionality has also spread, he argues, to unmediated or direct experiences: The spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of a real activity. Likewise, lived reality suffers the material assaults of the spectacle’s mechanisms of contemplation, incorporating the spectacular order and lending that order positive support. Each side therefore has its share of objective reality. And every other concept, as it takes place on one side or the other, has no foundation apart from its transformation into its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and underpinning of society as it exists.25

The spectacle does not simply exist on or through screens; the whole world becomes screened and spectacularized, even when it is experienced directly. As I argued in earlier chapters, the televisual interface, as a screen and a site, sustains a set of processes or effects through which one thing appears to turn into its opposite—the recorded appears live, the distant appears close, and vice versa. Debord describes this televisual property as structuring all of life and people’s engagement with things and other beings, lending credence to Crary’s argument for the centrality of television to Debord’s theories. Though mass media, according to Debord, are only “the most stultifying superficial manifestation” of the spectacle, they structure a sort of engagement and viewing that are essential to society under its rule.26 Debord’s language quite felicitously describes the social structure that emerged around Doomed. Burden’s performance was separated from the audience and administrators by a sheet of glass, which like the glass of the television screen made the scene seem “to unfold as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation” and “immune to intervention.” Burden became “mere representation,” unifying the group of observers only by sealing them off from the scene itself. Doomed was not sculpture or performance but “a social relationship between people mediated by images.”27 And despite the viewers being present in the same space with him, the communication seemed to be exclusively one-way: the viewers witnessed a spectacle and responded with inaction and isolation. The televisual logic spread into the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In his around-the-clock performance,

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Burden showed that spectacle, as Debord poetically put it, “is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity.”28 The passive contemplation of Debord’s “lonely crowd” was not the only model of televisual consumption circulating in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), which predated Debord’s book by just a few years, claimed an alternate set of properties for the television image and imagined a different viewing subject of contemporary media. Television, in McLuhan’s analysis, is a “cool medium” like the telephone, meaning that it required the viewer’s or user’s participation to reach its “completion.”29 While the participation necessary for a successful phone call is quite evident, it is much less clear how one interactively engages with television. Unlike speech or the telephone, TV is not a bidirectional medium. It is, as Debord wrote, “essentially one way”: TV sets are “receivers,” and the pictured scene is impervious to the activities of the viewers. McLuhan, however, had a very specific understanding of participation as it applied to television. The television image may seem to be complete and full of detail, but it is not. It is composed of fractured lines of color scrolling across the screen. An electron gun creates the television image by scanning the surface of the cathode ray tube, left to right, line by line. The image is never fully on the screen at any given moment, as a frame of film might be. It is a dynamic and partial picture with no stable, “still” form. The viewer, McLuhan argued, has to literally complete the television image by filling in the gaps between its scan lines. “The TV image is visually low in data. The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture.”30 If the viewer sees a complete image, it is only because her eye fills in the negative spaces. The eye becomes analogous to the “finger” of the electron beam, and sight becomes a haptic sense.31 This kind of looking, McLuhan argued, gives physical, sculptural shape to the image, which as a result enters into the viewer’s space. The mode of completion here is a kind of vision that, surprisingly, replicates tactility.32 In its insistence on the inherent, compulsive participation of the television viewer, McLuhan’s argument runs directly counter to Debord’s description of behavior in spectacular society. The synesthetic quality “or tactile depth of the TV experience,” McLuhan writes, “dislocates [viewers] from their usual attitudes of passivity and detachment.”33 The dispersed mass of television viewers, then, is not for McLuhan a “lonely crowd” but the contrary: an engaged, even “active” audience. Perhaps, however, Debord’s and McLuhan’s theories are not as distant from one another as they initially appear. Just as I argued in the previous chapter in regard to Krauss’s and Wagner’s interpretations of video’s essential qualities, this apparent opposition may also form an inseparable pair of mutually sustaining tendencies, the obverse and reverse of a single surface, namely, that of the video interface. It is hard to imagine a form of participation more passive than McLuhan’s automatic, compulsive filling in of the gaps in the television image. Moreover, Debord, like McLuhan, suggests that the spectacle

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causes a curious inversion of vision and touch. “Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via specialized mediations,” he writes, “it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch.”34 What we used to know by contact and closeness, we now access by vision and distance. “Every concept,” Debord adds, “as it takes place on one side or the other, has no foundation apart from its transformation into its opposite.”35 Here again the interface appears as a site where contraries become virtually indistinguishable. McLuhan’s “activity” looks just like Debord’s passivity. In both theories, television emerges as a type of seeing akin to touch. Debord’s reversal of privilege between the senses is in keeping with the technical specifications of television—it delivers real-time, distant experiences at the expense of embodied, tactile interactions in real space. McLuhan, on the other hand, saw television not as reversing but as uniting the senses, in such a way that vision becomes a subgenre of touch, the medium’s synesthetic qualities making up for the separation of the viewer’s body from the televised scene. This strange collapse of visuality and tactility, distance and proximity, as well as the inherently transgressive nature of such border crossings are significant in regard to Burden’s early performance and video pieces. His work from the 1970s stood at the interface between Debord’s and McLuhan’s theories. Burden’s performance works of the period assumed a passive spectator who would resist intervening in an unmediated and direct scene. His mediated, live video performances, on the other hand, challenged their audiences to become active participants, overcome the distance between viewer and viewed, and break the immobilizing hold of the televisual spectacle. The (Electron) Gun Burden exposed a close connection between the live performing body and the television image in his most infamous work, Shoot of 1971 (figure 3.3). Shoot gained him the curious reputation as “the artist who shot himself.” A quick glance at the work’s documentation (or we might say “evidence”) easily undermines this claim. A 16mm film of the event and several documentary photographs capture Burden in front of a white wall, squared off with a longhaired marksman. Photographs taken immediately afterward show his arm punctured clean through (figure 3.4). All of the documents make one thing clear: Burden did not shoot himself. They also attest to the fact that Burden and his agreeable assailant were not alone. There were others present. Not only were a filmmaker and a photographer on hand, but also a small audience, whose members appear at the edges of the photographs. Just as in Doomed, the audience was asked to witness an event. What else Burden expected them to do, if anything, was unclear. Frazer Ward has argued that Shoot “called out for intervention on the part of collaborators or audience members.”36 However, no one interfered; no one voiced a challenge in the face of the potentially lethal act. Here, as in Doomed, the audience followed the convention of nonintervention, despite the fact that they were not just

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Figure 3.3 Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971. Photographic documentation of performance, F-space, Santa Ana, California, November 19, 1971. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

witnesses to an unlawful act but also its complicit, complacent enablers. “The uncertainty of the demand made of the audience,” Ward writes, “means that to the extent that Burden’s public was a realm of participation and responsibility, it was one shot through with dilemma and indecision.”37 Ward describes the social situation created by Shoot as analogous to the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, which more than 30 neighbors witnessed from their New York windows although, allegedly, none intervened. Genovese was attacked by Winston Moseley just after 3:00 am on March 13 in Kew Gardens, Queens. Moseley chased her from a parking lot to her building, stabbing her twice in the back. He fled the scene after a neighbor shouted from a window, but returned again 10 minutes later, raping and repeatedly stabbing her as she lay in the hallway of her building. The reporting of the event at the time focused on the inactivity of the many witnesses to the murder.38 The case, Ward explains, “became a national media symbol for the failure of public responsibility,” and led to the development of sociological theories of the “‘bystander effect’ and ‘diffusion of responsibility,’ [which

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Figures 3.4 Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971. Post-performance documentation. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

posited] that an individual was less likely to intervene as the number of bystanders increased.”39 This “arrested judgment” and paralytic (non-)participation describes the televisual situation that marks the intersection of Debord’s and McLuhan’s theories, and also characterizes the audience’s roles in Shoot and Doomed. Shoot required both the audience’s presence and their passivity. They completed the piece in an automatic, effortless, “televisual” way by allowing it to render them immobile and inactive. The rifle and a TV camera’s electron gun seemed, for a moment, to be analogous, if not quite the same. Viewers of Burden’s “televisual” event found themselves, surprisingly, in front of a real shootout. The misattribution of agency—that Burden shot “himself”—speaks to how easy it is to absent oneself from a spectacular situation, and how readily spectators attributed all agency and responsibility to the artist. The spectators were just there to watch. Media theorist Stanley Cavell describes the logic of television, especially live coverage of unfolding events, as a form of armed event. In live television, he writes, “what we are presented with is happening simultaneously with its presentation,” but, he argues, what is actually presented to the viewer “is not the world, but an event standing out from the world. Its point is not to reveal, but to cover (as with a gun), to keep something in view.”40 Cavell’s description of live television and the kind of watching it produces is akin to the spectator

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positions in Doomed and Shoot, and to Debord’s description of the spectacle being perceived as “a world apart,” even if it shares the very same space as the viewer. The logic of “coverage,” of watching in an expectant way, of what Cavell calls “monitoring” the scene, is one that is based in distance—of hiding in blinds or using a kind of weapon that allows one to be simultaneously attentive and removed. While the gun metaphor may imply that one can react, that one can take action (“shoot”), the act of “monitoring” simultaneously implies that the scene will be watched on a monitor, or at least viewed in a mediated, screened, or otherwise separated, spectacularized way. The action taken will not be to interfere, but to press record. The decision to be shot was, for Burden, closely connected to television and the desire to get close to what it showed, to take it off the monitor.41 In a 1973 Avalanche interview with Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear, the artist explained Shoot as follows: “Well, it’s something to experience. How do you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t experience it? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing … everybody watches it on TV every day. America is the big shoot-out country. About fifty percent of American folklore is about people getting shot.”42 He offered a similar reading of the performance 25 years later: “We see people getting shot so many times, faked or real, on T.V.—everybody thinks about what it must feel like—not consciously but subconsciously. So I think that this is an entry point where people outside the art world can understand something about it.”43 In Burden’s mind, Shoot is emphatically linked to television and the distant-yet-present violence it delivers. As Ward points out, Burden’s work “operates in relation to what the artist calls ‘tradition’ or ‘folklore,’ but these are tied to mass media, and hence to the generic forms of gun violence, fictional or otherwise: westerns, war movies, crime genres, and also, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the television news.”44 To this one might add the bloodied bodies of antiwar protesters that fill Grant Park in Wexler’s Medium Cool, which were also carried on the reels of the evening news that night.45 Burden claimed that he wanted to get in touch with this mediate experience and actually feel the effects he had only ever experienced televisually. Burden’s wish to “know what it feels like” was, perhaps, self-destructive, but this knowledge was in the service of empathy. Just as the gallery guard identified with Burden’s thirst during Doomed, Shoot helped Burden empathize with those on the other side of screen. To his audience, he delivered the experience of being there, of knowing what it was like to witness the event without the literal mediation of the screen. Yet in taking the normative “spectacle” off of the screen, he activated Debord’s concept of spectacular culture and its “reciprocal alienation.” Despite their literal presence, the audiences of Shoot and Doomed still behaved like television audiences. It was as if the events were far away, mediated, and unavailable. The loss of physical presence, interactivity, and relationality established by broadcast television spectacularly spilled over into real space. To map the spread of the spectacular logic of television onto real space, Burden stepped into the direct fire of a gun. But to become present to his audience, he would step in front of the video camera, the electron gun.

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Do You Believe in Television? Burden’s sensational performances like Shoot led to offers to appear on network television. Recounting one invitation, he writes: “[A TV] producer called me up and said: ‘Chris, we will do anything for you blah, blah, blah!’ I said to them: ‘OK, I want 30 seconds of your advertising time.’ And they replied: ‘No! Impossible!’ It was absurd. They conceived of me as Alice Cooper—a big spectacle.”46 This comment communicates two important aspects of Burden’s desires in regard to television: first, that he wished to engage with the structures of television— not only its formal ebb and flow of program and break, but its commercial, commodity structures as well; second, despite his propensity for sensational stunts, that Burden did not want to be a “spectacle.” While he did make use of his newfound infamy to land appearances on major market programs, for the most part Burden got on television the old-fashioned way: he paid.47 Beginning in 1973, Burden began buying commercial airtime. “It was unfair that television was a monolithic structure,” he wrote. “It was a one way street—you know, it came to you. And then I thought, ‘Oh, I know how to get on TV. You buy it. You pay for it and those minutes are yours.’ You put a crack in the monolithic wall and they’ll be none the wiser.”48 Between 1973 and 1977, Burden ran four television commercials: TV Ad (1973) (figure 3.5), Poem for LA (1975), Promo (1976), and Full Financial Disclosure (1977).49 Each one advertised Burden’s career and general existence, as well as his success in opening a crack in the “monolith.” Burden’s TV ads announced his infiltration of the broadcast system. “The content wasn’t important,” Burden claimed, “it was the idea of being on real TV, which to me means something you can flip to on a dial. Anything else—cable, educational, video—it isn’t real TV. I didn’t have any illusion that people understood this, that they said, ‘Oh, that’s Chris Burden and he’s doing a performance.’ But I know it stood out like a sore thumb and I had the satisfaction of knowing that 250,000 people saw it every night and it was disturbing to them and they knew something was amiss.”50 Rather than using the sanctioned avenues for artistic expression, Burden played corporate television’s game by paying for the right to appear. He didn’t, however, become an unremarkable part of the “flow” of television programming. His ads called attention to themselves as aberrant eruptions. They stood out from the standard fare by means of their formal differences and strange agendas. They were minimal, quiet, and, because of that, jarring. They neither seduced the viewer nor attempted to sell her a conventional product. Neither did they allow her to recuperate a (false) sense of agency by making the choice to purchase something. Not even Burden’s artworks were being sold. The ads illustrated one way that an individual might have agency in the face of spectacular culture, and gave Burden access to what Debord calls “the exclusive assets of the system’s managers,” to the power the networks had over their passive and isolated audiences.51 He showed the cracks in the spectacle structure of television, yet without overturning or reversing the power that Debord had described. The ads neither made television bidirectional nor allowed the viewer any greater participatory

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Figure 3.5 Chris Burden, TV Ad, 1973. Storyboard for television commercial. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

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stake in the televisual image. The at-home viewer may have been shocked or even disturbed, but her engagement was still limited to merely “filling in the image” in McLuhanish fashion. In a parallel series of works from the same period, Burden did attempt to undo the isolating, immobilizing, unidirectional power of television. Yet he was only able to do so by leaving the realm of “real television” for closed-circuit TV (CCTV), which allowed him to focus exclusively on the properties of live transmission and vision at a distance without the distracting context of the broadcast channels. Live performances and CCTV provided a formal scenario in which he could test his audience’s passivity and the imperviousness of the televisual spectacle. Burden staged a series of video interventions that linked screen space to the immediate space of the spectator. In doing so, he not only made the televised image interactive and put a crack in the spectacular “monolith,” but also activated a tactile engagement with the televisual that far surpassed any mode of participation imagined by McLuhan. Burden took up CCTV as a way to model a kind of television that could restore the various forms of contact and participation that had been lost by spectacular culture and its attendant systems, “real television” in particular. If a spectacular, televisual logic had migrated from the screen into adjacent spaces of “lived” reality (not only in Burden’s Doomed and Shoot but in the society of the spectacle in general), his introduction of live video into his performances staked out the TV screen as a potential site—perhaps the only site—where one might regain contact or proximity, collapse spectacular distance, and thereby return touch to its privileged position. In a sense, Burden’s adoption of closed-circuit television constituted what Debord had described as a “mechanical assault” on the spectacle that transforms everything “into its opposite.” For Documenta 6 (1977), Burden made C.B.T.V. (Chris Burden Television), a working model of Scottish inventor John Logie Baird’s mechanical television system (figure 3.6). In 1924, Baird had been the first to successfully transmit a television image over wire, but his television was eventually made obsolete by the electronic television systems designed by Farnsworth and Zworykin. The title of Burden’s work, C.B.T.V. (Chris Burden Television), is somewhat misleading, since it was an exact model of Baird’s invention. Just as in the inventor’s original demonstrations, C.B.T.V. sent television images from one room to another. At Documenta, a visitor could position herself or an object in front of the perforated, spinning disk of the camera (figure 3.6a) and send an image to a nearly identical device that received and reconstructed the image (figure 3.6b). While the person at the camera could never see the monitor nor confirm that her images were being transmitted, a viewer could turn the corner and see how and where the images were created. Describing the piece, Burden writes: The theory behind television, or the instantaneous transmission of a moving image from one place to another, was known for 60 years before it was physically possible to demonstrate it. … I believe that

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Figure 3.6 Chris Burden, C.B.T.V., 1977. Installation documentation.

as a technological invention this apparatus is of extreme significance, as it is a most successful solution to man’s historic desire to “see beyond” his immediate surroundings. As technology becomes more and more complex, fewer and fewer people have any understanding of how anything really works. By duplicating and demonstrating this complex piece of apparatus in its original “simple” form, I hope to aid people to understand this complex instrument that has made instant visual communication possible.52

Burden time-traveled to an earlier technological moment with the hope of understanding daunting contemporary devices. If television’s modern, electronic form has prevented the average person from understanding how it works, Burden turns to its mechanical beginnings to establish the facts of the situation. His emphasis on mechanical television underlines the process and its effects as unquestionably and uncontroversially indexical.53 The setup encouraged the viewers to test the machine and the veracity and verisimilitude of the images it produced by staging encounters across its length of wire. A participant might travel from one room to the next, stand in front of the curiously spinning disk, and have a companion confirm her appearance on the primitive tube. Her own physical movement from one space to the other mimicked the path of her televised image. Through empirical testing, conversation, and collaboration she could confirm the operation of the image and the physical as well as temporal relationship of here to there. In the passage quoted above, Burden suggests that while Baird’s television may have been primitive in comparison to electronic (and now digital) models, the desire that fueled the research was in no way “simple.” Despite Burden’s active and atypical engagement with broadcast television, he defined television, here, exclusively in terms of instantaneous

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transmission and the motivating desire to “see beyond.” C.B.T.V. did not have thousands of simultaneous viewers as did Burden’s broadcast commercials. It distilled television to its formal essence and provoked the question, Just how far away does something have to be for it to be regarded as televised? Minimal distances are important in Burden’s live video works. Visions that come from across the hall or down the stairs are far enough to be mediated, but close enough to be reached. Burden’s video performance works Velvet Water (1974), Back to You (1974), and Do You Believe in Television? (1976) carefully exploited television’s capacity for live transmission to create situations that activated the same sense of urgency and intervention as had Shoot and Doomed, but with an additional remove provided by the image’s mediation. Each presented a live, televisual scene, but the distance of these scenes from the viewer was so small that the original was potentially at hand. If the viewer was so motivated, she could traverse the distance between her body and the real-time image. As in C.B.T.V., however, Burden denied her the “narcissistic” pleasure of seeing herself on the monitor.54 To see Burden in the flesh or to appear on camera themselves, the audience members had to travel to another nearby space. Velvet Water, Back to You, and Do You Believe in Television? did not unfold as if they were on TV; they were instead television in a simpler, more direct form.55 For Velvet Water, Burden invited an audience to witness him perform an act for live CCTV. The video documentation of the May 7, 1974, performance shows Burden sitting in a chair next to a small bathroom sink filled with water. He turns toward the camera and states, “Today I am going to breathe water, which is the opposite from drowning, because when you breathe water you believe the water to be a thicker, richer oxygen capable of sustaining life.”56 Burden proceeds to do just what he has said. He bows his head toward the sink and submerges his face. His back expands with a breath and his body convulses. His shoulders jerk violently with each inhale. His head pops up and he immediately forces it back down. The gagging sounds of Burden’s audible underwater breaths slow considerably over the five-minute duration of the performance. By the end of the tape, Burden’s head lolls in the water, only intermittently emerging for desperate gasps of breath. Burden continued this cycle of forced choking until he collapsed onto the floor, unable to compel himself to go on. Velvet Water had a similar structure to Shoot: Burden acted out a flawed and reckless premise and the audience watched without intervening.57 The difference between the two pieces, besides the duration and room for error, is how the audience received the performance. In Shoot, the audience watched the direct—if brief—act occur in their own space. Velvet Water, on the other hand, unfolded both in front of and adjacent to the audience. The seated audience watched Burden’s performance on a bank of live video monitors in front of them. A large center screen showed a close-up of his face, while smaller flanking terminals transmitted wide-angle shots. Documentation of the performance, which took place at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the majority of the audience facing forward looking at the monitors. Scattered individuals in the crowd look away, covering their mouths, as if choking

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back sympathetic gags. These viewers all face to the left, where Burden was actually located, shielded from their sight by a bank of lockers. Those sitting closest to the lockers in the photographs appear to be the most affected by the performance. They have turned away from the image and toward his physical presence. Though the audience watched Velvet Water on live monitors, the action took place in the very same room. This was not a “far-off” vision; it was merely indirect. The audience could, no doubt, hear Burden on the other side of the partition, as their attention to the left side of the room indicates. To see Burden directly, they would have had to cross to the other side of the lockers. Rather than using the video apparatus to repeat and multiply his image or to communicate his first-person perspective to the audience, Burden inserted a layer of distance between himself and the audience. In doing so, he emphasized the spectacular effects of his performance—a group of spectators witnessed an event that was, at once, both mediated and immediate. If C.B.T.V. could be understood as demonstrating the technical, formal, and epistemological properties of television to the audience in a science fair style, and as teaching them that video connects a here to a there, Velvet Water shows the audience’s resistance to seeing the implications of that relationship. Burden could not motivate the viewer to be more than a witness. Velvet Water seemed to be something set apart, untouchable and distant regardless of its proximity. What he showed them on the monitors was not his foolhardy suffering but their own unflagging passivity. Burden’s other video performances of the period worked harder to refuse the audience this spectacular distance. The audience could think—or believe—that they were separate from the event, but their belief, like Burden’s own “belief” that water was a thicker form of oxygen, was ill founded and false. Back to You and Do You Believe in Television? each forced the audience to participate in and asked them to feel directly responsible for what did or did not happen on the screen. Back to You, a live video performance on January 16, 1974, again took up the conceptual and ethical stakes of Shoot, while at the same time challenging the popular media image of Burden that arose in the aftermath of that work. The performance took place at 112 Greene Street Gallery in New York City as part of “Videoperformance,” an exhibition curated by Willoughby Sharp. Back to You would be Burden’s first New York performance. Local newspapers and tabloids touted his arrival and warned, to Burden’s dismay, “he’s coming to New York, he’s going to do something, and this time he’s going to DO IT TO THE AUDIENCE.”58 The papers’ insinuation of physical contact, possibly even physical violence, did not dissuade the more than one hundred spectators who gathered to see what Burden would do “to them.” The papers’ sensational claims were not completely mistaken; the spectators would play a role in Back to You. As with Shoot, Back to You’s audience was invited to witness a violent act. In this case, even more directly than with the earlier work, Burden placed responsibility for the performance and its potentially harmful effects squarely on the viewers, who thereby became not mere witnesses but agents of the action. At the start of the performance, the audience gathered in the foyer of the building. Four blank monitors flanked the elevator shaft. The emcee for the evening, video artist and

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founder of Avalanche Liza Bear, welcomed the audience with words no one expected: “Chris Burden has requested a volunteer. Will a volunteer please step up? Any volunteers?” Audio and video documentation bears witness to the crowd’s reaction: a wave of nervous laughter spread through the room, followed by a long silence when Bear repeated the question.59 The audience had come to see something happen or be acted upon, not to participate. After a palpable pause, a volunteer came forward, perhaps compelled by the awkwardness of the open question, or feeling suddenly accountable for the fact that there was nothing to see, no spectacle to behold. The participant, sculptor Larry Bell, was quickly escorted to the freight elevator in the front of the lobby.60 The moment he crossed the elevator’s threshold, the doors closed behind him and the video monitors switched on. Bell and Burden then took a short round trip to the basement and back. The audience maintained constant visual contact with Bell, though this connection spanned from real space to the monitor. Only once Bell was in the elevator did the audience see Burden. From that point on, it was clear that Burden’s only action would be to shift the terms of visual contact and insert a viewer inside the “distant” spectacle. The video documentation of Back to You shows exactly what the audience saw on the monitors and nothing more (figure 3.7). Burden, naked to the waist, lies on a sawhorse table positioned diagonally in the freight elevator. Next to his passive, immobile body is a stainless steel dish of alcohol and thumbtacks. The scene would have had the clinical look of a medical examiner’s office if not for the bright red walls and exposed brick of the elevator shaft. These details, however, were only visible to Bell. The audience saw only Burden’s closely framed body on the black-and-white monitors. Also hidden from the audience’s view was a sign at eye height tacked to the back wall of the elevator (figure 3.8). It politely read: “Please Push Pins into My Body.” Bear narrated this detail, but all the audience could see was a figure enter the frame, hover briefly above Burden’s body, and get to work. After asking an unresponsive Burden if he wanted the pins “anywhere in particular,” Bell pushed a total of five pushpins into the mute body.61 On the tape, the audience howls and yelps as Bell pushes the pins into Burden’s stomach and foot. The elevator makes its way back to the ground floor, and the doors open. Bell promptly exits. Burden, with eyes wide open, stares into the camera, back at the audience (figure 3.7). The camera in the elevator took the now very familiar vantage point of a surveillance feed. When Bell entered the frame, the high angle did not reveal his identity. Nor did it register his facial expressions. The live audience saw nothing but the back of his head. Bell’s anonymous, faceless figure stood in as an avatar for any and all of the audience members who might have crossed to the other side of the screen and taken part in the minor act of violence requested of them. This is television as Burden would define it in regard to C.B.T.V.: it is sight beyond one’s immediate surroundings. The title of the performance echoes the nightly news refrain, “Now, back to you.” Remote reporters at the scene of an event use these words to sign off and transfer attention back to the anchorperson, as well as to establish the temporal connection between the two sites. It signals their coexistence, if not in the same space, at least in the

Figure 3.7 Chris Burden, Back to You, 1974. Video documentation of performance. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

same time—and that they are engaged in conversation, a circuit of call and response. Burden’s gaze into the camera at the end of the performance, like Wexler’s at the end of Medium Cool, implicated the passive members of the audience in the action by highlighting their presence in the responsive system. Back to You asked how one’s understanding of and relationship to the televisual image might change if the image were to become available to participation and touch. Television, in its commercial form, may give one the feeling of being present at a remote yet live event by means of simultaneous live broadcast, but there is no potential for interaction.62 One can be only a passive witness to the event that seems to be at hand. Closed-circuit television, too, delivers instantaneous images and feedback to viewers, and rarely allows for interaction. The participant in Back to You, however, was made to cross from one side to another, thereby establishing a spatial as well as temporal link between the two sides of the screen. By pairing live transmission with the potential for physical interaction, Burden underscored the telepresent effects of television in all its forms—broadcast, CCTV, and video images. If the image is live, there is the potential for intervention, specifically tactile intervention in the pictured scene. The observer’s activity or passivity is, Burden suggests, a voluntary

Figure 3.8 Chris Burden, Back to You, 1974. Photographic documentation of performance. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

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choice. The screen does not have to stultify or disable her ability to empathize, act, and react. To engage with Burden, viewers had simply to choose a spatial relationship over a televisual one. But despite Bell’s apparent choice to cross over to the other side of the screen and become engaged in the action, his participation was also strangely automatic and unthinking, reminiscent more of McLuhan’s passively “tactile” participation. Burden described the type of violence in Back to You as “low-level.” Participating in it would not, he wrote, be “a major decision” for the volunteer.63 Deciding to participate in advance of knowing what would be asked of him required contemplation and courage, but the violent task solicited was, in the end, sufficiently “low-level” that whoever participated was likely to follow through. In that sense, Bell’s decision was a small one, but it was not inconsequential. The polite request of Burden’s sign could have been rebuffed with an equally polite “No, thank you.” Bell chose to play collaborator and accomplice to a degree only hinted at in Shoot and Doomed. Bell’s discomfort with the situation was not visible on the monitors but, according to Burden, Bell’s hands trembled so severely that he had difficulty handling the pins.64 Even so, Bell went through with the task set before him. What appears as conscious action might equally be figured as automatic completion of the image. Back to You functioned as a kind of attack on images. Bell pushed pins into Burden’s body and Burden’s media image simultaneously. In preparing for Back to You, especially in response to the media hype that surrounded his first New York performance, Burden actively sought to counter his violent and daring reputation. “I [had] already been branded by the media as a kind of Evel Knievel,” he wrote, “So I tried to do something people would have to think about a little more … [or] I would have been branded as a death freak again, which I don’t think I am.”65 In a post-performance interview with Bear, Burden admitted that pushing pins into someone is “a corny kind of violence.”66 It is, as Bear points out, a type of violence one inflicts on an image rather than on a body. Burden’s body was presented as inanimate or dead, a meaningless conduit for messages, like corkboard, rather than a “live” person. Much as with a voodoo doll, the setup suggested a means of magical attack, injury inflicted on a party only present by means of a representation. In Back to You, much as in Doomed, Burden compelled the audience to see his body as, at once, a subject and an object, an image and a person. In each performance, the screen—the glass in Doomed and the surveillance monitors in Back to You—functioned as an interface where such oppositions could be maintained. In Doomed, however, the glass screen called attention to the functioning of spectacular culture, while the TV screen in Back to You seemed, counterintuitively or even ironically, to make the spectacle permeable and open to intervention. This is not to say, however, that Bell or the audience fully accepted their active complicity in the scene. Despite the indexical evidence offered by live visual feedback—and the visual continuity of one member leaving the group and appearing on camera with Burden almost immediately thereafter—not all spectators believed what they saw. They drew other conclusions from the information at hand. Their abductive inferences about what went on in the

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elevator cleared them of any ethical culpability or social responsibility. Burden assumed that Back to You would provide the audience with a “window” onto what was happening in the elevator via the TV screen.67 Viewers, Burden predicted, would accept anything on the monitor as “TV reality”: “People automatically believe what they see on the screen—‘if the camera picked it up it must have happened.’”68 In the post-performance interview Burden told Bear that he did not think that anyone would ask Bell what had happened in the elevator, since they had all seen it for themselves.69 But Burden’s hypothesis didn’t hold up. Members of the audience still doubted what exactly had happened on the other side of the screen: a rumor spread through the crowd that the tips of the pins were broken off and that Bell had merely stuck them to Burden’s torso with gum.70 This is a strange set of assumptions, given Burden’s past willingness to put himself in exceptionally painful and dangerous situations. Bear and Burden agreed that people are “apathetic and lethargic about what they see on the screen,” despite also accepting it as “reality.” “They have a higher threshold and tolerance for it.”71 Television viewers are exposed to violence and also screened from it. The impermeable spectacle protects the image from intervention and anesthetizes the viewers; the empathy and accountability they might feel in shared physical space, let alone through a screen, gives way to apathy and ambivalence. Burden’s goal in Back to You was to establish a relationship between the spectators and this “secondhand experience,” forcing them “to deal with the fact that it was taking place a few feet from them.”72 No longer sealed off from the viewer by distance or unidirectionality, the spectacle calls for interaction, participation, and accountability. But even when confronted with Burden’s radical gesture of bringing the spectacular event within reach and making it participatory to a degree beyond merely “filling in the lines,” the audience, in general, remained passive, dazzled and distant. If, as Ward argues, Shoot uncovered the public as a group defined by a suspension of judgment and choice, Back to You showed them to be reluctant to believe in what they saw. The audience would do all that it could to remain detached and distant. Do You Believe in Television?, a video performance from just two years later, did not permit the audience any such ethical buffer or physical distance. Do You Believe in Television? (figure 3.9) established an even more immediate, embodied, and tactile connection between spaces linked by live television. This little-discussed performance took place on February 26, 1976, in a parking structure at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Canada. Again Burden invited an audience to witness a televisual event. They gathered on the landings of a concrete stairwell. Video monitors hung above each landing. A chain barred the spectators from going below the first floor, but they were free to situate themselves on any of the other levels. Burden was in the basement, completely hidden from view. The televisions showed an image of a small, black, wooden cross and a pile of straw. After the crowd had quieted, a voice came over the monitors and menacingly asked the audience: “Do you believe in television?” Burden’s hands then entered the frame with a lit match, setting the cross and the hay on fire, another act of symbolic, “corny,” image-based violence.

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After several minutes, smoke began to fill the stairwell as the flames traveled up a path of straw into the crowd. The audience, forced either to flee or participate, stormed the basement and stomped out the flames.73 Do You Believe in Television? could be dismissed as a “one-liner,” but its punch line is, I believe, an important one. It picked up the epistemological and formal themes of Back to You while disallowing the ambivalence and disbelief that surfaced there. Both works asked audience members to overcome the paralyzing distancing effects of the camera and television screen, as well as the spectacular, televisual logic that permeates all lived spaces. Although the audience of Back to You was shown the continuity between spaces, none felt a moral duty to intervene—aside from Bell, and he clearly thought his obligation was precisely to push pins into Burden’s body. Just as in Doomed, the governing assumption was to treat the body as always already an image or (art) object; however, no one present at Do You Believe in Television? could remain fully insulated from the event by a mere insertion of a lens or screen. Both performances linked the represented spaces on the monitors with the real spaces of the audience, and insisted that if an image were live one had the option, if not the duty, to intervene. Burden used CCTV systems to create continuous spaces that linked both sides of the screen, opening the conduit not only for the spectacle to spread into real space, but also for “reality to erupt within the spectacle.”74 While in his unmediated performance work Burden consistently relied on his audience to remain immobile, passive, and emotionally and ethically disengaged in the face of a television-like spectacle, his CCTV works raised the stakes of this inactivity and ambivalence. Beyond signaling that one could make a claim on the other side of the screen, as Burden himself had done in his paid TV ads, the artist’s CCTV works kept open the possibility that the audience would get up and get involved with the image. In these works, he suggested

Figure 3.9 Chris Burden, Do You Believe in Television?, 1976. Photographic documentation of a video performance. © Chris Burden. Courtesy of the Chris Burden Estate and Gagosian Gallery.

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that his audience had to become responsible for the television image and the audience had to establish empathetic relationality with the other side of the screen. Except for the case of Do You Believe in Television?, where, it might be argued, their own safety was at stake, the audiences for Burden’s CCTV works repeatedly declined the opportunity to become directly involved with the screened image, despite the fact that the structure of those works plainly showed them that possibility. What the works demonstrate is that the participation required to “touch” television and to be touched by it cannot be automatic or passive if one wishes to overcome the stultifying effects of the spectacle. Burden used CCTV to show his audience that passivity is voluntary; inaction is a choice. Do You Believe in Television? was able to compel the audience’s action, but only by having the image transgress the threshold of the terminal. Medium Cool Burden’s work pushed television to actually become a “cool” medium. But his direct engagement with it far surpasses McLuhan’s notion of “automatic completion” or filling in the blanks. His paid TV ads challenged the power structures of commercial television by making the unidirectional medium potentially “participatory,” but they made only a small gesture toward undoing the spectacular forces that his performances made so evident. Burden’s TV and CCTV works from the 1970s were, like Wexler’s Medium Cool, meditations on mediation and the spectacular spread of a televisual logic into real spaces. They demonstrated how that logic and its concomitant inactivity opened up questions about our own responsibility to the world around us. Through them he explored how television, as a specific instantiation of spectacular culture, clearly models formal and physical structures that create the isolated, ambivalent, and apathetic viewers Debord describes and Medium Cool portrays. Burden’s works point to the technological irony here: media designed to bring viewers up close to the event, that shrink space to deliver real-time, instantaneous images, sever feelings of engagement and connection. He showed how this effect spreads under the sway of spectacular culture, infecting all experiences, even those in which there is no mediating force. Shoot and Doomed revealed how events that take place in the here and now can feel far off, removed, and insulated against intervention. All vision seems to be television as the spectacle colonizes real space. Television, in its various forms, does not foster “a passion for depth involvement in every aspect of experience [or create] an obsession with bodily welfare,”75 as McLuhan claims; it does just the opposite by short-circuiting “creatively participant responses” in mediated and unmediated situations alike. Clearly Burden’s work highlights spectacle’s dominant sway over lived reality. But like Debord’s writings on the spectacle, it also opens up opportunities to throw a wrench into the spectacle’s “efficient motor of trancelike behavior.”76 Debord’s descriptions of situationist techniques and practices resonate strongly with Burden’s mediated and unmediated performances of the 1970s. In a 1957 essay, Debord calls for the creation of “situations,” that is, for

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the “construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature,” which might intervene in “the material setting of life and the behaviors that it incites that overturn it.”77 We might even hear a resonance between Debord’s situations and McLuhan’s description of the role of the artist as an “antisocial” constructor of “antienvironments.” “Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists,” McLuhan writes, “provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and new environments creates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.”78 This fixed point of view, Burden shows us, is from the armchair in front of the television screen. Artists, according to the media theorist, have a “need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power” that demonstrates that “environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes that are invisible.”79 While I do not intend to argue that Burden is a situationist, I do believe that his works model spectacular culture and propose “situations” or “anti-environments” that aim to break—or at least disturb and disrupt—the smooth functioning of the spectacle. Borrowing again from Debord’s own language about situations, Burden’s work appears to me as “a new species of games” that “[stands] out from the standard conception of the game by the radical negation of the ludic features of competition and of its separation from the stream of life. In contrast, [it does] not appear distinct from a moral choice, deciding what ensures the future reign of freedom and play.”80 Burden’s performances invited the viewer to play games of moral choice in which he asked them to struggle against the spectacle and its theatrical principle of nonintervention as a challenge to the alienation these structures produce and maintain.81 The refusal of the audience to play along forced them to recognize their own passive complicity in the situation—at least when their own bodies and lives were not at stake. When Burden pushed back into their spaces, the rules of engagement changed. Central to both Debord’s and Burden’s goals is countering the passivity of the audience members, turning them into what Debord calls “livers.”82 While Debord imagines this happening primarily through urban and architectural interventions, he did see the potential for reproductive media, particularly television, to create these kinds of anti-spectacular disturbances. “Besides the direct means that will lead to precise ends,” he writes, “the construction of situations will require, in its affirmative phase, a new implementation of reproductive technologies. We could imagine, for example, live televisual projections of some aspect of one situation into another, bringing about modifications and interferences.”83 Debord is writing, here, just before the commercial production and marketing of the consumer video technology that Burden and other early video artists would use. It is quite apparent how Burden’s use of these new tools created dislocations in architectural space by using real-time technologies to position the spectacular scene as simultaneously separate and immediately at hand.

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In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary took the emergence of new technologies such as the video camera, networked computers, robots, and virtual reality systems as a prompt to look back to proto-photographic and proto-cinematic technologies of the nineteenth century in order to understand how the role and subjective position of the observer has changed over the course of recent history. His study prompts the question: how might “computer graphics and the contents of video display terminals [be] a further elaboration and refinement of what Guy Debord designated as the ‘society of the spectacle?’”84 Crary’s careful use of the term “observer” serves to indicate the difference between this role and that of the traditionally passive role of the “spectator.” Unlike spectare, the Latin root for ‘spectator,’ the root for ‘observe’ does not literally mean ‘to look at.’ Spectator also carries specific connotations … namely, of one who is a passive onlooker at a spectacle, as at an art gallery or a theater. … [O]bservare means to ‘conform one’s action, to comply with,’ as in observing rules, codes, regulations, or practices. Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.85

Burden’s performances of the 1970s, particularly those including live video, call attention to the construction of the “observer” of the midcentury, one living in a culture dominated by televisual spectatorship and in its first moments of interacting with images on computer screens. He set up situations in which the rules that viewers compulsively and unthinkingly observed became apparent, if not through their transgression then at least from the consequences that ensued. Burden’s performances pushed observers into moral and ethical “games” in which they needed to renegotiate the conventions governing the scene. He asked them to see outside the given set of possible actions and viewing positions. Crary’s book offers “some notes on [the spectacle’s] prehistory” by thinking through those technologies and viewing positions prior to 1927 and the invention of television.86 Like Debord, he understands modernity as a story of the separation of the senses, in which “the loss of touch as a conceptual component of vision meant the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space.” This process was “a historical condition for the rebuilding of the observer fitted for ‘spectacular’ consumption.”87 Burden’s CCTV performances took television’s failure to live up to McLuhan’s fantasy of a multisensory interactive experience as a way to challenge the stultifying effects of spectacular culture and its “trancelike behavior.” If Burden’s spectacular yet live and unmediated performances like Shoot and Doomed produced or brought awareness to passive, distant observers, he surprisingly tried to reverse this tendency by remediating the spectacular experience through television, that archetypical site of spectacular appearances, and compelled the audience to literally touch and “complete” the televised image, to make the television image an “arena of action” rather than merely an “object of contemplation.” Back to You and Do You Believe in Television? aimed to momentarily disturb the loss of presence, participation, and physical relationality that televisual structures relentlessly sustain.

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The observers of Velvet Water, Back to You, and Do You Believe in Television? were invited to become tactilely involved with the elements and bodies that had before only been visible on the screen. The failure of the audience to act in many of these situations pointed out the moral and ethical asymmetry in the system and the necessity of its reversal.88 Burden makes it clear that for an ethical or even empathetic relationship to form, there must be the opportunity to touch and to be touched back. In his performances, Burden pushed video, which takes its name from the Latin for “I see,” to become “I touch.”

4 Inhabiting the Interface: The Mixed Reality of Satellite Telecommunication

On December 23, 1968, millions of television viewers saw a startling sight—a live image of Earth spinning in the quiet blackness of space (figure 4.1).1 The three men aboard Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, were the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit, and they brought a video camera along for the ride. In their second television transmission from the lunar module, the astronauts pointed the video camera out of the window, away from the moon, back toward the earth. Unlike the more famous photograph from the trip that was widely published after their return, Anders’s Earthrise (figure 4.2), the television image revealed Earth as neither tranquil nor weightless. In the photograph, Earth—beautiful, blue, and buoyant—slips out of an envelope of darkness and looks almost heavenly against the craggy and harsh, pocked surface of the Moon. On the television, it loomed at the top of the frame, the camera peeking in for an unsettling and unflattering close-up. It had not been a tranquil year, and perhaps the video image suited it better than the photograph.2 Across the globe, it was a tumultuous time, remembered for its protests, demonstrations, wars, assassinations, revolutions, and rebellions. It was also, as discussed earlier, the year video emerged as a consumer and artistic form. For the first time, individuals were able to see live images of themselves in television’s electronic mirror. In chapter 2, I consider Rosalind Krauss’s early diagnosis of video as a narcissistic medium that, because its live feedback acts as a mirror, traps users and viewers in a closed circuit of narcissistic self-regard and “selfencapsulation.”3 The image of Earth beamed live to home TV sets from more than 176,000 miles away unsettled, at least for a moment, this narcissistic principle and the basic assumptions that structured our political and social interactions.4 Because of its medium, the televised image had a different effect and meaning than the photograph. Photographs are always images of the past, sealed off and, to borrow a phrase from André Bazin, “mummified.” The Apollo 8 television broadcast delivered a real-time view of the whole planet and, by inference, of everyone on it. It was suddenly possible to see ourselves not as separate peoples and nations, divided by oceans, languages, and cultures, but as all one people in one place at one time—now. At the time of the transmission, Anders said to the television audience, “You are looking at yourself from 180,000 miles out in space.”5 One can imagine a dramatic zoom-in from outer space, through the atmosphere, down to the ground to picture an earthbound

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Figure 4.1 Apollo 8 live television broadcast of the Earth, December 23, 1968. © 2015 NASA. (Public Domain.)

viewer from behind staring at the back of her own head on the TV screen. If she turned around to face the camera, to narcissistically engage in the image, her own view of it would suddenly be foreclosed. To be in the picture, and to see herself as part of it, the viewer has to face the screen and be an object rather than a subject. It is easy to understand NASA’s space flights, and the Apollo missions in particular, as narcissistic, hubristic, nationalistic endeavors—the planting of flags and the photographing of footprints are all clearly motivated by the desire to evidence and index the advancement of humankind, or more accurately the rapid mastery of space, time, and physics by certain nations. Leaving the atmosphere to look down upon the Earth seemed to sustain two

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Figure 4.2 William Anders/NASA, Earthrise, 1968. © 2015 NASA. (Public Domain.)

simultaneous and opposing worldviews. To view the world from on high was to inhabit, as Borman put it, the vantage point of God.6 It allowed one to imagine holding an otherworldly, omnipotent, disembodied power over the globe, now figured as potential target for spy satellites or weapons systems. At the same time, the view of Earth from above sutured each and every living subject into a totalizing picture, not by a series of shot-reverse-shots, an alternating series of “I”s and “you”s, but by an establishing shot that showed us as a collective “we.”7 In this chapter, I examine how the space age technology of satellite television structured these two opposing yet linked views of the world. First, I look to “satellite spectaculars” on network television, such as Our World (1967), that showcased the power of military technologies to open up “windows” or “keyholes” onto faraway places for mastering views that served to separate east from west, good from bad, self from other; and then to artistic uses of satellite technology that worked to undo these structuring binaries. In particular, I devote special attention to Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts 1977 (1977), an early artistic collaboration with NASA, to show how the televisual image might go beyond mediating distant locations and become a “place” itself. This live, bicoastal, bidirectional video

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performance linked dancers 3,000 miles apart through a composite video image that merged the two sites into a continuous space. Galloway and Rabinowitz, I argue, transformed the television screen into a synesthetic surface by exploiting the inherent latency of the “realtime” satellite image, which required that the dancers negotiate all of their embodied senses through their collective image on the screen. They used their physical bodies to steer their images toward each other so as to “immaterially touch.” I propose that, through a series of “crossed wires” that combined two video feeds into one and synesthetically collapsed vision and touch, Satellite Arts 1977 modeled a version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “chiasm,” diagraming what phenomenological experience might be like in the space age. In doing so, Galloway and Rabinowitz hypothesized an ethics of engagement with others in mediated environments. They imagined what it might be like to be simultaneously real and virtual, self and other, subject and object, seer and seen, here and there, now and then. Satellite Arts 1977 proposed that telepresence happens on the interface rather than through the screen. Our World, Their World By 1968, the year television audiences saw Apollo 8’s live images of Earth, 768 rockets had traveled to Earth’s orbit or beyond, and 2,011 satellites were already circling the planet.8 Since Sputnik’s launch in 1957, the United States and the Soviet Union had been eagerly catapulting remote sensing devices into Earth’s orbit. The Russians began the space race with Sputnik 1. For three weeks, the small, polished sphere broadcast radio pulses from the ionosphere to anxious listeners below.9 The United States quickly followed with Explorer 1 in early 1958. In 1962 and 1963, the United States placed into orbit its first two telecommunications satellites, Telstar 1 and Telstar 2. Video could now be bounced from the ground into space and onto television sets across the globe. If Sputnik’s launch indicated that man had begun to conquer space, creating an object that could briefly colonize a small swath of the cosmos, Telstar, and the other telecommunication satellites that soon followed, demonstrated man’s conquest of time: the new technology enabled instantaneous, real-time audio and visual contact between distant sites, joining them in a simultaneous “now.”10 Humankind’s sudden mastery of both space and time was put on display in the mid1960s in a series of what media theorist Lisa Parks calls “satellite spectaculars,” live television events that illustrated the power of satellite telecommunications to connect far-flung people and places.11 Most notable of these programs was 1967’s Our World, a two-hour program aimed at “global” coverage rather than merely linking North America with Western Europe. The Telstar and Intelsat satellites linked the US with Europe; Syncom connected East Asia, and ATS-1 brought Australia into the “global” network of satellite telecommunication. In its own terms, Our World demonstrated this technologically (and militaristically) enabled “global unity.” However, as Parks describes in her close analysis of the show, Our World in fact did just the opposite: it highlighted how the fantasy of a “global present” as

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enabled by satellite technology was steeped in “Western discourses of modernization, global unity, and planetary control.”12 While claiming to create a utopian, McLuhanesque “global village” by using satellites to link geographically and culturally separated places and peoples, Our World actually “divided the world once again” by emphasizing the difference between life in the various hemispheres, and making it clear that the “industrialized” and “free” North and West stood against the “hungry” and “developing” South and East.13 That is, while bringing together some 500 million viewers from 30 nations, Our World dramatized distance, difference, and otherness by means of the technology that only a few countries had.14 The program began with grand utopian gestures—the Vienna Boys’ Choir sang the theme song in scores of languages, and the first segment featured a series of infants, born within minutes of one another, in places as far-flung as Japan, Denmark, Mexico, and Canada. Although the babies were born nearly simultaneously, they inhabited different earthly times. The Danish child was born on the date before her Japanese counterpart, for the time zones that demarked the physical space between them had little to do with the mediated, televisual experience of the “global now.” “The dawn,” the show’s host reminded the viewer, “creeps around the equator at a mere 1,000 miles an hour … our [television] pictures flash around at 186,000 miles a second.” Television was there to witness the miracle of life by overcoming the physical limits of the natural world. Satellite television, the message went, is godlike: it is everywhere at once. While the structure of the show appeared to present the children as equal citizens of the “global now,” the narrative worked contrariwise. Two of the children were positioned as outside of the modern moment. While the demographic information or living conditions of the other children are not mentioned, the Canadian baby, a Cree “Indian,” the viewer was told, would have a hard first year of life struggling to survive with her 8 brothers and sisters in the “rugged north bush country, but she should live to be 60 years of age.” The Mexican child’s birth was the only one actually shown live on television, yet the producers had doubted Mexico’s ability to be live for the whole the program, and therefore taped its other segments and falsely presented them as “live.”15 Months before his birth, producers already planned to represent the Mexican baby, Mundo, as premature—as poorly timed and not fully developed or modern, like the Mexican satellite uplink. The introductory segment with the newborn children was used as a foil for the show’s main themes—population explosion and the “hungry world.” Throughout the program the modern, satellite-owning countries of the North and West were set off against the still developing, struggling, and starving nations in the South and East. While the technology on display during the program ostensibly unified the globe, the narrative established a series of binary distinctions that undid any hope of equality. The show equated otherness with a lack of access to technology, as well as to food and other basic needs. The hungry, crowded, developing world was figured as a problem that could be solved, or at least pictured, by the modern, technologically advanced nations that looked down upon it from a celestial perch.

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While the struggling South and East were represented as economically, technologically, culturally, and racially other, another other was made present in the program by its very absence. Our World was originally slated to include satellite connections to Russia and other Eastern bloc countries, but they withdrew from the program just days before the broadcast in protest of Western support of Israel in the Six-Day War. The host casually explained the failure to deliver on the “globe circling” program that the advertisements had promised: “It’s a pity, but there it is. Now we can cover two-thirds instead of all of the world.” What the show’s absences pointed out, however, was that it was the terrifying otherness of the Cold War that had fueled the satellite program and the space race to begin with, and also that the entire southern hemisphere—save Australia—and nearly all of the developing world were still outside of the “global now” of satellite telecommunication. One must imagine that, lacking access to satellites or uplink technology, most of the developing nations were not even aware of their exclusion.16 Our World, Parks claims, established liveness as the defining feature of both television, particularly in its satellite forms, and modernity.17 The program, she writes, was structured around a set of contradictory impulses that claimed to unify the world while establishing it as a place that was always divided and incompatible. Even the show’s millions of viewers, located primarily in the privileged, satellite-owning North and West, were not truly involved either; they were neither put into contact nor joined together by the satellite transmissions. They were mere witnesses to the spectacular coordinated functioning of the space age technology.18 Viewers watched the hosts of the show connect the “here” of the television studio to the various “theres” of the satellite uplink sites. The viewers were neither here nor there; they were on the outside looking onto a “global now” that did not include them in any of its vectors. What the audience watched, rather, was a feel-good demonstration of western dominance and the desire for planetary control through technological superiority. The liveness on display in Our World established both the conditions of modernity and the threatening, authoritarian potential of satellite surveillance and remote-sensing military technologies. At around the same time as the Apollo missions were being planned, the United States was also beginning its secret Corona reconnaissance satellite program, its code name Keyhole indicating how the structures of power in the modern world relied on the ability to remain invisible while making others unknowingly visible.19 Satellites in ’77 Twenty years after Sputnik and ten after Our World, artists began experimenting with satellite technology, producing a series of events that imagined satellite technology and the relationships it sustained with networked others in a radically different light. They sought to upset the power structures that satellite technology implied, by using and thereby exposing the government-controlled satellites, and also by making visible the viewer at the “keyhole.” Between July and November of 1977, three satellite-based artworks “launched”: Nam June

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Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Douglas Davis participated in Documenta 6’s live satellite telecast on June 24; tests for Galloway and Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts 1977 began in July, and concluded in another series of transmissions in late November; and Liza Bear and Keith Sonnier produced The Send/Receive Satellite Network on September 10 and 11.20 By this time, satellite video technology had become commonplace in the mainstream media. News programs often showed reports from remote locations, and split-screen conversations were staged between talking heads in separate studios. Unlike the networks, artists working with satellites did not attempt to disguise the inequalities inherent in the structure of satellite technology (as well as in the access to and ownership of the equipment); they brought these qualities to the fore. I will briefly discuss the Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast and The Send/Receive Satellite Network before focusing on the details of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s project. In particular, Satellite Arts 1977, I claim, sought out the aesthetic qualities specific to satellite transmission— primarily its unavoidable latency and the inherent failure to achieve the “liveness” of closedcircuit video—and discovered how the structure of the screen determines the viewer’s relationship to distant others. If Our World used satellite technology to unintentionally divide the world and emphasized the otherness of distant people and places, Satellite Arts hypothesized how one might design an interface that intimately and tactilely connected bodies on the screen. The sixth iteration of Documenta (1977) had a “world-wide opening.”21 The art world traveled to the West German industrial city of Kassel for the exhibition of international contemporary art, which had taken place every four or five years since 1955. For the first time, however, the exhibition “traveled” as well: the opening ceremonies went out live on television via satellite transmission. Three artists, Nam June Paik (with Charlotte Moorman), Joseph Beuys, and Douglas Davis, each produced an artwork for the show that was broadcast to TV stations across Europe, Japan, and the United States (figure 4.3). It was, according to the producers, “the first global satellite use by artists.”22 The multinational origins of the artists, hailing from Korea, Germany, and the United States, mirrored the global reach of the broadcast. The globalization of the art world was not the only change on display at the opening. The transmission also highlighted a shift in artistic media. Unlike at past Documentas, a large portion of the exhibition program—nearly a third—was dedicated to moving-image media, including video and television. At the time of Documenta 4 (1968), video had just emerged as an art form in the wake of the first portable consumer-model video camera, the Sony Porta Pak. Video was a popular artistic medium by 1972, when Documenta 5 opened, but it was not extensively represented in the exhibition. The title of the 1977 exhibition, “Art in the Media World—Media in Art,” reflected these recent changes in the technological landscape of the art world. Video and television had become important artistic media in their own right. Documenta 6 director Manfred Schneckenburger based the exhibition on the idea that the 1970s were “media-critical,” as opposed to the “media-fascinated” 1960s.23 The difference between the “satellite spectaculars” of the 1960s and the Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast calls attention to this generational shift. The three artists made dramatically different works

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Figure 4.3 Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik, Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast, June 24, 1977. Video stills Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York.

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for the event, but each emphasized the power structures inherent in television broadcasts and dramatized ways in which the live satellite programs of the 1960s failed to actually connect the viewers to the far-off places and people on display. Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman performed a sampling of their well-known videoperformance works, including TV Cello (1971), TV Buddha (1974), and TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969). As they performed, Paik chatted with Moorman about the other times they had performed these same works. This time, however, was different. This time their friends were watching from all around the globe. They said hello to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in New York and the president of MIT, Dr. Jerome Wiesner, in Boston, among other luminaries and celebrities. Though the audience extended well beyond the insulated elite of the art world, Paik and Moorman reinscribed the boundaries of that milieu within the broadcast. Paik and Moorman’s conversation and their anarchic, esoteric performance were delivered into the homes of thousands of distant viewers, but at each moment the artists signaled that it was not necessarily aimed at them. In the background of the television image, the at-home viewer could see Kassel’s public pressed against a glass window, peering in at the ostensibly public performance (figure 4.3). They mirrored the television audience, who also looked onto a closed-off “now.” The satellite telecast made it clear that the “there” of the studio would never actually connect with the “here” of the viewers’ average homes and lives, just as the direct address commonly used in live television programs, like the evening news, created a false suggestion of intimate connection to the individual home viewer. The exceptional technology reached out to the exceptional few. Joseph Beuys’s performance, too, exposed the conventions of traditional live satellite broadcasts. Beuys used his four minutes of airtime to speak directly to the at-home audience, as if he were a politician or a newscaster. For the past decade, Beuys had been working in the field of what he called “social sculpture,” a multimedia form of performance art in which the artist strives to change society and its structures by actively involving the audience in the artwork. Through this process, according to Beuys, art becomes an “evolutionaryrevolutionary power … capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system” by transforming the society itself into a work of art.24 Beuys’s social sculptures of the time tended to take the form of freewheeling public dialogues in universities and museums, such as Fat Transformation (1972) at the Tate Gallery and his 1974 lecture/performance tour through the United States, Energy Plan for the Western Man. While Beuys typically dominated the lengthy discussions, there was ample room for audience participation and interaction.25 Beuys’s performance for the Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast, like his social sculptures, took the form of a public lecture. In the brief speech, the artist summarized his concept of social sculpture and its power to change political and cultural conditions. Art, he proclaimed, must be released from the structures that currently confine it to a specialized world of artists and institutions. The work of art, Beuys told the audience, should speak to all of humankind and involve everyone in its production. The direct, distributed address made possible by live

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broadcast television appears to be a perfect means for escaping the rarified spaces of the art world, and Beuys, unlike Paik, used it to speak to the average viewer. It is clear, however, that this performance, unlike his other lectures, was not itself a social sculpture; it was a description of a situation that was not possible through broadcast television. The “evolutionaryrevolutionary power” of social sculpture required participation and response from the audience. The artist was using a satellite, but the structure of the program remained within the standard unidirectional format of conventional television. There was a call, but no possibility for a response. Beuys’s address, then, served to draw attention to the impossibilities of contact and communication through satellites as the networks used them. Douglas Davis further illustrated the failure to connect through live satellite television in his performance The Last Nine Minutes (figure 4.4). Transmitted in part from Caracas, Venezuela, Davis’s contribution to the broadcast enacted the frustrations an at-home viewer might have felt listening to Beuys’s call for interaction and participation. Like the audience pressed against the window of the Documenta studio, Davis appeared behind a sheet of glass and peered into the adjoining space. But he did not look into a studio where a live performance was occurring; he appeared to be looking into to the living rooms of television viewers around the world. At the beginning of the performance he responds to a knock on the boundary glass by a pair of hands that seem to be on the viewer’s side of the screen. Wearing a stopwatch around his neck, Davis approaches the “screen” and pounds on it for the last nine minutes of the Documenta broadcast. His frustrated, awkward gestures go unanswered, and the broadcast ends with Davis exhausted and still alone. Commenting on The Last Nine Minutes in a 2004 interview, Davis explains that 1977 signaled the moment at which an artist could “finally use the satellite to reach out and destroy your TV screen in order to touch you.”26 While it is true that satellites held the potential to connect distant parties in new, bidirectional, interactive ways, Davis’s performance suggested

Figure 4.4 Douglas Davis, Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast, June 24, 1977. Video stills Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) New York.

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the continual failure of this potential. Bidirectional, live telecommunication may have been technologically possible, but it was a structural impossibility: satellites, uplink stations, and the other high-tech equipment were in the hands of the government and private corporations, not the people. Televisions were designed exclusively as receivers, not transmitters. Davis dramatized the desire to use the technology to “reach out and touch” the viewer, but the hands that seemed to appear on the viewer’s side of the screen only served as an uncanny reminder of the media’s limitations. Liza Bear and Keith Sonnier’s 1977 satellite project, The Send/Receive Satellite Network, also explored the frustrations of contemporary satellite technology and its structures. Bear and Sonnier did not critique the false notions of contact and presence propagated by mainstream uses of the technology, as the Documenta artists did. Instead they illustrated the difficulties of small-scale satellite use and the frequent impediments to its smooth functioning. The first part of the project, Send/Receive I (1977), a 23-minute television program distributed on Manhattan Cable, did not actually use satellite technology. The video presented research on satellites and an argument for public access to the technology. In the video, the camera pans over images of satellites, antennae, maps, charts, and close-ups of newspaper and journal articles detailing the early days of broadcast television in the 1930s and contemporary reporting on satellite television of the 1970s. The camera lingers long enough for the viewer to parse the photographs and even to read the articles, but the information is not easily taken in. Scrolling character-generated text partially hides the documents below, feeding the viewer information about PISA, the Public Interest Satellite Association, an organization “insuring that satellite technology serves the public, not the profiteers.”27 Two separate audio tracks play on top of the images and scrolling text, adding to the audiovisual dissonance: one voice reads aloud from articles on satellites, while two other voices debate the economic and political effects of satellite use. The dense layering of image, text, and spoken word makes it impossible for the viewer to follow along, even if she concentrates on just one of the four streams of information. The audio tracks interrupt and interfere with each other; the trembling electronic text is hard to read and obscures the images below. The discordant effect is intentional. “The overlapping of the dialogues,” Bear and Sonnier write, “tends to evoke the functioning of the satellite parallel channels and the attendant overloading of information which it makes possible. What are the implications of simultaneity? Of instant exposure and instant response?”28 The effects of simultaneity, the artists imply, are confusion and cacophony. This prophecy played out in the second part of their project, a live bidirectional satellite telecast between San Francisco and New York (figure 4.5). Send/Receive II connected artists gathered at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to counterparts in New York City, who broadcast via a mobile satellite truck stationed at Battery Park. Rather than the worldwide reach of the unidirectional Documenta Telecast, The Send/Receive Satellite Network set up a bidirectional link between local cable stations in two cities. If the Documenta Telecast highlighted the power structures of the conventional commercial uses of satellites

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Figure 4.5 Liza Bear and Keith Sonnier, Send/Receive II, September 10–11, 1977. Video stills. Courtesy of Bear & Sonnier, Video Data Bank.

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for television broadcast, The Send/Receive Satellite Network called attention to the realities of small-scale satellite narrowcasts. Bear and Sonnier’s signal was full of noise, and the participants could not hear each other clearly. When they could, a half-second delay caused confusion and misunderstanding. They attempted a collaborative dance, but they could not get the split screen effect to work properly. The scheduled collaborative performances were sidelined while participants explained how the technology worked, where interested parties could obtain infrared transmitters, and the need for satellite access by independent, public groups. Throughout the program, live-generated text overlaid the image explaining the problems: “The sync generator cannot lock the noisy signal,” “a half-second delay between what you say and when you are heard,” “We are asking the truck whether we can use the mics yet.” Their attempts at connection and collaboration were frustrating for the participants as well as the viewers. The realities of the technology seemed to get in the way of the artists’ desires; the two groups attempted to make contact and send the result to an at-home audience, but what they delivered was a document of just how difficult that was to do. Satellite Arts 1977 In 1975, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz answered a call for proposals from NASA for nonprofit groups that wished to experiment with the American-Canadian CTS satellite. Within a few months, they had secured NASA’s cooperation for Satellite Arts 1977.29 Working under the name Mobile Image, Galloway and Rabinowitz used NASA’s satellites, staff, and equipment at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to link sets of dancers in the two cities. Satellite Arts 1977, like the other two satellite works from 1977, is a document of a series of live experiments with high technology to see how it might change when out of corporate and military hands.30 Unlike the Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast and The Send/Receive Satellite Network, Galloway and Rabinowitz’s project embraced the difficulties of satellite telecommunication and signal latency, using the limitations of the technology and the disorienting effects of live telecommunication to focus attention on the screen and its virtual properties, rather than on the real spaces it had the potential to connect. The screen in Satellite Arts 1977 is not a window or a keyhole; it is a place. Satellite Arts 1977 exists today as an archival video recording of a series of live satellite test transmissions, closed-circuit video rehearsals, and a collaborative dance in a composite video space performed over a live satellite transmission. The documentation presents the three parts as components of a single work.31 According to Galloway, “the performances were tests and the tests were performances.”32 Following Galloway’s lead and the structure of the archival documentation, my discussion of Satellite Arts 1977 will give equal weight to all of the component performances. Together, I will argue, the various parts articulate a new understanding of how space, time, and the body might intersect on the surface of the

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screen to create chiasmic phenomenological experience with the other, or rather, to suspend the dualities that maintain distinctions between self and other, here and there, now and then. The interface, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, is a site that puts opposites in touch. In July of 1977, Galloway and Rabinowitz began the preliminary tests for Satellite Arts by transmitting signals over the short distance between NASA Headquarters in Washington and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. The artists knew that staging a collaborative, improvisational performance via satellite transmission would not be an easy feat. The purpose of the July tests was to experiment with live satellite transmission to understand the specific problems and phenomena bidirectional video telecommunication would produce. Though only preliminary tests, the July performances constitute some of the most interesting segments of the project. They capture the disorienting first encounter with satellite latency, and expose the fiction of the “simultaneous now” of satellite telecommunication. The documentation of the July tests shows Rabinowitz on camera in front of a curtained backdrop (figure 4.6). She appears sitting next to a monitor showing her own image repeated in the deep space of video feedback. The monitor looks to be just inches from her right shoulder. On closer examination, however, one can see the dividing line of a split screen running along the edge between monitor and curtain. She is, in fact, facing the television set displayed on the left side of the screen. Rabinowitz is looking at a feedback monitor that shows her the same image the viewer sees. The split screen that divides Rabinowitz from the monitor cleverly disguises this disjuncture in space, but makes apparent an even more dramatic

Figure 4.6 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video stills. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

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gap in time: the daisy-chained images on the monitor are dizzyingly out of sync. There is a significant lag between Rabinowitz’s actions on the right side of the screen and their appearance on the feedback monitor pictured on the left (and then, again, on the left side of that monitor, ad infinitum). This is because the supposedly instantaneous video signal is being bounced off a satellite circling high above the earth. A “live” video signal transmitted by satellite travels at the speed of light but it must cover a great distance, and this distance is manifested as visible temporal lag. Traveling from Earth into orbit and back again resulted in a latency period of about a quarter-second. This delay, which is present in all satellite video transmissions, is usually disguised in conventional uses of the technology. In Our World, the lag resulted in just a slight delay before a remote commentator responded to her cue. In typical split-screen news reports, or in Bear and Sonnier’s project, it manifests as a polite pause between question and answer, or occasionally as interruptions followed by overlapping apologies. During Satellite Arts 1977’s trial transmission, Rabinowitz playfully experimented with the delay, making small gestures with her hands and head. A quick motion with her arm on the live right side of the screen hops to the left a brief moment later, and then successively tumbles down the corridor of feedback images.33 Rabinowitz’s immediate past is displayed in space rather than disappearing with passing time. She and her “live” satellite image exist in different times. The lag makes visible the technological fact supporting the performance: Rabinowitz may look as if she is sitting next to her image, but it has traveled through the cosmos to meet her back on the screen. While the satellite latency produced a charming and comical effect when Rabinowitz engaged with her own image, it would cause problems for performers wishing to respond to one another in real time, as Bear and Sonnier would also discover. To test the effects of the delay on collaboration and improvisation, Galloway took Rabinowitz’s place in front of the camera. The documentation shows him sharing a split screen with a NASA technician at the space agency’s headquarters in Washington. On the tape, the two men attempt an exercise: Galloway makes a motion, and his partner imitates it as quickly as possible (figure 4.7). Playing this simple game was, in fact, quite hard. The temporal gap between the two movements was even greater than in Rabinowitz’s experiment with the playback monitor, because now there are two delays: the satellite latency and the synaptic lag of imitation. Galloway begins the test by opening and closing his hand at a regular interval, and his partner follows suit. They attempt to sync their images by counting beats, and eventually they fall into phase. The men have to concentrate to correctly control their images. They need to look at their side-by-side representations and use the feedback to control their slow avatars on the monitor; the only time-space that matters for this exercise is that of the screen, which does not exactly correspond to either of the physical sites. The July test performances exposed the problems that latency would cause for real-time interaction and the difficulty of engaging with other bodies in the specific, slow space-time of the screen. The monitor here does not act as a window or keyhole. It does not give the

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Figure 4.7 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video stills. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

viewer a disembodied, godlike point of vantage onto another space. The screen does not simply frame or transmit a camera’s view; it brings two feeds together to form a space parallel to those it represents, and which does not mirror any single reality. Moreover, it is governed by its own laws of time and space, which do not correspond to either of the source environments. It becomes a meeting ground, or as the artists termed it, an “image as place.”34 The specific conditions of any “image as place” are determined by how the sets of source imagery come together to form an “immaterial architecture” for the bodies to inhabit. Galloway and Rabinowitz spent the months between the July tests and the final performances in November rehearsing with an experimental dance troupe, Mobilus, in Optic Nerve’s San Francisco studio. They used closed-circuit video to explore the various ways an “image as place” might be constructed, and the specific aesthetic effects each arrangement would produce. An ex post facto storyboard for Satellite Arts 1977, “Image as Place” (1978), collages video stills from the project with drawings to map out all the potential ways the two sites could come together. The split screen, even in the novel form used during the tests, was only one potential arrangement. The artists show monitors appearing within other frames, images keyed together, or invisibly mixed into a single image-environment, among other options. Rabinowitz described the importance of this choice in a 1987 interview with High Performance: The video image becomes real architecture for the performance because the image is a place. … If you have a split screen, that defines the kind of relationship that can take place. If you have an image mix or a key, other relationships are possible. So it incorporates all the video effects that are used in traditional video art, but it’s a live place. It becomes visual architecture.35

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Each arrangement creates a specific organization of space and enables particular visual phenomena to occur. The artists experimented with a large variety of spatial arrangements, but the split screen and the mixed image are of particular importance for the work. The former represents the conventional mode of simultaneously presenting two satellite feeds. The latter emerged through their tests as an alternative mode of bringing people together into a single screen with drastically different aesthetic and phenomenal effects. A split screen constrains the dancers to their separate halves of the screen. If a person on one side attempts to cross the boundary line, she disappears into the fold between the images. In the rehearsals, the Mobilus dancers tested the limits of the split screen, emphasizing how it both bridges and maintains physical distance. The dancers leaned on the dividing line, as if the immaterial and physically nonexistent boundary were a wall. Alternately, they bowed their heads into the center of the screen, and decapitated their figures in the fold. The artists found the split screen structure to be limiting, for the dividing line prevented the participants from interacting with each other’s images. They could be side by side, but they could not “touch.” A mixed image, on the other hand, which blends the two feeds into a single picture, allows the dancers to occupy any part of the screen. It thereby highlights when the bodies are out of sync. Dissolving the split screen had a profound effect on how bodies could interact in the space.36 In the rehearsals, the dancers explored the mixed space with only their hands. Over a black background, the dancers reach from outside of the frame toward the center of the screen, and toward each other. They apparently touch fingertip to fingertip, gently caressing and holding each other’s hands (figure 4.8). It takes a moment for the viewer to realize that it is the images that touch, not the hands. Despite the fact that the dancers’ material bodies do not come into contact, the images act as if they do. They hover in the weightless televisual ether, yet they do not overlap, overcome, or occlude each other. To do this, the performers used the feedback monitor to carefully and precisely control the images. All of their physical movements were at the service of the screen image, not of what was in their immediate surroundings. The dancers transformed their material, tactile bodies into exclusively visible bodies in order to exist on the surface of the screen. They let go of their corporality to be together, not in space or time but in the “image as place.” The final series of performances for Satellite Arts 1977, which began on November 20, dramatized the process of breaking down the conventional split-screen structure in favor of “an immersive global real-time environment.”37 The dancers were now located on opposite coasts and were connected by a “live” satellite uplink with a quarter-second delay. For the satellite performance, the dancers took their places in fields lined with feedback monitors, which would allow them to always remain in visual contact with the “image as place” (figure 4.9). The images on the local feedback monitors were reversed from their true images to mirror images, so the performers could more intuitively navigate the screen’s space.38 The performance began within a split-screen video architecture. The far-flung dancers wave at their

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Figure 4.8 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video still. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

partners across the dark dividing line of the split screen (figure 4.10). Their gestures—waving, jumping, and shouting—all imply physical distance. The graphic bisection of the image maintains the feelings of detachment, distance, and insurmountable boundaries despite the fact that the dancers appear on the same screen. They run their hands along the seam as if looking for a break in its structure where they might push through to the other side (figure 4.9). When the dancers reach out toward each other, they disappear into the gulf between the images (figure 4.10). The line divides the image and constrains the dancers, and in doing so it accurately diagrams the technological situation: two video feeds from opposite ends of the country occupying opposite ends of a television monitor. Then the architecture of the image shifts. The four performers are no longer just in the “here” of California or the “there” of Maryland; they are together in a contiguous composite image on the television screen (figure 4.11). All the dancers now stand in an open field lined with trees and shrubs. It is only when they try to respond to one another that their

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Figure 4.9 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video still. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

separate locations become evident. The “image as place” is temporally disjointed despite looking spatially coherent. Just as Galloway did in the July trials, the dancers begin moving in a regularized manner in an attempt to sync up with their counterparts in a “scored improvisation.”39 The dancers hold their arms out from their bodies and begin to count off beats. They switch positions on each count, moving their arms as if they were the hands of a clock (figure 4.11). Through these careful motions the dancers make a slow entry into the time and space of the composite image. They can coincide once they have cut their ties to the physical world and given themselves over to the physics of the screen. Afterward, they are able to accurately navigate their “ambassadors,” as Rabinowitz calls the screen avatars, through the weightless space.40 The sets of dancers cross paths and weave between one another; they lightly, immaterially touch as they turn circles around each other’s images and create organized patterns of movement across time and space (figure 4.12).41 What happens on the screen in Satellite Arts 1977 has a close relationship to Jean Baudrillard’s

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Figure 4.10 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video stills. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Figure 4.11 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. The Mobilus dancers attempt to sync their movements through a “scored improvisation.” Video stills. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Courtesy of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

description of the Moebius strip structure of simulation. In his 1983 text Simulations, he writes: “All of the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another, where there is no longer any active or passive. … [If] the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.”42 The Mobilus dancers inhabit the screen as a Moebius strip.

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Figure 4.12 Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image), Satellite Arts 1977, 1977. Video stills. Copyright Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. Used with permission of the artists.

The Chiasmic Screen Sherrie Rabinowitz described the experience of performing Satellite Arts as an electronic version of a traditional dance studio mirror: It was a model, like the mirror in a dance rehearsal studio. You know, everyone’s dancing, looking at themselves in the mirror, seeing a reflection, and from that they’re able to develop a choreography, to get in sync. … So this was the electronic version of that: the creation of a virtual space, in which fullbodied individuals could convene, an electronic image space—so the ‘image’ becomes ‘place.’43

Since the 1976 publication of Rosalind Krauss’s “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” it has become commonplace to describe the video monitor as a mirror and to understand the performing video artist as a new Narcissus, fascinated with her own image. “Mirror reflection,” Krauss writes, “implies the vanquishing of separateness. Its inherent movement is toward fusion. The self and its reflected image are of course literally separate. But the agency of reflection is a mode of appropriation, of illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object.”44 In chapter 2 I argued through Joan Jonas’s confounding video Left Side Right Side that the video screen is not a mirror and that its “true” image is not automatically or easily recognized as the self but exists strangely as a version of the other. For Satellite Arts 1977 Galloway and Rabinowitz did make the monitor into a mirror by reversing its image to aid the dancers’ navigation in the image as place. However, Rabinowitz’s description of Satellite Arts 1977 as a studio mirror opens up a different set of understandings about the potential power of video’s mirroring functions than Krauss’s account. Satellite Arts 1977 does

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complicate the categories of self and other. The effect, however, is not self-fascination or a “bracketing out of the object.” Rather, Satellite Arts 1977 diagrams a phenomenological relationship between self and other that can only take place on the television screen. In Rabinowitz’s studio mirror metaphor, each dancer sees herself as part of a larger image via a mirrored wall. She takes in her image as part of a total visual field that includes her body as well as those of the other dancers. This is not a situation in which one fixates on one’s own reflection. The dancer, instead, uses the mirror to see herself in relationship to others, as part of a community of bodies occupying a space. This is only possible through the mediating and reflective function of the mirror, for one’s own body is always excluded from the picture in direct vision. The same thing occurs with the mixed screen in Satellite Arts 1977. The screen is, indeed, like the studio mirror in that it presents to the dancer an image of her own body situated in space among the other dancers. She uses reflection to understand herself as part of a total image. Rabinowitz’s apt description of the screen as a studio mirror models a kind of looking akin to the “intertwining” of subject and object that phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in his essay “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” Chiasm is an anatomical term that describes the crossing of physical structures in the form of an “X,” such as nerves or ligaments. Perhaps the best-known chiasmic structure is the crossing of the optic nerves at the base of the brain, which enables images from each eye to combine into a single image for binocular vision. The definition from optics strongly resonates with the structure of Satellite Arts 1977: the two video feeds come together into a single continuous, coherent, composite image despite coming from separate sources. There are, however, still deeper connections between the chiasm and the structure and effects of Satellite Arts. In his essay, Merleau-Ponty describes what he calls “a second and more profound” kind of narcissism, which is “not to see the outside, as others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it … so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.”45 The viewer sees herself as part of an image of the larger world. She is not separate from it (a subject looking upon a scene), nor is she fixated on her own singular image. She is “caught up in what [s]he sees.”46 She can see, but, more importantly, she recognizes herself as seen by others. To be a subject, according to Merleau-Ponty, one must necessarily be part of the world one looks at and touches; therefore one must also be an object in that world. “He who looks,” the philosopher writes, “must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at. As soon as I see, it is necessary that the vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of the word) be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot.”47 The chiasm, like the interface, is the site where opposites touch. One has vision, and one is a vision. The movement from subject to object, seer to seen, toucher to touched, sentient body and body sensed is the movement between “the obverse and reverse of one sole circular course.”48 In Krauss’s

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conception of narcissism, the viewer vanquishes the other in order to be with her own image. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of this more profound kind of narcissism, the individual gives herself over to vision so that she might be seen by the other and become part of the visible world. Even though the viewer is also a visible thing in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenological experience, she cannot experience these two poles of being simultaneously. The roles are reversible, not simultaneous. The concurrent experience of both poles of existence is “always imminent and never realized in fact.”49 This might be the case for the physical body, but Galloway and Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts 1977 suggests how this phenomenological experience of being simultaneously both subject and object, seer and seen, toucher and touched can happen through and on the television screen. A dance studio mirror performs the function of showing the dancer how she appears to others, “installed in the midst of the visible.” The image in the mirror, however, is still organized from her vantage point, displaying and adjusting the scene based on the shifting subjective position of her body. This is where the differences between the camera/screen setup in Satellite Arts 1977 and the dance studio mirror become significant. Each dancer in Satellite Arts 1977, too, sees herself from the outside as part of a total visual field. Her vision, however, is routed through the camera and the screen. Therefore she sees herself from the camera’s distinct vantage point, not from a subjective position relative to her body in real space. Displacing the subjective viewpoint from the body to the camera enables the dancer to see herself as others see her. She can experience her body as a visible object. There are further differences between the studio mirror and the satellite-transmitted screen images that result in a significant phenomenological shift. Unlike the dancer in the studio, the participant in Satellite Arts 1977 does not share her physical space with all of the other bodies represented on the screen. If she turned away from the monitor, she would not find all of the other dancers, only those who were at the same geographic location. The screen portrays an alternative space parallel to, yet separate from, the physical world. It does not simply mediate; it is a visible but not “material” place. Consequently, to engage with the others, the dancer must navigate her body via the screen. To operate as a subject, that is, she must view herself as an object. The temporal difference between a mirror reflection and the screen image in Satellite Arts 1977 further intensifies this effect. A mirror’s image is always live. It reflects what is in front of it in exacting real time, whereas a satellite image always registers the time that it has traveled in its latency period. Latency may seem to be a failure of the system to live up to its claim of real-time telecommunication. Satellite Arts 1977 turns the delay into an advantage, for the “unworkability” of the satellite video interface forces the dancer to synesthetically commute her understanding of her body and its movements to her sense of sight.50 She cannot simply act in real space and assume that her actions will coherently transfer to the screen, as they would in a mirror. The delay ensures that the dancer abides by the rules of the screen and fully inhabits her avatar. This process causes the distinction between “sight” and “site” to

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collapse, as vision becomes the tactile means by which one touches other bodies and inhabits space. The artists appear to enact Paul Virilio’s description of the strange temporal and spatial logic of telepresence. Telepresence technologies, he writes, promote “a sort of personality split in time between the real time of our immediate activities—in which we act both here and now—and the real time of media interactivity that privileges the ‘now’ of the time slot of the televised broadcast to the detriment of the ‘here,’ that is to stay the space of the meeting place. In the manner of a teleconference that takes place thanks to a satellite, but which does so, paradoxically, nowhere in the world.”51 Galloway and Rabinowitz aimed to “destroy” the split screen and its oppositional logic in Satellite Arts 1977.52 By crafting a mixed image space from multiple camera feeds, the artists used screen space to model an impossible and idealized phenomenological situation in which the binary differences that govern our typical experience of the world dissolve. The Immaterial World I have suggested that Satellite Arts 1977 stages a specific kind of phenomenological encounter in the space of the screen by collapsing the clear distinctions between subject and object, here and there, and now and then, thereby forcing the performer to see and control her body as an object “installed in the midst of the visible,” surrounded by other subjects-as-objects. Satellite Arts 1977, consequently, confuses the difference between the real and the virtual as well. The term “telepresence” is typically used to designate experiences enabled by live telecommunications technologies that allow users to execute actions in a real place via a screen interface. Ken Goldberg provides a helpful definition of the difference between virtual reality and “telepresence”: “Virtual Reality,” he explains, “presents a simulacrum, a synthetic construction: in contrast, telepresence provides access to a remote physical environment. With telepresence what is being experienced is distal rather than simulacral.”53 The salient difference between them, then, is that in telepresent experiences real places and real bodies are at stake. One’s actions have effects and therefore “matter.” Virtual worlds present fictions; telepresence presents mediated realities. Most telepresence systems are, like conventional television, unidirectional—a remote user can look at and listen to a far-off place and, with the help of telerobots, can physically manipulate people and things at the represented site. While there are physical effects to one’s actions, there are few consequences for the user.54 She can touch the site, but no one can reach back toward her. Virtual spaces, on the other hand, present nonexistent worlds but typically allow for interactivity between users. Their actions may not register physical effects, but they can communicate and come together within the fiction. The virtual might, at first, be taken for an area of freedom: the world presented is a fiction, and all actions within it are immaterial and thus seemingly inconsequential. Galloway and Rabinowitz make it clear that this is not the case:

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Our artwork is about social spaces that accommodate the physical reality and the virtual. A major theme is the mixing of the real and the virtual—those two things. You are more involved and invested in the presence of that image which is an extension of you. … [In Satellite Arts 1977] that meant that people had to take responsibility for the event, for their image and who they were as they were presented by the lens and camera captured imagery.55

By using indexical avatars in a simulacral space, the artists attach specific identities to the images on the screen. The avatars are not generic stand-ins for anonymous users; they are “ambassadors” for the individuals who control them. The performers are simultaneously real and virtual bodies; they are telepresent in a space that has “no geographical boundaries,” and therefore they are responsible for their actions on both sides of the screen.56 I began this chapter with an image of Earth seen “live” from Apollo 8. Astronauts Frank Borman and William Anders described the event of seeing Earth from the moon in two different ways. Borman imagined his vantage point from the man-made satellite to be like God’s. Anders, pointing the television camera at the globe, diagrammed the scene differently. When vision was routed through the screen, the view from the moon became an image of everyone on the ground “looking at themselves.” These two points of view—a mastering, God’s-eye view through a keyhole, and seeing oneself as part of a total, encompassing picture—are both equally possible through satellite video. The satellite spectaculars of the 1960s used the keyhole effect to create the fiction of a shared global “now” and to reinforce the divisive differences between the people and places represented. They separated here from there and stressed the differences between west and east, have and have not, us and them by giving the viewer an omnipotent, subjective view onto a world that did not include her as an object available for engagement or scrutiny. In the networks’ hands, satellite transmissions reinscribed the dominant power relations of the Cold War era. When, in the late 1970s, NASA offered artists the opportunity to engage with this same technology, they challenged not only the conventional uses and structures of satellite-transmitted imagery but also the politics and ethics of such uses. Satellite Arts 1977 undid these binaries without succumbing to narcissistic structures typical of video, which vanquish representations of others in favor of an overwhelming fascination with the self. Galloway and Rabinowitz reimagined the relationships a viewer could have to herself and to others by using a mediated image, and consequently they provoked the viewer to rethink how she might be responsible for and how she relates to the images she sees on the television screen. They demonstrated how combining the here and now with the there and then might stage a chiasmic experience in video space. One cannot simultaneously experience being both subject and object in the physical, material world, but the “image as place” diagrams what this phenomenological experience might be like in the “immaterial” world.

5

The Presence of Others: Telerobotics and the Digitization of Touch

“Digital” technology derives its name from the Latin digitalis, meaning finger or finger’s breadth.1 A series of associations and transmutations incrementally led this term from its original use, which posited the physical body as a reference point and measure of things, to its common meaning today: discrete, discontinuous, abstract representations or manifestations of electronic data. The slow etymological slide from tactile embodiment to “immaterial” information can be easily traced. The fingers—those very things that were used to touch, measure, and point at the immediate world—were also used to count discrete numbers, or digits, up to ten. The tips of those same ten fingers would eventually manipulate individual keys on a variety of machines that produced or processed distinct bits of numerical information. These digital machines came to be seen in contrast with a class of technologies that were now their new opposites, the “analog.” Analog devices, unlike their digital counterparts, manipulate and process continuously variable physical quantities (e.g., voltage, spatial position, time).2 At its root, “analog” names a condition of similarity, of one thing resembling another by shared characteristics. Analogy, the power to connect and transform via the analog, seems to have fueled the evolution of the meaning of its counterpart outlined above. By analogy, then, we witness the analog usurp a function of the original digitalis. The shift from analog, physical media, like photography, film, and videotape, to allegedly “immaterial” digital forms and formats has enabled the popular claim in media theory of the “death of the index” in the digital era. As I argued in chapter 1, the logic of this unfolds as follows: the physical, material properties of analog media provided existential—indexical— guarantees of what they recorded. Light touched photographic emulsion and left a physical trace testifying to—indexing—the co-presence of camera and represented scene. Digital information, however, is by these accounts “immaterial” and therefore unrelated to touch. Digital images, then, do not bear indexical witness to the events they record. The shift in technology brings with it, consequently, a shadow of doubt and disbelief in what these media appear to evidence. I proposed, on the contrary, that that indexicality was never primarily or exclusively based in materiality or physical touch, but instead has always been a doubtful and dubious kind of sign despite its conventional use as evidence.3 As such, I argued that,

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rather than becoming irrelevant in the digital age or impossible in digital media, indexicality is the semiotic category for understanding new media. More than anything else, I wanted to establish that indices function by pointing to shared contexts and moments of fleeting co-presence between various actors, including the sign and the subject who receives it and forms abductive inferences about it from the surrounding informational context. Here again I want to return to the index to focus on its specific relationship to digits and the digital—to touch and numerical bits of information—by turning to a series of artworks that aimed to extend the sense of touch and the experience of embodied agency through telecommunications networks, and in doing so help us both to rethink the status of materiality and matter in digital contexts and to reconsider our ethical relationships to mediated and virtual subjects and things. Some twenty years after Engelbart pointed his index finger at the computer interface and demonstrated the mouse as a technology that gave the user sensory access to and presence in data space, artists and engineers—and interesting new combinations thereof— began using the Internet and the newly established World Wide Web to extend the user’s vision, hearing, and touch into distant yet real environments via telepresence and telerobots.4 As I discussed in the previous chapter, telepresence technologies often appear to undo the baseline phenomenological properties of sensory reciprocity and reversibility in which the seer is always (potentially) seen and the toucher is always both the subject and object of touch. The artworks I take up in this chapter tend to use teletechnologies to explore the humanistic aspects of mediated action, but I would like to use their works, and specifically how they take up the digit and the digital, to push past the human—and even the posthuman—to hypothesize how we might conceive of the other and its presence in a medium and a semiotic register that tend to bring with them radical, existential doubt, as well as to articulate a phenomenology and an ethics of digital space in the face of philosophical misgivings. The Handshake In her provocative study of the relationship between software and ideology, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains how computers “both depend on and perpetuate metaphors.” “From files to desktops, windows to spreadsheets,” she writes, “metaphors dominate user interfaces. … Metaphors make abstract computer tasks familiar, concrete, and easy to grasp, since through them we allegedly port already existing knowledge to new tasks.”5 And just as we make computer processes material, concrete, and knowable—that is, “graspable”—through metaphor, we also have come to understand our own bodies and their very physical functions and processes through comparisons to the computer. We imagine our memories as “hard drives,” just as we can understand the Internet animistically as a distributed, global “brain.” Drawing on her own etymological reading, metaphor (“meta [change] phor [carrying]”), Chun argues, “is a transfer

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that transforms.”6 Having ceded to the analog its connection to the body—and particularly to the fingers and touch—the digital recoups it again by metaphor and analogy. Perhaps no computing metaphor is more poetic, personal, and tactile than that of the “handshaking” protocol. The oscillating, high-pitched electronic squeal of two stations attempting to establish a connection was synesthetically softened by the analogy to the hand and its intimate, respectful, civil touch. By now a distant memory to older web users, this process and the distinct sound it produced once represented the act of “getting in touch,” and served as a soundtrack for the 1990s and a new era of networked home computing. The modem’s handshake, like those that happen in the physical, interpersonal world, was a kind of greeting and establishment of polite protocol. It initiated a relationship and confirmed the rules of engagement between two parties; it signaled trust, agreement, and communication. It was a greeting and an acknowledgment. At the 1993 SIGGRAPH conference, artist-engineers Ken Goldberg and Richard Wallace presented Data Dentata, alternatively known as the “Datamitt” (figure 5.1), which literalized the intimate and courteous metaphor.7 The device, a metal-wire-wrapped tube containing simple touch sensors and haptic actuators, enabled users to “hold hands over the Internet.”8 For the SIGGRAPH demonstration, Goldberg placed one Datamitt at the

Figure 5.1 Ken Goldberg and Richard Wallace, Data Dentata (Datamitt), SIGGRAPH, 1993.

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convention hall in Anaheim, California, while a second was in Manhattan in Wallace’s New York University lab (figure 5.2). A user could slip her hand into the narrow tube and wrap her palm around a pliable rubber ball inside. If Wallace squeezed the ball in New York, the sensors would trigger the foam-padded actuators inside the other Datamitt, which would envelop the SIGGRAPH user’s hand in a soft squeeze. By this means, “an ordinary phone line” and modem became the conduit for physical contact.9 To have one’s hand squeezed indicated a presence on the other side of the unusual interface. To return the gesture acknowledged the other user’s existence. Remote, electronic presence turned into physical, tactile pressure, and it became clear that telephone lines could, indeed, be used to “reach out and touch someone.” Goldberg and Wallace’s device only transmitted one bit of information, that is, it made touch and presence into a binary arrangement—someone was either there or not there; someone returned your touch or the machine was inert. Even so, Goldberg recalls the powerful and profound experiences of the users who made contact with Wallace on the other side, often spending quite a long time just being together.10 Like all signals from “beyond,” Data

Figure 5.2 Ken Goldberg and Richard Wallace, Data Dentata (Datamitt) transparent prototype, SIGGRAPH, 1993.

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Dentata required faith and trust on the part of the user, and in return she received transcendence: in this case, overcoming the body’s specific spatiotemporal position and transforming a sense of distance into one of proximity. Data Dentata proposed the Internet as a “medium” in the paranormal sense of the word that Rosalind Krauss used for video art’s earliest stages.11 “The uncommon terrain for that common-enough usage [of the word ‘medium’],” she writes, “is the world of parapsychology: telepathy, extra-sensory-perception, and communication with an after-life, for people with certain kinds of psychic powers are understood to be Mediums.”12 Electronic technology, for the art historian, seems much closer to this occult sense than to any formalist meaning of “medium” because of the way a human becomes a “receiver (and sender) of communication from an invisible source” and because “the human conduit exists in a particular relation to the message, which is one of temporal concurrence.”13 Electronic technology and the time-folding experiences of presence it delivers, she reasons, therefore demand to be discussed in the parapsychological mode, alongside other (potentially fictive) phenomena such as “telepathy, extra-sensory-perception, and communication with an after-life.”14 The Datamitt’s paranormal, telekinetic powers refashioned the users as “mediums” and helped to articulate what the Internet could and would become as a medium—not just a network that expanded and disembodied thought and consciousness across an electronic neural network, but also one that could extend our physical reach and materialize touch out of the ether.15 Despite the fact that Goldberg and Wallace were attempting to recreate an intimate and pleasant kind of contact, they quickly recognized that the Datamitt produced initial experiences that were frightening and unsettling. The device on display at SIGGRAPH was wrapped in copper-colored metal wire, which gave it the look of a primitive and unfinished machine. Its coils were reminiscent both of the infrastructural cables that enabled the telematic connection and of the participant’s own electrical, bodily circuitry that made such feelings and experiences possible. While, in the end, most of the participants reported enjoying the experience of “holding hands” over the Internet, the choice to place one’s hand into the contraption was nearly always marked by hesitation and trepidation.16 The documentary photograph most often used to represent the project shows a participant who has just extended his hand into the Datamitt’s darkly shadowed cavity (figure 5.1). His free hand is frozen in a gesture of tense alarm, as if he is slowly, apprehensively approaching, ready to recoil at any moment. Goldberg and Wallace renamed the project Data Dentata, making reference to Rome’s Bocca della Verità or “mouth of truth,” an ancient carving turned tourist trap at the basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.17 The nearly six-foot-diameter carved stone medallion depicts a bearded man with his mouth agape. Legend has it that the sculpture acts as a lie detector, and visitors to the site are encouraged to reach their hands into the open maw and speak truthfully, or risk having their appendages bitten off by the judgmental idol. The name also, of course, cites the cautionary folktale of the “vagina dentata,” in which lustful and impudent men risk castration by surprisingly placed teeth when they force a woman into submission. In the first story, an object becomes animate, threatening,

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and overwhelmingly powerful. In the second, a being who is viewed as an object, denied subjectivity, autonomy, and independence, asserts her forceful, embodied agency by becoming terrifyingly augmented and more than human. Both legends give objects the power to disrupt the perceived order of things, and to give agency to the inanimate or the oppressed. These ideas, as well as Alan Turing’s famous “test” for computer intelligence, will help us reconsider what it what it means to be a subject or an object and how one might reverse or upset this binary. Coordinating Conjunctions Data Dentata acted as a tactile, haptic telecommunications medium that purported to put two individuals “in touch.” This was not, however, always true. For some part of its daylong run at SIGGRAPH, Wallace left the lab, and in Goldberg’s words, “hotwired” the SIGGRAPH Datamitt to transmit signals back to itself in a slightly delayed loop.18 Goldberg only discovered Wallace’s absence at the end of the day when the two debriefed over the telephone. Goldberg expressed his admiration for Wallace’s ability to keep up with and reproduce the complicated rhythmic patterns squeezed by a musician using the Datamitt. Wallace, flummoxed, ascertained that this particularly moving and impressive bit of telecommunicative connection must have happened when he was away at lunch.19 John Canny and Eric Paulos point out the deception in their account of Data Dentata: “One of the L.A. participants using the machine during this time said she felt very close to the person in New York she was interacting with. In fact, the apparatus was simply reflecting her own squeezes back to her, with some delay—a perfectly reasonable behavior for a real stranger to do.”20 One cannot help being disappointed on learning that this device, which seemed to promise and (according to Goldberg) deliver an experience of shared, embodied co-presence through an interface, had hidden within it elements of a hoax. It was just an inanimate thing that only had presence or power in the user’s own metaphorical, anthropomorphizing imagination. Each squeeze gave the user reason to doubt mediated experience. Taken another way, however, this fraudulent moment could point to something potentially much more profound than the promised tactile connection between distant persons. Wallace’s absence from his station meant that some of the participants were not holding hands with anyone, despite what they may have felt or perceived. Data Dentata became like the Bocca della Verità and the other mythical figures I have mentioned in this book—Terminus, Narcissus, and Echo—as well as the interface or screen itself: it was suspended between the animate and inanimate, not quite living but also somehow uncannily alive or “live.”21 One could describe this experience as simply one of reflection or narcissism, as Canny and Paulos are close to doing in their account. It seems, at first, quite right to say that the user was squeezing her own hand. But just like Narcissus in Ovid’s myth, the user understood the image as that of another rather than her reflection.22 And surely everyone knows what it is like to squeeze one’s own hand, and knows when one is doing it. In his 1950 article for

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Mind, Alan Turing reformulated the basic question of artificial intelligence: Can machines think? Instead he asked, Might a human mistake a machine for another human under certain conversational circumstances? He adapted an “imitation game” in which a man and a woman attempt to confuse an interrogator as to their genders, switching the (assumedly) binary difference at play from that between men and women to that between humans and computers.23 In Turing’s revision of the game, if the interrogator guesses incorrectly (mistaking computer for human) just as often as in the original (mistaking male for female and vice versa), might one surmise that fooling the interrogator is functionally the same thing as the computer “thinking”? Nick Monfort points out that this question was not posed to computer scientists but to the philosophers who read Mind, and therefore “was a way of challenging their notion of intelligence and how it could be defined phenomenologically.”24 Following this line of thought, Data Dentata could function as a sort of Turing test that queries the interrogator’s/user’s understanding of the situation as much as it queries the functioning of the machine. In so doing, it points to epistemological and phenomenological questions about how we know and understand the mediated world, and whether we behave and feel differently depending on whether we are playing with other humans or machines. Goldberg has described the duped musician’s experience as the most powerful reaction he witnessed, the one in which both he and the user seemed to most potently feel a presence and connection through the device, despite the fact that this was precisely when Wallace was missing.25 I think this power is worth noting. It is not the seduction of the simple narcissism that Krauss describes when video artists become captivated and entranced by their own images, but a magical moment in which an object passes for, or even seems to become, the Other. Goldberg and Wallace’s reformulation of Turing’s question is whether one is holding hands over the Internet or with the Internet. This conjunctive switch, from over or through to with, catalyzes a series of uncanny experiences with telecommunications interfaces, and Data Dentata in particular: it could be living or data, living and data, living yet data, living but data, and so on. The interface is a boundary that provides a point of contact between opposites, between self and other, here and there, now and then, animate and inanimate, human and machine.26 Telepresence interfaces, in particular, create strange meeting points in which one is here and there, here or there, here yet there, here but there, here nor there. The questions raised by mediated encounters are, then, as much ontological and phenomenological as epistemological. Another of Goldberg’s works brings the philosophical crux of telepresent situations into higher relief. The Telegarden, a telerobotic art installation that enabled remote users to plant and tend seeds in a small indoor flower patch, was housed in the galleries of Linz’s Ars Electronica for nearly a decade (1995–2004) (figure 5.3). During that time visitors to the museum or the project’s website could use an online interface to engage in the potentially boring— and certainly ridiculous—task of gardening over the Internet. Gardening at a distance seems to bar the user from all of the conventional pleasures and products of gardening: the sun,

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Figure 5.3 Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, project team George Bekey, Steven Gentner, Rosemary Morris, Carl Sutter, Jeff Wiegley, Erich Berger, The Telegarden, 1995–2004, networked art installation at Ars Electronica Museum, Austria, http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/.

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fresh air, scents, textures, tastes, and the bounty of the crop itself. The typical self-centered human reasons for wanting to garden were formally eliminated from experience of The Tele­ garden. One could, however, plant a seed and watch it grow, feed it, and protect it from the other users in the sharecropped remote environment via a robotic arm and web camera. There was always evidence of the presence of others in the garden. There were seeds and plants you did not sow, puddles of water you did not pour, and often the robotic arm was busy “servicing” someone else. The scattered, mutually invisible users could come together to exchange information, ask fellow gardeners to tend to their plants while they were on vacation, and give helpful remote-gardening advice through the “Alternative Town Square Chatroom.” That is, despite the fact that each gardener was separated from the other users, there were always indices of their presence and many opportunities to engage as a community.27 In just its first year of operation, 9,000 individuals joined the Telegarden community, registering for the website and collectively tending the plot, while another 100,000 visitors watched without intervening.28 Upon registering, users could visit the site and control the robot to care for the plants by watering them. After 100 visits, users would earn the right to plant their own seed in the garden. After 500 more, they would be permitted a second seed, and after 1,000 visits, a final seed.29 In her brief analysis of the work, art historian Kate Mondloch understands this system of earning the right to plant in light of William J. Mitchell’s theory of persistent virtual spaces, which posits that “users are more likely to behave as they would when encountering a ‘real’ place or person” after repeated visits and increasing familiarity. Quoting Mitchell, Mondloch explains, “if one realizes that you will have to live with your fellow inhabitants for a long time, and that you will need them to respect and trust you, then you will be less tempted by role-playing and momentarily amusing deceptions.”30 “In a seeming paradox,” she writes, “the more spectators engage in The Telegarden’s website as ‘real,’ the more they will engage in the garden as such.”31 That is, the more the users value the social relationships activated by The Telegarden, the more they will respect the garden, be it virtual or real. I think this is right; one is less likely to be rude or brazen or destructive if one intends to have ongoing relationships with the others involved in a community—whether proximal or online. One could, however, also see The Telegarden’s structure as fostering a set of relationships not just among users but also between the plants and the user (as well as between the plants and the water, the plants and the soil, the soil and the water, the robot and the plants, the users and the robot, and so on). One cannot simply start planting seeds in The Telegarden; rather one must spend considerable time tending those that already exist, caring for them, observing them, and maintaining their wellbeing. Users must first get to know the robot arm, the camera and the way it communicates to the user on the screen, and the responsiveness of the interface, as well as the slowness of the germination process. The Telegarden mixed the rapid response of informational immediacy that in 1997 we had already come to expect from the World Wide Web with the almost impossibly inhuman pace

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of watching the grass grow. A user could witness the robotic arm speedily plant and water her seed, and then endlessly wait, inhabiting the temporal scale of the plant. The first hundred times a user visited The Telegarden, she was permitted only to be among the plants—rummaging around their foliage in the guise of a point of view webcam, and perhaps with—or perhaps even in—the robotic arm as it guided the camera or sprayed water. Only much later could she plant a seed and call something her own, thereby establishing a hierarchy of ownership and authority. Until then, there were only indices of presence and life that were largely independent of her and her wishes. Unsurprisingly, a 1997 sociological study of online interactive environments charts only The Telegarden’s community of human members, devoting careful attention to the chat room interactions in which users collectively negotiated and established behavioral protocol. Authors Margaret L. McLaughlin, Kerry K. Osborne, and Nicole B. Ellison note that The Telegarden’s “hit-based” reward structure required users to demonstrate commitment through repeated visits to the site and accountability for their actions to the community by paying attention to the user logs. All members could access the user logs, which recorded how often each member visited the site as well as when and where they planted and watered.32 This allowed for the gardeners to observe and comment on (and condemn) each other’s actions, which were otherwise unregulated and open to mischief. “There was no mechanism inherent in the Tele-Garden [sic] apparatus,” they write, “to prevent members from sabotaging each other’s plants by crushing them with the robotic arm, planting on top of another’s plant, posting pornographic pictures in the chat window, or writing a script to flood the garden with repeated clicks of the ‘water’ icon, and in fact some of these events did occur, although most of the members were unaware of them.”33 I would like to venture, however, that the plants, soil, robot, database, and interface were “aware” of some of these actions (to the extent that one can attribute “awareness” to things), even if the users were not. If a plant was crushed or drowned in a garden, and no one was (remotely) there to witness it, it still surely happened for the plant. This does not have to be an epistemological issue of direct versus indirect knowledge, or one troubling the potential virtuality and simulation of screen-based images, but one that points to the ontology of the screen. As Mondloch notes, critical accounts of The Telegarden “rarely describe firsthand experiences with the material objects in the installation—in this case, the museum-bound patch of earth.”34 Rather, she writes, “the discourse surrounding The Telegarden is preoccupied with the question of the garden’s ‘realness’—an area of inquiry that Goldberg identifies as ‘telepistemology.’ That is, how can one know whether one is tending a real garden or a convincing facsimile?”35 One could dispense with the distinction between the real and the virtual and the entire Cartesian epistemological dilemma by following Gilles Deleuze’s flattening of everything “into an even consistency on the plane of immanence,” Mondloch argues, but this would not solve the problem of how to ascertain and create the “foundational elements required for meaningful human-to-human interaction [that] remain

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glaringly absent from telepresence and teleaction.”36 The fact that accounts of social interaction and epistemological doubt dominate the conversation about The Telegarden is not only unsurprising; it is, Mondloch emphasizes, also necessary. “Ultimately,” she suggests, “disembodiment and impassiveness toward screen-based spaces may be threats posed by the preponderance of screen-mediated activity in our digital era.”37 These epistemological issues, she argues, can and should be conceived as ethical issues as well. We must believe in our actions and the other users “out there” looking in from their screens. While I strongly agree with Mondloch’s assessment of the epistemological and ethical problems of telepresence and teleaction, and while I understand how the leveling of the real and the virtual (or the human and computer) may seem to be counterproductive to thinking through the ethical dimensions of these technologies, in the following section I would like to entertain a type of “flatness” derived from the writing of Czech philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser to suggest that the epistemological confusion produced by blurring the binaries that structure our online and offline lives might be ethically productive and philosophically expansive. This “flattening out,” I would like to suggest, is a means of temporarily bracketing the epistemological issues surrounding disbelief, fraud, and virtuality that haunt telepresence systems (and which will be the topic of the following chapter, which brings them into grave social and military scenarios). It is my intention that a Flusserian flattening may actually open up the possibility of having an ethical relationship to the screen and mediated others, particularly when there is a Turing-test-like epistemological uncertainty within a system. Mondloch is, quite rightly, most concerned with the human-to-human relationships in The Telegarden, that is, with the relationships between the various remote gardeners. But she sidesteps the gardener’s relationship with the matter “at hand”—the plants, the worms, the dirt, the robot arm, etc.—perhaps because the existential status of those things is continuously, “telepistemologically,” in doubt. While the things (potentially) on the other side of the screen are not human, and are not pretending to be, they are living (or at least animate/ animated) things that are explicitly positioned as in need of care. Our understanding of what is at stake in The Telegarden might shift were we to bracket, at least momentarily, the humanto-human interaction enabled by telepresence and the epistemological concerns these mediated interactions provoke. Mosaic Matter As I have argued throughout this book, the screen, particularly in its electronic, video-based forms, has always been subject to what Samuel Weber calls an “uncanny confusion” that is a result of the specific ontological properties that level phenomenal distinctions between the live and the recorded, as well as the virtual and the actual. Here we could add to the list animate/inanimate and human/machine distinctions. On the video screen, he writes, “the hierarchy [between the original and the copy] is severely perturbed, and consequently

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the logic and ontology that govern the relationship of mimesis, reproduction, and representation are unsettled. … Television is a site of such an uncanny confusion and confounding.”38 The screen is the site of ontological indeterminacy. All things, all times, all places are reduced to the electronic pulsing of the mosaic raster grid. Everything flattens on a single surface, all made of the same electronic matter regardless of the existential or ontological status of what it represents. Vilém Flusser also discusses the screen as an ontologically flattening device in his 1985 book Into the Universe of Technical Images, and describes this flattened state as the general condition of contemporary life.39 Flusser’s text tracks the transformation of humans via their technologies from creatures who were immersed in a four-dimensional world of “concrete experience”; to beings who faced an objective, three-dimensional situation, which they engaged by grasping and shaping physical tools; to subjects who understood the world through two-dimensional images and representations, and on to literate people who think and communicate through one-dimensional linear texts.40 But, the philosopher claims, we have now left this “historical” era of literary linearity and entered into “the universe of technical images,” a “posthistorical” world without dimension that operates at “the level of computation and calculation.”41 At the dawn of the telematic age, the world around us, he wrote, “disintegrates into a swarm of particles and quanta, the writing subject into a swarm of bits and bites, moments of decision and action.”42 It is not just “photographs, films, videos, television, screens, and computer terminals” that are particulate. They clearly lay bare their structure to the unaided eye, causing one to recognize the voids and gaps that exist everywhere, in all things. Suddenly one sees all of the intervals of emptiness that hold the whole world together by holding it apart.43 Seen in this way and at this scale, everything is made of the same stuff.44 Throughout his book, Flusser describes this new structuring of the world as “mosaic,” as tiled from innumerable bits that come together to form a picture or a thing across an even plane.45 In the telematic age, we live through pixelated pictures and we have become pixelated as well. Against the assumption that the alleged “immateriality” of digital information would make it inaccessible or unrelated to touch and the corporeal digits, Flusser argues that the primacy of technical images has brought us to a point at which our “being is concentrated on [our] fingertips.”46 The particles that we now know all things are made of—images, subjects, and objects alike—can only be accessed or represented through the very material technological devices or apparatuses which are operated by the physical act of pressing buttons. When, in the telematic age, everything “disintegrates into a swarm of particles and quanta,” he wrote, “what remains are particles without dimension that can be neither grasped nor represented nor understood. They are inaccessible to hands, eyes, or fingers. But they can be calculated (calculus, ‘pebbles’) and can, by means of special apparatuses equipped with keys, be computed. The gesture of tapping with the fingertips on the keys of an apparatus can be called ‘calculate and compute.’ It makes mosaic-like combinations of particles possible, technical images, a computed universe in which particles are

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assembled into images.”47 While Flusser deals in his text exclusively with what he calls “images” (photographs, videos, computer screens), I would like to venture that this universe of technical images would certainly include something like the haptic and teleoperative experiences offered by Data Dentata and The Telegarden. In fact, not only does he place special importance on touch and the role of the hand in operating within this new image world, but the entire trajectory of Flusser’s text is toward networked, bi- or multidirectional telematic telepresence.48 He imagines a future, fueled by these new images and their potential interactivity, in which the spectacular structures of televisual culture that “disperse society into corners” and position solitary individuals in front of their receivers’ screens are overcome by the possibility of being connected through rather than to images. “Dialogic threads (such as cable, videophones, or conferencing video),” he wrote, adapting a familiar, utopian fantasy, “could open the fascist tissue of the rising [spectacular] society to the kind of web we are in the habit of calling democratic. … For then the people would truly be in dialog, in a global conversation.”49 Because of their data-based structure, technical images—as well as our own telerobotically mediated, telepresent actions—can travel over these new infrastructural networks to connect with other individuals and objects. This is not a spectacular, isolating system, he argues, but rather one that circumvents the hierarchical, centralized systems of former media to put individuals directly in touch with each other. “I know,” Flusser writes, “that behind my terminal and the threads that stream from it sits still more. I know it because when I press a given key, messages from others appear. … I play within images not to exist in a particular way but rather to coexist.”50 The universe of technical images puts us in touch with others; we “coexist”—act, interact, respond—through our screens and fingertips. In the preceding chapters, I have maintained that returning to the semiotic insistence of the indexical sign— especially the pointing finger—will help us understand the operation of media images, particularly as produced by telematic or telecommunications technology. Flusser, too, figures the gesture of using these technologies as a kind of pointing that is literally done with the fingers, and explains “the current interest in semiotics” as a confirmation of “a rising awareness of the role of the fingertips in our new being-in-the-world.”51 Technical images, then, are “indicators,” “projections,” “lighthouses,” and “signposts” that “refer to the surrounding context.”52 They are “significant, commanding message[s]” that “do not show us their meaning; they show us a way we may be directed.”53 There are clear correspondences—even near verbatim echoes—between Flusser’s descriptions of technical images and what they do and Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of the index. If technical images for Flusser (and indices for Peirce) act as fingers pointing to a specific context, and are signs whose message exceeds their contents, what they appear to point to, above all, is the presence of other people, places, and things.

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Touching In In Flusser’s words, those who work against the centralized structures of unidirectional, broadcast culture are “unspectacular new revolutionaries.”54 Reformulating contemporary media systems to contain feedback loops and to connect viewers to one another (rather than to images) amounts to a kind of telematically enabled political activism. “By reconstructing the role of images in society,” he writes, the unspectacular revolutionaries “want to bring about a general reconstruction of all broadcasting. Then the global totalitarian apparatus could be avoided, and instruction would be directed dialogically against the apparatus—in other words, not programmed democracy but democratic programming.”55 Many early video artists and early users of the Internet might easily fit Flusser’s description of “unspectacular revolutionaries.” The artists and engineers I discussed in earlier chapters, from Engelbart to Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Chris Burden, Kit Galloway, and Sherrie Rabinowitz, all appear to be early examples of the kind of telematic agitator Flusser envisions, each also stressing the power of pointing at and dissolving into the screen. In the mid-1980s, when Flusser was writing, however, new technologies were becoming available that allowed for a public demonstration of the potential for telematic restructuring of everyday media and experiences. A singular example of the “democratic” telecommunications experiment was Columbus, Ohio’s QUBE cable, the first interactive television station. From 1977 to 1985, Warner Communications teamed up with Ampex Cable to wire this city for multidirectional interactive television. The service launched several now well-known cable channels, such as early versions of MTV and Nickelodeon, but is best remembered for its pioneering use of audience feedback in its programming.56 While the most lasting effect of QUBE’s mission is payper-view and à la carte television shows, the station funded a series of experimental programs that allowed viewers to interact with the television shows in real time. For the most part, audience feedback was confined to real-time polls about social issues during news and talk shows (for example, Phil Donahue’s 1977 special for the station that polled viewers on their opinions about issues such as sex, marriage, and abortion). Viewers were simply asked to respond to multiple-choice questions using QUBE’s unique remote control console.57 “But even those simple viewer-participation functions,” according to Kevin Featherly, “allowed for an early form of electronic democracy; by punching buttons in a keypad viewers could respond to issues raised during live city council and school board meeting broadcasts. Viewers could win prizes during quiz shows and occasionally select plays for local football teams during live game telecasts.”58 QUBE’s experiment in direct democracy through the pushing of telematic buttons was often much more trivial. For example, the program How Do You Like Your Eggs asked game show contestants to guess the public’s majority opinion on less-thanpressing issues, such as the titular question. Several artists were invited into the studios to create interactive television artworks, most notably producers Fred Barzyk and David Atwood, early video pioneer Peter D’Agostino, and

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Jaime Davidovich, who produced and starred in SoHo TV’s The Live Show!, an artists’ public access television program that ran on Manhattan Cable Television from 1979 to 1984. Barzyk and Atwood, known for their experimental television projects with Nam June Paik, Stan VanDerBeek, and others at WGBH-Boston, created a raucous, interactive live drama, “Lulu Smith: The Chicken that Ate Columbus,” in which viewers determined the major and minor life events of the title character.59 D’Agostino’s proposed project for QUBE never aired, but was later presented as a video installation (Proposal for QUBE, 1978) at Ohio State University’s Sullivant Gallery.60 The proposal would have let viewers edit the program by consensus, to highlight how the response mechanisms enabled by the QUBE system limited “feedback to the mere illusion of participation.”61 There were 120 potential combinations of text and image in D’Agostino’s project, but the effect, should it have aired, would likely have been either mediocre averaging or outright disorder and confusion, rather than algorithmic novelty or coherent artistic vision. Marshall McLuhan had imagined the viewer’s finger as being intimately involved in “completing” the television image in an automatic, compulsive, and synesthetic form of audience participation.62 The viewer’s eye, McLuhan explained, acted as a “limning finger” that ceaselessly traced the always-unfolding electronic image. Television, he argued, was an inherently participatory, “tactile” medium that required the viewer to “complete” the broken, rasterized, “mosaic” technical image on the screen to make a coherent picture of comprehensible depth.63 This form of participation, however, was automatic and unconscious, even in McLuhan’s techno-utopian formulation. QUBE may have claimed to more effectively integrate the viewer and tactile participation into the televisual experience, but D’Agostino’s project frames button pushing as a gesture that is at best arbitrary, at worst impotent and meaningless. Jaime Davidovich’s program for QUBE gave viewers control over cinematography rather than editing. The artist orchestrated a stripped-down talk show for his performance on QUBE.64 For the live program, Davidovich and his co-host, QUBE’s Carol Stevenson, sat at a table in an ersatz dining room, complete with flowers, wine, and a small television set (figure 5.4). Embarking on what Stevenson calls, “the most truly interactive show she … ever participated in,” Davidovich invites the at-home audience to “direct” the program. While Stevenson is disappointed that they will not be asking questions that might demographically “pinpoint” the audience, Davidovich insists that to be interactive, the audience ought to have some kind of agency, rather than merely voting or answering personal questions about themselves. To understand what video art is, he argues, the audience must have the opportunity to make it, not merely respond to it. After briefly educating the audience in the basic terms of cinematography and demonstrating standard camera movements, the hosts instruct viewers to call into the program to take control of the camera. The television picture switches to show the black-and-white monitor feeds of cameras one and two in the top half of the screen (camera one shows Davidovich in a close up, while camera two frames Davidovich and Stevenson in an establishing shot); the bottom half of the screen shows, in color, the

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active, live-transmitting camera. The hosts connect the telephone caller to the in-studio camera people, and the remote director begins issuing instructions. He asks to pan and zoom, eventually focusing in on the television set on the studio’s table. The call-in director’s decisive actions are enabled (or sometimes countered) by the desires of the other home viewers holding their QUBE consoles. They determine which camera the director can control by voting—what QUBE calls “touching in”—for either camera one or camera two on their keypad. Across the bottom of the screen flashes an invitation to “TOUCH NOW,” followed by bar graphs registering the votes of the at-home audience (figure 5.4). Stevenson initially instructed the viewers to all touch button one, then button two, to make sure that everyone knows what they are to do and, importantly, to make their invisible presence felt. The various callers who we hear over the phone controlling the camera movement during the program literally give voice to the silent, faceless individuals in their Columbus living rooms. Stevenson and Davidovich attempt to have a conversation in the background, providing the constant phatic patter that permeates live television as an indication of its very liveness. Television, according to Stanley Cavell, is primarily an occasion for talk.65 Talk, and its overwhelming prevalence in television programming of all kinds, is responsible, at least in part, for its use as a kind of “company” that convinces the dispersed viewers that they aren’t “alone, or anyway, that being alone isn’t unbearable.”66 This experience of “company” and the presence of others is in part, according to Cavell, “a function of the simultaneity of the medium—or of the fact that at any time it might be live and that there is no sensuous distinction between the live and the repeat, or the replay: the others are there, if not shut in this room, still caught at this time. One is receiving or monitoring them, like callers; and receiving or monitoring, unlike screening and projection, does not come between their presence to the camera and their presentness to us.”67 Davidovich and Stevenson attempt a conversation, but their voices are drowned out by the caller’s directions, and the image is distractingly overwritten by the audience’s meter readings. Even could one hear the hosts’ conversation clearly, the camera movements would no longer be in the service of their discourse. The traditional cinematic, shot-reverse-shot structure of on-screen conversation falls apart as the viewers direct the camera and explore the mise-en-scène. While the hosts claim that they will nonchalantly drink their wine and have a candid conversation in front of the cameras, instead they watch the program on the little television sitting between them, commenting on what the viewers are doing with the show. Their talk does not stop, but it shifts to obsessive narration of what is happening in the present moment, focusing not only what the viewers can already see, but what the viewers are actually doing. While they are receiving the calls and monitoring the images, the hosts’ conversation continually works to assure the viewers of their shared temporal present and recognize the viewers’ telematic agency. Figure 5.4 Jaime Davidovich, SoHo Wants to Know (QUBE Project), 1980. Copyright Jaime Davidovich. Courtesy of Jaime Davidovich.

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Talk and the simultaneity in time—if not in space—emphasizes what Cavell calls television’s “material basis” as a “current simultaneous event reception.”68 If television has the potential of being live and connecting viewers to live events (which punctuate the routine, regularized banality of regular, recorded programming), QUBE—especially in its artistic incarnations—put this property on display as a form of functionality. Viewers touching the buttons on their clunky remote controls intervened in the current of event reception, to make it, even if in a minor way, a current of event production. In Davidovich’s program, the two callers who have the opportunity to control the camera movements make clear the difference between this show and one more conventionally produced: they both immediately choose to zoom in on the tabletop monitor to create swirling, abstract images of video feedback. The at-home directors’ desire to create video feedback is not surprising. They assert their control over the scene by forcing the image to become uncontrollable and unreadable. They forgo the conventions of cinematography and narrative editing to introduce noise into the system. This noise is both electronic and cybernetic—the remote directors join together the input and output signals of a system to create distortion, and they modify, adjust, and control the operation of that system by responding to a situation in real time.69 Davidovich’s directors bring these two types of feedback and video art practice together by using a responsive, “democratic” television program to make disorienting visual noise. The double feedback structure is an effective means of becoming present at a remote scene, but the viewers’ presence at that place is extremely contingent and tenuous. The directors are present by live transmission of their voices over the telephone, and in the movements of the cameras that the embodied, physically present camera operators choose to enact. But the presence of the rest of the at-home audience is only registered in the bar graph data running along the bottom of the screen. By touching their buttons, they indicate that they are watching and present to the screen. The Presence of Others Almost a decade after the collapse of QUBE, the World Wide Web began to take shape as a multidirectional telecommunication platform, and artists and engineers exploited the structural potential of the Internet to create works that further developed the possibility for physical presence and embodied agency in remote environments. John Canny and Eric Paulos, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, began developing what they called Personal Roving Presences, or PRoPs, in the mid1990s as a means of “leveraging … physical presence in remote space.”70 While the QUBE viewers could only register their presence by “touching in,” Canny and Paulos’s PRoPs, which were simultaneously presented as feats of engineering and potential artistic efforts, enabled users to roam freely in remote environments by means of “simple, inexpensive, untethered, mobile tele-robots that [strove] to provide the sensation of tele-embodiment in real space.”71 Connected to the PRoP by a standard web browser and a Java applet, a user could roll her

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robot-avatar into a physical situation to engage with other people in shared space. Canny and Paulos designed the PRoP to be “unintimidating” so as not to trigger apprehensiveness in others by dipping into the “uncanny valley” of eerie anthropomorphic presence. The robot’s basic shape is that of a post and round base, with a set of small appendages attached near the top (figure 5.5). Far from cyborg nightmare, the PRoP most resembles the magically animistic brooms and mops in Disney’s 1940 cartoon Fantasia. Despite the distance from human likeness, certain key physical correlates were necessary for social functionality, primarily a responsive, individual face and voice (provided by bidirectional video and sound), and, importantly, an arm/hand for “deictic gesturing” when one needed “to point to a person, object or direction … or gain attention for asking a question in a crowded room.”72 The PRoP is an answer to the disembodiment of the user in telepresence. “The experience of being in the world,” Canny and Paulos write, “is much more than merely observing it.”73 The PRoP gave the telepresent subject the ability to engage in “motor-intentional acts” so that the “pilots” could learn about their environments by testing and exploring the area, as well as engaging with the people who were there in more subtle, embodied ways, including via facial expressions, eye movements, and gestures. Through the PRoPs, they aimed to “achieve not only new and rich means for knowing the world and other people at a distance … but also a new epistemological window onto the self” by understanding what is needed for an experience of presence, including presence to others.74 Canny and Paulos imagined PRoPs as a form of “telepresence for the masses.” They also felt, however, that there were limits on the kinds of interactions in which the robots could effectively take part. A face-to-face engagement between a single embodied individual and a single PRoP would feel “false,” whereas “with two or more people and a PRoP, the interaction is perfectly natural.”75 They imagine the oddity of a telepresence robot being less alarming in a group than in a one-on-one encounter, such as, say, a first date. But this set of claims begs the question: What happens when everyone sends their robots? What happens when all beings in the system are ontologically identical and everyone’s experience is mediated? Ken Feingold’s interactive robotic installation where I can see my house from here so we are, presented at the 1995 Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, gives ironic form to Canny and Paulos’s “telepresence for the masses” (figure 5.6). For the installation, Feingold placed three nearly identical, knee-high, remote-controlled robots in a geometric, mirrored environment.76 Each “robot-puppet” was connected by video and audio over the Internet to three “viewer-ventriloquists” in separate, adjacent spaces. The users could drive their robots in the space and speak to the other participants through the awkward little avatars. Scant time was spent engaging with the others or learning about the environment, however, because the users became completely preoccupied with discovering which of the three robots he or she was operating and how to tell actual from mirrored space. As Erkki Huhtamo points out, Feingold did “his best to obstruct the relations between seemingly clear-cut elements” by using an audio/video system with obvious signal latency, keeping the robots tethered to

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Figure 5.5 John Canny and Eric Paulos, PRoP 2, 2000–. Courtesy of the artists.

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Figure 5.6 Ken Feingold, where I can see my house from here so we are, 1993–1994. Interactive robotic installation. Courtesy of the artist.

obstructing wires, and placing them in an impenetrable environment.77 Users exited the system, he explained, feeling “frustrated” and “deceived” by Feingold. Media theorist Margaret Morse describes her own experience of Feingold’s telecommunications labyrinth as akin to being in L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz. “Members of the public hidden behind curtains,” she writes, “can speak and move via their avatars in the ‘public’ or exhibition space. However it is incredibly difficult for the robot operator to orient her- or himself in the mirrored space using the monitor to figure out if one is seeing a ‘real’ other dummy or a mirror reflection of ‘oneself.”78 In Feingold’s world, Morse implies, it is unclear whether the user is the wizard or Dorothy or somehow both at once. User and robot alike are “dummies,” unable to understand their place in this remote world. Feingold’s telereality sets the high ambitions of Paulos and Canny’s PRoPs into a dystopian environment where there is little to see, learn, or verify. Feingold constructs a miniature world in which ontological difference does seem to be leveled, in that all players are the same, and which is epistemologically absurd since no one can understand the world that surrounds her avatar or even who one is. If one were playing Turing’s game in this space, the primary goal would be to determine which robot was yours, and then worry later about whether the other operators were human or computer. Feingold models the kind of future, telematic world that Flusser prophesied, which prompts a worrisome question: If everyone sends their robots, creating a situation in which there is no ontological difference between things, and epistemological concerns are suspended because there is no possibility of clearly or directly understanding the surrounding world, is there even a need for the body anymore? Will embodiment, along with these philosophical questions, become irrelevant? Indeed, the body and its relevance to daily life have been up for debate since the dawn of

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the Internet age. The earliest proponents of telepresence and telerobotics, such as Marvin Minsky and Roy Ascott, saw the goal of telepresence as leaving the body behind, whether for safety from hazardous conditions or for freedom from the corporeal limitations of flesh.79 Even Flusser, who put such great importance on the fingertip’s role in the universe of technical images, had little use for the rest of the body. In the universe of technical images, he imagines the rapid withering away of the physical body to mere appurtenance or, worse, anachronistic baggage that “must be pushed to the margins of view.”80 Bodies demand to be sustained, nourished, reproduced, but all of this is now in the service of an image world in which bodies themselves cease to be “interesting.”81 This shift away from the body and toward data, Flusser argues, is existential in nature. Under this cultural logic of value, “the smaller the body is, the better. It doesn’t get in the way so much; it can be overlooked.”82 He imagines users connecting through rather than to images in an anti-spectacular revolution that frees us from having to be in contact with anything other than our screens and buttons. The guiding principle of democracy Flusser seems to imagine is equal rights to technology and disembodiment. These thinkers might have fantasized about the disembodied future telecommunications seems to promise, but we will want to keep in mind that the normative, military-industrial uses of telematic devices and telerobotics point to the inherent asymmetry of these interactions, an asymmetry required for the effectiveness of such equipment: drones and remote weapons are only useful if their targets are essential infrastructure or people, not other drones. They are not democratic in design or use. Some bodies are invisible, distant, and protected, while others are visible, vulnerable, unable to move freely or safely, and often unaware of any remote presence. Therefore, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s recent reappearance in the United States at a March 2014 TED conference as a telerobot doesn’t demonstrate the irrelevance of his body, but just how much his body— and where, exactly, it is—still matters. I want not to ask whether bodies still matter in the universe of technical images, but to suggest how we might extend attention and care to all bodies, human and nonhuman, present and distant, real and fictive, merely mediated or fully virtual, on this side of the screen or the other. Mosaic Ethics The theorists I have referred to, from McLuhan to Flusser, have described the electronic screen’s image as a “mosaic.” The image through which we see The Telegarden, where I can see my house from here so we are, or any other video-mediated scene, be it analog or digital, formally flattens the image into a raster of dots and pixels. The screen distances us from these sights and sites, but it also helps to underscore a recent ethical argument from political philosopher Jane Bennett that surprisingly requests that all beings be placed on a level ground. In her 2010 book Vibrant Matter, she turns the reader’s attention from anthropocentric conceptualizations of the world and its relationships to what she calls “thing power,” or

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“the strange ability of ordinary man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.”83 Drawing on the common, uncanny childhood experience of “a world populated by animate things rather than passive objects,” Bennett puts forward a political philosophy that emphasizes “the contributions of non-human forces … in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought.”84 Her argument ventures dangerously close to speculative realist arguments that fail to realize the ethical distinctions between living beings and inanimate things, but the payoff of Bennett’s proposal is that experiencing “the relationship between persons and other materialities horizontally is a step toward a more ecological sensibility” and, therefore, toward an ethical relationship with our environment and with other people that is not based in the idea of “an intrinsically hierarchical order of things.”85 It is her contention that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption,” and that the idea of an “intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of consumption.”86 Bennett’s environmental concern is easily applicable to the case of The Telegarden, which from this point of view would need to consider the interactions not only between the various human users but between the humans and the plants. Pushing this theory into a technological world also forces us to level the actual and the virtual, the proximate and the mediated.87 Leveling the ontological hierarchies between types of matter does come with serious philosophical and ethical risks. Despite its ecological and ethical basis, Bennett’s “vital materialism” and its desire to dissolve the binaries that structure our conventional, anthropocentric engagement with the world (self/other, subject/object, animate/inanimate, and even real/ virtual, factual/fictive) can resonate with the more radical agendas of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, which, in the words of Ian Bogost, “contends that nothing has any special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example.”88 These theories could help to unsettle politics of difference, in which certain bodies, cultures, and classes are valued over others, forced into submission, or eliminated for posing a threat to the hegemonic order. But this radical flattening of differences can also lead to a morally and ethically dystopian situation in which living, feeling creatures are treated as if they were as inanimate and unfeeling as stones, or instrumentalized as easily as a machine, especially given the (tele)epistemological uncertainty posed by mediation, vicariousness, and the screen. As Andrew Cole demonstrates in his efficient dismantling of object-oriented ontology, it is worth reformulating the propositions of these philosophers to question their ethical implications and soundness. “Names, characters, objects, and, of course, quirky lists of things, like aardvarks, baseball, and galaxies; or grilled cheeses, commandos, and Lake Michigan—these (‘Latourian litanies,’ as they are called) salt the prose of every object-oriented ontologist. They humanize the philosopher.” Altering these lists, as silly as they are, can highlight the risks of this thinking. Cole asks “whether an

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atomic bomb is really ‘equal’ to a doorknob, or the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘equal’ to a unicorn.”89 Object-oriented ontology offer a quick descent into nihilistic detachment from a real world that has become as weightless as a simulation. Bennett’s work, however, does attempt to make sure that any ontological flattening gains an ethical dimension. She argues, rather, that we must behave ethically and responsibly toward all elements; we must anthropomorphize all of them and raise them to our own status and to imagine switching places with them—to be the object to their subject. Here I would like to consider Bennett’s vibrant materialism strictly in the context of telepresence and mediated interaction. These systems, as I have attempted to establish, by their very engineering and technological components, already tend to ontologically level all of the elements within them, leaving persistent uncertainty about what is animate or inanimate, live or “dead.” They are composed of Flusser’s mosaic bits and subject to Weber’s uncanny confusion. All things appear equal or indeterminate on or through these interfaces. If that is the case, and telecommunications interfaces, particularly screens, are inscrutable in these ways, then perhaps the distinctions and hierarchies between what Bennett calls “ontologically diverse” elements must necessarily fade to the background. The epistemological concern about whether one is dealing with a real, mediated space or merely with a simulation also recedes. The distinction between the digital and analog with which I began this chapter, like all other binaries, ceases to be of much importance. If all things are level, then the real and the simulation are leveled too. This could mean that one is given permission to treat every representation as simulacral and untethered to an existent referent in the world, or to say that the simulacral and actual are ontologically identical, which may be already the assumed case following the rhetoric of digital doubt and the death of the index.90 But it could also point the other way, compelling us to take responsibility for our actions regardless of the ontological status of the images and to treat all things—mediated or direct, and for my purposes, material or (ostensibly) “immaterial”—with equal reverence. One would have to assume that all actions and outcomes were significant and that all choices mattered. Vibrant materialism and mosaic flatness could be used to quell the telepistemological dithering that telepresence systems inspire. “If matter itself is lively,” Bennett writes, “then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. … The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.”91 Bennett is aware that her suggestion to consider the vital nature of inanimate things may be taken as a failure to “affirm human uniqueness” and as authorizing “the treatment of people as mere things,” but, as she is at pains to underscore, destabilizing the primacy of the human in the hierarchy of being also gestures toward other productive destabilizations, such as the privileging of the self over the other or over any subaltern subject or object.92

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One of the ways that we do this, Bennett points out, is through anthropomorphizing metaphors, like that of the modem’s handshake. Anthropomorphism, she writes, “the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature,” counters the narcissism inherent in our anthropocentric world.93 It is, to her mind, “worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment.’”94 To anthropomorphize is to accord all things the right to be treated humanely. In the face of doubt, one must act with care. A vital materialism, she writes, attempts the radical displacement of the subject that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was attempting in his final and unfinished text, The Visible and Invisible.95 In the previous chapter, I took up Merleau-Ponty’s text as a means of conceptualizing the kind of subject/object collapse made possible through the screen and networked telecommunications. The video screen has the potential to be a chiasm or interface between the binaries that typically structure our grasp of the world around us, that pit subject against object, known self against the unknowable other. “The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “is not only a me/other exchange … it is also an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the objective body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a ‘state of consciousness’ ends as a thing.”96 The chiasm allows us to deictically switch from I to you, from subject to object. Or, as Bennett puts it, through our equal commerce with things we recognize our own “thing power,” our selves as “vibrant matter.”97 While Bennett is looking in her text toward a renewed human relationship with the physical environment of objects and animals, I appropriated Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic flip-flopping of subject and object positions to think about how we meet and interact via electronic interfaces by reading his “flesh of the world” as the screen’s mosaic structure. Bennett is far from discussing screens or digital art, but she too uses the word “mosaic” to describe the composition of vital matter. All vital mater—every thing—is “enmeshed in a dense network of relations.” Every action and every event, she argues, is actually a result of a conglomerate assemblage. Bennett frames this composite, collective situation through explicitly ethical questions: “the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends? Agency is, I believe, distributed across a mosaic.”98 If the images are mosaic, per Flusser and McLuhan, perhaps ethical encounters on and through them should be as well. By opening ourselves up to a phenomenological experience of and for things, and seeing ourselves as intricately connected with and to them, the particulate structure of the technical image becomes a flesh of an even larger world, one which includes all of the physical world and the material immateriality of screen space. While working in The Telegarden or holding hands

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with Data Dentata, the user is enmeshed in a mosaic, conglomerate, technical image of which she is just one interconnected point. Digits to digits, we touch. Unfortunately, all things are not ontologically equal in the world in which telepresence operates, even if the screen does a good job of productively leveling them. As I said earlier in this chapter, using the example of Snowden, telepresence systems are often used in their practical, normative, nonartistic functions to protect certain bodies from risk while greatly exposing others. In the chapter that follows, I will take up Bennett’s mosaic ethics to examine how this structure, which allows the whole world in and makes us responsible for all of our mediated and immediate actions, also effectively disperses blame across a network of actors and things. While there is a possibility, according to Bennett, that reimagining the structure of action across a network further breaks down a set of binary arrangements and a “moralized politics of good and evil, of singular agents who must be made to pay for their sins,” we must also note that telematic tools such as unmanned drones are purposefully designed to distribute action and agency across a group of operators to specifically avoid this kind of ethical accountability.99

6 The View from Here: Remote Action and the Trauma of (Not) Being Touched

Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal spent an entire month of 2007 under continuous artillery fire. He was not in Baghdad or Ramadi but in Chicago, Illinois, at the Flat File Gallery. On May 4, he moved into the exhibition space, bringing with him the bare domestic necessities: a cot, desk, chair, and lamp. Also in the room with him was a telerobotically controlled paintball rifle and webcam. During the run of the exhibition-performance, Domestic Tension, anonymous, remote participants from around the world fired over 60,000 rounds of bright yellow ammunition at the artist and his possessions.1 The web portal to the project generated approximately 80 million hits from 128 different countries (figure 6.1).2 Domestic Tension’s formal and conceptual parameters place it in a lineage of video performances from the 1970s

Figure 6.1 Wafaa Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Driscoll Babcock Gallery.

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onward, including the work of Chris Burden, discussed in chapter 3, in which the audience was invited to physically intervene in a live, televisual scene and to navigate their complicity and ethical culpability in relationship to a mediated scene of violence or neglect. Unlike in Burden’s Back to You (1974), Doomed (1975), or Do You Believe in Television (1976), Bilal’s observers did not have to physically cross to the other side of the screen to affect its events or outcomes.3 They did not have to personally appear in the represented space to have an impact. Bilal’s viewers could telecommunicatively “reach out and touch someone” without leaving their homes, and without the risk of being touched back. Their actions were physical, but their presence was not. Here is the trouble with telepresence: the virtual and the actual intersect on the surface of a screen that has an ambiguous epistemological relationship to what it represents. The “uncanny confusion” caused by the ontological indeterminacy of the screen (which gives few or no sensory or phenomenal clues as to whether it is live or recorded, actual or simulacral, near or distant) is amplified in telerobotic telepresence, because one not only sees but is also enabled to act via these slippery signs.4 Bilal’s installation asked users to rehearse actions, gestures, and viewpoints made familiar from first-person shooter video games in an arena that was far murkier, both ethically and existentially. Domestic Tension acted as a game—simultaneously real and virtual— through which users could test their belief in the image and their disembodied actions, as well as their social and political relationships to analogous efforts and equipment, such as unmanned aerial drones and other remote weapons systems in use across the globe, primarily by the American military in South Asia and the Middle East. This chapter looks to a range of artworks engaging with and critiquing remote weapons technology and the state of contemporary culture “under the shadow of the drone”—including our ethical relationships to persons on the ground and at the controls, and to the equipment in between—in order to understand how we might be made to believe in and feel accountable for our actions on either side of the interface, as well as the networked and often distributed structures of responsibility and command that these systems entail.5 I will continue the argument I began in previous chapters, claiming that the interface is a site that sustains apparently contradictory sets of relationships and puts opposites in contact with each other. This can mean the here/there of remote presence, the now/then of broadcast television, the self/other of bidirectional telecommunication, or the living/data of computer-mediated networks. What I want to argue here is that in the specific context of remote weapons systems the opposites that the interface sustains are particularly troubling. Not only are the above binaries in play, but also those of the now/not yet and the culpable/innocent. I want to show how the complicated epistemological status of telepresence combined with the ontological indeterminacy of the screen enables a user to feel responsible for or completely absolved and acquitted of any responsibility for her teleactions. I will look to the contradictory epistemological and ethical positions these systems sustain, while also suggesting a potential way out by occupying the screen or becoming the “slash.”

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The circumstances of the exposed, surveilled, and vulnerable bodies on the ground in today’s “theaters of war” demand urgent and careful attention. But I also want to consider the position of the drone operator and the particular phenomenal, ethical, and existential experiences of being where one is not. If, as Marshall McLuhan and others have argued, information technology “is not an extension of our bodies, but of our central nervous systems,” then one could understand drone operators (the team of the pilot and “sensor,” jointly operating the cameras and guiding the weapons) not just as extending disembodiedyet-physical agency into remote places, but also as exposing their psyches to shockingly hostile scenes, so that they become at once active antagonists and passive, potentially traumatized witnesses.6 The artworks addressed in this chapter, I contend, provide a more nuanced understanding of the sometimes contradictory effects of mediated and virtualized warfare than do most popular accounts, which figure the operators as unthinking, anonymous, disaffected, war (video)gamers who view their targets as faceless, nameless statistics. Rather, as I see them, these works suggest that the people on both sides of the screen are victimized by the uses of remote weapons technologies; more, they invite consideration of the drone and screen as active, animate players in these events. Before turning to the existential conditions of the operators, targets, and drone itself, I will take some time to address the conventional discourse around telepresence technologies and “telepistemology” as it developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which positioned teleoperators as full of Cartesian doubt, and as separated by an unbridgeable epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological gulf from their targets. Shooting Gallery For 31 days, Bilal crouched and ducked under the constant fire of the paintball gun. Its turret could only pan along the horizontal axis, so staying low was the only means of avoiding the projectiles, which, though nonlethal, cause bruising and bleeding at close range.7 After just a few days, the floor became soaked in pools of yellow fish oil paint, and was littered with the hollow, plastic skins of the burst pellets (figure 6.2). Along the sight line of the gun, the plaster on the walls began to swell and crack from the wet barrage. The artist’s bed sheets were soaked with the noxious liquid; his floor lamp was repeatedly destroyed by targeted fire; the Plexiglas shields that protected him while he ate and used the computer were splintered and cracked from the high-impact fire. While he could effectively avoid being hit if he stayed below the gun barrel, Bilal could not escape the deafening racket of the robotic gun or the menacing ticking of the turning turret as his remote assailants distantly surveyed the room. This vivid scene was, however, not quite so sharp for the online user of Bilal’s system. The artist and his possessions appeared in a small video window. The tiny paintballs disappeared into a vague yellow haze that hung in the space. The user often could not see her own shot, but she could see Bilal flinch. The most compelling evidence of being remotely present in the space was the sudden appearance of the user’s IP address and location in a shot log on the left

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Figure 6.2 Wafaa Bilal, Domestic Tension, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Driscoll Babcock Gallery.

side of the screen. She was watching Bilal, but she was also leaking evidence of her presence and actions. The idea for the performance and installation came to Bilal earlier in 2007 after seeing a television interview with a young American drone operator who had been dropping bombs on targets in Iraq from a base in Colorado. What struck Bilal was not just the technological fact that this woman could be active on the front lines while physically thousands of miles away, but also that, to him, she seemed so little affected by her actions, corporeally as well as psychically. “The reporter asked her if she had any remorse or doubts about what she was doing,” Bilal recounts. “She perkily answered that she trusted the orders and information she got from her superiors.”8 Bilal’s reading of the drone pilot’s unthinking inhumanity runs counter to the experiences of some other drone operators, discussed later in this chapter, who have come forward to critique these operations and who feel “morally injured” by what they’ve seen and done. This difference is not an inherent contradiction, for, as I argue below, the structure of drone systems can make the operator feel either intimately exposed to or

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completely removed from the situation. Bilal’s reaction, however, accurately and appropriately reflects the anger and pain these machines and asymmetrical warfare have inflicted on vast numbers of people, including his own family. Just two years earlier, Bilal’s younger brother had been killed by air fire at an Iraqi checkpoint.9 It occurred to the artist that a soldier just like this drone operator may have been, in part, responsible for his brother’s death, and that his own secure, insulated comfort in the United States (where he received political asylum after fleeing Iraq during the first Gulf War and then spending two years in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia) was a condition parallel to that of the drone operators, “whose lives go on as if without a care.”10 Domestic Tension illustrated what it was like to live under constant weaponized surveillance, a situation hard to imagine for many Americans, but a fact of life for people living in Pakistan, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other remotely occupied territories. Bilal points out the disturbing asymmetry between soldier and target in the “war on terror,” the tactics of which are as terrifying and menacing as the “terrorist” actions they hope to quell or preempt. The name of Bilal’s project also pointed to a debate that was emerging in the United States about the drone programs. The US operates two separate drone fleets, one publicly acknowledged and operated by the Air Force, another that is part of a classified program run under the auspices of the CIA and that secretly targets terror suspects around the world. Because the CIA operation is covert, it does not need to “provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”11 The program is classified, but evidence of its actions emerges every week in body counts, often including numerous reported civilian deaths. The idea that the state runs a targeted assassination program using high-tech robotic warriors is deeply troubling, especially because it is perceived by some to be “costless”: “Cut off from the realities of the bombings … Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and moral consequences. Nearly all of the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombing has remained unseen” by all except the drone operators and the scores of commanders, intelligence officers, and governmental officials who remotely watch the action as it takes place.12 Press attention was welcomed by the Air Force program between about 2007 and 2009. But access soon afterward became severely restricted, and by 2010 all but eliminated.13 During this time, drones became increasingly important to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with drone flight hours more than doubling over the period—from 262,000 in 2007 to 563,000 in 2010.14 Bilal invited his viewers to begin logging similar long hours as an opportunity to consider the ethical dilemmas that come with omnipotent power via weaponized telepresence, and the existential condition of living under constant remote surveillance. Despite the fact that he was under around-the-clock surveillance by a networked crowd of remote witnesses, these viewing conditions nevertheless produced the kinds of epistemological doubt that tend to accompany mediated engagements, as I described in chapter 1. As the site and the exhibition gained popularity, the inquisitive conversation that dominated the chat room in

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the first days shifted to racial epithets and slurs and accusations of simulation, falsehood, and fraud.15 Without physically traveling to Flat File Gallery, viewers could not confirm their doubts or verify their assumptions by investigating with their other senses. In the previous chapter I focused on the ontological problems posed by mediated experiences; in this chapter I would like to take up a debate that centers on the epistemological consequences of indirect experience, and the particular issues telecommunications and the electronic mediation of violence introduce into this scenario. To do so, I will draw upon the enthusiastic discourse around “telepistemology” that emerged around the turn of the millennium, when online telerobotic and telepresence technologies became more widely available. This also coincided with the increased use of remote-controlled drones in covert military engagements, which required both the invisibility of the operator (and machine) and the hypervisibility of the target. Telepistemological Doubt Artist-engineer Ken Goldberg coined the term “telepistemology” in his 2000 edited collection The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, which aimed to explore how new technology was changing the ways in which one acquired knowledge “at a distance.” “The distributed nature of the Internet,” he writes in the introduction, “designed to ensure reliability by avoiding centralized authority, simultaneously increases the potential for deception. Many Internet cameras and telerobotic systems have been revealed as forgeries, providing unsuspecting users with prerecorded images masquerading as live footage.”16 The essays in that book hypothesize that a new wave of technologies extending our senses into distant places has the potential to reinvigorate Cartesian skepticism, and the concomitant doubt in the reliability of our instruments and sense organs and the knowledge they produce about the external world. Since we cannot directly verify what we perceive through these prostheses, we are thrust into a situation analogous to Descartes’s, when a set of earlier optical technologies—particularly telescopes and microscopes—forced philosophers to consider the reliability of indirect knowledge, and to propose that an ontological gulf existed between the inner self and the outer world. This argument is addressed especially forcefully in phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus’s essay “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand.” There Dreyfus takes up the possibility that the proliferation of telerobotic and telepresence technologies could lead us to begin to believe again that there is a rift between our senses and the world they perceive, so that all knowledge appears to be indirect and unreliable. Telepresence technologies, in Dreyfus’s account as well as those of Roy Ascott, Marvin Minsky, and others discussed earlier in this book, “liberate” the operator from the confines of her physical body and its corporeal limitations. “When we are engaged in such activities,” Dreyfus explains, “our bodies seem to be irrelevant and, thanks to telepresence, our minds seem to expand to all corners of the universe.”17 Against the godlike omniscience and omnipotence teletechnologies appear to

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provide, Dreyfus imagines these same effects producing a hyperbolic doubt that quickly creeps into the consciousness of the remote operator. Leaving behind the body for sensory presence and physical agency in a mediated environment, the user might easily come to regard her relationship to the perceived and apprehended world as wholly and problematically mediated: “All this knowledge is indirect,” Dreyfus writes, “inferred from what we can see on our screens and hear from our loud speakers. What if all this telepresence were rigged and there was nothing outside our room but a duplicitous computer feeding carefully organized audiovisual data to our computer to create the illusion of a world with which we believe we are interacting?”18 Dreyfus sardonically imagines a hyperbolic slide from mediated action, to radical epistemological doubt, to the uncomforting and uncomfortable position of the user being only a “brain in a vat,” questioning even her existence as a body at the controls of her machine. Having descended this far into epistemological doubt, she could only steady herself with the supposition that at least the brain, the vat, and the computers feeding them data are real.19 At this point, Dreyfus argues, one would be back in Descartes’s position, sure only of one’s own private experience. As a good phenomenologist, Dreyfus claims that we are in fact highly unlikely to succumb to this tenuous epistemological scenario. Were real-time interactive telecommunication and telepresence to evolve to such a degree that they were as responsive, clear, and navigable as unmediated experience, they would provide us with the same sense of “being in direct touch with objects and people” that unmediated experience does, with the result that “the more skeptical questions as to whether our interactive prosthesis could be systematically malfunctioning would seem merely academic.”20 That said, Dreyfus acknowledges that the very purpose of telepresence technologies is to keep the user’s body distant from the place of interaction, and therefore eliminate by design the two factors that, regardless of how seamless and sophisticated the effect of mediated presence is, will prevent the user from feeling wholly in touch with that reality: risk and intercorporeality.21 Without these two components and the sense of vulnerability that they both inspire, Dreyfus admits, the experience will always seem unreal and false.22 Dreyfus, writing in 2000, described only generically pleasant or good-natured teleactions in his essay—embracing a loved one, helping an injured stranger—in order to argue that intimacy via these interfaces was impossible because of the lack of intercorporeality and risk entailed.23 In the twenty-first century, however, the normative and increasingly common uses of telepresence technology and teleaction are anything but pleasant or good-natured. Drones, by far the most infamous of these technologies, may allow the operator’s body to be very distant from the site of action, but she can be perceptually very close to the bodies of those she observes and “surgically” attacks. The combination of extremely intimate, mediated action and the lack of risk and reciprocity designed into telepresence technologies necessarily reframes Dreyfus’s argument. He simultaneously argues that, if telepresence technologies were to become extremely effective and sensorially rich, we would trust them as we do our own bodies and direct senses. But at the same time he maintains that the corporeal

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asymmetry of these systems means that we will never be fully there, and therefore what we witness and enact will never seem fully real. Here again, therefore, Cartesian doubt in the mediated senses and teleactions may seem merited—and this is a worry if it allows operators of these destructive and intimate tools to have plausible deniability or detachment from their actions, as I described in chapter 1. The Real of the Desert / The Desert of the Real Dreyfus’s essay was written before the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated a new and ongoing “war on terror” in which drones, officially called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), became commonplace if initially secret tools. Even 10 years earlier, however, during the first Gulf War, a troubling discourse was already taking shape around mediated violence and belief. Beginning in August 1990 with the deployment of American-led coalition forces to the Saudi Arabian border after Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait, and the air and ground campaigns of January and February of the following year, French philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio each chronicled the spectacularly mediated war in a series of articles and essays. The two oft-associated thinkers both took the war and its new technological particularities as occasion to explore the consequences of remote weapons systems for belief in mediated action. The first Gulf War, now overshadowed by the much more protracted sequel that inspired Bilal’s performance, became most widely known through (and is perhaps most often remembered for) its extensive live television coverage. Ted Turner’s Cable News Network (CNN) followed the conflict 24 hours a day, including live images of the bombing of Baghdad, satellite-transmitted reports from journalists embedded in the field, and nose cone images of missiles hitting their targets and exploding into television static. Baudrillard’s provocatively titled essays, “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?,” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” give a postmodern account of wartime reality and representation, especially as mediated for home audiences in the West. While the titles of his essays easily provoke anger and outrage on behalf of the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and Saudi civilians whose homes were the backdrop for aggressive air and ground campaigns, Baudrillard’s intention was arguably less to question the conflict than to emphasize that what occurred was so heavily mediated and virtualized, the images so detached from the events they represented, that it was impossible to confirm or substantiate what one was seeing. The images—of bombs exploding in dark skies, reporters cowering on hotel carpets, and black-and-white surveillance footage of missiles hitting nondescript buildings—had become, despite their constant narration and control by Western news outlets, completely undecidable and uninterpretable, and so lent themselves to endless speculation. These were indices at their least secure and abductive inferences that were not easily verified. Transmitted to global populations in real time, such images were not intended to inform or report on the war, he argued, but rather to produce a spectacle that served strategic and political

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functions. Furthermore, the total asymmetry between the opposing forces—technologically, economically, industrially, militarily—made it impossible to call the event a “war” in any traditional sense of the word.24 It was a demonstration of dominance in which the bodies of the American soldiers were largely off site, operating “smart” weapons that were satelliteguided to their targets. The media spectacle of the Gulf War was aimed not at communicating the truth of the engagements, but at producing a particular narrative of American power and morality by portraying a “clean war” that tactically destroyed key military and infrastructural targets while sparing human flesh and life. “The idea of a clean war,” Baudrillard wrote during the conflict, “like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain, is a sure sign of madness.”25 Nonetheless, such an image was produced by the telemedia and consumed by American audiences during the conflict. The war witnessed at home was waged only on the screen and had little relationship to what happened on the ground or in the air: “The Iraqis blow up civilian buildings in order to give the impression of a dirty war. The Americans disguise satellite information to give the impression of a clean war. Everything in trompe l’oeil!”26 As Paul Patton has argued, Baudrillard’s response to the mediation of the events and their inability to speak surely or clearly about the conflict was to push this logic to its hyperbolic extreme: “so you want us to believe that this was a clean minimalist war with little collateral damage and few casualties? Why stop there: war, what war?”27 Given the statistics— including the mathematical calculation that three times as many American soldiers would have died in road accidents if they had stayed home rather than gone to war—and the fact that Saddam Hussein was still in power at the end of the conflict, Baudrillard concludes that it is, from the perspective of the Western television viewer, possible that the war never in fact happened.28 Baudrillard attempts to maintain a rational and darkly humorous tone throughout the essays by questioning the reality of the representation of the war while simultaneously claiming that he does not doubt that the conflict actually took place. There are many moments in the texts, however, when he implies that events have become so subject to the logic of simulation that their veracity, indeed their very existence, is open to question. He compares the coverage of the war to the 1978 film Capricorn One, in which the public is duped into believing that the United States has landed men on Mars simply by the fact that the simulation of the event, shot in an American desert, was broadcast live on television. Rather than confirming the event, its real-time transmission, Baudrillard argues, can and should introduce doubt into the image. “Real-time information loses itself in a completely unreal space, finally furnishing the images of pure, useless, instantaneous television where its primordial function irrupts, namely that of filling a vacuum, blocking up the screen hole through which escapes the substance of events.”29 Real-time telecommunication, then, produces a particular problem: while it claims “to provide immediate access to real events, in fact what it does is produce informational events which stand out from the real, and which ‘inform’ public opinion

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which in turn effects the course of events, both real and fictional.”30 The images and the information they communicate may be simulated, but these simulations produce real effects. Through telecommunications technologies and other tools of virtualization, such as flight simulators and remotely controlled weapons, the boundaries between simulation and reality become irrevocably blurred. In several of his texts, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” included, Baudrillard invokes Jorge Luis Borges’s fable in which cartographers create a 1:1 scale map that literally covers the territory it intends to chart. After the decline of the empire that created it, shreds of the map could still be found in the desert. Now, he contends, in our age of simulation, the scale is still 1:1, but it is no longer the case that the territory precedes and survives the map. “If we were to revive this fable today,” he wrote in his 1983 text Simulations, “it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map, whose vestiges exist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.”31 Revisiting this story during the Gulf War, the philosopher cannot resist noting that we have found ourselves quite literally in the desert in the midst of a simulation.32 Baudrillard’s thought experiment—questioning both the reality of telecommunicative representation and its relationship to the physical events it ostensibly transmits—seems to reintroduce into daily life the Cartesian skepticism Dreyfus described.33 Within the same context of the Gulf War, Paul Virilio raised a set of concerns that also resonate with, even as they predate, Dreyfus’s epistemological worries. Like Baudrillard, Virilio saw the mediation of the Gulf War as illustrating the problematic relationship between real-time technology and representation. Describing the global media condition during the war, Virilio wrote: Since 2 August we have been living in a theatre of operations, spectators of a theatrical production. We have been living in a complete fiction. Faced with war, we must be not only conscientious objectors but also objectors to the objectivity of its representation. We must not believe our eyes. All is, if not rigged, at least arranged by one of several directors. Saddam Hussein on one side, CNN on the other. … For ten years he [Ted Turner at CNN] has been constructing the theatre of ‘real time,’ of the live broadcast that causes us to take as true that which we see live.34

Unlike previous wars in which the front lines were where the tanks and troops gathered, in this war, Virilio explained, adversaries now met on television, and the ultimate goal was to strategically occupy the screen through live coverage.35 While Virilio obviously shared some of Baudrillard’s epistemological skepticism about the reality of the war as given via its corporate news representations, his main concerns were more in line with Dreyfus’s final remarks about the believability of mediated images when they lack risk, reciprocity, and intercorporeality. Virilio’s account of the war, Desert Screen, centers on the viewpoints of those remotely engaged in the war as participants, rather than just on the doubting spectators. Virilio, whose work had already for several decades dealt with the coevolution of mass media, real-time telecommunications technologies, and the military-industrial (and later military-informational) complex, saw the conflict and its hypermediation as illustration of

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his long-prescient theory of “dromology,” or the “logic of speed,” in which technologies operate at the speed of light and “real time supersedes real space.”36 Real-time telecommunications and information technologies “globalize” the world into a realm of live interactivity, he argued, shifting the political economies of power from wealth to speed.37 For Virilio, the Gulf War provided a perfect example of this dromological condition. “The desert is a screen where all is exposed to the searching eye of an adversary employing the full array of object-acquisition systems.”38 Real-time telecommunications technologies, even in this war of the early 1990s, were displacing the battle—at least for one side—onto a series of screens. Because of the distance that coalition forces were able to maintain from the physical front, they were already experiencing the loss of intercorporeality and risk that Dreyfus attributes to telerobotic telepresence. From the ergonomic comfort of office chairs, they could enact godlike powers over life and death without risking their own very human skin: “Telecommunications put properties of the divine into play in civil society: the ubiquity (to be all present together at the same time), instantaneity, immediacy, omnivoyance, omnipresence. Each of us is metamorphosed into a divine being, at once here and there, at the same time.”39 But if telepresence, which Virilio sees as being enabled by all broadcasting, not just robotics, makes gods out of humans, these are unthinking, impatient gods. “No politics,” he writes, “is possible at the scale of the speed of light. Politics depends on having time for reflection. Today, we no longer have time to reflect, the things that we see have already happened. And it is necessary to react immediately.”40 Earlier media and the slowness they entailed ensured one some critical and temporal distance. Real-time technologies trade spatial distance for temporal distance, and eliminate both reflection and reciprocal risk from the equation. We no longer have the time to develop an opinion or assessment of what is unfolding; we can only react with the speed of the reflex.41 Speed here leads to what the philosopher calls “fatal risks of confusion” and “conflicts of interpretation.”42 Every action demands immediate attention, and there is another decision to be made quickly on its tail. What we are able to accomplish with these technologies— “confrontation without touching”—is nothing less than “a miracle.” Still, Virilio points out, major questions of ethics, morality, politics, and aesthetics arise when we are given miraculous, godlike physical powers to overcome the limitations of space and time but not equally impressive powers of reason or judgment.43 It is a different story for those on the other side of the screen, on the ground: “Today,” Virilio writes, “even if God still needs men, war does not, or just barely … as victims.”44 Baudrillard and Virilio locate the matrixes of doubt and power that Dreyfus marks as a concern of the new millennium as already existing and fully operational in the early 1990s. To be sure, the first Gulf War pointed to the future virtualization of war that we saw play out in the second Gulf War, the Iraq War (2003–2011) and its protracted aftermath. What has changed in the years since Baudrillard, Virilio, and Dreyfus wrote their essays is the acceleration and proliferation of teleoperative weapons, particularly UAVs, which exemplify and greatly expand the omnipotent powers Virilio described, while continuing to limit

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intercorporeality and further mitigating the risks to operators. Additionally, the pressures of real time that Virilio so acutely described as impediments to moral and ethical judgment have morphed into a new temporal register: the preemptive. As Pasi Väliaho puts it, our contemporary temporal logic inhabits “an uncertain difference between the now and the not yet.”45 “Since 9/11,” he writes in Biopolitical Screens, preemption “has come to define how the West responds to perceived threats at home and abroad: by waging ‘small’ wars in the global South and by introducing increasingly stringent measures of control for the ‘security’ of populations in our so-called democratic societies.”46 Our real-time technologies, then, have necessitated actions that attempt to become faster even than the speed of light: collecting and parsing data that can be used to manage the circulation of people and images, thereby preempting possible futures by responses in advance of the prompt. “Preemptive war is thus proactive: instead of reacting to actual facts, it operates by simulating future potentialities, which are brought to bear on the present. And this futurity made present— the perceptual production of indistinct forms of threat and fear—is the motor of its actions.”47 The drone operator is the ideal representative of the new dromological moment of the not-yet. Trained on video games and virtual images, she carries out tactical, deadly acts guided by presumptive data, transmitted in real time by satellites, mediated on television screens, simulated by graphics, with her body safely secured thousands of miles away from the actual theater of war. While she may be omnipotent, Väliaho explains, she is not necessarily emotionally composed or calm. UAV interfaces, like video games, place the user in a constant state of anxiety and angst that forces her to preemptively combat never-ending (and perhaps illusory or unsubstantiated) danger.48 “Drone screens,” he writes, “bring the distant affectively very near, and in doing so materialize images that afford the instrumentalization of death. They become enacted as future-invocative perceptions that are at least somewhat affected by a ‘strong desire’ to find weapons. … One could consider the drone pilot’s actions as instantiating the brain’s automatic, anticipatory, projective functions, which seek to eliminate ambiguity by means of hidden assumptions—assumptions that can sometimes turn into hallucinations.”49 Since the images from which the drone operator works (be they data-based simulations, real-time video, radar, or anything else) cannot but be open to the kind of doubt and undecidablity that Baudrillard and Virilio discuss, and which are inherent to indexical signs (as I describe in chapter 1), her only way of quelling ambiguity is to destroy the target. In his analysis of video games, war technology, and neoliberal culture, Väliaho is careful to point out just how easy it is to argue, as Bilal does, that the “action-oriented images materialized on UAV screens induce a kind of PlayStation mentality toward killing [and] that they turn warfare into a disembodied spectacle.”50 However, he warns, the ways that virtual images cognitively and affectively impact users are much more complicated. The restructuring of combat and conflict in the drone age dramatically disturbs the logic of representation for both the operators and the mass media. The remote pilots are simultaneously very far away

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and insulated from their targets and yet visually very close to the targets, whom they surreptitiously surveil for months on end before engaging or “touching” them with their weapons. And unlike the Gulf War, which televised live images of destruction and conflict, the drone war of the 2010s is being fought covertly, extrajuridically, and under a shroud of secrecy by technologies that sell themselves on stealth and indivisibility. Theaters of War However prone to oversimplification, the comparison between drone operators and conventional video gamers is still an important one. Beyond the formal similarities of screens, controls, and virtualized objectives, there are deep structural and economic connections between the military and the entertainment industry, so much so that the phrase “military-industrial complex,” once used to designate the imbrication of government, military, and industry required to mobilize troops and arms during the wars of the twentieth century, has given way to “military-entertainment complex,” or what James Der Derain calls the “military-industrialmedia-entertainment-network,” in order to signify the deep involvement of the entertainment and gaming industries in the recruitment, training, operations, and rehabilitation of contemporary soldiers.51 For example, the US Army developed America’s Army, a networked first-person shooter video game, in 2002 as a recruitment and propaganda tool that immersed gamers-cum-prospective-enlistees in a “realistic” virtual experience of contemporary war.52 The game was later modified to train actual soldiers for deployment.53 For their part, the US Marine Corps adapted the game Doom for specialized squad drills, and off-the-shelf flight simulators have been repurposed for official instruction.54 Full Spectrum Warrior, another popular first-person shooter game, was conceptualized and developed for simultaneous release to military and commercial markets.55 Defense contractor Raytheon hired game designers to improve their drone controls, and based their processor and its physical housing on the Xbox and PlayStation, respectively.56 Modeling the outputs and controls on commercial games is a practical decision: incoming soldiers would thus already be familiar with the devices and therefore partially trained in advance.57 Many critics of media and culture, among them James Der Derain, Ed Halter, Alexander Galloway, Robert Stahl, Patrick Crogan, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, have taken up the challenge of understanding the contemporary entanglement of the military and entertainment industries, particularly around shooter games and their modification for military training, action, and therapy. Video games have long been accused of promoting violence and emotionally deadening players to its psychical impact, but with this new marriage of the military and the gaming industry one might argue that games are also “banalizing” war itself and “habituating populations to perpetual conflict.”58 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, observe that massive conflict between nations is no longer the way war happens. Rather, since the 1990s and the Gulf War, the globe has seen savage yet minor conflicts staged by international coalitions “in the name of

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global order, not against an external enemy state but against a shadowy foe, who may take up temporary residence either in rogue states or domestic sleeper cells, and whose threat is sinisterly amorphous and borderless.”59 Wars, in this new world order, become interminable and without boundaries, and exist in a constant state of moral and ethical exemption (especially in regard to civil rights).60 As a result, this state of affairs becomes “the new normal,” and war—once monumental and epoch-changing—becomes “banal,” so that the entire population (not just gamers or soldiers) is socialized to endure, accept, expect, and sustain a constant culture of war.61 In other words, everyone is preprogrammed for it. The enemy becomes an ambiguous but absolute threat to the ethical order in need of constant surveillance, policing, punishment, and preemption. Drone operators, in particular, may seem to personify the disaffection and detachment of this view of war, as exemplified by the “perky” drone pilot Bilal saw on television who simply followed orders without thought, reflection, or remorse. Indeed, it is hard to resist the assumption that the drone pilots, despite their tactically important labor, are completely removed—physically, psychically, socially, environmentally, affectively, existentially—from the context of war shared by ground troops on both sides as well as the affected civilian populations. Rather than being engaged in the “theater of war,” the drone pilots, one could argue, experience war as a kind of theater or play, with no personal consequences or risk. Even within the military, drone operators are often regarded as “overworked, underpaid, and bored” office workers, whose actions require little courage or valor, and solicit little praise or recognition.62 The word “drone” calls to mind monotonous, mechanical boredom and slavish, unthinking labor. In fact, the pilots and sensors (who operate the drone’s visual controls and targeting devices) often describe their work as boring, and their labor is highly mechanized and technologized if not specifically mechanical.63 However, the operators are no more unthinking, empty-headed, or dulled than the planes are actually “unmanned.” While there are no bodies in the UAVs (and therefore no intercorporeal risk), there are people at the controls making choices, engaging in actions, and instigating and witnessing horrific tragedies “with their own eyes.” It is precisely this strange blurring of the here and the there, the embodied and the disembodied, the now and the not yet that has led to drone operators experiencing a high rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). According to recent studies, the long hours, extended shifts, and daily transitioning between military and civilian life take a particularly heavy psychic toll on drone operators.64 A study by the Defense Department found that UAV pilots and sensors are as susceptible to occupationally produced mental health problems as are pilots of manned aircraft deployed to war zones. They were found by some studies to have higher rates of “anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation,” perhaps because of the particular stresses of their jobs, including “witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.”65

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A 2013 interview in GQ with Airman First Class Brendan Bryant, a former drone sensor suffering from PTSD, described in graphic detail the duties and requirements of drone operators, throwing much-needed light onto secret protocols and actions. In the interview he detailed the procedures following a missile launch: after firing a weapon, he was required to linger over the scene, watching his targets writhe on the ground in bloody pain, limbs missing, slowly growing cold and dead on the infrared screen.66 Traditional pilots leave the scene immediately after dropping their munitions in order to protect themselves from any retaliation, never closely examining the effects of their actions. Drone operators, on the other hand, must watch in close-up the effects of their mediated, remote actions. Moreover, the victims are not necessarily nameless, faceless strangers. The attacks are often the conclusion of months of detailed surveillance in which the sensor has become very familiar with the target, his habits, his behaviors, and his family members. After a strike, drone pilots and sensors have to write an “after action report” which requires them to monitor the scene, where they might see “people gather up the remains of those killed and carry them to the local cemetery.”67 Drone pilots are also exposed to the death and devastation of their own forces, as Bryant also described in regard to a mission that went horribly awry when he could not communicate information about an IED to US ground troops. He once witnessed bound and gagged young girls pulled from a car trunk and executed, and he could do nothing to intervene.68 Rather than rendering them immune to trauma or exposure, I would suggest, the drone operators’ invisibility and untouchability—both in relation to their victims as well as to the general public and military, due to the covert status of their operations—is at the root of their trauma. Rather than completely insulated from risk, cyberwarriors emerge as strangely exposed to the site of action, even if they are not reciprocally or equally open to harm. They can vacillate between feeling there or not there, guilty or innocent, proud or demoralized, or, following the logic of the interface, they can occupy the strangely contradictory state of feeling both at the same time. To quote Virilio again, “in this prospective war there will be only victims.”69 Virtual Iraq While the idea of being traumatized without having been touched may seem new, this model for PTSD is by no means unprecedented. Sigmund Freud, studying the “shell shocked” veterans of World War I who were suffering from uncontrollable flashbacks and repetitious replays of their experiences, found a strange lack of correlation between psychic trauma and physical injury. Although even he was initially tempted to ascribe traumatic psychological disorders to “organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force,” war neuroses, he discovered, very often appeared in men who had suffered no physical trauma whatsoever.70 On the contrary, the doctor ascertained, a physical wound actually prevented the development of a neurosis. As film theorist Kaja Silverman explains it, war trauma in Freud’s conceptualization is the result of a metaphorical “wound or effraction resulting from the

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exposure of an unprepared psyche to a powerful excitation or ‘shock.’”71 Trauma, according to Freud, occurs when an individual experiences “fright,” that is “the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it.”72 Surprise, then, causes trauma. Anxiety, however, “describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.”73 Anxiety guards the subject against fright and, therefore, against trauma. One might then see how the banalization of war—the incidental training of young people for military conflict through their leisure time activities, and the inculcation in the general populace of the idea of constant warfare—works to put everyone into a state of perpetual anxiety and preemptive preparedness for the unknown. The traumatic repetition symptomatic of PTSD would, following this logic, retroactively produce the anxiety that could have shielded the individual from fright.74 Väliaho describes PTSD as the “key pathology of our neoliberal age” since it keeps those who suffer from it in a continual state of emergency, looking for unknown terrors and surprises.75 Virtual images play into this cycle of trauma and stress in a fascinating way in contemporary war. Full Spectrum Warrior, the game used to recruit and train soldiers and which has an interface similar to those of drones and other remote weapons systems, is also used to rehabilitate soldiers suffering from PTSD. In 2009–2010, artist Harun Farocki created a suite of dual-channel videos, Serious Games, which takes up this circuit as its subject and content, emphasizing how the “virtualization” of Iraq is used for training and rehabilitation alike.76 Serious Games 1: Watson Is Down (2010) shows young, clean-shaven, uniformed recruits facing laptops, training for ground missions with Virtual Battlespace 2, a “bespoke” battlefield simulation game that allows commanders to tailor simulations to their specific training needs, at the Marine Corps Air Ground Command Center in Twenty-Nine Palms, California (figure 6.3).77 The four-person team quietly drives a tank through an unremarkable virtual landscape of paved roads and rolling, barren desert. They search the ground for indications of danger—improvised explosive devices (IEDs), combatants, approaching vehicles—trying to tell the real threats from debris or “glitches.” Images of their virtual journey and actual office space are intercut with footage of their commander inserting objects in their simulated path: mines, Coca-Cola cans, dog carcasses, and “enemies”—tawny-skinned figures in turbans, burqas, and explosive suicide vests. One soldier in the group, Gunnar Watson, sits hunch-shouldered and slack-jawed next to his team leader, who repeatedly scolds him for not keeping vigilant watch over the scene. Within minutes, “Watson is down”: his avatar has fallen lifelessly to the ground, and his flesh-and-blood counterpart has slid his office chair away from the desk and computer. The unit’s virtual tank briefly lingers next to the prone body, and then unceremoniously leaves him in the dust. Based on soldier Watson’s physical comportment and the inattention it implied, it never seemed likely that avatar Watson would make it through the mission alive, but one assumes he will be miraculously and inconsequentially resurrected for the next round. Farocki’s “serious game” is a banal war: Watson cannot even seem to muster the excitement one would expect from a standard video game, let alone one that was

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Figure 6.3 Harun Farocki, Serious Games 1: Watson Is Down, 2010. Courtesy of Harun Farocki Estate and Greene Naftali Gallery. © Harun Farocki 2010.

measuring his future chance of survival after deployment. If war has become a video game, it is not even a very stimulating one. The same minimal excitement appears in Serious Games 2: Three Dead (2010), which opens with an impressive cinematic scene from a military video game. A swarm of helicopters descends into a busy Middle Eastern village accompanied by swelling thematic music of synthesizers and drums. The virtual scene quickly cuts to real-world rehearsal of an ambush in a stage set city in the California desert. Sandcolored doublewide shipping containers have been repurposed as buildings, populated with Arabic speaking extras who attempt to communicate with laconic soldiers. A quick burst of machine gun fire scatters the members of the crowd, unconvincing in their roles as they delay to pick up their Styrofoam box lunches before taking cover. The soldiers slowly and disinterestedly clear the buildings and dispassionately report the outcome of their response: three dead. The video cuts back to the video game, now showing the city from street level, empty of everything except occupying American military forces and endless caravans of humvees and tanks. The detached boredom of the soldiers in the first two installments of Farocki’s Serious Games are offset by the high passions and excitement of the third, Serious Games 3: Immersion (2009), recorded at a workshop for US Air Force psychologists at Fort Lewis Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, on “Virtual Reality Exposure for PTSD.” Immersion, like Three Dead, opens with video game sequences, this time appropriated from Virtual Iraq, the version of Full Spectrum Warrior modified for therapeutic purposes. On the right-hand screen are lushly rendered first-person sequences of walking into buildings and through civic squares and city markets. The streets are filled with average people going about their

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business. Suddenly, a violent explosion rips through the scene and sends the bystanders fleeing in chaos. The right screen goes dark. On the opposite screen, a salesman appears, narrating what has just happened in the game (figure 6.4, top). He adjusts controls on a desktop computer, altering the time of day, the quality of light, and the objects present in the scene— all the details of the digital environment—which the viewer can see enacted on the right channel. Interspersed with the Virtual Iraq sales pitch are sequences documenting veterans using the system (figure 6.4, bottom). They nervously and tearfully narrate their individual experiences to a therapist who constructs a virtual reality representation of the incident. The traumatized soldiers are compelled to relive their experiences over and over again, each time

Figure 6.4 Harun Farocki, Serious Games 3: Immersion, 2009. Courtesy of Harun Farocki Estate and Greene Naftali Gallery. © Harun Farocki 2010.

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adding specificity and detail. War veterans suffering from PTSD are often haunted by a frightening event—dreaming of it or even hallucinating that the event is recurring. The specific event spills into quotidian situations: suddenly a trip to the market becomes the scenario for a roadside bomb or an ambush attack. To cure the veterans of their compulsive “repetitions with difference,” Virtual Iraq “requires the patient to revisit and retell the story of the trauma over and over again, and, through a psychological process called ‘habituation,’ rid it of its overwhelming power.”78 The specific experience is recreated as a customized game with as much fidelity to the original event as possible. The goal is to make the trauma into “a discrete event, not a constant, self-replicating, encompassing condition.”79 The traumatic scenario is meant to become so specific, so thoroughly differentiated from everyday experience, that it no longer spills over into the present or co-opts subsequent events into the traumatic narrative. Repetition with difference becomes repetition of the exact same. Compulsive, neurotic repetition, Freud surmises, is part of an “instinct for mastery” in which some pleasure comes from playing an active role in what had been an uncontrollable scenario. The neurotic continually “relives his traumatic experiences as a way of binding those experiences, and so of integrating them harmoniously into his psychic organization.”80 Through repetitive games, that process is facilitated—both sped up and, ideally, rendered effective. One moves from being a passive victim to an active player, “endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.”81 The individual retroactively produces the anxious preoccupation that would have protected her from the traumatizing fright. In order to gain control over neurotic, compulsive repetitions, the patient must consciously repeat them. Repetition is both the symptom and the cure. In his video, Farocki shows the soldiers raw and exposed in the midst of a forced and simulated repetition. The viewer hears their tales of deadly blunders, careless disregard for protocol, humiliating fear, and crippling cowardice. The veterans are bent over, sick to their stomachs, crying at the pain of reliving their worst moments. The therapist urges them to quantify their fear and discomfort using increasing SUDS (Subjective Units Disturbance Scale) numbers. As the simulations run, the veterans issue higher and higher numbers. The viewer sees not only the soldiers in anguish, but also the virtualized versions of their memories; in those moments, the viewer, therapist, and veteran all inhabit the same set of eyes and experience the same tragedy from a first-person perspective.82 We look through their wandering eyes as they glance down at their shoes or nervously turn away from the scene of the action. The screen, here, becomes a conduit for a strangely shared embodiment. Neither the viewer nor the therapist was there with the soldiers when they were traumatized, but they all partake in the neurotic replay through Virtual Iraq’s interface. What were once the hazy, private visions of individual, subjective memory are externalized, particularized, and made visible for others to see.83 Just as Freud noted of his shell-shocked patients, the soldiers using Virtual Iraq in Farocki’s video were traumatized despite being physically unharmed. In fact, according to

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Freud, physical injury might have been able to steel the soldiers against psychic trauma by focusing their attention on the more immediate urgency of their bodily wounds and associated pain. In this sense, the circumstances of drone warfare seem perfectly engineered to produce psychic trauma, given both the operators’ insulation from physical harm and their orders to linger over and study the often horrific scenes left in the aftermath of the drones’ actions. The concept of “moral injury” has recently entered the psychological lexicon as a means of describing “the psychical damage incurred by witnessing or being exposed to acts that violate an individual’s conceptions of right and wrong”—a phenomenon evidently on the rise in the heavily mediated “war on terror.”84 In the context of military operations, write Shira Maugen and Brett Litz, the authors of a study in PTSD Research Quarterly, “soldiers can inevitably transgress deeply held beliefs that undergird a service member’s humanity. Transgressions can arise from individual acts of commission or omission, the behavior of others, or by bearing witness to intense human suffering or the grotesque aftermath of battle.”85 Moral injury produces the same symptoms as traditional PTSD (intrusive thoughts, avoidance, emotional numbness) as well as “unique” outcomes that can include “shame, guilt, demoralization, self-handicapping behaviors (e.g. self-sabotaging relationships), and selfharm (e.g. parasuicidal behaviors).”86 Maugen and Litz’s description of moral injury highlights the ambivalent position that might result in this kind of trauma. It can be unclear whether the soldiers’ deeds were of commission or omission, action or passivity. It might well be that, rather than thinking of drone pilots as sealed off from the events that they witness, we need to understand them as simply being differently and contradictorily exposed. The published accounts of drone pilots who, like Bryant, have stepped forward to critique their shadowy programs testify to the fact that not all operators see their actions as simulated or without reciprocal (if still uneven) consequence, even if they are virtual. Omer Fast’s single-channel video work 5000 Feet Is the Best (2011) takes up the subject of remote action and psychic trauma by structurally modeling repetition with difference. It is a 30-minute loop that contains within it a series of shorter false loops. A haggard, middle-aged man, whom the viewer learns is a former drone pilot, repeatedly enters and exits a darkened, glamorous hotel room to meet with an interviewer (figure 6.5). The two seem to know one another and immediately jump into a somewhat hostile conversation about his experience as a drone operator: Interviewer: What’s the difference between you and someone who sits in an airplane? Pilot: There is no difference between us. We do the same job. Interviewer: But you are not a real pilot. Pilot: So what, you are not a real journalist.

This exact exchange happens three times over the course of the tape. Each time the dialog begins, the viewer initially believes that the video has ended and begun again. But the pilot’s

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Figure 6.5 Omer Fast, 5000 Feet Is the Best, 2011. Single-channel, HD video, color, sound, English. Duration: 30 minutes. Edition of 6 (plus 2 artist’s proofs). Courtesy of gb agency, Paris and ARRATIA, BEER, Berlin.

answer to the provocation differs each time: “I know what you mean. You’re thinking about bodies and places. Euclidian shit. Like train drivers in the 1880s or something”; “I know what you mean. You’re talking about bodies and trenches. Rats running around. Mustard gas. World War One, right?”; “I know what you mean. You’re talking about Orville and Wilbur. Kitty Hawk. Top Gun. The Red Baron. Whatever.” In each agitated answer, the pilot cites a standard argument about the difference between traditional and cyber warfare: the existential and phenomenological conditions of space and time; the intercorporeal risk of the individual body; and, finally, the thrill of flight and the daring heroism of the pilot. After each outburst, the pilot begins to tell a story that seems to have only an oblique relationship to the question and his experience as a drone pilot. First, he tells the story of a man obsessed with model trains who, one day, hijacks a commuter rail line and drives it for the day without anyone noticing the difference. He is caught only later when breaking into his own home, after forgetting his house keys at the train yard. As the pilot narrates the story, the viewer sees it enacted on screen. A black man plays the lead role, and the interviewer interrupts the story—as if he can see the dramatization as well—and questions the pilot: “So, why does the guy have to be black?” The pilot angrily replies that he had not mentioned anything about race. The dramatization then continues with a white actor in the lead part. The two other stories that complete the cycle also turn on mistaken or substituted identities, stereotyping, and open interpretations. The second

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dramatized story revolves around a pickpocketing couple that lures lusty and unsuspecting casino patrons into their room only to steal their wallets by sending them out with pants similar to but different from those they wore in. In the first two stories, the viewer and interviewer alike have to search their minds to make connections between the tales and the question that prompted them. The first, one might venture, analogizes the drone to a model train. Driving the toy is no different from piloting a “real” train. The trouble comes when one goes home, when the mixing of the virtual and the actual have unintended and unforeseen consequences. The second story forces the viewer to stretch more. She must seek meaning, significance, and connection between elements that may or may not be relevant. Fast puts the viewer into the position of having to actively, abductively search for something significant and interpretable in the scene on which to act and draw conclusions. Fast structures these conclusions as uncomfortable realizations that one is “racially profiling” those in the scene and refusing to be cast as “the other,” as well as always expecting to see violence and terror played out on a screen. The third story brings this effect into bold relief, as the pilot tells the hypothetical tale of a family on a weekend trip who become collateral damage during a drone strike on men burying what one assumes is an IED in a desert road. But the desert road is not in the Middle East, South Asia, or North Africa but the American Southwest, and the family is middle-class and white. They leave their suburban tract home in a silver Volkswagen. On their way out of town they are stopped at various checkpoints controlled by the “provisional authority” and the “occupying forces,” whose camouflage-wearing representatives are clearly identifiable as being of East Asian descent. The family stops on the dirt road when they see three men wearing “traditional headdresses” and clothing—baseball caps and flannel plaid work shirts. While they linger, deciding how to proceed, the view switches to a drone’s perspective of the scene. The image is now black and white. Information lines the sides of the screen, providing what seems to be data on the aircraft, its location, altitude, and controls (figure 6.6). The text, however, is all in Chinese, and presumably unreadable to the implied, English-speaking, Western audience. The American family and the Western spectator are both suddenly and uncommonly positioned as the Other. Their habits and clothing are described as both curious and traditional, they are under constant scrutiny, and they are viewed from positions of power, both on the ground and in the air. The text on the drone’s interface produces a particularly troubling effect, since the only reason the West, and the United States in particular, feels powerful in this drone war is because the other side does not (yet) have the technology or necessary infrastructure to manifest its godlike powers. The asymmetry of the war is technological and economic. Fast’s intervention uses the image from a real-time technology to picture the “not-yet,” not just the preemptive strike but also the inevitable future of a more symmetrical era of techno-warfare and the potential reorganization of world power. The chilling experience of being on the other side of the interface becomes darkly comical when one translates the Chinese text on the screen, which provides directions to the nearest McDonalds (as if this were critical geopolitical information—like the location of a nearby

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Figure 6.6 Omer Fast, 5000 Feet Is the Best, 2011. Single-channel, HD video, color, sound, English. Duration: 30 minutes. Edition of 6 (plus 2 artist’s proofs). Courtesy of gb agency, Paris and ARRATIA, BEER, Berlin.

hospital, school, church, temple, or mosque—or directions so that the drone might swing by after the strike to pick up and deliver lunch to its operators). At the top left of the screen is a quotation from the drone pilot character. It reads like a koan: “the light at the end of the tunnel is just another tunnel.”87 The video acts as a loop, and every missile catalyzes another war rather than ending one. The repetitive structure of 5000 Feet Is the Best and the stories told within it model the repetition-with-difference structures of PTSD and moral injury, as does the strange confusion of ordinary daily life with the anxious vigilance of wartime. Throughout the staged interviews, the pilot repeatedly winces when a high-pitched noise disrupts the soundtrack, and it is unclear whether that noise is the cause or a symptom of the pilot’s pain. It may well be coming from inside his own head, yet, as with the dramatizations of his stories, the viewer can experience it too.88 Internal and external, private and public become confused. In this way, the situation is much as it is with Virtual Iraq, where the veteran, therapist/interlocutor, and observer can all look into the psyche and repressed memories of the traumatized subject. In between the pilot’s dramatized anecdotes, the video cuts to a recorded interview between Fast and an actual but anonymous drone sensor, “Brandon,” whose face is unrecognizably blurred and voice digitally distorted, and whose life formed the basis of the staged scenes (in which an actor plays the disaffected pilot). Like his fictionalized counterpart, he is suffering from PTSD, caused by the “virtual stress” of his former job, but he is soft-spoken, calm,

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pleasant, and utterly sympathetic. When he begins to speak, the image switches from the dark and mysterious hallways of the hotel to dazzling daylight images of a desert landscape as seen from a drone. Lost in the vast, rugged desert terrain, a young boy rides a bike into the nothingness. Over this image, Brandon describes being “in” a drone. “5000 feet is the best. You have more description. Plus, at 5000 feet, I can tell what kind of shoes you are wearing. From a mile away.” He goes on to elaborate on the clarity of the image and the strange beauty of infrared video. But his discussion of the aesthetics of disembodied, technologized vision becomes sinister and disturbing when he begins to talk about the subjects of his mission: You could be following them and they won’t hear nor see you. And I’ll set the laser on the spot. You’ll see a box pop up. And what it does is it locks on those pixels, as we’re circulating. And the computer will figure out the trajectory, the distance and the speed, and come up with an estimated time that it would take for the missile to impact. The pilot would get all of the clearances necessary to fire. He’ll release the missile, and I’ll guide it onto its target.

While he is speaking, the image of the boy on the bike zooms out, and the video tracks him on his ride. He is now just a small speck. The terrain begins to change as the drone rises and reveals more of the surrounding landscape. The viewer now sees that the boy is at the edge of a housing development in the suburbs of Las Vegas, Nevada, near Creech Air Force Base, where the drone pilots are stationed. It is the American landscape that is surveilled, and this young boy is, by implication, a target. Most of “Brandon’s” interview runs over aerial shots of American towns, in the Southwest and Northeast, bringing this “video game war” home. He compares flying a Predator drone to playing a video game, one that is not banal, per se, but monotonous and boring. “I guess Predator is similar to playing a video game—but playing the same video game, four years straight, every single day, on the same level.” What keeps the “game” from being banal is the clear realization of the scale of the loss of life and his direct—if mediated—involvement in those events, which, to him, cannot be mere statistics. He worries about his decisions, collateral damage, and being the agent of that action. 5000 Feet Is the Best humanizes the drone operator through the figure of “Brandon,” showing him as fragile, vulnerable, and traumatized. “Brandon’s” blurred image and disguised voice testify to the risk of coming forward to speak about the program, even if he is not speaking against it. Fast counters this sympathetic version of the drone pilot with the fictionalized character in the hotel room, who is hostile, cold, and dismissive. The contradictory affects and disorienting repetitions of the dramatized stories, which mimic the confusion and anxiety of PTSD, spread to the viewer, who finds herself now anxiously preparing for a “not yet” that is strangely muddled with the “this has been.” In 5000 Feet Is the Best, Fast puts the Western viewer into the traumatized, disorderly, looping psyche of the drone pilot during the narrative sequences. The reversal of expected imagery in the interview segments, on the other hand, simultaneously puts her in the place of the targeted other, where she is forced to

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imagine herself and her family under the shadow of the drone. She vacillates between opposing subject positions, flip-flops from one side of the interface to the other, experiencing the traumatized replay of the drone sensor as well as the haunting, constant terror of remote surveillance and the paralyzing doom of an impending “not yet.” Dreyfus’s account of the epistemological and phenomenological problems of remote action becomes much more complicated when one considers the odd vantage point of drone operators. Without intercorporeality or risk, he argued, these actions would never seem wholly real, and one would always have cause to doubt them. While the drone operator surely does not experience either intercorporeality or physical risk, the artworks and interviews discussed in this section make it clear that they can (and often do) experience a kind of injury, one caused precisely by the indeterminacy of their actions and the contradictions the interface enables. They are removed yet also surgically close. They carry out critical, tactical missions and witness the details of the aftermath, but yet are given the conceptual freedom to imagine that what they do is no different from a game. To further complicate Dreyfus’s proposition, I will shift attention to artworks that consider UAVs from a different set of subject positions—from the ground and as (rather than operating) the drone. Drone Vision “Brandon,” the documentary subject of 5000 Feet Is the Best, admits in an unused part of the interview that he has never actually seen a Predator drone, only pictures.89 While this might initially seem surprising, there is no reason that the operator should ever have had physical contact with the extended sensory device he “inhabits” while in combat. The drones he flies do not launch from the United States, but from regional bases and airfields adjacent to the theaters of operation. That the person who is so intimately connected to the device, and who has been traumatized by the events he has enacted and witnessed through it, has not actually seen one in person is perfectly in keeping with the general secrecy of the US military and CIA drone programs, as well as with the technical specifications of the drone itself, which can see but remains unseen, and can touch but is practically untouchable. Several artists have produced works during the 2010s “war on terror” that aim to bring drones into the visuality that they so actively resist. James Bridle’s Drone Shadows series (2012–ongoing) maps the outlines of drones at a 1:1 scale on the ground. His first publicly displayed drone shadow, Drone Shadow 002, appeared in October 2012 at the Istanbul Design Biennale, stretching across the sidewalk and bending over the parking curbs in front of a Greek Orthodox church (figure 6.7).90 Turkey has its own shadowy relationship with drones, Bridle points out, basing US Predators on its soil for military engagements with Iraq, and developing its own line of UAVs for military use.91 Flying at between 30,000 feet and the optimal 5,000 feet, the hulking drones, with wingspans of approximately 50 feet, cast no shadows. When flying at lower altitudes, however, people on the ground can, if not see their shadows, at least hear their buzzing engines, as they invisibly and menacingly hover

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Figure 6.7 James Bridle, Drone Shadow 002, Kemeralti Caddesi, Istanbul, 2012. Installation. Courtesy James Bridle / booktwo.org Photo Credit: James Bridle / booktwo.org.

overhead. “As a military tool,” Bridle writes, “the UAV allows its operator to act with complete impunity, which leads directly to the moral vacuum of kill lists and double-tap strikes. UAVs are the key infrastructure of the 21st century shadow war: unaccountable, borderless, and merciless conflict.”92 His shadows give shape and definition to these devices that are known only by their effects, even to their operators. Bridle’s Dronestagram series, too, seeks to give borders to this shadow war. Pulling data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/), a site that “provides a full dataset of all known US drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen,” he then matches reports with Google satellite imagery of the likely sites of the bombings. Bridle then posts the images to the photo-sharing site Instagram under the handle “dronestagram,” which updates followers on the most recent strikes and the reported casualties, both targets and untargeted civilians. The small squares of satellite photographs show untouched building in peaceful landscapes. They give the viewer a glimpse of what the drone must have seen moments before dropping its payload.93 Bridle’s artworks efficiently embody a technology that eludes embodiment by displacing its operator and typically remaining out of visual range. Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen

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has taken photographs of Predator and Reaper drones in the air above the United States, which present the drone as the contemporary manifestation of sublime terror. But it is his 2010 video Drone Vision that most effectively embodies the drone. It does so not by showing its outside but by humanizing its sensory encounter with the world. The video is comprised exclusively of footage shot by American UAVs and intercepted by amateur hackers who pulled the data down from unencrypted satellite feeds. What is most interesting about the tape is not that it uses classified footage of secret missions, or that it could depict bloody remote action, but that it gives the viewer the drone as a sensory mechanism that is neither as masterful nor omnipotent as one might have believed. The footage is grainy video overwritten with the expected informational text—the date and time, geographic coordinates, altitude, and elevation—and the ironic notation “Secure” in the top left corner (figure 6.8). Cross hairs rest in the center of the screen, but the drone does not seem particularly adept at—or even interested in—targeting. The video opens across a soft field of puffy, billowing clouds in black and white seen through the data array. A large dark object dips into the frame from the top right, and it becomes apparent that the drone is beginning to look around and is catching glances of its own undercarriage. For a moment, a bit of its own body almost crosses into its line of fire. With a blink, the drone is looking down

Figure 6.8 Trevor Paglen, Drone Vision, 2010. Archival pigment print of video still. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, and Metro Pictures, New York. Photo credit: Trevor Paglen.

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onto a rugged mountain landscape, with winding roads traversing the peaks and valleys. As in Fast’s 5000 Feet Is the Best, it could be anywhere, here or there, friendly or hostile. The camera dizzyingly spins around its center point, as if unsuccessfully seeking a meaningful orientation or relationship to the ground. Again another cut or blink brings the viewer back into the clouds, this time white and blue. The camera slowly runs its scope along the edge of the cloud, as if tracing its contour, and then zooms in on an unremarkable segment of its indistinct form. Paglen’s intercepted video is a far cry from the mission footage released by the Air Force on a military-sponsored YouTube channel in 2008, which showed dramatic, efficient, targeted strikes. Paglen’s drone appears distracted or even inebriated, as it glances around without apparent purpose. Another blink and it is looking closely at a bend in a mountain road. It rapidly zooms in on a vehicle, as if suddenly alert and interested, intently tracking the moving shape in its crosshairs. The scene cuts to a dramatic close-up of the same vehicle, a little green tractor pulling an open hay wagon. The camera centers and switches to infrared. The effect is terrifying; the drone appears confused, as if its operator had lost his mind, suddenly mistaking, however briefly, this quaint vehicle as suspicious or threatening. For a moment, one wonders if the farmer will meet his abrupt end, vaporized into a cloud of dust, before the camera moves on. The video continues for another five minutes, showing more distracted and uneventful outings from a few days in April and May of 2009: more clouds, more undercarriage, more mountain roads, and a bizarre cut to an office clock with what looks like the Batman insignia pasted behind the center pivot of the hands. The reference to the superhero, an idle rich man with expensive weaponized gadgets, suddenly seems both accurate and egotistically delusional, given the drone’s distracted and tentative behavior. It is confused, desperate for a purpose, and carelessly bleeding secure data into the satellite network.94 Perhaps the most effective and affective embodiment of life in the shadow of the drone comes from Kuwaiti-Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif in her 2013 video Home Movies Gaza (figure 6.9). She recorded the elements of the 24-minute video in Gaza during the lead-up to and implementation of Operation Pillar of Defense, an eight-day military strike by the Israel Defense Force in this Hamas-controlled region.95 During the strike, which was prompted by a barrage of Hamas missiles into Israeli territory, Israel attacked more than 1,450 targets in Gaza, killing militants and civilians alike.96 Alsharif’s “home movies” are simultaneously beautiful, banal, and unnerving. They begin with footage shot from the back seat of a moving car speeding and halting along a busy road in Gaza. She captures glimpses of daily life: people walking to work, motor bikes and horse-drawn carts, children running and pushing, graffiti-strewn buildings, crumbling walls, piles of rubble, shells of apartment buildings. The viewer catches only fragments of the context—she, like Alsharif in the car, is moving too fast to take it all in. Her fast rate of movement causes the uncanny effect of everything on the street appearing to run backward except for her own trajectory. The scene outside the window condenses into rapidly repeating patterns of rows of bricks, the ridges of corrugated metal siding, and flickering fence posts. The viewer has a strange vantage point on the

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Figure 6.9 Basma Alsharif, Home Movies Gaza, 2013. Video stills. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Imane Farés. © Basma Alsharif.

surrounding cityscape. She is at once too close to see clearly and completely cut off from what unfolds alongside her.97 What one sees in these broken glances is daily life amid destruction, and a place that seems to be unwinding and unbuilding itself in a time in which anxiety, disorder, and danger have become the norm. Music playing on the car’s radio carries Alsharif and her camera across a transition to comfortable, middle-class living rooms, situated among all this tension. The camera lingers in an empty room, the voices of inhabitants just off-screen, occasionally passing through the frame. The only consistent movement in Alsharif’s shot is the image on the television, playing to empty sofas. On the screen, a National Geographic program shows lions, lit up in night vision, leaping upon a struggling elephant, tearing it apart as it lumbers forward (figure 6.9, bottom left). The image, too, is struggling and torn. It decomposes into scrambled pixels and fragmented electronic patches. The constant interference, locals believe, is a result of the spying of ever-circling drones.98 Throughout the video, the specters of drones seem to hover overhead and in the background. The whirring mechanical hum of these otherwise stealthy objects is the background noise in Home Movies Gaza. It menacingly tinges every uneventful moment with looming terror and contingency. It blends into and becomes indistinguishable

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from less troubling sounds, like the buzzing and whining of backup generators or the different droning of a teenage cellist rehearsing her lessons. The sound of the drones and the scrambled, digital vision of the television screen bleed into other spaces, taking over all contexts, and thereby reframing banal aspects of daily life as ominous and potentially threatening. The broken, electronic, flickering blue of the elephant’s body is chroma-keyed onto turkeys, peacocks, and other fowl in a dusty yard (figure 6.9, bottom right). They are abstracted, turned into information, and stand out like highlighted and undeserving targets on a control screen. Un-Manned Bridle adopts strategies to make drones visible, to bring them out of the shadows and figure them as things. Paglen, on the other hand, uses video to imagine what it might be like to be a drone and to consider the drone as a thing in itself. Alsharif’s video brings the drone into the civilian home, and makes it an unwanted and omnipresent part of daily life. They may be invisible, but they leave phenomenal traces and cause everyone on the ground to see their streets, houses, and bodies as continually surveilled potential targets. By focusing on the drone’s particular physicality and embodiment, the artists challenge the idea that it is just a ghostly avatar for a remote power; it is, rather, a thing in the world that is manufactured, paid for by tax dollars, maintained by ground crews, and buzzing loudly over the heads of people on the ground, filling the air with deathly static. These elements are all connected by a network of relationships in which everyone is entangled. In the previous chapter, I took up Jane Bennett’s ecological politics as a means of thinking about our responsibility to all others, even when faced with the potentially radical epistemological doubt introduced by virtuality and telepresence. Bennett promotes the category of “vibrant matter” as a means of breaking down the self/other binaries that allow certain groups of people to be denied personhood and “to be treated as mere things.” Destabilizing the hierarchy that puts the human above all else, and thereby also upending the domination of certain national/racial/ethnic/religious/ economic groups over others, “vibrant matter” offers what Bennett calls an ethical “safety net” protecting individuals and groups who do not conform to the dominant conception of “personhood.” In fact, under her model, agency is spread out over a network or “mosaic” of relationships that not only minimizes the difference between subjects and objects but also elevates all things to a shared material and human status.99 While Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter aims to make everyone ethically culpable in any action and pressures us to see our own role in structures of social, political, and environmental injustice or offense, it also has the effect of making individuals “simply incapable of bearing full responsibility” for any event or action. In a world of distributed agency, a hesitant attitude toward assigning singular blame becomes a presumptive virtue. … Outrage will not and should not disappear, but a politics devoted too exclusively to

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moral condemnation and not enough to a cultivated discernment of agentic capacities can do little good. A moralized politics of good and evil, of singular agents who must be made to pay for their sins (be they bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or [George W.] Bush) becomes unethical to the degree that it legitimates vengeance and elevates violence to the tool of first resort.100

Under the logic of such a moralized politics, individuals are forced to assume responsibility for problems that are much larger than them, and in which they might not see themselves playing a direct role. I tend to agree with Bennett here, that a moralized politics of blame based on the binary divisions of good/evil and self/other does little either to right the system or to encourage recognition of one’s own culpability in the structures of power from which our contemporary political and social conditions emerge. Yet her championing of the network or “mosaic” as a radical rethinking of contemporary notions of agency is compromised by the same contradictory logic I’ve attributed to the similarly “mosaic” surface of the interface and video screen. While the popular press may hold singular individuals solely accountable for particular actions (e.g., Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 terrorist attacks), both the US military and Al Qaeda, for example, conceive of things otherwise. Indeed, both groups’ thinking might be described as broadly “mosaicist.” The drone program and its “signature” targeted strikes go after particular individuals because they have been implicated in a network of interconnections, the “terrorist cell.” The shape and size of these cellular, mosaic structures of engagement are determined by the surveillance of data and bodies, of information and movement. As a result of the networks’ distributed structure, potentially endless numbers of people are implicated in any given event or potential event, and they may be preemptively targeted and killed (often along with adjacent individuals) because of the way they are apparently tiled into the mosaic. Blame is distributed, but, in this case, so is punishment for actual, probable, or even possible events in the past or future.101 Just as the “terrorist cell” is mosaically structured, so is the military operation aimed at eliminating it. One might think of the drone pilot as the responsible party for a targeted strike, but it is quite obvious that she and the drone are pawns in a much larger strategic game. Even on the level of operation, control of the drone is distributed. Each individual aircraft is remotely operated by a team of two, pilot and sensor. The pilot fires the weapon but the sensor targets and guides the munitions. An intelligence analyst looks over their shoulders, interpreting data and making decisions based on the commands of an even larger network of off-site commanders and officials. While there are only two people in the drone’s virtual cockpit, the event may be directed and overseen live by scores of government and military personnel—up to the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the head of the CIA.102 There are also the overseas servicemen on the ground who arm, launch, and care for the drone fleet. This structure is designed to distribute blame and responsibility.103 As Ryan Bishop and John Philips describe the situation, “the ‘moral qualities’ of a human pilot as agent outside of the aircraft remain intact through the perpetuation of the myth of control

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and the unhinging of the ultimate responsibility on the part of any individual actor for the action taken by the craft.”104 One might equally characterize the whole structure of the Internet, and the telecommunications systems it enables, as a mosaic. To return to Goldberg’s description from earlier in this chapter, the distributed nature of the Internet is designed both to ensure structural reliability, so that taking out one node will not disable the system, and at the same time to decentralize authority. Significantly, such distributed, mosaic structures—whether used in telecommunications networks or in terrorist cells—simultaneously increase the potential for deception, to which we might add self-deception. In the context of drone warfare, of course, this combination is lethal: it not only opens the possibility of doubting the reality of one’s actions, but also institutes a structure whereby one cannot be held accountable for those actions, whether one believes in them or not. When it comes to screen-based interaction, Bennett’s mosaic has hidden within it an ethical back door (an escape hatch in addition to what she calls a “safety net”). One can choose to be implicated or exonerated, just as one can be here or there, touched or completely out of reach. These choices, however, are not available to everyone, only to those on the side of power. Cultural theorist Rey Chow describes this apparently paradoxical state as the structuring logic of contemporary Western culture since the rise of asymmetrical aerial warfare, and particularly since the United Stated dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Carried out and justified as a “pacific act” of “deterrence” “meant to save lives and save civilization, the atomic bomb—or more precisely for Chow, the image of the mushroom cloud—initiated what she calls a “semiotic transfer” that blurred the boundary between war and peace. “The transfer ushered in an age of relativity and virtuality, an age in which the powers of terror are indistinguishable from the powers of ‘deterrence,’ and technologies of war are indissociable from practices of peace.”105 Moreover, it is “only the privileged nations of the world that can afford to wage war and peace at the same time,” and therefore have the ability to assume this “moral” contradiction.106 In this way, the world, as Chow describes it, has been “divided into an above and below in accordance with the privilege of access to the virtual world.”107 If you are not on the side of power and privilege, one means of gaining agency and subjecthood in a political and technological system structured always to see you as an other may be to strategically occupy the screen, that is, to become a picture and meld into the screen’s mosaic. One must think like a target in order not to be one. Collaborating with the Screen, or How to be a Pixel Following Martin Heidegger’s landmark essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Chow argues that we have moved from the condition that the German philosopher described in 1938, in which the world is grasped “as a picture,” to one, enabled by today’s global telesurveillance, informational logistics, and aerial warfare, in which the world has “been transformed into—is essentially grasped as—a target.”108 Heidegger saw the world becoming a picture as

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a result of advancements that contradictorily brought together the “gigantic” with the “increasingly small.” “The gigantic, he wrote, presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear—in the annihilation of great distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through the radio by a flick of the hand.”109 Now, Chow writes, real-time telecommunications and remote weapons have extended these properties by virtualizing the world around us and refiguring it for maximum visibility and, therefore, maximum destruction. Under this regime, the traditional binary of self and other becomes “eye” and “target.”110 But between the eye and the target, the self and the other, the here and the there, the mosaic structure of mission command and the distributed network of the terrorist cell are the drone and the screen. They are pivot points in the array of vibrant matter. Hito Steyerl’s 2011 video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File addresses the political situation of global surveillance—both visual and data-based—and the threat of drone attacks and extrajuridical murder from the position of someone on the ground, which is to say, someone who appears on the screen as a target (figures 6.10–6.11). Rather than putting herself under the gun, as Bilal did, Steyerl imagines that in order to resist these forms of omnipotent, omnipresent, invisible, and predictive power one must enter into an intentional collaboration with the screen. The satirical video borrows its title from a 1968 Monty Python sketch that posed as a public service announcement aimed at educating television audiences on how to “be invisible” and of the value of this skill. The sketch shows a patch of scrubby English countryside. A narrator informs the viewer that 40 people are hiding within the scene. One by one they are called, by name and address, to stand up and reveal their clever hiding places. Upon rising, however, they are promptly shot, demonstrating the undeniable value of invisibility. Once the subjects smarten up, remaining hidden even after being called to appear, they are still targeted, either because the area is blanketed with fire, thereby eliminating all possible hiding places, or because neighbors are called upon to inform on them. All informers are also executed, as are any government officials who stand in the way, and entire nations are atombombed to eliminate threats to progress. Any execution is valid and justified because everyone is (mosaically) connected somehow. Following this logic would eventually lead to the destruction of the viewer and, perhaps, those holding the guns. Steyerl’s video adopts the same darkly comic tone, but moves the entire scenario from the television screen to the computer terminal. Her “fucking didactic educational” video is a .mov file, indicating that it is in a format meant to be shared and spread through the Internet’s mosaic network and watched on individual home devices, avoiding centralized control and censorship. It presents a series of skills acquired from the Internet, concerning how to become invisible to networked telecommunications and surveillance. How Not to Be Seen is narrated by a computer-generated voice that sounds strikingly like Robin Leech of the 1980s celebrity television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. He teaches the viewer the tricks of invisibility in five lessons: How to Make Something Invisible

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for a Camera, How to Hide in Plain Sight, How to Become Invisible by Becoming a Picture, How to Be Invisible by Disappearing, How to Become Invisible by Merging into a World of Pictures. The voice begins by reminding the viewer of the basic strategies of becoming invisible—“to hide, to remove, to go off screen, to disappear.” The advice he offers is hardly helpful to the individual who actually needs to take cover in a physical environment. He suggests seven strategies: “to pretend you are not there, to hide in plain sight, to scroll, to wipe, to erase, to shrink, and to take a picture.” The advice ranges from the obvious to the tautologically absurd or impossible—impossible, that is, if one thinks of oneself as a material body in real space. If we recognize, however, that we need not be invisible in the world but only on the screen, Steyerl’s directions become surprisingly useful, as evidenced by the last suggestion in the above list—the best way to be invisible is to be behind the camera, to be in the position of authority and power. The advice doled out by Steyerl’s narrator seems to be directed at a wide swath of social and political groups. The 13 suggested ways of disappearing range from living in a gated community or militarized zone to being either female and over 50 or undocumented and poor; he also recommends being a dead pixel, a captured Wi-Fi signal, or caught in a spam filter. What these diverse suggestions share is that all are strategies for not coming into vision or being caught on camera, whether because you are part of a disregarded group (middleaged women, the undocumented or poor), sealed off or protected from paparazzi and spies (gated communities and militarized zones), specially powered or equipped (superheroes, invisibility cloaks), or have moved to a nonhuman form and become data. Indeed, becoming data and migrating to the screen—occupying it as the primary battleground Baudrillard and Virilio saw it becoming in the 1990s—may be Steyerl’s most serious suggestion. In order to survive, one should disappear into the digits of this ubiquitous form of vibrant and vibrating matter. If, as Virilio argued, “The desert is a screen where all is exposed to the searching eye of an adversary employing the full array of object-acquisition systems,” one must blend with the screen and go digital.111 Steyerl illustrates her invisibility instructions with images of resolution targets used to calibrate and focus cameras. In front of a green screen, her black and white target for studio photography transforms into a cracked piece of painted asphalt in the California desert (figure 6.10). This resolution target, decommissioned and abandoned in the digital era, was used to “measure the resolution of the world as a picture” from satellites, airplanes, and drones. The shift to digital photography in the 1990s greatly increased the resolution of images taken on high. Smaller pixel-based targets were installed throughout the desert. In 1996, the viewer is told, “photographic resolution in the air is about 12 meters. Today it is 1 foot.” The way to resist surveillance and global militarized power is to become smaller than a pixel and migrate invisibly into the mosaic of the screen.112 Dancers appear throughout Steyerl’s video, draped in chroma-key green burqas blending easily into video images, 3D architectural renderings, and various screen test patterns (figure 6.11). The mosaic logic here is to merge into the vibrant matter of the screen, to become data, to become a “rogue pixel” hiding in “the cracks of our standards of resolution.”

Figure 6.10 and 6.11 Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, still from an HD video, single screen in an architectural environment. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. © Hito Steyerl.

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Steyerl’s video is humorous and at times absurd, but it offers a curiously rational way of thinking about how to survive in the age of the world target. Real-time telecommunication and the types of interaction, telepresence, and touch it enables, Virilio writes, throws our whole understanding of the world—of the here and now—into “disarray”; “it jumbles up the relationship of the living being to the world.”113 This is because one cannot cross or break the light barrier as one can with sound; “you crash into it.”114 We crash into the screen. While Virilio might not mean it this way, one could imagine coming right up against the screen and touching it from either side—migrating into it, rather than seeing through it. “To see at a distance, to hear at a distance,” he wrote, “that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting towards a domain it does not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact.”115 We are now governed by what he calls a “tactile perspective.” It is tactile but it is done with the eye for the screen. If the world has become a picture—or, worse, a target—and all bodies, depending on their relationship to hegemonic power and “privilege of access to the virtual world,” will either be mosaically subject or party to preemptive violence in the name of deterrence, then the way to become invisible, Steyerl suggests, is to become truly mosaic, to think of oneself as data and merge into the pixels to avoid being tracked or touched. One must become the flickering, pulsating static—simultaneously invisible and “noisy”—that disrupts the smoothing functioning of the technologies of terror and surveillance. To exit the binaries and the contradictory, divisive logic they sustain, one may have to become the slash.

Epilogue: Fingerprints

An enormous C-print photograph of the sun hangs in the galleries of the Columbus Museum of Art. A burning white ball of light hovers in the center of the image, radiating a bright yellow haze across the aquamarine morning sky. Along the lower edge of the frame, a blue-gray mountain range rises and dissolves into the thick atmosphere. Though mediated by the camera’s lens, the sun still seems to burn one’s eyes, and the viewer is compelled to retreat to a safer distance. From afar, across the gallery, the contours of the mountains become more distinct and the star’s light less powerful (figure 7.1). When one stands back, however, the subject of Trevor Paglen’s Reaper in the Sun completely disappears. The drone is hiding in plain sight. If the viewer comes in very close to the image and turns her eyes into the intense light, she can just barely pick out the insectlike body of the “hunterkiller” UAV. It is a glint of metallic bronze light in the outer aura just below and to the left of the sun. From Paglen’s long range, it looks like a tiny cylinder with wisplike wings. It could be a mosquito or a speck of hair or dust missed by a negligent framer. Even a visitor who carefully inspects the photograph inch by inch, searching for the titular drone, may have trouble finding it. It seems impossibly small in comparison to the vast, expansive sky. That the photographer managed to spot it and capture it is as remarkable as its very existence. According to the museum’s curator, the task of seeing the drone in the photograph is made doubly difficult: the miniscule form is often obscured under the smudgy fingerprints of previous viewers who have felt curiously compelled to breach institutional rules and long-established propriety by touching the art after locating the stealthy aircraft.1 For the same reason, however, one can often rapidly locate the drone by not looking into the photograph and its illusory three-dimensional space, but rather at its surface, by scanning the glass barrier that mediates artwork from viewer. The milky opacity of the delicate but illicit fingerprints stand out on the clean glass and pinpoint the drone’s coordinates. The fingerprints locate the drone, but also evidence those who stood in front of the image and called the drone into vision. One slips into Paglen’s vantage point through his lens and on the ground, calling the “invisible” drone into vision, looking up and looking back. The fingerprints on the picture’s glass index the past presences of unobserved others, and the current viewer’s presence is indexed there as well, even if she does not reach out and touch the image: reflecting back on

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Figure 7.1 Trevor Paglen, Reaper in the Sun, 2013. Archival pigment C-print. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, and Metro Pictures, New York.

the glass screen that separates here from there, now from then, and human from machine is the viewer’s own image superimposed onto the sublime landscape. Paglen has described his work, which brings to light the “black” world of American military secrets, as an encounter with the “sublime.” Paglen evokes eighteenth-century philosophical accounts of this aesthetic phenomenon, particularly as articulated by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. For Burke, the sublime entailed a sense of awe or astonishment that produces a “delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.”2 His contemporary Kant compared the effect of the sublime to that of beauty: beauty concerns the particular form and aesthetics of the object, while the sublime “is found in the formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it, and yet, it is also thought of as a totality.”3 To experience the sublime, then, points to “a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”4 Paglen updates the concept for the twenty-first century, defining

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the unsettling aesthetic effect as a “productive uncertainty” that marks “the fading of the sensible, or the sense that you get when you realize you are unable to make sense of something.”5 Paglen’s reframing of the sublime in the era of technologized warfare is exceptionally apt. Reaper in the Sun gives the viewer Burke’s tranquility tinged with the contemporary instruments of disembodied terror and annihilation, as well as a Kantian experience that tests the literal limits of her sensory powers. What the viewer cannot easily make sensible— understand or bring to the senses—in this photograph is the drone. It instills its own kind of indefinite terror into the scene. It is panoptic and invisible. It is far away and close. It is out of sight but never out of mind. The sublime, in Burke’s conception, is provoked by the sense of something being obscured, and inspires a reverential, respectful fear or dread in the viewer.6 Arthur Schopenhauer, another early theorist of the sublime, describes the experience as a realization of oneself “as an individual, as the frail phenomenon of a will, which even the slightest touch of these forces can utterly destroy, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, the victim of chance, a vanishing nothing in the presence of stupendous might.”7 In the sublime, the viewer glimpses “a power beyond all comparison, superior to the individual, threatening it with annihilation.”8 The lurking, hidden presence of the drone in Paglen’s photograph punctuates the already overwhelmingly sublime image of vast nature and the punishing sun, with a machine possessing the awesome, unprecedented, and terrifying power to make embodied human senses and agency unbounded and infinitely extended. Paglen, however, does not shrink and shrivel in the presence of this contemporary manifestation of the sublime. He turns his camera toward the drone and calls it into presence. He looks the sublime in its terrifying, weaponized eye and stares back. He makes it knowable, describable, stable, and small. He encourages the viewer to look and, to the limits of her powers, touch back. Paglen’s gesture and those of his viewers here act as final metaphor in a book about mediation, vision, touch, and reciprocity. Paglen figures and brings into vision a device—a technological extension of the human sensory and motor apparatus—that is designed to stay out of sight while it is seeing and to remain out of reach even when touching someone on the ground. When the viewer disregards museological protocol and smudges the glass, she brings all the many interfaces at work in this system into the foreground. She points at the systems that mediate what appear to be direct experiences and makes visible the site for resistance, response, and remediation. Over the course of this book I have sought to advance an understanding of the interface, and its close connection to the semiotic register of the index, as a site or surface that sustains contact between something and its opposite. It acts as the “slash” that both holds apart and joins together a series of binary, shifting terms—here/there, now/ then, self/other, subject/object, human/machine, physicality/virtuality—and blurs the distinctions between them. It is, I’ve argued, not a window or a door or a mirror, or any of the other handy metaphors we have previously used for thinking about screens and interfaces. It is, rather, a site of “uncanny confusion”; it is a surface where opposites touch and become indistinguishable from one another.

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The interface may appear to be transparent, but it is always opaque, and its solidity is emphasized in moments of unworkability and tactical misuse. My aim in these chapters has been to trace a history of artistic engagement with cutting-edge technologies (be they military, industrial, or consumer-grade) running in parallel to the history of our relationships to mediated images and the interfaces through which they appear, especially when they communicate live, existential, indexical information about ourselves or others. In each chapter, I looked to a series of technologies and artworks that took up the telecommunications interface as a problem, whether epistemological, phenomenological, ontological, or ethical. That interface was, alternately, a zone for action and doubt, a boundary that creates ontological indeterminacies, a barrier to be physically and ethically crossed, a surface to be occupied, a mosaic of information, power, and agency, and a site of trauma. The artists discussed in this book all devised ways of intervening in the interface, of touching back, in order to disrupt the smooth functioning of asymmetrical power. In each case, I argued, the artists called attention to the interface’s often overlooked materiality, and the logics of power it enabled, ethical values it imposed, and epistemological assumptions and ontological hierarchies it sustained. Compelled by the rhetoric of the death of the index circulated in conjunction with ever-increasing, ever more lethal activities enacted through digital interfaces, I have argued that the current media conditions require a return to Peircian semiotics and the ontological specificities of the index. Claiming that the interface is an index—that is, an ephemeral, present-tense sign that communicates pressing, existential, often indirectly observed information, and which is inherently doubtful and dubious—entails seeing it as a site of real consequence, despite its virtual underpinnings. It demands active interpretation and judgment rather than passivity or spectacular distance. In an age in which most of our actions are mediated, our warfare is increasingly telerobotic, and our interfaces are designed to have a “threshold of invisibility” that simultaneously protects individual privacy and obscures the evidence of tactical military actions, we must complicate the easy binaries that the interface only appears to enforce.9 We are all here and there, virtual and real, now, then, and increasingly not yet.

Notes

Introduction 1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005), 148. 2. Ibid., 151. For more on Brand’s involvement with staging the “Mother of All Demos,” see ibid., 152–157. 3. At other moments in the presentation, the projection screen showed just the documents Engelbart was producing or mixed these images with live feeds of other engineers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) lab. 4. This idea of the television screen as a “window onto the world” began as early as 1946; see Thomas H. Hutchinson, Here Is Television: Your Window to the World (New York: Hastings, 1946). 5. For a discussion of how early video artists sought to decentralize television distribution, see Kris Paulsen, “Half-Inch Revolution: The Guerrilla Video Tape Network,” Amodern 2 (Fall 2013), n.p., http:// amodern.net/article/half-inch-revolution/. For the involvement of the SRI in decentralized video projects, see Tung-Hui Hu, “Truckstops on the Information Superhighway: Ant Farm, SRI, and the Cloud,” Media-N (Spring 2014), n.p. 6. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 152. Brand was brought in to make the presentation more of an “event” by Engelbart’s collaborator, Bill English. “The unstated connection, of course,” John Markoff writes, “was Brand’s background in helping orchestrate Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests.” 7. Douglas Engelbart, “The Augmented Workshop,” in Adele Goldberg, ed., The Personal Workstation (Reading: AMC Press, 1988), 234. 8. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986), 64. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 64, 66.

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11. The word “virtual” is a contanym. It means one thing and the opposite at the same time: both “not really existing” and “almost the same.” Different scholars use the word to mean different things, for example simulated or simulacral images, or simply mediated images of existent things. Please see chapter 1 of this book for a discussion of the complex ontological category of the “virtual” as it relates to computer screens and interfaces. 12. See chapter 2 of this book for a lengthy discussion of the pointing finger and its relationship to the interface. 13. For wonderful work on haptics and touch interfaces see David Parisi, “Reach In and Feel Something: On the Strategic Reconstruction of Touch in Virtual Space,” Animation 9, no. 2 (July 2014), 228–244; and David Parisi, “Fingerbombing, or ‘Touching Is Good’: The Cultural Construction of Digitized Touch,” Senses and Society 3, no. 3 (2008), 307–327. For recent artistic work on touch screens and haptic interfaces, see, for example, the work of Victoria Fu and Michael Bell-Smith. 14. John Armitage, “C-Theory Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space,” C-Theory (October 18, 2000), n.p., http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=132, accessed May 1, 2015. 15. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 2008), 10–11. 16. Ibid., 10–15. 17. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi. 18. Roy Ascott, “Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications,” Leonardo 24, no. 2 (1991), 116. 19. Marvin Minsky, “Telepresence,” http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html, accessed November 11, 2011; originally published in Omni Magazine (1980). 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Eduardo Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 78, 97. The difference between these two definitions is whether or not the “remote action” must be carried out by a robot, rather than by a person taking orders. Both Kac and Ken Goldberg have produced telepresence projects in which remote operators control a human proxy through directions and commands. See Kac’s Telepresence Garment (1995–1996), and Goldberg’s Tele-Actor (2001) and Tele-Twister (2003–2004). 23. I borrow the term “user” from Roy Ascott. For Ascott, the “viewer” of contemporary art becomes a “user” around 1950 with the development of “vertical field viewing” introduced in the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and as discussed by Leo Steinberg in the “Flatbed Picture Plane” section of his landmark essay “Other Criteria.” While Steinberg sees Jackson Pollock’s work as still residing on the side of illusionism and the vertical picture plane, Ascott sees it as part of the flatbed logic and the movement from nature and the viewer to culture and the user. Pollock, Ascott writes, creates an “‘all-at-onceness’ that is

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the very epitome of telematic networking. His space is inclusive and inviting, in a sense providing for a kind of anonymity of authorship that embraces the viewer in the creation of meanings. The metaphysical promise of Pollock’s work is made technologically explicit in telematic systems, where the dichotomy of artist/viewer or sender/receiver of the earlier era is resolved into a unitary ‘user’ of the creative system.” Roy Ascott, “Art and Telematics,” in Edward Shanken, ed., Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 195. 24. Eduardo Kac, “Telepresence Art,” in Telepresence and Bio Art, 140. 25. See, for example, The Ornitorrinco Project (1989–1996), Rara Avis (1996), The Telepresence Garment, 1995–1996, and Urapuru (1996–1999). 26. In chapter 6, I address the psychological effects of telepresence on the teleoperator. 27. Ascott, “Art and Telematics,” 187, 199. 28. Roy Ascott, “Telenoia,” in Shanken, Telematic Embrace, 263, 265. In “Telenoia,” Ascott shifts his earlier description of networking as disembodiment to emphasize a new kind of humanity emerging, materializing through network culture. Networking, he writes, not only ignores “the boundaries of geography and region, and of culture and gender, but contributes, along with new scientific and philosophical insights, to the erasure of the established boundaries of the material body. … This erasure leads, however, not to a disembodiment of the person, nor to an immateriality, but to the rematerialization, the redescription, reconstruction—in short, the reinvention of the human being” (263). 29. Ibid., 263. N. Katherine Hayles points out that Minsky, too, found his way to disembodiment. She sites a 1996 lecture in which “he suggested it would soon be possible to extract human memories from the brain and import them, intact and unchanged, to computer disks.” Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13. 30. Ascott, “Art and Telematics,” 197; Roy Ascott, “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?,” in Shanken, Telematic Embrace, 241. 31. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 7. 32. Ibid., 43. 33. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. Ken Goldberg et al., “Beyond the Web: Manipulating the Real World,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 28 (1995), 209–219. In 1994, Goldberg and his collaborators Michael Mascha, Steven Gentner, Jürgen Rossman, Nick Rothenberg, Carl Sutter, and Jeff Wiegley launched The Mercury Project, a telerobotic artwork that enabled online users to excavate artifacts in a sandbox in their lab at the University of Southern California. 36. Ken Goldberg, “Introduction: The Unique Phenomenon of a Distance,” in Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 5.

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37. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 7. 38. Samuel Weber, “A Virtual Indication,” in Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, eds., Digital and Other Virtualities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 65. As Weber has pointed out, just because virtual worlds are fictional does not mean that actions in these spaces do not have effects outside of the game. Taking up the example of the use of “real currency” in virtual games and the growing market for “virtual goods and services,” he writes: “what this phenomenon demonstrates is how misleading it is today … to try to simply ‘oppose’ something like ‘virtuality’ to something ostensibly more material, more real, such as ‘indexicality’” (65). 39. Adam Heilbrun, “Virtual Reality: An Interview with Jaron Lanier,” http://www.jaronlanier.com/ vrint.html, accessed February 23, 2014, originally published in The Whole Earth Review (Fall 1989). 40. Thomas J. Campanella, “Eden by Wire,” in Goldberg, The Robot in the Garden, 27. 41. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Virtual, adj. and n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223829, accessed March 11, 2014. 42. Ibid. 43. For a discussion of the contranymic qualities of “virtual,” see the discussion of Bryant and Pollock’s Digital and Other Virtualities in chapter 1 of this book. 44. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Television, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198769 ?redirectedFrom=television, accessed March 12, 2014; Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Video, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/223260?rskey=7UyU0U&result=1&isAdvanced=false, accessed March 12, 2014. 45. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 11. 46. Hubert Dreyfus, “Descartes’s Last Stand,” in Goldberg, The Robot in the Garden, 49. 47. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 121. 48. Following the performance theorist Philip Auslander, I do not see an ontological difference between the “live and the mediatized.” While this is an argument primarily put forward by theater critics, who want to see live performance as resistant to market value, it is relevant here too, despite the fact that I am not concerned explicitly with economics in this book. Auslander rightfully insists that “the progressive diminution of previous distinctions between the live and the mediatized, in which live events are becoming ever more like mediatized ones, raises … the question of whether there really are clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones.” Philip Auslander, Liveness (London: Routledge, 1999), 7. Certainly, since this book takes up live events that are always already mediated, the (possible) ontological distinction between the live and the mediated is not in play. In fact, as I discuss at length in chapter 2, screens—especially television screens, per Samuel Weber—are ontologically indeterminate, and make it difficult to tell the live from the recorded. 49. See Kris Paulsen, “In the Beginning, There Was the Electron,” X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly 15, no. 2 (Winter 2012), 56–73, for a discussion of experimental uses of broadcast television in the late 1960s.

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50. Weber, Mass Mediauras, 121. 51. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 313. 52. Sam Biddle, “How to Destroy the Internet,” Gizmodo, May 23, 2012, http://gizmodo.com/5912383/ how-to-destroy-the-internet, accessed February 26, 2014. 53. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Interface, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/97747?rskey =Le382F&result=1, accessed May 2, 2014. 54. Weber, Mass Mediauras, 115–120.

Chapter 1 1. Thomas B. Sheridan, Telerobotics, Automation, and Human Supervisory Control (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 4. A telerobot, as defined by the robotics engineer Sheridan, “is an advanced form of teleoperator the behavior of which a human operator supervises through a computer intermediary.” A teleoperator is “a machine that extends a person’s sensing and/or manipulating capacity to a location remote from that person.” 2. I borrow the term “user” from Roy Ascott, who carefully points out that with telematic art the traditional “dichotomy of artist/viewer or sender/receiver of the earlier era is resolved into a unitary ‘user’ of the creative system.” Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. Edward A. Shanken (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 195. 3. Hubert Dreyfus, “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand,” in Ken Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 60. 4. Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 101. 5. Legal Tender, too, plays upon doubts the user might have in regard to capital, and the security measures necessary to protect its semiotic status as a stand-in for value. 6. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1966), vol. 4, 359. The complete quotation is: “This [the index] is a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and by also forcibly intruding upon the mind, quite regardless of its being interpreted as a sign.” Later in this essay, I will address this second element of indexicality. 7. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: A Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings, 101–104. In Peirce’s semiotic system there are three trichotomies of signs. The icon, index, symbol triad classifies signs in regard to their objects. The other two trichotomies divide signs by their mere qualities (qualisign, sinsign, or legisign) or by the sign’s relationship to its interpretant (rheme, dicisign, or argument). These nine types are recombinant and can result in ten classes of signs. 8. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 104.

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Notes to Pages 20–22

9. Some words, however, are also indexical or iconic in Peirce’s system. Onomatopoeic words sonically resemble what they represent and therefore have iconic qualities. Deictic shifters, as I will discuss later in this essay, relate to context and existence and therefore have indexical qualities. 10. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 3, 414. 11. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 106. 12. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1977), 154. 13. Ibid. 14. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. 15. As I argue later in this essay, pastness, permanence, truth, and resemblance are not necessary traits of the photograph either. 16. Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” in Carol Squires, ed., Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography (New York: New Press, 1999), 9. That digitization should raise the specter of death in photography is strange, Batchen argues, since, from its very beginning, photography has always been associated with death, as the Bazin quote above, and all related analog analogies to death masks and mummification, surely attest. 17. See, for example, Anne-Marie Willis, “Digitization and the Living Death of Photography,” in Philip Hayward, ed., Culture, Technology, and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century (London: J. Libbey, 1990); William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 18. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3. Media archaeology, according to Huhtamo and Parikka, is the rummaging through the “textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts [to emphasize] both the discursive and material manifestations of culture.” Media archaeology, which grows out of German media theory, particularly the work of Friedrich Kittler, and treats media digital and otherwise, points to the dense material structure and infrastructure of media, whether we might consider them to be “immaterial” or not. The work of Wolfgang Ernst, in particular, is useful. For an extensive treatment of the materialist conditions of Ernst’s media theory, see Jussi Parikka, “Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s Materialist Media Diagrammatics,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 5 (September 2011), 52–74. 19. There are, to be sure, theorists who recognize both the materiality of digital media as well as the more complicated (and potentially “immaterial”) nature of the index. I am interested here in the intersection of ideas about the immateriality of the digital and the materiality of the index (two claims I believe are false). 20. Willis, “Digitization and the Living Death of Photography,” 199. 21. Ibid., 198. 22. Ibid., 201–202; emphasis added.

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23. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 295. 24. Ibid. 25. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 225. 26. In an insightful book, Laura Marks also argues for the materiality of digital media. “Digital media are indexical,” she writes, “if we keep in mind what level of materiality they are indexing. They may index the imperfect flow of electrons that constitute them, or the platforms on which they were built. They may index what they cost to make, or the social networks in which they exist.” Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 190. Marks makes an important point here: there are without doubt material underpinnings to electronic systems. I do not believe, however, that one need go so far as to insist on the materiality of electrons or point to the financial, and therefore material, underpinnings of any system to keep the category of the index relevant in the digital age. As I will argue, the index has never had a tight grip on its own materiality, and materiality does not make an index. 27. See Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? Or Faking Photographs,” in Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Philip Rosen, Change Mummified (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Gunning, Doane, and Rosen address the false distinction between the digital and the indexical. 28. See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); John Tagg, “Evidence, Truth, and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State,” in Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Other Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984). For a helpful and efficient discussion of this “poststructuralist” turn in photographic theory, see Geoffrey Batchen, “Identity,” in Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 29. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), vol. 2, 461. 30. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 3, 211. 31. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 106. 32. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 55. 33. William Henry Fox Talbot described his early form of photography, the calotype, as “the pencil of nature.” Since then, many theorists of photography have chosen not to see man’s invention of and intervention in the process of photography. It is in fact an industrial and scientific activity, not a natural one. 34. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 55. 35. Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index?,” 32–33.

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36. Some indices take more than a moment to appear—such as erosion or a long-exposure photograph. The sign is created through duration, a drawn-out moment of co-presence. 37. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kindle edition, location 2776. 38. Light “touching,” “pressing,” or “inscribing” film, I’d argue, should be understood as metaphor rather than as literal description. The photograph seems to inspire a kind of synesthesia in which a visual quality appears as a tactile one. This is interesting in regard to telerobotic systems that turn vision and light into touch. 39. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4; emphasis in the original. 40. Ibid., 26. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 5. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 111. 46. Ibid., 110. 47. Ibid., 109. “Hi,” being a word with a defined meaning, is also a symbol as well. Pierce parses these two identities as clearly as possible. Insofar as it is supposed to grab the receiver’s attention and call his attention to the present moment, it is an index. 48. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, 359; emphasis added. 49. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 107. 50. Ibid., 108–109. 51. Ibid., 275. Peirce also calls the index a “true symptom” in his essay “Telepathy and Perception.” There he connects the indexical “symptom” to the illogical, perceptual judgments of telepathy. This seems particularly interesting given the connection I am making between indexicality and telecommunications technology. See Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 7, 373. 52. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 108. 53. Symbols, as mentioned earlier, operate by convention, and icons by resemblance and direct observation. 54. He does map out connections to logic in chapter 2, “Division of Signs,” in Speculative Grammar. His logical triad follows upon his ten recombinant classes of signs, but he does not specify the connection of abduction to any of the sign classes. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, 152–153.

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55. This mapping is, admittedly, a generalization. Peirce’s semiotics and logic are complex, and the classes of signs permute and recombine in ways that make such a generalization reductive, but it is also quite operative. His descriptions of icons often mirror and rhyme with his descriptions of inductive thinking, as do his descriptions of symbols and deduction. For example, Peirce calls deduction a “habitual” form of logic, and says that symbols are understood by “force of habit.” Symbols signify by means of agreed-upon meanings, rules, and laws, and deductions are the applications of rules and laws. Icons signify by means of resemblance and similarity of characters; induction is reasoning by likeness and analogy. Since abduction is the first stage of any logical process, it is often overlooked as a kind of thought. One might need an abductive inference to see the similarity of characters in an inductive process, and so on. 56. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 192. 57. Ibid., 189. 58. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 8, 209. 59. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 189. 60. Ibid. 61. Abduction begins with a “result” or clue and infers a rule and a case that would explain the “result.” With abduction one begins from the end. Induction operates differently. Induction examines a series of cases and their results to infer a rule. Deduction is the application of a rule or law to a case, with the result already known or assumed. Ibid., 188. 62. The Oxford English Dictionary gives both the primary definition of “leading … away” and the term’s history in logic, and specifically in Peirce’s writing; Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., December 2011, s.v. “abduction, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/215?rskey=YLEXpI&result=7&isAdvanced=true. 63. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 152. 64. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Guessing,” Hound and Horn 2 (April-June 1929), 267. 65. Ibid., 282. 66. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, 109. 67. Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index?,” 6. 68. Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Bryant and Pollock, eds., Digital and Other Virtualities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 10. 69. Ibid., 11. This collection of essays comes out of the 2005 CentreCATH Conference “The Politics and Ethics of Indexicality and Virtuality,” in Leeds, England. I first presented this paper, then titled “Abducting the Index,” at this conference. 70. Bryant and Pollock, “Editors’ Introduction,” 11. 71. Ibid.

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72. Ibid., 14. 73. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 9. 74. Ibid., 11. 75. Goldberg’s choice to present the bills as potentially forged was timely as well. It responded to a contemporary set of fears around simulation and seamless reproduction. Goldberg’s bills bore the US Treasury’s new design, which had just been released earlier that year and still looked unfamiliar. The redesign was a tactical move by the mint to confound forgers. Intricate lacework occupied the bill’s borders; dense cross-hatching filled each graphic figure. The new banknotes were nearly impossible to duplicate without error. 76. Title 18 U.S.C. §333 (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 700; July 16, 1951, ch. 226, Sec. 1, 65 Stat. 121; Pub. L. 103-322, title XXXIII, Sec. 330016(1)(I), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147), http://uscode.house.gov/ download/pls/18C17.txt.

Chapter 2 1. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), 52. 2. Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000), 69. 3. I borrow this term from David Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” Artforum (December 1975), 36–45. Antin’s article makes it clear that it is very difficult to distinguish between video and television. While Antin calls television video’s “parent,” one did not “give birth” to the other per se. All images on a television screen are video images. So one could describe all television as “video.” One cannot say, however, that all video is “television,” even if video images always (in the 1960s and 1970s at least) appeared on televisions (or TV sets). Television is a term best reserved for video images distributed over cable or broadcast television networks, that is, mass-distributed video images. Even so, the word “television” contains within it what many theorists, including the ones discussed in this essay, consider to be the defining characteristic of video in general—the ability to transmit live images from a distance, i.e., “tele-vision.” We might say, then, that “television” can designate three things: the mass transmission of images over networks, a video monitor (television, TV set), or vision at a distance. Because the word has so many possible meanings, and since the subtleties between them are significant for my argument here, I have attempted to clarify my uses of the term throughout the essay, using “television” to mean only the mass transmission of images, and adding qualifiers to the term to designate when I am talking about the device (television screen, television set, video screen) or about vision at a distance (live television, live video). 4. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. 5. Ibid., 51. It is interesting to note here that Peirce sees the effects of the index as primarily psychological as well. In “Logic as Semiotic” he writes, “Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity, and not upon associations by resemblance or by intellectual operations.” Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 108.

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6. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 57. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 55–56. 9. Ibid., 56. While I am arguing that video can be reflexive, television, because of its structure, is less likely to be so. In video works like Acconci’s, the individual has access to the camera and the display— the input and the output—and therefore can structure a feedback system. In conventional television, however, the input and the output are separated, and the viewer has access only to the receiver. She has no opportunity to feed back into the system. This inherent asymmetry in the formal structure of television inspired many early video works and structured the political and aesthetic philosophy of the guerrilla video movement in the late 1960s. See David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), and Kris Paulsen, “Half-Inch Revolution: The Guerrilla Television Tape Exchange Network,” Amodern 2 (Fall 2013), n.p., for a discussion of the asymmetry of television broadcasts and its relationship to early video. 10. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 56–57. 11. Ibid., 51. Krauss does, however, allow for three kinds of video work that critically engage with the debates of modern art and rescue the medium from its narcissistic tendencies. These are: “1) Tapes that exploit the medium in order to criticize it from within; 2) tapes that represent a physical assault on the video mechanism in order to break out of its psychological hold; 3) installation forms of video which use the medium as a subspecies of painting and sculpture” (59). 12. Ibid., 57. 13. In his earliest videotape, Corrections (1970), Acconci does use the monitor as a “mirror” (albeit a “true” one, as I argue later), as he confirmed in a 2002 interview with William Kaizen, “Live on Tape: Video, Liveness, and the Immediate,” in Tanya Leighton, ed., Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2008): “The immediacy of video was the most startling thing. The first video I made tried to make use of that … I could use the video as a mirror” (269). But despite using the monitor/camera as a “mirror,” Acconci did not use the camera to frame his face; rather he used it to see the back of his own head. If it was a mirror, it was one oriented from a perspective other than his own. As Kaizen describes it, “Video became an improved mirror—a hypermirror—that lowed the self to be examined from all angles and from every side.” 14. Vito Acconci, “10 Point Plan for Video,” in Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot, eds., Video Art (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 8. In this essay, Acconci describes how the monitor acts as a substitute for the artist’s presence: “Video Monitor as one point in a face to face relationship: On screen, I face the viewer, off screen.” He reiterates and expands this concept in a later essay: Acconci, “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with an American View,” in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video (New York: Aperture, 1990), 125, stating that while “in a projected film, the face is a monument or a monster—it comes up from the ground or the grave, it comes from another time,” “on a TV screen a close-up face is approximately the same size as an actual face: ‘his’/‘her’ face and ‘my’ face are face-to-face—we’re in the same world—the here and now. The viewer and the face on-screen are comfortable with each other; the news from that face, then, is assumed, taken as fact.”

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15. Later in this chapter I will further problematize the idea that video can act as a mirror via a discussion of video as a “true” image rather than a reflection. 16. Wagner, “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 69. 17. Ibid., 68. 18. Ibid., 69. 19. Ibid., 74. 20. Acconci, “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture,” 125; and Vito Acconci, “Centers,” Avalanche (Fall 1972), 12. Acconci’s own description of Centers also marks this ambivalence. He writes, “Pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen. I keep narrowing my focus into my finger. The result (the TV image) turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer—I end up widening my focus onto passing viewers (I’m looking straight out by looking straight in.)” 21. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “interface, n.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/97747?rskey=xyGo7 U&result=1&isAdvanced=false, accessed June 16, 2014. 22. Branden Hookway, The Interface (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 4. 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Wagner, “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 80. 25. There is no technological limitation that prevents bidirectionality per se; it was a commercial design choice to centralize control of the production and distribution of content. As David Antin explained in 1975, “Transmission is more expensive than reception. And it follows from this asymmetry of power relations that the taker-transmitter dominates whatever communication takes place.” Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” 37. Of course, this is no longer the case. As computer screens with integrated cameras have replaced our television sets, bidirectional video communication is now a daily, banal occurrence. 26. Acconci, “Television, Furniture, Sculpture,” 126. Acconci uses this same phrase “lies in wait” to describe the average functioning of broadcast television as it waits for a viewer: “When a TV set, in a particular household, is turned off, that world is lying in wait, the world-within-the-TV-set ready to erupt, to flash on ‘in the middle of things’ (the plot has already been going on without us). It is always there, though we might not yet be watching.” 27. See the previous chapter for full discussion of the index’s complex and contradictory identity. 28. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 109. 29. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–1966), vol. 4, 359. 30. Wagner, “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 69.

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31. Ibid. That Flagg used his own image for Uncle Sam interestingly doubles the analogy. Like Acconci, Flagg deployed his own face as the representation of authorial, summoning power, and of course Flagg used a mirror. 32. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 110. 33. Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” in Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies 1931–1981 (New York: Mouton, 1984), 43. Jakobson, here, is discussing shifters as a particular subset of Peirce logic, a combination of indices and symbols. For an extensive discussion of the semiotic category of shifters see Monika Fludernik, “Shifters and Deixis: Some Reflections of Jakobson, Jespersen, and Reference,” Semiotica 86, nos. 3/4 (1991), 193–230. 34. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 93. 35. Wagner, “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence,” 69. Wagner describes the gestural address in Centers as a version of “the well worn Dear Reader.” 36. Ibid., 80. 37. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 120. 38. Ibid., 121. 39. Ibid., 120. 40. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1996), 9. 41. Ibid., 11. 42. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 126–132. 43. Ibid., 132. 44. Ibid., 141. 45. Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” 36. 46. Eric Cameron, “The Grammar of the Video Image,” Arts Magazine 49, no. 4 (December 1974), 49–51. 47. Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” 36. 48. For a discussion of artists who did engage in an “Oedipal” struggle against the parent medium, please see my essay, “Half-Inch Revolution,” http://amodern.net/article/half-inch-revolution/. While the logic of Antin’s genealogy is clear—video art emerges as a reaction to the dominant medium of television—one might also, perhaps uncannily, reverse the terms. Since all television images are video images, one could say that television is a subspecies or offspring of video, making the child into its own grandparent. 49. Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” 38. The essay was originally published under the title “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” in the catalog for the show Video Art at the Institute

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for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. See Suzanne Delehanty, ed., Video Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1975), 57–74. 50. Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” 36. Antin’s text begins: “Video art. The name is equivocal.” 51. Ibid., 39. 52. Ibid., 38. See chapter 1 of this book for a discussion of photography and its relationship to representation. 53. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983), 13. 54. Ibid., 13–14. 55. James Friedman, “Attraction to Distraction: Live Television and the Public Sphere,” in Friedman, ed., Reality Squared: Televisual Discourses on the Real (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 143. 56. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in Patricia Mellencamp, ed., Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 229. 57. Ibid., 223. 58. Ibid., 232. 59. Kaizen, “Live on Tape,” 270. In his discussion of Centers, art historian William Kaizen describes Acconci’s body language as “replicating the look of direct address in television” and opening onto “the ways in which ‘phatic’ communication works in television.” 60. Jerome Bourdon, “Live Television Is Still Alive: On Television’s Unfulfilled Promise,” in Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, eds., The Television Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 193. 61. Ibid. 62. Ovid, Fasti, trans. Sir James George Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 105. 63. W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London: Macmillan, 1899), 326, http://archive.org/stream/romanfestivalsof00fowluoft#page/326/mode/1up/search/terminus, accessed June 26, 2014. 64. McLuhan, in his appropriation of the Narcissus myth, “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis,” goes to great pains to clarify that the “myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself.” “The point of the myth,” he writes,” is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any medium other than themselves.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 41–42. 65. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (New York: Penguin, 2004), 114.

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66. Ibid., 112. 67. Mirrors appear in several other of Jonas’s early works in addition to the ones mentioned above and Left Side Right Side (1972), which I discuss later in this chapter, including: Oad Lau (1968), Underneath (1970), Choreomania (1971), Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), and Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972). See Joan Jonas, “Mirror Pieces,” in Scripts and Descriptions 1968–1982, ed. Douglas Crimp (Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California, 1982), 11–24. 68. Those readers who wish to check this with the webcam built into a computer or a cell phone will be further confounded. Most self-view options on computers and cell phones automatically flip the image along the horizontal axis so that it looks like a mirror image and thus is more appealing to the user. The receiver of the image, however, typically views the “true,” nonreversed image, which will look “correct” to her. 69. Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 30. 70. Ibid., 25. 71. Ibid., 26. 72. Louise Poissant, “The Passage from Material to Interface” in Oliver Grau, ed., MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 240. 73. Galloway, The Interface Effect, 36. 74. Ibid., 34. 75. Ibid., 38. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 39. 78. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (June 2012), 99. 79. Ibid., 100. Mori writes, “The sense of eeriness is probably a form of instinct that protects us from proximal, rather than distal, sources of danger. Proximal sources of danger include corpses, members of different species, and other entities we can closely approach. Distal sources of danger include windstorms and floods.” 80. Galloway, The Interface Effect, 40.

Chapter 3 1. While the plot of Wexler’s film does seem to argue that the lens can provide spectacular insulation from the surrounding events, there are moments in the film when it is clear that Wexler has a hard time actually maintaining that boundary. For example, he is tear-gassed during the riot scene.

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2. See Deirdre Boyle, “A Brief History of Documentary Video,” in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video (New York: Aperture; San Francisco: BAVC, 2005), 53; Brian Winston, Media, Technology, and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (New York: Routledge, 1998), 138; Jesse Drew, “The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism,” in Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds., Collectivism after Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 95. Many historians, such as Deirdre Boyle, Brian Winston, and Jesse Drew, mark 1968 as the year Sony’s PortaPak (DV-2400) first became commercially available, even though the camera was officially released in 1967. Sony marketed other half-inch video systems as early as 1965, which were used by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik and Les Levine. However, cameras were not widely available until 1968. The PortaPak is considered the first “truly portable” system, thus explaining its popularity and the explosion of video art in and around 1968. Additional technological developments, such as the three-quarter-inch U-Matic cassette in 1972, further popularized the camera. 3. For a discussion of Alexander R. Galloway’s concept of the “unworkable interface,” see chapter 2 of this book. 4. Fred Hoffman et al., Chris Burden, ed. John Bewley and Jonty Tarbuck (London: Locus+, 2007), 225. The guard could not have known that his actions would “end” the performance, especially given the burden placed on the employees of the Market Street Gallery during Bed Piece (1972). For that work, Burden had relied on the staff of the Venice, California, gallery to attend to his needs while he remained in bed for 22 days. Without prompting, the gallery director, Josh Young, provided food, water, and waste removal for the unresponsive artist. 5. Ibid. 6. Roger Ebert, “Chris Burden: ‘My God, Are They Going to Leave Me Here to Die?,’” Chicago Sun-Times (May 25, 1975), available in Ebert’s online archives: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/19750525/PEOPLE/71024001/1023. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 222. 12. Ebert, “Chris Burden: ‘My God, Are They Going to Leave Me Here to Die?’” 13. Ibid. 14. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 26), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 21. The atomization of labor and laborers eliminated direct contact and communication between producers, and “consistency and communication [became] the exclusive assets of the system’s managers.”

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15. Ibid. (thesis 1), 12. 16. Ibid. (thesis 27), 21. 17. Ibid. (thesis 5), 12–13. 18. Ibid. (thesis 4), 12. 19. Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 324. 20. Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” in McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 457–458; V. K. Zworykin, “Television System,” Patent No. 1,691, 324, United States Patent Office, http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/ netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/1691324/, accessed September 22, 2014. Crary notes that in Debord’s 1988 book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, he wrote of the spectacle as “barely forty years old.” According to official patent documents, Zworykin filed the patent in 1925 but did not receive the patent until 1928. 21. Donald F. McClean, Restoring Baird’s Image (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000), 46–47. For a discussion of the patent conflict between Zworykin and Farnsworth, see Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (New York: Perennial/Harper Collins, 2003), and Daniel Stashower, The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). 22. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 458. 23. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 29), 22; emphasis in original. 24. Ibid. (thesis 18), 17. Debord’s description of the spectacle has other close connections to the specific capabilities of television and video as well as to their common uses in contemporary culture. “The spectacle,” he writes, “is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue.” (Ibid. [thesis 2], 12.) It is a one-way communication that can affect the viewer, but that she herself is unable to affect. “Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds as a pseudo world apart, solely as an object of contemplation.” 25. Ibid. (thesis 8), 14. 26. Ibid. (thesis 24), 19. 27. Ibid. (thesis 4), 12. 28. Ibid. (thesis 13), 15. 29. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; rpt., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22–23. Central to McLuhan’s argument is his division of various media into one of two categories, “hot” and “cool.” The “temperature” of any given medium has a profound effect on the receiver’s engagement with it. Hot media, McLuhan argues, tend to “extend one single sense in ‘highdefinition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data.” Film, radio, photographs, and print are “hot” media in McLuhan’s schema. Cool media, on the other hand, have a low data density

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and engage multiple senses simultaneously. The telephone, speech, and television are cool. Cool media are “low-definition” in terms of their information. They have gaps in their structures: the telephone and speech require active engagement by at least two parties. Cool media, therefore, require “participation” and must be completed by the audience. McLuhan’s “hot” and “cool” categories do not hold up well under pressure. Hot media surely require some completion, and many of them engage more than one sense simultaneously. For example, McLuhan points out that aphoristic writing “requires participation in depth” on the part of the reader. Perhaps, this is why both McLuhan and Debord adopt this style of writing. Despite the looseness of this classification, McLuhan’s characterization of television’s curious participatory quality is provocative and helpful in regard to theorizing ideas of touch and engagement in television. 30. Ibid., 313. 31. He explains how seeing easily becomes a kind of “touching” by describing a potentially erotic scene: “The open mesh of the silk stocking is far more sensuous than the smooth nylon, just because the eye must act as a hand filling in and completing the image, exactly as in the mosaic of the TV image.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 29.) McLuhan included an image in his 1967 picture book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, with Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Angel (rpt., San Francisco: Hardwired, 1996), 76–78, which appears to exactly illustrate this point. Opposite a close-up of a woman’s fishnet-clad thighs, he writes: “When information is brushed against information … the results are startling and effective. The perennial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.” The photograph, despite being a “hot medium” which thereby short-circuits participation, was clearly intended to illustrate the compulsion to completely fill in any image by running one’s eyes, as if they were hands, over its gaps. The title of the book too, which slips from the expected “message” to “massage,” further emphasizes the concept of tactile intervention into seemingly closed and complete visual images. 32. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 314. According to McLuhan, cool media engage multiple senses in a single synesthetic event, which is equally about reception and creation. “The TV image,” he writes, “requires that we ‘close’ the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object.” 33. Ibid., 336. 34. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 18), 17. 35. Ibid. (thesis 8), 14. 36. Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October 95 (Winter 2000), 116. 37. Frazer Ward, “False Intimacies, Open Secrets: The Public and Private Performance Art of Vito Acconci and Chris Burden” (dissertation, Princeton University, 2000), 195. 38. See Nicholas Lemann, “A Call for Help: What the Kitty Genovese Story Really Means,” New Yorker (March 10, 2014), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/10/a-call-for-help?currentPage=all, accessed November 10, 2014.

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39. Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” 124; Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, and the Crime that Changed America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Recent studies of the historic case have disputed some of the details of its original reporting. While it is still clear that many people did see Winston Moseley initially attack Genovese and flee the scene, they may not have seen his subsequent attacks thirty minutes later, as she may have no longer been visible to the large majority of the witnesses. It has also come to light that several neighbors called the police but that the police failed to respond to the calls. An ambulance, called by a neighbor, did arrive before Genovese died of her injuries. It is still the case, however, that several neighbors who directly witnessed the events over the long duration of the attack did nothing and that the “bystander effect” still holds up under clinical testing. 40. Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus 11, no. 4 (Fall 1982), 85. 41. Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” 118. Ward calls attention to the connection between Shoot and television as well. Shoot, he argues, is a critical engagement with minimalism and is at the same time a comment on the bloody spectacle of the Vietnam War. “Burden’s ‘clinical’ passivity in the face of the particular experience of being shot appears as an embodied extension or exaggeration of the passivity of Minimalist objects. … Shoot offered a comment on the bloodlessness of Minimalism’s phenomenological investigations, introducing instead questions of consequences, and both artists’ and viewers’ participation and responsibility.” 42. Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear, “Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy,” Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973), 54. 43. Måns Wrange, “A Conversation with Chris Burden,” in Chris Burden (Stockholm: Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, 1999), exhibition catalog archived online, http://www.magasin3.com/printedmatter/ burdenprinted.html, accessed May 8, 2009. 44. Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 89; Michael Mandelbaum, “Vietnam: The Television War,” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (Fall 1982), 161–162. It has long been commonplace to argue that television images of the war in Vietnam swayed US popular opinion against the conflict by moving viewers to empathetically identify with the brutalized bodies—foreign and American—that appeared on the screen. But there is evidence to suggest that this connection has been exaggerated. In his essay “Vietnam: The Television War,” Michael Mandelbaum, for example, argues that such claims are entirely unsubstantiated and that support for the Vietnam War mirrors the trajectories of support for other wars that did not receive extensive television coverage. He takes particular issue with McLuhan’s understanding of television and the empathy it might produce. “According to McLuhan’s theory,” he writes, “reading about the war would have left Americans willing to let it proceed in all of its destructiveness; seeing it on television, the humanity they shared with their Vietnamese fellow inhabitants of the global village was brought home to them, and they insisted that it be stopped.” But he also argues, citing television critic Michael Arlen’s “The Living-Room War,” that the images may equally have had an “alienating effect, flooding the nation’s living rooms with so many images of so many different things as to make it impossible for Americans to respond with feeling to any of them.” Here again we see the tug of war between passivity and activity, Debord and McLuhan.

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45. At many moments in the film Wexler’s characters enact the polar positions of McLuhan and Debord. For example, when the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. appears on television, Eileen describes being moved by the footage and his words. John dispassionately wonders aloud who shot the footage. I am indebted to my colleague Byron Hamann for directing my attention back to this scene. 46. Wrange, “A Conversation with Chris Burden.” 47. TV personality Regis Philbin invited Burden to appear on the Christmas Eve 1974 episode of his talk show Philbin and Company. Burden’s segment was sandwiched between interviews with a man in a plush Snoopy costume and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Over the course of the interview, Burden tried to explain how his performances were actually sculpture, while Philbin attempted a hard-hitting yet alarmist expose of “the Evil Knievel of the art world.” The interview quickly unraveled and Philbin attempted to get the police chief interested in Burden’s transgressions. 48. Chris Burden, interviewed by Glenn Philips in Philips, ed., California Video: Artists and Histories (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 64. 49. For brief discussions of Burden’s TV ads see Dieter Daniels, “Television—Art or Anti-Art,” on MediaArtNet, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/massmedia/, and Nick Stillman, “Do You Believe in Television: Chris Burden and TV,” East of Borneo, http://www .eastofborneo.org/articles/do-you-believe-in-television-chris-burden-and-tv. 50. Chris Burden, Documentation of Selected Works, 1971–1974, DVD (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1974). 51. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 26), 21. Getting on “real TV”’ was clearly important to Burden and well worth the expense detailed in Full Financial Disclosure. That ad presented a series of graphics breaking down Burden’s income for the 1976 calendar year. During that time, his business expenses totaled $16,156, netting him only $1,054 for the year. The most shocking item among his financial details is the $6,106 price tag for his television advertisements. Burden spent over a third of his annual income on his 1976 commercial, Promo. 52. Hoffman et al., Chris Burden, 174. 53. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the relationship to the mechanical to the indexical. While some believe that the index has a material, physical, mechanical basis, I argue that this is a very limited (and erroneous) understanding of the index and that electronic and digital processes clearly have indexical qualities, despite their “immateriality.” 54. For a discussion of the rhetoric of “narcissism” in early video, see chapter 2. 55. In addition to the three CCTV works discussed in this chapter, Burden made two others in the 1970s, Match Piece (1972) and The Confession (1974). I have left them out of this discussion for a variety of reasons, but primarily because they had different physical structures that did not allow the viewer to cross from one side of the screen to the other. 56. Burden, Documentation of Selected Works, 1971–1974.

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57. For discussions of the differences between Burden’s intention and the end result of Shoot, see Jon Bewley, “Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley,” in Adrian Searle, ed., Talking Art I (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), 19; Sharp and Bear, “Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy,” 54; and Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot.” In Shoot, he believed the bullet would only graze his arm and produce a single drop of blood, leaving the audience wondering if he had actually been shot. 58. Bewley, “Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley,” 19; emphasis in the original. In an interview with Liza Bear, Burden explains that Back to You was a “response to the media representation of [his] work” as violent and sensational. “It pisses me off,” he writes, “when they only take the first slice, the first level. ‘Chris Burden, man who walks through glass …’ I mean, come on! It’s true I’ve done some of those things, but I’m not doing them as a circus act. So I wanted to do something the media couldn’t present in that way. I wanted to show the media creation as the distorted myth that it really is. ‘Well, folks, here I am. I’m the guy that was going to get you. Now here’s your chance to get me, right?’” Liza Bear and Chris Burden, “Chris Burden … Back to You,” Avalanche (May 1974), 12. 59. The documentation of Back to You is in two parts. Audio recordings cover the beginning of the event, from Bear’s greeting to Bell’s entrance into the elevator. From this moment, the documentation switches to video. The documentation, then, reproduces exactly what appeared on the monitors during the event. 60. Bear and Burden, “Chris Burden … Back to You,” 12. A second person had volunteered as well, David Enblom, a student of Bear’s. Bear picked Bell so the event wouldn’t “looked rigged.” 61. Ibid. This statement was not audible to the audience. 62. See chapter 2 for an extended discussion of this effect of television broadcast. 63. Bear and Burden, “Chris Burden … Back to You,” 12. 64. Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot”; Bear and Burden, “Chris Burden … Back to You,” 12. Burden writes, “He [Bell] tried to poke one into my arm but his hands were trembling so bad that the pin rolled right off.” Burden was surprised when he saw that Bell had not pushed the pins “in to the hilt.” “It never occurred to me,” Burden wrote, “that someone would do it half way. Either you don’t put them in or you do.” This stark, “black and white, either/or situation” [Bear] contrasts dramatically with Burden’s expectations in Shoot, which he thought would constitute a “gray zone.” 65. Bear and Burden, “Chris Burden … Back to You,” 12. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 13. 70. Ibid., 12. 71. Ibid.

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72. Ibid., 13. 73. Hoffman et al., Chris Burden, 65. 74. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 8), 14. 75. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 328. 76. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (thesis 18), 17. 77. Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,” in McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 44. 78. McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 68. 79. Ibid., 68, 88. 80. Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations,” 45. 81. Ibid., 47. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 48. 84. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 2. 85. Ibid., 5–6. 86. Ibid., 18–19. 87. Ibid., 19. 88. This unbalanced situation will become even starker in the chapters that follow, when I examine telerobots, remote weapons, and drones that allow “viewers” to be both distant and tactically, physically engaged with a mediated place.

Chapter 4 A condensed, early version of this chapter appeared in Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Kris Paulsen, “Image as Place: The Phenomenal Screen in Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts 1977,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 19, no. 2 (April 2013), 98–111. 1. For a complete account of the Apollo 8 television transmissions, see Bill Wood, “Apollo Television,” Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (2005), http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ApolloTV-Acrobat5.pdf. While the images of Earth are the most memorable and iconic of the Apollo 8 mission, photographing and videotaping Earth was not a major part of the plan. The recording equipment on board was intended for imaging the moon. The mission transcripts record Commander Frank Borman jokingly telling photographer Bill Anders not to take the “Earthrise” image because it is “not scheduled.” See NASA’s transcripts of day 4 of the Apollo 8 mission, http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/14day4_orbits456.htm. Even an article

Notes to Pages 96–98

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on the development of the Apollo video camera by NASA engineers Stanley Lebar and Charles Hoffman begins: “More ‘vast wasteland’ is in store for television viewers—the surface of the moon.” The idea that the astronauts would look back toward Earth rather than at the moon was not fully thought out by either the engineers or the astronauts prior to the trip. Stanley Lebar and Charles Hoffman, “TV Show of the Century: A Travelogue with No Atmosphere,” originally printed in Electronics (March 6, 1967), available at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/Electronics-670306.pdf. 2. Andrew Chaiken, Man on the Moon (New York: Penguin, 1995), 134. Chaiken narrates the popular reception of the Earthrise photograph and the much-publicized telegram the astronauts received: “In the last days of 1968, there was a single image—pure, awesome, even holy—to counter a year’s worth of violence. It was a photograph of the earth, rising beyond the battered and lifeless face of the moon. Apollo 8 was more than a successful space mission; it was a bright moment for a nation experiencing its first pangs of self-doubt. Even as Vietnam threatened to become a war America could not win, here was an American triumph. Not long after Borman, Lovell, and Anders were back in Houston, Borman got a telegram from someone he had never met. It said, ‘You saved 1968.’” 3. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), 53. For a full discussion of Krauss’s argument, see chapter 2 of this book. 4. NASA places Apollo 8 at 176,533 miles from Earth at the time of the television transmission. See http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption.jsp?&photoId=S68-55809, accessed May 1, 2014. 5. NASA, Apollo 8 Flight Journal Transcript, Day 3, http://history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/09day3_green.htm. 6. Borman, describing the experience of seeing Earth, later wrote, “This must be what God sees.” Borman quoted in Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Appropriately, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the book of Genesis during their Christmas Eve television transmission. While the reading was chosen as a unifying gesture, since the story is shared by several of the world’s major religions, it also makes it clear that the astronauts are inhabiting the would-be position of a creator or god. 7. Stewart Brand, “Photography Changes Our Relationship to the Planet,” Click! The Smithsonian Photography Initiative, http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31, accessed May 1, 2014. It is interesting to note that Brand, whose involvement in the “Mother of All Demos” I discuss in the introduction to this book, campaigned in 1966 for NASA to release its then-rumored photographs of Earth from the satellites that were already circling the globe. If we could see a picture of the whole Earth, he argued, we would realize that it was a finite thing and that we were all on it together. To Brand, it is not a coincidence that the first Earth Day occurred and the environmental movement flourished after the publication of Anders’s photograph. 8. David S. F. Portree and Joseph P. Loftus Jr., Orbital Debris: A Chronology (Houston: NASA, 1999), 9, http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/TP-1999-208856.pdf, accessed May 1, 2014. 9. Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4, 1957. Its batteries lasted for three weeks, but the object stayed in orbit for 92 days before falling back to Earth. NASA, “Sputnik 1,” National Space Science Data Center, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1957-001B, accessed May 3, 2014.

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10. Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 21. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 23. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. Ibid. Our World was originally designed to integrate feeds from 30 countries. After the pullout of the Eastern bloc nations and the addition of Denmark, the final program included 24. 15. Ibid., 38. 16. Ibid., 28. Parks writes, “Since Our World’s cameras did not venture into the third world, the population problem was visualized as a series of statistics, graphics, and images of hungry people. … While producers may have had good intentions, the absence of both the Eastern bloc and developing countries within the show revealed its self-promotion as a ‘globe-encircling now’ to be somewhat of a farce. The ‘global’ scope of Our World was particularly problematic given that Nigeria, Pakistan, and India had expressed desire to participate in such ‘world community projects’ during the UNESCO meeting of 1965” (ibid.). 17. Ibid., 23. 18. I borrow the idea of coordination from Brooke Belisle’s discussion of satellite technology. See Belisle, “I See the Moon and the Moon Sees Me: Trevor Paglen’s Satellite Images,” Media-N (Spring 2014), n.p., http://median.newmediacaucus.org/art-infrastructures-hardware/i-see-the-moon-the-moon -sees-me-trevor-paglens-satellite-images/. 19. Ibid. Belisle writes, “At the same time the United States stoked public desire to go to the moon, and began the space program, it also created the National Reconnaissance Office and began a military spy satellite program. Since the 1960’s, The United States has launched optical spy satellites under the codename Keyhole, a moniker well suited to the idea of peeking through an aperture that conceals the intimate distance of the voyeur. The United States government did not admit the National Reconnaissance Office existed until 1992. The Keyhole satellite program was kept secret until 1995, when President Clinton released some details of its early years and declassified over 800,000 frames of early satellite images. By that time, satellites were becoming essential to the structure of contemporary life.” 20. The very first satellite art project was Douglas Davis’s Seven Thoughts, which took place on December 29, 1976. Other satellite artworks of around the same time were Nam June Paik’s Picture Phone Performance (1979), Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), and Wrap around the World (1988), Galloway and Rabinowitz’s Hole in Space (1980), Davis’s Double Entendre (1981), and Jaime Davidovich’s Artist & Television (1982). 21. Michael Glasmeier and Karin Stengel, eds., 50 Years documenta 1955–2005 (Kassel: Kunsthalle Fridericianuum, 2005), vol. 2, 273. 22. Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast, script, 1977.

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23. Manfred Schneckenburger, “Exposé for documenta 6,” in Glasmeier and Stengel, 50 Years documenta 1955–2005, 273. 24. Joseph Beuys, “I am Searching for a Field Character,” in Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 125. 25. For a discussion of the social and political dynamics of Beuys’s performances see, Barbara Lange, “Questions? You Have Questions?,” in Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely, eds., Joseph Beuys: The Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 183–184. 26. Douglas Davis quoted in Jeremy Turner, “Outer Space: The Past, Present and Future of Telematic Art—07: Interview with Douglas Davis about Early Telematic Art” (2004), http://www.openspace.ca/ web/outerspace/DouglasDavisInterview2004.html. 27. Liza Bear and Keith Sonnier, The Send/Receive Satellite Network I (1977). 28. Liza Bear and Keith Sonnier, Send/Receive Satellite Documents—Phase I, 1977. http:// sendreceivesatellitenetwork.blogspot.com/2009/02/sendreceive-phase-i-and-ii-documents.html. 29. Steven Durland, “Defining the Image as Place: A Conversation with Kit Galloway, Sherrie Rabinowitz & Gene Youngblood,” High Performance 37 (1987), 54. 30. Galloway and Rabinowitz staged another bidirectional satellite performance, Hole in Space, in 1980, and planned other yet-to-be-realized satellite works. 31. Technical difficulties on the final two days of the performance prevented the artists from completing the work as planned. See note 41 for further details. 32. Annmarie Chandler, “Animating the Social: Mobile Image/Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz,” in Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, eds., At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 161. 33. The right side of the image was totally live for Rabinowitz since it was in a closed-circuit connection to the camera. 34. Chandler, “Animating the Social,” 158. 35. Durland, “Defining the Image as Place,” 56. 36. Galloway and Rabinowitz pursued a large-scale study of interaction in mixed image space in their closed-circuit video project Art-Com ’82. 37. Chandler, “Animating the Social,” 159. 38. See chapter 2 for a discussion of “true” video images in comparison to mirror images. 39. Kit Galloway, email message to the author, February 19, 2013. 40. Durland, “Defining the Image as Place,” 56. 41. The dance described above was only intended as rehearsal so that the dancers might get their “sea legs” for the following two days of satellite time. Kit Galloway writes, “It was fortunate that we turned

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on the video recorders because in actuality we were just doing walk through.” The next two days did not go as planned: a fire knocked out the uplink from Goddard on the second day, and a severed power cable prevented transmissions on the third. On both days the artists were able to conduct experiments from one site. They inserted the dancers into broadcast television programming, showing the Mobilus members weaving among football players and dancing across commercial advertisements. On the final day, they bounced video and audio signals off the CTS satellite to create a feedback dance with the delayed images. Storyboard illustrations for Satellite Arts provide a glimpse of the intended scale and scope of the work. Kit Galloway, email message to the author, February 16, 2013. 42. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 30–31. 43. Waag Society, “Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz: Teleconference Lecture,” November 12, 2003, http://connectmedia.waag.org/media/sentientcreatures/gallaway.mov, accessed February 10, 2013. 44. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 56–57. 45. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139. 46. Ibid. This kind of looking undoes the structures of power established both by Cartesian models of subjectivity and by satellite surveillance. It is interesting to point out the metaphorical use of the “keyhole” by another phenomenological philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes [New York: Washington Square Press, 1992], 347–348). Sartre describes how “the look” structures our position as either subject or object. He uses the example of a person peering through a keyhole to describe the state of being “a pure consciousness of things.” When the person hears footsteps behind him, he is pushed into vision. He writes, “I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me, for the Other’s look embraces my being and correlatively the walls, the door, the keyhole. All these instrumental-things, in the midst of which I am, now turn toward the other a face which on principle escapes me. Thus I am my ego for the Other in the midst of a world that flows toward the Other” (350). 47. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” 134. 48. Ibid. 137. It may be helpful here to think of Merleau-Ponty’s oscillating subject as the image on a thaumatrope, spinning rapidly so that two images located on opposite sides of a disk appear in such quick succession that they seem simultaneous. 49. Ibid., 147. We might also think of the television image, which is in a constant process of forming and reforming, never actually showing a complete image on the screen at any one time, as also “always imminent, but never realized in fact.” Discussing the limiting concept of “electronic presence” in regard to “phenomenological nuances of electronic exchange,” Lisa Parks writes: “The term ‘presence’ ultimately privileges discourses of representation because we tend to discuss and evaluate it by what appears in the frame, and often this negates the idea that the electronic signal may indeed be a way of being in the world as opposed to a way of being present or re-presented. … If the video image can be described as ‘always coming into being’ by virtue of its own scanning process, then the satellite image adds to this a pronouncement about its own distribution, embodying in its quickly scanned surface an indication of

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the ways the material has been transported from here to there.” Lisa Parks, “Orbital Performers and Satellite Translators: Media Art in the Age of Ionospheric Exchange,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (2007), 210. 50. See Alexander R. Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface,” in Galloway, The Interface Effect (New York: Polity Press, 2012), 25–53. The inherent latency of the satellite video image makes the interface, at base, productively “unworkable,” to use Galloway’s phrase. For an extended discussion of Galloway’s concept of the unworkable interface, see chapter 2 of this book. 51. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), 37. 52. Kit Galloway, email to the author, February 16, 2013. 53. Ken Goldberg, “Virtual Reality in the Age of Telepresence,” Convergence 4 (March 1998), 33. 54. For extended discussions of the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of telepresence, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand,” in Ken Goldberg, ed., Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 48–63, and the first chapter above. 55. Chandler, “Animating the Social,” 162. 56. Durland, “Defining the Image as Place,” 55.

Chapter 5 1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “digital, n. and adj.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52611 ?redirectedFrom=digital, accessed October 20, 2014. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “analogue, n. and adj.,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/7029 ?redirectedFrom=analog, accessed October 20, 2014. 3. We might say, as well, that German media theory, especially stemming from the work of Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and the related trend of media archaeology, has sufficiently argued against the “immateriality” of media, digital or otherwise. As I emphasized in chapter 1, what I am indicating here is not that indices are still material because digital technologies are still as material as their analog counterparts, but that the index has never been based in materiality or physical touch, and therefore a threat to the materiality of the medium does not inherently cause a problem for the indexicality of the sign. 4. See the introduction to this book for more on Engelbart and the “Mother of All Demos.” 5. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 55. 6. Ibid., 56. 7. SIGGRAPH is the annual exhibition and conference for the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques.

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8. Ken Goldberg, telephone conversation with the author, December 10, 2014. 9. Goldberg, Data Dentata project description, http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/datamitt.html, accessed December 10, 2014. 10. Goldberg, telephone conversation with the author, December 10, 2014. 11. The idea that telecommunications media might be “haunted” has a long history that stretches much further back than video in the late 1960s. See Jeffery Sconce, Haunted Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 12. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), 52. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. For a thorough investigation of the ether as a substance, see Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing that Connects Everything (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 16. Ken Goldberg, telephone conversation with the author, December 10, 2014. 17. Ibid. According to Goldberg, the participant shown using the Datamitt in figure 5.1 is Lev Manovich. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. John Canny and Eric Paulos, “Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence: Reconstructing the Body for Online Interaction,” in Ken Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobots and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 290. 21. See chapter 2 for a discussion of animism and the uncanny. 22. There is some relationship between this sensation of “holding hands with the Internet” and a recent study by neurological researcher Olaf Blanke and his team, who were able to simulate the presence of a ghost or “apparition” in test patients using a robotic arm to touch their own backs. When the researchers introduced a slight delay in the feedback, the subjects began to think there were unseen presences in the room. See Olaf Blanke et al., “Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition,” Current Biology 24, no. 22 (November 2014), 2681–2686. 23. Turing describes the game as follows: “It is played with three people: a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. … The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. … It is A’s object in the game to cause C to make the wrong identification. … The object of the game the third player (B) is to help the interrogator.” Alan Turing, “Computing and Machine Intelligence,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 50.

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24. Nick Montfort, “Introduction: Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, The New Media Reader, 49. 25. Ken Goldberg, telephone conversation with the author, December 10, 2014. 26. Branden Hookway, The Interface (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 4. Following Hookway, throughout this book I have defined the interface as a surface that holds opposites in suspension. See the introduction and chapter 2 for discussions of the interface and of Hookway’s ideas: “the interface is defined in its coupling of the processes of holding apart and drawing together, of confining and opening up, of disciplining and enabling, of excluding and including. The separation maintained by the interface between distinct entities or states is also the basis of the unity it produces from those entities or states” (ibid.). 27. For an extensive sociological study of the early years of the Telegarden, see Margaret L. McLaughlin, Kerry K. Osborne, and Nicole B. Ellison, “Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment,” in Steven G. Jones, ed., Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage Publications, 1997). 28. The Telegarden website, http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/, accessed March 30, 2015. 29. McLaughlin, Osborne, and Ellison, “Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment,” 150. 30. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 86, quoting William J. Mitchell. 31. Ibid. 32. McLaughlin, Osborne, and Ellison, “Virtual Community in a Telepresence Environment,” 150. 33. Ibid., 153. 34. Mondloch, Screens, 90. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 90–91. 37. Ibid., 90. 38. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 121. 39. Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 28. 40. Ibid., 6–7. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 10. 43. Ibid., 15.

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44. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 34. While it is obvious that by the means of scientific tools one can observe the particulate, atomic structure of the world of objects—and even our own bodies—Flusser is not interested in unveiling the illusory solidity of the surrounding environment of things. Rather, he is interested in our ability to experience technical images, which are visibly particulate—whether we think of photographic grain, CRT lines, or pixels—as solid and complete. He terms this ability the power to “envision,” that is, “the capacity to step back from the particle universe back into the concrete.” To operate as images, “they require that the viewer keep his distance”; they must be viewed “superficially” (ibid.). 45. Ibid., 6. Flusser describes technical images as “not surfaces, but mosaics assembled from particles.” 46. Ibid., 28. 47. Ibid., 10. 48. Ibid., 4. Flusser sees two possible futures for human society in the universe of technical images. In the first, dystopian version, technical images remain unidirectional and exacerbate the spectacular structures codified in the age of mass media and broadcasting; the other uses new technology to retool the flow of information in society toward the formation of a “dialogic, telematic society of image producers and collectors” (ibid.). 49. Ibid., 64. In this passage, Flusser’s utopian media rhetoric mimics the “cyberscat” of McLuhan and other 1960s media radicals, most emphatically that of “Guerrilla Television” video activists such as Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Michael Shamberg. These theorists of television and video were writing in the midst of the technological revolutions of the 1960s, in particular of the commercialization of video equipment, the infrastructural expansion of cable networks, and, importantly, Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos.” As I argued in the introduction to this book, Engelbart’s demonstration of networked, telematic interaction also put particular emphasis on the role of the fingertips in the new era of multidirectional connectivity. He appears to illustrate in advance Flusser’s idea of dialogically envisioning the future as one in which we face screens and touch keys to connect with and point to the others out there. 50. Ibid., 127. 51. Ibid., 41. Flusser’s closeness to a Peircian claim is most evident in the cited paragraph. He writes: “The foregoing analysis of an emerging way of life was based on the hypothesis that we concentrate our attention more and more on our fingertips, a hypothesis that can be confirmed by the ubiquitous sight of the relevant gesture: pressing buttons. But fingertips don’t just press, they also point toward something, mean something beyond themselves, indicate what they mean. … The current interest in semiotics actually confirms a rising awareness of the role of the fingertips in our new being-in-theworld” (ibid.). 52. Ibid., 43. 53. Ibid., 49. 54. Ibid., 76.

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55. Ibid., 77. 56. Ken Freed, “When Cable Went Qubist,” Media Visions Journal (2000), n.p., http://media-visions.com/ itv-qube.html. 57. One should also remember that “participation” here often entailed divulging important demographic information that allowed programmers to better know their audience as a market. 58. Kevin Featherly, “QUBE,” in Steve Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of New Media: An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 383. For an extensive account of this very understudied phenomenon, see Robin Jeffrey Brown, “Two-Way Cable Television: A Study of Experiments, Applications, Including Warner Communications QUBE Project, Columbus, Ohio, 1977–1978” (master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1978). 59. For more information on “Lulu Smith: The Chicken that Ate Columbus,” see Curtis L. Carter, ed., Fred Barzyk: The Search for a Personal Vision in Broadcast Television (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2001), 69. 60. Peter D’Agostino, Teleguide (Dayton: Contemporary Media Study Center/Ohio Arts Council, 1980), 14–15. Also see Peter D’Agostino, Proposal for QUBE (1978) (Electronic Arts Intermix, 2007), DVD. D’Agostino’s QUBE project was slated to air on October 13, 1978, but was canceled “due to ‘special programming.’” The station never contacted him again about rescheduling the program. 61. D’Agostino, Teleguide, 15. 62. For an extensive discussion of this aspect of McLuhan’s theory of television, see chapter 3 of this book. 63. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 314. 64. See Rodrigo Alonso, “Torn Identity,” http://www.jaimedavidovich.com/english/translation.html, accessed February 11, 2015. Thirteen episodes of SoHo TV aired on QUBE during 1980. The project I discuss in this chapter is the only one currently in circulation. Subtitled “SoHo Wants to Know,” QUBE Project was Davidovich’s attempt to “use QUBE as a creative tool as well as to demonstrate the limitations of the voting system.” A segment of the program available from Electronic Arts Intermix, and on Davidovich’s YouTube channel, only contains the second half of the program. In the first half of the program, viewers selected the background color, the musical soundtrack, and whether or not Stevenson would be in the image. They also participate in demographic polling that establishes their interest in video art and their general belief that SoHo TV was different from regular programming and valuable in its difference. 65. Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (Fall 1982), 86. 66. Ibid. For a lengthy discussion of Cavell’s theory of television and the kinds of presence and immediacy it is able to communicate (or fake), see chapter 2 of this book. 67. Ibid.

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68. Ibid. 69. Art historian David Joselit has discussed the twin role of feedback in early video art by examining the abstract, aesthetic, and distortionist trends of the movement (represented primarily by artist Nam June Paik) and the simultaneous development of “guerrilla” video, which aimed to make television structures more democratic and responsive to the viewer by inventing new systems of television distribution (in the work of alternative and guerrilla television collectives). David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 70. Eric Paulos and John Canny, “Social Tele-Embodiment: Understanding Presence,” Autonomous Robots 11 (2001), 87. Canny and Paulos have developed a series of telepresence robots, including the PRoPs, through several iterations and designs beginning around 1997. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 91. Several users in Canny and Paulos’s trials noted that a missing element in the system was a “hand or hand like tool. But … users were split when asked if such a hand would be frightening to individuals near the PRoP. Most people explained that if the hand were offering something, as in friendship or some form of greeting, as it approached the intimidation would be minimized or eliminated. … The hand addition came up most often for aiding in communication such as shaking hands” (93). This complaint points to the strange awkwardness at the end of Edward Snowden’s TED appearance (mentioned later in this chapter) as a telerobot in which Ted Nelson searches for a hand to shake on the robot, eventually grabbing the Beam’s post. 73. Canny and Paulos, “Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence,” 277. 74. Ibid., 293. 75. Paulos and Canny, “Social Tele-Embodiment,” 87; Canny and Paulos, “Tele-Embodiment and Shattered Presence,” 280. 76. Some documentary images show the robots as identical copies, while others, particularly the documentation of the installation in Los Angeles, show the robots painted to have slight visible differences. 77. Erkki Huhtamo, “Seeking Deeper Contact,” Convergence 1, no. 2 (1995), 90. 78. Margaret Morse, “Dummies, Dolls and Robotic Simpletons Interpreting Artificial Stupidity: Body Narratives,” ISEA 1995 Proceedings, available archived on Feingold’s website: http://www.kenfeingold .com/morse_dummies.html. 79. See the introduction to this book for a discussion of Ascot and Minsky. 80. I borrow the phrase “merely an appurtenance” from Krauss’s article mentioned earlier, in which she describes video equipment as “mere appurtenance” to the psychological effects it produces. See Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 57. 81. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 131. 82. Ibid., 132.

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83. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 12. 86. Ibid., ix. 87. We should also remember that “Mosaic” was the name of the first widely used web browser, and was the interface that introduced the first generation of web users to experiences of networked interconnection. 88. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 6. 89. Andrew Cole, “Those Obscure Objects of Desire,” Artforum (Summer 2015), https://artforum.com/ inprint/issue=201506&id=52280, accessed September 1, 2015. 90. See chapter 1. 91. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 13. 92. Ibid., 12. 93. Ibid., xvi. 94. Ibid., 120. 95. Ibid., 30. 96. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 215. 97. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 98. Ibid., 37–38. 99. Ibid., 38.

Chapter 6 1. Mark Caro, “A Point-and-Shoot Exhibit,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 2007, www.chicagotribune.com, accessed May 17, 2007. The title of Bilal’s performance and interactive installation was, officially, Domestic Tension. The intended title of the work, however, was Shoot an Iraqi, which the director of the Flat File Gallery, Suzan Aurinko, rejected. Bilal would later use the discarded title for his book documenting the project. 2. Carol Becker, “Introduction: Drawing the Line,” in Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008), xvi. 3. See chapter 3 of this book for a discussion of these performances.

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4. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Samuel Weber’s notion of the “uncanny confusion” of the video screen. 5. I borrow the phrase “under the shadow of the drone” from artist James Bridle’s project Drone Shadows, discussed later in this chapter. See http://booktwo.org/notebook/drone-shadows/ 6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 43. 7. Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 24. In his memoir about the performance, Bilal notes that paintball guns are meant to be fired from 200 or so feet away from the target. Domestic Tension had only a 20-foot range. During the testing phase, Bilal took his first “bullet.” The pain from the impact brought tears to his eyes. 8. Ibid., 10. 9. Ibid. Accounts of Haji Bilal’s death vary across interviews with the artist. Some indicate that he was killed by an unmanned Predator drone, others that it was more generally “American artillery.” Bilal’s version of the story, published in Shoot an Iraqi, explains that Haji was killed by explosives dropped by a helicopter after the site was “scoped out” by an unmanned drone. 10. Ibid., 1. In his own words, Bilal intended his project to expose the dehumanization of the targets and the operators, as well as the American people who were both complicit in and largely ignorant of their government’s actions. “Domestic Tension was intended to be a provocative commentary on the nature of modern technological warfare, in which a soldier sitting in comfortable safety at a computer somewhere in the United States can drop a bomb causing death and devastation in remote locales with absolutely no physical or psychological connection to their target. It was also meant to highlight the dehumanizing effects on the citizens of the United States, who have been mostly shielded from the actual horrors of the government’s campaign in Iraq, whose lives go on as if without a care” (ibid.). 11. Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” New Yorker (October 26, 2009), n.p., http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2009/10/26/the-predator-war, accessed May 5, 2014. 12. Ibid. 13. Dawn Lim and Noah Shactman, “Air Force Tells Reporters: You’re Not Welcome at Our Drone Base Anymore,” Wired (November 29, 2011), n.p., http://www.wired.com/2011/11/press-kept-out-of-dronebase/,accessed May 15, 2015. 14. Ibid. 15. Bilal and Lydersen, Shoot an Iraqi, 81. The artist brings up the accusations of fraud at an interesting moment in his memoir: because of the nonstop barrage of pellets, he does, in fact, disconnect the gun for a period of time. 16. Ken Goldberg, “Introduction: The Unique Phenomenon of a Distance,” in Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3.

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17. Hubert Dreyfus, “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand,” in Goldberg, The Robot in the Garden, 49. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 59. 21. Ibid., 59–60. 22. Ibid., 60. 23. Ibid., 62. Dreyfus does mention that John Canny and Eric Paulos’s PRoPs do attempt to add the user’s body back into telepresent interaction though proxy, yet this doesn’t actually remedy the problems of risk or create a very appealing substitute for the flesh. 24. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 61–62. 25. Ibid., 43. 26. Ibid., 62. 27. Paul Patton, introduction to Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 7. 28. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 69. 29. Ibid., 31. 30. Patton, introduction to Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 10. 31. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 1; emphasis in original. 32. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 68. 33. See Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992). Norris, among others, has accused Baudrillard of absurd epistemological skepticism, and of staging a return to the Cartesian condition in which one has no direct access to the surrounding world. While Norris no doubt has a point here—we still do have direct, phenomenological sensory access to the world around us—Baudrillard’s points out that this is not the case for many of the most important events open to public opinion and political action. 34. Paul Virilio, Desert Screen, trans. Michael Deneger (London: Continuum, 2002), 41. 35. Ibid., 21. 36. John Armitage, “C-Theory Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War took Place in Orbital Space,” C-Theory (October 18, 2000), n.p., http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=132, accessed May 12, 2015. 37. Ibid. 38. Virilio, Desert Screen, 27.

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39. Ibid., 42. 40. Ibid., 43. 41. Ibid., 24. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 43. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. Pasi Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 48. 46. Ibid., 47. 47. Ibid., 51. 48. Ibid., 56. 49. Ibid., 55. 50. Ibid., 56. 51. Ibid. 52. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 79. 53. Grace Jean, “Game Branches Out into Real Combat Training,” National Defense Magazine (February 2006), n.p., http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2006/February/Pages/games_ brance3042.aspx, accessed May 7, 2015. For an extensive discussion of the game and its efficacy as a recruitment and training tool, see Roger Stahl, “War Games,” in Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 106–109. 54. Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16–17. 55. For an extensive explanation of the game, its history, and the differences between the military and commercial versions, see Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “Banal War: Full Spectrum Warrior,” in their Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 56. William Saletan, “War Is Halo,” Slate (July 28, 2008), n.p., http://www.slate.com/articles/health _and_science/human_nature/2008/07/war_is_halo.html, accessed May 7, 2015. 57. Roger Stahl, “War Games,” in Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 91. 58. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 99. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 100.

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61. Ibid. 62. Elijah Solomon Hurwitz, “Drone Pilots: ‘Overpaid, Underworked, and Bored,’” Mother Jones, June 18, 2013, n.p., http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/drone-pilots-reaper-photo-essay, accessed May 10, 2014. For example, a medal announced in 2013 to honor the efforts of drone operators whose actions had “extraordinary impact on combat operations” was discontinued after uproar from offended veterans and congressmen who thought the award would “cheapen the sacrifices made in battle” by soldiers who put their actual bodies and lives on the line. According to the critics of the medal, there is something inherently “dishonorable in the safety enjoyed by ‘armchair warriors’ who commute home to their families in suburban Nevada each night.” Drone critics, for their part, opposed the medal because it legitimized an “antiseptic” kind of killing that was covert, unjustified, and unethical. See “Medals for Drone Pilots?,” Economist, March 27, 2014, n.p., http://www.economist.com/news/ united-states/21599785-fraught-debate-over-how-honour-cyber-warriors-medals-drone-pilots, accessed May 10, 2014. 63. Hurwitz, “Drone Pilots.” 64. See Dan Gettinger, “Burdens of War: PTSD and Drone Crews,” Center for the Study of the Drone, April 21, 2014, n.p., http://dronecenter.bard.edu/burdens-war-crews-drone-aircraft/, accessed May 10, 2014. 65. James Dao, “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do,” New York Times (February 22, 2013), n.p., http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to -get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html, accessed May 10, 2015. 66. Mathew Power, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior,” GQ (October 2013), n.p., http://www.gq.com/ news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination, accessed May 9, 2014. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. At the end of his missions, Bryant described feeling “numb” and having to go home by himself, with no one to talk to, as if nothing had happened. After six years, Bryant left the Air Force. He was presented with a scorecard for his missions: 1,626 enemies killed in action. 69. Virilio, Desert Screen, 44. 70. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton), 6. Despite this specific designation of neurotic trauma as a result of a nonphysical surprise, Freud later “tries to literalize this concept of a wound which derives from the pathological definition of trauma, as a break in the cortical layer protecting the psyche against excessive external stimuli.” Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 56. 71. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 55. 72. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 15. 73. Ibid., 12. 74. Ibid., 37. 75. Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens, 66.

224

Notes to Pages 162–171

76. Farocki’s Serious Games has four parts, of which I only discuss the first three in this chapter. The fourth, A Sun with No Shadow, compares the training and rehabilitation mods of Virtual Iraq and functions as a metacommentary on the whole series. While there are many differences in detail, Farocki’s focuses on just one: the presence or absence of shadows. Drawing on footage from the other videos in the suite, A Sun with No Shadow describes how the training versions of the game are based on specific geographical locations and actual data to produce a very realistic environment, complete with shadows. The therapeutic reconstructions, on the other hand, have no shadows and seem to exist out of time. 77. “Bohemia Interactive Simulations-VB2,” http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/training/ bohemia-interactive/. 78. Sue Halpern, “Virtual Iraq,” New Yorker (May 19, 2008), 33. 79. Ibid. 80. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 57. 81. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 37. 82. Andrew Stefan Weiner, “Pretexts: The Evidence of the Event,” Afterall 26 (Spring 2011), n.p., http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.26/pretexts-e-evidence-of-the-event, accessed September 11, 2013. “Whatever sympathies viewers might have,” Weiner points out, “shift after learning that the soldier and therapist are actually both employees of a software development firm, and their entire interaction was scripted as an attempt to sell the firm’s VR-Therapy technology to the US Military.” 83. Väliaho, Biopolitical Screens, 64. But in this way they are also instrumentalized. They become, per Väliaho, what Farocki calls “operational images,” images that “rather than portraying a process [are] part of that process … [they are] tools of power that impose a grid through which the world becomes visualized, intelligible, and crucially, an object of manipulation” (ibid.). 84. Gettinger, “Burdens of War,” n.p. 85. Shira Maugen and Brett Litz, “Moral Injury in Veterans of War,” PTSD Research Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2012), n.p., http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/v23n1.pdf, accessed May 8, 2014. 86. Ibid. 87. I am indebted to my graduate student Linda Huang for her translation of the screen text. 88. Art historian T. J. Demos describes the train driver in the first story as “the personification of trauma,” whose symptoms “transgress between different arenas of experience, breaking into places they shouldn’t be.” T. J. Demos, “War Games: A Tale in Three Parts (On Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet Is the Best),” in Melanie O’Brian, ed., 5000 Feet Is the Best (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 79. 89. Omer Fast, “Recorded Interview Extracts,” in O’Brian, 5000 Feet Is the Best, 89. 90. Bridle drew his first drone in the carpark of his London studio earlier that year. James Bridle, “Under the Shadow of the Drone,” booktwo.org, accessed May 14, 2014.

Notes to Pages 171–177

225

91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. Bridle here refers to President Barack Obama’s list of targets for “signature” strikes against key Al Qaeda leaders and the “double-tap” tactic of striking a target, then striking it a second time when people rush to the scene to help the injured or trapped. 93. Early in the Iraq War, artist Jeff Cain, too, made drones more visible and knowable. In 2005, he used a 50-foot black weather balloon in the California desert to lure drones out of hiding at General Atomics’ Gray Butte Radar Cross Section facility in the Antelope Valley. Within minutes of releasing the balloon, Cain “made contact with General Atomic,” and three Predator drones pursued the balloon east over the desert. Cain’s shaky, hand-held video, with its deafening soundtrack of a wind-battered microphone, catches clear yet fleeting images of what were, at the time, largely unknown devices. With a simple toy, he engaged the mechanisms of militarized telepresence on civilian soil in the United States. 94. George Barber’s 2013 video The Freestone Drone expands upon the premise of the embodied and “confused” drone in a narrative video that imagines the drone as intellectually independent and in the midst of an existential crisis. 95. Email conversation between the author and the artist, February 14, 2016. 96. See Israel Ministry of Defense, “Operation Pillar of Defense—Selected Statements for the Reasoning and Justification for the Operation by Israel, The United States, and the United Nations,” http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/pressroom/2012/pages/operation_pillar_of_defense-statements.aspx. For an account of the targets hit and Hamas and civilian causalities, see “Factbox: Gaza Targets Bombed by Israel,” Reuters (November21, 2012), http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-gaza -idUSBRE8AK0H920121121, accessed February 16, 2016. 97. Describing her process of shooting Home Movies Gaza, Alsharif writes: “it was a way for me to re-familiarize myself with the territory which had changed dramatically since the last time I had been there. I was using the camera as an excuse for rediscovering it/seeing what it looked like as an image, and putting some distance between myself and the place.” Email conversation with the artist, February 14, 2016. 98. Email conversation with the artist, February 14, 2016. 99. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 13. 100. Ibid., 38. 101. For a discussion of the problem of personal responsibility in new materialist philosophy, see Sharon R. Krause, “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics,” Political Theory 39, no. 3 (June 2011), 299–324. 102. Fast, “Recorded Interview Extracts,” 114. 103. The CIA’s covert drone program is often criticized for being opaque and unaccountable to anyone, although there are hundreds of people involved in each strike. Mayer, “The Predator War,” n.p.

226

Notes to Pages 178–184

104. Ryan Bishop and John Philips, Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 193. 105. Rey Chow, Age of the World Target (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 35, 32. 106. Ibid., 38. 107. Ibid., 35. 108. Ibid., 31. 109. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 135. Also quoted in Chow, Age of the World Target, 29. 110. Chow, Age of the World Target, 36. 111. Virilio, Desert Screen, 27. 112. Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” E-Flux Journal, no. 64 (April 2015), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/, accessed February 1, 2016. It should come as no surprise that the military thinks like a pixel, too. Eyal Weizman’s work in “forensic architecture” examines how drone munitions are designed to operate below the “threshold of detectability.” Bombs with delay fuses drop through the roofs of homes, leaving only a small hole before they deploy their load of steel shrapnel fragments, which kill occupants but do not damage the structure. “Until 2014,” he writes, “this resolution was legally kept to 50 cm/pixel, with a pixel representing half a meter by half a meter of ground. … The pixel resolution is not only a technical product of optics and data-storage capacity, but a ‘modulor’ designed according to the dimensions of the human body. … The 50 cm resolution is useful because it bypasses risks of privacy infringement when recording people in public spaces. … But the regulation also has a security rationale: it is not only important details of strategic sites that get camouflaged in the 50 cm/pixel resolution, but the consequences of violence and violations as well.” 113. Paul Virilio, “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!,” C-Theory (August 27, 1995), n.p., http:// www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72, accessed May 27, 2015. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid.

Epilogue 1. Conversation with Tyler Cann, curator of contemporary art at the Columbus Museum of Art, January 14, 2015. 2. Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Project Guttenberg, 2005), vol. 1, 217.

Notes to Pages 184–186

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3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129. 4. Ibid., 134. 5. Trevor Paglen quoted in Jonah Weiner, “Prying Eyes,” New Yorker (October 22, 2012), http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/prying-eyes, accessed February 1, 2015. 6. Burke, The Works, 131–132. 7. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1909), vol. 1, 271. 8. Ibid. 9. Eyal Weizman, “Violence at the Threshold of Detectability,” E-Flux Journal # 64 (April 2015), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/violence-at-the-threshold-of-detectability/, accessed February 1, 2016.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Acconci, Vito, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64–65, 69, 134, 197n9, 197n14, 198n26, 199n31 Centers, 12, 39–48, 39, 42, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 198n20, 199n35, 200n59 Corrections, 197n13 Theme Song, 12, 40, 48–50, 48, 53, 54, 56, 61 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 1, 4 Afghanistan, 151 “Age of the World Picture, The” (Heidegger), 178–179 Al Qaeda, 177, 225n92 Alsharif, Basma, 15 Home Movies Gaza, 174–176, 175, 225n97 Ampex Cable, 134 Anders, William, 95–96, 119, 209nn1–2 Earthrise, 95, 97, 119, 208n1, 209n2, 209n7 Antin, David, 52, 53, 196n3, 198n25, 199–200nn48–50 Ars Electronica, 127 Ascott, Roy, 6, 7, 8, 15, 142, 152, 188–189n23, 189n28, 191n2 Asia, 98, 148, 168 AT&T, 14 Atwood, David, 134, 135 Aurinko, Suzan, 219n1 Auslander, Philip, 190n48 Australia, 98, 100

authenticity, 9, 10, 17, 31, 36 Avalanche, 78, 85 Back to You (Burden), 13, 69, 83, 84–90, 86, 87, 93–94, 148, 207nn58–61, 207n64 Baird, John Logie, 72, 81, 82 Barber, George, 225n4 Barthes, Roland, 11, 23, 25–29, 46 Barzyk, Fred, 134, 135 Batchen, Geoffrey, 23, 192n16 Baudrillard, Jean, 113–114, 154–156, 157–158, 180, 221n33 Bazin, André, 21, 95, 192n16 Bear, Liza, 78, 85, 88–89, 207nn58–60, 207n64 Send/Receive Satellite Network, The (with Sonnier), 101, 105–107, 106, 109 Bed Piece (Burden), 202n4 Bekey, George, 128 Bell, Larry, 85, 88, 89, 90, 207nn59–60, 207n64 Benjamin, Walter, 71 Bennett, Jane, 14, 15, 142–143, 144–145, 146, 176–177, 178, 179, 180 Benveniste, Emile, 46 Berger, Erich, 128 Beuys, Joseph, 103 Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast (with Paik and Davis), 101–104, 102 Bilal, Haji, 151, 220n9 Bilal, Wafaa, 15, 158, 160

242

Bilal, Wafaa (cont.) Domestic Tension, 147–148, 147, 149–152, 150, 154, 179, 219n1, 220n7, 220n10, 220n15 bin Laden, Osama, 177 Biopolitical Screens (Väliaho), 158, 224n83 Bishop, Ryan, 177–178 Blanke, Olaf, 214n22 Bocca della Verità, 125, 126 Bogost, Ian, 143 bombs, 150, 151, 154, 155, 165, 172, 220n10, 226n112 atomic, 144, 178, 179 Bonerz, Peter, 67 Borman, Frank, 95, 97, 119, 208–209nn1–2, 209n6 Bourdon, Jerome, 54 Boyle, Deirdre, 202n2 Brand, Stewart, 1, 4, 187n6, 209n7 Bridle, James, 15, 172, 176, 224n90, 225n92 Drone Shadows, 171–172, 172, 220n5 Drone Shadow 002, 171–172, 172 Dronestagram, 172 Bryant, Antony, 33–34 Bryant, Brendan, 161, 166, 233n68 Burden, Chris, 12, 68–69, 72, 75, 79, 90–94, 134, 148, 206n47 Bed Piece, 202n4 C.B.T.V., 81–83, 82, 84, 85 CCTV performances, 13, 69, 81, 83, 86, 90–91, 93, 206n55 Back to You, 13, 69, 83, 84–90, 86, 87, 93–94, 148, 207nn58–61, 207n64 Do You Believe in Television?, 69, 83, 84, 89–91, 90, 93–94 Velvet Water, 69, 83–84, 94 Doomed, 13, 69–72, 70, 73–74, 75–76, 77–78, 81, 83, 88, 90, 91, 93, 148, 202n4 ethical issues raised in the work of, 13, 69, 84, 89, 90, 93–94, 148 Shoot, 12–13, 69, 70, 75–79, 76, 77, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93, 205n41, 207n57, 207n64

Index

TV ads, 79–81, 90–91 Full Financial Disclosure, 79, 206n51 Poem for LA, 79 Promo, 79, 206n51 TV Ad, 79, 80 Burke, Edmund, 184, 185 Cable News Network (CNN), 154, 156 Cain, Jeff, 225n93 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 25–29, 46 Cameron, Eric, 52 Campanella, Thomas J., 9 Canny, John, 18, 126 PRoPs (with Paulos), 138–139, 140, 141, 218n70, 218n72, 221n23 Cavell, Stanley, 77–78, 137, 138 C.B.T.V. (Burden), 81–83, 82, 84, 85 Centers (Acconci), 12, 39–48, 39, 42, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 198n20, 199n35, 200n59 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 151, 177, 225n103 chat rooms, 6, 130, 151–152 Chicago, 67, 69, 147 Chicago Sun-Times, 69 Chow, Rey, 178–179 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 122–123 cinema, 4, 12, 13, 21, 22, 52, 69, 72, 73. See also film Cold War, 100, 119 Cole, Andrew, 143–144 Columbus Museum of Art, 183 computers humans and, 127, 131, 141 interfaces, 5, 14, 122 mouse, 1, 4, 5, 14, 122 networked, 16, 93 screens, 61, 93, 133, 188n11, 198n25 terminals, 6, 132, 179 co-presence, 29, 50, 121, 122, 126, 194n36 Corrections (Acconci), 197n13 Crary, Jonathan, 72–73, 93, 203n20 Crogan, Patrick, 159 Crosland, Alan, 72

Index

D’Agostino, Peter, 134–135, 217n60 Data Dentata (Datamitt) (Goldberg and Wallace), 123–127, 123, 124, 133, 146, 214n17 Davidovich, Jaime, 14, 135, 210n20 SoHo Wants to Know (QUBE Project), 135–137, 136, 138, 217n64 Davis, Douglas, 210n20 Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast (with Beuys and Paik), 101–103, 104, 104–105 Last Nine Minutes, The, 104–105, 104 Death 24x a Second (Mulvey), 23, 24, 52 Debord, Guy, 68–69, 72, 73–74, 78, 79, 81, 202n14, 203n20, 203n24 McLuhan and, 74–75, 77, 91–92, 93, 204n29, 205n44 “Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis” (Peirce), 29, 31 deictic shifters, 12, 16, 25, 28, 44, 45–48, 50, 192n9 Deleuze, Gilles, 130 de Peuter, Greig, 159 Derain, James Der, 159 Desert Screen (Virilio), 156–157, 161, 180 digital age, 11, 17, 19, 21, 22, 121, 122, 131, 180, 193n26 Digital and Other Virtualities (Bryant and Pollock), 33–34 digital media, 5, 22, 33, 37, 121 indexicality and, 17, 19, 21, 22–23, 33, 37, 122, 193n26 materiality and, 11, 21, 22–23, 192n19, 193n26, 213n3 disembodiment, 8, 10, 131, 139, 142, 189nn28–29 Doane, Mary Ann, 12, 46, 54, 193n27 Documenta 6, 81, 101 Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast (Beuys, Davis, and Paik), 101–105, 102, 104 Domestic Tension (Bilal), 147–148, 147, 149–152, 150, 154, 179, 219n1, 220n7, 220n10, 220n15 Donahue, Phil, 134 Donath, Judith, 18

243

Doomed (Burden), 13, 69–72, 70, 73–74, 75–76, 77–78, 81, 83, 88, 90, 91, 93, 148, 202n4 Do You Believe in Television? (Burden), 69, 83, 84, 89–91, 90, 93–94 Drew, Jesse, 202n2 Dreyfus, Hubert, 10, 152–154, 157, 171, 221n23 drones (UAVs), 5, 10, 15, 34, 142, 146, 148, 153–154, 157, 158–159, 160, 162, 166, 170, 208n88 artworks about, 6, 15, 147–182, 183–185, 220n5, 223n68, 224n90, 225nn93–94, 226n112 CIA drone program, 151, 171, 177, 225n103 drone operators, 15, 149, 150–151, 158–159, 160, 161, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 223n62 drone sensors, 161, 169, 171, 223n68 Predator drones, 170, 171, 173, 220n9, 225n93 Drone Vision (Paglen), 173–174, 173, 176 Duet (Jonas), 12, 40, 55–58, 55, 59 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 159 Earthrise (Anders), 95, 97, 119, 208n1, 209n2, 209n7 Ebert, Roger, 69, 71 Echo. See Narcissus, myth of Ellison, Nicole B., 130 Energy Plan for the Western Man (Beuys), 103 Engelbart, Douglas, 134 “Mother of All Demos, The,” 1–5, 2, 3, 14, 15, 68, 122, 187n3, 187n6, 209n7, 216n49 English, Bill, 187n6 Ernst, Wolfgang, 23, 24, 192n18, 213n3 Europe, 98, 101 Farnsworth, Philo T., 72, 81 Farocki, Harun, 15, 224n83 Serious Games, 162–166, 163, 164, 224n76 Serious Games 1: Watson Is Down, 162–163, 163 Serious Games 2: Three Dead, 163 Serious Games 3: Immersion, 163–166, 164 Serious Games 4: A Sun with No Shadow, 224n76

244

Fast, Omer, 15 5000 Feet Is the Best, 166–171, 167, 169, 174 Fat Transformation (Beuys), 103 Featherly, Kevin, 134 Feingold, Ken, 14 where I can see my house from here so we are, 139–141, 141, 142 Feuer, Jane, 12, 53 film, 4, 6, 12, 40, 41, 53, 54, 58, 72, 132, 197n14, 203n29 index and, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 35, 50–51, 121, 194n38 5000 Feet Is the Best (Fast), 166–171, 167, 169, 174 Flagg, James Montgomery, 46, 47, 199n31 Flat File Gallery, 147, 152, 219n1 Flusser, Vilém, 14, 131, 132–134, 141, 142, 144, 145, 216nn44–45, 216nn48–49, 216n51 Forrester, Robert, 67 Fowler, W. Warde, 54–55 Freestone Drone, The (Barber), 225n4 Freud, Sigmund psychic trauma and, 161–162, 165–166 uncanny and, 51–52, 57, 63, 64 Friedberg, Anne, 10, 34–35 Friedman, James, 12, 53–54 Full Financial Disclosure (Burden), 79, 206n51 Galloway, Alexander, 61–63, 64, 159, 213n50 Galloway, Kit, 13, 134, 211n36 Hole in Space (with Rabinowitz), 13, 210n20, 211n30 Satellite Arts 1977 (with Rabinowitz), 13–14, 97–98, 101, 107–118, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 211n31, 211n33, 211–212n41 Genette, Gérard, 64 Genovese, Kitty, 76–77, 205n39 Gentner, Steven, 128, 189n35 Germany, 101, 103 Gillette, Frank, 216n49 Goddard Space Flight Center, 107, 108, 212n41 Goldberg, Ken Data Dentata (Datamitt) (with Wallace), 123–127, 123, 124, 133, 146, 214n17

Index

Legal Tender, 17, 18, 19, 21, 30, 33, 34, 35–37, 191n5, 196n75 Telegarden, The (with Santarromana and others), 127–131, 128, 133, 142, 143, 145 Grau, Oliver, 9 112 Greene Street Gallery, 84 “Guessing” (Peirce), 32 Gulf War (first), 151, 154–157, 159 Gulf War (second). See Iraq War Gunning, Tom, 4, 24, 33, 193n27 Halter, Ed, 159 Hamas, 174 Hardt, Michael, 159 Hayles, N. Katherine, 8, 189n29 Heidegger, Martin, 178–179 High Performance, 110 Hoffman, Charles, 209n1 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 64 Hole in Space (Galloway and Rabinowitz), 13, 210n20, 211n30 Home Movies Gaza (Alsharif), 174–176, 175, 225n97 Hookway, Branden, 44, 215n26 How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (Steyerl), 179–182, 181 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 8, 189n29 Huhtamo, Erkki, 139–141, 192n18 index, 6, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17–37, 43, 45–46, 50–52, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 82, 88, 96, 119, 121, 122, 133, 183–184, 185, 186, 190n38, 191nn6–7, 192n9, 192n19, 193n26, 194n47, 194n51, 196n5, 206n53, 213n3 “death of the index,” 11, 14, 17, 19, 35, 37, 121–122, 144, 186 digitality and, 17, 19, 21, 22–23, 33, 37, 122, 193n26 film and, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 35, 50–51, 121, 194n38 indexical signs, 11, 12, 19, 21, 22, 31, 34, 37, 40, 44, 45, 50, 54, 59, 61, 158

Index

materiality and, 11, 19, 23, 25, 28, 31, 33, 121, 192n19, 193n26, 206n53 photography and, 11, 17, 19, 20–29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 45, 46, 50–51, 52, 121, 194n36, 194n38 Interactive Media Festival, 139 interface computer, 5, 14, 122 digital, 17, 33, 186 telecommunications, 65, 127, 144, 186 televisual, 50, 69, 73 virtual, 11, 15, 19, 34, 36, 37 Interface Effect, The (Galloway), 61–63, 64, 213n50 Internet, 4, 7, 35, 127, 134, 139, 142, 152, 178, 179 artists and engineers and, 9, 14, 37, 122, 138 “holding hands over the Internet,” 123, 125, 127, 214n22 “Intertwining—The Chiasm, The” (MerleauPonty), 13, 98, 108, 116–117, 119, 145, 212n48 Into the Universe of Technical Images (Flusser), 14, 131, 132–134, 141, 142, 144, 145, 216nn44– 45, 216nn48–49, 216n51 Iraq, 147, 150, 151, 154, 155, 162 Iraq War, 157, 225n93 Virtual Iraq, 163, 164, 164, 165–166, 169, 224n76 Israel, 100, 174 Jakobson, Roman, 46, 199n33 Japan, 99, 101, 178 Jazz Singer, The (Crosland), 72 Jentsch, Ernst, 51, 63, 64 Jespersen, Otto, 46 Jonas, Joan, 12, 40, 55, 58–59, 61, 62, 63, 64–65, 69, 134, 201n67 Duet, 12, 40, 55–58, 55, 59 Left Side Right Side, 12, 40, 59–61, 59, 60, 115, 201n67 Mirror Check, 58–59 Joselit, David, 218n69 Kac, Eduardo, 7, 188n22

245

Kaizen, William, 197n13, 200n59 Kant, Immanuel, 184–185 Kittler, Friedrich, 192n18, 213n3 Korea, 101 Krauss, Rosalind E., 39, 40, 41–44, 57, 58, 62, 64, 74, 95, 115, 116–117, 125, 127, 197n11, 218n80 Kuwait, 154, 174 Lanier, Jaron, 9 Last Nine Minutes, The (Davis), 104–105, 104 Lebar, Stanley, 209n1 Left Side Right Side (Jonas), 12, 40, 59–61, 59, 60, 115, 201n67 Legal Tender (Goldberg), 17, 18, 19, 21, 30, 33, 34, 35–37, 191n5, 196n75 Levin, Thomas Y., 72 Levine, Les, 202n2 Licht, Ira, 70 Linn, Will, 18 Litz, Brett, 166 liveness, 5, 53–57, 58, 100, 101, 137, 190n48 “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs” (Peirce), 29–31, 191n7, 198n5 Los Angeles, 13, 139, 206n47, 218n76 Lovell, James, 95, 209n2 Mad magazine, 62–63 Manhattan Cable Television, 135 Manovich, Lev, 11, 19, 21, 22, 214n17 Man Ray, 24, 26 Marks, Laura U., 11, 193n26 Mascha, Michael, 189n35 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 103 Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 6–7 mass media, 72, 73, 78, 156, 158, 216n48 Mass Mediauras (Weber), 11, 12, 16, 50–51, 63, 64 materiality, 8, 10, 35, 144, 145, 186, 189n28 digitality and, 11, 22, 122, 132, 192n19, 193n26, 206n53, 213n3 index and, 11, 19, 23, 25, 28, 31, 33, 121, 192n19, 193n26, 206n53

246

Maugen, Shira, 166 McLaughlin, Margaret L., 130 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 12, 13, 15, 69, 81, 88, 91–92, 93, 99, 135, 142, 145, 149, 200n64, 204n31, 205n44, 216n49 cool media, 74, 91, 203–204n29, 204n32 Debord and, 74–75, 77, 91–92, 93, 204n29, 205n44 media analog, 19, 31, 33, 121 archaeology, 21, 192n18, 213n3 digital, 11, 21, 22–23, 33, 37, 122, 192n19, 193n26 mass, 72, 73, 78, 156, 158, 216n48 new, 5, 7, 10, 21, 35, 92, 122 telecommunications, 7, 126, 214n11 mediation, 1, 5, 9, 10, 35, 37, 59, 61, 73, 75, 78, 83, 91, 143, 152, 155, 156, 185 mediated actions or experiences, 14, 36, 37, 122, 153, 154 mediated images, 5, 11, 17, 30, 37, 119, 156, 186, 188n11 Medium Cool (Wexler), 67–68, 68, 78, 86, 91, 201n1, 206n45 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 13, 98, 108, 116–117, 119, 145, 212n48 Minimalism, 205n41 Minsky, Marvin, 6–7, 15, 142, 152, 189n29 mirror, 25, 35, 62, 139, 141, 199n31 images, 58–59, 60, 64, 111, 201n68 Jonas and, 40, 55, 58–59, 60–61, 64, 201n67 as metaphor, 40, 41, 43, 55, 57, 58, 61, 64, 95, 103, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 185, 197n13, 198n15 Mirror Check (Jonas), 58–59 Mirror Piece I (Jonas), 58 Mirror Piece II (Jonas), 58 Mitchell, William J., 11, 19, 21, 22, 129 modem “handshake,” 14, 123, 124, 145 Mondloch, Kate, 6, 129, 130–131 Monfort, Nick, 127

Index

monitors television, 13, 39, 41, 45, 112 video, 13, 41, 59, 83, 85, 89, 90, 115, 196n3, 197n14, 198n20 Moorman, Charlotte, 101, 103 Mori, Masahiro, 63–65, 63, 139, 201n79 Morris, Rosemary, 128 Morrison, Jim, 49 Morse, Margaret, 141 mosaic, as metaphor, 15, 131–133, 135, 142–144, 145–146, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 186, 204n31, 216n45, 219n87 Moseley, Winston, 76, 205n39 “Mother of All Demos, The” (Engelbart), 1–5, 2, 3, 14, 15, 68, 122, 187n3, 187n6, 209n7, 216n49 Mulvey, Laura, 11, 23, 24, 52 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 69, 71, 73 Narcissus, myth of, 57–58, 61, 65, 115, 126, 200n64 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 1, 4, 13, 96, 119, 209n7 Ames Research Center, 105, 107 Apollo 8, 95–97, 96, 97, 98, 100, 119, 208–209nn1–2, 209n4, 209nn6–7 Satellite Arts 77, 13, 97, 107, 108, 109, 119 Send/Receive II, 105 Negri, Antonio, 159 new media, 5, 7, 10, 21, 35, 92, 122 New York City, 13, 76, 84, 88, 103, 105, 124, 126 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 24, 25 9/11, 154, 158, 177 Obama, Barack, 225n92 Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, 103 oNLine System (NLS), 1, 4 On Photography (Sontag), 20–21 “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (Jentsch), 51, 63, 64 “Ontology of the Photographic Image, The” (Bazin), 21, 95, 192n16

Index

Osborne, Kerry K., 130 O’Shea, Dennis, 70, 71 Our World, 97, 98–100, 101, 109, 210n14, 210n16 Ovid. See Narcissus, myth of Paglen, Trevor, 15, 172–173 Drone Vision, 173–174, 173, 176 Reaper in the Sun, 183–185, 184 Paik, Nam June, 135, 202n2, 210n20, 218n69 Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast (with Beuys and Davis), 100–101, 102, 103, 104 Pakistan, 151, 172, 210n16 Palestine, 151, 174 Parks, Lisa, 98–99, 100, 210n16, 212–213n49 Patton, Paul, 155 Pauline, Mark, 18 Paulos, Eric, 18, 126 PRoPs (with Canny), 138–139, 140, 141, 218n70, 218n72, 221n23 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 11, 17, 19–20, 21, 23–24, 25, 27–33, 35, 45–46, 133, 191nn6–7, 192n9, 194n47, 194n51, 194nn53–54, 195n55, 195n62, 196n5, 199n33 “Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis,” 29, 31 “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” 29–31, 191n7, 198n5 “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence” (Wagner), 40, 43–44, 45, 46, 50, 62, 64, 74, 199n35 Personal Roving Presences (PRoPs) (Canny and Paulos), 138–139, 140, 141, 218n70, 218n72, 221n23 Philbin, Regis, 206n47 Philips, John, 177–178 photography, 53, 72, 93, 95, 132, 133, 180, 192n16, 193n33, 216n44 analog, 21, 22, 24, 33, 52 as a “hot medium,” 203n29, 204n31 index and, 11, 17, 19, 20–29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 45, 46, 50–51, 52, 121, 192n15, 194n36, 194n38 physicality, 10, 20, 31, 176, 185 pixels, 15, 132, 142, 170, 175, 180, 182, 216n44, 226n112

247

Poem for LA (Burden), 79 pointing finger, 4–5, 12, 25, 28, 40–41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 64, 133 Poissant, Louise, 61 Pollock, Griselda, 33–34 Pollock, Jackson, 188–189n23 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 160, 161–162, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Chun), 122–123 Promo (Burden), 79, 206n51 QUBE, 134–135, 138, 217n57, 217n60 SoHo Wants to Know, 135–137, 136, 138, 217n64 Rabinowitz, Sherrie, 13, 134, 211n36 Hole in Space (with Galloway), 13, 210n20, 211n30 Satellite Arts 1977 (with Galloway), 13–14, 97–98, 101, 107–118, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 211n31, 211n33, 211–212n41 Rayograph (Man Ray), 24, 26 Reaper in the Sun (Paglen), 183–185, 184 Reconfigured Eye, The (Mitchell), 22 remote weapons, 34, 142, 148, 149, 154, 162, 179, 208n88 robotics, 5, 17, 63, 64, 129, 130, 139, 141, 149, 151, 157, 191n1, 214n22. See also telerobotics Robot in the Garden, The (Goldberg), 152 Rockwell, Norman, 62 Rossman, Jürgen, 189n35 Rothenberg, Nick, 189n35 Saddam Hussein, 155, 156, 177 San Francisco, 1, 4, 104, 110 Santarromana, Joseph, 128 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 212n46 satellite Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast, 101–105, 102, 104 Satellite Arts 1977, 13–14, 97–98, 101, 107–118, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 211n31, 211n33, 211–212n41

248

satellite (cont.) Send/Receive Satellite Network, The, 101, 105–107, 106, 109 spectaculars, 97, 98–100, 101, 119 telecommunication, 4, 5, 95–119 television, 97, 99, 104, 105 Satellite Arts 1977 (Galloway and Rabinowitz), 13–14, 97–98, 101, 107–118, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 211n31, 211n33, 211–212n41 Saturday Evening Post, 62 Saudi Arabia, 151, 154 Schneckenburger, Manfred, 101 Schneider, Ira, 216n49 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 83 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 185 screens computer, 61, 93, 133, 188n11, 198n25 television (TV), 12, 13, 14, 16, 34, 44, 58, 68, 69, 73, 81, 88–91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 104, 112, 116, 117, 119, 132, 158, 176, 179, 187n4, 190n48, 196n3, 197n14 video, 2–4, 5, 10, 13, 44, 51, 52, 55, 69, 115, 131–132, 145, 177, 196 Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Mondloch), 6, 129, 130–131 Sekula, Allan, 23 Send/Receive I (Bear and Sonnier), 105 Send/Receive II (Bear and Sonnier), 105–107, 106 Send/Receive Satellite Network, The (Bear and Sonnier), 101, 105–107, 106, 109 Serious Games (Farocki), 162–166, 163, 164, 224n76 Serious Games 1: Watson Is Down, 162–163, 163 Serious Games 2: Three Dead, 163 Serious Games 3: Immersion, 163–166, 164 Serious Games 4: A Sun with No Shadow, 224n76 Serres, Michael, 61 Shamberg, Michael, 216n49 Sharp, Willoughby, 78, 84

Index

Shoot (Burden), 12–13, 69, 70, 75–79, 76, 77, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93, 205n41, 207n57, 207n64 SIGGRAPH, 123, 124, 125, 126, 213n7 Silverman, Kaja, 161–162, 223n70 Simulations (Baudrillard), 114, 156 Snowden, Edward, 15, 142, 146, 218n72 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord), 68–69, 72–75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 91–93, 202n14, 203n20, 203n24, 204n29, 205n44, 206n45 SoHo Wants to Know (QUBE Project) (Davidovich), 135–137, 136, 138, 217n64 Sonnier, Keith, 101, 105–107, 106, 109 Sontag, Susan, 20–21 Sony, 101, 202n2 Soviet Union, 98, 100 space age, 97, 98, 100 space race, 98, 100 Apollo, 95–97, 96, 97, 98, 100, 119, 208–209nn1–2, 209n4, 209nn6–7 Sputnik, 98, 100, 209n9 Stahl, Roger, 159 Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 187n3 Augmentation Research Center, 1, 4 Steinberg, Leo, 188n23 Stevenson, Carol, 135, 137, 217n64 Steyerl, Hito, 15 How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 179–182, 181 sublime, the, 184–185 surveillance, 85, 88, 151, 154, 160, 161, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182 remote, 36, 151, 171 satellite, 100, 212n46 Sutter, Carl, 128, 189n35 tactility, 6, 12, 74, 75, 93–94, 204n32 Tagg, John, 23 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 193n33 Tate Gallery, 103 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 93 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 8

Index

teleaction, 10, 131, 148, 153, 154 telecommunications, 6, 7, 10, 37, 65, 101, 133, 134, 138, 141, 142, 148, 152, 156, 178, 194n51, 214n11 interfaces, 65, 127, 144, 186 live, 7, 105, 107, 118 networked, 8, 145, 179 real-time, 2, 117, 153, 155–157, 179, 182 satellite, 4, 5, 95–119 touch and, 7, 14, 122, 126, 145 Telegarden, The (Goldberg, Santarromana, and others), 127–131, 128, 133, 142, 143, 145 telematic technologies, 6, 8, 10, 125, 132, 133, 134, 137, 141, 142, 146, 189n23 telematic art, 2, 7, 191n2 “Telenoia” (Ascott), 189n28 teleoperators, 7, 15, 149, 191n1 “Telepistemology: Descartes’s Last Stand” (Dreyfus), 10, 152–154, 157, 171, 221n23 telepresence, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 40, 98, 122, 127, 131, 133, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157, 176, 182, 188n22, 218n70, 225n93 definitions of, 6–8, 118 ethical and epistemological issues surrounding, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17, 34, 36, 37, 84, 122, 127, 130, 131, 139, 141, 142–144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 160, 171, 176–177, 178, 186, 223n62 phenomenological issues surrounding, 5, 7, 10, 13, 14, 108, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 127, 145–146, 149, 152–153, 167, 171, 186, 212n49 systems and technologies, 7, 118, 122, 131, 146, 152, 153 telerobotics, 7, 14, 34, 121–146, 147, 148, 152, 157, 186, 189n35, 191n1, 194n38 television (TV) broadcast, 4, 12, 40, 44, 50, 54, 56, 78, 82, 104, 105, 148, 196n3, 198n26, 212n41 cable, 4, 11, 135 closed-circuit (CCTV), 4, 5, 13, 69, 81, 83, 86, 90–91, 93, 206n55

249

live, 44, 77–78, 89, 90, 96, 98, 103, 137, 154, 196n3 network, 49, 53, 79, 97 news, 53–54, 78, 103 ontological indeterminacy of, 11, 12, 40, 44, 50–51, 52, 53, 56, 131–132, 190n48 satellite, 97, 99, 104, 105 screens, 12, 13, 14, 16, 34, 44, 58, 68, 69, 73, 81, 88–91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 104, 112, 116, 117, 119, 132, 158, 176, 179, 187n4, 190n48, 196n3, 197n14 sets, 48, 55, 74, 95, 98, 108, 135, 137, 196n3, 198nn25–26 video and, 9–10, 50–51, 52, 199n48, 203n24, 216n49 “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent” (Antin), 52, 53, 196n3, 198n25, 199–200nn48–50 Terminus, 54–55, 65, 125 Theme Song (Acconci), 12, 40, 48–50, 48, 53, 54, 56, 61 Triple Self-Portrait (Rockwell), 62 Trips Festival, 1 Turing, Alan, 126–127, 131, 141, 214n23 Turner, Ted, 154, 156 TV Ad (Burden), 79, 80 TV Bra for Living Sculpture (Paik and Moorman), 103 TV Buddha (Paik and Moorman), 103 TV Cello (Paik and Moorman), 103 “Uncanny, The” (Freud), 51–52, 63, 64 “Uncanny Valley, The” (Mori), 63–65, 63, 139, 201n79 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan), 8, 12, 13, 15, 69, 74–75, 77, 81, 88, 91, 92, 93, 135, 145, 149, 200n64, 203–204n29, 204nn31–32, 206n45 United States, 36, 100, 101, 103, 142, 155, 178 Air Force, 151, 163, 170, 174, 223n68 Army, 159 recruitment poster, 46–48, 47, 199n31 drones from, 151, 168, 171, 173, 220n10, 225n93

250

United States (cont.) Marine Corps, 159, 162 military, 171, 177, 224n82 space race, 98, 210n19 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). See drones Väliaho, Pasi, 158–159, 162, 224n83 Valkanas, Arlene, 71 VanDerBeek, Stan, 135 Velvet Water (Burden), 69, 83–84, 94 Vibrant Matter (Bennett), 14, 15, 142–143, 144–145, 146, 176–177, 178, 179, 180 video closed-circuit, 107, 110, 211n36 games, 6, 15, 148, 149, 158, 159, 162–163, 170 guerrilla, 197n9, 218n69 satellite, 13, 101, 109, 117–118, 119, 213n50 screens, 2–4, 5, 10, 13, 44, 51, 52, 55, 69, 115, 131–132, 145, 177, 196 television and, 9–10, 50–51, 52, 199n48, 203n24, 216n49 video art, 4, 13, 52, 84, 100, 115, 127, 135, 138, 199n48, 200n50, 202n2, 217n64 early, 10, 11, 39, 40, 68, 92, 125, 134, 218n69 “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (Krauss), 39, 40, 41–44, 57, 58, 62, 64, 74, 95, 115, 116–117, 125, 127, 197n11, 218n80 Vietnam War, 78, 205n41, 205n44, 209n2 View from the Window at La Graz (Niépce), 24, 25 Virilio, Paul, 5–6, 15, 118, 154, 156–158, 161, 180, 182 virtuality, 9, 10, 33–35, 37, 130, 131, 176, 178, 185, 190n38 virtual reality (VR), 9, 15, 33, 93, 118, 164 Virtual Window, The (Friedberg), 10, 34–35 Wagner, Anne, 40, 43–44, 45, 46, 50, 62, 64, 74, 199n35 Wallace, Richard, 123–127, 123, 124, 133, 146, 214n17 Ward, Frazer, 75–77, 78, 89, 205n41 Warner Communications, 134 “war on terror,” 151, 154, 166, 171

Index

webcams, 6, 34, 130, 147, 201n68 Weber, Samuel, 131–132, 144, 190n38, 190n48 Mass Mediauras, 11, 12, 16, 50–51, 63, 64 Wedgwood, Thomas, 24 Wexler, Haswell, 67–68, 68, 69, 78, 86, 91, 201n1, 206n45 where I can see my house from here so we are (Feingold), 139–141, 141, 142 Wiegley, Jeff, 128, 189n35 Wiesner, Jerome, 103 Williams, Richard, 62 Willis, Anne-Marie, 19, 21–22 window, as metaphor, 2–4, 13, 40, 43, 45, 48, 55, 61, 64, 69, 89, 97, 107, 109, 122, 139, 185, 187n4 Winston, Brian, 202n2 World War I, 161, 167 World Wide Web, 4, 14, 122, 129, 138 Young, Josh, 202n4 Zettl, Herbert, 53 Zworykin, Vladimir, 72, 81, 203n20