Plastic People

I have never read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, unfortunately, but I have seen the Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer film version, perhaps more unfortunately. Equally present in both is Dr. Moreau's use of pain as a means of controlling the nature of his creatures. He is essentially separating his human/animal hybrids from their animalistic nature through pain. As Ollivier Dyens explains in his article “The Rise of Cultural Bodies,” “for Moreau, pain is the vector that allows reshaping, … making [the body] suffer to such a point that any organic, biological, or physiological aspect related to that pain has to be cast aside.” Dr. Moreau is transforming his animal/humans into what Dyens calls “plastic bodies.”

A plastic body, according to Dyens, is essentially any being that has been separated from its natural or biological existence, that is, it did not come from nor does it depend upon or exist within its natural biological world. An example of this is a clone. Though it is comprised of the same biological material as that from which it was copied, it does not share any of the original's biological integrity. It is what Dyens describes as an “embodied idea that creates itself from the realm of concepts and culture, … a living form without biological integrity, unstable and reproducible.” This is very similar to those creature of Dr. Moreau who are engineered rather than born and are reproducible through the same pain conditioning that the other animal/humans have endured. These creatures, however, are not yet entirely plastic as they are still connected to their biological existence, they still wear their shock collars because they still have animalistic urges.

To be entirely plastic is to be fully separated from all aspects of the biological world from which you have originated. Clones are inherently plastic as their beginning is also their metamorphosis, that is, their biological origins are cast off in their being engineered rather than conceived. Most other plastic beings must go through this metamorphosis in order to become plastic, they must shed all connection to their natural existence which includes their biology but also the culture, psychology, and all other forms of existence. This is where the plastic body becomes something to be feared, its shedding of all ties to normal existence.

If Dr. Moreau's beasts became fully plastic, as he is trying to make them, then they will no longer have a connection to that which he uses to control them, pain. Pain is a part of their metamorphosis, it is a tool used in their creation, therefore they must shed this aspect of their being, the feeling of pain, in order to become plastic. If these creatures no longer feel pain, then Moreau can no longer control them, which means unpredictability and danger.

Likewise, if people become plastic, as some would argue they are, then they would no longer play by the same rules as the rest of humanity. These plastic people would not be subject to social norms, nor would they feel guilt, remorse, apathy, love or hate for that matter. Their metamorphosis would not render them to be unrecognizable as humans, nor would it make them easily identifiable as others, potentially dangerous others, it would be invisible. Their entire natural existence would be replaced by something else entirely; supposedly one constituted by technology, at least this is a fear in our technological age. We as humans are replacing ourselves with technologically dependent versions of ourselves. We no longer need to consume real food, chemically engineered alternatives will do; we do not need to reproduce, we can just clone ourselves if need be; we no longer seek out human interactions, we have instead social worlds full of avatars.

I would say that we are not at this point yet, at least not the vast majority of us, but this is not an entirely unforeseeable future.

Cyborg Nation

I recently revisited Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" and found myself considering national identity as a component piece that transforms us into cyborgs, at least in the sense that Haraway explains cyborgs. The notion of "cyborg" put forth in this manifesto is that they are composite beings comprised of various, often oppositional (i.e. organic and mechanic), components, both tangible and conceptual. This means that anyone who is subject to some sort of mediation that directly affects their existence is a cyborg.

This construction of cyborg is used by Haraway as a means to the realization of a "powerful infidel heteroglossia". It is a strategy that empowers the marginalized and allows perpetual destruction and reconstruction of "identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories". This cyborg will make the world more inhabitable for everyone and less comfortable for a few, those few who have had it too easy for too long. It is postmodernism (surprise! this was written in the 80's) manifest in real life.

With this understanding of cyborg it becomes possible to think of national identity or nationalism as a mediator that turns all of it's constituents into cyborgs. To illustrate this point I am going to consider China as a purveyor of national identity and thus a converter of citizens to cyborgs. I have chosen China mainly because of the distinct ideological difference that this country has from the dominant “western” world, communism, and how this ideology clearly mediates the existence of the citizens of China from that of westerners. I compare to the western world because I am part of that category so it shows my perspective of difference, and also because it is a rough equivalent to a hegemonic dominant party that governs the world (the few who have had it too easy for too long).

A prime example of this mediation is in the censorship of media within China. Internet access is limited, many t.v. shows and films are banned, or drastically altered so that they do not conflict with the dominant ideology in China, the news is filtered and controlled by the government, virtually all aspects of modern life that can be mediated by the government are. As such, the experience of new technology, social networking on the internet for example, is experienced in different way from the western world. This means that everyone who is subject to this mediation, the purveyance of national identity or nationalism, has this ideology as a component of their being, they are cybernetic.

The important question to ask then is: how does their existence as cyborgs fit in with Haraway's hopes of a “powerful infidel heteroglossia”? The problem here is that the mediation is being forced upon the citizen cyborgs of China, that is, they are not choosing this component as part of their identities but it is being etched into them none the less. This is one aspect of this cyborg existence that Haraway does not seem to have considered. The closest she came would be talking about unconscious mediation, social conditioning that effectively does the same thing, but this is different in that you can chose to break with social norms, and thus shed this component, the cyborgs of China do not have this option.

There is still, however, a benefit to applying Haraway's cyborg to those who suffer from component requisition, that is their cyborg identities require this component because it is forced upon them and out of their control to choose. This application helps to identify the tools used by those “comfy few” to pollute our cyborg constructions. As I have mentioned, there are sociological constructs that function almost identically to the case of China. I say they can be escaped but this is only if you are willing to accept alienation as a piece of your cyborg self. This is unless, of course, we are all willing to make this shift, if not unanimously then at least as a majority, turning those comfy few with their component determinism into the alienated. This is how the Powerful Infidel Heteroglossia will succeed.

Here is another example of cybernetics helping the marginalized. A much different take, but very interesting and amazing none the less.

Uncanny

I am certain that in this day and age everyone, that is those of us who have access to 21st century technology, has experienced the "uncanny valley". With the proliferation of cgi (computer generated imagery) in Hollywood, the ever advancing gaming industry, and the development of digital art in general, there are so many opportunities to be totally freaked out by how human and lifelike these digital images seem while knowing full well that they are not human at all. But for all their efforts, the animators of these digital likenesses can't seem to master natural movement or the windows to the soul, our eyes. As graphics technologies are more and more common, these digital representations become more familiar and thus less creepy, but the valley still exists. It is not getting any shallower, only narrower, so one miss step and down you go, avatar and all.

How then can we ever hope to achieve absolute realism in our video gaming experiences short of tuning them into live action games? I think that the Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have the answer in their 2009 could-have-been-good-if-they-didn't-waste-such-good-ideas-on-mass-produced-garbage movie Gamer. Why bother advancing digital representations when real life stand-ins are available? “Society,” one of the two majorly popular games in the Gamer world, is a clear tribute to the Sims or Second Life type games that are so popular in real life. This new take, however, makes the game infinitely more real without hazarding a leap over the uncanny valley, it uses real people. “Slayer” the other epic game in Gamer does the same thing with the even more popular first/third person shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo. While there are obviously huge moral and ethical dilemmas with this type of development, I am interested by this approach to, and attempt at, overcoming the uncanny valley.

The approach, replacing avatars with real people, seems extreme. I know that the gaming industry is hugely lucrative, but people controlling other people purely for their own leisurely enjoyment is crazy. That there are people who are willing to be controlled in this context I am certain, and that there are people willing to pay a good price to play/control them I am also certain, but that this would be considered on a massive scale and become socially acceptable I highly doubt.

As for this attempt at crossing the uncanny valley in gaming, I am fully on board with and strongly encourage any venture that is going to enhance my gaming experience, within reason of course. Even though this approach is ridiculous at best, it shows some creative thinking when it comes to the problem of the uncanny valley. It is this type of unusual consideration that has lead, and will continue to lead, to viable solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.

Just as an end note; I wonder what it would look like to see one of these real life game pieces lagged out, suffering a lag in its (his/her?) connection to the user. Would they be frozen on the spot twitching ceaselessly? Or would they mysteriously jumping from one spot to another as avatars often do when there is a connection problem?Would they just stop moving and pause with a distantly vacant look on their face, waiting for commands? Or, worst of all, would they be in some kind of schizophrenic state where control over the mind is jumping back and forth between the user and the person being used? This last possibility seems like it would have severe psychological repercussions on those unlucky ones who end up with a user that has a bad connection.

Manchine

One of the most postmodern aspects of cyberpunk sci-fi is the realignment of the man vs. machine binary. In older forms of sci-fi a major theme was the fear of humanity being overrun by their own technology, namely robots. In postmodern sci-fi, such as cyberpunk, this dichotomy is thrown out as there begins to be a blurring of humanity and technology. The rise of the cyborg, whether it’s a man with a robot hand like Luke Skywalker or a machine with skin like the Terminator, creates this blurring between humans and machines which makes the former binary between them obsolete and inapplicable to the themes of cyberpunk and other postmodernist sci-fi.

In Lia Hotchkiss’ article Still in the Game: Cybertransformations of the “New Flesh” in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, she addresses concerns over human/technology interface, a new concern of postmodernist sci-fi. Hotchkiss points out that this technology “on the one hand, offers release from physical limitation but, on the other, may come at the price of increasing corporate control of people’s lives and consumption by, not just of, that very technology” (18-19). I am interested in this idea that human technology interface not only changes how we consume technology, but that the technology also consumes us.

A few examples of this consumption by technology as a result of our consumption of technology include eXistenZ, The Matrix, and Gamer. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ features game pods that are not played via controller but instead they plug right into ports on the players’ backs. These game pods use energy from the people who are plugged into and playing it to power themselves. So while people are playing eXistenZ, consuming this technology, the game pods are sucking the energy out of the users, consuming them right back. There is a similar consumption of humans by technology in the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, released the same year as eXistenZ. In this film the robots have constructed an elaborate VR if you will, to occupy the minds of humanity while they are really harvesting energy from our bodies in reality. Again we are consuming technology, the elaborate VR is reality to virtually all of humanity, it is in turn using our energy to power itself and keep us subdued. The 2009 film Gamer shows people getting neurological injections of some microscopic technology that goes into your brain, copies your neurons, replicates itself, then eliminates all of the organic neurons it has just copied leaving only the techno neurons. This procedure allows them to play or be played in either of the two games that have seemingly taken over the world. The replication of, then elimination of organic material in our brains again illustrates consumption by technology that we are consuming.

The fear of technology as an other has been transformed into a fear of our interface with technology. This new fear is the product of our designing technology to be as human as possible in order to function well as part of us. This means, however, that the technology will function like us, it will consume in much the same way that we consume. The new sci-fi fear is not of technology enslaving humanity, but of technology taking over from within.

Project Natal: Rebirth

I recently watched a video on Youtube.com called E3 2009: Project Natal xbox 360 announcement. It is a sort of promotional video for Microsoft's latest technological advancement in the video gaming world. This new gaming technology is still very new, it was announced at the beginning of June 2009, which makes it that much more interesting. Immediately after I watched the videos, there are a few but I find the aforementioned video and E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo to be especially interesting, I thought about the early conceptions of VR and how this changes, or even brings back to life, VR.

I would argue that VR, as it was originally conceptualized, has shown a glimmer of potentiality and then all but disappeared. With Project Natal, however, there is new hope for VR. This new technology is able to recognize faces, voices, emotions (or at least the facial expressions of emotions), and body movement in a way that video gaming equipment has never before been able to. While it may not be able to re-arrange particles to create a VR world as complete as the holodeck on Star Trek, that is one in which there is physical interaction with the virtual simulation, Project Natal can still offer a higher level of interactivity than any video game apparatus ever. This new development could potentially become an entire room, much like the holodeck, in which the VR is shown on all surfaces where your physical person not only becomes the controller, as is the claim in the promotional videos for Project Natal, but is the main character. All the games would be first person experiences where your actual movements, reactions, and facial expressions control the virtual world that surrounds you. As Jason Sperb writes in his article Scarring the New Flesh: Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome:“The act of representation becomes inseparable from the act of being.” The person who plays in this apparatus is both themselves and their representation in the game. VR has risen from the dead, and again seems to be approaching possibility.

Consider this new VR(ish) potential with Sperb's description of 'the new flesh': “existence in a pure state of simulation and repetition.” I would argue that this new technology brings us closer to achieving “the new flesh” as Sperb sees it, falling short only in that this “pure state of simulation” does not yet involve total physical interaction. As with any video game, however, this one will also allow for endless repetition. I would also argue that the player of this new gaming system is subject to Deleuze's 'scar' metaphor which Sperb explains as “time presently having past,” in two ways. First, every time they play the game, excluding their first attempt, they have experience with the game that will change their game play, their present has a past in that game. Secondly, there is certainly a dependance upon physical capability for this type of gaming. This dependence will mean that even if they play the same game, their capability at one time will be different 25 or 30 years from now, if not sooner due to physical injury. I know that this time period would definitely render anything in the gaming industry all but obsolete, but suppose that this was the exception, we found that one guy who really loved Project Natal and never upgraded from the time he bought it at 30 to the time he played it after the onset of his arthritis at 51. Because he himself is his own physical representation, his present self in the game has a past outside of the game. His avatar will be scarred by the effects of time that are not necessarily relevant in the game. As Sperb says, “There are profound implications with juxtaposing the metaphors of Deleuze's 'scar' (time presently having past) with the mantra of 'the new flesh' (existence in a pure state of simulation ad repetition)” and I believe that these implications are present in Project Natal. Much like the case of Videodrome as seen by Sperb in his article, Project Natal will suffer from a scarring of the new flesh, but this will take the passing of time. This new advancement may lead to other gaming experiences that will not be simultaneously scarred, but it will undoubtedly fall victim to time.

Is Size Everything?

In "The Poetics of Augmented Space", Lev Manovich states that "the difference between whether we can think of a particular situation as an immersion or as augmentation is simply a matter of scale – the relative size of display" (79). He is basing his distinction between VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) on the size of screen that you are watching a movie or playing video games on. Going to a movie theater, watching movies or playing video games on a big screen TV basically immerses you in VR, while these same activities being conducted on smaller devices like PDAs (personal digital assistants), cell phones, or psps and gameboys, constitute AR. If AR is something that “may add additional information to our experience” and VR “may add an altogether different experience” then I would say that scale, or the relative size of display, is not the only distinction between AR and VR. It is perhaps not even the main distinction between the two.

At first I was in agreement with Manovich's assertion - I become very immersed in the cinematic experience, possibly even to the point of something I might accept as VR - until I considered the role of content in this distinction between VR and AR. A great example of the importance of content is the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Arguably one of the most unique cinematic experiences, this film is anything but a virtual reality. The real interest for this film is the highly interactive twist it adds to movie going. Regardless of the size of the screen, the audience is going to sing along, throw rice and toast, cover their heads with newspapers or party hats, ring bells and the list goes on, all of which are not acceptable behaviors in a movie theater. This show is often accompanied by a live cast acting on a stage in front of the screen, though this is not always the case. The point is that the content of the film is very interactive and this overrules any screen that tries to silence the audience and engulf their complete attention. This is a big screen event that is very much in the realm of AR and anything but VR.

Another example that size is not everything would be the common displays of public self-humiliation that result from cell phone, PDA, and hand held video-game use. I am not one to get anecdotal but it is very useful in illustrating this point. I have heard stories from a good number of my friends – keep in mind that I do not own any of the required gadgetry to suffer from this embarrassment so 'friends' is not a clever coverup to save face – where they have walked into things, tripped, missed bus stops or sat through entire lectures unaware of anything being said because they were too busy texting or playing chess on their i-phones. Chess is a great example of the importance of content because it does not require any cutting edge 3-D graphics or cool effects, it is simple and yet engaging and that is all it takes. Something does not have to be huge to capture your attention entirely, it just has to be something that appeals to you greatly.

While I would agree that a larger platform is more engaging, hence the constant complaints of patrons at the Empire 7 Cinemas in downtown Ottawa who are subjected to one of the horrendously small 'screening rooms' when what they paid for and wanted was the gargantuan screen that is expected of the cinematic experience, it is content and not the size of the screen that transforms any movie or game into VR, at least in the sense that Manovich explains VR.

Virtual Love

After seeing Lawnmower Man I have a new appreciation for both the representation of people living with mental disabilities as well as the progress of science fiction films. This is not to say that the themes of science fiction or the genre itself have improved, but the advancement of visual effects and perhaps an increase in the availability of larger budgets have greatly improved science fiction films as a whole since the painful virtual reality scenes of The Lawnmower Man. Now that I have addressed these two pressing issues I had with the film I shall move on.

I found the "love scene" between Jobe and that wealthy single woman with the lemonade very interesting. This scene brings me back to that section in N. Katherine Hayles' article, The Seductions of Cyberspace, that brings up the idea of "teledildonics" which Hayles has gotten from Howard Rheingold. Teledildonics is essentially a convergence of VR (virtual reality) and eroticism. There are some striking similarities between the apparatus Rheingold describes and that which is used in The Lawnmower Man.


The VR device in Rheingold's teledildonics requires that you "climb into a suitably padded chamber and put on your headmounted display". The need for padding is overcome by the suspension in giant gyroscopes, or "orbitron" as I have found it to be known from a google search, but both scenes involve the head mounted display. Before you can do this, however, you must "slip into a lightweight ... bodysuit". Anyone who has seen The Lawnmower Man undoubtedly remembers what the bodysuits looked like in the film, but just to be indulgent here is a reminder. You may describe them as "something like a body stocking, but with all the intimate snugness of a condom". Feel free to enlarge the image and see just how intimate these "body stockings" are with these fine actors' bulges. The final aspect of Rheingold's VR sex machine is "an array of intelligent effectors", a technology that does not yet exist, that line the inside of the body suit. As you can see these come in the form of fiber-optics and they are attached to the outside of the suit rather than within. This, I am sure, is strictly for the purpose of special effect coolness so that Jobe's suit can light up while he does his evil deeds in the shadowy darkness of night.


Now I am sure that teledildonics did not play a huge role in the design of the VR suits sported by Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey but the similarities are striking. Furthermore, the lawnmower man actually uses the VR device in the film for erotic purposes. While I am confident that the devout advocates of VR would like it to be otherwise, it seems that the pornography and VR industries are destined to be best friends. This was so beautifully sollidified for me upon my casual viewing of The Big Lebowski. Never did I suspect that I would find any connection between that work of comedy genius and teledildonics but there it was. Jeff Bridges, the Dude in this context, is conversing with Jackie Treehorn, played by Ben Gazzara, about the ransom money, the plot point that has brought them to talking, as well as the crappy porn that Treehorn is producing. This is when Treehorn lays out for the Dude what will be the future of the smut industry, "interactive erotic software ... 100% electronic". Rheingold, a VR guy, sees the potential (inevitable?) as does Jackie Treehorn, the porn guy, and so both sides agree, VR and erotica shall live happily ever after. That is unless, like the dude says, people decide to continue to "jerk off manually".


Or, of course, VR could never really take of, as I would say it has not, at least not anything near how it was expected to when The Lawnmower Man was made, and thus it would never be able to fully form this beautiful symbiont with pornography.

Which is more real?