A Scanner Absurdly

The other day I came across an article in the Metro that appealed to my sense of the absurd (Rookie PC chases himself for 20min in CCTV bungle – Wednesday, 8^th February 2012). The article describes how a probationary plain clothes police officer was seen by a CCTV operator to be “acting suspiciously” in an area “that had [recently] suffered a spate of break-ins”. The officer was then contacted by the operator and asked to pursue the suspect, which he did for twenty minutes unaware that he was trying to pursue himself and unable to understand why, despite the fact that, as he was constantly being told by the operative, he was “on the heels of his prey”, he could see no sign of the fugitive.

I am reminded of a novel by Philip K. Dick, 1977’s A Scanner Darkly, made into a film in 2006 by Richard Linklater, in which an undercover drug enforcement officer is asked to follow and apprehend a suspected drug dealer by superiors who fail to realise that the drug dealer is the undercover persona of the police officer.  The novel, and subsequent film, through the metaphor of a fictional powerful psychedelic drug known as ‘Substance D’ or ‘Slow Death’, is a classic paranoid exploration on loss of identity and multiplicity of personality. A person, Dick is saying, is not a single coherent identity. We are each of us capable of being many different and often contradictory people depending on context and circumstance. The mask we wear at work is probably not the mask we wear in our own home, or with our own family, friends or acquaintances, and sometimes that contradiction forced on us by social conventions can have debilitating consequences to an individual’s sense of self.

The imaginary tale of Dick has a much darker and starker conclusion than the real life story in the Metro, which ends with a sergeant entering the CCTV control room and recognising the suspect and police officer to be the same person to much hilarity. But the story does highlight I feel how the world, with the aid of new technologies, has come to resemble a science fiction more absurd than anything invented by a novelist.   

Birth on Google Street View

In Germany the introduction of Google Street View has provoked an interesting response. As in other countries there are many people not happy about it. Numerous complaints have been made concerning the internet giants’ invasion into the German peoples’ public space. Some, however, have seen it as an artistic opportunity. As reported in the Observer on 28th November (Birth on Google Street View) some very striking images have been appearing on the German streets.

On Hubertusallee in the Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf a live birth can be witnessed. A woman in a purple dress lies on the pavement, her parted legs, knees up, angled away from the camera, a woman in black cradling her head while a man kneels in front of her holding a small baby aloft. Another man stands a little way off, his left arm raised, right hand to his ear speaking animatedly into a mobile phone. The image looks too clean and carefully composed to be real. The story informs us that no birth was ever reported on this street indicating that this is probably an elaborate piece of street theatre.

To me this looks like a new form of artistic intervention, the clever utilisation of a new tool to create memorable images and disseminate them to as wide an audience as possible. Apparently this is not an isolated incident. Many such scenes have been appearing all over Germany. This is another example of how the internet is changing the creative industries in ways which its designers could not possibly have foreseen. It is also an example of how artists (because I consider the anonymous culprits to be artists) continue to respond to new technologies in imaginative and unexpected ways in order to create new forms of expression and new forms of art.

This is one of those moments where, as one interested in issues of contemporary art, I can only look on in admiration at the intelligence and subversive wit of these performances and say humbly: I wish I had thought of that.

California Uber Alles

Now, if there is one place on this earth where one can avoid the authentic, California is it. It is the single most unreal place on the planet. I was recently reading about some interesting new developments in gaming technology being developed in Silicon Valley. It appears that the next step in the evolution of 3D entertainment is fully interactive projections. In the ‘90’s the talk was of Virtual Reality, the fully immersive experience whereby the ‘viewer’ enters a computer simulated world. Well, now all the talk is of digital simulacra entering the ‘real’ world of physical reality. Imagine if you will sitting outside a coffee shop with a friend, maybe in the Mission district of San Francisco, when a character from a game you have been playing walks up to you on the street, to all intents and purposes ‘real’. Your reaction to this intrusion depends upon the game. The character could be an agent sent to assassinate you, in which case you dive under the table and shoot him before he shoots you - similarly if it is a war game. On the other hand it could be a mystery game and your task is to discourse with this character to learn a clue which could lead you to the next level of the game. The character could even be an avatar controlled by a rival game player living perhaps in Beijing.

The possibilities for this kind of technology are, like much of California, literally mind-bending. Taken to its logical conclusion we could well find ourselves in a world where all boundaries between physical and digital reality are removed. We won’t know who we are talking to, working for, living with, sleeping with, whether they are ‘real’, digitally programmed, or the avatar of another. If we are to believe Californian software developers our future could be the realisation of a mass schizophrenic delusion. Could be fun.