IRC-Galleria

“It is not only the smart devices, which strongly affect our state of mind. Apart from internet, also much simplier tools affect to individuals strongly, making them enter a certain state of mind, which can also be understood as virtual:“...when reading a book, you are alone and in a focused state of mind. And in a conventional exhibition, you wander alone from one object to the next, equally focused—separated from the outside reality, in inner isolation.” (quoted in Groys, 2009; pg. 25)

In the 1960’s Jean Baudrillard, among many others, theorized the concept of representation (for which he used a term simulacrum) in the sphere of society, which he saw as the outcome of his contemporary technological innovations and capitalism. Baudrillard’s main question was, if the simulation could replace the real, which had already stopped existing—or if simulation was all there was in the beginning. (Baudrillard, 3) In his point of view, the contemporary consumer society itself is a product of simulations; however, he speaks on a rather metaphorical level and does not in detail point to specific media apart from television, but his statements are fairly connectable to the internet as a virtual platform, which similarly transmits also the replicative abilities of photography. He writes: “A simulation that can last indefinitely, because, as distinct from "true" power—which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake—it is nothing but the object of a social demand, and thus as the object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption. (Baudrillard, 26) Even though the internet functions in a more interactive way than for example television did at the time, by providing its users to have a stronger effect on the content and delivery, it shares similar values, characteristic for capitalism. These qualities are examined more closely in the next chapter.
Brian Massumi, a contemporary theorist, sees simulacra as a schizophrenic symptom of the current society, likewise Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, but he distances himself from negativity, attempting to give more constructive, Deleuzian views on the matter: “The challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of representation once and for all.” (Massumi, 7) He refers to Ridley Scott’s famous 1982 film Blade Runner to simply illustrate the concept: “The dominant replicant makes a statement to the man who made his eyes that can be taken as a general formula for simulation: if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.” (ibid, 3) The major error Massumi finds in Baudrillard’s thesis is that he does not take into account or question the “reality of the model”, which he then approaches with concepts introduced in the works of Deleuze and Guattari: “The alternative is a false one because simulation is a process that produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis of the real. [...] Every simulation takes as its point of departure a regularized world comprising apparently stable identities or territories. But these "real" entities are in fact undercover simulacra that have consented to feign being copies” (ibid)
In today’s ‘(post) contemporary condition’, a few decades after Massumi’s statement, when everything from everyday-objects to larger entities are increasingly connected to the internet, it is intrinsically impossible to go against the development and go back to the ‘old reality’, longed by Baudrillard. Medicine for the schizophrenia is now more like a distant, utopian dream, disastrous for the existence of the Western world -- we have not only become dependent on non-material networks and digital tools, but we already have a generation that does not remember the ‘offline ages’ at all. Kenneth Goldsmith writes: “Walking away is not an option. We are not unplugging anytime soon. Digital detoxes last as long as grapefruit diets do; transitional objects are just that.” (Goldsmith, 22) and adds that we should instead begin to explore the opportunities, even celebrate the ‘time wasted’ on the internet. (ibid) Ultimately, for certain contemporary theorists, such as for Hito Steyerl, it is clear that the ‘reality’ itself is postproduced and rendered by the virtual: “Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other.” (Cornel & Hartel, 444)
Susan Sontag closes her iconic 1977 oeuvre ‘On Photography’, written before the era of digitalization, with certainly similar concerns: “We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.” and finds that the long-desired magics of photography “have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.” (Sontag, 140-141) As the reference to Steyerl hints, Sontag’s verbalizations in today’s era of artificial intelligence, 2pac-holograms and deep fakes could be perceived as outdated or self-evident, but her foundational thesis is up to date. In the digital age, images (not only photographs) could be seen as consuming the ‘real’ much more effectively; ultimately in the case of social media, which in its foundation is based on the concept of representation.
In social media, shared photographs as representations are coequally delivered over the internet by the representations of the original subjects; however, any kind of delivered content can have a certain social effect towards the deliverer, also outside the virtual reality (assuming that the deliverer is somehow identified). The interactive qualities of social media makes evident that the notion of ‘real’ has crystallized, and that the online representation can become realer, or at least more socially relevant, than the physical, offline original. Today, partially because of digitalization and the internet, also the way we look at photographs has changed. Nathan Jurgenson writes: “Everything is informational, always seeing and being seen, seeing as if being seen, being seen as if seeing. The line between what is media and what isn’t is harder to locate.” (Jurgenson, 44) and with a reference to Gilles Deleuze’s earlier accounts on technology, he argues that “Social media is real life partly because real life is always mediated through the logics and technologies of human habit, interest, power, and resistance.” (ibid, 43) Alike Brian Massumi’s optimist viewpoint and the thesis of Hito Steyerl, Jurgenson underlines that it is no longer even important to talk about the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ in the context of social media and digital tools, because the digital world is as ‘real’ as the ‘analog’ world: “We live in a mixed, augmented reality in which materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the offline and the online all intersect. It is incorrect to say “IRL” to mean offline: the Internet is real life. It is the fetish objects of the offline and the disconnected that are not real.” (ibid, 64)