Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017
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Paulsen, Kris. Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2017, 264 PP, Cloth ISBN: 9780262035729, Digital ISBN: 9780262338233, FROM $28.00 (US)
Reviewed by
Neuroscience Research Group, Laurentian University
I don’t know where this is going, but that’s where I’m headed. That’s my impression after reading Here/There, Kris Paulsen’s argument for rebooting ‘the index’ (more on this in a moment) as a means of “understanding mediated information, ‘digital doubt’, and experiences through virtual interfaces.”
An assistant professor of History of Art and Film Studies at Ohio State University, Paulsen tracks the genesis of telepresence, which “allows us to feel present – through vision, hearing, and even touch – at a remote location by means of real-time communication technology.”
In her discussion of seminal works of telepresence in the last century, Paulsen draws attention to how artists – some well-known others not so much – made prosthetic illusions that challenged a viewer’s ontology about interaction and influence in a mediated electronic space; broadcast television, for one, and its progeny continually shift, disappear, and reappear as one might expect of a river going underground and popping up in unexpected places – all of this has consequence, the artists cautioned. Subsequent improvement and novel applications of the televisual medium, they speculated, should not only inform a way of thinking, but form it as well; thus, Paulsen reasons, the newest digital simulacra calls for a return of the index as a reliable interface and sense-making tool.
Beep!
Some clarification on index as a hermeneutic (Paulsen’s argument to repurpose the 19th century tool of indexicality – pointing toward – a plank in Charles Sanders Pierce’s theory of semiotics): While ‘the index’ fell out of fashion with contemporary film criticism and Post Modern Theory (words only refer to themselves) it ought to be rehabilitated and made prominent today, if we’re to make sense of platforms such as VR (virtual reality). Paulsen doesn’t actually write this, but it’s inferred – especially in the final chapter and the epilogue.
If you’re working with, as I am, or affected by digital immersion and a medium that’s spherical and recursive and as perplexing as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s rant on what truth is these days, then my takeaway from Here/There might interest you. I see it on a tee shirt: “The interface is an index. The index is an interface.” In the near future, Paulsen’s motto could be as potent as Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”.
And what would the great communications theorist of the 20th century make of the newest digital technologies, collectively described as immersive media, that are nascent yet fully formed, and almost ready for primetime?
Paulsen does speak to how modalities of human perception have been tinkered with, and engaged, for instance, the sense of touch by rudimentary haptic devices, but she doesn’t go far enough (although she does a superb job of illuminating how military drone operators are psychologically ‘touched’ by the work they do).
I was puzzled by the absence of contemporary neuroscience in Here/There. Artists, such as myself, have used recent technological advances to bypass human modalities of perception and appeal directly to the brain. Psychotropics are no longer the drug of choice (sloppy as they are, in the sense that it’s like strapping yourself to a rocket, firing off into the wild blue yonder, and hoping for the best); they’re being set aside for targeted electromagnetic therapeutic devices, which can, and do, stimulate the human central nervous system.
That these electronic devices can couple with immersive media, such as a VR headset, aren’t a cause for alarm in my mind; however, they do propose several questions for big brain thinkers like Kris Paulsen: Are we – collectively as human beings – about to be segregated from a digital commons by another Act of Enclosure? What is ‘user agency’ and personal responsibility in a digital simulacrum that is an induced figment of the central nervous system? Does the cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Zizek have it right when he says, “Even if it didn’t happen, it’s true.” And what’s in store for a generation that cannot discriminate between personal ‘feelings’ and mediated sensations of presence that could be, or might not be authentic?