Dis-oriented - a microfiction

This story owes itself to a professor (a great professor!) who fell from grace in my checkbook, fell from grace because he recommended I attend a guest lecture on cryptocurrency which truthfully left me totally disoriented, knotted, stupider, weepy – grew me thin under acroamatic confusion, insecure about my mental horse-handling, changed my life for the sucky worse. I draggled myself to this below-par lecture, at this professor’s square-meal-hearty recommendation, his council, what a disappointment, a cyclopean waste of an hour, still frankly fuming. 

I showed up thinking the guest speaker was ultra savvy, terrific, totally aces – post-lecture I thought he was an unlucky blast, a blight, a literal curse, the opposite of a four leaf clover, was hating this guy so much, mentally writhing, still chewing on what went down that day, the day I became permanently disoriented, near beer directionless, like permanently just-took-a-twirl, all of this metaphorical doggerel specifically relating to economics and business and investing and my understanding of them.

The topic of the lecture, already mentioned, was cryptocurrency, which I found to be confusing and non-intuitive. 

The guest speaker kept repeating that using bitcoin was like mining gold, that it required no central government apparatus, that the answer is mining but that mining doesn’t actually create bitcoin, rather it creates rewards, which I think you’re meant to give to friends, family and benefactors. That it’s resource-intensive because it castrates computers. It somehow relates to hash browns, you’re meant to pay out of pocket, and it’s normal to feel hopeless around bitcoin. It relies on a muscular phallocracy, but also men can wear skirts in 2017 and somehow this relates to bitcoin. Bitcoin effluvium is being studied for its effects on the lungs. Recently people keep asking what kind of art should be made in times like these, and the artists have responded by making art about bitcoin, and the internet, and blockchain, especially art that says the word ‘algorithm’ and then ‘skidoo’ and then there’s an explosion, and that’s when the bitcoin is made, or how the art is made, depending on who’s doing the stuff with the bitcoin hash brown value. 

Since it was “explained” to me, I’ve yet to regain confidence or compass in my intellectual capacity. My prior understanding of business, economics, and entrepreneurship has been expunged in favor of shadow doubts – I was supposed to become a spoiled fat city fortunate investor, and now I fear I’ve sailed too near the wind, and find myself totally disoriented, irritated, and with a great deal of antagonism towards the drippy guest speaker who vampired my self-confidence out of me that day. I also feel like I want to rhetorically insult my professor, whose judgement I used to trust like a sling, who told me not to sleep on the opportunity to see this guy speak, and now, oh mercy, I’m permanently confused, and there’s a heliotropic curvature to my cranium, I feel like I literally don’t have a backbone anymore. 

Can’t even get the image out of my head. The drippy guest speaker sitting like a bed-sitter at the front of the cosmically hot egg-shaped spare lecture room with big crystalline blinds covering the one window. And me, having shown up with my back-combed hair and yellow shirt, a leather workbook, expecting to learn something, never should have gone.


A Fragment of Self

An essay I wrote about the violence of VR fantasies is about to appear in Isthisit Issue_03, and after telling you to consider pre-ordering a copy, if you’re into it, if you want, I thought I’d reconstitute it as a blog post, with a few notes at the bottom, see below. 

A Rupture of Self

text by me, Hannah Nussbaum

You’re caught somewhere between the corporeal world and a digital landscape that’s been coded up and rendered for you by a 3D animation studio called Masters of Pi. Your biometrics rely on your successes or failures in a set of immersive games, and the games are sponsored by brands that exist in limbo, somewhere between virtual entities, and non-virtual peddlers of terrestrial products that you actually eat and shit out in the non-virtual world. In this world, there are a cornucopia of ways to indulge your desires in hyperreal detail: you and your avatar are in a schizophrenic union, and the darkest bonne bouches of the internet are available to stream in the round. William Gibson probably already told us this story: the one where immersive digital experiences gamify life. Life becomes an imbricated video game with incredibly high stakes, and pleasure and leisure become the Purge, only harmless because its only a digital simulation. 

In Azeroth, the mythical setting in World of Warcraft, digital currency is currently worth more than Venezuela’s bolívar. Does that count as virtual reality? When digital trappings permeate real space, we’re rendered avatars even when we step outside of the network. A collision of wet and dry takes place – synthetic emulsifiers rub vegetal and digital together. When you’re virtually online, offline, are you still an avatar? Are you accountable? Does hiding-behind-your-avatar become the next tax loophole, honorable discharge, etcetera?  

Beth Coleman conducted extensive interviews with a virtual Cannibal, Gy. Gy is a French white male adult who participates in gynophagia sex play – that is, violent virtual sex-play that ends in (virtual) death and (virtual) cannibalism – in European Second Life. His tendencies and pleasures provoke speculative meta-ethics, ‘in terms of what may actually be done to another person (legally and morally).’ Cannibalism is allowed on the net, because what does it mean to virtually eat someone who is only a proxy of themselves? One can also assume that participation is consensual, although consent is literally never as simple as I brought myself here of my own volition. full stop. Regardless, a virtual representation of a taboo ritual becomes ethically irrelevant for existing legal infrastructure when its being simulated. This feels like a pure expression of the way in which virtual prosthesis still claims the status of a ghost limb, when it wants to. It’s just a game is sometimes true, sometimes just a violently convenient alibi, more and more literally a category error. When pores between the screen and ‘offline’ are more like portals, when do video games and interactions that were borne-digital slip into life? So GamerGate looms large in this conversation: on the net until it isn’t. The larger point here: as wet offline life rubs closer and closer to dry online life, at what point can you enact your cannibalistic fantasies on the net, and still continue to compartmentalize your wet and dry selves? We move towards a new sense of sensuous geography.That was my avatar, not me.   

Roy Ascott asks us to imagine three VRs: Virtual Reality, Vegetal Reality (biohacking and technological instruments that interface with DNA) and Validated Reality (‘common sense’). He asks us to beat our brains over what he calls a ‘Biophotonic Flux’ – to “imagine a technology of the mind that allows you to become immersed in a vast database of universal knowledge, one that reaches deep into the neuronal zones, cuts through the layers of inhibition laid down by centuries of cultural conditioning, religious prejudice, and political repression.” He’s fantasizing about a thick futurity – again that word imbrication: said of the scaly covering of reptiles and fishes, of leaf-buds, the involucre of Compositæ. Once ontologically disparate layers of digital, DNA, and ‘everyday sensory reality’ will fuse like scales on a fish in our hybrid horizon. What then will the avatar imply? A bio-hacked avatar in an immersive virtual setting practicing biophotonic cannibalism, for fun. When DNA enters the network, and neural technology interfaces with virtual reality, compartmentalizing our avatars from ourselves may be a rupture we can no longer afford – or one that leaves us indifferent, affectless, traumatized: ‘Whoever turns into a swan, or a thing, is left with their abject original being inside.’ 

1) read this article in Spike Magazine by Dean Kissick. He really nicely describes the space between avatar and self as “the horrendous clinch.” This got me thinking about the clinch narrowing as virtual technology becomes more salient. Like, at what point can you stop differentiating between yourself and your avatar, particularly when space between those two selves explodes when augmented reality enters and interacts with “real” life. Can your avatar act like an asshole, but you’re just, like, regular you? 

2) P. Brey asked questions about the ethics of Representation and Action in Virtual Reality in 1999 - interesting if you’re interested, obviously dated (but kind of cool for that reason) and topical to my writing. 

3) Why VR probably won’t be “the ultimate empathy machine” for woman - Excerpt from the Nation article which I think is very very good: 

There is a strong continuity between the physical and digital worlds. Nick Yee, a cyberpsychologist, refers to the bleeding-through of the physical into the digital—and vice versa—as the “Proteus effect.” An avatar’s appearance, he posits, influences how we behave when we don that digital body, just as a leather jacket may inspire a combative demeanor, or a polo shirt a prim one. According to Yee’s research, that affect in turn bleeds into our IRL personae.

Endnotes

Coleman, Beth. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, 2011. (Cambridge, MIT Press), pp. 82.

Roy Ascott, ‘Biophonic Flux,’ 2003, http://www.academia.edu/1081142/Biophotonic_Flux 

Ed Atkins, in an interview with Chisenhale Gallery, discussing his 2012 exhibition Us Dead Talk Love  -  http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/images/EAtkins_Interview.pdf




Keyword: Cipher

In which Hammie considers the word Cipher

Cipher is a very noir word with a certain amount of sex appeal because it brings to mind swarthy code-cracking strangers or Francis Bacon doing steganography (my type). Cipher is also a generous word – it has at least seven definitions – and a currently a la mode word – it has less than six degrees of separation from hacking, hacktivism and digital activism, as its contemporary usage often describes an algorithmic method for performing encryption and decryption on the net.
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It’s a word that started out meaning very little, with an etymology that leads us back to nothing, zilch, goose egg, void, and zero; it’s the grandchild of the Sanskrit name śūnya, literally meaning ‘empty,’ and later the Arabic çifr, used to describe the arithmetical symbol ‘zero’ or ‘nought.’ It moved through medieval Latin: cifera, Spanish: cifra, on through Old French: cyfre, along the way retaining its gist of zero-ness, but also graciously opening up its usage to apply to all numeral figures, then more generally to describe any set of characters with symbolic or hieroglyphic functions. In the nineteenth century, a weatherman in Cincinnati used it to describe the zero-point on a thermometer, indicating its persisting allegiance to zero – and the likelihood of a raw evening.
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By the sixteen hundreds, Cipher was used most commonly in its sense of being a symbolic string of characters, or a code – one used to conceal a message with a key required to unlock it. Later, as computation developed, cipher took on a technical meaning: an algorithmic series of steps used to encrypt digital information. Today the usage of cipher enlists both technical and non technical definitions. Its hybridity reminds us how intuitively alike language and mathematics are; it’s used by some writers as a big-hammer style replacement (but not a synonym for) metaphor, and by white-hat digital activists to describe a computational tool used to convey a message in a way that circumvents digital surveillance. And it’s also used, increasingly by new-media-focused scholars and critics, with a bent somewhere in the middle: as an amphibious term triangulated by proxy, metaphor, and encryption, usually to describe a set of aesthetic choices that exist to translate something absent, either a future or a past that is unavailable for literal use this instant. Its zero origin lurks beneath the surface in this contemporary usage; it describes something that is not present – a zero – but that may multiply in a teratological futurity. 

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Andrew Norman’s review of Wyatt Niehaus’s first solo show for DIS magazine describes the exhibition’s content – eight C-prints depicting car interiors and a video televising their entirely robotic production process – as functioning to highlight the absent laborer in the contemporary ‘smart’ robotic assembly line. So the exhibition suggests, the thickening layers of code written by machines for machines render cars a distant derivative of human labor, mediated by numerical strings, or ciphers, which are increasingly not written for human comprehension. Norman speculates that the topmost layer of production – automobile R&D – may be the next stage to be swallowed up by ‘smart’ technology, wondering ‘what if this cipher were to move up a level?’. Cipher here takes on a multi-functional usage, referring to the new ‘smart’ software being used in the industry – the ‘dark language’…never intended to be read by a person’ – but also referring to the broader symbolic value of the installation: the installation acts as a cipher for a certain set of ideas about the future. 

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This future-speculative quality of cipher also appears in a Frieze op-ed written this June: Rachel Marsden describes the narrative around Hong Kong that emerges in a group show of Hong Kong artists: ‘As 2047 draws closer, when the ‘one country, two systems’ deal between Hong Kong and China expires, ‘From Ocean to Horizon’ attempts to construct an anti- or apolitical state of being, as a cipher for an unknown future’. Cipher here acts as encryption of something to come; as placeholder for currently inscrutable space or characters. 

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Perhaps the most hybrid and etymologically unifying application of cipher is the Xenofeminist usage of it in cultural theory and aesthetics. Cipher is used in a way that reunites its original meaning of zero with its evolved meaning of acting as a code or cryptogram. Amy Ireland prefaces a recent essay for e-flux – in which she presents the ideas of Cyberfeminist scholar Sadie Plant and considers the molecular potential of a bio-hacked and bootstrapped female body of the future – with a quote from ‘Amphibious Maiden,’ the 1998 cybernetics speculative fiction: ‘This sex which was never one is not an empty zero but a cipher. A channel to the blank side, to the dark side, to the other side of the cycle’. Cipher here is enlisted as a multitool. It is zero; woman as lack of phallus; void. But it is ‘not an empty zero,’ because it is also a code, a set of signs, a lexicon which intimates the production of something in the future – for Plant, ‘cyberfeminism is received from the future.’ Here, Cipher is zero as much as it is a constellation of ideas and signs that need to be cracked open. 

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The uptick in use of cipher in contemporary art criticism and fields like cultural studies has supplanted the (observable) declining popularity of the term metaphor, perhaps because where metaphor has a certain clunkiness that appeals to an oversimplified ontology, cipher has the texture of actually bringing the thing being alluded to into being. Metaphor, ironically, perhaps feels too literal for contemporary writers, too dismissive of the potential to actualize the absent information encoded. Whereas cipher, a code with productive capacity, feels more like a portal. 


1. OED, Cipher, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/33155, [accessed 23 September 2017].
2. Andrew Norman, ‘Discerning the Darkness: Wyatt Niehaus’s ‘Lights Out’’, DIS magazine, http://dismagazine.com/blog/65768/discerning-the-darkness-wyatt-niehauss-lights-out/ [accessed 24 September  2017]. 
3. Norman, ‘Discerning the Darkness: Wyatt Niehaus’s ‘Lights Out’’, in reference to Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Uncreative Writing
4. Rachel Marsden, ‘On Shaky Ground’, Frieze, https://frieze.com/article/shaky-ground, [accessed 24 September 2017]. 
5. Xenofeminism refers to a cybernetic feminist ‘coalition with the belief that “Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role’. Labor Cuboniks, ‘Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation’, XF Manifesto, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#zero/3 [accesed 24 September 2017]. 6.  Amy Ireland, ‘Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come’, e-flux, Journal #80 - March 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/, [accessed 23 September 2017] (Section 2, Women). 

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Using Format