Page 244 - Cyberculture and New Media

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as mediated and as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. The logic of
hypermediacy, in its full form, means logic of (formal) oscillation.
Richard Lanham calls this a tension between looking at and looking
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through. He sees it as a feature of 20 century art in general and digital
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representation in particular. A viewer confronting a collage, for example,
oscillates between looking at the patches of the paper and paint on the surface
of the work and looking through to the depicted objects as if they occupied a
real space beyond the surface. What for Lanham characterizes modern art is
an insistence that the viewer keep coming back to the surface of, in extreme
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cases, an attempt to hold the viewer at the surface indefinitely. He regards
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collage as the “central technique of the 20 century mainstream, which has
often created heterogeneous spaces and made viewers conscious of the act of
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representation”.
To fulfil this thought, Lev Manovich pinpoints the oscillation
protocol in a same manner as does Peggy Phelan. Manovich says the
production machinery can be revealed next to the creation of an illusion, and
the cyclical shifts between illusion and its deconstruction neither distract nor
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support in giving a reality effect. Phelan, from a feminist perspective, citing
extensively Lacan, says that the real is read through representation, and
representation is read through the real. Each representation relies on and
reproduces a specific logic of the real; this logical real promotes its own
representation. The real partakes of and generates different imagistic and
discursive paradigms. Phelan gives an example: a legal right in which
concepts such as “the image” and “the claimant” are defended and decided
through recourse to pre-established legal concepts such as copyright,
trademark, property, the contract, and individual rights. Within the physical
universe, the real of the quantum is established through a negotiation with the
limitations of the representational possibilities of measuring time and space.
She continues, within Lacanian psychoanalysis the real is full being itself.
Within the diverse genre of autobiography, the real is considered the
motivation for self-representation. The discourse of Western autobiography
and psychoanalysis are alike in believing their own terms to be most
comprehensive, the most basic, the most fundamental route to establish or
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unsettling the stability of the real. What Phelan thinks here is that
autobiography is an artistic method for shattering the stable real as a resistant
mode to something we can consider as “onto-typology”, a haunt for the truth
of illus
Donna Haraway postulates that in Renaissance visual technology,
form and narrative implode, and both seem merely to reveal what was already
there, waiting for unveiling or discovery. This epistemology underlies in
Haraway’s eyes the European-indebted sense of what counts as reality in the
culture, believed by many of its practitioners, to transcend all culture, called
modern science. Reality, as Westerners have known it in story and image for