Page 266 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 257
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of the unconscious, that is, of the difference between the repressed and the
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nonrepressed. The greatest joy of Videodesk (or Glowflow, 1969, Psychic
Space, 1971 and Metaplay, 1972 as prototypes to Videodesk) is to interrupt
the recognition project the user is practising. Erection of narcissistic
projection manifolds into the abysses of a mise-en-abyme that do not reflect
back the image but withdraws. A certain development can be seen from
change to surprise and finally to desistance. Engineer Krueger is searching
for the functional, ecological use of technology; the artist Krueger, then,
creates effects of withdrawal from these functions. A technological structure
can hold in itself different modes of use. On the introduction to “Artificial
Reality” he says “the computer should adapt to the human rather than the
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human adapting to the computer”.
Perhaps Krueger is right in believing that “the response is the
medium”: the structure is not media in itself, in the sense predicted by
Marshall McLuhan and Kittler. Technology does not adjust artistic
imagination; this imagination enters the determinations of technology.
Krueger says that the user is not in real interaction with the system – also this
relationship is fictioned. Homeopathic scenography is translated in the hands
of an artist into a hyperbological abyss, into something that Freud was not
able to comprehend in his system: the disruptive functions of modern art.
Within this apparatus of derealization art takes more than a simply
“secondary” function, that it has the power to confront us (only) with the real
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itself.
As with Krueger, other artists play with the user; one might think of
a 1995 work by Paul Sermon, The Tables Turned as much as Touch Me by
d’Urbano, both in a sense tintamarresques. Tintamarre, as posing through a
hole in the picture means a step away from the familiar paradoxically in the
tradition of the popular culture. Tintamarresque means not tragedy in a
traditional sense, but merely a carnival. In both example works the “actor”
partly disappears into the theatrical space through (technically produced)
masks. We can say that in tintamarresque this question concerns the
appropriation of the unthought, as Lacoue-Labarthe calls us for “exorcising
madness” as an abyss for a subject always to enter, instead of a narcissistic
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relation to what is seen. To describe this he uses the word “obliteration”.
The figure of the identification about to happen disappears in the manifold of
figures. Obliteration is the strategy of the thought, but the meaning of
obliterate is ambiguous: it means at once to efface and to surcharge
(superimpose). In each case, it is obviously a question of making an
inscription to disappear. A tintamarresque defers man: a masochistic pleasure
in losing yourself in an art of recognition. The movement that leads from
“madness” to the unthought is the same as that which leads from writing to
the unexpressed.