I was driving around the network of Doña streets and turned onto one of the smaller ones off Laurel Canyon. This is a suburban neighborhood in the hills of Los Angeles. The smooth black streets that crawl up the mountainside intersect rows of houses and I see it. Across from me at the far end of the street was a cul-de-sac but not that – towering behind these houses and streets, hugging the side of the mountain was Mulholland. I slowed my car to crawl. The steep drop-off from Mulholland to down below, to these suburban houses is filled with dry brush and tan rocks scattered with the occasional bush tree. It’s this steep vertical gap that caused me either to stop my being or become completely aware of it. I leaned forward so that I could look up through the windshield. In the middle of the street, I watched the cars coming around the bend.
I had a technological impulse to recreate this scene in my computer, in the 3d software called Maya. An immediate reaction of my body to mediate this experience and give it its own body.
Several months later I find myself with the three-dimensional models of suburban houses, sage brush, rail guards, Mulholland, and the other components of the scene completed along with another recreation of the First Avenue Deli down the street. My eyes wander away from my computer screen to the photo I took inside the deli at the moment I had the impulse to recreate it. A real photo, taken by a human. Why did I have that impulse? Looking back at the recreation on my screen I realized it was lacking weight. It was missing something that paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs have. It was weightless. Without a past. Without accidents like dripping paint or charcoal dust or physical human finger prints. The work is without noise.
Is it a cultural lack of appreciation? Is it just missing gravity? Or is it missing a body? Or rather, it has infinite possibilities of having body and therefore it is unpredictable. The screen and projector can show anything, but a painting is frozen. The deli I made was missing a static body. What is body? The body is the apparatus that we experience the outside world by. That mode of experience is changing from a contained, visible body to a disjointed body. To understand my body better I turn toward mediations of itself. I look back to years ago when I began playing online computer games. There I noticed while I was playing my body completely fell away, out of attention. And my new body, somewhere in between the virtual world and the real world was created.
Later, I started to involuntarily confuse my body with what I've heard called 'ghost vibrations.' I would feel a vibration on my leg and reach for my phone only to realize I didn't have it with me or there was no alert. I am moving into a different existence – one where our appendages are equally technological as a computer or a car; likewise, our technologies are equally appendages as our arms or eyes.
Jared and I are sitting in the kitchen. A muffled cellphone rings from the other room. Jared asks, “Is that you?” I paused at you, “No.” No, it was not me, nor was it my cellphone, but maybe I should start considering my cellphone to be a part of me. I began noticing similar confusions in others that pointed to a shared confusion of reality.
We were taking digital photos to celebrate my sister's birthday. We all looked at the picture afterward and one of my sister's friends exclaimed, “Ugh, I've been meaning to fix my hair, it's orange!” Everyone agreed that her hair isn't actually orange in reality – it is orange because of saturation levels and white balance in the camera. These facts were irrelevant to this girl, the way she looked in a photograph on Facebook was as important as the way she looked in real life after all it's one of the primary ways that she sees herself.
And finally the GPS represents the place as a list of directions and turns. I find that I have a hard time remembering how I got to a particular place if I use GPS. I do remember looking it up. The simulation of the experience has begun to replace the real one.
The map is not the territory! Meaning a the thing is separate from a description,
representation, reaction, or any abstraction of it. The concept was popularized by a Polish-American scientist and philosopher named Alfred Korzybski but it's been a primary concern of artists for some time, most famously Rene Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. These theories were developed in the early 20th century but they are extremely relevant now in New York with the dispersal of images interjected into everyday lives if not the LED display on the side of a bus, maybe your iphone's gps and networking capabilities. These map-derived experiences, which are heavily mediated, are so integrated into everyday territories that immediate experience is driven farther away from traditional notions of concrete reality. The result is a space whose reality is difficult to parse because it is disjointed. Immediate experience is as important as 'objective' scientific and logical knowns in creating a reality, a perspective. I do not feel disdainful toward the computer or other technologies because those experiences are just as real as any real experience. After all, we cannot escape our own perspective all this information passes through us. Therefore, I question that map-territory relationship that expects a separation between the map and the territory. When the map begins to successfully stand-in for its territories, like the iphone and physical space, like losing my physical body to a virtual body while playing online games. The map is literally sitting in for the territory and I am experiencing the map as a territory. My body is the contact point of many realities. How can they all be considered separate?
The game world is a map of reality, with simulated physics, gravity, wind, landscape, figures, and two point perspective. This map, the game world, provides a territory, a normative daily life world, a body that we can digest because it removes it from normative daily life and reduces its complexity substantially. This map is then layered, most overtly with GPS, in real time on top of the territory. In a similar way, past experiences stored as memories are layered onto territories in every day life. Imagine living inside your own memories. Would you be able to intake new experiences? So a map, whether in the form of memories or technological data, are mediating our world as we intake experience. Is there a competition between memory and other technologies when filtering our every day experiences and creating our own perspective? Is there a way to integrate human memory with other technologies of mediation and mapping? I just hope that the increased technological presence doesn't lead to a lack of acceptance of new, accidental experiences. No paint drips, no charcoal smudges, no gravity. Like living in a place with no noise.
It is less complex to solve the problems of body in my artworks because they are maps. My solution to give a body to the files containing three-dimensional models is to print them on newsprint. You can see the life, or rather the decay, after several days especially if it is left in the sun. This body of newsprint has changed my experiential reality of the original 3d file. It is no longer a world inside the screen but an image in the real world; my computer is no longer strictly a technology but an appendage. Therefore it does not need to be held in regards to a technological accomplishment but on an equal plane as a drawing on newsprint and the control exerted in my hand while doing the drawing. Now, the old concept of body is the map and the actual territory includes computer, cellphone, car, etc. Body is now composed of disparate elements.
It is an experiment to see whether these thoughts about technologies, bodies, and realities holds true to the body of an idea. I still wonder why, after acquiring and learning all this technology, we still have to lock something down, map it, and print it out to understand it.
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