Digital Detail

Ted Colless, Head of Art History and Theory, VCA

A few years ago at the Biennale of Electronic Art, held in Perth, I sat in a darkened theatre watching a widescreen projection that resembled the famous psychedelic "stargate" sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s space opera 2001. What I was watching was Chad Davies’ work, Osmose, or more specifically I was watching an instance of it, more specifically than that I was watching a single performative interaction with the program. To the left of the screen was a shadow play, a silhouette of one of the many performers who was rigged inside a data suit, twisting and spinning like Geiger’s Alien trying to krump, as they navigated vertiginously through the work’s cyberspace. What was especially unnerving, as well as embarrassing, was that this was what I had done only half an hour before. No two trips through it could be identical. Each was a unique performance, and yet each had an undeniably generic appearance. Like a roller coaster ride. What I was seeing on the screen also had the piquancy of amateur pornography: I was looking at someone else’s unique subjective experience, their pleasure; someone else’s trip. Why did this seem odd? Why did it seem to be a moral as well as ontological transgression? A guilty pleasure? That exclusive domain of subjectivity was not only being shared but, like pornography, it was being traded as both the responsive image of desire and its stimulus.