Avatar Emergency. Gregory L. Ulmer
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strongly, the image is a construct produced by the interaction of the equipment with our embodied condition. The theoretical basis for this insight comes from a revisionist reading of Bergson, partially rescued from Deleuze’s first retrieval of this philosopher for contemporary media theory.
The current usage of “avatar” is confused with “brand,” but “brand” is only my self-promoting ego. In electracy brand is augmented by avatar, beyond the pleasure principle. In the electrate image the individual body functions as filter, selecting from a flood of raw data what counts as real. Moreover, the selection is made coherent, given order, by an underlying intuition of unity that is the subject “I.” This unity is fundamentally affective (feeling, not emotion). Affect is distinguished, given its own modality, separate from and equal to the other faculties or virtues (in our terms): concept and percept. Hansen puts together this theory with the features of VR equipment and artists who experiment with and display this embodied affective ordination, such as Jeffrey Shaw. “By transforming the body into a screen that literally ‘selects’ images by absorbing them, Shaw’s environments institute a strict proportional correlation between action and perception: without the activity of the body within the space of the image, there would simply be no perception at all” (New Philosophy 54). In Bodies in Code, Hansen makes a distinction between a person’s body image and body schema (mirror perception versus proprioception), and the importance of the latter for “mixed reality,” that outlines a possible technical instatiation of concept avatar in digital media. Body image is projected as brand; body schema maps database information on triggers interfacing self and brand with collective knowledge (avatar).
The purpose of flash reason is to develop the rhetorical practice that allows users within the apparatus to take full advantage of the equipment and forms becoming available for everyday use, as described by Manovich and Hansen. This selective filtering of embodiment is made available for ontology in the equipment, just as alphabetic writing made analytical thinking available for ontology in literacy. What the written verb “to be” is to literacy, digitally designed emblems are to electracy. Literacy augmented the experience of idea (thinking); electracy augments the experience of affect (feeling). Concept avatar thinks feeling (the goal of Proust’s novel). Hansen notes that assigning affect its own modality brings forward for further application the experience of vitality, the intensity of a satisfaction in its own right (the value termed “life” made reflexive through avatar). Avatar personifies living. A relevant anecdote reinforcing this point is that of a seminal moment in the creative development of Bill Viola’s aesthetics, when he viewed a scene of a children’s birthday party filmed using high-speed equipment that produced a saturation of information (384 fps). “Viola recounted being dumbstruck by his observation of joy literally growing and moving through the faces of his subjects … even in a still image [from this footage] there was not only an excess of emotion, but a certain temporal expansion of it beyond the confines of what was captured in the image” (Hansen, New Philosophy 260).
The most relevant part of Viola’s discoveries for avatar is not that new media actually has the capacity to expand the temporality of a present “now,” but that emotion has its own temporality, or exists outside of time (264). The answer to the Internet Accident threatened in the conditions of collapsed dimensionality described by Virilio, is to ontologize this detour, this alternative register of emotion, from within which an electrate deliberative reason may be possible. Within the fully formed apparatus this modality constructs a new dimension of reality, supplementing the realities already informing our world, with unforeseen (unforeseeable) consequences for civilization. To access this dimension for judgment both individual and collective requires avatar simulation today, just as it did in bygone wisdom traditions. Avatar is the practice of netizens that remains for the most part implicit in the theoretical conversation to date. AE’s purpose, then, is to explore a category system for “new media.” Our experiment complements Hansen’s and Manovich’s accounts in adding the features for a skill set the electrate user will internalize in order to reason with an affective metaphysics, operating database feeds at light-speed in a dromosphere.
The debts incurred during the research process are numerous. Students at the University of Florida have contributed to Imaging Florida, the EmerAgency, and seminars exploring choragraphy, heuretics, and grammatology. Students and colleagues in the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland) have been a valuable resource for experimentation. My colleagues in the Florida Research Ensemble have been a continuing source of inspiration and help: thanks especially to John Craig Freeman and Barbara Jo Revelle. Colleagues and students in the Rhetorics, Communications, and Information Design program at Clemson University are making an original contribution to the heuretics of electracy. The Office of Research, Technology, and Graduate Education at the University of Florida supported the project with a grant from the Opportunity Fund. The Humanities Institute at the University of Florida funded a conference (February 2007), organized by Kate Casey-Sawicki, bringing together colleagues participating in the listserv Invent-L, where many of the ideas expressed here were first aired. Some of the sections of this study are adapted from essays published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Discourse, Pre/Text, and in two books published by Routledge Press: Ecology, Writing Theory and New Media, and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Thanks to Mark Amerika for including me in the online part of Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press). Special thanks to my wife, Kathy, for her support and understanding, and to my sons, Tyson and Leland, for keeping me humble. The ideas outlined here will continue to evolve in my blog, http://heuretics.wordpress.com.
Avatar Emergency
The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
1 Prudence
Decision
In electracy a new identity behavior and experience are emerging within the tradition of avatar. To understand the full potential of avatar as subject formation (supplementing spirit and self) requires that we go beyond the narrow, partial borrowing of the term in contemporary parlance, to review the new demands placed upon the subject in electracy. A detour through Nietzsche provides an orienatation to the question, undertaken from my own perspective. The first section of Ecce Homo is entitled “Why I Am So Wise,” uttered in a complex tone. Didactic, a lesson on “wisdom,” concerning how I inhabited time: writing. What was “writing” and why did I do it? There will be some delay in getting around to my idiocy but you already have an inkling. It has everything to do with “inkling” (Ahnung) as a mode of thought in any case. “You,” I am talking to you and me—to the “self” I was in 1966, age twenty-one, and anyone else not put off by the second person. A decision was made or took place or was ratified during that year, a turn, and I am testifying in order to generalize to a “decision” theory for an image metaphysics. Dates: May 1966 / May 2011. Temporality is part of the enigma. In the cineplex watching Cameron’s Avatar through 3D goggles, when the auditorium filled with the drifting descent of glowing Woodsprites, I suddenly recalled a scene that happened in a Spanish olive orchard, May 1966. We all make decisions, choices, (mistakes) each in our own circumstances, conditions presented as situations. It was (retrospectively) a scene of decision. My decision is a way to think about decision itself, decision today and right now in your present circumstances, concerning some graphical interface for an online database. In this book I am playing avatar, belatedly.
Decision concerns event. There is an event to come but not directly so I will start with experience, to test knowing against living (knowing as living). Nietzsche was the philosopher I read in college. He posed the question that turned out to have set the agenda of my research career, speaking with the benefit of hindsight (but everything here is a delay, retrospeculative, aftering). There is a singularity in your life, Nietzsche advised, marking the intersection of the aphorism of thought with the anecdote of life. In my hands is Ecce Homo, the Walter Kaufman translation, the Vintage original, subtitled “How One Becomes What One Is.” Werde der du bist. It was his motto, adopted from Pindar, to acknowledge the antiquity of this imperative. There is an ambiguity that will have been important, whether “what” or “who” comes. I am testifying that I have learned there is no more important phrase than this one in the history of the Western