IRC-Galleria

“It is not only the smart devices, which strongly affect our state of mind. Apart from internet, also much simplier tools affect to individuals strongly, making them enter a certain state of mind, which can also be understood as virtual:“...when reading a book, you are alone and in a focused state of mind. And in a conventional exhibition, you wander alone from one object to the next, equally focused—separated from the outside reality, in inner isolation.” (quoted in Groys, 2009; pg. 25)

In the 1960’s Jean Baudrillard, among many others, theorized the concept of representation (for which he used a term simulacrum) in the sphere of society, which he saw as the outcome of his contemporary technological innovations and capitalism. Baudrillard’s main question was, if the simulation could replace the real, which had already stopped existing—or if simulation was all there was in the beginning. (Baudrillard, 3) In his point of view, the contemporary consumer society itself is a product of simulations; however, he speaks on a rather metaphorical level and does not in detail point to specific media apart from television, but his statements are fairly connectable to the internet as a virtual platform, which similarly transmits also the replicative abilities of photography. He writes: “A simulation that can last indefinitely, because, as distinct from "true" power—which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake—it is nothing but the object of a social demand, and thus as the object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption. (Baudrillard, 26) Even though the internet functions in a more interactive way than for example television did at the time, by providing its users to have a stronger effect on the content and delivery, it shares similar values, characteristic for capitalism. These qualities are examined more closely in the next chapter.
Brian Massumi, a contemporary theorist, sees simulacra as a schizophrenic symptom of the current society, likewise Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, but he distances himself from negativity, attempting to give more constructive, Deleuzian views on the matter: “The challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of representation once and for all.” (Massumi, 7) He refers to Ridley Scott’s famous 1982 film Blade Runner to simply illustrate the concept: “The dominant replicant makes a statement to the man who made his eyes that can be taken as a general formula for simulation: if only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.” (ibid, 3) The major error Massumi finds in Baudrillard’s thesis is that he does not take into account or question the “reality of the model”, which he then approaches with concepts introduced in the works of Deleuze and Guattari: “The alternative is a false one because simulation is a process that produces the real, or, more precisely, more real (a more-than-real) on the basis of the real. [...] Every simulation takes as its point of departure a regularized world comprising apparently stable identities or territories. But these "real" entities are in fact undercover simulacra that have consented to feign being copies” (ibid)
In today’s ‘(post) contemporary condition’, a few decades after Massumi’s statement, when everything from everyday-objects to larger entities are increasingly connected to the internet, it is intrinsically impossible to go against the development and go back to the ‘old reality’, longed by Baudrillard. Medicine for the schizophrenia is now more like a distant, utopian dream, disastrous for the existence of the Western world -- we have not only become dependent on non-material networks and digital tools, but we already have a generation that does not remember the ‘offline ages’ at all. Kenneth Goldsmith writes: “Walking away is not an option. We are not unplugging anytime soon. Digital detoxes last as long as grapefruit diets do; transitional objects are just that.” (Goldsmith, 22) and adds that we should instead begin to explore the opportunities, even celebrate the ‘time wasted’ on the internet. (ibid) Ultimately, for certain contemporary theorists, such as for Hito Steyerl, it is clear that the ‘reality’ itself is postproduced and rendered by the virtual: “Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other.” (Cornel & Hartel, 444)
Susan Sontag closes her iconic 1977 oeuvre ‘On Photography’, written before the era of digitalization, with certainly similar concerns: “We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.” and finds that the long-desired magics of photography “have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals.” (Sontag, 140-141) As the reference to Steyerl hints, Sontag’s verbalizations in today’s era of artificial intelligence, 2pac-holograms and deep fakes could be perceived as outdated or self-evident, but her foundational thesis is up to date. In the digital age, images (not only photographs) could be seen as consuming the ‘real’ much more effectively; ultimately in the case of social media, which in its foundation is based on the concept of representation.
In social media, shared photographs as representations are coequally delivered over the internet by the representations of the original subjects; however, any kind of delivered content can have a certain social effect towards the deliverer, also outside the virtual reality (assuming that the deliverer is somehow identified). The interactive qualities of social media makes evident that the notion of ‘real’ has crystallized, and that the online representation can become realer, or at least more socially relevant, than the physical, offline original. Today, partially because of digitalization and the internet, also the way we look at photographs has changed. Nathan Jurgenson writes: “Everything is informational, always seeing and being seen, seeing as if being seen, being seen as if seeing. The line between what is media and what isn’t is harder to locate.” (Jurgenson, 44) and with a reference to Gilles Deleuze’s earlier accounts on technology, he argues that “Social media is real life partly because real life is always mediated through the logics and technologies of human habit, interest, power, and resistance.” (ibid, 43) Alike Brian Massumi’s optimist viewpoint and the thesis of Hito Steyerl, Jurgenson underlines that it is no longer even important to talk about the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ in the context of social media and digital tools, because the digital world is as ‘real’ as the ‘analog’ world: “We live in a mixed, augmented reality in which materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the offline and the online all intersect. It is incorrect to say “IRL” to mean offline: the Internet is real life. It is the fetish objects of the offline and the disconnected that are not real.” (ibid, 64)

It is often cheesily stated that the purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but “serve the body”. Whereas technological innovations have various effects on individuals and the society, simultaneously giving birth to an increasing amount of issues and concepts, it as well has an effect on our understanding of the so-called human nature. Fundamentally, the industrial revolution gave birth and modified society into the form we acknowledge it today, but it is now being commonly said that the two decades after millennium have shaped the world more than any other period of time ever before in human history. During the past few decades, humanity’s foundational understanding of its own state of being (in space) has transformed towards new directions because of digital tools and the internet -- the body, which technology is supposed to serve, has in itself become an increasingly abstract concept, regarding its relation to terms such as identity and place. (Buchanan, 1) Whereas the bodies of individuals are represented in the virtual space of the internet and connected to others, a strong social effect is created; the meaning of the original is a subject to change. Today, even the simple, manually operated tools are being linked to virtual, immaterial networks, becoming as well prominent parts of the virtual rhizome as social objects filled with information, multi-layering the connection between machines and humans. “As our worlds become smarter and get to know us better and better, it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins.” (Clark, 7)
The current setting of these ‘parallel realities’, which are in fact rapidly merging, could offer a fruitful base for future outlooks, comparable to well-known, perhaps to some extent ominous theories of the postmodern era, dominantly dealing with the notion of representation -- which is also one of the main features of the internet as a social wholeness. Nonetheless, this thesis does not attempt to predict the future, but by connecting influential accounts dominantly from the fields of media theory and philosophy from the past decades, it ventures to offer an interdisciplinary overview about the relationship of the customary, ‘physical real’ and the newer ‘virtual real’ in the context of social media and internet phenomena, such as internet memes, which operate hand-in-hand. Historically, postmodern figures such as Jean Baudrillard and Susan Sontag (in relation to photography) created a significant base for the discussion regarding the ‘real’ and the concept of representation. In this paper their early accounts are used as a historical standing point, which do not directly connect to the post-internet age, but are useful in order to illustrate a wider picture regarding the concept in question. Whereas the internet was once considered as a representative of freedom on various levels, it has along its popularization and capitalization transformed into an ultimate apparatus of representation, deterritorialization and (in)control, affecting basically all the aspects of Western, capitalist societies.
Whereas the world has become hyperconnected, only lately we have understood the broad significance of the internet’s social side and certain problems it has the ability to create, which resemble Sartrean ideas regarding a widely discussed philosophical concept, ‘the gaze’, which operates between the individuals and the others/society. For Jean-Paul Sartre, the gaze of others signifies hell, since it makes our “socially codified identities” visible, also making us realize that we cannot fight against it. (Cornell & Halter, 361) And in the words of Boris Groys: “... we try to avoid the gaze of others for a while so that we can reveal our “true self” after a certain period of seclusion—to reappear in public in a new shape, in a new form.” (ibid) The internet provides a sensation of possibility to alter this hell, since it functions without the immediate restrictions of space and time -- however, at turn, the same qualities can also strengthen the hell further. It can be said that the virtual representations on the internet are already in an equal position with their physical ‘originals’, especially in terms of social reality. As social media complexicates the foundational concept of an individual, it is today possible to exist only in the internet’s virtual gaze, dependent on one’s virtual communication, maintaining her physical remains as an essential bad -- such as the concept of Japanese origin, hikikomori.
Images and visuality are today evidently more crucial for communication than ever because of the internet; it is mundane to communicate and express oneself through visual content such as emoticons, gifs and memes. In the popular platforms of social media, especially photography as a replicative medium is in a central position and therefore as well an important aspect to include in this paper: it allows an individual to curate herself by letting to choose what to share regarding her analog presence and outlook. However, whereas identification is crucial for creating and/or re-creating networks online, the hell once illustrated by Sartre becomes evident. Nathan Jurgenson offers a significant take on the phenomenon by arguing that today’s social theory “should be, in part, a theory of social media, which should be, in part, a theory of social photography“ (Jurgenson, 16) For him, the so-called social photography is a cultural practice, “a way of seeing, speaking, and learning.”, which develops the skills of sociality and self-expression. (ibid) After all, today predominantly everyone needs to take part in the practice also in the sphere of internet to meet the standards of contemporary society.
The examination of the effect of social media and the perception-related ‘mind-body axis’ are mainly inspired and co-affected by the conceptual framework of my diploma art project, which serves as an elementary example of a wide and complex phenomenon. The project deals with matters such as social media, memes and most importantly representation, which is, as noted above, a conjunctive aspect of the internet as a social, non-linear space. Also human language is central for the project, as it is especially in the sphere of pragmatic philosophy understood as the only tool for us to describe reality. As internet memes have become central and extremely effective means of communication, comparable to the widely discussed concept of mythos, various words originated in such content have become parts of the analogue intercommunication, therefore collectively transforming the way reality is perceived and described: the online is present offline. Apart from my individual artistic practice, this thesis discusses art and its connection to the topic, including a slight comparison to popular culture, which functions on different means, but is likewise affected by the virtual realm. Talking about popular culture as an autonomous gestalt in addition to art makes it possible to create a wider overview of the phenomenon; the internet shakes and intertwines the boundaries of both, interconnected parts of capitalist society. The fifth chapter of this thesis goes through certain important characteristics for internet based/inspired art, including few examples of contemporary artists who are reflecting the current state of art as an institutional, social wholeness to the multidisciplinary power of the internet, dealing with matters examined in the previous chapters.