WB05 e-Symposium: Text by Gulsen Bal on WB05

/////////////////////Subjects in Space …

The ever-present phantasmagorical rupture in the possible!

………………… a passage from the il y a of the multiple to the localisable ‘being-there,' from être with the big ‘ E ' to the appearance of a determined and specific être-là ! or in Deleuzian lexicon: a passage from Being as the virtual One or being as the actual multiple …

In his introduction, Genco Gülan describes the nature of the first Web Biennale as “it is a framework for integrating heterogeneous artists that exist in a variety of environments... based upon the virtual space. […] As a result Web Biennial … not only aims to offer an alternative approach to exhibiting online art but also for exhibiting art online.” (1)

One of the things which is very current in new media art as its characteristic, as we all know, is a fluent transition between the different manifestations that can take on new meanings in multiple context re-configurations.

Gülan covers the project's issues through its dynamics deployment on “ Virtual Biennial: A Biennial without a City,” “The Representation Problem of the Web,” “The Notion of De-centralization” and “Open Exhibition Model.”

It is true that demarcations of the interactivity relative to the discourse of ‘obsolescence' are the overarching entities where a mutilated representation of the individual in the net/virtual environment became the ‘real' society that bind together all diverse dialogue beyond its mere presence as a work of art…

This paradox creates the space into the void, but then how do we define this space of engagement? And coincidentally to the same extent Steve Dietz problematizes that “as the net becomes a pencil - a tool in Baldessari's terms - then is the question of “web art” as a medium important or is the generalized characteristics of networking more important?”(2)

The virtual space conditions and determines the territory that reinforces hierarchies and ‘representations' in which they renegotiate the existence of the real space through ‘virtual/generative matrix' according to digital parameters.

This gives us no formal or material definition, but only remains in the representational theories with their internal or external forces of relations embodied in a long history of epistemological problems. This underpins the ontological opposition between “virtual reality” and the “reality of the virtual” within the discursive space of “being” and the “real” in its relation to the notion of “individuation” or “actualisation,” which is the ‘processes of becoming' that involves spontaneous spatio-temporal dynamisms.

Tracing through Deleuze's understanding what “being” is manifest has two definitions. Substantial being defined as “one” and modal being defined as “multiple”: ‘the one referring to the immanent life of a unitary being expressing itself, the other referring to the expressions or modes in which this immanent expression bring about itself.' Two definitions of being: as substantial being by itself, and as modal being by something else. Here there exists another question: how can we define the actual/virtual position of the subject in the virtual context?

Since the paradox introduce here as actuality constituting itself when a virtual and/or supplementary component is added to the pre-ontological “real;” the question might be, whether every actual is the result of the actualisation of the preceding virtual, or is there an actual that precedes the virtual? Alternatively stated, the extraction of the virtual from the real constitutes reality - actual reality is the real percolate through the virtual in its relation to the paradoxical problematic of actualisation conceived as the actualisation of the virtual, after its lineage from the preceding actual ?

Following from these arguments, then, “it [actualisation] does not result from any limitation of a pre-existing possibility... They are thereby substituted for the identity and the resemblance of the possible, which inspires only a pseudo-movement, the false movement of realization understood as abstract limitation.” (3)

In such a process subject/object relations are disrupted, presupposing that multiplicity is not a ‘subject', nor unity of ‘object' referred to a subject; so far the “theory of multiplicity that does not refer to subject as preliminary unity” in its reference to “divergence of actualisation” in a space for possibilities. Then what is the nature of relation?

It looks the epistemological portrayal of this argument needs to be re-evaluated in the entry of the subject through a discursive realm of representation .

Žižek in Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being (4) rejects the referential argument for representation in an understanding that there is no external reality beyond the stream of simulacra , merely because virtual reality carries the phantasmagorical reality to its extreme: “handing-over of the subject's “self” to the Symbolic Order that shares this same virtual logic, […] besides a Symbolic Order whose virtuality in prior has been forgotten with all of its apparent Cartesian self-consistency.”

For Žižek , the key dilemma is the ongoing “virtualization of reality” that allows subject to see the “sublime object” as arbitrary ideological proxy bearing no intrinsic meaning; but having lost the object which kept the Symbolic Order intact. The potential is then unfolded for the subject to fully accede to the “real.”

“...The main aim of Web Biennial [...] is to put the artwork itself before everything else and in its purest form. That means liberating art from the curator, the gallery/ museum/ institution, the sponsor, the media and the physical location or city. In other words, we are trying to get rid of the middle man or ‘the noise factor.' Direct from the artist to the audience; one to one but also many to many. This de-constructed structure of the exhibition stands outside of current Biennial models [...] But it also tries to re-construct new ways for effective communication and navigation. We are trying to inter-link the de-centralized structure of the WWW.” (5)

It is entirely possible that I might miss something profound in the discussion; h owever, i n aspect of Web Biennial attempts to address some of the issues mentioned above in as much as evokes another concept that emerges not from a process of conflictual/negative differentiation, aiming for either “virtual” and the “real,” but for both; something in-between emerging from a process of negotiation. The in-between refers to two fundamentally different notions of space whose only intersection is continuously negotiated by our-Self: the physical presence in the space of performative presence of “becoming in the virtual,” and as Žižek prompts: this order realizes the oxymoron of “being actually virtual.”

Regardless of the fact that a closed, pre-defined world such as Gülan offers seems more transparent and less ambiguous to its temporary inhabitant, the multitude as it designates new spaces as its journeys establish new residencies; embracing contradictions as a way of seeing possible alternatives.

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Footnotes:

1) Please refer to: http://webbiennial.org

3) ibid, p. 212

4) Slavoj Žižek , Plague of Fantasies - chapter: “Cyberspace or the Unbearable Closure of Being,” London : Verso, 1997, pp. 127-164

5) Art Today , An interview with Genco Gulan by Kun-Sheng Wang, http://www.artouch.com