A tortoise, its shell encrusted with jewels laid out to form a Japanese flower, plods slowly across the floor. Whether its hedonistic qualities repel you or draw you in, you cannot fail to react. You may be concerned for the animals well being or wonder of the cost. Perhaps marvel at its intricate workmanship or feel a revulsion for the rich. Regardless of your initial reaction, it is dissolved once you try to touch the gems on the tortoise’s back. What is in front of you is not a tortoise but a hologram similar to the type found on the Star Ship Enterprise. The web of potential connections, of value, history and more are now gone, what you are left with is a fascination, ‘that of passing to the side of the double’[1]. It is technique, that of generating the real, that captivates. This essay is the start of an exploration ofsome of the issues raised by the digital as a medium, and why it may appear to be undeserving of the rich language of illusion and metaphor.

Essentially the hologram is acting ‘as if’ there were a real tortoise there. More precisely the light that it emits effects our retinas ‘as if’ there were a real tortoise there. This inability of our senses to necessarily determine what is ‘real’ is not new. Prior to the nineteenth century it was generally accepted that what you saw was the result of an object emitting rectilinear light rays that travelled into your eye. What stems from this understanding of vision is that what we see is ‘truth’ [2]. The camera obscura was the dominant paradigm through which the status of the observer was described; It represented not only the mechanical working of the eye but the status of a knowing observer to an external world [3]. Both the rationalists and empiricists used it as a model for explaining how observation could lead to truthful inferences about the world, that vision was ‘a perceptible knowledge’ [4]. From the nineteenth century onwards vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes itself an object of knowledge and observation [5].

Goethe , like many of his contemporaries, used the camera obscura for investigating vision. He did not however use it as a model for the eye. He describes an experiment involving a camera obscura with a larger hole so you only see a circle of light. You would stare at the image for a while and then shut out the light. An afterimage of the white circle is then seen to float, undulate and go through a series of colour changes. These are what Goethe called ‘physiological’ colours and are ‘the necessary conditions of vision’ [6]. Temporality is introduced as an integral part of observation, in that the colours change over time [7]. Also the privileging of the ‘afterimage’ allowed sensory perception to be severed of any ties with an external reference.

In 1833 Johannes Müller published Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen. It covered all the senses though sight was given particular emphasis. His most famous research is on the nerves and how they function. What he discovered was that the nerves for each of the senses was physiologically distinct, and so could cause one sensation only. Hence if you apply electricity to the eye it will give sensation of light while on the skin that of touch. Equally several different causes can produce the same sensation. What this showed was that there is an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation, that the body has ‘an innate capacity ... to misperceive - of an eye that renders differences equivalent.’ [8]

Müller’s experiments redefined vision and the other senses as simply being the capacity for being effected by sensations that had no necessary link to a referent. This absence of referentiality is the ground on which new instrumental techniques were based, and it is these techniques of measurement and normalisation that educate techniques of media through to VR. This realisation of a subjective vision is part of what Foucault calls ‘the threshold of modernity,’

The site of analysis is no longer representation but man in his finitude ... It was found that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that at the same time can be manifest to it in its own empirical contents.[9]


(post)modernity

The subjective observer created in the eighteenth century has been modified most by the post-modernists. Modernity had taken the ideal of the Cartesian observer completely focused on an object and deconstructed him into a physiologically subjective viewer. The post-modern movement then deconstructed how he understood what he was seeing. Deconstruction’s main assertion is that ‘truth itself is always relative to the different standpoints and predisposing intellectual frameworks of the judging subject’ [10]. If any optical ‘truth’ is relative to the viewers physiological makeup and our senses only bear an arbitrary relation to ‘reality’, then how can language, which after all has an even more abstract connection to reality, provide us with ‘truth’ [11].
  
The problem with this line is that it presents a very nihilistic view of the world, what with modernism and post-modernism imperilling any coherent system of meaning through both the senses and knowledge [12] respectively. We do not live at this level of things.
   
Baudrillard argues that the meaning is lost with the digital because if we deconstruct the digital then what we are left with is ‘illegible, with no gloss possible,’ [13]simply a series of 110100101. Surely if we were to deconstruct language down to its own digital code [14], that of the alphabet, then what we are left with is also ‘illegible, with no gloss possible’ [15]. The fact is that information is not generated at this level. Take for example visual perception; A two dimensional pattern of varying light energy falls on our retinas, it is then converted into analogous variations in electrical energy that travel along the nerves to the brain. Precisely how it then decodes these signals is still open to debate, however the end results are colours and shapes.

Finally we interpret this pattern of colour as a three dimensional environment, again via processes that are still under debate [16]. What we have here is a system much like that of the digital, where abstract signals are decoded to give information.

Post-modern ideas of relative truth also have implications in the digital. Key to the idea of deconstruction is the relativism of words, that they do not so much define strict linkages, but merely push away or ‘defer’ its partners within a system, and so imply their existence. If you described somebody as ‘angry’ then this implies a point when they were not, equally ‘yes’ implies the existence of ‘no’. This reliance on context pervades how we understand the world. Information without context is meaningless, or rather has many potential meanings. It is only through a comparison of the information with its context that any ‘truth’ can be inferred. From a couple of simple diagrams it can be seen that how we perceive on a subconscious level is effected by relatives [17]. That perception does not merely reflect the world; perceived size is not the same as physical size [a], perceived brightness is not the same as physical intensity [b]. Equally if I were to show you a picture of a knife next to a picture of a fork, it would set off very different thoughts than if I had shown you the same knife, but next to a police mug shot. ‘He patronised the course.’ So did he become patron of the course or be rude about it?

All language, at its most basic level, relies on a series of discreet characters laid out in an order which can then be decoded according to an appropriate system. It is in the relationship of these characters to each other that any meaning is hidden, not in the characters themselves. The advantage that the digital has is that its decoding systems are governed according to strict rules and so are completely quantifiable [18], it also refers to nothing other than itself [19] and so has none of the pitfalls of the written/ spoken languages where meanings can shift [20].

Essentially what we have here is the idea of medium and content. The medium (alphabet, electricity, photographs etc), when broken down to its constituent parts can be seen as a system from which the content can be generated. Different media have different systems, and these systems effect us in different ways and on a different level to the content. The effect that the content has is always reliant on the medium itself, regardless of its message. Marshal McLuhan’s mantra, ‘the medium is the message’, seems at least in part to fit here. Certainly the medium as an area of study has blossomed with the post-modernists but it was perhaps ‘Benjamin first ...[who] understood technique ... as medium, as form and principle’ [21].


The Photograph vs. The [Digital] Photograph

In the eighteenth century it was discovered that the senses were fallible, subject to the complex physiologies of the human body. The camera obscura lost its popularity and was replaced by stereoscopes, dioramas, phenakistiscope’s and zootrope’s among others. All of these took advantage of the new understanding of vision, of the eyes indifference to being deceived. The decline of these devises coincides with the advent of photography, though this is far from coincidental. Modernism had taken visual perception and dissolved it from an all seeing ‘ideal eye’ into a fragmented and temporally dispersed experience. The photograph appeared to reinstate the authority of the ‘ideal eye’ lost with modernity, perpetuating the myth of the objective observer free of physiological restraints [22]. However this reinstatement is an illusory one. The camera masquerades as an invisible intermediary between the observer and world, when in fact it functions as a completely external object. Nevertheless the idealised viewer that the camera allowed made it a tool for ‘truth’ [23]. Light from the sun (or nearby light bulb) falls on to an object, off which it is reflected. This reflected light then passes through the lens and falls onto a strip of film in a two dimensional pattern of varying light energy, causing a chemical change which can then be read as an image. Although this may be simplified account [24], the epistemology of the photograph is that of ‘optical wavelengths of the spectrum and to a point of view, static or mobile, located in real space’ [25]. What we have here is an analogue form of representation, much like tapes, records and video [26].

The distinction between the analogue and the digital is one of space. Analogue is best visualised as a wave, and as such provides a continuous stream of information. In contrast the digital breaks the data into discreet characters so cannot encode all analogue values, only some of them [27]. We cannot however experience the digital directly, it must be decoded into analogue forms such as TV/computer screens or speakers. ‘The digital and analogue can arbitrarily approximate each other, thus the colour of a pixel on a VDU [monitor] is composed of different wavelengths (analogue), which is encoded by the computer as a binary number (digital), which is encoded as voltages in circuits (analogue), which correspond to energy levels (digital)’ [28]. Space is implicit in the analogue where waves occupy a measurable space, and it is this space that determines its qualities (and visa-versa). With the digital, ‘Space is no longer even linear or one-dimensional: cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals, like the tics of a prisoner gone crazy with solitude and repetition’ [29].

As printed image the effect that the digital and the analogue has on the eyes is the same, the difference lies in the medium. The epistemology of the digital does not require optical wavelengths or a location in real space, though with a digital camera it does contain it. The digital adds another stage before the image can be seen, and that is the decoding of the data. The digital image can only directly refer to the codes and systems that generate it. If you take the image on the right [c] you can clearly see that it is a computer simulation. As such you know that it has its origins in digital code, however you will still recognise it as a room with TV in and so on. The only way a digital photograph (as opposed to digital simulation) has any more connection to a real space is on a technical level, in that it simulates it to a more ‘realistic’ level. Regardless of whether it is a simulation or digital photograph the image that you see is the result of the decoding of abstract data, it no longer corresponds to anything in the physical world [30]. It can only refer to the real on the level of appearances. You could argue that a photograph or our own reflection also only operate on the level of appearances and this would be true, however the distinction is that they are formed by the same physical laws that govern our sensory ‘reality’ [31].

This clearly demonstrates the idea that the digital is entirely separate from reality, that it creates a truly ‘virtual’ reality based on its own codes and systems. Although it is only on the surface that the digital can simulate the real, we only ever experience a recreation of the surface of reality. In exactly the same way as the digital separates itself from reality, so we are separated by our senses (refer to earlier section on 1800’s) [32]. The fundamental difference is that we take an active part in our environment, we experience reality through a tactile interaction. The way the human brain interprets the information is vastly more complex than any computer [33].

This separation of the digital has an interesting effect on the photograph. As I have mentioned, the camera functioned as an invisible intermediary between us and the real world. With the digital, the camera, or rather the process, has reappeared. As I have already explained the medium of the digital adds another stage between the ‘real’ and its representation. Because the image is now abstract data it can be manipulated in a way not possible with the analogue [34]. Although it has been long understood that photographic ‘truth’ is not as solid as appearances suggest, the ease of computer simulation and manipulation has certainly put another nail in its coffin.

Of course the inherent physical reality assured by a photograph has not changed with the advent of the digital. The problem we have is that it is not necessarily possible to distinguish between direct forms of representation, such as the photograph, and digital forms of representation. The digital is, by its very nature, a simulator. In fact while I write this essay I could have a digital radio station playing, several internet pages open with movies playing, a live stock update and a few photographs all displayed on my screen. Although this would put strain and confusion on my senses it demonstrates that the computer can simulate a wide range of both ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media [35]. For us to experience the digital it has to be decoded into a form that we can recognise, and so must simulate the real. So to the untrained eye a digital print can be indistinguishable from a photographic one, even a holographic tortoise could get mistaken for a real one [36]. This is tied up with the driving force behind the digital which is technique, that of recreating the real. Even in a film like The Two Towers where Golum is clearly not ‘real’, he is very realistic. As the technical prowess of the digital increases it can become completely transparent, dissolving any boundaries between the real and illusory, at least within the world of images.

The impact that the photograph has had, although connected to its epistemology, lies in it having the same ‘all-important quality of uniformity and repeatability that had made the Guttenberg break between the Middle Ages and Renaissance’ [37]. ‘The fact alone that anything might be simply reproduced, as such, in two copies, is already a revolution’ [38]. It is this mass reproducibility that shifted the photograph from being purely a form of representation to being part of a new cultural economy of value and exchange [39]. It is on this level of reproducibility (in fashion, media, publicity etc) that the global process of capital is founded [40].

The digital has essentially taken this level or reproducibility and extended it. Baudrillard says of serial objects,

The problem of their uniqueness, or their origin, is no longer a matter of concern; their origin is in technique, and the only sense they posses is in the dimension of the industrial simulacrum
Which is to say the series, and even the possibility of two or n identical objects. The relation between them is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit – neither analogy nor reflection – but equivalence, indifference.

It is true that to each other they may be indifferent, but inherent in the technique of something like photography, there is a direct connection to the real. All forms of mechanical representation must, by their very nature, follow the same laws and systems that govern the real. The digital has discarded this requirement and in doing so no longer implies ‘serial’ production. The same photograph may appear in a newspaper, on the TV news, a website and even mobile phone. ‘It is not serial reproducibility which is fundamental, but the modulation’ [41].

Effectively this has caused what Guy Debord terms the ‘society of the spectacle’ to flourish. Debord defines the spectacle as ‘not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’ [42]. Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ has now shifted as the mediums have changed. The irony is that the digital era, heralded as one of freedom and transparency of information and of connecting the world in a utopian global village, simply mirrors the introverted media that Debord outlines, and seems only to have stoked their fires. The argument against the spectacle is always one of its lack of reality,

This is the principle commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfilment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence [43].

The digital appears to fulfil the prophesy by ceasing to have any direct reference to the real. As such the digital seems to fit much more comfortably within the society of the spectacle than the photograph. The digital has slowly permeated all other media and will continue to do so until it has reached saturation point. McLuhan saw that all new media takes the form of the old, that ‘we look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future’ [44].
The problem with characters like Baudrillard saying that the real is disappearing into the hyperreal is that it assumes that we only operate within the spectacle, that we have already passed over to the other side. This is a false premise. If our perception, language systems, and in fact reality in general rely on relativity, then the virtual world will always only operate relative to the real. Humanity has always had a passion for representing the world through the arts and controlling it through the sciences, and often combinations of the two. Our modes of visual representation are inextricably linked with technology and we will always use the latest technologies to try and simulate reality in a bid to understand it. At the end of the day we love our illusions and are not about to give them up [45]. For reality to disappear up its own backside as Baudrillard would have it, we would cease to see it as illusion, and so would have become delusional.

Whatever the senses may perceive at any time is all alike true. Suppose that reason cannot disentangle the cause why things that were square when close at hand are seen as round in the distance. Even so, it is better, in default of reason, to assign fictitious causes to the two shapes than to let things clearly apprehended slip from our grasp. This is to attack belief at its very roots – to tear up the entire foundation on which life and safety depend. It is not only reason that would collapse completely. If you did not dare trust your senses so as to keep clear of precipices and other such things to be avoided and make for their opposites, there would be a speedy end to life itself.[46]