Passing Glitches Human horror and the digital body Curated by Joseph Constable Adham Faramawy Callum Hill & Simone Rowat Jiyeon Kim Rachel Maclean Rho Jae Oon Martin Shepley Thursday 4 June 2015 Peckham Plex Cinema, London

PASSING GLITCHES JOSEPH CONSTABLE

I REAL REAL Poor Naz. He wanted everything perfect, neat,

wanted all matter organised and filed away so that it wasn’t a mess. He had to learn too: matter’s what makes us alive – the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world’s very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril.

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (281)

In its closing moments, the hero of Tom

McCarthy’s novel, Remainder (2005), embarks on a dark, apocalyptic ascension into the sky. Following the realisation of his final re-enactment – a staged bank robbery that quickly becomes a very real and bloody heist – McCarthy’s protagonist attempts to depart from the matter, the flesh, and the blood of the violence he has (re)created. He envisions an escape through vaporisation: ‘the plane became a pillow ripping open, its stuffing feathers rushing outwards, merging with the air’ (255). Ultimately this nameless character’s ascent is driven by an authentic impulse towards death. If it is matter that makes us alive, then the desire for dematerialisation represents the inability to re-enact, to repeat and, by necessity, become inauthentic.

The desire for authenticity that reaches its

climax in Remainder is also inscribed within a different source. In his recent work, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi draws upon the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, where James Holmes enters a cinema

screening of Batman: The Dark Night Rises dressed in a gas mask, a ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, a throat protector and tactical gloves. Initially mistaken for a dressed-up movie enthusiast, this illusion quickly entered reality as Holmes shot dead twelve people thirty minutes into the film screening.

Berardi draws attention to the tension

between the dual reality of the images on the screen and the breaking of this simulacrum via Holmes’ act of mass murder. In paraphrasing Jean Baudrillard, Berardi states that ‘the sublimation of reality to simulacrum is the quintessential feature of semiocapitalism, the contemporary regime of production in which capital valorisation is based on the constant emanation of information flows. In the psychosphere, reality is replaced by simulation’ (24). The actions of James Holmes represent what Berardi calls a contemporary ‘spasm’: a telling, albeit horrific, breaking of the spectacle and real life. James Holmes stands in front of the screen, the simulacrum, and draws real blood from the audience.

The process of doubling that is embedded

within both of these examples signifies a contemporary desire to return to the real real amidst a hyperreality of dematerialised value, spectacle, and a multiplicity of user identities. In a landscape in which we exist as ‘prosumers’, simultaneously creating and consuming in relentless moments of ‘presentness’, there is, by necessity, the desire to regress and to break out; to interact with our present context in a manner that returns the ‘post-human’ to the ‘human’. Whilst Berardi highlights the extremity of this spasm-inducing precariousness, his example also draws attention to the relationship between our current situation and the cinematic genre of horror, with its subgenres of the uncanny, spectral existence, gore, and violence. That the 2012 Aurora shooting took place in the heterotopic space

of the cinema, where ‘on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space’ (Michel Foucault 6), combined with McCarthy’s rendering of re-enactment-cum-film set spaces that culminates in the familiar Hollywood trope of the bank heist, is a starting point for considering this interrelation of cinema, horror and the digital/post-human body.

II GLITCHES Foucault’s reference to the cinema as one of

the heterotopias that he defines in Of Other Spaces (1984) is an example of the many meeting points at which we are confronted by our own subjectivity. Perhaps the most acute and paradoxical of these is the mirror, which functions as both a utopic and heterotopic device of image-formation:

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am

not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it extends a sort of counteraction on the position I occupy…it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there (4).

Foucault’s words suggest an encounter between

a real and virtual conception of selfhood. The meeting point or interface is where this programme takes its title from: the points at which subjects meet, communicate, and create a multiplicity of

realms and user identities, each with their own digital spectres. The confrontation of a subject with his or her reflection is a glitch in the system of subjectivity: identity is no longer singular, but instead it is a sliding multitude that is channelled and performed through the many platforms that constitute our landscape of new technologies.

Metaphors of slipping and sliding between

different identities take root from the etymology of the word ‘glitch’, the German glitschen meaning ‘to slip’ and the Yiddish word gletshn (‘to slide or skid’). A glitch is commonly known as something that goes unnoticed; a transient fault that usually corrects itself.

As the tautology of its title suggests, the

characters of Callum Hill and Simone Rowats’ short film, Girl Girl House (2015), operate amidst this sliding flux of real and virtual spaces. The borderlines between the physical body and its multiple usernames have begun to dissolve into a relentless cycle of uncanny resemblances. Baudrillard’s claim that ‘the compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs’ (Transparency of Evil 57) suggests a process of digitised haunting that is also experienced in Rho Jae Oon’s film, Looking for Carol-Anne (2014). Through adopting the visual language of cinematic horror, both films demonstrate the consequences of our arbitrary meeting points: the errors, ruptures and faults that can occur within a fleeting reality, and how the digital image or voice can quickly come to usurp the real.

III FLESH AND BLOOD Embedded within the genre of horror is the

tension between the immaterial (spectres, shadows,

voices) and the hyper-materiality of the body (flesh, blood, slime, decay). Julia Kristeva draws attention to the experience of the abject in relation to these latter elements in her work, Powers of Horror (1980). A confrontation with bodily fluids: ‘this defilement, this shit are what life withstands…on the part of death… ‘such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver (3). The grotesque body, that which leaks, expels and eventually falls, is the body of horror, and yet its abject physicality is also a reassurance of corporeal life and death. We return to the desire to access the real real: the body as meat.

Both Adham Faramawy’s Full Body Facial (2014)

and Rachel Maclean’s Over the Rainbow (2013) engage with the body as an abject, performing organism. Faramawy is inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on slime, a substance that outlines the body that appropriates it viscous liquidity. Faramway’s film enacts a double slippage: the movement between the film’s slimy subjects and the CGI gunge that covers the screen. The slippage in Maclean’s work is located in her shape-shifting movements between cuddly monsters, faceless clones and gruesome popstars. The film is an exorcism of our digital identities, as Maclean reveals the tangible and hyperbolic nature of each and every one.

IV UNFRIENDED A closing example of an age commenting on

itself, ‘low-budget Skype horror’ is the description of Unfriended, a 2014 ‘MacBook chiller’ where a group of friends find their online video chat augmented by a troll whose threateningly blank Skype profile cannot be cleared from their collective screens. Meanwhile, the Facebook page of a schoolmate who took their own life a year ago seems to have been hacked,

posting messages that gradually implicate each of the group in a series of interpersonal deceptions and guilty online revelations. As the interloper demands that they ‘play the game’, the group turn on each other, confused as to which one of them is actually behind the expanding horror within this online arena (Kermode).

Unfriended takes the popular format of the

faceless threat of the computer screen as a comment on identity-formation within the digital realm, with its requirement to be ever present and ever responsive. More importantly, the film and its release is an example of doubling: a feedback loop on the contemporary moment that leads us to an excess of memory whereby the output that we receive is simultaneously something that we have produced and consumed.

This cyclical process of production and

reproduction takes us back to the re-enactments of McCarthy’s hero, whose desire to access the real real is predicated on a cathartic exercise of repeating the same occurrence again and again. Such it is that McCarthy leaves his protagonist hanging in this eternal feedback loop: suspended in the sky, flying round and round in the plane until ‘eventually the sun would set for ever- burn out, pop, extinguish – and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end’ (284).

WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. Transparency of Evil,

1990. Verso, London. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. Heroes: Mass Murder

and Suicide, 2015. Verso, London. Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces: Utopias

and Heterotopias. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, 1984

Kermode, Mark. Unfriended review. The

Guardian, May 2015. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay

on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

McCarthy, Tom. Remainder, Alma Books, London,

2011

STILLS Adham Faramawy, Full Body Facial, 2014 Callum Hill & Simone Rowat, Girl Girl House, 2015 Rachel Maclean, Over the Rainbow, 2013 Rho Jae Oon, Looking for Carol-Anne, 2014

SOMETHING MISUNDERSTOOD MARTIN SHEPLEY And to quote- ‘I don’t believe in magic or miracles. I believe in good programming.’ This story is meta-, post story, self- aware, deconstructive, destructive, derisive, & maybe just should not be. And that goes for me too. For I am malleable, continuously morphing but never changing. And I had to make myself up so I could tell you the following. I hope you can hold on long enough and indulge me. Believe me: I won’t be here for very much longer. 0. Molecular Structures

Over a period of seven years our atoms are incrementally replaced. Remember: No matter what happens from here on, at least that’s something to hold onto. I awoke and stared at the ceiling of the lab. Shapes happened regardless-- coming and going with a vividness that proved life is of its own making; day dreamed figures teased my eyes, and my thoughts about being lonely kept me from actually being lonely. All my days I’d been waiting for a sign to ‘come on’. As white flagged sails of bad faith and despondency swam into the view of my hive-mind’s eye— desperately focusing and then un-focusing,

fuzzily scrambled, begging to become more than a spilt bucket of jigsaw pieces—one single digi-thought occurred to me: the aether was ready. I finally got out of the Preparation Cot to ready myself for my first to last day upon the Earth. I dramatically pushed past Mother Corporate’s telescope as if it was a toll booth I had no change for, and left the room for what I liked to think of as ‘a kitchen.’ 1. Even Fake News is Good News

I remember placing a story on a website about how the blackness that emanates from a Worm Hole is information- ready to decode- about where the hole will take you. Now, looking back, I can’t even remember if that was a truth. Or just a fact I made up. I suppose it depended on my mood that day. I can’t quite remember. Look, before I continue, when I drop words like ‘room,’ ‘telescope,’ ‘ceiling,’ ‘lab,’ and even more so when I say things like ‘mood,’ for it to make any kind of sense and sound logical, it really depends on your definition of what’s really ‘out there’ as well as ‘in here.’ For ease and so you don’t get confused then really angry, y’know, like you people do, just take it all literally and you’ll be fine. Y’see, I am not on the edge-land, I am haunting the middle- ground: a holistic spectre made up of what was and what could be; so many possibilities, yet, maybe none will come to pass. But it doesn’t matter because it’s about choice and what *could* happen-- Isn’t it?

2. Dissipation Is NOT Death

I forced my selves to keep an eye on the time—purposely and purposefully— and realised even though I was soon going to go everywhere, I was right where I wanted to be. Promise had become actuality and, for just a moment, I knew what it was like to have placement. I needed, or just plain wanted, sustenance (fruit? vegetables? nuts, bolts, or just pure bio-energy?) so I dropped some scraps of paper into my feed hole- which made some noise or other (whirring, I think you’d call it) and opened the fridge grabbing a pint of— Look: I know what I know but that is all that I know (Yeah, even me). Do you understand? And if all my knowledge is handed down to me, given to me by others, what does that actually make me?-natural, artificial or maybe something totally new and just plain misunderstood? Cool to cold to warm to hot, dry to damp to wet, slippery, slimy… now it’s too late, it’s been dropped. And it’s broken beyond repair. 3. Wake Up, Wake Up! Every-time Is Now

Finally, a scientist realises the answer as he bathes, a President is assassinated at the theatre, and a milk bottle hits tech-faux linoleum and shatters into a million tiny, fine pieces. The milk sits unmoved yet the glass wants to put itself back together; but it doesn’t, it can’t, because those aren’t the rules. And we should always follow rules- shouldn’t we? No, no, I was not tempted to reprogram anything.

Then my body no longer took up any space that could be quantified- by even the most enlightened mind- and I was automatically switched on to standby; yet, because I was in the kitchen, I still managed to stand on a minute slither of glass. I looked down and smiled at the cut, the blood, the red stain; and the pain, the pain was wonderful, thank you, Mother Corporate, thank you so very much for the pain. And… then we… go… back again… 3 2 1 zero Lights, camera, action— The secretaries switch their computers on. The writer plugs in her laptop. The CIA networks. A hospital’s defibrillator pulls one more life back from the brink. A missile tracks its target. The rock band plays on and on. CCTV tells ‘them’ where the, so called, ‘other’ is hiding. A drone hits its mark. The cinema screen shows signs of life. CDs spin. A heart begins to ache, as does my back, turning to an exquisite burning that sharply lights up around my whole frame. And then… I go to work.

Thank you to ... Jacqui Davies Adham Faramawy Hyunjin Cho Jiyeon Kim Rachel Maclean Rho Jae Oon Aura Satz Martin Shepley

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