<REVISTA TEXTO DIGITAL>
ISSN 1807-9288
- ano 3 n.1 2007 –
http://www.textodigital.ufsc.br/
MALBREIL, X. L’imaginaire de
l’internet et son evolution. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, ano 3, n. 1,
Julho 2007.
ABOUT THE INTERNET IMAGINARY AND ITS EVOLUTION
Xavier Malbreil
Université de Toulouse II
Toulouse, França
ABSTRACT: In this article, «About the Internet
Imaginary and its evolution», which short version was first published in
December 2006 on the Contemporaneous Art International Center (CIAC) Electronic
Magazine of Montréal, http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/sommaire.htm, I put the focus on the Internet Imaginary
evolution, in a historical and philosophical way. Since more than 150 years,
writers, poets, philosophers have imagined that some day, the networks will
allow man to be near to anyone, near to the artworks, near to the books etc...
So, after having clarify in what meaning I use the term «imaginary», I try to
look at some art works, some social behaviours, that
shows us something as an Internet Imaginary, and the evolution of this
imaginary. First, I notice how the networks have been the scene of contact and
travel, since Marcel Proust «Telephone Ladies» to the novel Neromancer. Secondly, I search how men have conquered
Internet to make him a place to stay, and to accumulate immateriel
goods – which will correspond to the web 2.0. And last, I show
, how Internet has act as a substitute scene of religion, and how the
evil has taken its place on it. My article has the aim to analyse
the distorsions between the real social network that
Internet is and how the imaginary as depict it – so that we can see it how it is realy.
KEYWORDS: Internet Imaginary. Evolution.
INTRODUCTION
Whereas the Internet, in 2007, arrived at a stage of
maturity in the majority of the developed countries, it is advisable to wonder
about the premonitory texts and the works of fiction which preceded it and
accompanied it, on the imaginary that it feeds, and on the nightmares which it
continues to generate. Its imaginary is neither timeless nor universal,
it has a history, that we must analyse without any
exaggerate enthousiasm or pessimism. The Internet,
more than majority of the inventions of the XX° century, is a machine to make
dream, to imagine.
Even before as it exists in the form we know since
about thirty years, even quite before, it had been imagined by the most
clear-sighted spirits of the XX° century, and even of the XIX° century. Current
source of the imaginary, it is itself resulting from an aggregation of
scientific and humanistic Utopias, prophecies and daydreams on which not a few
people would have bet. Its darkest face has been imagined, quite before as it
has been revealed by the facts.
Among the writers having imagined the future best more,
the French novelist Jules Verne, in his novel going back to 1860, Paris au
XX° siècle[1],
described the organization of Paris in year
Paul Otlet[2], Belgian documentalist,
far before writing its famous “Treaty of documentation, the book on the book”,
wrote at the end of the XIX° century “One can imagine the electric telescope,
allowing to read at home books exposed in the room teleg
of the large libraries, in the pages requested in advance. It will be the telepicture book”.
And the French poet Paul Valéry
himself, who in a famous text, The conquest of ubiquity[3],
published in 1928, expects that « works will acquire a kind of ubiquity.
Their immediate presence or their restitution at any time will obey our call.
They will not be only any more in themselves, but all where somebody will be,
and some apparatus. They will be nothing any more but kinds of sources or
origins, and their benefits will be or be found whole where one will want. Like
water, like gas, as the electrical current come by far in our residences to
meet our needs with the help of an effort quasi no one, thus will be fed to us
from visual or auditive images, being born and
disappearing with the least gesture, almost with a sign. »
Closer to
us, in 1960, the inventor of the hypertext, Ted Nelson have carried its
invention in the form of a daydream with the baroque name of Xanadu[4], polysemous word between
all, since it indicated in turn the capital of the empire of Kublai Khan' S,
the mythical house of the tycoon of Citizen Kane, the fictitious state
in which Mandrake the magician lived, a great number of video games, entertainement parks, animated drawings, without forgetting
the allegory of opulence in the famous poem of Colleridge,
Kublai Khan, etc...
Today, whereas the zealoies
of Web 2.0 speak loudly, whereas the media multinationals largely invested in
the field of the Internet, it would be perhaps time to make a focus on the
vertiginous gap which grew between the current, certainly out of complex
practices of consultation, and hopes, daydreams, Utopias which accompanied
since more than one century the establishment of the networks known under the
name of Internet.
Before coming from there to treat abyss between the
real use and the imaginary of the networks, perhaps it would be necessary to
specify in which meaning the word “imaginary” will be used, what will avoid us
many confusions.
The imaginary, in the meaning where we will employ it
is not the construction of archetypal, collective representations, coming from
the bottom of the ages, as Carl Gustav Jung understood it.
The concept of the German psychoanalyst, highly
estimable, would be quite difficult to use in this case, and source of
inaccuracies, since we will at the same time analyze literary texts, social
behaviors, works of art, all demonstrations which did not arise from the same
register, and that it would be delicate to place under the prism of the depths
psychology.
DEFINITION OF THE WORD IMAGINARY
The contribution of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty will be to us on the other hand of a better
help, who defines the imaginary as the “...lining of reality, the invisible,
carnal other side of visible...”. The imaginary is not, clearly, out of
reality, nor atemporel. It is, beside the symbolic
system, the face of reality revealed by the artist, or by whoever lingering to
request the thought, it is “[...] power
of restitution of an arising vision on the things and ourselves”.
The imaginary, in this meaning, is beside reality. It
circulates in parallel, and re-appears constantly, in a work of art which
reveals it, in a word, in a behavior. The imaginary can also precede reality,
as the science fiction writers do not deprive themselves any to do it. It can
be, for reality, also its drag, as the collective memory ends up transfiguring
it.
In any case, therefore, the imaginary, in the meaning
where we will employ it, will not be comparable with the dream, with the
fortuitous, with the non-intentional, nor with the powers of beyond. The
imaginary is a deliberate construction of man, to allow him to better live the
world. But it can also exceed this will, and take its autonomy, to return by
where one does not await it. See how the imaginary can be transferred in
reality will be one of the stakes of this article.
There is thus a real use of the Net. And then there is
what artists, writers, philosophers, imagined, thought, and continue to think,
to imagine.
Concerning the real use of the Net, one could find in
the statistics of sites like Le Journal du Net[5], or Internet World Stats[6], a
general survey of the practices of connection in the world. If one were to
stick to these data, the Net would be a synthesis of the telephone, postal
mail, telegraph, newspaper, television, marriage bureau, trader, casino and of
a whole heap of useful and useless services.
If one were to be satisfied to observe the planetary
cartographies, showing an over-concentration of the networks in the developed
world, and quasi an absence in Africa, in Latin America, in certain countries
of
But if one
were to confine oneself with the only field of the quantifiable, how could be
explained all the metaphors related to the voyage to speak about the Net, as if
it were about another country, another world? How to understand the high number
of terms borrowed from the field of the magic, religion, supernatural, such as
“magic”, “wizzard”,
“evil”, to point out very simple software, without forgetting our famous
Xanadu?
Isn't the
Net a little more than a networks fusion? Does its perception not exceed the
social and economic fact manifestly, in the imaginary? Artists, finally,
writers, experimenters of all kinds, who dreamed the Internet before it exists,
then who followed its invention, and who today still continues to question the
profound changes that the network will have brought to our lives, did they
influenced the history of its creation, through their own conceptual
constructions, or did they do nothing but envisage and accompany what was to
arrive?
As to answer these questions, we should initially
question us about the digital image itself.
Today where power of the computers, and subsidiarily that of the networks, us allows to have a
graphic image of high quality, we can forget as the image perceived on our
screen is only the result of a succession of calculations and instructions
given via the main memory of the computer. Each perceived pixel is the result
of an addition of algorithms.
It is the main difference with the analogical image,
that one develops at the revealing bath, after shouting it with a camera. The
analogical image is the proof of a state of the proven world. As Roland Barthes in the Clambre
Claire wrote “that was[7]”. For
little that the shouten character is close for us,
photography can cause in us this “satori where the
words weaken, rare obviousness, perhaps unique of “Thus, yes, thus, and nothing
more”[8].
The digital image, even if it reproduces an analogical
image, will be never of this kind. It does not tear off a material share of the
past, that we can almost seize between our hands, like a tangible proof. It is
never likely to install this temporal hiatus which we can feel with the vision
of old films whose actors charm us and are all died for a long time. The digital
image does not put to us in contact with “that was”.
It put in, on the contrary, above the da-sein. What we see on our screen hardly come to the
surface, and will disappear soon. The calculation which gave birth to this
pixel, how can we be sure that it will be reproduced accurately, in an
orthographical way?
The digital
image, it is this infinitesimal moment where we perceive forms, colors,
movements, where we read texts, without the least insurance of being able to
put back us above. An asymptotic tension of visible towards the image, who
never manages completely to convince us, to allow us to register in the
duration what we are seeing. This is why the term of « numerical
image » itself could be called into question. It is only by preoccupation with
a clearness that we will preserve the common use of this term.
The part of the digital image in the construction of
imaginary of the networks, because it is unstable, because it walks in the
interstice between the reality and the image of reality, will have thus never
to be underestimated.
This ahead perception of the world which is inherent
in the digital image, certainly try we to mitigate it, by mental projections
By weaving networks, who end up renewing the concept
of communities, by testing by very many means to build a numerical inheritance,
by seeking to recreate what the religious link had tied, or by transgressing
the law, the habit and until the typographical use, the users of the network
build a new cultural object, imperceptible, who would be incomprehensible if we
didn’t agree to hear what the imaginary says to us about it.
«[...] Danaïdes of the invisible who unceasingly emptie, fill, transmit each other the urn of the sounds;
ironic Furies who, at the moment that we murmur a confidence with a friend,
with the hope that nobody heard us, us shout cruelly: “I listen”; always
irritated maidservants of the mystery, easily
offended priestesses of the invisible, telephone ladies! And at once that our
call resounded, in the full with appearances night on which
our ears only open, a light noise - an abstract noise - that of the removed
distance - and the cherish voice is addressed to us. It is her, it’s her
voice which speaks to us, which is there. But as she is far! How many times I
could not listen to it without anguish, like if in front of this impossibility
of seeing, before long hours of voyage, that whose voice was so close to my
ear, I smelled better what there is the disappointing one in the appearance of
the softest bringing together, and at which distance we can be from loved
people at the time when it seems that we would have only to extend the hand to
retain them. Real presence that this so close voice - in effective separation!
But anticipation also of an eternal separation.» [9]
PROUST, Marcel, Le côté des Guermantes, tome 1
In volume I of the Côté
des Guermantes, published in 1920, Marcel Proust could be still filled with wonder at the remote
presence that the telephone dialogue inaugurated. In this rising XX° century,
it was not yet interdict to compare the operators of the telephone with Parques, Danaïdes, Furies, like
he does on several occasions in the Recherche
du temps perdu.
In his way, he inaugurated a rich intellectual and artistic production
based on the concept of remote presence. He also foresaw that the immaterial
network woven by two voices speaking remotely created a bridge between the
beings, above one blurred, alarming, incognita terra, which evokes for him the
“eternal separation” but which will be turn in a metaphoric way, otherwise,
very differently.
Since, works being pressed on this device followed one
another. To take only the example of the Hole in the space[10] installation
(1980) during which a cathode ray tube was installed in a street of New York,
while an other was it in a street of Los Angeles, both connected by camera and
microphone in real time, one can notice that what emerges from a network, it is
not only the meeting, the woven link, but also the vacuum drawn around.
The network put the focus as much on the presence in
the absence, that on the absence in the presence. The title of the work of Kit
Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz indicates it rather
clearly to us, who proposes a concept of lack, this “hole” in the space which
became, the time of the installation, an attraction and a place of appointment
for the walkers of the East coast and the West coast of the
The distance brings closer the men, and leads them to
change their ways of meeting, knowing, loving each other. The role of the
artists, in one like the other case, will have been to underline what the
technique implied. The technique made it possible to carry out the thing, like
speaking on the telephone, or to set up a telematic
network between two coasts of the
To still quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
“science makes the world available, art makes it livable[11]”. But
what the history of the networks setting-up and the Internet birth show us, it
is that the traditional dichotomy between art and technique cannot be held any
more for certain, for obvious. The power of imaginary of the networks scrambles
the borders most firmly established. An experiment, like that reported by Allucquere Rosanne Stone, in her article “ Could the real
body rise?» [12], us shows
how the first networks telematics constituted
themselves, at the end of the Seventies, in this so favourable
environment with the scientific and humanistic Utopias, north California.
The first members of telematics
networks were adventurers, often student or professors in the many universities
around
COMMUNYTREE
One of these first communities, connected by a telematic server, was called “Communytree”
- because discussions, laid out in the form of tree structure on the screen,
each new discussion in the form of a new branch materialized - and had as an
aim the study of the new religions, forming this nebula called the new age.The profession of faith of this community did not
certainly make in modesty, who affirmed “We are like gods, as much not scamp
work!”[13] But, as
opposed to what the over-sensitiveness of Marcel Proust
could blow to him, the members of this community did not see the distance
between them, and immateriality of their network, like the preamble with
eternal separation. Quite to the contrary.
What Alucquere Rosanne Stone
underlines in her article, it is precisely the quasi instantaneous and
unanimous transposition between this immaterial network and an experiment of
proven social life. Those who belonged to this network had the impression to
take part in a “new form of social experimentation”.[14] Why? The
answer to this question is known, given by William Gibson with this famous
formula: “The Net is a consensual hallucination”
Thus, members of Communytree,
connecting themselves to the server which connected them to this first network,
and discovering the tree structure of the messages, in graphic poverty that one
can imagine, did not see simple lines of figures, then words aligning
themselves on their tern screen, but saw human beings, full of spirituality,
carrying a transformation project for humanity. No matter what one can think of
a certain inherent naivety of this time, it is the power of networks imaginary
which must be underlined.
One must remember about this experiment, told by
Rosanne Stone, the way in which the small initial group of the participants in Communytree was quickly exceeded by young students, set on
data processing, who wanted to hustle the beautiful unanimism
of the network initiators, by communicating scatologic
and sexual contents messages, all that one easily imagines.
It is however thanks to this “disorder” that the
technique of the networks had to evolve, that the safety measures were born,
and that obligation to have a “pseudonym + password”, to exist on a network was
established. The creation of a « password + pseudonym », it is the
beginning of the concept of avatar and virtual life, such as they so well
nowadays are known.
Of a jamming of the network creators’s
initial intention by young hackers, who wanted to prove their know-how, the
establishment rose from a standard which appeared the most fertile one for the
imaginary: The creation of a Pseudonym + Password, it is the first step towards
this construction of oneself like another, who is the mark of the « addic-tionnel » lives on the network.
What it is necessary to retain of the experiment
reported by Rosanne Stone, it is the way in which the network organization
itself, in the form of tree structure will have transmuted a technical act into
a social object. The symbolic system of the tree moreover will have more
strongly marked imaginary of the network like social sculpture, like new way of
being-together.
It is however again in the shape of a novel that fresh
impulse, and in another direction, will be given to networks imaginary.
In its novel “Neuromancer”[15],
published in 1984, William Gibson describes a universe of hackers, smugglers,
performers, who fight in an existential fog, to find new ways of living their
body in a saturated with informational technique universe.
The subject of Neuromancer,
it is exactly that: how to live the - irrefutable – presence of the body,
whereas techniques increasingly more effective make it possible to project it
remotely. If Case, the hero of Neuromancer,
always a body has, he does not regard it any more but as “meat”, support of the
spirit which, he, wants to travel on the data-processing networks, and lives
its true life. The following step will be the decorporisation.
What Case and the other characters of Neuromancer indicate exceeds by far the framework of
a science-fiction novel, and this is why this work will have such a posterity.
Its popularity, overflow ensured by the mediums of the counter-culture, and by
the amateurs of science fiction, little by little the whole of the social body
will gain, owing to the Matrix film, which will popularize his topics,
until infiltrating the universe of publicity, drawing, fashion.
One of the more striking representations of Matrix,
these long curtains of greenish figures oozing top to the bottom, and which
materializes flows of information, became a gimmick to indicate the modernity
of all that is in connection with networks technologies, such as telephone,
Web, PDA, and for finally symbolizing the passage in another world.
MATRIX
But what remains from William Gibson intention apart
from these some graphic signs ?
It is a question which one could ask by putting it in
parallel with a novel having exceeded his framework much, like Don Quichotte. The novel of Cervantes remained by its
character who became what is called a literary myth. Novel itself, and of its
complexity, it does not remain more near general public this myth. But it is
already much. In the same way, with Neuromancer,
one holds an example among more striking way in which the literature of science
fiction, on a set of themes related to the networks, will have been able to
infiltrate the whole of the social body.
Belief in a plot theory, pushed until its extreme in Matrix,
so much so that it’s the apparent world itself which is the plot, here
something which will have passed today in the popular beliefs of some owing to Neromancer. One can say in a very clear way that the
fiction was introduced into reality and that the imagination of a novelist will
have modified general public imaginary.
Just like a considerable fraction of the American
people, with the question of knowing what is their religious belief, answers
“The force”, in reference to the Star Wars films, the social body reacted to
the vision carried by William Gibson, and certainly far beyond the intentions
of the author!
MARSHALL MAC LUHAN
These fruitful Eighties, during which the technique
of the networks telematics started to touch a first
circle of users, set on data processing and mainly resulting from the academic
world, are so strongly marked by the influence of work of Marshall Mac Luhan[16], that one cannot
overlook them.
With his famous mantra “the message is the medium”, he
directs the thought of his time, by the very fact that he carries the attention
of the public towards the wide-area networks of information like television and
the radio. What work of Mac Luhan changes, it is that
one can start to regard the networks as a matter, and not only like the means
of transport contents. Consequently, the tyranny of the contents, the tyranny
of meant, can be evacuated, with the profit of the interest for the support of
the contents themselves, that one can charge of meaning, that one can include
in the factory of the imaginary.
Neuromancer was
necessary to dare to imagine that the networks can become more than a transfer
means of the numerical data, more still transport means for the spirit, a
romantic matter. The following stage will be reached by certain theorists of
the post-modernism and the gender studies as Donna Haraway
in its famous Cyborg Manifesto[17] which
will make mix between body and technology the means of a rather fantasmatic emancipation… to tell the truth.
However, one will measure how imaginary networks will
have been able to evolve, since Marcel Proust and his
telephone ladies to the Cyborg Manifesto,
who postulates the introduction of the technique into the body. The technique
is not external any more with the body, and support of the daydream, the
technique returns in the body to increase the capacities and to release it by
them.
But what us proposes today, really, technique? The
infiltration of chips in the human body to ensure the traceability of it, whatever
the called upon reasons; prostheses of all kinds, visual for example, who
mitigate deficiencies today, which will increase the capacities tomorrow to
manufacture supermen; the remote control without the use of the hands nor of
the feet, only thanks to the collecting of the nerve impulses?, etc… Nothing
which is not, in germ, in the Cyborg
Manifesto.
Thus can one observe how the imaginary could seize the
networks of remote presence, with this first example given by the Telephone
ladies, of Marcel Proust, where the technique is
support of daydream, where the technique becomes the springboard to reinvest fantasmatic love reports.
A NEW ONTOLOGY
Did a new ontology was borned
from this founder story, in which the lover learns that the body can be present
in the absence, and symmetrically absent in the presence? The literary
treatment that Marcel Proust gives to the analysis of
this technical fact us makes it receive like a new chance for the literature,
which consequently can release itself from the alternative presence/ absence:
in the presence, the characters are obliged to interact over the moment, in the
spontaneousness of the dialogue, or in the fever of
the bodies, and in fact are subjected to the risk of awkwardness, failure,
incomprehension; in the absence, it is either the letter, or the thought
addressed to the other, who makes him exist, apart from the truth of the body,
and which sometimes disguises the other, with the risk of disappointment. The
literary kind of the epistolary novel will be for a long time the way in which
the literature will take party of the absence.
One will notice however with attention the dichotomy
described by Proust, between on the one hand the
comfort to hear the other, and to be able to take part his alive being in the
moment - this network with two which is called quite simply the love - and in
the other hand impression of tearing which cannot be removed of such a
situation, for the simple reason that the other is not there, in reality, and
that the writer transfigures like preamble with “eternal separation”. This
duality, consequently, will not cease existing, in all the installations of
remote presence, in all the experiments of social networks.
LOSS OF THE HUMAN BEING UNICITY
What is known as in it, it is this loss of the human
being unicity, this human being that the Renaissance
wanted “measurement of any thing”, who becomes, because or thanks to the
technique, a variable subjected to the risks of the networks. Either there is
tearing, because human being is quartered between its real presence, in the
moment, and its remote transfer, in the form of first his voice, then visual
signal - this duet Login + password, who will transform himself into avatar,
then in filmed image of the body, in the networks of visual telephony; either
there is fusion, constitution of a network, in which the disappearance of the
identity melts in a larger social being, more enveloping, where the
questionings of the one disappear in the answers from all.
Then, with the technological changes that we knew
during these last thirty years, this dream comes from a multi-connected man,
who initially loses himself, seeks itself, sometimes finds himself, in a long
drift, a voyage, on the wire of the networks, for finally arriving at this last
stage, where one seizes networks to install them inside his own body, and makes
of his body this giant, open chart, place of all the phantasms, utopian center
of the wedding of technology and biology.
What the Cyborg
Manifesto says to us, it is that this human being unicity,
« measure of all things », who has been lost in the techniques of
remote presence, can be found again, by connecting the networks inside his own
body.
Such blockbusters as “Matrix”, “Johnny Mnemonic”,
“Total Recall” can be seen like the result of this utopian current,
inspired partly by Mac-Luhan, who began in the
Sixties, then was based on technical progress to form a deposit.
This dichotomy, between on the one hand tearing,
aggressiveness, who are translated in a visual way by dark, cold decorations, a
pessimistic tone, such as one can see it in the sequences of Matrix
where the transfer is programmed, and in the other hand fusion inside the
networks, like the scenes of collective fright, inside Zion, always in the
Matrix series, part II, us shows, this dichotomy, therefore, remains - one
being marked with negative sign of the first steps of the Web, and the other
beginning again of the enthusiastic accents, that one believed arranged in the ray
of antiquities.
In an article on Web 2.0, published at the end of the
year 2006, Newsweek journalists, Steven Levy and Brad Stone, can conclude “the
Cyberspace was a faraway place. The Net is our home[18].» Like a way
of drawing a line on a Cyberpunk imaginary, strongly dependent on the stammerings of the technique and all that imagination
required to supplement, the report made by these two journalists takes note of
what the networks are today: a coloured, practical,
fluid interface, who entered the life of the every day like an obviousness.
However, would the Web
have become like the corner of the street?
Intense social life, promised by sites like Youtube[19], Flickr[20], and
other Myspace[21] and Wikipedia[22] could let it think.
The Net would be thus this simple meeting of networks, who would allow to
exchange contents, knowledge, to live an
alternative sociability, in a kind of dreamed world, unconstrained, without the
hideous capacity of the money.
An ideal world? The eagerness
of the heralds of this
If one examines a game like “Second Life[23]”, one
will be able initially to consider that it carries out the hopes and the
visions which always accompanied the network - the cyberspace like place favourable with the most extreme experiments, superlative
Utopia.
As in Matrix, the network becomes more than a
link woven between hosts, the network draws a new world. To paraphrase MacLuhan, “the media is the medium”. What was in germ in
these experimental Eighties, this rather cloudy “virtual reality” concept
became the banality of the beginning XXI° century.
In Second Life, however, one will notice like the
Utopia strongly divert toward consumerism: if the remote loading of the play is
free, the player is very quickly conscious that without spending at least the
price of the Premium chart, that is to say 9.9 euros per month, it could hardly
be other thing than a walker.
This second life promised by the game, who would take
place in a second world, is not reduced of the pecuniary contingencies -
invoiced in
The only held promise, it is that to transgress nicely
the interdict to be his own parent, by arranging his avatar, of which first
steps, the binomial “pseudonym + key word” are developed here until in least
the vestimentary and real estate details.
This second world, who tends more and more to resemble
the first, since Second Life from now on is equipped with law firms, concerts,
political movements - and why not, one day, of a Messiah! let us take the bet -
does not hold a long time with the analysis, when one reads the official blog[24] of it,
where a form of trickery bursts.
What a game as Second Life however leads us to note,
it is the evolution of this imaginary related to the network: whereas Internet
was perceived, in the novels, in the installations, like an experimentation and
crossing point, it became an immaterial territory where the accumulation of
immaterial goods is from now on possible.
MIXING REALITY, SYMBOLIC SYSTEM AND IMAGINARY
Accumulation and all that is dependent: the sale, the dissimulation,
the robbery. The being-in-the-network would not be only any more this moment
above the vacuum where two beings connect themselves, without their body being
put in presence, it would be also data exchange, dialogue with an external
storage, construction of a numerical inheritance, enacment
of a real life.
One will note however as it is difficult to regard
Second Life as raising only of the mode of the imaginary.
The money sums that some gain there are indeed one
cannot more real, and land on compte courant of the
player.
In addition, accumulation to which certain inhabitants
of Second Life deliver themselves would not arise well more of the mode of the
symbolic system ? By requesting powerful collective imaginary creation
around the networks, we evoked some aspects already, by mixing reality,
symbolic system and the imaginary one, wouldn't a game as Second Life end up cancelling the potential of imaginary related to the
networks?
To reformulate these questions under another angle,
could not one wonder whether the effective realization of a mind construction,
like the constitution of avatars, could end up killing the need for imagination
which was dependent for him?
These are questions that one can put.
If the Net is another
world, sure and tangible, where one could accumulate immaterial goods, it is
necessary to consider there, in a symmetrical way that the disappearance of the
human beings could have also a meaning in it. The example of the many sites
intended to keep a trace of our dear disappeared shows it well to us. This one,
for example, Christian memorials[25] seems organized like
a material memorial.
THE NET AS A FAMILY MEMORY
The families can deposit there a photograph of their
dear deceased, a short biography, testimonys of the
close relations, what could bring closer this memorial a traditional funerary
installation, tomb stone in a cemetery or epigraph in a columbarium. But one
notes on this site that a music is associated to the space dedicated to death,
as well as prayers and a certain number of signs coming under the field of the
intimacy, as if commemorative space was not apart from the family circle, in a
public place, but inside the house, like the ancestors altars of certain Asian
families.
This commemorative space on the Net also makes it
possible to the visitor to let durable traces, candle, flower, text, who will
be preserved as long time as the site will exist, with the difference in their
real equivalents, deposited in a cemetery and carried very quickly by the wind.
A meter will record the number of flowers, the number of visits received by the
dead one, and will allow to measure the index of popularity of him. Thus
presented under his best day, the defunct can be visited there by all, but one
supposes especially by his close relations.
However, by traversing one or the other of these
testimonial sites, one will surprise oneself to visit the “numerical steles”,
with curiosity, quite conscious of traversing new territories.
What will certainly strike us, it is this disturbing
feeling to take part of so close with the intimacy of the families of
disappeared, well more than when we traverse the alleys of a traditional
cemetery. The feeling which can traverse us, when we saunter in the alleys of a
public cemetery, it is that to approach the mystery of death, in a rather
external way, pondered. When these cemeteries on line are traversed, when one
penetrates in this space which is halfway of the public sphere and private
space, we have the feeling to approach more intimately this same mystery.
It is not no more « the death” that we approach,
but such or such dead one. Disappeared are there, often fixed in their
beautiful adolescence, a music, certainly their preferred piece, us restores
their tastes, us redraws them such as they were to be.
If one thinks to the abundant literary production,
especially in the XIX° century in
The most extreme case would however be that of this english artist, Donald Rodney, deceased in march 1998, who
created a web site[26] charged
to survive to him, and to maintain the fiction of his life. Whereas he felt his
end to come, he indeed decided to create a site which would be maintained by a
group friends artists, site which continues to evolve in 2007, just like if his
author was always there to occupy himself some. Isn’t said that an artist
remains always alive through his works! If his works continue to evolve, it is
thus that he is always in life. In the rich history of the negotiation that the
human beings always tried with death, the implacable death, the internet brings
its outstanding contribution!
This capacity of the networks to keep in memory a
trace of the alive ones, to even keep the illusion of the life, of course was
the source of works of Net-art, like the Book of the Dead[27].
CEMETERY OF THE DISAPPEARED DATA
Like an ironic opposite course to numerical
technologies brittleness, one will be able to consult the work of the French
Net-artist Blue Screen, the Cemetery of the disappeared data[28] which preserves a trace of the lost
data-processing files. The principle is simple, which asks each Net surfer
wishing it to entrust to the Cemetery of the disappeared data the trace
from a complete hard disk, or of a part only of this one: mail, photographs,
videos, works in progress...
What such a net art work shows us, it is the capacity
of the Net to become a space of retention, of accumulation, where the
immaterial goods can bet on a certain perenniality.
But contrary to Second Life, who bets on the accumulation of immaterial goods
in the game, contrary to the numerical cemeteries, who draw a new commemorative
space, the Cemetery of the disappeared data bets on the conservation of
a sign. Not any dear friend face to exhibit, nor brightly shining house, only
perfectly neutral files, similar to all the other files, who keep the trace of
professional or artistic work, mails, all kind of files, which never again will
exist.
In the literature or painting history, there are
famous cases of works having disappeared for always, which remain in the spirit
of their author like lost members, they will never find the use. These forever
disappeared works go on occupying a place in their history, just like a lost
member occupies a place in the life of a disabled person. In the same way for
each one among us, the loss of part of our data, mail, images, texts, can
appear irrevocable, but also founder for new works.
Thus, the Cemetery of the disappeared data
would be like the exhibition to everyone sight of one process that each one
knows: maturation of the feelings, evolution of the human relations,
construction of a spirit work. That the intellectual and emotional life is
built as much on accumulation that on the loss, whether this loss is accepted
or that is it never, here is a truth which was for a long time updated by the artists,
but that each one among us, closely, knows. To cross the files of the
disappeared data from the ones and others, it would be like traversing the
interior of our own brain, and more still interior of the perfectly unknown
ones brains. We know always rather early how the brain empties itself
unrelentingly, day after day, but how the spirit, him, also builds itself in
the lapse of memory!
If it were really necessary to find a specificity
undeniable with the Net, it would be this one, to be able to become a
palliative of the human memory, and much more, the collective memory. The Net
can certainly shelter very personal spaces of memory, but it finds its most
relevant use when it becomes this supplement with the collective memory, we can
hardly measure today the implications in the construction of the history.
The Cemetery of the disappeared data, through testimonys of those who take part in it, updates the
data-processing accidents of the every day, but also, the users of computer
know it well, parapraxes. What a site and an
experiment like the work of Nicolas Frespech, Tell
me your secrecies[29], show, it
is the capacity of the Net to reveal the workings of the unconscious. Briefly
let us point out the principle of this participative work, who saw the Net
surfers requested to entrust on line, on a host, their secrecies - which
consequently would not be it any more. Following the deposit of a secrecy which
could have been contestable in justice, work, bought by the FRAC Languedoc[30] had
quickly been put off line by this one. Today, the author seeks to find original
work.
Tell me your secrecies incited the Net
surfers to entrust their secrecies - certainly behind the barrier of anonymity
- as one could entrust to a third person. Consequently, the word of the
participants in this work could be released, since related to the public place.
A released word, but which underwent a coding, on a common meaning, when it passed through all
the languages of interpretation which work in background of the screen. The
word posted on a screen on line is never the word called by his speaker. It is,
because of the media, a word which was initially absorbed in a data-processing
code, before re-appearing.
It’s an original word since, mediatized,
it means differently, not being nor spontaneous word of the dialogue, nor that
of the psychoanalytical cure, who addresses himself by the means of the
transfer to, precisely, one human being, but that which seeks a way between
publicity and intimacy, between data-processing code dedicated to
interpretation, and natural language.
The fact that the intimate word on Internet does not
have a true statute - nor private word, nor public word - and that the place
where it is deposited is not completely circumscribed - whether they are the
numerical cemeteries, or the various numerical works of art that we could evoke
here, constitute the leaven for a work of imaginary in renewed directions.
Because whoever, by accident of a hypertext link, can
fall on an intimate word, on the trace of a disappeared human being or work, us
indeed brings to reconsider the discrepancy between interior and outside,
deprived and public: it is from the moment when we must call into question the
most established categories, that the imaginary is started again, to negotiate
with reality and the symbolic system the new systems of representations which
enable us to exist.
The article of the two journalists of Newsweek,
celebrating the new social networks born with Web 2.0, us partly allows to
understand how this renegotiation functions.
The web 1.0, in the continuity of the problems related
to the remote presence, showed work being concerned much with games around the
identity. Let us point out those of David Still[31], for
example, who made it possible to each one to take the identity of the artist
David Still. It was an humorous, ironic way, to use the faults of the email,
while proposing to each one to play “I is another”, according to the famous
formula of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Today, a
new ontology would be substituted, in which “I” would not be another, but would
be a superposition of several layers, like the images calques of Photoshop,
which superimpose themselves to form a final image. Those who use these new
social networks, like MySpace, Second Life, DailyMotion, etc… are often present on several interfaces,
maintain several blogs, which recut
themselves between them, which maintain between them several links. The incredible
increase in the mass of the numerical data required the creation of new tools
for localization, RSS, Tags, etc...
The
dilemma enters the loss of its identity in the remote networks, and fusion in a
chosen network, a network which would escape the social and geographical
determinisms, would be thus solved, in the imagination of those who take part
in this explosion of the mass of the numerical data accompanying Web 2.0. It
would be the addition of all the presences on the Net, in several social networks,
who would draw the new identity this multiplug being,
who would draw a new ontology. More the numerical mass would be important, more
the identity would be certain.
More
jamming between reality, symbolic system and imaginary would be strong, as
Second Life shows it to us with the most glare and more the disturbing
questions, around the loss of the unicity, would be
evacuated.
The work
of Jean-Pierre Balpe[32], highly skilled professor and French artist, who
multiplies the cross blogs[33], us the ironic translation of this reticular
proliferation of the identity gives, under the beautiful name of “The
disappearance of the general Proust ”!
RELATION SCENE, TRANSGRESSION SCENE
Word, on the Net, released certainly itself
from the frameworks which categorized it since the Renaissance. But to which is addressed it?
A story always supposes an addressee. A narrator writtes
for a reader. The million blogs,
forums, always do not have this precaution: most of the time, they are not
addressed to anybody in particular, and seem only intended for their narrators.
Thus the soliloquy, which at the classical era, could pass for a sign of
alienation, when the solitary word was not addressed to God, is on the Net
reconsidered.
Each one, on the Net, can soliloquize, can emit a public word, without
its good mental health being called in question. The structure of the network
itself ensures that least word, one day, can find a receiver. The word of the
soliloquy is not addressed any more to divine
The Net, in fact, is what connects. The creation of a collective
intelligence was often proposed by thinkers observing the grid of the territory
by the communication networks of any kind.
Let us point out what was often regarded as a premonition of the Net,
in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin[34] concerning the “Noosphère”,
“thinking envelope of the earth” which would join together the spirits for “the
blossoming of a really collective conscience”. Let us quote also Peter Russel[35] who announces “a coherence in the
total brain” thanks to the multiplication of the communications. Or the German
philosopher, specialist in the media, Norbert Bolz[36], who sees with work in Wikipédia
a process of self-organization allowing not-experts to compete with the
authorized word of the professionals.
This belief, whether it is the fact of the million bloggers,
or of intellectuals of reputation, in the capacity of the Net to connect the
beings and the consciences, could be compared with a form of religious feeling.
Etymologically, the religion is what connects. And concerning the promotion of
a world beyond the materiality, the religions showed the way for a long time!
In fact, the religions were not long being installed on the networks and in
exempting their message there, in all its forms.
More commonplace, like the purchase of luxury[37] chasubles, or supply of creative kits related to the
Cabal[38], with most astonishing like the
confession on line[39], or the papal homelie
on line[40], the religious currents most
traditional were for the time being satisfied to adopt a tool enabling them to
better communicate, until same proposing a numerical church, “Notre Dame of the
Web[41]”. They however did not modify
their message. The Net is a complement with the church, even a church out the
church, as in the example of Notre Dame of the Web.
RELIGION
CONNECTS
On the other hand, churches known as “evangelic”, coming from the USA,
manifestly adapted their message to the Net, and have a policy of communication
of most aggressive, to convert new followers on line. Thus, the evangelic
church of Pasteur Ray Comfort, propose on a site called “the evangelization[42]” a certain number of paying kits ready with
employment for evangelizing the Net surfer, and to transform him into
evangelist. Certain Moslem sites[43] try in the same way to convert the
remote Net surfer: it is enough to register its name in a field of request and
to click, one becomes Moslem!
At last, one find the way to entirely transfer the spirituality toward
his personnal computer, thanks to a web site[44] which proposes to make our hard disk repeat mantras,
then send them to the server. We just have to connect to this net art work,
whose aim is to grow the universal consciousness, then to choose our own
mantra, and let our computer work. After
100000 times repeating «
This new link created by the Internet is thus not superimposed exactly
with the religious link. In addition in certain cases, for the many churches
which make use of it like new vector of communication; for the new churches,
known as evangelic, the Net will be a vector of conversion, and for any
statement of viral conversion, since the leaders of these churches of course
count these new media to convert gradually new convert; finally, for those,
many in occident, who lost the traditional christian
faith, the sui generis
capacity of the Net to link can bring to regard it as a belief of substitution.
Technological messianism,
who had seen cyber-culture fans beting on the
overtaking of several centuries of history, the overtaking of customs, and
until the overtaking of the body - for the reason that the techniques of
information would provide cognitive prostheses to the human body and that
progress would allow one day the man to free from his body, to invest himself
completely in his prostheses - this technological messianism,
therefore, is it always of topical subject?
When one reads, on the blog
of Second Life, the message “Peace in our time”[45], which
claims that the new practices of sociability born with the game could
contribute to restore peace in the world, one could indeed think it. Unless the
commercial cynicism of the employees of Second Life pushed them to write this
message intentionally, to attract and retain the customer...
More still, when we read on Google Corporate[46], that
« Our mission is to organize all the information of the world », we
can be sure that this technological messianism is
always living ! And one of the others commandments of Google, « Don’t
be evil » goes on the way of a so strange religiosity for an european mind. « Mission », « evil »,
Google uses religious words and, most of all, refers to this so important faith
in its own destiny that is the leading point of USA in general, and Google,
there, precisely. Here, we can say that the technological messianism
is related to the
At all events, it is perhaps the only thing which
share the historical theorists of new technologies like Roy Ascott
and new supporters of Web 2.0: an immovable faith in the saving capacity of
technology. The difference between the first and the others, it is certainly
that Roy Ascott[47] imagined a
collective redemption, while the contractors of Web 2.0 think more particularly
of themselves!
FAKES, SATANISM, GOTHICISM, TRANSGRESSION
An apocryphal text as “The prophecy of Jean of
Jerusalem”[48] finishes
digging the seam of a network favourable with all
trickeries in the field of the religious feeling. This text, obviously a fake,
who claims itself writen in X° century, appeared
exclusively on the Net, and in first on a site dedicated to the wild imaginings
of any nature, Syti.Net[49]. It
pretends that the beginning of the second millenary would be the worst period
for men, but that after a lot of desasters, such as
civil and religious wars, will appear a time of peace and reconciliation.
Because it ‘s written in an allegedly religious style, perhaps that
gullible people have believed it – and have followed the counterfeiter in his
wanderings. In fact, we see very fastly what the man
who wrote this text wanted to : after having feared the reader with dark
predictions, being something as a new prophet for the peace and the living
together, thanks to the Net!
One will notice the very particular esthetics of
page-setting, black background, blue writing, with the limit of legibility.
Other sites, dedicated to the gothism as “I am
Gothic”[50], adopt
same page-setting, black background clear writing. Majority of the sites
devoted to the satanism, of which this one, heading
simply Satanism[51], also use
a black background, with red characters for the illustrated example.
This esthetics, who runs the counter to several centuries of tradition
of writing, intends to mean, before even as the contents is crossed by the
reader, that we will be in the field of the inversion, transgression.
The
performer Jean-Louis Costes[52], well-known for his spectacles based on the
provocation, pornography and the scatophily, also use
in its sites this page-setting: sombre background,
clear writing.
The
transgression, the non-observance of the usual rules of the life in society
which made say Net was a space of non-law, are initially meant by the aspect of
the screen. Dark Fund, clear writing, sometimes illegible characters and one
announces from the beginning the rebellious character of his page, one sends
the signal towards the hyperlector that one will not
yield with the rule of use. White or clear background, dark writing, print most
readable possible and the rules of printing works are respected, who aimed to
the broadest diffusion of the writing, like the Gutenberg bible, first
manuscript printed in great series, white pages, black characters.
TRANSGRESSION BEGINS WITH APPARENCE
Hackers web sites, sites related in a way or another
to the theories of the plot, Gothic and statanic
sites, sites of artists playing of the provocation and the transgression, would
run the counter to this requirement of legibility which initially prevailed to
propagate the divine message. According to a tradition that printed and coded
manuscripts - watch the example of the Voynich
Manuscript[53] - already
largely sat, these sites require of the hyperlector a
decoding effort, which can go until claiming a data-processing expertise on
most accurate. The transgression starts with appearance. One will note like
Chaos Computer Club[54], historical
hacker site, which became the carry-flag about it, shows from now on an
appearance one cannot more traditional.
But it
would be necessary to take care not to be satisfied with this taxonomy, who
would place on a side an official Net, seeking best legibility, and on another
side a protestor or criminal Net, playing of all the artifices of the revolt!
Certain
sites having allowed the realization of the evil were absolutely official.
Thus, this site of meetings in love, used by one former soldier who published
an advertisement asking a man to be given to him in order to be eaten and who
had actually devoured it[55]. Or the very official site of auction sales Yahoo
Auctions on which Nazis relics had been sold.
Other sites, like the paedophiles
sites hosted in
The presence of the evil, on Internet, cannot be
denied.
It takes new forms, and asks that one define precisely
where is the evil: at that who has the intention to do it or that who gives him
the means of making it. Vinton Cerf, one of the
“fathers” of the Internet, was opposed firmly to French justice, in 2000,
because it wanted to prohibit the auction sale of these Nazis relics.
The French
state wanted that Yahoo Auction would be closed at least with the French Net
surfers, to respect the French law. With the reason which the filtering of the
Net surfers was impossible, because the Net surfers could lie on their
nationality, and that to block accesses would have amounted blocking the whole
of the Web and would have gone against its philosophy, Vinton Cerf was opposed to the French decision.
Today, in 2007, this problem was solved for the sites
hosted in
Thus the revisionist association site, furthermore
racist and anti-semite, Unité
Radicale, was closed, by intimating the order to the
hosts to close their channels with this bunch[56].
The problem of the presence of the evil on Internet
remains absolute, maybe that it advances in a way with a mask on official
sites, either that it is not fought in time, by ignorance or negligence, either
that it is not fought, because of a permissive ideology, as in Russia, or
because of a libertarism that the first theorists of
the Web did not have any probelm to defend, but which
today could not any more be it.
To define the specificity of the evil, on Internet, it
is seen, is certainly not easy matter to achieve. With the problems which
philosophy has encountered for more than 2500 years to circumscribe it, those
of today are added, completely specific to the media, and which is due to what
precisely made all its success, namely dispersion of the servers in a
decentralized distribution of information. The concept resulting from the
second world war, of banality of the evil, proposed by Hannah Arendt, seems completely operative there and could be
applied to the hosts who release themselves from any responsibility, with the
reason that they would constitute only one simple technical interface, would be
only neutral agents, and could not be held for person in charge for the
diffused object.
The hosts, however are, in fact, diffusers: without
their mediation, the contents could not never be accessible to the Net surfers.
As well as a newspaper, as well as an emission of television, they have the
responsibility for what they lodge and which is diffused.
Evil, consequently, could be regarded as depending,
classically, of the person who achieves it intentionally, and of the person who
gives him the means of achieving it. For this reason, states, like
More still, the presence of the evil on Internet
exceeds the few too obvious cases which were given here. All those who, ensured
of impunity, benefit from anonymity to make what they would never have dared
apart from the network, in the form of vexatious remarks, anti-semites, sexists, racists, are carrying, them, not of a
banality of the evil, but of an inclination to the ordinary evil, that each one
carries in germ. The network, in their guaranteeing impunity, would give to
some the means of passing to the act. If they are not liable to the law, they
are not less responsible for what they make - to have benefitted
from a technology which connects them to the whole of humanity.
The most outrageous case, of loss of the feeling of responsibility,
would be still that of this businessman[57] who proposes remote
hunting, thanks to the network. The principle is simple, who allows whoever
discharging a sum of about 10000 dollars, to be able to shoot a real ball at a
real animal, while having quietly sat in front of his computer.
If we immediately feel this proposal like shocking,
and concerning the evil, it is because it encourages no matter whom to kill
without being present, to kill without endorsing the responsibility for it.
Evil, on Internet, wouldn't it be then the rupture of
the thin link which connects all the Net surfers between them? The Net being
what connects, the evil would consist of the rupture of this link, who would be
also the negation of an ideal living-together. By reading the first
ideologist-utopians of the Net, such as Vinton Cerf, Roy Ascott, Rosanne
Stone, one can be surprised not to detect any reference to the evil, as if this
one had never existed. The connected world that they describe is a world of
before the fault. Their request for an absolute freedom for the circulation of
the ideas always seems to be unaware of that all the ideas are not good, far
from there.
In the same way the installations of remote presence
always insist, except perhaps those of Stelarc[58], on the
friendly enrichment of the personal sphere that new technologies could get to
us. The remote presence, one sees it with the example of this remote hunting,
can perfectly become the hell of the deresponsabilisation
and the murder – even if they are yet « only » animals - without bad
conscience. The fault would be unobtrusive because of the distance, as if the
physical non-attendance made it possible to be freed from any moral rule.
Contrary to this irenicism
of the Net old or new utopians, first criminal lawsuits having clarified all
the party which the evil could draw from the anonymity guaranteed by the Net,
the network seemed the kingdom of a new evil, crawling, without face, an evil
which would not have any more a source, but only targets.
It would be, in the imaginary of the defenders of the
order, the entire network which would be the vector of the evil, which would be
the incarnated evil.
A philosopher like Bernard Stiegler,
in “ La technique et le temps ”[59], and in particular
in the third volume of his work, in the network itself the possibility of
penetrating for a new inhumanity sees, because any hierarchy would have
disappeared in the data computing economy. Ideas, art works, being located on
the same level as commercial flows, arms dealers using the same numerical tools
as the philosophers and the poets, there would be a contagion of the evil on
the good.
In the imaginary born with the first utopians of the
network, imaginary that one finds practically unchanged on the blog of Second Life, or on Google Corporate, the network
would be, for the only reason of its existence and in a consubstantial way, the
vector of the good.
It would be its structure itself which would guarantee
a Messianic role to it - because it would give to each one the same place in a
decentralized economy of information, what would attach the Utopias of the
network to the Utopias of a communion in the equality, a communist Utopia. All
on the other hand, in the imaginary that a certain gutter press conveyed, and
that continues to convey of the sites like Atout Cœur[60],
dedicated to the multiple mishaps of the meetings in love on the network, the
anonymity of the network would make the reserve of a multiform evil, undoubted,
because advancing with a mask.
Islamist sites showing decapitations, sites organizing
the draft of human beings, finished the mother of all networks to make like a
devil.
At the very least exaggerated ways in which all and
sundry make network the vector of a goodness being achieved on earth, for one
or another transformation of humanity, or on the contrary the vector of the
absolute evil must ask us questions about the intrinsic nature of the network.
All the men are not ignoramuses of the history, all did not forget the philosophy or religion lessons, and more
still they did not forget all than the simple common sense dictates to them.
How to explain whereas ones, and not only first
ideologists of the Net, seem to have forgotten that the evil exists, and what
it awaits only the means of being carried out? How to explain diametrically,
that the others want to prohibit the Net, that is to say to restrict it so
considerably that it would lose all its interest, while pretexting
that the Net would be the evil incarnation itself?
We saw that since more than one century and half, the
mother of all networks was imagined, dreamed,
envisaged and that the advent of an information flow and works of the spirit,
without borders and limits, had been hoped like the paddle of a new golden age
of humanity.
The fact that the data-processing documents are
dependent between them, by HTML link places all works of the spirit in a report
of universal continuity, who had never been carried out in the past. In theory,
no obstacle cannot prevent to me from passing from the work of Marcel Proust[61] on line
to the catalogue of an arm dealer as Smith and Wesson[62].
The imaginary is this reformulation of the reality
which enables us to discover it under a new angle. It shorts-circuit the
traditional cognitive diagrams, and shows to us sometimes better a form while
speaking to us about his odor, us makes sometimes better feel an idea by
lending feelings to him.
The transversality permitted
by the Net cannot it be brought closer to the structure even of the imaginary,
who traverses all the zones of the human brain, and is based in turn on
perception, reason, memory? And all insane, incomprehensible hopes which could
be projected on the network, they for origin do not have this strange proximity
between the dreams of all the utopians having preceded then carried out the
network and imaginary itself, who transfigures reality.
The imaginary causes transformation,
metamorphoses, tropes. Like a metaphor,
it brings closer what appeared distant, and makes spout out an unsuspected
truth, about the poetic one rather than of the conceptual one. This circulation
of the spirit between the forms and the ideas, this proximity between the
opposites, isn't this what the first dreamers of the Net had imagined?
When the first remote communication networks made it possible to bring
closer the distance, the imaginary of the poets seized some for pleading a new
way of living the human relations: what stimulated their imagination, it was
the way in which the spirit could be freed from temporal and spatial reality.
When the servers made it possible to consider the externalisation
of the brain and the conquest of new memory fields, it is all imaginary which
was set up, to dream of new spaces, which would not be subjected to biological
realities. When finally the networks made it possible to negotiate differently
with the philosophical and metaphysical categories, it is the dream, or the
nightmare, to be able to free itself from moral imperatives which could be
born.
The distortions which we could note in the
intelligibility of the techniques of information and communication explain
certainly better, if we do not lose sight of the fact its proximity with the
field of the imaginary. On the other side of reality, who must be bordered by
the law, to allow all to live without the constraint of the strongests,
the imaginary does not have such concerns.
Its field par excellence is transversality.
Between the forms, colors, words, feelings, the imaginary transfigures reality
- and this is why the poets, writers, artists, are the workmen of the
imaginary, and why people can lose the common sense when they speak about
Internet, when they use it. Internet is not out of reality, because the
imaginary isn’t either.
It is however with reality that it is always necessary
to return, so that the imaginary can exist.
Bibliography
ASCOTT Roy, «Y a-t-il de l’amour dans l’étreinte
télématique », Publishedin Art Journal, Automne 1990.
BARTHES Roland,
COURRIER INTERNATIONAL n°826, Norbert Bolz, «Le nouveau royaume
des idiots».
COURRIER INTERNATIONAL n°826, Steven Levy et Brad Stone, «Quand les internautes tissent eux-mêmes leur
toile».
GIBSON William, Neuromancien, J’ai Lu, 1985, pour la première
édition française.
HARAWAY Dona,
Première publication: «Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology,
and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s», Socialist Review 80 (1985).
MC LUHAN Marshall, Undestanding Media : The Extension of
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, L’œil
et l’esprit. Gallimard, 1964.
OTLET, Paul, Le Livre sur le Livre, Traité de Documentation: le livre sur le livre. Théorie et
pratique. Editiones Mundaneum, [IIB Publication No. 197]; Bruxelles: Palais
Mondial, 1934. 431[+ 19] pp.
PROUST Marcel, Le Côté des Guermantes, tome 1. Paris, Editions
Gallimard.
RUSSELL Peter, The
Awakening Earth, Routledge, Londres,
1982, p.9.
STIEGLER, Bernard,
STONE Allucquere Rosanne. Le
corps réel pourrait-il se lever? Première publication: Cyberspace: First
Steps, sous le direction de Michael Benedikt (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1991,
pp81-118). Traduction française dans Connexions, Art, réseau, média, sous la direction
de Annick Bureaud et Natalie Magnan, Editions ENSBA, 2002.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Pierre, L’avenir de l’homme, Paris, Le
Seuil, 1959 (vol5, note 2, page 203).
VALERY Paul, "La conquête de l'ubiquité" , in De
la musique avant toute chose (textes de Paul Valéry, Henri Massis, Camille
Bellaigue, etc.), Editions du Tambourinaire, Paris, 1928. Reproduit in Paul
VALERY, Oeuvres, vol.II, Coll. "
VERNE Jules, Paris au XX° siècle, Le Livre de Poche, 2002.
http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/kiosquerel/foienligne.html Documents
about religion on the Net.
http://www.branchez-vous.com/actu/00-03/04-175504.html Documents
about religion on the Net.
http://www.kabsoft.com/ Shop around the
Cabala
http://www.chagalldesign.com/ Luxury
Chasuble
http://www.discours-en-ligne.fr/viereligieuse.htm On line Papal Speech
http://www.pere-lachaise.com/ Guided Visit of the well known Père Lachaise cemetery
http://www.christianmemorials.com/memorials/list.asp Christian
on line cemetery
http://vaudou.technologie.free.fr/ About Vaudou
http://www.aish.com/wallcam/ Web-cam
on Lamentations wall
http://www.topchretien.com/devenir_chretien.htm On line conversion to the christian
faith
http://www.levangelisation.com/ On line conversion by evangelic church
http://www.islam.ru/ On
line conversion to Islam
http://www.religioscope.com/jfm/iesh.htm Religious
links
http://www.ndweb.org/
Notre Dame du Web
http://www.meditation-for-avatars.net/home.htm Making your PC repeating mantras
http://www.atoutcoeur.com/Articles/boom-des-rencontres-sur-internet.php About the bad meetings on the Net
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4022147.stm News
about remote hunting
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/fcramer/wordsmadeflesh A Florian Cramer text about coding
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm International
Stats
http://www.archive.org/ Finding
remote HTML pages on the Internet
http://www.livinginternet.com/ About
the Internet
http://histoire.info.online.fr/ About
the Internet History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mysterious_people Research
on wikipedia
http://www.presence-pc.com/actualite/Site-negationniste-censure-10307/ About a negationnist site
http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/ Magazine
électronique du Centre International d’art contemporain de Montréal
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accueil
Trangression sites:
http://costes.org/
Transgression Performer
http://jesuisgothique.free.fr/index/index.htm Gothicism
http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Shop/8593/Satanisme.htm Satanism
http://bible-satanique.over-blog.com/ Satanism
http://www.syti.net/Prophetie.html Fake
Prophecy
http://www.syti.net/Cybernetics2.html Many
examples of disinformation
http://atlantides.free.fr/ About the atlantide’s civilization
http://www.metaphilo.lautre.net/wintro.htm Wingmakers. Fantasy
http://www.onnouscachetout.com/ About disinformation
http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/index.html Hole in
the space
http://www.iniva.org/autoicon/info.html David
Rodney Web site
http://www.20six.fr/lessecrets/ Tell me
your secrecies
http://generalproust.oldiblog.com/?page=lastnews&id=111711 Jean
Pierre Balpe Crossed blogs
http://davidstill.org/ David Still Web site
http://jydupuis.apinc.org/Proust/index.htm
The whole «Recherche du Temps Perdu» on line
http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ Stelarc Web site
http://www.grammatron.com/htc1.0/ Mark Amerika. Grammatron.
http://www.b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net/ Cimetery of desappeared data
http://www.20six.fr/lessecrets/ Tell me
your secrecies
http://2067.hypermoi.net/ Site
allowing to send an email in the futur
by David Guez
https://www.postexpression.com/ Site
allowing the same thing
http://www.tell-a-mouse.be/T-deus/portrait&pray.htm Net art
works around religion
http://www.tell-a-mouse.be/sacrifice/sacrifice.htm Net art
works around religion by Albertine Meunier
http://www.livresdesmorts.com Net art
work about the travel through the death, by Xavier Malbreil
and Gerard
Dalmon
http://www.a-virtual-memorial.org/blog/
Art work around the memory
http://xanadu.com/ Xanadu Project by Ted Nelson
http://secondlife.com A
game or not a game?
http://lessims.ea.com/pages.view_frontpage.asp About the
Sim’s
<REVISTA TEXTO DIGITAL>
[1] VERNE Jules, Paris au XX° siècle, Le Livre de Poche, 2002
[2] OTLET, Paul, Traité de Documentation: Le livre sur le livre
[3]
VALERY Paul, "La conquête de l'ubiquité" , in De la musique avant toute chose (textes de Paul Valéry, Henri Massis, Camille Bellaigue, etc.),
Editions du Tambourinaire, Paris, 1928. Reproduit in Paul VALERY, Oeuvres, vol.II,
Coll. "
[7] BARTHES Roland,
[8] BARTHES Roland,
[9] PROUST Marcel, Le Côté des Guermantes, tome 1. Paris, Editions Gallimard. Page 65/158 dans l’édition en ligne de la Biblitheca Augustana, http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/gallica/Chronologie/20siecle/Proust/pro_t300.html
[10] « Hole in the
space » Kit Galloway et Sherrie Rabinowitz, 1980, see on
http://www.ecafe.com/getty/HIS/index.html
[11] ibid
[12] STONE Allucquere Rosanne. Le corps réel pourrait-il se lever ? First publication : Cyberspace : First Steps, sous le direction de Michael Benedikt (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1991, pp81-118). Traduction française dans Connexions, Art, réseau, média, sous la direction de Annick Bureaud et Natalie Magnan, Editions ENSBA, 2002
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] GIBSON William, Neuromancien, J’ai Lu, 1985, pour la première édition française.
[16] MC LUHAN Marshall, Undestanding Media : The Extension of
[17] HARAWAY Dona, Première
publication : « Manifesto for Cyborgs : Science, technology, and Socialist Feminism
in the 1980’s », Socialist Review 80 (1985).
[18] Courrier International n°826, Steven Levy et Brad Stone, « Quand les internautes tissent eux-mêmes leur toile ».
[19] http://www.youtube.com/
[20] http://www.flickr.com/
[21] http://www.flickr.com/
[22] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accueil
[23] http://secondlife.com/
[27] http://www.livresdesmorts.com
[30] Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de la région Languedoc, France.
[34] TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Pierre, L’avenir de l’homme, Paris, Le Seuil, 1959 (vol5, note 2, page 203)
[35] RUSSELL Peter, The Awakening Earth,
Routledge, Londres, 1982,
p.9.
[36] Courrier International n°826, Norbert Bolz, « Le nouveau royaume des idiots »
[37] http://www.chagalldesign.com/
[39] http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/kiosquerel/foienligne.html
[47] ASCOTT Roy, « Is
there love in the telematic embrace ? »,
published in Art Journal, Automn 1990 :
« The telematic process, as the technology which
incarnates it, is the product of a deep human desire of transcendence: to leave
its body and its spirit, to go beyond the language. Virtual and data space
constitute the field, formerly provided by the myth and the religion, where
imagination, the desire and the will can reintroduce the forces of space, time
and matter in a combat for a new reality. »
[49] http://www.syti.net/index.php
[50]
http://jesuisgothique.free.fr/index/index.htm
[51] http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Shop/8593/Satanisme.htm
[52] http://costes.org/
[54] http://www.ccc.de/
[57]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4022147.stm
[58] http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
[59] STIEGLER, Bernard,
[61] http://jydupuis.apinc.org/Proust/index.htm
[62] http:// www.smith-wesson.com