Human_condition.gif

Anonymous

This digital collage is a response to the overwhelming and distorting time using technology in the early days of remote work and quarantine in 2020. The laptop, two desktop monitor screens, and windows act as frames, or portals, into the outside world. The outside world is here conflated with the digital one. Behind these frames is a conglomeration of images of notifications, tweets, mindless Instagram game filters, and Zooms against a scenic backdrop. The image then toggles to a chaotic distortion: the walls and furniture are manipulated and skewed, the colors of the computers are inverted, and Photoshop’s white and gray checkered background transparency layer is exposed. The view of what is the representation and what is real, what exists in time and in space is muddied and confused.

Based on Magritte’s 1933 painting, The Human Condition, the digital collage borrows the symbolic imagery of representation in a digital form to mirror the subject matter. The medium of collage is extractive and almost violent as it rips images away from their initial environments and reframes images in new contexts. This act of extracting and synthesizing parallels the act of removing oneself from a physical space and entering into a digital version of self.

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I thought a lot about Magritte’s The Human Condition (1933) painting in the first few weeks of quarantine. At the time, I was living alone in a one-bedroom apartment and working from home. I saw the world entirely through screens: during the workday, I was on video calls, sending emails, and making PowerPoints on my laptop and borrowed monitor, and during the evening, I was FaceTiming my family, texting my friends, and doom-scrolling on my phone. My screens functioned as my gateway into the world, and I had a hard time feeling real. These screens were enabling connection yet necessitated disconnection.

When forging connections through screens, what happens to our own physicality as we exist as digital avatars? In an interview printed in John Bucher’s book, “Storytelling for Virtual Reality, Noah Nelson is quoted: “We used to go online to get away from reality, and now we go to reality to get away from online. The most valuable and dangerous thing in the world is going to be an off switch.” Though I resonate with the shift of what we are escaping from and what we are relieving it with, perhaps it is less of a switch and looks more like a dial. That is, as Tencent C.E.O., Pony Ma, quoted by Anna Wiener in The New Yorker, states that technology is making “the virtual world more real and the real world more rich with virtual experiences.” We’re turning the dial up or down, and I felt the gradual loss of tactility during those early days of quarantine. The worlds become fused, with perhaps not even a visible screen to separate them. It is, as Chenoe Hart describes in Real Life magazine, that the future of how we engage with screens and what they might become may no longer be “a deliberate transformative act of passage separating distinct materialized and dematerialized worlds from each other.” The legs of the easel and the side of the canvas are indiscernible in the painting.

Hart continues by exploring what it would mean for these spaces to blend together through immersive technologies. Hart describes this phenomenon as “future configurations of computer screens that distort the appearance of the world around us in response to our moods which could imitate the surface-level appearance of a psychedelic experience, but to serve a commercial agenda.” How will this alter the way we act and interact as our psychology is being exploited? There are existing precedents for this in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technologies that have been programmed to read and manipulate human behavior, and researchers have studied how these technologies mold human interactions. In one study summarized by the Montreal A.I. Ethics Institute, Royer writes: “[a] serious ethical concern is the fact that… [t]here is a self-realizing dimension to Emotional A.I. systems, as individuals may, over time, modulate their emotional responses to the norms produced by these systems.” Humans are converging to fit the molds dictated by these A.I. technologies, and with screens blending into the backdrop, space can have a similar altering effect in the way we relate to physical space.

Bridging the physical and digital can also be seen in recent developments in the metaverse, as technologies attempt to embed tactility in its digitally native landscape. For example, a Sony-backed start-up out of Tokyo, H2L, is developing technology that would allow for simulations of pain in the metaverse. This creation of physical feelings in virtual worlds through simulation converges the digital and physical into a hyperreal. This appears to be a step towards recreation into digital, where our reincarnation as digital avatars are inextricable from our physical selves. And I am left wondering how we got here.

I was in sixth grade when I first saw a copy of Magritte’s painting. It was one of many artworks my teacher had printed out and scattered across our desks. She had our class walk around the room and examine each of the printouts. When she picked up The Human Condition, she asked the class to describe what we saw. Children quickly noted the window, the curtain, the trees, the sky, and the grass. Finally, one student noticed the easel situated in front of the window that blended into the scene outside, revealing that it is a painting of a painting of a window — the human condition. As we add more subtle easels, or screens, to our world, I am reminded of Jenny Odell’s question in the introduction of her book, How to Do Nothing Resisting the Attention Economy. She asks: “Could augmented reality simply mean putting your phone down?”

References

Coldwell, Will. “What Happens When an AI Knows How You Feel?,” Wired. December 29, 2021.

Hart, Chenoe. “Magic Carpets,” Real Life Mag. February 10, 2022.

Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. New York, Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Stark, Luke, and Jesse Hoey. “The Ethics of Emotion in AI Systems.” OSF Preprints. October 8, 2020.
Sugiura, Eri. "Japanese start-up wants to cause real-life pain in the metaverse," The Financial Times. March 19, 2022.

Wiener, Anna. “Money in the Metaverse,” The New Yorker. January 4, 2022.