the collapsed boundary

i guess as a further extension of the point that not everyone gets equal access to technology, im always interested in any creative work that turns away from the original cyberpunk canon's fascination with Cyberspace and instead takes on what it means to have virtual worlds as extensions of daily life and how that might look for different people.

(by "the original canon" i do just mostly mean the matrix — which i realize isnt actually original original canon and also kinda retracted the idea of that hard and fast separation by the end of the trilogy (quadrilogy??) but. idk. i think the original film was among the 90s big genre-definers and the later films less so. anyway.)

suzanne treister’s fictional video game stills feel like a standout example of virtual worlds extending so thoroughly into "regular life" that we fundamentally have to reconsider whether there’s really any separation between digital and analog media. her paintings, which were created on a computer, but then reproduced as photographs of the computer screen displaying the paintings, really play at the boundary of where the “real” art is.

like — are they “really” digital paintings or are they “really” photographs? or are they really the sequence of all the photographs stitched together to make a short video reel that creates the experience of traveling through different environments in a very surreal indie video game?

i would argue that the answer is “none of the above” and also “it doesnt matter”, but it’s the degree to which the paintings utilize the complexity of their own medium of creation to drive home how much it doesnt matter that makes them compelling.

i love these paintings.

and even though they have no like. narrative arc. i think they fit very neatly among cyberpunk’s descendants specifically because they unravel that separation between cyberspace and “the real world”. these paintings couldnt exist at any moment prior to the creation of digital spaces. they invite us into a virtual world that doesnt exist but also that reflects something we can recognize as real , eg the like actual virtual worlds that suffuse our daily lives in the form of real video games.

especially if you watch the video reel of all the paintings on a loop, the effect of the paintings is kinda disorienting. at least for me, they confer this kinda jarring sense that the paintings might be real videogame stills? before i remember, yeah, actually. they are real — real paintings, just not of screenshots or videogames that existed prior to the paintings existing. which feels like a contradictory statement, given that the dominant discourse abt videogames is that videogames themselves arent real by virtue of...being virtual.

but clearly some videogames are “more real” to some people (even if theyre virtual) than videogames that straight up dont exist. which i don’t even think is like a problematic distinction. what remains compelling about these paintings is just that they rely on the fact that i know that videogames do exist in general, and so when i look at them, i can wonder if the paintings have a reference point (like maybe some retro game that i just dont know about), and i can wonder that at all because virtual worlds and real worlds, in the present day, are completely interlaced into one, total thing.

i think now in the present it might be a little too self-conscious to make paintings like this. but treister was doing it in 1991, ahead of the curve of the internet and like in-home video game systems being ubiquitous in the US. cyberspace in treister’s paintings doesn’t stop where meatspace begins; the two are totally enmeshed even before other people were willing to acknowledge that was a possibility. beyond the intersection of the human body and specific machines, these paintings suggest that reality itself is made up of different facets of analog and digital detritus, all of which can be picked up and realized through various modes of expression.

micha cárdenas' sin sol/no sun kinda pulls this in another direction. in a game that revolves around environmental collapse irl, the in-game environments are actual 3D scans of real landscapes and forests in the PNW. like. just speaking in terms of the actual question of "reality" — it seems self-evident that the distinction between real and virtual isnt so clear, particularly when the environments being captured through 3D scanning/photogrammetry are likely to not exist in the real world in the near future.

which isnt to say that people cant tell the difference between a plant irl and a plant in VR — the actual sensory experiences of those things are very different. it is to say though that the ways in which people may come to know abt the world and its contents is transforming, which was also true back when like. the printing press was invented. "cyberspace", such as it is, isnt really some 'other place' as some works of fiction might propose. it’s part of this place right here and now, and that can be pretty bleak, actually, but not because we’re losing something “real” with the rise of digital spaces.

to put it another way, in the words of the invisible committee: there is no essentially 'natural' compatibility between humans and the world; all human interaction with the world is always mediated by the technical (musical, architectural, erotic, and so on....). silicon based technology/digital spaces are just one kind of mediation. i think it’s good to make work that meditates on what it means to live in a world suffused with that kind of technology.

of course, a world overflowing with cyberspace, digital interaction, and etc doesnt come without problems. as (i hope) ive been saying throughout this whole uh. treatise. technology in general isnt inherently liberatory and in fact carries with it some very serious implications for the ways in which power can be leveraged against the already-marginalized. and for the ways in which power can be leveraged to plunder the lives of people who i think would generally not have been historically regarded as marginalized at all (at least not in modernity).

often i think the kinda commonplace paranoia about the evils of the internet specifically is a product of the fact that people intuit that an interconnected information network can be used to further prop up a surveillance state — but a lot of times people can't (or don't) decouple that potential from the general existence of a digital interconnected information network on its own. which like. i dont blame anyone for that.

showing my hand here (as opposed to the rest of this essay where my hand is completely occluded lmao) but i think it really is or was at some point possible for small-scale internet-like networks to exist without rapidly propagating the capital interests of big tech ceos and government surveillance. like im sure i'm not alone in that but just to state the point clearly: i think the best version of the internet could have allowed for more information-sharing and higher rates of digital literacy and more avenues for creative expression without necessarily having become a harvesting-pit for googlesque and zuckerbergian stalkers, cryptobros, and jack-dorsey-type snivelers who want to trade for your soul in data analytics while feigning like they just dont understand how fascists thrive on their platforms — but i can really see how people think that all those things are inseparable.

i already cited james bridle's point that the actual physical network of the internet retraces the borders of the imperium, but the software/social media/digital interface aspects of computer mediated experiences are also entirely antithetical to liberation. like, the tech industry's stranglehold on all of this (and its commitment to completely obliterating any other way of interfacing with the internet/computers/each other) cant be overstated.

and obviously im not the only person to have noticed/thought about this.

which brings us to: systemic power.