Human Consciousness and the Postdigital Analogue

Keywords: Analogue, Consciousness, Postdigital

It becomes apparent that empowered users negotiating with digital media, find themselves engaged in the recurring cycle. One in which the idealisation of representation is in conflict with the dominant technology which disavowed daily experience as an undifferentiated circulation of metaphors for desire and resistance. As much was at stake in the pre-cinematic age when Etienne-Jules Marey, for example, inquiring into the nature of movement regarded the new techniques of chronophotography as inferior to graphic methods using smoked drums and scribes attached to pneumatic sensors. Photo-technology used shutters that insisted upon the moment as a finite duration and consequently ruptured the flow of movement as experienced in a flux of time. The pseudo-guarantees of objectivity that this scientifically acceptable idealisation could offer, however, outweighed the deficits, and the representation of movement as an incremental sequence in a small finite and discontinuous moment became an acceptable norm to the extent that the subject was indeed collapsed into the object and temporarily 'lost in space'. However whereas chronophotography chained vision to the materiality of the body, in the post-chronophotographic analogue the principles of similarity, congruency and continuity found new life in the cinema of narrative integration (the movies) which rescued the subject in a seamless reality of the infinitely malleable virtual bodies for whom the eye was transcendent.

At this distance there is now little doubt that the digital revolution was, from its technological and conceptual inception, always destined to be the postdigital in which similarity, congruence and continuity found new applications. At stake in the postdigital analogue however, is more than the recovery of the subject: it is nothing less than whose vision of paradise prevails. The postdigital analogue points to a version of paradise that is not a finite discontinuous place or a non-homogeneous moment of time, not Eden in a nostalgic future, but a thick membrane in which local conditions, desire and resistance are constantly stabilised to form a whole identity. Where the digital proposes the perfect finite conditions for a perfect existence regardless of matter, (as for example in the human genome project), in the postdigital analogue (as for example in the ironies of genetic and wet biological art) human consciousness is regarded as almost infinitely malleable, able to shape its identity in response to local (and technological) conditions aware all the time of the range of possibilities (digital and analogue) that are not developed.