With the reality of planetary computation and the governmental challenges it poses, what do we make of the idea that “ religious ritual is the prototype of the mechanical reproduction that dominated Western culture during the modern period, and which, to a certain degree, continues to dominate the contemporary world. What this suggests is that mechanical reproduction might, in its turn, be understood as a religious ritual. It is for this reason that fundamentalist religious movements have become so successful in our time, for they combine religious ritual with mechanical reproduction ” ? Is this to contradict Baudrillard ’ s insistence that there can be no utopian function with the realization that there cannot not be actualized utopian space, but that the utopian is pure function and that pure function is utopian? For Groys, any affect of the projective utopian image is not the solemn duty of religio, the sacrality of the return within religious mediation, but in this digital nihilism a response drawn only from the desubjectifying solipsism of the instant sensation of repetition, the diagram of roteness, and the calming abdication that comes with machinic iteration. See Groys, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction. ”
- For example, Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (directed by Ren é Vi é net, 1973), though it is Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour who have provided the most applicable analysis of the subtitle and the production and mitigation of the experience of a “ foreign ” image, in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
- Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
- This is the basis for seeing the diagrammatics of information visualization operating as a utopian-projective discourse for the image-interface yet to come, as the deepest worldly recombinancy shifts from the linear temporal unfolding of metahistory to the nonlinear spatial unfolding of meta-interfaciality.
- It ’ s impossible then to avoid the comparison with Ž i ž ek ’ s well-worn reading of John Carpenter ’ s science-fiction film They Live (1988) in which certain characters can, by wearing special ideology-filtering Ray-Bans, perceive that Earth (or Los Angeles, at least) is controlled by skinless reptile aliens and that humans live in a state of somnambulant delirium. See, for one example, Slavoj Ž i ž ek, “ Through the Glasses Darkly, ” In These Times, October 29, 2008, http://inthesetimes. com/article/3976/through\_the\_glasses\_darkly. Regarding AR then, the wearing of glasses instead of allowing us to wake from “ false consciousness ” allows users to choose which subscription hallucination they prefer. After Ž i ž ek, we might say, “ Yes, AR looks as if people are strapping ideological reductions onto their face, but don ’ t be fooled; they really are. ”
- It is said that at the end of the rainbow, there is a pot of gold. Where that end is, however, poses a problem, since it is different for every observer. The rainbow is actually a distorted virtual image of the sun. Nevertheless, it looks like a real object. Could it be that similar distortions apply to other “ real ” objects? Otto E. Rossler and Peter Weibel, “ Our Rainbow World, ” in The World from Within — Endo and Nano: Ars Electronica 92, ed. Karl Gerbel and Katharina Gs ö llpointner (Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1992). Also republished in Peter Weibel, ed., Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded — Essays on Space and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 504.
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