T<sub>E</sub>CHNO<sub>L</sub>OGICA<sub>L</sub> MAST<sub>E</sub>RY OF DR<sub>E</sub>AMS
The artwork in “Found” (Kaplan 2005) depicts a person sound asleep. A banal, quotidian scene complete with soothing bluish bedding, a bedside table, and an electric alarm clock. But once again, as in “Time Warp” mentioned previously (Brown 2004), this familiar scene is a setting for a much more disquieting posthuman fantasy. Attached to the man’s forehead are two electrodes presumably connected wirelessly to the radio on the bedside table. This, however, is not a regular radio, but a device, manufactured by Sony, called a “Dreammachine.” It is in fact a computer that runs “dream scenario” programs in the sleeper’s mind. In this case, the person has chosen to run a “romantic thriller” (Kaplan 2005). The dreamer not only chooses the general story to be immersed in but also controls various variables within the dream. In this case, for example, he chose to have Scarlett Johansson and Elijah Wood as “celeb avatars“—that is, as protagonists in his dream. He also chose to experience the events of the dream from the “viewpoint” of a “first person,” to set the “action level” to medium and the “titillation level” to high, and to turn off “parental control.” Finally, the device allows the sleeper to set the level of “emotional intensity” (Kaplan 2005). In addition to running the dream program over the sleeper’s mind, it is clear from the diagnostic meters on the device (featuring an electroencephalogram reading and determining the sleep stage) that the device is interactive and can read the vital statistics of the sleeping person.
This is a fantasy, of course, but a fantasy of what? What can it tell us about the ontology of the network human in the digital discourse? In this fantasy, the postmodernist, poststructuralist undertones are evident, involving the withering away of two structuralist assumptions: that signs stand for real referents and that there is a distinction between subjects (or subjective and internal experiences) and objects (or objective and external realities). In this fantasy scene one can control one’s dreams. Rather than expressions of the psyche, an arena for the unconscious to surface, dreams are here construed as entertainment brought about by information technology, spectacles to be screened and watched. In the modernist and structuralist framework, dreams are seen as the epiphenomenal signs of a much more stable and deep human essence (such as the unconscious). As such, dreams are an internal realm where anxieties, unresolved conflicts, and other unconscious forces are reflected and can therefore also be worked out and resolved.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age