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THE REAL-FAKE

The Fake and The Real Symposium

Roger Denson

Matthew Fielder

Erkki Huhtamo

David Getsy

Donna Gustafson

David Schwarz

Robert Stalker

Carrie Robbins

Mark Levy

 

Matthew Fielder, Independent Scholar

On The Accuracy of Fictions

(What fiction can forget about reality and what reality should remember about fiction.) M. Fielder

"There is no true or real 'reality' -'Reality' is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern."1

-William S. Burroughs, Nova Express

"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."2

- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

The exhibition The Real-Fake, Virtual Bodies and Impossible Objects showcases a group of innovative artists using digital technology, and more specifically 3D computer software to construct speculative worlds that not only investigate and evaluate our connection to material existence, but also blur the boundary between reality and fiction. By placing this technology in the context of contemporary visual art the work in this exhibition, which ranges from still images, video animation, and multimedia installation, present a wide range of discourses and practices surrounding virtual images and virtual objects. Because of and beyond their employment of this technology all of the artworks in the exhibition The Real-Fake have been metaphoricized into the proposal, presentation, and staging of fictionalization. That is to say, all of the artworks are intentionally constructed realities that are in essence works of fiction. By fiction I am referring to a mechanism from which one un-realizes the so-called 'real', and by in turn, realizes the 'fake.'

In order to qualify the plausibility of this fictionalization hypothesis this essay will present some very general but key examples the role fiction plays in relation to 3D computer graphics, art, and the distinction between the real and the fake.

"Both the fictive and the imaginary, their interaction and their relationship function by shaping something which we might call the actual or the real."3

-Wolfgang Iser, The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology

We are engaged in a point in history where technology is growing at an exponential rate; it is a place where our virtual reality plays as much a part in our lives as our 'real' reality. As our virtual life and our real life begin to blur into each other the definition of reality itself comes into question. We appear to be at a point where it no longer seems feasible to rely solely on the Cartesian methodology of duality and scientific negativism that separates the mind from the body, or as in this case what is considered to be real or fake. While disbelief is at the core of Descartes theses and most of Westernized science, reality as it were looks to be readjusting and rearranging instead into a combination of both the

authentic and artificial. What emerges is a sort of self-generated or group organized construction of 'make beliefs'. The formation of belief and the phenomena of reality as it stands here results from a type of performative and additive involvement. This is not the dogmatic form of belief as demanded by institutions or hierarchies, but the producing of belief through an active participation in its own production. What gets produced from this process of fictionalization is something cyberpunk author and inventor of the term cyberspace, William Gibson calls a mass 'consensual hallucination.'4

"The old dichotomy between fiction and reality implies that there is a stance outside either, which would allow us to designate one particular instance as fiction and the other one as reality. This is logically impossible. There is no such transcendental stance which allows us to come up with these predicates. We can only say something about fiction by way of its manifestation and its use."5

-Wolfgang Iser, The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology

This is not intended to read as a form of techno-mysticism, nor meant as an adoption of the 'possible-world theory'6 of literature, this is to say that reality no longer seems a matter of sustaining the critical divide between the real and the fake, but rather a matter of constructing an ever accelerating process of fictionalization which allows us to grasp and come to terms with its contrary. If culture as a formative process is to invest in the meaning of reality as a reflection of the contemporary experience, then it would seem appropriate to wrestle with the real as a phenomena that is as strange as or stranger than fiction.

"Many a statement made by the founder of a religion was originally meant by him merely as a conscious fiction"7

- Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If The Brahman Bookshelf:

The illusory nature of the real and the performing of belief are common themes in Eastern philosophy and religious practices where making the distinction between mind and matter or the self and the universe is understood as a false dichotomy. In Indian religions for example there is the concept of Maya, the principle responsible for manifesting the illusion of reality itself. Maya acts as type of screen or 'veil' through which we perceive the ultimate and infinite non-dual existence of Brahman, the supreme spirit of the phenomenal universe. This idea becomes central to both Hinduism and Buddhism where the goal is to pierce through the 'veil of Maya' in order to see and experience the truth of pure consciousness that is nirvana.

The screen has become a powerfully strong metaphor and mediator comparable to the veil of Maya. In no doubt our current information and media culture is primarily based in images and accesses through screens. Through the written word, photographs, cinema, television, and now through our laptops and mobile devices we have in effect, become a

technocratic culture of the screen. All of the artworks in The Real-Fake exhibition manifest or materialize through the screen. Whether the works are projected on to surfaces or appear through monitors the screen becomes the vehicle through which the audience interfaces to experience the work. The French philosopher Baudrillard theorizes on the nature of the screen in relation to a computerized culture,

"We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the interface and the reduplication of contiguity and networks. All of our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens. Nothing that appears on the screen is meant to be deciphered in depth, but actually to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning-or an immediate convolution of the poles of representation."8

The tension between the mirror and the screen can be felt in Rachel Clarke's Night Flight (2011). In this piece we see a human female figure falling endlessly through an abyss of prismatic objects of different colors. She wears a type of skin that acts as a screen, mirroring and reflecting the objects that surround her.

Fig. 1: Installation shot from The Real-Fake at California State University, Sacramento, spring 2011. Rachel Clarke, Night Flight, 2011, computer generated images.

Issues regarding the 'depth of information'9 as it relates to the nature of the screen are brought up in the piece, Real Flow (2011) by Tiumur Si-Qin. Si-Quin's work is viewed literally on a video monitor positioned at a 55-degree angle and depicts a plasmatic fluid flowing over the 3D shape of a human face. The piece portrays what the artist calls a 'Primal-object-money-shot.'10 This work highlights the space between the tangible corporeal depth we experience and the kind of visual and virtual depth we encounter on screen.

"Since immersion depends on the vividness of the display, its factors are closely related to the devices that lead to realism in representation. A factor that comes immediately to mind is the projection of a three-dimensional picture. The introduction of perspective in painting took a first step toward immersion by creating a sense of depth that integrated the spectator into the pictorial space. But because the medium of painting simulates depth on a flat surface the spectator cannot break through the canvas and walk into the pictorial space."11

- Marie-Laure Ryan, Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory

In all of the works presented in the The Real-Fake, teleprecence comes to us through a specific plane of projection. These works depend on an accessibility of relations and use a narrative dimension of fiction whereby the viewer 'completes' the work through a purely visual form of reading. Penetrating the screen may be as difficult as piercing the veil of Maya mentioned earlier, and by Ryan's account we should view the screen the same way we gaze into the picture windows offered to us in classical painting or the media windows we open in our computers.

i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi = \hat H \Psi-

-Formula for a general quantum system

25^{1,312,000} \approx 1.956 \times 10^{1,834,09712 -Value as a mathematical thought experiment in Babel's Library

Recent discoveries in Quantum science and string theory support the illusory nature of reality. Quantum science even postulates the possibility of parallel worlds and alternate realities existing alongside own. In the holographic principle the entire universe can be viewed as a 2D information structure encoded upon a dimensionless boundary. This means that the 3D reality that we observe is only a lower dimensional description of the physical universe. Quantum theory also tells us that particles only arrange themselves in accordance to the observer and without conscious observation the universe would appear to be random and chaotic. Many scientists claim that beyond the universe of matter and energy there exists only pure information. This view of the universe is strikingly similar to the fictional attitude of Jorge Luis Borges who conceived of the universe as an enormously expansive and interconnected library. In his story "The Library Of Babel"

Borges concludes that "The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shifts between, surrounded by various low ratings."13 Borges' conception of the library 'is a metaphor for the limits, or infinites, of the world and the knowledge that encompasses it.'14 It is reasonable to assume that we are constantly assisting the physical universe in the rendering of itself as information by simply being conscious of it.

I Cannot Imagine What Could Be Re-imagined:

"The simulative system is like an alphabet containing all the books on a given subject, while the simulation itself is the writing of a potential book (except that there is no book left when the writing is completed)."15

-Marie Laure Ryan, Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory

Through the index of the actual we arrive at legitimate 'non actual possible worlds.' To enter into these worlds we are asked to make what literary theorist Nelson Goodman calls the 'stipulation.'16 The stipulation is that works of fiction are to be taken as real. Fiction becomes responsible for the appearance of things and thus reality becomes a responsibility of the imagination. As such the convergence of the real and the fake into a fiction generates the concept of simulation:

"In computer graphics, one of the main goals is to create three dimensional systems in which any changes to a model will be reflected immediately, without waiting for a new object or scene to be rendered. The more complex the three-dimensional structures, the more difficult it is to create and refine them in 'real time."17

Using computer graphics to generate a 3D simulation has become a ubiquitous aspect of new media and digital art; it is also the technically formal cohesion that binds all of the artwork presented in The Real-Fake exhibition. Artworks that are crafted and rendered through the process of digital manipulation often reevaluate the traditional values and historicized notions of classical representation. Such is the case in Jon Rafman's work, Woods of Arcady (2010). Rafman offers an interesting technological critique of culture by creating hyperealistic virtual spaces where the romantic notions of nature, idealized form, and human representation come into question. Rafman renders picturesque landscapes, Renaissance sculpture, and Roman architecture so effectively, that our preconceived notions of beauty in these forms turn into historically awkward and ironic estimates of uncanny perfection.

By producing an augmented reality that is neither a fake nor an authentically real representation, the 3D simulation proposes an alternate and virtualized aesthetic dimension of reality. Here the real is reinterpreted by overlapping information that is made up of bits, bytes and pixels. What remains is a unifying sequence of code, or what Roland Barthes might call a structuralized 'voice.'18 The simulation as a product of consumption and an exchange of symbols presents us with an interesting paradox. The simulation as a perceptual arrangement challenges the system of our already abstract

vision of the once native real. Even more it attempts to model and replicate that system. Baudrillard claims that society has exchanged meaning for signs, thereby replacing reality with a simulation. However, the advent of a virtually simulated space permits a performative field in which it becomes possible to actualize what is not possible in physical reality, and the opportunity to abandon it all together.

"The question isn't whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. This is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game."19

-Pimentel and Texeira, Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking-Glass

Fig. 2: Installation shot from The Real-Fake at California State University, Sacramento, spring 2011. Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab, Scaleable City, 2008, interactive new media artwork.

Conventional architectural models made from cardboard, foam, and plastic have in large part been replaced by 3D modeling computer programs. Spencer Hutchinson's work Temple Kingdoms on the Other Side (2010) creates geometric objects based on the structural forms of architecture and simulates the 'unseen forces' that act upon them. Likewise, Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab's piece Scaleable City (2008) combines arti-fictual representations with the realistic architecture of urban and suburban environments. In this work the realistic representations of the landscape and the houses, buildings, and structures that inhabit it are fragmented and reconfigured into new shapes and forms through computer algorithms.

It is through the total reversal and ultimate suspension of particular signs and symbols that 'non actual possible worlds' can become actualized. The uncanny semiotic abilities of 3D computer graphics and simulations can generate a state of hyperreality where the 'authentic fake'20 of virtual irreality resides. For Umberto Eco, hypereality is a place "where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred" and "falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of 'fullness'".21 The hyper real follows a fictional format and it desires to transgress every boundary possible. Baudrillard makes the assumption that in the hyper real, 'it is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody.'22 In this sense all of the works in The Real-Fake exist in the fictitiously actual dimension of the hyperreal. Here fiction becomes responsible for such an appearance and reality becomes a responsibility of the imagination.

"We pass no judgment either way"23 "We choose to be deceived"24 -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fiction does not require the same burden of proof that is demanded by empirical evidence, nor does it divorce logic from emotion. Fiction behaves autonomously, almost as if it were a free agent or an act of its own justification. Fiction gives permission to suspend and reconfigure the rules of the native real. To participate then in works of art, particularly art in the digital age of reproducibility, we need to suspend our beliefs about reality if we are to engage in discovering any preexisting truths about it. Through the awareness of digital art as fiction we invite ourselves into a more critical, intellectual, and expansive narrative of the work with relation to our own experiences and personal passions.

The concept of a "willing suspension of disbelief" can be attributed to the author and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge used the term as a means of validating the use of fantasy elements such as trolls and fairies by writers in fiction stories. Through literary criticism the concept was transposed from its initial meaning and came to represent the readers own internal psychological reaction to works of fiction in general. The willing suspension of disbelief often involves expressing the subtle distinctions between opposing states of reality. Much of Coleridge's work was produced while he was under

the influence of mind-altering substances and he preferred to write while in an altered state of reality. Coleridge described his own fiction as a function of such 'psychological curiosity'25 and stated that much of his own written material was 'given to him' in dreams or by imaginary dream agents from other realms and dimensions. In a sense Coleridge and his writing can be seen as anticipating and even desiring the schizophrenic state of modernism as well as the intermediate, transgressive, and fractured characteristics of postmodernism. In Coleridge's willfully positivist choice to be deceived we see fiction operating as a speculative unstable element and reality as an unstable speculation of that element.

It is not hard to imagine Coleridge's 'dream agents' performing in a similar fashion to the 'dream instruments' of computerization referred to by Lyotard at the end of his book The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard acknowledges the 'delegitamzation' of scientific knowledge that has taken place over the last century and claims that science as a "grand narrative" has "lost its credibility". He explains:

"It is recognized that the conditions of truth, in other words, the rules of the game of science, are immanent in that game, that they can only be established within the bonds of a debate that is already scientific in nature, and that there is no other proof that the rules are good."26

One of the qualitative values of using fiction to evaluate the digital is that fiction often supplies a more realistic or more 'truthful' representation of reality than the one afforded by scientific analysis. There are circumstances in which fiction becomes the only possible language to adequately express an idea or concept. In many ways the artists in The Real-Fake resist and in some cases down right refuse the working scientific model 'as is', while still maintaining a spatial and temporal reference to it. This sentiment is echoed not only in the art, but also in a majority of the artist's statements. In referring to his artistic practice and his work, Aliens with Extraordinary Abilities.v01B (2010), Jose Carlos Casado states:

"The important thing is not reality, but perception. Something can be perfectly real, but if the perceptive channels don't process it, or process it in an unconventional way, this reality will lack credibility, or its allegedly real qualities will be reduced or altered. We do not have to identify perception with unreality, though. Modigliani said: "I am not searching for what is real, neither what is unreal, but unconsciousness."27

N. Katherine Hayles warns us that technology as a conscious advancement "will be embedded in the same institutions that have brought us to this critical point."28 It should be noted here that computers were originally products of reductionist thinking. From this angle we understand all of the artwork in The Real-Fake being inexplicably linked to the technologies created by the military industrial complex. However, when seen as works of fiction they can easily provide new alternative applications and new potential narratives for that technology. According to philosopher Manuel De Landa, technology that is functioning on this level shows ' that the forces of technology are not easy for

institutions to capture and enslave.'29 It is here that we should identify fiction as a type of creative force more than a medium in itself.

Fiction Science and Science Function:

The creation and proliferation of alternate worlds has long been the territory of fiction. The most obvious correlation between new technologies and art in terms of the fictionalization process is science fiction. The genre of science fiction has always attempted to be ahead of the curve in imagining of our emergent futures, while at the same time critiquing our present tense. According to philosopher Fredric Jameson science fiction is "the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism."30 It is easy to see that technological advancements "are partly shaped by science fiction writers who create visions of a technologized world that are compelling enough to inspire their recreation in reality."31

In respect to our advancements in technology one might assert that the world in which we live today has become more science fact than science fiction. The psychological collapse of fact into fiction along with the merging of the real and the imaginary have become heavy signifiers of our contemporary situation. In the introduction to his book Crash J.G. Ballard comments on the blurring of science fact and science fiction:

"I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has significantly changed in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind-mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writers task is to invent the reality."32

Observations such as Ballard's became a springboard for the science-fictionalized discourse of Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto as well as a discursive investigation into the production and use of computer technology defined as the 'Digital Dialectic.'33 Science Fiction is also a fundamental and inspirational ingredient for many of the works in The Real-Fake, particularly in Yemenwed's video Episode 3 (2008) where we follow a female protagonist through several surreal alien-like landscapes and fantastical architectural interiors.

"Humankind cannot bear too much reality"34

-T.S. Eliot

"Bring something incomprehensible into the world!"35 -Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Like the body of text in any fiction novel, the virtual bodies displayed in The Real-Fake are, to use a term from Deleuze, Bodies Without Organs. Deleuze notes:

'The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors."36

While keeping the integrity of their respective collected potentials, it is important to realize that the anthropomorphasized virtual body that resembles the human figure in the work Corpus Callosum (2009) by Katrina Zimmerman and structuralized bodies in the work How to Hide Your Plasma (Handheld Icon Shapeshift for Liquid Chrystal Display) (2011) by Kari Altmann are not that different in terms of the holographic body being positioned atop a grid of calculations and linear logics. The body as it is presented in these works conforms to Kendall Walton's theory of fiction; wherein visual representation becomes a "prop in a game of make-believe"37 and by projecting oneself the game of make believes is played by "generating fictional truths."

3D computer graphics enables the artist to illustrate and maybe more importantly embody their imaginations and fantasies. Creating new virtual worlds and 'computer generated characters of data' for pleasure attests to the idea of fiction being less of a mediation and more of an idiosyncratic synthesis. Michael Rees' animation Putto 2x2x4 (2011), presents the body as a mutable form capable of performing its own permutations. Rees writes "My desire to use all these media is a way to point outside of this mediated experience to a fecund and creative space that is generative."38 Rees' artificial and sculptural take on the body allows him to explore the "spiritual/ psychological anatomy'"39 of the physical body as well as the transcendent and fictional disposition of embodied experiences.

"Generate enough ideas so you can kill as many as possible"40

-Peter Lunenfeld

Media theorist Peter Lunenfeld claims that the last few decades of contemporary critical theory "has proven itself only partially competent"41 in evaluating our current experience in relationship to digital technologies. Perhaps we should incline ourselves then to regard the great fiction writers of the last century as being as competent as the poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers of recent past. Man is a fiction-making animal, and fiction is a tool from which man envisions and creates more tools. It seems as though a reevaluation of the term fiction and the processes that it generates may be appropriate for understanding contemporary experience and cultural production in our technological age. Reality is retroactive where as fiction becomes psychoactive. In this fashion we might conclude that the works in The Real-Fake exhibition are more of a virtual fiction than a reality.

If we view fiction as a type of transition program mediating different realities we may begin to address the ontological construction behind our conceptualization of the real and the designations of the fake. On one hand we view reality as a product or a result of competing fictions, on the other hand, reality appears to be able to move beyond the limits of structure by proposing effective and legitimate non-actual worlds. In this situation we have shifted our ideations of reality into a fictionalized naratological co creation with ourselves. More accurately, art and science are to be understood as active transformative paradigms and generative systems. The methodological coming together of art and science in The Real-Fake exhibition points at both the artists and the audience's willingness to participate within the process of fictionalization. By considering fiction as a process of transformation, we engage, inform, and even add to what is regarded as reality.

Endnotes

1 William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, (New York: Grove, 1992).

2 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, (USA: Penguin, 2005).

3 Richard van Oort, The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology: An Interview with Wolfgang Iser, Anthropoetics III, no. 2 (Fall 1997 / Winter 1998): http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0302/iser_int.htm.

4 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984).

5 Richard van Oort, The Use of Fiction in Literary and Generative Anthropology: An Interview with Wolfgang Iser, Anthropoetics III, no. 2 (Fall 1997 / Winter 1998): http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0302/iser_int.htm.

6 Possible-World Theory is a form of literary study and criticism that applies possible- world logic to fictional texts.

7 Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy Of As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, PDF retrieved from GoogleDocs: www.livingcontrolsystems.com/enclosures/860915_AsIf.pdf.

8 Jean Baudrillard, Xerox And Infinity, trans. Agitac (Paris: Touchepas, 1988), 7.

9 Jonathan Steuer, Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence in Journal of Communications 42.4 (1992), 73-93.

10 Quoted from Timur Si-Qin's artist statement for The Real Fake exhibition: http://www.real-fake.org/impossibleobjects.html.

11 Marie-Laure Ryan, Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory, (1994): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.1ryan.html.

12 William Goldbloom, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (Oxford, Oxford Universit Press, 2008.)

13 Jorge Louis Borges, 'The Library Of Babel', in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Dimensions, 1962), 51.

14 Florian Brody, The Medium Is the Memory, in The Digital Dialectic, New Essays On New Media Art, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 142.

15 Marie-Laure Ryan, Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory, (1994): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.1ryan.html.

16 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983)

17 Peter Lunenfeld, Snap To Grid: A User's Guide To Digital Arts, Media, And Cultures, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 31.

18 The term 'voice' was used by Barthes to describe the combination of his five structural codes for interpreting a text. Barthes defines these codes in his seminal work, S/Z

19 Ken Pimentel,and Kevin Texeira, Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking-Glass, (Intel/Windcrest McGraw Hill, 1993), 15.

20 Umberto Eco used the term Authentic Fake as his definition for the hyperreal.

21 Umberto Eco, Travels In Hyperreality, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986)

22 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman (New York: Smiotext(e), 1983), 4.

23 Kathleen Coburn, ed. The Notebooks Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (London: Routledge, 1957).

24 Kathleen Coburn, ed. The Notebooks Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

25 Coleridge explained the inspiration for writing Kubla Khan in the preface to his poem; first publication date: 1816.

26 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 66.

27 Jose Carlos Casado artist statement for The Real Fake exhibition: http://www.real- fake.org/virtualspaces.html.

28 N. Katherine Hayles, Text Out Of Context, Situating Postmodernism within an Information Society, Discourse 9 (spring-summer, 1987), 33-34.

29 Manuel De Landa, War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines, (New York: Zone, 1991), 128.

30 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Captialism, (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press: 1991), 419.

31 Christine Paul, Digital Art, 2

nd edition (New York: Thames And Hudson, 2008) 22.

32 J.G. Ballard, Crash, (New York: Vintage, 1985), 4-5.

33 Peter Lunenfeld, ed. The Digital Dialectic, New Essays On New Media Art, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)

34 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton in The Four Quartets, (1935): First published as a series in UK, 1944: Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, An accurate online text- http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/

35 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (New York: Continuum, 2004)

36 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-OEdipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane. (New York: Continuum, 2004.)

37 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990)

38 Michael Rees' artist statement for The Real Fake exhibition: http://www.real- fake.org/digitalbodies.html.

39 Christine Paul, Digital Art, second edition (New York: Thames And Hudson, 2008), 62.

40 Peter Lunenfeld, from his lecture entitled: Bespoke Futures: Addressing the Vision Deficit, (ARP Lecture Series: USC, 12.02.08).

41 Peter Lunenfeld, Snap To Grid: A User's Guide To Digital Arts, Media, And Cultures, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 29.