My wife and I are like many other middle-aged bourgeois couples; we no longer inhabit the media culture of our youth, with its monolithic broadcasting and newsprint providers, yet nor are we enthusiastic adopters of the image-and-text smorgasbord lain out on the web and downloaded via cable or wireless broadband. Instead, we have a tendency to watch made-for-television drama series with an adult content; mostly these are from the HBO network in the US, but we also vegetate in front of Scandinavian detective tales and French policiers. A while back we were watching Engrenages (titled Spiral for BBC4 viewers), which – should you be unfamiliar – is a gritty cop show set against a backdrop formed by Paris’s meaner and remoter streets, when something bizarre happened.  The tough yet vulnerable Chief Inspector Laure Berthaud (played by Caroline Proust), was in conversation with her wittily paternalistic sidekick, Gilou (Thierry Godard), when the surface of first Proust’s and then Godard’s face began to heave and ripple, a small massif of cubes rose proud of their skin, each one manifestly three-dimensional, yet with each surface seemingly covered with their flesh. Then the cubes started to disintegrate, mingling both with each other and with the other planes of the actors’ bodies; the only term that really expresses this movement – at once fluid and somehow mechanical – was that it was as if the two bodies were geared into each other by a series of invisible cogs, but given the meaning of the series’ French title (“engrenages” translates as “gears”) this made strange sense. Midway through the movement the image froze: Proust’s head was only attached to her body by an iridescent smear of interference; Godard’s face was folded in on itself, making of him an extreme Elephant Man parody. There was a hiss, the image staggered, and normal service resumed.  The entire incident had taken perhaps fractions of a second – yet I found it deeply disturbing. I’m not particularly au fait with the way digital televisions work; I have heard that unlike on the old cathode ray tube sets, the picture on digital screens is generated by a myriad of saccades – short transverse pulses that shade in the images – although, in common with the way the human eye works, the television “assumes” that a lot of the background will remain constant, and so concentrates its fine detailing on more evanescent visuals. Whether or not it is this process that renders the distortion of images so peculiarly unsettling I’ve no idea, and in truth it’s not this aspect of the phenomenon that engages me, but rather what it suggests about our contemporary relationship with verisimilitude itself.  It’s often recounted how, when people heard the first wax-cylinder phonographs they were so overwhelmed by the lifelike sounds emanating from the primitive machines that they began searching behind the drapes for concealed singers and instrumentalists. Or there is the account I read in a biography of the Hungarian film director Emeric Pressburger of him screening a short film depicting the arrival of a train to some peasants on his country estate; as the steaming engine charged towards them, the spectators were so convinced of their imminent destruction that they rose up as one, and fled. The last century has seen two related processes occur: the creation of higher and higher reproductive fidelity, both of sound and image; and the wider and deeper dissemination of these sounds and images. When, in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote of how advertising and film were “pushing script into the dictatorial vertical”, he was describing an epiphenomenon: for these were merely the perpendicular labels appended to a simulacrum that, with mounting speed, was encroaching on all reality.  The Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges composed a famous fragment called “On Exactitude in Science”, that describes an empire whose guild of expert cartographers was commanded by their sovereign to devise a map which would be, point-for-point, coextensive with the empire’s entire territory. The fragment ends hauntingly: “In all the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography.” Borges’s fragment signposts the direction to our own imagistic realm, one in which the map and the territory have melded completely, and those who aren’t on the map are necessarily denied any territory. When I was a teenager there were only three television stations broadcasting in England; in order to watch the films I loved – those of European auteurs such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman – I had to hunch over a pathetic little black-and-white receiver, manipulating its aerial by hand until the static snowstorm on its 25cm screen died away, revealing the enigmatic features of Marcello Mastroianni.  Yet I never aspired to any greater fidelity – I didn’t bemoan my lo-fi lot; it was only with each succeeding technology that my ability to suspend disbelief became weakened: cassette and the eight-track tape replaced vinyl; in time these were themselves seen off by the compact disc. Concurrently, as cameras grew less cumbersome and more efficient, so visual effects became exponentially better at portraying sights so exalted, we never imagined we might witness them in this life. The inception of fully digitised, full motion, live action film coincided with the development of computer generated imagery capable of seamless integration – meanwhile the bodysnatchers had invaded our homes, in the form of wireless broadband routers. The guild of cartographers had done their job: for what is the worldwide web if not a scale map of our entire territory? One that corresponds, point-for-point, with everything we have ever seen, heard or known; or will ever be likely to see, hear or know. True, some tech theorists now speak of the “digital wilderness”, and observe that no individual – or group – is now capable of mapping the entire virtual realm. However, I’m afraid that’s precisely the situation described by Borges’s fragment: the tattered remains of the map are themselves the rendition of desert they litter.  Back in the 60s and 70s the main problems affecting television images were the aforementioned static and a phenomenon that was termed “lack of vertical hold”. As the phrase suggests, this latter glitch consisted of the picture refusing to stay centred in the screen; instead it would spool upwards in a succession of distorted frames, the whole reminiscent of a warped strip of celluloid film. Perhaps it was this similitude that made watching these images tolerable; the suggested physicality of film anchoring the ballooning faces and distended heads to their real-life counterparts – but I don’t think so. Rather, the key factor here was that, despite our universal ability to suspend disbelief in these images (after all, we knew nothing better), they weren’t really faithful. The world as we generally perceive it is not in black and white; and this meant that – although we didn’t appreciate it at the time – distortions of the image were simply this: distortions of the image, not of the underlying reality.  Let me take you back to Engrenages. My chronicle of the momentary disintegration of the image of these actors’ bodies was far from exhaustive. When I described the “small massif” of skin-covered cubes, and the “iridescent smear” of interference I was struggling to devise a typology for a completely novel phenomenon; the underlying technology productive of these images is completely different from the television broadcasting of the 60s and 70s; and it seems to me that when they prove friable and fall apart, what we glimpse is precisely that underlying technology: we actually see the ulterior realm of the digital, wherein our entire reality is composed from the zeroes and ones of software machine code. To me it really does appear that way – but why? It’s because of our faith, I think – not faith in an immaterial being, or a transcendent reality, but faith in the very ability of digitisation to produce the highest imaginable degree of verisimilitude. There is no real comparison between an isolated piece of equipment from which sound emanates and a world-girdling network of bi-directional digital mediatisation that pullulates with sound, images and signs.  Marshall McLuhan presciently wrote in Understanding Media (1964) that no new technology leaves human perception unaltered – and the web/internet represents the most powerful auto-altering of our perception that we’ve yet devised. Our willingness to upload our social existence to the web, to rely on it for our orientation, and to depend on it for our memory, means that when the silvery interface between us and it becomes perturbed, we seem to be witnessing the very lineaments of the thing in itself, stripped of its fleshly and humanising coat. It’s a strange notion, this: digitisation has become so comprehensive and penetrating it is now able to express the fundamental categories within which we perceive reality itself – but of course this is merely an image, like any other.  Joseph Brodsky once wrote, “should the truth about the world exist, it’s bound to be non-human”. Now we have the temerity to believe we can somehow perceive that non-human reality, although to do so would be a contradiction in terms. Over the next few years a new generation of television receivers will be rolled out. (We might call them “visual display units” since the formal distinction between computers and televisions is on the point of dissolving.) These machines are capable of displaying imagery at ultra-high definition; so-called “8K UHDTV” composes pictures employing 16 times the number of pixels of current high definition TV, which presents us – if we could only see it – with the bizarre spectacle of an image that exists in a higher resolution than our own eyes are capable of perceiving. Will this natural limitation on our capacity to technologically reproduce the world’s appearance lead our scientists and technologists to desist? I doubt it: the philosopher John Gray observes that: “In evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a byproduct of the media.”  This, surely, is the “hyperreality” defined by Jean Baudrillard: a feedback loop of constantly updated imagery that now has a value – as objective knowledge – that transcends the old categories of “reality” and “appearance”. When I was a child I was always struck by the confusion of reality implicit in advertisements for televisions being shown on … television: particularly when the feature of the television that was emphasised was its superior picture quality. I would sit there, thinking to myself: but how can we see that it’s a better picture, given that the picture on our television is inferior? In the ultra high-definition future children will no longer be subjected to this paradox, because they will have confidence that the imagery they perceive is no longer representational at all, but rather constitutive of reality itself.  Philosophical arguments, if presented with elegance and elan, should strike their readers as being tightly geared – as a good mechanism is. Yet such conceptual devices can only ever be representative of the world; they are, therefore, just as much figurations as any visual imagery, with the downside that they aren’t as entertaining, informative or communicative as what McLuhan termed “the unified electrical field”. I believe that my sense of being precipitated into the inhuman – yet humanly originated – substratum of reality each time the image of Caroline Proust’s head disintegrates into its component pixels is the shape of things to come. And this isn’t a fresh intimation on my part – writing about the internet in the late 1990s, I was already hypothesising that in a world in which humanity’s perception had fully integrated with bi-directional digital media, a large scale loss in internet connectivity could precipitate an outbreak of mass hysteria, as web users lost any grasp on reality that they had.  The age of those cyber-generated panics is now upon us. Conventional moralists oppose civilisation with barbarism, but really the opposition is between order and entropy – ethics are only a side effect. Germany was among the most civilised – in the sense of ordered – societies on Earth when Hitler triggered the mass hysteria that led to the Holocaust. Such pogroms against the Jews had taken place since time out of mind, but the inception of modern technologies – the train, the telephone, the gas oven – meant the Nazis could escalate the phenomenon to the level of genocide. Who can even guess at the ultra-definition of holocausts that may be precipitated by the very latest technologies? After all, when the image of a human and a human herself have become effectively indistinguishable, the only surcease from the toil of existence will come when she’s been switched off.  Not long after I had my epiphany watching Engrenages, I was introduced to the art of Wictor Forss. Forss takes his photographs of digital TV pictures using a digital camera. Somewhere in the infinitesimal calibrations of camera shutter and screen-pulse the juicy images of sports fixtures and presenters, public buildings and marathon runners, get caught up in the gearing and squished into cubist pulp. I love the idea of Forss sitting in his studio, camera in hand and aimed at the television screen, waiting to capture the very moment at which reality itself disintegrates – it makes the bravery of even the most battle-hardened cameramen seem picayune in comparison. Forss shoots all sorts of TV images in this way, capturing forever their mysterious evanescence – but he concentrates on sporting events of one kind or another. Why? I don’t know the answer for certain, but I suspect the interrelation of the bodies in physical games suggests to him, as it does to me, the very essence of unthinking yet feeling human communion. To see the underlying digital structure of a single human face may be disturbing enough, but to witness the disintegration of these playful groups is to bear witness, somehow, to chaos and anomie ever pullulating beneath our well-tended pitches.
Disturbed by a technical glitch while watching a box set, Will Self began to consider the narrowing gap between images and real life. Is technology altering our grasp on reality?