Liquid Electric

THE LIQUID ELECTRIC
Tracing nature’s machine code

Book Chapter | Virtualities and Realities. New Experiences, Art and Ecologies in Immersive Environments | Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (eds) | 2019

Abstract

Representations of techno-ecologies have a deep and evocative history embedded as they are within our most elaborate cultural fantasies and our most extreme scientific simulations. These digital media dreamscapes constitute the foundation principles of an emergent data aesthetics of liquid. Hollywood has codified this through an art director’s pallet that is often blue and luminous in tone, is found at the core of a film’s novum and often takes on a kinetic electrical form. It is as if these digital signposts - from Disney’s 1982 film Tron through to more recent ecological parables such as A.I., Gravity and Prometheus – recognize the very gothic anxiety we hold for our environment in the twenty-teens. A ‘liquid modernity’ as it were, bracketed by the twilight years of industrialization and an emergent century of automation and augmentation.

Stephen Spielberg (dir) Precog in Minority Report, Dreamworks, 2002

Appearing in all manner of image constructions nature’s liquid electric turn makes its most urgent call via the machine. Indeed, there is a discernible influence of machine vision at work here, and theorists such as Foucault and more presently Paul Virilio and Zygmunt Bauman have noted its ubiquitous rise. This machine presence is also strongly felt in the data visualizations emerging from the ATLAS observer at CERN and in the animations of NASA’s most earnest space dreaming. Here the liquid electric is presented as the source code - the host, the conductor, the origin material – of the human/machine interface. But there is something else at work here too; it is as if this liquid data – this coded luminance – is articulating a symbolic warning. Somewhere amidst these codified realities of remoteness and virtuality these mediated artefacts are reminding us of a great global unravelling.

Publication available from : RIXC Publisher
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Screenshot (2017-04-10) “Data” image search (google.com.au)