Page 12 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014One of them is to make the virtual “take place” in our real world. “Take place” is synonymous with “happen”; “occur”. And something that happens always happens in a place and at a time and can therefore be witnessed. The social movements there have been in recent years in a number of countries have shown this very clearly: discontent was floating on the Net, in the social networks, and downloaded from the virtual world to the real one in the form of concentrations of people in the squares or streets of a geographical place. The event springs into being in a specific place and specific time. Cultural spaces either dry up because they are emptied by digital migration or they tend to become resonant spaces where events happen that can be witnessed (being in a place at a time).It could be argued that such cultural events have always happened. Quite so, but today, because of the contiguity of the virtual world, it seems that places in the real world will not withstand if they do not make the most of what they have of presence (that things take place, which is to say that they have a time and a place) while at the same time being associated with the virtual world as inseparably as one side of the mirror with the other. Cultural events acquire vital importance and become the heartbeat of cultural venues. That having been accepted, the key issue is the search for, and interpretation of, the multiple forms in which a cultural event may make itself manifest. A much more extensive conception than the one we now have.Specular dualityI have just mentioned that the contiguity between the real and virtual worlds is like that between the two sides of a mirror. Virtual worlds (dream, memory, foresight—or imagination to plan the future—the beyond) are specular, as is the digital world that has just emerged. They are mirrors which, to a greater or lesser degree, deform the contiguous reality. When people look at themselves in a mirror the image does not leave them indifferent, which is to say the image influences them and they try to intervene in it by adjustingAC/Etheir posture to achieve an image that is more to their taste. The resonance between the virtual, and therefore also the digital, world and the real world is produced in the same way.Equally perturbing is a mirror in which the objects that surround us are reflected but in which, for example, we do not appear despite being next to them, like another mirror in which the image of some object or other does not have its corresponding original on this side.This consideration of the real/virtual duality is fundamental to understanding the broad relationship there is in digital culture between the space without places and the space in which things take place. A resonating relationship, in constant vibration between one side and the other. When this digital space didnot exist, anobject existed ina place whichcontained it andthat is where itwas to be found.But now thatthis mirror existsthis object existsbecause it is reflected, because it is also virtually on the other side. In the same way, an object on the other side of the mirror becomes present when it takes place amongst us, which is not the same as saying “takes a place” amongst us. “To take place” implies that something happens at a time and in a place and that to witness it you must be in that place at that time. It is vital to stress the importance of the interpretation—yet to be explored and tested—of the cultural event as a way in which the virtual takes place. And, as a consequence of that, the role played, a non‐exclusive role, by the cultural venues, that is to say places, for this event: (“happen: vb 1 (intr) (of an event in time) to come about or take place; occur”).The digital Aleph, which fits in the hand, like Borges’s in a crack in the a stairs, gives us a world without distances and without delays. At the sameThe Net is a kind of Aleph which, while it surrounds us, fits onto the tiny screen of a smartphoneWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...12