Page 13 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014time its presence, its immersion, amongst us can be achieved making it take place. How this can happen (cultural happening) is one of the keys to digital culture which includes a reinterpretation of cultural venues, places. In the same way, what happens here, what is here, in our real world has to migrate to the virtual side of the mirror for the necessary duality to obtain which the recent but imperious existence of a new virtuality—digitality—demands and which is, because it is contiguous, as if we were surrounded by a mirror: if there is something real in what is set before it then it must have its correspondingof the beyond: hallucinations, ways of dreaming whilst awake. All of them phenomena in which one of the virtual worlds we have is filtered by the gaps in reality and becomes installed there... and confuses it.Today we are witnessing the first filtering of the virtual into the real. They are only brief shadows of convincing apparitions that will eventually become installed in reality’s places until virtuality, confused with reality, lives amongst us.Two opposite tendencies, confinement and bursting forth, create the fracture whence will spring the phenomena that will create the stage for cultural changes in the coming years. The confinement of a virtual world, the black hole of reality, in a digital Aleph that is ever more astonishing; and the bursting forth of virtuality throughout the places of the real world.BIG VS. SMALLIn principle it would seem that the Net, because of its planetary reach, favours the big. There are obvious demonstrations of the empire of the big in the virtual world that perhaps even exceed those there may be on this side of reality, on the ground. But this magnitude conceals the effervescence of the small that is bubbling out in the digital world. A number of gigantic creations prevent a clear view of the uncountable shoots springing up from the small.What is it that makes the Net disposed to the small? Well, the fact that it is a space without places. When there are distances going from one place to another means transporting whatever it is that has to change place. This journey implies a delay. The further the distance to be covered and the more time it takes, the larger the quantity to be transported has to be because that is the only way to compensate for the time waiting and the work involved in the dispatch. If a handwritten letter took days to arrive at its destination full advantage was taken of the sheet of paper so that it contained a text and information that merited the act of sending it. The speaker at avirtual image. Knowing how to achieve this other virtual existence is also a challenge for digital culture.The digital world is a black hole which absorbs everything in the real world, but in turn, the virtual is continuously penetrating the realIf the digital world is a black hole that absorbs everything in the real world, we are also seeing that tendencies are appearing in the opposite direction such as make the virtual penetrate the real.Augmented Reality parasitises our reality’s placesOne of the phenomena is that the virtual world takes place in the real one. And another, which is already suggesting itself very convincingly, is that of “giving place” so that the virtual can be seen in the real world. It is the phenomenon of Augmented Reality. AR parasitises places in our reality. It occupies objects’ places, superimposing itself on them. With AR the virtual lives amongst us and in this way it achieves the immersion effect that provides presence. It stops being in a space with no places, like spirits, contained in an Aleph where there are neither distances nor delays, to become located in some place that is occupied by a material object. When there is interaction with this object somehow, by looking at it, for example, it is substituted by the virtuality that it parasitises. They are apparitions on the stage of the real that were formerly reserved for the spirits of the virtual world,AC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 1: TENSIONS AND TRENDS IN DIGITAL CULTURECURRENT PAGE...13