On Immersion
I’M IN THIS screen. So who cares that’s easy. The average American spends more than half their waking hours looking at one of these. That’s the word, anyways. And so you figure our neurological roads lean hard toward our being mostly screen. Dude McLuhan said something about how the advent of television, in contrast to the film projector, threw light upon rather than in front of us and made us screens that way as well. Something about how this left a gap in which the act of viewing became participatory, created an organic circuit.
So I’m in this screen and I AM this screen. I’m also positioned in front of or outside the screen. That’s already a trianglejob, without even considering the other very hard.
Every mage of the ages melted down and flattened all their shewing stones and crystal balls to make the LCD we’re gazing hard and scrying in. Whether the display is a window, a mirror, or a screen proper, or if the difference between those is even worth speculating on, it doesn’t change our being here, suspended outside time and space in a locus we’ve taken mostly for granted. What a bunch of witchy fucking cyborgs we’ve become. I’m either psyched on or repulsed by that depending on the mood.
What the shit is nature..? If we’ve developed these powers of sight and being as we have because they were inevitable then there’s no hard line. READ MORE >
Three things I’ve watched recently and loved plus one, or, the rational love for immorality
I’ve been watching a lot of television lately. Television off the internet. This is a preferable way to watch television. For one, I don’t have to deal with commercials. Also, I can watch a whole season at a time, and being naturally obsessive, I can’t deal with the suspense of waiting an entire week—much less a whole year for a new season to start—to find out “what happens.” That being said, I have to wait on two shows now, which brings me great displeasure and discomfort.
I’ve seen a few things recently, and I’ve struggled to understand what makes them enjoyable, what compels me to keep on watching. After all, if I weren’t watching television or movies, I could be reading. (Though to be fair to myself, I spend my days trekking through fairly dense geographic texts, so by the evening, I like to relax with my partner and our two cats, “turn off” so to speak, even though I know my time could be spent in a more “productive” manner.)
But even as I’m “turning off” and letting myself get tangled in television or film, I remain critically alert. And in the end, I realize the reason I love watching what I’ve watched is because through these particular shows and films, my morality is challenged and I not only empathize but also desire the success of immoral characters. It is not unlike the experience of reading Crime & Punishment, where the reader rallies for Raskolnikov, even though he is a murderer. We don’t want him to get caught. We want him to be ok. We want the best for him. And in the end, as his consciousness fractures under the weight of his lawfully unpunished crimes, we want him to be physically punished, just to alleviate the psychological punishment.