Between Wholeness and Flux

There's a whooossshhhht noise that happens when you teleport through different spaces in various virtual environments, and it epitomizes to me one of the core experiences of contemporary digital life. The sound represents the dissolution of pixels (and by extension the bits of materiality of each of us), their hurtling journey through space, and then the centripetal force that sucks them all back together as a body in a new space. Another seminal, contempoary representation - this time visual - was just created by the LA-based Zoo Films. Titled Data Anthem and directed by James Frost, the piece appears to be a single, swooping trip through vast spaces, from the sun and planets to the highways on Earth, zooming in to a hospital room and then to bits of data dotting an illustrated map. The camera is completely without obstruction, moving without constraint, and our sense of access, to be anywhere instantly, offers a rush of exhilaration. A few years ago, film scholar Vivian Sobchack wrote about the idea of the morph in an essay called "At the Still Point of the Turning World: Meta-Morphing and Meta-Stasis." She called the morph "uncanny" due to the effortless transformations it visualized. She argued that the effect defies the sense of coherence and continuity we feel as thinking beings, but at the same time, the morph also "calls to the part of us that escapes our perceived sense of our 'selves' and partakes in the flux and ceaseless becoming of Being." She was suggesting that the morph was intriguing because it shows us that state in between, between wholeness and flux, and points to our desire for that "ceaseless becoming." I think both the "whooossshhhht" sound and Frost's video move forward yet another step, leaving behind solidity altogether to give us pure motion, access, data and process, with a fantasy of existence as a kind of brilliant effervescence.