I Survive Only As Code

Clone - Julie Clarke - Exogenous, Public Office, Stairwell Gallery, 100 Adderley St., West Melbourne (July), 1999

In 1999 I was gathering thoughts and began to think about life and death, the seen and unseen. The writing was intended to address cyberspace, however I was drawn into thinking about the film the Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan,1999). Within the narrative, spirits who carry the inscription of the cause of their death are phantoms that inhabit and haunt the psyche of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). In traditional horror genre, revulsion is derived by the representation of body mutilation, disease and deterioration of bodily flesh; and the visceral presence which inscribe these phantoms confront the viewer with their own mortality and fear of untimely and traumatic death. In this film it is not only the frightening representations of damaged bodies that is confronting, but the fact that death has somehow entered into the space of the child who sees these apparitions and simultaneously hears the messages they transmit. After thinking about this I wrote:

Cyberspace is like this, a site of death where the undead roam the space of non-forms within text which moves forever and ever, receding into a soft hiss in a cool void. There is no real passion in cyberspace and so the non-body, the electric body (and we all desire to be electric bodies) is stimulated by the screen – soliciting a strange knowledge and intimacy with the other, as the non-space of ourselves.

In both these examples the human body is perceived as colonised by an unseen energy. I was reminded of the rhetoric deployed by those involved with the Heaven’s Gate cult who believed that aliens from the Evolutionary Level Above Human (HALE backwards), incarnated and took over human bodies. This cult solicited much interest after the bodies of 39 men and women were found after they committed suicide. The cult members, some of which had been castrated were found dressed in black jeans and tee shirts. The web-site was closed down and the CIA declared it a crime site, inscribing the video images as abject.

The unseen controller is a theme that runs through the history of humankind and continues in contemporary discourse.

In his beautifully illustrated and poetic text Angels, A Modern Myth (1988) Michel Serres uses angels as a metaphor of all things carried or transmitted and finds a magical quality in this bridge between the physical and non-physical world. It is interesting to note that as carriers and transmitters, Serres does not associate angels with viruses because this would afford them negative connotations. Although Angels inhabit space, they do not enter human bodies.

According to Serres angels are responsible for almost everything '...they send jailers to sleep and set prisoners free' and '…can pass through windows...' (1998:.84) Angels are the bridge, the essence contained in all things and all events. Almost everything may be explained by the existence of these angels. Somewhere in Serres description of angels as metaphors there is a fundamental notion that humanity is not responsible for its actions, and the writers desire for lightness and flight is symptomatic of a fear of corporeality and its legacy of disease, liminality and alienation.

Later in 1999 I held an exhibition entitled Exogenous; I included a digital image of a hybrid face (a combination of a photograph of my Auntie before she drowned at twelve years of age and my own face, cloned and distorted). Not only did the faces become alien, but in making the image an 'alien' face appeared in the middle of the dark section. On the image I wrote the words: 'I survive only as code'. I was thinking about how this image could be circulated throughout media and that in fact my Auntie who died too soon would somehow be resurrected as electronic information/digital code. When I consider my own websites and the citations of my writing and other work on the internet I realise that in many ways, not only do we live much of our lives being electric bodies of text based communication, but that evidence of mind, if not mind itself, continues as electronic information.