The Smart Phone Screen
A Mirror, a Labyrinth or a Mask?
The Thing Itself
My phone is hidden beneath a waterproof, dust-proof, shockproof case. Its outline is exaggerated and thickened by bulky plastic. My darkened image, foreshortened at an ill angle, frowns back at me. The glass screen is itself protected by a transparent plastic material marked with greasy fingerprints. Iridescent patterns pool in the contours of its surface, and tiny spots of grime creep across my reflection. A sudden blast of light and all is obliterated. A neat notification appears beneath the time and date in the centre of my wallpaper: a toddler's drawing, a rainbow scribble with a huge snag-toothed mouth. The screen darkens. I open the message—how did I log in? I didn't notice. A smiley face: a message from my sister. I check my mail, and another one, and another one. Somehow I'm on Twitter, annoyed by something, I grimace and grit my teeth. I've lost my thread. Back to the essay. Put the phone down. I lock the screen and once more it is a grimy dark mirror, potent even in its latent state, a threshold to other worlds.
The smartphone has become an extension of our psyche
When we use our phones it can feel intensely intimate or very formally public. We might be chatting to a sibling or a lover, checking the news, scrolling through angry exchanges on social media, viewing images of a lost beloved, making a job application, reporting a missed bin collection to the local council, or fearfully searching the symptoms of a deadly disease. We might be uploading a selfie, a movie of a night out, or a perfect sunset to our socials. The phone screen frames our desires, what we want, who we want, and how we would like to be seen.
Our relationship with the phone is also a relationship with the networks we use it to access—both public and private, material and immaterial, such as work or universities or gaming networks, aerials and antennae, maps and schedules, databases, and supply chains as well as our multiple, overlapping personal networks of other human beings. We accessed digital networks via computers for decades before the smartphone came along, and before that, we accessed networks via books, letters, television, radio, culture, and other forms of communication. Our networks have always influenced us and we have always influenced the networks. However, the advent of the smartphone has had an insidious impact on both the networks and our relationship with them.
The phone has unique qualities of size, proximity, and intimacy. It is hand-shaped. It is best held at arm's length. The smartphone screen fills our field of vision despite its small scale. There is a one-to-one relationship between the operator and the screen. Unlike the TV screen, the cinema screen, or even the laptop, it is designed to be viewed by just one person. It is always with us. We hold it close to us. It is warm and trembles at my touch. It pings, rings, purrs, shrieks and sings for my attention, gently tapping at my fingers as I swipe and type. It is a proxy for absent bodies and beings.
All content is delivered through the phone within the same frame, the screen. When we think of websites or apps we think of very clearly delimited boundaries—databases, spreadsheets, tables. The on-off of the binary marching in neat rows through the circuitry. The ladder-like social media feeds. Pixels, databases, codes UX: everything is designed on a grid. The symbolism is of science, control, and rationality.
However, this is an illusion. The phone and the network are spaces where boundaries are fudged. Our social media accounts are a mix of content: news, polemical rants, performances that might be theatrical or manipulative, highly personal emotional spills, incoherent and unsuccessful attempts to express a passing thought, bluster, noticeboards. Good jokes and bad jokes, professionally produced and amateur movies, memes, cartoons, photos we've taken and photos we've found, well-crafted written sentences, and typo-ridden babble.
As smartphones are designed for “usability” to reduce the friction as users jump from one app to the next, so the network itself has been designed to be a muddle and a baffle. It is built into operating systems, into websites and apps, and into the hardware itself, with the express purpose to dissolve boundaries, to produce an emotional response, and to create habits. As we slip from one app to the next, we slip between the public and the private, the present, the future, the past, reality, dream-worlds, and fantasy.
Some artists producing work that acknowledge the network produce travesties or reproductions of different kinds of content. Others try to perform in the space through Instagram profiles or via other social media, but few deal with the insidious nature of the screen successfully. To consider the screen I'd like to move away from the phone screen to the simpler screen of the cinema, and in particular, Derek Jarman's 1993 film Blue.
The Screen
A screen has the fundamental sense of shielding and protection. The first record of the modern English word “screen” comes from the early Renaissance and relates to an item of furniture that was put in front of the fireplace to stop sparks from jumping out. Things are hidden behind screens, and we hide behind them. Screens may sieve or filter out information. They act as boundaries, barriers, or thresholds. A screen both receives and projects images. A wall receives and projects a simple shadow play of images created from a handheld in front of a candle. It transmits an image back to us. A transmitting screen controls us to a certain extent. To receive effectively we must enter the right room, or sit in the right place, turn our heads just so, and hold our phone in a certain way. The screen works on us.
Derek Jarman and the Screen
Derek Jarman's film Blue famously consists of a blank blue screen with a narrative and a soundtrack. The film's marketing alibi is that it was inspired by the experience of Jarman's blindness, a result of AIDs caused by HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). The blank screen is often read as a straightforward metaphor for blindness. Some readings even interpret the blankness of the screen as a call for empathy, a vicarious experience of blindness. Other readings even see it as an act of revenge, arguing that in withholding sensory information, Jarman is blinding the audience, reenacting a kind of violence that society inflicted upon gay people in ignoring the AIDs crisis. This is a valid reading but it obscures Jarman's rich exposition of the role of the screen in the cinema. The real subject of Blue is vision in the transcendent sense.
Jarman first started work on the film that would become Blue in 1974, seven years before HIV was identified, and many years before he received his diagnosis. He conceived of the idea of a film without images from the start. Originally intended as a homage to the artist Yves Klein, (Jarman was inspired after he visited the 1974 retrospective at the Tate gallery), the film morphed into a semi-autobiographical account of Jarman's experience as a gay man in the 20th-century, and a public memorial to the victims of the AIDs epidemic. Jarman incorporated plays he'd written about the life of John Dee, the 16th-century courtier, alchemist, and emissary of Queen Elizabeth I. Indeed the film is like a collage of scraps of writing and imagery from Jarman's work throughout his career. He later said that the disease gave a structure to the work to which he had been struggling to give form for 20 years.
Blue is in one aspect an exposition of Klein's philosophy. Yves Klein was fascinated by the cultural belief that the contemplation of material things could generate a profound mystical or spiritual experience, and the way that this immaterial or spiritual quality was nonetheless located in material objects. It was this play between the immaterial and the material in Klein's art and philosophy that fascinated Jarman. In one sense Blue is an exploration of where the material world—the screen—transforms into the immaterial or to put it in another way vision and how this works on the self.
Klein developed and famously patented a pigment that he named International Klein Blue. He produced several large monochrome works which resemble paintings including IKB79 (1959, Tate Modern, London). The pigment, suspended within resin and applied to canvas, is intrinsically flat, yet it has properties that—for an engaged and alert viewer—can create a sense of boundless space. The apparent similarity of these works to those produced by Abstract Expressionists means that Klein is often linked to them, but art historians consider Klein's work to be closer to a group of French artists who had similar concerns to pop art. Klein was interested in the possibility of material substances sparking spiritual experiences. In a piece entitled The Monochrome Adventure (1955, reproduced in this exhibition catalogue), Klein wrote that he wanted to present:
... an opening to the world of colour... a possibility of enlightenment into the coloured pictorial material in itself whereby any physical state of things, stone, cliff, bottle, cloud can become an object of travel, through impregnation, for the human sensibility of the beholder; into the unlimited cosmic-sensibility of all things.
Klein's art mixed the imagery of Roman Catholicism, alchemy, and Eastern philosophies with a mischievous, Duchampian approach to the art world. For example, he exhibited sponges, symbolic of the crucifixion, (a very common symbol in religious art), that had been smeared with IKB. Here the artist-designed, industrially produced pigment of the 20th century takes the place of Christ's blood. In Christianity Christ's blood is both the material evidence of Christ's humanity and yet it is supernaturally charged, evidence of a higher immaterial truth. In medieval times the faithful were encouraged to pray and meditate upon religious paintings. Meditating before these paintings was a means to achieve spiritual enlightenment through empathy. The relic of this cultural practice persists as audiences are encouraged to find enlightenment in the contemplation of contemporary art. Klein's work literally and impishly replaces the blood of Christ with the artist's pigment.
The connection with Klein has led some writers to describe the colour of the screen in Blue as IKB. According to Jarman's notes, which are held in the archives of the BFI, the colour of the film is intended to be Ultimatte blue, a patented technology used in film and TV (similar technologies are now known as “green screen”). Jarman was inspired by its visual and conceptual similarity to IKB. Ultimatte was a material which allowed filmmakers to mask, obscure, layer, and mix images upon one another. Jarman uses Ultimatte as an analogy for the screen itself.
Much writing on Jarman tends to cite famous monochrome films such as Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Guy Debord, 1952) as important precedents. However, Blue was very much influenced by the work of Jarman's contemporary filmmakers in London, who he often exhibited with. Many of these filmmakers were associated with the London Film Maker's Co-operative. Their practice was often informed by Marxist philosophy and investigated the circumstances of production and consumption of the cinema screen and the filmic narrative. Several artists created work that reduced the cinema experience to its bare components—a screen with shadows cast upon it, an audience, a light, the light beam of the projector, and a shadow play. These artists were obdurately opposed to the business of art, and unfortunately, this means that their work is not widely known. They distrusted cinematic narratives as intensely tricksy. Jarman, for his part, admired their work but felt that the narrative was the whole point of film. Blue can be read as a creative dialogue with their work.
The Blue Screen
The screen in Blue functions as a structural centre for the work. Replete with blue light, it makes one aware of the mechanics of cinema, the room, the screen, the projector, the film, the soundtrack, the audience, and the body. There is a spatial ambivalence about the screen. It oscillates between apparent depth and total flatness. Gazing at it in the darkened room we experience afterimages and shifts in colour perception. The eye is frustrated in its search to focus upon something. Images are formed; indistinct, appearing momentarily and disappearing before they become fully manifest. Each viewer creates personal imagery in response to the soundtrack and this screen. Where are these images located? Do we locate them on the screen, on the retina, in the mind, or somewhere else?
The blue screen subjects the viewer to the effort of their own perception. The cinema screen is the counterpart of the internal screens of the retina and the mind's eye. The film's soundtrack inspires images and associations which are processed through the prism of one's own experience and projected back onto the screen. When I watch or recall the film I create a distinct set of personal images based on my experience and my memory. My experience of the film involves projecting my understanding onto the images provided by the artist. Jarman describes this effect. He recalls a visit to the eye doctor.
My retina Is a distant planet A red Mars From a Boy's Own comic With yellow infection Bubbling at the corner I said this looks like a planet The doctor says—“Oh, I think It looks like a pizza”
The doctor and the artist both render radically different interpretations of the projected image of the retina. Jarman perceives his own retina and as he considers it he journeys to the impossible distances and immateriality of space, internally to dreams and memories of a childhood specific to his own experience, and back to the here and now as he regards the infection impinging upon his body. Meanwhile, the doctor just sees a pizza. The same image is subject to wildly different interpretations and levels of emotional engagement based on the subjectivity of the viewer.
The “terrible blinding light" of the eye examination inspires the first appearance of the figure Blue in the film, “Blue flashes in my eyes.” It is an ambiguous phrase, prone to be read as a statement, a description of a visual disturbance, an afterimage caused by a flash of bright light. Blue's appearance coincides with a change in tone and pace as the whirring motors and clatter of the eye doctor's camera shutter yield to gentle acoustic music and a description of a blissful summer day. The passage establishes Blue's association both with a blinding light and the blue flower.
The sky blue butterfly Sways on the cornflower Lost in the warmth Of the blue heat haze [harp/guitar] Singing the blues Quiet and slowly Blue of my heart Blue of my dreams Slow blue love Of delphinium days
There are many meanings for Blue folded within this passage. One describes a vision of Blue—a person (or persons) whose body is both present and absent in the text. The narrator describes memories of a lover. The lover is not identified and remains an absence or ellipsis in the text, equivalent to the emptiness of the blue screen. The cornflower and the delphinium dominate the passage. The film is structured around images of blue flowers. Blue describes a blissful summer's day and also a state of melancholy, and “blue” love. Blue in this context holds both the meaning of melancholy and nakedness. “Blue” is also slang for talking about sex which may mean nude, pornographic, obscene, or simply sexy and titillating, depending on the context.
Alchemy
Jarman's work was strongly influenced by the history and symbolism of alchemy, in particular, he was influenced both by the writing of the historian Frances Yates and Jung's analysis of the symbolism of the philosophy of the alchemists. Jung understood alchemy as an analogy to the processes of the psyche. The key symbol is the philosopher's stone—the lapis—the magical, mythical substance that the alchemists sought which they believed would transform base matter into gold. Jarman creates connections between the lapis, the colour blue, gold, and the sun. Lapis lazuli is a blue pigment that was prized for the intensity and depth of its hue which evoked the heavenly blue sky. In early religious art, spiritual value was represented by gold leaf. Over the centuries this was replaced by the colour blue. In the Renaissance, the pigment lapis lazuli was more expensive than gold. The blue screen is analogous to the lapis and is also equivalent to the figure of Blue. They can all also be seen as equivalents of the philosopher's stone which is intended by Jarman as a metaphor for the possibility of psychic transformation enabled through creative vision.
Jarman created several notebooks whilst he worked on the film (now held in the BFI archive). In one of them, seven dramatic personae are listed, all describing aspects of alchemical symbols. The title of one of the players has been crossed out and a dried flower is taped in its place (possibly a delphinium). The blue flower is an important symbol for Jarman and it is present in the earliest incarnations of the film, for example, an early tangential version of the script was called Pansy—a homophobic term of abuse that for a gay man might yet also describe a desiring and desired body, the promise of sex and love. However, the blue flower is also a symbol of the philosopher's stone. Jung argued that the German Romantic symbol of the blue flower was a cultural trace of the esoteric philosophy. Jung explains that the flower is 'earth's answer to the sun's countenance' and retains a solar quality. In the film, the symbol of Blue is also a flower. It symbolizes hope, love, and inspiration and is associated with the philosophic gold in its connection with sunlight.
Blue and Inner Vision
Blue when personified in the film is often the idealised object of desire—a beautiful young man associated with solar light. The sun is, as Jung puts it, a symbol of the unity and divinity of the self, a symbol of the source of life and the ultimate wholeness of man. The figure of Blue is at once the object of desire located externally as the significant other and internally as the future self. Blue is the personification of the philosopher's stone, the harbinger, and agent of transformation. He is the personification of the philosophic gold, in Jungian analysis, the fully individuated self. For Blue is not just the object of desire, but can also be read as the subject, the self-portrait or mirror, the future self.
From his earliest films, beginning with The Art of Mirrors (1973), Jarman used the motif of a person holding a mirror that reflects the sun directly into the lens. The automatic light meter of the Super8 camera immediately adjusts and plunges the image into darkness. Sunlight literally blinds the camera. In the film Blue he talks of blinding mirrors in the labyrinth that threaten to send the traveller into madness.
In Jarman's film Angelic Conversation (1985), Shakespeare's Sonnet 43 is set over images of a beautiful young man's face. He is in sunlight, looking out of a window seemingly unaware of the camera. This segues into an image of a man looking down the lens shining sunlight into the lens via a mirror. In Sebastian Wrap (1975) the camera follows dancing golden sunlight which refracts, glimmers and sparkles into the lens of the camera before disappearing to reveal the figure of a young man on a sunlit beach. This complex imagery—gold, blinding light associated with the object of desire as the agent of transformation or the philosopher's stone are attributes of the figure of Blue.
Jarman evokes Ovid's mixture of solar symbolism, eroticism, desire, and transformation. He describes one of his own films of dancers in a nightclub in London using symbolism derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in particular the story of Phoebus (the sun god) and Phaeton. “Impatient youths of the sun....Dance in the beams of emerald lasers.” These lasers recall Phoebus's blinding emerald throne. Every dancer is a child of the sun god. Each one holds within them the power of the sun, and its danger too.
Inspired Melancholy
In colloquial English, it is common to use the word “blue” to describe feeling melancholy, and the reading of Blue as a mournful film is very much on the surface. Its meaning is pretty much available to everyone. But Jarman is thinking about it on a different level as well. For many years the working title of the film Blue was Bliss. This is linked to the notion of “inspired melancholy” which comes from the esoteric philosophy of the alchemists. Frances Yates argues that during the Renaissance, the medieval theory of the four elements (Air, Fire, Water and Earth) and their corresponding humours (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy) was assimilated with philosophic works that led back to Aristotle and Plato. It was at this time that the melancholic humour, traditionally associated with depression and sadness, came to be associated with outstanding intellectual and artistic achievements of genius. In The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge, 1979), Yates traces the development of “inspired melancholy” through the work of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535). Agrippa's work mixes occult practices with mathematics, geometry, and optics. He conceives of the universe as divided into a hierarchy of the elemental, celestial and intellectual worlds. The alchemist proceeds through these three states of inspired melancholy. The ultimate goal is “to approach the supercelestial world of angelic spirits,” “beyond which is the creator himself.” Agrippa wrote that when the melancholy humour “takes fire and glows” it leads us to “wisdom and revelation.” For Jarman, the state of “inspired melancholy” gives rise to artistic, intellectual, and spiritual skill and revelation.
In a transcendent passage about the power of vision—the power of the imagination—Jarman describes his friends and lovers as bringing forth sunshine, and in doing so he awakens the figure of Blue. The narrator states, “I fill this room with the echo of many voices / Who passed time here.” As Jarman “unlocks” the voices from the blue of the paint the sun floods his room. As Jarman remembers the lost voices of his dead friends, sound metamorphoses into solar light: “Each word a sunbeam / Glancing in the light.”
Jarman repeats the names of his dead friends. In doing so he also conjures up Blue who awakes with a literal inspiration of breath.
[Narrator whispers slowly, with pauses] David. Howard. Graham. David. Paul. Derek. Graham. Howard. David [calm music] Blue stretches, [inspiration of breath], yawns and is awake. Blue Blue Blue stretches, yawns, and is awake [music ascending] David. Derek. Paul. Howard. Graham. Blue
The repetition of the word “blue” with the variation in tone of the speaker and the rising music in the soundtrack express wonder and hope. Blue “stretches, yawns, and is awake.” The music ascends and its rhythm becomes quicker and lighter. Blue is associated with desire, remembrance, melancholy and the sun, love, and happiness, even conjured in grief Blue is a positive, healing comforting presence.
In Blue, the science of optics, and the worlds of medicine are set in opposition to vision and imagination. The shackled world of the rational scientist is emphasised by the use of left and right stereo filters applied to a dissonant and demonic female chorus who mimic the doctor's instructions and the mechanical sounds of the camera shutter. The instruments of the eye doctor and his restrictive directions: “Look left, Look down, Look up, Look right” are set against the freedom of a visionary state of bliss engendered by the workings of vision in the mind’s eye. Jarman the patient, subject of the medical profession is “attached to a drip,” but Jarman, the artist can move by means of a visionary state beyond such boundaries.
Jarman believed that the audience worked with the director to make the film together. In an interview published in 1985 he said, “I want [audiences] to make their own film because that is the most valuable thing that happened to me. It's to do with private and public worlds and that's what art is – attrition between the two, that is what makes it interesting.”
The narrative in Blue is ambiguous and dissonant: it is given form and made by work undertaken by the audience. This attrition, this work is done in any film or work of art. We understand the work on our own terms, with our own experiences and knowledge. When we meditate in front of the screen we work on the film, and it works on us too. This two-way work also takes place when we access the network via our phones.
The network is an extension of our psyche
We look to the network to find companionship, love or sex, educate ourselves, find information, solve our problems, slake our egos, and assuage or affirm our anxieties. We indulge in secret compulsions: tarot, gambling, pornography, conspiracy theories, and chat rooms. The network sits as much in the realm of the mind, the imagination, and the subconscious as in the material world. The phone is useless without the network. We are encouraged to view the network itself as liquid, nebulous, and immaterial. But it is material: made of earth, glass, plastics, metals, and flesh. Behind the phone in the hand are the circumstances of its production—mines, supply chains, factories, shipping routes, cables and wireless networks, data centres, databases, electrical circuits running the binary signals of the code, software engineers, and hardware engineers. There are marketing and advertising departments, content producers, musicians, actors, artists, governments, dissidents, academics, influencers, armies, psych ops operatives, computer programmers and punters, parents, siblings, and children. The people who use the network—and their flesh—are part of the network and the minds of those people are also part of the network.
The screen can be a receptacle upon which we project our fantasy and desire, upon which we make up the world. The phone is a screen, a mirror, an extension of our psyche, a projection of ourselves that works on us. The camera phone is often used as a mirror. There are people who will only examine their faces through the veil of the filters embedded in the phone. The filters are sophisticated beyond belief. They smooth out the skin tone, slim the jawbone, make the face more symmetrical, brighten and widen the eyes, plump up the lips, widen the pupils remove frown marks, wrinkles, and blemishes. The network remoulds and transforms us. Mirror mirror on the wall? Who is the prettiest of them all? The magic mirror in Snow White told the truth. The network masquerades as reality to better fit our desire. With the tools furnished by the network, you can “be” anyone you want: adjust your looks, your age, and your gender. Transgender people masquerade as the opposite sex easily online, males enhancing their apparent femininity with commercially available filters. But as illustrated by the story of Onibaba masks can be hard to take off. The 1964 film tells the story of a samurai who put on a mask to make him seem more fearsome in battle. He found that it bonded with his body, and became part of him. He was only able to show one face to the world, unable to be anything other than a soldier in a battle and when he finally tore it off it left him prostate and mutilated.
No frame
The phone screen might be seen as a protection, an apparent boundary between ourselves and the network, the public and the private. But this is illusory.
The way the network is designed means that everything appears within the same frame. Geographical boundaries disappear and with them the social, cultural, and political frameworks that bind them to context. Poor quality “adverticles”” appear beneath well-researched articles and their proximity means they bleed into one another. Local news is annihilated beneath an avalanche of adverts and clickbait. My Twitter feed is made up of strangers, friends, academics, celebrities (or their PR services), robots, marketing officers, journalists, and provocateurs. Individual voices are reduced by the medium. All are delivered within the same frame: the phone screen. There is little to distinguish between the content and my conscious and unconscious responses to it, between public and private, self-expression, being and performance, human and algorithm; between what we control and what controls us. The phone screen is the frame, but the phone has become an extension of our bodies. The ultimate effect is one of extreme attrition of the boundary between self and others. The network has become part of us.
Abjection
Perhaps this is why we react so viscerally to the content in our social media feeds. We believe we own our corners of the network. It is a public square, but we experience it as a private space. A decent person I follow retweets a post I find hateful and my unthinking thumb immediately hovers over “unfollow.” This post is like a spider running up my leg. I want to cast it away from me as quickly as possible. We experience social media feeds as extensions of our minds. Therefore we cast away the abject, the thing that threatens to destroy us. Perhaps this explains the extreme histrionics of social media, the ever-increasingly hyperbolic exhortations to go away, disappear. The threats and obscenities that amount to the intention to destroy and annihilate. As Mick Jagger sang: “Hey, you, get off my cloud.”
The illusion of agency and control
“Surf the net” so the slogan goes. Big Tech likes to tell us that we control how we use the network. We can choose whether we use a particular site or not, we can go deep into Google settings and switch off targeted advertising. We are told we can choose what data we share with each site or provider. We think we are choosing our paths but this is illusory. Most people are aware that there are forces behind the internet that seek to manipulate us, and we like to believe that we can resist it. The reality is that however diligently we have sifted through our privacy settings we are exposed to unseen and expert forces that seek to manipulate our desires and weaknesses. Do we really appreciate the network's collective power or its constant evolution? AI can now parse images and any text within them. I posted a photograph of a book and the author's account immediately appeared on my timeline. I went deep into my Google settings and switched off the targeted adverts, and now receive targeted adverts based on my IP address, on browsing history.
We think we are operating our phones to access the network, however, often it is the network that is operating us through our phones. The network is part of our unconscious, influencing us quietly, nudging us to pick up the phone, click on the link, needling at our emotions, and encouraging us to click on the like button, comment, and engage. It has intent and it directs us. Meditating using the network is not the free state of inspired melancholy. It is not like reading a book. Where we look is controlled using subtle and less subtle means for both good and bad intentions.
The network and the mycelium
Recent popular science often compares fungal networks to the Internet, but I think the analogy works better when it is flipped around. The network is like fungi in that there is a symbiotic relationship between it and its users. The network depends upon us. In its turn, it may nourish us or it may consume us. The hyphae of a billion species seek us out, to take advantage of our desires, our strengths, and our weaknesses to proliferate within us, for better or worse. The mycelium of the network grows within us. It influences the way we move and the way we think. We are part of the network.
For those of us who spend much of our time immersed in this world the phone becomes a proxy for absent bodies. The phone screen is a site of performance and a mask. For some who have become accustomed to the performance behind the mask, they seem to be taking it back to the real world and trying to impose their fantasies upon it. In turn they are prone to manipulation by groups who encourage this behaviour for their own purposes. A generation of so-called digital natives has grown up understanding their selves and their place in the world by performing in this weird digital space which is essentially made up of databases. The logic of the database impinges upon the way people understand the real world, hence I think the absurd proliferation of categories that attempt to describe fundamentally ambiguous circumstances.
For me, the proliferation of strange cults, the QAnon conspiracy theorists, the flat--earthers, the people who believe in some kind of gendered soul, and the incels on their miserable messaging boards are simply the most extreme and therefore the most obvious fruits of the network. A teenager, miserable in puberty, finds in the network explanations and apparent solutions. He, in his turn, assimilates this to create and upload content. He is like a carpenter ant with the fruiting body of fungi sticking out of its head, consumed by the mycelium, spiffing spores into the wind and onto the heads of its compatriots below.
The smartphone screen is a unique psychological space. We navigate our fears and desires within the screen of the phone, but we also encounter other people in an uncontrolled and insidious way. The smartphone is associated with science and rationalism but it has become an extension of our bodies and minds, and as such is subject to extreme irrationality. The network has been built to facilitate the manipulation of unconscious impulses, and it does this extremely well. When we seek our heart's desire through the network we are making ourselves vulnerable to forces beyond our rational control. Maybe it is time to put the phone down.
Blue (1993). Dir. Derek Jarman. 35 mm colour 79 minutes Basilisk Communications and Uplink in Association with Channel 4, Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal & BBC Radio 3
Quotes from the film are taken from a transcript made by the author of this piece, and annotated with descriptions of the soundtrack.
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