Digital Video, Physical Presence & Haptic Affect

Motivation

Without bodily touch, no ties can emerge. 

(Han 2022, 16) 

As an artist who makes digital things—images, sound, video—I’ve always been haunted by the possible insufficiency of corporeality, material texture or haptic affect in my work. 

So I want to ask: how insubstantial is digital video really? What sorts of presence, material texture or sensuous qualities is it capable of? Is haptic affect literally out of reach and so a central type of bodily relation foreclosed? How might the staging and installation of moving image work be entangled with its presence and affect, and how might that mitigate such concerns? Is staging always necessary? 

Context

Nam June Paik (Fig. 1) and Gretchen Bender (Fig.2) both used the boxiness of analog monitors to create sculptural installations. 

Bruce Nauman (Fig. 3) and Lutz Bacher (Fig. 4) frequently use multiple monitors and/or multiple digital projectors to create dissonant, disorientating spaces, while Jenny Holzer (Fig. 5) abuses the form and infrastructure of commercial advertising to puncture public space with her declarative ALL CAPS aphorisms.

In the last ten years or so, video installation has metastasized, becoming more elaborately theatrical, more ambitious, more pervasive. So, while Issac Julien’s languorous silver screen pieces may still be shown in a simple black box (Fig. 6), Larry Achiampong’s work is often accompanied by props from the film being screened (Fig. 7), and Hito Steyerl’s works have moved from austere auditoria (Fig. 8) to set ups that themselves look more like CGI renders (Fig. 9), and which need to be cited as e.g. “single channel high definition video installation with luminescent LED grid and beach chairs.”

Pipolotti Rist (Fig. 10),  Jenkin van Zyl (Fig. 11), and Heather Phillipson (Fig. 12) are grander still, with luxurious  interiors that almost outcompete the films.

Upping the ante, Refik Anadol (Fig. 13) uses screen mapping software to project sound and light shows onto the facades of public buildings, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA (Fig. 13).

At a similar scale is LuYang’s daily 3 minute takeover of the 90+ LED ad hoardings in Times Square (Fig. 14) and Marco Brambilla’s bombastic gesamtkunstwerk (Fig. 15) enveloping The Sphere in Las Vegas. You have to wonder: are they compensating for something? Ontological anxiety?

Where there is resistance to scale and spectacle, it often comes from net artists, early adopters of the web who came of age on IRC and in cooperative ‘surf clubs’, accustomed to crappy, low resolution screens. Cory Arcangel (Fig. 16), Petra Cortright (Fig. 17), and Olia Lialina (Fig. 18) all make slow, diffident and quietly poetic work, using hacked, vintage, obsolete, and sometimes analog equipment. Staging is minimal: cheap machines on shelves or trestle tables, messy, exposed DIY wiring; an eBay aesthetic.

Introduction

In Buddhism, there’s the idea that nothing is real, whether it’s in the digital or physical world. You can’t touch it; it’s like a bubble or a dream. Based on this concept, I don’t think digital worlds are fake. They’re real.

LuYang (Flash Art 2023)

In this essay, I focus primarily on the work of LuYang (b. 1984, Shanghai, varying pronouns). In particular, I will undertake a close reading of their sixteen minute, digitally animated video Delusional Mandala (LuYang 2015). 

I chose LuYang, because they exuberantly embrace a disembodied digital life, professing to “live on the Internet”, where they “dream of abandoning the corporeal,” (New York Times 2015) and also because, in spite of the anticipated ecstasy of pure virtuality, they often situate their work within complex, site-specific installations. 

I agree wholeheartedly with LuYang that there is no dualistic divide between the digital and the physical—albeit for different reasons. The digital and the physical for LuYang both belong to the impermanent and illusory world of appearances, and hence both are equally ‘real’ in a derogatory sense. I will simply argue that there is no such distinction, because the digital is physical, material, tangible and hence real, period. 

Digital Hyperreality

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept [….] it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. 

(Baudrillard 1994, 1)

LuYang’s Delusional Mandala is superlatively and wittily hyperreal. The film combines LuYang’s hot takes on neuroscience, biology, and Buddhism as they quest to understand the mystery of human consciousness in a manically edited, oneiric and metaironic tale of simulated birth, death, rebirth and spiritual road trip, all presented through the eyes of an otaku obsessed with anime, manga, J-Pop, video gaming, and CGI. 

Our experience of the work is more vivid and vibratory than that of everyday life, yet at the same time the torrent of images are devoid of referents. With the possible exception of the artist’s stylized face, all is simulation. The references to science and religion seem plausible, but lack evidentiary relation to the world. The expressionless voiceover in Mandarin, with both Chinese and English subtitles, conveys—to echo Baudrillard—both an excess of information and a paucity of meaning.

LuYang’s simulacra are a blast—narcissistically self-referential, endless versions of the artist in a hall of mirrors with no origin. The film begins with a shot of the artist’s physical head being 3D-scanned (Fig. 22), moving to what looks like a screen capture of the computer software in which the embodied LuYang is supposedly remodeling their own head (Figs. 23 & 24), ending with a simulation of the simulated artist in their simulated studio simulating the performance of these materially necessary operations (Fig. 25). 

Analog / Digital

All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

(Debord 1995, 12)

So the first passage between realms depicted in Delusional Mandala is that from the analog to the digital. LuYang is uploaded into an idealized, sexless, virtual avatar.  By “virtual” all I mean is “computationally digitized or digitally simulated” (OED Online). I do not mean immaterial. A number of synthesized glitches (Fig. 26) convey the risk of this transformational procedure.

I want to be really precise with terms in this essay. 

The opposite of digital is not physical. The opposite of digital is analog. Something is digital if it is quantized, meaning that it is composed only of discrete quantities, like the five digits of the hand.

The analog body of LuYang has transmigrated into pixels (more precisely: voxels) and thereby been digitized (Fig. 27). 

LuYang’s non-binary avatar is, amusingly, a string of ones and zeros. Binary code, not genetic. An array of discrete charges, opposed polarities, entrapped electrons.

In contrast, something is analog if it is composed of continuously variable quantities. In classical physics, space, time, sound, and light are considered to be continuously variable.

Digital and analog phenomena differ in their characteristics, but both are equally material, physical and real. They both exist in space and time. There is no ontological hierarchy.

LuYang knows this in their “tendon, flesh, marrow, spleen heart, liver, lung, […] brain and membrane” (Fig. 30). The digital LuYang is different to but just as real as their analog analogue.

Consequently, LuYang’s video ought not and does not need external props to feel lively, animated, vibrant, terrifying or exhilarating.

Animatic Virtuality

We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. 

(Haraway 1991, 150)

For LuYang, virtuality promises more than a dizzying precession of simulated images, it promises freedom from labels they yearn to escape.

In embracing body modification, degenderization, and digital transfiguration into both meat and ecstatic divinity, we can read LuYang’s practice as exemplifying a powerful feminist, cyborgian and posthuman rejection of limiting labels, oppositional binaries, and violent hierarchies. 

In this context, and thinking about the texture, affect and staging of LuYang’s work it is the plasticity and unlimited potentiality I want to linger on.

Deborah Levitt marks a crucial distinction between the metamorphic, deathless, and infinite plasticity of the animatic apparatus and the cinematic regime which is always indexed to the world, and thus always “haunted by temporality, decay, and death” (Levitt 2018, 28). This cuts to the quick of LuYang’s animatic project. It is precisely this plasticity and statelessness that LuYang craves, exhibits, and enjoys.  

For Delusional Mandala to work in situ, it needs to be staged as animatic not cinematic—simulation not representation—and for the experience of that staging  to feel validating, liberating, and perhaps even politically emancipatory.

Black Box

Mimetic [e]ngulfment is evoked by dark installations that suggest visitors’ dissolution; the possibility of locating oneself in relation to the space is diminished, because this space is obscured, confused, or in some way intangible. 

(Bishop 2005, 82).

The simple staging of Delusional Mandala (Fig. 32) at Basel’s Kunsthalle (LuYang Vibratory Field, 2023) lies at the immaterial end of the spectrum.

An empty black box, the video carefully projection mapped to fill one wall, as though the whole room illusorily opens out onto a startling virtual vista. The viewer is a hushed and private spectator, though not a passive one. As Rancière makes clear, spectating is always an active endeavor (Rancière 2011, 17).

What presence, if any, does the artwork thus staged possess?

The work, as it exists on the solid state flash drive as a set of temporarily entrapped electrons, has little in the way of “aura” (Benjamin 1992, 215). It can be replicated without loss or degradation, and, when deleted, will leave negligible (though not zero) trace. 

The projected image is another matter. Reflecting off the wall of Switzerland’s oldest contemporary art museum, the work accumulates history, context, and credentials.

Auratic or not as the instantiation may be, it’s still tempting to think of the work’s material presence as slight. The darkness of the room, the blankness beyond the framed image, the viewer’s inability to perceive other viewers as bodies in space, all conspire to lend the work a feeling of ghostly immateriality. LuYang’s psychedelic hearse is hurtling through outer space.

In this way the institutional black box encourages the idea that nothing has been made by hand, that there is little in the way of material texture, nothing tangible, palpable or haptic to be experienced. It can seem that there is no object which opposes me, resists me, withdraws from me. Staged and read like this, Delusional Mandala conforms  to the neoliberal digital imaginary.

Digital Imaginary

Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals 

(Haraway 1991, 153)

Delusional Mandala is virtual, digital, simulated. As such, it feels quite natural to call it depthless, ethereal, immaterial, insubstantial, intangible, slick, smooth, synthetic, unreal, virtual, weightless. This is the contemporary neoliberal imaginary of the digital cloud: uploading invisible data, wirelessly streaming weightless content, connecting virtually at incalculable speed through a transparent and harmless aether.

The ideological forcefield of the invisible skynet has two key benefits to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple et al. First, it enacts a narrative of magic not technology, enhancing the fetishistic appeal of their lickable products and airy services. Second, it banishes with doublespeak any hint of material extraction, excessive energy consumption, exploitative labor (Fig. 39), or planetary devastation, the realities of which are meticulously documented by Kate Crawford (Crawford 2020, 5-37) and Kara Siddharth (Siddharth, 2023, 31-68). 

Theatricality

Yu Lang staged Delusional Mandala within a much more elaborate environment three years earlier at a group show of Chinese media artists (Micro Era: Media Art from China, 2019). Vinyl wall paper and a giant balloon of LuYang’s head dominate the space (Fig. 42), while Delusional Mandala plays on a modest LCD screen (Fig. 43).

This installation is certainly more tangible and textured, more sensorially stimulating than the black box in the Kunsthalle (LuYang Vibratory Field, 2023). The narcissism inherent in the work is more pronounced, and is in fact self-consciously lampooned. 

More theatrical still was LuYang’s blockbuster show at the Zabludowicz Collection (LuYang NetiNeti, 2022). LuYang’s major new narrative work DOKU the Self (LuYang 2022) played on a mid-sized screen in a noisy main hall (Fig. 44), but all the action was in the gaming arcade behind it (Fig. 45): dazzling, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, viscerally affecting the body with a rising thrill, imbued with a retro-futuristic combination of nostalgia and anticipation.  And yet it also has something of the mercantile about it, lurid, touristic.

There is a risk here that the environment supersedes the moving image work. Perhaps that’s the intention. Perhaps this work is in fact a site-specific installation or even, in LuYang’s words, “a commercial franchise” (e-flux 2020). 

The crowds, the selfies, the talkability, the party atmosphere. None of this is bad. Who knows, it might even be necessary. But it doesn’t leave much space to contemplate, interpret or respond to the work.

Circulation

When I finish a work, I’ll upload it on Vimeo. For me, it’s important what average people online think.

YuLang (New York Times, 2015)

LuYang’s desire to reach a broad, non-art audience is real and genuinely additive. All their work is online.

Sure, I can scrub through a clip distractedly while I multi-screen, but I also have the control to rewatch, pause, think. If the black box invites a dematerializing gaze, the theatrical installation a gaze of gawking consumption, then online video comes closest to the form of poetry, enabling a slow, iterative unfurling of the work. 

With enough time and attention, I become better able to appreciate the texture and affect of digital video. Not just the nature of the content and the formal qualities of composition and lighting, but also the velocity of camera movement, the rhythm of the edit, the prosody of the language, the timbre of the human voice, film grain, dynamic range, plus more technical elements such as color space, gamma, bit depth, compression artifacts, and so on. 

Most people exposed to a plethora of moving image genres are pre-cognitively aware of the genre they are encountering. We can, as it were, smell the difference between reality TV, Netflix show, studio blockbuster, infomercial, arthouse film.

The very proximity and availability of online video might thus enable us to improve our ‘olfactory’ abilities.

Digital Reality

LuYang believes the digital to be real because it’s as illusory as anything else in the realm of the senses.

In contrast, I believe the digital is real because it’s really real, all the way down.

Quantum physics implies that certain properties of particles, such as energy and angular momentum, are quantized, meaning they can only take on discrete values. This suggests a digital-like structure underlying the fabric of reality, since it is stepped, or quantized, at its most fundamental level. 

Sound, sight, and touch are considered—in classical physics, at least—to represent analog phenomena. Yet as soon as the relevant sense receptors are activated, the signaling process immediately becomes digital. Activation requires the surpassing of a threshold level. The receptor is either activated or not. Intensity is then represented by the frequency of the signal transmitted by the receptor. It is all ones and zeros.

I emphasize these points to counter the digital imaginary that makes it so hard to believe that digital objects might have real presence.

Presence & Affect

Nothing shoots out of the digital screen like an arrow to pierce the observer. Information does not have arrow tips. [….] The noise of information prevents the experience of a presence, even revelation, that might house a moment of silence.

(Han 2022, 59)

As soon as the digital and the analog, the virtual and the material, are brought together under the banner of the real, it becomes obvious that digital objects have as much “preponderance” (Adorno 1970, 183), “alterity and facticity” (Pettman 2016, 111),  “withdrawal, [….] excess, surplus, or otherness” (Harman 2020, 12) “resistance” (Han 2022, 22) and are as “vibrant, vital, energetic, lively, quivering, vibratory, [and] evanescent” (Bennett 2010, 112) as stones, sticks, lithium fields, cobalt pits, power lines and so on. 

The unrendered simulation is on the same level as the uncaptured scene or the unwitnessed event. In all cases, the real object is unseen, not unseeable. If a minor detail of the hearse in Delusional Mandala is not seen by anyone, it still exists, because it exists in the model generated by the software. It is not paler than a real world referent. It is the real world referent.

What is true spatially, is true temporally, and is true also of the qualities of digital objects, including their haptic ones. 

It’s tempting to think, with Han (Han 2022, 16), that the affective impact of the audiovisual is only through and on the eye and ear.

This just isn’t true. When discussing LuYang’s Delusional Mandala we may talk variously of thrill, fascination, revulsion, threat, disorientation, confusion, hope, slickness, and many other subtler states that we will labor to articulate. None of these are predominantly the domain of the eye and ear. The underlying feelings of rising or falling, clenching or expanding, shrinking away or leaning towards are thoroughly somatic.

Conclusions

Digital objects are real. When we experience a digital object, most of the ways in which we could experience that object are irrecoverably withheld from us. Digital objects also have as much affective potential as analog objects, including the domain of the haptic.

Consequently, the question of physical installation becomes less urgent than I thought it was when I began this essay.

I have considered three modes of staging digital video.

First, the black box, which emphasizes our potential for personal transformation yet plays into a digital imaginary that hides the harms of planetary computing.

Second, theatrical staging, which enables us to experience other bodies in space and to communally experience the work, yet risks precluding the opportunity needed for contemplation and revelation. 

Third, online circulation, a kind of anti-staging, which cedes power to the viewer, enabling a work to be watched ‘freely’ and ‘conveniently’ wherever, whenever, and in whatever state of mind. Although this third mode feels most aligned with and most subsumable by the unrepresentable flows of capital, there is also a sense in which it yields a fertile truth.

The artwork and its reception are always out of the artist’s control and elaborate installation merely pretends to conceal that fact.

What of the relationship between the artist and the curator? Isn’t that a little similar to the one between artist and anonymous online viewer? Perhaps the curator should be the person deciding how to stage this work, in this place, at this institution, at this time….

Bibliography

• Adorno, Theodor, 1970. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York, USA: Continuum
• Barthes, Roland, 2000. Camera Lucida. Trans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. London, UK: Vintage
• Baudrillard, Jeam, 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, USA: The University of Michigan Press.
• Benjamin. Walter, 1992. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London, UK: Fontana Press.
• Bennet, Kate, 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, USA: Duke University Press
• Bishop, Claire 2005. Installation Art: A Critical History. London, UK: Tate
• Crawford, Kate, 2021. Atlas of AI: Power. Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven, USA: Yale University Press
• Debord, Guy, 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York, USA: Zone Books
• Han, Byung-Chul, 2022. Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
• Harman, Graham, 2020. Art and Objects. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
• Kara, Siddharth, 2023. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. New York, USA: St. Martins Press
• Levitt, Deborah 2018. The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Future of the Image. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
• Luckraft, Paul, ed. 2023. LuYang NetiNeti. Berlin: DISTANZ Verlag.
• McQuillan, Dan, 2022. Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press
• Pettman, Dominic, 2016. Infinite Distraction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
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• Steyerl, Hito, 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. London, UK: Sternberg Press.
• Westgeest, Helen, 2016. Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons

Artworks & Exhibitions

• Achiampong, Larry, 2019. The Expulsion. [Single channel 4K video with stereo sound]. Available at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK.
• Anadol, Refik, 2018. WDCH Dreams. [Public art installation, projectors, custom software, color, sound]. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, USA.
• Arcangel, Cory, 2002. Super Mario Clouds. [Modified video game installation]. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA.
• Bacher, Lutz, 2013-2015. PLEASE (LC). [Four-channel digital video installation with sound]. Pinault Collection, Paris, France.
• Bender, Gretchen, 1987. Total Recall. [Multimedia installation].  Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA.
• Brambilla, Marco, 2023. Heaven’s Gate. [Digital installation]. The Sphere, Las Vegas, USA. Available at: @spherevegas and @marcobrambillastudio
• Cortright, Petra, 2007. VVEBCAM. [Video]. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA.
• Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966), 2016. [Exhibition]. Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK. 29 January – 15 May 2016
• Holzer, Jenny, 1985. Protect me from what I want, from Survival (1983–85). [LED Billboard]. Times Square, New York, USA.
• Julien, Isaac, 1989. Looking for Langston. [16mm film transferred to high-definition video, black and white, sound]. Collection of the British Film Institute, United Kingdom.
• Lialina, Olia, 2015. Give me time/This page is no more. [Installation: 160 35mm slides & 2 slide projectors]. Available at And/Or Gallery. Los Angeles, USA.
• LuYang, 2015. Delusional Mandala. [Single channel 4K digital video with stereo sound]. Available at: https://vimeo.com/141005910 (Accessed:  21 April 24)
• LuYang, 2022. DOKU the Self. [Single channel 4K digital video with stereo sound.. Available at: https://vimeo.com/734423228  (Accessed:  21 April 24)
• LuYang, 2023. Doku: Digital Reincarnation. [Digital projection installation]. Times Square Midnight Moments, New York, USA.
• LuYang NetiNeti, 2022. [Exhibition]. Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. 22 September 2022–12 March 2023
• LuYang Vibratory Field, 2023. [Exhibition]. Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland. 20 January 2023 – 21 May 2021
• Micro Era: Media Art from China, 2019. [Exhibition]. Kulturforum, Berlin, Germany, 05 September 2019 – 26 January 2020
• Nauman, Bruce, 1992. Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning). [Video installation]. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
• Paik, Nam June, 1974. TV Garden. [Installation]. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA
• Phillipson, Heather, 2021. Rupture No. 1: blowtorching the bitten peach. [Installation]. Tate Britain, London, UK.
• Rist, Pippilotti, 2016. Pixel Forest. [Installation]. New Museum, New York, USA.
• Satterwhite, Jacolby, 2015. Reifying Desire 5. [Digital video]. Available at: Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
• Steyerl, Hito, 2013. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. [Digital video]. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA.
• Steyerl, Hito, 2015. Factory of the Sun.  [Single channel high definition video installation with luminescent LED grid and beach chairs]. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA.
• Van Zyl, Jenkin, 2023. Surrender. [Installation]. FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK.

Web Pages

• Artnet, 2022. Artist Lu Yang on How a Harrowing Flight Experience Led to a Breakthrough Digital Artwork. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lu-yang-artist-2124984 (Accessed: 20 April 24)
• Flash Art, 2023. LuYang ‘Vibratory Field’ Kunsthalle Basel. Available at: https://flash—art.com/article/luyang/ (Accessed: 20 April 24)
• It’s Nice That, 2021. Lu Yang’s digital reincarnations explore a world beyond gender and reality. Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/ones-to-watch-2021-lu-yang-digital-220321 (Accessed: 20 April 24)
• New York Times, 2015. Lu Yang on Art, ‘Uterus Man’ and Living Life on the Web. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/world/asia/china-art-lu-yang-venice-biennale.html (Accessed: 20 April 24)
• Ohio State University, 2016. Lu Yang, the next artist about to get kicked out of China. Available at: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2016/07/02/lu-yang-the-next-artist-about-to-get-kicked-out-of-china/  (Accessed: 20 April 24)
• e-flux, 2020. Digital Reincarnations. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/355558/digital-reincarnations (Accessed: 21 April 24)