Bodily traces in digital encounters: materializing virtualities for the political documentary.

With the emergence of digital technologies in visual culture, much concern has been expressed about its potential for manipulation at the expense of the conventional premise that art in some way represents reality. The digital turn elicits in film theory a fear of the loss of the index, a loss that renders the image's relation with the Real even more tenuous. Scan Cubitt, for instance, considers the digital sublime to offer "no guarantee of escape from ideology but rather a refusal of the social, the only possible ground of ideological work, conflict, interpretation, dialectic and history." (1) Such a statement, however, is the result of a slippage between two different discourses. The degree to which digital technologies allow for the manipulation of images, and as it were, the creation of images that do not exist in real life, taps into a conversation about the potentials and limitations of representation. Cubitt's concerns arise within the realm of such a discussion, although the implications of digital technologies for the ontological status of the index taps into a rather different discourse. Theorists such as SaskiaSassen, Philip Rosen, and Thomas Elsaesser in different ways articulate more complex views that subvert Cubitt's conception of the digital sublime and shows how the digital turn might present opportunities for materializing the political potentials of the digitized and the virtual.

Employing these theoretical premises about the political potentials of the digital, this article identifies the resurgence of the political in two rather different digital media practices, and examines their potential for theorizing the political documentary. Some time ago, Jane Gaines mused about the "strange association of apolitical films with social change and radical politics," and wondered about "the significance, if any, of the reception of political documentaries in the absence of a struggle." (2) As this article hopes to show, the various and effective uses of digital technologies to galvanize the body into political action have implications for the ways in which we define, and conceive of, the documentary.

Contrary to the fear that the digital displaces the significance of the physical, enfleshed, and the social, there are convincing arguments that conclude that the loss of the index might not lead to such dire consequences. Sassen cites the example of the global financial markets and insists that these electronic financial instruments require large varieties and quantities of conventional structures and that "much, although not all, of what we think of cyberspace would lack any meaning or referents if we were to exclude the world outside of cyberspace." (3) Acknowledging the transpository nature of digital objects. Sassen refers to the interface between the human and computer "layers" and the material conditions necessary for such interface. And indeed, the current global financial meltdown reminds us that abstract capital can result in very material consequences for the real economy. Using the example of satellite surveillance, Rosen similarly argues that "the 'purity' of 'pure data' cannot mean the obliteration of referential origins, for without referential entities or events pre-existing the data itself, the data would have no informational value as surveillance." (4) Moreover, Rosen notes, "digital imaging as such does not absolutely rule out a profilmic origin, for the digital has means of incorporating the indexical." (5)

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Despite the clear interrelation of the digital with the material, however, the fantasy (or horror, depending on one's perspective) of the loss of the index toward an attainment of the "digital sublime" persists. As Elsaesser insists, it is somewhat unfair to blame the digital signal "for the death of our notion of what is real or true." (6) Elsaesser furthers this assertion by using the issue of the trustworthiness of network news as an example, arguing that television news' fidelity to real events depends more on the political context and network-viewer contract than the loss of the indexical sign to the digital. In the same breadth, Elsaesser argues that "the political has taken a resurgence in relation to technological determinism and the theoretical." (7) From such a perspective, the digital turn does not so much displace the social and ideological than facilitate the proliferation of the political, as the video essays and locative media practice discussed below shows.

Ursula Biemann is a Zurich-based digital artist whose video essays transcend the confines of the experimental video and gallery space to interrogate issues of labor, mobility, globalization, and gender that often exist on a different register. Such an art practice represents an aesthetic, feminist, and materialist response to the contemporary digital, global, and hyper-capitalist ecology, Importantly, her works highlight the interface between the virtual and the material, politics and gender, the local and the global in its political analysis of the digitized global economy. In Remote Sensing (2001), Biemann considers the mobilization of Third World women to sustain the global sex trade. Meditating on the difference between the transnational flow of abstract capital that sustains global trade and the rather more physical and embodied movement of women across borders as sex workers to service the global economy, the narrator of Remote Sensing notes how satellite images are unable to trace the routes these women take while the tracking of transnational capital flows are precisely enabled through digital technology.

As a digital rendering of data, satellite images lack an indexical relationship to the globe, and therefore only gain meaning at the moment of interpretation. Although they are crouched in technical terms and digital data, these meanings do not only exclude issues of gender and identity but have wider symbolic implications because such technologies that visually represents and facilitates global capitalism and movements do not grasp the geographical relocation of women that it facilitates. The symbolic elision of gender here, therefore, is the contending issue in the transnational economy enabled by digital technology. While digital technologies cannot register the mobilization of these trafficked women across borders, it functions seamlessly to enable the generation of what Remote Sensing's narrator observes as "abstract footloose capital" that fuels the flesh trade that is "nonetheless so physical for some." Remote Sensing shows how being on the wrong side of the "digital divide," being confined to the material and embodied, has significant materialist implications for some people. As Remote Sensing articulates, being on the wrong side of the digital divide extends further than demographic discussions of Internet access and use. Being on the wrong side of the digital divide involves being subject to the complex ways in which the processes of international political economy deprive certain people of symbolic privileges that translate into very real and material consequences.

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Remote Sensing explores the gendered political economy that necessitates these mobilizations of women for the sex industry and attributes gendered meanings to the apparently clean, digitized, and seamless flow of abstract capital. By acknowledging the relationship between the material and the digital, Biemann's works facilitate, in Elsaesser's words, "the resurgence of the political in relation to technological determinism and the theoretical. "Biemann's works indicate that activities registered in satellites, digital archives, and locative media interface with material conditions, including those of migration and displacement, to arrive at a material and political feminism that responds to its context. In other words, it is a feminism that analyzes and exposes the systemic oppression of women, and goes beyond the privileging of personal voices, individual expressions, and the politicization of the personal. They also provide for us the opportunity to look at the different ways in which the interaction between the digital and the material enables activism, the collective, and the political in the emergence of locative media.

While Biemann's works use the video essay for purposes of political analysis and critique, locative media represents a newly emerging zone in performative multimedia. It constitutes a new global independent media movement interested in the convergence between digital domains and geographical spaces. It anchors the digital, which is often viewed as ambling around in a place-less realm, within geographic spaces. Artists marshal portable, networked computing devices like GPS, mobile phones, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) as well as wearable technologies to map space and intervene in data streams. Locative media practices focus on horizontal, user-led, collaborative projects to interrupt and interrogate a power system of observation and control. Locative, ambient, and migratory digital media employ reverse-engineering strategies of altering technologies like RFID to make visible these embedded invisible technologies as a form of public education, political consciousness raising, and mobilization. Artists and collectives have offered exciting new interventions into ideas about political engagement, microgeographies, psychogeographies, new cartographics. and the politics of terror.

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As an instance of emergent locative media practices, the digital artist Christian Nold conducts community and emotional mapping projects that are specific to particular geographical spaces. Equipping his participants with digital gadgets that measure pulses and heart rates, he records their physiological responses to specific places and landmarks as they go on walks around their neighborhoods. The results are maps that are distinctly different from conventional maps that show streets, landmarks, and architecture. Instead, the maps produced by such bio-mapping projects annotate physical and geographical spaces with the participants' subjective responses that are recorded by digital technology.

Such locative media projects in some way allow people to reclaim the material and public spaces that are increasingly either appropriated by corporations or abandoned in favor of private, isolating activities that are confined to the home, such as watching DVDs or playing computer games. They are also part of a longer history of attempts to delineate uses of public spaces, beginning with Charles Baudelaire's flaneur and testament of the continuing interest in, and potential of, ideas around psychogeography that were initiated by the Situationists in the 1950s. While Baudelaire's flaneur traverses the city with an objective eye to observe people, activities, and structures, the Situationists' reflections on the city and everyday life possess an important performative aspect that reverse engineer the city's function as facilitator of the capitalist work ethic. Derive, the art of urban roaming or drifting as a characteristic of play, sought to reconfigure physical space in order to shift the functions and meanings attributed to them by capitalist culture. As Guy Debord notes, "In a derive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." (8) Such strategies employed by the Lettrists and Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s are evident in the spirit of the strategies that contemporary digital artists use to remember, and galvanize, the body toward political action. Biemann's attempts to seek out parallels in the abstract and digital and locative media artists who performatively and literally ground the digital in the political emphasize the interface between the virtual and the material.

SHARON LIN TAY is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at Middlesex University, London, UK, where she teaches film theory and digital culture. Her forthcoming book, Women on the Edge, is about women filmmakers.

NOTES (1.) Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA and Landon: MIT Press, 2004), 269. (2.) Jane Gaines, "Political Mimesis," Collecting Visible Evidence, Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, eds. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 86, 100. (3.) Saskia Sassen, "Reading the City in a Global Digital Age," Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, Linda Krause and Patricia Petro, eds. (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 19. (4.) Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2001), 307. (5.) Ibid., 309. (6.) Thomas Elsaesser, "Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time," Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cale?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, eds, (Amsterdane Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 14. (7.) Ibid., 208. (8.) Guy Debord, "Theory of the Derive," Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City, Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, eds. (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), 22.