So Jason had suggested the other week that I offer up some of the reasoning for why I'm titling the postcard work The Exchange of Living and Nonliving Properties. Here it is...
The initial interest for the piece came from looking at how digital networks were vernacularly and academically regarded upon their commercial release to the public around the 1980s. For instance, William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer depicts a highly immersive technology that could be read as something of an allegory of the internet. Users "jack in" and find themselves disembodied into a virtual environment. While in this environment, movement through the digital reality has no correlation to movement in our normal reality, the two worlds are thoroughly distinct. It's kind of like The Matrix with the exception that in those films dying in the matrix implies a death down the line in real life.
And that actually marks a turning point for how we currently view virtual and actual spaces. One can still distinguish between the two but they've become so thoroughly embedded into one another, it's difficult to perfectly deconstruct these two kinds of reality. It seems to me that the status quo now is not to completely externalize and distance virtual environments but to see them as an architecture of digital information that hovers around, above, through, but ultimately within our geophysical presence. Let's call this architecture a cloud (it's an industry term). Sometimes we parse pieces of the cloud reality into our physical reality through hardware like phones, laptops, portable music playing devices, GPS devices, etc. Other times, with those same pieces of hardware, we transmit data to the cloud in the form of photographs, videos, sounds, fragments of text, geophysical coordinates, etc. These two realities, one virtual and one actual, are no longer perceived as totally separate spaces. They form a hybrid spatiality. So the postcard piece is essentially tooling that idea of a hybrid reality into a work of art. Images from a virtual space are assembled into the objects of our actual spaces. But of course the virtual images are based on photographs of real spaces in the first place. And for people to take away the postcards and use them doesn't totally fulfill the cultural purpose of a postcard as a marker for the prestige you feel granted to for going somewhere, they sort of fail as actual world objects. And can you really ever go to google? The reference to the IPv4 syntax is like a little nod to the hardware that really serves as the connecting tissue of our hybrid reality.
But why the title? Well, we've been talking about a binary of two spaces with an intermediary thread that puts them into contact with one another. I came to thinking that this is a bit like a late 20th/early 21st century version of the mythos of a Christian afterlife. Now the earlier 1980s model of really transcending into a virtual reality seems more conducive to a religious metaphor than the contemporary model of hybridized reality. At first. But then I did some more sci-fi reading, specifically books by Philip K. Dick like Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and VALIS. This man's writing was highly invested in moments when spiritual realms would interject into our own world maybe in the form of divine visions or out of body experiences and so on. And the main way Dick thought we could find these moments of insight was through advanced computer technologies and huge doses of psychedelic drugs. The images in the postcard piece seem kind of visionary/hallucinogenic, they're images of bizarre colors and patterns, mountains cracked in half by malfunctions in a secret text, a plant that seems really not of this world.
Ok so here we are finally... the title comes from a paraphrased line at the end of Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. It is spoken by a character named Charles Freck who has completely fried his brain abusing a designer drug called Death. He lives in a state of total paranoia until he unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide and has a vision in which he is confronted by a paranormal deity that's half man and half insect. Freck's final observation of the world is that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." And voila. My title.
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