A paradox of the information age is the trend towards low-resolution. Compare your experience to that of your grandparents:

• voice quality — your cellphone no match for their good old Bell telephone
• image resolution — your iPod videos or YouTube feeds as mud compared to the 35 or 70mm prints of their grand old movie palaces
• language — your email, chat, and texting often mere abbreviated grunting by contrast to their old-fashioned letter-writing

A similar trend, too, in attention — a tendency toward frayed time, our world designed for distraction, with interruption the rule, everything coming at us in overlapping blasts of information, cut into bite-sizes.

Our minds are elsewhere — our attention as low-res as our vision.

Such are the symptoms, if you will. Offset by many advantages, which we are quite sold on, the chief of these being the ubiquity of information and the instantaneity of search.

Fidelity

The American Heritage Dictionary definition:

1. Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances. 2. Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event; accuracy. 3. The degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.

“Image fidelity,” then, should imply more than accurate reproduction (though that’s important) — but also faithfulness to a given truth.

On the positive side, this leads to considerations pursued in the parallel thread Advanced Realism. For now, let’s keep our focus here on the negative flipside.

Grainy image, jittery camera, awkward jump-cuts, over-exposure, etc — low-resolution becomes an emblem of the authentic — which in turn is appropriated by corporate marketing. Thus arises a thoroughly inauthentic authenticity (or should that be “true infidelity”?)

Someone ought to do a little media history of the hand-held camera. Hand-held implies subjective vision, individuality, point of view; yet to my recollection its use in corporate advertising began a bit over a decade ago, in American Express ads. Of course, the individual behind that camera is a complete fiction, the corporation having shape-shifted its way into that pose.

A pose adopted a decade earlier in MTV videos — which again came across as individual expressions, though they too were essentially marketing campaigns, and about as personal as the music companies paying for them.

And so the “personal” turned impersonal — the singular camera eyes of cinema verité and experimental film now no longer even remembered…

An odd thing happened on the road to audio high fidelity. In the late 1960s it looked as if perfect studio recordings would soon eclipse live performance: in rock music the Beatles, and in classical music Glenn Gould, said goodbye to the road and hunkered down for good with their mixing boards and recording booths. Thus in London, Abbey Road; in Toronto, the CDC and the Film House. Ingenious new ways of conceiving and presenting music came pouring forth.

But now it seems part of this ingenuity derived from struggles with the imperfections of the recording process as it then stood in that pre-digital age. Both the Beatles and Glenn Gould experimented constantly to overcome the limitations they encountered — and their methods necessarily entailed physical interventions rather than digital simulations. Only by placing microphones oddly could they shape the sense of psychoacoustic space; only by cranking the tape faster or slower could they vary playback speeds. In any case, there was no easy resort to digital processing…

So what looked then like a sure road to better music now seems a mirage. Yes, the four-track limitation the Beatles faced at Abbey Road was soon swept away, digital effects opened up a seemingly endless new territory to explore, costs plummeted to let almost anyone experiment freely — and yet pretty soon music came to seem cold and brittle.

And so a backlash was inevitable. A return to raw performance, which was punk; or a reinsertion of the physical into the digital: scratching.

Grunge, as the word implies, was to be a dirtying-up of rock music again, though the supposedly raw sound of Nirvana’s first album was very much a studio creation. It’s in the posthumous releases that Kurt Cobain finally comes into his own. He demoes songs for his home tape recorder, and when you listen in to the diminished space between singer and song, you feel like an eavesdropper.

Now it’s this primitive intimacy that comes through most powerfully on the earbuds we wear through our solitary days.

Ars Electronica has a permanent Cave facility, so not having been in one for quite a long time, I signed up to take another look. I donned the polarized goggles that flickered in rapid alternation, and stepped into the small crowded chamber. There, sure enough, the walls, ceiling, and floor obliged with that familiar, slightly unreal 3D depth. Once again there came the usual symptoms of motion-sickness, my eyes decidedly disconnected from my other senses.

The main disappointment, however, was as before with the low resolution of the display, which did nothing to reward the close viewing distance of the cramped room. As with so many digital displays, the video disintegrated into jaggy lines and rough textures the closer one approached it. So panning and zooming in there ended up giving me not only a scrambled sensory experience, but also an impoverished visual one.

I compare this with old-fashioned stereo photography, which I remember first encountering many years ago, in the 1980s. Visiting the Leroy Street apartment of my friend Jane Nisselson, I happened to pick up a small stereoscope — not an antique, but rather a contemporary mass-produced viewer, molded from black and gray plastic. Peering through it towards the sunlight in her window, I had to force my eyes into a slightly cross-eyed squint, an act that successfully popped the image into startling 3D. There floating just in front of me was a nondescript desk and lamp, an image that possessed an uncanny mental presence.

Jane had been given this stereoscope by Scott Fisher, whom she’d met at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (Nicholas Negroponte’s pre-Media Lab research center). Scott was to become a well-known proponent of VR, and Jane put me in touch with him when I moved briefly to San Francisco in the early 90s. It was he who introduced me to Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut, whose VR artwork, Menagerie, he had just produced for the Pompidou Center. (They describe the piece elsewhere on this site.)

Though now Hollywood is again embracing 3D.

Virtual reality never lived up to its exciting promise, and certainly not up to the considerable hype it generated; experiences like the one I had in the Cave proved to be all too typical.

It was years later, in Atlanta, that I crossed my eyes again to peer at vintage stereo photographs. These came from Peter Bahouth’s vast collection, which I had the chance to explore briefly one evening after dinner at his house. First I examined 19th century shots of household interiors, in which I was astonished by the visual detail I could summon forth from the twinned images inserted into the stereoscope. No scene could be taken in at a glance, each too multifarious and detailed for that kind of cursory inspection. But with a little effort, a conscious shift of focus, I could bring the almost palpable presence of a long-vanished object right up in front of me — a vase on a table, a gilt-framed mirror, an embroidered cushion — suspended in space, suspended in time. Each photograph seemed almost infinite, as if I could never examine quite everything it held — I even found myself craning my neck slightly, as if I could see around objects to what lay just behind or beyond them.

Peter then brought out the most unexpected prize of his collection, the stereo photographs a traveling salesman had taken so obsessively at mid-20th-century. There is somethiing about a stereoscope that lends itself to pornography, for not only do the various allurements of the desired body practically shove themselves into your gaze, but also they do so in a space even more private than that of a peep-hole.

None of the salesman’s photographs were explicitly pornographic, though they very nearly were. The one that pinned itself in my memory was of a man and woman dancing, perhaps in a bar. The stereogram caught them just as the man, having lifted his partner, was spinning her around. Her skirt had flared out, and at the apex of the 3D triangle formed by the woman’s momentarily spreadeagled legs was the evident prize: her bright white panties.

For a moment, the stereoscope I held seemed identical to the salesman’s camera, and I had the grotesque sense of his sweaty excitement.

At a recent eye exam, the light the doctor shone in my eye made its capillaries suddenly visible to me, a network of bright red tendrils floating in the darkness of the examination room.

Earlier, the nurse had me peer one-eyed into the scope of a machine, in which I first saw a blurred picture of a brightly colored landscape. The machine whirred slightly as it measured the internal geometry of the eye, and then, without any direction from me, automatically adjusted its lens to snap the picture into focus.

A deserted road receded straight into a bright green landscape, and where the road met the horizon there hovered a large striped air balloon.

Inside out

The psychoanalyst-turned-crackpot Wilhelm Reich saw — by the evidence of his own eyes — a constant bombardment of the earth by a life force he called orgone energy. First noticing the telltale bluish light in the darkness of his lab basement, he was soon seeing it everywhere — most obviously in the sky, the color of which he had thus explained. Reich invented the orgone accumulator, a kind of therapeutic isolation box intended to concentrate the play of this life force on its occupant.

Reich’s fancies percolated through mid-century counter-culture, with its antiscientific bias and mystical predilections. That Reich had been imprisoned by the fda only increased his outlaw allure; among the most famous of orgone box enthusiasts was that other outlaw, William Burroughs.

Even the filmmaker Stan Brakhage thought he was seeing orgones when he looked up at the sky, a dance of particles whose motion sometimes seemed to foretell rain. So when as a teenager I gazed out the porthole of an airplane and saw the same particles popping across the bright clouds below, I felt I had joined my heroes.

This was a vision I can still repeat at will. Only years later did I learn that, as with so many miracles, what I was seeing was self-produced: the particles were white blood cells pulsing through the capillaries of my retina.

Inner light

In William Burroughs I first read about Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a flicker device for hallucinations. Following Gysin’s published instructions (now found online here), I used a turntable, a light bulb, and a slotted oatmeal box to fashion a dreamachine of my own.

See, too, Flicker stories

With closed eyes I faced the flickering light, the pattern of which bypassed my retinal vision to induce a kind of direct neocortical vision. This came in the form of huge wheeling expanses of intense and even repellent colors — acid greens, yellows, and pinks — unlike any you’d ever see on earth. The experience pitched me into an odd kind of panic, as if I were on the verge of an epileptic fit, and I did not repeat it often.