T I M E - B A S E D A RT A N D T H E D R E A M O F D I G I TA L I T Y

H O M AY K I N G
VIRTUAL MEMORY
 VIRTUAL MEMORY
T I M E - ­B A S E D A R T A N D T H E D R E A M O F D I G I T A L I T Y

H O M AY K I N G

D UK E UNIVE RSIT Y P RE SS ::: D UR HA M A ND LONDON ::: 2 015

© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on
acid-­free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Homay, [date] author.
Virtual memory : time-based art and the dream
of digitality / Homay King.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5959-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-6002-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7515-9 (e-book)
1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Time and art. 
3. Computer art. I. Title.
pn 1995.25.k 54 2015
791.43′684—dc23 2015014081

Cover art: Christian Marclay, installation

view of The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video
with sound; twenty-four hours. © Christian
Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New
York, and White Cube, London. Photo by
Todd-White Photography.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 ::: Keys to Turing 18

2 ::: Christian Marclay’s Two Clocks 47

3 ::: Matter, Time, and the Digital: Agnès Varda’s Videos 71

4 ::: Beyond Repetition: Victor Burgin’s Loops 100

5 ::: The Powers of the Virtual 125

6 ::: Another World Is Virtual 161

Notes 179

Bibliography 191

Index 199
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began with a talk on Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I that I
gave at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Lon-
don in 2005. Coincidentally that conference was also where I first met
Ken Wissoker, who has been a marvelous editor and friend. The many
years that it took to get from conference paper to book were essential
to the ideas expressed here, not because these ideas are necessarily
better for having taken longer to develop but because, as Henri Berg-
son puts it, the time taken up by the invention is one with the inven-
tion itself. The people with whom I spent this time—discussing ideas,
collaborating on projects, sharing space at lecterns and in print, or just
being sociable in person and online—were even more essential. They
have shaped this book’s contents and facilitated its creation. They in-
clude Farid Azfar, Eric Baudelaire, Leo Bersani, Emma Bianchi, Duncan
Black, Aviva Briefel, Victor Burgin, Israel Burshatin, David Campany,
Tim Corrigan, Drew Daniel, Julie Davis, David Eng, Jim English, Rodney
Evans, Jonathan Flatley, Saïd Gahia, Johanna Gosse, Guo-­Juin Hong,
Sarah Kessler, Maura King, Alex Klein, Simon Leung, Erica Levin, Aaron
Levy, Heather Love, Mara Mills, José Muñoz, John Muse, Nguyễn Tân
Hoàng, Joshua Ramey, Rebbie Ratner, Sascha Russel, Martin Schmidt,
Bethany Schneider, Todd Shepard, Henry Sias, Gus Stadler, Jill Stauffer,
Rea Tajiri, Kate Thomas, Sharon Ullman, Patricia White, Ming Wong,
Eric Zinner, and my fellow Camera Obscura collective members, Lalitha
Gopalan, Lynne Joyrich, Tess Takahashi, and Sharon Willis. Extra spe-
cial thanks go to Rosi Song and Karen Tongson for camaraderie and
adventure around the world, and to Kaja Silverman, who always lights
the way of intelligence and friendship. Finally I thank Elizabeth Ault
for skilled editorial assistance, and the two anonymous readers of the
manuscript for their remarkably detailed, thoughtful reports, which
wowed me in every way and moved me with their level of intellectual
generosity and care.
This book was supported by a University of Pennsylvania Humani-
ties Forum Regional Fellowship, a Bryn Mawr College Faculty Research
Grant, and a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation Distinguished
Achievement Award held by Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of
Contemporary Art Kaja Silverman, Department of History of Art, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of chapter 3 was previously pub-
lished as “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I” in
the Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24.5 in Fall 2007. A version of
chapter 4 appeared in Projective: Essays about the Work of Victor Burgin,
ed. David Campany (Geneva: Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain,
2014). A portion of chapter 5 appeared in the essay “Anabasis,” October
142 (Fall 2012). A portion of chapter 6 was previously published under
the title “Antiphon: Notes on the People’s Microphone,” first as an ex-
cerpt in Machete: Occupy Philadelphia, Marginal Utility Gallery (Decem-
ber 2011), then as an essay in the Journal of Popular Music Studies 24.2
(Summer 2012).

viii ::: Acknowledgments
 INTRODUCTION

THE BLUE MARBLE

Hannah Arendt begins The Human Condition with a parable about the
launch of the Soviet Sputnik 1 satellite, the first man-­made object ever
to break free from Earth’s surface and enter its gravitational orbit. The
launch occurred on October 4, 1957. Arendt writes, “For some time, the
satellite dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies, as
though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company.” It
was a moment of encounter with the seemingly miraculous, a techno-
logical achievement on the grandest of scales, and a symbolic reversal
of the Copernican Revolution. It was also a military event modeled on
imperial conquest that heralded the beginning of the cold war space
race. Before this race was under way, though, Arendt noted a collective
sigh of relief from Earth’s inhabitants at the satellite’s dispatch: a gen-
eral sense of optimism in the face of this “first step toward escape from
men’s imprisonment to the earth.”1
As a staunch advocate for her home planet who argued in favor of ac-
cepting the limitations that had thus far defined the human condition,
Arendt found this reaction troubling. The longing to escape the planet
and the idea that earth’s inhabitants were imprisoned or shackled to
its surface went hand in hand with the degradation of tangible, incar-
nate, sensory experience, along with the kinds of thought, speech, and
action that are made possible by embodied perception. For Arendt, the
launch of Sputnik was troubling insofar as it served as a metaphor for
I.1. Photograph of Earth taken by the U.S. Explorer IV,
August 14, 1959, from approximately seventeen thousand
miles, showing the sunlit area of the central Pacific Ocean
and its cloud cover. Image courtesy of nasa .

the upward gaze of the scientist or idealist philosopher. It allegorized

the victory of the notion that knowledge and power require extraterres-
triality, or a similar route to freedom from the web of relations by which
the living are bound on Earth.
Two years later, on August 14, 1959, a much-­anticipated image began
to circulate: the first photograph of earth taken by satellite from outer
space (figure I.1).2 The photograph was made by the U.S. Explorer IV, whose
flight was made possible in part by the integrated circuits developed at
Fairchild Semiconductor, a start-­up company located in what would
later be known as Silicon Valley. Explorer IV ’s photograph was heavily ab-
stract. It revealed that from the satellite’s point of view, Earth resembled
a curved crescent without precise outlines, blurred as if by rapid motion.

2 ::: Introduction
Its face was cast mostly in shadow, having been upstaged by the moon.
A blizzard of similar photos followed in quick succession. Many of them
were likewise dim, inchoate, and creatively framed, as if the mechanical
photographer had not yet learned the concept of figuration. Such pic-
tures, in spite of the fact that they were taken from outer space, lacked
what Arendt called the “Archimedean standpoint”: a position aspiring to
a “truly universal viewpoint . . . taken, willfully and explicitly, outside the
earth.”3 Earth, in a manner of speaking, had not yet had its mirror-­stage.
In 1966 Stewart Brand—a writer, environmental activist, and tech-
nology entrepreneur from California—suggested that it was high time
to cross that developmental bridge. He made buttons bearing the slo-
gan “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Brand
wrote letters posing this question to luminaries and dignitaries he had
selected, including Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, a few U.S.
senators, and members of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. The only
one to reply was Fuller, who wrote, “Dear boy, it’s a charming notion but
you must realize you can never see more than half the earth from any
particular point in space.”4
On November 10, 1967, though, a photograph appeared that made
Brand’s wish come true—or rather, half-­true, according to Fuller’s flaw-
less logic. Made by the U.S. ats -­III satellite, the image showed the
earth as a nearly perfectly round disc, in color, surrounded by a black
void. The planet was now visible from its good side, its face an evenly
illuminated, vivacious circle, beautifully centered in frame. Earth had
finally assumed what Jacques Lacan, in reference to the baby in front
of the mirror, called the “orthopedic form of its totality.”5 Brand eagerly
adopted this image for the cover of the fall 1968 issue of the Whole Earth
Catalog, for which he served as editor (figure I.2). This catalogue offered
“access to tools,” a collection of product reviews and short texts, and
its audience was the community of tech-­savvy, ecologically minded,
vaguely Libertarian, countercultural enthusiasts that was beginning to
form in the mid-­1960s in northern California. Located in and around
the San Francisco Bay Area, this community of proto-­hackers brought
together the curious paradoxes of the “Californian ideology”: a fusion of
“hippie culture and cybernetics, nature romantics and technology wor-
shippers, psychedelia and computer culture,” as it has been described.6
Rather than sell merchandise directly, the Whole Earth Catalog offered a

Introduction ::: 3
 I.2. Cover of the Whole Earth
Catalog, Fall 1968, featuring
a photograph of Earth taken
by the U.S. ats -­III satellite.

curated directory of product endorsements, pointing users to vendors

who could supply tools and materials for diy projects by mail order
alongside essays by Brand, Fuller, and others. As such, it was in some
ways a precursor to the crowd-­sourced reviews and linking practices
found some forty years later on the Internet.
For Brand, the color photograph captured the planet’s fragility. Earth
had finally appeared in the form that would earn it the nickname “the
Blue Marble,” as it was affectionately called in captions of similar pic-
tures taken from space. This photo, in Brand’s view, had the potential
to solicit an attitude of care and concern for Earth: to promote worldly
stewardship, environmentalist practices, investment in local planetary
resources and infrastructure, and harmony across differences that, from
an intraplanetary perspective, now seemed extraordinarily minor. It ex-
pressed not mankind’s jubilant conquest of outer space, nor a trium-
phant escape from Earth’s shackles, but rather the world’s smallness and
delicateness relative to the cosmos as a whole. In an interview Brand
described how the earth appeared to him in these images as a “little
blue, white, green, and brown jewel-­like icon amongst a quite featureless

4 ::: Introduction
 I.3. Cover of the Whole
Earth Catalog, Fall 1969.

black vacuum.” In Brand’s view, this image conveyed the precariousness

of the planet and its occupants. It looked like an island, with all the ac-
companying associations of desert island prudence. “Islands know about
limitations,” he remarked; nevertheless “people still think the earth is
flat. . . . They act as if its resources are infinite. But that photograph
showed otherwise. Unless and until we find other flourishing planets,
this is all we’ve got and we’ve got to make it work. There’s no backup.”7
The fall 1969 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog bears a similar “whole
earth” photograph on its cover (figure I.3). In this image the planet ap-
pears smaller and more marble-­like. The moon sits to its right, provid-
ing a reference point of size and distance. Whereas the 1968 cover’s com-
position and framing suggest a portrait—the world as a familiar face
in close-­up—the 1969 cover adopted a decidedly Archimedean point of
view. Here Earth and its companion satellite appear as lone figures in a
vast, inhospitable landscape. The picture offers an intriguingly contra-
dictory set of options for the viewer. On the one hand, if we identify
with the small world represented by the blue dot, the image might invite
the kind of caretaking attitude that Brand and his cohorts espoused. On

Introduction ::: 5
the other hand, if we identify with the eye of the camera and the per-
spectival point from which the image was taken, we find ourselves at a
great distance from the planet: exiled and painfully alone perhaps, or,
alternatively, larger than life, a deity who could crush the little planet
with just a thumb and forefinger.
The remote perspective is traditionally associated with a quasi-­
theological capacity to appraise, possess, and control. As Arendt writes
in The Human Condition, “The greater the distance between [man] and
his surroundings, world or earth, the more he will be able to survey
and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-­bound space be left to
him.” This perspective is also associated with disembodiment. The spa-
tial distance becomes a metaphor for disconnection and indifference.
The point of view in which the world appears as a distinct, independent
entity is like that of the mirror stage, insofar as this viewing position,
while joyful and satisfying to occupy, also entails an alienation or sepa-
ration. As Arendt puts it, the flight from the planet inserted “a decisive
distance between man and earth, alienating man from his immediate
earthly surroundings.”8
The space race has now come to an end, more or less, to the disap-
pointment of many youth of that era. But the longing to escape Earth
did not vanish when the race was over. It went elsewhere. It was chan-
neled into digital futures, dot-­com bubbles, and the information super-
highway, whose netscapes would be navigated, explored, safaried, and
homepaged not by astronauts but by new armchair Magellans who took
their legacy from Brand and his peers. Digital media universes seemed
to promise an alternate place of refuge from the weight and restrictions
of Earth-­bound existence. It was a virtual refuge, which would like-
wise require great feats of technical engineering, the assistance of the
military-­industrial complex, and the consumption of vast natural re-
sources, but it would put the dream of disincarnation vicariously within
reach of more than just the astronauts.

SILICON DREAMS

The term virtual reality first appeared in print in a 1987 issue of the
Whole Earth Review, a companion journal spun off from the Whole Earth
Catalog.9 It was the title of a short essay about utopian depictions of

6 ::: Introduction
technology in advertising imagery. The author was Yaakov Garb, a doc-
toral student in mathematics and science education at the University
of California at Berkeley. Garb was not writing about virtual reality in
the sense of an electronically simulated, computer-­based environment.
Rather he used the term to describe computer interfaces and end-­user
operating systems in general; he called them “masks” that layer on
top of hardware. “The source of much of the myth which [computers]
weave,” Garb wrote, “is achieved through multiple maskings, the cre-
ation of ‘virtual realities.’ One on top of another, levels of symbols are
built . . . each level further simplifying the material intricacies which
underlie and support it.” For Garb, “virtual reality” was the result of an
abstraction away from and occlusion of the machine’s complex material
hardware in favor of its friendly textual and skeuomorphic graphical
interfaces. The magazine advertisements added another layer to this
virtual reality, and they tapped into a set of fantasies that had begun
to crystallize around the image of the personal computer. Garb called
these fantasies “the dreams our culture has inscribed in silicon.” Above
all, and to Garb’s dismay, the dream involved “an uninhibited celebra-
tion of the separation and transcendence of mind over body.”10
Some of the images Garb analyzes in this essay feature gridded land-
scapes reminiscent of early Atari video games or the original Disney
version of the movie Tron (1982). The images are strikingly dystopic
by twenty-­first-­century standards: today technology industry adver-
tising tends to adopt a more pastoral, agrarian aesthetic, in which the
computer user has left the Kubrickian clean room and has gone to the
beach with her tablet computer, or perhaps she smiles amid a harvest of
fair-­trade, organic coffee beans. In the 1980s advertisements, though,
anonymous hands manipulate controls at personal computing base sta-
tions, giant heads generate reams of text and geometrical forms, and
investors use dial-­up modems to manage invisible soybean farms by re-
mote control (figure I.4). Garb’s commentary on them is prescient. He
quotes Descartes describing himself as a thinking entity “whose being
requires no place and depends on no material thing.” In answer to this
fantasy, Garb asks, “Who plants the soybeans, Gentleman Farmer? . . .
And where does the irrigation water come from?” He issued an early
reminder that someone, somewhere, is always “scurrying to support
our virtual reality. . . . Our machines are fed a tremendous amount of

Introduction ::: 7
 I.4. “The Power Is within
Your Reach.” Advertisement,
Timex Corporation, 1982.

Life so that they may whisk symbols around.” Among the things that
support this virtual reality, he listed “the labor of Taiwanese women in
microchip factories, the toxins flushed into our rivers, the dams, mines,
and factories,” all of which churn invisibly to power “our pristine alpha-­
numerics.”11
In the image of the computer user as a gigantic flying eye or head, we
are invited to assume the iconography and perspective of a deity. The
1960s-­era photographs of Earth seen from outer space split our con-
sciousness in two: we are this god-­like, extraterrestrial eye, but we are
also unimaginably small specks on the blue marble in the distance. In
the graphical images that Garb analyzes, though, there is no longer a
blue marble to identify with—and no stories or accompanying infor-
mation reminding us that there was once a photographic lens there or
an uninterrupted continuum of space between that place and the world
that we currently occupy. The Cartesian silicon dream would have it that
digital media, the Internet, and virtual worlds free us from the con-
straints of physical, sensory, and space-­bound reality. They allow us to
become someone else or to overcome geographical divides, all at seem-

8 ::: Introduction
ingly little cost to, and perhaps even to the benefit of, the environment,
worldly action and concerns, and the fabric of social relations.
This dream, as Garb and others have claimed, is a myth, similar
to those that have accrued to the purportedly uncharted frontiers of
earthly and outer space. Howard Rheingold, a former editor of the
Whole Earth Review and Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, says as much
with the title of his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier. The myth of digital media as immaterial, abstract,
and unworldly allows us to paper over the reality of embodied, lived ex-
perience (including experiences of gender, race, sexuality, disability, and
economic hardship), as well as the reality of Earth-­bound, time-­bound,
limit-­bound existence in general. The myth emerges in tandem with the
increasing association of knowledge with data and information and of
thinking with their processing. This association is in turn predicated on
the idea that computational, quantitative ways of thinking—ways of
thinking that can be expressed by a mathematical notation system and
rendered in what Alan Turing called “computable numbers”—are the
best or the only truly accurate ways of thinking.12

:: :: ::
These short parables about the Blue Marble and the silicon dreams that
followed, alternately cherished and critiqued by pioneers of the infor-
mation age, are here to set the stage for an inquiry into the relation-
ship between digital media and alienation from Earth-­bound and time-­
bound experience, perception, and thought. Like the early adopters of
computing technology, many of whom expressed skepticism about the
effects of widespread digitalization at the same time that they cele-
brated its potentials, in this book I approach digital culture in an extra-
moral sense, offering neither a purely utopian nor strictly dystopian
account of it. On the one hand, I elaborate a critique of digitality, spe-
cifically of the notion that everything can be rendered in numeric, en-
coded, and computable form; on the other, I claim that contemporary
artists and practitioners who use digital media have often rejected this
dream, in many cases actively subverting it, and that it is in no way en-
demic to the matter that supports these works’ continued existence.
My primary interlocutors for establishing the first point are the British
mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing and the French phi-

Introduction ::: 9
losopher Henri Bergson, best known for his theories of matter, percep-
tion, and duration and for his cryptic yet sustained elaboration of the
concept of the virtual. The digital media makers through whose work I
develop the second point are diverse in kind: they include Agnès Varda,
grande dame of the French New Wave, as well as lesser known figures
like the artist Erin Shirreff, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the
largely anonymous participants of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
These figures do not form a coherent set in terms of their geographical
origins or current whereabouts nor in terms of their modes of practice
or the extent to which they are expressly identified with computing,
new media art, or digital culture. What unites the practitioners in this
group is that they are denizens of the twenty-­first century who have all
attempted to grapple with the relationship between analog and digital
technology and who make works of digital media that cannot be under-
stood without recourse to earthly, time-­bound matter and concerns.
In addition to these figures who form the book’s substantive ar-
chive, there are a number of contemporary scholars whose work has
been inspirational for this study. N. Katherine Hayles established for
the emerging field of new media studies an idea similar to that of Garb’s
“silicon dream”: that “the great dream and promise of information is
that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the mortal
world” and “achieve effective immortality.”13 In Reading the Figural, or,
Philosophy after the New Media, D. N. Rodowick observed that the digi-
tal arts are “the most radical instance yet of an old Cartesian dream:
[that] the best representations are the most immaterial ones, because
they seem to free the mind from the body and the world of substance.”14
These scholars provided my initial access point to the notion of a digital
Cartesian dream, widespread as a symptom in popular media and cul-
ture, an idea that Rodowick also touches upon in The Virtual Life of Film.
In her book Carnal Thoughts, Vivian Sobchack cautions against digital
media’s promise to liberate its users from “the pull of what might be
termed moral and physical gravity”; she also describes how electronic
technologies invite the viewer into a “spatially decentered, weakly tem-
poralized and quasi-­disembodied (or diffusely embodied) state.” What
is lost, Sobchack asks, when digital media promise to liberate users
from the limitations of space and time, or indeed when spatiotempo-
ral finitude is understood as a form of imprisonment rather than as the

10 ::: Introduction
very precondition for perception, thought, and action? For Sobchack, as
for Arendt, the overcoming of gravity risks devaluing “grounded invest-
ment in the human body and enworlded action.”15
Some of the most relevant current scholarship on Bergson comes
from film theory and gender studies. Bliss Lim’s Translating Time:
Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique juxtaposes Bergson’s “cor-
rective theory of time” with postcolonial scholarship to argue that
Newtonian time, largely a Western construct, occludes the more deraci-
nated, plural, crisscrossing forms of temporality that are on display in
non-­Western science fiction and fantasy film. I join Lim in reading Berg-
son’s critique of the cinematograph not as a rejection of the medium as
such but as an arrow directed at schools of thought that “regard time as
a measurable quantity . . . the scientific and mathematical view of ho-
mogenous time . . . [from] the legacy of Newton’s clockwork universe.”16
In Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Elizabeth Grosz offers an ob-
servation that I take as another embarkation point for this study: that
the notion of the virtual, one of Bergson’s signature if slippery concepts,
is far richer and more complex than today’s vocabulary suggests: it “has
been with us a remarkably long time. It is a coherent and functional
idea already in Plato’s writings, where both Ideas and simulacra exist in
some state of virtuality.”17 Jean Baudrillard suggests something similar
when he complains that in its contemporary sense “the virtual stands
opposed to the real. . . . We no longer have the good old philosophical
sense of the term, where the virtual was what was destined to become
actual, or where a dialectic was established between the two.”18
Today the virtual has become practically synonymous with digital
and computer-­based technology and media. But this sense of the word,
as we see in Garb’s essay, emerged relatively late in the twentieth cen-
tury. The 1960 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus perhaps unwittingly captures
the good old philosophical dialectic that Baudrillard refers to, and his
plaint about its cleaving. In that volume the word virtual is indexed
under the entry for “Nonexistence,” along with the following synonyms:
“unreal, potential, unsubstantial, chimerical, fabulous, ideal.” But vir-
tual is also indexed under another heading, “Intrinsicality.” In this
competing entry, synonyms include “immanent, inherent, incarnate,
indwelling, indigenous, instinctive, natural.”19 These clashing entries
suggest that virtuality, at the dawn of the information era, was an an-

Introduction ::: 11
tilogy or a contranym: it simultaneously invoked existence and non-
existence, reality and unreality, fact and fable. Fifty years later, though,
the immanent, incarnate, and indwelling have been submerged in favor
of the ideal and the unsubstantial, which, in a Neo-­Platonic turn, have
likewise become synonyms for one another.
Meanings for the word virtual that have nothing to do with the simu-
lacral or immaterial first appear in the English language in 1398. The
word is descended from the medieval Latin virtuālis; its oldest defini-
tion is that which is “possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities;
effective in respect of inherent natural qualities or powers; capable of
exerting influence by means of such qualities.”20 This ancient virtuality
was not opposed to the actual. It was deeply rooted in the present world,
conducive to earthly actions and concerns, and infused with embodied,
sensorial, time-­bound experience. It has the whiff of what is conveyed
by the still extant expression “I am virtually there.” This phrase does not
mean “I’m not there” nor “I appear to be there by simulated proxy, but
in actuality I am somewhere else,” but rather “I am nearly there, almost
there, close enough to be practically indistinguishable from being there.”
Scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Lévy, Brian Massumi, Quentin
Meillassoux, and Rob Shields have worked closely with this more
grizzled sense of virtuality; their commentaries appear from time to
time throughout this book. In The Virtual, Shields critiques the notion
that the virtual is not “real” and outlines some of the dangers of the
fantasy of pure abstraction. Like Deleuze, Grosz, and others, he invokes
Proust, who wrote that memories are virtual in the sense that they
are “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”21 In this
Proustian formulation, the virtual is not a parallel, unreal world, sepa-
rated by a chasm from the present world, but an interstice that connects
the two and is the site of becoming or being-­in-­process. Lévy offers the
following related formula: “The virtual . . . has little relationship to that
which is false, illusory, or imaginary. [It] is by no means the opposite of
the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that
expands the process of creation.”22 Massumi defines the virtual as “that
which is maximally abstract yet real, whose reality is that of potential—
pure relationality, the interval of change, the in-­itself of transforma-
tion.”23 Hayles, in turn, calls for the recovery of “a sense of the virtual

12 ::: Introduction
that fully recognizes the importance of the embodied processes consti-
tuting the lifeworld of human beings.”24
These writers suggest that a virtual virtuality, more enabling and ca-
pacious than its successor, lies nascent within it, and that we might even
seek to recover it in works of digital media. This is in part the under-
taking of this book. The task does not require that we choose between
the two terms in Baudrillard’s dialectic, nor that we adopt the stance
of an analog, materialist purist to recover what is lost, nor even that
we privilege and isolate the sublimated moment of digital-­analog syn-
thesis. Rather it understands the virtual from another angle: as a new
reality on the cusp of existence that emerges in an interval of present
time that is rich with past and future images. The virtual, in this view,
is a potential treasure chest full of images that perform and elicit mem-
ory, intuition, and speculation, all while retaining an underlying conti-
nuity with what is here in the present moment. The figures in this book
deny the digital its divorce from the tangible and time-­bound, implicitly
critiquing the Cartesian dream of immateriality and countering tran-
scendence with immanence. At the same time they reveal other, more
genuinely progressive potentials that lie dormant in digital forms, in
large part by the way they work with time and change.

:: :: ::
The chapters that follow elaborate these ideas primarily through Berg-
son’s philosophical writings on time and the virtual, as they illuminate
and are illuminated by contemporary, time-­based works of art, film,
and video. However, chapter 1, “Keys to Turing,” provides a backstory to
this argument, dialing back the clock to the life and work of Alan Tur-
ing. Turing is perhaps best known for his World War II military intelli-
gence achievements at Bletchley Park in England, where he cracked the
infamous German Enigma cipher. As part of this work, he designed a
series of machines that served as prototypes for the modern computer.
Turing was also a brilliant mathematician who conducted pioneering re-
search in artificial intelligence. In the 1950s, though, he was arrested on
gross indecency charges and, as an alternative to prison, was subjected
to chemical castration treatments that may have driven him to suicide.
The cause of death was ingestion of a poisoned apple, a possible refer-

Introduction ::: 13
ence to Disney’s Snow White, which was Turing’s favorite film and one
from which he frequently quoted. According to an unproven rumor, the
Apple Computer logo pays tribute to Turing.
Turing’s life and work represent a queer drive in the development
of the computer. Proceeding through close analysis of Turing’s biogra-
phy, writings, and texts that inspired him, I argue that his sexuality—
or, more specifically, the way he endured the oppressive social burdens
of homosexuality in his time—was not incidental to his mental genius
and not simply a side note to his mathematical achievements. Rather
his deep immersion in logic and machines can be read as part of a search
for a transparent form of communication, one that would be free of
the enigmas and opacity of everyday human interaction. Computer lan-
guage offered a refuge, albeit one with its own limitations, from the
kinds of cryptic channels through which gay men in World War II–­era
England were obliged to interact with one another. The quest for this
refuge shaped and drove his research, until he reached a remarkable
turning point and came to define intelligence itself as the ability to
engage in casual, sociable, even illogical conversation: to simulate, in
other words, the analog aspects of face-­to-­face interaction.
In chapter 2, “Christian Marclay’s Two Clocks,” I elaborate definitions
of the analog, the digital, and the virtual in large part through Berg-
son’s collected writings. The chapter begins with a meditation on Berg-
son’s infamous critique of the cinematograph: his perplexing claim that
the cinema is not a genuinely time-­based medium and his use of it as
a metaphor for static, synchronic ways of seeing and thinking that fail
to apprehend life as movement and change. Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the
most well-­known heir to Bergson’s thought, found this claim so peculiar
that he devoted two whole books to its refutation—at least this would
be one way to understand the impetus behind Cinema 1: The Movement-­
Image and Cinema 2: The Time-­Image. By juxtaposing the cinematograph
with a suite of other metaphors found throughout Bergson’s writings,
I attempt to account for his rejection of the cinema in greater detail.
I sort through these new ways to understand the digital, the ana-
log, and the virtual through a work of visual art, Christian Marclay’s
The Clock (2010). This twenty-­four-­hour digital video is made entirely
out of sampled found footage of images of clocks large and small, and
it functions as an accurate timepiece. My reading of the video installa-

14 ::: Introduction
tion begins with a simple question: Is this a digital or an analog clock?
The attempt to answer it unsolders these two terms from their medium-­
specific connotations and reveals them to be less fully opposed to one
another than one might think.
Chapter 3, “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Agnès Varda’s Videos,” ex-
plores the connections between organic and inorganic matter and digi-
tal video aesthetics in Varda’s documentaries The Gleaners and I (2000)
and The Beaches of Agnès (2008), which use digital video as a way to de-
pict earthly, embodied, and, importantly, mortal concerns. These films
are expressly about aging, memory, and the urge to forestall as well as
the aspiration to let go of passing time. The Gleaners and I is a film about
salvaging and demonstrates a relatively early use of consumer-­grade
digital equipment to create cinema that is materialist, feminist, phe-
nomenological, and political. The Beaches of Agnès is a film about mem-
ory that, contrary to the digital dream of permanence, total recall, and
infinite storage, is underwritten by forgetting and displacement. Varda
imagines a form of virtual memory that is involuntary, indirect, and
noninstantaneous—a digital memory that is not modeled on the prin-
ciples of computer storage and the database. These late films of Varda’s
are exquisitely attuned to the new and progressive in equal measure
with decay and dissolution and to states of evolution and change that
are inseparable from the visible signs of entropy toward which her cam-
era often gravitates. My readings of the feature-­length films are sup-
plemented by observations about her video installation The Widows of
Noirmoutier (2006), a work that is in dialogue with both of these films.
Chapter 4, “Beyond Repetition: Victor Burgin’s Loops,” focuses on
two video installation pieces by the artist and writer Victor Burgin, The
Little House (2005), which explores Rudolph Schindler’s King’s Road
House in Los Angeles, and A Place to Read (2010), which includes a digi-
tal reconstruction of Sedad Hakkı Eldem’s Taslik Khave coffeehouse in
Istanbul. Both of these works are structured as loops. Taking inspira-
tion from this form, I identify and describe modes of repetition that do
not operate according to the logic of the death drive, of the Freudian
repetition compulsion, nor of eternal return without difference. Bur-
gin’s video loops repeat, but they do so in a Bergsonian way, as four-­
dimensional spirals or cones that activate connections across multiple
viewings, linking past images back to the present and vice versa, as well

Introduction ::: 15
as opening out toward the future. The repetitions are more properly
reprises, refrains, or rereadings, a distinction that I develop through
Deleuze as well as through Bergson’s writings on the phenomenon of
déjà vu. They repeat both in their looped structure in the gallery in-
stallation setting and in terms of the way they engage with the diverse
combinations of texts, histories, and visual materials that have inspired
them. These disparate points are connected not as a linear chronology,
nor simply by juxtaposing them in opposition to one another, but rather
through a slow, digitally crafted looping, panning, and scrolling move-
ment, a trope that cannot help but emphasize continuity over discon-
nection. In Deleuze’s beautiful phrase, Burgin’s videos supply “a story
[histoire] that no longer has a place . . . for places that no longer have a
history [histoire].”25 In A Place to Read, this place is a digital reconstruc-
tion of a destroyed Turkish coffeehouse, which Burgin created using 3-­d
modeling software.
Chapter 5, “The Powers of the Virtual,” takes up Deleuze’s concept
of the powers of the false, a notion that has, directly and indirectly, in-
spired a group of contemporary works of art, film, and video that fuse
fact and imagination as well as documentary and fictional modes of
storytelling. This power, I claim, is perhaps better understood as the
power of the virtual. In Cinema 2, Deleuze makes clear that the powers of
the false have less to do with the propagation of outright lies than with
the capacity to forge or fabricate: not necessarily with the aim of decep-
tion but in the more general sense of making or inventing something
new out of material that already exists. The four artists in this chapter
engage in a chiasmatic gesture: they virtualize analog media, reveal-
ing its hidden potentials, and they unvirtualize digital media, reinsert-
ing it into worldly settings and relationships. Each of the four works
I discuss remakes, reuses, or restages an “old,” analog form of media
in a new work that relies at least in part on digital technology. These
works are Eric Baudelaire’s The Makes (2009), a forged documentary
video about Michelangelo Antonioni’s supposed Japanese period; Ming
Wong’s Persona Performa (2011), a mixed-­media installation restaging
Ingmar Bergman’s film and relocating it to Queens, New York; Erin Shir-
reff’s Roden Crater (2009), a video about the astronomical earthwork
by James Turrell created from a single photo grabbed from an online
image search; and Matmos’s recombinant electronic music album For

16 ::: Introduction
Alan Turing (2006), made in part from sampled, digitized sounds of a
World War II–­era Enigma machine. These new creations are not simply
false copies of their analog source materials, nor do they aspire to re-
place or render them obsolete. Rather all four artists exercise the power
of invention to create a virtual Antonioni film, a virtual earthwork, and
so on, each of which is actual and substantive in its own right.
The book concludes with chapter 6, “Another World Is Virtual.” I
begin this chapter by invoking the familiar political slogan “Another
world is possible,” which expresses a thrilling sentiment. If we want to
be absolutely precise, though, the other world invoked by its incanta-
tion is not “possible”; it is virtual. The chapter begins with a discussion
of potentiality, juxtaposing Giorgio Agamben’s account thereof with
those of Bergson and Deleuze. Agamben’s primary interlocutor is Aris-
totle, whereas Bergson and Deleuze follow Spinoza. But they share a
philosophical goal, which is to separate the idea of the potential, which
is radically open-­ended, from the possible, which relates to a closed set
of options that can be calculated and assigned a probability. The possible
assumes that the future is already written, as a complete menu tree of
more and less likely options if not as an absolutely certain outcome. It
thus leaves no room for the exercise of radical free will or for the devel-
opment of something utterly new, unpredictable, and other. I put these
ideas into conversation with a final audio “medium” that is both old and
radically new: the people’s microphone, employed by the Occupy Wall
Street movement in the autumn and winter of 2011. The people’s micro-
phone, in my account, is a special kind of speech-­act, an actualization
of the principles of collective democratic process in viva voce. It is truly
potential, both a dramatization of political change and the means of its
enactment. It is also truly virtual, a medium that is no mere simulation
since it brings into being the change that it imagines.

Introduction ::: 17