CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Dirk de Bruyn, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia
Play it again, SAM.
The speed-up of images that the digital has delivered, as Mcluhan suggested, can be linked to increased spatial and social mobility, pattern recognition and also a pre-occupation with surface (Flusser) within the flux of everyday life. This situation has imposed sampling and collagic organisational strategies onto the flood of incoming sensory data. Inasmuch as this situation can be read and experienced as 'trauma inducing', recent neurological research into the functioning of memory systems during overwhelming (traumatic) experiences is useful.
Brewin (2001) has proposed two parallel memory systems. Verbally Accessible Memory (VAM) or explicit memory is characterised by instant verbal recall, linear and of low band-width (limited information flow) and involves the hippocampus in normal functioning. Situation Accessible Memory (SAM) is implicit, situationally triggered, information intensive, conveys no sense of time (is immersive) and is processed through the amygdala. During stress, the SAM system is dominant as the VAM system shuts down. The result is that there is no comprehensive 'story' of the event able to be constructed, only disparate impressions.
During an earlier period of technological change reading the moving landscape overwhelmed the early train traveller. 'The inability to acquire a mode of perception adequate to technological travel crossed all political, ideological and aesthetic lines.' (Schivelbusch, 1986: 58) New perceptual strategies had to be developed that contextualised the blur and the streak. 'To adapt to the conditions of rail travel, a process of decentralisation, or dispersal of attention, took place in reading as well as the traveller's perception of the landscape outside.' (Schivelbusch, 1986 :68-69)
This paper argues that, as another round of unprecedented technological change impacts on our senses, in which Flusser's 'technical images' (Flusser, 2000 [1983]) dominate, another 're-alignment' of the senses is required. It is suggested that, in the interactive dialogue between VAM and SAM processing, this re-alignment involves a greater emphasis on the SAM system.
Brewin, C. (2001) Memory processes in post-traumatic stress disorder. International Review of Psychiatry, 13, 159-163.
Flusser, V. (2000) Towards A Philosophy of Photography, London, Reaktion.
Schivelbusch, W. (1986) The Railway Journey : the industrialisation of time and space in the 19th century, New York, Berg.