{"id":5591,"title":"Presence of Future Presence of Video: Thing II","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/presence-future-presence-video-thing-ii","version":"0a06d5cdaa5f3b1bd767f02f5b3f1eb76fdc51a9d33009551b18a7cdda6b44e6","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4403423+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Alan Sondheim"}],"authorKeys":["Sondheim, Alan"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Art Vu","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"1994","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0834","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Presence of Future Presence of Video: Thing II.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/presence-future-presence-video-thing-ii.","publication":"Alan Sondheim. Presence of Future Presence of Video: Thing II. Art Vu. 1994.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5591.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0834","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":15512},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":319},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":810},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0834","generated":false,"characters":319}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"[For Leslie Thornton and Tom Zummer] The following essay is the result of two seminars at the New School for Social Research, and SVA in New York. A third source was a number of field trips to the American Southwest. In each of these situations, I worked with theory in relation to specific programming frames, suffering the dissolute edge of postmodernity. The reality of video is equivalent to the reality of everyday life; there is no difference between representation and the physical/material world. The natural is not subsumed beneath, beyond, or \u0022by\u0022 the simulacrum; the spectacle has become part of the natural. Any representation is political, of course, since control of representation requires capital and territorialization. Video is simultaneously a panopticon (singularity-eye observing everything through the lens of the absolute) and a membrane (eye-surface equivalent to every representation). A membrane observes itself; quick-time dampens infinite regress (as time speeds up, memory dissolves). History transforms into time-code which plays itself in two directions, at varying speeds, in fragments. [Time-code numerically labels individual video frames for post-production editing.] Video is becoming-digital [encoding the image in a binary format], thereby harboring eternity within, and absolving time completely of directionality. Digital video repeats itself endlessly, with explicit endless variations; digital video bypasses the \u0022truth\u0022 of the image, truth itself, by the particulation of every pixel. [The digital image can be copied, modified, and recopied without any loss of quality.] Truth resides only within the hardened structures of linear equations; digital video suppresses the chaotic domain (ranging from noise through fractal mathematics, perhaps including as well the work of Godel, Tarski, Skolen, Church, etc.), replacing it with binary neutrality. Conversely, information flows, becoming-chaotic; ultimately, paths through the video sememe [the \u0022videosphere\u0022 of programs, formats, and distribution networks] will be unrepeatable. No longer will flow be managed or manageable; the perception of the flood is the flood of perception. Information eddies around itself. \u0022Intelligence\u0022 - artificial or otherwise - plays no role in the midst of these circulations. Value is nonexistent. Inversely, the expanded redundancies of video representation (visual representation) become increasingly fragile; while energy levels for transmission/reception decrease, the overall energy and stabilizing structures of the planet decrease as well, in the face of overpopulation and planetary extinctions. The result is a precarious laminar topology [the \u0022video membrane\u0022] of information holding its own against global onslaught. Information/representation control replaces or exacerbates traditional warfare technologies. Video brings background to foreground, making them equivalent. The visual controls. The visual replaces other senses; aurality becomes a mode of association. Video membrane becomes a transposition of sexual experience, within or without the body. AIDS and video are both distancing functions; the body becomes nomadic, circulating around technological nodes. The concept of home slips from its moorings; stable geographic space becomes irrelevant. Postmodern geography develops within this domain of the nomadic, the marginal, and the impoverished, all beneath or within the membrane of telecommunications. Material/physical economies (housing, transportation, culture, vocation) transform from formal to informal; they become flows themselves, carrying bodies with them. Bodies are necessarily diseased. Human habitation (the lifeworld, habitus) becomes increasingly interstitial, liminal. It is not that the human is displaced, but that video occupies, as membrane, the human. The Enlightenment is literally illuminated by LEDs [light-emitting diodes]. It is not that the signifier has no referent; in fact, everything has become referent, and the signifier slips from its moorings as well. It is not that the phallus is everywhere and dominant, but that lack occurs as a potential (direct or indirect) address within a circuit. It is not that gender is irrelevant; gender becomes everything, just as numerous languages classify and subvert gender within nominal classifications. It is not that sexuality becomes plastic or manufactured, but that the video membrane become capable of excitation, arousal, and orgasm. \u0022Autopornography\u0022 - \u0022is everywhere. The increasing use of microelectronics in the home, replays of all sorts, registers of sexualities and chemistries beyond the limits of knowledge, transgressions and lines of flight inhabiting the body of dissolution, the universal computer or body transcendent, the pornographic emphasis on fragments and genitals - this is the refolding of flesh back into desire residing on the margins of every narrative, residing and breaking through. Philosophically, will and intentionality are replaced by pleasure and transparency; the autopornographers have left the seen...\u0022 [Cinematograph 3.] In 1988, autopornography defined the horizon of a body presenting for-others for-itself [autopornography - the introjected exhibitionist construct of sexuality, circulating among sublimating bodies intent on visual display through video.] In 1998, video circulates, replays itself; in 1998, video is literally pornographic, a membrane unfolding the interior. There is nothing \u0022beyond\u0022 cervical display (Annie Sprinkle), itself a form of screen. What are the symptoms of this bundle or thicket of transformations? Program content becomes an irruption, irritation of the skin; channels and programs proliferate and compete. Information exhaustion is replaced by individuated paths through the videosphere; audiences becomes subgroups united by video-activity. Technology miniaturizes, subsumes the body; video becomes flesh, located internally. Computer and video merge: Anything that can be well-defined can be represented. The mechanical is eliminated as prototype solid-state storage replaces magnetic media [videotape and disk require moving machinery including reading and writing heads]. Micro-narratives dominate, as video applies itself to re-enactments of crime and negligence. Legal and medical video become standard; televangelism merges with infomercial and political strategies. Information flows from everywhere. Fiber optics permit an enormous leap in channel carrying-capacity; channels generate information. Image-processing reaches from the stars (radio telescopy) to the atomic (tunnel microscopy). Side-scan radar images Venus and subterranean topography; Hubble stores Star-Wars. Satellites position every object on earth within centimeters. Artificial intelligence is buried in robotics, expert systems, microcomputers and emerging nanotechnology; intelligence becomes a bandwidth instead of dialog (Turing test). [Intelligence is \u0022smeared\u0022 across hardware and software, no longer (if ever) a measurable thing.] Sexualities flood; occupy fields, discursive formations; are everywhere interstitial, mesmeric. Autopornography merges with traditional pornography as home videos, fax, the telephone and Internet invert the body, turn interior towards eternal display. Every surface becomes subject to excitation; every surface arouses. Vision becomes desire becomes vision. You don\u0027t need to see to see. The physical body becomes prosthetic or nodal, within and without control central. It\u0027s chosen, makes choices. It displays itself within the habitus. It\u0027s both absolutely unavailable and available. Once on the horizon of the network television show, it now becomes absorbed in that horizon. The natural, nature exists, somewhat invaded, somewhat inert, measured and monitored from a distance, alien and alienated. The organization of the electromagnetic spectrum (radioteletype, radio, television, computer transmissions, whistlers), technological and political, becomes an integral part of every landscape. Management and the world collide only with scarcity; the \u0022rest of the world\u0027 (South and North) watches \u0022from a distance.\u0022 The real, reality remain/s philosophically problematic; however, representation now is integral to any description/explanation. The \u0022referent\u0022 of semiotics constructs itself upon both the \u0022signifier\u0022 and the \u0022significant\u0022; these merge. What is presented in video is consequential, has _real_ consequences; with the emergence of the video membrane, the message is the medium. Either everything is medium, or content constructs. Everything is equivalent; nothing is identical. Flows break and fragment at their nodal points (computer, television, telephone, face). Internally, every flow is equivalent to every other; there is no truth, no truth value there/here. Externally, flows are defined by null sets: 0 = {x: x not-equal x}. [Null sets are composed of those entities not equal to themselves.] What is equivalent within the channel dissolves upon exit. \u0022Exit\u0022 is not terminal (there are no terminal points), but impediments within networks. These impediments exist within chaotic domains; there is always an element of unpredictability at the interface. Further, action, human or otherwise, is not completely transformable into data; signifiers and referents leak. Leakages are everywhere; computers are vulnerable to viruses, telecommunications channels to interrupts, the electromagnetic spectrum to pirates, cellular telephony and shortwave to illegal monitoring, and space-time itself to bugging. Leakages also occur as content within programs, as sexualities within the \u0022clean and proper body,\u0022 as irritabilities. Leakage theory results, continuous and fluctuating forms of containment. Nothing holds for long. Nothing holds: Formats change constantly, from EIAJ video to 3/4\u0022 to VHS to Beta to 8mm to Hi8 to SVHS to D1 D2 D3 DV, MII and beyond. [From raw tape to cassette, from analog to digital, from tape to disk to solid state. Dreams of telepathy, telepresence.] As formats change, information is lost [old EIAJ tapes are relatively unplayable]; no matter, since representation itself flows and replaces. Death dies: \u0022Individuals\u0022 fade away, are dispersed, fade out in the midst of images. Individual voices, the \u0022voice of the poet,\u0022 become inaudible; authorship dissolves in committee or within the Internet - intellectual property becomes a losing and duplicated issue. New forms of discourse proliferate; anger flattens with the advent of automatic gain controls. On the other hand, perversions multiply; like truth, become equivalences; nothing is perverse (except perhaps the deliberate failure of a node, the result of everything from snuff films to cutting the power). And finally, everything games; business merges with militarism merges with the arcade; virtual reality, always on the horizon (or defining it), merges with sexual conquest merges with the news. The video eye becomes the video I, observing and playing. Not to play is not to participate; not to participate is to withdraw, lurk, become an empty set. The empty set remains within the grid ( /dev/null ); through geomatics and geographic information systems (GIS), everything remains. There\u0027s no longer an outside; everything\u0027s inside-outside in a permanent state of pornographic exhumation. None the less, the sheer inertia of the world remains a given; the vulnerability of electronic and optical representations (which form the central nervous system of everything under discussion) also increases exponentially. The emergence of the CIS out of the USSR is as much a destabilization as a problematic triumph; old ethnic hatreds and territorializations bring the world once again to the brink of mechanized warfare. Overpopulation and the proliferation of armament guarantee increasing conflict. While microchip/data storage costs drop, high-end electronics and formats such as high-definition television (HDTV) ensure that networking will always produce inequality. 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