The volume does much in the way of unhinging 'affect' as a technical term from whatever parlance bound baggage it might have: most of the volume's contributions, in spite of the authors' call toward higher consideration of the specificities of affects, are rather theoretical in scope, exploring definitions and boundaries of affect from a sociological perspective: essays such as Anna Gibbs' “After Affect. Sympathy, Sinchronicity and Mimetic Communication”, Patricia Clough's “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, or Lauren Berlant's “Cruel Optimism” establish firm ground with regards to its philosophical genealogy, its political belonging, and overall well define what competes to the 'affect rubric'. All these essays make occasional use of examples, yet only one section of the book, three chapters in all, specifically addresses affect as it interfaces with one specific, circumscribed context: specifically mental health services, office workplace and teaching in primary schools. The relative greater attention that the volume pays to the 'big picture' is not necessarily a mismanagement of focus, at all; yet, the more I dived through extensive swathes of Foucault, Spinoza and Deleuze, I felt more and more compelled to take up the challenge laid down by Nigel Thrift: the 'analysis of specific forms of affect as a means of investigating particular political-cum-cultural situations (p. 289).
The question was, hadn't I already touched upon affect in my doctoral research? If affect is, as Seigworth and Gregg suggest, a 'bloom space' of forces and relations that exist in the relationship between agents (2013, pp. 2 -5); and, as according to Thrift, increasingly technologically mediated and having to do with the relationship between animate and inanimate (2013), this was certainly the case.
Part of my doctoral research focused on a reconceptualisation of certain digital visual artefacts, which I termed, following the lead of Joohan Kim (2001), 'digital beings'. My underlying assumption was that even in a digital context the 'linguistic turn', marked by an assumption that the visual was a second hand copy of an already discounted item, as it functioned only as a 'window' into a discursive argument, gradually lost ground to the 'visual' or, rather', 'sensuous' turn: an increased attention toward aspects of the object that could not be reduced to discourse, but sat instead at the stage of the sensuous encounter with an object – which, consequently, gained a new significance as no longer merely a copy of an image to be semiotically read, but as an object of perceptive encounter in and for itself, a 'digital being'.
Then the question becomes, what are some specific examples of digital beings? what kind of encounter, metaphorical and literal, is actually possible between digital beings and human beings? In my dissertation work I chose to focus on what was, back then, the new thing in the displaying of art online: The Google Art Project. For the very few, probably none who have had no experience with Google's venture partnership with museums around the world, here is the quick and dirty summary: the Google Cultural Institute obtains from museums the rights to display on a proprietary platform 7.000 megapixel reproductions of choice artworks, usually well known pieces the public is well acquainted with. These digital reproduction can then be explored to a level of magnification previously unthinkable: each stroke of the brush can be seen in its full glory, often to the point where magnification makes the mimetic aspect of the artwork disappear from perception, turning masterpieces into swirls of colour (i.e. Seraut Grand Jatte). Barring some notable detractors, such as James Elkins, Google Art Project has received nearly universal acclaim as a novel, entertaining and meaningful way to explore significant works of art from all over the world.
What does Google Art Project have to do with affect? One aspect of Google's platform that I was very interested in was its user interface. In general, it is through the interface's level of interaction and manipulability that a digital item becomes a digital being proper: an 'ecosystem' (Manovich, 2013, p.331) is created through the different pieces and functions of the interface, and the ways in which they allow an ever-changing array of performances and relationships between human and non-human to form.
One first step is to identify some typologies of such performances and relationships, before we examine them qualitatively and observe them in their affective valence. One of the difficulties in describing a digital interface is the reality that, by the time you think you have described it, it likely will have undergone a new iteration. This is very much the case with Google Art Project (a case that forced me to write almost a whole dissertation chapter halfway through). Google Art Project's user interface and overall look is designed by Schematic, a WPP Digital company, and does not follow the predominantly white, stripped-down 'Google template' established by the company's search engine, mail service, or scholarly articles portal. Upon opening the front page http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/ in Google Chrome, we are presented with a gigapixel reproduction of a randomly chosen artwork, for example Carl Hofverberg's Trompe L'Oeil (1737).
Most of the screen around the reproduction is occupied by a patterned light grey field, which acts as a sort of virtual workspace. Two darker bands occupy the extreme top and bottom: the top band houses links and drop-down menus for navigating 'collections', 'artists', 'artworks' and 'user galleries'; a link to the 'street view' mode; the search engine and the login link. The bottom bar houses legal terms, language selection (18 languages available as of now), FAQs and a lighter grey 'Featured' tab, which slides down the main workspace to offer a selection of three featured artworks from the pool. In more recent updates, most likely in order to emphasise the expanding scope (geographically and culturally) of the project, another scrolling band partially superimposed to the image field has been added: it displays recent additions, a link to new collections available for exploration. While all images can be magnified to a certain degree, only select 'gigapixel' reproductions can be explored through Google Art Project's special magnifying interface, which has seen a degree of re-iteration over time
By dragging with the cursor, the gigapixel reproduction can be moved around the workspace, as well as beyond the frame of the browser's window. In a previous iteration of the platform, the gigapixel image could be explored through a sort of 'magnifying glass': by dragging this square section of the interface across the reproduction, as one would do with an actual magnifying glass, one can enlarge specific sections of the reproduction itself against the smaller whole. More recently, gigapixel reproductions can be explored by manipulating a thumbnail, superimposed to the workspace: in this case, the magnified section comes to occupy most of the workspace, while it is the thumbnail that remains static. This last interface iteration is, arguably, more in line with other well-established interfaces for the observation and manipulation of images in a digital environment as it recalls, for example, 'explore' tools used by many photomanipulation programs, a kind of convergence of the kind Manovich (2013) discussed perhaps.
What kind of sensuous encounter, what kind of interfacing and interacting does Google Art Project's gigapixel interface encourage? I am not solely talking about 'interaction' from the social point of view, as in the sharing of information among users of the platform; rather, I will focus on the qualitative moment of the singular encounter between the human and the nonhuman, as mediated by the interface's affordances. A very interesting aspect of both versions of Google Art Project's interface, and the first version in particular, is the relative shift away from traditional visuality, the disembodied and 'machinic' quality of vision (Johnston, 1999), through a peculiar and very sensuous interpenetration of touch, haptics and proprioception (with technological limitations, of course). Close inspection of the artwork to the level where gigapixel technology becomes relevant, which is to say the greatly magnified, renders necessary moving either a smaller version of the frame, or the frame itself through usage of a peripheral (a mouse, a keyboard) or touch itself (in the case of a tablet). Unlike a traditional (one could say, standard) museum experience where, aside from the quickly receding ambience, we 'look at' works of art with a gaze that is, essentially, disembodied; in the case of Google Art Project's gigapixel magnification the user is forced to act haptically on the image, which becomes an artefact of sensual interaction well beyond the distanced act of gazing: the user is encouraged, in fact required to manipulate haptically the technological surface that encapsulates the image which, in this context, through interface becomes an actor itself: it lets itself be negotiated by the user through the sensuous affordances of the interface.
Does this sensuous experience, however, imply the presence of affect? Overall I would argue so, and I think the missing link lies in the concept of 'public intimacy' laid out by Thrift (2013). Traditionally, going to privileged places for art viewing, including but not limited to museums and galleries, is an eminently public activity, in many cases a public performance: going on a tour of big museum names is historically an ostentation of wordliness, and rarely if ever one gets to see art one on one – artworks are hung on the pretence that they are, barring few exceptions, for everyone to see. While the images provided on Google Art Project are also, essentially, 'hung' in the sense that they are available to everyone with an internet connection, intuitively the experience one goes through is marked by privacy over publicness: we experience the artwork one-on-one, with the added problem that what we are looking at is, in the end, merely a copy. What we are looking at is not 'the real thing', which is eminently public and cannot be experienced on an intimate level (art inspired solipsist raptures aside): this private viewing seems, therefore, to be on a different and lower level than the publicly acknowledged act of looking at art in a physically public context.
This equation is put in need of re-evaluation, on a double level, once platforms such as Google Art Project come into play. First of all, much like Pinterest or, in some instances, Flickr, Google Art Project's social media apparatus makes the act of privately viewing art on a screen public in a very Web 2.0 sense: users can tag, create and share collections for others to see. In this first case there is a shift from intimacy to the public, but it seems to me that the latter supersedes the former, rather than integrate and enhance it; and, while performativity and sociality play a part, affect is not what this kind of public intimacy is ultimately about.
A more interesting way of understanding Thrift's public intimacy in the context of Google Art Project is by taking into question the kind of relationship that, as the mutual agents user / digital being meet, is formed by and informs a sort of prototypically formless, diffused affectivity that is, most of all, sensuous flow and aesthetic engagement as mediated by interfaces. Within this relationship between human and non-human, affect comes to the fore where the public object, displayed for all to see yet distant from everyone involved, comes 'closer' to the user, through magnification of an imaginable order, and turns intimate in a way art has - for many - never been. Exploring a gigapixel work on Google Art Project offers a radically flow inducing, 'hands-on' tactile and proprioceptical experience that, while materially different from the real artwork (but then again, how many get the chance to touch a statue in a museum?), philosophically offers an affective flow, engagement and overall aesthetic experience (in the broadest sense of the word) that simply cannot be conveyed if we erroneously assume that all the user does is looking at magnified art on a screen.
This affect-laden, intimate relationship with art has many implication of a cultural, social, economic and political nature. First of all, in spite of the ever raging debate about what online display might mean for museum attendance figures (comments to Proctor, 2011), it seems likely that Google Art Project and similar would rather enhance the user's interest in art and artworks: the intangible, diffused affective flow created between human and nonhuman through the digital interface reinforces, in the end, the status of the artwork, the copy and its once removed original, as iconic and auratic products of genius worthy of being digitally repurposed and reproposed, over and over. The distance between us and the artwork closes in, and we come to love them anew.
Another problem then emerges: even if we establish these digital reproductions as 'digital beings' which are not merely machinically gazed copies, but objects of a measure of bodily affect, how do we relate their intrinsic 'value' compared to the physical artwork? Do they have a life of their own, or they function as valuable reminders of what we could be seeing instead, in a museum? After all, even a copy of a painting that we hang on a wall and brings us joy is, in the end, indexical to the 'real thing'. This problem is not easily resolved, as it verges on the assumption that the affect generated by a copy possesses a philosophically intrinsic value that stands even when examined aside from the digital being's referentiality. Surely an aspect that needs to be explored more thoroughl
Another interesting facet of bringing affect into the Google Art Project equation is the sociological one, with all of its political implications – after all, according to Thrift (2013), affect in the contemporary context is a strong motivator toward consumption of the material and the symbolic kind, the latter applying very well to the kinds of affect that projects such as Google's leverage. The topic would (and will) merit its own post, however we could introduce the issue by observing how well the philosophy behind Google Art Project fits the Web 2.0 paradigm that Google itself is, in a measure, predicated upon: the participatory paradigm (Simon 2010) – or, in a less politically innocent manner, the 'prosumer' ideology (Toffler, 1980). While Google Art Project might seem, at first, a quintessential 'top to bottom' Web 1.0 project, where packaged content is delivered as-is from big names onto consumers, reality is more nuanced. On one level there are obvious markers: users can pin and share collections through the platform, generating therefore a participatory pseudo-community similar to those on Pinterest and other 'curatorial' social media. Also, more subtly, the publicly intimate affect that the user comes to feel with the once distant work of art introduces a culturally participatory element, albeit a potential and somewhat passive one: best case scenario is that the user comes to feel a new investment into a widely shared global culture, creating new potential networks of appreciation and de facto 'participating' into culture.
Accepting this point depends, of course, on what we qualify as participation, and remains open to arguments of Google Art Project as an avenue for reeling in approval and visitors into participating museums, and social legitimacy into Google the company. There is no doubt that the affectivity generated toward a certain cultural and social canon of what constitutes great art and, consequently, great culture offers all kinds of legitimising power to institutions that, in the end, are in it for the money and for the glory. In a future post I will look closer at the economical and political implications of Google Art Project's affective flow, within the contest of contemporary capital's symbolic production.
Elkins, James. “Is Google bringin us too close to art?” DailyDot (2011).
Google Art Project http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project?hl=it
Google Cultural Institute https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?hl=it
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The affect theory reader. Duke University Press, 2010.
Johnston, John. "Machinic vision." Critical Inquiry (1999): 27-48.
Kim, Joohan. "Phenomenology of digital-being." Human Studies 24.1-2 (2001): 87-111.
Manovich, Lev. Software takes command. Vol. 5. A&C Black, 2013.
Proctor, Nancy. “Google Art Project: a new generation of museums on the web”. Curator Journal (2011).
Simon, Nina. The participatory museum. Museum 2.0, 2010.
Toffler, Alvin. The third wave. New York: Bantam books, 1981.
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