<nettime> Telepresence, invocation and evocation

[Chris Chesher <c.chesher@unsw.edu.au>]

Here is a short article I've just finished for an Austrian magazine called
.copy (http://dotcopy.jet2web.com). They asked me to write something on
telepresence. In this piece I continue to explore the concept of
invocational media.

Chris



TELEPRESENCE: INVOCATION AND EVOCATION

Chris Chesher September 2001.
mailto:c.chesher@unsw.edu.au

Article written for .copy magazine (http://dotcopy.jet2web.com).

(6500 characters including spaces)

[An appropriate illustration should accompany this story, so that the
opening paragraph will make more sense]



The situation could belong to any time during the past four hundred years.
People gather in a specially prepared room. They sit in quiet reverence,
listening for distant voices. They occasionally mutter ritualistic
incantations. A convenor manipulates some mysterious controls. Everyone
gazes up at a flickering image, their senses open to the uncanny experience
of telepresence, presence-at-a-distance. And it works! They all sense the
closeness of something, or someone, who should not reasonably be there at
all.

This scene played out in the 18th century when illusionist and physicist
Etienne-Gaspard Robertson scandalised Paris by calling up Œphantasmagoria¹.
With an intricate gas lit lens system called the Œmagic lantern¹, he
projected an image of the King of France. After this scandalous invocation
of the Royal visage, he had to flee to Bordeaux.

In the 19th century people gathered in the same way, during a craze for
séances. A worldwide industry emerged for communicating with dead and
distant presences. Spiritualists (supposedly) communicated with the nether
world by knocking on tables, whispering through Œspirit trumpets¹ or
double-exposing spirit photographs to create apparitions.

The situation recurs again today around the world in the technocultural form
of the video teleconference. Teleconference systems work with an illusionism
that can be traced historically to Robertson¹s projection systems. They also
communicate instantly across a distance ‹ a power pioneered by telegraphy, a
development strongly associated with Spiritualism¹s emergence.

Today¹s video telepresence systems are expensive and complex, requiring
dedicated floor space, high capacity telecommunications lines and
specialised hardware. This expense is justified by an almost mystical belief
in the power of presence. Important business meetings are held using video
conferencing in the faith that decisions made in the virtual presence of all
interested people will be better.

All these media forms (phantasmagoria, seances, teleconferences) can be
considered as sophisticated technologies of telepresence. Telepresence
actually involves two related, but distinct processes, evident in the term
itself. The prefix Œtele-¹ denotes the first move - bringing distant things
closer. The suffix adds the second element,  Œpresence¹, reconstituting the
distant phenomenon in a new location.

The first of the events, the Œtele-¹ is an invocation. It makes a call that
brings something in from outside. The second, Œpresence¹, is an evocation -
giving the thing a recognisable form within a new space. All media work with
one technique for invoking, and another for evoking.

You can even consider novels or TV shows as creating telepresence effects.
Readers invoke a book by visiting a library or a bookshop, or pulling it
from the shelf at home. The evocative process for a novel is activated when
the reader starts to read the words on the first page. The work is
considered Œgreat¹ if reading it evokes recognition, memories and emotions
in a large number of readers.

Viewers invoke a television program by using a remote control, and possibly
adjusting the aerial. A television program evokes through the images and
sounds it offers to viewers.

Modern media have produced a multitude of non-human (or part-human) ways to
invoke and evoke. Media technologies such as photography, sound recording
and cinema have capacities to invoke and evoke a sense of presence-past.
They allow audiences to call in phenomena that evoke a sense of connection
with the past (including actors who have since passed away). Telegraphy,
telephony and broadcast media call in things from far away. They create a
sense of presence-distant. For example, many people have experienced the
emotional power of an unexpected long distance phone call.

The Spiritualists¹ observations about how weird it is to hear images and
voices of the dead and the distant were wrong only because they interpreted
these things as Œsupernatural¹. All modern media forms were at first
generally received as something quite disturbing, if not metaphysical. Over
time and familiarity, though, this strangeness tends to disappear into the
background of daily experience.

However, some recent technologies remain unfamiliar enough that users still
notice the uncanny (unheimlich) relationships they mediate. Video
teleconferences are still largely unfamiliar, and highly ritualistic.
Participants sit quietly until it is their turn to speak, and then carefully
introduce themselves to the camera. The space of the room is structured
around what the camera makes visible. Conversations are jerky, because of
signal delays. Most of all, though, there is something quite strange about
seeing and talking with people who aren¹t really there.

In spite of technical advances making telepresence systems more reliable
than seances, less has changed than many assume. The Spiritualist image of a
world alive with invisible spirits has been translated into the engineering
diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum. The technologies have higher
resolution, and it is now much easier to call things up. The level of overt
mystery and fraud involved with these shows is (hopefully) less prevalent.
However, the uncanny sense of presence-at-a-distance remains hard to
explain, even for more familiar technologies.

What has changed with computer-based media forms, including advanced
teleconferencing, robotic telepresence, and virtual reality games, is a
tighter integration between invocational and evocational components. The
methods that address things and call them in from out of view (the
invocations), and those that give them form (the evocations), have
converged. Networked computers combine any number of network inputs to
generate all manner of images, texts and sounds. They control remote
cameras, generate real-time graphics, synthesize machinic voices. The same
devices combine presence-past (databases) with presence-distant (networks)
to produce accelerated and seamless invoked environments. There is no limit
to what they might invoke and evoke.

But what is most unsettling about experiencing new systems of telepresence,
at least until they are rendered natural by familiarity, is how they call
into question our assumptions about supposedly natural, unmediated presence.
Telepresence draws attention to the artificiality of any sense of presence,
even so called Œdirect¹ experience. Not only is there no supernatural world.
There is no natural world, either.








-- -
Chris Chesher                            Work phone 61 2 9385 6814
Lecturer                                 Messages:  61 2 9385 6811
School of Media and Communications       Fax:       61 2 9385 6812
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of New South Wales            Email: c.chesher@unsw.edu.au
UNSW Sydney 2052                         http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/

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