Nomad Codes

systems, media art projects, hardware platforms, Web technologies, and loads of digital eye-candy. Add that to panel discussions on everything from artificial life to feminist critiques of the Cartesian coordinate system, and mere anarchy was loosed upon my mind.
    For a wide-angle cultural observer like myself, conferences like SIGGRAPH provide convenient one-stop shopping for signs of the zeitgeist. In my sensitized state of mind, SIGGRAPH’s frenetic hype, mind-bending machines and garish color schemes began to take on the apocalyptic momentum and incandescent hubris of the information age itself. It was as if my newly hatched subtle body was loosed in some bad electronic purgatory, cacophonous and claustrophobic.
    Like modern airport terminals or malls, the LA Convention Center is one of those abstract, weightless structures that belong in orbit. The poorly ventilated cavern serving as the main showroom floor was devoid of windows, because the game here—like the game at the Zen Mountain Monastery—was attention. Bruce Sterling said that attention is the money of the information age, the one genuinely scarce resource in the false infinity of the Internet. Both on and offline, the marketing engines of late capitalism have turned the capture of that attention into a science of psychological tease that rivals the fascist propagandists and religious mesmerists of earlier ages. Advertisements saturate the social field, as tag lines and slogans infect our speech and manufactured images organize our unconscious perceptions of the world.
    Hucksters and salesmen have been catching people’s eyes in the dusty din of the marketplace for millennia, of course. But at SIGGRAPH I began to feel like the machines themselves were attempting to lock onto my central nervous system and draw it in like a Star Wars tractor beam. And perhaps the best way for a machine to get your attention is to swallow your senses whole—in other words, virtual reality. Like the digital paint programs that specialize in simulating human flesh, virtual reality promises to translate our very bodies into the weightless condition of life inside the media. The old dream of angel flight, of rainbow bodies and astral doubles, has been electromagnified into the virtual avatar.
    The first VR machine I test-drove at SIGGRAPH was a simulated hang-glider flight that used a full-body sling to provide a sense of floating as you navigated the twists and turns of narrow red-rock canyon projected on the screen before your eyes. As with some other VR experiences that have quickened my blood, the hang glider triggered a bit of the quicksilver serenity I’ve felt in lucid dreams. It’s an odd and somewhat disturbing experience to have your most intimate forays into the otherworlds of the psyche recalled by an arcade game on a showroom floor, but there you have it. Moments like this have led me to take the connection between media technology and the archetypal imagination seriously. In this sense, SIGGRAPH was a savage temple of the electronic image, its booths and exhibits shrines for a cacophony of cults, whose terminal screens offer magical gateways into the surreal and tacky landscapes of the digital unconscious.
    “See the Unbelievable! Witness the Unthinkable in 3D!” the garish sign proclaimed. It was a Straylight “virtual theater,” and featured a dozen blank-faced folks reclining on chairs that occasionally shook, each person outfitted with a bulky head-mounted display that projected a computer-animated 3D video into their eyeballs. These folks looked like zombies in a liquid-crystal opium den, though I had to remind myself that, after all, I had just spent a week staring at a wall.
    The video that so absorbed their attention was an intense, hallucinogenic spin on one of the most potent and infectious mythologies of the modern West: the extraterrestrial encounter. The video’s creator was Steve Speer, a brash and innovative computer animator who mixes scatological satire with archetypal splendor—his “Carl Jung’s Dream” brilliantly fuses images of cathedrals and Norse gods with golden feces and giant worm-like penises. In this piece, a little kid gets sucked into an alternative dimension by a crew of diminutive, almond-eyed gray aliens.
    Strapping on a head-mounted display, I found myself somewhat underwhelmed with the ride, mostly because the point-of-view kept switching between first- and third-person perspectives—jarring cuts that ruined