2016 in review

Jerusalem: Already Told

 

Lenham Quarry, documentation from Cara Tolmie, Pit, 2012. Image courtesy the artist and Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Chapter I, August 2012

A journey is in the telling. From the waves of crusaders to Palestine to the treks up to the healing hilltop town of Lourdes, the long history of religious pilgrimages was created, and perpetuated, by the tales of exotic lands and miracles told by those who returned. The waning of religious paradigms and waxing of scientific views hasn’t quite precipitated the same votive rituals; we don’t, as yet, have a steady stream of devoted followers, wearing white lab coats and lighting their way with small LED lights, gathering at Cern once a year to celebrate the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. But a quick thematic survey of the desires and journeys represented in cultural texts, scanning our narratives for equivalent tales of transformation and affirmation, shows we might not be mistaken to think that the contemporary pilgrimage is that of the journey back in time. We’re more than familiar with Back to the Future’s flux capacitor, the impossibilities of La Jetée, the time paradoxes presented by films like Source Code or Looper. The 2006 Tony Scott-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced and Denzel Washington-led film Déjà Vu tries to play it with a CSI realism: FBI operatives have found a way to look back exactly three and a half days in to the past, via a television-like viewfinder that happens to work a lot like satellite surveillance. “Basically,” one of the technicians casually explains, “we’re folding space in a higher dimension to create an instantaneous link between two distant points [in time].” They know what’s going to happen—the past (in this case, an explosion on a New Orleans ferry) is a fait accompli—but they are using the window to locate the perpetrator. The pilgrimage itself is, in this case, a journey into the seen but not known, the fact of the already-occurred made re-familiar from a new perspective.

Improve Your Algorithm

Claiming the Technological Landscape

 

In 1999, science-fiction novelist William Gibson told an anecdote on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs about how he came up with the notion of ‘cyberspace’ for several short stories and his novel Neuromancer, 1984. Although he didn’t invent the term, his imagination helped to popularise its use and prefigured the implications of social interaction in the nascent world wide web: ‘With cyberspace, I found the first Sony Walkman – which is still my favourite piece of late-20th-century technology – and for the first time in my life I was able to take the music I wanted to listen to into any environment. And while moving through space with it, I saw a poster in a shop window for the first Apple IIc, which immediately preceded the first Mac, and I looked at that and I thought, “What if the relationship to the information that this machine processes could be like the relationship I’m having to my music that my Walkman processes?”’ Somehow I could see that this stuff was going to get under our skin; the Walkman is very very physically intimate technology and computing, as it was then, wasn’t very physically intimate – but I thought, “Why not?”’