BEN REVI asks why we continue to be obsessed with real things in the age of digital
Art by GARY SEAMAN

It’s a little vulgar, but would you let me open with a quote? Marx and Engels – I know, but go with me here – once wrote that all this buying and selling in our world would bring about a time where “all that is solid melts into air.” They weren’t exactly prophetic. Our solid goods haven’t exactly disappeared into the ether. But then, the objects in our lives are no longer always solid. Many of our possessions come to us in bytes, in words and images presented on screens, delivered through networks of cables and satellites.

Sure, our radical friends were actually describing the meaninglessness of commodification; in their view, once we attach value to an object based only on supply and demand, we alienate ourselves from any deeper meaning. But that’s also not always true either. Our lives are constantly enriched by the things around us, even if such things are bought at a price which matches our desire. But in the digital world, such things lose their physicality. How can we value things that, well, aren’t really things? What meaning can we ascribe to items that we can’t see, feel, taste or smell?

The Internet has changed the way we see ourselves, our world, and our communities. Previously uncontroversial ideas – like, say, ‘friends’ – now mean anything and nothing all at once. Jean Baudrillard, the lunatic French theorist who inspired The Matrix, once warned that “it is possible that the machine can metabolise the mind.” In other words, we may lose our sense of ourselves; we may be able to do anything except by the rules and language of the machines we’re using, and being used by. He might have had a point. We’re now being fed entire books, albums, films and more, without moving a muscle. Content has been decoupled from form; books are no longer rectangular things filled with pages, and albums no longer have covers, so nothing can be placed inside. Many newspapers no longer appear on paper. (Many don’t carry much news.) This is the kind of world Baudrillard would have laughed at – the simulation takes over from the real, and we no longer enjoy an existence outside of a controlled, computerised world.

What does this mean for art? Art is a commodity like any other, but it is a commodity to which we attach special meaning. At its best, art describes and defines us, and serves as a means of communication and enlightenment. We share art, and though we buy and sell it, we can never own it. This makes art more susceptible to this sweeping technological change. It’s hard to share a refrigerator. It’s significantly less hard to share a song, a story, or a photograph.

Sharing is the foremost motivation of most artists, and the Internet allows for sharing in vastly different ways. No more, the ancient practice of swapping books and CDs. The overflowing bookshelf, the pile of old records on the floor, all gone. We can carry every meaningful thing we have in our front-left pocket. But without being able to touch, to hold, to give, to softly caress these things, can we love them the same way?

Maybe we can’t; maybe we don’t have to. An equal and opposite reaction is taking place against the digitisation of our entire lives. Analogue is fighting back. The compact disc is dying, but vinyl is resurgent; your uncle’s old auto-focus film camera may be out, but Holgas and Polaroids are in. Ordinary glossy magazines are being stripped from the shelves, but new print media, from hand-written zines to big beautiful one-sheets are popping up everywhere. Such things are being sold in real outlets in physical locations – Melbourne’s Sticky Institute, Adelaide’s Format Zine Shop and Newcastle’s Bird In The Hand are only a few of the new small-scale retail spaces popping up across Australia.

But what is this, really? Is it a last ditch attempt by Luddites to destroy the Internet? Even worse, it just another way for so-called hipsters to assert their apparent superiority over the digital drones of the hated mainstream? Is it a human desire to attach ourselves to some forgotten cultural ideal, an inauthentic quest for identity that existentialist icon Jean-Paul Sartre would have called ‘mauvaise foi’ (bad faith)? Or are we all still just excited by retro - an excitement which Baudrillard claimed attempts “to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake”?

Chapter Music is a long-running independent record label based in Melbourne; its owner, Guy Blackman, is a singer-songwriter of great repute. Chapter started releasing cassettes in the early 1990s, but now runs a digital store, while at the same time releasing some of its most popular bands, such as twee-pop heroes Crayon Fields, on twelve-inch discs. Blackman seems excited by both formats.

“I was excited when I got my international digital distro sorted out through IODA (Independent Online Distribution Alliance), ‘cause I didn’t want Chapter Music to get left behind. It’s basically free money in a way, too, compared to the logistics of selling physical releases. And it’s nice [that] when a physical format sells out, like a vinyl single or EP, that it can stay in print online. I like the idea that everything record ever released in the whole world will one day be available online again. I think that’s a good thing.”

Another Melbourne label, Low Transit Industries, has been leading the push to online distribution, releasing several albums (such as Aviator Lane’s brilliant Common Distance) as download-only. LTI’s Darren Smallman is pleased that lower costs means more records can be released, but acknowledges that the system isn’t perfect.

“Digital distribution of intellectual property is amazing as far as making a lot of content available to fans at a cheaper price for them and us to manufacture; but financially it doesn’t add up compared to a physical product, so we all make less money for the same if not more work. It has also expanded the market to a point where there is so much content it can be difficult to find what you want.”

This is an important point. Just because more content is available, doesn’t mean this content is any good. Ander Monson, editor of online journal DIAGRAM, doesn’t see this as a problem. “It’s certainly made for a lot more work being offered. But there’s still the need for quality work, and some service to cull the stuff that’s deemed important from the stuff that’s deemed not. So there are still gatekeepers, as there always were. I am a proponent of more and more muchness. I’d rather have more voices than fewer, even if, as always, most of them are crap.”

Smallman raises points about the technical quality of online distribution. “I understand the issue a lot of artists have with the quality of digital content – MP3 compression, lack of a paper part in printed art, and packing – but we have to adapt regardless. It’s the same argument that happened in the analogue to digital change over and one I’m sure will continue throughout the evolution of art.”

Then again, there’s the vinyl resurgence. Isn’t this the ultimate case of retro-loving hipsters adopting anachronistic technology to make themselves feel special?

“I think a lot of people who once bought CDs now feel like they’re just pieces of plastic trash, and vinyl differentiates itself from digital more,” argues Chapter’s Blackman; and DIAGRAM editor Monson is one of those people. “There was never anything all that special about the CD, let’s admit,” claims Monson. “At least with vinyl there was a real sex appeal.”

Monson should know about the sex appeal of the physical product. The DIAGRAM is an American online journal publishing works of experimental writing; recently, the DIAGRAM has been publishing compendia of its online catalogue, in stunning books littered with amazing illustrations.

“As a writer of books (in addition to being a writer of digital texts), I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about the book as an artefact. If writers expect to have books published, we should be writing work that considers the form (the book, the artefact) and can be only – or best – published as a physical object. We should think of the weight of pages, the effect of margins, of our sentences set in type and physically printed.

“The cost of printing books has come down with digital printing and print on demand, so that books are becoming more viable as a form in some ways, just not the blockbuster big-label way.”

Monson does not believe, however, that all physical content will survive. “Only the most prestigious publications will continue doing print, or the most physical-obsessive (McSweeney’s, for instance),” he claims. “But the cost of the midrange litmags supported by universities will become prohibitive so those are sure to mostly move online.”

This brings us to On Dit, the student magazine of the University of Adelaide. In 2010, new editors Connor O’Brien, Myriam Robin and Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo are not only moving the magazine online for the very first time; they’re also completely redesigning the print editions, away from the scrapbook aesthetic of previous years and into a cleaner, sparser, more polished layout.

O’Brien is taking charge of the redesign, both of the print and online versions. “I think we have a way to go before people work out how to display online content beautifully, and I think the technology isn’t quite there (most computer screens are ridiculously low resolution compared to print). That’s why On Dit isn’t online-only yet, and probably won’t be for a little while. But at the point in which the online version of On Dit becomes more attractive to readers than the print version, and that point will come, there’ll be no good reason to hold on to print. I’m just going to say this again, though: we’re a little while off that!”

So there is something to be said for ‘real’. This is why, even with the ease and cheapness of digital, the humble Polaroid, that washed-out bastion of analogue photography, just does not die. Two years ago, the Polaroid company declared that it would cease production of Polaroid film. So a bunch of crazy people took over a Polaroid factory in the Dutch town of Enschende, called themselves The Impossible Project, and set about reverse-engineering a film which, although not actually the original patented product, will still work in old Polaroid cameras. The result will be ready by the time this article goes to print.

“I’m sorry but I have to keep you in suspense,” teases technician Florian Kaps. “The only thing I can say is that our new film will have a new, very unique character as it will be a complete new film that we developed from the scratch, combined with the iconic characteristics of the traditional Polaroid film (like frame, format, smell). Our first film will be a monochrome film, more flavours are to follow.”

The reasons Kaps gives for the survival of Polaroid seem eerily similar to those advanced for the vinyl record, the zine, and just about any hand-made thing you could find. “People are bored by the ever perfect, flawless, intangible, valueless and manipulated masses of digital images that we are surrounded with,” Kaps explains. “Analogue instant photography serves them with everything they are missing - unique characteristics, unpredictability, sensuality, no reproducibility and therefore significance, creativity and much more.”

That answer seems well-rehearsed, but perfect. Digital makes everything too easy. We know when the machines begin to ‘metabolise’. Our brains are wired to understand reality; the closer virtual reality gets, the better we are able to distinguish it from genuine reality, and the less authentic the virtual experience seems. That’s why Disney cartoons seem more authentic than computer generated films – Disney animations are genuinely artistically beautiful, whereas ‘hyper-real’ cinema still fails at being real. So a vinyl record, with its warps and scratches, has its own beauty, while a pristine digital recording can never quite match a live performance. A Polaroid photo never has to compete with the beauty of a real sunset, and so can just be a Polaroid, with all its flawed brilliance. Sartre may have called these artforms êtres en soi – beings in themselves. They let us experience the real, they let us know that life and death are at stake. The digital universe can load you with content - with words, with songs, with images - but it can’t quite give you real feeling. At least, not yet.