It's practically a given that the pleasure of film resides in its
fictive trance. Moviegoers earn their willing suspension of disbelief in
an endless Pavlovian reward system of psychological closure in the face
of the most shameless illusion. If the grime of a seedy back alley can't
be conveyed by smell, it's grease stained contours are shrouded in dim
lighting. If the dim lighting fails to convey a sense of urban bustle, a
soundtrack of chaotic car alarms and sirens rings out in the night. If
the confusion of alarms is not enough to express the alienation of life
in the ghetto, a slow pan of a homeless man reclining next to a dumpster
is expected to trigger our unease. If we are still not complicit in the
illusion, that alienation is further expressed as the protagonist takes
refuge in a bottle of wine–and if we can't directly experience the
euphoria of that moment as the taste metaphorically crosses our lips, we
are sure to witness the staggering aftermath in a series of jump cuts,
flash backs, or voice overs. That is, in film, the real is never
apprehended in a replete and continuous way so much as approximated
through a juggling of sensations. Yet despite this all too obvious
simulation of reality we keep coming back–lifted along that bouyant
narrative track to an end we always know is coming. So embedded in our
psyche is the narrative impulse and our need for some definitive
conclusion that we willingly sublimate our experience of doubt and
uncertainty all for a relatively guilt free 90 minute climax.

Telepresence, as a field of artistic and philosophical inquiry, stands
at the opposite end of this spectrum. As new technologies such as the
telescope, the telephone, and more specifically, the internet are used
to transmit information, collapsing distances in the blink of an eye, we
become increasingly vulnerable to error, deception, and forgery, raising
the specter of doubt. We've all used remote technologies on a daily
basis to open our garage doors, turn off our car alarms, or switch
channels on our televisions–these simple, binary commands registering
their efficacy immediately. But how do we know that the images beamed
back to us from Mars by Sojourner's telerobotic cameras are not highly
sophisticated computer simulations used to galvanize public support (and
government spending) for the space program? Or even that the
cybercontract we "sign" on Amazon.com is actually subtracting credit
from our visa cards. We trust the government not to deceive us with
propagandistic footage, and our uncertainty is allayed when the book
arrives at our doorstep three days later, but what of the countless
other transactions on the internet that seem ripe for hoaxes and
swindles?

Albert Borgman has remarked that trust is transitive. "Hence, I first
learned to trust those institutions that are trusted by people I trust.
Thus, I have learned by and large to trust the New York Times, and when
the Times established a website, it inherited the good name of its paper
parent. In many places the ramified tree of trust that is rooted in
nearness reticulates in mutually reinforcing connections, some of them
far distant from their grounding." Near and far, trust and doubt-this is
the province of telepresence, especially when these issues are examined
in relation to the decentralized and anonymous structure of the
internet-a structure that lacks accountability and policing mechanisms.

For instance, the operation via computer of a telerobotic arm in
endoscopic surgery, introduces the potential of remote agency-of
actually manipulating things physically and watching the results,
raising issues of access, authority, and responsibility for the person
typing in those commands. "As the telescope and microscope raised
epistemological questions that inspired Descartes' method of doubt, web
cameras and telerobotic systems on the Internet suggest new
epistemological terrain," writes Ken Goldberg, editor of the forthcoming
MIT Press book on telerobotic theory, "The Robot in the Garden."

Goldberg and Bob Farzin have collaborated on "Dislocation of Intimacy"
(www.dislocation.net) a net-based, telerobotic camera obscura housed
within a minimalist cube. The cube is a sealed, lightproof steel box
treated with black powder coating. Like a vestigial tail, a black
umbilical cord snakes out from the back and plugs into a socket in the
wall. Periodically, the box "breathes" (two fans are activated inside,
causing an audible ventilation that persists for about 2 seconds). Much
like Charles Ray's "Inkbox," where the illusion of the cube's perfect
sides is belied by a container filled completely to the lip with ink, a
double-take drawing us into the piece, "Dislocation" through its odd
mechanics, announces immediately that it won't be dealing with notions
of optical gestalt, but more complex relationships that unfold over
distance and time.

Visitors to the gallery carry home a printed web address, and at their
leisure can access the site. Once there, you are encouraged to
manipulate six buttons, which telerobotically activate a series of
halogen lights and a digital camera which delivers a "snapshot" of a
shadow back to your screen-each time a visitor somewhere in the world
accesses the site online, cooling fans are activated for about 2
seconds. Light reflected off various secret objects within the box
reminiscent of Duchamp's "Ball of Twine (With Hidden Noise)" cast these
diaphanous shadows whose lineage can be traced to Man Ray's "Rayographs"
or Moholy-Nagy's camera-less "photograms."

There are 32 possible combinations of shadows using this apparatus, but
is one selecting from a previously recorded database of images or
actually operating the instruments that make these specters? The almost
immediate retrieval of the information to the site, would suggest that
the shadows are preprogrammed, and Goldberg/Farzin part of the long line
of tricksters and charlatans stretching from Warhol to Koons. But
consider this: the server runs under a Linux operating system on a
Pentium II 266 MHz computer. A serial interface was custom designed to
control the lighting. Still video images are captured by a PC-37XS
microvideo camera and transferred to a WinVision pro video capture card
in the computer. All that power, all that speed.

Viewers at the gallery experience the exterior of the box and "hear"
each online visit, but they are denied the visual intimacy of the
interior. Meanwhile, the visitors online can view the interior, but are
denied the aura of the physical box. This precious withholding of
simultaneous information is enough to reach a substantial threshold of
doubt in the viewer's mind. While the degree of doubt is variable,
depending on one's level of skepticism, the applause meter is exact. As
artists in the guise of resourceful defense attorneys, Goldberg and
Farzin need not sustain this doubt over time for the piece to be
successful-once raised, it carries the familiar aesthetic hallmarks of a
sense of wonder, and a failure of the rational mind to organize one's
thoughts.

If the flip side of doubt is faith, the collaborative duo Diller +
Scofidio attempt to test their audience's belief in the "liveness" of a
series of images taken on office webcams in their project "Refresh"
(www.diacenter.org). A webcam is familiar to anyone who has watched a
surveillance camera track their actions while shopping in a department
store. In this case the camera takes pictures at set intervals, then
instantly transmits the images to a web server, where they become
immediately available to anyone on the web. In real life examples of
"The Truman Show," thousands of live webcams exist dispatching
voyeuristic images of people's private bedrooms or offices, satisfying a
deep-seated desire for exhibitionism and instant celebrity.

Diller + Scofidio construct a grid of twelve images that are snapshots
of actual remote locations in the US, Europe, and Australia. One of the
images is live and "refreshes" when clicked, while the others are staged
on a one-time basis using professional actors and touched up with
Photoshop to add a semblance of realness. Each image is accompanied by a
fictional narrative that describes the activity in the picture: "Like
most days consumed with grinding numbers, a gridded spreadsheet filled
the screen. His posture was erect while his fingers typed so rapidly at
the keyboard, they appeared to blur. As the day progressed, his posture
softened to a slump."

"Refresh" juxtaposes live and fictional images to heighten our awareness
of this seemingly silent trespass. There is no titillating drama or
illicit intrigue to the action. To the contrary, the images range from a
janitor cleaning to the ritual stacking of paper. But this primitive
eavesdropping awakens a sense of excitement and expectation-the
knowledge that no matter how banal or casual the images appear, their
uncensored quality always lends the possibility of trangression.

In explaining the allure of liveness, the artists have said that, "For
technophobes who blame technology for the collapse of the public sphere,
liveness may be the last vestige of authenticity-seeing and/or hearing
the event at the precise moment of its occurrence. The un-mediated is
the im-mediate. For technophiles, liveness defines technology's
aspiration to simulate the real, in real-time. Lag time, search time,
and download time all impair real-time computational performance. But
whether motivated by the desire to preserve the real or to fabricate it,
liveness is synonymous with the real-an object of uncritical desire for
techno-extremes."

While the images in "Refresh" act as a live confessional or memoir,
albeit non-riveting in their ordinariness, artists have also employed a
diaristic mode, using text as well as images to broadcast their
conceptual adventures. The Thai artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, embarked on
a monthlong "performance" trip in a mobile home with a group of Thai art
students, visiting quintessentially American destinations such as
Disneyland and Las Vegas as part of a moving cultural laboratory. Their
exploits are beamed back in words and pictures to the Philadelphia
Museum's website at www.philamuseum.org/exhibits/ontheroad/, with
constant updates and video clips.

A typical journal entry from one of the students reads: "Moving through
the streets of LA there are signs, houses and clouds which are not
familiar to my eyes. Pepper Avenue, Heaven Avenue. They remind me of how
we name things at home which are coming from that which is familiar to
us in hopes of the best. I saw a man sleeping on the street–it's
familiar to me–I didn't expect to see it here; but the temperatures are
different.

As viewers we never doubt the veracity of these mobile logs because we
see the adventure unfold before us as the horizon looms ever larger in
the windshield of the RV. When the group poses tourist-fashion for a
snapshot in front of a deep ravine, we take for granted, their claim
that it is the Grand Canyon. Rather, "On the Road" attempts to expand
the definition of Telepresence by introducing the notion of cultural
relativism-the idea that while the image we are looking at is indeed
"real" in a physical sense, and "authentic" in the sense that it is what
it claims to be, it holds an entirely different meaning and value for
people of different ethnicities and cultures.

As Plato banished poets from the Republic, intent on a rational utopia,
film and television, with their endless succession of reassuring
platitudes, has seemingly erased imagination and uncertainty as viable
strategies of artistic production. Telepresence seeks to destabilize
familiar notions of how we interpret art, leaving a lingering doubt, not
in our hearts, which have long since internalized this, but in our
minds, where it belongs.