so what

Since culture and communication began humans have expressed themselves through pictures. Whether it is on a cave wall or a computer screen an image is able to relay information in the most literal sense. The gift of sight allows people to observe space and the unfolding of time as a continuous whole. The photograph is able to dissect that continuity and preserve a section of it within a static frame. It is this characteristic that makes the photograph a perfect metaphor for the concept of virtuality. The term virtual implies existing in essence or effect though not in actual fact. A picture can only ever record, no matter how realistic and entire it seems, a proportional fraction of the real event via a process of chemical reaction. Thus a photographic subject is never more than a virtual representation of the actual object. It is like stealing time and locking it in a special chamber keeping it there to serve the needs of testament, communication and memory; of experience. This notion adds to the controversy surrounding the increasing digital application, hyper-reality and the concurrent media glut. Are we inadvertently stealing time from ourselves? Maybe we are by adopting more and more a culture of secondary technological mediation; by distancing ourselves from the level of primary engagement. Our realities become confused with the electric, the mechanical- becoming ever more synthetic. Perhaps human experience in this way, as a form of expendable energy isolating itself from reality within virtuality, is acting as an agent of entropy, evolving so that we may inhabit entropy. As time and space degrade virtual interface is normalized bringing us closer to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. This however, can only be quantified against an understanding of entropy and the role virtuality plays in its expansion. That is of yet uncertain though it continues to provoke questions. Like access and exclusion: if everybody on the in side of the digital divide is evolving to suit entropy what about those on the other side? Could the human race be experiencing sub division as a direct result of circumstantial transformation and evolution? Could all this be creating a platform for things we once considered science fiction i.e. a quantum leap? Science fiction, yes that’s more like media but perhaps the distinctions are no longer so clear between my ex- girlfriend’s quantum physics paper and my latest new media assignment. So what? So I don't know. There’s entropy and virtuality. What do you think?