Witnessed presence

Authors: Caroline Nevejan Satinder P Gill

Publish Date: 2011/09/25

Volume: 27, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-4

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Abstract

This special issue of AI and Society Journal for Knowledge Culture and Communication explores the notion of witnessing in the evolving technological culture Whereas witnessing is a concept used mostly within the courtroom and has legal connotations for many it originally refers to a process of being in the presence of each other To be witness and to bear witness is distinct through witnessing truth is assessed and trust establishedHuman beings in the act of being witness and bearing witness have been mediating presence for centuries by leaving traces telling stories making images and music and writing text However digital technology facilitates mediation of presence at scales and speeds unknown before and as a result of this mediation the dynamics of being witness and bearing witness are changing Personal organization and business communication is deeply affected by new ways of connecting sharing knowledge and doing transactions Social structures adapt and constantly restructure processes impacted by the rapid pace of changing information and communication technologies Foundations of social structures including power relations identity building trust liability and justice are being challenged As Manuel Castells formulated already 15 years ago in his impressive trilogy on the rise of the networked society‘Thus people do still live in places But because function and power in our societies are organized in the space of flows the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places Experience being related to places becomes abstracted from power and meaning is increasingly separated from knowledge The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked a historical space of flows aiming and imposing its logic over scattered segmented places increasingly unrelated to each other less and less able to share cultural codes Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between these two forms of space we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of social hyperspace’ Castells 1996 4281For the building of such bridges a better understanding of witnessed presence is essential When building bridges between the space of places and the space of flows an ethical position of the witness seems unavoidable How else can social structures that offer wellbeing and survival emerge The construction of such bridges needs to include elements that allow for human presence and human consciousness to partake in a variety of modes Physical and sensorial elements need to allow for immaterial interaction to emerge This special issue of AI and Society aims to identify possibilities and hurdles in such a questIn the spring of 2010 we published the call to contribute to this special issue on Witnessed Presence for AI and Society Journal for Knowledge Culture and Communication Authors in this special issue generously offer perspectives on witnessed presence from a variety of disciplines Some contributions are theoretical others reflect applied research Contributions focus on a deeper understanding of witnessing and address the changing human condition in which information and communication technologies play an increasing significant roleIn the first paper Phil Turner Philosopher at Napier University in Edinburgh eloquently discusses an everyday ontology of witnessing drawing on the writings of Martin Heidegger Having been involved in the EU presence community for over 10 years he describes how tele presence has been approached from the perspective of having the sense of ‘beingthere’ He concludes that witnessing is one of the consequences of beingintheworld of beinghere and suggests that the internet and other mediated contexts may facilitate witnessing He lays down three premises for witnessing presence availability and representation Presence has intentionality through which the body is bound to the world When witnessing this intentionality is ‘inherited’ This hints to witnessed presence as a force that creates social structures by sharing and inheriting ‘intentionality’ The second premise ‘availability’ is a matter of experience and embodiment is at its root The body is the instrument that defines what it is to be available and qualifies witnessing Thirdly witnessing recognizing what you see builds on weak representations things that only become active when an individual is engaged while bearing witness giving testimony builds on strong representations things that stand for something When being witness or when bearing witness the distinction between weak and strong representations allows for a better understanding of the kinds of mediated details an individual needs in specific contextsThese processes of being and bearing witness are deeply interwoven and even happen in the same instance argues FransWillem Korsten professor of Literature at the University of Utrecht Korsten describes how when being in mediated presence with its lack of other cues words have to act Text and language become fundamental and from software to Skype it is the foundation of mediated presence Words are actors Korsten revisits the rhetoric figure of apostrophe not to be confused with the punctuation mark which in specific cases denotes that bearing and being witnessed happen in the same instance in the same utterance spoken/line written To be a witness means to offer and address attention to what is being witnessed and to bear witness and thereby turning away from the situation at hand to offer an address of expression to a ‘virtual audience’ The address of expression functions like a comment on the situation By functioning like a comment values are questioned and ethics are communicated Peripheral perception is fundamental here when words act direct focus is not possible and words start functioning like images hence the use of metaphors that sketch associations and hint to associations The rhetorical figure of the apostrophe works because it is not direct In his contribution Korsten analyses a text by Maria Dermôut on Pattimura and an exposition by Kara Walker on the New Orleans flooding He concludes that in modern media this dual modality is lost as is ethical awarenessHowever argues Sjoukje van der Meulen art historian and media theorist at the University of Illinois at Chicago ethical awareness can exist when media is orchestrated in such a way that it deconstructs contradicts and amends itself in confrontation with the witness Van der Meulen analyses and contextualizes the work of mediaartist Pierre Huyghe who with great sophistication consistently seduces and confuses people in being witness to his work Huyghe’s work lends itself to presence theories within the field of media studies as well as art theory and criticism Van der Meulen applies Nevejan’s presence theory and finds that Huyghe plays out the tensions between natural mediated and witnessed presence Van Der Meulen uses Samuel Webers’s notion of mediaura to explain the way in which the power of fiction grants an auratic effect to characters that appear in Pierre Huyghe’s work Van der Meulen concludes that next to natural mediated and witnessed presence fictional presence is fundamental to being able to understand why specific media configurations create meaning in the field of art

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