Digital Fractal Kisses (#criticalwriting #RL)
Texting my partner:
*Hey, I miss you. Kiss me!
**Canāt, itās prohibited! I will kiss you digitally
*I want the physical
**Donāt ythink itās like fiction, darl?
Physical becomes burden and digital is our way out.
*Yeah and Iād prefer to name it digital fractal kisses
I am writing this essay during my quarantine after the Indonesian government has announced the national emergency status of Covid-19. The lethargic is real as I am just sitting in my lousy geometrical room, being confined in a quasi-inertia of the time, facing the screen to immerse myself into data reality, and a silly desire to ask for kisses. Needless to say, what I can get is merely digital kisses, aka kiss emojis. These emojis are streamed rapidly in cyberspace, either as an outlet for romantic dryness, encouragement, or just a new trend. On the other hand, they showed us that we-humans are forced to move the physical being into the trans digital realm and exploring cyber intimacy through the screen interface. Thus, what do kisses play in this analogy?
The coined term ādigital fractal kissesā is more than the desolation of physical engagement, but instead a neologism of the digital monad in which we are thrown off in sea data of infinite images. To comprehend the digital fractal kisses, we should understand what kiss is. If we derive kiss from its pure form, it is more than delirious fragmented motions of two or several people, and not merely initiated by a single sort. It is a totality that requires various feedback and consideration, such as do I have to kiss in constant circular motion? Shall my tongue move from bottom to top like a triangle? Is my kiss geometrically shaped? To kiss means, we will get caught in chaotic stimulation, then gradually finding the pattern and sync it to the absolute kiss. Therefore, a kiss is not a single entity but created from collective motions, resulting in a feedback loop which by it, geometric construction will be erected. Kiss is not a kiss anymore, but a structured fractal system.
The argument about the kiss as a system will help us to understand the image creation of quarantine videos from the perspective of geometrical space construction. A kiss, aforementioned, is created from the repetition of geometric motion; it is also applied to the production of geometric spaces, except the video will reproduce the first image into another sub-images to distribute it in sea data and building the infinite geometric space. Now, more than one million quarantine videos are currently circulating in various media, and in front of the screen, we watch the video image, from the subject to space; then, through the camera, we imitate the space of the image to be our own. Of the many images, an apparent physical similarity appears displaying the geometric space in vertical screen ā a discursive space that protects us from virus mutations and state censorship. Space becomes more performative when it produces an image and glides on a sea data to which its geometric arrangement is collated together into fractals that inhabit the digital world.
Therefore, the digital fractal kisses, like a kiss, will generate space into a totality by configuring it into complex systems. Digital fractal kisses may be chaotic, but beneath it, the deterministic creation of totality occurred.
Fractal Recursion in Digital Monad
āMirrors and copulation are abominable since they both multiply the numbers of manā Borges, 1940
The digital fractal kisses can be deciphered by the main characteristic of its composition ā the video vernacular. Rapidly spread and reproduce, video vernacular mostly deploys vertical screen and low qualities image (Steyerl, p.32), although horizontal screen or another format might be used either to adopt banal aesthetics or to deceive censorship and surveillance. In the meantime, the camera focuses slicing the image by capturing the spaceās corner within the length scale of approximately 4:1 between space and human object. The human object shall be diminished due to their consciousness of the camera; hence they must distance themselves from the cameraās eye to liberate space as the domain of interpretation and reproduction. Space is sliced to create new images and being disseminated by one click.
How does the slice image of space construct the alternative world?
Let us back to video feedback where the manual reproduction of the image is generated. It is the archetype of how an image can be duplicated from a camera using trans-medium and create another imagery dimension. To transfer the image, connect the video from the camera to the TV, then put one mirror below the monitor, the other on one side of it. Arrange the camera at the point at which both the mirrors touch the monitor. Adjust the angle and zoom of the camera as well as the angle of the mirror. The image generated from video feedback and two mirrors is very dependent on the scale and reflection that crosses the y-axis, the scale and reflection that crosses the x-axis, and the scale and rotate of 180 degrees. When seeing them as a totality, the video feedback creates a geometric configuration that reflects each otherās image and constructing a world in the mirror (monad).
The world, by which mirror reflected to, is a monad that reflects itself and the world of reflected itself. In the monadology of the mirror occurs an interiorisation process where the monad exists in the world, and there is exterior existence outside the monad (Hui, p.83). If monad can look at itself, like I am looking at myself in the mirror, it means there is the external existence of the world (pre-existence) to whom we can give a form and meaning to the world (authentic). Likewise, with us looking at the space we inhabit in the digital dimension, there is a pre-existing world ā the authentic world that is seen by us in digital, and in the end, that world is an image that is incessantly reproducing other images in sea data. In the end, the world we see is an image, a monad, where we are thrown off with no will and consciousness to the authentic world.
The mirror monadology is the same as the digital monad, there is interiorisation process, seeing like looking and calling the self in a mirror. In the video of a quarantine room, a monad is constructed when subjects record the space they are living in into the image, and the image will be distributed to sea data and watched by many viewers in a room whose geometric structure resembles the image they are watching at. Then, they produce a similar reflected image and delivering them to the iteration state in sea data. The image, in the iteration state, will open itself to all possibilities, including perpetual repetition. When it continues to be repeated by always referring to its initial self, the image in the form of data will create a geometrical digital monad construction.
While in interiorisation process, digital data that were initially chaotic and arbitrary hardly to be breached since the image in digital monad integrate into the infinite loop. Then, data will create an intricate and regular pattern called fractal recursion, inhabiting the digital monad dimension, duplicating geometric spaces continuously and endlessly. Although its configuration may not be apprehended in Euclidean symmetrical framework with a balanced composition, this fractal has unique invariant to size and may build irregular construction that is still displaying a distinctive form.
This recursive fractal provides an exciting way to view an idea of order and chaos since fractals draw all scales and measurements into the data, from which deterministic chaos will emerge. The higher the fractal dimension, the more irregularity is mixed into the underlying data loop. Once again, it is emphasised that recursion is not merely a duplication or mechanical iteration, but a repetition movement to return and call itself. Every motion opens to all possibilities that determine its singularity. Recursion generally has a beginning but no end (telos); they must be produced to an infinite resolution to achieve fractal status. During the process, the image still invokes itself while creating a visuospatial hierarchy to prevent themselves from drowning in sea data.
Infinite (in)finite
Where does the recursion begin? How do we find the beginning? We donāt need to look for a beginning to know the recursion since it is only a temporary and not necessarily a reason for totality. The reason is the totality of the loop itself and the whole fractal dimension. Imagine a kiss, do we remember its first movement? It can be. Nonetheless, it is only temporary as we remember and understand kisses, not from unit movements, but the feedback that constructs a kiss as a whole. Kiss is the result of a recursive process that continues to repeat towards infinity, because who wants a limited kiss?
However, that does not mean that temporality prevents all tracing efforts since every recursive movement leaves a trace like a road sign that stored in visuospatial memory; and in each trace represents questions whose answers can be found in the totality of the loop. Once again, we interpret the kiss as the totality of the kiss itself, but the entirety of kiss occurs from repetitive movements and its fracture, although not referring to the reason it can be used to construct its totality. In short, fractals are produced by rules or simple movements that generate complex hierarchical structures when applied repeatedly to feedback results.
To trace recursion, using mathematical or grid calculations is inherently required, but adult humans are endowed with cognitive ability to use recursion to process complex visuospatial hierarchies (Martins, 2016). This ability can be implemented in the visual dialogue by using the visual recursion task method of machine learning. VRT is based on the āgeometrical self-similarityā recursion and put iteration set given in every image. There several considerations to process VRT according to Martins: first, the subject must acquire categorical knowledge about constituents (form and position), recognising that constituents are hierarchical structured, recognising that constituents at different hierarchical levels display the same characteristic of areas. Here is the manual breakdown of VRT model in quarantineās sample video:
CQS (Chen Qiushi) recorded the video before he disappeared in February 2020. If we assume the video is the beginning, is it a reason behind the quarantine video? Yes, it could be the impulse of several videos criticising Chinese governments on the issue of freedom of speech. Nonetheless, is this video a reason for all vernacular videos or vlogs during COVID-19 quarantine? Not really. CQS video is not responsible for the heterogeneous image of spaces, it is not a reason for thousands of ultra-privileged self-care videos during quarantine, and it is not responsible for all quarantine videos in the digital world.
VRT, more or less, shows us how the recursion process begins: when we are dealing with images, we automatically scan the entire image as a cognitive stimulus from brain neurons, starting from the subject of people to space we inhabited, then the information will be reprocessed to produce a sequence of feedback. In the CQS image, the fastest constituents we can detect using working and short-term memory are the position and the form. The analysis attempt to stimulate our cognitive ability by igniting fundamental questions: are there windows? The first thing we hear that kind of question, our eyes will sweep the room from corner to corner, finding the shadow of the window, and concluding the answer that there is a window in the room.
The question does not stop there as the window will rise to new constituents: number. How many windows? Our eyes will not go directly to the window, instead of the whole image, and then to the details of the window. We look at the amount of reflected light into space, shadows, and find there are three windows in the room. The next constituent is the situation: whether the window is open or closed. Once again, we repeat seeing the whole image to find the answer until we can conclude that the window in the image is open.
In processing this information recursively, we unconsciously slice images per unit of information. We are able to gather information about the window, the number, and the condition of it by calling the image as a totality and slicing the image in every corner. When information is present consecutively, a recursion process occurs in which we will look at the totality of images to seek the answers. Later, this visual hierarchy can be sliced through the recursion process and producing other images. For example, if we slice a window, the contents of the window in the image will be created in another image, flooding the sea data with scattered images. In other words, in recursion, the image is open to all possibilities, from duplication to reproduction.
Recursion through iteration unit put the image into the higher level of visual hierarchy that in this meaning, the window is no longer a single entity, yet it is complementary to other images or low level that is united by the totality of the images as the highest level; therefore it can construct a structural representation where an element is embedded in another element. The small parts of an object are similar to larger parts and then to the whole object. However, recursion generate image from chaotic and random data, the images of a sliced window are not immaculate, consisting various scales that continue to show self-similarities and producing a visual hierarchical structure, yet those images will look-alike when being viewed on different scales as mirror reflected images.
And when an image continues to reproduce, pulling on a variety of scales, an image can be performative, that is to protect another image by calling the part of itself recursively; thus, they can produce other images and generating the strands of infinite data loops. It is the power of recursion, binding images to infinite hierarchical levels by using finite and limited rules. Moreover, to achieve the infinity, the recursion continues to call chaotic data that has been cut to various scales. Then, those data will move in iterative formula towards recursion by it will synthesise them through the totality, and instead of being a simple loop, those data transform into an asymmetrical yet complex fractal construction and continues to call themselves between the loop. My digital fractal kisses is a chaotic and infinite space construction in which there is no telos, only chaos!
________rafikalifi
References:
Hui, Yuk. (2019). Recursivity and Contingency. Rowman & Littlefield International.
Martins, M. D., Martins, I. P., & Fitch, W. T. (2016). A novel approach to investigate recursion and iteration in visual hierarchical processing. Behavior research methods, 48(4), 1421ā1442.
Steyerl, Hito. (2013). Hito Steyerl: The Wretched of the Screen. In Defense of the Poor Images. Sternberg Press.
Video Feedback, retrieved from: https://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/CA/VideoFeedback/VF2Mirrors/VF2Mirrors.html
Further Readings:
Mandelbrot, B. (2013). Fractals and chaos: the Mandelbrot set and beyond. Springer Science & Business Media.
Leibniz, G. W. (1898). The monadology and other philosophical writings. Š ŠøŠæŠ¾Š» ŠŠ»Š°ŃŃŠøŠŗ.
De Risi, V. (2007). Geometry and Monadology: Leibnizās analysis situs and Philosophy of Space (Vol. 33). Springer Science & Business Media.
Barnsley, M. F., Devaney, R. L., Mandelbrot, B. B., Peitgen, H. O., Saupe, D., Voss, R. F., ā¦ & McGuire, M. (1988). The science of fractal images (pp. xiv+-312). New York: Springer.
