a
b
o
u
t
This is a project dedicated to the Absolute Divide. The infinite distance between one screen and another.
I want to give credit to Walter Hopp, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, for coining the phrase “Absolute Divide.”
The Absolute Divide separates us in our digital connectedness. This project will investigate that separation.
Screens will set the stage for our actors – those of us participating in what I am calling virtualization. Philosophers have long used the term ‘virtual’ to be opposed to the ‘real,’ with ‘real’ pertaining to the embodied, physical world. Never has the virtual been more important. Virtualization is all around us. Every day we have experiences which exist outside of the physical world, which do not directly occur to our physical bodies in physical space. We communicate via our smartphones, we use social media, we video conference. The screen connects us – however the bridge it creates is not physical, but rather virtual. It is not a real bridge. I cannot cross the bridge to reach you. That is the Absolute Divide.
My project is inspired by and will be informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A mid 20th century French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty developed a groundbreaking phenomenological framework in his 1945 text Phenomenology of Perception.
Do not be alarmed, this is not an academic paper. I will be using Merleau-Ponty to prop up my own observations because of the power and immediacy of his framework. A lot has changed in the past 75 years, and yet much else – such as how we are embodied, conscious beings existing in a perpetual state of perceiving and projecting onto our lived world – has remained the same.
My aspiration is to sketch an extension of Merleau-Ponty’s vision which includes virtualization, the virtual world, and the Absolute Divide. To develop terminology that will help us comprehend our grasp on virtual experience. To understand how our personal lives, our societies, our political systems, and our general well-being as humans has become intertwined with the virtual, and to lay the groundwork for our path forward in a hybrid physical-virtual world.
These are my loftiest aspirations anyway. If nothing else, I hope that you enjoy the experience I have created here. It too is mediated by a screen, existing within the virtual world via the internet. Where ever you are in the world, you are existing as an embodied being bearing witness to my virtual presentation. I would encourage you to keep that fact in mind, and I hope you enjoy Absolute Divide.
- Alan Schuh (2020)