CHAPTER 5

The Powers of the Virtual

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Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists. . . . It was therefore certain
to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have
happened.
—Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind

The virtual is not the same as the false. They come from two different
orders. The true and the false relate what is actual and not actual; the
virtual has nothing to do with these. When Deleuze writes of the powers
of the false in Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, he does not simply mean the
power of brazen lies, whether the power of those who speak and propa-
gate them or the power of the falsehoods themselves to disseminate
and convince the public. Nor does he mean the powers of delusion, see-
ing or believing in things that are not really there, although this too is a
remarkably powerful phenomenon. The power of the false, in the sense
I would like to give it here, is more neutral: it is simply the capacity to
fabricate or forge something new out of preexisting materials in the
world—to “give being to what does not exist,” as Bergson puts it in this
chapter’s epigraph. It is the ability to make or invent something that
then really exists as such, regardless of whether it represents something
else in the world and regardless of whether it does so accurately or in-
accurately. This power thus relates more closely to the virtual than to
what we colloquially understand by the word false. It is related to what
Bergson calls the creative, and to the faculty of intuition as opposed to
that of the intellect.
One might say that this power came into its own with the inven-
tion of cinema. As Deleuze puts it, “The cinema does not just present

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images, it surrounds them with a world.”1 Christian Metz explains that
film’s mechanisms infuse images with an impression of reality. In typi-
cal narrative cinema, all images, even those that are marked off from
the rest of the story as flashbacks, eyewitness accounts, and so on, are
meant to be accepted as part of the film’s diegetic reality. It is extremely
rare in conventional cinema to encounter a camera that is an “unreliable
narrator” in the literary sense. Metz puzzled over why we suspend our
skepticism about these flat, two-­dimensional reflections of matter, and
he brilliantly uses Freud’s account of divided belief to explain how we
could know that they are tricks and yet experience them as psychically
real at the same time. Deleuze, by contrast, was not bothered by the ap-
parent contradiction. His cinema books operate, from the very start,
on the assumption that to make an image is to make something real—
not necessarily true, good, accurate, or just, but definitely real. This ap-
parently simple proposition, Deleuze’s minor revolution in film theory,
opens up all kinds of possibilities for the image. If images are real, they
cannot simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand as lies or mirages.
We are not fools for having responded in earnest to a two-­dimensional
light projection; on the contrary, we are exercising a unique power. It is
tantamount to saying that cinema is a form of virtual reality.
In his writings on the powers of the false, Deleuze observes that in
postwar cinema, the forger emerges as a new kind of emblematic char-
acter. Unlike the classical hero, the forger is not motivated by a quest
for personal fame or honor. Rather he achieves his greatest purpose
when he vanishes anonymously into the image systems created by
others. Deleuze cites Orson Welles as an exemplary model of this figure:
“Since Welles has a strong personality, we tend to forget that his con-
stant theme, precisely as a result of this personality, is to be a person
no longer.”2 Deleuze suggests that f for Fake, Welles’s essay film about
famous forgers, is the culmination of this theme. Here, Deleuze notes,
Welles becomes fully Nietzschean: he approaches the category of the
false in an extramoral sense.3 It is no longer a question of lying or telling

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the truth but of making images and stories that ask to be understood
and taken seriously on their own terms, within the worlds with which
they surround themselves.
f for Fake is a film about characters who work with preexisting

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images in the world, playing with them, riffing on them, and insert-
ing new entries into the groups of which they are a part. Elmyr—the
prolific, highly skilled forger of Matisses, Modiglianis, and Picassos—is
one of the characters portrayed in this film. Importantly Elmyr does
not copy existing paintings by these famous artists; he makes new ones
in the style of their work. His forgeries are thus originals in one sense.
But he does not get credit for them; the artists he forges do. He thereby
“becomes a person no longer,” and this is precisely what Deleuze means
by this declaration: he vanishes anonymously into other artists’ worlds
and expands their oeuvres in the process. These paintings’ existence in
the art market might detract from the economic value of the authentic
ones, but they add exponentially to their value as wellsprings of ideas. It
is as if “Picasso” were a mode that included a surplus of shapes, figures,
and forms that the artist never in fact painted but easily might have,
which Elmyr then taps into and brings to light in his compositions.
A whole set of contemporary art practices has grown out of this
proposition of Deleuze’s, some taking direct inspiration from it, others
participating more intuitively. Some of these practices directly involve
forgery in an extramoral sense: the creation of images attributed to
people who never in fact made them or of documents that relate to
events and histories that in fact never occurred. In an essay on the
artists Michael Blum, Walid Raad, and others, Carrie Lambert-Beatty
terms these “parafictional” works.4 Similar practices include speculative
fiction, presenting images in the guise of history that would not nor-
mally appear there, and other modes of image making and storytelling
that draw on real events and people in the world. Forgery, in the sense
I am exploring, might simply be a method of creativity that acknowl-
edges its debt to materials from the past rather than pretending to arise
out of a void. I would suggest that this method of image making is better
understood by the name virtual than false.

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 127

WHAT MIGHT BE: THE MAKES

Eric Baudelaire’s The Makes (2009) casts a glance backward to the cinema
of midcentury Europe. Its route to the past, though, is an unexpected

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one. The Makes is a forged documentary, and its ostensible topic is a
series of films that Michelangelo Antonioni produced during his non-
existent Japanese period. The video is staged as an interview with the
real-­life film critic Philippe Azoury, who provides a kind of oral his-
tory about this supposed phase in Antonioni’s career. Azoury appears
at a table on which lie vintage actor headshots, film stills, and Japa-
nese film publicity materials—ephemera that are allegedly artifacts of
these films. In fact they are found photographs that Baudelaire collected
and worked with while in Japan. The camera occasionally departs from
Azoury to show these fragments in a closer view, providing enough time
for the viewer to invest them with a sense of reality. Aside from the occa-
sional black screen and a brief interlude in which a simple musical motif
is heard, the video does not really depart from the filmic conventions
that would be expected of this style of documentary. Close viewing,
though, reveals moments in which the fiction is broken—clues that the
history being told is a fake, and openly so. At one point, an off-­screen
voice is heard asking “Can you start over?” as Azoury appears to fumble

5.1. Philippe Azoury in a still from Eric Baudelaire’s The Makes (2009).
Courtesy of the artist.

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5.2. Eric Baudelaire, The Makes (That Bowling Alley on the Tiber), installation view
(2009). Courtesy of the artist.

a line. The critic speaks earnestly about Antonioni, but his demeanor is
at times comical. On occasion he coyly avoids the camera’s gaze, like a
child acknowledging that he knows that we know he is fibbing.
While the history told in this work is a fictive one, the films in ques-
tion are not fabricated out of thin air. They come from a book by Anto-
nioni called That Bowling Alley on the Tiber in which the director wrote
notes, descriptions, and ideas for films that were never made, in some
cases because he didn’t have time, in some cases because they would
be unfilmmable or go beyond the limits of cinema. The Makes is thus
an exercise in imagining films that might or might not be. Baudelaire’s
video is accompanied by a group of mixed-­media works of the same title:
illuminated glass vitrines containing pages from That Bowling Alley on
the Tiber alongside the found photographs of Japanese actors that con-
stitute these virtual films’ archive. The vitrines, which resemble those
that used to house publicity posters in the lobbies of movie theaters,
lend materiality to the fiction.
In one sense The Makes involves a quest to find Antonioni. But in
another, the film aims to miss the director. Baudelaire does not look for
Antonioni in all the right places—Italy, for example, or the locations of

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 129

his film shoots. He searches for him in a wrong place: Japan. Although
Antonioni had indeed intended to film in Japan, the closest he ever came
was in 1972, when he traveled to China as the first foreigner permitted
to make a film there since the country’s communist walling-­off. The re-

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sult was his sprawling documentary Chung Kuo: Cina, a film that is as
much about the process of encountering an unknown place as it is about
China as such. Interactions with foreign people and places play a small
yet crucial role in Antonioni’s narrative films as well, and his characters’
encounters with alterity often prompt an about-­face, a metamorphosis,
or the undoing of stagnation.5 In keeping with the spirit of Antonioni’s
work, The Makes stages an encounter between Italian texts and Japa-
nese still photographs, and the meeting is transformative on both sides.
The Makes is a parafictional text and a forgery in the Deleuzian
sense. While not precisely forging new Antonioni films in the way that
Elmyr forges Picassos or that Welles forges stories about Picasso, the
video works with the director’s preexisting, unmade scenarios and sup-
plies found images to them. Close viewing of The Makes reveals that
the images do not merely illustrate the script fragments and fill in the
blanks; the relationship is more complex. The video begins with a close-­
up of hands placing black-­and-­white images of Japanese actors in a pile,
one by one. The shot resembles the one that begins Antonioni’s Story of
a Love Affair (1950), in which a wealthy husband hires a private investi-
gator to probe his wife’s past and shows the detective a series of photos
of her. As in Blow Up (1966), though, the detective fiction frame is only
an excuse for Antonioni to tell a different kind of story. The Makes seems
to promise a similarly investigative frame, that of archival film research.
But this is a ruse as well: no new facts about Antonioni’s career will be
unearthed, only unrealized possibilities and speculative scenes.
In some cases the found images closely match the scenarios and can
plausibly be imagined as frame enlargements from the films. Azoury
begins by describing a lost film called Four Sailors; accordingly he shows
us photos of four sailorish actors and a ship. As the video continues,
though, the fragments begin to grate against the films from which they
are supposedly torn. This gap is widest in the segment on The Silence,
a story of a husband and wife who have nothing more to say to each
other, whose silence Antonioni proposes to film. In the prelude to the
segment, Azoury places some still photographs in a pile, one at a time:

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5.3. A pile of photographs in Baudelaire’s The Makes. Courtesy of the artist.

5.4. A pile of photographs in Story of a Love Affair, directed by Michelangelo
Antonioni (1950).
a modern, disaffected-­looking couple, a couple in traditional Japanese
dress, more alienated couples with creases in the photographs that em-
phasize their separation. One photo shows a couple who look as though
they might have come over from a samurai film. Still, it’s possible that

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this could be their story; by this point in the video, the fictions begin to
smooth each other’s edges, and we have been primed to accept a great
deal of dissonance into the frame.
One segment of the video deals with an Antonioni film fragment
called Don’t Try to Find Me. Antonioni writes in That Bowling Alley on
the Tiber that this title is meant as a caveat to his reader: Don’t play
hide and seek with Michelangelo Antonioni, don’t try to find him. In
his fictive oral history, Azoury recounts that during this film’s produc-
tion, Antonioni struggled with direction, reverting to a more theatrical
Italian style of acting even though he had recently found a restrained
Japanese style that was more appropriate to the types of films that he
had always made. Azoury notes, though, that one scene stands out as
quintessentially Antonioni: a husband has spoiled his happy family by
distancing himself, when suddenly a fog intercedes, like the fog in Anto-
nioni’s native Ferrara.6 Here, finally, Azoury remarks, we sense Anto-
nioni’s presence as a director. That finding, though, is propped on the
image of a lost man—a man who is disappearing into a fog. It is only
when Antonioni gets lost that he is found, that is, that his cinema can
be rediscovered in a new way. This seems to be, in part, the project of
The Makes: to make way for the emergence of nascent, potential images
by looking for them where they are not.
In a sequence that occurs toward the end of the video, Azoury selects
one photograph from the pile: a Japanese couple standing under a tree,
with the man in a modern, Western suit and the woman in a tradi-
tional, Japanese kimono. Azoury says that the photo is taken from the
scene in The Silence in which Alain Delon and Monica Vitti, having met
at the Tokyo stock exchange, wander flirtatiously through the streets
of Tokyo, with Vitti pausing to float an origami boat in a rain barrel at
the side of the road. Minus Tokyo and the origami, Azoury seems to be
describing the memorable scene between Delon and Vitti near the con-
clusion of Antonioni’s The Eclipse (1962), but this is not what we see in
the photo. The thick layers of superimposition require unfolding: The
Eclipse appears as The Silence; Japanese actors appear as Vitti (as her

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5.5. A still photo of a couple standing by a tree in Baudelaire’s The Makes.
Courtesy of the artist.
5.6. Monica Vitti and Alain Delon in The Eclipse, directed by Michelangelo
Antonioni (1962).

character Vittoria) and Delon (as his character Piero). In addition the
scene in question from The Eclipse already involves several superimpo-
sitions. Piero’s image is eclipsing that of Vittoria’s former lover, whom
she has just left, and their initial playful meeting will soon be eclipsed
by a repetition of the scene—another date that Vittoria and Piero plan,
at the same street corner, at eight o’clock the next evening, to which
neither of them shows up.

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 133

 Antonioni’s camera shows up, though, and films the empty street
corner. In Antonioni’s films, this gesture is a kind of ethical principle:
to go to the places where “the people are missing.”7 We see him do this
immediately after The Eclipse, in Red Desert (1964), where he uses wan-

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dering panning shots to reveal empty and anonymous spaces, places the
characters can’t or won’t go. In The Makes, Baudelaire’s gesture is simi-
lar to Antonioni’s: the artist goes to Japan, a place where Antonioni is
not, and forges a collaboration among the director’s writing fragments,
found Japanese images, Antonioni’s actual films, and other texts that
they reference. The result is, in a way, the opposite of an eclipse: it
draws open a curtain, revealing a portal into a virtual film history that
is simultaneously a fictive invention and the illumination of a potential
that, in retrospect, was already there within cinema.
One might counter this reading of The Makes—and indeed similar
readings of contemporary film and video works that combine fiction
and documentary practices—with the accusation that they betray his-
tory and disregard fact or that they unjustly attempt to pull the wool
over their viewers’ eyes. But as should be clear by now, apprehending
the virtual requires that we think in a different way. The story of Anto-
nioni’s sojourn in Japan is, let me be clear, fiction; it is simply not true.
The Makes is a virtual film history, similar to the way that Elmyr’s Pi-
cassos are virtual Picassos: it depends on an existing group of films for
its existence, it draws on their frames of reference, and it is in dialogue
with this archive of actualities to which it does not belong. But in the
same way that Elmyr’s Picassos are not merely simulations or mirages
of paintings, but real paintings, so the stories and images in The Makes
are real, even if they are untrue. They are forged, real, and virtual all at
the same time.

TENUOUS FRAMES: PERSONA PERFORMA

The Singaporean-­born, Berlin-­based artist Ming Wong’s primary ges-

ture is to remake scenes from classical Hollywood and European New
Wave cinemas with the aim of teasing out their potentially queer, racial,
and politically subversive elements. His video installations and live per-
formances continue along a path taken by R. W. Fassbinder, Tom Kalin,
and Todd Haynes, where unexpected performing bodies appear in

134 ::: Chapter Five

familiar narrative scenarios. Similarly to these directors, they are often
direct remakes of scenes or narratives from films by Douglas Sirk and
other directors. They do not engage in a documentary mode, nor do they
present themselves as forged films by these directors. Nevertheless they

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too are a form of virtual cinema: they are virtual Sirks, Polanskis, Berg-
mans, and so on.
In Life of Imitation (2009), Wong casts Singaporean actors in key
scenes from Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959). They reenact scenes in drag,
occupying the roles of Sarah Jane and Annie Johnson in varying permu-
tations. Similarly in Making Chinatown (2012), Wong himself plays the
roles of Jake Gittes, Evelyn Mulwray, Noah Cross, and Katherine Cross
from Polanski’s film, making the Chinese body visible in a film where,
although referenced in the title, it is largely an absent presence. These
casting choices expand the repertoire of identities that film screens nor-
mally accommodate. But they do much more than this. The performing
body becomes a vehicle through which identity is rendered collective,
transitional, and mutable, while still retaining its visual, gestural, and
linguistic particularities. These works do not simply advocate on behalf
of diversity, inclusiveness, or even hybridity. Rather they present iden-
tity as a time-­based work in progress.
Wong’s Persona Performa is a work of film, video installation, and
live performance, which was included in the 2011 Performa festival and
mounted at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Its
source material is provided by Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, which tells
the story of Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who has fallen
abruptly into a state of elective muteness during a performance of Elec-
tra, and Alma (Bibi Andersson), her nurse. On the advice of Elisabet’s
physician, the pair retreat to the remote island of Fårö. There they be-
come locked in a dynamic of identification, desire, and passive and
active aggression, fueled by Elisabet’s refusal to speak. Bergman’s use of
nondiegetic imagery, a split screen, exposed celluloid, and similar tech-
niques famously made this film a landmark of experimental narrative.
Persona Performa departs from its source material, leading it off the
confined island of Fårö into a space of extreme openness. It undoes the
rivalrous dyad formed by the two women by multiplying the number
of players. Wong’s restaging, notably, continues a theme that is already
present in Persona, that of the tenuousness of singular personhood. His

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 135

most apparent intervention is to multiply Elisabet and Alma into twelve
pairs, casting twenty-­four amateur actors from the borough of Queens
in their places. The actors were selected in part to maximize the range of
ethnicities, countries of origin, genders, body types, and languages spo-

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ken. They dance and act out vignettes from Bergman’s film, undergoing
a series of permutations of gender and race. The staging is both queer
and brown, the latter in the sense defined by José Muñoz: a feeling that
resists crystallizing into a category or fixed position. As Muñoz puts it,
“Feeling brown is a mode of racial performativity, a doing within the
social that surpasses limitations of epistemological renderings of race.”8
Wong’s combinatory use of media forms is also queer and brown in
this sense. It reanimates cinema by juxtaposing it with video, dance,
and live performance, such that the medium resists crystallizing into a
fixed ontology or form. Upon entering the museum’s lobby, visitors are
greeted by a large video installation taking up the left-­hand wall, the
Persona Performa Panorama. The video shows the faces and hands of the
actors, but they have been splintered by vertical frame lines in mirror-­
fracture effect. We may be reminded of the convention of displaying
actor’s headshots in the lobby of a theater, introducing playgoers to the
real people behind the characters we are about to see before we become

5.7. Ming Wong’s Persona Performa (2011), lobby installation shot at the
American Museum of the Moving Image, the Persona Performa Panorama.
Courtesy of the artist.

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5.8. Dancers descend the staircase at the American Museum of the Moving
Image in Wong’s Persona Performa. Courtesy of the artist.

immersed in the fictional world. In Wong’s lobby installation, though,

the actors are already in the fragmentary state that they will occupy for
the duration of the performance.
Soon we enter the museum’s central gallery space with its white
walls, modernist angles, and glass panels with views onto a courtyard.
This space was redesigned in 2011, and Wong’s piece is tailored to its
new architecture. We advance toward a wide staircase, and on the mez-
zanine we encounter a 16-­millimeter film shown from a projector posi-
tioned in the middle of the room, the whirr of its gears audible. The film
is a remake of a single shot from Bergman’s film, in which the faces of
Alma and Elisabet appear spliced together in a single frame. At least
one of Wong’s actors appears to be Asian and male, but their genders
and races are indeterminate, made more so by the black-­and-­white film
stock, splicing, and identical costuming. The transitional space of the
mezzanine leads to another upstairs gallery where Bergman’s original
film is projected—a smaller, more black box–­style room tucked away in
a corner. In a third upstairs gallery, with sunken seating and windows,
a dance film plays, a color, digital video made during rehearsals for the
piece.
Through the windows we catch a glimpse of the courtyard, and if our
timing is right, we will see an extremely tall, commanding figure in dark

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5.9. A scene from the opening half of Wong’s Persona Performa with dancers and
a film projector. Courtesy of the artist.

robes slowly moving around the outdoor space. This figure is Death, a
reference to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Prison (1949), a brief
clip from which appears in the prelude to Persona. The reference may
strike us as comical: we glimpse Death only darkly, through glass. Such
humor is common in Wong’s work, which has a playful, camp touch.
Putting this dancer in the museum courtyard animates a space normally
allocated to static sculpture, in effect cinematizing it with the inclusion
of a statuesque but moving entity. Bits of rocky seaside landscape are
projected onto the glass panels; these confirm that the space is being
turned into a museum-­size cinematic apparatus.
At the start of the live performance component of the work, dancers
begin to descend the museum staircase one at a time, perhaps in a nod
to Duchamp. As they descend, an allegory is set in motion: the twenty-­
four dancers are like frames of film, and their movement through the
space resembles that of a spool of celluloid winding through a projector.
The sound consists of a track of mechanical ticks, like a camera shutter
clicking, along with occasional clinks of glass. A 16-­millimeter projector
runs nearby, providing another source of audio. The projector runs clear
film, casting light on the actors. Upon descending the staircase, each
dancer looks briefly toward the projector as if searching for someone in
its empty light. When all twenty-­four performers have assembled, they

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5.10. Inside the auditorium at the American Museum of the Moving Image
during the second half of Wong’s Persona Performa. Courtesy of the artist.

begin a dance in a row of pairs, clasping, embracing, locking arms, then

switching places before moving on to the next partner in the line and
repeating the same movements. Upon reaching the end of the line, each
dancer snaps off the chain and runs away, as if the film reel had broken
off abruptly, as in Bergman’s film.
The second act of the performance takes place in the museum’s large
auditorium with more traditional seating and sightlines. Again the
dancers form pairs, and they begin to recite bits of dialogue from Per-
sona. Each one speaks the text in a different language or dialect to a
mute partner. Occasionally the partners trade off. As they speak, a cam-
era mounted in front of the stage films them, and these images are pro-
jected in a live stream above their heads. The digital simulcast allows for
different pairs to be selected from the series of twelve with their audio
amplified above the murmur of voices. The lines of dialogue that the
actors speak add a twist to Bergman’s original, which is about the mis-
understandings and psychical projections that can accrue in the space
of silence. They speak Alma’s lines to the mute Elisabet, which vacillate
between idealization—“Many people have told me that I’m a good lis-
tener. Funny, huh? No one’s ever bothered to listen to me. Like you are
now. You’re listening. I think you’re the first person who’s listened to
me”—and denunciation: “My words mean nothing to you. People like

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 139

you can’t be reached. I wonder whether your madness isn’t the worst
kind. . . . I know how rotten you are.” These lines take on an entirely
new significance when spoken in the native languages of the diverse
group of actors. Bergman’s classic of European modernist film, Wong

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seems to say, can be recast to reflect the experience of the contempo-
rary migrant to Queens, New York, attempting to navigate a soundscape
of enigmatic foreign languages and in turn being perceived as foreign
with each attempt at speech. On the one hand, these new migrant Elisa-
bets are romanticized as the perfect passive servants, silently absorb-
ing whatever is thrown their way; on the other, they are denounced as
mad or rotten if they show signs of resistance. The racially, linguistically
marked immigrant figure is a screen for a range of projections involving
black-­and-­white thinking.
Bergman’s script does not say whether the Electra during which Elisa-
bet has gone mute is the Sophoclean tragedy or the comedic version by
Euripides. However, a line of dialogue states that she fell silent while
attempting to stifle the urge to laugh, suggesting that it was the Sopho-
clean version, in which laughter would be inappropriate. Sophocles’s
Electra is marked by an excessive and long-­lived mourning: her father,
Agamemnon, has been brutally murdered by her mother, Clytemnestra,
and Clytemnestra’s suitor Aegisthus, the usurping king of Mycenae, and
she has continued to mourn his death long past the customary grieving
period. As a result of her mourning, Electra is punished and confined to
quarters, where she nonetheless persists in loud, wailing lamentations
that carry beyond the palace walls. In answer to the first question that
the Chorus poses to her—“Electra, child of the wretchedest of mothers,
why with ceaseless lament do you waste away, sorrowing for one long
dead?”—she provides a voluminous response. In a series of wild free
anapests punctuated by the iambic pleadings of the Chorus, she replies
first that her lament is madness, then that it is her heart’s desire, that
it is honorable, and finally that it is the only proper recourse for a well-­
bred girl.9 Unlike her sister Chrysothemis, Electra refuses to comply
with those in power, to be silent and obey. As Ann Batchelder notes, the
word used here for “obeying” is akoustea, to listen.10 In Sophocles’s play,
it is not so much the content of Electra’s speech that offends, although
this is also a problem; it is the very shrillness and long duration of her
lament, which signal her refusal to submit to quiet passivity. Electra’s

140 ::: Chapter Five

cries are a form of verbal protest, the only kind available given that in
her world, heroic deeds and acts of vengeance can be undertaken only
by men.
Understood in this context, Electra’s wailing is an act of fearless

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speech, or parrhesia. As Foucault describes it, parrhesia is a form of free
speech, a speech-­act of a sort, that is marked by frankness and truth
and accompanied by a sense of both duty and risk.11 Elisabet’s mute-
ness, in turn, can be thought of as a form of fearless silence: silence as
protest, willfully pursued against doctor’s orders and against the de-
mands that the public places on the great actress. In Persona Performa,
the actors’ costuming in long, classical robes and their slightly Grecian
hairstyles suggest a reference to the themes of the Sophoclean tragedy.
In this version, both fearless speech and fearless silence come into play:
the vulnerable speech of the play’s Almas, who risk incomprehension in
their native languages, and the bold silence of the Elisabets, who refuse
to respond to such caricatured descriptions of themselves. A series of
additional twists on the dialogue emerge as the scene shifts from pair
to pair. When the scene is played by two smiling women of color, Alma’s
praise might read as part of a moment of genuine intimacy; when the
same lines are spoken by a white performer to an actor who mimes not
being able to understand English, the scene becomes a satire about
monocultural assumptions. Alma’s denunciations, in turn, can be read
in nearly opposite ways depending on what language and accent they
are delivered in and to whom.
Wong’s piece for the Performa festival was not as critically acclaimed
as his prior and subsequent work, including his installation for the Sin-
gapore pavilion at the Fifty-­third Venice Biennale, which included Life
of Imitation, and the Making Chinatown show at redcat gallery in Los
Angeles. The reactions to Persona Performa can be read symptomatically.
One critic wrote that the large number of actors and their racial and
sexual diversity disrupted the “existential dread” and the “good, dark
stuff” of Bergman’s original film, substituting for it “a feel-­good . . . Gap
ad . . . kind of sentiment.”12 Nothing could be further from Wong’s aes-
thetic than a United Colors of Benetton style of multiculturalism; the
work is full of acerbic commentary. Indeed Persona Performa has more
satirical bite than many of Wong’s previous works, most patently during
the act in which the characters speak Alma’s lines and infuse them with

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 141

the second, politicized layer of meaning that seems to have been lost
on the reviewer. This second meaning corresponds to the fearless, risky
speech and silence that is already a topic in Bergman’s film but that is
made more bitterly evident in the contemporary American context in

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which Wong restages it.
Nevertheless it is true that Persona Performa has a certain “feel-­good”
quality to it, or more precisely a playfulness and light touch. Wong
seems to say that just because the inhabitants of Queens are working
class, diverse, and largely of foreign origin does not mean that they are
immune to the alienations and existential crises that afflict Bergman’s
pale, twin protagonists; on the contrary, such crises may be the norm
rather than the exception. At the same time, the work’s choreography
suggests an alternative way of making sense of these affects. What if
identity were always already a crisis, a work in progress, or a time-­based
performance? The dancing frames that lock together and unlock from
one another, that clasp and separate, allegorize this notion of identity
as a time-­based, interactive work, with each frame and figure emerging
as a character through movement and dialogue.
The glass windows that become film frames, the film that emerges
simultaneously with its pro-­filmic event, and the empty spinning pro-
jector that make up the mise-­en-­scène of Wong’s Persona Performa are
as important to the work as are the human figures. In a sense they are
ready-­made versions of the apparatus-­exposing images that Bergman
includes in Persona: the visible projector, found footage, glimpses of
naked celluloid, and so on. Only in this case the apparatus that is being
exposed is not specific to the medium of film; perhaps it is the concep-
tual channels and glasses through which we view the world even in the
absence of an intervening camera. As Susan Sontag argues, Bergman
was perhaps less interested in baring the device for didactic purposes
than the reception of Persona would suggest: “Bergman seems only mar-
ginally concerned with the thought that it might be salutary for audi-
ences to be reminded that they are watching a film (an artifact, some-
thing made), not reality.”13
This point is important, since it illuminates certain political and
feminist ramifications of both works. As critical viewers, we may have
grown accustomed to thinking of film as “only a representation,” false,
partial, and potentially infused with ideological content that must be

142 ::: Chapter Five

exposed by the intelligent filmmaker or spectator. Sontag, though, helps
us to understand that Bergman’s departures from illusionistic conven-
tion don’t really operate in the service of exposing artifice, nor of help-
ing us to distinguish fabulation from truth. As Sontag notes, Persona’s

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viewers may find themselves “unable to decipher whether certain scenes
take place in the past, present, or future; whether certain images and
episodes belong to reality or fantasy. . . . Sorting them out is a minor
achievement, and it quickly becomes a misleading one.” Certain images
might represent daydreams or hallucinations, but, as Sontag suggests,
they are still “possible, and may even have taken place” in the film’s die-
getic reality.14 These images are virtual: they cannot be vouchsafed as
true or false; they simple might or might not be.
We can contrast this indeterminate enunciation with that of Polan-
ski’s Repulsion (1965), a film that makes fairly clear that we have been
witnessing the delusions of a madwoman, or Cukor’s Gaslight (1944),
which reveals in the end that we have not been, or Fincher’s Fight Club
(1999), whose ending resolves any indeterminacy by revealing that the
two major characters are aspects of a single personality. Persona allows
similar construals to glimmer to the surface at times—Is Alma going
mad as she endures Elisabet’s silence? Has this scene taken place, or
was it a hallucination? Are Elisabet and Alma two aspects of the same
person?—only to submerge them again. It presents them as real ques-
tions that nevertheless cannot be answered definitively for the film
as a whole, only, perhaps, tentatively for a given scene. This principle
also applies to Wong’s Persona Performa: questions of identity and its
attributes, and of which images belong to the register of diegetic truth
and which are infused with subjective fantasy, are not exactly unan-
swerable, but they can only be answered moment by moment, provi-
sionally, in time-­bound ways.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson adds the self or ego to his list of forms
that can be approached as if they were static over time, as the intellect
would prefer, or as if they were caught up in the vicissitudes of tempo-
ral change that are revealed through intuition. As one might expect,
he takes the position that we are not the same people throughout our
lives, that our identities are not singular and unchanging over time. We
live in stages. But these stages cannot be set up end to end on a time-
line as though they succeeded one another in a linear, developmental

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 143

way, each coming to a clean close prior to the next one commencing.
Bergson suggests that we are made up of a succession of states that are
distinct but that mutually interpenetrate, reaching forward and back-
ward, forming a continually evolving whole in which past and present

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loop through and overlap one another. “Pure duration” he writes, “is
the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when
our ego lets itself live . . . when it forms both the past and the present
states into an organic whole [quand il s’absitent d’établir une séparation
entre l’état présent et les états antérieurs], as happens when we recall the
notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.”15 As in the case
of Bergson’s melody, our egos are not isomorphic with themselves: we
cannot break off a chunk of our biography or reorder its chapters with-
out fundamentally altering the composition of the whole. Bergson con-
tinues, “Pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of quali-
tative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without
precise outlines.”16 We are not identical with ourselves over time, nor
are we a jumble of shattered fragments. The through-­line that makes
us ourselves is not a timeline laid out in an orderly column but rather a
messy, looping circuit that wanders in unpredictable ways through our
pasts, presents, and futures.
As we have seen, Bergson turned to the metaphor of the cinemato-
graph to critique ways of thinking that isolate select points on a line
and then attempt to string them into a unified, moving whole.17 With its
twenty-­four still frames per second, Bergson argued, the cinema offers
only an illusion of continuous movement; in fact it is composed of dis-
crete instants, locked into frames, all of which are already given from
the start and fated to unspool on the reel the same way each time. He
suggests that, like the cinema, a model of thought based in such an illu-
sion fails to take account of the true nature of time, which is smooth,
frameless, not perfectly linear, and, most important, admits of chance
and change. At first glance Persona Performa might seem to partake of
the cinematographic model that Bergson critiques: each figure is a dis-
crete frame, carefully numbered and queued up, as if they were boxes
on a census form or figures in a multicultural amusement park ride.
But through Wong’s use of blurred enunciation, multiple media, over-
lapping dialogue, and graceful dance movements, the figures in Persona
Performa come across less as a tally of separate personae, each one dis-

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5.11. Alma and Elisabet in Persona, directed by Ingmar Bergman (1966).

connected from the next, than as states that melt into one another. In
Wong’s reinterpretation of Bergman’s film, outlines are rendered yet
more imprecise, the frame yet more tenuous than it already is in the
original. On the one hand, it is a virtualization of Bergman’s film, in the
sense described here by Pierre Lévy: “Virtualization . . . calls into ques-
tion the classical notion of identity, conceived in terms of definition, de-
termination, exclusion, inclusion, and excluded middles. For this reason
virtualization is always heterogenesis, a becoming other, and embrace
of alterity.”18 On the other, it also unvirtualizes the film, or more specifi-
cally elements of it that are revealed to have been latent there but that
might never have become visible were it not for Wong’s restaging with
this new setting and cast of players.
Sontag closes her essay on Bergman’s Persona with the image of Elisa-
bet and Alma locked in an embrace in close-­up. For Sontag it is an image
of vampirism: the parasitical activity of the actress who pilfers material
from others for her craft, and the clinging activity of the fan who ad-
mires and copies the star’s gestures and attributes. Gwendolyn Audrey
Foster reads this image as a portrait of lesbian desire, drawing on the

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5.12. A publicity still for Wong’s Persona Performa. Courtesy of the artist.

psychoanalytic model of the negative Oedipus complex for her inter-

pretation.19 There is a third possibility that I would like to add to these,
one suggested by Leonardo’s well-­known painting Virgin and Child with
Saint Anne.20 Wong’s own practice, which relies on techniques of appro-
priation, restaging, and reenactment, could be described as vampirical
according to one reading. Like Alma, the devoted fan, he mimics the
postures of cinema’s great fading stars, and like Elisabet, the great actor,
his performance relies on preexisting materials. Persona Performa also
teases out the queer elements in Bergman’s film by permuting the gen-
ders of the actor pairs. But it is finally the third of these readings that
gets us onto new terrain: like Leonardo’s Virgin and Saint Anne, Wong’s
figures melt into one another in such a way that the self is neither para-
sitic on the other nor bound up in the thrall of identification and desire.
Rather the figures are coextensive with one another: echoing each other
formally and occasionally becoming one, while still retaining distinct
outlines.
Wong sometimes installs his work in multiple versions that respond
to the specific sites in which they take place. The version of Persona Per-
forma that he created for the Museum of the Moving Image draws ex-
pressly from the local population there. A future version, the artist sug-

146 ::: Chapter Five

gested in an interview, might return the work to the island of Fårö,
thereby implicitly connecting this isolated place to the other spaces in
which the work has been performed.21 This gesture would surely be in
keeping with the principle of connectivity and continuity and of dif-

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ferences that saturate each one into the next like the movements of a
dance.

:: :: ::
As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the artist Elmyr forges
Picassos; we see him making them in Welles’s F for Fake. I suggested,
though, that Elmyr’s paintings can be understood not just as counter-
feit Picassos but as virtual ones. They are almost Picassos, so close as
to be indistinguishable. They are not poor copies or substitutes for any
given authentic Picasso; they are images that, through their form alone,
suggest an interpretation of the artist or a reenactment of his painting:
they implicitly think about what “Picasso” means and what this group
of images can convincingly include. Elmyr’s forgeries, I would claim, are
not cheap imitations of creative work, but creative acts in the strongest
sense of the term, because he not only makes new pictures; he changes
the existing ones too, compelling us to rethink their place in relation-
ship to the interloper who is now a part of the group.
In a similar way Baudelaire’s The Makes is perhaps better understood
not as a fake documentary but as an exercise in making virtual cinema.
Unlike Elmyr, Baudelaire does not fully create the virtual Antonioni
films that The Makes is about; he merely describes and illustrates them,
just enough so that they become credibly imaginable. But the effect is
similar: whether or not we are tricked by the documentary frame, we
are invited to reimagine film history with a new tetralogy or more of
Antonioni films. Persona Performa continues this logic with yet another
strategy: the frame of actuality is dropped altogether. Instead Wong
imagines another Bergman, a virtual Bergman, revealing hidden poten-
tials, detours, and political resonances in his oeuvre that are, in a sense,
created by Wong at the same time as he unearths them, since they retro-
actively appear there as the new work unspools.
These two contemporary artworks teach us something important
about the powers of the virtual. The virtual, it seems, does not require
fully realized, indistinguishable forgeries to do its work. It can plant

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 147

ideas with just a few fragments of script and some mildly credible film
stills. It can even operate on suggestion alone. Significantly it also does
not require that we accept the virtual work as authentic, even on first
glance. We do not unthink the thoughts we have had about Picasso once

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we discover that a given painting was actually executed by Elmyr. We
may reinterpret the image in light of the new information, perhaps
seeing things in it that ought to have tipped us off, but this is a con-
tinuation of thought, not an erasure thereof. It relates to what Bergson
meant when he called negation “an affirmation of the second degree.”22
The same is true for The Makes: it retains its power of suggestion about
the European New Wave’s journeys abroad even once we realize that it
is not based in historical fact, indeed even if we know before we view
it. Most surprising of all, the virtual operates even in a restaged work
like Persona Performa, where there is never any suggestion that we will
be looking at a real Bergman film or learning about ones that were lost.
The new way of looking at Persona that we might glean from this experi-
ence is in no way lessened or negated. After seeing The Makes, even while
fully knowing it to be fictional, we might see Blow Up in a new light;
after seeing Wong’s installation and performance, perhaps we cannot
view Persona in quite the same way again. It is more than that our in-
terpretations of these films have changed; the films themselves have
somehow changed, as if they were new. This is the power of the virtual:
to trace a looping circuit through the 1966 of Persona and back again, so
that its past and future course is altered by images crafted in the cur-
rent moment.

SUBSTANTIVE DURATION: RODEN CRATER

Erin Shirreff’s Roden Crater (2009) is a 14.5-­minute video loop and an ex-
ample of a nondigitalic work of new media art. It is nondigitalic in the
same way that certain works of cinema can be non-­“cinematographic,”
as Bergson put it. The video’s subject is the geological formation of the
same name, a dome-­shaped, extinct volcanic cinder cone with an interior
crater. The cone is approximately three miles in diameter and 400,000
years old. It lies near the Painted Desert outside Flagstaff, Arizona, and
the land it occupies is owned by the artist James Turrell, who purchased
it in 1977 with the help of the Dia Foundation. Since the late 1970s Tur-

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5.13. Erin Shirreff, Roden Crater (2009), video still. 14:34 minute loop, silent.
Courtesy of the artist.

rell has been developing a now legendary earthwork at this site, a cosmic-­
scale observatory that takes inspiration from prehistoric archaeo-­
astronomical sites like Newgrange, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, and the
Mayan and Egyptian pyramids. In the Roden Crater project, Turrell con-
tinues to work with ideas, architectural elements, and optical effects
similar to those he has used in smaller-­scale sculptural installations:
“skyspaces” in which carved apertures frame sections of naked sky and
“Ganzfeld pieces” that induce perceptual deprivation, a state of tempo-
rary blindness or optical hallucination caused by exposure to a uniform
visual field.23 The project has been cloaked in mystery, in part due to the
extreme inaccessibility of the site. As one visitor put it, “Be aware that
the desert is not a forgiving place, and that the crater is remote, many
miles from the nearest paved road. You can die trying to get there.”24
Throughout Shirreff’s video, the cinder cone appears in approxi-
mately the same framing and point of view, a landscape in a fixed
medium-­long shot. As the video rolls, breathtaking alterations of illu-
mination and color slowly infuse the image, as if the crater were pla-
cidly enduring a slow succession of changes in the weather, lighting,
and seasons. The work is unabashedly delicious to the eye, sublime and
stunning. Each color and lighting scheme morphs into the next as a
slow, continuous dissolve; there are no apparent cuts or edits. Occa-

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 149

sionally flashes of light or patches of shade move through the frame and
create more dramatic changes in illumination, suggestive of lens flare,
clouds casting shadows, or an approaching storm. While the light and
hue change visibly, the crater remains equanimous throughout with its

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gently rounded top always tracing the same arc. The image seems to
pulse with life. As one critic writes, Shirreff’s Roden Crater solicits an
awareness of the “temporal register” of the viewing time, “the dura-
tion and rhythm of recognition.”25 Calmly persisting, the landscape
appears to be undergoing those miniscule changes that take place in
what Robert Smithson calls “geologic time”: changes that are undetect-
able to the human eye, mathematically insignificant across the span of
a human life, and perhaps not even radical over the course of an entire
species’ tenure on Earth, but whose existence suggests the Bergsonian
idea that even the largest, most solid earthly objects, like the planet as
a whole, are in a state of constant motion and entropy through which
they nevertheless endure. Smithson, in a dazzling essay, describes geo-
logic time thus: “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Em-
bedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries
which evade the rational order. . . . In order to read the rocks we must
become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric ma-
terial entombed in the Earth’s crust.”26 With its massive yet not par-
ticularly unique or breathtaking silhouette, the Roden crater seems not
simply to endure, but to abide.
Roden Crater has the appearance of a time-­lapsed moving picture,
and its richly vibrant colors and grain suggest fine celluloid film stock.
Its referent, though, is not a direct image of the crater but rather a digi-
tal image that Shirreff culled from the Internet. She printed this image,
then reshot it hundreds of times in her studio under different lighting
conditions and edited the stills together to produce a continuous take
of digital video. The time-­lapse effect is real, in a way, but it comes not
from changes in the light and weather patterns around the actual crater
but from lighting changes artificially produced in the studio. It is the
photograph, not the crater, that is being “weathered,” exposed to harsh
light at one turn and dappled in shadow at the next. Roden Crater is a
work of digital sampling that has been filtered back through an analog,
photographic process. By these combined means and materials, it taps
into the virtual.

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5.14. Shirreff’s Roden Crater, video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Turrell saw that there was something special about the Roden cin-
der cone that made it an ideal place for an astronomical observatory. “I
had this thought to bring the cosmos closer, down to the space that we
occupy,” he stated in an interview. “A lot of people come to art and they
look at it. This is one of the problems with contemporary art. You don’t
actually enter the realm that the artist is involved in, you have a little
more of a distance.”27 One could not wish for a more precise description
of immanence. The view from inside the crater reveals something that
is usually hidden: that we are in the atmosphere, that sky and earth are
not fully separate from one another, that there is continuity between
them. This perspective is a powerful one, unusual in the conventional
landscape genre. It reveals that the gaseous, apparently substanceless
sky is on a continuum with the solidly material, and that our viewing
position—unlike the satellite’s-­eye view of Earth from outer space—is
also inside of this earthly matter and atmosphere. It is not surprising
that Shirreff also works in sculpture; her affinity for tangible matter
is palpable. Rather than set up her digital video works as a foil to her
sculptural works, she bestows on them an equal affinity for that matter.
To the airy nothing of the electronic image, readily available to anyone
with a computer and an Internet connection, she imparts a sense of
presence, singularity, gravity, felt duration, and reality.
Curiously, many reviews of Shirreff’s Roden Crater have emphasized

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 151

an opposite quality, describing the work as one that plays up its own
digitally reproduced aspects and irreality: its airy nothingness, as op-
posed to its earthy materiality. One critic describes Shirreff as working
within the “realm of reproduction and mediated experience.”28 Another

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writes that in this work, as in others in Shirreff’s 2010 solo show at
the Lisa Cooley Gallery, “we are dealing with replicas. . . . All the action
occurs on the surface . . . where the artificial nature of the works is re-
vealed. Once the sleight of hand is exposed, and the viewer realizes what
he is actually looking at, the stand-­in nature of the works becomes ap-
parent.”29 Writing of the glare of the camera’s flash on the reshot source
image, a third writer suggests that “the repeated flare of the apparatus
. . . undoes any illusion of viewing actual on-­site footage and returns to
the viewer an acute awareness of the ‘vehicle of communication’ itself—
the mediated image.”30 It is as if these authors were describing a work
of situationist détournement, one that bares its devices and winks at
its viewers.
The fact that contemporary art critics would experience Roden Crater
in this way seems indicative of a profound disenchantment with images
that besets the digital age. The safe, go-­to viewing position is one that
wraps itself in an assiduously Cartesian distrust of visual media and its
potential to propagate illusions and replicas. That a work so compel-
lingly visual, so unencumbered by language and theory, and so infused
with a sense of duration that, for some, it borders on the spiritual, could
be received as if it were a work of conceptual media critique calls for an
explanation. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Re-
production,” or rather its popularity and reception in subsequent de-
cades, may be partly to blame for how baked-­in the Cartesian distrust of
the image has become. The text can leave readers stalled between origi-
nal and copy, critical of the former’s elitism but wary of the latter’s easy
availability and capacity to dissemble. The logical response to this quan-
dary is to approach images in general with extreme skepticism. This re-
sponse, though, results from a specific reading of Benjamin, one that
assumes that the primary danger of the replica is its potential to trick
viewers into accepting it as an original, and that the primary danger of
the aura is its potential to induce a cult-­like, subservient fascination.
Ever since Benjamin’s popularization in studies of film and the con-
temporary visual arts, we have come to think of images made using me-

152 ::: Chapter Five

chanical and electronic devices, especially those capable of serialization
or mass production, as if they were “mechanical reproductions” in the
sense he describes. But this way of thinking confuses matters on several
points. First, it sets so-­called hand-­made, unique objects in opposition

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to those made with the aid of tools or machines. Second, it creates an
artificial divide between primitive tools or machines and modern tech-
nologies. Third, it fails to understand the difference between a copy that
attempts to replace or serve as an adequate substitute for its source and
one that functions as something else. Finally, it disregards the possi-
bility that even a bad reproduction can rise to the status of an original;
that is, it can accumulate aura.31 The postmodern position according to
which there are no originals and all is copy or simulacrum aspires to
think its way past this impasse, but without an accompanying account
of the virtual, it succeeds only in universalizing the demand for skep-
ticism.
Benjamin famously defined the aura in section 3 of “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a quality that inheres in a
“natural object” viewed at “the unique phenomenon of a distance, how-
ever close it may be.”32 In section 2 of that text, he introduces his dis-
cussion of the aura by way of a related concept: authenticity. He defines
“the authenticity of a thing” as “the essence of all that is transmissible
from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testi-
mony to the history which it has experienced.” Authenticating a work
of art of course means analyzing the object’s history and provenance.
More broadly, though, Benjamin seems to be saying that authenticity
and aura are related to “substantive duration,” that is, to time-­based
existence. The replica—say, a digital photograph of the Roden Crater—
sacrifices its authenticity, the accumulated history and patina of the
original rock, in order to “meet the beholder halfway.” With recording
technology, Benjamin writes, images and sounds left the cathedral and
the auditorium to enter the studios and drawing rooms of his era; in
our era they leave the studio and drawing room to meet us even closer,
on gadgets that fit in our pockets. Benjamin writes of the desire of the
contemporary masses to bring things closer, satisfying a desire for in-
stant gratification; portable digital technologies, as the story goes, ful-
fill this promise.33
In Shirreff’s Roden Crater, though, the cinder cone’s longevity and

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 153

remoteness are brought along with it when it meets the beholder in
the museum gallery or on a computer screen. This meeting is not, as
in Benjamin’s critique of the reproduction, a “halfway” meeting; it is
a whole one. This is because Shirreff’s Roden Crater is not a reproduc-

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tion. It is simply an image. It does not pretend to substitute for the
actual crater nor claim to put it within reach. Shirreff’s Roden Crater is
not a stand-­in for the earthwork by Turrell or the rock formation in the
Painted Desert, nor is it simply a poor copy of these, not even one that
dutifully exposes itself as such. The crater appears in this work not as a
pin dropped on a satellite map nor as a jpeg file found on a Google image
search, both of which tend to give the illusion of having no author, no
provenance, and no history; rather it carries the substantive duration
of the worldly crater along with it: the felt sense, if not the actual clock
time, of 400,000 years of rugged abidance through as many seasons of
fire, rain, drought, light, and darkness. This is not an imposter Roden
Crater; it is another Roden Crater, a new one, and a virtual one.
Here again the virtual shines a light through the impasse thrown up
by the shadow of the false and the true. The virtual work’s existence does
not take away from the actual Roden Crater; it adds to it, and not just
by providing a kind of advertisement for it but by making a real contri-
bution to the repertoire of its iconography. The fact that it was created
out of a single digital file does not diminish or invalidate the work; it en-
riches it because it thereby reminds us that something solid and power-
ful can be created out of so few pixels. One doesn’t get closer to the real
by increasing the number and density of pixels. One gets there by way
of the virtual: by coming close while preserving the unique phenome-
non of a distance.

AVID FELLOW FEELING: FOR ALAN TURING

I conclude this chapter with a return to the figure with whom I started,
Alan Turing, and from whom we will hear once more via a work of re-
combinant electronic music. In 2006 the electronic band Matmos re-
leased an ep called For Alan Turing. The album was commissioned by
Robert Oysterman and David Eisenbud of the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and was first performed at
the dedication ceremony of Shiing-­Shen Chem Hall there in March 2006

154 ::: Chapter Five

for an audience of mathematicians. The ep was sold in a limited edition
of one thousand, each copy hand-­signed by the musicians, Drew Daniel
and M. C. Schmidt. It followed closely from the band’s previous record,
The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (2006). Each of the tracks on

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that album is dedicated to a queer icon; the song titles include “Roses
and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein,” “Snails and Lasers for Patricia
Highsmith,” and “Rag for William S. Burroughs.” Like the tracks on The
Rose Has Teeth, the three pieces on For Alan Turing—“Enigma Machine
for Alan Turing,” “Messages from the Unseen World,” and “Cockles and
Mussels”—are dedicated to their eponym and draw from his biography
for their content, form, and source materials.
Turing’s final project in the field of cryptology was a prototype for a
secure-­speech machine. The machine, developed at Hanslope Park with
Robin Gandy, with collaboration from Bell Labs, was designed to encode
speech for transmission over radio waves.34 It provided the prototype
for the Vocoder used in electronic music of the 1970s and popularized
forty years later by T-­Pane in the form of Autotune. Turing ran a contest
to name this machine and chose the winning entry, Delilah, for its ref-
erence to the biblical deceiver-­seductress. In a classified report, Turing
refers to the machine as “she.”35 Delilah encrypted the voice using sam-
pling: rather than transmit the whole sound wave, she would transmit
select points along the curve, which the receiving machine would then
reconstruct, as in a game of connect-­the-­dots.
While digital in design, Delilah had an important analog aspect, for
she depended on the transmission of amplitudes, their shapes and cur-
vatures. Her name also suggests some of the same conflations that we
find in the Apple Computer icon between the rational and the sensu-
ous, the scientific and the mythological. Similar technology is used to
anonymize the human voice to protect privacy during testimony, re-
moving vocal identifiers such as gendered vocal ranges, regional ac-
cents, and so on. In her own way, Delilah was thus a project with queer
overtones, a project about covert communication that involved mixed
signals of gender. She was in some ways the opposite of the Turing Test:
her purpose was not to determine a gender or mark of human identity
but rather to erase these things and thereby render indeterminate the
distinction between communication and electrostatic gibberish.
“Enigma Machine for Alan Turing” begins with the pounding of a

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 155

dissonant, slightly metallic-­sounding chord. A faint clicking sound be-
comes audible. This high-­pitched noise would be at home representing
the chatter of 1950s-­era B-­movie science-­fiction insects. Another me-
chanical sound is heard: the clicks of an old-­fashioned dial rotating into

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place. Perhaps this dial opens a combination lock, powers a mechanical
spring motor, or tunes into a radio frequency. A third percussion ele-
ment soon enters, sounding vaguely like a switch flipping or thudding
into on and off positions in a hollow shell. This track provides a rhyth-
mic bass line for a layer of rapid, arithmetical, baroque invention-­style
piano arpeggios. The arpeggios, which briefly play solo, are soon joined
by a selection of electronic tracks that resemble the beeps and whirrs
of a video game—or perhaps, once again, audio effects supplied for a
midcentury B-­movie, in this case one in which the script called for com-
puter sounds or distorted radio transmission waves. The piano merges
with these sounds and at times becomes indistinguishable from them,
suggesting a relationship between two kinds of keyboards: piano and
computer.
Matmos’s audio work proceeds according to the method of musique
concrète, a practice developed by the theorist and composer Pierre
Henri-­Marie Schaeffer in the 1940s. Musique concrète mixes conven-
tional instruments with sounds and noises sampled from acoustical
objects in nature and the world. Drawing on radio and magnetic tape
recording technology developed during World War II, it was one of the
first sound genres to fuse digital and analog aesthetics. As Schaeffer
put it, musique concrète operates in the interest of “plastifying music,
of rendering it plastic like sculpture.”36 In Matmos’s work, digital and
analog sound aesthetics—electronic bleeps and piano notes, distortion
crackle and mechanical thumps—are at times audible as distinct tracks,
but at times they blend together. The clicking sounds on “Enigma Ma-
chine for Alan Turing” were sourced from recordings of an Enigma ma-
chine in operation.37 A digital tool, the Enigma, is here used as an ana-
log instrument, a “plastic” or substantive object that makes sounds. Its
sounds are then redigitized in the final recording mix. The piano parts,
which might seem at first to represent the analog or “concrete” aspect
of the music, have in turn been digitized in two ways. First, the piano
is an electronic one, played by M. C. Schmidt. Second, after the melody
was composed, its notes were enciphered by Matthew Curry using an

156 ::: Chapter Five

emulator running Enigma’s polyalphabetic encryption methods, using
only the letters a through g so as to be playable on a musical scale. These
notes were then replayed in their encoded form.38
The second song on the ep , “Messages from the Unseen World,” has

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a distinctive vocal track. A male, British voice (David Tibet of Current
93) repeatedly speaks the words “The universe is the interior of the light
cone of creation.” This is a quotation from one of four postcards of cryp-
tic poetry that Turing wrote and sent to his friend and colleague Robin
Gandy in the early 1950s and which represent some of the final docu-
ments Turing produced prior to his death. Watery low tones and har-
monics of unclear origin similar to those heard in the previous song
sustain the musical track, interrupted by staticky crackling sounds and
a high-­pitched electronic ringing. As this approximately seven-­and-­a-­
half-­minute song progresses, the vocal track becomes increasingly dis-
torted and choppy, as if the speaker were attempting to make radio con-
tact from a distant galaxy. By midsong the repeated lyric is no longer
intelligible. The vocal has morphed into a series of clipped, nonsensical
but rhythmically adept percussive vocalizations. At the end of the song,
though, the voice becomes distinct one final time to speak the conclud-
ing lines of Turing’s poem, a line with unmistakably subversive, queer
implications: “The exclusion principle is laid down purely for the bene-
fit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted and become
charges or demons if allowed to associate too freely.”
The title “Messages from the Unseen World,” also quoted from Tur-
ing’s postcards to Gandy, invokes a second principle of musique con-
crète, that of the acousmatic. The term acousmatic, revived in the 1950s
by Schaeffer, refers to “sound that is heard without its cause or source
being seen”; this category of sound is familiar to students of film theory
by way of Michel Chion, who uses it to describe sounds that emanate
from spaces off-­screen or hors-­champ without necessarily being extra-
diegetic.39 In musique concrète, the unseen, unidentified elements of
the acousmatic are the material or plastic objects whose sounds are
sampled and then transformed through mixing and collage. In some of
Matmos’s recordings, these objects remain unidentified or distorted—
abstracted, in a way—such that the sounds can no longer be attributed
to a specific material. The term originates from the Greek akousmatikoi,
a pedagogical technique used by Pythagoras in which students were re-

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 157

quired to listen to his lectures in silence while he spoke from behind a
screen or veil. Epistolary forms like postcards, indeed written forms in
general, likewise involve a situation in which the author is absent in
image and body and present only as language. This situation becomes

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yet more pronounced in a keyboard exchange where not only the body,
face, and voice disappear but also the traces that would be left by hand-
writing.
In acousmatics the composer aims to keep the sources of sound hid-
den, like Pythagoras behind his screen, in order to decouple the listening
experience from knowledge about its origins that might interfere with
or precondition the listener’s reception and experience of the music. It
involves a depersonalization, a removal of the markers of identity and
attribution that would allow the listener to identify the audio source.
As a musical duo and couple who produce work under a single epithet,
often with their individual contributions not absolutely specified, Mat-
mos embody this principle in their practice. They also embody it in their
name, which was inspired by the seething lake of evil slime beneath the
city of Sogo in the 1968 film Barbarella, but which also translates from
the Swedish for “mashed food”—or, as Rick Moody and Michael Sne-
diker put it, “purée, which more exactly describes matmos.”40 These vivid
metaphors connect to another aspect of acousmatics: the abstraction of
sound, a mincing up and blending of distinct objects and a movement
away from figural reference that loosely approximates the movement
of abstraction in the visual arts. Finally, the acousmatic register aligns
in some ways with the operations of closeting and passing. An Enigma
machine passes as a snare drum, in a gesture that parallels a gay man
passing as straight, a woman passing as a man, or a computer passing
as human, tropologically if not in social significance and consequence.
The final song on For Alan Turing seems in many ways like a depar-
ture from the electronic aesthetics of the previous two tracks. “Cockles
and Mussels” follows a simple, standard time signature and features
a melodic refrain in a major key and identifiable guitar and violin
tracks.41 It also contains a rendition of the seventeenth-­century Irish
song “Molly Malone,” the unofficial anthem of the city of Dublin, sung
by Clodagh Simonds. According to his biographers, Turing played this
tune on the fiddle and drank wine on the day in 1952 that detectives
from Scotland Yard came to arrest him at his home. The song tells the

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story of a fishmonger who wandered the streets of Dublin hawking her
cart of shellfish. She died of a fever, but her ghost continued to roam the
city, pushing her barrow. A character by the same name appears in the
eighteenth-­century song “Apollo’s Medley.” This second Molly Malone,

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like the first, is a lost love object, and forgetting the loved one is poten-
tially fatal: “But poison be my drink/If I sleep, snore or drink/Once for-
getting to think/Of your lying alone.”
Matmos’s version of “Cockles and Mussels” invokes all three of
these melancholy tales—those of Turing, the seventeenth-­century
Molly Malone, and her eighteenth-­century counterpart—while situ-
ating them in a narrative about the voice and its impersonal sources.
From the first track of For Alan Turing to its third and final one, there
is a progression backward in time, from the 1940s of the Enigma ma-
chine to the folk tale refrain of Malone. The songs’ aesthetics mirror this
movement with a shift from the more electronic, computerish sounds
of the first track to the acoustic, lyrical, and melodic elements of the
final track. The album also moves from a register in which meaningful
human vocalizations are absent to one in which they take center stage.
The middle song, “Messages from the Unseen World,” dramatizes these
transitions internally, with its combination of digital and acoustic ele-
ments, and through the masking and unmasking of Tibet’s vocals with
a layer of distortion that settles and later dissipates.
There is a sense in which all of the voices on For Alan Turing, whether
bell-­clear or muffled, are voices that speak from beyond the grave, or
at least from a radically alternative space and time. Molly Malone’s cry
of “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh” forms the song’s chorus, and
at the song’s end, it is repeated by her wandering ghost. There is yet a
further layer of remove, since the repeated chorus takes the form of in-
direct discourse. The song is written in the past tense, and the singer is
both quoting his memory of Molly’s singing and “channeling” the re-
frain now sung by her ghost.
A key dimension of Matmos’s album is its dedication to Turing, which
in effect makes it a kind of gift and correspondence. As with the songs
on The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, these tracks are two-­
way; they have a sender and a recipient. Or rather they have multiple
senders and recipients: Matmos, who are already two, along with their
collaborators (Curry, Tibet, Simonds, et al.) and all the objects and in-

The Powers of the Virtual ::: 159

struments found in the world that contribute their sounds; the album’s
dedicatee, the audiences addressed within the songs, and the listeners
of Matmos’s music. A host of senders and receivers are referenced, ex-
plicitly or implicitly, within each song: the cryptographers on both sides

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of the war, Gandy and his postcards, the detectives who arrested Tur-
ing, Molly Malone and her auditors on the streets of Dublin, and so on.
How do these senders and recipients differ from one another? The
messages sent by military officers are in a sense one-­way: their pur-
pose is to impart orders and strategic information. Turing’s relation-
ship with Morcom too became one-­way at the moment that his friend
ceased to live. Turing’s encoded references to his sexuality in his pri-
vate writings and the cryptic poems he sent to Gandy were also in a
sense one-­way communications, the former until scholars began to in-
terpret and respond to them, the latter due to their extremely ellipti-
cal contents. What Matmos accomplish in For Alan Turing is to restore
multidirectional movement to these unidirectional communications, to
make them more “sociable” in Simmel’s sense. What is significant in all
these correspondences is not who sends what to whom but the very
fact and form of the address: the communication of a communicability,
which represents, as Simmel suggests, “the play-­form for the ethical
forces of concrete society.” For Alan Turing is, as Simmel puts it, “a gift
to the group—but a gift behind which its giver becomes invisible.”42 As
with Deleuze’s forger, who “becomes a person no longer” as he vanishes
anonymously into a world of images, sociable speech involves a creative
act, the creation not of a proposition or argument but of an implied
group or virtual community.
In For Alan Turing, Matmos take preexisting analog material—the
physical, plastic sounds of the enciphering machine; the poetic post-
cards that Turing wrote to Gandy—and convert it into a digital for-
mat. There it is remixed and transformed, and the original sounds and
voices are multiplied. But these techniques do not make a statement
about digital media as an endless series of copies of copies, its extensi-
bility to infinity, nor do they testify to remix culture as a prison in which
contemporary aesthetic creation is inevitably confined. Rather they re-
insert the found material into relationships with the present world and
into moving, durational time.

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