Salonism: The
Sunday Herald 1999
yesterday is real estate
Imagine, because I’d like you to, a brazen, nude hermaphrodite with the
clenched-fist face of Malcolm Muggeridge. Now
paste in a
soiled mattress, a motel room and a randy pensioner you’re convinced is
Bertrand Russell. While it may seem
the whim of a perverse mind at play, I’d also like to ask you to click
‘SAVE’ on that tableau vivant of the great Christian Moralist and the
Pacifist Philosopher for just a moment, as we ponder the links between Internet
porn, the emergent tourism of the 21st century and cheap holidays in other
people’s History.
As you read, the complete human archive - films and diaries and paintings and
newspapers, recipes and family photos, abstracted to strings of ones and zeroes
- is undergoing a steady, discreet conversion into digital data. Our
entire cultural record, available in every home, via the telephone, direct to
the screen, making History as convenient as the local 24-hour cornershop.
I submit that, just as the sailing ships of the Mediterranean empires opened the
doors to the New World, just as space shuttles ferry our astronauts to the
foothills of the infinite, so are our computers prototype time travel engines.
The technology may be gumming a rusk but steps to develop the undefiled
landscapes of our foremothers and fathers are already being taken. A
computer, a digital camera, a modem, some Photoshop packages: all you’ll need
to plan your own holiday in All Our Yesterdays.
Think of Tom Hanks in ‘Forrest Gump’, schmoozing LBJ, Lennon and
Bobby Kennedy. Think of the young
Dennis Hopper shanghaied into a car ad by his older, more cynical self.
Think, above all, of the potential ;wearing our own cut-and-pasted images
like spacesuits, we can freefall into the picture libraries of the past and
party with the dead. If the
software fits, any one of us can star in ‘Psycho’ or remake ‘The Sound of
Music’ with Diamanda Galas in the Julie Andrews role.
The
time-tourist in this world of perpetual now has CGI packages capable of
retouching the Zapruder footage to include a Take That reunion on the Grassy
Knoll. A few mouse-clicks arranges
the kidnap of Hitler and Goebbels from the 1938 Munich Olympics and strands them
forever, applauding, in the background of Uncle Isaac’s bar mitzvah video.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Grace Jones pushing your pram through Palermo
in 1974? No problemo. We have the power to stalk Saddam, undetected, through Gulf
War footage, hang out in old ‘Dad’s Army’ episodes or insert our grown-up
faces into black and white albums, haunting mum and dad before we were born.
Cut-and-paste, edit, save, delete, merge, rotate, shear.
What once seemed solid and certain dissolves, liquefies and ferments,
metamorphosing like a moth in a bag.
I recall a time when the past, romanticised till it shone or thundered, was
pimped as something truly ‘unspoiled’ and ‘untouchable’; the foundation
stone, the eternal rock of tradition upon which our days and lives were built.
Instead, the spectacle of two grand old men of letters engaged in a
sweaty power exchange on the VDU behind your eyelids.
A curious glance at the digitally-counterfeited ‘celebrity porn’
sites on the Net will reveal, to your undoubted delight or dismay, that Famed
Philosophers Faking is not so far from the truth of the labyrinthine byways of
alt.sex. No-one is safe any longer, no image beyond capture,
dissection and proliferation, no text sacred and inviolate. A dignified, elderly scholar is easily implicated in a
pornographic scam or sampled and condemed to rap on a club track. Joe McCarthy
and Joe Stalin can be made to kiss like Romeo and Juliet. The only price
we pay for our conquest of History is an acceptance of its rules; we, in our
turn, must agree to become fair game for cameras, computers and wire.
So, aside from insulating yourself with lead shielding, there is really very
little you can do to prevent your next door neighbour from snapping a series of
digital photographs of you chasing the ice cream van. There is nothing you can do to stop him downloading his
results and morphing your head onto the shoulders of John Knox, for purposes of
sexual arousal. The homegrown otaku
from number 45 already has access to technology which permits him to pleasure
himself before an onscreen display of your prize turnips grafted to a torso of
Marilyn Monroe...if that’s what toggles the scamp’s joystick. Hardcore
Disney, the Mona Lisa discreetly swallowing while Michelangelo’s David smokes
a fag in the background, Dolly the Sheep baying at the moon.
Like dodgy middle-aged bachelors booking flights to Chiang Mai, we tremble on
the threshold of a kingdom of unleashed, unpoliced desire.
It will be fascinating to see if we can be trusted any more than they
can. The past is, indeed, another
country; you can grab it by the acre for the price of a phone card and do things
to people there that would get you arrested back home. No passport required.
So relax, turn down the lights, power up the PC and unzip.
History can’t wait.
