Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Homay King. Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 216 pp.  

Review by Alison Landsberg

4 March 2016

Don’t be misled by the title; this is not a book about memory. What it is, though, is a bold and far-reaching attempt to theorize the potential of the virtual. King carefully distinguishes the possible from the potential. The idea of possibility implies that one can calculate all outcomes at the outset; all trajectories are “foretold.” Potentiality, on the other hand, is much more radically open-ended. With potential, the truly new and unexpected can emerge. And emerge it does in the realm of the virtual. King performs a careful excavation of the virtual through incisive readings of Henri Bergson, Baruch Spinoza and Brian Massumi, among others, arguing that the virtual always entails an encounter with temporal duration: “The virtual requires the mutual enfolding of here and elsewhere, and now and then” (p. 70).

King is as at home in this abstract, theoretical terrain. But as an art historian, she constructs her argument through a concrete engagement with contemporary digital art pieces that reveal the materiality of the digital as well as its temporal dimension. Her account of the work of video artists such as Christian Marclay, Agnès Varda, Victor Burgin, Eric Baudelaire, Ming Wong, Erin Shireff, and James Turrell, all of whom grapple with the relationship between the analog and the digital, challenges the idea that the digital is fundamentally pre-scripted and coded, closed as opposed to open-ended. Of course, in a literal sense, these pieces are pre-scripted, digitally recorded. Her point is that a work like Marclay’s The Clock does not merely catalogue or reproduce the viewer’s experience of time but also changes it, making it feel shorter or longer at various moments. Her analyses lead her to suggest that virtuality lives at the fringes of all media of expression. She wants to argue that these forms can summon something new into existence, much in the way that the “antiphon,” the people’s microphone used by the Occupy movement, actually realizes radical democracy. It’s a shame that the stakes of the virtual—its capacity to generate and instantiate new political realities—don’t really come out until the end of the book. It is also surprising that King doesn’t invoke Jacques Rancière, who shares her interest in the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In fact, her analysis reveals the ways that art can, in Rancière’s words, “intervene in the general distribution  . . . of the sensible,” altering what can be seen or said or thought at any given historical moment.[1]

Nevertheless, this ambitious book reveals the power of cultural production to open up new ways of thinking and new directions out of the morass of the present.

[1] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York, 2004), p. 13.