Fragmenting Reality: An Abyss between the Virtual and the Physical

In the post-information age, we are accustomed to the accumulation and evaluation of personal as well as collective data. This allows for governments and corporate actants to police individuals and generate capital (respectively). While both aspects of targeting individuals are controversial and populate debates around ethics and privacy, they continue to be legal and largely accepted by a globalised (unequal) public.

At the peak of its expansion, the digital space now leaks into the physical world. The resultant cognitive and functional seamlessness between these two supposedly separate realms has led to a partial reintroduction of our own spatial realities. In the case of Abyss, an ongoing photo series by Thiruvananthapuram-based artist and photographer Joe Paul Cyriac, the recalibration of spatial mapping in virtual space is explored as hyperreality through a series of fragmentations.

For Cyriac, the project began in March 2020, when India went into nationwide lockdown to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. He started using Google Street View as a way of travelling virtually. Cyriac collected images that had been uploaded on the app via the Google user base in the country. Abyss offers a series of screen captures as photographs that present a simulacra of digitally intravenous reality, where representation interacts intimately with reality. Unlike other parts of the world, Google Street View was restricted by the Indian government in 2016, citing national security. While Google’s own cameras are not permitted at the street level, users continue to populate the app with their own 360-degree photospheres. 

Over a telephonic conversation, Cyriac tells me that the screen is a “Window to this world,” refraining from elaborating on which world he might be referring to—conjuring the image of a totalising reality between the digital and the physical.

In its present digital format, one enters Abyss via “Daydream,” a .GIF of nearly inconspicuous blue skies mapped on the app. The piercing at the centre of these otherwise scenic skies suggests a material dimension, enabling surreal qualities in its viewing. As the aesthetic conjures a synthetic, almost-real landscape; the growing seamlessness between the physical and digital world comes under question.

Heightening the surreal quality of the collected photographs, in “Orders,” black geometric shapes—triangles, squares, polygons—are inserted in the image. These cut across the (assumed) three-dimensionality of the natural scene and the two-dimensional visual axis of the digital surface. One can speculate upon their incorporation as denoting absent informational spaces in these visual manifestations of errors. Errors rupture the very seamless quality that is espoused by a techno-optimist mindset. There is the quality of a world being thinly sliced that appears through this glitch. Here, the user is expected to perform a manual 360-degree panoramic and street-level capture, but errs in simulating the automated quality that is otherwise achieved by the Google Street View cameras. Cyriac collects images that lend themselves to this enactment: the pictorial frame between either edges along two axes are never fully aligned; often landscapes are subtly split into half; appendages are disassociated from bodies; shadows melt; the sky appears to have surgical wounds; water bodies rush in, alive. Seamless compositing is a quality of the digital—one wonders: did it even exist prior to the screen?

Cyriac tells me, “There is the sort of non-situation happening (in the series). Although there are clues as to what is really situational as well, according to public knowledge at the time.” He explains that the Google Street View project is “(Google) creating a map of the industrial world.” Informing the photo series is the background of a surveillance state: the incorporation of the data-mining biometric identification system of Aadhar backed by the country’s technocrats, internet shutdowns imposed by the government including Kashmir’s perpetual communication blackout, censorship in its many forms, as well as an allyship between the State and the Facebook-Whatsapp-Instagram social media conglomerate. Constant data accumulation points to an insidious form of control and partnership between the central government and private corporations in the accruement of data as value and surveillance for profit.

With a governmental regime that is pushing towards the ideal of an all-encompassing, centralised economy and polity; a state of total surveillance lies within speculative reach. An example of centralisation through brute force was the largely autocratic decision of demonetising all 500 and 1000 Rupee notes (again, national security cited, linked with black money). Demonetisation led to wider adoption of centralised digital payment systems like the Unified Payments Interface, which is instrumentally linked to the Aadhar. This decision ignored the reality of a by and large informal economy and professional sector occupied by a demographic without access to such digital infrastructure.

Cyriac says,

“I chose images that could represent the kind of contemporary India that I was witnessing through my mobile screen. The same screen that I am using to take the images and travel through India, using this platform, is where I am also learning what is happening—in terms of politics and developments—in the country.”

Mirroring the digital present, there is a dense, evolving set of information that one can extrapolate from Abyss. The nature of Cyriac’s project allows visual affect to create linkages for the viewer. In these fictional found images—occurring between the cracks of the physical and digital world—there are personifications, deterritorialisations, fragmentations of the human body and spaces removed of contextual signifiers. It is a refusal of the apparatus of capture and ultimately, control, that Cyriac’s work speaks to.

All images by Joe Paul Cyriac. Thiruvananthapuram, 2020–Ongoing. From the series Abyss. Images courtesy of the artist.