In 2006 Warner Bros. released “A Scanner Darkly” a sci-fi thriller feature film. This Rotoscope movie, directed by Richard Linklater, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, features a remarkable invention called “A Scramble Suit”. According to the novel, the acclaimed American writer gave a description on this technological breakthrough as below.
“ The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers… Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human. As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure – the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next…
In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him – or her – was meaningless. ”
At the moment, this invention might only exist in a novel or a film. However, considering how people these days present themselves through their avatars on social networks, we might find that the ambiguity and blurriness of self and identity in the boundary of virtual world and reality, are not much different from how the scramble suit works. The numbers of “Like”, “Share” “Retweet” have been critically affected on the way that people construct their selves and identities in the virtual realm of social network.
The concept of impermanence in Buddhism does play a crucial role in this work, as the video projection image of human skin is actually an embodiment of photon particles that temporarily appear on external fabric of the sculpture. Therefore, its existence conforms to the Buddha’s idea. The word “Shell” in the work’s title implies the hollowness of artificial lives on cyberspace, created by the social network users.
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