Mediacology

On July 10 blogger and multimedia artist Theresa Duncan took her life. A few days later her soul mate Jeremy Blake stripped his clothes off and entered the ocean never to return. Both were video game designers, Blake was an established video artist, his video for Beck shown above. The Newsweek story below touches upon the link between technology and mental illness that sometimes manifests in disastrous ways. The more interesting angle is the creeping paranoia towards the end of their lives that they were being sabotaged by Scientologists, perhaps triggered by the project for Beck (who is a Scientologist).

I wouldn’t go so far as to blame the media for this sad story, though I’m sure many have considered it (there is a hint of the wagging finger in the Newsweek story), but am interested because the strangest part is how the couple lives on within the digital realm. This confirms what some (such as Mary Ann Doane) have written about concerning the subconscious motive of our civilization to create media: so we can capture death and contingency in order to escape life’s impermanence. Of this I’m certain: Duncan and Blake will be immortalized by film, for this story has the perfect intrigue of a noire script. But the screenwriter will most certainly have to omit Scientology from the script; otherwise it will never appear in a theater near you (or a small box on your computer screen for that matter). Maybe Twain was right when he said the only thing certain is death and taxes, but we can add to the list as well that our digital apparitions will be eternalized as long as we still have electricity.
Duncan’s digital remains: Wit of the Staircase

For a more literary take, read this article.

Art, Technology and Death: A Love Story - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com:

For some, technology and mental illness have long been thought to exist in a kind of dark symbiosis. Blake and Duncan’s case follows a long history that began when the electric age upended daily life with baffling, complex innovations. The first victim is believed to have been James Tilley Matthews, an 18th-century British merchant who thought France planned to take over England with a mind-controlling magnetic machine using technology developed by Frank Mesmer—from whom the word “mesmerized” is derived. More recently, the introduction of television inflamed the minds of patients who believed that their TVs were watching them or broadcasting secrets about their lives. In this regard, the Web is especially powerful. “The condition of being super-social and super-isolated at the same time is an Internet-era kind of thing,” says Fred Turner, a media historian at Stanford University, who speculates that as Blake and Duncan withdrew from friends, “their only reality check left was the wisps of information on their computer screens. And unfortunately, that isn’t a very powerful check.”

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