As a film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is a landmark of both science fiction and cinema in general. Contemplating the tenuous relationship between humans and nature, art, and technology, it chronicles the strange occurrences upon a ship on the planet Solaris. Astronaut Kris Kelvin is tasked with traveling to the spaceship to discover what is happening there, but instead, he is immersed in a mystery when he is haunted by the corporeal presence of his long dead wife, Hari. What unfolds is an attempt to reconcile this reproduction with the memory of his late wife, and whether he can allow the figment to replace her. The question appears to be irresolvable, as the illusion always refers back to the original woman. Although the reproduction is the one that is present, it is impossible for it not to stand in contrast to what it is reproducing.Manuel Schmalstieg’s Google Street View Solaris project, an offshoot of LOW-REZ Stories, takes the elongated highway scene of the movie as his inspiration for a meditation on a similar idea. In his semi-narrative video installations, Schmalstieg takes “remote webcam feeds tracked by spider-bots, captured and combined into a self-generating cinematic video landscape.” The videos have no origin or destination, but rather exist staunchly within the confines of the journey. It acts as a documentation of the highway, while implying that through its movement it is leaving one place and going to another. Without an immediate referral, however, it exists in perpetuity within its endless movement.In the original film, the scene acts as a portal from the pastoral countryside, where the journey originates, to the bustling highways of the comparatively futuristic city destination. The scene terminates in a long shot over a sea of traffic that suggests a feeling of alienation where everyone is equally absent and present from one another. The highway scene operates as an umbilical chord to the natural setting wherein the futuristic city is never disconnected, however distended the relationship may be. The same technology that brings them together also divides them. This conceit of present absence has long been important in film and is especially poignant in the era of digital video and intermediary social networking. How can we be so constantly in the presence of everything yet still be so isolated from it, all at once?Just as the reproduction of Hari always refers back to the actual woman, rather than replacing her, the highway scene represents the tenuous yet still present relationship between nature and technology. Although presented with a copy of his former lover, Hari is never exact and thus Kris Kelvin is never satisfied. And yet, through his inability to be wholly happy he is able to refer back to the original memory of his wife. Similarly, there is an inherent dissatisfaction in the character of Burton, who has just returned from Solaris, during the highway scene, which highlights the absence of others although they are all around him.Rather than be put off by the uncanny valley of social communication and the omni-documentation of Google Street View, we embrace its imperfection for its referral back to what’s real. It is not a repudiation of real life through a reification of narrative, but rather an abstraction that reminds us that it is not the full picture. In this case, the upended journey of the Street View video, by doing away with a human referent with an origin or destination, endlessly reminds an observer that there is more to the story. However, while it is an augmentation of communication rather than a displacement, it refers to the inherent solitude that people must feel when engaging in this collective omnipresence. In a sense, through the Google Street View, the problem of present absence has seeped from film into real life where, although we are more connected to the world and people around us, it is punctuated with an isolation that refers back to the original.What is important is that the natural is never subsumed by the technological and that the inherent solitude in these new forms of communication remind us of their origins. Technology should always exist in contradistinction to nature, lest we lose our humanity and whither away in a solitude buttressed by enhanced communications that are otherwise empty when they lack proper signification.[via Triangulation]
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