In his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013), D. Fox Harrell strives to establish a new relationship between the human or posthuman imagination and computing. Writing code, or working actively with computational media, are, for Harrell, activities of artistic, cultural, social, critical, and personally empowering expression. The great expressive potential of computational media comes from their capability to both reveal and construct what Harrell calls “phantasms.” Phantasms concretize cultural ideas as imaginative sensory artifices. Computational media are especially adept at detailing, fleshing out, and codifying cultural ideas. Phantasms are subjective cognitive phenomena which are situated, distributed, and embodied. They are combinations of mental imagery and collective ideology. Harrell classifies phantasms as: senses of self, metaphors, social categories, narratives, poetic thinking.
Developers of computing systems – working with images, text, sound, video, animations, and other computer-based media, both expose oppressive phantasms which perpetuate power relations and create new empowering phantasms.
Phantasms that can be created with computers combine sensory imagery with conceptual ideas. They encapsulate beliefs, knowledge, social problems, the encounter between self and others, and experiences of everyday life. Cognitive processes bring together “epistemic spaces” and “image spaces.” “Image spaces give phantasms salience and sensory structures,” writes Harrell. He confronts the crucial question of how computers can be deployed expressively. We are only beginning to understand “expressive epistemologies.” These are human worldview-based data structures that enable digitalized imaginative worlds and poetic phantasms. Phantasms are involved in apprehending the world on levels ranging from simple events to complicated artworks. On the socially critical side, computational phantasms expose the largely fictional nature of social norms which reproduce power and oppression. Power relations can be as “real” as the fascist boot stomping on your face, but the existentialist philosophical position is that the first step towards overthrowing power relations is to stop internalizing their self-justifying narratives, and instead deconstruct them, in your own mind.
The practice of making effective phantasms involves skillfulness in the translation between subjective or cultural constructions of meaning and the data structures and algorithms of computer science. Harrell divides the knowledge field of creating compelling expressions with software code and artistic digital design tools into (1) Subjective Computing (creative, poetic, figurative, and ethical/political expressions that resonates with the imaginative experiences of users), (2) Cultural Computing (Subjective Computing grounded in cultural context), and (3) Critical Computing (raising Cultural Computing to the level of confronting social phenomena and bringing about societal change).
A cultural phantasm is a group-shared phantasm that can be described according to a comparative, descriptive, or computational cultural model. Cultural phantasms tend to be socially entrenched to the point that we are often not aware of them. Computing systems can be designed to render cultural phantasms more visible.
Critical Computing is the design of computing systems done while contemplating the social and political values that they embody. “Agency play” is the expressive personal and social impact of interactive systems, while combining user and system agencies.
Computational creativity can bring to life the form of imagination that Harrell calls the “poetic phantasm”: impactful mental imagery and ideas involving verse, metaphor, allegory, or narratives. What he calls “expressive epistemologies” are especially inspiring or evocative cultural productions such as artworks. “Polymorphic poetics” are, for Harrell, aesthetically rich structural mappings in systems and interfaces among goals, designs, and significations. Subjective, Cultural, and Critical computing systems stimu late and disseminate phantasms.
Harrell seems unclear on the question of whether the decisive level affecting if a given technology empowers or disempowers people is the design or use of the technology. He writes:
The values built into the structures of computer systems can serve to either empower or disempower people. The same technologies that allow one to chat with a loved one across an ocean in a different country, or that customize a user interface based on where one lives, can be used for illegal surveillance and restriction of privacy. The same technologies that can be used for educational training or artful entertainment can be used for online bullying…
From the first sentence to the second sentence of this passage, Harrell contradicts himself in a way that indicates that he has not sufficiently thought this issue through. Which is it? Are these values “built into the structures” of systems in their design at a fundamental level (my position) or are the values a matter of how the already-designed-and-structured technology gets used?
The substantial value of Harrell’s work for the present study is his manifesto-like advocacy of the integration of “humanities and arts-based approaches to critical engagement with society and the world” into computer science. He draws attention to the gap between computational media artistic expression and “more mature media forms that have much more established conventions and strong communities” engaged in creativity and theorizing. Yet I wish to point out another undifferentiated blurry area of Harrell’s research. He writes:
Computational media systems all too often remain focused on self-reflexive exploration of the media themselves, as opposed to producing transformative content. Are these two activities – “self-reflexive exploration of the media themselves” and “producing transformative content” – really in such strict opposition to each other? Should not the theory and practice of social transformation also include reflection on the nature and form of the media itself that is deployed to attempt to bring about social change? The more salient dividing line – between two conceptual sub-categories of the category of “self-reflexive exploration of the media themselves” – would be between works which are merely fascinated with stretching the technical possibilities of given software envronments (thus indistinguishable from standard Silicon Valley practice) and those which reflect on the digital media technology in ways informed by philosophical or art- or media-theoretical questions about form and the underlying human-machine relationship established by the media at hand.