Pulse

The gesture of the Internet in the form of flesh Pulse brings the internet out of the ethereal and brings it into the real.  Serial experiments lane is the gold standard for art about the internet but pulse manages to surpass it part in one very important way. Pulse is live action therefore it gets to show how the internet manifests and impacts “real” space. Real bodies being contorted and distorted by the digital.  Because of this pulse serve as a uniquely visceral mirror to our current reality 24 years later. We may not see literal ghosts in our hallways but we do see ourselves and others contorted by a vaguely fragmenting digital noise.  This physical manifestation of it is a vitally important one. It calls attention to the fact that our relationship to technology is not passive but an active force pushing against us. Showing this physical relationship to the digital is extremely difficult to depict seen in the fact that there is almost no cinema seriously discussing the internet and its real effects on how we move and interact with the world.  In pulse suicide isn’t merely when we hang our selves or jump off of a building it’s also the moment where we silently fade into the background walls next to us. Our bodies may still be visible to some but our souls have glitched out of our flesh into our environment and onto our screens.  Pulse is an apocalypse of technological alienation from the self. To interact with the digital is to fracture oneself into a series of personas and objects and it seems every is doing it. Like a virus each interaction with the internet changes us, changes how we speak to others, changes how we speak to ourselves. We end up in rooms alone in front of our screens yet our voices from our various fractured digital selves bounce around the room. No wonder we all want to kill ourselves lol.