Surrealist Resistance in the Digital Age: Attention, Daydreaming and Virtuality as Potentiality

Jonathan Crary, art historian, cultural theorist, and the author of the major work Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999), discusses how our perceptions have been disciplined and institutionalised in tandem with technological innovations in modernity, including the development of observational apparatus and visual techniques, which fundamentally reformulated our psychological and physical dimensions. While this may sound unfamiliar, there is an underlying relationship between Crary's work and Surrealism, particularly when he discusses daydreaming as a 'domain of resistance internal to any system of routinisation or coercion'.

In October 1924, the centenary of the publication of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto was celebrated with a major exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. What was the era like a hundred years ago? Some time had passed since the invention of various audiovisual apparatus, such as photography and cinema. The era of consumer society, popular culture and the media had arrived. People were adopting a new identity as the now familiar ‘masses’ or ‘consumers’, and a major reorganisation of perception and the body was taking place alongside this. A century later, we are witnessing the remarkable (almost violent) penetration of digital technology into our daily lives, and once again experiencing a significant reorganisation of perception and the body.

In my presentation, I will discuss the potential for resistance in the digital age by reimagining Surrealism's transgressive strategy. We are living in the digital age where the 'attention economy' is on the rise. When 'attention' itself becomes the focus and is increasingly exposed to violent exploitation and manipulation as it is formulated into a commodity, how can we conceive a space that resists the colonisation of our final frontier: the realm of our psyche?