C.D.s and Other Things

February 23, 1994
Issue 

By Gyorgy Scrinis and Peter Lyssiotis

When the Compact Disc first emerged in the 1980s, it participated in the undermining of one of our most long-held assumptions. With the C.D., the whole distinction between Side A and Side B of the old vinyl record was collapsed. With the C.D., all the tracks are on the one side.

Side A and Side B were more than just two sides of a record, for they framed the way in which we engaged with the world in general, and musical recordings in particular. There was Side A, and then there was Side B. We usually had our favourite sides. We could play Side B before Side A. When one side finished, we would get up and flip the record over to the other side, since Side A was not Side B, and Side B was not Side A. If someone asked what side of the record was playing, you would reply Side A or Side B. There was no getting around the fact that there were two sides to every record, Side A and Side B.

The C.D.'s collapsing of the Side A/Side B distinction paralleled that other world-historic collapse of the late '80s: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the distinction between Eastern and Western Europe, based on the great Capitalist/Communist divide. Now, is the C.D. revolution just a metaphor for the collapse of the Berlin Wall (and of other dualisms), or could the two be connected in some way, one following so closely on the heels of the other?

Until recently, it was only the sky and the angels over Berlin that united the East and West sides of the city. What is it now that brings the two sides together? What kind of unification is this?

No matter how many guards were posted at the Wall, no matter how many road-blocks were set up, there was always something that escaped, that penetrated the Wall: information. Information, not in the narrow sense of facts and data, but in the sense of human relationships stripped of their aura, and carried by the technologies of communication. Print, telephone, television. Words, sounds, images.

As these words, sounds, images cross the walls, the cities, the national boundaries, and the globe, they blur the space and time distinctions that we in other contexts take for granted. The same applies in the realm of movement. When we are out walking, we confront social and natural constraints, boundaries and obstacles. But these are the very sources, the conditions of possibility, of the experiences, pains, and pleasures that we encounter on the street. In an aeroplane and in a car, these particular constraints are transcended, as are the experiences that accompanied them.

As the technologies of extension and abstraction — computers, televisions, cars, aeroplanes, commodities — integrate distant places ever more tightly, the distinctions between different contexts are slowly erased, both materially (in "reality"), and as "reflected" in our minds. As these old boundaries dissolve, different places start to become part of the same flattened-out homogenous space. At this level, the other side stands-by for us as always instantaneously available. In this sense, the other side has been colonized.

The compact disc itself emerges out of the Information Age. It collapses the distinction between Side A and Side B. To ask what is on the other side of the C.D. is a bit like asking what is beyond the edge of the Universe, or, what happened before the Big Bang? It is a nostalgic question, which can only be asked, and only makes sense, from the perspective of earlier and increasingly submerged ways of understanding the world. The response can sound absurd: there is no other side.

But if there is no other side that is other to our own — the outside, the external, the beyond, the unknown — then what space is there left for the imagination to flow into — a place from which to imagine something that is fundamentally other to our own reality?

To the extent that there is no other side, you don't need your imagination, at least not in its prior forms. That's why we have television — virtual reality, Disneyland, etc — the colonizers of the imagination. And it's because we have television, C.D.s, mobile phones, etc, that there is no other side.
[This essay and photomontage are taken from the book C.D.s and Other Things, by Peter Lyssiotis and Gyorgy Scrinis. Distributed by Manic Exposeur and now available in bookshops at rrp $7.50.]

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