"i" am equal to my (8) Bits?

I love Black Eyed Peas (BEP). They've always done fun mixes with their music and find interesting "pop" ways to put a new beat onto some old, popular numbers. This time around they played around with a very popular Sound Track from the movie Dirty Dancing.This is called ' The Time of My Life.'
What caught my attention and why I talk about it here is because of the video. The final product and the way it has been shot are both have interesting aspects that I discuss below.

But first the videos: The first is the music video itself and the second is the making of the music video. 

Note the following in the music video:

• Everyone turns into "Pixels/Bits" at some point or another during the video.
• In the beginning of the song- Will.I.Am's face, and later, Taboo's face morphs into a Monitor with the faces of the other band members showing on it.
• The use of 3D animated "avatars" of all the BEP members.
• The use of the latest Black Berry tablet (- which is suppose to give the I Pad a run for its money.

In the making of the video, note the following:

• the director says the video is trying to bridge the 80s with modern visual effects techniques. (Aside: the point of reference for what is "modern" here is questionable..for wasn't the 80s cyber punk films galore? )
• part of the video is shot with 3D- 360. 

Some of the points above bought to mind ideas by two important theories in the study of new media- Lev Manovich and Donna Haraway. 

The idea of everyone turning into pixels or "8 bits" is not a far cry from our present day lives. Many aspects of our selves/ lives, if not all, can be reduced to information or what is called binary code/bits/pixels. In other words, some basic unit of information readable by a computer.
Manovich in his seminal work 'The Language of New Media' (2001, The MIT Press, Massachusetts) argues that media became "new" with the convergence of two major historical trajectories- that of computing and media technologies.
This convergence has led to "the translation of all existing media into numerical data accessible through computers."
The reason I bring in this idea- is like mentioned above, our "selves" are in a lot of ways reducible to information that can be accessed by computers. We can be "reduced" to pixels and bits as much as we can be "reduced" to genetic codes (Haraway takes this a step further, which will be discussed later).

Think about it! Right from when a baby is conceived and "mapped" on a sonogram as a "digital image", to recording home videos of when a baby first walks, to academic and work records online, biometrics for passports and visas, profile pages on networking sites, email, blogs, CCTVs.. and the list is endless.  It doesn't stop there. We, the government, marketeers, search engines etc. all keep track of our online presences in the form of billions and billions of bits of information.So BEP's video is probably only a representation of what we have (it's not even a thing of the future any more) become.
A glance at the above would bring in questions related to surveillance, power and privacy. These issues however are much too large in magnitude to bring  in here, and would serve for interesting debates in another post. What I would want to point out to, is the new possible ways in which we can and probably need to start thinking about ourselves.


Donna Haraway  was one of the first people to contemplate these new possibilities. In her meditation on the complex relationships between information, body and power, she revisits and reworks previous ideas from information sciences and cybernetic theory to conclude that " nothing, in essence, can resist being coded as information, including the 'human' body." She goes a step further and proposes that any object can be interfaced with another, if the appropriate standard and code can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.
What the above means (at the cost of over simplifying) is that basically, since all objects, organisms and spaces can be reduced to basic units of information (like pixels, binary code, bits etc), they can also "interface" with each other and exchange and incorporate information, if the right "common language" can be built.
Thus, Haraway suggests that we would have to break down all previous barriers that exist between human, animal and machine. The entities that emerge from such an exchange are what Haraway calls 'Cyborgs'.
 (ideas of Haraway as discussed in Gane and Beer's ' New Media: The Key Concepts; 2008; Berg Publications; New York.)

Considering all this, those interesting frames of Will.I.Am and Taboo in the BEP video with monitors for heads and human bodies, may not be such an implausible idea after all.

The "Future" is now! :)

Wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!

Cheers!