β¦ 1. Layers, not depths
The digital doesn't know depth. It has no "interior" β only surface, folded into interfaces, codes, signals, archives.
But, as Nancy wrote, surface is not the opposite of depth, but its unfolded form.
β Depth in layering, glitches, delays, fragments β in "almost" feelings, in unexpressed but preserved.
π» Surface as event
Mode of presence without center, without essence, without mystery.
Not "flatness" as simplification, but flatness as intensity. Code is not hidden, it structures.
Images, avatars, interfaces β don't conceal essence, they are the essence, expressed in protocols, renders, responses.
In this sense, digital surface is the proper form of object existence:
how it responds, appears, is produced before the user's eyes.
β¦ 2. Depth as delay
Lyotard speaks of the unrepresentable as that which cannot be reduced to image or discourse, but still disturbs.
β In the digital, this depth manifests not as clear memory, but as lag, glitch, loading failure, as inaccessible folder in interface.
There lives the restless heart.
ποΈ Surface β not deception
Unlike analog image, which can simulate "depth" (in frame, in painting, in actor's body),
digital surface often self-reveals:
glitches, delays in rendering, incorrect texture overlay β all this speaks not of destruction of depth, but of its inapplicability.
Digital surface doesn't imitate depth β it offers another logic of manifestation:
- logic of assembly,
- logic of navigation,
- logic of response.
Depth, which can no longer be localized in center, in source, in core,
becomes fractal, tangential, scattering.
β¦ 3. Memory as structural forgetting
Digital memory β not storage, but selection system.
Algorithm decides what to repeat.
Deeper than depths may be that which disappeared from repetition cycle, wasn't reposted, didn't pass moderation.
This is not an archive, but a phantom of archive. That which was, but didn't become part of data.
π§ Surface β is the body of code
It doesn't conceal, but presences.
It doesn't lead inward, but disintegrates into trajectories of touch.
This is not what needs to be overcome,
but that through which something is possible.
β¦ 4. New mysticism: inhuman desire
What if depth is not about us, but about intervention of alien into our I?
β In digital: AI, avatars, characters, models that want us.
β There arises that which intervenes in me.
π‘ Place of eventness
Interface is a model of surface:
- boundary where user and object meet,
- space where interaction unfolds.
In digital field, surface is not an image of object, but relation to it:
it arises when you click, look, move.
It's not embarrassingly flat,
it's β depth that refused to hide.