Jeffrey's Midterm

Using Guru Meditation I am continuously reminded of N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman. In particular I think of the passage, "The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction." This app foregrounds our subjectivity in a disembodied yogi. We are the floating yogi. More than just an avatar that we control in this game he (she, it, ?) is the digital representation of our heightened consciousness. It is meant to be a visual presentation of our ability to be mindfulness. Later in the same section of Hayles she cites deLeuze and Guattari and their concept of a "body without organs" which brings to mind Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs. Guru Meditation is our meditating agent that desires our conscious engagement with a meditative state. It demands its form of meditation in order to function. Otherwise it is simply a figure sitting in a dark place. There is no way of forcing the app to show us what it will do when we obey it's needs, namely sitting still and quiet, except to comply.
Guru Meditation also fits the article "What is an app?" perfectly. Of course Bogost both wrote the article and "wrote" the app so it would stand to reason that they would coincide. Using the Guru Meditation app I think about the dictionary definition that Bogost alters to fit the actual app and not just the word. It is hard to imagine what the not-slanged and not-shortened version of this application would be, but it is easy to see how it has slanged and shortened the practice of meditation. It seems very apropos of the zen buddhist practice of running meditation. In his information section on the app Bogost imagines people using it on the bus or in a crowded place and engaging in mediation on the fly. Whereas meditation has traditionally been a practice of becoming and then remaining still, Guru Meditation condenses this. It demands immediate stillness and then encourages you to best your previous records for focus.
I am above all else frustrated by this app. I see meditation as something that you cannot do wrong. Guru Meditation on the other hand demands strict adherence to its way of being. I find myself not letting go and becoming still but increasing in agitation until I give up. In fact during today's experience with it I felt, for the first time, that it actually did reflect my mindfulness at the end. Something went awry and my app entered a sort of schizophrenic loop between the opening screen, the all black screen with the figure, and the guru on his mat. It cycled through this repeatedly while buzzing a static tone. I thought "yes, this is in fact a reflection of my state of relaxation." A constant attempt to enter a meditative state that is constantly being drawn back out to general awareness only to attempt to dive back in, with the same results each time.


I have an app called Gilt. It is an iPad app for an online clothing store that sells designer clothing and goods at discounted prices. It also has a section, Jetsetter, in which it is possible to book lavish hotel accommodations at high end resorts around the world. I find it fascinating because it is an app designed to improve upon the experience of shopping a website which in turn was designed to improve upon or at least simulate and/or replace the experience of shopping in a store.
Removing the website from the equation however it is curious to see what has happened. The app is on the third level of the simulacra. It is very really founded on the model and aims at total control. It maintains the "cart" of the real store and the "departments" to separate goods but it offers the user a seemingly all seeing and all accessible interface to them. It is founded on a concept of shopping to which there is no original. Even the department store, were there to be a brick and mortar Gilt somewhere, is founded on a fallacious idea of the marketplace. In fact the fact that Gilt does not exist as an actual place is indicative of the level of simulacra on which this app operates. It is meant to be a representation of a thing that does not exist in reality. It is a cybernetic game in which users shop a store that is not real. However, the experience of shopping Gilt influences our concept of how we shop in reality. We want the real world to reflect our ability to have unbridled access to goods like we do online. In a very real sense the experience of shopping online recreates an ideal for which there is no origin. It is a "desperate rehallucinating of the past" in which the "real" experience of shopping can never surpass the model because this real was "only the pretext for the model."
On the other hand these images of goods are indicative of the first order of simulacra. The photographs are signifiers of the actual goods. They grasp toward reality and the real object.