Transparency

Letting light pass, letting lines of sight penetrate the surface and re-emerge at the other end without noise or distortion is transparency. In a different system of ethics and social dynamics, transparency also means letting internal compulsions and vulnerabilities show. It also means to not sculpt and curate one's public persona. To let things stand where they stand.

In the environment we live in, transparency is almost universally acknowledged as a positive value. Transparency is always apparent and always operates in apparent contrast to something else. It is a bricolage concept. The dense mesh work of the transparent with the opacity makes it possible to register either of them. Thinking of the negative space of transparency also yields certain value. What is shows makes sense only in relation to thinking of what is hidden. These are the basic principles to understand how any surface might behave differently if it were to be selectively transparent. To understand how when an ordinary surfaces becomes a media screen what does it have going on in its head.

Transparency can be a strategic instrument for psychosis too. What is shown and what is hidden in a given field of experience at every ongoing moment can be a choice and can productively render psychosis to be an internal experience and not a public spectacle in a world that chooses to read it as an aberration only. In the hands of a crafty and survival-minded psyche, it can lead to the creation of a very inventive and theatrical persona.

The profiling of personas does not work and pattern-analysis yields information about individual actors to be able to picture or simulate them. The dynamic and continuous rhythm with which the transparent and opaque filters dance together decides which parts of a given persona is revealed at any given time. If anything this dance needs to be tracked, and however impossible a task it is, analysed to yield some coherent identifying information. Otherwise it is impossible to know anyone or anybody. Every social interaction is fraudulent, every ID is fake. All hyperlinks lead to nowhere.

Animals are the only exceptions to this conundrum. They float around in the landscape, following smells, trailing the light. Animals maintain a front which is indivisible, you can't carve out an interior from an exterior. You have to operate on face value. There is no after-thought, no forethought, only a sensory paraphrasing of stimuli.

Transparent surfaces are the least guileless. They can enact fraudulent transactions, entrap, puncture balloons the easiest. What transparency achieves can only be stated through complex layers of political opera. It has no channel for conveying innocence.