SHIFTING BOUNDARIES.
'Time is no longer related to movement which it measures, but
movement is related to the time which conditions it: this is the
first great Kantian reversal in the Crtitique of Pure Reason'
. Gilles Deleuze.
The 'revolution' generated by the shift from analogue
to digital media has not come with a unified aesthetic theory. Rather,
the accumulating effects of electronic media have transformed and
dispersed many of our assumptions about the making of art and its
relationship with communication, technology, media, distribution,
and temporality. Over the past decade, a range of works has matured
to the point where some serious re-evaluations are necessary. Computer
animation, digital video/sound/imaging, electronic books, hypermedia,
interactivity, cyberspace the terms of a new discourse with the
electronic need to be integrated with a shifting aesthetic discourse
reeling in the aftermath of critical theories of representation
and postmodern experience. The merging of technology and art raises
some key questions concerning the way in which experiences will
be articulated.
Encompassing literature, cinema, entertainment, and the arts, technology
has become the driving force accelerating the emergence of what
we might call telesthetics.
The ramifications of this accelerated shift are difficult
to assess. No cultural transformation has occurred without a corresponding
technology. Networks, expert systems, artificial intelligence, immersion,
interactivity, biogenetics, etc., are forms in which many of the
creative practices of the future will doubtless be grounded. How
much this relates to the relationship between computers and representation
is pivotal to grappling with the development of hyper, interactive,
cyber, virtual, and networked media. Indeed, the development of
digital media, networks, and technology form much of the basis for
social communication. And, if the development of technology succeeds
in creating a universal digital system of exchange (as seems likely),
then a far-reaching critique of communication will be necessary,
one that would account for the cultural meaning of technology in
terms of the meanings it forms aesthetically and politically. Revamping
representation in electronic culture is a key to tracking the complexity
and subtlety of the emerging configurations of communication.
Several key challenges face the development of digital
technologies: adequately to account for the shifting histories of
technology in terms of its relationship with cultural theory and
experience; to create a critical forum for elucidating the form
these changes take; to integrate social and aesthetic issues into
the discourse of technology; to develop initiatives for the support
of independent production; to find and identify means of distribution
for creative projects; and fully to contextualize the long and deeply
consequential history of electronic art.
Emerging from digital media, there is a kind of transformation
of several traditions: montage, narrative, temporality, a rethinking
or extension of the issues surrounding the simple semiotic constitution
of the image, and a concern with the 'temporalized-space' of electronics.
In electronic media, a new range of problems is developing
that invokes not merely formal issues of juxtaposition and association,
but also hose of the interplay (or collision) of text, image, and
sound in spatial and temporal layers. Instead of resolving as a
singularization, the flow of associations emerges as a fragmented
temporal narrative. In many ways, hypertext (for example) has developed
away from a simple text-based media into a polyvalent one. Instead
of the textual cross-referencing of hypertext, works engaged in
dynamic media collapse many of the limits between text, sound and
image, and situate the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback.
The effects of this are to suggest a field characterized by transition
and not resolution, in which experience teeters between epistemic
presence and temporal contingency.
What seems so interesting about works confronting
the shift from linear-causal models to relativistic ones is that
the creative process becomes a reciprocal system rather than a signifier
of narrative mastery. Grounding much of this experiential approach
is an evaluation of collapsing boundaries between discourses of
space and time in the realm of electronics. As Virilio writes: "The
measure of extension and of movement is now almost exclusively that
of a technical vector, a mode of communication or telecommunication
that desynchronizes the time from the space of the passage." Yet,
the blurring of spatial and temporal is less a communicative problem
than a cultural one in which reconfigured subjects navigate in virtualized
systems whose hold on the laws of physics is not "measured" in material
temporalities and whose despatialized effect is not a loss of presence.
Indeed, the interplay between history, memory, fiction,
and discourse poses essential questions about the meaning of electronic
media. Rather than approaches that equate the formation of linkages
in thammatic forms, approaches emerge that structure material as
episodic. One might draw on the development not only of literary
theory to account for this but also on cultural studies, particularly
the works of Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari. Foucault established
the relationship between information and power in terms of the archive,
and posed the methodology of archaeology to address it. "Archaeology,"
he wrote, "tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images,
themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses;
but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying
certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document as a sign
of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but
whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach
at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held
in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as
a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline; it does not
seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be allegorical."
[Archaeology, p. 139]
Episodic, or arrayed, information is created in forms
that suggest that the metaphor of the unified image or text cannot
serve as a totality, but rather that events are themselves complex
configurations of experience, intention, and interpretation. In
this sense, the narratives of electronics are non-linear and kinetic
rather than linear and potential. They suggest transition and not
resolution. Indeed, the language being used to describe these works
is telling in its implications: navigation, hyperlinks, archive,
database,
archaeology.
Deleuze and Guattari have found in the metaphor of
'a thousand plateaus' a way of theorizing experience in digital
media, the rhizome."The world," they write, "has lost its pivot;
the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher
unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary
dimension to that of its subject...A system of this kind could be
called a rhizome...The rhizome is altogether different, a map and
not a tracing...Perhaps one of the most important characteristics
of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways."
These 'entryways' are linked by an associational
network in which causal leaps are superseded by temporal connections.
So instead of cross-referencing, many of the works of electronic
media collapse the limits between text, sound and image, and situate
the user in the midst of assimilation and feedback. Episodic, or
arrayed, this information is created in forms that suggest that
the usefulness of the unified image, text, space, or time, cannot
serve as a totality, but rather, that the coupling of events are
themselves complex configurations of experience, intention, and
interpretation. In this sense, the narratives of electronics are
non-linear and kinetic rather than linear and potential, as both
representational practice, and as a measure of production emerging
as an essential discourse in the extension of ideas in the 'sphere'
of the experietial.
A recent book by Regis Debray, Media Manifestos,
outlined a broad framework for characterizing the social meaning
of media: Logosphere, Graphosphere, Videosphere, each corresponding
to a different 'regime' represented as 'after writing,' 'after printing,'
and 'after the audiovisual'. And while there are problems in such
historical characterizations, Debray identifies significant cultural
issues concerning the image. "Thus", he writes, "the artificial
image would have passed through three different modes of being in
the Western brain- presence (the saint present through his effigy);
representation; and simulation (in the scientific sense), while
the figure perceived exercised its intermediary function from three
successive, inclusive perspectives the supernatural, the natural,
and the virtual". This kind of reflexive model conforms with
what Debray admits as the work of mediology rather than historicism.
Yet, the scope of the issue extends beyond the limitations of these
two disciplines into the realms of social epistemology, experiential
psychology, and scientific methodology. Nevertheless, the outline
serves to suggest that the virtualization of the image has a history
rooted in the symbolic even if Debray does not account for the technologies
forming these images nor the encounter with the epistemological
impact of representation.
The issues raised by the relationship between the
development of technology and the imagination pose stunning challenges
to the traditions of culture. It is clear that systems theories
of communication, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, cyborg
identity, virtual collectivity, or electronic democracy, will not
fully suffice to encompass the meaning of electronic culture, no
less of electronic art. Instead, theories of communication will
need to be reconfigured in terms of interactivity, dispersal, and
technological representation. Zealously promoted, these technologies
seem to offer remedies for the uprooted cultures of modernity and
confrontations with the return of stability of political affiliation
and discursive collaboration. As much concerned with ideology as
with identity, the technosphere is more than a new cyber-sociological
issue. It stands as a possible location for the establishment of
historical identity in terms of the conditions of dispersed affiliation
and contingent power.
The network breaks the grip of point-to-point limitations
of telephony and shatters the dominance of broadcast media. In their
place is a dynamic system in which the abandonment of location is
not a signifier of placelessness, and in which representation is
not a sign of the loss of the real.
Indeed, while issues of space and time dominated
discourses of modernity, the related issues of interface and duration
have come to stand within postmodernity as signifiers of a far more
intricate situation. Worn traditions of the public sphere, the sociology
of post- industrialization, the discreteness of identity, have been
supplanted by a form of distributed imbeddedness or better, the
immersion of the self in the mediascapes of tele-culture which must
generate a communicative practice whose boundaries are not mapped
in physical space. Instead, the technologies of new media map a
geography of cognition, of reception, andof communication emerging
in territories whose hold on matter is ephemeral, whose position
in space is tenuous, whose temporality is not mapped in decontextualized
moments, and whose presence is measured in acts of participation
rather than coincidences of location.
New York, November '96
Timothy Druckrey.
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