Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 12:24:22 +0100 (MET)
From: jnech-AT-imaginet.fr (NECHVATAL Joseph)
Subject: Art in the gutter.  


Hi m-. I just awoke to read your post and smiled. However, I was not
talking about dreams but about awaking from the drunken gutter stupor art
has become. I am awake to the fact that the euphoric futurism of media
technology is the motor of culture today (without artists being very much
involved), of the postmodern agenda of the disappearing of the everything
in the simulacra of information, and of the positivistic belief in the
eschatology of rationality, which can be bound virtuously with a
transdisciplinary field of fringe-science and salon academism. Awake to the
fact that the 'digital revolution' has led to a shift in the organization
of power in the western world, especially in the social and
ethico-political sphere. Alert to the fact that art now exists within the
global connection of computers. Instead of contributing to the museums for
the future, falling into nostalgic melancholia, or participating in a
cloistered self-referential art discourse by posing as taste defenders or
techno-rebels, there are several other options --- besides lying in the
gutter.

Across the world, developed and developing nations are racing to connect
their citizenry via fiber optics. Electronic networking is being asked to
carry the hopes of brave new digital societies into a new millennium. The
dream is of an electronic democracy on a global scale: dissolving
hierarchies; offering universal access, untrammeled creativity, unlimited
knowledge, empowering connectivity. Utopian dreams of the late twentieth
century reside in this transforming power of information technology. The
Internet, a global network of networks with no centre, has become the focus
for hopes of a liberation through electronic interaction. The Modernist
hope earlier invested in industrial technology has been displaced onto its
post-industrial successor. In this sense Saul is correct. Global
connectivity relates in other ways to the long quest for Utopia. The dream
of a common language haunts a system built on computer language. The very
word Utopia, deriving from Thomas More's book of 1516, means "no place";
the Internet is a world-wide no-place. This technology of the immaterial,
traveling at the speed of light, stands in a complex relation to Utopia. I
am not a Utopian though. Artists, curators and art critics are well aware
that the World Wide Web is a non-linear and chaotic space that doesn't fit
neatly into the existing structures of existing institutions, such as
galleries and museums. This shifts not only the relationship and the
dynamic of the existing power structures, but is redefining the field of
art itself. Long standing relationships between the artist and their
audience, the curatorial process, and entrenched cultural institutions,
neither apply to, nor nurture the development of contemporary art making as
it increasingly occurs in this radically reconfigured terrain. Artists who
have successfully made the leap from the traditional exhibition spaces and
who are creating a bridge between different worlds through research are
defining an evolving field of art making located between networks and
physical installations.


A wide range of topics could be addressed on this list instead of the same
old carping crap all the time- from problems of hardware dependency and
sponsorship to theoretical issues such as identity and the author/audience
relationship. We could all discuss the importance of visual and
interface aesthetics as a determining factor of how media works are
classified as art, and the question of who in fact is qualified to make
such a judgment at this stage. On the one hand, how does an audience
influence work that is open to their contributions? And on the other hand,
what strategies can the artist use to maintain the aesthetic and conceptual
coherence of their work? The web allows participants to wander in and out
of any space they visit. What ramifications does this have for the
experience of artworks? If the artist or institution controls this access,
do they negate the very nature of the web? What is the relationship of the
audience and the artist? How does this relationship shift from networked
space to physical public space?

Too often it has been suggested that the physical body has no significance
in the computer matrix - only the mental body can travel along the wires.
The body of flesh is (I presume the Human Body) is left outside while our
other self can travel the inner wonders of the computer virtual space.
Increasingly the terminology of a "split body" and metaphors of an "inner
and outer" are ambivalently adopted to describe a difference, of other
realities of space and body. More often than not the particular differences
and what the actual effects of these appropriations have on the actual
presence of a human being are never really specified. This suggests issues
of drugs and consciousness. Is dope the only hope?

I am proposing that in order to represent the human mind as a different
more technologically suited form, all aspects of the experience (the human
body, mind, senses as well as the computer hardware and constructed image)
must be present at the same time - otherwise a difference cannot be
demonstrated. I am interested in the futuristic application of the
mind/body. What are the possibilities in describing physical interaction
with technology? What is the importance of remaining a human body? What is
actually meant in stating the BODY? I do not suggest that these questions
are new but I do recognize that the direction of the current dialogue about
the body and its representation within a virtual space must take on a new
direction, maybe a new appreciation of both gutters and dreamscapes.

But the net is first of all increasing the question of inclusion and
exclusion - not only to the non-wired population (as Anne stated well) but
also 'between the firewalls', it is obviously following not only the lines
drawn by 'the war of browser standards' but by cultural differences,
language barriers, the distinction between 'citizen' and 'slave' which goes
beyond the question of representation and relates to the singular
subjective modes of existence and the possibilities to break the
capitalistic semiotics of media technology. It's a good sign for the
obsoleteness of an originally 'new media art' which legitimates through the
novelty of it's medium itself as compared to Saul's encrypted old school
painterly critique. Ethics in media could at least mean the right to noise,
enough noise to both wake the safely sleeping and stir the sluggish and
inebriated.




X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X
Joseph Nechvatal, Paris, France, Europa
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech
X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X_X 




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