Posted on April 14th, 2007 by Tobin Stewart.
Categories: Tobin • Reading Reviews.
Lovejoy, Art as Interactive Communications: Networking Global Culture (from Art in the Electronic Age), 2004
Lovejoy’s thesis for this chapter is delivered poignantly in its first paragraph: major changes in communications systems foster enormous shifts in societal connectivity.
She begins dissecting her argument in reference to ideas laid out in the 1930s in Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer, in which he suggests a transformation in the main function of artworks toward an emphasis on social function – Benjamin would propose the idea of spectator as collaborator. He would urge artists to challenge the system and transform it, as opposed to simply supplying it. Shying away from being overtly idealistic, he was also aware of the potential that technologies possess in regard to their ability to end up controlling us, and would stress among his ideas the possible dangers if artists were to create without fully understanding their role in the use of new technologies. As art now begins to be distributed on the Internet, Lovejoy continues along Benjamin’s train of thought, asking us: can we control it?
Lovejoy claims that the participatory aspect of the Internet supplies the grounds for a communications revolution – a new kind of dialogic public space that holds great promise, though she does not shy away from admitting of the great challenges it simultaneously presents. As its form lacks fixed entry points and narratives, Lovejoy understands how content and context, terms that have previously been so strictly defined (particularly in regard to the exhibition of artworks), have become entirely interchangeable characteristics. As the interplay between form and dialogue has come to forge new unpredictability to the aesthetic territory in which artworks lie, what occurs is the allowance of dialogic imagination, where the work begins to pertain to an arena of consciousness and feeling that did not previously exist – shared authorship and social exchange.
As metaphors for networks or webs have come to be defined as the infrastructure in which telematic communication occurs, Lovejoy draws attention its non-confined, open-endedness, where previous conceptual systems based upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity are replaced. She cites Roland Barthes’ From Work to Text, which suggests that “…knowledge no longer exists in fixed canons or texts with epistemological boundaries between disciplines but rather it exists as paths of inquiry seeking integration and meaning by passing through them without any precise limit or location…” She continues by referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which they further Barthes’ claims, leaning toward an orientation for knowledge based upon the desire of chartering unforeseen directions. Their ideas cater to those “…who have a certain taste for the unknown, for what is not already determined by history or society…” She goes on to reference the work of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (exploiting the phenomenon of the power of communication technologies to be able to mix spaces or exchange spaces), making clear their goal of being able to “…experience new ways of collaboration and co-creation, with geography no longer a boundary…”
Lovejoy goes on to describe the potential that creative networking can possess to build links between communities previously unable to communicate with each other – to generate “…a more participatory culture in order to engage and stimulate the collective imagination…” She makes note of the fact that interactive new media artworks travel with the viewer, providing greater potential for the creation of meaning. The Internet, thus, becomes a form of collective social consciousness.
Though Lovejoy is certain that the Internet embodies a certain promise of democracy (ideally being available to anyone, anytime, anywhere), she is also aware of the issues it poses seeing as though it is inextricably linked to commercial and corporate influence – access is also a matter of filtration. In regard to such issues, she poses some very interesting questions: Will there be cultural dominance and language dominance by those who have greater access to technology? Will selected access to powerful technologies create elitism? She suggests that it is the public’s responsibility to establish acceptable uses of the new technologies. Otherwise, she claims, powerful monopolies will continue to determine what is fed into the cultural mainstream.
Lovejoy’s concluding thoughts return to Benjamin’s thesis: artists are vital to the development of the process of cultural response to the new technologies. She finishes with a quote from Stephen Willats’ Art and Social Function:
“…the realization that all ‘art’ is dependent on society – dependant on relationships between people and not the sole product of any one person – is becoming increasingly important in the shaping of future culture…”
Johnson, See What Happens (from Emergence), 2001
Johnson speculates on they type of data the networks of the future will be transmitting. Specifically, he references the development of Will Wright’s latest creation, The Sims Online, a game that allows players to collectively build cities as part of a massive network collaboration. Every single citizen of these virtual worlds will be controlled by actual human beings, logged into the system from all around the world.
An early draft of the of the game displayed a neighborhood-creation system that seemed to Johnson to be straight out of the pages of Jane Jacobs – defined from the bottom up, and encouraging shorter blocks, livelier sidewalks, mixed-used zoning, and pedestrian-based transportation.
Contrary to popular speculation, Johnson does not see our newfound access to virtual cities on the computer screen abating our appetite for real-world city living. Rather than delivering the deathblow to city living (finishing a forty-year process that had begun with the suburban flight of the postwar years), Johnson claims the digital revolution to have turned out to be a tremendous energizer for dense urban centers. He understands that industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate toward physical centers of idea generation, that bright minds with shared interests still flock together, even when they have wireless modems and broadband in their living rooms. He suggests that even in an age of instant data transmissions, that the old-style self-organizing city is today as vital and relevant as it has ever been.
Rowland, The Need to Communicate (from Spirit of the Web), 1999
Rowland begins with a history of the Greek alphabet – it was not invented until about 730 B.C. He notes that through archeological evidence, it appeared rather suddenly, and was used from the beginning for what we now refer to as ‘literary purposes’ rather than for accounting, list keeping and other trade and business functions.
He discusses how until the coming of Greek writing, literacy was entirely elitist, and that as a communications technology, its failure to penetrate beyond the ranks of the professional would severely limit its impact on society at large. Rowland compares the situation to the nascent days of personal computer communications, when only the highly skilled ‘computer whiz’ had the means and capacity to make use of the technology.
Rowland suggests that as the Greek alphabet disintermediated the notion of literacy, it would simultaneously provide for profound and unpredictable effects upon the civilization that would be forced to embrace it. He claims that the alphabet would make possible the evolution of the detached intellectual state that makes possible the ability to philosophize and think abstractly – a shift that would make way for rational inquiry, inevitably leading to the scientific method.
Rowland understands that communications media are not neutral, but that they rather ‘colour’ or ‘shade’ the information they carry to greater or lesser degrees. He states that they possess the inherent potential to shape the very consciousness of their users by their emphasis on a single sense or set of senses, to the outright exclusion of others.
Davis, Crossed Wires (from TechGnosis), 2004
Davis suggests that by their very nature, information and communication technologies (or ‘media’) are technocultural hybrids. He argues that on one hand, they pertain to crafted, material mechanisms that are conceived, constructed, and exploited for gain, though, he continues, they are also animated by something that has nothing to do with matter or technique. Davis feels that information technology, more than any other invention, transcends its status as a thing, simply due to its allowance for the incorporeal encoding and transmission of mind and meaning.
He feels that, in a sense, this hybridity reflects the age-old sibling rivalry between form and content . He states that the “…material and technical structure of media impose formal constraints on communication, even as the immediacy of communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence, art, and information flow…”
Rowland also suggests that the new interfaces that have come to emerge between the self, the other, and the world beyond has forced media technologies to have no choice but to become part of this self, this other, and this new world. They have come to form the foundation for what we now increasingly refer to as the ‘social construction of reality.’ He continues, claiming that by submitting ourselves to the robot of science, technology, and media culture, we will continually cut ourselves off from the richness of the soul and from the deeply nourishing networks of family, community, and the local hand.
Word Count: 1544
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