Date: 5.21.98
From: david hunt (davidhunt@ap.net)
Subject: a report from "Computing Culture"
"Computing Culture: Defining New Media Genres"
May 1-2, 1998
UCSD, San Diego, US
A Report by David Hunt
"We would do well to watch over the Unicorn of aesthetic
experience as attentively as we watch over the Sphinx of science.
Bereft of a complete fable, the Unicorn has earned a place in
our imagination as an arcanum, an emblem of what we do not know.
Every day, the arts enter new domains and new media. We cannot
tell in what proportion the resulting works will enlighten, or
entertain, or infect. Meanwhile, we have moved a long way from
the disinterestedness that gave fresh impetus to art and science
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To curiosity have
been added since then the strong entangling factors of progress,
free enterprise, compulsive consumerism, and a semiautonomous
technology." --Roger Shattuck, "Forbidden Knowledge"
Object-based aesthetic practitioners could learn a lot from
new media artists. With the rise of pluralism and the sense that
anything can be art, we are dubiously rewarded with "anything-like"
art forms. The absence of any formalist "end games,"
a market hungry and ready to absorb any retro movement, and a
public dazed by historical amnesia, all of these remind me of
Joseph Brodsky's saying that, "Perhaps art is simply an organism's
reaction against its retentive limitations." Without these
limitations or obstacles to overcome, art becomes a tentative
meandering rather than a directed assault. Its timid meanings
are signed, sealed, and delivered to us in diffused and attenuated
forms. Enlightenment is passe, cleverness is chic. It's ironic
then, that in the frictionless world of cyberspace, where the
rules don't apply because there are no rules, we find digital
artists and theorists striving to overcome self-imposed boundaries,
using discipline and constraint to lend compactness (elegance)
and force to their arguments. Thankfully, Lev Manovich assembled
them in his "Computing Culture: Defining New Media Genres"
symposium at UC San Diego. Using the porous labels of Database,
Interface, Navigation, and Spatialization, Manovich attempted
to "inquire about the emerging logic, grammar, and poetics
of new media" without relying on deconstructive autopsy and
the embalming weight of academic citation, or the methodologies,
tropes, and rhetoric of other genres.
Presenting over the course of one day, the twelve speakers
sometimes seemed rushed, each with twenty minutes to present their
ideas. Yet the conference was able to achieve in the words of
Deleuze, "a high level of intoxication through extreme sobriety."
Manovich provided a Cliff's Notes capsule of digital art history
on opening night by displaying the real-time 3-D photorealistic
computer graphics of a flight simulator, an early post Cold War
navigation metaphor, next to the database nature of Greenaway's
"goose-stepping" procession of objects and images in
"Prospero's Books"--a literal marshalling of catalogued
images in rows and columns across the cinematic screen.
The event was guarded or "protected" by "etoy"
the pseudo corporate saboteurs and pranksters who gained notoriety
by hijacking websites. Their slogan, "the popstar is the
pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager
is the system," goes hand in hand with their mission to be
"your fashion beta test pilots." With shaved heads,
black sunglasses, and day-glo orange crew jackets emblazoned with
corporate logos, the four secret agents stood sentinel over the
event. Think Devo in Prada with a certain Luftwaffe charm.
John Welchman of UCSD moderated the Database/Interface discussion
and opened by sharing his thoughts on the dictionary as the fundamental
archetype of the databank/archive form. New Media theorists tend
to strike a defensive posture when obsessively reciting the history
of their own medium. These pret-a-porter reflections tend to be
database lists in their own right--fortune cookie aphorisms from
continental thinkers that might foster legitimacy through their
broad, antique appeal. Nietzsche's, "we are wandering encyclopedias,"
Benjamin's "unpacking my library," and Baudelaire's,
"Those that copy the dictionary suffer from the vice of banality,"
evoke a shopworn and dispensable parliamentary procedure.
Far more effective in my mind is Stephen Mamber's populist
analogy of the card catalog. In a library we typically move from
a large and physically unwieldy database, in order to find a much
smaller book, but the computer inverts this logic as we begin
with the "book" and then go to a card catalog structure
of information in the shape of a database. Michael Heim has cautioned
that while a library's sheer immensity breeds a sense of humility,
the hyper-linked world of the web encourages a sense of omniscience;
the illusion that all knowledge is separated from us distally,
rather than through the temporal labors of sitting down and actually
turning endless pages. Mamber's digital movies both eradicate
temporal and spatial concerns by serving up all the possible information
we could ever need in the form of a grid of thumbnails right at
our fingertips. He has taken each frame of Hitchcock's "The
Birds" and transformed it into a thumbnail. Clicking on an
icon, the image is enlarged and that portion of the screenplay
is revealed. The linear "reverse" and "fast-forward"
of traditional viewing is exploded into a kaleidoscope of possibilities;
innovation providing all the justification one might need. This
is technology as Ritalin: speeding up the play of images until
they are in synch with the reeling, hungry mind; bringing a sensation
of focused calm.
Joining Komar and Melamid's "Most Wanted Paintings,"
a web survey that proposes to give the people the art they want
(it turns out they want a mountain/lake landscape and a couple
of deer-not a far cry from dogs playing poker), and Ken Goldberg's
tele-robotic conceptual investigation of the nature of legal responsibility
and counterfeiting on the web entitled "Legal Tender"
(www.counterfeit.org), Victoria Vesna affirms with Bodies INC.
that the future of art on the web points toward Baldessari rather
than Titian. An open, evolving field, Internet art will most likely
be dominated by conceptual projects like the alpha-numeric obsessed
and abstract jodi.org, rather than the stills of lingerie-clad
ingenues-poster girls Vanessa Beecroft has on view at The Thing.
Bodies INC. is the Home Shopping Network of prosthetic virtual
body parts: use it to create your own surrogate avatar. It sports
the same crystal-meth, used-car dealer corporate marketing schtick
to ensure that collagen injected, bee-stung lips are just the
tip of the iceberg. Conjuring William Gibson's cyber-gothic chic
or the "morbid manner" deployed by Damien Hirst and
the Chapman brothers, Vesna created a multi-tiered conceptual
warehouse or manufacturing plant featuring LIMBO (where previously
ordered or inactive bodies are put on hold), NECROPOLIS (where
members go to delete their previously ordered or inactive bodies),
SHOWPLACE (where bodies are put on display, chatted about, and
interacted with, and HOME (where members begin their explorations).
While the first iteration of this very well known project appeared
several years ago, at this point the cloaking of Bodies INC. within
a Gothic shroud seems slightly dated--as a satirical strategy
the gothic style has been resuscitated more times than the undead
in a George Romero film. As critic Susan Kandel explains in her
review of "Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth
Century Art," "As a paradigm, then--as an art world
zeitgeist--it contrasts utterly with the insistently political,
identity-based practice that so dominated throughout the late
80's and early 90's; what it represents is a retreat from the
social into the intricacies of the commodity form. That Trent
Reznor's New Orleans home features the actual door of the Tate
mansion on which the Manson family once scrawled the word "PIG"
is quite perfect, then. Here is an emblem of every subculture's
destiny in and as collectibles; and further, the danger of appropriating
a subculture as the point zero of an aesthetic moment"--a
kind of Byronic, ruined Graceland for Bauhaus fans.
Personally, I know that when I'm not "Awakening the Giant
Within," I'm "thriving on chaos" with the "Seven
habits of Highly Successful People," so maybe it's a good
time to rethink my fetishizing of corporate marketing platitudes
rather than the peculiar stranglehold the actual products of these
companies have on me. For commodity critique, I felt Bodies INC.
lacked the time-release subtlety of Koons' vacuum cleaner's, or
the comprehensiveness of Hans Haacke's skewering of Mobil, not
to mention the wink and nod appropriation of historical photography
by Diesel advertising (take, for example, their ad with Churchill,
Stalin, and Roosevelt at Yalta with an inviting supermodel digitized
into the picture). In fact, Diesel ads let us in on the joke,
commodifying our dissent, repackaging it into hipster-rebel chic,
and literally selling it back to us, proving that clever, ironic
pose and not pragmatic "wrinkle free," is what moves
product.
Nonetheless, Bodies INC. is essential as a dead-on skewering of
the "one-click shopping" mantra that attempts to parade
convenience as a panacea for all of societies ills. Vesna points
out that avatar filled chat rooms stand to make $1 billion in
revenues next year and legal documents from Disney reveal that
they are spending millions designing human like avatars of their
own. Anyone who has attended a Whole Life Expo or is familiar
with the crystal channeling of Carlos Casteneda's books knows
that the New Age demographic is ripe for manipulation. Its spiritual
longings and "cyborg envy" can be felt on the web. Whereas,
"The Celestine Prophecy" was self-fulfilling (you got
took, but you liked it), Vesna's project offers the rare instance
of not preaching to the choir, not flattering the cynical slacker-savant
weaned on the necrophilic ennui of Bret Easton Ellis' "American
Psycho." If most conceptual art is a parlor game for bored
bohemians (a "Where's Waldo?" of referents), the subversion
of corporate lingo and the ever present fear of just exactly where
our transactional "cyber cash" is going is directed
towards the evangelical desperation of what David Beers calls
"Cyborg Fundamentalists," clearly, those most in need
of a healthy dose of satire.
I suppose Vesna qualifies for the database/interface discussion
since her avatars are more catalogues of physical information
than symbols of emotional complexity--perfect for the Tin Man
or Scarecrow looking for a heart or a brain, but perhaps not as
compelling as the Cowardly Lion waiting in the checkout line in
LIMBO to purchase some courage.
Fabian Wagmister of UCLA began his discussion by questioning
the ethical nature of digital media and how so much of database
discourse is ruled by the blind impulse toward accumulation. Databases
are revered to the extent that they act as giant vacuum cleaners
sucking up and storing anything in their path. He calls for an
analytical reading of databases where value is based on consciousness,
interpretation, and feeling rather than the power to store and
collate mass quantities of information.
For Wagmister the database becomes the tool for viewing, the
tool for construction, and the work of art itself (which locates
itself in the interactive performance between himself, the computer,
and the end-user). But even more fundamental than the consciousness
of the database is the core identity of the search engine where
whimsy and flexibility are allowed to run free. As curator of
a web gallery devoted to posters, songs, and poems of Che Guevara,
Wagmister assigns algorithmic values to "modes of interpretation"
such as local vs. international and essential vs. marginal to
demonstrate the expressive qualities of the search engine. We
are actually able to touch the screen and "click" on
a pensive image of Che while specifying the mode of "courage,"
leading to a succession of grave, noble, Social realist tableaux.
Wagmister's highly programmed curating is more controlled and
narrow than any museum show, but he immediately hands over the
reins and transfers that power to the participant. Imagine going
to Documenta and being able to change the configuration of each
pavilion.
Marcia Kinder of the University of Southern California describes
the symbiotic relationship between database and narrative and
how each one allows you to arrive at a new conception of the other.
For Kinder, narrative is essentially a discursive mode that exposes
the dual process of selection and combination that is at the heart
of all stories, and of language itself, as well as the arbitrariness
of these choices. The database paradigm asks which character or
plotline should be followed, which version should be trusted.
Whether you look at a popular movie like "Groundhog Day"
or "Back to the Future," or a European art film like
"La Jetee" or "Marienbad," a database inquiry
always reveals the meta-narrative issues at the core of storytelling.
In a hilarious anecdote she reveals how Bunuel, in his brief tenure
in Hollywood, fashioned a synoptic table of American cinema. He
came across a series of storyboards divided into categories: ambience
(Parisian, Western, Gangster), epochs, main characters, etc. By
rearranging these simple categories, which are really databases,
he showed how anyone could predict the outcome of any plot. Mark
America's "Grammatron" is an excellent example of undermining
any concept of an official text, while demystifying the hidden
mechanics of writing (the complex series of choices) by relinquishing
that process to the reader in a highly self-conscious way. Kinder's
examples were more subtle than Grammatron and dealt not with new
ways of presenting the Novel, but in fundamental modes of storytelling.
The best description of spatialization comes from Peter Lunenfeld
of Art Center College of Design who contrasts the overdetermined,
constantly forward generating momentum of the filmic trance with
the word/image relationship of dynamic typography in graphic design.
As the original "push media," film and television rely
on the superiority of their 35 mm resolution and the vastness
of the cinematic panorama to create a series of billboards and
not a page. Film uses its monumental scale to overpower us, self-consciously
advertising the seductions of the medium, dangling the carrot
that meaning is present just over the horizon of the next consecutive
frame. Even in a film as perspictively deep, and drenched in metaphors
of lushness as "Lawrence of Arabia," space is still
compressed in favor of the inertia of the narrative.
Alternatively, Lunenfeld describes a "poetics of lingering"--a
set-your-own-pace inversion of temporal control where the interactive
user is free to graze on an image for as long as he/she likes,
speeding forward and slowing down as one slips away from the dull,
plodding "cruise control" of film. Using the model of
ambient sound, he implies an ambient narrative--the story of objects,
rather than human characters, that are cast into a human environment--a
kind of totalizing anthropomorphism. He shows an example similar
to the early countdown videos on MTV, where a series of images
flash and dissolve upon each other in quick succession, each with
their own idiosyncratic sound/image/text matrix. "It's pretty,
it's fast, it moves, yet how much information, thought, dialogue,
and hence meaning can it hold? How much deeper than film can it
go?" The answer is: a lot. Lunenfeld acknowledges the preening,
supersaturated display of early MTV as a kind of "Muscle
Beach" of graphic design, suggesting that the ultimate torture
is to be strapped down like Malcolm McDowell in "Clockwork
Orange," forced to watch its progression. As testimony to
how far we have come: his example of student Saeri Cho's work,
accompanied by the fittingly spliced break beats of a drum-and-base
soundtrack, depicts the coalescing and disintegration, the show
and flow of meaning in a constant state of becoming. Images don't
advance (their own iconicity, the pleasures of the medium, a linear
narrative)--they just are.
Although Caligula would have blushed at the profusion of images
Lunenfeld shows, he goes far to demonstrate that spectatorship
and spectacle are not synonymous, and that we have outgrown the
linguistic tyranny of de Saussure's oppositional construction
of meaning through signifier/signified. I think he would agree
with Barbara Stafford who explains: "These vebalizing binaries
turned nuomenal and phenomenal experience into the product of
language. Not only temporal but spatial effects supposedly obeyed
an invisible system, the controlling structure of an inborn ruling
'ecriture.'"
In describing liquid or transArchitecture, Marcos Novak of
UCLA provides a fitting, conclusive metaphor for the aspirations
of the conference. As a world of invisible scaffolds, cyberspace
is a place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming-a
habitat for the imagination whose ultimate goal is the full embodiment
of the mind. If imagination is now dispersed across endless woven
matrices of bits, Manovich's conference went far in retrieving
those voices that are stationed like outposts on the forefront
of the digital age.
http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~culture/symposium.html
http://www.counterfeit.org
http://jodi.org
http://www.thing.net/~vanessa
http://arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc/
Référence: http://www.rhizome.org/cgi-local/query.cgi?action=grab_object&kt=kt1132