Art as Interactive Communications:

Networking a Global Culture

From Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media by Margot Lovejoy

COM597 Fall 2004

“Those artists committed to pioneering this new space speak in the sense of art

as connectivity and of art as communication and of an emerging

‘telematic culture.’”

Article page 222.

Definition: “Telematics” “It has been formed by merging two ideas,

more familiar, of telecommunication and data processing. We can then define telematics as

the «distance communication (= telecommunication) of codified information

processed according to logic (=data processing)”

1

1. Joan Bardina Studies Center. http://chalaux.org/ammsuk05.htm

“It is not surprising that the very power and rapidity of technological advance, accompanied by such an avalanche of social and cultural change, has stirred

deep-seated fears in so many quarters.”

Article page 212.

“Artists need to be involved in new technologies in order to define and

exploit their creative potential. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote ‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.’”

Article page 213.

“The Internet is a new kind of public space ... We are experiencing not a computer revolution, but rather a

communications revolution.”

Article page 213.

“Meaning is created out of the interaction between people rather than being ‘something’ that is sent from one

to another. Communication depends not on what is transmitted but ‘what happens

to the person who receives it.’ Art = Communication.”

Roy Ascott, Article page 215.

“The technology of the Electronic Café is configured ‘to build a context in which

artists could experience new ways of collaboration and co-creation, with geography no longer a boundary.”

Article page 219.

“Interactive telecommunications systems do empower the individual to connect

with others globally and vastly increases the possibilities for inventing expanded

forms of art. Artists’ involvement is vitally important in humanizing and extending the new technologies in

directions ignored by the marketplace.”

Article page 222.

“Increasingly, technological development in electronic media have

led to opportunities for interactive global dialogue where work can be shared in a

larger cross-cultural community than through the confines of the gallery or

museum system.”

Article page 222.

“Today’s inhospitable climate for free speech has extended to cyberspace the struggle to maintain first ammendment

rights.”

Article page 223.

“Interaction and interconnectivity leads to hybrid forms that grow out of creative experiences with conceptually organized

Internet projects.”

Article page 226.

“The potential of the new technologies is towards interaction and communication -

the kind of inclusivity that encourages global exchange through which fresh

insights can evolve through experimentation with diversity and

difference.”

Article page 228

“VirtuAlice is a telerobotic camera (pointable over the Web and from touchpads in the front window)

mounted on a wheeled electric throne, which visitors may ride around the gallery. Video images in real time are available to Web users, and to passers by, through the front window. The rider of the throne

can see the image which is going out over the Web, on a small monitor mounted on the handlbars. The Web user can see the face of the rider, in the rear-

view mirror.”Collaborative Project: Emily Hartzell and Nina Sobell

http://cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/alice/index.html

Article page 226

Collaborative Project: Emily Hartzell and Nina Sobell

http://cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/alice/doc1.html

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

MBONE = multicasting backbone

Wax: Discovery of TV among the Bees. Article page 227

“Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew

how to begin.” for you see, so many out-of-the-way things have happened lately that

Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

Article page 226

“The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in an

case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural

formations of the subject … Evidently a different nature opens itself to the

camera than opens to the naked eye.”

Article page 230

“… using the interactive potential of the medium to empower other people instead

of one’s self creates a powerful opening for a new role for the artist and a new kind of public art - one with all the constraints and freedoms to communicate within a wider

sphere … viewers become collaborators in an interactive dialogue …”

Article page 231

“The limitation of the Net is that it doesn’t yet allow the production of a

richly visual art.”

Article page 232

“Artists are democratically free to enter the Web … the downside of this is the possible creation of an infrastructure for art in Cyberspace which resembles the

prevailing Earthbound system with all its power structure intact.”

Article page 234

“In the Internet, we have the commingling within a vast global

community of international resources of both high and low cultural appeal. Some

see the screen as a linguistic leveling device which flattens and devalues the

use of language. Others see a rich evolution of language occurring on the Web ... Beyond the usual hierarchies of

mediated publishing.”Article page 234

“The Internet is CB radio only typing.”

John Barlow, Article page 234

“The sleek cyberdream of a collapsed global surface of instantaneity and

dematerialization persists only by erasing the waking actuality of a world that is increasingly unliveable for most of its

inhabitants.”

Jonathan Crary, Article page 243

“From the standpoint of culture and creativity, what content does the ubiquity

of telematics offer?” “‘…we live in a time of blinding speed:

but what people have to say to one another by way of technology shows no

comparable development.’”

Article page 243 (with quote from Theodore Roszak)

“There is a need to reaffirm the doctrine of public responsibility as a price for

private use of the public airwaves and to establish criteria of acceptable

performance … otherwise, powerful monopolies such as telephone and cable carriers will be able to determine what

ideas and images are fed into the cultural mainstream.”

Article page 245

“… that really takes me back to Nietzche’s statement about sin. If it feels to me that technology separates me, I try to reject it. If it feels like it has within it

the opportunity to bring me closer, on some spiritual level, to the rest of

humanity, I accept it.”

John Barlow, Article page 245

“While a society dominated by computers could on the one hand, bring about a dark age of passive centralization and decay of the human spirit, on the other hand, given the transformative interactive capabilities of the new technologies, there could arise

the evolution of a new kind of cultural response. Artists are vital to the development of this process …”

Article page 245-246

Art as Interactive Communications:

Networking a Global Culture

From Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media by Margot Lovejoy

COM597 Fall 2004