map of Soho,.Comparing Chelsea

Map of Chelsea

Through the wind..time...sound

Lev Manovich

New Media from Borges to HTML


(commissioned for The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The MIT Press, forthcoming 2002).




New Media Field: a Short Institutional History


The appearance of New Media Reader is a milestone in the history a new field that, just a few years ago, was somewhat of a cultural underground. Before taking up the theoretical challenge of defining what new media actually is, as well as discussing the particular contributions this reader makes to answering this question, I would like very briefly to sketch the history of the field for the benefit of whose who are newcomers to it.
If we are to look at any modern cultural field sociologically, measuring its standing by the number and the importance of cultural institutions devoted to it such as museum exhibitions, festivals, publications, conferences, and so on, we can say that in the case of new media (understood as computer-based artistic activities) it took about ten years for it to move from cultural periphery to the mainstream. Although SIGGRAPH in the U.S. and Ars Electronica in Austria have already acted as annual gathering places of artists working with computers since the late 1970s, the new media field begin to take real shape only in the end of the 1980s that. At the end of the 1990s new institutions devoted to the production and support for new media art are founded in Europe: ZKM in Karlsruhe (1989), New Media Institute in Frankfurt (1990) and ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) in the Netherlands (1990). (Jeffrey Shaw was appointed to be director of the part of ZKM focused on visual media while Frankfurt Institute was headed by Peter Weibel). In 1990 as well, Intercommunication Center in Tokyo begins its activities in new media art (it moves into its own building in 1997). Throughout the 1990s, Europe and Japan remained to be the best places to see new media work and to participate in high-level discussions of the new field. Festivals such as ISEA, Ars Electronica, DEAF have been required places of pilgrimage for interactive installation artists, computer musicians, choreographers working with computers, media curators, critics, and, since the mid 1990s, net artists.
As it was often the case throughout the twentieth century, countries other than the States would be first to critically engage with new technologies developed and deployed in the U.S. There are a few ways to explain this phenomenon. Firstly, the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the U.S. makes them ³invisible² almost overnight: they become an assumed part of the everyday existence, something which does not seem to require much reflection about. The more slow speed of assimilation and the higher cost gives other countries more time to reflect upon new technologies, as it was the case with new media and the Internet in the 1990s. In the case of Internet, by the end of the 1990s it became as commonplace in the U.S. as the telephone, while in Europe Internet still remained a phenomenon to reflect upon, both for economic reasons (in the U.S. subscribers would play very low monthly flat fee; in Europe they had to pay by the minute) and for cultural reasons (more skeptical attitude towards new technologies in many European countries which slows down their assimilation). (So when in the early 1990s Soros Foundation has set up contemporary art centers throughout the Eastern Europe, it wisely gave them a mandate to focus their activities on new media art, both in order to support younger artists who had difficulty getting around the more established ³art mafia² in these countries; and also in order to introduce general public to the Internet.)
Secondly, we can explain the slowness of the U.S. engagement with new media art during the 1990s by the very minimal level of the public support for the arts there. In Europe, Japan, and Australia, festivals for media and new media art such as the ones I mentioned above, the commissions for artists to create such work, exhibition catalogs and other related cultural activities were funded by the governments. In the U.S. the lack of government funding for the arts left only two cultural players which economically could have supported creative work in new media: anti-intellectual, market and cliché driven commercial mass culture and equally commercial art culture (i.e., the art market). For different reasons, neither of these players would support new media art nor would it foster intellectual discourse about it. Out of the two, commercial culture (in other words, culture designed for mass audiences) has played a more progressive role in adopting and experimenting with new media, even though for obvious reasons the content of commercial new media products had severe limits. Yet without commercial culture we would not have computer games using Artificial Intelligence programming, network-based multimedia, including various Web plug-ins which enable distribution of music, moving images and 3-D environment over the Web, sophisticated 3-D modeling, animation and rendering tools, database-driven Web sites, CD-ROMs, DVD, and other storage formats, and most other advanced new media technologies and forms.
The 1990s U.S. art world proved to be the most conservative cultural force in contemporary society, lagging behind the rest of cultural and social institutions in dealing with new media technologies. (In the 1990s a standard joke at new media festivals was that a new media piece requires two interfaces: one for art curators, and one for everybody else). This resistance is understandable given that the logic of the art world and the logic of new media are exact opposites. The first is based the romantic idea of authorship which assumes a single author; the notion of a unique, one of a kind art object; and the control over the distribution of such objects which takes place through a set of exclusive places: galleries, museums, actions). The second privileges the existence of potentially numerous copies, infinitely large number of different states of the same work, author-user symbiosis (the user can change the work through interactivity), the collective, collaborative authorship, and network distribution (which bypasses the art system distribution channels). Moreover, exhibition of new media requires a level of technical sophistication and computer equipment which neither U.S. Museums nor galleries were able to provide in the 1990s. In contrast, in Europe generous federal and regional funding allowed not only for mountings of sophisticated exhibitions but also for the development of a whole new form of art: interactive computer installation. It is true that after many years of its existence, the U.S. art world learned how to deal with and in fact fully embraced video installation, but video installations requires standardized equipment and they don¹t demand constant monitoring, as it is the case with interactive installations and even with Web pieces. While in Europe equipment-intensive form of interactive installation has flourished throughout the 1990s, U.S. art world has taken an easy way by focusing on ³net art² i.e. Web-based pieces whose exhibition does not require much resources beyond a off-the-shelf computer and a Net connection.
All this started to change with the increasing speed by the end of the 1990s. Various cultural institutions in the U.S. finally begun to pay attention to new media. The first were education institutions. Around 1995 Universities and the art schools, particularly on the West Coast, begin to initiate program in new media art and design as well as open faculty positions in these areas; by the beginning of the new decade, practically every University and art school on the West Coast had both undergraduate and graduate programs in new media. A couple of years later museums such as Walker Art Center begun to mount a number of impressive online exhibitions and started to commission online projects. 2000 Whitney Biannual included a room dedicated to net art (even though its presentation conceptually was ages behind the presentation of new media in such places as Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Intercommunication Center in Tokyo, or ZKM in Germany). Finally in 2001, both Whitney Museum in New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern art (SFMOMA) have mounted large survey exhibitions of new media art (Bitstreams at the Whitney, 010101: Art in Technological Times at SFMOMA). Add to this constant flow of conferences and workshops mounted in such bastions of American Academia as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; fellowships in new media initiated by such prestigious funding bodies as Rockefeller Foundation and Social Science Research Council (both were started in 2001); book series on new media published by such well-respected presses as the MIT Press (this book is a part of such a series). What ten years ago was a cultural underground became an established academic and artistic field; what has emerged from on the ground interactions of individual players has solidified, matured, and acquired institutional forms.
Paradoxically, at the same time as new media field has started to mature (the end of the 1990s), its very reason for existence came to be threatened. If all artists now, regardless of their preferred media, also routinely use digital computers to create, modify and produce works, do we need to have a special field of new media art? As digital and network media are rapidly became an omni-presence in our society, and as most artists came to routinely use it, new media field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts. I personally do think that the existence of a separate new media field now and in the future makes very good sense, but it does require a justification something that I hope the rest of this text that will take up more theoretical questions will help to provide.


Software Design and Modern Art: Parallel Projects

Ten years after the appearance of first cultural institutions solely focused on new media, the field has matured and solidified. But what exactly is new media? And what is new media art? Surprisingly, these questions remain to be not so easy to answer. The book you are now holding in your hands does provide very interesting answers to these questions; it also provides the most comprehensive foundation for new media field, in the process redefining it a very productive way. In short, this book is not just a map of the field as it already exists but a creative intervention into it.
Through the particular selections and their juxtaposition this book re-defines new media as parallel tendencies in modern art and computing technology after the World War II. Although the editors of the anthology may not agree with this move, I would like to argue that eventually this parallelism changes the relationship between art and technology. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, modern computing and network technology materialized certain key projects of modern art developed approximately at the same time. In the process of this materialization, the technologies overtake art. That is, not only new media technologies computer programming, graphical human-computer interface, hypertext, computer multimedia, networking (both wired-based and wireless) have actualized the ideas behind the projects by artists, but they extended them much further than the artists originally imagined. As a result these technologies themselves have become the greatest art works of today. The greatest hypertext text is the Web itself, because it is more complex, unpredictable and dynamic than any novel that could have been written by a single human writer, even James Joyce. The greatest interactive work is the interactive human-computer interface itself: the fact that the user can easily change everything which appears on her screen, in the process changing the internal state of a computer, or even commanding reality outside of it. The greatest avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects which contains the possibilities to combining together thousands of separate tracks into a single movie, as well as setting various relationships between all these different tracks and it thus it develops the avant-garde idea a film as an abstract visual score to its logical end and beyond. Which means that computer scientists who invented these technologies J.C. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Seymor Papert, Tim Berners-Lee, and others are the important artists of our time maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period.
To prove the existence of historical parallelism, New Media Reader systematically positions next to each the key texts by modern art that articulate certain ideas and the key texts by modern computer scientists which articulate similar ideas in relation to software and hardware design. Thus we find next to each the story by Jorge Borges (1941) and the article by Vannevar Bush (1945) which both contain the idea of a massive branching structure as a better way to organize data and to represent human experience.[1]
The parallelism between texts by artists and by computer scientists involves not only the ideas in the texts but also the form of the texts. In the twentieth century artists typically presented their ideas either by writing manifestos or by creating actual art works. In the case of computer scientists, we either have theoretical articles that develop plans for particular software and/or hardware design or more descriptive articles about already created prototypes or the actual working systems. Structurally manifestos correspond to the theoretical programs of computer scientists, while completed artworks correspond to working prototypes or systems designed by scientists to see if their ideas do work, to demonstrate these ideas to colleagues, sponsors and clients. Therefore New Media Reader to a large extent consists from these two types of texts: either theoretical presentations of new ideas and speculations about projects or types of projects that would follow from them; or the descriptions of the projects actually realized.
Institutions of modern culture that are responsible for selecting what makes it into the canon of our cultural memory and what is left behind are always behind the times. It may take a few decades or even longer for a new field which is making an important contribution to modern culture to ³make it² into museums, books and other official registers of cultural memory. In general, our official cultural histories tend to privilege art (understood in a romantic sense as individual products an individual artists) over mass industrial culture. For instance, while modern graphical and industrial designers do have some level of cultural visibility, their names, with the exception of a few contemporary celebrity designers such as Bruce Mau and [Philip Stark are generally not as known as the names of fine artists or fiction writers. Some examples of key contemporary fields that so far have not been given heir due are music videos, cinematography, set design, and industrial design. But no cultural field so far remained more unrecognized than computer science and, in particular, its specific branch of human-computer interaction, or HCI (also called human-computer interface design, or HCI).
It is time that we treat the people who have articulated fundamental ideas of human-computer interaction as the major modern artists. Not only they invented new ways to represent any data (and thus, by default, all data which has to do with ³culture,² i.e. the human experience in the world and the symbolic representations of this experience) but they have also radically redefined our interactions with all of old culture. As a window of a Web browser comes to supplement cinema screen, a museum space, a CD player, a book, and a library, the new situation manifest itself: all culture, past and present, is being filtered through a computer, with its particular human-computer interface. Human-computer interface comes to act as a new form through which all older forms of cultural production are being mediated.
New Media Reader contains essential articles by some of the key interface and software designers in the history of computing so far, from Engelbart to Berners-Lee. Thus in my view this book is not just an anthology of new media but also the first example of a radically new history of modern culture a view from the future when more people will recognize that the true cultural innovators of the last decades of the twentieth century were interface designers, computer game designers, music video directors and DJs -- rather than painters, filmmakers or fiction writers whose fields remained relatively stable during this historical period.


What is New Media: Eight Propositions

Having discussed the particular perspective adopted by New Media Reader in relation to the large cultural context we may want to place new media in the notion of parallel developments in modern art and in computing -- I know want to go through other possible concepts of new media and its histories (including a few proposed by the present author elsewhere). Here are seven answers; without a doubt, more can be invented if desired.

1. New media versus cyberculture.
To begin with, we may distinguish between new media and cyberculture. In my view they represent two distinct fields of research. I would define cyberculture as the study of various social phenomena associated with Internet and other new forms of network communication. Examples of what falls under cyberculture studies are online communities, online multi-player gaming, the issue of online identity, the sociology and the ethnography of email usage, cell phone usage in various communities; the issues of gender and ethnicity in Internet usage; and so on.[2] Notice that the emphasis is on the social phenomena; cyberculture does not directly deals with new cultural objects enabled by network communication technologies. The study of these objects is the domain of new media. In addition, new media is concerned with cultural objects and paradigms enabled by all forms of computing and not just by networking. To summarize: cyberculture is focused on the social and on networking; new media is focused on the cultural and computing.

2. New Media as Computer Technology used as a Distribution Platform.
What are these new cultural objects? Given that digital computing is now used in most areas of cultural production, from publishing and advertising to filmmaking and architecture, how can we single out the area of culture that specifically owes its existence to computing? In my The Language of New Media I begin the discussion of new media by invoking its definition which can be deduced from how the term is used in popular press: new media are the cultural objects which use digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition.[3] Thus, Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and DVD, Virtual Reality, and computer-generated special effects all fall under new media. Other cultural objects which use computing for production and storage but not for final distribution -- television programs, feature films, magazines, books and other paper-based publications, etc. are not new media.
The problems with this definition are three-fold. Firstly, it has to be revised every few years, as yet another part of culture comes to rely on computing technology for distribution (for instance, the shift from analog to digital television; the shift from film-based to digital projection of feature films in movie theatres; e-books, and so on) Secondly, we may suspect that eventually most forms of culture will use computer distribution, and therefore the term ³new media² defined in this way will lose any specificity. Thirdly, this definition does not tell us anything about the possible effects of computer-based distribution on the aesthetics of what is being distributed. In other words, do Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games, CD-ROMs and Virtual Reality all have something in common because they are delivered to the user via a computer? Only if the answer is at least partial yes, it makes sense to think about new media as a useful theoretical category.

3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software.
The Language of New Media is based on the assumption that, in fact, all cultural objects that rely on digital representation and computer-based delivery do share a number of common qualities. In the book I articulate a number of principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. I do not assume that any computer-based cultural object will necessary be structured according to these principles today. Rather, these are tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization that gradually will manifest themselves more and more. For instance, the principle of variability states that a new media cultural object may exist in potentially infinite different states. Today the examples of variability are commercial Web sites programmed to customize Web pages for every user as she is accessing the site particular user, or DJs remixes of already existing recordings; tomorrow the principle of variability may also structure a digital film which will similarly exist in multiple versions.
I deduce these principles, or tendencies, from the basic fact of digital representation of media. New media is reduced to digital data that can be manipulated by software as any other data. This allows automating many media operations, to generate multiple versions of the same object, etc. For instance, once an image is represented as a matrix of numbers, it can be manipulated or even generated automatically by running various algorithms, such as sharpen, blue, colorize, change contrast, etc.
More generally, extending what I proposed in my book, I could say that two basic ways in which computers models reality through data structures and algorithms can also be applied to media once it is represented digitally. In other words, given that new media is digital data controlled by particular ³cultural² software, it make sense to think of any new media object in terms of particular data structures and/or particular algorithms it embodies.[4] Here are the examples of data structures: an image can be thought of as a two-dimensional array (x. y), while a movie can be thought of as a three-dimensional array (x, y, t). Thinking about digital media in terms of algorithms, we discover that many of these algorithms can be applied to any media (such as copy, cut, paste, compress, find, match) while some still retain media specificity. For instance, one can easily search for a particular text string in a text but not for a particular object in an image. Conversely, one can composite a number of still or moving images together but not different texts. These differences have to do with different semiotic logics of different media in our culture: for example, we are ready to read practically any image or a composite of images as being meaningful, while for a text string to be meaningful we require that it obeys the laws of grammar. On the other hand, language has a priori discrete structure (a sentence consists from words which consist from morphemes, and so on) that makes it very easily to automate various operations on it (such as search, match, replace, index), while digital representation of images does not by itself allow for automation of semantic operations.

4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software.
As particular type of media is turned into digital data controlled by software, we may expect that eventually it will fully obey the principles of modularity, variability, and automation. However, in practice these processes may take a long time and they do not proceed in a linear fashion rather, we witness ³uneven development.² For instance, today some media are already totally automated while in other cases this automation hardly exists even though technologically it can be easily implemented.
Let us take as the example contemporary Hollywood film production. Logically we could have expected something like the following scenario. An individual viewer receives a customized version of the film that takes into account her/his previous viewing preferences, current preferences, and marketing profile. The film is completely assembled on the fly by AI software using pre-defined script schemas. The software also generates, again on the fly characters, dialog and sets (this makes product placement particularly easy) that are taken from a massive ³assets² database.
The reality today is quite different. Software is used in some areas of film production but not in others. While some visuals may be created using computer animation, cinema sill centers around the system of human stars whose salaries amount for a large percent of a film budget. Similarly, script writing (and countless re-writing) is also trusted to humans. In short, the computer is kept out of the key ³creative² decisions, and is delegated to the position of a technician.
If we look at another type of contemporary media -- computer games we will discover that they follow the principle of automation much more thoroughly. Game characters are modeled in 3D; they move and speak under software control. Software also decides what happens next in the game, generating new characters, spaces and scenarios in response to user¹s behavior. It is not hard to understand why automation in computer games is much more advanced than in cinema. Computer games is one of the few cultural form ³native ³ to computers; they begun as singular computer programs (before turning into a complex multimedia productions which they are today) -- rather than being an already established medium (such as cinema) which is now slowly undergoing computerization.
Given that the principles of modularity, automation, variability and transcoding are tendencies that slow and unevenly manifest themselves, is there a more precise way to describe new media, as it exists today? The Language of New Media analyzes the language of contemporary new media (or, to put this differently, ³early new media²) as the mix (we can also use software metaphors of ³morph² or ³composite²) between two different sets of cultural forces, or cultural conventions: on the one hand, the conventions of already mature cultural forms (such as a page, a rectangular frame, a mobile point of view) and, on the other hand, the conventions of computer software and, in particular, of HCI, as they developed until now.
Let me illustrate this idea with two examples. In modern visual culture a representational image was something one gazed at, rather than interacted with. An image was also one continuous representational field, i.e. a single scene. In the 1980s GUI redefined an image as a figure-ground opposition between a non-interactive, passive ground (typically a desktop pattern) and active icons and hyperlinks (such as the icons of documents and applications appearing on the desktop). The treatment of representational images in new media represents a mix between these two very different conventions. An image retains its representational function while at the same time is treated as a set of hot spots (³image-map²). This is the standard convention in interactive multimedia, computer games and Web pages. So while visually an image still appears as a single continuous field, in fact it is broken into a number of regions with hyperlinks connected to these regions, so clicking on a region opens a new page, or re-starts game narrative, etc.
This example illustrates how a HCI convention is ³superimposed² (in this case, both metaphorically and literally, as a designer places hot spots over an existing image) over an older representational convention. Another way to think about this is to say that a technique normally used for control and data management is mixed with a technique of fictional representation and fictional narration. I will use another example to illustrate the opposite process: how a cultural convention normally used for fictional representation and narration is ³superimposed² over software techniques of data management and presentation. The cultural convention in this example is the mobile camera model borrowed from cinema. In The Language of New Media I analyze how it became a generic interface used to access any type of data:

Originally developed as part of 3D computer graphics technology for such applications as computer-aided design, flight simulators and computer movie making, during the 1980's and 1990's the camera model became as much of an interface convention as scrollable windows or cut and paste operations. It became an accepted way for interacting with any data which is represented in three dimensions ‹ which, in a computer culture, means literally anything and everything: the results of a physical simulation, an architectural site, design of a new molecule, statistical data, the structure of a computer network and so on. As computer culture is gradually spatial zing all representations and experiences, they become subjected to the camera's particular grammar of data access. Zoom, tilt, pan and track: we now use these operations to interact with data spaces, models, objects and bodies.[5]

To sum up: new media today can be understood as the mix between older cultural conventions for data representation, access and manipulation and newer conventions of data representation, access and manipulation. The ³old² data are representations of visual reality and human experience, i.e., images, text-based and audio-visual narratives what we normally understand by ³culture.² The ³new² data is numerical data.
As a result of this mix, we get such strange hybrids as clickable ³image-maps,² navigable landscapes of financial data, QuickTime (which was defined as the format to represent any time-based data but which in practice is used exclusively for digital video), animated icons a kind of micro-movies of computer culture and so on.
As can be seen, this particular approach to new media assumes the existence of historically particular aesthetics that characterizes new media, or ³early new media,² today. (We may also call it the ³aesthetics of early information culture.²) This aesthetics results from the convergence of historically particular cultural forces: already existing cultural conventions and the conventions of HCI. Therefore, it could not have existed in the past and it unlikely to stay without changes for a long time. But we can also define new media in the opposite way: as specific aesthetic features which keep re-appearing at an early stage of deployment of every new modern media and telecommunication technologies.

5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology.
Rather than reserving the term new media to refer to the cultural uses of current computer and computer-based network technologies, some authors have suggested that every modern media and telecommunication technology passes through its ³new media stage.² In other words, at some point photography, telephone, cinema, television each were ³new media.² This perspective redirects our research efforts: rather than trying to identity what is unique about digital computers functioning as media creation, media distribution and telecommunication devices, we may instead look for certain aesthetic techniques and ideological tropes which accompany every new modern media and telecommunication technology at the initial stage of its introduction and dissemination. Here are a few examples of such ideological tropes: new technology will allow for ³better democracy; it will give us a better access to the ³real² (by offering ³more immediacy² and/or the possibility ³to represent what before could not be represented²); it will contribute to ³the erosion of moral values²; it will destroy the ³natural relationship between humans and the world² by ³eliminating the distance² between the observer and the observed.
And here are two examples of aesthetic strategies that seem to often accompany the appearance of a new media and telecommunication technology (not surprisingly, these aesthetic strategies are directly related to ideological tropes I just mentioned). In the mid 1990s a number of filmmakers started to use inexpensive digital cameras (DV) to create films characterized by a documentary style (for instance, Timecode, Celebration, Mifune). Rather than treating live action as a raw material to be later re-arranged in post-production, these filmmakers place premier importance on the authenticity of the actors¹ performances. The smallness of DV equipment allows a filmmaker to literally be inside the action as it unfolds. In addition to adopting a more intimate filmic approach, a filmmaker can keep shooting for a whole duration of a 60 or 120 minute DV tape as opposed to the standard ten-minute film roll. This gives the filmmaker and the actors more freedom to improvise around a theme, rather than being shackled to the tightly scripted short shots of traditional filmmaking. (In fact the length of Time Code exactly corresponds to the length of a standard DV tape.)
These aesthetic strategies for representing real which at first may appear to be unique to digital revolution in cinema and in fact not unique. DV-style filmmaking has a predecessor in an international filmmaking movement that begun in the late 1950s and unfolded throughout the 1960s. Called ³direct cinema,² ³candid² cinema, ³uncontrolled² cinema, ³observational² cinema, or cinéma vérité (³cinema truth²), it also involved filmmakers using lighter and more mobile (in comparison to what was available before) equipment. Like today¹s DV realists,² the 1960s ³direct cinema² proponents avoided tight staging and scripting, preferring to let events unfold naturally. Both then and now, the filmmakers used new filmmaking technology to revolt against the existing cinema conventions that were perceived as being too artificial. Both then and now, the key word of this revolt was the same: ³immediacy.²
My second example of similar aesthetic strategies re-appearing more than deals with the development of moving image technology throughout the nineteenth century, and the development of digital technologies to display moving images on a computer desktop during the 1990s. In the first part of the 1990s, as computers' speed kept gradually increasing, the CD-ROM designers have been able to go from a slide show format to the superimposition of small moving elements over static backgrounds and finally to full-frame moving images. This evolution repeats the nineteenth century progression: from sequences of still images (magic lantern slides presentations) to moving characters over static backgrounds (for instance, in Reynaud's Praxinoscope Theater) to full motion (the Lumieres' cinematograph). Moreover, the introduction of QuickTime by Apple in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition. Culturally, the two technologies also functioned similarly: as the latest technological ³marvel.² If in the early 1890s the public patronized Kinetoscope parlors where peep-hole machines presented them with the latest invention ‹ tiny moving photographs arranged in short loops; exactly a hundred years later, computer users were equally fascinated with tiny QuickTime Movies that turned a computer in a film projector, however imperfect. Finally, the Lumieres' first film screenings of 1895 which shocked their audiences with huge moving images found their parallel in 1995 CD-ROM titles where the moving image finally fills the entire computer screen (for instance, in Jonny Mnemonic computer game, based on the film by the same title.) Thus, exactly a hundred years after cinema was officially "born," it was reinvented on a computer screen.
Interesting as they are, these two examples also illustrate the limitations of thinking about new media in terms of historically recurrent aesthetic strategies and ideological tropes. While ideological tropes indeed seem re-appearing rather regularly, many aesthetic strategies may only reappear two or three times. Moreover, some strategies and/or tropes can be already found in the first part of the nineteenth century while others only make their first appearance much more recently.[6] In order for this approach to be truly useful it would be insufficient to simply name the strategies and tropes and to record the moments of their appearance; instead, we would have to develop a much more comprehensive analysis which would correlate the history of technology with social, political and economical histories of the modern period.
So far my definitions of new media focused on technology; the next three definitions will consider new media as material re-articulation, or encoding, of purely cultural tendencies in short, as ideas rather than technologies.

6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or Through Other Technologies.
A modern digital computer is a programmable machine. This simply means that the same computer can execute different algorithms. An algorithm is a sequence of steps that need to be followed to accomplish a task. Digital computers allow to execute most algorithms very quickly, however in principle an algorithm, since it is just a sequence of simple steps, can be also executed by a human, although much more slowly. For instance, a human can sort files in a particular order, or count the number of words in a text, or cut a part of an image and paste it in a different place.
This realization gives us a new way to think about both digital computing, in general, and new media, in particular, as a massive speed-up of various manual techniques that all have already existed. Consider, for instance, computer¹s ability to represent objects in linear perspective and to animated such representations. When you move your character through the world in a first person shooter computer game (such as Quake), or when you move your viewpoint around a 3D architectural model, a computer re-calculates perspectival views for all the objects in the frame many times every second (in the case of current desktop hardware, frame rates of 80 frames of second are not uncommon). But we should remember that the algorithm itself was codified during the Renaissance in Italy, and that, before digital computers came along (that is, for about five hundred years) it was executed by human draftsmen. Similarly, behind many other new media techniques there is an algorithm that, before computing, was executed manually. (Of course since art has always involved some technology even as simple as a stylus for making marks on stone what I mean by ³manually² is that a human had to systematically go through every step of an algorithm himself, even if he was assisted by some image making tools.) Consider, for instance, another very popular new media technique: making a composite from different photographs. Soon after photography was invented, such nineteenth century photographers as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar G. Reijlander[LM1] were already creating smooth "combination prints" by putting together multiple photographs.
While this approach to thinking about new media takes us away from thinking about it purely in technological terms, it has a number of problems of its own. Substantially speeding up the execution of an algorithm by implementing this algorithm in software does not just leave things as they are. The basic point of dialectics is that a substantial change in quantity (i.e., in speed of execution in this case) leads to the emergence of qualitatively new phenomena. The example of automation of linear perspective is a case in point. Dramatically speeding up the execution of a perspectival algorithm makes possible previously non-existent representational technique: smooth movement through a perspectival space. In other words, we get not only quickly produced perspectival drawings but also computer-generated movies and interactive computer graphics.
The technological shifts in the history of ³combination prints² also illustrate the cultural dialectics of transformation of quantity into quality. In the nineteenth century, painstakingly crafted ³combination prints² represented an exception rather than the norm. In the twentieth century, new photographic technologies made possible photomontage that quickly became one of the basic representational techniques of modern visual culture. And finally the arrival of digital photography via software like Photoshop, scanners and digital cameras in the late 1980s and 1990s not only made photomontage much more omnipresent than before but it also fundamentally altered its visual characteristics. In place of graphic and hard-edge compositions pioneered by Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko we now have smooth multi-image composites which use transparency, blur, colorization and other easily available digital manipulations and which often incorporate typography that is subjected to exactly the same manipulations (thus in Post-Photoshop visual culture the type becomes a subset of a photo-based image.) To see this dramatic change, it is enough to compare a typical music video from 1985 and a typical music video from 1995: within ten years, visual aesthetics of photomontage undergone a fundamental change.
Finally, thinking about new media as speeding up of algorithms which previously were executed by hand foregrounds the use of computers for fast algorithm execution, but ignores its two other essential uses: real-time network communication and real-time control. The abilities to interact with or control remotely located data in real-time, to communicate with other human beings in real-time, and control various technologies (sensors, motors, other computers) in real time constitute the very foundation of our information society -- phone communications, Internet, financial networking, industrial control, the use of micro-controllers in numerous modern machines and devices, and so on. They also make possible many forms of new media art and culture: interactive net art, interactive computer installations, interactive multimedia, computer games, real-time music synthesis.
While non-real time media generation and manipulation via digital computers can be thought of as speeding up of previously existing artistic techniques, real-time networking and control seem to constitute qualitatively new phenomena. When we use Photoshop to quickly combine photographs together, or when we compose a text using a Microsoft Word, we simply do much faster what before we were doing either completely manually or assisted by some technologies (such as a typewriter). However, in the cases when a computer interprets or synthesize human speech in real time, monitors sensors and modify program¹s based on their input in real-time, or controls other devices, again in real-time, this is something which simply could not be done before. So while it is important to remember that, on one level, a modern digital computer is just a faster calculator, we should not ignore its other identity: that of a cybernetic control device. To put this in different way, while new media theory should pay tributes to Alan Turing, it should not forget about its other conceptual father Norbert Weiner.

7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia.
The approach to new media just discussed does not foreground any particular cultural period as the source of algorithms that are eventually encoded in computer software. In my article ³Avant-garde as Software² I have proposed that, in fact, a particular historical period is more relevant to new media than any other that of the 1920s (more precisely, the years between 1915 and 1928).[7] During this period the avant-garde artists and designers have invented a whole new set of visual and spatial languages and communication techniques that we still use today. According to my hypothesis,

With new media, 1920s communication techniques acquire a new status. Thus new media does represent a new stage of the avant-garde. The techniques invented by the 1920s Left artists became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from a dream-existence of bourgeois society (constructivist design, New Typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing, photo-montage, etc.) now define the basic routine of a post-industrial society: the interaction with a computer. For example, the avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as a "cut and paste" command, the most basic operation one can perform on any computer data. In another example, the dynamic windows, pull-down menus, and HTML tables all allow a computer user to simultaneously work with practically unrestricted amount of information despite the limited surface of the computer screen. This strategy can be traced to Lissitzky's use of movable frames in his 1926 exhibition design for the International Art Exhibition in Dresden.

The encoding of the 1920s avant-garde techniques in software does not mean that new media simply qualitatively extends the techniques which already existed. Just as it is the case with the phenomenon of real-time computation that I discussed above, tracing new media heritage in the 1920s avant-garde reveals a qualitative change as well. The modernist avant-garde was concerned with ³filtering² visible reality in new ways. The artists are concerned with representing the outside world, with ³seeing² it in as many different ways as possible. Of course some artists already begin to react to the emerging media environment by making collages and photo-montages consisting from newspaper clipping, existing photographs, pieces of posters, and so on; yet these practices of manipulating existing media were not yet central. But a number of decades later they have to the foreground of cultural production. To put this differently, after a century and a half of media culture, already existing media records (or ³media assets,² to use the Hollywood term) become the new raw material for software-based cultural production and artistic practice. Many decades of analog media production resulted in a huge media archive and it is the contents of this archive television programs, films, audio recordings, etc which became the raw data to be processed, re-articulated, mined and re-packaged through digital software rather than raw reality. In my article I formulate this as follows:

New Media indeed represents the new avant-garde, and its innovations are at least as radical as the formal innovations of the 1920s. But if we are to look for these innovations in the realm of forms, this traditional area of cultural evolution, we will not find them there. For the new avant-garde is radically different from the old:
1. The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, and simulation.
2. The new avant-garde is no longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its primary material.

My concept of ³meta-media² is related to a more familiar notion of ³post-modernism² the recognition that by the 1980s the culture became more concerned with reworking already existing content, idioms and style rather than creating genially new ones. What I would like to stress (and what I think the original theorists of post-modernism in the 1980s have not stressed enough) is the key role played by the material factors in the shift towards post-modernist aesthetics: the accumulation of huge media assets and the arrival of new electronic and digital tools which made it very easy to access and re-work these assets. This is another example of quantity changing into quality in media history: the gradual accumulation of media records and the gradual automation of media management and manipulation techniques eventually recoded modernist aesthetics into a very different post-modern aesthetics.

8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post WWII Art and Modern Computing.
Along with the 1920s, we can think of other cultural periods that generated ideas and sensibilities particularly relevant to new media. In the 1980s a number of writers looked at the connections between Baroque and post-modern sensibilities; given the close linked between post-modernism and new media I just briefly discussed, it would be logical if the parallels between Baroque and new media can also be established.[8] It can be also argued that in many ways new media returns us to a pre-modernist cultural logic of the eighteenth century: consider for instance, the parallel between an eighteenth century communities of readers who were also all writers and participants in Internet newsgroups and mailing lists who are also both readers and writers.
In the twentieth century, along with the 1920s, which for me to represent the cultural peak of this century (because during this period more radically new aesthetic techniques were prototyped than in any other period of similar duration), the second culturally peak 1960s also seem to contain many of new media genes. A number of writers such as Söke Dinkla have argued that interactive computer art (1980s -) further develops ideas already contained in the new art of the 1960s (happenings, performances, installation): active participation of the audience, an artwork as a temporal process rather than as a fixed object, an artwork as an open system.[9] This connection make even more sense when we remember that some of the most influential figures in new media art (Jeffrey Shaw, Roy Ascott) have started their art careers in the 1960s and only later moved to computing and networking technologies. For instance, in the end of the 1960s Jeffrey Shaw was working on inflatable structures for film projections and performances which were big enough to contain a small audience inside something which he later came back to in many of his VR installations, and even more directly in EVE project.[10]
There is another aesthetic project of the 1960s that also can be linked to new media not only conceptually but also historically, since the artists who pursued this project with computers (such as Manfred Mohr) knew of minimalist artists who during the same decade pursued the same project ³manually² (most notably, Sol LeWitt).[11] This project can be called ³combinatorics.²[12] It involves creating images and/or objects by systematically varying a single parameter or by systematically creating all possible combinations of a small number of elements.[13] ³Combinatorics² in computer art and minimalist art of the 1960s led to the creation of remarkably similar images and spatial structures; it illustrates well that the algorithms, this essential part of new media, do not depend on technology but can be executed by humans.


Four decades of new media

Along with the ones I already mentioned, more connections between 1960s cultural imagination and new media exist. Similarly to another recent important anthology on new media (XXX Multimedia from Wagner to XXX), New Media Reader contains a number of important texts by the radical artists and writers from the 1960s which have conceptual affinity to the logic of computing technology: Allan Kaprow, William Borrows; ³Oulipo movement (whose members pursued combinatorics project in relation to literature), Nam June Paik and others. ³The Complex, the Changing, and the Intermediate² part of the reader presents the most comprehensive, to date, set of cultural texts from the 1960s whose ideas particularly resonate with the developments in computing in the same period.
Although modern computing has many conceptual fathers and mothers, from Leibnitz to Ada Lovelace, and its prehistory spans many centuries, I would argue that the paradigm that still defines our understanding and usage of computing was defined in the 1960s. During the 1960s the principles of modern interactive graphical user interface (GUI) where given clear articulation (although the practical implementation and refined of these ideas took place later, in the 1970s at Xerox Parc). The articles by Licklider, Sutherland, Nelson, and Engelbart from the 1960s included in the reader are the essential documents of our time; one day the historians of culture would rate them on the same scale of importance as texts by Marx, Freud and Saussure. (Other key developments that also took place in the 1960s early 1970s were Internet, Unix, and object-oriented programming. A number of other essential ideas of modern computing such as networking itself, the use of computers for real-time control, and the graphical interactive display were articulated earlier, in the second part of the 1940s and the first part of the 1950s.)[14]
The first section of the reader takes us to the end of the 1970s; by this time the key principles of modern computing and GUI were already practically implemented and refined by the developers at Xerox Parc but they were not yet commercially available to consumers. The second section ³Media Manipulation, Media Design² covers the late 1970s and the 1980s. During this period Macintosh (released in 1984) popularized GUI; it also shipped with a simple drawing and painting programs which emphasized the new role of a computer as a creative tool; finally, it was the first inexpensive computer which came with a bit-mapped display. Atari computers made computer-based sound manipulation affordable; computer games achieved a new level of popularity; cinema started to use computers for special effects (Tron released by Disney in 1982 contained seventeen minutes of 3-D computer generated scenes); towards the very end of the decade, Photoshop, which can be called the key software application of post-modernism, was finally released. All these developments of the 1980s created new set of roles for a modern digital computer: a manipulator of existing media (Photoshop); a media synthesizer (film special effects, sound software), and a new medium (or rather, a set of new mediums) in its own right (computer games). New Media Reader collects essential articles by computer scientists from the 1980s that articulate ideas behind these new roles of a computer (Bolt, Snheiderman, Laurel and others).
As computing left the strict realm of big business, the military, the government and the university and entered society at large, cultural theorists begin to think about its effects, and it is appropriate that New Media Reader also reprints key theoretical statements from the 1980s (Turkle, Haraway). I should note here that European cultural theorists reacted to computerization earlier than the Americans: both Lyotard¹s The Post-Modern Condition (1979) and Baudrillard¹s Simulacra and Simulations (1981) contain detailed discussions of computing, something which their 1980s American admirers did not seem to notice.
The last section of the reader ³Revolution, Resistance, and the Web¹s Arrival² contains to weave texts by computer scientists, social researchers, cultural theorists, and critics from the end of the 1980s onward; it also takes us into the early 1990s when the rise of the Web redefined computing one again. If the 1980s gradually made visible the new role of a computer as a media manipulator and an interface to media the developments which eventually were codified around 1990 in the term ³new media² in the 1990s another role of a digital computer (which was already present since the late 1940s) came to the foreground: that of a foundation for real-time multi-media networking, available not just for selected researchers and the Military (as it was for decades) but for millions of people.
In the 1960s we can find strong conceptual connections between computing and radical art of the period, but with the sole exception of Ted Nelson (the conceptual father of hypertext) no computer scientist was directly applying radical political ideas of the times to computer design. In fact these ideas had a strong effect of the field but it was delayed until the 1970s when Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox Parc pursued the vision of personal computer workstation that would empower an individual rather than a big organization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we seem to witness a different kind of parallel between social changes and computer design. Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the end of cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time. The first development ended the separation of the world into separate parts closed to each other, making it a single global system; the second development connected world¹s computers into a single networking. The early Web (i.e., before it came to be dominated by big commercial portals towards the end of the 1990s) also practically implemented a radically horizontal, no-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology and no value system can dominate the rest thus providing a perfect metaphor to a new post Cold War sensibility.
The emergence of new media studies as a field testifies to our recognition of the key cultural role played by digital computers and computer-enabled networking in our global society. For a field in its infancy, we are very lucky to now have such a comprehensive record of its origins as the one provided by New Media Reader; I believe that its readers would continue to think about both the ideas in its individual texts and the endless connections which can be found between different texts for many years to come.



[1] More subtle but equally convincing is the relationship between Panopticism by Michel Foucault which comes from his book Discipline and Punish (1975) and Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (1997). In 1960s and 1970s the prevalent model of computer use was time sharing XXX. It was Panopticum-like in so far as it involved a single centralized computer with terminals connected to it and thus was conceptually similar to an individual prisoner¹s cell connected by lines of site to the central tower in Panopticum. At the end of the 1960s, computer scientist Alan Kay pioneered a radically different idea of a personalized computer workstation, a small and mobile device that he called Dynabook. This idea came to be realized only in 1984 with the introduction of Macintosh. (It is not accidental that the famous Apple commercial --directed by Rodney Scott who two years earlier made Blade Runner -- explicitly invokes the images of Orvellian-like society of imprisonment and control, with Macintosh bringing liberation to the users imprisoned by an older computing paradigm.)
[2] For a good example of cyberculture paradigm, see online Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (www.otal.umd.edu/%7Erccs/).
[3] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001).
[4] I don¹t meant here the actual data structures and algorithms which may be used by particular software rather, I am thinking of them in more abstract way: what is the structure of a cultural objects and what kind of operations it enables for the user.
[5] Manovich, The Language of New Media, 80.
[6] I believe that the same problems apply to Erkki Huhtamo¹s very interesting theory of media archeology which is close to the approach presented here and which advocates the study of tropes which accompany the history of modern media technology, both the ones which were realized and the ones which were only imagined.
[7] Lev Manovich, ³Avant-Garde as Software,² in Ostranenie, edited by Stephen Kovats (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1999). Available online at http://www.manovich.net/. (The subsequent quotes are from the online text.)
[8] Norman Klein is currently completing a book entitled From Vatican to Las Vegas: A History of Special Effects that is discussing in detail the connections between the treatment of space in Baroque and in cyberculture.
[9] See for instance Söke Dinkla, "From Participation to Interaction: Towards the Origins of Interactive Art," in Clicking In: Hots Links to a Digital Culture, edited by Lynn Herhman Leeson (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996).
[10] Jeffrew Shaw, ed., Jeffrey Shaw--A User's Manual (DAP, 1997).
[11] For manfred Mohr, see http://www.emohr.com/.
[12] Frank Dietrich has used the term ³combinatorics²to talk about a particular direction in the early computer arft of the 1960s. See Frank Dietrich, "Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art," (Computer Graphics, 1985).
[13] It is interesting that Sol LeWitt was able to produce works ³by hand² which often consisted of more systematic variations of the same elements than similar works done by other artists who used computers. In other words, we can say that Sol LeWitt was better in executing certain minimalist algorithms than the computers of the time.
[14] See Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, reprint edition (The MIT Press, 1997).


http://nothing.org/netart_101/readings/manovich.htm

Interactive Art and the Phenomenology of Merleau Ponty

by silvia, 19.01.2006

At the base of Interactive Art there is a co-relational experience – a kind of interconnectivity- intersubjectivity which in its strong-experiential meaning signifies "mutual co-arising and engagement of interdependent subjects, or intersubjects"(1).

Interactive Art implies a strong emphasis on body, behaviour, negotiation of meanings, and the involvement of the public who, now transformed into "participants," play an active role in shaping their own field of experiences. Interactive Art focuses on corporal involvement of the public and this have social relevance and implications as it is not only limited to physical sphere but also to mental and relational faculties.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908- 1961) never experienced Interactive Art or technology, but he provides a brilliant description for the perception “that outstrips modern perspectivism” developing a phenomenology of sense experience, an ethics of the body. Therefore in order to understand Interactive Art I think that it' s then important to consider Merleau Ponty's point of view because there is a strong actional sense of embodiment in his philosophy which is also interactive and thus already intersubjective.

Ponty suggests that all perceptual experience be it mental or physical is bodily and dependent on the body world interaction He describes the relationship between body and mind (2) that overcomes the separation of human from body and presents new possibility for relation and community among world’s beings. Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of the "body-subject" as an alternative to the cartesian "cogito" (3). Consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined and mutually “engaged'. The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences, but a correlate of our body and its sensory functions (4).

Silvia Marini

(1) Maurice Merleau- Ponty The Visibile and the Invisibile, Translated by Alfonso Lingis, Evaston ; Illinois Northwestern University Press, 1969, p.245.
(2) In his final work The visible and the invisible he provides a most detailed account of mind-body relation. According to Merleau-Ponty modern philosophy ignores the role of the body in providing possibility for perception and for knowledge. He uses the phrase “lived body” as the basis for thought and consciousness.
(3) In the Cartesian model subjectivity is awareness of oneself as a subject, as the I who is the subject of thought. This model of relational ego creates a divide between the self and other. The other is excluded from my private field of perception. Ponty finds that subjectivity is “bound up with that of the body and that of the world - the subjective aspect of being is inseparable from body and world.” In his later essay “the Child Relations with Others” he describes how self consciousness and selfreflection originate in presence and relation to others.
(4)Maurice Merleau- PontyPhenomenology of Perception (first published in French in 1945), trans. Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. (http://www.answers.com/topic/maurice-merleau-ponty)

Tilman Baumgärtel
The Self on the Screen

This morning, while I was surfing the usual news websites, I stumbled
across the following opening lines: "Hackers evolve from pranksters into
profiteers Computer identity theft has long been a fast-growing
cybercrime. But increasingly, hackers are seeking profit rather than just
fun." (USA Today) "Surveillance Nation: Webcams, tracking devices, and
interlinked databases are leading to the elimination of unmonitored public
space. Are we prepared for the consequences of the intelligence-gathering
network we're unintentionally building?" (MIT Technology Review) And there
was a text about a man who auctioned off electrical equipment on eBay
under a false name but then did not deliver the goods after receiving
payment. And a Reuters' text about the chats Microsoft X-Box users have
on a new players' online network.

At first glance, these are three texts on very different topics, but upon
closer examination they have something in common: they all deal with
identity on the Internet, with the construction of an online self. MIT
Technology Review enumerates the countless and ever growing possibilities
for being spied on and tracked down via the Internet and other networks,
and for becoming fodder for databanks with personality profiles. X-Box
players, according to Reuters, use the Microsoft network primarily to chat
with each other under a pseudonym. And the crime of the eBay swindler as
well as of hackers who gain access to passwords and credit card numbers in
order to empty bank accounts or shop online is even called:"identity
theft". "It's the perfect crime of the information age", USA Today cites a
staff member of an American banking supervision board as saying. "The
Internet gives identity thieves multiple opportunities to steal personal
identifiers and gain access to financial data."

In the early 21st century, "identity theft" and the possibilities of
"multiple online personalities" has become a subject of everyday
bulletins. And it may indeed be a good idea to step back for a moment
from time to time and realize that these so seemingly familiar news items
today would have been at most the subject of science-fiction stories not
too long ago. The issue of "freely configurable" identity and
subjectivity, so commonplace today due to the worldwide networking and
immaterialization of communication processes, first began playing an
important role in the 1990s within two discourses which, admittedly,
hardly took notice of each other, but in retrospect display a remarkable
proximity: on the one hand, in traditional art; on the other hand, in the
debate on the new possibilities for interaction and communication which
digital media began to offer at the time, and their cultural offshoot: net
art.

I would like to illustrate in this text how the debate on issues of
identity has repeatedly been pushed forward by technological innovations,
and how art has taken up and examined indeed with growing keenness not
only with reference to but rather through direct and practical exploration
of these technologies. The references between visual art and cinema, video
and the Internet are manifold, and often muddled, but one theme repeatedly
surfaces at the heart of this artistic exploration of the latest media of
each period: identity, subjectivity, the self. And in each instance
whether it was cinema, video or the Internet the exploration of this
problem has been the product of the genuine properties of these
technologies as media. In this context, one can even speak of a constantly
recurring motif of media art, one which evolves from the specific
technical properties of technical media.

In my investigation, I have proceeded from a project which in this context
signalizes for me an end point in a development of media art and in
particular of Internet art: "life_sharing" by the Italian group
0100101110101101.ORG which, depending on one's perspective, takes from the
start either a disillusioned or an illusionless look at cyber-Utopias of
the 1990s and at conceptions of subject and identity negotiated in
connection with these Utopias.

"life_sharing" (an anagram of "file sharing", i.e. exchanging "music"
files via the Internet) allows access via the WorldWideWeb to the computer
of the two artists. This computer has not only their entire software and
other digital material on it, but also all of the artists' e-mails.
Visitors can read 0100101110101101.ORG's complete e-mail correspondence
since 1999. Afterwards they are familiar with the artists' exact web
address, their (secret) real names, their postal address, account number,
earnings, exhibition plans or invitations to lectures. One can learn about
their private contacts with friends, gossip from the media art scene and
other things not normally for the public. In 2002, in a continuation of
this project entitled "VOPOs", one could check daily on a website where
the artists were at any moment, since their cell phones transmitted their
respective positions several times a day to the Internet, where the
locations of the two 0100101110101101.ORG members were displayed on a map.

To put it briefly: "life_sharing" is a relatively complete form of
self-exposure. Since both the professional as well as the private life of
0100101110101101.ORG occurs, or at least is coordinated, to a large extent
via computer, there are few aspects of the artists' lives which cannot be
viewed by these means. One could almost describe "life_sharing" as a kind
of online self-portrait. Of course, this self-portrait leaves almost as
much open as it conceals: for despite all its openness, it does not reveal
what the two people look like who are working at this computer. Unlike the
countless Internet exhibitionists who continually film themselves doing
daily tasks and then distribute these images on the Internet (like the now
famous "JenniCam"), 0100101110101101.ORG entirely refrains from giving
visual information, providing only digital texts. And unlike all the
webcam girls and boys, 0100101110101101.ORG cannot even influence what
viewers see by how they position cameras and so deprive themselves of the
most important method with which human subjectivity is wrested from the
apparatus in cinema. The machine with which 0100101110101101.ORG work,
simply registers all the data they come into contact with.

The fact that machines can record and reproduce every human movement and
emotion is, of course, the primal media experience; and since the
emergence of photography as well as of the phonograph in the late 19th
century, it has sometimes been viewed with horror or as downright
traumatic. At other times it has triggered optimistic ideas of a "new
man", an "expanded consciousness" and a "freely definable subjectivity".

Long before anyone could even imagine such a global multimedia
communication network such as the Internet, it was the cinema which first
made a topic and motif of its technical dispositif. Much has been written
about early cinema's fondness of doppelgangers or doubles, indeed this
subject has become a similar topos in literature on cinema as the subject
of the Wiedergänger has on the screen: the armies of shadows and
mirror-images that have come to life, from Mr. Hydes and portraits of
Dorian Gray, clones and all the mechanical doubles to the doppelgangers
created from the flesh of their makers that have populated film and TV
screens for over a century.

Their origin in German Romanticism or works by Dostoyevski has been
extensively described. They have been interpreted as critique of the human
hubris or as satirical reflection of their environment. Yet these
doppelgangers, which early cinema so enjoyed making the subject of its
stories, can be understood as an allegory of the reflecting power of the
medium itself. For the most obvious property of photography and cinema is
the incessant production and reproduction of doppelgangers. Photography
and film also have doubling qualities. As Roland Barthes emphasizes in his
book "Camera Lucida": "A specific photograph, in effect, is never
distinguished from its referent (...) By nature, the Photograph (…) has
something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a
pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself,
both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very
heart of the moving world; they are glued together, limb by limb, like the
condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs
of fish (…) which navigate in convoy, as though united in an eternal
coitus." These specific properties of photography as a medium, its
potential for infinite technical reproducibility, mark its relationship to
pre-photographic reality. "The direct physical relationship between
light-reflecting objects and their 'take' in the chemical surface of the
film makes photography analogous to the world of material objects beyond
the picture." From this technical circumstance, Katharina Sykora deduces
certain "shared structural aspects" between photography/film and the motif
of the android, but what she states is doubly true for doppelganger
figures on the screen. These doubles, which have above all played an
important role in fantasy films, can at all times also be read as a screen
reflection of cinema technology with its qualities to directly reproduce
and imprint.

Particularly German cinema of the 1920s is rich in doppelgangers and
figures divided between different bodies. Among such films is "The Student
from Prague", which has been remade several times, and in which the
student sells his mirror-image to a sorcerer. Another such film is Max
Mack's "The Other". "Dr. Mabuse", who first appears as the director of a
"lunatic asylum" and then as one of its "inmates", must also be mentioned
in this context. The many artificial humans found in films such as
"Alraune", "Metropolis" or diverse other treatments of material about the
Golem and Homunculus, can also be seen as a continuation of the
doppelganger motif. Strikingly, it was primarily horror films which never
tired of dealing with the horrors of the reproduced self.

In "The Haunted Screen" , Lotte Eisner points out the special meaning of
motifs of shadows and mirrors in the silent films of the Weimar Republic:
"In their trips through the looking-glass the metaphysically-inclined
Germans go much deeper than Alice (that essentially very materialistic
little girl). The rhyme of Schein (seeming) with Sein (being) leads them
like Tieck, to juggle with reality and dreams until the forms born of the
darkness seem the only genuine ones."

In contrast to this romanticizing description, Siegfried Kracauer
interpreted "The Student of Prague" as an allegory of the German middle
class in the 1920s: "By separating Baldwin from his reflection and making
both face each other, Wegener's film symbolizes a specific kind of split
personality. Instead of being unaware of his own duality, the
panic-stricken Baldwin realizes that he is in the grip of an antagonist
who is nobody but himself. This was an old motif surrounded by a halo of
meanings, but was it not also a dreamlike transcription of what the German
middle class actually experienced in its relation to the feudal caste
running Germany?" Even if one is not so inclined to follow Kracauer's
rather willful Marxist-materialist interpretation, the fact that "The
Student of Prague" is by all means marked by a "deep and fearful concern
with the foundations of the self" cannot be denied.

Just as the technological parameters of film played a part in this concern
and the ensuing motif of the doppelganger in early cinema, the topic of
identity and subjectivity also played a an important role in the next
medium accessible to artists: video. Lucid observers quickly noted that in
the early video art of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the self,
(artistic) subjectivity, was a central motif. In 1976, in a now famous
essay written for "October" magazine, Rosalind Krauss describes an
"aesthetics of narcissism" as one of the most salient features of new
video art. Based on some works by artists such as Richard Serra, Nancy
Holt, Bruce Naumann, Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas and Peter
Campus, she points out a preoccupation of the artist with his or her self
as one of the most prevalent motifs of video art. By the way, a fact often
forgotten today as it is in part hard to imagine: for Krauss video was not
predominantly sculptural video installations or the presentation of
finished tapes, but works using feedback or closed-circuit arrangements,
or that were used as a component of a performance.

The recurring motif of the doppelganger in German cinema of the 1920s,
which resulted from the reproducing qualities of the medium, repeatedly
depicted the decentering of human subjectivity. Kraus, on the hand,
detected a completely different attitude with video: "The self and its
reflected image are of course literally separate. But the agency of
reflection is a mode of appropriation, of illusionistically erasing the
difference between subject and object." In contrast to the decentered,
literally 'torn' subject of German silent films, one can speak of
subjectivity and the apparatus of a reproducing medium absorbing each
other in the early video art works described by Kraus. Instead of a sense
of horror at the duplication of the human image, such as played so
significant a role in German silent film, Krauss detects in early video
art a kind of "peaceful coexistence" between recording/replay technologies
and their subjects, which may have been encouraged by the
technology-friendly or even underlying euphoria in the new technologies
prevailing in the art scene at the time.

Initially, net culture and art in the 1990s took an almost playful
approach to the topic of the reproduction of the self: its keenness to
experiment and lack of seriousness set it apart from the
analytical-indifferent attitude of video art towards its subject. As with
cinema and video, it was once again the genuine properties of new digital
technologies as media that made the topic of identity and subjectivity so
compelling. The anonymous character of online environments allows their
users to develop new and, if need be, different identities, as well as to
present themselves on the Internet without any correspondence having to
exist with their real personalities.

It should be emphasized here that by no means only Internet art which was
oriented towards traditional high art was immediately interested in this
topic. Rather, cyber-entities suddenly appeared, independently and without
having been coordinated, in such diverse forums as mailing lists, MUDs and
MOOs, chats and the web. These entities all played with their ability to
be ascribed to a real entity. Concealed behind avatars, nicks, fictitious
e-mail addresses or figures in an online game, one could or can splendidly
experiment with the possibilities of self-portrayal in online
environments. On the Internet, a person's identity, gender, age, ethnic
origin, class membership, etc. have become manipulable, unstable entities.

These games took place against the backdrop of a postmodern debate on the
"constructedness" of human subjectivity, "hybrid identities" and the
"deconstruction" and "de-essentialization" of categories such as gender
and race. Even if most of the participants in this play probably had no
knowledge of such academic debates, their experiments can be seen as
entirely congruent with such discussions. The American psychologist Sherry
Turkle, who in her books "The Second Self" and "Life on the Screen"
investigated the impact of computers and the Internet on the self-image of
her patients, summarized the facts neatly in the phrase: "Computers embody
postmodern theory and bring it down to earth."

On the other hand, it can be assumed that the participants in experiments
conducted in the early net art of the mid-1990s had at least a rudimentary
knowledge of the postmodern debates revolving around the self. The
abundance of works done on identity and subjectivity at this time are
almost too enormous too assess; they are so numerous that this motif came
close to becoming a cliché. Hence only a few works from this cheerful and
ironical period will be mentioned briefly here: in her work "Bodies Inc.",
American artist Victoria Vesna allowed users to construct their own online
bodies from a variety of digital elements and, when necessary, to bury
them in a designated cemetery. For a net art competition put on by the
Kunsthalle in Hamburg, German artist Cornelia Sollfrank created over one
hundred alleged cyberartists, who then submitted their entries to the
competition via e-mail addresses set up just for this purpose ("Female
Extension", 1997). Austrian artist Eva Wohlgemuth had her entire body
scanned in the USA and used the data from this 3D wire-frame model for
manipulations on her website. All these works play with human identity and
the possibility of their manipulation "in cyberspace".

In this context one net entity became especially notorious: she was called
Netochka Nezvanova or N.N. and she flooded countless mailing lists on
cyberculture and net art with her contributions as of 1997. In a peculiar
hotchpotch of English, French, German and diverse programming languages,
she presented herself by cursing and insulting most of the participants.
The campaign, evidently conceived as advertising for a computer program on
real-time manipulation of multimedia data, seemed to have come from a
whole group of participants. It is an amusing example of how different
people could converge in one online identity, instead as was usually the
case of one person splitting into diverse online identities.

Initially the attention which N.N. attracted in this campaign led to a
string of invitations to festivals; yet it was not long before everything
related to this artificial figure quieted down. And otherwise too, little
remains at the beginning of the 21st century of the delight of the
mid-1990s in the supposedly so freely selectable and constructible online
identity. Moreover, ever since the American music and film industry
successfully tracked down the identity of users of peer-to-peer exchanges
so as to reprimand or even take proceedings against them, and since a
series of dramatic trials have been held dealing with illegal materials on
private websites, the myth of the unrestricted freedom of cyberspace has
suffered. After the passage of strict laws on the liabilities of Internet
users in different countries (including the USA and Germany) and laws
requiring providers to store all user data or even to actively monitor
their users for violations of the law, the Internet no longer seems to be
a Utopia with much scope for playing with identity and subjectivity, but
rather a panopticum for perfect surveillance.

"life _sharing" marks exactly this post-Utopian point in the history of
the Internet and translates it into a kind of Internet ready-made: a
personal computer that is in fact nothing else but a personal computer.
Without selecting, it stoically records all in and outgoing digital data
and holds it for retrieval offering, like a deaf and dumb waiter, all the
information stored on it about its owner. In a certain way this work
evades analysis in the same way as did the pathological narcissist of whom
Freud wrote he was incurable because he was just plain not interested in
any form of therapy.

Yet against the background of the development of the doppelganger and
double as motifs in media art made with film, video and the Internet,
"life_sharing" appears to be an acceptance of the inevitable: of the fact
that the machines which surround us constantly register and record data
about us and that this information can be retrieved at any time.
0100101110101101.ORG accept this technologically-generated status quo, yet
they do not do so without an ulterior form of resistance: instead of
freezing in horror when faced with their digital doppelgangers or trying
to conceal or encode these data, they make them as accessible as possible,
as if they might be able to disown their continual reproduction precisely
by clogging the media's channels. Politically and in terms of data
protection, this might be seen as a problematic choice, yet it is
simultaneously a conscious reflection on how to deal with this topic, one
which most others recorded pursue without even knowing it.

And what has come of the horror which filled contemporaries in the early
20th century when confronted with the possibility of their reproducibility
in media? The doppelganger the evil Mr. Hyde who accompanies the Dr.
Jekyll of our everyday ego has today become the protagonist in computer
games like "Grand Theft Auto". Now, under his new nom-de-guerre, Tommy
Vercetti, he serves as frame and pretence to live out one's most asocial
urges, and by doing so to "win" "mission" after "mission". At this very
moment, a few hundred-thousand people around the globe are probably busy
stealing, murdering, blackmailing or committing arson in the cyberspace of
their PlayStations. In 1913, when sorcerer Acapinelli bought the student
of Prague's mirror-image for the very first time, he would not have even
dared dream of such an army of devious doubles.

Memento, Memory, and Montage

Nate Burgos

Memory is the innate power to make sense of our environment and ultimately ourselves. Mental images are the most vivid in their visual intensity. This is what makes memory a necessary and vital source of stimulation, developing and flowing like a filmic montage. This event-scene is about the connection between memory and montage with the film Memento being the narrative current.

Mapping the mind yields an empire of our own making. The mind's hemispheres are our territories whose landscape is of our own authoring. Composed of different images from different scenes, the mind is our domain. It is an empire expansive as experience itself. Learning and remembering build experience. The former is staking a claim in the past. The latter is staking a claim in the present. What develops are images striking in their impact.

...a memory is, in the phrase of the psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, a 'temporary constellation' of activity - a necessary excitation of neural circuits that bind a set of sensory images and semantic data into the momentary sensation of a remembered whole. These images and data are seldom the exclusive property of one particular memory.
Jonathan Franzen, "My Father's Brain",
The New Yorker, Sept. 10, 2001

Memory is the sponge of empirical matter, the "sensory images and semantic data" of life. We can be described as mental emperors for the mind is held together and ruled by images of our experience.

* Memory records and reads like film.

* Memento is the film used as a model to describe memory's dynamism.

* Montage is the filmic technique used as a model to describe memory's visualization.

Memory in the Multiplicity of Media

Media multiply. This is a constant. Television did not replace radio. The internet did not replace print. New media live adjacent to the old. Within this media ecosystem, memory is the most dominant, the breeder of them all. Memory is media. More than any readable-and-writeable medium, memory provides the most dimensional experience to its users. It is the ultimate cinema-machine. Memory is the camera, the film, the sound, the projector and the screen. A self-serving art form. A live theater of streaming visualization. What lives between the ears is a storyboard capturing experiences-the light of which enters through the mind's eye and becomes the amazing picture show. Brain cells are film cells, projecting continuously onto a highly reflective surface of the visual cortex:

* Sensory memory is a vignette.

* Short-term memory is a documentary.

* Long-term memory is archival footage.

Memory in the Cinematography of Life

Life's moments-details of the actionscape-are the script. This embodies a visible language all its own, for the faces and places recorded on film are different from their original source. This difference is the element of recall. Still life can become an impenetrable fortress of solitude. An infant's palm can become the cartography of a circuit board. A single tree can become a concrete jungle. Mingling with reality, metamorphosis and metaphor abound in memory. People and objects are constructed and deconstructed frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot, second-by-second. Every slice of the film playing in our midst is a rough-cut in making and multiplying memory.

In the film Memento, the protagonist Leonard has ultra short-term memory. He cannot create new memories. Leonard's case is extreme. He cannot even feel redundancy. His living script ended prematurely. Each new scene of his existence is a result of improvisation, making himself answer the unanswerable:

"Do I lie to myself to be happy?"

The terrain of Leonard's memory consists of mental meandering. His only base is his past to which he is passionately anchored in order to concoct and survive the next moment.

"I have to believe in the world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there."

His nemesis is John G., who took away his power to remember the now. In McLuhanesque fashion, Leonard "moves forward through the rear-view mirror". He advances in space-bar mode: One letter space at a time. One moment at a time.

"We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are."

Mirrors are popular amulets in the role-playing game of memory. They provoke self-examination. They read the writing done backwards. The narrative of Memento plays backwards to reveal the hidden messages and passageways. Details that were overlooked are accented with the motion in reverse, only to be advanced again. The cerebral script toggles between rewind and forward in sporadic fits.

Memento's storytelling marked by abrupt transitions has the quality of a montage, a rapid succession of scenes and images weaved together. The arrangement is spontaneous. Each scene fades in and fades out. Each image intensifies in resolution and superimposes upon the next. The effect is a potpourri of cerebral pixels containing information of the scenes and images that render themselves on stage. The mind is a powerful platform and memory is the architecture. The world is the ultimate setting whose cast and props are infinitely diverse and infinitely available. Some shots are zooms. Other shots are taken at extreme angles. Like Memento's Leonard, everyone is an auteur, establishing the shots that pan the region on-screen and off. Memory's filming of reality may appear disparate but this fragmentation lends itself to a meaningful framework that memory can uphold. The world is memory's GUI (Graphical User Interface). Pieces of the plot connect through introspect, retrospect, and circumspect. The movie in our mind plays out according to our circumstances, the "creatures" of humankind. Memory montage is our main survival technique in navigating the information landscape that is experience:

Montage helps in the resolution of this task. The strength of montage resides in this, that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator. The spectator is compelled to proceed along the selfsame road that the author traveled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image as it was experienced by the author.
Sergei Eisentstein, The Film Sense
The creatures of circumstance take on different masks and costumes that elude or seduce our senses. Memory consumes the circumstances that condition us. MBs are memory bytes. Some scenes and images are stored at a higher resolution than others. Leonard's memories are stored as Polaroids with brief notes since his disability prevents him from copying onto his "wetware" (mind). The Polaroid process of image-making can be applied to that of memory. The image is documented with a flash. There is an instant chemical reaction of internal developer and fixative merging in a milky potion. A moment emerges from the black photographic void.

Polaroids cannot be ripped. To delete a Polaroid, it must be burned. When the body is set ablaze does the mind ignite?

Memory Infinitum

The Memento film has no end. The story loops to a previous act. Memory's terrain is an infinite mass. What was strange territory can become familiar again and vice versa. Memory's path is cyclical.

The drive to produce an engaging sequence of events, a montage, is film-making's goal. Making memories--whether they be sensory, short-term, or long-term--with provocative shots, dialogue, characters, and settings is the challenge in an ever-changing and volatile information landscape. Leonard's cause in making meaning is our cause. Leonard's search for the beauty of truth is our quest. And like Leonard, we are plagued by circumstantial foes, the John Gs of the world, that harm and undermine our empire of the mind. The experiential images that compose life are diverse and many. Making experiential images that resonate with meaning and beauty contributes to the quality of life that all can rejoice in liberation and peace.


Nathaniel Burgos is a designer based in Chicago where he teaches visual communications at the University of Illinois. His current projects include an article on InfoRomanticism and DesignFeast.com, a resource for the disciplines of design.

http://www.janushead.org/6-1/Trifonova.pdf

Matter -image or image-conscousness:Bergson contra Sartre

I like this work a lot.

what I have to do?
I am in chaos.. which class I have to take?
There are alot of great classes during spring semester.
I don't want to miss them.

For the interactive table, flora.
Pattern