Art as Interactive Communications: Networking a Global Culture From Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media by Margot Lovejoy

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Art as Interactive CommunicationsNetworking a
Global CultureFrom Postmodern Currents Art and
Artists in the Age of Electronic Media by Margot
Lovejoy

• COM597 Fall 2004

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Those artists committed to pioneering this new
space speak in the sense of art as connectivity
and of art as communication and of an emerging
telematic culture.

• Article page 222.

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Definition Telematics It has been formed by
merging two ideas, more familiar, of
telecommunication and data processing. We can
then define telematics as the distance
communication ( telecommunication) of codified
information processed according to logic (data
processing)1

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

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It is not surprising that the very power and
rapidity of technological advance, accompanied by
such an avalanche of social and cultural change,
has stirred deep-seated fears in so many
quarters.

• Article page 212.

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Artists need to be involved in new technologies
in order to define and exploit their creative
potential. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote We
shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape
us.

• Article page 213.

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

• Article page 213.

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Meaning is created out of the interaction
between people rather than being something that
is sent from one to another. Communication
depends not on what is transmitted but what
happens to the person who receives it. Art
Communication.

• Roy Ascott, Article page 215.

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The technology of the Electronic Café is
configured to build a context in which artists
could experience new ways of collaboration and
co-creation, with geography no longer a
boundary.

• Article page 219.

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Interactive telecommunications systems do
empower the individual to connect with others
globally and vastly increases the possibilities
for inventing expanded forms of art. Artists
involvement is vitally important in humanizing
and extending the new technologies in directions
ignored by the marketplace.

• Article page 222.

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Increasingly, technological development in
electronic media have led to opportunities for
interactive global dialogue where work can be
shared in a larger cross-cultural community than
through the confines of the gallery or museum
system.

• Article page 222.

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Todays inhospitable climate for free speech has
extended to cyberspace the struggle to maintain
first ammendment rights.

• Article page 223.

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

• Article page 226.

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The potential of the new technologies is towards
interaction and communication - the kind of
inclusivity that encourages global exchange
through which fresh insights can evolve through
experimentation with diversity and difference.

• Article page 228

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VirtuAlice is a telerobotic camera (pointable
over the Web and from touchpads in the front
window) mounted on a wheeled electric throne,
which visitors may ride around the gallery. Video
images in real time are available to Web users,
and to passers by, through the front window. The
rider of the throne can see the image which is
going out over the Web, on a small monitor
mounted on the handlbars. The Web user can see
the face of the rider, in the rear-view mirror.

• Collaborative Project Emily Hartzell and Nina
  Sobell
• http//cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/alice/index.html

Article page 226
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• Collaborative Project Emily Hartzell and Nina
  Sobell
• http//cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/alice/doc1.html

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MBONE multicasting backbone

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

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Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!
I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.
for you see, so many out-of-the-way things have
happened lately that Alice had begun to think
that very few things indeed were really
impossible.

• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Article page 226
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The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply
render more precise what in an case was visible,
though unclear it reveals entirely new
structural formations of the subject Evidently
a different nature opens itself to the camera
than opens to the naked eye.

• Article page 230

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using the interactive potential of the medium
to empower other people instead of ones self
creates a powerful opening for a new role for the
artist and a new kind of public art - one with
all the constraints and freedoms to communicate
within a wider sphere viewers become
collaborators in an interactive dialogue

• Article page 231

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The limitation of the Net is that it doesnt yet
allow the production of a richly visual art.

• Article page 232

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Artists are democratically free to enter the Web
the downside of this is the possible creation
of an infrastructure for art in Cyberspace which
resembles the prevailing Earthbound system with
all its power structure intact.

• Article page 234

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In the Internet, we have the commingling within
a vast global community of international
resources of both high and low cultural appeal.
Some see the screen as a linguistic leveling
device which flattens and devalues the use of
language. Others see a rich evolution of
language occurring on the Web ... Beyond the
usual hierarchies of mediated publishing.

• Article page 234

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The Internet is CB radio only typing.

• John Barlow, Article page 234

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The sleek cyberdream of a collapsed global
surface of instantaneity and dematerialization
persists only by erasing the waking actuality of
a world that is increasingly unliveable for most
of its inhabitants.

• Jonathan Crary, Article page 243

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From the standpoint of culture and creativity,
what content does the ubiquity of telematics
offer? we live in a time of blinding speed
but what people have to say to one another by way
of technology shows no comparable development.

• Article page 243 (with quote from Theodore Roszak)

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There is a need to reaffirm the doctrine of
public responsibility as a price for private use
of the public airwaves and to establish criteria
of acceptable performance otherwise, powerful
monopolies such as telephone and cable carriers
will be able to determine what ideas and images
are fed into the cultural mainstream.

• Article page 245

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that really takes me back to Nietzches
statement about sin. If it feels to me that
technology separates me, I try to reject it. If
it feels like it has within it the opportunity to
bring me closer, on some spiritual level, to the
rest of humanity, I accept it.

• John Barlow, Article page 245

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While a society dominated by computers could on
the one hand, bring about a dark age of passive
centralization and decay of the human spirit, on
the other hand, given the transformative
interactive capabilities of the new technologies,
there could arise the evolution of a new kind of
cultural response. Artists are vital to the
development of this process

• Article page 245-246

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Art as Interactive CommunicationsNetworking a
Global CultureFrom Postmodern Currents Art and
Artists in the Age of Electronic Media by Margot
Lovejoy

• COM597 Fall 2004