November 14, 2004
telezone
more telematic embrace Telematic Connections at the Walker Art Center 2001 presented similar ideas about networked connectivity. WHAT'S CHANGED? We're STILL participatory, we're interconnected - WE'RE WIRELESS.
Telematic Connections, like many of the works in it, is a hybrid affair. Part history, part speculation, partly onsite, partly online, it crosses boundaries between art, communications, and popular culture. Its four sections include installation works, past and recent film clips, online projects, and a "telematics timeline." Through these various media, the exhibition presents the ways in which artists use technology—and the Internet—to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global consciousness and the dystopian consequences of our collective embrace, willing or not, of computer-mediated human communications. At the same time Telematic Connections places this emergent work within a historical framework.
The eight installations that comprise the "Telereal" component of this exhibition use the Internet and computing to explore this mediated embrace between parties, whether human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, or even human to nature. Here, as well as in the ten online projects in the "Datasphere" component of the exhibition, what the visitor-participant does in the galleries affects (and is affected by) someone or something somewhere else in physical space. "The Virtual Embrace" signals this shift from the viewer as an observer to embracing us as a participant, integral to the work-process of art.
While Telematic Connections presents the possibilities for connections and affiliations, it still acknowledges a persistent question about connective new media. Artist, theorist, and teacher Roy Ascott stated it poignantly already in 1990, "Is there love in the telematic embrace?" Is there content besides technology? Engagement beyond entertainment? A message that is not only the medium?
Telematic Connections is not fundamentally about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of art practice. It is about what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos calls "the forces of the cave"—some of the eternal human traits that have never left us, including the desire to connect, even to merge with another—but in today’s world of ubiquitous computing and global networking.
The TeleZone project is a successful example of the integration potential of the Ars Electronica Center. If you look at the list of the persons and institutions who made this project possible - university institutes, technical college courses, the Telekom, the company Wittmann, a project manager who is both an expert in robotics and a student of philosophy, graphic artists, architects, programmers - it almost seems to be a textbook example of the synergy of art, science and research which is demanded ever so often, as well as of the combination of different fields of competencies which are required when faced with the task of dealing with the challenges arising in connection with the new digital technologies.
Apart from the above, however, it is also a prototypical experiment setting for investigating the modern information society based on these technologies. "Software code - more than law - defines the true parameters of freedom in cyberspace. The question of what the architecture of cyberspace should be is not a neutral question. We need to think about it in political terms." This observation by Lawrence Lessing, lawyer and professor at Harvard, puts a crucial issue into words. Which norms and conventions will determine the way we will live together in a world defined by global acceleration and networking?
The most fascinating novel aspect about the Internet, its cultural and economic potential lies in its publicity, the way in which - unlike in any other medium in the past - not only passive consuming is possible but active participation on a broad and general scale. Each participant may act as transmitter or recipient, whatever pleases them more. Owing to this simple technical fact the Internet becomes a lot more than merely a modern information medium - it develops into a strong infrastructure for a community.
Telepresence (in simple words, the possibility of becoming noticeable at a location where one is present only via a network connection).
Posted by michelle at November 14, 2004 01:33 PM
