I would like to begin this brief consideration of digital, Internet and new media art, not with that first, terrifying suggestion of self-surveillance that Charlie Chaplin mimed into being, nor with the invention of the first Cold War super computers, but at the place where I think technology really became interesting. It would be another 14 years before the first domestic computers filled the homes of America’s privileged, but in Beverly Hills and various other desert, mountain and seaside landscapes, Robert Barry was busy emptying containers of the undetectable gases; xenon, argon and helium into the atmosphere. His series, Inert Gas Piece provokes us to interrogate what is happening when nothing can be sensed. While much of his work lies within the realm of that which is not applicable to language or image, this process of ‘knowing’ that something exists without any tangible proof, found it’s allegorical partner decades later, in the World Wide Web.
In 2011 at the University of Queensland Art Museum, a show titled New Psychedelia presented the work of new media artists exploring novel ways of understanding the term ‘psychedelic’. In a panel discussion that launched the show, Mark Penning, Kate Shaw, Sebastian Moody and Edward Collis began to draw clear parallels between psychedelic sensation and the experience of using and living with the Internet. Notable similarities included the inefficacy of explaining the machinations of both the psychedelic and the Internet to someone who has never experienced it, as well as the total conviction with which one believes that the experience (psychedelic and Internet respectively) is based in reality, despite the lack of any tangible proof beyond the interface or the ‘trip’.
Barry later produced It Has Order, 1969-70, which behaved as a sort of reference guide for much of his work. It reads, ’It has order... it is always changing... it is affected by other things... it affects other things... it is not confined... it is not in any specific place... it can be presented, but go unnoticed... to know of it is to be part of it ...’. A Frieze article from 2004 by Jorg Heiser resolves that Barry could have been talking about art, or he could have been talking about inert gases. He’d never heard of the Internet, but I would argue that it fits this description perfectly.
Andreas Muller-Polhe’s series, Digital Scores, 1995-98 translates the first known photograph into alphanumeric code. The series marks an initial foray into what, in the following decade, would become an obsession with data representation. Today, this obsession manifests in our desire to convert self into image, image into a matrix of images that forms a global society of online entities, each entity so multiple and limitless it is barely recognizable as the original self. Counterpart to this complex is the contradiction that lies in our gross lack of understanding the mechanisms that drive our identity formation. The tragedy of the 21st century could lie within the gap between the technology we consume and our comprehension of it.
We may not be interested in how technology works, but we’re certainly involved in how it can be used to reach desired outcomes. Nancy Burson uses face-mapping technology and the now-common knowledge of the human genome to insist that racism is a scientifically proven absurdity, while Second Life users attend virtual protests against censorship. Technophiles such as Ryan Trecartin will fervently agree that the digital frontier is at the vanguard of social evolution, encouraging multiplicity and collapsing previous notions of identity into freeform creativity.
Yet less noble motivations arise. With the online gaming industry predicted to be worth $83bn by 2016, the growing demand for gaming currency has established the incredible phenomenon wherein wealthy gamers (predominantly in the US) are able to purchase game credits earned by predominantly Chinese gamers, who treat the work as their primary source of income. This lucrative market echoes the more familiar model of Western exploitation of cheap Eastern labour. In the age of contingency, beyond postmodernism, where postpostmodernism would be if there was such a thing, we stretch our minds to think of anything at all that cannot be commodified. Our inquisitive and experimental nature dictates that any ‘thing’ has the potential to offer some good to us, and goods are capital, and exploitation is rarely separable from the acquisition of capital.
María Fernández would probably agree. Her paper presents a very important case for postcolonial media theory, or rather, the lack thereof. After some nebulous references to cyborgs and a fairly dichotomous explanation of the relationship between media theory and postcolonial theory, Fernández eventually arrives at a conclusion worth quoting: “The artistic activity…should function as a call for the elaboration of an electronic media theory which acknowledges contemporary political, cultural and economic complexities.”
It is clear that the postcolonial undercurrents that exist in the global realm of Internet-based art, should be more transparent, but Fernández persistently denies the ultimate potential of this art, at least at this stage, to virtually (and in reality) transform society. Without oversimplifying my argument, the unassuming idea remains in my mind, that though we may never erase the traumas of colonization, surely the ground that is traversed by digital technology; the sharing of ideas, the breaking of taboos, can only help facilitate the changes necessary to repair the psyche of both colonizer and colonized.
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